Anyone can become a boss. All you have to do is wear collared shirts and generally act like a douche, occasionally getting too drunk at office parties and putting your dick in one of your less attractive co-workers. It’s just a matter of walking the line and reading a bunch of super douchey books that no one with an even somewhat interesting personality reads.
But showing you’re a boss, that’s a different story. It’s more than just doing the things that make you a boss. It’s usually firing someone in a really public setting, and better yet doing it when they’ve done nothing wrong. If you want to score mega points you need to do it to someone who has good reason to make mistakes and really needs their job while someone else nearby is doing something completely incompetent.
Today you’re going to do it to Jeremy, one of your better employees, for giving you a black and white copy that he printed out of the color printer.
“But the queue on the black and white was huge and it was only one page,” he’ll respond, tears welling in his eyes.
“I don’t make the rules,” you’ll tell Jeremy, using the dad voice you’ve never had a chance to bring to bear on your non-existent children.
“This isn’t a rule!” he’ll scream as building security hauls him out.
“Tell it to the ACLU!” you’ll shout after him, letting loose a deep chuckle as you watch him get dragged down the hall. A band of whistling HR reps will already be hard at work cleaning out his cube, throwing away personal effects and reveling in the display of their incredibly limited power.
At this point you’ll notice that all your underlings are sitting and staring a the chaos. You’ll smirk to yourself and strut back to your desk, callously spitting a quick “get back to work” as you sit down to watch Youtube for the rest of the day.
Congratulations on Showing Those Fuckers Who’s Boss!
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Congratulations on Vomitting Words!
Normally when this phrase is used it’s intended to denigrate the speech of someone who just lets shit pour out of their mouth unchecked. But today it’s going to refer to an event which will occur after a night of heavy drinking, while you walk through Sommerville in order to reach Mass Ave and catch a bus to your lonely little on bedroom overlooking an old folks near the Lexington border.
You and your “bro” will be laughing especially hard at a really dumb racist joke when the alcohol will take over and you’ll literally vomit words in the form of partially digested alphabet soup. The words will go everywhere, so it’ll be kind of hard to really get anything solid out of them but we can tell you that some of the more interesting random collections of words will include “sad,” “fun,” and “desperation.” We’re pleasantly surprised here in the office at that last one.
We hope you take this opportunity to reconsider your life and maybe think about moving back in with your parents. They love you and they, like everyone else in the world who knows you even tangentially, is really worried about you.
Congratulations on Vomiting Words!
You and your “bro” will be laughing especially hard at a really dumb racist joke when the alcohol will take over and you’ll literally vomit words in the form of partially digested alphabet soup. The words will go everywhere, so it’ll be kind of hard to really get anything solid out of them but we can tell you that some of the more interesting random collections of words will include “sad,” “fun,” and “desperation.” We’re pleasantly surprised here in the office at that last one.
We hope you take this opportunity to reconsider your life and maybe think about moving back in with your parents. They love you and they, like everyone else in the world who knows you even tangentially, is really worried about you.
Congratulations on Vomiting Words!
Monday, June 28, 2010
Congratulations on Making Someone Watch the Cove!
Just to be perfectly clear you haven’t seen the Cove yet. And you won’t have seen it by the end of the day. But you will have forced your soon to be ex-girlfriend to watch it through a combination of craftiness and emotional manipulation.
You’ll start the process off by carefully laying a trail of M&M™ brand candies leading from the entrance of your shared apartment to the bedroom where the entertainment center looms. You’ll hide in a closet and wait for her to arrive home for several hours, falling asleep a few times. When she finally shows up she’ll slam the door, waking your from your respite.
“Fuck me,” she’ll shout to the seemingly empty apartment. “Thank christ I’ve got some alone time.” She’ll drop her bag on the table and let out a long sigh. Then she’ll notice the candy on the floor. She’ll look around the apartment to make sure that no one is around, checking underneath cushions and rugs but never thinking to look in the closet where you’ve cleverly concealed yourself under a sheet (you deserve each other).
Satisfied that the apartment is free from observers she’ll pick up the first M&M™ and place it in her mouth, chewing unexpectedly like a bird. Then she’ll proceed to do so with a second candy and so on and so forth until she reaches the next room. What follows next you can only speculate at, but you’ll assume that she follows the candy trail to the middle of the room and spends time devouring her newfound horde of chocolate.
You won’t be able to find out because you’ll have run up behind her and slammed the door shut, locking it and shoving a set of carefully designed wedges (you’re a carpenter) into the gaps between door and frame to seal her inside.
“Herrow?” she’ll call out from inside, her voice obscured by candy. You’ll giggle at yourself, delighted, then leave the apartment to go eat Chinese food alone while she deals with the trap you set up for her.
Inside the room she’ll see that the DVD player has been loaded and that a note is attached to the TV. It will read that you know she’s been cheating on you and that you feel really hurt. You’ll have rented the acclaimed documentary The Cove to show her just how sad you feel. You’ll instruct her to play it so that the she can share your feelings and the two of you can move on with your relationship, having grown from your heartbreak.
She’ll turn on the DVD player and the TV, fast forwarding through the previews and pressing play more out of hunger than any desire to actually salve your feelings. But after forty five minutes of watching those poor dolphins mistreated by the modern world she’ll be weeping openly. She’ll understand that she, like man, has mistreated you like a poor, defenseless and wise dolphin. When the film is finally completed and you arrive at home a little early to remove the wedges from the door and let her out of her makeshift prison she’ll run out of the room as quickly as possible. She won’t mention having missed dinner or how much of her time you’ve wasted.
She’ll just stand for a moment and say “I’m sorry. You deserve better.”
Then she’ll pick up her bag and leave for a motel. That night she’ll lay there on a motel bed wondering if she’s good enough for anyone if she can make you feel that bad. She’ll consider suicide briefly before masturbating herself to sleep.
Back at home you won’t be able to masturbate. Or sleep for that matter. All you’ll be able to do is stare up at your ceiling and wonder if maybe you should’ve picked a movie that you’d seen, or even a film that had a slightly less sad reputation. Maybe something like Tideland, which probably would’ve confused her but still been, in a way, more accurate.
Congratulations on Making Someone Watch the Cove!
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Wednesdays!
Each Wednesday night we meet according to the rules we agreed upon. I think it was Dan who first put them to paper, but at this point it’s hard to say. We all show up around seven or eight with a bottle of something and log on to Skype. One of us will call the others. It can be any of us, but it is almost always Alex.
One by one we sign in and take up our respective places, waiting in an unmarked Heroes of Newerth channel. We wait as a group, quietly musing over current events, movies, sports. whatever. We begin this way each night because it is slow, because it lets us ease in to one another’s company and because it forces us, briefly, to work as a team, which is what Guys’ Night is all about. Of course, because it relies heavily on teamwork this innocent game also puts our entire evening in jeopardy. A bad HoN game means a bad night, where everyone’s angry at everyone else, trying to prove that either the loss wasn’t their fault or that they can make up for their poor performance in some other way. If the first game goes well we’ll play another, and sometimes a third, bracing ourselves for our inevitable defeat.
Tonight we’ll win our first game.
“Alright,” I’ll say, sipping water and hoping that my sobriety doesn’t cloud my playing. “Sure we want to do another one?” I went six and two with Forsaken, a feat I’m unlikely to best. I really just want to play Modern Warfare so that we have some time to ride on our victory high before the night starts to turn.
“Yeah,” Alex says. He did pretty well too, breaking even with Magmus. He knows he can do better in another game and he wants to take a chance.
“I think we should play another one,” Dan quips in in his douchiest voice. Dan went one and six with Voodoo Jester and he really wants to get a good game in. He wants it bad.
“Okay,” I say, and click the refresh button.
Games populate inexplicably, re-ordering themselves on my list as if on a whim. There’s no real logic to how they appear or vanish, they just flash and then decide whether or not they want to stay, jockeying for position within my attention constantly. I pick one, open it up and Alex and Dan follow.
“Fuck, no. Leave,” Alex sighs into his microphone. He’s already left the game and we’re left to follow obediently. Dan asks what we’re both thinking.
“Why?”
“Did you see their scores, Dan? God.”
We search in silence, still sifting through games, looking for our gem. After all, we only need to really find one good one. We can throw away all the shitty games we like, even if we don’t all always agree that they’re shitty in the first place.
“Maybe Grove shouldn’t pick,” Dan intones. This intonation will come after my third unacceptable pick.
“Whatever,” I say, eying the bottle of whiskey, half left over from before I decided to give alcohol a rest. I sigh and step away from my keyboard to fill up my water bottle. When I return Alex and Dan are screaming over chat.
“Get the fuck in the game?”
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“Keep your fucking pants on, Jesus.”
I log in and slip, just barely, into the last slot on their team. I am seconds behind XXXPRIDEXXX, and if I’d lost the race I’m sure I’d have heard about it for the rest of the night. And rightly so. I broke one of the rules. I left without mentioning it.
But there’s no harm done, none yet, so we sit and watch the teams autobalance, the percentages even out and the clock count down from five. We don’t even hear these sounds anymore. They are like white noise underneath our own voices, like a rising wind in a storm. Part of knowing everything is going well in the game. But when the countdown settles and the heroes are randomly assigned, that’s when the cursing begins.
“Shit,” Alex mumbles. “We’re fucked.”
“We’re always fucked,” I grumble.
“Seriously,” Dan sighs. Surveying the selection, however, Alex is right. We’re very, very fucked.
“Shit.”
Of the five heroes we’ve been assigned, I can play two of them well. Alex can play one of them alright and one of them, in the hands of our lowest ranked player, amazingly well. Dan can’t really play any of them. We jockey for position accordingly. I stick with my mediocre hero, with whom I can guarantee results, if not great ones. Dan distributes his heroes as they come to him, hoping for the best and trying to make sure the rest of the team is more or less comfortable with their heroes, and Alex settles for a hero he hates but might be amazing at. That happens sometimes with Alex.
But when the game starts we don’t have a chance to see just how great Alex may or may not be with his hero.
The two of us head bot, already in irksome silence, already fully aware of our inevitable defeat. If we were in better spirits we’d be offering up quips, criticizing our teammates and calling each other queer. We’d have already had a lengthy conversation about whose semen tastes like what, but instead we’ll be verbally paralyzed, waiting for one of us to start the rage, In the end it will start with the source least likely to an external observer: it will start with Dan. Or perhaps with scotch. A team effort maybe? Whatever the source, Dan’s voice will sound, rage barely detectable in it.
“Thanks for the call.”
He’ll be referring to mid’s hero, which will have jumped lanes and killed him. His lane mate will have largely ignored his plight, apparently, and as a result Alex and I will be at fault. In the ensuing chaos, caused entirely by this discussion mind you, I will have died and Alex will be sighing at a deafening volume.
“Fuck,” I’ll mumble to the silence, returning with the promise of another explosion.
The game will continue in this fashion for an eternity, quiet rage erupting, then fading, erupting again. Numbers will increase rapidly, then slow, then rush up again, time slowing down all the while. The perfidious game clock will read twenty two minutes when Brown finally drops, having successfully sabotaged our entire team’s K-D ratios, as well as all of the middle lane’s defenses. His efforts will have been nothing short of prodigal.
Pink will still fight on, against our wishes, refusing to vote each time we try to concede so we can move on to other games. In the end this will stretch out for another fifteen minues, each second containing a similarly sized epoch within itself. Dan will be completely silent, Alex eager to move on. He won’t even say anything as he loads up Modern Warfare 2 and starts up a game. Dan and I will follow, knowing better than to chance his rage.
But Modern Warfare 2 will do little to soothe our bloodied egos. Every player we face will prove to be a hacker or dipshit or fucker or something, right up until they join our faction for the round, in which case they’re immediately transformed to a bundle of no-talent shit for brains faggotry intent only on ruining our entire fucking night. By the time the second round is over Alex will be shouting fuck every time he dies, and I’ll be eying the whiskey with renewed consideration. After all, if this game is a reflection of my life, shouldn’t I just go with it and enjoy being at the bottom a little?
“One more try at HoN,” I’ll ask, dreading the answer. We’ll be fighting a particularly vicious band of hacking Russian throat rapists when I beg the question. I’ll have just been shot from across the map by a young man with two machine pistols and aim that could only be bested by John Rambo. Our departure from this game will be a foregone conclusion, the only honorable path to take if we want to preserve even a shred of our dignity.
“Fuck yes,” Alex will respond, his courage returning. Or the rum emerging, again, difficult to say. If I wasn’t sober I’d have a better angle on what was going on, but I will, regrettably, still not have taken a drink. It will be a bad evening, one of our worst.
Dan will say nothing through the search for a new game. This, in turn, will prompt me to say nothing, which means Alex will talk, non-stop, about how shitty our team is throughout the matchmaking, hero selection and prep process. After these give way to play he’ll keep on about how much bullshit the other team’s heroes are and how incredibly fucking weak ours are. Each time he dies he’ll slam his desk and shout.
“FUCK!”
By the time the game ends our team will have a severe kill deficit. I’ll have managed to keep an even K-D ratio, a rare thing, but Alex and Dan won’t have been so lucky. Clucking my tongue at the good my sobriety has done me I’ll frown, listening to Alex swear.
“Well,” Dan will sigh. “I’m done.”
I’ll nod in agreement before I remember that my microphone doesn’t pick up gestures.
“Yeah, same.”
“Alright,” Alex will sigh one last time as we one by one back out of the Skype channel.
Once Skype is closed I’ll be left to my own devices, finally, the first bit of time I’ll have had alone for the whole of Wednesday. It will be twelve thirty in the morning and I’ll have three posts to finish before Thursday night. I’ll be sober, bleary eyed and surly. But, smiling, I’ll already be looking forward to next Wednesday, wondering if I’ll have enough in my savings to drink by then.
One by one we sign in and take up our respective places, waiting in an unmarked Heroes of Newerth channel. We wait as a group, quietly musing over current events, movies, sports. whatever. We begin this way each night because it is slow, because it lets us ease in to one another’s company and because it forces us, briefly, to work as a team, which is what Guys’ Night is all about. Of course, because it relies heavily on teamwork this innocent game also puts our entire evening in jeopardy. A bad HoN game means a bad night, where everyone’s angry at everyone else, trying to prove that either the loss wasn’t their fault or that they can make up for their poor performance in some other way. If the first game goes well we’ll play another, and sometimes a third, bracing ourselves for our inevitable defeat.
Tonight we’ll win our first game.
“Alright,” I’ll say, sipping water and hoping that my sobriety doesn’t cloud my playing. “Sure we want to do another one?” I went six and two with Forsaken, a feat I’m unlikely to best. I really just want to play Modern Warfare so that we have some time to ride on our victory high before the night starts to turn.
“Yeah,” Alex says. He did pretty well too, breaking even with Magmus. He knows he can do better in another game and he wants to take a chance.
“I think we should play another one,” Dan quips in in his douchiest voice. Dan went one and six with Voodoo Jester and he really wants to get a good game in. He wants it bad.
“Okay,” I say, and click the refresh button.
Games populate inexplicably, re-ordering themselves on my list as if on a whim. There’s no real logic to how they appear or vanish, they just flash and then decide whether or not they want to stay, jockeying for position within my attention constantly. I pick one, open it up and Alex and Dan follow.
“Fuck, no. Leave,” Alex sighs into his microphone. He’s already left the game and we’re left to follow obediently. Dan asks what we’re both thinking.
“Why?”
“Did you see their scores, Dan? God.”
We search in silence, still sifting through games, looking for our gem. After all, we only need to really find one good one. We can throw away all the shitty games we like, even if we don’t all always agree that they’re shitty in the first place.
“Maybe Grove shouldn’t pick,” Dan intones. This intonation will come after my third unacceptable pick.
“Whatever,” I say, eying the bottle of whiskey, half left over from before I decided to give alcohol a rest. I sigh and step away from my keyboard to fill up my water bottle. When I return Alex and Dan are screaming over chat.
“Get the fuck in the game?”
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“Keep your fucking pants on, Jesus.”
I log in and slip, just barely, into the last slot on their team. I am seconds behind XXXPRIDEXXX, and if I’d lost the race I’m sure I’d have heard about it for the rest of the night. And rightly so. I broke one of the rules. I left without mentioning it.
But there’s no harm done, none yet, so we sit and watch the teams autobalance, the percentages even out and the clock count down from five. We don’t even hear these sounds anymore. They are like white noise underneath our own voices, like a rising wind in a storm. Part of knowing everything is going well in the game. But when the countdown settles and the heroes are randomly assigned, that’s when the cursing begins.
“Shit,” Alex mumbles. “We’re fucked.”
“We’re always fucked,” I grumble.
“Seriously,” Dan sighs. Surveying the selection, however, Alex is right. We’re very, very fucked.
“Shit.”
Of the five heroes we’ve been assigned, I can play two of them well. Alex can play one of them alright and one of them, in the hands of our lowest ranked player, amazingly well. Dan can’t really play any of them. We jockey for position accordingly. I stick with my mediocre hero, with whom I can guarantee results, if not great ones. Dan distributes his heroes as they come to him, hoping for the best and trying to make sure the rest of the team is more or less comfortable with their heroes, and Alex settles for a hero he hates but might be amazing at. That happens sometimes with Alex.
But when the game starts we don’t have a chance to see just how great Alex may or may not be with his hero.
The two of us head bot, already in irksome silence, already fully aware of our inevitable defeat. If we were in better spirits we’d be offering up quips, criticizing our teammates and calling each other queer. We’d have already had a lengthy conversation about whose semen tastes like what, but instead we’ll be verbally paralyzed, waiting for one of us to start the rage, In the end it will start with the source least likely to an external observer: it will start with Dan. Or perhaps with scotch. A team effort maybe? Whatever the source, Dan’s voice will sound, rage barely detectable in it.
“Thanks for the call.”
He’ll be referring to mid’s hero, which will have jumped lanes and killed him. His lane mate will have largely ignored his plight, apparently, and as a result Alex and I will be at fault. In the ensuing chaos, caused entirely by this discussion mind you, I will have died and Alex will be sighing at a deafening volume.
“Fuck,” I’ll mumble to the silence, returning with the promise of another explosion.
The game will continue in this fashion for an eternity, quiet rage erupting, then fading, erupting again. Numbers will increase rapidly, then slow, then rush up again, time slowing down all the while. The perfidious game clock will read twenty two minutes when Brown finally drops, having successfully sabotaged our entire team’s K-D ratios, as well as all of the middle lane’s defenses. His efforts will have been nothing short of prodigal.
Pink will still fight on, against our wishes, refusing to vote each time we try to concede so we can move on to other games. In the end this will stretch out for another fifteen minues, each second containing a similarly sized epoch within itself. Dan will be completely silent, Alex eager to move on. He won’t even say anything as he loads up Modern Warfare 2 and starts up a game. Dan and I will follow, knowing better than to chance his rage.
But Modern Warfare 2 will do little to soothe our bloodied egos. Every player we face will prove to be a hacker or dipshit or fucker or something, right up until they join our faction for the round, in which case they’re immediately transformed to a bundle of no-talent shit for brains faggotry intent only on ruining our entire fucking night. By the time the second round is over Alex will be shouting fuck every time he dies, and I’ll be eying the whiskey with renewed consideration. After all, if this game is a reflection of my life, shouldn’t I just go with it and enjoy being at the bottom a little?
“One more try at HoN,” I’ll ask, dreading the answer. We’ll be fighting a particularly vicious band of hacking Russian throat rapists when I beg the question. I’ll have just been shot from across the map by a young man with two machine pistols and aim that could only be bested by John Rambo. Our departure from this game will be a foregone conclusion, the only honorable path to take if we want to preserve even a shred of our dignity.
“Fuck yes,” Alex will respond, his courage returning. Or the rum emerging, again, difficult to say. If I wasn’t sober I’d have a better angle on what was going on, but I will, regrettably, still not have taken a drink. It will be a bad evening, one of our worst.
Dan will say nothing through the search for a new game. This, in turn, will prompt me to say nothing, which means Alex will talk, non-stop, about how shitty our team is throughout the matchmaking, hero selection and prep process. After these give way to play he’ll keep on about how much bullshit the other team’s heroes are and how incredibly fucking weak ours are. Each time he dies he’ll slam his desk and shout.
“FUCK!”
By the time the game ends our team will have a severe kill deficit. I’ll have managed to keep an even K-D ratio, a rare thing, but Alex and Dan won’t have been so lucky. Clucking my tongue at the good my sobriety has done me I’ll frown, listening to Alex swear.
“Well,” Dan will sigh. “I’m done.”
I’ll nod in agreement before I remember that my microphone doesn’t pick up gestures.
“Yeah, same.”
“Alright,” Alex will sigh one last time as we one by one back out of the Skype channel.
Once Skype is closed I’ll be left to my own devices, finally, the first bit of time I’ll have had alone for the whole of Wednesday. It will be twelve thirty in the morning and I’ll have three posts to finish before Thursday night. I’ll be sober, bleary eyed and surly. But, smiling, I’ll already be looking forward to next Wednesday, wondering if I’ll have enough in my savings to drink by then.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Congratulations on Learning the Dirty Secret About the Webcomics Business!
When you first got into webcomics it wasn’t even a business. It was just a bunch of fat, asocial nerds ignoring people who were telling them that they were going to fail. But ever since Scott McCloud opened his fat ass trap and started yammering about business structure and concepts relating to the “reinvention of a non-page” people started looking at webcomics and asking where all that amazing ad revenue and t-shirt money was going.
As you’ll find out later tonight a small portion of it goes to your rent. The rest of it actually goes towards a massive machine that sodomizes all but a handful of comic artists, ensuring that they must take it up the ass at least once a week from a giant robot in order to keep paying their rent and buying cocaine. The rest of the industry is seperated into two groups: the Penny-Arcade guys, who largely survive due to a deal with the devil (who happens to be incarnated in Robert Khoo, the merciless Asian businessman so evil he masterminded the Child’s Play charity which purchases toys so that they may be kept behind bulletproof glass from ailing children, just out of their reach) and the Dumbrella guys, who only let you into their group if you participate in their predominantly male orgies.
Today you’re going to try and get into Dumbrella and find out what they make the newbies do in order to get in on the sweet deal that is having Jeff Rowland produce and sell your t-shirts at breakneck speed. Tomorrow you’re going to wish you had medical coverage.
Congratulations on Learning the Dirty Secret About the Webcomics Business!
As you’ll find out later tonight a small portion of it goes to your rent. The rest of it actually goes towards a massive machine that sodomizes all but a handful of comic artists, ensuring that they must take it up the ass at least once a week from a giant robot in order to keep paying their rent and buying cocaine. The rest of the industry is seperated into two groups: the Penny-Arcade guys, who largely survive due to a deal with the devil (who happens to be incarnated in Robert Khoo, the merciless Asian businessman so evil he masterminded the Child’s Play charity which purchases toys so that they may be kept behind bulletproof glass from ailing children, just out of their reach) and the Dumbrella guys, who only let you into their group if you participate in their predominantly male orgies.
Today you’re going to try and get into Dumbrella and find out what they make the newbies do in order to get in on the sweet deal that is having Jeff Rowland produce and sell your t-shirts at breakneck speed. Tomorrow you’re going to wish you had medical coverage.
Congratulations on Learning the Dirty Secret About the Webcomics Business!
Friday, June 25, 2010
Congratulations on Quoting the Bible Until They Just Give Up!
You’ve gotten a little sick of people taking your shit out of the freezer at work, which is totally acceptable. You worked hard to earn that single portion microwavable dinner and you deserve to ram it into your face while it is molten hot come lunchtime each day. But if you tell that to those cocksuckers in HR they just roll their eyes and recommend that you take an anger management class before further legal action becomes necessary.
Today you’re going to strike back the way your daddy taught you: using the Bible. But unlike what your dad did with you you won’t be beating them bodily with the Good Book until they admit they’ve been sneaking your delicious lunchtime treats out under your nose. No, you’ll just stand in the lunch room for a solid hour quoting the bible at people as they walk in and out.
At first you’ll start out light with some parables and Songs of Solomon. You’ll even mix in a few psalms and homilies to spice it up. But before long you’ll get a little lost and just start reading random passages out of Genesis, hoping for the best.
“The best” will apparently consist mostly of stories about prostitutes being stoned to death and men selling their daughters into slavery. There will also be a five minute period where you try to figure out how to pronounce various old timey names such as Abraham and Isaac (here’s a hint: it’s not “Is-Ack”).
Once that’s done you’ll read the entirety of Revelations from start to finish without pause. You’ll barely even take a breath you’ll be so busy listing off sins, and by the time it’s all done everyone will feel really guilty. That’s when Pam from Sales will come up and tell you that no one’s been sneaking your dinners, you just keep forgetting to bring them.
You’ll cold-cock that mouthy bitch right then and there and the entire room will go silent. From that day forward your cubicle will be moved to an isolated area and whenever you leave you’ll have a security escort, but it’ll be worth it because every day a new microwave dinner will be there just like it was before you ate it the previous day before. We hope you one day grasp the concept of things changing over time, but given the brain damage from all those bible beatings it is very, very unlikely.
Congratulations on Quoting the Bible Until They Just Give Up!
Today you’re going to strike back the way your daddy taught you: using the Bible. But unlike what your dad did with you you won’t be beating them bodily with the Good Book until they admit they’ve been sneaking your delicious lunchtime treats out under your nose. No, you’ll just stand in the lunch room for a solid hour quoting the bible at people as they walk in and out.
At first you’ll start out light with some parables and Songs of Solomon. You’ll even mix in a few psalms and homilies to spice it up. But before long you’ll get a little lost and just start reading random passages out of Genesis, hoping for the best.
“The best” will apparently consist mostly of stories about prostitutes being stoned to death and men selling their daughters into slavery. There will also be a five minute period where you try to figure out how to pronounce various old timey names such as Abraham and Isaac (here’s a hint: it’s not “Is-Ack”).
Once that’s done you’ll read the entirety of Revelations from start to finish without pause. You’ll barely even take a breath you’ll be so busy listing off sins, and by the time it’s all done everyone will feel really guilty. That’s when Pam from Sales will come up and tell you that no one’s been sneaking your dinners, you just keep forgetting to bring them.
You’ll cold-cock that mouthy bitch right then and there and the entire room will go silent. From that day forward your cubicle will be moved to an isolated area and whenever you leave you’ll have a security escort, but it’ll be worth it because every day a new microwave dinner will be there just like it was before you ate it the previous day before. We hope you one day grasp the concept of things changing over time, but given the brain damage from all those bible beatings it is very, very unlikely.
Congratulations on Quoting the Bible Until They Just Give Up!
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Congratulations on Beating Britain At What They Do Best!
This is a retroactive Sexy Results prediction that we initially rejected due to abject absurdity. Yesterday America beat the living shit out of Algeria 1-0 to advance to elimination play in the World Cup for the first time in decades. Because America was so awesome this victory catapulted them, retroactively, into a position about England in terms of international standings in soccer. So America, at present, has already handily defeated England at the only sport that the two of us actually compete in with one another aside from yachting.
Congratulations on Beating Britain At What They Do Best!
Congratulations on Beating Britain At What They Do Best!
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Congratulations on Rebuilding the Aggro Crag in Your Home!
Some dreams can never come true. For example, Pam from accounting will never find true love. James from AR will never have a chance to experience puberty as a young woman. And you’ll never be able to appear on the television show Nickoldeon GUTS as a child and climb the Aggro Crag in the final round in the Extreme Arena.
This is a lot more frustrating for you than the rest of us, because while we might never accomplish our dreams it is, in most of our cases, largely because of fate’s horrible, cold hands and our own abject poverty. In your case you possess the means to purchase the Aggro Crag and the drive to do so. You’ve even entered into negotiation with some higher ups at Viacom in an attempt to purchase the defunct structure, but those media fat-cats wouldn’t hear any of it, insisting that their precious heap of polystyrene and steel stay mothballed in their studio vault, along with the heads of the Jewish Media Elders and the souls of all the previous U.S. presidents who haven’t been inserted into robots yet.
So with all that money burning a hole in your pocket and no Aggro Crag to buy with it you did what any rational person would do: you started building a massive stadium in your home which effectively re-created the set of GUTS. Using extensive video reference and some of the original architects of the Extreme Arena you’ll build the entire thing from the ground up. But none of these people were involved at all with the construction of the Aggro Crag, and none of them will be able to help you in the least when it comes to fabricating a superstructure for the massive complex.
In the end you’ll be left with no choice except to hire a group of private investigators to track down the wily and reclusive architect of the Crag. He’ll be living in seclusion in North Dakota, far from where anyone would ever willingly go. But the detectives, at your behest, will track him through the massive, deadly obstacle course he calls his home and bring him back to you in irons. Five men will have set out: two will return.
Once you have him in your home he’ll be very amenable to building a new Aggro Crag for you in your home. Turns out he really likes doing that sort of thing, he just doesn’t like being bothered in his home. He’ll give you his email address in case you need to get in touch with him again and then give you some plans for the construction of a brand new Aggro Crag, complete with all the classic obstacles and suggestions for maintenance.
After that it’ll be just a matter of six months and twenty million dollars before you have your personal Crag up and running. The first thing you’ll do is stand atop it and survey the massive empty stadium you’ve created and wonder aloud at your snickering underlying as to why you’re still single when you can make things this amazing.
Congratulations on Rebuilding the Aggro Crag in Your Home!
This is a lot more frustrating for you than the rest of us, because while we might never accomplish our dreams it is, in most of our cases, largely because of fate’s horrible, cold hands and our own abject poverty. In your case you possess the means to purchase the Aggro Crag and the drive to do so. You’ve even entered into negotiation with some higher ups at Viacom in an attempt to purchase the defunct structure, but those media fat-cats wouldn’t hear any of it, insisting that their precious heap of polystyrene and steel stay mothballed in their studio vault, along with the heads of the Jewish Media Elders and the souls of all the previous U.S. presidents who haven’t been inserted into robots yet.
So with all that money burning a hole in your pocket and no Aggro Crag to buy with it you did what any rational person would do: you started building a massive stadium in your home which effectively re-created the set of GUTS. Using extensive video reference and some of the original architects of the Extreme Arena you’ll build the entire thing from the ground up. But none of these people were involved at all with the construction of the Aggro Crag, and none of them will be able to help you in the least when it comes to fabricating a superstructure for the massive complex.
In the end you’ll be left with no choice except to hire a group of private investigators to track down the wily and reclusive architect of the Crag. He’ll be living in seclusion in North Dakota, far from where anyone would ever willingly go. But the detectives, at your behest, will track him through the massive, deadly obstacle course he calls his home and bring him back to you in irons. Five men will have set out: two will return.
Once you have him in your home he’ll be very amenable to building a new Aggro Crag for you in your home. Turns out he really likes doing that sort of thing, he just doesn’t like being bothered in his home. He’ll give you his email address in case you need to get in touch with him again and then give you some plans for the construction of a brand new Aggro Crag, complete with all the classic obstacles and suggestions for maintenance.
After that it’ll be just a matter of six months and twenty million dollars before you have your personal Crag up and running. The first thing you’ll do is stand atop it and survey the massive empty stadium you’ve created and wonder aloud at your snickering underlying as to why you’re still single when you can make things this amazing.
Congratulations on Rebuilding the Aggro Crag in Your Home!
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Congratulations on Proving There's No Rules That Says a Dog Can't Play Basketball!
You know in those retarded sports movies about inspiring animals playing sports and leading a struggling team of human players to victory when some douchebag stands up and says “there’s no rule a dog can’t play basketball?” Well, today you’re the lawyer that asshat hired to prove his case. You’ll spend a total of seventeen billable hours preparing for what is an easy and straightforward case, and you’ll spend a total of two hours in court making sure it all goes down smooth. In the end you’ll make twenty thousand dollars for the entire affair. You’ll be depicted by Alec Baldwin in the made for TV version of the story about the basketball playing dog, in what will be called by many “the death knell of Baldwin’s career.”
Congratulations on Proving There’s No Rules That Says a Dog Can’t Play Basketball!
Congratulations on Proving There’s No Rules That Says a Dog Can’t Play Basketball!
Monday, June 21, 2010
Congratulations Bike Chain Gang Champions!
You and your friends didn’t really know what to do with yourselves after high school. Shelly got into Dartmouth, so she was all set, but the rest of you had spent far too much time smoking pot, having teen sex and riding bikes around so most of you barely got out. of high school. The few who did get into college couldn’t get financial aid, so you all decided to throw Shelly a nice party and then make your lives in the town you grew up in, living the way you know how: awesome.
For a while this meant taking jobs as they came, mostly in the service industry, and occasionally forming “bands” that break up within a few weeks due to lack of talent, interest and endurance. But once that got old and the general sense of purposelessness set in the lot of you decided that it was high time you formalized your friendship by starting up a gang.
Since you’re all fairly poor and a few of you don’t even have driver’s licenses yet a motorcycle gang is right out. But a bicycle gang is right up your alley. But there’s a problem, as there always must be: your town already has a rival bike gang in it.
They’re called the College Boys, mostly because they all went to college and graduated and now work the same shitty jobs with the same generalized lack of purpose that you all bring to everything you do. They also ride their bikes around and punch people who disagree with them, which includes you because you think you’re a better bike gang than they are (and you’re sort of right – fewer of your members are diabetic).
You’ve been at a disadvantage to them for some time since most of their members are older and cannier than the young turks populating your bike gang. But today you’re going to come up with a surefire solution that will solve your troubles once and for all: you’re going to meet them on the traditional rumble grounds with an old fashioned challenge dance. Then once the dance is done you’ll remove the chains from your bikes and beat them violently until most of them are either unconscious or dead.
A few of them will die from their injuries, and no one will be very happy with how it all ends. No one except you and your sweet ass new bike gang, the Bike Chain Champions. So as long as you and your lot is happy, who gives a fuck about anyone else?
Congratulations Bike Chain Gang Champions!
For a while this meant taking jobs as they came, mostly in the service industry, and occasionally forming “bands” that break up within a few weeks due to lack of talent, interest and endurance. But once that got old and the general sense of purposelessness set in the lot of you decided that it was high time you formalized your friendship by starting up a gang.
Since you’re all fairly poor and a few of you don’t even have driver’s licenses yet a motorcycle gang is right out. But a bicycle gang is right up your alley. But there’s a problem, as there always must be: your town already has a rival bike gang in it.
They’re called the College Boys, mostly because they all went to college and graduated and now work the same shitty jobs with the same generalized lack of purpose that you all bring to everything you do. They also ride their bikes around and punch people who disagree with them, which includes you because you think you’re a better bike gang than they are (and you’re sort of right – fewer of your members are diabetic).
You’ve been at a disadvantage to them for some time since most of their members are older and cannier than the young turks populating your bike gang. But today you’re going to come up with a surefire solution that will solve your troubles once and for all: you’re going to meet them on the traditional rumble grounds with an old fashioned challenge dance. Then once the dance is done you’ll remove the chains from your bikes and beat them violently until most of them are either unconscious or dead.
A few of them will die from their injuries, and no one will be very happy with how it all ends. No one except you and your sweet ass new bike gang, the Bike Chain Champions. So as long as you and your lot is happy, who gives a fuck about anyone else?
Congratulations Bike Chain Gang Champions!
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: A Savage Passion!
A brief disclaimer. I’ve never played Savage. I understand it was quite revolutionary but it premiered at a time when I had to ration both my games and my time carefully, and I missed my opportunity to sample what it had on offer. But I am a devoted DotA player and, as a result, when DotA “went pro” I immediately leapt on to its most similar successor: Heroes of Newerth. League of Legends was all good and well, with the original developers working on it and the raw spirit of the game intact, but Heroes of Newerth did a better job of capturing the mechanics, the flow and the intense, seething hatreds the original DotA managed to produce so readily.
I write this to essentially say that my first experience with S2 as a group of developers was with HoN. I didn’t have time to see their original concepts of indirect control and blending game types, I didn’t get a chance to get into screaming matches with friends over why they should follow my orders (or vice versa) when it was actually part of the game’s intended mechanics. I didn’t have a chance to experience any of the interesting and unconventional twists that Savage brought to bear firsthand, although I did my best to read about them, to learn about this fascinating new take on the strategy game where teamwork became an important mechanic. And while I did experience it this sort of mechanic second hand through games like Tribes and the original Rainbow Six titles (where coordination was not only necessary, but also complicated by a painfully underdeveloped communication system) secondhand experience is hardly experience at all, so I feel a little bit dirty writing about how Savage prepared S2 for the rigors of DotA. But no one else seems to be talking about it so I wanted to try and offer up something to kickstart the discussion.
Savage actually appeared around a similar time to the prototypical versions of DotA which started cropping up after the release of Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos. Apparently the idea of controlling a single hero unit and battling against other heroes was a compelling one even then, and while the mod community would still take its time in coming to unilaterally support DotA the seeds were certainly planted in those halcyon days of PC gaming, before the rise of the online console community. Still, Savage was a decidedly professional effort, unlike DotA, and it mechanized things that DotA simply relied upon wholesale (such as player cooperation and coordination). Without any sort of coordinating tools aside from Warcraft’s standard chat features and mini-map pings, DotA experienced many serious problems. So serious that they spawned a set of third party programs.
While many of these issues also afflicted Savage, such as key players leaving the game without consequence and people generally being dicks, S2’s attempt to generate a framework by which to encourage cooperation between players shines through, even in their earliest effort. Savage’s system of construction, buffs and waypoints isn’t obvious it the design of Heroes of Newerth. Only DotA really shines through HoN’s cracks. But the thought process behind Savage, the concept of forcing a small group of tightly knit players to work towards one goal and giving them the tools to do so is somewhat more pronounced in Heroes of Newerth than it is in the original DotA and, more particularly, in its rival, League of Legends.
While Warcraft 3 had many mechanics and provided users with an excellent set of tools which provided an excellent basis for some amazing customizations certain elements were hard set. Unit sharing was all or nothing, item trading on or off. Buffs could only have one effect, and while it could sometimes be contextual you couldn’t have it impact allies and enemies differently. And there were bugs, bugs galore, and no easy way to fetter them out. Testing was a mess, and the enthusiast group far outnumbered the people who actually knew how to use the scripting tools and had the drive to do so for DotA.
Paired with the enthusiast nature of DotA’s creators, the total lack of budget or any real funding to speak of and the demanding and dickish nature of DotA’s player base and it’s no wonder that DotA possessed such a phenomenal number of dicks and bugs alike. Even tools like Banlist could be tricked, its records falsified, tampered with or ignored, and they relied on a diligent and relatively cooperative user base, which anyone who has even briefly played DotA can tell you is not the case. It was a product of people who loved games, not people who were concerned with getting players to play them with one another.
Heroes of Newerth, on the other hand, entered the stage fully cognizant of these issues and of means by which to solve them. Providing greater customization for unit and item sharing, more sophisticated tools for tracking both player skill and sportsmanship and adding in a system that allowed players to actually find and stay with their friends, something DotA made almost impossible for a long time.
But these are just the more brute force nods that HoN gave to DotA’s many problems. While these were real fixes, and they show S2’s deft development hand in creating systems for players to find and finger wag at one another the real genius comes out in the play of HoN. DotA, while more encouraging of teamwork than most competitive mods, could still be won by a single player running alone without his team. While later versions worked to correct this it was especially bad in early versions, where a skilled Lycanthrope or an even somewhat awake Summoner could steamroll an entire enemy team given a few seconds. And if a team were to get a Stealth Assassin? Forget it. Uninstall the game, it’s done.
HoN, however, is all about balance. Opposing heroes balance each other out. Got a problem with the Witch Hunter? The Trickster will deal with that. Got a Trickster problem? Keep your Legioniare nearby. As for countering that Legionare? Try a well-supported Pollywog Priest. The system is far from perfect, but it does a commendable job of trying to keep any one hero from being a trump by encouraging an interlocking system of counters better than DotA ever could. Players who run off on their own are undone not just by superior numbers, but all too often by the complimenting skillsets of their enemies. It’s one thing to be hit by the Hellbringer’s DoT, but to be hit by the Hellbringer’s DoT and Pudge’s pestilent aura? Or the Voodoo Jester’s damage amplifying Dot?.*
This interplay between heroes, the manner in which it is encouraged and the manner in which its understanding is necessary in order to consistently win fights is something that DotA only hints at. While it is certainly there it is nowhere near as important as in HoN, where a poor performance from a supporting hero can ruin an entire game. A set of strong heroes capable of acquiring kills can usually end DotA games regardless of circumstances, but one or two good support heroes coordinating with an even somewhat aware team in HoN can devastate an entire enemy team with a handful of careful plays. Cooperation is even more important than capitalization, a team’s ability to coordinate just as critical a player’s own singular abilities.
League of Legends further accentuates this difference. In League a solid player can easily overcome an entire enemy team given enough kills, money and time, regardless of how well his team coordinates. What’s more, many of the abilities, more it seems than in HoN, are focused on allowing individual heroes to defeat other heroes rather than support one another. While there are certainly support abilities and items, League has a focus on nitty-gritty one on one combat that HoN forces to take a back seat to team oriented play. And the only real difference between these games, aside from art direction, is the teams developing them. LoL remains firmly in the hands of many of DotA’s previously amateur developers who are attempting to break into the industry, while S2 has brought their own insights in design and play mechanics to HoN. So while S2 certainly hasn’t acquired much of a résumé with their previous well-received, poor selling titles, they’ve certainly shown an impressive pedigree for managing the difficult problem of not only presenting players with an interesting system to play with but with a framework that both forces, encourages, and provides them with the resources to cooperate and act like a unit in a way that I haven’t seen since the heyday of Tribes.
* Apologies to the uninitiated, who are no doubt now asking what the fuck a DoT is. It stands for Damage over Time, and refers to attacks in strategy or role playing games which inflict damage over a period of time rather than in one single attack.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Congratulations Professional Lady!
Many ladies have jobs and many ladies consider themselves professionals. Some lads even seek these ladies out, and these ladies, let’s call them ladies with jobs, do stuff with those lads in exchange for money.
What we’re saying is that a lot of people are whores and a lot of people like whores and, to be honest, whores are kind of great. If it wasn’t for whores we’d probably all be a lot angrier at the world in general and much much angrier at our spouses for certain.
So we’ve established the validity of whores as members of society, which we probably didn’t need to do. But we haven’t established what you do as a professional lady because, as you probably know, you aren’t a whore.
Well, not yet and not ever, technically. Tomorrow while beating the shit out of your boyfriend you’re going to make him come. This will immediately inspire you to pursue a career as a professional dominatrix, specifically one who beats fully clothed men until they ejaculate.
You’ll show up at people’s houses and hotel rooms dressed in a flannel and jeans and just beat men with your tiny but shockingly potent fists until those men cave in and just jizz their pants. It will seem like madness at first, but many brilliant ideas do.
It will take you less than a month to start your business up, operating under the tag line: “Professional Lady: I Will Beat You Until You Come!”
You’ll have to hire two secretaries to deal with the volume of calls and you’ll have to build a swimming pool to hold all your money.
So Congratulations Professional Lady! You’ve translated what you love into a small business!
What we’re saying is that a lot of people are whores and a lot of people like whores and, to be honest, whores are kind of great. If it wasn’t for whores we’d probably all be a lot angrier at the world in general and much much angrier at our spouses for certain.
So we’ve established the validity of whores as members of society, which we probably didn’t need to do. But we haven’t established what you do as a professional lady because, as you probably know, you aren’t a whore.
Well, not yet and not ever, technically. Tomorrow while beating the shit out of your boyfriend you’re going to make him come. This will immediately inspire you to pursue a career as a professional dominatrix, specifically one who beats fully clothed men until they ejaculate.
You’ll show up at people’s houses and hotel rooms dressed in a flannel and jeans and just beat men with your tiny but shockingly potent fists until those men cave in and just jizz their pants. It will seem like madness at first, but many brilliant ideas do.
It will take you less than a month to start your business up, operating under the tag line: “Professional Lady: I Will Beat You Until You Come!”
You’ll have to hire two secretaries to deal with the volume of calls and you’ll have to build a swimming pool to hold all your money.
So Congratulations Professional Lady! You’ve translated what you love into a small business!
Friday, June 18, 2010
Congratulations on Finding Out Who Has the Best Drugs!
New York City is a weird place. Even though drugs are everywhere in it, in the sewers and the subway stations and even inside of homeless people’s bodies, it’s kind of hard to find out where the best drugs are, especially if you’re new in town.
So when you roll into New York in your cowboy hat and big old boots and ask someone on the street where to find the best drugs he’ll look at you like you’re crazy.
“You a cop?” he’ll ask you, horrified at your forwardness.
“Nope. Just an American,” you’ll say, giving him a firm handshake just the way your daddy taught you.
That handshake will net you the name of this guy the first guy knows who sells awesome drugs. You’ll show up at his place with that chisel jaw and handshake the name of his best dealer out of him and so on and so fourth until you arrive at The Top.
You’ll know it’s The Top because it will be, quite literally, on the top of one of the tallest buildings in the city, way above where the cops can get their faggot ass helicopters, near where planes soar and where eagles make dreams take flight.
You’ll stride through the marble halls as if you belong there, and none of the men in suits or expensive prostitutes socializing there will question your presence. You’ll immediately seem like one of them, like you belong. You’ll shake hands, pick up drinks, even mix a few in one of the penthouse’s many bars, handing them off to attractive women and important men wherever due.
After weaving your way through these hallowed halls for what seems like a week (but will, in fact, be less than four days) you’ll finally arrive in a room with a red chaise lounge, a bed with a canopy and a grand piano. You’ll have arrived at the place in New York with the very best drugs.
A man in a velour robe will step out from behind a dressing curtain and give you a two finger salute.
“Can I help you, sir?” he’ll purr, smiling like he’s known you for years.
“You holding?” you’ll ask, scratching your buttocks.
“You a cop?” he’ll respond, running his hand across your cheek. You’ll shake your head and he’ll smile. “Prove it,” he’ll say, dropping the robe and exposing his half erect penis.
You’ll get to your knees and start working and before long you’ll be relaxing with him on his chaise lounge while he plays his grand piano, enjoying the best drugs in New York City, which is to say the best drugs in the whole wide world.
Congratulations on Finding Out Who Has the Best Drugs!
So when you roll into New York in your cowboy hat and big old boots and ask someone on the street where to find the best drugs he’ll look at you like you’re crazy.
“You a cop?” he’ll ask you, horrified at your forwardness.
“Nope. Just an American,” you’ll say, giving him a firm handshake just the way your daddy taught you.
That handshake will net you the name of this guy the first guy knows who sells awesome drugs. You’ll show up at his place with that chisel jaw and handshake the name of his best dealer out of him and so on and so fourth until you arrive at The Top.
You’ll know it’s The Top because it will be, quite literally, on the top of one of the tallest buildings in the city, way above where the cops can get their faggot ass helicopters, near where planes soar and where eagles make dreams take flight.
You’ll stride through the marble halls as if you belong there, and none of the men in suits or expensive prostitutes socializing there will question your presence. You’ll immediately seem like one of them, like you belong. You’ll shake hands, pick up drinks, even mix a few in one of the penthouse’s many bars, handing them off to attractive women and important men wherever due.
After weaving your way through these hallowed halls for what seems like a week (but will, in fact, be less than four days) you’ll finally arrive in a room with a red chaise lounge, a bed with a canopy and a grand piano. You’ll have arrived at the place in New York with the very best drugs.
A man in a velour robe will step out from behind a dressing curtain and give you a two finger salute.
“Can I help you, sir?” he’ll purr, smiling like he’s known you for years.
“You holding?” you’ll ask, scratching your buttocks.
“You a cop?” he’ll respond, running his hand across your cheek. You’ll shake your head and he’ll smile. “Prove it,” he’ll say, dropping the robe and exposing his half erect penis.
You’ll get to your knees and start working and before long you’ll be relaxing with him on his chaise lounge while he plays his grand piano, enjoying the best drugs in New York City, which is to say the best drugs in the whole wide world.
Congratulations on Finding Out Who Has the Best Drugs!
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Congratulations on Being Beaten with Oranges!
You’re a deadbeat. Your wife knew it, your dad knew it and even your adopted Korean son that you put through college (mostly with blood and semen) knew it. But for some reason the banking system is blissfully unaware of your status as an inveterate debtor, and as a result you keep getting loan after loan. It might be your baby blue eyes, or your fourteen inch penis. We’re not really sure, to be totally honest.
But the one thing we can be sure of is that tomorrow you’re finally going to mess up: you’re going to run afoul of a credit union. See credit unions aren’t subject to the same level of scrutiny as large banks, and as a result they can sometimes use methods of questionable legality in order to reacquire funds from their debtors. Sometimes that means tactics that border on harassment, like sending reps to your door and calling you late at night to try and get you to pay up. In your case your handsomeness and incredible wang make those conventional methods of intimidation considerably less effective, so they’re going to go with something more traditional.
Yesterday they hired an ex-professional wrestler (the Umbaudsman, who “ended conflicts with a chair,” who lasted a meager four seasons due to his normal looking build and relatively calm demeanor) to come to your home and beat you in an excessively painful fashion that will leave little or no evidence. He’ll briefly toy with the idea of savaging you using bars of soap, but he’ll decide against it after realizing that the soap could be considered evidence, even if it was later used in personal hygene, and that it could be misconstrued as an act of support for the Iraq war.
After a twenty minute brain storming session with his roommate, the Umbaudsman will have decided to use oranges, which could then be disposed of at his roommate’s job at Orange Julius the next day (which is now tomorrow). So he’s going to roll up on your house at midday today, kick in your door and smack you with a pillow case full of ripe, juicy fruit until you go blind. When you call the cops they’ll arrive, examine the scene and laugh, assuming you broke in your own door in an attempt to bamboozle them out of funds. The oranges, you see, will leave no bruises.
After a nice long laugh at how great a prankster you are they’ll file out of your home calmly and you’ll receive a call from your credit union asking if you’ve made any progress on that payment. You’ll cough a little bit and tell them that they’ve won, giving in for the first time in your life and cutting a check with the receiver to your ear for the entire sixty three dollars you owe those heartless bastards.
Congratulations on Being Beaten with Oranges!
But the one thing we can be sure of is that tomorrow you’re finally going to mess up: you’re going to run afoul of a credit union. See credit unions aren’t subject to the same level of scrutiny as large banks, and as a result they can sometimes use methods of questionable legality in order to reacquire funds from their debtors. Sometimes that means tactics that border on harassment, like sending reps to your door and calling you late at night to try and get you to pay up. In your case your handsomeness and incredible wang make those conventional methods of intimidation considerably less effective, so they’re going to go with something more traditional.
Yesterday they hired an ex-professional wrestler (the Umbaudsman, who “ended conflicts with a chair,” who lasted a meager four seasons due to his normal looking build and relatively calm demeanor) to come to your home and beat you in an excessively painful fashion that will leave little or no evidence. He’ll briefly toy with the idea of savaging you using bars of soap, but he’ll decide against it after realizing that the soap could be considered evidence, even if it was later used in personal hygene, and that it could be misconstrued as an act of support for the Iraq war.
After a twenty minute brain storming session with his roommate, the Umbaudsman will have decided to use oranges, which could then be disposed of at his roommate’s job at Orange Julius the next day (which is now tomorrow). So he’s going to roll up on your house at midday today, kick in your door and smack you with a pillow case full of ripe, juicy fruit until you go blind. When you call the cops they’ll arrive, examine the scene and laugh, assuming you broke in your own door in an attempt to bamboozle them out of funds. The oranges, you see, will leave no bruises.
After a nice long laugh at how great a prankster you are they’ll file out of your home calmly and you’ll receive a call from your credit union asking if you’ve made any progress on that payment. You’ll cough a little bit and tell them that they’ve won, giving in for the first time in your life and cutting a check with the receiver to your ear for the entire sixty three dollars you owe those heartless bastards.
Congratulations on Being Beaten with Oranges!
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Congratulations on Proving that Theater Lives!
Let’s face it, most people are about as enthusiastic about going to a playhouse to catch the most recent rendition of A Bold Stroke for a Wife as they are to get their rectum probed with a fiber optic cable. It’s usually unpleasant, culturally it’s slowly fading into irrelevance and artistically most of the shit that goes on on stage is pretty derivative.
But you love theater. You love it with the irrational passion that only a woman who is constantly on her period due to a bizarre genetic defect unique to you can muster. Once a man said he didn’t really care for The Rover near you and you curbed him right there with your freakish bitch strength.
But that sort of display, while impressive, doesn’t really win hearts and minds and it definitely doesn’t show nay-sayers that the medium you love so dearly is still relevant.
That’s why tonight you’re going to produce a show about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. You’ll call it “Poofiesburg,” and it’ll be done entirely with puppets and have a lot of serious racism in it.
In the play Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush will conspire with Dick Cheney to blow up an oil drill in the Gulf. They’ll succeed and then use Fox News to pin it on Obama, who will counter their straw man arguments with incredible eloquence that can only come from the worst tradition of theatrical writing. And remember, all this will be executed using puppets and a single live actor who will portray The Loneliest Giant, a stand in for the average working American.
It will be met with rave reviews and vapid people the world over will applaud, cheering theater’s ability to oversimplify and misconstrue complicated events just as effectively as television or film. You’ll receive a massive grant from the Academy of Arts and Sciences, which you’ll immediate spend on making a version of the Vagina Monologues that stars only gay men who are dressed in full foam rubber vagina costumes that cover their entire bodies. It, too will be a hit.
Congratulations on Proving that Theater Lives!
But you love theater. You love it with the irrational passion that only a woman who is constantly on her period due to a bizarre genetic defect unique to you can muster. Once a man said he didn’t really care for The Rover near you and you curbed him right there with your freakish bitch strength.
But that sort of display, while impressive, doesn’t really win hearts and minds and it definitely doesn’t show nay-sayers that the medium you love so dearly is still relevant.
That’s why tonight you’re going to produce a show about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. You’ll call it “Poofiesburg,” and it’ll be done entirely with puppets and have a lot of serious racism in it.
In the play Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush will conspire with Dick Cheney to blow up an oil drill in the Gulf. They’ll succeed and then use Fox News to pin it on Obama, who will counter their straw man arguments with incredible eloquence that can only come from the worst tradition of theatrical writing. And remember, all this will be executed using puppets and a single live actor who will portray The Loneliest Giant, a stand in for the average working American.
It will be met with rave reviews and vapid people the world over will applaud, cheering theater’s ability to oversimplify and misconstrue complicated events just as effectively as television or film. You’ll receive a massive grant from the Academy of Arts and Sciences, which you’ll immediate spend on making a version of the Vagina Monologues that stars only gay men who are dressed in full foam rubber vagina costumes that cover their entire bodies. It, too will be a hit.
Congratulations on Proving that Theater Lives!
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Congratulations on Disappointing Everyone!
Today and today only you’re the guy who decided just what should go into the Made for TV version of Die Hard. Regardless of who you were yesterday you are now, at time of reading, mere microseconds from being painfully rammed into the consciousness of another being who devised such clever euphamisms as “mother father” and did all he could to recodify the story of John McClane’s night of hell so that it could be presented to whatever Hollywood thinks Middle American audiences should be like.
A note to everyone involved in today’s exercise: don’t panic. The body you’ll be occupying has an extremely delicate condition. That said, we do hope it breaks a little today, the same way it does every day as you sit and look at what your lifetime hath wrought upon the earth. Today you’ll reflect on your achievements and realize that you’ve disappointed both parents by leaving a staggering amount of physical violence in the movie and children by removing any trace of the delightful foul language they love so dearly and replacing it with what you consider to be incredibly pithy bits of dialogue that actually sound like someone with G-rated Touretttes going off.
You’ll think back on how you tried to “clean up” a movie which is basically just about a man enduring hell and killing a huge number of people and the way you neutered what was an awesome film for an entire generation, forever marring their cinematic experience by diluting awesome and replacing it with suck in a concentrated effort to make a flavorless cultural paste that can be ingested by every man, woman and child without any disagreement. You’ll think back to that and wonder why you couldn’t have taken on movies like The Shawshank Redemption and Saving Private Ryan. Why couldn’t you have ruined some classics like Schindler’s List or 2001?
For better or worse your legacy will be limited to the film Die Hard, and as you sit in your easy chair taking a bite of hard tack, watching Everybody Loves Raymond, you’ll sigh to yourself and rub your arm, which is kind of tingling for some reason.
Congratulations on Disappointing Everyone!
A note to everyone involved in today’s exercise: don’t panic. The body you’ll be occupying has an extremely delicate condition. That said, we do hope it breaks a little today, the same way it does every day as you sit and look at what your lifetime hath wrought upon the earth. Today you’ll reflect on your achievements and realize that you’ve disappointed both parents by leaving a staggering amount of physical violence in the movie and children by removing any trace of the delightful foul language they love so dearly and replacing it with what you consider to be incredibly pithy bits of dialogue that actually sound like someone with G-rated Touretttes going off.
You’ll think back on how you tried to “clean up” a movie which is basically just about a man enduring hell and killing a huge number of people and the way you neutered what was an awesome film for an entire generation, forever marring their cinematic experience by diluting awesome and replacing it with suck in a concentrated effort to make a flavorless cultural paste that can be ingested by every man, woman and child without any disagreement. You’ll think back to that and wonder why you couldn’t have taken on movies like The Shawshank Redemption and Saving Private Ryan. Why couldn’t you have ruined some classics like Schindler’s List or 2001?
For better or worse your legacy will be limited to the film Die Hard, and as you sit in your easy chair taking a bite of hard tack, watching Everybody Loves Raymond, you’ll sigh to yourself and rub your arm, which is kind of tingling for some reason.
Congratulations on Disappointing Everyone!
Monday, June 14, 2010
Congratulations on Establishing the Proper Use of the Term Party Down!
Most linguists spend their time thinking about languages, their structures, rules and the way they’ve both come to be and will evolve in the future. They think about what languages say about the various cultures they represent, the way that structure shapes communication and vice versa. What they don’t spend enough time thinking about in your opinion is how various pop culture terms should be used in casual conversation.
That’s why today you’re going to begin a lengthy series of papers about various American cultural slang words made up of actual words that mean shit completely unrelated to their contemporary meaning. You’ll begin with a fifty six page dissertation on the term “party-down” which has absolutely no discussion of or even reference to the possible origins of the term. It’ll just be fifty-five pages of you defining and at times proscribing proper usage of the term in contemporary society.
When you’re finished academia will stand up and clap. You’ll have attempted to define the indefinable and douche bags from private school will quote your paper for years to come (in partiality of course) whenever they’re forced to say something possibly interesting at parties. We’d facetiously say that you should be ashamed of yourself but you’d probably miss the joke anyhow.
Congratulations on Establishing the Proper Use of the Term Party Down!
That’s why today you’re going to begin a lengthy series of papers about various American cultural slang words made up of actual words that mean shit completely unrelated to their contemporary meaning. You’ll begin with a fifty six page dissertation on the term “party-down” which has absolutely no discussion of or even reference to the possible origins of the term. It’ll just be fifty-five pages of you defining and at times proscribing proper usage of the term in contemporary society.
When you’re finished academia will stand up and clap. You’ll have attempted to define the indefinable and douche bags from private school will quote your paper for years to come (in partiality of course) whenever they’re forced to say something possibly interesting at parties. We’d facetiously say that you should be ashamed of yourself but you’d probably miss the joke anyhow.
Congratulations on Establishing the Proper Use of the Term Party Down!
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: A Brief Indictment of the Dialogue on Real Time Strategy Games!
Real time strategy games have long been one of my favorite genres, despite their apparent fall from the main stream. The degree to which they require a balance of attention, careful planning, timing and adjustment on the fly, the chess like grace of high level play, anticipating and pre-empting enemies, at times successfully, at times less so, is invigorating and, to me, offers up so much of the generative narrative that makes multiplayer games in general so compelling.
The depth of involvement, the manner in which they demand so much and the personality that they can muster from repetitive and potentially boring subjects is nothing short of remarkable. Which is why I’m always a bit shocked to hear strategy game enthusiasts discuss real-time strategy games as if they were a plague upon the genre instead of one of the many saving graces it provides, and possibly the biggest money maker in the realm of strategy. To hear the voices of Three Moves Ahead discuss it, real-time strategy is an aberration, to be at best accepted grudgingly and, far more often, to be relegated to its proper place at the bottom of the food chain.
And when the most prominent proponents of a genre start to excoriate one of its cores it feels a little wrong to me. The greatest champions of real-time strategy games seem to be the competitive enthusiasts, the announcers, players and journalists who spend their time embedded in their microcosmic communities, extolling their game of choice with ejaculatory force. Reading through tournament news pages for DotA, Starcraft and Warcraft 3 make you believe that the world of strategy consisted of virtual athletes, mostly hailing from Korea or Sweden. You wouldn’t hear anything about the experience of casual play, the joy of moving units, planning out attacks, watching as they succeed or fail. You wouldn’t know about the manner in which these titles relate to one another, the way that the genre as a whole functions or the way its many diverse themes combine to make such compelling experiences. To be an RTS gamer who wants to read intelligent discourse about the state of the genre is to be the sort of person who is locked out in the cold, staring in a window wishing they could get some of the delicious stew brewing inside, stew being shared by 4X gamers, turn based strategy gamers and war gamers who all consider your genre too course and quickly paced to be worth playing.
But this concept of time management, the concept of attention as a resource and the stakes that emerge as much from waiting too long or playing inaction at the wrong moment as anything else, seem at odds with the relatively relaxed pacing that many of these gamers consider the cornerstone of their experiences. It is, in a way, understandable.
Many of the more prominently discussed 4X genres focus their attention on attracting a more mature audience with less time in general to spend playing games. Meanwhile many of people who spend their time playing more conventional RTSes are younger people, people who either have yet to cut their teeth in the journalistic community, who lack the desire or articulation to do so, or who are themselves quite busy with their own lives outside of the strategy genre.
It could also be a product of the relative lack of intelligent discourse in gaming media in general, however. When you look at the main stream coverage most games receive there are, at best, a handful of authors who actually treat them as if they were a medium every bit as intelligent as film, television or literature, and the few who do so are usually compelled by their employers to write about high profile games, games with marketing tie-ins and money to spend on exclusives with prominent publications. It is only occasionally that games like Dawn of War II and Starcraft II break this mold and actually receive serious discussion from larger media outlets, drawing the big talent that can occasionally deliver an intelligent discussion of games. Of course, the effect of this prominence is somewhat diminished by the raw amount of noise that surrounds major releases, and the overwhelming pressure to turn out a positive review which may gloss over or ignore elements of the game which don’t print well.
But I digress. Whatever the reasons it seems like those few articulate souls who discuss the strategy genre don’t care to talk about the real-time aspects of it, and when they do it seems like they do so solely to discuss the manner in which it caters to younger, action oriented audiences, a claim which wears thinner and thinner each time I hear it. I’d feel like the proverbial old man telling kids to stay off my lawn, but these seasoned writers and journalists have not only usually been in the business for decades, but they’re also usually at least fifteen to twenty years my senior. So any complaints I might voice are essentially proving their point: that real-time strategy games cater to a younger audience in their current incarnation, which may very well be true. Games are constantly jockeying for control of the 18 to 24 year old’s precious dollars, of which I’ve noticed we generally have precious few. It’s less a product of RTSes as a subgenre and more a product of games trying to sell bigger and bigger numbers by grabbing bigger and bigger audiences.
But that doesn’t necessarily excuse people dismissing entire genres out of hand, simply comparing them to other genres with elements they dislike without concern for the context in which these games exist. Action games exist within their own cosmology, a landscape of big sellng titles like God of War, Bayonetta and Devil May Cry, games that, regardless of their intelligence, are rooted in moment to moment action, wherein the activity of play is nothing but frenetic movement from target to target to target, occasionally interrupted by puzzles which involve using environmental elements to get to new targets. The action genre is the genre that invented the quick-time event, a feature which literally demands that players do nothing more than press buttons as they appear on screen. Action games want players to be able to jump in at a moment’s notice, to engage in their play without any thought of the past or future. The awesome boss you’re fighting is it’s own reward, not the victory cut scene at the end of the fight. A cursory examination of the atrocious stories that adorn most of these games is enough to prove that the play is the payoff here, not some sort of greater narrative.
But even the most frenetic real time strategy game is about the arc of entire games, not just the moment to moment instances of play you encounter. A game of Dawn of War II isn’t about unleashing your devastators on a group of advancing Nobz and ripping them to shreds – it’s about your devastators holding that position while assailed throughout the battle, distracting the enemy just long enough for your scouts to infiltrate behind their lines and grab their victory points out from under them in a stunning last minute win. It’s about the interplay of various forces over a long period of time, about building up units and unleashing them as a group, saving the ones you can and sacrificing the ones you must. It is, as some would be quick to snicker at, a game fundamentally rooted in managing resources, with all other activities being secondary to that one.
The only thing that a more frenetically paced RTS really brings to light is that attention is a resource which must be carefully rationed in strategy games in general. It’s less a matter of being forced through a series of reflex tests and more a matter of being able to quickly shift from task to task without losing sight of a greater whole. Action games are fundamentally about dealing with immediate threats: you see the orc, you decapitate the orc, you move on to the next orc. But strategy games are about planning ahead – you see the armies of the Uruk-Hai on the horizon, you feign at them while wheeling your cavalry into their flank and dropping your initial feign back into the body of your main force, catching the enemy between the two massed forces. Strategy games merely force you to look at this sort of a task from a greater perspective and, in most cases, to be able to deal with changes in this plan as things go wrong. And things will always go wrong: that’s what makes stories about battles interesting.
So while I’ll certainly admit that real-time strategy games are attempting to attract new audiences by providing more frenetic and action oriented experiences I don’t believe that it is in any way antithetical to the history of and purpose behind strategy games: forcing players to accomplish a task with limited resources. Quite the contrary, I think these new games do a far better job of giving players tools to more effectively manage large groups of units, with improvements in user interfaces and topos in control and management that have become commonplace in recent times which would have been inconceivable in the days of Starcraft. While it is fair to say that a game is too fast for your tastes, to deride a genre for encouraging a specific kind of play without concern or context for the purpose of that play is simply irresponsible. And in the end it does nothing more to forward the discussion about strategy games as a genre than me sitting here telling all you fucking kids to get off my lawn.
The depth of involvement, the manner in which they demand so much and the personality that they can muster from repetitive and potentially boring subjects is nothing short of remarkable. Which is why I’m always a bit shocked to hear strategy game enthusiasts discuss real-time strategy games as if they were a plague upon the genre instead of one of the many saving graces it provides, and possibly the biggest money maker in the realm of strategy. To hear the voices of Three Moves Ahead discuss it, real-time strategy is an aberration, to be at best accepted grudgingly and, far more often, to be relegated to its proper place at the bottom of the food chain.
And when the most prominent proponents of a genre start to excoriate one of its cores it feels a little wrong to me. The greatest champions of real-time strategy games seem to be the competitive enthusiasts, the announcers, players and journalists who spend their time embedded in their microcosmic communities, extolling their game of choice with ejaculatory force. Reading through tournament news pages for DotA, Starcraft and Warcraft 3 make you believe that the world of strategy consisted of virtual athletes, mostly hailing from Korea or Sweden. You wouldn’t hear anything about the experience of casual play, the joy of moving units, planning out attacks, watching as they succeed or fail. You wouldn’t know about the manner in which these titles relate to one another, the way that the genre as a whole functions or the way its many diverse themes combine to make such compelling experiences. To be an RTS gamer who wants to read intelligent discourse about the state of the genre is to be the sort of person who is locked out in the cold, staring in a window wishing they could get some of the delicious stew brewing inside, stew being shared by 4X gamers, turn based strategy gamers and war gamers who all consider your genre too course and quickly paced to be worth playing.
But this concept of time management, the concept of attention as a resource and the stakes that emerge as much from waiting too long or playing inaction at the wrong moment as anything else, seem at odds with the relatively relaxed pacing that many of these gamers consider the cornerstone of their experiences. It is, in a way, understandable.
Many of the more prominently discussed 4X genres focus their attention on attracting a more mature audience with less time in general to spend playing games. Meanwhile many of people who spend their time playing more conventional RTSes are younger people, people who either have yet to cut their teeth in the journalistic community, who lack the desire or articulation to do so, or who are themselves quite busy with their own lives outside of the strategy genre.
It could also be a product of the relative lack of intelligent discourse in gaming media in general, however. When you look at the main stream coverage most games receive there are, at best, a handful of authors who actually treat them as if they were a medium every bit as intelligent as film, television or literature, and the few who do so are usually compelled by their employers to write about high profile games, games with marketing tie-ins and money to spend on exclusives with prominent publications. It is only occasionally that games like Dawn of War II and Starcraft II break this mold and actually receive serious discussion from larger media outlets, drawing the big talent that can occasionally deliver an intelligent discussion of games. Of course, the effect of this prominence is somewhat diminished by the raw amount of noise that surrounds major releases, and the overwhelming pressure to turn out a positive review which may gloss over or ignore elements of the game which don’t print well.
But I digress. Whatever the reasons it seems like those few articulate souls who discuss the strategy genre don’t care to talk about the real-time aspects of it, and when they do it seems like they do so solely to discuss the manner in which it caters to younger, action oriented audiences, a claim which wears thinner and thinner each time I hear it. I’d feel like the proverbial old man telling kids to stay off my lawn, but these seasoned writers and journalists have not only usually been in the business for decades, but they’re also usually at least fifteen to twenty years my senior. So any complaints I might voice are essentially proving their point: that real-time strategy games cater to a younger audience in their current incarnation, which may very well be true. Games are constantly jockeying for control of the 18 to 24 year old’s precious dollars, of which I’ve noticed we generally have precious few. It’s less a product of RTSes as a subgenre and more a product of games trying to sell bigger and bigger numbers by grabbing bigger and bigger audiences.
But that doesn’t necessarily excuse people dismissing entire genres out of hand, simply comparing them to other genres with elements they dislike without concern for the context in which these games exist. Action games exist within their own cosmology, a landscape of big sellng titles like God of War, Bayonetta and Devil May Cry, games that, regardless of their intelligence, are rooted in moment to moment action, wherein the activity of play is nothing but frenetic movement from target to target to target, occasionally interrupted by puzzles which involve using environmental elements to get to new targets. The action genre is the genre that invented the quick-time event, a feature which literally demands that players do nothing more than press buttons as they appear on screen. Action games want players to be able to jump in at a moment’s notice, to engage in their play without any thought of the past or future. The awesome boss you’re fighting is it’s own reward, not the victory cut scene at the end of the fight. A cursory examination of the atrocious stories that adorn most of these games is enough to prove that the play is the payoff here, not some sort of greater narrative.
But even the most frenetic real time strategy game is about the arc of entire games, not just the moment to moment instances of play you encounter. A game of Dawn of War II isn’t about unleashing your devastators on a group of advancing Nobz and ripping them to shreds – it’s about your devastators holding that position while assailed throughout the battle, distracting the enemy just long enough for your scouts to infiltrate behind their lines and grab their victory points out from under them in a stunning last minute win. It’s about the interplay of various forces over a long period of time, about building up units and unleashing them as a group, saving the ones you can and sacrificing the ones you must. It is, as some would be quick to snicker at, a game fundamentally rooted in managing resources, with all other activities being secondary to that one.
The only thing that a more frenetically paced RTS really brings to light is that attention is a resource which must be carefully rationed in strategy games in general. It’s less a matter of being forced through a series of reflex tests and more a matter of being able to quickly shift from task to task without losing sight of a greater whole. Action games are fundamentally about dealing with immediate threats: you see the orc, you decapitate the orc, you move on to the next orc. But strategy games are about planning ahead – you see the armies of the Uruk-Hai on the horizon, you feign at them while wheeling your cavalry into their flank and dropping your initial feign back into the body of your main force, catching the enemy between the two massed forces. Strategy games merely force you to look at this sort of a task from a greater perspective and, in most cases, to be able to deal with changes in this plan as things go wrong. And things will always go wrong: that’s what makes stories about battles interesting.
So while I’ll certainly admit that real-time strategy games are attempting to attract new audiences by providing more frenetic and action oriented experiences I don’t believe that it is in any way antithetical to the history of and purpose behind strategy games: forcing players to accomplish a task with limited resources. Quite the contrary, I think these new games do a far better job of giving players tools to more effectively manage large groups of units, with improvements in user interfaces and topos in control and management that have become commonplace in recent times which would have been inconceivable in the days of Starcraft. While it is fair to say that a game is too fast for your tastes, to deride a genre for encouraging a specific kind of play without concern or context for the purpose of that play is simply irresponsible. And in the end it does nothing more to forward the discussion about strategy games as a genre than me sitting here telling all you fucking kids to get off my lawn.
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Congratulations on Making Us All Feel Like Pedophiles!
You’re the sort of pixie-ish young woman who makes people uncomfortable and a little bit happy just through her presence. You’ll be incredibly well developed for your build, but when you’re in the sort of bulky clothes you normally wear your gender will be indeterminate. All most people will be able to tell about you is that you’re incredibly attractive and that you’re really open and happy too.
But today it’s going to be early June and you’re going to make everyone in Southeast Portland deeply uncomfortable by stripping down to a pair of bike shorts and a tank top and riding around town running various errands. It would be bad enough if you were an incredible hottie showing off milky white skin that doesn’t normally see the light of day, butt no, you had to make it so much worse by looking like you could be anywhere between twelve and twenty-six, despite your gorgeous tits.
We’ll all be staring at you while your back is turned as you order coffee, wondering if you’re old enough to be asked out and, even if you were, if you’d say yes.
“If she had tattoos at least we’d know she’d be legal,” we’ll collective mutter into our black coffees, trying to shake our Thirsty Thursday hangovers. A few of us will wonder if you do have tattoos, somewhere underneath those clothes, but they’ll be in the minority, since most of us will just be really uncomfortable with the train of thought we were on in the first place.
“A teenager probably wouldn’t drink coffee, right?” we’ll mumble as you leave with your mocha in hand, stretching obliviously next to your bike while everyone tries and fails to avoid watching you. “But that’s basically hot chocolate. Shit,” we’ll collectively finish, giving you one long stare as you ride away, staring at your ass for a moment before feeling dirty about doing it.
“Would an adult wear that?” we’ll wonder while you pick up a floral print dress and hold it against your supple body at a thrift store. “Probably, I guess,” we’ll mumble as we look away, rummaging through a footlocker filled with assorted shit, hoping you’ll leave our field of vision but really praying that you’ll come over and ask us for our opinion about which pattern better accentuates your boobs and then making out with us in a bathroom. Most of us will leave the store ahead of you, deeply uncomfortable with that pattern of thought.
Finally we’ll be sitting in Belmont Station when you stop outside on your bike and lock it up. You’ll step in, flash your ID and get a pint of the blackest stout we’ve ever seen. Then we’ll all breathe a collective sigh of relief. Turns out none of us were pedophiles after all. You were just a really hot woman who we have now determined is somewhere between the ages of twenty one and twenty eight. Tops.
Congratulations on Making Us All Feel Like Pedophiles!
But today it’s going to be early June and you’re going to make everyone in Southeast Portland deeply uncomfortable by stripping down to a pair of bike shorts and a tank top and riding around town running various errands. It would be bad enough if you were an incredible hottie showing off milky white skin that doesn’t normally see the light of day, butt no, you had to make it so much worse by looking like you could be anywhere between twelve and twenty-six, despite your gorgeous tits.
We’ll all be staring at you while your back is turned as you order coffee, wondering if you’re old enough to be asked out and, even if you were, if you’d say yes.
“If she had tattoos at least we’d know she’d be legal,” we’ll collective mutter into our black coffees, trying to shake our Thirsty Thursday hangovers. A few of us will wonder if you do have tattoos, somewhere underneath those clothes, but they’ll be in the minority, since most of us will just be really uncomfortable with the train of thought we were on in the first place.
“A teenager probably wouldn’t drink coffee, right?” we’ll mumble as you leave with your mocha in hand, stretching obliviously next to your bike while everyone tries and fails to avoid watching you. “But that’s basically hot chocolate. Shit,” we’ll collectively finish, giving you one long stare as you ride away, staring at your ass for a moment before feeling dirty about doing it.
“Would an adult wear that?” we’ll wonder while you pick up a floral print dress and hold it against your supple body at a thrift store. “Probably, I guess,” we’ll mumble as we look away, rummaging through a footlocker filled with assorted shit, hoping you’ll leave our field of vision but really praying that you’ll come over and ask us for our opinion about which pattern better accentuates your boobs and then making out with us in a bathroom. Most of us will leave the store ahead of you, deeply uncomfortable with that pattern of thought.
Finally we’ll be sitting in Belmont Station when you stop outside on your bike and lock it up. You’ll step in, flash your ID and get a pint of the blackest stout we’ve ever seen. Then we’ll all breathe a collective sigh of relief. Turns out none of us were pedophiles after all. You were just a really hot woman who we have now determined is somewhere between the ages of twenty one and twenty eight. Tops.
Congratulations on Making Us All Feel Like Pedophiles!
Friday, June 11, 2010
Congratulations Interracial Porn Enthusiast!
Today you’re going to be hanging out with the woman you’ve been dating for several weeks in a bar. It’ll be close to your house, within walking distance, but you’ll feel as if you’ve moved a great distance just to be there with her.
The two of you will have discussed a lot by this point. Exes, weirdest places you’ve ever done it, that sort of thing. You’ll have compared notes about Europe, discussed which Woody Allen movie made you totally give up on him as a film maker and even shared the fact, guilty, that neither of you really like Curb Your Enthusiasm. But today you’re going to bring out the single biggest whammy you could possibly think of.
You’ll have selected this bar so that you can easily flee back home in the event that she freaks out. You’ll have shown up early and pounded two drinks to make sure that you have the courage to ask her. But you still won’t be able to bring yourself to start until the two of you have ordered food and you’ve each had at least one more drink.
“So honey,” you’ll begin, chewing your nails. “I need to talk to you about something.”
She’ll remove the straw from her drink to keep it from hitting her in the face and laugh. “What’s up, babe?” she’ll say. She’ll be pretty drunk by this point, smiling at nothing, happy without cause. You’ll bite your lip. It’s now or never.
“So remember how we talked about how we both liked porn a lot?”
She’ll nod, chewing on the ice from her drink, and laugh. “Yeah. Not as weird as you think, honey.”
You’ll nod solemnly.
“Well, there’s something I need to speak to you about,” you’ll say, sipping your drink and eyeing the door as you do so. “I like a specific kind of porn.”
She’ll lean forward on her hand and stare up at you.
“Oh yeah?” she’ll demure. “Do tell.”
You’ll look left and right, suddenly horrified that one of your co-workers could be nearby, listening, recording this whole conversation for your boss or something. Once your paranoia has been momentarily satisfied you’ll lean in close to her.
“I like interracial,” you’ll stage whisper to her. Someone nearby will laugh and you’ll shrink, but she, bless her heart, will just grasp your chin and pull you up.
“That’s really not weird,” she’ll say. Then she’ll lean over the table and kiss your forehead before ordering another drink.
You’ll feel relieved, and you’ll continue drinking, relaxed at last, until she takes you back to your place later that night, the two of you stumbling the five meager blocks, barely getting the key in the door and collapsing almost immediately on your futon. She’ll slide her hands down your pants and tell you that she’s going to open up your world before freeing herself from your genitals and turning on your laptop.
What follows will be a very thorough education in just how dark and weird pornography on the internet can get. In the end you’ll feel a little inadequate next to her, a little uncomfortable with the depth of your special lady’s knowledge, and a little bit better about your own fetishes, realizing that interracial porn isn’t really that weird compared to some of the things that people unabashedly profess their love for on the internet.
Congratulations Interracial Porn Enthusiast!
The two of you will have discussed a lot by this point. Exes, weirdest places you’ve ever done it, that sort of thing. You’ll have compared notes about Europe, discussed which Woody Allen movie made you totally give up on him as a film maker and even shared the fact, guilty, that neither of you really like Curb Your Enthusiasm. But today you’re going to bring out the single biggest whammy you could possibly think of.
You’ll have selected this bar so that you can easily flee back home in the event that she freaks out. You’ll have shown up early and pounded two drinks to make sure that you have the courage to ask her. But you still won’t be able to bring yourself to start until the two of you have ordered food and you’ve each had at least one more drink.
“So honey,” you’ll begin, chewing your nails. “I need to talk to you about something.”
She’ll remove the straw from her drink to keep it from hitting her in the face and laugh. “What’s up, babe?” she’ll say. She’ll be pretty drunk by this point, smiling at nothing, happy without cause. You’ll bite your lip. It’s now or never.
“So remember how we talked about how we both liked porn a lot?”
She’ll nod, chewing on the ice from her drink, and laugh. “Yeah. Not as weird as you think, honey.”
You’ll nod solemnly.
“Well, there’s something I need to speak to you about,” you’ll say, sipping your drink and eyeing the door as you do so. “I like a specific kind of porn.”
She’ll lean forward on her hand and stare up at you.
“Oh yeah?” she’ll demure. “Do tell.”
You’ll look left and right, suddenly horrified that one of your co-workers could be nearby, listening, recording this whole conversation for your boss or something. Once your paranoia has been momentarily satisfied you’ll lean in close to her.
“I like interracial,” you’ll stage whisper to her. Someone nearby will laugh and you’ll shrink, but she, bless her heart, will just grasp your chin and pull you up.
“That’s really not weird,” she’ll say. Then she’ll lean over the table and kiss your forehead before ordering another drink.
You’ll feel relieved, and you’ll continue drinking, relaxed at last, until she takes you back to your place later that night, the two of you stumbling the five meager blocks, barely getting the key in the door and collapsing almost immediately on your futon. She’ll slide her hands down your pants and tell you that she’s going to open up your world before freeing herself from your genitals and turning on your laptop.
What follows will be a very thorough education in just how dark and weird pornography on the internet can get. In the end you’ll feel a little inadequate next to her, a little uncomfortable with the depth of your special lady’s knowledge, and a little bit better about your own fetishes, realizing that interracial porn isn’t really that weird compared to some of the things that people unabashedly profess their love for on the internet.
Congratulations Interracial Porn Enthusiast!
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Congratulations Crusade Participant!
Today you’re a dude in the Crusades. We’re not really sure which one, but King Richard will be there fighting Saladin and there will be a whole bunch of camels and horses and bleeding and shit and a lot of racial intolerance too.
You won’t be anyone important. You’ll just be a young merchant who works out of Acre. Your day will start pretty normally, with a delivery from Muhammad to restock your shop with silks. He’ll warn you that he heard from Muhammad (also a merchant, man that’s a common name) that Christians are advancing on the city, but you’ll brush him off and go about your day normally.
You’ll go about your business normally until a bunch of fires start and some huge rocks start to fall out of the sky on and around your shop. You’ll poke your head outside to make sure it’s not just you and, sure enough, the entire fucking city will be in the process of being pelted by rocks and flaming arrows. You’ll run back inside to save some of your favorite silks and a picture of your favorite camel (you’re really fucking weird) and you’ll be crushed to death by a flaming piece of rock launched by an illiterate young man from Wales who was pressed into service in order to pay for his excessive legal fees after he stole several pigs from a neighbor.
He’ll be pretty psyched that he gets to launch flaming rocks at people, and he’ll be happy at the thought of killing people who disagree with him in general, especially after his incredibly unfair hearing, but he won’t actually think that you might have been a person with your own life and beliefs. That would probably bum him out, and he’ll be doing his absolute best to keep his spirits up because he’s going to be helping to load and launch heavy and occasionally incendiary rocks for like, five straight days, which is kind of going to suck.
Just not as much as being crushed.
Congratulations Crusade Participant!
You won’t be anyone important. You’ll just be a young merchant who works out of Acre. Your day will start pretty normally, with a delivery from Muhammad to restock your shop with silks. He’ll warn you that he heard from Muhammad (also a merchant, man that’s a common name) that Christians are advancing on the city, but you’ll brush him off and go about your day normally.
You’ll go about your business normally until a bunch of fires start and some huge rocks start to fall out of the sky on and around your shop. You’ll poke your head outside to make sure it’s not just you and, sure enough, the entire fucking city will be in the process of being pelted by rocks and flaming arrows. You’ll run back inside to save some of your favorite silks and a picture of your favorite camel (you’re really fucking weird) and you’ll be crushed to death by a flaming piece of rock launched by an illiterate young man from Wales who was pressed into service in order to pay for his excessive legal fees after he stole several pigs from a neighbor.
He’ll be pretty psyched that he gets to launch flaming rocks at people, and he’ll be happy at the thought of killing people who disagree with him in general, especially after his incredibly unfair hearing, but he won’t actually think that you might have been a person with your own life and beliefs. That would probably bum him out, and he’ll be doing his absolute best to keep his spirits up because he’s going to be helping to load and launch heavy and occasionally incendiary rocks for like, five straight days, which is kind of going to suck.
Just not as much as being crushed.
Congratulations Crusade Participant!
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Congratulations on Figuring Out Who Really Shot JFK!
People have been trying to figure this one out for decades, and even though that one dude came out and told everyone exactly what happened we all know that’s bullshit. It was really the Templar trying to get one up on the Illuminati who, as we all know, were rubbing Kennedy’s re-election in the face of the Free Masons, who haven’t done shit since they helped Edison ruin a bunch of people’s lives so he could start charging for electricity. Oh, and the Alien Pharaohs paid off the cops.
But no one’s ever been able to figure out this most basic of stories about one of the most important events of our history. No one, that is, until you.
You’ll be looking for jobs at a coffee shop, the same way you always do, when a man in a trench coat will sit across from you. He’ll slide you a manila envelope and gesture for you to open it. You’ll do so and, inside, find a neat three page write up that documents all the events surrounding Kennedy’s assassination, right down to the words his Cuban mistress spoke during his funeral.
You’ll look up at the man incredulously, but he’ll be ordering a latte on his way out the door already. Biting your lip you’ll assume that he had been following you for some time and had decided that this would be your new job: revealing the truth to the American public through a medium other than your terrible poetry (in fact he simply believed you were a reporter who had arranged to meet him there and looked just about as non-descript as you do). You’ll quickly log on to your blog and make a fresh post titled “WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO JFK,” then publish it.
Your blog will flood with traffic, and your weird, actually true theory will get mixed in to the internet, where it will start to gain popularity. You’ll remain mostly anonymous, but that won’t stop the Templar from tracking you down and sending assassins after you.
Thus will begin your long and incredibly exciting escape from large, nebulous organizations with little actual authority and plenty of weird people willing to kill for them. You’ll also finally start developing skills necessary for the modern workplace and when this whole crazy adventure is over you’ll be ready to find a real job, probably through a temp agency instead of just surfing the “looking for sex worker” ads on Craigslist.
Congratulations on Figuring Out Who Really Shot JFK!
But no one’s ever been able to figure out this most basic of stories about one of the most important events of our history. No one, that is, until you.
You’ll be looking for jobs at a coffee shop, the same way you always do, when a man in a trench coat will sit across from you. He’ll slide you a manila envelope and gesture for you to open it. You’ll do so and, inside, find a neat three page write up that documents all the events surrounding Kennedy’s assassination, right down to the words his Cuban mistress spoke during his funeral.
You’ll look up at the man incredulously, but he’ll be ordering a latte on his way out the door already. Biting your lip you’ll assume that he had been following you for some time and had decided that this would be your new job: revealing the truth to the American public through a medium other than your terrible poetry (in fact he simply believed you were a reporter who had arranged to meet him there and looked just about as non-descript as you do). You’ll quickly log on to your blog and make a fresh post titled “WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO JFK,” then publish it.
Your blog will flood with traffic, and your weird, actually true theory will get mixed in to the internet, where it will start to gain popularity. You’ll remain mostly anonymous, but that won’t stop the Templar from tracking you down and sending assassins after you.
Thus will begin your long and incredibly exciting escape from large, nebulous organizations with little actual authority and plenty of weird people willing to kill for them. You’ll also finally start developing skills necessary for the modern workplace and when this whole crazy adventure is over you’ll be ready to find a real job, probably through a temp agency instead of just surfing the “looking for sex worker” ads on Craigslist.
Congratulations on Figuring Out Who Really Shot JFK!
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Congratulations George Michael Fan!
You guys haven’t had a lot to celebrate recently. You had that one Limp Bizkit cover way back in the day which briefly brought attention back to George Michael for something other than hot man on man action, and then those god awful political songs he made back in the mid-naughties, but aside from that it’s all been money guzzling tours and relative silence about his sex life, which is all you guys really care about.
That’s why you’re going to be super psyched later on today when news breaks that George Michael was caught having sex with a woman. TMZ will break the story with the headline “ACTUALLY STRAIGHT?!?!?!” You’ll jump up from your desk and make the “goal post” gesture, spilling hot coffee all over your crotch and thighs.
You’ll be rushed to the hospital for burn care almost immediately, but you’ll spend the entire ride there telling paramedics about the latest development in George Michael’s life. They will, unfortunately, be unable to even feign mild interest. This won’t prevent you from chattering over their questions about your currently health, however, all the way to the hospital.
Once you’re in the ICU they’ll have the foresight to set you up with the one deaf nurse on the ward, who won’t even pretend to hear you after they sign what you’ve been prattling endlessly on about to everyone who can hear you. When she finally leaves you at the end of her shift she’ll mumble that you should talk less and that people generally don’t care about George Michael any more before turning to walk out as you sit in the hospital bed in silence, alone, thinking about your scorched genitals.
Congratulations George Michael Fan!
That’s why you’re going to be super psyched later on today when news breaks that George Michael was caught having sex with a woman. TMZ will break the story with the headline “ACTUALLY STRAIGHT?!?!?!” You’ll jump up from your desk and make the “goal post” gesture, spilling hot coffee all over your crotch and thighs.
You’ll be rushed to the hospital for burn care almost immediately, but you’ll spend the entire ride there telling paramedics about the latest development in George Michael’s life. They will, unfortunately, be unable to even feign mild interest. This won’t prevent you from chattering over their questions about your currently health, however, all the way to the hospital.
Once you’re in the ICU they’ll have the foresight to set you up with the one deaf nurse on the ward, who won’t even pretend to hear you after they sign what you’ve been prattling endlessly on about to everyone who can hear you. When she finally leaves you at the end of her shift she’ll mumble that you should talk less and that people generally don’t care about George Michael any more before turning to walk out as you sit in the hospital bed in silence, alone, thinking about your scorched genitals.
Congratulations George Michael Fan!
Monday, June 7, 2010
Congratulations Anal Spelunkers for Freedom!
Log Cabin Republicans have it all wrong and even some of those Democrats who campaign for gay rights don’t have it quite right, trying to protect the children from things like buttsex and awesome instances of buttsex that gay guys are talking about a little too loudly on a train. That’s why you and some of your friends started Ass Spelunkers for Freedom, an extremely vocal group that pairs the fight for gay rights with the protection of civil liberties as a whole, with great, deliberate attention paid to the right to free speech and the right to freedom of assembly.
That means all man nude love-ins would, under the dictum of your party, qualify as protected speech. As would discussing how great the handy you got your from boyfriend the other night was on a crowded train a little bit too loud and within earshot of children. Also included in the protections you want are protections levied towards tasteful same-sex focused pornographic websites and graphic sex education videos which show two young gay men having awkward, but kinda sweet sex.
Suffice it to say you’ve been met with nothing but controversy since your press release late last week declaring your intent to stage a rally in a public park to attempt to drum up membership and dispel some of the misconceptions about your new movement, like the idea that you’re a bunch of baby rapists.
The rally will start off uneventfully, with a few interested parties who heard about you from reading print news or on the internet trailing in an listening calmly as you explain your viewpoint in terms of constitutional law, then leaving, usually without signing the petition, after you finish describing the proposed sex-ed video. A few of them will sign it, though, saying it sounds “totally hot” and “way less boring than the sex-ed video they saw in high school.” One guy will even say, we paraphrase, “That sounds like a gay version of the video they make in the end of The Girl Next Door. [Expression of interest] yeah I’ll sign that [document].”
But after around an hour of good natured questions, agreements, disagreements and one phone number from a dude who thinks your struggle for civil liberties is totally hot, the Tea Partiers will show up.
They’ll arrive with signs declaring that they aren’t Republicans, still covered in McCain-Palin-2010 bumper stickers and start chanting the Pledge of Allegiance as loud as they possibly can while you’re explaining your belief in the natural extremism of the Constitution with regards to personal liberty and the necessity of its protection by the state to a young woman in a Bryn Mawr sweatshirt. The two of you will stop and stare at the Tea Partiers while they chant their black little hearts out. You’ll wait for them to stop patiently, but they’ll just start right back in. The two of you will then shrug and continue speaking in ASL, which you both know because you’re godless liberals who learn every fucking immigrant language that comes into this country.
Lucky for you American conservatives are notoriously bad at being straight, so even brief exposure to your people will almost instantly “turn” them gay. After around forty minutes of hoarse, often incorrect chanting of a relatively insignificant gesture popularized in the American public school system that these people so vehemently oppose, several of the men who have been chanting will break down and start blowing each other in public.
This will lead to a massive backlash as other members of the Tea Partying group claim the devil has been unleashed by your quiet demonstration of personal freedom. Many of their members engaged in the act of fellatio with other men will momentarily clear their mouths and shout their affirmations before continuing to suck dick like it’s going out of style (which it isn’t). This period of intolerance will be interrupted when one of the Tea Partiers notes that only their own members are engaged in acts of public indecency, then further broken up when another one expresses confusion as to exactly what they’re protesting.
The Tea Partiers will then break down into internal bickering, splitting into several additional groups, one of which will start talking to you and listening calmly while you explain your stance. That group will mostly sign your petition before you get to the part about the sex-ed video, and a few will do so even afterwords.
In the end the entire thing will be a rousing success, and the bizarre and confusing Tea Party protest will even get you national coverage. Thus will begin your journey to state senatorship and, perhaps, dare we say, the White House (probably not)?
Congratulations Anal Spelunkers for Freedom!
That means all man nude love-ins would, under the dictum of your party, qualify as protected speech. As would discussing how great the handy you got your from boyfriend the other night was on a crowded train a little bit too loud and within earshot of children. Also included in the protections you want are protections levied towards tasteful same-sex focused pornographic websites and graphic sex education videos which show two young gay men having awkward, but kinda sweet sex.
Suffice it to say you’ve been met with nothing but controversy since your press release late last week declaring your intent to stage a rally in a public park to attempt to drum up membership and dispel some of the misconceptions about your new movement, like the idea that you’re a bunch of baby rapists.
The rally will start off uneventfully, with a few interested parties who heard about you from reading print news or on the internet trailing in an listening calmly as you explain your viewpoint in terms of constitutional law, then leaving, usually without signing the petition, after you finish describing the proposed sex-ed video. A few of them will sign it, though, saying it sounds “totally hot” and “way less boring than the sex-ed video they saw in high school.” One guy will even say, we paraphrase, “That sounds like a gay version of the video they make in the end of The Girl Next Door. [Expression of interest] yeah I’ll sign that [document].”
But after around an hour of good natured questions, agreements, disagreements and one phone number from a dude who thinks your struggle for civil liberties is totally hot, the Tea Partiers will show up.
They’ll arrive with signs declaring that they aren’t Republicans, still covered in McCain-Palin-2010 bumper stickers and start chanting the Pledge of Allegiance as loud as they possibly can while you’re explaining your belief in the natural extremism of the Constitution with regards to personal liberty and the necessity of its protection by the state to a young woman in a Bryn Mawr sweatshirt. The two of you will stop and stare at the Tea Partiers while they chant their black little hearts out. You’ll wait for them to stop patiently, but they’ll just start right back in. The two of you will then shrug and continue speaking in ASL, which you both know because you’re godless liberals who learn every fucking immigrant language that comes into this country.
Lucky for you American conservatives are notoriously bad at being straight, so even brief exposure to your people will almost instantly “turn” them gay. After around forty minutes of hoarse, often incorrect chanting of a relatively insignificant gesture popularized in the American public school system that these people so vehemently oppose, several of the men who have been chanting will break down and start blowing each other in public.
This will lead to a massive backlash as other members of the Tea Partying group claim the devil has been unleashed by your quiet demonstration of personal freedom. Many of their members engaged in the act of fellatio with other men will momentarily clear their mouths and shout their affirmations before continuing to suck dick like it’s going out of style (which it isn’t). This period of intolerance will be interrupted when one of the Tea Partiers notes that only their own members are engaged in acts of public indecency, then further broken up when another one expresses confusion as to exactly what they’re protesting.
The Tea Partiers will then break down into internal bickering, splitting into several additional groups, one of which will start talking to you and listening calmly while you explain your stance. That group will mostly sign your petition before you get to the part about the sex-ed video, and a few will do so even afterwords.
In the end the entire thing will be a rousing success, and the bizarre and confusing Tea Party protest will even get you national coverage. Thus will begin your journey to state senatorship and, perhaps, dare we say, the White House (probably not)?
Congratulations Anal Spelunkers for Freedom!
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Role-Playing and Storytelling!
Centered around a table, surrounded by emptied bags of Funyuns and Fritos, I lick my lips and carefully examine the placement of my signifying letter on graph paper. As it near the mysterious disc I listen carefully to its description. It is concave, covered in reflective materials but apparently inactive. It may be possible to activate the disc, if I’d like to attempt to do so, but who knows what the results would be.
I climb on to the surface of the disc, carefully examine it. Some of its paneling has peeled back to reveal gears and diodes inside, but it’s impossible to say just what it does without blasting a hole in the ceiling and letting the light rain down on it. I sigh and clamber my way back up the disc, reporting to the rest of the party.
“I don’t think it’s worth it.”
An argument ensues. The ranger wants to activate it just to see what it does. The bard wants to explore some more and find some interesting stuff in the ruins before we potentially activate some plot sensitive object. And me, I just don’t see why a wandering group of adventurers would want to activate a device without having at least a vague idea of what it does.
Eventually we compromise – our sunrods are holding up, and we’ve got plenty of time. We’ll explore a little, then come back later with whatever we find. Something in the ruins might help us figured out just what we’re supposed to do with that disc, and even if it doesn’t my character is excited at the prospect of finding riches. That’s why he’s here, after all.
When I think of role-playing games, I have trouble fitting experiences like this into the context that games like Final Fantasy XIII and the old Gold Box RPGs have made, but this is role-playing at its truest. You assume the role of a character in a world, and the choices you make then have impact on that world. The choices aren’t necessarily limitless, but they’re not just a collection of visible lines awaiting a hammer’s stroke. There are objects in space, and these objects exist even when I’m not looking at them. Indeed I might not even find them.
But this is what role play fundamentally means – it’s not about dragging yourself through a series of events, it’s about embodying a character and investing yourself in that character’s world. It’s right there in the term role-playing game. If the game was about watching a movie, it could be called a movie-watching game, or a book-reading game, terrible names for genres both. But that’s essentially what the current generation of role playing games are all about: pushing you through a set of pre-ordained events and making you watch.
Take the Final Fantasy series for instance. Final Fantasy VII, debatably one of the greatest games in the history of gaming as a whole and certainly the most acclaimed of the Final Fantasy games within the body contiguous of the series, doesn’t really give you a whole lot of impact on your character’s future. In fact most of the game is spent uncovering various facts about Cloud Stryfe’s past, not deciding his future. And when you do start to forge ahead as a character you’re not making decisions that change world events: you’re following your characters along pre-ordained paths. The end result is a series of events where players can only really exert influence over the violent actions their characters take. Most of the story of the game unfolds in pre-rendered cut scenes that we are privileged enough to sit and watch following some of the more interesting and challenging bits of violence. Occasionally reading is required as characters pontificate on their motivations and just what Mako means to them in text format. But each of these scenes, each piece of information they offer, is immune to tampering from players. The role you assume in most video game RPGs is that of a cameraman, not a character.
There are games that attempt to change this, certainly. The Baldur’s Gate sequels, for example, did quite a bit to provide multiple paths for characters and allow them to spontaneously generate solutions to various situations as they emerged. But even in these games you weren’t really permitted to decide the fate of your character, just which of two paths he followed along. And even along those paths the choices you could make were fairly narrow.
Part of this certainly has to be attributed to the lack of a human consciousness governing the events of a computer-based role-playing experience. Developers can hardly be blamed for not being able to program every single possible iteration into a game, and the lack of choice in video game RPGs is simply a by-product of this difficulty. But at times it feels as if developers and designers simply aren’t looking for ways to let the players insert themselves into stories, like they’re just trying to tell a very specific story through the lens of a role-playing experience which has more in-common with tactical strategy games than its RPG roots.
“I don’t think its worth it” could easily become a rallying cry for these pragmatic developers. Generating carefully controlled experiences which require certain specific sorts of action can make it much easier to introduce, develop and resolve the arcs of various characters. That’s why it’s far easier to write an excellent book than an excellent game: an excellent book simply requires a reader to be realized to its full potential. An excellent game requires a co-author of sorts, as well as a primary author who is capable of planting cues subtly enough for his co-author to notice them and utilize them without feeling forced to do so. There are many sorts of writing it could be compared to, but none of the analogies really do the difficulty facing the authors of games justice.
Still, there are a few titles which approach the glory of pen and paper RPGs. The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series have both done much to preserve the feeling of “go to this place, encounter a situation, resolve this situation in your own way” that pen and paper games have always operated on. These games also have nearly no cut-scenes, and provide players with an at times overwhelming number of options for resolving various conflicts. Unlike its Baldur’s Gate contemporary, Fallout is known for allowing characters to resolve many of its conflicts without using violence at all, instead relying on guile, stealth and technological know-how in order to circumvent seemingly inevitable battles. The Elder Scrolls are famed for the same sort of loopholes, and it is telling that speed runs in these games, that is to say attempts to beat the games as quickly as possible, involve avoiding as much combat as possible. What is perhaps more impressive is that most speed runs in these games ask you to do so without breaking the scripting language inherent in the game.
So why is it that games like Final Fantasy and Baldur’s Gate don’t provide these non-violent solutions to problems? Why is it that these more venerable, better funded and arguably more popular franchises are allowed to ignore the important concept of non-violent resolution, the careful bending of rules that makes tabletop gaming so great? Perhaps it is simply a matter of design philosophy. Japanese RPGs lack the cultural basis of pen and paper games which the unabashedly western Bioware, Black Isle and Bethesda have drawn from liberally. As a result they seem to draw from popular and historical fiction rather than a history of collaborative storytelling, and as a result do their best to present players with world changing stakes rather than world changing decisions. The scope of the game is expanded and the scope of the player’s involvement reduced, the player forced into a precious few decisions which have dramatic and reverberating effects. Make this choice, get this character. Make this choice, kill another character, get the incredible-sword-of-fucking-you-up. Limiting the scope of your choices permits the developers to make the stakes of each choice that much higher, to draw you into the game with grandeur rather than minutiae. While you are no longer responsible for a few characters you are now made to feel responsible for unlocking an epic storyline that the developers have put plenty of blood, sweat and tears into generating. Even if your involvement is only pressing the A button occasionally your reward, being able to see that amazing cut scene at the day’s end, is worthwhile.
But what about games from western developers which seem to miss this all important element of choice and character development in their designs? Bioware seems like the best example of this trend, with their streamlining and simplification of the rules of Dungeons and Dragons to allow players more accessibility and ease of play, along with an overall glut of choices and an increased focus on combat. Perhaps we can trace these design decisions back to Bioware’s predecessors, the venerable Gold Box RPGs from the late 80s and early 90s. These games featured an almost slavish degree of loyalty to the original Dungeons and Dragons rule set, and also possessed a relatively extreme focus on combat, owed as much to increased technological limitations as to the combat-heavy focus of earlier Dungeons and Dragons games. These games did attempt to provide players with a decent dose of the “go anywhere, solve problems as you see fit” mentality of tabletop games, however, and would often present players with seemingly insurmountable obstacles as a result. By refusing to or failing to artificially gate their world the early Gold Box developers allowed players to get in over their heads and asked them to improvise in manners which they may not have been comfortable with as CRPG players. Their sales, as a result, were not equivalent to the overwhelming successes of competing properties such as the earliest Final Fantasies, the Bards Tale games or the rising star of the platformer as exemplified by the Mario series. A streamlining of the elements of these games into the most engrossing and best executed (that is to say, combat oriented) elements makes perfect sense for western developers.
But this is pure speculation on both counts. The fact is that regardless of cause role-playing games are predominantly less about establishing your own story within the framework of a larger adventure and more about defeating monsters in order to unlock chunks of story. And while there has, of late, been a trend towards creating more open worlds which encourage exploration and improvisation on the part of the players with the massive commercial and critical success of games like Fallout 3 and Oblivion there remains a bevy of games like Mass Effect 2 and Final Fantasy XIII which simply ask players to kill enough monsters to see the next awesome cutscene. And these games, while fun and certainly worthwhile, aren’t really appropriate representatives of what role-playing games are capable of as a genre. Which is a shame, given their massive commercial success and the fact that players will come to expect this sort of experience more and more from developers when they release an RPG. It simply feels like a missed opportunity when the game which made me best associate with a character and feel as if I was making my own story is a shooter like Bioshock 2, rather than an role-playing game, a game ostensibly created for this express purpose. Perhaps this is more a statement about the potential of shooters to tell stories than anything, but I’d love to see more RPG developers settle back into table and think about what made those experiences so great, sitting around a table with friends, drunk or high, telling one another “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
I climb on to the surface of the disc, carefully examine it. Some of its paneling has peeled back to reveal gears and diodes inside, but it’s impossible to say just what it does without blasting a hole in the ceiling and letting the light rain down on it. I sigh and clamber my way back up the disc, reporting to the rest of the party.
“I don’t think it’s worth it.”
An argument ensues. The ranger wants to activate it just to see what it does. The bard wants to explore some more and find some interesting stuff in the ruins before we potentially activate some plot sensitive object. And me, I just don’t see why a wandering group of adventurers would want to activate a device without having at least a vague idea of what it does.
Eventually we compromise – our sunrods are holding up, and we’ve got plenty of time. We’ll explore a little, then come back later with whatever we find. Something in the ruins might help us figured out just what we’re supposed to do with that disc, and even if it doesn’t my character is excited at the prospect of finding riches. That’s why he’s here, after all.
When I think of role-playing games, I have trouble fitting experiences like this into the context that games like Final Fantasy XIII and the old Gold Box RPGs have made, but this is role-playing at its truest. You assume the role of a character in a world, and the choices you make then have impact on that world. The choices aren’t necessarily limitless, but they’re not just a collection of visible lines awaiting a hammer’s stroke. There are objects in space, and these objects exist even when I’m not looking at them. Indeed I might not even find them.
But this is what role play fundamentally means – it’s not about dragging yourself through a series of events, it’s about embodying a character and investing yourself in that character’s world. It’s right there in the term role-playing game. If the game was about watching a movie, it could be called a movie-watching game, or a book-reading game, terrible names for genres both. But that’s essentially what the current generation of role playing games are all about: pushing you through a set of pre-ordained events and making you watch.
Take the Final Fantasy series for instance. Final Fantasy VII, debatably one of the greatest games in the history of gaming as a whole and certainly the most acclaimed of the Final Fantasy games within the body contiguous of the series, doesn’t really give you a whole lot of impact on your character’s future. In fact most of the game is spent uncovering various facts about Cloud Stryfe’s past, not deciding his future. And when you do start to forge ahead as a character you’re not making decisions that change world events: you’re following your characters along pre-ordained paths. The end result is a series of events where players can only really exert influence over the violent actions their characters take. Most of the story of the game unfolds in pre-rendered cut scenes that we are privileged enough to sit and watch following some of the more interesting and challenging bits of violence. Occasionally reading is required as characters pontificate on their motivations and just what Mako means to them in text format. But each of these scenes, each piece of information they offer, is immune to tampering from players. The role you assume in most video game RPGs is that of a cameraman, not a character.
There are games that attempt to change this, certainly. The Baldur’s Gate sequels, for example, did quite a bit to provide multiple paths for characters and allow them to spontaneously generate solutions to various situations as they emerged. But even in these games you weren’t really permitted to decide the fate of your character, just which of two paths he followed along. And even along those paths the choices you could make were fairly narrow.
Part of this certainly has to be attributed to the lack of a human consciousness governing the events of a computer-based role-playing experience. Developers can hardly be blamed for not being able to program every single possible iteration into a game, and the lack of choice in video game RPGs is simply a by-product of this difficulty. But at times it feels as if developers and designers simply aren’t looking for ways to let the players insert themselves into stories, like they’re just trying to tell a very specific story through the lens of a role-playing experience which has more in-common with tactical strategy games than its RPG roots.
“I don’t think its worth it” could easily become a rallying cry for these pragmatic developers. Generating carefully controlled experiences which require certain specific sorts of action can make it much easier to introduce, develop and resolve the arcs of various characters. That’s why it’s far easier to write an excellent book than an excellent game: an excellent book simply requires a reader to be realized to its full potential. An excellent game requires a co-author of sorts, as well as a primary author who is capable of planting cues subtly enough for his co-author to notice them and utilize them without feeling forced to do so. There are many sorts of writing it could be compared to, but none of the analogies really do the difficulty facing the authors of games justice.
Still, there are a few titles which approach the glory of pen and paper RPGs. The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series have both done much to preserve the feeling of “go to this place, encounter a situation, resolve this situation in your own way” that pen and paper games have always operated on. These games also have nearly no cut-scenes, and provide players with an at times overwhelming number of options for resolving various conflicts. Unlike its Baldur’s Gate contemporary, Fallout is known for allowing characters to resolve many of its conflicts without using violence at all, instead relying on guile, stealth and technological know-how in order to circumvent seemingly inevitable battles. The Elder Scrolls are famed for the same sort of loopholes, and it is telling that speed runs in these games, that is to say attempts to beat the games as quickly as possible, involve avoiding as much combat as possible. What is perhaps more impressive is that most speed runs in these games ask you to do so without breaking the scripting language inherent in the game.
So why is it that games like Final Fantasy and Baldur’s Gate don’t provide these non-violent solutions to problems? Why is it that these more venerable, better funded and arguably more popular franchises are allowed to ignore the important concept of non-violent resolution, the careful bending of rules that makes tabletop gaming so great? Perhaps it is simply a matter of design philosophy. Japanese RPGs lack the cultural basis of pen and paper games which the unabashedly western Bioware, Black Isle and Bethesda have drawn from liberally. As a result they seem to draw from popular and historical fiction rather than a history of collaborative storytelling, and as a result do their best to present players with world changing stakes rather than world changing decisions. The scope of the game is expanded and the scope of the player’s involvement reduced, the player forced into a precious few decisions which have dramatic and reverberating effects. Make this choice, get this character. Make this choice, kill another character, get the incredible-sword-of-fucking-you-up. Limiting the scope of your choices permits the developers to make the stakes of each choice that much higher, to draw you into the game with grandeur rather than minutiae. While you are no longer responsible for a few characters you are now made to feel responsible for unlocking an epic storyline that the developers have put plenty of blood, sweat and tears into generating. Even if your involvement is only pressing the A button occasionally your reward, being able to see that amazing cut scene at the day’s end, is worthwhile.
But what about games from western developers which seem to miss this all important element of choice and character development in their designs? Bioware seems like the best example of this trend, with their streamlining and simplification of the rules of Dungeons and Dragons to allow players more accessibility and ease of play, along with an overall glut of choices and an increased focus on combat. Perhaps we can trace these design decisions back to Bioware’s predecessors, the venerable Gold Box RPGs from the late 80s and early 90s. These games featured an almost slavish degree of loyalty to the original Dungeons and Dragons rule set, and also possessed a relatively extreme focus on combat, owed as much to increased technological limitations as to the combat-heavy focus of earlier Dungeons and Dragons games. These games did attempt to provide players with a decent dose of the “go anywhere, solve problems as you see fit” mentality of tabletop games, however, and would often present players with seemingly insurmountable obstacles as a result. By refusing to or failing to artificially gate their world the early Gold Box developers allowed players to get in over their heads and asked them to improvise in manners which they may not have been comfortable with as CRPG players. Their sales, as a result, were not equivalent to the overwhelming successes of competing properties such as the earliest Final Fantasies, the Bards Tale games or the rising star of the platformer as exemplified by the Mario series. A streamlining of the elements of these games into the most engrossing and best executed (that is to say, combat oriented) elements makes perfect sense for western developers.
But this is pure speculation on both counts. The fact is that regardless of cause role-playing games are predominantly less about establishing your own story within the framework of a larger adventure and more about defeating monsters in order to unlock chunks of story. And while there has, of late, been a trend towards creating more open worlds which encourage exploration and improvisation on the part of the players with the massive commercial and critical success of games like Fallout 3 and Oblivion there remains a bevy of games like Mass Effect 2 and Final Fantasy XIII which simply ask players to kill enough monsters to see the next awesome cutscene. And these games, while fun and certainly worthwhile, aren’t really appropriate representatives of what role-playing games are capable of as a genre. Which is a shame, given their massive commercial success and the fact that players will come to expect this sort of experience more and more from developers when they release an RPG. It simply feels like a missed opportunity when the game which made me best associate with a character and feel as if I was making my own story is a shooter like Bioshock 2, rather than an role-playing game, a game ostensibly created for this express purpose. Perhaps this is more a statement about the potential of shooters to tell stories than anything, but I’d love to see more RPG developers settle back into table and think about what made those experiences so great, sitting around a table with friends, drunk or high, telling one another “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Congratulations Charybdis!
Today you’re going to finally break away from your hellish bitch of a dog faced sister (puns!) and strike out on your own. You’ll slowly ease out from under her until you reach an appropriate distance and then speed away, leaving her waist deep in the middle of the Mediterranean, feeling like the dumb ass foaming cunt she is.
You’ll eventually escape from the sea in a series of wacky hyjinx, becoming the first and arguably most successful sea-based maelstrom to found and operate a credit union. It’ll flourish through the economic recession, where Scylla’s banking ventures will fold. Then she’ll have to move in to your spare room and it’ll be awkward for all parties involved.
And all because you finally decided to do something with your life other than wait for Odysseus to wind his way to the end of some weird sea passage and then navigate the two of you both topographically and sexually. Which, by the way, would’ve been a huge letdown anyways.
Congratulations Charybdis!
You’ll eventually escape from the sea in a series of wacky hyjinx, becoming the first and arguably most successful sea-based maelstrom to found and operate a credit union. It’ll flourish through the economic recession, where Scylla’s banking ventures will fold. Then she’ll have to move in to your spare room and it’ll be awkward for all parties involved.
And all because you finally decided to do something with your life other than wait for Odysseus to wind his way to the end of some weird sea passage and then navigate the two of you both topographically and sexually. Which, by the way, would’ve been a huge letdown anyways.
Congratulations Charybdis!
Friday, June 4, 2010
Congratulations on Beating the Devil at a Game of Your Choice!
You’re going to die today in a run of the mill boating accident. One of the hookers you hired for the day is going to be piloting the boat while you do some heroin and you’re going to slip and slide the needle way too deep into your arm, which will in turn make you freak out because you’ll be high as shit on horse at the time.
You’ll start backing away from the prostitute, as the back of her head will seem to start talking, until you pitch right over the back of the boat and fall into the water where you’ll be sucked into the propellers of the boat and die in a horrible swift fashion. Then through a process of transubstantiation the essence of your consciousness as it was at the time of your death will arrive in a place of tremendous heat and suffering: that is to say, hell.
Upon arrival you’ll be greeted by a slender, swarthy man with a big grin and deep, brown eyes that seem to change color like embers in a fire. He’ll speak your name as if he’s greeting an old friend, and in that greeting the topography and rules of your new home will be put upon you in one quick naming.
“That’s correct,” you’ll say, nodding him.
His smile will widen back. “Then I assume you’d like to play?”
He’ll be referring to a loophole in the laws of hell which permit any single (1) soul to remove his or her self from Hell pending the successful completion of a game against one Satan, aka Lucifer, aka the Dragon Called Beast. Victory conditions are the standard rules of said game.
You’ll walk over and examine the games which the devil has available, brushing off copies of Chess, Risk, Stratego and Monopoly to eventually select a worn and battered box of Magic cards.
“A fine choice,” he’ll say, twiddling his fingers. You’ll smile and nod at him.
At this point the devil’s bravado and your history as a drug dealer in high school with come into play. See, you used Magic cards as a sort of social networking tool to interact with your client base in a non-drug related capacity. You discovered quickly that people would be more likely to buy drugs from you if they thought you had a life outside of selling drugs, so you bought the cards, learned to play and even came to love it a little.
The Devil, on the other hand, spent most of his time in Heaven as a super popular douche bag who never had any trouble getting girls, making friends or getting by. He had it all and just decided to give it up so he could try and act cool down in hell, and also because he had a disagreement with his dad. So what we’re trying to say is that despite your single meager mortal lifespan and the devil’s nigh eternity in which he could’ve mastered any game of his choosing you’ll be by far the stronger Magic player.
What follows will be a Magic duel for the ages, one wherein your lands will all drop just right and the devil will try to cheat unsuccessfully. After you’ve trounced him using an amazing feign strategy and a bunch of stuff no one here understands because we’re not drug dealers and we have lives outside of Magic the Gathering, he’ll acquiesce and permit you to return to Earth.
He’ll reform your corporeal body on the shore near where the accident occurred. Your prostitute will spot you while driving the boat and feel a great wave of relief. She didn’t want to end up in jail because one of her clients killed himself again, and she had a feeling she would’ve had trouble getting your boat deposit back if you’d died. She’ll pick you up and the two of you will go back to shore for some margaritas.
Congratulations on Beating the Devil at a Game of Your Choice!
You’ll start backing away from the prostitute, as the back of her head will seem to start talking, until you pitch right over the back of the boat and fall into the water where you’ll be sucked into the propellers of the boat and die in a horrible swift fashion. Then through a process of transubstantiation the essence of your consciousness as it was at the time of your death will arrive in a place of tremendous heat and suffering: that is to say, hell.
Upon arrival you’ll be greeted by a slender, swarthy man with a big grin and deep, brown eyes that seem to change color like embers in a fire. He’ll speak your name as if he’s greeting an old friend, and in that greeting the topography and rules of your new home will be put upon you in one quick naming.
“That’s correct,” you’ll say, nodding him.
His smile will widen back. “Then I assume you’d like to play?”
He’ll be referring to a loophole in the laws of hell which permit any single (1) soul to remove his or her self from Hell pending the successful completion of a game against one Satan, aka Lucifer, aka the Dragon Called Beast. Victory conditions are the standard rules of said game.
You’ll walk over and examine the games which the devil has available, brushing off copies of Chess, Risk, Stratego and Monopoly to eventually select a worn and battered box of Magic cards.
“A fine choice,” he’ll say, twiddling his fingers. You’ll smile and nod at him.
At this point the devil’s bravado and your history as a drug dealer in high school with come into play. See, you used Magic cards as a sort of social networking tool to interact with your client base in a non-drug related capacity. You discovered quickly that people would be more likely to buy drugs from you if they thought you had a life outside of selling drugs, so you bought the cards, learned to play and even came to love it a little.
The Devil, on the other hand, spent most of his time in Heaven as a super popular douche bag who never had any trouble getting girls, making friends or getting by. He had it all and just decided to give it up so he could try and act cool down in hell, and also because he had a disagreement with his dad. So what we’re trying to say is that despite your single meager mortal lifespan and the devil’s nigh eternity in which he could’ve mastered any game of his choosing you’ll be by far the stronger Magic player.
What follows will be a Magic duel for the ages, one wherein your lands will all drop just right and the devil will try to cheat unsuccessfully. After you’ve trounced him using an amazing feign strategy and a bunch of stuff no one here understands because we’re not drug dealers and we have lives outside of Magic the Gathering, he’ll acquiesce and permit you to return to Earth.
He’ll reform your corporeal body on the shore near where the accident occurred. Your prostitute will spot you while driving the boat and feel a great wave of relief. She didn’t want to end up in jail because one of her clients killed himself again, and she had a feeling she would’ve had trouble getting your boat deposit back if you’d died. She’ll pick you up and the two of you will go back to shore for some margaritas.
Congratulations on Beating the Devil at a Game of Your Choice!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
