I caught some OWL when I probably should have been preparing for my son’s D&D game. They are now engaged in a live or death struggle with a race of featureless black cubes whose only weakness is candy. There are probably worse fathers but I can’t think of one right now.

There’s a period of time early in the creation of an institution where everybody has to pretend together that what they are doing is real. I’ve used the metaphor before, but we might call this phase Wearing Daddy’s Coat.

I’m making an observation about human culture and not something specific to the Overwatch League. You can shorten the amount of time everyone has to spend pretending by founding a considered and legible ritual; they’ve done this to a profound extent. The presentation and execution of an electronic league that attempts to inherit and modernize concepts like “pride of place” is fascinating to watch as a process, above and beyond whatever might be happening in the round. There is a Meta obviously but there is a Meta-meta and it’s about building a cultural universe that doesn’t fall apart two days later.

PAX East fast approaches, and with it, an opportunity for you to interrogate us in a comfortable, convenient, asymmetrical way. Behold: The PAX East Q&A form. Yes friends, peer deeply into our thought matrices and derive the kind of “benefits” that can only be expressed with a pair of quotation marks firmly attached.

Oh! I also want to mark the occasion today for our good friends Gavin Greco and Ryan Hartman, upon the highly successful and unprecedented performance of their precious birds.

(CW)TB out.