I wanted this strip to erupt into a thousand strips - I wanted flowers to bloom the world over. My counterpart said no because for him, any effort to create beauty is regarded as a personal attack. That was just an opportunity to throw in a line from an Art of Noise song; in truth, beauty is the only thing he cares about. To an extent that it's been a problem!
There are so many Bad Boys of Punctuation; I stood ready to investigate what became of these rough characters for as long as I had breath in my lungs. All those rich personalities, all that grist for The Dark Pageant. Ultimately condensing it the way we have makes it a collab, with you; I'm certain I could never descend to your monstrous and subterranean fantasies.
Sometimes I don't know how to feel about something because my moral superiors have not yet made a super long video. They don't always make a video about the thing I need, though. Like, I don't know if someone is still bad or if they've been exonerated. Since we don't trust any structure that would provide exoneration, and objectivity is illusory, since the law is merely another arena to sift power dynamics anyway, my guess is that their good opinion, once lost, is lost forever. Speaking of power dynamics, It must be neat to have the reins of a parallel legal system whose norms kaleidoscopically shift at a rate of one million shibboleths per second. The main issue is that it's not clear which games I'm allowed to buy. All I can do - all anyone can do - is spin very quickly in place while refreshing YouTube for the next sermon. I'm currently ablur.
ZA/UM's Disco Elysium is one of the most astounding things I've ever experienced, and like singular experiences are wont to do it has manufactured a point cloud of wide-eyed adherents. The game is the sacrament, and their bible is a comically long video about skullduggery on the part of ZA/UM because the game's Christ-like creator figure was ejected from the company by Corporate Judas.
When a demo for ZA/UM's next game "Zero Parades For Dead Spies" dropped during one of Steam's various fests, I went to check that sacred video again to reestablish some grounding - only to find that a second video had been uploaded, and the first twenty minutes are an overture that brings fundamental aspects of the original piece into question. Then there's another hour of video after that. I've got kids, guys. At the risk of being dubbed a class-traitor, I chose to experience a piece of media for myself - and that's something I have to live with.
I can't make heads or tails of any of that stuff, and I'm not, like… dumb. Ambiguities abound; and in any case, Mercutio had it right. You don't gotta tell me about business guys being fucking psychopaths, and you also don't have to remind me that a writer is simply a liar who figured out how to get paid for it. "Don't come after me in the comments." I'm interested in the pudding, where the proof is said to lie. I'm interested in work, great work, that against all odds becomes real. Zero Parades is supposed to be vile for a host of reasons - the fruit of a poisoned tree, wickedness and perfidy, but also because the talented people they kicked out and robbed were geniuses to whom all good things about Disco Elysium should accrue and whatever creative people they have left are servile scabs, huffing the inertia of a project whose brilliance is no thanks to them.
Except the demo was excellent - excellent. Like nothing else, not even Disco Elysium. Charming, hilarious, poignant, smart. Mechanical. Human. So, what now? I feel sick. I'm gonna go refresh YouTube. I need somebody who never had a job to tell me how to live.
(CW)TB out.
