Good morning, John, it's...Tuesday?  Tuesday?!  What am I doing?  Let's just say we had a brotherly conversation in which you were like, hey, I wanna make a Project for Awesome video this week and that doesn't make a lot of sense to do it on Tuesday when the Project for Awesome isn't until the weekend.  So I'm taking your Tuesday video, you're taking my Friday video, everything worked out better than expected.  

John, you know how the IPCC just came out with its climate change report?  It was full of bad.  I have people asking me pretty regularly how I, as a person who knows a fair bit about the situation we are putting ourselves into, have any hope at all left.  This is terrible, because I honest--I don't think that you can do anything without hope, so it's bad, and I think that it is a symptom of a few different things.  

1) News is gonna focus on bad news.  I've talked about that plenty on this channel and in this culture and I don't think we need to talk about it much more than just needing to mention it.

2) Some people, and I understand this, might hype it up a little bit because when you have been doing this for so long and no one is paying attention, you start to pitch the scariest version of the story, and you can tell that story and it isn't a lie.  Like, yes, the world is going to be worse.  There's going to be climate refugees.  Probably the whole global situation will destabilize a little bit as we deal with this problem.

I also am desperate to have people pay attention.  I just don't think that that ultimately works.  It might get you attention without action.  The third thing is that we're bad at non-binary things, like, 'very bad' is not 'the apocalypse'.  We have lived all of human history as a species so far somewhere in between utopia and apocalypse.  Like, we've been there.  That's the only place we've ever been.

But though you often hear about 'tipping points', like, there are a lot of different tipping points that we're gonna deal with, but ultimately, there's always going to be a spectrum of bad and our future is going to be somewhere on that spectrum.  The place where I'm at with regard to climate change, which is something I know more about than most of the big problems that we're dealing with, has actually helped me have more hope for those other problems.  

There just is not a binary state of fixed or broken when it comes to climate change, just like there isn't when it comes to crime or justice or racism or suffering.  There are billions of variables and we all get to affect those variables as we individually move through life, and one of the recipes I've seen work for other people and for myself, like the pie and ice cream of activism, is care mixed with hope.  Witnessing people who I have seen who are full of hope and full of care, that is what gets me up off my butt to actually do something.

I personally don't have too much problem with the care part of this, but I have, at various times in my life, lost a grip on the hope, but we are not working toward a fixed state.  We are working toward a better place on the spectrum of bad.  This isn't about success or failure, it's about every little bit of good work adding up to a better world, and at no time of the year do I feel that more than during the Project for Awesome.

The campaign on IndieGoGo just launched.  There's digital perks, there's physical perks, exclusive podcasts you can get, signed pieces of my manuscript that has editing marks from when I was fixing it up.  I just found ten episodes of hankgames and Games with Hank on old hard drives and I've uploaded them to the hankgames vault, and another challenge coin to add to my collection.  

John, the Project for Awesome for me is full of hope and care, and that's why it feels good, because it's doing good both because of and in spite of all the doom and gloom.  Maybe that might feel false, but I don't think it is.  I actually think that that is how almost all of the great work of humanity has been done: not out of despair, but out of hope. 

Join us for the livestream, during which we will be playing games and having great guests and I'm gonna do my punishment live and record it and then edit it for next week.  Upload your Project for Awesome videos.  I've put some resources, if you're making one of those, in the description, and also you can go to projectforawesome.com to learn more.  

John, I'll see you on Friday.