It was a strange week with ups and downs, both in life and in my recovery.

Happened

• Monday was a confusing day at work. Let's leave it at that.
• Since I heard about it on Tuesday, I shared the new “NOS Journaal in makkelijke taal” with multiple people who I know are trying to learn Dutch. I have always liked the Japanese NHK News Easy and I am so glad we now also have this resource.
• On Wednesday I took an afternoon off to visit my dad. He’s doing fine again for now, but I want to prioritize seeing him while he is still with us.
• I’ve been slowly trying to mobilize my left foot again. I am already walking on it, but so far that has been a bit of limping. My goal for this week is to actually put some minor load on it, for example by doing some calf raises while I am sitting. It’s crazy how little power there is, but it’s also nice to see that by Wednesday, the situation had already improved so much. I even once managed to stand single legged on the left side for about 20 seconds.
• My enthusiasm on Wednesday also made me discover some exercises by following pain and discomfort, moving my feet in ways that was uncomfortable but not too painful. The videos I found online afterwards confirmed my findings: they recommended most of those movements. All the discomfort and immobility was back on Thursday, and for the sake of not rushing things I did not repeat them too much, but it feels good to be in control of the progress.
• By Friday I felt like there was no progress at all in my walking. It's a bit demoralizing, having pain and knowing that it's probably something I should "go through", but also not being completely certain if this is the correct kind of pain to be seeking out. Am I reducing the soreness, or am I actually hurting my bone?
• Saturday I went to the Boardgayming XL event, where I played Delta Green again with Y. as DM. We played from 14:00 to 21:00, so practically the whole event. Afterwards, I found A. who did not survive in his game of Nemesis (which was still going on with the other players), so we played a few times with my new game Sky Team, which is a two-player cooperative game in which you are trying to land a plane silently assigning dice rolls to all kinds of buttons and levers you need to balance. It's a really fun game, would recommend.
• On Sunday, my dad was home again, as usual I went to Leiden to visit him. My stepmom said she saw real progress in the way I walked, compared to last week and compared to Wednesday. I was glad to hear this, did some more balancing on one leg and felt indeed that it improved. I even dared to walk a bit on forefoot, and it went really well and painless. Being my own physiotherapist, looking for natural motions, guided by pain and soreness seems to pay off after all.

  Read

• The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin, introduction and chapter 1

  Played

• Sky Team, successfully landed on Montréal-Trudeau (green), Haneda (green) and Kuala Lumpur (yellow).

  Listened

• En niemand bleef onaangeraakt (podcast about the HIV pandemic), episode 1

  Watched

• Fight Club (1999)
• The Boyfriend (the Japanese gay dating show on Netflix), episode 1-4

Another week, and more recovery. I feel like I am almost back to normal now, but I am very aware that I shouldn't think that too fast.

Happened

• On Monday I went to the doctor again for my foot. We did not do any x-rays, it was mostly just a talk about how it went. She told me I can take off the weird sandal and use normal shoes, that if I have pain I should go back to the weird one, and that I don’t have to come back anymore, as I can probably heal myself on my own. In my head I heard all my international friends scream how Dutch this is, but hey, I am Dutch and I actually prefer this approach.
• Tuesday I had my first improvisation class. I notice that I blank a lot when playing D&D and I would like to be able to silence my inner critic a bit more and just go with whatever is happening at the table (or in other life situations). The first session was mostly about learning names, but it had some really interesting simple but very hard games.
• After improv I went to Prik for boardgames, which was the first time I’ve been there since my foot broke. I just stopped by for a tosti and didn’t actually play anything, but it was nice to be able to do so again.
• Wednesday I felt I practiced enough with normal shoes in and around the house, so took them to the office. Also swapped the electric car I’ve borrowed (no clutch) for my Volkswagen Up again. It’s disturbing how much a fuel car shakes and I feel even more guilty now that I drive it (short distances) again.
• Friday evening was D&D again, this time with me as DM. I intended to run a homebrew heist, but because there was so much going on this week (I don’t share everything here), I just took a published adventure which turned into less of a heist than I hoped, but was still fun.
• Saturday I went shopping and to the park, then to the birthday of M., which was a nice social activity with plenty of sofa’s. The shopping was mostly by bike, but I did use normal shoes throughout the day and that all goed every well, considering this is week 5, but I should still be careful.
• I actually notice that I have more pain in the normal sturdy shoes than I have on bare foot in my house. Granted: in neither case I walk naturally yet, but it made me want to explore something I wanted to try out for a long time, so I bought “barefoot” shoes. They fit well and walking on them is strange but not painful. Will experiment with them carefully.
• (I didn’t dare to buy the individually toed shoes – search for “Vibram fivefingers” – but I did fit them and they feel amazing and I am going to try to dare to do that.)
• Sunday I visited my dad again. It's nice that I can move myself enough so that I can actually reach Leiden on my own, and it's also nice that I am recovered enough that I can push his wheelchair through the weekly puzzle that is our hallway. Yet, although I am recovering, from wheelchair to crutches to walking barefoot, he is not and never will. But I am glad we do the things we still have.

  Read

• The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (chapters 23-26)

  Watched

• Ocean’s Eleven (2001)

At the beginning of this week, all hope for a speedy recovery seemed far away, but a week worth of healing is still a lot.

Happened

• As I wrote previously, Tuesday and Wednesday I started and finished composing a shared document about Hadini's Hotel, the imaginary infinite hotel that we use within the Boardgayming community to hold our Dungeons and Dragons sessions together.
• On Wednesday, I was in a lot of pain again. I always imagined having a broken bone as a piercing pain, but so far it has been more of a bludgeoned pain. (Using D&D terms here, in Dutch I would express this as "stekende pijn" vs "beurse pijn".) On Wednesday there was piercing pain all of the sudden. I think it's because – even though I have been very religious about wearing the weird shoe while walking – I've been taking it off while sitting down. And sometimes I like to sit down in weird poses, pushing my foot against the chair. From then on, I always wore the weird shoe even more.
• On Thursday, I saw a man who clearly recently lost his left foot. I am very grateful I have mine still, and that it heals so well so far, even though it seems to go slow at times.
• My seemingly weekly D&D session was on Friday this week, and it was the second part of A.'s first try at DM'ing. The first part was in week 2 and I used the wheelchair a lot back then, but now I actually cycled to J.'s house and walked the short distances to the elevator and such without crutches. It seemed like I was the least tired person at the table, so many people having been on holidays and festivals, but it was still nice to finish the session.
• I've been wanting to go to Subcultures again for weeks and Saturday I finally thought it wouldn't be too unreasonable to take the train to Utrecht with my broken foot. I took my Cabin Zero backpack and attached both crutches via the straps on the sides of it. I walked without them to Bijlmer Arena (which is 400 meters) and then in Utrecht I used them both all the way to Subcultures. I don't know why this boardgame store attracts me so much, but I love being there and browsing their (Indie) RPG section. I bought Kids on Bikes: 2nd edition and also visited some other stores in Utrecht before going back early again.
• Today on Sunday I went to Sassenheim and Leiden again to visit my dad. There are some concerning things, but he seemed doing better today and it was a relaxing afternoon. Today included a combined 3km of walking, and I don't have pain now, so my foot is really healing. I am curious what the doctors will say tomorrow.
• One good thing that came from the broken foot is that my arms are starting to gain muscle, thanks to the crutches. In the first week, I could not support myself with my arms for very long, but walking through Utrecht this week I noticed that has changed. Let's see if I can keep this promise to myself, but I want to keep training my arms. Thanks to running I could easily support my full body weight on one leg, and the goal is to be able to do the same with my combined arms.

  Read

• The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (chapters 16-23)

A month ago I wrote that I was now a "Game Master", as I finished the book and ran some sessions. I'm still going strong with that, although I have had the pleasure to be a player to some new GMs as well in the past few weeks.

My shared universe

Most of the sessions I run, I run within a spin-off of the Boardgayming Amsterdam community. At the moment of writing this is a Whatsapp-group with around 50 people, where the habit is to just post a poll, proposing a time, with the options "Player", "Host", "DM" and sometimes "Yes but not this date". People can then vote for the role they want to take in the session and create a new group with only those interested to actually plan the thing. The sessions are always in-person and mostly at someone's house.

The group started playing at first level because D. joined a "normal" Boardgayming event and proposed to DM some D&D games. I missed those first sessions, but later on when J. took over the role of "most active DM of the group" I joined a few sessions. And well, as I was interested and found the book, this was the easiest way for me to just try to DM myself, and that happened.

As a structure, D. invented a central hub to our adventures, which is the magical Hadini's Hotel, an infinite hotel created by a wizard, which has entrance doors in many many cities. When it was first described to me by J., what I saw was an endless tavern (in my minds eye one infinite room with tavern furniture, but with a ceiling), and Hadini was wearing a top hat. This turned out to be a bit like the whisper game: D. later described Hadini's Hotel as a hotel in art deco style ("like The Movies in Amsterdam") and Hadini as wearing a fez. The structure still worked though.

Formalizing Hadini

Thursday I read this post by P. from the RPG Night in Utrecht, a third one in his series on distributed campaigns. In his series, he talks about a few prerequisites: have a number of truths about the world, divide the campaign world into regions and give each GM complete authority over their region, and finally create some non-trivial but traversable boundary between those regions. Read the series for more.

Quite coincidentally, or maybe influenced by the earlier posts, I actually did some work to get this working for Hadini's Hotel this week. I had the idea for a while, but since we're kind of moving out of the summer break, I proposed to the other DMs to call this a new season and to create some structure. To be fair: the main problem I was trying to solve was character progression, as the whole group had been level 4 since March, as non of the active DMs (me included) felt like they had the authority to level up the PCs.

In coming up with some form of structure for leveling up, I also created a page that contained some truths about Hadini's Hotel. This was the moment I found out about the fez. The whole document can since Wednesday be found on the on-purpose old-fashionedly styled page over at Hadini.nl.

But is it really decentralized now?

The main purpose of Hadini's Hotel is to have a shared narrative starting point. Since the Hotel has doors in infinite other places and realms, we can use it to plug in any adventure to PCs who already know each other, or have never met at all. This is also it's biggest downfall though: getting the party outside of the Hotel can be a bit of an exercise.

Several players have reported their character to be "trapped" in the Hotel. Which makes no sense: they leave it for an adventure and two weeks later "oh no", we're in the Hotel again. Comparing this to P.'s notes, where he uses regions: PCs only move to another region if the player is switching to another GM. This means the player has a reason to give the character a reason to change to the other region. This also means that characters are never magically transported back to start (and thus also never against their own will).

The other thing is that there are very little shared truths. Only this week I've canonized a few important (or minor?) details about the Hotel and it's staff, keeping stuff intentionally vague in order to give new DMs stuff to play with, while still giving them some frame of reference to play off of. But the details that are agreed on now seldom influence the actual adventure.

So no, I don't think we're a decentralized campaign now. We're still a series of one-shots with returning characters.

Does it have to be?

Hadini's Hotel doesn't have to be anything, of course. But I notice I am longing for a bit of consistency between sessions, both as a DM and as a player. Running completely unrelated one-shots every time is just a lot of work, as very little work you do for that one session can be carried over to the next one. And players get the feeling they are stuck within the Hotel, especially if they keep being the same level for months.

With the level issue solved, I think Hadini's Hotel can be enough of a structure for me. I am thinking of creating a world on my own, and just use the Hotel as a bridge, but still keeping the principles of the distributed campaign in mind. This will give me some factions and world events to build on in between sessions, and it could be a starting point if someone else also wants to DM in the same world.

New players could also just create a character in this new world and never be at the Hotel. I'll just inform them that it's an option to also be native to some other world if they want to be, as the Hotel can take them here, and they would still have access to the one-shots provided by other DMs using the old structure. If I do accept PCs native to my world, it does mean I would not always start the adventure in the Hotel itself, but just resort to some hand-wavy "you have been hired" kind of thing.

The last thing I want to start playing with is the idea that at the end of the session, the goal for the next session is determined. This is an idea from P.'s post about his open table for Mausritter, and I think it could work for me too. I have ran a "proactive" one-shot that is turning into a two-shot for another group of friends, and I really like the preparation style of just updating the state of the world based on what happened at the table, and keeping track of actual character goals and coming up with twists and backstory for them. I want that in Hadiniverse too.

The first session of this new "season" is next Friday, and I guess I will keep you posted.

Let's start some week-notes, because my life had a bit of an all-changing this week and I wanted to capture and share some of it in a structured way. Also, I've been wanting to track what I read and write for a while, but individual posts feel too much of a hassle. Let's see if this sticks – I wrote it in a draft file during the week, which worked well, and I even managed to remember to post it!

Happened

• I broke a bone in my left foot last Saturday on my way to a final Pride party. Of course I was only able to see a doctor on Monday, because "if you walked home, it is not broken". How else was I supposed to get home? My own pain tolerance also fooled me into thinking it was probably not that serious.
• For the first week, my leg is in a temporary cast, and only tomorrow a doctor is going to predict how long this is going to take. I therefore cancelled a lot of plans for this week, but I still have my hopes up for the coming week. I did however change my ticket for a 14km trail run in the end of September to 7km. I have no idea if that is doable at all, but at least this way I increase my chances. I really hope I can participate (no matter the time) in the 7heuvelenloop in November.
• While I was able to get crutches at the hospital, I also ordered a wheelchair and a special chair for showering. I got quite handy with those tools very fast, but I also cannot think how I would arrange daily life on my own without it.
• I went to Leiden for a night and a day, which was nice, but also challenging, because normal things ('sure I can get up the stairs sitting backwards') quickly became very complicated ('okay but how do I get off the ground now that I am on the second floor?'). Luckily my stepmom provided me with a few tools and groceries and drove me back to my own single-floor apartment, and it was just a lovely break of the week.
• By Thursday I had modified all kinds of things about the wheelchair: I added a shopper in the back, a small pouch to the side, removed the leg stand on the right side, and even attached a spare Philips Hue light switch with some tie-wraps. Sure, the situation sucks, but let’s make it as cool as possible.
• Saturday I played Delta Green with some friends who were so kind to move the session to my place. It's a roleplaying game in which you are part of a secret organisation that investigates occult things, and our (first time) DM Yicun chose Amsterdam as our setting, with the 3rd of August 2024 as the date. This meant that during the sesson, somewhere on Dam Square a Sebastiaan Andeweg was breaking his foot. I wanted my character Stefan Lennips to be there with a sniper or something, but unfortunately, he was caught up in an investigation of an apartment somewhere in West. Very strange things were happening there indeed.
• Today I discovered that there was a third point on the paper they gave me at the hospital: not only should I keep my leg high and keep the cast dry from any water; I should also do some exercises with my toes, every hour. This was a total surprise to me: I have been holding my leg as still as possible for the whole week, hoping that would speed up recovery. Tomorrow I'll hear how much this mistake will hurt me in the long run, but I am not too happy about it.

Read

• A Game Master's Guide to Proactive Roleplaying by Jonah and Tristan Fishel (parts, not finished)

Watched

• Dimension 20's Fantasy High, season 1, episodes 3 to 14

The only reason I dare to write any of this is because Henrique wrote about the positives and negatives of his new workplace.

I have a relatively new job too, since March, and one of the things I struggle most with is that my coworkers are much less "my kind of people" than I used to have around me in the previous company, which unfortunately went bankrupt. They are still nice people and most of them mean well, but I don't feel at home.

Last Friday, during lunch time, I found myself suddenly in a homophobic conversation among the three other coworkers at the table. It was the kind of conversation where straight males find an anecdote from their past where they were confronted with homosexuality, and then distance themselves from it by telling how they rejected it in the moment. The group will then encourage this by confirming they wouldn't have that either, and then someone else can take the turn to tell such an anecdote.

Being in the conversation felt like being in a slow train wreck. I looked up from my phone, wondered what was happening here, but then it not only continued, it worsened, with the anecdotes just piling up. It is very hard for any person to break such a chain, even for allies willing to change the subject, and I as an open gay person (to them too!) just did not how to handle this. When the conversation ended I walked away, did a solitary walk around the block and packed my stuff to work from home the rest of the day.

The reaction of my teamlead was good: we scheduled a meeting with someone from HR. After the meeting, I talked it over with two of the coworkers that same Monday, and with the last coworker yesterday, as he wasn't present anymore on Monday. With this, everything should be fine.

But I notice I still feel bad. To be fair, I felt much better on Monday. The reactions of the first two coworkers were really good and I noticed how completely at ease I worked on Monday afternoon. I knew I belonged, that I could sit there behind that desk, that it was my place and that I was valued. That is a very important feeling.

The third coworker was back on Tuesday, and this is the coworker I have caught with homophobic and racist comments before, so I felt a bit more nervous going into this conversation.

He didn't notice there was something wrong with the topic, and he said he did not have the intention of hurting me. I said I could try to help him by being more clear about when a topic wasn't suitable. He agreed. I said that I am actively withholding parts of myself and my opinions from lunch conversations, because I know he has different political views. He said that yes, he is that way, he likes to ventilate. At the end of the conversation the teamlead asked if I wanted to add anything. I said that for that moment, I did not.

I was already dissatisfied when we walked out of the room. I gave my coworker space to be himself (as I always try to) and hoped he would return the favor. He took the space, but offered none. In a way, I now made it my problem to wait for the next homophobic moment. I now have to be watchful again, because it might happen again – dare I say, will happen again. The first time it will be mild, but if I let it slip, it will come back bigger, until we are at full homophobia and full racism again.

I mean this last part is obviously speculation. But it reflects how I envision the situation to go, and how I lost that feeling of being able to just be, to just focus on my work without having to worry about what conversations are happening around me. Inclusivity is an effort, and it should not be on the shoulders of those who are in some minority.

In the conversation with HR, they said they were alarmed because I said "I have as much right to this job as them". Conversations like the one at lunch are a way to subvert that right for minorities, because it makes them be on guard when the straight white cis males can work with all their focus. Help, I even think I played this down a bit for HR, just because I didn't want them to feel so uncomfortable with the thought of homophobia in their company. It wasn't aimed at me right? Maybe they didn't mean it like that? But no: it was very toxic and it should not have happened. And: it is not my job to educate my coworkers.

I don't exactly know what note I want to end on. I guess I want to just thank you for reading. Trying to understand each other and to see life from their perspective is the best thing we can do in these matters.

Today, a discussion spawned in a queer boardgaming Whatsapp group I am a member of, about the boundaries of cheating, the value of rules and about competitiveness and fun.

In general, I like to think of myself as 'not competitive'. To me this means I don't try to win in games, but to just enjoy the experience. In the discussion I shared that I sometimes make smaller moves when I have a big lead, to even the game a bit. Not everyone in the discussion liked this.

To give a bit more context: I play the game of Go and I am around 7 kyu. This means that if I go to a tournament, I have no chance of winning a top-3 position, but against someone who knows all the rules but hasn't played before, I have a chance of winning that nears 100%. That's not my style of winning.

To me, the experience of the game is just much more important than winning.

Until someone is holding back

Someone in the discussion said they found it unfair to let someone play with a handicap without them knowing it. I have never thought of my 'holding back' in this way, but I think they have a point. Players are doing their best and they expect me to play to my full ability as well. Holding back undermines the base of the game.

A story related to that: I was playing Ticket to Ride a lot with housemates and they were really fanatic about it. I could just never win: they always completed all their routes, they always went for the longer connections (those get more points) and in general they played efficient.

Then later I joined another friend group, who were already playing Ticket to Ride a lot. I joined their game and won by a huge margin, not just once but several weeks in a row. That is the kind of experience where I feel bad about winning.

But on the other hand: I only learned how to play well because the housemates did not hold back. And my friends also got better because I did not hold back in those first games. Not holding back makes everybody improve their understanding of the game.

The weight of winning

There is another part of not being competitive, which might have to do with the way I look at myself and others. In the past month, I have done a lot of reflecting on self-acceptance and feelings in general. I notice that not wanting to win also has a component of not wanting the attention that comes with it.

And it's not really attention I dislike, because I have it even more in a group I know very well and with people I value a lot. I think this is because the nature of being the 'winner' kind of places you above the rest of the group. It is this aspect I dislike.

But then again: if you agree to play a game, you agree that there will be a winner (depending on which game you pick, of course, but most games work this way). Someone has to fill that role at the end of it. For me personally, I think it would be good to explore my competitiveness a bit more, seeing what happens if I actually try to win.

Trying to win is a bit scary too, because if I actually try, there is still the chance that I loose. It is about valuing myself enough to say "yes I won, I am the best this time", as well as forgiving myself enough to say "I tried and lost, and I am still okay". Therapeutic boardgaming, I guess.