About Me

Stephanie is a communications expert and campaigner who has worked in the union movement, public service and Parliament, as a political commentator, MC and YouTube board game reviewer.

Blog posts

Green Party announces Stephanie Rodgers as candidate for Ōhāriu

Stephanie Rodgers has been selected as the Green Party candidate for Ōhāriu. Stephanie is a communications expert and campaigner who has worked in the union movement, public service and Parliament, as a political commentator, MC and YouTube board game reviewer. “I am so proud to have the support of my branch to provide a real …

Fear

In a post lost to the mists of Internet time, on one of those forums like Tumblr or Ask A Manager, a tech support person related the tale of helping a member of the US military with a computer problem. They’d told him to make sure everything was turned off and unplugged, then, as the …

Support accurate birth certificates for trans and non-binary people

Content note: suicide, transphobia I’d wanted to get this done a lot earlier, but we bought a house in the middle of lockdown and that has a tendency to throw every other plan out the window. It’s definitely not perfect and I apologise for anything I’ve missed or messed up on. The important bit: there’s …

The Boots Theory

A lot of people wonder where the name of this blog comes from. Wonder no more! It’s taken from Terry Pratchett’s Men At Arms:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

PS. Get some more Terry Pratchett in your life. You won’t regret it.