Thanksgiving's Day 2024

It's that day again in the United States. Most of us will be either on the road to see family, hosting family, and (we hope) enjoy time with same.

This year in particular I am thankful for my friends online, from Oliver and the Goof Troop to my fellow Bros in the #BROSR, because there's been so much going on that is too big to directly affect such that it is too easy to fall into Learned Helplessness. Instead, by picking a space I could affect, I managed--with plenty of help, thanks to all of you--get a big idea back into the discourse and start building it up anew.

That idea is The Clubhouse.

Right now, if you zoom out, it seems insignificant in the larger hobbyist discourse in gaming. You may miss it until you look carefully at how it all went down over the year, how others took the concept and started talking it up, and compare that against the actions of others. In that compare-contrast process patterns emerge, patterns that betray the impact; there is awareness, however dim, that the Clubhouse is not just idle talk.

The #BROSR in particular converged upon the Clubhouse as a way to bring together the diffusion of ideas, experiments, and concepts together into a cohesive and coherent whole. In so doing it did the following:

• Revealed that the real hobby of Tabletop Adventure Campaigning is far larger than the Conventional Play norm of the Get Along Gang.
• Revealed that the real hobby is best expressed through the establishment and maintenance of a private social club, a Private Member Association, of functional adults that creates, sustains, and refines its own culture that results in the pursuit of self-mastery as a direct consequence of mastering the game.
• Revealed that the real hobby is inherently anti-commercial and thus cannot be commercially viable as the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play wants to believe, but instead must lobotomize the game to make it so and thus turn the game--and hobby--into something that it is not.
• Revealed that the real hobby is, put bluntly, a wargaming hobby and fails when not treated as such.

This is enough to write a manual explaining How To Do The Hobby Correctly. For this I am grateful. Thank you, Jeffro. Thank you, fellow Bros. And, for reminding me in as visceral a manner as watching Monster Hunter on Twitch allows, thank you Oliver for pointing that Persistence Greases The Wheels To Victory.

Now excuse me, as I have some turkey and pie to prepare for.