parodeity | subnautica ic inbox 3.0;

We should pick someone to root for.

[ shark or octopus. who are you feeling the team spirit for, dirk. ]

Octopus. Rose will kill us if we go shark.

...Fair point. [ he will not risk rose's ire (even her joking ire) today, that would be bad. ] A'ight. I'll get snacks, you can set up.

[ not because he's hungry just out of habitual feeling that dirk should eat stuff, why this ]

Sure. [He makes a decision not to hug Dave. It feels... wrong, to do it when Dave is like this. It feels like taking advantage. So he will just head upstairs and set things up for watching. He grabs the archive of all the other Asylum films they have to pull down in case they decide they want to watch more.]

[ snacks are for the record fruit slices and popcorn and juice. when dave comes up he arranges them in the usual fashion on the table and takes his usual seat, sinking back into the couch and crossing one leg over the other knee. ]

Why've you never seen this?

[Dirk flops down; unlike Dave, he falls less into regularity than into a cross-legged pose, with a pillow dragged into his lap to hug and rest his chin against.] Same reason I minimized my watching of other films in this style. I do not find them super funny alone. I've gained a new appreciation for them since we started watching them together.

Has your favorite changed?

[ movie, he means. ]

I don't think anything but a movie you make could possibly dethrone my current favourites.

[There's too much sentimental value mixed up in SBAHJ. Only Dave can get more of that affection out of him.]

I wasn't countin' those, exactly, and I find that unlikely at best.

[ what is dave going to make other than dumb home videos at this point in the post-apocalypse? ]

So discountin' 'em.

I didn't think filmmakin' would be your way, which isn't an issue to me. I like following along with your comics.

[They make him happy as they are. He absolutely reads them all the time.]

The issue with discountin' them is that I lack a favourite movie otherwise. There are favourite experiences of watchin' movies but that probably isn't what you are askin' for. Do you have a favourite movie?

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, maybe?

[ stupid best friend time travel shenanigans. he's there for bullshit like that. ]

I cannot argue with that choice. [He thinks for a minute.] Starsky & Hutch?

I like that one. [ or was that dirk attempting to name a favorite? but yeah. buddy cop shit is basically dave's jam as long as it stays absurd.

he debates asking about favorite movie experiences but decides he probably doesn't want to know.

also i looked it up and what utter bullshit THEY DIE IN A BATTLE TO THE DEATH, WHERE WAS MY LEGITIMATE OCTOPUS VS SHARK BATTLE? ]

[That's terrible and shame on you.]

It's maybe my favourite. I think that will change, though. It's been sort of traditionally the case that my experience of cinema has been highly referential and very much through a lens of understanding and responding to the culture that came before me, which in some ways I considered it my responsibility to try to analyse and bear witness to. I've kinda given up that thought as being totally stupid, but my general enjoyment of things definitely affected by the necessarily analytic perspective I took and the weight of history and association that every film seemed to be anchored in. I've only really started to watch movies as an experience to relax and enjoy since I started watchin' them with you, and I don't think at this point I've actually watched enough movies from this new perspective I get with you to give a true answer to the question of what I would call my favourite. I'll try to answer you when I can?

[ ??? ]

You can't actually mean you never watched a movie just for enjoyment's sake 'till you got here.

I did enjoy the movies. [but.] I never watched them just to enjoy them.

It sounds ridiculous from a pre-apocalyptic perspective, but to me they were important cultural artefacts, all requiring close scrutiny to understand their place in the historical past I was always trying to memorialize.

[so he means..............

he never watched a movie just for enjoyment's sake until Dave asked him to]

How are you not exhausted all the time?

[ real q ]

Well I literally crashed into this dude who constantly forces me to eat and sleep and relax, which helps.

[Dave makes him be less tired is the answer.]

Back then, being exhausted all the time was the state of being that I preferred.

[ ? ? ? not sure if computes, surely dave makes dirk more tired. ]

It's not like I don't understand that, but even I found time to chill the fuck out back in the day. This is one of those opposite direction things, maybe.

[Incorrect, Dave.]

I'm not sayin' that I never did. But aside from the issue where boredom allowed me time to contemplate how much I hated myself and how deeply alone I was, as I got older and understood more about myself and my circumstances, I felt like I was racing against a tickin' clock to try to be what I needed to. There were so many things to do and so many improvements I had to make on myself that it felt like I was wastin' my life if I wasn't in some way engagin' in something to those ends. Part of why I developed AR was to have yet another me to do all the things I needed to do, this one tireless and high-processing unlike my faulty and melancholia-prone brain. It's only been in the last year that I've started to consider chillin' somethin' I should actually permit myself.

Why? Didn't you guys have a gap year where nothin' of importance was happenin'?

[ like holy shit the meteor kids at least managed to find time to do fuck all. ]

If you mean the six months between game entry and your arrival, those would be the months featuring my self-distancing from two of my best friends while I simultaneously self-destructed on my other best friend, who was also my boyfriend. My fear of my friends hating me and everything bad about me ruining things was at an all time high. I was exhausted almost constantly.

[So. Not relaxing?]

It isn't that we didn't have any fun times, or that I never relaxed in the almost sixteen years before that. Just that feeling happy and relaxed was more of a rare exception than anything else, and generally my state of mind has changed to something much more capable of handling periods of calm and pure enjoyment since we met and started talkin'. As compared to before, when it was difficult to really accept those moments even when the opportunity presented itself.

I imagine it has a lot to do with the world not bein' in a constant state of endin'.

[ like. just hazarding a guess here. ]

Not really. To a degree, maybe, but there are different urgent things here. Mostly, I've changed my perspective on what I need to be. Competency and usefulness are not as desperately a priority as they used to be, although it would be disingenuous to imply that I don't still worry about being useless and incompetent. It just doesn't matter as much compared to other things. Or I guess it would be more accurate to say that I used to think I'd never be able to be any good at those other things so I tried to stack my stats in the things that made me exhausted, but while talkin' with you I decided it was okay to do my best to be understanding and loving and supportive towards the people I cared about, instead of writin' those things off as impossible and givin' up on pursuin' the things that genuinely make me happy. Now I can think of sitting with you and purely enjoying a movie as a good use of my time, because I can at least half-accept that my company is valuable and something that you'd actually want from me.

I'm pretty sure you would have figured it out eventually, dude. It's not like it wasn't a thing you didn't want to do.

[ presumably. ]

Personally I guess it's the opposite.

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