COME BACK TOMORROW AND MAYBE I’LL HAVE STOPPED TREATING TLG LIKE A GODDAMN LIVEJOURNAL.

Tomorrow will be my first day of classes in Vancouver Film School’s Game Design program. It’s an odd sensation – I feel as though I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, when it’s really only been the past few months. And yet the feeling is appropriate; this is my first real step in becoming what I really want to become.

Just a few months ago, I was desperately unhappy for reasons I am certain will fail to titillate: I was toiling unsuccessfully towards a seat in UBC’s Creative Writing faculty with little to no plan for my future (this very site actually began as a frankly cynical attempt to establish one more source I could site on my writing resumé.) I had been rejected by the faculty once before while a friend of mine got in (now that I have left UBC, I can say my goodbyes and wish both him and the faculty nothing but prosperity and success (which is writer-speak for “fuck them and their mothers too.”)) I was running low on money, I was about thirty-five pounds overweight, I was depressed to the point of mumbling philosophical ramblings to myself on long walks through the mist, and my sleep patterns could have at best been described as “erratic” and at worst as “insane.” I wasn’t so much in a downward spiral as I was in a full-on nosedive into a black hole.

Things are, um, better now.

For one thing, I’ve lost a ton of weight and have gained some nifty-looking muscles with which I have no clue what to do. I offer the following image of my right bicep as evidence (I actually didn’t just take this; it was taken several weeks ago as an accessory to a fairly convoluted Gaffe Station post telling Micheal to fuck himself sideways. It… it made sense at the time.)

And I’m going to a school where I’ll work towards something I want in courses I’m actually passionate about in a city full of life, color, and sound while surrounded by young people who want the same things I do (but who I’m also convinced don’t have ideas that are anywhere near as good as mine.) So there’s that.

I hope I don’t fuck this up. I know I’m essentially repeating what I said back when I started the site in October (not that most of you will remember that, what with the post where I said it having been deleted for several months,) but trust me – this time I’m serious. Not only because I doubt I’ll get a chance better than this, but also because it’s good to be happy again. It’s not pure happy, of course – it’s not the white-hot fanfare of trumpets on the front of your brain that is joy, and it’s not the electric whip-crack flavor of love – it’s just the dull, low-intensity contentment that comes from knowing that you’re doing the right things for once.

Sorry if this comes off as smug. It’s just good to talk about it.

Some actual site stuff for those of you that have remained conscious through my rambling: this program, incredible as it is, is also very intense and a ridiculous time commitment. I will be taking thirty hours of classes a week and doing an estimated thirty additional hours of homework. I have been doing my best to organize site affairs before classes start (such as the forums and the ads (which have earned me a whopping six cents so far,)) but content production and publishing has always been the major time-suck.

What I’m saying is that barring a mass attack of brain hemorrhages in my contributors that causes them to turn in their articles on time while neglecting family and work obligations, as well as a bout of divine intervention that puts approximately thirty more hours into the week… longer updates might come a little slow. To compensate for that, I’ll be attempting to do more of these shorter, bloggier thingies between the longer feature pieces. I don’t doubt that I’ll be short on inspiration.

This is normally where I might say something like “And if that isn’t good enough for you then fuck off because we do this for free,” but I don’t feel like saying that today. We do this for free because we love to do it, and we hope you enjoy the things we do. That’s the beginning and end. I want to write comedy because of gasping, gut-wrenching belly laughs. I want to make games because of unreserved, jaw-dropping joy. I want to do things I love because of love.

Today I am happy.

I’ll do my best to provide context and background, and also correct some of my more glaring mistakes of formatting and punctuation. Oh, and if this whole business seems uncharacteristically lazy and narcissistic, then you obviously haven’t seen my Twitter account.

Let me put it this way: Dane Cook LOVES my Twitter.

Okay, today’s forum bit was inspired by 5 Ways To Stop Trolls From Killing The Internet, an article by Cracked editor David Wong, and was posted in the discussion thread on the forums. It’s a script of an idyllic little father-and-son scene that will play out in the not-too-distant future, after the Internet has been legislated to death.

This script contains a lot more ridiculous scene-setting than I generally trouble myself to do in comedic scripts (I find characters and what they’re doing much more interesting than where they are. This is a bad habit, and seeing how well this script turned out makes me think I should really break out of that rut.) I inserted this ludicrous imagery because I had recently been reading through the archives of Anthony Clark’s site, Nedroid. For those of you not in the know, Clark is an inexhaustible fountain of riotous whimsy, and this was my attempt at aping his staggering imagination.

In addition to being very funny, Clark is an amazing artist. He also recently started doing the colors for Dr. McNinja, so you should really go check him out.

This script is also something of a record-holder in how fast I turned it out. All 500 words of it were written between 10:00 and 10:30 on the morning of November 11th, 2008. November 11th is Remembrance Day in Canada, and I was meeting my sister to attend the Remembrance Day ceremony at 11:00. Remembrance Day is sort of a big deal in my family, and neither my sister nor I have ever missed a ceremony, so I wasn’t about to bail because I was too busy making dick jokes on a comedy forum. However, I also knew that the images in my head wouldn’t survive the ceremony’s proceedings (paying respect to our nation’s fallen being something of a somber business, you understand.) Thus, the finished product suffered somewhat in terms of formatting (I normally agonize over every bracket, space, and italicization,) though you will be enthused to note that I have cleaned the errors up for this occasion.

So, with no further masturbatory rambling, I present to you: THE FUTURE!

Ooh! Aah!

The scene: a quaint suburban backyard. Father is on the deck in some comical apron, barbecuing all-American meat products. A robot drifts casually by, as though this sort of thing were completely unremarkable in the near future.

Suddenly, the virtual holo-door performs its opening animation and through dashes Junior, looking cute as a button and wearing impractical future-clothing.

Father: (Seeing his offspring approach, he lets go of his tongs. They continue to flip bratwurst independently of foreign impetus, looking totally rad.) Junior! I didn’t expect you home from E-School so early!

Junior: Father, you know that we get half the day off for the remembrance of the LoLocaust! You know, the day all those years ago when all those brave lawmakers gave their lives to scour the Internet of trolls?

Father: Ha ha! I remember, now that you’ve reminded me! Of course, in my day-

Junior: (Wearily cutting him off.) -in your day, you called it Christmas. I know, Father. You’ve told me before.

Father: (Embarrassed.) Yes, of course.

They stare off into space for several seconds. In the distance, three more robots float by, followed closely by a dinosaur.

Junior: (Obviously anxious to break the silence.) Father, I stumbled across something queer during my mandatory government-ordered three hours of browsing Wikipedia.

Father: Oh? And what did you find in the single largest and most trusted repository of human knowledge?

Junior: I’m not quite sure what to make of it. (He pauses. His voice quivers with uncertainty.) I was looking at the memes, you see. They all seemed rather foolish, but then I came upon what I thought must have been an error.

Father: (Leaping back with a start.) An error in the infallible Wikipedia!?

Junior: I could scarcely believe it myself, Father! The article was entitled “Milhouse” and the body consisted entirely of “Milhouse is not a meme.” It confused me ever so greatly, Father.

Father regains his composure and chuckles easily to himself upon hearing the source of his boy’s consternation. He walks over to and sits down in a deck chair, which morphs into a Lay-Z-Boy-brand recliner at the push of a button. Neither father nor son appear to regard this as remarkable, which is stupid, because it is. Father beckons to Junior to sit on his lap. Junior obeys.

Father: (Picking his words carefully.) You didn’t find any error, my boy.

Junior: But Father -!

Father shushes Junior.

Father: You didn’t find any error, but what you did find was one of the strangest artifacts of the wild days of the Internet.

Junior is rapt.

Father: You see, Junior… (He pauses, savoring the melodrama.) “Milhouse is not a meme” is, in fact, a meme.

Junior ponders this for a very long time. He scratches his head and furrows his brow. While he thinks, Father again stares into the distance, where the dinosaur can now be seen to be wearing rocket-powered rollerblades and sunglasses. Finally, Junior speaks.

Junior: That’s… stupid.

Father nods sagely.

Father: Yes, my son. (A single tear rolls down his cheek.) Yes, it was.

Fini