This was the conversation I had with Gabriel on his birthday, and we have rendered it for your consumption. He's basically impossible to buy things for, it's a tremendous pain in the ass, but I have learned and thus absorbed an undulating truthwave: that you may purchase a gift for a father's child and they will react as though you have purchased them two gifts. I secured for his brood the "Guardian," an Anki Drive car, which I am given to understand is a car.
That, uh... seems like an expensive hobby.
Something happened with Taken King: Kara decided to start in. The three of us used to play games all the time, actually - mostly the more tactical shooters, like an R6 or Halo. These days she goes by something else online, but when we were all playing as a group her handle was Orbital Strike and it was good. It's nice to pop the seal on the old jokes, and find that some of have retained their flavor.
It's related to something else weird happening with The Taken King, which is I learned that I'm completely unable to play this game by myself. Not skill-wise. Enemy heads still erupt on cue. I mean I just can't fucking do it.
I really, really like Destiny. At least, I thought I did. Grob and I talk about it constantly. I mean, there's stuff we complain about, but it's like Doctor Who - constantly complaining about it is generally understood to be the mark of the true enthusiast. We complain about how we can't just bring six people into the Court of Oryx and have to resort to the Digital Age equivalent of Voodoo talismans to play the game we want. You know. #justdestinythings.
It is in this spirit of authentic yet apparently porous enthusiasm that I sign on every night, in an effort to do the thing I thought I liked, but if nobody is on for two or perhaps three hundred seconds I shut the whole thing down. Gabriel played the game functionally alone for almost a year, to great result; this kind of Formian industry is regular for him, in the same way that being blind is regular for justice. I learned to play under optimal conditions, with an audience of friends helping each other, prepared to gaze on my works. When they aren't there, the game is just a pile of numbers stacked on top of each other. I can't find a handle. It would be like playing, I don't know. Soccer, by myself. Just running back and forth between the goals, and performing an increasingly small, ritualized "yay" each time it happened.
(CW)TB out.
