MonkyTumbl

“Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulations, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.”

1984, George Orwell

The Next Chapter

Since I left Fantasy Flight Games to go freelance in 2008 I’d been telling people I didn’t think I’d ever have a boss again — that there wasn’t a full-time job I’d ever be interested in having. It turns out that I was wrong, I just didn’t know what kind of offer it would take.

Out of the blue this summer, a former boss called me and began the process of recruiting me to come work at RiverKey Creative, a design firm in Kansas City. At the end of September, I started work there as the company’s Chief Operating Officer. RiverKey does websites, animation, motion graphics, and video production. Many of their marquee clients are pro sports teams. It’s a phenomenal job title and so far, a challenging and exciting place to work. There’s a ton of heavy lifting to do, but it’s work that plays to my strengths and experience. It’s almost eerie how well-tailored I am to do this exact thing.

Perhaps obviously, this means that we’re moving from the Twin Cities to Kansas City. For the moment I’m commuting weekly: Flying down to KC on Mondays and back to Minneapolis on Fridays so we can spend the weekend, at least, as a family. This is clearly no long-term solution. We’ve rented out our house in Roseville starting in December and the whole family will move shortly thereafter. We’re currently in the process of figuring out where exactly we’re going to live. It won’t be challenging to find a great place — real estate is relatively inexpensive and the schools on the Kansas side of the border are truly excellent.

All of this means that with a very short list of exceptions — most of them involving finishing out existing contracts — I’m taking a long-term break from tabletop game design. I love that work, but this opportunity will never recur and I’ve been designing those games for 15 years, now. They’ll get along without me.

Wish me luck, and if you know people in the Kansas City area… warn them!

I grew a ridiculous mustache to support the ENnies, and wore it to the awards ceremony at GenCon. Little did I know that in so doing, Ken Hite and I would become a pair of protagonists from a ’70s cop show.

atomicovermind:

Skitch ‘n’ Grisum. Together they fight crime. @kennethhite @jefftidball

“They marched into the mayor’s office and Sparky said, “Mister Mayor, you have some very silly ideas!”

The Very Silly Mayor, by Tom Tomorrow

“I have a secret passion for mercy,” I said. “But justice is what keeps happening to people.”

Lew Archer, in Ross Macdonald’s The Goodbye Look

ihavenothingforyou:

I love you, Vonnegut.

(Source: bandidaa)

My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant

mrgan:

Pulitzer-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas decided to stop hiding and wrote a detailed, personal, and heartbreaking account of his life in the US as an undocumented immigrant. If you saw Jose’s story in a movie, you’d think it was way too perfect to be true.

Perception of the Actor

Imagine a game where you click a tree and it generates a resource. The game designer thinks the player generated the resource. The engineer thinks the tree did. Neither is aware of how different the other’s perception is from his own.