Mark Liu: Week 8

This epic eight-week saga is coming to an end and if there’s one thing I could take away from it all, it’s that journalism is complete and utter bullshit.

With the internet, anyone can be a journalist. Anyone can spread information or post an opinion. There are millions of so-called news stories and opinions posted every day, the large majority of which are not read and the ones which are read often don’t deserve to be. To become a journalist by career, all that means is you have sold enough of your soul to get paid for it.

I do not know how most journalists wake up every day and do what they do. The damage they cause in order to get hits and get paid is comparable to someone selling weapons and drugs, except nowhere near as cool or violent. By damage, of course I am talking about things like 9/11. Sure, it was quite bad, but just think of how much worse reporters made everything by sensationalising it. Journalists also caused the recession.

Even my articles, which are incredible (in your opinion), still highlight how unnecessary journalism is. Someone came up to me and told me how because of me, they have stopped voting or breeding. It made me think, well why did they need me to tell them that? They could have figured it out themselves just by stopping to analyse everything like I do. Also, I then made her pregnant so it was all very counterproductive.

Meanwhile, there are people’s opinions that will not budge no matter how airtight my arguments are. Someone actually said to me “I hate your articles” but really he just meant he hates himself for how wrong he knows he is. I’ve also had a lot of haters in anonymous comments, but they are sad people who say vile things while hiding behind internet personas. Plus, when someone calls you an “insane individual who is cold and out of touch with humanity”, you must be doing something right.

Even within my columns though, I found myself selling out my values in order to pander to what people wanted, rather than writing about actual important things. Nobody wants to read about how amazing graphene is and how it will solve all of our world’s problems, or the constantly evolving meta in League of Legends. Instead, they want to hear about stagnant and unchanging things like politics, feminism and relationships.

But that’s what you have to do to become a successful journalist.  You have to give the shitmunchers what they want and that’s what I’ve done. I’m already writing a prequel to my first movie screenplay, titled “Mark Liu Must Die”, where four teenage girls, who are best friends since they discovered a bracelet that magically fits all of them, decide to get revenge on an unsuspecting young Mark Liu because they suck at maths. I’ve also spent more time cybersexing on Omegle, using topical themes to make it more interesting: http://logs.omegle.com/39c7522

You see, I have already solved journalism before taking it national just as I solved x² = -1 before I even learned the alphabet. It’s just like the Sims where you reach the top end of each career ladder; I feel I have achieved this in my eight weeks here as a columnist.

In fact, the Sims is the perfect analogy for life, in that I’m crushing it but it feels soulless. My Sim would get up every day and do the same exact routine: cook, eat, poop, shower, watch TV, go to work, get paid, come home, call up the friends he hasn’t seen the longest, give them back rubs and gifts, go to bed, repeat. This is basically how my life is at the moment. Maintaining my hunger, my hygiene and the Mark Liu 50 are all part of one big game. Every day, I spend time making sure my bars are full and green, and that I am satisfied, but what’s the point of this all?

It took me eight weeks to solve journalism. I’m already the most logical human I can be after years of playing chess against myself. Whatever I tackle next I will surely conquer just as easily, but then what? I do this for another eighty years or so, at which point the inevitable will come and my brain will be downloaded into a computer so I can exist purely virtually, and all these columns will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.