My RPG I’ve been working on for 6 YEARS called GLITCHED changes your protagonist’s personality based on your choices. The game starts with a questionnaire to learn about you.
What’s the point of grinding to the bone your whole life for money if you aren’t even gonna be there to spend it…
“The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.” -Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
“The thing about money is, we can always make more, so let’s go out to eat tonight!” —My dad, after being laid-off, working odd and probably demeaning jobs so we could have dinner.
“Ah, baby, I want to buy this for you, it’s not like I can take the money with me when I go.” —My mom, when she bought me new clothes while I was between jobs.
“There’ll always be a job out there you can work, but we’d prefer you happy instead.” —Both my parents on jobs (“I can always get ya a job ditch diggin! They’ll always need ditch diggers. Hard work, but no college necessary. I can talk to the Hall.”—My proud, union dad, enthused, three seconds later.)
“It doesn’t matter what they do with the money after you give it to them. Drugs, beer, it doesn’t matter, maybe that’s what they need? How do you know?” —My dad on giving money to the homeless.
“Nah, we’ll never make any money, my husband has morals.” —My mom’s friend, fondly reflecting on the fact her lawyer husband isn’t working for a big money firm.
“Don’t worry! I’ve got this!” My equally poor friend buying me dinner when my debt card declined.
“I know we didn’t have furniture in the living room when you were growing up, but—ha!—remember Balloon Ball?” —My dad reflecting on the made up, mock-volleyball game we’d play in the open living room, using balloons. He had used electrical tape to make the court.
“I’m sorry we could never take you anywhere greater growing up,” —My mom, reflecting on our “stay-cations.” (“Why?” I asked, reflecting on all our trips to the park, zoo, public swimming pools, libraries, free theater, two dollar movie days, and her and my dad right there with me and my brothers.)
Bring poor is hard and it’s not right that it happens, but I prefer it to the hustle because at the very least, poor taught me what love is and I won’t let a shitty job deny me that.
“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, from The Left Hand of Darkness
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet
“And maybe that’s all I wanted—to be asked a question and have it cover me, like a roof the width of myself.”
— Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
“[…] the openness to revelation. Which is another way of saying, to being wrong about what is possible and true.”
— Karen Russell, from “The Ghost Birds”
But, anyway, aren’t there moments that are better than knowing something, and sweeter?
— Mary Oliver, from “Snowy Night”
“In the end I would rather wonder than know.”
— Mary Ruefle, from “On Secrets,” in Madness, Rack, and Honey
With Captain Seven and First Officer Raffi, we finally after 57 years have a canon queer Captain and First Officer of the Starship Enterprise who’ve canonically been together as a couple (and if the spinoff happens hopefully will be together again).
The new captain of the latest starship Enterprise is a pansexual woman in her 50s, and her first officer is a bisexual WOC grandmother in her 50s. That’s pretty cool. That’s pretty amazing.
