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[stanleywbaxton]

Adventures in Alternative Fashion: The Chavs At Warrington Central

I don't dress normally.

This isn't something I say out of some need to fish for sympathy. When I'm going somewhere where I care about how I look, I dress head to toe in clothing part of, or adjacent to, the Japanese street fashion style known as 'ouji'. Go look that up for an idea what I look like. One of my favourite descriptions of this I've received was "A 19th century vampire who just discovered what punk is."

So, 'I don't dress normally' is a simple and unshakable fact.

This story takes place on a day I went out for a game dev meet. When I have an event straight after work, I'll go to the office in full regalia instead of the jeans and jumpers I usually wear on casual days. My coworkers, by now, are used to it. I got a lot of compliments on my first couple rounds with it, and nowadays get nods and smiles as my Tripp pants make the kind of noise only emulated by someone trying to walk 15 dogs simultaneously.

"Ah," they probably think, "there's this fucker again."

I really liked what I put together that day, even though the outfit itself was relatively simple. For the style I dress in, at least. Black Roland jacket and my go-to blouse and tie. Black jeans and knee-high laced boots. What I really needed was more jewellery. That would elevate my co-ords, I thought, and posted a picture with caption to some group chats.

That too was rare for me. Most of the time I dress up, look in the mirror, satisfied, and go about my day forgetting I look like this until I'm in the middle of Tesco needing to grab a pint of milk. I was feeling it that day.

I believe this encounter was God's lesson for my vanity.

The meet itself was typical and had no bearing on the encounter. Caught up with some people I'd spoken to before. Got sensory overload and had a breakdown in the bathroom. Returned like nothing had happened and got some CEO's email. The usual.

Warrington has two train stations. Central to get to Liverpool or Manchester, and Bank Quay to fast track to the rest of the country. Between this and the intersection of the M6 and M62 it's a town designed to get out of it as soon as humanly possible.

I'm at Central, as you have assumed from the title, waiting on platform 1. 10pm on a Thursday night, which should adequately set the scene. I'm sat on a bench reading a book on my phone. I forget what. It doesn't matter.

There's a guy sat next to me, who under normal circumstances I wouldn't have given anything more than a second glance to. He's wrapping up a video call with who I assume to be his family, in a language I don't catch. 

I then see two kids walking up the platform. They command it with the exact energy and confidence of 20 year-long career actors on opening night; the world was that platform.

These, my dear reader, are our titular protagonists. Eventually they walk up to me.

Now, when I say "walk up to me", I mean in the specific way that chavs do. You know the way, where walking straight takes several detours that involve kicking at random items on the ground and flailing the arms about in random directions. Never able to stand still, like the floor is covered in fire ants.

This introductory dance is performed, and the chav turns to me:

"Are you a horse rider?"

This was a new one. I've had many descriptions people have used while I'm kitted out. Some of them are genuine questions, some of them light-hearted digs, and others serious attempts to get me, someone who thinks he's never looked hotter while dressed as Dracula's gayer cousin, to be embarrassed that I look like this, and all I find equally hilarious.

"No," I say.

"You don't ride horses? You just look like that?"

"Yes."

The bluntness of my answers is deliberate. I knew how best to deal with an encounter with a chav. Be curt, but not confrontational, and give as few things to pick apart as possible so you can leave the conversation with haste. Preferably, physically.

Leaving wasn't an option. Standing from the bench would have caused a stir, and walking to the other end of the platform would have just made the fruit flies follow the fruit. I could deal with this for the next 10 minutes until the train gets here, I thought. I'd been through worse.

The second chav, a girl, starts chastising the first. Saying how you can't just ask someone why they look like that. Her protests are rebuked, and the chav turns to the man next to me, and cracks out this line:

"If I said you looked like a drug dealer, yeah, with that jacket, you wouldn't be offended would you?"

I feel it's now relevant to mention this guy was Middle Eastern.

He doesn't understand what the chav means by this. I still wonder if that was for better or worse.

A part of me jumped up and wanted to call this out on being blatantly racist, which I unfortunately had to suppress; I was alone and in no position to get into a physical fight, should it escalate. Because what a teenager falls short for in being a teenager, it makes up for in being a teenager.

Then the chav turns to me, and smiles. Hungry.

"What's your pronouns?"

Now hear me, dear reader. I am used to the Chav. I am used to how they conduct themselves and how to respond. The usual jabs. The usual language. The microcosm of how the United Kingdom is failing a significant number of its population.

I did not, under any sun I know, think the Chav could be trans-inclusionary.

So after a brief pause, I give them. Braced? Here's the second punch: "Ah. I'm she/her."

You might notice, dear dear reader, that I have been deliberately sidestepping her pronouns for the entire duration of this writeup. This was intentional to give you the full neck-snapping whiplash I received at this point.

Yes. I assumed she was a teenage boy, the exact ones who think saying slurs makes them 'hard' and spend all their time bullying the weird kids to crush their own latent homosexuality. You probably assumed that, too.

But then, I think. I see what's happening. We're at the critical point in trans rights, where people are well aware enough of pronouns, and thus aware enough to weaponise them. This was a test. If I used 'she', I would suddenly be met with outcry over how she was obviously a boy. If I used 'he' I would be labelled a transphobe. 'They' would have incited offence at not sticking to the binary, and circling myself back into the trap. It's a perfect catch 22, finely constructed with the exact cruelty only those under the age of 16 can procure.

I would have loved to, at this point, taken her word and been completely content those were her actual pronouns. It's a little like how you hate clocking the woman sitting across from you with the husky voice, experimental leap into lady's fashion, and facial hair ground down to the pore and beyond, with the divine revelation that she would kick your ass in Guilty Gear.

I then notice, the other chav who's with her, is referring to her as she.

There's no irony. No "Fuck off, it was a joke." It was a completely serious address that carried no traces of sarcasm.

Those were her actual pronouns.

My worldview getting obliterated in a blender and chucked into the river Mersey was packed neatly into a box labelled "shit to process in about 10 minutes, when I am sat down in an enclosed space alone, such as a train or perhaps a car".

This happens as they are slinging jokes to each other about neopronouns, of their pronouns being fuck/you and eat/shit.

After this is exhausted, she returns to the outfit. She points at me again and says: "So are you emo, or summat? Is that what you are?"

Two for one, that was also a new one. I have absolutely no traces of emo on me, but I also realise there's a generational gap and vocabulary drift. I grew up during the golden age of emos, however, and in a few years will probably be moaning about how no one is using the word correctly.

"I've been called goth," I say, "but I'm just myself."

A tangent I must get out: at another games meet, there was a small pack—or murder, if we'd like to be accurate—of goths. To me, they were Proper Goths, full black, straps and harnesses, piercings, fishnets; there had to be a collection of at least ten pairs of demonias between them. One of them points to me, delight dawning on her face, and proclaims: "One of us! He's one of us!" It's been one of my favourite interactions I've ever had.

Trying to drive that point home seemed to satisfy her, but she wasn't done with me yet.

I blank out part of the conversation from this point, my mind whirling with what the hell I was witnessing. When I tune back in, I hear this:

"He's got drip. Look at his sneakers; he's got drip."

The man is, again, confused by this. After she waters down the compliment, for lack of a better word, to 'I like your shoes', they fist bump.

This is the point where I think no-one is going to believe me when I tell this story.

After more markov chains with the word 'drip' in them, she turns to me, and frowns.

"You don't have drip," she says, shaking her head. "They didn't have drip in old times."

I have absolutely no comeback for this.

Now, letting this situation ferment weeks later, I still have no comeback for this.

...You know that one tweet?

That one?

It's not even a joke anymore. I have had this happen to me. Someone asked for my pronouns just to declare that I was dripless.

Satisfied, the two chavs leave the platform. They don't get on a train.

There's something to note here. Central has a ticket gate. That means they either jumped the gate to loiter on the platform for a bit, or paid for a ticket to do that.

I am left in silence. The train is still 10 minutes away.

I'm still unsure if the entire encounter took less than 30 seconds or if I was pulled into a black hole by the sheer weight of its absurdity.

There's no way I feel I can adequately wrap this up. It came and went as soon as a train, and left me utterly stunned with an unshakable need to bring this to written word.

It's also funny to think that I was younger, once, wondering how old people couldn't understand how we worked. And yet here I am, writing about my encounter with Those Damn Kids.

The kids, though, made me think. How my own prejudices and experiences as a child morphed how I perceived them. How, even through their own bizarre language and rituals, they wanted to connect with others in their own ways. And how, in the end, the little tranny with 4 years of experience ended up being the one who got schooled.

Yes, it was clunky. It was dripping with desperation of them trying to be whatever media outlets deem is cool for the Youth™ nowadays. But beyond the act of adolescence, there's a genuine and sincere want, and understanding, to be good to others.

I think the kids are alright.

They're still racist, though.

One victory at a time.

[stanleywbaxton]

You Can't Just Tell Me the Company's Paying For Lunch, Sir

My current job's alright. I design marketing emails, and besides wanting to hold the developers of outlook responsible for several war crimes, have a decent time with it. It's not what I want to do in the least, however. I desperately want to write for a living.

If the multitude of essays on very niche topics hasn't clued you in.

But regardless, until someone offers their magnanimous hand down from the heavens and offers me a job it works, I suppose. I'm given an inside view into the wretched underbelly of capitalism, and eight hours of my day are dedicated to producing nothing of value, to a pseudoscience based on outdated psychology and smoke and mirrors, that my knowledge of the occult has given me a better understanding of its workings than any tangible art grounded in human decency, but it works. I suppose.

The thing is, what makes this job a standout is how it contrasted with my last. That one was,

unique,

to say the least.

It was also a marketing position. The only thing, the owners were idiots. They were the quintessential small business couple who wanted to own a business for the bragging rights of owning a business. Brains so rotted with capitalism that any human connection was seen as a networking opportunity. Thought quoting old white men notable for being nazi sympathisers made Line Go Up. Used their employees for marriage counselling. You know the kind.

They also thought none of their workers would notice that half the clients we worked with were their side businesses.

I can really drive the point home to anyone with an inkling of HTML knowledge. The company made a huge point on its email marketing expertise. For starters, no-one on the marketing team knew HTML. I comprised 100% of the collective knowledge, and took all of it back when I quit. There were web developers on a different team, but they were strictly confined to changing hex values in premade wordpress templates. Cross-team help was limited to asking where someone saved a PDF last, lest they caught the ire of management and something about 'noise levels in the office', while they shrieked at full-volume tiktoks one desk over. So, what did the marketing team do?

They designed a 600 by several thousands pixel image, exported it lossless, set this behemoth of a file as the whole email, and linked it up with an image map.

For those not in the know, this meant they were sending emails that:

Were inaccessible for people using screen readers

Were inaccessible for people with slow internet

Were inaccessible for anyone using outlook

Were unable to have any text copied if it, say, had a promotional code

Almost exclusively contained promotional codes

Were ugly (unrelated, they just were)

Broke the law since the unsubscribe button didn't work

When I saw this, and that the apprentices on the team were being taught to make graphics using powerpoint, I immediately knew I needed a new job. That was day two.

The good part was they were very much in agreement. This was a Kickstart position, and for those who haven't heard, Kickstart is a government scheme in the UK. A business applies to be part of it, offers entry-level positions they have open, and gets them advertised to job centres. The government subsidises the salaries for these positions at minimum wage for six months, and gives the business a lump sum for filling it and getting a graduate off Universal Credit.

If you see the obvious exploit here, that's what my then-employers did.

The job starts off great. Our bright-eyed employee finds themselves fitting in quite well. Their boss loves them. Their coworkers love them. Oh, Lord, this is a lot of work, but everyone loves them! Month after month of glowing reviews, certainly worth being worn to the bone, and the job centre gets nothing but happy smiles all around. Suddenly, in the last month their 'performance' takes a 'nosedive', and by their next review they 'need to book their ideas up'. So coincidentally as the subsidy ends they're booted off the payroll. 'Not the right fit for the company', or something. By the time they realise what's happened they're back on Universal Credit with their labour already exploited.

So to go from this—a job where legal lines were played with like double dutch, the owners' dogs pissed in the entrance (a real, actual thing that happened, as the owners had three dogs that they refused to train, and instead of paying money for a dog sitter they were given full run of the office and all its cables), half the team sneered at a trans woman on x-factor but so miraculously didn't notice the lack of a bulge in my jeans—to a job where I got a pack of haribos as a welcome gift, was quite the stark shock.

It had been two weeks by this point. Still settling in, still getting all my duties in order. They were introduced one-by-one, another stark difference, and I was working about half of what my full job would be. This was going well. I could do this.

The head of the social team sends a message to everyone in the office. "Because we have a bunch of new guys," she said, "we're going out for lunch!"

Ah, from my old place I'd learnt this was 'we want to go on a date but need to write it off as a business expense, and we'll use this as leverage to never give you a pay rise', but considering this company wasn't family-owned, and the meet was organised by someone whose job it was to do this, it seemed to start on a better foot. I check my wallet for—

"It's all paid by the office," she answers to someone else.

...They, them, are paying?

Surely not. I'd heard tales from my mother's workplace going on trips and lunches and all manner of events, but my old job stamped out any delusions that would happen to me. Not without a significant payment out of my own pocket.

But if they are...

It Was a Brewdog

If you've never been yourself, Brewdog is a pub chain. I know little of it beyond this one trip but the immediate vibe of this place was mid-range luxury that's still trying to be rustic, but not rustic enough where it starts looking poor. Unmarketable. You know, your typical millennial shite that would fit right at home on instagram.

But I walked into this place with a plan. I was going to eat. I was giving myself a king-sized banquet and not a penny of it was coming out of my pocket.

This was mistake one.

I must stress, I don't have a large appetite. I just like making corporations pay for things.

My plan starts off superbly. We're given a menu, and I see a wonderful range for me to pick at. Mostly burgers, which gets me excited. The only thing that would have gotten me more is pizza. Conversation between us runs through what everyone does and doesn't want.

"They've got deep fried oreos!" the guy sitting next to me says. "Man, I really want those."

This inspires me. I love desserts! Of course I need to have one. I'd never had deep fried oreos, and if I didn't like them? Not out of my pocket! Nothing lost.

This was mistake two.

My order is thus:

Loaded fries

A pretentiously-named double bacon cheeseburger

Deep fried oreos

Yes, this seems like a lot for lunch. But my reasoning was sound, and at this moment was a fantastic plan. I was going to swap what I was having for lunch and tea. I'd have something big now and once home just have a sandwich to round off my day.

This was mistake three.

The stage is set; orders are taken. We then get to drinks, which I say I'm happy with water.

The person organising the trip interjects. "You're just having water? Do you not want anything?"

"Nah," I say. "I don't drink."

I should note, this isn't out of some moral code or health reason. It's simply because I don't like beer, and most pubs don't have fruity drinks. In both meanings of the word.

"Not even coke?" she continues. "Are you sure?"

"I don't like fizzy drinks when I eat out. They fill me and I don't enjoy the food."

Which is completely true, if I'm eating a lot. I was giving myself a three course meal here. I knew I couldn't expend useless calories on a drink.

This was the only thing I did correctly.

We continue light chatter for a while. Inane shit. Some meals come out, and because of course it is the oreos are the first thing I receive. I put them to the side.

Funny enough, I end up talking about my last job to someone higher up than me. I gave him the basic rundown. You know, exploiting the labour of young workers and running off with thousands of tax-payer pounds, when the tories are so desperate to tell you the person too disabled to work is the one claiming away your money. 

I don't say that, instead saying I had a six month time limit to find a new job. I'm sure he got the subtext.

He shook his head in response. "I never understood why companies do that."

Because of capitalism. This is another thing I don't say, because I don't want upper management to know I'm a pinko.

By now the food started to arrive, several waiters coming to us as a party of 17. I look over to the other one of our tables being served first, wondering what the small commotion was. 

This is where my problems begin.

These things are not burgers. They are monuments of hubris demanding—being made only for this purpose—God to strike them down, that were called burgers just because they happen to be made with the building blocks of a burger. All of them have knives rammed through their cores. The bun touches the handle.

When the plates actually reach the people who ordered them, the conversation switches instantly to how they were supposed to be eaten. They were too big to pick up in your hand. They were too tall to cut into with a knife.

I then realise, no-one else has ordered a double.  Mine will be even taller.

Oh, I think.

I've fucked up.

But the true magnitude of my fuck-up doesn't become aparant at first, because the first thing I'm given in this batch was the loaded fries.

Alright, don't panic. This is doable. I've had bigger meals. Probably.

The fries are a small dish, so I think I've lucked out. A small thing before I tackle the Tower of Babel. I can do this. But, I distinctly remember these being pretty expensive. For some chips, anyway. Maybe it was the fact they were covered in enough sauce to drown a small village that did it.

I eat one, do that cursory thing where you mention how it's nice to someone nearby while they do the same with their own dish, and continue to drill the mantra in my head. I can do this. I can do this. They tasted really nice, and reminded me of the deep fried ones my grandad made. I can do this!

Then I spot something, under the gap made by the fry now sitting in my stomach. I was expecting more fries, as you do. The thing you would most expect in a bowl of fries under the first layer of fries would be more fries. 

This was not a bowl of fries. This was a Trojan Horse seeking the end to my gluttony named Troy.

There are three chicken strips hidden under the fries.

They were in the small print on the menu, I later found out. And the reason they were much pricier than you'd expect. My mind was so captivated on reading 'loaded' and thinking of all the wonderful things that could entail, I did not read further to see what that entailed. 

And of course, they're covered in sauces, garnishings, and probably a whole farmer's field worth of greenery as well. This was loaded, in every way possible.

Well,

There's no way through this, except my stomach.

There's a specific feeling you get, when you're enjoying something you know is manifesting your doom. I pecked my way through those chips, indulging myself on the sauces, knowing that each time I swallow was only making the inevitable future where I have to eat that burger even more difficult. Every chicken strip I put into my face inches me closer and closer to burning in a hell of my own design, despite its juiciness and crunchy skin.

Maybe it's what oil barons feel.

The burger comes to me when I'm nearly finished with the fries. It's taller than I could have possibly imagined. 

You see, I was expecting something bigger than everyone else's. I'm not an idiot. A double cheeseburger is bigger than a regular cheeseburger; clue's in the name. But I did approach it in a manner I thought was rational. A patty was, what? About a quarter of the full burger? A third, if it's a bit chunky? More meat, and meat is filling, sure, but it couldn't be that much bigger.

These patties could have competed with the bricks that built the wall behind me.

The vegetables were barely there. The vegetables might as well have taken the day off. These patties, dear god, felt like they were specially selected to make an example of me. Some people on my table notice the size, and start joking about how tall it is compared to theirs.

I try laughing along. Hah. Ha hah. Funny. Yeah, it is funny. It's funny. Look how big it is. Funny!

The laugh was not from my belly, as it wept for its future.

Okay. Strategy time. I'd finished a majority of the fries, and could spin some tale about how I was so excited for this burger that I jumped straight into it. Then, I got full and didn't go back for them. I can do this.

I'm then faced with the same question everyone else ran through moments ago. How the hell do you approach this? Grabbing and shoving it to my mouth was completely out of the question. The entire thing would fall apart.

So I opt for something entirely different. I yank the knife out, and take the top bun off with one of the patties, and now I have two open-faced... 

Is open-faced burger a thing?

Google says yes. Grand.

Which really shows just how much of a terrible idea this was. Now I have two burgers to take on. But regardless, with some kind of approach to eating my monument to hubris, I pick up one, and bite.

It's greasy.

This was not a normal greasy. I've had greasy burgers before. I've been to America. Texas. Whataburger. That thing I thought was the peak of grease.

I was wrong. Have you ever eaten something greasy enough that the grease actually feels like another ingredient? That your teeth pierce through it like a layer of cheese? Not even the bun, or pitiful state of the vegetables could help me now. Both were soaked through. The bun passes better as a kitchen sponge.

After one bite, one bite, I felt full.

I'd never experienced this in my life. I will stress, again, I do not have a large appetite, but when it comes to (and someone else is paying) I can eat. I could consider it a talent, almost.

But here's the problem when you're eating on someone else's dime. You know when you, yourself, make a bad decision? That's entirely your fault. If you go to a new spot that ends up being a bust, or make an impulse purchase you immediately regret, or order too much food at a restaurant, you get to wallow in your own self pity and kick yourself over what an idiot you've been. It's only your wallet that's affected.

This was not my wallet.

The thing is, I'd never been faced with this dilemma before. Before when I'd eaten a bunch when others were paying, I ate all of it. No exception. Sure, it was basic tat like McDonalds or Taco Bell and that one time we went for sushi, but I ate every crumb I got out of their coin. I was so caught up in the chance for another one that I hadn't even considered the moral dilemmas that could come with it.

What was I supposed to do? Not eat the food they'd just spent God-knows how much on? Get invited out, as one of the new guys inciting this whole gathering, and order a metric fuck-load just to say: "Actually, no thank you. I appreciate you spending all this money on me, but, honestly? I'm just not feeling up to it."

I couldn't. I'd only been here a few weeks. I couldn't destroy what little good reputation I'd built up.

So I chew.

And chew.

It's the little twinges of enjoyment, that get me. By every metric, yes, this is a good meal. It tastes good. I enjoy eating it. The flavours dance around on my tongue and I'm reminded how much I love burgers. Then my stomach cries out to me that this isn't right. I've never eaten this much before. We're reaching uncharted waters. Terrible, terrible, terrible things are going to happen if I keep going.

And I chew.

I drink gulps of water, as if it helps.

I chew.

I listen to the conversations around me to give my stomach a break, which does nothing.

I chew.

I'm only halfway through this thing. It doesn't matter what strategy I go for. Smaller bites for less volume. Larger bites to trick myself into thinking it's going down quicker. Every bite feels like a workout and layer and layer of grease packs onto my lips.

Oh, good God. Why did I do this to myself—

"Hello," someone says.

"What?" I respond.

"It's me. A voice in your head of dubious psychological origin, and another sign you need to hurry up on finding that therapist," it says.

"Oh, you? What's your purpose this time? Laughing at my misfortune?"

"Encouragement. Cheerleading, perhaps."

"For what? Eating a burger?"

"Of course!" it bellows. "You can't just tap out now. You have a reputation to upkeep! Your family is known for their appetites, are they not?"

"That's not something for us to be proud of. We have an unhealthy relationship to food through a combination of reasons I refuse to detail in an essay designed to be comical." 

"Too scared to bare your soul again?"

"We're also more well-known for the basketball," I add.

"Yes, perhaps, but does that mean you're about to give up?"

"I also think the basketball fuelled the appetite," I muse. "My brother could eat a full buffet after matches."

"Allow me to rephrase this, are you about to be a disappointment?"

"The asthma attack in PE did that already."

"Are you going to be more of a disappointment?"

No.

I wasn't.

"Good man," it says, and retreats back into my subconscious.

I remember I'm sat in a restaurant.

And I fucking chew.

I've noticed something I do. Or my brain does, I should be more accurate. I have a tendency to not remember moments I'm under extreme stress. I was there, and things happened, but in what order and how it happened? Fuck if I know.

This is one of those times. Some minutes pass and my hands are empty.

I look down, lips tingling, undoubtedly an artery clogging somewhere, to see one bun and half of a patty remaining.

You know what? Sure. Victory. I'm declaring victory over this half-eaten burger. This is enough. I'd already resigned that finishing everything was out of the question as soon as the chicken strips ambushed me.

I sit back in my chair. Jesus Christ. Instead of having a moment reminiscing over the nice meal I'd just had I'm swearing on my life how I can never ever do this again. I grab a napkin to wipe my face, which was sat a bit weird, I thought, almost like it was hiding—

The oreos.

Oh.

Fuck.

I couldn't have got something easy, could I? A single cookie? A mint? A cracker? Nothing?

You know, if I didn't pick that napkin up, I might have gotten away with it. I'd forgotten that I got dessert. Surely everyone else had. But no. Now there they were, on their sickly sweet display. Someone else already took notice.

I pick one up and inspect it. I'm not out of the woods yet.

See, I do love desserts. I'm the kind of person who always leaves space for dessert. I love chocolates. Biscuits. Ice cream. The whole lot. As a kid, especially, I always considered the end of the meal the best part.

This day almost killed my love of them.

Then, I remember something. A saviour is here. The guy to my right, the one who said he was interested in the oreos.

"Hey, you mentioned wanting to try these. Would you like one?" I say as a masked cry for help.

"Oh, no, you enjoy them," he says with a smile, completely unaware of what he's just done. "Thanks anyway."

"Ah," I say, my hand trembling. "If you change your mind, just shout."

He does not.

The worst part, those oreos were good! When I wasn't focusing on what they were doing to me. They tasted like rich cocoa and cream with the texture of freshly made cake. "This is delightful," my mouth said. "I love warm desserts! Brownies, chocolate chip anything straight out the oven, treats that melt as you chew into them. This is delightful!"

"I feel like I'm traipsing through hell while the devil pisses on my face," my stomach said.

Somehow, dunking the oreos in syrup makes it easier. It's this runny chocolate thing, and I don't care what it actually is, besides the fact it's helping right now. I fail to reason why. It's extra calories. It should be causing even more protests in my stomach.

Against all odds, I chew. And I chew.

I pop another one in my mouth, and I chew. Another one, and I chew. Another one...

There's one left.

Fuck it.

It's Done

If I get diagnosed with an intolerance to anything, this will be a day I think back to. I'm half expecting to keel over randomly in the street, wake up in a hospital, to find myself with half of that fucking burger stuck inside my liver and an incurable allergy to anything that was on that thing.

And you know what? I won't even complain. I'll take a good, honest look at my internal organs and say: "You know what, guys? Sure. I'll take this one. I might not have deserved the asthma, but I'll take this one."

The walk back to the office there's a grey tinge to my vision. It's an absolute miracle my heart didn't give out. When I get back, on the company message board someone mentions my 'impressive appetite'.

...Should I be embarrassed by that?

Oh! I'm not a woman anymore. I shouldn't!

It took several days before any sense of appetite returned. I went through meals, only getting through factions of it before tapping out. That feeling of having absolutely no sense of hunger is one of the most alien things I've experienced. When the moment came that I could eat a ham sandwich without wanting to immediately eject it out of my food pipe I celebrated.

Of course, I would not be so much of a fool to make the same mistake more than once. Especially with what it did to me. I may miscalculate my ventures, but I learn from my experiences. Even if our office—any office!—was paying, I will never, never overeat to such an extent again.

So at the Christmas party, we ordered Domino's—

[stanleywbaxton]

Rhapsody: Aeroplanes

I went on an aeroplane, recently.

And it's been so long. Every year, since I was born, my family would jet off on another long-haul flight to the other side of the world; it's how I spent a two week chunk of my school holidays. We had a chain of doing Texas many years in a row. Before that, several trips up and down the east coast of Australia. 

You know exactly what halted my 20 year-long streak.

As a kid, before I learnt that poor people existed, I couldn't fathom the idea of someone never being on a plane before. It seemed like such a natural thing for everyone to do. To go on all these holidays I had no idea were that expensive. I couldn't fathom never being out of the country, even. Americans still flummox me with that one.

To dream of flying makes you human, I thought.

I think about people who are terrified of flying. Those who can't rationalise hundreds of tonnes of metal soaring through the skies. Those who look down to the impossibly small houses below, and can't comprehend seeing the Earth like gods do. Those who watched one too many documentaries on flight crashes. Those who clutch to their sickbags like it's a rosary, the only thing grounding their mortal form here.

And I feel genuine sadness, at that.

For me, I'm as excited for the plane ride itself as I am for the holiday.

It's been three years. I didn't realise how much I missed it. Manchester Airport heaves with holiday-goers and strains from its covid-ravaged workforce. I've been through my share of travel rushes, so this doesn't phase me, but knowing how to navigate it all doesn't dampen the constant adrenaline of not wanting to be the one guy holding up a security line of a hundred people. Where's your boarding ticket? Your passport? Is your covid test valid? Did you get all your electronics out of your bag? Is there something in your pocket you forgot? Is it shoes on or shoes off? Do you need to remove the jacket, too?

Then it all melts away at the familiar sights of luxury brands.

My instincts kick in, as I'm eating tax-free breakfast. I'm on holiday.

I'm going to be on a plane soon.

Boarding is nothing special. Sat at a gate playing on a Switch while waiting for a seat number to be called out. When I was younger, it was my DS. I always found the amount of times your pass needs to be checked funny, as well. Check at security. Check at the gate. Check before you're on the plane. Check while you're on the plane.

I will speak now from experience. A backpack under the seat beats a carry-on suitcase. Always.

And seating's always a palaver, isn't it? One extended queue, and then you've got one guy shoving his bag into the overhead bin and holding up everyone behind him. Then it's fumbling by that person shoving theirs up and squeezing by this person who's sat down, all just to sit down in an awkwardly leg-roomless chair.

Does that safety demonstration actually do anything, in the end? Twenty three years of my life and I've never needed that lifejacket. It's the exact same on every single airline. I have it committed to memory. I could jump up and join them.

Then, it doesn't matter. I'm on a plane.

My pupils dilate.

It's the unknowns, that get me. The thing about windows on an aeroplane, is how you can barely see the outside. In a car, you have full view of the world. Half of those walls are glass, and should you be so lucky the clouds above you smile down. In a plane, you're given a circular slice of nature. No more. When you're in a queue with anywhere between two to twenty planes in front of you, there's no idea how many away you are from escaping into the clouds.

The mechanical flaps on the wings ripple and flex, like an eagle catching the wind in its feathers. Satisfied, it marches on. 

Everytime the engines rumble you aren't sure if it's another part to the slow advance, or this is the one where it will make its triumphant assault on the sky. You can try peering out of that window, desperate for any glimpse of your orientation, but to no success. The tarmac here looks the same as the tarmac there. The tarmac there looks the same as the tarmac of the runways. Another rumble, another slow stop. Another rumble, longer this time, another slow stop.

Then, they don't rumble. They roar to life in an instant and barrel down the runway, the cabin shaking and metal grinding in its wake.

Pilots approach it differently. Some treat it as a delicate operation. To carefully ween the plane off the ground, to remind it of its purpose and the job it must do. So carefully, to not upset those the plane protects. Others treat it like rearing a wild horse. This plane will fly, hurled upwards, regardless of who or what inhabits it. You can feel that jolt when the wheels are no longer touching the ground. The weight liberated from them as the engines take the burden. You can feel it.

Flying sates a deep, deep need in my soul. I didn't realise how much I needed it. I'm not entirely sure why I need it. But I felt something as the plane took off. Like it was scratching an itch in a place I couldn't chart on a diagram. Like it was nourishing organs I forgot I had.

And the turbulence as you climb. The brief moments of weightlessness as the pilot banks and pitches through the winds. All the lefts and rights as we discover exactly which direction is our 'forward', to plough through unchanged for the next seven hours.

More. I want more. I want the sky to battle and bend us for having the audacity to think we could grace her heights.

I feel those fights, the most. After I'm off this plane and readjusting to life below the clouds. I feel my body trying to compensate for knocks of turbulence that aren't there, and popping my ear canals on reflex. I feel rushes through my veins preparing my heart to be left suspended in my ribs, just for a few seconds.

This is where I belong. In the infinite, insurmountable sky. Feeling the gentle rumble of meticulous engineering with a thousand hours behind it. Seeing how blue really is such a gorgeous colour. Looking down, hundreds of thousands of people through that little circle, realising how insignificant we all actually are in the end.

I'm at peace, here. I wish I could live in the skies.

Then I remember half the budget that went to this holiday is for everything this part isn't.

I went to Chicago, recently.

The city was wonderful to me, and makes me want to return. American cities have a specific touch, every road the same; all squares, no curves. I turn left, I should have turned right. I go straight on. I turn left. I turn left. I'm lost. I turn right.

I see one of the most beautiful skylines I've seen in my life.

I turn right, I should have turned left. I go straight on. I turn right. I turn right. I'm lost. I turn left.

I see the peak of American architecture a stone's throw across the river.

Americans are so eager to tell you how it's so easy to not get lost in their cities. They're built to be navigable! Here's a key. A crossword puzzle. Here's a number system that no other country uses to tell you how to navigate urban planning that only came to be in this single corner of the world.

It doesn't matter. I will never get used to it. There's nothing I can do to not look like a fool as I find myself clueless in the masses of these jungles, and the only victory is to embrace it.

One of the many things I've learnt to embrace.

I went to Macy's, recently.

In Chicago. My mother's taste in fashion has worn off on me, and I found myself on the better end of Captain Vimes' Boots Theory long before I read Discworld. I was walking around in black Levi jeans, a vintage edwardian-style blouse, a cape and mantle made from real leather; I'll wear plastic when I'm embalmed and thrown into the dying Pacific.

I get many comments on the outfit. Living in alternative fashion means you start getting used to the attention you recieve, but those unique compliments always stick in your mind. One man on the CTA called me a superhero.

I look like I belong, among the jewellery that's quintuple my credit card limit.

"Excuse me," an assistant says, as Americans are so fond of, and I'd been continually reminded of their unique approach to customer service, "what brand are your boots?"

The question stuns me. Never in my life had I had someone care for what was behind the fabrics. They only cared for the looks, no regard to the name and price tag behind them. As they should.

"Russell and Bromley," I say.

"I've never heard of them!" she sings. "They look so good!"

"They're a UK brand," I say, to her continued amazement. I smile and thank her for the compliments.

I wander back through the aisles, thinking how lab-grown gems shine just as bright.

I'm on the edge of that world of luxury. The world most will only experience through television series and documentaries. I brush by it almost everyday, to the point most people think I live there. And I know, because of how capitalism works, I will find myself ascending through salaries and back in the throngs of it, just like I was at the age of eight, dutifully following my mother through perfume aisles at the airport. 

My socialism is fueled by champagne.

But that world, it only exists on the ground. Where everyone else cares what you look like, and not where they put their boarding pass last. Where makeup isn't decanted from Italian leather and shoved into plastic bags. Where your high-end purchases aren't made two feet from someone on a budget airline.

I walked around Chicago in brands. Ones you wouldn't find imitated on the highstreet, but brands nonetheless. There's no use pretending they're something they're not. On the aeroplane, I wear my old zipped jumper with the fluffy hood to keep the cabin chill off. I wear my reliable jeans I bought five years ago with a hole I stitched over. I wear my trainers so broken-in they would be impossible for anyone else to wear. Only my arch fits that sole.

People fly in suits, of course. There's always the one. Some business-type with sunken eyes running on a redbull and jetlagged six hours behind. They probably have a meeting scheduled for the moment they run out that cabin door.

But there's no glamour here. There are no appearances to keep up. That suit holds as much fashion weight as my shirt with a still-unidentified stain does. On the plane itself, they're jammed into the same seats and given the same rules on when we can and cannot leave them. They eat shitty food and drink that one tub of water covered in tinfoil that's inexplicably served on every single airline. There's no glamour here.

We are all at the mercy of the sky. We respect it; we have to.

And yet, the aeroplane itself is the one thing that doesn't. Man was not given the means to fly. None of us have wings. And trying to circumvent that, to build our way to the heavens, eventually there's no oxygen. 

We made the aeroplane with no need to breathe. It only uses the air to travel, a careful balancing act of physics. How much thought, has gone into that? How many attempts and failures to bring us the dominators of the sky so commonplace today? Have you seen, the tests they put them through? They bend and break these beasts and strain them to their absolute limits, to face one of the most extreme biomes on Earth. The one place we were never meant to conquer.

They try so hard to make aeroplanes something they're not. The paradigm of luxury and style. Sophisticated. A jetsetter, a professional, rolling up to their velvet-clad seats with a pristine carry-on suitcase and a permanent, white-toothed smile. You see them, on every single advertisement. Served by a dutiful stewardess who wants nothing more than to dedicate herself to their entire existence, no more than an automation. Just like they would be served back on the ground. Or perhaps, they're served a slice of a life that, to them, is just out of reach, not realising how far that gap truly is. Maybe they, too, get mistaken for being part of it.

But the existence of an aeroplane is one that defies every attempt at aesthetic sanitation. There is no room for the matter of making things look 'better'. The exterior cannot change like a car can. Consider that, how many cars you've seen looking so different from the other. Someone believes this curve is more aerodynamic than that one. This shape is so much easier on the eyes than that one. 

An aeroplane cannot afford the silly opinions of man. One wrong concave surface, or a window slightly too big, or a wing too small, renders faults and stress that ruin its integrity. Then soon it will be unfit to fly. They all look so similar by a simple ruling of physics. Every plane is beholden to the sky, as much as it has the audacity to pierce it.

The aeroplane is the perfect evolution of rigourous engineering.

And there is beauty in that. Of course there is beauty in that. 

The beauty of the cabin with pressure calculated to the exact needs for life thirty thousand feet from where it should be. The beauty of the engines bursting into speeds scaling hundreds of miles per hour. The beauty of the wings, precision tensile strength and able to weather the worst storms humanity could dream of. 

A beauty that is in defiance of the world on the ground.

I've experienced the luxury they so desperately wish to sell. Multiple times. When we went to Australia, my parents deemed it reasonable to splash out the extra pounds on legroom and hot towels before takeoff. Business class.

They do so certainly try. This was Singapore Airlines, an airline that prides itself on an image of prestige and luxury for everything that isn't economy. Legroom is the one often quoted, but what isn't is how you get waited on. The cabin crew put on a whole performance of being butlers, remembering your drink orders and what snacks you like to eat. Doting on you so carefully that your meals are made exactly how you want them. The seats lean back far enough to turn into beds, with privacy shields from the rest of the world. You could play, to my five year old brain, the best games on the entire planet with that remote I have seen nowhere else but hoisted by a stretchy wire in an airliner chair.

But all around you, even the interior clad in rich colours, is still the omnipresent realisation that you are on a plane. The constant drone of the engines that no sound-cancelling has truly figured out how to silence. The toilets, that have terrified child and adult alike. The odd bits of turbulence that don't suddenly stop because you walked left instead of right.  Physics doesn't bend around a few more stacks of cash. You speak louder over your closed-back headphones to the person next to you, in bed. You clench your phone to not fall into a suction vortex, while applying skincare. You wear your seatbelt while the cabin trembles through the forces of nature, as you are handed a menu. 

It cannot be hidden. It cannot be covered in diamonds and jewels to be sold as something it's not. Even as they try, the cracks are revealed everytime they ascend. For that plane to be that little slice of luxury they are so desperate for, it would never be able to leave the ground.

They are completely beholden to its antithetical beauty. As the plane is beholden to the sky.

And capitalism has tried—oh, how it has taken what corners of the aeroplane it can!—as it has tried with everything else. All those lies of aeroplane luxury. Of painless flights. Of Egyptian cotton and French wine and Italian chefs. Of the world they're so used to packaged with a bright pink bow and brought on as cabin luggage, not a single inconvenience to grace them.

And the aeroplane will soldier on by the laws of physics, by the laws of the sky, forever suppressing form over function. Forever exposing how hollow those lies truly are. 

And there's nothing they can do about it.

[stanleywbaxton]

The One Time I Asked my Friend For a Lift and Left my Soul in an Arcade Car Park

Gas, gas, gas [x]

So this is a quick one, but I need to get it off my chest. Purely because this is the most distilled instance of a hobby matching the hobby-goer I've ever seen in my life.

Arcade Club

is a wonderful place in the middle of Bury. I have this terrible condition known as 'Rhythm Game Brain Fungus', which means I have a compulsive need to check if a rhythm game arcade cabinet is within any distance of my current location, constantly. Arcade Club is run by people who also have a terrible case of RGBF, making it a holy grail in the north of every Bemani game I absolutely adore.

As I'm the kind of person to spread brain fungus as an act of love, I pestered and pestered my friends to come with me for a day out. We're all gamer nerds, and at least one person had to get hooked onto them like I had. And hell, even if they don't care about the rhythm games there's plenty other cabs there, and Mario Kart set up in the corner as a last resort. Everyone wins.

But the actual happenings mean little for this story. I had a great time, my friends had a great time, great times all around. Good day..

Now, the main problem with going to Arcade Club, as much as I adore the place, is that it's quite the way out from where me and my friends live. It takes both a tram and a train to reach it, so if one is delayed or we're late to one regardless of the other, we're a bit snookered for making our way back. But we're not stupid, are we? We'd leave ourselves with plenty of time to account for any public transport mishaps that could befall us, and give ourselves more than enough time to make the connections.

So the last tram leaves in 10 minutes.

I run the numbers, and realise we're not going to make it in time. It takes 20 to walk to the tram stop from the arcade. I'm starting to think through alternatives, seeing if there's a weird train connection that loops back on itself that google can't figure out, and thinking of the final possibility of us all splitting a cab.

When I realise, one of us drove here.

Introducing Tavi. Tavi is insane.

There are so many things to say about Tavi I would be here all day. Here's a selection of favourites.

Tavi wanted a nice speaker system, paid for the entire thing upfront, and offset the cost by eating nothing but cereal for a month. It's so loud that at 15% volume it registered at 80db, and at maximum caused the posters on the walls to fall off. When she watched Inception, her friend who lived in the house next door asked her to stop making her window frames rattle.

Tavi regularly says 'owo' out loud in public. She pronounces it 'oh-woh'.

Tavi is terrifyingly good at Rocket League. She joined her university's esports league, and caused enough decimation during inter-uni matches she caused several people to quit permanently.

Tavi came down to Manchester for Halloween, and everytime she saw a Genshin Impact cosplay would point at them and happily declare "There's an oomfie!" She does not play Genshin Impact.

Tavi is completely obsessed with the game Hatoful Boyfriend, that one dating sim where you go out with a bunch of pigeons. In her home lives a collection of plushies of every single character and when we visit she pelts us with them at random. She has a full dakimakura of one of the guys you can date and proudly displays it in her room. I say 'guy' like he's not a bird. He's a bird.

Tavi is wonderful.

"Hey Tavi," I say, "we're not going to make it to the tram stop in time, would you mind swinging us up there before you go?"

"Oh, sure!" she says with an angelic rasp.

Everyone's rounded up and we make our way out. I'm still running numbers in my head. 5 minute drive to get to the station. It's a bit of a walk to the platform; 2 minutes. We should make this if we get a move on.

So we pile into her shitty little student car—and forgive my homosexuality, I couldn't tell you the model even if I tried—which we manage to fill every seat of.

Now. Let me tell you a few more things about Tavi.

Tavi is a huge fan of eurobeat

Tavi is a huge fan of Initial D

Arcade Club has several Initial D cabinets

Tavi has spent the last 2 hours doing nothing but playing Initial D

Tavi pops her phone in, brings up the tram stop on google maps, which starts to chime out the directions. As we're fastening our seatbelts the engine roars to life with the turn of a key.

And among its bombastic cry, is eurobeat.

This was not some pussy shit. This wasn't your 'Night of Fire' or 'Running in the 90s'. These were cuts deeper than the mariana trench, from a woman who has listened to all two hundred and fifty Super Eurobeat albums, from a woman who has a dedicated spot in her living room for a full driving simulator setup.

The English language does not have the words to describe the speed we ripped out of this car park.

You see, the car park does not have direct access to the road. It's one of those where it's two or three turns to hit a parking spot. She, somehow, transcended the need for right turns. Gravel parted in her wake like Moses leading a speedrun of the Exodus.

My soul, the titular protagonist of this whole story, I feel eject out my back and straight through the car seat. Whatever hold it had on my corporeal form was shattered as soon as my stomach hit my throat. There was nothing to be done. I was that stunned by the literal 0 to 60 I was thrust through.

If you go to Arcade Club, it will still be there. Curled up in a puddle and weeping into the asphalt. The puddle is not from the English weather, but instead from its tears.

We're on a road. Then a different road. I don't know what road this is. Not the one we walked down, is all I know. The spare part of my brain grappling what common sense it can says a prayer to God, and every god that does and doesn't exist between Him.

During this experience, I remember speaking. I don't remember what. Words left my mouth without consulting my brain.

I think I yelled one or two times.

My friends certainly did. One friend does almost constantly, occasionally evolving into a full howl. Others laugh in combined astonishment and terror. Another tries, and fails, a bid to get Tavi to slow down.

"Yeah," she said, completely levelled, "that's the thing about drifting, it's all in the throttle control."

At least three people scream 'NO' at the top of their lungs.

I do wonder what we looked like to the denizens of Bury from the outside. We did hit a red light at some point, which I only remember for the screeching the engine made when Tavi launched us off again. Did someone look through a window while we were stopped? To see a gaggle of screaming university students held hostage by a lunatic of a woman entirely fueled by the most gottagofast-inducing music known to man?

I'm too scared to look at the road ahead. I don't know where we are anymore. Where are we going? Some vague notion of 'in time' floats around my mind and slips between my fingers. The notion that did stick around was 'I am going to Fucking Die'.

Everytime we turn, it feels like my body is a sack of organs in a washing machine. I've never felt car sick before, but this would be the closest I've ever gotten to—

The cacophony stops in an instant as she yanks the key out.

"Okay, we're here!" she chimes with a smile.

It's the tram stop, I realise. The world slowly comes back into focus around it.

We leave the car, because what the fuck else were we going to do? That's the correct move when the driver says you're at your destination. I was running entirely on social etiquette and the survival response of being seconds from hurtling into a wall.

I wave goodbye. I think. I don't remember.

Her car roars to life again, the pounding of eurobeat resuming. She sped out of the tram stop with all the fury she took us here with, burning rubber on the bus stop markings.

We watch her leave our line of sight.

We walk into the station.

It takes ten minutes before any of us can speak again.

And you know what? We made that goddamn tram. We were all sat down with the familiar doots of the best thing to happen to Manchester around us, when our usual conversation starts picking up, realising we made this thing. Felt like death was seconds ahead of us, but we made it. The circumstances that brought us here started to matter less and less.

And it's left me with this story to tell.

I guess, in all, I learnt two things that day:

If you want to get there on time, sans sanity, ask your eurobeat-obsessed friend to take you.

Never give a transwoman the aux cord.

[stanleywbaxton]

The Bizarre Late 2000s Youtube Subgenre of Movies Made in The Sims 2

This All Started When I Remembered That Bratz: Forever Diamondz Existed

My friends were talking about trucks.

Yeah.

I've really thrown three punches out sequentially, haven't I?

It's not even that out of left field for us. Trucks are just somehow a frequent point of conversation.

"They've got trucks with giant screens on them now," one says. "18 wheelers with giant screens on them."

"Hacking trucks and playing wordle on 'em," another says.

"It lights up the entire landscape," the first continues. "It's crazy."

I realise out of context this sounds like we're talking about trucks with some kind of unironic love, and not the result of a chain of increasingly insane topics fueled by unmedicated ADHD.

But, a memory assaults me.

It's probably better if I just quote myself directly:

you just reminded me of something so fucking bizarre and obscure there was a scene in the bratz forever diamondz movie that was almost exactly like this their bigass truck thats got 500 million fairy lights on it all lights up in the middle of a corn field in wyoming for some shit for NO REASON then it goes into the opening credits that was a movie

"Excuse me," another friend says.

It turns out the entire movie is on youtube, absolutely not legally, but I assume MGA stopped caring about a direct to DVD movie released over fifteen years ago. Of course, I post it with the scene timestamped.

I wait one minute.

"Stan what the fuck did I just watch."

We laugh, we jeer, we return to filling our daily quota of cum shitposts.

I'm about to close this thing I opened in incognito mode—because I don't want my youtube recommendations filled with Bratz—and resume my day, when my eyes drift down the list of related videos. I get a tingle in the back of my mind, that weird sense of deja vu.

It's a scene from this movie, remade in The Sims 2.

Oh my God.

Oh, my God.

A million and one moments from my childhood come flooding back.

My Time on Youtube When I was 9 Years Old

I spent far too much on it at that age, in retrospect. But in the moment I didn't know I was rotting my brain out from the inside, I was just having a good time.

So, the title. Yes. There is really an entire genre of youtube videos that are just movies made in TS2. That's funny in itself, but things being remade in different mediums isn't anything new. Even if the medium is a bit bizarre. Just look at Bad Apple.

But what I want to talk about—and what tripped the nostalgia neurons of my brain—is not things remade in The Sims. No. There's another genre here, of original media made in The Sims.

I'm talking full, produced, feature length original stories made entirely with the built-in video mode and whatever editing software someone had their hands on in 2009.

I mean, as feature length as youtube videos could be back then, with having ten minute limits and all.

And I need to make absolutely clear, watching these things was one of the only things I used youtube for. It was this, Animal Crossing cheats, or Club Penguin music videos.

My God, you remember those? That's gonna need a deepdive in itself.

I look at this video, and know what I have to do. I'm going to clear out an evening, sit myself down, and go on a deep dive of these Sims videos, with nothing but youtube's recommendations to guide me.

Just like I did when I was ten years old.

So join me, dear reader, on this adventure of so-bad-it's-good, juvenile ignorance, and sleep-deprived hysteria.

A Prelude

Let's start with a bang. After throwing 'sims 2 movie' in youtube's search bar, it presents me with a video titled 'Sims 2 - Creepy Hotel (Horror Movie)'.

That title alone, I know we're in for a good time.

Horror is a popular genre of these videos. Hell, I'm pretty sure a good half are all horror or horror-adjacent, and the other half variations of love stories. I believe this is also applicable to most forms of media.

But before we get into the plot, before we get into any of that, there's so much we need to discuss first.

We desperately need to talk about how our protagonist looks, for starters. This is where my extensive, and honestly worrying amount of knowledge about this game comes in.

In the Sims community, it's a common opinion that most anything Maxis made for the game is ugly. Especially things that are put on your sim. Hair, clothes, body models, that sort of deal. Now, honestly? I think most base-game Maxis things look good. They all have a cohesive feel, in TS2 at least. It's cartoonish, which is very much the intention, and realistic enough that it's not distracting, but stylized enough that it's not dated.

But that didn't stop the development of modding communities entirely built around trying to make sims as beautiful as possible. And this beauty is... sanitised, shall we say. The uncanny valley was perfected by Sims modders.

Our protagonist is donned head-to-toe in custom content. Dewy skin, shaded to bring out her collar bones. A body with a waist that could only be achieved with a corset. Absolutely perfect makeup, designed to only look good from one exact angle.

And the HAIR.

If you've dabbled any in Sims custom content you know exactly what kind of hair I'm talking about. If you don't, how about you do some homework. Put 'coolsims hair' into google images and tell me what you see.

The worst part, all of this custom content put on our protagonist, the person we're supposed to be rooting for, just shows how this is what our video creator sees as beautiful. The heroes of the story are pretty. Unnaturally pretty. She doesn't have a single 'flaw' to her. It's quite a terrible snapshot of the body image shoved onto teen girls at the time.

"Are you seriously," you might be saying, "making critical analysis of beauty standards of the 2000s while watching videos made in The Sims 2?"

Yes.

These 'perfect' sims are an absolute delight to watch in motion. As mentioned, TS2 is cartoonish to the nth degree. Expressions are highly exaggerated and squash and stretch liberally, and the default textures are all stylised with this in mind. Ontop of making things 'beautiful', modders also had an obsession with the hyper-realistic.

I focused on hair specifically as there were several that were notorious for melting graphics cards with the amount of polygons they had.

But here's the thing, this is hyper-realism in a game released in 2004. Those tech demos that show every pore of skin being rendered in real time are decades away, which means people settled for insane amounts of detail, to then be completely static models. They looked great in screenshots to put on your website, but not so much when they moved.

In a game where the animations are extremely lively, well...

Our protagonist with her perfect hair, glittering eyes, sweat-defying makeup, is betrayed every time she moves. She's not 'acting' her way through this video, she's in a constant battle with a glitching instagram filter.

Another thing about these. Free will is a notable mechanic in The Sims. When you're not filling their lives with actions, sims tend to wander off and do their own thing. But, if you wish, you can disable it and sims will only perform actions you set out for them. For some reason, none of these Sims videos have any sense to turn it off. Any moment a sim doesn't have a plumbob over their heads is filled with them chewing the scenery. When they're front and centre on the camera again there's crumbs of cardboard around their lips.

Or feathers in their hair from a pillow fight. It's always a pillow fight.

Also, this doesn't even bring up the issue of just, well, the game happening. Relationships changing when sims are 'acting' with eachother, townies coming round to your house, childs and teens needing to go to school, random popups of friendships forming or enemies being declared, the camera suddenly panning over to dramatic happenings on the other side of the lot, speech bubbles of sims talking about planes when the video insists it's about family drama... The list is really endless here.

I'm not even on the story yet. I'm less than 30 seconds into this thing and I'm in a giddy fever picking apart all the things that tickle me in a perfect storm of comedy.

God, I love these videos.

Sims 2 - Creepy Hotel (Horror Movie)

Alright, let's cut the shit and get to the plot.

The stories in these videos are just as good, if not better, than all the quirks that come with them being made in TS2. Keep in mind, the vast majority of these—and I'd hazard to say every video I mention—are made entirely by a kid. Just the one, and occasionally a friend they bring round from school to huddle around their parent's PC. They don't understand plot devices. Acts. Narrative structure. They pick up whatever sticks from their dad's taste in movies and decide to make their own.

It's so genuine. And I love it.

I have to mention the title card, for starters. It's black arial font with a red glow, because those are spooky colours. The text balloons to full size, sits there for a second, and then shrinks back down. No music plays.

Absolutely stellar.

But snark aside, I was oddly... impressed with the opening? We have our protagonist carrying a child up a set of stairs into a hotel. It's got multiple shots, decently staged, and the pacing feels nice with how they're cut together. Not to mention the blue hues the night brings us, giving us a nice atmosphere off the bat. I'm actually enjoying myself.

"Are you seriously," you might also be saying, "giving credit to the cinematography of a video made in The Sims 2?"

Yes.

Fortunately for us the quality tanks as soon as we enter the hotel.

As we all know, the spookiest hotels are ones where all the lights are on full blast, and are decorated with furniture that would be dubiously sold as 'oriental'.

The mother walks up to the desk, and I assume she calls for attention. I wouldn't know because she just stands there. The receptionist then walks out to greet her.

We can immediately tell he is a vampire.

This is because of his very obvious vampire walk cycle.

He opens the door and walks out with an arm in front of his face, teeth bared. If we could hear the game audio he'd probably be hissing.

You know that whole bit I mentioned about animations? When supernatural sims got introduced, of course they had to be just as—if not more—cartoonish as the rest of them. Making your sim an actual vampire for the height of accuracy in your horror youtube movie is a requirement. This means they come with all the wonderful details Maxis shoved in them, back before EA sucked any sense of creativity out of the studio.

The aforementioned vampire receptionist, who looks like he stole his wardrobe from the Matrix, asks our protagonist what he can do for her.

Oh, another thing. There's no voiceovers to these. I'm so used to this that I completely forgot it would be something to mention. This is a silent movie with subtitles. Every TS2 movie is. That's the joy of being a one-kid production.

Our protagonist decides that Neo with skin blue enough that it could pass as camouflage in the ocean is trustworthy, and asks if there's a room available for her and her son. And they need a crib, she insists. The vampire nods, and I swear it's been sped up.

We're then treated to a random shot of silence while the two stare at eachother, and on the check-in desk we see several office paper trays. Because TS2 does not come with a hotel check-in book as decoration, and this is what our video creator decided was the closest thing.

The mother asks where her room is, and the vampire says it's "on top of those stairs".

He does an animation lazy sims do when they've been standing for too long.

This whole bit is so bizarre to me. He didn't even say the room number. Or any direction besides 'on top'. Regardless, the mother makes her way upstairs to her room.

A clown walks into the lobby.

No, seriously. A rainbow-clad clown walks into the lobby.

He speaks into the camera, which I assume is to our vampire friend, saying that it's been a long while since someone's stayed here. They want to scare her, but not so quickly that she runs away off the bat.

We now have our villains' motivations: to be mildly irritating.

One of our villains is a clown.

It's at this moment I realise why the hotel has pink wallpaper everywhere. This wallpaper is the only one in the entire game that comes with a variation where the edges are peeling up. Our video creator must have decided that peeling wallpaper is the only thing suitable for a haunted hotel, and having everything in a salmon pink was a worthy sacrifice.

Our protagonist enters her room, and surprisingly it has a crib. Surprisingly in the other direction, there's a sink in the bedroom. This must be a common feature of Sims-world hotels, as she does not question this at all and fills a glass of water before calling it a night.

The beloved title font returns. 'That night', it says. The boy sleeps, as does the mother.

We cut to the vampire punching a wall.

Our subtitles helpfully tell us '(constant banging)'. They have a red outline now, which I can only assume means we've shifted into spooky mode.

This wakes the mother, who gets up in complete serenity and, inexplicably, in slow motion. She holds her ear to the wall, then starts banging on it in return. Given the subtitle hasn't left us, the vampire doesn't stop.

Could you imagine his vampire ancestors watching him right now? Creature of the night, scorn of humanity. Now reduced to annoying someone trying to sleep.

Miraculously, the boy hasn't woken at all from this. This is the part I found the most unbelievable.

The mother goes down to the front desk to complain. Instead of our vampire friend, it's a zombie waiting for her. I know it's a zombie because of the zombie animations, the zombie skin, and the zombie rose it wears on its zombie suit.

She asks if there's anything they can do about her hotel neighbours using the wall as a drum kit. The zombie obliges. It calls her 'Mam', which is definitely not a typo of 'ma'am', and certainly a quirk of zombie culture.

We have a shot of the mother getting anxious over her predicament, and possibly having second thoughts about staying here. I watch her immaculately trimmed eyebrows squirm like caterpillars.

And then, oh no! The vampire takes the kid!

Who's quite calm about the state of affairs, I should note. Being carried out of his cot by a vampire and all.

The game reason is simple. Toddlers being kidnapped by adults in the same household isn't really an established mechanic. Toddlers being kidnapped isn't a mechanic, period. There's no proper way to drag the kid away kicking and screaming.

Looking at it from a story perspective is far funnier. Maybe he thinks that's his dad. Maybe his mother instilled him with no sense of stranger danger. Maybe he just really likes vampires and thinks it's his lucky day.

The vampire takes the kid away upstairs, and the mother returns to find her son missing. Oh dear. There's a moment of shock, immediately followed by her smiling. Our video creator decided her lip shape has to have the corners upturned. Her default expression is to always smile.

She runs out of her room, and into a corridor.

Dear God. This corridor.

Not only is it short enough that it's only a corridor in name, but our video creator tries to do this all-impressive shot where it pans down the whole length of it. Because of its length—that being, the lack of it—this shot barely lasts a second.

That's not even mentioning the doors. They're all laid out directly opposite each other. The zombie walks from one door straight across to the other parallel to it. This is some straight Scooby Doo shit and I'm in awe at how I'll never be this funny.

The mother tries to flag the attention of the zombie, following it into the room. Then in there we're met with the first true scare of the video, of...

Two people playing chess?

I mean, they're also covered in blood, but that's it. Two elders playing chess.

They've only just started their game, too. Ol' white-shirt over here's only moved a pawn and black-jumper's not even had a turn yet. Come on. They could have at least played a few turns before the cameras rolled. Give me the illusion they've been sitting here for more than thirty seconds.

We've been here for hours! We don't even care about the stains in our clothes! The blood has dried and has even less chance of being washed out now! Ooooooooooo!

Funny enough, I was playing Sunless Seas right before this and started a storyline entirely around chess. And blood. I should go back and play more chess.

The mother is terrified regardless. She runs out of the room, to see the vampire doing the same door stunt. As it went so well last time, she tries flagging him down instead.

Another scare behind the door! We're met with a nurse dead on the ground, who,

er,

I think it's better if I just show you this.

[Ma'am. Your cooch.]

You know one of those things that baffles you, but in a way that you can't really express it? How horrible and how hilarious it is cancel out and you're just left with an awkward void? You don't really feel it but you certainly know it's there?

The blood that's only on the body and not on the floor. Her nails that colour match it. The modded dress that I am 90% certain was made as fetish wear, and our video creator had no idea. The fact it's a pussy-out look. The fact I'm supposed to be scared. Her being dead but still cinched to high heaven. The fact her hair still had to be perfect.

That's the only way I can describe the emotion it elicits. I feel the square root of negative bafflement when I look at this.

The mother's smile is really working against her for the next shock animation. She looks like she just wandered into her surprise birthday party.

For some reason, the opposite end of the corridor leads directly outside to a staircase. Very nice that this haunted hotel comes with adequate fire escape compliance.

The mother runs down it, so I guess this is her attempt at an escape? Fuck the kid, I guess.

Maybe a bit of her brain was left inside on seeing that nurse. I know mine was.

But we don't forget about him long, because the kid is hanging off a balcony!

...Is what I assume this scene was going for. What's actually happening is the clown is playing with the kid, which involves throwing him up and catching him, and just so happens to be standing on a balcony. There's one part of the animation where the clown hangs the kid upside down while he babbles gleefully, and the music swells to tell you SPOOKY OCCURRENCES ARE TAKING PLACE during this part.

Oh yeah. There's music during this. It was so quiet until this point I genuinely didn't notice.

On seeing her child in such danger, the mother runs back into the hotel from the front entrance. Guess that suddenly reminded her of her responsibilities as a parent.

She makes it up to the balcony, and delivers the harshest words she can to the man who's holding her kid hostage:

Put down my baby down asshole.

Goosebumps.

The clown bolts away, taunting that she has to catch him first. She responds by going after him, and walking down the stairs at a completely normal pace.

This is because there's no animation for running on spiral staircases.

I know our video creator tried to make her run, because as soon as she hits the final step she gallops away with all the speed that Hermes could lend her. We run through her room, down a much longer corridor, and into another spooky corridor offshoot. I'm at the edge of my seat for what this one could contain.

There's nothing.

Genuinely, nothing. It's an empty room.

You know what? I'm honestly disappointed. I was hoping for a jumpscare from the clown at least. It's just the kid sat on the floor, vibing out. He's probably had the most fun he's had in his entire life over the past hour.

Regardless, she picks the kid up, they cuddle, and she runs out the hotel as fast as Hermes' remaining blessings will take her. We see the hotel's inhabitants on the porch, all jeering at the mother as she runs away.

And... that's where it ends. Credits. You thought I was joking with the villains' motives being 'be mildly irritating'? No. Apparently they succeeded.

What have we learnt from this? Never trust hotels run by men who take fashion tips from movies, I suppose.

And are also vampires.

Let's see some others.

the sims 2 gay

This isn't a story the title just made me burst out laughing.

Diversion aside, this is a prime time capsule. The whole video 5 frames a second from a PC that can barely run the game, and no sound because audio capture is off by default in the game settings. The majority of TS2 videos from this time are exactly like that, or have so few pixels you can count them on your hands.

Two male sims cuddle on a couch. This is the entire video.

"How do you make them gay???!!" a comment from 12 years ago cries to God, unanswered.

In the recommended, a Sims 2 video of Light and L from Death Note fucking eachother.

I decide to not continue further.

Light and L Screw

No of course I did are you kidding me?

There's nothing to comment on here, unfortunately. It's two characters remade in TS2 doing a default woohoo action. The player is spamming the action queue with kisses, as heard from the UI noises. It ends with the ever-infamous cutscene.

The video lasts for a minute and a half. I use this time to reflect on my life choices.

How would myself from ten years ago react to me writing this? These videos I spent so much of my time watching. I think I'd be confused why I'm writing out of fun, considering how much I hated English classes. Also at why I'm a man now.

"Love you," someone from last month comments.

Last month.

I spam the back button several times.

Sims 2 Anorexia

To be met with this!

I hesitate to put a content warning down. Not out of some kind of disrespect, but to the specific way that a ten year old tells extremely serious stories.

This is an interesting phenomenon I've seen. There's many of these videos that try to tackle serious matters. This is far from the only one about anorexia or other EDs. Others deal with matters of abuse, mental health, pretty much any terrible thing you could think of.

The problem, they are told by a ten year old.

And it's something not even limited to these kinds of videos. You ever read the ever-infamous My Immortal? The fanfiction that everyone still can't decide if it was actually made by a kid or is one of the greatest pieces of satire ever written? If it was made by a kid, it hits the exact thing I'm talking about here. It frequently mentions things like suicide, self harm, abuse, the whole deal. Played as a sad moment, of course, with how the characters react to it, but they're thrown around so blasé and as a side-step to other major plot devices that it wraps around from horrible to hilarious.

It's a mind trying to describe the horrors of the world they're seeing for the first time, but a mind that can't quite communicate how terrible they are.

We're introduced to Ella, a school-age girl. We're told that she is very overweight and spends most of her time eating food. We're then treated to a montage of her snacking.

And... Well. You can see how our video creator tried.

The fat model for sims children is, really, the same as the skinny one. The only difference is the stomach sticks out a bit more. Our video creator must have noticed this, as they tried to fatten Ella's face as much as possible.

The effect is we have an average weight child that looks like she's constantly puffing her cheeks out.

We're then told Ella is bullied at school over her weight. A group of kids point and laugh while Ella cries, and one of them gets into a full fight with her.

While they fight, two kids in the background talk about films.

Ella has a terrible time at school, and her homelife is about as bad.

...Is what we're told. When Ella gets home, her mother is distressed over the black eye she has, and tries to comfort her before she runs off to her room. When I read that, I was expecting her mother to scream at her, or something. Maybe that's because there's so many of these videos where that exact thing happens.

Ella is now determined to lose weight. She goes to the best place possible for advice on issues of appearance and self-esteem.

The internet! Oh, this one isn't going to end well, is it?

A few months later, it's Ella's birthday.

Now, a quick note on ageing in The Sims if you don't know. Sims don't age progressively, instead having their lives split into chunks known as life stages. It's this way for several reasons, both for easier programming and better gameplay. A Sim's 'birthday' isn't them getting a year older, but actually progressing to the next life stage. Ella's current stage is a child, so her next would be a teen.

So, from a story perspective, we have a child around the age of nine suddenly becoming sixteen.

I just wonder, why wasn't Ella a teen from the start? It wouldn't have changed the plot at all; I'd argue a kid is more likely to be bullied in highschool over their weight, even. Nothing actually happens at the birthday, either. It's a random point in the story that serves nothing.

I think I know why.

You see, many of these TS2 movies are improvised on what the game throws at them, as well as its limitations. Oftentimes they begin with a loose plot to follow, but quirks of the game will pop up and worm their way in. As these are almost always shot in chronological order, the story changes around whatever boundaries the game puts on it. Much like how a river morphs as it flows through a valley to reach the sea.

I really just tried to wax poetic about this.

One of the things Ella finds on the internet is advice to workout. Children in TS2, notably, cannot.

I think what happened, is our video creator fully intended for Ella to be a child throughout this story. Then, when realising that the crux of the plotline required her to do something the game doesn't allow, aged her up to a teen so the story continues unimpeded. To explain the sudden change, her birthday was included.

This also implies she had her birthday just to work out. The first thing we see Ella do after blowing her candles out is put on some gym clothes and start doing crunches.

Ella is a workout machine now. Apparently she's doing so 'all day and everyday'. Some days pass—no, no, 'days past', actually—and the story happily declares she's 'healthy as a fiddle'. I can only assume this is an avant-garde take on fit as a fiddle.

But more to the point, healthy in a few days? She lost what was, apparently, a horrendous amount of fat as quickly as all those diet suppressants say you can? I thought we were trying to operate on real-world time given that her birthday was months away, and sims are only children for eight days.

Whatever explanation, we're told that despite getting to a healthy weight Ella continues working out non-stop. The next shot of her in the mirror has her in a custom body model, one where she's exceptionally thin.

And the unfortunate part? She doesn't look that far off to the mother in the hotel video.

At school, everyone's shocked. One guy asks what's happened to her.

Does this mean she was locked in her house doing nothing but exercise for the past week? Good Lord.

Ella takes all of these comments on her weight as them simply making fun of her for being fat, laughing at why they're still doing it. The same guy apologises for bullying her when they were younger, but insists that she needs to do something about being underweight. They argue, it escalates, Ella storms back home.

There, her mother now says she has to eat something. Ella storms off again to her room.

Note for the back row: not how you deal with someone with an ED.

Weeks later, Ella falls very ill. Actually ill; the next animation she does is a coughing fit when sims catch the flu.

I thought this was going to end up with her in hospital, either ending in a miraculous recovery or her unfortunate passing. I was close to skipping a runthrough of this one, as it was similar to others that were pretty average. Poorly made and absolutely products of the time, but not poor enough where it becomes funny.

What happens next, I could not prepare myself for in the slightest.

Ella runs into the backyard, and starts digging a hole with a shovel while declaring that no-one cares anymore. I'm immensely intrigued by what she could be doing here. It's a sharp left turn to where I thought it was going.

She digs more and more, and hits the end of the digging animation. If you're wondering, the actual action here is a sim trying to find treasure.

We cut to night once it ends, and Ella now stands in an actual hole, a sharp depression made with landscaping tools.

Then, she dies.

She dies in a grave she dug herself.

I,

was stunned. I pause the video and just stare at the screen with my jaw open.

I cannot stress this enough. She literally digs her own grave.

I should not be laughing at this. By every metric, this is terrible. Everything that's brought Ella up to this point and every impact it's had on her is absolutely terrible.

But this poor girl dug her own grave, and keeled over in it.

And I laughed.

Is my laugh from disbelief? Horror? Actually finding it funny? A terrible blend of all three where I can't tell where one begins and the other ends?

I don't know anymore.

One of the people from school—who was walking by her house in the middle of the night, for some reason?—spots Ella and calls the police. They arrive, and break the news to her mother.

Now here's the thing, when we look at this from a game perspective. The only purpose of the police is to apprehend criminals. If there isn't one on the lot, the police reprimand you for wasting their time.

The shot of the officer is not her breaking the terrible news, but actually telling off the homeowner for abusing the emergency line.

Subtitles continue the illusion, anyways. The officer says: "Your daughter was found dead in a hole."

I shouldn't laugh again, but I do.

A funeral is held for Ella. Everyone from her school attends, all in very colourful dress. I can count on my hand the amount of people in black.

They decide to put her self-dug grave to good use, and put a tombstone in it.

Credits.

I burst out laughing again.

Sometimes I wonder why we even bother being comics, because we will never, ever, match the unfiltered humour of a child. We're too old to have the audacity to do shit like this.

Sad teenage pregnancy story ( SIMS 2 ) * This can happen in life*

In life.

Not just in real life. In LIFE.

What could this mean? What does the exclusion of 'real' imply here? Does this mean it can happen in unreal realities? Do unreal realities exist in TS2, or are we speaking about the waking world here? Does this video have occult properties we don't know of? Have I exhausted this bit?

It's only now I realise how tired I am, but my mind is filled with vague notions of the weird obsession these stories had with teenage pregnancy. Yeah, there are tonnes of these TS2 movies with similar titles all over youtube. Wasn't that a weird portion of the 2000s? So many pieces of reality TV, all obsessed with teen pregnancy stories. Why? Was it the scandal of it, something deemed so life-altering and simultaneously seen as a sign of a bad upbringing? Oh, no. This is going to go into another tangent on society and how it affects young girls, isn't it?

This train of thought explodes with my sides as soon as I click play.

The title card. Every goddamn time with the title card.

It happily declares, while clouds spin in the background, 'A sad teen pregnancy story!' in a bubbly font that's trying so hard to not be Comic Sans. We open with a shot of a mansion at daytime lasting barely a second, then it's suddenly night, and we're introduced to our two main characters Kevin and Kourtney eating dinner.

This is going to be a good one. I can feel it.

It doesn't stop being incredible once our protagonists start talking, either. This one takes a, say, different approach to the subtitles. Instead of having them on the bottom on a black background, they are instead right in the action, and are often on top of the sims' faces. It doesn't stop there either, as the colours for the text range from 'piss yellow' to 'pink hotter than a boiling kettle'. The dialogue is even more incredible. I can't tell if it's done out of a weak understanding of text-talk, or genuinely not knowing how to spell most of these words.

I haven't even mentioned the cinematography. Every single shot has the camera moving constantly while it tries to line up the currently speaking sim in the middle of the screen. It makes the subtitles even more difficult to read. Truly experimental.

The story.

Kourtney has moved in with her boyfriend Kevin, who says how overjoyed he is that she did. She jeers at how living with her parents was so annoying, and informs us that at her age of 16 she is "basicly[sic] a young adult."

The joys of being a teen. I'm 22 and don't feel like an adult. At 16, I absolutely did.

We then get an interesting nugget from Kevin, which gives us a lot of questions to think about. The best part, I don't even think this was intentional.

Kevin, too, moved out of his parents house. Except the house they're in right now is his parents house. They moved out, and left the house entirely to Kevin.

Why would they do this? There is no reasonable explanation I can think of. Let's say they're super rich. They move out, and buy a new house for themselves. Why wouldn't they have Kevin move into that house instead? Why would they uproot themselves from a house they've surely lived in for a good while? And if they're not rich, that brings even more questions on why this is the arrangement they settled on. I genuinely can't think of a logical conclusion here.

Why did his parents leave him a full mansion, with several bedrooms? He's the only person living here, before Kourtney arrived.

...Did he kill his parents?

No more, no more. Let's see the actual story.

Kourtney thanks him—no, sorry, "shankyou 4 letting [her] say." The two get all lovey-dovey. Kevin asks if anyone's called her beautiful, and Kourtney says no.

Which... implies he never has before? They've had sex, as the title says, and he never called her pretty?

She's flattered, anyway, and uses <3 as punctuation. I love the use of emoticons in this. Kourtney smiles with a :)

Kevin smiles like this:

(:

I don't like that.

The next day, Kourtney doesn't feel good. She's sipping on a can of Liquid when she runs to the toilet and throws up. The subtitles helpfully inform us of this as well, as Kourtney—now Koutney, actually—'* PUKES *'.

Koutney turns back into Kourtney, and after throwing up once decides this is the time for a pregnancy test. I've never been pregnant personally, but a cursory google tells me that morning sickness usually kicks in around six weeks after conception. Well, from a game perspective, sickness occurs a few hours after a successful woohoo. Maybe our video creator assumed that was also true of reality. Kourtney goes out to purchase a test.

My sides explode again.

I was going to try to describe this, but no. No words can possibly describe the visual impact. This is how the purchase is shown:

This image, set to a Jonas Brothers song.

I need you to understand how many of these videos deep I was. There's many I didn't even bother mentioning, so you're only seeing the cream of the crop. By this point I've lost count of how many I'd witnessed over the last three hours. My only pauses were to make occasional notes.

This broke me. I'd lost it.

I sat there for several minutes making pitiful laughs into my hands, weeping.

I'd lost track of time so bad I'd completely forgotten my commitments for the evening. Every Friday my friends get together to swap music. A panicked glance at the clock tells me we start in ten minutes.

I'm hosting, so I scramble to get a chrome window up, ready for a barrage of links. Fortunately some say they'll be a few minutes late, so why not continue my little journey? Clearly I have nothing better to do with my time. We have a shot of Kourtney on the toilet—which, honestly? I'm impressed our video creator knew how pregnancy tests work—whilst that same song continues over it.

I did not realise, if you share a chrome window, discord picks up the sound from all of them.

My friends had just heard me play the Jonas Brothers with no context.

"We heard your boy band," one says.

So, I mean, I had to come clean to them.

I can feel glares from across an ocean. "Why are you—"

"For an essay," I cut in.

They only send an ellipsis.

I heard some good tunes that night, but constantly overshadowed by this stupid video peaking behind another window. Back to our story.

A spinning title card, that has no attempt at being centred, tells us a few months pass. Kourtney monologues, unprompted, that she's been hiding her pregnancy from Kevin who thinks she's just been getting fat. She worries that he might leave her once he finds out, and out of context this sounds quite moving, if she didn't say it like this:

Ugh im stupid im only 16 and now pregnant i HATE my life!

The Jonas Brothers are still playing.

You know what I'm really stunned by? The fact that 'pregnant' hasn't been misspelt once during this entire video. That yahoo answers video has been staring me down at the edge of my peripheral vision this entire time. At least Kourtney isn't gregnant.

The camera moves towards Kourtney's face as she gets up.

"Oh GOD," I say out loud.

I genuinely thought she had some kind of skin infection, but looking closer it's some custom makeup to make her look like she's been crying. The only problem, it looks exactly like wax has been leaking out of her eyes. Also, I'm fairly certain she has base-game acne under all that. Poor girl.

Kourtney decides it's finally time to tell Kevin over lunch. The subtitles change to Arial, for some reason, and Kevin asks why Kourtney's been crying. He also throws a side jab that she needs to be easy on her sandwich.

The font changes back and Kourtney says no, she's not fat, she's pregnant!

Kevin's reaction is thus:

:OOO

Why do these stupid emotes make me smile so much.

The two argue. Kevin asks how she could be 'DAM PREGNANT'. Kourtney yells back what a stupid question that is, and that the baby's his. This implies that Kevin doesn't know how sex works.

Kevin denies being the father at all, and that even if he was he's too young to look after it. The font has changed back to Arial. I consider what creative decisions have gone into the font usage.

Kourtney demands that he has to be there, berating him. Her fears unfortunately come to fruition, and Kevin breaks up with her. He storms out of the house, saying his brother will come back to retrieve his stuff for him, and leaves with a final sneer of 'GOOD LUCK PAYING THE BILLS!'.

Now... there's questions here. I have a lot of questions about Kevin. He's left this house to never see Kourtney again, but isn't this his house? Or more, the house his parent's suspiciously left him after they moved out? Why did he just leave?

We've also established that he has a brother. Where does the brother live? With their parents? Him picking up stuff on Kevin's behalf would imply he's around his age, or older, to be able to make the trip there. If he's much older, he probably doesn't live with their parents, then. Is his brother aware of this arrangement? What does he think about it?

Also, the comment about bills. That implies that Kevin was the breadwinner while Kourtney didn't work, or went to school full time. What's his job? Does he have a job? Does he instead have an inheritance? If it's an inheritance, considering his parents never want to see him again according to his own word, how did he receive it?

Who are you, Kevin? Who are you? I have to know more. I have to—

Enough about Kevin. Enough. We never see him in the story again. Kourtney laments that she can't get through this pregnancy alone, but regardless tells her bump that they can do this without 'you dam father'.

There's also a spoiler on this subtitle. It says that Kourtney '* Talks to babys in belly*'. Plural, if not misspelt. By now she's been adamant it's only one, but now looks like there could be more.

Which I thought was going to be the twist, except the next title card tells us she gives birth to twins.

The same title card also tells us that 'days past'. This argument and Kevin leaving all takes place in one day, which means that she had the baby at around three months? Possibly four? Unless we're being extremely liberal with the amount of days here, that amount being a hundred and seventy of them.

Or, as a comment points out, she managed to make it through nine months of pregnancy without Kevin noticing. I'm not sure which is funnier.

Kourtney goes into labour. The Jonas Brothers have not stopped.

Now this, this is the peak of the video.

Her water breaks in the middle of the kitchen in her pyjamas. That's funny in itself, as well as the juxtaposition between the default labour animations and her apparent distraught state, as the cutscene always shows the sim overjoyed at the wonders of bringing a new life into the world. The subtitles say she '* SCREAMS *'.

In the background, however, you might notice that there's a pan on the stove. More alarmingly, whatever's in the pan is burning.

My flight or fight response kicks in. A million Sims disasters flash before my eyes.

I can tell you, with absolute confidence, this was not planned to be part of the story.

Sims giving birth is an autonomous event. It's on a specific clock of 75 hours after conception, and once the clock ticks over there's no way to stop it. It can't be cancelled. It can't be delayed. Not even with cheats or mods. Much like actual labour, once that child is coming out, that child is coming out. Your sim will cancel every action they're doing, call for your attention, and go into labour.

Our video creator, likely not knowing how to pause sim needs with cheats, had Kourtney make some food when she was hungry. This action was then cancelled by her giving birth.

Even if you haven't played The Sims you know what's about to happen.

Kourtney delivers her first child. Now, because she's having twins, the game cannot handle a sim holding more than one baby at a time. This means she places the baby on the ground.

In front of the oven.

She delivers the second with no issue. She also, inexplicably, places this baby on the ground.

The oven bursts into flames.

What gets me, is that this is such a Sims thing to happen. It's something you can't truly explain the experience of without having poured hours into the game yourself. Looking away for two seconds and your sim dying while an elevator malfunctions. A meteor hitting the school while the entire town's next generation is in there. Having your house go up in flames at the exact same time your sim's giving birth. This is the thing that greentexts are made of.

The Sims does not care for what headcanon you place on your household. It only cares for chaos.

Because there's a fire alarm somewhere, the fire department is here. Fun part about TS2, if you have a fire alarm in your house a fire truck will arrive seconds after it's tripped. No exaggeration.

Kourtney is still acting autonomously here. She grabs one of the babies and runs out of the house. The subtitles are desperately trying to save the situation, with Kourtney saying 'OMGGGG!', and the firefighter declaring they have her other baby safe, while it's still on the ground in front of the oven.

Cut. And the fire is never mentioned again.

You know what I'd talk about, even just once, if I gave birth in my kitchen while it was on fire? Maybe the fact that THE KITCHEN WAS ON FIRE.

Kourtney is just built different, I guess. The music now changes to Katy Perry.

She puts her babies into cribs, and one of the cribs is outside the baby room, which leads me to believe having twins was not planned either. Kourtney dotes on them, repeating over and over that she doesn't want them to forget her and how much she loves them. Many '<3's are sprinkled through this. A little weird on the insistence to not forget her, but who am I to go after how she expresses her love?

A scrolling title card tells us a few moments pass.

Now, I feel this is another time where I just show you an image.

There are ten seconds left of this video.

We're then treated to a title card telling us what happens after Kourtney dies. Or, sorry, 'after Kourntey drownded herself'. The police found her, and a funeral was held. No, no, a 'furneral'. And...

It's easier if I quote the whole thing.

After Kourtney drownded herself there was a funeral held for her as the police found her they also found the two babys inside witch the social worker took but they ended up being with kourtney parents ( there grandparents)

It took me three tries to fully parse this.

So, Kourtney has a funeral, which I assume was organised by her parents considering they took in her children. We also learn that Kevin didn't attend, and that he's skipped town entirely.

...Because he's running after he killed his—

No. We are not talking about Kevin.

We learn the babies' names are 'Stacy Destiny Hunter' and 'Luke Snow Hunter'. I have run out of funny things to say but they speak for themselves.

The video ends with a cut to black.

...

My God.

I'm not sure if the noise I made after finishing this can be described. Nor could my emotional state.

I'm exhausted. I'm delirious. I have to go to bed.

Just when I'm getting out of my chair, a memory assaults me.

Alex's Sims 2-Titanic

I can't go to bed. I was infatuated with this.

Most of the videos I watched when I was younger are nothing more than fleeting memories. As you can plainly see, TS2 movies didn't have the most distinct names, and they end up being so similar that even if one of them was one I'd watched when I was younger I doubt I'd remember it.

This, however. This stuck in my mind.

It's Titanic, the 1997 movie, remade in TS2.

Funny enough, I've never seen the movie. Nor had I as a kid. I'd seen snippets, and have fragmented memories of watching thirty minute chunks of it in English lessons, but never the full thing.

I have to confirm this was a real, actual thing that existed, and not some false memory.

And it does. My God, it does.

I still don't fully know why I was obsessed with this thing. Like I mentioned, I'd never seen Titanic. It's not like I'd watched it and wanted to see whatever 2009 youtube would throw at me when I put 'titanic funny' in the search bar. I watched this purely because of how much I played TS2.

And I watched it again. And again. And again and again and again and again.

Which is really the funny part, because I don't remember a single part of it. Just the sheer amount of time I spent watching it.

Here's the thing about this. When I say it's a remake of the movie, it's a straight remake of the movie. Our video creator's taken the audio track and is replicating all the visuals in TS2. Every scene is packed with custom content and all the sims look as close to the real actors as possible. The only limit being, well, the fact it's in TS2.

The opening is what I remember most vividly, and there is a mountain of anticipation behind my click on 'Part One'. It's the bit where Rose is watching the TV, and...

you know.

I remember this looking a lot better. I could have sworn this was in HD.

I'm not about to sit through this. Maybe another time. I didn't even have the capacity to laugh at it by now; my comedy brain had shut down completely.

Then, I notice something in the title.

It's a small thing, but the video has '(old version)' appended to it. Not entirely unusual. A lot of these old videos—not even limited to TS2 projects, at this point—would have 'old version' or 'dead project' or 'see description for new channel' in them. Sure enough, after investigating the channel, I see an attempt to restart the series with '(new version)'. It too was left unfinished.

It's like looking at a graveyard. Seeing all these videos posted a decade ago that feels like yesterday. The oldest ones on this channel are from fifteen years ago. I was barely 6 years old when these were upped.

I pause for a moment, thinking about digital history.

Then my jaw drops on seeing the latest upload.

Look at the gap between those dates. LOOK AT IT.

I pour over the videos, the comments recently left. The owner of the channel has restarted the project and wants to bring it to completion by the movie's 25th anniversary. The latest video is a showcase of the updated sim models, posted one month ago.

As far as I can tell, this project is still actively being worked on as I write.

Think about this. All of these Sims videos, they were made by kids. I, a ten year old, was watching videos made by other ten year olds. This had to have been made by someone in their early teens, back then. The creator of this video is now, in the current year, a twenty-something like I am, and still has the dedication to recreate the entirety of Titanic in a 2004 PC game.

With this revelation annihilating me, my brain is finally ready to let go. I close the window and finish the journey.

I say this with my whole heart, Iluvcats4, if you are somehow reading this, I want you to finish this in the God-given decade of the 2020s. Please. I don't care if you do it with the exact level of quality of the videos we've discussed previously. If anything, that would only make the experience better. I will, hand on heart, watch the entire thing, and love every second of it.

I exhale.

Jesus Christ.

So the Story Comes to Close

Wasn't this a journey?

I didn't expect this to be this long. I tried jumping down a rabbit hole and slipped and fell down the hillside instead. It just kept going on, and on. I forgot how my legs worked by the time I got to sleep.

Delirium aside, this was a genuine joy to write. Running back through this was a full nostalgia trip. All these little time capsules; snapshots of the years that were my childhood. I still love The Sims to this day. The classic stuff, at least. It was formative media for me.

And in a weird way, they're my roots.

The Sims, TS2 in particular, is what really started my storytelling kick all those years ago. I'd sit there with the scrapbook open, constructing on-the-fly storylines based on whatever bullshit flew into my head at that moment. Putting dialogue in the comment boxes. Going frame-by-frame with the pause button to make this camera shot just right.

I hated my English classes, you know.

There was no-one I was doing this for. No-one ever saw them. I did it out of genuine enjoyment, no care of how 'good' or 'bad' they came out.

And that's all these videos really are, and why I love them so.

There was no expectation. No audience to please. No rules, no boundaries, only the endless creativity the game offered us. A sandbox, an invitation. A few prompts to make the gears in our heads turn. We talked about Romeo and Juliet in school today. Let's make a love story. Would having three characters in this story be more fun? Four? How about a full house of eight? What about if we were in the desert? Or in the middle of winter, with piles of snow everywhere? What if we built a school? Or a castle? Or we downloaded some mods and made everyone mermaids?

We created, because the act of creating made us happy. And we shared them, to others who created, because the act of sharing made us happy. And we watched them, and enjoyed them, because it made us happy.

We were only children, playing as children should.

[stanleywbaxton]

Forming a Parasocial Relationship With My Printer

Not actually my printer; it just looks nice [x]

I'm Forcing You to Sit in This Chair While I Talk About Books

In its barest form, a book is some folded paper attached to a cover. This seems like something simple to make, but have you ever folded a stack of paper in half? Not just one or two sheets, I'm talking a chunk of the things. Enough that it could make a dent in your skull if you got the angle right. Go on. Grab a stack of old papers, thick enough that the ligaments in your thumb start to scream. Fold the whole thing in half. I dare you.

Bit tricky, right? You've got a lot of bulk in the way, and I bet that the paper on the outside has barely a crease in it, let alone a fold. Oh, there's also the length of the paper. Notice how the sheet on the top, on account of all the other paper pushing it back, appears much shorter? If you look at the stack from the side you have a full diamond on the edge. A far cry from the lovely straight finish books have. You could trim it (in fact, all books need to have their paper trimmed), but that's a lot that's going to waste. This is all a bit of a problem. Now obviously, books exist that are more than just stacks. They're tomes. How do you get that much paper in a book if folding everything in half leaves you with an absolutely awful time?

The solution: fold several smaller stacks, then stick them all together.

Go pick up a book, any book, and take a closer look at the spine from the top. See the little grooves? Each of those is one of those stacks—which are called signatures—all held together to make your book. If it's a cheap paperback it's been squeezed together with the force of a thousand suns with a little luck from God to make sure it stays tight. Also glue.

When you're binding by hand you use thread and needle. It's much nicer than glue, and means you get a lot more freedom in styling how the pages lay when you're reading. From this, making a book seems pretty simple. Get a stack of paper, put them into smaller stacks, fold them into signatures, stick them together as one text block, and put a cover on it.

Ah! But now you have to consider how printing works. You know how you had special printouts back in school to make little booklets? Fold it this way, that way, flip it around and spin it like a pizza, and all the pieces printed upside-down and rightways-left magically ended up in the correct spot? Printing full books is similar. For a signature, you have to arrange your pages in a specific order, or Lord knows what it's going to look like when it's all folded. If you have, say, a lined notebook with numbered pages, that order suddenly means a lot.

So. Here's a story about making the first journal I ever designed from scratch, and how the journal itself was absolutely the least notable part of the experience.

Introducing The Printer

It's a piece of shit.

Every printer is a piece of shit. I am very certain it's in the job description of a printer to be a piece of shit.

No matter what we do there's always streaks on the page when it prints in colour. If the tray isn't left slightly ajar it makes grinding noises that ultimately result in paper jams. It never seems to understand that the ink being below 70% doesn't mean the apocalypse is imminent.

But it does, in the end, function. This is better than most printers.

And the Tale of it

I got myself some lovely paper from some store that claimed heritage tracing back to the 1800s and being British as British blood could possibly British.

You know smooth paper? Where you can just trace your finger along it and watch it glide like a figure skater to ice? Oh, it was smooth. And had these little marks dappled all over where you could see the imperfections that promised human hands touched it in a factory, at some point. But not enough that it looks cheap. We need to be rustic and home-made but not poor, you know?

I do a test print to see if the printer loves the paper as much as I do, and it does. We're set.

Now, let me explain the setup. My PC with the book design is upstairs. The printer is downstairs. I cannot move either of them, before you see the immediate solution to this. Each signature is a separate pdf. Because the printer is convinced it was built before I was born, it does not understand that document queues exist.

This means:

Sending the first signature to print, upstairs

Going downstairs

Retrieving the signature

Returning upstairs with the signature

Folding and piercing the signature with holes, ready for sewing

Sending the second signature to print

Repeat ad nauseam

Or at least until everything's printed.

This was the first time I'd done double-sided on this printer, which was fun. By 'fun' I mean 'slightly more entertainment than staring at the wall until it finished'.

I hadn't got much else to do. I left my phone upstairs, and will forget to grab it every single time I go back up there.

I pull up a chair and just watch it.

You might call this sad, but a little part of me believed that watching it would prevent something bad happening. You might also call this sad.

This goes mostly unimpeded, returning back up, and punching holes with my bookbinding kit. The holes are more fun than they should be. Then I'd go back down, watching the printer print. This continues for several signatures.

For some reason, one round I get bored and leave the room. I'm not entirely sure why. I got bored of sitting and needed to stand up, then got bored of standing and needed to sit back down.

The printer tells me the paper is jammed.

It's decidedly not, as opening the back as the screen instructs shows no signs of wayward sheets crushed between the wheels and crying out for mercy. I put all the panels back, mildly confused.

Whatever happened interrupted it, besides. I now have this random sheet that's only been printed on one side. It's like the printer completed one half, had a breakdown, and made up some excuse about 'jammed paper' to save itself the embarrassment.

Which, I sympathise, but you're also a printer.

The rest continued as normal, even though I had to run back upstairs and do some mathematical equations to figure out which two pages belonged to the failed sheet. I could try putting the unfinished sheet back in, sure, but I had no idea which way up and what direction it should face in the tray. I had, what, a one in four chance of nailing that with one try? Doing the whole thing again was much easier.

Send to print. Downstairs. Retrieve paper. Upstairs. Fold the paper and punch holes for the—

I realise I've printed the wrong one.

...Resend to print.

Downstairs. Retrieve paper. Upstairs. It's correct this time, fortunately.

Next signature is up for print, and by this point I'd got used to the motions of going up and down and up the downstairs again. It was exercise at least, even though my recently-injected-with-testosterone leg wasn't agreeing with it, and sitting back down to watch was just another part of the routine.

At some point, my dog starts howling. Who knows at what. I find him and give a lecture about the importance of using his inside voice—or bark, if you will—and go back to my signature.

The printer tells me the paper is jammed.

Alright. This is what we're doing.

Once again, the paper is only printed on one side with no attempt to pull it back and print on the other. I open the back again just to double check there's nothing there, which there isn't.

I need to stress, everytime the printer claimed a paper jam, there's no actual jams, no mechanical failures. The printer just decides at random points that it didn't want to print the other side of this one page, in particular. I never see it happen first-hand so I don't even know what caused it.

I'm well aware that my printer is shit, so I'm not even mad. I signed up for this, really. I'll have to reprint some pages that fail. That's fine, and the exact reason I bought 50 more sheets of paper than I actually needed.

Then I realised something, while I was watching paper pulled in and out of the printer's jaw. Why was I wasting time? I could be working on the current signature while the next one was being printed. That way it would be ready as soon as I'd finished.

Yes. I'd printed five of these things before I thought of doing this.

A smug little grin creeps across my face after sending the next one to print. Like something so obvious should be celebrated. I should be celebrated. This time I go downstairs with a spring in my step.

The printer tells me the paper is jammed.

It didn't get past the first sheet. It cried out as desperately as it could on a screen smaller than most bank notes that the paper was jammed, that it needed attention right now, that its untimely demise was imminent if someone didn't come to its aid. I press the button, and watch as the rest prints as if nothing happened. I didn't even open the back this time.

And of course I did watch it this time, because I was back with nothing to do. The signature that I'm supposed to be working on was still stuck in the damn printer.

Then, I make a very stupid observation.

The printer was 'jamming' when I wasn't in the room.

It didn't fail at any other time. If I sat there, pulled up the chair and watched the printer diligently complete its task, it did it without fail. The only times it had stopped was when I'd left and pulled my eyes away from it.

Now I'll be honest. I'm superstitious, and have had far too many coincidences to believe there isn't someone looking down on me and laughing. I've always had inklings that there's [something else] behind the scenes, and little day-to-day rituals could influence how it might act.

But this, this is a printer.

And I'm a man of the modern age! My ancestors did not live and die by the scientific method for me to declare baseless accusations on faith. I slam the button to continue printing and leave the room. There was literally nothing else to do, so I just stood in the kitchen for a few minutes. I decide it's time to check the results of my experiment when my mum asks what I'm doing.

The printer tells me the paper is jammed.

...

I pull up a chair and sit down, face in my hand.

The rest of the signature prints just fine, because of course they do. I sighed, sifting through the papers and maybe hoping for a misprinted number, some bleeding ink, a rule not parallel that could prove that my stupid superstitions were no more than that. Stupid.

It's perfect.

Alright. Fine. But I'm not about to be defeated by a printer. I get owned by my friends daily, I'm not taking that from an inanimate object. I send the next signature off to print, tongue stuck out, and work on punching holes with no care what the printer thinks of me staying up here. I took a particular amount of anger out on the last one and went downstairs.

The printer tells me the paper is jammed.

First page, again.

"Really?" I said. "You're doing this to me? Really?"

I thought about smacking it, but I felt bad.

I mean, when you got down to it, when it did work it was doing a good job. It wasn't jamming with the new paper. It hadn't called for a replacement of ink once despite being reasonably low, for its standards. The colours weren't even streaking like they normally did. It just...

Needed me to sit by it.

I stare at the printer the entire time while dragging the chair over, saying nothing. I wanted it to feel every ounce of biting disappointment I had behind my eyes. The first page begins printing.

You know the sound a printer makes, don't you? That back-and-forth repetition like the pull and push of a wave. I could have sworn, when I listened closely, the pull sounded like 'love', and the push sounded like 'me'.

The printer finishes the first page, which I take and confirm printed correctly. It starts on the second.

"Love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me"

It pauses, and drags the paper back in, ready for the other side.

"Love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me"

"Loooooooove," it finishes after spitting out the paper.

"Meeeeeeeee," rumbles deep within the machine.

It starts on the next.

"Hug me," it sounds like this time.

"Hug me, hug me, hug me, hug me, hug me, hug me, hug me, hug me, hug me, hug me, hug me, hug me, hug me, hug me, hug me, hug me"

Hm, I think. There's worse machines to go mad over. A printer has precedent.

It continues like this. "Love me, love me, hug me, love me, hug me, hold me, love me... "

We're on the last signature now. I'm tired. It's been hours. I expected a bit of a slog but I'd had to scale those damn stairs at least twice as many times as I was expecting. The muscle in my leg still recovering from a needle screams at me. My God, I did not want to do another cycle of this I didn't need to.

I swallow my pride, and lean towards my printer.

"Ok, buddy," I said, "we need to have a talk about this."

The printer does not respond.

"I've been a bit harsh. I'll admit that. I haven't been the nicest to you on the last few runs."

The printer does not respond.

"And despite that, you like me sitting next to you while you work. I know a lot of people who need emotional support while doing something stressful. It means a lot that you still get that from me, even after snapping at you."

The printer does not respond.

"But I don't need to be here. I get that you think I do, but I don't. I don't even know the first bit about how to print things. That's why I'm asking you."

The printer does not respond.

"You're better than you think you are. You don't need me to hold your hand, alright?"

The printer does not respond.

"You can do it on your own."

The printer does not respond.

"I believe in you."

The printer does not respond.

I pat its scanner lid.

Double checking that my parents aren't dialling a mental asylum, I return to my workstation and set the next signature to print. While I'm poking holes, I'm already bracing myself for another trip after failing on the first page, rubbing the injection site idly. I go downstairs, ready for a wave of inky tears over jammed paper.

To find, much to my surprise, a fully printed signature waiting for me.

Every page was done. All the prints were perfect. The graphic on the screen bobs up and down happily over a job well done.

I smile. It's a genuine smile; I don't smile often. I smile in a mixture of joy and relief, that my printer did it all by itself.

I'm

proud.

I'm proud of my printer. My printer.

I pat it's scanner lid again and graciously accept its gift. It could rest now, so I turn the light off like a father leaving his children to sleep.

Then I leave and laugh hard enough I nearly throw up.

Why am I Like This?

The rest of the journal went without a hitch, but who cares about that? This isn't about the craft project. This is about the fact I gave an inanimate object the same care and respect that I would my fellow man.

Why? Why do I do this?

Giving a printer, a printer, a full peptalk over its job. A printer that has no emotion, rational thinking, or any possible qualifiers that could make it slightly human.

And the peptalk worked.

Of course, it didn't. If I didn't talk to it nothing would have changed.

But if I didn't do that it would have jammed again. Absolutely.

Oh,

I do love it, as a paradox. Everything's made up. All these rituals and bits all so complex and tied into each other are a complete waste of time. Not stepping on a crack. Saluting a magpie. Knocking on wood.

But it's also completely real.

When I try to explain this to people, they look at me like I'm a complete idiot. Which is correct. I am. I'm an idiot for doing this. I treat most anything as if it has a level of animacy and I'm a complete idiot for doing so.

But I'm not. Because it works.

Which is to say,

faith is for fools, and so a fool I'll remain.

[stanleywbaxton]

I Hate the Dad in Ayreon's Theory of Everything

I must begin this by saying this essay is a compliment, especially hot off the heels of my last. This isn't hate from bafflement at artistic choices and the longing want of how much better something could have been.

No, dear reader. No. This is a resounding applause, at how a single fictional man is able to incite pure unfiltered vitriol.

I have never hated a character in any sort of media as much as I hate this man. He lives rent free in an apartment of my mind that's overgrown with mould. Everytime I relisten to the album my detest for this man manages to reach heights I never thought possible for a fictional human.

Let me tell you about the dad in Ayreon's Theory of Everything.

Here's the Deal

Progressive metal ahoy, we've got another concept album. The one that kickstarted my descent into the prog rabbit hole, in fact. This album is extremely dear to me. Without this thing I wouldn't be annoying people for hours on end with guitar wanking.

Fortunately you don't need mountains of context, as explaining why I hate this guy so much means detailing the plot as we go. Huzzah!

What you do need is a little background on the band and the structure of this album. Because, dear reader, Ayreon is one of my favourite music projects of all time. I cannot recommend it enough. However, we have to talk about something very important, that being:

CHEESE

It's cheesy.

Very cheesy. Ayreon is the full package of cheesy sci fi proggy goodness and if you're not already tuned to that you're going to be raising an eyebrow or two as you pick through its discography.

But for me, I'd started my metal kick with power metal, so if anything it was less corny than I was expecting.

Calling Ayreon a band would be a bit misleading. It's better described as a musical project, headed by Arjen Lucassen. There's several 'core' members that usually pop up, and Arjen swaps out musicians, vocalists, and instrumentalists based on who would be the best fit for the current album in production.

To demonstrate this point, Ayreon has a dedicated wikipedia page just to list everyone that has participated. There is an entire table for the vocalists. With no other project will you hear Floor Jansen and Hansi Kürsch duet a verse together, and its magnitude cannot be expressed on paper.

What makes Ayreon even more special is that every album is a concept album. They all have a story to tell, and even more excitingly all intertwine into each other to form a greater narrative. I have many thoughts on Ayreonverse, but those must be restrained for another time.

Now let's move from the groundwork of Ayreon, to the groundwork of this album, to lead to why I absolutely despise this one guy to the point of needing to dish my opinions on the internet as therapy.

The Theory of Everything is stylised as ŦĦΣ ŦĦΣΦɌ¥ ΦƑ ΣVΣɌΨŦĦIΠG. Nice. THHS THHSphR円 phFH SVSRPHTHHIPG is my favourite album. For the sake of convenience let's call it TToE from now on.

Contrary to the tracklist, TToE is actually 4 songs around 20 minutes long, each dubbed a 'Phase'. Between them they're then split into 42 tracks, because of course they are. The tracks being split is pretty convenient, beyond tricking people into listening to long as hell prog songs. It gives you points in the storyline to reference quickly.

It's like the bible. If the bible was a sci fi rock opera.

I know I did, literally 5 paragraphs ago, say that every Ayreon album is connected to the other, but TToE is standalone. It's got similar themes, lyrical style, and stunningly good instrumentation, but as of writing does not connect into the main Ayreonverse storyline. You can enjoy the story whilst having no idea what goes on during the other Ayreon albums. Which does make it the perfect introduction to the project! Isn't that convenient?

If you do give this album a shot, I highly recommend having a lyric sheet pulled up in another tab. Not just to keep track of which character's which vocalist, but each song comes with a written prelude that gives you some extra story to chew on. It's a very nice bonus, but,

But.

I can't sit here on context and background much longer. I feel my anger stewing under my fingernails. It burns there, itching to be slammed into the keys to let the rest of the world know of its existence.

Hate.

When I say I'm doing a play-by-play of the plot that's no exaggeration. I'm going to be spoiling the entire thing. If any of this drivel has piqued your interest even slightly, give it a spin and come back when you're done.

Let's talk about why I hate the dad in Ayreon's Theory of Everything.

Phase 1: Singularity

We open at the end.

Our protagonist is collapsed on the floor of a lighthouse, barely alive, with two others here too late to save him. On the wall he's slumped against, a blackboard hangs ajar, filled with mathematical equations scratching the height of human understanding.

The rest of the album is what brings us here.

I should note, in most Ayreon albums the characters don't have names. They're referred to by their key role in the story. The name of our protagonist, absolutely not setting him up for potential disappointment, is the Prodigy.

We jump back 11 years before this point, and are introduced to the dickhead of the hour. The dad. I will not be going into great lengths on the entire plot, only the parts that make me angrier at his existence.

Now, I promise to try not to wax poetic on the music and the immense amount of talent on this album, but the dad is played by Mike Mills,

Mike

FUCKING

Mills,

who goes down as one of the greatest male metal vocalists alive right now. I do not care about your opinion. I do not care who you are desperately asking me to check out. I can't hear you over Mills' luscious melodies about robot sex.

I feel need to mention this specifically, because I'm certain that if the dad had anyone else behind him I would not be able to cope anytime he opens his mouth. I'm filled with rage, sure, but rage contained by a man who can casually hit a B5 live.

So, we learn the deal with the dad. He's tasked himself in chasing the album's namesake, the equation for the theory of everything. Insisting he's so close. All his other projects are shelved away as he spends endless hours pursuing this one formula. Alright, we've got ourselves an obsessive scientist. I'd love to see the multitudes this man contains.

This comes to a screeching halt when his wife, the Mother, cuts in. Not only has his obsession produced next to nothing, but it's driving a wedge between him and the rest of his family. That's his wife and his son, the Prodigy, making a point that he's been flat out ignoring him.

The dad responds to this.

[Father:] I'm sorry you feel neglected But it's clear that you don't understand

We are on the first song with this guy, and he's already dropped a 'sorry you feel that way'.

It only gets better from here lads.

Off to a sour start with his dad, we learn about the Prodigy. It's blatantly clear that he's neurodivergent, given the world overwhelms him to the point he's nonverbal, the obsession with patterns he sees with everything, not clicking socially, and I could probably list the rest of the DSM-5 like a shopping list with what the prelude notes tell us. It's practically impossible for him to connect with others, even through their—and his own—many attempts at trying.

We also need to take careful note of the Mother here. She's attempting, continually, to engage with her son with whatever means she can think of. Not to success, but she's trying, and very obviously is doing so out of a want to connect with her son to, well, connect with her son. Not doing many more favours for the dad here.

One of the Prodigy's teachers (you are correct, his namesake is the Teacher) notices how he's able to complete a maths problem he himself couldn't even solve. Adding more to the ND pile, the kid is staggeringly intelligent.

Also, can we note this part? After being asked if he's the one who actually completed the problem, to double check that it was his own work, his first reaction is this?

[Prodigy:] I'm sorry, sir, I can't explain It's the way I've always been

To immediately apologise? To think that he's being told off?

What's his dad saying between this that we don't see?

We also get the brewing rivalry between the Prodigy and... the Rival.

Look, I know. I didn't name these guys.

He's our antagonist for the evening, and when he isn't spending spare brain power on imagining edgy anime AMVs he likes to bully other kids for being social outcasts. We're also introduced to another character, who's name is,

...

The Girl.

Every time with the fucking names I'm trying to get people invested in this shit and I have to call everyone by all these fucking monikers how do—

The Girl jumps to the Prodigy's defence. She has a pretty obvious crush on him, and calls out the Rival on his small dick energy.

It is, I feel, important to remember that this stage of the album takes place while these guys are still kids. The reason the Rival is talking like a comic book villain is because, well, this is a thirteen year old child:

[Rival:] Oh no, I can't believe You're falling for this loser Oh no, I thought you know That I am so much cooler!

I want to pinch his cheeks.

The teacher, actually being a decent human being, decides to inform the Prodigy's dad about his son's talents. You'd think that this is a nice gesture. Who wouldn't want to know their child is excelling in school?

Now, put yourself in the shoes of the dad here. You're pretty disconnected from your family, whether justified or not, and clearly don't know much about what's going on with your kid. Let alone at school, given you don't know what's happening at home. Your kid's teacher goes out of his way to meet with you, and tells you that he's a mathematical genius.

How would you react? Would you be surprised? Excited? That he manages to succeed so well in an academic setting despite not doing so in social ones? Let's try a line of thinking the dad might be more attuned to, even. Could your son's intelligence help you? Would you be intrigued at the prospect of fostering it?

Would you react by calling your son a piece of shit?

[Father:] You must be mistaken He's useless and he's weak I see no sign of genius The boy can hardly speak

Quite reasonably, the Teacher asks what the fuck is wrong with him. Then the dad says something that hits a particular chord.

[Father:] Who are you to judge me You don't even know what we've been through!

What we've been through? You and your wife? The wife you've left to raise your son almost single-handedly, because you're too preoccupied in pursuing glory?

You can't even make the excuse for him that you could with the Mother. If she, after spending countless hours with the Prodigy, vents to a friend about how distraught she is about not being able to reach him, you'd sympathise. She's not venting out of anger at her son, but despair that she knows there's a way for them to express love for each other, one that she just can't find.

The Teacher lays in harder, demanding that the dad give him a little more of his time than absolutely none of it. He has potential, he promises. The dad begrudgingly agrees.

[Father:] Fine! I'll try to help the child Better not be wasting my time!

That's the thing with this guy. I'm not quoting his lines out of some laziness of not wanting to convert it all to prose, it's out of complete bewilderment, that this is not me flanderizing him in the back of my mind between listens. That thinking about this character has put my mind into overdrive over how he could be even worse.

Every time I read over his lines I pause. No, I did not misremember this. In my head I did not append another jab out of want to justify my anger further. These are the real, genuine lines that come out of this character's mouth.

But don't worry, mate. It's not like your son heard the whole thing,

[Prodigy:] Are you trying to drive me away? Just when I need you most?

or anything.

It's not like, as the prelude notes tell us, that he's the one trying to reach out to you, thinking he's the one who's broken.

The Mother reaches a boiling point. Realising she can't continue on like this without professional help, she demands that they take him to therapy. At last, the father agrees to help his son. Why does he do this? Out of parental love? Out of a want to connect to a son he could barely call his own beyond shared blood? To help him adjust to a society that doesn't know how to place him; to see his son thrive in his own way?

[Father:] It's worth a try, who knows He could help me complete The Theory Of Everything

Well then.

To summarise, in this Phase we have established that the dad:

Puts his work over his family

Ignores his wife's plea to spend some time with her and his son

Refuses to even try connecting to his son, despite his son fighting tooth and nail to connect to him

Thinks his son is a lost cause

Openly admits he thinks his son is a lost cause, in front of his son

Shoots down anyone who dares insist that his son isn't a lost cause

When his wife demands that their son gets professional help, he only agrees because of a chance for him to be 'useful'

Could you believe we're not even at the Phase where my hate ascends into a raging inferno?

Phase 2: Symmetry

We open at the Psychiatrist's office.

The Psychiatrist is another character I despise in this. You'll soon see why.

He's the one tasked with helping the Prodigy, and starts with a diagnosis session. The Mother continually asserts how desperate she is to be able to reach him, and how she just knows he would be worth the effort to get there, possibly to sway the Psychiatrist to use his time on him. On the Prodigy's end, he's convinced himself that he needs to have some kind of role. He's talented, and wants to put it to something. He needs to be useful.

Gee. I wonder who could have shoved that idea in there.

The Psychiatrist tells us what we already know; the kid's ND, and he's smart as hell. Shock and horror. The Prodigy's head is full of 'distractions', and he has an idea in mind of how to help.

Meth!

No, I jest. It's cutting edge meth.

Of course, the dad is onboard immediately. He's jumping at the chance to give his son a pill or two so he can concentrate on work. For his personal growth, you know?

Side note, I feel I have a moral obligation to note Mills' delivery on the line 'Please tell us more, that sounds intriguing'. I won't describe it. I seriously think it's something you need to go in blind and hear for yourself.

Then the Psychiatrist drops the bombshell. The drug he's recommending is experimental, still under trial, with possibly horrific side effects. At this, the Mother shuts down any notion of playing dice with her son's health, even if it could make life easier for them. There's particular wording here,

[Mother:] No matter what we could win I won’t let you endanger my child

under no delusion that this is a selfish want, that the true winners of the Prodigy fitting into society would be everyone else in his life.

We have the first of several arguments. The Mother and the dad go at it, with her calling bullshit on him wanting their son's health on the line for personal gain.

[Father:] No! Why shouldn’t I want to help him You make it sound like it’s a crime

Ah, this is out of a want to help him, is it? So completely selfless, is this want to throw him on experimental treatment without care of the side effects? Despite the fact the very words you said during the diagnosis, in front of your son, again, were:

[Father:] If he could concentrate he could help me He might even be of some use!

Is that your motivation, sir?

Time goes by, and the dad won't let this go. Still making no moves on the theory he still won't put his family's well being over, the idea that his son could be the final puzzle piece enthrals him.

He goes for his Hail Mary. He's going to get the Prodigy on the trial, slip him the drugs without him knowing, and watch him become the smartest man on the planet who will definitely help him, no questions asked. But that's ridiculous. No medical professional would agree to go behind one parent's back and violate a child's consent, right?

Right?

[Psychiatrist:] I know why you’re here You’re a fellow man of science

I think you're a fellow man of Getting Your Medical Licence Revoked.

They strike a deal. The Prodigy is going on the meds, in complete secrecy to the Mother and the Prodigy himself.

[Father:] Keep it between you and me Oh, they would never understand Denying him this chance just isn’t right

Denying him the chance of working on the project that robbed him of a father.

Charming.

The dad slips the drugs into the Prodigy's food, and the effects are almost immediate. We get a solo of the Prodigy realising that—

Hold it, hold it. Hold those thoughts. A voice has suspended my anger for a second. Tommy Karevik. Tommy Karevik my beloved. Why haven't I listened to Seventh Wonder yet? Why the hell haven't I listened to Seventh Wonder yet?

Back to anger.

Our protagonist is suddenly verbal. Just barely able to navigate the world around him. Who would be first to see him? The mother that was his rock the entire time?

[Father:] Oh, am I getting through to you Can you hear me, son?

For fuck's sake.

And the gems don't stop here.

[Father:] I never doubted you I always knew you’d win this fight

Ah! Did you, now?

You never doubted him? Never? You never thought of him as a waste of space to be shoved to the side? You stuck by his side through thick and thin just knowing that there was potential? Not even that there was potential, sticking by him through your love as a parent? That was you?

You believed he couldn't hear, didn't you?

And he can't even keep this lie up for long, because only seconds later he jumps into his agenda.

[Father:] Can you help me, son? I’m so close to the answer But I need your brilliant mind

Was the deceit even needed, at this point? Might as well save yourself the two breaths of oxygen.

The Prodigy doesn't even get a word in edgeways. The dad continues on like his son's agreed to join his little quest of his own volition. Like he's some kind of winner.

[Father:] Our goal is so much closer now Destiny waits

I guess he has to snatch what hollow victories he can considering he's never getting a Nobel Prize.

The Mother, too, is ecstatic. That her son can now show everyone his potential, and that they can connect like she could never do on her own.

She has no idea what's caused it.

Phase 3: Entanglement

We open to the Prodigy's father figure.

Nope, not the dad. We're with the Teacher.

The Prodigy, in the album's words, has 'woken up'. The only thing he truly understands in the world is the laws of mathematics. Even though now he can see the world around him clearly, he wasn't given the eyes of a child to learn about it, and he's no idea how to live. Who would be the first person he would go to for help? His parents, you would think. Instead he's gone to his Teacher.

This does bring up an interesting caveat. The relationship between the Prodigy and the Mother is pretty much left on an unknown. She isn't present in Phase 3 at all, actually, and looking back they never have a full conversation together on the entire album. The prelude notes tell us the Teacher is the only person the Prodigy trusts. It leaves us with a lot of questions we can't reliably answer.

What we can answer though, is the dad being even worse.

By this point, we can assume that he has tried to rope his son into working on his fruitless pursuits. Considering his first choice was the Teacher for advice, he does not see his Father as a father. And even then, the dad's made no moves to help him. Not a single moment is given to connect to his son now he's 'woken up', even now that he sees him as useful.

A couple pointers on how to make friends at school would be worth his groundbreaking theory, you would think. He can't even bother to connect to him through the project he demanded his son's help on. Every opportunity this story presents him with a moment to not be even more of a piece of shit he spits on it, like the spoiled child he thinks his son is.

The Teacher is more than happy to lend his aid, and promises to show him how he can live life beyond the numbers. So, the Prodigy's thriving. Now he has the confidence to stand up to his school bully.

This is where I break to mention the transition between Transformation and Collision. This is one of my favourite track transitions on any album period. I wish I could relive the first moment I heard those guitars bend into that synth.

Then, it doesn't end there, because it launches into my favourite part of all of TToE. I'm breaking even further to talk about Collision. This is a back and forth fight between the Prodigy and the Rival, both in increasingly ridiculous insults over how the other is intellectually inferior. It has the exact cadence of two theatre kids fighting over who gets the leading role in the school play.

And it's perfect.

Anyone who believes this argument couldn't happen in real life does not know enough academics in STEM.

I would also like to remind you they're, what, teenagers at this point? They're probably picking out their college options? And declaring how their 'arch nemesis' is going to meet his demise tomorrow?

This one track is quintessential Ayreon. An astounding combination of lyrical cheese, masterful vocal performances, unintentional comedy, and some of the best musical work you've heard in your entire life. Genuine perfection.

Back to hating the dad, and this is a real good one. If you thought that the highly experimental drug was likely to go wrong, guess what goes wrong?

Well done. You win nothing.

The side effects are confirmed as severe psychosis and delusions. The Psychiatrist says they have to tell the Prodigy what they've done, and promptly dips out of the story to never see the consequences of his actions. The dad speaks to the Prodigy, trying to give a last-minute spin that it was a selfless act. He reacts reasonably and tells him to go to hell.

[Prodigy:] Deceiving your own son to serve yourself You can go to hell

Direct quote. About time.

The Prodigy runs away from home, finding solace with the Girl—more accurately Girlfriend, now—and stays with her. He's distraught by the whole revelation, realising that his sudden clarity of the world wasn't his own, and time marches on with the Prodigy starting to regress without his medication. Keeping a keen eye on him this whole time, the Rival has a solution, in return for some help.

His offer is simple. If the Prodigy cracks a bank algorithm, he'll replicate his drugs and split half the pot of whatever they can grab. The Prodigy despises the idea of committing an outright crime, and the Girl gives him an ultimatum to not do it, but he can't bear to continue on as he is now. For a time, he resists.

Then, he breaks. Surely she'll understand, right?

Well...

Phase 4: Unification

We open to mourning.

The Girl's kicked the Prodigy out, and regrets her decision almost immediately, but can't get in touch with him now. Neither can the Mother, and they both lament over what could have been if they did things differently.

You know who else could have done something differently?

Now the only person left to the Prodigy is the Teacher. He declares, in a very sudden flip, that he's going to complete the theory of everything.

[Prodigy:] I need to show my father I need to show them all

A marvel how the man can not even be in the scene and manage to piss me off.

The Teacher shows him to a lighthouse, a secluded spot to work away on the theory, but gives him a very, very sharp warning to not let it run away with him. The Prodigy insists that he'll be fine.

Well, we've seen how this ends.

The Mother and the dad are at each other's throats again. The dad desperately wants the Prodigy back, and I don't even need to ask you why he does, do I? No, not out of worry of wanting your child home safely, but all because he wants help on his precious little theory.

He lets out his final, feeble, pathetic excuse. The Mother does what she should have done on their wedding day, and leaves him.

[Father:] But you can make him listen All I need is one more chance [Mother:] No! I can't take any more You never gave a damn!

Now mirroring his son, the dad is now alone. He declares to the universe that there's 'One thing left to do'.

So what could that be?

The Prodigy is near the end of his rope. Mentally; physically. He's been working alone on the theory for months, but gets a surprise visit one evening. The Teacher, perhaps? Telling him this has gone on for too long?

In a shocking turn of events, it's his dad.

He's rightfully hostile to him out of the gate. Demanding a reason why he should forgive him after everything he's put him through. Taunting him, that the only reason he's here is a final desperate appeal for his intellect.

And he's completely correct! Even now, even now, grovelling on his knees the dad still tries to enlist his son's help. He can't spend two minutes of his fucking life not wanting to work on that goddamn theory.

My guy, you absolute bellend, your son is knocking on death's door. He's probably subsiding himself by eating rats and sucking on the moisture in the floorboards. Could you perhaps for a second, one fucking second, consider your son's wellbeing? How it's your own damn project that brought him to this state? If you just spent a moment to get to know him, be the Father that he didn't have to find in someone else's, none of this would have happened?

But desperation gets to the Prodigy. Months and months of staring at those chalk marks, only moving things around, never creating the missing link. His rational mind fleeing, thinking how he could take a few more, just a few more pills to push his mind. Not wanting to break his streak of terrible influences, his dad encourages him.

The Prodigy slams the entire bottle down. Twenty-odd years of resentment melt away into a flurry of theorycrafting.

With dawn just breaking, they do it. The formula's broken, as is he, mind, body, and soul. He leaves a hasty note for the Teacher with what strength he has left, detailing the discovery. The final lines are an apology for taking his obsession too far, and a thank you for his support.

You might think, where is the dad during this?

The Teacher and the Girl reach the lighthouse, both harrowed at the state of the Prodigy, near catatonic. Reading the note that tells him, the Teacher mentions how the Prodigy's dad was here, helping him.

Then the Girl gets off the phone with the Mother. It's impossible for the dad to have been here. That 'One thing left to do' was not, in fact, seeing his son in his final moments, but killing himself.

Do I hate this man enough to call him a coward?

I do.

This leaves us with a question, and what the album ends on: how were there two different sets of handwriting on the blackboard?

In an idyllic case, the father was there, quite literally, in spirit. He visited him beyond death, and helped the Prodigy finish the theory as his final act in the waking world. By the morning, he vanished. This is the interpretation I've seen most go along with.

But, I think this is what really made me want to write this. Consider the possibility that he didn't. Either that's not how the afterlife in this universe works, or he simply didn't want to. His son, so irreparably torn from grief of being alone, never having a family like others did, considering himself a failure for never being able to complete his 'destiny'. The only thing he's been convinced by everyone around him that he's worth. Hallucinating, he imagines his father coming back to him, helping him like a parent comforting their child teary-eyed over homework. So starved for paternal love he retraces what he can remember from his father's blackboards, convinced it's his hand making the marks.

This isn't just me wanting to find more reasons to hate the dad, to rob him of any sort of redemption. Consider, if he really did come back to him in the afterlife. Once in the presence of his son again, what does he do? Drives him to finish the theory of everything. He learnt nothing. Even after he's died he chases his pathetic moment of glory over being a Father to his son, and indirectly killed him in the process.

I'd argue that's even worse.

We also shouldn't ignore how the main side effect of the medication is delusions. Who's to say that he hasn't been increasing his dose over time out of impatience at his failures, then having a drug-induced vision of his father telling him to take it to the extreme?

[Teacher:] If you're troubled by the visions If the voices start to whisper

Also consider, why he made the note to the Teacher in the first place. If his dad was there, wouldn't he have told him to tell the Teacher everything? Why did he need to make a physical note? And even if he wanted his final words on paper, wouldn't he have asked his dad to deliver it to him?

I think, he realised he was alone in the end. Mentioning his father in the note was a desperate plea for himself to believe otherwise.

It gives us the perfectly tragic end to the Prodigy's tale. A culmination of every bit of pressure and expectation that's been mounted onto him, crushed under the weight of it while everyone around him only watches. Wondering how this could have been different.

Yes, it might be nice for the dad to have his one moment of good. A little redemption arc. Maybe taking a moment to really think about everything he did to bring his son to this point. Maybe saying, with his whole chest, that he's sorry. Truly sorry. Not the hollow apologies he slings like a plaster to a severed limb. For the neglect. To realise it was he who did this. Forcing his son to the brink and pushing him to limits beyond limits, and accept that he's the one to take the blame. That he could maybe, give his son closure in his final moments. Maybe he wouldn't have encouraged him to overdose.

That might be nice, now I put it to paper.

I,

expected to be as angry as I was starting this rant. I was intending a bombastic finish to Phase 4, how much I despise this man reaching its critical mass to then be vomited onto paper.

Now... Hm.

Let me relisten.

I'm Angry Again

I hate him. I hate him.

I hate hate hate hate this man. Even looking back, through thousands of words, I feel no possible finite amount is able to describe how much I hate him.

And I love to hate him.

Again, I can't sing high enough praises to Arjen for creating this pitiful excuse of a man. This is a mastercraft in making someone overtly, subtextually, in-scene and off, every possible means in a narrative to make someone the most insufferable being possible. I was trying to think of a funny quip about how 'the only thing left is [insert generic horrible act]', but beyond brutal murder of puppies he's hit every single one, explicit or indirectly.

And, I know this man. I know so many people like this man. He's simultaneously a complete cartoon character and yet such a quintessential representation of that one guy everyone who's neurodivergent has to deal with.

And that's the thing. Most of the time, they aren't just 'some guy'. They are your father. Parents. Teachers. Doctors. Figures of authority who only see a misshapen tool with so much potential. If only you'd understand what's good for you, as they clearly know better than you would ever know about yourself. No, no. You just don't get it. You need to do this. You have to.

You are not just a person, to be loved and cherished. You are a disruption to the machine. A cog that had the audacity to not fit in this slot. Only when you fit somewhere special, after your edges are shaved down, after a coat of paint that melts away when no one else is around. To be spun so fast your core turns white hot while the rest of the world looks on in awe, at how anything could possibly move like that. Not seeing the gouges in the metal, the years of hammering that let you twist and contort. To only be mourned after the velocity makes you crumble to dust, and everyone else sees naught but a heroic sacrifice.

Your closure is a thought, a prayer, and if you're lucky, a moment of pause over how this could have happened.

I get to channel that hate, the hate I feel, the hate my friends feel, all of this oppressive hate channelled into one pathetic fictional man.

I hate the dad in Ayreon's Theory of Everything.