I played a bunch of Mechwarrior back in the day. Now I am old.

I confess it plainly, without shame or armor:
there is joy here—real joy—when the metal wakes.

Each step a vow.
The ground does not permit me passage;
it endures me.
I do not move—I commit.

And in that slowness, that deliberate tyranny of weight,
I feel power made honest.
No twitch, no panic, no cheap miracle.
Only heat management, sightlines, breath held steady
as the reticle settles like fate upon a cockpit pane.

Then—
the shot.
A single, perfect punctuation.
Not spray, not hope, but knowledge.
Skill made visible.

The headshot is not merely destruction;
it is proof.
Proof that patience has teeth,
that mastery speaks softly and ends conversations.

Yet let me not pretend this world is flawless.
Oh no—its seams show.
Its code stumbles.
Menus creak, systems groan, logic frays at the edges.
It is earnest, yes—but earnest in the way of a thing
built with love and held together by optimism and duct tape.
There are moments when the illusion falters,
when the machine reminds you it is, after all,
just a machine.

And yet—
redemption arrives not from on high, but from the many.
From hands unseen, unpaid, unthanked enough.
From modders who look upon imperfection and say,
I can fix this. I can make this sing.
They tune the engines, rewrite the rules,
restore the fantasy not by replacing it,
but by believing in it harder than it believes in itself.
So here I stand, enthroned in steel,
awed not just by what the game is,
but by what it allows us to become within it:
pilots, engineers, caretakers of a shared dream.

Give me weight.
Give me friction.
Give me a flawed machine that asks something of me
before it gives me anything at all.
For when the reactor hums,
and the mech lumbers forward,
and the shot lands true—
I am not merely playing.

I am home.

i can make things go boom. and run around in a 100ton stealth mech with a sword