#a:nr

[just-tabletop-things]

[poison-doll]

so, i woke up this morning, and anthony bourdain is dead, and ffg is shutting down production of android: netrunner. i don’t mean at all to trivialize bourdain’s death, or suggest that the cancellation of a product and a real actual human’s death are morally or spiritually comparable, but for me there’s an unfortunate and deeply saddening symmetry.

i don’t know how much the people who follow me here know about this, but in my early 20′s, almost ten years ago now, i did my level best to be a professional chef. i spent some time working in bars and in kitchens, and when i was 21 and came into some money, i moved to new york to attend the french culinary institute. it didn’t last very long. i was an absolute mess when i moved, a tangled ball of barely suppressed and disguised depression, anxiety, dysphoria, and drug abuse. i thought my passion for the industry could sustain me, but i left new york a year after i arrived, with a one-way ticket from jfk to houston, tx, where i would spend the next six months at a psychiatric hospital. i had always had a love of food, and always felt at home in kitchens, but it was, among other things, anthony bourdain’s book that lit the fire in my belly, that made me want to not be just a good cook but a great chef. i don’t have that passion anymore, and i don’t know that i could ever go back to that world, but it was an important if brutally painful part of my development as a human being. i don’t regret it.

when i started playing netrunner, i was pretty lost. a friend from high school who sometimes visited from his new home in cali introduced me to the game, and i got hooked in pretty easily. my first tournament was like two weeks after he taught me the game, and then it was a major part of my life for two, three years. i played online, i went to meet-ups every week, i travelled to tournaments in dallas, houston, san antonio. it was my dream to go to worlds, and even though i haven’t played in a year, i still thought that maybe one day i would. i made some really close friends, people who i would never have crossed paths with without the game, both online and in person, although when i stopped playing those relationships mostly faded away. it meant a lot to me, being part of a community when i was a very, very isolated person, and having something to work at, something to improve at when i was otherwise stagnating. even if it was kinda flukey because of a weird meta, i’ll always be proud of taking 2nd place at a store championship, and some of my favorite memories of that time period are driving to other cities with the weird tech bros that made up 80% of the scene, or the vague crushes i had on some other players, or the hours spent in the gay as hell slack channels trying to scheme up ways to make the scene a little friendlier to us. like, how often do you get to say you had a legitimate queer cabal with a gay agenda? goddamn

there’s a platitude that goes around sometimes that everything happens for a reason, and i’m not nearly so cruel or self-centered as to suggest that the shuttering of a six-figure product line and the suicide of an actual human occurred on the same day in order to send me, dizzy, a message from heaven, but it has got me thinking. i’ve been struggling a lot with nostalgia, with ghosts from the past. there are a lot of big decisions coming up for me: my boyfriend and i are talking about moving in together; my dad straight up asked me why we don’t talk anymore and i’m planning on telling him; and i’ve made the first steps in pursuing medical transition. i think that maybe i am supposed to learn something from the confluence of these events. i think maybe i’m supposed to keep recognizing my past, acknowledge how it’s shaped me, but move along. get to the next screen. 

become someone new.

[poison-doll]

both @mayagaster and @gamdroid tagged me in this thing, so here we go! sad white dude sings, android:netrunner injoke, and the last selfie in the set i took for my last selfie that i rejected bc i ended up looking emo as shit and framed poorly.

i’ll taaaaaag @thetroubledsoup @leafmoldandearth && @jcnathcnbyers

[runners-row]

A walk with Kit

Take a stroll through cyberspace with Netrunner's resident guru, Rielle "Kit" Peddler. A narrative pieced together from Netrunner card art.

[runners-row]

The Ballad of Dinosaurus

From assembly to... disassembly, the complete story of Dinosaurus and his best pal, Chaos Theory.

[runners-row]

We love this podcast, but this is definitely our favorite episode. The radiant Leigh Alexander joins the team to discuss NBN, and delves into the backstory of that corp's MVP, Jackson Howard. Not to be missed.

[runners-row]

Omni-Drive

 Omni Drive art by Bruno Balixa

Kit's signature console is a pair of independent drives with built-in storage and processing capability. She can offload the hard work to these drives while she focuses on achieving Nirvana with the help of her Feedback Filter and chakras. I love running as Kit, even thought she has an abysmal 10 influence points, because she is just dripping with flavor. It's so easy to picture her cross-legged with her Omni-drives resting on her knees. They're projecting various assistant programs into the net (maybe a Paintbrush, or an Omega) while she focuses on negotiating with the first piece of ICE she encounters.

The beauty and tranquility of this image is sharply contrasted by the art on this card. She's digging around in her viscera with what I assume is a Lockpick, in order to more effectively run. One of my favorite aspects of Kit is the juxtaposition of her tranquility with the incredibly invasive cybernetic modifications that she performed on her body. She has no fewer than 9 implants in places such as her forehead, her throat, and the other Chakra points.

She comes off as so new-agey and innocent, but Kit has done some remarkable violence to her body to further her mission to liberate her consciousness, as well as the consciousness of the ICE she encounters.

[rikkisixx]