No Fooling

Once upon a time, there was a traveler and a jester. Many moons ago, when the traveler was young and hale and hearty, they stumbled upon a most curious festival. It was there they met the jester, a comedian of, it must be said, somewhat limited capacity. Their jokes were a bit plain. Their stories were quite mundane. And they had a nasty tendency to bog down a sentence with so many embellishments and qualifiers that it became altogether harder to follow than if they had offered no clarifying details at all in the first place in addition to the fact that it generally robbed them of any of the sort of comedic punch that they were clearly intended to carry which probably was a result of their lack of brevity, I think. But…there was one thing the jester could offer: Consistency.
 
Every week, the jester came to the festival. Rain or shine, morning or night, funny or dull they came. And thus that festival became a place of comfort to the traveler, and they resolved to return when they could and watch for a time. But as the weeks turned to months and the months turned to years, the festival changed. The patchwork tents and faded banners disappeared, one by one, until only a single stall remained, but once a year: the jester's. The traveler could not hear the creaking bones behind the bells, could not see the wrinkled face behind the mask, but it was then they knew that one day, even the jester would be gone.
 
Sure as the sunrise, the day came. The traveler arrived at the site of the now-yearly event to a festival-shaped hole in the dust. The only color was the weeds poking through the dirt. The only song was the lonely howling of the wind. And not a single joke could be heard.
 
The traveler sighed, and picked up their pack. All things must come to an end eventually. And it seemed this year, they'd have to go elsewhere…to tell people Best 0nline Casin0 Free Sl0tz Click HERE!!
 
 
***
 
 
So yeah, that's all you're getting this year.
 
I could give a number of excuses for why I don't have a real April Fool's article prepared for you. As alluded to in the story above, this place is mostly a haven for spam bots. Every year before I post my April foolishness, I'll delete about as many of their comments as there are real ones. For the curious, this lifetime number of genuine comments is 39. In over a decade, and 159 articles, we have 1/4th of a comment for each of them, some of which are my own replies.
 
Small Favors is another reason for the reduced output. It's a free, full-length role-playing game I've been working on for over seven years. If you're wondering why on earth I haven't mentioned it before, it's technically still not done. But it's perfectly playable if you pine for my prose, with a few hundred thousand words of dialogue and a runtime approaching 40 hours for completionists. Once I finally drag my decrepit bones to the finish line, I'll put a link to it here alongside that Square game I made in a month a lifetime ago.
 
I've been busy the past month, having recently moved for the first time since college. But the truth is neither the busyness, nor the major project, nor the lack of engagement are the real reason we're so article-deficient in 2023. The real reason is simply: procrastination. And so in lieu of the genuine article this year, I'm offering you something else.
 
I'm offering you an IOU.
 
Sometime between now and April 1st, 2024, there will be another article on genericide-blog.com. I don't know what it will be. I don't know when it will be. But it will be. Because I still genuinely enjoy writing about games, and creating things that don't take seven years to produce. So until I tell you my writing's moving somewhere else, I'm a jester you can always count on.
 
Unless I die. Would be tough to schedule around that one.