Sorry For Being Gone!

Hello, dears!
     Should you be wondering why I vanished for a very, very extended period of time, my computer's charging port crapped out. Ordered a new DC/IN port, and a new power cord (since it was probably the gradual cause of the damage done to my port). Then came the eight thousand steps it takes to crack open a mac, disconnecting the old DC/IN from the motherboard, installing the new one, and putting everything back together. I kind of feel like a champ, actually.

     So, updates. Diamond has been through some crazy workplace shenanigans, and after some trying times, has landed at my Travelodge. She works the same shift I do, on my weekends, and some housekeeping shifts. Which means that we end up on opposite schedules, which is lame. But hey, thus is the life of a financially independent young adult.

     Also, Diamond and I will be moving to Denver in the upcoming year. I was initially hesitant, but the more I think about it, the more I want to go. There's more things to do and see, and more people there. Colorado Springs isn't much of a college town, and I think it shows. A lot of people are either in High School, or in the void left afterwards. I want to meet people who have interesting things to talk about, and don't sit in a basement smoking pot all day (I'm looking at you, an apparent three-fourths of our young adult population). And who knows, maybe I can go do things without having to be the one to foot the bill for a change :p

I've gotten WAY TOO INTO Tumblr, as was bound to happen really. It's a hub of humour and nerdism, and I just can't resist such things. Fandoms are my happy places. I've also started to watch K-Dramas, which are heart-rending. If you haven't watched any yet, dearest readers, don't. You will be crying on your floor. Or just really frustrated at the characters.

Except for Woo Bin, who will have none of anyone's bullcrap. 

I also joined a Sorority. Does that surprise you? Well, it's online. And it's a Pottermore Sorority. Silly you! We all just kind of post our lives at each other, and it's great XD My twin Ren added me to it, and it's been a good time. I've made some friends as weird as I am. I also need to plan a trip to New York. Partially so I can do a dance. It's gonna be sweet.

I look normal now, as well. I had my head split into halves, with black and purple hair for a while, But now I've dyed it dark brown for a spell, and that's okay as well ^^

I'm always an adventure, if nothing else.
This pretty much catches up the important things I've been up to, so I'll say farewell for now.

          Raven

"Fight Like A Girl" Album Review

 If you don't know who Emilie Autumn is, I will point you to two blogs that will help you out.

From Unlacing the Victorians, I blog that I personally love: http://unlacethevictorians.blogspot.com/2009/11/asylums-principle-inmate.html

From Stripy Tights And Dark Delights (Formerly the Ultimate Goth Guide): http://ultimategothguide.blogspot.com/2011/10/spotlight-on-emilie-autumn.html

It has now been about twenty-four hours since I got my hands on the newest album from Emilie Autumn, Fight Like A Girl. This album is part of a larger story, chronicled in Miss Autumn's book, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls, which itself is headed for a stage debut (sometime in 2014, by all accounts). You can definitely hear that theatricality in this album. Some of the tracks sound downright destined for stage, and there are a number of tracks that I absolutely love. The overall feel of this album is more fun than Opheliac, which was rougher than this one. The post-production seems to have improved greatly, in my opinion, which makes me happy! I have a few thoughts down for each song on the 17-track album, so without further ado, my review of FLAG


Fight Like A Girl: The title track for this album. Now, as a personal preference, I don't like the screamies. It's never been my cup of tea, but I love this song regardless. It's infectious, and has been playing in my head a lot. It kind of makes you want to go fight someone!

Time For Tea: More screaming, but I love this song anyway. It's pretty fabulous, menacing and powerful. I love the little ditty she used! Because I'm at my most terrifying when I sound like a sweet little child ;p

Four o'Clock Reprise: An instrumental track. It sounds very much like a soundtrack. A few strains of music remind me of Phantom of the Opera.

What Will I Remember?: A delicate number, showcasing the softer side of Miss Autumn's vocal talents, instead of the strength we usually hear from her.

Take The Pill: Creepy, catchy, and dark. I really like this one! It's a powerful song, you can feel the sense of struggling against captivity. You'll be singing this one to yourself! This one goes back a bit to Emilie's industrial roots. It really makes me want to jump around. Take the pill, take the pill, take the pill, take the pill!

Girls! Girls! Girls!: Bouncy and fun, this song brings to mind traditional musical numbers. It's up-beat and exciting. It also makes me think of a dark carnival, so of course I love it! Happy, with an undercurrent of darkness, of course. This is Miss Autumn after all! Catchy, it's a good time. Makes you want to do the can-can! ;p

I Don't Understand: A short little exchange between an inmate, and a boy with a camera. It's cute, and low-tempo.

We Want Them Young: This one has some tribal-sounding drums in it, which was unexpected, but it work well. The violins work to lend an epic feel to it. One of my favorites, it's a dark song. Fear-mongering by the Doctors against women in the town, attempting to get more inmates. I wish it was longer.

If I Burn: Reminiscent of Opheliac-era, it's a strong track, with the vocal "pow!" we expect from Miss Autumn. You want to sing it at the top of your lungs, as a declaration of being stronger than even death. It's chock-full of righteous fury!

Scavenger: A tale of the man who's stealing women away to the asylum. He's paid by the doctors. He takes a sick pride in his work, in hunting down girls who wander down that street they know they shouldn't wander down, or coming in their houses through the door they don't lock. The solid, repetitive beat lends an air of tense anticipation.

Gaslight: One of my favorite songs on the album. The harpsichords are lovely, and  almost heartbreaking, paired with Emilie's singing voice, and the desperate lyrics. I find myself wanting to sing this one as loud as I can. You can feel the asylum girls being crushed by their conditions, and the death of their sisters-in-captivity.

The Key: This short, high-tempo number is more like a part poem, part call-to-arms than song. You can really see the stage aspirations this tale has here. This is where the attitude of the girls shifts from victim to warrior.

Hell Is Empty: Very short. Feels soundtrack-like, and a bit ethereal. You can hear the rats swarming =]

Gaslight Reprise: Another instrumental track. Very soft and sweet.

Goodnight, Sweet Ladies: This is a farewell to their fallen sisters. Less sad than you'd expect, it's a sweet chorus of voices paying their respects to these ladies' bravery. Very melodic and lovely.

Start Another Story: This is another short little track. Another one that feels it would be at home on stage in a musical. Simple, but full of hope.

One Foot In Front Of The Other: This is another one of my favorites! It feels like a victory march. It speaks of finding yourself after a battle. The chorus is wildly catchy! It may not be lyrically complex, but it's so much fun that it doesn't need to be. Another one that will be stuck in your head, in the best kind of way =]

All in all, I really like this album. It's $14.99 on the Asylum Emporium, which includes both the physical album sent to you, and a download link sent to your email which you has all the tracks, and can be used thirty times! I don't know why you'd need it that many times, but hey,why not? This album is a pretty good ride, and I'm looking forward to the tour and stage production =]

Asylum Store: http://www.asylumemporium.com/collections/featured-items

Eek! Labels!

We've all seen them. They flock around in groups, looking identical, convinced of their transcendence above normal, boring people. And we've all made fun of them, it's officially a cliche. So I'm going to depart from that particular path for a quick stroll through an alternative line of thought.
There's another group that irritates me (actually, there's a lot of people who annoy me, but I'm being specific right now). Label-phobic people. The ones who get pissed off at the thought that they could be classified them as a punk, jock, or emo. Because they are special and original and different, damn it! I find that this is most common in adolescents, probably because they still have this mindset of "There is not one single person like me in the entire world".
Well, sorry to break it to you, loves, but there are people very similar to you, spread around the whole world. And that's okay.
You don't need to be a solitary pillar. You can't bogart all the individuality in the world, there will be other people with the same weird characteristics as you. It doesn't make you any less yourself, not unless you change to avoid being classified.
For example, I'm a goth. I love things other people may consider dark or weird. I've been listening to original goth bands since birth (thanks Dad!). I love bats, and vampires (Unfortunately Necessary Disclaimer: Not Meyer's atrocities), everything Victorian, black leather, and boots (boots, boots, boots!).
Can some of those attributes belong to other people, as well? Yep.
Can you have all these attributes and not be a goth? Yep.
Do I love goth culture and self-identify with it? I do!
So, embrace who you are, even if there's been a label attached to it. Be a punk, or a metalhead, or a goth kid!

Ah, happy Raven's soul.

Quick Ramble about Phantom of the Opera

As anyone who knows me is aware, I love musicals. I was in theatre for four years, and I miss the hell out of it now that I've graduated.
One of my favorites, of course, is The Phantom of the Opera. Go ahead and guess my favorite character. I'll wait.

Yes, of COURSE it's the Phantom!
The Phantom shows the true nature of people. He's a creative genius, he's self-educated (and did a good job), cultured, and devoted. Yet, people have shunned him, beat and tortured him, because he didn't look right. No one ever admits their own responsibility in creating his madness. They simply start a hunt for him. I don't much care for the rest of the main cast. Raoul strikes me as a spoiled brat (which seems to me to be confirmed in Love Never Dies), and Christine is really just dumb. She let's herself be manipulated, and sides with whoever is providing the most security at the moment.

Short, rambly. It's four thirty in the morning, and I still have two and a half hours until my shift is over. You'll have to forgive me. A proper post shall be forthcoming!

Prerequisites

Apologies for wandering away, in case anyone had wondered where I'd been.
I have been jotting things down at the bus stop, but only bits and pieces, nothing quite well-rounded enough for me to post.
A quick recap of life lately:
My job is annoying, and the quest begins for a new one.
My coworker makes me want to punch her so hard she gets lung cancer. Which makes for fun angry poetry while waiting for the bus. I may perhaps pastably post it for you, because why not?
Also, a new DND campaign begins soon, joyfully! I'm a half-elf ranger, should anyone be interested. I'm still building upon my character, so any input would be welcome and fun.

Now, on to my actual topic! This struck me today while setting up breakfast, and I've been rolling the idea around for about an hour, which is more time than I usually spend musing on my topics. I don't mean this will be any less wandering and unstructured than any other post, mind you.

Onward!

This may stem from way too many hours spent playing Final Fantasy Tactics, but I feel that there's certain things that come with prerequisites. You can't be a knight before you've been a squire, after all.

For example, if you've never had a proper job, where bits of your money have been spirited away into taxes, you don't get to complain about them. You don't get to complain about how high taxes are, you don't get to complain about how tax dollars are spent, because they aren't YOUR tax dollars. What you do get to do is sit, and shut your trap.

If you're thousands of dollars in debt, because you have a credit card, a tendency to want things you don't have the money to buy, and poor impulse control, you don't get to complain about the National Deficit. It's quite easy to sit there and feel superior, but until you deal with your own irresponsible spending, you can't complain about anyone else's. Deal with your problems in-house before giving advice about everyone else's. Guess what you ARE intitled to do? Sit, and shut your trap.

Don't like pop music? Do you listen to it? If you do, then just stop. If you don't listen to the radio at all, then you don't get to complain! :D You haven't actually heard it, you just dislike the idea of it. Until you've had an extensive listen to your local Top 40 station, you don't get an opinion of anything it plays. Not out loud, anyway. You can think whatever it is you like in that head of yours. But until you've heard what you're critizing, you get to sit, put your headphones in, play whatever music it is you feel is deep and meaningful, and shut your trap.

Think a food is nasty that you've never had?
SIT...
Think someone's views are ignorant, but haven't actually listened to what they have to say?
...SHUT...
Think something is stupid when you know not a thing about it?
...YOUR TRAP!

Don't shake your hypothetical head at me, every single one of us is guilty of it.

So let's try and make the world a better and more understanding place, one ignorant shut trap at a time.

Much love,

Raven, your charming (and occasionally arrogant) blogmistress.

Thoughts, Sittin on the Bus.

I love being from Texas. Hang in there for a moment. I hate living in Texas, I'm glad I moved away. But Texas is a fun place to be FROM, for two main reasons. First, because you can make fun of Texas until judgement day, an that's good times. Second, it's an automatic pass to get away with anything. "She just ate a jelly, nutella, honey and jam triple-decker sandwich. That she deep fried. I'm really worried about her." "No, she's from Texas." "Oh, well that's fine." or "She just shot him!" "Born in Texas." "Oh, that explains it, nevermind." I could do ANYTHING! And everyone would just laugh!

Here's the problem with me walking home from the bus stop. My walking path takes me by a Walgreens and a gas station. Normally, I'd just walk on by, but I just got off work, and I'm tired as all get out, and sometimes it's cold. I'll stop in, just to warm up for a bit, and suddenly I'm in a magical wonderland of stuff that I had no idea I needed, until sleepy brain sees it. "Industrial-grade towels? Why have I been using these shitty normal towels?" "A pack of three hundred and sixty dice? This is so handy! What if I have a lot of people who suddenly want to play yatzee? Sure, I have extra cups, but without dice, we'd just end up throwing cups around! This purchase is an investment in keeping my cups safe!" Makes perfect sense, take my money, goodly cashier attendant!

I have to assume people at the bus stop are super tired, all of the time. There's no other excuse for how dumb they act. "Are you waiting for the bus?" Nope, I'm just sitting in the cold under the sign, waiting for a man with a briefcase. And don't use a stupid question to try and start a conversation. You had to ask three times, as I was disentangling myself from my headphones, just so I could give you a look, and say yes. I'm clearly not looking for someone to chat with.

One day, I will have a police box in my yard. You know what I'm talking about. I'll have a police box in my front yard, and there will be a sign, written in Toilken's elvish, Klingon and dark elvish. That sign will say "Inquire inside for information." I may even translate that into English, because I figure if you can recognize the languages, that's good enough. When they come to my door, I will have assorted Enterprise-shaped cookies prepared, and ask if they play DND. Of COURSE they do. And this is how I will recruit for campaigns when I'm a grown-up.

Speaking of lawn decorations, I also want lawn gnomes. Not a little cute lawn gnome or two. Somewhere around a hundred, big, creepy lawn gnomes (Like the ones from Fable, if you know what I'm talking about). And when I get bored, I will move them around in the middle of the night, so the neighbors wake up to see them in different formations. Occasionally, when I'm feeling particularly ornery, I'll put one or two in different places in other people's yards. When they bring them back, possibly with their newly-broken flamingo, I'll peek out the door, and when I see the gnome, I'll jump with a horrified look on my face. I'll speak in whispers and tell them hurriedly to put him anywhere, and then slam the door. Yes, they'll think I'm completely insane, but you know a part of them will always wonder if those things are evil little monsters from hell.

This Blog Is About Religion

Religion always seems to be a topic that riles people up.
As much as I love open forum to discuss and hear multiple viewpoints, it never seems to end up that way, does it? Someone will come in, brandishing their Righteous Fury of Enlightened Wisdom, and somehow the end result is usually name-calling and finger-pointing. So I'd like us all, as a group, to take a deep breath, remind ourselves that this is a post that is absolutely based on my personal opinions, and that there are a million and two differing opinions.
Exhale.
Now, let me give you my personal take on spirituality and religion.

First off, I absolutely make a distinction between religion and spirituality. I do not consider myself religious at all, but I do consider myself spiritual. I totally sound like a hipster-bucket, don't I? Hang in there for me.
For me, religion always seems to get awfully bogged down in semantics. There's entire denominations that have branched off from the same core because of a phrase or chapter or book of the bible alone. There's wars fought over religion. Protests over minor dogmatic differences.
This has never really made any sense to me. It seems to me that these squabbles pull people away from the core values of almost any religion. They turn petty, causing meanness or even cruelty in the name of whatever greater deity is in charge. I generally use the term Sky Daddy, because it makes me giggle, and it's a vague enough term that anyone can substitute their own in it's place. Now, the majority of religions basically tell you to be a good person. That's a cause I can get behind. Don't run around stabbing people, don't make an ass of yourself, use your highly evolved brain to make the best choices you can. In defense of their particular set of rules, however, people will completely disregard everything their Sky Daddy has asked of them, because someone else is Wrong.
I see most religions as multiple sides of a magically poly-sided coin. We have the same general goals, we're all humans, we all bleed red blood (unless you don't, in which case welcome to my blog, other-blooded being!). Our versions of morality are usually quite similar as well. I feel like we could move so far as a unit if we could stop focusing on the phraseology and pay more attention to the deeper meaning.


Bringing me to spirituality. Now, this is a personal definition, but to me, spirituality is simply concerning the spirit. Many use the word soul, some don't, it's all the same general idea. The piece of us that makes us more than the sum of our parts.
We have biological needs to care for our physical selves. Similarly, we have needs for nourishing our mental and spiritual selves. Self-reflection about what we want in life, musing about our place in the scope of the universe, pondering about our purpose in existing. To me, these are spiritual. They concern ourselves and the whole big cloud of energy and matter and weird junk that our reality is made of.
I believe that we have very similar spiritual needs, and that most religions are attempting to address these. We use prayer, or meditation, or whatever it is that you practice, but the end result is generally very much the same. We're integrating ourselves into the whole. We're reminding ourselves that we aren't the center of the universe. We're weighing our own existence, and trying to find understanding and enlightenment.
So maybe, just perhaps, we can all chill out for a while? :p
I shall look forward to interesting and civil discussion on this topic.