Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

[vogon]

just started reading Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman this afternoon. loooooovin' it so far.

The Sims makes the unconscious conscious, but not in an existential Zen way; The Sims forces you to think about how even free people are eternally enslaved by the processes of living. Suddenly, I had to remember to go to the bathroom. I had to plan to take a shower. Instead of eating when I was hungry, I had to anticipate an unfelt hunger that was always impending. If I didn’t wake up at least an hour before work, I’d miss my ride and get fired. And though I need to do all those things in reality, the thoughts scarcely cross my mind unless I’m plugged into this game.

After playing The Sims for my first ninety minutes, I paused the action, logged off my computer, and drove to a Chinese restaurant called The Platinum Dragon. I had to pass through some road construction, and it suddenly occurred to me that there would always be road construction— not always on this particular road, but somewhere. There will never be a point in my lifetime when all the highways are fixed. It’s theoretically plausible that my closest friend might someday abandon me for no reason whatsoever, but it’s completely impossible to envision a day where I could drive from New York to California without hitting roadwork somewhere along the way. It will always exist, and there’s nothing I can do about it. And for the first time, that reality made me sad.

[Thyroid]

That's a funny, haphazard conclusion to draw. Enslavement, 2012: highway repair.

I don't know if that excerpt's particularly insightful, at least to me. I had most of those revelations when I looked at a furniture catalog when I was ten.

Edit: I'm sorry I came across as an asshole. For some reason, that excerpt jarred with me.

Edited May 5, 2012 by Kroms

[vogon]

That's a funny, haphazard conclusion to draw. Enslavement, 2012: highway repair.

I don't know if that excerpt's particularly insightful, at least to me. I had most of those revelations when I looked at a furniture catalog when I was ten.

Edit: I'm sorry I came across as an asshole. For some reason, that excerpt jarred with me.

it ties in nicely to a point he mentions earlier: "in The Sims, nothing is everything." The Sims lays bare all of the subtle machinations involved in getting yourself out of bed and out to work in the morning, by forcing you to do all of them explicitly, and all around the world, billions of people are doing variations on the same thing.

all of the greatest works of mankind, all of our art and media, all of our science, all of our wars and atrocities, are done by beings which are fundamentally just trying to be near a bathroom so they can take a shit in a couple of hours. (the road construction bit, I think, is just a reflection on the scale of humanity. or, at least, that's how I'm reading it.)