firehose

mattfractionblog:

seven years and three days ago, i spent christmas in an emergency room in florida. food poisoning. we went to make sure i’d be okay to fly and ended up there most of the day waiting out the real tragedies and injuries. my wife, her great aunt, and an endless loop on CNN about the death of James Brown kept me company. ho ho ho.

i saw something, heard something, a conversation, between a disconnected and numb orderly or intake nurse or nurse-nurse, I don’t know which exactly, and a man that survived a car crash. She told him his wife didn’t survive the crash. She said something to me about it and I wrote it down on an admission form so I wouldn’t forget it, because it was the most horrible thing i had ever heard, and i wrote it down to make it smaller, to make it a thing i could fold up and put in my pocket. later i put it in a comic. i still have nightmares about it though.

One at a time as other family arrived, they learned their awful news right in front of us.

At some point, as a daughter learned her mother died on christmas two feet from my left foot I had the thought, clear as day: if that was me, I’d go find a bar right fucking now and not come out until after New Year’s.

So I realized I had a problem.

•

I realized I had a problem a long time before that and my solution was to drink more and take more. I realized I had a problem and my solution was to just quit getting high and to just quit drinking. Only, for me, there’s no just about it. I’d swap one addiction for the other or make up new ones all-together. Girls, work, porn, fighting, sleep deprivation, anxiety, whatever — anything I could pour into that hole in the middle of me I used to dump booze and drugs into to stop feeling, i’d pour.

in certain rooms they call that white-knuckling. I had white-knuckled it for about five years before I found myself in that ER. Five years of still feeling all the pain and psychosis and depression a junkie and alcoholic feels with none of the anesthesia.  Five years of trying to hold my shit together and doing, honestly, a lousy fucking job of it.

We were trying to have a baby. We had one and lost it. We were trying again. I was six months out of my career in advertising. I was in a blind fearful panic every hour of every day. I had a wife and a mortgage and wanted a child but i felt like i was on fire all of the time. how could i hope to ever hold a baby in my arms when i was always burning up?

Something about watching that family, something about the… obscenity of being witness to their most awful, most private, moments. And I all I could think was if my wife was dead I could go get fucked up again. 

It’s what they call a high bottom but that was my rock-bottom. 

•

I’d been going to meetings, maybe four or five a year — at best — since I starting my white-knuckle joyride into the bright side of life. I was a tourist. I went at first out of curiosity. Or rather — I went because I knew I had a drinking and a drug problem and I knew I hadn’t solved it, I just slowed it way the fuck down. And the first meeting I went to, I identified myself as an alcoholic and addict and started to cry.

I stayed the fuck out of meetings as much as I could after that.

Like I said. A tourist.

•

December 29th, 2006, then. I went to a meeting as I had from time to time at noon, with a friend. My friend had been working on… not quite a year of sober time in program and had gone out and wanted to get back into a regular practice of meetings. So I went to make sure he didn’t run out the back. I went to sit there and fold my arms and half listen and make sure my friend didn’t bail on their promise.

And I heard something so true that once again a meeting made me cry and I stood up and said my name and took my first chip and began the process of adding real and actual sobriety to my life. Before that I was clean and I was on fire. I was clean and I was killing myself. I was clean and I was going to kill myself. I was clean and waiting to kill myself. Now I finally found myself out of moves, out places to run, out of excuses, out of energy.

If I was going to save my own life, it was time.

And I did. AA did. NA did.

•

AA and NA helped me. I am an atheist introvert with anger issues and deep suspicions towards groups, groupthink, and a bad fucking history with organized religion and I am telling you AA and NA helped me. Who I was was embraced and welcomed and accepted. For the first time in my life i realized i wasn’t so goddamn alone after all.

And little by little the pain went away. I learned how to live.

It worked for me. And it continues to work for me even though I don’t go to meetings nearly as much as I’d like or need. If you want what I have found

find an AA meeting near you or

find an NA meeting near you

This time of year is brutal — fucking brutal — if you share my disposition. Add in a birthday and, ho ho, a sobriety day i and the crush of months and years cannot be avoided. At the same time though… maybe, in some ways, it’s appropriate. It’s the longest, darkest, time of the year. Maybe it’s silly to expect some of that darkness not to spill over onto everything. 

It got easier when I reached out into the darkness and found other hands there reaching back for me. I found them in the basement of churches and in rehab centers, I found them in unsuspecting houses and shining medical facilities. I found them. It’s just that, first, first I had to reach —

** edit: for some reason i typed ‘agnostic’ instead of ‘atheist’ the first time. what i get for not rereading before posting. i’m tired and fighting off a cold. sorry. pls don’t make me turn in my secular humanist card at the next pagan fuckfestival.

The United States is falling dangerously behind in offering high-speed, affordable broadband service, according to technology experts and recent studies.

The NBA stepped out on a limb to save the Kings and Pelicans from relocation. So far, the league has been rewarded.

For a cold, calculating business, the NBA did something rather odd in recent years. It rescued two small markets threatened with losing their franchises.

In late 2010, NBA owners approved David Stern's request to have the league purchase the New Orleans Hornets from George Shinn. Shinn, who ruined the Charlotte market and had trouble finding a consistent paying audience in New Orleans, needed badly to sell the club, but couldn't immediately find a local buyer. Stern and the NBA owners could have allowed Shinn to sell to any number of vultures who wanted to move the club. Larry Ellison, who was rumored to be interested in adding a team in San Jose, was mentioned frequently. Instead, Stern took on the onus of holding on to the Hornets while a local owner was sought. And eventually, the search found paydirt, as Saints owner Tom Benson led a purchasing group.

Last January, the financially struggling Maloof brothers announced a deal to sell the Kings for a record price to a group that would move the team from Sacramento to Seattle, pending league approval. Most team sales zip through the process, provided the prospective owners' finances check out. Most relocation bids win easy approval. But Stern made a bold decision to give Sacramento an opportunity to present a purchase option of its own, against the wishes of the Maloofs. In the end, a local ownership option developed, along with an arena deal. NBA owners voted 22-8 against a sale and relocation of the Kings and unanimously to allow the Maloofs to sell to software mogul Vivek Ranadivé's group.

In buying the Hornets from Shinn and insisting on a local solution, Stern and the NBA forsake a relocation fee, a huge purchase price, the third-richest man in America in Ellison and the promise of a market far more robust than post-Katrina New Orleans. In keeping the Kings in Sacramento, Stern and the NBA forsake a relocation fee, the 21st richest man in America in Steve Ballmer and a market far richer with both residents and corporate dollars. Whether through altruism, less-than-obvious math or continued dedication to small markets, the NBA made decisions that you wouldn't necessarily expect.

As of right now, those decisions are paying off.

The Kings and born-again Pelicans have seen the biggest jumps in attendance  this season. The Pelicans, in their second season under Benson's watch, made big splashes in the last two offseasons to put a competitive product on the floor. In 2012, months after Benson bought the team, the Pelicans went out and signed Ryan Anderson, one of the best stretch power forwards in the league, and matched a max offer sheet handed to Eric Gordon. In 2013, the team flipped Nerlens Noel and a conditional 2014 pick for 23-year-old All-Star Jrue Holiday and then signed Tyreke Evans to a massive deal. Add in 2012 No. 1 pick Anthony Davis -- who might be an All-Star already -- and you have the core of a potential budding power that also happens to be loads of fun to watch. Benson allowed no mystery: he intends to win games starting now. That and brilliant effort from team officials to rekindle the love between the city and pro basketball has put butts in seats at New Orleans Arena.

Sacramento has made some big moves, too. It supplied the Pelicans with Evans, for one, and handed DeMarcus Cousins a max early extension. A few weeks ago, the team made its biggest move in years, trading some spare parts for Rudy Gay, who immediately became the highest-paid King in history and gave the franchise its highest payroll ever. Unlike the Pelicans, the Kings certainly aren't challenging for a playoff spot. But Ranadivé has talked about quickly rebuilding the dilapidated franchise and having a strong team soon. It seems like the Kings are following the Pelicans' blueprint in some ways. That hope, freedom from the Maloofian shackles and pride has fueled Sacramento's much-improved attendance.

But the Kings and Pelicans are just two points of data in this season's early attendance numbers. Let's take a look at the 10 biggest shifts from 2012-13 to this season in home attendance percentage (attendance divided by capacity). Data is from ESPN.com's attendance database.

* One of the mysteries of recent seasons has been when Pacers fans would again fill Banker's Life Fieldhouse. Here's our answer! Indiana's attendance is up 9 percent this season, up to 93 percent of capacity. Given the Pacers' recent trouble financing its lease from the public-owned arena, this should help.

* Check out the Cavaliers! Unfortunately, the Clevelanders hoping for a great season at The Q have been disappointed to date. But hey, at least the Cavs aren't the Browns. The Cavs are currently at 87 percent of capacity, so there's still room for growth if the team reverses its fortunes.

* Houston shows that Dwight Howard (and title contention) still matters. Keep in mind, though, that James Harden didn't arrive until days before the 2012-13 season began, so this was the Rockets' first real offseason opportunity to market him. With billboards and more, Houston took advantage. The Rockets are at full capacity this season.

Now to the less pleasant numbers ...

* The Celtics' position isn't as bad as it looks. Boston still has 95 percent of its seats sold, it just isn't selling out every night as it did during the Garnett era. But yes, building a team that totally doesn't care about making the playoffs for a year or two is bad for the box office.

* Regarding the Suns, see above. Phoenix, of course, has confused the heck out of everyone by being really good and really entertaining, thanks to the trade for Eric Bledsoe and some neat rookie coaching by Jeff Hornacek. One imagines that season ticket sales were crushed by last season's listless effort and low expectations. It'll be interesting to see how attendance fares in the spring if the Suns keep this up.

* Before Al Horford's injury, the Hawks were on track to be the third-best team in the East ... and average a capacity of 73 percent. Does Atlanta really miss Josh Smith that much?

* The Magic and Sixers have the same formula as the Suns: an awful 2012-13 married with low 2013-14 expectations. The Magic have exceeded expectations, though nowhere close to the degree that the Suns have. Philadelphia ... has not. The Sixers' incredible drop is a real cost of all-out tanking; fans may support a full rebuild, but they really do not want to pay money to watch it in person.

Stunningly, though, the Sixers do not have the lowest home attendance percentage in the league this season. That dishonor goes to the Detroit Pistons, who have sold 64.9 percent of seats compared to Philly's 65.3 percent. The Pistons do have a larger arena capacity and 2 million fewer metro residents, however. On the other hand, the Pistons are actually trying to win games this season, which should count for something. In theory.

The woes of Detroit (No. 11 media market in the United States), Philadelphia (No. 4) and Atlanta (No. 8) perhaps provide some rationale for why Stern and the NBA rescued Sacramento and New Orleans, Market size, after all, isn't everything. A connection between a team and its city is more important.

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I was ready to fight the possum I thought was banging on my house at 3 am, but then I looked out and saw human bodies standing on my porch...thumping against the front door. I turned on all the house lights and porch lights, so you pulled up your pants and just sat there. I had to come outside and ask you to leave while you explained your confusion. I got to stand in your smoke so that after I finally went back to bed I smelt like an old dirty bar. Shame on you -having drunk public sex with a near stranger, you classless jerk.

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It’ll be up to historians to decide whether 2013 actually reached a sort of Peak Asshole event, from which there had to be an inevitable decline, or whether it was simply another new high before year another new high, as Complete Asshole levels rise in correlation with global temperatures. Whatever the historians decide, however, from the inside it certainly seemed like the assholes were out in force in 2013, mad to leave the streak marks of their existence all over the pages of the year. What’s terrifying is it wasn’t even an election year. This makes me want to hide under a blanket for the whole of 2014.

Who’s on my finalist list of complete assholes for 2013? Well, let me tell you — and then you can vote for which one of my finalists you’d choose.

Barack Obama: Surprised? Don’t be — between the NSA stuff and the complete bungling of the Healthcare.gov Web site, he’s earned the spot. The NSA issues are the more existentially troubling items, but it’s the Healthcare.gov thing that makes me want to smack the dude upside the head. It’s like, Jesus, man, you just crushed the GOP on the government shutdown thing, now all you have to do to rip out their spines for the whole next election cycle is just have a fucking Web site that works. It’s like his finishing move was tripping at the finish line into a flaming pit of spikes and alligators.

(And no, he didn’t code the thing. But you know what? If I were president and the way that people were going to connect with the one thing that will cement my legacy as the leader of the nation was through a Web site, I would have damn well made sure the thing actually functioned. And yes, I know about the DDoS attacks. If Obama’s team didn’t know those were coming after everything leading up to the site going live, that’s indicative of a larger problem).

Look, I think the ACA is a good thing. So when even I am exasperated with this fuck up, there’s a problem. His saving grace with me is that I think he’s less of an asshole than others on the list. But at this point, five years into your presidency, not being ready for prime time makes you an asshole, period.

Rob Ford: You know, down here in the United States, we have a surplus of asshole politicians, so it really takes effort for one from Canada to not only impinge on our consciousness but also to impress. And partly that’s our fault; if the Harper administration has shown us anything it’s that Canadians are just as capable of electing assholes into office as we are. So, sorry, Canada. But on the other hand Rob Ford really is something special. It’s like if Chris Farley lived, lost any shred of loveableness, dropped 30 IQ points and started bragging about his oral sex skills. There’s nothing there that doesn’t scream “asshole.” So thank you, Toronto, for letting us know this uptick in assholes isn’t just a US thing.

Tech Dudes: 2012 had comic book and science fiction dudes front and center as assholes of the year, but this year they got tapped out of the ring by tech dudes, who have more money and apparently even more social entitlement, whether crapping on women or the homeless, or pushing to break up an entire state of California so they don’t have to deal with, you know, the dirty dirty people who do other things they don’t. Sure, they apologized (except the one trying to break up California, who is still at it). That’s nice. You shouldn’t need the whole Internet to drop on your head before you realize you’re being a jackass.

You know, I love tech and I have many friends and fans who make their living in tech-related fields — hell, I’m working on a video game as we speak. And not nearly everyone in tech is an asshole, thank God, just as not nearly everyone in comic books and science fiction are assholes. But there are some days when what I’d really like to do is tell all the ones who are that we’ve approved their sea-stead, let them float out into the Great Pacific Trash Gyre and then watch their pocket nation of assholes burn once they figure out some of them will have to gut fish and clean sewers, and then fall in on themselves in an utterly vicious game of “not it.” Don’t worry, in their absence Silicon Valley would be fine — turns out you don’t actually have to be a smug, fake-meritocratic libertarian in order to innovate and code. Funny about that.

Justin Bieber: Who knew that being young and rich and famous with no one on your payroll to tell you “no” would turn you into a complete asshole? Well, in point of fact, nearly everyone knows that, since it’s a tale as old as time. Justin Beiber is the one who got to tell it in 2013, just in time for his teen idol shine to transfer over to One Direction, who should enjoy their next couple of years. Save up your money, guys! Justin can tell you why. Let’s hope in a decade he’ll re-emerge as not a total tool of a human being.

Ted Cruz: This guy, I tell you. He’s like the Platonic ideal of an asshole. He’s the poster child of assholes everywhere, the one that young ambitious assholes look at and say, wow, he’s not about anything other than himself and wants what he wants because he wants it and I wish that was me. It take a special sort of asshole to talk for 21 hours on the Senate floor and have it not be filibuster but to pretend it is and also pretend that it did anything other then self-aggrandizement, but that’s Ted Cruz for you.

Likewise, there’s only one name for the sort of asshole to maneuvers to shut down the government without an end game planned out, and again, that’s Ted Cruz. He’s like Newt Gingrich minus the charm or political saavy, which is saying something absolutely terrifying. Gringrich is famously known as a “dumb person’s idea of a smart person”; Cruz is an asshole’s idea of a principled statesman.

(This is the spot where I’m supposed to insert a joke about Texas, but at this point I feel mostly sorry for Texas. Maybe they intended to elect an asshole to the Senate, but I don’t imagine they understood the magnitude of the asshole they actually sent along. Some things are too big even for Texas.)

What really burns me about Cruz is that he’s one of my generation — a Gen-Xer, and it embarrasses the shit out of me that the two most prominent national politicians in my age cohort are him and Paul Ryan, i.e., the current poster boy for the GOP’s Intellectual Poverty. Seriously, Gen X, what the hell.

Also: Cory Booker, speaking to you as a fellow Gen-Xer, you have a lot to make up for here. Get to it, please.

And now, a poll:

Take Our Poll

If you want to nominate someone else as the biggest asshole of the year, go ahead and do it in the comments. Do me a favor, however, and limit it to actual public personalities, i.e., don’t nominate a co-worker or some random dude you saw online. Thanks.

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Capcom plans to enter the ring and reaffirm its presence in the fighting game world, Deep Down producer Kazunori Sugiura told 4gamer in a group interview translated by Destructoid. There's no word yet on which IPs will lead the charge. The next ...

Zothecula writes "Shortly before Christmas, we heard about 35 year-old British adventurer Maria Leijerstam's planned attempt to ride to the South Pole on a recumbent fat-tired tricycle. On December 27th at 1am GMT, she achieved that goal, becoming the first person to ever successfully cycle from the edge of the Antarctic continent to the Pole."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Intel has ended out 2013 by publishing 5,000 pages of new GPU documentation about their latest generation 'Haswell' graphics hardware. The new documentation complements their longstanding open-source Linux graphics driver that has supported Haswell HD / Iris Graphics since last year. The new documentation covers the hardware registers and special information for 3D, video acceleration, performance counters, and GPGPU programming."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Using a remote-controlled camera disguised as a sea turtle, marine biologists watched as young dolphins got themselves stoned by ingesting a nerve toxin released by puffer fish. And as if sharing a joint, the dolphins could be seen passing it around.

Read more...

Japan seems like it is finally turning the tide in its decades-long battle with deflation.

Broad-based, persistent declines in prices are a drag on economic growth. (If prices are falling, it’s a good idea to hold off on spending and investment until they fall just a bit further. When everybody holds off on spending, the economy suffers.)

That’s why pushing prices higher is a key component of Abenomics, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s multi-pronged plan to use fiscal and monetary stimulus to jolt Japan out of its economic malaise. And it’s working. Last week inflation data for November showed prices had risen by 1.2% over the prior year, the highest level in five years.

Huzzah.

However, there’s a catch. The rise in prices is expected to outstrip gains in wages, which means that working stiffs in Japan will essentially be seeing their real—or inflation-adjusted—incomes fall. In other words, their their purchasing power will decline.

This is problematic for a couple reasons. Higher inflation could undermine consumer spending as a decline in purchasing power forces folks to spend a larger chunk of their income on necessities. Electricity bills, for example, jumped a hefty 8.2% in November, a significant chunk of the overall price increase. (Consumers also face a large sales tax rise in April 2014, which will pull more cash out of their wallets.)

There’s another problem too. Part of the reason that Abenomics has been successful is that Shinzo Abe was elected a year ago with a mandate to push through a radical economic overhaul. But if consumers begin to feel overly pinched by those policies thanks to inflation, that could weaken his political support and cause financial markets to begin to doubt whether he can really carry out reforms. Abe has already run into stiff resistance on labor market deregulation, a structural reform viewed as crucial for setting the stage for long-term growth.

That’s why Abe has been banging the drum for wage hikes recently. But it remains to be seen whether such government suasion will be enough to give Japanese workers a significant pay bump any time soon. And that’s why the effort to re-energize Japan’s economy is far from a done deal.

Seiji Sasa hits the train station in this northern Japanese city before dawn most mornings to prowl for homeless men. He isn't a social worker. He's a recruiter. The men in Sendai Station are potential laborers that Sasa can dispatch to contractors in Japan's nuclear disaster zone for a bounty of $100 a head.

To help you start to answer those pressing questions, we've got three clips from this week's Community season premiere, featuring the return of creator Dan Harmon. Plus tons of info about Space Dandy, from the creator of Cowboy Bebop. Here's all the details and clips for this week's TV!

Read more...

An anonymous reader writes in with this story about a hacker that took over a BBC server during the Christmas holiday. "A hacker secretly took over a computer server at the BBC, Britain's public broadcaster, and then launched a Christmas Day campaign to convince other cyber criminals to pay him for access to the system. While it is not known if the hacker found any buyers, the BBC's security team responded to the issue on Saturday and believes it has secured the site, according to a person familiar with the cleanup effort. A BBC spokesman declined to discuss the incident. 'We do not comment on security issues,' he said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At first I was going to go with a happy image of Downton Abbey's Mary Crawley, since doubtless if this bill had been passed back in her day she'd have been very pleased to be able to inherit her father's title herself instead of having to marry her cousin Matthew. You know, assuming she weren't fictional. But the allure of the Mary Crawley "judging you" look is just too strong.

For fans, few things are as exciting as game day. One of them, if Yankee Candle is to be believed, is this half-price candle for dudes.

"Hi, I'm Mike Ditka. If you're like me, you forgot how to read on purpose because you think literacy is effeminate, and also you think that there's nothing's better than old-school, straight-ahead football. Well listen up: I'm here to tell you that the First Down candle in Yankee Candle's line of Man Candles^TM is 'as exciting as game day,' thanks largely to the smells of vetiver, patchouli and leather, and offers up to 150 hours of 'true fragrance enjoyment.' Even better, it's currently half-price. It makes a great gift, even if just for yourself. I keep a few going in my Mustache Room pretty much all the time. Helps me unwind."

No, you're a ridiculous product.

popular shared this story from Daring Fireball.

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Fascinating bit from the Conan O’Brien show. Makes me wonder just how prevalent these canned segments are.

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This article is crossposted from my latest feature for the Border House; that version can be seen here.

What is staggering about much that passes under the banner of “fantasy” is how decidedly narrow its escapist vision tends to be. In both fantasy and sci-fi, far from transcending the fetters of real world limitations, we see our own world with its myriad failings reinscribed in uncritical verbatim form with only a smattering of chrome, Medieval grit, or magic to poorly disguise the copy. Dungeons & Dragons, long the towering mainstay of fantasy roleplay whose name is synonymous with its genre,  has at times been either a magnificent carnival of fantasy or a pitiless mire of the same tired clichés about gender, race, and sexuality that bedevil so much of nerd culture. This schismatic approach to its material is, I believe, a psychic scar left by the culture wars of the 1980s when D&D was accused of various and sundry evils; all ranging from reefer madness with dice to charges of blood drinking Satanism. The game remains gunshy about introducing content that might be deemed something less than family-friendly. Even its excellent Book of Exalted Deeds compendium—a supplement geared towards elaborating the concepts of virtue and divinity in D&D—came with a “Mature Content” warning sticker. The offending content was, well, a boob, along with a frank discussion of torture (and why it was morally unjustifiable).

This flinching instinct on the part of D&D’s inheritors, Hasbro-owned Wizards of the Coast, has kept LGBT characters far away from public acknowledgement in the game’s content. “Family friendly,” that delightful euphemism for wilful ignorance of and prejudice against sexual minorities, has become the catchphrase of the granddaddy of RPGs.

While my love for D&D was immense and filled with innumerable fond memories, many immortalised on a shelf groaning under the weight of 2e and 3.5e books, I lamented the fact that such a fantastic genre should be hamstrung by senseless timidity. It was not just the issue of LGBT inclusion, of course; the writing had ossified, the taken for granted dimensions of the setting had become set in stone, routinized and underdeveloped. Flashes of brilliant creativity were smothered in the gloom of playing it safe as the controversial Fourth Edition went to press.

Enter Paizo Publishing’s Pathfinder. For years I’d ignored it blithely, thinking it was a low rent, grittier D&D that had nothing new to offer, save a nostalgic continuation of the 3.5e ruleset. How wrong I was. The long, in-depth second look it deserved from me was occasioned by a friend’s breathless Facebook post about a trans woman character being introduced in the game’s latest adventure module.  A lesbian trans woman, married to a half-Orc Paladin of a Lawful Good goddess. My attention was well and truly piqued.

From Representation to Creative Flourishing

It is a common complaint amongst those determined to preserve a patriarchal status quo that characters ought not deviate from a white/male/hetero/cis norm unless there are “good narrative reasons” for doing so, whatever those might be. Curiously, nothing ever seems to fit the bill for such people; any deviation from that norm immediately occasions passionate metaphors about shoving things down throats and other vaguely sexual musings. But for those of us who, in good faith, worry about tokenisation occasioned by well-intentioned efforts at inclusion, there is a legitimate concern about ensuring that, say, LGBT characters are drawn to be people first and queer second, lest they be defined entirely by one facet of their identity.

Paizo gets this balance just right, in my view.

The 73rd issue of their Adventure Path modules—self-contained cycles of adventures that provide detailed information about settings and campaigns a DM can use to start a plot for her players—The Worldwound Incursion by Amber E. Scott might well serve as both illustration of inclusion done well and an example of what that inclusion can look like in the specific medium of a pen-and-paper roleplaying game. (Cover at left; art by Wayne Reynolds).

The eponymous Worldwound is a scar in the world of Golarion, spewing forth demons and other hellish beasts who break like a tide against the increasingly beleaguered defenders in the nation of Mendev. Divine wardstones help keep the fiends at bay, but when one of them is sabotaged, one of the great citadels of the nation—the crusader city of Kenabres—falls to the horde. It is into this maelstrom that your adventuring party is thrust. Spared from the invasion by a virtuous dragon’s last minute intervention, your party and a few NPC citizens of Kenabres awake in an underground cavern—you must find your way back to the surface and do what you can to ease the fate of the fallen city.

One of these NPCs broke her leg in the divinely cushioned fall from the surface, Anevia Tirabade, a forthright rogue of a woman who served the city as a scout and archer. The story from here on out is very well treated by Ms. Scott; Tirabade is one of three NPCs of varying strengths and personalities with whom your party must work, negotiate, and assist. The mechanics of this, and the story possibilities that emerge, are a delight to read; one’s imagination really takes flight with the help of the complicated entanglements Scott writes for each character— the other two are Aravashinal, a blind wizard whose membership in a secret society drives a subplot, and Horgus, an arrogant noble whose gossipmongering about the other two could bring about the downfall of the group.

The genius of this module, I believe, lies in its strong emphasis on relationships and the deep elaboration that Scott gives to the myriad ways they impact the story, even as Kenabres crumbles. Rare is the writer who captures the fundamental humanity of apocalypse (beyond clichés about survivalism, at least), and Scott certainly rises to that challenge. The depth of these relationships, the conspiracies, triumphs, and tragedies they all entail, emerge as rewards for good investigative roleplay—and it is only here that Anevia’s story emerges.

One discovers that Anevia Tirabade is a trans woman who is married to a Half-Orc Crusader named Irabeth. Irabeth Tirabade is, in this campaign, helping to organise the resistance against the demonic horde. There is a beautiful and romantic story behind Anevia’s transition that is inextricably bound up with the love shared between the rogue and paladin, there for the taking if one wishes to learn it. But it is neither the focus of the story nor Anevia’s raison d’etre for being in it. Like Amanda Downum’s Savedra Severos, Anevia is a trans woman who is many years post-transition and whose role in the present story is akin to that of her cisgender counterparts—being a person of some power and influence in Kenabres pitching in after its destruction.

Anevia’s story is presented neither as a joke, nor as the driving motivation of her character. Like all trans people, her transition was merely instrumental in helping Anevia live a liveable life; her true adventure lay in the work she did for her adopted hometown, and the labours she would come to share with her wife. She is now part of the resistance and thrust into the epicentre of a renewed crusade against the forces of Hell, all of which are entirely orthogonal to the fact that she happens to be a lesbian trans woman. This is inclusion done well; Scott’s backstory for Anevia does not render her invisible as a trans person, but it also does not centralise that aspect of her as being the only worthwhile or interesting thing about her. Instead, it threads through her life in a seamlessly realistic way.

She grew up as part of her mother’s criminal gang, dysphoria leading to asociality on her part, even as she both learned to pick pockets and escape into art about strong women heroines. When at last the forces of law broke up the gang, Anevia’s mother sent her away to a temple of Desna, where a priestess would raise Anevia as her daughter—initially as a disguise, albeit one rather eagerly donned by the young Anevia. Her foster mother let her set off on an adulthood of adventuring, like the women from the stories Anevia so loved, with her blessing for this new life. On that long series of adventures in which she lent her services to other temples of Desna, she would meet Irabeth and fall head over heels.

I shan’t indulge in telling the whole story but it’s very sweetly written (aside from pronoun mangling when discussing the pre-transition Anevia, but it’s a forgivable lapse considering the audience; it’s still a dramatic and graceful step in the right direction).

The one artistic suggestion I might make is as follows. After falling for Irabeth, Anevia, according to the text,

“had revealed herself to actually be a man… but this didn’t matter to the paladin, who had learned to value a companion’s personality over her appearance. In fact, Irabeth had spent a fair amount of her personal wealth (including selling her father’s sword) to fund the purchase of an elixir for Anevia, one that would shift her physical gender to match the rest of her.”

(Okay, so maybe I will recount a bit more of their adorable love story). But the point is that it is rather unfortunate to recycle the “actually be a man” language which, although well intentioned in its use here, probably engenders more confusion than not amongst those unfamiliar with trans people. Generally speaking, any talk of ‘actually’ being one’s birth sex tends to be the spearpoint of a lot of transphobic arguments, and it’s best not to legitimise that.

When I have written trans people into my sci-fi and fantasy settings, I’ve always made sure to give them a unique name (“transgender” and “transsexual” being too deeply ground in our own world’s political and medical rhetoric to be truly distancing). One Pathfinder playing friend, writer Katie Berger Tremaine, suggests calling trans people “Arsheans” after one of the empyreal angels devoted to, amongst other things, diversity of gender expression. (That angel, Arshea, is another of Ms. Scott’s inspired creations and merits their own article).

The Fundaments of the Inclusive Adventure

One of the more darkly hilarious criticisms levelled at Irabeth and Anevia was that they were improbable due to being “too many identities at once.” This bizarre charge, being the inverted version of the vituperatively bigoted joke that says one must be a “disabled black lesbian Muslim” to get ahead in the world, is merely another irksome spasm of privilege and the myopia it inculcates— but it merits special comment nevertheless.

Behind the slur lies the idea that such people do not exist—that one might be a lesbian, or trans, or biracial, but surely not all at once; that is merely a fantasy of leftist diversity maniacs, after all. Yet, we actually do exist. As I joked more than once on Paizo’s forums to people making such prejudicial criticisms, Anevia and Irabeth’s story is actually all the more affecting because it maps onto the contours of my own life. After all, I’m a lesbian trans woman in an interracial relationship, myself. And given Irabeth’s biracial heritage as a half-Orc who struggled against racial prejudice and aspired to fit into human dominated institutions—she is also someone in whom I saw a rather lot of myself. It’s the kind of story not often enough told, and Ms. Scott captured it with aplomb.

It is here we return to the question of creativity in writing and the benefits of artistically-crafted diversity (as opposed to hamhanded tokenism): it makes stories better, more original, and more interesting. While transphobes were attacking Anevia simply for being in the story, and Irabeth for simply being a lesbian—occasioning all manner of scrutiny not given to Worldwound Incursion’s several straight cis male characters—they ignored how much lore and roleplay grist each woman added to the tale. The Worldwound Incursion is remarkable for its emphasis on the many social relationships—be they interpersonal or at the level of organisational conspiracy—that make up a city, even one smouldering in ruin amidst a truly hellish war. Unlike many adventure modules, Pathfinders’ as a whole place a good deal of emphasis on fleshing out the NPCs who are a setting’s truest ambassadors, imparting the living and breathing soul of a fantasy realm.

In this light, Anevia and Irabeth are, in their ways, part of Kenabres’ essence; each woman and her history says something about the hopes and failures of their adopted homeland, and their love is a perfect symbol of the virtues they tirelessly defend from the Worldwound’s spew.

What the critics of these two characters miss is how elegantly Amber Scott drew their fundamental humanity (with apologies to Irabeth’s Orc-ness, of course). Diversity does not just exist as a discrete property of a person fully coterminous with one aspect of their identity. There must also be diversity within a character. Anevia is not just a transsexual woman; she’s the crafty child of the streets who speaks forthrightly to all, regardless of rank, and who fights back the memories of her scarred past, trying to live in the here and now. She’s the Worldwound scout who found love on the edge of the abyss and who, at the present point in this campaign, limps her way through a cave with several strangers on her way into a strange, new adventure that has turned that world upside down.

Well done, Ms. Scott.

Concluding Thoughts: To Tell The Untold Story

The adventure module itself is also a testament to everything Pathfinder is doing right as a roleplaying game; rich in lore, technical rules that intrigue but don’t bog one down in math, an epic story that drops level 1 players into the midst of an incredible tale, a lavish gazetteer for the city of Kenabres, a short story, and some unique monsters thrown into the fray—there’s a lot to keep you busy. My personal favourite detail has to be Scott’s exalted magical sword, Radiance, (which inspired this article’s title); it was the sword of an outspoken crusader, a woman named Yaniel, who witheringly condemened her superiors’ negligence and took the fight to the demons. The weapon, in the hands of a virtuous paladin, can ‘level up’ with you. From Amber Scott’s fast paced and captivating plot, to Jerome Virnich’s evilly cute Sin Seeker monster, the module presents a peerless toolbox for adventure. If Pathfinder excels at anything it’s finding ways to tell stories that fantasy RPGs haven’t before.

I’m going to have to resist the overwhelming impulse to make a cheesy pun on the RPG’s name by saying something like “there’s a new path being found in roleplaying games!” and instead simply say that Pathfinder’s latest books merit a closer look. Paizo’s Creative Director, James Jacobs, has gone on record to say that LGBT characters exist in the world of Golarion and that all freelance writers are advised of this canonical fact. The iconic Cleric, Kyra, has been officially revealed to be a lesbian woman, and we can—apparently—expect more ‘out’ NPCs in the near future. It is no less worth mentioning that Pathfinder has overtaken D&D as the world’s bestselling PnP RPG: it’s yet another nail in the coffin of the dreadful cliché that “diversity doesn’t sell.” Wizards of the Coast might do well to take note.

*The banner image and Worldwound Incursion cover art are by Wayne Reynolds; the art of Anevia is uncredited in the book but I will add a name as soon as I can find one.