forever / online
A Butthurt Dweller post.
Your mum calls you down for dinner. You shout "five minutes" through the floor. It's a raid. Forty minutes later the lasagne has formed a skin and your mum has formed an opinion. You go outside for the first time since Thursday. The graphics are incredible. The gameplay is a queue at the post office. Someone online says your favourite game is overrated. You write 1,400 words in reply. It is three in the morning and you start work at nine. You've never felt more alive. A colleague invites you to Friday drinks. You check whether it unlocks anything. It doesn't. You say you have plans. The plans have a loading screen. **Why it caught on:** the photo of a young Finnish man, which he has said first circulated on a Finnish imageboard, spread through 4chan as the stereotype of the basement gamer, and in Spanish as Gordo Granudo. Gamers were happy to laugh at the stereotype, as long as they did the writing.