Congratulations Sexy Cowgirl!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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.