Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 1/26/23

Magnus Robot Fighter Edition

Me, taking out Zuckerberg’s algorithm, courtesy of Russ Manning and George Wilson. The gorillas are just here to cheer me on.

Ordinarily I’d lead into this with a delightful bit of business about how the imaginary staff at the imaginary apocalypse bunker is up to their usual shenanigans, and boy, aren’t entrenched bureaucracies funny? But this is not a day for light-hearted mockery of the end of the world.

I got restricted on Facebook. Again.

This time? I’ll let you decide just how well our Corporate Robot Overlords are doing at keeping you safe from the scourge of Things You Don’t Like. This was, by the way, in private group, and the question was, “what are you doing to promote your ZineQuest 5 project this year?” Here was my answer:

Sacrificing a calf? Hey, have you ever eaten a hamburger? Just curious…

That throwaway bit of fluff, clearly meant as a joke, was flagged and got me a two—no, three—day restriction. See, the last two times this has happened, they set the punishment and then move the goal posts. I came out of Facebook jail this morning to find I was free, free, FREE...only, well, NOW my posts will be moved lower in the crawl for 26 days. That was an add-on, not listed in the original set of restrictions. It just showed up today, sneak attack style.

I was going to rage against the machine, but see, the last time I did that, they simply tacked on more punishment. Facebook has now become the Vice Principal in The Breakfast Club. “Don’t mess with a bull, young man, you’ll get the horns.” And just like every well-intentioned adult in every John Hughes movie ever made, I’m pretty sure what got me flagged wasn’t the concept of sacrificing a calf—a religious practice, I want to point out, and also, every hamburger you’ve ever eaten—but rather, my use of the word “throat” in the post. The phrase that has put me on the Facebook Mail Room’s Most Wanted Poster Wall is “throat-punch.” Every time I got pinched it was for using that exact phrase.

“Well, well. Here we are.” Richard “Dick” Vernon, The Breakfast Club, 1985

I am SO tempted to start using "throat” in every post I make; full-throated, open throat, throat lozenge, throat coat, sore throat, golden throat, the North American white-throated sparrow, and so forth. I don’t think it’ll confuse the machines, but I sincerely hope that every time I use it, a ping sound goes off and someone has to read my bullshit post to see if I’m stepping out of line again.

But considering that the people in charge like to assign a two day ban, then make it a three day ban, and then lather on additional penalties if you kick about it, or just if they feel like maybe you haven’t learned your lesson, I’m not so sure they wouldn’t ban me out of spite. And let me just point out again for you that this is what you asked for; you wanted a way to not have to ever see something that might trouble you in some vague and fleeting way. Forget the scroll. Forget the block. Forget the unfollow. We need help policing content so we don’t have to do it ourselves.

This is what that impassioned plea for help hath wrought. I’m fighting faceless robots and people who skateboard to work for the right to talk about zines, movies, and pop culture in my own idiomatic way. If I didn’t need Facebook to stay connected to friends and family and community, I would have rage quit years ago.

My options are limited. I can fight the machine and lose. They’ll just delete my account and never look back. I’ve seen them do it. They suck.

I can toe the line, insofar as I’m in a state of constant vigilance, trying my best to second-guess everything that I type, taking three times as long to craft a bland and inoffensive message, knowing full well that someone could simply report it anyway and put me back in the system. That sounds nice.

I can leave, and we’ll drop off of each other’s radar completely, unless you’re on Twitter, or you’ve subscribed to this newsletter, a thing I keep asking the thousands of people on Facebook to do, to no avail. Why? Because Facebook is easy, quick, and simple. This thing means you have to check your email. Oh God. What next? Reading?

I know we’re all supposed to hate Twitter now, but I’m enjoying it more over there than I ever have. The signal to noise ratio (and by that I mean the Generation Z/Millennial admonishments aimed at I don’t know who) has dropped precipitously since most of them typed “Be better, Twitter. Do better,” and flounced off into some Discord chat room where they can excoriate everyone who Just Doesn’t Get It.

What is left? I’m having lots of interesting conversations on Gaming Twitter about—games. Well, that and the Circus Clown Train Wreak that is the WotC/Hasbro/D&D shitstorm. But that’s okay, because I’m not getting bombarded with horribleness. Some of your have assured me that, oh, yeah, it’s much worse now, and maybe for you, it is, but I never did any political engagement on Twitter to begin with, mostly because I don’t think you can argue meaningfully with bumper stickers. These days, my 280 characters are mostly spent on stuff I want to engage with: books, movies, games, popular culture. The stuff I used to talk about on Facebook.

Do you see my problem? The majority of the people on Twitter are strangers to me—nice people, all, and very funny and interesting with smart things to say. But it’s not the folks in my curated groups on Facebook that I’ve spent time and energy participating in. It’s not my high school, college, and post-college friends. It’s not my friends and various fans from my Best Geek Life.

I’m really at sixes and sevens about this. As a writer who works, sells, and is in all other ways a creative, I am beholden to The Internets. And while Substack has been bery bery good to me, and Twitter has made me hate it 37% less in the last few weeks, I was, for my sins, as Facebook faithful. Evidently, there’s nothing Zuckerberg can do to his own platform that people won’t just shrug off and adapt to.

Speaking of Tilting at Windmills...

I got into it with Kickstarter this week, as well. They weren’t going to let me participate in ZineQuest 5 because I hadn’t wrapped up my previous campaign, which funded only six months ago. I got kinda snarky with them about it, and while I won’t say it’s entirely their fault, I will point out that the rules they cited as to why I couldn’t launch were both very contradictory considering there are companies in my chosen sphere with one to three as-yet-unfulfilled campaigns all in play at the same time, and moreover, none of that was anywhere on their website where you could easily locate it.

Thankfully, they relented, and so, starting February 1st, I’ll have a new project out for ZineQuest 5 called Polite Society. It’s a series of zines aimed at letting GMs run crews of interesting thieves who pull daring heists and get into madcap capers, much like the predicament that the main characters in the forthcoming Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves movie get into. In fact, sometime in late February, Wizards of the Coast is putting out a hardcover book called Keys from the Golden Vault, a collection of 13 heists that GMs can use to run their D&D groups through.

All of that would be great for WotC, if they hadn’t spent their Christmas break engineering a trainwreck designed to undo two decades of goodwill and brand awareness. How much of a cluster does a geek-based situation need to be that it makes an episode of "All Things Considered?"

Now it appears that WotC and Hasbro has completely capitulated. They have backed up, given in to the great majority of the community’s demands, and released their game license into the Creative Commons. Good Lord.

And while I am excited about the smaller victory of getting to participate in ZineQuest next month, this news about Hasbro completely retreating is huge. It’s worth clicking on the links above to see the numbers and note with some appreciation and satisfaction that the whole of the gaming community came together as a unified front and put a major corporation back on its heels. Mind you, Wizards of the Coast still has a ton of rebuilding to do, but they have, for now, at least, staunched the bleeding that was taking place from multiple wounds. They will never completely regain all of what they lost—many people were ready to jump ship anyway, and this was the perfect excuse—but it’s not unlike Admiral Ackbar watching the Star Destroyer get taken out in the final battle of Return of the Jedi.

Personally, I’m glad that it’s over; the whole thing was taking every molecule of oxygen in the room, and had been for weeks, again, with good reason. However, I’ve still got a zine to fund, and my intention remains the same: I’ve been working on this game in one form or the other for decades. I’ve been actively writing and playtesting it for the past five years. Now that the movie has caught up to popular culture (i.e. fantasy heists), I’m willing to put my expertise up against the new hardcover release that I suspect won’t be a big seller because so many people have turned their back on “official” D&D products, but are still very keen to run heists and capers in their games.

If that sounds like you, then click through to the pre-launch page and sign up to be notified when the campaign goes live. There are early bird goals for the first six days!

And now, to help us ratchet down from what has been a stressful week, here’s the Bunker Mascot, post-tummy rub, clearly living her best life. We should all be so lucky.