For the past few months I've been working on the UI for Demigod (and by the way, we released the first official trailer today) and we reached a point a couple of weeks ago in which the UI needed a complete overhaul. The other leads on the project were worried about how I'd take this because they knew they were essentially telling me, "we're sorry, but you have to completely redo this, it doesn't fit with the game now." After discussing what changes we wanted to make one of the leads asked me worriedly, "are you okay with this? I mean, we're basically redoing everything." And when I said yes, explaining that this always happens in UI because there's a point you reach at which it just sort of...well, happens, he said, "it does? So what are we doing wrong, then?" Speaking in the broad, industry-wide sense of the word we.

For most games, the UI should be developed in a set of stages that resembles this: a 0.1 prototyping pure whitebox phase in which you're merely prototyping functionality with raw, early gameplay; a 0.2 prototype phase in which you refine the whitebox and functionality; a 1.0 alpha prototype phase in which you now give the whitebox its art style. At this point you should be about halfway through your game's development phase, and you along with your designers and art lead will be pretty sure that your 1.0 is going to be the UI you ship with after you tweak and polish the art style a bit.

But you would be wrong. At this point your design team is still refining and tweaking gameplay and things are probably not fully settled. In fact, its at this stage where it seems most of the core gameplay is really iterated on and refined (or should be, for a decently-run project). Your whole team will be happily using the 1.0 UI that you created while you happily work on some art tweaks here and there, refine your UI's visual style, add some dialogs that the designers need, maybe add in things like your front-end movie and the like.

This is when UI entropy begins. I brought all of this up to Matt, who was also a game UI designer for a few years, and he was the one who used the term "entropy." UI entropy begins to affect your UI because as design elements change through the normal course of game development and gameplay design iteration they'll change in small enough ways individually that they likely won't cause anyone to say that the UI needs a revision, but they'll gather like a snowball, accruing more and more momentum as they go down the design hill.

And that's when they hit the tipping point, the point that hits two-thirds of the way through the game's development cycle where it's clear to everyone that the 1.0 alpha UI you built just doesn't work for your game anymore. The first few times this happened to me I felt disheartened. The process is always the same -- you're moving along in your own UI world, at this point likely mostly separated from the design team simply because there's no need to involve you much at this stage (I mean, you're just polishing art style at this point, right?), and then you get called into a meeting with the leads on the project, who hand you a sketch out of the blue outlining their new vision for the UI.

It can be debilitating. It feels like they're telling you that the work you did up to this point was for nothing, or that they're dissatisfied with the work you've done and are here to tell you how to do it the right way. But if you can get past all of that (it's hard, I know, I had to do it) you can see how this meeting is about the UI Tipping Point and what it actually means. Everyone to this point has been playtesting what has likely been a mostly solid and unchanging UI; it's given them time to really cement just what doesn't actually work in your HUD, and on the design side they've probably finally figured out what the actual focus is of the game and how the UI doesn't currently reflect it (which is a whole separate game development discussion -- sure, we're all supposed to know what our games set out to do right from the start, but even the best-run project goes through enough changes over its development life to change its focus a bit). So now they're telling you that they really feel that the weapon switching element is too small and made too unimportant over there in the corner of the screen, or that the game is about leveling up and your skill point indicators in the upper right just don't show up well enough, and this big element over here in the corner really needs to be a much smaller element, and these buttons here in the lower right are really important and should be front and center...

And it's okay. That's supposed to happen. The work you did to this point wasn't for naught, it was just another phase of prototyping. And I've found that once you've reached this tipping point, you have some early-phase stylization going on in the art passes you've done that still nag you as being just not quite right, and when you combine these with a completely new pass on the UI taking into account the things that the design team has been able to nail down as most important, wham -- you comp it all up in Photoshop (or Flash, as was the case for me on Space Siege since we used Scaleform) and you can see before you even start scripting it all into the game that it just works. The whole thing gels, the art style and the functionality. You've gone from a UI that might have felt on the surface like it worked by had slowly started nagging you as needing some kind of refinement or change that you couldn't quite pinpoint to a lean, mean, user interfacing machine.

And now you'll spend a few more months working that into the game, hopefully having had your time actually budgeted to handle this tipping point and subsequent redevelopment. Smart leads will learn to budget for this process, and smart UI designers will learn that it's just how UI development seems to work.

It looks like I made that goal -- earlier that I thought, even -- because my belly dance instructor has asked me to join her troupe, Skin Deep. I guess this means I'm a real belly dancer now.

It seemed that as soon as I joined the troupe we started getting a slew of performance dates alongside Skin Deep's student troupe, and since I've got a lot of family and friends local to the area, I thought it would be useful to point out where we're performing.

We'll be performing next at the Mediterranean Fantasy Festival on Saturday, July 19th on the indoor stage at 12:44 pm. Yes, you read that right -- 12:44, not 12:45. We'll be performing with Ishq, the live Middle Eastern acoustic band we've been working with, and I think it's such a great dynamic to perform with live musicians, which means it should be a great show.

In August we're the half-time show for the Rat City Roller Girls roller derby bout on August 16th. Now this show I'm really looking forward to. Our set is wicked fun, and how can you beat roller derby and belly dancing? You can't. Don't even try. No, seriously. Don't.

We also just found out that we have an hour on the Education Stage at the Puyallup Fair, again with Ishq, at 7 pm on September 11. It may be tough to follow the sheep and milking competitions, but I think we can pull it off.

I've been putting a lot of effort into my costume pieces, with my biggest effort going to the coin bra you can almost see in this photo. I'll post more detailed photos of costuming creation, especially since I plan to do a lot more.

So if you're in the Seattle area, you have no excuse. Find a show to come to and zagareet us on.

But all of that has changed, my friend! On a complete whim last year I decided I was going to try belly dancing. I figured if there was any kind of dance I might have a remote chance of being decent at it would be something that utilized my more than ample junk in the trunk. Sure, they call it belly dancing, but that turns out to be a bit of a misnomer.

The first style I tried out was Egyptian Cabaret with Alexandra. She teaches the class at Bally Fitness in Redmond on Thursday nights, so I figured there would probably be a good cross section of types joining in, and I was right. I was simultaneously hooked and dismayed right from the first class: we were doing hip circles, a super-cool belly dance move right in the first hour, but I watched in the mirror and thought, "I'm hopeless. How the hell do I do this? I look like an elderly snake with a broken back trying to get it on."

But I stuck with it. Alexandra is such a great teacher and so patient, with a really vibrant teaching style and sense of humor that makes you really want to stick with it. So I did, through two more sessions, and eventually moved into her Intermediate class where we learned zils, those little finger cymbals. Now those will make you feel like a real belly dancer.

But I'd been looking up belly dancing styles on the net and I kept finding these belly dancers all dressed up in the most incredible outfits -- jingly coin bras, huge skirts, tassel belts, coins everywhere -- and I had to know what it was. I was shamelessly attracted to a style of belly dancing based solely on the costuming, I admit it.

The style turned out to be American Tribal Style, a form of improvisational belly dance that focused on the group all performing synchronized moves based on a leader/follower method. Despite looking completely choreographed, the moves are actually done improvisationally, with the leader queuing the move so the followers will know what to do next.

I knew right away I wanted to try this style, so I looked up Katrina of Skin Deep, a local troupe of two and a dance studio that teaches the style. I began taking her classes in Issaquah on Friday nights alongside my Cabaret classes on Thursday until I found myself doing both level one and two in both styles.

Having been working on level two for a few weeks now in my ATS class, I know for sure that I want to actually stick with this and find people to perform with. Fortunately, my teacher Katrina is looking to expand her troupe and has added a level three class specifically for those who want to move into performing. These students will either form a student troupe or move up into Katrina's Skin Deep troupe, so I've made it my goal this year to do either of those two things, whichever comes first.

And I think I'll do it, too. Somehow I managed to be halfway decent at this whole belly dance thing, and at a weekend workshop recently, the Cues and Tattoos Festival in Seattle, my teacher introduced me to her dance partner as the student she'd been "raving about." I still have a lot of work to do to be performance-worthy, but I'm definitely getting there.

And of course, being the fiber and sewing geek that I am, I've already gone way too deep into the costuming. Fortunately we wear this stuff in class so it doesn't go to waste. The tassel belt you see in the photo is one of a couple of items I've made for my belly dance costume. The belt uses an old Uzbekistan pillow covering that I added a belt to and homemade tassels with beads to. It's layered over a green fringe belt, which is in turn layered over a silk sari petal skirt and a blank floor length skirt. I've already made a headpiece that I have yet to take some pictures of (coming soon) with flowers, shells, and more, and I'm working on some tribal hair falls with cowrie shells and wild colors to add to the headpiece.

So wish me luck on this whole plan to perform this year. If it all goes well, I may have some videos to post.

If you're an atypical gaming female like me, it's easy to let a knee-jerk reaction get the best of you and make you want to call him a misogynist or sexist, but if you have that reaction then you need to remember one thing: Magnus Bergsson isn't talking about you. He's talking about your average woman, and you know what? He's right.

Bergsson's statement might initially come off as a sweeping sexist generalization, but it's a generalization that has some basis in reality, and the immediate assumption that it's sexist is more our own projections on what we deem to be "girly" and "manly" in video games. Women and men are different creatures, and on average, excepting the odd few like myself, most women prefer their games to be centered around one or more of the following gameplay mechanics: exploration, simulation, socialization, and evolution.

Of these mechanics, only socialization has an inherent gender bias. When we think of "girly" games we tend toward a visual representation of the term: cute art, pastel colors. Evolution, simulation, and exploration, however, are all mechanics that are commonly enjoyed by players of both genders. The difference is that women on average tend to place more of their enjoyment on these mechanics as the main gameplay, while men tend to see these as a means to an end that usually involves other goals: visceral action-oriented gameplay, strategy, or stats-centric roleplaying.

So the question isn't, "is this generalization true?" The question is, "why does this generalization ring true?" I'd like to put forth three possible answers to that question.

1. It isn't the gameplay that prevents women from enjoying hardcore games, it's the art and presentation.

Pick any game off the shelf and you can reduce it to an abstract set of gameplay rules in a generic environment. Shooters aren't shooters because they're bloody and violent; they're shooters because some kind of projectile weapon is fired at a target to eliminate it. Nerf Arena Blast is just as much of a shooter as Soldier of Fortune; the former is a far more abstract form of the genre than the bloody and more violent latter.

The most common reaction that women have when asked if they want to play a game like Soldier of Fortune is distaste for the level of violence, the gore, and the clearly testosterone-driven tone of the art. If, however, the shooter were made more abstract, its violent imagery removed, would women then be able to get past the barrier the art style put in front of them and enjoy the game for its adrenaline-driven, hunter-and-prey gameplay?

2. Women are not introduced to these types of games at the early age that boys typically are.

The most common method by which women are introduced to video games, it seems, is via a college boyfriend or a husband. By then the concept of the video game as a strictly male pastime has been ingrained, and if they've been introduced to them at all it wasn't until they met boys who owned them. It seems that girls are rarely seen by their parents as a primary user of video games, only ever coming to it as a secondary user through a brother or a male friend. Kid's video games offer a wide range of styles and gameplay that, for a young girl, could very well provide a better basis for an open mind about experiencing different types of gameplay that they've been told fall into the "boys' game" category.

3. Women are simply hardwired for social- and exploration-based entertainment, and men are hardwired for visceral, adrenaline-based entertainment.

As much as modern society tries to rank the sexes as the same in ever category, let's face it: men and women are different. Our brains approach problems and puzzles in different ways; why not accept then that women and men tend to enjoy different types of gameplay experiences with different reward paths?

This last question points to the heart of the issue. Too often we resort to trying to figure out what a "girly" game is, and both men and women have an immediate negative reaction to the label "girly game" -- both genders view it as separate and unequal.

But the type of games that women on the whole tend to enjoy don't have gameplay that is inherently inferior; it's merely different. Again, women tend to enjoy games that involve exploration, socialization, simulation, and evolution. This is a perfectly valid set of gameplay characteristics that have no inherent gender bias, we've simply associated games that have them (like The Sims) as being "girly."

The industry is finally moving from a position in which women weren't worth catering to at all to a position in which they're at least interested in finding out what makes us tick gaming-interesting-wise. And so if you're a woman it's a good time to be a gamer. But let's hope they deepen their focus and start looking into the whys as well as the hows.

This isn't entirely new to me. Back in high school I was in Marine Corps. Junior ROTC where I was not only a good shot on the air rifle team (I had a sharpshooter medal), but I was able to spend a week in full immersion at Parris Island, Marine Corps. boot camp. Part of the boot camp experience was the M-16 rifle course, and I'm proud to say that I didn't do too badly, but that experience is a distant memory...

While visiting my family in Washington state, Matt took me to a shooting range in Ravensdale and let me fire a rifle and a couple of pistols that his dad, a gunsmith, actually made himself. We started with the rifle, which Matt assured me had no kick to it. Let me warn you about something: if a guy in a flannel shirt hands you a rifle and says that it "kicks like a squirrel through a pillow," do not believe him.

But regardless of the bruise the gun left on my clavicle and the deafness despite the ear protection, I didn't too badly (after we spent some time adjusting the sights). Then we switched to the two .45 pistols. I don't know why, but this is where I really started feeling like a bad ass. My shot groups at first were abysmal -- the pistols had a bit of a kick, and they were heavier than I thought they'd be. Matt would shoot a group and then I'd shoot a group, and then we'd compare our side-by-side targets. I'm a highly competitive person, and it irritated me that my groups weren't as good as his. So I'd tell him, "again!" And we'd each fire another round. And then another. And another, until finally we put the guns down and checked the targets and I heard Matt say, "damn...your groups are better than mine."

"Now we can leave," I said.

What have I got for sale? Well, in addition to the handknit items I've been putting in my Etsy shop, I've been going through my handspun yarn stash and I thought I'd see if people were interested in buying it. If you're a knitter who's unfamiliar with handspun yarn, you might wonder to yourself, "why would I buy handspun yarn when I can get cheaper yarn from the knit shop?"

The first yarn I'm offering for sale is a pretty purple superwash wool, two skeins that are around 350 yards each. Superwash wool is wool that doesn't shrink or felt significantly, meaning that you can throw it in the washer and dryer and don't have to hand wash it. I spun this as a two-ply yarn with a roughly worsted weight.

I'm also offering a couple of highly intricate scarves for sale -- The Peacock and The Seafoam. The Peacock is possibly the single-most intricate and delicate item I've ever knit in the fifteen years that I've been knitting.

One thing I'm hoping to see Etsy implement is the eBay charity integration. I'd like to be able to automatically donate a portion of the proceeds to a charity, just like MissionFish, but that has yet to be seen on Etsy. When they do I'll definitely be adding that option to my sales.

I'll be adding more handspun yarn soon and hopefully some other handknit goodies. Come on, you know you want to buy it!

Now you guys can finally see what it is I've been working on behind the scenes here, and I hope you like it. Not everything is finished yet, and in fact many things are still in transition. But given that most people are here to read my blog I thought that I could work on finishing up the rest of the site and make most of it live. You may find a broken link here and there or a page that hasn't been converted over to the new design. Don't worry...it'll all be taken care of soon.

Another new thing you'll see is some of the knitting and other hand-made stuff I've created featured to the left. It points to my Etsy shop where you can buy some of the stuff I've made. I'm actually hoping that with the first few items I sell (eventually) I can buy myself a Wii or a 360. Cross your fingers.

I'll update more as I add things, and I apologize in advance for the Internet Explorer 6 users among you...things may stay broken for you a little longer as you're actually the minority visitor here. But most of it should still be pretty functional. The worst you should see are a few broken graphics here and there because of IE6's inability to handle transparency.

I plan to use this redesign to fiddle around with AJAX, implementing some custom layouts to highlight either knitting content or gaming content, depending on your preference.

So feel free to let me know how you feel about the new design. Just bear in mind that this is more of a beta version as I roll it out and fix the last few things left to do.

O'Reilly's comments focus a lot on the erroneous belief that so many anti-game people hold: that people who play video games lose the ability to socialize with people. They don't know their neighbors, he says. Nothing could be further from the truth. Video games have, especially in the last few years, become a foundation for vast social interactivity. Hardly anyone sits in their room anymore playing a game in the dark by themselves; they're adding people to their Friends Lists and playing games together, either against each other or cooperatively. Or they're playing World of Warcraft with a thousand other people and making friends with them. Or they're going to game conventions or E3 and meeting people in person who they've only ever known as a voice on the other side of the Xbox headset. Video gamers have grown up and are having children, and now parents spend time with their kids playing video games together. As a video game developer, I can say that the social interactivity factor of games and the new console systems is nearly more important than the game itself now.

O'Reilly talks about gamers as if his sole exposure to them comes from a poorly written TV stereotype. I'd wager he's never actually met one. A video game console in a home is about as common a site today as a toaster. Video games are so common place that MTV, that shining beacon of social trend prediction, now has its own video game show. (Which bears the unfortunate name of The G-Hole...but we'll save that for another entry.) There are socially inept and withdrawn people who play video games, and there are socially inept and withdrawn people who have no idea what an XBox or a Playstation is. There are surgeons who have been shown to have improved motor skills and coordination because they play video games. There are soldiers in O'Reilly's beloved Iraq War that are better UAV pilots because they play video games.

There have always been people like O'Reilly -- people who are fearful of some new technology or new fad and think that it will be the death of civilization as we know it. It was said that comics would ruin society (they didn't), and the same was said about television and radio, the very media that O'Reilly relies on for his paycheck and yet conveniently considers benign.

He goes on at length about how impossible it is to hold a conversation with a computer geek, and that you can't really talk to them. The moment he said this, O'Reilly might as well have hung a big neon sign around his neck that read, I'M IRRELEVANT. While everyone else in the world moves on with new advancements and new technology, the dinosaurs of our society, the people who fear change, fear advancement, and fear their own relevancy and ability to keep up, wail and gnash their teeth about how society is dying and no one else can see it but them. And society doesn't crumble beneath our feet.

If O'Reilly can't have a conversation with a person who plays video games, uses computers, or uses an iPod (another device that he complains about), devices that are considered these days to be as basic as a calculator, it's much more telling about his own inability to keep up with the rest of society. Perhaps he should be more concerned about his imminent irrelevancy and less concerned about people who don't fear technology and are out talking to their friends and their coworkers about it.

There was a time in games, back before Alyx in Half-Life 2, before Jade from Beyond Good & Evil, when female characters in games came in only one variety: overboobified, underwaistified, barely-dressed stripper. For a female gamer like me, it was an easy time championing the fight to include less sexed-up female characters with more clothes on on their body and a few more brain cells in their head. All we had to do was hold up any ad from any gaming magazine that had a prominent female character and point to it. Or just say, "come on...just look at Lara Croft, for God's sake."

Then we were rewarded with the Alyxes and the Jades, and we female gamers were the happier for it. Finally we had some realistic female characters, ones who were smart, ones who wore real clothes and didn't exist solely to serve the male fantasy. We had characters we wanted to be.

So we should be happy, right? We won our fight, didn't we?

I had an interesting discussion with friends and fellow game developers today, and it made me realize that we're in danger of thinking we've won the war when we've only really won the battle. The discussion started with video from Gears of War that I can't link to because it's been pulled for copyright reasons, but the video had a shot of a female character that helps the player through the game -- her name is Anya and she's an intelligence officer that you mostly hear but never see. The video, however, gave us a sneak peek of her and one of my friends raised an interesting point: while Anya certainly isn't scantily clad by any means, my friend found it interesting that in the video she's standing with a fully-armored soldier having just landed in a helicopter. My friend wondered why the one female character didn't have any armor on while the male soldiers had full protection?

I'm not going to pick on Gears of War specifically -- Anya is a great character. She's exactly what a great female character should be: intelligent, approachable, and not oversexualized. I think the way Epic designed her is terrific. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that she's another character in a trend that I worry is almost eroding the very thing we're trying to get video games to stop doing: perpetuating the idea that women are an unusual commodity unfit for ordinary places in these fantasy worlds.

In an effort to raise video games out of the depths of sexism, more game companies are designing female characters that aren't oversexualized, that are approachable, and that play a pivotable role in the game. This is commendable, certainly. But what do Alyx and Anya have in common? (Or seem to -- I'll certainly be quite happy to retract any of this once GoW is released and I'm wrong about the role Anya plays.) They're helper characters. And they're almost always the only female character in the game.

It's as if the designers have figured out that they need to have a woman in the game in order to help work out this whole strippers-in-games problem, but they didn't broaden their scope enough to go beyond a band-aid solution. So they put in a female character that's certainly important enough to be a key part of the game, but its at the expense of the rest of the game world. (I should note that I'm mostly limiting this to shooters and other "hardcore" genre games -- RPGs generally do a pretty good job of having a lot of characters of both genders in their game worlds.)

Women make up 51% of the population. Women are construction workers, CEOs of large corporations, soldiers, some of whom serve in combat now. Why, when we're creating futuristic worlds, are we not including them among the background characters of our game world? Why is it that when you're walking around a military base in a futuristic world and encountering one generic soldier after another, not one of them is female?

I'm not absolving my own company (Raven Software) of this. We made Quake 4 and we absolutely should have had a good female marine in the game. We have a few women at Raven and all of us told the team that we really wanted a female marine. One of our artists even concepted a very good character but due to memory andtime constraints, we were told, there was no way to put her in. It's unfortunate, and it's something we ought to remedy in future projects.

But the remedy isn't making one very special female character, one carefully crafted to please the eye yet not offend the sensibilities, charged with carrying the burden of representing the entire female gender in the entire game. The remedy is actually a lot more plain than that: just add female characters to your game world. Add them in ordinary positions doing ordinary things. Got a game that has a scene in a futuristic space dock? Make one out of four of your generic dock worker models a woman. Got a game that takes place on futuristic battlefields with squads of soldiers, most of whom are there to add a living element to the game? Make one of them a woman. And if you can't spare the memory for the extra female model plus her voice files, put a couple of generic female voice files on one of your armored-up helmeted soldiers. After all, do men and women soldiers in heavy armor really look that different? (This idea was suggested by my friend who originally asked about Anya's armor, and I think it's a great idea. Okay, the model animations should definitely look different between a man and a woman, but hey, I'm willing to sacrifice that for something so much more obviously female as a voice file.)

Making special female characters is great, but in doing so we shift the focus from wondering why there are only strippers for female characters in a game to why there is only one woman in the game. That just shifts the problem, it doesn't help to solve it. We're an industry that's grown up a lot over the last couple of decades and we're really making strides. Many of the young guys who make games today have gone on to become family men, yet we're still seen as the socially awkward pimply-faced teen who has completely unrealistic ideas about women in games and art. Imagine how your wife, your girlfriend, or your daughter live in a world in which they can do anything they want and be represented, and then look at the game world that you're helping to create and re-evaluate why you might be leaving them out of it.

Special female characters are great and it shows how far we've come in our short history. But when the day comes that the inclusion of women characters in games is as ordinary and unexciting as the inclusion of male characters already is...that's when we've really nailed it.

And by the way, I want to add a postscript here. Some of you may say, "but Caryn, what about the Hellchick model? That's supposed to represent you, and she's the height of oversexualized, underdressed game characters!"

I want to make it clear that I have no problems with these kind of characters existing, and existing especially in game worlds that are suited for them. I like the expression of sexuality in games; I just don't want to see it as the only representation of women. Did anyone play Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K. 2? I did, and the main character was Julie Strain, a stripper heroine with only a few scarves around her that could barely be called clothes. And I loved her, because it fit the world she was in, just like the Hellchick model fits the world she lives in: a succubus creature designed specifically to be shown off in that way.

It's great to have both kinds of characters. We just need a little bit more of the ordinary ones to catch up with the extraordinary ones.

Listen. No one else is going to tell you this because they don't want to make you feel uncomfortable or anything, because, you know, what if they run into you again and oh God, wouldn't that just be really awkward? So I'm going to say this to you not to hurt your feelings or anything, but to help you. We girls have to stick together.

It's the 80s fashion. You've really got to let it die. Unlike most of you I actually lived during the 80s. My formative years. The high school ones. Oh, it was a heady time -- New Order was the rage and everyone wanted to be a character in The Breakfast Club. So unlike all of you who are wearing the skinny jeans, the leg warmers, all that crap, I actually know how stupid it looks because, like Jesus dying on the cross for your sins, I've already worn the stupid for you.

Those black leggings under the skirt have to be the first to go. I know, I know -- it's painful to hear. But really, when was the last time you wore black leggings under a skirt? It was when you were eight years old and your mom made you wear dresses because it was what little girls were supposed to do but you wanted to climb the trees and play hockey in the street (even though Eddie Sabatini said that girls can't play hockey, but he was just a stupid boy so what did he know) and you couldn't just let everyone see your underwear so you compromised, and that's where the leggings came in. And that's exactly where they need to stay. You look like a goofy 20-something-year-old trying to look eight. And failing. Miserably.

Do I really even need to say anything about leg warmers? If you were drunk when I saw you wearing them at the mall today, or maybe your hot boyfriend had just broken up with you and you weren't thinking straight, you can tell me. I'll forgive you. It's the only explanation I can think of for anyone wearing them. Ever.

Come on, ladies. Don't let the fashion industry bully you around. You know what they're doing, don't you? They're sitting around dredging up the worst fashions of every decade, probably sharing some port or sherry and saying, "do think we can get them to wear that?!" "Oh, honey, they're wrapped around our delicate little pinkies! When we say 'jump', women of America say, 'what kind of mule or espadrille would you like us to jump in?'" And then they bend their hands, lean forward, and laugh with their mouths wide open, but it's that kind of fake laugh where you're pretty sure they think the other one is a total bitch.

Seriously. Say no to 80s fashion. Do you really want to end up with Flock of Seagulls hair? Think about it.

Hey, I said you could have one cookie, not the whole damn plate.

Ever since adolescence I've been overweight. I can't remember a time in my adult life when I have, under normal healthy conditions, been less than 185 pounds. I'm tall at 5'9" and I come from both Finnish and Norwegian families, which means I have the body of a Scandinavian farm girl, but even 185 pounds is heavy on my frame. At some point in the last five years or so my weight hit a maximum of 197 pounds. Because I have a large frame, I'm curvy, and I'm tall, most people have underguessed my weight, but it was still 197 pounds up until a few months ago.

For most of my adult life I've also had very dry skin, brittle nails, dry and brittle hair, and flaky eyebrows. In fact, for years my husband would joke about my "rogue eyebrow" (my left one) as he brushed flakes away from the outer edge. We never thought anything of it -- we thought it was just me. My periods had also never been regular at all -- my average cycle was 52 days, and there were periods of time when I would go three months or so without getting my period at all, or I'd get it two weeks after I'd already gotten it. When I asked doctors about this I was told that every woman is different and it was nothing to be concerned about.

When I was about 24 or 25, I wanted to join the National Guard. To do so, I had to be a certain weight or body fat percentage for my height and age. Their requirement was 169 pounds or 32% body fat. So I began working hard: I added more exercise and I ate better. I was 185 and I stayed that way for quite a while. At my weigh-ins at the Guard post, they were dismayed at my lack of progress and insisted that I really had to stick to a diet and exercise regimen. I was, but since I wasn't seeing results I increased my regimen of exercise and reduced my caloric intake even more. I only lost a few pounds and I remained heavy. I continued to push myself further and further, trying to lose more weight. At my lowest I was at 172 pounds, still considered heavy by any standard for my height. The weight wasn't even muscular weight -- it was pudgy fat. The only way I was able to get to this weight and maintain it was by exercising for two hours every single morning and reducing my food intake to a single salad per day and nothing more. I was exhausted, I was tense, and I was mystified at how two hours of weights and aerobics and practically no food could still result in me being pudgy and overweight. And most of all, tired. I was exhausted. I saw a doctor, and he said, "your body simply doesn't want to get any lower than 172 pounds. I don't know what to tell you." I gave up trying to get into the National Guard, and while I kept a normal exercise regimen and diet, my weight ballooned back up to about 190 pounds.

About five years ago I began asking my doctor in California about why I hadn't gotten pregnant yet. She ran a few blood tests that led to an MRI, and that MRI revealed that I had something called a pituitary adenoma, or a small, benign nodule on my pituitary gland. The adenoma was, supposedly, pressing on my pituitary gland slightly and causing my body to produce elevated levels of certain hormones that fooled my body into thinking it was pregnant all the time. (This actually explained a lot of things for me.)

She prescribed Dostinex for me and told me that I had to follow up with an endocrinologist. The Dostinex was going to help offset the extra hormones and I would see a major difference -- my periods would finally be regular. I followed up with an endocrinologist, as my GP had suggested.

He did blood work and found out that in addition to my pituitary issue, I had something called Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, a not uncommon autoimmune disorder in which the body mistakes the thyroid gland for a foreign agent and produces specific antibodies to destroy it. From what he explained it was common to have a pituitary condition in addition to a thyroid problem as the two were closely related. When he asked me about previous doctors and the fact that my periods had always been irregular, he was appalled when I told him that no other doctor had been interested. He said that women's health care was in a terrible state and many women were never listened to when they brought up issues like that to their doctor. This made me feel that I'd found a good doctor.

Like anyone would do, I researched Hashimoto's Thyroiditis on the web. I read that some Hashimoto's patients can experience hypothyroidism, a condition in which the thyroid gland is underfunctioning. The symptoms included dry, brittle skin and hair, exhaustion, inability to concentrate, irregular periods, infertility, inability to lose weight or a weight gain, and -- oddly specific -- flakiness or balding on the outer edges of the eyebrows.

I was stunned. Could this have been causing all those problems for me? Could this by why I hadn't been able to get to a reasonable weight despite a good diet and exercise? At my next appointment I told this doctor that I'd read about it and how relieved I was to have found an explanation for these things. He gave me a patronizing smile and said, "you don't have those symptoms." I looked at him oddly. I wasn't making them up. I explained that I'd had them forever, especially the flaky eyebrows. He smiled again and waved his hand away. "No, you couldn't be experiencing those. You would be very far advanced in hypothyroidism."

So this doctor who'd just told me at my last appointment that female patients get short shrift was telling me I was lying, or that I was a hypochondriac. He said that my Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH) level was within the normal range, and therefore I couldn't be experiencing symptoms of it being out of that range. There wasn't anything I could do, so I simply went on with life, continuing to experience these same symptoms and continuing to not get pregnant.

We moved to Wisconsin and I continued to take Dostinex. By the time we'd moved I'd been on it for three years. Most patients are supposed to have gotten pregnant in less than a year on the medication. My endocrinologist didn't seem fased by this and simply kept me on it.

By the time we'd moved to Wisconsin, I was the heaviest I'd ever been: 197 pounds. Just a couple of months after we moved, I noticed that I was feeling incredibly exhausted all the time. At 8 pm I'd be sitting on the couch, literally unable to stay awake. Sometimes I'd doze off while sitting at the dining room table in front of my laptop. I'd go to bed at 8 pm, get eight hours of sleep, and wake up exhausted again the next day. I had a workout regiment of 45 minutes of exercise four times a week in the mornings. I'd force myself to get through my workout, but as the months went on I found that instead of being able to increase the difficulty of my workout, I couldn't even make it through easier workouts than I'd done before. I was getting more and more exhausted. Doing ten minutes of light housework had me sititng on the couch trying to keep from passing out. To be honest, I felt like a cancer patient. I was exhausted and sick all the time.

More troubling than this was a change in my period. During the first two days I began to cramp so painfully that I'd feel nauseous and nearly throw up. Until a year ago I'd normally just have to take a couple of Advil for normal cramps. I had to increase that to three Advil, and then finally four, with four pills still not doing the trick. At random times of the month I would get stabbing pain in my abdomen and cramps so bad that I had to lie down and take more Advil.

All of this continued to get worse over the course of our first year in Wisconsin. I asked my GP about the exhaustion; his explanation was that I had just moved from California and simply wasn't used to the seasonal differences here. I asked him about the abdominal cramping; he did all the gynecological tests and found nothing. I asked him about my inability to lose weight despite eating right and exercising regularly; his explanation was that he didn't have an explanation. Work out more, eat less. At this time I was already down to about 1000 calories a day -- even working out I was simply never hungry. I could eat one small meal a day and not be hungry until the next day. It was as if my metabolism simply was not burning very well. I even tried eating more food in case I wasn't getting enough and my body was going into starvation mode. It didn't work -- I experienced the same results and no change in weight.

He recommended that I follow up with a new endocrinologist here since I was still taking Dostinex and I needed to follow up on the thyroid issue anyway. (My previous endo had told me that Hashimoto's patients had to get regular check ups on their thyroid antibody count to find out if they'd gone hypothyroid -- the condition that that doctor had told me I couldn't have been experiencing -- so they can begin taking thyroid medication.)

I found the only endo available on my new insurance plan. I showed up and, because the medical establishment here is heavily involved in the UW medical school, spoke with the endo's medical intern (or whatever you call them). I spoke with her for 20 minutes and went through everything I'd been experiencing: the increasing abdominal pain, the increasing exhaustion, the weight gain and inability to lose weight, and the general feel of unwellness. She wrote some things down, explained that she'd speak to the endo, and would return with him for the actual exam.

The old doctor walked in and looked at her notes. He immediately dismissed everything that she'd suggested following up on. He then asked my why iIwas still taking Dostinex, as if it was my fault for some reason. I explained that my previous endo had continued to prescribe it. He said that it was unusual for doctors to prescribe Dostinex for longer than one year because they "don't know what kind of effects it will have." Oh, great.

It should be noted that this doctor stared at my chest during the whole five minutes he saw me.

He then palpated my thyroid -- a common thing to do with thyroid problem patients -- so roughly that he was choking me. He grunted and said it felt fine. He said that he was going to prescribe bromocryptine for the infertility. He kept focusing on fixing the infertility, which by now was pretty low on my list of health priorities.

I asked him about the abdominal pain, the lack of weight loss and the exhaustion. He literally waved his hand dismissively and his exact words were, "I don't know. We can check your bloodwork, but we won't find anything." He then proceeded to write out the infertility medication prescription and sent me on my way. The visit took five minutes.

I left the office thinking that I was a hypochondriac and that it was all in my head. For a couple of months I continued to feel abdominal pain, continued to be frustrated with my ill health, and just assumed that I was going to feel like this for the rest of my life and that I'd better get used to it.

Then I snapped out of it and figured I'd better find yet another doctor, someone willing to listen to me. I did some thyroid-related research and found a doctor in Milwaukee, an hour and a half away, who apparently was very interested in patients who'd been told the same thing I'd been told. His name is Dr. Burton Waisbren and I made an appointment.

His office is somewhat retro and he's very old-fashioned. This almost put me off but at this point I was willing to try anything. He sat down and talked to me about everything I'd been through medically up to this point. He said that he'd heard my story many times before and that doctors used to do a certain kind of test for hypothyroidism called the T3 and free T4 test. This measured certain compounds that your pituitary and thyroid both dealt with. At some point in the recent past, he explained, doctors switched to measuring only TSH. He believes that the older tests were more accurate and he's found that people with normal TSH levels will show abnormal T3 and free T4 levels and have all the symptoms of hypothyroidism, which he said it sounded like I had.

He did the requisite bloodwork and then I saw him for a follow up. He said that I was definitely hypothyroid -- my T3 and free T4 tests had come back showing it, and what was more, my Hashimoto's antibodies were incredibly high. He'd also done a few other tests that show I have a predilection towards autoimmunity (where my own body wants to attack itself) and he wanted to begin a regimen. He explained that we would try a few things and see what worked for me, but that we wouldn't stop until we found something that worked. He said that he wanted to make sure that I felt better first before we became concerned with any infertility issues.

One of the things he had me do was get a thyroid uptake scan and have another MRI to check on the pituitary adenoma. I went to the radiology department of the UW clinic and had the scan done. The radiologist said that everything looked normal and my uptake was smack in the middle of the normal range. So he scoffed when I told him that I was having another doctor take a look at this. He insisted I was wasting my time and that what I was looking for would not be found in my thyroid condition.

My doctor got the results and started my regimen. What worked was the first thing he tried: Armour Thyroid medication. He started me on a low dose and then followed up with me a month later, where he increased it from three pills a day to four. And let me tell you, I've never felt better. My exhaustion is gone, my skin isn't so dry anymore, and the weight is dropping off. This morning I weighed in at 176 pounds. I've lost 21 pounds so far since I've started taking Thyroid. I no longer fall asleep at 8 pm -- the other night I did yoga at 9 o'clock. I don't feel sick all the time, and I'm less prone to getting sick (it seemed that in the first year of being in Wisconsin I came down with colds and even walking pneumonia all the time). I started taking tae kwon do again, and instead of feeling like I'm going to die after a strenuous workout, I feel toughened up and exhausted in the right kind of way. I finally feel normal!

I'm happy that I pressed on and found a doctor who will listen to me. If you've been told this kind of stuff is in your head, don't listen to them. Keep looking and find a doctor who will actually listen to your symptoms. It's your body, and you're the only one who knows for sure when something's wrong.

If you didn't catch the segment on The Daily Show last night about the Congressional hearings on video game violence currently wasting your hard-earned tax dollars, your homework assignment is to watch it right here.

The first two thirds of the segment mostly just uncovers the complete out-of-touchness of the people that we hire to represent us to our government. You have some gems in there, such as Congressman Fred Upton (R-Michigan) proudly proclaiming that he's a gamer because he's an expert at Pong. I'm going to assume that right after he said that, he got into his Model T to go home and play the latest wax cylinder musical recording on his brand-new grammaphone.

Mr. Upton, if the last game you played was Pong, you haven't played a game in about 25 years, and there's generally a statute of limitations on the use of the word "gamer" when claiming that you are one. Things have advanced now. We have computers, there's a space station in orbit, and we have these things called lattes. You might consider checking them out.

But the best part is that while Jon Stewart is doing what he does best -- publicly making fun of those who deserve it -- he slips in some absolute gems of blazing ignorance. Take this quote from Congressman Joseph Pitts (R-Pennsylvania):

"It's safe to say that a wealthy kid from the suburbs can play Grand Theft Auto or similar games without turning to a life of crime, but a poor kid who lives in a neighborhood where people really do steal cars or deal drugs or shoot cops might not be so fortunate."

I want you to read that passage again, folks, because those are his exact words, unaltered. And then I want you to wonder how someone so astoundingly ignorant could have had enough sense to put on pants that morning.

So let's analyze this, shall we? According to Rep. Pitts, crime did not exist before video games. People didn't steal cars, do drugs, or shoot cops before Grand Theft Auto told them how. That's right, folks: Rep. Pitts actually stated the cause of poor kids turning to crime -- that of living in an environment where crime is commonplace -- and in the same sentence proceeded to blame it on a medium that is approximately 1/1,000,000th as old as crime.

And in case it wasn't clear to you, Rep. Pitts wants to assure you that this is why suburban kids never steal cars, do drugs, or shoot cops. He wants to make sure you know that suburban kids can obviously -- without any fear whatsoever of being influenced by them -- play the most violent, gory video games and never, ever commit the crimes they see in them.

Wait...why are we having these hearings again? I thought they just said that kids are all influenced by the video games they play?

This is ridiculous. These people are assinine, and Stewart's quote that Congress is filled with insane jackasses is absolutely dead correct. These people have no right to say one word against a medium that they so proudly display an astounding ignorance of.

Not only that, but they only seem to have one game they like to hold up as the example for all video games that have ever been made; to them, every game is Grand Theft Auto or Postal. This would be analogous to saying that every movie is Faces of Death, and because that movie is out there we need to have a Congressional hearing about movies and how our young people aren't being protected from them. There is a world of video games out there of which the Grand Theft Autos make up a very small portion. But they refuse to get off of the Grand Theft Auto train because they are crusaders on a mission that lacks all common sense.

If you're reading this and you live in the states that these Congressmen represent, you owe it to your own intelligence to write to them and tell them to get out of office and let someone with at least one living brain cell do their job.

These are the people trying to tell you what's best for you and your kids. These are the people who say that you as a parent aren't capable of making your own informed decisions on what your child should and shouldn't be exposed to. These are the people who are making our laws.

Don't let these ignorant jackasses tell you what you're supposed to think, especially when they don't even know anything about what it is they're trying to legislate.

So everything is still alive and things are growing. The squash plants -- Delicata, and summer green and yellow -- are absolutely thriving. Which is great, since we love us some squash. The watermelons are purring along as are the cucumbers, although something seems to have dug up one of my cucumber seed hills. The seeds nonetheless struggled through anyway.

As I may have mentioned, the only drawback is that things just aren't growing very fast. Some of those things are plants I started as transplants and some were directly sown. I'm disappointed in the tomatoes and peppers I started as transplants from seeds I bought -- they got to be about an inch high and then simply stopped growing. My hypothesis is that I started them in very tiny seed starter pots and I suspect that they might have eaten up all the nutrition in that soil and then just stopped growing.

Because of this, I got a couple of transplants for peppers and tomatoes just in case mine don't produce any fruit -- and at this point it's highly doubtful they will -- and as you can see from today's picture, my sweet banana peppers, a transplant from the nursery, are starting to fruit. I picked up Brandywine heirloom transplants and I'll likely also pick up a pear tomato plant or two since those are also very tiny.

But at least there are things starting to produce soon-to-be-edible foods now, such as my turnips. The beans are looking good and are beginning to flower, while the potato plants are just getting plain huge. I'll have more pictures of those through the week.