Greetings all,

I am a guy from Minnesota.  If you got linked here, you probably know me.  The short answer to “what do you do” is: I run a lot of Magic events in Minnesota, and I recently made Level 3 Judge.

My goal is to provide context, both for Magic folks and non-Magic folks.  I know a lot of different people both inside the buzzword-laden Magic world, and outside of it, and I want to try to explain things to those people.

Why?  Well, when I made L3 last weekend, I posted on Facebook, and got two types of responses from my friends and family.  “This is well deserved and awesome” from people in the Magic world.  “All these people are congratulating you, and I will too, but I have no idea what it means” from the non-Magic folks.  And I realized the non-Magic folks (and some of the Magic folks too!) lacked context and explanation of what in the heck was going on with something that is pretty important to me.

So I made a big huge Facebook post, and got a ton of positive comments, and Regina Cross (context!  Regina is a great L2 Judge from Missouri) suggested I should put it up as an article somewhere.

I have more things to say than just one long post, though.  Reading through the L3 forum, I found that Lems (Jason Lemahieu, a L5 Judge from Madison, one of the hugely influential and great pillars of the judge program) had put out a notice that L3s could make judge blogs.

So I am!

This is just the intro post.  What I intend to put here are a few things:

Explanatory articles.  Things like “why is becoming a L3 such a big deal?” or “you flew out to Vegas for some event, and everyone talked about it, why was that?”

Content for other judges – things like what kinds of work go into planning my event staffing for Minnesota competitive events, what kinds of things I am doing with reviews, and what I am doing on JudgeApps  as I get my feet wet helping on the project.  (Context!  JudgeApps is a site for coordinating events, contacting judges, managing projects, and discussing issues and questions on mailing lists.  It is run by James Bennett, a L3 from Kansas.  During Grand Prix Kansas City last weekend, he invited me to help work on it, which I am excited to do.)

Content for myself.  I plan to post plans about what I am doing, and ask for feedback.  I’ll cross post to Facebook/Twitter/etc and solicit advice.  For instance, Steve Peterman (L2 from Minnesota) and myself are trying to schedule a Judge Conference this fall.  I will probably ask about content there, scheduling, or feedback on our planning as we make it, and see what people say.

I’ll probably post sporadically as things come up.  My goal is to make short posts as I do outside of event work, things like reviews and planning future events, and I’ll make longer posts whenever people ask me interesting questions.

So, I’m off to convert that long Facebook post on L3 now, wish me luck!