Congratulations on Baking Some Delicious Cookies!

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

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

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

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

Congratulations on Baking Some Delicious Cookies!

Congratulations on Getting Engaged!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congratulations on Getting Engaged!

Congratulations on Getting a New House!

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

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

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

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

Until about an hour and a half after sunset.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congratulations on Getting a New House!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Enter Portal!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Portal is a little different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congratulations on Blossoming Into a Beautiful Woman!

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

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

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

You’re going to have to get a tattoo.

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

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

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

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

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

Congratulations on Blossoming Into a Beautiful Woman!

Congratulations on Losing Your Glasses!

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

You’ll drop your glasses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congratulations on Losing Your Glasses!

Congratulations on Losing at an Elimidate Clone!

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

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

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

Congratulations on Losing at an Elimidate Clone!