Well I was going to write up some sort of intro to these links, but today I organized the paper minis that I use for my Dungeons & Dragons games and did not expect it to take almost six hours! Here’s some stuff I read this week:
- Radley Balko: “The retconning of George Floyd, part three: the great flattening“. This is the last part in a very long 3-part series (in print, it would be about 100 pages) about the right-wing’s efforts to reframe the narrative around George Floyd’s death and to exonerate the murderer, Derek Chauvin. This last part discusses the life cycle of instances of police abuse that spark protests and how there’s inevitably an effort to retcon the narrative by conservatives in an attempt to downplay the police abuse and focus instead on the bad actions of protesters. If you’ve got the time (again, it is really long), I think it’s very much worth the read.
- Margaret Killjoy: “In the Land of Burning Children“. I really wanted to make sure that I included some link about Aaron Bushnell’s extreme act of protest by self-immolation.
- NPR: “Poland’s judiciary was a tool of its government. New leaders are trying to undo that“. This article has no relevance to the U.S. judicial branch, which is totally non-political and helmed at the top by people who have never engaged in deeply unethical behavior.
- NPR: “Farms fuel global warming. Billions in tax dollars likely aren’t helping – report“. I get really frustrated any time I read about a government initiative, like reducing carbon emissions in farming, and then you find out that the government is just giving companies money and saying “okay, figure it out!” As the professor quoted in the article says, “paying the farmers and then finding the evidence is super problematic”.
- NPR: “Billy McFarland went to prison for Fyre Fest. Are his plans for a reboot legal?“. Grifters gotta grift.
Portland links:
- BikePortland: “Here’s what we know about the violent, heartbreaking incident on SE Belmont“. One of my first questions when I read about this death, was, “How did someone go 40-50 mph in that little one-block stretch?” I incorrectly assumed that the driver was turning off of MLK, not trying to kill people. I’m really concerned about the past decade’s growth in people (dudes) using their cars to intentionally kill people.
- Willamette Week: “Commissioners Gonzalez and Ryan Question Neutrality of City’s Voter Outreach“. On one hand, this process of doing voter outreach through a hierarchy of non-profits doesn’t seem like the best way to do it, but on the other hand, the two Commissioners who are “just asking questions” are the most disingenuous and least trustworthy members of city council
- Portland Mercury: “Parkrose High School Students Speak Out Against Planned Freight Development“. Something that we’re blessed with in the city is that we actually have a really healthy amount of news organizations. It allows journalists to report on things that otherwise get that much attention, like student activism in under-served parts of town.
- Willamette Week: “To Catch Graffiti Taggers, Two Portland Police Officers Become Experts in Their Styles“. Is graffiti going to be WW’s next “open-air fentanyl market”? There’s already been two big articles on the subject; we’ll see if they’ll report out another couple dozen.
Tabletop Role-playing games links:
- Rascal: “Return To Perinthos Honors Jennell Jaquays’ Queer Activism And Her Dungeon-Breaking Legacy” [Paywalled article]. I only learned about game designer Jennell Jaquays after her death in January. She was highly regarded for her innovation of creating non-linear dungeons, and I wanted to know more. Rascal’s article was my jumping off point, but it’s paywalled so I ended up finding this series of posts I’m in the process of reading that deep dives into her concepts. Two posts in, I’m realizing that her ideas would have highly influenced the D&D mega-dungeon “Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage“, which I enjoyed quite a bit largely due to its use of the process. Here‘s her Wikipedia article for a quick introduction to who she was.
- Core20: “The Sweet Spot“. I enjoy reading through the sourcebooks of non-D&D games, even when I don’t plan on playing the games (just because I’ve learned the rules for some new game doesn’t mean that I’d expect the people that I play games with to do the same). I’m kind of interested in learning more about the Core20 system, but I dislike their font that they use for their logo, also used for their headers in their sourcebooks, so much that I stopped reading through their beta-version player’s handbook.
- Rascal: “Balancing Black Joy In Creating Black Horror” [Paywalled article.] I mostly just followed this link because the post I saw it in referenced Harlem Unbound, a sourcebook for the Call of Cthulu games. I’ve never been particularly interested in Call of Cthulu, but the idea of it being set in 1930s Harlem and having everyday racism be as big of a threat to the characters as otherworldly horror sounds pretty compelling. Here’s a review of it that I haven’t gotten around to reading yet. I don’t think that the appeal of this sourcebook is enough to get me to learn Call of Cthulu, but who knows.
Here’s a cool old illustration of streetcar lines as a reward for making it to the bottom of this post!
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