Congratulations on the Success of Your Niche Porn Site!

You’ve been incredibly unsatisfied with the state of internet erotica over the last few years. Its all gangbangs and choking and face-fucking; sexual brutality at its worst. There’s no heart to it, no subtly or synapse.

Which is why you’ve decided to toss your hat into the ring. Over the last few months you’ve been laying the groundwork for a hot new site. It’s called Jizz in My Jeans (JIMJ for short) and you think it captures all that contemporary porn lacks.

It consists exclusively of men and women, still fully or partially clothed, engaging in foreplay. The theme, as the site’s name implies, is that the man comes before any explicit sex act is performed.

You’ve been recruiting talent, filming videos and writing ad copy and, come Thursday of this week, the site is going to go live. The first week will be, as you expected, slow. People will still be watching Interracial BBW Gangbangs™ instead of your cerebral, startlingly well shot porn.

But your marketing director will come up with a great tagline, “Want to Jizz in Your Jeans?” It’ll be plastered on banners all over the internet, and you’ll almost immediately see an upturn in traffic. It’ll be like the Penny-Arcade effect, except it won’t go through the slowdown cycle.

Traffic will just increase and increase. As you acquire more subscribers you’ll find yourselves forced to upgrade your servers to meet demand within a month. In two months you’ll be able to retire on the money you’ve made, but you’ll be so enthralled by your success that you won’t want to.

You’ll be high on the act of creation, and you’ll make groundbreaking film after groundbreaking film, and you won’t ever want to stop. This year you’ll sweep the AVNs, much to the chagrin of actor-producers like Brandon Irons and Ron Jeremy.

You’ll show up on stage in a t-shirt tux with beautiful women dressed in casual clothes on each arm. The first thing you’ll say into the microphone?

“I just jizzed in my jeans.”

You are a class act, my friend. Keep up the good work and congratulations on the success of your niche porn site.

Congratulations Tosser!

Hey. What’s up. Look, we’re super hungover, so we’d like to get this one out as fast as we can.

Your name is Franklin, you’re a gay American and you’re vacation in Britain. This is old news to you. After all, you’ve been there for around three weeks now on a “work visa.”

But the only real work you’ve been doing is between the thighs of various men, performing sex acts, free of charge. After all, you’re only here for a few months, so why not? Its not like you’ll ever see them again.

But tomorrow night you’re going to run into Kelly.

Kelly is the one girl you thought you’d switch for back in high school. She was smart, aggressive, balls out gorgeous, and very selective. And since you’ve always had a bit of a weight problem she was way the fuck out of your league back then.

You were tearing through women back in the day, thinking that if you found the right one it might make you feel right instead of giving you the fuck and run instinct you’ve always had. You had the charisma, you had the drive, and you had the ability to convince yourself you were right. But it never took, and you always felt drawn to Kelly.

When you see her in Trafalgar’s you’ll feel like you just got a new lease on life. The introduction will be brief, but it won’t feel awkward at all. She’ll remember you immediately and her smile will come natural and beautiful as the sun.

She’ll only be there for two weeks, and her hostel will be on the other side of Hyde Park from you, but you’ll still hike your pudgy ass over there every god damn morning to greet her and take her to tourist hubs.

You’ll drag her from bar to bar and pub to pub. Occasionally you’ll even visit a British club together. At one point you’ll smoke weed and almost kiss.

And then she’ll be gone. For two whole weeks your mom would’ve been proud. She could’ve said you had a girlfriend, and it would’ve been true in its own way.

If you were a better man you’d hike out to her hostel and beg her to stay. You’d tell her you love her. You’d tell her you’re bisexual and that you’ve largely approached men as sexual partners because you’ve never met a woman who could live up to the standard she’d set in your mind.

But you aren’t. So instead you’ll sit on the Millenium Bridge. You’ll consider leaping over the suicide guards and crashing into the Thames. In your head it’ll be the most important thing you could do, a perfect coda to your cowardly life.

But you won’t be able to do it. Instead you’ll fly home, a week and a half and three sexual partners later, and start looking for temp work.

Eventually you’ll acquire enough capital, with the aid of your parents and your job, to start a small pet groom service. With time you’ll come to acquire a partner named Dan.

Dan will accept you for who you are and what you want to be. He’ll never look down on you and he will make you feel good whenever he can. Dan has had his heart broken many times, and he sees that you are good at heart but that you are ultimately afraid.

You will never come to love Dan as he loves you, but you will appreciate him and make him feel appreciated and that will be enough. The two of you will live to a ripe old age, grooming dogs until around sixty five when you start to shut down shop and just live for a change, the way you did when you were twenty-three.

You will think about Kelly every day, and Dan will know. He won’t mind. He knows that he’s your rock, and that whatever happens what the two of you have will remain intact.

When you die, you’ll kiss him on the mouth without having uttered a single syllable of Kelly Trelawney’s name before you breath your last into him and he grabs you, shivering with tears.

He always was too good for you.

But you’ll never see her after she left you in Stansted, smiling and waving, heading to meet her boyfriend in Amsterdam. You wish you knew what had happened, but time makes fools of us all.

Dan will smile, though, knowing that in the end he had you last and that your last thoughts truly were of him. And he’ll be right. In the end, Dan beat you.

Congratulations tosser.

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Genodical Maniacs!

A lot of first person shooters involve battles of genocidal proportions. I never really thought about it until I listened to Penny-Arcade’s Tycho and Gabe discussing Army of Two, but it could be said of almost any shooter. Over the course of the game you’re going to end up killing a lot of people. An incredibly large number, really.

There are exceptions, certainly. The early Rainbow Six games, for example, were harshly realistic. If you tried to act like a walking murder factory in those games you’d end up riddled with holes. Instead they demanded careful tactics and the judicious use of your a small force to wipe out a group of enemies who were rarely overwhelming in number.

But nowadays you can’t play a first person shooter without having to mow your way through legions of baddies. Think of every arbitrary machine gun segment in every military FPS you’ve played in the last two years. Think of all the rooms filled with three to four guards you have to pass through in “stealth” missions. Think of all those poor Combine soldiers killed in the line of duty in Half-Life 2. Where do they keep finding these guys, anyway? There don’t seem to be that many people left, but they’ve got an army of those fuckers coming at you out of the woodwork.

Even in multiplayer matches, our genocidal progress is how we measure our FPS prowess. Eventually it comes down to the all important kill-death ratio. How many can you take down before they catch up (and they will catch up, just you wait). Even relatively conservative games, such as Counterstrike, hold up a two to one ratio or better as a golden standard. If you pull a 17 to 1 or a 35 to 2 you should probably be playing for a living.

And this mentality persists in other genres. Real-time strategy games are almost all based around tossing man after man into a meat grinder in order to kill more of the enemy’s tiny soldiers than you’re losing. Again, there are exceptions, Myth and Dawn of War 2, to be specific, but most RTSes are based around killing as many little dudes as you can so that you can have free reign to destroy buildings with your remaining dudes.

And stealth games, even games which encourage players to expressly avoid killing such as the Thief series, involve leaving a trail of bodies a mile wide. Especially if you perceive the blackjack of Thief outside of the game’s explanation and in the context of its performance, where it stops being a non-violent implement and simply becomes a silent one hit kill weapon with some stringent use requirements.

So games encourage people to kill, to eliminate opponents. It’s almost everywhere, and its not that odd when you really think about it. After all, games are all about challenges. And what better way to offer up a challenge with both mental and emotional heft than to put players in mortal engagement after mortal engagement. But it is odd that we don’t think about it or discuss it more often.

Consider the Master Chief. He’s a heroic figure, fighting to keep Earth safe from alien zealots. But he accomplishes his goal not through savvy or subterfuge, but brute force. He’s a blunt implement, and a huge one at that. Think of all those poor Grunts, scrabbling to escape your grenades. You kill thousands of those little fuckers one after another without batting an eyelash. And then there are the Jackals, those poor, servile Jackals, and those noble Elites, simply fighting for what they believe in. The Brutes even have their good points, but you kill them by the truckload.

It doesn’t take much work to shift the Master Chief from noble defender to genocidal maniac with a little slice of racist in there. Yes, I know he has a black friend, but come on. That’s such a cop out. And its not an unreasonable subject to think about in the game’s context and think about how people who don’t constantly murder for a living survive in this world, the way that I Love Bees did.

This logic can be extended to almost any setting. Thief: Deadly Shadows has you literally annihilating the last remnant of an ancient culture in order to steal a sentient crown (on a side note, I love being able to say sentient crown, and would like to genuinely thank Thief: DS and its development team from allowing me that luxury). Resident Evil 4 involves methodically wiping out the entire population of a Spanish fishing village, with a careful eye towards resource management, then moving on to other exotic locations where you methodically remove more local inhabitants. Add in to that that you’re doing so to save a spoiled, rich white girl with connections and the game suddenly takes on a sinister air (assuming you ignore the part about mind-controlling centipede things).

Call of Duty 4 involves killing enough people in various locales to beg the question, where do they keep finding recruits for these suck-ass armies? Do they just have incredible health benefits or something? The earlier Call of Duty games involve killing enough Nazis by yourself to turn the tide of the war right there. Far Cry 2’s supply of mercenaries is literally endless, and you’re almost always going to have to kill every last one of them in a variety of fun, inventive ways. Play Time Splitters and you’ll be wiping out populations in various exotic locales and epochs to “save the world.” You’ll also be doing your damnedest to eradicate a totally inexplicable race of hilarious aliens, but whatever. And don’t even get me started on World of Goo, forcing us to kill all those poor, flammable goo balls. It makes my heart heavy just to think of it.

Innumerable foes of all shapes and sizes populate so many games, and so many times it makes no sense outside of the game’s internal logic. It’s simply the way things must be in order for the game to be as fun as possible. But it’s worth noting and thinking about, and when games do so they improve vastly.

Enter Left4Dead.

There’s been some criticism levied at Left4Dead, and rightly so. The game play is crazy repetitive and there are only four campaigns at around one to two hours each which, after you’ve beaten them, probably won’t be revisited by casual players. There are only seven different guns, three of which are just “upgrades” of other arms. There’s very little differentiation, in general, in the game play, and this is a problem for a lot of people.

This is coming from someone who, to this day, still plays Left4Dead on Expert and in Versus when he has the time, by the way. And in Left4Dead’s defense, I would like to mention that the dynamism offered by the Director, which makes replaying the game a lot of fun and is just incredibly cool from a technological perspective. But I digress.

Left4Dead is sort of unique in another way, as well: it actually offers a reasonable context for its traditional video game violence. In Left4Dead, life is quaintly precious. You are, after all, simply fighting to survive, and the people around you are soulless zombies. Even the Resident Evil games didn’t capture the oppressive and fearsome soullessness of zombie apocalypse as well as Left4Dead did.

Unlike in say, Call of Duty, the people you’re killing in Left4Dead really don’t have families anymore. They don’t have a culture of their own, and they’re actively destroying any surviving culture or intelligence simply by existing. Sure, they might’ve had parents at one point, but they’re so inhuman and you can inhabit Romero’s film and thinking of them, not as individuals with motivations, hopes and dreams and instead walking obstacles, hell bent on removing as much flesh from your bones as possible.

This is the only context where video game violence really holds up with external logic: you’re not fighting for a cause against people of other ideologies, and you’re not engaging thinking opponents. You’re just scrabbling as hard as you can to survive, to reach safety. And for this, I think Left4Dead deserves some praise, because in presenting us with a reasonable context for video game violence, it also casts a light on the absurdity of other contexts.

Is it really effective to mow down insurgents in order to accomplish your goal of moving across a city? Is putting the last shovel full of dirt over the bones of fish-person society really the thing to be doing, from both a moral and financial perspective? Wouldn’t the Combine consider listening to their supplicants’ complaints after losing the first thousand or so troops to one PHD who never even finished his post-doc? Left4Dead doesn’t raise any of these questions. You’re moving towards safety the only way you know how, and zombies are in your way. You’re not part of anything bigger than that.

I love all the games I’ve used as examples, and I don’t think that video game violence is bad, or stupid, or that it takes away from the experience of playing games. But I do think it warrants discussion and consideration. Video game violence is so often on an epic scale, and with good reason. We play games to experience stories, and bigger stories are usually more interesting. But the violence in these games, and our response to it, is something we need to consider if we ever want to sit at the big-boy’s table, art-wise. It’s no different than discussing Hemmingway’s misogyny or Stein’s pretension. It’s a part of the works we love.

Congratulations on Writing the Greatest Novel Ever Written!

You’re a young mob doctor and you live a pretty interesting life. Your work, in and of itself, is incredibly engaging and the people you find yourself interacting with both inside and outside of the mafia are fascinating individuals who could each have an entire book written about them.

Which is why your wife won’t be surprised in the least when you start writing a novel based loosely around your life. You’ll write it from the perspective of several characters: a defense attorney you oversaw the torture of, a reticent soldier you once removed three bullets from and an aging Don who feared that he would leave nothing but a legacy of violence and greed who you mercy killed some time ago.

They will form the center of a rich, ficticious web which you will weave. It will be given authenticity by your experiences, and eventually you’ll find yourself inserted into it in odd places. Your fear for your family’s safety will be reflected in the attorney, your grim resignation to a life beyond your control in the soldier. As was the case when you helped him find some peace, you’ll find more and more that you have quite a lot in common with the Don.

Eventually this encroaching age will become an overarching theme, and you’ll have made a book about what it means not just to live in the world of organized crime, but to live in a senseless world where men only grow older, not wiser. You’ll have written about a world where human life is slowly but surely becoming more commodified and disconnected, a world where people with incredible power are powerless.

Eventually you’ll insert a few section breaks from the perspective of the wife of the attorney, and the whole thing will fall together. You’ll have written a novel which flawlessly and unpretentiously captures both the wonder and horror of living in the present day, of straddling worlds as we all do and feeling out of place in all of them.

Your wife will read it and begin weeping before she embraces you. Your children will struggle through it, coming to see you in a new light. The soldier will read it and see himself reflected in your words, and become inspired to write his own novel, which will become the second greatest novel ever written, in the natural course of things. And your publisher will read it and call the Don’s son, who is a sociopath.

Once he catches wind that you were planning on putting him and his old man in some fruity, fancy pants book, he’ll have you executed in your sleep. If not for your lengthy service he would’ve also killed your wife and children, but instead he’ll just have them beaten by professional thugs.

The only suggestions we have for you here are to either find a new publisher who isn’t connected to Penguin and therefore the mob, or to put another copy of the manuscript in a safe so that it will go to the police, who can see to it that it will get the attention and publication it deserves after your death.

Whatever happens, congratulations on completing the greatest novel ever written. It taught us a lot about ourselves.

Congratulations Feminism!

You’re a Born Again Pastor with a mean streak a mile wide, a strong misogynistic opinions and a taste for whores. Cheryl is a woman’s rights activist from San Diego with a chip on her shoulder, a pretty face, and a steel-trap mind.

The two of you will meet in a hotel bar just a few miles from the Tucson airport. You’ll be on a lecture tour throughout what you call the “Real United States™” and she’ll have known you were coming.

She’ll have been waiting for a full day after she bribed your personal assistant to find out where you were staying, establishing herself as a lady of the evening in transit to parts unknown, just trying to scare up a little cash. She’ll have staged a man-friend of hers coming to visit and soliciting her for sex to make them think she was taking Johns (he’s actually just a fuck buddy) so that when you take her up to your room none of your entourage will think anything of it.

And you will take her up to your room. She’ll be the single most entrancing woman you’ve ever met, far more interesting than the sullen, slow-witted whore that you married. And what’s more she’ll be elusive, despite her price tag. Her mind, her identity, will evade you at every turn. She’ll talk like a prostitute and pontificate like a Berkley scholar in equal measure.

Perhaps part of her charm will come from your relative exhaustion. You’ll have just finished up a long, ranting tirade on why women, blacks, Jews, and gays are destroying the economy through the displeasure they visit upon Jesus Christ, our lord and savior, praise him, Amen, and it will have taken a lot out of you. It’ll be the speech’s premiere, and you give your all when you roll out a new speech.

And you knocked this one out of the park. There wasn’t a person within a mile of you who didn’t feel a mind searing rage before you were done, either against you or the fictional people you screamed about, and that’s what you love.

Cheryl won’t have known it was your first night giving a new, more hateful speech a try, but it’ll make the whole thing that much more worthwhile. Cheryl will begin her night by videotaping the two of you having brief, awkward sex (the best kind, am I right?! Seriously, though, take a class). Then she’ll give you some drugged whiskey which, as a misogynist, you’ll have requested and you’ll be out like a light.

This will give her the time and access she needs to arrange for your suicide. She’ll forge a scribbled note in a perfect re-creation of your writing and then insert a lethal dose of heroin into your body. It won’t be pretty.

When the sun rises you’ll be dead in a hotel bed, the shades still drawn, housekeeping waiting patiently to enter the room and remove the sheets to wash the mottled sex off of them. They’ll be waiting there until two in the afternoon and Cheryl, whose name is actually Sarah, will be long gone. Before the day’s end, so will your reputation and all the work you’ve done in the name of intolerance. Your followers will attribute your death to the devil’s presence in your new hate speech. Your opponents will see it as just deserts and the product of repressed desires under a thin veneer of morality. But they’ll both be a little sad.

They’ve both lost a man who made their lives simpler and gave them a symbol to rally around. Now if they want to engage in water-cooler conversation they’ll have to try their hand at rational discussion, something most people who watch you are incapable of.

So there’s only one true winner here: the rights of women everywhere. Congratulations feminism!

Congratulations Zombie!

You and your friend Sam will be at the Lyn-Lake Rainbow Foods at three in the morning. You often find yourselves there, stoned off your asses and buying Ben and Jerry’s so you can eat it while you watch Jay and Silent Bob and giggle to one another about how much cooler people who smoke pot too often are than everyone else.

You’ll be shuffling down the isles, considering some Shark Bites fruit snacks to go with those Cooler Ranch Doritos you’ve selected when you’ll notice a young man running through the store.

It will be Reggie, the manager, who normally just looks at you like you’re human waste. But tonight his eyes will be wide with panic as he races past, gasping. He’ll be muttering “What the fuck” over and over to himself. You’re really high, so you’ll giggle at first thinking that Reggie is totally wigging out.

But after a few moments standing there, thinking about your snack food choices it’ll dawn on you. Reggie couldn’t have been wigging out. He’s a square, doesn’t smoke pot, and therefore simply could not wig.

You’ll explain this to Sam in a series of monosyllabic grunts that the two of you have fine tuned into some retarded working system of communication and he’ll nod in response and suggest that the two of you investigate the cause of his distress.

When you come to the front of the store you’ll see that it has been overrun by shambling corpses in various states of decay. “Bro,” you’ll say to Sam, indicating that this is an unthinkable scenario, one which rattles your perception of reality to its core.

Sam will nod, indicating that he is also shaken, but remains comforted by your friendship and the support you offer. The two of you will hold hands for a moment and squeeze, briefly becoming lost in each others eyes.

Unfortunately this momentary distraction, lasting around two minutes in length, will be long enough for those zombies to get their teeth and claws into Sam, drawing him into their mass and devouring him as he screams horribly. You’ll try to pull him out, but all that you’ll get for your trouble is a nasty bite on the arm.

You’ll shout his name, then flee down the isles to the back of the store, where you take shelter within the walk-in freezer. Your entire body will be numb in there before long, with the exception of your arm.

The bite there will be throbbing and giving off the most intense heat you’ve ever experienced. It won’t hurt, per sec, but it’ll feel as if your life is leaking out through the wound. It will also have a strange warming effect on you.

Fearful that you will have become infected you’ll engage in your standard emergency medical procedure, smoking the last of your stash. Good and proper stoned, you’ll reflect on Sam and how good a friend he was, the way he always giggled absently when you spoke, the way he appreciated all the same movies you did and junk.

It is with these thoughts that sleep will finally find you, dragging you into a deep, comfortable slumber.

You will awaken, a mindless undead creature, in a few hours, immobilized by the combination of the THC and the cold. Your pathetic brain will be wracked by confusion and frustration, and all you’ll be able to think of now is your hunger, insatiable and unquantifiable, consuming all you’ve ever known.

It’ll be like the worst munchies you’ve ever had. Just hold out, though. In a few hours an Army zombie-eradication squad will find you and destroy your tortured shell with a flamethrower, although they will notget a sweet high from the smoke and ash as you had always hoped.

Congratulations Zombie!

Congratulations to the Abyss!

We know you’re not really a person so much a faceless, shapeless unknowable darkness nibbling away at the sanity of each and every one of us. But sometimes it feels good to have a little affirmation, so here we are, offering up a little pat on the back for something you’re going to do.

Next Thursday a young man, named Charles Kelvin will be hard at work in his dorm room. Charles is a brilliant student majoring in mathematics and physics, specifically quantum physics and the physical nature of our universe.

Naturally, this means he’s obsessed with what makes up our world and what lies beyond the world as we understand it. This is, of course, your domain and as a result you do not wish for him to pry too aptly or too deep.

While humanity could never really do anything to harm you even if they understood your existence, you prefer to remain a mystery to them. It makes life so much easier and who knows. They could one day find a way to harm you or even kill you given enough time and inclination.

So you’re going to reach out to Charles to keep him from your home, far, far away. It will be like stepping from one stone to another in a vast, endless pond. It will take little effort and bear little risk.

Then you’ll pierce the membrane between worlds, reaching in with only the tiniest part of your being and touching Charles’ mind. With this you’ll give him strange, cryptic dreams hinting at your existence and an intense desire to call himself Chaz.

The former will assure you a subconscious ally in this pitiful shred of reality, the latter will sabotage his academic career and push him to the fringes where he can do less harm to you. If you intervened more directly you’d risk exposure, or worse, empowering Charles with even a slight fraction of your power. And that could be disastrous.

As it stands you’ll have assured your anonymity for at least another human lifetime, and have planted seeds so that when you finally are discovered you’ll be seen as something other than the malevolent, vampiric thing that you really are.

So congratulations to The Abyss. Oh, also, Christy wants you to know that while you did something similar to her in a slightly more...personal...way that she wasn't into it, didn’t consider it sex and that she’d appreciate it if you stopped trying to contact her. Thanks.