Louis Grube Dot Com

Date a girl who plays video games.

You will find her at the local game exchange weighing whether to spend the next six months of her life re-exploring the childish games of the Nintendo 64 or devouring the substance of the original PlayStation cannon.  She will intimidate you with her harajuku style and her vaguely understood feminist ideals.  She will forgive you for being a little bit of a jerk, because she is fully capable of talking shit right back at you.

You will bond over the only new and truly developing forms of literature; Twitter, comic books, and narrative blogs.  She will criticize your own blog/Twitter feed, but she will read it religiously.  She will make fun of you publicly in the comments to your posts.  You will get into poke fights on Facebook.  It will turn into an eternal poke war with battles and respites of varying length.

Tell her that her exclusive love for the Final Fantasy games from FF7 and onward makes it clear that she is a girl.  Agree with her when she tells you that you are sexist.  Somewhere down there, you both realize that “like a girl” is a common turn of phrase used to indicate either disrespect for a bad gamer or serious and deep affection depending on context.  Your context will always be one of the deepest affection.   Force her to play Modern Warfare so that she will be shrewd, cold, and motivated when the zombies come for you.  When she beats you, she will call you a girl.

Lie to her.  Lie about where you are on the map in a game of Golden Eye.  Knock the controller out of her hands.  Play dirty.  She will rarely need your help to win.

Lose a fair amount.  Don’t do it on purpose.  Only do it when she legitimately wins or when you can’t deny yourself a view of her face exhibiting true elation and pride.  Always expect her to try her hardest to beat you.  Treat her like an equal.  She carries around her video skills as a badge of honor.  Massage her ego, no mater how precocious.

You will propose over World of Warcraft right after you complete a quest, but only if she doesn’t first.  You will have to do this because you’ll be playing together while you are both dicking around at work, and the elation of victory will overcome you. Again, you won’t be able to help yourself.  She would rather have a “Quick Strike Ring” than a diamond ring any day.  Give her both.

Date a girl who plays video games because she is fully aware of the difference between reality and fiction.  Unlike the girl who reads and the girl who does not, the girl who plays video games is stuck in neither reality nor fiction.  She changes her expectations based on which universe she inhabits at any given moment.  Your punishment for failure in either realm will be the expectation that you apologize if what you did really sucked and that you try again.  You might not have infinite lives, but she will never deny you a well deserved 1-UP.

Most importantly, date a girl who plays video games because she understands the value of loss as compared to the value of triumph.  She can square these two ideas in her head.  She can look at her life from many angles.  She can see an epic win on the horizon at any time, no matter how many times she fails.

This post in response to This and This.

And I turned it into a contest!  Woo.  Here are the rules.

• For each commercial break we have a mini competition and pick whichever commercial was best.
• At the end of the night, we select the best commercial.

Black Lady Pegs White Girl – Pepsi

This commercial has a funny race moment.  This commercial also managed to combine cute girls, violence, Pepsi, and racial humor in an appropriate manner. Also, the Doritos commercial made us feel a little weird.

Volcano Response – Chevy Silverado

This commercial shows cars how cars should be.  There is one problem.  When the man goes into the belly of a whale… Does the car help while parked on the dock?

Doritos saves the day – Doritos

Doritos dust saved a fish and an old dude, but most of all it saved the Roomate.

Cowboys versus Aliens

It should speak to the competitive nature of this specific commercial break that Scott said, “That looks kind of dumb.”

Eminem Clay-mation commercial?

Why did Eminem get his own commercial break?  Scott liked it.

Sleepy’s sex commercial

This commercial is suggestive.  Fortunately, most children won’t get it.  Weirdly, everyone looked like they could have been brother and sister.  Incest probably wasn’t what they meant.  Probably?

Hold me Closer – Budweiser

For a moment, I held my Bud closer, tiny dancer…

BMW escape – BMW

These cars are made for the nouveau riche of Thuh Unituh Statesuh ‘Merica.  Have I made it clear enough that they were selling those foreign cars to the south? Wait, those foreign cars were made in the south?!?!?!

Darth Volkswagen – Volkswagen

The Thor commercial might have been ok, but it will never beat Star Wars as a theme.  Children make every commercial good, but this one taps into the fact that we all want our kids to LOVE Darth Vader at some point.

Super 8

This preview got the dudes way interested.  It looks like it will combine things that parents are worried about and things that kids have always wanted to do.  Sandlot meets Alien?

Facebook Car – Chevy Cruze Eco

I hope we were all reminded that the most important part of dating is having a car that will make a girl kiss you.  Facebook helps too.

Android is ready to play – Sony Phones

This commercial sorta rips off the Wii?  Unfortunately they changed it a little bit so that the Android robot is medically altered in a painful way in order to play?  This one gets the Cinematography Award.

Worst Commercial Break

Why was there a Black Eyed Peas commercial before the Black Eyed Peas played?

Rupert Murdoch steals the Ipad from youth everywhere – The Daily

I hope we don’t lose our collective social perspective when the internet starts to look like Fox News.

Amusement Park Disaster – NASCAR

We all knew that NASCAR fans were psychopaths.  It seems, however, that NASCAR fans still don’t?

Beiber is a girl. – Verizon 4G

Even The Beib agrees.

Test Baby – Homeaway.com

A “test baby” literally sticks to and slides down a pane of protective glass.  Incredible.

Uniting Worlds – Coke

Nice war imagery.  I bet Coke actually sells more when there is a war on too, so it makes perfect sense.

Car Jacking – Carmax.com

“Oh, my delivery!”  I would probably freak out if gas station attendants still did full service like a pack of crazy people.

Imported From Detroit – Eminem

The capital of strippers, gambling and poverty; the makers of the Chrysler 200

NFL Episodes – NFL

How I met your mother matters as much as the Brady Bunch or Seinfeld.

Beaver saves the day – Bridgestone

Beaver is a G. One love.

Mercedes commercial that none of us could really remember.

Not even a good commercial, just the best one this time.  A lot of the commercials start getting shitty at some point here.

Best Commercial of the night: Black Lady Pegs White Girl

I think it should be pointed out that Pepsi had some awesome commercials tonight.  I’m honestly excited to try out Pepsi Max.

Extra big shout out tonight.  My brother made a super bowl commercial.  He is the coolest guy I have ever met, hands down.

…that gun control is a stupid thing to bring up right now in congress.

1: This is a constitutional issue that is going to more deeply divide the nation at a time when we need to come together and think about our collective future.

2: There is no solution.  The Gun lobby is as strong as the Anti-Gun lobby.  Congress will worry about re-election money more than they will need their base votes for at least the coming year.

3: It is just political douche-baggery and the left is bringing it up in order to collect stupid comments by the right in advance of campaign time.  Why are we talking social issues when individuals as a group are losing wealth compared to the ultra-wealthy and corporations?  Should not a strong middle class be the focus of our popular government?  Are we really interested, as a nation, in an economic system where the buying power of the rich is growing compared to the buying power of the poor?  Is this a good idea considering that our system of elections is entirely reliant on money from special interests?  Do we want to build stronger special interest groups for the rich?  Do we want to fritter away our time on gun control while this goes on?

I like to think that every great moment in our lives has a lesson hiding somewhere within it.  I don’t think that moments in life have purposes, or actually even that people have purposes.  Call me a cynic.  However, we all have lessons available for learning at any given moment.  I believe that the more profound the moment, the more depth to the lesson.  This Christmas I learned that I am a straight up adult and that I should act like it a little more often.

I’ll try not to be too much of a buzz kill while I do it.

Is trying to bring back the cold war.

Truth.

“What’s the word for people who get stuff in a will?  Testees?” – Emily Fortin

…

*Table erupts in laughter*

Christmas is a time of wonder and magic. Louis is a person of wonder and magic. This Christmas, when you are enjoying wonder and magic, think of Louis…. a man who lives every day like Christmas. Louis is Christmas. He really is.

The conservative party is doing exactly what they say they will.

Check it

They are conserving things exactly how things are right now.

Shitty.