20 years ago Harlan Ellison said I was "a superannuated teen-age golem with a slack jaw, a slow manner, a typical pointless surliness at a world unwilling or unable to accept him as Superlative, and on sum a twerp easy to dismiss" and I am still very proud of that.

Here's "The Story".

-Gabe Out

Part of being a core demo means being catered to by a variety of products and services - trinkets and baubles, lotions and potions, slakes for mortal lusts. Mork and I had a run-in with Candles For Men, back when someone recognized that men also have noses and thus might be addressable by olfactory weaponry. At the show, Gabriel was sold a candle not as a man - a state we match only the most rudimentary distinctions of - but as an adventurer, perhaps the only state to which we are less entitled to. Alas! No law may bind him; he is fifty to seventy percent beast.

There are a few things I am an absolute sucker for, just suckin' like crazy, and one of them is dice.  Or, several of them I guess.  It depends on how granular we're being. I thought that I was in remission, but here at PAX I've been thrust into the fire like a hot poker - a hot poker that for some inexplicable  reason wants to buy dice.

We like to write science fiction thinly disguised as industry commentary, or vice versa, and we also really like Antiques Roadshow. This sturdy triangle offered unprecedented strip opportunities, the kind that leave precedented strip opportunities in the dust.  This, I thought. This is how we drive brand loyalty and earn share in crowded marketplace.

It's incredibly silly to think that we have been at this - whatever this is - for twenty-seven years. That is a crazy thing to do for as long as we've been doing it. Any rational actor would have boarded the white ships aeons ago, as men reckon time. From this throne in the ATL, Ludacris calls upon all of us to - in his words - "Act A Fool." But he could never have imagined this kind of foolishness extended over such a substantial period of time.

Eurogamer's review is precisely the kind of activism they specialize in, but they're so earnest about it that I consider it an aesthetic. It only makes me mad when they pretend they aren't doing it - by and large they just have tender hearts and venerate the priors of their social class. I'm only mentioning them again because they gave the best shooter this year a two out of five because Embark used AI voices. Well, kinda. They might have, or they might do more in the future. I, uh… Goddammit. Far be it from me to venerate a prior, but I gotta give it to 'em.