"It was a stunning alchemy of human talent and organizational drama -- in short, it was just really damn-good television."

The public devoured it. It was real and it was human and it was intricate and it was dangerous and it had innumerable personalities involved at so many levels. People have always loved watching esoteric talents clash with neuroses, particularly when there's a good soundtrack and there's the possibility of injuries and explosions (D3's serving both the thermally- and emotionally-charged varieties). There wasn't a person in the Diffused that didn't watch every Sunday, or gobble up the pre-race hype broadcasts during the week.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

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(originally published June 15, 2011)

"[The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is] the best prom ever!"

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is the day in your life that you look back upon years down the road and say: "That was the last time anybody ever treated me right." Chronologically, Majora stands after your loss of innocence but before the onset reality of adulthood. In Majora, you say goodbye to firefly-questions, and accept that you do indeed have to live in a world where you must consciously accept your ignorance to the universe around you -- a universe that is entirely full of monsters and that you must nonetheless live in until the day you die. Majora is the first and only time you experience genuine, crystal-clear, 1080p, surprising euphoria following the appropriate build-up.

LittleBigPlanet

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(originally published June 13, 2011)

"[LittleBigPlanet is]...a pretentious, private elementary school compressed into a hyper-concentrated videogame form. Itís the most indifferent game of all time."

Kids, put your fingers in your ears, daddy's home, and he got the tip of penis clipped off by a cigar-cutter.

How, and why, would we allow this asparagus-scented game whose original title, we assume, was: Circumcision II: The Dick-Clippening, a piece of entertainment whose box-art displays a cuteness so violent that it violates the Geneva Convention, to get some playtime? Playtime that would lead to an over-abundance of dong-to-blade closeness? Because it was free.

NB: What follows is a work of fiction. No names or locations have been modified, because none of them ever existed. There was no relationship. There was no breakup. People that write these things are morons.

"Being in vengeance is like being in love -- you can't be told you're getting revenge, you just KNOW you are."

I broke up with a girl. She didn't reckon I had the backbone, or the wherewithal, to emotionally cripple her in the way she did me. This isn't karma. It's something more callous. It's vengeance.

The next sentence involves the word "ass." Coming out of a relationship, you can either kick it, or suck it. I will not suck it.

"[In The Hunger Games] A farmgirl with a compound bow on a mission to kill teenagers on a reality TV show run by a totalitarian government in the not-too distant future wilderness."

We deliberately kept ourselves from reading The Hunger Games too much, because we wanted it to last.

Ready for some mimicked misogyny? Hurr. . . hurr. . . women need to stop writing self-pitying stories about childhood and motherhood and iambic pentameter that have the themes of 'sadness' and 'ladyness' circled in big fat "fuck my life" red marker. Looking back, we had to read shitloads of books about female oppression in school, and do you know the moral of all those stories? "Sucks to have lady bits."

It only took half a lifetime for us to understand that was our fault.

"No, instead, you were risking a thousand self-righteous wanna-be superheroes ripping out your darkest secrets, and then displaying those blackened insides in glass fucking jars, whose curves magnify and enlarge to show the decayed organs' texture!"

You know the story because you've read your history, because it's required by law in this country, and because you're not an idiot. However, for this piece, my editor and I are in agreement that jogging your memory is a necessity for understanding where a concept like the D3 comes from.

In layman's terms, all five human senses had been "hacked." Hack is an ugly word though, it implies that you enter a computer, urgent fingers slithering across a keyboard, hammering some green characters into a command prompt, and stealing some passwords or catching some packets, or, God forbid, downloading the money!

"[Muse's Black Holes & Revelations] makes you question your own ability to kick ass, then gives you all the tools you need to strut across the peak of Olympus Mons like you don't give a shit that you can't breathe methane or carbon dioxide. Go forth and #SLAM_DANCE!"

Human imagination is a horrifying thing. This album's cover features a bunch of REM-looking motherfuckers sitting on Mars drinking tea. Calmly. Something in the artists' lives inspired them (imagining the electrical whirring of the human mind) to make the music that inspired the album, that inspired the cover, that inspired us to listen to the music that made us imagine a Acropolis-themed nightclub housed on a space-zeppelin's lower deck orbiting Mars' second moon, Phobos.

"The view was always the same, it was mostly just the colors that changed, really. It was always the same temperature, the same water, the same sky, the same sounds -- only the color changed."

As time went by, the world began to rebuild itself around him. Things were quiet. He didn't feel the blood in his ears at first. It was his lips splitting open. That was how it began.

The Stonecutter's skiff drifted on through the doldrums and the leviathan still kept quiet.

"[Waiting at an airport] is a really slow time machine that forces you to pass through an alternate Mirror, Mirror version of Nazi-occupied Britain before letting you reach your destination."

Flaming fucking hellshit in a deflating life-raft, I hate the airport. Every moment is an internal dialog. It's all questions. It's all criticisms, complaints, seething judgments, and escapist fantasy. How can this be so slow? How can this person be on their phone while disassembling their bag for security? Why is a soda cheaper than a water? Why does this guy smell like fruit that my girlfriend's cat puked up onto the radiator? Where the fuck is my plane? Why are all the people working at the airport so apathetic? Always? Why hasn't the air-travel "'business" imploded into itself with all these inefficiencies and infinite requests to tolerate their dickish practices? Seriously, 9/11 was almost 10 years ago, that's not an excuse. Get your shit back together. It's getting worse, they're just finding ways to gouge and tithe us until holograms put them out of business.

"[The Alchemist presents] Something even better than value."

For a while, we were wondering what all the fuss was about with The Alchemist. We read it years ago, so the fact that these details come straight from memory are a testament to how sticky these concepts are for us. It's not that long of a book and it's written. . . poorly isn't the right word. "Simply," is the right word. It is "simply" written. It's a vivid vehicle for a concept, not a style.