Today you’re going to spend your entire afternoon looking for a Sliders DVD in a Best Buy just outside of Boston. You’ll be there for forty five minutes, too embarrassed to ask any of the staff for help for fear that they would mock your dedication to a show that, in your words, “finally gave the O’Connell brothers the dramatic, comedic and action venue they deserved to showcase their incredible talent.”
You’ll be so reticent to ask about it that, instead of inquiring at the front desk, you’ll wait surreptitiously until no one is looking and then slip in the back, hiding in a box of Maid in Manhattan DVDs until everyone’s out of the store. Then you’ll hack their computer system to discover that the only Sliders box set they have is buried deep in the rear of the store on the top of a massive shelving unit.
You’ll commandeer and learn to use a forklift to reach the box in question, nearly dropping it off its pallet on the way down. Even once you have the box on the ground you’ll have to sift through what seems like a limitless number of unsold Everybody Loves Raymond DVDs.
But after an hour’s search you’ll finally have it in your hands: the first season of Sliders on DVD. Clutching it to your chest, you’ll turn to flee the store before dawn, but you’ll freeze in your tracks when a swirling blue vortex opens up in front of you.
You’ll pause, waiting to see who or what emerges from it. You won’t have to wait long before, to no one’s great surprise, Jerry O’Connell leaps forth and assesses his surroundings. He’ll be taking in the warehouse and your strange attire (a Doctor Who T-shirt and Hawaiian shorts) when he spots the DVD in your hands.
“NOT AGAIN!” he’ll cry, leaping forward and striking you in the mouth. You’ll fall to the ground, dropping the DVD into his waiting hands.
“NEVER AGAIN!” he’ll shout as he leaps back through the blue vortex, letting it collapse behind him.
You’ll lay there on the concrete, rubbing your jaw and taking it what just happened. Apparently Jerry O’Connell really didn’t want you to have that DVD, even though you worked so hard to get it and all you really wanted was to enjoy it. You’ll also cluck your tongue, thinking of how fat he’s become.
“Jerry O’Connell’s a dick,” you’ll mutter to the empty warehouse, scattered with Everybody Loves Raymond DVDs.
Congratulations on Finding a Sliders DVD!
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Friday, July 30, 2010
Congratulations on Doing it Right This Time!
This time you’re going to just walk into the ocean and not stop, and it’ll work this time because it involves walking, something even you can’t screw up. You’re not going to get caught on one of the dirigible’s many lines or accidentally choose the empty chamber during a game of Russian Roulette or choose the red pill and not die in Trinity’s arms like a good boy. You’re just going to walk into the ocean and be forgotten in a weird sort of reverse evolution.
But it still won’t get you any attention, so that blows.
Congratulations on Doing it Right This Time!
But it still won’t get you any attention, so that blows.
Congratulations on Doing it Right This Time!
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Congratulations on Your Expert Driving!
You’ll even the wheels up and back in easily, straightening them out with expert precision. Then you’ll ease forward, providing the car behind you with ample room to exit their space and straightening your vehicle out in the process. Then you’ll breathe a sigh of relief, exit your car, and carefully examine your handiwork.
You’ll start laughing there in the street, alarming passers-by and panhandlers alike as you point to your perfectly parked vehicle and hop up and down like an idiot. You’ll be so exited that you’ll pull out your camera phone, take a picture and send it to your estranged wife with the caption “AWESOME!”
She won’t be inspired by your parking competence and will not, as you secretly hope, take the opportunity to reconnect and renew your relationship.
Congratulations on Your Expert Driving!
You’ll start laughing there in the street, alarming passers-by and panhandlers alike as you point to your perfectly parked vehicle and hop up and down like an idiot. You’ll be so exited that you’ll pull out your camera phone, take a picture and send it to your estranged wife with the caption “AWESOME!”
She won’t be inspired by your parking competence and will not, as you secretly hope, take the opportunity to reconnect and renew your relationship.
Congratulations on Your Expert Driving!
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Congratulations on Your Viking Funeral!
You’re not entirely to blame, to be fair. When you requested a Viking funeral you just meant you wanted to be set on fire on top of a giant pile of sticks. You didn’t want your friends and extended family to assemble with a collection of barbaric weapons and charge headlong into a series of daring raids into other suburban neighborhoods so they could bring back their victims and rape them by the light of your pyre.
But come your spectacular funeral Wednesday night that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Six soccer moms and three priests are going to be thoroughly (and somewhat enjoyably, but in a weird kind of embarrassing way) violated by the incredibly drunk assemblage of people who will have convened to see you off to the next life. Seven police officers will also be hospitalized after trying, unsuccessfully, to halt the tide of human violence spilling out from your giant backyard and into the surrounding community.
Come the next day everyone will be really embarrassed by the whole affair, too embarrassed to even discuss it one another. They’ll just go get tested for STDs individually (which is what responsible adults do) and drink lots of water so that they feel a little bit less like they got super wasted and pillaged and raped their neighbors the previous evening.
On the upside the local news will do a piece about your unusual funeral. But as usual they’ll cut out the most interesting bits, specifically the parts about how everything went crazy and how your next three grandchildren were conceived by indeterminate parents.
Congratulations on Your Viking Funeral!
But come your spectacular funeral Wednesday night that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Six soccer moms and three priests are going to be thoroughly (and somewhat enjoyably, but in a weird kind of embarrassing way) violated by the incredibly drunk assemblage of people who will have convened to see you off to the next life. Seven police officers will also be hospitalized after trying, unsuccessfully, to halt the tide of human violence spilling out from your giant backyard and into the surrounding community.
Come the next day everyone will be really embarrassed by the whole affair, too embarrassed to even discuss it one another. They’ll just go get tested for STDs individually (which is what responsible adults do) and drink lots of water so that they feel a little bit less like they got super wasted and pillaged and raped their neighbors the previous evening.
On the upside the local news will do a piece about your unusual funeral. But as usual they’ll cut out the most interesting bits, specifically the parts about how everything went crazy and how your next three grandchildren were conceived by indeterminate parents.
Congratulations on Your Viking Funeral!
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Congratulations International Man of Mystery!
Today the CIA, FBI, Mosad, and whatever the KGB have become are all going to be asking one question: who the hell is this person.
Normally they’d be asking this because you’d just killed a bunch of their agents or found out about a super-secret clandestine plan to control the world’s cheese supply or because you were a gay in the military or something. But in this case it’ll be because you don’t show up on any government databases aside from one brief period of employment under Kinkos.
“Who is this man?” a Russian man in a dark room will ask, slamming his fist on a desk.
His subordinate will shrug helplessly, hoping to not be shot in the face for circumstances outside of his control.
“We need more data,” an American man in a suit will say to his subordinate, who will nod in response and leave the room, walking at an even pace. His subordinate will also be wearing a suit.
An Asian man will scream something in Japanese at another Asian man, who will bow in response and calmly leave the room. Both these men will be wearing suits as well.
“Bloody hell, wot,” a British man will declare to his British contemporary, who will solemnly nod in response. These men will be wearing Tommy Bahama shirts and will be minutes away from some of the most impressive sodomy you’ve ever heard of.
Meanwhile you’ll keep doing dishes in the back of the Fuddruckers, hoping that your band’s new single finally makes it out of the back of your mom’s station wagon and into the hands of some new teenage girls.
Maybe it’s for the best the authorities don’t know much about you.
Congratulations International Man of Mystery!
Normally they’d be asking this because you’d just killed a bunch of their agents or found out about a super-secret clandestine plan to control the world’s cheese supply or because you were a gay in the military or something. But in this case it’ll be because you don’t show up on any government databases aside from one brief period of employment under Kinkos.
“Who is this man?” a Russian man in a dark room will ask, slamming his fist on a desk.
His subordinate will shrug helplessly, hoping to not be shot in the face for circumstances outside of his control.
“We need more data,” an American man in a suit will say to his subordinate, who will nod in response and leave the room, walking at an even pace. His subordinate will also be wearing a suit.
An Asian man will scream something in Japanese at another Asian man, who will bow in response and calmly leave the room. Both these men will be wearing suits as well.
“Bloody hell, wot,” a British man will declare to his British contemporary, who will solemnly nod in response. These men will be wearing Tommy Bahama shirts and will be minutes away from some of the most impressive sodomy you’ve ever heard of.
Meanwhile you’ll keep doing dishes in the back of the Fuddruckers, hoping that your band’s new single finally makes it out of the back of your mom’s station wagon and into the hands of some new teenage girls.
Maybe it’s for the best the authorities don’t know much about you.
Congratulations International Man of Mystery!
Monday, July 26, 2010
Congratulations Carrion Birds!
Today through a combination of jet engine failure, general incompetence on the part of a pilot and extremely implausible odds you and your bird buddies are going to find a perfect human for munching at around 4:15 this afternoon. He’ll be morbidly obese, which means he’ll be super tender, and most of his natural juices will still be good and fresh since he’ll have died not of dehydration or exposure but of heart failure following a panic attack after he has pulled himself clear of the wreckage of the crash.
This, paired with the spotting of an exceptionally shiny object during your daily patrol, will make this the best day you can remember in a long time, which isn’t very long at all because you’re a fucking bird.
Congratulations Carrion Birds!
This, paired with the spotting of an exceptionally shiny object during your daily patrol, will make this the best day you can remember in a long time, which isn’t very long at all because you’re a fucking bird.
Congratulations Carrion Birds!
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Symbology and Us!
The people who create video games, as well as the people who consume and consider them, tend to be visual people. They create art in the style of their favorite games, papering the walls of message boards from 4chan to Deviantart with their own rendering of their favorite games. And a quick survey of the talent present in the gaming enthusiast community shows that there are far more competently drawn comics and fan art entries than there are well produced pieces of writing and music (even the enthusiast press seems to suffer a paucity of talent in the writing department).
So, working off the assumption that games are fundamentally visual, rather than verbal or tactile, experiences it behooves us to analyze the components of these experiences. And while there is much to be said of the manner in which characters and areas are created and defined in terms of game experience and animation, it seems as if we all too often ignore the symbols inserted into these games, the meaning-dense visuals developers spend oh so much time creating to jam their games full of the subtextual meaning that the medium loves so well. As such I want to sit down and go through a handful of the symbols from contemporary games and break down their symbolism and effectiveness. Heeeere we go!
The Animus Symbol
Assassin’s Creed is rich with symbolism and subtext. Each faction seems to have its own set of symbols, from the Assassin’s big open quasi-triangle to the overtly Christian imagery that the vast majority of templar surround themselves with. But when you actually examine these symbols within the context of the game they lack an abundance of meaning. Even the Assassin symbol itself, with its use of open space and implications of careful violence, is a pretty shallow affair. The various religious symbols, which could’ve leant the game some degree of philosophical depth beyond its relatively straightforward idea of positive nihilism, are all but ignored in the construction of non-historic areas.
When all of these faction symbols are stripped away we’re left with is the Animus’ sync symbol – a simple collection of lines that occasionally shifts to show your character’s status. The Animus symbol might not even be considered a proper symbol– it’s basically a UI element. But it is emblazoned in certain areas, constantly prominently displayed and if we were to get into a Joycian discussion of sign-signifier dynamics to justify its symbolism people would get even more bored with the site and just drop off completely. So let’s take it as a symbol at face value.
It’s pretty basic. Three lines that shift to show proximity to the mindset of a character at a given time, moving between a tight little swirl, and two triangles which pulse with different degrees of severity. When all is well and you’re doing just what the game wants you to do the symbol is calm, inactive. It’s a tight collection of geometric shapes forming something unassuming in the upper left hand corner of the screen, minimizing its spatial occupancy and providing an almost meditatively simple object that you can glance at in order to remind yourself that, hey, everything is pretty okay right now.
But when the action starts, which is normally when Assassin’s Creed gets fun and you start deviating from both what “the character actually did” and what the developers want you to do the symbol goes apeshit. It starts getting excited. During chase segments it lets you know that you’re getting away, offering reassuring little yellow pulses, suggesting that you find a hiding spot and watch those dumbass guards run for a while, but more or less willing to let you do your own things and just look good.
And during combat is goes crazy, going red and flashing like mad. The god damn thing is raging at you, telling you to fight or run, to live in the moment the game presents you with then and there. Some games would have a little flag pop up or an exclamation point to let you know that it’s action time, but Assassin’s Creed has a blossoming geometric flower that insists you pay attention, not to the flower itself but to your own actions. When the Animus symbol glows red it’s time to pay attention. Pause that DVD you had on while you were running rooftops and watch the shoulders of those guards as they shake and shift towards you. Get serious, because this is your time to shine.
By increasing its negative space while simultaneously calling attention away from itself, the Animus indicator at its most exciting completely represents the fundamental idea behind Assassin’s Creed as a game – that the systems that are created for us are far more interesting when we feel we’re subverting them, when they open up and allow us to treat them as playgrounds rather than storybooks. While some structure remains it is there to ground us, not to control us and certainly not to dictate our course of action. Sure, it might get in the way of the story and it will have to be resolved at some point if we want to continue the plot of the game, but the Animus’ blooming, its simplicity and its ability to call attention both to and away from itself all make it the perfect symbol for the first Assassin’s Creed game. That said, I totally understand why it was removed for the sequel and replaced with a silly little wanted indicator, completely bereft of any interesting symbolism in terms of game mechanics but far more adept at displaying iterations of noteriety.
Half-Life’s Lambda
There are few games more gifted at subtext than the Half-Life series. For all that can be said of the frequent delays, relative simplicity and almost total information blackout regarding upcoming entries in the series it is difficult to deny that the artists who craft Half-Life’s world are excellent at making subtle choices that speak volumes with relatively little information on the surface. Just look at the makeup of City 17, Alyx Vance’s outfit and yes, even the prisoner like jumpsuits the various unliberated citizens
found themselves in. All of these artistic choices, in and of themselves asthetically pleasing and functional, did volumes to establish the world of Half-Life 2 and what it meant to reside there.
But perhaps no symbol, worn or otherwise, did more to express the ideas behind the Half-Life series than the humble lambda which adorned your HEV suit. Ostensibly the symbol of a lab team, oddly stationed across the freaking base from where you pick up the suit in a classic example of video game logic, the lambda is, like most of the afforementioned symbols, mostly absent from the first game. It occasionally appears, but it is nowhere near as saturated as it is in Half-Life 2, which is really where the themes of Half-Life began to coalesce more clearly for me as a player. Still, the choice of the lambda is no mistake, and its use speaks volumes about what the entire Half-life series wished to accomplish.
On its surface the lambda is simply a stand-in for the universal decay constant, a term in equations determining the half-life of various elemental compounds, among other things. Get it?! But even this naked parallel explains the choice of the symbol. The Half-Life games are about change. Violent, ugly change that people don’t get to choose, change they’re forced to deal with, change they have to evoke, at times, to survive, and this change always involves destroying systems and structures, killing people and generally defying authority. Half-Life is fundamentally a game about unstoppable natural forces of time destroying the things we’ve attempted to establish, and how awesome and, at times, serendipitous these forces can be.
And when we consider it in a greater context the lambda takes on new meanings. To broaden our scientific horizons, it also represents Planck’s constant, a term in the deBroglie relation which expresses the relationship between matter as particle and matter as wave, the wavelength itself, and the heat of vaporization of a substance. It relates the physicality of objects to their state as energy, recognizes the duality of the existence of all matter and codifies the manner in which this duality occurs. Half-Life’s frequent missives with the G-Man and its various forays into interdimensional travel all rely heavily on the ideas, scientific and theoretical, that the humble lambda represents.
The lambda also has significance as a countercultural symbol, specifically one adopted by gay and lesbian groups. In a world such as Half-Life’s, where tradition and submission to authority are an invitation to disaster and where our ability to function romantically as human beings is quite literally oppressed by an inhuman and unsympathetic group of sexless overlords, it’s quite easy to parallel the struggles of the human resistance with that of the GLBT movement within the western world. But that’s a whole other essay. For now let’s just leave it at this: there’s quite a bit of subtext to the lambda, and even the discussion of the lambda is, in a way, part of Half-Life’s modus operandi. It’s unclear just how many of the meanings I just rattled off were intended, and it’s unclear as to whether or not that matters. Half-Life is a game where the meaning of most things is unclear, and the meanings we insert as just as important as what its creators at Valve intended.
The Chains of Rapture
Back when Bioshock first came out I read a review on a Sony fan-website which may or may not have been a parody. With fanboys it’s hard to tell sometimes. It opened with a biting critique of the chain tattoos of Bioshock which smirkingly suggested that the chains were supposed to help us establish ourselves as a former prisoner who was heading home to his family. Anyone who’s played Bioshock even briefly knows that this has absolutely nothing to do with the game and is, in fact, far from the case. As far as I can tell Jack has never done any prison time, although who knows what happened to him on the surface.
But the conceit of being a prisoner to something is key to the story of Bioshock, and the chains do an excellent job of symbolizing the binding force of narrative that forces you through the events of the game. With its stated emphasis on choice presenting players with a constant reminder of their lack thereof was an interesting choice on the part of Levine and the rest of Irrational games. One of my first essays delved into this subject in more detail, discussing the manner in which Bioshock used the traditional narrative framework of games to characterize and structuralize human bondage in a way that made me incredibly uncomfortable when I first played through it. And while the chains do symbolize this bondage, their design speaks to much more. Still, since I’ve written at length about this before I’ll do my best to keep this next section brief, a paragraph by paragraph breakdown of the way the chains operate as a more immediate symbol:
The manner in which they’re etched on the character’s arms, a persistent reminder, drives home the manner in which narrative constantly inserts itself into gameplay, even as we’re active encouraged to avoid it as we seek out hidden areas and secret subplots. It reminds us that even though we’re killing or saving little sister we really don’t have many options, and we’re only really doing that in an effort to move the story forward.
Then there’s the naked representation of them as pressing an element of the chains of Rapture upon the character, forcing the character to assist others even if he chooses to work selfishly. They in a way validate Ryan’s philosophy: your survival in Rapture demands that you assist people, even if you do not believe they have your best interests at heart. Even if you don’t trust Atlas you’re still going to work with him to kill Ryan. What other choice do you have, spare death?
And then finally, there’s the makeup the chains themselves: solid black borders with spaces in between, connected by solid lines which bind them together. Maybe it’s the liberal arts college student in me, but I read this as an invitation to the player to improvise whenever possible and accept that, at times, certain things will need to be done in order to advance the game. While you’ll never be pressed especially hard to do so you will, inevitably, have to swim to Rapture, have to kill Ryan and, eventually, have to undo Fontaine. It’s the choices you make in between that make your experience interesting and worth talking about. The things we fill these spaces with are the things that make Bioshock worth playing, and while they won’t shatter the chains they will change their meaning in a different way for each person.
The Vault Boy
A historic discussion of the Vault Boy as a symbol might be more appropriate than a textual one, but I’ve little patience for researching the various ways in which the original design team at Black Isle built up their iconic little buddy. What I’ve got great aplomb for is instead the discussion of what he has become to the game.
Originally a UI element intended to establish the tone of the game-world with new players as they created their character, the Vault Boy would eventually become a sort of spokesman for the Fallout world, just as much as the badass Brotherhood of Steel troopers kitted out in T-51bs. But whereas the Brotherhood of Steel represented the inherent gravity and violence in a post-apocalyptic world the Vault Boy made sure we knew just how hilarious it was as well. World laid to ruin? The values of society missing or completely absent? Daily life a struggle? That doesn’t mean you can’t laugh about it.
The Vault Boy, with his unassuming and unrelenting smile, could be placed in any number of circumstances without ever losing his good humor. Sometimes he’d be surprised, or maybe a little sad, but he always bounced back, grinning madly and wielding a minigun or demonstrating the proper way to sneak, study or shoot. He was a symbol for the sort of duality that Fallout has always contained, that mix of deadly serious violence, human emotion and genuine self-aware humor which begs us to think of the society that pushed these characters towards these circumstances and what the pillars of these society would think of what they have wrought.
But he’s also a symbol of our determination as players. In Fallout very nearly everything wants to kill us, from the tiniest rat to the meanest of Super Mutants, everybody wants a piece. The few people who aren’t looking to kill us sound like Macguyver or want us to kill people who sound like Macguyver. We need the joy implied by the Vault Boy’s perennial grin to get us through our day to day.
What’s more, he embodies everything he left behind and futility of those values and ideas in the world that you are pressed out of the vault into. He is, in many ways, a viewpoint both into the game’s present and past, an easy mouthpiece that allows both players and authors to speak. He’s a classic icon, an idol used to introduce you to each and every element of the Fallout world in shorthand. And that’s pretty awesome.
And so ends my brief and arbitrary list of symbols, none of which were used in mass-media marketing campaigns (aside from Vault Boy, debatably). These symbols, the manner in which they introduce and convey the ideas behind their respective games and the power they have over us as gamers is something we all too often ignore, and I just wanted to try and get people thinking about it. So if you’d like to discuss them at greater length in this post, or if you just want to bring up a symbol you find particularly important or influential, feel free!
So, working off the assumption that games are fundamentally visual, rather than verbal or tactile, experiences it behooves us to analyze the components of these experiences. And while there is much to be said of the manner in which characters and areas are created and defined in terms of game experience and animation, it seems as if we all too often ignore the symbols inserted into these games, the meaning-dense visuals developers spend oh so much time creating to jam their games full of the subtextual meaning that the medium loves so well. As such I want to sit down and go through a handful of the symbols from contemporary games and break down their symbolism and effectiveness. Heeeere we go!
The Animus Symbol
Assassin’s Creed is rich with symbolism and subtext. Each faction seems to have its own set of symbols, from the Assassin’s big open quasi-triangle to the overtly Christian imagery that the vast majority of templar surround themselves with. But when you actually examine these symbols within the context of the game they lack an abundance of meaning. Even the Assassin symbol itself, with its use of open space and implications of careful violence, is a pretty shallow affair. The various religious symbols, which could’ve leant the game some degree of philosophical depth beyond its relatively straightforward idea of positive nihilism, are all but ignored in the construction of non-historic areas.
When all of these faction symbols are stripped away we’re left with is the Animus’ sync symbol – a simple collection of lines that occasionally shifts to show your character’s status. The Animus symbol might not even be considered a proper symbol– it’s basically a UI element. But it is emblazoned in certain areas, constantly prominently displayed and if we were to get into a Joycian discussion of sign-signifier dynamics to justify its symbolism people would get even more bored with the site and just drop off completely. So let’s take it as a symbol at face value.
It’s pretty basic. Three lines that shift to show proximity to the mindset of a character at a given time, moving between a tight little swirl, and two triangles which pulse with different degrees of severity. When all is well and you’re doing just what the game wants you to do the symbol is calm, inactive. It’s a tight collection of geometric shapes forming something unassuming in the upper left hand corner of the screen, minimizing its spatial occupancy and providing an almost meditatively simple object that you can glance at in order to remind yourself that, hey, everything is pretty okay right now.
But when the action starts, which is normally when Assassin’s Creed gets fun and you start deviating from both what “the character actually did” and what the developers want you to do the symbol goes apeshit. It starts getting excited. During chase segments it lets you know that you’re getting away, offering reassuring little yellow pulses, suggesting that you find a hiding spot and watch those dumbass guards run for a while, but more or less willing to let you do your own things and just look good.
And during combat is goes crazy, going red and flashing like mad. The god damn thing is raging at you, telling you to fight or run, to live in the moment the game presents you with then and there. Some games would have a little flag pop up or an exclamation point to let you know that it’s action time, but Assassin’s Creed has a blossoming geometric flower that insists you pay attention, not to the flower itself but to your own actions. When the Animus symbol glows red it’s time to pay attention. Pause that DVD you had on while you were running rooftops and watch the shoulders of those guards as they shake and shift towards you. Get serious, because this is your time to shine.
By increasing its negative space while simultaneously calling attention away from itself, the Animus indicator at its most exciting completely represents the fundamental idea behind Assassin’s Creed as a game – that the systems that are created for us are far more interesting when we feel we’re subverting them, when they open up and allow us to treat them as playgrounds rather than storybooks. While some structure remains it is there to ground us, not to control us and certainly not to dictate our course of action. Sure, it might get in the way of the story and it will have to be resolved at some point if we want to continue the plot of the game, but the Animus’ blooming, its simplicity and its ability to call attention both to and away from itself all make it the perfect symbol for the first Assassin’s Creed game. That said, I totally understand why it was removed for the sequel and replaced with a silly little wanted indicator, completely bereft of any interesting symbolism in terms of game mechanics but far more adept at displaying iterations of noteriety.
Half-Life’s Lambda
There are few games more gifted at subtext than the Half-Life series. For all that can be said of the frequent delays, relative simplicity and almost total information blackout regarding upcoming entries in the series it is difficult to deny that the artists who craft Half-Life’s world are excellent at making subtle choices that speak volumes with relatively little information on the surface. Just look at the makeup of City 17, Alyx Vance’s outfit and yes, even the prisoner like jumpsuits the various unliberated citizens
found themselves in. All of these artistic choices, in and of themselves asthetically pleasing and functional, did volumes to establish the world of Half-Life 2 and what it meant to reside there.
But perhaps no symbol, worn or otherwise, did more to express the ideas behind the Half-Life series than the humble lambda which adorned your HEV suit. Ostensibly the symbol of a lab team, oddly stationed across the freaking base from where you pick up the suit in a classic example of video game logic, the lambda is, like most of the afforementioned symbols, mostly absent from the first game. It occasionally appears, but it is nowhere near as saturated as it is in Half-Life 2, which is really where the themes of Half-Life began to coalesce more clearly for me as a player. Still, the choice of the lambda is no mistake, and its use speaks volumes about what the entire Half-life series wished to accomplish.
On its surface the lambda is simply a stand-in for the universal decay constant, a term in equations determining the half-life of various elemental compounds, among other things. Get it?! But even this naked parallel explains the choice of the symbol. The Half-Life games are about change. Violent, ugly change that people don’t get to choose, change they’re forced to deal with, change they have to evoke, at times, to survive, and this change always involves destroying systems and structures, killing people and generally defying authority. Half-Life is fundamentally a game about unstoppable natural forces of time destroying the things we’ve attempted to establish, and how awesome and, at times, serendipitous these forces can be.
And when we consider it in a greater context the lambda takes on new meanings. To broaden our scientific horizons, it also represents Planck’s constant, a term in the deBroglie relation which expresses the relationship between matter as particle and matter as wave, the wavelength itself, and the heat of vaporization of a substance. It relates the physicality of objects to their state as energy, recognizes the duality of the existence of all matter and codifies the manner in which this duality occurs. Half-Life’s frequent missives with the G-Man and its various forays into interdimensional travel all rely heavily on the ideas, scientific and theoretical, that the humble lambda represents.
The lambda also has significance as a countercultural symbol, specifically one adopted by gay and lesbian groups. In a world such as Half-Life’s, where tradition and submission to authority are an invitation to disaster and where our ability to function romantically as human beings is quite literally oppressed by an inhuman and unsympathetic group of sexless overlords, it’s quite easy to parallel the struggles of the human resistance with that of the GLBT movement within the western world. But that’s a whole other essay. For now let’s just leave it at this: there’s quite a bit of subtext to the lambda, and even the discussion of the lambda is, in a way, part of Half-Life’s modus operandi. It’s unclear just how many of the meanings I just rattled off were intended, and it’s unclear as to whether or not that matters. Half-Life is a game where the meaning of most things is unclear, and the meanings we insert as just as important as what its creators at Valve intended.
The Chains of Rapture
Back when Bioshock first came out I read a review on a Sony fan-website which may or may not have been a parody. With fanboys it’s hard to tell sometimes. It opened with a biting critique of the chain tattoos of Bioshock which smirkingly suggested that the chains were supposed to help us establish ourselves as a former prisoner who was heading home to his family. Anyone who’s played Bioshock even briefly knows that this has absolutely nothing to do with the game and is, in fact, far from the case. As far as I can tell Jack has never done any prison time, although who knows what happened to him on the surface.
But the conceit of being a prisoner to something is key to the story of Bioshock, and the chains do an excellent job of symbolizing the binding force of narrative that forces you through the events of the game. With its stated emphasis on choice presenting players with a constant reminder of their lack thereof was an interesting choice on the part of Levine and the rest of Irrational games. One of my first essays delved into this subject in more detail, discussing the manner in which Bioshock used the traditional narrative framework of games to characterize and structuralize human bondage in a way that made me incredibly uncomfortable when I first played through it. And while the chains do symbolize this bondage, their design speaks to much more. Still, since I’ve written at length about this before I’ll do my best to keep this next section brief, a paragraph by paragraph breakdown of the way the chains operate as a more immediate symbol:
The manner in which they’re etched on the character’s arms, a persistent reminder, drives home the manner in which narrative constantly inserts itself into gameplay, even as we’re active encouraged to avoid it as we seek out hidden areas and secret subplots. It reminds us that even though we’re killing or saving little sister we really don’t have many options, and we’re only really doing that in an effort to move the story forward.
Then there’s the naked representation of them as pressing an element of the chains of Rapture upon the character, forcing the character to assist others even if he chooses to work selfishly. They in a way validate Ryan’s philosophy: your survival in Rapture demands that you assist people, even if you do not believe they have your best interests at heart. Even if you don’t trust Atlas you’re still going to work with him to kill Ryan. What other choice do you have, spare death?
And then finally, there’s the makeup the chains themselves: solid black borders with spaces in between, connected by solid lines which bind them together. Maybe it’s the liberal arts college student in me, but I read this as an invitation to the player to improvise whenever possible and accept that, at times, certain things will need to be done in order to advance the game. While you’ll never be pressed especially hard to do so you will, inevitably, have to swim to Rapture, have to kill Ryan and, eventually, have to undo Fontaine. It’s the choices you make in between that make your experience interesting and worth talking about. The things we fill these spaces with are the things that make Bioshock worth playing, and while they won’t shatter the chains they will change their meaning in a different way for each person.
The Vault Boy
A historic discussion of the Vault Boy as a symbol might be more appropriate than a textual one, but I’ve little patience for researching the various ways in which the original design team at Black Isle built up their iconic little buddy. What I’ve got great aplomb for is instead the discussion of what he has become to the game.
Originally a UI element intended to establish the tone of the game-world with new players as they created their character, the Vault Boy would eventually become a sort of spokesman for the Fallout world, just as much as the badass Brotherhood of Steel troopers kitted out in T-51bs. But whereas the Brotherhood of Steel represented the inherent gravity and violence in a post-apocalyptic world the Vault Boy made sure we knew just how hilarious it was as well. World laid to ruin? The values of society missing or completely absent? Daily life a struggle? That doesn’t mean you can’t laugh about it.
The Vault Boy, with his unassuming and unrelenting smile, could be placed in any number of circumstances without ever losing his good humor. Sometimes he’d be surprised, or maybe a little sad, but he always bounced back, grinning madly and wielding a minigun or demonstrating the proper way to sneak, study or shoot. He was a symbol for the sort of duality that Fallout has always contained, that mix of deadly serious violence, human emotion and genuine self-aware humor which begs us to think of the society that pushed these characters towards these circumstances and what the pillars of these society would think of what they have wrought.
But he’s also a symbol of our determination as players. In Fallout very nearly everything wants to kill us, from the tiniest rat to the meanest of Super Mutants, everybody wants a piece. The few people who aren’t looking to kill us sound like Macguyver or want us to kill people who sound like Macguyver. We need the joy implied by the Vault Boy’s perennial grin to get us through our day to day.
What’s more, he embodies everything he left behind and futility of those values and ideas in the world that you are pressed out of the vault into. He is, in many ways, a viewpoint both into the game’s present and past, an easy mouthpiece that allows both players and authors to speak. He’s a classic icon, an idol used to introduce you to each and every element of the Fallout world in shorthand. And that’s pretty awesome.
And so ends my brief and arbitrary list of symbols, none of which were used in mass-media marketing campaigns (aside from Vault Boy, debatably). These symbols, the manner in which they introduce and convey the ideas behind their respective games and the power they have over us as gamers is something we all too often ignore, and I just wanted to try and get people thinking about it. So if you’d like to discuss them at greater length in this post, or if you just want to bring up a symbol you find particularly important or influential, feel free!
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Congratulations on Finding the Raccoon!
Sure, it was just one night of passion, but you were right to track her down. She’ll be in the abandoned refrigerator.
“Francine!” you’ll cry when you find her. She’ll respond by cocking her head back at you as you run towards her.
As you near her crouching form, arms outstretched, her hackles will rise and she’ll leap at your face. You’ll fall to the ground, clutching her to you in the moonlight, trying to avoid being mauled too badly by her fangs and claws.
As the clock rolls over you’ll feel her baser instincts caving as she recognizes you, but it won’t be taking hold fast enough as the two of you struggle for dominance, your arousal growing quickly.
Congratulations on Finding the Raccoon!
“Francine!” you’ll cry when you find her. She’ll respond by cocking her head back at you as you run towards her.
As you near her crouching form, arms outstretched, her hackles will rise and she’ll leap at your face. You’ll fall to the ground, clutching her to you in the moonlight, trying to avoid being mauled too badly by her fangs and claws.
As the clock rolls over you’ll feel her baser instincts caving as she recognizes you, but it won’t be taking hold fast enough as the two of you struggle for dominance, your arousal growing quickly.
Congratulations on Finding the Raccoon!
Friday, July 23, 2010
Congratulations on Filling a Submarine With Fetid Woman Blood!
This one’s pretty self-explanatory. You’re a lady on a top secret test submarine which is showing the potential ill effects of having women live on submarines long term with the rest of the crew. The results will be interesting.
After a series of steamingly hot sexual episodes with eighty six percent of the crew you’ll get your period and turn into a raving bitch. You’ll go from being the coolest, most laid back crewmember to being an absolute nightmare to share a bulkhead with even briefly. You’ll be so intolerable that the crew will vote that you be temporary sealed inside of a secluded torpedo chamber where your irrational aggression can be put to use fighting Soviets held out at the bottom of the ocean where law abiding Americans don’t see them.
While there you’ll load torpedoes with great aplomb, and also very nearly flood your personal chamber with menstrual blood. Navy brass will look at your incredible effectiveness and efficiency under duress and the general boost to morale that occurred during your service and decide that they need to come up with some sort of advanced drainage system to accommodate your gushing, foaming lady bits. You’ll be like a white female Jackie Robinson with exclusive regard towards submarines.
Congratulations on Filling a Submarine With Fetid Woman Blood!
After a series of steamingly hot sexual episodes with eighty six percent of the crew you’ll get your period and turn into a raving bitch. You’ll go from being the coolest, most laid back crewmember to being an absolute nightmare to share a bulkhead with even briefly. You’ll be so intolerable that the crew will vote that you be temporary sealed inside of a secluded torpedo chamber where your irrational aggression can be put to use fighting Soviets held out at the bottom of the ocean where law abiding Americans don’t see them.
While there you’ll load torpedoes with great aplomb, and also very nearly flood your personal chamber with menstrual blood. Navy brass will look at your incredible effectiveness and efficiency under duress and the general boost to morale that occurred during your service and decide that they need to come up with some sort of advanced drainage system to accommodate your gushing, foaming lady bits. You’ll be like a white female Jackie Robinson with exclusive regard towards submarines.
Congratulations on Filling a Submarine With Fetid Woman Blood!
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Congratulations on Your Upcoming Curb Party!
We feel super bad about this, just so you know, but you totally have it coming.
See you’re one of those spineless banking douchebags who engineered, more or less, the recent American financial crisis through diligence, greed and sheer poor business decision making. And while you did already sort of get your comeuppance in the form of some wrist slap fines and a long talking to in public in front of Congress like you’re a naughty puppy or something you were never really punished.
Well today all that’s going to go right into the shitter while you’re driving your hot rod red drop top Lexus right through Hicksville Alabama (located just outside Montgomery). You’re going to stop for gas and while the toothless attendant fills up your car (actually just a homeless man you pay to stand there and hold the pump, since Alabama doesn’t enforce full service gas stations) a group of neo-Nazis will follow you into the bathroom. Once they have you surrounded inside they’ll ask you what you do. You’ll cheerfully respond that you do a little banking and that will be enough for them.
They’ll proceed to beat the living shit out of you, literally wiping the floor with your bloody face. Then a few of the repressed homosexuals in the group will take the time to rape you in the mouth and anus before taking you outside and giving you a good old curb sandwich while your homeless man watches from your car, perplexed. Eventually he’ll get the cashier to call 9-1-1, but only after he explains that dealing with the legal fallout of having a white person die outside his store would be devastating.
What follows will be one of the strangest trials ever, where a jury consisting mostly of poor black people will cheer enthusiastically during almost all portions of the proceedings. The judge will strongly consider throwing the case out as a mistrial, but after some backroom meetings wherein he’ll determine that everyone involved is a total asshole he’ll just shrug and decide to give the neo-Nazis a decade long prison sentence and leave you with your stitched together jaws, sucking food through a straw for the rest of your life. No financial restitution will be offered to you, for reasons unstated by the judge, but in the end it’ll be difficult for you to appeal. Your attorney will already have his fees, and whenever you ask him why he doesn’t want to appeal and get more money he’ll just shake his head and tell you to take what small victories you can in a nation where the vast majority of people just want you dead.
Congratulations on Your Upcoming Curb Party!
See you’re one of those spineless banking douchebags who engineered, more or less, the recent American financial crisis through diligence, greed and sheer poor business decision making. And while you did already sort of get your comeuppance in the form of some wrist slap fines and a long talking to in public in front of Congress like you’re a naughty puppy or something you were never really punished.
Well today all that’s going to go right into the shitter while you’re driving your hot rod red drop top Lexus right through Hicksville Alabama (located just outside Montgomery). You’re going to stop for gas and while the toothless attendant fills up your car (actually just a homeless man you pay to stand there and hold the pump, since Alabama doesn’t enforce full service gas stations) a group of neo-Nazis will follow you into the bathroom. Once they have you surrounded inside they’ll ask you what you do. You’ll cheerfully respond that you do a little banking and that will be enough for them.
They’ll proceed to beat the living shit out of you, literally wiping the floor with your bloody face. Then a few of the repressed homosexuals in the group will take the time to rape you in the mouth and anus before taking you outside and giving you a good old curb sandwich while your homeless man watches from your car, perplexed. Eventually he’ll get the cashier to call 9-1-1, but only after he explains that dealing with the legal fallout of having a white person die outside his store would be devastating.
What follows will be one of the strangest trials ever, where a jury consisting mostly of poor black people will cheer enthusiastically during almost all portions of the proceedings. The judge will strongly consider throwing the case out as a mistrial, but after some backroom meetings wherein he’ll determine that everyone involved is a total asshole he’ll just shrug and decide to give the neo-Nazis a decade long prison sentence and leave you with your stitched together jaws, sucking food through a straw for the rest of your life. No financial restitution will be offered to you, for reasons unstated by the judge, but in the end it’ll be difficult for you to appeal. Your attorney will already have his fees, and whenever you ask him why he doesn’t want to appeal and get more money he’ll just shake his head and tell you to take what small victories you can in a nation where the vast majority of people just want you dead.
Congratulations on Your Upcoming Curb Party!
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Congratulations on Removing Your Dick!
Today you’re going to be playing with a gun in the basement of your home while your wife is upstairs doing dishes.
“Pew pew, Osama,” you’ll whisper at the paper target on the wall, pointing towards it with the loaded weapon and flailing your arm about.
Your wife will know exactly what’s going on down there, but since you’re the breadwinner and divorcing you would make her a small town pariah she’ll do her best to pretend that you’re just building sex machines or something relatively normal like that.
After a few minutes of pointing at the poster and making gun sounds you’ll ram the pistol into the waistband of your pants and pretend to “draw” against the target. But when you reach in your hand will slip and feather the trigger, sending a .22 caliber round spiraling at high velocity into your penis and severing it at the base from your body.
“AUUUUUGH!” you’ll scream, which will bring your wife running down the stairs. When she sees the blood and the gun smoke she’ll know exactly what’s happened. She’ll calmly go upstairs, call 9-1-1, and then go downstairs to administer first aid to your ruined genitals.
She’ll apply pressure and cold to the wound until the paramedics arrive, at which point she’ll look at the lady paramedic and feel a tinge of desire. She’ll hold her hand outside of your house while you’re loaded into the back of the ambulance, telling her that she’d like to see her again. The lady-paramedic will be a little bit shocked, but once she thinks of your unique wound and your wife’s implausible attractiveness she’ll know what’s going on. She’ll put your wife’s cell phone number into her own and tell her that she’ll call her later, after your penis has been put on ice.
Then she’ll drive away with you howling curses at Osama all the while.
Congratulations on Removing Your Dick!
“Pew pew, Osama,” you’ll whisper at the paper target on the wall, pointing towards it with the loaded weapon and flailing your arm about.
Your wife will know exactly what’s going on down there, but since you’re the breadwinner and divorcing you would make her a small town pariah she’ll do her best to pretend that you’re just building sex machines or something relatively normal like that.
After a few minutes of pointing at the poster and making gun sounds you’ll ram the pistol into the waistband of your pants and pretend to “draw” against the target. But when you reach in your hand will slip and feather the trigger, sending a .22 caliber round spiraling at high velocity into your penis and severing it at the base from your body.
“AUUUUUGH!” you’ll scream, which will bring your wife running down the stairs. When she sees the blood and the gun smoke she’ll know exactly what’s happened. She’ll calmly go upstairs, call 9-1-1, and then go downstairs to administer first aid to your ruined genitals.
She’ll apply pressure and cold to the wound until the paramedics arrive, at which point she’ll look at the lady paramedic and feel a tinge of desire. She’ll hold her hand outside of your house while you’re loaded into the back of the ambulance, telling her that she’d like to see her again. The lady-paramedic will be a little bit shocked, but once she thinks of your unique wound and your wife’s implausible attractiveness she’ll know what’s going on. She’ll put your wife’s cell phone number into her own and tell her that she’ll call her later, after your penis has been put on ice.
Then she’ll drive away with you howling curses at Osama all the while.
Congratulations on Removing Your Dick!
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Congratulations on Enjoying Your Youth!
There are relatively few things on this earth that are truly universally reviled. Ticks, John Boehner, Jim Belushi and ranch dressing on French fries all seem like good bets, but even those sometimes have their exceptions. For example, birds like eating fattened ticks, really fucking stupid people who are easily manipulated like John Boehner, people with self-esteem issues feel better with Jim Belushi around and really dumb self-destructive people love ranch dressing on their French fries.
But no one, we mean no one, likes Junior High School. Even people who think they do are really just sadomasochists who spend most of their time devising new and horrible ways to spread their own self hate to others.
That’s why you, unlike every other person in America, are really going to enjoy your youth. This is because today, at the tender age of eight, you’re going to be traveling a plane which will crash land in the Yukon. Everyone on the plane except for yourself will be killed instantly on impact. You’ll drag yourself clear and be discovered by a pack of wolves who will raise you, teach you about the forest and one day, using connections with Jack London, get you into a relatively prestigious undergraduate university.
In raising you this way, in the frozen north, they’ll save you not only from starvation, but also from the terrors of other adolescent children beset by hormones, children prone to bouts of cruelty and malice for no reason other than the capricious chemistry within their bodies on that particular day. They’ll spare you junior high school. And so we feel not the slightest twinge of irony when we tell you Congratulations on Enjoying Your Youth!
But no one, we mean no one, likes Junior High School. Even people who think they do are really just sadomasochists who spend most of their time devising new and horrible ways to spread their own self hate to others.
That’s why you, unlike every other person in America, are really going to enjoy your youth. This is because today, at the tender age of eight, you’re going to be traveling a plane which will crash land in the Yukon. Everyone on the plane except for yourself will be killed instantly on impact. You’ll drag yourself clear and be discovered by a pack of wolves who will raise you, teach you about the forest and one day, using connections with Jack London, get you into a relatively prestigious undergraduate university.
In raising you this way, in the frozen north, they’ll save you not only from starvation, but also from the terrors of other adolescent children beset by hormones, children prone to bouts of cruelty and malice for no reason other than the capricious chemistry within their bodies on that particular day. They’ll spare you junior high school. And so we feel not the slightest twinge of irony when we tell you Congratulations on Enjoying Your Youth!
Monday, July 19, 2010
Congratulations on Winning at Online Dating!
Usually you wake up each day to see the ironically constructed name of some new future sexual conquest in your inbox, courtesy of “iwannaboneu.org,” a site which, due to some sort of regulatory oversight, managed to acquire .org status and now uses its reduced overhead and straightforward name to introduce horny singles to one another and tentatively ask them to send tapes of the ensuing lonely, desperate, often embarrassing sex.
But today you’re going to arise and find in your inbox not a collage of attractive women, new to town, who don’t know any better than to sleep with you yet. No, today you’ll arise with a message reading, much like the first word of this prediction “Congratulations!”
You’ll click on the email itself, revealing its trim, sensual body, in keeping with the website’s highest of sensual standards. The email will detail how you have boned more women than anyone else in your county over the course of the last year. It will then go on to reveal that none of these women have wanted to see you again, and that they have ranked your sexual competence somewhere between “adequate” and “needs improvement.” Then it will display a small e-card, informing you that you’ve had the most successful run in internet dating history.
It will go on to inform you that you’ve now “won” at internet dating, and that your profile is going to be deleted so that others can attempt to outdo your incredible romantic accomplishments. Smiling, you’ll star the email and go back to cooking breakfast in your huge, vacant apartment, almost completely unfurnished and undecorated so as to keep your potential sexual partners from stealing any of your valuables. You’ll wonder what this new period in your life entails. Maybe this means you can finally buy some paintings, or a TV. Then again, maybe not.
Congratulations on Winning at Online Dating!
But today you’re going to arise and find in your inbox not a collage of attractive women, new to town, who don’t know any better than to sleep with you yet. No, today you’ll arise with a message reading, much like the first word of this prediction “Congratulations!”
You’ll click on the email itself, revealing its trim, sensual body, in keeping with the website’s highest of sensual standards. The email will detail how you have boned more women than anyone else in your county over the course of the last year. It will then go on to reveal that none of these women have wanted to see you again, and that they have ranked your sexual competence somewhere between “adequate” and “needs improvement.” Then it will display a small e-card, informing you that you’ve had the most successful run in internet dating history.
It will go on to inform you that you’ve now “won” at internet dating, and that your profile is going to be deleted so that others can attempt to outdo your incredible romantic accomplishments. Smiling, you’ll star the email and go back to cooking breakfast in your huge, vacant apartment, almost completely unfurnished and undecorated so as to keep your potential sexual partners from stealing any of your valuables. You’ll wonder what this new period in your life entails. Maybe this means you can finally buy some paintings, or a TV. Then again, maybe not.
Congratulations on Winning at Online Dating!
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Dungeonth 'n' Dragonth!
Recently I’ve been working on a Dungeons and Dragons campaign to run with a few friends. It hasn’t been the greatest thing I’ve written by a long shot. I put most of it together while I was flying from Georgia to Oregon, taking breaks to charge my laptop and conceal it from those hideous sky-bitches who always want me to turn off my lovely toys. It wasn’t the best environment for writing, and it shows. The language is poor, I frequently change the names of places mid-paragraph, there are spelling errors and failures to account for certain bits of casaulity. The encounters are hastily assembled and I have no idea how they’ll play out. The story itself won’t hold up to close examination, and some of my attempts to account for decisions the players make are sure to backfire. And yet I cannot bring myself to change it.
I won’t go into the details of the campaign since people who may participate in this game do read this blog occasionally, but I want to talk about why I don’t care that it’s not perfect, why I don’t plan on revising or improving it and why I’m so excited to see how it plays out. When I was young, in third grade or so, I was hooked on Choose Your Own Adventure books. I spent hours and hours reading the Lone Wolf series of books, laboring over choices and doing my all to make the “correct” decisions. I’d labor over paths in more conventional Choose Your Own Adventure books and even tried my hand at writing my own. But however the books turned out I always felt they were guiding me down a singular path, and as time went on I realized that they were kind of bad. And when I began work on my own campaign I didn’t want it to be that way.
The writing in Dungeons and Dragons campaigns has never been particularly interesting. In fact it’s often kind of laughable. The campaign I gutted in order to make my own contained threads of story that didn’t make sense, self-serious and turgid prose and the character development and depth of a porkpie hat. The enemies are evil because they’re evil, less self-serving and more mentally ill. Ideal-less goblinoids inexplicably provide adventurer with nice, guiltless fodder. I didn’t want to tell that sort of story, the kind where faceless foes fight against good guys who win because they’re good and bad guys lose because they’re bad. I didn’t want to tell a dumb story. I didn’t want to lead a band of Mary Sues to an easy victory. I wanted players to feel challenged and enjoy the game as they played it.
Listening to the Penny-Arcade D&D podcasts was something a revelation for me towards this goal. When I heard the way Chris Perkins seamlessly wove the actions of his players into narrative by accepting even the dumbest ideas into an investigative effort he made a story I actually wanted to hear. In college I’d decapitated my fair share of orc and heard many a Monty Python fan’s idea of what was funny to do in a gaming context. It never really grabbed me, that sort of wish-fulfillment onanism, as far as narrative experience was concerned. But the moment I saw that there were players willing to laugh at themselves, my kind of nerds, I realized how amazing Dungeons and Dragons’ capacity for collective narrative was.
It seemed less like a silly bit of wish fulfillment and more like a group of people legitimately enjoying themselves. This is not to denigrate the people who quote Monty Python and love Monty Hall D&D, it’s just that these aren’t people I like spending time with. Listening to funny people play the game, I could imagine me and my friends from high school sitting down and getting drunk off of one of our parent’s liquor cabinets. I could smile and speculate at the fun we could’ve had, had we tried the Points of Light during our youth. But these forbidden feelings, like my repressed homosexuality, needed to be buried deep within my subconconscious, then engaged in safe places, like orgy clubs with a higher number of men then women, so that they could be at the very least partially resolved. So I did what any rational person would do. I joined a D&D game where I wouldn’t have to DM.
It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. There were organizational problems, no sense of place or story, and I seemed to be one of two people interested in actually portraying a character in the game. It was the sort of group that I’d more or less wanted to avoid. I appreciated the opportunity and enjoyed my time there, but when the group as a whole disintegrated it was hard to feel particularly bad about it. The one thing that game did do for me was whet my whistle for playing Dungeons and Dragons with people I knew better, people I felt would appreciate the game in the same way that I did. And so I set out to write something that could amuse these people.
But my friends hate my writing. When they read it they always seem to react to it in ways I didn’t intend, taking offense at embelishments and interpretting fiction loosely based on fact as perceived truth. So when I sat down and read over my draft, finding frequent gaps and poor choices, I realized I’d made the perfect adventure for them.
By making a piece of writing I wasn’t terrible fond of, one which at times even endeavored to make fun of itself, I’d make the perfect playground for my friends. Together we could explore, interpret and dismantle the various narrative frameworks I’d worked to coonstruct. At last I’d have my captive audience, and they their input into my asinine stories, but we’d both be fine with them dismantling and reworking them simply by merit of their loose and open nature. By refusing to refine and labor over the narrative I made it into something that could be more easily played with, subverted and turned into an active, participatory story about warring gods, fearful ignorant people and racism.
That might’ve almost been spoiler territory.
But regardless, trying to think of how to write for Dungeons and Dragons was in and of itself a challenge. And while I’d hardly go so far as to make grandoise claims about the improvements writing a D&D campaign have made to my own writing I would say that I take the whole process less seriously after thinking of it in terms of how I can actively adjust my authorship to fit my audience. It is, in many ways, anathema to the manner in which traditional creative writing education taught men to write. In creative writing we’re told to ignore our audience, to consider them completely passive and potentially non-existent, but to make a good Dungeons and Dragons campaign you have to see the readers as literal participants in the story and plan for their responses and present yourself with general purpose outs so that you can accomodate the crazy shit they devise on the fly. It’s a valuable set of lessons, and I’m glad that I’ve tried my hand and creating the loose framework for a story for my friends to participate. It makes me feel a little bit like I’ve improved in my approach to my writing. Instead of operating in a vacuum I’m thinking a little bit more, even unconsciously, of ways to dick with my readers. And while I’m not sure it’ll show in this particular venue for my writing I look forward to bringing this newfound playful antagonism to everything I write in the future.
I won’t go into the details of the campaign since people who may participate in this game do read this blog occasionally, but I want to talk about why I don’t care that it’s not perfect, why I don’t plan on revising or improving it and why I’m so excited to see how it plays out. When I was young, in third grade or so, I was hooked on Choose Your Own Adventure books. I spent hours and hours reading the Lone Wolf series of books, laboring over choices and doing my all to make the “correct” decisions. I’d labor over paths in more conventional Choose Your Own Adventure books and even tried my hand at writing my own. But however the books turned out I always felt they were guiding me down a singular path, and as time went on I realized that they were kind of bad. And when I began work on my own campaign I didn’t want it to be that way.
The writing in Dungeons and Dragons campaigns has never been particularly interesting. In fact it’s often kind of laughable. The campaign I gutted in order to make my own contained threads of story that didn’t make sense, self-serious and turgid prose and the character development and depth of a porkpie hat. The enemies are evil because they’re evil, less self-serving and more mentally ill. Ideal-less goblinoids inexplicably provide adventurer with nice, guiltless fodder. I didn’t want to tell that sort of story, the kind where faceless foes fight against good guys who win because they’re good and bad guys lose because they’re bad. I didn’t want to tell a dumb story. I didn’t want to lead a band of Mary Sues to an easy victory. I wanted players to feel challenged and enjoy the game as they played it.
Listening to the Penny-Arcade D&D podcasts was something a revelation for me towards this goal. When I heard the way Chris Perkins seamlessly wove the actions of his players into narrative by accepting even the dumbest ideas into an investigative effort he made a story I actually wanted to hear. In college I’d decapitated my fair share of orc and heard many a Monty Python fan’s idea of what was funny to do in a gaming context. It never really grabbed me, that sort of wish-fulfillment onanism, as far as narrative experience was concerned. But the moment I saw that there were players willing to laugh at themselves, my kind of nerds, I realized how amazing Dungeons and Dragons’ capacity for collective narrative was.
It seemed less like a silly bit of wish fulfillment and more like a group of people legitimately enjoying themselves. This is not to denigrate the people who quote Monty Python and love Monty Hall D&D, it’s just that these aren’t people I like spending time with. Listening to funny people play the game, I could imagine me and my friends from high school sitting down and getting drunk off of one of our parent’s liquor cabinets. I could smile and speculate at the fun we could’ve had, had we tried the Points of Light during our youth. But these forbidden feelings, like my repressed homosexuality, needed to be buried deep within my subconconscious, then engaged in safe places, like orgy clubs with a higher number of men then women, so that they could be at the very least partially resolved. So I did what any rational person would do. I joined a D&D game where I wouldn’t have to DM.
It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. There were organizational problems, no sense of place or story, and I seemed to be one of two people interested in actually portraying a character in the game. It was the sort of group that I’d more or less wanted to avoid. I appreciated the opportunity and enjoyed my time there, but when the group as a whole disintegrated it was hard to feel particularly bad about it. The one thing that game did do for me was whet my whistle for playing Dungeons and Dragons with people I knew better, people I felt would appreciate the game in the same way that I did. And so I set out to write something that could amuse these people.
But my friends hate my writing. When they read it they always seem to react to it in ways I didn’t intend, taking offense at embelishments and interpretting fiction loosely based on fact as perceived truth. So when I sat down and read over my draft, finding frequent gaps and poor choices, I realized I’d made the perfect adventure for them.
By making a piece of writing I wasn’t terrible fond of, one which at times even endeavored to make fun of itself, I’d make the perfect playground for my friends. Together we could explore, interpret and dismantle the various narrative frameworks I’d worked to coonstruct. At last I’d have my captive audience, and they their input into my asinine stories, but we’d both be fine with them dismantling and reworking them simply by merit of their loose and open nature. By refusing to refine and labor over the narrative I made it into something that could be more easily played with, subverted and turned into an active, participatory story about warring gods, fearful ignorant people and racism.
That might’ve almost been spoiler territory.
But regardless, trying to think of how to write for Dungeons and Dragons was in and of itself a challenge. And while I’d hardly go so far as to make grandoise claims about the improvements writing a D&D campaign have made to my own writing I would say that I take the whole process less seriously after thinking of it in terms of how I can actively adjust my authorship to fit my audience. It is, in many ways, anathema to the manner in which traditional creative writing education taught men to write. In creative writing we’re told to ignore our audience, to consider them completely passive and potentially non-existent, but to make a good Dungeons and Dragons campaign you have to see the readers as literal participants in the story and plan for their responses and present yourself with general purpose outs so that you can accomodate the crazy shit they devise on the fly. It’s a valuable set of lessons, and I’m glad that I’ve tried my hand and creating the loose framework for a story for my friends to participate. It makes me feel a little bit like I’ve improved in my approach to my writing. Instead of operating in a vacuum I’m thinking a little bit more, even unconsciously, of ways to dick with my readers. And while I’m not sure it’ll show in this particular venue for my writing I look forward to bringing this newfound playful antagonism to everything I write in the future.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Congratulations on Falling in Love With Radha Mitchell!
Today you’re going to be a 15 year old boy and you’re going to watch the film Pitch Black for the first time.
You’ll pick it out at random from your dad’s home theater after an exceptionally shitty day as a high school freshman, desirous for something outlandish and new to take your mind off of the oppressive, lonely place that is your teenage world. You won’t know anything about it. You won’t even know that it spawned a feature sequel, an animated sequel, two video games, a series of comics and a set of oft and justifiably ignored trade paperbacks. You’ll just see the lettering on the spine of the DVD and think “Huh.”
You’ll sit down in front of the TV with half a tray of pizza bites and a bag of Goldfish and have no idea what to expect. The opening shot will puzzle you, the flash back will disorient you, and the sexual tension between Fry and almost every male character in the film will make you unpleasantly aware of your teenage physiology.
At first you’ll just think “Wow, this is stylized” and “Wow, this is kind of bad,” and you’ll be more or less right about that. But as time goes on and you see the arc of Fry, her guilt, her choices, her sacrifice and her eventual tragic demise, you’ll come to see that Pitch Black is actually kind of an amazing movie. And when Riddick bites his lip, waiting for as many creatures as possible to climb on the engines as possible so that he can obliterate them when he takes off you’ll be able to relate to him completely.
When the credits finally roll you’ll see the name of the actor who played Carolyn Fry: Radha Mitchell. The cantor of the name upon your ears, its beautiful spelling and exotic tone paired with her incredible good looks will entrance you. And on that day you will realize that Radha Mitchell is that beautiful beacon of life that you’ve been searching for for so long.
Congratulations on Falling in Love With Radha Mitchell!
You’ll pick it out at random from your dad’s home theater after an exceptionally shitty day as a high school freshman, desirous for something outlandish and new to take your mind off of the oppressive, lonely place that is your teenage world. You won’t know anything about it. You won’t even know that it spawned a feature sequel, an animated sequel, two video games, a series of comics and a set of oft and justifiably ignored trade paperbacks. You’ll just see the lettering on the spine of the DVD and think “Huh.”
You’ll sit down in front of the TV with half a tray of pizza bites and a bag of Goldfish and have no idea what to expect. The opening shot will puzzle you, the flash back will disorient you, and the sexual tension between Fry and almost every male character in the film will make you unpleasantly aware of your teenage physiology.
At first you’ll just think “Wow, this is stylized” and “Wow, this is kind of bad,” and you’ll be more or less right about that. But as time goes on and you see the arc of Fry, her guilt, her choices, her sacrifice and her eventual tragic demise, you’ll come to see that Pitch Black is actually kind of an amazing movie. And when Riddick bites his lip, waiting for as many creatures as possible to climb on the engines as possible so that he can obliterate them when he takes off you’ll be able to relate to him completely.
When the credits finally roll you’ll see the name of the actor who played Carolyn Fry: Radha Mitchell. The cantor of the name upon your ears, its beautiful spelling and exotic tone paired with her incredible good looks will entrance you. And on that day you will realize that Radha Mitchell is that beautiful beacon of life that you’ve been searching for for so long.
Congratulations on Falling in Love With Radha Mitchell!
Friday, July 16, 2010
Congratulations on Getting It Just Right!
The ticking of the clock, the slow pulsing drone of trace electricity running through the circuit, the tingling of your own sweat. These things will be your world, these things and multicolored wires and screaming children, background noise to the tick, the hum, the drip.
The circumstances that brought you here will flash before your eyes. Jumping out into a cross walk, you’ll have made that young woman brake far too hard, driving her forward through her windshield due to an incorrectly fastened seat belt. She’ll be on the pavement a few feet away, still skidding to a stop as you trot up to check on her.
“Oh christ,” you’ll say.
“Hrrgh,” she’ll reply, coughing up blood.
“Oh jesus fucking christ,” you’ll say once again, dragging your hands through your hair. You’ll look at the girl, her eyes fluttering, her breath shallow and occluded by blood, and you’ll ram your hand into your mouth. You’ll realize, suddenly, that she’s really cute, and you’ll want her not to die.
“What can I do to help?” you’ll ask her, cradling her head, taking care not to move her any more than a few inches. Looking into her eyes you’ll know that there’s no chance that she’ll survive more than a few minutes. The knowledge will be there, in the iris, glinting meanly at you, shattering your lonely hopes of cementing the world’s worst meet-cute story.
“Case,” she’ll say, throwing her arm towards the now empty and idle car. You’ll assume she wants to sue you with her dying breath, but her hand will clutch, as if she’s attempting to grab something.
With dreams of a purse with a hot sister’s photo and a new meet-cute story already bright in your mind you’ll rush over the car and look inside. The interior will be sparse, without a purse or anything to speak of aside from a single black valise, clasped shut. The valise will be on its side on the passenger side floor, having been hurled to the ground. You’ll grab it and look inside, hoping for some hint of this exotic woman’s life, perhaps a hint referencing some hot friends or siblings who might be interested in her recent death.
You won’t find anything like that. Instead you’ll find a set of urgent directions, detailing a specific location on the bottom floor of a parking garage underneath an old Volvo less than a mile away. There will be a note accompanying the directions which projects casualties and makes several references to a previous relationship and sharing hurt feelings and some weird emo bullshit like that. There will also be some bomb diffusal tools in there for good measure.
Clutching the valise close to your chest you’ll shout back at the dying woman.
“I will avenge you!”
She’ll cough convulsively in response, a crimson stream arcing out of her mouth and splattering on the ground.
You’ll run flat out for almost a full mile, sprinting down city streets, your feet slapping the pavement, coat tails flapping in the wind. When you get to the parking garage you won’t stop, sprinting at full gallop through the ground floor entrance and down two levels to the lowest sub level.
Once you’re down there you’ll drop below the Volvo and very carefully drag the case out from underneath the car. Exposed to the light, you’ll be met with a mass of wires and cords, labyrinthine but with a few stand out ones, clearly important “disable the bomb” wires.
You’ll open up the valise and examine the tools, looking at the note to see if it has any directions on how to disable the bomb. When you fail to find any you’ll shrug and just go about disarming the bomb the way they do in the movies: by staring at it, sweating a lot and panicking.
After a five minute period of stressing out you’ll just go ahead and use a pair of needle nose pliers to snip the biggest, reddest cable in there, following the directions of every single movie you’ve ever seen. After it’s done there will be a second. Then another second, similar to the first, as you watch the timer and it remains unchanged.
You’ll breath a sigh of relief and wipe the sweat from your brow, smiling at your success. You’ll step back from the bomb and let the glow of your success wash over you. You’ll smile, thinking of the lives you’ve saved and the guy you made feel kind of like a dick for not being able to deal with being dumped. Then you’ll think of that girl and feel kind of sad, because even though you proved your manhood and saved the day you won’t have met a single eligible bachlorette despite trotting around the city in your finery for the better part of a day.
Congratulations on Getting It Just Right!
The circumstances that brought you here will flash before your eyes. Jumping out into a cross walk, you’ll have made that young woman brake far too hard, driving her forward through her windshield due to an incorrectly fastened seat belt. She’ll be on the pavement a few feet away, still skidding to a stop as you trot up to check on her.
“Oh christ,” you’ll say.
“Hrrgh,” she’ll reply, coughing up blood.
“Oh jesus fucking christ,” you’ll say once again, dragging your hands through your hair. You’ll look at the girl, her eyes fluttering, her breath shallow and occluded by blood, and you’ll ram your hand into your mouth. You’ll realize, suddenly, that she’s really cute, and you’ll want her not to die.
“What can I do to help?” you’ll ask her, cradling her head, taking care not to move her any more than a few inches. Looking into her eyes you’ll know that there’s no chance that she’ll survive more than a few minutes. The knowledge will be there, in the iris, glinting meanly at you, shattering your lonely hopes of cementing the world’s worst meet-cute story.
“Case,” she’ll say, throwing her arm towards the now empty and idle car. You’ll assume she wants to sue you with her dying breath, but her hand will clutch, as if she’s attempting to grab something.
With dreams of a purse with a hot sister’s photo and a new meet-cute story already bright in your mind you’ll rush over the car and look inside. The interior will be sparse, without a purse or anything to speak of aside from a single black valise, clasped shut. The valise will be on its side on the passenger side floor, having been hurled to the ground. You’ll grab it and look inside, hoping for some hint of this exotic woman’s life, perhaps a hint referencing some hot friends or siblings who might be interested in her recent death.
You won’t find anything like that. Instead you’ll find a set of urgent directions, detailing a specific location on the bottom floor of a parking garage underneath an old Volvo less than a mile away. There will be a note accompanying the directions which projects casualties and makes several references to a previous relationship and sharing hurt feelings and some weird emo bullshit like that. There will also be some bomb diffusal tools in there for good measure.
Clutching the valise close to your chest you’ll shout back at the dying woman.
“I will avenge you!”
She’ll cough convulsively in response, a crimson stream arcing out of her mouth and splattering on the ground.
You’ll run flat out for almost a full mile, sprinting down city streets, your feet slapping the pavement, coat tails flapping in the wind. When you get to the parking garage you won’t stop, sprinting at full gallop through the ground floor entrance and down two levels to the lowest sub level.
Once you’re down there you’ll drop below the Volvo and very carefully drag the case out from underneath the car. Exposed to the light, you’ll be met with a mass of wires and cords, labyrinthine but with a few stand out ones, clearly important “disable the bomb” wires.
You’ll open up the valise and examine the tools, looking at the note to see if it has any directions on how to disable the bomb. When you fail to find any you’ll shrug and just go about disarming the bomb the way they do in the movies: by staring at it, sweating a lot and panicking.
After a five minute period of stressing out you’ll just go ahead and use a pair of needle nose pliers to snip the biggest, reddest cable in there, following the directions of every single movie you’ve ever seen. After it’s done there will be a second. Then another second, similar to the first, as you watch the timer and it remains unchanged.
You’ll breath a sigh of relief and wipe the sweat from your brow, smiling at your success. You’ll step back from the bomb and let the glow of your success wash over you. You’ll smile, thinking of the lives you’ve saved and the guy you made feel kind of like a dick for not being able to deal with being dumped. Then you’ll think of that girl and feel kind of sad, because even though you proved your manhood and saved the day you won’t have met a single eligible bachlorette despite trotting around the city in your finery for the better part of a day.
Congratulations on Getting It Just Right!
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Congratulations on Aborting Sarah Palin's Latest Child!
There are many kinds of public servants, heroes really, who perform valuable acts for society each and every day. They are our police officers, our firemen and, yes, our abortion doctors.
Each and every day you get up and put your latex gloves on one at a time like every other Average Joe and you do your duty like a pro, providing solace and succor to teens who have made terrible mistakes and baby-crazy ladies who have suddenly come their senses after going off of birth control against the advice of medical professionals.
But today you’re going to go above and beyond the call of duty. Today a line of black SUVs is going to pull up in front of the clinic. A band of men in black suits will disgorge from each of the suburban hulks and clear out the protestors from the lawn. Some of them will still shout retarded shit at the bodyguards whenever they turn their backs on them, but a few dry tazes will knock that right out. It will take the better part of an hour, but your lawn will be bereft of irritating protesters for the first time since you started working there.
Once the proverbial dust has settled a woman in a bright red suit will step out of the middle SUV and, under the watch of two suited men, will be spirited to the door and into your clinic. In a matter of moments you’ll recognize the woman as former vice-presidential hopeful and current waste of human life Sarah Palin.
“We need your help,” the suited man will say, looking around your office and taking stock of the various horrified occupants of your office. “We’re willing to make a donation.”
He’ll slide you a piece of paper with a number scrawled on it, a number big enough to fund your clinic for years. Nay, decades. Then he’ll nod and you’ll nod back before sighing and waving Mrs. Palin into an operating room for her procedure.
It’ll take all of your Hippocratic oaths (the one we all know about and the two secret ones) to keep you from purposefully fucking up the abortion and murdering that bitch, but in the end you’ll complete your duties admirably, keeping another one of Sarah Palin’s retarded spawn from entering the world without causing her any undue harm.
In return her and her goons will get the fuck out of your clinic, leaving behind them a big-ass check made out to you personally, because they’re not comfortable donating to a public health clinic where they got an abortion, even though they know that it was really the best thing to do for the entire planet.
You will have kept Sarah Palin from breeding again and secured funding for one of the most oft-reviled and under-funded sectors of public health in the United States. You, sir, will be a true American hero before the day is out, not just one of those queer ass everyday ones like firemen and police officers.
Congratulations on Aborting Sarah Palin’s Latest Child!
Each and every day you get up and put your latex gloves on one at a time like every other Average Joe and you do your duty like a pro, providing solace and succor to teens who have made terrible mistakes and baby-crazy ladies who have suddenly come their senses after going off of birth control against the advice of medical professionals.
But today you’re going to go above and beyond the call of duty. Today a line of black SUVs is going to pull up in front of the clinic. A band of men in black suits will disgorge from each of the suburban hulks and clear out the protestors from the lawn. Some of them will still shout retarded shit at the bodyguards whenever they turn their backs on them, but a few dry tazes will knock that right out. It will take the better part of an hour, but your lawn will be bereft of irritating protesters for the first time since you started working there.
Once the proverbial dust has settled a woman in a bright red suit will step out of the middle SUV and, under the watch of two suited men, will be spirited to the door and into your clinic. In a matter of moments you’ll recognize the woman as former vice-presidential hopeful and current waste of human life Sarah Palin.
“We need your help,” the suited man will say, looking around your office and taking stock of the various horrified occupants of your office. “We’re willing to make a donation.”
He’ll slide you a piece of paper with a number scrawled on it, a number big enough to fund your clinic for years. Nay, decades. Then he’ll nod and you’ll nod back before sighing and waving Mrs. Palin into an operating room for her procedure.
It’ll take all of your Hippocratic oaths (the one we all know about and the two secret ones) to keep you from purposefully fucking up the abortion and murdering that bitch, but in the end you’ll complete your duties admirably, keeping another one of Sarah Palin’s retarded spawn from entering the world without causing her any undue harm.
In return her and her goons will get the fuck out of your clinic, leaving behind them a big-ass check made out to you personally, because they’re not comfortable donating to a public health clinic where they got an abortion, even though they know that it was really the best thing to do for the entire planet.
You will have kept Sarah Palin from breeding again and secured funding for one of the most oft-reviled and under-funded sectors of public health in the United States. You, sir, will be a true American hero before the day is out, not just one of those queer ass everyday ones like firemen and police officers.
Congratulations on Aborting Sarah Palin’s Latest Child!
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Congratulations on Your Faustian Bargain!
You’ll be sitting your lazy chair watching sports or some shit one night when the thought will wander into your brain. That will be enough for him and he’ll leap into your living room in a puff of smoke, standing there in his sweet leather jacket and kind of gay cape, stretching his fingers and licking his lips.
“Hellooooo?” he’ll say, waving away the smoke. You’ll look at him, baffled, but he’ll just keep smiling inscrutably. You’ll turn off the TV, gesturing around his body with the remote, before you really acknowledge his presence.
“Hello,” you’ll respond, standing up. You’ll wonder if you should put on pants for company for a split second before he jumps into the pitch.
“You,” he’ll say, making finger pistols at your now standing form while you look about the room, wondering if pants are conveniently available anywhere nearby, “look like the sort of discerning gentleman who wants it all. Am I right?”
You’ll look at him, perplexed. Perhaps he’s correct. Perhaps you do want it all.
“That’s what I thought,” he’ll say, straightening his tie. He’ll fluff out his coattails before he continues.
“That’s why I’m here today to offer you a once in a lifetime deal. For the low price of your immortal soul you can have that which your heart desires most deeply, no questions asked, no conditions assigned.”
You’ll think for a moment, and as you do so the Devil will conjure a contract from thin air in from of you. It will be made from what appears to be human skin, a strangely soft substance all things considered, and the writing on it will strongly resemble blood, although you won’t think that it’s human because of the rich color and consistency. You’ll be right; it’ll be kitten blood.
After a few minutes pondering you’ll suck on your lower lip and pick up the pen Beelzebub is holding out, putting your John Hancock on that there contract with only the slightest of hesitations. The devil will smile a pointy-toothed grin and nod at you.
“Please doing business with you.”
Then he’ll wink and disappear in a puff of smoke.
The following foursome with the Dixie Chicks will be a lot less interesting and more tear-filled than you’ll have expected, but in the end you’ll feel like you know a little bit more about some musicians who you once viewed as nothing more than sex objects. You won’t sure that it was worth the price of your soul, but it’ll still be something of a learning experience and a memory you’ll treasure for the rest of your ill-begotten existence in the pits of Hell.
Congratulations on Your Faustian Bargain!
“Hellooooo?” he’ll say, waving away the smoke. You’ll look at him, baffled, but he’ll just keep smiling inscrutably. You’ll turn off the TV, gesturing around his body with the remote, before you really acknowledge his presence.
“Hello,” you’ll respond, standing up. You’ll wonder if you should put on pants for company for a split second before he jumps into the pitch.
“You,” he’ll say, making finger pistols at your now standing form while you look about the room, wondering if pants are conveniently available anywhere nearby, “look like the sort of discerning gentleman who wants it all. Am I right?”
You’ll look at him, perplexed. Perhaps he’s correct. Perhaps you do want it all.
“That’s what I thought,” he’ll say, straightening his tie. He’ll fluff out his coattails before he continues.
“That’s why I’m here today to offer you a once in a lifetime deal. For the low price of your immortal soul you can have that which your heart desires most deeply, no questions asked, no conditions assigned.”
You’ll think for a moment, and as you do so the Devil will conjure a contract from thin air in from of you. It will be made from what appears to be human skin, a strangely soft substance all things considered, and the writing on it will strongly resemble blood, although you won’t think that it’s human because of the rich color and consistency. You’ll be right; it’ll be kitten blood.
After a few minutes pondering you’ll suck on your lower lip and pick up the pen Beelzebub is holding out, putting your John Hancock on that there contract with only the slightest of hesitations. The devil will smile a pointy-toothed grin and nod at you.
“Please doing business with you.”
Then he’ll wink and disappear in a puff of smoke.
The following foursome with the Dixie Chicks will be a lot less interesting and more tear-filled than you’ll have expected, but in the end you’ll feel like you know a little bit more about some musicians who you once viewed as nothing more than sex objects. You won’t sure that it was worth the price of your soul, but it’ll still be something of a learning experience and a memory you’ll treasure for the rest of your ill-begotten existence in the pits of Hell.
Congratulations on Your Faustian Bargain!
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Congratulations on Ripping Up Your Fishnets Real Bad!
Dressing in drag once a week is no picnic. Between the shaving, the plucking and the social stigma associated with donning the clothes of another sex and parading around like what your mother affectionately refers to as “a motherfucking freakshow” it’s a real drain physically and mentally.
Which is why we understand your frustration when, tonight, you’re going to put your leg through your fishnets and rip a nice big hole in them because you forgot to trim your big toe. Hey, anyone who cross-dresses and is a guy has been there.
We just ask that you don’t take it out on your dog. We don’t do this out of concern for the animal or anything like that: your dog just happens to be a magical wish granting dog, and if you take any of your shit out on him tonight he’s just going to hang out around your co-workers until one of them wishes that you’d just die in a fire (this will take, at most, fifteen minutes).
Then, whoosh, you’ll be up in a blaze and burnt to a crisp AND you’ll have a nice big tear in your fishnets. All because you never completed that court mandated anger management seminar.
Congratulations on Ripping Up Your Fishnets Real Bad!
Which is why we understand your frustration when, tonight, you’re going to put your leg through your fishnets and rip a nice big hole in them because you forgot to trim your big toe. Hey, anyone who cross-dresses and is a guy has been there.
We just ask that you don’t take it out on your dog. We don’t do this out of concern for the animal or anything like that: your dog just happens to be a magical wish granting dog, and if you take any of your shit out on him tonight he’s just going to hang out around your co-workers until one of them wishes that you’d just die in a fire (this will take, at most, fifteen minutes).
Then, whoosh, you’ll be up in a blaze and burnt to a crisp AND you’ll have a nice big tear in your fishnets. All because you never completed that court mandated anger management seminar.
Congratulations on Ripping Up Your Fishnets Real Bad!
Monday, July 12, 2010
Congratulations on Completely Trashing Your Hotel Room!
Prom night is a special time in every young person’s life. Well, most young people’s lives. Even if they don’t go to the prom they’ll probably end up at an afterparty or, barring that, alone in their home eating ice cream and watching re-runs of Dallas back to back while they have a good cry.
You, however, are one of those cool kids that drinks beer and smokes marijuana cigarettes, so there’s no question as to whether or not you’ll be going to your prom. After all, someone needs to be there to distribute various substances and be publicly inebriated in front of faculty member, chaperoning parents and staff, and you’d sooner die than shy away from your duties as head dipshit for the night.
But since you’re so cool and awesome you’re also going to host a super cool after party in a hotel room far above the prom. It’ll be stocked with wine coolers, “skank ass weed” (Mexican Brick variety) and the cheapest vodka money can buy. And even though you’ll be dancing with a super hot girl who doesn’t seem too interested in you and they’ll be playing that dope ass song by Disturbed you love so dearly all you’ll be able to think about is getting up to that room and partying down.
When prom ends and those fuckers unchain the fucking doors and let you little hellcats out into the real world for one night of adult style fun and passion you’ll sprint to the elevator, nearly ripping your bored date’s arm off. You’ll ram her, and several of your “friends” (people who buy drugs from you) into the elevator and head on up.
When you open up the door it’ll be everything your parents told you it should be. The wine coolers will be better than cool – they’ll be downright cold. The Mexican brick weed will be in pre-rolled joints, and the vodka will be “all up on ya” as you insist on repeatedly saying. You’ll run around the room high fiving your friends and hooting loud as you can. But before the festivities begin properly you’ll excuse yourself to the bathroom to “tame the snake,” which you think is a euphamism for urinating but is actually a coded phrase for masturbation.
You’ll be in there long enough for either of the two options to be a reasonable guess, thanks largely to an untreated UTI you caught through unprotected sex with the sullen faced girl during a yeast infection. By the time you emerge the room will be in shambles, most of your so-called friends gone with all of the booze. Most notable among the absentees will be your, until a few minute ago, date for the night, from whom you hoped to solicit a handjob.
The room will be in shambles, the few remaining party attendees mostly there to salve your wounded feelings, inform you of a fake second location where “the party has moved to” and to try and get some more drugs out of you in exchange for your friendship, because drugs are the only reason anyone talks to you in the first place anyways.
So prom night will tick by with you sitting alone in a hotel room with only the beer that you brought to the bathroom with you, watching your former friends file into someone’s minivan. They’ll look like they’re having a lot of fun.
Congratulations on Completely Trashing Your Hotel Room!
You, however, are one of those cool kids that drinks beer and smokes marijuana cigarettes, so there’s no question as to whether or not you’ll be going to your prom. After all, someone needs to be there to distribute various substances and be publicly inebriated in front of faculty member, chaperoning parents and staff, and you’d sooner die than shy away from your duties as head dipshit for the night.
But since you’re so cool and awesome you’re also going to host a super cool after party in a hotel room far above the prom. It’ll be stocked with wine coolers, “skank ass weed” (Mexican Brick variety) and the cheapest vodka money can buy. And even though you’ll be dancing with a super hot girl who doesn’t seem too interested in you and they’ll be playing that dope ass song by Disturbed you love so dearly all you’ll be able to think about is getting up to that room and partying down.
When prom ends and those fuckers unchain the fucking doors and let you little hellcats out into the real world for one night of adult style fun and passion you’ll sprint to the elevator, nearly ripping your bored date’s arm off. You’ll ram her, and several of your “friends” (people who buy drugs from you) into the elevator and head on up.
When you open up the door it’ll be everything your parents told you it should be. The wine coolers will be better than cool – they’ll be downright cold. The Mexican brick weed will be in pre-rolled joints, and the vodka will be “all up on ya” as you insist on repeatedly saying. You’ll run around the room high fiving your friends and hooting loud as you can. But before the festivities begin properly you’ll excuse yourself to the bathroom to “tame the snake,” which you think is a euphamism for urinating but is actually a coded phrase for masturbation.
You’ll be in there long enough for either of the two options to be a reasonable guess, thanks largely to an untreated UTI you caught through unprotected sex with the sullen faced girl during a yeast infection. By the time you emerge the room will be in shambles, most of your so-called friends gone with all of the booze. Most notable among the absentees will be your, until a few minute ago, date for the night, from whom you hoped to solicit a handjob.
The room will be in shambles, the few remaining party attendees mostly there to salve your wounded feelings, inform you of a fake second location where “the party has moved to” and to try and get some more drugs out of you in exchange for your friendship, because drugs are the only reason anyone talks to you in the first place anyways.
So prom night will tick by with you sitting alone in a hotel room with only the beer that you brought to the bathroom with you, watching your former friends file into someone’s minivan. They’ll look like they’re having a lot of fun.
Congratulations on Completely Trashing Your Hotel Room!
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Where Little Stories Come From!
I’m not a fan of Ulysses. I took a course while I was studying in Ireland that focused on Joyce’s prose and Ulysses formed the centerpiece of the class. The professor loved the book with all the fervor and reason of an abused spouse: gushing of its victories, ignoring its shortcomings and betrayals and beginning most conversations in class with abject praise for Joyce without consideration for the very serious problems that Ulysses had as a book, the very problems which make it so very worthy of discussion today.
So it’s fair to say that I didn’t really like Ulysses when I first read it, with good reason. It’s one thing to hear vague praise from academics about a text when they reference it offhand, or to see the text referred to again and again in abstraction on lists, but when you’re analyzing a text and your guide does nothing but gush it’s as if you’re on a guided tour: you miss out on the real experience of the book and you’re instead forced to endure someone else’s interpretation of it. You lose the personal context critical to reading any book, especially one like Ulysses and receive, instead a set of talking points about the book.
Which is sort of funny, given the nature of Ulysses as a text. Drawing from a diverse set of textual influences and personally obtuse, the only real value the book has is as a document about personal experience and the unintelligible nature of our own minds to one another. Joyce wrote it with the frank objective of not being understood, and succeeded admirably, making a book about one day in the city of Dublin which took place in the minds of its characters, rambling, chaotic places where readers can never feel at home. As such anything you really get out of the book, anything more than the most basic plot points, comes from the interpretation of this text, your personal experience reading it.
It might be frustrating, it might be enlightening, it might be boring, but it is an experience, and that is primarily what Ulysses has on offer. Its plot is thin and well tread ground, its language oscillating between poetic and irritatingly forceful attempts to be poetic, and the style can only be decoded by people who have read the specific influences Joyce drew each section of the book from. The experience is the text, the text the experience.
The same thing goes for reading poetry. While people like to spout on about personal meaning and depth in poetry I’ve found that good poetry, really good poetry, presents and interesting experience to the person reading it, regardless of their background or knowledge of the text. The test of a good poem is in handing it to a complete stranger and seeing how they respond. If you can elicit the intended response, or any sort of response, you’ve got something there. But the poem itself, the setting, its plot, where it comes from: these details are all inconsequential. What matters is the act of reading, of making the poem your own.
All books rely on this sort of tacit contract between reader and author to some extent, but these specific examples call attention to their demand for attention and the necessity of generating an experience while reading a book. They’re largely unpopular and widely misunderstood as a result, but they’re still important cultural documents that tell us stories, even if these stories are often about ourselves. This same case of incidental narrative shaping an experience is something we see reflected time and time again in video games.
There are plenty of games without interpretive narratives. Last week I mentioned Jericho, whose cardinal sin isn’t necessarily its poor game play, opaque puzzles or repetitive action, but a manner of telling a story which literally forces players to do everything in one very specific way in order to move the ball ahead. Most games provide some room for improvisation in their plots, but Jericho will take control away from you to make sure that you’re doing the right thing at a given time. The actions you carry out during the various fights in Jericho are either too constrained or mundane to really make them worth mentioning, as well. It’s a game that has a movie’s tenor while telling a story, occasionally asking that we help out in splicing together some of the action scenes.
Other titles guilty of this crime are most RTSes (Remember that time your zealots bravely charged through Kerrigan’s defense and won the day? Nope? Didn’t think so.) most brawler games (Although given the stories that they do present it probably shouldn’t matter – and the button pressing experiences are engaging enough that it’s hard to really consider this a detracting factor.) and, somewhat ironically, an entire subsection of console RPGs imported from Japan, where many mainstream developers still discount the importance of player input in games (Use your summon during the scripted cutscene and forget about it until you’re in a really hard fight again!). There are plenty of games that have set stories, that don’t want players to participate in their narratives, but the by excising player input the quality of a given narrative tends to decrease exponentially.
People frequently discount storytelling in games, saying that if they wanted a great story they’d watch a movie or read a book. These are the games that allow them to say that, games that want players to do very specific things at very specific moments, that want to tell stories that could just as easily be told in other mediums. They’re not always terrible at telling their little stories, although because they’re game stories they do tend to drag a good bit longer than most stories told in visual media do, and they’re often drawn from insubstantial or inconsistent material because games don’t really have the same draw as other narrative mediums.
But the people who criticize games because of the shortcomings of games that fail at telling a story in their own medium and people who make these abortive, misplaced stories are both making games as a medium less than it could be. Because games, the best games, take the contract between reader and author and twist it in unprecedented ways. They make players more than just a passive interpretive figure who can only impact the text as it is written: they give them agency as both a reader and writer figure.
Some games do this by providing players with lots of options during the interstitials between exposition. For example, Half-Life’s much vaunted story was really something that emerged during player, something that came as a result of well constructed levels and well built enemy AI. There were some bits they forced you to experience, sure, like making you do manual labor and forcing you to launch an awesome rocket, but for the most part Half-Life was all about letting events develop on their own. That vortegaunt that spawned in that corridor might always spawn in the same spot, but his responses to your actions, your approach to him and the resolution to the situation is what made Half-Life a game worth playing. That and some of the keenest writing and development in the industry which came as much from the efforts of Valve’s team as their knowledge of the community for which they made games.
Valve has been quite good at maintaining this attention to their audience, even if they do sometimes draw back the curtain to expose the moving parts behind their games and how they still attempt to shape player experience without being explicit about it. It’s telling of their finished products that even when the very people who made the game spend their time casting light on the seams Valve’s experiences never feel artificial or overly engineered. Instead the end project just feels polished, like it can accept any input from the player without breaking or, most of the time, even tearing. In a game so dedicated to breaking rules that’s quite impressive.
And Valve’s “improvisational interstitial” method isn’t the only way to tell a viable story in interactive media. Bethesda has all but perfected open world game play, offering up resilient little playgrounds that players can put through some impressive paces without breaking. While Open World play is far from easy to do, and some games, such as the Grand Theft Auto series, fail completely at adapting a story to it, instead using a hybrid of interstitial play and Open World setting, when executed properly a good Open World game is, more or less, the pinnacle of what games are capable of in storytelling.
By presenting players with a system which can be circumvented, a system which is more intended to shape interactions rather than dictate their pace and pitch, a good Open World game offers unprecedented narrative control to players and, as a result, requires a good deal more care in its design than traditional games. Games like Fallout, Oblivion and (to a far lesser extent) Far Cry 2 have to account for the player wandering into unexpected areas at unexpected times. They have to make their worlds interesting and full without making them too over the top. It’s a fine balance, and a difficult one to strike. The pantheon of open world games is littered with games that attempted to be too much and failed as a result.
And it’s here that the most important relationship between texts and games becomes apparent. Games generally don’t look to other media, except perhaps films, in how they tell their stories. The result in an unfortunate mish-mash of structural storytelling techniques in a medium which abhors such efforts, games that attempt or force cinematic moments on players who would much rather actually be playing the game. You can see this in manner in which bad cutscenes are made, the way that poorly constructed quicktime events just feel wrong, or the way that games sometimes remove control to make sure you see inconsequential things that the writer felt illustrated the setting. Games as they are written now want to be other things, things like books and movies. They don’t accept that they are games and, almost universally, fail as a result. Occasionally a game with an especially strong sense of character or a particularly good story will emerge and endure this process, but there are few games with stories that can be described without eliciting gales of laughter from listeners.
But by including texts, especially postmodern texts, in the narrative diet of the people who both consume and create games we can move forward faster than ever before. The same way that Levine’s experiences with Rand shaped Bioshock other developers could potentially take their leads from novels and poems rather than films in writing the stories of their games. While it might not happen any time soon, and may indeed never happen, it’s something to hope for, and a simple shift like this towards drawing real authors to the medium of games that could change the shape of our stories forever.
So it’s fair to say that I didn’t really like Ulysses when I first read it, with good reason. It’s one thing to hear vague praise from academics about a text when they reference it offhand, or to see the text referred to again and again in abstraction on lists, but when you’re analyzing a text and your guide does nothing but gush it’s as if you’re on a guided tour: you miss out on the real experience of the book and you’re instead forced to endure someone else’s interpretation of it. You lose the personal context critical to reading any book, especially one like Ulysses and receive, instead a set of talking points about the book.
Which is sort of funny, given the nature of Ulysses as a text. Drawing from a diverse set of textual influences and personally obtuse, the only real value the book has is as a document about personal experience and the unintelligible nature of our own minds to one another. Joyce wrote it with the frank objective of not being understood, and succeeded admirably, making a book about one day in the city of Dublin which took place in the minds of its characters, rambling, chaotic places where readers can never feel at home. As such anything you really get out of the book, anything more than the most basic plot points, comes from the interpretation of this text, your personal experience reading it.
It might be frustrating, it might be enlightening, it might be boring, but it is an experience, and that is primarily what Ulysses has on offer. Its plot is thin and well tread ground, its language oscillating between poetic and irritatingly forceful attempts to be poetic, and the style can only be decoded by people who have read the specific influences Joyce drew each section of the book from. The experience is the text, the text the experience.
The same thing goes for reading poetry. While people like to spout on about personal meaning and depth in poetry I’ve found that good poetry, really good poetry, presents and interesting experience to the person reading it, regardless of their background or knowledge of the text. The test of a good poem is in handing it to a complete stranger and seeing how they respond. If you can elicit the intended response, or any sort of response, you’ve got something there. But the poem itself, the setting, its plot, where it comes from: these details are all inconsequential. What matters is the act of reading, of making the poem your own.
All books rely on this sort of tacit contract between reader and author to some extent, but these specific examples call attention to their demand for attention and the necessity of generating an experience while reading a book. They’re largely unpopular and widely misunderstood as a result, but they’re still important cultural documents that tell us stories, even if these stories are often about ourselves. This same case of incidental narrative shaping an experience is something we see reflected time and time again in video games.
There are plenty of games without interpretive narratives. Last week I mentioned Jericho, whose cardinal sin isn’t necessarily its poor game play, opaque puzzles or repetitive action, but a manner of telling a story which literally forces players to do everything in one very specific way in order to move the ball ahead. Most games provide some room for improvisation in their plots, but Jericho will take control away from you to make sure that you’re doing the right thing at a given time. The actions you carry out during the various fights in Jericho are either too constrained or mundane to really make them worth mentioning, as well. It’s a game that has a movie’s tenor while telling a story, occasionally asking that we help out in splicing together some of the action scenes.
Other titles guilty of this crime are most RTSes (Remember that time your zealots bravely charged through Kerrigan’s defense and won the day? Nope? Didn’t think so.) most brawler games (Although given the stories that they do present it probably shouldn’t matter – and the button pressing experiences are engaging enough that it’s hard to really consider this a detracting factor.) and, somewhat ironically, an entire subsection of console RPGs imported from Japan, where many mainstream developers still discount the importance of player input in games (Use your summon during the scripted cutscene and forget about it until you’re in a really hard fight again!). There are plenty of games that have set stories, that don’t want players to participate in their narratives, but the by excising player input the quality of a given narrative tends to decrease exponentially.
People frequently discount storytelling in games, saying that if they wanted a great story they’d watch a movie or read a book. These are the games that allow them to say that, games that want players to do very specific things at very specific moments, that want to tell stories that could just as easily be told in other mediums. They’re not always terrible at telling their little stories, although because they’re game stories they do tend to drag a good bit longer than most stories told in visual media do, and they’re often drawn from insubstantial or inconsistent material because games don’t really have the same draw as other narrative mediums.
But the people who criticize games because of the shortcomings of games that fail at telling a story in their own medium and people who make these abortive, misplaced stories are both making games as a medium less than it could be. Because games, the best games, take the contract between reader and author and twist it in unprecedented ways. They make players more than just a passive interpretive figure who can only impact the text as it is written: they give them agency as both a reader and writer figure.
Some games do this by providing players with lots of options during the interstitials between exposition. For example, Half-Life’s much vaunted story was really something that emerged during player, something that came as a result of well constructed levels and well built enemy AI. There were some bits they forced you to experience, sure, like making you do manual labor and forcing you to launch an awesome rocket, but for the most part Half-Life was all about letting events develop on their own. That vortegaunt that spawned in that corridor might always spawn in the same spot, but his responses to your actions, your approach to him and the resolution to the situation is what made Half-Life a game worth playing. That and some of the keenest writing and development in the industry which came as much from the efforts of Valve’s team as their knowledge of the community for which they made games.
Valve has been quite good at maintaining this attention to their audience, even if they do sometimes draw back the curtain to expose the moving parts behind their games and how they still attempt to shape player experience without being explicit about it. It’s telling of their finished products that even when the very people who made the game spend their time casting light on the seams Valve’s experiences never feel artificial or overly engineered. Instead the end project just feels polished, like it can accept any input from the player without breaking or, most of the time, even tearing. In a game so dedicated to breaking rules that’s quite impressive.
And Valve’s “improvisational interstitial” method isn’t the only way to tell a viable story in interactive media. Bethesda has all but perfected open world game play, offering up resilient little playgrounds that players can put through some impressive paces without breaking. While Open World play is far from easy to do, and some games, such as the Grand Theft Auto series, fail completely at adapting a story to it, instead using a hybrid of interstitial play and Open World setting, when executed properly a good Open World game is, more or less, the pinnacle of what games are capable of in storytelling.
By presenting players with a system which can be circumvented, a system which is more intended to shape interactions rather than dictate their pace and pitch, a good Open World game offers unprecedented narrative control to players and, as a result, requires a good deal more care in its design than traditional games. Games like Fallout, Oblivion and (to a far lesser extent) Far Cry 2 have to account for the player wandering into unexpected areas at unexpected times. They have to make their worlds interesting and full without making them too over the top. It’s a fine balance, and a difficult one to strike. The pantheon of open world games is littered with games that attempted to be too much and failed as a result.
And it’s here that the most important relationship between texts and games becomes apparent. Games generally don’t look to other media, except perhaps films, in how they tell their stories. The result in an unfortunate mish-mash of structural storytelling techniques in a medium which abhors such efforts, games that attempt or force cinematic moments on players who would much rather actually be playing the game. You can see this in manner in which bad cutscenes are made, the way that poorly constructed quicktime events just feel wrong, or the way that games sometimes remove control to make sure you see inconsequential things that the writer felt illustrated the setting. Games as they are written now want to be other things, things like books and movies. They don’t accept that they are games and, almost universally, fail as a result. Occasionally a game with an especially strong sense of character or a particularly good story will emerge and endure this process, but there are few games with stories that can be described without eliciting gales of laughter from listeners.
But by including texts, especially postmodern texts, in the narrative diet of the people who both consume and create games we can move forward faster than ever before. The same way that Levine’s experiences with Rand shaped Bioshock other developers could potentially take their leads from novels and poems rather than films in writing the stories of their games. While it might not happen any time soon, and may indeed never happen, it’s something to hope for, and a simple shift like this towards drawing real authors to the medium of games that could change the shape of our stories forever.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Congratulations on Proving You're the Coolest!
Plenty of people think they’re cool. But relatively few of those people are, in fact, scientists who have painstakingly created methods by which to display their overall coolness. In fact most people who think they’re cool can barely do math. According to your coolness index that makes them, as a rule, incredibly uncool.
But you’ve never actually applied your coolness index to yourself. You’ve always wanted to, curious as to just how cool you’d turn out to be under the harsh, objective lens of science. But fear and laziness and attempts to bang hot chicks all got in the way. Until this morning.
This morning you’ll get some test results in early. Normally when this happens you just go play Peggle for a while and pretend to be “sciencing” but today you’re going to open up Popcap’s web page and be greeted with a message that, sorry, this page is currently down for scheduled maintainence. Cursing under your breath you’ll search through the various files on your hard drive, looking for something resembling a game, when you’ll find the lengthy word doc detailing your Coolness Index and its application. It’ll even have a form table that will allow you to insert values and calculate your own personal coolness.
You’ll immediately open the file and pull out a ledger, filling out your own coolness numbers by hand as you go. As a scientist you learned long ago not to trust computers with truly important math, after all, and this is perhaps the most important calculation there is: the calculation that will mathematically show how cool you are.
You’ll spend so much time crunching the numbers that when you look up, your task completed, you’ll have realized that you scienced right through lunch and into the early afternoon. Chewing on a Nutrigrain bar while you look over your results you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
According to the Awesome Coolness Index 2.0, you’ll be the coolest possible person in the world. According to your scale of cool, the manner in which you dress like you just don’t care, your single status, your shitty car and your amazing skills at math and science will make you the coolest and most uninhibited human being possible under the conditions of modern society.
You’ll share your results with your attractive female lab mate, but she’ll seem unimpressed. She’ll look over the test and laugh for a while, which, if anything, should make you feel even cooler because chicks totally find you funny. But for some reason it will just make you feel uncomfortable which, if it was factored into your coolness equation, would make you less than the coolest guy on the face of the earth.
Congratulations on Proving You’re the Coolest!
But you’ve never actually applied your coolness index to yourself. You’ve always wanted to, curious as to just how cool you’d turn out to be under the harsh, objective lens of science. But fear and laziness and attempts to bang hot chicks all got in the way. Until this morning.
This morning you’ll get some test results in early. Normally when this happens you just go play Peggle for a while and pretend to be “sciencing” but today you’re going to open up Popcap’s web page and be greeted with a message that, sorry, this page is currently down for scheduled maintainence. Cursing under your breath you’ll search through the various files on your hard drive, looking for something resembling a game, when you’ll find the lengthy word doc detailing your Coolness Index and its application. It’ll even have a form table that will allow you to insert values and calculate your own personal coolness.
You’ll immediately open the file and pull out a ledger, filling out your own coolness numbers by hand as you go. As a scientist you learned long ago not to trust computers with truly important math, after all, and this is perhaps the most important calculation there is: the calculation that will mathematically show how cool you are.
You’ll spend so much time crunching the numbers that when you look up, your task completed, you’ll have realized that you scienced right through lunch and into the early afternoon. Chewing on a Nutrigrain bar while you look over your results you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
According to the Awesome Coolness Index 2.0, you’ll be the coolest possible person in the world. According to your scale of cool, the manner in which you dress like you just don’t care, your single status, your shitty car and your amazing skills at math and science will make you the coolest and most uninhibited human being possible under the conditions of modern society.
You’ll share your results with your attractive female lab mate, but she’ll seem unimpressed. She’ll look over the test and laugh for a while, which, if anything, should make you feel even cooler because chicks totally find you funny. But for some reason it will just make you feel uncomfortable which, if it was factored into your coolness equation, would make you less than the coolest guy on the face of the earth.
Congratulations on Proving You’re the Coolest!
Friday, July 9, 2010
Congratulations on Alienating Tim Curry!
There aren’t many people in Hollywood more recognizable and accessible than Tim Curry. A veteran of camp and classic film, most people can’t imagine projects that Mr. Curry wouldn’t deign to associate himself with. Need a giant talking penis to be your villain in an upcoming film and want someone great at acting to play him? Call Tim. Want a hilarious Russian man to tell you what you’re doing in a video game? Tim. A wondrous human being to portray Rasputin in an oddball romantic comedy that recasts his political machinations in the Russian court as a madcap romance between a married woman and the executive of a film studio? Mister Curry can deliver.
There are pitiful few roles this consummate professional wouldn’t accept, and though none of us are sure if he is motivated by financial drive or simply by love of his craft, it’s hard to get Tim Curry to pass on a project. He’s like the opposite of H. Jon Benjamin.
But there are things he’ll refuse to do. And it turns out that asking him to portray a bear version of Hitler who cleanses a forest of rabbits who are thinly veiled stand-ins for Jews in a picture which is “like Shortbus without the positive energy or accepting message” is pretty much the line.
What’s more it’ll keep him from ever speaking to you again and make the scheduled coffee meeting you have with him (which he’ll still keep to because he’s such a classy gent) that much more awkward. We hope you’re pleased with yourself and that you enjoy featuring Mark Ruffalo in that role instead, since there’s literally nothing that asshole won’t do for money.
Congratulations on Alienating Tim Curry!
There are pitiful few roles this consummate professional wouldn’t accept, and though none of us are sure if he is motivated by financial drive or simply by love of his craft, it’s hard to get Tim Curry to pass on a project. He’s like the opposite of H. Jon Benjamin.
But there are things he’ll refuse to do. And it turns out that asking him to portray a bear version of Hitler who cleanses a forest of rabbits who are thinly veiled stand-ins for Jews in a picture which is “like Shortbus without the positive energy or accepting message” is pretty much the line.
What’s more it’ll keep him from ever speaking to you again and make the scheduled coffee meeting you have with him (which he’ll still keep to because he’s such a classy gent) that much more awkward. We hope you’re pleased with yourself and that you enjoy featuring Mark Ruffalo in that role instead, since there’s literally nothing that asshole won’t do for money.
Congratulations on Alienating Tim Curry!
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Congratulations on Convincing Yourself of the Veracity of the Show Hung!
Today’s fortelling is quite the feat. We honestly didn’t think anyone could make themselves believe that a TV show about an attractive young woman renting out a gym teacher to all of her suburban housewife friends for sex was actually possible. But someone genetics aligned and made someone as stupid as you, so we guess we’re wrong.
Step one will have to involve being desperate enough to believe in a fantasy like this. You’re a high school gym teacher, so you’ll pretty much have that bit covered.
Step two will be convincing yourself not only that attractive suburban housewives like sex in the first place (when, as we all know, women universally abhor sex) but that they’d actually be hard enough up for it and desperate enough for it to want it. We suggest head trauma or several decades of heavy drinking to deal with this step. Your career as a gym teacher, however, might’ve already taken care of it for you.
Step three will involve convincing yourself that all women everywhere find having sex with a man with a freakishly large penis to be the best sexual experience of their life, bar none. Pornography, especially the sort of pornography that features a dead eyed young woman who looks like she might start crying at any second, will take care of this for you.
Step four will involve seeing an episode of Hung. Since we know you can’t afford HBO, we suggest getting the DVDs through Netflix. The queue will have a fairly long wait, so this could take a while. Alternative viewing sites such as alluc or Hulu might also be able to help you here.
The fifth and final step will involve just willing hard enough that you can actually make yourself believe that the shit you see on television is more than just entertainment, that it is a real possibility that could become your life if you work out more and keep on those penis pills. You’ll accomplish this goal with unsettling ease.
So Congratulations on Convincing Yourself of the Veracity of the Show Hung! It’s still not going to make your dick bigger, and it’s definitely not going to get you laid!
Step one will have to involve being desperate enough to believe in a fantasy like this. You’re a high school gym teacher, so you’ll pretty much have that bit covered.
Step two will be convincing yourself not only that attractive suburban housewives like sex in the first place (when, as we all know, women universally abhor sex) but that they’d actually be hard enough up for it and desperate enough for it to want it. We suggest head trauma or several decades of heavy drinking to deal with this step. Your career as a gym teacher, however, might’ve already taken care of it for you.
Step three will involve convincing yourself that all women everywhere find having sex with a man with a freakishly large penis to be the best sexual experience of their life, bar none. Pornography, especially the sort of pornography that features a dead eyed young woman who looks like she might start crying at any second, will take care of this for you.
Step four will involve seeing an episode of Hung. Since we know you can’t afford HBO, we suggest getting the DVDs through Netflix. The queue will have a fairly long wait, so this could take a while. Alternative viewing sites such as alluc or Hulu might also be able to help you here.
The fifth and final step will involve just willing hard enough that you can actually make yourself believe that the shit you see on television is more than just entertainment, that it is a real possibility that could become your life if you work out more and keep on those penis pills. You’ll accomplish this goal with unsettling ease.
So Congratulations on Convincing Yourself of the Veracity of the Show Hung! It’s still not going to make your dick bigger, and it’s definitely not going to get you laid!
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Congratulations on Establishing New Defensible Grounds for Homicide!
Your latest client is a curious case. He killed his boss a few days ago in what could be considered a moment of rage following his unfair termination and was escorted out of his office by a cheering throng of supportive co-workers. He entered police custody without any sort of struggle and has been nothing but cooperative since his arrest. He is clearly sane, articulate, well educated, and generally not prone to violent outbursts.
You’ll get up in front of the judge and do your all to get his sentence down, citing his lack of violent behavior in the past, his full cooperation and his attempt to control violence, but the judge won’t want to hear about anything from you. He’ll just get the kid on the stand and talk to him.
The two will converse for several hours in front of a crowded courtroom, with occasional breaks where the young man’s co-workers come forward to defend his actions by describing how big of a douche their boss was. One woman will even come up and, tearfully, announce that she was once drugged and raped at an office event by her superior and that she did not come out publicly due to threats of termination. After this long, forum style discussion he’ll tell Jeremy to return to his seat at your bench and announce his decision.
“Time served,” he’ll mumble, then shuffle back off to his chambers.
In the write-up of the decision he’ll explain that he believes that the removal of certain excessively douchey people from our general populace is actually a public service, and that Jeremy was performing just such a service in a responsible, brave and honorable fashion. If anything he deserves some sort of reward, but the best our system can do for such a man is simply to let him walk free among the people he has given hope to.
You’ll scratch your head, collect your fee from the state and enjoy the business that being a part of one of the strangest legal precedents in recent history (just behind the dog one) brings with it.
Congratulations on Establishing New Defensible Grounds for Homicide!
You’ll get up in front of the judge and do your all to get his sentence down, citing his lack of violent behavior in the past, his full cooperation and his attempt to control violence, but the judge won’t want to hear about anything from you. He’ll just get the kid on the stand and talk to him.
The two will converse for several hours in front of a crowded courtroom, with occasional breaks where the young man’s co-workers come forward to defend his actions by describing how big of a douche their boss was. One woman will even come up and, tearfully, announce that she was once drugged and raped at an office event by her superior and that she did not come out publicly due to threats of termination. After this long, forum style discussion he’ll tell Jeremy to return to his seat at your bench and announce his decision.
“Time served,” he’ll mumble, then shuffle back off to his chambers.
In the write-up of the decision he’ll explain that he believes that the removal of certain excessively douchey people from our general populace is actually a public service, and that Jeremy was performing just such a service in a responsible, brave and honorable fashion. If anything he deserves some sort of reward, but the best our system can do for such a man is simply to let him walk free among the people he has given hope to.
You’ll scratch your head, collect your fee from the state and enjoy the business that being a part of one of the strangest legal precedents in recent history (just behind the dog one) brings with it.
Congratulations on Establishing New Defensible Grounds for Homicide!
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Congratulations on Taking Up Morphine and Then Giving It Up!
Today you’re going to be one of the millions whose lives have been ruined, or in this case nearly ruined, by morphine.
Following a car accident you’re going to be hospitalized with a fractured femur and a broken collarbone. You’ll be taken to the ICU and immediately hooked up to a morphine drip, which will dull the pain coming over your shattered body in waves.
The morphine will course strong through your veins for upwards of six hours before it stops, and when it stops the mind searing pain will return.
“My god,” you’ll say to your bewildered Jamaican nurse, who prefers it when her patients simply ignore her or insult her. “I think I might be addicted to morphine.”
“This feels like hell,” you’ll add as she hurries out of the room to pretend that you didn’t speak to her.
As you lay there in bed you’ll resolve never to use morphine again, lest it has been prescribed to you by a licensed physician, lest it ruin your life. Gritting your teeth in pain, you’ll look around the room and wonder when the next dose of sweet, sweet painkillers will come and wash this horrible feeling away.
Congratulations on Taking Up Morphine and Then Giving It Up!
Following a car accident you’re going to be hospitalized with a fractured femur and a broken collarbone. You’ll be taken to the ICU and immediately hooked up to a morphine drip, which will dull the pain coming over your shattered body in waves.
The morphine will course strong through your veins for upwards of six hours before it stops, and when it stops the mind searing pain will return.
“My god,” you’ll say to your bewildered Jamaican nurse, who prefers it when her patients simply ignore her or insult her. “I think I might be addicted to morphine.”
“This feels like hell,” you’ll add as she hurries out of the room to pretend that you didn’t speak to her.
As you lay there in bed you’ll resolve never to use morphine again, lest it has been prescribed to you by a licensed physician, lest it ruin your life. Gritting your teeth in pain, you’ll look around the room and wonder when the next dose of sweet, sweet painkillers will come and wash this horrible feeling away.
Congratulations on Taking Up Morphine and Then Giving It Up!
Monday, July 5, 2010
Congratulations Crisco Fans!
Crisco is great. Just great. And everybody’s who’s anybody knows it.
It has a thousand and one uses. Cooking. Lubricant. And nine hundred and ninety nine others we’re unfamiliar with but we’re absolutely sure are there.
But there’s a problem. Big Olive Oil has been spread perfidious lies about the amazing product that is Crisco. They’ve been telling people it’s fatty, that it’s bad for them, that it gives them cancer and makes them cheat on their wives, husbands or life partners. And while the last one is kind of true it’s largely a result of stress in relationships which was there to start with which isn’t really Crisco’s fault at all. And we all know Olive Oil is just jealous.
Which is why it’s going to be so awesome when a bunch of cans of Crisco crawl out, take human form and defend themselves today on national television.
The mass of animal fat and love will take up its seat across a television studio from a talking head who will incessantly mention childhood obesity and how bad Crisco is for people, and Crisco will mention that it has never claimed to be a role model and that it cannot be blamed for how it is used.
Then it’ll bring out Jessica Alba and do her on national television.
The high point of the entire episode, which will last an extra fifteen minutes so we can see Crisco’s money shot, will be Jessica Alba turning towards the camera, her face twisted in ecstasy, crying out “I love you so fucking much, Crisco!”
Congratulations Crisco Fans!
It has a thousand and one uses. Cooking. Lubricant. And nine hundred and ninety nine others we’re unfamiliar with but we’re absolutely sure are there.
But there’s a problem. Big Olive Oil has been spread perfidious lies about the amazing product that is Crisco. They’ve been telling people it’s fatty, that it’s bad for them, that it gives them cancer and makes them cheat on their wives, husbands or life partners. And while the last one is kind of true it’s largely a result of stress in relationships which was there to start with which isn’t really Crisco’s fault at all. And we all know Olive Oil is just jealous.
Which is why it’s going to be so awesome when a bunch of cans of Crisco crawl out, take human form and defend themselves today on national television.
The mass of animal fat and love will take up its seat across a television studio from a talking head who will incessantly mention childhood obesity and how bad Crisco is for people, and Crisco will mention that it has never claimed to be a role model and that it cannot be blamed for how it is used.
Then it’ll bring out Jessica Alba and do her on national television.
The high point of the entire episode, which will last an extra fifteen minutes so we can see Crisco’s money shot, will be Jessica Alba turning towards the camera, her face twisted in ecstasy, crying out “I love you so fucking much, Crisco!”
Congratulations Crisco Fans!
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Goood Old Clive!
When one considers the names of creative luminaries who have shaped video games a few fling to mind. Satoru Iwata, Kenicho Ueda, David Jaffe, Sid Meyer, Peter Molyneux. I think of Ken Levine, Tim Schaffer, Warren Spector, Satoru Miyamoto. Visionaries who craft systems of iterative narrative that play out through the course of play, men largely unconcerned with conceits of traditional narrative, far more comfortable creating a framework and letting people mess with it than painstakingly crafting a series of sets and forcing players to move through them one by one. But when it comes to discussing games, these men are largely silent. Iwata and Miyamoto love to discuss concepts of branding and the business side of games, and Schaffer and Levine have no trouble citing their creative influences outside of games, but when it comes to sitting down and defending the medium in public they leave it to representatives like N’Gai Kroal and Geoff Keighly.
The only creative mind involved with games who is also vocal in its definition and protection as an art form that I can think of offhand isn’t someone I’d consider a luminary. It isn’t someone I’d consider that good at making games. It’s actually Clive Barker.
Barker made his entry into the fields of electronic narrative with the early release, Undying. Undying was a gory, fun FPS , almost universally well received by critics and uniformly ignored by consumers. Undying was an ambitious attempt at pushing the relatively strict technological limits of the time and introducing gameplay mechanics that would one day be taken up by games as well received and iconic as Bioshock. That spells in one hand, gun in the other thing? Undying did that first.
Unfortunately I cannot vouch for any of Undying’s storytelling quirks or the quality of its play, except by secondhand opinion, but a casual observation of the response the game received, and its noteworthy position as Gamespot’s “Number One Game No One Played,” illustrates that regardless of its narrative hooks it demonstrated Barker’s keen eye for unsettling his audience and a knack for design. For all I know the story was shit on a biscuit covered in flies, but the fact that he’d produced an experience that was so well considered during such a halcyon era of game design was telling.
But I can tell you that the knack for creating games that he demonstrated in games like Undying did not carry over to Jericho. Jericho is Barker’s attempt at a contemporary game, and it plays like a brawler without a brain. You trudge down identical paths and fight scripted enemies until your resources magically appear. Occasionally you fight a boss and have to listen to your teammates shout at you until you do as they say and finish the fucker off. Sometimes there’s a tough fight and you have to weather it alone or something. Sometimes players go away. But you’re always heading down a hallway towards a set destination, fighting enemies with infinitely regenerating resources. It engages as much as a rail shooter, occasionally busting out of its skin with an intensely frustrating quicktime sequence which demands complete dedication or certain death.
Despite all these flaws a few good ideas are present in Jericho. Specifically the idea of a suicide mission that isn’t, the idea of a pocket plane and the futility of man’s existence. Jericho has some of the deep existential roots that Barker has shown in weird, sometimes campy, sometimes bad books and movies like Hellraiser. It shows the brain he brings to pop, the Lovecraftian sensibility about our fragility as people and the concept that terrible things occur not because of the supernatural invading our world but because of our own ignorance, misunderstanding and poorly construed attempts to tap these larger forces. Where we once had the theory of relativity we now have the power of the atom – we are children playing in Barker’s world, just as a child menaces the entire world because of God’s frivolity in Jericho.
Of course, none of this saves the game from being a piece of shit. But that’s neither here nor there. My point is that Barker is experienced in games. He’s experience in writing books and films and all other kinds of media. He’s a creative who engages a lot of fields and does some interesting stuff in each of them, even if it is sometimes incredibly flawed. He’s not perfect, nor does he claim to be, and even if he sometimes takes himself a little bit too seriously he does so with the occasional wink, recognizing that he knows that he isn’t going to win a Pulitzer and doesn’t care.
He should by all rights be one of our most valuable contributors, one of the only developers I can think of who has written books and films at all, let alone the veritable library Barker has created in his short life. He’s articulate, intelligent, and extremely open minded. Hell, he’s even gay, and gay game developers are a shamefully underrepresented group both professionally and thematically. He should be right out there in front, talking us up for the world to see. Listening to him speak about it, he makes horror seem elegant and poised. He’s great at countering arguments and making otherwise respectable people seem like loons. Hell, look at his open letters to Ebert from a few years past.
In what is, to the best of my knowledge, the only example of the gaming community using Barker as anything resembling the mouthpiece he could be for us Barker made an impassioned and intelligent refutation of Ebert’s condescending, ignorant conceit that sacrificing narrative control made games something other than art. Barker appeared in a series of interviews discussing games as they relate to other narratives, games as they constitute art. And in this he was invaluable. He was a mouthpiece for the creative members of the community, the ones who make fiction, poetry, painting and film influenced by games.
And that’s what Barker offers us as a community: a respectable, unpretentious voice that knows both games and other narrative mediums. And while our strange communal aversion to most non-filmic mediums does to some extent explain the fact that we’re not utilizing Barker as much as we could, his presence is still reassuring to me. So while there are many creative visionaries who come to my mind before Barker, I still hold him dear in the pantheon of those who dedicate their lives to creating electronic media for our entertainment. And while I’m not sure he’ll ever make another game after the flop that was Jericho, I’m interested to see what it will be like if he does.
The only creative mind involved with games who is also vocal in its definition and protection as an art form that I can think of offhand isn’t someone I’d consider a luminary. It isn’t someone I’d consider that good at making games. It’s actually Clive Barker.
Barker made his entry into the fields of electronic narrative with the early release, Undying. Undying was a gory, fun FPS , almost universally well received by critics and uniformly ignored by consumers. Undying was an ambitious attempt at pushing the relatively strict technological limits of the time and introducing gameplay mechanics that would one day be taken up by games as well received and iconic as Bioshock. That spells in one hand, gun in the other thing? Undying did that first.
Unfortunately I cannot vouch for any of Undying’s storytelling quirks or the quality of its play, except by secondhand opinion, but a casual observation of the response the game received, and its noteworthy position as Gamespot’s “Number One Game No One Played,” illustrates that regardless of its narrative hooks it demonstrated Barker’s keen eye for unsettling his audience and a knack for design. For all I know the story was shit on a biscuit covered in flies, but the fact that he’d produced an experience that was so well considered during such a halcyon era of game design was telling.
But I can tell you that the knack for creating games that he demonstrated in games like Undying did not carry over to Jericho. Jericho is Barker’s attempt at a contemporary game, and it plays like a brawler without a brain. You trudge down identical paths and fight scripted enemies until your resources magically appear. Occasionally you fight a boss and have to listen to your teammates shout at you until you do as they say and finish the fucker off. Sometimes there’s a tough fight and you have to weather it alone or something. Sometimes players go away. But you’re always heading down a hallway towards a set destination, fighting enemies with infinitely regenerating resources. It engages as much as a rail shooter, occasionally busting out of its skin with an intensely frustrating quicktime sequence which demands complete dedication or certain death.
Despite all these flaws a few good ideas are present in Jericho. Specifically the idea of a suicide mission that isn’t, the idea of a pocket plane and the futility of man’s existence. Jericho has some of the deep existential roots that Barker has shown in weird, sometimes campy, sometimes bad books and movies like Hellraiser. It shows the brain he brings to pop, the Lovecraftian sensibility about our fragility as people and the concept that terrible things occur not because of the supernatural invading our world but because of our own ignorance, misunderstanding and poorly construed attempts to tap these larger forces. Where we once had the theory of relativity we now have the power of the atom – we are children playing in Barker’s world, just as a child menaces the entire world because of God’s frivolity in Jericho.
Of course, none of this saves the game from being a piece of shit. But that’s neither here nor there. My point is that Barker is experienced in games. He’s experience in writing books and films and all other kinds of media. He’s a creative who engages a lot of fields and does some interesting stuff in each of them, even if it is sometimes incredibly flawed. He’s not perfect, nor does he claim to be, and even if he sometimes takes himself a little bit too seriously he does so with the occasional wink, recognizing that he knows that he isn’t going to win a Pulitzer and doesn’t care.
He should by all rights be one of our most valuable contributors, one of the only developers I can think of who has written books and films at all, let alone the veritable library Barker has created in his short life. He’s articulate, intelligent, and extremely open minded. Hell, he’s even gay, and gay game developers are a shamefully underrepresented group both professionally and thematically. He should be right out there in front, talking us up for the world to see. Listening to him speak about it, he makes horror seem elegant and poised. He’s great at countering arguments and making otherwise respectable people seem like loons. Hell, look at his open letters to Ebert from a few years past.
In what is, to the best of my knowledge, the only example of the gaming community using Barker as anything resembling the mouthpiece he could be for us Barker made an impassioned and intelligent refutation of Ebert’s condescending, ignorant conceit that sacrificing narrative control made games something other than art. Barker appeared in a series of interviews discussing games as they relate to other narratives, games as they constitute art. And in this he was invaluable. He was a mouthpiece for the creative members of the community, the ones who make fiction, poetry, painting and film influenced by games.
And that’s what Barker offers us as a community: a respectable, unpretentious voice that knows both games and other narrative mediums. And while our strange communal aversion to most non-filmic mediums does to some extent explain the fact that we’re not utilizing Barker as much as we could, his presence is still reassuring to me. So while there are many creative visionaries who come to my mind before Barker, I still hold him dear in the pantheon of those who dedicate their lives to creating electronic media for our entertainment. And while I’m not sure he’ll ever make another game after the flop that was Jericho, I’m interested to see what it will be like if he does.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Congratulations, It's Your Birthday!
Today marks the birth of the author of this website, one Michael Grove. As such we will take a day from predicting the horrible futures of our many varied readers and instead content ourselves with thoughts of Michael as he now is: fleeing from the state of Georgia with a vast horde of enraged hill people at his heels, wielding flaming torches and pitchforks, screeching for his blood.
Congratulations, It’s Your Birthday!
Congratulations, It’s Your Birthday!
Friday, July 2, 2010
Congratulations on Getting Some Sleep!
People don’t realize how lonely it is to have knowledge. That’s part of why we all work here. Even furtive knowledge of the future makes you feel isolated from people. Our office parties, as a result, rarely feature loved ones. We’re tough people to be in relationships with, and the few with significant others know better than to bring them around the office where we can see how they die or who they had sex with last and then blurt it out to the whole room.
But knowledge of the entire world? All distilled into one mind at one time? Well, that’s just got to suck the royalest of balls. So we totally understand why you have trouble sleeping and why you spend all that time doing speed and smoking weed and doing as much as you can to alter your perceptions so everything seems a little less clear than it really is for you.
That’s why we’re going to be so happy for you today when, for a forty five minute interval, you finally pass out and get some sleep.
It will be blissful, if brief, the first rest you’ve had in years and years. Enjoy it while it lasts, because once you awake again you’ll be thrust back into the living hell that is your omnipotent, joyless existence.
Congratulations on Getting Some Sleep!
But knowledge of the entire world? All distilled into one mind at one time? Well, that’s just got to suck the royalest of balls. So we totally understand why you have trouble sleeping and why you spend all that time doing speed and smoking weed and doing as much as you can to alter your perceptions so everything seems a little less clear than it really is for you.
That’s why we’re going to be so happy for you today when, for a forty five minute interval, you finally pass out and get some sleep.
It will be blissful, if brief, the first rest you’ve had in years and years. Enjoy it while it lasts, because once you awake again you’ll be thrust back into the living hell that is your omnipotent, joyless existence.
Congratulations on Getting Some Sleep!
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