Black Gate

I’ve been drinking coffee from this mug since way back in the twentieth century. It was a gift, of that I’m pretty sure, but I’ve had it so long I can no longer tell you who I got it from or when.

It survived my first marriage, a move from Arizona to Minnesota and several subsequent moves all over the Land of 10,000 Lakes, and being left through one brutal winter in a cow pasture (I lost it on a walk late in the fall; the following spring it was still there where I’d left it, sitting on the hood of a rusted old jalopy!).

It is a little worse for wear — a chip on the rim and another one on the base. The litho, though — incredibly — is pristine and unfaded, even though it’s been through hundreds of cycles in the dishwasher.

The caricature of Tolkien as a hobbit, which is repeated on either side of the mug, was done by Steven Cragg. The text, which is attributed to “Largely Literary Designs, Inc.,” reads as follows:

Ever since we were no bigger than a billiard ball we’ve wanted something important we could call our own — a yacht, for example, or a cottage in the Bahamas, or a marriage counselor who could go an entire hour without saying the word “feelings,” or, well, a mythology of Middle-Earth, to be perfectly honest with you, a unique vision of history and pre-history, good and evil, gods, devils, the whole shebang, the sort of thing J.R.R. Tolkien devised more than a half a century ago, which means we’re lucky as Frodo, of course, because thanks to modern printing technology and a newfangled bartering system called “money,” we now need go no further than our corner bookstore, pick up a copy of The Hobbit and suddenly we’re there, chucked head over heels into Tolkien’s magical kingdom, thankful that when our own world becomes too much for us, we can always turn to his.

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As a performing storyteller (think bard), I’ve had the chance to participate in some epic tellings. And I mean EPIC! Up to three days of multiple tellers from across various countries telling a long and ancient story, one chapter at a time. It’s, well, it’s epic.

I’ve had the chance to tell The Odyssey twice, once in my hometown of Ottawa, the other time on the West Coast in Nanaimo, BC. The last telling was two weekends ago, and it struck me that you could take Odysseus out of his story and plop him into a sword and sorcery adventure and voilà! You have a perfect barbarian hero. Let me, in fact, count the ways:

He Has Super Strength
He’s so badass that he’s the only one who can string his ash bow. The only one! People try, fail and then go drink wine while mumbling.

He Knows How to Keep a Story Going
Okay, so we encounter him in The Iliad (bloody fun stuff). That war lasted ten years. Ten years! Then he takes another nine years to get home, while partaking of multiple adventures. Kind of makes you understand why Epic Fantasy is so, well, Epic.

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The culture war has been going on for a while. We’re used to it played out large. Trying to boil down 50 years of social history and politics into a paragraph is going to lose some nuance but, in broad strokes, you’ve people for whom established mores work, usually from homogenous communities, and people for whom they don’t — who are frequently labeled with various flavors of moral degeneracy. Usually to the scorn of history.

It’s played out in government, often in schools. We’re used to that. But now it’s also playing out in our fandom, our games, our conventions. This year the Hugo Awards took some collateral damage from being a battlefield in a war that is part of that narrative but is also somewhat removed from how we’ve been used to thinking of this fight.

Safe Space and the Geek Social Fallacy

There is a social movement of, largely, white male nerds misusing the concept of safe space to exclude people from geekdom.

Safe space is an area where anyone can be comfortable in who they are without recrimination, without bullying and without threat.

Most of our society isn’t safe. The litany of violence, abuse, and microaggression thrown at people because of fundamental aspects of their person is well documented

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