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sabrinamariMichael is overjoyed to be watching the season premier of Survivor. He's sitting in his chair actually radiating happiness. I think he relishes every moment of strategy, each clever competition and every single coup d'etat. He's often told me that he would flourish in the game, and I have to agree. He'd do very well.
He actually applied for the series twice but wasn't selected. If he thought I could handle it, he'd apply again.
On the other hand, I'd rather die than be stuck in that universe. For me, watching the players scheme and plot against each other is an exercise in unmitigated stupidity and the lack of a genuine collaborative spirit is grotesque.
The inauthenticity required to even keep a toehold in that game feels like it would be one long sentence in hell. And to know that I couldn't trust anyone around me, beyond a day or so at most, would make me physically ill.
If I were required to survive under those conditions, I think I'd give up immediately. It would be less painful than trying to play that damn game.
Still, I can see why it's not painful for Michael. He really thinks of it as a game, while I see it as one inalienable component of the greater life tapestry that makes up my identity on this planet. I can't separate this little piece out, or mentally cut out that little bit over there, and think of it as somehow exempt from the way I live in the world.
We are so different. Yet he's been sitting there, quietly watching and making me beautiful pink and red duct tape roses while he relishes the show.
He is beautiful in his difference. I will just keep listening to my headphones and doing other things while Survivor is on. After all, chaotic neutral and lawful good can flourish together.
He actually applied for the series twice but wasn't selected. If he thought I could handle it, he'd apply again.
On the other hand, I'd rather die than be stuck in that universe. For me, watching the players scheme and plot against each other is an exercise in unmitigated stupidity and the lack of a genuine collaborative spirit is grotesque.
The inauthenticity required to even keep a toehold in that game feels like it would be one long sentence in hell. And to know that I couldn't trust anyone around me, beyond a day or so at most, would make me physically ill.
If I were required to survive under those conditions, I think I'd give up immediately. It would be less painful than trying to play that damn game.
Still, I can see why it's not painful for Michael. He really thinks of it as a game, while I see it as one inalienable component of the greater life tapestry that makes up my identity on this planet. I can't separate this little piece out, or mentally cut out that little bit over there, and think of it as somehow exempt from the way I live in the world.
We are so different. Yet he's been sitting there, quietly watching and making me beautiful pink and red duct tape roses while he relishes the show.
He is beautiful in his difference. I will just keep listening to my headphones and doing other things while Survivor is on. After all, chaotic neutral and lawful good can flourish together.
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no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 02:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 03:40 am (UTC)Also, bonus points for the D&D alignment geekiness!
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Date: 2012-02-20 04:25 am (UTC)But I'm going to quibble with your chosen alignment; you value lawful over chaotic, but not to the exclusion of exceptions to law when necessary. So more neutral good, I'd say. Or at least, neutral-lawful-good. Is that a thing? >:-)
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Date: 2012-02-20 04:45 am (UTC)This is why I prefer to play Toon or Paranoia. I like games where Chutzpah is a stat.
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Date: 2012-02-20 07:31 am (UTC)They both have 5 pips of Chutzpah, though. (Or whatever the top of the measurement scale is -- my brain defaults to White Wolf systems, the last thing I actually played. Nearly 15 years ago, now. :-)
no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 11:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 04:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 07:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 11:10 am (UTC)OK, just realised: I was a BBC kid for the most part, during an era when there were 3 channels, 2 of them BBC channels, and 1 a commercial channel during an era of limited choice, so the competition for airtime was fierce, rather than the airtime being huge and needing to be filled up with lots of cheap stuff and repeats.
I'm not into rose tinted glasses. It does seem, though, like there's a point where "choice" becomes "pointless dross to fill the ever expanding space".
no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 03:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 11:37 am (UTC)And what you see is not what occurred. Charlie Brooker's often a bit too aggressive and misanthropic for me, but this is a damn good piece on "reality" tv:
It's not just a lie, it's a particularly nasty lie.
Oh. I just realised that this soapboax needs a polish. I'll be off.
I'm glad Michael's a grown-up whose self-awareness is good enough to allow him to watch it without being affected by it, though.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-25 03:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 11:10 pm (UTC)Yeah. And the way that (in every reality TV show of that sort) they focus so much time on the backbiting and pettiness of the people involved, the quibbling and nastiness... it's really ugly.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-21 05:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 11:30 pm (UTC)At it's best, LARPing for me is an exponent of sub-creation, that "elvish art" of giving the products of imagination "a local habitation and a name." Sorry for mixing my Tolkien and Shakespeare here...**
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* a lot of things can be mapped into three-axis maps, no?
** especially since Tolkien cordially detested "A Midsummer Night's Dream"...