"What a funny bunch we all are" - or - "The fellas invited me to play": The True Story!

It had been a dreadful day in Milan, Italy, with the temp going steadily over 50 (and I'm speakin Celsius here, mind me) for most of the global overheated afternoon. I was ragdolled on my sofa when good ole Rudy from Sweden virtualphoned me and said: "Hey, you might want to come along tonite. We're meeting in the BFAA."

"What's the BFAA?" I asked, not much thrilled by the idea of leaving my warm wormhole.

"How can you possibly not know it?" came Rudy's rude voice from Scandinavia. "It's the Bryce Forum Arcade Arena, and tonite I'm gonna try to break down that darn record."

"What record?"

"You'll see."

Whoa, I thought, this sounds cool. The word cool was the key.

"Count me in", I said, and took off in a blink. During the brief dimensional jump, I wondered what marvels of technology I would be confronted with, so you can surely imagine my disappointment when I reached the famed BFAA and, over the entrance, I saw the poster, all glittering with thousandies of little lampies, reading: TONITE TETRIS GALORE.

Oh mein Gatt, I deutsched silently. Tetris!

Now, in the era of such amazing VR games such as Enter Once Again the Plurimatrix and Tomb Raider 56 The Very Very Very Last Revelation and the wondrous (We swear this time it's really the) Final Fantasy, how come some techie fellas like my fella Bryce Forumers still play that (aaaancient!) fallingblock nightmare? They're all into multiproc machines and render algorhythms...

But, when I entered the gigantic dome, my heart jumped and the wind escaped my throat like when I get punched in the guts (it happens quite often, alas). It was huuuuuge! Fascinated, I took my seat in the first row, right behind the excited challenger. "Hey, R-och-R", I said. "How come no one ever told me about this?"

He turned and smiled brightly. Under the metaballed head, that is, but I swear it was a smile. Ok, sort of. "Glad you're here", he said, avoiding swiftly the answer and trying to shake my hand. When I saw the taloned tentacle, I pretended to scratch an itch behind my left ear and looked at the ceiling. You don't want to mess with those talons of his, that's for sure.

Then the whole thing started. It was, as Roger Waters would've said, Fun Like Hell... ok, more or less. With the accompaniment of some freakin' whunz-whunz techno oldies by FatBoy Slim, the whole apparatus started to move, clanging and booming while the big gears came to life up there near the immense ceiling. Rudy's talon grabbed the control and the game begun, just as a bunch of gigantic spotlights pierced the murky darkness of the place to reveal a huge crowd of fella Brycers perched on the metal balconies.

I went all "whoas" and "omygods", while in the row beside me the retainers of the present highscores started to boo and hiss to try and distract the challenger. Alvin was making little balls of his works' screenshots and shooting them at Rudy using a Wacom DardLet; Sbleci took the neon sign from his Traversi Travel agency and used it as a bat to try to dismember Rudy's talon junction; Woody Jordan continously hissed "POV-Hurst! POV, POV, POV-Hurst!" in the challenger's ear, while Willem&Madeleine tried to sinuously and elegantly carve his head off using a strange egg-shaped plasmachisel.

To no avail, I must say.

When Rudy completed the first of the many rows he would disintegrate during that long and unforgettable night, I noticed some movements under the BFAA dome and recognized a bunch of very active fellas doin' their obscure but precious jobs to let us have the usual fun.

Almost right in front of me, Thomas aka Wahnfried1959 was fast-climbing one of the many rickety ladders that ringed the Arena. "He doesn't know if it's horizontal or vertical", explained Dash101 from behind my back. Dash was somewhat focus-blurred, but we giggled anyway like two old spinsters. How mean can we get when we feel like it!

SusanEelie was seated in the middle of the ladder just above, watching the proceedings while devouring a can of SPAM she strangely didn't send to Italy.

On the far right, just under the big octagonal pieces-forging structure, TheBryster and Tjohn, with their usual pungent attitude, were manning the servo-driven Adamite's Iridescent LaserCannon to get rid of Rudy's first completed Tetris row.

Halfway to the top, I recognized Jimbo Lemon overlooking the whole madness, surely taking mental notes on how to develop some geometrically correct tri-cubic-pano study about the pros and cons of rendering Escherian sand castles.

And, on the summit of the TetrisForge, OfficerSmith was directing the next piece on the dropping line (it was the long-awaited Vertical, at last: the piece all Tetris players crave, y'all know that, don't you?), while Clay the H supervised the animation process with a look of icy-pure volumetric fire.

"Hey, this is fun!" I exclaimed while Rudy happily kept on demolishing row after row of gigantic blocks. I looked again at the crowd and saw the fellas: Tres, MadDog, Swade, Eyecon, Eres, Zhann, Pakled, Drac, Calum, Elsina, Sharen and all the others... everyone was there hollering and cheering and having lots of fun.

"Where's Flak?" I asked Ang25 while, in a very Dylanian way, everything seemed to go a-quakin' and the times seemed like they were a-clanging.

"Flak? Oh, he's on the Dome top trying to multiple-render the whole crowd", she answered. "Ornlu too is up there, searchin' the 19,001st metaball. It escaped one of his renders some weeks ago, and nobody has been able to raytr... er, retrace it ever since."

"Oh, I understand", I said and, while beside me Doug was successfully trying to immobilize his fabled Wandering Cup, I pointed to the crowd and asked Catlin, "Cat, why are they all naked up there?"

She giggled. "That's because here in the B-Forum we're all naked, dork! We're dressed only with our 3-Dreams."

"This is very poetic", I whispered, deeply moved.

Suddenly she laughed. "Or maybe the Brycer In Question wasn't able to render such a crowd with their clothes on", she winked wickedly.

Gosh, I guess she was right.