Writing this proved to be much tougher than it needed to be. Not only is there extra stress due to all that happened in the past week, but I nearly waited until the end of the bundle I wanted to write this ramble about before I got my ass in gear to put out something.
I sincerely apologize if this ends up being a bit of a mess (Also, nice of the WP editor to make the default font ant sized so I can barely see what I’m writing without upscaling it… I hope this doesn’t break formatting) but I really needed to get something, anything out due to the time limit this was all under for me. I suck at time limits. In my head I rewrote what I wanted this to be about besides a boring, generic “donate to this good cause itch bundle with some minor recommendations” article, over and over and over again.
Every time I worried “oh god it seems more about me than the horror Minnesota is under right now” and I’d try a different approach. At one point I contemplated emailing the bundle creator for a Q&A interview, but got real cold feet about it. All this is to say the article likely sucks, but it’s from my heart and I barely give a shit about anything else, so that’s your heads up here. I feel it is vital I express how much Minnesota means to me as one who doesn’t even live there, because that’s in part why I’ve been miserable the past few months over everything that’s been happening since then, and why I hope for the future even if I worry about my second home immensely.
So, to put the key things upfront; Fuck ICE, and they need to get out of Minnesota. No, a drawdown does not mean they stopped harassing people, it just means they stopped harassing as many people, and even one is too much. For those from the future, to simplify the whole nightmare as much as I can from a guy who’d rather be writing about retro video games than worry sick about his second home state, basically what happened was for the past year+ the President has been sending immigration enforcement people all around the country to bully the shit out of immigrants here without documentation, or even with documentation.
This went around from state to state, but arguably didn’t get to the occupation terror that hit Minnesota until some serial loser dipshit made a video about a daycare that got the president’s Eye of Sauron pointed toward the state, leading to a huge surge of enforcement in the Twin Cities from an organization mostly consisting of fresh hires with low training and guns in their hand. Yeah, you can see why a lot of the stories of ICE agents acting like wackadoo criminals make more sense now, and also led to the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
People there have responded by doing the kind of strong community networking and work needed to protest in huge amounts, using whistles to warn of incoming agents and getting to know their neighbors like never before, and being on constant alert for agents, since they’re still wearing masks and refuse to identify themselves when acting in bad faith. To go into more detail than this would bloat the entire article and have been covered by other people in this industry a lot better, so I’ll just link a good example and move on.
In other words, there’s good reason to want them out. There’s really good reason to keep on pushing even as the media points away from a Minnesota still under siege because apparently less of a siege is OK, even though a siege in general is absolutely not OK. Lots of good causes have popped up since this whole thing started, but the main focus I have today is the ICE itch.io bundle for Minnesota, which you can find here. There are only a couple of days left and I planned to list a bunch of game recommendations, but to be quite honest there are so many damn games here it would be impossible to do so. All I’ll say is you can find a nice DRM free copy of some pretty good games once you buy the bundle, but if you want to help out, then I just honestly think you’re better off donating as much as you can rather than as much as will get you the bundle contents. Still, every little bit helps.
Causes like this are what has helped the people of Minnesota stick together to help their neighbors in need. A lot of important resources and charities for immigrants and their families have been doing the work since this surge started and will continue to need such help, so donating to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota directly is key, if you don’t want any of the gamey stuff. Either way, it’s for a good cause and I wanted to make a piece that mentioned it.
Now for the next part that I struggled the most to write, but one I feel is very critical in emphasizing just how much this issue relates to me despite not being in the Twin Cities for any part of my life. This isn’t like any ordinary other cause I support just because I want everyone to be safe and protected, this one is more personal to me. See, Minnesota is my second home of sorts, and I owe it a lot for how this very site came to be.
Vacation Habits are Bittersweet
Most of my life I’d have a good routine for the summer. Travel from my midwestern state to another one in the form of Northern Minnesota, and head to the cabin areas up north. People who live in Minnesota likely know this already, but for those who don’t know, Northern Minnesota is where a lot of fishing and cabin stuff takes place, especially during the summer. It’s a good way for people to hang out in a very small, local community and a lot of very tiny towns none of you have ever heard of before get a lot of traction during these summers. These parts are pretty conservative compared to the rest of the state, but that doesn’t mean the cabin camps are, or that such things are even on most people’s minds up there. A lot of people from all other the state or neighboring states come up to these cabin areas, so there’s a lot of different kinds of people at them. Thankfully for my community, mostly everyone was chill, empathetic and very nice overall, so these summers have been pretty consistently great memories for my summers growing up.
From this cabin area being the first time I ever got to meet another person who had a Pokemon game to trade with (Diamond/Pearl on DS), to being the place where I got someone really into Digimon Adventure by rewatching the old Fox Kids VHS tapes I had with this other friend coming over and getting them hooked on the show, this cabin culture has led to a lot of fond memories for me, and meeting people from all over the state at these cabin areas was quite enlightening to my younger, more sheltered self. Sure, younger me would find it blasphemous that we’d have kids coming up my age who didn’t like video games in the slightest and preferred stuff like going outside, but even still I was able to make a lot of great friends out of all that, and learn to do other things besides stare at my DSi/3DS all day like playing board games, making up swimming/splashing contests at the nearby lake, or visiting any pets these people brought with them. (yes, a lot of cats/dogs would come to the cabin too!)
As I got to my late teens I found being made to go here against my will a nuisance (if you know family traditions, you know how hard it is for parents to ever want to not do them), but as I age to my current self I appreciated what this area did for my life a lot more despite some burnout I was getting from this yearly tradition. Some of my first IRL friends ever came from this cabin area, and being outside of my tiny rural town for a slightly bigger one but with more friends to meet was quite an experience. Sure, we never stopped in the twin cities, but a lot of those friends came from that place or other cities within Minnesota. Minnesota was for 3 months during my year, every year for most of my post adoption life, a summer tradition and a cherished second home in the wilderness.
It also was where I got the idea for this very site; the Chubbins review only came about because I was bored on the Wii U eShop, used the gamepad due to the console being in a room I couldn’t get to most of the day (relative slept in that room a lot), and also used that sweet Wii U Web Browser as my go-to internet machine (It also is why the earliest SFG reviews look so badly formatted; they were literally made on a Wii U gamepad!). Add it all together and you have a chain of events leading me to getting bored and emailing the developers of that game to write a review for them and kickstarting SFG’s current path as a whole. So northern Minnesota is indeed, very, very cherished to me.
That’s why this whole ICE surge angers me despite not being in the cities, besides the whole obvious “bad things happening to innocent people are still bad things”, because since January, I’ve heard and seen people I keep tabs on dealing with the agony of the whole situation. Being from the Twin Cities and seeing neighbors kidnapped and detained. Having to join local community groups or jolt into action after taking calm for granted. Dealing with an admin that toys with cutting Medicaid funding just because they got bored and felt like it. Remotely keeping tabs on ICE from my own state to see if they’ve approached the cabin area I’ve gone to and messed that up. (They did get rather close, and I saw reports from a neighboring town, which just goes to show these crooks are everywhere and wanting to cause mayhem more than anything else)
But despite all the terror and pain, despite the agony, I’m motivated by the fact Minnesotans are not giving up and still are pushing back even as the media acts like the issue is all over. Some of the more conservative people I know from that cabin area are harshly against this to the point I’m gobsmacked to see actual transformation before my eyes. Some have used this to get their butts to local Indivisble or democratic meetups in their small Minnesota town. And most importantly, practically all the cabingoers I keep in contact with are against this federal invasion, and against any efforts to force Minnesota to be a cruel state that it does not and will not ever be.
That is why stopping ICE and unmasking them is key. That is why this surge needs to end completely, not just “wind down”. That is why it feels like a weight on my mind, because these are besties I’ve known since the late 2000s, now dealing with all the extra stress of federal occupation. I may be relatively safe in my state in comparison, but that doesn’t mean I can’t feel bad or angered I’m not there to help somehow. That I am too busy with a lot of IRL things to go to the vacation cabin this year and meet my friends again after many years of not doing so. That I don’t have a super platform of my own to raise gobloads of money to help Immigrants and Minnesotans in need.
That is why for the sake of my second home, I felt this sorta rambling was needed. I could have made a generic top 5 recommendations article and called it a day, but I had to emphasize that to me, this Minnesota battle is way more personal despite me never stepping foot in the twin cities. And damn it, i’m gonna at least try to link to that ICE Out bundle, share my and memories of peaceful times, and maybe nudge another person besides myself to get around to donating.
Because if I’m able to get just one person who reads this to donate to the itch bundle who didn’t already do so, that will have made this ramble all worth it. I have a platform, but dang it, I wish it had more power to make this cruelty stop.