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I want Werewolf to be popular and active here like 2000 post games active. 

Why can't I be normal and not suffer from SPD?? :p

I’m a very picky eater so I thought this would never happen, but I’m vegetarian now. Well, lacto-vegetarian, in any case (felt bad giving up cheese but I do avoid rennet). It’s been a few months already.

I thought eating vegetarian was about eating a bunch of disgusting salads. I don’t like greens, they’re too bitter for me. Turns out that legumes are amazing and I simply didn’t know just how versatile they really are.

It’s something I’ve always been keen on doing but I just didn’t know how since I am so picky. I spent a few days at a chicken processing plant a few years ago and it really drove the point home. It broke my heart seeing all the dead chickens being ferried around the place, hanging by the legs, like a fucked up rollercoaster.

I wish I’d done this earlier. It’s so much easier than I thought it would be.

Buddhists and Hindus have excellent vegetarian food if you haven't tried them out. Comes from having millennia-long traditions of vegetarian food and plant-based meat.

I personally don't like salads but I love cooked leafy vegetables. Tends to make things more tasty and often removes the bitterness from things.

I’m a very picky eater so I thought this would never happen, but I’m vegetarian now. Well, lacto-vegetarian, in any case (felt bad giving up cheese but I do avoid rennet). It’s been a few months already.

I thought eating vegetarian was about eating a bunch of disgusting salads. I don’t like greens, they’re too bitter for me. Turns out that legumes are amazing and I simply didn’t know just how versatile they really are.

It’s something I’ve always been keen on doing but I just didn’t know how since I am so picky. I spent a few days at a chicken processing plant a few years ago and it really drove the point home. It broke my heart seeing all the dead chickens being ferried around the place, hanging by the legs, like a fucked up rollercoaster.

I wish I’d done this earlier. It’s so much easier than I thought it would be.

Buddhists and Hindus have excellent vegetarian food if you haven't tried them out. Comes from having millennia-long traditions of vegetarian food and plant-based meat.

I personally don't like salads but I love cooked leafy vegetables. Tends to make things more tasty and often removes the bitterness from things.

Most of what I now eat are Indian and LATAM inspired dishes. I like to try new stuff (surprisingly), so if you have good sources I'd be happy to have a look!

I’m a very picky eater so I thought this would never happen, but I’m vegetarian now. Well, lacto-vegetarian, in any case (felt bad giving up cheese but I do avoid rennet). It’s been a few months already.

I thought eating vegetarian was about eating a bunch of disgusting salads. I don’t like greens, they’re too bitter for me. Turns out that legumes are amazing and I simply didn’t know just how versatile they really are.

It’s something I’ve always been keen on doing but I just didn’t know how since I am so picky. I spent a few days at a chicken processing plant a few years ago and it really drove the point home. It broke my heart seeing all the dead chickens being ferried around the place, hanging by the legs, like a fucked up rollercoaster.

I wish I’d done this earlier. It’s so much easier than I thought it would be.

Buddhists and Hindus have excellent vegetarian food if you haven't tried them out. Comes from having millennia-long traditions of vegetarian food and plant-based meat.

I personally don't like salads but I love cooked leafy vegetables. Tends to make things more tasty and often removes the bitterness from things.

Most of what I now eat are Indian and LATAM inspired dishes. I like to try new stuff (surprisingly), so if you have good sources I'd be happy to have a look!

I like going to Chinese Buddhist vegetarian restaurants. Good stuff.

I happened to run into this article on Quiet Quieting today. For those who don't know, Quiet Quieting basically means staying at your job but doing the bare minimum, and has become a viral thing in the last few months.

The timing of this is pretty amazing, because I had some realizations about my own job this week. For those who don't know, in April my boss resigned and I ended up in her position on an interim basis, meaning I was doing both her job and my own job. Since then I've been given an employee to help, who is actually a talented developer, but that's required even more time on my part training on the specific systems we've used. At the moment, I'm expected to be a developer, a data person, an expert on our information system, a manager, and part of the leadership team (read: more meetings). Suffice to say, for the last few months I've been fighting what felt like an overwhelming amount of work and the resulting burnout from it.

So I was laying in bed Monday night, dismayed and burned out, and the realization struck me like lightning. I had to set boundaries...not quiet quitting, but setting reasonable boundaries, no matter how much work there was. These sort of sudden lightning obvious realizations are very rare, but they've never led me astray (the decision to leave Spiritus another one of those). But these boundaries are needed, and if there's a lot of resistance to them I feel that it's a huge warning sign to consider whether it's the right place for this point in my career. With the knowledge and experience I've gained over the last few months, I'm confident in looking elsewhere if I need to.

These are the rules I put in place:

• I will commit four hours a day, including meetings but not including time I spend putting notes together and planning what I need to do
• If I get through that four hours, I'll commit the next four hours to Wintreath
• On weekends, this is flipped, with Wintreath coming in first and work coming in second. I usually don't mind working weekend nights, because I enjoy the actual work of my job and it's not like I'm doing much else.
• I stop all work of any kind at midnight, and spend an hour preparing for the next day. This involves planning, but it also involves cleaning my desk area and translating notes into action plans, guides, to-dos, etc.
• No more than two work projects at a time. If I'm doing more than two, then I simply state that we can't do it at that time. In fact, this is the first thing I did when I got back to the computer...pushed a project off to at least November.

Of course, it's not a straight 4 hour block of work...there's breaks, things that come up, meals, times I need to do other things, etc. But it's something I have tracked meticulously this week.

And I'm actually surprised at the results. It was actually one of the most productive weeks I've ever had, and it's especially surprising given that I also had to take time out to run various errands on Tuesday and Wednesday. It's not like I ran out of things to do, but I ended the week feeling like the most urgent stuff was all taken care of, and nobody was spending a lot of time waiting on me for something. I even at least caught up with what was going on here in Wintreath, although The Frosty Bugle became a lower priority as a result.

So I'm sitting here, relaxing and not stressing out over workload, for probably the first time in months.

I think a lot of it is psychological...committing to only four hours a day makes it feel more like a concrete amount of work rather than an endless mountain of it, and that in turn makes it easier to really put my nose to the grindstone and do deep work without giving into distractions. The midnight rule also gives me a bit of mandatory relaxation at night because I'm actually a nightowl, and I'm able to have time for things like naps and just doing nothing too.

It's almost like something in between hustle culture and quiet quitting, and I know in a way I'm lucky to (probably) have that kind of flexibility in my job, but I wonder if a lot of people just don't realize there's a middle option...it's not an all or nothing thing. It's not something I realized until just the other day, even though I had some understanding in my head before. This summer I read a quote that work was like water...it will fill whatever container you put it in. And that has kept coming to mind, but I didn't realize there was a reasonable middle. And my boundaries are quite reasonable...they result in me doing more and better work without me feeling burned out, which is a win for everybody.

Not to say there aren't remaining issues with my job (read: pay), but this has been one of the best weeks I've had work-wise since I took on the new role.

I have been thinking about life and what I would want to do next in life. It is hard when you have many options in life you can pick up on and just choosing one to do is too hard to grasp. How do you manage to choose a path that will lead you on journeys in your life?

Anyways, life is going well for me right now and I am looking forward to seeing what 2023 will bring for me! 

Yay! Someone revived SWOYM!

@Turbiatop: You're really just deciding on what direction you want to go right now, because life always changes and never stays in one direction. You might pick up new hobbies and interest that you want to pursue more seriously or turn into a career, you might meet new people that change your direction, or you might run into opportunities that change things around for you. Or you might just decide the direction your going isn't the one you want to stay on.

Don't get too hung-up on the long-term, cause you probably won't be stuck with your choices forever.

*dusts off this topic*

It's funny how ideas that build on who you are come into your life at just the right time. A few weeks ago, for some reason I was looking at the list of newsletters that were sponsoring a productive newsletter I read, and one that stood out to me, The Peacemaker's Guide to the Galaxy. I don't know why I subscribed, it's not the sort of thing I usually subscribe to...it was just a whim. But it turns out the newsletter is a lot of stuff on how to be a better person...more loving, more considerate, more present...a peacemaking.

"Peacemaker is more of an idealistic intention. If you want to be, if you practice, if you study, if you work… then you’re in. You belong. Because actually making peace with others is not only harder than most of us imagine, it’s often beyond our individual control. So it’s not our ideals that offer the greatest promise of peace, as much as our consistency in the pursuit.

Hope is a habit.
Happiness is a habit.
Love is a habit.
And so are the alternatives."

It also led me to discover the author's books, his first one I'm reading right now. It's called Preemptive Love: Pursuing Peace One Heart at a Time. It's about how he and his family were in Iraq in the 2000s as part of a foreign aid group, but through some circumstances came to found an organization that sold Kurdish klash (traditional shoes) to raise money to fund heart surgeries for Iraqi children, since their only hospital that could do that was destroyed in the war. But because the closest place that could do it was Israel, some clerics declared a fatwa on him and his organization basically calling for their deaths, and one of his colleagues was even almost kidnapped, (that's where I am in the book now). But through this experience he came to the Preemptive Love philosophy, which the book summaries so far as 'love first, ask questions later'. They decided to say, spread love, and save children even at the risk of death. That's where I'm at in the book right now, at least.

It's something that clicks so strongly for me...for a long time I've felt my calling was to spread love and compassion, but I haven't understood what that really means and my attempts to actually do that were inept and crude because I've been feeling my way around at it. But the courage to face what he has faced in the name of spreading love and doing good for others...it's just incredible, it's inspirational. And it's like what I'm reading is building on what I already feel. One of the few times in life that something instantly clicks and you know it's going to become an important part of your journey as a person. And it all happened really because of a whim.

After my last post, and after mentioning this newsletter in a few other places, taulover discovered some unsettling things about the author and his wife.

They were kicked out of the Preemptive Love organization, an organization they founded, for creating a toxic work environment. According to numerous former employees and associates, they demanded absolute loyalty and ran off anybody who disagreed with them, created arbitrary rules including who could as much as could talk to each other, and attempted to promote insensitive ideas, because they believed their experience in wartime Iraq gave them expertise on gender and racial equality. There's more to it, including that they mislead donors, took credit for being on the front-lines that belonged to their partners, and edited videos to make it seem that they were serving people in far more dangerous situations than they actually were.

But for me personally, the most appalling thing is what happened after they were kicked out. Instead of really reflecting on why so many of their former employees and associates were saying these things, they took a few loyalists and founded a new organization in less then a month. They claimed they had actually quit, and when the truth came out blamed "post-COVID American politics" for ruining their reputations. They actually compared themselves to the refugees the org serves because they had been removed. It's just...sad.

How can people so strongly promote a philosophy and fail to practice it in their own organization? Were they well-meaning to begin with, only to be corrupted by their power and status? Did their bubble as leaders make them unable to see or understand that their actions were detrimental to what they believe in? Or did they just stop caring at some point, the point where promoting their cause became less important than promoting themselves? It's hard to say, but I know from my own experience that over time being at the top subtly alters your perceptions in a way that you don't realize. You come to think more highly of yourself than you should, and come to consider yourself more of an authority than you are. You end up in a rose-colored bubble that separates you from the people you lead and  makes it difficult to have connections with people that might otherwise be able to help you figure things out. And it happens so slowly, you don't even really realize it until it's too late.

But why did they so casually just decide everyone else was the problem when it all came crashing down?

I still believe in the ideals of preemptive love. I strongly believe the world needs people who will put love and compassion first to create real peace, and I want to be part of that in some way. But I will no longer be promoting this newsletter. It's not enough that leaders say the right things...they have to do them as well, or at least try to understand why they've been led astray.

I had a nice weekend, so I felt like sharing. Hope everyone else had a good weekend, too.

On Friday I got off work around 1pm, which is a little earlier than usual, so it was a nice way to start the weekend. My wife and I had dinner at a lobster place I deliver wine to and ate lobster rolls and lobster bisque which was all really good (but expensive...). That night we finished up watching Star Wars: Andor -- looking forward to season 2.

On Saturday morning, my wife had to attend a meeting of a bunch of old ladies who make and donate quilts to her work (a nonprofit kids summer camp) to thank them, so I got some time on the Minecraft server. When wife got home, we went to get brunch at a tex-mex place nearby but it was busy, so there was a wait. In the meantime we went down the street to a toy shop and got a few little things to bring with us when we visit my wife's best friend back in Indiana in a month to celebrate her becoming a mother. Back at brunch, I got eggs scrambled with chorizo, carnitas, peppers, etc. with a side of refried beans, seasoned home fries, and a couple taco-sized tortillas to clean it all up. It was very good, if a not very healthy way to start the day. Brunch was also made even better by our waiter being a little goofy (we think he was probably high with his glazed eyes and smirk and he kept forgetting stuff).
Next up, we were planning on going to the rodeo that's in town right now, but tickets were already sold out, so I just bought some for Sunday. Instead, we found out that my wife's coworker who also works at a nearby boardgame store/cafe/pub was holding a boardgame night with friends, so we went over to attend that. I'm not usually the socializing type, but it was actually a lot of fun -- we ended up staying there for about 9 hours, which went by pretty fast. There were 4-8 of us at any one time, and we played games like Dominion, Wavelength, Werewords, Codenames, Root, and Reinforcements (a card game on kickstarter that is being developed by a friend of the guy hosting the game night) and had some beers and snacks. The guy apparently is trying to start hosting the game night on a more regular basis, so I'm looking forward to us potentially going to it more often. My wife and I bought a few colorful dice while we were at the boardgame store, and when we got home I taught her how to play farkle (I've been playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance recently).

On Sunday, we slept in until around 11am, which is really late for us, and then had breakfast at home -- I cooked up some Irish bacon (which is closer to English or Canadian bacon and almost just really thinly-sliced pork loin but still very good) and had a cream cheese danish, and my wife made a fruit parfait.
In the afternoon we finally went to the rodeo. I had been to a couple rodeos when I was younger at state fairs back in Indiana, but this was the first one I had been to as an adult (plus one that's in Texas), and it was a really good time. The rodeo is in town for a couple weeks as a tournament, and it's apparently run by a professional league, so it was a lot more fast-paced and well organized than I thought it'd be. There were I think 7 different events held over the course of 2 hours: a few different cow-roping events, barrel racing, bronco riding, bull riding, and (my wife's favorite event) mutton busting, which is where little 4-7 year old kids ride on the backs of sheeps until they're thrown off.
After the actual rodeo, we walked around the fairgrounds and looked at the farm animals, ate some Jamaican jerk chicken and washed it down with some beer, strolled through the carnival rides and games (I wanna play some games but why are the only prizes stuffed animals? Come on!), and finished it off with some deep fried Oreos (can't go to a fair without eating something deep fried, right?). I don't know why I like fairs and carnivals so much, but with the sun going down, causing rays to shine through the smoke from turkey legs getting grilled, and all the lights and colors and children screaming on rides and creepy carnies trying to get you to play their games got me nostalgic and all warm inside. Anyways we finally waddled out, happy with full bellies, back to the car and drove on home.
I was greeted with an Amazon package on our doorstep that contained a piece for my car I had ordered a couple days prior. For no reason at all, the trunk door on my car stopped latching shut, so I temporarily kept it shut with some rubber bands. After watching a couple YouTube videos, taking things apart on my car, and mucking about, I had figured out that the locking mechanism on the trunk door decided it didn't want to work anymore. Google said that getting it fixed at a mechanic would probably cost me a couple hundred bucks. Amazon said the replacement part that was most likely the cause would put me down only $20 and would be here in 2 days. I figured I could handle it and went with unfortunately trusty Amazon. Fast forward to a couple hours ago and I managed to take apart the correct pieces without breaking anything, swap out the broken part with the new part, and got it working again and back in shipshape in just 10 or so minutes. It was very simple and very cheap compared to what I would've paid for somebody else to do it for me, so I was pretty proud of myself. I want to give thanks to the random people on YouTube who show how to do this stuff, the Amazon workers who fulfilled and delivered my order for being so quick, and China for allowing me to buy an off-brand part for a fraction of the price.

Now as I type this I'm just relaxing with my cat, listening to my wife snore on the couch. So overall a pretty great weekend. Thank you for listening to my TedTalk.

@Gerrick: You forgot the most important part of your weekend...that you were playing Minecraft with me Saturday morning!

I know how you feel about fixing things yourself. Over the last month both of the sink faucet handles broke off in one of the bathrooms at the place we're staying in. They're old, and ended up chipping where they screw in so it wouldn't turn the stem. A little bit of research, a $12 handle replacement from Walmart, and 30 minutes and it's even better than it was before. I'm still impressed with myself everytime I turn the water on, lol.

You probably did more things outside the house this weekend than I've done in the last month, lol. Friday we ran errands and I bought some books even though I already have plenty of things to read as it is: Joyce Meyer's "Loving People who Are Hard To Love" and Bernie Sander's "It's OK to be Angry About Capitalism". I'm not necessarily a religious person, but I appreciate how Joyce teaches practical lessons that most religious teachers...well, don't. This book is actually about the things I've already been into lately: being a peacemaker and how to be loving to other people. And since my mom is into Joyce Meyer too, I get the read the book out loud...something I love to do but don't get much opportunity to.

I'm looking forward to starting the Bernie Sanders book too, although I'm amused that I had to pay $28 for a book that's about being angry about capitalism. xD

Saturday I just couldn't get into anything...I'll be honest, the last almost-month has been intense for me...I've dedicated myself to pursuing so many new paths, and I've ran through so many emotions over and over again, and still trying to keep up with life and work on top of that, and I was just mentally drained. I'm reducing the overall amount of time I work on things with Wintreath, but I'm also doing a lot of summarizing and writing that I'm not used to. Plus the only real leasure time I've allowed myself is the time on the Minecraft server...well, that and running through that furry game with Leesbra that one night, lol.

Sunday I started to get things back toether, but to be honest I'm still behind on Tuesday night, lol. I just did laundry which is something I usually do first thing Saturday. So yeah...hectic, lol. >>

Today I ran into the concept of value capture: "Value capture occurs when an agent enters a social environment which presents external expressions of value — which are often simplified, standardized, and quantified — and those external versions come to dominate our reasoning and motivations." Some examples were in the article I read today:

There are countless examples of value capture in daily life. You get a Fitbit because you want to improve your health but become obsessed with maximizing your steps. You become a professor in order to inspire students but become fixated on how often your research is cited. You join Twitter because you want to connect with others but become preoccupied by the virality of your content. Naturally, maximizing your steps or citations or retweets is good for the platforms on which these status games are played.

You start a community because you want to build something awesome with your friends, but you become obsessed with activity.

I've always loved playing around with data and finding insights within them...part of my job is doing just that, and so I guess it's natural that I'd bring that to Wintreath, but admittingly it got out of hand over the years. First was putting together top-line Discord and forum stats, which at least was quick to do and had some use, insofar as knowing which channels and forums should be archived and tracking how we've grown and declined over time. Then I started tracking census stats and writing Wintreath in Statistics, which if we're honest few people if anyone probably cared about and wasn't the best use of my time. I was probably spending at least 3 hours a month just on that.

But then beginning in December, I was ready to take it to the next level. I envisioned an entirely new system of meritocracy for Wintreath that would be hyper-focused on each person's individual daily activity stats and past contributions, part of the same system that inspired the Hearthkeep Discord area. As usual, it was with the best of intentions...the idea was that we could easily see who was up and coming in the community and reach out to them for mentoring, since we had long-concluded that we couldn't easily provide mentoring for everyone who applied for Citizenship. We could reach out to people who had suddenly become inactive and see if anything was wrong or if they needed help getting back into the community. We could consider new features such as Snapchat's Snapstreaks. We would be able to see where we needed to put work in to keep people from dropping out of the community.

lol.

In January, I started putting this data together on a daily basis for everyone who posted on the Discord. It took about 15-20 minutes a day, and by the end of the month I'd invested about 3 hours (on top of the 3 hours for the other stats) in order to get an interesting spreadsheet. Even I knew that I couldn't keep putting in that kind time on this, so I consulted with the Joint Moderation Group and in came Statbot, a bot that would take care of all this for me. But it wasn't free...the features that would be needed would cost $8/month (but included a module that tracked what games people were playing, so we could in the future see what games we should get involved in as a community), which was funded out of Wintreath donations.

How it would have worked in practice, I don't know, because things happened and these sorts of intricate systems no longer mattered (and probably never mattered to anyone except me). One of the first decisions of the RSS was to allow me to cancel the Statbot subscription and stop using the bot entirely. Obviously there was (and are) more important things to do in Wintreath than "crunch numbers", but there's an overarching point that will carry into the future. I had the best of intentions in wanting to use data to improve Wintreath, but in becoming obsessed with activity stats I lost sight of the forest for the trees. That's exactly what value capture is.

Of course, there's more to it...more that's worthy of another post sometime, but the short story is that I've come to realize that I've long used Wintreath as a crutch to escape from and cope with my real-life circumstances. Over time I made it into a vehicle for all my hopes, dreams, and personal ambitions, perhaps in ways that were at odds with the simple community of friends that we set out to be.

But as it is, I spent a lot of time chasing numbers that could have been better spent making cool things for the community, connecting with friends, and just having fun. Fun is something I've long-forgotten to do, especially when it comes to Wintreath, and that's probably one reason why it ended up feeling more like a second job. Being forced to drop all the pretentious excesses such as this has been a revolution in itself...it's allowed me to rediscover the joy of having fun and connecting with people in my own community. Part of a painful lesson in remembering what really matters that I can only hope will better equip me to avoid these sorts of rabbit holes in the future.

This morning I started reading the new Bernie Sanders book It's OK To Be Angry About Capitalism. The introduction includes Bernie's thoughts on why so many people voted for Trump, which I thought was worth a read by itself and which I've posted in the quote below.

The fact of the matter is, it's easy to make generalizations and jump to the conclusion that all Trump voters, or all conservatives in general, are bigots and "deplorables", and that they should just be written off as bad people. And of course there are people who truly are motivated by bigotry. But there are many reasons people voted for Trump, and economic issues are a key factor...Trump managed to convince many people that he's a successful businessman who could bring that success to everyone else as President. Here in West Virginia, where I live, Trump told coal miners that they would be "working their asses off" because he was going to revive an industry that was far beyond his power or even interest to really revive. He's managed to convince many people that he has their best interests at heart and that he's going to work for them.

He's far from the first politician to con people into thinking he gives a shit about them, but he's particularly good at it. And who better to target than desperate people who feel like Democrats abandoned them? But it's not just poor white people. In the 2020 and 2022 elections, Trump and Republicans also received more votes from Black, Hispanic, and Asian communities than in prior elections. They did this by running on messages of supporting hard work and entrepreneurship, while accusing Democrats of being communists. Perhaps it's also a result of Democrats taking their support and votes for granted. I remember reading an article in the New York Times newsletter some months back about an Asian-American correspondent who returned home and was shocked by how many signs there were supporting Republicans in what used to be a Democratic stronghold. Anyone who has followed the elections knows what a disaster Florida has become for Democrats thanks to this trend...they likewise are struggling even to keep their own strongholds in the state. 

It's a complicated issue, and we don't do the causes we support any favors by being quick to judge anyone who has voted a certain way as deplorables who should be cut off from society. In some cases, when people reveal themselves to really be bigots, there's nothing we can do but call them out on it and re-evaluate our relationships with them, but we have to also recognize that this is not everybody who votes a certain way or claims to be of a certain political party. We have to be very careful of creating political litmus tests, especially when the consequences are as far-reaching as ostracism from a society. 

Why People Vote for Trump
One of the more disturbing aspects of the 2020 election was that, while Biden won, Trump got ten million more votes than he had received in 2016. He did especially well in white, rural, economically depressed parts of the country. Why? Why did working-class people, many of them struggling economically, vote for Trump? Why was he able to hold rallies in the middle of nowhere that drew tens of thousands of enthusiastic followers?

I know that some pundits and politicians respond to those questions by suggesting that all of Trump's supporters are racists, sexists, and homophobes; that they really are "deplorable" and there is nothing to be done. Sorry. I don't agree. And I should know. I have been to almost every state in this country and, unlike corporate pundits, have actually talked with Trump supporters. Are some of them racists and exists who vote for bigotry? Absolutely. But many are not.

I think the more accurate answer as to why Trump has won working-class support lies in the pain, desperation, and political alienation that millions of working-class Americans now experience and the degree to which the Democratic Party has abandoned them for the wealthy campaign contributors and the "beautiful people".

These are Americans who, while the rich get much richer, have seen their real wages stagnate and their good union jobs go to China and Mexico. They can't afford health care, they can't afford childcare, they can't afford to send their kids to college and are scared to death about a retirement with inadequate income. Because of what doctors call "diseases of despair", their communities are even seeing a decline in life expectancy.

Many of these voters have spent their lives playing by the rules. They worked hard, very hard, and did their best for their kids and their communities. During the worst of the pandemic, they didn't have the luxury of of sitting behind a computer at home doing "virtual" work. They were putting their lives on the line at jobs in hospitals, factories, warehouses, public transportation, meatpacking plants, and grocery stores. They kept the economy going, and many thousands of them died as a result.

Many of these so-called racist Americans voted for Barack Obama, our first Black president, and for "hope" and "change" and "Yes We Can". And they voted to reelect him. But their lives did not change.

After almost fifty years of wage stagnation, Democrats were in charge-but did not raise wages for workers. After a massive amount of illegal corporate anti-union activity, we did not make it easier for workers to join unions. We did not improve job security. We did not address corporate greed or the massive levels of income and wealth inequality. We did not provide health care for all or lower the cost of prescription drugs. We did not make childcare and higher education affordable. We did not address homelessness or the high cost of housing. We did not make it easier for working people to retire with security and dignity. We did not reform a corrupt campaign finance system.

Today, tens of millions of Americans feel deep anger toward the political, economic, and media establishment. They look at Washington and the corporate media and see rejection and contempt. They see not only a government that is ignoring their needs but politicians busy attending fundraising events with the rich, who have no clue as to what the lives of the great majority of Americans are about.

The absurdity of the current-day situation is that Trump-a phony, a pillar of the establishment, a billionaire, and an anti-worker businessman-has been able to fill that political vacuum and tap into that anger. Donald Trump "champion of the working class." Beyond pathetic!

When I was researching some moderation stuff last night, I remembered that there was I site I'd check out when I was a teenager that allowed the community to moderate people on their own. I didn't know the details, cause to be honest it was mostly a place for teenage me to look up hot goth/emo guys and girls, but I looked it up...I hadn't actually even checked out the site in probably 10 years.

Turns out they closed their social network site in 2020, and now they're just a goth/emo/metal clothing store. The owner pretty much said that after 20 years he was tired of running a social network, and he wanted to live a more private life with friends offline and focus on their offline endeavors together.

So I went to archive.org and looked up the community moderation thing...it was definitely something else, lol. The way it worked is that donators got five 'power-bombs' every month that they could use against any free member (though they could only power-bomb a particular member once). If a free member was power-bombed 10 times in a certain amount of time, their account was suspended for 15 days. It was promoted as a moderation tool to fight against spam and objectionable content, but the page also specifically calls it a way to "get rid of unwanted members". And as you might expect, it was used more often for this purpose, to get rid of people who weren't popular with the various cliques on the site. One person even claimed the practice caused a real-life fistfight at a meetup in Aberdeen, Scotland.

At least we never had anything like that in Wintreath, though I'm sure some can think of people they wish they could've used an ability like this on.

But that was moderation in the 2000s...a sort of laissez-faire mindset where freedom of speech was paramount, the concept of professional moderation wasn't even a thing yet, and as a result anything went. I remember for most of that decade I was part of a small-scale MMO that usually had a few dozen players. The owner didn't even believe in moderation or administration...from one point on, he removed all administrators entirely, including the people developing the game. He believed that the players themselves should moderate the community...for example, if someone said or did things that offended enough players, the appropriate response was for those players to repeatedly kill them in-game, take their items, and generally harass them until they left. This worked sometimes, but often it didn't...I remember there was a guild of people who took joy in trolling, flamebaiting, and harassing people, and they were big and powerful enough to push back on this. And a few of them were the owner's then-wife's IRL friends. I don't think that played a role in it...the owner himself didn't as much as log in for long periods and the players were left to run themselves for months at a time, but I doubt it helped.

There's something I like about the idea of the community at large helping to moderate, which is why I started on this rabbit hole...there's a certain grassroots moderation aspect of it that in some cases feel more appealing than a top-down moderation approach. But these examples make clear how easy that can be abused or used for the wrong reasons. And moderation has become a much more involved topic since the 2000s, which is why professional moderation is a thing now...it's not just enforcing rules or keeping the community civil. It involves things like empathy, sensitivity, taking in the experiences of everyone in their community and the role it plays in what happens, de-escalation and conflict resolution, and increasingly knowledge on how to deal with mental health crises and actual illegal activity. It's hard enough for actual dedicated moderators to tackle all these things in the right way...in some ways I feel that a bit of my problem was that I was stuck in this 2000s moderation mindset. The idea of a community at large doing so for all but the most trivial of rules violations seems like an outdated concept these days.

Not to say that the idea couldn't emerge in a very limited fashion with a limited group of trusted people. But it's definitely not an appropriate large-scale moderation tool like I originally thought it could be.