Hearing about how anything not 100% made up of Bright And Shiny Optimism is dark-for-the-sake-of-dark misery porn always annoys me, even though I know you guys don't mean it in the way it's usually meant. Creative media are not solely about feeling good; rather, they are about feeling, and to suggest otherwise is to denigrate every tragedy ever written. Denying authors and artists and creative people any emotion, whether it be happiness or sadness (and don't worry, I get pissed off at dickweasels in black rollnecks who demand that all art be exercises in melancholy too), stunts the growth of their medium and lessens the impact of the stories they use that medium to tell. I'm surprised to hear this from people who play video games (I'm assuming that you do, so please correct me if this is otherwise), since the perception of games as "for children" is something gamers have tried extremely hard to change over the years and yet this line of argument, that a creative medium is only good for entertainment, is almost exactly the same as the one trotted out by the violent-video-games-r-teh-evilz spods.

Also, does anyone know where this box came from? Smells rather like soap...

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"Yeah, I'm definitely going to hell/But I'll have all the best stories to tell" -- Frank Turner, The Ballad of Me and My Friends