Gamer Girls

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41JTCz6LCLg

The typo in the title appears as Newt wrote it.  I just copied and pasted it.  

Anyway, this video looks like a school project.  I mean, what the fuck.  This is awful.  This isn’t campy bad.  It’s just bad.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma6wnKSEpns

There’s the behind the scenes making-of video.  You know what this town looks like?  A shoebox and construction paper set.  I don’t care how much fog you add and how many bad CGI lightning bolts there are, this doesn’t look like anything other than a project that children would have made.

What the fuck is Newt doing?  He’s spending time and money on this.  And at the end of this video, it says, “Created by Newt Wallen and Crystal Quin”.  How much of this did Horseface do?  None of it, according to the behind the scenes video.  But even if she did the whole thing, I wouldn’t want credit for this.  I’ve literally seen better dioramas at grade school science fairs.  

Why would he possibly do this?  Why would anybody?  Is this going to make money?  Is anyone going to be entertained by this?  

I’m trying to think of school projects that I’ve had like this.  There were two science fairs in like the 7th and 8th grades.  I did one on trains or something.  It was mostly based on the manual from that game Railroad Tycoon but, obviously I didn’t cite that as a source.  I just made shit up ala Newt Wallen.  I can’t remember what I put on the poster board but I had a little piece of a train track and a model train that I had to illustrate…I don’t know…the locomotive engine.  In case anyone didn’t know what a train was.  

Oh.  It’s coming back to me.  There were judges (parents of the kids there, presumably) who went around the exhibits and asked questions about your exhibit.  And I remember one guy asking me about the impact of the railroads on cities, or something.  And I said that it lead to the growth of cities because people were able to travel more easily now.  This must have been like the thesis of my project.  There was also probably a written portion of the exhibit.  You had to write a five or ten page report on this shit.  Anyway, yeah, in Railroad Tycoon, if you connect cities, the cities will grow and new industry will move in and whatever.  So that’s how I knew about that.

I got an “A” but my project was pretty lame.  Science fairs are just glorified art projects anyway.  The person who’s the most artistic is going to have the best project.  It’s not actually about science.  If it was about science, you’d just slam a carefully-researched 50 page article on the table and tell people to read it.

Then for the next year, I did something about how birds can fly.  Spoiler: hollow bones.  And I drew some pictures of birds in flight and cross sections of bone on my fucking poster board.  There was no other part of my project like a dead bird or my model train from the previous year, it was just the poster board.  So I got a “B” for that year.  I remember those drawings, though.  I drew four pictures of a bird in various moments of flight.  I just fucking stole the pictures ala Newt Wallen from some illustrations in an encyclopaedia.  They were my drawings, I didn’t trace them or anything, but that was the reference that I used.  I thought that they turned out pretty good.  I wasn’t much of an artist.

I can’t remember anyone else’s project except for two guys who made a castle.  They made it out of clay or something.  Then their castle broke when they brought it into class and this was the day before the science fair.  It just completely disintegrated.  And I remember the look of terror on that kid’s face.  He was about to cry.  But by the next day, they constructed a whole new castle and they had it ready for the science fair.  They labelled the broken one as “this castle lost the battle”, which I’m not sure is scientifically accurate.  Did castles just disintegrate like that?  No.  Look at modern ruins.  The fucking columns and pillars and whatnot tend to remain.  But, again, it’s just a glorified art contest.

Almost everybody got an “A” or a “B” on these things, by the way.  A “C” was basically a failing grade.  As long as you turned something in, you were almost guaranteed a “B”.

But yeah, you could do this shit in teams of two.  So I just did it by myself because I fucking hated group work.  You end up looking like a giant nerd with no friends when you do these projects by yourself but that wasn’t too far from the truth and I just hated everything about group work.  I refused to do it.  Even if I was doing it with a friend of mine, I didn’t do any fucking work and then this causes problems.

It really shouldn’t happen.  There should be no group work in schools.  Will we be getting report cards as a group as well?  No, we get individual report cards, right?  It’s supposed to be measuring individual achievements.  So what the fuck are we doing this group work for?  This isn’t a team effort.

People will argue, “Oh, it’s to prepare you for the workforce where you have to work in teams.”  No.  It depends on what your job is.  There are plenty of jobs where you work independently.  But even in jobs that I’ve had that do require interacting with other people, I never had to do some fucking horseshit project.  I never had a job where I was with a group of people, sitting around a table, and we were brainstorming ideas and all working together to make a model volcano that really works or whatever.  It doesn’t fucking happen.  

Has anyone had a job like this?  I’ve had jobs where you had to work in “teams” but it was just, you do your fucking job, other people are doing their fucking job, and there’s a manager overseeing all of this.  We all know what we’re supposed to do, there’s no creativity involved, you’re not really talking to anyone, you just do the job.  

There was another group project that I did in the eighth grade.  This was for history class.  It was with a friend of mine.  We had to make a newspaper but instead of it being on newsprint, it was on poster board.  Makes for difficult reading with your morning coffee but this was the project.

So again, I didn’t do shit.  My friend did all of the research and all of the work and I just fucked around.  I remember going to the library a few times with him but I just made a fucking comic strip about a cyborg going back in time and destroying the British at Yorktown.  I stole the idea from Terminator ala Newt Wallen.  

That was my only contribution to the project.  Then when it’s time to turn in the project, I see that my comic has been covered up with a fucking scholarly article.  I asked my friend what happened and he said that his mother made him do it.  

So we got an “A” on that project.  But why?  Why should I get an “A”?  I didn’t fucking do anything.  

In high school, I started off taking advanced classes but by the 10th grade I was taking all remedial classes.  It wasn’t mandated, you were able to choose what classes you wanted to take.  I intentionally took remedial classes because I knew that this was all pointless.  Why struggle in classes?  We’re all getting the same diploma.  I’d rather kick it with the mentally challenged kids and coast my way through.  

So there weren’t any projects in high school for me.  The classes that I was taking…the teachers had all given up.  

In the 12th grade, there was a science fair in a class that I had but I just refused to do it even though we were told that we would fail the class if we didn’t do it.  The teacher sold candy as a way to supplement her income.  So after the science fair and my non-existent project she said, “If you buy five dollars worth of candy, I won’t give you an ‘F'”.  I looked at this box of unsold candy, at the end of the school year, stuff that nobody else wanted, there were a couple of straggly suckers and Tootsie Rolls and whatnot, and I said, “No, I’m not doing that.”  

Did I get an “F” in the class?  I don’t fucking remember.  It doesn’t matter.  I still graduated.  And even if I didn’t graduate, who cares?  Nobody has ever asked to see my diploma.  Or my degree.  This was all a giant waste of time.  I knew it as a tenth grader and my position hasn’t changed.  Fuck school.  Fuck group work.  And fuck Newt Wallen’s shitty ass fucking movie ideas.