Maybe you found me through Twitter. Maybe caught one of my cross-links from Livejournal. Or Facebook? I go there. I link there. Sure. Facebook.

Or, could be you found this website through some particular search engine term.

My webstats track those. I look at them. And from time to time I post about it. Today, it’s time again. It’s time to talk about it. You and me, we need to sit down. Here. Have some oolong tea. The guards will pass it to you through this little Plexiglas window. No, no, don’t worry about that. It’s for my — erm, your safety. Plus, Plexiglas is the future. One day everything will be made of it! I’m just trying to be progressive here at terribleminds. It’s all Plexiglas and flying cars up in here.

Seriously, though. Sit in that chair. We really need to talk. Go over some things. You know? Like, for instance… ohhh, I dunno, the search terms you used getting here? Heck, I know, you were probably one of the upstanding folks who found this space by searching for something innocuous like, “learn how to write dialogue,” or, “scenes from The Wire.” But just in case. Just in case. We should maybe talk about… y’know, some of the other ways you maybe might have come here. Right? It’s okay. I know. You’re feeling woozy. I put something in the tea. A little extra “ooh” in the Oolong. Relax. Breathe. Zen. Don’t shit your pants — I mean, don’t relax that much. But give in to it. Shhhh.

Let’s talk. Y’know, as I unbuckle your pants. For comfort. For your comfort.

Yup, You Heard Me: “Turtle Penis”

It took me a while, but now I understand. See, every day, I get… mm, one or two visitors coming here via the search term “turtle penis.” I did not at first understand why my site even came up in that regards, especially since this phenomenon predates the Eddy Webb “Penis” essay. Ah, but now I dig it. Once upon a time, I spoke about the weird things people eat, and in that post is the term “turtle penis. See, it’s because you can actually eat turtle penis, and were you headed to, say, a getemono bar in Japan, you might get like, turtle penis sashimi or turtle penis soup or… I dunno, candied turtle penis soda.

Thing is, the search term isn’t “turtle penis soup.” Or sashimi. Or soda.

It’s just “turtle penis.”

So, I gotta ask. Why are you looking up turtle penis? School project? Okay. Sure. Trying to gross out a wife or girlfriend? Hey, I can get behind that. I do that! Good times, good times. But, if I were to poke my face through the monitor and come out through the Intertubes on the other side of your monitor, I wouldn’t see a bottle of greasy hand lotion and a box of tissues, right? And a coiled belt on the desk? And turtle posters all over the walls? I’m just asking. I… wouldn’t see that, right? Help a guy out.

Pauley Perrette Versus Avatar Porn

Every day, a secret war unfolds in the back alleys of terribleminds. The Avatar Porn Army rises from the tunnels, their lumpy nude bodies painted electric blue, homemade bows firing off arrows tipped in “alien venom” (really, it’s just hobo spit). They clash with the Proselytes of Pauley, those robe-clad emo-geek NCIS nerds, their hair tied off in Abby-style pigtails. It’s forensic tentacle porn. It’s Goth-freak tribal shamanism. It’s Pocahontas starring Mark Harmon.

People die. Bodies in the streets. Night after night.

Very sad.

No, what it is is a daily struggle of, “Who will win the Battle of the Search Terms?” One day, “avatar porn” nets the biggest views. The next day, it’s “Pauley Perrette.” Some searchers add words to the terms, and I count those, too — porn, nude, bondage, tentacles, rape, blue, free, pics, vagina, hot, tattoos, etc. Hell, someone actually searched for “freelance avatar porn.” Looking for a new career, maybe. I dunno.

If I tally the numbers day-to-day, I see that (to my surprise) Pauley is winning this war. I’m not yet willing to count Avatar out of the running though, as for the last week it’s held some solid numbers.

But I gotta tell you: I get fucktons of views from this. Hundreds of views a day, sometimes. Trust me, I don’t cherish these views. These are worthless views, the SEO equivalent of “empty calories.” I’m not courting these people with posts like this on the sly, wink wink, nudge nudge. They’re not coming here for my writing advice, my sardonic rage, my delicious blog nectar. They’re coming here to pudwhack to Pauley Perrette.

Though, were I to actually combine an Avatar image with a Pauley Perrette image — say, turning Abby into like, one of the sexy blue goat people — man, the views would probably crash the site. It’d be a perfect storm of weirdos. The fusion of those two fetishes could bring down the entire Internet.

Where Exactly To Insert Penis Into Girl?

Really? Is this the central mystery? This is what you search for in Google?

And further, you came here to answer that question?

God help you, son. God help you.

Hey, maybe he’s not looking for an answer so much as an opinion. Right? “Top Ten Places To Stick My Winky!” or something. “Number 10, between the toes! Number 9, the armpit! Number 8…” and so on. Though, were that the case, I’d think the search term would’ve been more like, “What’s the best place to insert my penis?” Right? (Oh, and hey search term dude. Don’t think I missed how poorly you phrased that question. Who are you, Governor Schwarzenegger? “Where exactly to insert penis into girl? Get to the choppah! It’s not a tumor! Hasta la vagina, baby!”)

(Sorry, I couldn’t help it.)

(I’m not proud.)

Just in case someone actually came here looking for an answer to this question, I’ll help.

I’ll offer my wisdom.

Dear 35-year-old-dude who hasn’t yet gone fishing in the love lagoon:

I get it, you have a handful of options when it comes to the placement of your wangledangle upon or within the female body. Let me just say: start with the vagina. It’s the best choice. I know. You’re thinking, “But it’s so obvious. It’s so pedestrian.” It’s like french fries, man. French fries might seem boring, right? But they’re fucking delicious. Nothing beats a good fry, am I right? Vagina’s the same way. It may seem the obvious way to go. It may seem a mundane choice — sure, it’s not as exciting as ear canal or whatever, but its the first best option. You’ll thank me.

And hey! You don’t have to stop there. If she gives you the thumbs-up, you can insert it into whatever cubbyhole she offers.

Read that again, by the way: “If she gives the thumbs-up.” The lady is the gatekeeper to all the PIZ (Penile Insertion Zones). She’s owns those. Not you. So be polite, and wait for the green light. You try to go on a red light, and that’s the kind of traffic violation that properly earns you a chemical castration. Got it? Good.

Regards,

Chucky Wendig, Doctor Of Love

Did that help, 35-year-old-dude? I hope it did.

If you’re still confused, sir, might I recommend this instructional video on “Vajazzling,” by Our Friend, John Hornor Jacobs?

Boiling Face Ouija Board

…uhhh.

What?

What the fuck is that?

“Boiling face Ouija board?”

I’m willing to believe that it’s like, a translation of what they called the “Paranormal Activity” movie in Japan or something.

Even still — how did it get you here?

What does it mean?

This shit will plague me. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe therein lies the horror. I’ll awaken at night and see a hypnagogic hallucination of the Boiling Face Ouija Board Man by my bedside, hunkered down, silent. He’ll clutch a Ouija board to his chest. His face will be a melting morass of third-degree burns, oozing onto the floor like candle wax erupted from popped blisters.

He’ll whisper: They are searching for me.

And then he’ll disappear.

But he’ll keep coming back. Oh, yes. Because that’s what Boiling Face Ouija Board man does. He’s a fucking dick, that guy. Just keeps on showing up. Night after night, until I am driven mad.

Now I’m all scared. Somebody hold me?

Fallout 3 Porn

Because that’s what I want. Sure! In a post-apocalyptic fuckhole where everything is some shade of diseased mucus or iron oxide, where the land is plagued by nuclear scorpions and ghoul dudes and Murder Bots, what I need is a little pornography. Mmm. Super Mutants rocking the stripper pole! Hot, sexy ghoul-on-ghoul action! Nngh! Yeah. Come on down to the Brotherhood of Steel. Know what I’m saying? Steel? Steel? (*points to genitals*) Steel.

What’s most unfortunate here is how I can’t serve these people’s needs. They come here looking for Fallout Porn, and I just don’t have it available. They will be left sorely disappointed. Their sadness will be limitless.

Sorry, search term weirdos. Can’t help you. I just don’t have the droids you’re looking for.

Splooge In Her Womb

Man, what? Is that a thing? Is that a thing you want? Or maybe it’s a thing of which you’re afraid?

If it’s the latter, okay. I mean, I guess that’s a guy fear, right? “Oh, man, my lady is preggo. If we go bang one out, my penis is going to hit the soft spot in the fetus-head and kill him. And if I ejaculate up in there, that little bastard is going to have to swim around in it for like, weeks. That’s not cool, man. Not cool.” It freaks some dudes out, so, fine. Maybe you came here to allay — or confirm — your suspicions. Then again, “splooge” is not exactly a medical term, and further, this ain’t WebMD. I’m not actually a doctor. I know, the lab coat and the shiny speculum maybe suggest that? But I just really dig the costume. And I use the speculum to crack nuts. I mean like, hazelnuts and walnuts. Get your mind of out of the gutter. Freak.

Now.

If it’s a thing you want –

Yeah, seriously, I don’t have it. I don’t have anything here that will help you. Go away. Get out of here. What does that even mean? Splooge in her womb? What? It’s hard to appall me, but you fuckers might just be doing it. Get out of here. I’ve got a shotgun loaded with rock salt. I will bury a load right in your ass.

…man, that doesn’t sound right.

Uhhhh.

*runs away*

Licking Snot While Fucking

Oh, what the fuck? Goddamnit. Really? Really? Snot? Licking? During sex? What? No. No! No.

You get the grumpy hedgehog in an eggcup. That’s what you get. That’s what you deserve.

I won’t even reward you with a discussion. Just get out of here. Just go. Leave. Shoo! We don’t have what you want. We don’t serve your kind here. How did you get here? Why? Why me? Why this place? It couldn’t have even been the Snot Boogie conversation from yesterday because this search term is days ago!

Gah. Gah!

Why? No!

I cannot help you. You’re beyond my assistance. I can’t get this image out of my head thanks to you. It’s hurting my brain. It’s like a worm, boring its way to the heart of the apple. You ass. You asshole. I am comfortable with all manner of terrifying visuals, but snot? Licking? Banging? During? Mah! Fnah!

*shakes head*

I can’t shake the thought out of my head!

Maybe I can drill it out.

Maybe I can use this Makita drill and just… bore the evil out. Trepanation! Right? That shit works! They still do that, yeah? It’s still an approved medical procedure? Seems like a sound, sane way of exorcising the evil spirits that have set up shop inside my head. Yes! Excellent!

Whirr, whirr!

Out, out, damned spot.

*drill meets bone*

*the smell of burning hair, scalded skull*

*laughing*

*drooling*

*thud*

(EDIT: Don’t believe that this is a search term?)

(Ta-da!)

Then, out of nowhere, some clown runs up, hikes his pants down, slaps his bepimpled cheeks, and screams: “NUH-UH!”

And then he runs away.

That is not a productive way of joining the conversation. You, my clowning friend, are only interrupting. You are disrupting. Your zit-speckled moon is little more than a brick wall, and this conversation just slammed right into it. Killing all passengers.

What the hell am I talking about?

It’s like this: remember the Ten Rules For Writing Fiction meme that went around? (I did my own list here at the site, in case you missed it.)  Being on the Twitters and the web in general, I have before and since this occasionally run upon a post or a comment that is, in essence, “Fuck you, this is dumb, everybody writes differently, you can’t apply rules to it.” It’s not the first time I’ve seen that. There exists real resistance to people offering writing advice. While I blessedly don’t see it here (because you people are awesome and are not from the standard primate house of grumpy sperm-flinging bonobos) I still encounter it “out in the wild.” It’s this defiant, iconoclastic middle finger to anybody who would dare to posit new ways of doing things or new ways of thinking about things. So, the response is more or less: “That’s bullshit, man.”

Or, put differently, it’s a dude smacking his ass at you and yelling, “Nuh-uh.”

(I won’t link out to any of these blogs. I don’t want to give them traffic, and they have a right to mouth off in their spaces as much as they’d like, just as I have the right to mouth off here to all of you poor bastards!)

Listen, I get it. Nobody can force you to do things. And nobody should tell you that from his mouth comes the One True Way, sang on a beam of light shot from an angel’s mighty pucker. I certainly hope I don’t come across that way. I know I’m a belligerent blowhard. But I always try to temper with that with the idea that I’m only just figuring these things out for myself and vocalizing them. You’re merely along for the ride as I stumble through my own pits and traps and drag my own sorry ass through the weeds.

“Fiction doesn’t abide by rules, man!”

Mm-hmm.

Here’s the thing.

Fiction has rules, actually. Writing has rules. They might be different for different people. Or different for different genres. Or for different languages. Or editors. Or media.

Further, in those gray, hoary margins where no sure rules exist, we can still talk about the potentials, can’t we? We can have a conversation about it? Surely?

I don’t know that I’ve helped anybody. I do know that I have been helped by not just you guys, but by many of the blogs and interviews and articles out there on the subject of writing. Heck, that Tim O’Brien interview from yesterday’s PWS had that great quote (paraphrased: when on the plateaus, head for the mountains). I don’t agree with everything he said, but that one thing was right for me, and I took it, and I absorbed it into my amoebic caul and uploaded it to my chittering hive-mind, and now that shit is a deep-ass part of me. Same with all those Ten Rules. I don’t agree with every rule every other writer put forth. But I found the things I liked, and I made them a part of me.

If I had been a closed door, if I had been grumpy-gussed and vinegar-pissed about all that, I wouldn’t have been open to absorbing any of that. I wouldn’t have been open to learning. No, instead I would’ve just shown my lily white shitcan and screamed “Nuh-uh!” at the top of my ever-loving lungs.

You have to be open.

This is a conversation. A dynamic back and forth. That’s why the Internet is awesome.

And jerkholes like the ass-slapping clown is why the Internet blows.

So, to you jerkholes?

You have three options.

One: Join the conversation.

Two: Listen to, or even ignore, the conversation.

Three: Eat a dick and die.

(Or, put more politely, be a fountain, not a drain.)

(And just to be clear: I’m not talking to anyone here. I’m yelling out into the mighty digital void, y’dig?)

Today, I think, is that day.

Thing is, this magical tablet has to be pretty dang magical. It’s not like tablet computers don’t already exist. They do. And they’re not that exciting. Will I buy this messianic device, birthed from the heavens, ejaculated from the quivering loins of gender-neutral angels, held aloft by a brigade of chum-covered cherubim?

Maybe.

But first, I have some demands.

Priced In The Sweet Spot

Believe it or not, my demands here are pretty loose, like the blown-out elastic in a pair of old tighty-whities. If Apple charges under a $1000, I’m happy. I’ve seen some balk at that price, saying that it has to be below $800 or whatever to really sing, but c’mon. The tiniest Kindle is over $250, and the mamma-jamma Kindle is over $450. And the Kindle does, mmm, ohhh, one thing. It is the definition of “unitasker” in the electronic world, and to me, that makes it a bit of a boat anchor. So, you tell me I can pay twice as much and get… a billion times the functionality? (Shut up. Not an exaggeration. Don’t you condescend to me, man.) Hey, I’m in. A grand or under is a sexy price point. Almost any existent tablet PC will cost you $1200 and up (though, yes, you get a keyboard), and they ain’t that special.

A Weapon In The Transmedia Revolution

My writing partner is one of the foremost proselytizers of the future of storytelling — “transmedia” being the way we can tell stories across multiple platforms, across multiple screens. (I can get into my newfound love of transmedia in another post, if sufficient interest exists surrounding that topic.)

I think the iTablet (or iSlate or the iRoc Z or whatever the hell this thing is called) could be the goddamn Rosetta Stone of the transmedia revolution.

Here’s how –

I rent a movie on my television screen.

I stop the movie in the middle, because I have to go upstairs, or get on a train, or head down to the robot brothel to wrangle up some borg-bitches out of the cyber-stable (relax, I’m pimping robot ladies, not real ladies, don’t get your athletic protector in a twist). I can take the film I’m watching on my television, and jack it over to my Apple Tablet, and continue watching it from that point forward. Even cooler, I now have access to a world of ancillary story components attached to that film — probably in the form of apps, because “apps” sounds like “appetizers,” and who doesn’t love Cheese-Sodden Bacon-Ribbed Tater Canoes? I can pull up interviews with the creators, I can watch connected episodic content, I can pause the frame and dig up IMDB on that one actor who looks like Ed Harris but isn’t Ed Harris, I can connect to social media like a CNN stock ticker and tell people about the fucked-up movie I’m watching, I can further extend out and play a game surrounding the experience, I can read an interactive script, I can pause the scene when the protagonist goes through the door on the right and I can click on the door he didn’t choose and see what story lurks behind that door, and so on, and so forth. All on the Apple Tablet.

I want, I can take the Tablet to my PC, and with a masturbatory flick of the wrist transfer the experience to my desktop computer. Or I can flip it right into my iPhone because I don’t want to take the tablet on the train because I fear filthy hobos will steal it.

In the perfect future, I’ll even be able to wander by my fridge, and pull the inventory of my fridge onto or off of the Apple Tablet. In that future, I’ll be so married to the Apple Tablet, I won’t ever be able to leave it behind. If I ever lose it, I’ll be like a man spun in a circle and dropped in a desert with no food or water. I’ll just wander around, cotton-mouthed, wondering where my underpants are, and eventually, I’ll perish. That’s the future in which I hope to live. A future where I am super-dependent on technology.

I like to dream.

I Don’t Give A Fuck If It’s A Phone

Everything doesn’t have to be a phone. My microwave is not a phone, and making it one will not increase it’s value. A lot of things aren’t a lot of things, and that’s okay. A blender is not a hard drive. A ham sandwich is not a seagull. Maybe in an eventual future we’ll only have one object, one magical device that becomes everything else, but right now I’m okay if the tablet serves as, well, a really awesome computer.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those people who thinks the iPhone is a shitty phone. It’s the best phone I’ve ever had — er, except when I was in Park City, at which point no part of the device’s connectedness worked because I was one of the approximately seven billion people crammed in that town using the same service.

Still, the Apple Tablet? Phone service? I get it. I get that people will want to have 3G on it so they can watch old episodes of Hong Kong Phooey in the middle of the Ozark Mountains, but let’s be clear: the service won’t extend that far, and really, 3G isn’t a robust enough protocol to get you that kind of media in a reasonable way. At least, it hasn’t been for me. Hell, some of my apps demand I be attached to wi-fi — you think the Apple Tablet apps (the Tablet is purportedly based on the iPhone OS) won’t require a profound bandwidth? They’re not going to be lesser, weaker apps. They’ll be beefier. Hungrier.

Further, if the rumors are true, once more the device will be married to AT&T. Now, that gets a lot of bad press, but I don’t think AT&T is the problem: any single carrier picks up the God Device, and that single carrier is going to have a hard time meeting demand in big areas. The issue is that it’s married to a single carrier. I don’t want to buy the Tablet and then have to saddle it with phone service and pay out the sphincter month-in and month-out. I pay that already with the iPhone. I bend over there, and I take it, and I like it. But my submission to these devices only goes so far.

Finally, again, I don’t need another phone. I don’t want to jam the Apple Tablet to my head and talk on it like I’m a child speaking into a giant’s shoe. “Hello? I’m on my Apple Tablet! When I’m done speaking to you, it turns into a cold and merciless pillow. Can you hear me? Where’s the mouthpiece on this huge hunk of technology? I think I have to spin it around, give me a couple minutes.”

I Want It To Be Friends With My iPhone, Though

I know, now I’m into “blue sky thinking,” but seriously, I want my iPhone and my Apple Tablet to go on little adventures together. Like George and Lennie from Of Mice And Men. I want them to hold hands and play together. Whatever I do on my iPhone, I want to do on my Apple Tablet (er, except the phone), only bigger and better. And whatever I do on my Apple Tablet, I want to do on my iPhone, only smaller and weaker. That’d be great. Together, they could fight crime.

Actually, if I were really thinking big, I’d think small. I’d say that Apple should come up with a third device — a device smaller than the iPhone to complete the triumverate. It’d be like, I dunno, the iThumb or something, and it would be a thumbnail-sized screen that literally fits over my thumb, and I’d be watching an episode of Leverage on it or something, and I wouldn’t be able to make out a goddamn thing, but that’s okay, because it’s so cute! (Actually, out of all seriousness, it’d be interesting to have a small controller device like that, some tiny piece of tech that serves as a motion based remote. I might just be making that up, or high on ayahuasca tea.)

Hell, we could go bigger, too. The Tablet could be the middle child, and instead maybe we’ll get a giant Apple device whose screen unfurls like the wings of a hang-glider, and I rise on vectors of warm air coming up off of hot asphalt, and I drift high in the sky with the turkey buzzards, craning my neck to see read the New York Times on the wings above my skull.

Mmmm. What a beautiful future it will be.

Can I Stick My Dick In It? Is There An App For That?

You cannot masturbate with the iPhone. You can try. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

See? See what I mean?

Okay, yeah, you can kind of hold it with the one hand, but the screen bobs and weaves, and it’s very distracting. Alternately, you can try to physically use the device as the masturbatory tool, but that’s just painful. Thwacking your wacker with the iPhone just bruises your little man, and further, you really need to invest in a robust screen protector. The headphone jack on my iPhone is… well. I’m just saying, it’s a little gummed up.

So! The Apple Tablet represents a great possibility: the chance to stick my penis inside powerful technology.

Okay, fine, I understand if the device doesn’t come with a “penile port” built in. That’s not unreasonable. But it’d be great if there were some manner of after-market attachment, right? Or maybe an app that conjures a virtual “cock portal” that ionizes the air and creates an electromagnetic thrum that simulates having sex, if not with a human, than with a robot human, or at least a Roomba.

And what about the ladies? I dunno. That’s your bag of tricks, girlies. You tell me. I don’t have a vagina. Those things are a mystery. I feel like I’m trying to find a trapdoor under a rug, and next thing I know there’s a wizard, and he’s trying to trap me with his riddles, and then there’s a little man in a boat and — well. I leave the iVagina talk to you. You make your own dreams. I’ll handle mine.

Really, what I’m saying is, the Apple Tablet can revolutionize both pornography and sex toys. I know, more blue sky thinking, but there it is. I said it. Someone pay me.

In Conclusion

The Apple Tablet could be, like Jesus, the alpha and the omega. It may be the end of things we’ve come to expect: a traditional keyboard, anchored media, the way we consume information, the way we connect with others, the way we masturbate. And it may be the beginning of new things: unfettered media, portable social connections, a world where the virtual and the physical are married, nü-porn.

Then again, it might just be a really nifty handheld computer.

Which is fine. I guess. I just hope Apple really takes the reins on this one and gives us a transcendent device, a device that enslaves us all, a device that demands its own religion.

(Actually, in all seriousness, as a creator and storyteller, I wasn’t being facetious when I said that it could help usher in a new way to consume both entertainment and knowledge. The iPhone may have been the missing link, the bridge between old and new — then again, the Apple Tablet might instead be that bridge, and this iteration might not get us there yet, wherever and whatever “there” happens to be. I joke, but if the device is as interesting as promised, I might seriously consider getting one eventually. Maybe not in this generation, but then again, if I really want to tell stories in a new way, maybe it’s not the worst idea to grab hold of the future while the gettin’ is good.)

Dragon Age: Origins

When times are good — times are really good. Lots of laughs and presents and love, all warming you with the hypnotic wash of whiskey breath.

When times are bad — boy, they suck. It’s all rage and thrown furniture and grotesque shame, all hidden behind a drying cake of beer vomit.

My opinions of Dragon Age — which I played on the Xbox 360 — are thus a wildly swinging pendulum. So many high points. So many low points.

The Opening Caveat

Actually, I’ve got quite a few, so buckle up.

First, I’m not a huge fan of fantasy. Like with any genre, when it’s good, it’s good. I’ll read a romance novel and enjoy it if it’s good — fantasy, though, feels too often like a derivative genre, and so much of it is, “Seen this before.” The shame of it is, fantasy is one of the widest playing fields in terms of potential content and originality, but most times, it just burps and throws up on itself while half-slumbering in the recliner. It’s content in derivative mediocrity. Like with anything, when it’s done well, it’s done well. I do still like fantasy at times. Both Morrowind and Oblivion are easily two of my Most Favoritest Games, ever. Ultima, too.

Second, I bought this game on the 360, which apparently is the Least Awesome Version of this game. So I’m told, anyhow.

Third, I apparently chose one of the weaker openings? Mage? Elf? I dunno.

Fourth, I’m a very impatient person. Keep this in mind.

Fifth and finally, I recognize that my opinions are out-of-step with the larger body of opinion on this game. I’m not trying to tell you not to enjoy this game, nor am I trying to poo-poo your experiences or limit them in any way. If you enjoyed it? High-five. Dragon Age: Origins is not your mother, and my insults to it will not be on par with me calling your mother a “grimy, cock-hungry slime-strumpet.”

Moving on.

The Kick-Ass

The Characters

Your companions might be the best characters in a video game. That might be hyperbole — I’m not really examining it overmuch, and it’s possible that with but a lance of a pin that illusion would pop. Still, hyperbole aside, these are compelling, captivating characters. They’re built on nuance. They aren’t so easily examined — “Oh, he’s a virtuous dude,” “Oh, she’s an evil witch twat.” Just when you think you’ve got ‘em pegged and think you know how they’ll react to your choices, they go and do something completely different. Yet, in retrospect, something completely in line with their character.

So, let me be clear: these characters are the single reason I continued playing this game. They’re what got me through the tough times, like when Drunk Daddy wanted to shackle me to the radiator and bitch about Mommy. I loved the ambient conversations (though for some reason they always came up just as I was about to exit one area and move to another, so I’d have to hang out by the door and listen to them), I loved the choices, I loved their individual stories, I loved their look, love love love.

Okay, the love ain’t universal — there’s always the Sten Factor to consider. Sten is the equivalent of an ATM machine or lamppost that follows you around. He’s dull as shit. Monotone. Big. Not a really intense story (though it has a few moments). I think the dog has more character.

That said? You gotta love the War Dog. (Best name I saw for him, as per Penny Arcade: “Barkspawn”) War Dog is tough. Eventually, I replaced him with Shale, because Shale talks and has story.

The Choices

You have lots of choices in this game, and they’re actually meaningful. It’s a revelation. Most affect the story in a small (yet interesting) way, but some affect it in a “big damn hammer” way. I won’t spoil it by listing such choices, but know that throughout you are offered meaningful ways to manipulate the story up to and through the end.

The other nice thing is, these choices aren’t “good” or “evil.” You have an array of gray area choices, with many of them offering outcomes on par with a Pyrrhic Victory. In other games, the choices are eerily polar, as many have noted (“Help the old woman get rid of rats!” or “Hollow out the old woman of her internal organs and use her body as a shuffling puppet while you deliver a moving truck of drugged-up pre-schoolers to your Lord and Master, Satan Almighty!”), but not in this sucker. In DA:O, the choices are fascinating and sometimes scary as fuck. I often had to gently lift my jaw off the floor. (“The game will let me… do that?”)

The game’s pretty brutal at times, too. I appreciate it. That said, some have claimed its mature themes and use of blood is original — those people did not play the Ultima series starting with Ultima VI and VII. Those games were dark, and pretty blood-soaked.

For the record, were someone to bring back the Ultima series away from its MMO bullshit, I would buy it. I would buy a hundred copies. I would make love to all of those copies.

The Dwarves

On the surface (er, pun not intended), the dwarves aren’t anything fresh. Short dudes. Big beards. They drink. They live underground. They work the forges. Snore.

Dig deeper beneath the surface (no, really, pun not intended, shut up), and the dwarves are fucking awesome.

The entire dwarven story geeked me out. I loved every minute of it. It felt like they really played with the culture, and put you smack in the middle of a very interesting “civil war” with some really intense choices. It was the most impactful part of the game, and part of that is because they had a rich and nuanced society down below in Ordzammar.

If I do play through the game again (answer unclear, ask again later), I’d play me a goddamn dwarf. I bet it will be awesome.

The Elves

The elves get a somewhat more radical overhaul, in that they’re treated as slaves and serfs, and are further the subject of racism. It’s a nice hook, and keeps them from being the Weird Mystical Beautiful Beings you see so often… erm, that is, until you get to the Dalish Elves, which end up essentially being the Weird Mystical Beautiful Beings. I kind of wish they didn’t do that? Like, maybe they just kept our experience with the elves bound to the Denerim Alienage? So it goes. They get points for trying.

Magic

A small point, but the magic in the game was interesting enough. I don’t know that it was super-compelling, nor was it a system born of intense originality, but it worked. It was easy to understand, it gave me nice variety, and blood magic (which I did not choose as a path, mind) is a nice hook.

Oh, The Fade on the other hand, sucked the air out of the mage story. Nice idea. Not a great execution.

The Little Stories

This ties back to the characters, perhaps, but all throughout, the smaller stories really got me. The Redcliffe stories, the guy who wants to open a Chantry in Ordzammar, Flemeth, the War Dog… lots of smaller stories that really made the tale come alive for me.

Hell, the Branka storyline blew me away. It was the first time in the game where I really grokked why the Darkspawn were a threat. All that business about the Broodmother and eating the dark flesh and Branka’s madness at the Anvil of the Void. Holy shit, crazy. Brave, weird, creative stuff. (Unfortunately, I played Ordzammar late, so half my playthrough I saw the Darkspawn as just a dumb “monster threat” ripped off of countless other tales. They really needed to hit that point harder throughout the entire game, in my opinion.)

The Moist, Open Ass

The Codex

Justin Achilli called it, and so I won’t go deep into it.

But fuck, I do not want to read books on my television.

Incorporate it organically, or leave it the hell out. Every time I turned around I found a new book that added to an increasingly useless library. Is that what I want to be doing? Let’s examine the choice: you could a) Run around and kill Darkspawn and be awesome, or you could b) Sit with your nose pressed against a television reading books on the screen about boring fantasy bullshit.

Mmm. Yeah. No.

I like books.

I just don’t want them in my console video game.

Sorry.

Combat

Fill a box with starving cats.

Shake the box.

Upend the box and let the cats all run out, willy-nilly.

You have now seen how combat plays out on the console version of DA:O.

I’d rather pass a fistful of gravel through my entire intestine than play the combat in this game on anything above casual.

I’ve got so many issues with the combat in this game, I don’t even know where to begin. It hurts me. It hurts Baby Jesus. It hurts us all.

Okay, first, thanks, Bioware, for not actually explaining everything about combat. I had a friend tell me things about combat I didn’t know when I was already halfway through the game. I didn’t learn about Tactics, or how to use them properly, for quite a while. Every other goddamn game gives you a robust (and sometimes even interesting!) tutorial. Wherezuh? Wuzza? I want my tutorial. I’m not reading the postcard manual that came with the game. That postcard is half-a-dick worthless.

Hell, on some of the load or transition screens, they’d offer “hints!” and some of these “hints!” were actually “essential motherfucking information!” about combat.

Second, the combat is inconsistently difficult. Anything above Casual was a fist to my balls. A fight with like, four brain-damaged Blight Wolves could go south in a half-second. Man, even on casual I had a few teeth-gritting controller-throwing moments. We were traversing the map one time and got stuck in a random encounter, and it was a bunch of jerkfaced nobodies we were fighting, and they owned us 10 seconds into the battle. Like, wham. Corpses! Us! Shit. And this leads to my next issue…

Third, load times. I got into the habit of saving after every successful fight (a slow process in and of itself), but that’s only made more frustrating because the load times were painful. You die in a fight, you then sit there while the game grinds and does simple math and takes a nap and eats some chips and takes another nap and — oh! We’re back! Combat again. And… we’re dead? We’re dead again? And we’re loading. And we’re loading. Aaaaand we’re looooaaaading. *gun in mouth*

Since combat is a huge portion of the game, I really wanted some strategy, and I wanted a robust combat experience. What I got was a bag full of anger and syphilis. Hate hate hate. Haaaate. (This is similar to my experiences with Mass Effect. Another great game ruined by God-fucked combat systems. C’mon, Bioware, really?)

The Skills

Half the skills seemed pretty useless to me.

That’s really all I’m saying. Traps? Potions? Crafting? Ehhh. I guess. This might be a personal preference, because I don’t think many games do this well outside of MMOs.

Items and Inventory

The items and inventory in this game were not fun to deal with. I don’t know what it is about games that constantly want me to do things that Aren’t Fun, since games should be Maximum Fun All The Time. Do you really think I want to micromanage my inventory? Got any spreadsheets I can do in the meantime? Maybe Morrigan needs me to shovel some snow? Or… is it time to do Alistair’s taxes?

It’d be one thing if the inventory items were interesting, and were born of nuance. Not a lot of nuance to be found, though. Pretty dull, and most of the armor and weapons look pretty boring, nor do they have flashy effects. I felt like every hour was lengthened by, “Oh, another four shitbark crossbows, three dwarf-dick axes, five tinfoil helms, an infinity of ‘deep mushrooms’ — whatever they are. I have to sell this stuff or I have to move to the junk folder and then destroy the junk and then… ZZZZzzz.”

Halfway through the game, I had the max weapons and armor for my companion peeps.

That means, for the second half, I basically found nothing new or interesting in regards to my inventory. That is not fun.

Oh! And stupid goddamn locked chests. It feels like zero thought went into making locked doors and locked chests interesting. Listen, you keep something behind a locked door, I’m forced to think, “It must be awesome; who locks away boring shit?” (Will is fond of bringing up the Thief series of games — that’s a series that made you appreciate the fantasy convention of people keeping Awesome Shit Locked Away.) But here? In DA:O? How often did I pick a locked door, behind which is a locked chest, inside which is like, a Deep Mushroom and a dog treat? Further, you can pick a chest’s lock and steal crap from people even when they’re standing right in front o you! For a game obsessed with choice and consequence, this is a silly stumble to make.

And, and! The game further default to that silly old game convention of, “Hey, I just killed a wolf or a bear, and… the bear has a bunch of coins and a dagger? Seriously? Does the wolf have an MP3 player? I could use an MP3 player.”

The Graphics

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.

I hate brown in video games.

The world around us is home to many colors.

Further, this is a fantasy world. I’d like it to come alive. Even if most things are brown, please choose a few dashes of color and paint some bold strokes. Please? Please? Otherwise, everything feels like it’s smeared with a handful of baby shit and Vaseline.

The game wasn’t universally dull — despite its earth tones, I think Ordzammar really felt like a fantasy kingdom — but overall, blergh. My eyes were sad most times.

The World Itself

In games like Ultima, Elder Scrolls and Fallout, you are privy to open worlds. Even way back in Ultima, it would take me a while to get to, say, Skara Brae from Yew — and that made the world feel big. It felt comprehensive. It felt alive.

With Oblibion and Morrowind (and Fallout), I really got a sense of the world simply by walking it. It made me a feel a part of time and place.

Further, in all those games, I see a building? I can go inside it. Door locked? Pick it! Smash it! Sure, it’s somebody’s house, but often the items felt tailored to those people — dresses and dolls and weathered blades. And if you enter someone’s house when they’re home or you steal their shit? Hey, surprise surprise, they attack! Or they call guards!

Dragon Age forgets all that. It feels like a small world, and outside some snow here or a forest there, it feels alarmingly homogeneous. I don’t have to walk everywhere. Denerim is basically just several small instances that feel mostly dead. Haven’t we gotten to the point where we can have the other characters… moving around? Instead, they all just stand there, dead-eyed. In Oblivion, which came out years ago, people move around. They have routines. Hell! They had routines in Ultima! They’d close up shops!

No day and night cycle?

Nobody cares that I’m in their house, stealing their shit?

The only people moving are a handful of children?

Major let-down to me. I know earlier I knock fantasy a little bit, but the one thing that is captivating about a fantasy world is seeing it come alive.

Here, I see it birthed stillborn on a dirty wooden floor.

DLC

I’ll let Penny Arcade say it:

… a heaping ladle of weaksauce, there.

Conclusions!

You might think, “Gosh, Chuck really hates this game.”

I don’t! I don’t.

But the game wildly vacillates between A-plus and F-minus for me. And that drives me nuts. I go through Ordzammar or Redcliffe and I feel bold and adventuresome and I believe I’m making captivating decisions, but then I’m doing the Circle of Magi quests or the Dalish elf quests, and I mostly want to snooze. I make great choices, I feel powerful. I get caught in combat with a bunch of Darkspawn, I feel stupid.

The game, like a drunken parent, loves me and hates me with equal measure.

The game reaches for greatness, and falls short. It mostly makes me want to play Ultima or Elder Scrolls again.

(View supersized!)

And so it was that our Xeno-Messiah — hermaphroditic spawn of the Jovian Overlord — was born into this plane of existence, pulled from his ultradimensional pocket.

The Gospel Of John Spiderface

In those days, an e-mail went out from Caesar Chewbacca to all the people in the world.

This was the first and most spectacular of e-mails, when the Devil was mayor of Poughkeepsie.

And all those in Poughkeepsie were told, “Lo, the Xeno-Messiah Xibus is coming, born from the ultradimensional womb, which is actually a dirty goat manger, and it would be good.”

And all came to Poughkeepsie to see.

And the Domo Brothers — DJ Domo Jones and Pimp-Daddy Domo the Roofraiser — came from Schenectady by hitching a ride with some fat dude in a rusted-out pickup truck.

They came because they were of the house and lineage of Domo, and frankly, if they didn’t play some bad-ass party music, who would?

And when they arrived, they found John Spiderface, the totem spirit of Poughkeepsie, waiting in a dirty manger laden with rotten hay and withered goat scat.

So it was that John Spiderface said something like, “I have to reach into the cosmic vagina to pull this alien baby out. Can you guys kick a fat beat?”

And the Domo Brothers did kick a fat beat, and lo, it was good.

With his hand thrust deep into the cosmic vagina — up to the elbow, if you must know — John Spiderface did pull forth the wriggling alien infant known as Xibus, the Xeno-Messiah, Son of the Jovian Overlord (Who Claims Ownership Over This World And Its Home Dimension).

And outside the manger, the people who came to Poughkeepsie did gather, and they did swaddle a lamppost in heaps and mounds of meatloaf, and thus the Meatloaf Effigy was born in support of Xibus the Xeno-Messiah.

Lo! Holy lightning from the Jovian Overlord did strike the Meatloaf Effigy, and it did animate the Meatloaf Effigy, and he went and picked a lone flower growing out of the snow, and it smelled very nice.

John Spiderface noticed that none could leave the manger, for all the people in the world had come to Poughkeepsie and that made it very crowded, and so he laid the squalling Xeno-Messiah in the hay and goat pellets for there was no way to get to the Ramada Inn just down the road.

Not far from the manger were two of Humanity’s Chosen Shepherds, Elfbucket and Baby Fatback, watching over the throngs of ecstatic gatherers, making sure that nobody stomped each other to death like they do anytime a sweet-ass new toy ends up at Wal-Mart, you know, like those goddamn hamsters.

And an angel of the Jovian Overlord did appear to Elfbucket and Baby Fatback, and this angel was a big blue dude named Watto, and this big blue dude was nebulously — and comically! — foreign.

The angel Watto was wreathed in Christmas lights and did carry with him a smaller version of himself that did all the talking, and that smaller version was all like, “Hey! Don’t getta me wrongo, I have-a great faith in a Johnny Spiderface, but be not-a afraid, for behold-o, I bringa you good tidings of a leetle ultra-dimensional monkey name-a Jesus or Jeebus or Xibus or somma shit like dat!”

And Elfbucket and Baby Fatback did hear the fat beats of the block-rocking Domo Brothers, and they knew that this was a great joy that Xibus the Savior was born from the trembling slick-walled cosmic womb by the hands of John Spiderface.

At the urging of the angel Watto, they went to find the Xeno-Messiah swaddled in foul-smelling hay and goat feces, and John Spiderface could only shrug, for he was merely a spiderface, not a professional hay-remover or feces unspackler or whatever, and Elfbucket and Baby Fatback knew that their time had come.

Together they performed ancient shepherd magics and conjured a trio of Bad-Ass Dogs: Haduken the Karate-Hound, Deathsniffer the Rapping Bloodbeast, and Snoop Dickity Dimebag the Mule-Kicked Great Dane.

Then they worked further magics and summoned a triumverate of Feral Cats: Lipstick Cat, Distracted Cat, and I’m On Ur Roof Pooping In Ur Gutters Cat.

And when the shepherds had finished with their pagan magicks-with-a-k, the Bad-Ass Dogs did go and eat the foul hay off of the Xeno-Messiah, for dogs are basically dumbasses that will eat anything they can find, especially if it smells like garbage.

And when the Bad-Ass Dogs were finished with their meal of foul hay, the Feral Cats did take the cocoon of goat feces and bury it, for cats, while bitchy little fuckers, are very good at hiding feces from the world.

And then Distracted Cat was all like, “Yo, I think that’s the fuckin’ Devil over there.”

And Hadouken the Karate-Hound was all like, “You shut your cat face. That Devil’s the mayor of Poughkeepsie. He’s a good man and keeps taxes low. He goes and gives money to cancer kids. So what if he’s the Devil?”

And lo, Distracted Cat was cowed and was like, “Snap, whatever,” and it was good.

When Watto, angel of the Jovian Overlord did decide he was late for an appointment and disappeared down into the Hollow Earth, the shepherds Elfbucket and Baby Fatback did cry out, “Glory to the Jovian Overlord in the highest, and peace among the gathered human flocks, for they shall find joy in slavery!”

And the gathered humans were like, “Whut? Slavery?”

And the Xeno-Messiah Xibus finally made a cry that sounded like words, and those words sounded an awful lot like, “Let’s enslave these pink-skinned apes!”

The gateways between worlds did open, and the Praetorian Guard of the Jovian Overlord poured through, uberboots stomping, and the Bad-Ass Dogs did howl, and the Feral Cats did keen, and John Spiderface was all like, “Where’s my money? My check better be on the way for this.”

And lo, the people did scream and gibber as they were thrown into unbreakable cages, and it was… well, not good at all.

And the Devil of Poughkeepsie did say, “Hey, dipshits, that’s what you get for making the Devil the mayor.”

And then Chewbacca growled.

All hail Xibus, the Xeno-Messiah, for He is Born!

The basket is oblivion.

It is filled with anti-thanks.

So, I share them with you.

These are the things for which I am totally not at all thankful.

Fuck these things. Fuck them right in their ears.

Let’s begin.

Cancer

I figure, go big or go home, right? So, let’s open big. Cancer sucks.

Cancer is a boring worm chewing its way through much of my family. If someone dies in my family? Probably cancer. (Which gives you a nice predictor for me: how am I going to die? Probably cancer. That, or my head’ll get cleaved in twain by an unruly ostrich foot because frankly, I’m always fucking with ostriches.) It’s coming up on two years now that Dad died, and others in the family have cancer now, too.

Cancer — technically “malignant neoplasm” — kills some 13-15% of people worldwide.

That being said, I’m not sure if people know what cancer even is. At it’s core, cancer is obviously “cells gone bad,” which is far less sexy than “girls gone bad,” as it features far fewer ladies making out with one another on top of pool tables. But some seem caused by viruses, others caused by environmental carcinogens, others still are caused by hereditary issues or gene mutations… shit, were you to tell me, “Cancer is caused by goblins,” I’d have to concede a knowing, suspicious nod. In fact, fuck it. Let’s just get it over with and call cancer the “Goblin Particle.” You come back from the doctor, and you say, “I got the Goblin Particle but bad. Goblins are all over my colon. It’s Helm’s Deep in there, but it’s deep deep. I don’t know if I’m going to make it.” Then, when you die, they say, “Shit, man, he finally lost his battle with the Goblins.” And everyone nods solemnly, and pours a little on the curb for our lost warrior, you who perished beneath the infected claws of the Underhorde, yet still dying with honor. Because you were fighting Goblins.

Alternately, you want to go a different metaphor, you might go with “terrorists.” I mean, here we are, constantly discovering that Terrorists Walk Among Us and we didn’t even know it, right? It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers up in this bitch. Terrorists seem normal until one day they take out the 7-11 and all the Slurpie Guzzlers contained within. Or it’s like school shootings, or postal freakouts. They go rogue, just like how normal cells in the body suddenly flip shit and start gunning everybody down (appropriate too how terrorists gather in cells — huh? huh?).

Point is, cancer is a big fuckin’ asshole. Plus, the darkest reality is it’s probably something we’re doing to ourselves. Your rarely read news that says that cancer is caused by something in nature. “Oh, hell, today they discovered that cancer is caused by sparkling clean drinking water. And puppies!” No, it’s always that we’re putting some kind of evil plastic in our baby bottles, or we’re feeding rubber tires to our milking cows, or that our laser printers emit some kind of invisible ink cloud that launches goblins into our lungs. Our Western lifestyle is a right fucker, and it’s probably going to kill us. Cancer in that way is maybe our way of exterminating ourselves — not individually, not necessarily, but as the decision of an entire species. Like maybe we got together in our dreams one night and simply agreed on, “Let’s bombard our lives and our world with chemicals, and see how long it takes for us to wither and die on the vine. Let’s spray our babies with pesticide and line our colons with industrial lubricant and bomb our clouds with microwaved pharmaceutical waste!”

Then again, maybe it’s just the ostriches. Maybe they’re cursing us with their dark ostrich magicks. That’s magic with a k, which means it’s for real.

Eggplant

I know, I’m an asshole — somehow, I’m capable of putting “cancer” and “eggplant” on the same Axis of Evil. But, fuck it. Eggplant is for jerks. (Plus, Thanksgiving is a food holiday, so it seems only fitting to list a food.)

I’ve come to terms with many of the foods I once disliked. I love fish. While I won’t do tomatoes raw (and insist that in that form they will dick up a sandwich something fierce), I do concede that in nearly all forms tomatoes are a godsend. Hell, I used to loathe raisins. I detested them the way you detest pimples or Sumerians. (In college someone once stuffed my mailbox full of raisins. Be aware, saboteur, soon as I find out who you are, I will stuff your mouthbox with my fist.) But even now, what do I sometimes eat? Raisins. That’s right. I’m over it. I’m good.

And yet, eggplant is still anathema to me.

Oooh! Eggplant, I hate you! Eggplant isn’t even a vegetable. It’s a fruit. A berry. A berry of… what family? Oh, right, the nightshade family. Nightshade being a poison and all, this surprises me in no way, shape or form. I recall sitting at the dinner table across from my father, who often insisted I clean my plate like any father, and he told me to eat the eggplant in no uncertain terms. I explained to him that I would throw up, but my father was not a bargaining man. I ate them. I vomited. That was the last time he forced me to eat anything off my plate. Goddamn nightshade.

Taste-wise, it’s bitter and unpleasant. Or, put more poetically, it tastes like a squirrel just shit in my mouth. It’s like a squash gone bad. It has minimal health benefits, and weirder still, possess nicotine and histamines. Plus, just look at the damn thing. It’s dark. Shadowy. The short squat ones look like demon eggs, and the big long ones look like truncheons wielded by the Armies of Satan.

Eggplant, you are the bane of the vegetable community. You are the culinary equivalent of a balloon filled with roofing tar. I loathe you. Anyone who eats you should be considered suspect.

Frankly, eggplant is probably what causes cancer, let’s just be honest.

Winter

Winter is coming, and I could not be sadder. I get why animals hibernate. It’s not some kind of biological function, it’s just because — well, fuck winter. Why subject yourself to that? Just crawl into a cave, your belly full of meats and root vegetables and chocolate, and pass out under an electric blanket for the duration. Since winter is basically the year’s own version of nighttime, it makes sense to me. Just sleep it off, little bear buddies.

Maybe if I lived somewhere where winter was serious, it’d be cool? Utah or Colorado or something — big dramatic snows, swift melts, skiers, Yetis, sherpas, all that shit. But no. I live in Pennsylvania. Winter consists of a few big snows, lots of little ices, and a ceaseless parade of damp, cold, gray days. Every day is like one hazy, unfulfilling nap. The color is sucked out of the world by some invisible vampire. Things are dead. I mean, listen, Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Years are all well and good, but those things are essentially still in autumn. Winter itself is that yawning gap between January and March, that nowhere-nothing verboten zone. It is the Wasteland, and in it, we are the Hollow Men.

Trust me, I intend to be one of those old dudes who escapes winter by fleeing to some tropical or semi-tropical clime. Every winter is the winter of my discontent. Last winter we fled to Hawaii for a week, and it was the best thing ever. January! With 70 degree weather! And orchids! And sun, sweet merciful sun! Of course, coming back was like re-entering the atmopshere after surfing the Aurora Borealis on a Space Pony — we got back home and it had snowed and iced and gotten colder. Still. What a respite, and a much-needed charging of batteries.

Screw you, Old Man Winter. Screw you big.

“The News”

Note the quotation marks.

Do you watch the news? Do you read the news? Do you believe you’re actually getting All News? Then you may be oxygen-starved. Check on that.

Let me thumb you in the eye with sharp truth: news is entertainment. This is particularly true of any so-called news you get on TV. They have to sell advertising. They sell advertising by gaining viewers. They gain viewers by exploiting, titillating, exaggerating. Facts are lost. Data is manipulated or ignored. Agendas on both sides of the political divide are plain. You don’t have to look far back in time for the evidence of this: Fox News has had their recent, erm, “mistakes” (riiiight, mistakes). Or what about that dude who Isn’t Really In A Coma? The media’s been touting how he’s been communicating, which according to James Randi (noted skeptic) is basically a charlatan’s act. (Randi isn’t disputing that the guy isn’t in a coma, by the way, only that the facilitated communication is highly suspect.)

Half the time I look at the news, I see barely any story, and a frenzy of “analysis.” I don’t want analysis. At least not up front. Not with my news. I want facts. “Yolanda jumped over the fence” is a fact. “Yolanda jumped over the fence likely because she is infested with fence-jumping toe parasites, or maybe she’s just depressed” is analysis. Save the analysis for its own weird little corner of the world. Don’t mix.

The other thing our so-called news is good for is stirring — or outright concocting — false debate. The reason why we’re suddenly having a surge against science and reason is in part because the news is happy to whip up the fake debate. They’re more than happy to give the Vocal Minority the Very Loud Microphone so that it seems like the booming voice is representative of millions of people, not the four Jesus-addled meth addicts in an Airstream trailer. Arguments over evolution, “nutrition science,” vaccines, the health care debate, Obama’s goddamn birth certificate — these are all false debates. They are debates that are not debates. This shit ain’t news, people. This is entertainment.

It’s a weird world when we get greater fact checking from Snopes-dot-com and The Daily Show than we do from our actual news.

Sad that we don’t have an American equivalent to the BBC.

So, fake-ass punk-ass news? I am not thankful for you.

Ptoo. I spit in your hair.

Poser Cable Channels

And that leads me to: cable channels that don’t show the shows they’re supposed to.

Examples:

MTV (Music Television) does not have music.

The only thing I “learn” from TLC (The Learning Channel) is to engage in Hercules-strength birth control.

History Channel thinks I need to have reality shows featuring pawn shops, truckers, and loggers.

Sci-Fi is now SyFy, rebranding itself into utter ambiguity.

Note that this isn’t true for all cable channels. Discovery actually still allows me to discover things — Mythbusters, Dirty Jobs, Time Warp, these are all entertaining shows, but I actually come away with information and appreciation. Comedy Central still shows comedy (at least, by most definitions). I don’t see shows on the Food Network about hunting the Chupacabra.

I mean, what the hell is up with all this exploitative bullshit programming? Why does Animal Planet want me to engage in cryptozoology? Why does the History Channel or the Travel Channel and the SyFy Channel and A&E all think I need television shows about goddamn ghosts? All these dillholes wandering around dark hallways with electromagnetic asshole detectors, jumping at every noise and voiding their bowels?

At least History still shows some really good historical programming, and at least Animal Planet is largely about actual animals rather than Unicorn Hunter University or whatever they put on Saturday nights. But TLC? Man, TLC. What the hell, dude? Every time I turn it on, it’s midgets on tractors or tattooed people or eight-year-old pageant sluts and their insane parents. Never mind the fact that TLC is the home to Jon and Kate Plus The Spawn of Hate, or their ever-enduring quest to find families with larger and larger litters. “It’s Buck and Stacy Plus Their 72 Preemies!” It’s an apocalypse of babies over there.

(For the record, that is the correct term. A school of fish, a parliament of owls, a murder of crows, and an apocalypse of babies.)

Still, the worst is probably MTV. MTV, oh how far you’ve fallen. Once a station whose opinion was actually important, once a station that concerned itself with social issues, once a station that played actual music. Anyone remember when Real World showed… semi-real people? Some dude wants to be a comedian, another dude wants to be a comic book artist, whatever? Sure, the drama was probably false and the participants still were occasionally Vapid Young People, but they seemed to want things, they seemed to be faintly human. Now it’s drunk, fighty 18-20-year-olds, all basically clones of the last batch. Empty-skulled bucket-heads, to the last. I think right now the only worthwhile show on MTV is True Life, and even then that show still doesn’t play music (an essential quality of any station inserting the word “music” and “television” in its name, but what the hell do I know?).

It’s sad, really. I know the day is coming when Comedy Central starts showing syndicated episodes of like, Gray’s Anatomy and when the Food Network offers some reality show where people compete to have sex with a grizzly bear. Lowest common denominator programming will rule the day like clumsy, crack-addled dinosaurs. We will be crushed beneath it and made extinct.

Oh, All Right, Thanks

Fine, fine, yes, it’s been mostly a pretty good year, and I’m thankful for all that, and I’m thankful to my wife above all others, for she puts up with my dumb-ass. I’m sure if I looked around the Internet hard enough I’d find her secret blog, and on it would be an Anti-Thanks list, and I’d be at the top under the header: “My Husband Is Basically A Dumbass.”

What I’m trying to say is, Happy Thanksgiving, people. Enjoy your turkey. Avoid the pterodactyl.

Feel free to comment here and tell me about the things for which you are most anti-thankful. Or, if you’re so chipper and cheery, those things for which you’re thankful. I don’t care. Surprise me.

So, it’s time to make up some new sexual fetishes. Feel free to pass these around. Try them out. Swirl them around your mouth,  figuratively and literally — tell me how their juices taste.

And, better yet, feel free to toss your hat into the ring. Hit the comments, and tell me about Your Made-Up Sexual Fetish. Best one wins a prize. By which I mean, you get no prize.

Ready? Let us begin.

Cloud Fuckers

Also known as “Misties.” Yes, that’s right. People who want to hump clouds. One guy gets turgid at the cumulonimbus. Some chick gets all tickly when thinking about cirrus clouds drifting across her heaving, dewy bosoms. You probably get two varities: the posers, and the doers. The posers think it’s impossible, but they get hot and heavy about it anyway. It’s like the dragon porn people. Can’t have sex with a mythical lizard beast, so they fantasize about it on the Internet. Same way, here. They write slutty fictions about having three-ways with an altostratus and a nimbostratus, and somebody takes a steamy load of contrails to the face. But then you get your doers, the people who really take this seriously. They probably die doing it. Maybe they enrobe a small jet in a greasy coat of off-white rubber and fly in and out of clouds. Or maybe they just jump out of the plane, naked, deep into the yawning cavern of a sodden thunderhead. (Edit: This is not that original, as it turns out. Damn you, Internet!)

Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors Fetishists

Don’t remember Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors? Neither does anybody else. Except me, and the made-up fetishists who get all hot-and-gooey thinking about this mid-80s cartoon where the heroes of the Lightning League battle the evil plant creatures of the Monster Minds. That’s sort of fucked up right there, the fact that the vegetables are the bad guys. Whatever. Point is, the Monster Minds dudes all look pretty much like dildos and blooming vaginas and bulging testicles anyway. Plus, there was something called a “magic root?” I dunno. I had the toys, and even back at age 10, I was like, “I think this brain guy looks a little like a scrotum.” It’s basically pre-teen tentacle porn. So, you can be sure that the kids who played with those toys now represent a small-but-persistent army of fetishistic adults. “I’m going to dress up as Herc Stormsailor. You be Dr. Zorg! I’ll violate your veiny brain with my Drill Vines! You nail me on the back with your Spray Gunner. This is hot. Let’s blog about it.”

Traffic Fiends

Guy listens to the local news station for the traffic report. He hears where the traffic hotspots are going to be. He heads out on his Moped, erection straining against too-tight khakis. But the traffic is too thick! He cannot penetrate it. He hides behind an exit sign and swoons. Trafficus Interruptus. He goes home and plays with Matchbox cars, but instead of racing them around the track, he simply shoves them bumper to bumper, and moans at the thoughts of sweet, sweet highway paralysis. … File this one under “inexplicable,” like car crash fetishists. You have to believe that this could exist. Somebody who finds the locked-up, restrained nature of a traffic jam tantalizing and titillating instead of maddening. “Holy shit, someone spilled chickens in Route 9. Nobody’s going anywhere! I have to get down there. Nnnnghhh. Muhhhh. So hot!”  (I’d like to clarify that he’s hot for the traffic jam, not the spilled chickens. A spilled chicken fetish is a whole different basket of eggs.)

French Foreign Legion Porn

The Nazis always get all the repressed sexual fetishism. They have the monopoly, and that’s just not fair. So, I posit that at least three people out there violate themselves to French Foreign Legion Porn. I mean, c’mon. They have big hats. Bulbous hats. Phallic hats. They’re out there in the desert. All those jangly bits. The sand-caked beards. The esprit de corps. Totally sextastic, right? … Hey, those three people think it’s hot. Okay, so maybe you’re not buying it. Hold on, I’m thinking, I’m thinking. What about Civil War porn? Don’t see much of that. Or the Polish People’s Army! Super-sexy! Mrowl!

People Who Masturbate With Pages Ripped From Stolen Library Books

… yeah, I kind of think that one says it all. Maybe they’d call themselves “Finers,” or “BSBTs, Boner-Sporting Biblio Thieves.” I think this one has traction. Let’s get on it. Let’s spread the word. In ten years, this’ll be totally normal. Of course, in ten years all our libraries will probably be Starbucks, so, maybe this one’s not so hot after all.

Let me explain.

The site keeps track of the search terms that you fine, upstanding weirdos are using to discover this website, and boy, am I glad it does. Because if it didn’t, I would never know that you found this site via searching for the following terms:

“Man sucks off monkey”

“Crushing feet sex”

“Free movies of big clits”

“Lee Majors penis size”

And, most recent and most favorite:

(drum roll, please)

“Insects in my ass”

That last one kind of… curled my noodle. It means that Someone is searching for that term on purpose. This Someone is looking for it either because he is plagued by the problem of having insects in his ass, or he is Someone who wants to have insects in his ass.

So, I’m left to wonder: do people want insects in their ass? Is that a thing? Anytime I think, “Shit, that can’t be real,” you look online and there’s at least three people who… y’know, gloomily masturbate to some made-up, almost impossible fetish. (“I want my girlfriend to dress up as a monkey, who is in turn dressing up as a butler, and I want her to duct tape a banana in my mouth. Is that weird?”) And hey, more power to them. As long as everybody’s signed the right consent forms, enjoy. Do whatever makes your grapefruit squirt.

Investigating this, however, took me down a fast wrong turn, and before I knew it, I was deep down the drain with the clots of hair and rat bones and goat placentas.

The Internet is home to some truly amazing — and truly bewildering – sexual fetishes.

Furries

Furries — a.k.a. those people who dress up in animal costumes and bang each other, or watch other people in animal costumes making the erm, beast with two backs — is almost so commonplace that it’s barely a fetish anymore. I’m happy I’m not dating these days, because I’m afraid I’ll meet some woman and we’ll go back to her place and she’ll start getting out a swan costume or something. (And by the way, that makes Zeus the original furry, because that guy was always ravishing chicks as a bull or a swan. Not to mention he’s all over the place turning people into dogs and turtles and shit.) I’ll be like, “Hey, yeah, no,” and she’ll turn her nose down at me because I must be one of those people on the Internet who do it human-style (also known as “skinnies!”).

I’m happy that these people have found their niche, really. I do wonder though, if you’re trying to hump some chick in a giraffe costume, doesn’t that mean you maybe kinda sorta want to hump an actual giraffe? (I don’t recommend that, by the way. Giraffes look cute, but they will fuck your shit up. Giraffes know some dark moves.) I’m just happy you’ve sidelined your bestiality.

Dragon Porn

Yup. They’re out there: people who want sex with mythic creatures. Don’t believe me? Clicky-clicky, non-believer. I guess this is pretty harmless, given that dragons don’t exist. Though I guess it could get out of control? You’ll know if it does, because some dude will be arrested at the zoo when a Komodo dragon bites off his peener. And at least there’s no unicorn porn. (Oh, no.) Well, fine. Hopefully no one has violated poor Humbaba.

Crush Porn

From what I can tell, “crush porn” comes in a couple flavors. The first is semi-harmful but entirely consensual: people stepping on people. Hey, cool. A boot-heel smushing your junk like it’s a still-smoldering cigarette? You signed on for it. Russian kick dance on your boobs and butt? Go you. The second variety involves stepping on rodents and bugs, and this might be the origin of why someone was looking for insects in his ass. If you get a sexual thrill from stepping on (and harming) harmless animals, you should probably just fellate a gun barrel instead. I don’t think that star-nosed mole under your cha-cha boots signed a consent form, Charo. And no, I’m not suggesting Charo maims animals for sexual pleasure, just in case her lawyers are poking around (and if they are, I’ll ask them: what search term did they use to get here?).

The Stuck Fetish

Another fetish with a few “sub-varieties.” One variety — demonstrated by Little Miss Gum Gams, here — involves getting stuck in some kind of gluey substance, like bubblegum or road tar or maybe a movie theater floor (“I’m so hot for melted gummi bears and boot-stepped nacho cheese”). Another variety involves what could only be described as “extremely clautrophobic shit.” A girl gets her leg caught in a hole, or a dude shoves half his body into a rolled-up carpet and can’t get out (this latter sub-sub-variety is called the “Stuck Headfirst” fetish). The former variety, I almost understand. Stepping in gum is totally crappy, but being stuck I guess simulates a bondage aspect. Kay, fine, sure. But cramming your body in a hole? I know people who panic when they get on an elevator or drive through a tunnel. I don’t have claustrophobia now, but you shove half my body in a sinkhole, and I’m damn sure going to develop it. Especially when I can’t, y’know, breathe. I’m getting weirded-out just thinking about this.

Robot Porn

At this point, I’m almost like, “Eh, who cares? Guy wants to sex up an android, sure. Girl needs all holes filled with cyborg pistons, whatever makes her tumescent.” (Sorry, I just wanted to say “tumescent.”) My greatest fear, though, is that I’m going to come home one day and find somebody trying to mouth-rape a Roomba. And I don’t even own a Roomba.

Formicophilia

You’ll note I’m not doing these in any kind of order. I’m kind of discovering them as I do, which is like feeling your way in a dark room and your hand keeps falling on sweat-slick unicorn pelts and sticky leather. Anyway. This one might also be the source of the “insects in my ass” search term, because apparently, some people (hopefully no more than, say, five of them) like to let bugs crawl on their junk. I guess that’s fine, I just know that if a centipede or a spider ever does the soft-shoe on my Mister Man, it will be at least a year and a day before I will once more be able to achieve erection. Or “tumescence.” Hey. Wasn’t he the satyr in that Narnia book?

Anyway, the point here is, I don’t think that praying mantis asked to participate in your sexual experience, pal.

Plushies

Aren’t these people basically “furries,” except… without a human partner? Some guy dry-humping a giraffe costume? I guess that’s cool. Just don’t touch my Care Bears. I get it, her name is “Love-A-Lot Bear,” but that doesn’t mean she’s asking for it. Go put the moves on Paddington. He’s super-lonely! Plus, he looks like a flasher, or some dirty old pervert fisherman.

Looners

The thought process here must go something like this: “I really like wearing latex. It makes me feel sexy. Hey, aren’t balloons made of latex? Yeah. Yeah, they are. I will now have sex with a balloon.” That just has to make the worst possible noise. All that rubbery squeaking? It’s like a nightmare. A nightmare with clown sex. Which calls to mind…

Clown Sex

I…

Ehhh.

*vomits*

No! No. I draw the line here, Internet. No clown sex for anybody! What the fuck is wrong with you? All that honking? The smeared greasepaint? The cake? (And yes, I am now also familiar with Cake Farts, Sweet Jeebus I’m going to scoop out my eyes and shove them into my goddamn ears). Hey, you want to gussy yourself up in a goat costume and fake-bang a plush pegasus on a floor covered in glue traps? Get in there and give a thumbs-up when you’re done. But clowns? Clown sex? Cake farts? This is why Rome burned. Wasn’t the barbarians. Wasn’t nascent Christianity. Wasn’t an Empire spread too thin. Instead of bread and circuses, it was clown sex and cake farts. We’re doomed. Western civilization is orbiting the drain, people. You go to some Third World village and show him a YouTube video of some clown poop-fucking a cake or something, and that person will kill you and cut off your penis because you are some kind of evil sorcerer. And they’d be right to do so! Shame. Shame on you, Internet! Can’t you just fuck a robot like the rest of us?

(Er, warning! This post contains profanity.)

Once, I thought, maybe I shouldn’t be so foul. I mean, okay, it’s not like I’m inappropriately foul in mixed company. I don’t go to a job interview and start dropping f-bombs or c-rockets. “What’s my greatest weakness? It’s that I’m so fucking bad-ass. I’m like a goddamn hammer. You put a problem in front of me, I’m going to find the problem’s cock and balls, and hammer the shit out of them. That problem will vomit blood out of its face pussy! I don’t even know what that means! Shut up, Sugar Nipples, and give me the job! Bam!”

Then you hear that old chestnut about how profanity is the linguistic tool of the weak-minded, that people only punctuate their sentences with profanity because they’re too slow or unable to conjure the proper words. But, c’mon, fuck that. I just wrote, “conjure the proper words,” which doesn’t sound entirely stupid. If I pepper in there a “conjure the proper fuckin’ words,” or even, “fuckin’… conjure the proper words” (I like to move my profanity around, like rearranging furniture), then I’m still using the same smartness. I’m just giving the turn of phrase a little pizazz, you know? It’s like fresh-ground pepper. They put your salad in front of you, and they say, “You want fresh-ground pepper?”, and you say, “Fuck yes,” and then they twist a little of that shit on your salad. It’s delicious. It doesn’t change the flavor of the salad. It doesn’t ruin it. It just gives it a little kick. Just like a nice splash of profanity.

To be clear: this is one of the gifts from my father.

My father had a foul mouth. My mother does, too, but not to the same extent — nah, Dad, he could hang with the best of them when it came to slinging the profane tongue. I don’t know that he got really out-of-control-poetic with it; I never heard him call somebody a “fuckbasket” or a “shit sandwich” or anything. The man knew his profanity, though. But, “fuckin’ asshole,” yes. Lawds, yes. (Or, even better, “fuckin’ mummy,” as in, “That guy’s a fuckin’ mummy.” To this day, I can’t be entirely sure what it means, but since he used it to refer to people who are in some way useless or lazy or of questionable intelligence, I assume he actually means it in reference to the Universal monster–mummies, after all, are like zombies or the Sleestak; they’re slow-moving and not particularly bright.)

I remember one day, I was maybe around 12 or so, and the two of us were standing out back of my father’s big metal building (that’s what it was — just a big brown metal building where he would sandblast or work on tractors or set up targets for shooting). Now, by this point in my life, I had already been cursing a little bit. Just testing the waters now and again. Feeling the vicious thrill of saying a verboten word. But, the funny thing here was, I accidentally let slip a curse word for no good reason. I said “piss,” and I meant to say, I think, “lava.” I’m not making that up. We were talking about some show on TV, some PBS show about volcanoes, and I don’t know how my brain rewired at that one moment to let fly with a word meaning urine as opposed to a word meaning hot melty rock stuff, but that’s what happened.

And my heart seized, because I was sure my father was going to, I dunno, beat me to death.

Instead, he clapped me on the shoulder and squeezed (your Vulcan death-pinch can go and fuck its mother in the shower, my father had this secret technique of grabbing the muscle-meats between your neck and your shoulder and delivering unto pain and madness like you’ve never felt before–and he did this as a gesture of affection), and laughed, and told me that he was proud of me, and that I could curse in front of him any time I wanted.

I thought it was a ruse, of course, and so it took me a few years to really settle into it. But no, he meant it. He was proud. I had said a bad word. I had joined the tribe of men. Now it was time to kill animals and eat their flesh (and, since I was 12, that was literally next on the agenda).

Anyway, the point of all of this is, I’m about 22,000 words deep into a re-novelization of a script (which was itself a scriptization of a novel I’d written but not finished), and this novel is sodden with profanity. It oozes verbal sewage. A snippet:

[scrippet]

She hears a car coming up behind her. It slows.

A white Mustang. Shit.

It pulls up alongside of her, the passenger window down. Ashley leans over, one hand unsteady on the wheel, peering out.

“Get in,” he says.

“Suck my dick.”

“Nowhere to go.”

“I got my getaway sticks. They take me all kinds of places.”

“I know who you are. I know what you do.”

“You don’t know rat rubes from rum punch. Whatever you think you know damn sure isn’t the half of it. Keep driving. Get away from me.”

She keeps walking. He continues to ease the car alongside her.

“I’m not going to sit here and drive along like an asshole,” he says. “I’m done arguing. Just get in the car. Don’t be a twat.”

Miriam reaches in her bag, and with a quick pivot of her wrist, the butterfly knife is out; metal gleams, and the blade flies free of the split handle.

“Hey—“ he says.

She lags behind a second, and kneels. One thrust, and the knife punctures the back tire of the Mustang. Air hisses from the rubber; a silent, whispering fart.

“What the?” he yells out from the car. “Where are you—oh, Jesus Christ.”

By the time he’s done taking the Lord’s name in vain, she’s already at the opposite back tire, slicing a new mouth in the rubber. It too leaks a steady hiss.

The rubber flaps on asphalt with each turn of the tire: thup thup thup thup.

She passes by his driver’s side window while he’s still looking out the passenger side, and calls in: “See? Told you my getaway sticks will do the trick.”

Then she gives him the finger, and jogs away, leaving the hobbled Mustang behind.

[/scrippet]

Dick. Shit. Fart. Pubes. Middle fingers. Asshole. Damn. Twat. Blasphemy. You’re looking at about 10 words out of 300, which means that I’m probably working at about three percent of the entire draft comprising profanity. And that snippet might not even be the worst of it.

Profanity is awesome.

High-five, needless vulgarity!

…

Anyway. Just a quick reminder that my Contest With No Prize (And Everybody’s A Winner!) ends tomorrow — so, getcher entries into me by tomorrow night. See the previous post for the 411, writers.

Appropriate, perhaps, that I’m testing a photo that references “syphilis.” I mean, the photo’s drippy, right?

Y’know, drippy?

Like, you might say to your doctor, “Doc, I got a… leaky faucet down there? Y’know? Down there?”

And then, just to make sure the doc got it, you’d raise your eyebrows high and casually gesture at your groin with a circling motion of the ol’ index finger?

I can’t spell it out in any greater detail without saying “syphilitic penis.” See what you made Daddy do? Now Daddy’s going to have to get the belt.

Anyway, so far, things are looking reasonable here at the Shiny New Blog, right? Rockin’ the Twitter widget. Sportin’ the Flickr widget. Got the logo. Got Flickr integration into the posts. Got way too many places to link a post (I don’t know what half of them are, honestly — what the hell is Ekstreme Socializer? Don’t click that button. We all might be superfucked if you click that button. F’reals).

So, I mean, there you have it. Drippy picture. Shiny web stuff. I deserve a high-five.