Greetings Horizoners,
It’s late April but it doesn’t feel like it here in West Yorkshire. It’s been a long, wet, cold winter/spring thing. My partner is worried (irrationally, maybe?) that this is how it’s going to be forever now. She might be right.
Still, the signs of spring are there. The birds are making nests (we find the broken egg shells that they throw out). The bats are out in the evenings again (because the bugs are out in the evenings). The trees are in leaf (apart from the beeches in my garden which don’t get enough sun). I can dry the washing outside again (thank the gods). We’re behind with planting, everywhere. It’s not dark when I wake up. Etc. Etc.
I posted this elsewhere this week:
We have a strange cherry tree in the garden; I'm pretty sure it's a cherry grafted onto something else like an apple. Every year we get two kinds of blossom: classic pink cherry blossom, and white blossom. But every year the pink blossom gets less as the cherry tree parts gradually die and the root stock becomes more like itself.
(It’s me, I’m the metaphor.)
Before I forget: I have a house full of FHC zines now. If you want a copy of Outliers, the solo TTRPG of absurd horror and weird research by Samantha Leigh x Far Horizons CoOp, then you need to put in your pre-order before Sunday. You can do that at the BackerKit hosted pre-orders page. Do it before Sunday! It’s £12 for a copy plus shipping; we still have some of Carly A-F’s cool stickers left too (although perilously few now). If you live in the Global South shipping is free, and I’ve tried to make it as cheap as possible elsewhere.
Warning: non-TTRPG rant
This week my partner, who runs a beautiful forest garden near our house, had some extremely negative feedback about the work she’s done. Some context: she runs this as a “community interest company”, which is a limited company legally restricted from making profit; she charges for entry to her groups, but keeps the price low to make it accessible; she took the site from overgrown, abandoned scrubland full of fifty-plus years of rubbish and made it into a wonderful community space; she pays rent to a private landowner for the privilege of running it; and up until last week she was not paying herself for what is probably a full-time job for her.
The running costs of this space (rent, insurance, and now her modest salary) are covered by the sale of tickets for groups, which are variously for toddlers, babies, school-age kids, and a monthly women’s circle. But the investment costs, for things like sheds, equipment, plants, trees, and so on, has to come from grants and donations. This means she’s reliant on grant-making bodies understanding the benefit of her work, which to everybody we’ve spoken to is totally self-evident: people benefit from being outside, and she’s making a safe and fun place to be outside, whilst providing life and practical skills to young people. I don’t see what’s difficult to understand, but, I’m a parent with young children. Anyway.
Earlier in the year we applied for a grant from a national grant-making body whose remit asked for opening green spaces to people from underserved communities, like poorer communities which are covered by our postcode. Unfortunately we didn’t get this (quite large) grant, but we were okay with that: we were competing with projects from all over the country, some of which would have fitted the criteria better.
This left us with a funding shortfall for this year: to plant up some new spaces, which is needed to keep the space feeling fresh and important, not to mention providing habitats and boosting biodiversity, we needed some money to buy plants and seeds. We managed to save some of the surplus from ticket sales, but there was still a hole, so we applied for a grant from the parish council1.
After not even acknowledging the application, the parish council initially said that we’d missed their deadline, which we knew probably wasn’t true because we’d applied at the same time as other bodies, and that they wanted to ask a few questions about our application, so they invited my partner to the next public parish council meeting. I would have liked to go with her, just for moral support, but having young kids basically prevents this, so she went by herself, expecting to having to answer a few questions about her accounts and projections.
It was An Ambush.
The council, and one councillor in particular, took the best part of an hour to berate, belittle, patronise, criticise, and offend my partner in every way they could. They said she provided no community benefit; that the site looked worse than when she’d started; that she’d put up large fences (lies); that there was nothing but plastic on show from the path (more lies); that the company would fail (it’s a NFP); that her ticket prices were too expensive (see above!); that she has no experience of business (she’s run her own business for years); that by providing others with employment, that they gave more community benefit than she did (nonsense and not relevant); that she was not even as good as the local playgroup (it’s a rubbish playgroup with almost zero costs and nothing but broken toys and bad orange sqash); that she should buy plants from our local plant shop (who don’t sell native wildflowers); and so on; and so on.
She didn’t get the grant, by the way, because as a private company she wasn’t eligible. They could have said that by email! but this councillor wanted to be nothing short of nasty and cruel in-person. This could have been a public meeting, too, but they knew they’d have her on her own, at their mercy. It’s violently unprofessional. The whole setup of chairs and tables made it sound like a Victorian Poor Board committee, coming to plead your case as the “deserving poor”. The chair never called the meeting to order, which is their entire job. Nobody in the entire meeting (there were maybe a dozen councillors) spoke up for her, and the two people who emailed her later and apologised on behalf of their colleagues were nothing short of absolute cowards. Thank gods I didn’t go, to be honest, because I would not have kept my cool.
Ultimately she didn’t get the grant because she’s not their friends, or somebody who looks like their friends (middle-aged cishet men). They fund bodies run by themselves or their mates, and whilst they helped her a little before, they made it absolutely clear they would not be doing so again.
I have so much rage about this, and so much more to say, but I don’t think you want to read it to be honest. If you’ve ever been at the sharp end of one of those homeowner’s associations or some other small semi-public body, you’ll know how this feels. It fucking sucks.
I started talking to my extremely good friend in TTRPG spaces about this, and immediately they offered to help, even though they’re time-poor, constantly ill, and busy with dozens of other things, important and not. This is the difference between small-c conservative bodies and leftist community ones: actual mutual support. When I said “sure let’s make a zine about plants and animals and sell it to raise money”, I had probably ten people immediately offer to give up their time to draw or paint or write or design or whatever just to help somebody they’d never met or meet make something they’ll never go to. Actual real people with lives and jobs and their own projects, making something for us. Completely humbling.
So I’m making a little riso-printed A6 zine to sell, which will be on Kickstarter later this year, and which will be beautiful not only through aesthetics, but because it’s made by people who, unlike the parish council, actually give a shit about community action.
I’m extremely motivated by spite and I can tell you that We Will Win and they will lose.
Warning: tangentially-related rant
People keep reminding me that Substack as a platform is bad because they also host extreme far-right content. I have mixed feelings about this, because on the one hand those chuds are extremely fucking awful and I don’t want to even be associated with them.
On the other hand, I’m very tired of having to move platforms all the time, and I kinda feel like it’s letting the bastards win. If it’s Substack today, it’ll be Ghost next month, and another platform the month after, and I already feel like they’re chasing me all over the internet.
Substack don’t get any money from us, and there aren’t any ads on their website, so they’re also not getting money from you. So, I don’t feel like we need to move at this time. Obviously if the fuckers start coming here in greater numbers I might have to re-evaluate, but for now, I can’t face migrating the newsletter.
I think that’s enough for now.
Project Updates
A Thousand Burning Stars season 2
Nynphaiel has handed the reins back to me for this one, so I’m currently re-organising the schedules to find out where we are. We have at least four cool games planned for this season, and they should start dropping fairly soon.
Stuff by Kamala Kara Arroyo
Arroyo’s Friendship Effort Victory from a couple of years back was hella cool and one of our ongoing most popular products. We love what Arroyo, Falco, and Lib did with it!
Arroyo is working on two games right now: We Dig Giant Robots, a tribute to Megas XLR, and a slightly secret project that may or may not be related to beloved children’s anime Digimon. They’re both in active development and we really, really hope to have them with you this year.
Far Horizons Guide to X
The Guide to Cults being wrapped up, Falco’s turned their attention to something else fun-sounding. We’re doing recruitment on that right now, but it’ll be another system-agnostic guide to some weird subjects. I’m pretty excited by it. I think you’ll see it much later in the year.
Other
Gungamesh is on the back-burner, apparently, contrary to what I said last time, and we regret to inform you that Sundo: We, Once Mortal has been permanently shelved whilst its creator focuses on other stuff. You can’t make ‘em all.
That’s all there is. Remember: make cool games. wage class war.
Marx // F.H.C.
What’s a parish council? It’s a very local, democratically-elected group of councillors who represent a few streets each. They meet in public meetings and help to make decisions about planning applications, as well as making grants to local organisations who provide benefit to the community. As residents, we pay a small “precept” every year which covers their costs (although the councillors are unpaid); they also receive money from larger planning applications within their postcode areas.