videostore

We’re in the slowest stretch of the offseason now: the dreaded post-draft period. There’s no football on, and there won’t be football on for quite some time. You’re angry. You’re hateful. We understand. At KSK, we’re hateful too. Of all things, at all times. Hating is what we do best. So, in that spirit, I’d like to present you with our new off-topic offseason feature…

Every week or so, we’ll be taking our lack-of-football-related depression out on any number of deserving targets: people, things, abstract ideas, group dinners, etc. It’s just the kind of cathartic invective we excel at. This week, PEOPLE WHO WANT TIPS ON WHAT TO WATCH OR READ.

With most TV shows wrapping up their seasons and trips to the beach not far in the offing, before long you’re going to be inundated with people asking for recommendations for their “next show to get into” or “what books I should take to the beach.” Tell these people to get fucked with a fire poker.

I hate recommending entertainment media. Any of it. Books, movies, TV shows, video games, porn, what have you. Not so much that I don’t like imposing my tastes on others, but I hate people who are standing aimless at entertainment crossroads, beseeching you to be to shepherd them to their next obsession. I don’t like having to answer for my tastes, because I’m usually passionate about whatever it is I’m into. Also because almost certainly the asshole who is too lazy to find things to pursue on their own is going to come back to you and tell you how lousy/overrated whatever it was you told them to check out was. And then ensues a vociferous argument about the merits of said work, which will strike you as them calling you dumb or obtuse or susceptible to hype for liking said work. And then you want to chop them with a a blood-encrusted halberd.

CONTEXT: At the end of high school I worked for the worst named video store in world.

ppvideo

Every day, inevitably, some fuckwit would come up and ask me “what’s good,” which I suppose on its face is not an unreasonable thing for a customer at a video store to do. HOWEVAH it’s such a deceptively complex question so as to be pointless. What’s good to me, the pretentious young video store clerk, almost certainly isn’t good to you, person dense enough to ask complete strangers for suggestions.

Now, I assume the worst of people. Always. But I betrayed this instinct at first, initially making plugs for things that I actually liked. And for this transgression, I was met with bitching. “A’yo, son, that LE SAMOURAI shit was WACK!” There were even those who went as far as to demand free rentals from the manager because they didn’t like what I had suggested they watch. And thus did I align my sympathies with the misanthropes of the world.

But then it felt even worse when I went the other way, and suggested shit that I loathed and they would return with kind words, which only validated deep-seated hatred for all creatures.

LISTEN: I don’t know what you like. I don’t know what you’re in the mood to see. I DON’T KNOW SHIT ABOUT YOU AND JUST WANT MY SHIFT TO GET OVER SO I CAN GO HOME GET HIGH AND FINISH PLAYING SHENMUE BECAUSE I’M ALMOST DONE WITH IT!

I venture to say that it’s just as bad with friends, because it opens fissures of disagreement, exposes fundamental weaknesses in the tenuous bond you share. “How could I associate with anyone who thought up in the Old Hotel was pedestrian? I can’t.”

These grounds are too precarious to tread. It’s better you send them to Uncrate and wish them luck. AND IF THEY TELL YOU THAT SITE IS OVERRATED SHOOT THEM WHERE THEY STAND.