The Saturn was for the safe, for the comfortable. The 32X was for the reckless. The violent. The ones who never made it past twenty-five.

You still see them sometimes, the ones who lived. Hollow-eyed men with prison tattoos, hands shaking, trying to remember the name of someone who died before Facebook could memorialize them. And when you find a 32X, buried in a junk bin, covered in dust and regret, you feel it. The weight of all those dead sons. The boys who owned the 32X did not grow up safe. They grew up hard, mean, and fast. Raised on gas station food and flickering lights, in trailer parks where the cops only came when someone was already dead. Their fathers were ghosts. Their mothers screamed into the phone at debt collectors. Their older brothers were already inside, or gone, or face down in an alley with a needle in their arm. America left them behind. First, the factories went dark. Then the mills. Then the shops. The fathers had no work, so they drank. The mothers had no money, so they begged. And the boys? The boys took knives to school. They got high at 14, kicked in doors at 16, and carried guns at 18. No one taught them how to live, only how to take. The violence came fast, like a thunderstorm in a dry county. A kid gets stomped outside a Circle K for his Jordans. A man gets shot behind a bar for looking at someone the wrong way. A woman is found strangled in a ditch, and the cops don’t even pretend to care. A boy—sixteen, seventeen—slams his car into a light pole at 120 miles an hour, fentanyl thick in his blood, his body ripped in half.

Fentanyl took the rest. It came like a flood, like a mercy. It hollowed them out, made them weightless, made the hunger go away. It was cheap, easy, final. They dropped like flies. Found blue-lipped in gas stations, folded over in parking lots, foaming in the backseat of cars they stole. One dead. Then another. Then another. Mothers wept into their hands. Fathers drank themselves to death. The funerals became routine.

And the ones who lived? The ones too stubborn to die? They sit in county jails, in prison rec rooms, in halfway houses where the walls are covered in piss-yellow paint and the ceiling fans never stop spinning. They look out at the world through dead eyes, clutching coffee cups with shaking hands. America does not remember them. But the 32X does. When you find one, buried in a thrift store, covered in dust, tangled in yellowed cords, you will feel it. The static of a lost generation. The ghosts of dead sons. The weight of all that violence, all that blood, all that wasted life.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5686916&forum_id=2Reputation#48701182)

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2h ago

You may be passionate, but statements like these ARE insulting and ignorant.

“They got in fights. They stole. They ran from cops. They took whatever they could to make the shaking stop. At first, it was Oxy. Then heroin. Then fentanyl, the great equalizer. They OD’d in gas station bathrooms. In motels with the windows cracked open. In pickup trucks parked behind liquor stores.

The Saturn was for the safe, for the comfortable. The 32X was for the reckless. The violent. The ones who never made it past twenty-five.”

You know NOTHING of the 32X or the people who love it. Please quit making statements like this as it turns off most people, including die-hard fans of the 32X. If you keep making posts like this, I WILL work my best to get you banned from this community, 32X fan or not.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5686916&forum_id=2Reputation#48703028)

cowgod180

OP

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5h ago

😔

RaspberryPutrid5173

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5h ago

Sorry if I seem a bit harsh, but these "stories" you keep making about 32X users are... off-putting, and nothing at all like any 32X users I've encountered since I first got my launch day 32X. I consider myself a huge 32X fan, and I am NOTHING like any of your descriptions. I work for a living, and live a simple life... that also includes working on code for my 32X. I've never met ANYONE even REMOTELY similar to your depictions from any cause, much less being a 32X fan. These stories don't entice people to look into the 32X - quite the opposite - you're making people glad they never looked into the 32X, and they never will. Please, PLEASE stop these stories! Thank you.

cowgod180

Do not beg me to stop. I will not. History is not obligated to flatter you.

Plato tells us that most men see only shadows on the wall and mistake them for reality. You are among them. You have mistaken your sterile, office-lit existence for the totality of the 32X’s story. You have never met the orphans, the foster kids, the sons of broken men, and so you declare them fiction. They are not fiction. They are dead. Your indignation betrays a deeper wound — the fear that my words have sullied something you hold dear. That the 32X, in your hands, was a vessel of joy, but in mine, is an artifact of sorrow. That the machine you cherish was, for many, an emblem of a doomed childhood. You resent this because it forces you to reckon with a truth you would rather ignore: your experience is not the only one.

The 32X was a wound imo. A jagged tear in the continuum of electronic dreams, a liminal artifact born not of ambition but of desperation. It was not crafted for victory but for attrition, a machine whose very ontology was predicated on its own obsolescence. In this, it was pure. Violence is the crucible of the real. The ancients knew this. Heraclitus saw war as the father of all things, and Schopenhauer understood suffering as the engine of the world’s will. The 32X, in its stunted, malformed existence, embodies this principle with an honesty no other console can claim. It was not meant to triumph, only to endure. It was an object of struggle —against the collapse of the American working class, against the disintegration of paternal lineage, against the entropy of hope.

Consider Mishima, who sought transcendence in the moment of obliteration, in the flash of the sword that reveals a life in full. The 32X, too, was a moment of violent revelation, a plastic totem of the NAFTA underclass, a black tumor grafted onto an aging Genesis, screaming its obsolescence into the void. It was ugly. It was unnecessary. It was real. To understand the 32X, one must reject the Platonic illusion that truth is found in some ethereal perfection. The 32X had no perfection. It had Doom, but worse. Virtua Fighter, but worse. Yet in that imperfection lay its verisimilitude. It did not deceive. It did not promise utopia. It was a failure, but it was an honest failure. And in its failure, it became a mirror, reflecting the faces of those who owned it—the lost, the fatherless, the violent, the dead.

The Saturn was for the world that moved on. The 32X was for the world left behind. And in that wreckage, in that bloodied, fentanyl-ravaged landscape, there was something more profound than success: there was truth imho.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5686916&forum_id=2Reputation#48704030)