A SERIES OF DISPARATE THOUGHTS FROM DIFFERENT MANIFESTATIONS OF MYSELF REGARDING A TIK TOK VIDEO ABOUT GAMING
ONE: (Informational) Here is a TikTok video I came across while looking at Twitter when I should have been doing something productive or fulfilling. Exercise, perhaps. Here is what happens: a guy in a white jacket and sunglasses alludes to gamers, like myself, hating something. He tells everyone to subscribe to his channel if they like gaming. We see him put a disc in his XBox. It's a new game, he tells us, but he doesn’t have enough space on his XBox’s hard drive to install the game. He spends “ages” deciding what to delete. He deletes something. It doesn’t make enough space. He sits on a footrest and looks completely defeated.
TWO: (Traditionalist) Technology has truly made men very soft. The threshold for this young man’s experience of despair, slumped on his couch, exhausted and weak at the prospect of having to delete another game to free up space for his new game, is a signal of deep weakness baked into all men of my generation. I watched First Cow today, a movie about two hustlers who do what needs to be done to make their way in life. If those two guys, men of the frontier both, were brought to despair by something this trivial they would have never been able to make the first donuts in Oregon.
THREE: (Histrionic) When I was a child and I said I hated someone from school, my mom would tell me to ease up on my use of that word. Hate is a powerful word that expresses a powerful feeling, she told me, and it should be reserved only for someone you want dead. As I have aged I do try to avoid using the word when it refers to people, especially now that I sit in recognition of the scope of historical violence that has been enacted in service of the feeling that word describes. But, I WILL use it for bullshit. I hate this movie, I hate this frittata, I hate the cold I have right now, that sort of thing. I have experienced what this man is talking about. I think most gamers, like myself, have. But I wasn’t MAD. I didn’t HATE looking for a game to delete. I just looked for what I wasn’t playing and deleted it, safe in the knowledge that my saves are stored on a cloud server and that I could download the game again if I want to fuck with it some more later. If I were to say that I HATED the experience of quietly and briefly organizing files on my computer, I would be able to say I hated anything I found even a little inconvenient, and I don’t. If you find yourself choked with bile while deleting Pac Man: Tournament Edition, you need to take a second and meditate on the value of patience. It will serve you well.
FOUR: (Critical) Do you relate to this? Does this vibe with you? This feeling I have, do you have it too? So much of the miasma on the internet is just people trying to screw down on one thing that someone else might be relatable. I hate, HATE doing file management. I am willing to bet someone else out there will see this and agree with me, then they will follow me on TikTok so they can see more posts where I post something they might relate to. There are thousands, millions of people doing this every day for tiny rewards. I probably do it too. What is the little vampiric part of our brains that drives us to relate to strangers on the smallest, stupidest possible terms?
FIVE: (Gaming related)
Top left corner.
This guy is still playin fuckin’ Cyberpunk?! Buddy that game is: 1. Fucking Huge 2. Widely disliked and 3. Has been out for A WHILE. If you really need space for whatever this Insurgency game is, why don't you just let go of the giant game that sucks. UPDATE: I just looked into this new game he’s so rocked up for. Apparently it’s a game where you play as either a NATO-aligned special force that is hunting “Insurgents,” or the Insurgents themselves. Really tasteful stuff. The game was going to have a single player campaign where you helped invade fake Iraq in 2003, but they didn’t finish solo campaigns so they took it out. I don’t know if you could have also played as a fake Baath soldier, sitting on the other side of the 21st Century’s biggest flagrant imperialist war crime. Probably for the best they didn’t manage to square the circle on that one.
SIX: (Pedantic) “The worst feeling EVER.” Okay look, I KNOW that we often use hyperbole to communicate feelings in language. I’m not dumb! I’m not being a guy who chides teenagers and tells them how to use “Literally.” But the content of this complaint is so small, so practically non existent, that-the form of exaggeration this guy utilizes just CRIES out for a Corbin Smith to kick his door down and yell “WORST FEELING EVER? WHAT ABOUT WHEN YOUR MOTHER DIES. OR WHEN YOU HAVE DIARRHEA. OR JUST NOW, WHEN I KICKED YOUR DOOR OFF ITS FUCKING HINGES WITH MY BIG, STRONG FOOT. WAS THE FEELING OF DELETING CYBERPUNK TO PLAY THIS UNNERVING IMPERIALISM GAME REALLY WORSE THAN ME KICKING YOUR DOOR OFF ITS HINGES? I’M NOT PAYING TO FIX IT, YOU CAN’T MAKE ME, NO JUDGE IN THE WORLD WOULD CONVICT. I’M THE HERO HERE BUDDY.”
SEVEN: (Speculative) Was there a time in like the 18th Century when rich guys who had tons of paintings would talk to other rich guys about how hard it was to take one painting off their walls to replace it with a new painting they got? If I were a servant boy at the time, watching their complaining and then being rapidly transported to the future and given full context for what this guy was saying, I would have sympathized more with my social betters who don’t pay me enough, considering: 1. It takes a relatively significant amount of time and (given, someone else’s) physical effort to move a painting. 2. Storing paintings is not a task that is automated by cloud storage: it requires basement space. Undeniable conclusion: this young man is whinier than an 18th Century Dandy Duke Boy.
EIGHT: (Unrelated) This morning, I watched the episode of TNG where Dr. Crusher accidentally engineers a retrovirus that deevolves everyone on the Enterprise. Picard and Data, away from the ship looking for a stray torpedo while this was happening, come back to see the whole place fucking WRECKED by Monster Worf Deanna (a fish lady now), Neanderthal Riker and Lt. Barclay, who turned into a fucking spider. Data figures out what is going on, tells Picard, then tells Picard that he is already devolving, and will soon turn into a Lemur Man. Picard says oh fuck, then they do a few more things to fix it. Picard never goes full Lemur-- Patrick Stewart doesn’t have time for that makeup bullshit-- but his brain does start to transgress into a Lemur like state, whereby he is consumed by an overwhelming sense of panic on account of his prey-like nature. Patrick Stewart manages to pull off a depiction of a Man possessed by the spirit of a Lemur with flying colors. What an actor, man. As they work on a cure, Prehistoric Klingon Monster Worf, who is roaming through the fucking halls and murking dudes, smells Deanna’s pheromones and starts trying to rip the door apart bare handed. Picard, half operating on his Starfleet Bravery, half consumed by his overwhelming Lemur Nature, lures Worf away from Data by spraying the pheromones from a little hyprospray bottle. It fucking rocks how outlandish it is, prestige tv simply will never play notes like this.
NINE: (Conclusion) I don’t understand anyone anymore. Why would you let anyone in on this pathology, this neurotic inability to just delete some fucking games off your hard drive? I would hide it from the world, keep a stoic face if anyone asked me about it in person. I would certainly never broadcast it to the whole dang internet.