Posted by Calé Reilly in Questions for the candidates -10 Questions at random
This question is for both tickets and running people in general. (I really struggled to word that sorry, no idea why.)

1- If you had to choose, what one thing would you say was the thing you were most proud of in your time in the club and why.

Exodus. I saved the club. I also built a complete web application as a side project that is used by real people. Many programmers start side projects that never really get used by anyone because they don’t finish them.

2- What’s currently in your fridge?

• a bag of shredded cheese, 4 cheese mexican blend
• a bag of shredded cheese, sharp cheddar
• greek yogurt, strawberry flavor
• packets of tunafish
• small cups of mandarin oranges in naturally sweetened water
• small cups of “pinapple tidbits”
• cottage cheese
• parmesian cheese
• several boxes of lunchables (light bologna and american cracker stackers variety)
• cookies and creme yogurt
• leftover homemade lasagna
• leftover quesadillas (from a restaurant)
• chicken cacciatore teryiaki
• ground turkey breast, 99% fat free
• sweet and sour sauce
• salad olives
• raspberry preserves
• butter
• kosher dill spears
• classic yellow mustard
• honey mustard
• something called “Powerful Drink”. Apparently it is coconut flavor?
• ketchup
• mayonnaise
• red raspberry preserves
• protein infused water
• honey barbecue sauce
• sweet relish
• aloe vera
• 100% lemon juice
• 1% milk
• half & half (my wife interrupted me while making this list, and insisted I mention to all of you that this half & half is past its expiration date)
• half a can of dog food
• an open can of coca cola
• one bottle of clear protein drink

Don’t make me categorize the freezer.

3- If you had to pick any Pokémon to be your starter in a world of Pokémon what would it be and why?

Ummmm… Pikachu.... because that’s the only one I can reliably remember the name of. Somehow I missed the entire Pokemon fad despite being in the target demo when it was at its maximum early peak in the United States. I just couldn’t get past the whole idea that there was a Red version and a Blue version and how to figure all of that out. Plus I didn’t play my GameBoy that often.

4- Choose a fantasy table top RPG character class and tell us what it is, where it’s from and why you’ve chosen it. (ie: Spellweaver, Gloomhaven, because it’s epic and elemental spells are doss.)

I choose the Barbarian from Dungeon’s and Dragons, 5th edition. You can play simultaneously as a highly effective meat-shield that can constantly attack with advantage by attacking recklessly. An especially powerful combination is to take Half-Orc as your race and multi-class with 3 levels in Fighter to get Great Weapon Fighting; you end up doing large amounts of damage by fishing for critical hits, getting extra critical damage dice, and maximizing the damage with the ability to re-roll damage dice. Greatsword is better until you get enough extra critical damage dice, which I think is at least 2. I have to check that spreadsheet again where I worked it all out.

It’s fun until you get bored of doing the exact same strategy every single encounter. But it works well.

5- Scenario question: You find yourself in Arkham where the veil between words has more holes than Swiss cheese. Which Lovecraftian monster would you be most worried about turning up?

Uhh… umm… none? It’s a book, right? Like the chthulu guy? Sorry, I only know who he is because some friends of mine wanted to vote for him for President of the United States instead of the other people.

6- What is your thoughts on ALT rpg areas?

They’re very nice. I like them quite a bit. Ogawa is fun, but a little to big and busy for me. I helped set up the Sentinel and I’m glad that people are keeping the 60’s vibe going instead of trying to modernize it with Discovery/SNW stuff. Those are the ones I’ve played on recently.

7- Following from question 6, in a world where Trek has moved on from just the standard TNG era timeline most of our ships exist in, how will you ensure that our club manages to ensure diversity or if you’d rather encapsulate the different eras, genres and subtle differences we know exist in the trek verse.

I would actually challenge the premise of this question. Nobody has expressed any real interest in having other timeline ships from the new shows; Sentinel in particular was a project to reject the vision of the future put forth by Discovery in favor of the vision put forward by The Original Series. So I don’t know that the people have actually moved on or want to.

I think we should offer what people want to experience. We’d have to ask them about the newer shows in particular. The last time I remember a public conversation about Discovery, people were pretty confused about what the difference between it an an Original Series ship would be; Seasons 2 and 3 of Discovery changed all that, so that might be worth having a newer conversation about it.

8- Every election, people talk about giving ‘new blood’ or ‘new players’ a chance in roles over ‘the old guard’ (i hate this term btw) which is fine and as it should be to avoid stagnation, however there are people who may have been in the club a long time who haven’t ever had a chance to do much outside of writing on a ship, how will you ensure that club members are able to explore roles and positions as volunteers in the club they may have never tried before regardless of years or lack of years being here.

As I mentioned in our restructuring post, we’re going to offer another process in which people can volunteer for nothing specific in particular, and Steve and I will figure out what to do with them, even if we need to bend the organization around them somehow.

If people don’t volunteer at all, in any way, no matter how we ask them… then that means they probably aren’t interested in doing that exploration. Which is fine. Not everyone needs to do out-of-character work.

9- Rank promotion and commendations exist. Awards exist. The GM Dept has its own recognition system. And yet it’s easy for people not to be recognised or not to receive rank promotions at the end of sims IC or just chug away in the middle writing and being awesome at that. How do you intend to ensure not only that recognition is ongoing and robust for club members but also that the middle group of people who maybe don’t volunteer to do more than write or get involved in other aspects of the club are recognised.

I think we need to look over the entire rank system completely. I don’t know that I agree with every statement I’ve heard everyone say about it (both privately and publicly), but I think there’s some assumptions in it that need to be re-examined. Especially after the last round, where two weeks ago we had complaints that people were being recognized just for being friends and being on Discord… which I very publicly said wasn’t generally true… and then this week Rob recognized people for being his friends and being on Discord. I don’t mean to take away from anyone’s accomplishment; it’s just that Rob quite literally wrote those things as part of the reasons he did it, and I think that kind of reasoning diminishes them in a lot of people’s eyes, which isn’t very fair to the people who are supposed to be celebrating something nice. So I think now we perhaps need to maybe start adding some more objective criteria. I wasn’t convinced of that before but now I’m changing my mind.

Regardless, I think the most under-inspected part of the rank system is actually in the ranks between Captain and Ensign. I think progression there is actually kinda murky because it was assumed ship COs would do certain things that they don’t seem to be doing regularly now. It’s also the range where we’re most likely to lose someone if we don’t address their concerns; the super-senior people who have stuck around for many years are a lot more “sticky” and their concerns are… vastly more elite.

10- Scenario question: Someone in your cabinet comes to you and says they are aggrieved in some way over something you have done or said. How do you handle this?

I’ll admit that this is something I can imagine happening. Very easily.

Usually, if someone comes to me privately, I deal with these sorts of things by making sure I understand why someone feels aggrieved. So, I usually ask them questions if I don’t understand it, and sometimes if I really want to make sure I’ve got it all, I’ll repeat back what I understand that they mean to convey in my own words; if the person thinks I understand them, then we’re ready to deal with the grievance. What that means depends entirely on what the grievance is. If I’ve done something wrong, I’ll apologize with a real apology (e.g. one in which I take responsibility for causing the problem, not one where I say “I’m sorry for shooting your dog, but this is your fault for picking your nose”). If I haven’t done something wrong, then I won’t apologize, but I might still be willing to work with that person to some kind of solution that we can all accept. If a solution isn’t possible, then, I think it’s best to just acknowledge that.

That’s how I deal with grievances that are expressed to me directly and in private. I assume that’s when you mean when you say “comes to you.”

Thanks

Calé

Thanks for asking Calé. Happy to expand on anything in particular.

Joe