It's been a hot second since I've been active over here. Not for lack of intention. I even have posts in mind, I do, that are variously updating on the state of my career; shredding some design choices in Dragon Age: Veilguard; talking about the metaphysics of consciousness and my deep dive into a model of reality that leads to some really woo magical thinking conclusions, but—

None of that seems important right now.

Yes, this is about the election. It's also about fascism and democracy, climate change and community, about kindness and group identity and the looming, inchoate future and where we go from here. I have thoughts chasing each other through my head trying to find something inspirational or meaningful to say, or at least something that will make someone else feel a little more okay and a little less alone right now, but there isn't much.

So here we are. Let's see what we've got:

Many unwelcome truths have made themselves known, all at once. The world is abruptly less kind than I had thought; less justice-minded; less rational. I say "rational" in the sense that it doesn't make sense, at least not to me. My entire working model of what people think is important and how they make decisions has been dismantled. I am at a loss, though not, it would seem, speechless.

The first time this happened, I took comfort, however dark, from the idea that our task might simply be to keep the knowledge burning for the next generations that things don't have to be like this. This is still true. But this is, I realize, a bare minimum. We can do better, and we should do better. I can do better.

In practice "better" can look like a thousand things. Some of us will volunteer a bounty of time and labor. Some of us will put our bodies on the line in protests and marches. For some of us, just getting through the day as your glorious self is a victory we should all celebrate. Some have skills they can apply to this task: technology or community-building, educating, counseling. Of course I've been asking myself what I have to give.

I have words.

It doesn't seem like enough.

Sure, maybe I can find a way to channel grief and rage and hope into some perfect work of fiction that changes something, somewhere for the better; the writer's eternal vanity, that.

But there is one other thing I can definitely do with words: I can synthesize a decade of theory from being Extremely Online and Extremely Progressive for people who spent that time more usefully — for my friends and family and maybe some of their friends and family, too. There are multitudes of Americans who are only now wondering about how to live under fascism, who are trying to make sense of how we got here and what to expect now. I've done a lot of reading and a lot of thinking about this, so I may as well talk about it. It might even help someone.

Well, we'll see.

This is the first of seven planned posts (and counting), most of which are already partly written. Time and energy and executive functioning allowing, I'll be putting them out every day, or at least every third day, until I've run out of things to say. This… might take a while.

We've been on this road before. Things got worse, though not as much worse as I feared. Things got better, though not as much better as I hoped. Things will get worse again now. God willing, things will get better again before much longer. There is work to do. Let's get to it.