Last week, literally days before I first heard about the OWS movement, I was discussing the economy with my husband and comparing it to a game of Jenga; supporting pieces of our nation’s financial system were being removed one by one by people trying to build the stack as high as they could. The farming industry, the dairy industry, schools and manufacturing – all vital and indispensable pieces of our day-to-day lives – are no longer profitable occupations. They haven’t been for years. But farmers keep farming, and teachers keep teaching, because they know that without them there would be no nation. I opined at that time that the Jenga stack was going to fall eventually.

Little did I know that it was already teetering on the brink. For nearly four weeks, the Occupy Wall Street movement has been growing in numbers and support. I don’t blame the media for my previous ignorance. I could, but that wouldn’t be fair, as I don’t watch television and I avoid news websites as if they were a deadly plague (some of them are, with their pornographic advertisements and gossip-riddled headlines). However, it has come to my attention that many of you out there are being left in ignorance or deliberately misguided by media corporations which stand to lose as protests grow.

If you want to know what the OWS is doing, watch us. If you want to find out what we are demanding, ask us. Don’t rely on your local news station, because many of them are ignoring the issues. Don’t believe the politicians who claim sudden empathy because they’ve realized we’re not going away – many of them accept of billions of dollars in campaign funds from people who like things they way they are. Prove to them that you’re not sheep by researching their stands on the issues, their sponsors, and most importantly their voting records yourselves.

Some – most – of our detractors are frightened because they realize that what we are demanding is some pretty serious change. Well I’m frightened too. I know that in between this American Autumn and the anticipated Spring there must and will be a Winter. But I am more frightened about what will happen to our nation if we ignore the growing corruption at our head. When your doctor says you have a tumor, you cut it out, even though you know it will hurt. You don’t watch in morbid fascination while it devours your entire body. Neither can we sit and watch anymore while politicians make policy based on the demands of the people who paid them into power instead of the ones who voted them there.

That’s not democracy. What democracy is, literally, is the people (demos) raising their voices and acting. While we stand silent, 9% of our workforce is officially unemployed. While we stand silent, another 9% are either underemployed – meaning they want full-time work but receive only part-time wages – or are no longer included in the official count because they have stopped looking for jobs that aren’t there. Let’s put a face to those numbers. A total of 18% of Americans without jobs means that one in five of your friends, one in five of your neighbors, and one in five of your family members can’t afford rent, clothing, or food for themselves and their children. One. In. Five.

I don’t care who you think is to blame for it; that is unacceptable.

If you think that you can’t do anything about it, you’re wrong. If you think that nobody can hear your voice, think again. When you stand there, shouting in unison with a thousand others, ten thousand, a million, it doesn’t matter whether they can pick your voice from the crowd; they have already heard you.

It’s time to stand up and shout.

For those of you who come here looking for D&D content, it will still be here, but all of my future posts will be located at my new blog site, http://www.ironwolfgames.com/. Everything’s up and running over there, so feel free to update your bookmarks now. I do have one more post already scheduled which will appear in both locations on Wednesday morning. All posts will remain up for a time, until I’m sure that google has caught on to the change, too.

Update: All posts are now in their permanent locations, and removed from this one.

Not a terribly glamorous topic, I know, but I saw a need and decided to fill it. While I was at it, I sharpened up my Illustrator skills by making my own graphic for it. If I was really ambitious, I’d do some more pics, but I’ve got a sore throat tonight and baby is due any day now, so … ambition will have to wait for a while. Maybe in a future update.

I’ve also decided that my camera stinks at taking pictures of the stuff in my tank. If anybody knows a way to manually focus a Sony digital camera, let me know.

Enjoy!

So today I was left with an inordinately long wait at the doctor’s office. Once I had exhausted all other options for amusing myself (Reading my tweets, playing puzzle games, and contemplating on the manufacturing process of the artwork on the office wall) I decided it was time to do something useful with myself and jotted down a couple spaceships. I got about five of these done before it was my turn, but these three are the only ones I was satisfied with.

After that was done, I had a quick lunch and was off to work. Now, making decals in a shopping mall is all well and good for keeping you busy most of the time, but it’s February. Even people who had money left over from Christmas have spent it by now, and of those who haven’t, most won’t be thinking about decorating their car until it’s warm enough to actually apply a decal without scraping ice off the windows first. So I was once again left with little to do. Fortunately, I do work at a decal shop. That means Illustrator is one of the (slightly) less expensive pieces of software on my hard drive.

Surprisingly, my finished product versions of the ships turned out remarkably similar to the original sketches. I think I’ve finally found my way around this obnoxious illustrating barrier. The same thing happened on Tuesday when I was working on a logo – I got exactly nowhere on the Illustrator version until I had a passable working sketch drawn on a sheet of paper. It didn’t have to be perfect – and was far from it, really – but the basic shapes had to be down before I could make that creative leap.

Note that this is not the best clean-up job I’ve ever done, but like I said, it was a brief project.

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There’s also an announcement for a new FMA movie, which I’ll take another look at later to see what I can get out of it.

Yesterday I found myself wishing I had some way to tell my phone to switch on silent mode at a certain time and then switch it back off again after a certain period of time. Wouldn’t that be convenient? You could program in your entire week’s activities (church 1-4, work 8-5, movie 7-9, whatever) during which your phone wouldn’t bother other people if somebody happened to call you at an inconvenient time, but then it would turn itself right back on once you were available. No more missing that dinner invite from grandma because you didn’t think to check whether your phone was on after work.

What about you? What do you need in your life that hasn’t been invented yet?