Current Post On Trae’s Blog:
My grandmother died last night. This wasn't a shock or a surprise. Her health has been on the decline, and she's been in hospice for the last month. She lived a long life, and in her final days she was surrounded by her three adult children.
My grandma was a kind woman. She wasn't perfect, but I always felt loved in her presence. She was a retired kindergarten teacher, and was still working when I was a kid. I have so many happy memories sitting at her kitchen table, and I'm going to carry those with me for the rest of my life. She was also proof that anyone who claims that you get more conservative as you get older is full of shit, because she certainly didn't.
I think it's interesting how the body processes grief sometimes. I don't know that I'll cry, but over the past month, knowing this was coming, I've felt a tension in my gut. Now that she's passed, instead of relief that tension is replaced by a sense of emptiness. That something is missing that should still be there. Something has been taken away, and I feel it.
Of course, as I wrote that, I immediately started crying... so I guess my body processes grief in pretty ordinary ways too.
I wanted to come up with something profound linking this to Beltane, which we sit in the middle of right now, but it just seemed hackneyed. Like I was trying to dig out some greater significance when the truth is death comes whenever it wants. The only predictable thing about it is that it's the end of all of our journeys. I hope that when I pass I'm so lucky to have lived such a long life with people that I love around me in my final days.
For the record, I will be fine. I just needed to get these words out while they were still in my head. I don't have some rousing conclusion or deep insight to tack on here at the end, just that gut feeling that something is missing.
Because it is.
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Well it appears the war has just begun. Time to knock Jim down peg.
Nah, nobody could have seen this coming. Hope one of them screenshotted the Facebook group Jim was running before he takes it down.
This is kind of odd, really. If Jim’s this incompetent at game-playing, he wouldn’t have been in the position he was. Something’s not right here. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not hardly rooting for Jim in this thing – but I’d expect a more insidious and harder to counter effort. This is like Superman showing up to fight Lex Luthor, and finding out all he’s got no plan, a BB pistol, and 2 guys with blackjacks or something. You’d have to wonder what he was setting you up for, given his part history. I’d be wondering here too.
Gah. Past history, not part. Reminder to me – no typing when your hands (and apparently brain) are freezing.
It could be a matter of Jim just underestimating the Internet. When he talks about keeping Garner in check when he was getting on Lynn’s case (after she first joined), he talked about distracting Garner with other tasks and breaking up any cliches. That’s all real-world, in-person matters. And all Unagi-con meetings and primary communication seems to be occurring in-person too.
It makes sense to me that you could be a master manipulator in-person, but not so much in online if you underestimate the masses and how easy it is to document/screenshot things. There’s a reason the phrase “the Internet never forgets” is around. Jim might not be taking into account simple things like this. I think this might be especially so since he didn’t know how to disguise himself as an admin on the Bork Con Sucks Facebook page.
*matter of Jim not understanding the Internet.
Oh my goodness, I am not awake. I had it right the first time. @___@
Jim is good at manipulating but he’s not thinking at the moment. He’s completely over-the-top livid and his anger is clouding his judgement. He’s grabbing at anything that looks like a weapon to use against Lynn.
Next play will be for Bork Con to mention the Bork Con Sucks FB group, which Jim will have to delete. he should have already done so before releasing the e-mail.
As an aside, it is poor form at best for Jim to have NOT redacted the contact e-mails for the Bork con staffers. That info should be considered private.
No, he’d be able to claim the un-redacted stuff is fabrication by Lynn after the fact: time-stamps can be altered.
You’d be scandalized to know just how much the average low level staffer does not know and does not want to know the dirty laundry; many have a keeping my head down and doing my job approach to getting the job done.
Now in all truth the story is going whatever way Trae wants it to go and has story-boarded it out already
I think at this point, since Jim’s the one who made it public, the unreacted version of the letter needs to go up on Bork Con’s social media and they need to screen cap the “Bork Con Sucks” Facebook page before it is deleted.
I think there’s something else that’s being overlooked. Overconfidence. Jim’s not used to ‘playing the game’ with capable people. He’s surrounded himself with people he knows and can manipulate on staff. And he’s used to being successful at it. He’s also used to playing from a position of strength, as Con chair. Now he’s playing against a team of people who are better at the game than he is (individually, and as a group).
Just because Jim managed to play the game for a long time against a group of people doesn’t mean that he’s skilled at the game, it just means that he’s better than those he’s playing against.