James Wallis: 'Brave N00B World' is Kitsch
When inane dipshits are granted access to higher education one result is an application of academic exploration, method, and know-how to bullshit like Buffy the Vampire Slayer; so, rather than fostering useful and meaningful exploration of the human condition we get shit like Buffy Studies. The latest example of this trite "academic" waste to come to my attention is N00b World Reorder by James Wallis, a "scientific" exploration of Azeroth, the primary fictional world in World of Warcraft.
Starting with James' first sentence, "I have spent the last few months on sabbatical, visiting a persistent fantasy world known as ‘Of Warcraft’." the tone of this academic diarrhetic is set as both faux-academic and tongue-in-cheek to the point of oral harm. It acknowledges that the "world" is fantasy yet also feigns a notion of "visitation", defining the duality of this rampant idiocy which serves as my primary source of psychotic fucking hatred.
James Wallis, henceforth referred to as "motherfucker", is incapable of setting a perspective for the damn article. Motherfucker measures distance based upon the movement of in-game characters, then utilizes "page 66 of one of the only authoritative works of Azerothian Studies to date (World of Warcraft Game Manual; Hutchens, Catalan et al, 2005)" as a means of comparing various race dimensions. Motherfucker does not break the fourth wall so much as motherfucker continually leaps back and forth through its shattered frame. But this duality, this inability to establish perspective, is not limited to only motherfucker's tone. No, the rampant, schizophrenic lurching is also evident in motherfucker's process.
After establishing a rough estimate of the size of the landmasses within the game, motherfucker then wraps that surface area around "an imaginary sphere" and calculates the sphere's diameter as "12 kilometres [sic]". From this motherfucker is able to determine the sphere's density, gravity, and its spacetime. These calculations are all certainly interesting, until motherfucker points out the main problem with the entire fucking thought experiment: "all this assumes that Azeroth is a standard astronomical body, and it isn’t".
That's right, you fucking guessed it. Motherfucker, after wasting his valueless time extrapolating bullshit, negates any progress he might have made by determining that WoW's World is flat. How did he determine this? By "swimming to its edge and jumping around like a prat" motherfucker found that "Azeroth is (a) flat, (b) finite and (c) rectangular". Gosh. It's almost as if Azeroth is merely a coded plane upon which a game occurs which is governed by the code of the fucking game rather than any sort of planetary body maintaining gravitational forces.
YOU MOTHER FUCKING, DIPSHIT, FAUX ACADEMIC, TRITE, SHIT-HEADED ASSHOLE!
Imparting real-world physical characteristics and mechanics onto game worlds for the sake of justifying a bullshit-stupid paper is fucking moronic. Period. Trite assessments of in-game gravitational forces by calculating the relation of gravity and biological composition required to ensure that Supremus does not break his non-existent hip bone is not academic, not insightful, not brilliant. It is the height of useless, ignorant, base, fanboy-level faux academic stupidity which ought to merit expulsion on the grounds that motherfucker is fundamentally confused about why the fuck academics do what they do.
We're not trying to kill time bullshitting. We're not trying to dick around while we avoid real jobs. We're trying to accomplish something. We're trying to make progress. And if you'd rather go play WoW than make some lasting improvement to mankind's shitty existence then just fuck off and die, James Wallis, rather than dragging academia down to your base level of sophomoric stupidity with your meaningless, wasteful kitsch.
10 comments:
man.. I love Kitsch.
but not that.
That's.. just boring.
I kinda want to dig up Chex' old War for the 4th Wall and post it here.
I kinda want to kill James Wallace with my mind.
God damn this bullshit pisses me off.
That's Telepathy, KYLE!
wait.. is that Kitsch?
hmn.
How would you feel about the same work if it was done by a theater major, as a form of performance art or satire?
I'm asking becuase.. as a joke work.. it's not a bad thing to be done.. and it'd be similar to dissecting Buffy or The Prisoner, or whatever modern work in an English Major way.. .. I guess.. what I'm asking is.. where do you see the line stop?
http://io9.com/5020957/worlds-greatest-astronomical-detective-strikes-again
Better use of Astronomy?
and.. yeah.. fix the link. I am made of fail.
I'm ok with satire. I hate faux academic bullshit. Especially if it's all a self-contradictory thought experiment or imparts real-world physics onto coded crap.
In the article he talked about how the world's gravity could not be more than X lest gigantic creatures' hip bones explode. FUCK YOU!
Interestingly, this sort of also delves into my hatred of role players. In order to role-play in WoW one has to pretend away many particular components of the game to arrive at some shoddily constructed mental fabrication. Since they cannot fully account for and include everything in their role-playing my stance is that they need to shut the fuck up and get out the graph paper.
... that last paragraph is interesting.. becuase it pretty much describes the very act of role playing... and thus you hate it for... well.. being.
But.. further, and I guess I didn't ask this quite well, I was more curious about where the line between the faux academic and the scholarly lies.
I started wondering it with the Buffy Con stuff.. because.. I get where you're coming from, and yet I wonder how it's any different than say, my writing an IS on the James Robinson run of Starman..
I mean.. talking about some classical theme or topic through a modern interpretation makes sense to me, both as a way to see how that theme holds up to different circumstances, and to see how the modern interpretation might change the classic in it's execution..
There has to be some sort of boundary beyond the academic version of "Simpsons Did It", to shorthand it.
"talking about some classical theme or topic through a modern interpretation makes sense to me, both as a way to see how that theme holds up to different circumstances, and to see how the modern interpretation might change the classic in it's execution.."
Here's the short-hand difference:
1) I'm going to write about Starman and discuss Post-Modern Escapism.
2) I'm going to write about Post-Modern Escapism and discuss Starman.
1 can go fuck itself.
It's about the intent of the writing and its focus. And not in some incorporeal way which cannot be determined. You just read the damn article and determine its focus and why it was written.
If you want to write about Starman then write about Starman. If you want to write about Post-Modern Escapism then write about Post-Modern Escapism. If you're writing about both? Odds are pretty good that you're just a fanboy who wants to write about something they like and found a half-assed justification.
I'm not against using something from pop-culture as an example for a concept. I'm against focusing on the example moreso than the concept.
Especially when the result is as fucking stupid as the "Brave N00b World" article which collapses in on itself.
That was mostly hastily written because things broke at work. So feel free to rip it apart.
Err.. the "comment" was hastily written. The post is a work of pure wonder and awesome.
What if I'm discussing Starman's treatment of Post Modern Escapism?
I.E. specifically working from the text? Define the topic from outside it, as a starting definition, and then stay entirely on the text?
Nah.. it's cool.. I'm not looking for an argument here, so much as insight.
Because.. I agree the original post is on some elementally pure crappile. But what I get coming from you.. and again, I generally agree with that tone.. seems to run perilously and uncomfortably close to precisely what I'm expected to do as an English major..
just poking around with a stick, to feel things out here..
Academics, huh? Tough-talking academics, who dissect and dismiss a blogpost till there is nothing left but bile... and mis-spell the author's name throughout.
You'll go far.
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