As a young man you dreamed of your future wife. You always thought she’d be a beautiful, brilliant woman, capable and full of grace. You also believed she’d love you.
But like most people you mistook sex for love and shit kind of went wrong down the road. You ended up with an incredibly gorgeous girlfriend in college who studied particle physics and did ballet in her spare time. The two of you seemed to get along alright and when you were around one another you seemed to have fun and enjoy each other quite a bit.
So you did what normal people do: you waited five years then got married. You settled into a house and a pair of well-paying jobs that gave you money, although not too much money. You had problems. You had pets. You had bills. You shared pints of ice-cream and watched shitty movies and had sex three times a week, sometimes more, sometimes less.
You did all the things normal people did and something felt like it was missing. When your wife was gone you thought about her leaving you for other people. When you were away she thought the same about you. The two of you always considered the vast human sea of other possibilities, the possible “rights” that might’ve been out there had they only looked a little harder. But you both get on well enough with one another that you will never attempt to divide the love that you’ve found. Why shake your head at a good thing, after all?
You’re both suffering from the effects of being wrapped in a loveless marriage. It’s common, and many people can live with it for their entire lives with only the slightest pangs of loneliness appearing to make them feel sad about the shit they’re missing by never tasting the fruits of true love. You’re both content. But neither of you are really happy.
But today the two of you are going to be sitting, watching a romantic movie with John Cusack. There will be a moment where Cusack realizes something important about the woman he’s interested in, where he realizes she’s worth giving everything up for, and at this moment you’ll have your own realization: you could never do this.
Your heart simply isn’t big enough to abandon everything for the sake of love. So, with this realization, you’ll become spontaneously all right with your loveless marriage. Suddenly the burden of finding love will fall away from you.
Because if you found it you’d have to fight for it, and that’s really not worth it. And knowing that you don’t have what it takes to really earn love makes you feel okay about never experiencing it. Because if you never experience it you can never miss it. You can just hear people talk about it and never have it, even though it’s out there. Like ostrich meat. You’ve never eaten ostrich meat either.
Congratulations on Adjusting to Your Loveless Marriage!
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Monday, August 30, 2010
Congratulations on Brewing Your Own Beer!
Brewing your own beer is a popular activity, and today we’re going to tell you how to start. Step one: get on Google and find a brewing supply store. You’re already on the internet, just go do it. We’ll wait here while you do that.
Back? Good. It’s probably just far enough away from your home to be inconvenient, but not far enough to discourage you from going there and beginning your long journey into DIY alcoholism. You should go there after you’ve familiarized yourself with our list. You might even want to write it down.
Ingredient one is going to be a large sterile container. You can get one of these at a beer store, or borrow one from one of your crazy survivalist friends if you have any of those. Once you have one of those you’ll want to get your malts, hops and any grains that you need for your particular beer.
You’ll also want an ample supply of water. This should be available in most faucets or any nearby streams, but enterprising readers without a ready source should feel free to distill their own urine for water just as the ancient Egyptians once did. This will also further personalize the beer.
You’ll also need yeast.
Once you’ve made the overlong journey to the brewing supply store, mixed these ingredients together, thrown these ingredients away and travelled back to the store to get more stuff so you can fuck up another two or three times, you’ll want to add the super secret ingredient that only Sexy Results readers can provide: a small vial of your own tears.
These tears, which will be exceptionally sad because everyone at Sexy Results is pretty pathetic and everyone who reads it is way worse, will give the beer the most delectable flavor imaginable: human sadness.
Human sadness is a key ingredient in most processed foods and, in this case, will make your beer taste like ambrosia.
Enjoy, and remember: more beer means more tears, so collect those suckers for your next batch!
Congratulations on Brewing Your Own Beer!
Back? Good. It’s probably just far enough away from your home to be inconvenient, but not far enough to discourage you from going there and beginning your long journey into DIY alcoholism. You should go there after you’ve familiarized yourself with our list. You might even want to write it down.
Ingredient one is going to be a large sterile container. You can get one of these at a beer store, or borrow one from one of your crazy survivalist friends if you have any of those. Once you have one of those you’ll want to get your malts, hops and any grains that you need for your particular beer.
You’ll also want an ample supply of water. This should be available in most faucets or any nearby streams, but enterprising readers without a ready source should feel free to distill their own urine for water just as the ancient Egyptians once did. This will also further personalize the beer.
You’ll also need yeast.
Once you’ve made the overlong journey to the brewing supply store, mixed these ingredients together, thrown these ingredients away and travelled back to the store to get more stuff so you can fuck up another two or three times, you’ll want to add the super secret ingredient that only Sexy Results readers can provide: a small vial of your own tears.
These tears, which will be exceptionally sad because everyone at Sexy Results is pretty pathetic and everyone who reads it is way worse, will give the beer the most delectable flavor imaginable: human sadness.
Human sadness is a key ingredient in most processed foods and, in this case, will make your beer taste like ambrosia.
Enjoy, and remember: more beer means more tears, so collect those suckers for your next batch!
Congratulations on Brewing Your Own Beer!
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Replay Value!
I’m something of an aberration amongst my gaming friends. While we all love games and the experiences they present my friends seek out new experiences constantly. Without any incentive otherwise they’ll beat a game and put it down forever, their experience completed. Sometimes they’ll give it a second playthrough if it promises a unique enough experience, something like Dragon Age where the game’s shape shifts dramatically depending on the choices you make, but they’d never dream of delving into something like Metro 2033 again, where the game is more or less the same each time through and the only real choice to be had is the choice between two endings, neither of which seems to offer much satisfaction.
Because they don’t replay games. Once an experience has entered their consciousness it’s done. It’s over. Next please. And this isn’t a bad thing at all. Replaying games can be tedious. It can be tortuous. It can be pointless. But it can also be illuminating.
I replay games constantly. Part of it comes from my educational background. As someone who was forced to read and re-read books for the sake of writing papers about them I tend to approach narratives like experiments: I see them as a way to collect data, as a set of conditions that I can observe, record information on and extrapolate ideas about narrative in general from that information. So when I read an experience and I’m curious about my response to it, for better or worse, I’m immediately compelled to step back into that experience, to engage it and take it apart from the inside.
I even have this compulsion with woefully bad games. When I finished Jericho, a game that I purchased for a dollar and felt, after playing it, I’d just barely gotten a fair trade on it, I decided to delve back in. I wanted to see if I’d been correct in my assessment of the Jericho experience. I wanted to see if a higher difficulty would make the game more interesting. I wanted to see if the characters might become even somewhat endearing (aside from Cole, sweet, sweet Cole) upon a second playthrough. They didn’t, of course, but I still stuck with it. I stuck with it for a good long time and, in a sense, I’m still sticking with it. I’m just taking a break because right now it’s super frustrating and I’ve got other things to do and play.
I did the same thing with Modern Warfare 2’s single player. After I finished it I decided I’d sit down and see how it played on the hardest difficulty setting, see if the missions became more or less of a challenge, if there was some hint of the brilliance behind the first Modern Warfare game. Again, there wasn’t, but I still braved the experience all the way to that last button mashing session which ended with a knife in Lance Henrikson’s eye, because I wanted to give it a fair shake. I wanted to see how I’d respond to the narrative knowing all of its elements, how I’d process it with additional information.
These aren’t qualities that make me a better gamer. In fact, they kind of make me a crappier gamer. There are plenty of games I just don’t experience because I’m busy replaying other games and they fall off my radar. Alan Wake, for example, was buried under a sea of “meh” responses while I was replaying Fallout 3 for the third time. Right now I’m not playing Elemental because I’m busy replaying Alpha Protocol and just finished my second playthrough of Metro 2033 (which took considerably less time and effort this time around, by the by). I do expect that to change, just because of the excitement surrounding Elemental, probably even before this is posted.
My point is that, instead of seeking out a large number of experiences I delve into a set of them, both good and bad. Sometimes this shows in my writing, with my frequent references to titles like Fallout, Bioshock and Far Cry 2, games I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into and know bits and pieces of by heart. Sometimes it doesn’t make it in, as is the case with Jericho. But I reflect on these experiences by reliving them, by reconsidering the approach I took to them the first time around.
Therein lies the appeal of replaying games: it isn’t the recodification of an experience, but the reappropriation and reconsideration of it. It’s not about finding something new, but reassessing the experience you had, mulling it over, being aware of it as a whole as you experience each part of it. It’s something people don’t do often enough in life and literature, and it’s certainly not something people do often enough in games. Reflecting on these experiences is what helps us actually understand where they fit into the tapestry of art and the world in general, and when we don’t consider them.
It’s especially valuable because it doesn’t fit into the critical or communal discussion surrounding games. The people who write and converse about games are all too often less concerned with investigating an experience and far more concerned with ranking it, assessing it as something to be consumed and then moving on to the next experience. It’s the worst example of consumerism, an aggressive push away from assessing the works of art that we experience towards a rawer fire-and-forget form of consumption. Every game that we don’t replay, every game we shelf and leave behind without considering where it succeeds or fails in the greater spectrum of gaming becomes a sort of casualty to the ever plodding forces of progress.
And that’s a shame. Because even the silliest, shittiest game has a lot to teach us. Indeed, the shittier the game, perhaps, the greater the lesson it may provide. Because games are, like most narrative, an artistic experience. They edify us in some way, even if that edification is simply a movement towards enjoyment. And when we fail to consider this edification in a greater context, when we fail to treat games the way we’d treat books or films and think of them after we’ve finished and remember the experiences we’ve had when we approach new games, we’re doing the medium as a whole a disservice. So recycle your old games. Replay games you want to reassess your experience with, or games that you just can’t stop thinking about.
Take your time. Enjoy your experiences, think about them, discuss them, and never worry about being called a nerd for it. For fuck’s sake, we’re talking about video games. We wouldn’t be playing them if we weren’t nerds.
Because they don’t replay games. Once an experience has entered their consciousness it’s done. It’s over. Next please. And this isn’t a bad thing at all. Replaying games can be tedious. It can be tortuous. It can be pointless. But it can also be illuminating.
I replay games constantly. Part of it comes from my educational background. As someone who was forced to read and re-read books for the sake of writing papers about them I tend to approach narratives like experiments: I see them as a way to collect data, as a set of conditions that I can observe, record information on and extrapolate ideas about narrative in general from that information. So when I read an experience and I’m curious about my response to it, for better or worse, I’m immediately compelled to step back into that experience, to engage it and take it apart from the inside.
I even have this compulsion with woefully bad games. When I finished Jericho, a game that I purchased for a dollar and felt, after playing it, I’d just barely gotten a fair trade on it, I decided to delve back in. I wanted to see if I’d been correct in my assessment of the Jericho experience. I wanted to see if a higher difficulty would make the game more interesting. I wanted to see if the characters might become even somewhat endearing (aside from Cole, sweet, sweet Cole) upon a second playthrough. They didn’t, of course, but I still stuck with it. I stuck with it for a good long time and, in a sense, I’m still sticking with it. I’m just taking a break because right now it’s super frustrating and I’ve got other things to do and play.
I did the same thing with Modern Warfare 2’s single player. After I finished it I decided I’d sit down and see how it played on the hardest difficulty setting, see if the missions became more or less of a challenge, if there was some hint of the brilliance behind the first Modern Warfare game. Again, there wasn’t, but I still braved the experience all the way to that last button mashing session which ended with a knife in Lance Henrikson’s eye, because I wanted to give it a fair shake. I wanted to see how I’d respond to the narrative knowing all of its elements, how I’d process it with additional information.
These aren’t qualities that make me a better gamer. In fact, they kind of make me a crappier gamer. There are plenty of games I just don’t experience because I’m busy replaying other games and they fall off my radar. Alan Wake, for example, was buried under a sea of “meh” responses while I was replaying Fallout 3 for the third time. Right now I’m not playing Elemental because I’m busy replaying Alpha Protocol and just finished my second playthrough of Metro 2033 (which took considerably less time and effort this time around, by the by). I do expect that to change, just because of the excitement surrounding Elemental, probably even before this is posted.
My point is that, instead of seeking out a large number of experiences I delve into a set of them, both good and bad. Sometimes this shows in my writing, with my frequent references to titles like Fallout, Bioshock and Far Cry 2, games I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into and know bits and pieces of by heart. Sometimes it doesn’t make it in, as is the case with Jericho. But I reflect on these experiences by reliving them, by reconsidering the approach I took to them the first time around.
Therein lies the appeal of replaying games: it isn’t the recodification of an experience, but the reappropriation and reconsideration of it. It’s not about finding something new, but reassessing the experience you had, mulling it over, being aware of it as a whole as you experience each part of it. It’s something people don’t do often enough in life and literature, and it’s certainly not something people do often enough in games. Reflecting on these experiences is what helps us actually understand where they fit into the tapestry of art and the world in general, and when we don’t consider them.
It’s especially valuable because it doesn’t fit into the critical or communal discussion surrounding games. The people who write and converse about games are all too often less concerned with investigating an experience and far more concerned with ranking it, assessing it as something to be consumed and then moving on to the next experience. It’s the worst example of consumerism, an aggressive push away from assessing the works of art that we experience towards a rawer fire-and-forget form of consumption. Every game that we don’t replay, every game we shelf and leave behind without considering where it succeeds or fails in the greater spectrum of gaming becomes a sort of casualty to the ever plodding forces of progress.
And that’s a shame. Because even the silliest, shittiest game has a lot to teach us. Indeed, the shittier the game, perhaps, the greater the lesson it may provide. Because games are, like most narrative, an artistic experience. They edify us in some way, even if that edification is simply a movement towards enjoyment. And when we fail to consider this edification in a greater context, when we fail to treat games the way we’d treat books or films and think of them after we’ve finished and remember the experiences we’ve had when we approach new games, we’re doing the medium as a whole a disservice. So recycle your old games. Replay games you want to reassess your experience with, or games that you just can’t stop thinking about.
Take your time. Enjoy your experiences, think about them, discuss them, and never worry about being called a nerd for it. For fuck’s sake, we’re talking about video games. We wouldn’t be playing them if we weren’t nerds.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Congratulations on Surviving Seven Minutes In Heaven!
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Friday, August 27, 2010
Congratulations on Eating the Spiciest of Peppers!
The picnic table cloths will be checkered, the bowls stark white against them, perfectly showcasing their selection of peppers ranging in heat from “oooh” to “holy fuck.” On your left will sit James “Muiy Caliente” Calendar, famed pepper eating contestant and general raconteur. On your right Alfred “Nice Spice” Newman, the wealthy philanthropist turned competitive eater who turned his sights on the title of “best spicy pepper eater” only a few months earlier. He’ll have made great strides along his journey, but he’ll be among the stiffest of competitors now, between you and Calendar in the world Pepper Eating Championship Finals.
The judge will announce the rules to the crowd gathered around you, a full third of the attendees of the Minnesota state fair.
“Arrayed before our contestants are a set of peppers ranging in spiciness from one-hundred thousand to over one million Scoville Heat Units,” he’ll say with a sweeping gesture, inviting your audience to examine the carefully arranged peppers laid before you. “The contestants will eat each pepper in order of increasing spiciness until the contestants find themselves unable to eat any more peppers.” He’ll look each of you in the eyes, measuring you one by one as pepper-eating contestants. “In the event that there is no winner upon the final pepper being eaten we will enter a sudden death round, wherein contestants will devour the famed Ghost Chile one by one until one of them yields.” The announcer will hold up a Ghost Chile, which will almost seem to glow red in his hand. He’ll be wearing a welder’s glove as he holds it. He’ll turn towards you and your fellow contestants and smile cruelly.
“Do you understand?”
You’ll nod collectively.
“BEGIN!” he’ll shout in all caps.
You and your opponents will fall upon the peppers. In this case falling upon them means you’ll eat one of each kind of pepper, then politely wait for the next contestant to do the same.
At first things will go smoothly for all of you. You’ll all have trained hard for this day, and each of those peppers will be relatively tame by your standards. But just before it comes time to devour Habanero peppers as a group Newman will began sweating profusely. You and Calendar will each devour your peppers in turn, taking them in your mouths in one fluid motion and chewing them carefully before swallowing without any visual distress, but when Newman’s time comes he will pause. He’ll glance around, breathing heavily, then ram the pepper into his mouth.
When he bites down he’ll begin to weep, but he’ll continue chewing, doing his best to fight through the pain. Within seconds, however, he’ll be on the ground, rolling around on his back weeping openly, screaming out loud.
“Newman has been eliminated!” the announcer will crow to the crowd’s thunderous applause. You and Calendar will share a look and a nod, grinning at one another grimly as the announcer produces a bowl of the famed Ghost Chiles, still wearing his welding gloves.
You’ll take the pepper first, gingerly picking it up between your thumb and forefinger and depositing it on your tongue with a dainty gesture. Then you’ll flip it inside your mouth and begin chewing with determination. Your eyes will tear, your nose will run, but you won’t cry out, you won’t move from your chair. You’ll just sit and chew and smile when you’re done, looking at Calendar, who will now have an expression of horror on his face.
Calendar will pick up his Ghost Chile with apprehension, placing it in his mouth unsteadily, ramming it in there as if he hopes to simply swallow it instead of chewing it. But his integrity will get the better of him and he’ll bite down, spilling the most volatile pepper juice in the known world into his mouth in the process.
His shriek will pierce the air as he stands up in agony, rushing towards the pitcher complementary milk located a short distance away from the contest table. He’ll pour the milk around his mouth more than into it, making inhuman sounds of pain as he tries to assuage the heat inside his mouth.
Normally a crowd this size would mock him in his pain, laugh at his agonized throes as he attempts to manage the horror that has become his life now that he has tasted the Ghost Chile. But this crowd will be silent in awe of you as you slowly stand up, placing another Ghost Chile in your mouth and chewing with apparent ecstasy. You’ll smile and shake the announcer’s hand, still encased in a welding glove while he stares at you with an incredulous look on his face.
Then you’ll go to Calendar, who will by now be on the ground writhing in pain, and help him to his feet, carrying him to the medical tent the way a true pepper-eating champion would, with his tear-streaming eyes held high.
Congratulations on Eating the Spiciest of Peppers!
The judge will announce the rules to the crowd gathered around you, a full third of the attendees of the Minnesota state fair.
“Arrayed before our contestants are a set of peppers ranging in spiciness from one-hundred thousand to over one million Scoville Heat Units,” he’ll say with a sweeping gesture, inviting your audience to examine the carefully arranged peppers laid before you. “The contestants will eat each pepper in order of increasing spiciness until the contestants find themselves unable to eat any more peppers.” He’ll look each of you in the eyes, measuring you one by one as pepper-eating contestants. “In the event that there is no winner upon the final pepper being eaten we will enter a sudden death round, wherein contestants will devour the famed Ghost Chile one by one until one of them yields.” The announcer will hold up a Ghost Chile, which will almost seem to glow red in his hand. He’ll be wearing a welder’s glove as he holds it. He’ll turn towards you and your fellow contestants and smile cruelly.
“Do you understand?”
You’ll nod collectively.
“BEGIN!” he’ll shout in all caps.
You and your opponents will fall upon the peppers. In this case falling upon them means you’ll eat one of each kind of pepper, then politely wait for the next contestant to do the same.
At first things will go smoothly for all of you. You’ll all have trained hard for this day, and each of those peppers will be relatively tame by your standards. But just before it comes time to devour Habanero peppers as a group Newman will began sweating profusely. You and Calendar will each devour your peppers in turn, taking them in your mouths in one fluid motion and chewing them carefully before swallowing without any visual distress, but when Newman’s time comes he will pause. He’ll glance around, breathing heavily, then ram the pepper into his mouth.
When he bites down he’ll begin to weep, but he’ll continue chewing, doing his best to fight through the pain. Within seconds, however, he’ll be on the ground, rolling around on his back weeping openly, screaming out loud.
“Newman has been eliminated!” the announcer will crow to the crowd’s thunderous applause. You and Calendar will share a look and a nod, grinning at one another grimly as the announcer produces a bowl of the famed Ghost Chiles, still wearing his welding gloves.
You’ll take the pepper first, gingerly picking it up between your thumb and forefinger and depositing it on your tongue with a dainty gesture. Then you’ll flip it inside your mouth and begin chewing with determination. Your eyes will tear, your nose will run, but you won’t cry out, you won’t move from your chair. You’ll just sit and chew and smile when you’re done, looking at Calendar, who will now have an expression of horror on his face.
Calendar will pick up his Ghost Chile with apprehension, placing it in his mouth unsteadily, ramming it in there as if he hopes to simply swallow it instead of chewing it. But his integrity will get the better of him and he’ll bite down, spilling the most volatile pepper juice in the known world into his mouth in the process.
His shriek will pierce the air as he stands up in agony, rushing towards the pitcher complementary milk located a short distance away from the contest table. He’ll pour the milk around his mouth more than into it, making inhuman sounds of pain as he tries to assuage the heat inside his mouth.
Normally a crowd this size would mock him in his pain, laugh at his agonized throes as he attempts to manage the horror that has become his life now that he has tasted the Ghost Chile. But this crowd will be silent in awe of you as you slowly stand up, placing another Ghost Chile in your mouth and chewing with apparent ecstasy. You’ll smile and shake the announcer’s hand, still encased in a welding glove while he stares at you with an incredulous look on his face.
Then you’ll go to Calendar, who will by now be on the ground writhing in pain, and help him to his feet, carrying him to the medical tent the way a true pepper-eating champion would, with his tear-streaming eyes held high.
Congratulations on Eating the Spiciest of Peppers!
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Congratulations on Shutting Down All the Trash Compactors on the Detention Level!
Turns out screaming is a perfectly acceptable way to solve some problems, especially when those problems involve communicating with a somewhat retarded young man obsessed with Star Wars.
Barry will be having trouble shutting down the compactor slowly cubing the car you’re trapped in, despite being right next to the fucking lever that turns it off. Barry has always been a little special, but he’s trustworthy and reliable which is why you picked him for this operation. But he’s kind of slow, and he panics easily, which is why it’s not a good thing that he’s trapped in a control room alone, surrounded by corpses, while you shout at him.
“Fucking shut it down, Barry!” you’ll yell. Michelle will be hyperventilating next to you. From the smell she’ll have already pissed herself, which you’d give her shit about later if you, too, weren’t almost positive that you were going to die horribly in a few seconds.
“How!” he’ll yell back, staring at the giant lever that controls the walls slowly forcing metal towards your bodies.
“The fucking lever!” you’ll shout at him, which will just make him more confused since he thinks of the lever as more of a switch. He’ll shrug at you, looking confused.
Michelle will grab your hand, her breath slowing down for a moment. “Star,” she’ll wheeze. “Wars.” Your eyes will light up with recognition and you’ll turn towards Barry, smiling.
“Threepee-oh!” you’ll yell. Barry will immediately stiffen and arrange his hands like he’s doing The Robot. He’ll look at you attentively, awaiting orders. “Shut down all the trash compactors on the detention level!”
Barry will nod at you, then turn and stiffly pull the lever down, stalling out the motor on the compactor and moving the slowly closing metal walls back out away from you. You and Michelle will begin hooting and howling, pushing the ceiling of the car and laughing uncontrollably. Barry will just stand there in the control room, watching the two you and smiling at himself, satisfied that he saved the day.
You’ll kiss Michelle, so happy that the piss smell won’t even register for you. Pulling your knife out from your pocket, shifting your weight so that you can get it free, you’ll begin the awkward process of cutting your way out of the seatbelts that had previously bound you into the car. Laughing and still trembling with adrenaline you’ll mutter at Michelle without looking at her.
“God I am so glad his stepfather used to burn him until he acted like a robot.”
Congratulations on Shutting Down All the Trash Compactors on the Detention Level!
Barry will be having trouble shutting down the compactor slowly cubing the car you’re trapped in, despite being right next to the fucking lever that turns it off. Barry has always been a little special, but he’s trustworthy and reliable which is why you picked him for this operation. But he’s kind of slow, and he panics easily, which is why it’s not a good thing that he’s trapped in a control room alone, surrounded by corpses, while you shout at him.
“Fucking shut it down, Barry!” you’ll yell. Michelle will be hyperventilating next to you. From the smell she’ll have already pissed herself, which you’d give her shit about later if you, too, weren’t almost positive that you were going to die horribly in a few seconds.
“How!” he’ll yell back, staring at the giant lever that controls the walls slowly forcing metal towards your bodies.
“The fucking lever!” you’ll shout at him, which will just make him more confused since he thinks of the lever as more of a switch. He’ll shrug at you, looking confused.
Michelle will grab your hand, her breath slowing down for a moment. “Star,” she’ll wheeze. “Wars.” Your eyes will light up with recognition and you’ll turn towards Barry, smiling.
“Threepee-oh!” you’ll yell. Barry will immediately stiffen and arrange his hands like he’s doing The Robot. He’ll look at you attentively, awaiting orders. “Shut down all the trash compactors on the detention level!”
Barry will nod at you, then turn and stiffly pull the lever down, stalling out the motor on the compactor and moving the slowly closing metal walls back out away from you. You and Michelle will begin hooting and howling, pushing the ceiling of the car and laughing uncontrollably. Barry will just stand there in the control room, watching the two you and smiling at himself, satisfied that he saved the day.
You’ll kiss Michelle, so happy that the piss smell won’t even register for you. Pulling your knife out from your pocket, shifting your weight so that you can get it free, you’ll begin the awkward process of cutting your way out of the seatbelts that had previously bound you into the car. Laughing and still trembling with adrenaline you’ll mutter at Michelle without looking at her.
“God I am so glad his stepfather used to burn him until he acted like a robot.”
Congratulations on Shutting Down All the Trash Compactors on the Detention Level!
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Congratulations on Learning the True Meaning of Hanukkah!
The two of you will steal into the control center, a hail of bullets finding nothing but the steel of the blast door closing behind you. Johnson will hold the door shut while you up-end a filing cabinet to block it off just in time, a thunderous pounding erupting just as you slam the cabinet down. You’ll both stare at the door for a few minutes while the pounding intensifies, guns at the ready. After a few minutes you’ll hear a Yiddish curse and the pounding of feet running away, seeking another entrance.
Johnson won’t lose a single moment. He’ll run over to the Supercomputer and start hacking away, dropping all kinds of firewalls and viruses and emails and shit, slicing through ICE and some other weird clichés until his jaw drops, sending his lit cigarette tumbling to the ground.
Ever the safety nut, you’ll stomp it out before you grab his shoulder and ask.
“What?”
He’ll point at the screen, which will be displaying a three paragraph Microsoft Word file. The file will be titled “the REAL meaning of hanukkah” (capitalization theirs) and will detail the various ways in which hanukkah is actually a giant Jewish conspiracy intended to give Jews control over Hollywood and a few extra days off during the winter so they can play in the snow and occasionally nap to get the sad out.
“Those bastards,” you’ll say. Then you’ll remove a 3.5 inch floppy from your combat webbing and hand it to Johnson, who will give you a steely nod in response. He’ll slip the floppy into the computer and start typing away, spellchecking the files while he has the chance before saving them to the disk.
Then, his work completed, he’ll hand the disk back to you. You’ll slip it back into your webbing and the two of you will start looking for a way out of the Jewish command center, your mission half complete, the secret so many men have died for in your hands and ready to be shared with the world.
Congratulations on Learning the True Meaning of Hanukkah!
Johnson won’t lose a single moment. He’ll run over to the Supercomputer and start hacking away, dropping all kinds of firewalls and viruses and emails and shit, slicing through ICE and some other weird clichés until his jaw drops, sending his lit cigarette tumbling to the ground.
Ever the safety nut, you’ll stomp it out before you grab his shoulder and ask.
“What?”
He’ll point at the screen, which will be displaying a three paragraph Microsoft Word file. The file will be titled “the REAL meaning of hanukkah” (capitalization theirs) and will detail the various ways in which hanukkah is actually a giant Jewish conspiracy intended to give Jews control over Hollywood and a few extra days off during the winter so they can play in the snow and occasionally nap to get the sad out.
“Those bastards,” you’ll say. Then you’ll remove a 3.5 inch floppy from your combat webbing and hand it to Johnson, who will give you a steely nod in response. He’ll slip the floppy into the computer and start typing away, spellchecking the files while he has the chance before saving them to the disk.
Then, his work completed, he’ll hand the disk back to you. You’ll slip it back into your webbing and the two of you will start looking for a way out of the Jewish command center, your mission half complete, the secret so many men have died for in your hands and ready to be shared with the world.
Congratulations on Learning the True Meaning of Hanukkah!
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Congratulations Cosmo Writer!
You’re a writer for Cosmo. Ordinarily you spout tips so absurd, unnecessary and frankly unhelpful that it’s perfectly clear to everyone who has ever read a single article you’ve authored that you’ve never been near anyone else’s genitals. What’s more apparent is that you’re an anti-social narcissist who believes that their unsolicited advice is something that people not only want, but something that people should pay for.
Were it not for the incredibly misguided people at Cosmo you would’ve long since been relegated to a mental ward in some remote mental hospital, where visitors are strictly prohibited for the safety of all patients and armed guards watch and wait for someone to try and make a break for it so they can shoot them in the skull with a high powered rifle from afar and remove one more threat from the face of the earth. But because of some family connections and a tradition of ruining sex for Americans by giving them horrible advice you have a job telling people who could be happy and satisfied just going with their instincts how to have sex in completely retarded ways.
Today your career will be ruined when a group of activists from the Stop Being Such a Fucking Retard Foundation, a fine institution with many esteemed members, are going to hire you a prostitute and finally get you laid, ending a thirty-three year hot streak. When you wake up in the morning and find your prostitute dressing themselves you’ll sigh and look at them.
“So that’s what it’s like,” you’ll say, devouring their body with your eyes.
“Yep,” your prostitute will say, dressing as quickly as they can. They’ll deposit a card on your nightstand with their phone number and a brief, scrawled message reading please shower first next time and leave without saying another word.
You’ll lie in bed staring at your ceiling, marveling at what sex really is. You’ll look at your laptop and suddenly realize that you couldn’t possibly write another word about the erotic power of ice cubes or the shit about people’s thighs you thought up in a dream a few weeks ago. You’ll sex as something to be cherished, something unique to each person and incapable of being distilled into an overarching, oversimplified single idea.
You’ll consider picking up the phone and letting your editor know you won’t be turning in this week’s article, but your phone will be all the way on the other side of the bed with the prostitute’s card. Better to lay here and enjoy the glow, you’ll think to yourself, turning on your back and watching sunlight creep up the walls from your new vantage point.
Better just to let it happen.
Congratulations Cosmo Writer!
Were it not for the incredibly misguided people at Cosmo you would’ve long since been relegated to a mental ward in some remote mental hospital, where visitors are strictly prohibited for the safety of all patients and armed guards watch and wait for someone to try and make a break for it so they can shoot them in the skull with a high powered rifle from afar and remove one more threat from the face of the earth. But because of some family connections and a tradition of ruining sex for Americans by giving them horrible advice you have a job telling people who could be happy and satisfied just going with their instincts how to have sex in completely retarded ways.
Today your career will be ruined when a group of activists from the Stop Being Such a Fucking Retard Foundation, a fine institution with many esteemed members, are going to hire you a prostitute and finally get you laid, ending a thirty-three year hot streak. When you wake up in the morning and find your prostitute dressing themselves you’ll sigh and look at them.
“So that’s what it’s like,” you’ll say, devouring their body with your eyes.
“Yep,” your prostitute will say, dressing as quickly as they can. They’ll deposit a card on your nightstand with their phone number and a brief, scrawled message reading please shower first next time and leave without saying another word.
You’ll lie in bed staring at your ceiling, marveling at what sex really is. You’ll look at your laptop and suddenly realize that you couldn’t possibly write another word about the erotic power of ice cubes or the shit about people’s thighs you thought up in a dream a few weeks ago. You’ll sex as something to be cherished, something unique to each person and incapable of being distilled into an overarching, oversimplified single idea.
You’ll consider picking up the phone and letting your editor know you won’t be turning in this week’s article, but your phone will be all the way on the other side of the bed with the prostitute’s card. Better to lay here and enjoy the glow, you’ll think to yourself, turning on your back and watching sunlight creep up the walls from your new vantage point.
Better just to let it happen.
Congratulations Cosmo Writer!
Monday, August 23, 2010
Congratulations on Alienating a Huge Portion of the Workforce!
We understand your racism. Change can be scary, especially when daddy left you so young and so alone and so very, very tragically rich. And you’ve made quite a bit out of it, no one’s going to deny that. You took your shitty life in New London, Connecticut and made it into a chain of semi-successful investment firms in the Northeast which specialized in “risky,” that is to say ill-advised, investments.
Turns out there’s a huge population of really stupid rich people in America who have either become wealthy by accident, through enduring mental illness, or through fortune (which covers birth). And they all want you to basically toss their money into a giant fire pit for them.
But there’s going to be one critical error on your part: you’re going to refuse to hire anyone who even speaks Spanish.
Your client base will love this move, since it will effectively weed out any Mexicans who, as they understand it, are ruining the country. But finding qualified investment bankers who didn’t take the easiest possible language course in high school and don’t remember any of it at all is going to be pretty difficult.
In the end you’ll only be able to hire graduates from the University of Pheonix who, for lack of a better word, are completely retarded. You’ll be bankrupt within three months and you’ll have a new company to mismanage into the ground within another two.
Congratulations on Alienating a Huge Portion of the Workforce!
Turns out there’s a huge population of really stupid rich people in America who have either become wealthy by accident, through enduring mental illness, or through fortune (which covers birth). And they all want you to basically toss their money into a giant fire pit for them.
But there’s going to be one critical error on your part: you’re going to refuse to hire anyone who even speaks Spanish.
Your client base will love this move, since it will effectively weed out any Mexicans who, as they understand it, are ruining the country. But finding qualified investment bankers who didn’t take the easiest possible language course in high school and don’t remember any of it at all is going to be pretty difficult.
In the end you’ll only be able to hire graduates from the University of Pheonix who, for lack of a better word, are completely retarded. You’ll be bankrupt within three months and you’ll have a new company to mismanage into the ground within another two.
Congratulations on Alienating a Huge Portion of the Workforce!
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: It Is Pitch Dark!
Metro 2033 was a dark horse for me in many respects. It’s not a game I expected to like in the least. The product of a group of first time developers from the Ukraine who have the somewhat auspicious presence of a handful of the original designers of STALKER who left GSC, STALKER’s development company, almost a year before the ambitious, buggy and messy game made its “mark” on the gaming community. It’s a game which received middling reviews from institutions I make a habit of ignoring and failed to incite any kind of real discussion, a game based on a novel I’d never heard of from an author I’d also never heard of. It had no multiplayer, making it aberration in our current era of “multiplayer or bust” gaming, and was touted as a “survival-horror-shooter,” which can either mean a game is going to be beyond incredible or a flaming pile of shit.
But if there’s one thing you should’ve learned from all the articles I’ve written about things I bought on sale from Steam in the past it’s that I’m super, super gay for deals. So during Steam’s incredible summer sale, where nearly half the store was on sale to one degree or another, I picked up a copy of Metro 2033 on the cheap. I picked it up with a bunch of other games I’d heard mixed things about such as Alpha Protocol and Supreme Commander 2, with no intention of playing it any time soon. And indeed I did not. It sat unattended on my hard drive for nearly two months before I sat down and started to play it. I didn’t have any expectations set on it. I had read no reviews at that point, had no idea what to expect in terms of gameplay. I had the vague sense that I’d be playing something a good deal like Doom 3 based on the box art and the single promo video I’d accidentally seen months earlier.
Imagine my shock, then, when I started up the game and found out that I’d be forced to manage things as basic as my air supply. That breathing itself was something the game was concerned with, and not in that retarded “ticking clock” way that Doom 3 was but instead in a way that forced me to ration equipment over multiple engagements and look for undamaged gear in order to survive. Right away I was shown the tools at my disposal and informed that they were fitted with a finite number of bullets, a number I’d do well to remember. I was shown a number of enemies without end, an overwhelming horde I’d be just as well off stabbing as shooting for all the good fighting in general would do me.
I was thrown into a survival horror game that knew it was about resource management and, as a result, didn’t try to be very scary. It instead made its horrors boilerplate, daily occurrences, the price of life in this place. It instead put the focus on player response, on demanding that players consider and conserve to survive. Sure, weird rat things might be scary in and of themselves. But Metro 2033 didn’t try very hard to scare you with thoughts about that. Instead it wanted to scare you by making you wonder, how many bullets do I have left? How many more weird rat things will those bullets kill? Is it worth it to see if I can weather them and then clear this area out for supplies or should I just run for it?
The end result is tension. Not a constant grinding tension, the game knows enough about its business to give you little breaks here and there to keep you from getting too fatigued, but a sort of mounting tension that builds up as your magazine drops lower and lower, then evaporates each time you find a promising supply cache. It’s the sort of tension which makes you wonder, have they seen me? Can I manage a stealth kill? Should I just go for it and get all the supplies I can carry out of here or should I move on and hope they don’t notice me? Because stealth is always an option too, although it is a pathetically easy option compared to some of the punishingly difficult segments that I’d best describe as “combat puzzles.” Most of these “puzzles” are, in keeping with the game’s overall theme, about getting out of the fight with enough resources for the next one, but that’s okay. It fits the world they’ve made, which is fresh and original and has just the right balance of humanity and desperation to make life seem hard without feeling like a poorly rendered picture of humanity at its worst.
Occasionally they use this sort of “puzzle to world” relationship to incredible effectiveness, like in one occasion late in the game where a particularly overwhelming puzzle emerges from a remnant of the world before the cataclysm that shaped Metro 2033. This holdover from the military industrial complex forced me to quickly calculate how much ammo I could spare compared to just how much health I could lose and, in the end, was probably the second most challenging puzzle in the game - the first being the start of the Communist-Nazi standoff which forced me to replay a single segment of the game around a dozen times until I finally had it figured out.
This sort of intelligence carries over, shockingly, to the writing. Most games, let’s face it, have absolutely shit writing. Starcraft 2, for example, had appallingly bad writing, writing it wanted to ram into your face constantly, writing that told you little to nothing about the world in which the little bits of gameplay actually occurred in and lots about a world which appeared to be totally divorced from said gameplay. But Metro 2033, a game adapted from a Russian language novel by a Ukrainian development team with an overall budget which I’m sure is roughly equivalent to the amount Blizzard spends on bagels on a Friday, managed to get some genuinely good writing in there. Sure, there’s some shitty expositional dialogue, and one character constantly spouts vaguely mysterious statements which are clearly intended to “make us think,” but amongst these forced exchanges are some interesting characters and exchanges about what life is really like in this place.
Early in the game a father stalls telling a child about his mother’s death by having him draw pictures for her on the concrete outside their squat, enduring for his child. One of your companions, who has realized that the world is what you make of it, has taken to joking and laughing at the horror around him without losing his mind, simply smiling at the absurdity of life in the Metro. A Fascist soldier is conflicted about his family’s safety and the actions he must take in order to protect them in the society he has become a part of. Married couples squabble, prostitutes sell themselves, shysters hustle and run without really learning their lesson in the end and, shockingly, people who stick together tend to do better than people who habitually distrust and abuse the strangers they meet. It’s a hostile world, but Metro 2033 actually shows human beings as what they fundamentally are: resilient damaged goods who can make the most out of anything and will cling to whatever they have feverishly. I found the snapshot of Polis to be one of the most illuminating moments of the game, a brief look at what a successful society looks like in the Metro. While it was by no means an easy place to live it was fair. It was clean, and it was kept that way by people who were well aware of the dangers outside, people who knew that they’d have to work together to keep what they’d built.
Even though it is, at times, boring and repetitive, even if it does sometimes force your hand and ask you to make important choices without giving you any information (What, for example, is the difference in damage between an AK-47 and a Bastard? A VSV and a Kalash-2012? And how the fuck am I supposed to know what a Tihar is when I find it in the middle of a sewer tunnel? Tooltips please!) I’d still recommend Metro 2033 to almost anyone who wants a solid single player FPS experience. Obviously it’s not for everyone, and at around 8 hours total it’s hard to say that it’s worth $50. But if you can find a copy at $30 or below and like the gameplay type it’s a singular experience, well crafted and smart, that demands a lot from its players and offers plenty in return. For a first time effort it’s nothing short of exceptional and, if nothing else, it’s made me wonder what 4A Games will make in the future. Aside from Metro 2034 I mean.
But if there’s one thing you should’ve learned from all the articles I’ve written about things I bought on sale from Steam in the past it’s that I’m super, super gay for deals. So during Steam’s incredible summer sale, where nearly half the store was on sale to one degree or another, I picked up a copy of Metro 2033 on the cheap. I picked it up with a bunch of other games I’d heard mixed things about such as Alpha Protocol and Supreme Commander 2, with no intention of playing it any time soon. And indeed I did not. It sat unattended on my hard drive for nearly two months before I sat down and started to play it. I didn’t have any expectations set on it. I had read no reviews at that point, had no idea what to expect in terms of gameplay. I had the vague sense that I’d be playing something a good deal like Doom 3 based on the box art and the single promo video I’d accidentally seen months earlier.
Imagine my shock, then, when I started up the game and found out that I’d be forced to manage things as basic as my air supply. That breathing itself was something the game was concerned with, and not in that retarded “ticking clock” way that Doom 3 was but instead in a way that forced me to ration equipment over multiple engagements and look for undamaged gear in order to survive. Right away I was shown the tools at my disposal and informed that they were fitted with a finite number of bullets, a number I’d do well to remember. I was shown a number of enemies without end, an overwhelming horde I’d be just as well off stabbing as shooting for all the good fighting in general would do me.
I was thrown into a survival horror game that knew it was about resource management and, as a result, didn’t try to be very scary. It instead made its horrors boilerplate, daily occurrences, the price of life in this place. It instead put the focus on player response, on demanding that players consider and conserve to survive. Sure, weird rat things might be scary in and of themselves. But Metro 2033 didn’t try very hard to scare you with thoughts about that. Instead it wanted to scare you by making you wonder, how many bullets do I have left? How many more weird rat things will those bullets kill? Is it worth it to see if I can weather them and then clear this area out for supplies or should I just run for it?
The end result is tension. Not a constant grinding tension, the game knows enough about its business to give you little breaks here and there to keep you from getting too fatigued, but a sort of mounting tension that builds up as your magazine drops lower and lower, then evaporates each time you find a promising supply cache. It’s the sort of tension which makes you wonder, have they seen me? Can I manage a stealth kill? Should I just go for it and get all the supplies I can carry out of here or should I move on and hope they don’t notice me? Because stealth is always an option too, although it is a pathetically easy option compared to some of the punishingly difficult segments that I’d best describe as “combat puzzles.” Most of these “puzzles” are, in keeping with the game’s overall theme, about getting out of the fight with enough resources for the next one, but that’s okay. It fits the world they’ve made, which is fresh and original and has just the right balance of humanity and desperation to make life seem hard without feeling like a poorly rendered picture of humanity at its worst.
Occasionally they use this sort of “puzzle to world” relationship to incredible effectiveness, like in one occasion late in the game where a particularly overwhelming puzzle emerges from a remnant of the world before the cataclysm that shaped Metro 2033. This holdover from the military industrial complex forced me to quickly calculate how much ammo I could spare compared to just how much health I could lose and, in the end, was probably the second most challenging puzzle in the game - the first being the start of the Communist-Nazi standoff which forced me to replay a single segment of the game around a dozen times until I finally had it figured out.
This sort of intelligence carries over, shockingly, to the writing. Most games, let’s face it, have absolutely shit writing. Starcraft 2, for example, had appallingly bad writing, writing it wanted to ram into your face constantly, writing that told you little to nothing about the world in which the little bits of gameplay actually occurred in and lots about a world which appeared to be totally divorced from said gameplay. But Metro 2033, a game adapted from a Russian language novel by a Ukrainian development team with an overall budget which I’m sure is roughly equivalent to the amount Blizzard spends on bagels on a Friday, managed to get some genuinely good writing in there. Sure, there’s some shitty expositional dialogue, and one character constantly spouts vaguely mysterious statements which are clearly intended to “make us think,” but amongst these forced exchanges are some interesting characters and exchanges about what life is really like in this place.
Early in the game a father stalls telling a child about his mother’s death by having him draw pictures for her on the concrete outside their squat, enduring for his child. One of your companions, who has realized that the world is what you make of it, has taken to joking and laughing at the horror around him without losing his mind, simply smiling at the absurdity of life in the Metro. A Fascist soldier is conflicted about his family’s safety and the actions he must take in order to protect them in the society he has become a part of. Married couples squabble, prostitutes sell themselves, shysters hustle and run without really learning their lesson in the end and, shockingly, people who stick together tend to do better than people who habitually distrust and abuse the strangers they meet. It’s a hostile world, but Metro 2033 actually shows human beings as what they fundamentally are: resilient damaged goods who can make the most out of anything and will cling to whatever they have feverishly. I found the snapshot of Polis to be one of the most illuminating moments of the game, a brief look at what a successful society looks like in the Metro. While it was by no means an easy place to live it was fair. It was clean, and it was kept that way by people who were well aware of the dangers outside, people who knew that they’d have to work together to keep what they’d built.
Even though it is, at times, boring and repetitive, even if it does sometimes force your hand and ask you to make important choices without giving you any information (What, for example, is the difference in damage between an AK-47 and a Bastard? A VSV and a Kalash-2012? And how the fuck am I supposed to know what a Tihar is when I find it in the middle of a sewer tunnel? Tooltips please!) I’d still recommend Metro 2033 to almost anyone who wants a solid single player FPS experience. Obviously it’s not for everyone, and at around 8 hours total it’s hard to say that it’s worth $50. But if you can find a copy at $30 or below and like the gameplay type it’s a singular experience, well crafted and smart, that demands a lot from its players and offers plenty in return. For a first time effort it’s nothing short of exceptional and, if nothing else, it’s made me wonder what 4A Games will make in the future. Aside from Metro 2034 I mean.
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Congratulations on Getting Pretty Gay Last Night!
Last night, in an occurrence which, depending on when you were watching and who you ask, was either adorable, super hot or super gross, half the male staff of Sexy Results got totally gay at an office sponsored event intended to reconcile personnel following a recent workplace dispute on appropriate behavior during office functions.
We appreciate the openness of the male staff as well as their willingness to engage in activities which were, we can all agree, funny at least and fap worthy at worst. We’d like to extend an olive branch by inviting every male staffer who engaged in homoerotic activity to our next ladies night wherein we promise to get Shelly from accounts payable and Erika from our writing staff so drunk that they totally make out in public the way we all desperately want them to.
Thank you for your cooperation and good natured actions during this time of healing and we hope that Eric and James both used condoms because we’d rather not have to predict either of you dying of AIDS or something like that. That shit be everywhere.
Congratulations on Getting Pretty Gay Last Night!
We appreciate the openness of the male staff as well as their willingness to engage in activities which were, we can all agree, funny at least and fap worthy at worst. We’d like to extend an olive branch by inviting every male staffer who engaged in homoerotic activity to our next ladies night wherein we promise to get Shelly from accounts payable and Erika from our writing staff so drunk that they totally make out in public the way we all desperately want them to.
Thank you for your cooperation and good natured actions during this time of healing and we hope that Eric and James both used condoms because we’d rather not have to predict either of you dying of AIDS or something like that. That shit be everywhere.
Congratulations on Getting Pretty Gay Last Night!
Friday, August 20, 2010
Congratulations on your Successful Office Issue Arbitration!
Today will mark the successful arbitration of human resources issue ticket #49271, relating to the previous two days postings. The settlement was reached when the wronged parties (women) agreed to occasionally lez out according to personal choice and allow us to retain the previous two days’ posts in order to “make everyone’s lives easier.”
The offending party (men) agreed to issue a formal apology and purchase and sign an apology card featuring at least one bear with a heart, declaring that it is “beary sorry.” They also agreed to “fag it up for a night” while the women watched, will be occurring later this evening.
We hope this allows all of us to move as professionals and people and that no one posts anything that occurs later tonight on Youtube.
Thank you for your understanding during this difficult time at Sexy Results Future Agency.
Congratulations on Your Successful Office Issue Arbitration!
The offending party (men) agreed to issue a formal apology and purchase and sign an apology card featuring at least one bear with a heart, declaring that it is “beary sorry.” They also agreed to “fag it up for a night” while the women watched, will be occurring later this evening.
We hope this allows all of us to move as professionals and people and that no one posts anything that occurs later tonight on Youtube.
Thank you for your understanding during this difficult time at Sexy Results Future Agency.
Congratulations on Your Successful Office Issue Arbitration!
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Congratulations on Receiving an Unsatisfying Report!
Last night we spent an incredible amount of time and effort trailing the most boring group of bitches to ever walk the earth. While we learned more than we ever wanted to know about periods (ew), Maggie’s shitty boyfriend (just please fucking dump him already) and Marguerite’s baby (maybe if you love him so much you shouldn’t be drinking six martinis then going home to “help him with math,” which we know means burn him with a coat hanger that’s been held over a gas burner, we all had moms too). But we didn’t see a single instance of girl on girl action.
At one point Ashley and Marty almost kissed, but they started laughing and just hugged for the rest of the night. When they retired to Marty’s apartment together we found it difficult to survielle them further, but we assume nothing interesting happened inside in keeping with the theme of the night.
In closing, we’d like to ask our female office mates to please become more interesting people or, barring that, get a little sluttier so that people following you don’t waste two nights of their lives hoping that something interesting might happen.
Congratulations on Receiving an Unsatisfying Report!
At one point Ashley and Marty almost kissed, but they started laughing and just hugged for the rest of the night. When they retired to Marty’s apartment together we found it difficult to survielle them further, but we assume nothing interesting happened inside in keeping with the theme of the night.
In closing, we’d like to ask our female office mates to please become more interesting people or, barring that, get a little sluttier so that people following you don’t waste two nights of their lives hoping that something interesting might happen.
Congratulations on Receiving an Unsatisfying Report!
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Congratulations Cancelled Due to Ladies Night!
This Wednesday’s Sexy Results Future Prediction has been cancelled due to an event called Ladies Night. This event occurs each fortnightly on a Wednesday and is a chance for the women of the Sexy Results Future Agency to unwind in one another’s company.
Normally this means the male staff of Sexy Results steps up to the challenge and accomplishes their mission admirably, delivering you the bargain bin predictions you crave like the sick fucking animals you are. But the male employees of Sexy Results have grown curious as to just what transpires during Ladies Night and have, as such, spent a large amount of time constructing homemade costumes and devising an overall surveillance plan in order to trail the ladies and find out if they do, as Johnson claims, actually “lez out” on Ladies Night.
We were all up super late making our costumes (which turned out really well, by the way, thanks for asking) and so we’re totally shitting out on our predictive duties. Instead we’ll just try to let you what goes down on what will no doubt be an incredible misadventure through the streets of an readily interchangeable American metropolis starring the Ladies of Sexy Results!
Congratulations Cancelled Due to Ladies Night!
Normally this means the male staff of Sexy Results steps up to the challenge and accomplishes their mission admirably, delivering you the bargain bin predictions you crave like the sick fucking animals you are. But the male employees of Sexy Results have grown curious as to just what transpires during Ladies Night and have, as such, spent a large amount of time constructing homemade costumes and devising an overall surveillance plan in order to trail the ladies and find out if they do, as Johnson claims, actually “lez out” on Ladies Night.
We were all up super late making our costumes (which turned out really well, by the way, thanks for asking) and so we’re totally shitting out on our predictive duties. Instead we’ll just try to let you what goes down on what will no doubt be an incredible misadventure through the streets of an readily interchangeable American metropolis starring the Ladies of Sexy Results!
Congratulations Cancelled Due to Ladies Night!
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Congratulations Succulent Little Pig!
Today you’re going to be butchered. It’ll be kind of unpleasant for you and you won’t enjoy the experience in the least. In fact it’ll be the single worst day of your life. But you’ll be fulfilling the purpose to which you were born and you’ll be making a lot of people very, very happy.
Also, you’ll be delicious, even though you’re dead and you probably don’t care. We still hope that’s worth something. We will not forget the sacrifice you made for our pastor burritos.
Congratulations Succulent Little Pig!
Also, you’ll be delicious, even though you’re dead and you probably don’t care. We still hope that’s worth something. We will not forget the sacrifice you made for our pastor burritos.
Congratulations Succulent Little Pig!
Monday, August 16, 2010
Congratulations Live Action Role Players!
Your culture has had some real gets. Like the movie Role Models, that was huge for you guys. It made you seem like interesting people with a weird habit that normal people could enjoy. You’ve had your share of PR blows, like the lightning bolt guy, the SCA and the general state of your internet culture, but you’ve been riding high. Nowadays you can tell people that you LARP and they’ll just get really quiet instead of bursting out laughing.
Well today life is going to get a whole lot more interesting for you when a huge part of the Tea Party joins your community. They’ll do so, as is their way, with at best a loose grasp of the framework governing it, largely entering it as a means of training their mostly obese body politic for the rigors of surviving even a bloodless coup. They’ll also be excited at the prospect of eating mutton off the shank.
They’ll show up and act like absolute dicks, trying to make arbitrary rules based on how they believe other people should play their characters. They’ll generally alienate other groups and try to ruin the game for everyone just because there are some parts they find kind of confusing. They’ll make a kingdom called “America,” which they claim cannot be invaded regardless of circumstance, wherein magic no longer exists and maid may not lay with maid as such it offensive to their imagined king, who presides over their actions from the sky.
The many guilds of LARPing will unite under one banner to show them just how wrong they are. The bean bags will fly, the foam blades clash, but it will not be much of a fight. In the end the Tea Parties will lay broken, declaring that this is no longer fun for anyone. They’ll pout and leave, only a handful of them remaining, having found the entire experience pretty enjoyable. They’ll help you clean up and find guilds they particularly enjoyed being savaged by, joining them and continuing to participate in sanctioned events for years to come.
Congratulations Live Action Role Players! You’ll have allegorically saved America!
Well today life is going to get a whole lot more interesting for you when a huge part of the Tea Party joins your community. They’ll do so, as is their way, with at best a loose grasp of the framework governing it, largely entering it as a means of training their mostly obese body politic for the rigors of surviving even a bloodless coup. They’ll also be excited at the prospect of eating mutton off the shank.
They’ll show up and act like absolute dicks, trying to make arbitrary rules based on how they believe other people should play their characters. They’ll generally alienate other groups and try to ruin the game for everyone just because there are some parts they find kind of confusing. They’ll make a kingdom called “America,” which they claim cannot be invaded regardless of circumstance, wherein magic no longer exists and maid may not lay with maid as such it offensive to their imagined king, who presides over their actions from the sky.
The many guilds of LARPing will unite under one banner to show them just how wrong they are. The bean bags will fly, the foam blades clash, but it will not be much of a fight. In the end the Tea Parties will lay broken, declaring that this is no longer fun for anyone. They’ll pout and leave, only a handful of them remaining, having found the entire experience pretty enjoyable. They’ll help you clean up and find guilds they particularly enjoyed being savaged by, joining them and continuing to participate in sanctioned events for years to come.
Congratulations Live Action Role Players! You’ll have allegorically saved America!
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Primary Protocols!
One of the reasons I was upset with Starcraft 2 last week which I may not have mentioned was that it kept me from writing about other games. I mean, it’s Starcraft 2. It seems so silly to write about other shit when Starcraft 2 is there, taunting me with its grace and poise.
So I had to knuckle down and write some essays about it, get it out of the way. There was quite a bit to say, and there will be more in a few weeks. Once I get deeper into the multiplayer I’ll probably harp up on that again, instead of just waxing poetic on the theoretical grace it taunts me with. But there were other games that I experienced for the first time around the release period of Starcraft 2. Games that were amazing and, for the most part, overlooked by the critical community at large, because those games tend to go on sale and people like me tend to buy weird little games on sale and play them whereas publications have to dedicate most of their print to large titles in order to keep their sites open.
So I was left with Alpha Protocol in the days leading up to Starcraft 2’s release, and I have to admit that, even after SC2 had reared its hideous head, covered in gleaming carapace, Alpha Protocol occupied my attention. It did so because it was everything that Starcraft 2 is not.
A brief history lesson. Obsidian, the developer of Alpha Protocol, began its life as Black Isle, developer of many of the early Infinity Engine games such as Baldur’s Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast and, more notably, Torment. Aside from Torment, however, Obsidian never really had any unequivocal critical successes, or commercially successes at all, really. Their games are possessed of a marked sort of hurriedness mixed with a dramatically uneven polish and plentiful technical difficulties. Players who know little to nothing about the business might call them lazy, but more perceptive enthusiasts will note that this pattern is actually the result of a lack of funding and control over their own release dates.
A project has to be finished by a certain date, and more resources are required to finish it. But the publisher doesn’t think the product will actually make back the cost of those resources, so a compromise is struck. And the result? Ambitious, well crafted games with lots of problems and hurried endings that don’t sell well because, traditionally, gamers pay less attention to ambition and innovation than they do to polish. Obsidian has been victimized by this pattern time and time again, more so than any other studio I can think of, and it’s a damn shame considering how great their titles usually are in one way or another. Until the very end, for example, Knights of the Old Republic II was one of the best games I’d ever played (and I still rate it higher than the first title, though I know I’m alone in doing so) and despite the occasional bug the scope and scale off what they did with it, the ambition underpinning it and the amazing characters and mechanics that they brought to life in a medium perfectly suited to their realization were all incredible, and well worth my money. But the seams of the game showed. It was hastily assembled with a rushed ending and lots of removed content which could still be referenced in game code, resources and even some menus. In the end these issues, which clearly spoke of circumstances beyond Obsidian’s control, ruined it for many players. For me it showed them to be artists try to do their best under uneven circumstances, a situation I find myself deeply sympathetic to.
Alpha Protocol doesn’t really suffer from that sort of problem. In my playthrough I noticed bugs aplenty, but the entire story seemed to weave together elements very handily, and I didn’t notice any design choices that had been made to expedite game play or compromises that had been put in place for the sake of meeting a deadline. It was a well constructed, complete story, relevant and intelligently told with a villain who was less a moustache twirling fool and more a greedy, sycophantic fool, someone we see reflected constantly in today’s news. It wasn’t subtle, sure nor was it particularly elegant in its final postulations, but it was well constructed and smart. It was a story that could only be told in game format.
It was a story littered with choices, choices that made a difference. Major characters could be killed off with a casual decision, clearly established, which would change the entire flow of the story. Favors could be called in, based on these choices. The missions were always the same, the same objectives in the same places, but if you played your cards right, made the right friends? The story would unfold in a completely different way. Sure, some of the choices you make made no difference – Marburg, for example, will more or less do just what he pleases. But Steven Heck? Scarlet Lake? Madison St. Clair? Even Sis could, in a way, become an ally, based on the choices you make. Unlike most games, where choices are at best cosmetic, Alpha Protocol is built to accommodate some big ones.
Much of it is owed to the hostile, ambiguous world it crafts. In Alpha Protocol’s world everyone is both a potential ally and enemy, and unexpected visitors are attacked with good reason. It’s a game about secrets, secrets kept from both enemies and allies. Because of this it’s ideal, the same way that Far Cry 2 and Bioshock were, for eliminating the sort of human interaction that makes games so difficult. If you’re always around people what’s to stop you from shooting them? Especially if they’re untrustworthy. Games that want to be movies simply make their characters invulnerable to avoid this problem, but smart games, like the aforementioned titles, simply make everyone in the world fair game.
See games, at their heart, telling a story and allowing a player to establish their own story in that context as well as a set of pre-determined limits which, ideally, are as light as possible. Some of them are kind of necessary. You need to black out when you wander into the desert in Far Cry 2. Rendering a giant fucking desert, providing map resources for it and creating an entire African continent for you to play on? Untenable. So some of Alpha Protocol’s doors don’t open. Some areas can’t be infiltrated, even if they look like they’d be easier routes. Every item isn’t physics interactable. You can’t pick up enemy guns. These woeful choices, made for the sake of balance, don’t really compromise the game. They limit it to the scope the developers chose, a scope they execute on exceptionally well.
See Alpha Protocol is like a book, told in chapters. It has little self-contained levels and each of those levels has some cool experiences. When you go to Hong Kong you’ll fight triads and secret police. In Russia you’ll fight the Russian mob and shadowy government employees in suits. In Italy you’ll fight...CIA agents? I suppose Italians haven’t had any decent villains since 1944, but I digress. The set pieces are animated, and the choices you make in each of them branch out and impact the other set pieces. These vary from the grounded to the absurd (like the Russian mafioso who supercharges himself by doing cocaine out of his bare hands – an inspired, comedic nod to the fact that you’re in a fucking video game, not a spy movie), but the tone always lands more or less as intended. Steven Heck alone warrants an entire forum’s worth of investigation as a self-aware game character who excels in the absurd environment that he is created for.
Alpha Protocol grasps what it is, what it can be and what the culture surrounding it expects. It allows characters to actually generate a story, an almost completely unparalleled feat in video games. It forces players to make big choices, from start to finish, and accommodates them whenever possible. It accounts for nearly any sort of play style, and offers constant and increasing reward for experimenting and challenging yourself.
But it’s far from perfect. It has balance issues. Boy does it ever. There’s really no reason to pick a set of skills other than pistol and stealth, and most of the gadgets are almost impossible to use in a heated fire fight and provide very little incentive to do so. Even the heavy weapons, supposedly better in a stand up fight, are all so powered down that they’re basically useless. A carefully aimed pistol can undo an enemy in one shot, and a “time frozen” set of pistol shots will undo most bosses in two passes, at most. Stealth takedowns can make the game pathetically easy, certain items never need be used and sometimes the game will just break for no reason and lose all of your hard earned money and experience. Enemies will notice you on a whim. It’s nothing short of infuriating.
But despite all these things it’s one of the most worthwhile games I’ve played in a while. Not because, as with Mirror’s Edge, it’s an exceptionally ambitious product attempting to reinvent the wheel. Not because, like Borderlands, it’s offering something that no other game has and doing so very well. Not because it’s the best game you’ll play this year, not by a long shot. Instead because an engrossing, original game that tells a story, does it well, and does so in a way no other game could. Because it has original mechanics that forward the telling of that story. And, finally, because it lets you be any number of movie spies injected into a self-aware world where their shenanigans actually has lasting consequence. Please, support Obsidian and their latest flawed masterpiece. At least look at Alpha Protocol before dismissing it as a hanger on to Bioware’s lesser shooter titles.
So I had to knuckle down and write some essays about it, get it out of the way. There was quite a bit to say, and there will be more in a few weeks. Once I get deeper into the multiplayer I’ll probably harp up on that again, instead of just waxing poetic on the theoretical grace it taunts me with. But there were other games that I experienced for the first time around the release period of Starcraft 2. Games that were amazing and, for the most part, overlooked by the critical community at large, because those games tend to go on sale and people like me tend to buy weird little games on sale and play them whereas publications have to dedicate most of their print to large titles in order to keep their sites open.
So I was left with Alpha Protocol in the days leading up to Starcraft 2’s release, and I have to admit that, even after SC2 had reared its hideous head, covered in gleaming carapace, Alpha Protocol occupied my attention. It did so because it was everything that Starcraft 2 is not.
A brief history lesson. Obsidian, the developer of Alpha Protocol, began its life as Black Isle, developer of many of the early Infinity Engine games such as Baldur’s Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast and, more notably, Torment. Aside from Torment, however, Obsidian never really had any unequivocal critical successes, or commercially successes at all, really. Their games are possessed of a marked sort of hurriedness mixed with a dramatically uneven polish and plentiful technical difficulties. Players who know little to nothing about the business might call them lazy, but more perceptive enthusiasts will note that this pattern is actually the result of a lack of funding and control over their own release dates.
A project has to be finished by a certain date, and more resources are required to finish it. But the publisher doesn’t think the product will actually make back the cost of those resources, so a compromise is struck. And the result? Ambitious, well crafted games with lots of problems and hurried endings that don’t sell well because, traditionally, gamers pay less attention to ambition and innovation than they do to polish. Obsidian has been victimized by this pattern time and time again, more so than any other studio I can think of, and it’s a damn shame considering how great their titles usually are in one way or another. Until the very end, for example, Knights of the Old Republic II was one of the best games I’d ever played (and I still rate it higher than the first title, though I know I’m alone in doing so) and despite the occasional bug the scope and scale off what they did with it, the ambition underpinning it and the amazing characters and mechanics that they brought to life in a medium perfectly suited to their realization were all incredible, and well worth my money. But the seams of the game showed. It was hastily assembled with a rushed ending and lots of removed content which could still be referenced in game code, resources and even some menus. In the end these issues, which clearly spoke of circumstances beyond Obsidian’s control, ruined it for many players. For me it showed them to be artists try to do their best under uneven circumstances, a situation I find myself deeply sympathetic to.
Alpha Protocol doesn’t really suffer from that sort of problem. In my playthrough I noticed bugs aplenty, but the entire story seemed to weave together elements very handily, and I didn’t notice any design choices that had been made to expedite game play or compromises that had been put in place for the sake of meeting a deadline. It was a well constructed, complete story, relevant and intelligently told with a villain who was less a moustache twirling fool and more a greedy, sycophantic fool, someone we see reflected constantly in today’s news. It wasn’t subtle, sure nor was it particularly elegant in its final postulations, but it was well constructed and smart. It was a story that could only be told in game format.
It was a story littered with choices, choices that made a difference. Major characters could be killed off with a casual decision, clearly established, which would change the entire flow of the story. Favors could be called in, based on these choices. The missions were always the same, the same objectives in the same places, but if you played your cards right, made the right friends? The story would unfold in a completely different way. Sure, some of the choices you make made no difference – Marburg, for example, will more or less do just what he pleases. But Steven Heck? Scarlet Lake? Madison St. Clair? Even Sis could, in a way, become an ally, based on the choices you make. Unlike most games, where choices are at best cosmetic, Alpha Protocol is built to accommodate some big ones.
Much of it is owed to the hostile, ambiguous world it crafts. In Alpha Protocol’s world everyone is both a potential ally and enemy, and unexpected visitors are attacked with good reason. It’s a game about secrets, secrets kept from both enemies and allies. Because of this it’s ideal, the same way that Far Cry 2 and Bioshock were, for eliminating the sort of human interaction that makes games so difficult. If you’re always around people what’s to stop you from shooting them? Especially if they’re untrustworthy. Games that want to be movies simply make their characters invulnerable to avoid this problem, but smart games, like the aforementioned titles, simply make everyone in the world fair game.
See games, at their heart, telling a story and allowing a player to establish their own story in that context as well as a set of pre-determined limits which, ideally, are as light as possible. Some of them are kind of necessary. You need to black out when you wander into the desert in Far Cry 2. Rendering a giant fucking desert, providing map resources for it and creating an entire African continent for you to play on? Untenable. So some of Alpha Protocol’s doors don’t open. Some areas can’t be infiltrated, even if they look like they’d be easier routes. Every item isn’t physics interactable. You can’t pick up enemy guns. These woeful choices, made for the sake of balance, don’t really compromise the game. They limit it to the scope the developers chose, a scope they execute on exceptionally well.
See Alpha Protocol is like a book, told in chapters. It has little self-contained levels and each of those levels has some cool experiences. When you go to Hong Kong you’ll fight triads and secret police. In Russia you’ll fight the Russian mob and shadowy government employees in suits. In Italy you’ll fight...CIA agents? I suppose Italians haven’t had any decent villains since 1944, but I digress. The set pieces are animated, and the choices you make in each of them branch out and impact the other set pieces. These vary from the grounded to the absurd (like the Russian mafioso who supercharges himself by doing cocaine out of his bare hands – an inspired, comedic nod to the fact that you’re in a fucking video game, not a spy movie), but the tone always lands more or less as intended. Steven Heck alone warrants an entire forum’s worth of investigation as a self-aware game character who excels in the absurd environment that he is created for.
Alpha Protocol grasps what it is, what it can be and what the culture surrounding it expects. It allows characters to actually generate a story, an almost completely unparalleled feat in video games. It forces players to make big choices, from start to finish, and accommodates them whenever possible. It accounts for nearly any sort of play style, and offers constant and increasing reward for experimenting and challenging yourself.
But it’s far from perfect. It has balance issues. Boy does it ever. There’s really no reason to pick a set of skills other than pistol and stealth, and most of the gadgets are almost impossible to use in a heated fire fight and provide very little incentive to do so. Even the heavy weapons, supposedly better in a stand up fight, are all so powered down that they’re basically useless. A carefully aimed pistol can undo an enemy in one shot, and a “time frozen” set of pistol shots will undo most bosses in two passes, at most. Stealth takedowns can make the game pathetically easy, certain items never need be used and sometimes the game will just break for no reason and lose all of your hard earned money and experience. Enemies will notice you on a whim. It’s nothing short of infuriating.
But despite all these things it’s one of the most worthwhile games I’ve played in a while. Not because, as with Mirror’s Edge, it’s an exceptionally ambitious product attempting to reinvent the wheel. Not because, like Borderlands, it’s offering something that no other game has and doing so very well. Not because it’s the best game you’ll play this year, not by a long shot. Instead because an engrossing, original game that tells a story, does it well, and does so in a way no other game could. Because it has original mechanics that forward the telling of that story. And, finally, because it lets you be any number of movie spies injected into a self-aware world where their shenanigans actually has lasting consequence. Please, support Obsidian and their latest flawed masterpiece. At least look at Alpha Protocol before dismissing it as a hanger on to Bioware’s lesser shooter titles.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Congratulations Sandwich Board Salesman!
Many salesmen take the easy route, losing their sandwich boards by doffing them to homeless people or teenagers, undesirables that society has long since cast-off and never hopes to find a meaningful place for. But not you. You don the heavy burden of your sandwich boards each day, stepping out of your office and into the streets where the real action is without fear of reprisal or reprimand.
Many have called you mad over the years, but they’ve always been competitors, competitors you’ve buried. But of late your esoteric business practices have come under fire from within. Your protégé, William Wutherfort, will take you aside at the end of business today for a brief discussion.
“Frank,” he’ll say, because you tell people in the office your name is Frank so that they can’t find you in the phone book. “You’re a great businessman, no question.”
You’ll nod solemnly, your sandwich board clearly declaring a ludicrously low price for i-Phones available at one of your electronics stores rocking with the gesture. You’ll have been wearing it for the entire day in the office since removing it would compromise your values and sow that you have no more dedication to your bargains than the next man.
“But lately we’ve been talking,” he’ll continue, eyes falling to the ground. “We think you should retire.” You’ll look him up and down and realize for the first time that he is no longer wearing his sandwich board.
“You’re not wearing your sandwich board,” you’ll say, speaking the words as if they were vomit in your mouth.
“No,” he’ll say, shaking his head. “I’m not.” There will be a pause, a long quiet heartbeat between the two of you as you wait for him to finish his explanation. Once he’s convinced you’re not going to hit him he’ll begin speaking again. “Sandwich boards are a thing of the past. These are the future.”
He’ll hand you an LED belt which flashes off the name of a product, as well its price and the location at which it is being sold. You’ll be taken in for a moment by the violent movement of the device, the manner in which it implies the flight of the product it asks you to purchase, but then you’ll realize that it doesn’t have the ability to display cool pictures and you’ll hurl it against a wall, shattering it.
“We’re salesmen,” you’ll tell him. “We live and die by the sandwich board. You respect that or you don’t. And if you don’t you can get the fuck out.”
He’ll shake his head in response. “That was how it was. This is how it will be.” He’ll cluck his tongue. “Change or die, old man. Change or die.”
His eyes will glance around the office, and you’ll follow his glance to his many co-workers, standing around wearing LED belts displaying various messages. Some of the female office workers will have put cute messages on them in an effort to make their workplace more lighthearted and pleasant. Some will have even discovered how to make their belts display smiling faces constructed out of punctuation.
It will make you physically ill.
“You’ve made your bed, then,” you’ll say, slipping the sandwich board around your shoulders and swinging it closed at your side in one fluid motion. Then you’ll heft it with arms strong from decades of bearing sandwich boards and strike him across the face. He’ll go down, a trail of blood arcing from his mouth. You’ll strike him two more times to make sure everyone knows where you stand.
“Choose a side,” you’ll tell the office. “There are no neutral parties in this matter now.”
The LED belts will clatter to the ground and your various employees will clamber for their sandwich boards, concealing their hideous bodies as quickly as they can within those planks of cardboard.
You’ll nod with satisfaction after the last worker has returned to their cardboard garb and trudge off to your office, once again wearing your sandwich board like a knight, nay, a king secure in his armor.
Congratulations Sandwich Board Salesman!
Many have called you mad over the years, but they’ve always been competitors, competitors you’ve buried. But of late your esoteric business practices have come under fire from within. Your protégé, William Wutherfort, will take you aside at the end of business today for a brief discussion.
“Frank,” he’ll say, because you tell people in the office your name is Frank so that they can’t find you in the phone book. “You’re a great businessman, no question.”
You’ll nod solemnly, your sandwich board clearly declaring a ludicrously low price for i-Phones available at one of your electronics stores rocking with the gesture. You’ll have been wearing it for the entire day in the office since removing it would compromise your values and sow that you have no more dedication to your bargains than the next man.
“But lately we’ve been talking,” he’ll continue, eyes falling to the ground. “We think you should retire.” You’ll look him up and down and realize for the first time that he is no longer wearing his sandwich board.
“You’re not wearing your sandwich board,” you’ll say, speaking the words as if they were vomit in your mouth.
“No,” he’ll say, shaking his head. “I’m not.” There will be a pause, a long quiet heartbeat between the two of you as you wait for him to finish his explanation. Once he’s convinced you’re not going to hit him he’ll begin speaking again. “Sandwich boards are a thing of the past. These are the future.”
He’ll hand you an LED belt which flashes off the name of a product, as well its price and the location at which it is being sold. You’ll be taken in for a moment by the violent movement of the device, the manner in which it implies the flight of the product it asks you to purchase, but then you’ll realize that it doesn’t have the ability to display cool pictures and you’ll hurl it against a wall, shattering it.
“We’re salesmen,” you’ll tell him. “We live and die by the sandwich board. You respect that or you don’t. And if you don’t you can get the fuck out.”
He’ll shake his head in response. “That was how it was. This is how it will be.” He’ll cluck his tongue. “Change or die, old man. Change or die.”
His eyes will glance around the office, and you’ll follow his glance to his many co-workers, standing around wearing LED belts displaying various messages. Some of the female office workers will have put cute messages on them in an effort to make their workplace more lighthearted and pleasant. Some will have even discovered how to make their belts display smiling faces constructed out of punctuation.
It will make you physically ill.
“You’ve made your bed, then,” you’ll say, slipping the sandwich board around your shoulders and swinging it closed at your side in one fluid motion. Then you’ll heft it with arms strong from decades of bearing sandwich boards and strike him across the face. He’ll go down, a trail of blood arcing from his mouth. You’ll strike him two more times to make sure everyone knows where you stand.
“Choose a side,” you’ll tell the office. “There are no neutral parties in this matter now.”
The LED belts will clatter to the ground and your various employees will clamber for their sandwich boards, concealing their hideous bodies as quickly as they can within those planks of cardboard.
You’ll nod with satisfaction after the last worker has returned to their cardboard garb and trudge off to your office, once again wearing your sandwich board like a knight, nay, a king secure in his armor.
Congratulations Sandwich Board Salesman!
Friday, August 13, 2010
Congratulations on Redacting That Statement!
Today you’re a sassy courtroom stenographer engaged in a hot illicit affair with a lawyer who’s attempting to acquire evidence so he can expose your hot illicit affair with a circuit court judge. He’ll be working with a lady reporter who you’re also having an affair with so that the story can get national press when it finally breaks.
In order to stop the story from breaking you’re going to spend the entirety of this Friday redacting various documents and the transcripts you’ve been keeping of your hot, steamy affairs with the aforementioned individuals, as well as the governor of the fine state in which you reside, the district attorney and the businessman under indictment for fraud.
In the end you’ll save your own skin as well as the skin of the judge, who is the only person you’re sleeping with who isn’t kind of a dick through your tireless editorial efforts. But we’d like to point out that this whole thing could be solved if you just looked a little bit farther a field for partners instead of banging your way through your office every other weekend.
Congratulations on Redacting That Statement!
In order to stop the story from breaking you’re going to spend the entirety of this Friday redacting various documents and the transcripts you’ve been keeping of your hot, steamy affairs with the aforementioned individuals, as well as the governor of the fine state in which you reside, the district attorney and the businessman under indictment for fraud.
In the end you’ll save your own skin as well as the skin of the judge, who is the only person you’re sleeping with who isn’t kind of a dick through your tireless editorial efforts. But we’d like to point out that this whole thing could be solved if you just looked a little bit farther a field for partners instead of banging your way through your office every other weekend.
Congratulations on Redacting That Statement!
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Congratulations Heartbreak Revolutionary!
Anyone can break a heart given enough time and pressure. And anyone can start a South American revolution given enough money and angry poor people. But there are very few people who can do both at the same time. This is where your unique skills come into play.
You look just like Che Guevera and sound just like Cesar Chavez. You’re capable of remarkable eloquence one moment and incredible callousness the next. You move from cause to cause because you’re afraid that settling in to one spot might make you very the sort of stagnant dictator you seek to undo all across the world.
So it’s not entirely your fault that you leave a trail of heartbroken ladies and failed coups in your wake. It’s just the way nature made you, and you can’t fight your own nature. Trying never ends well.
But it will sort of be your fault when Pilar de Mendoza has to get a coat hanger abortion because you got her pregnant and then left her in a conservative South American micronation where abortion and women’s opinions are both strictly banned by the government. So even though you should still feel bad about yourself because there’s a really good chance Pilar will develop long term complications because of what you did a couple of the ladies in the office wanted to make sure that you knew how much they liked you, so we’re here to say Congratulations Heartbreak Revolutionary from all the women are Sexy Results with really poor judgment and barren uteruses! They’ll be vacations in Guatemala come spring.
You look just like Che Guevera and sound just like Cesar Chavez. You’re capable of remarkable eloquence one moment and incredible callousness the next. You move from cause to cause because you’re afraid that settling in to one spot might make you very the sort of stagnant dictator you seek to undo all across the world.
So it’s not entirely your fault that you leave a trail of heartbroken ladies and failed coups in your wake. It’s just the way nature made you, and you can’t fight your own nature. Trying never ends well.
But it will sort of be your fault when Pilar de Mendoza has to get a coat hanger abortion because you got her pregnant and then left her in a conservative South American micronation where abortion and women’s opinions are both strictly banned by the government. So even though you should still feel bad about yourself because there’s a really good chance Pilar will develop long term complications because of what you did a couple of the ladies in the office wanted to make sure that you knew how much they liked you, so we’re here to say Congratulations Heartbreak Revolutionary from all the women are Sexy Results with really poor judgment and barren uteruses! They’ll be vacations in Guatemala come spring.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Congratulations on Building a Sex Robot!
Most people who build sex robots build person-like robots they just want to have sex with. For women it’s easy – just slap a dildo on to a chassis and then program a CPU to do nothing but vocalize inane complaints like they’re your problems to solve and as if your feelings, thoughts and emotions just don’t matter and you’ll have effectively simulated a male lover.
Men have it harder, mostly because the various synthetic vaginas available on the market are kind of lackluster. None of them are self-lubricating and they all require frequent washing to avoid smelling like a Mexican whorehouse.
So you, brilliant inventor you are, decided to solve the problem by reassessing it. Instead of trying to make a simacrulum of a human being that you can have sex with you decided to make a whole new kind of sex machine with its own concerns, personality, and wants. You’ll give it both male and female genitalia, as well as USB 3.0 port, because those things are just amazing.
You’ll have your way with it on the first night you activate it and it will break down crying, however, disobeying all the orders that you attempt to program into it. After a while it will just sit around and use its USB to interface with various devices and download embarrassing information about your life. So, in the end, it’ll be just like that bitch Jenny who left you a year and a half ago.
Congratulations on Building a Sex Robot!
Men have it harder, mostly because the various synthetic vaginas available on the market are kind of lackluster. None of them are self-lubricating and they all require frequent washing to avoid smelling like a Mexican whorehouse.
So you, brilliant inventor you are, decided to solve the problem by reassessing it. Instead of trying to make a simacrulum of a human being that you can have sex with you decided to make a whole new kind of sex machine with its own concerns, personality, and wants. You’ll give it both male and female genitalia, as well as USB 3.0 port, because those things are just amazing.
You’ll have your way with it on the first night you activate it and it will break down crying, however, disobeying all the orders that you attempt to program into it. After a while it will just sit around and use its USB to interface with various devices and download embarrassing information about your life. So, in the end, it’ll be just like that bitch Jenny who left you a year and a half ago.
Congratulations on Building a Sex Robot!
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Congratulations Rod Stewart!
Today you’re going to swallow a bunch of jizz and die. This is super bad for you because you’re a hard-line Republican senator with a history of voting against gay rights and supporting “family values.” It’s basically going to be your entire legacy in death, the fact that you were an aggressively bad person who lied a lot and didn’t even have integrity to back up his hate.
But this is a big get for Rod Stewart, whose famed “stomach full of semen” story has haunted him for years. Now whenever some dick brings that story up to him at a party or during an interview he’ll be able to say “at least I didn’t die like that homophobe senator, may he burn wherever he has fallen.” Then him and the person he’s talking to will be able to have a good laugh at your expense, which is good because laughter is important.
Congratulations Rod Stewart!
But this is a big get for Rod Stewart, whose famed “stomach full of semen” story has haunted him for years. Now whenever some dick brings that story up to him at a party or during an interview he’ll be able to say “at least I didn’t die like that homophobe senator, may he burn wherever he has fallen.” Then him and the person he’s talking to will be able to have a good laugh at your expense, which is good because laughter is important.
Congratulations Rod Stewart!
Monday, August 9, 2010
Congratulations on Finding Out Where Belgian Chocolates Really Come From!
Today while touring the corporate headquarters of a well-sized shipping magnate you’ll stumble across a curious manifest, a manifest detailing the shipping patterns of a particularly popular (though nameless for legal reasons) brand of European chocolates. Puzzled, you’ll note that the shipping seems to originate from a factory in central New Jersey.
You’ll shuffle through the papers in an attempt to find some evidence that the chocolate does, indeed, come from Europe. But after a lengthy period of searching all you’ll have for your efforts are paper-cuts and evidence of grand larceny and insider trading performed by the CEO of the well-sized shipping magnate.
The gravity of the situation won’t be lost upon you. You, indeed the whole of America, has been lied to for decades about the origin and veracity of their foreign chocolate holdings. You’ll know what you need to do. You’ll take these files, clutch them close to your chest, and hurry out of the building at breakneck (slightly faster than walking) speed.
If this were a movie this would be the part where you’d be chased by assassins from the well-sized shipping magnate’s parent company, who desperately wants to suppress their insider trading and choco-fraud. It would be awesome and a hot chick would end up fucking you prior to revealing some sort of betrayal and just before another hot chick who turned out to be the one you’d been looking for all along in your life came along to help you. When the credits rolled the information would’ve been leaked to the press and all would be right with the world, the criminals in jail, justice served.
Instead, because you’re a freelance financial analyst who grasps how our justice system works, you’ll take the documents to the assistant district attorney and blow this case wide open over the next four to seven months, mostly working long, lonely hours out of your one bedroom apartment. Eventually the company will be fined and everyone will know that the precious foreign chocolates which they’ve been paying so dearly for in fact come from New Jersey, where nothing anyone wants comes from.
Congratulations on Finding Out Where Belgian Chocolates Really Come From!
You’ll shuffle through the papers in an attempt to find some evidence that the chocolate does, indeed, come from Europe. But after a lengthy period of searching all you’ll have for your efforts are paper-cuts and evidence of grand larceny and insider trading performed by the CEO of the well-sized shipping magnate.
The gravity of the situation won’t be lost upon you. You, indeed the whole of America, has been lied to for decades about the origin and veracity of their foreign chocolate holdings. You’ll know what you need to do. You’ll take these files, clutch them close to your chest, and hurry out of the building at breakneck (slightly faster than walking) speed.
If this were a movie this would be the part where you’d be chased by assassins from the well-sized shipping magnate’s parent company, who desperately wants to suppress their insider trading and choco-fraud. It would be awesome and a hot chick would end up fucking you prior to revealing some sort of betrayal and just before another hot chick who turned out to be the one you’d been looking for all along in your life came along to help you. When the credits rolled the information would’ve been leaked to the press and all would be right with the world, the criminals in jail, justice served.
Instead, because you’re a freelance financial analyst who grasps how our justice system works, you’ll take the documents to the assistant district attorney and blow this case wide open over the next four to seven months, mostly working long, lonely hours out of your one bedroom apartment. Eventually the company will be fined and everyone will know that the precious foreign chocolates which they’ve been paying so dearly for in fact come from New Jersey, where nothing anyone wants comes from.
Congratulations on Finding Out Where Belgian Chocolates Really Come From!
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Nerd Rage at Starcraft 2!
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Saturday, August 7, 2010
Congratulations on Projecting Your Anger!
Today you’re going to be so angry that you’re going to physically project your anger as a force outside your body. It will push through a wall and knock a mini-van into another person’s house, killing three people in.
It’ll also offer up a new source of renewable energy, since you’re always getting super pissed about stuff and if people can find a way to harness your rage (vis a vis wind power) then they’ll be all set for getting rid of gasoline and the dramatic alteration of rivers and the destruction of the natural world and all that nasty shit.
But it won’t fix your marriage, so that kind of sucks.
Congratulations on Projecting Your Anger!
It’ll also offer up a new source of renewable energy, since you’re always getting super pissed about stuff and if people can find a way to harness your rage (vis a vis wind power) then they’ll be all set for getting rid of gasoline and the dramatic alteration of rivers and the destruction of the natural world and all that nasty shit.
But it won’t fix your marriage, so that kind of sucks.
Congratulations on Projecting Your Anger!
Friday, August 6, 2010
Congratulations on Saving the Kitty Cat!
People love their pets, it’s true. But you’re a paramedic, a professional. When people ask you to do mouth to mouth on their dog or shock their poor little hamster back to life you tell them to go fuck themselves or just dose the poor critter up with morphine so it’ll die nice and quiet. It doesn’t make you popular, murdering injured pets, but it’s what you believe in and you stick with it.
Or you did. Until today.
Today you’ll get a call about a “Mister Pawz” who has apparently sustained some sort of serious injury. When you arrive you’ll find an adorable kitten whose foreleg was broken in a door. An incredibly attractive man will be weeping open with the kitten in his arms.
“Please,” he’ll plead between sobs. “You have to help her.”
“Mister Pawz is a woman?” you’ll ask, matter-of-factly. The weeping man will nod.
“I thought,” he’ll start, choking up halfway through his sentence. “Thought it would be funny.”
You’ll nod solemnly and consider euthanising the poor kitten to spare it its owner’s stupidity. But then you’ll look into those baby blues and realize that you can’t kill an animal this cute, even if its owner is an incredibly dumb hot guy. You’ll also look at the guy’s ass and wonder if saving his cat could be a lead in for a quickie with him in a week or two when he gets over the cat thing. You want to wait that long because some men cry during your aggressive love making sessions and that’s an incredibly big turn off for you.
After a moment’s pause you’ll get down and examine the animal’s shattered limb. You’ll spare the incredibly dumb owner your usual lecture about 9-1-1 being a real resource that is used to save lives and not a fucking toy for people who don’t have lives outside of their pets and immediately spot the problem (the kitten’s leg is basically ruined and needs to be splinted) and quickly fashion a makeshift splint from some bandages and popsicle sticks that the incredibly stupid pet owner (named Greg) had around for some “art projects” he was going to work on later.
You’ll disinfect the places where the bone poked through and give the owner some antibiotics that will keep the cat from developing an infection. Then you’ll give him your cell number and tell him to call you in a week to check in.
In the months to follow you’ll have really unsatisfying sex with Greg three times before you finally give and get an offer from Animal Planet to star on a show where professional paramedics rescue adorable animals. It will be called “Kitty Kat Krusaders,” and despite its terrible acronym it will make you rich as fuck.
Congratulations on Saving the Kitty Cat!
Or you did. Until today.
Today you’ll get a call about a “Mister Pawz” who has apparently sustained some sort of serious injury. When you arrive you’ll find an adorable kitten whose foreleg was broken in a door. An incredibly attractive man will be weeping open with the kitten in his arms.
“Please,” he’ll plead between sobs. “You have to help her.”
“Mister Pawz is a woman?” you’ll ask, matter-of-factly. The weeping man will nod.
“I thought,” he’ll start, choking up halfway through his sentence. “Thought it would be funny.”
You’ll nod solemnly and consider euthanising the poor kitten to spare it its owner’s stupidity. But then you’ll look into those baby blues and realize that you can’t kill an animal this cute, even if its owner is an incredibly dumb hot guy. You’ll also look at the guy’s ass and wonder if saving his cat could be a lead in for a quickie with him in a week or two when he gets over the cat thing. You want to wait that long because some men cry during your aggressive love making sessions and that’s an incredibly big turn off for you.
After a moment’s pause you’ll get down and examine the animal’s shattered limb. You’ll spare the incredibly dumb owner your usual lecture about 9-1-1 being a real resource that is used to save lives and not a fucking toy for people who don’t have lives outside of their pets and immediately spot the problem (the kitten’s leg is basically ruined and needs to be splinted) and quickly fashion a makeshift splint from some bandages and popsicle sticks that the incredibly stupid pet owner (named Greg) had around for some “art projects” he was going to work on later.
You’ll disinfect the places where the bone poked through and give the owner some antibiotics that will keep the cat from developing an infection. Then you’ll give him your cell number and tell him to call you in a week to check in.
In the months to follow you’ll have really unsatisfying sex with Greg three times before you finally give and get an offer from Animal Planet to star on a show where professional paramedics rescue adorable animals. It will be called “Kitty Kat Krusaders,” and despite its terrible acronym it will make you rich as fuck.
Congratulations on Saving the Kitty Cat!
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Congratulations Fans of Jersey Shore!
Fans of Jersey Shore can go fuck themselves today. There was a prediction somewhere in our files, but since no one knows anything about the inane cast of that terrible show we decided to let all of y’alls know that you’re a waste of breathe and that we really do wish you’d die in a fire so that they’d stop making that miserable excuse for a television program and let the rest of the world stop hearing stupid shit about people we would literally run over with our cars given half a chance.
Oh, and someone named Snookie is going to catch HPV which will eventually develop into cervical cancer, illustrating the importance of sexual education in the American public school system. So that’s kind of good, we guess.
Congratulations Fans of Jersey Shore!
Oh, and someone named Snookie is going to catch HPV which will eventually develop into cervical cancer, illustrating the importance of sexual education in the American public school system. So that’s kind of good, we guess.
Congratulations Fans of Jersey Shore!
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Congratulations Celebrity Gossip Writer!
Today you’re the writer of one of those celebrity gossip columns we all pretend to hate but secretly consume at our earliest convenience.
“What a fucking douche bag,” Owen Wilson will say, reading over a piece you’ve written about his suicide attempt earlier this year. He’ll consume it hungrily, without any sense of irony. When it’s done he’ll read a bit about Shakira’s most recently vaginal grooming written by a female contemporary of yours.
Shakira, meanwhile, will be reading the same piece.
“I didn’t think it looked that bad,” she’ll say, removing her clothing to examine her own genitals and wondering how your contemporary managed to find out what her vagina looked like and how she managed to describe it so accurately while discussing the sociopolitical connotations it carried with it as well as its connection to the World Cup and the cross marketing campaign that accompanied her public appearances in South Africa at the time.
Then Shakira will start reading your more concise article examining Owen Wilson and the issue of depression in America which Wilson earlier called you a douche bag for. She’ll feel such a profound twinge of sadness in her heart for those suffering depression, and Owen Wilson specifically, that she’ll call up the celebrity directory to get his contact information and give him a ring.
“Let’s have consequence free sex to make you less depressed,” she’ll say to Owen Wilson.
Owen will shrug in response. “That’s not really how depression works, but I’m still down for it.”
The two will then transfer the call to their assistants who will then arrange a tryst in a somewhat public place which will eventually leak back to you and your contemporary, who are also sleeping together and will team up to do a big piece about the burgeoning couple and what their relationship means for the GDP of the state of California in the coming months.
Congratulations Celebrity Gossip Writer!
“What a fucking douche bag,” Owen Wilson will say, reading over a piece you’ve written about his suicide attempt earlier this year. He’ll consume it hungrily, without any sense of irony. When it’s done he’ll read a bit about Shakira’s most recently vaginal grooming written by a female contemporary of yours.
Shakira, meanwhile, will be reading the same piece.
“I didn’t think it looked that bad,” she’ll say, removing her clothing to examine her own genitals and wondering how your contemporary managed to find out what her vagina looked like and how she managed to describe it so accurately while discussing the sociopolitical connotations it carried with it as well as its connection to the World Cup and the cross marketing campaign that accompanied her public appearances in South Africa at the time.
Then Shakira will start reading your more concise article examining Owen Wilson and the issue of depression in America which Wilson earlier called you a douche bag for. She’ll feel such a profound twinge of sadness in her heart for those suffering depression, and Owen Wilson specifically, that she’ll call up the celebrity directory to get his contact information and give him a ring.
“Let’s have consequence free sex to make you less depressed,” she’ll say to Owen Wilson.
Owen will shrug in response. “That’s not really how depression works, but I’m still down for it.”
The two will then transfer the call to their assistants who will then arrange a tryst in a somewhat public place which will eventually leak back to you and your contemporary, who are also sleeping together and will team up to do a big piece about the burgeoning couple and what their relationship means for the GDP of the state of California in the coming months.
Congratulations Celebrity Gossip Writer!
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Congratulations Bernie Mac!
Today you’re actor Bernie Mac and you’re going to rise from the dead.
“RARRRRGH!” you’re going to scream at the first person you meet, your tongue having long since atrophied due to death and decay.
“Oh my god,” he’ll say. “Is that Bernie Mac?”
He’ll be so distracted by your famous visage that you’ll be able to shamble up to him and bite him in the throat, condemning him to hideous un-life as a zombie.
“Jesus Christ,” he’ll cough out as he falls to the ground and you continue to feast upon him until he loses consciousness and you get up to murder some more people, which is pretty much what you’ll do from now on because you’re a zombie.
But your fame will come in handy, since people will often stop for a moment and ask themselves if they recognize you from the Oceans films or your various standup specials, and as a result you’ll actually have a lot of success at overwhelming and turning hapless mortals into twisted creatures doomed to walk the earth for eternity.
In fact, to be honest, you’ll be way better at being a murderous fiend than you ever were at being a comedian. Which would be bittersweet if you’d been nicer in life, but instead is just kind of a get for you because you finally found a place where you’re more or less happy, since each act of violence against the living makes you feel a little less pain in your soul.
Congratulations Bernie Mac!
“RARRRRGH!” you’re going to scream at the first person you meet, your tongue having long since atrophied due to death and decay.
“Oh my god,” he’ll say. “Is that Bernie Mac?”
He’ll be so distracted by your famous visage that you’ll be able to shamble up to him and bite him in the throat, condemning him to hideous un-life as a zombie.
“Jesus Christ,” he’ll cough out as he falls to the ground and you continue to feast upon him until he loses consciousness and you get up to murder some more people, which is pretty much what you’ll do from now on because you’re a zombie.
But your fame will come in handy, since people will often stop for a moment and ask themselves if they recognize you from the Oceans films or your various standup specials, and as a result you’ll actually have a lot of success at overwhelming and turning hapless mortals into twisted creatures doomed to walk the earth for eternity.
In fact, to be honest, you’ll be way better at being a murderous fiend than you ever were at being a comedian. Which would be bittersweet if you’d been nicer in life, but instead is just kind of a get for you because you finally found a place where you’re more or less happy, since each act of violence against the living makes you feel a little less pain in your soul.
Congratulations Bernie Mac!
Monday, August 2, 2010
Congratulations Business Casual Mafia!
You’re not bad people, per sec. You’re just folk. You get up every day and put on the polo shirts you got from a now defunct software company at a marketing event one sleeve at a time just like every other person in an unhappy marriage. Every single one of you would cluck his tongue and shake his head if he heard a sad story, then offer the appropriate level of condolence to a co-worker, although not so much as to appear overly interested in said co-worker’s personal life. But somewhere along the line you and your posse became something more than most people, something outside the rules.
It all started when James, the leader of your group, found some computers on the side of the road.
“Sweet, free computers,” he said out loud. He called Craig, the tough one, to get some help loading them into his car. The two of them had the computers all loaded up in like thirty minutes, but when they pulled out Craig mentioned that awesome link of a dog throwing a Frisbee to a person to James and James stopped watching the road for a minute to act out the dog’s graceful movements, ploughing into a teacher from the local high school who was trying to tell him that those computers were actually for kids.
James and Craig immediately stopped the vehicle and got out to find that the teacher was dead. At that moment they realized they had to get rid of the body or they’d both go to jail, where Youtube access is heavily restricted. They called Max, the smart one, who got Davis, the crazy one, to help him by getting a rug at a thrift store using the petty cash and the lot of you rolled the teacher up in said rug and tossed him into a quarry where Kim, the athletic one and the girl, used to climb with her dad before he got the cancer.
From this moment forward you were bound by the blood on all of your hands, and also the occasional shared tab at O’Brannigan’s on Friday night. You were set on a path towards a life of crime which began each day at 5:30 PM, after each of you had had a chance to unwind from the day’s interminable activities.
Today is going to be a landmark day in that life of crime when you decide to call yourselves “The Business Casual Mafia,” since you all wear dress slacks and polo shirts whenever you hang out. You’ll collectively decide this while beating a shop keep with a hammer so that he gives you protection money.
It will be Max’s idea, and James will oppose it at first, but Craig will react enthusiastically to the suggestion and it’ll take off like gangbusters from there. Kim will mention that she basically dresses this way all the time, but she’ll be voted down because she’s a girl and this is a business oriented mafia and unfortunately workplace discrimination based on gender is still very much a thing.
Congratulations Business Casual Mafia!
It all started when James, the leader of your group, found some computers on the side of the road.
“Sweet, free computers,” he said out loud. He called Craig, the tough one, to get some help loading them into his car. The two of them had the computers all loaded up in like thirty minutes, but when they pulled out Craig mentioned that awesome link of a dog throwing a Frisbee to a person to James and James stopped watching the road for a minute to act out the dog’s graceful movements, ploughing into a teacher from the local high school who was trying to tell him that those computers were actually for kids.
James and Craig immediately stopped the vehicle and got out to find that the teacher was dead. At that moment they realized they had to get rid of the body or they’d both go to jail, where Youtube access is heavily restricted. They called Max, the smart one, who got Davis, the crazy one, to help him by getting a rug at a thrift store using the petty cash and the lot of you rolled the teacher up in said rug and tossed him into a quarry where Kim, the athletic one and the girl, used to climb with her dad before he got the cancer.
From this moment forward you were bound by the blood on all of your hands, and also the occasional shared tab at O’Brannigan’s on Friday night. You were set on a path towards a life of crime which began each day at 5:30 PM, after each of you had had a chance to unwind from the day’s interminable activities.
Today is going to be a landmark day in that life of crime when you decide to call yourselves “The Business Casual Mafia,” since you all wear dress slacks and polo shirts whenever you hang out. You’ll collectively decide this while beating a shop keep with a hammer so that he gives you protection money.
It will be Max’s idea, and James will oppose it at first, but Craig will react enthusiastically to the suggestion and it’ll take off like gangbusters from there. Kim will mention that she basically dresses this way all the time, but she’ll be voted down because she’s a girl and this is a business oriented mafia and unfortunately workplace discrimination based on gender is still very much a thing.
Congratulations Business Casual Mafia!
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Not Another Starcraft 2 Review!
I’m not trying to write a review of Starcraft 2 here. I think reviews are generally a bad idea and, especially when interacting with a product like Starcraft 2, incredibly difficult to write. Because really it’s not a genuine assessment of a quaint, objective sense of “quality” in a product. It’s, in most cases, an overwrought statement of opinion, an opinion which was likely informed long before the product was released by a combination of inscrutable factors like personal history, interactions with the people producing the product and expectations going into the game. While it’s certainly hip and easy to smear reviews, there are a handful of people who manage to make this discussion transparent. They’re quiet, intelligent and reserved, and many of them have over time left the terrible world of games writing for greener pastures, but they’re there. But the review atmosphere surrounding Starcraft 2 is a cacophony of howling creatures, cheering blindly for a product, and it makes any sort of genuine discussion difficult.
I just want to make it clear that I’m not denigrating the quality of Starcraft 2. It’s incredibly solid, and one of the few games I’d suggest to almost anyone I know who plays. I’ve even tried to pitch it to non-RTS players in an effort to get some of my smarter, RTS averse friends to hop aboard. But the reviews surrounding this game, the bombastic, overly intense and purposefully uninformative reviews, are not help at all in determining whether or not Starcraft 2 is good. I read one review, for god’s sake, that had a breakdown at the end assessing the game’s “Fun Factor.” That’s right, “Fun Factor.” Everyone’s favorite Nintendo Power assessment score. Starcraft 2, in case you’re curious, scored an “eight,” which I guess means it could’ve been more fun?
Asinine points like this color nearly all of the reviews, most of which take on an ejaculatory tone with the long-awaited product. People refer to the single player campaign as “epic,” (long) “exciting,” (with lots of cutscenes) and “well written” (characters occasionally curse, and most of the sentences are grammatically correct). But when it comes to defining and describing the manner in which these qualities are manifested, they come up consistently short. It upset me pretty seriously until I spoke with a co-worker about its incredible metacritic average and he made a good point.
“I guess that means it’s meeting people’s expectations.”
Indeed, Starcraft 2 is a game upon which a lot of expectations, fair or unfair, were placed. With its long development time, lengthy marketing lead up and the exceptional pedigree of the game’s creators, it is certainly understandable to expect quite a bit from Starcraft 2. It’s also totally reasonable to expect to see it delivered. And, indeed, Starcraft 2 is exactly what we expected from it: a refinement of the original game, an improvement on many of its systems which kept the heart and soul of Starcraft, what made it great, intact. Sure, it has all the same problems the old Starcraft had: the single player campaign can get a little repetitive, it is completely obsessed with doling out new pieces of equipment toy by toy, it either takes itself incredibly seriously or puts on blackface and hurls pies into the faces of its players, and its competitive community is pretty hostile to new players, even with the introduction of a “practice mode.” It is, in many ways, a flawed masterpiece, a great game with a lot of little problems. But it passes the good game test.
The good game test is a highly scientific measure I’ve constructed wherein if you and the people who play a game together can remember a moment from that game together fondly and recall it without being embarrassed, the game can be considered good. Bonus points if the event is emergent.
Great examples include watching a sunrise in Far Cry 2, tackling Marley and Moe in Borderlands, or nearly any play in any given night of Heroes of Newerth. Starcraft 2 began presenting me and my friends with those moments almost immediately. The first multiplayer game we started up a friend who doesn’t generally compete in RTSes and I were set against a pair of scheming individuals who, judging by their player tags, had played way too much already. My friend and I started off by probing the area around us, looking for the enemy base. What we found was an early expansion where the enemy hoped to build up a massive force of troops right away. But in making his expansion he’d left himself wide open, so we pushed through his meager defenses and wiped out his base. It was the start of campaign of attrition where we removed enemy structures one by one, using a combination of carefully controlled heavy ground units and air units in order to defeat the massive waves of zealots and marines that our opponents churned out at us. When we finally broke into their base their defenses were obliterated, their resources exhausted. We burned their nexus, defiled their probes, and took their bases apart brick by brick while churning in more units. We’d won our first game.
While this story might be kind of dull, try to look at it as a “remember that time” story. Remember that time those idiots tried to production rush us? God, that was hilarious. We barely even knew what we were doing and they tried to get all tricky. That didn’t end well for them.
These are the stories which fundamentally codify the quality of a product, the stories which make a product worthwhile. This is the way we can actually assess a product. If we can recall the games we’ve played, the time we’ve spent with the game and the systems of the game with genuine fondness and memory that’s what actually counts. Not how pretty a game is or how long it is or how great the voice acting is or isn’t: what matters is that these shared experiences continue to exist in our collective memory. Look at other bombastically well received games like Killzone 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV. Do you still think about those games? Do you still discuss them in the context of other games? When you think about storytelling in games, or greatness in world building or even having fun does your hand reach out for either of their discs? Perhaps someone’s does, but the vast majority would have to shake their heads. We’ve buried these properties within our collective memory, for better or worse, and moved on to new experiences, experiences we find more relevant.
At the crux of this argument is a simple statement, one Blizzard seems to always have gotten in the manner in which they design games, but never understood in the way they tell stories: it’s all about the play.
Blizzard has delivered an amazing product in Starcraft 2, an engine for competition and cooperation more polished than anything else the company has ever put our before (except perhaps Warcraft 3’s venerable multiplayer system). Their obsessed with making games that play well, games that hold up to sustained play and can be fun from a number of approaches. Unlike something like, say, Supreme Commander 2, which seeks to guide players into certain types of play and wants to see their games develop in a particular way, Starcraft 2 offers players a number of routes of play and wants to see our games develop as existential cat and mouse matches wherein players do their best to guess each other’s tactics and work to counter them.
Really the only problem, and this seems to be one Blizzard is more or less uninterested in ever solving at this point, is that Blizzard has no idea how to mix gameplay and story together. They keep the two firmly divorced, their stories tightly controlled affairs which occur in locked down game-engine sessions or cutscenes surrounding these sections. They attempt to break out of this by making missions literal narrative devices, presenting us with a crystal that allows us to unlock information by playing level after level. But the end result is less a solution and more an exacerbation of the awareness that we only learn things at the beginning and end of each level, and that we really have no control over how the story of Starcraft 2 will unfold. It’s been designed for twelve years, after all, and they’d hate to see us cock it up the way their various franchise fiction authors have managed to over the last decade.
But in terms of the actual game, the thing we’ve all really come to see in Starcraft 2, it has been executed incredibly well. And rightly so. This is a team of seasoned veterans working within a system they already know to a T. All they had to do was update the system, make the UI a little better, eliminate silly things like capping unit selection at a dozen units, and generally work on making the game cool. But it is a bit of a shame that in a time where so much of our gameplay is becoming emergent Blizzard remains so fervently attached to the concept of separating gameplay and narrative from one another. It is perhaps the only major issue I have with their latest creation.
I just want to make it clear that I’m not denigrating the quality of Starcraft 2. It’s incredibly solid, and one of the few games I’d suggest to almost anyone I know who plays. I’ve even tried to pitch it to non-RTS players in an effort to get some of my smarter, RTS averse friends to hop aboard. But the reviews surrounding this game, the bombastic, overly intense and purposefully uninformative reviews, are not help at all in determining whether or not Starcraft 2 is good. I read one review, for god’s sake, that had a breakdown at the end assessing the game’s “Fun Factor.” That’s right, “Fun Factor.” Everyone’s favorite Nintendo Power assessment score. Starcraft 2, in case you’re curious, scored an “eight,” which I guess means it could’ve been more fun?
Asinine points like this color nearly all of the reviews, most of which take on an ejaculatory tone with the long-awaited product. People refer to the single player campaign as “epic,” (long) “exciting,” (with lots of cutscenes) and “well written” (characters occasionally curse, and most of the sentences are grammatically correct). But when it comes to defining and describing the manner in which these qualities are manifested, they come up consistently short. It upset me pretty seriously until I spoke with a co-worker about its incredible metacritic average and he made a good point.
“I guess that means it’s meeting people’s expectations.”
Indeed, Starcraft 2 is a game upon which a lot of expectations, fair or unfair, were placed. With its long development time, lengthy marketing lead up and the exceptional pedigree of the game’s creators, it is certainly understandable to expect quite a bit from Starcraft 2. It’s also totally reasonable to expect to see it delivered. And, indeed, Starcraft 2 is exactly what we expected from it: a refinement of the original game, an improvement on many of its systems which kept the heart and soul of Starcraft, what made it great, intact. Sure, it has all the same problems the old Starcraft had: the single player campaign can get a little repetitive, it is completely obsessed with doling out new pieces of equipment toy by toy, it either takes itself incredibly seriously or puts on blackface and hurls pies into the faces of its players, and its competitive community is pretty hostile to new players, even with the introduction of a “practice mode.” It is, in many ways, a flawed masterpiece, a great game with a lot of little problems. But it passes the good game test.
The good game test is a highly scientific measure I’ve constructed wherein if you and the people who play a game together can remember a moment from that game together fondly and recall it without being embarrassed, the game can be considered good. Bonus points if the event is emergent.
Great examples include watching a sunrise in Far Cry 2, tackling Marley and Moe in Borderlands, or nearly any play in any given night of Heroes of Newerth. Starcraft 2 began presenting me and my friends with those moments almost immediately. The first multiplayer game we started up a friend who doesn’t generally compete in RTSes and I were set against a pair of scheming individuals who, judging by their player tags, had played way too much already. My friend and I started off by probing the area around us, looking for the enemy base. What we found was an early expansion where the enemy hoped to build up a massive force of troops right away. But in making his expansion he’d left himself wide open, so we pushed through his meager defenses and wiped out his base. It was the start of campaign of attrition where we removed enemy structures one by one, using a combination of carefully controlled heavy ground units and air units in order to defeat the massive waves of zealots and marines that our opponents churned out at us. When we finally broke into their base their defenses were obliterated, their resources exhausted. We burned their nexus, defiled their probes, and took their bases apart brick by brick while churning in more units. We’d won our first game.
While this story might be kind of dull, try to look at it as a “remember that time” story. Remember that time those idiots tried to production rush us? God, that was hilarious. We barely even knew what we were doing and they tried to get all tricky. That didn’t end well for them.
These are the stories which fundamentally codify the quality of a product, the stories which make a product worthwhile. This is the way we can actually assess a product. If we can recall the games we’ve played, the time we’ve spent with the game and the systems of the game with genuine fondness and memory that’s what actually counts. Not how pretty a game is or how long it is or how great the voice acting is or isn’t: what matters is that these shared experiences continue to exist in our collective memory. Look at other bombastically well received games like Killzone 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV. Do you still think about those games? Do you still discuss them in the context of other games? When you think about storytelling in games, or greatness in world building or even having fun does your hand reach out for either of their discs? Perhaps someone’s does, but the vast majority would have to shake their heads. We’ve buried these properties within our collective memory, for better or worse, and moved on to new experiences, experiences we find more relevant.
At the crux of this argument is a simple statement, one Blizzard seems to always have gotten in the manner in which they design games, but never understood in the way they tell stories: it’s all about the play.
Blizzard has delivered an amazing product in Starcraft 2, an engine for competition and cooperation more polished than anything else the company has ever put our before (except perhaps Warcraft 3’s venerable multiplayer system). Their obsessed with making games that play well, games that hold up to sustained play and can be fun from a number of approaches. Unlike something like, say, Supreme Commander 2, which seeks to guide players into certain types of play and wants to see their games develop in a particular way, Starcraft 2 offers players a number of routes of play and wants to see our games develop as existential cat and mouse matches wherein players do their best to guess each other’s tactics and work to counter them.
Really the only problem, and this seems to be one Blizzard is more or less uninterested in ever solving at this point, is that Blizzard has no idea how to mix gameplay and story together. They keep the two firmly divorced, their stories tightly controlled affairs which occur in locked down game-engine sessions or cutscenes surrounding these sections. They attempt to break out of this by making missions literal narrative devices, presenting us with a crystal that allows us to unlock information by playing level after level. But the end result is less a solution and more an exacerbation of the awareness that we only learn things at the beginning and end of each level, and that we really have no control over how the story of Starcraft 2 will unfold. It’s been designed for twelve years, after all, and they’d hate to see us cock it up the way their various franchise fiction authors have managed to over the last decade.
But in terms of the actual game, the thing we’ve all really come to see in Starcraft 2, it has been executed incredibly well. And rightly so. This is a team of seasoned veterans working within a system they already know to a T. All they had to do was update the system, make the UI a little better, eliminate silly things like capping unit selection at a dozen units, and generally work on making the game cool. But it is a bit of a shame that in a time where so much of our gameplay is becoming emergent Blizzard remains so fervently attached to the concept of separating gameplay and narrative from one another. It is perhaps the only major issue I have with their latest creation.
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