Sharrukin's Palace

I’ve been radio-silent for several weeks here. Mostly this is due to the day job, which has soaked up a lot of my time, attention, and energy over the past month or so. What with teaching courses, writing new courses, going on business travel, mentoring my colleagues . . . I’m not having a lot of extra resources to spend on creative work lately. Which isn’t to say that projects aren’t perking along in the back of my mind in odd moments, which seems to be how I often make progress on things anyway. So I’ll certainly be back to this space and pushing things forward once the weather changes.

In other news, I learned something today that severely disappointed me regarding several individuals and a publisher with whom I’ve worked in the past. Not going to name names, but if you know something about my creative history and are aware of recent events in the tabletop gaming industry, you can probably put two and two together. Still not sure what decision I’m going to make about that. How do you respond when you discover you’re associated with, working with, actively supporting someone whose other activities you find reprehensible? How do you respond when, as here, the relationship is at one or two removes? That is, your associates aren’t carrying out the reprehensible actions directly, but they’re continuing to partner with and support, and generally seem to be okay with, someone who is.

I’ve been in this situation before. A few years ago I contributed to a product written and published by an individual whom I discovered later was actively involved in the alt-right movement. I generally avoid issuing political or social opinions in this blog, but you can take it as read that I am not fond of the alt-right. Still, it was too late to back out. My name was already attached to the product in print. Not that this was ever likely to be a huge deal – I was one of dozens involved, and my contribution was minimal – but it still left a bad taste in my mouth. I resolved at the time that I wasn’t going to be put in that kind of situation again, through my own lack of due diligence.

So I’m going to have to think about this. In the meantime, I’m going to temporarily set that publisher’s products aside and make no use of them in this space, until further developments have resolved the conflict or I’ve reached a more permanent decision.