Tag Archives: Society

Audacious Compassion: a Podcast About… That

Did y’all know I’m the co-host of a podcast?

“Audacious Compassion” is a monthly podcast I record with MacGregor in which we take listener questions about ways they’re having trouble being compassionate in everyday life. Much like in our game design, we hope to enable and inspire not just general compassion, but compassion when it’s hard, when it takes audacity to enact.

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Generosity Isn’t a Contest

I had an… unforgettable dinner this past Saturday night with the local live-action roleplaying players that I’ve been gaming with for the last handful of years.

I took a break from gaming with them last summer after my surgery, initially due to the inconvenience (I couldn’t drive, and the sling was uncomfortable), and then due to the fact that when I weighed the fun vs. the toxic behaviors the group has, I found I’d rather be spending my time doing things like building Future Proof Games.

The dinner on Saturday was to get folks face-to-face to talk about a big issue in the group: they lost their regular gaming location at the end of 2014. Some games have had to be canceled, but folks have been very generous. People have opened their homes to host a game or two, and one person rented hotel rooms for us to game in.

That night, though, I heard something pretty disgusting — a denigration of people’s generosity, at times in the same breath as an exaltation of their own (the below is paraphrased, in part to remove names).

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Good reads

It’s been a loooong time since I posted some good reading.

5 Things I Learned as the Internet’s Most Hated Person | Cracked.com
"I watched every avenue of social media suddenly blow up with messages of abject hatred from thousands of strangers. For the first five days, I couldn't sleep. Every time I would start to doze off, I'd be shocked awake from half-asleep nightmares about everyone I love buying into the mob's bullshit and abandoning me. The ceaseless barrage of random people sending you disgusting shit is initially impossible to drown out — it was constant, loud, and it became my life."
They Are Not Trolls. They Are Men. | Make Me a Sammich
"By calling these people “trolls,” we are basically letting them off the hook. It’s a lot like the “boys will be boys” mentality that helps to keep rape culture thriving, but it’s also different, because boys are expected to be human. By calling these people “trolls,” we relegate them to non-human status, and we make it clear that we don’t expect them to live up to the same behavioral standards as human beings." Continue reading Good reads →

Links! September 13th

Some good reading:

"3-Sweep" Software Can Extract 3D Objects Out of a Single Photo | Popular Photography
This is incredible.
Tone policing: a tool for protecting male power | Geek Feminism Blog
"If you still need evidence that there’s a double standard, there it is. I think what’s happening here is that whatever men do gets defined as being effective, by definition, because they are men. It’s a little bit like how women frequently get describe as “emotional”, but this (often pejorative) label is rarely applied to men who are raging out, because apparently anger isn’t an emotion."
Programming Comedy – Wat – YouTube
This is how a colleague of mine came up with his StarCraft 2 name.
Ice, Ice Baby | Whole9 | Let us change your life.
"This next tip is really important, especially for the men. For the love of Peter (and your Pauls), keep your underwear on." My freezer wouldn't hold enough store-bought bags of ice to do this twice a week, but I could maybe try to collect the bins of icemaker ice over the week and use those. Could be a fun experiment.

Too Many Links on the Dance Floor

That’s a Flight of the Conchords reference (NSFW!).

First, a couple of lengthy jokes:

Then some psychology:
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