This weekend you and your buddy Ron had quite an adventure. But we don’t need to tell you any more about that. Heck, you were there! Racing against the clock, shooting people in the face, solving mysteries.
It was all very exciting, all the more so for the fact that the two of you normally work as assembly line managers in a sex toy factory. So when you show up for work on Tuesday after collectively having taken Monday off to convalesce and drink beer while watching Newsradio at home, you’re going to feel pretty bummed.
You had a glimpse of a whole new world over the weekend, and what’s more you found that you were pretty well suited to it. Your feelings of detachment and keen eyes were put towards seducing dames and finding clues rather than spotting defective products and distancing yourself from your co-workers for once. And what’s more, you look awesome in a moustache and aviator sunglasses, the latter of which goes strictly against company dress code.
You’ll be sitting in your office, your nose stuffed into a cup of coffee, when Ron shuffles in, looking just as dejected. You’ll see that the gunshot wound he sustained to his right arm has been bandaged now, and that most of his staff have signed the bandage with various fun slogans, not understanding that a bandage is not a cast and that applying pressure to a gunshot wound can oftentimes be quite painful. He’ll plop down across your desk from you and sigh.
“Tim,” he’ll say. “We need to talk.”
You’ll nod. You’ll try not to give it away but excitement will already be building inside you. “What’s up, Ron?”
“Well...” He’ll avoid eye contact with you, getting up and walking towards the window so he can look out at the factory floor. “I had a lot of fun this weekend.”
You’ll let loose a sigh of your own, longing this time. “Me too, bro. Me too.”
Ron will turn around dramatically. “And we got a lot done. And it gave me an idea.”
You’ll brace yourself against your desk and stand, all two-hundred sixty pound of you resting on the leg that wasn’t broken by Chinamen over the weekend. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
Ron will nod gravely, then the two of you will high five and collectively shout.
“Detective agency!”
You’ll sit down together and write out your joint two weeks notice, since Ron can’t really write with his arm as it is. Then you’ll turn it in to your puzzled boss and start looking for office space in the paper.
And so Shake and Bake Detective Agency will be founded by Timothy Baker and Ronald Shakesfield on April 22nd. Congratulations Shake and Bake, and godspeed.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
Congratulations to Julia Roberts' Period!
You’re not really a sentient entity, and this isn’t so much about a particular event in your future as it is about what you do and will continue doing until Julia Roberts enters menopause. So we’d like to ask everyone to bear with us today, because while this isn’t a momentous prediction it is an acknowledgement we’d like to hand out.
Once a month, under varying conditions which are for the most part similar you, along with your dear friend PMS, inflict wonderful discomfort upon that infuriating woman and her gargantuan mouth.
You live our dream once a month, that is to say you hurt Julia Roberts. You hurt her so bad she bleeds. We wish we could spend a little time in your shoes, even though you’re just a bodily function and aren’t, in fact, really a thing at all. Just knowing you exist makes us happy.
So everyone here at Sexy Results Future Agency would like to say congratulations to Julia Roberts’ period! Also, could you introduce us? We think she’d really like us.
Once a month, under varying conditions which are for the most part similar you, along with your dear friend PMS, inflict wonderful discomfort upon that infuriating woman and her gargantuan mouth.
You live our dream once a month, that is to say you hurt Julia Roberts. You hurt her so bad she bleeds. We wish we could spend a little time in your shoes, even though you’re just a bodily function and aren’t, in fact, really a thing at all. Just knowing you exist makes us happy.
So everyone here at Sexy Results Future Agency would like to say congratulations to Julia Roberts’ period! Also, could you introduce us? We think she’d really like us.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Walking The Path!
Spoiler alert. I’m going to talk about things that happen in The Path. It’s hard to spoil a game which advertises its intention to kill every main character on the front page of its website, but The Path is a game about exploration and experience and if you want to keep your experience as fresh and personal as possible I suggest you pony up your ten bucks and enjoy the ride. But if you’ve played it already or you’re on the fence, read on without fear.
Last week I bought The Path. On a related note, last week I started to relapse into childhood habits regarding monsters and closets. I started to believe that, at any moment, my reality could be torn asunder and reshaped by some faceless malevolent will hell bent on dragging me into some sort of horrible purgatory underneath my bed.
What I’m saying is that The Path is a subtle, horrifying game about family, about home, about suburban life and what happens when we remove ourselves from it. It’s a game about growing up and learning about yourself, about exploring and seeing the world and about lots of other things. It’s a game rich with subtext, perhaps largely because its light on text-text and big on character.
It’s a game about experiencing a world uncannily similar to your own which is simultaneously alien. It’s a game about being uncomfortable. And more people should play it.
I’m not really saying anything new in those paragraphs. Reviews across the board have said as much. The Path is a good game. It’s a thoughtful game. And it’s a game that makes us consider ourselves, to reflect on our own response to the experiences it opens up to us. All games allow for this sort of reflection, but it’s normally occluded by any number of factors, from the action and pacing of a the game to the experience of the game’s storyline.
For example, experiencing Fallout 3 involves removing yourself, physically and intellectually, from Fallout 3’s storyline. Because while you’re experiencing the story they’re trying to tell you aren’t making your own story. At least, not as effectively as you are when you’re exploring, interacting with places and processing your experiences as you stride across the wasteland. And what you’re doing and thinking in these interim moments is what really shapes your experience and shifts Fallout from a great game to a work of art. In these moments the game begs the question “what does your reaction to this mean?”
The Path doesn’t have this hurdle. The Path’s central storyline is an obtuse continuation of Little Red Riding Hood. Kind of. In this case, “central storyline” means “framing device,” since The Path doesn’t have a preset central story. It’s a lean, intelligent treatment of what it means to be a videogame. You’re given a pretext, and you’re then placed in a position to subvert it.
You guide six young women or girls, as the case may be, one by one, through a swath of woods. You don’t really have any map to speak of and navigating can be a torturous affair most of the time. In fact, I’m still not even sure that the game doesn’t remove certain places from the world each time you play. I’ve yet to find The Playground as Ginger, despite looking for almost an hour.
Through this “challenging” navigation, The Path discourages the normal obsessive compulsive habits gamers bring to new experiences. There’s no way to see where you are in relation to the other map objects at any given moment, so a walkthrough wouldn’t do you any good. Instead you’ve got no choice but to enjoy the journey itself, rather than pursue rewards along the way.
And in return The Path is beautiful in a strange and alien way. Alien in that you are inhabiting the psyche of a young woman, an odd experience for myself, a young man with no children. I found myself coming to sympathize with characters as I guided them. I found myself disarmed, not by the strength of writing or the quality of art (although both are excellent, which is all the more impressive considering the design team of two could quite literally fit inside of a phone booth) but by the game play itself.
I’ll give you an example. The second time I played through I chose Carmen. I wandered around the woods with her, stole a man’s hat, lit some fires, and thought Carmen was an irritating tomboy slut. Her every self-aggrandizing thought made me want to stab her in the neck. Unlike Ginger, who I’d immediately felt sympathy and compassion towards I really wanted something terrible to happen to Carmen.
But it never did. I wandered to grandmother’s house and was treated to a not-so-surreal trip through its halls (only by the game’s standards, mind you; the house consisted of corridors out of an Escher painting filled with trees), delivered her bottle of wine and laid down in bed next to her. The game “ranked” me as a failure, as I had not encountered my wolf. But it was late and I was tired, so I shut down my computer for the night and went to bed.
The next day I started the game up and put Carmen through her paces once more. I was treated to the same set pieces and experiences that I’d had the previous night, colored somewhat by Carmen’s trip through the house. I felt closer to her this time, like I knew her a little better, but I still didn’t like her particularly. It wasn’t until I’d met her wolf that she truly got under my skin.
After Carmen essentially seduces her father figure she’s treated to the same rain-soaked walk of shame as all of the other girls. Then she enters the house and what had been a bland, lifeless piece of suburbia is now a hideous sort of butcher’s shop. The mundane fixtures of the house were replaced by bladed spinning monstrosities. The still, too peaceful passages leading to her Room were now colored by the sounds of sawing and loud sex. And Carmen’s Wolf hadn’t done anything violent or horrible to her. He’d simply given her what she wanted: beer and warm company.
Seeing Grandmother’s House once more through Carmen’s eyes, now that her innocence had been stripped away, made me feel a profound pity for her. In both worlds, Carmen was distinctly unhappy. She did her best to straddle them, reached for a life of hedonism while staying true to her family, but she simply couldn’t pull it off and in the end she had to go home with someone at some point. And for her that means choosing an extreme. There are, after all, only two options for her. She becomes a woman or stays a girl. The middle ground is only in her walk, and that cannot last forever.
And in becoming a woman the preconceptions of her girlhood are destroyed. We can never have them back without erasing our own memories. What was a beautiful shared experience in her mind will always, to the player, now seem like a horrible, ghastly, violent ordeal. Something she must endure, rather than savor, something that isolates her further rather than bringing her into greater harmony with the world.
I could keep going about Carmen, about how she made me feel and how she made me reflect on my own life. I could pontificate for pages about the way that she’s informed my perception of the world and of people in general. And that’s just one of six experiences this game offers, seven if you count the epilogue. And these experiences are infinitely replayable and engaging in a way that most games aren’t, aside from perhaps Left 4 Dead.
And I could write an essay about the experiences I’ve had with each girl, about how they made me feel, how I engaged their characters and how I tried to piece together the narrative of the game through their experiences. I could probably write an essay all about piecing together The Path, of the joy of being given an incomplete mystery with some real meat behind it. I still think about this game while I’m doing other things.
And this is a game I bought for ten dollars.
Wanted might be a fun experience, but are you going to think about it after the last bullet has been curved? Probably not. And that game costs sixty fucking dollars. Sixty.
The Path, however, still keeps me up at night. It makes me reconsider the world around me. Even mired in new releases, purchases, and personal matters I look forward to sitting down with The Path again and seeing more of the woods through each girl’s eyes. And I spent as much on this game as I’d spend on a pitcher of PBR in Southeast Portland (including tip). In terms of bang for your buck, or in this case creeping horror for your buck, it’s a tough game to beat.
The Path’s selling points go beyond the normal equation of fun to money that must color any game purchase, however. It steps into the territory of defining games as an art form. It offers up a compelling experience that almost anyone can sit down and enjoy, an experience informed entirely by the player. It’s a game I’ve used to get an old friend who can barely grasp a controller to become more comfortable with a keyboard and mouse. And it’s a game I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every unsettling second of.
The Path is important. It’s not important in that it will sell a large number of copies, or that it will be remembered in the same hushed tones of wonder and caution as Psychonauts and Beyond Good and Evil. It’s important because of the experience it offers.
The Path is important the same way that so much great art is important: it shows us beautiful and horrible things inside of ourselves while telling its own story. And it looks good doing it.
Last week I bought The Path. On a related note, last week I started to relapse into childhood habits regarding monsters and closets. I started to believe that, at any moment, my reality could be torn asunder and reshaped by some faceless malevolent will hell bent on dragging me into some sort of horrible purgatory underneath my bed.
What I’m saying is that The Path is a subtle, horrifying game about family, about home, about suburban life and what happens when we remove ourselves from it. It’s a game about growing up and learning about yourself, about exploring and seeing the world and about lots of other things. It’s a game rich with subtext, perhaps largely because its light on text-text and big on character.
It’s a game about experiencing a world uncannily similar to your own which is simultaneously alien. It’s a game about being uncomfortable. And more people should play it.
I’m not really saying anything new in those paragraphs. Reviews across the board have said as much. The Path is a good game. It’s a thoughtful game. And it’s a game that makes us consider ourselves, to reflect on our own response to the experiences it opens up to us. All games allow for this sort of reflection, but it’s normally occluded by any number of factors, from the action and pacing of a the game to the experience of the game’s storyline.
For example, experiencing Fallout 3 involves removing yourself, physically and intellectually, from Fallout 3’s storyline. Because while you’re experiencing the story they’re trying to tell you aren’t making your own story. At least, not as effectively as you are when you’re exploring, interacting with places and processing your experiences as you stride across the wasteland. And what you’re doing and thinking in these interim moments is what really shapes your experience and shifts Fallout from a great game to a work of art. In these moments the game begs the question “what does your reaction to this mean?”
The Path doesn’t have this hurdle. The Path’s central storyline is an obtuse continuation of Little Red Riding Hood. Kind of. In this case, “central storyline” means “framing device,” since The Path doesn’t have a preset central story. It’s a lean, intelligent treatment of what it means to be a videogame. You’re given a pretext, and you’re then placed in a position to subvert it.
You guide six young women or girls, as the case may be, one by one, through a swath of woods. You don’t really have any map to speak of and navigating can be a torturous affair most of the time. In fact, I’m still not even sure that the game doesn’t remove certain places from the world each time you play. I’ve yet to find The Playground as Ginger, despite looking for almost an hour.
Through this “challenging” navigation, The Path discourages the normal obsessive compulsive habits gamers bring to new experiences. There’s no way to see where you are in relation to the other map objects at any given moment, so a walkthrough wouldn’t do you any good. Instead you’ve got no choice but to enjoy the journey itself, rather than pursue rewards along the way.
And in return The Path is beautiful in a strange and alien way. Alien in that you are inhabiting the psyche of a young woman, an odd experience for myself, a young man with no children. I found myself coming to sympathize with characters as I guided them. I found myself disarmed, not by the strength of writing or the quality of art (although both are excellent, which is all the more impressive considering the design team of two could quite literally fit inside of a phone booth) but by the game play itself.
I’ll give you an example. The second time I played through I chose Carmen. I wandered around the woods with her, stole a man’s hat, lit some fires, and thought Carmen was an irritating tomboy slut. Her every self-aggrandizing thought made me want to stab her in the neck. Unlike Ginger, who I’d immediately felt sympathy and compassion towards I really wanted something terrible to happen to Carmen.
But it never did. I wandered to grandmother’s house and was treated to a not-so-surreal trip through its halls (only by the game’s standards, mind you; the house consisted of corridors out of an Escher painting filled with trees), delivered her bottle of wine and laid down in bed next to her. The game “ranked” me as a failure, as I had not encountered my wolf. But it was late and I was tired, so I shut down my computer for the night and went to bed.
The next day I started the game up and put Carmen through her paces once more. I was treated to the same set pieces and experiences that I’d had the previous night, colored somewhat by Carmen’s trip through the house. I felt closer to her this time, like I knew her a little better, but I still didn’t like her particularly. It wasn’t until I’d met her wolf that she truly got under my skin.
After Carmen essentially seduces her father figure she’s treated to the same rain-soaked walk of shame as all of the other girls. Then she enters the house and what had been a bland, lifeless piece of suburbia is now a hideous sort of butcher’s shop. The mundane fixtures of the house were replaced by bladed spinning monstrosities. The still, too peaceful passages leading to her Room were now colored by the sounds of sawing and loud sex. And Carmen’s Wolf hadn’t done anything violent or horrible to her. He’d simply given her what she wanted: beer and warm company.
Seeing Grandmother’s House once more through Carmen’s eyes, now that her innocence had been stripped away, made me feel a profound pity for her. In both worlds, Carmen was distinctly unhappy. She did her best to straddle them, reached for a life of hedonism while staying true to her family, but she simply couldn’t pull it off and in the end she had to go home with someone at some point. And for her that means choosing an extreme. There are, after all, only two options for her. She becomes a woman or stays a girl. The middle ground is only in her walk, and that cannot last forever.
And in becoming a woman the preconceptions of her girlhood are destroyed. We can never have them back without erasing our own memories. What was a beautiful shared experience in her mind will always, to the player, now seem like a horrible, ghastly, violent ordeal. Something she must endure, rather than savor, something that isolates her further rather than bringing her into greater harmony with the world.
I could keep going about Carmen, about how she made me feel and how she made me reflect on my own life. I could pontificate for pages about the way that she’s informed my perception of the world and of people in general. And that’s just one of six experiences this game offers, seven if you count the epilogue. And these experiences are infinitely replayable and engaging in a way that most games aren’t, aside from perhaps Left 4 Dead.
And I could write an essay about the experiences I’ve had with each girl, about how they made me feel, how I engaged their characters and how I tried to piece together the narrative of the game through their experiences. I could probably write an essay all about piecing together The Path, of the joy of being given an incomplete mystery with some real meat behind it. I still think about this game while I’m doing other things.
And this is a game I bought for ten dollars.
Wanted might be a fun experience, but are you going to think about it after the last bullet has been curved? Probably not. And that game costs sixty fucking dollars. Sixty.
The Path, however, still keeps me up at night. It makes me reconsider the world around me. Even mired in new releases, purchases, and personal matters I look forward to sitting down with The Path again and seeing more of the woods through each girl’s eyes. And I spent as much on this game as I’d spend on a pitcher of PBR in Southeast Portland (including tip). In terms of bang for your buck, or in this case creeping horror for your buck, it’s a tough game to beat.
The Path’s selling points go beyond the normal equation of fun to money that must color any game purchase, however. It steps into the territory of defining games as an art form. It offers up a compelling experience that almost anyone can sit down and enjoy, an experience informed entirely by the player. It’s a game I’ve used to get an old friend who can barely grasp a controller to become more comfortable with a keyboard and mouse. And it’s a game I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every unsettling second of.
The Path is important. It’s not important in that it will sell a large number of copies, or that it will be remembered in the same hushed tones of wonder and caution as Psychonauts and Beyond Good and Evil. It’s important because of the experience it offers.
The Path is important the same way that so much great art is important: it shows us beautiful and horrible things inside of ourselves while telling its own story. And it looks good doing it.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Congratulations Lessie!
We here at Sexy Results Future Agency like to think of ourselves as fairly progressive (who’s goes two thumbs and thinks lesbians are awesome? This guy!) so we tend to veer away from traditional family values and stereotypical Christian sensibilities.
So we’d like to offer you, Karen, a wholehearted congratultions for whats going to happen this Sunday.
You normally work as a police dispatcher. You receive negative feedback round the board, simply by the nature of your job. But you hold on to it because the pay is good and you feel like you’re helping people.
The one brief respite for you comes each weekend, when you hit up a few gay clubs and try to find you a cute chick to bring home and fuck the living shit out of.
It’s an almost universal procedure now for most. You embark on the town for a night of consequence free substance abuse, and perhaps you find yourself a sexual partner. In any other time it would seem madness, but nowadays it is the norm.
But this Sunday, at 3:43 AM, you’re going to meet a woman named Melissa. Melissa is going to find you fascinating on every level. You need to take her back to your apartment and think about nothing other than her gorgeous eyes and incredible hair. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll also be permitted to think about her flawless pubis.
But tonight, don’t think about the future or commitments. About what your parents would think. Just think about Melissa’s bright smile, and the possibility it invites.
And congratulations, lessie. We don’t use that term in a derogatory manner.
So we’d like to offer you, Karen, a wholehearted congratultions for whats going to happen this Sunday.
You normally work as a police dispatcher. You receive negative feedback round the board, simply by the nature of your job. But you hold on to it because the pay is good and you feel like you’re helping people.
The one brief respite for you comes each weekend, when you hit up a few gay clubs and try to find you a cute chick to bring home and fuck the living shit out of.
It’s an almost universal procedure now for most. You embark on the town for a night of consequence free substance abuse, and perhaps you find yourself a sexual partner. In any other time it would seem madness, but nowadays it is the norm.
But this Sunday, at 3:43 AM, you’re going to meet a woman named Melissa. Melissa is going to find you fascinating on every level. You need to take her back to your apartment and think about nothing other than her gorgeous eyes and incredible hair. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll also be permitted to think about her flawless pubis.
But tonight, don’t think about the future or commitments. About what your parents would think. Just think about Melissa’s bright smile, and the possibility it invites.
And congratulations, lessie. We don’t use that term in a derogatory manner.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Congratulations on Your Vacation!
It’s been many a year since you’ve taken off from work. Eight years, to be precise. Longer if we don’t count sick days as “time off,” and most people don’t. So it would be fair to say you’ve never really had a vacation.
You spend most of your time working as the editor of a prominent magazine which delivers photographs of attractive disabled people in their underwear. Its a niche business, but you do all you can to keep the photos tasteful and the office a professional, comfortable, tolerant environment.
After all, this is, and always has been, your passion. Your hectic working schedule and solitary lifestyle isn’t an indication that you’re fleeing personal problems. You just love your peculiar brand of erotica so much that you, a mentally healthy and intelligent thirty-something with an impressive bank account, haven’t had time for a relationship or a hobby or anything else, really, aside from your photographs of vulnerable and convalescent young men and women.
But a lot of your readers aren’t quite so mentally stable. Many of them have very little free time, despite being unemployed, because they spend all of it clipping images out of your magazine and making impressive, twisted mosiacs and collages out of them. If you followed the internet more closely you’d know that there are actually around thirty of these guys, and that most of them really love your work.
But one of them thinks he can do better. His name is Barnaby and he’s going to break into your home this weekend (like all crazy fucks he has a connection at the DMV and managed to track down your address for a bag of Funyuns and a handjob) and hold you at gunpoint until you acknowledge that he is the greatest appreciator of your very specific brand of almost-pornography in the world.
You’ll politely and reasonably tell him that you believe that appreciation is subjective and that, while you’re glad he enjoys your magazine that it isn’t healthy for him to believe that loving something is a contest. In response he’ll shoot you in the shoulder and then again in the thigh, thankfully missing the artery.
At this point the whole thing will have been going on for a few days. It’ll be all over the evening news, the daytime talk shows, and that small group of internet fans you’ve acquired who will spend most of their time talking about how they all totally saw this coming (seven of Barnaby’s last twenty three posts had “I AM GOING TO TAKE THAT FUCKER HOSTAGE” in the subject line) and the police will have surrounded your house with snipers and the like.
Once the shots are fired they’ll assume you’re dead (which wasn’t far off since Barnaby was planning to do an “angry dance” then shoot you in the face) and storm your home. An attractive young lady cop will lead the charge, a woman named Marge. When Marge kicks in the door Barnaby will panic and shoot her in the calf, splintering her tibia with a .380 round.
It’ll hurt a lot, as well you know, and she’ll scream, but before she drops on the weight of her now ruined leg she’ll put two rounds into Barnaby’s chest and head, dropping him to the ground and eliminating the threat.
You’ll thank her profusely in a horse voice and the two of you will stare at each other across the room, united in that moment by your shared pain. It won’t last long before the two of you are loaded by the waiting paramedics into an ambulance and whisked away to the hospital. However, during the ride the two of you will hold hands, at least twice.
After your operation you’ll be up and walking, but because of thee bone damage Marge will be confined to a wheelchair during recovery. You’ll visit her and finally you’ll know what love is.
Over the course of your recovery the two of you will foster a relationship based on mutual workaholism and a deeply repressed loneliness that love of your respective jobs had kept buried for so long. Eventually you’ll take photographs of her. They will never be published.
Aside from that... Well, we’d prefer it if you were surprised.
As for the serious injuries, they’ll keep you from working for around two weeks. Don’t worry, though. Your assistant editor is well trained and your readership is loyal. Just sit back, watch some movies with Marge and try to enjoy the first real bit of time off you’ve had in a decade and a half.
Congratulations on your vacation.
You spend most of your time working as the editor of a prominent magazine which delivers photographs of attractive disabled people in their underwear. Its a niche business, but you do all you can to keep the photos tasteful and the office a professional, comfortable, tolerant environment.
After all, this is, and always has been, your passion. Your hectic working schedule and solitary lifestyle isn’t an indication that you’re fleeing personal problems. You just love your peculiar brand of erotica so much that you, a mentally healthy and intelligent thirty-something with an impressive bank account, haven’t had time for a relationship or a hobby or anything else, really, aside from your photographs of vulnerable and convalescent young men and women.
But a lot of your readers aren’t quite so mentally stable. Many of them have very little free time, despite being unemployed, because they spend all of it clipping images out of your magazine and making impressive, twisted mosiacs and collages out of them. If you followed the internet more closely you’d know that there are actually around thirty of these guys, and that most of them really love your work.
But one of them thinks he can do better. His name is Barnaby and he’s going to break into your home this weekend (like all crazy fucks he has a connection at the DMV and managed to track down your address for a bag of Funyuns and a handjob) and hold you at gunpoint until you acknowledge that he is the greatest appreciator of your very specific brand of almost-pornography in the world.
You’ll politely and reasonably tell him that you believe that appreciation is subjective and that, while you’re glad he enjoys your magazine that it isn’t healthy for him to believe that loving something is a contest. In response he’ll shoot you in the shoulder and then again in the thigh, thankfully missing the artery.
At this point the whole thing will have been going on for a few days. It’ll be all over the evening news, the daytime talk shows, and that small group of internet fans you’ve acquired who will spend most of their time talking about how they all totally saw this coming (seven of Barnaby’s last twenty three posts had “I AM GOING TO TAKE THAT FUCKER HOSTAGE” in the subject line) and the police will have surrounded your house with snipers and the like.
Once the shots are fired they’ll assume you’re dead (which wasn’t far off since Barnaby was planning to do an “angry dance” then shoot you in the face) and storm your home. An attractive young lady cop will lead the charge, a woman named Marge. When Marge kicks in the door Barnaby will panic and shoot her in the calf, splintering her tibia with a .380 round.
It’ll hurt a lot, as well you know, and she’ll scream, but before she drops on the weight of her now ruined leg she’ll put two rounds into Barnaby’s chest and head, dropping him to the ground and eliminating the threat.
You’ll thank her profusely in a horse voice and the two of you will stare at each other across the room, united in that moment by your shared pain. It won’t last long before the two of you are loaded by the waiting paramedics into an ambulance and whisked away to the hospital. However, during the ride the two of you will hold hands, at least twice.
After your operation you’ll be up and walking, but because of thee bone damage Marge will be confined to a wheelchair during recovery. You’ll visit her and finally you’ll know what love is.
Over the course of your recovery the two of you will foster a relationship based on mutual workaholism and a deeply repressed loneliness that love of your respective jobs had kept buried for so long. Eventually you’ll take photographs of her. They will never be published.
Aside from that... Well, we’d prefer it if you were surprised.
As for the serious injuries, they’ll keep you from working for around two weeks. Don’t worry, though. Your assistant editor is well trained and your readership is loyal. Just sit back, watch some movies with Marge and try to enjoy the first real bit of time off you’ve had in a decade and a half.
Congratulations on your vacation.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Congratulations on Your New Car!
On Thursday you’re going to purchase a new car. It’ll be your first new car ever, a Mazda Protégé purchased with money from the economic stimulus package. It’ll be an absurd misappropriation of government funds for personal gain, and you’ll relish every penny.
Oddly enough, however, when you get home and start checking the car out you and your wife will discover several bodies in the back. Panicked, you’ll call the dealer and inform him that your car was, in fact, used as it, like most used cars you’ve purchased over the years, was filled with corpses.
The dealer will be very apologetic, but will insist that the car is new and that his company maintains a stalwart “no backsies” policy. As such he will offer a slightly better finance package, but will steadfastly refuse to exchange the car for another model.
You’ll be furious with him, swearing for a solid minute and a half, but as a car dealer who sells mostly to shady, overpaid investment bankers with little moral sense and less courage he knows that you’ll give up soon enough.
Sure enough, after two minutes of shouting your voice will start to crack and you’ll hang up, already assaulted by vaguely homoerotic thoughts which you feel would somehow threaten the car dealer as much as they threaten you. You’ll yell at your wife across the house that that faggot car salesman wouldn’t offer you a new model and she’ll roll her eyes as she shouts back that that’s just too bad.
Frustrated, you’ll call your mafia contact, Tony, and he’ll send a few guys over to deal with the bodies. Then you’ll have awkward unsatisfactory sex with your wife and go to sleep.
The moment your eyes close your head will be filled with tortured dreams. Your every nightmare will come to light, every forbidden thought aired to your colleagues. Your father will live once more and your mother will be out of the home and cooking for you in your kitchen.
You’ll wake time and time again, screaming, into a new nightmare. When dawn finally comes you’ll be soaked through t and your wife will be above you, concerned.
You spent the entire night screaming and eventually she had to move to the couch just to get some rest. When you didn’t wake up at six and start screaming about Jews she thought something might be wrong, so she came up and dumped a bucket of water on you.
That day you’ll call the car dealer once again, complaining of the nightmare visions which accompanied your recent purchase. He’ll simply laugh menacingly and inform you that his dealership cannot be held responsible for any paranormal activity experienced by the purchaser. Then he’ll hang up.
You’ll be too unnerved, after the horrible night and his unearthly calm the previous day, to call him back. You’ll just go about your day as normal, driving to work in your new Mazda. The day will go by without incident, an eerie way for events to proceed given the previous night. It’ll all be horrifyingly mundane, that is until you begin your evening commute.
You’ll be shocked when, during the ride home, Abraham Lincoln’s image appears in the rear view mirror. You’ll turn around and see nothing, but when you look in the mirror again he’ll be there, sitting cool as a cucumber in your backseat. Then he’ll speak in a stenorian voice that shakes your very being.
He’ll tell you that you’re a terrible man, worse than a war profiteer. He’ll tell you that all you’ve done in your pathetic little life is pursue material gains and that he has returned from the afterworld to render vengeance for the fraud you’ve committed against both the people and government of the United States. But he’ll call it the Union.
Then he’ll smile grimly as you scream no, informing you that the rest of your brief life will be spent in the most profound mental anguish imaginable and that you’ve always been gay.
This will break your fragile little mind and you’ll hurry home to start weeping on your wife’s dress. She’ll roll her eyes and try to calm you down until its bed time. Then she’ll head to the couch, assuming that you’re going to scream all night again.
But you won’t. Tonight you’ll be silent, laying awake in your bed waiting for the horrors to come. This is how you’ll die, horrified in your bed, praying against sleep, murdered with an axe by Abraham Lincoln’s ghost.
Congratulations on your new car, asshole!
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Congratulations on Having Your Nose Broken!
When Tom says what you know he’s going to say about Karen you’re going to lose your shit. You knew it was coming and you know it’s partially true, but that doesn’t really matter, does it? He still had no right to say that about your fiancé. And the only thing that could ever make it feel alright for you is slamming your fist into his big, fat self important face.
Unfortunately Tom has a lot of weight on you, and he’s been in many more fights during his lifetime than you have, so once you’ve hit him he’s going to hit you back harder and in a much more sensitive place. Before he even knows what he’s doing you’ll be holding the ruined swath of face and cartiledge that used to be your nose.
The moment the punch connects his body will go slack. His arms will snap back to a fighting stance, then drop to his sides. He’ll try to grab your shoulders, to apologize, but you’ll just shove him away with all of your body weight, flinging blood and snot all over him.
He’ll try to tell you that he didn’t mean it, that he’s just drunk, but you won’t hear him. You’ll already have ripped your friendship bracelet off and tossed at him, screaming “Fucker” at the top of your lungs as you walk away. He’ll stand there covered in blood, holding that camp relic of your friendship limply as he watches you flag a cab.
And that is how it will end: a fiancé you know is cheating on you, a best friend who only wants you to be happy and your pretty face all smashed up.
Good luck on finding a new best man, and congratulations on having your nose broken.
Unfortunately Tom has a lot of weight on you, and he’s been in many more fights during his lifetime than you have, so once you’ve hit him he’s going to hit you back harder and in a much more sensitive place. Before he even knows what he’s doing you’ll be holding the ruined swath of face and cartiledge that used to be your nose.
The moment the punch connects his body will go slack. His arms will snap back to a fighting stance, then drop to his sides. He’ll try to grab your shoulders, to apologize, but you’ll just shove him away with all of your body weight, flinging blood and snot all over him.
He’ll try to tell you that he didn’t mean it, that he’s just drunk, but you won’t hear him. You’ll already have ripped your friendship bracelet off and tossed at him, screaming “Fucker” at the top of your lungs as you walk away. He’ll stand there covered in blood, holding that camp relic of your friendship limply as he watches you flag a cab.
And that is how it will end: a fiancé you know is cheating on you, a best friend who only wants you to be happy and your pretty face all smashed up.
Good luck on finding a new best man, and congratulations on having your nose broken.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Congratulations Solid Gold Gorilla!
It’s been a long life-journey, but you’ve finally made it to the big leagues. After attaining your graduate degree in villainy (undergraduate degree in political science and chemistry) and enduring a two year stint as a “second” to Dr. Deathclaw, a prominent bay area super-villain you’ve finally got your own practice.
You’ll be starting out in Billings next week, going up against a group of neo-survivalist “heroes” who still perceive communism as a serious threat to America. It’s not a big gig, but considering that Dr. Deathclaw’s whole shtick was opposing gay rights it’s a lot more up your wheelhouse than your apprenticeship was.
Your name, by the way, is Gold Gorilla, and you believe passionately that socialized medicine needs to be instituted on a national scale. Your overlong explanation is that during villain school your roommate transformed you into a large, blonde gorilla (true!) and that you couldn’t receive treatment for this condition because you lacked insurance (partially true).
This will immediately draw the ire of the Survival Rangers, as the Montanan heroes call themselves. Unfortunately for these heroes you’ll be the first villain they ever face, and it won’t go well for them. When they track you to your lair, a beautifully rendered piece of jungle, they’ll then attempt to use skeletal lamping techniques to flush you from your woodland paradise. They’re serious dicks.
However, since you aren’t a mindless animal you’ll avoid the lamps easily and kill four of their five-man band with a combination of rocks and your bare hands. Then you’ll violently sodomize the last member before spitting on him and leaving him there, stripped of his weapons and without any means of communication, to drag himself back to civilization, humiliated and defeated.
As he lays there bleeding you’ll bend over and whisper into his ear “Better find a doctor.” Contextually, it’ll be fucking awesome.
After that you’ll assemble four fence posts around your compound and lash the battered corpses of your enemies to them. In addition to being a tasteful yard decoration, you hope that this will also deter future bands of heroes since even though you’re a vicious psychopath you don’t actually enjoy murdering people over differences in ideology, and you’d just like to see this country get its act together and catch up with Europe on this whole healthcare thing.
Once the Consortium of Villains hears about your stunning premier performance they’ll send you a pair of solid gold gauntlets that weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds and give you a new name: Solid Gold Gorilla.
Enjoy the promotion and keep fighting the good fight. Also, try to avoid dying in an ironic way. That’s how most people will be trying to kill you from here on out. And congratulations Solid Gold Gorilla!
You’ll be starting out in Billings next week, going up against a group of neo-survivalist “heroes” who still perceive communism as a serious threat to America. It’s not a big gig, but considering that Dr. Deathclaw’s whole shtick was opposing gay rights it’s a lot more up your wheelhouse than your apprenticeship was.
Your name, by the way, is Gold Gorilla, and you believe passionately that socialized medicine needs to be instituted on a national scale. Your overlong explanation is that during villain school your roommate transformed you into a large, blonde gorilla (true!) and that you couldn’t receive treatment for this condition because you lacked insurance (partially true).
This will immediately draw the ire of the Survival Rangers, as the Montanan heroes call themselves. Unfortunately for these heroes you’ll be the first villain they ever face, and it won’t go well for them. When they track you to your lair, a beautifully rendered piece of jungle, they’ll then attempt to use skeletal lamping techniques to flush you from your woodland paradise. They’re serious dicks.
However, since you aren’t a mindless animal you’ll avoid the lamps easily and kill four of their five-man band with a combination of rocks and your bare hands. Then you’ll violently sodomize the last member before spitting on him and leaving him there, stripped of his weapons and without any means of communication, to drag himself back to civilization, humiliated and defeated.
As he lays there bleeding you’ll bend over and whisper into his ear “Better find a doctor.” Contextually, it’ll be fucking awesome.
After that you’ll assemble four fence posts around your compound and lash the battered corpses of your enemies to them. In addition to being a tasteful yard decoration, you hope that this will also deter future bands of heroes since even though you’re a vicious psychopath you don’t actually enjoy murdering people over differences in ideology, and you’d just like to see this country get its act together and catch up with Europe on this whole healthcare thing.
Once the Consortium of Villains hears about your stunning premier performance they’ll send you a pair of solid gold gauntlets that weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds and give you a new name: Solid Gold Gorilla.
Enjoy the promotion and keep fighting the good fight. Also, try to avoid dying in an ironic way. That’s how most people will be trying to kill you from here on out. And congratulations Solid Gold Gorilla!
Monday, March 23, 2009
Congratulations Muskrats!
Today society will be turned on its ear as muskrats the world over emerge from rivers in major metropolitan areas and begin to take over daily life.
All around us muskrats will assume the functions which the mentally retarded or immigrants once performed. They will begin by taking over our theaters, then our fast food restaurants. They’ll expand to gas station attendants and, before you know it, investment bankers.
Before long society at large will come to see them as normal and acceptable individuals for these roles. The whole thing will be very Gogol-esque. After a few months muskrats will have taken over most clerical work. Soon after that politics will fall under their sway. And then the few remaining humans in these select urban centers will be devoured by rodents.
Our only hope is that we live long enough to see our new masters devour our enemies.
Congratulations muskrats!
All around us muskrats will assume the functions which the mentally retarded or immigrants once performed. They will begin by taking over our theaters, then our fast food restaurants. They’ll expand to gas station attendants and, before you know it, investment bankers.
Before long society at large will come to see them as normal and acceptable individuals for these roles. The whole thing will be very Gogol-esque. After a few months muskrats will have taken over most clerical work. Soon after that politics will fall under their sway. And then the few remaining humans in these select urban centers will be devoured by rodents.
Our only hope is that we live long enough to see our new masters devour our enemies.
Congratulations muskrats!
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Beautiful Failure of Battletech 3025
Games are a diverse medium. They can be used in many ways to many ends, but for the most part you can divide modern games into three categories. There are games which try to tell a story, games that offer up a system for competition, and games that offer players a toolset with which to create their own story. There’s certainly more nuance to the spectrum of games, and the objectives which games attempt to accomplish beyond this are too many to mention. But for the most part you can break down what most developers are trying to do into one of these categories.
There’s usually quite a bit of overlap in these categories. Call of Duty 4, for example, gave players a compelling story and layered one of the best multiplayer FPSes in recent memory on top of it. Fallout 3 offered up a wonderfully realized coming of age story and simultaneously gave players an almost overwhelming degree of freedom to make their own adventure.
But it’s fairly rare to see a game which provides both a solid storyline, a structure within which to create your own narrative and a compelling multiplayer model. The only major release I can think of that provided all of that is Dynamix’s Tribes, and the DIY storytelling aspects of Tribes were dubious at best and non-existent at worst (although I challenge any gamer to not feel as if they’re part of an epic battle while they soar through the air above a cascade of explosions, struggling to shoot opponents out of the air as they fly).
However, there was a game in development, long long ago, that blended all of these elements, building off of the venerable intellectual property and placing it in a context where players could have a direct impact on a constantly shifting world around them while engaged in some of the gameplay so compelling that it still makes me want to write about it, eight years after the game’s beta’s cancellation.
Battletech 3025 wasn’t a well known game. It wasn’t scheduled to be a blockbuster release. The beta was released as part of multiplayer.net’s now defunct and at the time dismal multiplayer service. It was far from perfect, fraught with bugs and balance issues (good luck fighting a Raven armed with LRMs as a laser Javelin, despite the meager five ton difference) but even as a beta it presented a compelling model which managed a rare “triple threat” of a compelling competitive multiplayer model, complicated and intruiging story (although in this case it was nearly entirely taken from the existing Battletech lore) and a world where players could have an enduring impact through their efforts.
The core of the game was the tried and true MechWarrior combat model. Players would pilot multi-ton mechs of varying size and configuration into 4v4 combat against one another in brutal multiplayer matches from a first person perspective. Visually, MechWarrior has always struck a chord with geek culture (although its hard to see anyone not enjoying the fiction of piloting a giant robot into combat). It possessed all the standard trappings of the Battletech universe that have persisted since its tabletop origins, its only original contribution coming in the form of a new hit recognition and damage calculation system.
But this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing by any means. Battletech’s core gameplay has always been fun, and has never really required a massive overhaul (in fact the death of the series could be linked to the overhaul which Mechwarrior 4 brought to bear on the customization system, which destroyed a long standing gameplay concept). And with Battletech’s gameplay came its story.
The politically charged and morally dubious world of Battletech has never been the sort of place you can discuss in public. It’s sort of embarrassing to even think about when you’re not invested in the games. But once you’re in the cockpit of a Catapult its hard not to be invested, if only at a subconscious level. You might not know anything about House Kurita, but damned if you aren’t going to plant that badass dragon standard over the corpses of all those dudes with fists painted on their mechs.
The Battletech universe manages to offer up enduring and resonant symbols and then back them up with a deeply involved and complicated backstory with real human drama and plenty of moral ambiguity. Even if the writing was never up to Jonathan Lethem or William Gibson the world that Battletech made you a part of was compelling in a way many developers still struggle to grasp.
But what made Battletech 3025 interesting and unique against the sea of other Battletech games was the enduring tactical aspect. 3025 put the tiny, bite sized slivers of action into context, creating a galactic battle map against which players could engage in their skirmishes. Collectively players would win or lose control over swaths of the map, battle lines shifting over the course of days or weeks. Winning territory would translate into experience and cash for players, and holding territory in the long run would mean a slightly bigger paycheck from your faction each week.
It would’ve been fascinating to see how this system could function in the long run, but unfortunately 3025 was in beta for less than a year and never saw release. Numerous groups have tried and failed to resurrect the game, but legal issues and a floundering community which never emerged from its infancy have managed to stymie these efforts.
And so Battletech 3025 will remain forever in the past as a brief, brilliant glimpse of what could have been a revolutionary entry into the Battletech gaming catalog. Before Sovereign failed, before Planetside crawled its way to sustenance, there was another game blending persistent world game play with a non-RPG model. A game that, even with its adolescent pangs and problems, managed something which games today still aspire to.
It managed to remove players from their daily lives, place them in a world wholly different from their own, make them feel at home, and make them feel like they mattered.
There’s usually quite a bit of overlap in these categories. Call of Duty 4, for example, gave players a compelling story and layered one of the best multiplayer FPSes in recent memory on top of it. Fallout 3 offered up a wonderfully realized coming of age story and simultaneously gave players an almost overwhelming degree of freedom to make their own adventure.
But it’s fairly rare to see a game which provides both a solid storyline, a structure within which to create your own narrative and a compelling multiplayer model. The only major release I can think of that provided all of that is Dynamix’s Tribes, and the DIY storytelling aspects of Tribes were dubious at best and non-existent at worst (although I challenge any gamer to not feel as if they’re part of an epic battle while they soar through the air above a cascade of explosions, struggling to shoot opponents out of the air as they fly).
However, there was a game in development, long long ago, that blended all of these elements, building off of the venerable intellectual property and placing it in a context where players could have a direct impact on a constantly shifting world around them while engaged in some of the gameplay so compelling that it still makes me want to write about it, eight years after the game’s beta’s cancellation.
Battletech 3025 wasn’t a well known game. It wasn’t scheduled to be a blockbuster release. The beta was released as part of multiplayer.net’s now defunct and at the time dismal multiplayer service. It was far from perfect, fraught with bugs and balance issues (good luck fighting a Raven armed with LRMs as a laser Javelin, despite the meager five ton difference) but even as a beta it presented a compelling model which managed a rare “triple threat” of a compelling competitive multiplayer model, complicated and intruiging story (although in this case it was nearly entirely taken from the existing Battletech lore) and a world where players could have an enduring impact through their efforts.
The core of the game was the tried and true MechWarrior combat model. Players would pilot multi-ton mechs of varying size and configuration into 4v4 combat against one another in brutal multiplayer matches from a first person perspective. Visually, MechWarrior has always struck a chord with geek culture (although its hard to see anyone not enjoying the fiction of piloting a giant robot into combat). It possessed all the standard trappings of the Battletech universe that have persisted since its tabletop origins, its only original contribution coming in the form of a new hit recognition and damage calculation system.
But this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing by any means. Battletech’s core gameplay has always been fun, and has never really required a massive overhaul (in fact the death of the series could be linked to the overhaul which Mechwarrior 4 brought to bear on the customization system, which destroyed a long standing gameplay concept). And with Battletech’s gameplay came its story.
The politically charged and morally dubious world of Battletech has never been the sort of place you can discuss in public. It’s sort of embarrassing to even think about when you’re not invested in the games. But once you’re in the cockpit of a Catapult its hard not to be invested, if only at a subconscious level. You might not know anything about House Kurita, but damned if you aren’t going to plant that badass dragon standard over the corpses of all those dudes with fists painted on their mechs.
The Battletech universe manages to offer up enduring and resonant symbols and then back them up with a deeply involved and complicated backstory with real human drama and plenty of moral ambiguity. Even if the writing was never up to Jonathan Lethem or William Gibson the world that Battletech made you a part of was compelling in a way many developers still struggle to grasp.
But what made Battletech 3025 interesting and unique against the sea of other Battletech games was the enduring tactical aspect. 3025 put the tiny, bite sized slivers of action into context, creating a galactic battle map against which players could engage in their skirmishes. Collectively players would win or lose control over swaths of the map, battle lines shifting over the course of days or weeks. Winning territory would translate into experience and cash for players, and holding territory in the long run would mean a slightly bigger paycheck from your faction each week.
It would’ve been fascinating to see how this system could function in the long run, but unfortunately 3025 was in beta for less than a year and never saw release. Numerous groups have tried and failed to resurrect the game, but legal issues and a floundering community which never emerged from its infancy have managed to stymie these efforts.
And so Battletech 3025 will remain forever in the past as a brief, brilliant glimpse of what could have been a revolutionary entry into the Battletech gaming catalog. Before Sovereign failed, before Planetside crawled its way to sustenance, there was another game blending persistent world game play with a non-RPG model. A game that, even with its adolescent pangs and problems, managed something which games today still aspire to.
It managed to remove players from their daily lives, place them in a world wholly different from their own, make them feel at home, and make them feel like they mattered.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Congratulations Again Dumptruck!
Hello again Dumptruck! Remember that time in the not so distant future when you solved that murder mystery in your uncle’s haunted mansion and acquired leadership of your fraternity? Of course you do. It’s going to be an amazing ride, and your life is pitifully dull aside from the things we’ve prophecied here. I mean, you watch Everybody Loves Raymond for god’s sake.
Well after that you’ll be putting your heart and soul into transforming your fraternity from a non-stop party house into a gay rights advocacy group. It’s actually the best thing you’ve ever done with your life, hands down, and we wanted to give you a heads up on the trials and tribulations you’ll run into with it.
It’s going to be tough at first. The entire fraternity is super homophobic. For about sixty percent of them it’s because they’re gay. Another twenty percent of them are bi, and the last twenty percent are so full of hate because their dads weren’t good to them that they just look at everyone in the world trying to find a reason to spit bile at them.
But you’ve stayed strong and the by-laws protect you so members of that last bit have slowly migrated to other fraternities, and the ones who are staying around are trying out the gay lifestyle for a while to see if they like it. Your open announcement of becoming a “gay frat” actually caused a flood of additional membership from other fraternities, since many members tired of the closeted homoeroticism which had become so stale and wanted to give the out thing a try.
Throughout this transition you’ve been building up the image of your frat as a positive force in your community, offering services and sponsoring events. You did a super gay carwash last weekend, and before that an incredibly gay food drive (both these events involved neon tank tops and fanny packs) and your most ambitious measure is still to come.
You’re going to transform the frat into a full fledged LGBT support group this weekend. You’ve been tight fisted with your plans, since most of the other leading fraternity members were murdered in your uncle’s mansion. The only one remaining was the secretary, and he’s intensely loyal to you since you basically saved his life and he thinks your relationship with Craig is adorable. So it should come as a surprise to the entire frat when you announce it on Friday.
You’re not sure what to expect. You’ve made so many strides in making your fraternity into a place of acceptance rather than one of derision, and you know this is the step you have to take if you want to do some real good in the world (your gay uncle’s ghost told you so) but you’re still frightened that it will backfire.
You haven’t even told Craig yet. The two of you have been making baby-steps towards commitment, by the by. You still see other people, but you spend most of your time together and share a bed on the nights when you have the time. You feel like things are becoming real, and the way he looks at you...
He’s seeing that you’re so much more than the token fat kid in the frat. He’s seeing a person who’s always wanted to make a difference, who saw something inside of him that he was terrified of and showed him that it was okay.
You want the rest of the frat to accept your idea, but if Craig were to walk out of your life because of it... You’d beyond devastated. You don’t think you’d be able to go on, period. Not that you’d kill yourself or anything that severe, just that you’d be too emotionally wrecked to keep up your effort to offer homosexual students on your campus a place to be themselves.
So come Friday night at the “Acceptance Kegger” your heart will be racing. When your frat brothers have assembled before you to hear your Friday night Beerdress (you really need to get someone to help you with the marketing aspects of your regime, by the way) you’ll begin with an uncharacteristically long pause. Scattered hoots will beckon you to speak, however, and you’ll begin.
Alea iacta est.
You’ll open, as is custom, with a joke.
“You know that when I first took leadership of this fraternity I wanted to make it a place where people could feel safe to be themselves, without having to worry about being murdered mid coitus by anyone, regardless of race, creed, or sexual orientation.”
Laughter will greet you, much as you hoped. You’ll proceed.
“You’ve all been instrumental in making this dream a reality. It’s been a long hard road for all of us, and I doubt a one of us would’ve guessed at the beginning of the semester that this is where we’d be now. But here we are. We’ve made sure that each and every one of us is free, within the walls of this house, to be whoever they want to be.
“We’ve let the community know that they can count on us to offer charity whenever possible, to give of ourselves wherever we can.”
This will prompt a few giggles from your audience, which you’ll ignore.
“I believe that everyone should have access to a place like this. I’m glad we’ve been able to share some of the good we’ve done with the world, but I believe we have more to offer. I think we can make this more than just a safe place for ourselves and our brothers. I think we can make this a safe place for everyone.”
You’ll take a deep breath and steel yourself.
“That is why I’ve chosen to open our fraternity to the public as an LGBT Pride and Support group. Our membership will no longer be exclusive, although no existing residents of the house will be removed. We will simply be allowing individuals in through an equal application system, rather than a pledge system.”
The crowd will begin to murmur.
“I understand any trepidation you may feel, and I encourage you to discuss it with me in a more personal forum so that we can work through it. I believe that this is the way for us to do the most good in the world, and to be the best we can be. Thank you.”
You’ll be sweating when you finish, your eyes focused on Craig. All around him the crowd will be surging with activity, but he’ll just be sitting there. It’ll be too far for you to know for sure at the distance but you’ll think you see his eyes tearing.
He will sit there for a seeming eternity in thought, expressionless and statuesque, before he stands up. When he does it your heart will break a little, but it’ll barely take a beat before he slaps his hands against one another as loud as he can. Slowly at first, then faster and faster until a peal of applause rips through the room.
You’ll smile out at him, and he’ll smile back.
Congratulations again Dumptruck.
Well after that you’ll be putting your heart and soul into transforming your fraternity from a non-stop party house into a gay rights advocacy group. It’s actually the best thing you’ve ever done with your life, hands down, and we wanted to give you a heads up on the trials and tribulations you’ll run into with it.
It’s going to be tough at first. The entire fraternity is super homophobic. For about sixty percent of them it’s because they’re gay. Another twenty percent of them are bi, and the last twenty percent are so full of hate because their dads weren’t good to them that they just look at everyone in the world trying to find a reason to spit bile at them.
But you’ve stayed strong and the by-laws protect you so members of that last bit have slowly migrated to other fraternities, and the ones who are staying around are trying out the gay lifestyle for a while to see if they like it. Your open announcement of becoming a “gay frat” actually caused a flood of additional membership from other fraternities, since many members tired of the closeted homoeroticism which had become so stale and wanted to give the out thing a try.
Throughout this transition you’ve been building up the image of your frat as a positive force in your community, offering services and sponsoring events. You did a super gay carwash last weekend, and before that an incredibly gay food drive (both these events involved neon tank tops and fanny packs) and your most ambitious measure is still to come.
You’re going to transform the frat into a full fledged LGBT support group this weekend. You’ve been tight fisted with your plans, since most of the other leading fraternity members were murdered in your uncle’s mansion. The only one remaining was the secretary, and he’s intensely loyal to you since you basically saved his life and he thinks your relationship with Craig is adorable. So it should come as a surprise to the entire frat when you announce it on Friday.
You’re not sure what to expect. You’ve made so many strides in making your fraternity into a place of acceptance rather than one of derision, and you know this is the step you have to take if you want to do some real good in the world (your gay uncle’s ghost told you so) but you’re still frightened that it will backfire.
You haven’t even told Craig yet. The two of you have been making baby-steps towards commitment, by the by. You still see other people, but you spend most of your time together and share a bed on the nights when you have the time. You feel like things are becoming real, and the way he looks at you...
He’s seeing that you’re so much more than the token fat kid in the frat. He’s seeing a person who’s always wanted to make a difference, who saw something inside of him that he was terrified of and showed him that it was okay.
You want the rest of the frat to accept your idea, but if Craig were to walk out of your life because of it... You’d beyond devastated. You don’t think you’d be able to go on, period. Not that you’d kill yourself or anything that severe, just that you’d be too emotionally wrecked to keep up your effort to offer homosexual students on your campus a place to be themselves.
So come Friday night at the “Acceptance Kegger” your heart will be racing. When your frat brothers have assembled before you to hear your Friday night Beerdress (you really need to get someone to help you with the marketing aspects of your regime, by the way) you’ll begin with an uncharacteristically long pause. Scattered hoots will beckon you to speak, however, and you’ll begin.
Alea iacta est.
You’ll open, as is custom, with a joke.
“You know that when I first took leadership of this fraternity I wanted to make it a place where people could feel safe to be themselves, without having to worry about being murdered mid coitus by anyone, regardless of race, creed, or sexual orientation.”
Laughter will greet you, much as you hoped. You’ll proceed.
“You’ve all been instrumental in making this dream a reality. It’s been a long hard road for all of us, and I doubt a one of us would’ve guessed at the beginning of the semester that this is where we’d be now. But here we are. We’ve made sure that each and every one of us is free, within the walls of this house, to be whoever they want to be.
“We’ve let the community know that they can count on us to offer charity whenever possible, to give of ourselves wherever we can.”
This will prompt a few giggles from your audience, which you’ll ignore.
“I believe that everyone should have access to a place like this. I’m glad we’ve been able to share some of the good we’ve done with the world, but I believe we have more to offer. I think we can make this more than just a safe place for ourselves and our brothers. I think we can make this a safe place for everyone.”
You’ll take a deep breath and steel yourself.
“That is why I’ve chosen to open our fraternity to the public as an LGBT Pride and Support group. Our membership will no longer be exclusive, although no existing residents of the house will be removed. We will simply be allowing individuals in through an equal application system, rather than a pledge system.”
The crowd will begin to murmur.
“I understand any trepidation you may feel, and I encourage you to discuss it with me in a more personal forum so that we can work through it. I believe that this is the way for us to do the most good in the world, and to be the best we can be. Thank you.”
You’ll be sweating when you finish, your eyes focused on Craig. All around him the crowd will be surging with activity, but he’ll just be sitting there. It’ll be too far for you to know for sure at the distance but you’ll think you see his eyes tearing.
He will sit there for a seeming eternity in thought, expressionless and statuesque, before he stands up. When he does it your heart will break a little, but it’ll barely take a beat before he slaps his hands against one another as loud as he can. Slowly at first, then faster and faster until a peal of applause rips through the room.
You’ll smile out at him, and he’ll smile back.
Congratulations again Dumptruck.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Congratulations on Sorting Out the Last Piece of the Puzzle!
The piece of paper will have an address scrawled on it. It will be in Northeast, a solid seven miles away.
Once you get out of Powell’s you’ll start running to your car, a smile slowly forming on your face. The address means something, you know it does. It’s specific and inelegant, unlike the other clues. It must be a message, a sign that you’re closing in on the end of your journey.
By the time you get to your car the lunch rush will be in full effect. It’ll take you almost an hour to get across the river, and by the time you get to Northeast you’ll be so turned around you’ll screw up some crucial turns and end up traversing one way streets for some twenty minutes until you finally find your way to the address.
When you get there you’ll see that it’s another book store, this time a much much smaller one. You’ll almost tear the paper in half, but you’ll stop yourself, getting out of the car and walking to the door, legs unsteady with each step like you were just learning how to walk.
When you step inside you’ll be the only customer. A young man will be at the counter, slouched and reading a tattered copy of Les Miserables. He won’t even acknowledge your entrance. He’ll also clearly be gay, what with his Milli Vanilli Tee and highlights.
You’ll feel uncomfortable the moment you step inside, but you’ll feel like you have to see this through. You’ll unfold the paper and put it on the counter, interrupting his reading.
“I found this,” you’ll say.
He won’t listen to you at first, so you’ll slam your first on the table. That’ll get his nose out of the book, so you’ll point at the paper again, this time without saying anything.
The threat of implied violence will get his attention well enough, and he’ll nervously nod his head back over his shoulder to a door marked employees only. After that two of you will resume ignoring each other and you’ll trudge over to the door, paper in hand.
You’ll pause a moment before you open it, heart aflutter. Within will be a small, warmly lit room ringed with book shelves. It’ll feel homey to you, even though you’ve never been there before. Cigarette smoke will hang in the air, even though it’s clear no one’s smoked in here in weeks at least.
The centerpiece of the room will be a young girl lounging in one of two chairs. She’ll be pretty. Very pretty, with a pierced lip and a pierced eyebrow and a pair of fleeting tattoos on her arms that you’ll notice each time she flips a page. Her hair will be carelessly beautiful, as if she’d just rolled out of bed looking like the prettiest girl in the whole world.
You’ll stand there, staring at her speechless, for a full two minutes before she notices you. She’ll smile when she looks up.
“Hi,” she’ll say.
You’ll feel embarrassed once she’s spoken. After all, you didn’t bring anything to read. But by the look on her face you can tell she’s just glad someone came.
Congratulations on sorting out the last piece of the puzzle, you lucky dog you.
Once you get out of Powell’s you’ll start running to your car, a smile slowly forming on your face. The address means something, you know it does. It’s specific and inelegant, unlike the other clues. It must be a message, a sign that you’re closing in on the end of your journey.
By the time you get to your car the lunch rush will be in full effect. It’ll take you almost an hour to get across the river, and by the time you get to Northeast you’ll be so turned around you’ll screw up some crucial turns and end up traversing one way streets for some twenty minutes until you finally find your way to the address.
When you get there you’ll see that it’s another book store, this time a much much smaller one. You’ll almost tear the paper in half, but you’ll stop yourself, getting out of the car and walking to the door, legs unsteady with each step like you were just learning how to walk.
When you step inside you’ll be the only customer. A young man will be at the counter, slouched and reading a tattered copy of Les Miserables. He won’t even acknowledge your entrance. He’ll also clearly be gay, what with his Milli Vanilli Tee and highlights.
You’ll feel uncomfortable the moment you step inside, but you’ll feel like you have to see this through. You’ll unfold the paper and put it on the counter, interrupting his reading.
“I found this,” you’ll say.
He won’t listen to you at first, so you’ll slam your first on the table. That’ll get his nose out of the book, so you’ll point at the paper again, this time without saying anything.
The threat of implied violence will get his attention well enough, and he’ll nervously nod his head back over his shoulder to a door marked employees only. After that two of you will resume ignoring each other and you’ll trudge over to the door, paper in hand.
You’ll pause a moment before you open it, heart aflutter. Within will be a small, warmly lit room ringed with book shelves. It’ll feel homey to you, even though you’ve never been there before. Cigarette smoke will hang in the air, even though it’s clear no one’s smoked in here in weeks at least.
The centerpiece of the room will be a young girl lounging in one of two chairs. She’ll be pretty. Very pretty, with a pierced lip and a pierced eyebrow and a pair of fleeting tattoos on her arms that you’ll notice each time she flips a page. Her hair will be carelessly beautiful, as if she’d just rolled out of bed looking like the prettiest girl in the whole world.
You’ll stand there, staring at her speechless, for a full two minutes before she notices you. She’ll smile when she looks up.
“Hi,” she’ll say.
You’ll feel embarrassed once she’s spoken. After all, you didn’t bring anything to read. But by the look on her face you can tell she’s just glad someone came.
Congratulations on sorting out the last piece of the puzzle, you lucky dog you.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Congratulations on Following the Clues!
You’ll rise from bed early today. It’s been a strain for you to climb out from under the sheets before noon for a long while now, since before you'd even lost your job.
But today you’ll be in the shower before the sun rises. You’ll spend the twilight hours shoveling Cheerios into your mouth and watching music videos on VH1 until they start their reality programming and you know it’s time to leave your apartment.
You decoded the map last night. It was difficult, but not too difficult. You recognized the landmarks and the “green crossroads of north and south under shade of the rising sun” it mentioned had to be Laurelhurst Park. Your day will begin there.
You’ll begin by walking calmly around the park, trying to suss out the clues. They were layered in poetic references (which were, in fact, cleverly parodies of T.S. Elliot’s The Wasteland, not that your drunk ass picked up on it) but you know South-East pretty well, so ere long you'll found the cigar box in the cleft of a tree.
It'll take a solid five minutes and two dozen rocks to get it out of there. You'll even stop for a smoke break half way through, but once the box is free you'll open it up with all the tredipdation you felt during your first sexual experience.
Inside there will be another piece of paper. It will simply read “follow the white rabbit” with a sketch of the street corner outside of Powell’s to the side. You’ll pull out your cell phone and scroll until you get to Greg, the English Major™.
Greg was a guy you fucked for a week and a half before you left on amiable terms. The sex was good, but you didn’t click energy wise. So you parted ways. The two of you occasionally hung out, but of late you haven’t called him. This will the first time you’ll have spoken to him since The Breakdown™.
When he answers his phone it’ll be clear you just roused him from sleep. “Hello?” he’ll mumble, barely awake, into the mouth piece.
“Greg.”
He’ll recognize your voice immediately. “Jesus, Marly. Are you all right?”
“Fine. But I need your help.”
“Fuck. What’s wrong? Do you need money?”
“It’s tough to explain, and no. I need your brain.”
There will be a moment’s pause.
“What time is it, anyways?”
“10:42,” you’ll resepond without looking at your watch. “AM.”
“Fuuuuck,” he’ll moan. You’ll hear a few more muffled curses, like he just tucked his head under his pillow before turning back to the phone. “What?” he’ll mumble brusquely.
“What does ‘Follow the white rabbit’ mean?”
There will be less than a minute’s pause. “It’s either a reference to The Matrix, or Lewis Caroll’s Through The Looking Glass.”
You’ll nod on your end. “Thanks.”
Then you’ll hang up, hoping he rolled over and went back to sleep, just as puzzled as you are now.
You’ll drive to Powell’s and then slowly move out from the store in circles trying to find parking (heyo!) and then you’ll trudge the quarter mile to the store proper.
When you arrive it will be, as it always is, a marvelous cavalcade of books stacked to the ceiling. But you, normally distracted, will surge with purpose through them until you come to a copy of Through the Looking Glass nestled high on a top shelf.
You’ll need a ladder to get it down, but once you do you’ll immediately notice a piece of paper jutting from the top of the book. You’ll withdraw it once more, your fingertips electrified with the sensation of the paper.
Breathless, you’ll barely remember to replace the book before you unfold the sheet.
To Be Continued!
Congratulations on following the clues!
But today you’ll be in the shower before the sun rises. You’ll spend the twilight hours shoveling Cheerios into your mouth and watching music videos on VH1 until they start their reality programming and you know it’s time to leave your apartment.
You decoded the map last night. It was difficult, but not too difficult. You recognized the landmarks and the “green crossroads of north and south under shade of the rising sun” it mentioned had to be Laurelhurst Park. Your day will begin there.
You’ll begin by walking calmly around the park, trying to suss out the clues. They were layered in poetic references (which were, in fact, cleverly parodies of T.S. Elliot’s The Wasteland, not that your drunk ass picked up on it) but you know South-East pretty well, so ere long you'll found the cigar box in the cleft of a tree.
It'll take a solid five minutes and two dozen rocks to get it out of there. You'll even stop for a smoke break half way through, but once the box is free you'll open it up with all the tredipdation you felt during your first sexual experience.
Inside there will be another piece of paper. It will simply read “follow the white rabbit” with a sketch of the street corner outside of Powell’s to the side. You’ll pull out your cell phone and scroll until you get to Greg, the English Major™.
Greg was a guy you fucked for a week and a half before you left on amiable terms. The sex was good, but you didn’t click energy wise. So you parted ways. The two of you occasionally hung out, but of late you haven’t called him. This will the first time you’ll have spoken to him since The Breakdown™.
When he answers his phone it’ll be clear you just roused him from sleep. “Hello?” he’ll mumble, barely awake, into the mouth piece.
“Greg.”
He’ll recognize your voice immediately. “Jesus, Marly. Are you all right?”
“Fine. But I need your help.”
“Fuck. What’s wrong? Do you need money?”
“It’s tough to explain, and no. I need your brain.”
There will be a moment’s pause.
“What time is it, anyways?”
“10:42,” you’ll resepond without looking at your watch. “AM.”
“Fuuuuck,” he’ll moan. You’ll hear a few more muffled curses, like he just tucked his head under his pillow before turning back to the phone. “What?” he’ll mumble brusquely.
“What does ‘Follow the white rabbit’ mean?”
There will be less than a minute’s pause. “It’s either a reference to The Matrix, or Lewis Caroll’s Through The Looking Glass.”
You’ll nod on your end. “Thanks.”
Then you’ll hang up, hoping he rolled over and went back to sleep, just as puzzled as you are now.
You’ll drive to Powell’s and then slowly move out from the store in circles trying to find parking (heyo!) and then you’ll trudge the quarter mile to the store proper.
When you arrive it will be, as it always is, a marvelous cavalcade of books stacked to the ceiling. But you, normally distracted, will surge with purpose through them until you come to a copy of Through the Looking Glass nestled high on a top shelf.
You’ll need a ladder to get it down, but once you do you’ll immediately notice a piece of paper jutting from the top of the book. You’ll withdraw it once more, your fingertips electrified with the sensation of the paper.
Breathless, you’ll barely remember to replace the book before you unfold the sheet.
To Be Continued!
Congratulations on following the clues!
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Congratulations on Finding the Map!
You’ll be shopping for groceries at the Powell and 39th Safeway after midnight tonight, where we all far too often find ourselves, and as you take the last bottle of two buck chuck off the shelf a piece of paper will flutter out from beneath it and come to rest on the floor.
You’ll pick it up quickly and hold it in your hands for a moment before you decide what to do. It’ll be yellowed with age, nearly crumbling. It’ll even have a few cigarette burns in it for good measure.
You’ll be afraid to open it, afraid to even touch it. This is where you have to make a choice.
If you choose to put it back on the shelf you’ll pay for your groceries and go home tonight. You’ll drink yourself to sleep as you always do and the next day a stock boy will find the note and toss it to the ground, where it will eventually be collected by a homeless man. Predictions hereafter become vague.
If you choose to keep the map you’ll tuck the still folded paper into your coat pocket with a quick glance around to see if anyone’s watching. There will be a young couple necking (I think that’s what they called it in your time) over by the pasta sauce, but they’ll have been too engaged to notice anything.
Then you’ll pay for your groceries, bouncing with nervous energy. The clerk will look at you with even more derision and puzzlement than usual, but for once you won’t care. You’ll just head back to your 1973 Hugo, bouncing with each step, and putter on home.
You won’t even unpack your groceries, you’ll be so excited. The wine will sit in a plastic bag, unopened, the Doritos you planned to consume slowly being crushed by its weight. Your mind, for the first time in months, couldn’t be farther from drink though.
Your eyes will be locked on the map as you slowly unfold it, electricity coursing through your fingertips each time they graze the paper.
To Be Continued!
Congratulations on finding the map!
You’ll pick it up quickly and hold it in your hands for a moment before you decide what to do. It’ll be yellowed with age, nearly crumbling. It’ll even have a few cigarette burns in it for good measure.
You’ll be afraid to open it, afraid to even touch it. This is where you have to make a choice.
If you choose to put it back on the shelf you’ll pay for your groceries and go home tonight. You’ll drink yourself to sleep as you always do and the next day a stock boy will find the note and toss it to the ground, where it will eventually be collected by a homeless man. Predictions hereafter become vague.
If you choose to keep the map you’ll tuck the still folded paper into your coat pocket with a quick glance around to see if anyone’s watching. There will be a young couple necking (I think that’s what they called it in your time) over by the pasta sauce, but they’ll have been too engaged to notice anything.
Then you’ll pay for your groceries, bouncing with nervous energy. The clerk will look at you with even more derision and puzzlement than usual, but for once you won’t care. You’ll just head back to your 1973 Hugo, bouncing with each step, and putter on home.
You won’t even unpack your groceries, you’ll be so excited. The wine will sit in a plastic bag, unopened, the Doritos you planned to consume slowly being crushed by its weight. Your mind, for the first time in months, couldn’t be farther from drink though.
Your eyes will be locked on the map as you slowly unfold it, electricity coursing through your fingertips each time they graze the paper.
To Be Continued!
Congratulations on finding the map!
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Congratulations on Being Crushed by the Hull of Your Own Ship!
Well, it’s been one hell of a career as a pirate/treasure hunter/soldier for hire. You’ve spent most of it partying hard and never looking back, even when you’ve met someone who seems to demand a glance backwards, the way you did when you met Her.
You’ve done your best not to think about Her lately, about the way the two of you felt for one another and the promises you made, promises you broke without a second thought.
You left her almost as soon as you had the chance, before something better had even come along. You left her because “your bros needed you,” because you could.
You left her without a note, without batting an eye. You did it because it’s what you’ve always done, and it was too much to expect you to change.
The last twenty years will have been kind, since then. You’ll have done your best in life, even if you were occasionally a bit inattentive, distracted by thoughts of Her.
I mean, she was absolutely amazing in bed. That thing with her tongue? And those Kegels! Sure, she was batshit, but you’ve never met a woman with Kegel control even close to hers in the time since.
As you grow older and older you’ll sit and think of her more and more often. You won’t feel guilt or passion, just her presence across your mind. It’ll be strange beyond reckoning.
As your golden years turn to silver you’ll stop being a leader and be left to wander on your own. You’ll start to spend time in boneyards and dry docks, looking at ships old and new and dreaming of adventures that may have been upon these leviathans.
It is beneath one of these hulks that you will come to nap one day, a smile on your face. You’ll have climbed under it for protection against the midday sun, and you’ll drift off to a peaceful slumber from which you’ll never wake. The timbers will collapse, dropping the full weight of the bow atop you, killing you in your sleep.
The name on the hull will read “Argos.”
The thing to take away from this would be that this wouldn’t happen if you just stopped sticking it in the crazies. Or if you weren’t afraid of commitment. Stop toying with the emotions of dangerous women.
And congratulations on being crushed by the hull on your own ship. Even thought it was peaceful it’s still a pretty ironic death.
You’ve done your best not to think about Her lately, about the way the two of you felt for one another and the promises you made, promises you broke without a second thought.
You left her almost as soon as you had the chance, before something better had even come along. You left her because “your bros needed you,” because you could.
You left her without a note, without batting an eye. You did it because it’s what you’ve always done, and it was too much to expect you to change.
The last twenty years will have been kind, since then. You’ll have done your best in life, even if you were occasionally a bit inattentive, distracted by thoughts of Her.
I mean, she was absolutely amazing in bed. That thing with her tongue? And those Kegels! Sure, she was batshit, but you’ve never met a woman with Kegel control even close to hers in the time since.
As you grow older and older you’ll sit and think of her more and more often. You won’t feel guilt or passion, just her presence across your mind. It’ll be strange beyond reckoning.
As your golden years turn to silver you’ll stop being a leader and be left to wander on your own. You’ll start to spend time in boneyards and dry docks, looking at ships old and new and dreaming of adventures that may have been upon these leviathans.
It is beneath one of these hulks that you will come to nap one day, a smile on your face. You’ll have climbed under it for protection against the midday sun, and you’ll drift off to a peaceful slumber from which you’ll never wake. The timbers will collapse, dropping the full weight of the bow atop you, killing you in your sleep.
The name on the hull will read “Argos.”
The thing to take away from this would be that this wouldn’t happen if you just stopped sticking it in the crazies. Or if you weren’t afraid of commitment. Stop toying with the emotions of dangerous women.
And congratulations on being crushed by the hull on your own ship. Even thought it was peaceful it’s still a pretty ironic death.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Congratulations on Being the Richest Tile and Grout Removal Specialist In the Tri State Area!
Your career hasn’t been taking off the way you’d like it to of late. You’ve been apprenticed for some time now to a moderately successful contracting company and you’ve gotten pretty good and ripping up people’s bathroom floors, but it hasn’t proven as satisfying, gratifying, or rewarding, material wise, as you’d hoped.
All that will change today you’re going to receive a call to head to Hoboken to tear up the house of an old mafia crime lord that a well to do Jewish family purchased at police auction. You can only assume that they want to lay down new tile or have one of those fancy wall-to-wall carpet bathrooms you’ve heard so much about.
You’ll be excited because you’ve worked for this family before, and they have a promiscuous daughter who insist on sleeping with anyone her parents have paid to do manual labor in order to punish them for lavishing gifts and attention on her. This will be your first sexual experience in almost seven months, since you last worked with this company, so you’ve been jonesing for some Jew princess of late.
Once you’ve finished sleeping with her (total time eight minutes, thirty six seconds) you’ll begin the monotonous and grueling work of tearing the bathroom up tile by tile. It’ll be a slow day until around halfway through the job when you’ll find a large hollow compartment dug into the floor.
It will be sealed over haphazardly with a piece of plywood and a brick. Underneath these auspicious trappings will be a few handguns and a briefcase. Inside the briefcase will be three million dollars, neatly counted in twenties, just like in the movies.
You’ll start to hyperventilate when you open the case (you’re a bit of a pussy) and it’ll take at least the length of your intercourse before you regain your composure. You’ll grab the case, poke your head in the girl’s room, and mumble something about needing some more tools.
She’ll give you the middle finger and say “Whatever,” indicating that she heard you and will buzz you back in.
You’ll deposit the money on the passenger seat of your van, along with one of the shinier handguns, and throw the other two in the trash. Then you’ll go back inside and continue your backbreaking labor until that bathroom is as tile free as the good lord intended, albeit with a conspicuous hole in the middle of it.
You’ll leave in a hurry, scribbling a note that the hole was there before you arrived and then calling in sick on your drive home. You’ll claim you caught something from that skank daughter and your boss will laugh.
Then you’ll start the delicate process of informing your girlfriend that you’re now a millionaire. She’ll probably flip out and hop your dick, so shower first. After that the two of you can start spending the cash.
Enjoy it while you can, because once you’ve started some mafiosos will figure out what’s going on and track you down, murdering you both with a hammer.
But for the next month and a half congratulations on being the richest tile and grout removal specialist in the tri-state area. Your grandmother would be proud.
All that will change today you’re going to receive a call to head to Hoboken to tear up the house of an old mafia crime lord that a well to do Jewish family purchased at police auction. You can only assume that they want to lay down new tile or have one of those fancy wall-to-wall carpet bathrooms you’ve heard so much about.
You’ll be excited because you’ve worked for this family before, and they have a promiscuous daughter who insist on sleeping with anyone her parents have paid to do manual labor in order to punish them for lavishing gifts and attention on her. This will be your first sexual experience in almost seven months, since you last worked with this company, so you’ve been jonesing for some Jew princess of late.
Once you’ve finished sleeping with her (total time eight minutes, thirty six seconds) you’ll begin the monotonous and grueling work of tearing the bathroom up tile by tile. It’ll be a slow day until around halfway through the job when you’ll find a large hollow compartment dug into the floor.
It will be sealed over haphazardly with a piece of plywood and a brick. Underneath these auspicious trappings will be a few handguns and a briefcase. Inside the briefcase will be three million dollars, neatly counted in twenties, just like in the movies.
You’ll start to hyperventilate when you open the case (you’re a bit of a pussy) and it’ll take at least the length of your intercourse before you regain your composure. You’ll grab the case, poke your head in the girl’s room, and mumble something about needing some more tools.
She’ll give you the middle finger and say “Whatever,” indicating that she heard you and will buzz you back in.
You’ll deposit the money on the passenger seat of your van, along with one of the shinier handguns, and throw the other two in the trash. Then you’ll go back inside and continue your backbreaking labor until that bathroom is as tile free as the good lord intended, albeit with a conspicuous hole in the middle of it.
You’ll leave in a hurry, scribbling a note that the hole was there before you arrived and then calling in sick on your drive home. You’ll claim you caught something from that skank daughter and your boss will laugh.
Then you’ll start the delicate process of informing your girlfriend that you’re now a millionaire. She’ll probably flip out and hop your dick, so shower first. After that the two of you can start spending the cash.
Enjoy it while you can, because once you’ve started some mafiosos will figure out what’s going on and track you down, murdering you both with a hammer.
But for the next month and a half congratulations on being the richest tile and grout removal specialist in the tri-state area. Your grandmother would be proud.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Impressionist RTS!
Warcraft 2 planted the seeds of asymmetry in the RTS, offering up a series of almost identical units which, late game, could develop in dramatically different ways in line with the “theme” of their side. But Warcraft 2’s asymmetry was crude, if functional. It was a little lazy. Identical units would battle one another and have access to different upgrades. It wasn’t ground breaking by any means.
Fast forward to Starcraft, completely ignoring its long and painful design cycle and leaping right into its remarkable gameplay. This was the great rise of asymmetry. Three sides with very little in common, completely different play styles and progression through the game, and we can see the archetype upon which every modern RTS since has been based.
Starcraft was ground breaking for a number of reasons, but one of the most apparent to older gamers is that it completely changed the rules of how a game was made. No longer were identical sides with different unit skins the norm. Certainly games would keep using the outdated mirror model for some time, some, like Sword of the Stars, to great effect, but for the most part games after Starcraft have aspired to those impeccably balanced factions which have a very different play style from one another.
Sometimes the attempt is too blatant and ham handed. Relic’s first entry into the Dawn of War had dreams of asymmetry which were largely cosmetic and numeric. In fact, most of the units in the original Dawn of War feel very similar to one another. Not to say Dawn of War is a bad game; it just relies on subtle differences between units in order to make play interesting and balance factions. Space Marines and Chaos Space Marines (the units, not the faction) feel the same. Sure, they have access to different upgrades and their “stats” are different, but you pretty much use them in the same fashion.
Dawn of War 1, in its original manifestation at least, also tried to carry over a number of Starcraft’s tropes for better or worse; things like Zerg ground control bonuses and Protoss pylons. Before Dark Crusade it seemed a good amount more concerned with capturing the gimmicks of the previous generation than with coming into its own. It was a fun game, but it didn’t manage to wholly capture the schizophrenic personality that makes the Warhammer universe great.
Dawn of War II doesn’t have this problem, which is funny because this game has had every other problem imaginable. A population cap bug that occurred while reinforcing squads, something the game encourages you to do like nothing else, and would render the game unplayable, especially later on. A matching service which randomly drops, crashes, barely functions and seems to almost completely randomly bunch players together. A stat tracking mechanism which fails as often as it succeeds.
Many of these problems, to Relic’s credit, have been corrected, but Relic still published a multiplayer game with crippling bugs that rendered the entire thing largely unplayable. But even at least, I didn’t care. Because Dawn of War 2 is so god damn compelling.
It manages to deliver the sort of unique interplay of units that Starcraft brought to us so long ago, updated with an amazing physics engine and imbued with the amazing personality that makes Warhammer such a great intellectual property.
Playing each of Dawn of War 2’s factions is like playing a new game each time. The Eldar, for example, play an awful lot like more traditional RTS units. They have a weak general purpose unit which can be incredibly useful throughout the game, and they unlock specialist units who are excellent at killing one kind of target or fighting one kind of combat and awful at everything else. Orks, on the other hand, play like a gang of soccer rowdies, their slipshod units moving en masse, ham-handedly completely tasks. The Tyranids have a feel unlike any other race I’ve ever played in an RTS – including Starcraft’s Zerg, oddly enough. And the Space Marines play like a conventional tactical army – one very tough general purpose unit who can fight off the enemy for the entire game if used properly, and a whole mess of very tough specialist units who will “do in a pinch” if forced into new situations.
My point, with that long “review” of the races is that they’re all unique, and that this uniqueness extends past the little fiddly numbers attached to their units. When I play Tyranids I’m playing a different game than I am when I’m play Space Marines, because the races are possessed of such different mindsets and play styles.
The only thing that really compares to it is the original Starcraft, where each race was unique in both form and function. And this is the meat of the contemporary RTS. Games that discover and realize this tend to do well, and rightly so. They create compelling multiplayer narratives on the fly by letting the smaller pieces of the game interact in original ways, ways that can change dramatically based on the addition of various new tiny bits.
Sins of a Solar Empire does the same thing on a larger scale with far less accessibility, creating asymmetrical sides that fit together and constantly rebalance. I’d love to discuss Sins more, but I still haven’t played it. I’ve heard Tom Chick talk about it enough to feel like I’ve spent several years on its professional circuit (yes, I know it’s from 2007) but by all appearances it upholds the tradition of what makes great RTSes great.
And Dawn of War 2 does so as well, in an absolutely brilliant way. Its fiddly bits, as Tom Chick would say, interact in interesting and original ways. And these fiddly bits all feel very different, act very different, and fit together impeccably. Add to this delicious chocolate interior the delightful candy shell of Company of Heroes’ revamped and improved cover system and you have what could be the best multiplayer RTS since Warcraft 3.
Not every game has to have this wonderful asymmetry in order to be fun. Homeworld and Sword of the Stars both almost completely avoided it and those games were still amazing. But multiplayer games that can sustain themselves tend to be designed around this principle of interlocking, irregular pieces.
Starcraft had it, Myth had it, Warcraft 3 had it, and Dawn of War 2 is the latest game to bring it to bear. And it’s well worth spending time with while you wait for Starcraft 2 to come out and do it again, in another wonderful, original way.
Fast forward to Starcraft, completely ignoring its long and painful design cycle and leaping right into its remarkable gameplay. This was the great rise of asymmetry. Three sides with very little in common, completely different play styles and progression through the game, and we can see the archetype upon which every modern RTS since has been based.
Starcraft was ground breaking for a number of reasons, but one of the most apparent to older gamers is that it completely changed the rules of how a game was made. No longer were identical sides with different unit skins the norm. Certainly games would keep using the outdated mirror model for some time, some, like Sword of the Stars, to great effect, but for the most part games after Starcraft have aspired to those impeccably balanced factions which have a very different play style from one another.
Sometimes the attempt is too blatant and ham handed. Relic’s first entry into the Dawn of War had dreams of asymmetry which were largely cosmetic and numeric. In fact, most of the units in the original Dawn of War feel very similar to one another. Not to say Dawn of War is a bad game; it just relies on subtle differences between units in order to make play interesting and balance factions. Space Marines and Chaos Space Marines (the units, not the faction) feel the same. Sure, they have access to different upgrades and their “stats” are different, but you pretty much use them in the same fashion.
Dawn of War 1, in its original manifestation at least, also tried to carry over a number of Starcraft’s tropes for better or worse; things like Zerg ground control bonuses and Protoss pylons. Before Dark Crusade it seemed a good amount more concerned with capturing the gimmicks of the previous generation than with coming into its own. It was a fun game, but it didn’t manage to wholly capture the schizophrenic personality that makes the Warhammer universe great.
Dawn of War II doesn’t have this problem, which is funny because this game has had every other problem imaginable. A population cap bug that occurred while reinforcing squads, something the game encourages you to do like nothing else, and would render the game unplayable, especially later on. A matching service which randomly drops, crashes, barely functions and seems to almost completely randomly bunch players together. A stat tracking mechanism which fails as often as it succeeds.
Many of these problems, to Relic’s credit, have been corrected, but Relic still published a multiplayer game with crippling bugs that rendered the entire thing largely unplayable. But even at least, I didn’t care. Because Dawn of War 2 is so god damn compelling.
It manages to deliver the sort of unique interplay of units that Starcraft brought to us so long ago, updated with an amazing physics engine and imbued with the amazing personality that makes Warhammer such a great intellectual property.
Playing each of Dawn of War 2’s factions is like playing a new game each time. The Eldar, for example, play an awful lot like more traditional RTS units. They have a weak general purpose unit which can be incredibly useful throughout the game, and they unlock specialist units who are excellent at killing one kind of target or fighting one kind of combat and awful at everything else. Orks, on the other hand, play like a gang of soccer rowdies, their slipshod units moving en masse, ham-handedly completely tasks. The Tyranids have a feel unlike any other race I’ve ever played in an RTS – including Starcraft’s Zerg, oddly enough. And the Space Marines play like a conventional tactical army – one very tough general purpose unit who can fight off the enemy for the entire game if used properly, and a whole mess of very tough specialist units who will “do in a pinch” if forced into new situations.
My point, with that long “review” of the races is that they’re all unique, and that this uniqueness extends past the little fiddly numbers attached to their units. When I play Tyranids I’m playing a different game than I am when I’m play Space Marines, because the races are possessed of such different mindsets and play styles.
The only thing that really compares to it is the original Starcraft, where each race was unique in both form and function. And this is the meat of the contemporary RTS. Games that discover and realize this tend to do well, and rightly so. They create compelling multiplayer narratives on the fly by letting the smaller pieces of the game interact in original ways, ways that can change dramatically based on the addition of various new tiny bits.
Sins of a Solar Empire does the same thing on a larger scale with far less accessibility, creating asymmetrical sides that fit together and constantly rebalance. I’d love to discuss Sins more, but I still haven’t played it. I’ve heard Tom Chick talk about it enough to feel like I’ve spent several years on its professional circuit (yes, I know it’s from 2007) but by all appearances it upholds the tradition of what makes great RTSes great.
And Dawn of War 2 does so as well, in an absolutely brilliant way. Its fiddly bits, as Tom Chick would say, interact in interesting and original ways. And these fiddly bits all feel very different, act very different, and fit together impeccably. Add to this delicious chocolate interior the delightful candy shell of Company of Heroes’ revamped and improved cover system and you have what could be the best multiplayer RTS since Warcraft 3.
Not every game has to have this wonderful asymmetry in order to be fun. Homeworld and Sword of the Stars both almost completely avoided it and those games were still amazing. But multiplayer games that can sustain themselves tend to be designed around this principle of interlocking, irregular pieces.
Starcraft had it, Myth had it, Warcraft 3 had it, and Dawn of War 2 is the latest game to bring it to bear. And it’s well worth spending time with while you wait for Starcraft 2 to come out and do it again, in another wonderful, original way.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Congratulations on Giving Blood!
Tonight is going to be one hell of a Saturday night for you. In fact, you might consider just singing the song right now to get in the mood. Ready?
S-A-T-U-R D-A-Y NIGHT!
Nice.
That’s pretty much how it’ll go, all 80s hits and booze. You’ll hop from overpriced bar to overpriced bar, from Fenway to Cambridge and back again, until you finally come to rest at a small, run down little place in JP.
You’ll be too deep in to remember the name of the place, but once you reach there you’ll meet an attractive young woman in a lime green tank top. She’ll be deathly pale, but that’s kind of your thing so the two of you will end up going home together.
The next day when you wake up she’ll still be in your bed. You’re in sales, so this is strange enough, but there will also be tinfoil on all of your windows. Unsure, you’ll rise from your bed, feeling a strange nausea which increased with every step.
You’ll start to reach towards the tinfoil, to pull a piece off and see just what time it is, but before you touch it the girl will be upon you. Her arms will be wrapped all around, holding you back.
“No,” she’ll whisper, soft and harsh into your ear. Then she’ll sink her teeth into your neck and you’ll jizz your pants and pass out.
This isn’t that unusual for you, but when you wake up you’ll still be aroused. That’s beyond unusual for you. You were actually driven to pursue a high paying business career because of your embarrassingly serious impotence.
It’s because you’re a vampire now. She was a vampire who was turned in the 80s and had a serious thing for the fashion and music of that period.
Try to enjoy yourself, since vampire sex is fucking amazing. And congratulations on giving blood. Get it? It wasn’t consensual!
S-A-T-U-R D-A-Y NIGHT!
Nice.
That’s pretty much how it’ll go, all 80s hits and booze. You’ll hop from overpriced bar to overpriced bar, from Fenway to Cambridge and back again, until you finally come to rest at a small, run down little place in JP.
You’ll be too deep in to remember the name of the place, but once you reach there you’ll meet an attractive young woman in a lime green tank top. She’ll be deathly pale, but that’s kind of your thing so the two of you will end up going home together.
The next day when you wake up she’ll still be in your bed. You’re in sales, so this is strange enough, but there will also be tinfoil on all of your windows. Unsure, you’ll rise from your bed, feeling a strange nausea which increased with every step.
You’ll start to reach towards the tinfoil, to pull a piece off and see just what time it is, but before you touch it the girl will be upon you. Her arms will be wrapped all around, holding you back.
“No,” she’ll whisper, soft and harsh into your ear. Then she’ll sink her teeth into your neck and you’ll jizz your pants and pass out.
This isn’t that unusual for you, but when you wake up you’ll still be aroused. That’s beyond unusual for you. You were actually driven to pursue a high paying business career because of your embarrassingly serious impotence.
It’s because you’re a vampire now. She was a vampire who was turned in the 80s and had a serious thing for the fashion and music of that period.
Try to enjoy yourself, since vampire sex is fucking amazing. And congratulations on giving blood. Get it? It wasn’t consensual!
Friday, March 13, 2009
Congratulations on Leaving Cuba!
You’re a young man named Javier with six siblings and a single mom who’s spent most of his life living on the “mean streets” of Havana. It’s time for you to embark on your harrowing journey to freedom from the oppressive land you’ve known for your entire life. Yours is a heady tale, one from which we could all learn much.
Just kidding!
Your name is actually Tony, and you’re an American college student who’s just spent two weeks in Cuba on a lavish, hedonistic vacation paid for largely by your parents.
You’ve been “living the vida loca” (James, the oracle who divined this prediction using a ouija board, insisted that we include that bit, but it shames the rest of us) sleeping with local prostitutes and drinking way too much inexpensive communist rum.
The entire vacation, including the legally gray activities you’ve been participating in and your lavish four star hotel stay has only run you about $75 American, so when you walk out of your hotel and into daylight for the first time in a fortnight you’ll be carrying over three thousand dollars in cash.
As a wealthy American tourist, it’s fair to say that you draw a lot of ire simply by being in Cuba. You represent all the dreams that have been denied to these people. Moreover, you represent the worst excesses these dreams can produce when they succeed.
See, you’ve also been kind of a dick while you’re there. You don’t tip very well, you don’t speak Spanish and ignore people in lieu of trying to understand their accents, and you choke prostitutes. And that sort of behavior has escalated local ire into hate.
So as you’re walking down the street Javier, who we mentioned earlier in this story and whose sister is one of the fifteen year old prostitutes you choked during your vacation, is going to step out in front of you with a knife.
He won’t have to try very hard to mug you, since you’re fat and weak and won’t be able to run away or fight back. He’ll just punch you in your pasty face, breaking your nose and knocking you to the ground. Then he’ll tear your wallet out of your pants pocket and spit on you before saying something in Spanish and walking away.
When you finally get to your feet you’ll be lost in downtown Havana with no money, no friends, and a local public that would like nothing more than to see you raped by dogs.
It’ll be a rough walk to the embassy, and you’ll almost die a number of times from a number of sources. We’d love to detail those exploits here, but we’re told they’re part of an upcoming prediction from James which we believe he’s holding out on in order to keep his job here. He’s on thin fucking ice and we love to see bad things happen to you, so we really are only keeping him around so we know that your life is shit.
And shit it will be. It’ll be four hellish days, at least, before you drag yourself to the airport, naked and bleeding, and manage to get on the phone with your bubbie in Florida and manage to sort out your exit from the country without a passport (your bubbie is ex-CIA and she’s got a lot of pull).
Even then you’ll have to fly coach. When you find this part out you’ll drop to your knees and scream “Nooooo!” as loud as you can. It’ll be fucking hilarious.
Anyhow, the plane ride will be uncomfortable, shitty and overlong, but eventually you’ll be home. Congratulations on leaving Cuba. This would’ve been easier if you weren’t such a douchebag and you stopped choking women during sex.
Just kidding!
Your name is actually Tony, and you’re an American college student who’s just spent two weeks in Cuba on a lavish, hedonistic vacation paid for largely by your parents.
You’ve been “living the vida loca” (James, the oracle who divined this prediction using a ouija board, insisted that we include that bit, but it shames the rest of us) sleeping with local prostitutes and drinking way too much inexpensive communist rum.
The entire vacation, including the legally gray activities you’ve been participating in and your lavish four star hotel stay has only run you about $75 American, so when you walk out of your hotel and into daylight for the first time in a fortnight you’ll be carrying over three thousand dollars in cash.
As a wealthy American tourist, it’s fair to say that you draw a lot of ire simply by being in Cuba. You represent all the dreams that have been denied to these people. Moreover, you represent the worst excesses these dreams can produce when they succeed.
See, you’ve also been kind of a dick while you’re there. You don’t tip very well, you don’t speak Spanish and ignore people in lieu of trying to understand their accents, and you choke prostitutes. And that sort of behavior has escalated local ire into hate.
So as you’re walking down the street Javier, who we mentioned earlier in this story and whose sister is one of the fifteen year old prostitutes you choked during your vacation, is going to step out in front of you with a knife.
He won’t have to try very hard to mug you, since you’re fat and weak and won’t be able to run away or fight back. He’ll just punch you in your pasty face, breaking your nose and knocking you to the ground. Then he’ll tear your wallet out of your pants pocket and spit on you before saying something in Spanish and walking away.
When you finally get to your feet you’ll be lost in downtown Havana with no money, no friends, and a local public that would like nothing more than to see you raped by dogs.
It’ll be a rough walk to the embassy, and you’ll almost die a number of times from a number of sources. We’d love to detail those exploits here, but we’re told they’re part of an upcoming prediction from James which we believe he’s holding out on in order to keep his job here. He’s on thin fucking ice and we love to see bad things happen to you, so we really are only keeping him around so we know that your life is shit.
And shit it will be. It’ll be four hellish days, at least, before you drag yourself to the airport, naked and bleeding, and manage to get on the phone with your bubbie in Florida and manage to sort out your exit from the country without a passport (your bubbie is ex-CIA and she’s got a lot of pull).
Even then you’ll have to fly coach. When you find this part out you’ll drop to your knees and scream “Nooooo!” as loud as you can. It’ll be fucking hilarious.
Anyhow, the plane ride will be uncomfortable, shitty and overlong, but eventually you’ll be home. Congratulations on leaving Cuba. This would’ve been easier if you weren’t such a douchebag and you stopped choking women during sex.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Congratulations on Receiving Your Very Own Neko Case!
She’ll arrive at your door tomorrow morning, bright eyed and smiling, red hair streaming down her shoulders like a mane. If a lion were given human flesh, you think, this would be its apparition.
She’ll stride into your home, taking in every object in your living room with a childlike look of wonder on her pretty, pretty face. She’ll walk all around, touching each item and taking in its texture before she sits down on your couch between your roommates, who will be staring openly at this point.
She won’t say anything, but she’ll give them a quick wave, followed by a knowing nod to you. You’ll smile in return, baffled, wracking your brain to recall just how this happened.
The haze of alcohol will hang heavy over your memory, but after a few minutes Neko’s presence will begin to wash over you and you’ll stop wondering why she’s come and simply bask in her glowing presence.
You won’t know if this is the real Neko Case, if she’s a clone or some sort of by-product of a quantum event, but you won’t care. You feel in your bones that you’re better with her here.
You’ll sidle next to her on the couch and hold her hand. She’ll offer you a benevolent smile and the four of you will go back to watching Seinfeld reruns, chuckling occasionally at jokes you’d forgotten.
Congratulations on receiving your very own Neko Case. Don’t forget to feed her and play with her.
She’ll stride into your home, taking in every object in your living room with a childlike look of wonder on her pretty, pretty face. She’ll walk all around, touching each item and taking in its texture before she sits down on your couch between your roommates, who will be staring openly at this point.
She won’t say anything, but she’ll give them a quick wave, followed by a knowing nod to you. You’ll smile in return, baffled, wracking your brain to recall just how this happened.
The haze of alcohol will hang heavy over your memory, but after a few minutes Neko’s presence will begin to wash over you and you’ll stop wondering why she’s come and simply bask in her glowing presence.
You won’t know if this is the real Neko Case, if she’s a clone or some sort of by-product of a quantum event, but you won’t care. You feel in your bones that you’re better with her here.
You’ll sidle next to her on the couch and hold her hand. She’ll offer you a benevolent smile and the four of you will go back to watching Seinfeld reruns, chuckling occasionally at jokes you’d forgotten.
Congratulations on receiving your very own Neko Case. Don’t forget to feed her and play with her.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Congratulations Losers!
Tonight it’s all about you, boys and girls. Every last one of you.
Maybe you can’t find a job because you freak out every time you’re in an interview, talking incessantly about various ailments that have afflicted you, your parents, your grandparents, and your numerous biracial children.
Maybe you’re one of those biracial children and you catch shit every day because mommy was Cherokee and daddy was Inuit and he’s unemployed and cries in public a lot, sometimes while feeding birds.
Maybe you make fun of kids on the playground for being biracial because of your own insecurities and a mild delirium, your horrible experiences from Vietnam still burdening your consciousness and chasing you through your day, making you lash out at everyone you meet.
Maybe your daddy lost his leg and his love for mankind in an unjust war for an ill conceived purpose so you work nights a donut shop to make ends meet and keep your family together, skipping classes to pick up shifts and occasionally sleeping with boys for money.
Maybe you’re a sad, lonely twenty-six year old who hasn’t been laid in five years so he pays a high school student for sex one night and afterwards he cries and cries into her breast and she holds him awkwardly until tears fall down their cheeks and then the two of them look in each other’s eyes and realize that maybe they’re broken but they’re broken together.
And that’s all that matters. We’re all broken here together.
So watch a nice movie tonight, hug someone you love. Eat some cookies or drink a bottle of wine alone. Smile at people you see on the bus and make eye contact when you talk to cashiers. Ask that cute barista to watch Land Before Time 2 with you and feel good about it.
Because you’re not alright, you’re a fucking mess, and maybe you don’t need to get better right now. Maybe you just need to be for a change.
Today’s your day, though. Hold each other close and cry and whisper.
Congratulations losers.
Maybe you can’t find a job because you freak out every time you’re in an interview, talking incessantly about various ailments that have afflicted you, your parents, your grandparents, and your numerous biracial children.
Maybe you’re one of those biracial children and you catch shit every day because mommy was Cherokee and daddy was Inuit and he’s unemployed and cries in public a lot, sometimes while feeding birds.
Maybe you make fun of kids on the playground for being biracial because of your own insecurities and a mild delirium, your horrible experiences from Vietnam still burdening your consciousness and chasing you through your day, making you lash out at everyone you meet.
Maybe your daddy lost his leg and his love for mankind in an unjust war for an ill conceived purpose so you work nights a donut shop to make ends meet and keep your family together, skipping classes to pick up shifts and occasionally sleeping with boys for money.
Maybe you’re a sad, lonely twenty-six year old who hasn’t been laid in five years so he pays a high school student for sex one night and afterwards he cries and cries into her breast and she holds him awkwardly until tears fall down their cheeks and then the two of them look in each other’s eyes and realize that maybe they’re broken but they’re broken together.
And that’s all that matters. We’re all broken here together.
So watch a nice movie tonight, hug someone you love. Eat some cookies or drink a bottle of wine alone. Smile at people you see on the bus and make eye contact when you talk to cashiers. Ask that cute barista to watch Land Before Time 2 with you and feel good about it.
Because you’re not alright, you’re a fucking mess, and maybe you don’t need to get better right now. Maybe you just need to be for a change.
Today’s your day, though. Hold each other close and cry and whisper.
Congratulations losers.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Congratulations on Becoming Center Square!
Ever since your career collapsed like a pulsar and drew you into the smoking abyss called syndicated television you’ve been working your ass off with one goal and only one goal.
You’ve murdered dozens, destroyed marriages, friendships and great loves. You’ve hurt children, parents, grandparents, all for the sake of this one thing. You’ve even murdered four people (six if your joke about “the fall killing them” isn’t taken literally).
But this weekend it’ll all come to fruition. After a lengthy seduction you’ll find yourself in bed with Whoopie Goldberg, your bodies glistening from your passionate exertions. It’s a pity no one saw your performance; it was perhaps the greatest of your career.
You’ll give her exhausted, splayed form one final kiss before clutching an ether soaked rag over her mouth. Whoopie will thrash, briefly and weakly, before she calms down and collapses in your arms, her head heavy and wrong against your chest.
You’ll drag more than carry her to her car. Then you’ll leave her sitting upright, careful to plant all the right prints so that when CSI shit goes down they’ll see that she turned the key and sat there, inert as carbon monoxide filled the garage.
Your hands won’t stop shaking until long after you’ve exited her compound and you’ll feel a slight tinge of sadness, but you know this is just that last bit of human weakness leaving your body before you take your rightful place upon that holiest of altars.
You’ll light a cigarette to calm the shaking, never stopping to think that if you’d put this kind of effort into your acting things never would’ve had to go this far.
Congratulations on becoming center square, Mister Diamond.
You’ve murdered dozens, destroyed marriages, friendships and great loves. You’ve hurt children, parents, grandparents, all for the sake of this one thing. You’ve even murdered four people (six if your joke about “the fall killing them” isn’t taken literally).
But this weekend it’ll all come to fruition. After a lengthy seduction you’ll find yourself in bed with Whoopie Goldberg, your bodies glistening from your passionate exertions. It’s a pity no one saw your performance; it was perhaps the greatest of your career.
You’ll give her exhausted, splayed form one final kiss before clutching an ether soaked rag over her mouth. Whoopie will thrash, briefly and weakly, before she calms down and collapses in your arms, her head heavy and wrong against your chest.
You’ll drag more than carry her to her car. Then you’ll leave her sitting upright, careful to plant all the right prints so that when CSI shit goes down they’ll see that she turned the key and sat there, inert as carbon monoxide filled the garage.
Your hands won’t stop shaking until long after you’ve exited her compound and you’ll feel a slight tinge of sadness, but you know this is just that last bit of human weakness leaving your body before you take your rightful place upon that holiest of altars.
You’ll light a cigarette to calm the shaking, never stopping to think that if you’d put this kind of effort into your acting things never would’ve had to go this far.
Congratulations on becoming center square, Mister Diamond.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Congratulations on Losing Them!
You’re a cool enough pot dealer, but as a black dude you frequently find yourself fleeing the cops. It would help if you were smarter and didn’t sell on the streets, especially near junior high schools, but lately you’ve been desperate and the money is so good and so easy that it’s been impossible to resist. You also have a lot of roommates, so selling at home would be riskier than you’d like.
So tomorrow afternoon at three fifteen sharp, sure enough, some nerd is going to rat you out and you’re going to be booking it from the cops. They won’t be subtle, pulling up next to you with their lights flashing, so you’ll have a good amount of time to start running.
While the cops in this part of Newark are pretty out of shape, you’re not really much of an athlete yourself. You smoke weed almost constantly and you’re lazy (like most drug dealers) so exercise is antithetical to you. You’ll find yourself outpacing them, but just barely, wildly searching for a place to hide.
After several blocks, the cops still only a few moments behind you, you’ll spy an open basement level window. You’ll try to do a little parkour move through it, but instead of sliding through gracefully you’re going to almost tear your arm out of your socket and lose your jacket up above before dropping six feet from the window to a concrete floor stained with blood.
The cops back on the street will find your jacket, but with no trace they’ll look at each other and nod, assuming you used your mystical powers of pyrokinesis, the same powers that all drug dealers share, to burst into flames. They know you’ll come back again, using those same powers to reform yourself out of base matter.
For the time being, though, they’ll just take the fifteen dollars you have in your jacket pocket as change from buying a sandwich and walk back to the school to hoot at under aged girls.
You, though, you’ll be in a dark basement, surrounded by the scent of sweat and fear. A spotlight will come up on you, blinding you briefly, and you’ll hear a dog’s growl.
You’ll have fallen into an illegal dog-fighting arena, and they’re right in the middle of their mid-day competition. Better think fast!
Oh, and congratulations on losing them. You should exercise more and smoke less if you want to avoid these situations, though.
So tomorrow afternoon at three fifteen sharp, sure enough, some nerd is going to rat you out and you’re going to be booking it from the cops. They won’t be subtle, pulling up next to you with their lights flashing, so you’ll have a good amount of time to start running.
While the cops in this part of Newark are pretty out of shape, you’re not really much of an athlete yourself. You smoke weed almost constantly and you’re lazy (like most drug dealers) so exercise is antithetical to you. You’ll find yourself outpacing them, but just barely, wildly searching for a place to hide.
After several blocks, the cops still only a few moments behind you, you’ll spy an open basement level window. You’ll try to do a little parkour move through it, but instead of sliding through gracefully you’re going to almost tear your arm out of your socket and lose your jacket up above before dropping six feet from the window to a concrete floor stained with blood.
The cops back on the street will find your jacket, but with no trace they’ll look at each other and nod, assuming you used your mystical powers of pyrokinesis, the same powers that all drug dealers share, to burst into flames. They know you’ll come back again, using those same powers to reform yourself out of base matter.
For the time being, though, they’ll just take the fifteen dollars you have in your jacket pocket as change from buying a sandwich and walk back to the school to hoot at under aged girls.
You, though, you’ll be in a dark basement, surrounded by the scent of sweat and fear. A spotlight will come up on you, blinding you briefly, and you’ll hear a dog’s growl.
You’ll have fallen into an illegal dog-fighting arena, and they’re right in the middle of their mid-day competition. Better think fast!
Oh, and congratulations on losing them. You should exercise more and smoke less if you want to avoid these situations, though.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Fallout 3 and The Modern Age!
You’re raised in a closed off unconscious parody of suburban America. Your days are largely ordinary, only marked by birthday parties and exams. But you know there’s a world outside your own, seen through cathode rays and books and missives. After all, this can’t be all there is. But you never really know until, one day, you’re forced out by circumstances beyond your control. You have to leave your home and stumble into the blinding light of day.
And suddenly you’re free. More so than you might be comfortable with, in fact. And for better or worse you’ve got to make your own way. No more parents telling you what to do, keeping you safe. The world is yours to wander aimlessly through. Or to do exactly what's expected of you in. But who’d choose that life?
Fallout 3 is a coming of age story at heart. But it’s a very grown up coming of age story in a strange way. Because it’s as much about being an adult in the modern age as it is about becoming an adult.
If you simply follow the central storyline the entire game could be reduced to following in the footsteps of your father. The central plot is all about this literal journey towards adulthood through both physical space and the history of your parents. You learn more about who your father was at your age, what he did and the impression he left on the world. You learn of his life’s work, of the places he visited and the dreams he aspired to, and in the process you come to understand and shape your place in life. You grow up.
There really aren’t many options as far as endings go for Fallout 3. There’s clearly a “good” ending and a “bad” ending. In fact, the ending of Fallout 3 almost destroys the game and its message. As with Bioshock, the true wonder of Fallout 3 comes in the space between set pieces, the tiny beginnings and endings that players create in interacting with the rich world that Bethesda created. And Bethesda delivers these moments, both intentional and unscripted, with expert skill.
Fallout 3 manages something most open world games aspire to; the ability for a player to simultaneously have almost total freedom and to still have an impact on the game world. From that first blinding moment of sunlight, the player feels a connection to both the world and the character, and the journey we’re on truly becomes our own.
In doing so Fallout 3 steps outside of the boundaries of traditional coming of age stories. Instead of offering us a tale exemplifying or explaining a way to grow up, instead of just expressing how we need to become adults, it shows us that adulthood is less a journey and more an expectation.
Players are given a guideline, a very very general guideline: follow the white rabbit. But players who slavishly do so will find a dull experience punctuated by moments of scripted wonder, something that hardly warrants an overwrought essay posted on some d-bag’s blog. But this sort of slavish waypoint chasing is discouraged from the moment you exit the Vault. Instead it pushes the player towards a decaying scenic view point as if to say, here is your new world. Have fun.
And in our exploration of these set pieces we begin to build our character, both mechanically and textually. Not that the world knows who our character is, really, and that’s sort of the brilliance of it. Each time we come to a new place we have to rebuild our reputations.
Sure, this isn’t the case for everyone, and it’s not a perfect parallel. Certain things about you carry over. If you’re a dick you’ll give off a dick vibe, and so on. But for the most part each time you arrive in a new place and each time you deal with a new organization, you do so with a clean slate. And even if they don’t know your name these new faces are forever changed by meeting you.
With this simultaneous expression of importance and insignificance Fallout 3 truly uncovers what it means to grow up in the world today, where we are all too often seen as interchangeable or disposable parts, more resources than people, more numbers on a sheet than faces in the world. Fallout 3 grasps this dichotomy and exploits it, forcing players to exist as both.
Sure, everyone isn’t going to bond with the world and develop personal relationships with the people they visit. But not everyone does that in the real world, either. Fallout 3 gives players the opportunity to form these bonds, offering up resonant and realistic characters simply trying to live their lives. If the majority of the side quests weren’t so simultaneously banal and epic the game wouldn’t have hit its mark so well.
But it blends the every-day and the exceptional. The setting is the perfect entry point: a world both pedestrian and alien, devastated by war and populated by eerily familiar characters. It is harsh and uncaring and warm and enduring. It is a game of dichotomies, and it succeeds at what most open world games fail at with almost no effort: it makes players a part of the world, let’s them have a home, neighbors and people to care about.
Consider GTA4 for a moment. GTA4 wanted players to care about their world so badly it crippled itself, interrupting game flow so that you could receive unsolicited phone calls from characters they desperately wanted you to care about. But they forgot the key in making people care was caring in and of yourself.
It’s hard to see sympathy and compassion in the characters that Rockstar made to draw us in to GTA4. Roman, debatably the most human of the bunch, vascilates between quiet vulnerabilty and mysoginy. Packie, the only other identifiable character of the bunch, moves between postured masculinity and a bittersweet commitment to family. The only character in my “friends” list I could really care about was Little Jacob, and in that case simply because of his outlandish cartoonishness and his effortless humanity. And he was built as a charicature, not a character.
No, Rockstar listened too long and too hard to people calling them “visionaries” and forgot that the act of creation requires compassion. But compare the “friends” and “relationships” of GTA4 to the inhabitants of Megaton. Nova, an NPC prostitute with only a handful of responses to her name, manages to elicit more emotion and interest from me than Carmen or Alex. Because her story, while familiar and perhaps even trite, was human. Her responses were believable, and she seemed like a person, albeit one who didn’t let people in. Carmen and Alex were parodies of people, shoddily built and put there for the game makers and the audience to guffaw at together. They were insubstantial, frustratingly so. I couldn’t believe that these people existed when I turned off my console. In Fallout 3 I could believe that Megaton was a real place, filled with struggling people living their lives, each day on the brink of oblivion.
Fallout 3 managed a profound and difficult balance, the same one that previous Fallouts walked. It embraced self-referential comedy while simultaneously presenting an unflinching and unexaggerated portrayal of human nature. And in this portrayal and its parody of the culture of the 50’s it managed to show us something about our present day.
Disconnected and isloated pockets of society, communicating unfathomably and poorly like children playing telephone. Incredible technology counter-pointed by profound ignorance. Brilliance and childishness together, represented by resonant and identifiable characters in a setting lovingly recreated from an actual American city. Fallout 3 offered a vivid image not just of human nature but of the state of the world today as well.
I’m not saying it was bereft of problems. It still suffered from having characters who stared straight ahead like talking heads, reciting the same lines of dialogue again and again. It had a difficulty curve which went from spot on to piss easy by game’s end, and a shooting mechanic that could politely be described as “shitty.” But the personalities filling these talking heads and the vivid, poetic gore populating these gun battles more than made up for these flaws.
In these talking heads and improvised shootouts Fallout 3 presented us with a gripping story, one that was at times pontificating, horrifying and frustrating, but through it all resonant and beautiful, with the message that however strange the world becomes, people will always be people. In its half-deserted streets, fraught with peril and awkward haircuts, it offered up the knowledge that beauty will always remain to be found however horrible things might seem.
And suddenly you’re free. More so than you might be comfortable with, in fact. And for better or worse you’ve got to make your own way. No more parents telling you what to do, keeping you safe. The world is yours to wander aimlessly through. Or to do exactly what's expected of you in. But who’d choose that life?
Fallout 3 is a coming of age story at heart. But it’s a very grown up coming of age story in a strange way. Because it’s as much about being an adult in the modern age as it is about becoming an adult.
If you simply follow the central storyline the entire game could be reduced to following in the footsteps of your father. The central plot is all about this literal journey towards adulthood through both physical space and the history of your parents. You learn more about who your father was at your age, what he did and the impression he left on the world. You learn of his life’s work, of the places he visited and the dreams he aspired to, and in the process you come to understand and shape your place in life. You grow up.
There really aren’t many options as far as endings go for Fallout 3. There’s clearly a “good” ending and a “bad” ending. In fact, the ending of Fallout 3 almost destroys the game and its message. As with Bioshock, the true wonder of Fallout 3 comes in the space between set pieces, the tiny beginnings and endings that players create in interacting with the rich world that Bethesda created. And Bethesda delivers these moments, both intentional and unscripted, with expert skill.
Fallout 3 manages something most open world games aspire to; the ability for a player to simultaneously have almost total freedom and to still have an impact on the game world. From that first blinding moment of sunlight, the player feels a connection to both the world and the character, and the journey we’re on truly becomes our own.
In doing so Fallout 3 steps outside of the boundaries of traditional coming of age stories. Instead of offering us a tale exemplifying or explaining a way to grow up, instead of just expressing how we need to become adults, it shows us that adulthood is less a journey and more an expectation.
Players are given a guideline, a very very general guideline: follow the white rabbit. But players who slavishly do so will find a dull experience punctuated by moments of scripted wonder, something that hardly warrants an overwrought essay posted on some d-bag’s blog. But this sort of slavish waypoint chasing is discouraged from the moment you exit the Vault. Instead it pushes the player towards a decaying scenic view point as if to say, here is your new world. Have fun.
And in our exploration of these set pieces we begin to build our character, both mechanically and textually. Not that the world knows who our character is, really, and that’s sort of the brilliance of it. Each time we come to a new place we have to rebuild our reputations.
Sure, this isn’t the case for everyone, and it’s not a perfect parallel. Certain things about you carry over. If you’re a dick you’ll give off a dick vibe, and so on. But for the most part each time you arrive in a new place and each time you deal with a new organization, you do so with a clean slate. And even if they don’t know your name these new faces are forever changed by meeting you.
With this simultaneous expression of importance and insignificance Fallout 3 truly uncovers what it means to grow up in the world today, where we are all too often seen as interchangeable or disposable parts, more resources than people, more numbers on a sheet than faces in the world. Fallout 3 grasps this dichotomy and exploits it, forcing players to exist as both.
Sure, everyone isn’t going to bond with the world and develop personal relationships with the people they visit. But not everyone does that in the real world, either. Fallout 3 gives players the opportunity to form these bonds, offering up resonant and realistic characters simply trying to live their lives. If the majority of the side quests weren’t so simultaneously banal and epic the game wouldn’t have hit its mark so well.
But it blends the every-day and the exceptional. The setting is the perfect entry point: a world both pedestrian and alien, devastated by war and populated by eerily familiar characters. It is harsh and uncaring and warm and enduring. It is a game of dichotomies, and it succeeds at what most open world games fail at with almost no effort: it makes players a part of the world, let’s them have a home, neighbors and people to care about.
Consider GTA4 for a moment. GTA4 wanted players to care about their world so badly it crippled itself, interrupting game flow so that you could receive unsolicited phone calls from characters they desperately wanted you to care about. But they forgot the key in making people care was caring in and of yourself.
It’s hard to see sympathy and compassion in the characters that Rockstar made to draw us in to GTA4. Roman, debatably the most human of the bunch, vascilates between quiet vulnerabilty and mysoginy. Packie, the only other identifiable character of the bunch, moves between postured masculinity and a bittersweet commitment to family. The only character in my “friends” list I could really care about was Little Jacob, and in that case simply because of his outlandish cartoonishness and his effortless humanity. And he was built as a charicature, not a character.
No, Rockstar listened too long and too hard to people calling them “visionaries” and forgot that the act of creation requires compassion. But compare the “friends” and “relationships” of GTA4 to the inhabitants of Megaton. Nova, an NPC prostitute with only a handful of responses to her name, manages to elicit more emotion and interest from me than Carmen or Alex. Because her story, while familiar and perhaps even trite, was human. Her responses were believable, and she seemed like a person, albeit one who didn’t let people in. Carmen and Alex were parodies of people, shoddily built and put there for the game makers and the audience to guffaw at together. They were insubstantial, frustratingly so. I couldn’t believe that these people existed when I turned off my console. In Fallout 3 I could believe that Megaton was a real place, filled with struggling people living their lives, each day on the brink of oblivion.
Fallout 3 managed a profound and difficult balance, the same one that previous Fallouts walked. It embraced self-referential comedy while simultaneously presenting an unflinching and unexaggerated portrayal of human nature. And in this portrayal and its parody of the culture of the 50’s it managed to show us something about our present day.
Disconnected and isloated pockets of society, communicating unfathomably and poorly like children playing telephone. Incredible technology counter-pointed by profound ignorance. Brilliance and childishness together, represented by resonant and identifiable characters in a setting lovingly recreated from an actual American city. Fallout 3 offered a vivid image not just of human nature but of the state of the world today as well.
I’m not saying it was bereft of problems. It still suffered from having characters who stared straight ahead like talking heads, reciting the same lines of dialogue again and again. It had a difficulty curve which went from spot on to piss easy by game’s end, and a shooting mechanic that could politely be described as “shitty.” But the personalities filling these talking heads and the vivid, poetic gore populating these gun battles more than made up for these flaws.
In these talking heads and improvised shootouts Fallout 3 presented us with a gripping story, one that was at times pontificating, horrifying and frustrating, but through it all resonant and beautiful, with the message that however strange the world becomes, people will always be people. In its half-deserted streets, fraught with peril and awkward haircuts, it offered up the knowledge that beauty will always remain to be found however horrible things might seem.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Congratulations Listeners!
Late next week you’ll be hearing, live I might add, the entire tale of the murder-suicide-hostage situation of DJ KrazyKraig (so crazy he spells his names with Ks! KAPOW!). Kraig (as his friends and family call him) had been going through some issues, but they never thought it would come to this. After briefly listening to his broadcasts, however, our entire staff concurred that it was incredibly fucking obvious, especially that one time when he said, and we quote, “I swear to god one of these days I’m going to hold a gun to my sound engineer’s fucking head and make him blow me while the entire studio watches in horror.”
Anyhow, tune in to KRS 97.5 FM. And congratulations, listeners. You’re really in for quite a treat.
Anyhow, tune in to KRS 97.5 FM. And congratulations, listeners. You’re really in for quite a treat.
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