update from the life of darf · 10:44am May 24th, 2020
it's weird that our name is 'darf' here. it's not that anywhere else. mostly we would think of it as "Q.E.D.", and then when no one cared what that was or ego-checked us over wearing the hat, we'd admit we're just a crazy ptsd-survivor with multiple voices in our head. that's not a very careful distinction. anyhoo.
we feel like writing but don't know that we can condense our thoughts creatively into a story. so here is some stuff that has been on our mind recently.
firstly, thank you to everyone who reached out with cooking advice. i think we realized or are realizing that our main problem with cooking and grocery shopping isn't the physical details or logistics, but the emotional difficulty we encounter simply thinking about the tasks. we have a lot of baggage and bad memories based around the kitchen, food, our mother's absence during our childhood and adolescence, and general feelings of competency (or incompetency) when it comes to life tasks. we tried to make a big pot roast yesterday and when it didn't turn out perfect we got very depressed and wanted to throw out the whole thing. then we kept it and tried it with a little more salt and barbecue sauce and it was pretty good. we will try very hard to remember we are not so flawed we can't learn from our mistakes. it just feels that way a lot of the time.
what we do most of the day is watch episodes of The Big Bang Theory and play video games. we don't really want to be doing either of these things, but if we don't do something while we're awake, we feel miserable, so it is better than that. The Big Bang Theory started out kind of intriguing from a conceptual perspective, and the jokes that had sciency and nerdy themes were genuinely funny, but over the seasons the show kind of crept through the usual hoop-like progression of flanderizing its characters and making every plot relative to the function of inter-group relationships. our main complaint is that Sheldon goes from a semi-likable introvert to a blatantly racist and mysogynistic control freak, but that's probably not news to anyone. we like having something we can put on in the background and not have to pay attention to. it's a set of friendly, familiar voices and known character quantities that lull us into vague comfort like a set of people talking in the room over. we don't really laugh at the jokes or care about the characters or plots. but it feels nice to have something there to listen to.
the games we have been playing are Monster Hunter World: Iceborne, and The Long Dark. The former is a giant grind-fest that feels like a job we have to play in order to eventually play a game. it's the rawest form of digital asset gathering, and even though we feel a deep craving for that, it's probably ultimately a substitute for genuine physical asset gathering, and we'd be better expending our positive energy on something that would generate us revenue or positive clout. sometimes we use that desire to write. other times we just sleep.
The Long Dark is a game where you wander around in the wilderness and try not to get eaten by wolves. if you don't kill rabbits or fish you'll have a hard time. we're mostly in a rabbit-killing loop right now, and we stop playing when we get bored. sometimes exploring is really exciting, but it's such a pain in the ass to leave your storage area, and there are wolves everywhere, and the map doesn't work that well even after they upgraded it, and installing mods seems interesting but such a lot of unnecessary work we don't want to do or even feel capable of. so far we've survived twenty days in the Town of Milton. we have a storage-base in the big house on the hill, and we make daily trips to check our rabbit catch and survey the area near the farm for animals who got killed by wolves. also the workbench is there, and so far we've built a rabbit hat and rabbit mittens. we have also built a lot of snares for catching rabbits. we don't really want to use guns, but we don't have really much ammo anyway, so that's not a problem.
mostly we feel lonely all the time. people reach out and say we can talk to them, but then you message all of them back and treating correspondence like a continuous game of tennis can be very exhausting. mostly we would like someone energetic to keep throwing balls in our direction while simultaneously understanding we lack the energy to keep up on a volley-by-volley basis. maybe that's what everyone wants. maybe we're being idealistic.
the last thing we want to talk about is YouTubePoops. We don't like the name, because we have an aversion to mentioning anything scatalogical or bathroom-function oriented probably due in some part to the nature of our ubpringing. that aside, they're people taking existing videos and mangling them in editing programs to humourous effect. if you ever recorded your voice and then had fun speeding it up and slowing it down, you'll get the ethos of the humour immediately, but what's unique about these videos, or what i find most intriguing about them, is the unique transformative relationship they hold with the original content. if you watch a video for something you know, and then see it mutilated and remixed, you gain a different understanding and appreciation than someone who's seeing the remixed video as their first introduction to the content. i wondered about this in showing people YTPs of series they'd never watched, but strangely found that the humour translated even without existing knowledge of the original material. maybe funny is just funny no matter what. we want to do a video or a podcast or something about how much we like YTPs, specifically King of the Hill ones, but we don't really feel qualified. we'd just be talking into a microphone, then showing some clips, then talking about them, that kind of thing. if it works for youtubers with cool furry avatars, maybe we can do it with our dumb pony name. anyway.
please drop us a line if you'd like to chat. we're perpetually sad and isolated, and will probably continue to be so long into the future. also please continue to look for our commissions as they're published in the near future. if you've wanted to sort out a commission but haven't, don't hesitate to message us and see if we can work something out. <3
Ever tried Mortal Kombat?
If you like sciency shows that are still shows you can't go bad with the various Star Trek series. Their characters are pretty beloved by most and don't have quite as much flanderization as most shows. I've been binging deep space 9 since the lockdown, and I definitely appreciate more now in middle age than when I first saw it in my late teens.
I’d totally watch the YTP thing. They were a big part of my young adulthood growing up, and there’s definitely an art form to them in some strange way. Plus, the beauty of Youtube is you don’t need qualifications necessarily – just do the thing (tm) and put it up for all to enjoy! Some might not, but that’s okay – the internet is a fickle place anyway. :P
Re: YTP's: YTP's have a special place in my heart because that's what got me interested in video editing. AlpacaHawk's timing is legendary; he rarely misses a beat. He's done Star Wars (some of his best work imo), The Matrix, and Toy Story to name a few. DaThings1 is a legend in the community who tends towards more obscure content. He's also done gameshows, How It's Made, Lion King (on his other channel, just "DaThings," no 1) and Le Mis. He's even done ponies if you go far enough back. I hope these creators make you laugh, or at least make your day a little brighter.
AlpacaHawk: Morpheus contacts Mr. Incredible
DaThings1: LegoTM RiverTM