This is the last strip in this series, at least, I think it is; ol' Gribbz gets home tomorrow, and it may be that something has occurred to him in the intervening period. Judging from the response to it and other content in this vein (something my associate alluded to in an earlier post) we, uh... hm. It seems like there is a huge group of people that nobody is talking to about this stuff, and they really, really want to know it. Complicating matters is the fact that, in their situation, to ask the question is to fail! You're supposed to know it already, and if you don't, that's one more thing you've fucked up this afternoon. The only way for you to learn it is for someone else to volunteer it. Wheels are in motion.
I try not to let my first feeling about something be my only feeling. My initial read on the Saurids, for example, is that they were amphibious reptilian bipeds. That isn't a good example I guess because that all ended up being true. But, let's say we were talking about Mortal Kombat Easy Fatality Packs. These are packs for Mortal Kombat which allows players to execute Fatalities easily. On the surface. But is that what they actually do? Yes.
I think I need to have my, uh… metaphor thing calibrated.
One hearkens back to the environment fighting games hatched in, an agar plate of teenage anguish in which all manner of dark creatures grew, and when I think about a person beating you in the arcade and then putting in another quarter to do a Fatality, or to perform some other literal or figurative emasculation, I try to imagine this person escaping with their life.
Fatalities are not about pressing buttons, and to make them so is what I would describe as a "profound inversion of meaning." Fatalities are - in the tradition of Ulysses Everett McGill, Geralt of Rivia, Sherlock Holmes, or Marinus Bicknell Willett - about knowledge. They are about knowing what buttons to press. Offering such shortcuts is the true shape of the medium as it stands, and pretending that it's not, like, a genius move just trades one falsehood for another. We need there to be a place where we can discuss techniques like this in a measured, technical way free of shaming language - except that men and women of moral vigor shun such practices, and those who take them up are in league with the horned devil.
(CW)TB
