Join in five full days of gaming from June 13-17 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. Events include collectible and trading card games, eclectics, live action role-playing, miniatures. tabletop games, and True Dungeon. There will be an Art Expo, costume contest, film festival and live podcast.

You can sign up for games on-site as part of your registration, (or if you pre-register, as a separate action), but you can also purchase any number of generic tokens to use as you wish. Generics come in $2.00 increments, and they match up with the cost of our events. If you see a game you want to play, and there is space available, you can just sit down and join in! You simply give the appropriate number of Generics to the game organizer. You will want to pay particular attention to three pieces of information that each game will have listed: Minimum Age, Experience, and Complexity.

Registration runs from $35-$70. See http://originsgamefair.com/registration/ for more information.

Rogue Machine, which earned the Best Season Ovation Award for 2017, is known for pushing the theatrical envelope with edgy, often hard-hitting shows. These hot potato topics range from Western colonialism in Africa in Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs to racism at home in Mexican Day, Dutch Masters and One Night in Miami to contemporary anti-fascism in Daytona to psycho-sexual angst in bled for the household truth and Cock, et al.

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But with its world premiere of 100 Aprils Rogue Machine is tackling its heaviest topic yet: Genocide. Playwright/co-star Leslie Ayvazian's one-acter takes a deep dive into the 1915 ethnic cleansing of Armenians and the trans-generational PTSD that is passed down to its characters in a 1982 psychiatric ward of a hospital. Well, it’s not exactly a musical comedy - in dramatizing the mass murder of Armenians 100 Aprils is unrelentingly depressing.

The US Supreme Court (by the usual 5-4) has certified Ohio’s Jim Crow stripping of more than a million mostly black and Hispanic citizens from the 2018 voter registration rolls. Unless the Democrats effectively respond, a GOP victory in the 2018 mid-term election may be a done deal.

The decision approves Ohio’s race-based assault on the right to vote. Secretary of State Jon Husted has been stripping citizens who don’t vote in consecutive federal elections. His office mailed some 1.5 million queries to registered voters. He got back fewer than 300,000 responses – and then stripped some 1.2 million voters from the computer files.

Husted (now running for lieutenant governor) says he’s sent voters a notice after they skip a single federal election. If they don’t vote or respond in the next four years, they lose their ballot.

Court documents confirm that those eliminated are mostly urban blacks and Hispanics in mostly Democratic districts. Voters in rural Republican districts are often not queried, and their registration rolls are not stripped.

By David Swanson
Seymour Hersh’s new memoir, Reporter: A Memoir, occasionally notes the failure of the exposure of wrong-doing to result in accountability or policy reforms. That’s the closest the book generally comes to touching on any motivation behind Hersh’s work related to ending war or torture or any other evil. The exception is the bit about Hersh’s time working for Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign. In 1960, in Chapter 3, Hersh joins the U.S. Army without one word as to why. In Chapter 14 he self-censors the story of President Richard Nixon seriously assaulting the First Lady because Hersh thought it was a story unrelated to public policy. Wasn’t allowing Nixon to remain in office and unindicted related to public policy?

While crossing High Street at Graceland Boulevard in Clintonville the other day, I noticed a bumper sticker stuck to one of the light poles. It read “Fluoride: There is poison in the tap water” with a link to the ultra-conservative, white supremacist site InfoWars.

Though I know it’s nearly impossible to have political ubiquity in a neighborhood as large as Clintonville, one doesn’t expect to see InfoWars stickers peppering a neighborhood that probably went overwhelmingly to Hillary in the last presidential election. It’s much more common to see yard signs with slogans like “hate has no home here” and “no matter where you are from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor” in six different languages. While the anti-fluoride sticker is among the more benign of InfoWars’ stances, it’s still jarring to see.

I thought about what a thing like that said about my neighborhood and how someone who’s perhaps not versed in media literacy might see it and decide to check out the website. And how the internet is full of rabbit holes for one to fall down.