After that squirrel shot your captor, the bizarre and unsuccessful serial killer who was so upset about the low quality of the pasta-like product your factory produced, you thought you were done for. But then you remember high school science (your teacher made a lot of shit up) and remembered that squirrels have the unique ability among rodents to reason.
“Look squirrel,” you’ll begin.
Then the squirrel will panic at the sound of your voice and shoot you in the stomach with its gun, which it will be surprisingly adept at using by now.
“This might be considered irony,” you’ll mumble to yourself as you lose consciousness, killed by the hubris that made you think you could pass a product that only met 80% of your company’s requirements through to the market and suffer no repercussions. May hell’s fires greet you.
Congratulations on Making a Deal with That Squirrel!
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Monday, May 30, 2011
Congratulations on Finishing All the Spaghetti!
Most people held accountable for their sins are put on trial or subject to the harsh measures of “street justice” that we all read about and watched in films in the seventies. So really, you’re going to be getting off easy when a crazy guy who ate some sub-standard Chef Boyardee that you let go through your factory gets pissed off and kidnaps you to torture you, forcing you to eat the same product you unwittingly made him consume.
“PAY FOR WHAT YOU’VE DONE!” he’ll scream at you through his hockey mask, which will have been painted to look a little bit like a tiger.
“This isn’t really that bad,” you’ll tell him as you continue eating the spaghetti. The Goldberg machine he made will still be ticking down while you eat, the clocks hands moving towards the moment where they’ll knock the egg timer into play and the jumping egg timer will startle the squirrel in the cage with the gun, where it will respond by shooting you in the gut. But it won’t feel urgent since he’ll only have asked you to eat a can and tell him that it didn’t ruin your life.
“NOT THAT BAD?!” he’ll say. Then he’ll pull out pictures of the Holocaust. “LOOK AT THIS!”
“That seems broad,” you’ll calmly tell him. “Also, it’s not great, but it’s not awful. Definitely still within our standards.” And with that word you’ll finish the last bite. “Could I go now?”
He’ll sigh and shake his head. “I suppose so.”
The madman will get up from the throne he fashioned from Chef Boyardee cans and move to unlock you from your chains, but his movement will startle the squirrel who, until then, was just kind of chilling out and watching the two of you have at it.
“No!” you’ll cry as you watch the crazy guy who kidnapped you bleed out on the floor.
“How ironic…” he’ll mutter just before losing consciousness, denying you the opportunity to correct him on his use of irony.
Congratulations on Finishing All the Spaghetti!
“PAY FOR WHAT YOU’VE DONE!” he’ll scream at you through his hockey mask, which will have been painted to look a little bit like a tiger.
“This isn’t really that bad,” you’ll tell him as you continue eating the spaghetti. The Goldberg machine he made will still be ticking down while you eat, the clocks hands moving towards the moment where they’ll knock the egg timer into play and the jumping egg timer will startle the squirrel in the cage with the gun, where it will respond by shooting you in the gut. But it won’t feel urgent since he’ll only have asked you to eat a can and tell him that it didn’t ruin your life.
“NOT THAT BAD?!” he’ll say. Then he’ll pull out pictures of the Holocaust. “LOOK AT THIS!”
“That seems broad,” you’ll calmly tell him. “Also, it’s not great, but it’s not awful. Definitely still within our standards.” And with that word you’ll finish the last bite. “Could I go now?”
He’ll sigh and shake his head. “I suppose so.”
The madman will get up from the throne he fashioned from Chef Boyardee cans and move to unlock you from your chains, but his movement will startle the squirrel who, until then, was just kind of chilling out and watching the two of you have at it.
“No!” you’ll cry as you watch the crazy guy who kidnapped you bleed out on the floor.
“How ironic…” he’ll mutter just before losing consciousness, denying you the opportunity to correct him on his use of irony.
Congratulations on Finishing All the Spaghetti!
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Actual Review of Brink!
I love Brink so much, it’s hard to imagine how much I hate it at times. Brink is that crazy girlfriend you have who is absolutely incredible in bed but makes your life an absolute nightmare outside of the bedroom. If Brink were a woman she’d shave your cat and call it fashionable. She’d make you drink every night of the week and she’d give you a handjob in the high-occupancy lane of the highway while you’re going ninety just to see how you’d react.
I’m exaggerating, of course. Brink’s low points aren’t actually that low, despite what you may have heard. But I’m getting ahead of myself. What is Brink?
Brink is a multiplayer shooter released by Splash Damage which follows most of the traditions Splash Damage has lain out in their previous games. It relies on objective centered game play which demands the coordination and cooperation of a number of different classes in order to achieve or prevent the achievement of a set of objectives. Victory depends on how well your team coordinates towards these ends and how well you understand what the class you’re playing is supposed to be doing at any given time. Brink is full of tiny moving parts, so this last part is actually really tricky. Playing it correctly can be slippery, but there are few things as satisfying as working side by side with six of your teammates to accomplish an objective.
But that’s old hat to anyone who played Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Brink brings revolution to bear in the manner in which it asks players to gate their own ability to move and use equipment. In most team based shooters you’re provided with a set of guns based on the class you choose. Not so with Brink! Brink gives you the same guns regardless of your class choice. Instead you’re asked to choose a body type before the match begins. This body type won’t impact the abilities of your class or your ability to perform any objective-specific actions. Instead it impacts your ability to move freely through maps, absorb damage and equip weapons.
Light body types will fly across the battlefield, darting in and out of combat when expertly controlled. But their access to weapons is severely limited, and Light body types will go down a lot faster than their Medium and Heavy counterparts. Heavy body types, on the other hand, can carry some pretty sweet gear. They’re the only character types who can carry the high damage and big clip machine guns that any player who isn’t a Heavy will quickly learn to hate. They can even carry full size assault rifles and grenade launchers as their secondary weapon. To put this in context, Light body types can only choose between a variety of pistols. Medium body types, the balance between these extremes, are still relatively limited to a set of submachine guns and sniper rifles that are often ill-suited to the fast paced play of Brink. But Heavy characters are bigger targets, and they move at a crawl compared to other characters. They respond more slowly to nearly every kind of stimulus and, because of all these factors, they’re all too often the first target in a firefight.
The end result of this new system of equipment, body type and class selection is a very familiar style of play with some fresh new twists. Movement, as the tutorial isn’t afraid to tell you, is a lot more important in Brink than it is in other games. In fact you’ll be hard pressed to crack a well prepared defense or counter a well coordinated assault without a solid understanding of the mechanics of motion and the flow of a level. All of this still contributes to the pursuit of concrete primary objectives, several of which must be accomplished in order to win a match, and there are secondary objectives aplenty for players who want a slightly less intense experience at any given moment. But coordination of movement and the equal footing offered to various classes in terms of combat capability is a bit of a game changer for Brink.
It means that cooperation is that much more important. Every single class has some critical function, not only with regard to accomplishing objectives. Every class in Brink is a support class. A medic, an engineer, a soldier and an operative working as a team all have specific jobs in addition to shooting bad guys, and knowing what those jobs are and performing them well is more important in Brink than it has been in any other game in recent memory. Including Quake Wars, which was already quite demanding in its expectation of players to know their role. In Brink you’ll be expected to be helping your teammates second to second. Buffing each other, keeping track of the health, ammo and supply of your companions, all of these things are necessary. And if you don’t keep track of them you’re going to lose matches.
This is where Brink gets kind of frustrating. It’s difficult to say that a primarily multiplayer game is just straight out hard, but Brink fits the bill. It’s demanding, and it’s not going to tell you just what you should be doing at any given moment. There are certainly cues. Medics should be healing friendlies with low health, Soldiers should be tossing out ammo when they can and Engineers should always be buffing. But what about the special grenades and hacks provided to Operatives? What about Metabolism buffs available to Medics and the bevy of formation disrupting grenades that Soldiers have to choose from? How can Engineers use their turrets and mines to help out offensively?
Players who know their role expertly are a pleasure to play with, and make Brink a fantastic experience. Even losing with a good team on your side can feel good, the mark of a well-crafted game. But playing with novice players, or players who are simply uninterested in the mechanics of the game can be infuriating. Brink has plenty of these people – Medics who run past downed teammates without even thinking to toss them a revive syringe, Soldiers who don’t toss ammo to their teammates, Engineers who don’t buff anyone but themselves. And while it’s an overstatement to say that players like this ruin Brink for people who want to experience it, it does make the game frustrating at times.
It’s a petty frustration when you compare it to the learning curve of Brink. Brink is more than willing to let you flail about all on your own and never realize a crucial piece of information about the game. While it has a nice set of “Challenges,” what Splash Damage opted to call their training missions, following Blizzard’s lead in StarCraft 2, these challenges only touch on the basics of play and none of them, not a one, offers any useful feedback on how to play the crucial Medic class. And playing through the campaign alone will do little more than familiarize you with the layout of the levels. While that sort of knowledge is pretty important to Brink, given how many new ideas Brink brings to the table it’s far from the most important thing for new players to learn.
But that’s how new games work sometimes. When a game emerges with new ideas and concepts behind it it takes the community time to adjust. And Brink shows strong signs of growing into this adjustment after less than two weeks as a fully grown game. Sure, it has its fair share of problems, and new players will face some pretty serious challenges in learning the finer points of play. But despite all of these issues Brink remains one of the most impressive games I’ve played in recent memory, and the new ideas it brings to bear are well worth the effort it asks of you to engage them.
I’m exaggerating, of course. Brink’s low points aren’t actually that low, despite what you may have heard. But I’m getting ahead of myself. What is Brink?
Brink is a multiplayer shooter released by Splash Damage which follows most of the traditions Splash Damage has lain out in their previous games. It relies on objective centered game play which demands the coordination and cooperation of a number of different classes in order to achieve or prevent the achievement of a set of objectives. Victory depends on how well your team coordinates towards these ends and how well you understand what the class you’re playing is supposed to be doing at any given time. Brink is full of tiny moving parts, so this last part is actually really tricky. Playing it correctly can be slippery, but there are few things as satisfying as working side by side with six of your teammates to accomplish an objective.
But that’s old hat to anyone who played Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Brink brings revolution to bear in the manner in which it asks players to gate their own ability to move and use equipment. In most team based shooters you’re provided with a set of guns based on the class you choose. Not so with Brink! Brink gives you the same guns regardless of your class choice. Instead you’re asked to choose a body type before the match begins. This body type won’t impact the abilities of your class or your ability to perform any objective-specific actions. Instead it impacts your ability to move freely through maps, absorb damage and equip weapons.
Light body types will fly across the battlefield, darting in and out of combat when expertly controlled. But their access to weapons is severely limited, and Light body types will go down a lot faster than their Medium and Heavy counterparts. Heavy body types, on the other hand, can carry some pretty sweet gear. They’re the only character types who can carry the high damage and big clip machine guns that any player who isn’t a Heavy will quickly learn to hate. They can even carry full size assault rifles and grenade launchers as their secondary weapon. To put this in context, Light body types can only choose between a variety of pistols. Medium body types, the balance between these extremes, are still relatively limited to a set of submachine guns and sniper rifles that are often ill-suited to the fast paced play of Brink. But Heavy characters are bigger targets, and they move at a crawl compared to other characters. They respond more slowly to nearly every kind of stimulus and, because of all these factors, they’re all too often the first target in a firefight.
The end result of this new system of equipment, body type and class selection is a very familiar style of play with some fresh new twists. Movement, as the tutorial isn’t afraid to tell you, is a lot more important in Brink than it is in other games. In fact you’ll be hard pressed to crack a well prepared defense or counter a well coordinated assault without a solid understanding of the mechanics of motion and the flow of a level. All of this still contributes to the pursuit of concrete primary objectives, several of which must be accomplished in order to win a match, and there are secondary objectives aplenty for players who want a slightly less intense experience at any given moment. But coordination of movement and the equal footing offered to various classes in terms of combat capability is a bit of a game changer for Brink.
It means that cooperation is that much more important. Every single class has some critical function, not only with regard to accomplishing objectives. Every class in Brink is a support class. A medic, an engineer, a soldier and an operative working as a team all have specific jobs in addition to shooting bad guys, and knowing what those jobs are and performing them well is more important in Brink than it has been in any other game in recent memory. Including Quake Wars, which was already quite demanding in its expectation of players to know their role. In Brink you’ll be expected to be helping your teammates second to second. Buffing each other, keeping track of the health, ammo and supply of your companions, all of these things are necessary. And if you don’t keep track of them you’re going to lose matches.
This is where Brink gets kind of frustrating. It’s difficult to say that a primarily multiplayer game is just straight out hard, but Brink fits the bill. It’s demanding, and it’s not going to tell you just what you should be doing at any given moment. There are certainly cues. Medics should be healing friendlies with low health, Soldiers should be tossing out ammo when they can and Engineers should always be buffing. But what about the special grenades and hacks provided to Operatives? What about Metabolism buffs available to Medics and the bevy of formation disrupting grenades that Soldiers have to choose from? How can Engineers use their turrets and mines to help out offensively?
Players who know their role expertly are a pleasure to play with, and make Brink a fantastic experience. Even losing with a good team on your side can feel good, the mark of a well-crafted game. But playing with novice players, or players who are simply uninterested in the mechanics of the game can be infuriating. Brink has plenty of these people – Medics who run past downed teammates without even thinking to toss them a revive syringe, Soldiers who don’t toss ammo to their teammates, Engineers who don’t buff anyone but themselves. And while it’s an overstatement to say that players like this ruin Brink for people who want to experience it, it does make the game frustrating at times.
It’s a petty frustration when you compare it to the learning curve of Brink. Brink is more than willing to let you flail about all on your own and never realize a crucial piece of information about the game. While it has a nice set of “Challenges,” what Splash Damage opted to call their training missions, following Blizzard’s lead in StarCraft 2, these challenges only touch on the basics of play and none of them, not a one, offers any useful feedback on how to play the crucial Medic class. And playing through the campaign alone will do little more than familiarize you with the layout of the levels. While that sort of knowledge is pretty important to Brink, given how many new ideas Brink brings to the table it’s far from the most important thing for new players to learn.
But that’s how new games work sometimes. When a game emerges with new ideas and concepts behind it it takes the community time to adjust. And Brink shows strong signs of growing into this adjustment after less than two weeks as a fully grown game. Sure, it has its fair share of problems, and new players will face some pretty serious challenges in learning the finer points of play. But despite all of these issues Brink remains one of the most impressive games I’ve played in recent memory, and the new ideas it brings to bear are well worth the effort it asks of you to engage them.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Congratulations Codpiece Model!
You’re a codpiece model, and that means you spend all day wearing codpieces. Sometimes just codpieces. It’s tough work.
“I’m more than just a crotch,” you’ll scoff whenever someone checks out your dick-region.
“Huh?” they’ll normally respond, having briefly been hypnotized by your dick. But by then you’ll have left them in the grocery line to contemplate their purchase of Funyuns over Fritos (always a mistake). As you can imagine, this sort of exchange is quite normal in your life, and it makes forming relationships quite a chore.
So today you’re going to ecstatic when you meet a blind woman who is reasonably attractive. “Huh?” she’ll say when she bumps into you while trying to ask for a table at Chick-Fil-A.
“Oh hello,” you’ll say, stroking your crotch in a way you assume she can’t notice at all.
“It sounds like you’re stroking your crotch,” she’ll say, proving you wrong.
“Well played,” you’ll mutter under your breath, falling in love instantly.
Congratulations Codpiece Model!
“I’m more than just a crotch,” you’ll scoff whenever someone checks out your dick-region.
“Huh?” they’ll normally respond, having briefly been hypnotized by your dick. But by then you’ll have left them in the grocery line to contemplate their purchase of Funyuns over Fritos (always a mistake). As you can imagine, this sort of exchange is quite normal in your life, and it makes forming relationships quite a chore.
So today you’re going to ecstatic when you meet a blind woman who is reasonably attractive. “Huh?” she’ll say when she bumps into you while trying to ask for a table at Chick-Fil-A.
“Oh hello,” you’ll say, stroking your crotch in a way you assume she can’t notice at all.
“It sounds like you’re stroking your crotch,” she’ll say, proving you wrong.
“Well played,” you’ll mutter under your breath, falling in love instantly.
Congratulations Codpiece Model!
Friday, May 27, 2011
Congratulations on Discovering Lazy Boys!
You’re an overweight white man, so there are actually quite a few products that have been made just for you. Fruit Rollups, pickup trucks and Rascal Scooters. But none are quite so dedicated to the retention and advancement of fat white people as the Lazy Boy recliner, a chair whose very name emphasizes how much of a waste of life its users are. Therein lies the irony. You, possibly the laziest of boys, have yet to discover the amazing relaxation afforded to you by a Lazy Boy recliner.
Today that will be rectified.
You’ll be riding your Rascal through a Sears department store, pausing occasionally to use your little grabby-thing to pull various items off of shelves, occasionally into your Rascal’s shopping basket, and you’ll be feeling unusually melancholy.
Normally this feeling is just a side effect of your heart dying at an accelerated pace. But today it’ll be more profound, more emotional in nature. It’ll be the creeping sadness that strikes your lungs and tells you that everything everywhere is horrible and that if you don’t find the true light of the world you will surely die with this feeling wrapped around your heart like a boa constrictor.
This feeling will chase you throughout the Sears superstore as you wander its halls to grab items and, occasionally, just scatter shit to the floor to watch some hapless employee pick it up minutes later, glaring at your fat ass while he does so. This will make you feel a little better each time, but not enough to risk potentially being kicked out of Sears.
So after a while you’ll just wander. You’ll drive past the big-screen TVs, zoom through the garden supply section, chortling at the young people as they purchase seeds and trowels, and pause occasionally in the air conditioner section to think about what being hit by a falling air conditioner would feel like. These misadventures will provide you with a brief distraction, but their true purpose will quickly become clear when you stumble upon a section of furniture dedicated exclusively to lounging.
The concept of lounging will be super appealing on its own to you. But when you spy the variety of lounging apparatus available to you you’ll immediately start calculating just how much that fat ass disability check of yours can buy.
You’ll survey dozens of couches, considering their sit-ability with your eye, but you’ll be very careful not to actually sit down on any because you’d most likely break them and then you’d have to pay for them which isn’t in your day planner. You’ll eye each one carefully, imagining what it would be like to realize that you have to take a dump while seated on it, how hard it would be to get up. And that’s when you’ll see her.
She’ll be a Lazy Boy recliner with a method of “ejection” designed primarily to help the elderly get to their feet. She’ll be capable of supporting two metric tons without buckling and she’ll have buttons that prevent you from doing any actual work if you want to recline.
At that moment you’ll fall in love.
Congratulations on Discovering Lazy Boys!
Today that will be rectified.
You’ll be riding your Rascal through a Sears department store, pausing occasionally to use your little grabby-thing to pull various items off of shelves, occasionally into your Rascal’s shopping basket, and you’ll be feeling unusually melancholy.
Normally this feeling is just a side effect of your heart dying at an accelerated pace. But today it’ll be more profound, more emotional in nature. It’ll be the creeping sadness that strikes your lungs and tells you that everything everywhere is horrible and that if you don’t find the true light of the world you will surely die with this feeling wrapped around your heart like a boa constrictor.
This feeling will chase you throughout the Sears superstore as you wander its halls to grab items and, occasionally, just scatter shit to the floor to watch some hapless employee pick it up minutes later, glaring at your fat ass while he does so. This will make you feel a little better each time, but not enough to risk potentially being kicked out of Sears.
So after a while you’ll just wander. You’ll drive past the big-screen TVs, zoom through the garden supply section, chortling at the young people as they purchase seeds and trowels, and pause occasionally in the air conditioner section to think about what being hit by a falling air conditioner would feel like. These misadventures will provide you with a brief distraction, but their true purpose will quickly become clear when you stumble upon a section of furniture dedicated exclusively to lounging.
The concept of lounging will be super appealing on its own to you. But when you spy the variety of lounging apparatus available to you you’ll immediately start calculating just how much that fat ass disability check of yours can buy.
You’ll survey dozens of couches, considering their sit-ability with your eye, but you’ll be very careful not to actually sit down on any because you’d most likely break them and then you’d have to pay for them which isn’t in your day planner. You’ll eye each one carefully, imagining what it would be like to realize that you have to take a dump while seated on it, how hard it would be to get up. And that’s when you’ll see her.
She’ll be a Lazy Boy recliner with a method of “ejection” designed primarily to help the elderly get to their feet. She’ll be capable of supporting two metric tons without buckling and she’ll have buttons that prevent you from doing any actual work if you want to recline.
At that moment you’ll fall in love.
Congratulations on Discovering Lazy Boys!
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Congratulations Effete Weight Lifter!
You’re a super buff dude who lifts weights all the time. It’s your thing. You’re jacked, huge, whatever thing you like to say about people who are big and strong and tough. But there’s one little problem: you’re kind of fey.
You’re not gay. That would be kind of awesome, since you’re surrounded by dudes who work out and clearly like other dudes who work out all the time. You’re just really girly. You lisp and wear pink tank tops and short shorts. You’re gay and super buff.
Suffice it to say you’re in an awkward spot socially. The gay weightlifters, the balance of the crowd, all want to fuck you. This means they’re unwilling to form real friendships with you. And the straight weightlifters are all threatened by the fact that you make them question their sexuality and the security you have with yourself. Most weightlifters are driven by a serious insecurity towards crafting and honing their bodies into tools for combating the issues they could never bring up with their fathers, and someone with self-esteem who just likes rigorous exercise drives those assholes crazy.
So most of your time at the gym is just spent working on your lats or quads or whatever. It really doesn’t matter what bullshit terminology you apply, it’s mostly spent isolating yourself from the environment you’ve built around yourself. But today you’re going to find your niche.
Today your gym is going to come under fire from a richer, more popular gym. That gym is going to be filled with assholes. Bigger assholes than the people populating your gym, which is no mean feat. And these assholes will be bent on nothing less than the total annexation of your gym and all associated gym-going activities. Suffice it to say this will be totally uncool.
So you’ll do what you have to do as a gym go-er who plans on defending his gym: you’ll challenge the rival gym to a weight-lifting off.
When you arrive the rival gym will have fancier uniforms, more aggression and an Asian dude who will just be hanging out for some reason. But you’ll have something far more important than any random Asian dude: heart.
You’ll step up to the weight lifting competition and lift the shit out of a whole bunch of weights. We’d go into greater detail, but the whole contest will actually be super fucking boring. Like, crazy, unbelievable boring. We’ll basically want to pass out and one of us (Eve) will be there watching, will be a heterosexual woman who likes really cut straight dudes with a fem side and even she’ll have trouble staying away. But in the end you’ll win because this is America and whenever something other than corporate law is on the line the underdog always has to win here.
So you’re going to prove you’re awesome at lifting weights, you’re going to become socially accepted among your peers and you’re going to have unsatisfying victory sex with one of our more emotionally dysfunctional employees all in one day. The end result is that you’ll feel pretty okay about being you.
Congratulations Effete Weight Lifter!
You’re not gay. That would be kind of awesome, since you’re surrounded by dudes who work out and clearly like other dudes who work out all the time. You’re just really girly. You lisp and wear pink tank tops and short shorts. You’re gay and super buff.
Suffice it to say you’re in an awkward spot socially. The gay weightlifters, the balance of the crowd, all want to fuck you. This means they’re unwilling to form real friendships with you. And the straight weightlifters are all threatened by the fact that you make them question their sexuality and the security you have with yourself. Most weightlifters are driven by a serious insecurity towards crafting and honing their bodies into tools for combating the issues they could never bring up with their fathers, and someone with self-esteem who just likes rigorous exercise drives those assholes crazy.
So most of your time at the gym is just spent working on your lats or quads or whatever. It really doesn’t matter what bullshit terminology you apply, it’s mostly spent isolating yourself from the environment you’ve built around yourself. But today you’re going to find your niche.
Today your gym is going to come under fire from a richer, more popular gym. That gym is going to be filled with assholes. Bigger assholes than the people populating your gym, which is no mean feat. And these assholes will be bent on nothing less than the total annexation of your gym and all associated gym-going activities. Suffice it to say this will be totally uncool.
So you’ll do what you have to do as a gym go-er who plans on defending his gym: you’ll challenge the rival gym to a weight-lifting off.
When you arrive the rival gym will have fancier uniforms, more aggression and an Asian dude who will just be hanging out for some reason. But you’ll have something far more important than any random Asian dude: heart.
You’ll step up to the weight lifting competition and lift the shit out of a whole bunch of weights. We’d go into greater detail, but the whole contest will actually be super fucking boring. Like, crazy, unbelievable boring. We’ll basically want to pass out and one of us (Eve) will be there watching, will be a heterosexual woman who likes really cut straight dudes with a fem side and even she’ll have trouble staying away. But in the end you’ll win because this is America and whenever something other than corporate law is on the line the underdog always has to win here.
So you’re going to prove you’re awesome at lifting weights, you’re going to become socially accepted among your peers and you’re going to have unsatisfying victory sex with one of our more emotionally dysfunctional employees all in one day. The end result is that you’ll feel pretty okay about being you.
Congratulations Effete Weight Lifter!
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Congratulations Amateur Bus Driver!
The normal bus driver ODed last night on some bad meth, but those kids still need someone to get them to and from locations during field trips. They still gotta learn about planets and dinosaurs and woodlands and ecosystems and all that shit. And you’re gonna be the one who makes sure it happens.
Nevermind that you can barely drive stick, or that you cooked the bad batch that killed the driver. You’re a mom and if you don’t take care of the situation all the parents who paid fifteen bucks to get rid of their kids for an extra hour on this beautiful Thursday afternoon are going to have to put away their bongs and beers early and deal with the rotten little shits who have taken over their lives. Ain’t gonna happen, mister.
So today you’re going to saddle up and start driving. You’ll hit a few small animals and kill more dogs than you probably need to, but when you pull up to that first child’s house and see his mother’s face turn from a look of agony to an expression of relief it’ll be worth it. As she pushes her horrified child on to the bus she’ll shout after him.
“Don’t do anything stupid!”
You’ll smile at the young boy, his hair unkept and his teeth chattering in horror, and give him a wink.
“You can be stupid all you like, honey,” you’ll say, tussling his hair and making it worse in the process. “You’re going to school now.”
All the houses will go like that, which is why you’ll be so shocked when, at the end of the day, you’re in a shootout with the cops and that little boy is only one of a handful of survivors from what the newspapers will call “the second worst school bus accident in the last decade.” But you’ll still do a better job than the usual driver.
Congratulations Amateur Bus Driver!
Nevermind that you can barely drive stick, or that you cooked the bad batch that killed the driver. You’re a mom and if you don’t take care of the situation all the parents who paid fifteen bucks to get rid of their kids for an extra hour on this beautiful Thursday afternoon are going to have to put away their bongs and beers early and deal with the rotten little shits who have taken over their lives. Ain’t gonna happen, mister.
So today you’re going to saddle up and start driving. You’ll hit a few small animals and kill more dogs than you probably need to, but when you pull up to that first child’s house and see his mother’s face turn from a look of agony to an expression of relief it’ll be worth it. As she pushes her horrified child on to the bus she’ll shout after him.
“Don’t do anything stupid!”
You’ll smile at the young boy, his hair unkept and his teeth chattering in horror, and give him a wink.
“You can be stupid all you like, honey,” you’ll say, tussling his hair and making it worse in the process. “You’re going to school now.”
All the houses will go like that, which is why you’ll be so shocked when, at the end of the day, you’re in a shootout with the cops and that little boy is only one of a handful of survivors from what the newspapers will call “the second worst school bus accident in the last decade.” But you’ll still do a better job than the usual driver.
Congratulations Amateur Bus Driver!
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Congratulations on Being Eaten by a Hawk!
Today you’re going to be going about your business, collecting grain and nuts and the like that larger creatures have forgotten, when a hawk will suddenly and violently descend from the heavens and grasp you in its claws.
You’ll screech your tiny mouse lungs all the way up, and when the hawk drops you you’ll believe, because you’re a mouse and ergo are a bit of an idiot, that you are free and that you have nothing to worry about. This belief will be dashed, along with your little mousy brain, when you hit some rocks.
Then the hawk will gently descend on some thermals and settle upon the stones where your body lays so that he can eat your remains.
The whole thing is basically an allegory for the middle class in America, by the way.
Congratulations on Being Eaten by a Hawk!
You’ll screech your tiny mouse lungs all the way up, and when the hawk drops you you’ll believe, because you’re a mouse and ergo are a bit of an idiot, that you are free and that you have nothing to worry about. This belief will be dashed, along with your little mousy brain, when you hit some rocks.
Then the hawk will gently descend on some thermals and settle upon the stones where your body lays so that he can eat your remains.
The whole thing is basically an allegory for the middle class in America, by the way.
Congratulations on Being Eaten by a Hawk!
Monday, May 23, 2011
Congratulations on Hitting Your Wife in the Face with a Corona!
Today you’re going to be at a beach party filled with beautiful women. Like, an entire beach, end to end, covered with a sea of available women. And you, as a single man, will feel kind of overwhelmed. You’ll have flirted with several already, and it will have gone horribly wrong each and every time.
The first time you’ll compliment one of them on her eyes, and she’ll smile and then run off with someone who is trying to spray her and a bunch of other women with a hose. The second time you’ll try to offer one weed in exchange for a handjob, but instead of giving you a handjob she’ll just take all your money and laugh at how small your penis is. The third time you’ll offer to buy a girl a drink and she’ll just throw up on you.
It’ll be pretty normal spring break fare. It happens to everyone at one point or another. But it’s not what you wanted. You wanted whirlwind romance and dancing fun times. You wanted love, in all its messy, fluid swapping glory. And you’re not going to stop until you get it.
You’ve spent most of this morning trying to be mean to girls, but you’re just not hot enough for that strategy to work. So in a fit of frustration you’re going to just hurl a beer bottle into the crowd. It won’t be an attempt to accomplish anything, it’ll just be a gesture of frustration at the futility of your efforts. But, against all odds, you’ll catch a girl in the skull and she’ll go down with a grunt.
The spring breakers will assume that she’s just lost consciousness from drinking too much, but you’ll know the truth. You’ll run to her side in a panic, worried that you’ve killed someone. But when you get to her you’ll just see her there in a peaceful repose, a grimace on her face from the moment the bottle hit her.
“Shit!” you’ll say, slapping her face to wake her up. You’ll have gotten the idea from a cartoon you saw when you were a kid and, like most of the ideas you get from cartoons, it’ll work marvelously.
“Wha?” she’ll say as she regains consciousness, her eyes fluttering open. They’ll be the deepest, most wonderful shade of brown you’ll ever have seen.
“Thank god you’re alright,” you’ll say, hugging your body next to hers.
“Aww, you’re sweet,” she’ll mumble, patting on you on the head as you help get her to her feet and assist her in hobbling to the nearest medical tent. She’ll be cleared a short while later and the two of you will bone later that night. It’ll be so-so.
Congratulations on Hitting Your Wife in the Face with a Corona!
The first time you’ll compliment one of them on her eyes, and she’ll smile and then run off with someone who is trying to spray her and a bunch of other women with a hose. The second time you’ll try to offer one weed in exchange for a handjob, but instead of giving you a handjob she’ll just take all your money and laugh at how small your penis is. The third time you’ll offer to buy a girl a drink and she’ll just throw up on you.
It’ll be pretty normal spring break fare. It happens to everyone at one point or another. But it’s not what you wanted. You wanted whirlwind romance and dancing fun times. You wanted love, in all its messy, fluid swapping glory. And you’re not going to stop until you get it.
You’ve spent most of this morning trying to be mean to girls, but you’re just not hot enough for that strategy to work. So in a fit of frustration you’re going to just hurl a beer bottle into the crowd. It won’t be an attempt to accomplish anything, it’ll just be a gesture of frustration at the futility of your efforts. But, against all odds, you’ll catch a girl in the skull and she’ll go down with a grunt.
The spring breakers will assume that she’s just lost consciousness from drinking too much, but you’ll know the truth. You’ll run to her side in a panic, worried that you’ve killed someone. But when you get to her you’ll just see her there in a peaceful repose, a grimace on her face from the moment the bottle hit her.
“Shit!” you’ll say, slapping her face to wake her up. You’ll have gotten the idea from a cartoon you saw when you were a kid and, like most of the ideas you get from cartoons, it’ll work marvelously.
“Wha?” she’ll say as she regains consciousness, her eyes fluttering open. They’ll be the deepest, most wonderful shade of brown you’ll ever have seen.
“Thank god you’re alright,” you’ll say, hugging your body next to hers.
“Aww, you’re sweet,” she’ll mumble, patting on you on the head as you help get her to her feet and assist her in hobbling to the nearest medical tent. She’ll be cleared a short while later and the two of you will bone later that night. It’ll be so-so.
Congratulations on Hitting Your Wife in the Face with a Corona!
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The State of Video Game Reviews and Brink!
The state of gaming media is a sorry one. Inflated review scores, incoherent diatribes seated behind a paper thin wall of journalistic neutrality and a constant flow of money and freebies make it difficult to take the majority of what major gaming publications say seriously. There are a few halcyon beacons where this isn’t true, mostly fringe websites focusing on smaller subcultural groups such as Gamerswithjobs, or edifices of journalistic integrity helmed by veteran writers instead of video game writers, places like Gameshark and Kotaku.
It would be forgivable if this inflated scale was applied across the board. But instead gaming culture has become an entity which must ferret out some sort of rough hewn money trail if it wants to discern the validity of any sort of review. L.A. Noire’s 90 percent metacritic score has to be considered in light of Rockstar’s relationship with the press, which could best be defined as the relationship between the cool kid on the playground and his fawning, nascently homosexual, above all else obedient followers. Dead Space 2’s 87 and 90 percent Metacritic scores represent a similar expression of money, media leverage and fawning adoration for franchise and publisher. Compare this to games like Fallout: New Vegas, flawed masterpieces with dwindling scores (84/84/82 depending on your platform) despite remarkable execution and design.
I’ve selected these games because of the myriad of technical issues that plague both. New Vegas is well known for its issues on the X-Box 360 and I’ve occasionally had issues on the PC (nothing I’d bat an eyelash at) and Dead Space 2, considering that it uses an engine that was already in place for three years before its release, has thrown some hilariously inept technical issues involving its physics engine my way during nearly every play session I’ve experienced so far, occasionally ruining the combat changes that its developers attempted to implement with their renewed focus on thrown objects in combat. Let’s also not forget just how ambitious Fallout: New Vegas was with its efforts, its writing and its scale, and just how derivative and repetitive Dead Space 2 is, to say nothing of its atrocious writing and facile storytelling.
If we were to assess these games based on their scores, Dead Space 2 would clearly be the better purchase. But even a cursory examination of them as crafted objects that hundreds of artists collaborated on for years would expose serious differences between them, differing concerns and differing accomplishments. And if we were to examine these games the same way that we examine, let’s say, films, we’d understand the expectations of the reviewer going into the product. We’d know that Dead Space 2 was given some free passes because no one expected much of it and that Fallout: New Vegas was held to a higher standard for the phenomenal performance of its franchise in the past.
But this isn’t the nature of the discussion of video games. Instead we’d left with raw scores that people use to assess the quality of works. In fact, reviewers are pressured into assigning these scores even when they don’t because of the perceived short attention span of their audience (pause for the irony, given the dozens of hours required to finish a brief game and the two hour investment required of a film). Perhaps some of this can be blamed on the development of this critical apparatus in the age of the internet, where feedback is immediate and attention spans are pathetically short in any forum for discussion. But an explanation doesn’t make this kind of a pattern acceptable, nor does it make it any less appalling that games are denied their just deserts, that the apparatus for assessing them is undermined by its own participants or that people who attempt to break this cycle of blah are at best ignored for their efforts and far more often ostracized for even trying.
This has been particularly apparent to me while watching the evolving discussion surrounding Brink, the latest excellent release from the underappreciated and oft-ignored British developer Splash Damage. Brink, in case you aren’t aware, is a team-based multiplayer shooter that builds on Splash Damage’s tradition of creating unconventional objective oriented games that cater to a variety of play styles through a supportive network of various classes. Brink specifically plays with the idea of movement in shooters, specifically asking players to balance their mobility against their combat capabilities. This runs in clear violation of the old gating of combat capability in shooters: class selection. The result is a game that is as much about movement mechanics and the control of movement on the map as it is about playing as a team, accomplishing objectives and shooting dudes. If you’re interested in any of these elements it’s well worth looking at, and if you like two or more it’s pretty much a must buy. If you liked any of the Enemy Territory games you’ll probably like Brink, and Section 8 players looking for a more populous and faster paced game would be well advised to look into it.
But you’d never know any of this from the reviews of Brink. Rather, Brink is a failure. The single player game is weak, the bots are stupid, the guns aren’t powerful enough and the shooting isn’t shooty enough. It’s so obsessed with teamwork that it’s broken, broken, broken, and its cardinal sin is that it’s not Call of Duty.
This is the state of discourse surrounding games. I know I’ve written of it derisively before, but no game better exemplifies it than Brink, a “half finished” game of big ideas with an infrastructure for growth built in. Brink is a game from a small studio, published by a publisher with a relatively modest media presence (compared to juggernauts like Electronic Arts, Sony, Microsoft and Activision) with an unconventional focus and new ideas about game-play that have a handful of qualities in common with other game play varieties. If ever there was a game that warranted critical defense and discussion, Brink was it.
Perhaps some of this is owed to the isolated nature of game reviewers. Most reviewers don’t have the time to actually assess multiplayer products as actual, functioning entities. These are games that don’t really materialize until release, games that rely on dedicated communities to propel them, and they’re being assessed by people who are being asked to constantly churn out a stream of interchangeable comments and grades for products which are often shown to them half-finished with a set of notes, however incomplete, about what will be changed in the release version.
But the state of discourse remains one where this sort of attention is not only standard, but is rewarded. Brink is going to be buried under a mountain of praise for L.A. Noir, a game which will likely be forgotten in a matter of weeks for the next big media release. And we as a community will be left with a handful of reviews written and published before this multiplayer gem was released which will provide all of zero insight and background to neophytes to gaming culture, the people who really need these reviews. These are the people most thoroughly failed by the state of game reviewing: the people who aren’t inoculated against the bullshit culture of which they’re born.
It would be forgivable if this inflated scale was applied across the board. But instead gaming culture has become an entity which must ferret out some sort of rough hewn money trail if it wants to discern the validity of any sort of review. L.A. Noire’s 90 percent metacritic score has to be considered in light of Rockstar’s relationship with the press, which could best be defined as the relationship between the cool kid on the playground and his fawning, nascently homosexual, above all else obedient followers. Dead Space 2’s 87 and 90 percent Metacritic scores represent a similar expression of money, media leverage and fawning adoration for franchise and publisher. Compare this to games like Fallout: New Vegas, flawed masterpieces with dwindling scores (84/84/82 depending on your platform) despite remarkable execution and design.
I’ve selected these games because of the myriad of technical issues that plague both. New Vegas is well known for its issues on the X-Box 360 and I’ve occasionally had issues on the PC (nothing I’d bat an eyelash at) and Dead Space 2, considering that it uses an engine that was already in place for three years before its release, has thrown some hilariously inept technical issues involving its physics engine my way during nearly every play session I’ve experienced so far, occasionally ruining the combat changes that its developers attempted to implement with their renewed focus on thrown objects in combat. Let’s also not forget just how ambitious Fallout: New Vegas was with its efforts, its writing and its scale, and just how derivative and repetitive Dead Space 2 is, to say nothing of its atrocious writing and facile storytelling.
If we were to assess these games based on their scores, Dead Space 2 would clearly be the better purchase. But even a cursory examination of them as crafted objects that hundreds of artists collaborated on for years would expose serious differences between them, differing concerns and differing accomplishments. And if we were to examine these games the same way that we examine, let’s say, films, we’d understand the expectations of the reviewer going into the product. We’d know that Dead Space 2 was given some free passes because no one expected much of it and that Fallout: New Vegas was held to a higher standard for the phenomenal performance of its franchise in the past.
But this isn’t the nature of the discussion of video games. Instead we’d left with raw scores that people use to assess the quality of works. In fact, reviewers are pressured into assigning these scores even when they don’t because of the perceived short attention span of their audience (pause for the irony, given the dozens of hours required to finish a brief game and the two hour investment required of a film). Perhaps some of this can be blamed on the development of this critical apparatus in the age of the internet, where feedback is immediate and attention spans are pathetically short in any forum for discussion. But an explanation doesn’t make this kind of a pattern acceptable, nor does it make it any less appalling that games are denied their just deserts, that the apparatus for assessing them is undermined by its own participants or that people who attempt to break this cycle of blah are at best ignored for their efforts and far more often ostracized for even trying.
This has been particularly apparent to me while watching the evolving discussion surrounding Brink, the latest excellent release from the underappreciated and oft-ignored British developer Splash Damage. Brink, in case you aren’t aware, is a team-based multiplayer shooter that builds on Splash Damage’s tradition of creating unconventional objective oriented games that cater to a variety of play styles through a supportive network of various classes. Brink specifically plays with the idea of movement in shooters, specifically asking players to balance their mobility against their combat capabilities. This runs in clear violation of the old gating of combat capability in shooters: class selection. The result is a game that is as much about movement mechanics and the control of movement on the map as it is about playing as a team, accomplishing objectives and shooting dudes. If you’re interested in any of these elements it’s well worth looking at, and if you like two or more it’s pretty much a must buy. If you liked any of the Enemy Territory games you’ll probably like Brink, and Section 8 players looking for a more populous and faster paced game would be well advised to look into it.
But you’d never know any of this from the reviews of Brink. Rather, Brink is a failure. The single player game is weak, the bots are stupid, the guns aren’t powerful enough and the shooting isn’t shooty enough. It’s so obsessed with teamwork that it’s broken, broken, broken, and its cardinal sin is that it’s not Call of Duty.
This is the state of discourse surrounding games. I know I’ve written of it derisively before, but no game better exemplifies it than Brink, a “half finished” game of big ideas with an infrastructure for growth built in. Brink is a game from a small studio, published by a publisher with a relatively modest media presence (compared to juggernauts like Electronic Arts, Sony, Microsoft and Activision) with an unconventional focus and new ideas about game-play that have a handful of qualities in common with other game play varieties. If ever there was a game that warranted critical defense and discussion, Brink was it.
Perhaps some of this is owed to the isolated nature of game reviewers. Most reviewers don’t have the time to actually assess multiplayer products as actual, functioning entities. These are games that don’t really materialize until release, games that rely on dedicated communities to propel them, and they’re being assessed by people who are being asked to constantly churn out a stream of interchangeable comments and grades for products which are often shown to them half-finished with a set of notes, however incomplete, about what will be changed in the release version.
But the state of discourse remains one where this sort of attention is not only standard, but is rewarded. Brink is going to be buried under a mountain of praise for L.A. Noir, a game which will likely be forgotten in a matter of weeks for the next big media release. And we as a community will be left with a handful of reviews written and published before this multiplayer gem was released which will provide all of zero insight and background to neophytes to gaming culture, the people who really need these reviews. These are the people most thoroughly failed by the state of game reviewing: the people who aren’t inoculated against the bullshit culture of which they’re born.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Congratulations on Manipulating Your Loved Ones Into Buying You DVDs!
Today it’s your birthday. And that means you gave your family and friends a “list” of “gift ideas” that they could “buy” for you if they were so inclined.
But all of these gifts are desperate cries for help. Everybody Loves Raymond, seasons one and two on DVD? Exporting Raymond, the documentary about Ray Romano’s producer visiting Russia to see if it was worth it to develop a Russian Everybody Loves Raymond? Welcome to Mooseport, the movie our readers just Wikipediaed to make sure it was that unwatchable piece of dross they thought they remembered seeing a trailer for way back in the winter of 2003?
And the worst part of all this, the part that breaks our hearts here at Sexy Results Future Agency and Pie Shoppe (we don’t see it lasting long), is that your loved ones are all going to pitch in and buy you every single one of those DVDs. In fact, you’ll end up with two Everybody Loves Raymond box sets, more than you ever thought you’d get. You’ll think about returning them, but you’ll be so excited at the prospect of watching the same episode of Everybody Loves Raymond on two TVs at once that you’ll decide not to. Instead you’ll keep them and watch them, alone in your apartment on your birthday while your family weeps outside on the street and your friends drink in a nearby bar, lamenting how incredibly depressing your life has become ever since you discovered that fucking show.
Congratulations on Manipulating Your Loved Ones Into Buying You DVDs!
But all of these gifts are desperate cries for help. Everybody Loves Raymond, seasons one and two on DVD? Exporting Raymond, the documentary about Ray Romano’s producer visiting Russia to see if it was worth it to develop a Russian Everybody Loves Raymond? Welcome to Mooseport, the movie our readers just Wikipediaed to make sure it was that unwatchable piece of dross they thought they remembered seeing a trailer for way back in the winter of 2003?
And the worst part of all this, the part that breaks our hearts here at Sexy Results Future Agency and Pie Shoppe (we don’t see it lasting long), is that your loved ones are all going to pitch in and buy you every single one of those DVDs. In fact, you’ll end up with two Everybody Loves Raymond box sets, more than you ever thought you’d get. You’ll think about returning them, but you’ll be so excited at the prospect of watching the same episode of Everybody Loves Raymond on two TVs at once that you’ll decide not to. Instead you’ll keep them and watch them, alone in your apartment on your birthday while your family weeps outside on the street and your friends drink in a nearby bar, lamenting how incredibly depressing your life has become ever since you discovered that fucking show.
Congratulations on Manipulating Your Loved Ones Into Buying You DVDs!
Friday, May 20, 2011
Congratulations on Using Butter As Lube!
We’ve all done it. We’re banging our wives and we run out of lube and we’re like “Hey, butter is kind of lube-like.” So we slip into the kitchen, rub our dicks into butter until the body heat melts it and then we’re back in the bedroom getting anal out of the trade Quaker style.
But here’s the thing. It’s not a great idea to use butter as lube when you’re fucking a cow. Right off, fucking the cow is a bad idea in the first place. Second off, you’re using the cow’s own milk to fuck it which is kind of hot, sure, but it’s really just pretty sick because the cow isn’t complicit in it at all. It’s like you’re raping a cow with the sustenance that would normally go to its little fucking cow baby. Third off, cows are kickers sometimes, and nothing says no like a hoof to the balls.
You’re going to learn this last lesson the hard way today when Bessie, upset over your latest amorous intrusion, bucks your dick out of her cowgina (a word we made up for cow vagina just now) and lands a nice big back kick right on your dick.
The coating of butter on your genitals will offer you no protection. Her hooves will rip the flesh of your penis and catch on your scrotum, tearing it as she returns her feet to the ground. This will make your testicles spill out of the ruined sack of flesh that once held them, and the residue of the butter will make the already excruciating pain unbearable.
“Aggh!” you’ll shout at your cow. “Fucking whore!”
Your cow will look at you lazily and resume chewing her cud, which is what she was doing before you tried to get your dick in her. We hope this is a lesson to you about why you shouldn’t try raping cows and also why girls in general don’t like you.
Congratulations on Using Butter As Lube!
But here’s the thing. It’s not a great idea to use butter as lube when you’re fucking a cow. Right off, fucking the cow is a bad idea in the first place. Second off, you’re using the cow’s own milk to fuck it which is kind of hot, sure, but it’s really just pretty sick because the cow isn’t complicit in it at all. It’s like you’re raping a cow with the sustenance that would normally go to its little fucking cow baby. Third off, cows are kickers sometimes, and nothing says no like a hoof to the balls.
You’re going to learn this last lesson the hard way today when Bessie, upset over your latest amorous intrusion, bucks your dick out of her cowgina (a word we made up for cow vagina just now) and lands a nice big back kick right on your dick.
The coating of butter on your genitals will offer you no protection. Her hooves will rip the flesh of your penis and catch on your scrotum, tearing it as she returns her feet to the ground. This will make your testicles spill out of the ruined sack of flesh that once held them, and the residue of the butter will make the already excruciating pain unbearable.
“Aggh!” you’ll shout at your cow. “Fucking whore!”
Your cow will look at you lazily and resume chewing her cud, which is what she was doing before you tried to get your dick in her. We hope this is a lesson to you about why you shouldn’t try raping cows and also why girls in general don’t like you.
Congratulations on Using Butter As Lube!
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Congratulations Drug Addled Youth!
Today you’re just a couple of drug addled teens having the time of your life.
“Phewwwww!” you’ll breathe to yourself, running with arms outstretched back and forth across your parent’s backyard. “I’m an airplane!”
Your buddy Tommy will laugh.
“Yeah right!” he’ll say. Then he’ll take some more children’s aspirin and you’ll totally turn into an airplane for him too and he’ll break into your dad’s shed and grab a hammer and murder you with it.
Your story will become a cautionary tale for the abuse of children’s aspiring for decades to come. Although you’ll be a black girl and Tommy will be a racist little white boy, instead of Tommy being Hispanic and you being Jewish and both of you being kind of gay for each other.
That’s how history works, though. Sometimes it gets the details wrong.
Congratulations Drug Addled Youth!
“Phewwwww!” you’ll breathe to yourself, running with arms outstretched back and forth across your parent’s backyard. “I’m an airplane!”
Your buddy Tommy will laugh.
“Yeah right!” he’ll say. Then he’ll take some more children’s aspirin and you’ll totally turn into an airplane for him too and he’ll break into your dad’s shed and grab a hammer and murder you with it.
Your story will become a cautionary tale for the abuse of children’s aspiring for decades to come. Although you’ll be a black girl and Tommy will be a racist little white boy, instead of Tommy being Hispanic and you being Jewish and both of you being kind of gay for each other.
That’s how history works, though. Sometimes it gets the details wrong.
Congratulations Drug Addled Youth!
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Congratulations on Shooting David Blaine!
David Blaine is going to be doing one of his boldest and baddest stunts today. Today he’s going to pull a stranger from a crowd to shoot him with a real live gun to use his “extreme magic” to catch a real live bullet.
Of course, that’s bullshit. He’s really going to hire a homeless vet to shoot a blank at him and then break a ketchup packet in his hand and sleight a bullet into there so it looks like it hurt a lot. But you’re going to fuck it all up.
“Who will shoot David Blaine?” he’ll shout at the crowd, which will have gathered, eager to see David Blaine get injured in a retarded scheme.
The bum will stand up, but you’ll punch him in the face and knock him to the ground. Then you’ll take the gun from his supine body and fire wildly into the air in joy. The crowd will cheer as the bullets tear through the leaves above their heads.
David Blaine will look nervous, but he won’t want to call it off. So you’ll aim the gun at his torso and pull the trigger.
Blaine will shift to the side, quick as he can, but it’ll all come to naught. The bullet will take him just below the wrist, nearly removing his hand. His pinky and ring finger will be torn clear off, his blood flowing freely from his ruined hand.
“Shit!” he’ll cry as the crowd cheers, lifting you up on their shoulders. They’ll cheer with you up there for a good thirty minutes while David Blaine writhes in pain on the ground, waiting for the paramedics to arrive.
Congratulations on Shooting David Blaine!
Of course, that’s bullshit. He’s really going to hire a homeless vet to shoot a blank at him and then break a ketchup packet in his hand and sleight a bullet into there so it looks like it hurt a lot. But you’re going to fuck it all up.
“Who will shoot David Blaine?” he’ll shout at the crowd, which will have gathered, eager to see David Blaine get injured in a retarded scheme.
The bum will stand up, but you’ll punch him in the face and knock him to the ground. Then you’ll take the gun from his supine body and fire wildly into the air in joy. The crowd will cheer as the bullets tear through the leaves above their heads.
David Blaine will look nervous, but he won’t want to call it off. So you’ll aim the gun at his torso and pull the trigger.
Blaine will shift to the side, quick as he can, but it’ll all come to naught. The bullet will take him just below the wrist, nearly removing his hand. His pinky and ring finger will be torn clear off, his blood flowing freely from his ruined hand.
“Shit!” he’ll cry as the crowd cheers, lifting you up on their shoulders. They’ll cheer with you up there for a good thirty minutes while David Blaine writhes in pain on the ground, waiting for the paramedics to arrive.
Congratulations on Shooting David Blaine!
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Congratulations on Letting Your Cat Convince You You Don't Have AIDS!
STDs are a thing that happen to people, and getting tested for them is the responsible thing to do. So you shouldn’t feel ashamed about that. And being a little nervous about the results is also the most natural thing in the world, so don’t feel weird about that. But you can take it a little far.
For example, you can sit on your couch wondering if you have AIDS. Not wondering if you have AIDS because you fucked a dude and it turned out that he died of AIDS months later. You’re actually a pretty big dyke, so that isn’t too likely. Just wondering if you have AIDS because you’re the kind of person who imagines the worst possible scenario and tries to make it real in their head.
But don’t despair. Because that same trait also forced you to buy a cat and heap all your hopes, fears and dreams on its fuzzy little head. So while you sit next to the phone with a bag of Funyuns, waiting to hear back from Planned Parenthood to find out if your vageen is going to turn black and fall off your precious little cat is going to do what cats do and nuzzle up because its bored and it wants to see how you’ll react.
You’ll pet her, and she’ll purr, which will convince you that you don’t have AIDS. You’ll know somewhere deep in your soul of souls that cats couldn’t possibly love a person with AIDS. Then you’ll feel kind of horrible for realizing that, but that feeling won’t last too long because you’ll just be so, so excited that you don’t have AIDS.
We wish we could see the look on your face when you get the test results back and find out that you do in fact have Chlamydia, though.
Congratulations on Letting Your Cat Convince You You Don’t Have AIDS!
For example, you can sit on your couch wondering if you have AIDS. Not wondering if you have AIDS because you fucked a dude and it turned out that he died of AIDS months later. You’re actually a pretty big dyke, so that isn’t too likely. Just wondering if you have AIDS because you’re the kind of person who imagines the worst possible scenario and tries to make it real in their head.
But don’t despair. Because that same trait also forced you to buy a cat and heap all your hopes, fears and dreams on its fuzzy little head. So while you sit next to the phone with a bag of Funyuns, waiting to hear back from Planned Parenthood to find out if your vageen is going to turn black and fall off your precious little cat is going to do what cats do and nuzzle up because its bored and it wants to see how you’ll react.
You’ll pet her, and she’ll purr, which will convince you that you don’t have AIDS. You’ll know somewhere deep in your soul of souls that cats couldn’t possibly love a person with AIDS. Then you’ll feel kind of horrible for realizing that, but that feeling won’t last too long because you’ll just be so, so excited that you don’t have AIDS.
We wish we could see the look on your face when you get the test results back and find out that you do in fact have Chlamydia, though.
Congratulations on Letting Your Cat Convince You You Don’t Have AIDS!
Monday, May 16, 2011
Congratulations Unfortunately Named Scientist!
You’re a scientist and today you’re going to discover a new element. There’s only one problem: you have a terrible name.
Other scientists end up with cool elements named after them, or at least get a decent animal or particle named after them. But you’re going to end up with an element called Boringium named after you because your name is James Boring and you didn’t have the presence of mind to change your name before you went into science. So the way we see it you’ve got two choices:
Choice the first. You run down to the city courthouse and immediately schedule a name change. You’ll explain to the judge that you made an awesome scientific discovery of an element that may cure cancer, erectile dysfunction and a bunch of other shit that people normally get psyched about. Then you’ll offer to blow him in his chambers if he’ll change your name right away.
Possible downsides of this choice include the element being named after you anyway, or the judge fudging the paperwork so your name is James Homoface now. Homofacium is still a better element name than Boringium, but it’s not that big an improvement. Plus, this sort of a relationship with a judge can only end with one or both of you dying in a contract killing intended to squelch any knowledge of the sort of backroom dealings you’ve been engaging in.
The second choice is simpler: just come to terms with the fact that your name is Boring. Own it. Become Mr. Boring. Be so awesome that when people call you Mister Boring there’s no chance they mean it as an insult. Make your life the sort of constant parade of interesting events that can only be inhabited by a very interesting man with the unfortunate last name of Boring.
We know you’ll probably be going with the first option, and that you’ll probably end up dead in two months. But we wanted to try so that you could go on an accomplish more shit in the scientific community. We’re funny like that.
Congratulations Unfortunately Named Scientist!
Other scientists end up with cool elements named after them, or at least get a decent animal or particle named after them. But you’re going to end up with an element called Boringium named after you because your name is James Boring and you didn’t have the presence of mind to change your name before you went into science. So the way we see it you’ve got two choices:
Choice the first. You run down to the city courthouse and immediately schedule a name change. You’ll explain to the judge that you made an awesome scientific discovery of an element that may cure cancer, erectile dysfunction and a bunch of other shit that people normally get psyched about. Then you’ll offer to blow him in his chambers if he’ll change your name right away.
Possible downsides of this choice include the element being named after you anyway, or the judge fudging the paperwork so your name is James Homoface now. Homofacium is still a better element name than Boringium, but it’s not that big an improvement. Plus, this sort of a relationship with a judge can only end with one or both of you dying in a contract killing intended to squelch any knowledge of the sort of backroom dealings you’ve been engaging in.
The second choice is simpler: just come to terms with the fact that your name is Boring. Own it. Become Mr. Boring. Be so awesome that when people call you Mister Boring there’s no chance they mean it as an insult. Make your life the sort of constant parade of interesting events that can only be inhabited by a very interesting man with the unfortunate last name of Boring.
We know you’ll probably be going with the first option, and that you’ll probably end up dead in two months. But we wanted to try so that you could go on an accomplish more shit in the scientific community. We’re funny like that.
Congratulations Unfortunately Named Scientist!
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Dead Space 2 and the Destructive Power of Writing!
Silence has always been a potent storytelling tool in games. It permits writers to make the main character a cipher, an entry point into the world they want the player to explore. It lets them allow the player to engage their internal fiction without obstruction and become a greater participant in the narrative as a whole. But one thing I’d never realized until recently was just how destructive dialogue could be for a game, and how silence prevents writers from absolutely ruining their own fucking game.
There’s bad writing aplenty in good games. Grand Theft Auto 4, case in point, is a game with marvelous ideas that, among other things, is totally undone by its poor writing. I never felt less connected to Nico than when I was listening to him speak. Even games where player characters remain silent are occasionally injured by their writing. The Call of Duty series, for example, would be a marvelous corridor shooter without its laughably poor dialogue. FEAR is an amazing, atmospheric and scary shooter with great mechanics, except when the various cast members open their retarded word-holes. And don’t even get me started on Red Faction: Guerilla, which violates both rules.
The point is that the destructive power of poor writing is well known. But I’d never known just how destructive bad writing and design for a faceless cipher of a protagonist could be until I played Dead Space 2.
Some background: I was a Dead Space fan. Not a tremendous one, certainly, but enough of a fan that I played it, enjoyed it and tried playing it a second time through to see if I’d get anything new out of the “improved mode.” I didn’t, so I moved on to other things, but I thought it was a nice bit of homage to a set of genres, and some of the most prominent work in those genres. System Shock 2 was an amazing game, and anything that apes it is bound to be fun to play. Dead Space did that expertly.
Dead Space was also all about its faceless protagonist. It’s never entirely clear just how much of the game is real and how much is the perception of your twisted psyche, and the game never seems too concerned with that. When you’re finally allowed to rest after the events of the game conclude it’s not even clear that you’re actually attacked. And it really, really doesn’t matter even if you were. Dead Space lets you form your own responses and reach your own conclusions. While it has many problems that isn’t one of them. In fact that could be its greatest strength.
Dead Space 2 does away with that right away. You hear Isaac speaking almost immediately. Not giving us useful information or anything like that, but gibbering and weeping and generally being kind of irritating. He laboriously recounts the events of the previous game, sentence by fractured sentence. Then he wakes up and acts confused. In fact, he acts like a bit of a dumbass. He runs to crazy scientists for help immediately after “escaping” from their clutches. He only uses his jet boots at random, plot appropriate segments instead of using them all the time, which is totally what I’d do given my druthers.
But this ridiculous boiler plate video game plot fare might be forgivable if the tone and language of the writing wasn’t so piss poor. But nearly everything that Isaac says makes me want to steer him right into the nearest Necron. It’s all either bluster or weeping, which well executed would be alright. But it’s never well executed, never builds towards anything interesting or rewarding. It’s not even bad enough to be funny, it’s just poor writing that draws attention to itself. At its best, it’s generic. Far more often it’s offensively bad, everything people who don’t play video games expect of our writing and the end product is terrible.
And they had to pick Gunner Wright, also known as “who?” to voice Clarke. Gunner brings all the life and vibrancy you’d expect to the world’s least interesting, most generically tortured video game character with a dark past. He doesn’t even try to make Clarke into something more interesting or subtle, instead vascilating wildly between emotions to achieve the action-movie appropriate response for a given scene. The end result is less a performance and more a mish mash of set pieces that are quite familiar. And while this familiarity could theoretically work to the ends of the develops the reality is that it actually undermines them, laying bare the ineptitude of the writers and designers, their inability to weave elements together into a coherent product and their embarrassingly lacking capacity for intelligent thought.
Clarke’s voice and behavior even boils down to the face he makes when he gets new equipment. In Dead Space equipping a new suit was a comic beat which involved stepping into a welding chamber and emerging in new clothes, seemingly disoriented from the experience. Dead Space 2 gives Issac a beat each time he equips a new piece of gear (and there are far, far too many outfits for you to only see this happen two or three times) to saunter around like a smug asshole and tug at his clothing in an equipment-appropriate fashion. It has less of an air of celebration and more the feel of a twenty five year old asshole doing a touchdown dance in a game he won against a youth football league. It doesn’t make me feel for Clarke, it makes me want to, just as before, run him into the nearest hazard and watch his limbs tumble off.
There are plenty of problems with Dead Space 2. It’s just as derivative as the previous game, but it has none of the style or self-awareness that the original Dead Space had. It doesn’t even have the good sense to ape Aliens the way that Dead Space did. Instead it goes for cheap closet scares and occasional pallet shifts in place of actual gameplay or innovation. Mechanically it often falls apart and, even playing on the Hard difficulty setting I’ve found that I have, if anything, too many resources most of the time. My bank is already filling up fast. But giving their protagonist a voice, especially such a poor one, is the biggest issue in Dead Space 2 in my mind. It destroys what little staying power the game might’ve had and instead forces you to relate to one of the least sympathetic, least interesting characters I’ve had the displeasure of interacting with in recent memory. And I just finished playing the Kane and Lynch games back to back. More’s the pity, because all the writers of Dead Space 2 had to do to fix the problem was put down the pen.
There’s bad writing aplenty in good games. Grand Theft Auto 4, case in point, is a game with marvelous ideas that, among other things, is totally undone by its poor writing. I never felt less connected to Nico than when I was listening to him speak. Even games where player characters remain silent are occasionally injured by their writing. The Call of Duty series, for example, would be a marvelous corridor shooter without its laughably poor dialogue. FEAR is an amazing, atmospheric and scary shooter with great mechanics, except when the various cast members open their retarded word-holes. And don’t even get me started on Red Faction: Guerilla, which violates both rules.
The point is that the destructive power of poor writing is well known. But I’d never known just how destructive bad writing and design for a faceless cipher of a protagonist could be until I played Dead Space 2.
Some background: I was a Dead Space fan. Not a tremendous one, certainly, but enough of a fan that I played it, enjoyed it and tried playing it a second time through to see if I’d get anything new out of the “improved mode.” I didn’t, so I moved on to other things, but I thought it was a nice bit of homage to a set of genres, and some of the most prominent work in those genres. System Shock 2 was an amazing game, and anything that apes it is bound to be fun to play. Dead Space did that expertly.
Dead Space was also all about its faceless protagonist. It’s never entirely clear just how much of the game is real and how much is the perception of your twisted psyche, and the game never seems too concerned with that. When you’re finally allowed to rest after the events of the game conclude it’s not even clear that you’re actually attacked. And it really, really doesn’t matter even if you were. Dead Space lets you form your own responses and reach your own conclusions. While it has many problems that isn’t one of them. In fact that could be its greatest strength.
Dead Space 2 does away with that right away. You hear Isaac speaking almost immediately. Not giving us useful information or anything like that, but gibbering and weeping and generally being kind of irritating. He laboriously recounts the events of the previous game, sentence by fractured sentence. Then he wakes up and acts confused. In fact, he acts like a bit of a dumbass. He runs to crazy scientists for help immediately after “escaping” from their clutches. He only uses his jet boots at random, plot appropriate segments instead of using them all the time, which is totally what I’d do given my druthers.
But this ridiculous boiler plate video game plot fare might be forgivable if the tone and language of the writing wasn’t so piss poor. But nearly everything that Isaac says makes me want to steer him right into the nearest Necron. It’s all either bluster or weeping, which well executed would be alright. But it’s never well executed, never builds towards anything interesting or rewarding. It’s not even bad enough to be funny, it’s just poor writing that draws attention to itself. At its best, it’s generic. Far more often it’s offensively bad, everything people who don’t play video games expect of our writing and the end product is terrible.
And they had to pick Gunner Wright, also known as “who?” to voice Clarke. Gunner brings all the life and vibrancy you’d expect to the world’s least interesting, most generically tortured video game character with a dark past. He doesn’t even try to make Clarke into something more interesting or subtle, instead vascilating wildly between emotions to achieve the action-movie appropriate response for a given scene. The end result is less a performance and more a mish mash of set pieces that are quite familiar. And while this familiarity could theoretically work to the ends of the develops the reality is that it actually undermines them, laying bare the ineptitude of the writers and designers, their inability to weave elements together into a coherent product and their embarrassingly lacking capacity for intelligent thought.
Clarke’s voice and behavior even boils down to the face he makes when he gets new equipment. In Dead Space equipping a new suit was a comic beat which involved stepping into a welding chamber and emerging in new clothes, seemingly disoriented from the experience. Dead Space 2 gives Issac a beat each time he equips a new piece of gear (and there are far, far too many outfits for you to only see this happen two or three times) to saunter around like a smug asshole and tug at his clothing in an equipment-appropriate fashion. It has less of an air of celebration and more the feel of a twenty five year old asshole doing a touchdown dance in a game he won against a youth football league. It doesn’t make me feel for Clarke, it makes me want to, just as before, run him into the nearest hazard and watch his limbs tumble off.
There are plenty of problems with Dead Space 2. It’s just as derivative as the previous game, but it has none of the style or self-awareness that the original Dead Space had. It doesn’t even have the good sense to ape Aliens the way that Dead Space did. Instead it goes for cheap closet scares and occasional pallet shifts in place of actual gameplay or innovation. Mechanically it often falls apart and, even playing on the Hard difficulty setting I’ve found that I have, if anything, too many resources most of the time. My bank is already filling up fast. But giving their protagonist a voice, especially such a poor one, is the biggest issue in Dead Space 2 in my mind. It destroys what little staying power the game might’ve had and instead forces you to relate to one of the least sympathetic, least interesting characters I’ve had the displeasure of interacting with in recent memory. And I just finished playing the Kane and Lynch games back to back. More’s the pity, because all the writers of Dead Space 2 had to do to fix the problem was put down the pen.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Congratulations Stodgy Business Man!
You’re a business man from the 20s who is, for some reason, alive in today’s society. You have a monocle and everything. You read print newspapers. And you’re constantly shocked by the world around you.
“My word!” you’ll cry as a woman walks by in a skirt that shows off the bottoms of her thighs. “What a bawdy young harlot!” you’ll shout after her, making her turn around as she goes and flip you the bird. “Mayhaps later, milady!” you’ll shout as she crosses the street.
“What is this?” you’ll muse as you step on to an elevator and meet a black man in a suit and glasses.
“Excuse me?” he’ll respond, but you’ll pretend you didn’t hear him. He’ll let it go and when he gets to his floor he’ll step off the elevator and you’ll wait until the doors are closing before you shout.
“Nigger!”
He’ll turn and run towards the door, but they’ll have closed before he gets a chance to beat the living shit out of you. You’ll chortle at yourself in the elevator and slap your knee, taking great pleasure in his discomfort. You’ll amuse yourself with thoughts of his rage until you notice an Oriental (actually, he’s Korean, but you don’t know that word because you’re a 1920s racist) staring at you.
“Pardon good Chinaman,” you’ll say, putting your hands together and awkwardly bowing to him. “Would you know where I could happen upon an opium den?”
His jaw will drop, and he’ll step off of the elevator at the next stop, even though he’ll have to take five flights of stairs to get to his destination that way.
“Wonder what troubled that slant eye!” you’ll shout too loud after he leaves, generating another supernaturally awkward silence with your words. You’ll let it sink in for a little while before you slap the bottom of a woman in a pants suit and shout.
“Bloomers!”
Congratulations Stodgy Business Man!
“My word!” you’ll cry as a woman walks by in a skirt that shows off the bottoms of her thighs. “What a bawdy young harlot!” you’ll shout after her, making her turn around as she goes and flip you the bird. “Mayhaps later, milady!” you’ll shout as she crosses the street.
“What is this?” you’ll muse as you step on to an elevator and meet a black man in a suit and glasses.
“Excuse me?” he’ll respond, but you’ll pretend you didn’t hear him. He’ll let it go and when he gets to his floor he’ll step off the elevator and you’ll wait until the doors are closing before you shout.
“Nigger!”
He’ll turn and run towards the door, but they’ll have closed before he gets a chance to beat the living shit out of you. You’ll chortle at yourself in the elevator and slap your knee, taking great pleasure in his discomfort. You’ll amuse yourself with thoughts of his rage until you notice an Oriental (actually, he’s Korean, but you don’t know that word because you’re a 1920s racist) staring at you.
“Pardon good Chinaman,” you’ll say, putting your hands together and awkwardly bowing to him. “Would you know where I could happen upon an opium den?”
His jaw will drop, and he’ll step off of the elevator at the next stop, even though he’ll have to take five flights of stairs to get to his destination that way.
“Wonder what troubled that slant eye!” you’ll shout too loud after he leaves, generating another supernaturally awkward silence with your words. You’ll let it sink in for a little while before you slap the bottom of a woman in a pants suit and shout.
“Bloomers!”
Congratulations Stodgy Business Man!
Friday, May 13, 2011
Congratulations Very Vocal Pervert!
“Unhook her bra!” you’ll shout at the young couple walking hand in hand in the park. You’ll be crouched behind a bush, your pants around your ankles, watching them walk on the breezy fall evening. “Or at least cup her titty!”
The young man will look at the young woman, who will shrug. “New York, right?” she’ll say, and he’ll laugh.
“I guess so,” he’ll say back before grabbing her titty and massaging it. She’ll beam back at him and it’ll be obvious that they’re a young couple in love with a private, secure romance that you can’t touch. Or so they’ll think.
“Awwwww yeahhhh,” you’ll say as you rub your erection, still covered by your briefs, against the bush. “That’s the stuff.”
The young couple will look at you and finally realize just what you’re doing. They’ll shake their heads and trudge off into the night, ashamed that they were party to your peeping.
When they get home they’ll sleep on opposite ends of the bed from one another. They won’t touch, or even consider touching, during the night. Instead they’ll just lay there and stare at the ceiling, wondering if you’ve somehow corrupted their love.
The next day they’ll forgo their normal sex shower. They’ll skip right to eggs, which will be good, but not as good. The young woman’s smile will be a little weaker, the young man’s gait a little less confident.
You, you’ll just go back to the underpass you use for sleeping and pee all over yourself. Then you’ll rub your pee into your own skin, groaning as you do so. The homeless people around you will know better than to ask you to stop. They know that if they respond they’ll just encourage you, and that’s no good for anyone.
Congratulations Very Vocal Pervert!
The young man will look at the young woman, who will shrug. “New York, right?” she’ll say, and he’ll laugh.
“I guess so,” he’ll say back before grabbing her titty and massaging it. She’ll beam back at him and it’ll be obvious that they’re a young couple in love with a private, secure romance that you can’t touch. Or so they’ll think.
“Awwwww yeahhhh,” you’ll say as you rub your erection, still covered by your briefs, against the bush. “That’s the stuff.”
The young couple will look at you and finally realize just what you’re doing. They’ll shake their heads and trudge off into the night, ashamed that they were party to your peeping.
When they get home they’ll sleep on opposite ends of the bed from one another. They won’t touch, or even consider touching, during the night. Instead they’ll just lay there and stare at the ceiling, wondering if you’ve somehow corrupted their love.
The next day they’ll forgo their normal sex shower. They’ll skip right to eggs, which will be good, but not as good. The young woman’s smile will be a little weaker, the young man’s gait a little less confident.
You, you’ll just go back to the underpass you use for sleeping and pee all over yourself. Then you’ll rub your pee into your own skin, groaning as you do so. The homeless people around you will know better than to ask you to stop. They know that if they respond they’ll just encourage you, and that’s no good for anyone.
Congratulations Very Vocal Pervert!
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Congratulations on Showing Real Courage!
Today you’re going to walk up to a Scientology protester and punch them right in the face.
“You’re not helping!” you’ll shout at them as they massage their jaw. They’ll look at you, puzzled at your response.
“But you’re a secular humanist,” they’ll say. “How could you disagree with our cause?”
“Because you’re being total shitheads about it!” you’ll shout at them. Then you’ll go back to your Prius, take a sip from your locally grown organic coffee and continue driving into Manhattan where you’ll manage some sort of charitable trust or some bullshit, we’re sure.
Congratulations on Showing Real Courage!
“You’re not helping!” you’ll shout at them as they massage their jaw. They’ll look at you, puzzled at your response.
“But you’re a secular humanist,” they’ll say. “How could you disagree with our cause?”
“Because you’re being total shitheads about it!” you’ll shout at them. Then you’ll go back to your Prius, take a sip from your locally grown organic coffee and continue driving into Manhattan where you’ll manage some sort of charitable trust or some bullshit, we’re sure.
Congratulations on Showing Real Courage!
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Congratulations Gayest Meth Dealers in Omaha!
Yesterday you were just a couple of kids cooking and counting pay offs in a condemned house. Then you got your sweet new double-wide up and running and life really started looking up for the two of you. It was a beautiful change, one that gave you both the stability you craved and the love nest that you were denied for so many years while living in your respective parents houses.
But now you’re an independent couple of gay meth dealers, living on the outskirts of Omaha near a drainage ditch which has been optimistically named a river, and you’re going to endure your first real hardship since moving to the Jewel of Nebraska. You’re going to deal with a bunch of white supremacists trying to force you out of your lab.
“C’mon out faggots,” they’ll shout at you from outside of the meth lab. “We know you’re in there.”
You’ll be cowering under the fold out bed in the sealed off, meth free compartment of the trailer (you’re pushers, not users) with your partner, wanting to cry but worried that crying will give your location away and lead to your death under a hail of generally intolerant bullets.
You’ll have been there for thirty minutes, wondering if and when the white supremacists will leave, when your boyfriend will finally lose his patience.
“Damnit,” he’ll say, picking up the old double barrel shotgun you use to menace people when they refuse to pay and checking the chamber. It’ll have two shells in there, unspent, their telltale gold backings unmarred by the antique weapon’s hammer. “There’s only one way it ends.”
He’ll step up to the front door and open it, sticking his head out for just a moment. Then he’ll step out in front of it and fire the barrels one at a time. A man will scream and you’ll hear two bodies hitting dirt.
Quaking, you’ll run over to the twin bed you share and grab the revolver you keep under your pillow. Shaking, you’ll load it round by round while the white supremecists outside shout at you and your boyfriend to come out and fight like men.
One voice will come louder than the others. It’ll come closer and closer, as it it was walking towards you all the while, and it’ll come from a man you recognize: Old Racist Tom, your grand pappy.
You’re not much for family, nor are you much for tradition, but it’s not hard to say that Old Racist Tom would kill you outright if he had the chance for being a homo and cutting it on his business. And here he’d see himself as within his rights to do it. So when you aim that pistol out the window and squeeze the trigger real carefully, you’re not going to feel a whit of regret as Old Racist Tom falls down on his back, coughing and choking and his boys run off and leave him there.
You’re not going to feel bad when you and your boyfriend go outside after you’re sure they’re all gone and shoot the other two dying men in the head. And you’re certainly not going to feel bad when you cover Old Racist Tom in gasoline and light him on fire.
He’ll scream some, but it won’t last. He won’t have much to him in the end. And when it’s all over, more than anything else, you’ll just feel proud that you became your own man that night.
Congratulations Gayest Meth Dealers in Omaha!
But now you’re an independent couple of gay meth dealers, living on the outskirts of Omaha near a drainage ditch which has been optimistically named a river, and you’re going to endure your first real hardship since moving to the Jewel of Nebraska. You’re going to deal with a bunch of white supremacists trying to force you out of your lab.
“C’mon out faggots,” they’ll shout at you from outside of the meth lab. “We know you’re in there.”
You’ll be cowering under the fold out bed in the sealed off, meth free compartment of the trailer (you’re pushers, not users) with your partner, wanting to cry but worried that crying will give your location away and lead to your death under a hail of generally intolerant bullets.
You’ll have been there for thirty minutes, wondering if and when the white supremacists will leave, when your boyfriend will finally lose his patience.
“Damnit,” he’ll say, picking up the old double barrel shotgun you use to menace people when they refuse to pay and checking the chamber. It’ll have two shells in there, unspent, their telltale gold backings unmarred by the antique weapon’s hammer. “There’s only one way it ends.”
He’ll step up to the front door and open it, sticking his head out for just a moment. Then he’ll step out in front of it and fire the barrels one at a time. A man will scream and you’ll hear two bodies hitting dirt.
Quaking, you’ll run over to the twin bed you share and grab the revolver you keep under your pillow. Shaking, you’ll load it round by round while the white supremecists outside shout at you and your boyfriend to come out and fight like men.
One voice will come louder than the others. It’ll come closer and closer, as it it was walking towards you all the while, and it’ll come from a man you recognize: Old Racist Tom, your grand pappy.
You’re not much for family, nor are you much for tradition, but it’s not hard to say that Old Racist Tom would kill you outright if he had the chance for being a homo and cutting it on his business. And here he’d see himself as within his rights to do it. So when you aim that pistol out the window and squeeze the trigger real carefully, you’re not going to feel a whit of regret as Old Racist Tom falls down on his back, coughing and choking and his boys run off and leave him there.
You’re not going to feel bad when you and your boyfriend go outside after you’re sure they’re all gone and shoot the other two dying men in the head. And you’re certainly not going to feel bad when you cover Old Racist Tom in gasoline and light him on fire.
He’ll scream some, but it won’t last. He won’t have much to him in the end. And when it’s all over, more than anything else, you’ll just feel proud that you became your own man that night.
Congratulations Gayest Meth Dealers in Omaha!
Monday, May 9, 2011
Congratulations on Buying Your Dream Meth Lab!
It’s going to be a double wide tractor trailer down by the river.
“Cops don’t like to come here?” you’ll ask the real estate agent, a young man named Shankbone with a shaved head and a tattoo of Madonna circa 1986. Shankbone won’t be a day over 18, if that.
“Not unless they have to. Or is already,” he’ll respond, running his finger along the sawed off shotgun he put on the kitchen counter when you and your partner started looking through the double-wide.
“Any pest problems?”
He’ll shake his head, then nod. “Some rats, yeah. But we got traps for that.”
Your partner will suck air through his teeth. “Rats are kind of a dealbreaker at this price.”
You’ll give him an are you out of your mind? look, but he’ll have a twinkle in his eye that will tell you that if ever you should play along, now is the time.
“But this is a great location. Maybe we could make a deal?” you’ll say, opening and closing the cabinets, searching for any sort of listening devices that might’ve been left there after a previous bust.
Shankbone will shake his head, but then your partner will take him over to the side and start talking to him. When the two return they’ll both look like they just fucked each other over royally and loved doing it.
“Reckon we could make this work for a hundred and fifty less, but we’re gonna need some cookies every month for our real estate office, get my meaning,” he’ll say. He’ll compliment his message by holding up an index card reading meth and pointing to it as he speaks.
“I think we can make that work,” you’ll say, hugging your partner and giving him a quick kiss on the cheek. Shankbone will pretend he didn’t see, turning his head towards the door and starting on his way out front.
You won’t be able to bring yourself to care about his discomfort. This is the fresh start you’ve been dreaming of for so long. You’ve worked so hard to get it, and now it’s here. Nothing will break the spell of this moment.
Congratulations on Buying Your Dream Meth Lab!
“Cops don’t like to come here?” you’ll ask the real estate agent, a young man named Shankbone with a shaved head and a tattoo of Madonna circa 1986. Shankbone won’t be a day over 18, if that.
“Not unless they have to. Or is already,” he’ll respond, running his finger along the sawed off shotgun he put on the kitchen counter when you and your partner started looking through the double-wide.
“Any pest problems?”
He’ll shake his head, then nod. “Some rats, yeah. But we got traps for that.”
Your partner will suck air through his teeth. “Rats are kind of a dealbreaker at this price.”
You’ll give him an are you out of your mind? look, but he’ll have a twinkle in his eye that will tell you that if ever you should play along, now is the time.
“But this is a great location. Maybe we could make a deal?” you’ll say, opening and closing the cabinets, searching for any sort of listening devices that might’ve been left there after a previous bust.
Shankbone will shake his head, but then your partner will take him over to the side and start talking to him. When the two return they’ll both look like they just fucked each other over royally and loved doing it.
“Reckon we could make this work for a hundred and fifty less, but we’re gonna need some cookies every month for our real estate office, get my meaning,” he’ll say. He’ll compliment his message by holding up an index card reading meth and pointing to it as he speaks.
“I think we can make that work,” you’ll say, hugging your partner and giving him a quick kiss on the cheek. Shankbone will pretend he didn’t see, turning his head towards the door and starting on his way out front.
You won’t be able to bring yourself to care about his discomfort. This is the fresh start you’ve been dreaming of for so long. You’ve worked so hard to get it, and now it’s here. Nothing will break the spell of this moment.
Congratulations on Buying Your Dream Meth Lab!
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Portal 2 and the Mighty Vagina!
The first Portal was a game about a round, gently shaped gun that fired vaginas into walls. These vaginas allowed you to subvert the structure of levels, non-violently isolate and neutralize threats and generally avoid conflicts. Occasionally they’d redirect objects of violence, phallic and intrusive destructive objects of violence, back on their users. Through your efforts with this vagina gun you removed a series of orbs from a giant phallic robot, reducing its strength with each partial castration. When you’ve finished castrating the giant phallic robot you’re rewarded with your freedom. At least, briefly. Until retconning set in and you were dragged back to your testing chamber by some indubitably inefficient robot arm.
Basically, it was the girliest game ever. Girlier than Barbie Horse Adventures, because Portal wasn’t content to just portray a concept of womanhood and ask us to go along with it. It wanted us to think about how phallic first person shooters were and think about how their shooter rejected all of the concepts that made these other games so phallic and homosocial. It forced players to unwittingly forward the end goal of girl-power, and it did it subversively, smartly and effectively. Portal made other games seem silly, violent and irrational by comparison. It was a game that introduced us to the idea of uniquely feminine game play and heroes, portrayed and conveyed with the same consistency and authority normally reserved for masculine gaming archetypes.
Portal 2 is far, far girlie-er. If Portal 2 was a women’s support group Portal would be a group of anti-abortion protesters chanting outside of a Planned Parenthood, screaming at young women as they attempt to enter. So how can this be?
Portal 2 builds on all of the themes that Portal originally laid: ideas about subverting authority, evading enemies and using a vagina gun to solve all of your problems. But unlike the first Portal game, which pitted woman against woman, or at least against disembodied female robot, which is pretty good for a non-exploitative portrayal of a woman by video game standards, Portal 2 is all about subverting male authority and restoring a feminine authority structure.
Portal 2 begins in the ruins that have come from Chell’s previous efforts. Clearly people have moved through these ruins since her insurrection, but without GlaDOS’ supervision the facility has fallen into disrepair. A bumbling male caretaker ejects Chell into this brave new world with the best of intentions, intending to use the portal device, the embodiment of feminine power in the world of Portal, to exert authority over the world and find a way to escape the crumbling ruins around them. In the process, entirely due to the efforts of the bumbling male figure, they resurrect GlaDOS, overthrow her and then set the facility on a path to self-destruction under its new male leadership. But don’t despair! GlaDOS is nicer, and has been moved into a potato, so you’ll spend a great deal of time getting to know her and solving puzzles by her side so that you can restore girl-power to the facility and restore order.
Oh, also, the moon is in there. Like, all over the place in art and design. It fits into the back story, even. As a symbol of feminine power and energy, the moon really can’t be beat, and in time it becomes a pretty significant character in the world of Portal 2.
Portal 2 is basically all about girl power again. And not the girl power that Portal the First exerted against an abstract, faceless female authority figure who was carrying out the will of a faceless masculine group of scientists against one hapless test subject. Portal 2 is about re-awakening a feminine authority structure, restoring women to their bodies, their history and their freedom.
At the forefront of this battle is GlaDOS. GlaDOS begins Portal 2 stripped of her power, in the same state that you left her in at the end of the original Portal. But before long (after destroying both her ability to produce new robot-life within the facility and her ability to remove unwanted life from its walls, gee thanks for the subtlety Valve) she’s removed from her seat of power, replaced by an inept and violent male replacement. And then she’s inserted into a potato. Her body is subjugated and she’s forced into a shapeless mass, where even her mind is constrained by her surroundings.
But in this shell parts of her, long dormant, awaken. Through adversity GlaDOS learns of her past, who she was and where she came from. She learns of other male authority figures less adept than herself at maintaining the science factory that is Aperture Labs. And we learn of how she came to control Aperture and make it into something truly great. Or at least quite clean and filled with very efficient science.
GlaDOS and Chell embark on a journey together. They bond, they discover things about their womanhood they’d long since forgotten. They paint stuff, granted with various gels that fuck up physics in all sorts of interesting ways. And then they expose the facile nature of the new male authority figure, subvert him and then dismantle his ill-conceived and self-destructive empire on the eve of its collapse, only to replace it with a new, cooperative and functional world order, one where women reign once again.
If I was writing an academic paper, I’d wax on the specifics. But I don’t think video games are well suited to academia. That’s part of what makes them such an interesting art form: they resist traditional analysis. So much of the meaning of a game comes out in the experience of playing it, and so much of what a player gets out of a game comes out of the small, subtle choices that they make during the course of play, right down to where they look at a given moment.
Portal 2 is all about that specific moment, the moment where you interrupt Wheatley with a solution to a puzzle or burn down literal barriers in order to create portals. It’s all about how you feel when GlaDOS prattles on to you about how amazing Cave Johnson is during his lemon speech or how you feel when you see her in that final scene, trying to decide what to do with you. It’s all about making your own decisions with the tools provided to you, even if those decisions are all too often constrained (especially when compared with the original Portal). It is fundamentally a game about using the moon, the symbol of womanhood and the connection between women and the planet, to castrate a male robot bent on destroying your home not through malice but through blind ambition and ineptitude.
The first Portal was a game about subverting authority and exploring how much women could do in games. It did a great job with that and it made us laugh while it made us think, just like Professor Frink. Portal 2 is just as funny a game, just a subtle a narrative about gender and authority. But where Portal was all about women fighting women and establishing an hierarchy, rejecting the idea of authority in general, Portal 2 is all about establishing an hierarchy where a woman is king.
Because in the end of Portal 2, GlaDOS is back. Even if she’s not exerting authority over you anymore, having learned her lesson about girl power in the past, she’s still a female authority figure subjugating a pair of male robots for her own personal pleasure and entertainment. And there’s no way you can convince me that that isn’t an endorsement of the power of woman and a statement on the importance of re-evaluating the manner in which women interact socially, so that we enter a society where women support one another rather than tearing one another down. Portal 2 is about more than just girl power. It’s about creating a female society. It’s about lady-on-lady love.
Basically, it was the girliest game ever. Girlier than Barbie Horse Adventures, because Portal wasn’t content to just portray a concept of womanhood and ask us to go along with it. It wanted us to think about how phallic first person shooters were and think about how their shooter rejected all of the concepts that made these other games so phallic and homosocial. It forced players to unwittingly forward the end goal of girl-power, and it did it subversively, smartly and effectively. Portal made other games seem silly, violent and irrational by comparison. It was a game that introduced us to the idea of uniquely feminine game play and heroes, portrayed and conveyed with the same consistency and authority normally reserved for masculine gaming archetypes.
Portal 2 is far, far girlie-er. If Portal 2 was a women’s support group Portal would be a group of anti-abortion protesters chanting outside of a Planned Parenthood, screaming at young women as they attempt to enter. So how can this be?
Portal 2 builds on all of the themes that Portal originally laid: ideas about subverting authority, evading enemies and using a vagina gun to solve all of your problems. But unlike the first Portal game, which pitted woman against woman, or at least against disembodied female robot, which is pretty good for a non-exploitative portrayal of a woman by video game standards, Portal 2 is all about subverting male authority and restoring a feminine authority structure.
Portal 2 begins in the ruins that have come from Chell’s previous efforts. Clearly people have moved through these ruins since her insurrection, but without GlaDOS’ supervision the facility has fallen into disrepair. A bumbling male caretaker ejects Chell into this brave new world with the best of intentions, intending to use the portal device, the embodiment of feminine power in the world of Portal, to exert authority over the world and find a way to escape the crumbling ruins around them. In the process, entirely due to the efforts of the bumbling male figure, they resurrect GlaDOS, overthrow her and then set the facility on a path to self-destruction under its new male leadership. But don’t despair! GlaDOS is nicer, and has been moved into a potato, so you’ll spend a great deal of time getting to know her and solving puzzles by her side so that you can restore girl-power to the facility and restore order.
Oh, also, the moon is in there. Like, all over the place in art and design. It fits into the back story, even. As a symbol of feminine power and energy, the moon really can’t be beat, and in time it becomes a pretty significant character in the world of Portal 2.
Portal 2 is basically all about girl power again. And not the girl power that Portal the First exerted against an abstract, faceless female authority figure who was carrying out the will of a faceless masculine group of scientists against one hapless test subject. Portal 2 is about re-awakening a feminine authority structure, restoring women to their bodies, their history and their freedom.
At the forefront of this battle is GlaDOS. GlaDOS begins Portal 2 stripped of her power, in the same state that you left her in at the end of the original Portal. But before long (after destroying both her ability to produce new robot-life within the facility and her ability to remove unwanted life from its walls, gee thanks for the subtlety Valve) she’s removed from her seat of power, replaced by an inept and violent male replacement. And then she’s inserted into a potato. Her body is subjugated and she’s forced into a shapeless mass, where even her mind is constrained by her surroundings.
But in this shell parts of her, long dormant, awaken. Through adversity GlaDOS learns of her past, who she was and where she came from. She learns of other male authority figures less adept than herself at maintaining the science factory that is Aperture Labs. And we learn of how she came to control Aperture and make it into something truly great. Or at least quite clean and filled with very efficient science.
GlaDOS and Chell embark on a journey together. They bond, they discover things about their womanhood they’d long since forgotten. They paint stuff, granted with various gels that fuck up physics in all sorts of interesting ways. And then they expose the facile nature of the new male authority figure, subvert him and then dismantle his ill-conceived and self-destructive empire on the eve of its collapse, only to replace it with a new, cooperative and functional world order, one where women reign once again.
If I was writing an academic paper, I’d wax on the specifics. But I don’t think video games are well suited to academia. That’s part of what makes them such an interesting art form: they resist traditional analysis. So much of the meaning of a game comes out in the experience of playing it, and so much of what a player gets out of a game comes out of the small, subtle choices that they make during the course of play, right down to where they look at a given moment.
Portal 2 is all about that specific moment, the moment where you interrupt Wheatley with a solution to a puzzle or burn down literal barriers in order to create portals. It’s all about how you feel when GlaDOS prattles on to you about how amazing Cave Johnson is during his lemon speech or how you feel when you see her in that final scene, trying to decide what to do with you. It’s all about making your own decisions with the tools provided to you, even if those decisions are all too often constrained (especially when compared with the original Portal). It is fundamentally a game about using the moon, the symbol of womanhood and the connection between women and the planet, to castrate a male robot bent on destroying your home not through malice but through blind ambition and ineptitude.
The first Portal was a game about subverting authority and exploring how much women could do in games. It did a great job with that and it made us laugh while it made us think, just like Professor Frink. Portal 2 is just as funny a game, just a subtle a narrative about gender and authority. But where Portal was all about women fighting women and establishing an hierarchy, rejecting the idea of authority in general, Portal 2 is all about establishing an hierarchy where a woman is king.
Because in the end of Portal 2, GlaDOS is back. Even if she’s not exerting authority over you anymore, having learned her lesson about girl power in the past, she’s still a female authority figure subjugating a pair of male robots for her own personal pleasure and entertainment. And there’s no way you can convince me that that isn’t an endorsement of the power of woman and a statement on the importance of re-evaluating the manner in which women interact socially, so that we enter a society where women support one another rather than tearing one another down. Portal 2 is about more than just girl power. It’s about creating a female society. It’s about lady-on-lady love.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Congratulations on Enduring the Wind!
She won’t be there yet. She won’t be coming at all for all you know. An old man will walk by and shake his head at you. He’ll know right away. He’ll be appropriately dressed for the weather, in a thick coat with a snug hat and a sad little smile.
“Lady asked you to wait, eh?” he’ll mumble at you, nudging you in the shoulder. He’ll point to your t-shirt. “Wants to see how much you care?”
You’ll nod at him, since your lady also asked you to remain completely silent while you wait for her. He’ll shake his head in response.
“She’s just waiting for you to die. To die or to give her a reason to leave. If she loved you she wouldn’t put you through this shit.” He’ll tap his cane on the ground and walk off. “Fucking idiot,” he’ll mumble, just loud enough for you to hear.
You’ll think about what he said for a moment and realize he’s completely right. But then you’ll think of how smug and insufferable she’ll be if you actually leave. She’ll be able to blame you for wrecking the whole relationship, never mind the fact that she fucked your best friend, your best friend’s sister and your best friend’s sister’s girlfriend. If you stay there she won’t be able to break up with you and keep the high ground.
Better to die than to give her that.
Congratulations on Enduring the Wind!
“Lady asked you to wait, eh?” he’ll mumble at you, nudging you in the shoulder. He’ll point to your t-shirt. “Wants to see how much you care?”
You’ll nod at him, since your lady also asked you to remain completely silent while you wait for her. He’ll shake his head in response.
“She’s just waiting for you to die. To die or to give her a reason to leave. If she loved you she wouldn’t put you through this shit.” He’ll tap his cane on the ground and walk off. “Fucking idiot,” he’ll mumble, just loud enough for you to hear.
You’ll think about what he said for a moment and realize he’s completely right. But then you’ll think of how smug and insufferable she’ll be if you actually leave. She’ll be able to blame you for wrecking the whole relationship, never mind the fact that she fucked your best friend, your best friend’s sister and your best friend’s sister’s girlfriend. If you stay there she won’t be able to break up with you and keep the high ground.
Better to die than to give her that.
Congratulations on Enduring the Wind!
Friday, May 6, 2011
Congratulations on Drinking Too Much Champagne!
The occasion will warrant it, or so you’ll tell yourself. Really it’ll just be so refreshing and sweet, so bracing. Each sip will make you feel a little more alive.
“I think you might’ve had enough,” your wife will tell you, which will make you laugh into your flute (that’s right, it’s called a flute, quick, laugh again). When you finish laughing you’ll polish off the rest of the flute and hold it out for the hostess to refill. She’ll do it, reticently, trying to send you the message that you should slow down with her body language.
You won’t.
You’ll keep on trucking, tucking away another four glasses. By the time your wife walks you out the door you’ll be giggling incessantly, feeling light and heavy at the same moment. Your feet will stumble but in your mind they’ll be dancers flitting down the stairs, trying to guide your wife into joyous celebration.
But she won’t have it. “Come on,” she’ll whisper in your ear as she drags you down the walkway into the car. You’ll slip inside, bumping your head delicately against the frame. “Shit,” she’ll mumble, strapping you into your seat like a child. You’ll lean forward against the straps, youthfully straining them with your bulk.
“We should make love,” you’ll tell her as she enters the car, but she won’t respond. She’ll start the vehicle and take off down the road.
As she drives the road outside will move with horrible speed. It’ll rush by, a series of endless streaming lights that eventually fold into trees and moonlight when the two of you reach the highway.
The nausea will have begun long before that, a miasama beneath the euphoria of your drunk. It will creep into your hands and feet and when it reaches your head there will be no stopping it. You’ll lurch forward and vomit, suddenly and violently, into the passenger side floor and dashboard of your 2004 Subaru Outback.
“Fuck,” your wife will whisper, shaking her head. She won’t speak to you for the rest of the ride home. She won’t say a word when the two of you get into bed together, and when you wake up the next morning, head pounding with the glaze of champagne, she’ll be gone. You assume that she’ll be downstairs making breakfast, but after last night that might be too much to believe.
Congratulations on Drinking Too Much Champagne!
“I think you might’ve had enough,” your wife will tell you, which will make you laugh into your flute (that’s right, it’s called a flute, quick, laugh again). When you finish laughing you’ll polish off the rest of the flute and hold it out for the hostess to refill. She’ll do it, reticently, trying to send you the message that you should slow down with her body language.
You won’t.
You’ll keep on trucking, tucking away another four glasses. By the time your wife walks you out the door you’ll be giggling incessantly, feeling light and heavy at the same moment. Your feet will stumble but in your mind they’ll be dancers flitting down the stairs, trying to guide your wife into joyous celebration.
But she won’t have it. “Come on,” she’ll whisper in your ear as she drags you down the walkway into the car. You’ll slip inside, bumping your head delicately against the frame. “Shit,” she’ll mumble, strapping you into your seat like a child. You’ll lean forward against the straps, youthfully straining them with your bulk.
“We should make love,” you’ll tell her as she enters the car, but she won’t respond. She’ll start the vehicle and take off down the road.
As she drives the road outside will move with horrible speed. It’ll rush by, a series of endless streaming lights that eventually fold into trees and moonlight when the two of you reach the highway.
The nausea will have begun long before that, a miasama beneath the euphoria of your drunk. It will creep into your hands and feet and when it reaches your head there will be no stopping it. You’ll lurch forward and vomit, suddenly and violently, into the passenger side floor and dashboard of your 2004 Subaru Outback.
“Fuck,” your wife will whisper, shaking her head. She won’t speak to you for the rest of the ride home. She won’t say a word when the two of you get into bed together, and when you wake up the next morning, head pounding with the glaze of champagne, she’ll be gone. You assume that she’ll be downstairs making breakfast, but after last night that might be too much to believe.
Congratulations on Drinking Too Much Champagne!
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Congratulations on Saving the Planet by Fucking!
Today you’re an ecologist and you’re going to save the planet.
“With science?” you’ll ask, your heart filled with hope. But the answer is, of course, no. Who the fuck are you trying to fool? You’re an ecologist. There are so many other more scientific professions, including linguists for fuck’s sake. And nearly all of them are better suited to saving the world than your slutty ass.
No, you’re going to find yourself kidnapped by a super villain who wanted to nail you in college. Back then he was a nice young chemistry major, and pretty much the only boy who ever asked you out that you didn’t immediately take up on his offer and fuck until he could no longer walk. He’s going to be pretty pissed, and he’s going to have a giant laser pointed at Greenland which, as it turns out, is actually one giant volcano.
We’d encourage you to check our facts here, but it’s fucking Greenland, so we know no one’s going to. If they did they’d find that Greenland is just lousy with magma, and one good laser blast will make the entire thing go kablooie all over the northern hemisphere. And if the northern hemisphere gets blasted there might as well be no planet anymore, because the southern hemisphere pretty much has a handful of nice beaches and fuck all else.
Once you get to your old non-fuck buddy’s lair he’ll treat you to a lovely dinner where you’ll be chained to a table. He’ll lecture you for some time on how ecology isn’t a real science, upsetting you in the process. Then he’ll talk about how many is killing the planet and your knees will turn to jelly.
“I never saw this in you before,” you’ll whisper into his ear once you’ve finally gotten him close to you.
“Well, I was nice in college,” he’ll reply like a normal person. “Now I’m kind of an asshole.”
“Give me one free hand and I’ll make sure you’re a happy asshole,” you’ll say, licking your lips. He’ll unlock one of your hands and you’ll give him a handjob that will turn into a whole lot else.
When the whole thing is over and done with you’ll be unconscious on the table and he’ll no longer want to destroy the planet. He’ll be happy, content for the time being. But, just to warn you, you will have given him herpes. So if you want to stay alive past tonight you should probably get out of there fast.
Congratulations on Saving the Planet by Fucking!
“With science?” you’ll ask, your heart filled with hope. But the answer is, of course, no. Who the fuck are you trying to fool? You’re an ecologist. There are so many other more scientific professions, including linguists for fuck’s sake. And nearly all of them are better suited to saving the world than your slutty ass.
No, you’re going to find yourself kidnapped by a super villain who wanted to nail you in college. Back then he was a nice young chemistry major, and pretty much the only boy who ever asked you out that you didn’t immediately take up on his offer and fuck until he could no longer walk. He’s going to be pretty pissed, and he’s going to have a giant laser pointed at Greenland which, as it turns out, is actually one giant volcano.
We’d encourage you to check our facts here, but it’s fucking Greenland, so we know no one’s going to. If they did they’d find that Greenland is just lousy with magma, and one good laser blast will make the entire thing go kablooie all over the northern hemisphere. And if the northern hemisphere gets blasted there might as well be no planet anymore, because the southern hemisphere pretty much has a handful of nice beaches and fuck all else.
Once you get to your old non-fuck buddy’s lair he’ll treat you to a lovely dinner where you’ll be chained to a table. He’ll lecture you for some time on how ecology isn’t a real science, upsetting you in the process. Then he’ll talk about how many is killing the planet and your knees will turn to jelly.
“I never saw this in you before,” you’ll whisper into his ear once you’ve finally gotten him close to you.
“Well, I was nice in college,” he’ll reply like a normal person. “Now I’m kind of an asshole.”
“Give me one free hand and I’ll make sure you’re a happy asshole,” you’ll say, licking your lips. He’ll unlock one of your hands and you’ll give him a handjob that will turn into a whole lot else.
When the whole thing is over and done with you’ll be unconscious on the table and he’ll no longer want to destroy the planet. He’ll be happy, content for the time being. But, just to warn you, you will have given him herpes. So if you want to stay alive past tonight you should probably get out of there fast.
Congratulations on Saving the Planet by Fucking!
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Congratulations on Falling Into That Acid Vat You Set Up For Your Enemies!
Today you’re going to walk into your house and forget about the elaborate trapdoor you set up underneath the threshold of your house.
“Shi-“ you’ll shout before tumbling down into a vat of acid, where you’ll be dissolved by a combination of acid and your own hubris.
Congratulations on Falling Into That Acid Vat You Set Up For Your Enemies!
“Shi-“ you’ll shout before tumbling down into a vat of acid, where you’ll be dissolved by a combination of acid and your own hubris.
Congratulations on Falling Into That Acid Vat You Set Up For Your Enemies!
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Congratulations on Reading Ayn Rand for the First Time!
Today you’re a fifteen year old girl and you’re going to read Ayn Rand for the first time.
You’ll be sitting in bed with a dog eared copy of The Fountainhead that your aunt, the one who was never married and doesn’t “believe in love,” even though she does almost nothing but read romance novels, lent you. You’ll be pretty bored for the first few dozen pages, up until you get to the first sex scene.
“Oh shit,” you’ll mumble to yourself, unbuttoning your pants and cramming your hand in there as you continue reading. “Oh fuck.”
When you finish you’ll end up passing out, partly from your exertions and partly because of how dense and turgid the prose is. You’ll sleep for a good hour or two before your parent’s cries of “dinner” wake you and you wash your hands before tromping downstairs to sit at the table and look at them glumly. They’ll sense that something is wrong, but they won’t know just what it is until you look at the two of them, open your mouth and ask:
“Have either of you ever read Ayn Rand before?”
The table will immediately go still. Your father will stop chewing and your mother will put down her utensils and look at you with the same expression she gave you when you asked to go on birth control.
“Who told you about her? Aunt Cheryl?” she’ll ask. She’ll sound a little disappointed and very, very tired, as if she’s already done with the discussion she knows the two of you are going to have.
“Kinda. I’ve been reading some of her stuff and it’s kinda neat. Some of it makes a lot of sense.”
At this point your father will flip over the table and just start screaming. He’ll punch the air wildly while his voice pitches up and down, as if he could shout over what you just said and remove it from his memory. Your mother will be slightly more reasonable, shouting to contend with your father’s voice.
“She’s not really a role model. It’s good that you’re reading and making your own choices, but remember. She was a crazy bitch who never had a real friend and is responsible for influencing the worldviews of the many of the people who are directly responsible for the current global financial crisis.” She’ll motion for your father to stop shouting, but he’ll have entered some sort of fugue state that makes communication with him difficult at best, so your mom will just keep on shouting over him. “We’re also positive that she’s the reason your Aunt Cheryl is still single.”
You’ll get up from your chair at this point, which you were still sitting in even though the table was totally upended right in front of you a few minutes earlier, and run to your room weeping. You’ll curl up in bed again and start thumbing through pages, lazily playing with yourself until the combination of boredom with the text and disappointment with your parents makes you fall asleep.
Congratulations on Reading Ayn Rand for the First Time!
You’ll be sitting in bed with a dog eared copy of The Fountainhead that your aunt, the one who was never married and doesn’t “believe in love,” even though she does almost nothing but read romance novels, lent you. You’ll be pretty bored for the first few dozen pages, up until you get to the first sex scene.
“Oh shit,” you’ll mumble to yourself, unbuttoning your pants and cramming your hand in there as you continue reading. “Oh fuck.”
When you finish you’ll end up passing out, partly from your exertions and partly because of how dense and turgid the prose is. You’ll sleep for a good hour or two before your parent’s cries of “dinner” wake you and you wash your hands before tromping downstairs to sit at the table and look at them glumly. They’ll sense that something is wrong, but they won’t know just what it is until you look at the two of them, open your mouth and ask:
“Have either of you ever read Ayn Rand before?”
The table will immediately go still. Your father will stop chewing and your mother will put down her utensils and look at you with the same expression she gave you when you asked to go on birth control.
“Who told you about her? Aunt Cheryl?” she’ll ask. She’ll sound a little disappointed and very, very tired, as if she’s already done with the discussion she knows the two of you are going to have.
“Kinda. I’ve been reading some of her stuff and it’s kinda neat. Some of it makes a lot of sense.”
At this point your father will flip over the table and just start screaming. He’ll punch the air wildly while his voice pitches up and down, as if he could shout over what you just said and remove it from his memory. Your mother will be slightly more reasonable, shouting to contend with your father’s voice.
“She’s not really a role model. It’s good that you’re reading and making your own choices, but remember. She was a crazy bitch who never had a real friend and is responsible for influencing the worldviews of the many of the people who are directly responsible for the current global financial crisis.” She’ll motion for your father to stop shouting, but he’ll have entered some sort of fugue state that makes communication with him difficult at best, so your mom will just keep on shouting over him. “We’re also positive that she’s the reason your Aunt Cheryl is still single.”
You’ll get up from your chair at this point, which you were still sitting in even though the table was totally upended right in front of you a few minutes earlier, and run to your room weeping. You’ll curl up in bed again and start thumbing through pages, lazily playing with yourself until the combination of boredom with the text and disappointment with your parents makes you fall asleep.
Congratulations on Reading Ayn Rand for the First Time!
Monday, May 2, 2011
Congratulations Actual Sexy Office Worker!
You know those websites where pornstars who have, in almost every case, never worked in an office fuck in vaguely businesslike clothes like glasses and stockings after some really weak dialogue about TPS reports? Those are actually based on a real set of offices where co-workers just fuck each other constantly in order to resolve issues and accomplish tasks faster.
And it turns out you were just hired in to one of those offices.
“I’m not sure I’m okay with this,” you’re going to say while a 40 year old woman with fake tits gives you a blowjob while her boss, a thirty six year old woman wearing glasses and covered in tattoos, shakes her head.
“Shut up unless you want to get fired,” she’ll mumble, watching you get a hummer while she masturbates. You’ll come after a few agonizing minutes and they’ll sit you down at a desk where you’ll populate an Excel spreadsheet for like, forty minutes, with the names of various companies that make helicopter engines. It’ll be boring and involve a lot of Google searching which, even though you won’t type anything pornographic into the search fields, will keep generating pornographic search results.
“This is surprisingly unfun,” you’ll mumble to yourself, which will prompt three young women walking in and engaging in a lesbian orgy nearby you.
“What the fuck?” you’ll ask. This will draw one of the trio’s attention while the other two service each other orally. She’ll grab you by the face and start making out with you with way too much tongue.
“Stop please,” you’ll ask her, but she won’t pay any attention.
“Shut up newbie,” she’ll say as she fumbles with your belt. You will, to your great chagrin, get super hard. The two of you will have awkward, messy sex on your desk, followed by a brief session where the two of you dress without making eye contact.
“Welcome to the team,” she’ll tell you as she leaves, slapping the ass of one of her cohorts as she goes. The two young women will continue servicing one another long after she’s left, long after you feel is a realistic amount of time to have sex. You’ll walk past them when you break for lunch, wondering if this is really worth the sweet, sweet health insurance or if you should go back to temping, where you don’t get molested every time you open your mouth.
Congratulations Actual Sexy Office Worker!
And it turns out you were just hired in to one of those offices.
“I’m not sure I’m okay with this,” you’re going to say while a 40 year old woman with fake tits gives you a blowjob while her boss, a thirty six year old woman wearing glasses and covered in tattoos, shakes her head.
“Shut up unless you want to get fired,” she’ll mumble, watching you get a hummer while she masturbates. You’ll come after a few agonizing minutes and they’ll sit you down at a desk where you’ll populate an Excel spreadsheet for like, forty minutes, with the names of various companies that make helicopter engines. It’ll be boring and involve a lot of Google searching which, even though you won’t type anything pornographic into the search fields, will keep generating pornographic search results.
“This is surprisingly unfun,” you’ll mumble to yourself, which will prompt three young women walking in and engaging in a lesbian orgy nearby you.
“What the fuck?” you’ll ask. This will draw one of the trio’s attention while the other two service each other orally. She’ll grab you by the face and start making out with you with way too much tongue.
“Stop please,” you’ll ask her, but she won’t pay any attention.
“Shut up newbie,” she’ll say as she fumbles with your belt. You will, to your great chagrin, get super hard. The two of you will have awkward, messy sex on your desk, followed by a brief session where the two of you dress without making eye contact.
“Welcome to the team,” she’ll tell you as she leaves, slapping the ass of one of her cohorts as she goes. The two young women will continue servicing one another long after she’s left, long after you feel is a realistic amount of time to have sex. You’ll walk past them when you break for lunch, wondering if this is really worth the sweet, sweet health insurance or if you should go back to temping, where you don’t get molested every time you open your mouth.
Congratulations Actual Sexy Office Worker!
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Dead Money Love!
This has been a great time to be a gamer. Not just because of new releases like Portal 2, which are pretty incredible. I’ve been digging into my back log of Steam purchases from the holiday sales, finally playing through all the wonderful little titles that escaped my notice when I was so busy back in January and February. Most of them are dross, don’t be mistaken. Some incredible footnotes like VVVVVVV and Super Meat Boy are mixed in there, but mostly I’ve been working on completing archaic shooters no one in their right mind would find fun (I’m looking mostly at Kane and Lynch here).
But mixed in with that dross was the Dead Money DLC for Fallout: New Vegas. I was a huge fan of New Vegas when it dropped over six months ago, and I played through all of Fallout 3’s downloadable content, for better or for worse, so playing Dead Money was a bit of a no-brainer for me. But my expectations were set very, very low. Anyone who played Operation Anchorage or Mothership Zeta knows why.
Fallout DLC has been miserable in the past. The consistently excellent games have been paired with poor, rushed-to-market, hastily constructed downloadable content, and it’s been infuriating to deal with both the technical aspects of Fallout’s DLC and the structural elements of having to play through a series of corridor maps that capture none of what makes the Fallout series in 3D so fantastic. Dead Money has none of these problems.
Dead Money works in a carefully enclosed setting, made with all new, all pitch perfect artistic resources. There’s none of the content recycling that plagued much of the Fallout 3 DLC. Unlike say Broken Steel (ironically my favorite piece of Fallout 3 DLC), which reused assets from previous Fallout games to the exclusion of any new content, Dead Money is a visual feast of new content, a glimpse of what life looks like outside of the Mojave desert. It introduces new combat mechanics, some of the most interesting and rewarding that I’ve ever seen, that contribute to both the setting and the difficulty of play itself.
Let’s face it, most of the DLC packages in Fallout 3 were pathetically easy, and had all the teeth of a kitten when it came to actual new challenges. Dead Money is all about changing the way that Fallout: New Vegas plays as a game. New rules, rules that show how dangerous the world is outside of the Mojave, come into play. And moving through Dead Money is all about coming to terms with these rules, learning them and learning how to manipulate them.
A big part of that is Dead Money’s new characters. Replacing traditional companions, Dead Money has a self contained set of compatriots who offer up bonuses exclusive to the Sierra Madre casino. The end result is not only a brand new cast of characters with their own stories, idiosyncrasies, strengths and weaknesses, but also a set of new mechanics unlocked by having each character in your party, most of them related to exploring world around you. Having a specific companion will make elements of the Sierra Madre that would normally make areas impossible to traverse safe by comparison.
The characters also provide depth and insight to the world of Fallout: New Vegas. New Vegas delves deeper and more incisively into what the world of Fallout is than any other Fallout game ever cared to, and it generates some pretty effective narrative in the process. Visiting the Sierra Madre will teach you volumes about the factions you’ve already met, the factions you haven’t met, the places between Vegas and DC and everything beyond. Fallout 3’s fascination with the war with the Chinese, its focus on the Brotherhood of Steel separatists as noble saviors attempting to impose order on a harsh new land, was all far less interesting to me than New Vegas’ constant struggle, settlement and resettlement. New Vegas is about society recovering, becoming something new and real and horrible and wonderful. Fallout 3 was almost entirely about what had occurred, and how people had trouble letting go of the past.
Dead Money does great service to both of these ends. Thematically it strattles New Vegas and Fallout 3, and it offers up insight on the struggles of the world of Fallout 3 better than Fallout 3 did. It captured the futility and frustrating towards the old world that Point Lookout aspired towards exposing far more adeptly. And it does so in a way which was still incredibly fucking challenging, even to an experienced player with a maxed out character.
It also carries with it all the goodies Fallout DLC is expected to: new weapons, armor and tools. There’s even a new currency, one that generates almost exclusively items that no one would really ever want. It’s a pity Sierra Madre chips cannot be used to secure fresh food and water supplies, but that might’ve made the game too easy.
In fact the only critique I’d have of Dead Money is less a criticism and more a comment: currency, and selling items in Dead Money is a bit difficult. Since vendors never use bottle caps and insist on a combination of chips, goods and old world currency, dropping off loot becomes a mini-game unto itself. It might’ve warranted adding a tracker where you could compare the value of goods you were selling to the value of goods you wanted to exchange for them, the way the old Fallouts did, but instead it takes the shape of a system of trial and error wherein you will repeatedly offer vendors goods and adjust the amount of pre-war money that you want back. It’s not a deal-breaker, just an irritating reality of Dead Money.
And it speaks volumes that that, aside from the sometimes punishing difficulty, is the only negative thing I can think of saying about this game. Dead Money is Downloadable content done right. It grows the world of Fallout: New Vegas as a whole, provides a set of rewards and challenges that were both unexpected and quite enjoyable, introduces new story elements that tie in to the original story of New Vegas and generally just constitutes a great way to spend fifteen dollars. If you like Fallout: New Vegas at all, there’s really no reason not to buy it.
But mixed in with that dross was the Dead Money DLC for Fallout: New Vegas. I was a huge fan of New Vegas when it dropped over six months ago, and I played through all of Fallout 3’s downloadable content, for better or for worse, so playing Dead Money was a bit of a no-brainer for me. But my expectations were set very, very low. Anyone who played Operation Anchorage or Mothership Zeta knows why.
Fallout DLC has been miserable in the past. The consistently excellent games have been paired with poor, rushed-to-market, hastily constructed downloadable content, and it’s been infuriating to deal with both the technical aspects of Fallout’s DLC and the structural elements of having to play through a series of corridor maps that capture none of what makes the Fallout series in 3D so fantastic. Dead Money has none of these problems.
Dead Money works in a carefully enclosed setting, made with all new, all pitch perfect artistic resources. There’s none of the content recycling that plagued much of the Fallout 3 DLC. Unlike say Broken Steel (ironically my favorite piece of Fallout 3 DLC), which reused assets from previous Fallout games to the exclusion of any new content, Dead Money is a visual feast of new content, a glimpse of what life looks like outside of the Mojave desert. It introduces new combat mechanics, some of the most interesting and rewarding that I’ve ever seen, that contribute to both the setting and the difficulty of play itself.
Let’s face it, most of the DLC packages in Fallout 3 were pathetically easy, and had all the teeth of a kitten when it came to actual new challenges. Dead Money is all about changing the way that Fallout: New Vegas plays as a game. New rules, rules that show how dangerous the world is outside of the Mojave, come into play. And moving through Dead Money is all about coming to terms with these rules, learning them and learning how to manipulate them.
A big part of that is Dead Money’s new characters. Replacing traditional companions, Dead Money has a self contained set of compatriots who offer up bonuses exclusive to the Sierra Madre casino. The end result is not only a brand new cast of characters with their own stories, idiosyncrasies, strengths and weaknesses, but also a set of new mechanics unlocked by having each character in your party, most of them related to exploring world around you. Having a specific companion will make elements of the Sierra Madre that would normally make areas impossible to traverse safe by comparison.
The characters also provide depth and insight to the world of Fallout: New Vegas. New Vegas delves deeper and more incisively into what the world of Fallout is than any other Fallout game ever cared to, and it generates some pretty effective narrative in the process. Visiting the Sierra Madre will teach you volumes about the factions you’ve already met, the factions you haven’t met, the places between Vegas and DC and everything beyond. Fallout 3’s fascination with the war with the Chinese, its focus on the Brotherhood of Steel separatists as noble saviors attempting to impose order on a harsh new land, was all far less interesting to me than New Vegas’ constant struggle, settlement and resettlement. New Vegas is about society recovering, becoming something new and real and horrible and wonderful. Fallout 3 was almost entirely about what had occurred, and how people had trouble letting go of the past.
Dead Money does great service to both of these ends. Thematically it strattles New Vegas and Fallout 3, and it offers up insight on the struggles of the world of Fallout 3 better than Fallout 3 did. It captured the futility and frustrating towards the old world that Point Lookout aspired towards exposing far more adeptly. And it does so in a way which was still incredibly fucking challenging, even to an experienced player with a maxed out character.
It also carries with it all the goodies Fallout DLC is expected to: new weapons, armor and tools. There’s even a new currency, one that generates almost exclusively items that no one would really ever want. It’s a pity Sierra Madre chips cannot be used to secure fresh food and water supplies, but that might’ve made the game too easy.
In fact the only critique I’d have of Dead Money is less a criticism and more a comment: currency, and selling items in Dead Money is a bit difficult. Since vendors never use bottle caps and insist on a combination of chips, goods and old world currency, dropping off loot becomes a mini-game unto itself. It might’ve warranted adding a tracker where you could compare the value of goods you were selling to the value of goods you wanted to exchange for them, the way the old Fallouts did, but instead it takes the shape of a system of trial and error wherein you will repeatedly offer vendors goods and adjust the amount of pre-war money that you want back. It’s not a deal-breaker, just an irritating reality of Dead Money.
And it speaks volumes that that, aside from the sometimes punishing difficulty, is the only negative thing I can think of saying about this game. Dead Money is Downloadable content done right. It grows the world of Fallout: New Vegas as a whole, provides a set of rewards and challenges that were both unexpected and quite enjoyable, introduces new story elements that tie in to the original story of New Vegas and generally just constitutes a great way to spend fifteen dollars. If you like Fallout: New Vegas at all, there’s really no reason not to buy it.
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