IF Comp 11 – Andrew Schultz’s Fan Interference!
November 8, 2011Time for another edition of Searches What Brung You Here, because man, you people have been outdoing yourselves.
close pissy horse sex
peanuts marbles banjo
what if vampires got herpes
how chocolate powder can reveal intriguing clues
how did hipsters ruin macrame owls
setting shit on fire and unlockable hats
little pink jeeps to look attractive
swedish man people
present your compliments to the melancholy curate
smoothfaced on a beach
milk in my pissy
Man. Now I really want to know how chocolate powder can reveal intriguing clues. (Perhaps Swedish man people know!) Some of my recent searches, for fairness:
handy french sex phrases
fluffy baby duck videos
accomplishment of six sigma process for folder review
flail snail
woman’s place is in the ford
tell how big a lake is by tasting the water
my new pink button
the history of dentistry
boring bisexual
teasing your poultry
best crappy jobs
“tony baseball”
Hey, speaking of baseball, shall we play a game?
[spoilers begin here]
Full disclosure: I have a really hard time getting it up for baseball. (No, not you, Tony, you’re great. I’m a huge fan.) This is probably actually a benefit where this game is concerned, because I’m from southeastern Wisconsin, and I think my people are supposed to hate the Cubs. Yes. The internet says this is correct.
[Note: this game, being about baseball, contains baseball-specific terminology and references to people. If you have a question, WHAT IS and WHO IS should answer it.]
Oh thank God.
For baseball terms like bunt, home run, etc., you can WHATIS BUNT or WHAT IS BUNT. For players, you can WHOIS or WHO IS.
WHAT IS BUNT
HOW ARE BABBE RUTH FORMED
>what is bunt
Where a batter doesn’t try to swing at the ball but hopes to touch it lightly with his bat. Often, weaker hitters use this to sacrifice a baserunner ahead, but fast runners can get an infield single if the defense is caught off guard. A bunt foul on the third strike is an out, as the batter is deemed not to have properly swung at the ball.
I know what all these words mean individually, but I keep reading this as “blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah you know jack shit about baseball.”
So… this game starts with me in a room more or less unable to do anything besides watch a baseball game? This is more hellish than the last game I played, in which I literally went to hell.
Oh, good, Bobby Brown’s in it, at least. I understand the concept of Bobby Brown. Maybe Whitney will show up later and we can watch them be on drugs.
Hmm, as far as I can tell, none of these conversation options will convince your mom to let you stay and watch the game. I rather like that. It’s realistic.
Didn’t I lose my wallet or something the last time I played a baseball game? Oh, it was just in my blazer. Cool. I’m buying a t-shirt.
There’s nothing especially weird about him. He could probably fit in comfortably at a weirdo convention.
Huh?
Hmm, the weird-looking (but not especially weird-looking) man gave me a ticket, and told me I had to use it to help the Cubs win the pennant by, I assume, performing various text-adventure protagonist functions. That’s sort of awesome. I’m in.
“Well? Get going! Weird people have a right to feel awkward around normal people, too!”
Out of my sight, corporate skinbag! Vamos! Vamos al basebaria! (I also feel awkward around normal people. I worry they’re suddenly going to have two point five kids at me.)
I’m wondering if this is the sort of game I will have to replay until I get it right. Boy, have I ever lost patience for those sorts of games. Can’t decide whether to be sad about that or not.
You see turnstiles into Wrigley Field to the northeast. A chunk of the huge bar district is south, you hear a scratchy old recording above the crowd to the east, and the media lot is to the north.
Hey, isn’t the Metro near Wrigley? Yeah, two blocks north. I could skip this baseball game and… let’s see, this game took place on October 14th, 2003, I could go to the Metro and see… oh. Nobody. Peaches is playing in three days, though. Aw, man, I missed Polyphonic Spree.
A bottle of ritzy antacid lies here.
Ritzy antacid?
CONSUMER NOTE: This product probably cures a lot more than those fascist repressazoids at the FDA will let us claim.
RETAILER NOTE: Do not sell for below $14.99 under penalty of law.
Hee hee!
The drunk guy to pretty women ratio is probably too high for you to have a chance.
I dunno, there’s only one drunk guy, and multiple pretty women. Hot Christ I’m being pedantic. Ignore that! Ignore this!
Wait, I went and bought the Sux shirt, and then went back to Addison East to buy the cassette tape, but the guy selling it was gone, so I tried just taking it and got the “It’s the last one. The snotty Cubs fan would notice” failure message. This is definitely looking like the kind of game you need to replay or cling to the hints for. And it’s about baseball. Fuck.
Hmm, assuming I don’t need the Sux shirt for anything else, it’s actually cheaper for me to wear the Cubs shirt and spend forty goddamn dollars on a cassette tape. If I didn’t know this was gonna be a puzzle solution, buddy…
There’re enough support beams and such that you could change shirts in a pinch, if you need to.
Oh, good, because the faster I change shirts, the more support beams I require. Wait, what?
>take glowsticks
Which do you mean, the blue glowstick or the red glowstick?
>both
blue glowstick: Taken.
red glowstick: Taken.
I… was not expecting that to work! Let me wipe a single tear from my eye while we appreciate the beauty of this moment.
Protip: you can X ALCS or X NLCS in the future for the AL or NL series.
I told you the future was a cool place.
Oh God there is baseball happening. Protect me.
Do I have to give this game a fair shake, or can I plead excused on account of being bored to tears by baseball? Can I present a note from my basebologist?* It’s a perfectly cromulent game, as far as I can tell, but man is it ever not my thing. Sorry, Andrew Schultz. Sorry, Tony Baseball.
* I am my own basebologist. This may lead to complications later in life.
Pissy Little Sausages 
I loved reading this review. So hilarious. I felt the same way about wanting to try hard, but, not being too interested in baseball.
Thanks! Man, you lasted a lot longer than I did. I hope you get a shiny trophy or something for that.
“how did hipsters ruin macrame owls”
“setting shit on fire and unlockable hats”
We must fess up; those two were us, and intended entirely for your enjoyment. Looks like it worked. (:
-Two long-time lurkers & fans
Now that rule 5 is down…thanks for the funny review even if baseball wasn’t your thing. It actually opened up a couple jokes I should’ve made. Which I think work.
I think I should’ve put a warning in that knowledge of baseball wasn’t necessary. Or, it shouldn’t be when I actually revise things. I’ll even try and make it amusing.
Ouch on the support beams. My point was, you could duck behind one and change shirts with a minimum of modesty, but my brain skipped. It’s so easy to see this thing in other people’s games.
Oh, man, you could have a non-baseball-fan mode where all of the accurate descriptions of what was happening on the field were replaced with nonsense.
And man, don’t sweat the support beams: that was an instance of me seeing what you were getting at but being unwilling to give up the joke. (These work better in person. Or, well, I always think they do, but then my friends assure me that they don’t, and that talking to me sucks.)
That non-baseball baseball idea would be awesome, but the touchups/bug fixes I needed to make the game less obscure are more than enough as it is. There’s a lot more stuff than awkward support beam description, there.
Fun to imagine, though, even if it did distract me for a few days.
Also, I think I would’ve caught the joke if I hadn’t responded at 1 AM. I tend to avoid trying to judge Internet jokes of any subtlety at that hour.