Imagine stumbling into a fairy ring that belongs to the fairy mafia. An enchanting being appears, smile wide enough to reveal rows of sharp and glistening teeth, and it remarks, "Why, traveler, you look positively destitute! I have just the thing!"
It turns its palms up, revealing fistfuls of gold coins. Gold coins falling to the moss below. Gold coins all around you.
"Borrow whatever you'd like! Just bring it back by the next full moon, alright, my sweet?"
That's when you notice its necklace of withered human fingers.
You take a handful of gold coins, because you really do need the money. As long as you pay this strange creature back before the next full moon, nothing bad will come of it.
Now, obviously the fairy is trying to trick you. You know that! But you're confident you can outwit it.
You borrow what you need, and you return it to that magical forest place before the moon fills. All is well. Better than well! The fairy grows fond of you, leaving you larger and larger piles of gold to borrow.
Other fairies begin to make offerings to you as you walk the woods.
One month, life is particularly cruel to you. You can't pay back the gold you borrowed.
On the night of the full moon, the being appears. "Don't worry, my sweet. I am merciful. Just give me what you have today, and pay the rest by next moon." It strokes its gruesome necklace.
"I'm sorry," you say. "I'll earn the money. I'll pay back the debt!"
"Don't worry at all, precious darling! All in due time. Things have a way of working themselves out." And then, before disappearing in a puff of smoke, whispered under its breath: "that's the first finger."
The fairy keeps leaving you bigger piles of gold. The temptation grows stronger. Eventually, you come to think of it as *your* gold.
You borrow too much sometimes, and can't pay it back. "Two fingers," it whispers without sound. Then three. It keeps letting you take more money.
One day, you realize that regardless of whether you make good on your debts, you can't stop borrowing more gold. Not only because you've built your life around it, but also because if you ever stopped borrowing it would make the fairies very angry. Not just this one. All of them.
You look around you at the world. Your fellow villagers have all fallen under the sway of the fairies. Borrowed fairy gold runs your whole town. People only do business with others if they are known to be in the favour of the fairies. Every day, more hands with missing fingers.
The savvy villager knows just what to do: borrow small amounts of gold regularly, to attract the attention and good graces of the fairies, and always repay it in full before the next moon, knowing it is not their gold. Get charmed and keep their fingers.
Few villagers are savvy.
Anyways, "sinister temptations from the fairy mafia, who will love you dearly if you play their game right" is the framework that helps me make my best credit decisions. Maybe it will be helpful to someone else out there too.
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A growing frustration that I've been contending with over the past year is how much trans advocacy is grounded in an individualist and liberal understanding of gender, rather than, say, a socialist feminist, radical feminist, decolonial, or other structural analysis.
And a big part of that frustration comes from looking back at my own history of trans advocacy, and seeing how much of it is grounded in themes of personal choice, individual identity, self-improvement, and a naive understanding of the rights of the individual.
My sincere hope is that the currents within trans advocacy and transfeminism that are materialist continue to grow, and that as trans people we constantly work to build political coalitions that reach beyond our own community, and that we do queer and feminist history-keeping.
Over the past year, I've started playing a competitive miniatures wargame, and it has had a huge impact on my emotional growth - something I definitely wasn't expecting!
I've noticed myself becoming more open to criticism, more comfortable with failure as a learning process...
I've learned how transformative it can be to not only accept that someone is smarter and more knowledgeable than me, but to embrace it, and to position myself to absorb their criticism, take in their wisdom, and reconsider my own instincts in light of theirs.
I spend serious energy preparing for matches, studying and weighing every possible interaction. I use all of my brain power, and I get crushed. But I've learned to ask "So, do you want to tell me the mistakes you saw me making throughout that game?" Which means I learn quicker.
Would fellow tabletop roleplaying game designers find it helpful if I wrote a thread about the basics of managing your finances as a sole proprietor?
I'm thinking about things like: personal budgeting, bookkeeping, forecasting, planning for taxes, and inventory management?
Cool, it seems like there's some interest.
I'm going to approach this thread in terms of things I wished I had understood better, when I was a young designer just getting started with publishing games.
Let's dive in!
I want to open by acknowledging that we live in a world of class violence, unequal wealth distribution, and unequal access to financial tools and knowledge.
Every recommendation comes with an invisible "...if you have the security and privilege to do so" rider attached.
Another thread in my series of game design threads:
I want to talk about what The Forge meant for me, as a new roleplaying game designer getting started in 2005.
I don't think it was perfect, but it definitely shaped my career and life. This thread is mostly autobiography!
At its core, The Forge was a site that hosted game design theory articles and a community forum for analyzing play and design, and it was live from 1999-2012. It was dedicated to independent, creator-owned RPGs. It also organized projects that spilled out into the real world.
While in high school, my friend group spent the better part of a year trying to start a D&D campaign. It kept crashing and burning. We would have arguments about the rules, about how beholden we were supposed to be to existing lore, and about how the game was supposed to feel.
Fellow white people from Protestant-informed backgrounds! I want to share a protest thought.
WASP culture disciplines and regulates itself through respectability and propriety.
When police interact with us, they often try to leverage this obsession with respectability.
I've witnessed in a lot of protest situations that police will start their crowd control efforts by leveraging respectability politics to get white people to fall in line. Often it starts with things like, "Can you please step back onto the sidewalk?"
And people (especially white people from WASP cultural backgrounds) often do so without thinking, because it's a police officer giving them instructions.
But "please" is doing a fucking ton of work in those interactions, and it's important to take a moment to second-guess it.
I've had the strange luck of being there for numerous situations of abrupt street violence.
In each situation, for various reasons, I knew calling the police wouldn't help. They would show up late and punish the victims for existing.
So, many times, I've stepped in.
I mainly want to talk about this so that people inhabiting bodies like mine, big able-bodied white people, know that while being the first to intervene and put yourself in the path of harm isn't easy, it's definitely doable.
I have a diagnosed anxiety disorder, which can make navigating uncertain social situations difficult. But in situations where I've intervened in street violence, all it has taken is a few seconds of moral clarity & decisive action, before adrenaline has kicked in to chill me out.