This story would be megathread material if not for the fact that I could turn it into a discussion topic lol <3 So share your stories if you have any.
Anyway today I found out that on the 29th season of The Amazing Race (special interest: competitive reality TV) which I haven’t seen before because it was after the time I paid attention to that show, had a roadblock challenge where one of the two racers from each of the remaining four pairs had to play a game of Street Fighter 5 against a pro until they won. (Special interest: Street fighter’s competitive scene and fighting games in general)
Few interesting things about this.
- The leg took place in South Korea, which is interesting because South Korea’s fighting game community is MUCH more focused on Tekken. Most top Tekken players are South Korean. Its Japan’s fgc thats more Street Fighter focused, with a lot of top players being Japanese. Like there are very good Japanese Tekken pros and very good South Korean Street Fighter pros, but if you really wanted to like, represent South Korea’s pro gaming culture which would supposedly be the idea, it should be Tekken. But obviously they did Street Fighter V because Capcom sponsored them lol.
- The two noteable pros were called Poongko and Infiltration. Both pretty over the top personalities. Poongko is known for being sponsored by reddit’s (incredibly bigoted and incredibly horny) /r/Kappa community at one point, and for a lot of silly antics. He’s actually pretty likeable. Infiltration has always been really funny but uh… he’s banned from Capcom sponsored events indefinitely because of a domestic violence case and a few N word drops on stream and a think a couple other problematic instances. So its kinda embarrassing now that he was the representative. He did admittedly have a very fun personality and made funny jokes in interviews and stuff. (Also was known for randomly pulling out unexpected low to mid tiers which is always a crowd favorite).
- The roadblock was a terrible idea lmao. Expecting people with no experience to beat professionals, even in a somewhat unstable game like SF5, was absurd. They ended up having to repetedly have the pros adopt random handicaps until the racers could win. AT least thats how it was explained to me, I havent watched this yet (though I Really want to check it out so I can see how it played out).
Interesting stuff for me!
for me it was a year or two ago after i read Capitalist Realism and got really into that. Then i realized Mark Fisher was one of only a few people (and also the first, iirc) to interview Burial, my favourite musician of all time. I also learned that Fisher was an important (important-ish?) person in a lot of the underground electronic music from the UK in the 2000’s, being close with Kode9, Caretaker, etc.
i think i read the Mark Fisher x Burial interview like +10 years ago when I was first introduced to Burial’s music and had to learn everything about him and his music, but by then, i had never heard of Mark Fisher, lol.