Category: Self-ish

What I’m doing this week

Part of my life is being manager of the Centre for Applied Cross-cultural Research. Every week the researchers get together and there’s a presentation of some sort or another.
This week, I’m doing one. I’m not a cross-cultural researcher, but I am a giant geek. So:

Playing culture: Dungeons & Dragons, fantastic ethnicity, and the undisciplined mimetic imagination

For several decades, intercultural education has made productive use of interactive exercises, role-plays and simulations. These “infinite games” offer a way to explore and practise cultural interaction in a way that is immersive, memorable and supportive of exploration. Such engagements are carefully managed with inductions and post-experience briefings to contextualise what has taken place.

However, there exists a vibrant strain of parallel activity that is purely informal. For forty years, small groups of people have gathered together and imagined intercultural experiences without any inductions, briefings, or contextual guides. Tabletop role-playing games use an infinite game structure for the shared creation of character-based narrative fiction, and intercultural engagements often feature. In this presentation, I’ll describe how these games have presented and explored culture, and how innovative techniques are opening new possibilities for playing culture. To explore some of these ideas, a prototype for a new game based directly on cross-cultural research will be presented for discussion and feedback.

Happening Thursday. Should be fun.

Online Stocktake

This weekend I got to turn a virtual acquaintance into a real-world one (heya Andrew) (also heya Phil) and it got me thinking about where I exist on the internet at the moment.

Obviously: From The Morgue, formerly part of the additiverich collective and now a member of the isprettyawesome crew. Here is for thinking out loud, and talking about media, politics, and things I’ve seen or read. Occasionally I try to be funny. I used to make an effort to blog every weekday, but those days are gone. Isolated personal blogs like this one are on the way out anyway.

And my livejournal, which is only rarely updated. LJ used to be a busy hub of activity but it has been on a long, slow fade for several years now, because isolated personal blogs are on the way out. I’m more self-indulgent on LJ, and will not hesitate to post self-promotion or be incomprehensible. I guess I see LJ as a more forgiving space, content-wise. (From The Morgue is also syndicated to LJ, don’t know who set that up but thanks.)

I’m mr_orgue on Twitter. I don’t tweet much, and when i do it’s mostly just to say “I’ve blogged”, but I reply to other people and re-tweet messages a fair bit. I don’t try to keep up, just drop in and read a bit from time to time. Twitter is a fun time. I’m a bit scared of what it’d be like with a smartphone, though; I only access Twitter from desktop at the moment, but I think it’d be a completely different social experience with constant mobile access.

And of course I’m on Facebook. Facebook is mostly for tracking events, seeing photos and saying happy birthday to people. I’m pretty capricious about accepting friend requests – some days I’ll approve some random friend-of-friend I don’t actually know, other days I’ll refuse someone I’ve met more than a few times. Generally, if I want to say happy birthday to you, I’ll happily be your facebook friend.

Those four sites cover probably 98% of my online presence (outside of RPG-related activity, which is a whole separate issue). I have legacy accounts on MySpace, and WAYN, and probably several other sites I can’t think of right now. And of course there’s my rarely-updated personal site, which I’ve had for over a decade, Apocalypse: A Kind of Revelatory Experience. I should probably let it pass into history, but I like it, and also it hosts the infamous Leon Is A God subsite.

Oh yeah! I’m also on Hoffspace, which is where I ironically celebrate David Hasselhoff. Join me!

State of Play

Man, I’m looking forward to when that baby gets born so I can finally catch up on some sleep!

No, wait.

Still in the depths of a sustained busy like there has not been since I cleverly arranged to finish my Masters thesis in the weeks leading up to my wedding. Achieved the rare trifecta of working Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. Unsurprise: this has severely hindered progress on Day One in the novel vs. baby race. But I am not downhearted. When I get through these weeks I might be able to put some proper time in and make up the deficit. It’s about how much I want it done, innit?

Timely link: Chuck Wendig on how to be a writer. (Thanks to the people who took a look at the opening pages of D1, by the way. Comments v. helpful.)

Right. Back to work.

Thanks Dad

My dad just dropped around to drop off some lemonade and food treats, on account of hearing that I’m home with a cold.

He is a good man, my dad.

It’s just a little cold. I hope. Fascinating sleeplessness night-before-last though, as the sickness rolled in on me like a stormfront, and I found myself lying awake nearly face-down on the pillow and with the clear awareness that my head was a seamless component of an enormous crystalline array of cubes constructed of thought. Ideas represented as small visual icons flipped through the cubes to line up in long significant sequences, but it was impossible to complete a thought because the meaning always extended out of reach into the distant extent of the array. I was awake and asleep at once, like a lucid dream that perfectly overlapped with reality. Heh. Consciousness is fun.

But, thanks dad! Yum. Red licorice.

Profile Pic

As part of some other work I’ve needed to finally look for a new profile image. The ones I use currently are a photo from 2006 and a cartoon image that’s even older than that.

Here are three more recent profile pic options. Which should be my go-to option when I need to present a face to the world?

I’ll close voting Friday midnight, NZ time. Winning choice becomes my Twitter pic.

(I’ll make no comment until voting is closed.)

Impending Fatherhood

Sometimes I actually do think about becoming a father in terms unrelated to undercooked pop-culture gags. (No, really, I do.)

Back in university student days I had some jeans that were covered in graffiti; my “word jeans” I called ’em.

One phrase was: “Strive to die to self”, which I think I lifted from a Christian-oriented poem by NZ writer Joy Cowley. It carried a secular meaning for me, about the need to make ourselves the least important part of our world; to direct our energies outwards, not inwards. I have a more nuanced position now when it comes to “selfishness”, but I still think those are mighty good words to live by.

Also on those word jeans was a quote from Jung: “A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.” (I think I deliberately mangled it so it read “Until you have passed through the inferno of your passions…”) It was intended to be a provocative statement to myself, but I will never forget how my mother pointed at it and said “you won’t understand that fully until you’ve had children”. At the time I expect I rolled my eyes and thought “how silly, that’s not what Jung was talking about” (even though what I meant by it was equally Jung-inappropriate). But it stuck with me, those words of my mother’s, because it suggested that parenthood is a powerful experience in a way that I didn’t understand then. (Foolish callow youth, etc etc.)

In all seriousness, I’m looking forward to being a dad. I surprise myself with how much it feels like a sensible step forward. It’s a new selfhood to encompass, but morgue-as-dad is not an unfamiliar concept to me. In fact for the last fifteen years I’ve regularly thought about an alternative life in which I was a father. That wouldn’t have been a bad sort of life, I came to realize. I could be a dad. I could be a really good dad.

Yeah, the surrender of control and autonomy, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a bit unnerved by that. Being a dad and caregiver is going to mean handing control of my world over to the little one. That’s going to be a huge change and a huge challenge, but y’know, I’m looking forward to it. I think I’m good for the challenge and I’m certain the rewards will be profound.

So I guess I’m hoping to split the difference of those two quotes. There will be a lot of dying to self; there will be some passion inferno. There will be sleepless nights and really early mornings. (Every time I sleep in I wonder if I’m being smart, because I’m doing it while I still can, or foolish, because I’m not getting myself ready for what is coming.) There will be plenty of other challenges besides.

And overall, sitting here, four-and-half months out? It feels like a privilege.