Congratulations on Embarrassing Angela Merkel in a Whole New Way!

Angela Merkel has had to deal with so much shit during her time in office. A Texan hillbilly once rubbed her shoulders at a public function, some idiotic waiter once spilled soup on her, and I have on it the highest authority that many people in Germany sometimes purposefully pronounce her last name as “Merkin” in order to draw comparison between her name and the term for a pubic wig, which sounds quite similar.

But you’re going to take it to a whole new level today when you, a North Korean diplomat with some serious MILF issues and Fjord Fever (copyright Martin Starr’s character from Party Down), meet her at a function and totally lose your shit.

The moment she shakes your hand you’ll begin trembling uncontrollably. Then you’ll drop to your knees and lean in real close and start kissing her feet. Tears will well up in your eyes and drop upon her shoes and you’ll start trying to mop them up with your tie as you babble in Korean.

The translator accompanying you will translate every single god damn word you’re saying, since he’s been told to do so on pain of his family’s death, and will do so in a monotone in an effort not to upset you further, but in the end this will just give Chancellor Merkel the vague impression that her new North Korean suitor is a sort of emotionless robot.

“I am so sorry to react this way,” the translator will intone, in English for some god damn reason. “You are simply so beautiful.”

She’ll laugh delicately and try to get you to stand up, but you’ll find yourself suddenly unable to stand, unable to even think of looking at her. Your shame will become so severe that you’ll vomit, disgorging the porridge you ate as part of your luxurious diplomatic lunch, as afforded to you by the nation of North Korea.

“I apologize for the mess I have rendered upon your footwear,” the translator will intone tinily. Chancellor Merkel will not respond. She won’t back away. She’ll just stand there, stock still, as she places in her life where, exactly, this event will fit on her list of most awkward social interactions ever.

After limited internal deliberation, she’ll settle on 3rd place, a fact which would honor you if she ever told it to you out loud.

Congratulations on Embarrassing Angela Merkel in a Whole New Way!

Congratulations on Siphoning Gas Off Her Tank!

It’s a story as old as time: boy meets girl, boy has no idea how to approach girl so boy siphons off some gas from girl’s tank as an icebreaker. But there’s a twist to this. The awesome office hottie, in this case? Isn’t so defenseless. She’s the krav maga instructor who teaches classes for you and your cube-mates to learn to punch properly. And instead of you siphoning gas off of her tank and then showing up to save your ass, you’re going to be such a wreck around her that, after a week of nerves kept you from gassing up your car (which always makes you think of her) your car will just plum refuse to start as a by-product of being totally out of gas.

Lucky for you she’ll be there, your knight in a thick white tank top and breathable pants, with her muscular hands and sharp, embittered eyes.

“Car trouble?” she’ll mumble at you. You’ll nod back at her, still too frightened to speak.

“I can help with that,” she’ll purr before taking out a length of tubing and then slipping it into her engine. Then she’ll start the siphon into a gas can she keeps in the back of her car for just such an occasion . Then, as the gas can fills up she’ll look at you like a cat eying an especially interesting mouse.

After about five minutes of awkward silence she’ll walk up, run her hand through your hair and murmur into your ear.

“Man of few words?” You’ll nod in response. “I like that.”

She’ll punctuate the sentence with a kiss, dragging your face into hers and mashing her lips all over you until you’re not sure which was is up. You’ll just know how much you like making out with her, and how glad you are that you’re totally inept at life.

She’ll be glad that she finally met a guy she can physically intimidate, since her last three boyfriends have been hyper-aggressive dicks she met in krav maga class. She knows you won’t have the courage, acumen or desire to cheat on her any time soon. She also likes being in control in the bedroom and, based on your kissing technique, she knows she won’t have any trouble with you there.

She’ll give you a break, only for a moment, away from her lips to check on the gas can as it fills up.

“Thanks,” you’ll murmur to her and she’ll smile.

“We’re not done yet,” she’ll whisper into your ear before she gives it a nibble and occupies your mouth anew with her tongue.

Congratulations on Siphoning Gas Off Her Tank!

Congratulations Sexy Embarrassment!

Our society is pretty permissive when it comes to sexy ladies. They can be absolutely batshit crazy self-hating fucktards and we’ll still treasure them if they’re hot enough. And our society is pretty upset about racism in general. If you want to upset people, be a racist. Only other racists will ever like you and if anything bad ever happens to you people will consider it totally justified, because holy shit, did you ever ask for it with all that racism.

When those two forces clash, it’s never pretty, and today you’re going to make them clash.

You’re a jaw droppingly hot lady, the kind with legs that go down to the floor and an ass that we’d like to put our penis into.

Sorry, the guy who usually writes overly dramatic dialogue about lady bits is sick today.

Anyhow, you’re really hot. But you also have some really antiquated views on gender, race and sexuality. And you own a Cafepress store where you make your own t-shirts and sell them online. Your hotness allows you to model these shirts, which makes everyone super uncomfortable because your tits are amazing, but your racism is really unimpressive on a humanistic level.

And today, during a Yelp review, a young woman named “CuriousOwl47” is going to hit the nail on the head when she describes you as:

“The most gorgeous throwback to a bygone era ever, conf3der4at3 b1tch would be charming if she weren’t so earnestly dedicated to diminishing both the contributions of her own sex and the multicultural tradition that embodies America through the generation of truly artless and offensive t-shirts. Even a white supremacist would find these shirts offensive, if only for their infantile approach to the most tired and unfortunate of uncomfortable subject matter. Please, someone out there, make this woman feel bad about herself so she can learn something, anything, about life.”

CuriousOwl47’s review will, in fact, fulfill its own purpose as, immediately after reading it, you’ll be cut to the bone. And in that instant you’ll look at your chest and realize that you’ve been so distracted by your incredible rack, you’ve never questioned whether or not you deserved to have it. You’ll begin weeping softly, letting your tears fall on your boobs, which will be too big and firm to permit those tears to roll off. They’ll just soak into your shirt as they fall, a trickle leading to a torrent, ruining the low quality screen printing that illustrates the insanely racist cartoon on your t-shirt.

Congratulations Sexy Embarrassment!

Congratulations on Fixing the World Economy!

You’re a crazy, tiny troll of a man who we love none the less, and you’re going to make your mark on history today when finally, after years of shouting “Goooooooold” at the top of your lungs hoping that someone will listen to you, someone’s finally gonna do it. And it’ll just happen to be a wealthy tycoon who, shockingly enough, will have sacks upon sacks of gold to throw at the perceived problem of the fiscal world at large.

Turns out that once he throws gold at the idea of the global economy everything will be, as you’ve recommended will occur, be instantly fixed. Which is good, because we’re running out of money and we could really use jobs all around. So thanks for that, and don’t take your inevitable departure from the Republican presidential ticket too harshly!

Congratulations on Fixing the World Economy!

Congratulations on Re-Interpreting the Dead Sea Scrolls!

Plenty of people have looked at the Dead Sea Scrolls and come up with all sorts of batshit crazy ideas. Jerry who works in HR told us that his uncle looked at a photo of a guy looking at them once and that it “turned him gay,” and Jerry believed him, which just goes to show that even thrice removed they have the power to make someone an idiot.

But tomorrow you’re going to get a chance to look at the Dead Sea Scrolls directly, in person, in your filthy little hands. And unlike most people, who lose their fucking minds because they speak Sanscrit or some shit and as a result can comprehend the wisdom of the scrolls, you’ll be cushioned by a nice big old layer of ignorance, and the scrolls won’t have any effect on you.

This means you’ll get a chance to turn the scroll over and find a totally sweet Pink Floyd album poster on the back. It’ll be a bunch of naked chicks with various Floyd cover art painted on their tits, and it’ll be totally sweet. It’ll also constitute proof positive of the aura of pseudo-mysticism which Floyd has been surrounding itself with since its inception. Apparently they weren’t just dickheads: they were spiritual representatives of a higher power, or at the very least an older power.

You won’t do anything with that, lucky for everyone involved (knowledge of the true nature of Floyd could potentially shatter the earth) but you will make a poster using the art you find on the back of the Dead Sea Scrolls which will, we all agree, look pretty fucking sweet and will finally give you the capital you need to move out of your parent’s basement and start that surf shop you constantly blather about at parties.

Congratulations on Re-Interpreting the Dead Sea Scrolls!

Congratulations on Completing Your Taks with Great Enthusiasm!

A lot of people would start what you’re about to do and quit halfway when the full gravity of the situation dawns on them. But not you. Today you’re going to kiss that girl on the mouth, haul her drunkenly into the back seat of your Toyota Camry, slip your hand awkwardly into her pants and start going to town, and you’re not going to stop no matter what.

You won’t stop when you hear hoots from the street. You won’t stop when you spaz out while making out with her, slamming your head into the ceiling of the car painfully. You won’t stop when she says “Yeah daddy” when you enter her with your finger. And you won’t stop when you realize, quite suddenly and profoundly, that you’re finger fucking your cousin in the backseat of your Camry in front of your best friend’s house.

This will be for two reasons, really. First off, you’re kind of in to incest play, and you don’t think it’s that weird to fuck a cousin (you normally make love to women, but as we all know, when it’s a blood relative you can never make love to them, you can only fuck them). Hell, you sort of prefer it, and even when you’re not fucking someone you’re related to you sometimes like to imagine them as a family member, or imagine them talking to you about your extended family, what they’ve been up to, how their health issues have been developing or declining. That sort of thing. You even pay prostitutes to talk like this, when you visit them.

The second, and far more relatable reason, will be that you are a gentleman, and a gentleman does not stop what he’s started, especially when a lady’s orgasm is on the line. So even though you’ll feel a little lukewarm at the prospect of publically showcasing your fetish, you’ll feel that your embarrassment is less important than your cousin’s sexual fulfillment. So even as the hoots turn to scandalized whispers as people slowly realize just what’s going on you’ll continue finger banging away, until your cousin finally spasms against your hand, grinding herself into you, crushing your palm between her crotch and the fabric of jean and car seat underneath her.

Only then will you pull out your hand, delicately wipe it on a towel you keep in the backseat for this purpose and whisper into her ear as she pants against your collarbone.

“I think we should go back inside. People might be wondering where we are.”

Congratulations on Completing Your Task with Great Enthusiasm!

Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Portal, Continued!

In Portal, there is most definitely a lady in charge. GlaDOS, the villain of Portal who has taken over the Aperture Science Facility from its (presumably male) former owners. GlaDOS isn’t just a lady in charge, however. She’s a lady in charge who compulsively creates, teaches and nurtures. She’s the embodiment of maternal instinct run amok: she is compelled to free Chell, to provide her with the portal gun and run her through a series of tests. GlaDOS just can’t help herself, even though she knows that Chell’s continued existence threatens her.

And GlaDOS works hard to keep house: we can see what the areas of the Aperture Facility that she doesn’t constantly clean look like, and it’s not pretty. Raw sewage abounds, ugly, undulating pistons replace austere hazards like bouncing white balls and cute little egg-shaped turrets. We can also see that GlaDOS was never intended to run Aperture Science on her own: she’s an emotional wreck, unstable, self-destructive and erratic. She’s essentially playing the role of a single mom, abandoned, in a sense, to her current situation by the scientists she murdered.

In her attempt to resolve the conflicting desires of running Aperture Science and nurture Chell and to free herself from her own bondage, GlaDOS not only liberates Chell, who was formerly harmlessly imprisoned, but also provides Chell with the means to defeat her. Chell, after all, has no weapons of her own aside from the portal gun. The only way she can ever actualize violence against her oppressors is by cleverly using their violence against them, in this case GlaDOS’ missiles which, to be fair, aren’t as phallic as some unfamiliar readers might assume.

All of this girl-on-girl action is accompanied by some of the pithiest writing to grace the halls of video gamedom. If brilliant minds could conceive of this new feminine paradigm, a means by which to both invert the traditional structures of a genre and power dynamics, it only seems reasonable that those same brilliant minds could put the effort into writing a fantastic story, though, I will say that Portal’s story is an extremely linear affair.

It’s aware of this fact, however. Whereas the Path is ideally built to its meandering design and approach to telling a story, Portal is possessed of a parsimonious, angular, heavily designed story, one that does all it can to draw a player’s eye to where it’d like it without ever making it clear that that’s what it’s doing. It’s a conventional narrative built around theme and wonderful dialogue, short and sweet and not a word or object out of place. Like Komunyakaa’s Grenade, there isn’t a single element out of place, and these elements form something decidedly more than the sum of their parts thanks to the adroitness of their assembly.

The sequel to Portal, the unexpectedly named Portal 2, continues this tradition of terse, atmospheric and environmental storytelling, relying on linear progression and environments, meticulously arranged to evoke specific responses from players at specific times in specific manners which, most of the time, work quite well. But Portal 2 stretches its wings, and the length of the game itself, by adding a number of new characters to the stage, including two men: the bumbling, initially affable Webley and the recorded voice of Aperture Science’s wonderfully absurd, long dead founder, Cave Johnson.

Portal 2 does little to actually change up the gameplay of the first game, and does less to introduce new themes to this gameplay that improve the feminine parallels which, all things considered, would be pretty difficult to do. Think about it: Portal gives you a gun that shoots vaginas and forces you to re-direct force and violence in order to accomplish your goals. There’s really no way it could more explicitly subvert the traditionally masculine context of the shooting genre without leaving it. But what Portal 2 fails to do in mechanics it achieves in spades with its characters.

By introducing both a former male figurehead to Aperture’s history and a bumbling, hapless male caretaker to its present (who eventually becomes the new master of the Aperture facility) and placing them alongside and at odds with GlaDOS over generations, a more complicated image of gender politics at Aperture emerges. As Webley inadvertently wakes GlaDOS then, with, and only with, the player’s help, unseats her from her role as the master of the Aperture testing facility, he showcases a distinctly male aggression, as well as a considerably less maternal approach to testing than GlaDOS’.

Webley is aggressive about his testing, his testing chambers malformed and ill-conceived. And his aggression, his temper and his vindictiveness all flare in ways that GlaDOS, while undeniably a psychotic, could never equal. Webley places GlaDOS in a potato, casts her and Chell into the ruins of Aperture science of old and has absolutely no idea how to run the Aperture facility. When he is inevitably unseated and defeated by Chell, who of course plays his own violent methods against him, he is literally castrated, cut off from his seat in Aperture and left to drift in orbit near the moon.

Webley is foil and fop, and his manner of acting as author for the player’s experiences showcases that a male touch is not necessarily a good thing: he lacks focus, organization, and he showcases how clumsily men fit into Portal’s world. His reign is so barbaric and ill conceived that when GlaDOS usurps him and returns to her rightful place ruling over Aperture Science’s testing grounds the adorable, egg shaped turrets cease their firing and lift up their voices in song. And the Webley dominated sections of play are disorganized, confused and a little bit haphazard: GlaDOS is organized, skilled at manipulation and sharp. Webley is none of these things.

Of course, Cave Johnson, Aperture’s former owner (voiced by the wonderfully committed J.K. Simmons), has a far more organized view to the testing process. If Webley is an idiot son, Cave Johnson is a father figure who established the framework by which Aperture’s future testing chambers would be crafted. And the gameplay of his sections reinforces this: art deco design reminiscent of a bygone era, direct puzzles that utilize new dynamics in familiar ways and a constant, masculine air of camaraderie which both the player and GlaDOS (entombed in a potato for Cave Johnson’s sections) cannot participate in, both in the past (as we learn that GlaDOS was once Cave’s fiercely loyal assistant) and the future, where the testing grounds are in ruins and devoid of life.

A bluntness surrounds both Cave’s dialogue and the paces through which he puts players, but in the end subversion of this system, which, like Cave’s status as an authority figure, has decayed severely, is what allows the players to progress through the game’s story. By overcoming a series of structures invented and presented by a masculine power structure, players restore a female leader figure to her authority. Granted, that authority was given to her by Cave Johnson, not just a man but THE man in Portal 2, but within the context of the gameplay no assistance is rendered: players must run through the hoops of the male-dominated Aperture Labs and step over its ruins in order to achieve their goal of realizing girl-power once again.

And while a great deal of this gameplay is shown through dialogue, just as much of it emerges through gameplay, and the gameplay is arguably more feminist than the dialogue: of the three speaking characters in Portal 2, two are male, whereas all actions in the game are, with a handful of exceptions, performed by a lone woman with a gun that makes wall vaginas. So strong female characters, established through dialogue and design, are upheld and reinforced by a gameplay design which encourages a feminist mindset and forces players to become a feminist agent in order to reach the game’s end.

Just as Tennyson’s In Memoriam takes on a sort of grueling countenance which demands the reader figure’s participation and personal connection, Portal and its sequel utilize a sort of participatory loop to reinforce a distinctly feminine domination which, in the end, isn’t even particularly dominant: players do not come to power in Portal, they merely survive, seek freedom and, if they’re good enough at aligning themselves with Chell and, in Portal 2, GlaDOS, attain it.

And there’s no shortage of critical praise for Portal 2. I’m going to slap a bunch of praise for its writing into the text at this point in the paper, along with some great stuff about its dialogue specifically. The feminism at the root of Portal 2 is great, but it’s simply part of a greater delivery system: a refined system of storytelling that utilizes both conventional narrative features and highly developed gameplay to convey what could have been a clumsy or ordinary narrative in an extraordinary way. And it’s all about girl-power to boot!

Congratulations on Wasting a Day!

Today you’re going to wake up and think about going out and buying a bunch of home organizing shit at Target. You’ll think really hard about rolling over, getting your keys from the nightstand and sitting up. Then you’d have to put on some real clothes, which would involve putting the keys back down, removing your pajamas, realizing how bad you smell, taking a shower, then opening your closet and removing an outfit. After the outfit is removed you’ll still have to figure out how to get those clothes on your body, which will involve a staggering array of buckles, holes and buttons. There might even be a zipper or two involved with the process, just to add a little bit of extra “fuck you” to the whole affair.

After that you’d have to drive to Target, which would involve walking to your car (UGH), starting it, and manipulating the various levers and wheels inside it to get you to your destination. Then after you arrive there you’ll have to find a parking space, get out of your car, shamble into the horrible pocket plane that is Target and then navigate its various awful tribulations in a fashion that allows you to get what you need.

Then you’ll have to get into an extremely long line, hop from foot to foot as you wait, drop the thing you wanted to buy, bend over and pick it up, get cussed out by the lady behind you for showing your butt to the world, then figure out how to pay the Target cashier, who will refuse to speak loud enough or in a cadence recognizable as English even. After all that you’ll still have to carry all the home organizing supplies back to your car, load them, repeat the driving process to get back to your house, and then unload your car, drag all that shit to your house WITHOUT THE AID OF THE CART YOU USED AT TARGET and then actually unpack it and use it to “organize your life.”

Fuck that!

After thinking of all that you’re gonna roll over, put your hand between your legs and rub yourself lazily until you fall asleep without cumming. You’ll dream of someone who you used to see a long time ago, someone who made you really happy and broke your heart, but did it so far back that all you can remember now is that warm feeling in the pit of your belly whenever you imagine them naked.

Congratulations on Wasting a Day!

Congratulations on Building a Robot Capable of Being Convicted of Sexual Harassment!

The culmination of years of effort, nearly a decade, will arrive today. You’ll flip a switch, grimace as electricity arcs wildly about and then cackle as the robot roars to life and stumbles off of the platform upon which it was constructed.

“IT LIVES!” you’ll shout for copyright reasons.

The robot will shudder to life and step inch by menacing inch towards you and your assistant. It’ll be clear what’s going on: it’s learning, learning who you are and who your assistant is, and what it should do to appropriate react to each of you.

Halfway across the room the shamble will turn to a rush and the robot will careen towards you and your assistant. It’ll be unclear just what he’s doing until the last moment, when he pushes you out of the way with two of his cold metal arms and grabs your assistant in his pincers. He’ll begin vibrating steadily as he presses her body uncomfortably against his own and pinches, with his claws, her breasts and ass as configuration allows.

“HEY BABY,” he’ll drone in a monotone voice. “COME HOME WITH ME.”

“Inappropriate!” your assistant will scream as she wriggles against the robot, trying to escape its advances. She’ll start kicking and biting after around a minute of non-stop pinching, at which point the robot will give her butt one last squeeze and then drone at her.

“TEASE,” it’ll say before turning to you and winking with one of its brilliant red eyes. “WOMEN, RIGHT?”

You’ll shrug and laugh nervously in response, and the robot will do the same, laughing, making a sound that resembles a saw attempting to, and failing to, cut metal. You’ll make some marks on a chart and nod to your assistant, who will be rubbing her sore secondary sex characteristics.

“I think we’ve done it,” you’ll whisper to her after the robot distracts itself from the two of you, fiercely rubbing the part of its body where, were it a person, its groin would be.

Congratulations on Building a Robot Capable of Being Convicted of Sexual Harassment!

Congratulations on Finding Out What Her Asshole Tastes Like!

Today you’re going to lick your roommate’s asshole on her request. She’ll want to know if it tastes funny and, since you’re the only one around, you’ll acquiesce.

“Nope, taste like a normal butt,” you’ll tell her. She’ll wriggle it up towards your face and won’t take that for an answer.

“Try it again,” she’ll moan.

You’ll lap at it for a few seconds, then back off.

“Nope, still tastes like butt.”

She’ll rear her ass up towards your face, but you won’t get the hint. You’ll back away quickly and grab her bare thighs, holding her up.

“Are you okay?” you’ll ask her. “It looked like you were slipping.”

“ARRRGH,” she’ll groan before getting off of all fours, putting her underpants back on and slapping you in the face. Then she’ll go into her room, we assume to masturbate furiously.

“Let me know if you need anything else!” you’ll shout to her through the closed door. If you were more perceptive you’d actually be able to hear her giving you the middle finger which, in this case, qualifies as a double entendre.

Congratulations on Finding Out What Her Asshole Tastes Like!

Congratulations on Baking Some Delicious Cookies!

You know you love to bake, we know you love to bake, and everyone loves fresh baked cookies. Yours, of course, are the best.

But what’s your secret? White chocolate chips? A few drops of a child’s blood? Wizardy magicks?

Wrong on all counts, nerds! It’s spiders. You fill cookies with spiders. And even though everyone who eats them gets kind of sick they all agree after the vomiting stops that your cookies are quite tasty. Then they ask you how you get that curious “bite” in there and you can never stop laughing, which is a little bit awkward but your cookies are good enough that it never keeps people from eating them again.

Which just goes to show, you can get away with almost anything if your cookies taste good enough.

Congratulations on Baking Some Delicious Cookies!

Congratulations on Getting Engaged!

You’ve been in love with this girl for a long time, conservative sexual morays aside, and you’ve wanted to do stuff to her. But there’s a catch! There’s always a catch, haven’t you noticed?

She won’t let you put a ring in it (your penis is ring shaped, kinda, it’s weird) unless you put a ring on it. And ring in this context means a wedding ring, not one of them cervix-aligned birth control devices. But today you’re going to get down on one knee, next to the Coney Island Freakshow (her favorite attraction!) and hold the ring up for her approval.

“Yes!” she’ll shout so loud that it hurts your ears. “Oh god yes!”

It’ll come out, as you walk home, that she’s wanted to get laid for a while and she’s been willing to compromise on that front to make it happen, so she’s now willing to sleep with you before marriage, as long as you’re engaged when you do the deed. To this end she’ll lead you back to your Bay Ridge apartment, push your head down to her crotch and coo encouragingly.

You’ll push her panties gently to the side and then scream in horror as spiders just pour out of it.

“AHHH!” you’ll shout. “FUCKING SPIDERS!”

She’ll giggle as you swat them off yourself and then rise up and moan when you run to the bathroom to leap into the shower in an effort to avoid being eaten alive by spiders.

“Was it good for you too?” she’ll ask as the spiders crawl all over her skin, moaning gently each time they bite her. You’ll stay in the shower for a good half hour, weighing the pros and cons of going through with the wedding.

Congratulations on Getting Engaged!

Congratulations on Getting a New House!

You’ve been living a version of the dream for a few years now, but it’s been, at best, a diluted form of it. Sure, you have a wife, two and a half kids (that is to say, two boys and one girl) and a wonderful job where you sell insurance for couches to the couches themselves, effectively tripling your sales because, as it turns out, one in every three people doesn’t really give a shit about their couch. But you’ve been renting this whole time, and fuck that shit!

Three months ago, you put in an offer on a house. A month later, it was accepted. And today, glorious day, you’re going to move in.

You inspected the place very carefully before you made an offer. You’re not an idiot, and you knew the risks. Mold, ghosts, goblins that want to turn your family into plants so they can eat them. You also looked into the schools, the crime, the neighbors. You had your friend, a retired cop with zero morals, go to the home of the neighborhood’s only registered sex offender and murder him with a piece of rebar. You thought you covered all your bases.

And you hired professional movers to handle the whole job, a good call because you’re really ill-suited to manual labor. The whole thing will go swimmingly. You won’t have cable set up yet, but you’ll have gas, power, all the important stuff in place on the day you move in and your furniture will be flawlessly arranged by the obedient, tired looking Mexican dudes who work for the moving company. It’ll seem perfect.

Until about an hour and a half after sunset.

Once the sun goes down, the noises will begin. Gentle skittering sounds within the walls, indicative perhaps of mice or rats. You’ll press your ear to the wall and they’ll stop, only for a moment, before they increase in intensity.

You’ll learn the cause of the skittering an hour later when a spider, a surprisingly large spider, crawls out of your kitchen sink’s drain, looks at you, then crawls back in.

You’ll be a little freaked out at this point. Smash cut to-

Your doors covered by webs, your family cocooned as spiders crawl all over their bodies, biting them again and again and again. You’ll be in the process of being cocooned yourself as the police bang futilely on the door and you speak to your real estate agent on the phone. She’ll calmly explain that:

“Legally we don’t have to disclose any information that isn’t explicitly asked for during the showing and, frankly, I think it was pretty irresponsible of you not to inquire as to whether or not there was a swarm of hell-spiders occupying that particular residence.”

You’ll want to scream at the agent, but when you open your mouth to attempt to it will be filled with web and you begin to feel the effects of the spider’s venom as they bite you, a hundred dozen tiny clicks into your skin that spread numbness and pain out from them, and breed in you a kind of sleepy sensation that still cannot soothe the rage you feel towards the real estate agent.

Congratulations on Getting a New House!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Enter Portal!

There are games, though not as many as it seems like there should be, that have well developed and well rounded female characters paired with more conventional narratives than The Path (Tale of Tales has illustrated that the intellectual process surrounding The Path has a sort of nebulous ars poetica surrounding it, shrouding it in mystery and relying, to some extent, on players to imbue or discover meaning within the game). In fact, one of the most critically and commercially acclaimed releases of the last decade, Portal, centered around a female protagonist, who did battle with a female villain in a world devoid of explicitly male characters.

For those unfamiliar with games (I expect there are a few of you here, since this is targeted at an academic audience, and academia is nothing if not adept at insulating itself from the influence of popular culture which has not yet been filtered through the system academics have constructed to reduce anything earnest or genuine to a point where it can be received without risk of intellectual contamination by the reader) Portal was a mass-released puzzle game, roughly an hour to two hours in length, designed by a group of students from DigiPen’s game design program. It was revolutionary in a few senses, which we’ll address in greater detail as we look closer and closer at it, but just so we’re all on the same page it:

• Played from a first person perspective.
• Utilized a handful of mechanics to fulfill a number of goals through environmental interactions.
• Featured no offensive weapons that the player could directly could control.
• Was about two hours long, during a time when games are usually between twelve and eighty hours in length or were considered anemic by most critics and players.
• Was originally attached as an element of the Orange Box, essentially emerging as a freebie along with the purchase of other, more conventional mass market titles (Footnote about the Orange Box here).
• Kim Swift, a lady, was the lead designer of Portal. This was unusual at the time and, it’s reasonable to say, still is today.
• Portal’s story and dialogue was written by Erik Wolpaw and Chet Falsiek, humorists who came to Valve through their work on the seminal internet humor site, Old Man Murray.

These “fun facts” or “factoids” or “fact chunklets” all make Portal an interesting enough artifact to investigate on its own. But what’s cool about Portal, really fucking cool about it, is that it effectively imbeds itself in a male controlled genre of games, the First Person Shooter, and successfully inverts every single trope in said genre while effectively constructing a functioning and intelligent story within it.

In a first person shooter you nearly always control a faceless, voiceless male protagonist whose perspective functions as the game’s “camera”; you see what the protagonist sees, hence the label of first person. There’s usually a gun fixed to that camera as well, which forms the primary means by which you can interact with the world around you. Play usually consists of moving from one place to another and firing your gun in order to eliminate threats or damage your environment in order to open new paths of motion and play. You essentially utilize a phallic symbol to impact the world and forward the plot. Female characters are normally absent. If any are present they may appear as little more than tokens or, at times, damsels in distress.

It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to call first person shooters a little bit gay, or, more correctly, to refer to them as problematically homosocial. They’re violent games by nature, pitting what is usually a lone protagonist against his environment. In the event that you have companions with you you’ll often have to fight off scores and scores of enemies, and the bodycounts represented in first person shooters are usually astronomic. There are sometimes some great stories with deft treatments of theme and gender in FPSes, don’t misunderstand me (Bioshock is a stellar example of an intelligent, well crafted shooter with a fantastic story) but the majority of shooters are fairly weak tea in these categories. They’re usually focused around a power fantasy, wherein you are a strong tough guy who, when the chips are down, kills everyone and then saves the day or, barring that, elegantly sacrifices himself in order to save the day.

Portal is a little different.

Portal opens in a prison cell crafted from plexiglass. Players do not possess a weapon, or any adornment at all really: their perspective is simply a camera. They can pick up and manipulate the items surrounding them, flush the toilet in their room, look at their empty mug, throw the clipboard inexplicably left in their cell across the room. A clock counts down soundlessly, and then a tinny female voice fills your ears, informing you that testing will begin in five, four, three, two…

At one a blue portal opens up in the lone white wall of the cell. An orange portal appears outside of the cell. If players take the time to look through either of the portals they’ll immediately see the character they control, Chell. Chell is a young woman with light brown skin, hair bound in an terse ponytail and a formless orange jumpsuit. She also has a pair of metal protrusions attached to her boots, a pair of sturdy struts which, as play will instruct the players, prevent her from taking damage from exceedingly long falls. If the player attempts to look down hard enough they’ll catch sight of Chell’s legs and arms pumping as she moves.

Already, we see some inversions of the tropes of first person shooters. Players are given a view of their own body right off the bat. Not just that, they’re informed that their body is female, and a bit of a looker at that (though she’s by no means provocatively dressed). Players are unarmed and unable to act on the world around them. Instead they’re simply following the prompts of a disembodied voice in order to make their way through a neutral, white walled environment. There’s no action to be taken, and certainly no violent action.

As the game unfolds players acquire the Portal Device or Portal Gun, an item which allows players to open up portals on any white surface in the game world: a floor, a ceiling, a wall, anything goes. These portals allow players freedom of movement and allow players to toy around with the physics of the game world in order to solve puzzles and avoid hazards. If there’s a pit of toxic sludge, players will be prompted to cross it by firing a portal at a wall on the side of the pit they’re already on and then open a destination portal on the other side of the pit.

As the game becomes more complicated the hazards become more direct. Adorable, egg shaped turrets begin to emerge, talking in robot voices, firing their machine guns wildly, and players must find a way to either disarm (by knocking them over) or evade (through artful evasion) these turrets. Players never receive a gun that allows them to do this, although they may sometimes re-direct existing environmental hazards in order to deal with turrets. This is the shape the game takes: players may never directly harm any entity in the game, they may only manipulate elements so that they harm one another. They never get a gun that allows them to harm anything else, just a gun that allows them to make portals on the wall. A smooth, circular gun at that.

That makes holes. In the walls. That allow passage.

As people have noted, it’s basically a gun that shoots vaginas.

That would be inversion enough of the masculine archetype, but Portal goes farther with its manipulation, a lot farther. It doesn’t have a single explicitly masculine character except arguably the companion cube which, as Heroine Sheik’s author points out, is referred to as “he,” is destroyed by a female power structure and is, long before that, covered in adorable hearts, effectively sissified by the designers of Portal. It’s a woman’s world in Portal, and as a result there are a lot of deliberate, feminist threads that run through the story.

Next week I’ll get deep into those, but I’d like to set them apart from this week’s SNS, which is essentially an introduction to Portal and its varied tropes. Suffice it to say, this feminine structure falls into a relatively loose narrative framework which, all the same, is more structured and self-contained than the structure within The Path. It’s also linear and has a lot of pre-set dialogue and characters that the player can’t exert too much influence on, aside from guiding them through their expected paces.

But the deftness of writing and the well written dialogue and plotting that makes up the play of Portal makes its treatment of sex and sexuality and power within these structures effective. Really effective. And I’m going to try and discuss just how this happens next Sunday. Portal 2 is likely going to be a part of this, just so you know.

Congratulations on Blossoming Into a Beautiful Woman!

There comes a time in every girl’s life, after she moves to Portland, where she has to make a choice.

She can either move somewhere else, have a kid, or get a tattoo.

You really like Portland, and you absolutely loathe children (especially the concept of your own) so there’s really only one option for you if you want to stay.

You’re going to have to get a tattoo.

You’ll opt to get a tasteful rendering of the great tree of Lothlórien from Lord of the Rings that will range from your shoulder down to your elbow, stretching mostly across your bicep with some of the larger branches bleeding onto your tricep. It’ll be in full color, and it’ll take three hours to do.

During the process you’ll take three breaks, one every forty five minutes or so. Two will be for your pain, one will be for your artist to smoke. You’ll consume two glucose tablets and some garlic toast from a nearby Italian restaurant where the staff of the studio will have ordered lunch. It will take about two and a half weeks to heal, but it will require no touch ups (if your first tattoo is the correct tattoo, this is always the case).

When you exit the shop your bandages (black meat packing paper with a waterproof layer on one side and a soft, smooth layer on the other, bound with clipped black gauze wrapping) will hide your art, but people will already look at you a little differently. Your ass will be just a little bit firmer, your step a little springier, your smile easier.

As you board the 15 to ride back out to the decrepit house you live in with four other people you’ll see something new in their faces, an unspoken daaaaaaamn as you walk down the aisle.

Welcome to the new world, sweetheart. Don’t abuse this new power, we don’t think our hearts could take it.

Congratulations on Blossoming Into a Beautiful Woman!

Congratulations on Losing Your Glasses!

Well this is just going to be embarrassing. While climbing around an ancient ruin, much like the one portrayed in the 1999 classic film The Mummy, you’re going to have to do some climbing. And some leaning. And a little bit of fast moving when evil Egyptian bugs and evil Egyptian scarabs (not to be conflated or confused, racists) attack you and your guide. And while you flee up some sort of ornately carved wall with convenient hand-holds in it, while the bugs devour your shrieking companion beneath you, the unthinkable will happen.

You’ll drop your glasses.

They’ll fall right off your face and on to the oozing corpse of your one-time companion. You could wait for the bugs to stop murdering him and then climb back down and get your specs, but they’ll be all covered in gore and other gross red stuff, so you won’t be too keen on that idea. Instead you’ll opt to keep climbing and trust your terrible, terrible eyes (-100 x 175 is your prescription) to guide the way.

Since you’re basically blind once you reach the top you’ll just stumble down the hallway, clutching a luger in one hand and a torch in the other, hoping to stumble on some jewels or treasure or something. But it turns out crypts aren’t just filled with rubies and shit like they used to be back in the old days. Turns out they don’t even really have mummies anymore. Turns out they’re just big stretches of nothing filled with super dangerous bugs.

After around twenty minutes of blind stumbling, you’ll be kind of angry at yourself for not going back for your glasses. You’ll consider rigging up a makeshift pair of glasses using a piece of paper from your Adventurer’s Notebook (™) and a pin so that you could poke a hole in the paper and then look through it to effectively re-focus your eye. But then you’ll realize how stupid that would make you look, and you’ll think better of it.

In frustration, you’ll sit down to consider your options and rest your aching feet, wondering if those bugs carried your glasses off to some kind of gross bug nest or if they just left them in the gore of your former companion. You’ll weigh the option of heading back to see if you can find them, and you’ll be leaning towards it pretty heavily when a moan will echo down the hallway.

You’ll turn and squint at the sound, raising your luger and shouting a warning.

“Kensington?!” you’ll ask, wondering if your servant found a way to up and walk about without his skin on.

A moan will answer in a fashion that suggests, even if it is Kensington, he’s not particularly friendly.

You’re normally a pretty good shot, but without your glasses all bets will be off. You’ll fire off all seven of the rounds in the luger, but to no avail. Whatever it is that’s shambling towards you will still be coming.

Spoiler alert, it’s going to be a zombie, and you’ll have missed its head. Turns out mummies were just forced out of their crypts by zombies, who work longer hours for less pay, and now zombies devour the bodies and brains of those unfortunate enough to lose their glasses in crypts.

We hope you appreciate the inversion of conventional structure that your death will represent.

Congratulations on Losing Your Glasses!

Congratulations on Losing at an Elimidate Clone!

Remember Elimidate, the dating elimination show that went off the air a few years back and that no one talks about anymore? No? That’s too bad.

Because today you’re going to be asked to go on an “Elimidate” style date with a random young woman and a film crew. She’s going to show up incredibly high on cocaine and ask you to go throw rocks at cars from the overpass with her. You’ll refuse to do so and she’ll give you the middle finger and tell you “you been axed,” which is the phrase the producers of the show decided to come up with to describe the action of eliminating a contestant from the show.

It’ll be kind of a relief because she’ll be arrested a few minutes later while you and the film crew watch. Within a few days the show will be dead before its first episode airs, and “So You Think You Can Handle This?,” the dating show centered around dating self-destructive, horrible people, will be mothballed until a generation of television viewers awesome enough to handle it comes along and makes everyone’s life a little more interesting.

Congratulations on Losing at an Elimidate Clone!

Congratulations on Establishing a Context Where You Aren't a Loser!

In this context, apes will rule the planets and your hygiene, giant forehead and hairy brow will all be considered socially acceptable and desirable traits. Your love of reggaeton and your terrible taste in clothing and food will also be in line with ape-fashion and, as a result, will be considered quite gauche.

In this scenario, apes will murder people en masse on a whim. Ape-rape will be commonplace, human reproduction tightly controlled. A gathering of more than three humans away from work will be strictly prohibited by ape-law, which is fine by you because you’re never invited to parties anyway.

In this scenario you’d be a perfect under-lieutenant for the apes, which would make you less of a loser than you are in the real world, where you work fourteen hours a week in a video rental store while living in your parent’s basement. It will take a lot of work to establish this context, and we respect that, but we’d still prefer you stopped trying to make it into a reality, because if it works we’ll all be in big trouble. When you come up with it tonight, just write it down and take some solace in the fact that maybe, just maybe, there’s a version of you out there who doesn’t suck at life.

Congratulations on Establishing a Context Where You Aren’t a Loser!

Congratulations on Oblierating the City from Orbit!

The ship will ease into orbit silently, a city unto itself, towering mire of steel set in the sky, immobile by the merit of the application of constant force, constant effort against the laws of physics preventing it from descending into the well of the planet’s gravity, from whence escape would be all but impossible.

The helmsman will sip his coffee nervously as the captain makes his rounds. The captain will be frowning the way he always does when you have this sort of job, but he won’t say anything. He’ll just nod at you, at the gunnery console, and you’ll nod back.

The calculations will be set, trajectories double checked. There will be no room for error here, which will seem a little ironic to you, but you won’t say anything. You’ll just sit there silently while the captain paces, the helmsman sips his coffee and the rest of the bridge does everything they can to avoid looking at you.

It’ll take the magistrate five minutes to arrive from his quarters, but it will feel like an eternity. When he steps on the bridge, sash barely buckled, belly bulging from his waistband, he’ll be sucking his breath like he just sprinted up a staircase, a fact made all the more puzzling by the absence of stairs on the ship. He’ll barely seem aware of where he is, and the odor of liquor will emenate from his body, permeating the entire bridge.

His assistant will trail him, a thin lipped man whose face will have long since forgotten how to smile. He’ll carry paperwork with him, paperwork he’ll hand to the magistrate, who will flip through it briefly before he mumbles, more to himself than to the captain:

“Guilty. Carry it out.”

The captain will sigh and nod in response.

“Gunnery officer,” he’ll shout tonelessly. “Ready firing solution.”

“Ready,” you’ll respond, the tension you feel somehow absent from your voice.

“City guilty of crimes against space,” the captain will say. “Execute sentence.”

“Aye,” you’ll shout before pressing the big red button on your console. It’ll have fire stenciled on it in giant white letters, and it’ll load a giant chunk of rock into the magnetic accelerator that runs along the spine of the ship. The accelerator will charge the rock up to sub-luminal but not inconsiderable speeds. The rock will then enter the upper atmosphere and descend along the trajectory you calculated. It will press past whipping winds and split clouds before it finds its mark, striking the city with a ballistic force equivalent to a nuclear bomb. The force of the impact, the shockwave, will crush buildings and force a ring of debris outward and upward in a plume of dust and smoke visible from space. In an instant the city, twelve miles edge to edge to edge, will be gone, replaced by a hole in the ground.

The magistrate will leave before the dust has begun to settle, his assistant trailing. When the two depart it’ll feel as if the bridge took a collective sigh of relief, though no one will make a sound.

“Helmsman,” the captain will shout. “Plot a course away.”

“Aye,” the helmsman will respond, relief palpable in his voice.

You’ll be left to sit at your station and calculate theoretical vectors for theoretical asteroids that might one day strike theoretical targets, a peaceful activity when compared to devising and reviewing the math required to destroy a city of fourteen million people in an instant. You’ll know how to do both things, but you’ll prefer the former.

You’ll have a moment of epiphany, during a particularly interesting calculation, that although you know many things about the math associated with resolving them, you won’t actually be entirely sure what “space crimes” are. You’ll ponder asking the captain for a moment, but given the gravity of the situation you just resolved, that’ll seem like a bad idea. The question will stick in your mind, however, and calculations will become, for a time, much more difficult than they need to be.

Congratulations on Obliterating the City from Orbit!

Congratulations on Whisking Her Away!

There are many ways to show your love, like a kiss on the cheek or a flower or a heart shaped balloon. If you’re really old school you can rest your hand on your lover’s hand until she starts to weep softly and you pull her in and kiss her on the cheek and then light yourselves on fire. Or you can use any number of cards devised specifically for the purpose of informing a loved one just how much you care. We’re not trying to note you to death here, just give you some options.

Because the way you’re going to express your love today isn’t really appropriate. At all. We understand that love is a confusing emotion and that we all process it a little differently. But when you kidnap a woman and bind her in your basement you’re taking it a little far. And when you shove roses down her throat until she chokes to death, you’re taking it way too far. When you start stirring her bones in a cauldron so that you can eradicate them from existence and make a sort of gelatin substrate that will allow you to, with a little work, make a scale statue of your lady love before she was whisked into oblivion.

When you’re done you’ll have your paste, but you won’t have thought ahead far enough to prepare a mold in her shape. You’ll be undone by your own hubris, left with a puddle of rapidly cooling gelatin and no one to help you stir it. The irony of the situation will be lost on you, which is good because irony drives you to kill, and we’ve already seen what you do when you just want to love.

We don’t want to see a scenario where you explicitly intend to harm someone.

Congratulations on Whisking Her Away!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Examples of Narrative in The Path!

There are a number of ways we can investigate the narratives surrounding these young women. We can do so at a surface level, chortling at the fact that these young women each endure what could be considered a “tiny death,” a fact that is not lost upon Tale of Tales, who cast many of the revelations that these young women undergo in an explicitly or potentially sexualized light. But if we go deeper, we can see the structural elements assembled to convey the experience of each individual girl.

Because even as the player exerts literal control over the young woman he or she guides through the forest we can find concrete elements that players are encouraged or forced to interact with. The elements of dialogue unique to each young woman, the gestures that they make as they approach each element of the environment surrounding them, these are the framework that generate the effective poem of The Path. And through these objects we find a narrative structure not unlike that of a conventional poem.

Pacing substitutes for things like meter and line, the word choice for word choice, art and action for tone and style. If we have to establish a parallel of theme than our reader may, perhaps, be beyond convincing of the validity of games as an art form (I’ll grant you that writing in games is very, very different from writing in poems, hence my grasp at wit above) so let’s just agree for convenience that theme is readily apparent in both games and poems. My point is that we’re looking at a game and we’re seeing concrete, constructed elements provided expressly for us to interact with. Which is pretty effing cool in and of itself! But what’s really cool is that interacting with any of those objects is a choice, even if the choice is between interacting with an object and quitting the game (though that’s never the only choice with The Path).

And the elements themselves in The Path are fairly sparse: while the forest is an interesting place to play, there isn’t a whole lot to it when you really come down to it. Compared to many games, The Path is spare and, if you’re not willing to meet it half way, kind of boring. Poems, similarly, are often separated from prose by their sparse elements which require the involvement of the reader in order for cohesion to take shape. In this way the player of The Path becomes the equivalent of the reader of a poem: they become an agent of change in the game’s world, giving form and meaning to the elements of the game by choosing which ones to interact with and how.

And depending on your approach you can emerge from each of the vignettes that make up The Path with very different experiences. The actions you take during your journey with each girl has a profound impact on your outcome. One might guide Ginger, the tomboyish thirteen year old, through her travels with relatively little event, as I did, delivering her unintentionally to her wolf, a young woman waiting in a field to entreat her to an (implied) lesbian experience, and come away with a sense of tragedy afterwards. I spent so little time with this lively character and saw so little of the world with her and the moment of happiness she found seemed to fill her with such shame and dread that she had no means by which to process it except to drag her heels and return to her path, to the house where she was expected and find her quiet, literal death within the home of her family.

But another player, might have spent more time with Ginger. They might have explored the woods thoroughly and not found her wolf at all, instead eventually guiding her to her grandmother’s house after growing frustrated at her liveliness and excitement at the world around her. They might’ve taken some time to guide other girls through the woods before returning to Ginger’s vignette with a more complete understanding of the woods and their nature and the journey that each of these young women is on. And when they guided her to her wolf, they might’ve felt joy at the fullness of her experience and woe and frustration for her shame.

This is more or less exactly what I experienced with Carmen, the fifteen year old sister who is undergoing a more conventional sexual awakening. Upon my first attempt to guide Carmen through the woods I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to get her to interact with her wolf. I figured out more or less where it was supposed to be, who it was supposed to be, but I couldn’t actually get the events to sequence correctly. I’d started the journey off thinking that Carmen was a frustrating ditz, and as it progressed that opinion was reinforced pretty thoroughly: Carmen was little interested in the sort of childish or profound play that I was looking for in the woods, she was far more interested in trying to fuck boys and drink beer which, in her mind, was the perfect way to realize her goal of fucking some boys.

She was the only girl I guided to grandmother’s house without first meeting her wolf, which was a strange experience. Knowing what I knew about her character from exploring the woods with her I found a kind of horror in the quiet of grandmother’s house, a sort of cruel repression that seemed to strip Carmen of what made her…her. And when I finally discovered her wolf (more accurately, how to get her wolf to pay attention to her and grant her the sexytimes that she spent most of her journey in the woods trying to find) I felt a profound sympathy for her and the world that her grandmother’s house had become. Spinning, pulsing steel and flesh consuming itself composed the house now, formless horrors of concrete physicality replacing the horrid quiet that had been there before. Carmen seemed to find the world after sex every bit as horrible as the way she’d seen it beforehand. I walked away from her scenario angry, not just as Carmen, but at Tale of Tales for making me relate to a character I hated so thoroughly.

If the game had been more structured, I might’ve been able to distance myself from Carmen’s journey. I might’ve been able to snort at her awakenings and ignore her set pieces as a construct separate from myself, a forced series of actions that I disagreed with.

But every action, even success or failure, is conditional in The Path, an event requiring the effort and intervention of the player. And when Carmen “failed” at dying, I had to come back to her, get a more robust sense of who she was and re-explore the woods with her to get her where she needed to go. I had to become the agent of narrative fulfillment required by every poem and, by most turns, every game. The only real difference here was that I knew I was doing that, knew how active I was in this process.

In the end, I was forced by the permissive mechanics and loose construction of The Path into constructing a more complex and engaging female character, a protagonist I could find meaning and resonance with. The formlessness of the experience forced me into generating a narrative and a suite of emotions in order to engage with the game at all. If The Path was just a series of linear puzzles that I had to “complete” in order to unlock the next scene, I might have found the stories of the characters within it trite. But because it forced me to construct my own meaning (by providing me with engaging set pieces to construct it from, of course) it allowed for the construction of a deeply nuanced treatment of gender, sexuality and the nature of womanhood, all rendered through a video game, a member of a medium often rightly reviled for infantilizing women, for casting them in parallel to masculine roles or for turning their sexuality against them in order to generate a sense of objectification or absurdity.

Take Lara Croft of Tomb Raider for instance: she was constructed as a “female Indiana Jones” rather than a character in her own right, an archetype of masculinity imposed on a feminine frame rather than a uniquely female protagonist. Even if she could be taken seriously as a character on a thematic level we’d never know, since her appear has been so ridiculously overblown, an exaggerated confluence of masculine and feminine images mashed together haphazardly. Just look at her, sporting two massive pistols and tremendous, absurd breasts that defy physics. She’ll climb up an ancient temple without breaking a sweat, kill dozens of men to get to her goal and then drown underwater and essentially have an orgasm as she twitches and dies, running out of air.

Even her serious moments are undercut by deliberate attempts to feminize her character and make her seem less threatening, less like a construct of power and more like an agent of a power structure who reinforces that structure even as she’s subjugated by it. Romantic subplots are injected, Lara is captured, a love of money sidetracks her attentions. To be fair, efforts are emerging to try and counter this pattern, even within the Tomb Raider series: Lara is being rebooted as a (normally bodied) young woman who is shipwrecked on an island and has to use her wits and her resilience to save herself. But it remains to be seen how well this attempt will follow its archetype, indeed if it will succeed at all.

But there’s reason to take heart and hope for a more progressive portrayal of women in games, even those with more conventional narratives. It comes from, among other places, the Portal series of games, and it’s going to be the subject of next week’s SNS, and hopefully tie this topic together. Thanks for bearing with me!

Congratulations on Uncovering Those Ancient Ruins!

Your journey began on Wednesday, as many journeys do, and it’s been anything but dull. After arriving by plane in godless Mexico City on Thursday morning you took a ramshackle bus to the Yucatan Peninsula. Your bus was, natch, attacked by cannibals who killed most of the crew, but thanks to your honed survival skills (the product of years of thieving) you managed to come out of the whole affair more or less unscathed, with a few cannibal dicks for your belt.

After that you started wandering around the Yucatan which, by the way, means walking around for days on end without a ready source of fresh water or food. You occasionally found tourist traps, such as “working cattle ranches” and “shacks without windows” that had a few jugs of water and some sub-standard granola bars for trade. But nothing substantial.

This trend will continue until you reach your destination, early this morning.

You’ll more stumble upon the ruins than find them: they’ll leap out of the jungle at you, rising up from the earth into the skyline. Vines will have grown over the stones, stones that time has grown into the ground, out of the dirt. Bones will be scattered around the stones, animal and “other.” And, shockingly enough, there will be a Whole Foods standing in the center of the Mayan ruins, its bright green letters staring down at you. A bearded man will be sitting outside on his smoke break. As you pass by him he will not acknowledge you. He will simply stare ahead blindly.

Once you enter the building it’ll become quite obvious that he’s the only employee there. Most of the shelves will be unstocked, the produce will be rotting and the bread will be slightly staler than it usually is at Whole Foods.

The only thing that a yuppie would find familiar will be a massive granola bar display in the center of the store. It’ll essentially consist of a ziggurat built from granola bar boxes with Mayan statues and unfamiliar writing on them. They’ll rise well above your head, easing their way towards the ceiling. The bars displayed on the boxes will look a great deal like the one you found in the museum earlier this week.

You’ll grab one of the boxes and, after a cursory look around to make sure the Whole Foods employee isn’t watching you, you’ll tear out a bar and rip into it with your aching teeth.

It’ll taste just as grand as the other granola bar, better perhaps for your hunger.

You’ll open up your duffel bag, your knap sack and your empty water bottle and begin stuffing granola bars into all of them. When you’re finished you’ll be thoroughly weighed down with granola bars, but the display will still be towering above you, monstrously. You won’t be worried about not leaving behind granola bars for future generations. Quite the opposite, the sheer scope of the display will make you wonder if some force greater than man made these bars to keep us bound to this planet, for space seems at best a distraction when beset by such granola bars.

As you leave the man you saw as you entered will still be sitting outside, smoking the same cigarette. He’ll nod at you this time and mumble something that will sound vaguely like “thanks for shopping at Whole Foods.” You won’t respond as you walk off into the woods, beginning your harrowing journey home.

Congratulations on Uncovering Those Ancient Ruins!

Congratulations on Winning at Your Ethics Hearing!

Usually at ethics hearings, people try to justify the weird shit they did in all kinds of ways. “I had a devil inside me” or “I thought I was doing something legal but kind of morally questionable” are two things you hear all the time at those fuckshows.

But you ain’t gonna do none of that shit. You’re just gonna walk up to the podium, pull out a little notebook, and announce to the crowd.

“I thought I’d make a shitload of money.”

The chair of the ethics committee will curve his ear towards you when you say that. Then he’ll gavel his gavel to bring the court to attention before he asks you to clarify: “That isn’t really related to ethics.”

“That isn’t really a clarifying question,” you’ll quip back.

Then he and the rest of the ethics committee will just sit there, stupefied for a few minutes while you figure how to get the microphone off its little standy-thing in front of the podium. Then you’ll drop it on the ground and walk away. Halfway down the aisle two bailiffs will grab you and escort you into a holding area, where you’ll be kept until the ethics committee can decide what the fuck to do with you.

Congratulations on Winning at Your Ethics Hearing!

Congratulations on Locating the Device Those Aliens Implanted In Your Wife!

It made for a pretty good sex game these last few years: find the alien tracking device implanted inside your wife. It let you explore a lot of things you might have engaged with if you didn’t have a good excuse to try them: nasal, anal and aural all had their rightful place in your sexcapades as long as you were looking for that device.

You even worked in blood play (what if it’s in her blood?), breath play (lungs!) and something called kidney play (interstitial redacted). But none of these fetishes really bore fruit. You started talking to doctors (real ones) and sexperts (not real doctors) to come up with new ways to explore your wife’s body, hoping to discover the tracking device that those aliens use to find her, even when you’re fucking in the woods, and take unfortunate pictures of her while the two of you are boning.

Today you’re going to find it, and boy are you ever going to be embarrassed.

You’ll be fucking your wife doggy style for the first time since the abduction four years ago and, in the throes of passion, you’ll slap her ass good and hard. As your palm impacts her buttock you’ll make a strong, hard sound, and you’ll feel something, something unfamiliar. You’ll give her another slap just to be sure and there it will be again: something small, rigid, immobile and hard. You’ll stop moving inside her mid thrust and rest your hand on the mass, puzzling over it for a moment.

“Honey,” you’ll say. “I think I found it.”

The two of you will cease your erotic intermission, disentangle yourselves from one another, put on clothes and head to the doctor’s office. Once there a CAT scan will reveal an object unlike anything the radiologist has ever seen. We wish we could tell you that this would be the end of your weird sex times and alien related troubles, but really this will just spark a heated chase that will lead to some really dark stuff going down between you, your wife, your radiologist and a young, impressionable lady FBI agent with really nice hair and skin. We suggest you make the best of it.

Congratulations on Locating the Device Those Aliens Implanted In Your Wife!

Congratulations on Discovering the Greatest Granola Bar Ever!

Today, during what you first thought would be just an ordinary museum heist, you’re going to discover – drum roll please – a special exhibit dedicated to granola bars.

Most of the exhibit will be given over to the history of the granola bar, resplendent with dioramas of how the ancient Sumerians crafted granola bars in their ziggurats and would give them to slaves so that they could have convenient high energy snacks with low to no fuss while they toiled themselves to death doing whatever it is that the Sumerians made their slaves do. Other dioramas will comment on the function of granola bars during the American revolution, during the Great Depression and during World War II. Another granola diorama will ask the question “DID THE DINOSAURS EAT GRANOLA BARS?!” inconclusively.

Most of these dioramas will be, as dioramas tend towards, extremely boring. But one of them will stand out. It’ll be at the back of the room, surrounded by red velvet ropes and a glass case. It’ll have a small, tasteful gold plaque below it, reading: “THE WORLD’S MOST DELICIOUS GRANOLA BAR.”

You’ll scoff at the exhibit and consider running off to find some paintings or something, but that plaque will bring you back. You’ll get out your museum-glass-case-opening-kit and crack the glass case containing the granola bar right out. Then you’ll taste it, just to see how it measures up to Nature Valley.

It’ll destroy your taste buds. In an instant you’ll learn what true deliciousness is. Your jaw will unhinge, and you’ll want more than anything else in the world to eat another bite of that sweet, sweet granola. Lucky for you the wrapper, upon examination, will be a map that details the location of an ancient ruin in the Yucatan Peninsula. This ruin will be labeled:

GRANOLA PARADISE

Pack your bags, son! You’re goin’ to the Yucatan tomorrow!

Congratulations on Discovering the Greatest Granola Bar Ever!

Congratulations on Ripping the Shit Out of That Bill!

Sometimes you just have to do something crazy, something that breaks all the rules. It can be something big or something small. Today you’re going to opt into the biggest of the big gestures: you’re going to sit down at your kitchen table, look deep into that Disney Club Membership Bill, and you’re going to tear it right in half. Then you’re going to take the scraps and tear them again, then again, then a fourth time until you have sixteen little bill bits in your hands.

Then you’ll grab the membership card itself and try to tear that in half. You’ll flex it and twist it, trying to shear it in half, grinning and sweating all the while. In the end you’ll less tear the card in half then crease and bend it beyond use, which won’t be quite as satisfying as ripping up the bill, but these things happen.

Some people would’ve just called to cancel their membership. Some people would’ve thrown the whole letter away. But you took a stand against the Disney Corporation. And thanks to the cameras that Walt Disney installed in every American home starting in the 30s, his frozen head will have seen all of it. And boy will he ever be pissed. You made a powerful gesture today.

Congratulations on Ripping the Shit Out of That Bill!