irony is the new black

Fatworld is a new web game in which hyper-anime characters court morbid obesity. for fun.

There are some calorie-free class politics including the surfeit of subsidized, processed foods and a lack of parks/gyms in poor neighborhoods in this virtual world of convenience stores and high calorie meals. it's nutritious for your brain! or not. this takes the gamer god-complex--which omnipotent obsession the reverend doctor Andrew Greeley already explored in the novel God Game in 1986 back when BASIC was the o/s, computer screens were camo black & green and the cursor was called "Turtle," Logo anybody?*--to a whole new american level discourse writ in code the decadent bipolar ethos of excess consumption (bulimic impulse, tract homes) and of protestant ethic of ascetic control (anorexic impulse, martha stewart).**

There is a Choose-Your-Own-Moral™ in here somewhere. i mean i spose i could go on a rant about processed foods, toxic chemicals for consumption and morbidity. but eh, its sunny outside so if people want to put cheetos, big macs, cokes devoid of any nutrition and chock full of preservatives and poison in their body and choose slow cellular death, weo, shrug. i have better things to do. ironic, right?

*the last time i programmed it was a pythagorean theorem program on a floppy that single-handedly delivered me from an 'F' in Geometry class.
**i completely forget the anthropologist lady (Orbach?) who wrote an insightful article about the dual ethos of capitalism and its cultural manifestation in eating disorders. She predicted/called out how anorexia is more socially acceptable even admirable as manifestation of personal control than bulimia which reads as a lack of control, based on the Durkheimian treatise of the Protestant Ethic of Capitalism which fundamentally undergirds american society.