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Episode 237 1/2: Hobbes Has Something To Say
155 Plays16 days ago
Hello, Podwalkers. Today we do not have a full episode. Today instead Hobbes wanted to sign on to talk about the recent situations involving the RC and EDH/Commander. This covers the topics of Emotions vs Behavior and Grief. We highly recommend checking out this previous episode with Ryan Sainio. Hobbes also mentions Emotion Wheels which can be a great tool.
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As promised, we keep Mental Health Links available every episode. But For general Mental Health the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has great resources for people struggling with mental health concerns as well as their families. We also want to draw attention to this article on stigma from NAMI's site.
If you’re thinking about suicide or just need someone to talk to right now, you can get support from any of the resources below.
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988
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- Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741-741
- International suicide hotlines: A comprehensive resource list for people outside the US.
- IMAlive: Click Chat Now to access a live online network of volunteers through instant messaging.
- TrevorLifeline, TrevorChat, and TrevorText (LGBTQ+ crisis support): 1-866-488-7386, or text “Trevor” to 1-202-304-1200
- Trans Lifeline (US): (877) 565-8860
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, Podwalkers. This is Hobbs Q. um We do not have a full Goblin Lore podcast episode for you today. We did have one that we kind of were planning on and had in mind. We were going to really focus a little bit on community reactions to news and kind of the toxicity that that can come about from that, especially in light of everything that kind of happened last week with the bands related to EDH.
00:00:28
Speaker
I had posted a better days MTG, which is kind of my way to speak about mental health on Tuesdays as best as I can. I'm open to talk about mental health and mental health topics on those days. And I posted last week about emotions versus action. And I wanted to kind of go through a little bit of that today and just kind of a reason why we're not recording and why we chose not to this week. Emotions are often described as being valid. That is a topic that comes up a lot. And I think that it's important to understand what that means. emotions being media Emotions being valid or having validity to them does not mean that actions or behaviors in response to those emotions are acceptable. And I think that's one of the things that is the biggest to remember. By saying emotions that are
00:01:24
Speaker
valid, we're acknowledging that it's your own your emotions cannot be taken away from people. And I think that is very important to realize, feeling things, even feeling them intensely, is not something that you want to avoid. It's not something that is good or bad. People don't get to tell you how you're feeling or how what you're feeling is wrong. And I find that emotions are actually something that are complicated or difficult to understand. And I'm gonna include a link to an emotion wheel in the show notes for this brief episode, because I think it's very helpful to see kind of how core emotions, things like happiness, sadness, feeling bad, feeling fearful, angry, have degrees to them and have levels of intensity to them. And I think it's important to be able to look at those differences.
00:02:12
Speaker
because naming the core emotion and the intensity level really can help us understand what is being experienced. There's a big difference between saying that we are angry and saying that we are irate, or understanding kind of what that means. So with that, my initial point is feelings are valid, everybody's emotions are valid, there was a lot of strong emotions that I knew would be felt with kind of that announcement once the band hit. And That's okay. That is something that is totally acceptable and find it to be disappointed, to be frustrated, to be angry. However, that's the first step is to recognize the emotion. What is not acceptable, at least for me, is how these can end up being
00:03:04
Speaker
Well, ah for lack of a better word, how they end up being expressed when it moves into that realm of what is a behavior or an action. And that's unfortunately the nature of social media. And we know this people often act quickly and people escalate. And there was a lot of passion and energy that crossed lines. I ah personally, and I can say that for me, this is something that I witnessed from memes about Sheldon over his dead body slurs that were being used in this happened in my own feeds as well as the feeds of people that are important to me. And
00:03:42
Speaker
There were threats and I can tell you that those were credible. They were enough that people felt unsafe and they were not just people overreacting or people weaponizing what they believed were perceived threats. They were threats. They were threats of revealing locations.
00:03:59
Speaker
they were actual wishes of death upon people. um I mean, we saw similar remarks even when Sheldon was alive, and there's been this push in some ways to even want to act like all of this is in due to Sheldon and him him being gone. And I will say right now that invoking that and telling the people that knew him well that they're pissing on his memory is just unacceptable once again.
00:04:24
Speaker
So I was already dealing with that and personally and is as a cast. We really wanted to talk about the fact that that's how people respond. Since that time, as of yesterday, I'm recording this on Tuesday, the October 1st, the RC has been dissolved. They are now going to be managed, the band list and kind of the the format, the philosophy of the format is going to be managed by Wizards of the Coast. This is something that personally for me is something that I'm struggling with because I just
00:04:58
Speaker
do not believe that it is the right move or what was ever wanted. Um, it's been kept separate for many years for reasons. And I think those reasons are because it is helpful to have had this group that was overseeing it that were casual and did not have direct ties to the production. And it's not to say that there weren't ties between members of the RC and Watson. There wasn't communication, but I do think that this is different. And so,
00:05:29
Speaker
Yesterday I experienced a lot of grief. And that's the other part that comes along with this is is grief and loss. um There's an episode of the Goblin Lore Pod with Ryan Sainio. I once again will be linking that in just this brief kind of discussion because I think that it's a really good one to realize that there's no correct way to grieve.
00:05:49
Speaker
um the The idea of the stages of grief that we are going through, whether it be around the band list or now around kind of the loss of the RC, the CAG, and kind of the switch that will be great, um or the switch that will be happening to WOTC.
00:06:08
Speaker
There is this concept of the stages of grief and the stages can be useful for understanding kind of phases that people may experience with grief, but they are not linear. um A lot of the research that kind of led to that and into pop culture was actually based on people who were dying themselves of terminal illness. Kubler Ross's book is on death and dying and it really was not focused on the people who were around the survivors or um Yeah, the just it was really focused on what people went through when they were dealing with terminal illnesses. And I think that there's been a lot of recognition that grief does not happen in concrete, discrete stages in a linear way. And grief does not necessarily mean just the loss of actual human life, it is grief over the loss of relationships, the loss of, well, in this case, a structure and a format that um I've been a part of for a very long time.
00:07:04
Speaker
and It's a very complicated thing. And I was feeling this, you know, I i was feeling this yesterday with the, through conversations with a friend of mine. Um, it really did feel to me that it we were dealing with like the loss of Sheldon all over again, because I saw the people that had known him so well that had been affected by the toxicity expressed their fear. They had failed him. And I think that this is where I struggled yesterday. And I fully recognized that I engaged more than I planned on. And I, I like to think that I kept it as.
00:07:38
Speaker
level-headed as I could I mean I'm not gonna say that I didn't respond with emotion but I think that without hopefully getting into feeling that I was attacking others with my words or with what I was saying or that I was not just tweeting sarcastically which is my go-to or my frustration wise but it did make me realize that last night I did not think and I i reached out to Alex and Taya they are definitely were understanding where I was coming from that this episode that we had planned, the topic itself was just not a good idea. But also that we might need to take a break this week and just not put out a full episode to be able to give this a space um to move forward. I don't know if that we'll do this as an episode. I think it was a great topic to be thinking about with some great lore tie-ins and we need to consider what we're gonna do with it.
00:08:30
Speaker
But I wanted to kind of highlight the two threads that I had written because I thought that they were relevant. I wanted to get on here as somebody who has greatly been affected personally, whether you consider that right or wrong. I am expressing my emotions, which are valid.
00:08:48
Speaker
And I am also just trying to put out there what my belief system is and what I value and also how that relates to the show and how it relates to the Magic community at large. I hope to see healing within it because I think that we do need that. I think it's going to be necessary moving forward. ah This is a big deal when it's Commander. This is the format that most people play at the end of the day. And so it's important. I want us to have conversations and This could also change a lot about people's relationship with the game. And I think that we need to be ready to recognize that, not be doomsayers and also be aware that things will change just like anything in nature and anything in our lives, they will change.
00:09:33
Speaker
And that could change our relationship with a game, with a community, with relationships. So thank you for giving me this space today. I hope that this could be helpful. And we look forward to coming back with new episodes for you all very soon.