| "Art"(Dogshit) | Links | sludgefest
So this is my blog, sludgefest. where i type uncontrollably and post the result out here. they are sorted by most recent, and are typically first drafts with dates based on the the "Last Modified" timestamp the .txt file gives it.
March 7, 2025: Pirate the News!
yarrrr! st draft
"Democracy dies in darkness", 5 seconds later, "$4 USD, please." - the washington post probably
THE OH SO TRUSTED NEWS OUTLETS YOU "LIBERALS" PRIZE AS TRUTH TELLERS ARE CAPITALIST ENTITIES. this is not surprising. in fact, i would go as far to argue that a news outlet's financial incentive is far more insidious than it's political bias.
i remember i used to like reading the online versions of american broadsheet news outlets, it made me feel worldly and well read and such. that was until they started charging me to read their articles. it felt like an odd step back for freedom of the press when it aint free anymore. i dont live in a place where i can buy the print versions easily (believe me i would if i could), and i do still want to read their editorials. (for news, associated press is better. and it's free.)
and here's the secret- i still can read for free, i have *insert past tense form of article title here*. these sites' paywalls are VERY easy to bypass, actually. all you have to do is stop the site from fully loading once the page has loaded the article's text. it's THAT simple. and i believe that this exploit exists because (at least in WaPo's case) the site provides you with like 4 free article reads before prompting you every other time.
there is however, another way if you only plan to read the archival pieces for research or something- the wayback machine. yeah thats it. i think that if you're tech savvy in any way, you would have already figured out everything i just said by now. in fact, if you're sharp enough, you dont need to rely on "trustworthy" news.
any news source can be credible, you just have to know what their angle is media-wise. who are the target demographic of this news? why is this issue in particular being reported? how sensationalised or downplayed is their tone? and most importantly, where is their funding coming from. political bias in most reporting is influenced by the people funding the news, remember that jeffrey bezos himself prevented WaPo (which that bald ass owns apparently) from publishing it's endorsement of Kamala Harris. financial interests will inherently motivate political posturing. big businesses cannot have morals because it often gets in the way of their fiduciary incentive. plain and simple.
another thing to keep in mind is that all news is inherently biased, objectivity in news is a myth. especially in a post-24/7 cable news world where all stories are breaking, by it's nature it will never give the full story immediately, therefore it will always be incomplete, and therefore unobjective. objectivity is a suggestion, i'm not saying journalists are'nt trying to be as truthful as possible, i'm saying that the nature of the medium of news makes that inherently impossible.
but i feel most importantly, EVERYONE is biased, in one way or another- financial, moral, political, or even fact-wise, people get things wrong, reputable sources have put out misinformaation by mistake before. it's only natural. if even HISTORIANS disagree on what happened IN THE PAST, how do you expect people to get the current narrative 100% right?
this isnt to deter anyone who seeks objectivity though, an objective truth CAN exist, you CAN synthesize one, you just have to know how far you can go in either direction, and if the reporting feels off, follow the money.
February 25, 2025: the future's not ours to see, que sera sera
i think it's obvious that a lot of people don't like the current way that the tech world shapes our culture, hell- i'm one of em. the anti-tech sentiment of today feels more grounded in principled frustration than the simple nostalgia the millennials had for old tech formats. no, this feels like a middle finger to the capitalist big tech as their newer products detach us from our work, our lives and our humanity. all while our real world crumbles around us, making the cyber space the only safe space we have left. it's plain to see that this is corporate-driven tyranny slowly creeping into our supposedly free and democratic world, resistance is only inevitable. but will it last?
because i think of a large reactionary movement to the status quo, the counterculture of the 1960s comes to mind, and that died with a whimper, its aesthetic genericized and absorbed into pop culture, its seedy underbelly exposed and left as it's real legacy, and its core ideology and message left behind and forgotten about. the hippies either died or got square, or never got over it, left as ghosts ruminating on what could have been (but never really could be).
And this all happened essentially because the counterculture's relative political equivalent, the democrats, did not see eye-to-eye with it. after kennedy's big brain blowout, the democrats, who still kind of represented an alternative to the hawkish conservative political climate of the time, chose to replace kennedy with his aging vice president who made the situation worse by starting an unpopular war and skyrocketing public disillusionment in the government. then leading a victory from their opposition by a crook. who made the situation even worse.
and it's 2025, forget about the part with JFK aannndd we're back.
despite being filipino, i write about american politics because like it or not, in a globalized political landscape, those with the most power, in this case, the United States shape world politics. and so when they get fucked, i partly cheer, but also worry. because the worst crooks copy the best, and all the best crooks in politics, are american presidents. i want you to remember that Ronald Reagan helped Marcos Sr. flee the country after EDSA.
the good side to globalization is that the internet is a part of it, and it lets the newswire reach me quickly, which means i, and all others paying attention, like betters at a horse race, are made aware of the political horrors as they unfold by the minute. and that means that we have time to think about how we should go about responding to the madness. and frankly, i dont think we have consensus- BECAUSE NO ONE EVEN KNOWS WHAT THE FUCK IS REALLY HAPPENING ANYMORE.
i mean, if you have half a brain, you can. but most people don't; or can't think about it that hard. they have better things to do with their lives, like taxes and playing scrabble. instead of being a frontier for real political change, the internet has become a vacuum where critical thinking goes to die and you are data to be bought and sold. the current mediums of discourse are created in a way that the regular person using it will not understand, it is a headache to decide whether or not that 5 second GIF of a hyperrealistic cat running on it's hind legs with pickle rick in it's mouth while it's background shifts like an LSD fever dream is real or not. you laugh, you like, you move on. is it art? is it deception? is it worth your fucking time? who cares! the almighty A L G O R I T H M has deemed me worthy of all this slop, therefore i as the data pay pig, shall gladly consume it with pleasure.
the "doomscroll" as it is now known has become an even more philosophically horrifying version of TV channel surfing. where once you flickered through channels that all simultaneously bore you until one finally puts you to sleep. NOW you are given content mathematically decided is to your EXACT LIKING, yet it is never enough, you eternally seek more. because it drip feeds it to you, bit by bit, making you feel like you worked to find that ONE post that amused you enough. all the while having corporate propaganda known as "advertising" EQUALLY targeted FOR YOU shoved down your throat as filler, because you'll be too numb to notice.
and this, model naturally does not allow for a condusive environment for discussion, no all it does it prioritize inflammatory content that makes you engage further with this profit-model by making you bicker and bicker while Zuckerberg's Cayman bank account gets bigger and bigger, thereby supporting a system that you the reader, probably, hate. you are sisyphus, roll that boulder for the tech gods' amusement.
this is an article i have sat on for a solid year, draft after draft, because i felt i was too hasty in my conclusion of a doomed world. and yet, here we are in the future. which brings me back to counterculture, i think the core of why the counterculture failed is because of how messy and disorganized it was, it people of very different, often clashing persuasions coming under a single, cultural, artistic movement. there were civil right activists, war veterans, communists, anarchists, you had milquetoast liberals and radical revolutionaries of all persuasions under the same banner. and bob dylan. but that diversity led to it lacking in a main political agenda ASIDES from vague progressivism and "get the fuck out of vietnam". and i believe this to be it's weakness because it's opposition was united in it's goal of sticking to the status quo of "hippie and black people bad" (something nixon ACTUALLY believed).
so now i look at the modern anti-tech movement and ask, what comes next? we had definetely come to this belief because of online discourse on it, so will we follow through on our ideals and continue to struggle for a world where our lives and livelihoods arent tied to the internet? or will we succumb under the weight of our modern tech-fueled and tech-oriented establishment, and accept the cybershit future for the sake of your own survival in this cruel, competitive, kill or be killed world?
so, what'll it be kids?
SOURCE ABOUT NIXONS THOUGHTS ON HIPPIES AND BLACK PEOPLE
February 12, 2025: tom lehrer, and what hasn't changed yet
revised draft
i'm going to say upfront that this is not going to be an articulate analysis and assesment of the relevance of tom lehrer's music has to the socio-political issues of the modern united states. no, this is a rant, another unhinged rant about how shit the world always was. we were all born in the shit and are all forced to wipe.
to answer the title question though, yes, he is. sort of. because i think that what made the bulk of his work riveting in the first place was the shock factor his statements had to the general public of his time, Lehrer was a sympathetic outsider to the 1960s counterculture. himself having a disdain for the cultural-political landscape of his time, he existed as a shock jock within the world of the squares, he performed in suit and tie at concert halls, and poked fun at folk musicians of the time for being "pretentious", while also agreeing with their stances. his intent was to shock, and who better to shock than the white upper-middle class of the 1960s.
but tis now 2025, and i'd consider this to be a post-punk era desensitized to and fatigued by the mindlessly profane and shocking tone of the mtv decade of the 90s-2000s. (as perspective for the older folks reading, family guy and the simpsons are no longer funny)
however, it's interesting to me, that the commentary in his songs has shockingly, and concerningly remained topical. pollution, supreme court censorship, and geopolitical tension-edging of course are relevant if you still listen to the news. but "Wernher Von Braun" in particular is his standout track in my opinion, especially now, in the year of our lord 2024. where the tech sector has grown even more powerful in the world than ever. because those self-proclaimed innovators of our era are very much like the ex-nazi scientist, in that they claim neutrality on the basis of only intending to innovate on their work, while letting their work be both indirectly and directly complicit in the oppression and atrocities ongoing in the world right now. only back then, these invertebrates sucked up to the powers that be, while now they get to elect their preferred leaders so that they can continue making wacky stacks on their techno-business empires with the same ideas in mind as the literal "allegiance-less" ex-nazi rocket scientist. (fuck you in particular, zuckerberg)
there are some of lehrer's work that has aged like a fine wine, like the song mentioned, but also even more songs that either went stale or spoiled like a cheese slice left out on the basketball court. some call him an early bo burnham, but i would not. yes, bo's early work was as edgy as some of lehrer's edgiest. but he grew past that the immaturity to go on to make INSIDE the best breakdown of the liberal white men's psyche i've ever seen. lehrer however stopped before he could, his place was mainly in academia, music seemed to be his side gig for the most part since his career only lasted from the mid-50s to the 60s, quickly retiring back to his job teaching math for "$3000 a year". (asides from his stint writing for the electric co.)
to think of what social issues tom lehrer would sing about if he still wrote topical satire post-1969 would be like thinking how hunter thompson would write about trump today. impossible. these were men of their time, who were at times overwhelmed by the absurdity of their nation's politics even then. and i feel making them even look at today's news would make them collapse into dust the way a victorian chimney sweep would collapse upon being shown skibidi toilet.
February 12, 2025: i feel so broke up, i wanna go home
first draft
why dont you do something funny about trump and musk? that's like asking a resident of pompeii for some humorous comments on lava. aaand that is a quote i stole from tom lehrer. paraphrased obviously, he was originally referring to nixon and agnew, but nowadays the power couple stomping around DC is elon musk and his lovely wife donald trump, so i changed it naturally so.
but frankly, i find that making timely commentary on topical issues and media to be deeply anxiety-inducing and tiring. because as soon as my fingers start clacking at my keyboard after reading the news, my own thoughts betray me roman style. darting into my heart through my chest and taking their turns sapping away my will to write anything that present time. " you dont have the full story yet ", " there's a lot of angles to this caper baby ", " someone somewhere is thinking the exact same thing as you are ", " you're gonna get drowned out by more qualified people anyway ", " ai will replace you, bub ".
all the little discouraging words drown me in worry, worry, worry. then i take a short break, to relieve my "writer's block", (which is what i think of this as, yes it is a cope) and then i see what other people have said already- editorials, headlines, twitter, the daily mail, and, by god, they all really have said what i was thinking, more eloquently and crassly than me, all at once. i HAVE been drowned out, i AM irrelevant.
"wait, no one reads this shit", i think to myself, my twitter where i fujopost gains more eyes than this traumadump of a blog ever does, and i put zero effort into posting on there. once again, i'm taken back to junior high. i am alone, only me and my scrambled thoughts swimming in an infinitely large, dark and empty void of shallow tar. waiting to be swallowed up by my own internal rejection of the validity of my own thoughts.
this blog is my hell- it's like talking to my dad. i pour out all of myself as relevant into these, only to be met by an unphased, deadpan nonresponse. it's all i ever did, and ever will know.
QUOTE SOURCE: youtube.com/watch?v=pK4lSx_Dl6U&t=900s
February 6th, 2025: on writing, and leaving drafts
fittingly, a first draft
i think, therefore i write, therefore i was. because really, what i wrote (past tense) is what i was thinking at the time, from the sentiment expressed, it's intensity, and my wording. i choose my words based on what comes to mind first, in the hope that i may never write the same sentence twice, and then i often slightly edit it later for prosaic flare
now the trouble is, i write a lot, but i dont think in comlete essays, and since i write out only what i'm thinking in that moment, i often leave unfinished drafts. and because i think about a lot of different stuff very frequently, i have a habit of leaving my drafts unfinished and untouched, that is until i remember that i wrote them and then reread them,
but rarely have i ever finished a draft like that, more commonly i leave drafts as is, and then leave for dead as the initial thought i was writing about slowly fades from my short term memory along with it. leaving a corpse of what was a thought, but is now just a vague idea i once had. something that could have been more.
so writing really is like conceiving a child for me, i either take the time to properly write up that thought into a complete piece, or i cant spare the time to dwell on that thought, and it's gone before it's even done marinating.
i want to just dedicate this piece as a eulogy for all of my old essays, which i will very probably never gain the spark to work on again, may they rot in peace in the hazy shade of pale that is my memory.
January 17th, 2025: heads will roll once again, maybe.
FOREWORD: i am dearly sorry for spoiling persona 5.
sometime in late november of last year i was talking to a friend who shared a lot of my political views about the state of the world. for some context to how i felt about the state of things at the time, horrible. is how i'd describe it. observing worldwide political turbulence ongoing at the time some of which is still ongoing now as i write this, and the decaying corpse of the economy leaving the working class of the developed world for dead. the situation not helped by (or perhaps leading to) loud bigoted mouthbreathers being elected who would only certainly make things worse under the guise of "retvrning to tradition". it felt like the last vestiges of my seemingly stable world had begun burning down around me, and i was paralyzed in fear to head for the fire escape. In other words i felt powerless and disillusioned.
and with that feeling came the only detail from that conversation worth mentioning, being the line i ended it with: "i'm starting to think Lee Harvey Oswald had a point, you know." he laughed, i laughed, it was a dark joke, we saw each other off, and moved on. and then come december, a christmas miracle had come early- the heroic slaying of brian thompson.
i am of course joking when i call it that. my true feelings towards the crime itself are likeable to a flat apathy, or to quote song used in the fancams of his killer using the Cell block tango from the musical Chicago- "he had it comin, he had it coming all along". you see, he was a healthcare CEO, and healthcare in the united states is the worst in the developed (white man's) world. hate for this man is not surprising, and even without evidence, the motive is fairly clear to most americans.
the interesting part of this story is however, the killer himself- Luigi Mangione. you see, when news of this triumphant poaching had reached me, i had assumed that the killer was some radical far-left antifa type, (in short, my kind of guy) but i was wrong, Mangione was a techbro who came from a middle-class background that ironically enough, included family who owned a healthcare company (not insurance company, mind you). he was an anti-woke stoic who was also into bodybuilding, ergo, he is an average young man of the current day and age.
and this i feel is what led to him dethroning the Unabomber in being an icon of revolutionary class struggle among the american left. he isnt a balding intellectual paedophile, or a suicidal poet, he is the common man (and i mean man). The smokescreen of economic prosperity has finally subsided to lay bare the regressive and oppressive structures that lord over said economy and keep the working class subservient. the twentieth century may have finally come full circle, we have once again realized that our world is broken, and now we have to choose how to change it. and if recent elections across the world are telling me anything, we are'nt gonna choose progress, and hitler's gonna be chancellor again. and as long as these goons maintain the economic status quo as it exists now, i can only foresee more heads to roll.
i have replaced my desktop wallpaper from a sprite of goro akechi to that one shirtless picture of luigi mangione. from one deranged, misunderstood killer to another. i salute you, dear mario brother.
January 6th, 2025 : Squid Game ISN'T about capitalism - a marxist perspective
first draft
Squid Game season 2 seems to be nearing release, and with that i had begun to remember the online discussion surrounding the actual themes of it's original run and the flurry of thinkpieces about how it is a "critique of capitalism", i remember that there were so much of these that it was memed to death by more casual internet people as some form of loony leftist brainrotty slop. but, as a pinko left wing weirdo myself, and having thought it through again recently, i mildly disagree.
okay, the crux of my arguement is this- the "evils of capitalism" is not the main theme of the show, but more an early plot driver. i will concede on the fact that the show depicts poverty (in the S.Korean context) exceptionally well, and that created solid motivations for the lead characters to actually join the titular squid games to get out of it.
but, that's it. i feel that after it's first act, the main theme explored becomes human nature, it becomes more akin to the film The Platform (it's really good, go watch it if you liked Squid Game), where the characters are taken out of the world as they know and are put in a setting where survival at any cost is prioritized over human decency. the absurdity of the games themselves play into this, the losers of the games die, and it is shocking to the characters as soon as they learn this. the squid games are not an analog for capitalism, it is a bloody(er) alternative, this is literally it's stated purpose, which i will concede, is again, a damn good raison d'etre for the squid games in universe, and as a story.
but what kills this idea for me is the fact that the ending takes a sharp left turn into the left field and kills an entire baseball team with how ham-fisted and out of nowhere it's final plot twists are, where-[***SPOILERS****: the old man lived and is actually the founder of the games, and it was NOT made to be an alternative to poverty, but solely for the amusement of rich bastards like himself. as stated, this came out of buttfuck nowhere and frankly ruined my immersion]
and that had further took me out of the idea that the show was about capitalism all along as the writers seemingly sacrificed cohesive theming for sequel potential. and THAT i feel is the real critique of capitalism in all this, being the contradiction of media seeking to criticize capitalism themselves being big-budget capitalist products that make big money for capitalists, and thus prove the efficacy of capitalism as a system. and Squid Game i feel was (at the time, i do not know how this article will age) an especially lucrative franchise, spawning a sequel and an adaptation in, ironically enough, game show form, two, actually, one hosted by netflix and another hosted by mr. yeast infection himself. both of which are surrounded in their own unrelated controversies which i will not expand on but seem to prove my point and seemingly reinforce the idea in my head that the same force that creates the pop-culture i enjoy will hammer it to marketable slop as part of it's process.
December 9, 2024 : american idiot is forever
First Draft
I have been listening to the same albums for the past 3 years of my late teenage years, and man i feel dead. Green day's American idiot has been one i have relistened to more in recent weeks post-election as i find that while green day is not, american idiot seems like it will last forever as long as america keeps socially regressing every 20 years by electing a damagougic righty into power who promises to bomb 'merica back to the stone age with bastardizations of protestant tradition, or some other more cynical description of the shit conservatives have always done yet we pretend is new every time.
in my interpretation, american idiot is about how much of a dead end modern america is. saint jimmy is dead (in a way) and our lead characters are still in shit situations, distracted only by drugs and tv. there is no one to blame except for everyone. this is all we have. and that was 2004, 2024 and we've recycled the fashions of the time's hot topics, culture wars, actual wars, topped off by a failing economy led a growing oligarchic class of tastelass jackanapes. Even the medium of getting our news and editorial opinion has not changed- a glass screen of attention seeking slop curated by a megacorpwith zero social concern motivated solely by a bottom line that goes up. swap out cable news and the tabloids with twitter or tiktok and the differences blur away.
even whatever progress was made since then is now under threat of reversal, democracy has failed, and it feels as if we are going back to 1934 as well. my odd choice to engross myself in the media and pop culture of the near past has paid off, i can make connections between the news of today and the headlines of before- the elections were just nixon all over again, the global resurgence of the far right and the numerous wars they have started or have threatened to feels eerily like the prelude to the second world war. and the failure of that mid-2010s progressivism feels like he similar left-wing and liberal social movements of the 1920s and the 60s that died swiftly under the aggressive conservatism of their times.
i am starting to think i am simply overwhelmed and making stupid connections based on surface level similarities, did 20 years really go by so fast- is time really a flat circle? fuck it, all i know is that i feel like september never ended. just dont wake me up, please.
August 30, 2024 : the ballad of the terminally online
First Draft
back in the day, i found immense satisfaction reading through random wikipedia pages, filling my head with worthless unsourced junk knowledge i will never use in my life lest i become a jeopardy contestant. In fact i still do. but then wikipedia updated the site to look more "modern" i guess, and now i only get half the joy i used to reading it because the text is no longer dense enough for my cataracts to stare into. And Youtube as a website has been slowly enshittifying itself for a few years now, and now it is split between being a spotify or tiktok wannabe.
so i got a twitter account instead. I wish i didn't.
I started using twitter around the time elon reeve husk threatened Twitter corporate with a hostile takeover. this was also around the time i started really disliking him, i remember praying to god that he does not since i did not want the social media site i just got onto to turn into reddit. fast forward to today and it is now just 4chan with a tumblr minority. I came onto twitter hoping to get away from the kind of doomer attitude i had picked up from 4chan, but i personally find that twitter only amplified that idea in my head, that things will never get better. and i find that having a website that i just joined get metaphorically thrown to the hounds for supper doesn't really help alleviate that feeling.
but to be fair, the site always was miserable, just bad news, even worse news, and blue check dipshits yapping and complaining about that news. at it's core nothing's changed.
so i go to youtube for a change of pace from twitter, something in the background, but youtube does something even worse, it breaks me down with algorithmically spoonfed slop, whether that be through youtube shorts, which is just tiktok but worse, or through recommendations, where i am locked into watching videos so similar that my fucking brain eventually shuts off to stop fearing death.
at this point i am genuinely convinced that the things i liked as a kid were only interesting to me because i actually cared back then, because now i find no joy in the things i used to like. so my only choice now, is to, without distraction, face the reality that doomerism was right, nothing will get better. and i know this because the most people will tell me otherwise is always equivalent to "oh boohoo what took you so long [INSERT SLUR OF YOUR CHOOSING]!"
i often think of a quote from noted asshole Bret Easton Ellis, where i assume in responding to the name of the "It Gets Better" campaign, he tweeted "Not to bum everyone out, but can we get a reality check here? It gets worse."
June 04, 2024 : The fallout of the fallout show: oddly enough, a retrospective
First Draft
With the fact that prime video just announced a Ryu Ga Gotoku (Yakoozer) series i feel that it's now a good time to talk about my thoughts on the fallout show. because i do think it's a perfect adaptation of the bethesda games, in how it's a generally ok story with questionable lore-building that is set behind a well rendered and somewhat alive feeling world.
I enjoyed the show, because i feel that the writing in the betheda games works better in blockbuster forme than as a game. Obsidian just made the better game when it came to giving the player an actually meaningful choice that affects the wasteland majorly. while bethesda can barely set up meaningful conflicts like in fallout 4 or has an interesting plot, but made it way too linear like in fallout 3.
I will stand by the fact that fallout 3 is a good game, just not a good role playing game, i enjoy 3 in the brainspace i do the Yakuza games, where i see the protagonists as their own character rather than a character i can project my own playstyle onto (and also cuz i mod both games to hell and back).
the show plays out like 3 in a way, a grand race to get a macguffin tech-gizmo to save the wasteland. both have their plot contrivances, however still remained generally enjoyable.
To add on to this, an aspect of bethesda's writing they get well are side content and DLCs, once again best exemplified in fallout 3, and to an extent carried over into 4 & 76 where most of the side quests are quite well written, DLCs as well (except for mothership zeta and nuka world imo).
This aspect translates into the show, with a lot of my enjoyment coming from the sidetracking lucy and maximus get into and cooper's backstory AND surprisingly enough Norm's entire B-Plot which is the tensest cliffhanger they could have left the series on.
But thats as much i want to talk about fallout for now, now i want to talk about video game adaptations as a whole, because i notice that the best adapted games are always the ones that already ape/mimic blockbuster films- The Last of us is a good example of this. and bethesda's fallouts are too as i just made the case for, and now Prime is adapting Yakuza, which is exactly like i've said- a game that is practically a blockbuster film, an earlier yakuza movie already exists, [LINK TO A GOOD REVIEW OF IT HERE] which worked pretty well so i'm not too worried about it being good.
But i feel that my observations are becoming a trend of sorts, and i dont really know how to feel about that, because earlier video game movies were either so far from the source material that theyre enjoyable for how batshit weird it's been morphed into (the 90s Mario and Doom Movies) or just kind of plain and decent (the 3d Sonic and Mario movies) and also the persona 5 anime which is just a downright inferior product.
Im not even sure what my point is anymore, i think i just miss wild movie adaptations of tiny italian pixel men. the wild experimentation with that movie is something i dont see in big-budget film adaptations anymore. because they all adapt games that are already like films, it's a safer investment i guess.
November 2, 2023 : Five Years in Denial: A long and droning Five Nights at Freddy's movie review
First Draft
it was 3 in the morning, i was drowsy, i yearned to shut my eyes and die already, but all i could think about at that moment was that i could not, i SHOULD not perish before i find a copy of the five nights at freddys movie, you see i am what you call a lame nerd, i grew up on the internet in the 2010s and as a small, dumb child, all that mattered to me, was five nights at fedd's. so when i heard the movie had come out i did not give a shit, i live in a backwater third world shithole, and they were only showing it in the country with the 8 figure GDPs, (the UK and the US). but then i heard that the streaming version had leaked, as a cheapskate, i rush at the chance for anything free that i normally had to pay for. so i found a copy of off the shadiest porn-virus looking website that had a full downloadable unembedded copy, and then downloaded it. i could now rest.
the next night after whatever i did that day (i do not remember) i watched the movie. i had read reviews about it previously, i did not care what the people said, i had waited 5 years for this movie, i was still a child (very lame) when this movie was announced.
it was now finished. it was ready, i was not excited, not out of any animosity or cynisism, i had just grown to not feel at all about these things, maybe if it was released 3 years earlier before the [Al yankovic 9 coronas birdemic] i would have been ecstatic, but year after year of dissapointing life outcome after another left me stonefaced and unfeeling. sometimes i wish i could still feel wonder and joy like i felt as a young (lame) fan of the earlier FNaF games. i dont want to feel that child-like joy is beneath me.
the movie starts, then it ends, i felt the exact same going in as i did going out. unphased, and underwhelmed. the whole film felt to me like a nauseating collage of all of the games' stories merged and chewed into a single product. At once overwhelming, and not enough. i rationalized to myself that the movie was made for a new audience untainted with the FNaF lore, but all the highly specific references proved otherwise, like the cameo from Matrick and Patrick of Food Theory fame, the reused character names, or the "[ZOINKS SCOOB]" line spoken by [SPOILER], i now think this movie was made for people like me: little worms who grew up with the FNaF games and know the lore, the perfect sucker to buy a ticket for the movie. and i would have. [if i lived where it showed and had friends or went outside at all]. Dont get me wrong, the movie is well-made, it's a very good production, like the animatronics look like the ones in the game, but cleaner-looking for some reason (i guess 40-or so years meant nothing to 80s technology), it's the story i'm hung up on. they had used The Living Tombstone's fnaf 1 song as the end credits, and it felt to me like a very repsectful nod to the audience of feddys hypernerds(geeks and freaks), but also like they based the treatment on the song's narrative instead of the actual games'.
"5 years." i thought to myself twelve times. those 5 years felt like nothing to me. those were 5 years of buildup for an outcome that felt exactly like where i started. talking aout my life right now by the way, but the FNaF games were no different. the more games came out the more i felt that i was too old for them, everything i liked as a kid felt more and more inappropriate for me to like, but i didnt know or care about what "older people interests" were, so i continued partaking in FNaf media, but from a degree of seperation where i didnt enjoy it like how kids enjoy it, i was more bitter, cynical and critical about it, but in a performed way, that felt like not how i would view it, but how i should, i carried this over to almost everything else in my life and found i could no longer truly enjoy anything anymore. i had become like the cynical cross arm avatar commentary "people" who hated everything who i mocked equally, i had in fact idolized that worldview back then, while simultaneosly rejecting all forms of genuine expressions of passion, so i both loved and hated commentary content as a whole. those 5 years passed me by, bitter about the future, past, and present. i had conditioned myself not to feel anymore.
I'm listening to green day as i write this, which me from 5 years ago would probably call "gay", to which i would promptly respond with a quick kick to the jaw, to myself, now, for ever wishing this curse upon myself. i just want to enjoy things, but now i just cant, as hard as i try. i see my friends and family still hold real passion and enjoyment for their interests, and all i can think is that i wish i could still feel that way for my own interests. maybe i should have just shut my eyes and died instead of downloading the movie, i wouldnt have missed out on much personally anyway.