Japan: It's Not Funny Anymore

Life would be an excruciating slog if I had enough time to write a fucking novel about the things I hate in a place I chose to live.

I'm actually very surprised this ended up here. For those who might not know Tim Rogers, him and a few other college-age gamers started a recently defunct site called 'insert credit' around 8 or 9 years ago to try to apply Hunter S. Thompson style "New Journalism" to video game journalism.

Their articles had a high incident of insight to them that was largely the result of repeated deconstruction and re-examination of the game design of various 80s-era classics. Quite often the articles (some of which read a lot like the linked article) were pretty entertaining.

Bringing personal experience into the essay or game review was always the point, and Tim in particular tended to go off on completely wild tangents and write in an almost incoherent and stream of consciousness style (perhaps, "style"); from memory, in one review he pauses to go cook a burrito, then describes the burrito cooking process, before resuming what he was writing about the actual game in question.

This article is pretty classic Tim Rogers: an extremely long exploration of an idea that touches on some interesting (if perhaps apocryphal) stories or facets of that idea, but may or may not have a coherent underlying vision or message.

"I only read about half that article before losing interest, but one argument jumped out at me: the mandatory office parties and drinking outings. This, IMO, is not a Japan-only phenomenon, although I'm sure the Japanese put their own cultural twists on this lovely concept."

You are right about this. Pretty much any place I have worked (I'm from the US) has had office parties or other kind of outings. I almost always went because it does help you get to know your boss and co-workers (it was only about once-a-month). I don't really see a problem with it.

Your example of going out three times a week is a bit much (I wouldn't go out that many times a week), but you could have at least gone out with them once-in-awhile to show them that you don't completely hate your co-workers. If you do, you probably shouldn't be working there anyway.

You can't take the human nature/social aspect out of working. If you don't do these things, people will think you are weird/the outsider/don't like them.

Maybe you should run your own business?

I was in college when it hit over here. Couldn't make head nor tails of it. It seemed like crap to me.

Then again, I used to watch TMNT after school and to this day will maintain that it was actually quite funny, even though someone older than me will, with some justification, villify that as well.

Some of this article was worth reading. The complaints about how things used to be better, however, were not.

Reminds me of the time I bought a used Dreamcast at GameStop and it had a disc all scratched to hell in it and reeked of pot. Actually looked and smelled like someone cleaned their pipe and dumped it in the system.