Natterings From Nepantla

The last year or so that I was at my previous job, my team had a whiteboard with an area set aside for a calendar of the current and following month. This was used to track releases, people's time off, and other important work stuff, but pretty soon it also started collecting doodles commemorating holidays.

Adding a Juneteenth flag to it sticks in my mind for two reasons. One is that it forced me to confront the limits of my artistic abilities for drawing even simple geometric shapes. The other is that I then had to explain what Juneteenth was to everyone working in that corner of the building, except the one guy who'd lived in Texas for a couple years.

This year, Twitter and Square have made Juneteenth a permanent company holiday for their US offices, so hopefully everyone in the US software industry knows what it is now.

My company hasn't followed suit on this one, but it happens that I will be taking the day off, albeit for the less noble purpose of attending an online gaming convention. Originally this was going to be Origins Online, but it was abruptly cancelled this week. The immediate cause was a bunch of its non-white program participants pulling out over the lack of a statement in favor of racial justice, but one suspects there were pre-existing problems and this was just the last straw. (Also the whole event had a feel of being slapped together at the last moment, and perhaps this provided an excuse to avoid a logistical meltdown.)

But there is ConCurrent. It was conceived when Paizo submitted 450 game sessions to Origins Online and only 100 of them were accepted. Having already started to marshal the resources to run the other 350, Paizo decided it would run all of them anyway as a companion event. When Origins vanished, it was a simple matter of getting those 100 sessions that had been under its umbrella moved over to ConCurrent.

In case you're wondering, Paizo already made a statement on racial injustice last week.