***ARM***
"KIDS THESE DAYS!!?"-->THERAPY
Story about a guy with shitty self-esteem who sees a therapist. Therapist is trying to get him to work on being kinder to himself. Through therapy, they identify that subconsciously, he is extremely judgmental of himself. She gives him the consideration, "Imagine you speaking to yourself as a child with the abusive tone with which you speak to yourself now." This dredges up crazy memories he'd long ago buried. He's a child, in his own time, and doing something that appalls his grandfather. His grandfather cries, "Kids these days!" and the kid, furious, retorts, "Kids THESE days!!? I'll show YOU kids in days...!" and he whisks his grandfather off to a future (may well be our present--zing!) in which kids are killing one another with automatic weapons, injecting drugs into their eyeballs, and having rough, abusive, loveless, promiscuous sex. The grandfather, who seems more shocked by the activities of the kids around him than the time-travel himself, cries, "You fuckin' idiot! I was supposed to die way before this time! I'm never supposed to have seen shit like this! Thanks. Now I can't die happily." For some reason, the older version of the kid (the guy in therapy, maybe a few years ago, or a few years in a future that now probably won't happen) is also there (maybe he's become a really bad person and is the warlord in charge of all these drug-addicted child-prostitute-soldiers), and he gives his younger self the most disapproving glare imaginable. This obviously implies a causal loop, since in the original image there were all these layers of subtle implication: The guy remembers taking his grandfather against his will into this heartcrushing future and feeling a guilt so strong for that that he ultimately dooms himself to fulfil that bleak future for himself, right down to the near-singularity of self-loathing necessary for him to be so unable to separate himself from his younger self. If this doesn't make sense, it's not your fault; I'm really not explaining it well. But it does make sense.
IMG BANK: New Locksley Elementary students whose families are from different times, and some summers they vacation at one-another's vacation homes in respective eras. Kind of like how Bo and Shelby's friends often go to New Hampshire with them during some portion of the summer. (I was specifically imagining the only time I went to the Strauss Farm in New Hampshire, and Eva and Jack and Rowan were there.) Then, of course, I started thinking about if there are any games that have something similar as their premise. It feels like I'm forgetting a lot, but the two that sprang to mind the most immediately were The Sims: Bustin' Out (GBA) and Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. Then I started imagining the latter with a thematic overlay that replaced Fayt with Bo or Shelby and Sophia with Rowan or Eva, and Hyda IV with New Hampshire. However, spoiler alert, that game's plot renders itself irrelevant when it's revealed that the 762 years of developing in-universe establishment (as well as, presumably, the whole of "real-word" history leading up to 2097 AD) have all been part of some fuckin' MMO. I don't know what I could possibly "lay over" that, other than that it's basically the giant plot twist at the beginning of the first Matrix movie. Then I thought about how, in 2003, I was totally amped to play the Matrix MMO and that I could have my character just be anyone from any vaguely real-world setting, minimally adapted to fit the notion that that "real world" was a virtual reality made to seem just like human civilization at the end of the Second Millennium AD. Then the second Matrix movie reveals that there have been like five other iterations of the Matrix itself before this circa-1999-AD one, and my imagination (as well as, I have to assume, those of every other goddamn Matrix fanboy) went berserk. "What if there was a high fantasy Matrix! What if there was a futuristic Matrix!" ...And on, and on, and on. But The Matrix really is compatible with almost anything you want to do a crazy crossover with. The Star Wars galaxy could have been a Matrix. Lord of the Rings could have been a Matrix. Vampire: The Masquerade seems to BE THIS Matrix. Fuckin' anything. Furthermore, it's potentially compatible with worlds that don't necessarily take place within the Matrix. In Firefly, it's never explicitly detailed why nobody knows where Earth is or goes back there. Maybe it's because it's overrun with machines and the human population there is either asleep in some unknown dreamworld or fighting a hopeless rebelling against their mechanical overlords. I don't know anything about Battlestar Galactica but oooh, there's a missing thirteenth colony somewhere, oh shit, we got there and it's covered with machines. Maybe the city in THX-1138 was a colony founded by or left in the care of some rogue VI charged with protecting its insular human population from the wrath of the machines of 01. Maybe even Nausicaa is eventually compatible with The Matrix. Fuckin' any post-apocalyptic scenario--The Matrix (to my knowledge) has only told us the story of one struggling human population in the aftermath of the loss of the Sun. What if there are fuckin' zombies out there? That's awesome.
Story about a guy with shitty self-esteem who sees a therapist. Therapist is trying to get him to work on being kinder to himself. Through therapy, they identify that subconsciously, he is extremely judgmental of himself. She gives him the consideration, "Imagine you speaking to yourself as a child with the abusive tone with which you speak to yourself now." This dredges up crazy memories he'd long ago buried. He's a child, in his own time, and doing something that appalls his grandfather. His grandfather cries, "Kids these days!" and the kid, furious, retorts, "Kids THESE days!!? I'll show YOU kids in days...!" and he whisks his grandfather off to a future (may well be our present--zing!) in which kids are killing one another with automatic weapons, injecting drugs into their eyeballs, and having rough, abusive, loveless, promiscuous sex. The grandfather, who seems more shocked by the activities of the kids around him than the time-travel himself, cries, "You fuckin' idiot! I was supposed to die way before this time! I'm never supposed to have seen shit like this! Thanks. Now I can't die happily." For some reason, the older version of the kid (the guy in therapy, maybe a few years ago, or a few years in a future that now probably won't happen) is also there (maybe he's become a really bad person and is the warlord in charge of all these drug-addicted child-prostitute-soldiers), and he gives his younger self the most disapproving glare imaginable. This obviously implies a causal loop, since in the original image there were all these layers of subtle implication: The guy remembers taking his grandfather against his will into this heartcrushing future and feeling a guilt so strong for that that he ultimately dooms himself to fulfil that bleak future for himself, right down to the near-singularity of self-loathing necessary for him to be so unable to separate himself from his younger self. If this doesn't make sense, it's not your fault; I'm really not explaining it well. But it does make sense.
IMG BANK: New Locksley Elementary students whose families are from different times, and some summers they vacation at one-another's vacation homes in respective eras. Kind of like how Bo and Shelby's friends often go to New Hampshire with them during some portion of the summer. (I was specifically imagining the only time I went to the Strauss Farm in New Hampshire, and Eva and Jack and Rowan were there.) Then, of course, I started thinking about if there are any games that have something similar as their premise. It feels like I'm forgetting a lot, but the two that sprang to mind the most immediately were The Sims: Bustin' Out (GBA) and Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. Then I started imagining the latter with a thematic overlay that replaced Fayt with Bo or Shelby and Sophia with Rowan or Eva, and Hyda IV with New Hampshire. However, spoiler alert, that game's plot renders itself irrelevant when it's revealed that the 762 years of developing in-universe establishment (as well as, presumably, the whole of "real-word" history leading up to 2097 AD) have all been part of some fuckin' MMO. I don't know what I could possibly "lay over" that, other than that it's basically the giant plot twist at the beginning of the first Matrix movie. Then I thought about how, in 2003, I was totally amped to play the Matrix MMO and that I could have my character just be anyone from any vaguely real-world setting, minimally adapted to fit the notion that that "real world" was a virtual reality made to seem just like human civilization at the end of the Second Millennium AD. Then the second Matrix movie reveals that there have been like five other iterations of the Matrix itself before this circa-1999-AD one, and my imagination (as well as, I have to assume, those of every other goddamn Matrix fanboy) went berserk. "What if there was a high fantasy Matrix! What if there was a futuristic Matrix!" ...And on, and on, and on. But The Matrix really is compatible with almost anything you want to do a crazy crossover with. The Star Wars galaxy could have been a Matrix. Lord of the Rings could have been a Matrix. Vampire: The Masquerade seems to BE THIS Matrix. Fuckin' anything. Furthermore, it's potentially compatible with worlds that don't necessarily take place within the Matrix. In Firefly, it's never explicitly detailed why nobody knows where Earth is or goes back there. Maybe it's because it's overrun with machines and the human population there is either asleep in some unknown dreamworld or fighting a hopeless rebelling against their mechanical overlords. I don't know anything about Battlestar Galactica but oooh, there's a missing thirteenth colony somewhere, oh shit, we got there and it's covered with machines. Maybe the city in THX-1138 was a colony founded by or left in the care of some rogue VI charged with protecting its insular human population from the wrath of the machines of 01. Maybe even Nausicaa is eventually compatible with The Matrix. Fuckin' any post-apocalyptic scenario--The Matrix (to my knowledge) has only told us the story of one struggling human population in the aftermath of the loss of the Sun. What if there are fuckin' zombies out there? That's awesome.