Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

--Oscar Wilde

A genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and the portal of discovery. -- James Joyce

Issue 50. A moment of silence, followed by a big ruckus. Well, alright! I remember reading my first issue of SHADIS... #10. John Zinser and Dave Seay were peddling the magazine everywhere. It was free at conventions, they were nice and approachable individuals who wanted to know who their readers were, and back then you could come by and visit the office and people would talk to you * Back then, the magazine had two ads, a lot of articles by the then-editor jolly Blackburn, and some funky artwork by lesser known gamer deviants.

Man, have things changed.

Now we work in a sweat shop producing knock-off Gucci wallets for sale on the streets of Chicago and Akron.

Most of us are trapped, and there is no way out. There are no walls, but a line of trucks and a busy railroad insure that no one makes a break for it. The art is all produced by local vagrants tricked into coming to work for a game company, and all of the text is typed out by a mega-computer enhanced to create any style of sentence imaginable -- it's manned by a 800 pound monkey named Muriel. We're forced to eat rations from a rusted, delapidated lunch truck, and endure the ravages of lice and millipedes from the soiled cots we sleep on. If anyone receives this note, please send help.

I was in a record store a few nights ago (a lot of nights ago, by the time you read this) and I saw this style magazine (you know the ones that tells you what's cool and in -- they should know, because they just told you). In it, there's an interview with Tori Amos and she talks about all these deep secrets and thoughts and whatever. Now, I'm not a Tori Amos fan at all ( I just read the articles), but in this interview Ms. Amos talks about her most disturbing thoughts and how she thinks about killing her grandmother, yadda, yadda, yadda [insert disturbed images to shock Gen Xers].

Here's what I've surmised: Tori Amos has an image she cannot possibly maintain in our over consume/digest society as these late-20th century entertainment Cabals continue to make more and more "people" magazines and 20 minute show-biz blurps telling us every detail of every minutia so that when we do go to see Mission Impossible or Godzilla we know everything that will happen and there is nothing there to impress or surprise us except the mega-sounds waves pulsing through the floorboards and the passive images assaulting our Visual receptors.

Therefore, Tori Amos must be subject to constant scrutiny from every front, and the need to seem cutting edge is instrumental to her longevity as a popular musician. When I read her comments about "wanting to beat up some woman with a bottle", I thought, 'perhaps this is staged and we will never be allowed to know what really goes on inside the mind of Ms. Amos.' And perhaps this is best. Her freedom to be alone and outside the public eye for 21 minutes a day should be worth something, but her need to put on a good show is just as necessary.

This all brings me to a very important point. SHADIS is not in the habit of selling you on SHADIS -- this month another Interview with Maureen Yates of AEG. Of course it would be great if you all bought 7 copies each month (but that would mean 7 times as many typos), SHADIS knows that we need to be better to demand a greater readership. SHADIS does not need to have yearnings of hate for everyone else to do what we do. When I was hired, I was told that SHADIS is what's best about gaming. Not the best of gaming, or the best thing gaming has to offer or a host of other pep talk comments that could have been made. No. John made it simple. SHADIS is what's best about gaming.

[I wish I could put that on a bumper sticker, or something else poignant and meaningful -- three point braille drive-up window]

What he meant was: SHADIS is here because gaming is the best thing any of us can do; gaming is what sorne of us stay alive for; SHADIS is here to recognize the best of what this hobby has to offer. SHADIS chose a course when the CCG/Role-playing rift shook gaming, and SHADIS hasn't looked back. SHADIS took a stand on Independence and we've honored it every month. SHADIS would like to think that means something; from talking with some of you, we know that it does.

SHADIS is not Tori Amos, and SHADIS doesn't need to tell you how much we hate anything to keep YOU interested in our hype-ridden mentality. We made it this far, which means we did something right. A magazine talking about the "style" of a gamer's life is like telling you what brand of toothpaste to use - it has no significant use and is, at all levels, insulting. No single gamer lives like any other (although, we all for the most part are big fla ing geeks and care little what exactly that means). We game to ether, sometimes we watch bad movies together, we argue about dumb rules together, we argue about the best lines from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and we even share the same love of fatty, deep fried snacks. I hope from here on out that we have lots of useful, intelligent articles for your gamer consumption because SHADIS knows all gamers love dice, charts, big swords, fresh fish, and dumb editorials.

See you in 50 more!