Flip – William Tidwell

August 23, 2024

SEXLESS IN SONORA, GIVE US YOUR TWO CENTS:

There was something in the soil of Death Valley in 1994. I remember reading in a junior science magazine about how they took measurements of the soil and discovered a chemical gas leaking from the earth. By 2003, that chemical’s concentration in the soil had increased by 85%. There was still no explanation for the appearance of this chemical. The chemical may have been hazardous to humans, I think it was, but only slightly. That was the year I was born.

The source for Flip‘s engine came out in 2005. I lived an hour from San Diego. The game was a platformer, modeled somewhat after Super Mario Bros., but first person and real time 3D. You moved through a series of tunnels, trying to escape a military science fiction base with a collapsing life support system. You could kick enemies and send them flying, they would bounce off walls. You would show up in mirrors. There were those super-deformed Japanese style monsters with huge heads and little bodies. One level consisted of a hangar blocked by a massive square head about twenty times the size of the body it was sitting on, which ran up and down the hangar repeatedly, dragging metal debris with it that crushed you to death if you stood in the wrong spot too long. It was crazy good, some people played it so much they got sick and puked. It was called Skidoo. Some guys my older brother knew in High School played Skidoo, but he wasn’t cool enough to play those kind of games. He liked to play Steppe Nations, a real time strategy game with lots of different European races and historical facts. He works for a non-profit funded by the federal gov’t now…crazy right? I knew a kid in sixth grade who said he got Skidoo for his console, but it was a different game. He was lying because he thought it gave him sex appeal, I think. Skidoo was extremely popular. It was one of the first games you could make alts for. Flip was one of those alts.

Games like Flip were banned before I was even born. This shareware game called Wolfenstein 3D inspired some psycho kid to go postal at a local Holocaust museum. People were playing this shit on floppy disks or whatever and freaking the fuck out…imagine! Dan Sparrow was a sixteen year old into Slayer and MTV’s Liquid Television, this weird-ass show where basically anything went (mostly ugly cartoons where guys had loads of zits and stuff). He liked to write morbid poems about worms mingling in love through the eye sockets of his dead grandmother, garden variety basket case. The public was swayed by the story of how he put a .38 round through his Labrador’s nose before he left the day of the shooting, supposedly emulating the most infamous feature of Wolfenstein, which was I think shooting Nazi attack dogs in the head. Dan Sparrow emphasized that he was not a NeoNazi in his suicide note, but that he “hate(d) all of you faggots equally.” I think the developers went defunct in under a year.

Games struggled in the latter part of the nineties, apart from spreadsheet simulations like Maxis’ SimYacht and Office Tycoon 4. In 2001, perhaps the happiest year of my life, I got a Nintendo Flora, the latest console. I played Legend of Zelda: the Aether Stone until one in the morning, which was late for me. I’ve never been able to stay up very long. There was this cel art scene, kind of like a VN, where Link kisses Zelda on the cheek, and that gave me a boner. The graphics in Aether Stone were what I guess you would call isometric, Link’s green leotard had a kind of matte plastic appearance, like on the cover of Super Mario RPG for the SNES, but now the entire game looked that way. In 2001 and 2002, almost all the games looked like claymation movies, the Year without Santa Claus type crap, Tim Burton flicks. The most violent game I had ever played by ten years of age was on an arcade emulator I downloaded from this sketch as hell Romhack site. It was called Splatterhouse. A Namco beat em up from ’89 with a psycho in a Jason mask. Lots of blood and guts to feed my prepubescent imagination in between thinking of Cindy whoever-the-fuck and touching myself under the sheets at night, hoping big bro couldn’t hear me. I had this bad habit at fourteen of making barking noises whenever I got off and I swear I woke him up a few times…but anyway, sorry for the detour.

Flip was an alt like I said. That’s where you make a game from the base game, an alternate version, using most of the same graphical assets. Hassle Games was notable for being one of the first developers to make their source engine totally available to players in this manner, an attitude that had apparently been curtailed to the dark corners of the interwebs since the last Linware release in 1999. There were a ton of alts for Skidoo and…take a guess, most of ’em were crap! Haha. But Flip was different. The first version of Flip was basically just Skidoo, but multiplayer. You could run around kicking and jumping on your friends, playing virtual tag, and that had a lot of appeal. Then the guys who made it got real clever. They added knives, guns, and bombs.

The game was called Flip because halfway through a match, your team’s outfits would be flipped to the others at random, and you wouldn’t be able to tell who was who. If you killed someone who wasn’t on the opposing team, you would lose an enormous amount of points, on top of having all your friends bitch at you. Hardcore modes increased the number of “Flips” to four or five times a match. Some levels for Flip would take the metaphor to the obvious conclusion and rearrange the entire structure of the map, randomly opening up hallways in the back of camping spots and getting some clown swatted. Snap!

Flip came out in 2009. I was a sophomore in high school. I honestly hated every minute of it. I used to punch myself really hard in the nose when the teacher wasn’t looking just so it would start bleeding and I could get out of class. I’ve got this cut in my right nostril, it never heals because I have a blood thinning condition…it just reopens on a regular basis. I suppose my parents could have got it fixed but they didn’t care enough. It usually gets worse around March and April, beginning of Spring, when the pollen count is high and all I can think about is you-know-what.

So anyways, yeah, I was playing Flip from day motherfuckin’ one, before they added the weapons or the gore or any of the dicey shit. I played it constantly…as you may have ascertained, I wasn’t doing too well in my classes! But I became really good at Flip. I never had to read any guides or watch a video on it or nothing. This is how it was in those days. You just played a game, if you played it a lot, you became good at it. This is why I don’t read books. In the words of the African American Musician Bootsy Collins…you can’t fake the funk! If you fake the funk, your nose will grow, bitch! (He didn’t say bitch, I just threw that in.)

I got so good at the game that I started playing in a Set, which is like a team or a street gang, but online and for video games. We called ourselves Heaven Set. We absolutely ruined people at Flip. When the weapons mod came out, we lost it. All the guys in HEAVENSet (like heaven-sent, get it?) were dudes like me who just played Flip a lot and became inhumanly good at it. We frightened people, we were so good.

The problem was, most of us were flunking out of school. And it’s not like you can get a scholarship for playing video games. So we got this bright idea that no one had before. We would compete live, in a public venue of some sort, and charge people to see it.

One of the members of HEAVENSet was a fellow resident of my hometown at the time, Boulder, Colorado. Frisky, or Albert ofl (offline) was pretty good at the guitar. He played in a punk band until he was sixteen, the year Flip dropped. He said he could get us a local auditorium that tweeny bands had gigs in. I had girls in my mind…thought about ’em watching me LAN, getting wet. Thought it was gonna be like backalley chicken fights or something. We had to drop over a grand just to get half of HEAVENSet to the states. Frisky’s friends hyped it up the best they could, telephone pole posters and ads on EyePages. These were the Hillary Years…things were pretty even keel, it felt like ’97-99 again, from what older folks told me. I didn’t do much outside of game. At home, I would sit in the dark and listen to mixes I found on these lame websites. Smoking Popes, Witches with Dicks, Charles Bronson, powerviolence and 80s hardcore. I liked to seethe, take my shirt off and get really screwface (that’s like “mad”, in Jamaican) and make these punching motions like Henry Rollins on stage. I wondered what it was like to be a ne’er-do-well such as myself c. 1980 (no INTERNET), my drooling Down’s Syndrome face parents zoning out in front of televangelists in the living room. I liked to go to the library now and then, even though I don’t read too much, and look up articles from those years, scour ’em for a story or two about some hapless fuck like myself having a run-in with the law. I didn’t talk to girls much.

It was a shock the first time we held an event. There were so many babes there…midriffs, crop tops, my kind of thing. Girls with nose piercings. And they were watching us play video games, like this was a cool thing. We totally annihilated the opposing set. And afterwards Frisky took us to a party, a kind of thing I’d literally never been to. I had no idea Frisky went to parties. I guess I didn’t know him well. We had only hung out and had pizza once.

There were even more girls at the party, and cool dudes that smelled like hooch and weed, and had jackets with band patches on them. They were asking us about Flip. How the hell did we get so good at it, how did you play it, did we need a ten thousand dollar computer chip or something. I recognized the way they were talking about Flip. They were talking about it like it was cool. We had made it cool.

Thing is, it was always cool, and those people sucked. But man I wasn’t about to turn down the opportunity of a lifetime. I talked with Frisky at the end of the day about how we needed to do this again…we could live like rockstars I said. This is what being a gamer is about. It’s like being a rockstar or a rapper. It doesn’t have to be about being a loser. He laughed at me and said he could imagine me sniffing coke off a hooker’s ass at a LAN party. “Sure,” he said. “But what about money?”

Frisky is a thin guy, and in those days he liked to wear these blue dress shirts with pocket protectors like something out of a Dilbert strip, but always untucked, and with cargo pants and a boonie hat and sunglasses. He looked goofy as fuck. This was his idea of fashion. But he wasn’t stupid. I think he was the only one of us who was doing alright in school. He’s one of those guys who doesn’t even need to try and he gets straight A’s.

Despite having the time of my life being showered with social status of the likes I had never known and could not comprehend, I was still broke, and also I wasn’t getting laid. Girls thought it was cool what we were doing, but they didn’t want to get with us. I asked Frisky about it one time in his car. We were smoking bud together, another new habit of mine.

“You need to get rich like that Conehead who made Mosaic.”

“What?”

“It was like Netscape before Netscape. Marc Andreessen. All those Silicon Valley programmers from the 90s had girls taking it off for them pronto.”

“I don’t know shit about money.”

“Suck dick.”

“What?”

“Become a hoe.”

“Fuck you man.”

“We need sponsorships is all.”

Money for playing a fucking video game. It was inconceivable. 2009 was the first year that a competitive online Flip Set was officially sponsored. Guess who. I have Frisky, vErtig0, Manfish and reP to thank, because I know nothing about business deals. I have done an interview exactly one time in my life, it was for a local public library, and I got so nervous I came up with an elaborate lie about working at a chicken farm beforehand, but when they caught me contradicting myself I just admitted what I was doing and these three old ladies walked out, slamming the door behind them. I think I got pathological issues or something. But I’ll get back to that.

The deal came in the third week of July, after our seventh live LAN party, with probably the biggest projector screen yet, but a shocking lack of honeys. The cool people had bled out over the last few months as the excitement wore off. We were approached by a couple of these balding fat dudes with really nice teeth. They worked for a company local to Boulder, called Clara Semiconductors. With the boom of 3D platformers, and now 3D competitive action platformers on the rise, they had turned their focus to graphics processing units, where before they designed products solely for mobile phones. They were prepared to supply us with thousands of dollars of equipment, advanced personal computers optimized for interactive gaming. I don’t think anyone, not even my parents, had made this large of an investment in me before. In matters of taste, let there be no dispute, a wise motherfucker once said…

The pace picked up from there. Things started to change rapidly. HEAVENSet changed, the way we thought about ourselves, the way we lived – forever. But the first thing was Frisky made a website, with which all of you are familiar, of course. This was the beginning – the beginning of the end!

In the first week of operation the site was flooded with new users. The amount of people asking us for advice on how to play Flip was astonishing. We had to practice for a tournament in Washington around Christmas, but we spent so much time replying to people’s questions. Not only that, but their insults. There was a lot of banter on Frisky’s site. I couldn’t understand at first why people tried to talk so much shit, not just anonymous losers but other self-identified members of the Flip community, guys whose name and number were familiar to me. Frisky told me it was because people saw us as an authority. What the fuck, I thought, what am I Big Brother or something to these retards? Hahahaha.

But it was true. People were intimidated by us. They saw us as the old guys behind the desk, the bullies pushing them down the steps, the assholes fucking their girlfriends. The first officially sponsored Flip crew, and not by some manufacturer of expensive noise-canceling ear condoms, a real computer company, with connections to some of the wealthiest businessmen in the world of information technology…

This is where I have to make a confession to you, dear reader. I didn’t give a shit about all that. I just wanted to play games and chase girls. But the others were not of a like mind. That’s where the friction started. Frisky would correct me when I tried to explain something to an amateur player, a green flipper, so often that it started to get on my nerves. It was even with basic stuff like good head-shot locations on popular runway maps. He would point out some insignificant weakness in my suggested strats and walkthroughs and act like it was a complete dismissal of my advice. “Take all this with a grain of salt,” he liked to type at the end of his post every time, word for word, like he didn’t know what he was doing. What was worse, reP and vErtig0 would give his post a star underneath, meaning they basically agreed with him.

Sure, we won the Contraction 2009 Winter Flip Tournament and came home with 35k each. But I returned home to remedial High School classes, being an eighteen year old fuck-up, and my friends continually alienating me. I started spending more time away from them. Sometimes with this girl, I hope you won’t judge me to say, but also with someone else. Someone who happened to be well-known on the forum already.

Thomas161 probably needs no introduction to some of you limpdicks. He was the most abrasive poster in early 2010. Reading a Thomas161 post was like taking the SAT. There were going to be paragraphs, and you couldn’t skim anything, but unlike the real SAT there was absolutely no way to cheat, no way to fake understanding what you had read. Mano a mano, he was to the point, believe it or not.

One of the things he said that stuck with me from the first minute I heard it was about gamers being freaks. I was telling him how we were going to make it like being a rockstar, like being GG Allin, who was a freak saying stuff like “I want your cum” and smearing shit all over his body, but still a rockstar, and that it should be like that, and he said he knew, he could tell, but that we were still freaks. “And every community of freaks has a hierarchy,” he explained, “just like normal communities. There is no escape from this vertical order, with someone at the top and someone at the bottom. The only difference with a community of freaks is that it is inverted. It is shaped like a cone or a funnel, and all the evil of the world above drains into the least likable person, whom even the other freaks loathe. This person is analogous to Satan…”

“Hell on Earth,” he said, “that’s what a ghetto is.” Mobb Deep started bumping in my head!

T161 as you can tell was a heavy mofo. He was like that all the time, and he didn’t suffer mockery from anyone. He is one of the most honest people I have ever met. About as soon as we started talking, things heated up ofl (offline). The specter of Wolfenstein 3D and the influence of violent video gaming on the young reared its ugly head in the public mind again. Thomas had told me that it was bound to happen soon, but I didn’t listen to him. He told me that the other members of HEAVENSet would shaft me even further. He was right and wrong at the same time.

There was no real effective method of banning Flip. It was a free modification that was playable without the base software. Hassle had never given a public statement about it. The John Birch Society – which had taken no interest in the Sparrow shooting – decided to fund a campaign against Flip as an example of the child exploitation and all-around rampant degeneracy under Hillary’s administration. A Moral Reform Committee tried to indict the owners of various Alt sharing sites that hosted versions of the game. The way things were looking, we were going to have to make things underground again. I didn’t have a problem with it…but the sponsorships were going to disappear. I wasn’t sure how I was going to pay off the loan on my 1984 Lincoln Continental with red velvet interior (a long-held dream of mine the gaming years had made into reality).

There was more and more cruelty on the forums, and I spent less time on there. People were roasting the Flip community left and right, comedians with no political affiliations, in the midst of all this controversy. A talk show host did a bit on us where he went through the pictures of HEAVENSet one by one, lastly myself, and asked why the hell we all had “hair like that,” sometimes switching in a photo of Himmler or some SS fuck in comparison. People would laugh on time like the fucking circus animals they are. (I don’t have my hair like anything, for what it’s worth).

It’s one thing I’ve never understood, schaden-freude it’s called. Thomas161 taught me that word. It’s when you laugh at something like a stupid person slipping off a backyard pool and cracking their skull open. When I was a kid, my parents and I would watch America’s Funniest Videos, which was just a montage of embarrassing shit like that. I had a feeling the people who made these videos and the people who compiled them were intending me to react some way…I could sense when the cue would come, but it’s like there was nothing there. Nothing but a blank spot. I don’t understand laughing at other people’s suffering. I don’t claim to be a role model, but I don’t have this experience. It’s something I notice in day to day life, but only from the outside. Tom said this is because I am the “Golden Man.” I think he meant that as a kind of joke. When I first met him ofl, he said, “it is the Golden Man!” He had a dramatic way of speaking.

He had gathered a bunch of people from the forums to his place, or what I thought was his place, in downtown Denver. There was food. He tried to make us feel at home. He didn’t want to talk gaming, though he was once a relentless player, from what I heard. He never got to the point where he played for money. He didn’t seem to want to do anything in particular, but he went from person to person asking them about their lives. He wasn’t forceful about it. They were already sympathetic to his ideas.

After his little party, we went to the park together, he and I, and smoked some bud on a bench. People could see us but didn’t seem to care. I think I saw a police cruiser go by.

“How do you intend to live after Flip?” Tom asked me during the second bowl. I didn’t know how to respond. I asked what he meant.

“There are no other lifestyles…most of the players, I suspect, will retire around twenty two or twenty three, once their youth has truly ended. They will perhaps spend the rest of their lives womanizing to increasing scorn due to age difference and working in software development for mediocre pay. Or they’ll kill themselves.”

Sometimes he never let up and I really couldn’t handle it.

“That’s harsh,” was all I said.

He gave me this look of his. He had a way of staring, and though I’m sure I remember him blinking, it was like he never once blinked when he looked at anything. He would stare off into space and start talking in this flat, assertive tone of his. The way his eyes moved, it was like he was tracking heads in-game.

“People speak of lifestyles. So and so needs to reconsider their lifestyle. But this is absurd. There are no more lifestyles, Louis. There is money, and death. The hustle, and some form of suicide. One cannot play video games for money, not forever.”

“Well…I don’t think you’re wrong about that.”

“Would you rather die privately or publicly?”

When I thought about it, I had to laugh. I told him I’d rather die publicly in an epic accident on the interstate, my body going up in a twenty four foot column of flames at the center of a ten car pileup. He grinned and nodded with me.

“I figured you would,” he said, “even him – the beautiful soul.”

A couple months later I tried to visit Thomas’ place again. I still had the address in my phone. But when I got there, no one answered the door. I caught the Super coming down the hallway and asked him about a man named Thomas who lived in that apartment. He said it was vacant, told me to fuck off, and walked away. I think he recognized the name.

Thomas no longer messaged me online. His IRC was dead, and I didn’t see him on the forums. A few of the guys he had invited over had also stopped posting. It spooked the hell out of me, I have to admit. I had the usual self-doubt, asked myself if I imagined it all. I could see him fresh in my mind. He looks like that piano player, Glenn Gould. He had a vinyl of Gould performing Bach’s Partitas in that apartment. He said he would listen to it every Friday and drink. I wonder if he lived there more than a week. I think he set it all up on purpose.

In Summer of 2011, HEAVENSet was merely a name. We talked maybe twice a week online. We had tournaments scheduled, and Frisky had found us a manager, but nothing remained of our former friendships. reP seemed to be fighting with Frisky and vErtig0 a lot during practice. Manfish had sort of dipped out, just like me. Frisky’s Gaming Forums had a highly active General Discussion board that was devoted solely to shit-talking and bizarre running jokes that made sense mostly to devoted Flip players, but especially users of the site. Frisky’s home address had been retrieved by stalkers multiple times and posted on gay sex hookup BBSes; many practical jokes of that nature. No one knew or cared about me enough to find out where I lived.

The news came out in August. Police had busted a drug den in Orange County and discovered a small setup of gaming computers with Flip installed on them. Six men, including one I recognized as Thomas161 or Thomas M. Busby, had been living in this building and consuming narcotics while receiving sexual services from a couple of sixteen and seventeen year-old girls who had been seemingly brainwashed into roleplaying as a 24/7 “support unit” (reportedly ordered to stimulate the players mid-game in succession under the desk). Worst of all, the police discovered a military-grade stockpile of assault rifles, sub-machine guns, 5.56 NATO and 9mm parabellum ammunition, and small quantities of nitroglycerin, which may have been used for its vasodilatory effects as a crude aphrodisiac. Thomas’ emails to members of the gaming set, known as SiN-TILLA, were also released, detailing a bizarre occult philosophy the likes of which I had only seen glimpses of…it was like an evil twin of the guy I had chilled with! What the actual fuck!

The next day, I was unable to log into Frisky’s forum. I wasn’t even banned, my account had been deleted entirely. It said my records could not be found. I looked up my profile, my posts in the Gaming Advice board, and there was nothing there, not even “this reply has been deleted”. I had been memory-holed completely from the site.

It didn’t do Frisky much good in the end when the heat started pouring in. The headlines didn’t hold back, calling his forum a hotbed of far-right radicalism, a fascist recruiting ground. These words, as you may remember them, were pure exaggerations, but not entirely devoid of truth. There were things that Thomas said in his private emails that I never focused on. But this was not the case with others who were entranced with his philosophy. I make no judgment on you dear-skrub, or your readers, as I know how much his thought and those inspired by him have influenced your community. That’s why I am writing to you. Like you I am an outsider…I am “living in darkness, a world of my own,” as Agent Orange said.

The last episode in this farce is the strangest one, at least to me. There were people who wanted to make a movie about us. This never came to fruition, so it might be the first new piece of information in this lengthy missive. The project was spearheaded by “the Mosaic guy,” as Frisky would call him, Marc Andreessen. He looks like one of the aliens in that film Coneheads. The question of his high cranial vault, its abnormal contour, and what idiosyncrasies it may have bestowed on his mind could be much discussed; it perhaps deserves its own treatment. If you don’t know about him, he made one of the first web browsers, and founded a series of venture capital firms. He has spent the rest of his days lurking the internet and looking for new and hip things in which to invest sizable portions of his multi-billion dollar fortune. Naturally, he discovered Frisky’s Forums, and the whole phenomenon we know as Flip.

Marc was a fan of HEAVENSet. He claimed to have recordings of every tournament we competed in burned to multiple backup discs kept in a black leather binder at home. He told us that we were “humans of the future.” A site devoted to electronic gaming competition and self-development that was a bit of a “modern day Athens” and “a Weimar era discothèque.” I was interviewed by a guy from Rolling Stone in order to promote the film. He seemed polite the whole conversation. Later, I read his article and he painted me as a bitter, misogynistic shut-in who thought of himself as a modern day aristocrat. Marc’s idea for us was a documentary with dramatized portions and real taped interviews. We were flown out to California and provided an early draft of the script. Frisky took issue with it, feeling it demonized him too much, though he was indifferent about my portrayal as a Ritalin-addicted skinhead on the verge of becoming the next Charles Whitman. My role was to be performed by Jake Gyllenhaal, whom Marc thought I resembled. Some girls I’ve been with have said the same to me. I don’t think I resemble him at all – for instance, I’m ugly. Somehow I’m not ugly enough, I guess.

Some interviews were taped with Manfish and reP where they chewed gum and obnoxiously avoided direct answers to questions. Marc kept getting into heated arguments with the director, Joaquin Phoenix, an unshaven Hollywood nobody who wore sunglasses indoors and was seemingly stoned on set all the time. Joaquin would poke fun at Marc too much and send him into a tirade, throwing papers around and yelling shit like “do you really think I believe in the fucking singularity?” Frisky demanded to be filmed sitting at his computer, turning a swivel chair to the side to face the interviewer. His PC had to be shipped from Colorado eventually, and his bedroom was recreated with furniture from the Salvation Army.

Every interaction I had with people on set was difficult. I would say things and people would just look at me. They said I repeated words too much. I said “everything” and “everybody” a lot, and other things like that. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something wrong with my brain. I can’t talk to people right. You’re supposed to talk to people a certain way, especially in the cities, and I never knew how to do that. Frisky said that a lot of people, including Marc, were starting to get the impression that I was mentally ill or just stupid. Some of the women who worked on set were put off by the way I looked at them. I didn’t even notice I was doing this. I have a way of spazzing out and slapping myself sometimes that I can’t control – it’s no big deal. But these Californians would stop and stare at me when they caught me doing it, or just get up and walk away. I would sit down next to someone, start talking to them, and they would get up and rush to the other room, say they had to do something. That happened a lot.

Production dragged on for months, and then years, with intermittent returns to Boulder where I sat around doing fuck all. No one wanted to associate with me anymore. The Flip community had survived from the horror of Thomas161’s Manson-lite sex cult, funnily enough, and new forums had been created by professional Sets. There was even a Flip gaming TV channel you could stream online, but this only lasted a year or so. Andreessen had bought out Clara Semiconductors, but since we were too absorbed in the production of the film, we no longer played or even practiced much. “Going OFL (Offline)” was finally abandoned in 2015. I no longer heard from Andreessen, Frisky, or other members of HEAVENSet. They went from infinitesimally distancing themselves to ignoring me altogether.

I knew this guy on Frisky’s Forums. He was kind of fucked in the head like myself. After he took mushrooms for the first time, he went to jail for a few weeks after stealing something from a gas station, just to see if he could do it. He didn’t try to hide it or anything. Once he got out, he played this Star Wars game, Universal Empire, for a month straight without leaving his house. He became really good at it, kind of like we did, and he met a girl through the game that decided to come live with him and “make him food every day.” He said that games weren’t like this anymore, you had guys talking about strats or “para” (newer slang for strats surrounding a particular mechanism in a game), making videos about it and charging for online lectures from their mom’s basement or whatever. He believed in the power of just doing stuff, not thinking about it, being like a machine without any regard for human behavioral patterns. He liked to turn every conversation on its head with nth level ironic skewering out of nowhere. I can appreciate all of that. What he didn’t seem to understand is that, the one thing turns into the other. It’s because of what Thomas said. The guys hanging around and doing something become the humorless fucks behind the desk that everybody peacocks to. That or they just die.

The nicest thing to come out of Marc’s film was meeting this girl. She’s a woman, I should say. She’s like fifteen years older than me. She understood my predicament and invited me to live with her down in Arizona after the production was shelved for good. I had no job skills, no desire to play games for all the bad memories, and my parents were getting increasingly sick of me, taking walks that lasted several hours. I could tell they wanted me out.

We live way out in the desert. It’s like forty-five minutes to the nearest trace of civilization. We have an atrium out back that I like to spend the evenings in, when it’s cooler. I spend a lot of time just sitting and looking at the walls in this Frank Lloyd Wright eyesore she got from her grandparents. I’ll think about the same things in circulation, again and again, or I won’t think. I feel brain damaged, but a lot of the Flip guys from those days talk about feeling the same. I sometimes look up reP and Manfish online. reP works for Clara Semiconductors, the marketing division. I can’t find much else about him. Manfish has a video site where he just plays guitar. He plays Dream Theater and Crimson King covers. He stopped updating it from 2017-2019, then came back when the power grid virus appeared.

We have backup generators here, so there’s no issue. I think we can survive if infrastructure starts coming apart in the fundament, shitting the bed, as it were. I won’t say that I’m not anxious about it.

When my mom was pregnant with me and her water broke, she was driving with my Dad through Death Valley. They were already more than halfway across, but it was a close call to make it to Alabama Hills in time. I like to think the chemical I read about seeped into the car somehow, into the air conditioning, laden with Freon, and made me the way I am. Sometimes the woman I live with leaves for months at a time on business. It’s not like we’re married. Sometimes I can’t stand her, I can’t stand anyone. I think I want to start a band.

If you’ve looked at the news recently since the catastrophe started, you may have read about prison riots breaking out due to the failure of automatic locking mechanisms during outages. I know about the prison that Thomas161 is kept in, Utah State, outside of Salt Lake City. They used to house Ted Bundy there. I read about an outage there in 2021. One inmate was killed at long range while attempting to escape. No other breaches were recorded during the event. There was a small group of inmates that were unaccounted for afterwards. Thomas Busby was listed among them.

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What a tale, Louis! We didn’t expect a novel this week, gentlemen, but after taking turns reading it, we all liked this one. We don’t know how much he’s stretching the truth, but we love it when someone gives it uncensored, raw, in this day and age of political correctness. Maybe you can find yourself a Thai mail-order wife, Louis, and leave this eggless hag who’s off fucking Joe Money on Wall Street every March! Gaming isn’t the pinnacle of manlihood, and it’s apparent to us that you aren’t celibate, but we’ll let it slide for entertainment value. The show must go on!