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Month: August 2019

The Six Months Hoist

It was just about eighteen years ago when I was a member of a youth parliament and we were to debate a contentious piece of legislation. It was not a hot-button issue or related to the events of the time. It was the internal bylaw which defined the age limits for the membership of the parliament. During this debate I could see that emotions were running high. I believed that the proposed changes were the right thing to do, but could also see that it was not going to be helpful to be more forceful in words. Perhaps there was some kind of procedural trick we could employ to end the debate for the moment, depressurize our emotions before resuming, but not defeat the bill and risk sending the message that the changes were not a good idea.

Aha! Right there in the standing orders: the six months hoist. We can take a little while to cool down and then move on to pass the bill, right? Wrong. Due to the way the Westminster system works, when a session of parliament ends all bills not passed are basically tossed in the bin. Being that our sessions lasted for one week per year, to move to adopt a six-month pause in one of our debates was to, essentially, pick up a pen and introduce a motion never to discuss it again. Or at least until a similar bill is drafted from square one, now with the baggage of having been recently voted down in its previous form. The pause button I was looking for simply did not exist.

The big change, if you are curious, was to define the age range to be 15-21 instead of 15-20 with an extra year available only to a 20-year-old who wins election to one of the four top leadership positions. It was the right thing to do at the time. It eventually happened, though too late for me. But that’s not the point of the anecdote.

On second thought, let’s not go to parliament. It is a silly place.

So why do I bring it up at the beginning of the eighth month of 2019, when my most recent post was close to the start of the second month of the same year? Because it was never my intention to disappear entirely. I had intended to follow up with the conclusion of the short D&D adventure I was running at the time before running more Full Steam Ahead. But one week turned into two, one month into two, and every week that I failed to post, the worse I felt about getting down to writing anything or even logging in to see if there was a comment to approve, an update to install, or traffic numbers to look at.

And so while I never got around to announcing the start of it, I am here to announce that my six months hoist is now complete. I have been running more D&D adventures that I will be unpacking in this space. There is more Full Steam Ahead in the hopper. I am getting into some other projects that are kind-of gaming-adjacent, and certainly things I can talk about from an intellectual perspective. I’ve been really getting into Don’t Starve Together despite my apparent inability to get my dedicated server up and running. I’m still alive and things are happening, but it’s going to take a few weeks for me to get into all of it.

This is not an apology. Saying sorry for not posting often enough is usually the last post on blogs that have been dormant for several years and counting. This is what trying to break out of a rut looks like. I started this project because I knew that going any further in writing and publishing starts with showing up, and so there is no time like the present to get up and get my head on straight.