Jonathan H. Liu

“America’s favorite Pokémon”: a map of the US, with every state colored yellow and a legend in the corner noting that the yellow stands for Pikachu

This is such a useful map.

Donate here to help trans folks get out of Kansas.

I'd also love suggestions on what to do for folks who can't or don't want to uproot their lives because I know that's not an option for everyone who's endangered.

I just read this one! That was a fun one--a nice way to break out of the usual time loop tropes, and also the best possible title for the book.

I just played this for the first time last week and then immediately bought a copy. :)

I used to keep them but then realized if I ever get rid of a game it's most likely going to somebody who can use the English rules because otherwise I'm not sure how I'd be facilitating that transfer anyway.

I just read Inbetweens and I wondered how much of a connection there was!
(Iron Giant is so amazing; alas Brad Bird)

"Friends" is a beloved American sitcom that aired from 1994 to 2004, following six young adults—Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Joey, and Phoebe—living in New York City. The show explores their friendships, romances, careers, and personal growth over ten seasons.

This makes my eyes hurt

Not that a grace period would have made this okay, but not having a grace period is just more cruelty piled on top of itself.

I don't have a podcast or anything but I appreciate your responses and am going to sit with that a bit.

I hear you! This is me acknowledging that I understand and even agree with a lot of the reasoning, and also still fall short in my own actions. Which, you know, is a real thing in all sorts of areas.
I can understand the reasons to be vegan and I don't have a strong rebuttal except "I like meat."

What I do: is it making me money? No, not really.
But is it important? Maybe also no.

Yes, that's true. I meant also the sort of thing I happen to be doing is giving an opinion of a game, not reporting on something because it's newsworthy. What I do is, as others have pointed out, often closer to marketing. Trans journalism is not as limited to talking about a commercial product.

Oh, for sure, that's the bigger pressure, and even though I have more games than I can actually get to in a timely manner, I'm still tempted by more.

On the other hand, I also (in theory) agree that a standard is a standard, and that the dollar amount in question isn't what makes it okay or not okay—if so, then where's that line? I don't have an answer for that. But also, practically, this is a lot of work to do for free (or net loss).

I'd love to give Re;ACT a shot, sure—please send me a DM!

The seasonal conversation about ethics in game journalism!

Anyway, there's my big long rambling thread. I suppose I should have just written something and posted it on GeekDad and been more organized. This is probably a terrible forum to have this sort of conversation. 🤷

And what I love most about having written about games for so many years is the fact that I've gotten to meet the people who make the stuff I enjoy. I didn't really enjoy the experience of writing for the NYT, despite getting paid much more for a single article than I ever did at GeekDad.

But that system doesn't really exist for tabletop games. Sure, there are a few magazines or publications, but I don't know that there are many outlets out there buying the games and then paying their writers to cover them, with no contact with the publishers or designers.

That system separates the reviewer from the publisher/designer/author, even down to the review copy. The idea is that this is the closest we can get to being unbiased.

There were all sorts of rules about what I could say and how I could say it, a strict word count limit. I had to give them citations for anything I said about the book. "It's about kids on a spaceship (see pages 1-300)."

I wrote a book review once (and only once) for the New York Times. It was a very different process. I had no contact whatsoever with the publisher or author—the NYT bought a copy of the book and sent it to me, and the NYT paid me for the review.

I saw a comment that publishers should just stop relying on hobbyist enthusiasts like me and just let magazines review games instead. Which, yeah, there's a whole system that is set up to avoid these sorts of conflicts of interest.

But honestly I don't know what else to do with the books and the games sometimes.

So I also take stacks to Powell's and trade them in for store credit, because it's one of the single places I can dump the largest number at a time. I understand that there are ethical problems with this even if what I'm getting is small fractions of the cover price and it's still not cash.

Like, it's great that we donated a bunch of books to the library and feel good about it, but in reality we offloaded this whole category of work for them that we don't see. (I spend maybe as much time just managing the physical handling of books as I do reading and writing about them.)

And even then, I can't get rid of them fast enough. I stuff them in little free libraries, donate them to school libraries, and there's still more leftover. My mom used to work for a public library and I remember they always had a bunch of donated books that were so much trouble to deal with.

I give away so many books. Back when I was on Facebook more, I would post photos of boxes of books and asked who wanted them, because media mail is cheap enough that people could get a pile of books and just cover the shipping. Friends who come to game night leave with some books too.

I also happen to review books, and the thing about books is that they are a lot cheaper than games to produce and to ship, which means publishers are not stingy about sending copies. If you're in the games world, I don't think you understand the sheer magnitude of it.