Clash of coined terms who's punchlines backfired and were rewritten to mean something else-Cal Arts Style vs. PC Master Race

There are at times where people coin terms for certain things they despise and yet, years later, they become rewritten to totally mean something else rather than what that term was originally susposed to mean.

First off is

CALARTS STYLE.

This is a term to describe the MODERN AMERICAN ANIMATION aesthetic that we see nowadays.

But the term CALARTS Style originally didn't mean what it is today.

The term was originally coined by retired Canadian Animator JOHN K. in a long since deleted blogpost of his where when he was describing Brad Bird's THE IRON GIANT(1999)

He ruthlessly criticized the both the AMERICAN & CANADIAN side of ANIMATION for always drawing their characters in the Classic DISNEY MOLD instead of coming up with new animation styles to suit the artist's needs.

And really, who can blame him,

(We're still mad at his allegations and his rage towards his late father MICHAEL)

If you look at films from Disney's competitors from back in the day like.....

The Princess and the Goblin(1991)

Ferngully: The last rainforest(1992)

The PageMaster(1994)

Once Upon a Forest(1993)

The Thief and the Cobbler(1992 Workprint and Recobbled Cut)

Cats don't dance(1997)

Quest for Camelot(1998)

Almost all of these productions required the film to go through the realms of designing their characters in the DISNEY mold because executives are obsessed with the money as well as unseating DISNEY and making a fool out of MICHAEL EISNER...

Too bad their mantra caused these films to bomb in the BOX OFFICE.

Only a few OUTRIGHT defied the mantra such as....

BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD DO AMERICA(1996)

This mantra of his eventually moved into the realm of ALL-CGI movies where once again, the EXECUTIVES demand that the characters be in the..... PIXAR mold...

NO IFS, ANDS, OR BUTS

So this meant films that had really great concept art

 They're older art gets tossed out the window and replaced with piece of shit imitations of what's hot 

And it's no wonder why when I see A.I Filters for cartoon characters, they always use the DISNEY/PIXAR style.

Somewhere along the line in 2010, 

ADVENTURE TIME showed up on CARTOON NETWORK after NICKELODEON rejected the show.

And then suddenly, many an artist in the US and CANADA decided to bank in on what made ADVENTURE TIME so successful and they deduced it was the art style.

STAR VS. THE FORCES OF EVIL

RICK & MORTY

And certain legacy characters like THE FREAK BROTHERS are redesigned to use this new art style whether the original creator likes it or not.

THE FREAK BROTHERS 

as originally illustrated by GILBERT SHELTON

THE FREAK BROTHERS

as they appear in the TUBI Series.

I, like a lot of you people who are against this mantra of the modern animation aesthetic, thought that the infamous CALARTS design was enforced by EXECUTIVES.....

But the reality is that the art style is actually enforced by the Alumni not just from CALARTS but also from the likes of those from SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS in New York.

and some from SHERIDAN COLLEGE in Canada, have also followed suit.

Now, let's switch gears and go to the gaming side which is PC MASTER RACE

Just like with CALARTS STYLE where it was JOHN K. criticizing North American artists for following DISNEY, only for it to devolve into a criticism of BEAN MOUTH DESIGNS,

PC MASTER RACE originally started as a criticism of a Factor of Gamers who think COMPUTERS are King,

only for the term to be far removed from the original intent by a REDDIT COMMUNITY.

BEN CROSHAW of ZERO PUNCTUATION fame,

originally coined the term PC MASTER RACE in a 2008 online article he wrote for THE ESCAPIST where he criticized the ELITIST attitudes he perceived amongst PC GAMERs regarding the player base for the WINDOWS port of THE WITCHER.

Here are his words from said article:

What quickly becomes obvious is that THE WITCHER is very much a PC-exclusive game, which are typically designed to be as complex and unintuitive as possible so that those dirty console-playing peasants don't ruin it for the glorious PC-gaming master race.

-Ben Croshaw

So in his words, he was poking fun at those PC GAMING ELITISTS out there.

He was criticizing the mentality of PC GAMERS for demanding that interfaces screw with our perception in favor of making games use keyboard controls though most games on PC still let you use controllers like an XBOX CONTROLLER

or Joystick like a MICROSOFT SIDEWINDER

all thanks to the PC now requiring controllers to conform to X-Input for game controllers.

Unfortunately for CROSHAW, the term PC MASTER RACE would wind up getting it's original meaning misconstrued by REDDITORS across WEB2.0 and later WEB3

and the term quickly became a symbol of PRIDE for them same PC GAMING ELITISTS and their SUPERIORITY of their COMPUTERS over GAME CONSOLES.

Using Dr. Livesey, Jim Hawkins, & Squire Trelawny from

 the UKRAINIAN TREASURE ISLAND(1988) 

to represent "CHADLY" PC GAMERS.

Why?

Because....

01. PC ports of games can be modded with different assets,

FAMILY GUY mod for GTA V Legacy on PC

(GTA V Enhanced doesn't support the above mods..... yet.)

02. You can change the graphics settings on the fly to suit your rigs needs,

Using CYBERPUNK 2077 as an example

03. The hardware is user upgradeable due to IBM taking the OFF-THE-SHELF approach back in 1981 when releasing the 5150 PC that year,

PC depicted is the original 5150 PC from 1981.

04. You can use any game controller as long as it conforms to USB and Bluetooth,

This needs no description as it's perfectly described above....

05. You can emulate other hardware though most emulation efforts are limited to older consoles like a SEGA GENESIS or Sony PS2 just to name a few.

KEGA FUSION playing EARTHWORM JIM

PCSX2 playing SHADOW OF THE COLLOSUS    

It's clear many years later that BEN CROWSHAW now regrets coining the term because the term was to criticize a mentality, only for it to be context to mean the opposite in the ensuing years and that not only drove him insane but also made him want to RAGE against the factor of people who support the idiom now.

For example, when he was questioned about it the PC GAMING community during the release of KINGDOM COME: DELIVERANCE in 2018,

He blurted out a profane response to his dislike of the PCMR Community and their arrogance.

I'm not going to use his words regarding PCMR so....

Instead, I'll quote from CROSHAW about his regrets:

"It was intended to be ironic, to illustrate what I perceived at the time to be an elitist attitude amongst a certain kind of PC gamer. People who invest in expensive gaming PCs and continually spend money to make sure the tech in their brightly-lit tower cases are up to date. Who actually prefer games that are temperamental to get running and that have complicated keyboard interfaces, just because it discourages new or 'casual' players who will in some way taint the entire community with their presence. I meant it as a dig."

Nothing short of the 

2008 Great Recession,

2020-2023 COVID Semiconductor Shortage,

and now the 

2025-2028 RAM Shortage/AI Price Hikes for Consumer Ram and flash storage.....

Is enough to put an end to the PC MASTER RACE idiom just to finally give CROSHAW some closure without driving him up the drywall....

And I just noticed something in that above quote from BEN CROSHAW:

Who actually prefer games that are temperamental to get running.

TEMPERMENTAL, huh?

I've been there.

My very first PROPER PC game INCOMING,

I remember how temperamental that game was getting to run on my family's PCs back in the day but to be honest, it was COMPAQ's fault for bundling it with my PRESARIO 5477

thinking it could run on INTEL's integrated AGP chipset but in reality, you needed a 3DFX Voodoo 3 AGP GPU to run that thing with the best framerates.

Instead, I got a game that either refused to run, or it ran like PIGCRAP with a pitch-black sky which made me wait 25 years until I paid for a version on STEAM that works in MODERN WINDOWS.

Oh well, it pays to make you ponder about your childhood wish fulfillments and whatnot.

Happy Fathers Day 2026 Reuben Martinez-INCOMING, My very first True PC Game.

We know the drill.

Whenever it's Fathers Day, I need to celebrate for my Father REUBEN MARTINEZ.

Rather than share a ton of photos ad-nauseum, I like to tell you all about a little PC Game that me and my father used to play on the family's computer in the late 90s and early 2000s.

This photo is with me and my Father shortly after we moved to

a nice house in SKEENA/GEORGIA Street in VANCOUVER.

This game I'm referring to is:

This is an arcade style SHOOTING GAME that I referred to as 

THE ORIGINAL CRYSIS of 1998.

Why? You'll find out more as you read this post.

Anyhow......

How did I end up with this game?

It was included with our first computer:

A Compaq Presario 5477 Desktop Computer from 1999.

Here's me playing on WINAMP on my family's PRESARIO back in 1999.

I might be rusty but here are the Specs for this Presario:

500mhz Intel Celeron MENDOCINO

64MB PC100 Ram(Standard from the Factory)

13GB WD Caviar Hard Drive

......

That pretty much covers the internals without mentioning the peripherals so not much.

And I've managed to find the original commercial for this computer:

You may ask:

"HOW'S A GAME LIKE INCOMING INCLUDED WITH YOUR LATE 90s PC?"

It was normal for OEM companies like COMPAQ to include a myriad of software from the likes because them OEM Companies know that People often would prefer to use Computers as game machines so including games like this is a good way to get gamers on their side as well as use them games to benchmark certain specs like Integrated Graphics, Partnerships with GPU Companies like     3dfx, etc.

And INCOMING was no exception.

Incoming was included not only with Computers like my Presario.

It was commonly found on GPU bundles like 3DFX VOODOO2 Cards.

That was how I was able to attain my very first TRUE PC GAME.

Because as mentioned in the past, my parents limited my PC Game Collection to EDUTAINMENT TITLES instead of real games like UNREAL TOURNAMENT, Half-Life, etc.

I guess the idea is that my parents would not want to expose me to the horrors of shooting up dudes or Head-Crab Zombies due to how impressionable of a toddler I was back in 1999.

Yes, I doctored an Old Photo Scan of myself with images of HALF LIFE.

All it took was some careful editing through PHOTOSHOP.

Heh Heh. What a cute smirk from 2000 me.

Remember how I said INCOMING was the original CRYSIS from the late 90s?

My memories of my toddler years are fuzzy at best, even with photographic evidence.... but I do vaguely remember who frustrating it was for both me and my dad trying to get this game to run on both our COMPAQ PRESARIO & later our VOBIS HIGHSCREEN.

Because we didn't get inside the system, because we both thought that PCs were as closed of an architecture as an iMac, we couldn't upgrade the CPU, nor install a GPU.

We often would try to get the game started up but it often threw up errors and refused to execute, or it would crash the computer, etc.

It often wouldn't get past this screen most of the time....

And on the times we did get INCOMING actually running on the computer, the thing was a buggy mess and would lag but still be playable.

(How buggy? I don't remember other than the in-game sky being pitch-black.)

If things had been different, had my father known at the time that PCs were an open architecture, we would have swapped out that 500mhz Celeron for a 850mhz PENTIUM III Cartridge and of course installed a 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 AGP card.

(I have to say Celeron & Pentium since our COMPAQ was an Intel Machine.)

Instead, whenever I'm not around or I'm inside my bedroom watching Disney Movies on VHS, my father often preferred to use our computers for serious business

SERIOUS BUSINESS... STUFF!!!

A mantra that would make both IBM & the late IAN MCNAUGHT-DAVIS happy,

but would upset seriously STEPHEN "GAMERS NEXUS" BURKE

The sad irony is that both me and my Dad often got frustrated whenever INCOMING refused to run on the computers we had access to back in the day,

And now I can just run the game fine on STEAM or GOG via 

my 16-Core AMD RYZEN 9 9950x3D MAVERICK FALCON 7900RT Build.

(Barring a few CPU Upgrades and some software to fix some graphical glitches.)

And here's proof:

So to you REUBEN, Happy Fathers Day. And I hope you're happy that after all those years I'm finally able to get this game running on my own hardware without too many hassles.

(PS, I also got this game running well on my MSI Laptop in 2022 and my 2023 Maverick Warhawk Ryzen 9 5900x build.)