I’m not done blogging, in fact I have several half finished posts floating around but I’ve just been super-busy as the school year starts again.
Anyway, and I might be a little picky here, WoW.com is full of idiocy even when they’re not posting about UIs. Today someone named Lesley Smith (boring) posted that “she” was ‘Deconstructing’ the Cataclysm trailer. My brain kind exploded as I thought “holy fuck, WoW.com is going to deconstruct something? Are their readers even going to know what deconstruction is?” and more appropriately “Where did they pick up a writer literate enough to not only read Derrida but then apply what they’d learned to WoW?!” I was right to be skeptical, as the idiot who wrote the piece has obviously heard the term deconstruction used by people with multi-syllabic vocabulary and appropriated it for her own uses with approximately zero knowledge of what it ACTUALLY MEANS.
Let’s be clear, deconstruction is a specific process applied to “texts” (like, actual texts, films, symbols, whatever) that was developed by Jacques Derrida. You can read about it here.
In any event, I threw myself on the grenade and actually read the “deconstruction” just to see what they were doing – as you can imagine, it wasn’t a textual deconstruction at all, but rather a segment-by-segment guessing game based on the preview video for Cataclysm. It was a riveting intellectual experience, with such gems as the following observation concerning a tornado ripping through Darkshore:
This image of a tornado tearing through Darkshore suggests a series of ‘natural’ disasters will besiege the land before Deathwing’s return.
Jesus fucking christ, thanks for pointing out the most blazingly obvious thing in the history of the planet. A tornado signals natural disasters? Oh, what else could have brought on the image of a nature disaster…HOW ABOUT THE FUCKING WORD CATACLYSM? OH SHIT. After picking myself up off the floor (I had fallen out of my chair after being blown away by the intellectual mastery of Ms. Smith’s earth-shattering (perhaps, cataclysmic) discovery of cataclysms in the so-named expansion), I sat down to read a few more and they were equally uninspiring. Basically what she did was take the movie, watch it, and then decide that the procession of obviousness that WAS the trailer needed to be made MORE obvious.
Before I began to subject myself to wow.com there were few times when I actually feared for the future of humanity – now I frequently find myself in fits of existential terror. I hope, for generations to come, that a cataclysm comes and wipes their “editors,” “contributors, “authors,” and “serious readers” from the face of the earth.
Oh, and Ms. Smith, the word you were looking for was dissecting - NOT – deconstructing.