Call it the participation trophy problem, after those little totems of insecurity that older people like to bring up – forgetting that they’re the ones who spent money on those trophies and no one my age cares about any of the participation trophies they received: because if everyone got one, that means that they don’t matter. We don’t feel that we earned them, we feel that none of them actually signify anything, and so praise is fake.
Read MoreHere’s why: due to a family tradition of just fucking impeccable timing, I recently put a cap on two projects, both of which took an inordinately long time. One is a still-pretty-secret translation project, alluded to elsewhere, which consumed my every free hour for eighteen months, as well as much of my brain power the rest of the time. The other is ten years in the making: a novella, entitled The Horn, the Pencil, and the Ace of Diamonds, forthcoming from us. Is that tacky? Yes. But I promise I’m going somewhere this.
Read MoreI’ve been playing tabletop games for at least half of my life, and it’s been a rewarding hobby. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without it, and I think I’d be a measurably worse person without it. From Dungeons and Dragons in high school and college, all the way up to more recent experiments with Powered by the Apocalypse, FATE, and Chronicles of Darkness games, it has been a constant for me.
Read MoreI have been gaming forever, or near enough as makes no difference. My brothers and I dug up an AD&D core set back at the edge of my memory, 2000 or 2001, and knew we’d struck mithril. It was my father’s and it took us all of a heartbeat to drag him away from whatever project he was working on and get him to tell us all about it. It took us a week to get him to agree to build a campaign and another month or so to get everything ready.
Read More
