Weird...

I'm home alone until Friday afternoon. Well, and at work alone, but that's normal.

On the plus side, as I'm here working on the paperwork for my lost luggage, I have things strewn around the desk and the floor without any worry that they are going to be eaten. I can devote as much time to whatever project I need to or want to. I've been trying out lyre techniques for the heck of it, preparing for my University class. I don't have to worry that I'm slacking on my parenting duties when I do so.

On the other hand, there's nobody to have the coffee ready in the morning, nobody to tuck me in at night, and it's just creepy to go by the nursery and know that it's empty.

It's nice to have the single life for a few days, but I think it's better to be reminded how blessed I am to have my family.

Women, RPGs, Lack thereof in

Note to publishers and distributors:

Thinly veiled bad softcore like this may have something to do with your difficulty in attracting the female of the species into the hobby.

Come on, people. The "oh, but we have guys too" doesn't cut it. Your male "portraits" aren't in "display" poses, nor do they seem to be predominantly on the floor.

And "teen" heroes and villains? That's just icky, even if they are just CGI who are as "teen" as my Firefox browser. (Although wouldn't you think that "teens" would have smaller boobs? What, they're teens because the headline says so? Okay, whatever headspace gets off on that is not one I want to be near.)

Follow-up to previous post

"But telerib," I know the argument will go, "sex sells! If these CGI blowup dolls weren't selling, they wouldn't make them!"

Okay, yes. Sex sells. As a female GM, I use this simple fact to my advantage.

...No, my sessions are not red-hot X-rated phone sex.

Simple fact: Men will RP romance with a female GM that would squick them out to play with a male GM. Women don't usually seem to care much one way or the other. So a female GM has a larger emotional space to work with than a male GM.

Another simple fact: Merely hinting at sexual themes is enough to rivet the attention of most gamers. When they say "sex sells," they don't mean that they're going to show you naked people driving a Mercedes. They show good-looking people getting into the Mercedes, implying that you, too, could entice beautiful people into this car if you owned it. And like in the horror genre, it's generally more powerful to imply that certain things could happen or are happening, and then leave it up to the individual imagination, rather than spell it out in unnecessarily graphic detail.

How this is different from "action hero pin-ups": All of the above applies to people, both men and women, and is a tool to increase their interest and participation in an RPG. It also adds an important, often neglected personality component to PCs and NPCs, if it's handled with maturity.

"Action hero pin-ups" are just pure wank fodder. The heavy use of display poses, and startled and/or threatened expressions gives the lie to the assertion that these are competent heroines engaged in butt-kicking. These are CGI porn stars in hero costumes. While I don't find anything inherently morally wrong in wanting a picture of a CGI porn star in a hero costume, I'm somewhat offended to find it in an online gaming store rather than a fetish emporium. About the last thing I really want to see in a gaming store, as a female gamer, is more of this "woman as nothing more than a vehicle for the man's desire" crap.

It's the Internet. There is real porn out there. Go find it. Get out of my gaming store.