new article time!

I'll try to keep this one short.

Originally, I intended to have an article or two out way earlier in March. For several reasons, that didn't happen, but the article is done, and you can read it there.

https://docseuss.medium.com/the-biggest-threat-facing-your-team-whether-youre-a-game-developer-or-a-tech-founder-or-a-ceo-is-8cd1ad359508

The short version is that a very, very dear friend passed. Laura Woolard was one of the best human beings I've ever known. Brilliant, hilarious, loved her cats dearly. Laur also was one of those extremely rare people you just vibe with, because she immediately understood what we were trying to do with our writing. Her suggestions matched ours well.

Laur was instrumental in helping us work on and research our trans/nb/queer characters, working with her fellow trans community members to help get some of these characters ready for the next couple of games we were planning to make.

I've been talking with some trans friends about finding a good way to give Laur tribute in our next game, and they seem to be in agreement that what we're gonna do for her is the best thing we could do.

I'm not trans. There's a lot about being trans I don't get. I tend to describe this as "I'm disabled, and anyone who isn't disabled writing about the experience of being disabled will inevitably miss things," but I saw this point put pretty brilliantly by Denzel Washington in a video I watched today.

He said something like "Spielberg made Schindler's List and Scorsese made Goodfellas. Now, Scorsese could've made Schindler's List, and Spielberg could've made Goodfellas, but something would've been lost. It's not the skin color, it's the culture that matters. Smell of the iron in your hair on a Sunday morning, that kind of thing" or something to that effect.

I can't possibly do these upcoming characters like Reggie and Cecil the kind of justice they deserve. I'll do what I can to work with trans writers to do them justice--a few have volunteered already, but fuck volunteering; they deserve to be paid, so I need to figure out a way to bring in the funds to pay people what they're worth, and I need to find writers who can vibe with what we're doing the way Laur did.

Grieving is hard. It's broken me. I have very little left in the tank.

I went through two dental surgeries, grief from another loss of an extremely dear friend earlier, my kitchen sink leaking everywhere and needing to do three days worth of work to clean everything up, and now here I am, grieving my adoptive big sister. I can't keep going on, but I have to. So I will until I can afford to take a break, or until I drop. Thank you for your support; I'm able to do this because of you.

I wish I could do more.

I'll see you next month, hopefully with a new article. It'll probably be about one of the supporter commissions: I Was A Teenage Exocolonist.