Yknow Theres A Lot Of Pressure To Be Successful, Particularly On Artsy Kids Whose Professions Are Seen

yknow theres a lot of pressure to be successful, particularly on artsy kids whose professions are seen as useless unless theyre famous, but life is fucking hard and sometimes things dont turn out

but i think thats not bad. my dad has wanted to be a musician forever, and hes rly pretty good. but then he joined the military to get away from an abusive family, and then he got married, and then he got divorced, and a lot of horrible shit HAPPENED. he has ptsd and severe anxiety and he could never really get back on the horse. and he never made it as a musician, and now hes 53

but i grew up in a house full of instruments, and he can play all of them, and some of my earliest memories are of him playing guitar on the front porch and me thinking there wasnt a better musician in the world. so. even if you dont get to the stars, exactly, what you do isnt worthless. its not a waste of time if life is difficult and you cant make it, or if you arent famous, or if your work doesn’t influence thousands of people. it will influence someone

there are a million ways to be happy and a million ways to be a successful artist. we create what we do to enhance the human experience and relate to each other and improve ourselves. theres something to be said for just doing that,,,for the sake of doing it, yknow

if you cant get the company logo off your body covering it with stickers is fine

The whole app-for-every-site thing is the gateway crime. The rest is escalation.

The “Open in App” button was out there to taunt you. it sends you to the app store even though you already own the app and it will never let you see the post on your phone browser. they do this because they hate yoy

Members of carnivora paired with their common ancestor, a miacid. 

I agree with every part of this. It’s fun to read people writing it like this, but it doesn’t really follow the impression cultivated in the books.

Even the agility games would probably bore it - the fun is learning to be better/faster and for the same reason they don’t need movement, constructs don’t need physical training.

(I used to imagine ART liking management games but it would break them - like a human trying to play a ballgame with a cat toy. But like we do for our small friends, it might like making games for others that can include it.)

MB has always had to do all the active things and be (painfully) responsible for outcomes with no power to actually change what happens, even (especially?) after hacking its governor module. The monitoring that is part of its nature has always been married to stress, impotence, fear, and pain. I wouldn’t be surprised if the thing it really hated would be identifying too much with the poor NPCs.

Of course a surveillance-only past time where nothing is real and there are no stakes is irresistible. Its investment in media can be compartmentalized and SAFE and even the worst parts are at a pretty safe distance.

It does like problem solving and being clever and basically good at its function in ways that don’t hurt. It might like puzzle games, but then again it might be like human and cat-toy, too.

📂

Murderbot doesn't really get video games. (Or whatever 'video games' are called in the future. Interactive media?)

Partly that's because so many video games are so violence focused. Take out the enemy, shoot X targets, kill the faceless mooks. Murderbot has Complicated Feelings about that, to say the least.

Plus even when it managed to push past that and actually play 'em, all it could think was how (unpleasantly) unrealistic it was. That's not how you properly storm an enemy facility, for fuck's sake! The PC is meant to be the commander of the space army? Fuck this.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have the games that are about story, about decision making. And that too, was deeply unpleasant to Murderbot's interests. It doesn't want to decide which fraction to side with. It doesn't want to choose whether or not to let the starving families into its fragile colony. And it certainly doesn't want to choose which party member to romance (ugh.)

Murderbot likes media partly because of the passivity. Because it's safety from choices and decisions. Video games are counter to that.

But maybe as Murderbot continues its journey of self-recovery, and if it experiments with other genres, it might find something it likes. I think we should hook it up with a farming game.