[State of affairs]

[Ron Edwards]

Here's a look at the stuff I'm working on.

Circle of Hands*
A couple of interviews
A couple of essays: "Finding D&D" and "Kittybox"
Reading and taking notes for Amerikkka
Shahida: promotion
My book on The Island of Doctor Moreau*
Review of a new evolutionary bio book

* These are the current top priorities, both to be finished by December.

This is also a big life-change moment for me, as I'm aiming at working full-time as an author with related activities. So I'm in the last couple of weeks of my 25-year career in academia, although since evo bio is my writing focus, I'll probably stay connected with it.

Questions, issues, whatever, are all welcome, but the point is merely to let you know what I'm doing. The past four weeks have been very very No Fun and the next two aren't much better, so expect more grumpiness and backlog on my gaming posts. But after that, hope looms.

[Miskatonic]

Wow. Congrats? Very interested in hearing about all of these things when time permits.

[Ron Edwards]

Yes, congratulations are OK. I should have been a little more clear about that. I'm leaving the university because even this, the best job a contingent faculty can hope for, is criminally underpaid. My department head would very much prefer that I stay, and why should he not? The bio department consistently gains better teaching evaluations than the university average, and within the bio department, I consistently gain better evaluations than its average, plus a variety of other faculty-level services. And I cost about a quarter of any tenured faculty who's been there as long as me. My stress and health hassles all arise from this state of affairs, including the time and costs of getting back and forth. I could go on and on about how much of my meager paycheck goes to fund child-care, not only reducing my time with my kids, but basically earning so that I can pay in order to earn, in an absurd cycle.

I am leaving with pride about one great thing: a couple of weeks ago, after seven years of struggle and rather astonishing external opposition, the Students for Justice in Palestine at DePaul successfully led a referendum for the university to divest from twelve corporations which profiteer from Israel's occupation. It's the first such action which carries (some) binding power upon university policy, across all the BDS campus work so far. I was one of SJP's two faculty advisors for those seven years and I am so proud of those students and their efforts, and glad that for once in this life I was able to do something politically valuable.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Good to hear that you're moving forward. Hopefully good things will come of this. I would certainly expect that you'd fit well in other milieus aside from American higher education.

[Moreno R.]

Congratulations for BOTH: the career choice (the university's loss is our profit, if you'll have more time for writing) and the SJP victory!

[John W]

Congratz!  Good news for your family and for the gaming community.

[Troy_Costisick]

Wow, congrats, Ron!  Are you officially retiring or just stepping away from that career for a while?  I'm very happy for you! :)

Peace,

-Troy

[Christoph]

A bold, courageous and inspiring move; best wishes!

[Ron Edwards]

Many years ago, someone or some bot successfully attacked my email account with some kind of substitution game, such that my email invisibly sent out literally millions of crazy spam messages and then quite visibly received many thousands of "your message has been blocked" type responses. Clinton explained to me how they did it (which seemed absurdly easy, horrifyingly so). Like a lot of people with uncertain computer situations, then more so than now, I used my email archives as a filing system and it could have been catastrophic rather than merely incredibly inconvenient and somewhat destructive.

Anyway, since then, as an ongoing task, I would go to my "old messages" folder every so often and clean out a few pages of emails left over from all this. The on-line email I use isn't sophisticated enough to do this easily, so it was laborious and never-ending. We are talking about insane numbers of emails, for your information, not easily categorized or grouped, with a program that chokes and locks up if you try to do too much at once. Sometimes I'd forget about it for months, and other times I'd get a few pages deleted every day for a while.

Yesterday, I finished it. All gone. My "old messages" folder is now a useful archive again.

[James_Nostack]

Best wishes, Ron.  The business side of academia strikes me as one of the cruelest tricks played on people, at all levels from undergrad to adjunct faculty.  I'm glad you're getting out of it, and I hope you end up in a much better spot in every dimension.

[Ron Edwards]

With friends' help, I cleaned out my office today. Wiped the computer. Turned in my keys. With a wrench, left behind my extensive collection of scientific journals and articles, as they would be incredibly heavy and difficult to store. Amassed mainly between 1985 and 1999, carefully catalogued, destined for mulch.