Common Decency for Dummies, or "How to Internet"

Internet, we need to have a talk. I know things have been a little hard since the dawn of the web, and I know that sometimes I've been a little bit disappointed in you. It's just that now it's moved beyond disappointment and I'm really just pissed off.

Guys. Seriously. The comments. They need to stop. I'm not talking about comments on my blog, or comments on my opinions, or comments about the way I'm choosing to live my life, or whatever. I'm talking about internet comment sections. They need to stop. Don't know what I mean?

Take a moment to think about the last time you saw a constructive, well thought-out discussion about a potentially controversial topic in the comment section of a website. No? Think about the first time, then. Still nothing?

Now think about the last time you saw something like this:

"Wow, whoever wrote this is clearly retarded. It's different from my opinion, so clearly this person is just stupid."
    -GuyWho'sAlwaysRight
   [23 Comments]
         "lol wow loser ok y u take the tiem to rite this if u dont like lol faget kill urself"
   -420blazeit2011
   [Show more comments]

Look familiar? Probably because this is probably about 99.99% of comment sections on the internet. Doesn't even matter what the comment box is attached to, whether it's news articles, Facebook status updates, YouTube videos, Kickstarter pages for bringing back Reading Rainbow (that exists, by the way, and it's totally funded), anything and everything is a victim. My recent favorite is a lovely top comment from the article at [this link] detailing how poorly McDonald's is responding to its employees' demands for better wages. It reads as follows:

Ivan Saucedo-

"It's funny how flipping a burger pays as much as working at a hospital in direct patient care..... If we can't get a raise for savings lives you can't get a rise for making people fat.."
 

(Oh, and in case you were wondering, that is his real name, and that link is to the facebook profile he chose to leave this little gem of a comment with. I openly encourage you to send him a nice message explaining exactly how he is incorrect. Tell him the internet police sent you.)
 

Now, this is about to get really angry and ranty, so if you can't spot what's wrong with that comment, you might wanna pull up a seat and get ready to take notes. I'm about to give you a crash course in what your mothers should have spent your childhoods teaching you instead of drinking heavily while you ate paint chips in the corner.
 

Now I know that there's just something about the moment that you realize you have total anonymity on the internet that just makes you want to grab the nearest sharp thing and sodomize your neighbor with it. It's like when you threw pencils at that nerdy kid when your elementary school teacher turned the lights out. Only this time you can just lynch him from the ceiling fan and nobody can even see you snicker and send you to the principal's office. The thing you need to understand though, is that everyone else on the internet isn't just boxes of text with no feelings that you can say whatever you want about. There are human beings on the other side of those words. Human beings who now think that you're a complete brainless asshole for drunkenly smashing out a garbled mess of hate-bait in the comments of an Owl City lyrics video.

 
Guys, we're born with brains. Brains are wonderful things. Sadly, an increasingly large number of us all around the world are failing to learn to use them beyond the mastery of getting hand to put cheetos where mouth hole is. Even less fortunate is the number of white-belts in cheeto-mastery that have also learned to whack their dusty orange fingers on keyboards to make internet words. And they have black belts in being complete imbeciles. And they're forming opinions.

Let me explain a little something about how opinions work with the brain. In order to develop an intelligent and informed opinion, one must first have a developed and at least somewhat intelligent brain. At the risk of using a potentially offensive metaphor, underused brains trying to make opinions is a lot like teenage pregnancy. Biological signals say that this is supposed to be a proper function, and everything kind of has an idea of what it should be doing, but chances are the result is just gonna come out with problems. Similarly, a mind that isn't yet prepared to be forming opinions can still attempt to do so, but they're going to come out with a lot of problems, and they likely won't function correctly.

Skipping over the obvious abortion joke I could be making about Mr. Saucedo's comment (and kind of just made anyway), you get my point. The vast majority of comments on the internet are the brain-vomit of minds that didn't fully digest what they were reading or viewing before regurgitating a response. Maybe they just didn't have the capacity to. But you know what? That's why I'm here.

Here is my fool proof* checklist of questions you should ask before you press the "Post Comment" button:

1: Does this really need to be said?

2. Have I spent at least ten minutes thinking about what I'm about to say?

3. Am I prepared to defend this opinion in a civil manner against an expert on this subject?

4. Am I an expert on this subject?

5. Would I say this to this person's face?

6. Would I say this to this person's face if he/she/they could definitely kick my ass?

7. Does my internet comment contain anything of a religious, political or controversial nature?

8. Does this comment accomplish anything outside of letting everyone know that I am angry?

9. Am I sober right now?

And finally,

10. Shouldn't I be doing something more constructive than starting fights with people I don't know on the internet?

If you answered in an unsatisfying fashion to any of those questions, congratulations! You shouldn't be posting a comment on the internet. Take your bag of throwing rocks and go home, because you don't belong here and nobody needs your trash. Sincerely, everyone with the capability to form thoughts outside of our own selfish agendas.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

The Subjectivity of Progress

I've never been good at allowing myself to be comfortable. That isn't to say that I'm a particularly motivated human being, or that I'm ambitions or driven. Rather, it's quite the opposite. I'm a simple man with simple ambitions. I began to see a long time ago that I was never destined for greatness. I'll never leave a mark on the world, my name will never be known to millions or likely even hundreds, and the world as a whole will be largely unchanged by the events of my life. In light of this, I've decided that all I really want from my life is to be happy, because at least that much I can obtain. It's a simple goal.

Or at least I thought it was until I finished college and began to see the deeper inner complexities of happiness. For a long time, I viewed happiness as a state I would enter when a set of specific circumstances had been fulfilled. Those circumstances were different for everyone, of course. Some people want a house, a spouse, a kid or two, a nice car. Other people want a powerful position, or a meaningful job, or lots of money. Ambition, motivation and drive were just the words we used to weigh an individual's personal dedication to achieving their personal idea of happiness. Everyone had a number they wished to reach, and a number they were currently sitting on. Between a person and their end happiness goal is a staircase; a series of events and circumstances which must be met and fulfilled before happiness can be had.

In the beginning, I had a high number in mind. I wanted to be a leader of some kind. I wanted to be a famous author, or a great professor. I wanted to live in a nice home, and have nice things. I wanted to get married and have a great relationship, and come home to visit every now and then and have Christmas parties in the holidays where my friends and I would get together and reminisce about how stupid we were as kids. It was all very idealistic, of course, but even with a mind as logically programmed as mine it's easy to get lost in the notion. Especially when growing up, we're force-fed the concept of "you can do and be anything if you try hard enough" at every turn. I'd spent my whole life with everyone around me telling me how smart I was, and how blessed I was. Every cartoon, every story book, every song, every movie, every goddamn breakfast cereal commercial spent every breath telling me that I was a special individual and that if I settled for anything less than fulfilling my dreams, I was just letting myself down.

In reality, of course, it isn't quite that simple. As my college years went by, my suspicions that this whole notion that everyone is a beautiful snowflake with limitless potential carried with it the slightest aroma of bullshit were slowly confirmed. As I began to grasp the realities of my own potential, my number began to change. At first I tried to fight it. I felt like there was no reason I should have to lower my expectations, because that only meant I was letting myself down. I was giving up on my dreams, and in the blind world of optimism I'd been surrounded by growing up such a thing was unheard of. There was never any little engine that got half way, went back down and suggested maybe building a track that went around the hill instead of over it because in addition to being more cost efficient over the amount of fuel it takes to move a hundred ton steam engine over a seventy degree incline, you're also not trying to move a hundred ton steam engine over a seventy degree incline. I'm also fairly positive that no Disney character ever sang a song about "Y'know, maybe I'll just stick with my mediocre lot in life because friendship and dreams can't solve everything and I'm kind of terrible at stuff."

Ultimately, I was defeated. The realities of my potential became impossible to deny, and I was forced to settle. I graduated into a field I didn't want, realized that I'll likely never be a famous author, and that given the average salary of my career options I'll be fortunate to own a home, much less a large one. And as I sat there, staring at the shattered remains of my tragically hopeful former life goals, I began to piece them back together into something that made more sense. Something didn't compute. In the logical portion of my mind, I had done everything I'd been told. I had tried my best, I had given it my all, and I had dreamed hard. By all accounts, everything should have fallen into place and I should have succeeded like the underdog hero I was always meant to be. But instead, I failed. So now what? I had no answer. There was no preordained course of action when you in fact cannot become anything and anyone you want to be because you dreamed hard enough.

I needed a foundation to build a new viewpoint from to make sense of this. Much like fishing for the corner pieces in a box of a thousand piece jigsaw, I started to root out the things I truly wanted in life that I felt would lead to happiness. I threw out the things I didn't want and left only the fundamental things I would require to achieve that state of being known as "happy." What I came up with was fairly simple. I wanted a job I enjoyed, and a space to live in and call my own. I wanted a good computer, and a reliable car, and I wanted to be able to comfortably afford these things. Big houses are nice, but my apartment in college taught me that I'm quite comfortable in small apartments. My experiences with relationships and the value I place in privacy and the sanctuary of solitude taught me that I didn't really want a wife or a family.

Suddenly, my pretty picture of hopes and dreams had been reassembled as a simple list of things. An apartment, a nice job, a good computer, a reliable car. It seemed simple enough. The problem then became getting there. Or getting anywhere, for that matter.

In order to achieve a goal, one must find a way to make progress, and the shortest path between two points is a straight line. Logically, it made sense to arrange these things in the order of priority. I needed a job before anything, of course. After I had a job I could worry about replacing my car, and then moving out. When I had my own place, I could get a new PC. On paper, most people would arrange things in this order.

Life isn't written down on paper, though, and I soon began to find that my ability to follow straight lines is about as good as a Parkinson's patient's ability to draw them. I figured it would be easy to just fixate on one thing until I'd achieved it and then move on to the next, but as life went on and my perspective of my position changed, I couldn't decide which goal to fixate on. I spend the most time on my PC, and it's the least expensive thing to replace, but at the same time it's a non-necessity, but my car still runs, and better than my PC does. Meanwhile though I'm still living with my parents, and I desperately crave independence and my own place, so for a time I'll fixate on that, but then my PC starts to show its age again and becomes the center of focus. Meanwhile I'm working jobs around the city, and while I have money coming in, it seems to be going out just as quickly between repairing the car I have now and paying off my student loan.

Furthermore, I've found myself questioning what defines a good job. What defines a reliable car, or a good PC? What defines a good apartment? How much of the quality of each thing on this list am I willing to sacrifice for the sake of brevity or easiness to obtain? Suddenly my structured corner pieces have become a mismatched handful of black pieces with stars on them from a puzzle that is literally just the night sky. I don't know where they go, or how they fit together, or even why I'm holding them. I could ask for help, but what good would that do? Everyone's opinions will either reflect the standard logical order I mentioned earlier, or be tainted with bias based on their own personal views of what happiness is. They'll tell me I don't need material goods, I need religion, or maybe that I don't need money, I just need a good relationship.

Everything has suddenly spiraled into a catch 22. Only I can determine what makes me truly happy, but I have no idea what happiness even is.

Let's go back to my original statement. I've never been good at allowing myself to be comfortable. I'm constantly trapped in a state of wanting to stop and just be comfortable where I am, wanting to settle, but feeling like if I just try a little bit more I can achieve the goals I need to be happy. Every time I feel like I'm making progress along the line, I look up and realize that I've been walking in circles and nothing I've done for the last week has been productive. Am I making progress if I have a job I love that doesn't pay me enough to move out? Would it be different if I had a job I hated every day of my life that paid me better?

In the end, I have no idea. I have no idea what happiness is, or how to get there. I don't know how I'm going to take these abstract, subjective ideals of happiness and comfort and meld them together with life and reality. What I do know is that in the evenings I have good friends to talk with, I enjoy the job I have now, and I'm 500 million points into the best game of Pokemon Pinball I've ever played. Maybe until I find out how the rest of all this works, I should just take the little bits of happiness I get from simple things like these and be done with it.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

Kids these days, and the games that make them stupid.

Despite my best efforts, I recently came into possession of a 3DS XL. When the original Nintendo DS came out, I swore on my life that I'd never own one of these gimmicky, glorified doodle pads that cost more than half of what a real console cost, but I've finally caved. I justify the decision based entirely on the fact that I was able to get a limited edition Legend of Zelda 3DS that's gold colored with an image of the Triforce emblazoned on the top, but deep down I'll always know I've spent a large sum of money on a handheld toy intended for children.

The decision was also influenced, however, by a group of friends who are all fans of the Pokemon franchise. You remember Pokemon, right? That game from the mid 90's about 10-year-olds who leave home to wander the world free of supervision, capturing dangerous wild animals in cramped plastic spheres and forcing them to savage each other for sport and money? Of course you do. Even grandparents who call them pokeymans or refer to all of them as either Pikachu or Pokeychu at least know what Pokemon is to some degree. When I was a kid, my dad made up his own pokemon named Squeegee just to pester us when we played the game.

The point of all of this is, I was eventually convinced to get a 3DS so that I could give the new Pokemon generation a try. I haven't played a pokemon game before this since the third generation, and with the franchise now in its sixth and sporting over seven hundred of the little creeps to capture, getting back into it was a little bit overwhelming. However, this blog post isn't actually going to be about pokemon. This post is going to be more about the aspect of the game that bothered me more than any other change, which is saying something because they've declined to the point of trying to pass off ice cream cones with eyes, piles of garbage and a set of car keys as pokemon. (Here's a fun project you can try at home. Get a bag of plastic googley eyes, a hot glue gun, and a random household object. Glue some of the eyes someplace onto the object and make up a name that combines something that describes it with something it does. Congratulations, you've created a pokemon. Send it to Nintendo and wait for your royalties check.)

The aspect of the game that bothered me the most is a term you'll find frequently among gaming communities, and that term is hand-holding. The term means pretty much exactly what you expect it might. It's when a game takes you gently by the hand, assures you it's gonna be okay, and then proceeds to do everything for you as if you had no idea what a video game was and were very lost and confused as to how this device made it into your hands.

I'll give you an example. When you begin this game, you enter a forest full of tall grass- regions where wild pokemon will attack you, and you have to battle them with your lone starter pokemon. In previous games like those from my childhood, if you didn't remember to get the secret potion hidden in your bedroom or buy some from the store before entering the forest, if your pokemon fainted it was your own damn fault. Too bad for you, guess you lose a bunch of money and have to start over. You learn a lesson about being prepared and you don't make that mistake again. In this new game however, an irritating two-dimensional character followed you around and offered to fully heal you for free anytime you liked. No lessons were learned except that the healbot in the pink shirt is evidently a magical walking hospital to be maliciously abused.

Now, this isn't to say that there weren't any tutorials in the early games. In fact, in Red and Blue versions, the first pokemon games, there was even a mandatory tutorial on how to catch pokemon. A man stopped you, you entered a cutscene where the game demonstrated how to navigate the menu, select a pokeball, and use it on the wild pokemon. Then it was over and you were free to go. No more tutorials, no more help, no more hand-holding. That was it. In this new game, however, the tutorial phase seems to last for the entire first half of the game. Your group of two-dimensional cardboard cutout characters the game forces you to be "friends" with follow you around and act like morons, adding a babyish and irritating glaze over the game's potential fun.

Another feature that's been persistent through most if not all of the games thus far has been the presence of a Rival character. In Red and Blue versions, your rival was a tough competitor who almost always gave you a run for your money. He appeared without warning at times, and his team was actually difficult to defeat in many cases. This, however, served a purpose. The game developers weren't just being sadistic by creating this obstacle you'd have to fight time and again to overcome. If your team wasn't strong enough to defeat your rival's team, it meant that progressing in the game beyond that point was going to be too difficult for you. Many transitions of the map in that game were designed to become impasses when you crossed them until you defeated a certain gym or found a certain move that would allow you to backtrack. In many cases, your rival served as a checkpoint before these impasses to make sure you didn't find yourself in a situation where you were trapped in an area too strong for your under-leveled or poorly constructed team. The point is, you learned from experience. The game didn't baby you and tell you exactly what to do and put band-aids on your boo-boos. It would coldly defeat you and tell you to go work harder. And you learned from it. Even if surpassing that obstacle meant just training one pokemon to a super-high level so you could brute-force things, it forced you to work for your progress.

In the new game however, your rival is one of the weakest trainers in the game. Her team is never full all the way to the end, she's never a challenging opponent, and there's nothing gained from defeating her. You don't learn anything except that your neighbor sucks at pokemon. Then right after that, you can stroll into a gym (or boss-area) full of confidence from your triumph only to get curb-stomped by trainers who are an actual challenge.

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old codger, back in my day, games just weren't this... childish. By this point, you may be dismissing all of this because well, it's a children's game. It's designed for children. Of course it's going to be easy and hand everything to you. But what I'm saying is that video games have almost -always- been for children, but up until recently they haven't been anywhere near this level of insultingly brainless. It isn't limited to Pokemon games, either. I've also been playing the new Legend of Zelda game that came with my special 3DS, Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. While some of the age-old difficulty and puzzle depth remains intact, there are literally areas in this game where NPCs are dotted around puzzle rooms to hand you solutions to the puzzle at hand. For instance, in an older Zelda game, you would walk into a cleverly hidden puzzle room and see a collection of moving platforms, switches, pressure plates, impassable obstacles, and a really shiny treasure right in the center of it all. You'd have to figure out how to move the platforms, what order to hit the switches, what box to place on the pressure plate and what barely-visible eye switch to shoot with an arrow in order to reach your prize. It may have taken upwards of fifteen to twenty minutes to riddle that out, and sometimes you just couldn't do it. Tough break, guess you don't want that heart piece badly enough. In those instances in A Link Between Worlds, however, if you make it across the more obvious points of the puzzle, you reach little "thief" NPCs who mutter to themselves when you speak to them. They literally mutter solutions to the problems. The game is handing you the solution to the problem with absolutely no progress required.

Furthermore, there is literally an item in the game that you get very early on called "hint goggles." You put them on, and it shows you the solution to the puzzles in the game. Not in cryptic hints, as were present in older Zelda titles, but literally hands you the solution to the puzzle on a silver platter because you used a get-out-of-thinking-free card. In an older Zelda title, if you had trouble figuring out the sliding ice-block puzzle, you could just get stuck there until it finally clicked in your brain or you wimped out and bought the guide book. It forced you to think. Learn. Solve the puzzles by using your brain. Abstract reasoning, spatial reasoning, problem solving, patience. You learned these things from these puzzles. Why then, are new games handing the solutions out like plastic trophies at the end of a tee-ball season? It's literally the same as saying, "Look. I know you didn't hit a single ball the whole season, even though it was stationary and resting on a stick right in front of you, and your foot never even touched a base, and you peed yourself in the outfield more than once. Hell, our team never even won a game the whole season long. But you know what? You showed up, sat on a bench, wore a uniform and chewed bubblegum. So here. Have a big plastic shiny reward for doing nothing. Good job, kiddo."

Guys, kids aren't stupid. They may be loud, messy, obnoxious little bundles of financial suicide, but they aren't stupid. I spoke to dozens of parents while working retail electronics over the holidays who were buying iPads and other tablets for their four and five-year-olds so they'd stop playing with theirs. After talking with them I learned that these kids nine times out of ten didn't only know how to slide the screen around and poke the buttons, but they knew how to play the games. They knew how to launch the Angry Birds to blow the castle up in one or two hits. They knew how to get on the internet, go to websites, get on the App store and buy new apps. These kids are toddlers, and they've figured this out. So why the hell are we continuing to treat them like mentally deficient sheep who need a guiding shepherd for every waking moment?

From a company standpoint I can understand these design decisions. Kids these days don't have the patience for solving puzzles or learning or challenging things. Why would you make games that are hard for kids who won't buy the next one because they couldn't beat the first?

But riddle me this. Why are these kids like that in the first place? Could it be because maybe this generation is too busy molly-coddling their kiddos, handing them everything for free and rewarding them for lack of progress? Maybe it's just being ingrained into our society that if we show up and look around, if the answer to the puzzle isn't made obvious in the first glance, we don't have to solve it. It'll eventually solve itself, or someone will hand us the solution.

All I'm saying is, it's going to be a sad day when you march down Victory Road with your assembled team of googley-eyed household objects and instead of battling you, the Elite Four just congratulate you, shower you with money and praises and cupcakes, and then gently take your hand and lead you into a degrading tutorial on how to push a big red button and have all the pokemon you haven't caught delivered to your PC free of charge because you earned it, slugger.

-The Sarcastic Soul