Thou ice-hearted harpy, incessantly prattling on, whose tongue drips with honeyed promises, then turns to fire with outward blame for all the world when confronted with those same promises broken: look now how you bluster and swagger, filled to overflowing with righteousness and self-aggrandizement. Your overabundance of faith in your own correctness leads you to reject the mere possibility of your fallibility. Your pride makes you reject accusation out of hand as a witch hunt, then you cannot even hear dissent through ears stopped with the hardened wax of ego.
But therein lies the issue. In this case, your inaccuracy lies plain for all to see. Assuming that everyone else thinks the way you do and that a situation will never happen merely because you cannot conceive of it leaves you blind and mockable when that same situation comes to pass, as it inevitably will. As it recently, in fact, has.
Showing posts with label rant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rant. Show all posts
2017-04-13
2015-11-20
Pushing Past the Devil and the Empty Well
Waiting for inspiration is the devil in disguise. That feeling of limitless potential, of the world laid out before you, begging to be discovered, explored, colonized, made real; that feeling intoxicates me into inaction.How can I improve on that feeling of endless possibility? How can one person, crude in aspect and clumsy in skill, take even one tiny part of this bounty and hope to make something worthwhile by simply changing its form? How can one person possibly improve to the point of mastery in any craft?
2013-11-01
On Toxicity and Empowerment
(Writing this challenged me, and I'm a little nervous about publishing it.
Also: No art. Deal.)
I'm currently dealing with some political crap. Yes, it's been consuming and very distracting, and I apologize if I've been out of touch lately. But this experience has made me realize some things that I thought I'd scribble down.
A Tough Spot
If you find yourself in a situation where you feel uncomfortable or anxious, you need to change the situation. Don't just endure it thinking that things will change without your input; if nobody else knows there's a problem, nobody will change what they choose to do and the situation will remain or get worse. Talk with an uninvolved friend to get some perspective. Explaining your situation to someone else will help clarify the problem and let you know you aren't projecting personal dislike into a larger issue.
Enduring unpleasantness will drain your energy and make you feel miserable, perhaps even sick. No wonder situations and people get labelled "Toxic". If you want to improve your situation, you need to speak up. Hoping that something else will fix the problem only teaches you how to be helpless and how to resent others for not reading your mind.
If you want things to change, you have a responsibility to initiate that change.
You Always Have Options
No matter how riled or jangled I may get, nothing calms me down faster than realizing I have choices. It doesn't matter what those choices are; just remembering that choices exist renews my feeling of control over a situation. It may be as simple as "do this one thing later", but at least it's a focus for action.
Take some time to figure out your options. Write them down somewhere private so you can analyze them somewhere outside of your head. Writing out a list of pros and cons for each option helps me. When I identify a worst case outcome and accept it ("I may get fired... Y'know, I'm OK with that."), I feel much less anxious and more free to choose any option when dealing with the issue.
Dealing With People
Talking with the others at the game table is a good first step, but frame the conversation carefully. Accusatory statements that start with second-person absolutes such as "You always..." tend to shut down communication before it starts. Even the most reasonable person can't help circling the wagons when accused. Stick with personal statements like "I feel uncomfortable when I hear..." and invite communication to the table. One-on-one conversations work well, but they can be scary. I failed my players as a GM once when I was too afraid to deal directly with a problem player who made the game much less fun for everyone else at the table. Lesson learned.
If one person's behavior makes you uncomfortable, or if they fly off the handle no matter how gently you broach the topic of your discomfort, get others involved. Something brought you to this group. Remember why you agreed to join and start there. If a friend invited you, then you probably already have an ally at the table. If a store or game club led you to this group, start asking around and see if others have a similar issue with this person.
Eject! Eject!
You always have one option: pull the ripcord. If your role in the gaming group dynamic boils down to "Emotional Punching Bag", GET OUT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. You may lose friends out of it, but your friends shouldn't hurt you, especially if you've already talked to them about the situation. Don't worry about "it's the only game in town" - that particular fear just means you haven't met the right group of local gamers yet.
You're playing a game. Games should be enjoyable and add positive experiences to your life. If your game keeps you up at night worrying about how others at the table will make you feel, you need to remove yourself from that situation immediately.
If your game keeps you up at night worrying about what mayhem your character will experience in the next game session, it sounds like you're part of an excellent game. I don't think you need help dealing with a toxic group in this case. Also: I'm jealous.
About You
I don't know you, and I don't know your situation. I can't speak directly to what you're going through, so I'm not going to try. You need to set your own tolerance threshold for whatever social mess you're experiencing. Once that line gets crossed, you need to act.
Some people are so selfish that they can't comprehend the pain they cause. These people are not worth your time nor your friendship. You are not responsible for their actions; you are responsible only for your own actions. Protect yourself first, then communicate about the problem from a place of safety, and if nothing changes walk away.
This should go without saying, but if you feel physically threatened or have been hurt, get out as quickly as possible and call the authorities, up to and including the police. Help is out there, but you can't count on help finding you on its own.
Final Thoughts
Gaming should empower everyone. You play the hero. You can enact change on the game world. Changing the world is your job as a player.
Take that attitude back to the real world. You have power. No matter how things play out, never forget that you have the power to change your circumstances.
I hope all your gaming experiences are positive.
Also: No art. Deal.)
I'm currently dealing with some political crap. Yes, it's been consuming and very distracting, and I apologize if I've been out of touch lately. But this experience has made me realize some things that I thought I'd scribble down.
A Tough Spot
If you find yourself in a situation where you feel uncomfortable or anxious, you need to change the situation. Don't just endure it thinking that things will change without your input; if nobody else knows there's a problem, nobody will change what they choose to do and the situation will remain or get worse. Talk with an uninvolved friend to get some perspective. Explaining your situation to someone else will help clarify the problem and let you know you aren't projecting personal dislike into a larger issue.
Enduring unpleasantness will drain your energy and make you feel miserable, perhaps even sick. No wonder situations and people get labelled "Toxic". If you want to improve your situation, you need to speak up. Hoping that something else will fix the problem only teaches you how to be helpless and how to resent others for not reading your mind.
If you want things to change, you have a responsibility to initiate that change.
You Always Have Options
No matter how riled or jangled I may get, nothing calms me down faster than realizing I have choices. It doesn't matter what those choices are; just remembering that choices exist renews my feeling of control over a situation. It may be as simple as "do this one thing later", but at least it's a focus for action.
Take some time to figure out your options. Write them down somewhere private so you can analyze them somewhere outside of your head. Writing out a list of pros and cons for each option helps me. When I identify a worst case outcome and accept it ("I may get fired... Y'know, I'm OK with that."), I feel much less anxious and more free to choose any option when dealing with the issue.
Dealing With People
Talking with the others at the game table is a good first step, but frame the conversation carefully. Accusatory statements that start with second-person absolutes such as "You always..." tend to shut down communication before it starts. Even the most reasonable person can't help circling the wagons when accused. Stick with personal statements like "I feel uncomfortable when I hear..." and invite communication to the table. One-on-one conversations work well, but they can be scary. I failed my players as a GM once when I was too afraid to deal directly with a problem player who made the game much less fun for everyone else at the table. Lesson learned.
If one person's behavior makes you uncomfortable, or if they fly off the handle no matter how gently you broach the topic of your discomfort, get others involved. Something brought you to this group. Remember why you agreed to join and start there. If a friend invited you, then you probably already have an ally at the table. If a store or game club led you to this group, start asking around and see if others have a similar issue with this person.
Eject! Eject!
You always have one option: pull the ripcord. If your role in the gaming group dynamic boils down to "Emotional Punching Bag", GET OUT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. You may lose friends out of it, but your friends shouldn't hurt you, especially if you've already talked to them about the situation. Don't worry about "it's the only game in town" - that particular fear just means you haven't met the right group of local gamers yet.
You're playing a game. Games should be enjoyable and add positive experiences to your life. If your game keeps you up at night worrying about how others at the table will make you feel, you need to remove yourself from that situation immediately.
If your game keeps you up at night worrying about what mayhem your character will experience in the next game session, it sounds like you're part of an excellent game. I don't think you need help dealing with a toxic group in this case. Also: I'm jealous.
About You
I don't know you, and I don't know your situation. I can't speak directly to what you're going through, so I'm not going to try. You need to set your own tolerance threshold for whatever social mess you're experiencing. Once that line gets crossed, you need to act.
Some people are so selfish that they can't comprehend the pain they cause. These people are not worth your time nor your friendship. You are not responsible for their actions; you are responsible only for your own actions. Protect yourself first, then communicate about the problem from a place of safety, and if nothing changes walk away.
This should go without saying, but if you feel physically threatened or have been hurt, get out as quickly as possible and call the authorities, up to and including the police. Help is out there, but you can't count on help finding you on its own.
Final Thoughts
Gaming should empower everyone. You play the hero. You can enact change on the game world. Changing the world is your job as a player.
Take that attitude back to the real world. You have power. No matter how things play out, never forget that you have the power to change your circumstances.
I hope all your gaming experiences are positive.
2013-10-31
The Rhythm of Year's End
Traditions abound. Traditions connect us with our past, with the memories of family and society. Some make sense, and some have been shuffled to the back of the relevance pile as we've moved away from the tradition's origin.
It makes me wonder if a colony on Mars will celebrate Christmas.
Now here we are at All Hallows Eve. Samhain. The end of harvest, and in some traditions the end of the year. We celebrate in our own ways: dressing in costumes, consuming pumpkin beer, begging neighbors for candy, talking to trees, doing homework, or sitting in quiet contemplation as we in the Northern Hemisphere pass into the dormant cycle and start planning for spring.
.jpg/172px-Fall_and_Winter_(6319353963).jpg)
It's a time for putting the past year to rest as we wait for our blanket of snow to tuck us in for hibernation.
I try to walk outside after dark and wish the trees a happy new year. I'm not sure anyone else does that, but it works for me. I take a little time to reflect and to wish us well on the next orbit around the sun. When Halloween falls in the middle of the work week, it's harder to make time.
Life goes on. Work doesn't stop. Modern society still makes the same demands on our time, but in winter we only have half the daylight to work with. We want to sleep, and yet our chosen industries want us to put in extra effort to meet our year-end goals.
And the struggle continues. We've moved beyond agrarianism, but we're still tied to the rhythms of the planet. The only change is our perception of it: Seasonal Affective Disorder expresses our bodies' earthbound rhythms, but modern medicine can overcome that now. But should we engage in chemical warfare against what we have always been?
If human bodies are tied to the planet's cycles so deeply, isn't our physiology the way things have "always been" and our societal demands the "constant change"? Who fights on the side of Tradition now?
Let's bring this into game terms and think about the ramifications of this idea for your game world.
How old is your in-game society? What aspects of your game's society remain the way they have always been? Do those constant traditions spring from physiology, environment, or society? What forces of change challenge those traditions? How does that struggle express itself during play? Are the PCs involved? What happens if PCs work for both sides of the struggle?
Change is the only constant in life.But that's the struggle, isn't it? We pit the way it's always been vs. constant change. We hold on to our culture and holidays, even when that culture no longer functions. Even when the holidays that came from a specific world are celebrated in space, or on an alien world with endless days and nights.
- Heraclitus
It makes me wonder if a colony on Mars will celebrate Christmas.
Now here we are at All Hallows Eve. Samhain. The end of harvest, and in some traditions the end of the year. We celebrate in our own ways: dressing in costumes, consuming pumpkin beer, begging neighbors for candy, talking to trees, doing homework, or sitting in quiet contemplation as we in the Northern Hemisphere pass into the dormant cycle and start planning for spring.
.jpg)
I try to walk outside after dark and wish the trees a happy new year. I'm not sure anyone else does that, but it works for me. I take a little time to reflect and to wish us well on the next orbit around the sun. When Halloween falls in the middle of the work week, it's harder to make time.
Life goes on. Work doesn't stop. Modern society still makes the same demands on our time, but in winter we only have half the daylight to work with. We want to sleep, and yet our chosen industries want us to put in extra effort to meet our year-end goals.
And the struggle continues. We've moved beyond agrarianism, but we're still tied to the rhythms of the planet. The only change is our perception of it: Seasonal Affective Disorder expresses our bodies' earthbound rhythms, but modern medicine can overcome that now. But should we engage in chemical warfare against what we have always been?
Let's bring this into game terms and think about the ramifications of this idea for your game world.
How old is your in-game society? What aspects of your game's society remain the way they have always been? Do those constant traditions spring from physiology, environment, or society? What forces of change challenge those traditions? How does that struggle express itself during play? Are the PCs involved? What happens if PCs work for both sides of the struggle?
2013-09-01
In Praise of the Fantastic
It's been a rough couple of days. On Thursday we drove from MA to Ohio. The 11 hour drive was stressful, but we didn't run into much traffic and the audiobook of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone made the time fly by. My daughter complained of stomach issues off and on during the day, but we chalked it up to the travel. She just got through a growth spurt and her appetite had slackened a bit from that as well.
Friday I worked from 3 states away. My daughter's stomach got worse - she had the dry heaves in the morning and barely ate during the day. Reading a few chapters of The Battle of the Labyrinth made her forget about her fever and discomfort for a while, even if she barely touched her dinner.
Saturday I got up at 6 to watch my daughter pray at the porcelain altar, but no vomiting this time. Since she had a hard time getting through applesauce and dry toast, we decided to visit the emergency room.She peed in a cup and we got a $100 can of apple juice. They found no evidence of a UTI, and they told us to keep her drinking juice for hydration and caloric content.
We came home and she had a nap. Her grandparents ran some errands for a while, which gave my wife and I time to play Lords of Waterdeep. Neither of us were collecting Arcane quests, so sadly we ended up burying the Domesticate Owlbears quest, much to both of our *HOOT!*ing chagrin.
My daughter didn't eat dinner, but her temperature was normal and she ended up having a snack before bed. I got to be bad cop and made her shower and brush her teeth before bed. She cried and whined through both. I snuggled with her for a while, then she decided to snuggle with her plush Tinkerbell instead. She smiled for the first time in days. I think we're through the worst of the stomach issues now.
The house got quiet. I spend the next couple of hours reading the last half of John Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation. I laughed out loud a few times. In the silence there was me, John, and Papa on Zara XXIII with fires and explosions and finally getting the son of a bitch. It was half past midnight, and I was tired, but I felt better.
I turned off the light. And I got up to write this.
I don't think I would have made it through the past few days without the time I spent in fantasy worlds as a pressure release valve. Taking some time to be in someone else's head, watching them deal with the fabricated issues of a fictional life or struggle for control of a city that doesn't exist gives us the space we need to deal with our day-to-day reality.
We need games. We need fiction. We need different perspectives, different ideas, different inspirations. We need to know that whatever hand we're dealt isn't fixed. We need variety so our brains can make connections and solve nagging problems and continue to function.
We need hope.
Fantasy gives me hope. And inspiration. And a place in my head to regroup.
Thanks to John Scalzi, J. M. Barrie, Ed Greenwood, Rick Riordan, J. K. Rowling, and everyone else who creates for doing what you do and sharing it. Don't stop. Don't ever stop. You helped me through a rough patch when I needed it, and for that I thank you.
If anyone asks why you do something so frivolous for a living, you tell them you help people cope just before you flip them off.
And whatever you do, never stop creating.
2013-08-08
Whelmed
Scribbling for sanity: I'm currently whelmed, and I don't mean I've already recovered Blackrazor and Wave from White Plume Mountain.
I've got 4 gaming projects to work on, 2 of which came in yesterday. They're each small, but there's the extra work of prioritization and setting expectations to worry about. And work keeps me going flat out during the day as we push to the next rollout deadline, so I can't steal a few minutes and scribble something on paper. Today I had to pick up some slack at church from someone who didn't follow through on what they said they'd take care of. I could feel the waters rising, and I just wanted to run away.
Wankwankwank.
Y'know what? Suck it up, my precious little snowflake. Sometimes things suck. Sometimes it takes more effort than it should to do something easy. Sometimes everything hits all at once. That's life. Go with it. Get back in the saddle before you waste another breath on worrying about the entire world of problems in front of you.
You have a choice: You could worry about what to do next, or you could do something to cross an item off your list and simplify your next choice. Which makes more sense?
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
Get to it.
Do or do not; there is no wanking.
(Master Yoda, I apologize.)
(Warning: Personal navelgazing ahead!)
I've always struggled with follow-through. My default reaction? Escape.
Why? Moving back and forth between my parents and travelling cross-country with my grandparents every summer didn't let me put down too many roots when I was younger. I started to think that consequences didn't apply to me - I could screw up royally, then just move and start with a clean slate next year. I could live in a perpetual grace period by continually being the new kid. I could abandon anything that got "too challenging" and it wouldn't matter. Apparently children of alcoholics tend to have trouble finishing things, so I've got that working for me as well.
I constantly struggle against the "Don't finish? Don't care." mentality. I find it's limiting me to work with things I find easy and not stretch myself into uncomfortable territory. I find it lengthens my list of open projects and subtly prevents me from finishing any of them. I find it's self-defeating and extremely frustrating.
That mentality is a part of me - it's not an "it", it's another facet of "me".
So let me rephrase: I limit myself. I don't let myself finish. I have a hard time not beating myself up every time I catch myself slipping down this particular spiral. I understand what's happening mentally, but emotionally I feel like I'm betraying myself.
Enough. Time to act.
Let's check some things off my list and make some space to think, shall we?
I've got 4 gaming projects to work on, 2 of which came in yesterday. They're each small, but there's the extra work of prioritization and setting expectations to worry about. And work keeps me going flat out during the day as we push to the next rollout deadline, so I can't steal a few minutes and scribble something on paper. Today I had to pick up some slack at church from someone who didn't follow through on what they said they'd take care of. I could feel the waters rising, and I just wanted to run away.
Wankwankwank.
Y'know what? Suck it up, my precious little snowflake. Sometimes things suck. Sometimes it takes more effort than it should to do something easy. Sometimes everything hits all at once. That's life. Go with it. Get back in the saddle before you waste another breath on worrying about the entire world of problems in front of you.
 |
| Eat me. |
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
Get to it.
Do or do not; there is no wanking.
(Master Yoda, I apologize.)
(Warning: Personal navelgazing ahead!)
I've always struggled with follow-through. My default reaction? Escape.
Why? Moving back and forth between my parents and travelling cross-country with my grandparents every summer didn't let me put down too many roots when I was younger. I started to think that consequences didn't apply to me - I could screw up royally, then just move and start with a clean slate next year. I could live in a perpetual grace period by continually being the new kid. I could abandon anything that got "too challenging" and it wouldn't matter. Apparently children of alcoholics tend to have trouble finishing things, so I've got that working for me as well.
I constantly struggle against the "Don't finish? Don't care." mentality. I find it's limiting me to work with things I find easy and not stretch myself into uncomfortable territory. I find it lengthens my list of open projects and subtly prevents me from finishing any of them. I find it's self-defeating and extremely frustrating.
That mentality is a part of me - it's not an "it", it's another facet of "me".
So let me rephrase: I limit myself. I don't let myself finish. I have a hard time not beating myself up every time I catch myself slipping down this particular spiral. I understand what's happening mentally, but emotionally I feel like I'm betraying myself.
Enough. Time to act.
Let's check some things off my list and make some space to think, shall we?
2013-05-09
Focusing on the Positive
An unsolicited recommendation brightened my yesterday and touched off this post.
Everything outside the metaphysical construct of Me piles on the crap day in and day out. At least that's how it feels some days. The feeling that some deeper life exists just under the surface itches in the back of my head, and I feel powerless to capture the infinite possibilities passing me by. The unconscious conspiracy aligns the world against us, as if there's a universal Them tasked with making us miserable.
But here's the Capital-T Truth:
Nobody conspires against us except us.
Nothing brings that into focus for me like getting unexpected good news on an otherwise bad day. That jarring bit of sunshine makes me look at the mire of the day and start singing along to the Indigo Girls, "It's only life after all." It provides perspective and offers a choice.
My life comes from my experiences, and experiences only happen through what I perceive. Therefore, my life comes through my perception of the world. Just as I can block someone on a social network or change the TV channel, I can choose what I perceive. "Perception Is Reality" lies at the heart of Schrodinger's Gun GMing, but it works in life as well as in games.
I watched "This Is Water" yesterday, which comes from a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace in 2005. It covers this idea in short film form quite well.
Do I want every tedious situation to sap my life in a stupid internal me vs. the world default setting? This is water. I need to remember that I have a choice. This is water. I can dwell on the negative and feed my life to the darkness, or I can focus on the positive and live in the sun while I can. This is water. This choice happens every moment of every day, and in the words of Rush, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." This is water.
I edit. I am an editor. I want to edit for a living, but right now it's a side job I use to improve myself while improving small corners of this RPG hobby I love. I fear jumping into it with both feet, mainly because I have a family that I need to provide for and with whom I want to spend time, and partly because the psychological and financial pain of past businesses failures still lingers. I don't know if I'll ever get past those fears, but I hope to. In the meantime, I'll work at it when I can.
Here's the thing: I'm good at editing. Sure, I'm still running on intuition at this point, but I notice my toolbox filling up with new skills on every gig. Part of me still fears the Fraud Squad, but that fear diminishes every time a creator wants me to work on a new project. I'm still working on ways to deliver criticism that don't make authors automatically reach for a pack of razor blades, but I'm learning with every new manuscript I read and piece of feedback I write. I can see the path I'm on rising up the mountain, and I'm looking forward to the climb.
An out-of-the-blue recommendation for my editing work tells me I'm doing something right, or at the very least that someone else thinks I'm doing something right. You can't pay for that kind of validation because asking for it cheapens it. These moments shine like gemstones in shale, and I am so thankful for them when they happen.
Thank you to Christina Stiles for thinking of me, for taking the time to respond to a G+ community thread, and for lifting yesterday out of the grey ooze of mundane drudgery with nothing more than four words and an acronym.
If you need more words of wisdom spurring you to do rather than just dream, I give you the "Make Good Art" commencement speech from Neil Gaiman.
I have a path. It's slow going, but I have a path.
Much as my mind resists the idea editing is art, and I make good art.
Now to continually steer my mind toward the light and keep walking my path.
This. This is water.
Everything outside the metaphysical construct of Me piles on the crap day in and day out. At least that's how it feels some days. The feeling that some deeper life exists just under the surface itches in the back of my head, and I feel powerless to capture the infinite possibilities passing me by. The unconscious conspiracy aligns the world against us, as if there's a universal Them tasked with making us miserable.
 |
| Perspective for one, no waiting... |
Nobody conspires against us except us.
Nothing brings that into focus for me like getting unexpected good news on an otherwise bad day. That jarring bit of sunshine makes me look at the mire of the day and start singing along to the Indigo Girls, "It's only life after all." It provides perspective and offers a choice.
My life comes from my experiences, and experiences only happen through what I perceive. Therefore, my life comes through my perception of the world. Just as I can block someone on a social network or change the TV channel, I can choose what I perceive. "Perception Is Reality" lies at the heart of Schrodinger's Gun GMing, but it works in life as well as in games.
I watched "This Is Water" yesterday, which comes from a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace in 2005. It covers this idea in short film form quite well.
Do I want every tedious situation to sap my life in a stupid internal me vs. the world default setting? This is water. I need to remember that I have a choice. This is water. I can dwell on the negative and feed my life to the darkness, or I can focus on the positive and live in the sun while I can. This is water. This choice happens every moment of every day, and in the words of Rush, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." This is water.
 |
| Found at Healthy Blender Recipies. |
Here's the thing: I'm good at editing. Sure, I'm still running on intuition at this point, but I notice my toolbox filling up with new skills on every gig. Part of me still fears the Fraud Squad, but that fear diminishes every time a creator wants me to work on a new project. I'm still working on ways to deliver criticism that don't make authors automatically reach for a pack of razor blades, but I'm learning with every new manuscript I read and piece of feedback I write. I can see the path I'm on rising up the mountain, and I'm looking forward to the climb.
An out-of-the-blue recommendation for my editing work tells me I'm doing something right, or at the very least that someone else thinks I'm doing something right. You can't pay for that kind of validation because asking for it cheapens it. These moments shine like gemstones in shale, and I am so thankful for them when they happen.
Thank you to Christina Stiles for thinking of me, for taking the time to respond to a G+ community thread, and for lifting yesterday out of the grey ooze of mundane drudgery with nothing more than four words and an acronym.
If you need more words of wisdom spurring you to do rather than just dream, I give you the "Make Good Art" commencement speech from Neil Gaiman.
I have a path. It's slow going, but I have a path.
Much as my mind resists the idea editing is art, and I make good art.
Now to continually steer my mind toward the light and keep walking my path.
This. This is water.
2012-09-13
On Path-Changing and Little Intentional Deaths
Or do you make the character jump into the metaphysical bottomless pit, crumple up the sheet, and start from scratch? I think this is the essence of the gamer's midlife crisis. Gamers are used to playing wildly different characters in a variety of settings, so totally reinventing a life seems much less daunting than it would to a non-gamer.
The challenge comes in keeping the life essentially intact while reinventing only pieces of it to improve the character.
"But Wombat, Why Are You Thinking These Things Now?"
Last Friday I celebrated my 43rd birthday. As of last week I'm no longer the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. I haven't been able to be trusted for the past 7 years. I'm sailing through the amorphous no-man's-land in the middle of my demographic age bracket. I don't know why this birthday hit me harder than my 40th did, but I'm having thoughts of changing parts of my life more often lately.
I've made some positive changes this past year. I'm coming to grips with my job and its commute and not treating it as a temporary inconvenience. I'm earning a decent secondary income editing RPGs, something enjoyable which challenges me as I learn new methods and ideas while still sticking to a deadline. I'm reconnecting with my family. I'm discovering the sources of my frustrations and learning to control when and how they come out. I'm starting to plan again after convincing myself there's no point in even trying to fight the Cancellation Monster and his Bag of Endless Monkey Wrenches."Cool. What's Next?"
I have general things I want to improve. I need to start a routine to get in better shape than I am now. I could stand to lose about 20 pounds and add some muscle mass to stop the annoying creaks and pains. I have no stamina, and I blame sitting at a desk in front of a laptop for two different jobs for that. I need to carve more time out of each day to meditate. I feel guilty when I take time for myself, like I should be doing something productive instead of staring off into space or stealing a few minutes to write up a blog post like this. I know it's time spent sharpening my axe, but I still feel those pangs of should-ness. I've read a total of three pages from a book in the past few weeks. I read to feed my head, and this perceived lack of time to spend on reading makes me crazy.
These are all side projects that will make a better me. But the big question remains: Do I want to continue in my current vocation at my current workplace or should I figure out how to jump tracks before it's too late to change? Do I stick it out for a few more years in hopes of earning a feat and a few more skill points that I can put into something else?
I think I may have advanced as far as I care to in my Programmer life. The question is, what do I focus on next? And how do I make ends meet during and after the transition?
2012-04-27
Ghosts of Cyberpunks Past
Note: This hearkens back to the rants I used to write in the dim and dusty past on Usenet newsgroups and in LiveJournal. I'm posting this here as an experiment. The fact that CISPA passed the US House of Representatives last night was purely coincidental as I wrote most of this yesterday.
Would this format work as an introductory piece to a setting or campaign? Would you like to see more of these written to detail the background of a game world? Would you like to see more of these on modern-day Earth? Would you play a Cyberpunk game set in this world? Is Cyberpunk simply past its prime, unrecognized by a world that chose a different path? Please let me know what you think.
We’ve failed, chummers. We’ve become professional pooch-screwers shuffled off into a quiet, irrelevant corner where our incompetence hopefully won’t taint the next generation.
We tipped our hand too early. We let the corporations know that we were onto them. We were going to stop the tide of corporate takeover. We would never let the world get bad enough to allow a financial conglomerate to tank an entire country’s economy. We’d prevent the dystopia or die trying. We weren’t important, the Cause was.
In our cyberpunk worlds, technology and humanity melded against the backdrop of corporate nihilism. Wage Slaves turned a blind eye to the chaos on the street. Hackers and Deckers and Riggers and Techs and Netrunners made magic with technology and turned the tide so the Talkers and Rockers and Samurai and Fixers and Solos and Facemen could apply just the right pressure at just the right time. When things went South as they always did, improvisation kept the ‘run on course. The heroes in the shadows adapted in a hurry or died trying.
These images painted the Cyberpunk world. We read these books and played these games and prepared for the inevitable takeover. We waited for that one tipping event and stood ready to rally.
But it never came.
Corporations learned from our Cyberpunk stories. They adapted faster than we did. They got subtle and seduced us out of our future with promises of comfort and ease and everything that money can buy. Now we’re bent over and tied down. The pain only stops when a mid-level corporate drone removes our ball gag and lets us choose the color of the next dildo to get inserted, giving us the satisfaction of participating in their illusion of choice. They limit our choices, so we usually get choices that are either A) Dookie, B) Crap, or C) Feces.
Corporations own all the outcomes. They know how we think, and they don’t let that shit get taught in school because it’s “junk science”. Crackpot or not, the science of emotional manipulation gets used against us every day. In 30 seconds, a well-crafted ad can twist your emotions and make you dance on the marionette strings in a totally predictable way. And if we want to change something, we’ve become conditioned to buying instead of making.
The disposable culture extended to manpower. We outsourced jobs, and offshored them to the lowest bidder. And now support calls for your credit cards are handled by incarcerated inmates or people who need the money rather than people who respect the job. Mike Rowe is right: We declared war on work and trained ourselves to buy something new because it’s cheaper than hiring someone to fix it when it breaks, or, heavens forbid we should roll up our sleeves and get grease on our manicured nails, learn to fix things ourselves. The quality of goods has dipped so low that the furniture we inherited from our grandparents outlasts anything we buy new through a megacorp, even with a 60 year head start on decay.
We’ve lost our pride and forsaken our sense of responsibility. We’ve convinced ourselves that total failure is OK. We can walk away from tragedy simply by slapping up a “Somebody Else’s Problem” sign with an arrow pointing to whatever we don’t want to deal with. We’ve talked ourselves into accepting modest changes instead of sweeping reforms, which will leave our kids to make decisions in a situation that’s ten times worse. We drive our hybrids that get the exact same mileage as small cars did 30 years ago but cost three times as much because of all the new technology, and we call that a fucking win like we’re helping the solution instead of perpetuating the problem.
We’ve been trained to fear. Boogeymen nowadays take two forms: terrorists and pirates. Never mind that dying from a plane crash is eight times more likely than dying from a terrorist attack. Never mind that sharing music and video gives us common ground for personal connections in this nebulous space we call “culture”. Lesser offenses either get pushed to one of these extremes or get accepted as “the price of doing business”. We’re so afraid of the big bad world that we let corporations dictate what “safe” means. We force our culture into tiny pay-per-view boxes that very few can afford to open in the name of protecting the economy from piracy, and the spin doctors convince us that this New World Order makes our lives better.
The media won’t help us. The watchdog of liberty has been bought and caged like a stray dog hungry for table scraps. Important stories drop in off the front page in a heartbeat, while asymptotic and hyperbolic soundbytes bombard us until we’re pissed at the person whose idea we ripped from its context instead of the editors who focus on the 1% of the speech guaranteed to shock the audience. And the media claims they’re innocent because they simply report the news. Bullshit. They decide where the cameras and microphones point and which clips get rerun 24 hours later. The media chooses the focus, and so it filters what stories we can focus on.
And now for the news. We’re still running out of oil, and now even faster that in the ‘70s when the energy crisis had people lining up for hours at service stations for gas rations. And all that carbon needs to go somewhere – why not into the air where we don’t see it until it kills us? Global weirding continues with stronger storms, stranger weather, and environmental backlash from places we can’t even conceive of yet.
But we focus on arguments about how slowly to change things so we don’t upset the corporations and their obscenely wealthy owners. Deck chairs? Titanic? Anyone?
Yes, we fucked up. We went to sleep once the specter of Mutually Assured Destruction dropped off the headlines. Once Red Menace fell apart and the Wall came down, we thought we were safe. We never thought to look within the institutions we trusted and thought were above suspicion. Without an overt enemy to fight, the paragons of democratic leadership kept starting quiet wars and twisted the organizations and agencies that were supposed to work for us into what they are today: self-perpetuating institutions of selfishness.
Another news flash: We’re a couple of years away from blood-borne nanites. We’ve been playing God medically for years, but the stakes will really kick in the afterburners with all the innovations coming down the pike. The future is here, people, and we’re too busy pouring our attention and lifeblood into paying Corporations to look around and say, “That’s fucking awesome!”
We’re so connected now, but that’s as much curse as blessing. We retweet messages that we can’t spend the time to fully appreciate and convince ourselves that we’ve done our part to make the world better simply by boosting the signal. And what happens? Very little, and we go back to drinking from the firehose in the deluded quest to keep up with the world. We exhaust ourselves enduring the constant fusillade of information, looking for that one 140-character morsel that will give our lives meaning today. By connecting broadly, we dilute the depth of our connectivity, and we wake up in an electronic bed with hundreds of acquaintances we barely recognize.
We’ve lost focus. We always thought the cyberpunk ideal of fighting The Man would be easy – they’ve got the money and are abusing their power. Like the way “bad guys” pop off the screen – we know about bad guys. In the grey world, everybody looks the same, and people still swallow the argument of, "How can I help you succeed if you take my power and money away?" Even when the bad guy explains the plan to screw us to our faces, a part of us understands the idea as completely reasonable if misguided. There is no black and white, even when we continually ask our media to boil down complexity to overextended conclusions with only two sides. We can only conceive of two political parties, good and evil, those in power and those preparing to take power, us vs. them.
There is no “Them”. “They” are just a part of “Us” that we separate from our tribe to stay sane because we don’t want to share the term “human” with someone whose ideas we don’t like or can’t comprehend. We’re all complex people with priorities and aspirations, and sometimes we disagree with each other to the point where we stop communicating. Social media lets you sever ties with somebody else in that system by clicking a button. News flash: They still exist even when you don’t see them. Each one of us should have learned the concept of permanence by our second birthday, but sometimes we need reminders.
So yeah, we failed to keep the darkness out of the world. But we ain’t dead yet, chummers.
So now what? How can we take a stand in this post-cyberpunk world? Where do we expend our limited stockpiles of attention and focus our limitless frustration at the way things have become? What games can we make to get the masses thinking in different ways? How can we change our world for the better?
Would this format work as an introductory piece to a setting or campaign? Would you like to see more of these written to detail the background of a game world? Would you like to see more of these on modern-day Earth? Would you play a Cyberpunk game set in this world? Is Cyberpunk simply past its prime, unrecognized by a world that chose a different path? Please let me know what you think.
| We even trust Megacorps to keep us in the fight. |
We tipped our hand too early. We let the corporations know that we were onto them. We were going to stop the tide of corporate takeover. We would never let the world get bad enough to allow a financial conglomerate to tank an entire country’s economy. We’d prevent the dystopia or die trying. We weren’t important, the Cause was.
In our cyberpunk worlds, technology and humanity melded against the backdrop of corporate nihilism. Wage Slaves turned a blind eye to the chaos on the street. Hackers and Deckers and Riggers and Techs and Netrunners made magic with technology and turned the tide so the Talkers and Rockers and Samurai and Fixers and Solos and Facemen could apply just the right pressure at just the right time. When things went South as they always did, improvisation kept the ‘run on course. The heroes in the shadows adapted in a hurry or died trying.
These images painted the Cyberpunk world. We read these books and played these games and prepared for the inevitable takeover. We waited for that one tipping event and stood ready to rally.
 |
| Is this the Cyberpunk Dystopia we expected? |
Corporations learned from our Cyberpunk stories. They adapted faster than we did. They got subtle and seduced us out of our future with promises of comfort and ease and everything that money can buy. Now we’re bent over and tied down. The pain only stops when a mid-level corporate drone removes our ball gag and lets us choose the color of the next dildo to get inserted, giving us the satisfaction of participating in their illusion of choice. They limit our choices, so we usually get choices that are either A) Dookie, B) Crap, or C) Feces.
Corporations own all the outcomes. They know how we think, and they don’t let that shit get taught in school because it’s “junk science”. Crackpot or not, the science of emotional manipulation gets used against us every day. In 30 seconds, a well-crafted ad can twist your emotions and make you dance on the marionette strings in a totally predictable way. And if we want to change something, we’ve become conditioned to buying instead of making.
The disposable culture extended to manpower. We outsourced jobs, and offshored them to the lowest bidder. And now support calls for your credit cards are handled by incarcerated inmates or people who need the money rather than people who respect the job. Mike Rowe is right: We declared war on work and trained ourselves to buy something new because it’s cheaper than hiring someone to fix it when it breaks, or, heavens forbid we should roll up our sleeves and get grease on our manicured nails, learn to fix things ourselves. The quality of goods has dipped so low that the furniture we inherited from our grandparents outlasts anything we buy new through a megacorp, even with a 60 year head start on decay.
 |
| Cybereyes. Does replacing the windows of the soul with metal somehow make us less human? |
We’ve been trained to fear. Boogeymen nowadays take two forms: terrorists and pirates. Never mind that dying from a plane crash is eight times more likely than dying from a terrorist attack. Never mind that sharing music and video gives us common ground for personal connections in this nebulous space we call “culture”. Lesser offenses either get pushed to one of these extremes or get accepted as “the price of doing business”. We’re so afraid of the big bad world that we let corporations dictate what “safe” means. We force our culture into tiny pay-per-view boxes that very few can afford to open in the name of protecting the economy from piracy, and the spin doctors convince us that this New World Order makes our lives better.
 |
| I'm still looking for Netrunner cards. |
And now for the news. We’re still running out of oil, and now even faster that in the ‘70s when the energy crisis had people lining up for hours at service stations for gas rations. And all that carbon needs to go somewhere – why not into the air where we don’t see it until it kills us? Global weirding continues with stronger storms, stranger weather, and environmental backlash from places we can’t even conceive of yet.
 |
| Cyberpunk characters in the style of Order of the Stick, from the Cyberpunk Contest thread. |
Yes, we fucked up. We went to sleep once the specter of Mutually Assured Destruction dropped off the headlines. Once Red Menace fell apart and the Wall came down, we thought we were safe. We never thought to look within the institutions we trusted and thought were above suspicion. Without an overt enemy to fight, the paragons of democratic leadership kept starting quiet wars and twisted the organizations and agencies that were supposed to work for us into what they are today: self-perpetuating institutions of selfishness.
Another news flash: We’re a couple of years away from blood-borne nanites. We’ve been playing God medically for years, but the stakes will really kick in the afterburners with all the innovations coming down the pike. The future is here, people, and we’re too busy pouring our attention and lifeblood into paying Corporations to look around and say, “That’s fucking awesome!”
 |
| No, it's not just like the fucking Matrix. But Green is the color of Cyberpunk. |
We’ve lost focus. We always thought the cyberpunk ideal of fighting The Man would be easy – they’ve got the money and are abusing their power. Like the way “bad guys” pop off the screen – we know about bad guys. In the grey world, everybody looks the same, and people still swallow the argument of, "How can I help you succeed if you take my power and money away?" Even when the bad guy explains the plan to screw us to our faces, a part of us understands the idea as completely reasonable if misguided. There is no black and white, even when we continually ask our media to boil down complexity to overextended conclusions with only two sides. We can only conceive of two political parties, good and evil, those in power and those preparing to take power, us vs. them.
 |
| Click for a Rockerboy instrumental. |
So yeah, we failed to keep the darkness out of the world. But we ain’t dead yet, chummers.
So now what? How can we take a stand in this post-cyberpunk world? Where do we expend our limited stockpiles of attention and focus our limitless frustration at the way things have become? What games can we make to get the masses thinking in different ways? How can we change our world for the better?
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