The hills of West Virginia are deeply lush in the summer and the humidity of the rain forest weighs heavy in the lungs. Overnight, a thick, cool fog will steep the land, lasting just before daybreak, when it settles onto the grass as dew.

In the year 1994 I worked as a disk jockey at the local (and only) alternative nightclub in Huntington. I was going through a lot and my thoughts were always chaos. Many were the nights that I would come home from work at four in the morning, restless, and walk through the fog and the peace.

I enjoyed the stillness while coming down from the buzz of working and would ramble far from the house. It was a ritual.

One night I met a dog. The fog was exceptionally thick and so I heard his paws padding on the asphalt before his silhouette emerged. He was a golden color and short-haired, a magnificent animal. He didn’t have a collar but was clearly cared for.

The dog walked up to me but refused a pet when I bent down, hand outstretched. He made a chuffing sound and started walking away before stopping and looking back. He chuffed again, and when I walked towards him, he started walking further.

Lone dogs were not uncommon there and then and I assumed he was a neighbor’s charge. However, he was leading me somewhere. I followed.

We walked down Hammill Road and onto South Altamont, which was then paved with gravel which crunched under my beaten Chuck Taylor’s. The dog was growing more agitated, chuffing louder and with greater frequency.

Eventually the dog cut off the road, into the deepening forest. The fog flowed through the trees and the moonlight cut through the canopy and here was an earthy smell of renewal.

I felt drunk and foolish, following a stray dog through the forest. I knew these woods by sun; at night they were foreign, but I wasn’t afraid: this was my home, and I was merely seeing another side of it.

The dog chuffed louder and picked up its pace, heading up the hill, leaves crunching under-paw. I knew where we were supposed to be – or at least I thought I did – but we must have slipped around the house I knew was sitting off the road because I never saw it.

A quarter mile from the road the dog let out an actual bark. Not a bark of fear or anger, nor one of warning. It was a bark to attract attention, and that’s when I heard it.

From the top of the hill, a low rasping through the fog, like someone sucking in a big breath, followed by a scream, loud and abrupt and terrifying, more so because it was staccato in nature: “AHH-AHH-AAAAH-AAAHHH-AAHHH” echoing through the murk of the forest.

A figure rose suddenly in shadow, slippery, and spread what I was sure were wings out through the pin points of moonlight. It seemed to me to keep getting larger and more indistinct; time was suddenly meaningless to me.

The dog ran towards the shadow. I did not. I couldn’t run. I couldn’t move at all. I felt adrenaline drop down my spine and my legs twitched and the air tasted metallic and foul. The figure seemed to shrink, and there was a quick breathing sound, like a “hesh-hesh-hesh”.

Then, just as suddenly as it happened, it was gone. So was the dog. I stood still for the longest time, hoping that I was invisible in the dark. My heartbeat was loud enough to hear in Kentucky.

I sat down in the leaves and waited for my heart to normalize before creeping as silently as I could back to the gravel, so that I could go home, to my dog.

I grew up hearing that the Mothman was a portent, a signifier of pending change or a reckoning. Within three months I had moved across the country to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I’ve remained to this day.

I have some ideas about what that actually was. I think it was a hobo and his dog. I think he stood up quickly, trying to scare me, or summon the dog. I think he was more scared of me than I him. I think he ran up and over the hill, taking his dog with him.

At least that’s what I hope happened.

I need to open this entry with a trigger warning. It isn’t possible to talk about defending against harassment without being exposed to it.

That said, here we go.

I strongly believe that I have a duty to try to prevent harm from coming to those who choose to use the things I design. This means that I need to think about the bad parts of the system, which often isn’t very pleasant.

I want to talk about Anita Sarkeesian and the horrible things that have been happening to her over the past years but first I feel like I need to establish some street credentials.

Back in the year 2011, several employees of the Wikimedia Foundation were put up on the site’s yearly fundraising banners. I was one of these people. I was a very successful banner candidate. I’ve written about this experience before but I wasn’t very expansive about the darker side.

Whenever my banner went up for a test run, I could literally feel the internet turn its attention to me like the fucking Eye of Sauron. Hundreds of tweets, LinkedIn views, Facebook posts. Pow, pow, pow. Lots of it was fun and exciting. Some of it was . . . not.

It’s a bit of a bummer to be told by random strangers that you look like a pedophile. Almost especially when they don’t know anything about you.

Back to Anita.

I don’t want to write about Gamergate or the state of the art of misogyny on the internet but I need to provide some context.

Anita Sarkeesian is a feminist game critic. She produces a series of educational videos about how sexism pervades the game industry. She does not, in any way, call for censorship or banning of topics or anything like that. She really only says, “just be aware of what’s happening here and maybe try to do better.”

For these statements, she has been continually bombarded with harassment through every possible means available to trolls on the internet.

In early 2015, she posted a blog entry detailing a single week’s worth of harassment. Scrolling through it is an inexhaustible stream of sewage and hatred. Some of it is ironically self-aware.

Let’s scroll through a miniscule amount of Anita’s harassment.

I dare you to click over and scroll through the full list. See if you can get through Monday.

Anita gets thousands of times more hatred than I ever did. I almost buckled under the weight of the sewage directed at me. I can’t imagine how strong she must be to keep going.

I’ve not been very scientific in my investigations but it appears that only about half of these accounts have been suspended or blocked. Not that such action matters much: these shit-goblins simply create a new anonymous account and let the good times roll again.

This is the face of evil. Beelzebub with the thousand eyes and mouths.

It’s a true failure on Twitter’s part. One they have acknowledged in public but (at the time of this writing) have done nothing to address.

When you design a product without understanding how it will be used for evil, you are designing poorly.

On Trolls

Let’s take a moment to understand the basic mindset of internet trolls. There are, as near as I can tell, three primary motivations that any one troll will have at a time.

Understanding these things will help you defend your users against them.

To Defeat the System

These trolls want to break the system just to break it. To do it for the lulz or the thrill of doing it. The desire to defeat systems (hacking or cracking them) is a deep part of hacker psyche. They aren’t necessarily motivated by evil but they often will open the door for others who are.

These people will find holes in your systems. They do it just to find them. But once they’ve found them, they nearly always share these holes with others.

To Subvert the System

Trolls who subvert a system intend to use it against the spirit of the system. This is often for laughs but sometimes it has very, very dark results.

In 2008, Christopher Poole was elected as the most influential person of 2008 by Time Magazine, beating out Barack Obama, because users of 4chan figured out how to game the voting software. This year’s Hugo Awards have been hijacked because someone figured out how to bend the rules to their favor. No big deal, right? No one is getting hurt, right?

Some horrible people use Secret to disseminate revenge and child porn. Secret’s not a great way to do bulk distribution of child porn, though. Embedding zip archives of this stuff into svg files and uploading them to a site like Flickr or the Wikimedia Commons may be, however. Maybe as large attachments in un-sent emails on any one of a thousand free-to-use web mailers.

To Weaponize the System

This is when your system or design is being used against you or another person in a hostile, damaging manner. This nearly always happens because of “Not Thinking It Through”.

This may not always happen directly in your product, mind. Data leakage may lead to someone being doxxed on another site, which may then lead to a swatting. Or worse.

Consider the proud young parent posting photos of their child at play to Facebook with open privacy settings. Are there things in that photo where a predator could identify the location?

Mitigation Strategies

How can you prevent your product or design or system from being abused? How can you deal with it?

Well, there’s no silver bullet on this. There are a series of strategies you can employ, though. Many will not apply. You will probably need to use multiple ones, each at differing degrees of strength or opacity.

Some of these strategies suck, but I’ll include them for completeness’ sake.

Ignore Everything

Just do jack and shit about it.

This is the worst strategy. You can do it – and some companies appear to remain successful while doing so. This is the way that car companies handle recalls: only deal when there’s sufficient blood on the pavement to affect the bottom line.

I personally find this to be odious and unethical.

Shut it Down

Just prevent anyone from doing it at all. This typically means shutting down your application entirely. It’s often a last-resort solution.

PostSecret had a short-lived application that allowed users to post their own photos and captions. It was pulled when people starting posting porn and gore because there were no features to limit this and there was insufficient moderation to work at scale.

This is not a good mitigation strategy because everyone loses.

Troll Personas

This is a strategy for understanding your weakness. Many design teams create personas for the users they want to service. The customers they want to have. Good personas are often an excellent tool for helping to understand the business needs of your product or market. These personas are almost universally nice, however, and always assume good faith on the part of the persona.

I say to you thus: you must always make at least one “troll” persona. You must learn to think like your enemy. Think about their motivations and how they will subvert your product to aid them.

Limit Feature Strength

This is reducing or intentionally crippling your product in order to protect your users.

Years ago I worked on a site that was intended as a social and games site for children. They wanted to have a chat system. Obviously, we wanted to make sure that foul language wasn’t a part of it.

It would be easy to write a series of regular expressions so that the chat catches and censors Carlin’s magic seven and all variations. It’s not so easy to catch “Hello, little girl, what time do you get out of school?” or “I am going to put you in a wood chipper.”

This is why Nintendo’s chat systems only allow you to pick from canned statements.

Banning Wrongdoers

Very simple. Have a very strong code-of-conduct and brook exactly zero violations. You must be merciless. You must not allow for rules-lawyering. Identify bad-actors and get rid of them.

Wikipedia has some editors who are simply horrible, toxic individuals. The way they conduct themselves and talk to new users drives new users away forever. They are allowed to remain because there is always some bullshit reason why the latest round of bad behavior is “okay”.

This is the type of behavior that creates gender gaps.

Educate Users

You can educate users as to the bad things that could potentially happen and things to prevent risk.

The biggest problem here is that no one wants to read a bunch of snooze-fest documentation. I didn’t join Facebook to have to take a class about it. Sometimes you can put up interstitial dialogs (like an end-user license agreement) but are you ever really sure that the user understands this?

Does the proud parent really understand that the photo of their daughter’s recital they just uploaded is geo-tagged? Did they think about the fact that they took it at the school? Do they really understand what “Friends of friends can see this” means?

Deny Anonymity

Simply prevent people from posting or using the service completely anonymously. Allowing pseudonymity is fine and even great (and recommended). Just make sure that there is a way to tie any activity back to a specific user.

Purely anonymous culture is fairly toxic so you don’t want that anywhere near you. There’s a reason moot stepped down from running 4chan. But you don’t want to force “real names”, either, because that will probably open you up to other scenarios (like dead-naming transexual people).

Access Control Systems

Give users controls over who can contact them and how. This nearly always requires both white and black lists to work along side a default setting.

Livejournal does this very well: my private posts are only readable by those I’ve set as “friends”, and I can even write elaborate rules about posting only to groups, or to specific people.

Facebook has this kind of fine control, too, but it falls apart very quickly. There are too many options and degrees of visibility and the lack of any serious group support makes managing access difficulty.

It should be terribly easy to add someone to a block list. Press-and-hold on a tweet and I can block it in one tap. Blocking someone on Secret, however, requires me to first read the offending secret (which usually contains a photo of gore or revenge porn), report it, and then I can block the user.

Shadow Reputation Systems

This is a great method but it requires a lot of research and technology. You’ll need to instrument everything in your product and identify several patterns of behavior used by your bad actors.

When your system sees someone engaging in these behaviors, you silently and secretly drop them off into the bucket. This is called shadow-banning or hell-banning.

For example, say your product is one that allows your users to rent out extra rooms in their apartments for short-term stays. If a new user joins your site and then their first several actions are to browse exclusively female profiles, you might be able to determine that they really aren’t there for the rooms but instead to creep on women. The system could then silently prevent messages they sent from arriving at their targets and they themselves may never appear in searches.

In order for shadow-bans to work, you cannot allow anonymous access to your site. You must sit behind a log-in wall. The reason is that if the banned user can see that their comments are not being seen, that they are invisible, they will know that they’ve been shadow-banned.

Ask Questions

When all is said and done, when you’ve set your ideas to paper, you have to sit down and ask yourself a very specific question:

How could this feature be exploited to harm someone?

Now, replace the word “could” with the word “will.”

How will this feature be exploited to harm someone?

You have to ask that question. You have to be unflinching about the answers, too.

Because if you don’t, someone else will.

For many years, when asked about getting ear piercings or tattoos, I would say, “I’m going out the same way I came in, with no extra holes or colors.”

That turned out to be a lie.

I (currently) have five tattoos, inked into my flesh in seven sessions, over the course of around 15 hours of my life. Each one of them has meaning for me, and a few are intended to mean things to other people. All of them are hidden if I wear long-sleeved shirts; only two are visible normally.

In order of application:

The Mani Mantra

Over my heart is tattooed the Sanskrit for the Mani Mantra (om mani padme hum). It is a complicated sigil to explain, so bear with me.

There is a painting called The Treachery of Images by René Magritte. I’m certain you’ve seen it. It is an image of a pipe and with the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (literally, “This is not a pipe”). The painting is a comment on the existentialist position that the symbol of a thing is not the thing itself.

Did you ever see the Bruce Lee film, Enter the Dragon? There is a short (but important) scene where Lee instructs a student. He has a great line: “Words are fingers that point at the moon. Once you see the moon, you no longer need the finger.” The word “apple” is not a physical apple, it is a representation of an apple.

The concept of “symbol” not being the “object” is one that has stymied philosophers for thousands of years. It seems basic, that words are representations.

The Mani Mantra is the opposite of that idea.

The Mantra is the embodiment of Avalokiteśvara, a bodhisattva who embodies the idea of compassion. In context, there is no difference between the bodhisattva and the words used to describe it. To say the words is to invoke the deity.

Many believe that reciting the mantra brings the world closer to perfection. The more it is said, the further we (as a an existing thing) walk down the path towards unifying compassion. In Nepal I obtained a prayer wheel. Inside there is a scroll upon which the mantra is written hundreds of times. Each time the wheel is spun, it is as if the mantra is said hundreds of times as well. Each spin brings us to compassion.

Likewise, every time I take a breath.

It is said that simply knowing that the mantra exists shall protect a person in the deepest of hells. So this tattoo serves a dual purpose: it is both a spiritual armor and an engine for bringing the universe into perfection.

The Protection Sigils

Some time ago I came into possession of a rare book that concerns itself with the practice of “Tibetan Demonology.” How this tome came into my possession is a story in and of itself:

One day a package arrived for me, sent from West Virginia by a friend. He explained thus: “My next door neighbor died of a heart attack last week, and a package was left on his doorstep the next day. I took it, opened it, and thought, ‘Brandon would love this’.” So he sent it to me.

The book’s author died at a young age, ostensibly from pneumonia. However, an urban legend has grown up around this, saying that the very demons he studied were those what caused his death. Accordingly, the book is considered cursed, the idea being that the demons in the world don’t necessarily want mere mortals to have the knowledge of how to protect themselves.

There are rules about handling this book. Never set it flat on the ground. Never point your feet at it. And so forth.

I have a fairly large library and many of the tomes within it concern themselves with spiritual things that I do not believe in. However, despite my relative atheism, I remain a pragmatist, and sometimes it is better to not anger Things We Do Not Understand.

So, of course, I got some protective sigils tattooed over my right kidney. From top to bottom, they protect me from:

• All kinds of evil caused by the eight classes of supernatural beings
• Epidemics and illnesses
• Injury caused by weapons

So more armor.

The Blue Birds and their Tree

By far the largest swath of ink over my body is a tree that covers around half of my back. Leaves swirl from its branches down my right shoulder, and two fat, jolly blue birds are flying there.

I had been planning and designing this tattoo for three years before it was finally applied. It was such a large work that I wanted to be absolutely certain that I was going to cherish it for the rest of my life. It was laid out in two sessions, both lasting about five hours.

The tattoo changed during its construction. I had originally planned to have cherry leaves swirling down my arm, but after the first session both the artist and I agreed that hundreds of leaves probably wouldn’t work. I said, “well, how about some birds, then?” and he agreed that was a good idea.

I had envisioned several dark ravens flapping around in the moonlight. But when I arrived for my next appointment, he showed me a different vision entirely: a pair of fat little blue birds, happily singing in the sun. I was surprised for all of thirty seconds before I realized, with absolute certainty, that his direction was the only way to go.

At the time, I was going through Some Shit. I was depressed and dreary. I felt my life was going nowhere. If he had drawn up ravens, the tattoo would have become about winter. About life ending and shutting down. Instead, with the bluebirds, the image is about an eternal spring: renewal, hope, and moving ever forward.

From that day forward I decided to just trust the artists.

The Indelible Barnstar

Wikipedians express gratitude and congratulations by awarding each other virtual “Barnstars.” The idea is that “it takes many people to build the barn” and you have done your part. There are many, many types of Barnstars.

As a reward for his hard work, several of us pooled money together to buy my friend Oliver a tattoo. Heather designed the “Indelible Barnstar”: a Barnstar with crossbones. Several of us took him to the needle shop to get it; it was a thing. Even our Executive Director, Sue Gardner, showed up to watch.

Now, we’d been talking and joking during the days leading up to the event. Who else could be convinced to get a Barnstar tattoo? There was a lot of “if Sue gets one, I’ll get one.”

Well. I didn’t need a lot of convincing. My life is about Free Culture. To express that is a no-brainer. So I got one (and so did my friend Steven). They got theirs in black; mine in grey. Later I had color added to it.

For Wikimania 2012 I had a thousand temporary tattoos made of Barnstars and handed them out to everyone.

Courage

On the outside of my left forearm is tattooed the word “courage“. I got it with my friend Steven. He wanted a Barnstar on his left shoulder (to match the one on his right) and I said I would go with him to the needle shop because I wanted a new tattoo as well.

This tattoo is not for me. It is for other people.

I had been thinking a lot about the things that define me – my core values and principles. What I wanted to project to the world and what I wanted to see reflected there. I thought long and hard about what those were, and I came up with a mantra to use going forward:

“Let courage be thy bulwark and compassion be thy sword.”

The shield is how we react to the world. The weapon is how we respond. There are many awful and amazing things that happen to us in our journeys; all should be met with unflinching courage. Compassion for the world is how we cleave it.

Whether or not my parents and their parents intended it, I was instilled with a great deal of courage. Courage is not the same thing as “fearless”. Those who lack fear are stupid. Many situations call for fear and its absence is dangerous.

Courage is acting despite being afraid.

I think everyone has courage but they forget. For a time, Dan Rather ended his broadcasts by saying “Courage” to the audience. I liked that; it was inspiring.

The left arm is classically where one wears a shield. Hence its location: outwards-facing, towards the world.

I’m thinking about getting “Compassion” tattooed on the other arm. The jury is still out.

Start early. Around nine a.m. run to the store and buy your stuff. This is what you need:

• 1 sweet onion
• 4-5 cloves of garlic
• 1 can whole peeled tomatoes
• 1 can crushed tomatoes
• 1 pound ground beef
• 1 green bell pepper
• Soy sauce
• Oregano
• Basil
• 2 Bay leaves
• Sugar
• Salt
• Sriracha

First: take about three-quarters of a sweet onion (depending on size) and 3-5 garlic cloves. Take them apart with a knife like you were a serial killer. Cast iron: dump in some olive oil and then start a sautee going.

Next: find a big-ish pot. Into it dump the crushed tomatoes and then the peeled tomatoes.

Next: wash your fucking hands. I’m super serious now because you’re going to get into it.

Now dive your hands into that pot of tomato goop and tear apart those peeled tomatoes like you were a rabid dog in a room full of babies. Now clean up the tomato mess that got out of the pot so that your wife doesn’t get mad at you.

Put the pot on low heat. Don’t deviate from the low heat. That’s essential. Add in a whole mess of oregano and basil. Add in two bay leaves (I actually own a bay laurel tree, so mine are always fresh). Add: 2 teaspoons sugar and salt. Pour in about a half cup of soy sauce. Give it a three to five second squirt from the bottle of sriracha.

The onions should be done sauteeing now. Add them to the pot.

Brown the ground beef. Drain it and add it to the pot.

Now it’s gonna sit for like, five hours. Stir this pot every now and then, of course. But mostly: play video games and let the smell permeate the household.

Five hours is about right. Three is barely acceptable. Longer is better: the acid in the tomatoes is taking apart the other ingredients. It needs time to work.

Freeze leftover sauce. It actually gets better the older it is. Heat up on the stove, not the microwave.

Enterprise was not built for orbital flight. She was a prototype craft, designed to test the aeroform’s gliding and landing capabilities. NASA used a specially built Boeing 747 to lift her way up in the sky before letting her go and watching her land.

I remember thinking how awkward and absurd the shuttle looked, perched atop the larger airplane. I was almost eight years old and in love with Star Wars and all things space. I remember desperately wishing to see such a thing for myself, a space ship, with my own two eyes.

Today, 30 odd years later, while walking to the train by Merritt Lake, Space Shuttle Endeavour flew overhead, strapped to the back of a specially-built Boeing 747. She was being paraded around the Bay Area, on her way to her final resting place at the California Science Center.

It was both exhilarating and saddening at the same time.

Exhilarating because, well, space ship. After 30 years, my wish came true.

Saddening because the shuttles have been haunted by spectres my entire adult life. There was first the destruction of Challenger in 1986 and then that of Columbia almost twenty years later.

Back in 2003, when we lost Columbia, I wrote a post about my memories of January 28th, 1986. Here it is.

February 1, 2003

I was thinking today and I discovered that I have very few clear memories of the three years I spent in junior high school. Seventh grade through ninth grade were perhaps the most difficult years of my life – they are a three year period of prolonged fear and embarrassment, of jockying for position and dominance and the favor of the ladies fair.

I’m not surprised I ditched a fair chunk of that memory. I would hope I have better things to do with my time than relive old wounds and humiliations.

I was thinking today about what I did remember. Aside from random and meaningless snippets of conversation bookended by a blur, the list is very short: getting in trouble during science class; a prank involving rubber cement, old yearbooks, and a forgotten room in the school; a “serious” talk with a teacher I hated when I had gotten a C in her geometry class; getting trouble for leaving school grounds with Garrett – (this was funny, because we had gone off ground to get drunk and instead we only got nailed for leaving).

Two teachers were ultimately the bane of my existence, then: Mr. Kendall, a math teacher, who had an almost psychopathic demand for respect, which made him all the more comical, and Mrs. Wilson, an English teacher. It was extra difficult with her because she was a neighbor, often gave me rides to school, and was, in general, an all around busy-body, perfectly happy to stick her nose into things that had nothing to do with her.

(it was she who discovered that we had left campus that day.)

I don’t remember what we were supposed to be doing but I know that I wasn’t doing it. I was busy drawing a knight in armor – my Dungeons and Dragons character – and I remember very specifically modeling the armor after one of the characters on the cover of a battered Dragonlance paperback.

Maybe it was a quiz. I usually finished those early.

Our school librarian burst into the room, pitching a fit. “The space shuttle,” she said, “it’s blown up!”

I was thinking today about how I didn’t grasp the totality of her words then – none of us did – and I remember someone muttering (maybe it was me), an aside to friends, made to mock the teacher, who cares? they send things up all the time. Space flight was routine; a ship going up wasn’t news anymore.

But no: mistaken. Every class was possessed of an ancient television perched atop a cobalt-blue cart on rollers, shunted in a corner like an unwanted cousin, and they pulled it out and turned the signal on and it came, bleeding through, bright and sinister fireworks on repeat and the words, over and over again,

Space Shuttle Challenger explodes on take-off;
Seven Astronauts lost including first civilian, Christa McAuliffe.

I was thinking today about how the tasteless jokes had been created and circulated before lunch was even served.

why is nasa switching to sprite? because they can’t get seven up!

I was thinking today about how I laughed then. I laughed because everyone else was laughing. I laughed because I didn’t fully understand.

I was thinking today that I wish that I hadn’t.

I was thinking today of flags this morning at half mast, in honor of seven more who died on the Columbia this morning, symmetrical, seventeen years distant.

Many of them were close to my age.

Did they, too, remember Challenger? Did they say a silent prayer in memory when the terrible engines beneath them ignited, thousands of pounds of fire and fuel pushing a feeble craft away from mother earth’s sleepless grasp and into the the most hostile of environments?

I was thinking today about the young teenagers of today and how they are reacting. Will they, too, created horrible and cruel jokes about today’s tragedy?

Will they laugh?

I was thinking today that I hoped they will have the strength not to.

I’m also spoiling other stuff: The Sopranos, Lost, Hamlet. This is rant about story consistency.

Then I explain how ME3 should have ended.

Short review: If you liked the previous games, pick this one up. Play it, get enraged at the ending, and then come back here. I have candy for you.

Spoilers from here on.

The ending of Mass Effect 3 has been called “controversial” in a lot of places because, frankly, nearly everyone hates it. These people are gamers who have invested possibly hundreds of hours into the storyline of the universe and the trilogy – a fact that speaks to the overall awesomeness and engagement of the world and the story (thus far).

The background and events approach Tolkien-level obsession to depth and detail. The developers crafted a grand space opera:

In the future, humanity discovers it is not alone. The galaxy is riddled with alien species, and, for the most part, the various species co-operate with each other, despite histories of war and tension.

All of these alien races are inheritors of grand, almost magical technology that was left behind by a long-dead spacefaring empire. This empire, the Protheans, were wiped out some 50,000 years ago by the Reapers, who are basically the Borg as imagined by H.P. Lovecraft.

The overall arc of the trilogy is this: the Reapers have returned. They are destroying everything. They are taking all living creatures and turning them into borg zombies. They are “glassing” planets. We don’t know why: it’s one of the great mysteries.

There are several factions with different ideas as to what we should do but basically there’s the Alliance (which wants to fight the Reapers) and then there’s Cerberus, which is a kind of shadowy, human-centered (and racist) cabal who think that the Reapers should be controlled. Cerberus is led by the Illusive Man (read: Martin Sheen).

The primary theme of Mass Effect’s storyline is that of tolerance. All the species learn to tolerate each other, to make peace, to work together to raise the floor of all societies.

The primary theme of Mass Effect’s gameplay is that of player choice. Decisions you make in the first or second game radically alter the story in later games. Characters may be killed. Your choices – even from the first game – have an effect on everything.

One of the reasons I played ME2 so many times was because I wanted to see what different choices led to. The ending of that game was heavily dependant upon the choices I made as a player.

Not so much with Mass Effect 3.

Without going too much into the minor changes that can happen, there are really only three endings, all of which are a choice that happens in the last 10 minutes:

1) You decide to control the Reapers, or
2) You decide to destroy the Reapers (and all synthetic life, including your AI friends), or
3) You decide to create some sort of synthesis beteween organic life and synthetic life.

Regardless of which choice you make, the following things happen:

1) Your character, Shepard, dies, and
2) The Mass Effect relays are all destroyed, ending any kind of galactic travel, and
3) Trillions of people die (because of said relay destruction)

To make matters worse, the ending is sewn up in the most awful way possible: we are introduced to a new character, some sort of god-like alien, who controls the Reapers. This alien takes the form of a little human boy to communicate with you (we aren’t even given the stupid cliche from Contact where the alien says “I chose a familiar form to speak to you with”).

This alien tells you why he sics the Reapers (a synthetic lifeform) on the galaxy every 50,000 years or so and it makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever. Here’s his reasoning:

After a certain point, every galactic society creates artificial intelligence that rebels against its creators and causes wars. That, in its mind, is a bad thing. What’s its solution? To send a fleet of artificially intelligent, synthetic constructs to annihilate everyone. So that they don’t get destroyed by synthetic lifeforms.

Yo dawg! I put some world-eating synthetic lifeforms in your galaxy so you can be destroyed by world-eating synthetic lifeforms while you get destroyed by world-eating synthetic lifeforms!

Now, I’ve got no problems with uncompromisingly bleak endings. Especially if they are consistent with the story as it has been told.

For example, the ending to The Sopranos has Tony Soprano, the main character, presumably getting shot in the back of the head while eating dinner at a restaurant with his family. We see him smiling and laughing with his family while Journey plays on the jukebox. In the background, there’s a man wearing a Members Only jacket – a subtle nod to a previous episode about mob killings.

Suddenly, the screen goes black and the audio cuts out, mid-song. We get the blackness for a long, long time until finally the credits roll.

That ending? Perfect. It’s exactly how Tony lived. It’s completely consistent with all the storytelling that they had done. It was uncompromising and brutal but that’s what The Sopranos was about.

Some will argue: “Well, who killed Tony? That’s unresolved.” Those people miss the point entirely: Tony killed Tony. That was the major theme throughout the entire show: that Tony’s lifestyle was self-destructive.

Compare that to the ending of Lost, which was just a muddled mess of conflicting, under-edited ideas. Further, new concepts were introduced at the end, concepts that are brand new, things that we, as an audience, should probably have been aware of before (I wrote a thing about this previously).

The only person who has been able to introduce characters in the final act and have it work was Shakespeare when he wrote Hamlet, and that was essential because we need someone to explain what happened because everybody dies. Pro tip: If your name is not, in fact, “William Shakespeare”, you should probably try to avoid this storytelling trick.

So, adding a new alien species at the end of the Mass Effect trilogy is cheap and amateurish. There are better ways. There are always better ways than hail-mary deus ex machina plots. It felt tacked on because they ran out of ideas.

BEGIN TANGENT

Here are other things that don’t make sense:

First, the “synthesis” ending is just fucking stupid. Seriously? A pulse of energy can suddenly add circuitry to all living creatures? Are you shitting me?

Second, how the fuck did all those characters who I just saw on the planet Earth not five minutes ago get aboard a starship that crashes on an alien planet? I know that they wanted me to see that those characters survived but let’s not break the story with Fridge Logic. Show them celebrating on Earth.

Third, now that the Mass Relays are destroyed, well. Whupz? All those aliens are now stranded in the Earth solar system. They probably didn’t bring enough food to eat (you know, alien biologies and all), nor did they probably bring the stuff to settle planets with, so, uh, good luck?

That’s to say nothing about the trillions of people stuck in other star systems that depend on shipments of things from other star systems to survive. Scarcity of resource creates war, so I guess the entire “trying to save the galaxy from war” bit gets thrown out, too.

END TANGENT

So, here’s my “rewrite” of the ending:

Make it all about the Illusive Man. He was set up as the bad guy from very early on. An ambiguous bad guy, a complex bad guy. A bad guy who had a motivation: he wanted the human race to be the top dog. He nominally wanted to protect humanity, which is why he sought to control the Reapers.

Make the Reapers just what they were: Borg-like things who just rove the universe. Every 50,000 years they make their way back to the Milky Way. That’s fine. They don’t need deep motivations.

But then let’s say that the endgame has it that the Illusive Man has succeeded: he figured out how to control the Reapers (presumably during the time between ME2 and ME3). Rather than ordering the Reapers to fly themselves into a star, though, the Illusive Man decides to use them as a weapon to eliminate all other advanced species from the galaxy.

He has to elminate the current human alliance, of course, because they won’t understand and they traffick with aliens too much. Thus, the Illusive Man is a threat to everyone.

The final showdown is then about him, and how corrupt he’s gotten, and how wrong he is. The overall theme of the story remains about tolerance and growth, about co-operation and sacrifice. It remains consistent.

So that’s how I’m going to say it went down in my mind.

You might have seen it mentioned on various news sites.

I am very proud of our accomplishment. I want to write a bit how this went down, behind the scenes, and how I came up with the “black out” design, something I am extremely proud of.

On the afternoon of Friday the 13th, I attended my first “SOPA War Room” meeting. At this point in time, it was clear that the community wanted to do something about SOPA and PIPA. We (the Foundation) felt that it was time to start the gears turning about enacting whatever the protest action was going to be.

I was brought into the discussion because the screens needed to be designed and implemented, and, well, my title is “Senior Designer.” I was tasked with coming up with two design variants and to publish them before midnight that evening (which gave me roughly three hours time, once I was able to work on them).

During this meeting, I walked everyone though the ramifications of the design so that we were all on the same page. I knew that since time was tight I was going to have to “get it in one” and we weren’t going to be able to do a lot of futzing with it.

I recommended that we go with something that was simple and had a “statesman” like feel to it rather than something over-the-top (which I referred to as the “dragonslayer” approach).

It was about an hour after this that I got nervous. “Jellyfish in my belly” nervous, because I realized that this was going to be an historic event, and really, how often does anyone design something specifically to be historic?

So. I armed myself with the following thoughts:

1. The screen must be iconic. This image will be used in screen shots in the media and elsewhere.
2. The screen must be simple. While the issues presented are complex, they must be boiled down to easy-to-understand concepts, with room for expansion.
3. The screen must be symbolic. This is potentially a historical event.

And the following design considerations:

1. The Wikipedia “puzzle globe” image is a “busy” icon, and not appropriate for the type of statement required.
2. Simplicity over complexity.
3. Seriousness over frivolity.
4. The Wikipedia wordmark was deemed important to include.

My design philosophy is summed up as “More Kirk, less Spock.” I felt that, for this image, anything that could be deleted from the design should be.

The first image I came up with was a “white” version. It was really just a really large “W” logo, in a dark grey, and a block of text on a translucent white box set to overlay it. It didn’t feel right, though, and in a fit of inspiration I added the shadow to it.

I then sent the images around to the team for comments. We played around with the sample language a bit and I published them to the discussion on the English Wikipedia around 11:30 pm, about two and a half hours after I started.

We figured that the community would come to a vague consensus as to which direction they wanted to go within about twelve hours: do we want to go with a “light” theme or a “dark” theme was the real question.

The next morning I woke up to see that the “dark” image was leading in the polls by a factor of around 50 to 1. So, that answered that question pretty clearly, and we (Ryan Kaldari and I) began the technical implementation.

The black out screen was actually implemented through the technology we use for our fundraising banners (it’s called “CentralNotice”). We chose this method because at the time we were still assuming that it was going to be an interstitial image (so we had to load the “real” Wikipedia behind the scenes) and that it was going to be targeted to the USA (the banner system has some sophisticated Geolocation technology).

I did most of the initial html and css coding on a static page (Neil Kandalgaonkar would later do the implementation inside of CentralNotice entirely in Javascript) while Ryan worked on creating an extension to handle congressional representative lookups. We had a passable prototype by the end of day, Sunday.

I made some tweaks to the image design along the way – tweaks that I thought were minor at the time but ended up having a massive impact to the overall mood. I raised the W logo from its shadow, so that it floated, and I changed the gradient to be radial rather than linear.

Monday was a work holiday, but the Anti-SOPA team came into the office anyway. This was when the bulk of the congressional lookup feature was coded (though the superheroes I work with were coding it right up to the launch on Tuesday evening).

At four o’clock in the afternoon on Monday the consensus discussion regarding the protest was closed and we were given our marching orders: a global, “hard” blackout, 24 hours, beginning at midnight EST on Wednesday the 18th (which meant we had to launch at 9 PM local on Tuesday evening).

Monday evening’s war room time was spent on messaging: Sue Gardner wrote a blog post explaining what we were going to do and why. It was published and linked from a banner on Wikipedia and. . . instantly crashed the blog server.

Ryan Lane spent an hour heroically battling the performance issues on that server, upgrading it, adding caches, and generally hyperdriving its performance. This was a weird thing: no blog post had ever gotten more than a few hundred comments before but this one picked up a couple thousand within an hour. It took four of us operating at once to moderate the comments they were coming in so fast (as of this writing, there are almost 13,000 comments on that post).

The decision for the black out to be global and “hard” were problems for us. At the time that the decision was handed down, we had been committed to our technology choices (the train had actually left the station on Friday, to be honest). Blacking out the mobile gateway was a non-starter: that technology doesn’t do CentralNotice at all and the development time required was deemed too much.

We also made a call that there should be ways for people to get at the data if they absolutely needed to, which is why we designed in some ways to get around the black out screen (disabling Javascript, pressed ESC before it loaded, and appending ?banner=none were all ways to do this).

I’ve been asked a lot why we didn’t just point a redirect to a single “black out” screen and the answer to that is, frankly, it would have annihilated our search rankings. We felt that doing so would actually be a disservice to The Mission. Google suggested that most sites just return “503” error codes to avoid this, but Wikipedia isn’t “most sites”: we are indexed differently (Google polls the recent changes feed). We were specifically told not to do the “503” trick.

Tuesday was a blur of meetings. Meetings about messaging. Meetings about press coverage. We wrote and rewrote the text of the landing page about fifty times. Everyone who could program was working on getting the congressional lookup system working. We ran into problem after problem and worked through them. Text was being edited all the way up to the launch moment.

I was plugged into the projector. At nine pm I hit “refresh”, and this is what happened.

I work with some superheroes.

In the end, we managed to change minds. We flooded the internet with our message and people listened. We melted the phone lines on Capitol Hill. We struck a blow for the free and open internet.

And that’s something, I think.

The entire event was exhausting, exhilarating, and elating. I felt closer to The Mission in those hours than I ever have.

I had lunch today with a friend of mine who used to work for the Foundation and she told me that she’d never been prouder of us and what we do than that moment. It was a good thing to hear, and a good thing to feel.

I absolutely love this job. I want to say thank you to everyone on the planet for giving me the opportunity to do the Good Work. I am filled with gratitude, knowing that this work makes a difference.

So I did the math and figured that Saturday would be the best day for it, and since it’s my “birthday weekend” I figured what the hell, people could come over. So I made a pot of chili.

I don’t want to toot my own horn too much (actually, I do), but I make a seriously bad-ass chili. I have modified and played with the recipe for about fifteen years now, and each batch is unique.

Now I’m going to tell you how I (currently) make it. I’m not good with writing recipes, so bear with me. I’ll write for those who don’t know from cooking.

The first lesson of Chili Club is that real chili does not contain beans. Beans are a filler. Use hamburger for filler.

I call this my “Vegetarian Chili” because it’s made of vegetarians.

Here’s what you need:

• A stock pot. If you don’t have one, modify the ingredients to size.
• A cast iron pan. Mine is over 150 years old, but if you don’t have that, you don’t have that.
• A chef’s knife
• A metal spatula
• A cutting board
• A whisk
• 3 cans tomato paste
• 3 (large) cans crushed tomatoes
• 3 pounds of stew meat.
• 3 pounds of hamburger.
• 2 onions.
• 2 to 3 green bell peppers
• 2 to 3 yellow bell peppers
• 2 to 3 red bell peppers
• A batch of green onion
• Powdered habanero. WARNING: handle with extreme care
• Cayanne pepper
• Ancho chilis
• Various other chili powders, seriously, just use to taste
• Sriracha (rooster sauce)
• Brown sugar
• A jar of powdered sipping chocolate (I use Theo’s spicy chocolate)
• Soy sauce

Okay. Open the tomato paste cans and spoon them out into the pot. For each can of tomato paste, add three cans of water. Whisk the shit out of this until it’s a smooth slurry. Dump in the cans of crushed tomatoes.

Put this bad boy on the stove and turn the heat on. Just go right to simmer; you don’t need to start it boiling immediately.

Now, open your packs of stew meat. Usually this stuff isn’t very high quality, so you’re better off going directly to a butcher. Either way, you’ll probably have to slice up the meat into more bite-sized chunks.

Once you’ve done that, you need to brown the meat. So heat up the frying pan to about medium heat and dump a handful of meat into it. Keep turning it over until it’s “browned” on all sides (there’s no red left). Then dump the batch into the pot and stir.

Do this until there’s no more stew meat.

Now, you’re going to do the same to your hamburger. Brown it in the skillet. Keep chopping at it with your spatula so that it gets grainy and exactly the opposite of a hamburger patty. Dump that in the pot, too, and repeat until no more hamburger.

Now you’re going to add in a bunch of flavors all in a group:

• Chili powders, especially cayenne. Do this sparingly; you keep adding them over time.
• A half-cup of soy sauce.
• A handful of chili peppers. They’ll simmer out.
• A couple solid squirts of rooster sauce.

The pot should be “popping” now. This is cool. Just stir it.

Now go back to your cutting board and chop up those bell peppers and onions (make sure to peel the onions first; you might want to just chop off the ends of everything, too).

Chop the peppers up until the parts are about the size of your fingernails. Do this by slicing each pepper in half, and then taking each half and cutting it several times horizontally. Then chop the horizontal slices, etc.

The onions – you can sort of cleaver them. Onions naturally fall apart; I like to have the individual “leafs” be about the size of my last thumb joint.

Dump all this into the pot. Stir it.

Okay. Now, go play a video game for an hour. Stir the pot every fifteen minutes.

After an hour, come back. Now you’re going to enter the SERIOUSLY I AM NOT KIDDING THIS IS DANGEROUS part of the operation: powdered habanero. You may have difficulty obtaining this ingredient. I keep mine in a jar, hidden where no one can accidentally open it.

I’m not kidding. This stuff will seriously mess you up if you breathe it, or it gets on things, or pretty much anything. If you have latex gloves you may want to use them. Put your shirt over your mouth while you goof with this stuff.

One – and I mean one teaspoon of the stuff. Gently drop it in, stir it up.

Let the pot simmer for another hour, stirring every fifteen minutes or so.

Now for the sweet: about a quarter cup of brown sugar and a quarter cup of the chocolate. Stir it in. Let simmer for ten minutes.

(From now on you’ll absolutely have to keep stirring it every 10 to 15 minutes. If you don’t, the sugar will burn on the bottom of the pot. This is bad; you don’t want it to happen.)

Taste the chili. Get a chunk of stew meat, some tomatoes, etc. Eat a couple spoonfuls. It should not be noticeably spicy until about the third bite, and even then not too serious (the sugar and chocolate changes the flavors). If it’s too tame, add more cayenne. Too hot? A bit more chocolate or sugar.

Do this over and over again for the next three hours. This entire dish takes about four to five hours to be “good”. The longer it simmers, the better it is.

When it comes time to serve, take those green onions (you didn’t add them already, did you?) and chop them up. Fill a bowl with the chili and sprinkle the chopped green onions on top.

Enjoy.

I also took some photos.

A couple years back, I wrote a “browser-based multiplayer role-playing game” called Nexus War. Don’t go looking for it on Wikipedia; the article was deleted (again) a couple weeks ago for being “non notable”.

(Fuck you for that, by the way. I play lots of “free to play” games from time to time to see what they do, and so many of them integrate gameplay elements that I fucking invented so fuck off with your entire “not notable” shit. The game was mentioned in fucking Playboy but whatever I guess people who don’t know dick about the subject at hand know more than me.)

Anyways.

Nexus War was fun for me to build. It started as a small hobbyist thing that my friends could play and that was cool. That was my only reason for doing it for a long, long time. Later, it got popular and it started requiring Real Cash Money to manage.

I never designed the game with the intent to make money and it showed. Any monetization principles were clearly bolted on after-the-fact.

After a time, the output for the game overran the input for the game and I had to kill it.

Those of you who have been in the situation where you had to murder your own children may understand the emotions I dealt with in this.

Given that I am a communist bastard at heart, playing the game was free. Everyone could play. You got to have three characters for free and that ended up to anywhere between 15 and 30 minutes a day that you could play. For free.

I really only ever wanted to break even.

If you wanted to play more than a half hour, you could buy “character slots” at a one-time cost of about five bucks per slot. That gave you an additional dude that you could have running around. But buying slots didn’t create any advantage for you: you still couldn’t work your characters in tandem, nor could you “slip time” to other guys. So a one-time drop of five bones gave you another 10 minutes a day for the life of the game.

Later, I added the ability to buy small tokens. These things were not game-affecting; they were the equivalent of “cool clothes”. 25 cents and you could have a rare type of clothing. That sort of thing. It was a credits system, where one US cent equalled 1 credit.

I also ran ads in sidebars and such not. Mostly text ads, but some were images.

At it’s peak, Nexus War had 40,000 unique players at a time (80,000 over its life). Games like this have a rotational user-base. The lifecycle of a player is about 3 to 4 months, after which they move on. I guess it was costing me about 700 dollars a month to run on multiple servers, before the entire “cloud computing” thing happened. I was coding this in my spare time.

There was exactly one month that I made a profit and two months that I broke even. The ad revenue was key, actually. The introduction of ads pushed me into the green for the initial 30 days I had them turned on.

You cannot imagine my emotions at this. I could do this! I could continue running the game and not compromise any of my principles. Holy smokes, I was in the green.

Then someone made a post on the game forums about how to best disable the ads using various adblocker techniques.

I briefly thought about killing the post. I could do it. No one would really complain. But I would be censoring someone and I couldn’t abide that. They weren’t being racist or homophobic or any other kind of hateful. I had to let it go. So I did.

And the advertising revenue halved itself in the next month. And yet again in the month after, with no appreciable loss in players.

At that point I was deep in the red. It continued to get worse, until my ad revenue checks were along the lines of “ten dollars”. The playerbase hadn’t really decreased, either.

I ran the game at a heavy loss for another eight months before I had to close it. I just couldn’t do it anymore.

So.

Every time I visit a site and it throws an advertisement at me? I know what that means. And I don’t block it. I reckon there’s somebody on the other side of that http request who is hoping that my visit will earn him 1/100th of a penny.

Remember that when you decide that you love something and want to kill its ability to make money.