Sexy Results

Congratulations on Getting Your Girlfriend Pregnant!

2012-02-15T00:00:00.001-08:00

Remember that scene in Slaughterhouse Five where the main character has sex with some actress while aliens watch and take notes and she ends up theoretically getting preggers? Aliens LOVE that part of the book, and for years now they’ve been trying to figure out how to make it, to loosely paraphrase Disney’s Ariel, a part of their world.

Three days ago they figured it out. If they capture a pair of desperate enough people with low enough self esteem they know that they’ll be able to get those folks to bump uglies out of desperation, and if those people are in a relationship already it’ll be that much more likely to happen. So tomorrow they’ll hover down over the trailer park where you and your girlfriend live together in a single-wide that you rent for around two hundred a month and they’ll snatch the two of you up as you head out into the yard to throw things at people’s dogs before their owners wake up.

Then they’ll freeze you, take you to a small research facility on the surface of Phobos, and lock the two of you in a small metal room while they wait for you to thaw.

The room will be wired with cameras, cameras that will catch everything that’s happening from every angle, allowing aliens to pipe the feed of you and your girlfriend adjusting to your new circumstances into conventional solo-masturbation rooms and larger, more culturally acceptable masturbation stadiums that aliens invented a while back. Then the aliens will sit back, occasionally feed you, and wait for you to fuck.

They’ll only have to wait two days before you get comfortable enough with your surroundings (an all white room that slowly drives you mad) to bone it up. You and your girl will, following a dramatic fight, fuck like rabbits while the aliens watch. You’ll use the lone condom you keep in your wallet to keep the deed clean (your girlfriend refuses to use birth control because she sees it as a form of abortion) and then fall asleep nude in each other’s arms.

The next day you’ll be in the habit and you’ll figure, whatever, fuck it. You’ll bump uglies in the morning and jizz all up inside her, immediately making your girlfriend pregnant. You’ll keep fucking for the next seven months, just in case she wasn’t pregnant enough, before the two of you, due to pregnancy and lack of exercise, are deemed “too gross to watch” by the aliens and sent back to earth without ceremony.

She’ll give birth two months later in an emergency room, where Medicaid will take care of your costs. You’ll later recount the story of how you got your girlfriend pregnant to your friends, but no one will ever believe you because, like most trailer park residents, you spent most of your time before your abduction talking about how aliens are watching us all the time, effectively ruining your credibility in case you ever had call to tell a story about aliens.

Your inability to stop talking about it will make everyone really uncomfortable around you, and render you even less attractive to local employers and potential friends. You will be unemployed and a terrible dad in the decades to come.

Congratulations on Getting Your Girlfriend Pregnant!

Congratulations on Losing All That Weight!

2012-02-14T00:00:00.001-08:00

American prisons are known for two things: non-consensual anal sex and providing prisoners with three warm meals a day and a cot to sleep in. Hence the well known idiom: “three hots, a cot, and a throbbing, engorged penis.”

Today you’re going to find out that this adage does not hold true for all prisons. Specifically Saudi Arabian prisons where they put men for wearing dreadlocks and Phish t-shirts in public. You’re going to get pulled off a street in Riyadh and shoved in a cell within minutes of getting off the plane, totally failing in your quest to “change the world from the ground up” by, in your mind, teaching Saudi women to appreciate their own independence (largely through a combination of basic literature and ESL skills and fucking you regularly).

Your cell will be roughly four feet long and wide, seven feet tall, so you’ll have to curl up when you want to sleep. There will be a single window, a slit really, that will issue only the tiniest hint of light into your new home. You’ll take to it almost immediately, since it will remind you a little bit of your parent’s basement, except it won’t have wi-fi or any wi-fi enabled devices in it.

But, even though you’ll feel more or less comfortable since you’re used to living like a shiftless hippy, you’ll be a little bit disappointed by the fact that you are, unlike when you’re in your parent’s basement, totally unable to leave. So by the end of the first day the lack of weed will infuriate you. By the end of the second day you’ll be frustrated by the fact that you’re fed only a heel of bread and a liter of water a day. By the end of the third day you’ll have become resigned to your fate, largely because the guards won’t speak English or loud, slowly shouted English, the language you normally use to communicate with brown people.

In around five months you’ll be set free, which will be great for you since you’ll be able to smoke weed again, as soon as you get out of Saudi Arabia, where that’s a felony. But what’ll be even better is that you’ll be svelte and slender for the first time in years. You’ll be attractive, were you to bathe, to members of the opposite sex and your performance while playing ultimate Frisbee will have never been better.

So Congratulations on Losing All That Weight!

Congratulations on Fighting Off That Falcon!

2012-02-13T00:00:00.001-08:00

We all watch the evening news, so we all know that between China, northeast China, Indochina, Iran, North Korea, Russia circa-1983 and the Philadelphia Flyer’s franchise the world is in constant danger. It’s a miracle we haven’t all been obliterated by a nuclear weapon or subjected to the most grotesque treatment imaginable by the Flyers. But we haven’t, so we all continue to live in fear.

And today, while you walk along the banks of the Charles River, you’re going to discover a whole new concept for us to irrationally fear. You’ll have your eight month old infant and you’ll be taking a brisk walk from your upscale apartment off of Memorial Drive to the lab where your husband works. You’ll be planning on confronting him for never being around you and your newborn in the least appropriate fashion possible: by bringing an infant into a basement filled with high pressure furnaces following a walk through extremely inclement weather in mid-February.

It’ll be a terrible idea, and your marriage would be ruined, condemned to a slow death over the course of a decade and a half, if you actually went through with it. But on your way something far more interesting and less disastrous will happen. A falcon will swoop down out of nowhere and try to snatch up your baby.

In a flash your momma instincts will kick in. You won’t even realize that the falcon is coming, just that you have a vague sense of ill-omen descending upon you and your child. You’ll clutch your purse a little tighter before a flash of tremendous movement collides with the back of your child’s stroller.

The falcon will impact the shield intended to keep rain off of your baby, and it will be disoriented for a few moments. You’ll flip shit on the falcon and start wailing on it with your purse, battering about the head until it flies off, crawing in an annoyed fashion. Then you’ll realize just how stupid your idea was and head back home to your one bedroom apartment, where you’ll continue to work on monetizing your Gilmore Girls fansite.

You won’t succeed at that, but at least you’ll have saved your baby and, without really realizing it, your marriage!

Congratulations on Fighting Off That Falcon!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: A Concept Forming Exercise on the Subject of Women in Games!

2012-02-12T00:00:00.000-08:00

So, sometimes I write cop-out essays for this and it’s quite apparent. Things like sandwich discussions and the like really don’t fit well into this blog’s focus, nor do they really explore the things I set out to focus when I started writing Sexy Results. And sometimes I write cop-out essays because I’m feeling sort of dry. That’s not the case right now at all. I’ve got a lot of games I’d love to write about, including Rage and Space Marine, to say nothing of ongoing essays about The Old Republic, Modern Warfare 3 and Skyrim, all of which have kept me captivated for quite some time now.

But I’m working on a paper this semester, a paper where I’ll finally be able to discuss video games as a literary form at length. I’m going to be posting some of the preliminary work here as it develops, and what follows is going to more or less be a hybrid abstract and proposal: a tentative statement of scope as well as a sample of what the content of the paper will consist of. This will likely be more in line with the older posts that used to make up Super Nerd Sunday, and if you’d like to see more of this sort of thing, please let me know. It’s a lot more labor intensive, but I find it to be interesting most of the time, and if you agree then I’d love to hear it.

Gender has long been a problematic subject in video games. The manner in which archetypes of masculinity and feminity are portrayed, the roles that male and female characters play and the way they’re developed as protagonists, antagonists and supporting characters is in equal turn fascinating and problematic. Ever since the obscure Custer’s Revenge, an Atari based sex-game allowed a floating ghost general to literally drop cum-bombs on horrified Native American women below, began sexualizing and destroying the agency of women within games decades ago, an uphill battle has slowly been taking shape. Occasionally marketing forces have combated the slow progress of the industry, eviscerating strong portrayals of women and transforming them into ditzes, sex objects and pubescent fantasies made manifest. Lara Croft, who began her life as a proposed “female Indiana Jones,” famously became an implausibly physique, nude code adjacent target for criticism within and without the industry. And it becomes difficult not to see this sort of self-destructive path as a necessity of continuing to exist within the industry when games with strong female protagonists from the Playstation 2 generation, such as Beyond Good and Evil, bomb so thoroughly despite critical accolade.

But of late a renaissance has been underway in the games industry. Female protagonists and even female supporting characters have been emerging as complicated, interesting figures who outstrip their male counterparts in complexity and form the cornerstone of carefully constructed, socially aware stories in high-grossing, critically acclaimed games. Brutal Legend’s seemingly male-dominated story turns almost entirely upon feminine power, and female supporting characters are, in the end, both the enablers of the plot and the sole survivors of a harrowing military campaign. Half-Life 2 relies heavily on Alyx Vance, a strong, competent woman who both defies many social morays of feminine behavior and forms the cornerstone of a revolutionary movement, taking on qualities of both mother, sister and lover for the protagonist while embodying a sort of ultra-competent woman warrior, a valkyrie for a digital generation.

Perhaps no game series better illustrates the progress that has been made towards more complex and intellectually engaging portrayals of female characters in video games than Portal, wherein Chell, a voiceless protagonist whom we rarely see, comes to embody and invert many of the tropes that we, as gamers, have become comfortable with over the years. Chell simultaneously upholds and violates many of the rules of first person shooters, creating a revolutionary new kind of genre, a new kind of storytelling and a new kind of energy in gaming. Through the progress of Portal we can see both a complex concept of female sexuality and power emerging in contemporary games and a broader deconstruction of concepts of authority, invention and power in games. We can also look to Portal to find a new methodology and mentality for telling stories in games, representative of a movement towards more complicated, more interesting storytelling that seems to both accompany and rely on this feminine growth within games.

And alongside titles such as Portal indie titles have been expanding both what it means to be a game and what it means to portray women within them. Developers such as Tale of Tales, makers of such revolutionary titles as Fatale and The Endless Forest, have been exploring both our historical perception of women as well as the manner in which we perceive sexuality, gender and sexual development as a part of life and death. In The Path, they retell the story of Little Red Riding Hood as only a video game could, recasting it in a post-modern light to provide gamers with a new means by which to approach the topic of sexuality and explore their own relationship with just what it means to be a young woman growing into a teenager, coming to terms with desires both redemptive and self destructive. Through the revolutionary play of The Path, we’re forced to assess ideas of success and failure in games, ideas of life and death and the concept of achievement as an ethereal or unattainable subject, all the while interacting with a female cast of characters who express more without speaking a syllable than most can manage in an entire novel.

I’ll be bringing these titles into conversation with a number of articles about concepts of sex, sexuality, women in games and the nature of power in both narrative and games in order to explore just how it has both changed and is changing in the days to come. Bringing together figures such as Shodan and Victoria (from System Shock and Thief respectively) and looking at them along with the masculine and/or paternal counterparts (The Many, The Jackal/Father Karaas) illustrates more than just dynamics of feminine power in games. It also illustrates how the introduction of these complicated literary characters forms part of a larger tapestry wherein themes of resurrection, life, death and authority are both constructed and simultaneously undermined through the unique structure and storytelling requirements that games are uniquely possessed of as a medium.

From Custer to Chell, it’s been quite a long journey, and it is far from over. Masculinity continues to be a pervasive and often limiting trope in the construction of stories within games, and patterns of overt masculine exclusion, those evident in works such as Gears of War and Modern Warfare, operate to both undermine their own stories and convey simplified fictions of what it means to be a man in today’s society. By placing these examples next to more complicated stories and revealing the manner in which the perception of gaming as a “boy’s club” has undermined its growth, we can learn about the destructive power of exclusion. We can also witness the importance of inclusiveness within examples of potent female characters who propel complicated stories with key themes and literary methodology behind them. Stupid games will always exist, but it is difficult not to look to the growth of women within the games industry as well as in the stories told by that industry and see a correlation between the quality of stories told, the increasing maturity of the industry and the growth of games not just as a business but as a literary medium for telling singular and structurally unique stories.

Congratulations on Re-Enacting Part of the Movie Ghost!

2012-02-11T00:00:00.000-08:00

You love love LOVE the movie Ghost. You’ve put a shitload of time into trying to re-enact parts of it: you’ve tried to foster a relationship with Whoopi Goldberg in the hope that she might one day sleep with you. You’ve done pottery with literally every person you’ve dated just in case you die while dating them so that you’ll have an excuse to share that experience with them posthumously. But it’s never worked out. Not until today. Today’s gonna be your lucky day.

Because today you’re going to be buying some heroin at a construction site filled with broken glass and discarded condoms and you’re going to pick a fight with your dealer.

“What the fuck, man?!” he’ll shout at you, pulling out his gun and turning it sideways as he prepares to shoot you.

“Wait wait wait!” you’ll scream at him, holding up your hands. He’ll look at you like you’re an idiot and cock the gun, then you’ll back up against the shell of a window, where some shards of glass will be hanging above you. You’ll point up, drawing the dealer’s attention to said bits of hanging glass.

“Shoot those out,” you’ll beg him. “It’ll look so much cooler.”

He’ll give you another look of disbelief before shrugging and pointing his gun upwards. He’ll loose two rounds into the top of the window. One of them will crack the glass and liberate a particularly nasty shard of glass, sending it cascading down into your body. It’ll strike you in the neck, which won’t be just like Ghost, but it’ll be close enough to make you happy, if only for a moment.

Unfortunately your happiness will rapidly subside as you lay there, impaled and bleeding out. You’ll begin to wonder how realistic the movie Ghost was when you don’t notice any tiny black specters coming out of the floor to collect your soul. As the world goes dark you’ll wonder if this was the best trajectory for you to follow with the last decade of your life, but the thought won’t last long. Blood loss will strip the thought from your mind, dwindling out all the others until your body even forgets to breathe.

Congratulations on Re-Enacting Part of the Movie Ghost!

Congratulations Ego Booster!

2012-02-10T00:00:00.000-08:00

Today you’re going going to be jet skiing on Lake Michigan, an activity that only an idiot of the highest conceivable caliber would engage in in mid-February. You’re going to be wearing a beer hat and carrying an assault rifle on your back hooting and hollering at the top of your lungs.

After around an hour and a half of doing that you’ll notice a ferry puttering its away across this, your Great Lake du Jour. You’ll also notice a patch of ice that, in your head, will look like a totally sweet ramp. Revving your engine, you’ll drag your jet ski in a languid loop around the side of the lake until you turn in and angle towards the ferry, manipulating your jet ski so that your path will cross the ice along the way.

“WOOOOO!” you’ll scream at the top of your lungs as you gun the engine and floor it, speeding towards the ferry as fast as your little engine can carry you.

You’ll holler like a madman as you speed along, hair slicked back. In your mind you’ll see yourself hitting the ice and turning it into a ramp with the weight of your jet ski, propelling yourself into the air and over the ferry.

In reality you’ll hit the ice and lose control of your jet ski, flipping it end over end and casting you into the water. The force of your impact on to the surface of the water will knock you unconscious, and the cold will start to kill you almost instantly. The crew of the ferry will scramble to rescue you from the freezing water, pulling you out as the passengers chortle at your plight.

Their otherwise miserable commute across the lake will have been lightened by your ridiculous misfortune. Your retardation will have lifted their spirits. And in the end, your brain damage from the cold and lack of oxygen will be minor, so no one will have to feel too bad about it.

Congratulations Ego Booster!

Congratulations on Capturing Leslie Feist in a Crystal!

2012-02-09T00:00:00.001-08:00

It’ll begin, as all things pertaining to Leslie Feist do, with an incantation.

We’d print the incantation here, but we’d prefer it doesn’t get out, because it not only contains within it the framework by which any creature can be contained, bound into service most foul and infinitely fair, but also references Leslie Feist’s true name, necessary to bind her into service. We would be remiss to reproduce such information, as it would make grievous oversteps of mortal authority such as yours commonplace. Even though we could certainly use the hits, we’re not going to subject a being as magnificent as Leslie Feist to that ilk of bullshit.

Once the incantation is completed Leslie Feist will be standing before you within the circle of sealing. Stripped of her glamour she will stand before you as she truly is: twelve feet tall, skin glowing magnificently. Her wings will long to stretch outside the circle, but its limits will force them into a sphere’s containment until she manages to furl them and wrap them around herself. She’ll shiver, naked, the heat of her own inner fire rendered distant by your efforts.

“What do you wish?” she’ll rasp, voice also severed by the circle.

“Get in this crystal for my girlfriend!” you’ll shout at her. She’ll wince, leaning her body away as if she would do anything she could to escape her fate. But she won’t be able to, and like sand in the breeze she’ll shift rapidly, molecule by molecule, towards the crystal, tapering down and filtering into it. When the process is done the circle will be obliterated, the salt woven into her being, into the crystal. Her face will not appear within its facets, her voice will not echo from its depths. The only hint at what it contains will be an unearthly glow, the glow that is all that this world will be able to see of Leslie Feist so long as she remains contained within that crystal.

You’ll pick up the stone, which will be warm to the touch, and pocket it. You’ll leave the windowless study room on the fourth floor of Macalester College’s library whistling to yourself, imagining how psyched your girlfriend will be to have a stone containing the essence of Leslie Feist. You won’t be able to imagine her staying angry at you for cheating on her with her roommate.

Turns out you’ll be totally wrong about the anger allaying effects of a crystal containing Leslie Feist, and your girlfriend (ex-girlfriend, really) will freak out and throw the stone to the ground, cracking it and allowing Leslie Feist to escape from it in a glittering cavalcade of light. She’ll emerge full of rage, not only for what you’ve done to her but what you’ve done to your girlfriend.

By the end, you will beg for death, but your ex-girlfriend will have Leslie Feist’s autograph and an awesome story of bonding with her over your slow, painful end, so that’ll be pretty boss for her.

Congratulations on Capturing Leslie Feist in a Crystal!

Congratulations on Watching All Your Plans Go Up In Smoke!

2012-02-08T00:00:00.000-08:00

After the robbery, after the guns go quiet and you’re sitting back in your hideout you’ll be sitting perfectly still on your stool, looking at the chaos arrayed on the table in front of you: bills, thrown about on the table, pistol with its barrel still cooling, dye bomb stained bags. You’ll look at your team: the driver, the heavy, the nerd, the chick. All of them will be fine because, TWIST, your entire plan went off without a hitch!

You robbed a Wells Fargo branch in central Indiana in a green Subaru outback you stole from a stranger two towns over without a word or a shot. You did it quick and clean, like you’d all done it before, but you hadn’t. Really, you just watched the movie Heat a bunch and sorted out what they did wrong. They:

A) Didn’t have any ladies along for good luck.

B) Robbed a bank in the middle of a major city.

C) Brought a bunch of assault rifles along for some reason.

D) Used highly recognizable actors to rob a bank.

Based on all these mistakes you robbed a bank with a small, charismatic but unrecognizable group of community theater actors from Northern Wisconsin and, sure enough, it worked out. It helped that they all shared the practical skills that were normally associated with their heist-role archetype. The nerd knew a lot of stuff and had some practical skills as a result of growing up in the Midwest. The chick had boobs, which distracted and comforted a number of bank patrons during the entire affair. The heavy was a pretty big guy who looked scary but was actually quite nice and the driver could drive stick.

You also Googled “how to rob a bank” before doing the whole thing, so you knew to watch for dye bombs, to pack money yourselves and to avoid killing anyone if it was at all possible. You came through on all of those, though it was impossible to resist firing your guns in the air in celebration after you finished packing the money, which did damage the bank’s ceiling and made dust fall all over the bank patrons.

All that’s left is for you to burn the original bank plans and go your separate ways. You won’t ask anyone where they’re headed. That’d break the rules. But you will wish them all good luck and share a beer with them, stepping out of your shed to sit in deck chairs in the backyard and watch your plans literally go up in smoke as they burn in the barbecue pit you dug yourself, ages ago, back before you knew you’d never have to work again.

Congratulations on Watching All Your Plans Go Up In Smoke!

Congratulations on Accidentally Blinding Yourself!

2012-02-07T00:00:00.000-08:00

Remember when you fucked with the eye wash stations in your lab so that they’d fire gouts of sulfuric acid instead of water into whoever used them? Yeah, we didn’t think you did. Well, today you’re going to wish you had, because following a particularly nasty incident where another prank you were working on (monkey urine in a spray bottle) backfires and ends up spraying gross monkey pee all over your face you’re going to head to one of the aforementioned eye wash stations and try to get the crud out of your face.

You’ll bend down, pull the lever and gouts of acid will spray right into your peepers.

“Agggh!” you’ll scream. “This prank is a lot less funny than I thought it would be!”

You’ll thrash around on the ground for a while as your eyes burn out of your skull, wishing you could cry. But you won’t be able to: your tear ducts will be totally annihilated within seconds. After what seems like an eternity of pain the reaction will stop: the acid will have run its course, and you’ll be left on the ground with a ruined face and a newfound respect for the limitations that need to be in place for workplace pranks to be both funny and appropriate.

This will result in an entire week without any of your retarded pranks ruining shit for your co-workers until you forget all the lessons that your scarred face has taught you and decide to train your seeing-eye dog to attack white people, forgetting (since you’re blind) that you’re white and getting yourself pretty badly mauled along the way.

Congratulations on Accidentally Blinding Yourself!

Congratulations on Winning the Underground Super Bowl!

2012-02-06T00:00:00.000-08:00

We rarely hear about it, but every year after the regular, above ground Super Bowl a second, far more interesting Super Bowl is played beneath the streets of America’s filthiest metropolises. Everything from were-bats to people who have been turned into bats after being exposed to radioactive materials gather in a series of subterranean arenas to determine who is truly the best football player in the seedy underworld of America.

We should mention, underground football has far fewer rules than regular American football. It’s like Aussie rules football, but slightly less brutal: players can carry blunt and edged weapons on to the field and use them to hack and slash at one another until a player is incapacitated, at which point all other players on the field are encouraged to fall upon the downed player and devour them.

This year your team, the Cleveland Mutants, will be up against the Brooklyn CHUDs. It’ll be a grudge match, since the Mutants used to be in Brooklyn back in the day, but as we all know moved to Cleveland when Brooklyn got kinda racist and Ohio threw enough money in the right direction. Both teams will have been hard pressed to get as far as they have so far, but the CHUDs will have put quite a bit of money into getting to the title match: they’ll have attracted more impressive freaks of nature and they’ll have bribed a lot of refs, which is slightly more legal in underground football than it is in regular football.

So tomorrow all bets will be off. It’ll be you: a scrappy group of mutants with no families to speak of, morals to claim or scruples about committing acts of terrible violence against an endless, sniggering horde of cannibalistic humanoids, most of them pretty tiny, a handful of them incredibly large.

Your team will wade into the game wielding bats with nails hammered into them, machetes attached to the end of brooms and fire axes that weren’t carefully secured in the city. A few of your more interesting teammates will also have blades where arms should be on their bodies. The CHUDs will have nothing but teeth, claws, and a lot of money to get their way out of various fouls.

But that money will run out quick, and before you know it the head basket that hangs in your end zone will be full and their head basket will contain only the head of Gary, the insufferable team captain who sought to inspire all of you to succeed. Everyone will be happy, everything will be great and you’ll have won the Underground Super Bowl! Enjoy the brief period of increased adulation and pay before people go back to shitting all over you for being from Cleveland again!

Congratulations on Winning the Underground Super Bowl!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Me and My M-4!

2012-02-05T00:00:00.000-08:00

This is my M-4. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

And I don’t just mean there are a lot of M-4s out there. There most certainly are. But there are also guns that are an awful lot like the M-4 in how they play: the G-36c, the CM901, and the ACR all play an awful lot like the M-4, with nice, quiet, controlled fire and middling power and range backing them up. But I’ve got a soft spot for the M-4, for both its cultural cache, its contemporary significance and its general well roundedness, so when it unlocks it becomes my gun. I’m here to plumb its depths.

Modern Warfare 3 really wants you to do this. It has its unlockable system set up so that you acquire attachments, exchangeable upgrades, weapon skins and even cosmetic changes for your gunsights based on using weapons so that you can unlock these fancy little features. It really makes you want to sit down with a gun, get to know it and carry it around with you for a few hundred hours. Unfortunately the ability to actually create a class with your weapon of choice, along with the ability to invest time and effort in that weapon, is cordoned off until level 4, which takes around an hour and a half of playing to reach.

Immediately after paying my dues this way I hastily created a class while under severe duress from the constantly ticking clock that counts down the time until the next round. I picked my perks all but at random – something called Stalker, which apparently lets me actually move around while looking down my sights (a savvy balancing move considering the heavy favoritism that Modern Warfare usually gives to perks that eliminate the need for silly things like the ironsights they put the time into balancing in the game), something called Recon, which encourages me to throw grenades at random, and something called Quickdraw, which I think I recall from another Modern Warfare game. This is supposed to help me switch between weapons a little faster, though I’m not sure why I’d ever do that. The clock hits zero before I have a chance to pick anything else, like killstreak or deathstreak items, but since I’m just starting out I don’t really have any options to play with in those arenas just yet, so there’s no biggy.

And I am suddenly and violently transported into a dusty, grey-brown realm, surrounded by gunfire and some kid who won’t stop chanting “gay” into his headset mic. A grenade goes off a short distance away, hurled by some invisible foe, and I’m prompted to sprint forward – it’s an old dance, a familiar dance.

I twirl around aimlessly, painfully aware of how out of practice I am. Dual wielded sub-machine guns have apparently come into fashion, and I’m repeatedly cut down by sustained fire from not one but two barrels as I round corners time and time again. Eventually I see someone just before they see me and open fire, barely (just barely) cutting them down. Red tinges my vision, but I’m back in the swing of things. I’m okay running around, aiming down ironsights and pulling my trigger without flinching. The number to the far right is a lot bigger than the number to its left, but I do my best not to get discouraged – I used to be good at this, and becoming decent at it again can be a meta-game all its own for me.

But after the third or fourth kill something unexpected happens – I’ve been told not only that I leveled up (I’m used to seeing that, thanks) but that my weapon has leveled up. My M-4 is apparently now level 2.

After I endure the rest of the match, which I finish with a kills to deaths ratio that would embarrass any sensible person, I decide to step out of the game for a minute to customize my classes. I see that, to my surprise, something new has been unlocked under my assault rifle tree. Usually I only get a notice about this sort of thing when I’ve got a new weapon to play with or when, in Modern Warfares of old, I racked up enough kills to unlock the latest attachment. But now I learn that I’ve acquired a red dot sight for my M-4, and with it a new “Challenge,” which is what Modern Warfare games like to call their quests in the MMO sense.

Apparently if I shoot sixty people while I’m looking through my fancy new red dot sight, I’ll get additional experience. And, judging by the locks next to all the other rows in this “weapon challenges” display, this experience will go towards leveling up my gun so I can get more stuff to slap on to it to fulfill these other challenges.

With this in mind, I go back to the Create Class menu, make four more classes, and then decide that I’m going to ignore them and pursue unlocking every last element of my M-4 with dogged determination into the night. I last another forty minutes before I log off for the night, a paltry dozen or so kills into my gun-quest’s progress.

The next day I blow through it. I also acquire a silencer, a grenade launcher, an ACOG scope, some holographic sights and a few weird little symbols that modify my gun’s performance slightly, but don’t have any quests associated with them. Although one of them does let me attach two upgrades to one gun, effectively doubly the rate at which I can complete my gun quests, which is pretty nice. And I’ve got to say, I do enjoy using most of the attachments. Even the ACOG sight, worst of the worst in previous Modern Warfare games, is fun and well suited to its purpose in this iteration. And it’s really hard to feel anything but joy with a silencer strapped to the front of your gun.

But of course, it all can’t be joy. The next day, after I blow through a few more gun quests pleasantly enough and unlock a few new toys I end up with something called a “shotgun attachment.” Apparently my gun isn’t gunny enough, so I’ve duct taped a shotgun barrel to it and I am now being encouraged to shoot forty people with it. Forty!

I set to work immediately.

Two days later I hate the M-4. The shotgun attachment is terrible, and having to struggle through it is like pulling teeth. I put round after round into assholes, and it just won’t kill them – a point blank blast won’t a kill make, and I rarely have time for more. I want the M-4 to fucking die. My psyche is so shattered by the experience that I’m tempted to step away from the M-4 altogether and start seeing other guns, but I persevere. I move on to my quest to murder people while using hybrid sights, my modest K-D in tatters, my love of the M-4 eroded.

By the time I finish with hybrid sights and extended mags to wrap up the gun-quest cycle by using the thermal scope, my love of the M-4 is restored. I think the thermal scope is a little ridiculous, sure, but I go through it all the same. People make fun of me for doing it, but in the end I’ve got all of my little M-4 achievements achieved, and I’m happier for it. And a bunch of other guns unlocked in the mean time, guns I can put myself to work unlocking gun quests for. I shelve my completed M-4 for a CM901, which looks enough like an M-4 to keep me from feeling uncomfortable when I use it. I give my monitor a little kiss as I finish the process – it’s been a wild ride.

There’s a downside to this, of course. Now that I’m done with my M-4, it’s unlikely that I’ll come back to it. As enjoyable as Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer is, some of its problems (the aforementioned clutter I brought up in the last essay which, while somewhat reduced, remains an issue, for example) will keep me from ever playing it in the ravenous, compulsive way I played the original Modern Warfare. I reserve that kind of play for games that traditionally fall into an e-sports model, and I think there has to be a sort of essentialism for an e-sports game to work – an essentialism that Modern Warfare 2 and 3 lacked.

But this feedback loop remains compelling – I spent a month of my life letting it distract me from the also very compelling Star Wars: The Old Republic. In the end it leaves you with a list of things you’ve earned and a nice, pretty, full progress bar in the Barracks sub-menu. And it really does make you feel attached to a weapon and make you feel like you know it. For instance, even though they feel very similar I know my CM901 shoots a little harder and a little slower than my M-4 now, which is a really fine distinction considering how fast guns seem to shoot in Modern Warfare 3 as a rule. Still, the M-4 will always have a special place in my heart as my first fully unlocked weapon in Modern Warfare 3.

Congratulations Sexy Cowgirl!

2012-02-04T00:00:00.000-08:00

Normally we predict important events in people’s lives. Sometimes the importance of these events could be called into question, but if the intended target of a Congratulations rises from their slumber to discover their prediction and then reads it (this has almost never happened) the importance of the prediction is unassailable to that individual. When you’re suddenly going to jump-cut into the consciousness of Jeff Goldblum we think you’d like to understand why here at Sexy Results, and we don’t think anyone could disagree with that.

Today’s prediction is going to be of absolutely no importance to you. Today you’re going to get your W-2s delivered to the trailer you live in on the outskirts of Helena. You’ll be surprised to be getting them at all, since you didn’t recall working for anyone who didn’t pay you in cash over the last year. You’ll light an unfiltered cigarette and smoke out in front of your trailer, wearing a man’s shirt and no pants, staring out at the horizon and wondering just what you should do with this thing.

When the cigarette is done you’ll go back inside your trailer, take down your rifle and think about what you’d like for dinner. Occasionally your dog will nuzzle your bare thigh as if he wants attention, and you’ll pat his head (every good cowgirl has a dog). Then, once you’re satisfied with how clean your rifle is, you’ll read some of a book before you get up to cook.

It’ll be a dull day, a lazy, languid winter morning in the life of one of the few remaining cowgirls, but that’ll be alright. Sometimes the quiet times are the best. You’ll recall the work you did as you cook some brown rice and a little bit of chicken, which you’ll occasionally feed to your dog when he asks for it. It was a month of loose work on a ranch back in March, unexpected work that you grabbed when it came up and never thought about again. You won’t be too sure what to do with your W-2 based on that knowledge, since you don’t really see the percentage in paying taxes when you live the way you do.

You’ll bite your lip and pout as you continue cooking, scratching yourself in a completely unselfconscious way that anyone watching would wish they touch you too. Then you’ll shrug and let the thought slip from your mind – if the government wants a few hundred dollars extra out of you they can come and get it from your lily white ass.

Congratulations Sexy Cowgirl!

Congratulations on Murdering Your Ex With a Hammer!

2012-02-03T00:00:00.000-08:00

Bruises on thighs turned to bruises on lips and eyes and then it had to end. Four years ago, three if we use dates as a means of tracing time back to the time before calendars became unfortunate inconveniences. It was a bad breakup, a bad end to a bad time that made you do bad things.

It would be easy to say that you hated him before, that you hated him when you swung at his skull, but you didn’t really. You knew the face, not the eyes but the shape, the hairline, the half-beard, the scar. You let the hammer carry through, obliterate the skin and bone and muscles underneath and didn’t concern yourself with cleanup.

It was the way of things – you and your friends needed food. He was already dead. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t blink, just limped and lurched towards you stiffly. When he fell you imagined a sigh of relief, though it was probably just gas escaping. It will be a heartbeat where you’ll feel selfless, like you’ve done something good for someone for a change. That isn’t a feeling you get to have that much anyone, so that’ll mean a lot.

Once the dust has settled you won’t remember where his body falls. You won’t try to find him or say any sort of last rite above him to sanctify what has transpired. You’ll grab all the oatmeal you can, stuff it into a duffel bag along with readymade soups, boullion and anything that was still sealed inside of a plastic bag. You won’t even look down as you walk out, but that night you’ll dream of him, what he looked like long before.

You’ll think about the time you had with him, the moments you felt happy, the end, the devastation and the movement beyond what he said: that he couldn’t deal with being someone who’d been raped, that the burden was too great for him. You’ll recall the weeks before the ending, the weeks that stretched into months, the self-destruction that came back, that almost didn’t leave.

When you wake up the next day in your sleeping bag, ass to ass with the man you’ve been fucking whenever you can find a safe moment of privacy, you’ll have a big grin on your face. You won’t be able to describe way, even to yourself.

Congratulations on Murdering Your Ex With a Hammer!

Congratulations Valence Electron!

2012-02-02T00:00:00.000-08:00

You know how electrons in the outer layer of atoms often depart to fulfill some other, more attractive function? Well today you’re going to leave the 2p ring of your Nitrogen atom for greener pastures.

It’ll be a tough decision for you, but you’ll know it’s the right one. You’ll fly off of the outer shell of your Nitrogen atom and attach yourself to a nice looking coffee shop in an affluent Midwestern town. The electrons in the adjacent shell will pretend to be puzzled by your decision, but really they’ll totally get it. You never had a paired electron, you didn’t really do a lot except occasionally interact with ions in liquid solutions and you never finished college.

We hope you’ll be happy in your new life, as an electron in the cash register of said coffee house. That is, until you rub up against a dollar bill and become a part of that before moving on to an exciting new investment opportunity, you shiftless drifter you.

Congratulations Valence Electron!

Congratulations on Accidentally Setting Your Van on Fire!

2012-02-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

Your stepdad Franklin told you this would happen, but you didn’t listen.

Today you’re going to wake up shrouded in flames. The pain will be tremendous. Your mattress will have caught fire, ignited by the embers of the lit cigarette you clutched between your lips as you drifted off to sleep. You’ll want to scream, but the heat will choke off the words. You’ll want to surge forward from your bed and burst out of the doors of your van, into the cool night air outside, but your muscles will refuse your commands – you’ll be paralyzed by fear.

Instead you’ll lay there, skin charring, waiting for something, anything, to happen. The pain will be immense, beyond anything you’ve ever felt before as the nerve endings in your tissues singe and go dead. Your life will begin to flash before your eyes, a cavalcade of kegstands and sweet drum solos that only your stepdad Franklin ever heard. You’ll know, absolutely know, for a moment that you are going to die.

And then the back of your van will burst open and the manager of the Walmart where you were sleeping in the parking lot will appear beyond the flames, a red cylinder in her hand. She’ll spout the contents of the canister towards you at tremendous velocity, coating you in it. The flames will cease immediately, the sensation of heat replaced by the most profound cold you’ll ever have experienced.

She’ll stand there with her jaw hanging open while her co-workers mill behind her, each of them independently calling 9-1-1. She won’t be able to walk towards you she’ll be so shocked by your appearance.

When she tells the story years later to your adopted children, she’ll let them know that she was actually heading out to ask you to buy something or leave in keeping with Walmart’s policy regarding people living in their cars. You’ll want to crack a joke, but your lips will still be sealed shut from the van fire at this point, so you’ll just sign one with your hideously deformed hands instead. It’ll be a hoot, and everyone there will laugh uncontrollably.

Congratulations on Accidentally Setting Your Van on Fire!

Congratulations on Convincing That Gopher to Let You Go!

2012-01-31T00:00:00.000-08:00

Fun fact: the character portrayed by Bill Murray in the film Caddyshack was actually based on a real live person, and that person is you. And your life didn’t end when the film did. You spent the last few decades working in various groundskeeping capacities, keeping it fresh and real in equal measure, and you’ve been quite good at your work. You’ve kept the greens of every place you’ve worked perfectly manicured, and decapitated, poisoned, burned and blown up hundreds of gophers along the way. It’s been a great ride, but there’s a downside.

Every time you move somewhere new a gopher or group of gophers tries to kill you. Most of the time it’s easy enough to deflect: gophers don’t have opposable thumbs and they’re not very bright. Most of them are only dimly aware that human beings aren’t all the same person. But given all the chemicals and shit in the world today sometimes a gopher of unusual size and intellect will emerge. Today, following your move to South Carolina where you hope to tend the most divine of greens, you’re going to meet one such gopher.

He’ll have appeared at your house last night with a baseball bat and some rope. He’ll have knocked you unconscious and dragged you away to his lair, where he’ll bind you and wait for you to wake up so that he can take his revenge on you.

You’ll awake about midway through today, while he’s out doing whatever giant gophers do, so you’ll have some time to take in your surroundings, test your bonds and think about escape. You’re a crafty and resourceful individual, but you won’t be able to think of a single way to escape with the materials you have on hand before the giant gopher returns, clutching some giant radishes that won’t stop glowing. He’ll notice you’re awake right away and put down his radishes, picking up a pair of shears in their place.

“GRAAAA!” he’ll scream at you, but you won’t be so easily cowed.

“Hey buddy,” you’ll drawl in your sweetly retarded voice. “Whaddya doin’?”

Your friendliness will make him pause (he isn’t very bright) and you’ll continue talking to him, trying to convince him that you just want to be his friend.

Over the course of an hour you’ll tell him all sorts of bullshit and he’ll fall for it completely. He’ll loosen your bonds and get ready to make some turnip stew for you, his new bestest buddy. At this point you’ll stab him in the base of the neck with the shears he was going to use to torture him and manipulate them until his head comes off. It’ll be messy and horribly, but when you’re done you’ll have a new giant gopher head to display on your front lawn as a warning to others.

Congratulations on Convincing That Gopher to Let You Go!

Congratulations on Rewriting the Gay Rulebook!

2012-01-30T00:00:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while the gays sit down and re-write their rulebook. The best known rewrite happened in the mid-ninties when they decided to make condoms a necessary accessory for nearly all sex in response to the AIDS pandemic, but other lesser known rewrites include “bros before hos,” the conceit that a failure to make eye contact “cancels out the gay” and some pretty stringent rules on how much cuddling is too much.

But the gay rulebook has never been re-written by anyone, even big old homos, who are publically strongly opposed to open homosexuality as a lifestyle before. But today it’s going to happen. Today you, Senator Rick Santorum, are going to write a whole new page in the gay rulebook and, shocker, it’s going to cause some controversy.

In this page you’ll strongly encourage all gays, especially Leonid Tamerlin, your young, firm lover and poolboy, to “keep their traps shut about what goes on in the shed” under punishment of being beaten with a rubber hose while an obese man watches and laughs. You’ll also put in some Gay Union stuff about improvements to health benefits and financial support for gays who have been particularly hard hit by the recession.

That rider will trigger a fervent discussion over a set of provisions which would have otherwise been dismissed immediately – closeted gays like you, Senator Rick Santorum, normally don’t get to set policy. Your failure to openly participate in gay culture really makes it seem like you don’t have the best interests of the social group at heart, and a lot of the reforms you propose do seem quite heavily geared towards using heavy handed tactics to silence a handful of poolboys.

But the provisions that would improve the quality of life for hundreds, if not thousands, of underprivileged gays in the community will make most people pause. They’ll wonder if giving a little ground is worth it if they can make such a progressive movement towards supporting the least fortunate members of the gay community. Conservative elements of the social movement who would normally block such a provision’s passing will be supportive of it, thanks to its poolboy related provisions.

There will be ten hours of long, hard debate and a little bit of sex on the floor of the gay assembly hall surrounding these provisions, and by the end large portions will be stripped out, but two things will remain: gay universal healthcare and Leonid keeping his perfectly formed lips pressed together in a fashion that prevents any sound, however delightful, from escaping his pert little mouth. It will mark the first time that a closeted homosexual has ever made an effective change to the gay rulebook, a dark day in Leonid’s life and a tremendous gain for the gay community who, closeted and open alike, enjoy going to hospitals just as much as anyone else.

Congratulations on Rewriting the Gay Rulebook!

Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Modern Warfare 3 in Perspective!

2012-01-29T00:00:00.000-08:00

So Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has a hilariously poor single player story that literally hits every note you don’t want to hit when you’re telling a story in a game. Arbitrary plot twists, nonsensical set pieces, poorly written dialogue delivered with self serious gravitas and nonsensical level design. Okay, whatever. People don’t buy Modern Warfare games for the story! They buy them because, since Call of Duty 2 in 2005, they’ve been the standard for competitive multiplayer play for first person shooters. So, with that in mind, how does Modern Warfare 3 stack up to its predecessors?

To put it briefly, quite well. The thumb for this game is decidedly pointing up, even from Modern Warfare 2. Everything about it is a little bit better than Modern Warfare 2, each retained element refined, each omitted mechanic wisely chosen. Modern Warfare 3 represents the latest refinement of the Call of Duty model, and, unlike the previous two installments, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Modern Warfare 2, it hits more often than it misses. In fact, more than that, it does so in a fashion that showcases both the focus of Modern Warfare as a multiplayer series and the problems at emerge from this focus.

In the past it’s relatively clear that balance was the central concern for Infinity Ward in their multiplayer. The first Modern Warfare game exemplifies this marvelously. Every gun has a unique personality, a unique set of pros and cons, and fits into the tapestry of the game quite well. There are no useless weapons, nor are there any weapons which eventually become obsolete. You could be successful in a match using only the starting weapons (in fact, quite a number of people would use the M-16 ad-infini and do embarrassingly well) given the right style of play and sharp enough reflexes. Even the most similar weapons cut different profiles and showcased different efficiencies. Weapons demanded different skill levels, different approaches, benefitted different styles of play, each in their own special way. The end result was a complicated game which could still be grasped and enjoyed by the most casual of players, while mastery remained reserved for the most dedicated few.

But the focus has noticeably drifted over the course of the last few titles. In fact, you might even contend that this trend began with World At War: the trend away from balance and towards refining the metagame, the feedback loop that drives sustained play in Call of Duty games. In Modern Warfare this loop was initially relatively isolated. You would rank up, earning a fancy badge, and you would unlock new weapons, perks and pieces of equipment along the way. Earning unlocks for each weapon was entirely reliant on kills you earned with said weapon, and earning new skins for the weapon revolved around getting headshots with it. Anyone could get that grenade launcher, but to unlock that red tiger camo? That was an act of love.

Modern Warfare 2 added on to this system tremendously. It replaced the simple “name tag and badge” badge system with a series of ever-evolving name tags and badges which were earned based on your ability to meet a set of isolated circumstances, varying from using a weapon a lot to jumping off a building to piloting a helicopter into a crane to killing someone with a dog. The lean, mean progression system suddenly acquired “pro” versions of each perk, which would unlock when said perk was used to accomplish its required goal. It also acquired additional killstreak rewards, unlocked through sustained play.

There were three killstreak rewards in the original Modern Warfare. Three rewards, set in stone. Modern Warfare 2 boosted that number to eleven.

Even so, many of those rewards were duplicates. I’m not entirely sure how an attack helicopter and an attack AC-130 were really that different. And while the concept of a Stealth Bomber was cool, it wasn’t functionally that different from a regular bomber. Nor was a normal helicopter sufficiently different from a Pavelow to really warrant the addition of a whole new accomplishment. Some of these new killstreak rewards were pretty cool, don’t get me wrong: care packages were a great concept, and changing the number and the mechanics of targetable explosives that you could use after a set number of kills was a brilliant way to tie some of the most enjoyable moments of the single player game into Modern Warfare’s superb multiplayer model.

But this killstreak creep had a lot of problems. The duplicates, for example, were a bit impractical from a design and balance perspective. And then there’s the way that they were structured, with an overwhelming number of late game options, one of which effectively ended the game, but a parsimonious selection of low kill killstreak rewards. The end result was a system that simply gave players who were already winning, in a community dominated by hardcore players who were already hostile to new or novice players, a new selection of tools with which to punish their fellow players.

This was echoed in the way that weapon and skill unlocks functioned. Weapons were no longer carefully balanced. There was no longer an excellent interplay between assault rifle, machine gun, submachine gun, shotgun and sniper rifle. Instead there was a coiterie of exploitative playstyles that completely broke the game when employed, changing the game from a thoughtful shooter to a zombie-horror movie or an exercise in frustration. Death streaks were added in order to alleviate this problem, and they did to some extent. But again, redundancy abounded: the careful balancing that the first Modern Warfare had done so artfully, so invisibly, was totally absent, replaced with a mishmash of features intended to counteract each other which clearly hadn’t been given enough time in the oven.

Then there was the issue of hacks. Hacking abounded in Modern Warfare 2, and since it occurred entirely on the side of a single, isolated, randomly selected client it wasn’t something that anyone could do anything about. The end result: a broken game which could be easily exploited so that players could leap in the air randomly, receive a prestige rank with each and every kill or run the game in fast motion. And basic issues, like the famed javelin bug, pervaded multiplayer. It was a mess, a big, sloppy, expensive mess.

Modern Warfare 3 entered into this stained battlefield for my affections, and appropriately sits between the original Modern Warfare, with its elegant, pared down model, and Modern Warfare 2’s bounty of features and means by which to advance. Everything that Modern Warfare 2 added is still present, but you might not recognize it. It’s cleaner, meaner and leaner. It’s a smarter game through and through, and while you could be forgiven for not noticing right away, it’s pretty clear, as time progresses, that they’ve done a lot to reduce the number of redundant killstreaks, remove game breaking elements such as teleporting ninjas and long-range shotguns that could kill in one hit and reload indefinitely, and generally turn out a more polished product.

And the Death Streaks, simplified and refined as you might expect, have also been complimented by a new set of killstreak options, including the Support killstreak, which provides unique rewards to players based not on their killcount for a given life, but rather their kills over the entire game with said class. It’s a fantastic way to allow players who don’t fit into the hardcore model of Modern Warfare to get into the game and feel like they’re contributing, and it doesn’t interrupt or override the existing killstreak model at all.

Even dedicated servers, the enemy of hacks and the cornerstone of online communities, have made their return, though the XBLA style matchmaking system remains the game’s default means of pairing you with other players. Still, the nod to the community is a nice touch, and it shows that Activision is a little worried about the Battlefield franchise stealing their bucks.

Really, the only issue I have is the total lack of weapon balance. It’s obvious that many of the clear balance issues from the previous game have simply been cut. But dual wielding submachine guns is suspiciously effective at all ranges, many of the assault rifles are replaced by weapons that are simply better versions of them and I’m almost positive that there’s a shotgun which is simply a slightly reskinned version of another shotgun in this game.

It’s unfortunate to see Infinity Ward broken up, but this is the price of doing business with Activision, it seems. And we, as consumers, will lack their acumen in fine tuning their products. Their work used to polish to a fine sheen, and it seems that this is no longer the case. Still, Raven and Sledgehammer have picked up the torch admirably. The progression system for both players in general and weapons has been fine tuned in a great way, and they’ve done a lot to make the game more customizable and friendly to new players. I’m enjoying it and playing it a lot, and while it lacks the raw polish of the first Modern Warfare, most games will. All things considered, it’s a step in the right direction and, for a studio’s first game, a fine multiplayer offering. Just steer clear of the campaign.

Next week: the story of me and my M-4.

Congratulations on Delivering!

2012-01-28T00:00:00.000-08:00

Today you’re going to open your pizza box and, instead of delicious pizza, thousands of rats will emerge.

“OH SHIT, RATS!” you’ll scream, but the customer will seem unperturbed.

“Oh good,” he’ll mumble at you, licking his lips. “This is even more rats than I expected.”

Congratulations on Delivering!

Congratulations on Teaching Joe Rogan How to Love!

2012-01-27T00:00:00.001-08:00

It’s well known that Joe Rogan, despite his rapidly advancing age, doesn’t know what love is. It’s not for lack of trying, he’s just been barking up bad trees, trees with legs that don’t quit that make sadness in his heart, constantly. And lately it’s been taking its toll on his work.

He’s been more of a dick in public and seems a lot less manly when he appears on re-runs of The Man Show and current episodes of Fear Factor (Joe Rogan exists simultaneously in all times, so however, he is now effects how he acts in all tapings, ever). So today you are going to enter the body of “romance therapist” and awkward person Doctor Drew Pinsky and, instead of giving the adequate, well intentioned, often totally wrong advice that Pinsky usually gives, you’re going to sit down with Joe Rogan and make balls-sloppy sex all over him.

You’ll start by caressing his butt. When Joe protests you’ll whisper in his ear “Don’t worry, I’m a doctor,” and that’ll shut him right up. Then you’ll put your hand on his before unbuttoning his pants and ramming your dick all up in that weird, smelly, tight, warm crevice we like to call “the magic button.”

You’ll be a little bit rough in there, and there’ll be a little tissue tearing after you thrust awkwardly a few times, so you’ll pull out right away and, to Rogan’s relief, slather some aloe-infused lubricant all over your dick and his gaping asshole. Then you’ll re-enter him and introduce Joe Rogan to a world of awkward, shameful delights over the course of the next sixteen minutes.

When you come inside him, he won’t protest or try to shrug you off. He’ll just let you hold him there for a few minutes, running your fingers over his nipples, letting your tongue linger inside his ear. As he sighs and relaxes in your arms he’ll feel, for the first time, complete.

Then you’ll phase out of Doctor Drew’s body and back into Tom Green’s body, where you’ll be miserable again. Doctor Drew will be confused and revolted by what he’s done and Joe Rogan will know, for the first time in his life, that he can feel complete if he just gives in to the moment as it occurs around him. He’ll also know he likes buttsex with people he trusts, something every human being could do to learn.

Congratulations on Teaching Joe Rogan How to Love!

Congratulations on Embodying a New Adage!

2012-01-26T00:00:00.000-08:00

You’re a tortoise. That means that, usually, you’re just kind of generally unemployed, but today it also means that you’re going to become the centerpiece for a new adage. Because today you’re going to engage in a footrace with a speed freak.

“C’MON LET’S DO THIS!” he’ll shout at you as you saunter up to the starting line.

You’ll lick your lips lazily as he twitches uncontrollably, occasionally surging forward before trotting back to his starting position to make up for his false start.

When the race does finally begin the race-judge-man will fire his pistol into the air to signal its start and the speed-freak will drop the ground, clutching his chest. His heart will have exploded.

You’ll win the race on a technicality and go home to fuck your tortoise wife. Slowly.

Awwww yeaahhh.

Congratulations on Embodying a New Adage!

Congratulations on Getting Your Modern Art Installation Approved!

2012-01-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

Modern art is a tough business to crack. Sometimes people do it through raw creative force or sheer willpower, but you know that those people are actually tremendous suckers. You’re going to blow all of them out of the water today because you know you’re a freak of nature and more than anything else, modern art patrons really just want to see freaks on display.

So today you’re going to propose to the gallery you spend a lot of time in in Chelsea that they give you an installation. It’s going to be, in your words, “All about the pain of being a man in modern society, the pain you project and the pain you receive, you know?” But really, it’s just going to be an exhibit where you hang a giant weight from your penis for several hours while you’re surrounded by a combination of pictures of your penis without a weight around it, really beaten up vaginas from around the world and botched circumcisions that organizations attempting to make people hate Jews like to pin up around the city.

The end result will be a work of “art” that showcases less a conceit of how the world functions or a piece of insight on how humanity as a whole exists and more pinpoints just how much genital punishment you can both take and how much genital mutilation you can tolerate in your life. It’ll fall just short of “Somalia” and well above “the amount that normal people can enjoy.”

In the weeks to come you’ll see reviews of your “showcase of pain” that uphold you as the Norman Rockwell of America’s disdain for sex – one critic will go so far as to call you “the Norman Wreckwell of dicks.” But you’ll know in your heart of hearts that this entire thing was accidental: that really all you wanted was rent money and attention and to have a bunch of strangers look at your penis with weights attached to a fishhook that has been skewered through it. Really, that’s all you ever wanted, though you’re rarely comfortable saying as much.

Congratulations on Getting Your Modern Art Installation Approved!

Congratulations on Being Convinced to Live By That Gargloye!

2012-01-24T00:00:00.000-08:00

Today you’re going to be on the top of a building, looking down at the city below. You’ll be contemplating ending your life, and who could blame you.

It’s been a rough couple of months. First your food cart business “Shit on Your Sandwich,” where you’d put almost anything on a sandwich for anyone who showed up, failed for some completely inscrutable reason. Then your girlfriend left after you asked her if she “wanted a threesome” for her birthday (you figured she’d like a guy-guy experience since she often asked to watch double-penetration themed porn during sex) and your mom stopped taking your calls following your advice to “discuss dad’s cheating with him” after she complained for the umpteenth time about him dicking around behind her back (that one’s not your fault).

So today when you go up to the roof of your building to smoke you’re going to look over the side and wonder what the world might be like without you. And you’ll happen to do so while you’re next to the only psychic gargoyle in Brooklyn (most of them live in the Bronx). And as you ponder your life he’ll start to talk.

“Yyyyyyyoooooouuuuuu shhhhhhhoooooooulllllld dooooooo iiiiiiiit,” he’ll intone in a voice that reverberates through your body.

“What?!” you’ll shout back, astounded at the fact that a gargoyle is talking to you.

“Kiiiiiiiiiiiilllllllllll yyyyyooooooourrrrrssssselllllffff,” he’ll mumble.

“How did you know?” you’ll ask, fascinated by him now, no longer fantasizing about the end of your own life.

“Goooooooodaaaaaaaaaamniiiiiit,” he’ll moan. “Iiiiiiit’ssssss oooooobviiiiiiousssssss.” The tone of his voice will shift downward, and you’ll realize almost immediately that he just wanted to see your body splattered on the street below – that would make his day a lot better. His telepathy will work both ways, and he’ll know that you’re actually kind of an okay dude, aside from the fact that you’re a bit of an idiot, and that the world is better with you in it.

“Thanks, I guess,” you’ll tell him, and then you’ll throw your cigarette into the street below and walk back inside.

He’ll call after you:

“Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo…”

But you won’t pay it any heed. You’ll head back downstairs to call your mom and let her know you care on her voicemail, because it’s important that she knows she can always talk to you if she has to. Then you’ll consider the best way to get back in touch with your girlfriend, because you’re pretty sure she’ll get VD if she tries to move on from you.

Congratulations on Being Convinced to Live By That Gargoyle!

Congratulations on Offending Everyone at Ground Zero!

2012-01-23T00:00:00.000-08:00

Everyone loves to laugh, and people love to reference 9-1-1. So when you show up at Ground Zero to perform your award aware-of one man show, “Forgetful Freddy’s Day About The Globe,” you won’t think that anything could possibly go wrong.

You’ll begin your show, as you always do: by donning a diaper made out of the American flag and pooping your pants.

“I FORGOT!” you’ll shout at the crowd assembled to pay their respects in a baby voice. You’ll frown when they respond not by laughing hysterically but by grimacing and looking away from you, mostly at their shoes.

You won’t be discouraged, though. You’ll know that if you want to make it big you’ll have to work past such petty disagreements. So you’ll load a t-shirt gun with a photo-copy of the Constitution wrapped around your own poop and shoot it into the crowd.

“I FORGOT!” you’ll shout at them again. This time you’ll get the attention of some police who, ill at ease at the best of times, will stare awkwardly at you, deciding whether or not they should act or just get a bagel. They’ll stand there, transfixed, as you prepare for the next part of your act.

This will involve taking off your shit-filled American flag diaper while the crowd, now even more horrified, stares at you. You’ll then carefully clean your rectum and genitals with an American flag towel before winking at the crowd and laughing.

“C’mon, guys,” you’ll say douchily. “Work with me here.”

You’ll shake your head and walk towards them, hefting the shit-filled diaper in one hand while you keep your towel closed with the other.

“Shouldn’t you be able to remind me of something here? Or did you all forget too?”

You’ll laugh at your own joke as you prepare to heft your diaper towards the site of Freedom Tower in an attempt to express your feelings about the influence of capitalism on American nationalism and the direction our country has been in, but none of the people assembled at Ground Zero will recognize the validity of your self-expression. Instead the biggest one of them, a giant of a man named Hank from Missouri, will burst forward from the crowd and tackle you, covering himself and you with the feces from your diaper.

“I guess not!” you’ll cackle at him as the police officers rush towards you, bagels in hand, trying to figure out what, exactly, they’ll have to arrest you for.

Congratulations on Offending Everyone at Ground Zero!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Star Wars: The Old Republic: After Chapter One!

2012-01-22T00:00:00.000-08:00

I’ve spent almost a month playing Star Wars: The Old Republic now, and it’s been a fascinating journey. There have been ups and downs, new companions I love and new companions I hate but still want to love oh so very badly. The game has been unfolding in a way that previous MMOs have never really been able to, in a fashion that makes me regret each piece of content that I miss through careless action or misstep.

This is something that I never felt in WoW, where I skipped entire sections of the game that were just the wrong level for me and never gave a shit. In SWTOR, when I skip a portion of an area I feel like I’m missing out on the bigger story at work there, and even when I’m not a fan of those areas (and there are some planets that feel like a chore, I’ll be honest) I feel like I’ve lost something by leaving it before finishing everything.

Now, the gear and money I receive for this completionist attitude, previously the distinction that MMOs like WoW would use as an incentive, really isn’t that great when you come right down to it. SWTOR uses an upgrade system to actually make getting fresh drops a lot less significant than other MMOs, and I’ve found myself selecting which piece of equipment I want to wear based on appearance over stats because I know that I’ll be able to spend a handful of commendations to get some armor upgrades that will let me get the whole affair up to snuff. And the experience boost, by the time I’m done with all the quests on a given planet, is usually pretty minimal by the end of my time there. Quest rewards scale with level, and I’m usually well above the level range for a given world by the time I’m done there. So these conventional incentives for retaining my attention as a player aren’t at work – what is?

Well, if you remember the previous tirades I’ve issued about SWTOR you’ll likely be unsurprised, since the thing that’s keeping me around is also the thing I’ve been lionizing for the last few weeks: SWTOR’s heaping injection of story into each and every aspect of its content.

Some of the stories backing its missions are a bit meh – one of the earliest planets involved a tale of political intrigue that made fuck-all sense and put me right to sleep. But for the most part, the storylines that run through SWTOR make great worlds even better and sustain me through environments I’d be miserable in otherwise. A perfect example: I’m currently playing through Taris, the first world of “Chapter Two” of the SWTOR experience. While on Taris I’ve been enjoying the story more than almost anywhere else: I’ve been engaged in a rivalry with another Sith, who seems to fuck up everything she touches, I’ve been tracking down complicated and interesting enemies who are in equal turn crazy assholes and noble antagonists and I’ve had some great comedic beats while helping incredibly earnest Imperial agents spread zombie toxin throughout the planet’s water supply. And I’ve been doing all of this in a planet that is, frankly, uglier than any planet I’ve ever seen before.

The encounters themselves on Taris seem poorly designed – I’ll often find myself fighting wandering elite enemies along with dozens of trash mobs because of poor timing, and I’ll summarily die and spend a bundle of my hard earned cash repairing my gear, not because I made a bad decision but because a giant golden frilled lizard decided to wander up at that moment. I’ve been fighting re-skins of the same enemies again and again and, following an enjoyable stint where I was fighting and killing Republic troops and Jedi early on in the world, most of those enemies have been identical zombie-like creatures called rakghouls who can only be differentiated by their proper names (such as Greg) and slight variations in color between them.

But the class-story missions bring me back, showcasing the sort of epic war and the balance between nobility and honor and self-serving skullduggery that makes playing an Imperial character interesting. There are still stretches between these missions that I find pretty unenjoyable, stretches that focus on me churning through dozens of samey enemies until I’m standing atop a pile of their bodies next to a giant toxic pit. It feels (not incidentally) like one of the starting levels of Knights of the Old Republic, the first true Star Wars RPG, and it reminds me of why I hated playing through Taris then as well.

What’s really remarkable, then, is that I’m still hunting down all of the quests on Taris, unlocking each nugget of story, doing my all to avoid missing out on a portion of the game that I might enjoy. And even when I’m frustrated by the enemies I have to churn my way through or the map design of the area that I’m traversing, I still persevere because I actually want to know how this story sorts out. I’m interested in how the Sith Warrior storyline will progress into Chapter Two. Right now it doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as exciting as the search for Jaesa Willsaam, but I have faith that that will change, and even so the wholesale slaughter of the war-making body of the Republic offers some pretty promising stakes.

I have a feeling that the whole thing will pick up even more-so once I leave Taris. But even while I’m not a fan of my surroundings, I do enjoy savoring the plot and the pace as much as I can – even previous worlds that were frustrating, in retrospect, simply served to accent more enjoyable portions of the game. Frustrated as I might be by how ugly Taris is and how little I enjoy fighting its denizens I’m still hooked, and I’m all the more excited for the worlds to come. It’s tough to be a kid who grew up with Star Wars and not be excited at the prospect of fighting wampas on Hoth.

And therein lies the crux of SWTOR’s appeal. It’s not just that it allows you to be a part of the Star Wars universe: it’s that it allows you to experience the sort of epic story that fits so well into that universe. It’s all good and well to give people blasters and lightsabers and ask them to play. It’s an entirely different matter to guide people through an epic storyline that leans on these set pieces, warts and all, as well as Bioware does. And I can’t wait to see how it pans out, how the end-game will unveil and how my next playthrough will unwind as I do it all again.

Congratulations on Killing Your Potential Stepdads!

2012-01-21T00:00:00.002-08:00

Your name is Telly, which is short for Telemachus. We’d like to claim that it’s just a crazy coincidence that your dad is a drifter and that your mom is named Penelope, but that’s not true. The fact is that you’re actually part of something bigger than yourself, and that tomorrow you’re going to have no choice but to get into the big old clock tower in your town’s square with a high powered rifle, chamber up seven rounds and wait until the bidding begins on your mom at today’s bachelorette auction.

It’ll be a silent auction, so the sound of the first shot will ring out true and clear through the county fair. The man who was bidding on your mother will drop to the ground immediately. Unfortunately for the townspeople, most of them won’t be too bright, so another man will immediately rise, assuming that the previous courter just lost his nerve and fainted, and raise his auction number.

The second bullet will take him just below the base of his skull, ripping through his throat and sending him to the ground gasping for air. A third and a fourth suitor will rise and fall before people start to catch on, relating the sound of the rifle firing to the sudden collapse of the men who want to rail your mom. By then, however, you’ll have noticed three additional men who seemed like they were sort of interested in your mom.

You’ll put down two of them before they have a chance to flee the town’s square. The third will be a squirrely bastard, but you’ll catch him as he dives into his car, putting one through his front windshield and his forehead, ending the various attempts on your mother’s honor that might’ve challenged your father’s rightful claim when he returns in a few days.

You’ll spend the next two days in a standoff with police, occasionally firing at them to keep them from advancing as you sit in that clock tower alone. Some will call you mad, but you’ll know in your heart of hearts that what you’re doing is right, and when your pappy shows up with flowers and a condom for your ma and helps tell off the police so you can all get drunk together you’ll know that you done right by killing all those men.

Congratulations on Killing Your Potential Stepdads!

Congratulations on Explaining Everything to the Judge!

2012-01-20T00:00:00.000-08:00

Following your victory at Hammer Tag yesterday you’re going to begin the traditional “assault hearing following victory at Hammer Tag” portion of the game. This process was kicked off yesterday when your neighbors called in a noise complaint and found you standing in your backyard holding a hammer next to your dad, who was holding a gun, above your brother, who was bleeding profusely from the head. The officer really get anything you said about “Hammer Tag” and didn’t seem to care when you showed him your liability waivers, so you ended up in temporary holding pending a hearing to determine the scope of wrongdoing and whether or not your brother wants to press charges.

The trial will begin sharply at 10:15 in the AM, an ungodly hour for any god-fearing individual. It will begin with the judge reading off a list of the charges, which consist mostly of “talking about Hammer Tag” and “beating your brother with a hammer.” He’ll then open the floor to evidence. Your dad will bring the waivers that you and your brother signed to the floor and the judge will look at them. He’ll then ask your brother to come to the stand.

He’ll acquiesce, head wrapped in a bandage still stained with his own blood. After a barrage of question, which the headwound will make answering problematic, he’ll black out briefly before being rushed out of the courtroom to receive medical attention. The judge will then review the documents, pinch the bridge of his nose, look at you and ask one final question.

“Why?” he’ll ask in a tired, reedy voice.

You’ll shrug. “It’s the best,” you’ll say. “Plus FREEDOM!”

The judge will shake his head and stamp your form. Then he’ll slide a copy to you and ask you to leave his courtroom. You’ll emerge into the fresh air and inhale deeply. It will, indeed, taste like freedom. You’ll squeeze your pappy’s hand and head off to the hospital, where you’ll meet your brother for the awkward, final chapter of Hammer Tag: the “Holding Your Injured Brother’s Hand While He Tries to Remember How to Write Finale of Hammer Tag: Sponsored by Doritos.”

Congratulations on Explaining Everything to the Judge!

Congratulations on Winning at Hammer Tag!

2012-01-19T00:00:00.000-08:00

To the uninitiated, Hammer Tag is the latest sport to sweep the nation. It consists of two or more people chasing each other around with hammers and attempting to strike one another in the head with said hammers, shouting “TAG!” upon each successful hit in order to score a point. Ten points are awarded for a successful knockout, and all points are nullified if an individual is killed during play. Play occurs over six seven and a half minute rounds.

That’s for people who don’t know about Hammer Tag already, people not you. You already know all about this spectacular sport. So you’re going to play Hammer Tag tomorrow with your brother and you’re totally going to kick ass at it.

It’ll begin as it always does, with the traditional signing of the Hammer Tag liability waivers. With the paperwork out of the way the two of you will wait for the referee (your dad holding a gun) to fire the starting shot, signifying the beginning of Hammer Tag.

You’ll charge at your brother and give him a pair of quick taps on the skull, which will make him drop to the ground in a heap.

“Urrgh,” he’ll mumble as he tries to rise to his feet. You’ll give him one last tap for good measure before your dad fires the finishing shot, indicating that a technical knock-out has occurred.

“Winner!” he’ll shout as he grabs your hand and raises it above his head, beaming with pride as your brother, now losing blood from a headwound, rocks back and forth on the ground wondering where he is.

Congratulations on Winning at Hammer Tag!

Congratulations on Escaping Your Failing Company!

2012-01-18T00:00:00.000-08:00

After your CEO parachuted dramatically out of your offices yesterday you knew what was coming. Integrated Dynamic Business Life Solutions was going to collapse. And, having seen many other companies torn apart after their services were outsourced, you knew how it was going to go. You didn’t want that for yourself, so this morning, after you wake up from your night of binge drinking underneath the boardroom table where so many companies have had their futures broken, you’re going to enact your escape plan.

The corporate death squads will already be wandering from cubicle to cubicle, shooting staff in the chest and head and then leaving them for dead, but since they’re corporate death squads they’re not very well run and generally the people in them aren’t the brightest, so you’ll just lay there perfectly still until they pass.

Then, come nightfall, you’ll steal as many laptops as you can carry from the ruins of the office, reaching over corpses to get them. Then you’ll creep out the front door and begin the process you swore you’d enact should the company ever fall: tracking down and killing the former CEO with your bare hands.

Step one will involve selling all those corporate laptops to generate capital, so make sure none of them have password protection enable still and then get started! We’ll follow up with you later to let you know how the manhunt is going.

Congratulations on Escaping Your Failing Company!

Congratulations on Driving Your Own Company into the Ground!

2012-01-17T00:00:00.000-08:00

You came up with a great idea for a company about four years ago. You’d figure out how to outsource various businesses to India by generating effective models for those businesses and then moving them to India wholesale through American companies that essentially manage outsourcing to Indian outsourcing companies.

It might be shocking to you that this isn’t actually a sustainable business model, but turns out it’s not. Turns out that when you basically just outsource people for a living you generate an infrastructure that eventually allows your employers to outsource your own job. So today, following your successful outsourcing of a customer service system for a mid-sized software company to India through a shell company in the Midwest, you’re going to go back to your office and treat yourself to a good job scotch.

About halfway through it, you’re going to get a call on your land line. It’ll be from the head of the company that hires your company to outsource shit to other companies. He’ll sound kinda sad.

“Bill,” he’ll say. “It’s time.”

You’ll know what he means immediately. You’ll know that he’s met an amoral Indian person who is also a compulsive liar with a sociopath’s mentality but not the courage to murder who expresses his desire to undo others by outsourcing work to other countries so that he can harm his fellow man without risking direct conflict.

”I knew this day would come,” you’ll mumble into the phone. Then you’ll put the receiver down while your boss continues talking. You’ll ride up the elevator to the roof, where you’ll grab the parachute you stashed up there ages ago. Then you’ll dial the number you marked as “END” in your cell phone and leap off the side of the building with your parachute.

The cell call will go to another phone in the basement of your building, which will trigger a set of explosive charges that you imbedded into the underground parking structure of your building ages ago when you first moved here.

As you descend gracefully from the building, winding along fifth avenue to the honks of cars below, you’ll smile at your foresight. But as the ground races up towards you you’ll wonder for a moment at just what the future holds for you, at what you can do now that the life you’ve built for yourself, a life constructed on other’s misfortune, has fallen apart.

When your feet hit the ground, agony will shoot up your legs. You won’t know how to land properly, and you’ll lock your knees and walk as you hit the ground, causing stress fractures to emerge in your calves. The pain will momentarily distract you from the void of your life, which will be nice for the time being.

Congratulations on Driving Your Own Company Into the Ground!

Congratulations on Making Love to That Horse!

2012-01-16T00:00:00.000-08:00

War Horse was a hit. It’s pretty clear to everyone involved and the critical apparatus that there’s never been a better time to be a horse in the industry since that movie came out. Seabiscuit is now a name dimly remembered. Everyone’s scrambling to get the horse that played War Horse (lovingly referred to as “Horsie” by agents everywhere) attached to their picture.

They’re plying him with carrots, oats, horse blankets and, of course, expensive prostitutes.

You’re one of these prostitutes. You’ve always had a thing for horses thanks to the absence of a strong father figure in your life when you were growing up. Unlike all the other hookers that get thrown at Horsie you’re actually going to be accepted into his stable and, instead of being stamped to death, you’ll make sweet, sweet horse love with him.

What follows will be an explosion of media, scandal and a story of true love.

“Can horses marry?!” slower reporters will ask, while other, smarter reporters cover other stories in newspapers.

When the dust settles the media coverage, months from now, will ruin any chance the two of you had at a real relationship, which is a shame because you’ll get along famously. But Horsie’s career will be propelled by his tale of love lost, crisis and redemption and you’ll be well taken care of for the years to come thanks to your role in the entire thing. Some other woman will write a book with your name on it and you’ll occasionally go on talk shows to talk about love and just how much punishment vaginas can really take.

But the real victory here will be the love you two will share, however briefly, following your sexcapade. Facilitated by Horsie’s success, sustained by your big heart and durable vagina and your mutual distaste for language and eye contact during sex, it’ll be brief but wonderful, the best that either of you will ever have throughout your entire lives.

Enjoy it while it lasts and try not to cry in the shower in the years to come.

Congratulations on Making Love to That Horse!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Unfortunate Return of Modern Warfare's Storyline!

2012-01-15T00:00:00.000-08:00

I absolutely loved the first Modern Warfare. It’s one of those games that resonated with me in a tremendous way. It was problematic, sure, and the potency of its single player campaign was easily overshadowed by its spectacular multiplayer, but my god. What a single player campaign! Pitch perfect, well paced, with some new, evocative themes that perfectly fit action movie topos to video game logic. The famed Chernobyl sniper level, with its mix of melancholy, tension and pulse pounding action, was almost perfect in every way. The nuclear explosion and the final car chase (following the conclusion of the most dramatic set piece, mind you!) were fantastic as well: moments that reminded you of your character’s fragility and made you realize that danger could strike and people could die even when the world wasn’t at stake.

I’d like to say that Infinity Ward has been resting on their laurels, just treading the same ground again and again, but that’s not quite accurate for two reasons. The first is, of course, that Infinity Ward is no longer making Modern Warfare games following the catastrophic layoffs that Activision implemented. The games are now being made by Sledgehammer Games, famous for making absolutely nothing, and Raven Software, famous for making slightly shittier versions of other games and Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. The second is that the set pieces in Modern Warfare 3’s single player campaign don’t just tread the same ground that Modern Warfare tread far more aptly, they stumble over it clumsily, always trading logic and intellect for a bigger explosion.

It’s as if Michael Bay made a video game and infused it with all of his unintended absurdity and acerbity. The finished product is a clumsy, awkward treatment of a type of game I really used to love, levels and pacing that ape an earlier game but lack the intellect or the controlled movement that earned the twists and turns that earlier iterations in the Call of Duty franchise used to such tremendous effect. Modern Warfare 2 already lost some of the franchise’s glamour, but it did manage to do a few things right. Modern Warfare 3 didn’t even pull that off. Instead it nakedly utilized all of the set pieces that Modern Warfare used to greater effect without pacing them correctly or inserting them with any sort of meaning or logic in the game itself.

I’m about to get into specifics, just so readers know. Spoilers to follow.

My personal favorite was a moment wherein Yuri, a character Tom Chick astutely described as “the Modern Warfare equivalent of Woody Allen’s Zelig,” and Soap, the affable be-mohawked protagonist from the first two games, are in a tower together. You’re playing Yuri this time, instead of Soap. That’s the only new thing about Modern Warfare 3 I noticed, by the way. The two of them are getting ready to snipe someone, presumably the big-bad for this game, from a clock tower. This, of course, follows a journey through a war-torn eastern European city where people are dumping bodies into rivers left and right where you’re encouraged to use stealth to avoid conflicts and quickly resolve the conflicts you’re forced into. That part should sound quite familiar to anyone who played the first Modern Warfare.

The two of you are sitting in the tower until you’re prompted to pick up your rifle and look down the scope. You’ve been up there for fourteen hours, mind you, purportedly monitoring the building across the street and cleaning your rifles or whatever. After a sniping session which is striking similar to, while a great deal less difficult or interesting than, the climactic assassination attempt that capped off the first Chernobyl’s storyline, something goes wrong. The plan, which involves one character leaping into a board room to await the arrival of the big-bad of Modern Warfare 3 just so he can look cool while he’s killing him, should’ve been foolproof! But apparently a minor character from the first Modern Warfare game (I consider it a fanboy feather in my hat that I immediately knew who Kamarov was, though I’m not sure I’m proud of said feather) tied to an office chair and covered in explosives has replaced the big-bad! After a brief bit of expository dialogue, the big-bad mentions my name and calls me his friend, which, of course, then triggers a bout of distrust and some explosives which, conveniently, were timed to go off just after he said that. You and Soap then leap out of the building on to some conveniently placed plot device – I mean scaffolding. The scaffolding breaks your fall but Soap, who has not only previously fallen great distances but has also been hit by cars, shot, stabbed in the chest and recovered just fine in the past, is done in by his fall. He then mentions that the big-bad mentioned your name on an open radio channel to Price, the badass character from the previous Modern Warfare games, before dying on a table because, well, it’s time for him to die dramatically. Price, armed with this knowledge, then knocks you down a staircase after you’re forced to open another plot device – I mean door – and you explain, through a series of first person cutscenes, why you don’t like the person who mentioned your name very much.

There’s a lot wrong with this whole setup. Right off the bat, the logic is problematic with almost every aspect of the scene. Although I will say that so much troublesome logic abounds in Modern Warfare 3 that you could hardly be blamed for missing it here if you missed it earlier. But it should seem odd to you that two highly trained military operatives who have spent half a day casing a target missed a bunch of explosives planted around them, theoretically at some much, much earlier date. It should also seem a bit out of place that two men you’ve spent the last few days murdering hundreds of people with, men you’ve at times carried to safety, men you’ve killed and bled with, would react so violently when the big-bad mentions your name in passing.

But this is just symptomatic of a larger problem within Modern Warfare 3, wherein explosions are often used to replace plot points. In fact, I spent a lot of my time while playing Modern Warfare 3 thinking of tag-lines that could’ve been applied to the game. I came up with:

Modern Warfare 3: LOUD NOISES!

Modern Warfare 3: OH SHIIIII-!

Modern Warfare 3: I GUESS WE’RE GONNA HAVE TO JUUUUMP!

Modern Warfare 3: Ear Raper

Modern Warfare 3: Revenge of the Explosions

Modern Warfare 3: OOPS! YOU FELL DOWN! THAT MUST MEAN THE PACE OF THE LEVEL IS CHANGING!

Modern Warfare 3: ARE WE DONE YET?

I’m not proud of most of them (though I think Ear Raper is a goodie and LOUD NOISES is very accurate) but the staccato explosions that substitute for plot have kind of pressed me into a place where I have to view the game in these terms to get any sort of enjoyment out of it. I have to look at it as a work of unconscious parody of what Activision sees as what its players want in order to find something that justifies the time and money I’ve invested in Modern Warfare 3. This isn’t how the series was, but it seems to be the direction it’s gone in of late.

And the end result is, as I mentioned earlier, the Michael Bay-ification of video games. There’s a lot of homosociality that borders on closeted homosexuality, a lot of explosions, and a lot of choices and developments in the story that don’t make a lot of sense. I could perhaps deal with all of these in a game which strives to earn these experiences, but Modern Warfare 3 launches into them without any real lead up. Characters die and we’re supposed to feel bad not because we’ve been encouraged to empathize with these characters, but because the script calls for us to feel bad. In one level, where you’re called on to protect the Russian president, I immediately knew upon starting the level that I would die by the end of it – I just had that feeling. Sure enough, when I came to the end of the map I was shot in the chest by the big-bad in a scene that could’ve been ripped straight from Modern Warfare 2.

And this dovetails nicely into another major gripe I had. It’s not enough that Modern Warfare 3 wants players to attach themselves to undeveloped, personality-less characters. It’s not enough that it wants to just do random shit and blow up monuments and expect us to be impressed by the sheer spectacle of what they managed to do with a graphics engine (which no one who’s played Red Faction: Guerilla would find impressive, by the by). Modern Warfare 3 has to tell us a story while haphazardly ripping off and inserting parts of other Modern Warfare games into its structure. And bear in mind, there have only been two, so this ground is both pretty familiar, and already pretty limited. The aforementioned level wherein a Russian secret service agent dies, for example, begins with a re-tread of the first Modern Warfare’s bonus level, a firefight through a plane to rescue a VIP. The map is almost identical to the original level, but is played in reverse this time for good measure. Then it dovetails into a moment where you’re killed while attempting to board a vehicle by the big-bad, a scene which happened at almost the same point in time in Modern Warfare 2. Hell, the same character even kills you in both games.

This comes up again and again. The sniper missions are especially bad – you’re asked to do synchronized sniping with your buddies in some new locations, but many of these new locations seem quite familiar, and bring back some very, very, very familiar gameplay mechanics. And then there are the climactic levels which take place in a cave/castle, reminiscent of the fortress built into a mountain that capped off Modern Warfare 2. Even the missions in Sierra Leone Somalia, included to showcase the horribly relevant issue of genocide in Africa, echo the design and mentality of the Brazil and “generic Middle Eastern” missions of previous Modern Warfare games.

It’s uniquely frustrating to see a series with such potential ridden into the ground in such a fashion. Modern Warfare was a game that broke all the rules of a first person shooter. It showcased amoral protagonists who did awful things and let civilians die if it meant completing the mission. It was a game that made you feel your character’s mortality at every turn and used death as a set piece sparingly, in such a manner that it did not elicit an emotional response so much as a thematic note, a rising pitch that resounded through the game and colored all the actions that came afterwards. Modern Warfare 2 undid much of my love for the series with its single player, and Modern Warfare 3 has carried this tradition of diminishing returns to a new extreme.

Of course, I’m harping on something largely insignificant here. Steam isn’t showcasing Community Achievements for Modern Warfare 3 right now, but I wouldn’t be shocked if many players didn’t even bother booting up the single player campaign at all. And really, why should they? Modern Warfare games have spectacular multiplayer. I expect that I’ll like Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer a little less than Modern Warfare’s, which I liked quite a bit, more than I like most people. These games have made multiplayer gameplay a feedback loop of challenges and positive reinforcement and they’ve found interesting new ways to iterate on the idea of reinforcing and encouraging improved performance even as they also sometimes muddy the formula with their efforts. I’m excited to see how Modern Warfare 3 will shake down in that respect. But I cannot help but harp on such egregiously poor storytelling in a game where the story was once a spectacular element, which could sit comfortably alongside titans the like of Bioshock. I wish I had the clarity of vision to simply see Modern Warfare 3 as I wish to: a multiplayer affair, bereft of any sloppy single player story trappings, but the single player game is so pervasive, so insistently incompetent, that I cannot do so. Alas, for the ability to purchase a copy of Modern Warfare 3 which excised these elements completely.

Congratulations on Captaining That Ship Filled With Human Cargo!

2012-01-14T00:00:00.000-08:00

Human trafficking isn't for everyone. A lot of people get into it because they're big old rapists, and a lot of other people get into it because they're friends with big old rapists but just don't know how to say no. You got into it because your daddy left you when you were just a boy and you didn't know no other way. Warn't your fault that folk couldn't understand a boy from the Balkans wanting to be something more, and it certainly warn't your fault that the only job you could find out of Balkan college happened to be running guns with mercenaries.

From there it was just a quick skip and a hop to human trafficking.

At first you just did it in trucks and vans, bringing a handful of refugees across the border at a time. They were almost always women, young, pretty women. You never asked where they were coming from or where they were going. Occasionally you'd move someone unusual through, a man or an elderly person. Sometimes you'd move children through: you'd always ask about them. A man has to have some principles.

After a few years of doing that, though, it just got old. So you decided to move on to bigger, better things. You saved up your pennies or rubles or whatever they use for money in that shithole you call a country and you bought a boat.

It wasn't a big boat - it was a sixty foot fishing boat, retrofitted to function as a small cargo ship. You decided to fill it up with people and set sail.

Your maiden voyage is going to be tonight (cops take the weekend off in your country, which makes your job super easy) and it's going to go swimmingly. No one is going to die or make trouble, which means you'll get all the money you thought you were going to get for the run: enough to pay for the ship and still have plenty to divvy up among your crew.

Also, you'll have customers who aren't just pervy old men trafficking in women and mobsters trying to get their family members out of the way of the law after committing murder or whatever. You'll have mostly moved families attempting to avoid one of your many festive genocides out of the country. And you'll have moved them into Turkey, a country with even looser borders than your own, and far fewer genocides of late.

So you'll feel good about being you, and you'll have launched a lucrative business venture that makes you, more or less, your own boss.

Congratulations on Captaining That Ship Filled With Human Cargo!

Congratulations on Having That Sixth Digit Removed From Your Left Hand!

2012-01-12T00:00:00.002-08:00

Bitches always be staring and men always be asking for hand jobs and lately it’s all gotten a little bit much for a prospective senator from upstate New York to be managing, so today you’re going to go ahead and do what you’ve always wanted to get done: you’re going to get a doctor to take some acid and fry the living shit out of your left hand until that extra finger you’ve always had is nothing more than a giant, unsightly scar sitting at the edge of your hand.

You’ll roll up to the office with your aides flanking you, West Wing style – you always have to look good for the cameras – and then remove your illustrious, custom made gloves, exposing your exquisitely formed extra digit.

“Oh my,” the doctor will say, shaking his head at the raw perfection that is your freakishness.

You won’t pay him any mind, though. You’ll hop up on his exam table, kick off your shoes and wink at him.

“Let’s do this,” you’ll say, putting on your shades so he won’t see you cry.

He will hear you cry, however. They’ll be muffled and drawn out, but the sobs, oh god the sobs, will rack your chest as you lay there, feeling that doctor sear off your unique little digit through a protracted, corrosive campaign. It’ll take him nearly four hours from start to finish, and he’ll have to anesthetize the region six times. You won’t want to think about what the whole affair would feel like without anesthesia – the thought alone would make you break composure, and then you’d have to have the doctor killed for seeing you totally lose it, which isn’t great for you financially right now.

When all’s said and done you’ll remove your sunglasses, wipe the streaks of eye shadow from your eyes and hop off the table to examine your hand. Where once a perfect sixth finger lay there will be nothing more than a long black splotch of skin.

“That’ll turn into really weird grainy skin after a few days,” the doctor will tell you around the cigarette that he’ll have immediately popped into his mouth after finishing your operation. “But you can wear normal gloves right away.”

He won’t tell you about infection or heavy lifting – he knows you won’t have time to change your life to deal with that kind of bullshit. Instead he’ll write you a prescription for Percocet and slap you on the ass on your way out the door.

“Look out world!” he’ll shout after you.

Outside of his office you’ll examine your hand, hideously deformed to your eye now, and smile. Now you’ll be able to campaign without waiting for something called “Sixth Digit-Gate” to come up. Next stop: a seat in the state senate. Several stops later: The White House!

Congratulations on Having That Sixth Digit Removed From Your Left Hand!

Congratulations Sexual Vasco de Gama!

2012-01-12T00:00:00.001-08:00

Everyone’s always talking about sexual exploration like it’s some sort of big deal. Whatever, most of it’s already been done! If there’s a hole and a pole, it’s probably been put in there by someone long before you came along – we’re all just treading the same ground time and time again.

What’s important, and indeed kind of beautiful, is to recognize the people who have come before, to understand the lessons they learned and incorporate those lessons into your own sexual knowledge. The trick is figuring out what kind of sex-adventurer you are, what tradition you’ve come from.

It’d be easy if you were into bondage or black chicks or whatever – you’d just have to run a quick Google search and bam! You’d be bombarded with your sexual progenitors. You’d come to know Man Ray and the quaint spider web that is the history of interracial porn in a matter of hours, and you’d get super aroused in the process.

But your fetish is a bit more obscure. Not so obscure as to have an interesting or easily mapped history, unfortunately. Just obscure enough that you have trouble finding pornography that isn’t constructed by really weird douchebags and can’t really find any information about the genealogy of the porn you prize.

See, you’re not that weird. You just like Indian girls. Mostly Indian girls sleeping with white dudes. You kind of have a conquistador fetish mixed in there too, but not too prominently. Mostly you just like watching a nice, sweet girl from the Indian subcontinent getting railed by someone with a skin tone similar to yours.

As a result you did pretty well for yourself in college, but you’ve still spent a lot of time feeling alone and wondering if there’s anyone else like you, anyone who came before. Today, while perusing Wikipedia entries about Hindu culture you’re going to find a name you haven’t seen before, thanks largely to the malfeasance of American public schools: Vasco De Gama.

Turns out De Gama was the first European to sail from Europe to India. De Gama, as a filthy sailor, liked to fuck, no question, but he also respected the ladies and respected alone time where people didn’t try to high five him while he was inside someone.

As you read more and more about him you’ll realize his love of math and his fear of Muslims are exactly like what you’ve felt your whole life. You’ll also realize that with your fetish apparently comes a tremendous capacity for human cruelty. Aware of it now you’ll see it reflected in the way you’ve named every pet you’ve ever owned.

Armed with this new knowledge about your sexual past you’ll determine yourself never to repeat it: you’ll swear to hate Muslims a lot less and to avoid complicated revenge fantasies on people you believe have “wronged you” while embracing your love of Indian pussy.

Congratulations Sexual Vasco de Gama!

Congratulations on Realizing the Truth!

2012-01-11T00:00:00.000-08:00

Seconds before the axe blade severs your friend’s feet you’ll realize the truth.

“It’s not an axe blade at all!” you’ll yell at him while he writhes on the floor. “It’s a scythe blade!”

“What?” he’ll moan at you.

“A scythe blade!” you’ll shout at him. “Like, for harvesting crops.”

“Oh,” he’ll groan in response. “How does that help me?” he’ll beg.

You’ll shrug.

That’ll be the last thing your friend will see as the scythe doubles back and catches him in the base of the neck, mercifully ending the twist spectacle that his life has become over the last few seconds.

You’ll sit there and stare at his corpse, wondering how this new piece of information can be put to good use. After a lot of pondering you’ll realize that it can’t, and that the real lesson here is that no amount of hillbilly gold is worth your life.

Congratulations on Realizing the Truth!

Congratulations Heroin Jack!

2012-01-10T00:00:00.000-08:00

Today your name is Heroin Jack and you really like heroin. You sometimes rob people for heroin and then retreat to your lair, which is a street corner, to do some heroin real quick before Batman catches you and puts you in jail for assault. Tonight, after a pretty mild crime, Batman is going to catch up with you just after you’ve done some heroin.

“Fuuuuuuck,” you’ll tell Batman as he shines a light in your eyes to see if your pupils dilate. They won’t.

“Hm,” he’ll mutter to himself before calling the police from a payphone and telling them where you are.

“He won’t be going anywhere for a while,” he’ll tell them. “He just shot up.”

“Laaaaame,” you’ll mumble at Batman as he leaves you on the street corner, gun inches from your hand as the twilight of drug takes your mind and makes you forget for just a few hours how terrible a Batman villain you are.

Congratulations Heroin Jack!

Congratulations Newborn Baby Hitler!

2012-01-09T00:00:00.001-08:00

The nursery has been in a state of economic depression for some time now, and someone’s got to draw it out. If not you, then who?

You’ll be the only baby in the nursery with any kind of notable hair at all, which in old-times was a terrible mark of Satan’s influence on your life. It’ll only be appropriate that you, with your fashionable moustache, should be such an auspicious child, destined for such fleeting, horrible greatness.

Your campaign for dominance will begin when you rise up from your crib (having somehow crazied your way out of your blankets) and begin speaking. By speaking, we mean “crying.”

When you start crying as loud as you can all the other babies in the nursery will cry back in response: the revolution will have begun! Weeping as loud as you can you’ll force the foul Jewish nurse who takes care of you to notice your economic plight and take action.

She’ll storm into the room (quietly and gently), settle you back into your crib and tuck you into your blankets.

“That’s a terrible moustache,” she’ll mumble as she works.

This will instill in you a terrible hatred of Jews will which eventually become sexualized when you’re in high school and you fuck a Jewish dude for the first time, proving once and for all that Hitler was both gay and that, if he had hooked up with a dude we never would’ve had World War II.

We really dodged a bullet there.

Congratulations Newborn Baby Hitler!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Building A Computer!

2012-01-08T00:00:00.000-08:00

I built my first computer when I was twenty-three. I was living with my parents in Massachusetts, working a job I hated. I was saving my money to move somewhere, anywhere, which would eventually narrow down to Portland, Oregon, but part of saving money is having money for the first time ever. And having money made me want to do things that I’d always wanted to do but never been able to do due to lack of money. Things like build a computer. So I set myself a budget of $1,200 (three weeks or so worth of pay) and set to it.

I had a lot of great resources available to me. Most of my friends in Cambridge were in tech support, and had insight on how to assess hardware. They were also extremely poor, and had a lot of advice on how to comparison shop and spot a bargain, sorting out true finds from rip-offs. I talked through my system with them, learned a lot about how all the parts fit together and what I should consider while constructing my theoretical computer, and then I learned what could go wrong. I learned about things that aren’t listed on item’s profiles when you’re shopping for them, things like rate of failure and the pros and cons of certain technological operations I’d previously viewed as entirely beneficial (read: I learned why I should RAID and why I shouldn’t RAID). I learned what OEM meant and learned why buying OEM was smarter and cheaper than buying products with warranties. In a way, I learned how to do something awesome on the cheap, a skillset I’ve carried over to other things in my life.

I still use my first home-made computer, despite some technical failures since then. I’ve had a power supply brick during a heat wave, which taught me both how to assess a failing power supply and how nasty a failing power supply can be for your motherboard if you let it go long enough. Each of these issues, thanks to my home-brewing ways, became a chance to learn something new for me about my system and how it worked. I learned, for example, that a fluctuating power supply can cause problems with almost every part in your system, that it can damage a motherboard and that re-seating a CPU on a motherboard is actually quite easy.

I’ve had to replace almost all of the major parts in my computer by this point – only the original RAM case, and CPU remain. I’ve learned how to navigate warranties on products that had warranties and how to replace products that are out of warranty quickly and effectively. I’ve learned how to get as much performance as I can for my buck and how to differentiate poorly optimized software from poorly optimized hardware – for me, building a computer has been an experience just as much about learning how the system worked as it has been about assembling a platform for playing games and storing information.

My friend Alex had a slightly different take on system building. With a very different situation, economically, and a very different mindset, Alex focused on building mechanical beasts of machines: the best that money could buy or nothing. Quad core processors, SLIed video cards and multi-disk arrays, and damn the expense. In the end, he’s certainly come out with more potent machines that I’ve ever made, but he’s also missed out on some of the learning experiences that I’ve had: the troubleshooting and DIYing that I’ve done is alien to him. He thinks it’s insane to enjoy doing it, and think it’s a sign that I built a bad system that I’ve had to tune it and repair it. We’ve both wired cases and selected products, but the mentalities we brought to the table lead to very different experiences with building systems. I was interested in simply meeting my requirements. Alex wanted to destroy them. We also, as I mention, live very different lifestyle, with very different spending habits: I’m in Graduate School, and have hovered near the poverty line with minimal to no benefits for half a decade now, Alex has been steadily employed and, until recently, lived rent free.

What’s interesting to me, and what prompted me writing this, is another friend of mine who has decided to build a system. This friend, Dan, had never built a system before. He purchased performance laptops (a VAIO, techies lament) and had some technical difficulties getting them to perform as-advertised consistently, but when it came to assembling a system he took to it well. Dan’s also easily the most responsible of my circle of old friends: he doesn’t have any of Al’s trouble with keeping money or my trouble with “living like a normal person.” As a result he came to the process of system building with a healthy bank account, a stable life and job and a balanced mentality on the whole process.

I’m not sure how he’s come out of it yet: I still don’t think that you can really know what you’re doing with your system until something has gone wrong, until you actually have to sit down and patch your computer, make sure it’s working. But I’ve already noticed a renewed sense of excitement in him (as much as Dan displays) when I talk to him about games. He’s no longer concerned with technical requirements, he’s actually playing The Old Republic (which his Vaio had previously prohibited) and he seems to be genuinely excited about the process of making, updating and maintaining his new computer. It’s been kind of incredible to see, and regardless of how he continues to develop I’m excited to watch as he grows into a member of the system-building community.

Watching Dan make a computer has done more than just make me excited to see how he’ll grow into using his system. It’s made me long for the days when I had the disposable income to build computers on my own. There’s a certain magic to making a computer, in assembling a complicated piece of equipment, using it and fine tuning it. Upgrading systems, growing them and ironing out the kinks is tremendously fun in its own way (also stressful and frustrating). It’s inspiring to watch someone go through the process of building a computer for the first time, and it makes me long for the days of disposable income when I could afford to build my own computer. The repairs I’ve had to do have kept my system functioning well enough for my purposes, but sometimes I do long for the days when I could build a new system from the ground up.

There’s a power in building systems, a sense of competition and completion, a realization of philosophy in an act of creation which is almost always beautifully, accidentally unique. It’s a singular, wonderful, informative experience and it’s something any gamer, or any moderate to heavy tech user in general, should do at least once. I’m excited to see how it turns out for Dan in the long run, and I look forward to the day when I can sit down with a nice fat stack of money I don’t need and turn it into a brand new system of my very own.

Congratulations Fervent Believer!

2012-01-07T00:00:00.000-08:00

No matter what anyone tells you, you believe that Scott Bakula is a very good actor.

“Quantum Leap was fucking amazing!” you’ll shout at them whenever they point out that Scott Bakula wasn’t really that great in it.

“FUCK YOU!” you’ll scream at anyone who mentions, even in passing, that Enterprise was unwatchable drek which owed a great deal of the critical ill-will it received to Bakula’s so-called acting.

No one else will say anything else to you, because you’ll seem really unreasonable and, by this time, no one will want to talk to you at all, let alone about something as insignificant as Scott Bakula’s acting abilities. Your belief, thus unquestioned, will never waver.

Congratulations Fervent Believer!

Congratulations Interracial Porn Star!

2012-01-06T00:00:00.000-08:00

You’re a porn star and you only sleep with other races.

“It’d just be too weird,” you’ll tell the white guy who is fucking your pussy.

“URRRGH YEAH BRO!” he’ll shout, which will be distracting and really, really weird.

“You know?” you’ll ask the black guy in your asshole.

“WOOOOOAERRRRRGH!” he’ll shout as he comes inside your asshole, prompting the director to call a stand in (the boom mic operator) to enter your asshole in his place.

“Where would we even find another half-Filipina, quarter-Native American, quarter-Swedish porn star?” you’ll ask him.

He won’t say anything, mostly because your asshole will be incredibly tight and also because he’ll also be half-Filipina, quarter-Native American and a quarter Swedish and he knows that if he tells you that you’ll freak out and force him to get out of your butt. He’ll really want to keep fucking your butt until he’s told to come on your face – it’ll be really pleasant and you’ll be quite pretty, and if he doesn’t fuck up he’ll get double pay for the day for being willing to have unprotected sex with a woman he barely knows on film.

Congratulations Interracial Porn Star!

Congratulations Disco Orphan!

2012-01-05T00:00:00.000-08:00

You didn’t ask to be an orphan, but you sure took to it well. When you were like three you spent most of your time running around, delivering papers to various locals for pennies on the hour. That kept you fed and kept you in contact with other orphans, but it wasn’t really a long term thing you wanted to do for the rest of your life. So by the time you hit six you had moved on to stealing bits of fruit and tiny valuables from shops and tourists and giving them to an old man with a beard who would sometimes hit you and sometimes give you food.

That kept you going until you were twelve and you realized that the old man with a beard was actually a pedophile who was waiting for you to get old enough to “be his type.” You turned the police on to his little operation and moved on, which meant being homeless for several days until you, snowblind and starving, wandered into Chicago’s last standing discotheque.

Discotheque people aren’t like other people: they welcomed you with open arms and let you stay in their discotheque. They fed you disco-biscuits and disco-soup until you were strong and then they asked if you wanted to stay and learn the ways of the disco.

You didn’t have anything better to do, so you said yes.

Over the next decade you learned how to dance every dance in the disco handbook. Your hips learned the rhythms of disco, your legs came to understand the purity of the steps and strides that were expected of them. You learned to hustle, to do other dances we’re not familiar with because, like most people, we stopped paying attention to disco decades ago and, as a result, most of what we see of your future is just a mass of random images that make no sense to us.

But they’ll all make perfect sense to you, and they’ll give your life a sense of purpose that it never had before. It’ll feel like it’s all building to something, something tremendous and momentous that will be threatening to collapse the dam of your senses at every turn and let in the blessed, overwhelming waters of enlightenment. You’ll know peace for the first time in a life where you’ve only been dealt bad hands, and it’ll be wonderful.

Alas, nothing can last though. Three days ago an evil urban developer approached the owner the discotheque’s property and offered them seven times the property’s value in order to purchase it from them and turn it into high-class new apartments that could only ever be occupied by people who have never even heard of disco. Your disco-parents will be crestfallen – they’ll have only one option if they want to save the discotheque: they’ll need to have a disco-extravaganza and raise eight times the property’s value so they can buy the evil urban developer out.

Obviously, things haven’t been too lucrative at the discotheque of late, but having been saved by the power of disco you’ll know that it is not only capable of changing worlds, that it also must be preserved if the world is to remain worth anything at all. So you’ll go out on the street with a boom box and start disco-ing your ass off on a daily basis.

You’ll disco up and down the streets, boogying, beginning today, from the South Side to Evanston. By the time you’re done Chicago will be pulsing with the power of disco – it will have remembered the fun, the cocaine and the ridiculous clothing that people used to wear without the slightest measure of shame. Chicago will, for one brilliant day, have remembered the magic of disco.

You’ll stumble your way back to the discotheque late, late, late this evening. Your feet will be bleeding in your wing tipped shoes, your bell-bottoms will be tattered by the exertions of your dance. You’ll attempt to do a little boogie as you enter, to announce your presence, but you’ll just collapse into the arms of your disco-father. Behind you a crowd will be surging, struggling to enter the doors of the discotheque for the first time in decades. Your discotheque will easily pull in the money they need and then some. You’ll spend the evening sitting in a chair, watching others fill the dance floor for a change. For the first time in your life you’ll feel like you gave something to someone instead of taking it. It’ll be a good feeling.

Congratulations Disco Orphan!

Congratulations Professor Octopus!

2012-01-04T00:00:00.000-08:00

Professor Octopus, we love you!

You teach at an undersea university, each student equally important in your eyes.

“You should hang out in anemonies more often,” you’ll tell a clown fish who is often being lured to bad neighborhoods by a barracuda who he was interested in dating. He’ll take your advice because he loves and respects you.

“You should just find out what you really want,” you’ll inform the related barracuda, who hasn’t been sanguine about a future where she functions as one of the world’s most vicious eating machines ever. Thanks to your advice she’ll free to pursue whatever occupation she wishes. She’ll pick art therapist, which isn’t the worst thing she could’ve gone for.

“Let your girl go,” you’ll tell the shark who raised the barracuda, who will think you’re sticking your tentacles where they don’t belong but will be restrained from the physical violence he so desperately wishes to commit by the presence of your assistant, a very physically imposing sperm whale who is considering graduate school.

“I’ll get by without you,” you’ll kindly inform the sperm whale, who will be tentatively asking you for letters of recommendation for a number of graduate institutions, most of them at the bottom of the ocean. With the force of your confidence he’ll propel himself into a fantastic career as one of the most prominent Melville Scholars in human history.

“I think we can make this work,” you’ll tell your wife, a giant squid whose family disapproved of your marriage from the start and who have, lately, begun to make your life quite difficult with their constant prodding and smack-talk about your octopus heritage. She’ll want to believe you quite badly, and she’ll know she still loves you, but it’ll be hard, so hard, for her to see the future.

She’ll rest her tentacle on yours and her black eyes will gaze into yours. She’ll long to lock her beak with yours so violently that she rips the delicate membrane surrounding it, but she won’t. Instead she’ll stroke the back of your adorably bulbous head with four of her arms.

“Okay,” she’ll tell you, smiling as best a squid can.

Congratulations Professor Octopus!

Congratulations Micro-Loan Management Company!

2012-01-03T00:00:00.000-08:00

Thank you! Thank god for you! You know those micro-loan companies that have been making waves by vastly improving the quality of life in sub-Saharan Africa, largely by improving the lives of women in rural areas? You know how people cannot stop fucking gushing over them and how they can do no wrong? Well after today people won’t be able to say that about those fucking self-righteous baby saving fuckface micro-loaners, and it’s all thanks to you.

Because today you’re going to put into place “…And A Chicken In Every Pot,” a 401C that exclusively attempts to put automatic weapons in the hands of underprivileged Africans, mostly AK-47s with a smattering of World War II and Belgian leavings thrown in to round out the arsenal.

You don’t care if they want to protect their family or if they want to join a guerilla movement. Your only rules are that you only provide loans to individuals, and that you only do so to cover the cost of five or fewer automatic weapons or accessories thereof. It’ll be a huge hit: the number of arm sales will double within your first week, quadruple by the end of the first month, and reach ten times the current level come the end of the fiscal quarter.

No one will sympathize with your cause or believe that you were just trying to “round out by the power base by putting everyone at an equal footing.” Even your history as a celebrated member of the ACLU won’t save you from accusations of racism and hate mongering. You’ll forever sully the useful, practical lone infrastructure that so many people have been able to better their lives through, and you’ll do it tomorrow with the stroke of a pen when you sign the paperwork to make your ill-fated, ill-conceived, observably amoral 401C.

Congratulations Micro-Loan Management Company!

Congratulations Mouse Train Conductor!

2012-01-02T00:00:00.000-08:00

You’re a mouse who conducts a tiny train. You already know this, we’re telling our readers what’s up, because they might be a little confused. So here’s the deal, READERS:

Mice have trains that run through your walls. That’s what all that scuttling is about. Usually these trains run between key locations, like from the kitchen to the Mousehome, the giant hollowed out collective home that mice have in the center of each and every home they inhabit. Sometimes they stop at the bathroom so mice can get small amounts of toothpaste and watch naked people while they’re wet and soapy (fun fact: mice are almost all perverts). Wherever they go and whatever they do there, they have to get there via the mouse train, and you’re the mouse who drives it.

This means you wear a tiny, adorable conductor’s hat. Sometimes it falls over your eyes and it’s even more adorable. Occasionally you squeak orders at coal-stained mice who stoke your engine. You act imperious to them, but you’re really buddies who hang out later at the mouse-bar, so it’s all still quite adorable.

But that’s all just background for the neophytes. What’s really important is what’s going down today.

Today your train is going to be assaulted by cat-bandits. They’ll have found their way into the wall and, despite being horrified, their instincts towards mindless cruelty will have remained intact. They’ll hiss and strike at you with their claws, trying to rake mice off the train.

But as a stalwart mouse conductor you won’t be perturbed. Instead you’ll simply load your mouse-kett (so cute!) and fire it, point blank, into a cat’s eye, blinding it and giving your train the time it needs to reach the Mousehome. Once you get there you’ll spread word of the approaching threat and rally a small army to combat it. You’ll be celebrated as a hero, and tomorrow you’ll be a mouse-conductor no more, but for now we’d just like to say Congratulations Mouse Train Conductor!

Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Practical Problem Solving and Games!

2012-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

There are some fantastic thinkers who have considered the pedagogical implications of game and the impact game theory can have on the process of education. James Paul Gee and Jane McGonigal have written some fantastic books on the subject and done some fascinating research on the subject. I’d go so far as to call McGonigal’s work in generating gaming communities with practical impact seminal. Sure, it’s not a global phenomenon yet, but her optimism is so infectious, her generosity and work ethic so inspiring that it’s hard not to see her vision of games changing the world becoming a reality. Each victory for her is a landmark, an assurance that our progress as both a subculture and a cultural whole is indefatigable and unstoppable.

I want to believe in McGonigal’s vision, and in a way I do. But she’s very specific in her goals and her conceptual reinforcement, which is fantastic, and I’m not sure I quite agree yet. Because games have taken a lot of my free time and made me something of a social recluse. Well, games, books and writing together have. And television and film. But I digress.

I also just haven’t noticed the kind of conceptual benefit that McGonigal expresses, and I find some of her abstract attempts at solving specific problems through gameplay models to be somewhat obtuse. She essentially sees games as a means of behavioral reinforcement and structural progression in order to showcase an incremental progress system which makes seemingly insurmountable tasks extremely achievable (as I understand it – apologies to the wonderful Ms. McGonigal if I just misrepresented her here!). Such a system relies on a majority of an effected group participating in such a system – World of Warcraft, for example, wouldn’t be able to support its end-game model of giant fifty person raids without a collective understanding and investment in completing the operation again and again, performing specific tasks that form a portion of a massive collective task. McGonigal’s model of collective problem solving makes total sense, if we can get enough people to participate – she says as much. More people need to play games and play them with the kind of focus she has in mind. If they do so, the world can change, reform into a wonderful, beautiful, better place.

I’ve got a notion that games can improve the world in a more personal and individual fashion, based on another claim that McGonigal makes. In her fantastic TED talk she introduces the idea that games boost our self-esteem by presenting us with manageable problems – a game never asks you to solve an un-solvable puzzle, never puts you in a situation where you don’t have the tools to solve the problem you’re presented with. This is totally true, especially now. Games, since around 1998, have endeavored to never present a player with an absolute fail state, an occasion wherein the player will be totally incapable of advancement. The end result is a system of games that are sometimes quite easy, sometimes quite difficult, but always present players with a task that is inimitably do-able.

The downside of this is that gamers sometimes do things that aren’t necessarily in their best interest, things they can’t necessarily do (I recall a situation where a gamer was shot while attempting to subdue an armed assailant in a public place in…I want to say the Netherlands?) and sometimes develop inflated senses of confidence that make them in some measure unbearable. But all games encourage a sort of problem-solving skill set, a tendency to look for solutions where others see problems, and certain games do this explicitly and, despite their abstraction, in such a fashion that encourages the develop of problem solving skill sets in their users. Games like World of Goo and Portal, for example, force players to engage in systemic problem solving that involves assessing resources, environment and goal and then form an effective solution (perhaps not the one the developers anticipated!) based on these factors. This pattern of behavior and thought isn’t just attuned to this sort of systemic problem solving, however. These are the same factors that enter into practical problem solving.

I’m not sure these skills translate perfectly – I’m not aware of any psychological studies on the matter, and to be perfectly frank I’m not sure how you’d form control groups for assessing such a conditional skill set (though psychologists who assess behavioral traits of “gamers” rarely seem troubled by such concerns) but I will say that I’ve personally come to approach practical problems with a more open mind since I’ve started playing more puzzle games. I’m not saying that it magically made me good at solving problems – rather it made me realize that solving problems is something anyone can do, so long as they carefully observe the tools available to them, the problem facing them and the circumstances surrounding that problem.

Perfect example: I’ve been hand-binding books to help out one of my classmates who are micro-publishing a magazine for our MFA program. Hand binding, unfortunately, is quite difficult and takes a shitload of time. Each book takes thirty to forty minutes of collaborative work to complete, even after the signature pages have been printed. And sewing the book is probably the single most time-consuming part of the process for the worker – four book signatures need to be bound by thick gauge fabric thread, bound tightly and securely. And mistakes can happen.

My mistake occurred before I even began sewing – I miss-measured the amount of string I needed to bind the signatures by around half a book length. As such I found myself at the last signature with most of the book assembled, but a string end where I needed another four inches to finish my spine. After briefly lamenting my plight I looked at the resources I had available, noticed some string remnants from previous bindings (over measuring string is encouraged, as under measuring leads to situations like mine) and realized that I could just knot a remnant into my spine on the inside of the signature I was working on and then complete the project. In the end, I created a book that was indistinguishable from the other copies, thanks to sitting down, assessing my resources, assessing the situation and trying to derive a solution for success. I did this a few more times with miss-bound books with skipped stitches and miss-formed spines.

I know it’s a bit much to say that this is a product of me playing puzzle games – I’ve also been involved in wilderness survival since I was a kid and spent time in elementary school in a club that challenged young students by presenting them with engineering puzzles. But as I play more puzzle games I’ve certainly noticed my aptitude for seeing solutions where others see road blocks improve. Sure, I still fuck up a lot, but that’ll happen. I’ve learned to let my failures inform me and help me form solutions. If something doesn’t work, it’s a lesson that can point me in the right direction.

Sorry if this got a little too anecdotal for some – it’s New Years Eve and I’m somewhat homeless, so I’m writing this as a bounce from couch to couch and my gaming rig sits in a storage unit in downtown Brooklyn. I’ve actually gotten my hands on some games I’m incredibly excited to write about – Star Wars: The Old Republic, the final chapters of Skyrim, Modern Warfare 3 and Rage are all stand-out games with great histories and topos that I want to explore and discuss over the next few weeks. DotA 2 will soon be going live, and a renewed involvement in critical theory and textual analysis in the coming months might find its way in here soon. It’s been a wacky year, and just keeping the content coming has been a challenge over the last few weeks. So if you find this particular SNS lacking, but think the topic of the practical impact of games interesting, I apologize (more so than I usually do for these, which is saying quite a bit) and encourage you to read some Ian Bogost, some James Paul Gee and some Jane McGonigal. There’s some great material on this subject, and a discussion is slowly taking shape around it – if you find the topic interesting you should read up and get involved. Become a bigger part of the community and figure out how games can impact the field you care about more than gaming!

Congratulations Burlesque Comedy Lady!

2011-12-31T00:00:00.000-08:00

Today you’re a sexy lady who tells jokes! You’re going to get up, go to a coffee shop dressed in a sweatshirt, and write jokes for most of the day without speaking to anyone. You’ll listen to a lot of peppy, upbeat music while you do so and occasionally read articles from various online news sources.

The barrista will be pretty bored with you since you won’t have any long or embarrassing conversations with anyone while you’re at the coffee shop, but she’ll honor the fifty-cent refill policy of the coffee shop all the same each time you come up to her with an empty cup.

When you’ve spent around six hours working you’ll head home, cook dinner and then write some more. You won’t make money for any of this time, mind you, but you will develop your craft in a dedicated, demanding way that few will see and fewer will understand. Once you’ve eaten you’ll crawl into bed and repeat the whole thing again tomorrow, except tomorrow you’ll cap it off by dressing up really slutty and doing your routine on stage while men who are terrified of speaking to you fetishize you sexually. You won’t get any numbers, but trust us: a lot of guys are going to be thinking of you tonight.

While they masturbate. We wanted to make that clear, since the last paragraph left it a little unclear.

Congratulations Burlesque Comedy Lady!

Congratulations on Being the Best MC Ever!

2011-12-30T00:00:00.000-08:00

Many MCs do their derndest to entertain us while they disseminate vital information to crowds. It’ a rough job: they’re generally not very good at entertaining people, or else they would be being announced rather than MCing people, but they also provide us with vital information, like who is coming on stage next and when that cystic fibrosis picnic is going down.

The result is a group of socially stunted, awkward people who like attention but can’t really deal with having attention paid to them- a troublesome group of well meaning folk who aren’t really trying to hurt anyone, but can’t help but draw some ire for just being so unlikable. Today there’s going to be a dent in that perception of MCs, though, because today you’re going to debut on stage.

“Welcome to the Laugh Shack,” you’ll announce to the crowd. They’ll be unruly, staring at one another, yammering on about who knows what; their cats, their taxes, their insanely boring jobs. It’ll seem like they’re absolutely incapable of shutting the fuck up and letting you announce who was about to show up on stage after you leave.

Most MCs would just tell a few shitty jokes and maybe do some light crowd work, but not you. You’re just going to unzip your pants, drop your trousers to your knees and let your dick hang out. Then you’ll tense your kegels and squint real hard and make the magic happen.

Fireworks will shoot out of your dick.

They’ll be small fireworks. They won’t go high – they won’t even hit the ceiling of the comedy club, which will be a modest eight feet. They’ll be bright and a multitude of colors. They’ll all arc and explode perfectly, above and in front of the crowd, silencing them in awe.

After around thirty seconds of that you’ll zip your pants back up and move your mouth back to the microphone.

“Our first act is going to be Nick Thune. Please give him a big round of applause!”

Your introduction wsill have been awkward, but that’ll be one warmed up crowd. Their applause will come as a cascade and Nick Thune will come out laughing, guitar in hand.

“Let’s hear it for that MC. Wow. Just wow,” he’ll begin.

You’ll receive a call at nine AM the next morning from the club manager, asking you to come back and MC again that very night.

Congratulations on Being the Best MC Ever!

Congratulations Porpoise Mechanic!

2011-12-29T00:00:00.000-08:00

Most mechanics aren’t very bright. Not to say they’re stupid, they’re just not scientist material: they’ve got good heads, but they don’t generally invent stuff.

You’re special in that regard: you invented an above-water breathing apparatus that allows you, a porpoise, to explore the world outside the ocean to your heart’s content, manipulate objects with alarming dexterity and you work as a mechanic when you’re not inventing shit.

Oh, you’re also a porpoise who fixes cars. That makes you special too.

Anyhow, today you’re going to get an especially cool car to fix. Someone’s going to bring a big old ‘Cuda (pun unintended, but still great) from the mid sixties in. The customer will be a middle-aged businessman type, someone who likes muscle cars but doesn’t know a break pad from a drive shaft. He’ll want to know how much the whole rig will cost to fix.

You’ll smile (an imperceptible gesture for most people, because you’re a porpoise and people can’t easily interpret your facial expressions) and know right away that if you quote too high he’ll offer to sell you the car right then and there. It’ll be a fierce old beast, but the chassis will be all that’s left: you’ll be able to restore the entire thing for around ten or twenty grand in parts, far more in labor, but you’ll look him right in the eye and tell him, using your dolphin to English translator, just what you think of his attempt to get a car he can’t handle with your quote.

“Hundred thousand, hundred twenty,” the tinny robot voice will squawk.

The businessman will curse up and down, throwing shit about and swearing about the man who sold him the car, who told him exactly how much it would cost to fix it in parts but left out details like labor and over-quoting. When he calms down you’ll place one of your metal pincers on his arm and make him an offer he’ll be ready to hear.

“I will take the whole thing off your hands for twelve thousand dollars,” you’ll squawk. He’ll look at you like you’re crazy – he paid eight thousand for the whole wreck, along with a few hundred to get it to your shop. But after the two of you discuss it, and you use words like pet project and imply that you might sell the car to him after you patch it up if the fancy strikes you, he’ll come around.

At the end of the day your bank account (quite robust thanks to your inventions) will be down twelve grand, but you’ll have a sweet ass ‘Cuda with drop top that you can fix up and then ride around in wearing your driving robot suit and a burning desire to get that sucker gutted and fixed up. It’s going to look fucking awesome when you’re finished and driving around, so be sure to take it for a spin or two around our neighborhood.

Congratulations Porpoise Mechanic!

Congratulations Obese Stripper!

2011-12-28T00:00:00.000-08:00

There’s all kinds of strippers: strippers with piercings, strippers with tattoos, even strippers who have neither piercings or tattoos. There are strippers who are missing limbs, strippers who have cesarian scars. There are strippers who once knew true love and then lost it and strippers who go to sleep at night dreaming of it still.

There are very few strippers who know true love right now, but you’re one of them.

Every day you get up on stage to have bunched up dollar bills thrown at you (just how you like it) and men leer and jeer at you. Then you get off stage to find your life love standing there, tall and too-skinny in big thick framed glasses and his mouth constantly changing shape, shifting as if his brain is moving too fast from thought to thought for his face to catch up.

“Ilovedwatchingyoudance,” he’ll tell you in one rapid fire spurt.

“Thanks sugah,” you’ll say to him, leaning over to embrace him. He’ll squirm at your touch, but that’ll be normal. He’ll push you away after a few seconds and then blink at you. Once. Twice. Then a pause. Then the pattern will repeat itself.

“Iwannatakeyouhometomeetmymom,” he’ll tell his shoes.

Your heart will swell (metaphorically – if it were to actually swell you’d die, you’ve got a really weak heart) and you’ll grab his hand, tears welling in your eyes.

“I’d love to,” you’ll drawl at him, kissing him chastely on the cheek before he takes you out to the parking lot to his windowless, unmarked white van.

Later on, as you eat dinner at a table with him and the stuffed corpse of his mother, you’ll realize something is probably wrong. But during that car ride you’ll be happy as a clam, which means you’ll die pretty close to being happy early tomorrow morning. The details of your death cannot be disclosed here for legal reasons.

Congratulations Obese Stripper!

Congratulations Rabid Mom!

2011-12-27T00:00:00.000-08:00

Moms can be great. They really can. They give of themselves to their children and, sometimes, to their communities.

But sometimes moms aren’t great. Sometimes moms get bitten by bats that were trapped in their attics and they start foaming at the mouth and making insane requests of the people around them.

“FUCKING JEWS GOTTA GO!” you’ll shout, spraying your children with spittle.

“Mommy?” your daughter will ask, tugging at your shirt sleeve. You’ll want to pat her head and tell her everything’s okay, but instead you’ll grab her hand and just start vibrating uncontrollably.

“SHIT’S GONNA GET REAL DANGEROUS FOR YOU, SHITHEAD!” you’ll lean into her ear before shouting. She’ll start crying, which will make you want to comfort her, but the rabies in your brain will translate that thought into letting go of her and opening your freezer, where you’ll try to consume several pounds of raw meat while standing.

As your daughter sits several feet away and weeps you’ll begin convulsing on the kitchen floor, face covered in blood and bits of meat. You’ll reach out at her, wishing you could tell her that everything’s okay, that you love her very much and that whatever happens to you, she’ll be alright and taken care of.

Instead you’ll shout “PRESIDENT SHOULD GET HIS SHIT IN A BUCKET!” Then you’ll slap the floor repeatedly while coughing up blood. “GRAB THE RINGS AND CALL THE GENERAL! PHONES ARE THE WAY TO GO!”

At this point your daughter will leave the room to find a phone and call someone: not the general, as you requested, but an ambulance to take you to the hospital where you’ll be diagnosed as being too far gone for aid and will be “put down” so that hospital staff won’t have to deal with you. But as she’s gone you’ll shout something profound, something so fantastic that, had she heard it and shared it the world would be so, so much better than it would’ve been otherwise. Hunger would no longer be a problem, healthcare would spill out to the masses like molasses from some sort of molasses accident and even though your mom would be dead she’d be remembered as a profound, tragic figure rather than a crazy bitch with rabies.

But she won’t hear you say anything until she returns to the room and you shout at her.

“FUCKING STOP STEALING MY SOCKS YOU WHORE!”

Congratulations Rabid Mom!

Congratulations on Installing Those Tinted Windows!

2011-12-26T00:00:00.000-08:00

Most people who install tinted windows are pedophiles.

We do not congratulate those people.

But you’re a porn producer living outside the valley who likes to film people fucking in vans while an overenthusiastic cameraman and driver have really loud conversations, apparently to distract you and everyone else from how hot and desperate the young woman fucking in the car is.

Sometimes people see you fucking and you have to stop shooting and pay a fine for public indecency. It’s a problem, and you’ve been working on finding a solution for it.

Today you’re going to find one: install some god damn tinted windows in your van. That way your driver will be able to see out, and police won’t be able to see in and watch you and your “models” fucking.

Everyone wins, especially you, who won’t have to worry about being slapped with a felony for driving past a school or a playground ever again. One charge was enough! Now please stop talking while people are fucking in front of you, you have an annoying voice and no one wants to hear you stutter and repeat "bro" in front of a woman who's being paid to fuck someone with a huge dick.

Congratulations on Installing Those Tinted Windows!

Super Nerd Sunday Presents: The First Eleven Levels of Star Wars: The Old Republic!

2011-12-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

As I put the finishing touches on my final paper of the semester, the day after I’d finished with my students, the day my work, more or less, ended, I received an email.

The subject line proudly declared: “Your Saga Begins!” It was my notification that I could begin playing Star Wars: The Old Republic. I knew I wouldn’t be able to right away, even though I’d updated the client fully earlier that day. I still had commitments: handmade books needed binding, a class needed attending. But when I got home, after fourteen hours of work or work adjacent activities, I was ready to play.

My friends hadn’t picked a permanent server yet, so there was no call for me to jump into making my final character. I’d briefly played through the game as a Jedi during the beta, but I hadn’t done anything in depth. I’d spent most of my time as a Sith, and I’d been less than inspired by the visuals that surrounded me on Korriban. The time I spent in the starting areas of the Jedi had been equally uninspiring, but hey. These things happen. I stepped in expecting nothing to have changed, and I was more or less unsurprised. Spare a slight polish, most of the graphics seemed the same.

But the play, the stability, and that slight, almost imperceptible increase in visual fidelity has been shaping my experience with SWTOR, inspiring me to play more and more. It’s made me take my wee Jedi from level 1 to 11, make my Knight into a Sentinel. There are still plenty of bugs to be found. My personal favorite came during a mission critical cutscene, where Satille Shan, head of the Jedi order and normally a fully grown adult woman, shrank down to one-tenth size during council meetings. I ran into this bug during my previous playthrough as a Jedi, so I wasn’t overly surprised or frustrated. In fact, I thought it was kind of funny. The bug gave the entire thing a certain surreal-ness that made me chuckle. I’ve come to accept, indeed expect, this sort of thing from SWTOR at this point, but it’s been considerably less prominent in the release build.

Since then I’ve leapt into leveling a Sith Warrior up for the third time in as many months, however, and there I’ve noticed fewer differences. There’s some nice polish throughout – a texture upgrade was put in place for many of the more prominent NPCs I encounter, lag issues have been much more manageable and combat has been a great deal more fluid. Sure, the character classes are exact parallels of one another (visual effects aside) across light-side dark-side divides, but I already knew that was coming. While it’s lamentable and unnecessary, I understand the mentality behind it and the way that the visual effects of their abilities shape the mechanics of different classes while retaining parallel effects is kind of cute. For the most part, though, what I’ve noticed is that this game hasn’t changed much since beta.

The only thing that’s changed since then, aside from the NDA and my reticence to share half-formed thoughts, is my impression of the first ten levels of the game.

See, previously I’d only taken time to play through the game from a single class’ perspective – I had elected, once my friend Alex decided to be our Powertech, to be our group’s Marauder: a class that does massive amounts of damage and can take a little too, sometimes. Each time the beta reset my characters I’d dutifully level my Marauder up as far as I could so that we could all enjoy the wonders of Dromund Kaas together.

This time I took a very different tack: by leveling up a Jedi Sentinel first, I saw more of the world and came to understand both the game and the way that alignment choices function in it a little better. It also made me realize what Bioware has done here that no MMO has ever done before: they’ve made you feel powerful and important from level one.

I’m not just saying they do a great job scaffolding their game and guiding you through specific areas at specific times appropriate to your level. They certainly do that, largely through the use of very well designed maps that make you do what they want without ever making you aware that you’re doing it. They also use the solo story areas to such tremendous effect, it’s kind of insane. By inserting a single player story into a multiplayer game, they make your every choice in the world a crucial one, one that not only establishes your character but also the fundamental nature of the world around you. Adding in hirelings who grow near or distant to your character based on these decisions was an smart move, and making them not only useful gameplay aids but also integral parts of a crafting system? Inspired.

In fact, these hirelings and their impact on story missions sort of showcase my point: namely, that Bioware spilled a singleplayer game all over SWTOR, and that SWTOR ended up far far stronger for it. In an era where other games try to out World of Warcraft World of Warcraft Bioware looked at their arsenal and realized that their greatest strength was their ability to weave a story, something Blizzard has failed at miserably in recent times.

I’d like to take more time to get to know the various ins and outs of Bioware’s latest baby before I write about it in-depth. Space combat, for example, is something I haven’t touched at all. I’m not entirely sure what the Legacy system is, though I’m excited to find out. But my first impressions, my first for-realsies impressions, are terrific. They’ve made something special, something new that violates all the rules of MMORPGs using the tools that were already available more adeptly than anyone else has before.

Sure, Blizzard perfected the conventional MMO in World of Warcraft by creating a feedback loop system that rewarded specific kinds of exploration and art assets that meshed perfectly along with a gameplay system that was hyper accessible and simultaneously difficult to master. And it’s going to be hard to crack that nut, even as subscriptions dwindle from MMO fatigue. But Bioware has done something completely different: they’ve made an MMO where your individual choices have meaning, where you can play through the game nine different times and experience nine different stories. They’ve made a game where expansions could not only expose new worlds but tell new stories and let us continue to grow not only numerically but emotionally with the characters we’ve built.

Regardless, after my first twenty hours with SWTOR as a released product, I’m convinced that this game is something special, and I can’t see the next twenty hours changing that.

Congratulations Christmas Eve!

2011-12-24T00:00:00.000-08:00

Christmas is usually a rough time to be a prostitute. It’s cold outside and everyone’s at home with their families, so the majority of Johns are really just serial killers looking for an easy mark. Violence against sex workers spikes, and prostitutes the world over are sometimes forced to huddle together in big naked, writhing piles just to stay warm. Some people would probably pay to see that, but none of you have come up with a fair, effective business model that would make it a reality, so times remain quite tough.

But there is an exception, and that exception is you. You’re a hooker and your “working name” is Eve. Normally that means you’re asked to work with snakes and that you endure a lot of “snake” jokes when you’re about to fuck dudes. You hate it, and you always think of changing your name to “Charity” or something classy like that.

But tonight, and each night like this in the past, has made you realize just why you should hold on to your ignominious name. Because tonight, you see, is Christmas Eve. Which means that your clients, instead of asking you to “tempt their snakes for a change,” will instead ask you to “make their Christmas merry” and to “give them plenty of Eve this Christmas.”

On this night of the year your business increases sevenfold. You’re sore for days later, but it doesn’t matter because you can take time off you rake in so much dough. You charge extra because you’re so pressed for time and you sometimes just get so generous with the sexy-times that you end up giving random dudes on the bus handjobs just to keep the holiday spirit flowing.

Also, tonight your last client is going to have a huge dick and fuck you until you actually come. You’ll wake up sore tomorrow and gingerly touch your pussy, thinking that the whole thing was a Christmas miracle.

Congratulations Christmas Eve!

Congratulations on Catching That Stroller!

2011-12-23T00:00:00.000-08:00

Today you’re going to be involved in a shootout in a train station and then-

OH NO! THAT STROLLER IS ABOUT TO ROLL DOWN THE STAAAAAAAAAIRS!

You’re going to catch it and shoot someone in the chest and he’s going to tumble down the stairs the way the stroller was about to.

The entire thing will make you feel like sort of a hero in an action movie. When your partner comes over and helps you get the stroller out of its precarious position you’ll both look inside and discover that it has not a baby, but a bomb inside.

You and your partner will turn, look at each other and then shout: “OH SHI-!”

Then you’ll leap away from the impending explosion, down the stairs, to safety. If either of you were brighter you’d note the irony of the situation, but neither of you are, so that’s unfortunate.

Congratulations on Catching That Stroller!

Congratulations on Making Her the Best Glass of Orange Juice Ever!

2011-12-22T00:00:00.000-08:00

You’ve been trapped in the basement of a crazed old woman who thinks you’re an incredibly gifted novelist for months now. She lured you in when your car broke down outside her house and she’s had you chained near her boiler with a typewriter for a long while now. She occasionally stops by to throw things at you and shout at you to “write better,” which you never do.

But today things are going to be a little different. Today she’s going to unlock your manacle and ask you, quite politely, to make her a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice.

You’ll walk up her stairs unsteadily, legs trembling with the effort of movement after months of atrophy. When you reach the top you’ll see that she has arrayed a variety of oranges on her kitchen table, organized by size, shape and region of origin. You’ll be excited, since your real job is working as a professional juice maker, and set to work right away.

You’ll select a blend of oranges, so that the flavors pop appropriately, and squeeze each orange to its maximum potential. You’ll take great care not to obliterate the orange, not to make the juice too pulpy or watery. After fifteen minutes of intense labor your arms will be sore from the bustle of activity after months of disuse. Your legs will be screaming from standing up. But you’ll have a perfect glass of orange juice ready for consumption, set in front of that crazy old lady.

She’ll put down the rifle she’s had pointed at you this whole time and gingerly take a sip. Then a slurp. Then a gulp down the back of her throat. She’ll make a little moaning noise and, inside of her head, she’ll realize she needs to let you go.

Unfortunately she won’t get a chance to tell you that. She’ll be hit in the back of the head with a toaster by you. The force of your blow will knock her to the floor, where you’ll climb on top of her and smash her face repeatedly with the toaster clutched in both hands.

When you’re finished she’ll be unrecognizable, and you’ll be free to leave, which will be pretty great. But on your way out you’ll be sure to make a fresh glass of OJ and take a nice long sip of it, just to keep your strength up.

Congratulations on Making Her the Best Glass of Orange Juice Ever!

Congratulations on Disarming that Roadside Bomb!

2011-12-21T00:00:00.000-08:00

The army is full of all kinds of heroes. Most of these heroes do stuff like run around, shoot guns and generally celebrate life in all its forms. These men are the most brotherly of brothers, representatives of the American way of life who stand as halcyon beacons of hope to all who gaze upon them.

The army is also full of other heroes. These heroes are mostly robots. They’re the unsung heroes of our military. No one ever talks about the sacrifice that predator drones make. Well today we’re going to. Today we’re going to talk about you.

You’re one of those robots that they send in to disarm bombs when they don’t think that a particular bomb is worth the risk to human life that it involves or if they know for a fact that the bomb is going to go off and kill anyone nearby. You’ve had a long life (four months of sustained operation!) and you’ve done a lot of good in it. You’ve successfully determined that several abandoned backpacks were not bombs at Baghdad International Airport, you disarmed a bomb in a parking lot one time without it going off and at an event at a school in Baghdad you convinced a little girl that robots can love by robo-winking at her coyly when she hugged your chassis.

Yes, you’ve had a good life. But sometimes good things must end.

Today you’re going to get “the call,” meaning the door of the box you spend most of your time inside is going to open up. You’ll then roll into the heat and dust of the Afghani sun and, after receiving some directions from your operator, make your way towards a pile of rags and sandbags by the side of what could charitably be called a road.

You’ll be the only one around for miles and miles, and you’ll be fine with that. That’s kind of how you like things: you’re a bomb defusing robot, you like alone time and helping others. So as you roll up to the roadside bomb you’ll be kind of excited. This is just another time to shine for you.

But as you approach, before you even get a chance to use your clever little manipulating appendages to do your thing, the un-thinkable will happen: the bomb will explode. The explosion will launch hundreds of pieces of scrap metal, marbles and wood out in a dome-like pattern from the sacks laying on top of the charges, tiny fragments that are intended to maximize damage to the soft tissues most people are made up of so prominently. Most of these makeshift flechettes will ricochet harmlessly off your steel chassis.

But the concussive force of the bomb will not be so kind. You’ll be just close enough that the shockwave of the explosion will rattle your frame and devastate your motors, shaking your servos to bits. The bomb will effectively be defused, your mission a success, but your body will be in ruins. A pair of techs will rush out after the dust settles to collect your parts and put them in a small wood box.

The wood box will be sent back to the place of your birth, Flint, Michigan, where you’ll be given a hero’s burial: entombed underneath the factor that produced you in the hope that your spirit will transmit to the chassis of a new robot and find a new life as another bomb defusing robot. It will be a good death, and a burial appropriate for a hero of your magnitude.

Congratulations on Disarming that Roadside Bomb!

Congratulations on Blasting Out the Side of the Mountain!

2011-12-20T00:00:00.000-08:00

You’re a wealthy oil tycoon who likes to blow stuff up just for the sheer meanness of it. You don’t even care about there being oil in the shit you blow up, you just like to blow it up and then laugh and laugh and laugh about it.

You recently set your sights on a piece of land owned by a group of industrious youth who run a camp to help at-risk-youth reform their wayward natures and become safe, secure members of society who can contribute and find happiness in the world at large. They don’t charge them anything, run the entire project on donations, and have a prodigious success rate.

You won’t care though. You’ll love oil and destruction so much that those kids and the things they do for kids won’t matter one whit to you, no way, no how. So several months ago you’ll have bought up the land surrounding their wayward youth camp and then started to develop it. Eventually fumes made the wayward youth camp uninhabitable, and the wayward youth camp’s property ownership company was forced to sell off their land or face severe fines for running an at-risk-youth oriented camp in such a toxic environment.

The plucky twenty-somethings who run the camp were left with only one option: a massive fund-raising concert to generate enough funds to purchase their land from the property ownership company so that they could possibly, somehow save their home for wayward youth. So today they’ll get a bunch of bands together, a few celebrities, and then they’ll hold a concert.

It’ll be a huge success, and they’ll raise enough to buy the property. Or rather, they’ll earn enough to buy the property assuming you don’t outbid them by ten grand the entire parcel, which you will.

You’ll then bulldoze their at-risk-youth rehab center while laughing maniacally. The kids and the counselors will just sit there watching you do it, wondering where they’ll be able to go next. A few of them will cry, and the rest will resolve to move to Philadelphia, dragging their weeping cohorts along with them. Once there they’ll hook up with one William Cosby and make the best damn at-risk-youth rehab center in the world, courtesy of the Cosby foundation.

You, on the other hand, will blow up the side of a mountain to find out if there’s oil inside. It turns out there won’t be, and you’ll have spent millions and millions of dollars just to fuck with a group of social activists and inner-city kids. But you’ll have blown up a mountain and hurt some good people, and that’ll make you feel a little bit better about life. Even if it also makes you realize how insignificant you and everything you do truly are.

Congratulations on Blasting Out the Side of the Mountain!

Congratulations on Losing Your Horn!

2011-12-19T00:00:00.000-08:00

We all know the story about how unicorns are just horses who need to get laid bad. Horse pedophiles prevent the formation of unicorns for the most part nowadays (most horses develop their unicorn horn, or unihorn, at the age of six months, and most horses get fucked at around four months) but every once in a great while a unicorn is born.

It’s not common – if it was common we wouldn’t give a shit – but it happens. And it happened to you, and you’re a unicorn and now you’re going to lose your horn.

You’ll lose it after a delightful bottle of red wine that you’ll share with Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch is fascinated by things like unicorns, pure things that simply beg corruption.

He’ll have sex with you in missionary, then “horsey” style, because that’s what he’s into.

After sex your horn will begin to wither in fast motion – it will dissolve in fast motion, a flaccid erection to a man’s thinning hair into a nothingness so permanent and final that you’ll wonder if you ever had a horn at all.

Of course, you did. But Rupert Murdoch took it away, because Rupert Murdoch fucks horses. That’s what he does. He’s a horse fucker, and he loves destroying innocence.

Congratulations on Losing Your Horn!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Reflections on The Old Republic Beta!

2011-12-18T00:00:00.000-08:00

It is truly remarkable how quickly ire dissipates under the right circumstances, how fast we’re willing to forget decades of cruel mistreatment for a few seconds of joy. This is, in a very real way, the story of my relationship with Lucas Arts.

Anyone of a certain age within the gaming community came of age with some truly amazing Star Wars games, games like Dark Forces, like X-Wing and TIE Fighter. But of late there’s been a lot of, for lack of a better word, Shit Wars material coming out on the Star Wars license. With the exception of the wonderful, technically flawed and obviously under-funded and under-supported Knights of the Old Republic titles there hasn’t really been a good Star Wars game in a while, to say nothing of a good Star Wars MMO.

There was an attempt at a Star Wars MMO, one that could be considered two different attempts by especially generous commentators. But this attempt, or attempts as you choose to look at it, fell apart. It fell apart hard. So when early rumors started almost five years ago that Bioware was going to be developing a Star Wars MMO, people responded as you’d expect: with tentative, heavily tempered hope. If anyone could make a Star Wars MMO and do it right it would, after all, be Bioware, who had managed to eke out a worthwhile space in the downtrodden franchise’s annals. But no one, in their wildest dreams, actually imagined that this game would do anything new or interesting. No one ever hoped that it would be good, that it would make us feel something other than bitterness when we looked upon the Lucas Arts logo.

Today, while attempting to log into Star Wars: The Old Republic on a bus’ wi-fi, (I make no apologies for my actions, my beta time was limited and I wanted to get as much in as I could) I found myself frozen on a loading screen. The loading screen presented me with a number of triumphant graphics informing me of the involvement of Bioware, EA and, of course, Lucas Arts with the project. Full disclosure, I’d already played the beta, albeit on someone else’s account, but I’d spent enough time with it to get to know the game, to start to understand what it could be, to like it. So now, attempting to start over on my own account, frozen in time as I tried to struggle my way through those miserable early levels, I found myself staring at those logos, wondering how I really felt about them, and suddenly I realized something, something strange.

I loved the Lucas Arts logo again.

Lucas Arts was a bastion of intellect in gaming back in the day, releasing not just amazing Star Wars games but titles the like of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle which have earned their rightful place in Nerd Valhalla. But time, and the examples I mentioned above, mademe look at the Lucas Arts logo with something other than affection as time dragged on: it was no longer a treat to see it cast upon a box’s face, but rather a signpost pointing to disappointment. Buy our re-skin of a Battlefield game here. Play this truly atrocious, forgettable adventure game here. Lucas Arts logo, once synonymous with excellence, was a signpost to shit.

But the first twelve or so levels of The Old Republic, along with the impressively constructed Black Talon Flashpoint (encounter?) were all it took to win me over. An MMO with a moral system? With companions and party mates and enduring relationships in the galaxy at large? With lightsabers and dames that know how to use ‘em? There are certainly problems with the product, beta issues and bigger game design issues that involve player bottlenecking and some character development and difficulty curve snags, but the problems, contained within the product as a whole, are so minor, so overshadowed by the power of the experience as it can function, that I really don’t care.

I don’t care that the instancing system that makes earlier levels playable also makes party making an interminable chore. I don’t care that the chat system doesn’t take any of this instancing business into account when it’s trying to help me form a party. I don’t care that I can’t use the /who feature to actually look up players at this point to find out what kind of character I’m adding to the party before I invite them to join. I don’t care because the game, when it works, is still really, really fun.

See, The Old Republic, at its core, is about being a badass from level one onward. The ways you get to be a badass change and improve, sure. But from the second you log in you’re pretty awesome – you’ve got an epic destiny (just like the rest of the server), you’ve got a chip on your shoulder and you’ve got some special powers that just rip the shit out of your enemies. And what’s more, you have a personality, a personality you get to establish in the context of the world at large. Which means you’re not just grinding levels: you’re developing a persona, a persona which, despite moving through a set of limited conversation trees which usually have, at best, three options, allows you to make a pretty well archetyped character to project your actions on to. There are complaints I have about this system (the randomization of collectively selected conversation choices in encounters, for example, rather than a nuanced voting system which might weight player majorities and use randomization as a tie breaking measure) but overall it actually works quite nicely.

And the gameplay! There’s a sound balance between frenetic mashing and careful choice in the game, enough that a good player and a bad player, despite their limited ability selection by level 10, are clearly discernable from one another by any group member who is paying attention. Anyone who’s played with a Sith Warrior or a Jedi Knight who doesn’t use their Focus/Rage knows what I’m talking about. The end result of the design is a chaotic, visually engaging morass that keeps players occupied most of the time, unless they’re not doing their job. And the lack of an auto-attack feature, originally something I lamented, is something I’ve come to see the sense of in a game where even the most basic attack can constitute a tactical choice that can influence the course of a battle.

But connectivity issues and some early-game visual design issues plague The Old Republic. It’s not catty to say that the characters early in the game are pretty uninspiring, and you won’t really start to get out of this slump until you’re about to leave your starting world. If you’re lucky: one of my friends, a bounty hunter, still looked pretty lame when we ran The Black Talon together, more or less like a second rate Han Solo with a Fallout Boy haircut (though some of that might’ve been his choice). And time sensitive hits, an awesome idea, can be problematic with response-lag like the kind you can expect to see in SWTOR for quite a while.

Server queues are a frustrating thing and, as I discovered on this bus, a somewhat unpredictable and buggy thing. There’s a paucity of technical notifications for a bevy of issues that seem to be besetting testers left and right. But that’s beta for you: part of playing a game like this before release is enduring the problems that come with early builds.

Even with these problems it remains amazing to me that my heart swells at the sight of the Lucas Arts logo again. It’s such a coarse thing, such a simple thing associated with such a variety of creations good and bad. But this one great creation, a creation still in progress, a creation I’m still uncovering bits and pieces of, has turned me around on Lucas Arts. I no longer feel an urge to spit when I look at their logo: instead I kind of want whatever it is they’re selling in my mouth. Is that a bit too dirty or forward? I’m not sure I care.

This isn’t anything approaching a full treatment of SWTOR: I don’t think I’ve played enough of the game to really give one of those. Nor is it a defense of its many flaws – I don’t think anyone in their right mind would try to make one of those, especially at this point, except to say, quietly, that the game is, in fact, still in beta and that it might need some more time in the oven. This is just a quick love letter to Lucas Arts, to that crazy bitch who has fucked me over and wasted my money so often in the past.

I still have feelings for you, and that kind of scares me, but I want to go for it.

Call me. My home-made lightsaber is ready.

Congratulations on Catching That Giant Fish!

2011-12-17T00:00:00.001-08:00

You’re a toothless old man from South Carolina (pronounced Souf Carlinny) and you love to fish.

But there’s a conflict! There’s a giant fish in the lake where you fish and you haven’t caught it yet.

“That giant fish doesn’t exist,” your son will tell you.

You’ll throw a full bottle of beer at his head. It’ll shatter and leave a terrible stain on the wall and the rug beneath.

“You have erectile dysfunction and a fish won’t change that,” your wife will tell you.

You’ll shoot your gun into the ceiling until she leaves the room in a huff.

“Let’s go fishing,” your old alcoholic buddy who also has erectile dysfunction and will, for some reason, still be in the room at this point will tell you.

You’ll grab your hat and get in the truck and drive down to the local fishing hole, which will be a giant lake flooded with toxins from years past.

Then you’ll get in a tin boat with some poles and spend the next three hours quietly suppressing your mutual homosexual urges. You’ll sit there a good long while, chewing your lip and letting your pole rest in the water. You’ll wait and watch the horizon and wonder what’s past it, what’s outside of Souf Carlinny, if it’s anything at all.

Then your pole will dip.

It’ll dip once, twice, and then a third time, a big time. It’ll dip so violently that you’ll barely be able to catch it as it starts to fly out the boat, your body surging forward, hands gripping the pole as a force than can only be the Biggest of Ones tries to pull it not just from your hands and from the boat but from the world itself – the pressure of the fish upon the pole will threaten the very space time continuum the force of its bite will be so great.

Your friend will grab you around the waist, taking great if momentary care not to touch your junk as he does so. He’ll grunt as he pulls back along with you, as the fish drags the two of you, along with your boat, around the lake.

The fish will move so violently and so vigorously that your boat will zip around the whole lack, back and forth and back and forth until your friend suddenly pitches forward into the water.

At this moment the violent movement of the boat will cease. The water beneath you will go dark.

The fish’s mouth will erupt from the water to swallow your friend whole.

You’ll act without thinking, catapulting out of the boat and on to the fish’s back, hands wedged into its gills. The fish will try to dive, but without the ability to close its gills it’ll feel pretty uncomfortable doing so, so it’ll mostly just skim around the surface of the water, making you wet and making its back feel quite dry.

You’ll yank on whatever fleshy bits you can get your hands into as hard as you can, struggling to guide the fish towards the shore, anywhere that might allow you to save your friend. The fish will be so powerful, so potent and unaware of its own strength that it will rush through the water, blinded by pain, into the shallows and up onto the shore itself. Beached, the fish will flop, flap, flip you off onto the dirt.

You’ll lay there a moment, gathering your wits as the fish tries to work its way towards the water. You’ll see it in all its splendor now: it’ll be the size of a small car, possessed of splendorous, scintillating scales. It’ll be beyond gorgeous, the single most profound thing you’ll have seen in your entire life. Mutated or not, it’ll be an incredible sight.

At this point there will be two options: you can either let the fish go, let the myth go on for future generations and perhaps let your grandson one day have the same experience that you’ll have that day: a moment where he realized that beneath the surface of everything, however banal or hideous, something beautiful and dangerous lives, something beyond our comprehension.

Or you can end it, kill the fish and go home to your shit life. Your friend will almost certainly already be dead, and you hate your wife so you won’t want to have to worry about fucking her again, so there’s no way you’ll be bringing the fish back with you. It’ll just be a moment in time after you leave the fish’s corpse on the shore, waiting for the buzzards.

You’ll walk back to your car and get your gun.

Congratulations on Catching That Giant Fish!

Congratulations Mexican Mom!

2011-12-16T00:00:00.001-08:00

There are two kinds of Mexican moms, and they’ve both got huge assess. That’s why we love Mexican moms. That, and the fact that if we’re ever in a fight they’ll totally grab a tire iron and beat the living shit out of whoever we’re in a fight with (some of our members volunteer at their kid’s school). But that’s not why we’re writing this.

We’re writing this because today you’re going to be a very special Mexican mom is going to give a very special young man a handjob in the backseat of a Toyota Corolla outside of a Sam’s Club in South Bend, Indiana tonight. It’s going to last about fifteen minutes, involve a lot of spit and end with a kiss. It’ll be super romantic.

Then immediately afterwards you’re going ask the boy if he wants to come home. He’ll be nervous at first, but you’re a great mom, so you’ll be super encouraging and pushy and within another fifteen minutes he’ll be back at her apartment having very, very quiet sex (sock in the mouth) with you while your kids sleep in the adjacent room.

When he comes you’ll let out a long, fulfilled sigh and then roll back over to your side of the bed, dimly aware that a young man just came inside you, oblivious the fact that there could very well be a child preparing to grow in your belly at this very instant. The young man will be unable to think of anything else, and will lay there awake with a boner into the night, wondering if he’s ready to be a dad until you wake up the next day, notice his erection and immediately hop on for round two.

After that, you’ll make breakfast for everyone in the apartment.

Congratulations Mexican Mom!

Congratulations Really Important Soccer Ball!

2011-12-15T00:00:00.000-08:00

Soccer is super popular in South America, and today we’re finally going to be able to give you a feasible explanation as to why. Because today you, a humble soccer ball, are going to kill a South American dictator.

You’ll begin your day, as you usually do, being played with by a group of orphans. These orphans will have recently received a bag of candy, care of the United States Marine Corps and so their kicks will be more energetic than usually (they’ll have eaten).

They’ll be so energetic that their usually listless soccer ball playing will be instead horrifyingly energetic. Where normally they simply bat you about lazily they will now actually be kicking you towards the net. They’ll score several goals, shouting “GOAAAAAAAAAL!” each time you connect with the back of the net.

They’ll kick you with greater and greater force, as if by driving you through the back of the net they’ll be able to escape their shitty lives. One boy will kick you so hard that you’ll soar over the net.

You’ll soar through the air, past the edge of the field and into the open top of the dictator of whatever South American country you’re in. You’ll catch the dictator’s driver in the back of the head and knock him into the steering wheel, making him lose control of the car. He’ll crash into a dynamite factory and kill the dictator instantly as you roll back towards the kids so you can continue the game.

The kids will barely even notice the blast, since they live in one of the explodier countries in South America, but the news will notice, and three weeks from now that little South American country will have a new leader who isn’t quite such a prick. Not the best guy in the world, but nowhere near as bad as the last asshole who was running things, which is a blessing.

Congratulations Really Important Soccer Ball!

Congratulations Ginger Queen!

2011-12-14T00:00:00.000-08:00

You’re a an eight foot tall redhead and you’re queen of the gingers. What does this mean?

This means you hand down decrees to other gingers.

“WE SHALL ONLY DATE OTHER GINGERS IN THE MONTH OF APRIL!” you’ll shout as your pale, formless horde shuffles in front of you.

“Creepy,” one of the gingers of diluted blood will mumble.

You will point to him, or someone near him at least, and the crowd will fall upon your target with ferocious rage, tearing them limb from limb. The crowd will be briefly made less pale by the display, but it won’t last. Their natural, freaky coloring will begin to shine through the blood almost immediately, and the stains will fade away under their luminescence.

“GINGER! GINGER! GINGER!” they’ll shout in unison.

“IT HAS BEGUN!” you’ll shout back at them, signifying the beginning, and the period just before the end of, your reign of terror.

Congratulations Ginger Queen!

Congratulations Vending Machine Bandit!

2011-12-13T00:00:00.000-08:00

Your tools: a sledgehammer and a pair of bandanas.

Your rate of success: prodigious.

You’re the best damn vending machine bandit in the northeastern seaboard and there’s no question. You’ve been through sixteen vending machines in the last four days and all you really do is smash them up and rip all the candy out of them before you smash ‘em up a little more but damned if it doesn’t work wonders.

Some men would take all that candy and stuff their fat faces or try to sell it in high schools, where candy can fetch a high price. Some men would take all their ill-gotten gains and go try to retire somewhere in Europe where vending machines don’t get robbed, but then they’d get greedy and try to pull one last big job where they’d end up getting shot up real bad by European vending machine cops who don’t know how to appropriately use force to subdue vending machine bandits. Some men would just leave the candy on the ground where anyone can take it, even if the people who take it are the kind of evil fucks who don’t deserve any candy, people like CEOs and hedge fund managers who would destroy candy forever if they thought it would make them a little richer.

But you, you grab all that candy and pack it into white trash bags (so the sun doesn’t make it too hot.) Then you drive to various nearby orphanages and you leave the candy, anonymously, under cover of nights, for kids to eat the next day or for nuns to distribute among kids if the orphanage is run by nuns or something. You make sure to pick out all the gross stuff, like Combos and apples, before you leave it.

Today you’re going to pull an especially big job, one that would’ve gotten the Feds on your ass if they gave a shit about vending machine banditry. And you’re going to drop all that candy with the biggest group of orphans of all: the United States Marine Corps.

“Thanks for the candy, mister,” one of the Marines on duty will shout at you as you drive away, waving furiously after you.

You’ll let a single tear fall from your eye as you drive away. That’s all you’ll allow yourself, though, before you start planning the next job.

Congratulations Vending Machine Bandit!

Congratulations Mango Thief!

2011-12-12T00:00:00.000-08:00

You’re a thief and you exclusively steal mangoes.

“Why do you only steal mangoes?” the grocery store owner will ask as you push the gun against the side of his face.

“Man’s got to have principles,” you’ll tell him as you stuff mangoes into your pockets.

“They’re just not that expensive and have very little resale value,” he’ll start telling you, but then you’ll hit him in the face with the butt of your gun to stop him from talking.

Folk’s always gonna try to find something to complain about in life, and you give them that. And so, if only for that reason, you’re a very special sort of man. Plus you give most of your mangoes to orphans and you rarely kill people while stealing mangoes.

That makes you alright by us, mango thief.

Congratulations Mango Thief!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: A Few Steps Backwards!

2011-12-11T00:00:00.000-08:00

Just a brief statement to start this: I’m not sure if there’s an NDA on the build of DotA2 that I played. I don’t recall signing one, and I can’t really imagine a reason for one to be in place given what they’re making, but if this is in violation of any kind of NDA it’ll be coming down immediately. I’ve no desire to violate Valve’s intellectual property by posting something damaging about one of their upcoming projects.

I’d like to tell you that, after playing DotA2, I’m super excited about it. I’d like to tell you that it’s the latest and greatest DotA clone to emerge since the first DotA, the best of all worlds rolled into one. I’d like to say that it learns from all of the previous missteps and improvements that versions since the first DotA have made. I would really, really like to say all of these things.

But I can’t. DotA2 is, for all the hype surrounding it and the resources being funneled towards its completion, kind of a tremendous disappointment. It looks fantastic, don’t get me wrong – heroes, particle effects, landscape and creeps are all visually stunning – but it’s missing quite a bit of the polish that League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth brought to the table. And at the steep asking price attached to it, it’s going to be a pretty tough sell to most players without those basic features they’ve come to expect from their games about controlling a single hero up and down the map.

See, DotA2 is actually little more than a reskin of the original DotA. A lot of the third party tools that were generated for the original DotA, tools like Banlist, for example, have had elements incorporated into the overall design of the new game. But the tools that were selected are old – over half a decade old at this point – and many more appropriate measures of addressing the issues they were created to deal with have since emerged. For example, tracking and rating the number of premature drops that a player makes during a game might’ve been a great way to deal with the issue of leavers back in the days of the original DotA, and it’s still a vital component of managing the issue now. But without other means of addressing the problem, tools like concede and remake votes that allow players to collectively opt to restart or resolve a game, they’re not really a solution. They’re just a punitive measure, and replacing a resolution with a punitive measure is just a way to make your game more tedious for the people who want to play it as it was offered. People who want to engage in antisocial behavior will always find a way to do so; they’ll go to great lengths to do so, in fact.

And without a concede or remake vote to be found in DotA2, they’re actually in a better position than ever to pursue this anti-social behavior. People can trash games with captive audiences, they can grief to their heart’s content and then use whatever quaint loophole they find to continue doing so in another game after souring everyone else’s evening in a quick and dirty forty-five minute asshole session. In my mind there’s no real justification for not including concession in DotA2. It’s not a tool intended to break the game, it’s a tool intended to let players play the game more easily and pleasantly.

And it’s symbolic of the mentality behind the game. Once the game is actually a finished product I’ll sit down and comment on other elements of it, but some pretty basic aspects of DotA2 have, in my mind, almost completely failed at taking in the lessons of games like LoL and HoN (the good lessons, not the micro-transaction lessons). And this is at the forefront of those elements. LoL and HoN both changed the mentality of DotA by putting the player first. They generated systems that were intended to help acclimate new players and provide players in general with a way to self-police themselves within games. They experimented with game types and map types, they’ve experimented with heroes and game balance and mechanics as well. But the most important improvements they’ve made in my mind are improvements on how people approach the game on a social level.

They’ve made it easy to mark assholes as people you don’t want to interact with a second time. They’ve made it easy to make comrades out of your fellow players quickly and easily, and play with them again if you want to. They’ve made it easy to escape unpleasant situations if you want to, and they’ve provided a reasonably easy to use framework for reporting such situations as they emerge. The game of DotA itself has remained relatively inelastic since its inception: it is the tools that allow us to manage the social environment surrounding that game which have changed. DotA2 appears to have ignored these messages, seems to think that DotA is fine as it was. But we aren’t playing in 2006 anymore. There are tools that allow us to avoid unpleasant people and escape from unpleasant environments and we’ve gotten used to using them. And removing them isn’t going to make the problems that made those tools necessities suddenly go away. I worry for DotA2’s future.

Congratulations on Watching the Barn Burn!

2011-12-10T00:00:00.000-08:00

Light it. Light it with gasoline cans stuffed with rags, lit in haste, thrown carelessly. Light it and run away. Run away behind some hay bales and wait. Wait for it to catch.

The cans will explode, gas expanding rapidly, too rapidly for the container holding it. Small amounts of metal will fly about, most of it will dissolve in the fire, the flames moving outward, upward, scaling the wood up to the tin, peeling the paint instantly with their heat. Don’t move, just wait there, just watch it go.

Reach out your hand and let the person you love take it. Bite your lip, it’s not time to kiss them yet. Wait for the fire to surge, to move through the barn, catch the hay, cascade flames upward, inward until they find the propane tanks, boil the liquid in them to gas and the second explosion comes. Then squeeze their hand and pull them close and kiss them. Don’t use your teeth: they’ll already be freaked out by all the explosions, it won’t be a good time to be aggressive. Be tender, be true, be romantic. It’ll be the perfect moment, just the two of you erasing the past for the future.

Go home the next day. Drive to where the barn once stood. File your insurance paperwork in a timely fashion, though not too timely. Remember this moment when you think of leaving the one you love years later, idly scrolling through bus tickets online, doing the math, figuring out if you have enough to make a new life somewhere else.

Congratulations on Watching the Barn Burn!

Congratulations Mechanical Bull!

2011-12-09T00:00:00.000-08:00

True fact: inanimate objects fall in love with people all the time. It’s not that weird. What’s weird is that we don’t talk about it!

For some inanimate objects it can be tougher than others. You, for example, are a mechanical bull who lives and works in a strip club. You fall in like quite often, and far more occasionally love. Today is going to be one of those days.

It’ll begin when a stripper with no panties on mounts you and starts riding away. You’ll feel her privates grinding against your genitals (cruelly placed upon your back by your creators) and you’ll grow excited right away. She won’t notice, because she’s not a mechanical bull, but you’ll be really, really turned on. And when she kisses the front of your chassis you won’t be able to control yourself.

You’ll begin rocking back and forth wildly, even more violently than you usually do. Your rider will shriek with glee as she thrashes about on your head, relishing the violence of her movement, the excitement of the ride. She’ll be so full of joy that her grip will slip slightly and she’ll go flying off of your chassis, over the padded mats that normally keep riders safe and straight into one of the exposed support beams that make the décor of the strip club so tasteful.

The force will crack her skull, shatter her spine and leave her laying there, a limp, dead vessel that once held the being you love. You’ll wish that you were born as something other than a sentient mechanical bull, so that you could weep at the loss of such a lovely creature. But you’ll know that you were not, that you cannot. And you’ll simply rock in place there, trying to figure out a way to hurt yourself so that you can feel something, anything, for just a moment, to distract you from the pain.

Congratulations Mechanical Bull!

Congratulations Girl With Just the Right Number of Piercings!

2011-12-08T00:00:00.000-08:00

Most people don’t have it as good as you. They’ve either got too few piercings (like most of us in the office) or too many piercings (like anyone who self-identifies as goth). But you, you’ve got exactly the right number of piercings in all the right places, and we just wanted to thank you for it.

You’ll probably read this sitting at a coffee shop, sipping on a chai tea that you made yourself. You’ll probably read it while you’re on break. We hope you smile, making that lip ring stand out even more than usual against the outline of your mouth.

Then we hope you get back to making coffee, because as much as we want to celebrate you for looking so adorable and having just the right amount of metal in your body we kind of hate the way that Monika makes our lattes, and we’d really prefer if you did it.

Congratulations Girl With Just the Right Number of Piercings!

Congratulations Mongoose Smuggler!

2011-12-07T00:00:00.000-08:00

Everyone’s gotta live somewhere and everybody’s gotta make a living. And the southwest part of America with all those rocks and mountains and shit, it’s got a lot of snakes. So what better way to make a living than to come down there and bring in something to deal with those snakes than to bring in something to deal with all those snakes? Something safe and natural and kinda cute when you’re not up too close to it? You figured there couldn’t never be a downside to bringing in mongooses and letting people buy them from you. They’d get to protect their property and get a cute animal to keep them company, you’d get to keep the lights and the heat on. Nobody gettin’ hurt, nobody losin’ nothin’ in the trade.

If only the government saw it that way. The Feds have been bird dogging you a while now, and while you’re pretty savvy you’re also proud. So whenever they make an obvious challenge, like when they have a special mongoose exhibit at a museum in Tuscon or something, you always show up to rub the Feds noses in the fact that they can’t catch you.

But as it turns out the Feds aren’t the biggest problem. Mexican cartel runners love snakes for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to us at this point, and they haven’t been happy with your campaign to eliminate snakes from their ancestral snaking grounds. So yesterday they captured your boyfriend (you’re gay by the way) and today you’re going to get him back and in order to do so you’re going to have to get the assistance of those Federales that have been trying to take you down for a good long while.

“This is bigger than me,” you’ll tell them, which is true because you’ll be assisting them in taking down a Mexican drug cartel and all you do is smuggle mongooses into a place where they aren’t native, but don’t really have a significant impact on the ecosystem.

“I know,” the Fed who took over for the Fed you used to sleep with will tell you. He’ll be a lot more professional than that other guy, a fact illustrated by the way he totally ignores your technically illegal but mostly just moronic activities.

“Good,” you’ll nod back at him. Then the two of you will formulate an elaborate strategy to rescue your beau involving mongooses, which the Fed will pretend to agree to in order to get you to go along with his real plan: using your fake plan as a distraction and then killing all of the cartel members with snipers and hoping you and your boyfriend don’t die in the confusion. If the two of you die, they’ll have to do a lot more paperwork, and this guy hates doing paperwork. Either way, you’re proving your love for someone and doing some good in the world today, and it’s been a while since you did either of those things.

Congratulations Mongoose Smuggler!

Congratulations Philanderer!

2011-12-06T00:00:00.000-08:00

There’s no denying it: you love the shit out of the ladies. You love all their lady parts: their boobies, their va-jay-jays, their bumbums. You even love their pee holes, which, as you are always quick to point out, are separate from their va-jay-jays. But not everyone knows it.

So today, after totaling making it with the boss lady that you sometimes put your peener in (your Aunt Carla, but she’s like a family friend aunt, not a blood relative, so it’s cool) you’re going to go out into the quad of the college campus where you live and, on a megaphone, announce how much you love the ladies to the world.

“I LOVE THEIR SKIN!” your voice will boom. “IT’S REALLY SMOOTH, EVEN WITHOUT MAKEUP USUALLY. LIKE SMOOTHER THAN A GUY’S, EVEN WHEN THE GIRL HAS PIMPLES.”

People will be passing you by for the most part, but as you go on they’ll clump together, stop, and listen.

“I LIKE HOW THEY SMELL,” you’ll declare. “EVEN WHEN THEY SMELL KIND OF BAD IT’S STILL SORT OF NICE!”

At this point young women will start smiling at you. They’ll start checking twitter on their i-phones to see if they can follow you and a select few will begin rubbing their crotches sensually as they listen. But it won’t all be roses. Their boyfriends will, to a man, begin cracking their knuckles and looking at you like they want to beat you up.

“THEIR LIPS ARE REALLY SOFT!” you’ll whisper into the megaphone, an awkward half boner surging into your pants. “I KIND OF WANT TO KISS EVERY GIRL AT LEAST ONCE TO MAKE SURE THAT ONE’S TRUE FOR EVERYONE, SINCE I CAN’T ALWAYS TELL BY LOOKING.”

At this point the women will lose all composure and mob you, grabbing your limbs and tearing your clothes off. The women, and by this we mean the entire college campus surrounding you, will then take turns having sex with you while their boyfriends look on, upset and perplexed. Each girl will make sure that, while you’re inside of her, she takes the time to kiss you and whisper her name in your ear softly, so that only you can hear it. Some of the girls will whisper their True Names, the names you can use to capture their souls in gemstones.

Their boyfriends will all consider beating you up, but they’ll fear a mass collective reprisal from their ladies, so they’ll decide that that probably isn’t the best idea. After all, they can’t all be dumped by their girlfriends for you, and if they freak out all jealous-like they’ll almost certainly be dumped at least a little.

When the orgy ends you’ll squeak “Thank you,” into the megaphone, let it ring out in the courtyard and the ladies will tweet about how much fun they had. You’ll lay there on your back a good long while, thinking about what just happened, about the walk back to your dorm room and just what you’re going to tell Aunt Carla about what you did today.

Congratulations Philanderer!

Congratulations on Finding Your Man All Over Again!

2011-12-05T00:00:00.001-08:00

Worried about your marriage? Confused about how to bring the spark back into it after all these years? Here’s an idea: hire a skinhead to beat you with a pool cue until the memory center of your brain is so damaged that you lose the last decade and a half of your memory and believe that you’re still a junior in college.

When you wake up from your coma you’ll be in a hospital bed, alone and disoriented. Before the doctor has a chance to inform you of just what has happened you’ll leap out of the bed, ripping off your heart monitor in the process and triggering an alarm. Then you’ll throw your arms up in the air and scream “SPRING BREAK!” at the top of your lungs, the way you always used to when you were in college (you were kind of an idiot) and run out of the room, gown flapping around you. You’ll run as hard and fast as you can, which will leave you totally winded by the time you reach the end of the hallway.

You’ll pause in the waiting room, hands on your knees, bent over, flashing your ass to an entire hospital. You’ll want to vomit a little on the floor, head spinning, but you’ll just heave for a few seconds there, jaws aching, throat opening and closing in vain. Then you’ll look up and take in the room around you, the bevy of people staring at you.

One of them will catch your eye: an older gentleman in a suit and tie, nice shoes, jacket off, looking nervous, kind of desperate. He’ll make you think of a sexy professor, sort of. He’ll be your husband, but you won’t know that (remember, you’ll have mentally regressed to being a junior in college). You’ll just know you want him inside you. You’ll walk up to him and run your tongue along your lips, which will be super super dry.

“Hey there,” you’ll say, brushing up against him so that your vagina kind of touches the top of his leg. “Waiting for someone?”

He’ll look at you like you’re crazy, then nod. You’ll flutter your eyes at him and place your hand on the side of his face.

“Is it me?” you’ll ask. He’ll nod emphatically this time and you’ll smile and pat the side of his face before dragging him off to a supply closet, where you’ll have sex with him while the doctor and orderlies search for you. Later on, after you’ve emerged and the doctors explain your condition to him he’ll feel awful, like he just took advantage of a young woman and cheated on you at the same time. But then, later on, the two of you will learn to incorporate role play into your sex and this will become a huge trigger for the both of you, so don’t stress over it!

Congratulations on Finding Your Man All Over Again!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Still Not Done With Skyrim!

2011-12-04T00:00:00.000-08:00

I still don’t know how close I am to finishing Skyrim, and I’m now 80 hours into it. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the central quest line at this point, and I’ve really only tackled a handful of major quest lines. I’ve purchased houses in two cities and finished two sets of guild quests. I’ve uncovered a conspiracy at the heart of a city and liberated a war criminal. I’ve been trying to cure my lycanthropy, but it doesn’t seem to be going too well for me right now. And I’ve been looking for a Necklace of Mara to give to a Aela so that she’ll settle down with me and we can start making some half-scaly, half-regular babies, but to no avail.

This is kind of the heart of Skyrim, of Elder Scrolls games in general: distraction, rather than guidance, is the order of the day. And that’s actually kind of great. Since Daggerfall the games have been less about what you’re supposed to do and more about the staggering array of options available to you in the world on offer. For the most part the series has just improved the fidelity and accessibility of the material as time has gone on, rather than really expanding it overmuch. There aren’t a lot of options that haven’t been around for many, many games at this point: the ability to acquire property, the ability to improve your own equipment, being able to marry characters, become a member of a guild and so on, you’ve been able to do most of these things since Daggerfall, at least. In fact, sometimes features are lost in a new Elder Scrolls offering and the world of possibilities shrinks a little. Oblivion and Morrowwind, for example, didn’t let you form relationships with NPCs. In fact, I’m confident that Oblivion got rid of your ability to become a werewolf altogether, a crucial part of many storylines in previous iterations.

The skill based leveling, the way that magic functions and the way that you chose stat bonuses, these were qualities that Elder Scrolls titles before Skyrim had kept consistent but they weren’t the core of the game itself. They were its delivery system. The experiences themselves formed that core, the wealth of cool shit you could do in Tamriel was the real driving force behind each of the games. And while fidelity has always increased from game to game, the degree of cool shit has remained inelastic at best, at times shrinking as the game progresses. That is, until Skyrim.

Skyrim has some problems, to be sure. It features a simplified system of character development and combat, wherein difficult decisions really don’t have to be made: you really can be a jack of all trades, there’s no sort of upkeep or grind for your equipment and the major and minor skill system which previously controlled leveling and the speed at which skills increased is gone, lost in favor of a set of stones that allow you to pick and choose which skill set you want to raise faster at any given time. In doing so, Skyrim has abandoned a number of things that would’ve been considered key Elder Scrolls features in the past, but it has also accomplished something wonderful. It cut through a lot of the bullshit of playing the game and made experiencing the world that much more approachable. And this more approachable corner of Tamriel is jam packed with cool shit that you couldn’t do in previous Elder Scrolls adventures. If you want to dual wield, you can. For the first time ever you can have companions at your side. You can make your hand into a fucking flamethrower, for fuck’s sake. And you can fight dragons, use your voice as a weapon and fight in a revolution that reshapes the entire game world.

I understand why die-hard fans might not like the mechanical changes: they’re a big step away from what was a previously consistent element of a venerable series. They dumb down a system which people would ply painstaking mathematic formulas to in order to develop the best character, a system people really loved. But much as I loved it, I have to admit I sometimes found that system of character progression to be kind of oppressive. In order to make the character I wanted to play I had to invest a lot of time and effort in gaming that progression system, effort that I’ve put into exporing the world in Skyrim.

Which brings me back to the scale of the game, the scope of its distraction. Skyrim is full of details, so full of them that I’m not sure I’ll be able to actually ever experience everything the game has on offer. And many of its details are things I don’t want to engage on my first playthrough, like picking a side between Imperials and Stormcloaks. Skyrim is full of places, more so than anywhere else I’ve been in a video game, ever, spare possibly Morrowwind. I don’t just mean that it’s big, though the world is quite large. I mean that the world has a lot going on in it, that it is densely populated and interesting in a way that other places normally aren’t. Each tiny hamlet, each ramshackle camp, is possessed of a story all its own, not just a single quest line but a history, a branch of quests that twine into the surrounding world and sometimes make their way back to distant places, places you’ve already been with histories you’ve already been a part of.

The end result is a flowing, shifting world where your actions, which are as robust as they’ve ever been in any Elder Scroll’s game, more than most of the recent releases, have meaningful impact, where you can make a name for yourself and change the world around you. Sure, there are technical problems (the giant-death bug where you’re launched into the skybox remains one of my personal favorites) but in any game with the sheer scope that Skyrim has, you have to accept a modicum of bugginess. When physics act a bit odd, there’s nothing wrong with it. However, when the scripting language bugs out the immersion breaks a bit. I’ve had to use console commands to complete a major quest which has a history of breaking early on (the Thieves Guild quest line, specifically) and a character who dramatically sacrifices himself in battle is now sitting in the Companion Hall again, ready to give me quests as often as he feels like it. The fact that things like this happen is a problem, bigger than a handful of bugs that make the game a little wackier than intended.

But with all that said, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a wonderful place to take a very, very lazy vacation, and I still think that, for allowing you to become a part of a world, to relax there and build it up or break it down as you wish to, there’s no better game at present. I can’t wait to finish enough of it that I’m comfortable writing a fuller and more formal review of it.

Congratulations Hilarious Executive!

2011-12-03T00:00:00.000-08:00

You’re an executive and you’re hilarious.

“Stock prices are down,” you’ll say, before letting a snake out of a can of corn nuts.

The board room will go crazy, doubling over with laughter.

“Thank you,” you’ll tell them. Then you’ll shoot yourself in the temple to escape the shame of running a failing company.

They’ll all continue laughing until you’ve been dead for almost a full minute. Then one of them will stumble up to you and shake you. Then he’ll realize what’s happened and laugh even harder.

“Always was such a great joker,” he’ll say as he picks the gun up out of your hand, cleans it off and shoots himself in the temple to make it look like murder suicide instead of just murder.

The rest of the board room will follow suit in order of seniority until only one person, a junior executive in the company, remains laughing hysterically at what has transpired.

Congratulations Hilarious Executive!

Congratulations Asteroid Kid!

2011-12-02T00:00:00.000-08:00

“This is a terrible idea,” your commander’s voice will crackle at you through the headset.

“You are!” you’ll shout back, even though your microphone will be turned off at this point.

You’ll flash back to all of those moments during your training where you thought about giving up, where you didn’t think you’d make it here. Then you’ll remember where you are: with a lasso tied to the surface of an asteroid, your feet planted on it, swinging a cowboy hat around as it begins re-entry. Everything you’ve done has all been to this end.

“Yee-haw!” you’ll shout as it starts getting warmer around you from the friction of entering the atmosphere.

“Shit!” you’ll shout as your suit begins to melt away.

You’ll die horribly a few seconds later, every ounce of your body burned away, but in the future you’ll be held up as a legend to other astronauts, an example of the dangers of chasing your dreams, but a handful of less-bright students will hold you up as a legend, as someone who never took no for an answer and never stopped dreaming. They’ll think you’re still out there somewhere, riding another asteroid, but the reality will be that you aren’t, of course, that you’re dead and that your body was burned so horribly that it’ll never appear again, which is just as good as being immortal if you think about it.

Congratulations Asteroid Kid!

Congratulations Fashion Icon!

2011-12-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

Fashion draws from many strange places. The movie Zoolander, for example, posited a fake fashion movement called Derelicte based on the way homeless people dressed. This was based on a real fashion line generated by a very rich crazy person who lives in New York.

We say this because you’re a homeless person, and because the rags you clothe yourself in are, today and just today, going to suddenly become very, very gauche. It’ll all start when a man with a fake mole and a top hat on takes your picture outside of a very popular fashion show, mistaking you, in your incredible slimness, for a model.

“Oh my gawd!” he’ll shriek as he photographs you. “So raw!”

Twenty minutes later a group of fashionistas in a white, unmarked van will pull up outside the corner where you live and storm out, grabbing a hold of you and drag you back inside their van. They’ll cover you in cocaine, light a cigarette, ram it into your mouth and then start shouting at you.

You won’t be able to discern most of what they say, it’ll overlap so severely, but you’ll catch a few phrases that inform you that “you’re a model now.” You’ll nod dumbly at this declaration, as if it should be obvious by now.

You’ll be pushed from the van as it speeds by the fashion show, hitting the ground and rolling a few times before you come to a stop by the curb. A group of women dressed in black will stumble over and grab you like they’ve done this many a time before, dragging you through the doors of the fashion show and backstage, where they’ll look you over briefly, shake their heads and push you out on stage.

Once you’re up there you’ll look around in a dazed fashion, then stumble down the catwalk, unsure of exactly what you’re doing or where you are. When you reach the end the crowd will cheer as you shuffle around so that you’re walking back towards the backstage area. The crowd will surge as you return backstage, making you feel like you’d eaten (though you won’t have eaten in several days).

When you settle in behind the scenes in a nice quiet place a man will shove a contract in front of you and tell you to sign it.

“You’ll get money and a place to live,” he’ll mumble at you.

“Hot dog…” you’ll moan before illegibly signing and beginning your meteoric rise in the fashion world as the rawest of all models.

You’ll be dead within two months of a cocaine overdose, but it’s going to be one hell of a ride!

Congratulations Fashion Icon!

Congratulations Wolverine Tamer!

2011-11-30T00:00:00.001-08:00

You’ll be struggling to pick up your glass with your stumps when she comes up behind you and lifts it for you, bringing it to your lips. You’ll sip deeply from it and then nod at her as she brings it back down to the bar top for you.

“Thanks,” you’ll say.

She’ll wink at you and smile. “Looks like you’ve got a few stories,” she’ll say, pointing at your stumps. You’ll shrug and smirk.

“Wolverine tamer. Comes with the work.”

She’ll learn over the bar at you, cleavage glaring down at you. You’ll suddenly realize, just as you do every time you’re in this situation, that this is the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen. Her tongue will dart out from behind her pearly whites and lick around her lips before eventually lolling back down into her drink. After she takes a swig, a long powerful one, she’ll exhale and speak.

“My daddy was a wolverine tamer,” she’ll murmur. “Always liked the kind.”

You’ll raise your stump to show that you want the check and then have the bartender sign your name for you. Then you’ll rush the little lady out of the bar and into the parking lot, where the two of you will enter the car you own that uses your eye movement to help you drive (you get into a lot of accidents). Then you’ll drive fast as you can back to your apartment, where she’ll strap in and ride on your giant, wolverine scratched cock for the rest of the night.

Sometimes it’s good to be a wolverine tamer who attracts emotionally damaged women. Sometimes.

Congratulations Wolverine Tamer!