There was a brief window where I was gonna go to college. Well, I was gonna try to. And it was community college - the same one that Gabriel attended, very briefly, until the N64 came out and he never went back.

I remember taking a day off my real job that I already had in order to see if I could earn documentation that I thought might make me better able to keep it. At that time, if you understood how computers operated you could probably get a job fixing them. The skills weren't common. But I suspected they might become moreso, it was easy to see the world changing in the early days of the consumer Internet. So: college, to grab some certs to get a scaffold of paper under my work.

It wasn't going to be something I could afford directly, so when I went to get some basic info I also took a meeting with the You Can't Afford To Go Here department, where they told me that I was making too much money to qualify. That surprised me, because I was making 800 dollars a month. Rent was 280, and my car was not a vehicle in the classic sense, but a bunch of little machines held together by spite and mutual hatred. I could feel it disintegrating under me; I had to restart it at stoplights. It took most of the rest of my money just keeping it in a car-like shape. What they told me was that I needed to quit my job and live with my mom if I wanted to go to school there.

So, I just went back to work. And now, something like thirty years later, I'm gonna be dragging my eldest - the one experts assured me would never be able to lead a normal life - around a campus on a vibe check. If a mind can get whiplash, I am experiencing it.

Hey! So, as soon as I post this, I'm gonna crank up the stream and check out some Cobalt Core, which just released! The sales pitch from me for Cobalt Core is as follows: "I hit a point with roguelite deckbuilders where I felt like I was playing the same game over and over again, and it was like chewing mouthfuls of cold, wet cardboard. Then I played Cobalt Core, and I was like, WHOA!"

(CW)TB out.