Thursday, September 30, 2010

Congratulations Failing Containment Unit!

Today you’re the containment unit on a spaceship’s reactor. You’re going to fail, bathing the crew in horrible radiation and forcing them to overcome personal and professional adversity in order to survive. Or try, at least. You’ll kill all of them except for the brilliant, overlooked, hot, Mexican female engineer, the black guy who is blind but concealed his blindness from recruiters so he could join the space-navy and this well rounded white slacker dude who doesn’t really have a personality. Even though white guy and Mexican-lady were going after the same promotion they’ll put their rivalry aside to fix the horrible mistake you’re going to make. And the painstakingly de-sexualized black dude? He’ll teach us a lesson about how people with darker skin tones and blind people can totally accomplish all the same shit that white middle class people with no real problems can, sometimes more.

You’ll teach us so much through your failure that it’ll be hard to get angry at you directly for killing eighty three people.

Congratulations Failing Containment Unit!

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Congratulations on Molesting That Corpse!

Fame is a worthy goal. At least, in the minds of the disaffected loners who work in this office it’s a worthy goal. More functional men and women might consider the pursuit of fame above all else as a “petty” or “silly goal that will only lead to heartbreak. But you know what? Those people are chumps.

Those people don’t have what it takes to go into a graveyard late at night and dig up a corpse. They don’t have what it takes to rent a video camera and get their friend to film them while they do it. They definitely don’t have what it takes to edit and master that video and do a super classy voice over narration during the whole thing. And you can bet your ass and theirs that they don’t have the balls to put a corpse’s dick in their mouth.

But you do. And after you send that tape in to The Network tomorrow you’re going to explode like a bottle of acid on some crazy bitch’s face. They’ll receive it today and all the executives will watch it together in a conference room, which is normal and par for the course for Network executives.

“This man belong in prison,” one of the Network executives will say.

“I love it!” another Network executive will say, completely misunderstanding the previous Network executive. “Maybe we could get some other necrophiliacs in with him and make it a new reality show?”

“I think that could play pretty well,” a third Network executive will chime in.

A fourth Network executive will vomit into a trash-can, disgusted at the people around her.

“I’ll see about freeing up some funding and talking to some officials in various states,” a fifth Network executive will announce.

“Are you okay?” a sixth Network executive will ask the fourth Network executive.

And just like that you’ll be pulled out of your prison cell and dropped on to the TV, where you’ll place eighth in rankings and last a season and a half, enduring the horror that is cancellation just before you thought you were going to get a pardon for being such an awesome dude. C’est la vie.

Congratulations on Molesting That Corpse!

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Congratulations Bizarro Superman!

Life isn’t so bad for you, really. You’re a little bit of an ugly mug, but you’re hung like a horse and you have no qualms about using your incredible powers for evil instead of holding them back constantly to do some weird, abstracted version of good. You live fat off your super villain status, robbing banks and taking people hostage for incredibly large ransoms which you then invest in shorting sub-prime mortgages.

Briefly put, evil is a very profitable business for you and you engage it expertly, if a bit bluntly. But you’re always compared to your “successful” good half. You’d try killing him, but that never works out. And you’d try outdoing him with charitable donations, but for some reason people are a lot more excited about saving jet airliners than they are about Pakistanis left without food and shelter receiving aid because of your generosity.

As a result you spend most of your days miserable, staring out across your jungle paradise wishing just once something would go your way. Well today is your lucky day.

Today an incredibly violent Amazon princess from beyond the stars is going to crash-land in your jungle (this shit happens in the world you live in constantly, so that isn’t the exceptional part). This Amazon princess is going to carve a swath of destruction through the piece of land you call home. Since you like your home this isn’t going to sit well with you, and you’re going to flip shit and fight her.

But she’ll be hot. Like, really really hot. Jordana Brewster at the start of her career hot. And while you grapple you’ll develop an incredibly huge erection. The Amazon princess from beyond the stars will see how big your junk is and her interest will be piqued. She knew she was in for some surprises on this planet, but she’d never expect to find something as weird and exotic as your dick (It’s kinda bent. You are Bizarro after all).

She’ll look in your eyes and see that burning itch to hate fuck the living shit out of her and she’ll plant a nice big kiss right on your deformed face.

What follows will be the best relationship either of you have ever had. And while we can’t see past this day and, ergo, can’t see just what will come for the two of you in the future, it’s fair to say that whatever it is will be pretty...bizzaro!

Also, it’ll involve some pretty incredible sex which will be more than a little weird to watch.

Congratulations Bizarro Superman!

Monday, September 27, 2010

Congratulations Swarm of Bats!

Today you’re the incorporeal intelligence governing a swarm of ravenous bats. Some would say that you’re some kind of sonar bullshit or something, but we all know the truth. Bats have a hive mind, and today you’re it.

You’re going to be super into it, too. First you’ll wake up and make the bats huddle together for warmth and poop upside down. It’s going to be fantastic and for the first time your life you’re going to be happy with the morning routine you’ve stumbled upon. You’ll even get a few of the bats to have upside down sex, which a fantasy you’ve always had. Living vicariously through them will be kind of bittersweet, but more than that it’ll be edifying. You’ll look at them and see ways you could potential make upside-down cave sex work.

Then you’ll get the bats to fly around the cave a little and catch bugs. You’ll also get a few of the bats to think about fruit idly for a while before deciding that it’s too bright outside and that they’d rather not go there at present.

Then the bats will settle in for nap-time, again at your discretion.

After naptime you’ll direct the bats in their nightly terrorizing of cavers. You’ll make them swarm around the cavers’ heads and dive at them and bite at them and generally make the cavers’ day unpleasant. You’ll even kill a few of them, which will make the bats really happy because bats are kind of dicks.

All in all it’ll be the most active day you’ve had since you entered this coma, and it’ll change your whole outlook on the situation you’re in which is medically considered life.

Congratulations Swarm of Bats!

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: On Pacing!

When we talk about games we like to discuss the number of hours we get out of our purchases. We compare them, considering the overall cost of a product to the amount of time we can spend on it without repeating ourselves endlessly. For some games these comparisons are completely insignificant. Multiplayer games, 4X games, rhythm games, all of these games break the model. But action games and role playing games can, more or less, be fairly assessed by how much bang they offer for their buck. But something we rarely discuss is how well these action experiences are paced.

In any other medium pacing is a critical part of a narrative experience. A poorly paced film will drag on endlessly to its viewers. A poorly paced novel will be unreadable. But we’ll frequently let poor pacing in video games slide, so long as the game is long enough. Final Fantasy games, for example, are notoriously poorly paced, with long dragging sequences broken up by frenetic action and vivid exploration. In the context of an eighty hour experience this sort of thing is totally justified, since people playing a Final Fantasy game expect such traditionalist measures imbedded in their game play. They expect to see lots and lots of gameplay, much of it chaff but some of it delightful nutritious wheat, and they’re willing to put up with that bullshit because they bought the game largely to eat up time.

On the flip side, many action games are almost criminally short. Heavenly Sword, for example, was supposed to be a platform exclusive that launched the PS3 into stardom. Instead the marketing machine behind the enterprise collapsed due, in large part, to the brevity of the game. Trine is a measly eight hours, Dead Space close to a lean twelve, and the ambitious failure Mirror’s Edge clocks in at nine with time trials. Of course, historically the worst case of quality and time to dollars spent was the Timeline video game which, historians claim, clocked in at around forty minutes and consisted of a segment where stationary players just threw spears. So criticism can come down harshly on games for being too quick.

But many of these short games are brilliant in the manner in which they pace. Dead Space, for example, rips off all the best parts of System Shock 2, including its masterful grasp of pacing and moving the character through stages. Mirror’s Edge is literally a game about pacing, and it thrives and fails based on how well it realizes this. And Trine, the bite sized adventure game it is, is clearly designed to be taken down piece by piece in multiple sittings. It’s paced so that players are encouraged to take breakers in a way that the Half-Life 2 Episodes or Portal fight wholesale – these are games that are designed around allowing players to remain immersed as long as possible whenever possible.

Which bring me to the centerpiece of this discussion: the Ghostbusters game.

I bought the Ghostbusters game because it was five dollars and I like Ghostbusters a lot. It’s a fucking fantastic movie, and if you disagree we’re going to have to fight. I warn you, I will go for the balls.

I bought the Ghostbusters game knowing it was short, expecting it to have the same excellent qualities that the movies presented so expertly: a well told story that mixed actual danger, humor and blithe sarcasm in perfect quantities. I thought, if nothing else, it would be an amusing diversion from other games that sucked me in constantly and took themselves incredibly seriously, games like Fallout and Alpha Protocol which I literally cannot alt-tab from.

I was not disappointed. But I’d like to discuss why, and to do that I have to bring up Jericho.

Jericho is that ex-girlfriend I keep coming back to on this blog even though I know she’s bad for me. It’s not even that we have so much fun together or that any single element of the relationship is particularly good, it’s just that there’s something about her that I can’t put my finger on, something that keeps me coming back. Maybe it’s the fact that, if I keep pushing her hard enough, I think I could get her to do anal. Sorry, were we talking about video games?

Anyhow, I’m not sure why I find my thoughts drawn to Jericho quite so often. It is very much a B-movie of games. It does so many things wrong, so ham-handedly, that it can be brought up without fail as an example of how not to execute a particular concept. It awkwardly gates gameplay, it spontaneously introduces new skills and tools without explanation, simply because it’s time for you to solve a puzzle with them, it has some of the most patently repetitive combat I’ve ever experienced and the writing is appalling. The one original character, the only character I liked, is killed off without ceremony or reason, except to give the final boss some degree of weight. And the pacing. Ugh, the pacing.

I’ve played through Jericho twice now, and my second playtthrough was around 5 hours. This was on Hard, after beating the game on normal in around 12 hours. That should speak volumes about the way Jericho is constructed: you will spend, at times, thirty to forty minutes banging your head against a puzzle not because the puzzle is hard, but because it is poorly designed. You will go through long stretches of gameplay that could easily be truncated, repetitive combat sessions that drag on and on unless you’ve learned the trick to dispatching this band of enemies faster than the last.

All of these factors combine to make a five hour real-time game that feels closer to twenty hours in a single playthrough. Despite there not being a lot there Jericho made me feel like it was sprawling and dramatic, like it had a lot to say. Which is really upsetting, because it doesn’t. It’s just terribly paced. A few very long early stages open up into some impressively brief end-game stages where puzzles fall away in favor of “puzzle battles with one solution,” the bane of any competent first-person shooter. The poor writing and poor level construction combine to make that twenty minutes I spent hunting down cultists in the Pixar feel like an hour and a half. It’s enough to make me play games on my DS instead.

However Ghostbusters is similar in length. I spent around eight hours on my first playthrough of Ghostbusters, taking lots of time to explore levels fully and get as many of those special artifacts as I could. I looked around for Easter Eggs, I’d occasionally get stuck on an especially rough battle, that required some extra TLC and I think I was once lost in a hedge maze for fifteen minutes while being attacked by spiders. But I never really noticed any of these issues, because Ghostbusters is such an incredibly well paced game. The moment I started playing it in earnest I found myself ignoring titles like Fallout 3 and Alpha Protocol, titles I’d been laboring over for a while by this point. I ignored them because I actually wanted to see how the story of Ghostbusters was going to resolve.

And I wasn’t disappointed. It wasn’t a twist ending per sec. It wasn’t an earned ending or anything so dramatic, either, it was just a fun ending to a fun game that balanced its story very well. It was a game I never felt fatigued with, a game where I never tired of playing with my new toys and learning how to abuse ghosts in new and exciting ways. I’m already excited to play it a second time and see if it holds up as well without those distracting little extras to stretch the pacing a little more. Because the pacing was almost perfect. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any game quite as well paced as Ghosbutsters.

Some of the credit is certainly due to the professional writing of Akroyd and Ramis, who make most video game writers look like douchebags. Not that video game writers need a lot of help to look that way, Ramis and Akroyd are just on the ball in every respect. But a lot of it is also owed to Threewave Studio’s remarkable design acumen. Most people would’ve tried to load their game down to make sure it sat alright with a pre-establish set of rules, but Threewave wove the action of Ghostbusters into a game intended to immerse players in their internal fiction rather than distracting them with it, and a result they succeeded impressively. Even though the play of Ghostbusters should’ve been repetitive and annoying, even though it should’ve had all the problems that Jericho had, I didn’t notice a single one of the glaring flaws that made Jericho so intriguingly shitty to me.

So to say nothing of the quality of writing, of the originality of the gameplay and the deftness of craft that went into building the Ghostbusters game I would say that it is worth playing if only for its remarkable pacing. If you’re interested in making games or if you spend a lot of time thinking about games Ghostbusters has more to teach you than most triple-A titles coming out this holiday season, and while it’s sort of a shame that its such a small game, when it’s so well apportioned and executed it seems more than a little petty to complain.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Congratulations on Unleashing a Fierce Plague!

You’re a graduate student at UCSC, working hard and trying to get your Ph.D. It’s not an easy life, but it’s the one you chose. You spend most of your time analyzing the reproductive traits of various benign bacteriophage, taking them through generation after tiny generation each week, trying to discern how and why they transfer their genetic data and how you can effectively manipulate it.

You’re also really clumsy. So this Saturday, while trying to move a new petrie dish from one counter to another, you’re going to drop it. It’ll shatter into a million little pieces and those super reproductive bacteria that you’ve been engineering all willy nilly will start to consume air and spread like whoa.

See you’ve been getting government funding for your projects under a set of provisions that were established to assist in the researching of certain “super-plagues.” The idea was that developing plagues that might one day come about and then developing reasonable antidotes to said plagues was the best possible way to approach the subject, so to give our boys and girls a leg up on the competition we should sponsor the craziest mad scientists we have and give them cash so they can work on new and creative ways to wipe out half of the Earth’s population will man-made illness.

You’ll be the first one to die, which kinda sucks. Usually in movies with this plot you’d survive long enough to make a cure or become some sort of important figure who feels bad and looks thoughtfully out of un-shattered windows. But in this case you’ll just start choking as your flesh is consumed and your organs begin to liquefy.

Next your Mexican janitor will carry the plague outside when he flees, having discovered your body. He’ll die on the pavement, where he’ll infect paramedics, who will infect easily influenced young co-eds, who will infect campus security, who will infect police, and so on until almost the entire world is wiped out by your little plague.

All because you insist on wearing latex gloves and refuse to drink coffee.

Congratulation on Unleashing a Fierce Plague!

Friday, September 24, 2010

Congratulations Martial Arts Master!

You’re a novelty martial arts master whose only real move is punching people in the dick.

“That sounds surprisingly effective,” a young woman who wants to learn self-defense from you will say. You’ll bow to her and punch her in the vagina.

“Ow!” she’ll shout. She’ll hold herself for a few seconds to make sure she’s okay before she lunges forward and punches you in the dick as hard as she can.

Her blow will fold you over on yourself and you’ll be unable to move for several seconds. You’ll throw up a little on the gym mat. It’ll be a full five minutes before you can breathe correctly again, and when you get your strength back you’ll raise your face towards her on the mat and cough at her.

“I have nothing left to teach you, greatest of my students.” Then you’ll roll on your side and let out of a long moan of pain.

“Jesus Christ,” you’ll mutter at the ceiling as she leaves, thankful that she didn’t pay in advance.

Congratulations Martial Arts Master!

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Congratulations Actual Kublai Khan!

We watch plenty of Star Trek around here. A cursory examination of previous predictions should prove as much. But even we find it kind of hard to believe just what’s going to happen to you today. See you’re Kublai Khan, famed conqueror of the 13th century. And through a combination of ancient sorcery and romantic-comedy grade misunderstanding you’re going to be catapulted forward in time to the present day (today!)

You’ll arrive, for some weird reason, in downtown Seattle, where you’ll immediately begin terrorizing the incredibly mild residents of the jewel of the American Northwest. You’ll murder and rape and carve a bloody swath across town before Seattle’s police force finally assembles and politely asks you to stop your rampage.

You’ll ignore their requests, butchering their emissary and defiling his corpse in ways that even we consider unspeakable. This will prompt the authorities to enlist the aid of Wizards of the Coast and their impressive staff of mystics.

Wizards of the Coast will dump all of their resources into figuring out just how to get you the fuck out of our time and into a period where your behavior was considered par for the course rather than relentlessly dickish. They’ll spend three hours researching topics, scheduling meetings, and brainstorming before they use some crystals they harvested from the heart of a volcano and cast you back into the past, where you’ll live happily ever after.

Congratulations Actual Kublai Khan!

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Congratulations Modern Day Kublai Khan!

Cultists in America are a dime a dozen. The byproduct of free speech is publicly displayed lunacy, and crazy people who want to be a part of something bigger than themselves will never shy away from an opportunity to match themselves with a charismatic madman. If that madman preaches a message of hope, all the better. And if he is a ruthless conquistador possessed of fearsome appetites then those cultists find purpose in his service.

So it will be with you.

By the time today rolls around you’ll be good and well set up. Thousands will have to come to stand under your banner and sleep under your tents. They’ll be rough men and women from all walks of life who have lost everything and, in their madness, believed that your dreams of slow boiling conquest were the best chance they had at a future. You’ll have spent the last few years as an aesthetic, denying yourself all pleasures for the sake of discipline, to make yourself the best of all possible warlords.

But today you’re going to wake up with a raging hard-on. This hard-on will govern your thoughts, as it does with so many men. It will force you on to your Addressing Platform and make you open your mouth and force words to pour out of it. There won’t be many words, but they’ll race out regardless.

“A pleasure dome,” will be the first three words. They’ll be followed by “I do decree.”

And after those quick six snips of language you’ll turn on your heel and stride back into your tent, dragging the most attractive of your female followers with you. The rest of the camp will trickle in, eventually building to deluge where they’ll begin copulating madly under your canvas roof.

With this act you’ll turn your surprisingly successful crazy militia centered around the idea that corn syrup is bad into the only militia movement in the history of the United States to ever get someone laid, and secure your place forever in the annals of cultist history.

Congratulations Modern Day Kublai Khan!

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Congratulations on Finding Out You Like Being Choked!

During a freak accident in a factory where you work your penis is going to be caught in a set of very well lubricated, surprisingly soft gears. At the same time a fan belt which snapped during the accident will wrap around your neck and start to pull you upwards, partially restricting the flow of oxygen to your brain.

The motion of the gears will force you in and out without tearing off your dick, which is super implausible. At the same time the motion will pull you down and push you back, slackening the fan belt and allowing just enough blood into your brain to keep you conscious.

It’ll be the single most pleasant experience of your life, and you’ll ejaculate three times before you’re finally rescued and hospitalized. You’ll feel like you discovered an important part of yourself, a fundamental truth that you would’ve spent your entire life denying had you discovered it any other way.

Now if only you could find a partner who would choke you during coitus. Or a partner at all.

Congratulations on Finding Out You Like Being Choked!

Monday, September 20, 2010

Congratulations on Leaping From the Overpass!

Today is the first day of your life. Today you’re going to make your first attempt at Big Rig Riiding. Big Rig Riding is the latest Extreme Urban Sport that no one really does, which revolves around leaping from overpasses on to fast moving trucks and trying to stay on them as long as you can without being hurled off. It usually ends immediately when the person who leaps on top of an eighteen wheeler is hurled on to the street where they’re summarily struck by multiple other vehicles.

“This is a terrible idea,” your friend Jed will tell you. Jed will still be dressed in his work clothes. He’ll have come down straight from there because he doesn’t want you to kill yourself.

“Shut up, tool,” Jessie will shout at him. Jessie is the really hot girl who will have convinced you to try doing this. She’ll have short dyed hair and she’ll be wearing a tank top. Her cleavage will be awesome.

“Quiet! Both of you!” you’ll shout. Then you’ll speak a little quieter. “I need to think.”

Jed will sigh. “Dude. Don’t jump off an overpass and try to ride an eighteen wheeler. You’ll probably just die, and even if you don’t die you’re going to end up being severely injured,” he’ll say.

Jessie will snort. “If you jump and make it I’ll totally give you a handjob. Maybe more, depending on how your dick looks.”

You’ll spend a moment pondering their statements. You do like living, but Jessie is really attractive, and your dick is nice enough that you could probably get at least a blowjob out of her, really, maybe even more depending on how badly you were injured.

You’ll leap off the overpass on to a rapidly approaching eighteen wheeler.

“Sorry man!” you’ll shout at Jed, who will shrug and give Jessie the finger as he leaves to go back to work.

Congratulations on Leaping From the Overpass!

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Difficulties!

I am wandering through the passages of Rapture, pistol drawn. I am watching for any sudden movement, any sign that I need to mash buttons swiftly to draw my wrench and give a few splicers the one-two punch to save the bullets I’d waste firing at air as they leap and scream at me. I listen carefully for their footfalls, listen to the whale-song and the drip, the creak of steel, the beating heart and collapsing lungs of the city at the bottom of the ocean. Suddenly the sound crackles, then goes dead. I am deaf in my right ear.

I reach up and grab my headphone, gently adjusting the wire, listening to sound crackle in and out of my ear, and the game falls away. I am back in my parent’s house, biting my lip and carefully engineering my escape to somewhere else. I am learning how to hear again. I am fixing my broken headphones blindly, without looking away from the screen. The game is still on so that I have a constant stream of sound informing me of my progress. I am doing this because the alternative is to send my headphones away and be without them, to rely on speakers and ear-bud headphones to immerse myself in Rapture. Not acceptable. Between the booming aerobics music and the startlingly loud late night television my parents insist on blasting through the house each evening it’s hard to drown out enough sound to truly feel like I’ve gotten away without big cup headphones.

I should also mention that I’m playing Bioshock on a Dell Inspiron 8300, which is a lot like using cheesecloth to remove dense solids from liquid substrate. It takes more effort than it needs to, it’s slow and uneven and makes you sore and tense. Moving is like moving through water, and occasionally I’ll miss out on things that may or may not have been important because of my computer’s lurching speed.

But despite all these problems, I am the happiest I’ve been in almost a year. For the first time since graduation I am not depressed. Life is alright at the bottom of the sea. I’m enduring these circumstances not because I enjoy them thoroughly but because the experience is worth this protracted price of admission. They’re the incredibly difficult puzzles that make the humor of Monkey Island so worthwhile, the Hard Mode objectives in Thief that let me unlock those little nuggets of story and feel like I’m really a rogue stalking the galleries and ruins of a steampunk city.

Enduring them doesn’t refine the experience per sec, but it characterizes it. It adds a layer of struggle, a layer of actual challenge to the entire thing. Or so I tell myself. But the reality is that this specific set of difficulties is a combination of my poverty and my stubbornness. Were I less headstrong and less poor I’d fix the whole set of problems by buying a new computer and a pair of working headphones. But as it stands I enjoy myself more than I ever had, because there’s something wonderful in front of me, even if it is a challenge to hold it.

This is the same struggle that has always been reflected in my personal relationships. I seem to avoid easy, healthy relationships the way most people avoid snakes. I’ll look at them, consider them, and then move on without touching them. Sometimes, almost instinctively, I’ll go to great lengths to avoid them. I’ve never had a relationship that could be defined as overly healthy, and I’ve never thought my relationships were particularly odd at the time. The fact that my friends can’t relate to offhand comments like “Well, she means well, but her anxiety issues kind of force her into making excuses and keeping her from experimenting in bed” or “Sometimes she stops breathing at night and I just have to hold her until she remembers how. It’s kinda scary” never really bothered me.

I’ve never felt like my relationships were particularly odd, and I’ve never found them unfulfilling (aside from one particularly dysfunctional one with someone who was largely incapable of intimacy and strung out on meds for disorders she may or may not actually have). Anything important in life, after all, is worth busting your ass over. If you turn tail when things get difficult and settle into an easier pattern then you don’t deserve any sort of reward. It’s that simple.

And while it is difficult the reward, the story, is that much better, that much more personal. No one will ever have the relationship that you had. No one else will hold her in the summer tundra to keep her from freezing, no one else will stand with their arms around her, stripped to their bottom layer in a Minnesota bus stop in mid November, trying to get her feet to stop burning with cold. No one else will ever have to deal with these things. No one else will ever have done what you’ve done for these simple, unclear goals. No one else will understand what the two of you have.

This is a great deal more personal than most of my essays. Perhaps it’s the depression. Perhaps it’s the subject matter. It’s tough to get much more personal than personal experiences, and no personal experience seems more shameful and awkward to share than stories of romances gone awry and the problems that dot your daily life, the obstacles of your routine. When everything goes wrong you come to see shit going wrong as a sign that you’re doing something right, that you’re setting yourself up for a good fight. Maybe that’s why I haven’t quit yet.

See I have atrocious luck with tech. Beyond my continued relationship with my incredibly unreliable headphones I’ve had a lot of piss-poor experiences with my various gaming systems. My old Dell, for example, once lost a hard drive containing a veritable shit-ton of saved game information and almost half a decade of my writing. I still have it on my book shelf, awaiting the day I can spare the cash to get the data restored. It also lost a video card when I once left Dawn of War running for five hours while I was out and about. Shockingly the card seemed to have developed some sort of heat issues after that and needed to be replaced.

More recently my home-made PC has suffered no fewer than four catastrophic failures. I’ve lost my power supply, my video card and my motherboard. I’ve lost two of those three things twice and have now, after finally getting the balance right, corrected the issues with my PC. Our relationship has been fine since around May at this point, but there was a solid eight month period where my computer was failing just about every other month. I have, consequently, learned quite a bit her hardware and hardware issues in general. I’ve also learned a lot about various company’s warranties (word of advice: Mushkin and BFG are both excellent companies with marvelous warranties and incredible customer service staff. ASUS is okay).

And this even extends to hardware I buy explicitly so it will work without stress. I’ve had two full-failures on my X-Box, a box that I purchased second-hand that had already endured one red-ring. I once induced a red-ring so I could have the system repaired and, eventually, purchased a new post-red-ring core system so that I could reliably play console games following one last post-warranty failure that may or may not be tied to the GPU. I still have the old box stored in its original packaging and, as with the hard drive, would like to have it repaired at some point. Then there’s my Wii which, while mostly good, no longer has a working controller-charger. The controllers hold, at best, a brief charge and then have to be switched out. The end result is that I’m constantly hot-swapping controllers whenever I want to play a game.

I put up with a lot of bullshit for my fun. I treat the most basic things in life as a labor of love. And it’s a fine way to be, I think, because it teaches you a lot about what you’re willing to deal with for what you want. Having to work for the most basic things is a great way to learn more about yourself. Stacking boxes on loading docks in the Pacific Northwest because someone thought rich people deserved a bigger take-home, for example, teaches you quite a bit about what you’re willing to do to be free (like beg your parents to cover your rent while you try to scare up some work and learn that stacking boxes on loading docks is both depressing, back breaking, and pays terribly). Wrapping yourself in a plastic sheet to keep from freezing to death in the woods in the midst of a New England winter teaches you about how frail your life really is, and how close to death we all truly are on a daily basis.

One of my favorite one of these “hero stories,” where I press myself into completely unnecessary adversity, is about my experiences with Baldur’s Gate 2. Baldur’s Gate 2 featured a number of romances, most of which were easily accomplished. Play through the game, choose the right dialogue responses and you’ll get a quick bit of dialogue and a post-coital discussion set in the often incredibly dirty world of Forgotten Realms. The shit those drow get up to, man. But scripting errors plagued the Jahiera romance. They were so severe that people created home-brew patches and mapped variables that you needed to set to complete her romance. People wrote guides on how to trick the game clock to insure that the scripting worked as intended. I spent around two years working on “getting” Jahiera’s romance, learning the back-end language of the game and letting the game idle to trigger variables. By the time I finally finished it I was in college, and I’d actually made my first girlfriend jealous with my efforts. But it was done, and even now I barely remember the experience itself. I just remember the challenge.

The experience that made think of writing this essay happened more recently. While playing through the expansions for Fallout 3 I hit a huge hurdle in Mothership Zeta. See, the game would shift objectives that I hadn’t completed to complete at irregular intervals during a certain period of time in the game. This would make the quest unplayable and, given the heavy scripting of Mothership Zeta, the level itself inescapable. I didn’t catch this fact until I’d already sunk hours and hours into playing the game, and when I first discovered it it came just before a particularly devastating real-world series of events centered around a friend’s wedding which has left me about as bad off as I’ve been during the last decade. Suffice it to say I wasn’t too excited to go back to Mothership Zeta and deal with all this bullshit, however much I love Fallout 3.

This morning I sat down and worked around the problem. It involved setting up save files. Lots and lots of save files, hoping that the mystical energy that caused the scripting to malfunction wouldn’t take hold until I’d accomplished some new goals. It involved checking my objectives screen to make sure that the game hadn’t had a scripting error every time I investigated a crate or killed an enemy and then quick-saving immediately to keep myself from having to deal with that particular issue again. I spent almost five hours on thirty minutes of game-play this way until finally I reached the death ray room, overloaded the generators and unlocked the next area of the game where, in theory, the bug will no longer persist.

I worked on solving a problem that I’d been unable to approach for months at this point. I came back and took the game by the horns and dragged it to the ground, and now I’m actually excited, for the first time in a while, to see this latest bit of DLC to the finish. I’m excited to try and be a little less sad in my life in general. I’m excited to maybe drink a little less and write a little more. I’m excited to bike around town. And I’m excited to try my next challenge, to work around the technical bars which are keeping me from my next gaming experience.

Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment. Maybe I have some sort of complex that makes me make my life harder than it needs to be. Maybe I need to learn to quit more easily, to leave things and move on. But that’s not really who I am. I’ll keep my broken headphones, my cracked heart, and my sputtering Frankenstein computer. I’ll keep my aging car and burn-scarred desk. And I’ll keep trying, desperately, to get past that fucking boat sequence in Call of Cthulhu, even if I have to download a save file to do it.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Congratulations Adorable Birds!

Today you, indeed all adorable birds, will take wing and watch as the deformed members of The Great Society Which Hurls Grains At Our Feet rebels against The Society Of Those Who Force Us From One Section of Concrete to Another. The deformed members of The Great Society Which Hurls Grains At Our Feet will strike swiftly, while Those Who Force Us From One Section of Concrete to Another will be entirely unprepared. It will be a bloodbath, body parts strewn everywhere.

When the dust settles, after a day of harsh fighting, the Great Stone City will be littered with delicious corpses for you and your friends to eat, and there will be no more Society of Those Who Force Us From One Section of Concrete to another to boss you around and tell you what to. Your first act will be freeing all the imprisoned adorable birds, as well as many of the less adorable birds. Then you’ll just hang out with the crows and eat some dead bodies, enjoying the feeling of being in charge for the first time since the beginning of the Holocene era.

You’ll treat each day of freedom as a gift, letting your songs echo through empty streets, wheeling as high as you can in the sun and then resting on rooftops, occasionally watching as the Societies still battle on your streets, grinning madly as you wait to see if the one who lives will be One Who is Tasty or One Who is Foul. You will cock your heads in the sun and watch them fret below you with no idea of how wonderful it is to fly freely, to catch insects in their beaks and gobble them still living and writhin, and to poop while moving at incredible speeds.

You will carry us into a new golden age.

Congratulations Adorable Birds!

Friday, September 17, 2010

Congratulations on Surviving the Mutant Uprising!

Most people will be taken entirely by surprise. When the mutants come, following the incursion of He Who Is Far Too Funky into their den, they’ll strike swiftly and mercilessly. They’ll die in droves because of the superior strength and agility of many topsiders, as well as our proficiency with firearms, but it won’t be enough to stop them. They’ll be legion, and a lot of our society-members will be super obese.

But you’ll be one of the lucky ones. You’ll be out jogging when they hit. You’ll be moving through the dawn along the riverside, enjoying the feeling of cooling dew on your skin as you lope gracefully across the city. You’ll be halfway through your run, perfectly warmed up. It’ll be your most peaceful, most aware moment of the day.

You’ll be watching the ass of a female jogger in front of you, wondering if she’s wearing underwear, when a flash of motion draws your attention away from her ass, away from the river, into the city. It’ll be a blur of gray and brown, and at first you’ll think it’ll be an especially energetic homeless person, but it’ll be moving far too steadily. It will just seem wrong.

That’s when you’ll notice the obese guy who always flips you off in the morning running his little stumps off. He’ll round the corner huffing and puffing wordlessly, his mouth a grimace of fear. At his heels there will be a trio of shambling forms which could only be called remotely human. They’ll have clawing hands, rippling masses of mean looking teeth and feverish eyes.

They’ll close on your daily antagonist in seconds and fall upon him, their hands ripping as his flesh while their teeth dig into him and tear out big chunks of flab and bloody meat. They’ll choke it down like it’s the sweetest meal they’ve ever tasted, even though you’re pretty sure that guy showers in pure dog shit. And then you’ll slow in your run to get a better look and they’ll pause in their eating. They’ll look at you. And they’ll scream.

They’ll move towards you in a furious burst of energy, surging towards you like rats normally do when you’re getting on the subway. But you’re a runner, and you’ll be swift, take off sprinting towards the cute girl in front of you. As you reach her you’ll grab her arm and carry her forward, whispering in her ear, breathlessly.

“Fucking run.”

“What the fuck?” she’ll say, looking at you and then looking back. When she catches sight of those shambling mutants behind you her eyes will go wide and you’ll barely hear her say “Shit” before her footfalls rush up to yours and the two of you pound pavement, looking for any way off the street, any way away from the mass of teeming street people who seem to be roaming the city this morning, devouring any who are unwary.

You’ll run for blocks and blocks looking for a way out, feeling and hearing more than seeing a steadily growing mass of gnashing teeth just a few meters behind you. You’ll be faster, but these people, if they can be called that, they’ll feel relentless. Tireless.

Your break will finally come when a young man smoking on his fire escape on the second floor of an apartment building sees you. He’ll shout at you as he drops the fire escape ladder down to you.

“Get the fuck over here!”

You’ll grab the girl’s hand and run towards the escape, letting go to leap up on to the rungs and climb faster than you’d ever thought you could’ve. You’ll climb with your upper body, thinking “god I hope I don’t kick her in the face” as you glide up the steel.

When you reach the top you’ll reach back down for the girl and grab her wrist, hauling her up the last few feet while the smoker pulls up the ladder in one practiced movement.

“Fuck,” you’ll say, bent over and panting, watching the mutants leap at the ladder, clawing. They won’t be able to reach it. They’ll be too bent, too forelorn, and before long they’ll start to head off, staring at you as they do it as if to mark you.

“You’re lucky my roommate’s a dick,” the smoker will say as they depart. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be out here so much.”

The girl will shake her head in agreement. “We’re lucky you haven’t quit yet.”

The young man will shrug as the lot of you watch the chaos beneath you, watching people die like animals, waiting for someone to come close, close enough that you can save them.

Congratulations on Surviving the Mutant Uprising!

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Congratulations on Getting Absurdly Funky!

Uh. Oh yeah. Shit’s getting out of control. The concrete slapping your sneakers, the bitches dishing looks like they’s on sale, the haters stopping just to pay the love they owe, shit’s fucking bananas for you right now.

Shit’s so bananas that when you miss that open manhole and tumble downward, into a hellish New York subway filled with terrible, terrible subhuman mutants who reach out towards you to grab you and start ripping your flesh apart the moment they make contact they’re all gonna hop back and say “Daaaamn.”

Then they’ll pitch you upwards in a fit of coordinated dancing, launching you out of the manhole and back on to the relative safety of the street where you’ll land between two ladies who will turn, give you the once over and go “Oh snap!” taking an extra moment to admire your funkiest of asses.

Then you’ll strut into the bank, drop a gun on the counter and tell the teller to fill up one of those fly ass bags with money. She’ll be so taken by your urban vernacular and forthright manner that she’ll just fill that bag right up for you without any trouble or dye tablets and you’ll walk out, whistling, into the street, drawing every eye towards you, including a few poking up from underneath the street, where word of how funky you are is quickly spreading and likely to spark a mutant uprising.

Congratulations on Getting Absurdly Funky!

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Congratulations on Boring the Shit Out of Your Cat!

Cats are easily entertained, and not just because they’re stoned all the time. They’re laid back, zen creatures who have come to terms long ago with the absurdity and pain that governs the world we live in, and they’re not afraid to smirk at us when we invest too much of ourselves in that absurdity.

But even cats have limits, as you’ll prove today. While recounting office gossip to your cat, who really just wanted to watch Gilmore Girls on your lap, you’ll prove so incredibly boring and distracting that your cat will get up and leave, seeking out a nice quiet corner of your apartment where it can lick its own anus in peace. Because licking one’s own asshole is more pleasant than listening to you yammer on endlessly.

Congratulations on Boring the Shit Out of Your Cat!

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Congratulations on Getting Your Passport Back!

Immigration officials are well known for being corrupt. Just look at that Machete movie, where immigration officials were bad/good guys, or something like that. I don’t know, none of us have seen it. It just seemed topical to mention it.

Better yet, look at The Visitor, where immigration officials are kind of nebulous, disorganized and senselessly harmful bad guys who didn’t do evil out of ill intent, perhaps, but out of ignorance and bull-headedness. Picture that, but paired with violent corruption and greed and you’ll have an excellent picture of the TSA agent you’re going to run into later today while trying to board a plane to Amsterdam out of JFK.

“But I am just a pot-smoking enthusiast,” you’ll cry. “One who wishes to smoke weed legally in the magical world that is Holland!”

The TSA agent will shake his head and hold your passport up.

“I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way.”

You’ll sigh and drop to your knees and he’ll unzip his pants. Luckily, unlike the TSA agent in Logan, he’ll have bathed recently, which will make the whole process a lot more pleasant.

Five to fifteen minutes later you’ll have your passport back and you’ll be at Sabaro, using that grease to get that flavor out of your mouth.

Congratulations on Getting Your Passport Back!

Monday, September 13, 2010

Congratulations on Joining the Softball Team!

Organized sports aren’t your thing, which is cool. Most of us here in the office can certainly relate. Even if organized sports do bring gambling to the forefront of our consciousnesses and occasionally let us see hot girls in strangely sexual uniforms as far as we’re concerned the various mongoloids who obsess over who hit the most home runs to win Sophie’s Cup can go fuck themselves.

But we have to make some exceptions for lesbians who just moved to small towns. Lesbians like you.

Montana isn’t really the best place to be gay. It’s also not a great place to be an outsider, but you happen to be both. So when you show up in Superior next week you’re going to feel pretty isolated. You’ll spend a lot of time staring out your windows, smoking cigarettes and wondering if the various women you see with short hair are lesbians or various abused spouses who are somewhat interested in becoming lesbians. You won’t have the courage to get out and ask anyone since Superior is about as warm and friendly as a speculum, and the people there will stare daggers at you for even mentioning Depeche Mode. God only knows what they’d do to you for soliciting them for a little bit of mutual oral in your one bedroom walk-up.

After a few weeks of misery at work where you pine over all the pretty little things in women’s suits that you want to do unforgivable things to you’ll catch a break. You’ll catch word that a women’s softball league meets once a week in a public park for some good clean fun.

Now you’ll never have played softball. The closest you’ll ever have come was once beating the shit out of a girl with a bat for calling you a dyke in high school, then avoiding suspensions because the superintendent wanted to avoid controversy. But you’ll know that softball has a reputation, and knowing that reputation you’ll sign up immediately, letting your hand linger a bit too long on the hand of the girl you pass the pen off to. She’ll meet your eyes and blush a little and you’ll immediately know you were right to slap your name down on that mimeographed sheet with a picture of a methed out baseball on it.

You’ll show up to your first practice with The Ballsey Ladies wearing a pair of short shorts and a home-made tank-top, showing off your ink and lithe little muscles. You’ll move with nigh mystic grace and poise, despite being fairly clumsy with a softball bat, and you’ll have every eye on you each time you take a base and round home.

You’ll feel, for the first time, untouchable. And when the game ends and you go out for drinks with “the ladies” you’ll really just be biding your time until you get a chance to ask that pretty little thing that blushes easy if she wants to come back to your apartment and welcome you to Superior. You’ll be sipping your drink, smiling to yourself, wondering wishing Softball had started weeks ago.

Congratulations on Joining the Softball Team!

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Far From the Greatest Generation!

Like most gamers I’ve fought through my fair share of World War 2 scenarios. I’ve been through Normandy more times than I’d like to count, taken Carentan and San Mer Eglise at the fist of a screaming column of iron. I’ve watched friends die in droves on the eastern front and I’ve even, occasionally, used racist terms to refer to Japanese people while wielding a flamethrower.

I haven’t been there since the beginning. I hopped on the WW2 train after the first Wolfenstein game had left the station, beginning my career with a few forced games of Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. These indistinct dogfighting blobs, fighting for such high stakes, symbolizing so much with such little effort, were my first experience with World War 2 games in general.

So perhaps they’re to blame for my sustained interest in the subject matter, my feverish consumption of any documentary on the war, even if its veracity is highly suspect. Perhaps it’s Lucasarts’ fault, as it so often is, that I didn’t get tired of killing Nazis between Battlefield: 1942 and the first Call of Duty. But after the Call of Duty series hit its fourth World War 2 oriented episode and Battlefield went the way of DLC the state of the subject matter should seem pretty grim to any but the most pie-eyed enthusiast.

Which is why I was so shocked to be so excited about Company of Heroes.

An oft overlooked, buggy, finicky, poor selling, oddly balanced and chronically mismanaged game, Company of Heroes is one of the few World War 2 games which does not put you “in the boots” of a solider at some point during the war, but instead asks you to act as a commander during it. Its tone, as a result, is quite different.

Where most World War 2 games are flippant celebrations of patriotism, Company of Heroes seems to be almost obsessed with the loss of life associated with the conflict, the horror that the sides visited upon one another and the inhumanity necessary to facilitate violence on such a grand scale. From the opening cutscene, which entreats you to watch wave after wave of the troops you’ll soon be controlling die futilely for the sake of an inept strategy.

Even when “my boys” hit the beach and I had to guide them to the shore it was less a matter of carefully moving my troops through a puzzle-landscape and more a matter of running them madly across the beach, hoping that at least some of them would make it. It was surprisingly easy to get them all across, even if most of them did end their careers in the water instead of on the front line. And without any sort of autosave functions it was readily apparent what kind of game this would be: the kind where shit happened and you dealt with it. It was a game about the brutal reality of war and the necessity of operating within the limitations of that brutality if you wanted to succeed.

It wasn’t a game about honor or glory, about being better than your enemy. It was a game about a terrible conflict with real reprecussions, and it was a game that aspired to do the people who fought in that war so long ago some sort of justice. I’m not trying to oversell the game, or saying that it was overwhelmingly successful. It still has a lot of the problems that other World War 2 games have had throughout the years. But even if the Abrams tanks don’t act like flaming coffins, even if paratroopers leap into combat constantly, mid-firefight, and even if flamethrowers are quite infrequently deployed and, at best, sanitized in the portrayal of the violence they visited upon their victims, Company of Heroes still knows that the sheer loss of life that came during World War 2 was nothing to make light of.

And it wants to show us, respectfully, that both sides of the conflict were both myriad, human and extremely mortal. Your units, instead of the gruff, noble stand ins from Band of Brothers we usually get, best resemble actual people. They’re scared, they joke, they laugh, they insult one another and, just as often as not, they’re huge dicks. They say stupid things, insult each other moments before their deaths and, occasionally, just act like merciless killers doing all they can to put fear into the hearts of their enemies on the battlefield. And they’re also vulnerable, unprofessional men who miss their homes.

The unit patter that broadcasts from my toy-soldiers in Company of Heroes is unlike anything I’ve ever heard. Starcraft has some self-aware humor and generic tough guy statements that I’m sure their tween target audience finds enthralling inserted in there. Dawn of War has an assortment of religious statements that bombard anyone with ears every time a unit is told to attack move. Civilization has that unintelligible drivel that your various AI friends spout with every click. The Sims have simlish, or whatever it is. So I’m not just saying that Company of Heroes has unique unit patter with its own tone and candor.

It has unit patter that makes the units seem like actual people. They whine, they make statements of realistic false bravado, they curse. Apparently someone in one of my squads trips a lot, because one of his buddies gives him shit about tying his shoes. Apparently my sniper has social problems, because he just whispers rhymes all the time to himself. Apparently my mortar team doesn’t get much of a break, because they’re always shouting. These examples and jokes don’t do the writing justice. In a genre where shit writing is par for the course Company of Heroes makes a great attempt, and mostly succeeds, and it does so in the service of its overarching theme.

Maybe that’s why I like it so much: its adherence to theme. Sure, it’s far from perfect, and as a multiplayer game, good as it is, I prefer Dawn of War’s unique sides, highly specialized units and fantastic setting. But as a game it made me do something I didn’t think I’d ever do again: get excited about World War II. And if it does that by making the entire thing seem more real, by making the people who fought in it seem more like real people and making the loss of life that the war took that much more apparent, well then bully on them for doing so.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Congratulations on Yammering About Star Trek Until They Just Leave You Alone!


You’re an unlikely covert operative: a computer programmer turned super spy after he uncovered a super-secret group of spies located outside the purview of the government, like a less stupid Alpha Protocol. But here you are, sitting in a prison cell in Saudi Arabania, alone and with the intelligence that all of those terrorists so desperately want.


Which wouldn’t be a problem for a real super-spy. A real super-spy would just crack his suicide tooth and let the sweet, sweet cyanide course through his body, removing any threat of exposure. Or, if he was a real badass, he’d endure the torture and then murder his way out when his antagonists dropped their guard in a year or two.

But your training was sort of rushed (thanks, War on Terror) so you didn’t get all of the prep work that would’ve taught you how to resist interrogation. And you’re a devout Catholic, so suicide, like divorce from your soul-sucking whore of an Eskimo wife, isn’t really an option. So you’re going to have to draw on a some of your more unique espionage techniques in order to get out of this sticky situation.

When the burly, be-turbanned man who has been shocking your balls shows up in your cell this morning to give you your wake up pain you’ll go through your ordinary, perfunctory screams. You’ll writhe and moan and then, as you always do, you’ll start talking.

“THIS IS JUST LIKE PICARD AND THE BORG!” you’ll shout at the torturer, who will pause and fix you with a perplexed look. He’ll assess the information you just offered, consider his battery, and then pull up a chair.

“What is this to be meaning?” he’ll say, sitting on the chair backwards like a rapper in the nineties. You’ll take a minute to gather your breath before you go on.

“You’re trying to make me into your tool. But in doing so you’ll destroy what makes me useful. So you can’t push too hard.”

He’ll consider your logic, your panicked breathing and the burn marks covering most of your lower body and then stand up again.

“Like Jordi. Whenever he gets mind-controlled. Or Data with his programming removed,” you’ll continue, ignoring the menace he seems to be preparing to bring to bear upon you. He’ll pause mid-step as he slowly translates what you’ve been saying.

“Data?” he’ll say.

You’ll nod. “Brent Spiner.”

With this name in hand he’ll promptly exit the room. For a few minutes you’ll sit there in rare silence, laughing silently at the ceiling as the weight of your arms above your head constricts your breathing. After a few perfect minutes of this dull, throbbing pain he’ll return, frowning, with a man in a suit in tow. The man will pull up a chair and sit in it properly, looking you in the eye, effortlessly avoiding glancing at your exposed genitals

“Who,” he’ll say, “is this Brent Spiner. And where does he keep the data?”

This man will speak without an accent. This man will be the one you’ve been waiting for, the link you need to strike to attain your freedom.

“Who’s Brent Spiner?” you’ll spit out before tossing your head back and cackling. “One of the more underrated actors of our generation, my friend!”

The man will lean in closely as if he expects you to continue. You’ll give him a few seconds to consider the wisdom of so closely approaching a mentally unstable prisoner before you continue.

“Data, the chief science officer on the Starship Enterprise. Perhaps you’ve heard of him?” When you finish your angry declaration you’ll laugh again, this time collapsing into yourself.

The man in a suit will ask you a few more pointed questions over the next few minutes before he realizes you’re just talking about Star Trek. After he gets the idea he’ll shake his head, whisper something to the burly interrogator and leave the room. The burly interrogator will proceed to lower you to the ground after the man in a suit leaves. Then he’ll wrench you to your feet and force you out of the building.

He’ll almost drop you a few times, seemingly purposefully, but after a long, baffling walk he’ll hurl you out of a plaster building and on to the cold night sand. Then he’ll toss a blanket on top of you and turn around without speaking a single word.

He, along with the be-suited Saudi prince, will have assumed that you’re so mentally shattered that Star Trek is now the only topic that you can hold within your brain. The same coping method you used to avoid people in high school will have served you once agaiin, and you’ll be free. Free to fight terror once more.

Congratulations on Yammering About Star Trek Until They Just Leave You Alone!

Friday, September 10, 2010

Congratulations on Having a Lifetime Movie Made About You!

At first you thought that being trapped in your home and systematically terrorized and raped by a werewolf was the worst thing that could ever happen to you. The sex was okay, fun if a little awkward, but the biting and clawing? Just not worth it. You still have scars.

But after the court settlement (he was normally a lawyer who decided he’d see if he enjoyed terrifying people instead of controlling himself while “wolfing out” so he managed to play the legal system just right and avoid prison) and the massive payments for various damages that you received as a result of the settlement things kind of slowed down for you. You grew accustomed to daily life, where people looked at you in a new light, the small town you lived in having heard tales of your werewolf rape.

After a while you grew frustrated and you decided to go on a rampage to Capitol Hill, which is just above where laws are made, and get some new laws made preventing “werewolfing it up” from being a defensible strategy for home invasion and rape. The decision will come down in your favor 4-3, largely because of your super-hot relationship with Elena Kagan (no anal, unfortunately, but like everything else).

You’ll be excited about the outcome, but that’ll pale in comparison to the excitement you’ll feel when you hear they’re making a Lifetime movie about you called “Furry Fury: A Tale of Sex, Violence and Independence.” As one of the network’s dozens of viewers you’ll immediately green-light the project and do everything you can to give them period accurate details of your life and habits leading up to and following those events which left you forever changed.

When the movie is finished you’ll be portrayed by a young comedic actress named Lizzy Caplan, who can play a surprisingly broad range of ages depending on what kind of hat she’s wearing. It’ll be surprisingly well received for a Lifetime movie, largely because of the werewolf elements of it, and the part where they show a PG-13 sex scene between Lizzy Caplan and some lady we can’t remember the name of who is supposed to be Justice Elena Kagan.

And you? You’ll be able to sit at home drinking a single glass of red wine for three and a half hours, smiling at yourself and thinking of how being savagely raped by that werewolf lawyer was really sort of a blessing in disguise. Kind of.

Congratulations on Having a Lifetime Movie Made About You!

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Congratulations on Saving Your Grandmother's Orchard!

The eighties are littered with the ruined corpses of feel good teen rom-coms with premises that just weren’t good enough to make it to the silver screen. Movies about saving puppies with the money you won from a Jam Off or getting an abortion with money from a Stair Falling Contest might’ve seemed good to their writers, but those fat-cat producers in Hollywood never would’ve let their brilliance come to light because they’re intimidated by real creativity.

Well today you’re going to, more or less, live one of those movie’s plots. Your gam-gam is a cheerful old lady who has lived through the Second World War and all of the hells that have visited us since, and she’s never lost her upbeat attitude. But a recent movement on the part of a bank to foreclose on her treasured ancestral home has had her down of late. Enter yourself: a young woman sent to live with your grandmother due to a suspension for violent and anti-social behavior at your junior high school. As you arrive the bank will begin stepping up their attempts to move your grandmother out, starting by hiring a group of toughs to push her far enough that she breaks. Seriously, you just can’t write this shit.

After a series of increasingly intense run ins with the toughs, which will parallel a somewhat serious summer romance with a cute, understated boy without many opinions but a fantastic ass to make up for it, things will come to a head when the toughs try to raid your grandmother’s house. You’ll murder all of them using your grandfather’s old service rifle hidden in the attic and the bank, realizing that the fifty thousand dollars your gam-gam’s house and land are actually worth probably don’t warrant the cost in lives, will give up on trying to get her to move out.

Everyone wins! Except the families of the toughs, most of whom were down on their luck Iraq war vets who were just taking whatever work they could find.

Congratulations on Saving Your Grandmother’s Orchard!

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Congratulations on Establishing Just How Close Too Close Is!

Today, in an MIT lab under controlled conditions, you’re going to make an important discovery. You’ll be wearing a pair of jeans and a tattered old Jethro Tull t-shirt that was purchased for you by an ex-girlfriend of six years who knew how much you love Jethro Tull. You’ll be paired with Sheila, an attractive young woman wearing a sleeveless t-shirt and capri pants. You and Sheila will be observed by Professor Geraldine, who will be dressed more or less the same way you are because that’s actually how scientists dress. None of this suits and lab-coats shit.

He’ll be having you step progressively closer and closer towards one another, occasionally asking you to check in with your personal comfort levels. Then he’ll assess your levels of discomfort with a set of objective questions about ferrets.

When the test is finished we’ll have discovered that “too close” to Sheila for you is basically six inches away, which isn’t too surprising because you’ll be attracted to her and any closer than that she’ll be able to feel your erection.

“Too close” to you, however, will be around twenty meters, give or take. It’ll vary slightly depending on how recently you’ve bathed, and it’ll be used to justify a number of highly specific restraining orders in the near future. It will be based largely on the fact that you look like you have an erection and, at varying distances, the appearance of said erection generates variant levels of discomfort.

Professor Geraldine will be warded a fellowship, which he’ll put to use studying why men named Geraldine have so much trouble dating. Findings of this future study will be largely inconclusive, but science is nothing without risk.

Congratulations on Establishing Just How Close Too Close Is!

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Congratulations on Setting the Spike Perfectly!

You’re one of those super sexy lady volleyballers with a ponytail, a pair of sunglasses and a chip on your shoulder to anyone who’s too big a pussasaurus to step up to you on the court. Your favorite masturbation video is that one gay scene from Top Gun and you have difficulty engaging people in a conversation unless it relates to volleyball in some way. Luckily you’re good at spinning it into conversations so you can manage to draw in topics as diverse as Haiti, the Afghan war and, as you likely guessed from our earlier reference, the film Top Gun and jet-fighter pilots as a whole.

You’re serious about volleyball. Deadly serious. So serious, in fact, that during the Big Game Which We’re Not Aware of the Name of Because We Have Social Lives Outside Volleyball you’re going to get a little bit too intense. You’re going to set a spike so perfectly that when one of your super sexy, buff, socially retarded teammates spikes your set from behind you it’ll kill one of the other super sexy ladies playing white-ball sport.

This will have two immediate repercussions. Your team will win the tournament, as per the official rules of volleyball, and you’ll be found guilty as an accessory to the crime of manslaughter. Your attorney will try to get you off but that set will be such a perfect movement, such a perfect lead for such a perfect spike into the perfect place at the perfect moment to lead to the perfect decapitation with a leather ball that his defense will fall on deaf ears.

“How could she have set such a perfect spike and not expected this to happen?!” the prosecution will scream, pointing to you as you hang your head in shame. “A creature of such grace could make no error!”

The jury will harrumph in agreement and you’ll be sentenced to eighteen months with a chance for parole in six.

The upside is that your “how’d you get in here” story will revolve around volleyball and, ergo, actually help you interact with people in the joint. The downside is that you’ll become the head of a volleyball based prison gang and, upon your release, enter into a life of ruthless crime centered around volleyball.

But at least we’ll all have months of super hot lesbian sex to look forward to!

Congratulations on Setting the Spike Perfectly!

Monday, September 6, 2010

Congratulations on Making Porn Boring!

Today you’re going to release a pornographic film which depicts a close-up shot of a penis in a vagina for forty-five minutes. They’ll both be shaven, totally normal looking human genitals, displayed on camera without context for forty-five minutes. What could’ve been an enchanting or engrossing display of erotic endurance or the hideousness of human sexuality will instead be the single most boring, de-contextualized display of genitals in the history of modern cinema.

Congratulations on Making Porn Boring!

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: At the Bottom of the Bin!

When I was a little kid my parents didn’t give me an allowance. I’m not trying to tell a hard luck story or anything, it’s not like they locked me in a basement and refused to buy me toys. I just didn’t have money of my own to spend. I had to justify my purchases, convince my parents that I somehow deserved games or comics or whatever it was I wanted. I had to convince them that the approaching holiday was the right fit for that Sega game or that straight A’s did warrant an SNES, thank you much. It helped me, in a way, because it made me justify purchases even as a kid. It made me elucidate just why I wanted the things I wanted. It kept me from making impulse buys, with a few incredibly noteworthy exceptions.

But there was a downside to it all. It kept me from the allure of the bargain bin. See one of the most tantalizing things about the computer shop I’d be dragged through once or twice a month by my dad, who needed RAM and video cards and heat sinks in the days before the internet made it painfully easy and cheap to buy computer components, was that I’d be locked in close proximity with the Bargain Bin, an assemblage of fascinating and completely un-justifiable products. Box art, text describing the nebulous concepts outlining those early games and tech specs that I could barely understand, reading like a language I half remembered, all these things paired with lower than average price tags used to captivate me. I’d spend hours pawing through the bins, searching for something I could justify buying, something I could express the remarkableness of to my parents.

This was my only connection and contact with a number of other games that have since become somewhat legendary. Populace, Terra Nova, many of the early Ultima titles, all of these classics popped up in Microcenter’s bargain bins at one time or another and made me wonder about the multitudes they contained. I didn’t play them then. In fact, many of the titles that intrigued me I’d never get a chance to play. Technical issues and a lack of availability have kept them relegated to the annals of wikis and essays for me, second-hand experiences I can at best sigh over missing. Most of the time they weren’t even worth that, but I often wish I’d had the chance to play through all of the original Thief in its heyday.

But I digress. My point is that bargain bins never really gave me any great experiences as a kid. Instead they just tantalized me, made me wonder what I was missing. They became elusive, ever shifting tidal pools, teeming with strange new bits of life I could only glance at, hold for a moment and then leave behind. And when I finally was old enough to have my own money there were other distractions (MMOs, teen angst and books, readily available and constantly distracting books) that kept me from exploring the depths of the bargain bin to test the wonders contained within. Then came college, summer jobs and heavy drinking. I became even more profoundly socially dysfunctional. The games I felt compelled to play began to outnumber the money I had to spend on them, and I could only journey to places like Best Buy and Electronics Boutique with a purpose, with limited funds.

So I didn’t start to really explore bargain bin games again until Steam came about. I’d still browse through them, sure, but when I was thinking of how to spend that sixty bucks I’d earned from hefting trash cans over my head or making sandwiches for yuppies I didn’t want to take chances. I had one shot at an experience with each purchase, I had to make sure it was a good one. But after I’d graduated from college, after I’d negotiated the shit filled mire that was the job market during Bush’s second term and started to make money I suddenly had something I’d never had before: money and time to burn. For the first time in my life I had the time, the means and the method by which to savor the bargain bin, or rather its digital successor.

See bargain bins nowadays aren’t quite as grand as they were in their halcyon days of yore. Step into a Gamestop and you’ll see a tally of overpriced shit, returned copies of four year old Madden games and un-sellable dross which has, after years collecting dust, been re-packaged and cast into the commercial mix. It’s less like examining a tidal pool and more like sifting through a garbage container. Even if you do find something it is, at best, a discard of some minor value and, far more likely, it’s going to be a piece of shit. But Steam changed all that.

Before Steam started to run incredible sales over the course of the last year, proving just how shambling and hideous traditional box retailers are when placed next to a means of distribution with more direct communication with publishers and developers, before they started to drop prices as quickly and violently as they could whenever they could, Steam was home to one of the finest bargain bins in the gaming universe.

And of late it’s only become better. Games will find their way in and out of Steam’s bargain bin with all the random aplomb that they managed in retail chains. Sales a little slow this month for Bioshock? Drop it to five dollars and all those stammering chuckle-heads who were too cowardly to pay twenty for it and watch the sales ramp up. After a weekend at five dollars buzz comes back up and interested parties will start flocking to it once more. Even people like me who bought flimsy physical copies and might want to lend them out and still play their treasured old games still will drop money just to support the effort, the idea of such a dramatic price drop.

And what’s even more shocking is how well it works for everyone. Steam releases games on sale, sales spike for a week and Steam issues more sales. It’s as if the bargain bin becomes a tool for drawing attention to an aging title instead of removing it from stock to free up space for additional copies of Super Buck Fucker IV: The Buckiest Fuck. From a marketing perspective it reflects what Valve has always shown to be their expertise: listening to their consumer base and hearing, beyond what they request, what they really want, then making just that. Valve built a means for publishers and gamers to communicate, and proved that publishers want gamers to, more than anything else, be excited about their games. They also proved that gamers, more than anything else, want to see what publishers have on offer.

Because that’s the whole appeal of the bargain bin: less of a risk for the same reward. Games I would’ve scoffed at buying that intrigued me for their horrible-ness, games like Jericho and The Ghostbusters game that were almost universally panned were must buys once they dropped under five dollars. Games I would’ve laughed out loud at the prospect of buying at full price like Supreme Commander 2 and Killing Floor have been really enjoyable experiences that I only approached because they were discounted on Steam. Hell, I bought the complete Civilization 4 for twenty bucks, STALKER for five and X-Com’s entire run for a dollar a game, all of them excellent, if flawed and sometimes unapproachable experiences.

I’d liken it to walking through Powell’s books in Portland. There’s plenty of chaff out there on the shelves, marked down and prominently displayed, that you won’t enjoy regardless. But along with that chaff, there is a wealth of experiences awaiting the savvy consumer who is willing to look past the surface and work to uncover new and interesting bargains. The time you put into finding and investigating these bargains, the impulses you follow when presented with a seven dollar book next to a thirteen dollar book, are inevitably rewarded the same way buying a game like Gratuitous Space Battles, which might not even really be a game, is rewarded through Steam.

And what’s more, this magical bargain bin is something brick and mortar stores could never do. Coordinating on a national level, getting people with GEDs to actually tag hundreds of products correctly for a limited time sale and then hold up when customers try to bullshit them into discounting other games? Retail is a brutal, bleak landscape and there is little hope for innovation therein.

So even though the bargain bin was a cruel mockery in my youth, even though it seemed to only be there to make me miserable and wish I had millions of dollars and could just play games all the time and dive into these amazing experiences, it has become crucial to my existence as a gamer as an adult. If not for the digital bargain bin I’d be forced to play only a handful of titles, the same way I did when I was unemployed. The bargain bin is where I live as a gamer now, and it’s a wonderful and inclusive place. So god bless us, every one, for that noblest and most well-established of traditions: the highly esteemed bargain bin.

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Congratulations on Wearing That Cap In a Fashion That Makes Us All Super Uncomfortable!

There’s a website we’re sure most of you are familiar with. It’s called Lesbians That Look Like Justin Bieber, and it’s dedicated to attractive young women who have sex with other young women and happen to strongly resembling a young man. It has broad appeal for obvious reasons. It allows people to indulge their inner queer and, most importantly, it lets them do so anonymously. If anyone catches them looking at LTLLJB they can even deflect it as humorous, because it involves cases of mistaken gender which many people find amusing.

The reason it’s totally cool for everyone, though, is because it’s anonymous. They can all be aroused and no one has to know it’s because they’ve got a little bit of gay in them. Everyone can keep moving with their lives without having to worry about being outed. But what you’re doing today isn’t so anonymous. So it’s nowhere near as cool for everyone impacted.

See today when you wake up you’re going to check out your sweet new buzz-cut in the mirror and decide that you’re not entirely sure you want to share it with the world. You’re worried that everyone’s just going to assume you’re a crazy butch dike and stare at you. So you decide to obfuscate their judgment with a gender concealing chapeau, a sweet ass red-plaid-over-gray cockney cap which makes it hard to tell whether you’re a man or a woman.

This, paired with your compact frame and your gender neutral style of dress it, makes it impossible to tell if you’re male or female until you undo the top three buttons on your shirt. Then it’s perfectly apparent, from the sunrise-worthy gap between your perfectly formed breasts, that you’re a girl. But even after this revelation looking at you kind of makes people uncomfortable.

See you cocked your cap, without even thinking about it, at this playful angle that makes it look like you’re just begging everyone you meet to take you back to their apartment and explore their inner freak whichever side of the fence they’re on. So even after folks see your tits they’re still tied to the idea of you as this gorgeous, gender neutral pixie and they want to drag you back to their cave and do unspeakable things to your unmentionable parts regardless of their usual inclination towards vaginas.

The end result is that everyone who looks at you feels super, super hot under the collar. You’re kind of a walking boner patrol today. Which is totally fine and great. The world needs more boners. But the egalitarian nature of the boners you spread will make us all super uncomfortable.

Not in the “oh god, pretty girl, freeze frame” way that so many of us are used to. Instead they’ll make us question our own sexuality in a number of ways that most adults have never really had to before. It’ll force every single person who stares longingly at your firm, shapely ass to question if they really like the parts they’ve been playing with all these years or if they were just making due until they got a chance to roll in the hay with you.

So today you’re not going to get laid, despite looking incredible and not knowing it. You’re not going to be hit on in any way. You’re just going to make a lot of people go home and wonder if they’ve been doing it all wrong all these years.

Congratulations on Wearing That Cap In a Fashion That Makes Us All Super Uncomfortable!

Friday, September 3, 2010

Congratulations Bond Villain!

Congratulations! Today you’re going to fulfill your career long dream by capturing and murdering James Bond!

You’ll capture him using, to no one’s surprise, an incredibly beautiful woman with an implausible name and lax morals. She’ll fall for him but, unlike most of the women he sleeps with, she’ll be a product of the American university system. As a result she’ll know the value of a dollar and realize that a man who slept with her out of a combination of boredom and a subconscious desire to spread syphilis isn’t worth risking her life for, and she’ll leave him hanging above your tank filled with vicious mutant dogfish.

Bond will taunt you while he hangs there and he’ll get your entire evil plot, more or less, out of by the time he’s done. But this time when you leave the room while he is slowly descended into the dog-fish pit (where he’ll be made to feel very uncomfortable by your mutant dogfish before dying of radiation poisoning due to the radiation you used to make them mutants) he won’t escape through a series of implausible deus ex machina.

Instead he’ll shout the name of the woman he slept with last night for five minutes, then pause for a while wondering where she is. Karen (the woman he slept with’s real name) will actually be in Seattle by then, paying for her father’s chemo bills with the money she received from you in exchange for sleeping with James Bond. When she doesn’t mystically appear James will start shouting the name of another woman he slept with.

Then another.

And so on.

He’ll finish shouting after two and a half days, just before he succumbs to radiation poisoning. You’ll occasionally check in on him, but by the end it’ll just seem kind of sad that he managed to seduce that many people and didn’t form a relationship with any of them that had even a scrap of meaning. In the end you’ll be the closest thing to a real friend he has, and as he gazes up at you from sunken eyes in his final, silent moments, too weak to speak, you’ll see that he recognizes it too.

Congratulations Bond Villain!

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Congratulations on Being Struck By a Falling Tree!

You’re one of those skateboarding teens we hear so much about through Dateline. You’re kind of a douchebag, you’re virtually unemployable and, unlike the talented countercultural skaters of yore you don’t really do anything interesting or noteworthy, you just skateboard in the same way that people skateboarded before you.

You do, however, make sure that you do it in public places where you interfere with the lives of as many people as possible. Most of them try their hardest to ignore you, even though you’re a skateboarding girl and, according to the rules of the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s we’re supposed to find you very attractive and go out of our way to make sure your life is more or less honky dory. So people generally genially smile at you and wave and have sex with you and put up with all your myriad bullshit while you nosegrab to 750 flipkicks or whatever the shit it is you do and profoundly piss our reptile brains (which aren’t fooled by your wooden plank) into next week.

It’s all frustrating and really annoying and today it is finally going to stop. It’s going to stop when a municipal employee who is removing a tree asks you to please stop skateboarding in his work area. He’ll politely tell you that there are some great rails on the other end of the park, far from chainsaws, smiling at you while you scowl at him. You’ll proceed to ignore him and, since he has a job to do, he’ll just do his best to cut down the tree and not murder you in the process.

But your remarkable propensity for retardation will finally catch up with you today when a branch comes loose from the toppling tree and knocks you off your piece of wood. You’ll go tumbling to the ground with a sickening crunch and find yourself completely unable to move. You’ll also be puzzled at the physical pain assaulting you and be somewhat amazed that you finally have a reason to scowl.

Since you’re a good American who conforms to a set of social standards you’ll completely ignore the fact that you were at fault in your accident and do your all to get the municipal worker fired. The best you’ll be able to manage will be an embarrassingly large settlement from the city and a verbal apology from the worker, who really does feel terrible about you being struck by a tree even if you were being a little bitch at the time.

So you’ll keep on not working and we’ll finally stop having to deal with you skateboarding around like it’s 1994 and you think you’re cool. It’s really a win-win today.

Congratulations on Being Struck By a Falling Tree!

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Congratulations on Moving Into a Glass House!

Contrary to what people say all the time glass houses are more or less stone proof. Well, stone resistant at least. Otherwise you’d constantly be losing windows every time a strong wind came up or some stones were kicked up by a passing car. What you’re really going to have to look out for are ex-girlfriends and strangers who want to see you naked. We suggest either working out a lot or getting more curtains. Also, you might want to masturbate a little bit less. We don’t want you to stop altogether, it just might make people a little uncomfortable if they knew how often you fapped it.

Congratulations on Moving Into a Glass House!