you: stupid
yes, i am stupid but you is a stupid too so leave me alone
the dangerous type
the dangerous type inflating her kiddie pool for ducks: super cool
Father Son Reunion
It was October 2001, and a twelve-year-old boy, after incessant pestering, had just received the newest giant-robot game for the PlayStation 2 as an early Christmas gift from his mother. This annoyed The Boy’s father, who never saw eye-to-eye with his ex-wife and preferred his son to stay focused on the three S’s: school, sports, and socializing; so it follows that The Boy lived two lives, switching back and forth monthly between his mother and father’s house. It was always autumnal during these split-custody blues.
Nearly ten months prior, in December 2000, Bandai released its first game for the PlayStation 2, Mobile Suit Gundam: Journey to Jaburo. The game is largely a retelling of the first half of the classic 1979 anime Mobile Suit Gundam. It follows the crew of the White Base – a military vessel of the Earth Federation – in their nigh-hopeless battle against the Principality of Zeon, a nation of space-Nazis that will do anything to achieve their fascist goals, notably: dropping populated space colonies on Earth thereby killing millions. Bright Noa, captain of the White Base, chances upon a special boy named Amuro Ray, who happens to be a natural when it comes to piloting the Earth Federation’s new experimental giant robot: The Gundam. These events kick off Amuro’s coming-of-age story as he finds himself in a tough-love father-son relationship with Bright Noa and develops a sibling-like rivalry with a Zeon commander as equally talented as he is effortlessly cool and mysterious and handsome and blonde: Char Aznable.
Childhood is wanting to be Char; adulthood is wanting to be Char, also. Which brings us to The Boy; and, of course, The Boy in this story wanted to be Char, but he was more of an Amuro-type: geeky, angsty, obsessive. The Boy’s father was most certainly a Bright Noa-type, both in his disciplinary approach, which leaned heavily towards mild forms of corporal punishment, and in his no-nonsense haircut. And the father just purchased a new home, which he treated like his own White Base.
The new White Base was as tall as a Gundam made of bricks with four exact ninety-degree angles, wearing a pyramid like a paper hat with such perfect folds that it must have been crafted by an origami master who knew all the ancient tricks but lacked any creativity whatsoever. The front door was mathematically placed in the precise middle of the home and was surrounded by exactly nine windows; this made the house appear as some sort of eldritch wall-of-eyes and simply walking by the place evoked an intense feeling of being-watched. The house had a modest front yard dotted with thin maples and, during these autumnal months, the lack of chlorophyll caused the decaying leaves to float down from the hormonal trees and blanket the yard in death both fragrant and fugacious. When the breeze came, the naked trees appeared like skeletal fingers casting curses upon the very land they sprouted from. This eyeball-window-skeleton-hand-tree dynamic caused the local kids to describe the home as a haunted painting of some long-dead person whose eyes actually followed you instead of fake followed you; The Boy just described the home as prison.
For reference, the original Gundam stood eighteen meters tall or fifty-nine feet high or ten-people-standing-on-each-other’s-shoulders, and weighed sixty metric tons or one-hundred-twenty-thousand pounds or half of a blue whale, which aligned closely with a standard-three-story-middle-class home built in the eighties but renovated and sold in the turn of the new millennium; the same type of home The Boy found himself living in every-other month after both his mom and dad and the child therapist told him that it was not his fault and that mommy and daddy just don’t love each other anymore and that, on the bright side, he might have two Christmases from now on.
*eyeball-window-skeleton-hand-tree dynamic with The Boy and The Father and The Gundam
The Boy’s father saw the new home as his own White Base to lead his family into a better life, only with a four-thousand-dollar-a-month price tag; but to The Boy, the new home meant sitting on a hardwood chair with approximately zero lumbar support at the kitchen table all afternoon because he had to finish his homework before he could do anything else and he didn’t know how to do the assignments because he didn’t pay attention in class and he was too ashamed to ask for help so he would only sit there doodling pictures of giant robots in the margins of his worksheets between poking small holes in the fruit placed in the decorative bowl at the middle of the glass table at which he sat for hours. And this infuriated The Boy’s father, who made The Boy sit there until the work was done and then went behind The Boy to check his accuracy, and if it was not correct – which it rarely ever was – he would make The Boy do it all over again. It was tough love for the greater good of the White Base; some real Bright Noa Stuff was going on in that kitchen with the glass table and the uncomfortable chairs. The Father, like all fathers, wanted his son to have a better life than he did – he didn’t want his son stuck in a dead-end sales job at forty, like he was – and this meant perfect grades and sports three days a week and absolutely no distractions.
Directly below The Boy’s cramp-inducing chair, in the basement, was the PlayStation 2; it was hooked up to a television set about the size of a Jackson Pollock canvas, which painted pictures of giant robots upon The Boy’s adolescent brain. Mobile Suit Gundam: Journey to Jaburo was down there in the basement, snapped into the disc tray like the neurons that snapped robots into The Boy’s mind at all hours of the day. The Boy had Gundams on the brain while he was in the classroom staring at the circle that ticked time in slow motion; during every breezy autumn Sunday when raking leaves into piles that were then tossed into metal garbage cans to be burned days later; when he was in the field during recess just-kind-of-wandering-around-looking-at-stuff while the other kids played kickball; during the basketball practices when The Father would desperately encourage him to put-in-even-the-smallest-amount-of-effort; and definitely during that time he was in the outfield when the pop fly crashed into his head like a small meteorite rendering him unconscious for several minutes; and especially while he was wide-eyed in bed, staring into darkness because the child-therapist-prescribed ADHD medication gave him robot-inspired bouts of insomnia.
Every night during these split-custody blues, The Boy would slink out of his bedroom, tiptoe down two flights of stairs, and plop himself on the couch in the basement, where he covered himself in the glow of Mobile Suit Gundam: Journey to Jaburo. There, The Boy would control The Gundam: a glistening white 18-meter-tall Minovsky-Ultracompact Fusion Reactor-powered robot with a state-of-the-art rocket-thruster backpack module that provided a maximum speed of 165 km/h, sporting an incredible 5700 meter sensor range, and boasting a swift 180-degree turning time of 1.1 seconds. It was armed with two gatling guns mounted in its kabuto-shaped head, alongside handheld armaments including a beam rifle, a 380mm hyper bazooka, something resembling a riot shield, and two beam sabers.
The Boy’s wishes were only one pink flash of a beam saber away from being fulfilled. He felt powerful, clever, needed, and completely understood when he climbed into the cockpit of that virtual Gundam. His real father didn’t get it, but Bright Noa did. Bright Noa pushed The Boy to be the best damn Gundam pilot there ever was, while his real father only pushed him to be a healthy, productive member of society – something as far from the mind of a twelve-year-old boy as Mercury is from Mars.
The Gundam, with its shogun-like presence, demanded respect, much like the controls of the game, which – being Bandai’s first game for the PlayStation 2 and their first three-dimensional game ever – were clunky, archaic, obtuse, and reminiscent of an airplane cockpit with lots of unlabeled buttons and switches. Considering the PlayStation 2 DualShock controller with its two analog sticks, d-pad, four face buttons – ECKS, OH, TRIANGLE, SQUARE – two right triggers, two left triggers, start and select, and two secret buttons in the clicking-in of either analog stick, one would assume that The Gundam is moved with the left analog stick while the right analog stick controls the camera, but this is not the case; instead, up and down on the d-pad move The Gundam forward and backward while left and right turn The Gundam left and right; the word “turn” is important here; note that the word is not “move” or “strafe,” because the left and right triggers strafe The Gundam left and right instead. As such, if one wanted to move The Gundam in a diagonal direction, they would need to hold both up on the d-pad and either the left or the right trigger. If one wanted to turn The Gundam 360 degrees, they would need to hold left or right on the d-pad for ten whole seconds while the robot awkwardly stomped around in a circle, which left the clumsy metal giant wide open to enemy attack. This resulted in something akin to piloting a bipedal tank with a Tonka-truck controller.
In Bandai’s three-dimensional naivety, they had accidentally created a control scheme that mirrored what it may actually feel like to control The Gundam: clunky, archaic, obtuse; as if the PlayStation 2 controller was an actual Gundam cockpit. Every button on the DualShock was utilized in some way. The difficulty of the controls made pulling off even basic feats feel like mastering advanced Taekwondo techniques.
Amuro may have read the manual before jumping into the cockpit of The Gundam, but The Boy did not. At first, The Boy was hopelessly wrecked by Zeon mobile suits, but as the nights passed and the homework piled up, he became more dexterous and more dangerous, and soon he was controlling The Gundam like a seasoned veteran. The Gundam became an extension of The Boy, and whenever The Boy successfully slashed through an enemy robot with a well-timed dash attack or boosted out of the way of oncoming bazooka fire, he felt immensely satisfied in a way that The Father’s three S’s could never provide.
*the cockpit of The Gundam
On the seventh night of basement slinking, The Boy had reached the last story-mode mission. The story mode included a meager nine missions, covering the first twenty-nine episodes of the anime, and culminated in a final showdown with Char Aznable at the Earth Federation military base of Jaburo. The final mission consisted of a sortie with several mobile suits before Char entered the fray; and as the game lacked ways to repair The Gundam mid-sortie, The Boy had to carefully eliminate each mobile suit without taking damage. Otherwise, he would have no health left for the showdown with Char, who piloted a deadly amphibious mobile suit painted red – the Z’Gok Commander Type – equipped with sharp claws that could be pointed into metal-piercing spikes or splayed like a starfish to reveal devastating laser cannons. Throughout the first half of the mission, the regiment of Zeon mobile suits – mostly Zakus of green coloring and shoulder pads that looked like something a post-apocalyptic biker gang would require their members to wear (spikes and all) – would extract a great toll on The Gundam’s armor. When Char appeared, The Boy would be easily defeated. It didn’t help that the stagger animation of The Gundam was such that it was far too easy to get caught in an endless loop of laser-beam stagger locks; this stun-lock effect drove The Boy to the edge of madness.
After multiple failed attempts at defeating Char, The Boy lost all pretense of being twelve-years-old and needing-to-be-quiet: he howled as if he was the one getting hurt instead of the facsimilized samurai robot behind the phosphor. Each time The Boy failed the mission, he had to start over from the beginning; this improved his ability to complete the first-half of the sortie – battling over ten Zakus while not getting hit a single time – but ultimately resulted in CONTINUE? when Char locked The Boy in another laser-loop lock of death.
The Boy’s howling traveled through the home’s ductwork and echoed out of the ventilation shafts, alerting The Father, who was reading a Civil War novel in the spare bedroom, as he was prone to do every night. The Father promptly got out of bed, discovered The Boy’s empty room, and made his way down the many flights of stairs into the basement. His fists clenched in paternal frustration as he considered all the ways he would discipline his son. Bright Noa would often slap Amuro right on the face, but The Father preferred the buttocks as it was more socially acceptable. He mentally prepared himself to deliver this proper spanking, preemptively erecting mental bulwarks to deal with The Boy’s inevitable tears.
It was at this time that The Boy really wanted to be Char Aznable. He placed the DualShock on the coffee table in front of him, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath; he imagined that the air he was inhaling was actually the comet trail left by the Red Comet himself. Now serene – and very stubborn – The Boy picked up the controller and became one with The Gundam; he precisely maneuvered his way through the military base of Jaburo, slicing through Zakus as if he were practicing iaijutsu in a bamboo forest. The Boy had mastered the first half of the mission, but it was still not enough. When Char showed up in his crimson robot, The Boy was abruptly snapped back to reality with another CONTINUE? But The Boy was nonplussed. In his channeling of fictitious masked anti-heroes, he had become zen with calm determination, and it showed on his smiling face, all aglow with Mobile Suit Gundam: Journey to Jaburo.
*Char and his crimson Z’gok
The Father silently stood behind the basement couch for minutes, watching his son. At first, The Father was angry; after all, The Boy was sneaking downstairs, breaking the household rules, and it was clear that he had been doing this for a while, as he lacked the nervousness typically associated with burgeoning troublemakers. The Father had tried his damnedest to make The Boy a better version of himself; he had visions of his son becoming a star athlete: tennis and basketball and football and baseball. He even coached The Boy’s sports teams himself. But The Boy was clumsy, uninterested, and unhappy with everything that was thrust upon him. The Father had forgotten what The Boy’s smile looked like during these split-custody blues.
The Boy, now beaming with a huge smile on his face as he edged closer to victory, reloaded the mission once more full of confidence and verve. The screen went black for several seconds while the PlayStation 2 whirred and read the disc; and just as the screen went black, The Boy caught a glimpse of a shadowy figure in the reflection of the television’s leaded glass. The Boy’s stomach dropped and an audible gulp could be heard as he turned to face his father.
But The Father lacked his typical scowl; instead, there was a single hot tear rolling down his cheek. In the reflection of the television screen, The Father had seen his son’s smile for the first time since the divorce, and suddenly, everything made sense. He wiped the tear from his face and sat on the couch next to The Boy.
The Boy trembled in fear. He thought he was surely going to be punished for this transgression and had already started formulating some sort of lie in his head about how this was the first time he had ever come down here and how he might have sleepwalked or how he heard something weird and had to investigate; but The Father, as if reading The Boy’s mind, let out a light chuckle before placing his large hand on his son’s shoulder.
“What are you playing, son?”
The Boy, amidst a sea of stuttering, uttered something that sounded like the word Gundam being fired from a machine gun.
“Mind if I try?”
The Boy responded by staring at his father through dilated pupils swirling with confusion and faint computer-game photons. Then, suddenly, something clicked. The Boy’s lips curved like a rainbow turning upside as he relinquished control of the DualShock controller. The Father eyed the boomerang-like device in his hands, twisted and turned it, and then pressed all the wrong buttons, causing the television screen to go wild with menus and laser beams. This only caused The Boy’s smile to widen – and this smile was like a golden contagion, as The Father could not help but smile himself.
The Boy laughed a cherub’s laugh, placed his hand on his father’s, and spoke without a single stutter,
“No, Dad, not that way. Here, let me show you.”
(Originally published on 7/7/2024)
#ComputerGames #MobileSuitGundamJourneyToJaburo #Autobiographical
grandma's pills
grandma's many pills as a child, it was so strange now i take them too
envy of the sea
deep as a puddle i'm so jealous of the sea yet it envies me
boy; table
boy: rowdy and rough quit climbing on the table i have had enough
i am the raccoon
nighttime dalliance appropriate your refuse i am the raccoon
I Wanna Destroy You
I. The Dark Genie Cometh
I want to destroy you. Yes, you – the reader. You’re judgmental, self-righteous, and vain. You style your hair and groom your face like anyone gives a shit. You do nasty stuff when no one is looking, and you know what I’m talking about; just reading this brought to mind that nasty thing you will neverever confess to because you care a whole hell of a lot about what people think of you. You lie outright and through omission. You will pretend to read this article then comment something like “this really made me think” or “very well written” when you only skimmed the first two paragraphs and thought the writing was pretentious. You’re corrupt, ugly, and no fun to be around. You fake-nice to climb the social ladder while your mind is full of dark clouds and envy. You secretly hate it when your friends become successful. You trash-talk and gossip to suck people into your vortex of misery because you can’t stand to bathe alone in the acid bath that you drew yourself. You disown anyone who questions your motivations. You smirk when someone drinks your venom. You fear that people can see through your facade, so you double down on the pretenses, becoming a grotesque caricature of what you think a decent human being should be. You have the smile of Ned Flanders but the mind of Mr. Burns. You’re a know-it-all. Whenever someone shares one of their interests with you, you subtly interject with obscure trivia about that same interest to demonstrate your superior knowledge; you then suggest twelve similar things, not as a genuine suggestion, but as further showcase of your superior knowledge. You’re shallow. You believe that extensive knowledge of television series, computer games, and music makes you interesting when it only goes to show how little you go outside. Your personality doesn’t extend beyond what you’re wearing and what media you’re consuming at the moment. You have curated a sycophantic following of weak-willed people who are too meek to challenge you and these people lubricate your fragile ego like white lithium grease. You’re transparent. You say you don’t care when a person criticizes you but you never speak to that person again so you obviously care a whole hell of a lot. All your favors come with invisible strings attached, and if those strings aren’t pulled you become very upset, but you will never vocalize why you’re upset because this would be an admission of your duplicitous nature; and you can’t have that, because you’re perfect and nothing is ever your fault. You deflect blame like bulletproof glass. You brand yourself with every trendy subcultural label because there’s nothing else going on up there. You self-diagnose mental illness like a fashion statement and wear complicated-psychological-diagnoses like a badge of honor, all the while delegitimizing those illnesses and harming those who actually suffer from them. You’re starving for validation and this oozes from every atom of your being. You splurge on the newest things – phones, computers, clothes, cars – even when you don’t need them. You unwittingly keep up with the Kardashians. You’re a full-blown consumerist yet claim to hate consumerism. You advocate theft then wonder why all the stores are closing down around you. You haven’t a clue but pretend that you do. You’re a faker. I can’t stand you. I want to destroy you. And when I have destroyed you, I will pick at your bones until you don’t have an atom left to call your own.#1
You make me physically ill.
*moments before I completely destroy you
I want to destroy you. Yes, you – the lobotomite. You fester in your little echo chambers after ostracizing everyone around you with your dogmatism, and you pretend that you’re just-asking-questions whenever someone challenges your bullshit. Your intolerance reverberates so loudly that it vibrates into the ears of everyone around you like a vitriolic dog whistle, and those who resist are otherized and pushed into their own extremist echo chambers. It’s not turtles all the way down – it’s echo chambers all the way down. You perpetuate cycles of extremism. You’re scared of people who are different from you. You think skin color dictates behavior and that sex organs decide what I’m allowed to wear and who I’m allowed to have sex with. You assign labels like you’re still in high school, both to yourself and to others, so that you can easily identify who to hate and who to tolerate. You believe in a firm right and wrong with no room for debate and you talk down to anyone who believes otherwise, and then you wonder why people can’t stand to be around you. You say you love your fellow countrymen yet vote for politicians who disembowel those same countrymen and then make them pay extra for the stitches, and you’re OK with this because you think healthcare is not a human right until the day comes when you’re the one coughing up blood on a hospital bill for sixty-thousand dollars that you don’t have. You think that small redistributions of wealth are true communism and that social safety nets are spider webs spun by the most potent of black widows. You have no principles. You hated electric cars because “battery manufacturing is even worse for the climate than gasoline-powered cars” until your favorite political-talking-head endorsed electric cars and now you have two electric cars parked in your driveway, and when your family asks about it you say something like, “I’ve always liked electric cars!” You then complain about having to drive your new electric car to your grandma’s house three-hundred-miles away without realizing that the creation of the car led to the creation of the highways which led to the mass dispersion of families which led to grandma living three-hundred-miles away to begin with. You perpetuate systems that tear us apart. You question the water’s surface without peering underneath. You believe the only thing wrong with your country is the people coming over the border. You believe the mainstream media is corrupt from capital influences yet parrot alternative-media networks which are subject to the very same capital influences. You see the mass instead of the molecule. You make excuses for bombing children and then beheading their parents in land disputes that amount to arbitrary lines on a map whilst not even pretending to offer a peaceful solution; and you vote for more of this every four years. You think madmen and nuclear codes are a good mix. You claim to support freedom but continuously vote authoritative-populist-goons into public office. You really mean it when you say, “we should glass the entire Middle East,” while you and your idiot friends have a good laugh. You advocate killing each other over petty differences and then advocate killing each other for killing each other, thus perpetuating endless cycles of killing each other. And you don’t care.
I have come to undo you. I am the big bad final boss of the universe, released from my sealed urn to wipe the slate clean. I am destruction itself. I snort the ashes of ruin and savor the bittersweet nasal drip of death.
The Dark Genie cometh.
II. Wait, I Thought This Was About Dark Cloud?
Dear Reader,
You’re right – I went off the deep end there. I apologize. Let’s move onward to computer games.
Dark Cloud, released by Sony on December 14, 2000, in Japan and developed by the now-famed Japanese developer Level-5, is an action-adventure hack-and-slash mystery-dungeon city-builder role-playing game with light simulation elements. And while that arbitrary jumble of genre labels makes Dark Cloud sound like one of the most convoluted computer games ever created, it happens to be fairly straightforward and one of the most addictively-fun games on the PlayStation 2, with an idiosyncratic gameplay loop that has yet to be replicated by any computer game since.
Dark Cloud’s central themes are destruction and creation. You assume the role of a silent protagonist: a boy named Toan. His world – or at least most of it – has been destroyed by the Dark Genie. Toan, chosen by the Fairy King, is tasked with rebuilding the world; and to do this, he explores dungeons that change their shape, destroys hordes of monsters through basic button-mashing and the occasional quick-time event, drinks enough water to avoid succumbing to dehydration, upgrades his weapons to become stronger, and recruits new friends that help him overcome increasingly weird obstacles, all while collecting little balls that contain fragments of the destroyed world. These little balls, called Atla, are used to rebuild the world, starting with Toan’s own hometown of Norune Village.
Dark Cloud is like the Biblical flood myth, but instead of collecting animals, it’s collecting little balls of people and their homes and then arranging them in such a way that everything fits just perfectly. And, yes – in this analogy, the Dark Genie is Yahweh, Toan is Noah, and Toan’s large pockets are the Ark. In his rebuilding efforts, Toan spins the verdant plains like a diorama as he plops homes, rivers, shops, trees, huts, and roads down on the land beneath him. He even repopulates the towns with the appropriate villagers; some of these villagers have special requests, like “I don’t want to live near those misogynistic muscle builders who always hit on me” or “I hate everyone and want to live as isolated as possible,” and fulfilling these requests helps bring peace to the world and increases Toan’s rewards.
*collecting little balls of people and their homes
Amongst Toan’s laundry list of tasks, the most important is defeating the Dark Genie, and to do this he must travel the ruined world searching for tools to aid in his quest. The gameplay loop thus follows: come across a ruined town that holds a key to defeating the Dark Genie, there is a local dungeon nearby full of town balls, explore this dungeon, collect the town balls, return to the town and start rebuilding with the collected balls, repeat until the town is fully rebuilt, then move on to the next ruined town and start all over again. This gameplay loop is easy to slide into and even easier to get lost in, in the best way possible; this is partially driven by the down-tempo soundtrack that accompanies every zone; towns are chiming with soft guitars accompanied by melodic flutes and strings, while dungeons are trance-like in their psychedelic sitar melodies and groovy basslines. The soothing soundtrack, combined with the low-poly, earth-toned graphics, creates an experience that can only be described as Computer Game Zen; this, combined with the inclusion of a villager-request system, fishing, a day-and-night system, and randomly generated dungeons, makes Dark Cloud something akin to Mystery Dungeon: Animal Crossing Edition.
Dark Cloud is not without aspects that I want to destroy, however. Dark Cloud utilizes weapon upgrading in lieu of a traditional leveling system. Weapons can be upgraded from meager rapiers to Excalibur-Caladbolg-Lion-Heart-Ultima-Weapon swords, but they can also be broken if you’re not careful; this is fine in theory but becomes problematic when you accidentally break your weapon because you drank one too many glasses of wine and weren’t paying attention. The stomach drop upon watching a weapon you painstakingly crafted shatter into little pieces is whale-weight in its profundity and something only Dark Cloud can deliver. And it’s easy to accidentally break a weapon, as a weapon’s durability decreases at a random increment with each attack, requiring you to pay close attention. On the one hand, this makes weapons seem more valuable, forcing you to cherish your weapon like the only gift your dad ever gave you – that one pocket knife upon his return from his Aspen skiing trip, for example – but on the other hand, it’s infuriating and only goes to promote, at best, abusing save-games when you accidentally break a weapon; and, at worst, artificially increasing the game’s playtime by forcing you to rebuild broken weapons from scratch. The moral is, Dark Cloud is not the type of game you want to play after three glasses of cheap Cabernet – unless you like broken weapons, screaming at television sets, and the feeling of existential dread that comes with the realization that you continue to waste your life playing computer games.
Dark Cloud hammers in the concept of destruction and creation through both its narrative and its gameplay mechanics: the destruction of Toan’s world, the destruction of Toan’s weapons; the rebuilding of that world, the rebuilding of those weapons. And while Dark Cloud is a joy to play and one of the most unique computer games on the PlayStation 2, when your weapons break, you will feel it coming on again – that feeling of wanting to destroy something.
III. I Wanna Destroy You Redux
The greatest positive change has been brought about by violence, and each violent event has been a response to another act of violence. It’s fire vs. fire – spy vs. spy – within the soul of humanity. The American Civil War, in which an estimated six hundred thousand people died, brought about the end of slavery in the United States; slavery itself being a form of existential violence. The French Revolution, in which an estimated two million people died, led to the death throes of feudalism’s hold on the peasantry in France; feudalism being a form of violent class-based oppression. The Haitian Revolution, in which an estimated three hundred thousand people perished, led to the first-ever country abolishing slavery and the establishment of the first black republic. Even events such as the American Revolution or the Mexican War of Independence brought about positive change, both leading to the establishment of new independent nations and increased rights for the citizens within those nations. Revolution and violence overlap, and in some cases become synonymous.
Historically, the truly oppressed have never liberated themselves with picket signs adorned with clever slogans. Imagine, in 1791, instead of Haitian slaves violently revolting against their French oppressors, they held signs reading, “Freedom is the New Black!” and marched outside their oppressors’ plantations; those signs would have been caked with blood in minutes. The reality was that the majority of slaves could not read or write, as their masters purposely refused to teach them so that even small forms of protest would be impossible. The slaves’ oppressors had taken the very tools needed to peacefully fight back; at that point, what tool is left other than violence? And while there have been forms of nonviolent protest that have led to change, such as the Women’s Suffrage Movement and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, these examples only succeeded because there was a serious threat of violence bubbling underneath the surface.
What this means is: to change you – I have to destroy you.
I want to destroy you, and once I have destroyed you, I will rebuild you into an even better version of yourself: stronger, happier, healthier, wiser, all the best -ers. And once I have rebuilt you, I will release you back into the world; then, I will be able to tolerate you. However, the time will come when you revert. You will become corrupt, ugly, self-righteous, vain – again. And when that happens, I will return to destroy you once more.
But do I have the right?
*a better world is just a few hundred-thousand deaths away
Throughout history, every leader has believed that they were correct in their philosophy; they fought for their Greater Good. Alexander the Great spread his kingdom from Greece to India atop the corpses of hundreds of thousands of people. Genghis Khan spread his shamanistic beliefs through all of Asia and Eastern Europe, killing an estimated forty million people along the way. Adolf Hitler’s vision for the world was that of a racially pure society of “Aryan” people, and that this would elevate humanity to enlightenment; he saw Jews – and many others – as less-than-people who stood in the way of his Greater Good, which led to the systematic murder of over six million people. Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union Communist Party for over twenty years, believed that Soviet communism was the greatest socioeconomic system, which resulted in the deaths of over seven million people due to famine. Each of these leaders believed in their Greater Good – but history has recorded them as villains, and rightly so, for their efforts brought nothing but ruin.
But what if these leaders were successful in implementing their Greater Good? Suppose, for a moment, that Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union was successful, that communism spread throughout the world and that we are now living in a golden age; even if a few million people died along the way – would the history books see Stalin as a hero? European settlers slaughtered over fifty million indigenous people before the founding of the United States of America, and while this is sometimes criticized, it’s often overlooked due to the success of America after the fact. We even celebrate Thanksgiving yearly as if the violence never happened. The only difference between Joseph Stalin and the colonization of the Americas was that Stalin failed and the colonizers succeeded.
The truth is that we cannot know the future. And, most importantly, we cannot know at the moment if we are truly right or wrong in our beliefs; we especially cannot be so certain of our beliefs that we should then impose these shaky beliefs on everyone else. As such, we find ourselves in a conundrum. We know that violence can bring about positive long-term change, but we also know that violence can bring about terrible suffering and ruin. How do we know when to use violence and when to abstain? Fighting against slavery seems like a no-brainer; we can see the immediate harms of slavery on an individual level. But what about fighting against capitalism? Or fighting against a presidential candidate who might establish themself as a dictator? At what point do we flip the picket sign and plunge the stake into the heart of our oppressors? Must we wait for our oppressors to start mass murdering us before we can respond with violence? And who are our oppressors to begin with? In the case of our mindless consumerists and lobotomites in the first chapter, are those people at fault for their behavior – or are the media and politicians at fault for polluting their minds? Should we then stake the hearts of the owners of the media outlets – kill the politicians? And if we do, are we certain that our goals are any better than their goals and, most importantly, that our goals are actually achievable?
The Dark Genie lives inside me. He sits on my shoulder and tells me that I am correct in my beliefs. He tells me that the world is corrupt and that it should be destroyed. He says I can rebuild the world even better than it once was. But if this Dark Genie exists inside me, then surely I am corrupt, ugly, self-righteous, and vain too. If people like me continue to exist, the world will only return to its corrupted state. To destroy the world and rebuild it better than before, I would have to destroy the very notion of destruction. I would have to destroy myself. And knowing this, is someone with the notion to destroy fit to be the one to rebuild the world to begin with?
In the case of Dark Cloud, Toan is a bystander tasked by an outside force to rebuild the world. Toan is not the destroyer himself. He does not take it upon himself to rebuild the world; he is thrust into the rebuilding effort due to the actions of the Dark Genie. Compare this to our world: people take up the mantle of both the Dark Genie and Toan, but one cannot be both things. The Dark Genie is a destroyer. The destroyer does not create anything – he does not have the capacity to do so. The very urge to destroy is antithetical to creation. Even if the Dark Genie could create something, that thing would eventually need to be destroyed again because it was created by the same force that begets destruction.
It’s true; I want to destroy you. Yes, you – the reader. You’re judgmental, self-righteous, vain, corrupt, ugly, and no fun to be around. But I’m guilty of these things as well. I see the worst in you because I am the worst in you, too. And while I do want to destroy you – I don’t have the right. None of us have the right; and once we realize this, we won’t have to destroy anything – there would be no need.
Footnotes:
#1. This is an exact lyric from the song “I Wanna Destroy You” by The Soft Boys, which coincidentally has the same title as this article; it’s almost as if this article was inspired by the song. The song can be found here.
(Originally published on 7/14/2024)
The Great Pizza Wars
Behold: a tubby nine-year-old boy obsessed with computer games and cheese pizza; absentminded, shy, and prone to angry outbursts; selfish, hyperactive, and if he didn’t find immediate joy in a task – he didn’t do that task. He would skip homework because “my dog ate it!” and couldn’t be bothered to come up with a more original excuse because The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Transformers cartoons lived eternal in his mind. These antisocial proclivities landed The Boy in “special education” classes, but the more The Boy was treated as “special,” the worse his behavior became, and he retreated ever deeper into computer games.
The Boy’s Mom didn’t know what to do with him. She noticed The Boy’s digital obsessions and that they were violent; after all, Zelda featured a young boy that slayed monsters with swords. The Mom thought that if she replaced the violence with educational games that this would not only improve The Boy’s behavior – turning him boastworthy for soccer-mom-watercooler-confab – but also show that she cared about his interests, because above all else: she truly loved her son.
The Mom took The Boy to the local electronics store and told him to pick two computer games from the educational section. It was the year 2000 and stores were packed with computer games containing the prefix “Sim’” and the suffix “Tycoon”; these morphemical games were baby’s-first-capitalism; business simulators wrapped in graphical-interfaces targeted toward children. The Boy immediately gravitated to the vibrant theme park packaging of RollerCoaster Tycoon. He quickly dismissed the dated graphics of DinoPark Tycoon. SimCity 3000 was also considered but it intimidated The Boy with its technicalities. And just when The Boy was about to call-it-quits, he noticed a glimmering jewel calling out to him from the discount pile. The jewel was an Italian caricature sporting a floppy chef’s hat and a white apron stained with what was hopefully pizza sauce; he sported a mustache even more extravagant than Freddie Mercury’s during the recording of Queen’s 1980 album “The Game” and was grinning into the camera while holding a pizza-with-the-works as if breaking the fourth wall to summon The Boy into a universe of freshly cooked pizza pies forever. Not only was pizza The Boy’s favorite food, but Queen was also his favorite band – and by this logic: Fast Food Tycoon was bound to be his favorite game.
After The Boy came home and ate a few slices of pizza for dinner, he slid the pizza-shaped disc into the tray of the Windows 98 computer in Dad’s office and clicked through the many prompts of the installer. Upon boot, the words “Fast Food Tycoon, Eat Here” flashed in cold cathode above a seedy street corner that was positioned between a club and a pizza joint; the club was red carpet, and the pizza joint was a money-laundering scheme; both owned by the same organization. The Boy was about to learn many important life lessons.
Fast Food Tycoon – or Pizza Syndicate, as it’s known in Europe – is a business simulator centered around managing your own pizza franchise, created by the German developer Software 2000 and published by Activision in North America in November 2000. When the game starts, you are given the option to make your own pizza person, choosing their picture from a premade selection of Italian caricatures, selecting their name, and adjusting their starting stats from a long list that rivals the most complicated of role-playing computer games. Once your character is created, you are thrown into the sleazy world of pizza and quickly realize that you are smack-dab in the middle of an all-out pizza war between ancient crime families. And there’s no hope of survival unless you sell your soul to the mafia for better ingredients, better pizza, and guaranteed protection from getting whacked by Papa John. Once you become a made man in the dark underworld of pizza, you crawl your way up the pizza chain from Chuck E. Cheese Capo to Don of Domino’s and, if you’re lucky, to The Godfather of Pizza.
*The Boss evaluates your Pizza Performance; he is not impressed.
Fast Food Tycoon is as much about making the tastiest pizza as it is about sending armed goombahs to rival pizza joints; bursting with such depth as “goths like meat on their pizza” to “should I poison the food at Mario’s Pizza Palace or should I just plant a bomb instead?” to “which style of music should I play to attract the correct demographic?” to “should I bribe the mayor or just save the money for more machine guns?” All the while fudging numbers and trying to make the perfect pizza pies only to perpetuate The Great Pizza Wars – an endless cycle of pizza-funded violence.
Fast Food Tycoon teaches children many valuable lessons about the stygian horrors of not only pizza but also business and humanity as a whole. It teaches children that bribing the mayor has massive perks in the form of blind-eyes and tax-exemptions. It teaches that if you plant rats in a restaurant, the Department of Public Health will shut down that restaurant. It teaches that pizza joints are a surprisingly efficient way to launder stolen bank money. It teaches that fear is one of our most powerful motivators. And above all else, it teaches that pizza is very serious business.
Of course, The Mom had no clue that Fast Food Tycoon bestowed these valuable life lessons upon The Boy. To her, Fast Food Tycoon was just another educational business game for her son to level up his business acumen and help on his path to becoming a fitter, happier, and more productive human being. When she watched The Boy play, he was simply managing ledgers and decorating restaurants and there was nothing to be concerned about. The Mom was so impressed by Fast Food Tycoon’s ability to engage The Boy that she recommended her neighbors buy the game for their children, and thus, the ancient cycle of pizza violence continues to this day – The Great Pizza Wars rage on.
When The Boy looked back, he realized that Fast Food Tycoon was not prescriptive; instead, it was a warning – a commentary on the dangers of unregulated capitalism, the prominence of quid pro quo in the private and public sectors, and that, while fear and violence may rule humanity, the golden rule always kicks in and you will eventually reap what you sow; be that in the form of delicious pizza pies or a bag over your head in Papa John’s basement.
(Originally published on 4/8/2024)
Artificial Sweeteners, Sarcasm, and Cynicism
As I write this piece on The Powerpuff Girls: Bad Mojo Jojo for the Game Boy Color, I am completely shitfaced and drunk and stoned and very deep into adulthood; at this moment, I am the exact opposite demographic from the one that the developers at Sennari Interactive intended for this game; that demographic being: kids who begged their parents to take them to Toys “R” Us after school to buy some Crazy Bones and happened to wander into the computer games aisle only to find their favorite Cartoon Network cartoon wrapped in Game Boy Color packaging with a $50 price tag stamped on it – in 2000.
Yes, Game Boy Color games cost $50, even in the year 2000. I remember. I was there. I was that kid.
The bottom line is this: if Cartoon Network executives knew that a drunk man in his thirties would be writing a piece containing the words “shitfaced,” “drunk,” or “stoned” for their beloved The Powerpuff Girls: Bad Mojo Jojo and releasing that piece in a highly esteemed computer games magazine, those executives would be sending their goon squad to that man’s office to cut off his fingers, thereby ensuring that he neverever puts digital pen to paper again. And I imagine that goon squad would look very much like villains from The Powerpuff Girls.
The Rowdyruff Boys could be descending upon my location at this very moment.
It’s well known that the 2000s Cartoon Network-branded Game Boy Color games are merely palette swaps with different intellectual property names slapped-on, but The Powerpuff Girls: Bad Mojo Jojo has a unique twist: it’s the first in the mythical The Powerpuff Girls Game Boy Color Trilogy; the other two games being: The Powerpuff Girls: Paint the Townsville Green and The Powerpuff Girls: Battle HIM. Each game allows you to play as one of three prepubescent Chemical-Xers: Blossom, Buttercup, or Bubbles; and has you fighting a different group of villains in each title.
Cartoon Network executives clearly wanted to capitalize on mom’s hard-earned-waitressing-money by coming up with diabolical ways to get children to buy the same game three times. When we were children, being unknowingly taken advantage of by corporate goons was fun; as adults, it’s just another boring day in Townsville. I guess we can blame Pokémon for the Mephistophelian trend of let’s-release-the-same-game-with-minor-differences-as-an-entirely-separate-game-at-full-price-and-incentivize-children-to-buy-them-through-playground-shame-and-ridicule.
The Powerpuff Girls was created by cartoonist Craig Douglas McCracken in 1998; he also helped direct Dexter’s Laboratory, which released around the same time and had a strikingly similar artistic style, albeit Dexter’s Laboratory was created by the legendary Genndy Tartakovsky, known for creating the truly mythical Samurai Jack and Star Wars: Clone Wars cartoons. Don’t get these cartoonists confused; one created the greatest thing in the Star Wars extended universe, and another created a cartoon featuring a very irresponsible father who uses his three genetically engineered children for casual vigilantism.
That’s not a crack on Craig – I am getting wasted and writing about someone else’s creations for a zero-reader computer games blog while he’s had more success doing what he loves than I could ever dream of.
While The Powerpuff Girls was never one of my favorite cartoons as a kid, the significance of one of the villains spitting blood whilst being kicked in the mouth by Buttercup during the opening was not lost on me; being one of the few times blood was shown in a children’s show – and that’s special because this violence inspired me to become that 2000s Toys “R” Us kid who begged his grandma to buy the The Powerpuff Girls: Bad Mojo Jojo during one fateful 2000s summer. My friend also had the game and I wanted to battle him because we both knew all three games had link-cable-functionality but we soon found out that the link-cable-functionality was only for trading collectibles found in the game’s levels and the collectibles were nothing more than blurry pixel art and we were sorely disappointed but we played and beat our respective versions regardless because back then you got a new game once in a blue moon and you savored every moment with those blue-moon games because they were all you had until the next cerulean satellite.
*something resembling an oval with pink eyes rams a man wearing a prison jumper
I asked that same friend if he remembered playing The Powerpuff Girls on Game Boy Color with me during that warm 2000s Charleston summer and he stared at me with a dumbfounded look on his face, indicating that this stuff is far more important to me than it is to him. And that’s probably a bad thing for me; a sign that I shouldn’t be waxing nostalgic on childhood frivolities so often; perhaps my brain power could be put to better use than writing over 1000 words on games that no one has thought about in over two decades and that are clearly targeted toward children?
No – it is he who is wrong, not I.
But I have been waxing far too long; you’re here for the riveting gameplay review, of course – so it’s time to start waning.
The Powerpuff Girls: Bad Mojo Jojo and its two sisters are side-scrolling beat-em-ups with controls as slippery as four glasses of wine at a dive bar after getting into a big fight with your girlfriend; all you can do is punch, kick, and fire some special-liquid-attack provided you have enough Chemical X in your bloodstream. There is no jump button, but holding up on the directional pad makes your character fly for a brief period, which never feels quite right. The levels range from The Professor’s Laboratory to Townsville Rooftops to Pokey Oaks School Playground to The Mouth of a Volcano and they all contain a non-zero-number of barely-hidden collectibles meant to be traded with friends using the link-cable-functionality. The enemies are mostly big dudes in prison jumpers with large muscles and guns; attacking said prison people is a combination of very-specific-angles and luck and always-taking-damage because you got too close to the enemy in the process of attacking. The bosses are just more-dangerous versions of prison dudes and there is no real strategy involved in anything and it’s about as entertaining as playing tic-tac-toe with a six-year-old who cheats.
The Powerpuff Girls Trilogy is an uninspired palette-swap cash-grab meant to encourage kids to trade in-game collectibles with their friends or – for those with no friends – buy all three versions and trade the collectibles with themselves in what amounts to the ultimate foreshadowing of lifelong depression. Of course, kids never did either of these things because the collectibles are lame and the game just isn’t fun to play. Cartoon Network tried to take advantage of children by tricking them into buying their insipid shovelware cash-grab games like Professor Utonium took advantage of three small children to fight crime in Townsville.
Except, Cartoon Network failed. The Powerpuff Girls Trilogy bombed commercially upon release and some Cartoon Network executive somewhere probably got fired for pitching the idea.
Instead of Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice; The Powerpuff Girls trilogy is Exploitation, Corporatism, and Everything Wrong With the Licensed Games Industry. And, as a result, I am full of artificial sweeteners, sarcasm, and lots and lots of cynicism – thanks Cartoon Network.
(Originally published on 4/8/2024)