A medium time ago I worked for the navy on an aircraft
carrier. I was an aviation ordnance man, we dealt
in bombs, guns, pyrotechnics, rockets, missiles, and torpedoes.
But mostly we dealt in bombs.
We assembled bombs, moved bombs from place to place, or guarded bombs until ordered to put them on something leaving the boat. I spent my entire naval career hanging around explosives.
We assembled bombs, moved bombs from place to place, or guarded bombs until ordered to put them on something leaving the boat. I spent my entire naval career hanging around explosives.
Nowadays I work in a chair doing video game stuff, there are good days and bad days like any other of the kabillion jobs I had leading up to this one, it is what it is. But I gotta admit, some days I can't fuckin' stand video games, straight up, I will see a game and throw up in my mouth a lot.
It wasn't always like that, but day after night after day of waking up to them have made them a part of everyday life I can't escape. There was this one title I tested that had an old 30 seconds to mars song blasting everywhere. All up in the menus, load screens, everywhere. I would find myself singing the song on break, as in unknown to me I would be sing-saying, I'm maaaaking my coffee/ I'm nooow in the hallway/I'm taaaaaking a piss now/ I'm wriiitttiiing buggggs noooow!
People would tap me or throw a vending machine sammich at me to stop me. We all hated ourselves for being there, for how much longer we would have to be there, everything we were missing to be there. The last thing we wanted to hear was the soundtrack of our decline in RL.
While crawling Reddit I pulled a thread that had the vox populi conducting lynch mob operations on some chair dweller that made the foolish mistake of appearing to not really be into games as they are that much.
At first I was heated because the words they set base camp around were just not true, and then I got bemused when I noticed what the op wasn't saying was a nasty dark truth only known to people that have been into games for so long they wound up on the inside looking out.
At first I was heated because the words they set base camp around were just not true, and then I got bemused when I noticed what the op wasn't saying was a nasty dark truth only known to people that have been into games for so long they wound up on the inside looking out.
For me it's like the bomb farm back in the day. We sit down to these disparate parts of what will become a game at one time or another in the future, and we are forced to treat it like a game the whole time even though its not, it's not even close. Build after build show up, and when the stigmata stops and you start to look at the possibilities of what it might be, enter the foulest hope.
Then it's done, and you are like meh, because you saw the process of what it could have been and see what it is now and know how that sausage got made and you resent it. You send your baby out into downtown Gomorrah with little notes attached to its collar, I like to eat this, this is what can do with that, with predictable results.
Then you watch as another parent sends theirs out with M16's strapped to rocket launchers with those truck flap brass balls attached to the end whereupon the masses rub it down with baby oil, lift it high on their shoulders, and parade it around as the second coming of everything. Then you kind of start to resent the people you make the things for.
Then you drink, or ride a bike, or sit down to a table top, or clean up the stitch-work on your outfit, or jam with your band for a while to chill out. Then the next day you wake up, throw on whatevers clean, and go to work on the new alpha. Ey, better than digging ditches.
