Pink Clouds (Satire)

How many times have you felt torn between deleting an application and still keeping it around because, who knows... Not because you are running out of diskspace, but rather because the application itself is either a recycled game, buttered up with graphics straying from the original flick and you figure that the developers have done a poor job at that.

It's names like Tribe, instad of Tribes or Fandango, a subtle phishing of the classic Grim Fandango - although, when you see the screenshots, it has absolutely nothing to do with the original. Watch me use "original" for an idea, I know what they were so angry about with the software patents, it makes sense now... Angry Animals, instead of Angry Birds, and a bunch of other trash that makes you wonder whether these applications are really just generated automatically.

Reading the descriptions, you find hollow claims that it has been voted as being in the top 10, of some competition you have neither heard about, nor care to do so. You have taglines, such as "most addictive game", and it makes you wonder, "why would I want to be addicted to something in the first place?". Or sentences like "connect to Facebook to beat up your friends". . . If you think about it, yet again why would you want to beat up your friends? Why would you want to be part of a mafia? Wake up, mafias are, bad . . .

Facebook is no better, your timeline or front page is constantly seeded with completely useless disinformation that just clutters your head with meaningless facts. I have recently tried one of those "what type of microbe are you", twice even... Giving them the same answers, and can you guess the outcome? Different results for the exact same answers to the quiz. So what is the tradeoff? Well, you are asked for your personal data when you install the application, and even if you do not use it again, the producers are still able to "access your information" at any time... You cannot wonder then how come your account has been stolen - accounts are never hacked, and always snarfed.

It makes you think that the game industry is having a considerable lapse of inspiration. After all, most games these days can be classified into certain genres, which are not many, if you think about it. Then you had that "Plants vs. Zombies", which is just a tower defence for those old enough to realise. Later on, you had that Minecraft craze... It's not even Bomberman... Why would you name an application so close to a famous, other game if there is no connection? Trivial, of course, to sap on the community of avid players of the other game. Face it, would you be playing "Opuss", you would be clicking on "Doofuss", the next time it pops up within your recommendations. That whole game sucks-in fans, even the older ones, being more retro inclined. Some go as far as to brush over the horrible graphics, claiming that 8-bit colored boxes are stylistic. I bet that the producers of the older, retro games, facepalm every time when they see these buffoons trying to duplicate outdated graphics while remembering how annoying it was to create those sprites in the first place. I have recently seen a replica of a Tardis - another catch-all flick, made out of boxes... It looks, well, bad... You would do a better job drawing it with a crayon on paper with a bottle of Tequilla next to you.

Then you have those pointless role-playing games which have been extended to gangsters and pokemon. The stories are so recycled that the contribution of the producers becomes quite shallow. You can see it all now, you are some hero, somebody important to you has been killed, there is some magic item that has some or other power... You can think up any number of these in your head by just shuffling the cards that widestream media has dealt you.

Coming back? What is with this Facebook craze? Vote us, like us, love us, give us a comment we would like... It just makes them look like attention whores, going at any aggressive length to cash-in on rankings. Not to mention that they are designed so that you can only play to a certain level until you have to seriously invest real money to buy coins, diamonds, unlock useless powerups that you do not really need. I remember trying out a racing game with real players and I was grinning and thinking that they may just all be pre-programmed bots. After all, there was no in-game chat... Names like "pinkydooll" and "M0nstereman" can just be generated... Use neons, call it Trok instead of Tron and you have yourself a party. I was playing a drawing program, in which you have to draw something for another person. Regardless of the outcome, "iloveapples" was never able to guess what I do and five times in a row, the comment "she" wrote was "That was hard". So on the last try, I sent "her" a blank page...What would you think? "That was hard", after a random amount of time...

I remember a discussion, somebody claiming that Facebook has accomplished in a few years what the CIA has been trying to do for hundreds of years. Lately, even more aggressive because you can find environments which you cannot access unless you supply them with full access to your Facebook account, grant them unjustified permissions to your data - who cares what your birthday is in a platform-based jump game? Most of these "applications" are also free of charge, or so they make you think. In essense, it is a trade of information. You give them your information, and they make you pay for the processing by paying them with "buy more diamonds", "install more software" . . . That one always makes me laugh, when I just have to suck the Web dry of flashy programs, most of which I will never use.

Then again, you do not care, you would not even find out whether some decision was made based on your behavior, so why bother? Orwell would just have to sue for being plagiarized... And you still think that buying "Catcher in the Rye" at a public library is a paranoid's delicacy... Have some coin.

About that, another nieche market, which you would recognize if you were a pupil or a student, are those "automatic plagiarism" detectors and you see educated people reading into them. So, why is it not some software that you can buy and it searches the Internet for you to check whether sentences do not belong to you - good luck if you are writing an essay on Shakespeare, the usual result is that you copied it all... Funniest results include plagiarizing your own website... You are probably wondering what the trick is with those? Easy, those services harvest your work and then use outlet websites where others can buy your work and hand it in or use it themselves. Spelling is cheap and cannot be resold, ideas on the other hand, are difficult to generate.

I remember wanting to convert an e-book between formats, so I can read it on my tablet. Scrounging the Internet, I came accross this rather well-made website - yet another website really, that looks better than it is functional - which had an "upload here", professionally fake looking button. I mean just looking at it, you know precisely that you upload the "well-formatted" e-book you have, they store it on their servers, and they barf back at you something the dog chewed on, but never really managed to digest.

Most of these, play on your sensibilities. The easiest and cheapest tricks in the book that any beggar could teach you. In crude words, they fuck with your head. You draw a cute little rabbit, with very very sad face and you get people to pay to make it happy again. Not to mention that, incidentally, the rabbit eats triple its own bodymass per day as well as getting ill of a multitude of exotic diseases. Although, the funniest thing is that the rabbit never really dies, it just starts to complain exponentially till you either get angry and delete the application or cancel your account - frequently, you never find the button or you have no choice but to burn more time and money to put a smile on the fucker's face...

Another trick is causes, again, playing on your sensibilities. I am sure you have seen the "press Like to get the baby a[nother set of] kidney". You are fairly inclined to proceed, because it is just a Like. Very much Like a pyramidal scheme. Perhaps it is truthful, perhaps it is just a hoax - how could you know for certain? The baby looks sufficiently eviscerated to spare the doubt. What big loss could it possibly be, just tap that thumbs up button? I have watched a short report about a couple that made milions just by playing on people's good will. In the end, if you really want to contribute, you really can do so yourself, without having to be engrossed every time by some mortifying image. Although, laundering off the consumerist shame in public definitely makes you feel much better than being an anonymous contributor to world hunger.

Then again, you may be some confused and jobless teen, named "Fred" or "Libby" and you just cannot resist flashing pictures of your loins, wrapped up in the most exotic of breeches. Your treats being cockteasing "coins" for the average, catch-all, seniors of the planet. Skin does look pretty when it's properly stretched so it is best if you exaggerate, for a shocky delivery of wound up nonsense to your fans. At some point, you come to realise that regardless what new, flimsy and shitty thing you post, the posse of men around you will always like it and try yet another shot at entertaining you once more, perhaps this time you will let them see your nipple while asking them if they think it is "sweet". From time to time, you just have to post something about how you feel underapreciated and insufficiently loved... You could crack yourself up, watching thousand of beauty-struck glowworms write back and offer up their flowers for pollination. You could be really ugly, or increddibly beautiful, once the wheel is spun, the mules will be hauling your emotional dysfunctionality around. After all, we have already established that anything, no matter how devoid of meaning crosses your skull, will start a carousel of flirts - every, single, time. Let's not forget that you can also identify yourself with some random, shallow or shady character from some game - you only look badass when you spew a trail of mystery behind you. Players only love you when you're playing... So why not play? For coins and love.

Shame, pride, pitty, anger, and every other cardinal sin is designed to work against you. Even the virtues are turned into gold... The next best thing are wargames where you pick a side, how corny is that? You pick world power, you join the game and have an all-out warfare over public servers, Facebook and others. It certainly blows racism up to a new level of "fun". Blast from the past, perhaps you can roll a nazzi enclave, crash your plane into buildings and hurl nukes at others, squeezing that last drop of bigotry out of yourself - everything running over SSL, and being securely transfered to some server. No worries, your grandmother will certainly not find out... I wonder if they store the ladderboards and select most avid players... Congratulations! You blew a person's head off, don't think much about it, they were trendless losers, here's your cookie... Remember, you can get even more cookies in the store... Talk about reward-driven training...

Reminds you of those advertisements about your "secret diary", where you can write your darkest thoughts, the description going to great lengths in order to convince, albeit, insist to the point of begging, to write something outrageous because everything will be encrypted very securely and stored on the cloud, for processing... Since you have been brought up in the Moon landing era, the visuals of seifs, keys and completely non-functional electronics, wrap you around in a sense of security. Perhaps I will go ahead and download it, put up a few stories about my daddy teaching me how to deeply suck a lolly and look around to see whether I get a phonecall or hear a related squeak.

They teach these things in school, reminds you vaguely of the "You Have no Friends" - episode. You are so totally uncool if you do not wave your cleavage about or drink beer through a garden hose, while your "friend" gives you an enema out the other end. Have you seen those video-blog people? Or the other people writing typing their opinions to the grand public? You think they are lame, but you keep on reading or typing anyway... You hear it on the news too, the "bloggers" movement, it's like a political party, or a religion. Without the money, naturally... They're all incidentally broke. "A man in Australia bit another man's face off." - ca, ching, thousands of "likes", although shouldn't that pedantically be "dislike"? Yetis have been spotted playing poker at the bottom of the Atlantic. Yet another piece of worthless information that just asks for ridiculous comebacks and unnecessay stray from your Zen.

How about those community-driven worlds, where you pay to contribute, twofold, with money as well as freely advertising for the company. You even double your efforts, as others around you are doing so well, twisting your soul, making you desire to be just as good as them. After you invest a sizeable amount of time, you may get some attention, and they may raise you on the pedestal to sway others into following your path. Makes you feel so proud for your losses, doesn't it? If you are "lucky", you might just end up on the next game, cited in some spell or ability, thereby becoming famous for your boilerplate platitudes, everybody admiring how wasted and strung up you were that evening.

You could even infiltrate them, like a Wiki, sign up, gather all the possible liabilities and annex China for India. All it really takes is plenty of cleavage and a game of trust by concensus. It is always amusing to see websites cited as reliable sources, when there is no common denominator except the falter of people's hearsay. You could create several accounts, one claiming to be more prestigious than the other with full credentials and a swarm of glowworms, ready to act as your supporting vigilantes. The truth is, you want it, and you want it badly... Otherwise, why would you seek to scare yourself by playing a horror movie, and why would you compell yourself to find beauty that is not there? You find yourself groveling through mud for that diamond, telling yourself you have free will, perhaps it might just may just compensate for your previous psychological traumas.

If you're large enough, you can form the first circle and parade on the streets, drunk and angry, all the while berrating the shallow morality that the world has slipped into. Perhaps you could create yourself a logo, a mild deviation from something "epic", in the proper sense of the word, and run about in goatskin costumes, favoring some rationale over another. Where there is a cause, there is at least one person following it. I've seen those parades, all I really did see were walking, talking, Like buttons just waiting to be pushed. Afer all, with a good social security, your phone in pocket, your fans crutching you while you play on their discontempt, what could possibly happen? Every word of wisdom needs an ear to be shouted at, but if those ears are not there, you just find yourself whispering.

It is impressive to watch the circus, I most certainly play along, if only just for the shits and giggles...