#416

Work

Well, since GoCardless has been acquired by Mollie we don’t have the annual GC Live anymore: instead we have Mollieverse, which was this week, in Brussels.

Never been on the Eurostar before, it was a very good experience. The departure lounges (both in London and in Brussels) felt a lot like an airport departure lounge which, you know, makes sense: it’s a space lots of people need to hang out in with luggage for a while. The queue at St Pancras was terrible, but the actual passport control & security check was much more straightforward than flight. I could imagine taking it for a day trip or something.

Books

This week I read:

• Dangerous Games by Joseph P. Laycock

  Seth Skorkowsky did an amazing video on this book which covers the three waves of RPG moral panics in the USA: the first wave was that players would lose the ability to distinguish between reality and fiction; the second was that by imagining demons and gods players were actually opening themselves to real occult influence (i.e., the Satanic Panic); the third that these games glamorised and encouraged murder and other immoral behaviour.

  But it’s not just a dry history, the author constructs two very compelling and well-researched arguments. Firstly, he ties these into the wider cultural fears at the time to explain why these specific fears rose up and why roleplaying games were the target. Secondly, throughout the book he refers to “frames” of truth, arguing that the post-Enlightenment world, and particularly Protestantism, have been so highly suspicious of imagination, collapsing all the ways in which something could be “true” or “meaningful” into two modes—backed up by empirical evidence, or totally meaningless speculation—resulted in a culture poorly-equipped to deal with highly imaginative games.

  I read most of this while on trains and I intend to go back through it and take notes, as it’s really well written and has a lot of references I want to look into.

• Last Days by Brian Evenson

  Not to be confused with Last Days by Adam Nevill, which is also a horror novel about a weird cult. I suppose it’s a good title for religious horror. I picked this up after enjoying Brian Evenson’s short story collection A Collapse of Horses and this novel apparently started as a short story that got expanded. It’s about a weird self-mutilation cult called “The Brotherhood of Mutilation” that draw in a guy who lost his hand, wanting to use him for their own ends. It opens with Matthew 5:29–30:

  And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee… And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee.

  It’s basically an action movie in book form, it’s horror-themed but definitely not written with the intend to instil fear. But despite that it’s great, I suppose you could call it a thriller.

Roleplaying Games

No game this week! I was away this weekend (see below).

Miscellaneous

This weekend I attended VeXpo, the UK VTuber convention. I’ve never been before, I wasn’t even into VTubers this time last year, but now I am, and I decided to check it out. It was a lot of fun.

With the Mollieverse timing, this did unfortunately mean I had to cart around a bunch more stuff with me, which was fairly inconvenient. I had to be at St. Pancras for the Eurostar at 05:30 on Thursday so I stayed in London overnight on Wednesday, meaning I had my work laptop, personal laptop, dirty clothes from Wednesday, changes of clothes for Thursday to Monday, etc. I was tempted to skip Mollieverse—these big company gatherings, they’re not that fun—but foolishly, despite knowing the VeXpo dates months in advance, I hadn’t booked the Friday off work, and attending Mollieverse was strongly encouraged so I felt bad about booking it off on relatively short notice. A lesson for next time I suppose.

Anyway, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. While I do watch VTubers, I almost exclusively watch tiny indie VTubers, so I only knew a couple of names amongst all the meet & greets, panels, and performances, and they weren’t people I’d watched. In retrospect, I should probably have just booked a couple of meet & greets at random to see what’s what. The panels were fun, that’s where I spent most of the time. I missed the concerts due to poor ticket planning on my part (they sell out very fast!) so another lesson for next year. I met a small VTuber that I follow and she gave me a sticker, and I saw a few others that I’m kind of aware of but don’t watch around the con. There were some very good cosplays too. Overall, it was a good time, and I’ll be back next year.

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