This Lousy T Shirt

Dear lord, is kayne a gamer? Are all omnivores gamers? Are thorned raspberry plants gamers? Is the sun a gamer? Are the bacteria that cause tetanus gamers??? This is madness! I can’t accept this. Everyone can’t be a gamer. The word doesn’t mean anything anymore if we go around calling every violent houseplant we encounter a gamer.

I decided there was only one solution to this irreconcilable situation: deleting the concept of gamers entirely from this realm. My finger was poised right above the gamer delete button when suddenly, some random white guy I don’t know yelled “wait! don’t do it!” I don’t know how he got in my house. His face looked like one humans tend to have. “don’t press that button! gaming is all I have!” he said forlornly. He fell to his knees dramatically. I don’t know who this guy is, so I asked the only relevant question: are you a gamer? “yeah,” he said, like it meant something profound. So I asked him, what is a gamer? “I dunno.” Is this fern a gamer? He looked intensely at the fern for twenty-four minutes, then stated, “yeah. that’s a gamer.” Dumbfounded, I asked if this small potted cactus was a gamer. He said “nah”. At this point I was beyond done with this gamer nonsense. I asked him if one needs free will in order to be a gamer. “nah”. Nah?!?!

I pressed the gamer delete button. The man in front of me disappeared. The sun disappeared. Even I disappeared. Most everything disappeared that day, except for every bucket and a small potted cactus. It was awful.

Then I got better and pressed ctrl + z. The world was once again inhabited by gamers. My houseplants were traumatized. The random gamer was still in my house. He stared at me with sad eyes, and I realized my finger was once again hovering over the gamer delete button, just as it had an eternity ago. I asked him for his name this time. He gave me his gamer tag. It was unremarkably weird and I forgot it immediately. “you gotta trust me, the world needs gamers,” he pleaded earnestly. I said cool, now get out of my house. But he didn’t. (Is that the true mark of a gamer?) So I did the only thing I could do in that moment. I gave him the gamer delete button.

I was hoping he would destroy it or at the very least leave my house immediately. But instead his “twitch” “chat” dared him to press it. Reader, you cannot know the depth of the baffled rage I experienced when I felt all the gamers in the world being deleted for the second time. I stewed in the void for a long while, wondering where it had all gone wrong. And as I did, I remembered my favorite quick and easy recipe for baked chicken that I learned from my father, who learned it from a family friend. Of course, that method was much less versatile than the version I offer you today.

You will need an oven, chicken meat, and a bottled sauce of your choosing. Consider choosing a restaurant sauce you enjoy, if they sell it somewhere, or possibly a salad dressing if it seems like one that could go on a piece of chicken. Either marinate the chicken in the sauce or chuck it in with the chicken before you bake it. Wash your damn hands and anything else that touched the raw chicken, you maniac. Then bake the chicken in your oven at the correct time and temperature for the variety of chicken meat you are dealing with. Consider using a meat thermometer as well. When this is done, you will have delicious cooked chicken. Unless you chose a horrible sauce. Then you will just have vaguely edible cooked chicken.

Reflecting on my love of baked chicken, I realized that my oven was a gamer, as it had also disappeared when that awful gamer guy pressed that awful gamer delete button. I once again re-introduced the gamers into our world’s ecosystem. “what happened?” the gamer guy in question said. He then was encouraged to press the button yet again by the same force that convinced him to do so previously. The last thing I heard before being yeeted once more into the void was “it would be really funny”.

At that moment, I was at my lowest. Did the world deserve to be infested with gamers who would toss out everything they cared for merely to advance “the bit”? Was there any way out of this mess or would the gamer guy trap himself in a loop of self-destruction? (Is that the mark of a true gamer?) I needed a gamer-proof plan.

There in the void, I created the unthinkable: a gamer delete button delete button. As soon as I brought back the gamers via ctrl + z I pressed the new button, causing the gamer delete button to be sent to the shadow realm, which was like getting yeeted into the void except slightly more permanent. The gamer guy was looking at me again. Leave my house, I said again halfheartedly, just in case it worked. “you saved the world, bro. thank you so much for that.” With a sincere smile, this man who I still don’t know crawled away into my ventilation system.

I had lost so much of what I had previously taken for granted. My button, my worldview, my sanity. But I had gained one thing from all this, one pyrrhic pearl of wisdom: the true meaning of gamer. All you have to do to qualify as a gamer was vent sussy amogus imposter like and subscribe. And in that moment, it felt so meaningful. Profound, even. And now I know for a fact that both the Stanley Parable and Malevolent contain gamers. My venn diagram may be fucked but that’s okay. I’ll make a new kind of diagram to contain all the similarities between these two pieces of media. I’ll call it a list diagram. It’ll be exactly like a list, but with more syllables that add no meaning.

List diagram of the similarities between Stanley the Parable and Malevolent the Podcast:

GAMER

Choices

Wrestling with predetermination

Horror

Wife

Voice describes everything

Fanon divorce arc

Leads are petty

Music that haunts me

Yellow