Note: While this post directly won't be getting political, politics might come up. Nothing crazy, but consider yourself warned just in case.
Editor's Note: Disregard this; past me is a fucking idiot.

Jesus Christ, where to start...

About 15 years back, I designed a card game called Lucky Lead. The gameplay can best be described as if Russian Roulette was played like Blackjack. There's also a backstory involved: Lucky Lead is the most popular game played in the National Casinos, a gambling outlet in the future where you can legally use your life as collateral to gamble, which is compulsory. It's actually a pretty fun game, and it makes an excellent drinking game. You can still buy it from TheGameCrafter, and if you are interested: Get it while you can, because it's poised for a redesign and re-release in the unforeseeable future.

When I was designing the game, the backstory was more or less an afterthought. I just needed some kind of flavor text for the rule sheet to explain the context of the game's existence. As time went on, I started privately expanding on the idea of a post-apocalyptic future run by casinos. I made a couple more prototypes for games that ended up unreleased, and wrote some short stories that widened the scope of what was going on. Since they were generally unfocused and riddled with grammatical errors, they became lost to time.

Then, I began a series: The NC Times. Telling the story of the world of the NC through their fragmented and possibly-propagandistic news publication. The story would be told in two possible forms: Articles seemingly found in the trash that were scanned and cataloged, and corrupted bits of stories captured from data dumps of discarded terminals that were pieced together as closely as possible.

Life in the NC is bleak, violent, and over-stimulating by design. Again, gambling is compulsory, but it's not hard to get people into the casinos because they were raised to worship Luck. What backs their currency? Death. Every night during The National Curfew, people die in large numbers, and their blood is essentially traded for money in the National Casinos (believe it or not, the idea for this was sparked before those Purge movies came out). Piece by piece, The NC Times paints a clearer picture through the news stories within.

One of the logos used for The NC Times.

I could never really get it off the ground. As much as I love publishing stuff, I'm also really bad at it. A zine version that only contains half of the articles (and with no pictures) exists, but only a handful were ever fabricated, and most of those were similarly lost to time.

Of course, at some point, I'm going to want to try again. Despite being written almost a decade ago, the general story of The NC Times is pretty relevant to today's political climate. After all, you know what else I've always struggled with getting off the ground? This website. Despite owning the domain for years, it's always been difficult for me to really lock it down in a way that I'm happy with, and now I finally feel like I have. So I'm going to revisit The NC Times. Only thing is...

I have to finish The Textbook Case first.

I mean, I guess I don't have to, but I'm forcing myself to. My past is full of a litany of projects that have gone unfinished, and I refuse to let at least this one story be unfinished. I need to start forcing myself to finish what I start, and it starts with Jackie Carlisle. Of course, Part 1 is online, and there are three parts to go. Why is it in four parts? Because shut up, that's why.

So, I guess this is me... more or less putting this out into the universe, to further pressure myself to do it.