Welcome to 2026 and the third (!!) calendar year this site has been in operation.
Of course I hope everyone’s Fall and Winter holidays have been inspiring, joyful, and restful experiences, in precisely all of the ways that you have needed for them to be. Regardless, I’m going to skip the retrospectives, the predictions, the intentions, and the resolutions. Everyone else has done them, and in more timely fashion than I’ve managed.
There have been any number of things pinballing through my head, ricocheting off of what they find there, gaining unexpected trajectories and velocities.
This short essay, Thin Desires are Eating Your Life, has been threading a through line on my thinking ever since I came across it. JA does a great job realizing their goal to “think in public” with this one and I strongly recommend the read.
The whole concept doesn’t present anything ground-breaking or uniquely revelatory, but the framing is unique, salient. The distance between desires born of “sensation” versus “enrichment” resonates with me, and recalls my own admonition: “don’t mistake activity for productivity.” My formulation was inspired by entirely too much workplace crowing about “how busy” people always were, proudly brandishing time cards over-stuffed with early ins and late outs but never able to show a problem solved or a toil ended.
David Graeber gave that sort of thing a pretty memorable name.
Prominent conspiracist and loathsome antisemite Henry Ford had a respectable observation (even a stopped clock can be right twice a day) on the matter, too:
“Many people are busy trying to find better ways of doing things that should not have to be done at all. There is no progress in merely finding a better way to do a useless thing.”
Look, I know that this is a blog forum about games. I know society regards that as childish, frivolous. I grew up under the long, enduringly-anachronistic shadow of the Satanic Panic and that heritage fills me with a particularly precious pride for ever so many souls shepherded to the perdition from whence all our math rocks issue.
Call me Virgil, maybe.
I’m not here to repudiate those ideas, but to ignore them. This thing is going to run like a pinball machine, keep your hands on those flippers and stay alert. We’re going where eagles wouldn’t dare.
This year marks 10 years since one of my best friends died. “Ten” is a magic number, or must be based on how central it is in this civilization. Ten fingers, ten toes, ten numeric glyphs, ten-to-the-nth, the decimal, the tithe, the decimation, the measure of a life… And for all that, there will be no Decennium Day for her passing - just a “tomorrow” and a “yesterday” - like the day fell out of the universe’s pocket, into the sofa cushions, where we’ll find it quite by surprise looking for something else.
If it were a wedding, we’d mark the occasion with a great bronze skull. Something tasteless, grotesque. Fully-articulated, motorized with shining aluminum gimbals to jaw along to a hopelessly campy Halloween soundtrack and swing its diamond-hard gaze as you move around the room.
But it wasn’t a wedding, and even on the furthest side of saying “yesterday” is too early to be thinking of daffodils. Daffodils again. Their sister-appellation gives me a rueful chuckle as things turn maudlin. I miss her as endlessly as I am simultaneously grateful for the many points of hatred, shame, and horror we’ve drawn ourselves across in that span of years.
And I hate it. I hate that the so much of what we endured in the interval was inflicted, exacerbated, or - at best - just ignored in service of a suppurating narcissist working to establish itself as Darklord while maximizing the Despair in this domain. I don’t think any revelation is waiting for us, this is terminal first-stanza energy.
Role-playing games are a space-making endeavor, though. They can center sensation through power-fantasy and wish-fulfillment, but there is the power to enrich the people who play them. The “thin” activity can be a potent “thick” experience, when we want it to be, if we want it to be.
“We join spokes together in a wheel, but is the center hole that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house, but is the inner space that makes it livable.
We work with being, but non-being is what we use.”
– Lao Tzu
This “thick experience” and the desire for it doesn’t need to be anything revolutionary. We are people, connecting with one another over a shared interest. We visualize ourselves in heroic - or villainous - roles, responding to extraordinary dangers, “playing through the pain” that would destroy us in real life.
At the table, we are all Holly Wheeler conjuring up an Heroic version of ourselves to overcome a terrible threat. The space we make, together, for our silly little game is a safe haven away from the too-real threats outside of it. It is a space that lets us be powerful, be mature in that power - it’s a space that lets us be unoptimizable and authentic, despite pretending to be someone, somewhere else.
Our pretend spaces are more than just diversion. They are useful by virtue of their non-being, by virtue of standing inside that box and saying the holy words “maybe”, “if”, or “probably” and call forth the only good god that remains there. We are desperate, hungry for its release and it really wants out.