Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Congratulations on Solving the Sudoku Puzzle!

You’re going to awake on Thursday night to the buzzing of flourescent lights with no idea where you are and no memory of how you got there. This will be a little unusual. Usually this doesn’t happen until Friday morning and usually you wake up outdoors. This time you’ll be in a windowless concrete room with a pair of what appear to be two-way mirrors affixed to opposite sides. A door will be set in one of the remaining walls and a table with a small book of sudoku puzzles will be sitting at its center.

You’ll swab the inside of your mouth with your tongue but, oddly enough, you won’t taste the residue of alcohol. Instead it will be the terrible sobering flavor of your own flesh. You’ll walk around, testing the door and knocking on the glass for around a minute and a half before a voice booms at you through an unseen speaker.

“Hello, Marcus.” It will be unrecognizable and sexless, filtered mechanically in order to render it inscrutable.

“That’s not my name,” you’ll say, absently toying with the sudoku book. The voice will laugh in response, a terrible rasping sound.

“Let’s not play games, Marcus. I have something important to you.”

As the voice finishes the lights will come up behind one of the two-way mirrors and you’ll see your twin brother Mark there, bound and gagged, suspended over a pit of hyenas. He’ll be in his gym clothes, blood still staining his face from his capture.

“Fuck,” you’ll say, exasperated.

“I’m afraid more than just the American economy will be stripped to the bone if you don’t play along,” the voice will quip. “You’ll follow my directions precisely unless you want to see your precious brother Stephen tossed to the dogs the way you tossed the American citizenry to them.”

You’ll shake your head at the still-concealed two-way mirror. “I’m Steve,” you’ll shout. “That’s Mark! Are you retarded or something?” The voice will laugh again.

“Don’t play games with me, Marcus,” the voice will say, bemusement creeping through the filter. The chain holding your brother will jolt and drop him half a foot, which will get the attention of the waiting hyenas. They’ll all look up suddenly, as if your brother’s calves were the only thing in the world that mattered.

You’ll sigh. “What do you want from me?” you’ll shout at your captor. This will elicit another unsettling bout of laughter, which will by now have become more grating than chilling.

“I want you to solve a puzzle for me, Marucs. If not the one you made.” The voice will be referring to your brother’s prominent position in Lehman Brothers prior to the recent economic collapse. “Pick up the book and turn to page one-seventy-three.”

You’ll grudgingly acquiesce and turn to page 173. The top of the page will read “expert level” and, from the look of things it’ll be quite a doozy. “You want me to solve a sudoku puzzle?” you’ll shout.

The voice will elaborate. “I want you to prove you can work towards making something right, even if it seems impossible. Better act quickly. Your brother’s life depends on it.”

The other two way mirror will light up and a man in an Eyes Wide Shut style mask will be revealed sitting behind a table with an alarm clock in front of him. At least you’ll think it’s a man. They’ll be wearing a form fitting black leotard, but you won’t be able to tell through the mirror if your apparent captor has tits. You don’t want to be sexist, and you find the possibility a little arousing, so you’ll think of your faceless antagonist as a woman as you begrudgingly pick up the puzzle book and get to work.

No doubt your brother would have had a lot of trouble. Despite, or perhaps because of, his success in the business world he was never much of a problem solver. You, though, you’re an unemployable liberal arts student who double majored in Philosophy and English lit. You spend most of your time playing video games and, of course, solving sudoku puzzles in coffee shops where cute girls work.

You’re largely unemployable in the current American market, mostly because you’re a bright young person with everything to offer and not a qualification to your name. You wouldn’t even be able to survive if Mark didn’t give you a hefty allowance from his various private accounts, largely out of a sense of guilt for hogging all the attention when you were kids. But you’re great at sitting down and figuring out systems and then solving problems within them.

You’ll have the “expert” puzzle done in around fifteen minutes. You’ll do a few others, just to kill time and convince the masked figure that you might actually be Mark before you push the finished puzzle up against the two way mirror where your captor will have been sitting pacifically for the last forty five minutes.

They’ll get up, examine the solved puzzle, nod approvingly and then turn off all the lights again. After about fifteen minutes of silence you’ll hear the latch on the door turn and you’ll stumble out to find your brother, still bloody from his previous beating, laying unconscious in a long hallway lined with steel doors. They’ll all look pretty much identical, except for one at the end labeled “exit.”

You’ll heave one last sigh and pick your brother up, carrying him from the warehouse district to the nearest police station where you’ll report the incident. On the whole it’ll be a really big boon for you, since your brother will be so happy to be alive that he’ll double you allowance. If only you had something useful to do with that money it might make your life more fulfilling. Oh well.

Congratulations on Solving the Sudoku Puzzle!

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Congratulations on Being Eaten by a Grue!

You’re unique in that you’re one of the few people whose favorite Tom Hanks film was the 1974 made for TV movie Mazes and Monsters. You love Hank’s awkward portrayal of an introverted young man for the purpose of showing a group of social outcasts to be wrong in their outcast-ness.

You love it so much that you spend your weekends reenacting Hank’s trips into the “steam tunnels” below various universities. You’ve done a number of stints in the midwest, hung out under MIT’s campus and you’re about to start your investigation of utility tunnels on the west coast. This is where things are going to go terribly wrong.

At UCSC (go Banana Slugs!) you’ll enter the tunnels as you always do, carrying enough food and water to last a week and copies of your favorite alarmist novels from the 70s about Dungeons and Dragons and how it’s going to kill us all. You’ll have a flashlight and, for once you’ve really gotten into those books and you want to wander around pretending that you’re pretending that you’re losing your mind, a torch made from gasoline soaked rags. You’ll be as prepared as anyone can be to enter the tunnels beneath the campus of a major university.

The one thing you won’t be prepared for is the prevalence of real-live monsters beneath the UCSC campus. See it turns out that UCSC’s bio program has some skeletons in their closet, and many of those skeletons take the form of hideous skeleton like creatures, goblinoid freaks of nature and genetically modified gila monsters that spit acid.

We’re not sure which part of DARPA funded these experiments, but you’ll be contending with them for three days in those tunnels, believing that you’ve finally gotten really, really in to those subpar books of your youth. You’ll be so proud of yourself and the strength of your idiocy, as you dodge claws and strip clothes off to avoid permanent scarring, that you won’t realize that the genetically engineered horrors surrounding you are all completely real.

This blissful ignorance will continue until you wander down a dark hallway after all of your light sources have been destroyed by various unspeakable horrors and you are eaten by a slavering creature of teeth and fangs which has never known light and has no need for it.

Congratulations on Being Eaten by a Grue!

Monday, September 28, 2009

Congratulations on Meeting Your Wife!

You never really experienced financial solvency before prison, but as a non-smoker you found that you had no trouble scrimping and saving without the constant temptation of whores and Thai food. Outside you were lucky if you could make rent in a given month, but here you’re a god damn banker. You’re a king.

You transferred that capital into a large full-back tattoo from the best artist in the county (he was on Miami Ink for a while!) depicting a montage of your favorite characters and moments from Star Wars. Anyone looking at you would clearly know that you were a member of the Rebel Alliance which, coincidentally, was the name of your power faction in prison.

All of that will change next week when white supremacists take over your prison. They’ll kill your gang leader for refusing to blow them and, in the ensuing conflict you’ll end up being severely beaten. This will keep you from the worst of the inevitable escalation as most of your old buddies are firebombed in their sleep or raped, but it won’t be pleasant by any stretch. You’ll be under constant surveillance as they plan to transfer you to another facility. The only kindness you’ll find will come from your male nurse and an attractive young attorney working to have your sentence overturned.

She’s one of those young, pretty idealistic lawyers who doesn’t believe that the current “rape party” prison system is the best way to reform our society. She also will be a huge nerd, so when she visits you one night to make sure you aren’t murdered by a corrupt guard in order to send a message to anyone in the joint who was still thinking that “we could all just get along” and that “Star Wars was better than Star Trek” and sees your back tattoo she’ll be immediately intrigued.

“So, what’s up with the tattoo?” she’ll ask, chewing on the end of a pen while she stares at a wall in the interview room.

You’ll shrug. After a moment’s pensive thought you’ll respond. “Star Wars is the greatest narrative of our time. It encompasses every part of the hero’s journey and subverts some of the aspects in intriguing ways while telling a story both familiarly epic and strangely touching and filled with new and invigorating characters.”

It’ll be the most you’ve said in the last few months and she’ll respond accordingly. She’ll nod at the guards behind the two way mirror, which is code that she wants privacy so she can beat you with a phone book. They’ll turn off the cameras and, to the best of your knowledge, leave.

After a few seconds of waiting she’ll drag a chair over next to yours and sit, legs wide like a man. She’ll stare into your face, reading you, measuring you, an active version of the interaction the two of you will have shared daily for weeks by now. When she’s satisfied she’ll hurl the chair to the side and begin kissing you passionately.

Before you really know what’s going on you’ll be cuffed to a chair and both of you won’t have pants and you’ll be inside her for a few glorious minutes.

As the two of you slowly convalesce from the first sex that either of you have had in years she’ll hold you against her breasts and you’ll notice for the first time that she has some ink of her own. An emblem of the Rebel Alliance will sit above her right breast, just below her collarbone, mirrored by an Imperial insignia above her left. You’ll look up into her eyes and it’ll be like Han and Leia.

With the strength of your love guiding you you’ll be out of prison in around a month and in her apartment a few hours after that, pinned to the floor by her surprising strength. It’ll only be a matter of time from there before the two of you start to raise some Padawans of your own.

Congratulations on Meeting Your Wife!

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Way We Play!

Of late I’ve had some technical difficulties. It’s only fair to let you know that the only reason there isn’t an essay coming up about Red Faction: Guerilla, a game I’ve been struggling to keep from purchasing on the console for some time now is that my gaming PC, which has been bricking and unbricking itself for almost two months now, finally shit the big one and lost its motherboard. I’m waiting for the good people at ASUS to send me a replacement board right now, but in the mean time I’m playing console games and seeing what does and doesn’t run on my old media machine, which has spent an embarrassingly large amount of time gathering dust.

But I’ve had some issues on that PC now as well, with Nvidia’s drivers moving in and out of fuckery with no apparent design or pattern. And, at the risk of sounding spoiled by my glorious, hand crafted machine, my old PC is a lot slower and playing on it is a bit of a chore. Sure, I still like the games I play, but loading them takes minutes and I’m horrified to even try running Far Cry 2 on this machine. But this recent PC gaming experience has made me think about something that can delay, if not replace, the inevitable Red Faction essay to come: the way we play games.

Back in the 90s, when I was just starting to realize how awesome games were, the PC wasn’t that great a platform from a young person’s perspective. It was clumsy and the graphics were meh at best. Why play on a PC you had to share with your dad, after all, when you could rock out on an NES or a Genesis? And once the SNES entered my household, forget about it.

Back then consoles were rock solid machines that did one thing and one thing only: play games. But as I grew older the strength and complexity of the PC’s library of titles drew me in. Games like The Secret of Monkey Island, X-Wing, Dark Forces and Mechwarrior 2 all necessitated beefing up that 486 with an entire 16 megs of RAM. Sure, consoles had great titles too. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that most of my modern gaming life has been spent finding close analogs to Shining Force and Chrono Trigger. But the PC was the place to be for a hardcore nerd brought up on science fiction film and irreverent comedy. Unfortunately, playing on the PC brought with it a new set of problems.

PC gaming has always been about reaching the proper equilibrium of technology, drivers and settings so that you can get the relevant games to look and run just right. It’s a sort of meta-game unto itself, one I find myself fighting tooth and nail now. Oddly enough, however, it’s an affliction which seems to strike primarily at the hardest of the hard-line enthusiasts, and it doesn’t really take a break. I’ve been grappling with my computers for as long as I can remember to get it to run games. I had to install a modem to play UO, an early 3d accelerator to get Everquest to run, and had to purchase a whole new computer to play Warcraft 3.

These aren’t problems afflicting the moms playing Peggle or the kids using their computers for word processing. They’re problems facing gamers, almost exclusively, who are perpetually pressed into an arms race against the entertainment medium they love. How, then, do these people come to be if our lives are so fraught with trouble? If our means of escaping from daily tedium asks so much of us why do we ever get in the habit of relying on them?

For me personally it came from having a computer in the house. My father went on sabbatical early in my life and I found myself in Cape Town, South Africa without my Sega or NES. The only things that even remotely resembled those wonderful devices were the choose your own adventure books I consumed at an alarming pace and the bleeding edge 486 sitting in our spider infested attic.

That South Africa is not a nerd-friendly country certainly helped with this, but a large part of it was that there were remarkable stories being told on my home computer without my parent’s express consent. They could use this machine for business or communication or whatever but I’d be there frittering away hours with Oregon Trail, Monkey Island and some math submarine game I’ve long since forgotten the title of. I don’t mean to imply that my interest was piqued because I perceived gaming as something illicit, just that my parents already had the computer there and that it was much easier to sell them on the (at the time) $20 games than it was to talk them into buying a $150 console. It was, for me, all about access.

And after experiencing the amazing quality of PC games circa 1991, with their more mature mindset and focus on storytelling and character over the majority of concurrent console titles, it was tough to go back. Sure, Chrono Trigger could get me to sit in front of my TV for an entire weekend, drawing my attention so firmly that I skipped meals, but it was the exception which proved the rule. There’s no way I’d hop around as Sonic when I could jump jet my Marauder IIC on top of a Dire Wolf assault mech for a death-from-above kill. And as fun as Donkey Kong Country and its sequels were, they couldn’t hold a candle to the humor offered up by Monkey Island and Full Throttle, the latter of which wasn’t even that funny.

I still kept my consoles around, but they lost a lot of their cache through their competition. I had to choose between a Playstation 2 and a Dreamcast, but I never had to worry about my parents buying a current generation PC so they could run the latest version of Netscape Navigator. The PC was always there.

Perhaps that’s less true now that consoles are trying to become home entertainment centers. An X-Box 360 can largely eliminate the chore of driving to a store to rent movies and, by the way, it play games. And Playstation Home seeks to deprive your children of even the hint of normal social interaction by forcing them into a twisted digital ghetto where they’re can contend with the worst members of society in order to experience such invigorating activities as bowling and waiting in line. What a brave new world Sony has offered us!

I should also emphasize that consoles bred my enthusiasm for gaming at an early age. The first time I played Shining Force I knew I was a lost cause, and A Link to the Past occupied my thoughts for huge swaths of adolescence. But when I started to self-identify as a gamer it was through the PC. I played shooters and MMOs and strategy games, games which couldn’t exist on consoles. Sure, consoles were great for fighters or RPGs, but why would I clumsily wander around the levels of Doom on an N64 when I could do it with better graphics and smoother controls on my PC? Why buy a platform specific modem attachment when I could use a cable modem which my parents were easily sold upon. They could see as well as I could that faster access to the internet could only be a good thing, but there’s no way I could have convinced them of the merits of hooking my Genesis up to a phone line and nerding out.

It’s this sort of platform utility which makes me ignore statements about the PC’s upcoming demise. The PC has been an enduring platform for videogames longer than anything else out there. Even if we’re looking at generations of consoles not a one can match up, although Nintendo does come very close. And the PC endures because it is a versatile device that people use for other things. It’s already in their home, they already have to upgrade and update it in order to take advantage of software (although certainly less so now than when I was coming of age). Why not use it to play games?

As the console market grows people seem to be convinced that the market for PC gamers has to shrink to accommodate it, especially in a recession. But as time goes on we see that that simply isn’t true. PC gaming is shifting and refining the things it does best while consoles grow and try to branch into new kinds of play. The TPS-RPG, for example, is a genre dear to my heart which could only emerge from console gaming history. But this, like most games, ends up on the PC because designers and publishers know that it’s going to be worth the cost of a port.

I was in a discussion on the Quarter to Three forums some time ago about this very subject and indie darling Jonathan Blow weighed in on the matter. Naturally I’m inclined to give his opinion more weight than my own, but when he talked about sales of Braid on the PC making up only a tenth of the total sales for the game something didn’t gel for me. Not the numbers, certainly. Braid is a game I would never consider playing on the PC. Platformers are best with a controller in hand, everyone and their NES knows that.

But if Braid sold so poorly, and if it was such a telegraphed outcome, why did they put it out on PC in the first place? Exclusively developed side scrolling platformers for the PC perform incredibly poorly, even when they build off of esteemed properties like Half Life. So why waste your resources as an indie developer making a port you knew fewer people would see?

Perhaps because that ten percent remains a significant portion, enough to recoup the cost of their inclusion. And perhaps because that ten percent represents an audience outside of or tangential to the core gaming audience, people who can justify their tricked out computer but can’t buy a console. Perhaps Braid reached an audience on the PC who never would’ve seen it on the X-Box, hidden behind the veil of Live’s store.

While I’m not foolhardy enough to close this piece by claiming that the PC is a platform for everyone I do want to point out that it’s an accessible platform. It’s diverse, durable, and useful for things other than playing video games, a key selling point for anyone above or below a certain age who still has to contend with a strong authority figure a la parents or a significant other. So I’ll put it this way: it’s a gateway platform. It’s socially acceptable to have a computer in your house and to have it hooked up to the internet. It might even have some games on the desktop. Hey, what’s that one with the kid with goggles all about? Psychonauts? A psychic summer camp? Torching squirrels and saving brains? Seriously? Let’s fire that mother fucker up.

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Congratulations on Speaking Your Mind!

At 7:37 PM tonight, seated around your dinner table with your wife to your left and your daughters arranged to your right, counterclockwise according to age, you’re going to slam your glass of milk down so hard it shatters and splatters everyone there.

“GrrrrAAAAHHHHH!” you’ll scream.

Your wife and children will stare at you, befuddled.

“Honey?’ your wife will ask, over the growing tide of your wordless scream.

“AHHHHHHHHHH!” you’ll continue, still trying to make your point.

“Was it the casero-“ your wife will begin before you hurl a plate at her head and she leaps out of the way just in time, leaving the plate to crash against the wall behind her.

“Jesus Christ!” she’ll say, taking care to capitalize each word.

“Mom!” your younger daughter will say, concerned for her well being.

“Dad!” your older daughter will say, impressed that you still possess the passion necessary for physical violence.

“RAAAAAAAAHHHH!” you’ll continue to shout, until everyone at the table quiets down and just stares at you, still covered in milk, waiting to see what you break next.

You’ll let the scream die and then take a few deep breaths, giving them a chance to interrupt you just in case you don’t really have their attention. When they don’t you’ll speak in a collected tone, your brief, crucial piece.

“I’m gay,” you’ll say.

Your wife and daughters will look at one another. The older one will snicker and the younger one will look puzzled.

“What’s gay mean?” she’ll ask. Her older sister will snicker and whisper in her ear and her eyes will widen. “Oh!” she’ll exclaim. “Like Uncle Teddy!”

She’ll be referring to Theodore, your lover of the last three years who both your daughters and wife have met on multiple occasions and once even visited the opera with.

Your wife will shake her head and stand up.

“No shit, honey. We’re all fine with it.” Your daughters will nod their assent and you’ll apologize for making such a mess and go get a new place setting from the kitchen so you can all finish dinner in peace.

Congratulations on Speaking Your Mind!

Friday, September 25, 2009

Congratulations on Doing Your Laundry!

Ever since The Plague up and turned the majority of human beings into mindless, rage filled assholes who ceaselessly committed acts of violence for absolutely no purpose, rather than performing them due to racism or as a byproduct of being poorly educated, it’s been hard for “normals” who turned out to be immune to go about their daily lives. Every time you walk down the street you end up getting chased by a group of slavering dickwads who want to beat the shit out of you and the general collapse of society has made the most basic chores into life-threatening operations.

So while a year ago you might’ve just been able to stroll down to your laundry room and drop a load in your washer doing your laundry now requires a bit more effort.

You’ll begin your preparations by loading your sawed off shotgun and double checking the oil in your battle-mobile, a heavily modified Toyota Camry with spikes and a cow catcher welded to it. Then you’ll bundle up your clothes, double check your ammo and roll out of your garage, smashing through a handful of Ferals who are sitting outside your home. You won’t miss a beat, rolling down the street with your car’s chassis rattling all around you. You’ll barely slow down for turns and by the time you’ve cleared a mile your windshield will be covered with gore.

After the second mile you’ll start to wonder if you should even have tried to make it out there. Maybe it would’ve been for the best if you just wore dirty clothes and focused on planning your escape from The City. But then you’ll remember how itchy you felt the last time you tried that and dismiss those regrets for the weak-kneed hemming and hawing that they are and put the gas to the floor.

When you see the makeshift barricade surrounding the laundro-mat you’ll start honking your horn like mad, alerting the wall guards and every single Feral in eartshot to your presence. The gates will creek open and the guards will open up with some scavenged automatic weapons, knocking the snarling masses of humanity off of your Toyota Camry with unnerving ease.

Once you enter the laundromat an uncomfortable looking man in a stained tank top will ask you for your quarters. You’ll hand him a cluster of bottle caps and your clothing and he’ll shuffle off into the back, leaving you with the other laundro-mat patrons. You’ll consider striking up a conversation with that cute girl who always seems to be here at the same time that you are, but instead of going for it you’ll sit on your own, reading a year old copy of Time and thinking about all the ways you want to change your life for the better that you’ll never have the courage to follow through on.

While reading an article about Sandra Day O’Conner you’ll fantasize about walking up to that girl and ravishing her on top of a washing machine and then fleeing Los Angeles for the wilderness where the Ferals can’t survive. But instead you’ll sit quietly and consider what it was like to be on the Supreme Court with all that responsibility and then to have something like this happen and prove that it was all completely meaningless. You’ll guess that it was pretty frustrating.

Congratulations on Doing Your Laundry!

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Congratulations on Moving Up In the World!

You’re spent a lot of time playing second fiddle to “the man.” “The man,” in this case, is your dad, Peter Treig, computer repair guru of Flint, Michigan. In this context, computer repair means he lies to the elderly and occasionally installs anti-virus software on your computer if you ask really nicely. He’ll then charge you several hundred dollars for the trouble.

You’re grateful to your dad, certainly. He gave you a job out of high school and a garage to sleep in. But he’s a huge asshole and you’re a bit sick of his shit. Which is why, in an elaborate scheme to improve your lot in life, you’re going to murder him with a golf club this evening.

You’ll set your plan into motion by calling him in a falsetto voice. He’s a terrible father and a shittier listener so he won’t recognize your voice, even though you’re terrible at masking it. He’ll just write down the address and tell you that he’ll be there in a few hours.

You’ll wait inside the condemned house, largely indistinguishable from other parts of flint, until he arrives. Then you, wearing a wig, will guide him through the house until you reach an empty computer case. He won’t seem to notice you’re a man in the worst drag imaginable or that you’re his son, despite your voice breaking occasionally and one of the grapefruit tits you made slipping out and falling to the floor during your tour of the house. When you reach the computer room you’ll tell him to look inside the case and then, when he says he doesn’t see anything you’ll say, in your normal “I know.”

Then you’ll beat him with a golf club for fourteen minutes until you’re relatively certain he’s dead. You’ll torch the clothes you were wearing and drive out to the shore to dump his body before splashing whiskey all over yourself and driving home to your waiting mother.

She’ll be totally unsurprised at your apparent drunkness when you enter her home, but then again she won’t seem too surprised when your dad doesn’t show up that night. She won’t even seem surprised in three weeks when they find his body and the issue of his estate is finally resolved with the confirmation of his death. They’ll determine that a disgruntled patron must’ve beaten him to death in a fit of rage, a totally believable scenario for anyone who knew your father.

The only shock will come when his will is read and you aren’t given the company. Instead it’ll go to his considerably nicer assistant, who he always wanted to boost. The assistant will treat you with kindness and respect and turn the computer repair business into something legitimate and worth being a part of. So even though you won’t be “fuck you” rich the way you thought you’d be you’ll still make enough money to move out of your parent’s garage and start improving your life in general terms.

We just hope you don’t try to kill again, since your dad’s assistant is a super nice dude and he really doesn’t have it coming. Also, you have no idea how to manage a company and you’re way better off this way.

Congratulations on Moving Up In the World!

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Congratulations on Doing the Time!

We told you not to spend it all in one place. Didn’t we tell you? These aren’t the sort of people you can just fuck in the ass and expect to forget about it. These fuckers are out for blood. They’re relentless animals who don’t value life in the slightest. They’re Chuck-E-Cheese, mother fucker.

After your disregarded our advice and traded all of your tickets for a bunch of boomboxes you could sell at area pawn shops it was only a matter of time. You just got lucky and the cops saw you first at a gas station, your vehicle filled with children’s boom boxes. He checked your priors and determined you were a suspect for robbing a Chuck-E-Cheese several months ago. It wasn’t the crime you committed, although it was quite similar, but that didn’t matter to him. He just beat you with a phone book until you signed a confession and carted you off to court.

The judge couldn’t stop laughing long enough to rap his gavel during your hearing. When his “Guilty” finally came out it was choked with laughter and derision. He could barely finish the sentence he was laughing so hard. The only upside is that because you committed such absurdly stupid crime he decided to go easy on you and give you the minimum sentence.

The next three years of your life begin today.

On your first day in prison you’ll be escorted by two guards to your cell, which is a lot bigger than you expected it to be. Your cellmate will be a businessman named Bernard, and he’ll seem really nice. That is, until the lights go off and he sexually assaults you. You’ll be in good shape, though, so you’ll fend him off and at the end of the exchange he’ll seem more sad than anything else.

When you try to bring it up during exercise the next day he’ll just try to shank you in lieu of conversation. You’ll strip him of his weapon but the two of you will be injured enough in the altercation that you’ll both end up at the infirmary and Bernie will be transferred to another ward where he can be kept in isolation until he stops trying to fuck people in the ass.

Your new cellmate will arrive the next day. He’ll be a large black man named China-Bitch, and he’ll be surprisingly affable. He won’t try to rape you or anything. The two of you will get along so well that you’ll form a multiracial group called the “Rainbow Coalition” and reform the economic infrastructure of your prison from a rape based economy to one based around the trade of arts and crafts. This will be accomplished through a combination of your genius scheming and China-Bitch’s staggering capacity for violence.

Before you know it your three years will be up and your friends will be waving goodbye to you from the gates, but you’ll always remember China-Bitch and your other prison buddies fondly. They taught you so many lessons, like how to avoid being raped and how to love yourself.

Congratulations on Doing the Time!

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Congratulations on Doing the Crime!

There are a lot of platitudes you could make about the course your life is taking. You lacked a strong male authority figure early on in life and it crippled you emotionally. You were poor and learned early how to do anything, literally anything, to make ends meet. Your mom was a crack whore. Boo fucking hoo. The point is you’re a criminal. Always have been.

But any criminal worth his salt has at least one big score coming his way and tomorrow night is yours.

Tomorrow night you and two of your crime buddies, Knuckles, a young man named ironically for a birth defect which has left him without knuckles for his adult life, and Sledge, a large man named for his powerful semblance to a sledgehammer, are going to pull up in front of the local Chuck-E-Cheese in an unmarked van leaving Jitters, your straight laced driver, to watch the exit.

Then you’ll enter the building, Sledge dressed in a unsettlingly small children’s costume, claiming that it’s his birthday and that he should be able to get in for the price of his weight. When the clerk tries to tell you that that is the Ground Round and that it’s every Tuesday and that it applies to the cost of your entree you’ll lose your shit. You’ll prattle on about how they’re discriminating against same-sex couples with mentally impaired adult children and demand to see a manager.

When the manager comes out you’ll put a gun in his face and tell him to send the staff home early. He’ll comply after a few seconds of stammering and the staff will flee the building, cheering you for liberating them. Then the manager will tell you that whatever you want is yours, just don’t hurt him. You’ll laugh menacingly and then lay down your plan.

He’ll pale at it, telling you that you should just take what’s in the registers and run but you’ve watched enough documentaries on bank robbing to know why more people don’t do it. Money is traceable. Prize tickets aren’t.

You’ll hold your gun to the back of the manager’s head while he unlocks each of the ticket dispensers on the skee-ball machines. Sledge and Knuckles will follow closely behind, stuffing the tickets into burlap sacks with “POP TARTS” stenciled on the side. By the time you reach the ticket storage room they’ll have four sacks filled and three more just waiting for what’s left of the tickets.

When you start to clear out the last of their store the manager will weep openly, telling you that you’re ruining him. He’ll say that you don’t understand what Chuck-E-Cheese will do to him. He’ll start to describe being sodomized by a giant mutated rodent in the basement of some horrible lab where cheese-less pizza is created. Towards the end he won’t be able to form words anymore, just pained noises and moans like that mouse was already balls deep.

Once he’s finished you’ll clock him on the back of the head with the butt of your pistol and you and your crime buddies will finish loading up the tickets. Then you’ll run outside where Jitters is still blending in with all the other weird fucks in unmarked vans outside of Chuck-E-Cheese. The four of you will drive away to divide up your prize, secure in knowing that you’ve just pulled off the perfect crime.

Congratulations on Doing the Crime! We just hope you don’t spend it all in one place!

Monday, September 21, 2009

Congratulations on Bringing Back the Term Chinaman!

You’re a grandpa. Not the world’s greatest, despite what your sweaters and mugs might read, but an okay one. You remember birthdays well enough to mail checks on time and remember World War II well enough to tell stories about it, even though you were seven so most of your stories are less about battlefield heroics and more about throwing shit at Asian kids.

But lately you’ve been losing your hold on your grandkids. They’re getting older and smarter and you’re getting slower and increasingly cantankerous with age. Unlike most of the elderly your rage is levied less at homosexuals and black people and more at Asians. You’re infuriated that they had their own playground when you were younger where white people couldn’t go and where they got to stay and play all the time.

As a result you refuse to ride in Asian cars or eat Asian food. You refuse to fuck Asian whores and only speak to Asian women with the back of your hand. It makes spending time with your other irascible buddies kind of tough, especially the ones who went through the Korean war. And since the favorite film of your somewhat retarded grandkids is Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift it’s also put a wall up in helping you bond with them.

All these cultural barriers might encourage another man to become even slightly less racist. But not you. You think you’re just fine and really, who’s to say you aren’t? You fought for your country in the first American Gladiators and marched with the gays at Stonewall. Aside from your almost crippling prejudice towards Asian people, you’re almost a paragon of humanity.

So tonight, using the internet that you heard about recently from one of your less retarded grandkids, you’re going to start a website about your feelings on Asians. You’re not going to call for any sort of violent action, or even any sort of general discrimination. You’re not a barbarian, you just fly into an irrational rage when you’re offered udon soup, and you’re willing to compromise.

This website will, in wonderfully flowing language, outline your case for bringing back the word Chinaman into the modern vernacular so that you can use it without being ostracized and vent your racism a little bit in daily conversation. Your case will sway the hearts of many a red-state senator and blue state senators all seem to lack the sack to say no to old dudes who used to be on American Gladiators so it won’t be long before a constitutional amendment emerges stating that anyone who wants to can use the term Chinaman without fear of being refused service in any business establishment or whorehouse. You’ll also be able to use it in movie theaters and car dealerships, but not within 300 feet of railroads or in ad copy, with special dispensation granted in exceptional cases.

You will be able to die happy in three years when a young Asian woman you blinded with mace shoots you in the chest twice at point blank range, knowing that you’ve protected this basic American freedom for generations to come and that maybe you aren’t quite as crazy as your grandkids think.

Congratulations on Bringing Back the Term Chinaman!

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Story Problem!

It’s a bit surprising that I’ve never broached this topic directly on this site. It seems like the most obvious thing in the world. But it took the release of Section 8, a game with its focus centered squarely on multiplayer action, to make me consider in general the state of storytelling in games.

Part of it is also tied to Leigh Alexander’s pieces of late about the way that we seem to be repeating the same stories over and over again in games, the way that space marines clash and zombies rise and we keep on dealing with it. The Campbellian archetypes have been reduced in number to the tiniest of ultra-masculine handfuls and we define our taciturn, heavily armed protagonists by the specific nature of their armament and the morality which they apply to their Herculean struggles. It’s not terribly helpful in proving that we’ve grown up as a culture or a medium.

Section 8 exemplified the worst of these habits. Whilst to its credit the game’s story mode doesn’t claim to be anything more than a glorified tutorial it seems to aspire to do something more, to beckon us into a world so general, non-specific and riddled with clichĂ©s as to be largely indistinguishable from other science fiction settings. It introduces us to a series of generic soldiers, asks us to inhabit one, and expects us to give a shit as the others are picked off one by one.

It might not be so bad, but they’re all drawn so facelessly, each invoking a North American or European character archetype and cramming it down our throats with hackneyed accents and generic “specialities.” The only value I perceived in my teammates was their role as indestructible bullet shields who would, on rare occasion, hold the attention of enemy mechs long enough for me to empty my rocket launcher into them. Even the DIY epic moments which emerged from Section 8’s gameplay, and are indeed a huge part of what make its multiplayer so great, were undone by its attempted storytelling.

An early game boss fight where I beat off a berserking mech who had just killed my generic commanding officer ended when I fired a rocket at point blank range, destroying the vehicle, its rider, and throwing myself from the blast, dead or unconscious. However, thanks to Section 8’s removal of fail states from its single player experience instead of savoring the moment or even considering the events I was simply treated to a generic cutscene as the game haphazardly attempted to respawn me in orbit.

I’m not saying that games need to account for situations such as this, although Far Cry 2, a devoutly non-linear title with some top notch storytelling certainly managed to do so, but I do think it endemic of a larger problem with storytelling in games, that they don’t consider the player or the player’s mortality important to the story. The player is all too often looked at as a member of an audience rather than a figure interacting with and shaping the story. Hideo Kojima, upon whom so many criticisms can be leveled, should be celebrated for pushing the meta-textual envelope of games and doing some impressive things even as he maintains an almost slavish devotion to traditional game-narrative. Even if he is book-ending his gameplay segments with lengthy, non-interactive cutscenes he is at least trying to make players feel like they’re inhabiting the game world by playing the game.

I should also point out that a number of titles have already started doing this. The Half-Life series, Fallout 3 and Bioshock all lock the player’s perspective into a first person camera which all information must pass through. Sure, they all occasionally take over the game to force us to play through certain elements and they’re still, even in Fallout 3’s case, mostly linear, but they make the player and the player’s actions significant.

The elements a player pays attention to in a scene inherently take on meaning when they are given this sort of freedom. The manner in which they approach the environment shapes the story the environment tells. In Fallout 3 players can even dramatically influence the story, although certain characters must survive for the game to “go right” and certain events must eventually be fulfilled in order for events to conclude. Still, the manner in which these games allow you to accomplish these actions, the freedom they give you in interpreting the content and context of these actions is impressive. Depending on your actions during its cutscenes Gordon Freeman could be a taciturn scientist or an ADHD afflicted prick who can stop touching shit. Bioshock’s Jack could be a quiet young man seeking answers or a mindless, violent automaton who knows only violence. And in Far Cry 2 your faceless mercenary could be a divided soul who thought he was doing some good in the world or a psychotic prick who takes relentless joy in what eventually amounts to mass murder.

It’s great that people build this sort of narrative and this sort of narrative framework, but it remains limiting. Games, by nature, have trouble being open ended. Even the most robust programming team can’t create thousands upon thousands of endings for consumption. Chrono Trigger hit its limit over a decade ago with an impressive 15. But it is something to aspire to, and it’s something indie games are pushing. The Path, for example, literally forces players to insert their own story by interacting with preset objects. Blueberry Heaven may or may not have an actual ending – I’ve personally only noticed that it allows me to simulate stacking random objects as a bird man. And each of these iterations is a step towards allowing players to write their own stories into the games they play and eventually create a narrative all their own.

The real bone I have to pick with games and their stories isn’t that we’ve yet to reach this narrative nirvana. It’s that games, by and large, don’t trust their players to help them pen their stories. And developers are, of course, gamers by and large. They should know that the best moments in playing games come from the emergent elements, the occasions where the player and the persona blend together and you truly experience the narrative and feel as if you’re a part of it. Yet they do all they can to draw us out of these moments.

For example, Section 8, halfway through the game, offers up a lengthy cutscene where Corde runs rampant through a clutch of enemies, tearing them to ribbons like some sort of mad beast. It’s interesting to watch but it leaves me wondering “why can’t I do shit like that in game?” It makes me feel like the story that I’m a part of between these moments is just less cool than what the developers came up with, like I’m not worthy of playing the game that they could’ve made if only I was a better player. It makes me feel a little cheated, to be honest.

And this is the norm in games all too often. Halo’s cutscenes are entirely divorced from its gameplay, even if its gameplay does allow you to feel like a mad, cyborg devil committing alien genocide, an accurate portrayal of the Master Chief in the context of his world. Final Fantasy is infamous for treating the players like retarded children, forcing them to play the story the right way, god damnit, if they want to play any more game. And there’s a standing tradition in real-time strategy games of making sure that the story plays out entirely outside of the game itself, relegated to book-ending cutscenes informing us of why it’s so important that we build up our base and roll over the enemy base on the other side of the map.

These choices aren’t bad or wrong in and of themselves, but they fail to take full advantage of the amazing power that games have, the power to make players feel like they’re part of a story. Games all too often seem like they’re trying to ape Hollywood blockbusters, giving us big stories and pulse pounding action at the price of immersion and sensibility. They seem like they’re, to put it as pretentiously as possible, suffering from a general lack of books in their lives.

And that’s a shame, because games are really continuing the author-reader love affair that books started so long ago. They demand collaboration between players and developers, they tell stories even when they don’t mean to and those stories, even when they seem intensely cut and dry, can be debated into the ground. And that’s really really cool to me, and key to making a good game in my book. A compelling framework is good and well, but the ability to tell my own story, whether it’s a skirmish in a multiplayer game or an epic struggle against seemingly unbeatable odds in a single player game, is key to my gaming experience. Call me a pretentious ass, but if a game’s story is intractable or absent I’m not interested in playing it. If I want to master a mechanical system in order to gain some sort of ephemeral “props” I’ll play pinball, or some variation thereof. But if I want to experience some of the weirdest, most surreal, occasionally embarrassing storytelling in the world I’ll play a game. Preferably a good one.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Congratulations on Clearing the Check!

The economy is sort of a universal excuse for anything that goes wrong in your life. In your case, it simply isn’t true. You had a fairly successful career in a service industry and there was no reason for it all to go to shitsville. No reason except for the gambling problems which have left your bank account a smoking ruin.

This whole economy thing was just a really good excuse so you could still get women to sleep with you despite your poverty. And it’s been working pretty well, thanks to your surprisingly reasonable loan sharks and understanding employers.

But you’re sort of unbearable and in order to sleep with women you often find yourself paying bills for them so that they’ll give you various sexual favors. And even with your current financial situation you hate to appear weak, so you do all you can to look fiscally solvent despite your destitution.

So when Carey, the young medical student you’ve been receiving occasional oral sex from, asks if you can help her pay her cable this month in exchange for getting into her snatch you’ll all but jump for joy. You’ll cut her that $140 check right away to make sure she doesn’t miss a single episode of True Blood and won’t even think of it clearing until you’re back at your house, making pasta with butter.

You’ll be so upset that you’ll burn yourself a little when you realize what you’ve done and rush out the door, clutching your checkbook tight as you speed towards the nearest U.S. Bank location. Once there you’ll loudly demand to speak to a manager, to the bafflement of the bank staff. But this isn’t your first time at the rodeo and you know what you’re going to need to do if you want that check to clear.

It won’t be long before you’re back in the manager’s smoke filled office. He’ll have a lit cigar sitting in an ashtray and a snifter of brandy in front of him. You’ll be wearing your “Why Yes I Do Work Out” t-shirt and a pair of ripped jeans as you stand in front of him explaining your situation.

When you finish he’ll nod, then stand and unzip his pants. You’ll drop to your knees immediately and enthusiastically fellate him until he orgasms, whereupon you’ll vomit all over his office. After you clean up he’ll put in the good word and the check will clear without any fees. You’ll be all set to sleep with Carey, who, spoiler alert, will break down crying before you do the deed and tell you some bullshit story about her dad to get you the fuck out of her house before she sits down to watch another episode of True Blood.

Congratulations on Clearing the Check!

Friday, September 18, 2009

Congratulations on Finding Your Estranged Spouse!

When the missles started flying and shit hit the fan the world over you were at a conference in Buffalo, learning about new techniques for selling insurance to people who didn’t really need it, a futility made painfully clear on that day. While you watched news stations sound off on casualty reports and fizzle out one by one the one thought dominating your mind was that you really didn’t want to die here, surrounded by people you hate so far from the people you love.

Luckily Buffalo is perceived as being slightly behind Cheyenne in terms of importance in the United States and no one thought you and your lame co-workers were worth the cost of a long range cruise missle. As such you and some other large swaths of Americana were free to roam the countryside after your local meteorologists determined that the fallout had reached safe levels.

You still had to stay away from major cities, where humanity had gone mad and turned into something terrible and monstrous under the tender ministrations of the atom, but for the most part America was just one blasted slice of suburbia, littered with decaying corpses and the worthless trappings of a bygone era. Not particularly pleasant to look at, but very safe and easy to travel through.

Before long you got into a rhythm of stealing water from the backs of suburban toilets and food wherever you could. Your once considerable girth slimed at first, then shriveled until you were a wirey collection of nerves and muscle. You watched constantly for the hint of an ambush, for raiders or bears or wild dogs. Without the promise of a better life to keep them in check people had gone wild as a race. You heard rumors of settlements, but you couldn’t stop.

You had no reason to think she was alive, but the only thing you wanted to do was find your wife in Tacoma. You knew that the city probably hadn’t done well for itself, that it had likely fared worse than most places even if it had been spared, but you couldn’t just give up on her.

So you crossed the country, step by step. You narrowly avoided death, barely made it across the Dakotas and Montana where the wilderness had almost immediately taken the land back and food was all but impossible to find. Then finally you hit the Cascades, jutting up like a series of fists from the ground, mocking your journey with their height. But the ruins of the highway were surprisingly clear and as you came closer and closer to the Pacific coast there seemed to be fewer madmen and mutants.

This morning you’ll begin your approach.

When you finally close on Tacoma you’ll find that they’ve erected a massive wall. As you step towards the gates, rifle above your head, you’ll hear a massive commotion on the gunwales. A man’s voice will shout down at you to lay on the fucking ground and not move and you’ll comply. You didn’t get this far by ignoring loud potentially armed men.

You’ll expect the boot in your back or the hand on your crotch but for several minutes nothing will come. There will be only silence. Still you’ll hold your face in the dirt. Sometimes people just want an excuse to kill someone, and sometimes if they get bored they won’t. So you’ll lay there on your belly, barely breathing, waiting for a gunshot or a rustle, but there won’t be one.

Not until a woman’s voice sounds a few meters off to your right. Not just a woman’s voice, your brain will tell you, gears slowly turning together. Your wife.

“On your feet, shitstain,” she’ll say, amused, and you’ll comply, turning to face her. You’ll be smiling when you turn around and she’ll be puzzled at first. Then her tough-girl facade will drop and she’ll stand there, dumbstruck, staring at you.

It’ll be a few seconds before she awkwardly shuffles forward and embraces you, weeping, and suddenly that entire trip will have seemed worthwhile. That feeling will hold up until you get inside the gates and find out that she has a new husband. What follows will be one of the most interesting events in post-apocalyptic marriage law we’ve ever seen, but it’s not particularly germane to your lengthy cross country journey. So we’ll close by saying Congratulations on Finding Your Estranged Spouse! We never thought you’d make it!

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Congratulations on Filming Yourself While Masturbating!

You and your husband love each other very much, but not in any sort of sexual way. That’s why marriage was such a perfect institution for you. It forced you to cohabitate closely and not really deal with the bigger issues of your relationship until they reach some sort of critical mass.

It’s odd, then, that the bedroom issue that through the two of you together would be the one weighing so heavily on you of late. You know what we mean. Since the start of the week the two of you have both been totally bummed that you’re in your mid fifties and have never once had even decent sex. As a result you’ve done some pretty weird shit to try and get your mojo back already.

You’ve hired a hooker to watch the two of you, another hooker to fuck the first hooker while she watched the two of you and paid your adult son to walk in on the two of you and scream and then run out. So far none of it has worked. Your husband is considering hiring another hooker to do one of you while the other watches, but neither of you are willing to risk getting a disease.

You’ll finally come up with the decision while searching for solutions on the internet. Instead of productive discussion on the issue your search will turn up a bevy of videos of obsese men masturbating. That’s when it’ll come to you.

You’ll sit down, Thursday night, and tentatively play with yourself until you reach orgasm. You’ll look a little bit awkward and painfully aware of the camera for the entire time but eventually you’ll come so it’ll all turn out okay.

The tape won’t fix your deep seeded problems, though, and the two of you will eventually see a marriage counselor and end up having an okay threesome with him and calling it quits.

The tape will, however, destroy your attempt to run for state senate in about three years. So tough luck there. You probably shouldn’t keep things like that around.

Congratulations on Filming Yourself While Masturbating!

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Congratulations on Your Plans Coming to Fruition!

You’re the assistant manager of a Arby’s in the area just outside of Indianapolis and it’s no secret that you want to move up. You’re AM at the most important fast food restaurant at your rest stop and you’d like to take your career to the next level. You’d also like to propose to your tepid girlfriend who manages the nearby QwikStop and consolidate power over your rest area in your fist.

But your manager is no dummy. He knows what it’s like to work at Arby’s and the things people are willing to do to get ahead there. He did some pretty terrible things to a regional manager’s wife to get where he is today, and he’s not looking to meet his end in a similar way.

But you’ve laid the foundation for your rise to power carefully, and you’re not going to fuck this up. First there’s Julio, whose name you pronounce with a J. You saved him long ago from an INS inspector and let him sleep in the kitchen whenever you close and he’s never forgotten it. He might not kill for you, but he certainly wouldn’t call the police if he saw you killing anyone.

Then there’s Lorelei, your teenage employee who seems to perpetually be trying and failing to find a new job. Lorelei was super pregnant when she started working at Arby’s and you personally performed her coathanger abortion. Lorelei could help you by keeping the other employees out of the manager’s office, either by faking a feminine emergency or blowing everyone on the staff at the same time. You haven’t specified, since, as you’ve made abundantly clear to all the other employees, you don’t like to micromanage.

Sean and Tom, the pothead brothers, aren’t really an issue. They’re more of an installation. That leaves Brucie, the ex-con and last member of your shift. Brucie doesn’t like you or your ambition. He doesn’t like your manager either, though, so it shouldn’t be too hard to frame him for the murder afterwards, especially with your unemployed uncle’s help.

Tonight you’re going to put your plan into motion. Lorelei is going to start bleeding everywhere just before it’s time to count out the cash drawers before the evening shift comes on. While Sean and Tom stare dumbfounded at the pool of blood underneath her you’ll grab the cash drawer, shouting “I HAVE TO COUNT THIS” as loud as you can and rushing to the manager’s office.

Inside Julio will be waiting, staring blankly ahead, keeping constant watch. He will appear to be a perfectly loyal guard to any curious parties, but you know better. You’ll give him a quick nod, which he’ll return, and then you’re throw the money at the manager and produce a hammer you stole from Bruce’s garage weeks earlier.

You’ll proceed to beat him clumsily about the head and neck until your breach his skull and brain matter and blood spills out on the floor. It’ll be super messy and super gross and you’ll wonder if this was really the wisest course of action. Luckily with Julio’s loyal help and natural cleaning skills you’ll have little trouble stuff what’s left of your manager into trash bags and stowing them in Brucie’s car trunk while he’s doing cocaine in the bathroom.

Then you’ll be a shoe-in for the management position that just opened up within the company. Unless they hire from outside the rest area you should be running your little slice of highway heaven by mid 2010 if everything keeps up the way you hope.

Congratulations on Your Plans Coming to Fruition!

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Congratulations on Starting the Worst Business Ever!

You sort of embody the term entrepreneur. You live your life as a veritable font of ideas, ever flowing. Some of them are a little bit too modern, like your “doggy fuck swing” or your controversial home abortion kit. But your line of anus specific lubricants (which you’ve aptly named lubriCANs AH HA HA HA!) and your extra-shattery beer bottle ideas have both been pretty big successes. Every once in a while you have a great day where everything seems to come together and all of your zany ideas just click.

Today’s not going to be one of those days. Today you’re going to purchase a small office space and set up some cheap cubicles. You’ll put out some ads in the local paper and acquire a small army of temps by driving around in a pickup truck and offering young men in hoodies and jeans healthcare.

After a thirty minute orientation they’ll be trained and on the phones and you’ll think that your new business is about to take off. The first ever call center catering to clients who want to hear young men pretending to be women while simulating phone sex will be open for business.

After two hours the only calls you’ll get will come from lonely old men who wanted companionship for the night and just wanted someone to talk to and some angry closeted homosexuals who wanted to feign surprise that they were masturbating to a dude talking them off. You expected this, but the volume of calls won’t be nearly high enough and you won’t be able to keep all your temps on.

That will in turn lead to a small temp rebellion which will almost take your life. You’ll have to scatter candy across the floor in order to distract them while you leap out of the window to relative safety and drive away.

You’ll be out $200,000 and you’ll really deserve to be in this case. This whole operation was a terrible idea and you should’ve known better. It was your line of cat eveningwear all over again. Oh well. Sometimes we need to relearn our lessons.

Congratulations on Starting the Worst Business Ever!

Monday, September 14, 2009

Congratulations on Meeting Sandra Oh!

You and your wife love hanging out in the Sonoma Valley whenever you can, touring wineries and generally acting like pretentious dipshits. But occasionally it gets a little uppity, like when you insult someone of color and get your ass kicked by someone who’s spent most of his life cleaning pools or when you drink some wine that isn’t as amazing as some other wine you’ve had.

Life is hard for you sometimes is what we’re saying. And that’s why the two of you occasionally take time to frequently brothels filled with weeping fresh out of the container Asian prostitutes.

It’s not hard to find them in Sonoma. In fact, aside from the area surrounding Vancouver and Seattle it has the largest concentration of terrified Asian prostitutes per capita in the continental United States. It would be perfect if it wasn’t for all those god damn celebrities who were turned on to the area by Sideways.

Celebrities can’t let an average working management level employee at a prominent American investment banking firm just kick back and have a good time, oh no no no. They’ve got to come in and start preaching morality, telling you that it’s wrong to jack off on a terrified young woman’s face while your wife lazily masturbates as she watches.

It’s lead to surprisingly few arrests considering how illegal the entire thing is, but the police hate being told what to do by celebrities and love their whores as much as anyone, so for every arrest Bono has had his retarded face bashed in.

But lately celebrities who aren’t asinine douches have started to speak out against the reprehensible shit that you spend your time engaging in. And one of these celebrities is going to burst in on you as you awkward thrust your penis at a horrified young woman’s mouth, shooshing gently and telling her it’s okay.

Sandra Oh’s presence will fill the room instantly, her assertiveness making your erection vanish as quickly as it does in the presence of a willing woman. You’ll immediately forget about the underprivileged illegal you were attempting to rape and clasp your hands together.

“Oh god!” you’ll cry, looking around for something for her to sign. “I’m such a fan!”

Sandra Oh will look at you like you’re retarded and then hit you in the face with a motorcycle helmet, just like she does in Sideways. You’ll lose consciousness after the first hit, but just so you know she won’t stop for about five minutes.

You’re going to need a lot of surgery and your wife is finally going to come to terms with her lesbianism and start pursuing women without telling you. She’ll also stop attending your Asian whore/vineyard vacations so that she can hold on to some scraps of her sanity.

And while you won’t have Sandra Oh’s autograph you will have steel wiring your jaw together courtesy of her violent social activism. And isn’t that really just as good?

Congratulations on Meeting Sandra Oh!

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Hipster vs. Nerd!

In case you haven’t noticed, I think of markers and social structures which emerge within and between subcultures a lot. I think of the labels we use to define ourselves and one another with an almost unhealthy fervor, and I think that our approach to these labels, the way we choose to apply them, speaks volumes about who we are.

For example certain genres are notorious for being ill-defined. People without affinity for literature or either genre, for example, have issue discerning between science fiction and fantasy. However, emo is my personal favorite. The term emerged in the mid ninties to refer to DC area punk bands with a unique sound, referring to themselves as “emocore,” shorthand for emotional hardcore. The best known and arguably most definitive of these bands was Sunny Day Real Estate, whom many music fans will describe as an archetype of what emo means as a style.

But step into the present day and the term is applied to a laundry list of bands with sounds that vary from similar-to-Sunny-Day to how-the-fuck-did-you-make-this-connection. This term is now used to describe, depending on who you ask, Coheed and Cambria, The Decemberists, Death Cab for Cutie, Sage Francis and Rilo Kiley. There are a number of bands which are inarguably emo, but many of the distinctions are feeble at best. Most people I’ve heard define Death Cab as emo, for example, are loathe to lay the same claim at the feet of The Postal Service. While the songwriting is certainly markedly different, the leader singer of Death Cab’s influence remains intractable and it’s hard to draw the line between the contributions of the collaborators of The Postal Service. That’s part of what makes them such a great band to listen to: two creative minds working in concert, making something wonderful.

So is it useful to use a label so ill-defined, a label with such a pejorative tone to it in common usage? Can we apply it to pre-emocore music like The Cure or Nine Inch Nails? Is it even a term that warrants use in conversation in the present day? There are better people than I to field that discussion.

But as a giant nerd I do want to talk about two other terms: nerd and hipster.

Hipster off the bat. Black20.com did a very enlightening piece about hipster almost a year ago, back when they had funding, and the conclusion was something which rang true to my experience: hipster is a term constantly used to define an “other.” It is never a term that one would apply to oneself even if, perhaps, it would have been properly used as such at one time.

At present it is used to apply to people who follow actively seek out trends after they’ve occurred, people who are always one step behind the bleeding edge of culture. It’s a term with regional basis but a broader cultural application (While we all know Hipsters come from Williamsburg, Portland has a holdout of hipsters in Hawthorne. Huzzah, Hipsters!) and it’s never used in a positive light. It’s always used to describe someone you find shallow, inexperienced, pampered and uninteresting who attempts to construct a personality from objects of cultural interest to which they have proximity.

The term poseur would’ve been used a decade past, but that term has also moved into a strange new place and lost much of its cache over time. For now, for better or worse, hipsters are followers of trends, people who receive money through mysterious means and seem to never be at a loss for ways to spend it despite an attempt to appear poor. They’re people who are often defined by the things they hate, rarely the things they like. They’re people who have no idea they’re hipsters.

Let’s step back to the 80’s, before the landmark film Revenge of the Nerds. It’s totally a landmark film, by the by. If you disagree you probably shouldn’t be reading this website. Prior to Revenge of the Nerds no one would call themselves a nerd. In fact the concept of what a nerd was was pretty ill-defined. A jaunt through the OED will toss up a few theories, including an origin story involving an offhand Ted Geisel reference, my personal favorite origin story and the most plausible I've heard.

It was a term used to define losers, people who couldn’t get a date and would never win. They’d never get letterman’s jackets or blonde girlfriends or any of the other things we were supposed to want. They were fags and weirdos, beyond help and far from beyond reproach, people who genuinely enjoyed Star Trek. It was a term you’d never apply to yourself.

But it was certainly a descriptor with a clear line of demarcation, in the form of a pair of glasses and a general asocial tendency. It was a shameful expression, yes, but the cultural markers would never dramatically change depending on who you asked. In that respect, it differed from the term “hipster.” It also offered a counterpoint to hipster in how it evolved. Where hipster has become less inclusive nerd has become much, much more inclusive.

After Nerds came out and achieved its cult success MTV, at the time the purveyor of some of America’s most ground breaking television before it adopted the policy of broadcasting as many asinine reality shows as possible simultaneously, started airing a promo spots called Real American Nerd featuring one of the side players of the American Splendor comics. These unabashed admissions of geekhood were clearly there for the “cool kids” to laugh at. But they offered up a lot more. They offered a beacon to the disenfranchised intellectuals of a culturally bankrupt generation. They gave them a rallying point.

It’s hard to point and say just where it suddenly became okay to be a nerd in the decades that followed by at some point the shift occurred. Blame Devo or the movie Hackers or the internet or Nine-Eleven, but ere long it was not only acceptable to be a nerd but impressive. Nerds were no longer the targets of shame, but instead our culture’s heroes, the people who came up with the ideas and made shift work. By the time the nerdcore movement arrived Gabe from Penny-Arcade had put it best: out there, in the real world, we ran shit.

Nerd has, over time, gone from a belittling term to a badge of honor which you may be able to wear if you prove yourself smart enough and weird enough. It is no longer the “ultimate burn,” and instead refers to a group of young men who rebuilt a tank on a tropical island and beat the shit out of some jocks for trying to keep them down. It has become a term for many people who would’ve felt ostracized by their own generation to unite and form communities which have created their own art, music, literature and film. It’s spawned an industry to rival film in its ability to generate capital and a number of cultural gatherings across the globe where people come to celebrate their genuine enthusiasm for shit that many people couldn’t care less about.

Unlike hipster, nerd has blossomed as a term, perhaps because it began its life as a pejorative. And even though hipster is now in a similar place, culturally, it reflects the opposite of what nerd has always meant. It refers to those who are devotedly dispassionate and obsessed with the perceptions of others, so much so that they’ll attempt to belittle their own culture in order to take attention away from themselves. The hipster, after all, will be the first to cry hipster, the first to criticize another for biting their style. They’re like rappers without the adversity (or admissions of weakness, in the better cases), postured personas we’re meant to find impressive but present themselves as intellectually bankrupt to even the most passive observer.

And that’s sort of a shame, because hipsters could’ve been nerds if they were willing to admit their passion and just give in to being what they are. Their dogged pursuit of what’s cool is incredibly nerdy. It’s unending and intensely unselfconscious, it involves isolating yourself from other elements of society and pursuing knowledge, the defining characteristic of nerdhood for most, to the virtual exclusion of all other leisure activities.

But it lacks the genuine absence of concern which nerds possess, the ability to discuss shameful passions with genuine love in public. Instead it is marked by a desire to cut down the things others love and feel passionate about. And perhaps that’s why hipster is unlikely to gain cultural cache any time soon – it’s all about taking other people down, rather than celebrating the things you love yourself.

It’s a term used to injure others by people to whom it could be applied, a subculture dedicated to never coming together. But it could just as easily be a celebration of youth, if only people would admit their own passions. And that’s sad to this nerd, who’s seen an excoriated culture rise into an adult subculture, something which is decidedly outside of the mainstream and totally cool with it. If only hipsters had stopped caring about their own label they might not have to worry about it.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Congratulations on Entering Graduate School!

Briefly after returning to Madison you’ll be reminded of why you left when Gary, your best friend from high school, taps the window of your car with the barrel of a revolver. You’ll sigh and roll your window down to avoid being shot in the face.

“Hey Gary,” you’ll say, exhaustion from driving for eighteen hours overshadowed by the dead tired feeling you get just seeing Gary here on the same street corner you left him on eight years ago.

“Hey shitbird,” he’ll say, eyes flitting nervously. He’ll barely seem to know he’s holding the gun, his wrist slack and tired. When he holds it pointed towards you it’ll seem almost accidental. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

You’ll shrug. Time won’t have been kind to Gary, his eyes hollowed out, his arms too thin and his beard a bit too unkempt, even by the standard of the hipsters you’ll just have abandoned.

He won’t be happy with that.

“Open the door,” he’ll say, and you’lll comply, letting him twitch into the passenger seat. He’ll smell like an exhausted animal, like a man on the verge of a seizure. His twitching won’t help, but it will give him a touch of madness that makes him seem capable of anything. When he finishes settling in and says “Drive” you’ll drive.

He’ll guide you through familiar streets filled with landmarks that, for all your time away, haven’t changed much. It’s like everything in Madison was locked in time just for you. Everything except Gary, who will gingerly and considerately point for you to turn well in advance until the two of you reach a bar on the edge of the warehouse district.

Then Gary will give you directions on exiting your vehicle, turning off the engine, opening your door and handing him the keys. Then he’ll put his gun right against your spine and push you towards the bar’s waiting door.

Inside Gary will calm down a little, sitting at the bar with you, still at gunpoint, by his side and ordering a drink, making sure that the bartender knows to tell Julio that he’s found you and has you here.

Gary will go through three more scotches while the two of you wait. The place will be like a rogue’s gallery of people from your high school. Mary Keating, the girl you lost your virginity to, will be sitting on a man’s lap in a corner. Max Fairingway, your math tutor, will be nervously selling coke to Farah Thomson nĂ© Franks, the lead cheerleader who ended up pregnant towards the end of senior year and married her sweetheart of the time who, rumor had it, was not the father of her child.

It’ll be almost exactly like what you expected your high school reunion to be like, but two years before you expected it. When Julio steps in the front door the gathering will be complete.

“What the fuck are you doing back here, you fucking snitch?” he’ll ask before he even sits down, advancing towards the bar with violent intent.

You’ll explain that you are starting graduate school tomorrow at the U of W in Madison and that you will hopefully have a degree in music theory completed in around two years time. He’ll shake his head.

“Maybe that shit will help you get out of loans to the federal government, but it won’t help you with me.” He’ll nod to Gary, who will pull his gun out again and cock it.

You’ll ask him, puzzled, what he’s talking about. He’ll answer by detailing a scenario, almost a decade ago now, where he covered your ticket to the last Lord of the Rings movie for which you still “owe” him. You’ll ask if you can treat him to a movie and call it all Even Steven, but he’ll shake his head mournfully.

“It’s too late for that now,” he’ll say. Then he’ll nod to Gary, who will be shaking a little bit again. His grip won’t be too steady on that pistol and you’ll notice but you won’t think about it. You’ll just move.

You’ll grab the pistol by the barrel and jerk it forward, smashing your fist into Gary’s face. Then you’ll toss the pistol into your free hand in and endless heartbeat and point it at Julio. He’ll have begun to speak but the words won’t have left his mouth before the revolver interrupts, leaping in your hand and leaving your wrist with a broken feeling.

The shaped .357 won’t so much hit him as it will leave him, a hole the size of a quarter just to the left of his heart. You won’t see the exit wound, but you’ll know what it looks like: torn flesh and jagged bone pushing through meat decorating a fist sized hole. He’ll be on the ground in a few seconds, in shock before Gary even has senses back.

You’ll mutter at Gary before you pull the trigger again.

“Sorry,” you’ll tell him. You won’t be sure what you mean exactly.

As you leave the bar and re-enter the car you’ll feel strangely calm. Tomorrow’s a big day for you. Everything’s going to change, and today was, in a sick way, the perfect prelude to it. You’ll put the car into first, start the engine and drive to your parent’s house from muscle memory. It’s going to be weird to sleep in the same bed you grew up in after all that’s happened.

Congratulations on Entering Graduate School!

Friday, September 11, 2009

Congratulations on Finding a New Place to Live!

Pitchfork writers are a homogenous bunch. They’re white, educated, unmotivated and perceive themselves as being better than the people around them for no apparent reason. They also only wear clothing “ironically,” smoke clove cigarettes and they live exclusively in Brooklyn, where they attend shows and have “other interests” aside from music which seem to exist constantly in theoretical space.

As such you should’ve known you wouldn’t fit in with you genuine passion for music and subculture, your journalism degree and your apartment in the Bronx. You even spent time volunteering at local soup kitchens. How could you possibly think this would work?!

So today, when your boss calls you into his office, you’ll feel a twinge of surprise and a strong undercurrent of dread. When he says your name like he’s your dad you know what’s coming next and you won’t even hear him talk about synergizing brand image and ensuring consistent quality of work without sacrificing journalistic integrity.

All you’ll be able to do is stare at his cochney cap and think “what a fucking douche.” You’ll be on your feet by the time he finishes, staring at him like all you want him to do is shut the fuck up. He’ll pause briefly in his speech and give you a look like “could you please sit back down and let me finish?” but you’ll just take the pause to walk calmly out of his office, knowing that the uncoolness of shouting or chasing after you would keep him glued to his chair, twitching and sputtering in impotent suburban rage.

You’ll emerge from his office and grab your laptop from your desk and a handful of pens and notepads, ignoring your hanging cat picture and your bobble head doll. You’ll even leave your Pitchfork mug, depicting a young man with an apathetic expression on his face wearing a shirt one size to small for him.

You’ll stuff the milieu of useful shit you scavenged from your desk into your laptop bag and step briskly out of the office to the bafflement of your co-workers, as going outside during the day is shamefully un-hip, leading to such uncool activities as sweating and meeting foreigners who haven’t had the benefit of an American college education.

Out on the street you’ll hop from train to train to get from Bushwick to your shitty, un-air conditioned rent controlled apartment. There you’ll think about went wrong. You wrote intelligent commentary about music, assessing it not objectively but with a transparent means of interpretation which any of your readership could comprehend. You had an excellent rapport with the bands you interviewed, but you never became friendly with them or perceived them as friends. You were a perfect music journalist. There were only two problems.

You never grew an absurd moustache and you lived in the Bronx.

You’ll smack your forehead and make an exasperated groan. You know it’s too late for you and Pitchfork now but you’ll flip open your laptop and start cruising through Craigslist to see if you can find something in Bushwick in your price range anyway. Even if Pitchfork has rejected you Vice might still have room for someone too “edgy” for Pitchfork.

After twenty minutes of looking, however, you’ll realize that all of these places are too expensive for you to afford without assistance from a large financial institution or wealthy parents. You’ll look out your window at the ruin of your street, your local crackhead trembling with arms stretched towards God, muttering to himself.

You’ll wonder how people like that come to be. They must have been sane at one point, but something must have happened to make their minds break that way. Perhaps it’s something within themselves. Or perhaps it’s the city.

With this thought in your head you’ll dial your mother on your cell phone. After a three minute conversation you’ll have made arrangements to stay with her back in Wisconsin until you can get into grad school in Madison. She’ll sound happy that you’re coming back and you’ll just feel relieved, even as you inventory your apartment deciding just what can fit into your Tercel and what you’ll leave behind in New York.

In the end you’ll find there’s very little you want to bring with you.

Congratulations on Finding a New Place to Live!

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Congratulations on Living Your Life The Way Caddyshack Taught You!

Your parents weren’t around much when you were young. As a child of “the naughties” your parents were pretty much guaranteed to be negligent and once you were old enough to pee on your own they pretty much raised you and blamed all your defects on television.

Mostly this has resulted in a lot of resentment towards USA, who you now perceive as your father, and TNN, who you see as your mother. It’s also led to you seeing Bill Murray as a sort of wise, humorous uncle who showed up almost at random and whose wisdom can always be trusted. As such you treat every film that he’s been in as a delicate nugget of gold to be treasured and learned from.

Caddyshack was a particularly rich vein of life lessons. You pretty much disregarded what every character except Bill Murray had to say about life. As such you don’t see Zen philosophy or being an outgoing, humorous fellow who’s normally marginalized by women because of his appearance but has a lot of heart as being key to personal success. Instead you think the key to being a worthwhile human being lies in a mindless pursuit of revenge through violence.

You’ve done okay with it so far. Most of the people who made fun of you in high school have encountered a variety of ice fishing accidents. The few who escaped those have since been killed when you lit fire to their homes and murdered their children with a golf club.

Recently, however, you’ve come under scrutiny for your actions. It’s hardly surprisingly (you’re minority whip) but its still a bit of a shock to the system to have to deal with the attention you’ve always actively avoided.

Lucky for you there’s a little station called Fox News. And there you’ll be able to use all the skills that Caddyshack has taught you to impressive effect.

You’ll act folksie and mildly retarded to amusement of the half dozen correspondents who interview you on the hilariously named “Fox and Friends.” After outsmarting them you’ll move on to the O’Reilly Factor, where you’ll be perceived as a straight shooting maverick with a heart of hold who’s hoisted himself up from nothing. You’ll attain this image by barely being able to form a cogent sentence but still offering a (by Fox standards) understandable political viewpoint which coincides with their perceived topography of American politics today.

After that it’ll be a short step to senator-ship and then, onward to the White House. And it’s all because you learned to live by solving your problems with dynamite, gasoline and free candy bars.

Congratulations on Living Your Life The Way Caddyshack Taught You!