Oliver Lee Bateman's Blog, page 6

Heavenly Warrior Legend III - 7 (X Type)

Last month’s release of Toma Gameworks’ Heavenly Warrior Legend III - 7 (X Type) was met with both critical and popular acclaim. Out of the five million pre-orders, however, only one purchaser had played all 67 prior games in the series.

"Do I think it’s time that they release a different game and stop making all these sequels? No, of course not," said Brian Powell, considered by nearly everyone to be the most knowledgeable person on earth in matters related to HWLIII. "This story is far from over. In fact, it’s only beginning."

Hideki Toriyama, the reclusive creator of the original Heavenly Warrior Legend III, wrote a series of tweets that shed light on his intentions for the series. “Heavenly Warrior Legend III is like a peony, which is both meaningful and tremendous,” read one. “Razorkina [the razor blades-for-eyes wielding heroine of either thirteen or seventeen of these games] represents all the secrets of the megaverse, and Stanoclaus [her wood golem lover] is the megaverse’s Prometheus. The color for this game, which came to me in a dream, is magenta.”

The plot of HWLIII-7 (X) is almost indistinguishable from the previous half-dozen entries in the series, with quite a few scenes appearing to overlap or simply be repeated among 7 (T), (U), and (V). In this installment, Razorkina, who has unmanned the Grand Beast of Aetheria and repopulated the Trazospace with Lesser Trinketeers and Tchokote Radicals, confronts a twisted vision of her deceased father, the Furious Razorsmith Tam O’ Shanter. O’Shanter seizes control of her mind-beagle and orders her to take the Amalynth Gem to Upper Barnard, where it can be apotheosized so that the Grand Hegemon who appeared as the final boss in HWL III - 6 (Z Type) might be restored to life. Along the way, Razorkina enlists the services of several interchangeable new allies, nearly all of whom boast oversized weapons of one sort or another, and levels up the various “q-balls” used in the game’s enchanting theoretical physics-inspired billiards side quest. Like its predecessors, HWLIII-7 (X) boasts 10 hours of actual gameplay and over 100 hours of CGI cut scenes.

"We have reconfigured the primary attack-based coordination distancing system," lead programmer Hideo Matsuzaka explained at this year’s E3 convention. "Now, instead of re-queueing, the distancing system uses a pour-over lapping approach that enables status effects to process in real time."

HWL III expert Brian Powell approved of the changes. “A lot of people think it’s only a minor and unhelpful tweak, but it actually forces you to re-sync on the fly. Let’s say you’re tethering an ember soul to your blast beacon, and you mis-click…well, in 7(X) you have to reconfigure in active time as opposed to tilting paced time.”

The mini-game has proven so popular that it now boasts dedicated fanbase of “q-ballers” who have devoted their every waking minute to playing the game within the game. Terry Tyell, who maintains the QBALLCOMMUNE Reddit, has been working on a modification of HWL III - 7 (X) that allows for a direct-boot to the minigame. “We think this is the game—Q-Ball—that Matsuzaka was really trying to develop. The rest of Heavenly Warrior X Type is just so much wrapping paper for the amazing present he’s given us. You could play this game twenty hours a day for fifteen years, and you’ll still never understand how beautiful and complex it is.”

"Oh no, that’s not the case at all," Matsuzaka said when reached for comment about the growing but still marginal appeal of the minigame. "It’s in there as an amusing diversion. It’s meant to be played casually, for a couple minutes at a time, as a respite from the serious events unfolding in Heavenly Warrior III - 7 (X Type)."

"Fuck him," Tyell replied, as surely as if he were sitting across the room from me (which was understandable, because he was). "Fuck him and the horse he rode in on. We gamers built this franchise, and we can destroy it, too. My Reddit’s already got 1500 subscribers. This minigame is all most of us have."

Regardless of the reasons for its success, the Heavenly Warrior Legend III franchise has prospered since the first game was released in 1995. “We didn’t have the technology to do [on 16-bit systems] what we’re doing now,” creator Toriyama explained. “I think that’s why it has taken me so long to unfold and imagine the story of Razorkina, the girl with razors for eyes. Her essence haunts my every waking moment. I hope I live long enough for 3d hologram technology to animate her likeness, so that I can ask her if she forgives me.”

"It’s decent enough for what it is," said video game critic and philosophy professor Ted Tunnell, who claimed he had played a few of the games in the series but couldn’t remember which ones. "You can tell it’s a labor of love for the programming team, who have put as much effort into a rendering a single fire hydrant-clad dreidel knight or hydrocephalic electro-werebear brow furrow as they have into Razorkina’s iconic eye-daggers. But fifty years from now, will this be something we’re still talking about? No, I don’t think so. It’s not particularly deep or rewarding. It’s not that kind of a game at all."

—

OLB

You Buy It, You Break It

"How much for this one?" the customer asked, pointing at an item within the glass display case before him.

The merchant looked up from the newspaper he was pretending to read. “Pardon, sir?”

The customer tapped gently on the glass with his forefinger and pointed at delicate looking vase with an intricate flower pattern on its sides. “This vase,” the man said.

"Ah," the merchant paused to fold his paper and then took a few steps closer to the customer, took a gander at the vase in question and then mulled over or pretended to mull over the query for another moment. "That was given to me by my mother, to whom it was given by her mother and her mother before her — an heirloom, you see."

"Yes," the customer said, nodding.

"It has quite a bit of sentimental attachment," the merchant continued as he made a show of stroking his chin as if in the midst of deep contemplation.

"Name your price," the customer said eagerly.

"Mm," the merchant intoned softly. "Twelve hundred dollars."

The customer produced his checkbook promptly and cut a check for the full amount. He handed it to the merchant. They both smiled.

The customer took the vase delicately in his hands, looked it over carefully, traced its pattern with his finger, a satisfied smile on his face. Then, still smiling, he spiked the vase on the floor as if it were a football he’d just caught for a particularly meaningful touchdown. The merchant wept.

—

J.R. Powell

Starrcade '83

The WWE Network, for all its warts, carries the old Jim Crockett Promotions/NWA/WCW pay-per-view catalogue. Starrcade ‘83 was the granddaddy of them all, a closed-circuit wrestlepalooza that preceded V. McMahon’s much glitzier and much less entertaining Wrestlemania I. I didn’t expect anything from SC ‘83, since it wasn’t an event I had watched on tape during my youth and thus felt some nostalgic yearning to see again (Starrcade ‘86: The Night of the Sky Walkers was the first of those), although I had watched the Roddy Piper/Greg Valentine and Ric Flair/Harley Race matches on WWE compilation videos. And those matches remain great—they’re perfectly paced, the crowd is into them, and the finishes are skillfully done. But what stands out here is how all of the other matches are at least fine, and many of them, like Orton Jr/Slater vs. Youngblood/Wahoo, are far, far better than they needed to be. Until I moved to North Carolina in 1989, I had no idea that the non-main events weren’t supposed to be horrendous muscleman squashes…yet here you had Orton and Slater running around the ring, bumping an eager Youngblood every which way but loose, and performing moves (superplexes, etc.) that wouldn’t be seen in WWE rings until the shitty, highspot-afflicted ECW and its cast of beer-bellied, t-shirt wearing bump-takers forced McMahon’s hand.

And it’s all played straight—the backstage interviews with Flair and Race, Solie’s matter-of-fact commentary (even when he gets things wrong, like the fact that Piper/Valentine isn’t for the US strap, it’s the kind of thing a real sportscaster would stumble over), the earnest attitudes of all involved. Even the pointless booty-shaking of Rufus R. Jones and Bugsy McGraw is fine in the context of a 2-star match against the Assassins. Even the “we’re going to drive spikes into each other’s heads”-edness of Abdullah the Butcher vs. Carlos Colon doesn’t detract from the realism. Manager Gary Hart, far from flitting around the ring like a craven coward in the manner of most WWE mouthpieces of the era, actually takes a dropkick from Mark Youngblood and then coolly produces a foreign object from his boot, a device with which Wahoo McDaniel, Youngblood, AND an intervening Angelo “King Kong” Mosca (making the save for no reason at all, “natch”) are all bloodied.

So it’s decidedly an autres temps, autres mœurs kind of thing—the Southern fans weren’t the sorts of people who could appreciate the sport’s clear Barthes-ian signs. They were used to blood, they were used to spectacle, but most importantly of all, they were used to “wrasslin’.” The world we have lost, with all of its genuine regional differences, has left sports like NASCAR and professional wrestling unmoored from their foundations. Now wrestling is just an empty, scripted entertainment: it’s neither fake nor real, but is instead a billion-dollar industry that does nothing, means nothing, accomplishes nothing. Can Danielson, Cesaro, Bo Dallas, Bray Wyatt, et al. buck the tide, or will it be Katie Vick storylines and bra-and-panty matches all the way down?

OLB

Mike Mamula: The Perfect Man

Boston College’s Mike Mamula broke the NFL Combine, or so the story went. Then he disappointed everyone, so the story also went, which proved once and for all that the combine he broke was itself irreparably broken. But none of this matters, because the combine still matters. Do you follow?

Six exercises and the 12-minute Wonderlic test give us the measure of a man. A decade of competitive athletics is reduced to a 40-yard race, a vertical jump, a broad jump, a 3-cone drill, a shuttle run, and a “bench press for reps” activity. Never mind that only three of those—the cone drill, the shuttle run, and the broad jump—seem to have any bearing on actual football activity. Never mind that there’s no correcting for weight in the bench press (what does it say, for example, that 230-pound Brian Leonard “put up” more reps than the average 300-pound lineman?). Never mind that football speed is better measured along 100 yards, since the true “open field” is about the only time you’ll be breaking away from anything at all.

But it’s fine, it’s football, it’ll be gone soon enough after the lawsuits sweep it under. And Mike Mamula, the perfect man, was perfectly average in the NFL. His 28 bench press reps, 4.58 speed, and 49/50 Wonderlic score translated into 209 tackles and 31 sacks over the course of a six-year career. Teasing excellence and delivering adequacy is a beautiful thing: you’re always on the cusp of something, statistically speaking, except you’ll never get there…but maybe you could’ve, and how great it would’ve been if you had. Does that make the Eagles’ decision to draft him okay? Writing for everyone who has failed to live up to his or her potential, it’s okay by me.

OLB

Rick Rude: The Loneliness of the Designated Hitter

What I’m about to write has nothing to do with Richard Rood, the performer, and everything to do with “Ravishing” Rick Rude, the character he played in the WWF.1 Rood is dead, which means his performances as Rude are fixed in amber. We can expect no subsequent appearances, no critical reappraisals, no sudden turns. He is what he was: a monster heel who had the bad fortune of peaking in a cartoon superhero-fronted federation that never put the world “strap” on heels, monster or otherwise. Like the Honky Tonk Man, the Macho Man, and the Million Dollar Man—but better than either, really—he generated heat and then carried his hapless face opponents through better matches than they had any right to perform. He wore the airbrushed likenesses of other women, and eventually himself, on his wrestling tights. He gyrated his hips. He insulted the “sweat hog” fans who had paid to see him get his butt kicked. He kissed unattractive momjeans-wearing women and caused them to swoon.

By the standards of 1980s beefcake grapplers, Rude was a fantastic performer. His matches against the Ultimate Warrior were somehow not terrible. His later WCW matches against Sting and Ric Flair are borderline classics. He could work the mic, work his gimmick—do it all, really. In his excellent and opinionated autobiography, booker and hard man extraordinaire “Cowboy” Bill Watts derided him as a steroid creation who’d be 170 pounds soaking wet if he weren’t abusing performance-enhancing drugs…though hey, it’s not like Watts is bitter or anything.

But like fellow Minnesota native and “perfect” competitor Curt Hennig, Rude never succeeded in putting all the pieces together and supplanting the no-talent megastars of the era. Injuries constituted a big part of the problem in both cases, but for Rude, I think it was also something deeper: the Ravishing One rose to fame playing a designated hitter, and how could a designated hitter ever really win anything?

Wait, what? What the hell are you talking about, bro? Srsly bro, do u even lift?

Bear with me here, brahski, as I’m about to make a Really Important Point that 1 out of 10 readers of this blog (there are actually only 9, so I’m not sure how that will work) will find enlightening.

Before I reach that point, let me exhort you to watch the video at the top of this post. I suppose it’s classifiable as “NSFW” if you’re in one of those workplaces where viewing homoerotic striptease acts happens to be against company policy, but why on earth would you want to answer to such heartless paymasters?

At any rate, the video gives you a good sense of Rude’s in-ring persona. Although others have expatiated on the implications of his act vis-à-vis gender and sexuality, I’m not interested in taking that discussion any further. Instead, I want you to focus on how joylessly he goes about his paces. He’s hip-gyrating and kiss-stealing almost as enthusiastically as Ralph Wolf punched the clock at the end of a long workday spent getting his shit tossed by the invincible Sam Sheepdog.

In spite his extraordinary heat-getting abilities, Rick Rude clearly wasn’t a threat to anybody. Kissing the wives and girlfriends of the “sweat hogs” he detested was a chore. Showcasing his washboard abdominals was an obligation. And the “real” women he lusted after in storylines—insofar as he lusted after anyone, since he seemed to be more interested in proving Lacan’s point about desire being a desire for recognition from the ‘Other’—wanted nothing to do with him. Cheryl Roberts, wife of soft-bodied ring general and eventual cocaine casualty Jake “The Snake” Roberts, did everything short of puking up her guts to express his distaste for Rude’s crude come-on lines.

Rude-as-designated-hitter was the “ideal man,” but he was also a nobody. The audience didn’t so much boo him as serve as a mirror for his own insecurities. Women might enjoy copping feels along his obliques, but to what end? None of them wanted to go home with him. Rude was so “ideal” as to be ridiculous, and out of this ridiculousness arose selfish indignation: when would he ever be good enough to be worshipped like the demigod he knew he had become?

When I was a kid, I thought Dusty Rhodes was the best wrestler in the whole wide world. He was my cynosure; everything else was secondary to whatever kind of nonsense feuding and interviewing he happened to be engaged in. I began watching WWF programming in earnest because he’d signed with McMahon’s company, after which he would spend the better part of six months wearing polka dot tank tops and straight-up “cooning" with his heavyset African-American valet Sapphire. But Rude soon proved to be the guy I found myself relating to, for reasons that I then saw through a glass darkly.2

Say wha? You’re telling me you related to this dude, who was playing a misogynistic, egotistical piece of garbage? Broham, u out ur fukkin mind? I mean, U even lift bro?

No, that’s not it. I didn’t relate to the substance of Rick Rude’s performance. How could anybody relate to the substance of anything that was on display in McMahon’s WWF of the late 80s and early 90s? Save for a handful of Ultimate Warrior interviews that mirrored my father’s tirades far too closely for me to take any comfort in them, it was mostly a lot of stupid shit, performed stupidly, and lacking even the patina of redeeming postmodern subversiveness that it would develop during the “Attitude Era.”

But Rude—Rude was a sad bunny rabbit. Here was this wonderful specimen, this self (and steroid) made creation, and he couldn’t catch a break. He just wanted so badly for everyone to recognize his greatness. His hatred was an outgrowth of this lack of recognition, recognition that would never be forthcoming because, ye gods, what could be more loathsome than giving credit to someone who actually craves it? Screw you, meathead!

It was only years later, after I had undertaken a regimen of self-improvement in order to slough off the bitter memories of this period, that I understood precisely how this fictional character felt. I knew what dark forces ravaged the soul of “Ravishing” Rick Rude. I had gone to ludicrous lengths to impress other people…because I just wanted, for once in my godforsaken life, to be impressed by myself.

Such a perfect fate: after years of practice, you’ll be lucky if you become the man of your dreams. When you’re a designated hitter—the man who has everything except something to offer—it’s the utter pits. The Cheryl Robertses, those fair maidens whose attention you crave because they’ll validate something about yourself, are repulsed by that excessive persona you’re always toting around with you. Like Rick Rude, you’re always trumpeting your mad skillz to the world…but to what end? Your flaws are only made more manifest because of your assiduous efforts to conceal them.

You know that one real jacked guy who wasn’t the love of your life but you kinda didn’t hate dating him only he wasn’t really all that memorable and now every few years you look him up on the ol’ Facebook to see what he’s doing and it turns out he’s doing okay or even better than okay and you wonder if maybe it could’ve worked out better than it did before finally concluding que sera sera and getting back to whatever hot new iPhone app is occupying your time? “Ravishing” Rick Rude used to play one of those guys on TV. So did I, only in real life.

Go and read wrestling critic David Shoemaker’s new book for a more extensive treatment of Rude’s significance. Shoemaker hits paydirt when he writes: “Not long after, Rude began decorating his tights with his own face, a level of narcissism previously unmatched even in wrestling’s ego parade. To be self-absorbed and overconfident was perhaps an act of sensible egomania; to paint ones own treasured visage with crotch as canvas was an unprecedented affront to our wrestling sensibilities. Previously, ring gear had largely been an afterthought, a series of unspectacular mini-billboards reminding us of catchphrases, nicknames (‘Mr. #1derful’), and the names of special moves (‘Thump’). If anything, such sewn-on words distracted us from the fact that we were looking at a man’s pelvic region. Rude’s attention-grabbing ensembles inverted such convention. They underscored the fundamentally homoerotic nature of the enterprise: his comeliness was indistinguishable from his physique and also from his, er, manhood. The masturbatory allusion was not ambiguous. When Rude rotated his hips in the ring, hands behind his head, he wasn’t showing off for the crowd or playing mind games with his opponent: He was sucking his own dick.”

The character he was playing, I mean. The WCW Rude, who actually won a major “strap” there while also having the best matches of his career, wasn’t nearly as compelling as this earlier, more colorful version. Usually, I found McMahon’s buffoonery and squash matchery to be insufferable, but Rude, like “Adorable” Adrian Adonis before him, benefited from this sort of makeover. Both men were good as “mean heels,” but they were amazing as cartoon super villains.

OLB

Slaughter, Patterson, and Buckets of Blood

For some reason you don’t see this one until the early 2000s, even if your e-wrestling buddies have been talking about how great it was since forever. An “alley fight” in the WWF between big fat Bob Remus, the villainous Parris Island drill sergeant, against not-so-Pretty Boy Pat Patterson. By the time you watch this, you’ve heard all the rumors about how Pat Patterson sexually harassed midgets and handsome ring announcers and other people. Patterson, the openly gay and openly tough as nails wrestler who could work a match like none other. You’d never seen him wrestle. He was probably better when he tag teamed with “Crippler” Ray Stevens back in Roy Shire’s San Francisco promotion, but you don’t know. All you see is a sorta fat, sorta in-shape (that instantly recognizable way all former athletes gone to seed start looking in late middle age) dude wearing an “I <3 NY” t-shirt that he has tucked, for no obvious or essential reason, into skintight jeans. Is this how you dress for a fucking “alley fight,” for the match that supposedly inaugurated, even more than the dismal Sheik-Abdullah and Rhodes-anybody else bloodbaths from the 70s, the hardcore style of the 90s and beyond? Who cares. Now out comes Sgt. Slaughter, one of twenty or so real humans who was lucky enough to have a G.I. Joe action figure modeled after him (comics writer Larry Hama and pro footballer William “Refrigerator” Perry were two others). The Grand Wizard, a forgotten transitional figure in WWWF/WWF history, leads out Remus/Slaughter, who is wearing much more sensible loose khakis and a wifebeater. The build-up for this was huge, but it’s hard to wrap your brain around the pre-Hogan WWF goings-on. Why was the world “strap” still on “Howdy Doody” Backlund? Why wasn’t it on an awesome villain like Slaughter? Why is Pat Patterson, aging and worn down and looking like Tommy “Wildfire” Rich’s gross uncle, still headlining cards like this one? Why is he wearing cowboy boots? Why why why?At the 3:55 mark, Pat removes his belt. What I thought was coming, based on my knowledge of Patterson, isn’t what happens (lawlz). Pretty Boy Pat whips and strangles Slaughter with the belt. They’re really selling their hearts out. I can’t believe it. Is this the same federation that gave us an endless array of squash mashes and stiff Backlund title defenses? From 6:00 to nearly 7:00, they writhe in agony on the mat. At 7:15, the belt is wrapped around Patterson’s mouth like a ball gag, and then, per announcer Vince McMahon Jr., “Slaughter starts working on that ‘I <3 NY’ t-shirt.” Meaning he rips it off and chokes Patterson with it. Why a t-shirt instead of the belt? Why not Slaughter’s belt? Patterson’s fortysomething man belly is really amazing, but the guy is also clearly in shape and able to go. At 9:30 he gets some decent elevation on a second-rope “cowboy boot stomp.” It’s easy to forget how drawn-out these matches were, and how good old troupers like Slaughter and Patterson were at selling fake pain. Slaughter finally juices, possibly from a real bite but most likely from a blade, at 10:30. The WWF/WWWF never got as bloody/nasty/hepatitis C-filled as the southern promotions, but this one’s about to get ugly. More slow kicks and punches, but my goodness, the selling. Why does this look so good? These guys are just out of shape slobs and yet they’re as compelling as a half-dozen First Responder funerals. After some hot and heavy action around the ring apron, Slaughter is really busted open around the 13:00 mark. He’s stumbling around the ring better than prime-period R Flair, and his face is redder than prime-period D Rhodes. This is the real deal, and McMahon can’t stop, uh, gushing about it. Slaughter blasts a great low blow at 14:00 that Patterson sells as if it were the cannonball that sunk the Titanic and precocious toyboy Leo Di Caprio along with it. Then at 14:40 there’s a beautiful close-up of Slaughter’s badly damaged face. To’ up from the flo’ up, as they (whoever they are) would say. Patterson, from 14:00 on, is just beating the holy hell out of Slaughter. Slaughter’s stumbling, bumbling—where’s the drama here? Yet by 16:00 you’re totally into it. You wouldn’t be surprised if Patterson stuck a gun in Slaughter’s mouth and blew the Sarge’s motherloving brains out. It would seem totally apposite, given the context. Patterson’s doing all of this labor with the grim resolution of Christ lugging the cross up to Calvary. “This place is absolutely bonkers,” McMahon says at 17:25, and he’s not dramatizing for effect. The Madison Square Garden crowd is “popping” (it’s crazy to imagine a real, mainstream Northeastern audience watching this kind of trash and “marking daqfuqout,” but here we are), and when Slaughter retires at the 18:00 mark, the boos ring out like so many call-backs on a mediocre rap album. There wasn’t much left of Patterson as a full-time grappler after this victory, though both he and Slaughter would hang around the sport for three more decades. Slaughter would headline Wrestlemania VII in a terrible Gulf War-related angle involving “Hulk” Hogan, and Patterson would plot out the finishes of dozens of classic matches while allegedly molesting a fair amount of the backstage talent. How much of the anti-Patterson material was simply just anti-gay stuff is unclear, but “Pretty Boy” Pat never apologized, never played a gay gimmick…just acted every match like it was the match of his life, and maybe this one was. It’s certainly the only Pat Patterson match I’ve ever watched, I’ll tell you that.

OLB

Dusty Rhodes, You Know?

Jesus man, study that promo. I write about this garbage, this fake ludicrous bullcrap, but in all honesty so little of it is transcendent and so much of it is beneath our contempt. But watch this performance and imagine you’re watching it from the perspective of a little kid in 1989 watching a VHS tape from 1985. It starts slow. You’re focusing on the man’s purple scarred-up forehead, the marceled hair, the tea shade glasses, the pink shirt with the neck button that won’t close around the capacious double chin…how could you do anything but direct all of your attention to “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes? You’re transfixed, under his spell. For the first seven years of your life, you’d watched a fat man scream and shout in your house, so this kind of performance fits around your brainpan like an old shoe or an old jock strap or an old pair of jeggings or some other tortured simile. Then it starts to build. At 1:00, Rhodes bellows that there is “no honor among thieves.” Your father was probably saying something similar while his own life melted around him. On we go to 1:10, when Rhodes starts with this “hard times” nonsense. Yes, you know from “hard times.” Your life is nothing but hard times, so that’s très relatable. “A computer took yo place, daddy,” Rhodes says around 1:40 or so. Now comes a flirtatious taunt: “I admit I don’t look like the athlete of the day is supposed to look…my belly’s just a little big, my heinie’s just a little big, but brother I’m bad. There were two bad people. One was John Wayne, and the other is right here” Holy shit. At 2:20 he extends his hand and tells you your hand is touching his hand for this “gathering of the biggest body of people in this universe.” It doesn’t make any sense, yet it’s undeniably brilliant. Dusty Rhodes is the man of the hour, the man with the power, too sweet to be sour, etc.…he could get away with reading the phone book and you’d adore him. Coda: “I’m proud of you and thank God I have you.” Are you, Dusty? Are you really? Gosh, that means the world to me.

OLB

DOTA 2 FTW

I’ve been playing a child’s game, against children, alongside someone else who should know better. Is this what we’ve been reduced to? We were involved in a dismal and ultimately unsuccessful game the other night, partnered with an insouciant youth who spoke to us over a terrible microphone connection (is there any other kind?) and through a mouth ostensibly filled with marbles. “Ish shish ish tiiiiiiite,” the voice said after he purchased an item from the secret shop. “Naaahh yeeeewww ainnnnnn gonnnn git daaaaaaaaaaat” after a failed team fight. On and on like this. What a revelation, to learn that such people inhabit the world. My partner attempted to mock this individual’s speech patterns but inadvertently began to communicate with him. “Naaaaahhhh ssoooooonnnnn yeeeewwww naaaaaah,” he said in jest. “Yaaaaa, iiiisshhh aiiiiiiiighttt, yaaaaaaaa, gots dat ddaawwwwwwwwwwg,” the player replied in utter dead cold seriousness (giving a 9/11 firefighter’s eulogy edition). The player was at that point referring to a small dog trophy that he’d been awarded, perhaps because he was the least worst player on our dreadful team. I went to sleep wondering what kind of feelings a person like this could have, if he had any at all. Might I understand him the same way he seemed to be understanding my partner? “NNNNNaaahhhhhhhhhh yeeewwwwwwwwwwwww gots git miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid,” he would say to us, and perhaps it meant the world to him.

OLB

OS 7

The Apple OS has changed so many times that you can’t possibly remember when it was something else. What was that beloved WODTimer app like during the OS 5 era? Was it beautiful? Sublime? Insufferable? The old programs keep upgrading to new programs, but imperceptibly so. Gradually the phone or tablet or whatever is rendered obsolete, irrelevant. You, the human user, are depreciating in a similar manner. No one will miss you. The improved versions have so much to offer. Did you see how you can do that new finger swipe thing that does that other thing? That’s some space age bullshit they’ve put in there, dawg. It’s one small step for man and one giant step for mankind, fo’ sho’. My children’s children and their children’s children’s children will surely <3 it with all of their <3s, insofar as they still have those and not some super high level mega-upgraded combination dick-<3s in the year 2525.

OLB

The Sad History of Immanuel Kant, Internet Funnyman

Dec 9, 2012 - Dear readers, I fear that I must apologize for yesterday’s blog post. After a deluge of hate-tweets and vitriolic blog rants aimed at yours truly, I realize I should have thought twice before publishing Homeland Season 2 [SPOILER ALERT]. Looking back, it was a mistake to call Brody’s wife a “perpetual piece of ass” and then writing “just the prolegomenon, baby, just to intuit what it feels like.” I know that most of you come to the Rolling on Reason blog to follow my adventures in synthetic, transcendental thought. I figured that you might appreciate some “lawlz”, a little “teeheehaha”. I was wrong and it was wrong.

Dec 9, 2012 (Later) - I am peeved by the revelation that a parody Twitter account @immanuelwank has been created. I have a friend who is in law school — quid juris, what what — who thinks that this might be libel, so be forwarned. Your days of posting “Butts, butts, butts #kingdomOfEnds” and “Babes, I got a cannon of pure reason over here.” are, soon, over.

Dec 10, 2012 - Please DO NOT link to the post on philchix.com about my recent … debacle. It refers to me as a “noted internet misogynist”, a claim that I take issue with. Even if you are defending me — and thank you, to those who are — you are giving this clickbait site traffic.

Dec 10, 2012 (Later) - Ok, this is getting ridiculous. The Chatter post about my piece is accusing me of “sexual misconduct”:

We wonder if Mr. Kant has ever met a woman before. He seems to delight in reducing accomplished actresses to inhuman objects of puerile fantasy. We speculate that if one were to dig into his personal life, they would find a history of mistreated or, possibly, abused females. If Mr. Kant is capable of such vile sexual speech, what other sexual misconduct can we expect from the Konigsberg professor?

Dec 11, 2012 - I think I’m starting to like the trolls …

Dec 11, 2012 (Later) - So, the University has remanded me to board of discipline for “conduct unbecoming of a Prussian.” Wonderful.

Dec 20, 2012 - The last two weeks have been insane. What started out as a bit of locker-room humor has ended in me losing my job and being labeled as “a champion of women’s disenfranchisement.” (This is absurd because I have donated a lot of money to Kickstarters owned and about women.) Either way, you, my readers, deserved better from me. I am deeply sorry and hope that you will follow me on whatever path I choose to travel next.

Dec 21, 2012 - Hey, PM me your gamertags if you are bored today.

Dec, 24, 2012 - Thinking of taking a grand tour of Europe. Anyone got room for a couchsurfer?

Jan 3, 2013 - I’m going to start a new blog where there are no rules. A place to really experiment without the dark cloud of Internet slacktivist censorship. I might even disconnect from Twitter, get a new perspective on things. I have an essay in the works about how social networks are changing everything. Could this be a good first piece? Thoughts?

—Erik Hinton