Anyway, the news reports start. The talent show video. The corner store video. Stories of crazy kids getting beat up and robbed for their cures/Botimals, and stories of other crazy kids really publicly breaking their cures/Botimals in ways that kids who don’t have cures/Botimals think are really exciting. All of that is really awesome for the news to report because it’s about violence, and so what happens is cures/Botimals get zillions of dollars of free advertising from the news.
So now everyone knows about them and no one has them and most kids want them so bad they’re willing to hurt mentally disabled crazy kids to steal them, which they might not have even thought about doing until they saw the news reports about other kids doing exactly that. And that’s when Graham&Swords starts selling them to the general public for $300 a HatchKit. And they sell like crazy.
So that’s first of all. That’s the scarcity strategy everyone loves to admire.
And then what happened is the whole thing I mentioned earlier about how people got worried for society because of the way kids were going into overload and interacting with their cures/Botimals (dacting them). It’s after that happens that Graham&Swords starts marketing cures/Botimals as “Curios” instead of “Botimals” and finally admits that cures/Botimals are purely robots, not animals at all, and so there’s no need to worry about children becoming monsters, but at that point, some people still have trouble believing it because it’s a new idea, that a thing that’s soft and bleeds could be considered a robot, even though the blood looks like water. But people keep dacting their cures/Botimals however they want because it’s a really fun thing to do and it’s totally legal. But then also what happens is that some haters start saying, “Look, these things sometimes get sick the way birds get sick, and they’re kind of human-shaped, like miniature human monkeys almost, and they act like maybe what a person crossed with a parrot in some mad scientist’s laboratory would probably act like. We want to investigate this,” and they start spreading rumors.
But the thing is that while all of this is happening, our whole country has been almost broke because of Reagan who made it cheaper to make cars in Mexico or wherever, so there’s less and less jobs in the USA, but inside of just a couple years of cures/Botimals being sold to the general public, the whole Cute Economy is going strong, and people who didn’t have jobs have jobs now, making clothes for cures/Botimals and toys and organic pellets and better sleeves and nests and soon enough after that off-brand formulae, plus exports, so when finally someone does research on the DNA or genetics of them or whatever, and they find out that, yes, there’s a lot of human genes and bird genes and other animal-like amino acids and stuff in cures’/Botimals’ nucleotides or whatever, Graham&Swords starts talking about Burton Pinflex and the mysterious and tragic fire at the LiveTech facility really loudly to the media, and they talk about it in that way because it changes the subject and confuses people. They never say in that FAQ answer that cures/Botimals aren’t made of human and bird DNA or whatever—they say maybe this, maybe that, maybe aliens, maybe genius, maybe swamps in Africa or whatever. By saying what they say, they’re basically saying that the DNA stuff is beside the point. Which: whatever. It is. Coal is made of carbon and so are humans and other animals. That doesn’t mean coal is a human or other animal. And etc.
And not that I’m a biologist or a chemist or anything, but the thing is that it doesn’t matter in my opinion because even if it turned out that cures/Botimals were just some weird combo of humans and birds and other stuff that might be technically thought about like an animal if someone really wanted to think about them that way, there’s no way people stop buying them and using them and seeing them as robots. There’s no way because by the time the “Cures are people! They’re people!” people start getting attention, not only is the whole Cute Economy happening and making everyone in the USA richer, but everyone in the USA and most of the rest of the world has already overloaded a bunch of times and enjoyed doing it, and has learned to want to keep doing it, and, like I said, if it turned out that cures/Botimals weren’t machines made of flesh but real animals or animal-humans or whatever and that it therefore wasn’t okay to do what we all do to them, not only would the economy get messed up, but we’d all hate ourselves and commit suicide because we’d see that we’d been monsters all along. We’re not monsters, though. And that’s how we know cures are robots. And that’s why it seems like Graham&Swords is being condescending to the reader in that first question of the FAQ in the new manual. Because they are. Because anyone who sweats about cures/Botimals being robots or not is as backward and ludicrous as a small, crying child who you need to condescend to to get them to calm down.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I have shown by compare-contrast/juxtaposition-implication that some people will say anything to sell you what they’re trying to sell you, especially if those people are corporations, and it’s shady. But what is deeper and more important to think about, I think, is that the truth will out, and being shady, in the end, will always be exposed as a way that is inferior to the way of being truthful. Graham&Swords never needed to pretend that cures were animals to get anyone to buy them. In fact, if they never pretended cures were animals, they might have sold even more of them even sooner. People want machines.
A Fistful of Fists
A Documentary Collage
the transcript of a film by Jonny Pellmore-Jason, Jr.
Limited Copyright © Jonny Pellmore-Jason, Jr.
Some rights reserved. Only VERBATIM copies of this transcript IN ITS ENTIRETY may be distributed, displayed, sold, or recited without prior permission of the copyright holder.
Jonny “Triple-J” Pellmore-Jason Jr.’s film, A Fistful of Fists: A Documentary Collage, comprises twenty-five discrete video clips shot between 1988 and 2013. Its running time is 170 minutes. A few brief notes concerning some of the more atmospheric and technical aspects of both the film and its transcription appear below. The transcript proper follows.
Clip-to-Clip Transitions
As often as not, blank, black screens appear between clips for a duration of one to three seconds, and most of the clips are introduced with a title card. Clips that aren’t introduced with a title card are all preceded by blank, black screens.
Titles
All titles appearing in the film appear in this transcript. With the exception of their final, bracketed lines, which indicate the duration of the clip, the transcript’s titles contain the same text as the film’s.