Merry Christmas! I feel like we're sufficiently beyond the turkey threshold to make such an entreaty. I'm in the market for a Merry Christmas; having returned from PAX Unplugged primarily with a sense of profound gratitude, all that remains really is to… actually feel it? I'm gonna try. Let's both of us try.

Part of this almost certainly requires careful curation of gifts. I once said during a Q&A that I don't really get gifts for him typically, and the bottom of the crowd completely dropped out. I could feel it as a chill wind. I understand that it's probably not the best but I have an almost paralytic response to the entirety of the tradition. He understands that this is the case and extends me grace. But I'm gonna switch up the flow and get him a present this year.

What, though? He had the temerity to choose Tyranids as his army of choice, which must be like wearing the same suit to an event, except the suit is made from tightly linked bio-armor plates and heaving with clusters of glistening eggs. There might be an angle in here, though: some way to intimate that we are, the both of us, just two wet mouths on the same fleshy stalk, puppeteered by a starving and insensate galactic intellect. You know? Something Christmassy.

I thought maybe I could get him a copy of Owlcat's Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader, because he's in a period of obsession, and while even the introduction has proved to me that these people know what they're doing… I can already tell that the crafty, grid-based, grim-dark XCOM shit is gonna work, he's not gonna want to read a novel every time he clicks somebody by accident. He might be more of a Space Marine II guy, which is fine, and maybe even an investment in my own future, because it has co-op. But a preorder as a gift feels weird, especially since the game got delayed to… about a year from now. Hmm. It's the sort of gift that says, "I didn't get you a gift."

I was talking to him about it last night, and I said, you know what? Fuckin'... buckle up, or whatever, because I'm going to do what literally every other person does this Christmas. I'm gonna secure you an object and then I'm gonna obscure it in a ritual way so that you can reveal it at a dramatically appropriate time. But this is the year he decided to stop getting me gifts, and now shit's weird as hell. I mean… that's kinda funny, right?

(CW)TB out.