Cookin' up pastas for chef Dabuz

“dabuz kinda cute tho 😳😳😳”

The words floated into chat from unknown origin – another yawn issued from the abyssal maw of immense groupthink known as “Twitch Chat.” These syllables sat in the midst of millions of other more common sentiments. Sentiments we were all used to seeing surround a Dabuz set.

“Lame” “Boring” “ResidentSleeper” “Come on [opponent of Dabuz]!!”

These feelings formed like an armor around not only Dabuz’s set, but the sets of many a zoner, many a defensive player. In the Smash community, this armor weaves so tight that it can feel impenetrable – an Achillean wall of parasocial, secondhand suffering. For Hbox, it took a real-life person throwing a real-life crab to shatter this wall.

But for Dabuz, it was a simple sentence. A simple pasta. Sailing through the air, like an arrow towards the heel of the Greek hero himself, this pasta struck its mark and shattered the armor like the chrysalis of a caterpillar, birthing a new era of Dabuz. An era where, whenever Dabuz approached the screen, he flooded the chat with glorious pastas, ever-building in complexity and intensity. An epoch where Dabuz was not merely a player but a master chef. Masterful for both his channa masala and his copy pasta.

“DABUZ KINDA CUTE 😳 DABUZ KINDA CLEAN 😳 DABUZ KINDA LOOKIN’ LIKE THE MAN OF MY DREAMS 😳”

What was it about this arrow, that sailed true, when a barrage of others had failed? Was it that Dabuz had begun to lean into, to play the heel when appropriate – the face when otherwise? Was it the fact that Dabuz genuinely has some of the strongest social skills of any pro Smash player, pushing more and more community figures to root for him? Was it pure chance? Did the threads of a chaotic universe randomly twist together to form a celestial 😳?

Or is it because the words true? Try as you might to deny it, they are all true.

Dabuz is kinda cute. Dabuz is kinda clean. Dabuz is kinda lookin’ like the man of your dreams.

Bring on the pastas

Only, in this case, your dreams aren’t merely romantic but communal – rich with a social purpose and a desire inlaid to the human experience. A desire to belong, yes, but deeper still to contribute. To find your part in a rising momentum, to be one droplet of separate action that coalesces into a greater wave. To create great works with a resonance of the immensity of humankind.

Or in other words: To shitpost but, like, with a lot of people.

When the time comes, Dabuz will very likely appear on screen at Genesis. He will be dripped out in Liquid finery, perhaps even wearing the Yeezys he bought with Thunder Gaming money. He’ll be looking kinda cute and kinda clean and you’ll be presented with the opportunity to cook up the pastas of your dreams.

But unlike another player who may simply have one or two pastas, you must contend now with a master chef whose mere presence has set the chat to a roiling boil, dumped the strings of letters into the pot, and stirred up sentences on sentences of syllable spaghetti. Lost in a sea of linguistic linguini, you may rightly wonder which pasta to prepare for the head chef. Set aside your anxieties, and let’s review them together:

  • DABUZ KINDA CUTE 😳 DABUZ KINDA CLEAN 😳 DABUZ KINDA LOOKIN’ LIKE THE MAN OF MY DREAMS 😳

Ah yes, the classic. The origin point. A noiseless spark in the midst of the dark cosmos. A “Big Bang” of raw memetic energy.

You can’t go wrong delivering this to the chef. Sure, at this point everyone’s tasted this dish, so you will not be impressing chef Buzby with your ingenuity, but in some circumstances, it makes sense to serve the old standby. This pasta works well when the man himself is on the screen, dazzling us with a deeply concentrated duck face. It’s alo great as an appetizer for the set to come, simultaneously a rallying cry for the spammers and a verbal sacrifice to the screaming void called Twitch Chat.

And it’s flexible too! What if Dabuz is playing Chag, Sparg0, or MKLeo (please no, not this guy, just once, PLEASE)? Well…

[embedded content]

  • DABUZ TAN LINDO 😳 DABUZ TAN BELLO 😳 DABUZ TAN COMO EL HOMBRE DE MIS SUEÑOS 😳

And what if Dabuz is in Paris, playing against Glutonny, truly the most talented and the most French of the Warios?

  • DABUZ PLUTÔT MIGNON 😳 DABUZ PLUTÔT PROPRE 😳 DABUZ A UN PEU L’AIR D’ÊTRE L’HOMME DE MES RÊVES 😳

What if you’re simply looking for more ways to let the world know that Dabuz is lookin’ kinda cute, clean, and dreamy right now? The good news is that classics always contain permutations.

  • 😳 If Dabuz grabs me 😳 I’m not mashing out 😳 I’m leaning in 😳
  • 😳 IS DABUZ GRAB 😳 INTO DABUZ KISS 😳 A TRUE COMBO?

Now let’s say that the set is well underway and that you’re feeling ambitious and saucy. You want to show the Master Chef the true depths of your culinary expertise. Then we should go back to a pasta with a long, storied history starting when a crowd of rowdy Carolina smashers started hyping up their boy – not so much a chef, but a doctor.

  • if dabuz 💋 and my girl 👸 😍 both drowning😱 🌊 and I can only save one😤 catch me at my girls funeral😔 👻 🌹 chanting KING OF NEW YORK 👑 👑

We owe this dish to Dr. PeePee, or as he is more professionally known, PP, MD. But give it a simple twist, a tiny tweak in ingredients, and it works perfectly for Dabuz. This is a fine pasta for when the set is young or goes in favor of the pikmin-wielding champion.

But what if, heavens forbid it, our boy is behind?

  • Who is Dabuz? For dablind, it is dalight. For dahungry, it is dabread. For dasick, it is the dacure. For dasad, it is dajoy. For dapoor, it is the datreasure; for dadebtor, it is daforgiveness.
  • Our father, who art in New York, hallowed be thy main. Thy Pikmin come, thy will be done, on smashville as it is on battlefield. Give us, this match, our daily win, and forgive us our camping, as we forgive those who camp against us.
  • Dabuz kinda cute. Dabuz kinda clean. Dabuz is kinda in a weird place right now. He’s got the potential to be a top 5 player but is going through a slump. He’s not as dominant in Ultimate as he was in Mario Party, but he’s still on track to be a mid-tier by this time January.

These pastas point to faith and the enduring human spirit. In da darkest hours, we look to da light of faith to champion us as we are down, stretching a veneer of meaning over the pointed cruelties of the universe – so full of chance and peculiarity as they are, that they exist beyond our scrutiny and demand us to guess at their nature. Real or merely perceived to be, these layers of meaning will soften the blows we endure so that we persist in this world, much as Dabuz does even in his worst matchups. And for this, sometimes, on beautiful occasions, we are rewarded with breakthroughs. Like that time Dabuz defeated MKLeo.

[embedded content]

When those breakthroughs arrive, we need a dish that tastes sweet, like victory. They should make the spirit soar, not as though you are Dabuz in this moment, because this level of parasocial interaction with a Smash player can cause certain moral epicenters in your brain to blanch with disease and give you close-to-sociopathic responses to their wrongdoings.

These dishes should taste sweet, yes, but not taste like a saccharine obsequity. These pastas should feel like a crisp pat on the back. A “Let’s fucking go!” roaring through the crowd. A guy, in a banana suit for some reason, jumping up and down on stage. A dessert for the chef.

  • WALK AROUND IN THIS BlTCH LIKE IM DABUZ 🚶 FIRE THIS BlTCH LIKE IM DABUZ 🔫 SIPPIN CHAMPAGNE IN SAKS LIKE IM DABUZ 🍾 ALWAYS IN NEIMAN LIKE IM DABUZ 🛍️
  • ITS ABOUT DABUZ 😳 ITS ABOUT DAPOWER 😳 WE STAY DAHUNGRY 😳 WE DAVOUR 😳 PUT IN DAWORK 😳 PUT IN DAHOURS 😳 AND TAKE WHAT’S OURS 😳
  • DABUZ 😳 isn’t someone you like or “dislike”. It’s someone you do research on to arrive at an informed position 😳The last thing you should do is not get involved because of his lips 😳 or his status as the King of New York. 😳

The Chef’s Choice

Though we may call all these pastas “good” and “tasty” and “true” – none of them are truly blessed. Reading these pastas, perhaps Chef Lagasse would say, “Bam!” and perhaps Chef Ramsay would softly whisper, “Damn.” and perhaps even celebrity baker Paul Holywood would offer a firm handshake.

But Chef Buzby honors a different pasta. A pasta above all these.

  • I’ll take a double triple Dabuzzy Deluxe😍, on a raft🛶, four-by-four min-min style🍜, extra pikmin👽 with a shimmy and a squeeze, light Luma⭐️ grease, make it cry😭, burn it🔥, and let it swim🌊💦

And truly, it is an excellent choice. All the great pastas contain an element of the out-of-nowhere, the borderline randomly generated. Like the FitnessGram Pacer Test pasta, the original source is ubiquitous but buried in the recess of memory, making it easy to recall but hard to fathom what drew anyone to post them. These pastas are things that seem to simply amalgamate across the circling vortex of Words And Letters Nonsense that we call Twitch Chat. This pasta approaches from nowhere, a spark pulled from the darkness of void, snapping into bright life. This is the Chef’s Choice.

[embedded content]

(The scene from which the pasta draws, the spark which lights the fire.)

What next? AKA: A promethean fire called language

But what is all this, really?

Does any of this that you’re reading, that we’re copying, that we’re pasting, that we’re doing – does any of this make any sense at all? Sure, you can dress it up with 5 dollar words, but it’s still just Twitch Chat. It’s just memes. Just words repeated on endless loop.

Maybe so, but in the end, this is the true spirit inside humanity. We are the only animals documented to create fire where there was none before – a great symbol of our terrible ability, simultaneously creative and destructive. But this is not because of our bodies, our hands. For the other monkeys have these too. This fire ultimately stems from our language. Our word.

We were all born with a Promethean Fire called language – equally blessed and cursed by it. The flame burning ceaseless in our minds, a thousand paired noises that could make you sleepless whilst every other animal dozes. Should there be a Heaven, a God, a divine entity of any kind, this language, this Promethean Fire is likely your one true tether to it.

You may be asking what to do with that tether or you may have never asked. You may have simply been posting this whole time, bleeding words across the web your entire life without a scant thought at its effect. But the answer is all the same, even if you never asked the question. The answer to the question, the thing to do with your little heavenly flame, is to create. Because even if you don’t think about creating with language, you’ll do it reflexively, building relationships and understandings and communities and networks with this fire that you couldn’t put out if you tried to.

Armed with your aberrant evolutionary function, your awesome and awful divine fire, you’re bound to make something up anyways. To create and iterate. To shape and reshape.

So, in essence, you’re already here. You’re already doing it. Why not create your own pasta and feed it into the open mouth of Twitch Chat? Why not sit there and see if it regurgitates, tosses the word about, attaches new bits of media ephemera to the edges?

And fortunately for you, as far as creating goes, Twitch Chat ain’t exactly War and Peace. I mean it’s called pasta for a reason. You throw noodles in boiling water. It’s so straightforward that, in the spirit of the thing, I’ve whipped up 3 of em myself. (Of course, honoring the number of Pikmin warriors who bring glory to Dabuz.)

  • if dabuz has million number of pikmin i am one of them. if dabuz has six pikmin i am one of them (and it is Brawl). if dabuz has no pikmin, that means he hurl me off stage for greater good. if meta against dabuz, i am against the meta. i love dabuz till my last damage tick… die hard fan of dabuz. Hit enemy with skull if u think dabuz cutest & galaxy brain in the world
  • Dabuz isn’t so great? Are you kidding me? When was the last time you saw a player with such an ability and movement with Olimar? Samuel puts the game in another level, and we will be blessed if we ever see a player with his skill and passion for the game again. MKLeo breaks metas. Marss breaks expensive flatscreen television sets. Dabuz breaks the spirit of rushdown players. You can keep your statistics. I prefer the zoning.
  • In New York, crowd goin’ wild 🗽That’s how we already know Dabuz’s here 👑My king would prolly do it for the yeezy drip 👟That’s just all he do, he don’t know how to lose 🏆 I tried to zone ’em, yeah ✋I tried to zone ’em, yeah, yeah ✋Gone on you with the Pikmin toss 👽🥕 Young Dabuz, he in Lippo mode 💋

And there, you’ve really got most of the implements you need. You can pick a tried and true esports pasta pioneered by another player – like Doublelift or Alex19 – lift a few elements, retool a few things, and you’re onto something. Or you can pair Dabuz up with an iconic rap song that’s already been paralleled to his career by casters and community members. (Look, again, you’re not trying to figure out how to communicate the Hegelian fuckin’ Dialectic here.)

The thing with these pastas though, is that by gaining form from Team Liquid – fundamentally a commercial entity – they are born slightly cheapened. They are removed from their organic form, from their true birthplace: the abyssal tidal pool of the world’s fastest chat room. You are welcome to set them free there, to see if they swim.

But these pre-cooked pastas are not the true purpose. The true purpose is the blooming of a thousand Pikmin, the cooking of a thousand dishes, the copying of a thousand pastas. The true purpose is in you, Internet Stranger. You will be welcome there, in the void. Welcome to stand by the Promethean Flame, endlessly fluttering. Setting down the words to come next, the new pasta to be spammed.

Pick your words wisely, cook your pasta well, and do the Chef proud.

Writer // Austin “Plyff” Ryan
Graphics // Lucas de Paula

Time Stamp:

More from Team Liquid