Regarding the Gathering in Magic the Gathering

 I love board games and card games, particularly Magic the Gathering. I love the community that content creators for Magic the Gathering wish to foster. From the Professor, to Loading Ready Run, to the incredible cosplayers, the community the content creators and designers wish to foster and grow is the kind of community that I want to belong to. An open, affirming, and diverse community with people across numerous cultural groups. However, my experience in real life has not been the same as the community being fostered by content creators.

It has been hard for me to go to any larger events like a Grand Prix or Magic Fest in the past five years. For the majority of that time I worked in a hospital where making it to an event like this would have meant my vacation, because often the nearest event was 300 to 500 miles away. I have seen from content creators that these events are (mostly) worth it. I have never been able to attend.

The bulk of Magic the Gathering communities, the heart of the game, is the local game store. Before getting into my experiences in my state, Nebraska, I think it is important to say that local game stores operate on razor thin margins, with changes from Wizards of the Coast changing the security of a location at any given moment.

I have been to a total of three (four if you count different locations) local game stores where I, as a cis-gendered, bisexual, white man have felt remotely comfortable to be myself, the Game Shoppe, Krypton Comics, and Legend Comics and Coffee. The majority of my cultural identity is deeply privileged, I am aware of that, but the rest of the nearly twenty game stores I have been to have had cultures as a store that have made me uncomfortable in some way.

Around April of 2017, I had to replace the motherboard on my primary computer, and then reinstall the OS because the motherboard was defective and dying. When I said at commander night that I had to go home early to check on my Windows reinstall update, someone at the store who did not even know my name said "because you watched to much porn?" Some staff members gave slight chuckles. 

That made incredibly uncomfortable. Pornography and a person's relationship with it is a personal issue that is incredibly complicated and tied up in gender studies and equality, and making a joke about it to someone whose name you don't even know is a sign that the culture of the place you're playing is broken.  

The store would later close, and had more offenses beyond that one, including someone remarking that the story team at Wizards of the Coast is a bunch of "SJWs", with SJW said in a tone to emphasize that he saw it as a swear word.

Shortly after the sexual harassment allegations against Owen Turtenwald were substantiated, I attended a different store (that would also later close). When I talked to a friend about Owen Turtenwald being banned from Hearthstone and Magic for life because of it, the staff member present said, "well my opinion of the #metoo movement is that we should be case by case, because I have a friend who was falsely accused and it ruined his life and I don't think it's that big a deal." A guy, literally mansplaining to another guy.

At another store where I attended a prerelease when I was out of Omaha, the store owner was bemoaning Wizards of the Coast cutting ties with Terese Nielsen, and that her incredibly hateful and transphobic views didn't matter because her art was good and she "only retweeted some things." When that is not the actual case. She actually has gifted multiple alt-right podcasts printings of her art. When I pointed this out, the store owner said "what is the alt-right anyway?"

My relationship with Magic the Gathering leaves me at a very weird impasse. I can honestly say I owe some of these content creators my life. The time when I worked at the hospital was some of the darkest in my life and I was close to suicide attempts multiple times. But the professor's next video, the next Friday Nights, or the next Command Zone podcast was enough for me to wake up and keep going. But the Gathering experience I have seen in my personal experience has been such, mostly due to circumstance and schedule that is inherently different from the community that Wizards of the Coast and the content creators wish to foster. And I will most likely be moving 1600 miles for a job later this year, if I wasn't I would be attending Krypton when COVID blows over for FNM every Friday.

Krypton, Game Shoppe, and Legend announce at the beginning of FNM that they will disqualify or ban you for comments like what I've experienced in other stores. It's why I list them as the ones worth it. My schedule had not always permitted attending those stores and forced me to go to the ones that did not have a good environment. 

And that sucks. My experience with the Gathering is so disparate. Fostering the Gathering to be a truly welcoming place requires work on all of us. It requires calling out behavior we don't like, and if a store refuses to change their culture, taking our business elsewhere. 

When COVID is over, I cannot wait to see some of my favorite content creators and thank them for their content and what it meant to me in dark times. I cannot wait to draft Commander Legends, and then build a cube with it, and add custom Wheel of Time cards to take to Magic and Wheel of Time conventions.

Futurama, The Big Bang Theory, Chuck, and "Nerd Culture"

I've been trying to figure out exactly what bothers me about the show: The Big Bang Theory. I've been trying for weeks, actually. My family loves it. Yet to me it has been unsettling for over a month. Though on the surface it seems that nerds can "finally"(Futurama beat Prady and Lorre by nearly a decade) laugh with nerds, it's not the case. We are meant to laugh at them. I've noticed for a long time that the audience is meant to relate to Penny, and to a lesser extent, Leonard. The comments about "the ridiculousness of the nerdiness", or "I get why we were bullied" motifs are unsettling. It is not done out of love of Geek/Nerd culture, but in the same vein as it has always been.

The primary characters perpetuate stereotypes about the nerd/geek, and even their profession only represents an extremely small cross section of professions of people who enjoy some of the activities (D&D, Video Games) and nerd universes (Star Trek, Star Wars, DC and Marvel). Sheldon is a recluse who would rather be by himself to engage in his loved Science Fiction/Fantasy works and his work on Theoretical Physics rather than social activities (Geek Cliché Stereotype #1). Leonard is hopelessly in love with a woman who is way out of his league, and is also passionate about certain "fandoms" more than others (Geek Stereotype Cliché #2). Howard is a man in his thirties who masturbates all the time and lives with is mother (Geek Stereotype Cliché #3). Raj is hopelessly incapable of speaking to a woman (Geek Stereotype Cliché #4). While the use of these stereotypes by themselves allows for a large section of the show's humor and plot, it reduces the narrative and comedic power of the jokes. Compare this to Futurama, a show written by Trekkies, Tolkien fans, Star Wars fans, Mathematicians, and more; the Star Trek episode of the show ("Where No Fan Has Gone Before") is deeply rooted in the lore of Star Trek and Futurama itself: to really understand the humor of the episode, someone must have been a Star Trek fan; when they make the joke about a middle aged virgin living with their mother in Futurama, they've earned it by establishing the humor and poking fun at themselves as writers, not at the expense of others. There are many shining examples in Futurama that make The Big Bang Theory fall short of humor, situation and understanding of the culture, and that is the finest one.

Inserting jokes about varying "fandoms" reduces the power of the show considerably. I personally do not have the time to be a fan of Star Wars, Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings(and its surrounding lore), Battlestar Galactica, Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, DC Comics, Marvel Comics, A Song of Ice and Fire (colloquially called A Game of Thrones) and so many more that they reference in the show (likely to try and get fans of that particular "fandom" to watch for an episode), and I am in a transitional period of my life, where work is varying from week to week. The men in this show are not at that point. They have post graduate degrees (all in Physics), and work at a prestigious university, yet still find time to be fans of all of these things, and be experts in them. It's an unrealistic portrayal in two forms: first the suspension of disbelief is thrown out the window when the writers do this, no one has the time; second, and more important, it sets up an expectation that all nerds/geeks appreciate the same things to the same degree. This is not the case at all. I have never been able to get into Star Trek or superhero comics, but I love The Lord of the Rings, and a large amount of fantasy fiction to follow it. This second fallacy of the portrayal stems from a popular culture understanding of geek/nerd culture, and is not done with the depth and care for the show that Futurama, The Guild, and Video Game High School have shown for it, as if it was written by an outsider who does not understand the culture.

Geek is chic, but The Big Bang Theory is not geek. It is mainstream to the finest. While there is a subsection of geek/nerd culture that appreciates this show, I have found myself drifting from it. My parents love it, and I watch it with them because they think it helps them understand me. I am not Leonard, Sheldon, Howard, or Raj. My parents are not Penny and Bernadette. The deepest issue I have had with this show is not that it portrays geek/nerd culture, but that it does so with no regard or love for the content of the things that geeks/nerds are passionate for. And the show has the same shortcoming in its portrayal of religion.

In the show Christians are judgmental and "fundamentally flawed" about their understanding of the universe and morality (at least Sheldon's mother is and she is the only Christianity we see in the show), Judaism is a religion to be lax on (at least Howard is with dietary restrictions), and Hinduism is reduced to racial jokes about Indians. These in no way portray the experiences individuals have within these varying traditions.

I find myself rolling my eyes at the show more and more. Every time The Big Bang Theory makes a joke at the expense of a religion or geek/nerd culture, I cringe and roll my eyes. The jokes to me have been made with those subjects as the target of the joke, and not its subject. And it reduces the power of the show and its humor to the laugh track that carries it.