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Episode 151: Risk Management and Commandfests
523 Plays2 years ago
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome back to another episode of the Goblin Lore Podcast! Today is a smaller Hobbes only episode. He recently attended the Commandfest in Richmond and wanted to discuss Risk Management and personal decision making.
Again we would like to state that Black Lives Matter (with a link to where you can offer support both monetary and not).
We also are proud to have partnered with Grinding Coffee Co a black, LGBT+ affiliated and owned, coffee business that is aimed at providing coffee to gamers. You can read more about their mission here. You can use our partner code for discounted coffee!
On another new note we continue our partnership with The Fireside Alliance. From their main page: "An independent media network and a progressive community of progressive communities". Please check them out!
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If you’re thinking about suicide or just need someone to talk to right now, you can get support from any of the resources below.
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255)Veteran's can Press 1 at anytime to be taken to the Veteran's Line
- Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741-741
- International suicide hotlines: A comprehensive resource list for people outside the US.
- IMAlive: Click Chat Now to access a live online network of volunteers through instant messaging.
- TrevorLifeline, TrevorChat, and TrevorText (LGBTQ+ crisis support): 1-866-488-7386, or text “Trevor” to 1-202-304-1200
- Trans Lifeline (US): (877) 565-8860
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You can find the hosts on Twitter: Hobbes Q. at @HobbesQ, and Alex Newman at @Mel_Chronicler. Send questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to @GoblinLorePod on Twitter.
Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art by Steven Raffael (@SteveRaffle).
Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast, and a part of their growing Vorthos content – as well as Magic content of all kinds. Check them out at hipstersofthecoast.com.
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Transcript
Introduction from California
00:00:30
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers and welcome back to another episode of the Goblin Lore podcast. This is HobbsQ coming at you today with a solo episode. So after our fourth year anniversary, the remainder of that week Alex had some guests in from out of town and the week that you're hearing this episode I am actually in the mountains of California with my family in one of my happy places. It's actually
00:00:52
Speaker
up in the Sierra Mountains in California. It's where I grew up going as a kid. And I'm there exploring with my children this week. And we wanted to still make sure that we had kind of an episode for you. So I decided to record a little something kind of special as a follow up to our fourth anniversary.
Spotlight on Grinding Coffee Company
00:01:08
Speaker
Before we get started, I just want to remind everybody about the Grinding Coffee Company. We are still in the midst of pride and they are an LGBT-ran and owned company and they help support gamers. That was their whole model in their philosophy. Their mission statement was providing coffee to gamers and also giving gamers a voice. They have partnered with us for a long time providing
00:01:32
Speaker
prizes to our charity events, just kind of being willing to retweet us. And we just are so thankful to be able to partner with them. If you do go to our link tree, which you can find at the goblin lore pod on Twitter, you will be able to get a discount for their coffee. And we do get a portion of that. So we always want to say thank you to them. We just really enjoy being able to work with them and continue that relationship.
Theme of Risk and Decision-Making
00:01:56
Speaker
So today, I want to just talk a little bit about kind of risk mitigation and kind of decision making intentionality. So the joke this year is that we have harped on intentionality over and over again. We've talked about purposefulness. We've talked about
00:02:12
Speaker
everything from mindful planning to just how we want to be intentional with how we approach topics on the show.
Attending Command Fest Richmond
00:02:20
Speaker
Today is no different because we're going to be talking about the command fest that happened at the beginning of the month in Richmond. So people know I decided to go to that event. So that was an event that I went to. It's an event that I attended. It's an event that I had a great time at.
00:02:39
Speaker
We're still in the middle of a pandemic. I mean, I think that that is something that is on people's mind. And, you know, it is something that you can get kind of at this point two years in there. There is kind of almost a wanting to go back to normal. And I think a realization that there is not going to be a normal or a return to where we were prior to this.
00:03:05
Speaker
COVID has not gone away. My wife is a physician and she has had exposures at work. We were at a children's birthday party. We found out that people had tested positive thereafter. We are seeing cases, you know, maybe hospitalizations are down, vaccines are helping, but we're also seeing kind of almost a learned helplessness in the response.
00:03:34
Speaker
I understand this. I understand the wanting to kind of return to normal, and there is an element of making decisions that does have to happen at this point in the pandemic.
Personal Pandemic Reflections
00:03:47
Speaker
I was still masked the entire time going through the airport, going on the flight itself. And I will tell you that that was not something that's common. And it was jolting and jarring for me. I have not done a ton outside of kind of my family.
00:04:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's been really it. I mean, a few events here and there where I've been outdoors with people and I've seen them, but I mean, I'm not returned to my life the way that it was before. I wear a mask everywhere I shop. It's not no longer required, but it's a decision that we have made as a family, that we are going to try to minimize risk as much as we can, knowing that, you know,
00:04:35
Speaker
We have had to make choices on where that might fail or may not always be the level that we want it to. Our most glittering example is having a child that is three years old and at a daycare. That's always been our vector even before she turned three. She's been in daycare. And right before Christmas, that happened. She had her first exposure since she had started her daycare in her classroom.
00:05:05
Speaker
And it was Omicron. It was highly contagious. My wife, who was double-vaxxed and booster, one of the first boosters available because of her profession, same with me. And my wife and both of my daughters, including the one-month-old
00:05:23
Speaker
you know, tested positive. I was the only one in the household who didn't. And, you know, we can be thankful. There was, you know, mild cases. They were kind of sick for a couple of days. Daughter got to stay home for two weeks, wouldn't hang out with her new baby sister. But we're lucky. We don't know the long-term effects. We still are taking precautions in the ways that we can.
Event Safety: Masks and Vaccines
00:05:45
Speaker
And now I'm going to talk about the duality of that, which was I chose to go to Richmond. I made that decision.
00:05:51
Speaker
I did not make that decision in a vacuum. I made that decision with my wife, with my family, with the recognition that being social is an important element. And I want to be very clear about this because I think that there has been a tendency to want to say that we're ruining kids and we need to just give it up and not
00:06:14
Speaker
worry about this. It's just the flu. Everybody's going to catch it. And we don't need to care. We have to go back to normal. And I think that there is this idea that the lack of social interaction is dangerous. We don't know the data yet. We have preliminary stuff coming out about suicide rates and mental health symptoms. We know that there is increases in depression. We know that isolation and
00:06:43
Speaker
having to step back for things is impactful. We also know that there has been a pandemic that has been killing people at a very high rate. And even in this era now that we're at where things are reopening and precautions are being lifted, it's not like we're out of the woods. It's just we have started to shift our view. And this is not necessarily something that I'm happy about.
00:07:14
Speaker
I am thankful that I went to an event that still had a mask mandate and still had a requirement for either a negative PCR or a vaccine requirement because it's not happening at future events, it's being dropped. And I would not have signed up for this event if those things weren't in place.
Balancing Social Needs with Risks
00:07:35
Speaker
I wanna talk about this because even with everything that was in place,
00:07:42
Speaker
It's not like the risk moves to zero. People that were at the event, and I think I am very thankful for this, they announced onto Twitter that they had tested positive after the event. And these are people that I know. These are creators that I saw at an event. Decisions were made to go even
00:08:07
Speaker
And I don't know, I'm kind of fumbling because the purpose of this is to kind of recognize that I wanted to be able to go see friends. I wanted to be able to go be as safe as I could and still start to have these human connections that are very important to me. On the fourth anniversary episode, I did allude to the fact that
00:08:32
Speaker
We have had many guests on the show that I have never met in real life and Richmond was a place that I was able to actually get to see a person's upper part of their face or you know, I was able to sit down and have a conversation one-on-one without a microphone or a screen or distance between us and as a psychologist and as a person who is
00:09:00
Speaker
an ambrovert, I guess that would be the term. I've talked about this on the show before. I am kind of somebody that needs some level of extroversion. I feed off of kind of other people, and I need time to recharge. That's where I think my introversion comes in. I talk about the ambrovert kind of piece. I was able to hang out with Chase, who has been on this show more than anybody outside of me, Alex and Joe.
00:09:28
Speaker
They were amazing. They were somebody that I have wanted to sit down with and to get a photo with and to exchange a handshake or a hug or exchange stickers. The things that I would love to do with a person in face to face, I was able to do that with Chase.
00:09:48
Speaker
I was able to see Anthony Waters, and I talked a lot about this on last week's episode. If you haven't listened to it yet, we kind of ran through our top four episodes out of the first 150. But I was able to meet Anthony Waters, who came on the show and was very vulnerable in talking about his father's death and talking about mental health.
00:10:10
Speaker
I was able to sit across and next to somebody that I had developed a connection with even before I'd had that chance to actually see them, which is something that can be difficult for me to do. I have made a host of friends in the CEDH world, for instance, which is a new kind of community to me that I never would have had cause to necessarily see or do something with before this event. And I got to sit down and just talk to them and play magic with them.
00:10:40
Speaker
I got to meet somebody like Hermit Druid from Canada that I've had just so many interactions with over the course of the last year, year and a half that I was able to go out to food with. And that's where we get to.
00:10:55
Speaker
There still were events that were risky. I went out to eat with people. I'm not going to be wearing my mask there. I was N95'd up for the entire time I was at the convention. Most of the time if we were out walking, if I was done eating, I had that mask back on. I didn't have it on me at all times.
00:11:19
Speaker
was making choices at each step of the way of how I was going to engage. And I'm saying this because I think that we need to say it out loud. I think Ryan, so Barbarians would one, he kind of mentioned this and was retweeting and really kind of asking creators to be open and upfront about this. I talked about doing my testing because there were a couple of people that tested positive. I had spent time with the lobby con and I'll get to that.
00:11:48
Speaker
And so I knew that I was at least a mid-risk exposure. These are things that I had to contend with. I came home to my family.
00:11:57
Speaker
I tested it when I got home, but we know there's an
Guilt and Intentional Decisions
00:12:00
Speaker
incubation period. I was negative when I got home, but I continued to test and I continued to talk about it online. And part of the reason I'm doing this episode today is to talk about this. And I'm not trying to shame and I'm not also trying to excuse or just take that attitude of just return to normal because I, once again, I don't think that there is a return completely to normal.
00:12:26
Speaker
We're talking balance. We are talking risk mitigation. We are talking intentionality. You know, I thought about this stuff and I.
00:12:39
Speaker
made decisions each step of the way about when am I going to put my mask on? When am I not? How close am I sitting to people? If I am still sitting at a table, am I sitting right next to somebody without a mask on while we're playing a game of magic? Or am I trying to still put some distance? And I saw a lot of this throughout the weekend. I saw people with varying levels of comfortability and I saw people that were
00:13:07
Speaker
making these decisions for themselves. And these decisions are going to be different for each of us. It's weird to me being two years into something that impacted my wife and I's decision of when to get pregnant. And we still didn't dodge
00:13:27
Speaker
the fact that our daughter ended up getting COVID, both of them. I am fortunate in some ways with my job that I do a lot of it by video. We talked a lot about teletherapy, the rise of that, and I think that we're going to continue to see it. But I'm now seeing people in the office and there's precautions in place at a hospital, but I don't fully know.
00:13:57
Speaker
You know, I'm looking at this and I don't know how long this episode's going to be because I don't know everything of what I have to say. And so it's a little rambly and I'm going to just acknowledge that. I mean, that's what our solo episodes can be. But I'm just wanting to kind of have people be aware of why I made the decision I made.
00:14:16
Speaker
I hung out with people after hours in the lobby. There's photos of it. I wasn't shying away from it. I was trying to be very clear and be transparent of what I chose to do. But there was me thinking about it. This isn't some post hoc explanation or trying to explain away what I did. I definitely had exposed myself to more risk than I had at any point prior in the pandemic. I mean, that's just the easiest way to say it.
00:14:44
Speaker
I was having fun, I was playing games, I was drinking while I was doing that, so I did not have a mask on while I was playing these games or sitting around talking to friends in the lobby. I was out to eat. Like I said, food was a big part of my weekend. I love food to begin with. Richmond had amazing food and we went out for almost every meal.
00:15:10
Speaker
I felt uncomfortable at times. I felt like I wasn't doing enough. I felt an incredible amount of guilt. I had this discussion with my wife when I came home and realized that a day after I got back that people had tested positive already that I had been around without a mask. Now, I can't tell you how long or what distance I was, but it's a risk.
00:15:35
Speaker
I started feeling an incredible amount of guilt. That's my brain anyway. Even though I had made a decision, I had weighed pros and cons. At the end of the day, I was put in the position where I had to think about, did I now put my family at risk?
00:15:57
Speaker
I've been lucky so far. I'm COVID free. I have not had any, you know, I've done testing. I've never had a positive test. I haven't had symptoms. I am likely finding out of the woods. And it was worth it to me to go. It really was.
00:16:19
Speaker
I have the people that I spent the most time with are people that I have grown incredibly close to during the pandemic.
Online Friendships and Reconnection
00:16:26
Speaker
And I highlight the fact that online friendships are things that we cultivate and we develop that are just as real as anybody that I've known and spent time with in person. The old way of me kind of making friends.
00:16:43
Speaker
I've experienced some of this in the past with meeting people from Twitter either at GPs or at Vegas, but never after this long of a break and with as close as I have become to some of these people online. I was having this discussion at work earlier this week when I presented on kind of the use of
00:17:04
Speaker
gaming in therapy. And I got some of this kind of stuff about online culture and the stigma that's still associated with it and even some remarks that were not meant to be, but I think people downplaying the importance of
00:17:18
Speaker
pro-social behavior and pro-social relationships that develop in online spaces because they don't know as much about it. And the research, I wouldn't expect them to. The people that I was talking to, the people that I was presenting to are even older than I am, but I'm 43, right? I just happen to be more steeped in online culture. And I can say from anecdotal evidence that these friendships are beneficial. These friendships have gotten me through a pandemic.
00:17:49
Speaker
And two of the people that have most helped me get through some of these tough spots went and I got to spend
00:18:00
Speaker
quality time with them. I mean, I kind of joke, but I played so little magic over the course of the weekend. I mean, I played games. There oftentimes was games in front of me, but that wasn't kind of the purpose. The purpose was to connect with people. And in particular, the purpose was to spend a lot of time with people that I have grown close to and that, you know, I would
00:18:22
Speaker
I would reach out to, in a heartbeat, if I needed help. These are people that I would say, even no matter where they are in the world, I would count on them for that support. So along the way, every stop, I'm making decisions. I'm making decisions on what risk is acceptable to me.
00:18:45
Speaker
Once again, I'm not trying to justify, I'm not trying to tell people what to do. I'm trying to be transparent about the decisions that I made for myself and my thought processes that went behind them.
Privilege in Decision-Making
00:19:01
Speaker
I have a privileged background. I am in a situation where if I had gotten sick, I likely could take time off work and it not have to be an issue.
00:19:18
Speaker
I made these as decisions, these are mine. And I just want to put out there my desire or my hope that people are thinking about this, that people are approaching these decisions and these events and approaching just things in a life with intentionality and purpose.
00:19:42
Speaker
I would love to say more. I don't really have a lot more to say. I thought I would, but I realized that it's kind of coming down to that. It's coming down to intentionality and making purposeful decisions for yourself and realizing that sadly, we are at a point now where these are decisions are going to kind of continue to be at the forefront.
00:20:12
Speaker
And I'm struck by the fact that feeling like I'm almost giving up or there's learned hopelessness or that kind of the idea that I think that a lot of us were really bothered by of the belief that what we're doing is performative by getting upset and pointing these things out because well, we're still making decisions to put ourselves at risk.
00:20:35
Speaker
I don't think in any way, shape or form it's performative. I think that we are all recognizing that we are trying to minimize and mitigate as much as we can. It's not going to be perfect. It's still riskier than any point we've been in our lives. And having masks works, having negative tests to come into an event. All of these elements, having to have a vaccine, these are things that are at least going to help
00:21:01
Speaker
the overall transmission and spread and overall kind of impact. And, you know, I just don't want to get caught into this idea that people aren't able to live their life and, you know, it's going to continue to be a balancing act as more information comes out and as we learn more and we don't fully know the
Long-term Effects of the Pandemic
00:21:25
Speaker
impact. I mean, we won't, right? I mean, that's the thing that's hard about this. This is the hard part about
00:21:29
Speaker
not believing science or rushing everything is these are not questions that are answered in a year. These are not questions answered in two. We're gonna be filling effects of a pandemic for a long time on multiple levels that we don't even know yet. And so I want people to continue to be thinking about the decisions that they make. And if people come on and think that I'm being performative or that I'm, whatever it is, I mean, I would love to hear from you and to have these discussions further.
00:22:00
Speaker
If you saw me there and think that what that was about, then here's your chance. I would love to talk about it because this was not a decision that I made lightly. It wasn't a decision that I made alone. And it is basically how I approach most things in my life. And just going to kind of end here.
00:22:26
Speaker
I don't even know, we wanted to get something at least out to you all in between week and this was coming on the heels of just seeing so much discussion of it online and me wanting to encourage people to continue to post your test. Don't shy away from it. If you made that decision, I would love to see the transparency, the honesty that I did see out of a lot of people after Richmond. I've already seen it a little bit after Vegas.
00:22:50
Speaker
I think that's kind of what I'm saying. If you're making these decisions that there could be consequences, talk about them if you're able to, if you feel comfortable. Normalize testing, normalize discussing that you're making decisions at this point in a pandemic that may not be for everybody.
00:23:12
Speaker
Yes, there's going to be a degree of selfishness because that's, that's the whole point. We're all making decisions that are going to include that. And, you know, for me, the social aspect was something that, uh, I've really been struggling with and I chose. So I don't know.
00:23:34
Speaker
I just want to thank
Conclusion and Future Topics
00:23:36
Speaker
people. We're coming off of four years. Next week, we are going to be back with the second part of our look at Kiki Kiki, the second part of the mirrored reflection, digging a little bit deeper into the lore and kind of talking about some
00:23:51
Speaker
Potentials for how Kiki is actually coded within the story. But anyway, I really do appreciate everybody. I thank you. We want to thank our Discord as always, giving them kind of the shout out that they deserve. They're a community that we just really believe in and support. And I hope that everybody does what they can to be as safe as they can for themselves.
00:24:15
Speaker
And that's our show for today. You can find the host on Twitter. HotzQ can be found at HotzQ, and Alex Newman can be found at Mel Underscore. Send any questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to at goblinmoorpod on Twitter or email us at goblinmoorpodcast at email.com.
00:24:33
Speaker
If you want to support your friendly neighborhood gospel, the task can be found at patreon.com. Opening and closing music by Vindergotten, who can be found on twitter at Vindergotten, or online at vindergotten.bandcamp.com. Logo art by Steven Raffaeo, who can be found on twitter at Steve Raffaeo.
00:24:56
Speaker
Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast as part of their growing Vorthos content, as well as magic content of all kinds. Check them out on Twitter at hipstersmtg or online at hipstersofthecoast.com. Thank you all for listening, and remember, goblins, like snowflakes, are only dangerous in numbers.