The charts showed every conceivable way his bodily functions could be turned into measurable and rank-able metrics. The amount of hours his brain spent in REM mode, his metabolic exchange rate, a cornucopia of brainwaves, ox levels, testosterone production, level of Vitamins B, C, D and E, anti-oxidants, glucose, every variety of cholesterol, white blood cell production, how often he moved in his sleep, expressed gas and the frequency, length and strength of his nighttime erections. The bed fed the data directly to the 2maochan City Productivity and Longevity Ranking database and showed him his performance against all other Alpha ranked males of his Tier and against the optimal range for PAP or Peak Ascendacy Potential.

96% percentile. Adequate.

Sean spent exactly 3:12 minutes examining his results, highlighting points of interest and areas in need of improvement. He then started to carefully disconnect the magnetic senors that were attached to his body. They connected directly to the monitoring sensors that he had had surgically implanted into every one of his major organs. The implants were entirely optional and Bactamed had stated they weren’t strictly necessary for the Scanbed Pro + to function. But the amply endowed holorep had stressed that using the implants guaranteed more accurate results along with a permanent boost to his PAP ranking. The surgery had costed the equivalent of six months salary and the immunosupressants another three, though he had received a discount for engaging the service of the John R. Brinkley Enhancement Clinic, a sister company of Bactamed.

Each sensor slowly reeled back into a canopy that hung above the bed. The last one was a medical syringe attached to a port implanted under the skin just below his right collarbone. The machine extracted blood through the port and fed him a personalized mixture of supplements, hormones and electrolyte enhanced saline throughout the night to further improve his physical productivity. The tube retracted into the canopy, which closed with a click. The bed starting to whir with the sound of its disinfection function.

Getting out of bed, Sean went to the bathroom to express waste and retrieve samples. His glasses gave him a live feed of his blood pressure and heart rate during the act, as well as the force of his muscle contractions. He performed several Kegel exercises, each adding an additional point of PAP. Samples secured in proprietary plastic containers, Sean walked, still naked, back to the Scanbed Pro + and tapped a haptic button on the inbuilt night stand. A compartment opened up and Sean placed the containers in the appropriate slots. The compartment closed and screen embedded onto the top of lid thanked him for his donation and informed him he would receive a detailed analysis of the results directly to his glasses in 6 hours.

Sean then turned to his walk in closet, fishing out his work out clothes, putting on his wearables. In total it was a sport version of the glasses, a watch, a ring for each hand, a bracelet, an amulet, an anklet and a sync station that magnetically attached to his chest that allowed all these tools to draw on the data produced by his implants. It even connected with his shoes to give him an absolutely exact reading of the amount of steps he took. Thus girded for battle, he left his apartment to go to the gym on the 26th floor.

What followed was a meticulously structured workout routine composed by the top ranked masc forward fitness influencer of 2maochan City, Curtis Rogan. Sean had paid for 5 virtual sessions and a personalized routine created to maximize not only his physical gains, but also his PAP and his MascMaxx ranking. The routine was accompanied with the most recent episode of Curtis’ wellness focused podcast TestosteTalk, that regularly featured top wellness experts to discuss the newest AI driven revelations to push ones PAP ranking and achieving peak masculine productivity and dominance. It was the second most popular of Curtis’ 5 podcasts, just before Masc Money but after Clear Thought. Sean listened to Masc Money on occasion, he had several compacts running on the city hedging markets after all, and Curtis always had good tips on how one could best recognize the patterns in the markets to find the Golden Hedge. He wasn’t too much of a fan of Clear Thought, he always found that it elevated his blood pressure in ways that made it exceed optimal bounds. He generally agreed with the portions about a properly ranked society, but otherwise, skipped it.

The workout routine complete, Sean returned to his apartment to shower and change into his work clothes and wearables. Given it had been a strenuous routine, he opted for a one time splurge on this shower program, purchasing an upgrade in water pressure and heat. He was on track to exceeding his quarterly quota again, and from the bonus he planned to upgrade his Shower & Sanitation subscription. Showered, shaved, exfoliated, moisturized and serumed, Sean suited up, slipped his glasses on and mixed himself a bottle of MEEL. Let the betas eat steak and ferments. He popped in two sticks of flavorless gum to work out his jaw muscles. Thus equipped he turned off the light of his single room apartment, dominated by the Scanbed Pro+ and nothing else.

The automated car that picked him up in front of his hab tower was a Chinese manufactured, sleek, black, four door sedan, part of the premium package that his ranking granted him access to. As a child, Sean had starred at such cars gliding past while standing on the curb, waiting in line for the BasicBus. He had wondered what it was like to have a whole car to oneself. The idea of it had seemed too outrageous to be real. Little had he realized that the were entire worlds beyond what he had imagined. The truly imminent citizens of 2Moachan City, The Investors, had access to domestically produced, armored, 8 wheeler limousines, equipped with their own AI harness. Now Sean dreamed of those rides.

Retrieving his phone from his inner jacket pocket, Sean opened several apps and his glasses sprung to life once more. Several windows hovered in the air, seemingly 30 cm in front of him, displaying what was essentially a personalized news feed. Sean had several agents programmed to feed him the most important updates of the day, from the current movements on the hedge markets, earnings reports, reports from city news bots aggregations and the Daily Stated Values, all laid out in neat, summarized bullet points. The last of these he paid most attention to. The Daily Stated Values was a direct feed every Investor, Citizen and Resident and Arrival of 2moachan City had access to for free. It was AI summarization and analysis of the public statements by the Founders and the City’s most imminent Men from the social networks, white papers, interviews, podcasts, speeches and talks, that then presented the user with a personalized distillation of the beliefs and principles that someone of their status and ranking should hold. It was helpfully accompanied by a quantified evaluation of how much of a shift these stances were from the ones the user had proclaimed just the day before. Sean frowned. The visualization of these numbers were deeply yellow, verging on amber. He hoped that this discrepancy was due to outside circumstances, rather than him not being up to date. Being more than one standard deviation from Daily Stated Values could carry harrowing consequences, socially, professionally and in his ranking.

Swallowing to cover the fluttering sense of unease in his stomach, Sean got to work, posting on various sites statements, clarifications and edits of previous takes that would ensure that his alignment with the Daily Stated Values was unquestionable. The car pulled up at his place of work just as he was firing off the last post. He waited for a few seconds for the bot to evaluate his statements. He held his breathe. The the number ticked over and turned green. A congealed mass of anxiety dissolved within Sean’s chest and he stepped out of the car.

The above opening line, the most remarkable one in the Western Canon, is an amalgamation of a scrap of memory of an audio book version I had on tape cassette in the late 90s and the Robert Fagels translation upon which that audio book was probably based, a copy of which sits upon my book shelf, propping up my intellectual credentials. The line has been echoing in my brain meats for weeks now. Partially that might be due to the fact that Nolan’s treatment of the second part of the worlds most renowned duology is currently the hottest thing in the cyberculture, generating memes, hot takes and Muskian tantrums by the metric ton.

In truth, the phrase has often returned to me over the years, not merely due to its powerful simplicity, but because I have found myself to harbor a good amount of rage at times. Most often it expresses itself in a tendency to react defensively in the face of criticism. More than one person in my life has commented on my Beratungsresistenz and I need to concede their point. The source of this reactions is.. complicated. I have been working on myself. I always was trying to be a bit better, even if I felt I had a good reason for my behavior.

Until I got sick. It is immeasurably more difficult to contain ones anger when you are constantly feeling like side of sun baked road kill. Once I was through the therapy, I physically started to recover remarkably quickly. Being allowed, nay encouraged, to indulge in the most wanton form of calorie inhalation will do wonders to lift the mood, even if the digestive results were at times unpredictable. The touchiness, though, the thin skinned reaction to unruly children, impatience with my wife, exploding at perceived slights from family members, that remained. It wasn’t a problem yet, but it could become one. My children are still young, and I live in terror that the lasting impression they have of their father is of a mercurial man who will go off at them for the slightest infraction.

Now that I have managed to physically stitch myself back together, it seems that the time has come look inside and sort this shit out. I have ample reason to, though traditional therapy hasn’t proven tremendously effective. My previous therapist effectively sent me home, as she thought I had managed to over come my medical trauma quite well. Fair, in a way. Its more the reverbations into the already existing flaws that need addressing.

So I guess I will try it with writing. Maybe spewing my trauma into my own private, unvisited corner of the internet will allow me to work out those tenacious devils of my darker nature.

The abode sits in a small inlet, immediately adjacent to a larger but still comprehensible bay, itself only a mote next to a more well known body of water. Sea water snakes its way through tall, spiky grass, past imperial blue horse fly traps, bird nests and a bridge. Further out, toward the more open water of the bay, several small boats are moored, including a tiny red skiff, built out of pure Popeye vibes and puckishly named The Colonel. My mother has always said, the presence this naval jalopy is her signal that summer has begun. The area is alive with fauna of a stunning variety for such small square meterage. Herons, cranes, hawks, seagulls, fish, crabs, clams, coyotes, skunks, deer, raccoons, rabbits and even wild turkeys. It is as if Noah’s Arc dumped its bounty here and they all decided to stay.

The kitchen and the attendant table sit look out on to this mini estuary, framing the view through a sliding door and windows that combine into a modernist peak cathedral window. Mornings, when I am chased out of bed by the rising sun and the slowly decaying grip of jet lag, I walk down the hallway towards the sun pouring into those panes. Popping a generic pod into the old Nespresso machine, I stare out onto a glorious vision as it whirs and grinds, filling the space with noise and the promise of hot stimulant. If the tide and the weather are just right, I am treated to a vision unparalleled in the world. The colors descend from a gray to purple and then a deep, warming orange. At the bottom, there is a sliver of ephemeral pale yellow. The grass, starts black, but slowly unfurls to a vibrant green. All of it reflected on a surface to placid and reflective it puts polished silver to shame.

It is my own, personal vision of paradise.

Mostly I sit there and allow the beauty to wash over me, feeling how slowly, the accumulated stresses and irritants of the world seep out of my legs and feet into the floor to the sound of morning bird calls. This year, with a socially significant birthday rapidly approaching, I have found my mind wandering to about who else might have seen this sight. Before the rapacious hand of modernity carved the landscape to allow for manicured lawns and shingled summer homes. I imagine a man similar in age to me, his hair long and jet black, his skin a deep nut brown, further tanned and roughened from fishing in the sun his entire life. I wonder if he too had children and a wife. If he engaged in the politics of his tribe, settling disputes about fishing and hunting territories or was happy to just live inside the cycles of seasons and harvests. I do not have much in common with this man, who lived here in the centuries before doom came calling on wooden hulls. But I feel a kinship with him none the less. How could I not, when we look over the same landscape, and surely shared a similar feelings of wonder and gratitude to live alongside such splendor.

Namely: what even is a game? Its one of those things that has been both meticulously defined yet persistently gets redefined as mechanics, concepts and ludonarrative frameworks (I use BIG words!!) get stuffed in a bag and shaken up to reveal something new. As I am a lazy git and serially disinterested in reading the blogs and white papers of veteran game designers with decades of experience or Ad executives who are trying to misuse the core loops as a means of farming engagement in the pursuit of dubious KPIs, I started where everyone does: Wikipedia.

There a game is defined as:

A game is an activity defined by a challenge and a set of rules, typically done for enjoyment, competition, or development.

The source is listed as Game Design Essentials by Briar Lee Mitchell. Never heard of her and a quick scan of her book shows it is a guide to creating video games specifically, which means it is inherently restricted by the confines of the medium. But I like this definition a lot, as it very simply encompasses the inherent nature of games while neatly excising the numerous ways in which games have been abused in the last twenty years in the venal pursuit of productivity and Effie Awards.

So now that we have our definition of what a game, another question leaps to mind, bright eyed and bushy tailed: Why did we need to define gaming? Mostly it was to provide a literary framework to talk about what I find to be the Categorical Imperative-esque essence of gaming that under-gird tabletop gaming specifically. (I promise I will not engage in any further Kantian musings.)

They are engines of human growth.

Every game requires one to engage in a meta loop outside those of the core gameplay. That meta loop consists of:

• Curiosity/Exploration
• Experimentation
• Application
• Mastery

Engaging in this meta loop is prerequisite to engage in even the most basic form of gaming. They outline, in the most basic form, the act of development that occurs when one develops an interest in a game and makes to learn how the motor that drives it functions. This cycle of learning, application and mastery is primal in nature. Humans will invent games from nothing more than a few stones and a plank of wood, and use those scraps to teach each other everything from crop management to battlefield strategy. Or even better what the optimum combination of drinks and snacks is for your tea stall that exclusively caters to gay dragons. No matter if one chooses to go deep (committing oneself to total mastery of a system) or broad (learning lots of new games to play during a weekend with friends), the intellectual and well being benefits are substantial. In fact the deeper one goes, the more challenging this meta loop becomes and the greater the rewards. Going from light board games > medium board games > heavy board games > role playing games > wargames, each rung of the ladder adds layers of complexity that demand the development of additional skills.

With rpgs for instance, the players are required to learn how to put themselves into a new personality (essentially it is rudimentary acting) and engaging in a complex social interaction that is part power fantasy, disassociation and Noh theater. The personalities of the players, the GM and even those of the characters that are being played must be considered, weighed and planned for. Dedicated, years long players of role playing games be some of the most deft hands of managing social networks (the actual, interpersonal ties that form the bedrock of human civilization rather than the digital advertising networks dedicating to disrupting them for obscene profit), thus spitting in the face of the still lingering cliche of gamers as soap shy, friendless misanthropes. In fact it is this social layer that exists to varying degrees in all forms of tabletop gaming that manages to elevate it a step over many forms of video gaming.*Modern wargaming adds artistic skill into its list of requirements for participation. Naturally, player made art forms a significant part in role playing games, but it is far from a necessary element. One can murder all the citizens of Waterdeep without even drawing the most basic stick figure of ones character. Unless one is willing to deploy significant financial resources, you have to assemble your miniatures yourself. As filled with frustration, glued together fingers and hazardous fume inhalations the process may be, it is inherently worthy for the patience it teaches, and the creativity it invites through personalization and kitbashing. From there, ones skills and wallet are further challenged give painting a try. Painting the models is in no way a requirement to engage in the game perse, but it is the sub-activity to incubates the greatest growth. From basic, tournament required 3-color-minimums to the most divine expressions of Blanchitsu or cartoon cel style models that clog hobby Instagram feeds, the ocean of possible artistic expression is fathomless and all participants are free to explore and experiment as they wish. Taking into account that it is a not inconsiderable financial commitment, it is one of the few activities beyond intramural sports where each motion, each conscious decisions is one that drives human value.

So there we have it, my freshman level ideation of why gaming, in particular tabletop gaming is such a valuable activity, an road to the ultimate “end in and of itself” which is human growth and betterment. I hope it was at least moderately insightful. Next up is my musings around playing rpgs.*I should clarify that I am not an adherent of the philosophy that tabletop players are somehow members of a Glorious Cardboard and Plastic Gaming Master Race. As stated in my previous post, I have gamed on consoles and computers for longer than the majority of TikTok users have been alive and continue to do so with abundant glee. Playing with friends, be it in competitive formats such as MOBAs, head-to-head bouts of fighting games, friendslop, battle royale or just faffing about with friends in a strategy game has always been core to the video gaming experience. The proliferation of Roll20 and Discord have even allowed TTRPGs to the online realm. Even so, the standard video gamer more often than not finds themselves physically alone when engaging in any of these activities. LAN parties and all night Street Fighter sessions with a gaggle of friends on the couch are more exception than rule. Additionally, the infestation of gambling mechanics and social network and streaming functions into gaming software packages have steadily driven the physical, mental and emotional isolation of gamers while having them be in contact with everyone on the planet. This is nakedly for the purposes of generating more profit. After all an isolated human is far more easily convinced to hand out cash than one who has their peeps and peers around them. Humans are haptic creatures, and the sensation of high fiving your friend as you plot to steal all their sheep is not one a vibrating Xbox controller is capable of emulating.

In truth, I had never been able to fully hide my cultural proclivities. Comics, from their lowest to their highest forms, printed or web, have been a fascination of mine since I was but a wee lad. It is not for nothing that Calvin, looking forlornly into the stars for meaning, is my chosen avatar. Video games too, have contributed a number of vertebrae to the central spine of this portion of my identity. Stars of the War and Trek variety were also part of the mix, as they ever are, along with the Buffys, the Mulder & Scullys and many many others. But I had always been reticent to venture into the lands of the Deep Nerd. My unspoken guiding principle up until that fateful year could be summed up by another portion of my favorite monologue delivered by Al Pacino: “Look, but don’t touch. Touch, but don’t taste. Taste… but don’t swallow”.

Maybe it was the fact my family viewed my geekish tendencies with bemusement, mixed with a mild dash of contempt. Or maybe it was the lack of actually good board games or that getting too enmeshed in these hobbies still carried a perceived societal tax for young men that I was not then willing to pay. We were still a decade and a half away from Gamer Girls after all, let alone Debrah Ann Woll smoothly demolishing any journalist foolish enough to question her nerd credentials or Henry Cavill gawping at a Custodes and building his own PC while looking like Apollo made flesh.

Fact of the matter is that these three pillars of nerddom (board games, tabletop rpgs as mostly represented by D&D and wargaming as seen through the prism of the Warhammer universes) accompanied me basically thorough out my meandering 40+ years of existence. The first core memory is one probably shared by many of my Jahrgang: the twin classics Hero Quest and Space Quest (known as Space Crusade outside of Germany). The former I encountered through a sleep over at a friends house. During our session, the host disappeared just to return dressed a very late 80’s Russian style Hazmat suit of his fathers. Why he wanted to spring this on a group of boys who were living in a country still gripped by the aftermath of Chernobyl, even 5 years later I cannot tell you. I asked him at our 25th high school reunion. He just laughed at the memory. Vague recollections suggest the wizard being a vehicle of frustration for me, while the dwarf was a far more satisfying experience. These preferences are imprinted early in life.

I remember the Space Quest box prominently positioned in the display of the local toy store, the art by titan Jim Burns, singing of glory and desperate battles in cramped corridors, beckoning me through the impenetrable barrier of molten sand. No coincidence that it is roughly at this point in my life when I, my younger brother and our two cousins had our first illicit viewing of that James Cameron classic. It ended with us cowering under tables and behind chairs with the lights on. Again, the signposting here is not subtle.

Childish persistence eventually wore my parents down until they bought the box despite their considerable and vocal misgivings (my mother had very clear ideas about what type of interests and activities were appropriate for her children to pursue and they did not involve burly men shooting guns at aliens, she found it “ugly”). However, the treasure came with strings attached: a certain academic performance had to be achieved before it would be handed over into my greedy little hands. Needless to say, I did not prove worthy to earn the Precious and it languished in a cupboard for a many months. So long in fact that I had even forgotten it existed, so that when it appeared on my chair at Sunday breakfast after having correctly written some 100 words in an impromptu vocabulary test, I was genuinely surprised.

Ultimately, I think I would only play the full game one or twice, and the box would follow us on our many moves until the cardboard disintegrated. But every so often I would take the figures out to make play with them, setting them up and imagining scenarios in much the way I also did with GI-Joes or teenagers that were also mutated amphibians. They were loci of creativity, arcane focuses through which the worlds contained in my developing brain could find their outlet.

A few years, a move, a new school, new classmates and my world expanded. One friend, a Finnish lad whose name escapes me was a True Follower. In retrospect he was one of those for whom John Blanche was something of a spiritual Tenzing Norgay. His notebooks were more often filled with sketches evoking Blanche’s peerless work than they were ever of our actual class subjects. I keenly remember bringing him to tears when I inadvertently stepped on a tank or titan. I was deeply abashed, though I also had the suspicion that he had been using my ignorance of the rules to his advantage.

I also have core memories of spending biology class with another fellow student, pouring over Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rule books, creating characters I would never play but for whom I would craft great adventures in my head. Alas the memory lives alongside some of the sharpest recollections of awkward adolescence. These Imagineering sessions took place in the biology lab, that was also the site of our 7th grade sex-ed class. The teacher actually had put into practice the meme of a jar filled with questions and had honestly, diligently and with a straight face answered every absurdity a class full of 13 year-olds could conceive of in an attempt to embarrass him (forget not, this was pre-internet). My would be DM took an opportunity to out me in front of the class for the sin of finding athletic women attractive in the mid 90s. Once the laughter had died down, the teacher had looked at me sympathetically over his bushy moustache and assured me that he too shared my appreciation. “Wannabe” would reach number one just a few years later and Melanie C is still my favorite.

Lest we think that I was only meant for the grimdark future, Fantasy, or the “The Old World” as it is now known, managed to squirm it’s way into my life. TV commercials for the board game known as “Battle Masters” drove their hooks deep into my brain and one Christmas it too was mine (again in Germany, the game was renamed, but this time to the infinitely cooler The Claymore Saga). I’ll admit, I never made the connection to the GW universe until years later, but my hands still recall phantom sensations of laying out the vinyl mat and moving the trays of little plastic men around with my younger brother. His interests always leaned more in the traditional “boy” topics like basketball and being American. But, whenever he was sure his friends weren’t around he would snoop into my room, asking what I was doing and testing the waters. He still does this. He once joined me and a few friends for an afternoon of board games not to play himself but to watch and to heckle from the sidelines. Meanwhile, he is more open about his love for folded cardboard.

After that things become more blurry, the years and experiences flowing together like candle wax as other things started to take precedent, friends, girls, school, athletics, SATs, college, love, sex, heartbreak, alcohol, weed, Spain, Mexico, work, life etc. Well, somewhere in there my cousin, the younger of the two I had watched Aliens with as a child briefly got into the hobby. I remember he had a classic metal Arbites. The area where my contact with the nerd realms was evergreen though was the medium of the screen.

Computer games ranging from Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat to the original Chaos Gate came in the full game CD gifts that were back then included in various magazines. The era of the live service game that is meant to spin cash eternal or be contemptuously dumped in a charnel pit renders the idea utterly alien, but yes, sometimes magazine would give you free games when the publisher deemed they had made as much money as they ever were going to make. Dawn of War and Winter Assault swallowed countless hours of my time in the early 2000s when I was a hapless college grad, working retails and not really thinking too hard of the future.

And through out that time, I kept in touch with the lore and changes of the Warhammer worlds via the website, scouring the model descriptions and lore wikis over and over again. I never felt compelled to try it out, the stigma still lingered, as was the appeal of other goods to spend my money on. But the worlds I was free to explore to my hearts content. I journeyed north with Karl Franz, breathlessly following the ins and out of the Storm of Chaos from a Internet Cafe (WOOF.) in Mexico and reveled in the art drops of Blanches ultimate creation, the Black Templars. Somewhere in there the Middle Earth game was flung into a market ravenous for anything even moderately hobbit flavored, but curiously that game always left me cold despite owned every one of the extended editions and first enter the Tolkienian realms at the tender age of 14.

RPGs were also a constant staple of my digital dispersion. Every version of Diablo that has ever existed burned itself into the hard drives of my Turing machines, and I dumped hundreds of hours into both Oblivion and the first Witcher game. I tend to obsess and then drop such experiences before they are complete. In the case of my Elder Scrolls experience, the air violently leaves the balloon when you are the head of every guild and can slay abominations from the nether realms with contemptuous ease.

We roughly arrive to my time in grad school, a season of tumult both geopolitically, economically and emotionally for me. The world economy burned around me while sitting in an air conditioned lecture hall in Phoenix, AZ listening to a finance professor confidently predict that the recession would be done and dusted by the time we graduated. This was 2008, at graduation, only a third of us had job offers. The details of that particular period of ego dissolution and self manufactured emotional angst shall remain unexplored for the moment. All the needs to be said is that I committed myself to alcohol consumption and serial monogamy with a side order of studying. Dawn of War 2 and the first Dragon Age game kept the flame alive, but it was a very small, sputtering candle at this point. Until, roughly in 2010-2011, during the nadir of a period of unemployment, I discovered the already mentioned first few seasons of Acquisitions Incorporated.

While the main storyline was the initial attraction, four nerds at the height of their powers engaging in witty tom foolery sponsored by Wizards of the Coast, it was actually a smaller adventure that has stuck with me over the years. The Penny Arcade Dark Sun podcast is smaller and shorter, one of their unnumbered side projects that exist for the briefest flicker and is then discarded. But it is more true to how I imagined then and now, an rpg session to be. The atmosphere is closer and more intimate, away from the center stage of PAX and by then already choreographed player-audience interactions. The audio equivalent of the dark basement with the single light hanging from ceiling as if it were a poker game amongst gangsters in a Dick Tracy movie. The setting is darker and weirder and Jerry Holkins DMs the session with the soft touch of a veteran, guiding Mike Krahulik, Scott Kurtz and first time D&D player Kris Straub through the world of Athas, a place where hope had been replaced by dust and the basest instincts of humanity.

Thus, after many many words, we come to the watershed moment. My friend Chris was visiting his parents with the unnumbered children. The eldest was a avid reader and drawer of manga, as person of that age oft are, and I had told her and my friend that the comics store in the city had an ample selection. So, one cool and misty afternoon in late summer, we piled into a car and traveled to T3 Entertainment in Frankfurt am Main. There, while the child rummaged around the shelves of books that must be read from right to left, I pulled the Dungeon & Dragons 4th Edition Red Box from off a shelf and eyed it critically. Penny Arcade had been thoroughly instrumentalized to promote this particular First Taste so I was well aware of the pedigree it was harkening back to.

There in that basement (always basements!) fate turned. I bought the box, and that evening, in my parents friends kitchen, at the table I had sat at often as a yoof, the three of us cracked it open and took out first steps into a larger world.

I think I will leave this here for now and continue taking a deeper look at my experiences with tabletop rpgs. Look out for that one.

Lata.

So having secured an almost ever green source of cheap music, and set up the basic infrastructure needed to digitize, store and and play it back, by all metrics, I should have been perfectly happy. Right?

Alas, it’s been my experience, that once the chains of habit/brand loyalty have been broken, the switching costs shrink and the compulsion to tinker and improve takes over. I had already pushed the Jellyfin Android app off a cliff due to it’s terminal shyness whenever asked to actually play anything (it survives on the family central entertainment slab, as it thus far has proven itself capable of playing an MPEG4 file without unaliving itself). In it’s place had stepped Symfonium, a beautiful music app that is capable of far more than I currently ask of it. It could cache a certain number of albums to take with me when out and about town, and that was fine for about a week before the itch started up again.

I already planned on getting a mini PC to serve as a dedicated media server. My gaming rig was more than a tad overpowered for the job and I did not fancy having it chug away in the corner just so I could listen to Stankonia in the kitchen. A short trip to kleinanzeigen.de (a German version of Craigslist - also owned by eBay) catalyzed a very fortuitous encounter with serendipity - a local willing to let go of their no name brand mini PC for half the original price. A short trip uptown, a wad of cash and a short, friendly chat and the little screamer was mine. The prior owner was a Cyberpunk Red style techie of considerable skill, who had scoured the device for any possible digital peeping toms and used it to run a set of AR goggles to watch movies. I admit, I just barely understood what he was talking about, but it was very cool in a way that the actual tech industry hadn’t been in over a decade. Yes I know about Meta glasses, that is exactly my point.

The weekend after, I committed myself to the task of ushering my media home lab to its final apotheosis. A new 9 plug power strip, some LAN cable, a five port ether-net switch, some swearing, Jellyfin, Emby, returning to Jellyfin, more swearing, Tailscale, YouTube and then it was done. I tend towards hyperbole, but in fact, the entire process fit comfortably in a 90 time slot. Now, no matter where I go, I have my music, that I own and that no corporation can take away from me because their licensing agreement with EMI wasn’t renewed. Just don’t look under my desk.

Now I just have to do the movies. I fear I may need a new NAS…

There are probably several dozen Buzzfeed articles from the late 00’s early 10’s that list precisely what ones function around gaming table tells you about a that persons character, political leanings, sexual proclivities and favorite pizza. But that format of digital bullshit has been swept into the dustbin of history along with the pit that spawned it and I am severely disinclined to go looking for it on the Way Back Machine. From the beginning, I took on the role of Dungeon Master in my friend group. It seemed the most natural fit, not because I yearned for control, but more so because I wanted to use these tools to immediately breathe life into the multiverse contained between my ears. To this day, many years later and over a variety of systems, I have not once used an splat book adventure or campaign for a tabletop rpg. I have bought them. The 5th edition version of Curse of Strahd sits on a shelf in my apartment along a dozens of other hardcover rules books. But I have always had the tendency to read the books, learn the system and then toss the established worlds and storylines aside to express my own vision.

Chris would many years later state that my talents as a GM lay with creating a narrative and world rather than in the technical aspects. He should know, he has sat in as a player in every session I have ever run. Soon after we started our journey, he too took on the mantel of storyteller, primarily as a means of entertaining and indoctrinating the basketball team worth of children he had created. He succeeded, they are all nerds to one degree or another. In many ways, he is my antithesis as a GM. He works with the pre-written adventures and runs a tight ship where encounters and dungeon crawl are concerned but would be the first to admit he struggles with the grandiose emotions or creating that mystical distortion field that allows humans to easily slip the chains of the mundane world. Ironically, as a player, he favors chaotic magic users, preferring to solve any problem with the liberal application of the fireball spell. The precise target of the spell is largely a secondary concern.

The cultural cliche about GMs is that they are worse than the monsters they puppet. Cruel, capricious gods that lust for the blood of their players’ characters, reveling in their pain while artfully dodging responsibility by pointing to a mass produced resin polyhedron. And that trope certainly has it’s basis in reality, though it is matched by it’s mirror image of the player who, finding themselves unshackled by society’s norms turns into something resembling the unholy union of a frothing at the mouth psychopath and a drunk toddler. “Don’t over prepare.” is a painful lesson every stripling GM must learn the hard way as hours of preparation, notes, picture searches and map creation on Roll20 are gleefully set on fire by giggling “friends” who decided murder was the appropriate response to being asked the time of day or that rather than follow a carefully prepared story path, they want to get on a boat bound for the other side of the planet and now you must entertain the miscreants for 2 hours with some shit you came up with off the top of your head.*But in the end, those are the stories that are the most fun. And that is the entire point of this. Fun. Fun and the permission the game gives you to step outside of yourself. To test out a new self, doing those things you would never dare do. The rules, the mechanics, the feats, skills and stats, to me all these things are mere scaffolding. That includes my beloved world building. All these things exist to allow humans to have fun by, for a few scant hours, shedding their skin and becoming something else entirely. The timid become brazen, the strong may be gentle, the logical dive into chaos and the prudes tear open their bodices with abandon. One of the more remarkable developments I experienced as a GM was watching the evolution of a mousey North Irish woman, a devout protestant who had created a cleric worshiping the most Christ coded god she can find in the rule book (Pelor) subsequently gain the moniker “Kill Stealer”. By the time she left the group, her eyes would flare with a greedy light at the prospect of combat. She didn’t even really care about the loot!

Since those early days exploring the realms of Gygax the Great, I have led my friends into countless other worlds. Cramped hallways where only a thin layer of metal separates you from a pitiless expanse where screams go unheard, or the trash strewn alley ways of a city drenched in neon light and human suffering. Along the way, I have used these tools to bring the stories in my head to life and to allow my friends to explore aspects of themselves that they cannot when within the confines of their own lives. Some choose to be even more themselves, while others find out something new about themselves every session. It has been a wondrous experience.*My favorite rpg story is unfortunately one I neither created, nor participated in. Zac (the third of the triumvirate of brothers from different mothers together with Chris and Rod) had invited us all to attend his bachelor party. To my great sorrow, I was unable to attend. As Zac is a man genetically disinterested in the mainstream trappings of male English celebratory traditions (pub crawls, strippers, projectile vomiting) the heart of the evening would be a rpg session run by one of his two best men. The gentlemen, whose name I never committed to memory, had never even played an rpg let alone occupied the seat at the head of the table. Players are feral wolves, and when presented with a wide eyed naif will go straight for the jugular. For one and a half hours, the innocent fool proved incapable of convincing the group to disembark the boat they had arrived in so the could finally start the adventure. A veteran GM would have quickly asserted dominance by fixing the players with a jaundiced eye and immediately started handing out de-buffs and syphilis infections. But the poor lad was utterly out of his depth and apparently has never approached a tabletop rpg again. I wish I had been there to witness it!

Rod had stolen a march on me in terms of divesting himself of the most invasive tentacles of This Digital Life. Streaming video, music and screen time in general, he had been dialing it back for years. However in terms of alternative he has (at the least initially) opted for the more haptic form of audio entertainment. For years now he had been scouring record shops in Berlin and around Europe for good deals and interesting finds. And on this day, he came to my apartment and gushed at me about the used record shop located off the local market square.

I knew of the shop, it prominently featured a mannequin in a Star Wars stormtrooper get up so it was obviously aimed squarely at my demographic. But I had never ventured in, having had thus far, no reason. Now, Rod had taken that step for me, and painted a glowing picture of the great selection at great prices.

So one afternoon, I tucked a bag over my arm like a good German Dad and went to see what all the fuss was about it. And they had a nice selection! Rock was overrepresented, while the hip hop section was a little on the weak side. Likely a feature of the purveyors own tastes. But I was able to unearth four CDs that spoke to my own tastes and the new sense of adventure with which I had endeavored to undertake this project (mainly this meant looking to purchase seminal or classic albums I had not deigned to listen to in my youth and then never thought to commit to once the Time of Abundance fell upon us all). Which is long way of saying I bought London Calling by the Clash, Mama Said Knock You Out by LL Cool J, Use Your Illusion I by Guns n Roses and Befehl Von Ganz Unten by Deichkind.

One of these is not like the others…

All for the princely sum of €15.95. What had once been the average price for a decently popular album pressed to silvery plastic not even 15 years ago. I was quite chuffed with my find, bragging about it to all and my brother-in-law about this great deal I had found. Most reactions (with the except of Rod, bless his little Dutch toes) were those of polite bemusement at the middle-aged man feverishly telling them about how little money they could spend buying something that they mostly got for free. But in search of better deals, I eventually turned on my Personal Pocket Slab and set sail upon the Bay of E.

There are times in a capitalist society, where supply and demand for certain products and services fall into such a state of disequilibrium that if one happens to be a buyer or seller in such a market, one is capable, nay empowered, of committed what feels like entirely legal, brutal highway robbery. I had first experienced this second hand as a scruffy cheeked young man in Boston in 2004, when my friends would come back from the local record store sporting vinyl that was by turns cool, hipster-cool (again, this was 2004), inspired madness or just kind of a joke. The only important thing was that the records were cheap. Dirt cheap. Nowadays, the store commands a premium for its wares, as vinyl has returned as a product for those seeking The Real in a world dictated to ever more by a coven of uncool megalomaniacs who watch your every utterance through your phone to find a better way of selling you rage bait/eating disorders/raw liver (delete as desired).

CDs, judging by the prices I encountered online, are in much a similar state in 2026, as their elder cousin was in 2004. The professional stores will usually offer their wares at around €3.80 with free shipping. Snoop around in the bargain bin of private auctions, and you are liable to find those same albums listed at €1 on their 4th relisting. Stone cold classic albums, sometimes first press limited editions out of Japan can be gotten for the price of a day ticket for public transit. I personally was able to get a Japanese collectors box of the first 10 albums of Metallica for €26. The collected works of Daft Punk, including live albums, were mine for €40. At one point I had to remove the eBay app from my desktop because I couldn’t stop. It was madness.

My buying spree has ebbed of late, my duties as a good little consumer are currently elsewhere (once more a topic for another post). But it seems the universe is not done throwing high quality, disc shaped digital music at me with reckless abandon. It is considered a polite thing to do in Germany, to place unwanted wares on the street corner so that the community might partake in the bounty you no longer want. The box above basically hurled itself at me like a desperate 20-something at the end of a night of clubbing. It had obviously been trying to be subtle, but I am a stubborn beast at the best of times. Regardless, it would have been rude of me not to sample the wares on offer…

Some of these things were touching. Birthday cards from friends, some of whom I still hold dear, others who have drifted away on the currents of time. Some were love letters, others jokes. One significant batch constituted a years worth of paper correspondence with a girl I had met at summer boarding school. I was obviously deeply smitten with her and do hold to the the fanciful notion that she might have thought a little fondly of me. Why else all the letters? I kept most of these writings, even though I have a wife and children now. I feel that they are the greatest testament to my existence. Proof, that I lived and met people and influenced them as much as they influenced me. All of it expressed via ink on paper. Maybe one day my children will read them and learn that this is who Dad was before he met Mom. These are the people who loved him and what they thought of him. This is who he was when he was us.

Or maybe they will toss them away, as we all must do periodically. Evicting the old to bring in the new.

But sometimes, by rediscovering old stuff, it can launch you into a new project of self discovery. Unearthing an old piece of clothing, a beloved book you thought you had lost, that you rediscover, unearthing the feelings you had when you first read it.

For my part, I discovered that my siblings and I had left a metric fuck ton of CDs at my parents house. And that got me thinking.

A bit of context is necessary here. I have always been a keen follower of the trends in digital products and services. Never the early adopter and always prone to skepticism where others tended to exuberance, but certain to embrace the new world whenever it had passed whatever arbitrary point I decided it needed to in order to merit my attention and money. Often this meant I started using these things just before they took off in the mainstream. It is a pattern I have noted with myself in a number of different unrelated instances but that is for a later post. In any case, after many years of joyful participation in the global online community I had found my love of these products and the companies that build them to slowly wear thin.

It started with giving up on Facebook. It was not a conscientious decision, I just kind stopped one day around 2017-2018. This was followed by me ceasing to post on Instagram in 2019, following the birth of my son. My wife had requested I don’t post any pictures of him on to a public social media network and I could not come up with any good reason why I should be posting at all. In truth, what I was feeling were the first tendrils of a phenomenon that would lack a coherent descriptor until 2024, when Cory Doctrow once more proved the magical power of names by coining an exceptionally powerful neologism: Enshitification.

As happens when you first find a name for something and can point it out with knife sharp clarity, you end up seeing it everywhere. And so I did. I saw and felt clearly the degradation of every experience I had online. How the joy of sharing and discovery had become grey and miserable and constrictive and expensive. I realized that between my wife and I, we were subscribed to 4 streaming services and Spotify and often could not watch what we wanted to watch or were forced to listen to Leon Bridges’s Take me to the River until it echoed in our bones because the algorithm had decided it needed to be in every generated playlist and there was no convincing it otherwise. One evening, I went looking for Once Upon a Time in the West. Surely, one of these bloody services must have one of the best westerns ever in their catalogue, no? I pay hundreds of Euros a year and the movie is older than I am by almost a decade or more. One of them must have allow me to watch it?

No. It was only available to purchase. I returned to Netflix and saw that Goodfellas would be leaving the service within the week. I was incensed. We were paying out the nose for movies, series and music that were compressed to hell and back. That sounded tinny and looked muddy. And at any moment theses companies could just take it away. And then they started putting ad breaks in the shows. And every playlist became plugged with so much AI slop it started to ooze out of the speakers like pus. I was disgusted, I was angry, i was done. But where else would I go?

And then on a warm March Sunday, I stood in front of the piles of CDs that I, my brother and my sister had carelessly abandoned at my parents house and that my parents had never thrown away. It represented hundreds of hours of music. More than that in monetary terms. High quality music that we owned, that no company could take away from us.

In the cobweb draped machinery of my mind, something began to tick…

I could digitize all this music! I had an old DS116 Synology NAS sitting around in a box at home, dating back from my time in exile in Switzerland (I’ll probably write about that at some point). It was 3 terabytes, mostly unused, and would easily be able to hold the music and DVDs that my parents had assembled over 30 years.

The next steps were fairly simple: a short Google session pointed me in the direction of all the hardware I would need: a cheap and cheerful DVD drive (forgive the Amazon link, but sometimes we all must swallow our disgust for overnight shipping), recommended by Wirecutter and a pair of peak millennial CD folders to hold the discs themselves as back up (the main impulse of this had been to declutter after all).

In terms of software, the path was more twisted and gnarled. Self hosting media is an enthusiasts occupation, though anecdotal evidence points to it gaining in popularity with the “youff”, likely from impulses not dissimilar to my own. Unpicking the partisan preferences of various subreddits to find the media server software that best suits ones needs takes time. In the end I opted for Jellyfin over leading brand Plex. The latter company seems to have been creeping towards the same trend of chopping up all its features into distinct tiers as a means of shanking your wallet from multiple directions. Doctrow stays correct.

Figuring out which tools to use to actually rip the music also required some figuring out. In the end Exact Audio Copy became the program of choice (here is the guide I used for those interested).

And so will all the parts assembled the process began. With sparkling eyes and a bubbly enthusiasm, I started to build my own media library. I could stream my music directly from my computer to our Sonos network and to my phone while I was in our home WiFi. My wife was a picture of studied disinterest to my flailing about. I had forced her onto Spotify during the early years of our courtship, and she had the grace to note my return to silvery discs with nothing more than wry bemusement. As long as she had access to Fettes Brot and Diana Krull, she was happy.

Had I left things there, everything would have been fine. But the ancient works warning of Mans obsession are still with us for a reason. Never are we content to just sip from the cup of forbidden knowledge. Ever must we quaff it down like a thirsty Labrador. So two thoughts percolated in brain that would drive me further into the heart of darkness: “How do I get this on my phone when I am out and about?” and “I wonder if I can find any more music?”.

Ebay hoved into view.

I hope you feel loved and celebrated as every human being should!

So.

Let’s give it shot!

Yet beyond it’s capacity to inspire, terrify and delight, (for me the group stages of the World Cup have an almost ephemeral feel of floating in space, where the air itself is laden with the possibility of Côte d’Ivoire upsetting Spain), its the tournaments ability to mark time that preoccupies me in the moment.

Yesterday Germany rather rudely defeated Curaçao 7-1. There isn’t much to say about the game itself, other than Germany’s defensive woes have reached a decided middle and that the island nation can rightfully proclaim the entire tournament a smashing success for having exposed the aforementioned vulnerability and scored their very first goal ever in a World Cup against one of the footballing super powers. After the game, the internet (by which I mean Reddit, because that literally is all it is these days) was awash with memes referencing the 2014 World Cup semi-final where Germany dismantled Brazil with all the tenderness of a plundering horde of Visigoths. In general the sentiment was that Curaçao came out the better of the comparison, but that is besides the point.

The mystical power that has been invested in that score line, (which truly has no inherent meaning) sent me on another deep dive into YouTube to watch recaps and to listen to the BBC5 radio commentary of the entire game. I do this on occasion, because I, like every other shaved ape that wears clothes, am susceptible to nostalgia.

I was a younger man back in 2014. Considerably younger, though I often don’t feel like it. It has been 12 years since I stood in a friends apartment in Frankfurt am Main along with a dozen others, periodically grabbing my friend Remi by the shoulders and shaking him in frenzied anxiety (he gave as good as he got). The elation and then awe we felt as the game unfolded seared itself into my memory and I return to the footage often to get another hit. Curiously, it is the only sporting event I do this with. I almost never rewatch the Germany Argentina final that occurred just after.

Despite the rampant corruption of FIFA and its caricature of a president, the venality and cruelty of the Trump administration and the unfortunate schedule, there is something comforting about acknowledging that the World Cup can still make you feel. Whether it is the excitement of Japan drawing with the Netherlands in the last minutes of overtime, Australia beating Turkey or the trip down memory lane inspired by a completely overmatched team managing to get one in before it is unceremoniously swept away. Unadulterated joy is in short supply these days, and it pays to drink deeply from the cup when it happens to pass before you.