Congratulations on Symbolically Killing Your Father!

Today you’re going to symbolically kill your father by chopping down a tree, which is essentially a giant woods penis.

“TAKE THAT DAD!” you’ll shout with each swipe of your axe. Sap will ooze out of the tree’s wounds, which will look a little bit like semen, adding to the penis metaphor.

“YEAH!” you’ll scream at the tree as it begins to shift awkwardly and drift towards the ground. You’ll give the tree the middle finger and start to walk away, dreaming, as you often do, of fucking your sister. Then you’ll be crushed as the tree falls on you, symbolizing the enduring and suffocating nature of paternalism, violence’s impact on both the victim and the agent thereof and how important safety is when you’re working as a lumberjack.

Congratulations on Symbolically Killing Your Father!

Congratulations on Winning All the Events at Track and Field Day!

When you were a kid you weren’t very good at running. It’s always hounded you, and you’ve always hated yourself for not being able to win a single event at any kind of school spirit, team building or confidence renewing happening. When you were diagnosed with leukemia, your dreams of becoming a dad and running on the field during one of your child’s games to beat the everloving shit out of the rest of the kids on the field were crushed: even if you survived the cancer, chemo would likely leave you sterile, and your stretch marks from the explosive weight loss that treatment would cause would render you so unattractive a sex partner that there’s no way anyone would ever be willing to sleep with you.

Flash forward from your incredibly boring last few months of heartbreaking revelations to today, when the Make-A-Wish Foundation finally responds to your request. They’ll have thought you were a very young boy, thanks largely to your judicious use of crayon and some creative record keeping that you used when you submitted your application, so they won’t think your desire to “win a footrace” was at all unusual or any sadder than usual.

When they do meet you, they’ll feel entirely too awkward to say anything about it, so they’ll just send you, as planned, to the Special Olympics, where you’ll handily beat the shit out of all those lovable, big hearted kids. You’ll devastate them, and during the award ceremony, where everyone receives medals, you’ll go totally dickhole on all of them and start pushing them out of the way, throwing bows and punches and crotch chopping incessantly throughout the award ceremony.

You won’t be invited to the second day of the Special Olympics, but that’ll be okay. You’ll have had your moment in the sun, ruined the day for those kids the way your days were always ruined, and that’s what really matters. Have fun at chemo!

Congratulations on Winning All the Events at Track and Field Day!

Congratulations on Realizing Your Own Potential!

A lot of people spend years upon years looking for the careers that are right for them. Take, for instance, a banker who might not realize he loves money until he’s in his middle age, the autumn of his life. How much is that going to suck for him, realizing that he could’ve pursued one of the easiest and most lucrative careers imaginable if only he’d given up when he was younger?

You’re going to be a lot luckier. You’ve always known you wanted to be a cat burglar, ever since you were a young man. That first B&E, the rush of your first sale at a pawn shop where you knew you’d never be back in there to fence another piece of merch, the lightness in your feet as you ran from a resident the first time. It was all just what you’d always wanted.

But lately you’ve realized that without a calling card, without some sort of focus to your actions, you’re just a face in a crowd. And that’s not how you’d like to go down, as some two bit father of four and cat burglar who was never caught and never did anything interesting with his life. Which is why today is so important.

Because today while you’re casing an apartment for stuff to steal you’re going to see an elaborately constructed cat toy sitting on a velvet fringed pillow. Its purpose will be clear: to satisfy the curiosity of a cat that eats better on a daily basis than you do, despite its lack of a GED and opposable thumbs. Rage will well in your heart at the sight of these excesses, and you’ll snatch them up.

You’ll also steal any jewelry or laptops you see in the apartment, but you won’t think overmuch on those. They’ll go to your fence and you’ll eat for another month because of them. But the pillow you took, the cat toy, with its series of bells within bells within catnip shells, will make you feel some deep satisfaction.

Thus will begin your spree, your era of infamy, as a cat burglar who specializes in stealing cat toys and accessories, which you sometimes wittily refer to as “excessories.” The nightly news will have a field day with it, the police will spend years searching for you without success. You won’t tell a soul until your son comes of age, years from today, and you take him to a storage unit you rent in downtown Brooklyn. Once the two of you are inside you’ll begin telling him, in a hushed voice, that this is how you’ve made your mark on the world. You’ll describe that first day to him and his eyes will spark with recognition and respect for the first time.

It’ll be a good day to be a dad.

Congratulations on Realizing Your Own Potential!

Congratulations on Reading War and Peace!

When you’re in prison, sometimes you choose to improve yourself in some way. Some people improve themselves by leading a horrifying band of white supremacists who rape and kill minorities and people who aren’t overly concerned with minorities. Other people sometimes take the time to learn a craft or a trade.

But you’re not much for any of that, what with your dainty hands and record of insurance fraud and murder (once they’d caught you those kids had to die) so you had to find another means by which to improve your life.

You decided you’d go through all of the books you’d lied about reading in your life one by one and try to make good on them over the course of your twenty to life. Thanks to dramatic improvements that have been made to the libraries of American prisons over the last half-decade and your own ruthless adherence to pacts you make with yourself, it’s actually been going quite well. You’ve found all the titles you’ve looked for and had plenty of time to sink into reading them.

Today you’ll have been going at it for almost a year and a half, and you’re going to finish your first book. It’ll be War and Peace, Tolstoy’s masterpiece. None of us here at Sexy Results have ever read Tolstoy, but one of our friends once did, and he told us it was outta sight, so we have a feeling that the appropriate response would be something like “Wow,” or “My eyes have been opened to the world.”

You’re going to put it down, slam it down really, and shout “WHAT” as loud as you can. Then you’ll decide to stop reading books altogether, and take up a new habit, maybe bitch raping, to pass the time.

Congratulations on Reading War and Peace!

Congratulations on Winning the Oyster Shucking Competition!

The Maine Oyster Shucking Competition is conducted every year by a group of hard working, wader wearing youths with loose morals and big dreams. They come from all over the state to prove their prowess at removing the shells from mollusks with artistry and speed, and they do not all prove themselves worthy of the competition. The Maine Oyster Shucking Competition is known to many as “the finger destroyer,” in reference to unusually large number of finger injuries sustained by youth during the competition. It is not unusual for shuckers to lose one or more digits as they attempt to prove their skill.

And, of course, losers lose far more. Because in Maine, if you turn sixteen and you’re still a virgin you’re forcibly deflowered by the town De-Virginator, a man, usually obese, whose only purpose is to have unpleasant sex with you so that you’ll understand how abysmally sad your life in Maine is going to be over the years to come. The only way out is to win the Oyster Shucking Competition, through skill or guile.

You’ll be the daughter of a fisherman and you’ll go by the name of Sam. You’ll be one of those androgynous beauties, one of those rare human beings with a sexual fluidity that makes them appealing to nearly everyone who beholds them. You’ll be a spritely, brilliant young woman with dreams of leaving Maine and finding a real life somewhere else, somewhere slightly less horrible like Boston or maybe just one of the bigger towns in New Hampshire. But you know that you’ll be so traumatized if you give up your virginity to someone who doesn’t deserve it, especially a De-Virginator, you’ll probably fuck up college applications and, with them, the next eight years of your life.

So you’ll show up for the Oyster Shucking Competition with your trousers rolled up around your ankles, a man’s shirt hanging, too big, from your shoulders and a cockney cap hiding your gorgeous face from onlookers. You’ll have your own shucking knife, natch, and a sprig of wheat tucked in your mouth from an unknown source.

You’ll sign your name, take your place and, knife backed by your thumb, await the starting pistol with relaxed muscles and calm breath. When you hear the shot your hands will move the knife through and across, slicing the muscles at the back of each shell before you pry open the rest of the mass and scrape off the remainder with a deft pair of knife sweeps. You won’t bother putting the shells into their own bucket, you’ll just let them fall on the ground around your bare feet. Only the meat will have a new home.

You’ll repeat this motion again and again and again, your hands moving fluidly: one for the knife, one for the shells. Your fingers, calloused and thick pads on them gripping their precious cargo, will move like dancers: hardened and swift. Around you curses will echo from the mouths of other participants: blind rage as they cut their hands or lose some meat to the ground. Men and women alike will stare at you, at your hands and shoulders as they barely move with each new shucking. Your feet will remain still, the pile of shells growing around you.

You won’t think about time or effort as you move, just of the sun above you, how that same sun shines down in places that aren’t Bar Harbor or Bangor. You’ll be aware of where your hands are and where the shells are and where the knife is the same way you know where your heart and your eyes are, but you won’t give much thought to what you’re doing or how you’re doing it.

That’s why, when the sun sets and all the other shuckers are sitting on overturned buckets, cursing their luck and bandaging your hands you’ll just look up at the buckets you’ve filled, shift your feet to send the shells around you scattering to the ground and let yourself smile for the first time that day.

Your competition will be staring at you to a man, baffled by your success. They’ll all be shaking their heads in disbelief, watching you as you take off your hat and run your hand through your short, shaggy hair. You’ll laugh, sort of a guffaw, as you head up the beach to the card table where the registration desk will be ready to give you your prize.

You’ll only be there for a moment, and then you’ll be gone, your grace a sharp memory burned in the minds of each and every person on that beach. You’ll be on your way back home, where you’ll begin drafting one of your admissions essays centered around that day, around the rhythm and the sun and the hope that you found out there on that beach, the hope you gave each and every one of us when you reminded us that sometimes good things do happen. Sometimes the institutions that Maine has constructed to ruin the lives of its own inhabitants fail. On the days when that comes to pass, the weather, you’ll note in the essay, always seems exceptionally nice, even when it is not, necessarily.

Congratulations on Winning the Oyster Shucking Competition!

Congratulations on Tricking Your Wife Into Having the Devil's Baby!

“Hey honey,” you’ll mumble into her ear, winding your arm around her stomach. She’ll let out a long breath, one you’ll feel rolling through her gut as she rests her head against yours. You’ll feel the smile roaring through her body rather than see it.

“Mmm,” she’ll purr. “Hi.”

You’ll turn her around gently. Both your eyes will already be closed as you inch her nearer and nearer to your face. You won’t speak another word, you’ll just move your lips to hers and up and over and under and within and words won’t matter by the end of it. You’ll drag step to the bedroom awkwardly in each other’s arms, but you won’t notice, you’ll be so focused on not touching, on not removing any clothing until you settle into the bed and begin your work, purposeful, methodical, reflexive and thoughtlessly infinitely engaging.

When you enter her you won’t be thinking of anything, anything in the world. That moment, that moment you’ll find yourself pinned within will be perfect, leaving you to echo inside your own mind until it builds to soundless cacophony in your ears, the driving force of your own blood pushing you over the edge gasping soundlessly as she smiles and sweats below you, her eyes again closed.

You won’t think about the deal you made with the devil until the next morning, when your Ski Doo materializes in your garage. Your wife will be puzzled, but you’ll tell her not to worry as you run your hands over her belly. You’ll wink and tell her that everything will be fine, wondering, as you do it, if the children of the anti-Christ might be spared the fires of his coming, on account of raising him and stuff.

Congratulations on Tricking Your Wife Into Having the Devil’s Baby!

Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Another Portion of a Paper Draft!

In order to have an effective conversation about this subject, we’re going to have to define two nebulous, seemingly concrete, oft overused terms. First and foremost, what is a video game? And second, what is a post-structural narrative?

A video game is, for the purpose of our discussion, any game that utilizes multimedia components in order to convey a story or sense of action. These multimedia components are usually arbitrated through a single processing entity, a “computer” or “console.” This entity can be reserved for another purpose: it can be a phone or a home computer utilized for word processing and email. Or it can be a dedicated device, such as an X-Box or, as older individuals might recall, a Nintendo Entertainment System. The platform is simply a means to an end: whether it is built towards one purpose or towards multiple purposes the games themselves are usually best experienced when they’re engaged with without distractions.

Video games normally have narrative elements within them, sometimes strong, sometimes weak. These elements vary dramatically in prominence, however. Linerunner, for example, invents the simplest of narratives: there is a line, and a man rides it. However Bastion, an independently developed title with a relatively modest time commitment attached to it, invents a pair of warring societies with identity crises and immigration disputes between them, a cold war parable nested within a game. There is no actual ruleset, simply a concept of interactivity which demands the insertion of a player figure who can, in more conventional literary senses, be seen as a reader.

And that brings us to the concept of post-structural narrative. In literature, this term is used to define narrative modes that attempt to redefine or defy conventional ideas about narrative, effectively refuting conventional narrative structure in order to reinvent the means by which a story is told. Hence the term. In video games, this term can be applied in a considerably broader fashion. If we observe post-structural narrative as the norm, and not the exception, for video games, we see that games are not simply piddling attempts at storytelling, but rather a unique means of conveying a narrative experience which relies on the input from players.

This is indeed what sets them aside from other narrative forms: no other narrative form relies on user input in the fashion that video games do. Books require the participation of an active reader figure who, while somewhat active, remains less active than the player in video games, a truly active “reader figure” who re-defines narrative as it emerges. This is what distinguishes games from film, given film’s heavy reliance on passive reader figures (a factor which games embrace and utilize with unnerving regularity in cutscenes). In order to tell a story effectively in a game, you must involve your player, and failure to do so will make a game boring or tedious.

We need look no further than examples like Final Fantasy XIII and Clive Barker’s (bless his heart) Undying to witness this: these are games which decouple passive narrative from active involvement in order to couple a conventional narrative with a post-structural medium, and they suffer for the effort. Players lack influence over the events of the game, and the events which they have influence over (that is, overcoming the obstacles that face them) are so non-narrative and, all too often, monolithic in their established goals that players would find themselves hard pressed to find a place to insert themselves as readers or even active participants in the narrative, spare as the meagerest of facilitators for a writer’s vision.

It should be said, then, that video games do not represent a factotum which permits the effective facilitation of post-structural storytelling. Rather, they are a tool which enable this end. They do not necessarily fulfill this goal. Some games tell stories with such loose structures that they are totally invalid as narratives (man shoots gun, man dies, man reloads gun and walks on) but this is not the ultimate potential of the medium. Instead it rests within this medium to express narrative stories that permit the active insertion of reader figures as never before, as is the case in games such as Bastion.

Bastion, for the uninitiated, is on its surface an action game with a top down view and freeform story that showcases this dynamic wonderfully. Let me explain.

In Bastion players are given verbal and visual feedback based on their actions: that is, the story adjusts to their actions. They learn new things about the world around them as a result of their explorations. And while there is an existing story that the player must engage, a story with immutable elements as dramatic as the apocalypse of the player’s world, there are smaller events within that storyline that require the player’s action for actualization. These events vary in gravity from deciding the fate of a major character to simply uncovering details of characters lives through drug induced hallucinations.

Through Bastion we can see that there is more to games than simple a recounting of an existing narrative. Rather, narrative is collaboratively shaped between players (readers) and designers (authors). In this respect, games represent not only a medium of entertainment but also an extreme example of a certain vein of literary thought.