The morning routine was always started at 5 am and was conducted with all the rigor and humanity of a GPU chip fab procedure. Before even getting out of bed, Sean Fuentes would check in with his wellness and longevity monitoring agents to update himself on his performance during the just finished fatigue refresh and cerebral defragmentation cycle. No one above Ascendant Tier 5 called it sleep anymore. Alongside time and the amount of REM sleep he had gotten, he monitored himself for metabolic exchange, right brain activity, ox levels, fat burning, thetas, testosterone production, how often he moved in his sleep, expressed gas and the frequency, length and strength of his nighttime erections. The agent fed the data directly to the 2maochan City Productivity Ranking database and showed him his performance against all other Alpha ranked males of his Tier and against the optimal values for peak ascendancy potential.

“Rage, sing muse of the rage of Peleus’s son Achillles…” - Homer

My parents have a house on the east coast of the United States, right in the middle of New England. They were first invited to visit by family friends in the early-mid 80s and have been returning to it with a seasonal rhythm to rival migratory fowl. I myself can count on only a few fingers the years where I have not spent some measure of time on this particular shore. Over the past three and a half decades, it has been a central spoke around which my nomadic meandering across the globe have spun. It is a haven, where the soul may shed the annoyances and burdens of everyday life for just a short while. The house itself is a more recent addition in this saga. by which I mean to say that they bought it a mere 15 years ago. Piddling really.

After having written nearly 3000 words about my journey towards tabletop and Deep Nerd gaming from childhood to middle age, I realized that I should probably step back and answer the existential question that has been thoroughly answered, but as ever nihil sub sole novum, before I continue exploring the various nooks and crannies.

It took until I was what society deems to be a fully mature adult before I felt empowered to allow my freak flag to fully fly: I was a proper nerd and I didn’t care who knew it!! To be fair, it was 2011 and nerd media empires Geek & Sundry and Nerdist were on the verge of being birthed, catapulting names like Chris Hardwick and Felicia Day to internet fame, returning Wil Wheaton temporarily to the lime light as a proponent of board games and a kind of geek philosopher and forming the chrysalis for the actual play juggernaut that is Critical Role. (Team Visibitch!). It is remarkable how central these two media entities were when Nerd Culture was just taking its first, shaky steps into the mainstream, and how little of the original projects is left. The genealogical map between those two networks and Dropout is nothing more than a thick red line. Their work has spread like pollen, sprouting into a thousand podcast networks and YouTube channels, though they themselves only exist as wan shades of their former selves.

This is the last one on the topic, I promise,

So there we stood, box open, all the evils of the world unleashed. Well, that’s a bit much. It was mostly level one monsters, premade characters and cardboard tokens.

To seek and find is a joy far sweeter than to possess. Especially when rifling through a discount bin at a record shop.

Earlier this year, I engaged in a fairly standard activity for a man my age with aging parents: I cleaned out a bunch of crap that was lying around their house dating back from when I was a teenager. While I have on occasion returned to the parental abode in the unnumbered (for I refuse to count them) decades since I left my teens behind me, I had always seemed to leave more things there then I ended up taking with me. This was likely largely due to the Global Nomad existence I was engaged in from my late teens well into my 30s. Which is a long way of me saying that I had accumulated a lot of detritus to clear out.

We return to the scene, ankle deep in old letters, clothes bound for the donation bin and stacks of CD jewel cases, when inspiration crept up on me like Rose Finger Dawn, reaching out delicately over the horizon to bathe us all in her radiance.