Enlightenments from a Born-Again Feminist

Hello. This new blog is run by the actor who portrayed ParkourDude91, AKA the #GamerGate figurehead who sent those death threats to Brianna Wu. This blog will serve as my apology to the feminist community and a continued resource for my own education and amends to everyone I have hurt.

My name is Jan Rankowski, but you probably know me better by my art name, January Rankowski. As a dabbling poet, I have always found that month to be the most inspirational in trying times, for my inspiration. In such a way... One could speak that seeing the cold expanses of winter out side is really just a mirror to the warmth inside ourselves. Or maybe not... Either way, it's just one more step on this crazy journey I call life. Lately, this meandering smorgasbord of life has lead me on a new leaf, which I have turned. This new leaf is "Feminism", a good cause I once tarnished with my classless satirical art piece, "Deagle Nation". If you are not aware of Deagle Nation, it was a postmodernist didactic new media parable filmed through the lens of a mentally ill, violent, dangerous straight white man named "Jace W. Connors". This was a narrative I had perhaps crafted, looking back and forwards, in order to cope with some of my own uncomfortable inadequate misgivings about the unfortinate brain-children of those born into a male-dominated culture. Such as, myself: a victim of a parasitic, infestatious virus we call "Culture". In my formulative years as a white male teenager, I never felt comfortable in such a macho, "extreme" environment. I was always expected to buy the next gaming console, the next sports drink, or watch the next misogynist anime cartoon. I was expected to use illegal drugs, make offensive jokes, and lift weights to feel cool. In a way, I think if I had not found feminism, or my wonderful non-binary girlfriend, or if I had not came out of the closet as an autistic homosexual, I would have been perpetually frozen in time as an unenlightened teenage male. I would have become all those things I feared, all those horrible "friends" I hung out with and their offensive stereotypes about women's lives, all the things I did to fit in would have become me. But instead I stepped outside of that mold. I did not let them break me. I was the one that got away. I was a survivor.

And that is perhaps why I created this character, of Jace W. Connors, as a didactic post-enlightenment (postmodernist) feminist new media parable, to illustrate the contemporary nightmarish phantasm of the man I could have been.

Even now, some days I have doubts. Some days I feel that I still don't belong at all, like I don't know who I am, or that I don't understand the world around me. Some days I think that if it weren't for the wise tomes of my philosophy degree, I would slip back into my old habits, and become a "gamer" again.

And that nightmare is what continues to motivate me forward, one step at a time, lunging forwards towards tomorrow, in my quest to educate myself on the people and groups (disadvantaged peoples) I have wronged with my new media sins, and to make it right, and try to earn back the dignity we all lost when I made those death threats against Brianna Wu.

I don't want to be Jace Connors. I don't even want to be Jan Rankowski. Truths be told, as I walk my sandals along this lonely cobblestone road into the odd future, I only know what I want to believe, and the truth I want to see: that I can become a respectable, ethically upstanding netizen, and not just a two-bit "gamer".