Congratulations Brisket Thief!

Your mom cooked all the brisket in the house, did it up nice with a nice rub and roasted it on a barbecue in the backyard, but you know what? Doesn’t fucking matter.

It doesn’t fucking matter because you stole it, you fucking prick. You stole every last bite. Now your family is crying while you lay in your room on your belly, head on your pillow, brisket under your pillow. It will make your room reek of meat, but the whole house will reek of meat because of your mom’s cooking. No one will accuse you of any wrongdoing, which will make it that much worse.

You got it into your head that you’d be staging an act of protest against factory farming by making your whole family miserable, but it turns out you just kind of hurt a bunch of people close to you by attempting to impose your values on them.

You’ll try to fix the whole situation tomorrow when you leave the brisket outdoors for someone to find, but in the end it won’t work out so well. Before anyone wakes up to discover your brisket package, a wild animal of some kind will happen upon it and tear it to ribbons. It’ll upset your mother tremendously, but at least it’ll take the heat off you.

Congratulations Brisket Thief!

Congratulations on Discovering that Sex is Better WIthout the Sheet!

Sheet sex is safe sex, and it’s the only safe sex. Even no sex isn’t safe when there’s no sheet involved. We all know the cachetisms and the public-service videos. But do we live by them? Rarely! Handjobs and open mouth kisses abound with nary a sheet in sight.

But you, dear reader, have always stood as a halcyon beacon to true American values (where American means, as Republicans will tell you, the most retardedly conservative Christian value system imaginable) and have never, ever, ever had romantic physical contact with anyone at any time without the use of a sheet.

Until tonight. Your wife, bless her whorish heart, is going to start kissing you on the forehead without putting the sheet with a hole in it in place, and you’re going to get super aroused.

“I’m getting super aroused,” you’ll announce to your dutiful wife, who will smile knowing and then put your penis in her mouth.

You’ll open up your gab-flap to protest her amorous actions, but within about twenty seconds of raw, un-sheeted fellatio, you won’t be able to remember why you ever used a sheet in the first place. The two of you will then get a pair of lesbians and an obese man in a gimp costume to come to your house and join in on your sheet-free lovemaking, proving once and for all that true American values are under attack from the gay and gimp communities.

When you’re done you’ll have abandoned your coital sheet in favor of living dangerously, having marital sex without the intervention of a small piece of fabric intended to obscure the horror of your twined naked bodies. You’ll enjoy sex tons more, since your wife is super hot and your sheet was made of some weird, really chafe-ey fabric. But unfortunately you’ll also be condemned to an eternity of damnation, thanks to your abandonment of the true path. So you won’t be lifted from the planet when the Rapture comes in a few days.

Win some, lose some, we guess.

Congratulations on Discovering that Sex is Better Without the Sheet!

Congratulations on Getting That Tree to Love You Back!

You’re a dendrophiliac. It’s a lonely life, because trees, for the most part, can’t easily reciprocate love. They live outside, they have difficulty expressing consent, and much of their experience with romance involves being involuntarily involved in three-way sex which ends with humans carving hearts and sets of initials into their bark in the most painful way possible.

You’re a lot nicer about it. You softly stroke trees, whisper to them, and then rub their roots with teatree oil until they rustle, which you interpret as a tree orgasm. It’s actually just trees showing their arousal, but they appreciate your effort and attentiveness in general, despite their inability to communicate approval verbally.

They like the way you touch them, and tonight they’re finally, after months of slowly moving their branches towards your window, show you how much they appreciate it. They’re going to reach their branchy branches into your open window, rustle on down towards your body, get inside your pajama pants and start rubbing on your junk with their bark.

You’ll wake up with a raging hard on, bark rubbing your skin off your genitals so that pleasure and pain coalesce into the most delicious imaginable pool of fluids buttering your sex. It’ll be like a series of shocks guiding your brain in and out of states of alarm until, after fifteen minutes of overwhelming stimulus, you come all over those branches.

The three will then gently withdraw, quick as it can, which is incredibly slow by people standards. You’ll kiss and lick its branches as it passes your face, savoring the taste of yourself as it passes. You’ll smirk and throw your sheets back on yourself. You’ll resolve to sleep with your window open for every night left in the fall. When winter comes, you’ll have to make a difficult decision. It’s possible that the tree might not still be into you by then.

Congratulations on Getting That Tree to Love You Back!

Congratulations Bobby the Bullet!

Today you will be born, fictitious cartoon bullet. And through your birth children will learn a valuable lesson. It’ll be just like you’ll sing it in the various commercials and one pornographic movie that features your likeness:

“Sometimes it’s important to shoot your gun, but you shouldn’t shoot it or even point it at a person you don’t intend to seriously harm or kill!”

Kids the world over will realize, through your message, that guns are really dangerous and that they probably shouldn’t play with them until they’re ready to perform the highly sensual act of murdering another living soul, one of the most arousing actions a person is capable of.

Despite this achievement, your television series will be cancelled mid-season by some weird anti-gun advocacy group, like a group of concerned mothers or something. We don’t know who they are for certain, we just know they’re against good All-American fun.

Congratulations Bobby the Bullet!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Reflections on Assassin's Creed: Revelations!

Since I moved to Brooklyn, I haven’t had a TV where I live. Which means a lot of games I want to play, games like Mass Effect 3 and Bayonetta and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations have all been side-lined. I thought this would change when I moved, but it hasn’t. It might when I move again, but I’m not sure right now. Right now I’m sort of used to life without a TV, for better or worse.

But I’m not really cool with living without Assassin’s Creed. I love the Assassin’s Creed games with a fervent passion, and the kind of play they deliver has been a tremendous hook for me since I saw that first weird triangle back in 2007. Since then the series has changed a lot, shifting gears to an annual release schedule and offering up some of the most delightfully horrible storytelling in gaming today. I’ve wanted to play Revelations, really wanted to play it, since I heard a name title in the series was coming out. Then I heard some pretty believably poor things about it, and I got a little bit bummed out about it, but knew I’d play it when the time was right.

Then a Steam Sale reared its beautiful head and I picked up a copy of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations for twenty bucks. Score! I was excited to start playing, so excited that I was legitimately upset that my schedule kept me from really sitting down to play for three whole days. I wanted to make this game a big entry in my daily gaming diet, and I wanted to give its into the time it needed to digest in my brain.

Then I started playing the game and, within an hour and a half, stopped. I was disappointed. It was as if the scale of the game had been reduced in every way. The game opens on an island with the single most annoying unseen character from previous Assassin’s Creed games. You don’t know who I mean right away, I’m sure, but you’ll know immediately after you begin Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. Then it REALLY opens with a series of corridor missions that serve as a tutorial, a tutorial that it’s difficult to see the facility of, given the effectiveness of previous, considerably less horrible tutorials. This is followed by a period of the game where you are, no shit, dragged on the ground behind a carriage during a high speed carriage chase before being dropped into a river and washed on to a shore some distance away with none of your fancy movement powers, the abilities which usually form the core of Assassin’s Creed games. Acrobatic leaping was replaced with frantic limping. Suddenly I was press ganged into playing a meh action game. The magic was gone and the frustration began. I finished the arbitrary challenges that were presented to me so I could recover my movement powers, then opted to stop playing for two days.

When I came back, I moved on to the next memory with the non-aid of my perennial unhelpful and irritating Animus-mate. I found myself in Istanbul, recently after its conquest by the Ottoman Empire. Yes! I thought. This is the Assassin’s Creed I love. Exploring the city, uncovering unlockables, getting into fun, unexpected antics. Then, I started getting into Den Liberation battles. A little more irritating than I remember them, but whatever, do-able. Then I started getting into Den Defenses, which are essentially a tower defense game no one asked for, which no one in their right mind would ever want to play. It’s as if a mix of the profound balance issues that make up play in Assassin’s Creed, which the raw enjoyability of the play normally eschews, are suddenly laid bare. Some units are totally worthless. Some units are absolutely crucial, and must be employed in a very precise way to complete these challenges. And the game is totally unconcerned with pointing out which one is which to you. Sorry if you were hoping for some sort of guidance, you’re not gonna get it.

These tedious bits might be more forgivable in a larger environment, but there’s something about Istanbul that makes it feel much, much smaller. Perhaps because most of it is unlocked from the get-go, or perhaps it simply IS smaller. I don’t know, but I know that, with less than forty percent of the game completed at this point, I’ve run the length and width of Istanbul on its map and feel pretty well acquainted with it at this point. Unless a massive portion of the city remains to be unlocked, which does not look to be the case from what I can tell, the game is going to mostly take place in this tiny re-creation of Istanbul, one of the more spectacular cities in the world.

It seems that the energy that once went into populating this city with vibrant characters, missions and nooks and crannies to explore has instead gone into building some occasionally spectacular ruins, and some tremendously middling action-oriented scripted sequences. Now, the ruin exploration sequences are fun, don’t get me wrong, and they hit the climbing-puzzle spot that I come to Ubisoft games for more often than not. But the action-oriented scripted sequences are just bad. Bad in all the ways that Assassin’s Creed doesn’t have to be bad. They lack the scope and intensity that the action sequences in Assassin’s Creed 2 had or the freeform chaos that Assassin’s Creed the First left in its action sequences. Instead it’s as if we’re put into a corridor brawler in three dimensions and asked to flip out briefly in a small collection of sets that usually feel hastily designed, when they aren’t re-hashes of areas from previous games.

The Assassin’s Creed that fans know and love is here, but it’s buried under mistakes, mistakes that feel like they’re emerging from Ubisoft’s insistence on making Assassin’s Creed into an annual franchise. I understand why they’re doing it: they’ve got to appear competitive with groups like Activision and EA, who are desperately scrabbling to get out games with words in their titles that will get people to buy them. But here’s the thing: this isn’t necessarily a positive trend. In fact, I’d argue it’s quite negative. When you get into a development cycle that revolves around putting out the same title year after year after year, you often do your games and, by association, your gamers a disservice.

Cliff Blezinski had a great piece of wisdom for game designers, one which they all too often seem to ignore: you always want to stop an activity while participants are still enjoying it. That way they’ll want to come back for more. Letting them sit with that want helps build it up and gives you time to refine your next play experience. It’s an unmitigated positive, one that Revelations ignored. Rather than just letting players sit and enjoy Brotherhood, which made some pretty amazing design choices and managed to keep the Assassin’s Creed series fresh, they’ve essentially generated a game that re-treads the ground that Brotherhood showed us previously while inserting content that feels untested. They’ve added things to their fantastic game that ignores what makes the game great where it doesn’t simply fight it outright. I don’t need a tutorial to show me how to slide down a hill, nor does the experience of sliding down a hill feel particularly rich or enjoyable to me.

Has Assassin’s Creed: Revelations made me unsure of Assassin’s Creed 3? Sort of. If this is the direction they’re taking the series, it might be moving into a place that I’m not interested in. But I’d be lying if I wasn’t going to buy Assassin’s Creed 3. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the core play of Revelations: the running, jumping and acrobatic fighting is all fantastic. And goofing off with over-the-top historical figures is great fun too. But it’s not hard to look at the looming feature creep of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and see within it an ugly beast that threatens to slow down or possibly even overwhelm that core gameplay. It’s also hard not to look at the number of scripted sequences and get really, really frustrated. Holy shit, dudes. Your first game was a genius mix of light scripting and free-form play. Every game since then has taken a step back from this concept, and it’s been your sole detractor. Don’t fall into the pit of trying to make everything more cinematic. Just let it happen.

Congratulations on Sleeping With That Guy!

Really? Him? Hm.

No, we don’t mean anything by it. Just surprised is all.

We didn’t think you were into that sort thing.

We’re not upset. Just kind of surprised.

Should we be offended? It doesn’t seem like this has anything to do with us.

What do you mean by passive-aggressive?

We’re starting to feel offended now, I will tell you that.

What do you mean “well then it’s a good thing that this happened?”

Where are you going?

Oh god, Charlene, watch out for that bus!

Congratulations on Sleeping With That Guy!

Congratulations on Breaking Into Conan O'Brien's House!

So here’s a funfact: NBC is actually powered by a not so secret gemstone that is normally kept in Lorne Michael’s chest. You can tell when it’s missing because SNL enjoys a marked decrease in quality during its eras of absence. And you thought it had to do with the cast changes!

Well it turns out that Conan O’Brien was actually promised that gemstone as part of his infamous Late Night Contract. And he got it. And when he was asked to give it back, he refused.

NBC was displeased, to put it lightly, but they couldn’t make a fuss about it in public, not without exposing the horrible truth behind their sagging fall line-up and their completely insane decision to remove Dan Harmon from his place at the helm of Community. With no legal means of addressing the issue they’ve simply begun sending intern after intern to try and retake the gemstone, with the promise of an executive producer credit on a new, potentially disastrous sitcom if they succeed.

So far none of them have come back.

Today you’re going to get farther than most do. You’ll bypass Conan O’Brien’s trained manta rays, who also have lasers strapped to their heads and patrol his outermost moat. Then you’ll evade his many fire-breathing dogs, mostly by masking yourself in Andy Richter’s scent (available through the internet to those with the temerity to look for it).

Once you breach the interior of the house, you’ll discover that O’Brien has filled it with attack robots that detect NBC employees by scanning for the radiation emitted by the microchip implanted in each and every one of you. Being an enterprising young man, once you figure this out (largely from the massive heat buildup that their scanning will trigger in your left shoulder, where your chip is located) you’ll carve your NBC ID chip out of you with a knife and then throw it into his living room, where it will be vaporized by mother fucking lasers.

With all of your hurdles seemingly eliminated you’ll crawl on your belly past the robots, not wanting to arouse any additional suspicion. You’ll keep an eye out for trip-wires and any defenses you might’ve missed, things like attack bees or Labomba. After nearly twenty minutes of crawling you’ll find yourself in the specially designed containment vault in the basement of Conan’s virtual fortress-palace-home. The gemstone will be in the center of the otherwise unmarked white room, hovering inside of a field of pulsating blue energy. You’ll pick yourself up off the floor, dust yourself off and begin walking over to the gem.

Before you get three steps in, a force will strike you in the side of your torso so severely that you’ll be catapulted across the room and on to your back. You’ll lay there, staring up at the pure white ceiling, the dim hum of the gem’s containment field beckoning you to rise to your feet. You’ll be unable to move.

Co Co himself will suddenly step into your field of vision, carrying an antiquated double barrel shotgun. He’ll pop open the breach and withdraw two shells, still smoking. Then he’ll calmly reload the weapon and snap it closed.

“Give my regards to Johnny Carson,” he’ll mutter as he takes aim at you. Then the sound of a gunshot will crush your ears and the world will go dark.

Congratulations on Breaking Into Conan O’Brien’s House!