Summer Roundup

Whoosh, there went July and August. And almost September. I did remember the 21st night of September, though.

It’s been a weird summer, lots of ups and downs. A good chunk of my blahs are from the weight of still taking Covid precautions while watching the majority of people pretend things are normal. I’ve been trying to combat that by intentionally connecting with more Covid Conscious (CC) communities online. I connected with a couple nearby that started up a CC Discord server for games of all types. They’ve had a couple in-person events in their garage. Masks were required, air purifiers were running, and there was good airflow with the garage door open. It’s been great to meet more people in a safe way like that. Yesterday, we had our first virtual board game night using Board Game Arena. It was a success! There’s also some general CC servers for San Diego and broader SoCal. They’ve been a great place to ask questions, learn, commiserate, and just have fun.

I’ve been following the Fan Favorite SD Instagram (formerly CovidSafeSocal) for a while now. It’s a mutual aid group that distributes high quality masks and Covid tests to anyone that needs them. They also loan out air purifiers (get it, Fan Favorite) to help make events safer. Every layer of protection helps and every broken chain of transmission has a tangible impact! Earlier this year they set up a Discord to coordinate volunteers. I was excited to get involved in any way I could, but especially with improving the web presence so we’re not reliant solely on Instagram. It’s still very basic, but we have fanfavoritesd.com now and we’re taking control of our links by using our own links in bio instead of Linktree. I look forward to adding more to the site like a local event calendar, links to resources, and of course a blog.

When the people who started up Fan Favorite were starting to get burnt out from juggling everything, I offered to help out with the mask pickups and mailings. I’m privileged to work from home and have a pretty flexible schedule, so it made sense to jump in. Seeing the requests for masks come in reminds me that I’m definitely not alone in this and it helps me maintain hope during times of despair. It’s really important to me to fight for hope. I am also enjoying the logistics of keeping track of our stock of masks 🤓 and thinking about open source software that might make it easier for groups to do this type of work without relying on big corporate silos. More to come on that sometime.

I can’t forget to mention that I went to the final XOXO Festival in Portland. I loved seeing some IndieWeb friends that I hadn’t seen since the before times; sharing the XOXO experience with Joe and Kelly; and the care the organizers put into their health and safety policy. I might write more about XOXO soon, but for now let’s click publish!