I Love You Mom

by on September 27, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

You never know where life is going to take you, or how many days you have to enjoy it. That is why I always made it a practice to say “I love you mom” whenever I left her house. I wanted to make certain that those were the last words I said if something happened and I never came back. Or if something happened to her, and I never saw her again. “I love you mom” were always the last words I said before I left. Now I’m moving into her house in preparation to rent my house. Tonight I opened her door to go to work, and those words came bubbling into the forefront of my mind. I just froze for a moment, because she wasn’t there to hear me. She would never hear me say those words again. That took a minute or sixty to work my mind through. It is amazing the random thoughts of a lifetime that will rise up and hit you without warning.

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Teaching Gaming

by on September 26, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Many years ago, I demoed games for people to play as a Catalyst Agent. I had a lot of fun doing that, until the day I found a loophole in the Agent rules that could allow unseen minis on the table. I noted the loophole on the official Agent forums in hopes that the head Agents would close the loophole. They fired me instead, saying it was for trying to sneak unseen onto my table. Truth is, I was simply the first to note the loophole on the official forums. That angered people, and I got the axe. I spent a lot of years not doing much with the game. But the truth is, no one should stop you from playing games you love. Last year I rebuilt my old BattleTech Grinder kit and took it out for a spin with friends. It was fun. And then I built an Alpha Strike Demo kit and took it out for a spin as well. That was fun. And now I have an agreement with my local game store to teach and demo once a month. The truth is that I love teaching people how to play games. So I will.

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Dawn

by on September 25, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Dawn DeMarco observed the forms of the master and servant society the Chinese built in the Hyades Cluster because she grew up on a world that lived an idealized version of the concept. It was a voluntary game to her people, but she used the skills she grew up perfecting to inhabit the role the Hyades Cluster citizens needed her to play. And she pulled the rest of us along with her. She introduced us as her compatriots, and the locals quickly put us on the same level as her. Well, maybe a step or two down. Especially when those of us who had no understanding of royal or caste systems failed to act the way we were supposed to. But the locals were surprisingly good at coaching us to correctly play the role when we deviated too far. Being taught how to play the part of a master by a servant caste learning what it was to be free was one of the more surreal dancing acts I’ve played in my entire life.

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Dawn

by on September 24, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Dawn DeMarco grew up on a planet that lived the voluntary illusion that some people were royalty and most were not. She knew how to act in an environment like that. The Chinese had filled the Hyades Cluster with billions of people by shipping their excess slave populations out of Greater China to labor in the outer colonies. Most Western Alliance citizens simply don’t understand how fundamental the difference between the Chinese overlords and their slave populations was. The locals knew they were being dragged into new and strange worlds when we liberated them, but as much as they wanted that, it terrified them. Dawn made it easier by playing the illusion with them. She played the superior their culture demanded had to exist, even as she quietly subverted every teaching of that culture. And the really interesting bit is that the locals knew what she was doing and helped her at every opportunity.

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Dawn

by on September 23, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

The Western Alliance and the Republic of China wanted to bring the Hyades Cluster into our world of human rights and democratic elections and equality for all. But they underestimated how foreign those concepts were in the Hyades. They had forgotten what it was like to be taught from the moment you were born that some people were more equal than others. Dawn DeMarco was our answer to that. She walked into their world as a visiting royal, a princess of a high family, and she inhabited a place in the highest caste the locals could accept at a gut level. Then she valued their opinions and suggestions as if they were equals without requiring that they stand up as equals to people they’d been trained to never stand up to. Dawn made the first crack in generations of programming by simply treating them well and allowing them to place her in a position they could comfortably stand next to.

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