Roller Jammer is a video game that predates modern derby

So there's recently been a group of people who have ported all these old-school video games (like Frogger, Pac Man, etc.) to make them playable in your browser. The whole collection is available to play for free at The Internet Arcade.

Amongst the offerings, I found a game called Roller Jammer.

So of course I played it, and while it's obviously not a game about WFTDA derby, you play a skater who has to pass a bunch of other opposing skaters and you get points for each one you pass. You can also jump and punch them.

WUT?

Some scrounging online shows that it was made in 1984, which makes it older than the current reincarnation of roller derby, which started in the early 2000s. My mind is blown.



Here's a video of some of the game footage. Or you can play it yourself here.

Derby and Race: a 6 (or so)-part series

Over the next few weeks I'm going to explore the relation between race and roller derby. This was prompted by an interview I did with the lovely RayWoWW when, as a follow up question, she asked me, as a nonwhite person, what I thought the role of race in derby was. I ended up writing her a giant text wall of an email back, and I realized as I was doing it that there were all these issues that I couldn't really resolve for the purposes of telling her what I thought about race and derby.

Part of the reason that I'm interested in this is, obviously, because I'm a member of a racial minority. But at the same time, this semester I'm also teaching an awesome class on the Philosophy of Race and Gender, and it is really making me think about this stuff in my spare time. It's weird to just think about concepts like white privilege, for example, independent of any context. But then applying race theory to practice also brings out some interesting results.

Now, I know that there is an amazing blog entry by CRG's Elektra Q Tion on why derby is such a white sport. I think this is a really big contribution to the dialogue on race and derby, and what I'd like to do is build on some of the things that came out of that discussion, in addition to some other thoughts that have been rolling around in my brain.

Here's an example. New York City is a pretty racially diverse place, right? Well, here's a picture of Gotham's All-Star team from 2011:

And here's one from their 2013 team:

Hmm. So there are a few changes, but it still looks predominantly white. Why? I'm not asking that derby teams have to be proportionate to the diversity in the city's population, but what is it that makes nonwhite skaters less inclined to make the team? This might not be a problem, depending on how we think about the issues. I'm not sure what I'm going to be looking for here, but I think there are a LOT questions that need to be asked about what happens when race and derby collide.

So, in the next few weeks, I'll start where Q left off with asking about why derby is so white. But maybe that only works because whiteness is the norm, overwhelmingly, in western culture, where derby is predominantly played. So then another question comes up: what's the relation between derby and nonwestern culture? Does the role of gender and cultural norms have anything to do with it? And if there is a problem with racial underrepresentation in derby, what obligations do skaters (minority or not) have to make derby more diverse?

And down the rabbit hole we go...

Swork it baby, yeah

We've had some pretty bad weather the last couple of days, so right now outside looks something like this:

Brrrr.

At least the dog seems to be enjoying herself.

It also means yesterday and today I was literally trapped in the house since there was over a foot of snow outside my door and that involved lots of  pushing to squeeze out. Bleh. So there was a lot of pushing and lunges and whatnot to get the door open. And then I had to shovel a whole driveway, which turned out to be pretty good exercise for my core/back/puny arms. So even though I can't get to practice, there is still working out to do!

Stupid twerk face not included.

But if I was REALLY unable to even go the 10 feet around my house, I can still do some sort of exercise at home. I've downloaded this neat app for my phone called Sworkit. (Yeah, so whoever came up with the name was trying a portmanteau of "Circuit Training" and "Workout" and came out with some weird thing that sounds like a weird form of twerking or something.) I don't know, the word "twerk" is gross to me; it just looks aesthetically unpleasing. "Swork" is not much better. Oh well.

But anyway, basically Sworkit is a pretty customizable workout thing that you can do without very much space and without much equipment. The only thing I've seen that you might need is something to step onto for step-ups, but otherwise all you need is enough floor to stretch out. And if you want you can mix things up by adding weights that you might have around the house (read: skates) or whatever.

You just type in how long you want to work out for, what you want to do (stretching, cardio, even some random yoga stuff) and then it will set up a workout for you. And if you want you can mix it up, so like 5 mins stretching, 20 mins cardio, 10 mins stretching, or whatever.

Here is a list of all the exercises you can do. On your phone, there's even little pictures so you can see what you are doing, and if you get the upgraded PRO version (for 99c!!) it gives you access to youtube videos so you can see form and whatnot, and a nice British sounding robot lady who will tell you when to do the next exercise.

Heh, there's one called "Skater". :D

Okay, some of that shit is HARD. But I guess also if you're doing this then it also has the added bonus of keeping you warm when it is cold outside or something and thus lowering your heating bills while you stay in shape. Yeah.

A roller derby quiet book

You know those interactive books you get when you're a kid and it's all like "feel the bunny's fur" or "lift up this tab and see some random thing" or whatever, so that you'll get distracted from yelling and carrying on like a kid, and do fun activities instead? Well, now there's one for derby.

Obviously it's not in print or anything, but it should be! You can do derbyesque activities like dress the skater:

And get the ref to signal calls properly:

Cutting! Major!

And do an actual 3D bout!

Adorable! :D
(All pictures in this post are from this page.)

Rebel Girl

So this is popping up on the interwebs today. It's Estro Jen, being badass as usual.

Holy crap. I get so nervous with outdoor skating, but this looks TOTALLY awesome. I wish I could do like 10% of the stuff she does in this video. I have to admit that I do find it a bit cringeworthy when she's skating all like this without pads on, but it's nice to see that sometimes even the superstars still stack on sidewalks though. :)

Happy Friday!

A very derby weekend

So two weekends ago was very derby-eventful:

Hehe, Mouse with a mouse. I am so funny sometimes.
(Photo: Bettie Lockdown)

Thursday was the league's Trunk or Treat at the skate rink. Basically all this means is we do Halloweeny stuff and give out candy to the local kids. I can't say that this event is a great success, since there's usually a godawful low turnout of children (well, the rink is kinda far away from everything really), but I got to eat a shit load of candy bars and pixie sticks. And I revived the pikachu outfit but this time it was family friendly and I was sober (but full of sugar).

Halloween is also the anniversary of my munty hand injuries. One year later, my fingers are still slightly crooked and still require physical therapy. Good times.

Friday was a party at Pumpkin's house. Pumpkin is my Team Pie collaborator here at NRV. She is super artsy and makes awesome food. So a party at hers means a shit load of awesome food and lots of nice homemade arts and crafts things. A bunch of people from the league showed up (in costume!!) and I learned about some awesome American cultural practices like this totally INSANE game where you wear oven mitts and punch open boxes (yes, WTF!) and then we did things like drink a lot of booze and play spooky bingo.

Arrak-Kiss and I wanted to play a geography game where people would have to list the states in Australia (given that I get shit for not knowing where ANYTHING is in the US, I thought it'd be nice to reciprocate), but we had maps of Australia and Canada and I didn't even know Canada looked like how it did until someone pointed out that I was looking at a map of Canada. MEGA FAIL. :P But it was a super fun night, yay.

Okay, seriously, how the fuck was I supposed to know? :P

Then Saturday was pre-bout day! The B-team had a bout out in WV, and a few of us decided to take Beth's RV and go camping the night before. Hell, it was more like GLAMping--this RV is the fucking shit. It was super fancy and had a TV with cable and a fancy kitchen and oven and running water and everything. It was seriously good fun and an awesome team bonding experience.

FANCY SHIZ YO! (Note presence of TV)

And we got to have fire-roasted bananas and smores for breakfast the next day! How fucking fancypants is that, really!

Fucking breakfast of champions!
(Probably not really, because too much chocolate = crash)

And finally, Sunday was bout day! We had a lazy morning (complete with smores--see above), showered, played with some of the native wildlife (well, some of us wanted to throw grasshoppers in to the fire... :/), then we packed up the RV, and then headed over to the Civic Center in Charleston for some bout prep. There's an entry about it here, but this was basically the pinnacle of an awesomely derbylicious weekend. Yeah. That felt good.

Now for some art

So one of the ladies I used to skate with back at VDL (Cruel-Roller De'Ville) is also is in the States now, going to cartoon school in Vermont. Roller made a comic about the state of Men's Derby in Vermont. It looks like this:

The merby issue is an interesting one. There are no sports I can think of which are predominantly female oriented that don't also have an element of the athlete doing things that look good-- the "looking good" ones I had in mind were gymnastics, figure skating and cheerleading (hell, there are few sports I can think of which are predominantly female oriented at all). I am totally on the fence about whether or not merby poses a threat to derby as we know it. Recently, the best mens' derby league at the moment (Your Mom) beat Gotham at a private scrimmage, and there was a lot of talk of the men coming in to take our sport away or whatever. I don't think that's the case, but I can see the worry if you're not willing to share the sport or whatever.

On the other side of the fence, I also know some men who think "Merby" is a derogatory term. I'm not sure exactly why but maybe it goes along the line of "moobs" and "murse" as well. To be fair, I don't see it as derogatory but it's not great; you could just call it "derby" for everyone without needing to make that distinction. It's like, why do you need to say "female doctor" or "female parliamentarian" or something when they are just doctors and parliamentarians?

Roller's full comic is here.

I have taught them well.

I have a lot of derby posters on my door so it's
not hard to guess that I'm into derby if you're
a student who shows up for office hours.

Right now I'm not doing a lot of big posts because I'm busy with the end of the semester in my non-derby life, which involves (among other things) a lot of grading.

I usually don't tell students upfront that I do derby because 1) I did this last semester and then one of them tweeted it to the internet from class and 2) being in a college town, it's already hard enough to have a life away from academia and students, so I try to keep those things separate.

But of course, the derby monster is a big monster, and occasionally he creeps into my academic work. I advertise our bouts on my office door. I also wear my derby helmet when I ride my bike to work. I also had a diagram of a track on my whiteboard in my office once because I was explaining what derby was to some students who came by to ask. Yep.

Anyway, this semester, I taught a graduate seminar where one of the main topics we talked about collective responsibility and whether group was anything over and above the individuals that constitution it and that sort of stuff. It was a good class; the grad kids all know I do derby, since they have offices down the hall from my office anyway and can see when new flyers go up.

So I found this today in a paper I was grading:

Consider, for analogy, a roller derby team.  When they lose or win, they do so as a team, and this means more than each of the members winning individually (the coherence of which is doubtful).  Although the individual performances strongly affect the outcome, there are properties that the team has as a group that affects the responsibility for their performance.  For instance, if a team lacks a particular position, say a really scrappy jammer, they would be far worse off than a team composed of individually equally-skilled players that includes a jammer.  Yet, there is no straightforward way in which the responsibility for not being a jammer is "shared" by the members of the team. 

To be clear, I hvae no idea what a "scrappy jammer" is, but considering this student didn't know anything about derby at the beginning of the semester, I'd say he's done pretty well. :D

A cautionary tale

Like most people, I strongly dislike going to the dentist. I don't like the little high pitched drill things, I don't like how hygienists make you feel guilty about your teeth cleaning practices, I don't like the fact that when I leave I am thanking someone for making my teeth sore and my gums bloody. I also think that teeth are just pretty gross. So yeah, boo going to the dentist, indeed.

But you get free shit from the dentist, hooray.

Anyway, I finally braved going to the dentist today and got my teeth cleaned and whatnot, but one thing I was told was that I had like five cavities. FIVE. What the fuck. I didn't have any a year or so ago, and I don't even like candy. As far as I'm aware, my teeth don't look gross. I am usually pretty good about brushing and even flossing and burning my mouth with listerine, so really, WTF?

Okay, science time. Our teeth have microscopic grooves and pits. Sometimes food and other random stuff can get in there that you can't brush out. Cavities are caused by a bacteria in your mouth that eats all the random food particles. The bacteria is in your saliva as well, and when it eats the food and multiplies, boom, cavities.

Your temperament's wrong for the priesthood
And teaching would suit you still less.

You might be asking what this has to do with anything derbyish. Well, because in derby you use mouthguards and they are often covered in spit and other random disgusting shit (e.g. sweat, floor crud, whatever), they harbor bacteria as well, especially if you eat before/during practice and don't clean your teeth/mouthguard (seriously, who has time for that). Then when you don't clean your mouthguard, the bacteria grows on it, and then when you put your mouthguard back into your mouth you're basically shoving a bajillion bacteria into your mouth. Then they get at all those easy to eat food-covered random spots, and have a giant bacteria party.

EWWWWWW.

Okay, gross! Now how do you prevent it? My dentist said something pretty obvious: "you should be cleaning your mouthguard every time you use it." Yes, I felt dumb. I normally brush it with a toothbrush every other week or so, but you can also listerine it (although I did that with mine once and it dyed it green) and you should replace your mouthguard every 6 or so months. I've had mine for over a year. Yeah, so that is some pretty nasty shit.

So because I didn't clean or replace my mouthguard often enough, I have cavities, and I have to go back in and get a shit load of fillings done. Sadface. I hate those stupid drills.

MORAL OF THE STORY: If you don't clean your mouthguard out, this could be you:

SERIOUSLY. VOMIT.
(Not my mouth, to be clear)

This shit is bananas.

Okay, so the NRV all-stars are having their opening bout tomorrow for the season. I'm on the bout production committee, and my job (at least for this bout) is to make some snack baskets for the teams and the refs. We have baskets; all I have to do is fill them for about $30.

Also now all the food has been on the ground next to my
stinky gear. At least everything is prepackaged. I call this
a food handling win.

I feel a little bit like a waterboy doing this. Also, I have an idea of how much a derby girl or boy eats (a LOT), and feeding that many people for virtually under $1 a person is pretty tough. Plus, you want the things to be nutritious to some extent, and/or be good sources of energy. And THEN presumably they've got to be relatively easy to eat; something prepackageed and edible with hands (with stinky wrist guards on, ew) would be the goal.

So off I went to the store. Shopping on a budget is hard; shopping on a budget with nutritional restrictions is even harder. I had to get lots of things that were on sale or were cheaper if you had a membership card from the grocery store. I actually ended up spending something like $38 but got a fair bit, and there are leftovers for next time as well. So this is waht the baskets look like:

The baskets don't look super terrible when they're filled.

This is what they have in them:

• Bananas (obviously)
• Chocolate chip cookies
• Peanut butter cookies
• Peanut butter cracker things
• Cheese cracker sandwich things
• Berry trail mix
• Random assorted mini candy bars
• Gummi bears
• Potato chips (you could get an assorted box of snack size ones for $10)

I assume I don't have to get each person one of everything; presumably these are supposed to supplement food that they already have with them. But yeah, I managed to cram them all into the baskets, and then also have some left to make a snack/thankyou box for the announcer (who is driving from Charlotte) and also possibly feed the NSOs.

Oh, and I also got a free box of cake mix from the store with some random store coupon, so tomorrow I'll make cupcakes for the NSOs; it's like they are always neglected in these cases and they work pretty damn hard. And that way I'm feeding pretty much everyone who has anything to do with the bout for under $40 because I am a champ. :D

FREE CAKE. YOU CAN KEEP YOUR NASTY HEALTHY FOOD.

 I just hope it's enough food for everyone... it's not like I'm Jesus or anything and can do magic food division.

SASHIMI AND BREADCRUMBS FOR EVERYONE!

Random reminder that I am in the South: when I went to load up my cart with bananas, the guy who was stocking them was looking and said "are you making banana puddin' or something?" and I said no and explained why I needed like 20 bananas, and then I was like "damn I really want banana pudding now, because that shit is tasty." I love southern food.

Derby girl problems

Packing for Season's Beatings is ridiculous. I'm doing three half-bouts in the day, and all I need for that is my gear and maybe some spare clothes to wear the next day (and maybe in between bouts). Normally all my gear (and my water bottle) fits into my backpack, and I just carry my skates. This is what I do for practice.

All this gear (except skates and helmet) fits into this bag.

But for a road trip I have to also take an overnight bag, yeah? So I have to bring my toothbrush, and at least a clean shirt for the trip back. My bouts are at 10:45, 1:30, and then 8:00. So I've got a chunk of time in between, so I was also planning to bring my laptop to do some work--I have to write my classes for next week. And then I decided to buy a bunch of food for energy between bouts and after going to the store, I somehow ended up with:

As if you can't tell that I have an eating problem.

• A bottle of muscle milk (cookies and cream flavored!)
• Nutter butters to eat in the car on the way up to Richmond
• 4 bananas
• A bag of dried cranberries
• Two boxes of granola bars (they were 2 for $5...)
• A fucking huge 64 oz bottle of gatorade bigger than my head

I was going to make peanut butter and banana and chocolate sandwiches from two bananas, and bring the other two up just to eat. But now I have way more shit than can fit in my derby bag because of this stupid bottle of gatorade. Also, that's not to also mention that I am bringing a hoodie to wear in between bouts, a water bottle, and maybe my microfleece blanket because I can't wear pants with my gear on.

I also have a bag of other small skatey things: spare 88A wheels
(in case I need to switch out my new 91As), 3 different skate tools,
spare laces, bandaids, blister bandaids, two kinds of strapping tape,
an ankle brace, and a partridge in a pear tree.

What to do? The obvious solution is to make my overnight bag my derby gear and assorted food bag for things to have at the bout, and my backpack for the measly things I need for overnight. So that's what I ended up doing. This means that all my stuff will stink, derby or not. But now my street clothes will smell like derby stank, and my derby gear will smell like bananas. What the fuck. It is super ridiculous; this is all the stuff I have to bring for the bout (as opposed to the hotel):

And this is all the stuff I have to bring for just staying there overnight:

Fucking ridiculous, I tell you.

This gatorade bottle is so big it makes me tired to hold it up for this picture.

Hahahaha what

Okay, so apparently I'm not jam timing, so I got a whistle for nothing.

I got put on penalty tracking/wrangling.

Okay, what the fuck. I have no idea what that is. Is this both jobs I'm doing? I read the manual for it and understood about 50% of it, and then it was seriously like, I don't even understand what this is. The list of responsibilities is ridiculously huge. I saw the example diagrams they had in the tracker/wrangler manual and my brain shut down already. It makes me want to cry because I'm seriously like what the fuck, I don't get this at all and tomorrow night I have to be doing this in front of hundreds of people and hoping that I don't fuck up, lest I incur the wrath of everyone. Ugh.

I can't do math to save my life, I don't even have any real familiarity with the codes used by WFTDA to track penalties and this is an actual WFTDA sanctioned all-star bout and they want to put in someone who has minimal NSO experience to do arguably one of the most complicated jobs that there is out there?


This is really stressing me out, and given what's happening in my non-derby world and the amount of stuf I need to do there, I am at that point where I'd rather not go to the bout and NSO than have to penalty track. But that sounds wrong, doesn't it? :/

How to win friends and influence people

I'm a little bit of a social idiot. Like, I have basic social skills, so if we go out for lunch I'm not going to poop on the table and stuff. But I find it hard to actually fit in with groups, much less stick with them over time. I find friendship to be somewhat demanding, and I don't like small talk or banter or whatever that you need to actually insert yourself into an existing group. Luckily, I have wonderful friends who are forgiving when I drop off the grid for years and then come back into the group as if no time had passed. That's why my friends are awesome.

Anyway, it's hard to fit into groups for me, especially if 1) it's a long-established group with its own dynamic and 2) I'm the only new person and everyone already knows someone else. Well, that's what it's like joining NRV. We skate around and do warmups, and apart from one or two people, nobody would really talk to me and everyone else skates around in a big pack chatting and I'm just this lone person on the opposite side of the track or whatever. It's tough. I mean, it's still early days and everyone is nice and nobody is a dick or anything, but it's hard to know where to fit in, right?

The little piggy still has socks on because
presumably fresh meat need rental skates.

Tonight was NRV's recruitment night. What that meant was that we had regular training, but people interested in derby could come and watch us train and ask us about stuff. NRV trains at an actual skating rink, so there were plenty of hire skates and pads for them to try on and roll around with later and whatnot. We did our normal warmup and then some drills (which I'll write up later), and then we went and introduced ourselves to the newbies (the new name got a few laughs, hooray) and talked to them for a bit, and then they got gear on and we did a little bit of a demo scrimmage to explain to them what was going on. If you were benched while a jam was going on, you could sit amongst the newbies and explain to them what was going on and whatnot, and then at the end there was a social skate and we skated around with them and taught them how to do things like snowplows and whatever.


So, a few things. Warmup was still kind of antisocial, as was our first drill, which was the in and outs (I'll write these up in a bit). There are a couple of fresher meat people that I talked to the first few times before I was allowed to scrimmage, and they're still nice and I talk to them. There are also a few newer team people who recently passe their skills test, but they were all in the same cohort so tend to stick together (see--COHORTS ARE IMPORTANT). Anyway, when we wet to  I was benched with a few of them and what, people were actually talking to me! In fact, Priss was like "WHOA YOU'RE AUSTRALIAN" and then wouldn't let me shut up because she was so excited by the fact that I had an accent. And she just never knew because I had never talked to her.

And then I realized two things:

1. I am not as new as the newbies being recruited. So I can't be all wimpy about being new and shit like that.
2. People actually want to talk to me if I take the time to talk to them.

Admittedly, because I'm a social moron I probably didn't talk to people because I thought that they didn't want to talk to me, and so on. But once I realized that then training was actually fun. Like, I could be all shouty when the jammer was coming up without thinking that people were thinking I was being a bossy bitch, and I even talked to some of the new people and taught one how to sticky skate forwards and backwards. And she thanked me and said she'd come back to another training. Yay.

But the best part was when they put music on and it was stuff like Love Shack and I wanna dance with somebody or whatever which is fine, but then I was skating by a couple of other people and we all started singing the Gangnam Style song, and doing the dance. I think it was more or less spontaneous. It was really weird. But yeah, that was fun. And then we all had the song in our head so we did the dance again. Also, surprisingly, nobody fell down.

If you have no idea what Gangnam Style is, please watch and learn:

Obviously NOBODY had ANY idea what the hell was going on or what he was saying or anything, but it was fun and we all laughed about it and I actually felt like I was bonding with the people I was skating with. And it's all because we've all individually watched some video of a chubby Korean guy doing some weird horse riding dance thingy on the internet. And we've all watched it about 20 times and know all the bits to it.

By the way, the fast sideways running bit is HARD to do on skates.

And then afterwards there was food. Some of the NRV ladies had made food to bring so we could all sit and share a meal with the newbies while we geared down and stuff. Man, southern cooking is fucking fantastic. And the NRV peeps must really like their league if they're going to make like 20 different kinds of food for it. So yeah. Good food, good times. And then we did Gangnam Style again but off skates. Yay. I am happy.

Clockwise from bottom: mac and cheese, peanut caramel blondie thing
(like a caramel brownie), jam and vanilla frosting cookie thing, tiny
tiny hotdogs, pastry thing with chili beans and cheese, plastic fork, more
M&C. Nomtastic.

Boudi and Mouse in San Francisco, Part 3

Sea lions!

After we finished stuffing our faces with awesome seafood, we headed down to Pier 39 to see some sea lions. Pier 39 is the touristy one and kind of ridiculous to skate in, since it's made up of boardwalk boards and full of people (with children in prams--and one rude bitch rammed her pram into the back of my legs so I would get out of her way and she could park her child in front of the sea lions, and she kept yelling at me in Spanish. WTF, really). We walked around that one, and then geared up for our Embarcadero skate! (However, the sea lions were pretty neat too.)

The Embarcadero is the waterfront road/pier area in San Francisco, and it pretty much goes from just before Pier 39 down to near AT&T Park (where they play baseball). It is about 5.8 miles all up, but quite flat (since it's all waterfront). It's got tourists galore though, and also cyclists and those weird bicycle-rickshaw cart things. Plus there aren't any barriers to stop us going onto the road or into the water. However, it's considerably wider than the Golden Gate Bridge, so we weren't at risk of running over sock-and-sandaled feet. It's also not consistently paved, so some bits were much smoother to skate on than others which felt like we were getting a nonstop foot massage on a massage machine that was having a seizure.

This is something to look at when you're skating the Embarcadero.

There isn't much really to look at when you're skating the Embarcadero, building-wise. We passed the Alcatraz ferry launch and also a building that was Pier 29 1/2 (where the "/" in the 1/2 was a lightning bolt like in Harry Potter). The busiest part was around Pier 1 and the San Francisco Ferry Terminal where people were actually using the ferries and being tourists and whatnot. However, because the footpath was really wide, it wasn't a problem getting around them. I found familes with gaggles of children a little bit annoying to get around (because they would walk like five abreast or something, and also unpredictably stop or change direction) but even then it wasn't too tricky to manouver.

At the Bay Bridge.

Our endpoint at AT&T Park.

Again, people were really nice and supportive of the fact we were skating. At one bit I had to slalom around a whole bunch of metal grating and some random guy was like "Nice moves!" and another time we skated past this guy that was like "faster faster faster faster YEAHHHHH" which was a bit weird but he was all smiley so, yeah. We also passed lots of people who saw us skating and were really happy and smiley, and of course we smiled back. We stopped briefly at Rincon Park to take photos of us at the Bay Bridge, and then continued onwards to AT&T Park. As we were heading towards AT&T Park, we started having to slow down for clumps of baseball fans (some of which were carrying or towing coolers) and the footpath narrowed a whole bunch and got mega bumpy. I ran out of water, and I had to go into a cafe (which included walking up stairs on my toe stops) to buy more, which I think was amusing and somewhat confusing for the people eating in there. But I didn't stack, so hooray.

I think our skate overall turned out to be over 8 miles, since we looped back.

We skated back to the Ferry Building/Pier 1, and geared down outside. It was pretty sunny so we sat there for a bit and aired out our gear (that is, maybe the blazing sun and the breeze from the bay will make our wristguards non-stinky). Then, a quick walk through the Ferry Building and around the Embarcadero Center Market (where they have specific "no roller skating" signs), and then on a streetcar to The Castro! (I'm not sure what the difference between a streetcar, tram and trolley is, but it is apparently different to a cable car, which is the touristy thing you hold onto.)

Anyway, we took the streetcar down to the Castro area, which is seriously one of my favorite areas of San Francisco. It's the gay district, and everyone there is happy and shiny and there are really cool shops and stores with names that bring out your inner twelve-year-old boy (a nail salon called "Hand Jobs"? Titter.) There's also a good cookie store called Hot Cookie that sells delicious baked goods and underpants/hotpants that say HOT COOKIE right on the crotch. Hee. Anyway, our first stop as we got to The Castro was the Creme Brulee Cart! It's not really a cart; it's a food truck. I love food trucks, but that is another story.

The Tupac. California knows how to party.

Our new friend. Also, he made his own shirt.
We didn't even get his name, so he will be
forever known as Glitter Spats Guy.

Anyway, so we got some really delicious creme brulee (mine was called "The Tupac", heh) and we're just sitting at the streetcar terminus in the garden eating our little tubs of creme brulee and this guy skates past us with the shiniest skates I have EVER seen in my life. Of course, then we had to chase after him and talk to him, but we were still stuffing our faces with creme brulee and he looked like he had disappeared down Castro Street, which was very sad.

But then we saw him come out of the Hot Cookie store, and he was skating towards us! Of course we stopped him and told him he was awesome, and how did he get his fantastic skates and whatever. He actually stopped and talked to us for like ten minutes about how he made his "glitter spats" for his skates--they were velcroed on skate covers over his Riedells, with little pockets so he could put his wallet and cigarettes in them. Then he told us where we could buy glitter spats fabric in the Castro, haha. We told him we did the Bridge and the Embarcadero that day and he was like "Oh, that's so awesome! I love skating in this city!" and then we talked a bunch about the skate culture in San Francisco and also suggested a bunch of skating places too. Whee!

Close up of GSG's glitter spats. They have a velcro
piece on the side and elastic strap up under the trucks, and
under the spats are little pockets over his laces for
holding stuff in.

We walked through the Castro for a bit and came to Harvey Milk's camera store, which is now a human rights centre. By that time, we were pretty wiped from being out skating all day, so we hopped on a bus to get home. Well, we had to take two buses. On the first bus, the guy sitting across from Boudi randomly started talking to us about how he wants to give some girl who was his best friend relationship advice or something, and that almost started a fight on the bus.

He sounded pretty camp, and there was a lady who was sitting in front of him and she was listening to our conversation and mumbling some apparently homophobic stuff and first we were trying to ignore what she said but then the conversation went something like this:

Guy across from Boudi: So anyway, what should I tell her, because she's my best friend and I love her to death but she just can't find a man--
Old lady: Well, maybe you should be with a woman.
GAFB: Nobody's asking you, bitch.
OL: What did you call me?!
GAFB: You're a bitch.
OL: (jumps out of her seat and goes and stands next to him) What did you say motherfucker! I'M GONNA FUCK YOU UP!!

Double runner ice skates.

And all this time everyone's like sitting in their seats thinking, "Whoa, what the fuck!" and this old lady's jumping out of her seat while the bus is going and yelling at this guy and telling him to step outside and she will fuck him up and the bus is still driving and she's threatening to hit him and everything and then finally the guy sitting across from me is all like "hey, sit down" and stuff and eventually she calmed down and sat down again, and the bus driver actually had to turn around and ask if we were all okay. Wow. But then GAFB started talking to us again, but then almost missed his stop and had to run off the bus and OL was all like "YEAH, THAT'S WHAT I THOUGHT." when he got off the bus, and the guy sitting across from me had to engage her in conversation to get her to shut up and whatever.

Anyway, there is a skatey point to this story. To defuse the sitaution, the guy sitting across from me saw that we had skates and then started talking to us about roller skating and how he used to ice skate a whole bunch like 10 years when San Francisco had a bunch of ice skating rinks, and we said roller skates are different to ice skates because ice skates just have one blade and on quads your weight distribution is different and then he started talking about these crazy ice skates with two blades that we could use because the weight distribution would be the same and then asked me where I got my Antiks and I told him that I got them at Cruz, and he was all like "yeah I know where that is; those people there are awesome" and stuff. So yes, look at that, it's the power of skating coming to make people less grumpy and more happy and awesome! Whoo! And then he wished us a good day when we got off the bus.

Chantilly Mace (aka Skater 26). OMG I JUST REALISED
I HAVE WORN THAT JAMMER PANTY AT BAD TRAINING.

So, we were all like WTF WAS THAT when we got off the bus, and then we had to transfer to another bus. It's not like any more random conversations can happen, right? Oh ha. And then on the second bus, the guy sitting across from Boudi there basically saw us and was all like "Do you guys do roller derby??" and then we had a pleasant conversation with him about Skater 26 and how he knew the people that made it until he got to his stop, and he also wished us a good day. How nice.

Then Ze Boyfriend bought us Puerto Rican food for dinner because by that time we were exhausted and starving. And then we watched Die Hard 4 which is an awful movie, but that doesn't matter. And then I discovered I had a mega reverse farmer's tan from my shoulder getting sunburnt and my arms not getting any sun from being in my elbow pads. Also, my chest is really red.

Boudi and Mouse in San Francisco, Part 2

MASSIVE EPIC SKATE DAY TODAY. After a bit of a sleep in, we packed our skates, gear and water (it was pretty warm!) and took the bus up to the Golden Gate Bridge. Yep. Our first skate for the day was on the bridge, and we went from the southern base of the bridge to the North Tower. It's apparently illegal to skate the bridge, but I couldn't find any information on that online. Travis from BAD had told me that she skated it with a couple of other people and was told it was a $10,000 fine (but they didn't get fined) but I didn't see that online, and the only thing I found was something about how officially the law permits skating "on sidewalks in residential areas", which is absurd. You'll see why in a second.

Anyway, bridge skate. We started at the south base, just past the pavilion. I have to admit that was I a bit nervous when we were gearing up, like as if we were doing this and then the cops would come and arrest us or tazer us or something before we even started. But nobody came to tell us off when we were putting our gear on, and a guy tried to not-very-surreptitiously take photos of us. Anyway, then we put our shoes and warm clothes into our packs, and we were off! (Well, we did stop when we got onto the bridge to be like "EEEE We're on the bridge!!!" for a second before we started skating again, but you get the idea.)

We took this picture AFTER our skate.
This is the only sign we saw the whole time
about the impermissibility of skating the GGB.

The bridge has a slight slope at both ends, and we had to also go around pedestrians and tourists. There's also barriers on either side, so we weren't going to fall into the bay (which has a 98% success of death rate) or get hit by cars. Anyway, the first part of the skate was just us getting used to the path, and there were some spaces between the pavers in the sidewalk that were weirdly shaped--like, every third one was slightly wider than the others--and there were also metal gratings and whatnot. If you skated too slowly over them, your wheels would get caught and you'd stack or something. There were a few times when I would get wobbly because I wasn't going fast enough over the cracks, but it was okay. Luckily nobody caught my flailing arms in the mouth.

Then we got to the South Tower! It wasn't very busy so we could stop and take photos and have a water break and whatnot. There was a little bit of getting around tourists taking photos of giant orange metal rivets and whatever, but nothing that couldn't be done by hopping around on toe stops. After that, we kept skating onwards. By this time traffic was picking up a bit (it was about 12:30 or so) but it wasn't giant tour groups or anything, so it wasn't too tricky to negotiate.

It wasn't clear if we were pedestrians or bicycles.

I think after this point we kind of realised that we would be okay skating the bridge and wouldn't stack and die (although I guess getting tazered was still a real possibility). But then we started to enjoy ourselves on the skate, rather than more "oh god let's just hurry up and do this". People were looking at us all in our gear and stuff, and kids would point and smile and one guy on a bike was like "Roller skates! That's awesome!" and everyone was really happy and excited that we were skating the bridge. I think that made us a bit more confident with what we were doing, and we were smiling back and stuff. We got to the halfway point (the dip in the cable) pretty quickly, and then after that the bridge started on a gentle slope downhill towards the northern base. There was a bit more plow stopping that had to happen here, but it wasn't too bad.

Note random Asian tourist umbrella lady
who basically came around the blind corner
and didn't stop staring at us for 5 minutes.

We got to the North Tower and had another break. The slope down from that to the Northern Base is a bit steeper, and it wasn't clear where we could stop afterwards. (Later, it turned out that we could have stopped in a little concrete section near the base, but we couldn't see it from where we were.) Anyway, we then turned around and headed back to the Southern Base. We also stopped for some photos again, and ended our skate at the Southern Base before the blind corner. Basically, at this corner, pedestrians go one way, and cyclists another, but the cycling thing is hella steep and kind of dangerous (since it's a giant steep hairpin with no barriers). So we geared down, did some stretches and put warm clothes on (it was cold and foggy) and hopped on a bus over to Lombard Street.

The only casualty on the bridge skate was a tourist who was leaning against the roadside barrier and then stepped forward without actually looking to see if there were oncoming cyclists and skaters, and I may have run over his foot a little. :P Well, I felt a little ba-bump kind of thing. Boudi was behind me, and when I stopped I said, "I think I ran over that guy's foot", and she said "yeah, then he made some kind of "Arrrggggghhh" noise when I skated past him". Whoops. But he seriously didn't look, so if I had been a bicycle or something he would have been much more run over than just "Arrrrggggghhhh". Also, I think he was wearing socks and sandals as well, so maybe he deserved it. I wonder if that's just traumatised his bridge experience or whatever.

The idea of skating down this part of
Lombard makes us want to cry.

Now, let's speak more about "traumatic". Lombard Street goes over the many hills in San Francisco and has ridiculously hilly bits, like where your driveways are at a 45 degree angle or whatever. We climbed up one of those hills (with our gear and skatey jelly legs) and looked down behind us and it was seriously a death skate. So we didn't do that. However, Lombard is also famous because it has this CRAZY crooked part with zigzags. We joked about skating it. Technically, it's a residential street (i.e. has houses on either side of it), so it's legal to skate on Lombard. I think if we tried to we might (in some possible world) have succeeded, since it'd be like shitlots of slaloms and plow stops. But tons of cars drive down it as a tourist attraction, and it does open out onto a road with more cars, and if that doesn't stop you, the wall of millions of tourists at the bottom taking pictures will. We just walked down it. Then we walked up it again. It's fucking steep and has stupidly shaped steps, plus we were carrying all our derby gear and it was the middle of the day and the sun was blazing hot, so if you can think of a better workout for your ass and legs while also taking in views of the San Francisco Bay Area and photobombing like 20 tourist shots, I'd like to hear it.

*random nod to CRDL*

At the top of Lombard, we caught a cable car down to Fisherman's Wharf. Now, I didn't take any photos on the cable car because it was like how it is in the movies with people hanging off the sides. Specifically, we were hanging off the sides of the cable car, since it was full by the time we caught it. I now have hulk arm from holding onto the cable car with one arm, which also happened to be the arm that my backpack and skates were hanging off (because I didn't have time to put my other arm through my pack strap). And there was one part when our cable car was going downhill and another was coming uphill and we were SO close to the people on the other car we could have high fived them. I had to derby stance the whole way down to not fall out or drop my gear. But then at the bottom we were just north of Fisherman's Wharf, and it was almost on 2pm and we hadn't eaten since breakfast.

We went to Alioto's and ordered from their "Fried foods in a basket" section of the menu. Seriously, that is what it is called. Fried calamari and fried fish and lots of chips, nom. It also came with salad (pfffft) or clam chowder. YES PLEASE. They also gave us half a baguette and like six hundred pats of butter before our food and we pretty much inhaled everything. I even made my own bread bowl for my chowder too because I am classy.

NOMTASTIC.