#failuretocomic

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Failure to Mobile

Technology develops, and people adapt - but attitudes, not so much. (Or subtlety. Or irony...)

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Failure to Construct

The immediately recent political climate aside, argumentation and rationale have become a lost cause in postmodern social interaction. Nobody wants to sit through a lecture or jump through hoops to achieve greater understanding when you can toss a humorously captioned image and get more attention, likes, and shares that way.

After all, a picture says a thousand words... and each one of those thousand words say "NERD!".

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Failure to Walk

"Footprints in the Sand" is a commonly used religious motivational parable that gets my goat due to several reasons. It's overly utilised, inherently trivialises personal tributlations, and ignores other theological issues just to make a point. It's a cheap way to explain away or ignore human error, poor happenstance and underlying problems, using the premise that an almighty, all-loving being noticed, thereby invalidating any sort of negative feedback or critical thinking.

That also bring us to the other issue with this train of thought - namely, the fact that the same inclusive entity also brought along the people who possibly contributed to one's present situation in the first place. If the "footprints in the sand" parable is intended to vindicate the person it's directed at, the underlying theological principles effectively apply this to everyone around that person, including the people antagonising said individual. Boiled down to its core, the story isn't much different from other similar fables that carry a subtly worded, veiled "suggestion" for the recipient to have an attitude change and/or assume all responsibility... or else.

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Failure to Try Your Best

"Try your best" hasn't made a lot of sense to me - partially because of the semantics in pronouns as illustrated above, but also because of its usage as a veiled warning. "Try your best" doesn't sound as harsh as "Perform, or suffer the consequences", but because it sounds slightly more forgiving, the person who says it often lays an implicit claim to being upset if you happen to fail meeting expected standards. i.e. "I was less punishing in my demeanour; how dare you not achieve the expectations I didn't explicitly declare beforehand!"

This supposed "less critical" vibe of "try your best" has also come under fire for being too forgiving towards millennials, who apparently have been brought up under a pampering, mollycoddled cavalcade of encouragement and certificates of participation. Therefore, the suggestion that one's personal best is enough is considered to be too kind, especially since it implies that "personal best" is defined on one's own terms and discourages further effort.

It really doesn't matter in any case - those terms were never yours to define to begin with. There isn't any "your best", just what others think it should be.

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Failure to Linearity

Modern videogames are often bemoaned as having close to no challenge or difficulty, due to the need for greater inclusivity necessitated by a larger playerbase. Bosses are gimped, sidequests are given away, and rewards pander to the player's sense of self-esteem. This has caused considerable backlash from gamers who consider themselves a cut above the rest - including criticism against Nintendo for having a "family friendly" image in game content and difficulty, to independent games being lauded for "returning to old school" (and by that, it usually involves nebulous instructions, obscure hints, irreparable-points-of-no-return sidequests, etc.).

I get that ideally, you want some form of challenge in order to have a sense of achievement and make the sensation of catharsis all the sweeter. But pragmatically, this isn't always the ideal to aspire to. There's a reason why clicking and idle games are big on mobile phones - having to put in effort for grinds and experience is time-consuming, roleplaying games being a frequent offender. I'd really rather not spend hours of what time I have to realise, possibly days or weeks later, that a benign decision I made earlier effectively wasted hours of gameplay.

I'm not saying give players an auto-win button from the get go, but masking robotic-level precision, a lack of player instruction, poorly balanced difficulty behind "the experience" does not constitute game design. When it comes to physical, collectible card games, it makes sense to collect and purchase the better cards based on what's considered good in the meta, rather than constantly buy random assortments and hope for a situation where the weaker cards become viable. If obtaining information and making the best decision from it is considered logical for physical games, why is it such a sin for virtual ones?

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Failure to Report

"We figure that eventually, the complainant will receive enough blows to the head to either get the message, or suffer memory loss from the blunt force trauma and forget the problem exists."

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Failure to Improve

Talking about upgrading skills has been a topic du jour for a while now in our postmodernist society and economy, but the consequences of this obsession have apparently just started to catch the attention of education correspondents. Companies use the opportunity for improvement to denigrate and deny applicants, on the grounds that other better applicants exist. Parents, unable to cope with these ever-increasing standards, reacted in the only way they know how - force-feed their kids with endless enrichment, once again reducing the ideal of "lifelong learning" into little more than a paper chase that you know will never finish, but the "consequences" of even daring to think of slowing down will be dire. (And even if the consequences don't actually exist, "well-meaning" peers, family members and organisations are perfectly happy with reminding you that the consequences exist, and they are very open to enforcing them on behalf of society's nebulous pressures.)

Sincerely, I could go on for a long time about this war that is explicitly designed to be unwinnable - because by definition, the terms and conditions and rules are always changing against all possible favour. But for the sake of this week's comic, there are several points I'd like figures of authority constantly expecting upgrades to remember: - Figures of authority hate being told they're wrong - Figures of authority have a habit of complaining that graduates, i.e. the very people they asked to go on skill upgrades, command a salary which figures of authority consider to be too expensive, and constantly want to reduce these wages, or resort to hiring unskilled labour on the cheap

I'm not saying that all graduates are reasonable when it comes to asking for a job and salary negotiation, but honestly. Telling youngsters to go on skill upgrades that you asked for, then turning around to complain that they're too expensive/you don't like it when they disagree with you, is unproductive and irresponsible. It's like if a carnivore chose to walk into a vegan salad bar and subsequently complained that there was nothing to eat.

(Also, why is it that everyone's first response to questioning the status quo is to put on airs and ask things like, "Oh, so you expect fresh grads should be allowed to ask for CEO positions?" Seriously, I get it, people of the youngest generation can be obnoxious brats, but how does responding with a completely hyperbolic scenario constitute a counterargument to inflating job requirements being a thing?)

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Failure to Peruse

Just to head things off, I'm not saying resumes need to be long or that Human Resources should be swamped with reading them - but it's pretty hypocritical to blame the younger generations for lacking patience or reading skills when adults complain about the same thing. I mean, when your job literally involves reading and you complain about how much work you have to go through, you don't really have the moral high ground when children pick up on that cue.

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