The Default State Is Broken

It's still a little rough, but it's in place and ready to be cataloged: the Brian A. Newman Memorial Boardgame Lending Library. Brian loved boardgames: collecting them, playing them, teaching others to play them, getting new people interested in them. He was a gift, and now that he's gone, I want to try and share that gift with as many people as I can. And this is how I'm going to try and do it. I want to allow people and organizations, like schools and classrooms and shelters and whomever, to check out and try out games. To use them as teaching tools, or just to enjoy playing them, and maybe get people interested in playing and collecting their own games.  I haven't worked out all the details yet, but when I think about this idea, I feel good, like it's a Good Thing To Do. And so I want to do it up right. I didn't have room for everything, but I made room for as much as I could. And I'm hoping that I'll be able to share as much of these as I ca...

This is probably incredibly shallow and male and white of me, but I have to admit that every so often I just straight-up forget  how beautiful my partner is. It has to be at least partly because I can't believe that someone so beautiful would be interested in me, and at least partly because I have a terrible memory, and probably partly because I'm pretty self-involved and self-directed by nature. But yeah, I'll be sitting around and I will just plain forget that my wife is beautiful. And then I'll see a picture, like this one: Or she will come home from work and I will get up from my desk and she will take off her scarf and say "Hello, Husband!" in this fantastically posessive  way that never fails to make me smile, and I will see her and suddenly remember all over again how beautiful she is, and how amazingly glad I am that she is a part of my life. I don't want to forget, but sometimes I do. And the best part of that is when I get to learn again ...

My friend Brian died today. He'd been sick for a little while. It'd been tough to see him struggling. Brian was kind, and generous, and fiercely self-reliant (to his detriment, it turns out). He was sharp and wise and while he didn't talk very often, frequently his contributions were the spot-on perfect note for humour or insightful commentary. He was a good host and a good gamemaster, and he convinced me to try more than one thing I never would have tried before, from specific boardgames to specific game engines to specific foods, even to specific music. He was one of the people that convinced me to move to Portland, and who welcomed me when I arrived, and who opened his home and his social circles to me when I was settling in, and who consistently made sure I had a place at his table and his games. He sold me his house, my first house, when I decided I was ready to put down roots here. We were going to pick back up on our tabletop game next week; we tried to work out ...

So here's a thing that happened this week: I got promoted at work. My current organization has had significant growth over the last 12 months, including a pretty significant ramp-up in the team I'm on -- basically doubling the number of people in the team over my tenure at the job -- which has led to some serious conversation about what the layout of the organization should be. And this week, the management team rolled that plan out, including a promotional ladder for both managerial and non-managerial advancement, roles and responsibilities for each level, expectations for time-in-grade, and basically a bunch of stuff that bigger organizations have to worry about and smaller organizations ignore to their peril once they become bigger organizations. So now I'm technically at least a part-time manager. Finding ways to shoehorn the much-needed time for managing people is going to be exciting given the current workload, but at least there's the intention of giving some...

My pinned tweet on my Twitter timeline gets favourited every so often, which is always a good reminder that I, as a white male in the United States, am VASTLY over-represented and over-sampled in the culture at large. The "default" audience for nearly everything including videogames, TV shows, movies, even food and petrol are all aimed squarely at me: the white guy with spare cash. So, as my tweet reminds me: But as a white male feminist, my single greatest job is to LISTEN. I must must MUST remember that. I MUST LISTEN.  One of the ways I work to make sure that that's happening is my twitter feed. Not too long ago I was challenged to retweet ten things from women in one day, and I found it easier than some others, but WAY too hard for my own preferences. So I ruthlessly cleared out my twitter following list -- if you were a white dude, and I didn't personally know you, then off you went. I started following people of colour, especially black men who were doing s...

Not spoilery, but may be triggery. Gonna talk about AKA Jessica Jones on Netflix. Here is the thing about Jessica Jones.   There's no artistry or metaphor, no allegory or subtext in it. I mean, there is, but it all points to the text: that toxic masculinity hurts everyone, that consent matters very much to women and almost never to men, that in our culture men are impervious and always believed while women are victimized no matter how "strong" they are, that abusers more often get believed than the abused, that you can't trust the cops, and that people, all kinds of people everywhere, are fucked up and hurt each other and support each other and hopefully we can all live with ourselves and our choices at the end of the day. It's incredibly noir . Not in the sense of the common understanding of "noir" to be black-and-white, but rather in the classical sense of the movies (and especially the books): that every person lives their lives in the shadows and ...

The only way I can manage to even function as a semi-reasonable human being in situations like Blizzcon is because of alprazolam. It's the generic form of Xanax, and often even just a quarter of a pill will allow me to not have a panic attack or a total freakout when surrounded by people who can't seem to figure out where they're going and feel it's appropriate to stop at random times and places without regard to anyone else including the bloody bastards following them.  Or, y'know, things like that. Having a couple of pills in my purse means that sometimes, I don't even have to take it; just knowing it's there allows me to manage the anxiety well enough (though, I will say, not at Blizzcon; at Blizzcon I'm taking half a tab in the morning and half a tab in the afternoon and even then I have to manage my exposure pretty consciously). That said, I love to see my friends, so I'm willing to take the pills and make the effort. On the one hand, it...