Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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The D&D Open Gaming License / The Dangers of Playing with Other People’s Toys

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This week everyone is talking about Dungeons & Dragons, but it’s not for a good reason.

Last week, a revision to the longstanding D&D “Open Gaming License” leaked. I’ve written about the OGL before, but in short it’s the persistent legal agreement that allows independent creators to use the core rules and concepts of D&D to create their own 3rd party material. While that ostensibly exists for people who want to sell their own 3rd-party D&D supplements, it also acts as a safety net for anyone homebrewing their own content.

Many outlets have written at length about the newly-drafted version of the OGL – i09 reporter Linda Codega broke the story at Gizmodo last week. The draft institutes a number of restrictions, including tightening the ability to distribute digital content, enforcing royalty-sharing on big earners, and instituting some potentially-invasive rights to reproduce creator content.

Understandably, both creators and players are in an uproar – after all, every D&D player is also a co-creator of their campaign’s story! Even if they never intend to publish or profit from their storytelling contributions, there’s a pervasive feeling of “this affects all of us” solidarity from the D&D community.

Another reliable leak mentioned that D&D owners Wizards of the Coast (WotC) and Hasbro would be looking at digital DNDBeyond subscription cancellations as an early metric of the community’s response to the OGL changes. A leak coming from within the DNDBeyond team makes a lot of sense. WotC and Hasbro bought DNDBeyond last April from Fandom for $146 million dollars. The DNDBeyond team don’t have a long-term allegiance to the Hasbro corporate overlords and they are watching the stellar good will they’ve amassed as a community platform being quickly eroded by this decision.

As the DNDBeyond team may have feared (but also secretly wished for), this new leak immediately lead to a cascade of hundreds of players posting proof of their subscription cancellations on DNDBeyond forums and on Twitter.

I was one of those players.

Tomorrow is my bi-weekly D&D date with my best friends from the states and I am currently the Dungeon Master of our campaign. That means today ought to be spent finalizing maps and building out potential encounters for my custom campaign that has taken a hard left turn from the official campaign in Storm King’s Thunder.

Instead, I’m spending the day wondering if it’s worth putting in the effort to tell stories in a fictional world that is just another capitalist playground. [Read more…] about The D&D Open Gaming License / The Dangers of Playing with Other People’s Toys

the early bird gets the eggs

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Today I woke up at 6:55am, laced up my running shoes, and walked to the supermarket because it was 6:55am and I was definitely not jogging at that hour.

Why? Because New Zealand has run out of eggs. We are officially in a national egg shortage. It’s an ovo-crisis!

I mean, New Zealand has some eggs. Personally, we’ve got about 23. But there are not enough eggs. Few enough eggs that it has become common over the past month to visit the grocery store to see an entire bank of egg shelves picked entirely clean, which didn’t even occur during the height of our lockdowns.

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

Yes, people are even buying that one last carton in the corner with the cracked egg in it.

Apparently one measures these things not in terms of eggs but in terms of laying hens. Literally, the chicken came first, in this scenario. I have learned from the prestigiously-titled Stuff that we currently have 3.5 million egg laying hens (a 68% hen-to-people ratio), but we ought to have 3.8m egg laying hens (a 74% hen-to-people ratio). Those hens (and their predecessors, I suppose) laid about 92 million eggs in the year ending in June 2022, down an apparently staggering amount from 101.2m in the prior egg-laying calendar year.

Long story short, today I learned you need three hens for every four people.

The thing is: it’s not like New Zealand just found a whole lot more people. Even if we count tourism, we don’t have as many people in our borders as we did back in 2019, and there hasn’t been any chicken-specific diseases (that I’ve heard about, anyhow – and, we do have a line into the chicken community).

How did New Zealand run out of eggs?

To the best of my understanding, we actually ran out of eggs 10 years ago and just didn’t realize it until last week. [Read more…] about the early bird gets the eggs

family, but make it camp

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Today is the day of the annual family camping trip, where “family” means all relatives currently within the borders of New Zealand except for me.

I abstain from camping not only because it means sleeping near bugs, but because skipping it presents an incredibly rare occasion for to be alone in our house.

Both E and I have worked from home for the past two years and will continue for the foreseeable future, but I serve the role of our errand-runner-in-chief. That means that if anyone is occasionally left at home alone, it’s E rather than me. That means the family camping trip might ne the only time alone in the house for more than 15 minutes for all of 2023 – just as it was in 2022!

I claim to love being alone. In reality I like it for about twelve hours.

After that, I get lonely and want to make some food for someone.

It turns out that what I crave isn’t necessarily “alone time,” it’s uninterrupted time. It’s hard to choose that for myself when the alternative is a rare hour where E and I are both free to hang out, and even harder when I’m in the same house with an awesome and highly-entertaining kid during her waking hours.

I walked away from the perfect work/life balance of my dream job just to spend more time with that kid – so, of course I’m going to give up some potential quiet time to hang out with her!

Sometimes the only way to enjoy uninterrupted time to myself without feeling guilty is for the kid to be nowhere within a 100-kilometer radius of me. Maybe camping is that far away? I’m not sure. All I know is that it involves sleeping in a tent in a well-managed slice of wilderness with questionable access to plumbing and electricity. That’s a combination of factors I would only endure for a reality show with a significant cash prize. [Read more…] about family, but make it camp

The Great Solstice Baked LEGO Diary Disaster of 2022

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Gather ’round, readers, for a tale of unfortunate diary explosions, precarious Wellington roads, and one very ill-advised decision to put a LEGO set in the oven that nearly ruined Solstice.

For the record: Do not put your LEGO set in the oven. If you take nothing else away from this story of disaster and triumph, please take to heart this single important lesson. Do. Not. Bake. Lego.

Believe me.

Little did these poor, innocent elves know what Solstice would have in store for them.

Picture it: It’s the morning of Summer Solstice. There are a pile of presents under a tree acting as symbol of multiple different holidays. We’ve just finished having a delightful breakfast of gingerbread muffins and have opened all of the windows because it is the hottest day of the season so far.

(December holidays can be very confusing in the Southern Hemisphere for a Philly kid used to wishing for a White Christmas, which is why we have leaned into celebrating the change in seasons like Pagans with a Saturnalia festival spanning from Solstice to Christmas.)

(Yes, we also celebrate Winter Solstice.)

It was an ideal holiday morning. The kid had just opened her first gift, which was LEGO’s special 2022 free holiday gift set: a diorama of a pair of elves in snowy landscape.

We picked it as the first present not only because she loves LEGO, but because it was part of our Saturnalian theme. No, not human sacrifice. You see, because I am an obsessive dungeon master who can only celebrate things like Bachelorette Parties if I turn them into day-long, city-spanning alternate realty games, I can’t just put presents under a tree with normal “To / From” labels on them.

No. That takes the mystery out of things.

Instead, our Solstice gift-giving is a double-blind process. Every time anyone in the family wraps a present, they reserve a random number for that gift on a shared spreadsheet. Then, starting on Solstice and continuing through Boxing Day, we periodically reveal gift numbers to each other and it is the kid’s job to play Holiday Elf and find said numbered gift in the ever-decreasing spread of presents and deliver it to its intended recipient

The LEGO was a commemoration of her official role of Holiday Elf. It was the kickoff gift to our whole holiday festival.

And that’s where things started to go wrong.

The kid had dumped her LEGO into the middle of the floor to begin working on bag #1. I had made myself a peppermint milk in my home sippy-cup, because I am disaster-prone and cannot be trusted with an open container even in my own home.

(As will become evident in a moment.)

I attempted to hopscotch through the splayed-out LEGO to take a seat closer to the tree so I could watch the assembly process. During my incredibly graceful leaping, my grip on my sippy-cup slipped upward towards the lid. Unbeknownst to me, I hadn’t lined up the lid with the threads of the cup, so the connection between the two was tenuous at best. The combination of holding the cup by the lid and my hopscotching sent a half a liter of peppermint milk plummeting to the ground, where it struck DIRECTLY in the middle of the brand new LEGO kit like a minty dairy bomb and spread to cover the entire carpeted path to the tree.

This sent various family members springing into action. Well, the kid mostly sprung into whinging, which was totally justified based on me dunking her entire first gift as if it was a holiday Oreo.

(That joke wouldn’t work for a New Zealand audience, because they don’t dunk their cookies in milk here, but that’s a whole other post entirely.)

I bustled across the house to find supplies to begin the long process of making sure our carpet wouldn’t smell like spoilt milk for eternity. Meanwhile, E and the kid attended to scooping all of the milky LEGO into a fine strainer to whisked away to be rinsed off in the kitchen sink.

By the time I was done with my extensive soaking up, soaping, soaking up again, and-dehumidifying process there was no resumed LEGO-ing but the kitchen was suspiciously quiet. I poked my head in.

“Are the LEGO still drying?” I asked

“Yep,” E replied.

“Cool. It’ll probably take a while for the water to drain out of all the little nooks and crannies.”

“Oh, don’t worry, I put the LEGO in the oven.” [Read more…] about The Great Solstice Baked LEGO Diary Disaster of 2022

time, see what’s become of me

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I am making a New Year’s resolution.

I haven’t made any resolutions for over two decades. I’ve always believed that resolutions are intentions to fail.

Or, as I said back in 2001, “You can’t really resolve to do anything except for those things so explicitly under your own power that you could and should be doing them anyway.” A decade later in 2011, I added, “Why should 1/1 be any different from 4/5 or 6/6 or any other day of the year?”

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

In January 2004 I said I was not resolving to do three things, but that I’d like keep my focus on them throughout the year. They were:

  1. Know What I’m Spending
  2. Be Aware of What I Eat
  3. Use Time Smarter

Even as my life got more complex in the following decade, I hewed closely to those non-resolves and they served me well. As I said in 2007, “even if I went on a bender of money or time wasting, or food devouring, at least I knew it was just a bender.”

(A decade ago I tried to expanded those three goals to 10 Commandments. They were an excellent set of commandments that would be terrific to live by, but they proved to be too many things to keep in mind all the time. Three is a magic number, after all.)

After I had those three rules in place, instead of making resolutions I began to focus on goals. Goals aren’t ephemeral ongoing vows. They are tangible, doable, accomplishable things, like “get my driver’s license” or “record 10 songs.”

I liked to set a large amount of goals in January and then see where the year took me. I thought of them as the corporate balance sheet of the business of me. I’d grade myself at the end of the year, and it could be as revealing to score well as to score badly. As I explained 2010, “The goals were good for something else, too – they let me know what wasn’t important. If I cannot bring myself to tag the last 800 posts from CK’s first three months even with my grade hanging on the line, it’s just not gonna happen.”

In 2014, I claimed even those goals were getting overwhelming, and I was going to strip down to a simple flowchart. I think that had less to do with the goals being a bad idea and more to do with having an infant human to raise and an infant start-up team to grow, plus two adolescent bands to lead. I needed simplicity.

Then, all of those non-resolutions and goals trickled away. I kicked off both 2015 and 2016 without mentioning them at all. January 2017-18 & 20 were consumed with comics posts. I didn’t even post in January of 2019 or 2021-22.

Something interesting happened in those intermediate five years other than just moving to New Zealand. To put it plainly: my life went from the simplest it has ever been to the hardest I’ve ever experienced. [Read more…] about time, see what’s become of me