part i | don't be upset just because somebody brought it up

Recently, a woman named Anita Sarkeesian kickstarted (yeah! Kickstarter!) a web series intending to engage the Tropes Vs. Women In Gaming. The first episode came out a while back on YouTube (and the third most recently), clocking in at about 20 minutes, and it detailed how frequently damsels in distress are used as a trope in games. A simple argument to make, right? Well, yeah, of course, you might say, games are simple, they tell simple stories, especially in the early days of the game industry, of course the stories they tell would be basic tales with chivalrous story-beats. The term for this is "courtly love" (which is different from Courtney Love).

The Nintendo Wii U is out. Has been since last November. It's the newest game system to hit the market, and so it shall remain until the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One launch. The Wii U is a trim piece of kit. Check it out, you can have some fun with it, especially if you don't have any other modern gaming system. The extra screen is kinda funky. Hardly intrustive, though.

Babies can use the Wii U. Non-babies can also use it, too. I promise you that your genitals will not *SHLORP* back up into your body if you touch it. The choice is yours.

Reports came out today that the Wii U sales are tanking. Does that mean the next generation of videogames has not begun? Is the Wii U really just a PS3 controlled by an iPad... thing? That's a big question, Jimmy. Let's examine it.

At a movie theater with $6 matinée tickets, still humming the Pacific Rim theme song and picking popcorn kernels out of my teeth, a dad and his daughter, she was probably 7, came walking past me. He was walking. She was hop-scotching. Her was mouth agape, like it should be.

"It was was so awesome! So, so awesome! And so funny at the end when he cut open the monster, and he shouted, 'where is my goddamn shoe!' "

"Okay, yeah, it was pretty awesome, but let's try not to use the bad words though, okay?"

This, everybody. This right here is proof that kids have taste.

There are kids that aren't in kindergarten that have broken more iPads in their lives than I've owned. That's easy to do, because I've never had one. I'm not bitter, it's a bigger, more spiteful emotion. Like most parents, I bet these iPad-breaking kids' moms and dads collapsed into bed one night, and before gravitating towards That One Dream, they mumble, maybe to themselves, maybe to nobody, "gonna get that kid all the shit I never had."

That way, they won't end up like you, right? A failure and a fuck-up?

I hope those kids' iPads stay broken. That way they don't have to live in the Internet. It sucks in here. It's too hot and there are these messed up animals everywhere. I think they're starved wolves? Maybe shaved bears? Whatever they are, them dogs are running wild. It'd be nice to avoid them. Luckily, it's the summer, and that's as good an excuse as any to unplug from the Internet's digital slap-fight. I did this by accident over this last weekend, maybe because the information-chugging that my day normally is wasn't a priority when I could actually go outside and smile at the sun. I recommend it! 

"...it's more like Luigi's Adventures In International Waters: The Emerald Pants Mystery."

I had to be somewhere. We both had to be somewhere. There was precious little time.

I pointed at the screen and kept my eyes on my brother, and I bet him $20 that I could beat level D-4, the final level in Super Mario Lost Levels for SNES, on one try. I didn't have the money to pay if I lost. The bet was made anyway.

There's this part in Independence Day where Jeff Goldblum is a scientist. He's upset with the President's craggy, cabinet members for doubting his warnings about the incoming alien attack. These old grumps aren't tech-savvy. They care about facts, Mr. Scientist! They care about bullets, and how big they are, and assessing danger, assuming point-blank that they know what they ought to fear. My guess is they have never read anything by Kurt Vonnegut and chosen Jim Beam and cigarettes as their vices and signposts in life.

Everybody on the roller-coaster, put your hands up! That's a direct order from Commander Fun! There are jerks out there that probably went to undergrad at UCLA that are being quoted in ads for Star Trek Into Darkness for using words like, "whiz-bang!" or "fun!" or "adventure!" or "rip-snorting!" in their film reviews. We would be so blessed to have rip-snorting added into any sentence, especially one about Star Trek Into Darkness.

The movie isn't bad. It is entertaining, but if it were rip-snorting, that would actually mean there was a possibility of people getting dirty or facing some consequence. This movie, this $99.99 add-on protective casing for your iPad that your dad got you, believes that it has form, function, and maybe even some brains under that fantastic dye-job.

The trouble is that Star Trek Into Darkness is trying to serve wine to young people when it should just serve cheese to people that like cheese. Lots of people like cheese! It's on almost every kind of sandwich imaginable. It's awesome. If I had to give up cheese or chocolate for the rest of my life, I'd give up chocolate. While trying to serve that many tastes, Star Trek Into Darkness' helmsmen had to sacrifice logic in the name of, well, creating a living homage to The Wrath of Khan. That's when the plot holes start cracking open.

part i | in TOMB RAIDER, you are playing as a woman

What was the last good game I played where my character was a female? Emphasis on character. Emphasis also on female. I've played plenty of games where my avatar has been a chick. They were hardly characters or women though. Commander Shepherd in Mass Effect, my "FemShep," Lu Shepherd (named after my bro's adorkable black lab rescue), was indeed a woman -- but she was also androgynous. She was a soldier and a human before she was a woman. The Mass Effect galaxy reacts to Shepherd's good/evil tendencies more than his/her gender, which I suppose is optimistic for the future of humanity. In the future, we won't be as hung up about that. I previously mentioned how Saints Row: The Third was the biggest feminist statement in gaming in years for how your female avatar earned respect for her actions, not because she was a dude or a lady.

Ahh, another year, another crop of over-qualified slave labor for unhappy mid-management jerks to exploit! Welcome to the terror-dome, new graduates. The good news is, you're probably smarter than you realize. The bad news is that not many people care. It's not really your fault, it's just that you probably have a spine and individuality, more so than any other crop of potential graduates. Also, you're probably dumber than you realize, sorry to circle back on that point. But it's true. You just don't know much about the world you're entering. You might remember I spun up a similar article around this time last year, and you can give it a gander here, but it's a year later, and I'm a year wiser, and wouldn't you know it, there are nine more things worth knowing, now that you've graduated from college to the desert of the real.

"What if a child dreamed of becoming something other than what society had intended? What if a child aspired to something greater?"

Truth, justice, and the American way. Strangely enough, I learned a lot about Superman from my mom, who in turn had learned it through osmosis from her brothers when she was young. Back when comic books were books, and not recognizable intellectual properties ripe for mass-marketing, they represented a kind of simple math that a kid could understand. Superman was the simplest, so much so that most people, young people especially, are untucking their shirts and sneezing directly at the idea of Man of Steel coming out in June, because while The Dark Knight Rises was a French revolution allegory, what in the blue fucking hell could boring-ass Man of Steel possibly bring to the modern discussion? These days, we have Batman, and Wolverine, and The Avengers, and Robert Downey Jr, who is a genre unto himself. Superman's a boyscout. Punch the Commies, save the cat in the tree, last son of Krypton, Moses-allegory, defend the defenseless so they can live in peace, and on and until the day is done. Superman was conceived in 1933 in a time before the term "nuclear family" had been added to the American lexicon, nevertheless, he was the hope, the aspiration that even though we aren't invincible like he is, America, and all its promises, won't burn out if we stick together and keep driving forward.