Read more..

look! an old man is talking again!

On my Tumblr thingy, someone asked:

I know it’s been a bit since you were in school, but as someone who is about to go to university, do you have any tips?

I wanted to share my reply:

It is such a huge privilege when someone your age asks an Old like me for advice. When I was young, I thought dudes in their 50s were lame and had nothing to offer. Now that I’m one of those dudes, I understand what a gift it is when you ask me to share my experience. I hope this helps you a little bit.

Make time to meet your professors during their office hours.

You don’t have to go have a deep conversation, just introduce yourself, tell them which class you are in, and thank them for their time.

You’re doing this because there will be a time in your future when you need an extra day for something, or a little extra help or attention, or something like that. When you go to talk to your professor about that, it won’t be the first time you’ve met them, and that will make a difference.

That’s on an academic level. On a personal level, you’re going to spend a LOT of the next few years figuring out who you are, what your values are, and how you want to live your life. Most of us try to be someone profoundly different from who we are, in our first year or two, because we’re on our own and trying out what it feels like to be an adult. The thing I want you to just remember while you do that is: you know who your are in your heart, and if you try to not be that person, you will draw people to you who don’t like *you* as much as they like who you are pretending to be.

It’s a long way of saying “be true to yourself. Know what your values are and live them consistently, so you find other people who share them.”

Finally, the advice I give everyone who asks me questions like yours:

Choose to be kind.

Choose to be honest.

Choose to be honorable.

Choose to do your best and understand that your best will vary from day to day. Don’t judge yourself when your best on Monday is not the same as it was last Thursday. Just do your best, consistently.

You’re at the beginning of a really great time in your life. I hope you get everything you want out of it, enjoy learning, and make life long friends.

Read more..

Six unelected people forcing their unpopular christian nationalist agenda on a population of three hundred and forty million is not a Democracy. It is tyranny.

Josh Marshall writes:

Donald Trump threatens the entire existence of the American republic. He is able to do this because the Supreme Court he created is assisting him in doing so. It is a corrupt Court – on which more later. It overturned a central right for half of our population. It routinely mixes and matches rationales, jurisprudences, logics to arrive at the end point of transforming America into their extremist vision. We’ve heard that yesterday’s decision was a terrible decision, an extremist decision, that it changes the American experiment fundamentally. No disagreement with any of those points. Most importantly, in my mind, it’s a fake decision. Yes, it will now be controlling within the federal courts. But it doesn’t change the constitution any more than a foreign army occupying New England would make Massachusetts no longer part of the United States. That may seem like a jarring analogy. But it’s the only kind that allows us to properly view and react to this Supreme Court.

The rationale for the decision yesterday has literally no basis whatsoever in the US constitution.

Josh is correct, but I don’t think it matters. This corrupt, activist, fascist SCOTUS majority does not care that they just made up law out of whole cloth; they’ve been doing it for years. These six people who make up the majority have decided that the Constitution, 250 years of precedent, popular opinion, and the foundational ideas that have made America what it is since 1787 are what they say they are, fact, history, the will of the people and precedent be damned.

I live in a country of three hundred and forty million people.

In this country, six unelected christian nationalists, five of whom were placed on the court by presidents who lost the popular vote, all of whom are opposed by SEVENTY PERCENT of the population, are making up laws out of whole cloth because their power is unchecked. A country that allows six people to impose their regressive authoritarianism on an entire population is not a free country. It is not a Democracy.

America has not been attacked like this since 9/11. Six unelected people forcing their christian nationalist agenda on a population of three hundred and forty million is not a Democracy. It is tyranny.

In the pointless parlor game of “What can Joe Biden Do, Now That He’s Above The Law” (as if he ever would), everyone is missing the central message I took from yesterday’s ruling: SCOTUS is going to install Trump as dictator for life, by any means necessary. Somehow, after he loses the popular vote again, and after he’s even lost the Electoral College again, these six Fascists will invent a reason to overturn the will of the electorate, again, even if they have to invent law to do so. Every single one of their rulings this term have been part of their coup. Now, just line them all up and connect the dots. Don’t leave out Project 2025 or Agenda 47.

This is terrifying. We barely survived four years of Trump, when there were at least some guardrails around him. SCOTUS just tore those down and turned them to ash. I am terrified that we are four months away from the likely end of what passes for freedom in America, and once it’s gone, I doubt it is coming back in my lifetime.

Read more..

ProgCore is Coming

For years, a whole bunch of my friends kept telling me that I needed to meet Todd Stashwick, because we would be fast friends who share a ton of extremely nerdy interests. Todd is the dungeon master for an ongoing D&D campaign a few friends are part of, and he runs these really great one shots set in a world of his own design, called The Dark Age of Theer.

Our paths never crossed, I think, because they are parallel to each other, and there wasn’t ever a reason that they would link up … until Todd was cast as Captain Liam Shaw in Star Trek: Picard. For Ready Room, I get to watch all the finished episodes long before they are released (I will now pause to receive your envy. Imagine my hands are on my hips and I am beaming) and from the moment Todd came across my screen, I was like “Holy shit this guy is incredible and I hope I get to interview him!”

I mentioned this to some friends, who happened to play D&D with Todd, and that’s when I realized that the guy so many people were telling me I should meet because we are spiritual siblings and the guy who I freakin’ LOVED in this show was the same guy.

Fast forward about a eight months, and Todd invited me to play a one-shot set in his Dark Age of Theer, at his house, in his Nerd Lair (which is almost identical to my game room, down to the arcade cabinets and vintage 80s nerd toys). It was incredibly fun, so when Todd asked me if I wanted to play another session with the same character in the same world, but this time we’d do it in front of a bunch of Trekkies on the Star Trek cruise, of course I said yes. It was super fun, especially watching Michelle Hurd discover and fall in love with D&D, in real time.

Todd’s campaign setting, The Dark Age of Theer, is

… a fantasy game world designed by Todd Stashwick and David Nett specifically for ProgCore-style play. It is built to feature the Three Pillars of Wonder, Mystery, and Danger, and to offer fertile ground for any fantasy roleplaying game, as well as stories told in other mediums. In this Dark Age of Theer, magic is rare and met with fear or wonder, the ruins of a majestic, ancient civilization mock all with their horrible grandeur and tempt adventurers with mystery, and dragons are terrifying symbols of the unknown. Its denizens live in wonder of the ruins of ancient power all around them, their lives are defined by all that is mysterious and unknown, and danger lurks around every corner.

The Dark Age of Theer is part of what Todd calls ProgCore Fantasy:

ProgCore Fantasy is a style of play, an agreement between players and game masters, that focuses on recapturing those breathless moments of early play. It’s about intimate, ephemeral experiences for players and characters alike. It’s about how you feel when you’re playing the games you love. ProgCore Fantasy is system-agnostic: it does not ask you to learn a new game, or switch from the game you love, only that you agree to pursue the Three Pillars of ProgCore Fantasy: Wonder, Mystery, and Danger. 

The ProgCore Fantasy style is grounded in the intimate fantasy of the 1970s and 1980s: movies like Rankin & Bass’s The Hobbit, Dragonslayer, Legend, Labyrinth, Ladyhawke, and more; books by Tolkien, LeGuin, Zelazny, Leiber, and others; the music of Yes, Styx, King Crimson, Queen, Rush, and others; the art of the Hildebrandts, Michael Whelan, Alicia Austin, Erol Otus, Roger Dean, Bob Eggleton, and others. We see ProgCore Fantasy as an opportunity to take what’s beautiful from this golden age of fantasy art and media, discard the systemic prejudices endemic to the era, and use it to tell stories from myriad perspectives. We’re putting new wine in old bottles.

A lot of these influences inspired me when I was developing Titansgrave (just add in some Thundarr the Barbarian) so you can probably imagine how excited I was to explore the lore and details of the setting. And if you can imagine that, you can probably imagine how excited I was when Todd told me he was planning to develop The Dark Age of Theer into something pretty epic, with a team of extraordinary collaborators, and would I like to contribute to it as a writer?

Fuck yes, I would! I get to write some fiction, develop some lore, and add it to the legends that shaped this world.

ProgCore: The Dark Age of Theer is “A Multimedia Fantasy RPG Experience: System-Agnostic Sourcebook + 5E Compatibility, Actual Play, Original Soundtrack, Animation, & more”. It’s a wonderfully ambitious project that I’m so excited to be part of. If you’re interested, you can find out more details, including how to back it, right here.

Read more..

Something you need to know about me is that I’ll do literally anything in the world before I will go to the doctor.

It was Thanksgiving 2022. We went to our kids’ for the holiday, and because I’m a dad who loves his children and family more than anything in this world, I totally forgot I was in my 50s and thought it would be just fine to play badminton with my boys.

Turns out it wasn’t. After the thrill and adrenaline and fun of playing a game I’m terrible at with my adult children who didn’t take it easy on me even a little bit wore off, I started feeling pain and weakness in my shoulder. By the following morning, it had spread to my elbow. When we got back home, my wrist had joined in on the action.

Something you need to know about me is that I’ll do literally anything in the world before I will go to the doctor. I know that’s not the smartest thing, but it’s how I’ve been forever. But I’m trying to actually center myself and my self care more consistently as I enter this part of my life, so I only ignored this for a little over a year; a new personal record.

About five weeks ago, I woke up and couldn’t lift my left arm. It was completely dead and my forearm hurt like crazy. What the fuck, Wil’s Body? All I did was sleep!

Well, all I did was sleep and ignore an injury for a year. So I went to see the doctor about a month ago, and told him the whole embarrassing story.

He ran all these tests on me, and looked at my medical history. He pointed out that when I was 18, I was a goalie in a recreational hockey league. I took a slapshot to my face that defied physics and engineering, collapsed my helmet into my forehead, where it split open like an orange peel that was squeezed too tightly. It also gave me whiplash, and herniated two discs in my neck.

He said that it was a serious injury, and while I had always known that in the abstract, I hadn’t even really thought about exactly how serious it was.

I don’t remember much of it (I was in shock at the time), but I spent hours in surgery with a cosmetic surgeon who did such a good job closing it (with something like 30 stitches), I don’t have a cool scar to show off today. Nobody said anything about my skeleton, my neck, my spine, or the herniated discs, so I never followed up about what turns out to be the most serious and lasting part of the whole thing. I don’t know how a person goes over 35 years with a neck as messed up as mine without knowing it, but all I can do is point to myself and make the “i dunno” face with the hands up.

So when I woke up with a completely dead and aching arm (because I slept on my left side like a maniac), I admitted to myself that I’d chosen poorly for over a year, and I made an appointment with the same doctor who has provided excellent care to Anne.

I fully expected that I had a soft tissue injury, possibly a tear in something. I thought maybe surgery would be involved, which would not be great but is entirely my fault for choosing the “ignore it and it will go away” approach to being a middle-aged dude.

But it turns out that, according to the X-ray and other tests he did, I have no soft tissue injury or any tears in any part of my body. The badminton and associated activities just pushed my body past its ability to barely hold itself together.What I do have is no curve in my neck, three almost entirely compressed discs, and a bunch of muscles all doing their best to compensate. These things work together to form Voltron, where Blazing Sword is my arm feeling like it’s experiencing an electrical fire that also itches. Really great stuff. I’ll form the head.

The good news, according to my doctor, is that physical therapy will heal all of this. The great news, according to me, is that I get to start it today after waiting a month for a spot to open up.

I’m so excited to go do this, I woke up two hours before my alarm this morning and I’ve been counting down for the last six hours until I get to leave.

That’s so fucking middle-aged, isn’t it? “Oh my god, you guys! I am so excited to start physical therapy, I woke up early! What a great day! See you all at 4pm for dinner, after my nap!”

…still punk as fuck.