A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

No, what really underscored the truth of the maxim, "Never meet your heroes", were two particular incidents. I asked him after he'd gotten back from his vacation, if he would still keep in touch. "No," he laughed, "Honestly I'm going to try to forget about all of you."

The other was that some months prior, I'd loaned him a book that I thought was really cool: "Show Stopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT", by G. Pascal Zachary. It's a nice balance of a verbal documentary, docu-drama, and non-fiction. Well, I got it back. Somewhat.

When he was cleaning out his office in preparation to leave, he binned it. I wasn't able to find it among the trash bags of his things that he just left behind. When I contacted him about it, he dutifully bought me a used copy (fair enough, it's out of print) from Amazon.

A used copy which was in manifestly worse shape than the one that I had loaned to him. Ultimately, transphobic, alt-right-sympathizing tweets aside, that one incident really speaks to his character: Doing the minimum necessary to get people off his back.

The crowning achievement was some months after he'd left, when he decided to break the silence in the form of a blog post about how he'd left the company for reasons that amounted to "people were mean to me on the Internet". The undertone of that post was it all being about him.

Absolutely no acknowledgement that it was ultimately his impotent rage at servers having the temerity to resell portions of the game that caused the whole fiasco to begin with.

No recognition that his decision caused a dramatic impact, good *and* bad, on 30+ people, because of his own rage over people taking advantage of loopholes in the EULA. No, it was about how being called "fat" by ignorant teens. Which is not okay, but let's have some perspective.

Now, years on, I feel at partially vindicated. Now that he's started openly turning into an alt-right mouthpiece, going on about how he'd "rather be a fascist dick than a trans vagina", people have at least somewhat started to clock that hey, maybe this guy is broken.