Now… how does this go again?
Ah… yes.
It’s been a while. Four months, to be roughly exact, he says, knowing full well the phrase makes no sense. I haven’t logged into Magic Online since July. I suppose I owe some kind of explanation as to why, operating on the extremely dubious notion that you actually care.
The reality is, another game interested me more. I really hated Ravnica by the end of it all. It’s funny – I originally slavered at the idea of a Standard where Wizards finally re-established standards for gold cards. When Invasion was first designed and executed, there were a range of spells that weren’t overpowered, per se, but were just too much when they accumulated. You know the list. The usual suspects – the cards that sneak into your Prismatic decks, and even when you cut them, they slowly sneak back. Exclude. Repulse. Recoil. Undermine, Absorb, Fact or Fiction… oh, god, fact or fricking fiction, good grief, who the hell let Fact or Fiction through to the keeper I ask you?
On the other hand, creature wise, Invasion gave us such sterling examples of color pairs as Flowstone Shambler and Marsh Crocodile. There were some good fellows in Invasion, I am sure (some dragons, I’ve heard), but the olden days of Magic design were much more about spells than they were about creatures. There’s a reason Duress beats out Ostracize every day of the week (Duress deals with things that are actually scary).
Initially, Ravnica looked like the Elysian fields: A chance for sensible new developers to put together a Magic set, balancing each of the color combinations, for this one brief time, as completely equal, and showing us new points of flavor. A world where creatures were valued as equal to spells and “draw a card” wasn’t slapped on every last card they could find. A place where your alliances were important, as were your enemies — the mechanical strengths of two colors wedded together to face the color combination that most aggressively opposed you. Honestly, I think they did well in that regard: The color pairs were generally treated well, and top tier decks that combined all the colors showed up in a fairly large amount.
Sort of.
See, the paired colors didn’t do as well as the trio’d colors. And the trio’d colors romped all the hell over the single colors most of the time. The good lands made this feasible, then more feasible, then really feasible, until you had this Blue-White-Black control deck that was casting 6WWW spells alongside BB, 1BB, and 1WU in a lazy search for its 3WWBB angel to clear out your blocker.
Then there’s the fact that the color pairs weren’t all created equal. The Golgari started out strong (or, at least, it showed up a lot) based on fan idiocy, then quickly fell apart as people realized that guilds which didn’t even have duals yet were still better than it, thanks to this Remand thingy. People spent the first three months of Ravnica’s life b*tching about how underpowered the Dimir were and continued to do so throughout the whole rest of the block, even ignoring the fact that Blue-Black decks were beating the living hell out of everything, and will, I am sure in some godforsaken corner of the internet, be b*tching even now.
I blame Meloku and Remand, honestly.
The Izzet, just on the basis of being both Red and Blue, was absolutely amazing, with only Kird Ape seemingly able to scare it, and this is before they printed Izzet Signet. Magnivores and Solifugidae smashed through red zones backed up by — oh, hey, Remand! — and all was good, at least, provided you were a fan of Blue and Red. The White-Green guild got to do some cool stuff at Worlds, then rapidly spiraled out into obscurity once it stopped having creature removal on a two-mana legendary stick. Boros was a mainstay in Extended, which I suppose is actually a really positive thing to say about it, when you consider that that format is far, far more unfair and ridiculous than Standard. Every deck had their own little time in the sun in Standard, which works out okay, except Golgari didn’t get to really shine until they added Blue in Future Sight.
Oh well. C’est la vie.
Steadily, the color pairs that I’d been rejoicing so much to see revitalized and defined were lost to the slush of three-colored crap. Worse, the three-colored and four-colored decks were really good, and the duals were also really good. You needed to be a pretty special card to pull someone to a specific pair of colors – a pretty special card like the Ghost Council of Orzhova, or Tallowisp… oh that’s right, I went there.
Steadily, my interest waned. Then I got shifted to the early week slot. Suddenly, I didn’t have the other early week crap to fuel my interest, and anything I wanted to respond to wouldn’t hear the retort until after a weekend, meaning I was always rejoining what could only be defined as “old news.” The schedule didn’t mesh well with me, what with my employment and newfound fascination for pretending to jump around a city in silly tights, and my newfound ennui for playing the game as much as reading about it and its design was starting to weigh heavily on me. I felt I was irrelevant.
Let me summarize, roughly, a conversation that played out with roughly every fan I asked for feedback on what I should write next:
Me: So what do you like about what I do?
Them: Well, you’re really good when you’re angry about stuff. And do more ranting about Green.
This is the point where the fan would collapse unconscious as I strangled them. It’s always really embarrassing when that —
Aside The First: Why I Don’t Rant About Green
Before we go any further, let me provide for some of you a quick bit of effort reduction. Actually sending you off to read a dictionary site might necessitate a whole two clicks or more, and then you’d have to type a word out, which is just too much bother for the kind of mushrooms that need it, so I’m here to help.
Ironic: Both coincidental and contradictory in a humorous or poignant and extremely improbable way.
Sarcasm: A form of humor that is marked by mocking with irony, sometimes conveyed in speech with vocal over-emphasis.
My own writing has been defined as “ironic to the point of impenetrable” by a person who I respect, and that person also happens to be smart enough to know both the word ironic and impenetrable, which automatically puts her a step ahead of some of the folk who’ve taken to throwing stones at writers, so I’ll take what she’s had to say and bandy it about like a big label so I can feel clever. I don’t have Peter Molyneaux or Cindy Brady pimping my work, and despite the absolute rash of SCG alumni showing up on the mothership I have basically no chance of getting much more than a giggle out of Aaron Forsythe, so what the mmkay, right?
That said, she — the girl who described my work as “ironic to the point of impenetrable,” in case you’ve forgotten her already — was right.
Typically speaking, my writing is very dry — in the humor sense, that is, and more often than not is about juxtaposing the real (what I am actually like and what I am actually saying, which is to say a sad nerd who couldn’t seriously intimidate his way out of a daycare centre) with the fanciful (what people seem to think I’m like, grr, firebeathing etcetera). I can only name a handful of articles that have actually been “rants” about Green as I see it. One of the most maddening things to me with my writing is when someone argues against what they wanted to argue, rather than against what I had to say. What’s even nastier to me is when a well-meaning, enthusiastic spod decides to heartily agree with what they thought I said.
Without dredging up old, stupid arguments about, what, Giant Solifuge as a 4/3, or a 3/3 for 2W in white, or whatever, this means that I often have support from people I don’t agree who seem to think that I do.
Of course, part of this is my own fault. A million years ago, I wrote the following:
Dredge
Dredge is not a good deck because Mark Herberholz can beat Mike Flores.
Some people thought I was serious! I look at that sentence and cannot help but find it laughable: that I would try and support a serious criticism of a deck with only one sentence? That it would lean on an article I criticized? That it would involve pitting a Very Good Player against an admittedly Not As Good Player, with one in their element with a pet deck and the other out of his element with a deck he admitted he disliked? The whole testing regimen there was corrupted, and even if hindsight or post fact or whatever has told Flores that he’s totally right or whatever (I didn’t pay attention to competitive Magic long enough to know), it’s still a bit bizarre to me that someone would take that sentence as a legitimate criticism of the Dredge deck at the time. The sentence was a criticism of Mike Flores‘ whole article — and an offhanded one designed to get a reader to laugh.
I ended that article with “nerf Blue,” another ironic twist designed to provoke a laugh as people saw what I was saying and explaining turned into a simple and shallow emphasis of a point everyone thought I espoused. This is of course frog dissection writ large, but I stand by it. When it comes to the people who respond to me in forums, a portion of the population seem to take me far more seriously than they should.
Weird stuff, folk, weird stuff. I’m considering using mnemonic devices or the like to help readers understand when I’m serious or not. In this case, every third word of this article is serious, and the rest is a joke. Just run through it like that and see what you get.
Oh, and Devin Low now writes the column formerly written by Aaron Forsythe, which I think requires one of us to start acting like the other one of us knows the other exists. I’ll spare him the trouble, since I’ve already done all the groundwork.
End Aside The First.
— happens. Anyway, so as I set aside the dead body of a fan, I sat back and looked over my past work of Magic. I realized that there was some stuff that I’d had a lot of fun writing. The set reviews, for example, were a real treat, and I noticed a trend on StarCityGames.com while I was writing the set reviews.
As I wrote more and more of my set reviews — brief, skipping a lot of cards, avoiding repetition, and avoiding cards about which I had nothing to say (and wow, when you’re a casual gamer, that list is really short compared to the more serious tournament player), I saw the same thing happening in other people’s reviews. When I first started playing Magic, I went and read all the Onslaught Set Reviews, because they were interesting and engaging and written by funny people like Ian Telfer and Geordie Tait (who is kind of a big deal).
A lot of them were the same, but most of them had the same ironic bent to them: Here I am, they’d say, covering every card in the set, and I know it’s wasting space and whatnot, but hey, bear with me.
And then they’d do it.
This let me deduce an old rule which I will trot out for Lorwyn —
Aside The Second: The Shortest Lorwyn Review Ever
“Could be good, provided
End Aside The Second.
— and which I figured I’d apply to any set reviews I wrote. So I considered doing a set review — you know, just writing out my thoughts and posting them on my blog, maybe on the forums here on SCG. I looked at the spoiler for Lorwyn, although calling it a “spoiler” is a bit stupid when the whole set’s been out for yonks, and Wizards themselves are providing the card graphics for the damn thing, but what the hell ever, right?
I found myself finding something perturbing happening. I was looking at cards and my brain was working. I know, that happens sometimes, but it’s this odd kind of bubbling feeling you get. The back of my mind began to open up, asking questions like How many elementals do you have to have to make this card a consistent Jackal Pup? and How much deck manipulation would be necessary to make Sylvan Echoes good? and, most importantly How the hell can I get my hands on a playset of Tarmogoyfs so I don’t find myself roughly violated my first time back in the casual room?
It was an interesting and exotic feeling, one I’d been missing —
Aside The Third: Blocks And Their Differences
Playing Ravnica had been an exercise in chasing fifteenth place. During Kamigawa, there really were only two or three good cards, and most of them had the grace to cost five mana or so, or were so hated out of the casual room by Frown Power. I might have been annoyed at the idea of spending four bucks on a set of Hand of Honor, but at least he let another aggro deck crawl into the game occasionally.
Time Spiral had been the straw that broke my back. In addition to still chasing the good lands out of Ravnica (although my collection of duals is not entirely god-awful, and I might hang onto my Temple Gardens just as a show of G/W solidarity), I was chasing cards that weren’t just interesting in Time Spiral, but were actually also pretty damn good. Of course, the best example of this is Tarmogoyf, but there were others — the big 5/5 flying delve guy, or the frustrating affair that was getting a playset of timeshifted Disintegrates for cheap. Basically, Ravnica’s chase rares were so good I kept chasing them well after they should have stopped being chase. Given its overall presence in the world at large, doing precisely d*ck, I should not have had to pay more than half a ticket for Grave-Shell Scarabs, which is why when I sold my Scarabs, I only had three. The same kind of thing just populates amongst Ravnica rares — it’s like merely putting a twenty-dollar-bill in the rare slot one time in thirty-six point six six six six six had some kind of negative effect on the secondary economy. Pshaw.
Let me explain. When you pay six bucks for a booster and crack it open, and find a card that is not worth twenty dollars, when you were hoping for one that costs twenty dollars, you get awfully scabby about how much that rare did cost you. Because Ravnica was riddled with totally gas rares on cost, the effect it had on all but the most crappy of crapulent crap was to pull the prices upward. Of course, an economist I am not, and there may actually be a huge swathe of people who legitimately think that Stitch In Time is worth a ticket.
About the time I noticed that I had about half the cards I wanted because I was willing to pay about half what their owners wanted, I just stopped logging in. I couldn’t be bothered surfing the auction room any more for bulk lots of uncommons, because the average cost of a cheap lot had gone up beyond my means to buy and resell. I couldn’t be bothered putting together decks just to lose with them — lose, not because I was playing against little jimmy netdeck with his amazing deck of awesome, but because I kept putting together absolute heaps of crap that had no place pretending to be real decks.
Routinely I found myself trying to explore one of the subthemes of Ravnica only to find one of the big themes elbowing its way into the deck as the only way to actually win a game or two. Eventually, I sighed and caved and found myself putting Chord of Calling in everything.
Love. That. Card.
End Aside The Third.
— from Magic. So there I was, the equivalent of a frothing aspro-clear laid on the back of my brain and doused with gasoline and I reach tentatively for my start menu, looking for that dust-encrusted shortcut that read “Magic Online,” curious to see my collection — and to see whether my collection of awful rares had evolved a form of civilization on their own, where they heralded me as “the great gatherer” and who engaged in ritual scarification to reduce themselves down to “one third,” a value with great, deep meaning to them across their cultural memory.
I found no such shortcut. I’ve had two new hard drives since I last logged onto Magic Online.
With some trepidation, I felt it time to come back. If only for a visit. I’d make sure to bring that ghastly cardigan that Magic gave me, and not to take it off and definitely not to sit down, and if Magic offered me a cup of tea, I’d have to politely decline because, you know, I have to be going in just a little bit, and really, it’s been so nice to see you, and yes, I know it’s your birthday in a few months, well is that the time, best to get going ahead of the traffic. This is actually —
Aside the Fourth: Addiction
I get addicted easily. Since getting a full-time job, I’ve found my free time cut down into tiny slivers, which now has to be shared amongst my pastimes quite carefully, and one of those pastimes I have found very enjoyable has been City of Heroes. Suddenly, all my Magic time vanished, and I was busy planning the carefully refined points of getting permadomination (totally worth it, I just don’t have the money), and so on when I finally got kicked in the head and realized that I was spending most every night on it.
This is pretty sobering to me, because one of the points my parents established and got very annoyed about me when I started using a computer was that I was “addicted” because I kept wanting to find out what was behind the next pyramid in Commander Keen, or insisted on pushing on to the bigger and better tombs in Ancient Empires. Of course, they might have been right, in hind-sight, but quite frankly, if you’ve got a seven year old Christian child, you could do a fair bit worse than having him be addicted to rescuing ancient treasures and seeking ways to learn — like, say, reading the Bible.
End Aside The Fourh.
— pretty common for me, treating video games like my grandma, because they’re very similar. Most of them have had their best days past them and I love them anyway, because they’re nice and kind while everyone’s off doing silly things with the latest new hip grandma on the block, I can go back to my grandma and just enjoy myself in the quiet tick-tock of that cuckoo clock that’s been around longer than I have — despite my best efforts when I was four.
‘Scuse me a second, I’m just going to give my gran a call.
Anyway, so I came back. I haven’t logged back in yet — I’ve been too keen looking at the various tribes and wondering what I’m going to do with them. This time around, Kelly Digges isn’t there to take all the best jokes away from me regarding tribal summaries, so I can choose to dole out the humor in careful, individualized packets for you folk rather than the shotgun blast of pure rainbow-flavored crack cocaine unicorn ice cream awesome that he would do.
I miss Kelly Digges as a writer, but not as much as I miss Oscar Tan and Geordie Tait and Ted Knutson. I officially feel old.
Peter Jahn hit 300 articles, and so did Abe. I officially feel like a p*ssy.
Evan Erwin went to the Invitational. I officially feel —
Aside The Fifth: Evan Erwin, Invitational, Etcetera
Shut up.
Yes, you!
You’ve been bleating and blaahing about how Evan didn’t deserve to go to the Invitational, and how his presence ruined “your” Invitational and some people have even been insane enough to invoke my name in this affair, which is really stupid. It hearkens back to people not listening to what I say and listening instead to what they want to hear.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but did Evan Erwin get to the Invitational on the back of him being voted for? So for those of you who disagree with that nomination on the basis of its result: Shut Up. It’s not Evan’s fault your opinion couldn’t sustain an election.
I don’t like that Evan went to the Invitational, but only because now it’s going to give the man a kind of people’s mandate and I, a mere mortal, am not going to be allowed to criticize him when he’s writing badly or making bad conclusions or just generally falling short of the mark I feel that he can reach. Not that that’s a huge change from the situation at large, as people recognize quite readily that I’m just a jaded snarling misanthrope who lurks under bridges and throws stones at girl scouts. Some arrogant know-it-all is of course now going to tell me that I’m only disagreeing with the situation because I’m jealous.
Before addressing the jealousy issue, I am curious at some of the nominations for Storyteller. I can accept my own omission because I never write about tournaments, or, really, anything relevant at all (sob sob I am emo, but it’s true, I’m a casual writer and will continue to do what I’m doing regardless of Wizards’ recognizing me, as long as I’m having fun). But some of the names on the ballot had me pausing and thinking: Hey, shouldn’t someone be on the list before they are? I mean, like, anyone? What about that guy, you know, the one, with the shirt? It might just be that the five best tournament writers suffer a sharp drop-off on the way to the sixth.
Calling me jealous is weird, though, because I cannot think of something I’d less like to do than disrupt my life and work schedule to travel to a tournament in a different country that doesn’t have any decent cheese, turn up to a city that I invariably won’t like much (as I am a savage effeminate hermit who seeks the comfort the a bare bulb under which I can write my governmental magnum opus through plotting the overthrow of IXL Jam and Canned Goods), meet a bunch of Magic players who are far better at the game than I am, far more successful in their personal lives, much better dressed and probably better in bed as well, contrast their lives to mine, realize what a colossal failure I am, play with someone else’s deck, get bounced in the first round before I get a draw step, then mope around the site for another seventeen hours like an unemployed Wizards coverage drone, before we do the eventually embarrassing affair of the card nomination, where I get to have the entire Great Unwashed poke and prod and ridicule at a card I design, then have the Great Washed poke and prod at it, then have everyone unanimously vote for the most broken submission on the list, before being told in private by Maro that they’d have totally had to make my card suck anyway, because it doesn’t fit with the “Shuffling Matters” block that’s coming up. I suppose there’s always the possibility of visiting my nan. I’m not entirely sure what the Invitational would offer me.
You could make the case that I’m jealous of Evan for being recognized by Wizards, but big deal. I stand on my chair and routinely call them idiots — he spends his time frothing at the mouth at how utterly orgasmic their next set is going to be, or how this latest iteration of Solo Fire Winner Winner is the bizawmb shiznoz. See, I feel old just typing that sentence. I was born crotchety, it seems.
Yes, you catch more flies with honey, and I’ve found people aren’t interested in seeing me catch flies.
Without exception, Evan provides the best tournament coverage, better than Wizards’ own, and he damn well deserved to go on the basis of that. That’s tournament coverage, though, and when it comes to tournament reports — i.e. his own experience at tournaments, his own discussions of the events and the feelings? Well, Ffej beats seven shades of tar out of Evan and leaves behind the massive shell of an ego for small feral children to hollow out and inhabit like Old Mother Hubbard’s titanic shoe. Smemmen’s reports are fantastic and actually coerce you into thinking about the game play scenarios and get better at playing yourself. The guy’s style is pretty hard and the reports are long, I suppose, but so what? It’s not like it’s the worst long and hard thing you could spend an afternoon with keeping yourself occupied.
The process was democratic. We had a chance to get someone ELSE into the Invitational, and Evan won. Now, you can be an arrogant git about it and claim the other voters are idiots, or should have voted for the person you did, since clearly that many people can’t possibly form their own opinions, or you can shrug and say, well done and congratulations.
Here’s the path, for those of you too dense to follow:
EITHER, Evan deserved to win the Invitational spot because the majority of people like him.
OR, the majority of people who disliked Evan didn’t care enough about the whole affair to vote.
The first is, as positions go, rock-solid. You can’t exactly b*tch about your Invitational being ruined by someone who was supposed to be there as mandated by the people. It’s not your Invitational, it’s our Invitational, and that our includes half a million other people, no matter how much you might think that they’re a pack of ninnies. Speaking as one of those ninnies, I got my vote so I’m happy.
If we accept the second, my simple edict is: Shut up. You had your chance to change things. Heck, I had my chance. I took it – I voted for Smemmen – I like his writing more than I like Evan’s. You can’t blame me for not trying, and if you didn’t vote, you can shut up twice.
But to sit around and lazily whine that your Invitational game was “ruined” by the presence of one less-skilled nerd amongst the cavalcade of nerds? Good grief, do you think Smemmen belongs within spitting distance of a tournament where the phrase “Attack you for three” is ever going to come up? Smemmen plays Magic where life comes in chunks of two-for-me, two-to-you, and the closest thing they have to combat phases is the gap between storm copies.
Someone has to be the worst player in the room, and I doubt it was Evan. If nothing else, Maro was there.
To wrap up my thoughts on the Evan situation and move on, I will make the cynical note that if he was really that ordinary a player compared to the charismatic stallions against whom he competed, then he stood a 100% chance of getting bounced out of the rounds early, and could thereafter drift around doing coverage like any number of Wizards’ existent coverage drones. We get kick-ass coverage (if we want it) and you don’t have your precious Invitational ruined by a guy with, what, an 1850 rating? He’s a better player than me, that much is sure.
Besides, he was the first Magic YouTuber to actually get any attention, most of which involved setting himself up for embarrassing criticism from those around him, whether or not they were in a position to make a reasonable assessment of his play and play skill. Hindsight 20/20, and the camera adds about 20 psi.
And while I’m at it? Stop b*tching about Premium. Evan’s on the free side of the site. If anyone in Magic writing has a mandate to start charging pennies-per-view, it’s Evan, and Star City aren’t.
End Aside The Fifth.
— like having some cake, which is delicious and moist.
Magic has undergone few changes in recent months. 9th went, and 10th Edition brought legendary creatures, none of which I see as being all that good, unless you count Squee + Masticore as being all that good. Except while it’s the old Squee, it’s the New Masticore, which immediately evokes New Coke (feeling old again) and the comparison is a fair —
Aside the Sixth:
I wonder if the Razormane Masticore is called the Masticore64 in Japan — it’s just like the old Masticore, but they’ll continually try to convince you it’s better because it looks prettier despite the fact you can clearly remember just how much fun the first one was to play with by comparison.
Also, Savage Bastards and Retards are awesome things to have and I hope like hell I get to see one of them in action one day. Right now, I’m too poor to play offline — or rather, I keep going “Meh” about buying offline cards and finding people to play them alongside — so I figure I’ll just have to find some Offensive Language Patch for Magic Online.
End Aside The Sixth.
— one. So Tenth Edition has added some cards to the pool that I like, but it hasn’t done a hell of a lot to pump up tribes I like much. Spiketail Hatchling, an old favorite, is back, and oh, look, the painlands are still here and the Ravnica-Oh-God-What-Did-You-Do-To-My-Wallet-lands aren’t.
I could live with this.
Don’t call it a comeback or anything silly like that. Chances are, I’ll buy a pair of precons, sling together some silly deck that I want to work but just doesn’t have the pieces to do it, write about it here, get laughed at on the forums for forgetting something about Oblivion Ring’s timing rules, feel like a complete ass, borrow money to cover my gambling debts, steadily begin to sell all my property and family in an attempt to stave of Nicaraguan thugs, and eventually drink myself down into the gutter in the hopes that I can make the inevitable end a relief as it releases me from this life of toil and sorrow, finally coming to my steeped end in the shadow of a nondescript gaming center, pauper tournament submission clutched in my fingers as my hands are broken by hammer-wielding store proprietors for wearing reflective sunglasses.
But I hope to be entertaining along the way.
That’s what I’m here for. I’ve tried being thought provoking, and I’ve tried being analytical. Without any kind of divine mandate and validation from on high, I’m just another of those saddos sitting around wondering why we can’t have —
Aside the Seventh: Planeshifting
They planeshifted the wrong Wumpus. Seriously, Thrashing Wumpus should have been put in Red. I know, they already did that with Pestilence, but c’mon! A five power walking Pyroclasm-on-my-turn, Pyroclasm-on-yours is just fun, and I miss Thrashing Wumpus so badly.
They should do a set which is just Mercadian Masques 2, all the cards from Masques, costed properly, and every last Rebel card laced with a pyrophoric agent that means whenever you open it the packet the card bursts into flame.
Does anyone have any statistics or knowledge on how successful the timeshifted cards are? I can’t really see any of them having proven successful, which relegates most of them to ‘cute but useless’ status. We’ll call it “Cuseless.”
End Aside The Seventh.
—an interesting 4/4 for 5 with trample and some extra sass. And nobody likes those people. Lots of people listen to them, but nobody seems to pay attention to what they’re saying. Most of the time, when I started a discussion of Green — or more weirdly, White, people would eventually, in the forums, turn it into a You Make The Really Stupidly Overpowered Green Card excursion, and I’d be left rubbing my temple as I tried to steer the conversation away from ‘G, Ancestral Recall Me and make a 3/3 shroud creature’ while simultaneously fending off people who seemed to think Golgari Grave Troll was a perfectly good example of a Green fattie that was a tournament success in Extended Ichorid. About that point the government chip kicks in and makes me go and have a nice quiet lie down until I can feel my toes again.
So here I am, Magic readers. I can try at clever, I can try and provocative, but the only real goal I have these days is funny and interesting. So, with that absolutely mammoth introduction out of the way, let’s actually get on to the discussion of a subject, shall we? How are we for time?
…
Talen.