Author: Robert Brockway

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: Street Fighter: The Novel, Part 2 🌭

Previously, on Part 1 of Street Fighter: The Novel…

Nothing.

And now for Part 2.

Alright, fine. Here’s a synopsis.

Yeah, now you agree with “nothing.” That’s everything that happened for over a hundred pages. There wasn’t a single Street Fight in this, a novel about Street Fighter. It’s like writing a Doom novelization without any Mormonism at all-

That’s right. Credit where credit is due, there was a graphic full-frontal spanking scene with a young child. That kid was named Kenji and he got his ass handed to him, literally. If you could’ve seen the Street Fighter-style HUD, Kenji would be K.O.’d and the two grown men would have completely yellow bars, save for a sliver of red from when Kenji’s wildly flailing genitals hit them.

But hey, Kenji turns out to be an important character. Ryu left that scene vowing to care for this child forever – even breaking his vow not to murder, should he ever meet those spankers again. It’s an important bit of growth, showing Ryu maturing from a selfish lone wolf to a caring protector. I’m sure it will play a huge part in the story, so I’m going to highlight every single Kenji passage in Part 2.

But first, your favorite original character and mine, director Rob de Chow. Fat, horrible Rob de Chow, who talks like the first draft of Temple of Doom that George Lucas doesn’t want you to see. Rob is not just a racial caricature. He can also molest!

Los Angeles. The city that eats young women. They ride to LA on a dream and leave it in a body bag. Some actresses will do anything for their chance… at fresh air.

That’s the problem with Talyn’s writing – well, a problem. One of the problems. A single grain of problematic sand on a beach made of problems. That smog line is supposed to be a throwaway to set the vibe – sleazy LA takes advantage of young actresses – but Talyn botches the description so badly it scans as a woman dying in a smog bank. She whiffed noir so hard she wound up accidentally doing a Spaceballs gag. Incredible.

We focus a lot more on Tawnya’s fake relationship with Fei Long in Part 2. Now, if you’re not familiar, Fei Long’s backstory in the games is “what if Bruce Lee’s legs were on fire”? Here, it’s “guy who can’t fuck hates his bitch girlfriend almost as much as Street Fighting.”

That’s two things he has in common with every Street Fighter character. We get a look into Ryu, Ken, Guy, and now Fei Long’s minds and it turns out during every match in every game they’re really thinking “well, this fucking sucks. I wish I was somewhere else, burying my bitch wife.”

In a moment of desperation, Tawnya is so overwhelmed by her conflicting feelings for Fei that she turns to drinking. That’s right, she has an entire one glass of champagne about it. Talyn writes about this Junior High pre-game like it’s the pivotal moment in a D.A.R.E. video. Or maybe more like she’s sarcastically describing pathetic Earth hydration to alien thought-swarms, but that’s kind of how she writes everything.

If you haven’t read Part 1, you’re wondering why I’m picking on an ESL fifth grader’s first fanfiction. It’s true this is some of the worst writing I’ve ever seen, but I wouldn’t be covering the book at all if it weren’t for Talyn’s rabid marketing efforts. She created her own page on the official Street Fighter Wiki implying this is the best novel ever written, and that it might’ve been endorsed by Capcom as canon. It isn’t, and it wasn’t. She is a fully-grown British woman using every marketing grift at her disposal to make this seem like more than what it should’ve been: a 700-word Tumblr post with no likes.

Some real simple writing rules being broken here: Don’t write with a thesaurus. Don’t write horny about race. Don’t compare girls to fruit.

This may be an intentional technique. Talyn writes so overwhelmingly wrong that you can’t help but let some of it slide. In Street Fighter terms this is like sweeping your opponent every time they get up and then, when you screw up the timing, turning around and blasting diarrhea all over the controls so they can’t counter. Everything you just did sucks, but it’s probably going to be overshadowed by the shit shotgun.

An example: In the book, Sakura writes a gossip column to make it seem like Tawnya is stalking Ryu. That’s something I also struggle with – mimicking gossip-style writing. It’s hard to nurture that kind of self-hatred for a whole paragraph. I deal with it by looking up actual gossip columnists and aping their structure. Talyn deals with it by not knowing what a magazine is, typing like an adjunct professor who’s recently had their brain hemispheres severed, then removing every fourth word.

You’ll agree her prose is a crime which should be punished with snakes. But Talyn’s not done! Before you can drill down into this word malfunction, she’s already segueing into a review of Tawnya and Fei Long’s movie-

Shit shotgun!

What were we even talking about? I think I brought this up to pick apart the gossip column bit – but is this a kung fu movie about a pussy that turns men to gold? Talyn’s style guide is the fascist playbook: Flood the senses with garbage and trust on the human mind to shut down in defense. And it’s working, I started out ready to criticize her writing and now I’m just thinking how I wish I was watching a movie where Jackie Chan fights a woman with a golden cooch.

It turns out Fei Long hired Sakura to write that hit-piece at the behest of Rose, who is astral projecting as a vibrant cherry-mouthed phantom to make Tawnya think she’s schizophrenic. This is a Street Fighter book. At any point in this convoluted soap drama, Fei Long might screech like a chicken and unleash a flaming jump kick. That could happen!

That doesn’t happen.

My first instinct is to point out “her tone high-pitched and loud” isn’t how you write an upset woman, it’s how you transcribe a kettle at a school for deaf Italians. My next impulse is to ask why everything is thrusting. All of it gets obliterated by the shit shotgun when Fei Long has that ADHD lapse about furniture appreciation. What the fuck was that?! Now it’s the only question I want answered, and everything else gets to slide. I guess describe the couch that distracts from a psychotic break, if I have a note?

Back to Guy’s storyline. Now, this is complicated: you have to remember Guy, like every Street Fighter, mostly just hates his bitch wife and Street Fighting. That’s his personality, motivation, and plot.

But there’s a complication!

He also wants to bang his bitch wife’s sister.

But there’s a complication!

He wants to bang the sister in the same house, at the same time as his bitch wife. And I get it: When the love of Street Fighting dies in your heart, you have to replace it with something equivalent. Guy is just trying to play the Turbo Hyperfighting Championship Edition of infidelity.

Back to Ryu’s storyline: remember he started this book by nuking a Japanese ninja village with a fireball because a goth girl got too close to him – a metaphor that’s happened to the best of us – and he has refused to do anything interesting since. I guess he rescued that one spanked child, cared for his genitals, and promised to protect him forever. I forget the child’s name. This next passage will surely remind us.

After the spanking scene, Ryu immediately left the country to eat an insane breakfast an AI would put together after scanning Waffle House police reports. He probably brought the spanked boy with him. He did vow eternal care for those genitals, remember. It’s just that this chapter isn’t about their burgeoning father/genital relationship. It’s mostly here to reiterate the most important motif of the book:

Street Fighters can’t fuck, and hate their bitch wives.

Wait, holy shit. Hold on! Drop everything, especially any freshly-spanked boys! There’s a Street Fight in this Street Fighter book!

Don’t get overwhelmed by the shit shotgun. Ignore the wild adverbs, the kick that pushes, the Greek chorus of fight hobos, the fact that Talyn thinks bellowing means singing – none of it matters! We’re getting a street fighting scene and it’s only 16 chapters into the Street Fighter book!

You know fistfights, right? Mostly shoulder-striking? Like you really gotta laser focus in on that big shoulder muscle and make sure all your blows land there. We didn’t know that back in the day. We used to think fights were all about knockout blows, and then UFC 1 happened. Remember? When Royce Gracie dead-armed all of his opponents into submission and changed the game forever?

I’m being unfair. Sakura does manage to get off one fireball, and Tawnya counters it.

It puts both of them in the hospital.

Guy overreacts a bit.

This is actually great grounding for a comedy skit: set up fantasy conditions and subvert them with real world results. Like the announcer says “ROUND 1! FIGHT!” and Sakura starts charging up a fireball, then smashcut to both of them in the ICU burn center. If Talyn meant that as a joke, I’d applaud it.

She treats it as a heartrending tragedy and spends several chapters being weirdly horny about it.

Meanwhile, Fei Long has returned home to Kowloon, where it’s revealed he’s only been obeying Rose to save his neighborhood from triads and inadequate deodorants simply not pH-balanced for a man’s needs.

Now that the seal has been broken, there are Street Fights happening all over the place! By which I mean two. Here’s the only fight Fei Long has been in this whole book. He is instantly exhausted by it.

Ugh, Street Fighting am I right? Just the worst.

Fei Long’s character in particular is all over the place. One scene he’s Brucesploitation Christian Grey, the next he’s a sweaty little toad. Talyn wants Fei Long to simultaneously be a dreamy, powerful, charismatic sex symbol, and a scheming abusive loser who can’t fuck. He’s playing both kinds of Bill Paxton role at once, basically.

Complete with all the sniff play you’d demand from classic Paxton.

There’s actually a genuinely cute moment where Ryu plays Street Fighter against the child he’s sworn to protect forever. What was their name again?

Oh, right. Sakura.

I’m sure Kenji will come up again. He must be an important character, otherwise including that whole chapter about his graphic dong-dangling spanking and Ryu vowing bloody vengeance on his spankers would be completely fucking crazy.

He’ll come up again. Any minute.

But first a pointless Dan Hibiki cameo!

Dan’s a great joke character. He’s basically Mr. Satan from Dragon Ball Z. He’s Steven Seagal inserted into the roster of a fighting game – only it’s not Seagal from the movies, it’s the real narcissist who can’t actually fight for shit. Dan is also used as a disguised bit of self-deprecation, owning how ridiculous the power creep has become in the Street Fighter universe. People generally fall into two camps on these kinds of characters: Folks who get the joke and love them, and folks who think the joke is “we hate Dan.”

Back in the 2000s we had a word for people in the second camp, but it was wrong of us to say it, and I’m sorry.

Anyway, we all know what this was building to. It’s actually pretty insulting to force us to endure 200 pages of excuses for why you wrote it, when we all instantly knew why this book exists: It’s time for the author’s blatant self-insert to go on a date with Ryu.

Talyn probably spent hours just on this moment, plotting every second of the perfect romance in her head. Here’s what she came up with:

If I had the ability to generate and shoot a Hadouken, I could not imagine a world in which that line is met with anything but a pointblank fireball. Not even because of the idiocy or awkwardness, but because that’s plainly a podperson coming out of the closet. That’s not even close to a human sentence. Anything talking like that is not a woman, it is a woman-shaped fruit who needs your meat to plant her seeds. That’s why her hair smells like that. Ask Fei Long.

Maybe you’re a saint, maybe you’re thinking “the author is just trying to sell how nervous and dumb she would be on a first date with her fictional crush. We’re supposed to hate this moment.” No. Fuck you. This is why you have to be murdered to become a saint.

Ryu hears this – the dumbest thing ever said by man or panicked turkey accidentally making human sounds as it’s devoured by coyotes – and thinks “that is way too clever, she’s up to something.”

Imagine watching somebody rollerskate in front of a speeding garbage truck and thinking “ah, a masterful opening gambit. The game is afoot!” This is like starting a chess match by turning around and firing diarrhea all over the board. I’m sorry, I know I’ve used that before. There’s simply no other metaphor for it.

But there’s a good reason Ryu thinks Tawnya’s unbearably clever: Ryu… is also an idiot.

Everyone in this book is an idiot, because Talyn herself is an idiot. We are about 200 pages in and Ryu changed out of his ragged karate gi for the first time just for this date. “How would she know I enjoy fighting?” Thought the bare-footed karate hobo who travels the world searching out new and exotic concussions.

In Talyn’s mind, what should be on the page here is a careful tete-a-tete – ostensibly a friendly date, both sides are secretly probing the other for weakness. What’s actually on the page is two newly-awakened coma patients struggling to reconnect their speech centers. What’s implied off-page is a depressed rehab aide, quietly giving up on them.

“Gasp, he asked me why I wanted to know – the one move I wasn’t prepared for! Quick, to swallow this fork as a distraction! Gork. Sporgle. Checkmate.”

Ryu just discovered this woman whom he already knew was possessed by the dark power of Akuma might be associated with Akuma somehow. He solved this mystery when he saw Akuma’s symbol tattooed on her.

Now that Ryu finally has confirmation of the thing he already confirmed in the first chapter of this book, there’s only one course of action left…

He cums.

And then punches her in the face.

This is the real world equivalent of Ana de Armas taking Rampage Jackson to dinner at Nobu and then getting her nose caved in before the drinks arrive. As the police haul him away, the paparazzi flashes illuminate his stained jorts.

I take everything back. What a perfect scene.

I’m all the way invested in this, the story of Kenji the spanking boy and his precarious genitals. Let’s find out what happens to those genitals in Part 3 – I hope they continue to be cared for!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: AnAndy, who picks Dan even in Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. Not just that, but he has also been taunting you the entire time you read this article.

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: Street Fighter: Dream Never Ends 🌭

I love Street Fighter, it’s the first game I was ever good at, until I tried to prove that in a regional competition at an Encinitas arcade that burned down soon after. No follow up questions. I also love struggling novelizations for video games that barely have a story. It is with great joy I bring you Street Fighter: The Novel. No, not that one. No, not that other one. Look, it’s called Dream Never Ends.

You haven’t heard of it, and that’s weird, because according to the official Street Fighter Wiki it’s the greatest novel written in any language.

This is the Street Fighter Wiki. Not one of those chump wikis anyone can edit. And you know somebody is policing it because it’s about something important to the internet, a beloved video game, and not something trivial like a female politician or an African country.

This page reads like the sock puppet account of a YA author about to be the center of a social media controversy, but fighting game fans are notoriously overzealous. Whoever wrote this wiki just got carried away by the power and majesty of the story Ms. Talyn created. Let’s see who that editor might be.

Sorry, I was trying to build that up into a surprise. When what you’re feeling right now is the opposite of surprise in every way. It’s just hard to “build something up” into weary resignation.

Talyn may froth at the mouth when talking about her own story, but when it comes to Street Fighter itself she tosses out terms like “flat video game personas” and “floundering.” That’s a little weird for somebody who just wrote 350 pages about it, but there’s a simple explanation: Clinical insanity.

Actual diagnosable narcissists aren’t unwaveringly confident. They’re wildly insecure – they can never just build themselves up, they always have to tear something else down. Even if they’re supposed to be speaking positively about that very thing. There must be some high-profile example of this behavior I could point to, something that illustrates how destructive it is not just to video game fandoms but to the entire global economy, but I can’t think of one because I’m a fucking idiot.

We’ve all read fanfiction by unhinged narcissists, because that’s all of it. Their first move is usually to write a new Mary Sue character who’s just a thinly veiled self insert. But that’s NOT what’s happening here – it says so right in the official Street Fighter Wiki.

Her name is “Tawyna,” not “Talyn.” There’s an entire one letter of difference. “Tawyna” has a W, and it stands for “WHOA, that’s no Mary Sue!” Also it’s unfair of me to call this fanfiction. This is a “semi official” Street Fighter story, which seems semi trustworthy. Elsewhere, Talyn describes the book as “officially acknowledged by Capcom.” And hey, right there on the wiki – it says there are plans for the book to be published in partnership with Capcom. Plans! It wasn’t, but there were plans!

I’ll translate from social media grifter: They were Talyn’s plans. “Semi-official” means Capcom hasn’t sued. “Officially recognized by Capcom” means the intern who ran Capcom’s Twitter account liked the book announcement tweet she @’d them in, and was probably fired for it.

This might be the meanest thing I’ve ever said, but you usually find this kind of manic spin and unrelenting ego from somebody calling themselves shit like “a Girlpreneur” or “a Personal Brand Expert.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Talyn was actually working as a diplomat-

-ic consultant.

A diplomatic consultant. For her own diplomat-adjacent brand consultancy business. But it’s legit, see: Her network includes top diplomats and celebrities like Bob Geldof and Kofi Annan!

I’ll translate again: Desmond Tutu follows her on Twitter. It might be an intern, it might be a parody ballet account, but that’s enough to count as “in her network.”

It’s also weird how Talyn’s own Wikipedia page is strangely exhaustive for such a minor public figure, and full of more over the top praise.

Again, I’m being unfair. Writing your own glowing Wikipedia page is a move more befitting a Personal Brand Expert who calls herself shit like The Fairy BOSSmother – not a dignified, trained diplomat with a tweet once heart emoji’d by @CoffeeAnnan.

I wonder what Talyn is up to today…

I’m scared that if I keep chasing this rabbit, I’m going to uncover a case of systematic corruption that has caused thousands of human deaths. I would rather make fun of the book about punch buttons. Let’s stop learning about Talyn Rahman-Figueroa the person, and instead delve into the art. Which, as a reminder, is longform fighting game fanfiction written by an internet grifting brand ambassador.

They say your opening line is the most important. The ending line is next. They don’t say anything about your second line, and that’s good, because Talyn’s thinks you can get small cases of passing dementia. Like a headache, or a runny nose. If it gets really bad, you might have to call in demented at work.

By the second paragraph, we establish a vibe.

Stephen King once wrote that adverbs are the enemy. I think they’re more like a weird neighbor. See him every once in a while and it’s fine. See him every day and you’re going to find out which cryptids he’s horny for. Same with Talyn’s style, it’s clear she cut her teeth writing about fucking werewolves, and I didn’t mean that as a werewolf fucking pun.

First chapter. Talyn’s self-insert is cutting herself for Ryu. First chapter.

As an avid goth dater, of course I’ve traded cuts for tits. But I’ve always imagined Ryu with more discipline. If martial arts mastery doesn’t give you the self-control to avoid sharing a dark connection with somebody Madisyn from Pre-Calc once called “a high flow bitch” after her tampon fell out of her purse in class, then I don’t know what a black belt is even for.

Don’t let the vibrant cherry mouth distract you, I know you: You’re easily distracted by vibrant cherry mouths, and you always forget to bring your knife. This is why you never get to stab anybody with a vibrant cherry mouth, and I’m telling you: that’s the best stab. Just slides right in like a human sheathe.

This fight scene is pure Street Fighter though. We all remember the first time we pulled off that full 360 and hit punch only for Zangief to realize in horror he’s gotten lost in Blanka’s soft strawberry lips and forgotten his Spinning Piledriver at home.

I’m not saying a Street Fighter book should be all about fighting. A straight-up fight with nothing else going on is one of the most boring things to read. Hey, maybe there shouldn’t be a Street Fighter book at all. That’s not my business. I’m just saying if you do happen to write a fight scene into a Street Fighter book, the IP whose name is 50% fight, you need a better signature move than Playful Water Splash.

See, this is what I’m talking about. This is the prose of a werewolf fucker. You know how when you see a spider or something, your senses begin to thrust into panic? They swell unbearably, growing hot and engorged – your senses do – just before they slip into the wet welcome of panic with a moan of lusty terror? You know that totally normal feeling.

It’s almost worse to write like this when nobody is even fucking a werewolf. It’s a little weird to write Street Fighter erotica, but you do you. It’s crazy to write a guy making a fireball like he’s fucking a werewolf. If anything, that should be reversed.

There’s not a page in here that isn’t trembling, quivering, shuddering, or thrusting. This is a tired man leaning against a wall, and it reads like both he and the wall are about to cum. Talyn clearly learned to write from horny fanfiction sites. And those all tell the same story: a gorgeous but misunderstood self-insert heroine is torn between powerful men who at once dominate and are dominated by her. This whole book is like if you held start while selecting 50 Shades of Grey to unlock its Street Fighter palette-swap.

There’s only one thing Talyn doesn’t find unbearably erotic, and it’s the stinking tenements of… Osaka, Japan.

Now, pictures of Osaka might look gorgeous. You might find articles about how it’s a wealthy financial hub, an impeccably clean city, and considered one of the best places to live on Earth. Osaka’s Wikipedia page even describes it as “a showcase of the Japanese urban phenomenon,” but I bet Osaka wrote that page itself. Don’t trust it. Remember: One of Talyn’s diplomatic credentials was “lived in Japan,” so this is probably colored by her actual, personal experience.

Two things Talyn doesn’t seem to like much: Street Fighter and Japan. It’s a little strange that she chose to write a Street Fighter book set in Japan. I don’t write books about The White Lotus set in an Ocean State Job Lots. But she’s not wrong to say Japan struggles with a xenophobia problem. I think it’s probably also fair to say Talyn showed up to those apartments wearing a shirt with her face on it and offering to pay rent in exposure.

Now that she’s shaken off the psychic damage of Japanese rental discrimination, Tawnya is free to relax in her apartment the way all normal, non-insane narcissists do: By stripping nude and examining herself in the mirror.

You guys know this, right? You know the erotic touch of wet hair? Famously the most sexy of sensations, the amorous cold touch of your own damp hair on your tits? This is number three on a list of phrases you can destroy pod people for saying. If somebody whispers this dirty talk in your ear, you need to get the fuck out of there because you’re about to bone a well ghost. This is how Grima Wormtongue masturbates. This whole book is so desperately horny and it absolutely cannot fuck.

I’m starting to get kind of a Street Fighter vibe from the writing now. Stay with me: The early games weren’t so much about memorizing long strings of combos, but about learning a handful of supermoves to spam over and over again. If you replaced all the Flash Kicks and Yoga Fires with cliches like Trembling Hands and Pupils Filling with the Sights of Things, this does read kind of like a Street Fighter match. Like in this passage for example, Talyn is baiting you into a jumping attack by holding back on a Nostalgia Sense, only to punish your approach with a perfectly timed Lip Bite.

Why did you stay with me? That’s fucking nonsense by a man going mad from terrible prose analysis.

Let’s switch gears and focus on the story of Dreams Never End. So far everything in this book reads like a parrot phonetically transcribing an Evanescence video, and that’s not going to stop.

But it is all overlaid with actual Street Fighter lore. Dreams Never End takes place after Ryu kills Akuma, and believes he is being possessed by a destructive power called the Dark Hadou. That’s all canon stuff. Talyn just dares to imagine “what if the Dark Hadou was a woman, and what if I was that woman, and what if I was also a sexy international movie star?” And then she masturbates to that question for 300 goddamn pages.

There are a handful of subplots and alternate POVs to break up the action. That’s not the right word, but you know what I mean. Watch the emotional fire blaze as Talyn’s prose breathes life into Guy – if you remember his pathetic, two-dimensional backstory from the video game, you’ll know him only as the best-trained ninja in his village. As though that’s enough!

Now he’s also intuitive!

I’m being unfair again. Talyn’s Guy does have another personality trait besides “ninja.” It’s the same one everyone else has: Hornily unfucking.

There’s supposed to be nothing sexual happening in this next scene, I want you to keep that in mind while reading it. The opening chapters were about the Dark Hadou overcoming Ryu because Tawnya came too close to him and woke him up inside (woke him up). He then unleashed a fireball that destroyed Guy’s village. This scene is Guy talking to his own martial arts master about the loss of their home.

You simply can’t read that scene without mentally filling in the saxophones and eyebrow waggle at the end. This is a cellular infection of horniness that cannot be cured. The Last of Us is a big show right now – do you know about this? Have you heard about this? Imagine if, instead of cordyceps, a person could be hollowed out and totally replaced with a Tumblr fandom. Then imagine if that abomination wrote a book. Then imagine it was about Street Fighter. Then subtract the Street Fighter part again.

Talyn isn’t just dismissive of the Street Fighting parts, it’s like you can actually see her disgust whenever it tries to intrude.

“The ninja lifestyle is not a burgeoning field that appeals to the young,” is something a Personal Brand Expert would say in their book about ninjas. How dare Street Fighter show its head here, in this tender moment between an old dry hand and a jogging bottom? Master Genryusai only wants to talk about Guy dating his daughter. At one point in the conversation hei sees Guy just thinking about Street Fighter, and has some sage fighting advice:

“Knock it off,” the ancient ninja master says. “Let’s talk about who you’re like, into into. Is it my daughter? I hope it’s my daughter.”

In fact, that’s how all the ancient martial arts masters feel. They are absolutely sick to death of teaching their young pupils about harnessing spirit energy into projectiles, when they could be dishing about the dating scene. There’s a whole flashback chapter where Ryu reminisces about the lessons of his own sensei, Gouken. If you don’t follow the games, Gouken is the guy who taught Ken and Ryu how to shoot fireballs, and apparently the pull-out game.

This goes on.

And on.

AND ON.

Gouken never even gets to the martial arts training. He brought these boys to a crumbling temple to have them meditate on teenage girl courtship. Gouken is more of a sensei in the pickup artist sense. They talk about their training a lot, but Ken and Ryu really paid $10,000 each for a weekend retreat on discovering their inner Alpha. I did mean to write that Street Fighter pun, I won’t apologize.

But oh man, when we flash back to the present and Ken and Ryu, those ancient rivals, finally get together again – you know what’s gonna happen!

They politely discuss sparring and how neither want to do it for different reasons, then begin complaining about marriage. When Ryu finds an opening in the conversation to mention that he’s been possessed by the Dark Hadou and has recently destroyed a small village with a fireball, Ken knows exactly what to say.

Checking back in with Tawnya Blaze – remember she’s no Mary Sue! She’s only the most beautiful actress in the world, caught in a love triangle between Ryu and Fei Long on the set of his new movie. For those of you unfamiliar with the game series, I guess I’d describe Fei Long as milky-faced. And if you have to know only one thing about him, it’s that he loves to sniff women.

Meet another of Talyn’s original characters: Rob de Chow, the director of this film. Don’t be fooled by the name, he’s actually a deeply flawed character. There’s actually only the one flaw, but it is real deep.

We’ve got milky faces and wildly offensive Asian accents, we need to get the fuck out of here before Mickey Rooney shows up. Let’s check back in on the rest of the book. Surely we’re not still dwelling on Guy’s relationship troubles-

Or Ken’s identical relationship troubles-

I miss Ryu’s sections. I bet he’s doing something fireball-adjacent-

Ryu – Ryu from Street Fighter, the karate gi guy, whose whole personality is half-circle forward punch – is watching the ocean and wishing he could crawl back up his mother’s vagina. At this point, I’ll take it. I’ll take one other thought in my Street Fighter’s heads beyond “frustrated by CW relationship drama.” Even if it’s just that other staple of CW angst: basic parent issues. So long as every character doesn’t now start talking about their mommy and daddy problems, we’ll-

I’m not even surprised. Everyone in this book has the inner monologue of a 14 year-old’s secret alt Livejournal. This book takes place in 2005, I’m allowed that reference.

I bet this all ends at the annual Street Fighter prom with Sakura pregnant with Brad’s baby (Brad is a new Talyn original character who dies after not asking Tawnya to the dance.) This book was not a work of love, it’s transparently chasing that Twilight/50 Shades of Grey money. I wouldn’t even be surprised by a spanking scene-

I lied, I was surprised. I did not expect Ryu from Street Fighter’s ocean musings of reverse-birth to get interrupted by an underage public spanking. I definitely didn’t expect Ryu, the Japanese character, to call out the slanted eyes of another Japanese character. But let’s see where this is going. You don’t know, maybe he does something awesome in this scene like unleashing a dragon uppercut or caring for some tender genitals.

He does! He cares for the tender genitals, just like in the hit video game Street Fighter.

I take it all back, this is the Street Fighter I want to read. Stay tuned for Part 2, with hopefully more genital shielding, maybe some cherry mouths. Vibrant ones, if we’re lucky!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Sam Koepnick, who ABSOLUTELY knows the erotic touch of wet hair and will not shut up about it.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: The Heartbreak of Krull

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When I was a child, I thought Krull was the name of the magical throwing star the main character uses in the 1983 movie Krull. Then I grew up, and realized Krull was the name of the main character himself. Then I grew old, and realized Krull was the name of the planet. This column is about the 1983 sci-fi/fantasy adventure movie, Krull. Krull is the story of Krull, and everything is Krull.

Krull was a series of grand mistakes stacked together into something greater, like piling up loose hand grenades to find you’ve inadvertently created Donatello’s David. It was directed by Peter Yates, who had a resume full of gritty crime movies about car chases and heists, like Bullitt. The perfect guy to direct a high fantasy adventure with no crime, heists, or chases. But in 1983 sci-fi/fantasy was hot, and the budget was a staggering 30 million dollars. Peter Yates thought Krull was his ticket into blockbuster American genre movies.

Krull had other ideas.

Producer Ron Silverman wanted to make a Dungeons & Dragons movie, but there was a problem with the licensing, in that he didn’t want to pay for it. At all. So he hired Stanford Sherman, the guy who wrote Ice Pirates, to pen an original script that only resembled a D&D campaign. The studio didn’t like the final result, because it was a D&D campaign by the guy who wrote Ice Pirates. Instead they hired serious playwright Steven Tesich, who turned in an artful, dialogue-intensive character script.

They went back to the Ice Pirates guy.

But not before building several wildly expensive sets based on the Tesich scenes they just scrapped, so Sherman had to rewrite his own script again based on sets from scenes nobody liked. At no point during the making of Krull did any one single person understand what Krull was supposed to be, including me, who still calls everything and everyone in it “Krull.”

It’s a bunch of hilarious fuckups crashing together to make a charming movie, but there is one perfect scene in Krull. I want to talk about it, but it requires some grounding to understand. So let me give you the gist of Krull: The planet Krull has been invaded by The Beast, who sure looks like a Krull to me. He and his army of Slayers – Krulls, the lot of them – ransack an unnamed kingdom that I’m going to call Krull.

The prince of a rival kingdom, Colwyn Krull, is set to marry Lyssa Krull to secure an alliance of the Krulls. It’s the only hope they have of standing against the Krull Beast’s army of Krulls. Both Colwyn and Lyssa’s fathers are against it, but it’s too late: They’ve already been fucking for years and the whole Beast from beyond the stars thing was just a happy coincidence.

The marriage ceremony is the cornerstone of this movie, so pay attention: Colwyn, as the groom, must put a torch out in a bowl of water, which is called “giving fire to water.” They tell Lyssa her job as the bride is to “take fire from the water,” and then they all turn to look at her because they’re a bunch of assholes. It’s a strange prank. Perhaps this is meant to shame women into compliance early in the marriage. But Lyssa simply reaches into the bowl of water and produces a fireball in her hand.

It’s the only magic any of them will do, and nobody blinks at it. “Yep, this is how all marriages go here in Krull, which is either the town, country, or planet we’re on,” the movie seems to say. Lyssa does nothing with this fireball, even as Slayers attack the ceremony. Here’s what the Slayers look like:

They’re terrifying, Guyver-armored bugbots. Those things they’re holding are Star Wars style laser blasters. Here’s what the good guys look like:

Those things they’re holding are the lasers they’re getting blasted by.

I tried to find a scene where the citizens of Krull weren’t getting laser-blasted to oblivion, but there isn’t one. I adore how Krull brings sci-fi tropes into a world of fantasy and the two sides aren’t depicted as equal but different. Science wins, dipshit. One side shoots laser blasts, and the other eats laser blasts. But like everything in this movie, it was not on purpose. The fight choreography originally called for sprawling swashbuckling scenes between the Krullers and the Slayers, and then the Slayers showed up in eighty pounds of foam rubber with no eye-holes. So now, instead of backflipping, they laser blast. And instead of parrying a backflip strike, the good guys die to laser blasts.

The Slayers abduct Lyssa and kill everyone but Colwyn, who is rescued by a mysterious stranger named Ynyr. Ynyr tells him about the Glaive – a mystical throwing star, and this universe’s version of Excalibur. I have always called it a Krull, and it’s too late to change now. Maybe that’s because a glaive is already an actual weapon, and it’s not that one. It’s a blade on a stick, not a giant shuriken. But either nobody knew, or cared enough to look up whatever “fantasy bullshit” a glaive is, and that’s the origin of the raddest weapon in sci-fi/fantasy.

Colwyn finds the Glaive hidden in an ancient volcano, but to avoid confusion I’ll be calling it a Krull from now until I die. Colwyn’s first test is to reach into a pool of molten placenta to retrieve the Krull.

Colwyn pulls out a weird black rock, and he is not impressed. Then he knocks some of the rock loose, and finds out it’s a sweet throwing star.

He’s into it. Then he turns his hand just so, and realizes it’s a switchblade throwing star-

He’s completely in love, and so am I. I used to build popsicle stick Krulls and whip them at my friends, screaming “KRULL” as they exploded. I might again.

Colwyn’s so fucking excited about his Krull. It’s adorable. Ken Marshall, the actor who plays Colwyn, keeps the role pretty straight. He’s a cocky Errol Flynn-type and has one shit-eating expression throughout the movie. He does try an emotional crying scene at one point, and it is not convincing. But he nails Colwyn’s child-like reaction to finding a switchblade throwing star – he comes bounding down the mountain and leaps out of the rocks behind Ynyr. He doesn’t say a word, just takes an excited breath, runs up to him, then cocks his arm back to Krull the shit out of the place. It is the universal body language of a child about to say “check this shit out” before losing his favorite toy forever.

Ynyr just grabs his arm and tells him to knock it off. It’s not the right time. Daddy’s hungover and he does not feel like going to fetch a Krull out of a tree for a crying Colwyn.

Now that Krull has the Krull, he can save the planet Krull by finding and defeating the Krull Beast in his Krull Fortress. Along the way, they recruit a ragtag band of charming misfits, every single one named Krull as far as I’m concerned.

There’s Ergo, a shape-shifting wizard and comic relief whose spells always go awry. Think Orko, and then don’t think a second thing. It’s just Orko.

There’s a group of bandits led by the roguish Torquil-

With a few famous faces appearing in early roles. Liam Neeson’s here-

And Robbie Coltrane, who played Hagrid in the Harry Potter movies and also retroactively in every other movie you see him in.

There’s the cyclops, Rell, who gave up one eye to the Krull Beast in exchange for the power to see the future. But the Krull Beast double-crossed him, and the only future he can see is the day he dies. Rell has a sick trident that one-shots everything in Krull, and he’d be the main character if he didn’t look like this.

In true Krull tradition, they got so carried away covering actor Bernard Bresslaw’s face in cyclops makeup they forgot to make eyeholes. He had one tiny opening off to the side as an afterthought. He couldn’t see shit. Then they put him in lifts to make him appear bigger. Most of act two takes place in a swamp, and Bernard Bresslaw spent most of act two falling into that swamp.

The Krull Party also picks up The Blind Emerald Seer, the only one who can foretell where the Krull Beast’s Krull Fortress will appear. I hate him. His very existence traumatized me as a child. He was my least favorite monster in Krull, even when he’s just a normal guy with no special effects makeup. He looks like a sick cocker spaniel who bleeds when you pet it.

The Seer keeps a young and unexplained boy.

It’s probably supposed to be a wholesome apprentice role, and it might actually scan like that if the Seer didn’t look like a mummy filled with wasps. Seriously, this guy fucked me up so bad as a kid. I still have trauma response just looking at his face, and that’s before he was replaced by a black-eyed changeling.

Who died by melting into a giant plague boil.

Just his dry, empty skin burrowing away into the earth to find you, to find and taste your feet every time you take your sandals off at the beach.

All the wizards are fucked in this movie. The unexplained boy is sad about his worm-father dissolving, so Ergo the shape-shifter does something strange to comfort him. Here’s the catch: Earlier in the movie, Ergo turned into a goose and was shown talking with his own voice, with his own mind. He doesn’t fully transform into these animals, there’s still a middle-aged man’s brain in there. So yes, this next bit could have been cute-

If you didn’t know that puppy is still Ergo. That’s a middle-aged British man pawing at a distraught young boy. That is Ergo thinking “I’m going to crawl into this boy’s lap.” That is Ergo thinking “I shall now lick the young child’s face.” There’s no way the makers of Krull intended this, they just didn’t think about any of the worldbuilding – which is a very Krull thing to do.

Now that the team’s assembled, many grand adventures are had – Ynyr hooks up with his ex, a giant milk spider; another black-eyed changeling tries to bang Colwyn while Lyssa and the Krull Beast watch on spectral pervert vision; the party steals a bunch of fire horses and just tear ass across the country like a 20 year-old Air Force cadet destined to die in a souped-up Mazda. If it feels like I’m hand-waving the best parts, that’s because so did the director. Peter Yates hated directing Krull so much he took an unplanned three-week trip to the Caribbean in the middle of filming. That’s an insane thing to do, abruptly stopping production on a major motion picture to take a vacation. Amongst several others, Krull was booking the 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios, one of the largest and most expensive in the world. Yates’ meltdown alone probably accounts for a third of Krull’s $30 million dollar budget.

The Krull Party arrives at the Krull Fortress, and beloved characters like Krull, Krull, and Cyclops Krull make the ultimate sacrifice for the grand finale. One of them was nearly actor Ken Marshall. There’s a scene in the movie where it looks like a death trap opens beneath his feet, nearly crushing him. Using movie magic, the makers of Krull accomplished this by building the exact death trap and throwing Ken Marshall into it.

That floor isn’t foam rubber, there’s no little safety switch to detect resistance and pull back. It’s a massive hydraulic press built to crush men, and everyone in the scene simply practiced not getting crushed by it. Ken Marshall did his own stunts, but sometimes he let the stuntmen practice them. You might recognize that as complete madness, and you would have been fired from the set of Krull for being a buzzkill. It was the stuntmen who practiced timing the deathtrap, until Ken Marshall came in and sent them away for the real deal. He took a little longer saying his lines than they did in practice, then jumped right into the jaws.

The timing was off by five seconds, exactly how long it takes a hydraulic press to split a man in half. Only one crew member noticed this and slowed the machine down in time.

Meaning this expression was real.

It’s now time for Colwyn to face the Beast, who takes the form of an R-Type boss, complete with orbs. Colwyn unleashes the Krull for the very first time. You’re expecting a monumental fight scene in the face of great adversity. Nope. No. Nuh uh. It’s a one-shot. Fish types are weak to Krulling.

Fuck yeah, Krull! It’s such a rad fantasy weapon. Sure, it doesn’t get a lot of screen time, but it absolutely wrecks shop when it does.

We’ve arrived at the scene I wanted to talk about, but just a quick recap: Krull was directed by the wrong man from a script written twice by the same guy, around setpieces his fired replacement invented, on way too big a budget, whose fight scenes all had to be scrapped because nobody factored foam rubber underwear into a backflip. This movie broke its director’s mind and nearly ate its lead actor. I love it dearly, I would not say it’s competent art.

Except for one scene. The scene after Colwyn finally Krulls the shit out of the Krull Beast, then opens his hand for the Krull to come back.

In any other movie, this scene takes a few seconds. Luke realizes the lightsaber is less important than the lives of his friends or whatever. It’s accomplished with a little frown and a quick cutaway.

In Krull, this scene takes about five minutes. It’s easily the most high-effort sequence in the film. Peter Yates slow-plays the whole thing, ramping up dramatic tension before cutting away just to build it up again. Ken Marshall acts the holy shit out of this scene in a way he simply does not bother to anywhere else in the movie. Remember he had a moment at the start where he cried over his dead entire kingdom. That involved making a constipated face and whimpering for four seconds. That’s because Ken Marshall was saving it so he could leave his heart on the floor here: For the scene where an excited child loses his sick-ass toy after playing with it for the very first time.

If you’ve ever had a remote control car go down a sewer drain on Christmas morning, you know this pain.

Look at the despair and madness on his face. He’s sweating, he’s crying, he’s smiling and breaking all at once. He just wants his Krull! And the awful thing is… the Krull wants him back. It’s trying, you guys. The Krull is trying so hard.

But it can’t break free of the Beast’s flesh.

Over and over again, we cut from the Krull ripping itself apart trying to get back to its master, to Ken Marshall channeling child-death trauma to pour his very soul into this, the throwing star retrieval scene.

But it’s no good. With the Krull Beast dead, the Krull Fortress is collapsing, and Colwyn Krull’s precious Krull is lost forever. He must flee with Lyssa Krull, his true love, before they’re both crushed.

Lyssa gives Colwyn a meaningful look, no words need to be shared.

And then he goes back in for the Krull.

We cut back to Lyssa just for this expression.

He ditches her to get his throwing star back! He’s the most relatable hero in movie history. Colwyn heads into the Beast’s lair to reach for his Krull, but the Beast awakens again, forcing him and Lyssa to flee. Luckily, Lyssa realizes the power of badass remote-control switchblade throwing stars was inside them all along. A beautiful sentiment. She opens her hand, and reveals… the marriage fireball.

Oh, right! She was always a pyromancer, from the very start of the film. We just fucking forgot about that, because this is Krull, baby. It’s less a script and more of a vibe.

The Krull Beast tries its orb shot again, but that’s nothing before the power of love.

The Krull Fortress collapses, the Krull Beast dies, the Krull is lost forever, but Krull has been saved by its champions, the newlyweds Colwyn and Lyssa Krull. And sure, maybe sometimes Colwyn dreams of Krull, the one he lost. The switchblade shuriken-shaped hole he will always feel in his heart. But he has something better now.

It’s the power of love.

Which is a flamethrower.

Love is a flamethrower.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Autumn Armstrong-Berg who is going to flip the fuck out if they get hit with one more popsicle stick Krull.

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos, Part 2🌭

Last week I wrote about CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos, the epic tale of triple-doc Dr. Daryl Daxler, a community theater puppetmaster who solved the Fermi Paradox with racist puppets, In Part 1, I focused solely on the art of Robert J. Gold, a maniac spending his retirement years on this CGI porn asset cinematic universe. It’s sort of like a horny Skibidi Toilet for boomers, if that helps.

“Huge tittied woman has a lot of real problematic puppets” has not historically been a dealbreaker in my personal life, but this idea had its time and place, and that time was 1993, and that place was the clearance bin in a KB Toys. Any reasonable person would discard this premise as the misfiring of dying neurons, and decide to stop huffing paint. But these puppets ate Robert J. Gold’s brain until all that remained was lust and puppet scat. He wrote a 70 page graphic novel, a 136 screenplay, and a 70,000 word novel of the exact same story. Just the Hand Puppet Commando origin story over and over again, and it all looks like this:

Absolute visual poison. Glossolalia for the eyeballs. A lens flare siphonophore held together by a network of beams, bolts, and rays. It somehow reads exactly like it looks:

That’s enough to medically diagnose a hyperactive child. It’s what a Decepticon tells his dementia nurse before transforming into a rhombus. I can tell you with authority that reading this is what it feels like to get hit on by Ernest Cline. Robert J. Gold has spent years of his life writing a faithful transcription of a car wash. But, remember, horny.

This is a comic book, screenplay, graphic novel and animated trailer that could’ve been a math doodle. It’s somehow both not enough and way too much effort. Robert J. Gold has been working on this for, let me check-

Twenty years. Two decades of bothering his wife and co-workers with puppet accents he swears are ironic. A quarter of a lifetime spent tweaking the computerized feet of a virtual model meant to be plowed by Sonic the Hedgehog. I’d say this is a man in love with the first and only idea he ever had, but nothing could be further from the truth. Robert J. Gold is literally an idea man.

That’s exactly the Photoshop I would’ve made as a punchline for the obsessive puppet guy’s life. But that’s a real book. Not only that, Simon & Schuster published it. They’re one of the Big Five, the largest and most prestigious traditional publishers in the world. That doesn’t mean it’s legitimate, just that Robert J. Gold got paid actual money for it. It’s important to remember “inventor” has always been a polite term for grifter. If somebody told you they were an inventor in the 1990s, that meant they were going to sell you a headscratcher for $40 and skip town. Not so with Robert J. Gold, he spun that one book into an empire, culminating in the most prestigious of 1990s publications: the interactive CD-ROM.

Suddenly, the design sensibilities of CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos make total sense. It does have “1995 Educational CD-ROM learning to fuck” vibes. The weird thing is, when you drill down into Robert J. Gold’s actual inventions, they get very boring. A 1990s grifter usually claimed to have invented a working hoverboard or a cancer preventing straw. Robert J. Gold claims to have invented a flat panel display controller and a new kind of energy bank. Boring shit. Legitimate sounding shit. But then there’s this-

That’s the grifter we want! Scam inventors love to say they worked for the military, and it’s not always a lie. DARPA owns a lot of hilarious patents because some charismatic weirdo came in with a slick PowerPoint presentation about a Battle Whistle. Let me guess, Robert J. Gold tried to sell DARPA some kind of beam-based weaponry.

Wait! Laser puppet.

Wait! Racist laser puppet.

Once again, that sounds worryingly legitimate. There’s no way the horny CGI puppet guy actually invented a real flashbang grenade in use by SWAT teams and militaries. Let’s track down that patent.

No mention of lasers, beads, or magnets – the holy trinity of ‘90s grifter inventions. This might be real. There’s one way to check how legitimate a patent is, and that’s to see who’s cited it. Check who might be using elements of the invention outside of the owner. If it’s a patent for some stupid scam device, the only thing in the citation section is the original inventor wearing a fake mustache, trying to run the scam again under a different name. Here’s the citations of Robert J. Gold’s flashbang grenade.

That’s too many for a scam. Let’s pull out just one:

So he really did invent an influential form of the modern flashbang grenade back in 1992, it truly was used by military and police forces around the world, and it’s still relevant decades later. Normally when I go looking into sexual puppet maniacs all I find are crusty felt holes and unhappy churches. The occasional cannibal. I have never found a real life weapons designer. But it makes sense. It’s all there in the work: Each and every racist puppet has a bright beam, a stun ray, or a novelty grenade. Like all the best authors, Robert J. Gold is subconsciously writing his past trauma into his current fiction.

Hold on, “trauma” is a spoiler.

Before we find out what that trauma is, we have to start at the beginning. Flashbang grenades existed for a very long time, but they did not work very well, and they weren’t used often. What you think of, when you think of a flashbang today – that all started with Bill Nixon, who invented a more stable version in 1988. He filed his patent and began widespread distribution in 1990. Flashbang grenade usage skyrocketed around the world, but especially in the US. And Robert J. Gold rode this wave right behind Nixon, with his own patent just a couple years later in 1992.

Flashbangs aren’t fun and harmless like in video games. They’re a modern plague. They were only meant to be used sparingly, in very specific scenarios. If you have to incapacitate a hostage-taker and only probably but not definitely kill the hostages, you use a flashbang grenade. That’s pretty much it. There just aren’t many times where throwing an explosive at somebody is the safe option. Flashbang grenades are still bombs.

After people like Bill Nixon and Robert J. Gold made them mainstream in the ‘90s, military and police started tossing flashbangs around like party favors. This resulted in at least 50 deaths, but probably more like hundreds.

Considering that statistic only goes back to the year 2000, it may be thousands. What was once used solely by elite military forces in hostage scenarios, was now being used by yokel cops to detonate the local Boy Scout troop. Did you think that was a fun joke example? That’s not a fun joke example.

Oh, good. He only exploded himself, and not the troop of Boy Scouts. Because those were the two options he left himself in that scenario. Real quick: Why do Boy Scouts need to know how to deploy a flash grenade? Do they work on bobcats? Troop 187 may not have learned the proper way to stun and disorient a chipmunk, but they did learn a little something about the militarization of the American police force that day.

This motherfucker was so desperate for 12 year-old nerd respect that he gave himself stun grenade leprosy. Somehow that was the last straw for inventor Bill Nixon. Ten years after his invention started exploding minorities, he helped turn a cop into a flashbang zombie and that was his Oppenheimer moment. He got out of the game.

If teaching Boy Scouts what the Rapture will look like weighed heavily on Bill Nixon’s conscience, the time a cop threw a flashbang into a baby’s crib must have ruined him.

This kind of guilt destroys a man’s soul. Bill Nixon must have built a Silent Hill in his mind because of that shit. He probably spends every dreaming moment sneaking past Boy Scouts with beams for eyes, trying to collect shredded baby clothes.

Look, I know this is darker than you want to go in a comedy article. I’m sorry. The line isn’t always clear, but for future reference it helps that we found it. It’s right here, between a cop blowing himself up in front of a Boy Scout troop, and exploding a baby. Both things made possible by the modern flashbang grenade. They’re truly an atrocity. The State Supreme Court of North Carolina recently classified them as “weapons of mass death and destruction.”

Which should theoretically make their use on civilians a war crime, but that’s American Exceptionalism at work.

We’ve lost track of Robert J. Gold’s whimsical puppets a little bit.

We needed all this groundwork to establish that flashbang grenades are a disaster, that their reckless use should probably be a war crime, and is for anyone but American police officers. But flashbang grenades are still a tool, and misuse of a tool comes down to training. Who’s training these cops?

The manufacturers, of course. Usually for a lucrative government contract fee. Ideally, that training would teach police to use flashbangs only in situations where it’s absolutely necessary, and not to huck them at protestors or air-drop them from helicopters.

Which I only mention because they’re two specific citations of intended use in Robert J. Gold’s patent application.

We all know the best people to teach how and when to use a potentially lethal product are the ones who make money every time it’s used. If it’s good enough for the pharmaceutical industry, it’s good enough for handgrenades. Robert J. Gold not only invented and sold grenades to the police force, he was responsible for some of that training everyone agrees was reprehensible. Some men are consumed by guilt. Some men stick in guilt’s throat. Bill Nixon is over here in Flashbang Hill fistfighting Pup Tent Head, meanwhile Robert J. Gold has this on his LinkedIn profile.

Accuracy Systems, Inc. of Phoenix, Arizona is where Robert J. Gold taught, and presumably learned flashbang safety himself before going on to start his own facility, First American Counter-Terrorist Systems. Let’s look into his alma mater:

Ooh, you don’t love to see headlines about explosive decapitation in your handgrenade certification school. This happened at Accuracy Systems, Inc. in 1989, just before Robert J. Gold filed his patent in 1990. Gold doesn’t list a date of employment, but the timeline implies our beloved puppet maniac was working, training, and possibly building his own future curriculum under Accuracy Systems owner, Chuck Byers, before Byers’ incompetence exploded a man’s head off. That’s me being generous, because the alternative is after.

You better believe we’re going off on a Chuck Byers tangent. If karate movies taught me anything, it’s that you can kill a guy by slapping him in the nose. If I learned two things, it’s that the student is only as good as his teacher. Robert J. Gold learned his Flashbang Style from Handgrenade Sensei Chuck.

First day, straight to grenades! Most places don’t let you work the cash register. If 1/7th of a Wendy’s Grill Skills program doesn’t sound like enough training to assemble sensitive explosives, you’ve got more foresight than Chuck Byers.

Somehow, this is not the decapitation story. This is what most places call criminal negligence, but in the grenade world is known as dramatic foreshadowing. By “grenade world” I mean “Arizona.” Not only did Chuck Byers not learn to change his ways from this, he told the recently exploded man to walk it off.

Put some dirt in those stumps and get back to work, pussy. In my day, we exploded ourselves to work at the grenade factory, where we exploded all day and then blew ourselves back home to our terrible wives, who were just a collection of handgrenades stuffed into a dress.

Why didn’t it stop there? Why would anyone watch a fellow employee explode themselves over the treeline, and still clock back in after lunch? Cult! The answer is cult.

Holy shit, I think there was some actual karate in there. This story truly has everything. We started at harmless horny puppet maniac and somehow wound up here, in an Amateur Handgrenade Karate Cult. A marketing team’s favorite thing to ask new clients is “describe your brand in one sentence.” 1900HOTDOG does not have a marketing team, but we do have our answer.

The one good thing about a 1980s Amateur Handgrenade Karate Cult is that they mostly just blow themselves up. Maybe some ninjas. Not the case with Chuck Byers and Accuracy Systems, Inc. They became a national threat.

Throughout the late 1980s, UPS was shipping boxes full of live handgrenades without so much as a FRAGILE sticker. That’s a Naked Gun gag. It feels like we’re veering off into slapstick.

Imagine slipping on a banana peel while carrying a box of live grenades and filing a workman’s comp claim for a tweaked back. The clerk would think they’re on a prank show. They’d start looking for hidden cameras and BAM! That’s when you explode. In the comedy world that’s called an Arizona Misdirect.

Eventually the government would catch up to Handgrenade Sensei Chuck…

And slap him with a fine slightly less than the cost of a well-loved jetski.

If you know anything about right wing maniacs, you know that “a minor fine laughably inadequate for their crimes” is enough to drive them completely insane. Here’s a letter Chuck Byers later wrote to congress about the worst military aviation crash in history, the Gander Air Disaster. It killed 248 American soldiers. In the letter, Chuck Byers spins up a conspiracy about a nuclear backpack bomb and a secret Iraqi sabotage mission-

All pretty standard right-wing nutjob stuff, down to the obligatory Oliver North. So what did Chuck Byers want out of this? The bad kind of attention? Backpay for the top-secret backpack bomb he developed? To cut a novelty rap single with Oliver North where they rhyme “and I’d like to say” with “handgrenade?” Nope, all Chuck wants is credit…

For killing the American soldiers.

Byers claims that an LAPD Bomb Squad officer recognized the explosive that blew up the Gander flight, and that Accuracy Systems, Inc. manufactured it. Byers wants congress to know he totally did that. He built the bomb that exploded the plane and killed those troops. It’s just that he thought it was for the CIA. Now, you might be asking yourself: What kind of lunatic wants this? What kind of absolute face-chewer wants false credit for 248 murders? What could he possibly get out of this?

He’s trying to get out of the accidental death charge at his explosives factory! Chuck Byers, Amateur Handgrenade Karate Cult Maniac, thinks the best way to prove his innocence in a single accidental death charge is to implicate himself in a CIA conspiracy that killed 248 US soldiers and also, just for fun, the attempted assassination of the President of the Philippines. It’s like trying to clear yourself of a trespassing charge by saying you’re a 9/11 hijacker who jumped out right before the plane hit.

Because this has all the hallmarks of a political thriller, you’re probably picturing a fancy bomb at the heart of this scandal. Something with tubes full of blue liquid and multi-colored wires. No. Chuck Byers wants credit for putting napalm in a Coke can.

Okay, that’s enough about Chuck Byers. I only mention him to prove- I’m sorry. I’m being informed that’s not enough about Chuck Byers. He would eventually be convicted of a kickback scheme with the military unit who killed Osama Bin Laden.

Okay, now that’s enough about Chuck Byers, I only bring him up to talk about-

Hold on. Sorry, again. I just learned Byers sold his Amateur Handgrenade Karate Cult compound without removing the grenades, and it’s still exploding people decades later.

We got off track again!

The important part is that Robert J. Gold, the horny racist puppet guy, probably got his grenade training from Chuck Byers, and definitely worked at his explosive decapitation factory. Gold used that knowledge to start his own flashbang grenade training facility, and the one thing everyone agrees on is that flashbang grenades are a disaster that cost many American lives due to the dogshit training methods around them.

Just knowing he was responsible for burning the shape of an exploding cop into the retinas of a Boy Scout troop was enough to do in Bill Nixon’s conscience. Robert J. Gold followed in Nixon’s footsteps back in 1992, and his products were likewise responsible for the surge of flashbang deaths in the ‘90s and beyond. He’s apparently cool with it. He’s still got it on his LinkedIn profile. He proudly lists his certification in Booms at Sensei Chuck’s Huckin’ Hut to this day. He worked for and studied under a guy who wants you to believe he blew up 248 American soldiers with Napalm Coke. Somewhere in there was an exploding baby.

Whether you acknowledge it or not, this kind of thing fucks you up. The inventor of dynamite started the Nobel Prize to try to make up for it. Oppenheimer resigned out of guilt. Bill Nixon is on GameFAQs right now looking up how to beat the gunpowder zombies in his mind. Robert J. Gold used his American war crime money to obsessively recreate the same story over and over again. A story full of stun rays and novelty grenades. A story where the tiny, vulnerable creatures are actually strong warriors who would never be blown apart in a crib. A story about puppets, and beams, and bright lights, and beams, and explosions, and more beams, and regret. And titties.

Fetishes are birthed from trauma.

I’m not saying I can prove Robert J. Gold’s weird puppet gigantism kink comes from a repressed brain trying to absolve itself of explosion guilt. I’m just saying puppet research always goes like this.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Jared Clack, who only has enough room in his heart for one Amateur Handgrenade Karate Cult.

Categories
NERDING DAY

CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos, Part 1🌭

Some ideas are so good you dare not speak them aloud before filing every possible copyright and trademark. You only get one billion dollar idea in your lifetime, and that’s if you’re lucky. When it comes, you need to be ready to drop everything and devote your whole life to it. Robert J. Gold was ready. He was ready for CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos.

It’s generally not great if people have notes on your story from the legal filings stage, but CyberKnight, Hand Puppet Commandos & GrayLord and the Metalicans sounds like too many things. That’s the complete failed lineup of UPN Kids. I’m not being fair, CKHPC&GL&TM is intended for a visual medium. Maybe it all gels once you see it in action.

We’ve added five racial stereotypes, a touch of pornography, and the Fermi Paradox. We’re still on page 0. This image has bad vibes. That huge blonde lady is definitely porn DLC for Poser. It feels like the inverse of the White Couch Girl meme. I think those puppets are in trouble.

Visuals aren’t helping. Let’s go back to the text.

I’ve been to a lot of con functions, if you notice the whole room avoiding the snack table except for one wild-eyed dude, don’t go in for cheese. He’ll open his mouth and this will spill out. You’ll be trapped for the next hour listening to his escalator pitch for the story of triple-doc Dr. Daryl Daxler, who discovered a solution – hold on, it’s important you know her adoptive Asian parents were big fans of Yogi Bear – she’s always had this theory about alien communication that – wait, she’s not actually called that, call her Dax – actually let’s talk about some scientists having lunch first. Hold on, Dax is actually called CyberKnight, the scientists got hot dogs but Dr. Iverson refused to eat his because the others made fun of the way he suckled the tip-

Why refine a premise into a satisfying story that suits both characters and theme, when you could just open up with both barrels of the idea shotgun and blow your reader’s attention span to shit in the buckshot of a thousand terrible concepts? Robert J. Gold never had an idea that didn’t have three sub-ideas of its own. His brain is a bullet list that nests to infinity. His dirty talk comes with footnotes. Since we spoke last, triple-doc Dr. Daryl Daxler Dax the CyberKnight also became a master puppeteer and used her community theater puppet skills to put herself through three doctorates. Since I wrote that sentence she invented the solution to contacting alien life. It was so simple! It was synthetic telepathy!

Triple-Doc Dr. Daryl Daxler Dax the CyberKnight and now Paradox Puppeteer’s synthetic telepathy machine exploded, but not before downloading the World Protector Kit into her brain, which didn’t do anything on its own, but let her invent the Personifier, which didn’t do anything on its own, but could be used to give life to her racist community theater hand puppets! I didn’t mention it before, because we had to explain why Dax knows Yogi Bear’s catchphrase, but her puppets are racist.

Every puppet team needs a blademaster, just look at Puppet Master, Thunderbolt Fantasy, or Bert. This one’s name is Wasabi, he’s both a Samurai and a Ninja, but just because he’s three kinds of racist against the Japanese doesn’t mean he’s Japanese.

He’s from all Asian countries at once, except only Japan, inspired by Taiwan. I’m sorry! Inspired by a hot blonde girl’s childhood memories of her parents’ memories of Taiwan.

You’re already exhausted. You need to rally. Drink some electrolytes, we’re here for longer than you think.

Sam is every tough cop who ever lived, but once again filtered through the crowded brain of a tri-genius puppet wrangler.

Don’t worry! She has beams! They have many functions. I’m glad we covered the important part, her beams, because Sam is already dead. She dies early in the origin story. What kills her? I’m glad you asked: Tuberculosis.

No, it’s MORE BEAMS.

Iron Ghost is the team’s problem.

He’s the problem character on a team of nothing but problems. If you want to prove you’re not racist, just give a racial caricature one thing that breaks type. Then when people accuse you of stereotyping, you can say “yeah, he’s an American Indian with a supernatural connection to nature, yes, he comes equipped with an electric tomahawk, but he’s actually a chemist. Don’t you feel the fool? What’s that, say his catchphrase out loud? Oh, I… I don’t want to, is all. But I totally would, if I wanted to.”

Decker is sort of Deckard from Blade Runner, but actually wait! No, he’s Indiana Jones. He’s both, and that makes him just Harrison Ford. He carries a .45 caliber pistol, which is actually a stun gun that does a lot of things and one of them is Ion Beam. I didn’t know “stun” was measured in calibers, but I did know the best fists are measured in wetness.

“BRAINS” is … well, the Brains of the team!

Capitalization matters. Saying Brains is the Brains of the team means all teams have a black woman named Brains, and this one fulfills that role. There’s a word for that, I forget it. I’ll ask my one smart black friend what it is.

Brains’ superpower is her intelligence, which is actually triple-doc Dr. Daryl Daxler Dax the CyberKnight’s power. It’s weird, huh. It’s weird that Dax’s intelligence was a simple combination of innate gifts and education, but the black woman needed it bestowed on her by alien telepathy and she’s still not smarter than Dax.

Let’s meet Swami! It’s too late to say no, he’s already here.

Let’s not talk about Swami’s “Short Rope.” Let’s not talk about Swami at all.

Lupe is the “Tactical” one. Like all the best writers, Robert J. Gold has no idea what quotation marks might be, but “god damn” if that’s going to stop him.

She’s hot-blooded, but not in any stereotypical Latina way – she’s all kinds of Mexican at once, inspired by an ignorant child’s memory of a friend’s big sister’s quinceanera. I shouldn’t joke like that, it’s indistinguishable from Robert J. Gold’s actual writing. Lupe is both a Ripley and a “Laura Croft,” you know, from Tomb Marauder? But there’s one important difference: beams! She comes with an Ion Blaster, “stun” functions, and grenades of many flavors.

Already you can see Robert J. Gold is obsessed with beams, stunning, and grenades. Mentally bookmark that. You’ll need it later.

Our main villain is, don’t laugh, GrayLord. It’s fine that you laughed before. Don’t laugh at this one, though. His tag line is “Obey the will of GrayLord.”

He received the evil version of Triple-Doc Dr. Daryl Daxler Dax the CyberKnight’s powers. Where she used them to bring her extremely racial childhood hand puppets to life, Dr. GrayLord just opened a can of life in his garage and let destiny take the wheel.

GrayLord’s pretty lucky his garage was filled with toxic waste, knives, and assault rifles. If I set off a life bomb in my garage I’d get a supervillain squad made of a sassy neglected exercise bike and six old furnace filters clogged with dog hair. I actually do have a barbecue grill in there, but mine never shot white hot plasma. It mostly just clicks when you turn the knob.

Here’s how the epic tale of CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos begins:

It’s like lighting a scented candle while drowning in a septic tank, but I have a note on the prose: Robert J. Gold, this is a level of uncertainty I don’t love to see in a first paragraph. Before we even learn Dax’s name, we learn she isn’t sure what things are called, and doesn’t like that they’re called that. I’m being unfair. That’s actually a motif in Robert J. Gold’s writing.

Commitment is a surprising problem for the guy who dedicated his life to the first idea a bored child at a Jiffy Lube has. It’s not enough to apologize in text for the terrible name – the whole comic pauses for a full-on flashback to the moment somebody called the commandos that happened to be hand puppets the Hand Puppet Commandos. I’m sorry, that felt too committed. I meant to say they’re some sort of hand puppet commandos.

It’s been a while since we’ve had some beams. Let’s check in on the beams.

What a ransom letter of an image. That’s what the inside of a dog’s brain looks like at a Pink Floyd Laser Spectacular. Just totally disparate objects devoid of context, mashed together from a dozen different sources, all fighting with bright visual gibberish.

A zoomed out view might help.

From this angle it’s more like a scam game made of stolen Newgrounds assets for Huawei phones only. What are we even looking at there? Beams! Mostly beams. Is that guy flying in a cargo container? I’m sorry, I meant some sort of cargo container?

GrayLord and the Metalicans fly in a shipping container? Why? Is that commentary on the tyranny of international consumerism, or is it because the Spaceship DLC in Beat Beat Garage Slaughter: The 23 Obscurers costs 2000 KWD and installs ransomware on your camera?

Anyway, they were being pounded.

By what? By beams!

BEAMS!

\

That’s all from the first few pages of the comic. Just an unceasing, breathless description of beams, the direction of beams, the countering of beams – with what? More beams! Robert J. Gold wrote the novelization of a Hanna-Berbera cartoon, but somehow less rad than that sounds. If this text was 67 pages shorter, it would be perfectly fine on the cardstock of a dollar store action figure in 1989. But the problem with obsessing over a bad idea is your subconscious knows it’s not working, and if you’re unwilling to confront that, you wind up remaking that bad idea in every possible medium, forever, sure that the right format will finally fix it.

Robert J. Gold wrote 70 pages of comic book (that’s too long for a comic book), a 136 page screenplay (that’s too long for a screenplay), and a 70,000 word novel (that’s not long enough for a novel) about hand puppets fighting barbecue grills. Let’s check out the first page of that book-

Beams! First page. Right to the beams. Just hours upon hours of meaningless beams and rays. I’d make a joke about Marvel Studios hiring Robert J. Gold, but that implies a reality in which screenwriters are being hired. Hey, speaking of the total collapse of human art as a career: A friend of mine does short films he calls “in the margins of a movie,” where he removes every shot with a character in it, leaving behind a haunting liminal exploration of atmosphere.

Let’s try the same thing in CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos, but with removing beams.

This is a far more interesting story about a young woman’s mental breakdown following a series of loveless puppet threeways in seedy motels. Driven completely mad from the guilt and lack of emotional connection, she tears her house apart and starts building bombs. While she lay dying in the ensuing explosion, her mind comforts her the only way it can: with sexual puppets.

Robert J. Gold, that’s the story! You’ve been obsessing over the beams, when the beams are the problem. This is how you get whatever an Academy Award is for puppet pornography. A Felty?

Hold on, zoom in, enhance, hornify.

Is that the exact same scene, but rendered semi-professionally instead of copy/pasting jerkoff models and Half Life assets? That’s not from the comic book…

That’s from the video trailer!

Yes, Robert J. Gold found yet another way to explore the nature of-

I think the comic book came first, then the screenplay, then the novelization. This video trailer seems like it was last. That means Robert J. Gold is thousands of hours and three formats away from his original idea. If you know any artist working in any medium, you know that means they’ve done nothing but obsess over all the flaws in that time.

Surely the puppet gangbang isn’t still in here-

You can almost forgive Robert J. Gold for using porn assets to build his comic magnum opus. When your wife checks the credit card bill and sees a $69.99 charge for Virtual Misty Melons, you have to get creative. But to pay a Chinese vanity animation studio to re-render the whole thing and still keep the porn asset – that means you were never just doing the best with what you had. You meant for it to be this way.

I don’t know what you call a fetish this repressed. It feels like more than simple puppet fucking, and yet less than advanced perversions like toy cuck macrophilia. Robert J. Gold must be working through some really bizarre shit in his past he refuses to confront. Something involving explosions and beams, no doubt.

Here’s where a normal comedy article would end. But here at 1900HOTDOG, we pride ourselves on always finding the secret crimes behind puppetry. So I’ll see you next week for Part 2 of CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos, where I successfully track down the explosion and beam-based tragedy that poisoned Robert J. Gold’s brain. I’m not joking: It’s a true story about mad inventors, fringe weapon manufacturing, terrorism, grenade cults, karate maniacs, decapitation, CIA conspiracies, political assassination, the militarization of the American police force, actual war crimes, maybe an exploded baby, and definitely-

This article was thanks to a Hot Dog Tip from Peter S. who had no fucking idea what box he was opening when he sent this along.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: SpaceJamFan, a small puppet climbing a large woman in search of purpose, only to find beams.

Categories
REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: Hot Dog Shakeup 🌭

Five years ago, we started 1-900-HOTDOG with a simple mission: Make enough money to buy a private island, Ron Perlman, and 30 feral baboons for an interactive remake of Primal Force. We’re not there yet, but we have come a long way. If we wanted to, right now, we could get a budget hotel room, Jake Busey, and 2 orangutans who used to smoke cigarettes in an Arizona dive bar. And that’s pretty close. And that’s because of you.

That was and remains our main priority, and it would be a betrayal of your trust to change that goal now. But there was a second, far less important goal: To build a space where the world’s best comedy writers could be paid very well to manufacture joy while insane robots ate the internet. Hot Dogs, I’m proud to say we did that. The writer thing. Not the robot thing. From the beginning we set our writer’s rates high, and with every other milestone we’ve hit, we’ve given them all raises. We just hit one of those milestones again, so it’s time to give everyone raises!

There’s one problem, and it rhymes with us being bad businessmen, and worse rappers. See, we set this ambitious goal of paying human beings what they’re worth way back when we only had a few humans writing for us once a month. 1-900-HOTDOG started with just Seanbaby and I, and the plan was to each write two 500 word articles doing some surface level riffing on weird media every week. Within days, we found ourselves writing 3,000 word deep dives into cursed artifacts that each required dozens of hours of research. We needed more time, and no matter how fast we ran counter to the spin of the Earth, we couldn’t seem to get more than a few seconds. So we brought those sporadic guest writers on to regular gigs, we paid them well, we gave them raises, we high fived. Job done, back to the Hot Dog archives, pictured below.

Over the years, you’ve helped us fill out our ranks with better writers than we ever dreamed, and that’s thanks in no small part to the total destruction of art as a career in this long slow apocalypse built on coprophiliac algorithms. And in large part to you, and your continued support. We started here:

Just two pixelated boys with moxie and a dream- oh, but we’ve already talked about Primal Force: The Resort.

We arrived here:

Now for that problem I mentioned: We never factored for success. Giving milestone pay raises to one or two guest writers was no problem. Doing it for eight regular writers plus two employees meant us taking paycuts. So we did that! We cut our own pay, we high fived again, and ran off giggling to dive into Scrooge McDuck vaults full of tidbits books. Somehow, despite not addressing it in any way, the problem persisted. We took paycut after paycut until we found ourselves here, not making enough to keep the orangutans in smokes.

That leaves us with two options: We could act like capitalists, cut our writer’s pay, overwork them, fire them, outsource their job to an AI that teaches children how to build bombs when they ask for Play-Doh recipes, then dress ourselves head to toe in money suits. It doesn’t seem to be working great for the world right now. Or we could simply raise prices for the first time since 1-900-HOTDOG began back in 2020, before COVID and runaway inflation. You know, like every single other business did five years ago, and then several more times after that.

Since our start in 2020, the site has changed dramatically. Instead of four, 500-word blurbs a week by just us two lunatics, we have a small fleet of lunatics delivering in-depth essays five days a week. We do bonus team up articles every month, we’ve launched two ad-free podcasts, and created a thriving community of amateur garbage archaeologists. We’ve slowly and quietly added immense value to the site while basically forgetting that money is required to live. They say the best motto in business is “underpromise and overdeliver.” The Hot Dog motto is “forget to promise, vastly overdeliver until you’re in trouble.”

So we’re raising prices, and that’s the bad news. The good news is we’re crippled by guilt over practicing even the most basic capitalism, so we’re also giving everyone more for their money. Here’s what the tiers look like now:

Our entry level tier was $3 a month, and increases to $5 a month. This tier originally got you four short articles a week from the two of us, but now gets you five longform essays from a diverse cast of lunatics. And as of this afternoon, it will also get you access to our community Discord, a thriving place with new events that pertain to your interests (wallowing in insane garbage) nearly every day.

The $5 tier, which originally got you access to one additional article a month, still gets you the bonus teamworking days, but you might have noticed those already expanding to incorporate new and dangerous tagteams like Merrittbaby, Schmitdybugg, and Sissynard. Over time, this tier would also get access to hundreds of bonus episodes from our free podcast, The Dogg Zzone 9000. As of this afternoon, it will now get you into the biweekly Discord Meat Parties, where Seanbaby and I make jokes about bizarre videos with you guys, or just stare in mute shock at what we’ve unleashed, like that movie where big baby Mickey Rooney developed a milk fetish.



That’s the end of the price increases, but not the bonuses! The $10 tier isn’t going up, but now you get access to our revamped Behind the Scenes Discord channel. Every single article will feature cut material, bonus facts, and extra research we loved but couldn’t use for whatever reason. As ever, it still holds the behind scenes banter from our weekly podcast, and anytime we’re really impressed with ourselves in the company Slack.

The $20 tier also sees no price change, and still gets you access to Untubed Sausage, the VIP chatroom full of its own cursed artifacts. It’s just like the British Empire proved: you can have too many artifacts, but never enough curses! In the coming weeks, this tier will also get an exclusive at-cost store, the PoxCo Vaults. All of our retired designs, our limited run shirts, our milestone celebration art – it all lives here forever, for you, at the cheapest price we can list. We make no money off of these sales, and therefore take no liability for what happens to you when you wear these things in public. This store will also update monthly with new designs too insider, too weird, or too vile for mass market appeal. Just like you!

Here’s some of the shirts you’ll find there at launch:

Finally, you can own a shirt celebrating the time a reality show murderer wore a red flag that should’ve saved a life, if anyone had listened. And you can proudly say you supported the fundraising campaign to buy aging pickup artist Don Diebel’s grave!

You’ll also find all the limited-run designs formerly available to Hot Dog Appreciators.

Yes, that’s including both versions of the Punches shirt! Finally, there can be peace between the tribes.

You’ll also get all our milestone celebration designs, including two new ones never before available in shirt form:

Celebrate the many crimes of Mascot and Puppet Week!

WARNING: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE SECRETS OF PUPPET WEEK TO CURIOUS SHIRT-GAZERS.

And of course, our latest milestone must be celebrated as well. We’re going to party the only way we know how – shirtless, with lots of hunks. The upcoming Hunk Week (3/3/25) art will also be available in the at-cost store for a frankly ridiculous bun-to-dollar ratio.

Finally, this tier will get a new Discord channel for merch requests – if we have a design that you want on a different cut, a different color, or even a different item entirely (so long as the store will legally let us sell it, no, just for example, Hot Dog branded feral baboons), let us know and we’ll do our best to accommodate it.

The $50 tier also doesn’t see an increase – you people already qualify for a conservatorship just for doing this. You’ll still get a custom title to live forever on the About page, you’ll sponsor our articles with hand-joked dedications every day of the week, you’ll get cute roll calls from our cutest Hot Dogger at the end of every Dogg Zzone, and you’ll be thanked at the end of both The Dogg Zzone and Bigfeets video podcasts. As of this afternoon, you will also have an exclusive Discord channel to suggest topics for and vote on our next Teamworking Day – that’s right, you decide the direction of the site. That basically makes you our bosses, complete with all the resentment that brings.

We know times are tough, and they will only get tougher until we learn to appreciate the taste of roasted billionaire. So if you can’t stay with us after this, we understand. If you’re part of the Discord already and don’t want to lose access, shoot us a message and we’ll keep you in there – we don’t want to take away anyone’s community right now. And remember, you can use the free tag to see our new free articles every single week, plus our substantial free archives.

Browsing from the free tag will never bug you with pop-ups about pledging, or show you what you’re missing. You can just pretend we became a free weekly comedy site turning out carefully researched long form essays from some of the best writers around, which would still put us way above our remaining competition of AI pun sites and Twitter recaps.

For those of you sticking around, thank you so much, we couldn’t have done any of this without you, we definitely shouldn’t have but you made us, it’s your fault, we accept no responsibility, somebody tell Jake Busey that one of the orangutan’s safe word is BANANAS and the other does a trick where it tears a human face off every time you say BANANAS.

See you in Hunk Week!