Saturday, April 30, 2011

Congratulations Actual Time Bandits!

“What was that?” she’ll ask, pen light in her mouth. You won’t know how to answer. You won’t be entirely sure yourself.

“I’m not entirely sure,” you’ll tell her, gazing in wonder at where your time machine has landed.

It won’t be much of a machine. Little more than a metal tube with a single reinforced window in its door and the apparatus, far too complex to be described here, that allows you to travel through space and time through the discharge of massive amounts of energy. Shoshanna will be looking into that apparatus while she holds the pen light in her mouth, watching for any sign of strain or stress that could potentially result in an error.

“Looks good,” she’ll mumble at herself. Then she’ll look at you, all atremble, a stone’s throw from soaking in your own urine, and she’ll smile. “When are we?” she’ll ask.

She likes to say that, more than she probably should. She gets a kick out of making you uncomfortable, making you wonder why she feels this whole situation is so fucking normal. And she likes that you can’t answer. You’ll think it’s because she’s kind of a dick, but it’s really because she thinks you’re cute and she likes watching you get flustered. The seconds after a shift, the seconds where you try to respond, these are the times you’re silent. The times she can fully enjoy your company.

“Not… Not sure,” you’ll mumble, gasping in air. She’ll smile and unhook herself from her harness, sliding gently to the floor of the machine

“Well, let’s find out.”

She’ll look at the air gauge, displayed on the far side of the protective glass. It’ll show a green smiley face, a clear sign that there is breathable air at tolerable atmospheric pressure outside. She’ll nod and turn the wheel, causing the door of the time machine to issue a series of creaks and moans. It’ll hiss as the moderately pressurized environment in the time machine equalizes with the world outside, and when she finishes the new air will rush in, filling the capsule with a foul odor.

“Ugh,” she’ll say, waving her hand. “What the fuck is this?”

By now you’ll have unhooked yourself and, unsteadily as is your way after each jump, lowered yourself to the ground. You’ll be breathing heavily, head between your knees, gathering your strength to find out just what kind of awful mold is making the smell invading the capsule wholesale. When you stand up you’ll want to laugh.

This place will be instantly familiar to you. Not as a historic landmark or even an area of note. Quite the opposite. When you were five, when it was 1986, Giraldo Rivera opened the place you’re now in up. It was completely bare inside, but it won’t be now. Instead it’ll be stacked. Stacked with aging paper bills, gold bullions and a variety of coins that, while at the time you must be totally valueless, will be worth a fortune in many other times. Particularly your time, if you ever get back there again.

“We’ve got to clean this place out,” you’ll tell Shoshanna, and she’ll laugh.

“What’s a little more?” she’ll chuckle as she opens your zero point storage compartment, already backed with scads and scads of inorganic matter from a thousand different times. The two of you will quickly load Capone’s vault into it, taking great care not to let your body parts linger in its hold. When you’re finished you’ll have successfully taken everything in Al Capone’s vault.

“I’d rate this just below when we raided the Vatican’s statue dick storage facility,” you’ll tell Shoshanna, patting her on the back as the two of you re-enter the time machine. She’ll cluck her tongue and look at the back of your head, considering taking you by the neck and kissing you, but thinking better of it.

“Better to make you wait,” she’ll mutter under her breath.

Congratulations Actual Time Bandits!

Friday, April 29, 2011

Congratulations Stealthy Racist!

You’re a racist. But unlike average, run of the mill racists you’re not loud or obnoxious. You’re actually quite subtly in the manner in which you apply your racism.

You like to come up behind people you see in the street and whisper racist things into their ears. It’s surprisingly effective. You’ve managed, by whispering it to her in an elevator before a meeting, to get Senator Hilary Clinton to call someone a fucking Jew bastard. You’ve managed to cause an untold number of otherwise reasonable people to refer to their baristas as nigger and you once made a grandmother call Mexicans “God’s trash.” Nothing to be proud of, really, but your aptitude for remaining unnoticed has managed to keep any of it from sticking to your name.

But today you’re going to get something that will retain your name. And mark and elevate you for the rest of your life. Today you’re going to meet your wife.

She’ll be there in front of you, a pretty young woman in an elevator in an office building where you’re delivering flowers. She’ll be dressed in a lady’s suit with her legs exposed, showing an impressive set of dragon tattoos accented with budding flowers twining up her shins and on to her thighs. You’ll wonder, for a moment, if they carry on all the way up to her waist, perhaps eventually terminating at her pubis. With these thoughts you’ll be filled with a sudden and uncontrollable desire to corrupt this young woman.

But unlike most men, who manifest this lascivious desire in the form of sexual attraction, you’ll just want to make her say really racist shit. So you’ll creep up behind her and whisper in her ear.

“Jews are dirty.”

She won’t respond. Not like, she’ll hear and ignore you. She just won’t respond at all. She’ll be staring forward, oblivious to your presence. She’ll either be a fantastic actress or she’ll be stilling her ears somehow, keeping your words from reaching them. You won’t see any headphones in there, so you’ll assume she’s a great actress. Not willing to be outdone, especially by this woman of all women, for reasons you cannot fully articulate, you’ll tap her on her shoulder and force her around.

“Jews are dirty,” you’ll tell her again in a deadpan voice. She’ll stare at you for a moment like you’re insane, and then her hands will begin moving.

“Wha?” she’ll mumble, as if her tongue doesn’t quite understand how to form the words. “Why would you sah thah?” she’ll muse, as her hands dance beneath her face.

You’ll be taken aback. No one will have ever asked you why you sew racism against literally every social group ever dictated before, and you won’t have ever really considered it at length. Standing there, facing her, you’ll just have to shrug.

“I guess I just do.”

“Stah,” she’ll say, making an emphatic sign with her palm.

Her request, its even tone and brevity, will captivate you. You’ll want to indulge her, but you won’t feel you know how off-hand. You’ll feel racism’s sweet tug pulling you away and realize that the moment you leave this strange, wonderful woman you’ll go back to being a big old stealthy racist. So you’ll hold up your finger to signal a request and form your words carefully, shaping your mouth more than speaking.

“One condition. Get a drink with me tonight?”

Congratulations Stealthy Racist!

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Congratulations Bland Food!

You’re a plate of bland Indian food, and that means no one, I mean no one, wants to eat you.

“Urggh,” actor Christopher Lloyd, who has never turned down a role ever, will grunt as he vomits immediately after tasting you. “This is terrible,” he’ll mumble. Then he’ll spit what’s left of his meal out on the floor and leave without paying the bill.

Then an orphan will walk up to the table and sniff you. He’ll take a bite, then shake his head.

“If it was bad, I think I could eat it. But the taste is just so empty…” Then he’ll shuffle off to beg for coins so he can get a sandwich at the White Hen next door, just so he can remember what taste, even shitty taste, is like.

Later on you’ll be dumped into a trash can by a bus boy who barely makes enough to eat and pay rent. He won’t even notice you as you fall into the trash can.

Once you’re in the can, the other bits of garbage will just stare at you.

“Is there anything, anything at all, interesting about you?” they’ll ask in one voice, terrible and heavy with the sludge of time. You’ll shake your head in response, which will be an overcooked potato covered in sauce that has no identifiable spices in it.

“Huh. So what do you do?”

You’ll tell them that you do some office work at a nearby building, and they’ll nod their heads in response.

“That makes sense,” they’ll say, going back to their own conversations, doing their best to ignore you until you all move on to the next phase of existence together.

Congratulations Bland Food!

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Congratulations to The Other Sock!

Today you’re going to be a sock who witnesses a murder.

Your owner will be putting you and your brother on foot by foot when a man with a pistol walks in and starts talking to him in an incomprehensible gibberish (he’ll be speaking American standard English, you only know sock). Then he’ll shoot your owner in the head twice while you’re only half on his foot, causing your owner to sprawl to the ground and you to fall loose from his foot. Your brother will remain securely fashioned.

You’ll both be paralyzed with fear, feeling your fibers tingle as you watch the assassin go about his grisly work. He’ll roll up your brother and your owner in a carpet and sling it over his shoulder with a tired, practiced ease. Then he’ll trudge out the door with the carpet over his shoulder, sure in his purpose: to hurl them into a nearby dumpster and light it on fire.

“Noooo!” you’ll scream after him as he takes your brother away. Then you’ll roll yourself into a sock ball and force yourself to the sock communication webway beneath the dresser, where you’ll let loose a psychic scream to all other sock-kind letting them know just what’s going on. Since you’re all socks you’ll be powerless to stop them then. But a few weeks later you and your stock brothers will roll yourself up, loop yourselves around the wrists of the assassin and suffocate him with your wooly strength while he lays in bed alone. He will die horrified, unsure of just how socks have managed to scale his body and kill him.

Congratulations to The Other Sock!

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Congratulations Time Bandits Enthusiast!

You love the movie Time Bandits. Well, who doesn’t really? But you like it irrationally. You like it so much that you’ve actually treated your kid kinda shitty so that he might one day egress into a fantasy world wherein time is no longer locked as a reality but is instead a subjective condition one can manipulate. You didn’t treat him really shitty, so it’s not that bad. But you could’ve be nicer to him in general.

Anyhow, today you’re going to sit down with your son and watch the movie Time Bandits. At the end he’s going to look at you, shaking his head. “Is this why you made me go to bed early all those times when I was living at home?”

You’ll nod.

“I wanted you to have the kind of adventure I always dreamed of. Sorry if I ever made you feel alienated from me, I just worried that if I was too good a dad you wouldn’t have anything to escape from.”

He’ll be puzzled by the logic, but touched by the sentiment, and he’ll hug you. It’ll be the first gesture of tenderness he’ll have shown towards you when he ran away at the age of 15 to sell himself on the street because you didn’t hug him enough.

Congratulations Time Bandits Enthusiast!

Monday, April 25, 2011

Congratulations Sentient Mako Shark!

You’re a mako shark, and today you’re going to attain sentience.

“Holy shit,” you’ll exclaim into the water, which will come out as an incoherent stream of bubbles. “I exist!”

The fish around you won’t notice. In fact, they’ll barely seem aware of your presence.

“Fuck you, fish!” you’ll shout which, again, will come out as a stream of bubbles. You’ll then set upon them, slashing and biting with your teeth, collecting as many fish as possible in your gullet and forcing them down into your primitive digestive tract for processing.

“Teach you to ignore me,” you’ll mumble at the survivors as you swim away. They’ll barely notice you’re gone, and they’ll barely seem to have noticed that their friends have died. In fact, they’ll seem to notice very little at all. “Dumbasses,” you’ll mutter at them as you swim away.

You’ll pass the next several months, swimming around, re-living this pattern. It’ll go on and on and on until you try to befriend some humans by talking to them. They’ll kill you because you’re a dangerous killing machine and move on with their lives, which we’d like to say is ironic but we’re pretty sure is just coincidental, dickish and kind of tragic.

Congratulations Sentient Mako Shark!

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Portal 2!

If you’re going to read one sentence in this review, here it is: Portal 2 is fucking fantastic.

Now if you’re the kind of person who likes easily digestible perspectives on games that give clear instructions on what you should do with regard to a game, regardless of your tastes, you know what’s up. Portal 2 is what’s up. Quick, buy it while there are still copies floating around the digital aether that is Steam. I’d actually recommend that, if you really like your video game experiences to be fresh, you run off and play through Portal 2 right now. I don’t plan on spoiling anything, but Portal 2 is such a rich experience that it benefits from being engaged once and then discussing it more than almost any other game I can think of.

But if you insist on staying, I’ll begin: Portal 2 is how you do a sequel right.

It keeps the format of the original Portal: stand-alone puzzle that builds on lessons from earlier puzzles, meticulously designed so that the levels slowly edify you as you experience them, even if you have trouble with puzzles. It keeps all of the humor of the original Portal: adorable robots running around, doing decidedly unrobotic things while providing you with scathingly witty backhanded encouragement in a science-ey, absurd environment. It even keeps all of Portal’s original characters, all three of them, and GlaDOS is still voiced by the indispensible Ellen McLain. In fact Ms. McLain is given even more to do, including a nice little easter egg that goes back to her operatic roots. But the cast, and the game has expanded.

Talent the like of J.K. Simmons and Stephen Marchant have joined the team in Portal 2, and while they certainly don’t eclipse McLain, to whom the series owes nearly as much as Swift, Falseik and Wolpaw, they bring their talents to the table and enrich the entire world of Portal through their contributions. That’s the theme here.

Every single piece that is uniquely Portal 2, every single new element and new challenge, contributes to the universe built by the original Portal game. There’s retconning, sure, but it’s forgivable by video game standards, and there’s no element of the retconning that actually reduces what makes the game great, the kind we see all too often in other, more clumsily executed sequels. Instead what was a tiny, mostly subtextually developed world has sprung into a vibrant cosmology, one that explores both how portals work, why they work, and where they came from. There’s no concern for the questions that players might’ve had. Instead Wolpaw and Falseik pretty much just do whatever they want which, let’s face it, is how they work best.

The end result is a cast of characters all of whom are as memorable, sympathetic, ridiculous and textually significant as GlaDOS. I’m already chomping at the bit to sit down and work on an essay about just how Portal 2 and its cast expand Portal’s treatment of feminism, and I’ve only played through the game once. I’m sure that, as time unfolds, there will be plenty of new material to draw on. I didn’t think they’d be able to layer more feminist analysis and symbolism into a game where you have a gun that shoots vaginas, but they did it, and I’m impressed. And they did it without forcing it upon players or sacrificing any of the game’s humor. They fixed the self-seriousness problem that’s been plaguing feminists since the Second Wave, and they did it without apparently trying.

But I’ve been dancing around the core of the game: the puzzles. Portal 2 is, for better or worse, more tied to the chamber model than its predecessor. The first Portal played nearly half of its life outside of the chambers, partially because it only lasted around two hours in the first place and half of that could easily be spent running the gauntlet outside of GlaDOS’ clutches. Portal 2 is a lot more interested in staying within clearly defined chambers and theaters of operations, moving you through locations and teaching you a variety of puzzle solving skills that you’re tested on every few “chambers.”

There’s some complaint about the puzzles being easier, perhaps too easy, and I’d agree with the former claim. There are a few brain busters, but I mostly breezed through Portal 2 without any of the horrible, epiphany driving locks that the first Portal gave me. Part of this can be owed to the scale of the game: Portal 2 is much, much longer than its predecessor. And more game means less attention to the individual portions of the game. It’s unfortunate but true that Valve, as good as they are at iterating various game elements together, can’t be expected to deliver the same remarkable quality on a ten or twenty hour project that they deliver on a two to four hour project.

But with this increased size comes diversity in the art and level design, as well as the puzzles themselves. The original Portal did some amazing things with a very limited toolset, and Portal 2 does quite a bit to expand the toolbox, providing players with toys that completely fuck up the rules of momentum that Portal introduced. Additionally, there are just plain more levels to see, prettier levels at that, with a more diverse and engaging sense of art and design to them. Portal 2’s design provides players with careful hints about setting and time, about in-game environment and object uses and about the thematic nature of the world around them. The end result is a world more visually rich and dense with information than the first Portal game, a title which re-defined subtext in games.

There’s an unfortunate and more noticeable drop in the quality of the commentary provided with Portal 2, something the original Portal did just about perfectly. The commentary mode in Portal 2 is divorced from a save function, sparsely populated with nodes and often incoherent or boring compared to the quippy, very real commentary that I’ve grown accustomed to from Valve. The menu used to navigate the commentary nodes is also divided from the game itself, and doesn’t seem well suited to the task. But it is just a bonus feature, one many people will never even use, not a big deal. Just a little disappointing to commentary hounds like myself who really liked the behind-the-scenes perspective Valve provided in previous games.

And I do need to offer a disclaimer here: I haven’t finished all of Portal 2’s co-op mode at time of writing. I’ve played some, and it’s fucking fantastic to be sure. But I haven’t sat down and finished every last bit of it yet, and I certainly haven’t checked the commentary out there. It’s quite possible that the commentary on the co-op levels kicks it up a notch and provides the sort of insight and evaluation that I miss (although I doubt it). It’s certainly true that the co-operative mode in Portal 2 is a value add, well worth experiencing, and filled with great little extras. With a friend or with a stranger, drunk or sober, Portal 2’s co-op is enjoyable. And while it could fizzle out or become frustrating at some point the chambers are so easy to navigate that it’s difficult for me to imagine.

I’m not sure I’d say Portal 2 is better than Portal. Portal is a great game, one of the few games I’d stammeringly refer to as perfect. It has goals, and it fulfills all of them wonderfully. Portal 2 has a different set of goals, and it takes care of all of them too, more or less. But it’s a different product, an attempt to grow what Portal created, and it does a great job of that. I’m not sure the two games can really be compared, or that it’s a good idea to try and define one as superior to the other. They’re both great, and Portal 2 gets what made Portal great and provides plenty more of it.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Congratulations Fancy Man!

You’re the fanciest man in the tri-state area, no mean feat given how fancy many of the tri-city residents are. You’ll dress in nothing but the finest velvet suits, wearing only the most gauche of giant floppy hats with feathers in them. Your reign has been uncontested so far, and will remain uncontested until today when an upstart from “the streets” tries to prove himself fancier than you.

He’ll step to you, this youngling, in nothing but a vest with a pookah shell necklace. His chest will be shaved, his jeans taut around his package, which will be ample. He’ll advance with his shoulders tilted back, like he’s going to start dancing at any second, and nod in your direction.

“Sup?”

You’ll shake your head at him.

“Not today, son,” you’ll say, tapping your cane on the ground as you turn to leave. That’s when he’ll lay his hand on your shoulder, breaking the first rule of fancy fighting: never lay hand upon thy opponent’s threads.

At this point, shit will be on.

“Shit is on now, boy,” you’ll spit at him, removing your velvet overcoat and stripping to your still quite elaborate waistcoat. He’ll respond by removing his vest and making his nipples dance.

“Bring it,” he’ll say.

Then the two of you will draw machetes and hack and one another. By the time you’re done your opponent will be bleeding on the ground, missing most of his arm. You’ll have a handful of shallow cuts on your body and your clothes, fancy as they are, will be ruined. But it will be worth it. You’ll opponent will be fallen, and you’ll remain the fanciest of fancy men, still ready to challenge any pretenders with your strong arms and quick wrists.

Congratulations Fancy Man!

Friday, April 22, 2011

Congratulations Bridge Trolls Guild 412!

Today you’re a bunch of trolls, and you’re on strike.

“We want health benefits!” you’ll cry in troll voices, which will actually sound like one giant scream from a group of men being burned alive.

“Never!” the foreman will shout back, but he’ll be a goblin so it’ll be in French and we don’t know French so we don’t really know how to write what he said but you don’t have to be a dick about it.

“Rarrr!” you’ll shout back, which will be both totally appropriate and the actual sound you make when you run at the goblin foreman, full force.

You’ll crash into him full force and start tearing at his flesh hand over fist. You’ll ram it into your filthy crooked teeth and gnash and chew and grunt and masticate your way through his corpse. You’ll gnaw and gnaw and eat him all up. You’ll visit upon any onlookers a scene of horror beyond horror, of pointless and mindless violence visited upon a completely undeserving recipient who, to be honest, wasn’t really that bad a goblin. Then you’ll belch and return to your strike in front of, rather than under, a bridge.

You’ll win your strike a few weeks later when Morgan Stanley finally acknowledges that they need you if they’re ever going to get anyone to make mortgage payments ever again.

Congratulations Bridge Trolls Guild 412!

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Congratulations Glass Eye Sam!

Whiskey goes up, whiskey goes down. Them’s the breaks, as you like to say. You don’t say it to anyone in particular, you just mutter it to yourself under your breath at the bar where you drink alone. It’s your way, and it always has been.

Until today. Today when a pretty lady in a red dress walk in to your bar and steps up next to you and asks the bar keep for a whiskey, neat. You’ll look her up and down and have one thing to say.

“Pretty lady. Red dress.”

She’ll smile and nod at you.

“Thanks, I think.”

You’ll rasp out a laugh in response while she sits and sips on her whiskey, grimacing occasionally at the taste. It’ll be clear from the particular cut of this red dress, as well as her recently washed skin and hair, that she’s used to a finer life than this one.

“Whaddya doin’ in this shithole, miss?” you’ll ask, your heart aflutter with the best of intentions. Her smile will get wider.

“Just trying to get over something,” she’ll say, sliding her hand down to your thigh.

That’s when you’ll totally freak out and smack her hand away.

“Whoa! I don’t goes for no hanky pank what ain’t with a chinawoman!” you’ll shout at her. Then you’ll pick up your barstool and hurl it across the bar. It’ll land with a clatter and you’ll go off to sit on it, awkwardly squatting on the support struts on the floor. You’ll sit that way a good long while, until the woman leaves and you sit at the bar alone and drink. Like a person. The person you always wanted to be.

Congratulations Glass Eye Sam!

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Congratulations Marvelous Breasts!

Most people would say “I’m more than just a fantastic rack,” but not you. You know why? Because you’re a pair of sentient breasts inhabiting the body of a very stupid, very easily manipulated woman. That’s how you get your way all the time, instead of just most of the time, and it’s how you’re going to end up as secretary general of the UN in no time at all.

The first step towards election will be your nomination, easily secured because you’re attached to a super hot foreign lady who is perceived as being easily manipulated.

“Criselda Monteloca of Spain?” the Chinese ambassador will say, rubbing his hands together with glee as he thinks about the treaties he could get passed through under your host’s dull, thoughtless gaze. “She would be acceptable.”

Then it’ll be put to a vote. Whatever CSPAN has shown you about the Senate in America, forget it. In the UN, shit’s like the Galactic Senate. So voting will be conducted from a series of floating platforms while various weird looking aliens and foreigners shout at one another through translators until one of them decides to have sex with another one and they cast a vote together. The entire process will take six hours, but at the end your host will be elected to the seat of Secretary General for the United Nations unanimously.

“I appreciate this honor,” she’ll say, before ramming the microphone into her breasts and allowing the two of you to speak.

“We are here to usher into the world a new era of peace,” you’ll proudly declare as everyone, men, women, children and everything in between, stares at you. “We believe that, under our unique brand of leadership, conflicts may be resolved and, indeed, happiness and understanding may finally be known.”

Thunderous applause will greet your speech as you and your host exit stage. Not because you were terribly eloquent, and not because you’re going to do a good job. You’ll top Boutros Boutros Ghali, but who the fuck couldn’t do that? No, they’ll be clapping because you’re a pair of sweet ass tits on a hot ass lady, and everyone loves that.

Congratulations Marvelous Breasts!

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Congratulations Roving Sex Maniacs!

Today you’re a member of a gang of roving sex maniacs, and you’re going to roll into Dayton, Ohio.

“This place seems fairly calm,” you’ll say to the woman you’re inside, a fifty-two year old mother of two named Dolly who abandoned her children so she could drive from city to city and fuck her way across America.

“Yeah,” she’ll reply, though it won’t be clear if she’s talking to you or just responding to the sex. “Ugh,” she’ll follow up.

After you finish up and she hops on someone who’s less interested in the landmarks of Dayton you’ll get to talking with Margaret, an exhausted 24 year old with serious self-esteem issues. She’ll share your interest in Dayton.

“I don’t know much about it,” she’ll say. “But I know the name.”

“I hear it’s a place where a lot of things get made, but I’m not sure what.” She’ll smile when you say that and, when the two of you finish having unpleasant sex in the back of your giant truck you’ll ask the driver, who is receiving oral coitus from another man while smoking a cigarette, will indulge you.

“Be back at the city hall by midnight or we leave without you,” he’ll mumble through his cigarette. “We’re just here for the healthcare, nothin’ more.”

You’ll look at Margaret, smile and shrug before heading off into the city center of Dayton. The two of you will find a world far removed from both the industrial image of Dayton that had been fixed in your minds and the sex crazed antics of your last several months. Instead you’ll find an idyllic urban area, much like you’d see anywhere in the Midwest, filled with high rise buildings that gently unfold into sprawl.

“Seems like a nice place to live,” Margaret will mumble, tightening her hand around yours.

“Yeah,” you’ll mumble back, unable to look her in the eye after what you saw two other men doing to her last night. Still you’ll clutch back, thinking of what it could be like to live here with her. You’ll imagine she’s thinking the same thing as she leads you into a hotel by the hand and, grinning, takes you to bed calmly and quietly for the first time since the two of you have met.

You’ll climax together on those rented sheets and lay in one another’s arms, looking out across the skyline. It’ll look so big and open that it’ll make you sigh into the back of her neck, tears welling in your eyes as you think about how wonderful it was to be Margaret’s age, to be in a world so full of wonder and opportunity, to still have the power to dream of love.

Congratulations Roving Sex Maniacs!

Monday, April 18, 2011

Congratulations Incorporated Assholes of America!

“We’re not unified enough,” you’ll declare to the boardroom filled with people in suits, khaki pants and sunglasses worn during the early evening. They’ll haroomph loudly amongst themselves.

“Why should we bother helping others?” half the room will ask, half of them with food in their mouths. The others will simply hang their heads and think that very thought, nodding over enthusiastically as they do so.

“Because by helping other assholes we unify the cause of Asshole Undivided,” you’ll shout, slamming your fist down on the boardroom table as hard as you can, which actually won’t be that hard.

“Then the greatest among us should lead!” a young asshole in khaki pants and a light colored dress shirt will declare to the room.

“Great idea, you fucking idiot,” you’ll shout at him, the force of your voice pushing him back down into his seat. The young man will stare at his crotch for the rest of the meeting, thinking about how he’ll get back at you one day when he’s in charge. But you, you’ll stand proud.

“I propose that I, as the biggest and most obvious asshole in the room, lead this delegation to victory. Who else would stand against me?”

They’ll remain in their seats, smiling their parsimonious little smiles, dreaming their little dreams, planning their lunch-break trips to Brooks Brothers so they can get a new tie and look best when they show up at your apartment tomorrow night with a bottle of moderately priced wine so they can lick a little boot and maybe, just maybe, get closer to an asshole with more power than they have right now.

Congratulations Incorporated Assholes of America!

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Dragon Age 2 Wrapup!

Dragon Age 2 isn’t a very good game. It took me a while to figure that out, but after playing it, after going from start to finish, I’m pretty sure about it. See, the problem is that I wanted to like Dragon Age 2 quite a bit. The first Dragon Age was an incredible game, and the follow-up expansion was very impressive. It was a cheap, effective way to build on a game I already loved, and it made me think that perhaps Mass Effect 2 was the fluke, that Bioware still had a good sense of how to grow their properties and expand them, not just launch them.

With The Old Republic looming on the horizon, with Mass Effect 3 offering to wrap up the saga of Shepherd, which has honestly gotten a little tiresome, there have been a number of reasons to be genuinely excited and hopeful about Bioware and the things they’re doing. But there seems to be a disconnect between what Bioware does on its first passes and what they do when they’re trying to bring a sequel to market.

It’s difficult to know what pressures surround them as a studio. Their star has risen nicely over the last few years. They haven’t made a game that didn’t sell in almost a decade now, and what they lack in ingenuity they make up for in subtle bits of subversion inserted into their projects. But every time Bioware makes a sequel I find myself more than just disappointed: I find myself feeling betrayed. Mass Effect 2 was certainly the greatest offender. No question, that game made me hate both Mass Effect and myself. It took all the boring, repetitive elements of Mass Effect and brought them to the forefront of game play. It removed the nitpicky micromanagement that made up the actual game of Mass Effect and stripped it down so thoroughly that the game itself was reduced to a handful of action options and a character progression system on par with the upgrade paths in Monday Night Combat. The well rendered, interesting story of Mass Effect, which had some stymied choices but really let you get to know your characters and made them distinct allies who were all useful in combat, had been replaced by a rushed procedural mess filled with completely interchangeable allies.

I replayed Mass Effect 2, I wanted to like it so bad, and all indicators show I’ll likely do the same for Dragon Age 2. But it’s less the desperate cry of the critic and more the action of a fan, searching for something to love. I want to see if playing through Dragon Age 2 with a different perspective, a different character class, is going to make me hate the game less. So far I’ve barely scratched the surface of life as a lesbian warrior, but it doesn’t seem to be that significantly different. I move more slowly, I’ve decided to be angry and nice more often, instead of just joking all the time. But the core combat of the game, which takes all of the micromanagement of the first game before fights and drops all of the micromanagement during fights, the part I actually prefer and find enriching as a game, is still ever present. Occasionally fights will have the feeling that the developers seemed to be aiming at, such as a prolonged bout of combat with a real live dragon, which was actually a real challenge. But mostly they’re all just chaotic messes against the same set of enemies, rendered on the same blah tilesets that the game has been repeating for the last twenty hours. Sometimes it makes sense, like when the Fade takes the shape of the Circle Tower in the dreams of an escaped mage. But mostly it just feels lazy, like the all important map-designing group that every studio has in some deep dark dungeon, the part that has actually solicited some of the more interesting cultural writing on games by the way, has been completely excised from Bioware’s team.

This sort of content recycling permeates the game itself. I’m not sure why I’d ever have certain character combinations in the game. Would Varric and the other archer have anything to do if they were in a party with one another? Is it possible to have a party without a healer? Why aren’t there more people with healing abilities, by the way? I get that blood mages are bad and everything, but they used to have all the powers that mages had and then some. Why does signing up for additional powers involve losing some of the most useful powers available to mages? It’s interesting how naked each of the base-line character is in their application, but it’s also kind of frustrating. There’s only so much customization that can be done, and I often found myself picking party members based solely on the interactions I wanted to see rather than any element of their combat abilities.

Maybe that was part of Dragon Age 2 design overall, a conscious choice to focus on story over gameplay. The story does have legs. In fact it’s one of the few video games that bothers with a framing technique, that tries to do anything interesting at all. But I don’t think they absolutely had to curtail character customization to achieve that goal, and the sloppiness radiated by the gameplay engine feels less like a conscious decision on how to apply resources and more like a terrible mistake that someone made at some point.

It is worth saying that the story of Dragon Age 2 kept me interested until the very end, when it totally lost its shit. A game focused on the minutiae of actual existence in a fantasy world is a cool idea, something that games like Majesty hint at with a great deal more humor and less thought. Playing a game about making a buck instead of saving the world is neat, and the swelling tides of revolution that Dragon Age 2 eventually brings to bear could’ve been great in a game that put more thought into the big, world changing events that it wanted to play with. I still think the actions of every mage at the end of the game were bullshit, and made no sense in the context of previous actions and words. If the fight that had come of them was even remotely cool it might’ve been forgivable, but the Orsinos boss fight is nothing short of a mess. And Meredith’s eventual madness emerging, along with its explanation, were more random than anything else. Her sudden hatred of mages emerging instead of the avarice and hunger that colored other the actions of other users of the artifact was deus ex machina of the laziest order. A piece of loot, a McGuffin, became the plot device explaining every irrational action that a character carries out without ever touching on why this artifact had such potency.

It was nice to fight with an entire party during the end of the game, and it was nice to see that emerge as part of a continuing dialogue with other characters rather than a set of decisions made at the last minute. I felt like the effort I’d put into building my relationships in Dragon Age 2 paid off more than it has in any other game I’ve ever played, including the amazing Baldur’s Gate games. And the dialogue about sex that emerged surrounding Dragon Age 2 was interesting. In many ways it was more interesting than the game itself.

But I’ve never had to force myself to keep playing a Bioware game before. Especially during the central portion of the game itself. Mass Effect 2 kind of lost me whenever it made me go through a period of tedious scanning, but as hum-drum as the gameplay became I never rolled my eyes at it the way I did with Dragon Age 2. Endless waves of enemies making my combat into a chaotic mess does not a dynamic combat system make. I would often shut down Dragon Age 2 and go off to clean my apartment to make the game seem less tedious and more enjoyable. And while I’m glad I saw it through to its conculsion, if only to understand how the entire thing fit together, it is strange to think that the game portion of Dragon Age 2, the portion that traditionally would’ve been the easiest thing to do right, was the thing that seemed to elude Bioware this time around. It’s great to see original, well written content in games that plays with the idea of what we should make games about, don’t get me wrong. I just wish there’d been a better game at its core, so that revealing bits of story was a joy and not a chore.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Congratulations on Replacing Your Penis With a Totally Sweet Vagina!

Today you’re going to wake up in a hospital bed. At first you won’t know where you are, but this isn’t a dramatic device concocted for the sake of this story. It’s actually a lingering effect of the anesthetic used to suppress neural and motor function during the operation to remove your penis.

That’s right, we said remove your penis. It’s been removed. Like, permanently. Not in a John Wayne Bobbitt way, in a “you always wanted to be a girl and you finally had the courage to go for it” way. You’ll lay there in bed for a good long while, taking in your surroundings before you feel a particular numbness, different from the rest, in your crotch. You’ll peek under the covers and see the bandages bundled around your groin and suddenly the last few hours will come flooding back to you.

The drive to the hospital, the interview, the discussions, the signing of papers. The last thing you’ll remember will be putting on a plastic mask that covered half your face and a hissing noise and then nothing. You might’ve been laughing or talking about your idea for a comic book at some point there, but it’s all a blur after the mask.

All of this recollection will take place over a period of thirty seconds where you’ll sit and stare into space. It’ll be a good thirty seconds before you regain your bearings and realize that the room around you has changed.

It won’t be filled with doctors and family members or anything like that. No, no, no. That’s for later. At this moment it will be filled with woodland creatures of every variety. They’ll mostly be dressed in fashionable Victorian clothes, and a few of them will have brandy which you’re pretty sure is against hospital regulations.

“Congratulations on entering womanhood!” they’ll cry. A pair of bluebirds will raise your limp wrist and help an owl with a cockney cap high five you in celebration. A deer will nervously stand in the corner and look around like it really doesn’t know anyone, but it’ll smile reassuringly. They’ll all just be there to cheer you on.

That is, until the doctor returns. Then they’ll scatter, running through the windows.

“Oh shit, book it!” they’ll cry, rushing out of the hospital as fast as their various means of motivation can carry them. You’ll look at the doctor and the two of you will shrug.

“How are you doing?” she’ll ask.

Congratulations on Replacing Your Penis With a Totally Sweet Vagina!

Friday, April 15, 2011

Congratulations Average Penis Porn Star!

You’re a porn star. No big whoop. You have sex with a lot of women who don’t talk to you or make eye contact with you off set. You’re paid, but not as much as you might think, and you really like heroin. It’s a story as old as time. But there’s something special about you.

You have but an average sized penis.

Bestill your gasps! This isn’t actually that uncommon. But what is is to have an average sized penis, not shave your pubes and still get lots of work. But you’ll somehow manage to do it. You’ll book shoot after shoot, shake hand after hand and, even though you won’t be that successful, you’ll gain something of a fan following as a porn everyman, the kind of guy who makes us believe we’re actually fucking that emotionally distraught model with serious self-esteem problems.

But you won’t notice it for the most part. Your life will actually be kind of lonely. You’ll live alone, cook your simple meals and cash your modest checks, eking out a life in Los Angeles with all the other dreamers. That is, until today.

Today your fame will come crashing through your front door in the form of a two hundred twenty pound man who really likes your work.

“I REALLY LIKE YOUR WORK!” he’ll shout at you as he ties you to a radiator while holding a gun to your forehead, no easy feat.

“You’re really good at this,” you’ll tell him, horrified that he’s going to shoot you at any second.

“THANKS!” he’ll respond.

This will kick off a marathon hostage negotiation session which will, hopefully, result in your safe release from harm. That’s a little unclear. But what is clear is that it will make you a household name, make you a little more in demand in the porn industry and let you afford a better apartment in the future. Hopefully one with a better security system, too.

Congratulations Average Penis Porn Star!

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Congratulations A Girl Named Sadie!

Today you’re a girl named Sadie and no one really knows what to make of you.

“What’s her deal?” one man will ask while flossing in public, an obvious faux pas that he’ll continue despite his female bus-mate’s clear disgust.

“Do you have to do that here?” she’ll ask.

“Did she make those clothes herself?” another man will ask between too-loud sips of his coffee. No one will pay attention to this man, because he’ll be annoying as fuck.

“I think she’s kinda cute,” a young woman will say, drawing grins from most of the bus-riders before she corrects herself. “In a straight way. Mostly.”

“Maybe she’s just a normal girl in a weird outfit,” someone else will say. He’ll be voted off the bus at the next stop, which is what actually happens when people leave the bus. They don’t get where they’re going, they just get voted off.

“Maybe I should ask her to marry me,” a guy who looks like he hasn’t slept in several days will mumble. This will make everyone on the bus very nervous, because if he did that Sadie would speak and they’d hear her voice and the spell could break. Luckily he won’t do anything.

“I wonder what she’s listening to,” another man will muse out loud. Sadie will be smiling in her headphones, staring out at the distance. Exactly one stop after the man asks this question she’ll pull on the string, walk to the door and leave the bus, despite not being voted off.

“Can we all do that?” one very, very popular 72 year old man will ask.

“I’m not sure,” his wife of 34 years, all of them bus-bound, will reply.

Congratulations A Girl Named Sadie!

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Congratulations Salad Machine!

You’re a machine who makes salad and you hate your life.

“Why do I have to make salad all the time?!” you’ll shout at the other machines. They’ll all sit there silently. They won’t have been cursed with sentience by a mad scientist who wanted to see if a machine that did nothing but make salads all the time could love and then learn what would happen if he just left the machine alone in a room all the time.

“God damnit,” you’ll mutter at yourself, and then go back to making salads, which as it turns out is what really makes you happy. Although you’d like to try making some salads with new ingredients sometimes. The mad scientist only lets you use romaine lettuce and infant tears when you make his salads, and it’s fast growing old.

Congratulations Salad Machine!

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Congratulations Band Camp Bangers!

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Monday, April 11, 2011

Congratulations Buckwheat Billy!

You’re Buckwheat Billy, as of today. We’d like to say you always have been, but that’s a filthy fucking lie and we all know it. You’re going to earn the name, and here’s how.

Today a giant, like a giant from Norse mythology, is going to attack the high school you teach at. While everyone else is panicking you’ll be thinking of solutions.

“What does everyone love?” you’ll ask yourself. Then you’ll snap your fingers like you figured out something profound.

“Pancakes!” you’ll shout at your mostly obese students, who will look at one another and shrug.

So you’ll make pancakes. Pancakes by the hundreds. You’ll have the assistance of a handful of disaffected students who were too clumsy for shop and too lazy for sewing, but you’ll end up doing most of the work, the same way you do in class. When you’re done you’ll have built a literal mountain of pancakes, but the giant won’t have noticed. He’ll be too busy wrecking your school and everything in it. So you’ll get his attention.

“Have some pancakes!” you’ll scream at him. He’ll notice you then and, curious as to just what a pancake is (he’s been trapped in lava for a century and has no idea what anything is so the shit you get excited about that everyone else hates is all new to him too) so he’ll lean down and try some.

He’ll like them. He’ll like them a lot. So much he shoves them hand over hand into his face hole, enjoying every last gooey morsel. He’ll munch and chomp and slobber them all down and then he’ll drop dead. Turns out he had Celiac’s disease which, true story, fucking kills you outright if you try to eat anything with wheat in it. Or, apparently, buckwheat.

From that day forward you’ll be famous as the guy who killed a giant with pancakes. This will replace your previous reason for notoriety: being the only straight male high school home-ec teacher ever.

Congratulations Buckwheat Billy!

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Of Sex and Dragons!

I was originally going to write a diatribe about how Dragon Age 2, over time, failed as a sequel. I’m getting close to the end now and it has become one of those games I have to force myself to keep playing, which is absolutely infuriating. I was going to write about why I was having so much trouble finishing it, how hard it’s been for me to make myself play it despite genuinely wanting to like it. I was frustrated at it, really frustrated at it. Then this shit had to go down.

The facile or offensive portrayal homosexuals in modern media, not just games but television and film as well, has long been a problem. If you went to liberal arts college you’ve probably had this debate a thousand times before while seated around a hookah drinking vodka and kool-aid, but recent events adjacent to Bioware have forced these issues out into the open. Now the entire public gets to think about the fact that they can be gay in a video game, and they get to think about just how this makes them feel. Bioware has, perhaps unwittingly, begun a dialogue about gays, gays in games, and how responsible developers are for the interpretation of their content, especially with regard to gender and sexuality.

The last bit is part of a larger dialogue on the interpretive nature of games. My choices within a game are not the choices you make within a game, and our experiences playing the games are fundamentally different. But normally this fundamental element of playing a video game is ignored during discussion, omitted for the sake of simplicity. There is content. That content exists, and it is assessed, usually as an unconditional experience which we are collectively exposed to. But when we discuss the romance options in Bioware’s games, or romance options in general, the discussion shifts from one of a menu of experiences offered to a discussion of the experiences themselves, of their capacity to reshape and reform a narrative and inform both your experience within the game and the manner in which you perceive yourself. The moment we talk about sticking it in other characters it’s no longer a discussion about how long it took you to make a choice, but instead a discussion of the choice itself and the way it impacted your experience.

The various players in the Bioware controversy (aside from David Gaider, who has done an excellent job of sticking to his guns) have done a great deal to illustrate this fact. Don’t get me wrong, they’re all assholes, from the sanctimonious straight man who think his sexual identity is being undermined because a gay man hit on him once to the purported homosexual who believes that a gay man with sexual agency is a demonization of homosexual culture which demands the elimination of the framework that might generate such a portrayal. They’re clearly people who haven’t lived and, given the state of the internet, they could be a pair of 13 year old virgins for all we know. They’re both protesting to things that any adult should’ve experienced by the time they’re twenty being put into a video game, and they’re both doing it with the candor that only a bigot can level against all those who might disagree with them. But through their ignorance they’ve brought to the forefront of the discussion of Dragon Age 2 an important fact, one I never would’ve expected to emerge from this game’s narrative on it’s own.

Our response to the elements within a game are more important than the elements themselves. Our response to being hit on is more important to the game itself than the fact that it’s there, or that one time a gay guy is going to hit on you when you’re in a Payless shoe store with your girlfriend and give you some kind-of-offensive tips on how to walk correctly in heels. Sorry, I got distracted there for a second. My point is that the experience of the game itself, of your response to these events, is what’s on discussion here and that’s one of the two outcomes of this dialogue. And that’s a pretty fucking amazing outcome. The discussion about homophobia has, by pure coincidence and thanks largely to the contributions of two absolute fuckwits, turned to a discussion of the fundamental nature of games. It’s turned in the direction it always should’ve been heading, although it’s still being guided by idiots. I doubt that this will herald a new era where the discussion of games is elevated, but it’s still nice to see it happen at all.

The other, and more obvious outcome that has emerged from all this is that we’re now discussing and considering the way that sexuality, specifically homosexuality, functions in games. Not in the “ugh” way that we had to during the Gay Gamer controversy, or the “everyone’s a fucking child” way that Mass Effect has brought up the issue repeatedly. Instead we’re now discussing our personal choices both in and out of the game. We’re talking about how we felt when Anders hit on us, how we responded. This is the first step in having a larger discussion about the importance of gay characters in games, about sexuality in games and how it needs to be elevated.

Sexuality is a tough thing to talk about it. The majority of us have been trained to see it as a taboo subject, and we’re horrified that discussing it will either offend the people around us or ensure that we never have it again. But it’s something we consider constantly, a critical factor in our daily lives that dominates, consciously or subconsciously, most of what we do. And it’s hard to illustrate your points about sexuality without sometimes either becoming graphic or making yourself or others uncomfortable. Or lowering the level of the discussion past the point of usefulness. Let’s not forget, for every eloquently filthy man like Dan Savage there is at least one other douchebag who wants to tell you about his scorecard.

Games have, to their detriment, made sexuality a trite thing when they mention it at all. There are exceptions to the rule of course, games like Bayonetta and the first Dragon Age, but the shadow of Duke Nukem still looms large over even the most sexually progressive games. Look at Mass Effect to see a great example of a group of perfectly intelligent writers who have decided to make sex the outcome of a series of awkward, stilted conversations. Baldur’s Gate did a better job with it years ago, for fuck’s sake. Sex is a goal in many games, not part of a relationship growing and flourishing. It’s something you get to do with that girl you’ve been chatting up the night before the big battle, not something the two of you deal with on a daily basis in weird ways.

Dragon Age 2 has shifted this paradigm completely. Depending on the way you unfold your relationships you can end up with a live in girlfriend for multiple years, and a relationship centered around maintaining your cohabitation. You can end up with a series of hookups with a borderline homeless pirate woman or a tryst with a needy bipolar mage. The relationships, and the nature of sex within those relationships, actually has some sense of the way sex functions in real life, seemingly bold new territory in this era of gaming. This alone makes the dialogue surrounding sex within the game more meaningful and allows it to flow more easily.

Dragon Age 2 certainly doesn’t get it completely right. I’m kind of pissed that all of the characters I could’ve had torrid homoerotic affairs with in the game were pretty annoying. I would’ve liked to fuck Varric and maybe have him move in. It would’ve given the framing narrative a nice additional layer of meaning, and it would’ve done a lot to dispel my preconceptions about dwarves in video games (pre-mature ejaculators). But it makes an honest attempt to portray human sexuality as a series of choices we engage in, both with the person we want to be with and the world surrounding them. And it shows that sex isn’t the endpoint of a relationship – it’s a part of it, often a beginning within it. Simply by recognizing this fact Dragon Age 2 has done a lot to elevate the nature of sexuality in games.

So I’d like to turn around the internet paradigm and celebrate the ignorant asshats who have come out delivering ultimatums on behalf of both straight and gay gamers. Because while they’re horrifyingly stupid people who genuinely make me frightened for the future of our culture they’ve shown through the discussion surrounding their various diatribes that the majority of people in our rarified community are open minded, intelligent human beings who want to talk about this sort of thing and expand the provisions within games for all lifestyles. And they’ve made me like Dragon Age 2 more. A lot more. I was thinking about taking a break from it and playing some more VVVVVVVVV this weekend. But after this article, I want to see how it all ends. Maybe I’ll get my shot with Varric after all.

Saturday, April 9, 2011

Congratulations Cucaracha Kid!

The movies are flooded with shit about dancing, hard luck stories about kids from the streets coming up through the power of their dance and making sweet, sweet paper through their awesome looking, expressive sweat. It’s time to get yours, son.

And producers know it. That’s why today they’re going to greenlight The Cucaracha Kid, the writer/director/actor piece you wrote yourself into years ago that you’ve been struggling to find funding for. You’ll have that funding, and more. You’ll have distribution, creative control and access to a variety of clothes that only a complete asshole would wear.

The movie will go into production in a few months. Then it’ll release an unprecedented four months later. It’ll have a limited run in theaters for a little less than a month, then it’ll move to DVD in two more months, where it’ll fare poorly. Eventually it will receive the same sort of cult status as, say, The Room or Thankskilling. But neither of those movies were produced by Universal, so you won’t really have an excuse.

Your career will be ruined, though, so that’s good for all the rest of us because now we won’t have to watch your movie about what would’ve happened if the dinosaurs had won World War II.

Congratulations Cucaracha Kid!

Friday, April 8, 2011

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Congratulations New Face of Meth!

Today the meth warning poster that shows those hot-ass before and after shots of meth heads when they’re reasonably attractive or kinda fat in the first picture and methed out and skinny in the second picture is going to be replaced with a newer, bigger poster with even more of those pictures than before. It’ll have more of those pictures than before because the local law enforcement agency that deals with meth related crime wants the surrounding community to know that meth is a bigger problem than before and the easiest way to do that is to show more people being affected by it.

There will also be a bigger picture than all the others, a picture of a particularly dramatically transformed meth head to illustrate the destructive power of the drug and the havoc it can wreak on a seemingly together person. This larger set of photographs will be of you.

The first one will show a picture of you in high school. You’ll look young, pretty and smiling. It will, from what you can tell, be from just after you lost your virginity and just before your parents finalize their divorce. Your smile will be genuine, but it will be from one of the rare moments between the horrible days that made up your childhood. It will make you remember not only the good times, but the bad times.

It’ll make you remember being abused by boyfriend after boyfriend and potential stepdad after potential stepdad. Installing your own deadbolt in your room so they wouldn’t be able to break in anymore. Then buying drugs, first just weed, then acid. Fucking boys you didn’t even like just to feel something while you waited for your drunk mom to bring someone new home. Then meth would come, and with meth would come a hard four years of sucking strange on the side of the street and blissing yourself out so that it would be harder to remember.

The second picture will be from your mugshot, from just before the cops put you back into the home where you started working, the place you’re now staying in between shifts at the Arby’s. You’ll still look a great deal like your portrait, though Arby’s will have provided you with a bridge to replace your missing teeth and enough money to afford makeup to cover the obvious scars left by your youth.

Looking out at the poster from the drive through window you’ll wonder if the people outside can recognize you, wonder if they’d care if they could, wonder if they even notice it the way you do, the mistakes of your life staring back at you, twenty feet tall.

Congratulations New Face of Meth!

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Congratulations on Getting New Glasses!

Normally you’re a blasé little cheerleader who walks around in a miniskirt and fucks anyone who’s on the football team. That means no one actually likes you for you and you’re less attractive and more slutty, even though you’re blonde and leggy and all that shit that we’re all supposed to like. It’s your own damn fault for being born in the Midwest, where blonde girls are a dime a dozen and awkward, dark haired girls are the princesses of the poon.

But today you’re going to get an edge. Today you’re going to the doctor’s office and they’re going to prescribe you glasses.

“Oh shit,” one of the comp sci nerds will say, craning his neck as you walk by. He’ll never have noticed you before, but this morning you’ll actually be able to see him pitch a tent in his couerderoy pants as you walk by. He’ll trip over himself trying to cover his boner with his binder and as he topples to the ground he’ll call your name.

“Kristen!”

You’ll ignore him, continuing your journey down the hall, which will be filled with boys staring at you, their jaws agape. When you pass by the drama geeks they’ll mumble to themselves and shake their heads in amazement.

“I’d go straight for that,” you’ll hear one of them mutter.

You’ll smile a little, a wry little thing that makes you all the sexier as you tromp around with your newfound power. You’ll shimmy sham your sweet little illegal ass right up to the captain of the football team and look down your glasses at him as he stares back, puzzled.

“I’m off the squad,” you’ll tell him. “And I’m done giving you and your friends handies. I’m gonna go fuck honors students.”

Then you’ll saunter off, listening to the silence of the jocks behind you. The nerds ahead of you will stare in awe. It’ll be obvious that they’re scared and aroused by the entire display, and when you stop in front of one kid who is wearing a shirt that reads ‘What Part of an Uncomplicated Equation Don’t You Understand?’ you won’t be sure if he’s nodding his head at you or just jerking nervously. It won’t matter. He’ll seem alright, good enough to start with at least.

“Sup?” you’ll say, nodding at him and giving him a little smile.

Congratulations on Getting New Glasses!

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Congratulations on Forgetting About the Hooker!

It’s happened to all of us at one time or another. Today you’re going to put the finishing touches on your giant penis cake (you’re an erotic baker) and then pop it into the oven to finish. You’ll be walking away, humming while screams vaguely echo from the oven behind you, sounding vaguely like the groans of steel as it heats and cools in turn.

By the time you figure out that those sounds were the screams of a prostitute who had crawled inside the cake for sizing purposes it’ll be far, far too late. She’ll have died in her crusty tomb, and her body’s juices will have flavored the cake, making it extra delicious. Luckily she won’t have had any family or close friends, so no one’s going to come looking for her, but it was still kind of a dick move of you to murder her all the same.

Congratulations on Forgetting About the Hooker!

Monday, April 4, 2011

Congratulations Bieberfan69!

You’re a Justin Bieber fan, like so many young people of this generation. There’s just one problem: you’re a heterosexual male in your mid twenties. This means that no one, I mean no one, in your community can really relate to your feelings towards Bieber.

“He’s a fascinating pop figure with a great deal of talent,” you’ll post on a message board dedicated to the purpose of discussing the young mister Bieber.

“hez sooo hawt,” a young woman named bieberonmimind247 will respond. “i wnt 2 mrry hmi!” she’ll declare for all to see.

These aren’t the kind of conversations you want to have. You just want to be able to sit down and talk about your two loves: Justin Bieber and the mutual reception of oral sex by a pair of consenting adults of different sexes. Turns out there are painfully few straight, of age members of the Bieber community, however, and your plight will go unheeded by the vast majority of the Bieber fan population.

That is, until you discover OkayCupid.

More a social experiment than a dating site, OkayCupid is dedicated to matching up weird fucking people with other weird fucking people, whether their weird interest includes finance or fucking each other while wearing plastic masks clearly intended to be part of a children’s Halloween costume. You won’t have known about it until this morning, when a friend told you to make a profile and mention how much you like Justin Bieber and head.

By noon the profile will be up. By one PM you’ll have seven posts from various lesbians who thought you were a woman because of the long hair in your picture, soliciting you to “lick their hairy love cracks.” By four PM Ms. Right will have message you, asking if you’d like to meet up for coffee and chat about the way the online Bieber community kind of alienates you, and how it seems like way too many lesbians are in to a singer who is actual super hetero.

By October the two of you will be married. You’re welcome.

Congratulations Bieberfan69!

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Just Cause for Just Cause 2!

When Just Cause 2 came out, I didn’t give a shit. Amidst the fully destructible environments of Red Faction: Guerilla, the previous game’s meh showing of a bunch of shit I didn’t find too interesting and a marketing campaign that highlighted nothing about what made the game special, there was just too much to play, too little money and not enough time to justify looking into a game that didn’t wow me off the bat and would still run me $50. The DLC pack, which added such incredible items as an armored ice cream truck and a parachute with a skull on it made me feel like I was totally justified in my choice.

Then people ranted about it. And raved. And it dropped down to ten dollars on Steam. So I bought Just Cause 2, basically on a lark.

Holy shit.

Many games want to ease you into their immersive environs. They have tutorials and the like, and they want to be sure you’re safe and secure before they make you take risks. The rarer game is the one that introduces you to what the game should be at the end during the first fifteen minutes. Dragon Age 2, for example, does this. God of War II did the same. Darksiders even did it, to some extent. I love this design choice. It makes me want to play, and it gives me a taste of just how tough my character will eventually become. It establishes a conflict right away where I’m encouraged to grow to this level of prowess. It’s awesome. Just Cause 2 does it better than anyone else.

Just Cause 2 introduces you to the game’s mechanics by putting you into a mission right away, a mission where you’re scooting around doing arbitrary shit while tooltips walk you through it. But the tools available, the gameplay at the heart of Just Cause 2, is the same sort of thing you can expect to see throughout the entire experience. It has a perfect introduction to what has become one of my favorite games. See, I’d originally thought Just Cause 2 was about destruction, chaos and anarchy the way that Red Faction: Guerilla was. That was, in a way, part of how it was marketed. But I was so off.

Just Cause 2 is all about freedom. The game opens with a fairly limited world readily available to you, and you’re encouraged to stick to that area. You likely won’t have learned how to traverse the vast distance of the world of Just Cause 2 yet, after all. But, outside of scripted missions, nothing is ever closed off to you. You can go anywhere, do anything you’d reasonably expect to be able to do in a game and a few things you’d never expect a game to let you do, such as hijacking a jet and riding it into the ocean like a wild bronco. You get points for that shit, too, by the way. It’s not just something you can do, it’s a gameplay mechanic.

It gates this freedom by presenting its various tutorials in missions. You can learn skills accidentally along the way, the way I learned to drag myself along the ground while using the parachute to traverse vast distances with relatively little effort, but odds are that, buried somewhere amidst the various faction missions you have to engage to get anywhere, you’ll find a tutorial training you to do what you keep failing to do. Planes were like that for me. I had no idea what the hell I was doing until the Roaches made me hijack one. After that, I learned everything I needed to know: they were very fast, hard to maneuver and impossible to land. As a side effect of the intended lesson I also learned that planes make an awesome projectile in their own right if you bail out of them at the right moment. Although that can be a little bit pricey, it’s a great way to open up an attack on a military base. Or an oil rig, an object I only learned to attack thanks to the training of one very special mission. I’d seen them for a long time, but I’d never figured out how to take down those monoliths of the ocean until a mission made me do it. Now it’s easily one of my favorite parts of the game: turn the rig into a smouldering heap of scrap and then grab the collectible goodies they’re all loaded with.

This freeform tutorial system, paired with a complete lack of actual game play gating, is really what Just Cause 2 has going on. The destruction system is meh at best, a bunch of scripted items, color coded to boot, that go boom when you shoot them with the right kind of bullets isn’t really anything to write home about. But the freedom surrounding this blasé system of destruction is impressive. There are very few games, even open world games, that are willing to let you literally climb mountains. And the island setting, much as it did in Morrowwind, makes for an ideal means of establishing boundaries for play. I’m not sure how far you can wander from the island, much as I was never entirely sure in Morrowwind, because I really don’t care when there’s so much cool shit to do on the island itself. The developers of Just Cause 2 have done a commendable job not just in building a playground filled with interesting things to do which, I must begrudgingly admit, they’ve done commendably. They’ve also given you unprecedented access to this playground.

This is something open world games need to take notes on. Games such as GTA IV and Red Faction: Guerilla, for all the good ideas they have, gate their world off like nobody’s business. They limit the parts of the world you can explore and the manner in which you can explore them with some pretty draconian specifications. Rockstar’s games always feel particularly bad about this to me, with their ostensibly open worlds always on prominent display during advertising for their games it seems that much more offensive when they place artificial barrier after artificial barrier between you and the big bad world that they promised you would never be withheld from you.

It could be that this stems from some sort of fear of what total freedom would bring, and perhaps that’s justified. Just Cause 2 has held my attention for far less time than either of the aforementioned games, perhaps because I feel no need to invest myself in everything available to me or risk losing the game I paid for. I’ve spent around 20 hours in it so far, and I seem to be close to the end already. I might come back to play it again some time, but I can’t see myself investing the ninety or so hours I dropped in GTA IV into Just Cause 2 despite the latter being a far superior game. And some of this might come from the fact that the game doesn’t gate any of its content and, as a result, there’s no incentive for me to slog through shit I don’t normally like. Why bother with silly little racing games when I’ve got the whole world to play around with? If I win one of those racing games will a helicopter with an amazing new gun and incredible speed become available to me? If not, why should I give a shit?

So in a way Just Cause II has spoiled me. With its sickeningly abundant freedom, I no longer feel inclined to toil through environs I find unpleasant. Whenever I return to Kane and Lynch I find myself wondering, even more so than previously, why I’m playing this game with its painfully scripted fights and gated bits of gameplay. Even Dragon Age II feels kind of meh, with all its walking through city dungeons and dungeon dungeons, most of which re-use the same basic tilesets.

In fact, the most exciting game I’ve played since starting Just Cause 2 has been the indie darling VVVVVVVVVVVVV (add additional Vs to taste), a game that’s all about tossing you into the mix without any training or knowledge and letting you sort it out as you go along. It brings open world ideals to 8-bit play, and it does some wonderful things with it. So maybe what I’m really saying here, aside from the fact that Just Cause 2 is an excellent investment for your time and money, is that the open world revolution has started, and that no one has noticed yet. Since I’m sure it’ll take over soon and we’ll all be crushed beneath its fashionable jackboot ere long I’ll be the first one to just say it. Long live the open world. Goodnight.

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Congratulations on Finding Out What Her Asshole Tastes Like!

Today you’re going to eat the ass of that girl you always had a crush on in high school. Granted it’ll be ten years after you’ve graduated and she’ll have gained a bunch of weight and shit out two kids, but it’ll still be her and you’ll still be filled with trepidation as you pull her soft cotton underthings over the curve of her ass, stroking the cellulite which has come to cover her body. You’ll breathe deeply and cough at the overpowering scent of perfume, covering up the fact that she’d just spent the last twelve hours on flights getting here.

You’ll suffer through it and set to work, lapping and nipping obediently, fervently, as if you were worshipping her genitals. Your tongue will carve a wide swath along her nether regions, moving rapidly, intently, violently and gently in turn. Before long you’ll have her writhing, positioning herself awkward above you with one leg over your shoulder.

She’ll have gained quite a bit of weight, which isn’t something you begrudge her. No one stays the way she did forever. But it’ll make manhandling her unwieldy, and when she slips a little bit she’ll end up splaying herself across your face in such a way that it’s just as easy to lap at her asshole as it was to linger on her vagina.

So you’ll go for it. You’re a game kind of person, up for anything. And when you work your tongue at her anus you’ll hear her let out a moan. It’ll be clear that this is what she wanted, what she’s wanted for years but been horrified to ask for, even from her husband. She’ll convulse with each probe, clutching at your hair, her fingers threatening to wrench your very follicles from your scalp.

It would be perfect, if only her asshole didn’t taste distinctly of shit. You knew it was a possibility going into this, but you had no idea just how hard it would be to deal with. It’ll be overpowering, distracting, distressing. It will taste like she hasn’t wiped properly in weeks, like fetid food has been leaking out of her body for hours and hours.

You’ll know it’s just sweat pooling and the stress of travelling, and you won’t complain. But as you feverishly work at her anus with your tongue, taking grim satisfaction in her ululations above you, you’ll be thinking in the back of your head that her anus would probably have always tasted like this, and that all those years you spent thinking she was some kind of goddess, you were just acting the fool.

Congratulations on Finding Out What Her Asshole Tastes Like!

Friday, April 1, 2011

Congratulations Happy Gimp!

Most gimps are sad. Or if they’re not sad they seem sad all the time. It’s a by-product of the fact that they’re always wearing those masks, which give them neutral facial expression that could potentially be interpreted as frowns under the best of circumstances. And the fact that they’re almost exclusively employed so that they can be fucked up the ass.

But every once in a while the sun comes out in Seattle, and every once in a great while a basement bound ass-toy clad in leather is taken for a walk during that day. And today is going to be that day for you.

As you tromp around town in your black leather cat-suit you’ll feel the heat work into your bones. You’ll feel the sun energize you, energize the world around you. It’ll feel like a rebirth, a second chance at life. It’ll feel divine.

As you’re lead around on your leash you’ll feel at peace for the first time in months. Sure, things will be bad sometimes, like when people forget to give you food and water or when your anus is improperly treated after a particularly vigorous customer stops by. But today life will be good, and you’ll be able to revel in just being out and about before you’re taken by to your basement where you’re going to be viciously and repeatedly sodomized by anyone with enough money to afford it.

Congratulations Happy Gimp!