Magnificent Monday: Button Mashing

Once again Monday has arrived. This week though, it's different. It's personal. This week we will be discussing the ramifications of a technique referred to button mashing on the greater martial combat genre of video games. Alternatively we can talk about what happens when you forget about any given fresh produce in the back of your fridge for some months. (Hint: nothing good.)

Alright, so here's the thing. There is such a thing as sucking at something and yet still being really good at said thing. Now, while paradoxical in theory, I am able to say with confidence that such a paradox exists. It's called button mashing. For those of you unaware, button mashing is what your little sibling (or quite possibly you if you were the younger one) did when given a controller of some type but no instruction on the use of said controller with any given application, ie: a video game. Now usually this would result in the younger sibling running off a cliff, shooting a wall, or quite possibly running up to you and dropping a live grenade at your feet. In other words, they would not do well.

However! There is an exception to this rule of thumb and that is the phenomenon of fighting games and button mashing. This phenomenon is unexplainable if you've never fallen victim to it, however the best I can do is to say that it would be as if your little sibling somehow managed to press just the right combination of buttons to cause their character to develop Chuck Norris-like powers and subsequently kill your own character by sneezing out a fiery dragon of death. If you play WoW, which I think only one of you does/did, then you might understand if you played a mage. For everyone else though, there's this video. Now one might claim that it was a one time thing. That the young one got lucky for once, and I would say to you, "Nay." Nay, that is not true my friend. You see, the thing is that every time, EVERY, I would face my sibling in one on one combat, I would die as a horrible bloody mess. Statistics dictate that because of my crushing defeats, my little sibling must be good at the game and I bad even though they are mindlessly beating their controller with a spoon. Correlation does not necessarily mean causation!

Now then, back to my point. Button mashing can be frantic with stressful results. This is kind of like how my past 2 weeks have been: frantic with stressful results. (If you say anything about the sudden transition I will throw a carrot at you.) The thing is, there are time when I really just feel like I'm button mashing my way through life. The past couple of weeks have kind of been a great example of that. However, luckily, I find that most of my classes will have their exams/major projects/essays all about the same week-ish. What this means usually is roughly a week without homework, which in turn means I can catch up on anything I've been slacking on. In other words, a reset button. And so today marks the first day of my reset. My hope is that by the time the next set of exams/major projects/essays are due I won't be a frantic mess spamming the "OMG IT IZ DUE TOMORROW" and "ZOMG CAFFEINE!!!!!" buttons. That's my goal at least.

-Ken
[EDIT]: Added tags.