Between everything else I’ve had going on (include falling behind on Animorphs books because I’m too tired to stay awake reading most nights), I read a book recommended to me on Cohost called Ducks: Two Years In The Oil Sands by Kate Beaton (of Hark! A Vagrant fame). The user who wrote the post held it up as part of an example of the great talks Beaton gives since she doesn’t just discuss the book at hand. In the talk that user shared, Beaton took the themes of the book as the starting point and talked further, focusing on the way that class impacts the arts and how a person’s conception of a place doesn’t necessarily reflect the place so much as it reflects the person. Even a person’s experience of a place can sometimes reflect them more than the place they’re at because if someone excepts a ruin, they will find a ruin. If they expect a garbage dumb, they’ll find a garbage dump. The Cohost user brought in some examples from their own life, mainly focusing on how they dislike the common depiction of gas station attendants as vapid wastrels with no prospects who are sometimes even depicted as being a waste of space. Those jobs need to be done and a lot of people doing them are more than just their job. There’s a lot more to people than their situation or the brief context in which you see them, for good or for ill, and one of the things that Beaton’s autobiographical graphic novel does is examine that idea through her experience working off her student debt via jobs in the oil sands of Alberta, Canada.
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Tabletop Highlight: How to Waste Your Time and Destroy Your Relationships
Are you tired of your peaceful and content existence? Do you have valuable relationships you wish to destroy via petty arguments and baseless accusations? Do you feel like you have too much time on your hands and not enough to spend it on? Do you find yourself desiring to feel either the same penniless destitution my generation finds so common or the baron-ish wealth of the landed gentry from a time before anyone but a blooded noble was considered fully human? If you answered “Yes” to any or all of these questions, then I have the solution for you, you potentially masochistic misanthrope.
The solution to your lack of actual problems is clear, stranger. Simply go to the nearest book or game store and purchase yourself a copy of Monopoly! If you can convince your treasured friends and family to play it with you, they will not be treasured by the time your game is through. If you’d prefer to draw out this revolting and evil alienation you so desire, you need not worry. Depending on how many people you have convinced to join you in hell, it may take several days for them to realize their burning hatred of everything about you from your smug grin to their mental concept of you as a thinking, feeling individual. A single game of Monopoly, if played correctly by a competent bunch of adults, can take in excess of three hours, and it is only that short when one or more players is excessively more skilled at deception, betrayal, and debauchery than the others.
Despite the seemingly innocuous nature of this chunk of cardboard, the game of Monopoly is actually a clever device that was created by distilling all of the worst things in the universe, such as war, hunger, income inequality, the housing market, police brutality, the abuse of power by elected officials, the stock market, and anyone who walks around in a top hat and a cane as a part of their usual outfit without being able to understand that they look like a bit of a jerk. After that, a few other awful concepts were thrown in for flavor (capitalism, gambling, and vanity), and now any child can cry themselves to sleep at night as they listen to their parents arguing over whether the banker has been skimming off the top or not. Both adults know the banker has had their hand in the cookie jar, but one of them has no proof and the other is the banker who will refuse to admit it because they have gone from the sweetest, most honest person in existence to a horrendous and unrepentant liar in a matter of hours.
Wars have been fought over money and land in the past, and this game now allows you to bring the horrors of war to your family and home. You may go the entire game without seeing a bloody corpse, but that’s only because verbal eviscerations and emotional destruction don’t leave corpses, merely the hallowed-out husks of once-vibrant people. Argue with the people closest to you with such reckless abandon that problems from the very beginnings of your relationships will resurface and raise the stakes at the start of every turn, from who wins a simple game meant to emulate land-ownership by the incredibly wealthy into a competition to determine who has the moral high ground. Such vile hatred shall be spewed that you will find yourself dwelling on both what you heard and what you said for at least several days afterward. If you cannot shake it off and make yourself believe that it was simply a game and not a nuclear missile shot straight at all of your relationships, then such feelings will consume you until there is nothing left of who you once where or you have gotten extensive therapy.
Despite the giddy anticipation I can sense you feeling as you contemplate this mental and emotional self-destruction, I must urge you to reconsider. You may revel is such depravity, but please keep in mind that innocent lives hang in the balance. Sweeter souls than yours can be destroyed by Monopoly, if only be being caught up in the wake of destruction that follows this foul pastime. Spare yourself and these poor beings the wrath of capitalism pretending to be a family-friend game. Pick up Settlers of Catan instead.