It's E3 season again, and this marks the second year in a row that I haven't attended, after 4 straight years of going.

To celebrate my staying-at-homedness, I rebuilt E3Feed almost from the ground up and relaunched it. It went live today.

For the uninitiated,E3Feed is a kind of automatic newsblog. It automatically pulls newsfeeds from dozens of popular video game news sites and filters out only the E3-related news. This is advantageous, because E3 is one big convoluted clusterflock of news exploding all at once. Hundreds of media outlets from teeny blogs with forged credentials to monolithic conglomerate-owned gaming news media empires are all in one convention center trying to be the first to cover everything.

This makes it difficult for the readers, as they've usually got to constantly be checking a whole bunch of sites for updates, flipping between browser windows and tabs like they're watching the election numbers come in.

E3Feed fixes that by bringing it all together in one place where you can see it, sort it, and search it.

Last year I came up with the idea 3 days before E3 started, and rushed to get it half-working. And half-work it did.

This year I had a bit of a head start. I generally refined things, and made extensive use of the javascript I've learned in the last year (e3feed in '08 was the first time I'd basically ever used javascript extensively, and it was pretty ugly). I added some new features, like pasteable URLs and automatic fetching of story images and videos. Plus it looks a lot better, thanks to John.

The only problem with a site like this is that the most natural place to publicize it is at gaming sites, but none of them want to link to it because it's effectively driving their traffic away from them and to the competition. Fortunately, I found salvation in Wil Wheaton, who was kind enough to mention it on Twitter to his 600,000 subscribers, who all flooded to the site at once and practically melted my server.

So it seems to be flourishing on Twitter, the literal vox populi, rather than on gaming sites... who I shouldn't be so quick to disparage, as they're providing me all the content for E3Feed for e3free.

A friend of mine from high school intends to be a teacher. He's basically done with college, graduates soon, and is even applying to various school districts around the country. Because I've known him for a while, and even employed him at Electroids back when the demand was insane, he's been putting me down as a reference on the job applications.

Yesterday I got an automated email from one of these school districts asking that, as a person listed as a reference, I fill out a brief questionnaire about this friend.

Most of the questions were basic, obvious stuff: rating various qualities from "below average" to "outstanding." After those were some more specific questions, like how I know the applicant and how long. Without thinking about it, I entered three years and continued on down the page.

When I reached the end I went back to check everything, making sure I hadn't said anything too damaging, then I looked at that "3 years" I'd selected. I did some math, and realized I'd known him for seven years. Junior year of high school was seven years ago.

That number hit me like a bag of golf balls.

Whenever I've had to reassure myself that I'm still a young person, I've counted off the years since high school and reveled in the relative slightness of it. I graduated in 2004, though. It's been almost 5 years now. I think that's too distant to be used as a mile-marker now.

Then I realize that this friend is the same age as me, and he's only a cap, gown, and background check away from being a school teacher. A teacher. The guy standing in front of the room and not sitting in the back.

For 13 years my life always revolved somehow around one or more teachers. Like it or not, they dictated nearly everything about what I would do in a day and how I looked at my life going forward. There was always a clearly drawn faction line, though. Teachers on one side, everybody else on the other. Teachers always represented everything I wasn't. Now, I could probably better pass myself off as a teacher than a student.

This is alarming.

It seems to be a common phenomenon in our society that people never seem able to leave high school behind. As much as I try to shirk it, my brain still operates in high school mode. I always have an underlying feeling of dread that I'm not where I'm supposed to be, that I've forgotten about some assignment, that I'll get caught not doing what I'm supposed to. I could do anything I want now, but some part of me will always expect to need a permission slip signed first.

I think this happens because, for a lot of people, high school is the last time our lives are so rigorously structured. Unless you join the military or go to prison, it's unlikely that your daily whereabouts and activities will ever be so oppressively monitored and regulated. After school, people stop being freshman or seniors and just become people.

I spent every moment of high school waiting for the day when I'd be free of this control, but now that I am I can still feel the reverberations, and like a conditioned lab rat I'd probably rather return to the maze where I know there'll be cheese than escape into the real world and find my own damn cheese.

I can't even remember school as a series of events, but more like one protracted state of mind. I dont remember a single day of 4th grade or anything I did there, but I remember how 4th grade felt. I can't even remember the teacher's name, or picture her face. I remember my mental impression of her, though, compared to previous teachers.

The only moment of my school life I remember vividly is my last day of high school, effectively my last day of real school. After I'd taken my last two finals, gotten my navy blue cap and gown, and participated in the mandatory "senior walk" which was invented to prevent the previous traditional "senior rampage," we all went to a school-organized party at a nearby park. I remember it so well I could sell tickets to the video in my head.

I remember standing there with the two friends I had to my name, one who would later become a teacher and another who would become just as clueless about adulthood as myself, and watching everybody else play volleyball or eat catered hamburgers. I remember feeling like I should be feeling what they're feeling, some kind of release or freedom.

I couldn't, though. All I could think about was that some day I would look back on this day and wish I could go back. I wouldn't see this as the end of my oppressive life in state-run institutionalized learning, but I'd see it as the last time anything made sense, and I knew exactly what I'd be doing the next day.

I just expected it would take a lot longer for that to happen.

This morning, on the way to work, I stopped at a Costco gas station to fill up my tank. Like one does.

When I got out of my car, something strange caught my eye. Sitting on a concrete barrier meant to stop people from driving into the gas pump (video games have taught me that's a bad thing), was a single spent bullet casing.

It's standing on its end, like it was deliberately placed there.

Like it was a message.

It's the sort of thing a character in a movie would notice, then look curious, then overcome with a sudden mysterious dread, then look up and out into the distance just in time to have his head blown off with a long-range rifle shot.

It wasn't rifle ammo, though. It was a .380 ACP casing, otherwise known as "9mm Short," a relatively weak pistol round. Not many guns use it. Mostly small, lightweight guns like the Walther PPK.

I picked it up to examine it. There was a dimple on the firing pin. The round had been fired, naturally.

Fired, picked up, and placed gingerly on that concrete post.

Not strewn casually on the ground, like a clue in a mystery. Placed there, in plain view. To taunt me.

I looked around, and didn't see any more casings or dead bodies. Other patrons of the gas station met my curious gaze with suspicious half-glances.

The mystery would remain unsolved.

For the past few weeks I've been thinking about this "Young Adult" situation, and I've come to realize that Mind & Body's appeal to youngsters should be seen as a positive, not a negative.

"YA books is where ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD is right now," a friend told me. A famous friend. One whose name I won't drop. It might be Wil Wheaton. It might not.

It is.

He's right, though. Juvenile fiction is BIG MONEY right now. Harry Potter, Twilight (god I love books about vampires), Everybody Poops, Lord of the Flies, Cats in the Hats... these are all huge franchises making billions of dollars.

So to capitalize that, and in the spirit of my personal role model Bill O'Reilly, I'm releasing a for-kids-only version of M&B: Mind & Body: For Kidz!!.

It's a completely rewritten version of the original, but with a more kid-friendly focus and with some of the more mature themes taken out.

For example, most of the killing and guns and poisons are removed. To fill up that space, I added some scenes about school bullies, saying no to drugs, the advantages of abstinence, and pinewood derby tips.

The character Amy was given HIV, to teach kids some tough real-world issues in a non-threatening way, in the vein of Sesame Street.

The storyline dealing with Chris's dead father and the mystery surrounding it has been removed. In its place is an exciting adventure-slash-mystery about stolen bake sale money. Chris (renamed Chris Awesome) causes some pretty hilarious hijinks, and even uncovers a vast conspiracy created by an evil cookie corporation, Schumer Confections.

In light of this sure-to-be-bestseller, I'm discontinuing Mind & Body (the original version) to bring the focus on MB4Kidz.

Please enjoy a sample from the first chapter:

I was seven, almost eight, the first time I punched someone.

It was kind of an accident, in the same way that Meowth is kind of a Pokemon (how come he can talk? lol). I hadn't set out to punch him, but I wasn't exactly trying not to, either.

Anyway, I got a cool red bicycle for my birthday.

Look for Mind & Body: For Kidz!! in bookstores next April 1st.

Today is my birthday. I have one every year.

I think I'm done with overwrought introspection about the nature of life and aging. From now on, life is all about bills and mortgages and cholesterol and credit ratings. Nothing is allowed to be fun anymore. I have only to live and die. Hopefully, more of one than the other.