SHM128III

fiveforfive - collective fund for trans women and girls and transfem causes

gendered intelligence - trans led advocacy org

mermaids - supports trans youth

akt - lgbtq youth homelessness charity

loving me - domestic abuse service for trans people in england

Like corporations are bad, but there’s a bigger reason that games cost so much. I’m actually okay with mainstream games getting more expensive bc it helps raise the floor on indie game prices (which should all be higher, Stardew Valley being $15 is actually bad for indie devs everywhere bc everyone compares your indie game to SV and is like why can’t you have this much content and be this cheap. SV should be like $40-50.) bc then me an indie dev might get paid more and not be starving.

The nuance is that twin evils are at work here: 1. video game costs have kept up with inflation (as they should to pay for the higher fidelity gamers demand and to pay the bigger and bigger teams) but wages have not. Ppl should be asking why isn’t our minimum high enough I can afford a game with a few hours of work (the equivalent of less than half an extra shift if you wanted to take it once a month)?

Essentially: please gain class consciousness, bite every billionaire, demand minimum wage and thus all other wages be raised to keep up with inflation and suddenly you will have money for games and consoles, and game devs will be able to make quality products that allow them to feed their families.

Evil #2, (this evil is also why AI has gotten so big) is that art has been even further reduced to things that are solely meant to be consumed, spit out and then immediately forgotten for the next item of consumption. This conflating of art (and video games are art!) with products and consumption is the other half of the nuance here. It’s not wrong for people to ask, hell even to demand they get paid well for making good art. They should be getting paid well for it.

Either that or gamers need to lower their impossible standards.

Even with console games jumping to $80 USD video games are, barring maybe books, by far, the cheapest dollar to hours of entertainment investment than anything else!

$80 game that you play for 100 hours of entertainment=80 cents per hour

2 hours of Disney slop at the theatre for $15 (forgive my estimate I live in Canada and don’t actually know how much y’all’s movies cost) = $7.50 per hour of entertainment.

The reason I started this blog is so we can have frank conversations about things, so please let’s talk about this.

Imagine if every time you turned on the TV or watched a movie, no one looked like you. For some of us, that’s never happened. We see ourselves constantly, so it’s hard to truly understand what not seeing yourself represented in media is like.

I do have a personal window to this experience. While I am white and male, there’s an area where I am the minority - my religion. Jews are just under two and a half percent of the US population. I have had many experiences where I’ve been in situations where everything is geared towards a group I do not belong to, and zero consideration is given that not everyone at that event is part of the majority.

You just feel invisible and like an outsider. It’s not a great feeling. And I just experience it a tiny portion of time, only things that are geared specifically towards something religious. Most minorities have this feeling all the time, whenever they’re outside their personal community.

Now imagine, after years of not seeing yourself ever, you finally see someone that looks like you, but nothing about the character rings remotely true. They don’t sound like you, they don’t act like you, the facts about their day-to-day life are just wrong. It’s clear whoever wrote the character didn’t truly understand the lived experience of the character, so the character feels fake.

You bring up Sisay. Michael Ryan and I didn’t technically create Sisay (she played a small role in the Mirage story), but we did do a lot to flesh out her character as the creators of the Weatherlight Saga. We turned her from a minor character into a major one.

And while I’m proud, in general, of our work on the Weatherlight Saga, I don’t think we did justice to Sisay as a character. Neither Michael nor I have any knowledge of what it’s like to be a black woman. Nor did we ever talk to someone who did.

And if you’re someone like us that has no knowledge of that experience, you probably didn’t notice. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.

Imagine if we made a movie about your life, and we just made everything up. We invented people you never knew, we gave you a job you never had, and we had you say things you’d never say. The movie might even be a good movie, but your response would be, but that’s not my life - that’s not me.

Now imagine we put the movie out, and people that never met you assumed that was what you were like. When people met you for the first time, they assumed things, because, you know, they’d seen the movie.

That’s what misrepresenting people does. It not only makes them feel not seen, it falsely represents them, spreading lies, often stereotypes, making people believe things about them that aren’t true.

Our move towards diversity is just us trying to better reflect the world and the people in it. We’re trying to do to everyone else what a certain portion of people get every day without ever having to think about it.

But why are we “making it the forefront of their character”? We’re not. We’re making it a part of their character. But in a world where you’re not used to ever seeing it, it feels louder than it is. Things that are a natural part of the world that you’re used to feel like the background of the story because you understand the context to it.

If a man kisses his wife before going off to a battle, that’s not a big deal. It’s just a thing a husband might do to his wife when he leaves. It’s not the forefront of his character. It’s just part of his life. But you’ve seen it hundreds of times, so it feels normal.

When someone does something that isn’t your lived experience it pulls focus. It seems like a big deal, but only because it’s new to you. It’s just as mundane a thing to that character as the man kissing his wife is to him.

Even the turn “pushing” implies that it’s unnaturally here, that we’re forcing something that naturally shouldn’t be. But why? That thing exists naturally in the real world, and it doesn’t make the real world any less. Maybe you’re less aware of it, but is making you aware of how others live their life “pushing” something on you?

How you live your life is represented constantly, everywhere. Why isn’t over-representing your experience at the expense of everyone else’s “pushing” it? Why is media only being the experience of those in power the “proper way”?

Having more depth and variety doesn’t lessen stories. It makes them deeper, more rich, more nuanced. In short, it makes them better stories. In my former life, I was a professional writer. I took a lot of writing classes. One of the truism of writing is “speaking truth leads to better stories”.

There’s another famous quote: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” You’re used to being over-represented, so being a little less over-represented feels like something has been taken from you. But really it hasn’t. Having a better sense of the rest of the world comes with a lot of benefits.

I’ll use food as an example. Let’s say all you were ever exposed to was the food of your heritage. Yeah, that food is really good, but sometimes isn’t it nice to eat foods of other nationalities? Isn’t your life better that you have a choice? Isn’t your exposure and access to the food of other nationalities a positive in your life?

Exposure to variety is a positive. It allows you to learn about things you didn’t know, experience things things you’ve never experienced, and get a better sense of understanding of your friends and neighbors.

Our actions are not to harm anyone, and if you think that’s what we’re doing, please take a minute to actually absorb what I’m saying. You’ve spent your whole life metaphorically eating one type of food, and we’re just trying to show you how much you’ve missed out on.

And while this might not impact you directly, we’re making a whole bunch of people felt seen. We’re bringing joy. Think of it this way. We make a lot of cards. Not every card is for you. But if it makes someone else happy, if they get to include it in a deck, and it makes Magic better for them, how is it harming you that we include it? You have so many cards that you can play.

To this poster or people that share their viewpoint, the narrative that a gain for someone else is an attack on you is just not true. As I just pointed out above, you play a game all about personal choice, about players getting to choose how they play and enjoy the game. Why should life be any different than Magic?

Magic: The Gathering may not be perfect, and they may make some boneheaded decisions at times, but regardless of all of that, it's moments like this that make me stick around. With so many other individuals and companies backpedaling on this kind of thing because of the current political climate, MaRo saying this so eloquently and whole-heartedly (and, for what it's worth, WotC/Hasbro letting him say it on an official channel) is something that's really needed right now.

The anniversary day of the reinauguration of the temple in the 25th of Kislev גתשמ"ד, and the anniversary day for the birth of Reb Yeshu?a bar Yosef, the Christian Messiah, 25th of December 1 AD.

In 1863, a man named Henry spent Christmas morning sitting next to his son’s hospital bed in Washington, DC.  He was perhaps looking back at the events that brought them both there.  Henry had spent the two years since the start of the American Civil War trying to convince his eldest son Charles not to join the Union Army.  While not ideologically opposed to the war, he didn’t want to risk his son dying.  Henry had already lost a daughter in her infancy, and Charles’s mother had died from a tragic fire shortly after the start of the war.  These two deaths undoubtedly weighed heavy on his mind, especially considering Henry had been through the pain of losing his first wife and child years before.

He did not want to see any more death, and so refused to allow his son to join the army.  It is not difficult to imagine an argument that might have erupted on a March night in Cambridge, Massachussetts earlier that year which finally compelled the 19-year-old Charles to run away from home and join the Union army in Washington, DC.

Imagine what the last spoken words between Henry and Charles might have been liked. What was the last thing he had said to his son?  Charles left a note telling his father where he was going, and in a few short weeks he had earned himself and officer’s commission.  What pride and fear did Henry feel?

In a few months time, in late November, Henry’s fears were realized when Charles was struck by a bullet, gravely injuring him.  It wasn’t until December 1st that a message reached Cambridge that the young man had been taken to a military hospital in Washington, DC.  The distraught father immediately made arrangements and set out for the warring nation’s capitol.

Once there, he is told that the bullet passed through his son, coming very close to his spine.  Even if his initial injuries are recoverable, there is the looming threat of infection and disease so common in the Civil War.

And that is how we find him on Christmas morning 1863, sitting at his son’s bedside.  The hospital ward is filled with other young men, some perhaps wounded even more severely than Charles.  Imagine Henry listening to tolling of the church bells as he sits at his son’s bedside, surrounded by wounded men.  Men who are, in his 56-year old eyes, only children.  Men who have waged war and had war aged against them.  The tolling of Christmas church bells being rung in celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, while he is surrounded by the human toll of man’s penchant for violence.

This is where we find Henry Wadsworth Longfellow when he wrote “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.”

I heard the bells on Christmas Day Their old, familiar carols play,    and wild and sweet    The words repeat Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come, The belfries of all Christendom    Had rolled along    The unbroken song Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way, The world revolved from night to day,    A voice, a chime,    A chant sublime Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth The cannon thundered in the South,    And with the sound    The carols drowned Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent The hearth-stones of a continent,    And made forlorn    The households born Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head; “There is no peace on earth,” I said;    ”For hate is strong,    And mocks the song Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: “God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;    The Wrong shall fail,    The Right prevail, With peace on the earth, good-will to men.” 

While the story (and the song) are painful and bittersweet, I found solace in them this past week after considering the tragic events in Newtown, Connecticut.  And while it seems hollow and insufficient at times, it helps me to hear that last line when I’m hurting or confused:

If you live in a swing state, please properly consider your role in this election. Remember to distrust the polls, the projections - the presidential election will be infuriatingly close. Nothing is set in stone.

Please think about your queer friends and family, your community that includes people of colour, disabled people, poor people, immigrants. Evaluate the true historical value of what a protest vote does - compare it to the two candidates, one of which will be the president at the end of this final stretch.

Gonna call it the Aerith% Run.