Categories
PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting Day: Kumite – The Home Game, with Zak Koonce and Vanessa Guerrero 🌭

At the end of our Bloodsport 2 podcast (our second podcast about the first Bloodsport), we hit you with a teaser for our upcoming Bloodsport RPG, Kumite: The Home Game. Starring Kicking and Screaming’s kickful Vanessa Guerrero, The Auralnaut’s auralful Zak Koonce, and 1900HOTDOG’s dogful Seanbaby. And me (I’m the other one!) hosting as your Bloodmaster. When we first announced this, you rightfully did not trust us. ā€œThis is a joke I don’t fully get,ā€ some of you said, nursing tight smiles. ā€œI know when to expect a betrayal around here,ā€ others said shakily, ā€œand it’s always.ā€ You were right on both counts! But we’re actually doing this one. Listen to the setup episode right now!

We use the German poster as the landing page for our campaign on Roll20, which was chosen because Kampfart makes me laugh. 

I looked it up, this tagline means ā€œthe toughest fight ever.ā€ ā€œHarteste Kampfartā€ is how you say ā€œtoughest fightā€ in German. I looked it up, and German is a real language!

A brief introduction to our characters: Vanessa Guerrero plays Francine Ducks, our resident Ninja Liar.

Zak Koonce channels mystical martial arts bullshit as our Karate Shaman.

And Seanbaby is our Unstoppable Kick Machine. He initially followed naming conventions and called himself Fraud Kicks, then he showed up to the game as Tarantino Liefeld and changed his avatar to this. 

That’s the kind of game this is going to be. Episode One in two weeks!

If your mind is ready and your heart’s on fire, push it over the wire in your very own Kumite: The Home Game: The Podcast: The Shirt

Artwork by: 56-time Art Kumite Champion Rusty Shackles

Modeled by: You!

Categories
REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: Tormented Robo-Shirts for Charity! 🌭

You’ve seen those Artificial Intelligence artbots, right? You feed them a prompt and they crawl all the artwork in human history to remix it and spit out what you want. Or more often, what you hilariously don’t want and have no possible use for. It’s fun, but the legality of the whole process is questionable, and the morality is answerable. It’s ā€œno.ā€ 

The AI is just savvy enough to cost good artists work on bad projects, but not savvy enough to authentically replace human joy, so it’s a lose-lose scenario built only to reinvigorate jaded lawyers looking for a new challenge. Still, it’s damn good fun to fuck with a robot. The first guy to kick one of those Boston Dynamics dogs could tell you that, before they started putting guns on them and he had to google how long robots hold grudges. So how do we automate art and still survive with our human souls intact? It’s an impossible philosophical question that we completely solved. No problem.

We torment the robots with bizarre prompts, laugh at their flailing confusion, then sell T-shirts as monuments to their anguish and give the proceeds to charity!

It’s the perfect scheme, and it helps so many: It helps the charities, it helps you put sweet nonsense on your body, and it helps our precious human artists by poisoning the minds of the AIs forever. Every robot you teach to understand Hulkamania can never again understand the Baroque Movement. That’s art fact!

We wish we could take full credit for this scam, but the whole thing started and continues to live on our Discord, where Mo first tried to teach a robot to Hot Dog.  

It’s wonderful. It’s the best attempt by thousands of years of technological progress to understand tubed meat. And it’s not even close. It’s a 1986 Food Engineer’s cocaine nightmare that inspired a terrible new kind of microwave sausage technology. ā€œIs this a hoge?ā€ The robot asked. ā€œDoes it hange?ā€ And the only answer it got was our derisive laughter. 

There will be plenty of crypto-scum to shamelessly profit off of this kind of thing in the future, but Mama Hot Dog raised us right. We put this sucker on a T-shirt, and let Mo choose the charity that all profits would go to. He picked the Chattanooga Trans Liberation Collective, and we left them a deeply confusing memo with our donation.

It was only available to the Discord, and only for a limited time – but if you want to Hange Hoge baby, all you gotta do is click here. In fact, we’re making all of our anguished AI shirts available for one week only. And again, all profits go to the robo-inquisitor’s charity of choice.

Like when Adrienne tried to teach the text robots about Popsicle Pete:

And my god, they understood. They understood so well. They spat out horrific poetry and it was a marvel, a feat of understanding. We taught a robot to fear. 

And then Mo fed its terror to the artbot again so we could mock its revelation. 

The AI could only understand those haunting words as some kind of Hungarian arthouse horror flick where a vampire ice cream man banishes nosferatu with his ghostpop. ā€œVatetie, Pepe!ā€ He cries, either summoning or perhaps banishing the albino cat-mimes. 

Of course we needed that on a shirt, this time benefitting Adrienne’s charity of choice, Neighborhood Legal Services.

Juho skipped the middleman (which is me, I think? Jesus, am I already obsolete?) and asked the robot for a pre-made Hot Dog shirt.

Seanbaby joked that this is swag from his Kazakh taco shop, but we figured out what the robot was really trying to say.

We’ve long said that the goal of any good comedy site is to attack and dethrone god. We needed our mission statement on a shirt, and Juho chose to benefit the Transgender Law Center.

We like to court hubris, so we figured we’d organize this pure relentless chaos. We let the community start officially submitting and voting on confusing hot-dog related AI shirts. The first round was simple: Let’s keep trying to teach a robot to Hot Dog until they get it.

They did not.

But we can all learn a life lesson from that robot, which fucking completely does not have it but never stops swinging for the fences. The vote was close but Mo’s Hatter Doghouse won out, with these profits going to Heifer International.

I finally gave in and wandered into the robot den myself. I knew the AI struggled with people, so asking for any specific celebrity could only result in a nightmare-faced double goblin. And yet I thought of a cheat code. ā€œRobots,ā€ I called out to the echoing steel cavern, ā€œDo you know… Andre the Giant?ā€

They!

Fucking!

Do!

They fucked up a little on the last one, interpreting Andre the Giant as a Davy Crockett-like character adventuring through the wilds challenging polar bears to guitar solo competitions, but wait did they fuck up? Because that’s actually the most correct thing I’ve ever heard.

The Discord agreed, voting that the right and only choice was ā€œIn the Lair of the Shred Bears,ā€ with proceeds going to Make Way for Books.

You’ve got until 8AM ET on Friday, October 21st to buy one or all of these shirts, with 100% of profits going to their respective charities, and then they’re going away. You will have officially missed your chance to torment a robot in the name of human generosity. Your torso will be naked and explicable. Nobody will look at you for a long time across a crowded bar before finally, reluctantly approaching to ask ā€œwhat the fuck is that shirt?ā€ And that was it, that was how you met. That’s the moment you fell in love and started the rest of your lives together, and you missed it.

OR DID YOU?

If you want in on the ground floor of this movement, you must join our absolutely hoppin’ Discord to submit and vote in future AI shirt-mess competitions. This is how we fight back against the robot scourge! With weaponized absurdity!

Categories
PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting Day: The Underground Comedy Movie with Abe Epperson 🌭

Seanbaby wanted to invite brilliant filmmaker, writer, and podcaster Abe Epperson from Small Beans on the podcast to discuss cinema. It was a fantastic idea, so we did that! Then he had a second idea: Let’s watch Vince Offer the ShamWow Guy’s sketch collection, The Underground Comedy Movie!

Seanbaby is no longer affiliated with the site. 

I don’t know why you would subscribe to our podcast after this. I’m asking you not to leave us a review based on this episode. 

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: S Rob Magic

We all have our problems. I used to take SSRIs until one day I realized I could google ā€œtactical + anythingā€ and turn my mood completely around. 

Don’t abuse this. When your brain chemistry mutinies and you find yourself thinking ā€œI’m not suicidal, but if I could be cryogenically frozen and then just never unthawedā€¦ā€ Well, then it’s time to google ā€œtactical barbells,ā€ expecting only bars with absurd grips and getting so much more. 

I’m serious. Save this for special occasions and use it in moderation. Just like ketamine and Chinese lithium mines, you might go in for a good time and give your entire life to that hole. There’s a very real danger that you’ll push this too far and start, say, Amazon searching subgenres of books for the word ā€œtactical.ā€

You are rapidly approaching the point of no return. Instead of a quick joy-zap to kickstart the broken lawnmower that is your brain, you’re about to lose a whole week to the comedic failures of toxic masculinity. Here, let’s redirect. My other favorite trick is to browse wacky Occult and Paranormal Books – sort by least popular, of course!

Under no circumstances should you combine these tips-

Did you feel a little twinge behind your ear? That was your brain destroying part of itself to make room for what’s about to come. I’m serious. 5th grade Social Studies – try to remember it. Nothing, right? It’s gone. Me too, I now think the Magna Carta is an anime robot because my brain napalmed one full square inch of itself when it saw Tactical Pen Occultism.

This can’t be exactly what it sounds like. Tactical pen guys are the biggest dorks of the military wannabe set, and that’s the most hotly contested category of dork outside Web 3.0. And pretend battle sorcerers are the least respectable magicians, way behind filthy Alan Moore fuck wizards, really only holding one spot above erotic hypnotists. So this can’t exist, it’s too perfect. This book cover is the exact photoshop I’d make to mock a Scott Adams tweet, it can’t be real. 

It’s real.

Haha this is the worst start to a book I’ve ever seen and God’s Debris by Scott Adams starts like this-

S Rob was given a chance to thank anybody who helped him with this book, in life, or just ever, even in an abstract fashion. He looked around, saw nobody and nothing, then thanked make-believe sorcery for being so generous. 

Wait, there’s also a dedication-

So he does have family! Maybe? Are… his parents named S Rob, too? This is amazing. We are two total sentences into this book and already the madness is impenetrable. Imagine being given the opportunity to thank your parents and saying ā€œI hope all me-names gain in power so they might multiply.ā€ Like best case scenario he’s hoping his family gets Jamie Madrox mutations, worst case he’s wishing himself success in starting a breeder cult.

There’s no way this is real. Tactical Pen Occultism is too much to ask for from the universe. And if it is real, it can’t be exactly as crazy as it sounds-

That…

That is some prime madness.

The biblical references, the mass repetition, this is an actual crazy person. I cannot in good conscience write this article unless this lunatic is also an incompetent grifter, so if you’re reading this – good news! I got there eventually.

Let’s get back to the book:

Oh! It’s more of this.

S Rob wrote four sentences about trying to gaslight a demon into thinking it already likes you, then did a find/replace on its name. I don’t know where the tactical pen part comes into this. I can only imagine he’s standing naked in his room air-stabbing his bullies with a Bic while shouting that nonsense.

I didn’t have to imagine it.

So real magic is just listening to heavy metal lyrics while shadow-fighting your imaginary enemies with household objects? If I’d known that I would’ve called myself a sorcerer in middle school and never learned those painful lessons about hiding enough dork shit to fit into polite society. 

Let’s skip ahead-

Oh no, is this it? This book was only ever 57 pages long. It was technically a grift on the grounds of format alone. It can’t really be four sentences with slight variations for 57 straight pages-

It’s the kind of unhelpful boilerplate spell you’d get by searching ā€˜magic’ with ā€˜Creative Commons licenses only’ checked. And then 56 variations on who does that spell and where it’s pointed. Yes, this is the book. The same thing repeated for each god and each part of the body you wish you were courageous enough to attack with a pen. By page 56 we’re asking the ancient Egyptian god of medicine to do foot stuff. 

God it’s perfect, it is two lunatic premises and the funniest weapon combined with brazen Amazon book scams. It’s the perfect Hot Dog artifact. I think it’s word for word the mission statement we started the site with.

Nobody could ask for more than this but holy shit there’s more than this??

There’s…. SO MUCH more of this.

S Rob is the Holy Grail. An internet tough guy magic maniac and sad Amazon grifter with a more prolific output than some entire languages. There are more S Rob books about mystical stabbings than there are Croatian language books about anything. 

This is already too much to ask for.

Let’s ask for more. 

Let’s… let’s click on his author bio. There’s no way it’s that easy. I have a lot of experience going dumpster diving in pop culture, and it’s always work to find the true gems. Every catalytic converter is buried beneath six loose diapers and a broken Furby stuck in attack mode. Nothing is easy, nobody ever looks inside themselves and says ā€œyes, if you’d like to know all the other ways I’m hilariously deranged, just go here!ā€ 

Except S Rob.

He just lists them. I’ve trained my whole life for this. I’m ready to track pseudonyms, delve into court records, hit the dark web to trade horse drugs for old screenshots from dead homepages and he just… lists them.

Right there in the Amazon author bio, he gives us his own webpage, his YouTube channel, his hold on IMDB credits?? His IMDB credits.

Ancient Alien Birdmen! (Short)!

When Dog Headed Men Attack! (Fucking Documentary Short)!

It’s like a broken SEO bot trying to warn the future about societal collapse. Magnificent.

This man’s very existence is doing me a personal favor. All of my instincts had me ready to deep stalk his life to find meager scraps of madness scattered across deleted social media accounts and he just, he just gave it all to me. I need to start a religion just so I can saint him. 

Well, he didn’t give it all. I guess, I guess I had to dig a little bit to find the Lulu account where he sells many, many, many other books about using pretend magic to do everything from conjuring chocolate to cheating a leprechaun, you can be a superhero, you can- 

What-what the fuck?

Dog-Headed Men again? That wasn’t a fluke? In a sea of inexplicability, I still managed to dash myself on the rocks of true insanity. I can’t even fathom what Dog-Headed Men Magick might be. I’m picturing a Final Fantasy-style summon that beckons the Dog Police. 

So that’s what this article is about now. I know it was about Goofy Tactical Products and then Tactical Occult Pen Battle Tactics and then, briefly, it was going to be about Ancient Alien Birdmen. God, remember when it was just about Ancient Alien Birdmen? What an innocent time that was, four paragraphs ago. But it’s this now, the article has to be about whatever the fuck Dog-Headed Men Magick is – unless I click over to one of these other tabs and find out it’s really about S Rob’s webstore where he sells freelance dick ensorcellment.

I can’t believe I caught ADHD from this article. I never realized it was contagious, much less self-inflicted.  

S Rob is truly a one-stop shop for bush wizardry, he’s like the Dollar General of mystic conmen – you can buy a wack version of anything, from the devil’s war-pen to a bigger cock and the sexy naked ghost to use it on. He’s a prolific grifter-shaman, which is my favorite type of liar mixed with my favorite type of drug addict.

But there’s something here I don’t understand. Like… beyond the several levels of incomprehension I’ve Inception-ed myself into already. On his website, S Rob also seems to sell DVDs of old movies that have nothing to do with him.

Let’s read that closer: ā€œS Rob performs a ritual to manifest the films?ā€ 

Is he selling these DVDs and just no longer has the language to explain that in a normal way? In the same way he would explain staying at home Friday nights to masturbate to Disney feet as ā€œinvite the Goofy to step through the gateway MAKE UP AND DOWN GROIN ATTACKING MOTION LIKE THISā€? 

Or is this a ritual to bring the movies to life, assuming somebody has always wanted to live in the lush universe of The Killer Shrews

Or is this a spell for YOU to follow along and manifest the physical DVDs in your living room, because the Wal-Mart bargain bin is all the way in the back of the store and you personally broke all the mobility scooters trying to turbo charge them with pen magic?

Are you paying to watch footage of S Rob doing a spell to create Attack of the Giant Leeches DVDs in his own room, or wait! It’s a spell to make the movies exist backwards through time and the fact that they do exist is proof it works! That has to be it. 

I guess he could just be using the framework of amateur magic to slip through some sort of copyright loophole, which holy shit, we’ve come so far that sounds like the boring answer.  

Good lord we haven’t even gotten to the YouTube channel.

Thank god, thank god he wears those sunglasses all the time. He looks like the Butterball Cenobite back when it was alive. And I’m so grateful for him cataloging every second of his existence. Look at that army of clones all trying to explain The Matrix to a frightened gym receptionist. Print that screenshot out, tack it to a circle and spin it: You just made an incel zoetrope.

There’s an entire series called S Rob Doorway where he just reviews books in a doorway, which is a quainter kind of crazy. But his editorial videos are a bit spicier, like ā€œKILL WITH MAGICā€ where he argues that because nobody believes magic is real, it’s legal to murder with it. 

That means we could – nay, must! – use internet spells to supernaturally execute pedophiles. Which he calls pedia-philes. I don’t know enough about regional British accents to know if that’s how they pronounce it. I feel like it’s not, but after what they did to ā€œaluminiumā€ I’m not willing to put money on that. Sure fucks with the YouTube captions though, which think this man is advocating for the psychic slaughter of baby doctors because nobody closed the UK wizard loophole. 

And we haven’t even gotten to the movie!

HE.

MADE.

A.


MOVIE.

This article is literally going to go on forever. I’m just going to keep typing and hit post whenever I pass out, then wake up tomorrow and do it all over again because I’ll never reach the end of it. This is our eternal dance, S Rob creates the madness and I mock it and he has a 50 year head start. But every race starts with one step- 

Hold on.

I see it now. This is a trap. This is too much. At every turn my wildest wishes have been granted with no resistance. This is one of those police scams where they promise bail jumpers a free boat and arrest anyone dumb enough to show up. Well I don’t believe your free hedge warlock, you fucking arcane narcs – you’ll never catch me!

Categories
PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting Day: Bloodsport 2 (The Second One About Bloodsport) with Vanessa Guerrero and Zak Koonce 🌭

It’s finally here, the day you’ve all been waiting for: It’s the Bloodsport podcast! Again! Bloodsport expert Zak Koonce and Bloodsport professor Vanessa Guerrero joined us, Bloodsport scientist Seanbaby and Bloodsport sommelier Brockway, to talk about Bloodsport for the second time. Why did you assume there would only be one Bloodsport podcast? That would be insane. Brace up for a 3rd-through-50th, we’ll Bloodsport ā€˜til the world dies.Ā 

Side note: Everyone knows the Bloodsport poster rules – it’s all kick and nothing else, because nothing else was needed. But just for fun I’ll show you my other favorite Van Damme movie posters in this writeup.

You might remember the first time we bloodcasted our podsport with Maggie Mae Fish – it was wonderful, perfect. She had never seen the film, and got to experience it for the first time with us as her kumite sherpas. It was an impossible-to-beat achievement in entertainment, much like Bloodsport, but much like Bloodsport II, The Quest, WMAC Masters, Arena, Undisputed, the Mortal Kombat franchise, UFC 1, every third movie starring Jean Claude Van Damme, and every single movie starring Don ā€œThe Dragonā€ Wilson – that didn’t stop us trying. 

For the first Bloodsport podcast we introduced a smart young woman to the best Van Damme movie that doesn’t feature time travel or a sassy lost twin, then got her fresh take on a wonderfully dumb old movie aimed at men. 

This time we’re going with experience – Bloodsport blackbelts only, discussing the ways that Bloodsport shaped the people, and unstoppable fighting machines, that we’d become.

There’s no further agenda for bringing Bloodsport up again! This is a safe and easy podcast. Stop checking for conceptual traps, weird twists, and sudden dives into other genres. It’s just Bloodsport, buddy. Kicks and stuff! 

Relax. 

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Nerding Day: WikiHow to Act Like Shinji Ikari 🌭

WikiHow is an instructional site started by aliens to bring down humanity from the inside, beginning with our most gullible and least capable. Every how-to is not only incorrect, but escalates stakes in such a way that you are guaranteed to be ruined as a human being by the end of it. If you look up how to get into AirSoft and carefully follow every step, you’ll wind up the cause of a piercing cellphone alert by the end of it. If you look up how to cosplay as your favorite anime character, you’ll get a step-by-step guide to suicide. I was joking about the first one, I think, until I actually look up the ā€œHow to Get into Airsoftā€ page. I am not at all joking about the second one.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is one of the most famous and influential anime ever produced, so already everyone interesting is totally lost, and everyone I don’t want to talk to knows exactly what I’m talking about. If you’re one of the cool kids who thinks ā€œNeon Genesis Evangelionā€ is an autocorrect disaster you get trying to research a used Hyundai, let me break it down for you: Schoolgirls, giant robots, confusing metaphysical bullshit, something something killing and/or becoming god. 

It has all the anime hallmarks. It may actually be the reason all anime is that!

The main character of Neon Genesis Evangelion is Shinji Ikari, who is the anime Holden Caulfield. Shinji Ikari sucks shit. That’s the point of him. He’s a totally ruined little boy who fails in every direction at once and spends his days mentally rehearsing long speeches about how that’s all your fault. Nobody wants to be Shinji, and that very much includes Shinji. So already this guide is for nobody, and it’s going to teach them how to do something they don’t want to do, and it’s going to do that completely wrong. But here’s an important quirk: You look at the bottom of the images below and they’ll tell you the page is called ā€œHow to Cosplay as Shinji Ikari.ā€ 

That’s a lie. That is a lie WikiHow is telling you, I presume to escape the class action lawsuit you’ll join by the end of this article. Check that red box in the image above: The original title was ā€œHow to Act Like Shinji Ikari,ā€ which is a very different thing. Don’t worry, this guide is still about acting like Shinji. The title is the only part they changed. It’s the work ethic you’d expect from the site that pays impoverished artists to trace film stills for 3 Cedi per page.

Let’s get the cosplay part over with:

Wear slacks and a white shirt. This is nothing. Nobody wants to dress like this at Comic Con, they’ll think you’re a Mormon there to protest. This is what every drunk waiter is wearing two hours after pulling a double. This is how far you’ll get undressing a magician before the charm of the hidden handkerchief trick wears off and you leave him to masturbate into his bottomless top hat. Nobody is looking up an article about how to dress like Shinji Ikari. 

ā€œHelp! What are those, slacks?ā€ Fuck you, WikiHow, you fail at existence.

I will give the artist credit, they really capture the spirit of cosplay, which is the art of looking almost like an anime character but less attractive. 

But this is it. This is the only part of the cosplay article that teaches you how to cosplay. There weren’t even tracks for this to veer off – they built four feet of rails that led straight into the side of an orphanage.

Step 1: Learn to stalk an anime character. 

This page could end here and it would already ruin a life. This is it: This is how you build a subhuman. ā€œLearn to stalk an anime characterā€ is the Baby Shoes Never Worn of unwashed 13 year olds. You don’t even need to specify that it’s Shinji Ikari to unravel everything good about a child. But it helps!

I worry those of you unfamiliar with the show aren’t getting the stakes. Here’s something to establish Shinji’s character for you non-anime folks, shredding through this article on your snowboards, dipping your Oakleys to scoff at us Inside Children: 

There’s a scene in Neon Genesis Evangelion where one of Shinji’s fellow tween robo-pilots is severely injured, so he goes to the hospital to masturbate to her unconscious body. It’s not played as fun! This is anime, I have to specify that. The scene is there to illustrate what a total shitbag Shinji Ikari is, despite his narcissistic victim delusions. 

Study that shit intently, kids! Watch it over and over, learn to get inside his mind at that moment, really internalize his logic until it’s your own. Think about it, really process the logistics of ejaculating to coma patients. That is the only way, the only way to pull off a black-slacks-white-button-down costume. Without it you’re just a valet using his break to hustle nerd tail from the weeb con. 

Hey okay fuck you Wikihow. Shinji doesn’t like Gang of Four. Shinji is very clearly the kind of poser kid who listens to music he thinks gives him status rather than stuff he actually enjoys. Just because he found a cool thrift store shirt one time, it doesn’t mean he appreciates the thin pop veneer over the stripped down lo-fi punk foundations of Content – you take it back!

But you can kind of see where the romance of Shinji Ikari might come in for people who skim the anime while playing Genshin Impact on their phone. We’re all suckers for a quiet boy who listens to music a lot. In theory that’s a Baby Driver. Shy boy loves music too much is shorthand for a sweet child with a rich internal life. In theory. In practice it’s more a warning sign for a domestic terrorist, especially since Shinji Ikari is a struggle-dump of a boy who never once listened to Entertainment!.

Fucking just master an instrument for this! 

Not to enrich your life, or for the love of music – spend decades of your life perfecting a difficult art because WikiHow said to. And when a tremulous waif moved by your performance asks why you play – you tell her it’s to be more like Shinji Ikari. She either doesn’t know who that is, in which case you have to explain the hospital jerkoff scene until she slaps you in the mouth, or she knows exactly who that is and she will slap you in the mouth before you try to explain the hospital jerkoff scene.

Here it is: Here’s the one step nobody interested in this guide has any trouble with. Look at that boy aggressively avoiding eye contact. That is the thousand-yard stare of a professional girl avoider. That kid successfully made it around the corner without fully seeing a girl before the adrenaline dumped out on him and he threw up in his backpack so he could take the shame home.

Imagine if I was wrong though! The guide thinks you’re not already doing this. It’s written like there are happy extroverted teens with active social lives reading this article, and WikiHow is like ā€œhey Part 2, ditch those losers and learn to cultivate self doubt, idiot.ā€

Hahaha ā€œbecome desperate for love.ā€ That’s a step! 

That is an actual step somebody wrote down. This is exactly what I’d tell my hypnotized grade school bully to kickstart an elaborate revenge. This is literally reverse therapy.

I mean, credit where it’s due, from the first bullet point it seems like the page kind of wants to warn you about itself. 

Become passive and lose agency, WikiHow says. Also don’t wear a sheer shirt – Shinji Ikari wears thicker weaves, that was Step 1. But Step 4 is ā€œlose your free will and learn to love conformity.ā€ Both equally important.

And now we spiral. 

Here’s where ā€œHow to Act Like Shinji Ikariā€ earns its Hot Dog wings. This moment right here, when it starts to become self aware. Where the guide itself realizes that every successive step is making you an objectively worse person. This point where even WikiHow, the most oblivious of Wikis, the least sapient of Hows, thinks ā€œoh no, I fucked up! I fucked up! Kid, you need to go – google how to act like Goku, that one just teaches you to abandon your wife and kids for the love of punches!ā€

You will be bullied for this, and your bullies will be right. 

This is a step. ā€œBe more susceptible to bullying.ā€ 

This is according to plan! Write down in your journal: ā€œDay 136 of becoming Shinji – Michael pulled down my pants in the cafeteria and the entire school laughed at my bashful penis. It’s working!ā€

ā€œStep 7: Oh god, I shouldn’t be doing this. I started writing this guide because I desperately need the ramen money, but I didn’t know I’d have to kill a child! There’s no time to edit, I can’t! The WikiHow text editor only scrolls forward like an oldschool Mario game. Some SEO bot crawled this search term, which was probably a dyslexic kid looking for Shinji’s voice actor, and now here I am. Here I am teaching children about the glory of suicide for $6.82 cents a day, and I will have to explain that. I will have to explain that to the devil when my time is come. Step 8. Live With a Penguin: Penguins are often found-ā€œ

Let’s head down to the Q&A section and collectively realize that people actually did read this, holy shit, they internalized it, and they want to engage further: 

Haha if you don’t have a robot, pretend your bike is the robot! It’s the saddest advice from a parent that doesn’t have time for crafts, especially when you remember that Shinji’s robot was actually some sort of bioengineered motherbeast. Pretend your bike is your mother, who is never coming back! Pretend she loves you but has gone mad from losing her humanity, and then pedal her as hard as you can – pedal your mother, child, pedal her to undo the collective psychic mass of humanity’s sin! Do a bunny hop!

Man, that’s a perfect ending line but WikiHow isn’t done apologizing yet:

Once again, child, you simply must be prepared for scorn. 

Step 1. Prepare for scorn. 

Step 2. Internalize scorn and realize that it’s earned.

Step 3. Try not to kill yourself – even though Shinji would if he was just a lil’ braver!

This article can never be sorry enough. It ends like every Malibu Comics series: with profuse apologies and passive aggressive blame shifting.

HOT TIP: Life is worth living. 

That’s seriously the last line. That’s the way the guide ā€œHow to Cosplay as Shinji Ikariā€ ends: with a firm reminder that there is still some good to be had in life, even though you’re currently using it to learn how to act like a cartoon child sex pest, and you’re taking those lessons from a Journalism School dropout making moral compromises for Hot Pocket money. 

This whole thing was a missed opportunity. This should have been about Shinji’s caretaker. She kicked ass. Maybe there’s a ā€œHow to Act Like Misato Katsuragiā€ – all having you get wrecked on tallboys, fuck a lot, own a penguin, and do sweet drifts in your sports car. Let’s see if WikiHow has that shit-