I make prodigious use of timers in my games, but my players are used to them, so this doesn’t work nearly as well as it used to.

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Did you notice that we have a working archive now? I did. There’s a weird story behind it, too. A guy showed up in the Webcomic discord (which is where the wonderful Mike Sisk helps us with his plugin) and showed me how to style the Archive function of the plugins I use to help glue this site together. It was nice of him.

Then he looked me up on Facebook, and if you follow me on Facebook, you know I don’t shy away from politics. I guess didn’t like what he saw. In a thread about the far right attempting to co-op the OK symbol as a weirdly nuanced political hate gesture, he flashed the “ok” emoji and then immediately blocked me.

I had no idea who this was, of course, but it won’t surprise most of you that my wall largely detests far right politics and especially white supremacy (“joking” or otherwise), so it wasn’t an hour before I had the guy’s life story in my inbox (nothing private — just stuff they peeled off his facebook and accounts related to his facebook — I call this dox-lite). This led to the discord admin finding out who it was, and now the guy who helped style my archive isn’t welcome in the tech support chat room, since hunting people down on Facebook to heckle them breaks the TOS of the Webcomic plugin.

The alt-right is kind of bad at trolling, I think. They convinced a huge portion of people that the “Ok” gesture is specifically white power, and then started using it to help identify other alt-right people in photos and other media. So now, surprise surprise, when they do this, people think, “oh, that person is white supremacist.” The goal was, I suspect, to create uncertainty about the gesture and to make the left who complained about it look like crackpots. Instead, what it’s done is create a sort of hyper-awareness about a half-truth that forces people onto the offensive immediately.

I’m not sure there’s a moral to this story, other than that life can get pretty strange and that the Trump era of politics has put people who’d typically ignore one another at each other’s throats instead. I want to assume the best in people. For instance, when someone tells me they’re joking, I want to believe them. I want to believe that this guy was just being flippant and then blocked me on Facebook so that he wouldn’t see my feed, and that he had every intention of continuing to be pleasant in other venues. I definitely want to believe that he knew the complexities of the gesture, and not that he believed it was a white power symbol.

But lately I’ve found that it’s wiser to take people at face value when they tell me who they are.

I’ll get the Patreon comic uploaded as soon as possible. I am still lettering it.

-B