Aside from a couple high profile indiscretions - on par with, let’s say, a dalliance with a footman - I haven’t purchased retail software of any kind. As soon as they gave me the opportunity not to, I stopped doing it in much the same way we stopped marrying our cousins. It’s simply not the done thing.

We have a Northron in our employ; another indiscretion, to be sure, but she is sworn to our banner and has undergone the Rite of Renunciation. The Canadian Pharaoh has no power over her. She asked if we could prowl around for Amiibos down here, maybe rare ones, I wouldn’t know. Eventually those tiny statues will have an interaction with something I can’t resist and I’ll wish I’d been obsessed previously, but that hasn’t happened yet. Our search culminated before a young man put in an impossible position, ground flat like the molars of a hippopotamus, inserted into a place where all he can do is tell people he doesn’t have what they want unless they had the presence of mind to purchase it two months before it could be bought.

It’s not his fault, essentially. It’s not his yoke I’m casting off. But God damn if I don’t hate a motherfucking yoke.

The weirdest part in all of this is that much of the fire that started this generation of consoles was about physical ownership of discs and whatnot, what I have called totems primarily in my guise of Internet Asshole, but “going digital” was empowering on one axis and disempowering on another. Regardless of the provider, if you purchase a game from the company store you’re essentially making that hated “DRM” model real. You see this happen when the Services that enunciate these new platforms go down, and some people’s “libraries” of software become strange and occasionally illusory. When music became digital, it became portable. That doesn’t happen with software tethered so tight to an appliance.

Did I start buying software electronically to defy some imagined master? The new master opened a store in my living room and I thanked them for it. I’ve changed all my purchasing behaviors wholesale and, short of a momentary convenience, I can’t think of a single reason why. Except for, you know, the obvious.

(CW)TB out.