Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

I tend to consider myself an amateur Real World scholar. I say “amateur” because I’ve done no actual university study on this subject, but I still say “scholar” because I’ve stopped watching the show as entertainment. At this point, I only watch it in hopes of unlocking the questions that have haunted man since the dawn of civilization. I’ve seen e

However, some things are just too enchanting (and just too weird) to ignore. Those were my thoughts when I first read about The Sims, arguably the most wholly postmodern piece of entertainment ever created. Much like the TV show Survivor, the Pokémon phenomenon, and Parliament Funkadelic, The Sims is a keenly constructed product that seems hopeless

when people tell you that you should be on a reality program, they’re basically saying you’re crazy enough to amuse total strangers. I was always flattered by this suggestion, and I used to fantasize about being cast on The Real World, imagining that it would make me famous.

But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for

The Sims makes the unconscious conscious, but not in an existential Zen way; The Sims forces you to think about how even free people are eternally enslaved by the processes of living.

In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever “in and of itself.”

I profoundly prefer to be turned on by any woman who looks vaguely fuckedup; that’s much more intellectually satisfying.

There was a time when Paradise City had a tour bus, but they lost it last summer. This is not a euphemism; they literally can’t find it.

Some would claim that this is kind of like “agnosticism,” but true agnostics always seem too willing to side with the negative; they claim there are no answers, so they live as if those answers don’t exist. They’re really just nihilists without panache.

Cereal commercials teach us that anything desirable is supposed to be exclusionary.