My first main character in City of Heroes was a regeneration scrapper called RooGirl. Her ability to avoid injury in the first place, and recover spectacularly when she did get knocked down, was one of her defining traits. However, in 2005 the game’s developers served up a dreaded “nerf” to the regeneration powerset. In game terms, imagine a character with a mighty mace that suddenly is reduced to wielding the power of a Nerf bat. This meant that Roo’s superpowered immune system was suddenly rendered less impressive.
RooGirl before her nerf...
I didn’t know it then, but at that same time the nerf bat, which has come to mean the implement with which developers apply their blows, was in the middle of a long, slow swing right at my own face. And while RooGirl made it through her experience with barely a pause to shake it off, the same can’t be said of me.
In the space of about five years I went from being a perfectly healthy, active person to being indefinitely disabled by illness, mainly chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). The details (and the sob story) are on the Health Bio page. The mission statement behind this blog, however, can be found in the title.
• “Newly” — my self-image as a healthy, capable person still hasn’t caught up to my new reality. To quote Dana, @The808girl on Twitter, “I feel like my body is the enemy of my spirit. Like they are working against each other.” There’s a lot of conflict as a result.
• “Nerfed” — already explained. But as if you hadn’t guessed after the first sentence of this introduction, it also means I’m a geek, the kind who makes videogame jokes about the state of her health.
...and after (by Kevin Chin)
So here I am, this newly disabled geek, looking for ways to keep working, keep active, keep having fun while sitting here with my laptop; I couldn’t control what happened to my body but I can sure as hell keep it from happening to my mind. I’ve been doing some kind of writing all my life, from dramatic to journalistic to academic, and writing a blog seemed like the kind of thing that a newly disabled geek might do. In fact, according to our charter, I believe it’s required.
I hope to bring you a mix of topics, and I hope to entertain. There will be my usual goofiness and outrage. And that’s not easy to sustain, let me tell you. I appreciate that you’ve come here, and I hope that you will stick around, and join the discussion, and be patient as I learn more about how to drive this thing. Special thanks to Christopher, Keith, Kirk, Matt, Teena, and of course Paul for help in starting this up. Let’s see where it goes!
