mistressofmuses | Entries tagged with queer stuff

I gave myself another four-day weekend, this time to attend Denver Pride on Saturday. It's the 50th anniversary of Denver Pride this year!

Saturday:
( Denver Pride )

-

Sunday:

We started by visiting the park! It was already stupid hot, but we wanted the dogs to get to walk around outside for at least a little while.

I took pictures of bees, but right now my photo-embedder thing is timing out, so I will have to share those later.

( Mostly, we had to clean. )

Monday:
We'd braced for having to do nothing Monday and Tuesday, since we didn't know when it would be our turn for the apartment inspection, and we weren't allowed to leave the dogs in the apartment unattended/unconfined. Since it's so hot, we can't take them anywhere either, so we were going to have to stay home until it was our turn.

Well, they came to our apartment first thing on Monday morning at 8:30, ha. Score! It took them all of maybe 90 seconds, so it definitely didn't require as much cleaning as we did, but it'll still be worthwhile for us to have a better environment. The guy was nice, and he said that it was preventive, not in response to any issues. (I hope that is the truth. Having a friend here going through a bedbug war right now, it sounds AWFUL.)

Buuuuuut... despite no longer having to wait around we also didn't have any plans for the day, since we'd assumed we'd be stuck home.

Alex went down to the county services office to try and sort out an issue with some of his benefits, which wound up being a very frustrating appointment. (They want a letter from his psych provider, which they did not include anywhere in their redetermination list. And his provider just moved to NY.)

After that, he was annoyed and just wanted to take a nap.

I finally got around to making more boards to put my enamel pins on! I've been trying to do that for months and months, and just never manage to get around to it! I'm really happy with them, but again, I apparently can't embed photos at the moment, so that'll be a later share.

Today:
We filled out our ballots and dropped them off. We took the dogs to the park to give them a good brushing, because oof, so much shedding!

Ran some needed errands, including over to the vet to put in a new request for refills on Cy's meds, since the voicemail on the px line we left weeks ago never got returned. Also hit the grocery store.

I wish we'd done a bit more with the long weekend. It's likely to be the longest stretch I'll have off for a while, and I feel like I wasted it a bit, minus going to Pride. But at the same time, it meant that all the cleaning and responsible errand-running didn't take up ALL my time off for a given week, which feels better too.

Plus I really am happy about getting the pin boards done, as well as quite a lot of reading. (I am finally halfway through The Name of the Wind. Why is it so looooong?)

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my apartment

The capitol building, with a bit of the crowd and some rainbow-y art.

I took this picture of Bella that turned out surprisingly nice!

Yesterday we went to Pride. :)

Taylor decided not to come this year - they were worried it would be too hot for them.

We'd originally planned on trying to leave about 10:30 or so, but it wound up being quite a bit later by the time we actually got out the door (so I'm glad no one else was waiting on us, ha.)

We decided to take the train downtown and the bus over to the park, because trying to get there by car and find somewhere to park is near impossible.

We also brought Bella with us. (Previous years, Cy has gone, but I think it would be far too long and hot a day for him. His feet have pretty bad arthritis, and he just gets tired a lot more easily.) This was the sort of thing we *want* Bella to get exposed to - lots of noise and people and things going on, but we also weren't completely sure how she'd handle it. When we got her about four months ago, she was pretty reactive to sounds, and experiences like "riding in a car", "getting on an elevator", and "crossing over a small grate in the garage" were terrifying. She's improved a lot, but hasn't ever been on the train, or on a bus, or in a massive crowd, etc.

She was SO good! You would never have guessed it was the first time she'd dealt with any of it! She was well-behaved, and friendly, and so happy to meet so many people (who of course all wanted to pet her.) There was the benefit of her being small enough that Alex could pick her up when needed, which was helpful with the hot ground. We also had to take pretty frequent breaks in the shade for her to cool down and get some water. She was pretty sure it was the best ever, and loved all the attention she got.

The crowds themselves were... a little less than previous years? It was weird that both the train and bus - which we're used to being extremely full - were both nearly empty, both heading down and heading home. Once we were AT the fest, it was closer to normal, though I feel like it wasn't AS packed as the last few years. I don't think it was the weather - this was hot, but by far not the hottest Pride fest day. I do wonder if there were people who decided not to show up for safety concerns. :(

We encountered a few protesters at the lines for bag check when coming inside. Just "repent, you're going to hell" shit. They had big signs and megaphones, so they were loud, but there were also only like... seven of them. They were outnumbered by Parasol Patrol members standing with their big umbrellas between the line and the protesters (they mainly aim to protect kids from protesters, but were here anyway).

There were a couple conspicuous absences, though it's also possible we just didn't see them. Usually Target has a huge multiple-lot booth, and we didn't see them this year. The Log Cabin Republicans were also not there as far as we saw. (Alex had hoped to point and laugh. They were gutsy showing up last year with a "Why the GOP is better for gays" sign.) However, we did skip one side of the fest, so we may have missed either or both of them.

We mostly tried to go to smaller organizations than any of the corporate tents. There were the usual banks or the like, mostly trying to hire, but much like last year, it felt like there were fewer of those than a few years before when it had started to feel like all corporate stuff and nothing else. For better or worse, there were a lot more tents - ACLU, some state of Colorado governmental departments, some lawyer groups - with "know your rights" type materials. Better if it helps someone, worse that it seems more necessary.

We came away with a few pamphlets and things for some organizations that we'll try to remember to look into. I think I've been saying I'll check out Secular Hub for way too many years now, and I always forget (though in part it's because their big weekly thing is on Sunday, for people who are looking for a replacement for a church community, if they've left the church or been rejected, etc., but I work.) History Colorado had a newspaper issue about queer history in Colorado, which is cool - we've been planning on going to a couple of their museums, too.

One thing that I was really happy to see was The Center mainly focusing on older adults. They've got a whole slate of programs that are open to all ages, but are geared toward 50+ adults. That was... really nice to see. Previous years, The Center has been one of the ones who had pamphlets about support groups, or social events, etc. that looked to be a "for everyone" thing, which turned out to mainly be for teens or young adults. I know I've talked to a bunch of people, including here on DW, about how once you're 30+ it feels like queer spaces are Not For You, and you get sideeyed for existing. (And that gets more and more acute the older you are, so 40+? 50+? Forget it, why aren't you doing your taxes, hur dur.)
I don't know if we'll manage to go, but it at least feels like the sort of space that WOULD be friendly for us to go to. I'm not yet 50, but I'm old enough that I feel out of place at a lot of the meetup things I have tried to go to. Alex is only a few years shy of 50. I'll have to take a look at when some of the groups meet and see if any work around my work schedule.

I ran into someone that I was dress-twins with! I was wearing my bi-pride colored galaxy dress from NerdyKeppy - they were wearing the ace-pride one! We complimented each other on our styles. ;)

I'd been hoping to find another acrylic rainbow ring, to replace the one that broke. (The superglue did not hold.) Those used to be a standard at some of the "cheap pride swag" tents that set up right inside the gate, but they didn't have them last year or this year. :( I've had that thing for a long time! Alas.
[I found the exact same ring listed online, but only as part of an assorted lot, marked as "actual rings may vary", so I'm not confident it would be included, or that it would be the right size. I wound up ordering a stainless steel ring that's an anodized rainbow, so we'll see if that one works for me.]

Visited Terra and the Atomic Pixies tent, and bought a bunch of stickers. Alex and I both bought a shirt. We bought a flag. I *didn't* go into the queer indie books tent, even though I wanted to, lol. We did get a lot of free stuff.

We made it roughly halfway around before Alex and Bella were both getting tired. I went down one of the remaining sides, and just reported back if there were worthwhile things to visit. (Like a vet that had a tub of ice water for dogs, ha.) This was by far the longest day that Bella has ever had, so it wasn't surprising that she was getting a bit tired. And Alex had to keep carrying her, so he was also pretty tired!

We skipped the last side of the walkway, so we may have missed some tents that I'd mentioned not seeing.

Bella fell asleep briefly on the train back, and again in the car when we stopped by the grocery store.

Then as soon as we got home, she was back to energy level 10/10 and wanted to play, lol.

( 3 more pictures; two of Bella, one of the smallest spider: )

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my apartment

Taylor and I finished Nier: Replicant (for real this time!)

I was going to write a fairly quick "here's what I thought of the secret ending" thing but then I kept talking!

This is basically just a whole wall of spoilers and a few of my thoughts about it.

Quick summary - the first playthrough of the game is split into two large sections. In the first, you play as a younger version of the main character, with a fairly ordinary JRPG feel. You do a lot of sidequests to help other characters out, with the overarching plot being an attempt to find a cure for an as-yet incurable disease that your sister has. The primary antagonists are monsters called "shades". The first half of the game ends with the Shadowlord, an extremely powerful humanoid shade, kidnapping your sister. One of your party members, Kainé, temporarily sacrifices herself to confine another shade that you're unable to defeat.
The second half of the game picks up years later, with you having grown stronger, now able to rescue Kainé and defeat the shade she'd sealed away. Now your quest is to find and defeat the Shadowlord, in order to rescue your sister.

I mentioned before that the setting is quite interesting and cool, imo. After a prologue that happens a thousand+ years before the game proper, set in an abandoned-looking city, it becomes clear that yes, your fantasy setting for the game is definitely actually set in a post-post-apocalypse. Rather than crumbling castles as enormous setpieces for an area, you find overgrown crumbling... office buildings. Collapsing highway bridges glimpsed far offshore. ~~Horrible mad science lab.~~

Also, the music is fucking phenomenal.

( Spoilers for Ending A: )

( Spoilers for Ending B: )

The third and fourth endings require getting all the weapons in the game in order to unlock. These two continue on as the second playthrough does, picking up after the timeskip, but with an extra fight followed by a moral choice at the very end after you defeat the Shadowlord.

( Spoilers for Endings C and D: )

The game does not ever allow you to change the broad outcome - even knowing what the shades are saying, even having been through the big tragedies that occur, you have no opportunity to prevent them or change the outcome of the game. You will always insist that shades are mindless evil; you will always do all you can to kill them; you will never save the people they kill.

That definitely serves the meta theme about the futility of hatred and revenge. The game makes it clear in other ways as well - a character that serves as a foil, obsessed with killing the robots he (incorrectly) blames for his brother's death, and he is shown to be *unhinged* about it ["I just want to ~KILL ROBOTS~!"], but the protagonist isn't aware enough to recognize that he sounds exactly the same way in his single-minded desire to kill shades in revenge for one that took his sister. You get stories about all of the weapons you collect, and if you read through them, almost all of them are about terrible slaughter and tragedy. There are a lot of seemingly simple fetch quests that take dark turns, where even if you "succeed" in the quest, it ends badly. You learn that many of the shades that attack people are only doing so because they've already been attacked; the violence perpetuates because each side is seeking revenge.

And then... the secret ending! This was not originally in the game, but was originally a sequel novella that they made into a playable scenario for the re-release. I find it interesting that there is NO hint that this ending exists. The others, you're told about and given a hint as to how to unlock them. This one does not give you that, and in fact steers you AWAY from it, by telling you that [that thing you do for Ending D] is THE END. That's what leads me to wonder how many people stumbled upon it with no idea that it existed, ha.

So... you start a new game. You can't name your character the same thing as your previous, now-deleted file. But you start from the very beginning, as the younger version of the protagonist, going through the game exactly the same as the first playthrough. (And endings B, C, and D all have you start after the timeskip, so you likely haven't played this section of the game for a while, even.)

( Spoilers for Ending E: )

( Less plot-spoilery, but still spoilery thoughts on Ending E: )

( My thoughts and feelings on Kainé: )

As a sidenote, even though I didn't talk about him much - in another mild surprise for a 13-year-old game, Emil is canonically gay. Two queer-in-some-fashion characters out of a party of four (the other two characters being the protagonist and a talking book that's maybe an advanced computer) is surprising in a good way to me. With one of the additional themes of the story, especially for Kainé and Emil, being the ways in which they've been mistreated by people they have actively tried to help, and combating the ways and reasons they're excluded by "normal" society, it seems like it was a thoughtful decision.

So yes. I enjoyed the game, even when it spends most of the later playthroughs really driving home that you're not really the good guy here, you piece of shit, ha. And even *that* aspect isn't dealt with in a way that turns it utterly lopsided... because you're genuinely trying to protect *other people that you also care about*. You aren't really the heroes you think you are, but you also aren't utter villains either. I LIKE the fact that there is no side that's utterly correct! I mean, in games that have a moral choice system, I almost always play as the most obnoxiously good character possible, because I'm such a "Being Mean Is Not Nice" player. So it is a little uncomfortable to have to do things I hate that I'm doing because I have no plot choice. But it doesn't feel overbearing... and it feels like understandable characterization of the protagonist, who is not a blank slate for the player, but is a character who feels strongly about certain things.
Plus the meta commentary on futility and such, ha.

I'm glad it got rereleased, and I'm glad that the rerelease seems to have fixed at least a few of the things that Taylor was bothered by in the original incarnation (Nier: Gestalt.) We did opt not to 100% the quests, because fuuuuuck that flower quest, lol.
I love that basically the entirety of the original cast were willing to come back (especially Laura Bailey as Kainé, considering how much more high-profile she is now!)
I enjoyed the characters. I enjoyed the lore.
The music really is SO good.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my apartment

Cy!

We did go to Pride again today - as usual, we couldn't get up early enough to make it down there for the parade, but we went back to the festival.

It was fine, but a LOT more crowded. Yesterday was plenty packed, but today was even more so. Glad for the turnout, but it made walking through pretty frustrating - people were of course stopping at booths and things, but there never seemed to be enough space for people to keep walking. The really slow shuffling was rough on Alex and some of the issues he has in his hips (regular walking is fine, but the super slow, tiny steps causes issues before too long.)

But it was nice and cool today, so Cy got to come! He got to visit the pet tents, and got some tennis balls and we bought a rainbow squeaky toy from our usual pet store.

He wore his bandana the whole time, and the hat about half the day. Especially with the hat, I always joke that he brings joy to the masses. So many people just... lose their minds at a dog in a silly hat. It makes me happy when people are so excited about it they go grab friends or partners to show them.

Cy was of course delighted by the attention, and is pretty sure this was a festival all about him, lol.

There was also someone who saw him and thought he was really cute... and then gave us a bunch of food tickets because they were heading out!

So we got some free-to-us samosas, because the line for that tent was comparatively short and it sounded good... And holy crap, they were! We got a curried potato one and an apple/peach one. It sounds like the place (Safari Samosas) only does food stall type things at events, or will arrange delivery or pickup, but doesn't have a formal location. Kind of a bummer, because I would 100% go to a restaurant for these.

Bought a few more enamel pins from Atomic Pixies, and donated to a couple other organizations that I'd missed yesterday - The Matthew Shepard foundation and Parasol Patrol. I can't afford much, but they're organizations that do work I appreciate, so $5 seems better than nothing.

I think tonight may be an early night. I slept pretty poorly last night despite how tired I was, but I'm already practically nodding off.

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Location: my apartment

It was a nice day. :)

I got to spend it with Alex and Taylor, my two favorite people. (And I rarely get to spend time with both of them.)

The weather was unseasonably cool, and cloudy most of the day. That was actually quite nice for walking around. Last time, in 2019, it was in the upper 90s and was pretty brutal. Despite the cloudcover... I somehow wound up with a really bad sunburn. Ouch.

We got swag, and while there were certainly some big corporate booths, there were actually fewer of those than I remember from previous years - we mostly got stuff from public health groups and nonprofits. I bought some bracelets and pins, including a few pins from Atomic Pixies (the ones I shared the kickstarter info for for their Weirdeer pins.) Terra wasn't there - she's unfortunately in the hospital for at least a few more days. She finally got a long-awaited breast reduction surgery... and then got sepsis. But she's recovering well!
I also bought a pride shirt and some stickers from the Museum of Nature and Science's booth. Rainbows + dinosaurs + support the museum, so... pretty great, ha.

One other thing that I noticed was a LOT more inclusiveness with flags and stuff? I guess that's partially just kind of a more recent trend, but in 2019 I was trying DESPERATELY to find ANYTHING with the nonbinary flag on it to get for Taylor, and there was nothing. (I found ONE booth that was selling pins with pokeballs on them and they had an nb colored one. That was literally it.) This year there were nb flags as like... a standard swag option for little flags and bracelets and things. Same with other flags that I didn't used to see available.

Especially considering yesterday, the "Log Cabin Republicans" had some nerve still having their booth set up with their "Why you should vote for the GOP" board. It *was* however super gratifying to see how every other booth on that stretch was crowded with people, and the pathway was in its usual state of gridlock, and yet people were leaving this radius of empty space between everyone else and their booth, ha.
"I never thought leopards would eat MY face" says person who voted for the Leopards Eating Faces Party, indeed.

Not a lot of like... social opportunities, which I'd low-key hoped for. Lots of places looking for volunteers, but not a lot of places just offering like... meetups. The handful that I did see were almost all exclusively youth-focused, which is cool, but. Yeah. Or like... sports leagues, and one music group, but those don't apply to me either, ha.

I might try to check out secular hub - I usually grab a pamphlet and then forget about it, ha. But sounds like they have a new location that isn't too far away from us, and they're supposedly geared toward just being an enjoyable community space for non-religious folks. They sponsor interesting talks and do movie night type things. It could be fun, depending what the vibe is.

Alex wants to go again tomorrow. The weather is actually supposed to be a few degrees *cooler* tomorrow. We'd left Cy home today for fear of the heat... but he would have been fine. So Alex wants to go back and bring him with so he can visit all the pet tents, lol. Our usual local pet store always has a booth with pride-themed stuff, and there were a bunch of others too.

I'd... be fine not going again, lol. We had fun, but I'm still SO TIRED. I'm not as fatigued as I have been post-Covid, and I have enough energy to do things, but afterwards I am WIPED. Also, this sunburn hurts. (HOW did I burn THAT badly through clouds? I would have expected maybe a little bit, but it's worse than anticipated.) I feel like tomorrow will just be more same-same, so we'll see.

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Location: my apartment