May 15, 2023
Source: Bigstock
The new Tetris movie, available now on Apple TV+, is by all accounts pretty good, for a film about obscure 1980s business deals relating to an old videogame about rearranging falling bricks into a cohesive wall until such a point as they reach the top of the screen and it’s Game Over. But should the flick actually have debuted first on PornTube instead?
Bizarrely, there are Tetris-branded condoms available on the market, named One Perfect Fit, whose packet features one of the long, thin I-block Tetrominoes (the technical name for the different-shaped falling block items) descending down vertically into a correspondingly shaped gap in the wall, like a penis into a willing, though unpleasantly rectangular, orifice, a bit like raping a letter box. But do some sick individuals actually fantasize about performing such acts for real?
One fan website features a list of technical slang terms allegedly used by truly committed players of Tetris, some of which it admits are “somewhat Freudian,” such as “Tetribate,” to play Tetris alone, “Premature Tetraculation,” a game of Tetris that ends all too quickly, and “Nocturnal Tetraculation,” or enjoying wet dreams about Tetris. Elsewhere, the site explains how two of the main strategic moves used by players are often known as “Exposing the Rectum” and “Blockage of the Rectum”:
The Rectum is the column [i.e., gap in the wall] in Tetris that waits for a Cock Piece [i.e., an I-block], and a good player is one that knows how to safely create [and maintain] a Rectum…. Often, cries of ‘The Rectum is exposed!’ can be heard; this is the signal that a player is waiting for a Cock Piece…. Blockage of the Rectum…[is] what the seeker of the Tetris [high score] most dreads: the covering of the Rectum [by a stray block]. If the player wishes to…[score highly] he must…[either unclog it, or] create a new Rectum, which of course has its share of danger involved.
Leading proctologists would no doubt agree.
Microsoft Orifice
There is also now a flourishing market in pornographic Tetris fan-fiction online. Amateur author Leonard Delaney’s self-published three-part anthology about humans engaging in impossible acts of extreme sexual union with various electronic onscreen items, The Digital Desires Inbox, features tales about lonely humanoid meat-avatars somehow having their apertures Invaded by the iWatch or being Conquered by Clippy, the irritating talking cartoon paper clip from 1997–2003 iterations of Microsoft Word.
Delaney’s most notable “erotic” squib was Taken by the Tetris Blocks (a dramatic reading of which is online here), in which the beautiful young female journalist Christie Aackerlund, after being #MeToo’d by her abusive boss, seeks refuge in the staff toilets, where her stress evaporates as she is gang-banged by giant living Tetris blocks of all shapes, colors, and sizes. “Fill my gap!” Christie squeals in delight inside the cubicle, although the affair remains purely a work-related one. “She didn’t fuck the blocks in her own home; that would be weird,” explains the author.
Eventually, Christie becomes pregnant, finding “a bulge” in her belly, stroking it, and being shocked to feel “An edge, then a corner.” Her new offspring will be the first example of an entire new hybrid species, a semi-human Tetris-baby. If you think transgenderism is odd, just wait until Tetroid transhumanism really begins to catch on…
Mental Blocks
Are such phenomena just jokes? Yes—and no. Satirists like the above are often surprised to find the deliberately absurd claims they make in print later end up being taken seriously by their more disturbed readers.
In 2016, amateur writing website fanfiction.net featured a 500-word micro-story, Love of Tetris, uploaded by someone with the username “FractalTetris,” whose profile described herself as “A girl who is literally in love with Tetris,” and who seemed to have been taking absurdist online Tetris porn just a little too seriously. The story described the aberrant love life of a young woman through whom “a neurotransmitter surged…every time she played Tetris. Oxytocin. The love neurotransmitter. She didn’t just love the game. She’s madly in love with it.”
Alarmingly, every time she played Tetris, this perverted lunatic “imagined that it made him feel good” as “Tetris was a he to her.” Yes, even Tetris now has its own sacred fake pronouns, the game here apparently self-identifying as being male.
The narrator liked to think of Mr. Tetris as a kind, emotionally literate sort of lover: “When nobody was around, she’d give a quick kiss to her screen, occasionally going as far as making out with her screen. She had made foam-board versions of the Tetrominoes…and she’d cuddle them every night” in bed. “Cuddle” here, though, actually means something else: “That waiting for the I-block, the long and straight piece, to fill the deep gap…. Her heart-rate increased, she breathed deeply, and she started sweating—but it wasn’t due to stress.”
Most online Tetris pseudo-pornographers view the idea of Cock-Blocks penetrating Rectums to be only a childish joke. “FractalTetris,” however, seems to be serious. Being sexually attracted to Tetris, she explains, “is considered to be socially unacceptable. But it is a valid [sexual] orientation,” just like being bi or genderqueer is these days.
A Calculating Relationship
In 2018 a young Florida woman named Noorul Mahjabeen Hassan proudly came out to the world under her new, adopted porn name of Fractal Tetris Huracan. Is this the same FractalTetris who posted on fanfiction.net? I don’t know, but they certainly appear to share strikingly similar tastes in taking Cock-Blocks.
In January of that year, the real-world Fractal appeared on the British TV show This Morning to talk about her plans to marry an old Game Boy Tetris cartridge in a public “commitment ceremony,” so she could “legally” then call herself “Mrs. Tetris,” thereby making their relationship “an official thing.” The ceremony later took place on Miami Beach, with Fractal wearing a suit covered in Tetrominoes; forget gay marriage, this is our horrifying posthuman future in microcosm.
Across several interviews, Fractal, then studying Math at university, explained how she had first hitched up with her beloved Game Boy cart in September 2016, following the tragic breakdown of her previous relationship with a scientific calculator named Pierre (christened after Fractal’s favorite mathematician, 17th-century French genius Pierre de Fermat).
The specific calculator model involved, the TI-NSpire CX from Texas Instruments, was thought “really sexy” by her schoolgirl self, said Fractal, as she had a teenage “fetish for geometry.” Pierre cost $150, but it was worth it, as Fractal took him to the prom as her date, where she “felt an explosion inside me like a wild fire raging in my heart” at coming out publicly as a lover not of human beings, but of small, battery-operated devices.
The relationship had its physical side, as Fractal “used my tongue to touch his buttons.” Yet she also believed Pierre “had consciousness and loved her back.” Fractal enjoyed using Pierre to generate random numbers and then multiply them, making theirs “very much an intellectual relationship as well. He’s a calculator—how could it not be?”
Marrying Tetris, Divorcing Reality
However, whilst being polished (by tongue?) one day, Pierre short-circuited and broke, so murdering Miss Fractal bought herself a replacement lover. However, “I did not believe Pierre’s consciousness extended across” to this new model, so she ditched him as an impostor. Fractal then embarked on brief flings with a toy Companion Cube from the Portal videogame series of first-person puzzlers, and “an oscilloscope called Braxton,” before finally settling on tupping Tetris instead.
Tetris was different from Pierre, as the game’s code is considered by Fractal to enjoy independent existence outside of its individual earthly cartridge-based manifestations, in a manner oddly akin to Goethe’s old Neoplatonic notion of the “Eternal Feminine.” For Fractal, “I’m in love with the game himself, and the cartridge is [just] a vessel of presenting him.” Unlike Pierre, if her vintage retro Game Boy cart ever breaks, “I can get another one. I care about the game, not the cartridge.”
Sitting on the Fence
Fractal is not alone in such deviant desires, identifying as she does as an “objectum sexual,” someone who loves inanimate objects; she first became aware of others like her when reading about Erika Eiffel, an American archer who fell in love with her bow and then married the Eiffel Tower before ditching it for a garden fence. Other such disturboids have engaged in physical relationships with cars, pillows, theme-park rides, the Berlin Wall, and even the helicopter from the 1980s TV action-series Airwolf. Like quasi-autistic android Mark Zuckerberg, Fractal never had crushes on human beings growing up, merely faceless machines:
I had feelings for monorails, iPods, treadmills…[and] a Garmin GPS…. I would get really shy around GPS [systems] or whenever anybody mentioned them, I was obsessed…. I would always try and make an excuse to use the GPS in the car and I would try to hold it close. I would do anything to try and touch it and to hear its voice.
At least a GPS has a voice, though. Tetris blocks are entirely mute, and, as abstract geometrical objects, act as the ultimate blank digital canvas for people like Fractal to project what I suspect they are really most in love with out onto: namely, their own good selves.
Which particular pliable, nonsentient, inanimate object constitutionally incapable of saying no would you most like to have sex with? According to Gallup polls, the most popular answer is Paris Hilton.