So I’m not usually one for multiplayer games–I was an only child, so for me video games are for playing alone in your room at 3am while listening to Queen and Pink Floyd’s The Wall on repeat, wondering why God would give you the desire to beat Raijin and Fujin in Balamb but not the ability–but I booted up this Among Us game, because my grandboys are bonkers about watching it on the YouTube1, and two things are immediately clear:
- I am out of my element and bad and what we’re doing
- I am accidentally ruining everyone else’s fun
Between these two I’m pretty sure I’m playing as intended. It feels kinda like when I watch Survivor; I don’t understand the strategies and alliances and invisible gameplay at all, so I just keep my head down, do my tasks, visibly vent for the lols whenever I’m an Engineer, and vote for whoever’s being most annoying or vulgar in the chat.
Speaking of honest work, time to force a robot to make a very simple decision for me:
#12: What is your favorite thing
to do in order to relax?
Well, there’s relaxing and there’s relaxing; mostly I have a hard time doing it at all because I suffer from the productivity-disease that capitalism wires into us from birth, so I can’t play D&D with my pals without feeling like I should be recording it, can’t play a video game without also listening to a podcast so I can do two things at once and fully engage with neither of them, can’t enjoy an episode of Voyager without also working on an article and applying for jobs. I imagine this is a tune that will be very familiar to most of us.2
For those six days in the year when the out-of-doors isn’t doing its level best to boil my body-waters, I really enjoy an entire category called Walking-And, as in: Walking And Reading3, or Eating, or Pokémon Going, or on one notable occasion, Hoisting A Bookcase4. It’s a great way to focus on whatever you’re doing and be more present because you have to be, but also once your body realizes it’s walking it’ll take over and you can lose yourself a little while it does the grim work necessary to keep you alive until another Leap Day. Mindful and lost in something? Yes: this walking contradiction5 is only a problem if you’re gonna let words boss you around and tell you how to live your life. You are not the one who listens to words, you are the one who talks.
And now if you’ll excuse me, Only Murders In The Ding-Dang Building is back, and I gotsta find out who killed Paul Rudd and ask why they didn’t do it before Quantumania started filming.
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK.
–The Bageler
And now, open your eyes and see
What we have made is real
- Along with these extremely strange randomly-generated racing and battling videos, and terrifying Paw Patrol fanimations featuring a dagger-mouthed spider-version of Thomas the Tank Engine??? Still better than Blippi! ↩︎
- If only it was the tune of the ice-cream trucks that drove around selling weed in my hometown! If only I was hearing Camptown Races ripping out of a megaphone duct taped to the roof of an Econoline. ↩︎
- Food tastes better on the move, your caveman DNA knows that it is wise to hide your delicious haunch of sabertoothed venison from caveman-bears; try taking a sandwich on your next walk or a bowl of pho on the elliptical.* ↩︎
- I will laugh for the rest of my life at the thought of a kid in their living room seeing me turtle-carry that home and no one ever believing him; to be now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently a local Mormon cryptid ↩︎
- Ho-HO! ↩︎