Elegy For A Zaibatsu

This blog is again going to be a short one, because I am running at a super low ebb right now.

There's a specific piece of music that I am told is one of the theme tunes to Kirby, which is something I'm not aware of because frankly I never much liked any of the Kirby games. But whenever I hear it, I never think of the Kirby games.

I think of at least two dudes on YouTube chatting shit at each other and playing video games, under the monicker Two Best Friends Play.

It's Let's Play stuff, with these two guys - Matt and Pat - that snipe at each other, and know a fair thing or two about game culture and design. They've both worked as playtesters, I think. They both also love fighting games, which is where their pal Woolie comes in, who is apparently some kind of god-level fighting game expert. He is, also, very funny.

They played all sorts of games together. Every Halloween they'd do a thing called Shitshow, wherein they would put on display a bunch of awful and sometimes good horror games that they'd collected over the years. That was a favourite of mine. I've always liked Halloween, and people that know games ratting on bad games with a horror theme is just my idea of a good time.

I've always kind of wondered how their friendship kept going, though. I mean it's not in my nature to be all peeping on the personal lives of youtubers, that's their business and if they don't want to make it part of their public lives, that's their business - but they have always seemed to be quite antagonistic. Like, the sniping on occasion got to be a little personal. And some people are more okay with that than others, I get that. I just wondered.

Last night, a video got put out involving each of them individually, talking about the fact that the channel is over. The two best friends aren't friends any more. Like, literally, that's their reasoning. So that's just over, now.

That got me thinking about permanence.

About how quickly shit can get just.. snatched away. Even if it is clear to others that it has been going for a long time, that it is most definitely on the way out, the actual moment of something going away that it actually starts to sink in. We haven't necessarily thought about the shape of the hole that it has left in our view of the world - but we're aware the hole is there, sudden and empty.

That's not just about YouTube channels. That's about almost everything. It never seems to happen to shitty or awful things, either - and I know full well that is confirmation bias, but it's still the feeling left behind, like a taste in the back of the throat. Like the good things get snatched away so quickly and so imperiously, and the bad things drag out and dig in, clutching on with a will of their own.

I've held for a long time that the only purpose we have in life - the only purpose higher than replication - is happiness. That can be a hard thing to nurture, in the face of - well, everything, really. Society at large eating itself like Ouroboros, millionaires using the poor as ablative armour for their profits, fascists and racists and sexists and bigots generally making our lives miserable. We have to hang onto the things that make us happy, that make it worth getting up tomorrow.

I guess that is why it kind of sucks when one of those things slips away, even if it's only a YouTube channel that made me laugh.

Hang onto the good things, people.

We need them.