Jonathon Coulton & GLaDOS (Ellen McLain), “Still Alive”

I finally played through the wildly popular Portal video game last night and, sure, the rest of twenty-something America was out getting wasted and having fabulously uninhibited sex, but whatever.

It was brief, clocking in at roughly three hours of gameplay, but one of those rare plots that’s compelling and memorable enough to leave you feeling as if you’ve actually accomplished something greater than just passing a few hours of your otherwise monotonous life. Like that time when you finally rescued Princess Toadstool. Or the first time you beat the piss out of Dr. Robotnik. Or when you played all the way through Metroid only to discover on the last board when your character victoriously removes its helmet to reveal its flowing blonde locks that you were a woman the whole time (and even though she was only portrayed in 8-bit graphics your ten-year-old self was pretty sure she was the hottest creature ever to walk the earth, but then your ten-year-old self got very confused about the role playing nature of the gaming experience and started to worry what it meant that you were a woman all along, and moreover, whether it was vain or narcissistic or fetishistic to be thinking that this reflective she-as-me-as-she on the TV was as spectacularly hot as you were pretty sure she was, and so your only response was to throw in Excitebike for a few hours because you were certain that dirt and motorcycles were the only things that could help reassert your underdeveloped sense of masculinity*).

Anyway, this is the song that plays when you beat the game.

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* Interestingly, one also doesn’t realize that one is a woman in Portal until the first time one sees oneself through the wormhole, but whereas the ten-year-old me might have found this unsettling, the more mature me is resigned to the fact that this is the closest I’ve been to a woman in quite some time.