How did I find out about all of this and where did I get all these banned books from? I got them from my street business selling used secondhand books in New York in the 1990s where I often dealt in the remnants of the estates of dead men from wealthy rent-controlled apartments around Central Park. These rich guys had tons of books that had not been printed in decades and were largely forbidden for the peasants to read or even possess. I used to sell their paperbacks and sit down with these hardbacks on a milk crate flipped upside down and read all day long, occasionally pausing to open my hand for money from a customer buying a book off my table in front of Union Station.

I read and I read and I read. Then I read some more. Day after day, week after week, month after month. I read in the open air and I read under an umbrella. Sometimes at the end of the day when I pushed my books back over to the West Side warehouse I would be so engrossed in a book that I tried to push and read at the same time. Months turned into years and I read all the non-existent, out of print forbidden literature and secret books that the world had left from the shelves of dead men whose heirs had only wanted their money and left their books for the garbage. The doorman of that man’s apartment took $10 from me and let me fill up a cardboard box. I was just a nobody, a loser who sold books on the sidewalk in New York City. I was also a person who managed to read almost all of the books they no longer wish to see in public circulation anywhere. What they said should remain in their private libraries for their own edification, I read sitting on a milk crate. The privileges that billionaires enjoyed were also extended to me because I was at the bottom of the food chain when those men died and nobody was there to see to it their secret taboo library was burned.

He is not all crazy. One of the things that made his reputation originally was that he was on the Australian team that was tasked with doing a sequel to Wizardry 8 (? I think), it was a horrific mishmash of incompetence, and he decided he could do just as good a game entirely on his own and that in fact it would be the BEST GAME EVER and in fact he’s been working on it super-hard and it’s going to come out WITHIN SIX MONTHS HE SWEARS and that’s been going on for about 20 years now; demos of the game have been released (most recent one was I think a year or so ago), and he definitely nailed the gameplay feel and definitely has the skills to do what he says, but he just never seems to get around to actually finishing it and releasing it instead of just talking about how great it will be.

Aaaaanyway, in discussions about this game, he’s repeatedly made allusions to the Australian team that inspired or horrified him into taking on this project, and the incredibly demented ideas they had (“the penis monster” being one of the most memorable; the stack of dildoes and gay porn magazines in the project manager’s bathroom being another – said PM’s apartment being a place where local teens and preteens were constantly being invited to “play video games”). This was generally considered just Cleve being Cleve, wild exaggerations, crazy talk, trolling, saying things that might have a shred of truth somewhere in them but don’t take bets on exactly what … until, a few years ago, somebody acquired a whole pile of paper documents dating back to those days, and put them up for sale on Ebay (I think) along with scans of the documents, and pretty much all of Cleve’s wildest and most hair-raising claims about the people and the project were vindicated by said evidence. Including the penis monster.

I take everything Cleve says with a grain of salt, and I would never, ever give him money for something that didn’t involve him IMMEDIATELY handing over whatever it is I’m paying for … but he sometimes speaks truth that absolutely nobody else does. That’s valuable.

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Someone who is Neanderthalesque doesn’t get along with Homo Sapiens, you say? I wonder how well a lone Sapiens would do in a crowd of Neanderthals.