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 have been working from home full time for around five years. This is not my first remote-work job; I have pretty much always done this in some form or another, even when I was supposed to go to the office.

Going to an office gives your brain a strong context-switch. When you go to the office, you have: home -> commute -> office -> commute -> home. Now you don’t have travel modes, which are natural context switchers. You’ll have to adapt. It’s easy, but requires discipline.

The first and most important things are routine and distance.

Routine

You need to create a routine. This routine will include what you should call your “working hours”. Your working hours do not need to be consecutive. Spread them out in chunks if you like or do them all at once – it’s up to you. However, I’m going to tell you that you will have problems getting a straight eight hours in, and in fact will advise you not to try.

You will develop a routine. You used to have one, but it involved commuting for an hour and then sitting in an office and then commuting for another hour. Now you have those two hours back! Fill them.

My daily routine goes: Wake, Run, Shower, Coffee, Email. That brings me to about 9 am. Then: Grocery store across the street (food for the day). At eleven I take the pup out to pee. After that I begin my first “work block”.

Work blocks are usually 2 to 4 hours – enough time to handle a set of tasks. This is how you should think about working: not as “time spent on the clock” but “tasks accomplished”. You’ll have several work blocks throughout the day. Schedule them when you feel right.

Think of your day as “slots”. Sometimes slots get filled, sometimes they don’t. I have a slot for “errands that require me to get in a car”, and it goes between “running” and “groceries”.

Don’t feel bad if you work really late! You may find yourself doing work at two a.m. because why not? An important thing is that you must give yourself permission to break the norms because the norms are broken already (more on this in a bit).

Distance

The second thing that you need to create is distance – psychologically – between your “work life” and your “home life.” This is most easily accomplished by creating a “working space” – a place you go to do your work that isn’t part of the “daily routine” of your household.

Maybe you work from the guest room. Maybe on the porch. Maybe you set up your nest at the end of your dining room table. Where ever this place is it must allow you to create a “transistion”.

I used to work on my building’s roof where I could smoke cigars all day. Now I use our guest room.

Never work from your bed or your bedroom. Consider that to be a sacrosanct line and crossing it is always moving to “home life”.

Some people like going to cafes. I find that they are hit-or-miss, with lots of distractions. You do you, but in the age of COVID-19, I’d avoid them.

Take phone calls outside if you can. That helps create distance as well.

Productivity Anxiety

You may get really anxious because you don’t think you’re being productive. Ignore that shit; it’s a lie. Productivity really can’t be measured that way.

You’ll spend hours doing nothing because you’re stuck and you’ll feel shitty about it. You’ll get unstuck eventually, but until then it’s anxiety-town. This is a terrible place to be.

Here’s how to fix it: Go play a game for an hour or take a walk or vacuum the floors or cook a meal or take a yoga class.

Is this fucking off? No. No, it is not.

You have days in the office where you don’t get fuck-all done, too – only you had to pay the Commute Troll its toll.

The difference between getting nothing done at the office and getting nothing done at home is that you can fake what you think of as “productivity” in the office. You can always look busy if there are other people around.

Here’s the thing: that’s not being productive. It’s all a bias illusion. You are no more or less productive or stuck at work or at home; it’s just at home you can only compare your apparent lack of progress to yourself.

Freedom comes from realizing that this is an illusion and knowing that your brain does not stop working. It is always solving problems, always working to unstick you. It will let you know when it’s solved your problem. Trust it.

Don’t spend your “stuck” time feeling anxious. Use that time to do something useful or fun. Use it for yourself! Just do not feel guilty about it.

Procrastination

You may find that you end up taking on more and more chores around the house. Fight this impulse. It’s procrastination.

If a thing needs doing (the dishes are dirty), do it (wash them). But don’t do extra stuff (sharpen the knives). Does your bookshelf really need organizing right now? Probably not; lower the priority of that task.

Self Care

Now that you’ve got all this time you’ll find that you start filling it. It is super easy to fill up all your time with work and chores. A really important thing that you need to do is carve out an hour of time every day for yourself and only yourself.

I’m talking about “set your phone on do not disturb for an hour and do a thing.” I will play a game or run around the lake, maybe. Do the thing for yourself and only for yourself. Schedule this time if you have to.

Get dressed every day. Take a shower at least every other day. You will likely have video conference meetings, sometimes randomly, and you need to be ready for those.

Go outside at least once a day – if only to get the mail or see another human being.

Make your bed every day. Making your bed creates a psychological marker: Now is the time that the day starts. It’s time to get busy.

Buy a french press. Make your own coffee.

Substance Use

Regarding substance use: I have no advice for you. You’re at home. You know how you work best. Get the job done.

Maybe you drink a beer or two when you code. Maybe you don’t. Get the job done. Maybe you eat some marijuana gummies. Maybe you don’t. Get the job done.

I used to smoke cigars on the roof in the sun. Now I don’t.

However that works out is between you, your employers, and the Great Programmers Of Our Simulation.

Communication

You’ll find that you change the way you want to communicate with your co-workers. This is going to be different for everyone, but my experience is that people tend to avoid spammy communication systems while working from home (e.g., you’ll learn to hate Slack).

On-demand communication (things that ping you a lot) are easy to get lost in when you work in an office because it feeds into that whole “looking busy” part. How useful is the constant pinging really? Shut it off. Shut off your email and chat programs. Only open them once an hour, at best.

You will quickly learn which meetings could have been merely an email.

Good luck!

To that end, I wrote a book about making fantasy maps and you can read it online for free:

Designing Maps for Roleplaying Games

Christmas morning came and we children destroyed reams of wrapping paper revealing a series of molded chunks of plastic inside cardboard boxes: toys and talismans that would possess brief importance in my life before being later supplanted by a different toy. Packages containing clothing (ugh, corduroy pants) were small disappointments hidden behind smiles but we knew what to open based on the shape of the package.

I didn’t know it then, but Virginia’s gift to me would become one of my most treasured possessions: a boxed set of the Lord of the Rings. I had seen the Rankin/Bass Hobbit cartoon and had already developed a deep love for Dungeons & Dragons.

I started reading them immediately and voraciously. This was sometimes a confusing process. Someone gave me a dictionary to use after becoming exasperated at my questions about the meaning of words. I felt terror for the Hobbits on Weathertop, sorrow for Gandalf in the depths of Moria, and deep betrayal by Boromir. The books changed my life and I re-read them every year for almost two decades, committing huge swaths of them to memory.

My copies are dog-eared and sun-bleached now, held together with scotch and packing tape. I still read them. Despite their fragility, I still lend them out to anyone who asks because books are made to be read and loved.

Virginia was born on May 7th, 1920. She was an orphan (as was her husband, Howard) though we believe that her adopted father was also her biological father. The word “gumption” best described her personality – or perhaps “piss and vinegar”. She made up her mind and that’s what was going to happen and that’s all there was to it.

She died this morning, January 19th, at the age of ninety-seven.

She was a lioness, fearless and true.

I remember being scolded one year for trying to clear her walk of snow. Despite being in her 80s, she wasn’t going to let anyone else do her chores. She continued to shovel her own snow deep into her 90s, too; it just took her longer. She would bundle up, step out into the heavy Minnesota weather, clear perhaps a foot or two, and return inside to rest for a bit before beginning the exercise again.

She loved games and word puzzles. She taught me to play Rummikub and was one of the few people who could routinely defeat me. She even once played a session of Dungeons & Dragons with me, though I imagine she found it confusing.

Recently, she once again ignored the pleadings of her children to “slow down”. She slipped on a patch of ice and shattered her arm, requiring surgery and a promised long road of rehabilitation and pain. There came a day when she was simply done and events unfolded from there. Implacably. Mercilessly. Shakespearean.

My heart has been clenched for weeks. It has been a long time since I have felt this level of grief.

I find myself running my fingers over my tattered copies of Lord of the Rings. I reach for any volume and read random passages, each one evoking tiny memories and soothings. Here I am drinking cocoa and trying to keep the names of the Dwarves straight in my head. There I am laying on my back, waiting to be called to dinner, as Sam and Frodo escape from Amon Hen. Look! I am being thrilled as Eowyn destroys the Witch-King of Angmar during fifth grade recess.

For Christmas in 1984, Virginia gave me a boxed set of The Dragonlance Chronicles, further cementing my love for fantasy and adventure. It was her way, to recognize the things we loved and to share our enthusiasms.

I will miss her terribly.

Tacoma is is absolutely a “Fullbright” game. The cynical call their games “walking simulators” but I don’t understand that mindset. This term is supposed to imply that the game is “lesser” because it doesn’t involve twitchy combat and thus doesn’t require what munchkin players call “skill”. This is an immature line of thought; a game is good if it is fun and engaging, and Fullbright manages to directly engage me every time.

Combat doesn’t make a game good. The absolute best parts of Witcher 3 do not involve combat. I love that game but honestly W3’s combat is weak sauce. It’s fun, but there’s not much to it. No – the best moments are the emotional crescendos that the game is capable of producing inside of you, and those crescendos come only after you invest time in understanding the characters.

The best games are great because they have great story.

Tacoma takes place on board an empty space station. You are a contractor sent to recover the station’s artificial intelligence named ODIN. Along the way you discover what happened to the crew. The way this happens is so well done I am in awe.

Nearly everything is handled through augmented reality (AR) systems. You will see digital overlays all over the place. Pick up a book written in Russian, and a translation is automatically overlaid on it that you can read. Email is read through AR. You can find an AR yoga instructor.

How you discover what is happened is by viewing recovered AR recordings of the crew that the station recorded. They download into your AR device and then you can view them in a kind of holographic “playback”. You watch the crew interact and sometimes even access their own AR systems. It is through this mechanism that you unspool the puzzle.

It’s not overly complex but it takes some ingenuity sometimes. You’ll have to follow people around station as they split up inside of a single recording and sometimes figure out how to unlock doors so you can follow them.

The game affected me. I felt several moments of happiness, sadness, and fear for a bunch of people that I only learned about through old recordings and snooping through their email folders. At one point I feared I was witnessing the death of a crew member and I felt my chest tighten.

It doesn’t take a long time to complete – maybe three and a half hours to suck the marrow out of it. It’s cheap, too – twenty bones right now – so well worth your time.

Let’s talk about how I did this, why I wanted to, and what happened.

The first thing I did was unfollow hella dudes. Mostly these were men who I don’t remember following and never posted, or people who I was following merely out of politeness’ sake, or because they were “industry luminaries” and had a reputation for being smart (which was rarely the case, I found).

The next thing I did was go through my follow list and find women whose opinions I respected or I thought were funny. Then I looked at the women that they retweeted and followed them without worrying too deeply about what they would post (or not). I figured that I could always unfollow later if their posts were distasteful or annoying or useless.

(Spoiler: I have unfollowed exactly zero of these women.)

My goal was to reach a ratio of 60/30/10 of Women/Dudes/Brands in my feed. I don’t mean this ratio applied to my “follow list”, which is a useless method, but instead to apply to the “posts I was seeing”.

(I managed to hit this ratio, but it’s actually more like 60/30/5/5 Women/Dudes/Brands/Dogs.)

Why did I want to do this? It’s based on a thing I tell all my students: Listen to music you don’t like or know.

Are you a metal head? Give Taylor Swift a spin. Listen to R&B? Try some Johnny Cash. Love country? Try some Godspeed you! Black Emperor!. Get out of your comfort zone. Hear tones you’re not used to. Listen to someone else’s story.

If you stay in one place mentally you will lay down roots. This will make you inflexible and slow. You will have fewer tools. So always seek out things you don’t know anything about and do what you can to experience them.

A lot of my life’s biggest changes have started from small changes like that. I am a big believer in will-to-power. About 30 years ago, I was a dumb teenager and depressed about something stupid, and I remember saying, “I want to change stuff but I don’t know how.” My friend Mike said, “Dude, just change your brand of cigarettes. Switch from Marlboro to Winston for a while. If you don’t like it, switch back.” I did this, and it worked: the small alteration in my routine had a larger butterfly effect.

(Man, can you believe I used to smoke cigarettes? What a world.)

When faced with a daunting task, small accomplishments lend vigor to your motivation and encourage you to do even more. A journey of a thousand miles begins with but a step, that sort of thing.

Want to expand your mind? Start with something manageable. Listen to music you aren’t familiar with. Change the layout of the furniture in your apartment. Change your brand of shampoo. Something. Make a change.

Making small changes makes leveraging larger changes easier.

I wanted to change my perspective. It was inadequate. I needed to see different points of view. I made a change.

So what happened?

First, I feel smarter. I know more today than I did a year ago.

I feel that I am better informed generally, but specifically about my industry and hobbies and their politics. A large part of this has to do with the way that men and women share knowledge.

Dude programmers and designers (including myself – I am not an innocent) share knowledge like this: “Check out this thing I wrote about $TOPIC.” Women programmers and designers share knowledge like this: “I learned a bunch of stuff about $TOPIC and I think you may find this useful.”

There’s an implication in this: Men are seeking recognition; women are seeking knowledge transfer (sadly, this this is often worded in a way that seeks permission to enact knowledge transfer). It’s a fascinating distinction.

Further: dudes, as a whole, do NOT hold nuanced opinions. I count myself in this group. I am very much a “this is the line” type of person, very black-and-white, especially when it comes to issues of justice. When you hear nothing but black-and-white opinions, your opinions tend to be black-and-white. That’s sub-optimal.

I dropped some really awful dude journalists (<cough>Glenn Greenwald</cough>) and for each one of them I followed two female journalists. I tried to skew towards more conservative journalists when possible to counteract my natural bias. I feel that this gives me a more informed, smarter opinion about politics. It definitely keeps me thinking.

Second, I’m happier. Oh man, I’m so much happier these days. A huge part of that is that Female Twitter (ugh, I hate these terms) is generally more supportive.

Let me rephrase. Not “generally more supportive”; I mean “absolutely more supportive”.

The small encouragements I get make me feel good. Even seeing someone give encouragement to someone else makes me feel good. This causes me to want to encourage others to feel good as well. It’s a virtuous cycle; the same cycle I banked heavily on when I designed the “thanks” system for Wikipedia.

A real-life side-effect that this has had in my life is that I respond to people’s posts on Facebook and Twitter with way more likes/favorites/smiles/prides/whatevers. I didn’t use to do that; now I do. I like spreading encouragement.

Another way that I am smarter is due to less raw anger in my feed. There’s less entitlement. Less shouting. There’s not always less “outrage”; there’s still plenty of that. But the outrage is tempered. More thoughtful.

Third, I think I’m funnier. Dudes, lemme tellya, women are funnier than we are. They just are.

The funny women I follow challenge my own comedy. They make me work harder for my laughs and, interestingly, they make me want to improve the calibre of my audience. It’s great.

Fourth, I’m calmer. I feel much more in control of my emotions and my responses to them.

Part of this has again to do with having less I AM STRAIGHT MAIL TESTOSTRNE GAH in my ear all day. Part of this is because women tend to talk with a more emotional language, which helps me to identify my own emotions. Being able to identify your emotions helps you get control over them.

The biggest part, though, is the presence of more nuanced opinions. Hardline outrage feeds itself, getting louder with each cycle. That’s unnerving and it fills the mind with itself. While I am a Creature of Rage, constantly being filled with Rage is a less useful tool than one would think. Rage requires a single-mindedness that is defeated by nuance.

Fifth, I have more empathy. I understand more people better.

There’s another benefit of following people who are different from you. Say you find an account run by a woman of color. About half of what she posts is interesting or related to your industry but the other half is personal shit, stuff you won’t care about, make-up and hair tips? Follow her anyway and you’ll level up your Empathy score.

You’ll pick up a lot of ambient awareness about different parts of our culture. You will learn some glory and some heartbreak from this ambient awareness. For example, I will never, ever have the problems with my hair that black women do. I just won’t. Learning about relaxer and the costs involved in hair weaves seems like something trivial – until you understand it, and then you see it as anything but trivial. Knowing these types of things makes you smarter because you see more of the game board.

I don’t think I could have done this on Facebook, by the way. Twitter allows you to be a passive observer; Facebook invites interaction. Interaction is good! I love interaction. But on Facebook, the echo chambers are too loud. I cannot easily engage in conversation with my conservative friends on either my wall or theirs. This is because there are always the Asshole Donnies. You know the ones I’m talking about, too: they exist only to inject a special brand of stifling idiocy into conversations by calling folk “cuck” or “fascist”. The ones you want to shout “shut the fuck up” at.

So here’s my lesson to you, my young apprentice: Follow more women.

In November of 1991 I worked two jobs. Most nights I spun records at Gumby’s, the local alternative nightclub. Other nights I was on-air radio talent at WMUL FM, the college radio station, where I was also a producer (think “music director” for a single format). It is the intersection of these two jobs that put me in the position to lay out GG Allin.

I would often use my position at one place to help out the other. Mostly this took the form of doing on-air interviews with bands that were playing in town. We would record the interviews, edit them for profanity and time, and then broadcast them a few hours before the show. This was a win for everyone: the station got a listener bump, the club got an attendance bump, and I often got to party with rock stars. I did a lot of interviews. Most of them were boring but every now and then I’d land a gem.

On a Wednesday evening in November, 1991, GG Allin and his band the Murder Junkies were going to play at Gumby’s. I had no interest in seeing them perform which was good because I worked radio on Wednesday nights. However, like the dutiful music nerd that I was, I agreed to set up an interview with GG and to broadcast it. We were to meet at Davidson’s Records, a store ran by my friend Dave, which was across the street from the radio offices.

GG was late to arrive, of course. He was alone (no entourage) and he was thin and twitchy and clearly not doing well at all. He had sunglasses on and a hoodie and looked more than a little like the wanted posters for Ted Kaczynski, back when we only knew him as the Unibomber. He stank like a homeless person in summertime.

Every third word out of GG’s mouth was “fuck”, “fucking”, or “motherfucker”. I do not wilt from exposure to foul language but the Federal Communications Commission was pretty keen on not letting words like that over the airwaves. Keen enough that I would end up facing some pretty serious fines if I knowingly broadcast them.

We talked for a bit, the three of us: Me, Dave, and GG. It comes to light that GG thought the interview was going to be broadcast live. When I corrected his confusion, he went absolutely apeshit as if a switch had been thrown inside of his tiny junkie mind. He called me a coward and a “Tool of the Man” who carried water for the censors. Little flecks of spit and/or hopefully chicken kept flying out of his mouth while he ranted. At this point I am getting a little heated as well but I’m trying to be cool because it’s my friend’s record store.

Finally, he said, “Well, if the interview isn’t going to be live, then I’m not fucking doing it, you fucking coward.” To this I replied, cold as ice: “Then we are not fucking doing the fucking interview. Motherfucker.”

This was his last straw, apparently. It doesn’t matter what he said to me, about me, about my family, about my friends, about my jobs – it mattered that I called him a “motherfucker”.

So he took a swing at me.

If you’ve ever been in a fist fight with a junkie, you already know how this ends. Fist fights are always tricky: you never know who can fight and who just shows. I’m from West Virginia. We used to get into fist fights for fun. Because we were bored.

He made a feeble feint with his left before trying to land a haymaker with his right. By and large, heroin addicts are slow and transparent, so I saw all of this coming for a country mile. It was like he had spent a long time thinking about how to throw a punch like that but had never actually done it. He lifted his left fist and then tried to swing his right.

I took a step forward, into his zone, and connected. Hard. He fell backwards into a CD rack

and he went down, legs splayed out, and all the compact discs fell down on his head like out of a cartoon or a shitty romantic comedy.

I stood over him, really angry, and shouted down, “Okay, motherfucker. You want to go outside with me? I will knock out your remaining teeth.”

GG did not want to go outside with me.

He sat on the floor, confused, as if he were not sure how (or why) he found himself on the ground. I wasn’t sure if he was high or not but it was suddenly like a spell had been lifted and I could see him for what he truly was and I was disgusted by it. If anything he started smelling worse.

Dave kicked him out of the record store. “Get the fuck out before I call the cops!” GG picked himself up as best he could and slunk out the door. I helped Dave pick up the CDs and put them back on the rack and when I left I half-expected that I’d have a junkie with renewed courage to deal with but no: GG had hot-footed it back to the club.

That night he would shove one of the club’s microphones up his own asshole. There is not one moment that I regret being absent from that spectacle.

A year and a half later, GG would die as he lived: pointlessly and on heroin.

I nurture and love this pan. I make food for the people I love with it.

I did not buy this pan. It was my grandmother’s. It came to me after her death. I remember her frying chicken with it. She made food for the people she loved with it. She nurtured it because it was once her grandmother’s, too.

Cast iron pans work because of seasoning. Seasoning keeps the pan from rusting and creates a surface that doesn’t stick: ideal for cooking. A pan’s seasoning is actually a thin skin of hardened and polymerised fat. The process of seasoning cast iron is both a science and an art. Like any skin, seasoning can be damaged. This is what happened to my pan: it suffered a scrape that went through to the bare metal, and from that violence bloomed the red tidings of rust. I was distressed.

When a pan’s seasoning is damaged, it must be re-seasoned. A true re-seasoning is a difficult and lengthy process and begins with the removal of the pan’s old seasoning. This is a brutal doing. All the cruft and crap must be removed. Steel wool will grind away all the black from the iron. The correct depth is when the surface turns grey or silver. That’s the bare iron.

Grinding to the iron takes time, patience, and no small amount of agony. It must be done clinically. While it is possible to shorten this effort through the use of aggressive chemicals, such techniques are dangerous and not recommended. It is best, always, to do the hard work on one’s own, relentlessly. When or if rust appears, that must be ground away as well. In the end, fingers may bleed, but the iron revealed is stronger and blessed by the suffering.

When the pan’s surface has been returned to a dull grey sheen (you’ve flushed your bullshit), it is time to re-forge its seasoning. This is a process that cannot be rushed: doing so courts disaster. It must be done methodically and with patience.

Cast iron can be seasoned with many kinds of oils. Most will produce a decent, usable result. For my pan, I chose to season it with flax oil. Flax oil is a food-grade version of linseed oil, which has been used by artists for centuries to provide long-lasting sheen to paintings. Flax oil has low “smoke point” – the temperature at which the oil begins to burn and produce smoke.

You will want to cover a cookie sheet in foil and place it in the bottom rack of the oven. This is to catch inadvertent oil drippings from the pan. There will be no drips if the process is done correctly but it never hurts to be careful.

Flax oil should be coated over the entire surface of pan. This must be a very light covering. Once the pan is covered, as much oil as possible must be removed from it using a paper towel. This must be done continuously until no more oil can be removed with a paper towel. Only the barest hint of oil sheen should be apparent. I suggest wearing latex gloves to reduce mess.

The pan should then be placed in the oven on the top rack, cooking surface down. At this point the oven should be turned on and heated to 500° Fahrenheit (or 450°, whatever your oven can do). Let the pan heat along with the oven’s pre-heat cycle. When the oven reaches temperature, leave it there to forge in the heat for one hour. Baking flax oil produces a peculiar scent that is unusual but not unpleasant. The odor only lasts for the first half hour that the pan is in the oven. My wife tolerated it but I asked her permission before each burn.

Turn the oven off after an hour. Let the pan cool in the oven unmolested for two hours after which it may be inspected. It should be darker in color but only barely.

After the first firing of the pan, you must repeat the process: oil the pan, bake it for an hour, and allow it to cool for two. This must be done a total of six times at a minimum, including the first firing. Six is the magic number. Six is the smallest perfect number. But if the devil is six, then god is seven. I baked my pan a seventh time, for luck.

Since that period, I have set about determining what behaviors and traits in myself that I to encourage and grow. I have also decided which parts of myself I want to improve or jettison. I’ve had some successes in that regard. Some changes were obvious and carried immediate result. Others are much more involved and subtle, with slow effect. It’s slow going, sometimes frustratingly slow, but nothing of value is ever rushed and I have patience.

When I pulled the pan from the oven for the last time, after the extra firing (for luck!), I felt a deep satisfaction and pride in my work. This is a real thing I have done. The process was difficult. It required skill and patience.

Today, the pan feels different now. It rolls smoother in my calloused palms. The seasoning is subtly iridescent in the light: a thousand golden flecks glimmer in the deep black of its abyssal surface.

Tonight, I will pick up my sleeping dog and move her so that I can climb into bed next to my wife. I will open my book. I will daydream before I dream for real. I will plan out the next day. I will fall asleep.

Tomorrow, I will make food for the people I love with my pan.

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.