Tamagotchi
May 2, 2023

My girlfriend bought me this Tamagotchi Happy Meal toy off of Xianyu for 15 RMB. She wanted a real Tamagotchi — specifically one of the newer color-screen ones. But they’re all several hundred RMB. So there’s nothing to do but buy plastic that doesn’t have a little computer creature living inside of it.

My girlfriend is a DJ, which seems like a very Tamagotchi-like occupation to me. Sometimes I go with her to smoke filled clubs without any lights and stand at the back of the gyrating crowd, staring into her vacant eyes as she adjust knobs on the giant control panel at the front of the room, often blocked off from all the dancers by some kind of screen. I wonder if the Tamagotchis in their plastic eggs also have to bang their marshmallow like appendages against a whole series of buttons in knobs in order to send transmissions to our world, on the other side of the screen. I can only imagine the monochrome pixels that we see are nothing but an impressionistic depiction of the Tamagotchi’s inner life. If Tamagotchis could be DJs, would the music they play be as scary as my girlfriend’s?

This is what happens whenever I try to take pictures of my girlfriend DJing:

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