Richard, you lovable gosling
I am late to this but I cannot beLIEVE I have never read this. Not only am I reading this right the damn now, I am forwarding it on to somebody else!
Maybe more of a sort of Marion Ravenwood to our hero? (Skip to the last 'graph for a spoiler-free experience, some of you.) http://www.mysterymaverick.com/blog/farewell_my_lovely.html
Yeah, isn't the dérive interesting? It's this existential game you play to simulate a geographic disorientation; there's, uh, a lot more to say about identity/urbanity here, but something do with a rootlessness, like the lack of a defined sense of self you might experience in a crowd. Anyway, geographically, the dérive isn't so different from hopping in at one end of Wikipedia and emerging, hours later, at another end. (Kind of similar, but different: when I lived in San Francisco the Jejune Institute was in my neighborhood, and after I'd played this ARG I became way hyper-aware of all these runes and glyphs that were chalked all over my neighborhood, which I'd heretofore never noticed. Playing that ARG was sort of like being on a dérive, too, in that the city had this secret personality. Except that there were basically all these arrows on the ground, which I guess makes it not like a dérive at all. OK!)
I *think* I know who this is, but rather than posting my random guesses in public, I will just say thanks! I'm glad you read the column in the astute way that you did, which is really as this very positive thing. (I hope it didn't read as bleak! It isn't meant to be!) But I do feel, exactly, like I might've finally popped out the other side of a wringer, not that much worse-for-wear and honestly a lot happier. Thanks for your supportive words, Tomm! (Tomm H.? Eh? No?)
Thanks for this, very, very much! It's extremely helpful for me, intellectually and personally. :)
No problem. But I'm not sure what else I can discuss with you! All of my opinions are already embedded in the column above! If you take issue with any of those opinions, of course, I'd be happy to discuss them with you.
Hmm. Your comment gets really amped up toward its end, has counterpoints to points I did not make in the column -- because the column is not about "unrealistic depictions" of "women in games," at all, and is instead about the normalization of beating people up -- and then calls me "delusional." It's very surprising! Because the column IS supportive of "people like [you], who support equality but not the attacks on [stuff]," and if you think I am "whining" about any "cup size" but my own, you might want to take another hard look at the article.
I took really great pains to "demonize" one person, one type of person, and one type of attitude only: me. Me and mine. If you see yourself in there, that's great! But it doesn't mean I'm launching an attack on "you," or continuing a preexisting attack on "you."
Ha! No, my family always spells it "Jen," so that's more than fine!
At the conclusion of my relationship with my First Love, I began listening to an album called 'Julie Doiron and the Wooden Stars'. No, I won't stop listening to it, as if it were something to shrug off. :)
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Jenn Frank 
Ruckus