Congratulations Fallow Field Obsessed Farmer!

America’s farm subsidy system is fucked.  But what most people don’t know is that you can actually paid to farm dirt, thanks to former Shadow President Cheney.  You just have to make sure that absolutely nothing grows in the giant slab of land that you own.  Most of Wyoming is actually made up of these dirt farms.  Don’t believe us?  Visit Wyoming!

Yeah, we didn’t think anyone would.

Anyhow, today you’re going to make the rounds in your fields with a flamethrower, torching any saplings that appear down to nothing.  When the smoke clears, you’ll dig up the roots and torch the hole as well.

When you’re finished you’ll sit on the porch and drink a mint julep, reflecting on how the field looks like loamy glass, rolling waves of dead earth muffling the silence of nature for acres around you.

Congratulations Fallow Field Obsessed Farmer!

Congratulations Finfucker!

Dolphins.  They’re beautiful, subtle creatures of ethereal spirit and glory, and they own your motherfucking brain.  But the romance you feel for them can never be realized.  Right?

Wrong!

Today you’re going to creep into a tank in Sea World and position yourself, ass in the air, near a male dolphin.  He’s going to poke you a few times to make sure you’re not a seal or a shark.  Then he’s going to try and move you around to see if you’re a fun toy.  Once he knows you’re not any one of those three things, he’s going to pull down your pants with his surprisingly dexterous nose and then rub his erect dolphin dick all over your ass.

He’ll slide into you easily and soundlessly before he begins making love to you slowly, steadily, eagerly.  When he comes inside you the force will rock your colon, slap your prostate and trigger an explosive orgasm for you as well.  Then the dolphin will swim away as your blood, his semen and yours all mingle in the dolphin tank.

Security will find you an hour from then, stretched out on the concrete, unable to walk or sit comfortably.  But your heart will be full for you, side, completed one of your life goals, and that can be the greatest feeling of all.

Congratulations Finfucker!

Congratulations on Finding that Poplar You Forgot!

You’ve had a full life: wife, kids, dog.  But underneath it all was a lie.  A relatively massive lie: that you were a straight man.

You weren’t.  Ever.  Every time you were inside your wife you just closed your eyes and imagined Alan Cumming’s smiling face with a weird, very cushiony asshole in the front instead of a dick.  And while you avoided throwing up during the birth of your children just barely, you never really loved them.  It took all your strength not to call them “spawn” when they were young and “breeders” when they started make motion towards forming families of their own.

All of this covering took its toll.  Not just on you, miserable ulcer cementing on your insides burning a hole through your gut and into the world outside where your rage could flow from it, but on your first and only love, a young man whose name we cannot speak to you who you killed with a brick one night in a fit of sorrow that you could never run away with him and buried under a sapling twenty years ago.

Today you’ll be driving through the countryside, reflecting on your wasted life on your way from one chore to another, when you’ll spot a shadow that you don’t recognize so much as feel rising above the landscape: a gesture of memory  cascading up the line of the horizon.

You won’t have visited that tree in a decade and a half, but you’ll know it, every twist and tangle.  Every knotted root.  Every chip of stilled bark.  You’ll pull off the country road, on to the dirt road, up to the base of the hill the tree rests atop.  You’ll climb it, failing knees aching with each step, letting the tree grow larger and larger in your vision until it is your world: its branches stretching above you, gently encompassing you.

You’ll sit down, back to the tree, and begin humming tunelessly.  Slowly, surely, the tune will come, the song he’d sing you as he held you, face pressed into the back of your neck as you wept.  You’ll feel tired under that tree, and you’ll sit there for twenty, thirty, forty, and so on minutes, waiting for sleep to come for you.  You’ll wait until the sun has gone down, the moon has risen, until your cell phone beeps and vibrates and announces its death.  You’ll wait a little longer without a means to count the passing minutes before you return to your car and drive home alone.

Congratulations on Finding that Poplar You Forgot!

Congratulations on Living Up to Your Role Model's Expectations!

When you met Christian Slater back in the ninties, he told you to “suck your own dick.” You went home right away and gave it your all but, of course, you couldn’t actually do it.  So you did what anyone with even a whit of common sense would do: you sold all your worldly possessions and moved to India to study under a guru who promised to teach you the mystical art of sucking your own dick.

The last two decades have consisted of some of the most intense study that you’ve ever experienced as you try, day after day, to get your lips around the tip.  It seemed impossible when you started, but a year ago you first touched your tongue to its shiny head.  Six months ago, you got your lips halfway down your own shaft, and a month ago you managed to get to the base.

Satisfied with your efforts, you’ve purchased a plane ticket and, today, you’ll be arriving in Hollywood, California at the home of former actor and current cautionary tale about cocaine use Christian Slater.  You’ll ring his doorbell and, like any formerly popular actor, he’ll open up his own door and ask you:

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I wanted to show you something,” you’ll somberly announce.  Then you’ll pull down your pants, get on your back and cram your entire unit into your mouth.

Christian Slater will clap and laugh, bewildered and amused by your actions.  This will have been a rough decade for him, so that moment, so perfectly random, will crystallize in the years to come as an incandescent instant in what will be a decidedly not so shining life.  So when he takes an i-Phone picture, give him a nice thumbs up so he and the internet know, hey: it’s all in good fun!

Congratulations on Living Up to Your Role Model’s Expectations!

Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Of Orcs and Men and Small Stories!

Of Orcs and Men took me nearly a year to finish, from the day I purchased it to the day the end credits rolled.  It was, all things considered, an uneven, ambitious and tremendously original concept, undeveloped and haphazardly executed with the best of intentions and some pretty keen design insight on display.  And unlike the affable Space Pirates and Zombies, another game that has kept me preoccupied for over a year of my life (nearly the entire span of my time in New York, in fact) when I abandoned of Orcs and Men it was not because I felt frustrated or stonewalled by the game.  Rather, I just didn’t feel like I had time to give Of Orcs and Men my full attention.

Because even thought Of Orcs and Men is a relatively short game (especially by RPG standards) and it has a brief, limited character development system, with a set of skills that you’ll be tired of relatively quickly, many of which you’ll ignore, it remains a serviceable, even well crafted piece of storytelling in games.  Fundamentally a tale of redemption and friendship (granted a tentative, strange friendship), there’s something very basic about the almost rote twists in Of Orcs and Men that form a compelling narrative, all the more engrossing for the moments in the game where a plot twist is telegraphed or a character has a sudden change of heart for the sake of advancing the story.  Despite seeing each betrayal coming, and watching revolution and death unfold in the landscape of Of Orcs and Men, I was compelled to continue clicking, reading, listening, and watching.  And when the game reached its climactic scene and Arkhail threw the emperor-regent from a tower in a starkly beautiful cutscene that showcased everything Of Orcs and Men did well?  I felt like I’d accomplished something.

It’s the resolution of a hero’s journey in miniature, cast as an anti-hero’s quest for revenge.  But within this mini-story, this microcosm of the fantasy universe, something wonderful unfolds: a personal journey, as much about the things unseen as the things seen.  Arkhail and Styx are party to many more dramatic, world and life changing events outside of the context of the game than within its framework.  Arkhail loses his wife and son at the battle that effective issues the start of the war between orcs and humans that sits at the heart of the game, and Styx is purportedly an orc shaman whose drive for power turns on him, twisting his body into its new shape and birthing the race of goblins from him.  This is the sort of shit you’d usually see in video games, but instead of getting an opportunity to experience these epic events, Of Orcs and Men’s journey centers on a small, peripheral mission to assassinate the human Emperor.  Sure, the stakes are high, but the arc of each character involved is miniscule, and the grandeur of the places you visit and battles you fight is thoroughly middling.  An “epic battle” in Of Orcs and Men consists of you and your goblin buddy fighting six humans and two orc slaves – hardly the sort of awe inspiring affair you’d see in the climactic moments of Dragon Age or Mass Effect.

But in this low-key approach to high fantasy, there’s strength.  Because while Of Orcs and Men doesn’t really have arcs for its characters, or really present us with the spectacle many RPGs have made us accustomed to, it does tell a story and develop a relationship between two characters.  And it does so handily, doling out information, allowing players to guide the course of the relationship and reinforcing the growth of that relationship between gameplay.  If you don’t get a good sense of how to make Styx and Arkhail work well together, Of Orcs and Men is going to be an unpleasant affair, but if you work out how they can fit together, the game itself explodes into conceptual fulfillment.  It’s a high concept move for relatively little reward, but it’s certainly there.

Of Orcs and Men is, in a sense, a more nuanced version of Dragon Age 2, another game preoccupied with small stories and a concern for eschewing high fantasy.  Of course, where DA2 shines (world building) Of Orcs and Men flops.  The setting of Of Orcs and Men is hardly fleshed out, and even when Elves and Dwarves are introduced into the mix in the fourth act, it’s not to any real effect, in or out of gameplay: they’re simply reskinned humans, they could’ve been anyone, and while their artistic style hints at certain cultural and physical qualities, there’s really nothing behind it.  Likewise, the political system and the nature of both magic and religion in Of Orcs and Men seems to shift from moment to moment, as needed.  Its strongest point comes through in its dedication to building up an orc culture replete with a rich history and rules and regulations that exist in a sort of extralegal system that all orcs adhere to.  It’s a neat twist, but it’s not quite enough.

But there’s nobility in the attempt, and even if Of Orcs and Men fails in so many ways, its relatively small scope and low budget make it an underdog in my mind.  It’s far from perfect, to be sure, but there’s something there to love, if you give it time, have patience, and can look past a limited, dead-end riddled skill-tree and leveling system.