For those those that were paying attention on social media or watched the Extra Life 2024 streams, you may be aware that my good friend Jen Miller, AKA Test Subject IT To Porn (though she was much more than that), died rather suddenly in October 2024. If you have purchased any BBotE off the store side of the website, please know that Jen touched your life. Every single BBotE label was either edited or outright created by Jen and I cherish that.
More than that, Jen was either the instigator or accomplice to so many adventures. Jen lived a “Yes, and…” life style that we can all aspire to. While I can’t say she lived without fear, she very much embraced the opportunity for novelty. Every damn time Jen and I saw a statue, we made sure to clap hams on that statue’s ass to make assessment. I don’t remember either of us suggesting we should do it, it just happened. She made Japan possible for me, I wasn’t nervous to be there as long as I was with her. She remained angry to the very end that I did not record her slumping drunkenly into the butt crack of a salaryman on a train as he DESPERATELY tried to make eye contact with me and thus turn Jen into my problem. Recording such things is not something friends do in my book but she’d wanted this Authentic Life Experience documented.
With Jen, I realized the concept of Feeble Excuse Local Tourism. When you live in a place, you never go to the tourist locales and thus you don’t suck the marrow of your home thoroughly. Without her, I don’t know if I’d have ever made it to Alcatraz. For her, I made a trip to the Point Chicago Memorial happen and she came 400 miles north to see it because it was Important.
Jen was a college friend’s partner who I didn’t reconnect with until after I got back from Antarctica. Gabe, AKA Test Subject Mortician, brought her with him for a wedding and they both crashed with me when I was living in Livermore and working at LLNL. In more recent years, Gabe has been making his way through med school to become a medical examiner/pathologist while Jen minded the fort working with an unappreciative cadre of edgy clients, coworkers and banks where she kept the plates spinning for their not entirely approved of edges of the economy. And it is for Gabe that I write this because he now has to keep on keeping on without his partner for 20+ years.
On Veterans’ Day Weekend TEAM SENSIBLE SHOES played a series of rather difficult Shadows of Brimstone missions for Extra Life 2024 but we didn’t, in our opinion, manage to fulfill all the pledges we owed folks. So, this MLK Jr. Weekend starting at 10am PST Saturday we will fire up the livestream again to keep on playing. Except this time, our Tiltify campaign is going to Gabe to help him deal with the unexpected expenses of Jen’s death and re-establishing his life to finish med school. Multiple wildfires all around him ain’t exactly helped. If you would like to donate and/or add to the chaos of our play this weekend, please go here. This is not the entirety of the incentives, more will go live on game day proper on Saturday, along with the twitch livestream. And, of course, I will be liveskeeting it on Bluesky.
If you enjoyed my bullshit on the Better Offline CES podcasts, I am only encouraged more in honor of Jen. I miss her. We all do.