Are We Not Great

The Philadelphia sanitation workers have been going on strike, and the city mayor supports the strike. I support the strike too, and now that I’m registered to vote I wrote to my local representatives to let them know as much. (It was cathartic, honestly, and also stress-relieving.)

Still, it’s been very hot, and there has been a lot of trash on the street for a long time.

So I booked a night at a bed and breakfast in upstate New York. I hear that’s what rich people do, and I thought it might be nice. West Philadelphia is green and beautiful, but I wanted to see, like, a forest. It was only about three hours away, with most of the drive through New Jersey (as opposed to western Pennsylvania), so I thought, why not?

My husband, who lived most of his life in the desert, was delighted. He told me that he used to read Lord of the Rings to practice English, and that he used to dream about driving through mountain forests.

Meanwhile, I was shocked. The nature was pretty, sure, but there were recently abandoned and boarded-up buildings everywhere, even around Woodstock, which is a wealthy white people fantasy village. It didn’t look like the South, because the landscape and climate are totally different, but also it kind of did.

I’m not articulating this well, but I think we might be in trouble if even upstate New York comes off like an urban exploration photoset. I guess a decade of economic depression will do that.

That Sweet Sweet Final Fantasy Lore

Final Fantasy VI – 1994 Developer Interview
http://shmuplations.com/ff6/

Most of my engagement with Final Fantasy VI fandom has been in the form of reading dōjinshi...

(I used to read a lot of dōjinshi, and I couldn't tell you why, but FFVI has a truly extraordinary community of dōjin artists who are still active to this day, even after many of them have gone pro.)

...and people kept referring to various bits of lore that occur nowhere in the game or its official extratextual materials. "Sabin is afraid of squirrels," for example, or "Edgar wears blue because that's the sacred color of Figaro."

I think I may have found the source of some of this lore. The two interviews collected in this post are both super fun to read, and it's wild to think that so many people on the FFVI development team were hired because they were Final Fantasy fans who wanted to work on the next game.

Digital Stage Fright

Late last night I had some Zelda fandom feels and went scrolling through Twitter, where I stumbled across this tweet. I'm not used to people saying nice things about me (especially not about my meta posts), and I almost cried.

I'm really nervous about the talk I'm supposed to give at Otakon Online tomorrow afternoon. I don't know whether it will be just myself and the five people producing the event, fifty people, or five hundred people. I don't know whether the streaming software will work properly, or whether someone in the audience will ask some kind of crazy question that I have no way of answering.

Also, as much as I'm honored to be able to give this talk, I'm also hyper aware that I was invited at a relatively late stage for an online event that - while very fucking cool tbh - is probably only seen by most people as a temporary substitute for the real thing. So I feel a little weird.

And, given that this is streaming on Twitch, I hope there's not going to be anyone trolling or hate-watching. I try not to think about this or let it affect me, but it's still a real possibility, and it's still scary - although perhaps not as scary as the possibility that no one shows up at all.

So when I saw this tweet, it was the most amazing thing. Like, maybe I'm not just shouting into the void, and maybe there are people who might be interested in what I'm doing. This person has no way of knowing this, but their random tweet is such a powerful act of kindness that means the world to me.