Careful how you use that word, just. You can demean the obstacle, which can be good, and my efforts to get over it, which can be bad. You imply that it’s no big thing, that mountain that’s keeping me from my goal, or at least that it’s no big thing to you.

“I’m stuck on this decision I have to make in this story,” I say. “I don’t know if I should kill the villain or let him live.”

“It’s easy,” you might say, “just have him appear dead and then you can decide in the sequel.” You might imply the word duh. You might even say it.

Even if you’re right—even if you know a pass through the mountains or you have some excellent climbing skills—diminishing the scale of my challenge isn’t necessarily essential to solving my problem. Hell, it may not even be helpful at all. You don’t have to say, “I’ve climbed Everest, this is just the Rockies.” Even if you solve my problem (and maybe you haven’t because your immediate gut-check answer just doesn’t fill me with confidence that you’ve considered all the angles) you’ve also made me feel like a heel, a loser, or unfit for being troubled by it in the first place. Maybe I was looking forward to the accomplishment of scaling that mountain you just called a hill.

It may be simple or obvious to you. Not everything that’s simple or obvious to you is simple or obvious to me. Respect that others may be wrestling over a problem for good reasons, even if the answer seems simple to you. Simplicity and complication are sometimes a matter of position. Perspective matters.

It’s great that you’re on the side of the mountain with the elevator; that doesn’t shorten the trip on this side.

This week, I’m trying something. It’s been a little while since I wrote you because I’ve been busy working on big writing and design projects and I didn’t think I had time to blog. Blogging doesn’t have to take long. So I’m setting myself a little bit of time and tackling a few little bits of blog fodder over the rest of the week. Bit by bit.

Tonight’s post, for example, is just about this: The more stands I take, the more reasons people have to turn away from me.

If I stay nimble or vaporous, you won’t be able to get ahold of me, inspect my stripes, and realize that I’m some sort of scalawag or loser or political enemy or whatever other Other you don’t want me to be. I spend some time hiding even as I’m writing. Lousy? Sure. True? Yes.

If I take positions on various issues, I am easier to categorize, label, summarize, and dismiss. I don’t like being summarized. I think most people—that is, people who I do not wish to diminish or oppose—are complicated. I want to be treated as though I’m complicated in return. I sometimes say stupid things without being, on the whole, as stupid as those stupid things might make me look. I hope that’s the way of it.

So I avoid talking about certain things to avoid driving people away. Politics, for example.

SOPA and PIPA are terrible bills. They would make lousy laws. I am a content creator, I work for content creators, I have had my work pirated and I believe that piracy hurts businesses of different sizes in different ways. For some, it may be a knife in the belly. For others, it is a mosquito on the arm. Piracy can even benefit artists and creators who languish in obscurity. It is a complicated issue. I respect it for being so complicated.

MPAA chief Chris Dodd called the voluntary blackouts of certain key websites tomorrow, as a form of protest against these bills, an “abuse of power[.]“ I do not agree that sites voluntarily suspending access to their own content in protest on a free Internet abuses power. Nor do I trust that some sponsors of SOPA and PIPA won’t abuse the power afforded them by these bills of theirs, permanently revoking or destroying sites and content that displease them.

SOPA and PIPA are bludgeons wielded against an issue that calls for cautious instruments. They respond to a complex challenge—a bold new creative environment—with destructive force. They diminish what makes the Internet a vital and vibrant place for a multitude of creators willing to compete for the sake of a flabbergasted few unsure how to adapt.

I won’t be going dark tomorrow. Instead, I’ll be writing and working online. I’ll be on the Internet that I love and fear for as long as it is still free. One thing that I’ll be writing: letters to my representatives. I’m taking a position.

Music: “Hindsight,” The Long Winters

Music: “Immigrant Song,” Karen O with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

Times like this, I wish iTunes gathered more data. I’d check to see what I was listening to in January versus what I’m listening to now. The clock tells me what time of day it is, but my sense of the year is tied to what was in my headphones and where I sat when I wrote what.

To get me writing, I’ve locked myself inside a playlist. There was no code or hidden meaning to these when I made the playlist and put it on random. Looking back, meanings emerge.

Music: “My Body Is A Cage,” Arcade Fire

The trouble is, I can’t remember if I wrote this thing or that in 2011 or 2010. For me, time was divided by space in 2010 and everything since we moved back to Chicago from Atlanta feels like “this year.” Everything before feels like before. I hear your Gregorian calendar rattling around out there and, yes, I’ll party tonight to celebrate the moment that we peel the numeral 1 off the sign and paste a numeral 2 in its place, but my years are not your years anymore.

Music: “Dance or Die (feat. Saul Williams),” Janelle Monáe

For me, it seems, the year runs from Gen Con to Gen Con, from PAX to PAX, from Shared Worlds to Shared Worlds. These are overlapping semi-translucent circles in varying muted colors, their radii cover the prep time, the fretting, the travel and activity, the relief and the fallout and the sadness that these things pass too quickly. The center of each diameter is a dot a few days wide—a weekend or a week—during which the actual event actually occurs. Everything else is a shadow cast in two directions, forward and back, onto the days before and the days after.

Music: “Derezzed,” Daft Punk

These circles create a chain of Venn diagrams that collaborate with my deadlines to define my year. It’s like a narrow landscape, like a fractal or a ring world—not a Halo-brand ring, maybe, but something—this wide and this tall at its highest points, with waters so deep and secret passages at these intervals leading to subterranean or subconscious caverns both eerily beautiful and decidedly unhealthy. They affect the structural integrity of the surrounding earth like a cavity in a rotten tooth. But that’s the year, concise and vast, a narrow habitable zone in an expanse of the unknowable beyond.

Music: “Empire Ants (feat. Little Dragon),” Gorillaz

This song takes me to the writing camp in South Carolina, to the little cottage where I stayed and wrote and read stories. And then I realize that I’ve traveled not to this past summer but the previous one, because the desk is on the wrong wall in the cottage and the iTunes installation I downloaded this album into was virtually bare back then. My memory’s clock is out of sync, turning at a speed that falls behind here but overlaps with your time there and again. We’re together and apart, ’cause I’m writing this now but you’re reading it then, when I’ve traveled back to another time as I wait at a red light en route to the restaurant tonight, before the year-end party, before the year’s end, or at least the year’s end here.

Maybe now has already happened where you are.

Read more »

So, that happened.

As you can see in the sidebar (at the time of this writing), I launched the Kickstarter campaign for Always/Never/Now. It went live yesterday at 4:50 (Central time) in the afternoon in what I intended to be a soft launch. The actual “grand opening” would wait until today. I thought. It turns out, people didn’t want to wait.

Thus, I conclude, you’re wonderful.

Additional funding makes it possible for me to grow the size of the product, add on new features, and offer better compensation to the artists and designers who helped me make the Kickstarter video (thanks to Quantazelle for “Unlawful Furniture,” the track under most of the video!) or are working with me on graphical elements for the finished project. I’ll be posting updates on the Kickstarter page telling you about them. It also means I can devote more time to writing and laying out the finished product.

I’m also devising additional rewards and preparing the additional milestones I already had in mind. The response to the Kickstarter campaign has been stunning already—I didn’t expect I’d have to move this fast to keep up with interest. I’m flattered. I’m floored. I’m excited as hell.

So, please do give the campaign a look—and stay tuned for updates and news in the days ahead. We’re just getting started.

Music: Deus Ex: Human Revolution, soundtrack by Michael McCann

At first, I was writing about how I am sometimes irked by the phrase “get ahead.” As in, ”I just want to get ahead.” It’s the implicit metaphor that bothers me, when it bothers me. It’s the idea that we are each of us in a race against each other and the only way to finish that matters is to place and the only to place is do so at someone else’s expense—because nobody cares about those assholes who place below.

“I may be in third place, but at least I’m not one of those losers vying for fourth.”

This bothered me a bit when the President used the phrase on The Tonight Show:

And, traditionally, what held this country together was this notion that if you work hard, if you are playing by the rules, if you are responsible, if you are looking out for your family, you are showing up to work every day and doing a good job, you’ve got a chance to get ahead. You’ve got a chance to succeed. And, right now, it feels to people like the deck is stacked against them, and the folks in power don’t seem to be paying attention to that. [via the Washington Post, emphasis mine]

Then I realized that the basis of my ire was bullshit. The phrase doesn’t have to mean “to get ahead of your neighbor.” It could just mean “to get ahead of where we are now.” To move forward, even together. The implicit object doesn’t have to be thy neighbor. We can many of us get ahead—maybe all of us. (See also, something about rising tides and ships.)

Civilization is not a race to a finish line. No finish line exists. No limit has been set on us, no ceiling holds us down.

We should be able to grow our civilizations and keep them growing. Setbacks, sure—but the notion that he who dies with the most toys wins is a sham. It’s a minigame that distracts and diminishes those players who have mistaken an inning for the game, for the season, for the sport. When your at-bat is over, the game doesn’t end. The dugout is full of hitters and next year’s rookies are eager to play. When you die, you don’t win, you just stop running. The game is bigger than you.

Then I saw this passage from Douglas Rushkoff go by on Tumblr:

Rather, they see the futility of attempting to use the tools of a competitive, winner-takes-all society for purposes that might better be served through the tools of mutual aid. This is not a game that someone wins, but rather a form of play that is successful the more people get to play, and the longer the game is kept going. [via Douglas Rushkoff]

I agree. The point is to keep the game going. The hope is that our pitches and fields, stadiums and domes don’t end up as mysteries marking our vanished people, our vanished ways. The aim is to fill the stands with cheers and the taverns with stories, to build great teams and great respect. And a lucky few get to be heroes, held up on shoulders and sung about by fans.

But heroes aren’t built out of stolen parts. They’re built out of admiration and excellence, and we can always make more admiration. We can teach excellence.

That’s what I think it should mean to get ahead.

So I like Twitter rather a lot. How much is a lot? As of this writing, somewhere around 17,801 tweets much. I even use the web interface most of the time, rather than any of a million Twitter apps that also, you know, both exist and function fine.

Like a lot of people, I don’t care much for the Activity tab. When Twitter first tried to get rid of the mentions tab and replace it with Activity-style data, I rebelled. I badmouthed it on Twitter, clicked some things, and got the old interface back—for a while. Now the Activity tab is there, asking to be clicked when I’m desperate for a social media fix. Sometimes, I do click it. Sometimes I see tweets there, favorited by friends, and I read them and then—and here’s the thing, don’t judge me but this is true—sometimes I read a tweet under the Activity tab and I am glad I did.

I know. I know.

Yes, it’s true, I find the trending topics to often be feckless, depressing chaff with the occasional venture into actual offensive content. Recommended Twitter users to follow almost (but not) never produces someone I actually end up following. The Activity sidebar just feeds into the feeling that I follow someone not to read their tweets and keep up with their public persona but to see what they do—to stare, to leer at them, in a weird way. I don’t do that. I follow them to read what they compose, not to track their Twitter movements.

But there’s a limit to my irk. (If favorite is a verb, I can make irk a noun.)*

Can anyone explain to me what’s wrong with the built-in retweet mechanism in Twitter? Why all the hate? I get the initial backlash against it—new thing! different! oppose it!—but even now? Really? Yes, it puts a tweet into your timeline from someone you didn’t authorize. It lets the people you follow have some curatorial power over your Twitter stream. It also lets you retweet a worthy tweet that doesn’t allow extra room for the letters RT and the person’s Twitter handle. It helps give credit (and context!) where it’s due. Is that so bad?

Seriously, though, trending topics so often make me real sad.

*(We have a verb for favorite, by the way. It’s favor. As in “to favor [something].” And something that is favored is a favorite… as if it was a person from the land of Favor. Or it was a fossil creature or an explosive. I guess. I don’t know. Shut up. Look at “-ite” in the dictionary, good stuff in there.)

Music: “Human After All,” Daft Punk

A friend of mine sent me a link to a blog entry, saying she thought of me when she read it. That post presents a letter from Austin Madison, an animator at Pixar. In it Austin says, among many other good things, “[t]he important thing is to slog diligently through the quagmire of discouragement and despair.”

I agree.

Even though I’m often facing (and depicting) my frustrations and my doubt directly, make no mistake: I’m not giving up. I’ve had setbacks and I’ve been knocked down. I’ve experienced some things that, were I a character and you a screenwriter, you might call reversals, sure. I’m still here. I’m moving ahead. I’m persisting.

Because, seriously, what’s the alternative? Not trying? Not failing? Not trying again? Listen, I’m not exactly a well man, but that? That would be proper maddening. I’m not doing that—I’m persisting.

So let’s keep at it. Let’s keep moving and writing and trying and retrying. One day—one day—we’ll be forced to quit for real. I’m not sitting around waiting for that. I’m persisting.

Who’s with me?

 

 

It occurs to me that I’d probably me remiss if I didn’t mention this here: My first bit of work for the Dragon Age RPG went live to today in a free PDF piece called Faces of Thedas: Tallis. This contains my interview with writer/actor/gamer Felicia Day, creator and star of the web series, Dragon Age: Redemption. The main character of the series, the Qunari/elf assassin called Tallis, gets complete game stats in this debut installment of Faces of Thedas, in fact. In addition to working on the third boxed set for the game, I’m working on more content like this—but I shan’t say much more than that.

As I said on the Green Ronin blog:

As a gamer who’s played a lot of RPGs adapted from TV, movies, and games, I always want to ask actors and writers about the characters they portray so their perspective can inform roleplaying at my game table. When I heard that I’d be the new shepherd of the Dragon Age RPG, just as Redemption and Mark of the Assassin were about to debut, I figured I had to pursue the chance to get Felicia Day’s insight on Tallis, a character she created. As a writer, actor, and a gamer, Day is a rare expert on how those roles overlap–and how they differ. [via]

So, there you go.

“but I’m bailing water and bailing water
’cause I like the shape of the boat.”

—”Hindsight,” The Long Winters

I pocketed my notebook, because I often get story or essay ideas at performances like these. I thought about wearing the T-shirt with the ninja girl on it, went with one witha keyboard design on it, promoting Technoir, instead. I fussed with my hair, so I’d look good for the people I was accompanying to the show—and to make a good impression at the signing. I slipped a copy of The Bones into my bag, thinking I would give it as a gift, just as I gave him Things We Thing About Games at a previous signing for his previous book.

The author is John Hodgman. The new book is the last volume of complete world knowledge, That Is All. The event is the Chicago stop on his End Is Nigh tour, which I’d been following via his Tumblr, Areas of My Expertise dot com.

I thought about what I might say at the signing after the performance. As I put my shoes on, as I rode with my friend, Anne, up to the venue, as I appreciated the stark jacket design for That Is All—a departure from the designs of his previous books—as I drank my beer, I thought about what I would say. I wanted to be memorable and supportive, to show my appreciation for his work. I wanted to tell him that his move from squalor to literary agent, from literary agent to freelance writer, from freelance writer to popular author, gives me a measure of hope. I wanted to tell him that his work on This American Life, where he drew out the comedy and the humanity in the ridiculous, is a ruler against which I gauge other essays. I wanted to tell him how well his work works.

I, too, want to eventually come out from behind other people’s books and offer up my own. I, too, want to share a stage with the writers, artists, and musicians I know, whose work deserves to be seen. I, too, want to be complained at for my appearance on Battlestar Galactica. Well, okay, not so much that.

Read more »

It’s just 9 days until I get to run Always/Never/Now for the first time, so I’m committing to that name and moving forward with materials to run the game on the night of 11/11/11. Here’s the logo I’m putting on the playtest kit:

It’s very close to one you’ve seen before, but I like how the lines interact with the words—moving differently through Always and Never and Now—so I’m keeping it. It’ll get updated for print, but that’s the gist of it.

In other news: I got the necessary permissions I needed from the great designers whose footsteps I’m walking in. That means Always/Never/Now will go on sale after playtesting is complete. It’s sort of like a Lady Blackbird with multiple action-packed episodes built-in. The final kit’ll feature 10 or so locations to fight or chase or sneak or talk your way through, guidelines on using music during play, notes on how to dramatize the game’s themes, playtest notes, and more.

Exactly what form the release will take is still up in the air but I’m leaning toward a ransom model, right now, in which I release the kit as a PDF and/or POD booklet if I raise enough funds. It’s a balancing act between paying myself for the time I spent working on this and letting the thing circulate freely once it’s released. I continue to weigh options.

My estimate is that I’ll only be able to play 50-60% of the content I’m generating for this adventure in the long one-night session I have scheduled. So, after my in-house playtest on 11/11/11, and my revisions based on that, I’ll need a few play groups to play this thing on their own and let me know how it works. (I want to keep the number of groups small and nimble—I don’t have time to manage a big playtest project right now.)

Stand by for more information about the adventure and the deadlines that come with playtesting.

Music: “Future Starts Slow,” The Kills