Having not previously read Alan Moore’s Watchmen, I recently found myself watching the film to get a handle on what all the fuss was about. I spent most of the film trying to grok the logic as to when the radioactive Smurf wears his duncoloured briefs and when his schlong is allowed to swing free. (Surely his giant blue radioactive cock would have terrified the Vietnamese into more rapid submission?) But it was a line uttered by Rorschach that had me reaching for the rewind button: “Beneath me, this awful city, it screams like an abattoir full of retarded children”.
As I sighed and sheepishly typed in ‘wings’ yet again, I knew what I was doing. I was satisficing. Scribblenauts, one of the most deeply frustrating and amazing games I have ever played, dares you to be as surreal and inventive as possible. It awards bonuses and style points, and challenges you to complete the same level in different ways. It is a glorious feeling when you see that, yes, sure, you can rope that sheep to a hot-air balloon and fly it back to his friends.
One of the strangest novels ever written sees the hero, disgusted with bourgeois society, lock himself away in solitude to pursue artificial pleasures. Des Esseintes, the hero of Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884), constructs a device to blend liqueurs in unprecedented combinations, sows a garden with freak plants, tries his hand at making perfume and has a tortoise’s shell encrusted with gems.
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