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Imagine That

July 8th, 2014 | roo

Sometimes I imagine
That I would like to be
A strong and brave protector
Of my whole community

A strong and brave protector with my lovers by my side
I’d have a leather jacket, and a bike that I could ride
And my friends would say, “Jamila, you’re so caring, big, and strong,
Please join us at this action, in case something huge goes wrong”

And I’d get on my bike and I’d start to ride
I’d scope out the route for the march outside
I’d find the cops waiting at the end
And I’d yell a warning back to friends
And the action would go so perfectly
That our friends in jail would get out and be free

And I’d tip my hat
Imagine that
Imagine thaaaaaaaat
Imagine that!

Sometimes I imagine
That I would like to be
A writer who tells stories
Pf the world we want to see

I’d think of ways of living that don’t rely on stolen lands
I’d gaze into a future with no nations, states, or brands
And I’d hear folks say, “But Roo, right now it’s getting worse I fear,
It’s hard to have much hope if you’re a woman, brown, or queer!”

And I’d tell a tale that is long and deep
I’d speak of joy that our work will reap
I’d talk of love built without regret
I’d tell a story that you can’t forget
I’d show a future bright and clear
And I’d give us hope, and we all would cheer!

And I’d tip my hat
Imagine that
Imagine thaaaaaaat
Imagine that!

Sometimes I imagine
That I would like to be
A person who feels stable
In thier own identity

Who comes back from a daydream
To a self that just feels true.
But I still have to imagine.
Because I’m Jamila,
Roo, that’s who.

And I’d tip my hat
Imagine that
Imagine thaaaaaaat
Imagine that…

Inspired by Ernie

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Muppet Astrology

August 24th, 2013 | roo

Muppet astrology

Order in the chart is determined by time of first appearance in The Muppet Movie (1979). The quotes are all from The Muppet Movie, and exemplify the character’s archetype.

Example usage: I, MxRoo, am a Kermit sun, Scooter rising, with a Gonzo moon.

Statler & Waldorf

Statler/Waldorf – “I’ve seen detergents leave a better film than this.”

Kermit

Kermit – “Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection. The lovers, the dreamers, and me.”

Fozzie

Fozzie – “Ah, a bear in his natural habitat. A Studebaker.”

Janis

Janice – “Jelly-belly gigglin’, dancin’ and a-wigglin’, Honey, that’s the way I am!”

Animal

Animal – “Beat drums! Beat drums!”

Scooter

Scooter – “I’m the band’s road manager.”

Gonzo

Gonzo – “Sure, if you wanna do it the easy way.”

Sweetums

Sweetums – “Hey! Hey, where’re you goin’? Hey! Wait for me!”

Miss Piggy

Miss Piggy – “Thank you. Kissy-kissy.”

Rowlf

Rowlf – “I finish work, I go home, read a book, have a couple of beers, take myself for a walk and go to bed.”

Dr. Bunsen Honeydew

Dr. Bunsen Honeydew – “Welcome to our laboratory. Please don’t touch anything.”

Beaker

Beaker – “Meep.”

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TOFcon 2013 Keynote Speech

June 23rd, 2013 | roo

I come before you today to talk about Butts, and their proper care and feeding. Butts are glorious thing, and I wish to share with you…
No, wait, that’s not right.

Gaybies and elephants, welcome to the third TOFcon. Thank you all for coming. I would like to talk to you today about sustainability.

I don’t mean like green energy, though that’s where I got my start in activism. I mean living and acting in a way that you think everyone could, and that you can keep up without burning out. I want what we do in kink to be sustainable because I want things like TOFcon to continue. I promise this won’t be entirely a rant, and I promise it won’t be entirely a motivational speech, but I have some pretty strong feelings about this and you fuckers gave me a soapbox. I’ve seen the organizers of TOFcon, every time they do an event, say that they’re never doing it again. I see Andy do the Myth parties and be completely drained. I was going to talk about butts, and it’s rare that I will say anything is more important than butts, but this is more important than butts. I want us to keep putting our ideas about sex and kink out there.

I spend a lot of time around activists, of many sorts, and I see a lot of burning out. I’ve burnt out myself a few times. I want that to happen less. You’re going to get some of the same rant that I give to executive directors of nonprofits. Plainly, we need to be able to keep doing this if we are going to end up with the kind of scene, and the kind of world that we want to live in.

We need to be able to keep throwing events. I know how exhausting it is to throw an event, I’ve helped with a few, but I keep doing it. I do it partially because I want there to be more events that share my values. More events that value community over prestige, that value consent over appearances, that value irreverence over protocol. I want more, because the greater BDSM scene that I see, and the culture at large, do not share those values. Now, I’m a weirdo, I’m pretty far out on the edge of a lot of demographic fringe categories. However, I’ve found some folks who may not share all my intersectional identities, but they have some of the same ideas about sex and kink, and the same values about consent and ridiculousness.

This con shares the idea that you can do horrible, fucked up, disgusting, creepy, illegal, and permanent things, but it’s fine if you do it with consent. I have happily said yes to someone cutting above my spine with a scalpel; I’ve beaten someone’s ass with a baseball bat; I was the surface for vegan frosting knife play. I don’t think any of these ridiculous scenes were diminished by getting consent. I think weird scenes are strengthened by consent, it’s possible to be more creative when you know everyone involved is fully on board with the idea. It’s not just consent, though.

It’s also valuing the ridiculous. I like the kind of kink that takes consent and communication seriously, and laughs at a lot of the rest. Silliness and a sense of humor about yourself are actually pretty great defenses against taking yourself so seriously that you ignore when you fuck up. I think being silly is a good response to our egos telling us we can’t do this.
Go, be ridiculous, reenact a horror film scene except use actual blood, reenact a sci-fi scene but use a nerf gun, tell a children’s story but with more dildoes this time, this is a space for being weird and going out there. Just use consent, cause we want to be able to tell the stories of the things we did, and know that our stories have happy endings.

We need to keep telling our stories. We have an opportunity right now, in the kink world, to decide where to go from here. There are a lot of people coming into this for the first time: what do we wish they would know? What do we wish someone had told us? We can now do that. We can create our own spaces and say, hey, here’s how I think this should go, and then inspire others to do the same. Please, if there is something you wish someone had told you when you were new in the scene, do what you can to put that out there. We need spaces like TOFcon because spaces like this give space like so few others. We are teaching each other as a community. There are some experts in their subject here, but there’s also classes that are just hey, here’s a thing I learned that I wish I had learned earlier. I think that we are doing that is huge. There’s a lot of queer and trans and weirdo voices here, putting our thoughts out there. There is not enough of that in the world.

And I want this to keep happening. I want the people who throw the parties I like and the cons to feel like they can keep it up. I want throwing parties and cons to be something that the people who share my values are able to do. I have to hope that that is possible, I have to believe that. I am, at heart, an optimist. I do what I do, and I support others doing what they do because I believe that we actually can make a difference. Yes, we are going to have fun and have a play party, but we’re going to do more that that here today. We’re going to put out our ideas of how kink can work. We think this is a good way to do kink. and I want us to be able to keep doing that.

I want the organizers to be able to keep putting on events.
If you are an organizer, a party thrower, a person who takes on responsibility, please take care of yourself. I’m saying this out loud because I suck at this, please know I’m not coming from on high to give commandments. I’m coming from below to say, hey, try to do this, it might not suck so much!

Let people help you, figure out what you can delegate and then ask for help. I know how hard it is to ask for help. I pretty much always try to do everything myself. I needed help writing this speech, cause writing is actually something that’s pretty hard for me, but I needed help and Andy helped. Ask for help, and make yourself accept it.

While you’re at it, if you’re able, have a few people who won’t just help you, but will point out when you fuck up. Surrounding yourself with sycophants is not sustainable. If you don’t have people around you who will call you out on the small things, shit will blow up in your face when you fuck up big.

You can ask for so much from people, and they will give it, as long as they don’t feel taken advantage of, especially in this scene. Figure out what the people you are working with need to feel satisfied, and make sure they get it. It may be credit for their words, it may be a few good punches or beatings, or it may just be a heartfelt thank you. And you’ll get more people giving their energy to you the more you prove that your volunteers feel satisfied.

I want people to keep coming to events. If you’re not a person who takes responsibility for an event, if you’re just an attendee, you can help the events you enjoy continue by taking care of yourself as well, and by showing care to the people who do run an event.

When you’re going to a party, see if you can have someone who will be there for you. It doesn’t need to be as defined as a buddy system, but try to have someone. If you’re new and don’t know anyone, let the folks running the event know, and if it’s a good event they’ll take care of you and not just try to fuck you.

If you can volunteer, do so, and if you know what would make you feel good about volunteering, be upfront about it. It’s ok if you don’t know.

If someone does a thing that helps you, tell them. If someone works to make a party or a space or a con that expands your ideas of what is possible, or helps you feel safe, or not alone, thank them.

This is something old queer communities and old kink communities did, they supported each other. Just because there are more of us now who are out and about, doesn’t mean we don’t still need that. Kink may be old, but as a community it’s still pretty young. How would we act, towards ourselves, and towards each other if we thought that we were going to be doing this for a long time? How would we act if we truly believed that as individuals and as a community that we are going to live for a long time. I think about this a lot in the queer community, with so many lives ended well too early. What if we treated everyone coming to kink as someone who would be part of our communities for a long time, and not just as a new plaything. What if all of us had been treated that way? I think spaces like this really do move us towards that, a little bit at a time. Please, take care of these spaces, take care of yourselves, and take care of each other. I want us to build a world where our desire, with its unbridled imagination, is free to explore, and play, safe and consensual, and ridiculous. Thanks for listening.

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Transferring contacts to a Prius using only Apple products

June 17th, 2013 | roo

I have been frustrated for about 7 years by the fact that my prius has a phone book application, but my iPhone cannot connect to it.
I have been searching for several years for a solution. and I finally found one using my MacBook Air.

This worked using a 11-inch, Mid 2011 MacBookAir to connect to a 2005 Prius. I sat inside my car so I didn’t have to worry about signal degradation.

On the MacBook:
In the Address Book application:
Create a contact group of all the contacts you want to copy over to the Prius phonebook.
Export that contact group from address book to a vcf file.

On the Prius:
Telephone -> Settings -> Bluetooth -> Settings -> Change
Change the bluetooth Passkey to 0000.
Telephone -> Settings -> Bluetooth -> Settings -> Add Phone

On the MacBook:
In System Preferences:
Make sure Bluetooth is On and Discoverable.
Turn on “Show Bluetooth status in the menu bar”.

In the Bluetooth menu bar application:
Click “send file”.
Find the address book vcf file we created earlier.
In the window of devices that pop up, look for HANDS FREE, that’s the Prius.
Attempt to send the file to the Prius.
It will ask if you want to pair with HANDS FREE, say yes.
The pairing should succeed, but the sending of the file will fail.

Go back to Bluetooth System preferences.
Click on HANDS FREE in the left sidebar, then click on the gear at the bottom and “Update Services”

On the Prius:
Telephone -> Settings -> Transfer Phone Data -> Start Transfer
You can choose whether to add entries to your phone book, or overwrite the whole book. If this is your first time tranferring contacts it doesn’t matter which you choose.
Once the Prius starts listening for a transfer, this should update the description of HANDS FREE in the Bluetooth settings on the Macbook to include the line “Services OBEX Object Push”

On the MacBook:
Again, use the Bluetooth menu bar app to “send file” the address book vcf file we created earlier. It should now transfer the file, and fill your phone book!