You, too, can cosplay poverty with this €159 Disco Elysium carrier bag

I’m just so tired, man. Is this a dare? Because I’m basically taking the bait just by writing about it, aren’t I? “The last carrier bag you’ll ever need,” begins the description of this tribute to the plastic bag Disco Elysium’s protagonist uses to collect bottles to exchange for cash at Martinet’s local off-licence. “Frittte brings reassurance that the bag will serve your everyday needs on the toughest streets.”

This nod to people whose main takeaway from Fight Club was how rad Brad Pitt’s taste in shirts was is being sold by ZA/UM’s collobrative merch store with company Atelier. They’ve previously put out things like a replica of Kim Kitsugragi’s jacket. I’m not going to link them, as a pathetic act of rebellion.

As the man who couldn’t afford an ambulance to get the gash on his head sewn up once said, let’s try and keep an open mind about this. The bag’s Dyneema fabric “is up to 15x stronger than steel on a weight-for-weight basis and provides the highest tear and tensile strength of any competing materials”.

I am willing to accept that this a very strong carrier bag. The brief amount of research I’ve done shows that Dyneema is indeed expensive, and also stronger than Kevlar. I have no doubt that, when it comes to the act of carrying things inside of it, this bag may be in some sense ‘worth the money’.

But is it worth your soul, ZA/UM? Stupid question. Nothing attached to this game has escaped its curse. There was some brief hubbub over the weekend over a false rumour that creator Robert Kurvitz uploaded Disco Elysium to the Internet Archive. The actual upload had been around since 2023. It’s now no longer available, presumably as a result of this new wave of attention. Meanwhile, writer Argo Tuulik is currently running a crowdfunding campaign for legal fees for himself and fellow write Dora Klindžić in a fight to get back the Disco IP. There are three Disco Elysium ‘spiritual successors’ currently in the works. In any timeline but this, that should be cause for celebration.

Me? I’m just staring at this fucking carrier bag. Trying times, soulwise. I can’t even think of anything sage or witty to say about it. It feels like even gesturing at the irony is itself such a self-defeating rabbit hole of cliches that I sigh loudly before I’ve even finished the sentence. It’s just that Zoolander bit again. Be kind to each other. Leave tips. Not for Atelier though. Fuck those guys.