Life, Writing, Weirdness

Wankpanzer. Incel Camino. Deplorean. The Homer. TP Cruiser. Cyberdoorstop. Cyberbrick. Tesla Model Why. Apartheid Ride.

The first two are my favourites and I laugh and use one of them, mentally or out loud, whenever I see one of the very small number of local ones.

Setting aside the fact that you shouldn’t drive it in the rain, or through a puddle, or get it washed, and its tendency to burst into flames, and its inability to carry a real load, and the absolutely ridiculous price tag, and the tendency of its supposed designer and corporate overlord towards fascism and other far right-wing douchbaggery, I should be the target market for the Cybertruck.

No, seriously. I’ve been thinking about this for a while. A couple of years, maybe. Check my reasoning before you decide I’ve gone crazy. I’m clearly not the target market, but I should be. Muskrat wants me to be. Otherwise, why would the vehicle’s design aesthetic be straight out of an early 1980s video game. Who was playing those games? This guy.

And why would its name clearly be a reference to Cyberpunk, a SF literary subgenre born in the mid-1980s? Who was there reading a whole lot of SF, some of it Cyberpunk? This guy.

Of course, Muskrat is not even a year younger than I am. He was playing those games too and obviously reading those books. He was doing it on a much fancier computer or console, and probably in a personal library with every book he ever wanted.

The real difference between the two of us though, other than my not coming from an ultrarich family and becoming the world’s largest and most notorious douchebag because I don’t think having money makes one a better human being than anyone else (the opposite seems to be true on a regular basis), is that I recognize the design as the nostalgia that it is and didn’t sink tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars (of mostly other people’s money) into making that nostalgia into a concrete thing that turned out to be a really expensive piece of junk. Instead, I take a moment now and then to appreciate the warm feeling I get from remembering games of the era (like Car Builder) and remember that I live in the future now.

If only Melonhead were able to rub a few brain cells together and figure out that he could actually do some good with his dragon hoard instead of hiring people who are far smarter than he is to make the dreams of his fourteen-year-old self come true at the expense of the rest of the world. We can discuss his various failures of character and business acumen another time, if someone really wants to, but there’s been plenty of that done in other places, and I’m not likely to convince any of his true believers otherwise.

For now, though, I give you the massive failure and nostalgic disappointment that is the Cybertruck.

Be well, everyone.