As I read more and more of the tortuous rambling of lonely high school freshmen I find myself enjoying it in much the same way one enjoys a bad movie like, say, Dungeon & Dragons. It’s great fun to watch that film and point out which scenes have been lifted from other movies. There’s also that gray beholder thing that apparently rode the short bus to the dungeon. Were he an actual beholder he would have ended the movie the moment he appeared and probably would have gone on to enslave the audience. No, our plucky cast of teens straight from the Disney Channel manage to sneak by a creature typically loaded with tons of free-moving tentacle eyes, each with their own unique magical ability, to rescue princess Leia or something. Of course, the beholder in the movie didn’t have all the eye stalks and very well could have just been a cheap beholder balloon purchased in Waterdeep’s Party City used to fool some of the less clever dungeon explorers.

The point is fan fiction, like a bad movie, is made with near insane sincerity and thought by most involved to be simply the greatest thing ever. It’s only in retrospect when no one remembers their efforts that we find them sitting alone in their trailer, dried blood and cocaine dabbed around their nose, looking at their work on the Sci-Fi channel and cursing to and at themselves.

(more…)

I started writing a tender, beautiful article filled with bittersweet memories of lost youth in gaming. It was touching, if not a little sad, and was dripping with personal revelations and confessions. My goal was to convey this gentle melancholy to the reader and fill them not just with nostalgia but also a sense of acceptance of days gone by…to act as a gentle reminder that it’s perfectly okay to hate kids that run around with NES belt buckles and Duck Hunt T-shirts.

(more…)

There’s this guy who sits a couple of cubicles down who couldn’t possibly be any more stereotypical of an office goon. He’s the type of person who flirts with only the cute girls, kisses up to the supervisors, and is extremely anxious to climb that corporate ladder. His fat, chipmunk face looks as if he has two massive jawbreakers lodged in his obnoxious maw and he regales the floor with last night’s football game as if he were not only there but orchestrating every single play himself.

I once saw him tell a guy who had just been let go, a guy he didn’t even know, to keep in touch.

(more…)