Stupid smug smuggers smuggy face jerk wanna punch him in his stupid smug….

Sigh.

As many of you may know, I am a bit of a fan of the Myst franchise. Understatement? Yes.

I am as obsessed as Brad Dourif is crazy

I began playing Myst when I was eleven years old. My future best friend owned it. She enjoyed it too, but was still slightly disturbed by my obsessive begging to keep playing the game and to show me more of the game and to talk about Myst every spare moment we got.

Since then, I have played all five other Myst games. I have read the novels. I learned some D’ni. I became and have remained a Myst fangirl.

Riven is my favourite!

Now, as some of you may or may not have read before, I appeared recently in the DoubleClicks music video “Nothing to Prove” (which is an awesome video and they are awesome people) clearly displaying my love of all things Myst and cementing my status as “cray cray”.

This video went viral. And someone watched it who also happened to be a Myst fanatic. And then that person took to Twitter, and let Cyan Worlds, the creators of Myst, know that there was a girl who mentioned Myst in this music video. Cyan asked if anyone knew who this girl was.

And so the Double Clicks were asked. The Doubleclicks, who knew Errol because everyone now knows Errol, and who also knew that the mysterious girl in the video was a friend of Errol, asked him who I was.

Errol then drew attention to my twitter account, pointing me out as a humongous Myst fan.

The next morning, I woke up to about five tweets, the final one being this:

And this…was my reaction:

I know what you might be thinking. I mean, this was just a tweet, correct? Everyone tweets and retweets. And this was a simple and sincere thankyou for the support and promotion.

But this wasn’t just any tweet. It was a tweet from a game company I had idolized from childhood. That had shaped the way I viewed storytelling. That had cemented my love of adventure games for all time. And they were tweeting me.

EEEEEE!

Not only that, but I discovered that they are creating a NEW game, a game they have a Kickstarter for, which THEY HAVE OFFICIALLY TOTALLY FUNDED HUZZAAAAHHH!

But I digress. The tweets went on after that, and I was on cloud nine for the rest of the day.

“But Manda, why?” you think to yourself, “Why all the anger at the beginning of this post? Isn’t this all GREAT news?”

Well yes, dear reader, yes it is. But then you see, I still have to contend with Errol.

Errol…and his smug.

Do you wanna punch it? Cause I sure do.

For you see, as much as I am Ra-Ra Errol much of the time, there is no denying that he can be a smug jerk when he’s right. Which is pretty much all the time.

And alas, it was Errol who dragged me to that Doubleclicks concert in the first place. And it was Errol who made sure that Cyan found me. And it was Errol who tweeted and retweeted throughout.

Because he’s somewhat of an addict

Did he take the high road, choosing instead to simply let me be in my fangirling rather than hold this grand favour over my head for the rest of my life?

Of course not. I came home to a G-chat message of “You SO OWE ME!”

Jeez, you’d think I’d bought a donut from him or something

And I do. And it’s infuriating. Because nothing is worse than the Errol smug face.

Except this maybe.

I tried to downplay it. He has been saying he now owns my soul. I say it’s just a tweet, and at most I owe him wings for the awesome day.

But he knows. Oh, he knows. That jerk.

And so I am torn. On the one hand, my eleven year old self would leap with joy to know that I got to briefly talk with the folks who inspired me for so many years.

On the other hand, there’s stupid face.

Yargh.

For now, I am still squeeing. But soon I will have to finally face the hard truth that once again…Errol was right. And he will never let me forget it.