True Fortress Ameritrash Confessions

I was 14 when I first saw that chilling and mysterious TV ad for Alien. My mom promised to take me to see it on my birthday, along with a few of my friends. But I couldn't wait that long, so I bought the book adaptation by Alan Dean Foster and read that quickly. So I slowed down on the popcorn as the chest-bursting scene approached. My mom didn't see that coming, and it really killed her appetite when it happened. More popcorn for me.

So who are the cool kids clique here? Is it just the most frequent posters? Or the people who call each other by their real names? For what its worth I've been posting here for years and still feel like the outsider at the party. So I know I'm not one of them. Also I drink and smoke pot sometimes, but my partying days are long behind me. I'd be happy to join others at the sober table.

^apparently everyone simultaneously doesn't feel like they belong on the site, which is a funny insight into human nature.

Oh, I don't feel like I don't belong on the site. Nor do I consider myself a "cool kid" which implies a sort of exclusivity that I haven't found here. New people are welcomed as far as I can tell although the culture that if your going to dish it out you have to be able to take it is very much in play. And that applies to trash talk or opinions or arguments.

Anyway...more confessions....

People I think I'd really like to play games with....

Gary Sax! I'd like to show up at his door with three other gamers in tow with a bunch of cool games. He'd be horrified at us slobs but he'd secretly love playing games and laughing all night long like we do when we get together.

Doc Mabuse! I think we share a similar taste in many games and he seems like he'd be a fun dude to hang with. Initial scouting reports seem to back this up.

Jeb! We are such polar opposites in the political sphere but we'd have a great time playing games which as a rule is a "politics free zone".

Space Ghost, but he'd probably crush me with the power of his mind alone.

I am a cool kid, for sure, but not because of F:AT or board gaming. I'm just a cool kid.

I have a new avatar. It's my dog, Cappy.

I've only met most of the people here once or twice, and in such a way that I'm pretty sure I didn't make much of an impression one way or the other. I'm old and cranky and don't know or care if I'm a cool kid, I just like running my mouth.

I don't like Cosmic Encounter, Tales of the Arabian Nights, Titan, or Imperial.

I don't play with Lego nearly as much as I'd like to anymore.

I was a scaredy-cat kid growing up and was terrified of everything.

I read comics but have no interest in superhero stuff. I don't see many movies at all or watch a whole lot of TV. (Though that's been changing recently.)

I'm a godless socialist liberal.

Almost everything Barnes wrote up until maybe 2 months ago sent me into an absolute rage from which I could not string two coherent words together and yet sometimes still attempted to post anyway. 2 months ago I ended up saying something I really wasn't happy about but it enabled me to finally stop taking anything he said seriously. I have no idea what took so long.

I haven't had a whiskey I like yet.

I put all my energy into work and wife and kid (order varies depending on the week) which means I have very little left over to learn or play boardgames. So I play Diablo 3 instead.

I want to start drumming again, with a group even, but I am not quite sure how to make that happen.

I would love to make ConnCon one of these years.

I am somehow intimidated by Matt Loter, even though I enjoy his online persona. Maybe it's the patter.

Oh, and I generally dislike scary movies and avoid them. I am a very visual thinker and the images tend to stick in my head and really disturb me.

I have a confession that I was saving up for the Friday Freakout. Get ready.

I think some of y'all took Steve Weeks way, way, way too seriously.

I liked that guy. I got his schtick right away and I thought it was hilarious for the most part. Back at BGG, it was awesome watching him work the crowd, so to speak. He was a master manipulator, and I swear that guy had a mutant power to know exactly where to get under people's skins. But yet, he totally didn't take ANY of this crap about games seriously. He loved games, loved to play them, but thought all of the talk about games online was kind of silly. But he participated and sometimes pretty much made a mockery of the whole thing. He dug into me a couple of times, and I found my hackles getting raised a few times even though I knew better. He bothered people in a way that I never was able to, outside of the MES avatar for whatever reason.

His podcast was funny as hell, he wrote original songs about games and did stuff that was really kind of ahead of its time. The few video podcasts I've seen are nowhere near as entertaining and funny as what he did.

I met him one time at Dragon Con, he was just as garrulous and outgoing as you'd expect. In the PMs I've had with him, he was really a nice guy that just totally was taking the piss out of the entire hobby. But with a genuine endearment for it...you don't write a song about "cube confusion" if you don't care about it. I wish he had gotten around to doing one about "shelf toads", another term he coined.

Gosh, those things like the Greg Schloesser versus Michael Barnes list...those skits he would do, where he'd narrate what was happening in a game...that shit was so much funnier than just about anything else. But some folks just took him too seriously and just got pissy about him.

I did get that he felt somewhat ostracized when we started F:AT and he wasn't included, and I think he had almost a kind of bitterness about not being in on it, which is why he did that whole "Voice of Ameritrash" thing, the Ameritrash Hall of Fame and all that. I think he really wanted to be included.

Anyway, I'll confess, I miss the guy...I miss seeing people- some of you people- just flipping your shit over some of the ridiculous stuff he'd say or do. I wish I had a chance to play some dumb old horse racing game or something with him when I met him.

I always liked him as well. I actually FB friended him for a short while, he defriended me though due to talking about my emesis thanks to my lovely brain damage.

He was a cunt, but no more than the rest of us. At least he was funny. He never got under my skin. I loved SuperWeeks TNT. That was hilarious.