Sick Days, Part 2
June's Pugsteady Update!
Hey all! I’m getting ready to fly out to visit my mom in Ohio this weekend, so I wanted to get this out to you before I left. So let’s dive in!
Work-Life Imbalance
Remember last month when I mentioned I got sick and it ended up throwing my life out of whack for a week?
Soon after, someone in my family ended up contracting COVID-19 from their workplace. Thankfully, everyone in my house is fully vaccinated and boosted, and in the end they only ended up having bad flu-like symptoms for about a week, but it builds on some of the things I talked about last month.
For starters, I want to emphasize that, by some miracle, I never actually contracted COVID myself. At least, I don’t think so: I never got any symptoms, and I tested negative the whole time. But, it’s entirely possible to be asymptomatic, and home tests can give false positives. So while it was unlikely that I had COVID, I couldn’t 100% rule it out. So I cancelled any in-person plans I had, including my upcoming convention appearance at Momocon. I talked about it a bit on Twitter:
If you don’t want to read that, no worries. The short version is that I made the decision to cancel out of an abundance of caution. And the folks at Momocon were great about it. But it did mean that I missed chances to network with other professionals and talk to fans, which meant I missed out on business opportunities.
This gets back into work-life balance. I still feel like I made the right decision, and I would do it again if needed. We weren’t sure about the upcoming visit to my mom until we did several tests. Even though it’s been over two years, freelancers still need to be constantly assessing risks, and we don’t have the chance to send someone else in our stead. Sometimes making the right decision on one side of the work/life divide affects the other side.
If anything, all this has caused me to reconsider not only how I approach vacation in my career, but how I approach health care. Which is a huge topic (particularly in the United States, where I currently live), so probably best to leave that there for the time being. Just know that when a creative in your life bows out of a convention or other appearance, you don’t need to express how disappointed you are. Trust me, we’re disappointed as well.
News Roundup!
While I unwrap another home test, just to be sure, here’s the latest news!
Onyx Path Publishing continues their year-long celebration of their 10th anniversary, and this month they’re having a sale on all sorts of products across the board! Here’s a handy link of all the DriveThruRPG products on sale that I’ve worked on!
I’m contributing to another Kickstarter! Transgressive Sci-Fi is a book of essays about science fiction films that changed the game. I talk about Blade Runner, which is not only a seminal cyberpunk film, but also a bit of a mess in release, and surprisingly not much like the original Philip K. Dick material at all. Back the campaign to find out more!
I wrapped up my Hawkeye (2012) coverage on Speechless. In case you missed it, you can get them all in the Genreless podcast feed. One episode in particular was emotional for me: Episode 5, covering the sign language issue. If you want to get an idea of how important it is for disabled people to see themselves meaningfully in fiction, this is a great episode to check out.
Onyx Path Con is coming up next weekend! You can find games to play that weekend here, with 40% of proceeds going to charity (the rest goes to the Game Masters and StartPlaying). We’ll also have panels all weekend on Twitch. Come swing by and celebrate ten years of Onyx Path!
My Media
Last month I realized my knowledge of DC comics wasn’t as robust as my Marvel knowledge, so I tried out DC Infinite, their new-ish comic streaming service. And honestly, it’s pretty great. Initially, I got it to finish up reading runs of Batman Beyond and Teen Titans, but I discovered an interesting phenomenon I haven’t experienced in a long while.
It all started with reading up on the Giffen/DeMatteis run of Justice League International, which I never finished because the whole run isn’t collected together (I have the six volumes that have been collected, but never read the later issues). As I reread my way through, I decided to try and catch up on crossovers. So, for example, when they did a crossover with Suicide Squad, I would go back and read that comic up to the crossover point. When a spin-off comic was referenced, I’d go through and read some of that as well (like Justice League Europe). I learned that Legends actually leads into both Suicide Squad and JLI, so I’ve bookmarked that, along with “The Death of Superman,” which crosses over into Justice League at a later point in my reading.
It’s been fascinating to read not in a strictly linear path, but rather bouncing back and forth, spinning increasingly outward from a central spine. It’s not something I can do with, say, Marvel comics, because I know the overlaps really well. However, this is all relatively new to me — sure, I’m aware of both the Justice League and the Suicide Squad due to pop culture, but I don’t know the specifics of these stories. So it’s almost half reading and half excavation, as I uncover more and more layers of continuity and reference.
Well, I need to get packing, so I’ll wrap it up for today. See you next month!
