Angst and children
You must listen to the song.
So let me try to summarize where this started. I was reading the boards for some game. Which game is not important. In any case, you could have a zombie in this game, and use its body to summon a more powerful pet temporarily. The more powerful pet was a spirit of some kind. Anyway the pet in question was essentially the zombie itself except mildly transparent, able to fly and scream. The resulting creature can last a short time, and you can't make another for a long while.
Is it a fully controllable pet, or a mindless pet by the way?
Fully controllable, hell it is even nameable.
Hey lets examine that idea for a moment. Here's a pet that you can control, name. Grow to love, develop a bond with, and yet it is ultimately transitory! How like life!
This is the most existentially complicated entity I've seen in popculture since cookie monster.
You see, cookie monster is a simple being, with only one real driving goal. He desires cookies. But he is ultimately a victim of his own existence, since his mouth is simply a black cloth. He craves the cookies, yes, but when he devours them, they simply break apart and fall out of his mouth, as ashes to an unyeilding earth.
Cookie monster teaches children about the cruelty of reality. That in order to *enjoy* a cookie, you must sacrifice. You must gain weight and suffer from the effects of excessive sugar. You cannot taste the cookie and be truly satisfied. It is a microcosm of your existence, you are a mindless hungering being in a life which drives you inexorably to debilitation, and you need, you desire all the way to your grave.
And here is something similarly allegorical for the afterlife. Yes, the miserable body you inhabit (in this case, the rotting shell of a mindless reanimate, in itself a kind of commentary on life's unthinking pursuit of continuance through reproduction) is a vessel that may one day rise again to be greater, but on that day, the flight, the aura of the divine, and a voice to sing are so many ragged scraps adorning the same miserable shell which tripped out of its mausoleum and into a nameless ditch. Your identity is only the fleeting arbitrary term for *any* creatures such as yourself; you all share a common mud-stained existence into a finite dream world, where, despite the almost fulfilling advent of divine apparel, you are still what you are, and no more, and even this dream cannot last, because in the end, the answers you sought were never yours to have. You are what you are and nothing more.
This, ladies and gentlemen is the very *crux* of a new movement in society.
I was in a Target, as luck would have it with some friends of mine the other day, and, looking at the toy isle, I was relieved. You see, I had had a great concern in the recent past that toys would be in a continued downward spiral until only the shoddiest lowest common denominator from some kind of transpacific hybrid society would be responsible for providing icons to our playtime. This is apparently not the case, thank god, looking at the toy aisle today, I see that toys I grew up loving are back, and better. Batman, and Teenage mutant ninja turtles, which were without context, until recently, are on the shelves. Star wars, obviously, had a second birth, but this time the toys benefited from the standard of articulation that japanese imports create.
Video games are on the shelves now too. Remember those shoddy ripoffs that they used to push on those of us who saw the early days of digital watches? Crap like the nintendo Game In Watch, and the various Tiger games which were nearly universally an embarrasement to the concept of an interactive game? Those aren't there anymore, and here lets break.
There is a continuing grognardian phenomenon in any given activity which transitions from the fringe to the mainstream, in which the primitive, experimental, awkward first steps that the unusual characters who founded the hobby experienced must be enshrined and passed on, because if they aren't, surely the will not *understand*. How can they be expected to appreciate, for example, the vehicle-combat of Battlefield 2 if they've never played the stilted Gunship, or the ground combat of Warcraft III if they never saw 'Combat'. How can they live and breath a modern mature platform game like the lego star wars game, or Spyro, or something, if they hadn't had their brains nearly destroyed by endless hours of space invaders or galaga? Surely without these experiences the dream will be lost!
Which is delightly silly.
I spit on this concept simply because *I* have never watched a Charlie Chaplin film from beginning to end. I've watched them partially in some cases. I find them intolerable. As a kid my dad had me get into the Three Stooges. They were delightful. Looking back on it, with *today's* available media, I doubt I'd bother. How can I make my kids watch daffy duck when Animaniacs kicks his ass? The Marx brothers are a kind of supernatural curse on humanity compared to the antics of Monty Python. Entertainment becomes more sophisticated as times progress. In ancient times there was no calculus or even algebra, yet now, the average high-school graduate has a casual aquaintance with one and proficiency with the other. You can argue back and forth on this issue, but the point is, provided the education is *there* children will rise to that level of sophistication and move forward from it. Children are the future. I say this begrudgingly, as I hate this kind of smug aphoristic bullshit.
So to resume, the video games on the shelves are small self-contained systems which have 4-10 games stored on them. It's usually in the shame of a controller or joystick, and comes with AV jacks. Plug it into the TV and simply play. This is wonderful, and the kind of thing we dreamed of as kids. The great thing is, the games on these things aren't the lame nintendo or atari games we grew up with. They take a principle like 'catch the fruit in the basket' and make it luke with a lightsaber deflecting laser blasts from an oncoming droid army. Space invaders or Gradius are now similarly starwars themed, or themed after batman and so forth. Kids get to experience these mindless games on an interesting format with art that is far more sophisticated. In short, what was a complete ripoff in *my* day is merely a scam for these kids. Of course parents won't get it until the old people die off. They're say ludicrous things like 'why do you want the latest game for Playstation 4, we just *got* you 10 games on your starwars toy...' and the kid will weep for a life spent under the yoke of the ignorant.
My advice? Stay poor until they're ready for college, that way witholding what they actually want will be a kind of character building take on reality.
Which is bringing us back to the original premise here. There are deeply philosophical icons at work in our pop culture, especially what's available to kids. Moving through to the girl aisles, we are of course assaulted by two things; Pink, and toys which are no fun whatsoever at all to anyone. There was a girl along to offer commentary. It's what you'd might expect. You are driven towards domesticity and habits like being a clothes horse. You're engaged in conditioning to accept impossible standards of beauty and still crave motherhood etc etc. Your male icons are sexless unromantic empty shells who accessorize the insane fashion zombie who represents you future. In an added twist of hilarity, a fake electric guitar with various pre-canned 'riff's on it was on a higher shelf. We pressed a few buttons and found that *any* combination of buttons produced hideous noise far removed from music. Thus the opportunity to nurture a hobby or non-domestic pursuit is doomed to failure. Keep in mind that it's not impossible to create a fake instrument that can make good noises. For instance, there are 4 cords in rock which, no matter the order or rhythym (to an extent) will never clash with each other, making someone playing with them feel talented (you may notice this delusion in many modern popular bands).
Turning a corner we see the new depth to which female toys have sunk. The 20-something whore with her own dream car and mindless sexless boyfriend have come and gone. The various terrifying effigies of human children with exorbitant hair-dos and dresses are also in our past. Strange intermediate naive visions of the immature struggling with misunderstood sexuality forced on them by a society seeking unexploited target audience for long walks on the beach and future dedication to consumerism are also no longer quite in vogue. In the typical 3rd step in psychotic disassociative disorders (which I'm making up for the purposes of this particular hyperbole), they've combined all 3 in dolls which are baby whores. As in dolls of babies, with diapers, and milk bottles on 12-year-old glam-rock silver bandoliers, Vegas prostitute quality makeup. These are 2 year old streetwalker icons.
I think the point here is that, boys, with a virile super-ego and id icons which they can use to exorcise their developmental demons, and a society predisposed to sit them in front of the learning machines that people call video games, are getting a pretty decent deal, so that when they see these icons designed to engage their minds with the concepts of deep angst which existence entails, they get a somewhat more even handed approach, whereas woman, to be simplistic, see a world demarcated by pink and the blackness of unrelenting oblivion.
Thank god women are more mentally resilient and social, or they'd all be retarded.
One has to wonder if it's not the perfect amount of adversity in which to train mature people.
no, nevermind, Barbie is still psychotic.
Plus, how unfair is it to be denied stuffed animals in favor of damned dolls?! Girls raised in this way particularly should become serial killers. The fact that they aren't caught merely heightens my paranoia.
etc etc.
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