Blog 23 - Forward

April 5, 2012

I’m nestled safely on a flight bound for Boston and the assured surly exploits of one PAX East, I am patiently scouring Aliens interviews to see which quotes have upset which group of people, I curse softly to myself about talking about the ending of Mass Effect 3. As they say in various Hot Topic branded neck-beard T-shirts, “I’m addicted to the misery.”

To provide clarification for the calm and rational tweets (seriously, thank you guys for being rad) I’ve been receiving, I riffed off-the-cuff in one of the interviews about petitioning artists to change their art. I was coming off of a second day straight of ten hours of interviews and I was not using the “don’t be a flippin’ idiot” part of my brain. While I do feel it’s somewhat strange that people would find it necessary to go to such an extreme to alter a story, I wasn’t looking to rail on that. I was poking at the idea that a group of people would petition the government in a legal sense to alter a work of art.

That blows my mind. I can’t make sense of it and I don’t intend to waste the brain cells attempting to. Sometimes we get disappointed, and that’s not false advertising, that’s a disconnect between an artist and an audience. Sometimes that’s a legitimate issue and other times it’s simply a measure of expectation management. I don’t actually have an opinion on whether the ending of Mass Effect meets expectations or not, and I won’t share one here. I know a thing or two about an audience hating an ending—

Wait; is there a petition to change the Borderlands ending? Can I sign that?!

I guess that was a different era in the game industry when you could promise a Vault full of riches and treasure and surprise them with a gigantic tentacle monster instead. We’re like David Lynch up in this biatch.

Changing gears.

PAX East (or PAX Easy as I like to pretend it’s branded,) is my first large public appearance since the Stroke and the MS diagnosis. I’ll be hobbling around the floor on my cane and hoping I’m enough of the old Mikey that it won’t be too weird for people. To be honest, I’m a little nervous. We have a panel on Sunday, and I watched the PAX 2011 panel last night on YouTube to prepare, but I ended up tearing up watching myself jump up and down off the stage – like, that was me in September. That was about two to three weeks before I collapsed from the Stroke at work after a particularly terrible round of Left4Dead 2. It was fascinating to watch, if not more than a little heart breaking, but we keep moving. Always go forward, even if you need a cane to do it.

A pretty purple cane with swirlies on it.

#thuglife

Going back to art for a moment, I’m going to beg.

As everyone that reads this blog already knows, I’ve started a novel experiment on the internet called “BOZ.” Publishing. Eventually, this site will publish all matter of serialized content, but for the time being it’s just my SciFi novel, “The Returners.” The website is http://bozpublishing.com Please, PLEASE, go there and check it out. Like us on Facebook. Mail me some Cinnabons – whatever you can do to support this effort (provided you enjoy it, of course) is worth the world to me.

Okay, time to PAX it up. If you’re in Boston, come say hi to me at one of our booths or at the panel on Sunday. I might not be jumping around like an idiot, but I am moving forward.