Author: Robert Brockway

Let’s Play: Genshin Impact 🌭

Post author By Robert Brockway
Post date 11/25/2020
11 Comments on Let’s Play: Genshin Impact 🌭

Genshin Impact is a freemium Breath of The Wild clone made by a Chinese studio and riddled with gacha mechanics. With a pedigree like that, it should have stolen a small market share from the prime mobile gaming demographics — confused children and desperate perverts — and then imploded into irrelevance. Instead, Genshin Impact made 245 million dollars in its first month, and game journalists were talking about it for Game of the Year. And that’s because Genshin Impact did something absolutely and completely insane for a F2P mobile gacha game: It tried to be good.

Yes, for possibly the first time ever, a developer looked at the classic free mobile game trap, and thought “okay, but what if we put some effort into this?”

Genshin Impact looks beautiful and plays like a dream. It’s like some high-end BoTW mod that replaces Link with 18 squealing teenage girls. If there was a Legend of Zelda anime adaptation where Link turned into a different cartoon stripper every time he saw panties — and I’m pretty sure there was — this is the video game meta-adaptation of that now highly-illegal cartoon.

The elevator pitch for Genshin Impact is that it mashes together modern Zelda games with JRPGs, and while I think they succeeded, they did it in the craziest ways. For example, you explore a beautiful and massive open-world as a single character, just like in a Zelda game, but you also carry a standard JRPG squad of four inside you at all times, like you were molested by a guy in a Moogle suit and your personality had to split to deal with the trauma. You rapidly swap between characters in an instant with no tag-out animation, so every fight scene kind of looks like the death of the T-1000 if he’d assimilated the Hanipotto Junior High School Girl’s Volleyball Team. It’s like some kind of sex criminal remake of The Thing.

In other words: It’s awesome.

The fighting system is fluid and deceptively deep, despite looking like your eyeballs got sick and barfed up a Crunchyroll trailer. Here, let me decipher what’s happening in that gif: To start, I switched from the boring graham cracker of a main character to cutesy battle-chef Xiangliang, dropped her fire-breathing red panda to get the goblins burning, then I switched to big-tittied nympho-mage Lisa to hit them with ball lightning so they’d be electrocharged, cast an area storm spell to set off those charges, and finally switched back to the main character to hit all of them with a wind burst, which swirls those elements together to set off explosive reactions. That’s an extremely basic combo. If this were a JRPG, that visual slurry up there would be your “Press A to attack.”

It’s a nuanced system that’s a lot of fun to use, and it feels pulled right from some AAA Japanese game that’s way too weird and complicated to make it over here, but that Deep Nerds with Otaku tattoos would reference twenty years later to prove their dork-cred. It’s Seiken Densetsu 3, basically.

And the whole game is this dense! There are special weapons that alter your gameplay style…

Character growth through skill and stat trees…

An expansive armor system laden with ability augments and set bonuses…

There’s even lore and character backstories to unlock…

You would expect precisely none of this in a freemium gacha game. It’s the very antithesis of the gacha mentality, where gameplay usually consists of swiping in up to two directions, and all the characters are thinly-veiled ripoffs like Ryu But Black and (Slightly More) Slutty 2B. Genshin Impact actually did all the legwork to make a thoughtful, complex, and very good game… and then they wrapped it in an IP lawsuit and deep-fried it in shady microtransactions.

Also just like those shitty gacha games, Genshin Impact is chock full o’ fan service. Most of the characters are sexy anime girls, and they all wear short skirts or sultry lingerie. Since the game also brazenly steals the glider system from Breath of the Wild…

This is your primary method of locomotion — long distance panty-gazing. There are fast travel points, but there are no rideable horses or epic mounts, unless you count Lisa…

This is what it looks like, playing Genshin Impact. Maybe 10% of the time you’re scrolling through item menus reading dry percentages, 20% of the time you’re quick-swap battling through anime gibberish, and then 70% of the time you’re taking long-exposure upskirts of a floating librarian. It is a game designed to instantly lose you the respect of anybody that walks in on you playing it. And you really feel that fan service pandering while playing it. It’s not pornographic by any means. The sex appeal is kept very PG, but it is omnipresent. You just get the sense that every one of these girls was designed by a behavioral psychologist to get some poor budding misogynist married to a bodypillow. This is what it looks like just walking around.

A lot of work went into them knocker physics! In fact, so much effort went into plotting the optimal boob bounce that the developers thought it was a waste to ever have them stop bouncing.

Look at those sentient titties yearning for freedom. That is not a breathing animation. That is two frightened hamsters who took a nap in the wrong bra. It’s like watching stabilized video of a stripclub in an earthquake.

These gacha games are almost always horny — they know it’s another path toward addiction — but they don’t usually put a lot of effort into it. They’ll slap a CGI ass on the banner ad. They’ll throw a pair of breasts hulking out of a shirt on the opening splash page. They know it’s enough to hint at a nipple and hope you love Breakout.

But as usual, Genshin Impact goes that extra mile. They want you to fall in love. They write full backstories for every character. Each girl gets a unique moveset, deep skill trees, and extensive dialogue that you can revisit anytime.

Again, it feels almost clinically exploitative. Like the developers went on a recruiting drive to the James Franco College of Deviant Sexual Psychiatry just before the Senior class had to take their oath to do no harm.

Some of this unlockable dialogue is from the game, or builds on their backstories — but most of it is just the girls talking about their favorite foods, what they look for in a man, what they do for fun. Genshin Impact doesn’t have any romance game mechanics, but they sure took every weird relationship hook from romance games and then locked the most loveable girlfriends into plastic bubbles you could only win through gambling. That’s the gacha element: You get new waifus by spending real money on virtual slot machines. Just as with any freemium game, there are supposedly ways to get everything without spending a dime. But whenever you see multiple obscure currencies layered around one simple pay system, alarms should go off in your brain.

Nowadays these “free” mobile games are required to post a disclaimer that explains how their loot systems work. It’s kind of like putting “Smoking Causes Cancer” on cigarette packs. There to pretend like you’ve tried to dissuade people who don’t want to be dissuaded yet. The disclaimer notices are usually presented like a shameful secret – a basic section consisting of a few hundred words and maybe a handful of percentages, wherein a lawyer tries their best not to explain gambling to children and idiots. Genshin Impact once more defies the norms, and puts its disclaimers front and center — the game is downright proud of how deep, strange, and obscure they made their slot machine. Because they know, to a certain type of person, playing with those numbers is its own draw. (That certain type of person is a gambling addict.)

It’s yet another exceedingly clever system designed by some rogue behavioral psychologist who’s one cursed mask away from becoming a supervillain, all to exploit some weird broken mechanic in the nerd brain:

Genshin Impact is densely layered with every addictive progression system from anything designed to hook everyone — from collectors to gambling addicts, from stat-nerds to anime-nerds, from the tragically horny to (most surprising of all) just people that like good games.

Do you get it? They finally did it: This is the mobile game that all those ads for mobile games were actually talking about. Somebody finally saw that millions of people were clicking on janky, horny mobile game ads that promised epic adventure with no cash up front, and then they wondered: What if you actually delivered on those promises?

It’s finally here: This is the fabled promised ass that the ass-game banners have prophesied.

Ogle, and despair.

…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Neil Schafer: the rarest and most prized tittyshape of all.

Tags 2020, Free, Video Games

FUCKING DAY

Explaining Prince to People Who Don’t Know Prince

Post author By Robert Brockway
Post date 11/19/2020
6 Comments on Explaining Prince to People Who Don’t Know Prince

It is the mission of this site to bring you Wrong Media: bizarre pieces of pop culture that simply do not belong to our dimension. Things that fit our reality like Magnum condoms fit everyone who buys Magnum condoms. But not everything that penetrates the veil and stains the sheets of our zeitgeist is bad. For example: Prince.

In the 1980s — an extremely conservative era full of white-washed and heavily consumerized corporate music — one of the biggest acts in the world was a guitar-shredding minority sex-elf. In a time when the radio was so afraid of masturbation we had to “dance with ourselves” and “turn japanese,” Prince put the line “I met her in a hotel lobby / masturbating with a magazine” on his biggest album. That’s so horny I actually don’t even understand what it means. R-rolled up, like a tube?

Everybody was supposed to be cute about sex, but Prince very openly wanted to fuck your girlfriend on top of your mother and we thought that was the best. We let him make a movie! Purple Rain was a smash hit! He basically cast himself as the bad guy. All he did for an hour and a half was rock, fuck, ride motorcycles, and slap women. He did many of those things simultaneously and for some reason we loved it? This feisty lil’ fuckgnome clearly did not belong to our universe, and that’s before I mention he was a Jehovah’s Witness.

But it’s been so long since Prince molested every single year of the 1980s that there are now grown-ass adults who’ve never heard of him. What follows is something of a field guide to his biggest hit, “When Doves Cry,” in the hopes that it might help you explain Prince to a generation that’s way into silly dances and devouring butt.

Both of which Prince may have invented.

When Doves Cry

Dig if you will the picture

Of you and I engaged in a kiss

The sweat of your body covers me

Can you my darling

Can you picture this?

Prince knows the importance of foreplay. He’s not going to slingshot you straight into his bizarre world of inverted sex and sticky velvet without the proper lubrication. He’s going to ease you into it. This is just the tip of the song. All he really asks here is that you, the listener, picture yourself fucking Prince. You, of course, are already doing this.

Let’s go to the video for visual reference…

See, at this stage you’re just opening the ornate doors to Prince. The world outside — the one that you’re used to — is dilapidated, ugly, worn-down. But beyond it lies a soft purple glow, a kind of color out of space. It pulses softly, just like you’ll be doing shortly.

Dream, if you can, a courtyard

An ocean of violets in bloom

Ah, Prince is still setting the stage. You are in a courtyard. There are purple flowers all around you. Soon there will be purple deflowering you. This is all sort of a mise-en-place for you getting reamed.

And now you meet Prince for the first time, the same way anybody meets Prince for the first time: Orbserving him in a distant bathtub through an explosion of doves.

Animals strike curious poses

They feel the heat

The heat between me and you

Okay, it is important to understand that nearby wildlife will watch you fuck Prince. This isn’t a big deal, but some people get upset the first time a giraffe peeks in the window to watch you spread-eagled on the bed while a sexual sprite spelunks your various caverns. But this is just nature: Every animal knows when you’re about to fuck Prince just like every animal knows when an earthquake is about to hit. There’s just something monumental impending in the air.

Prince has now emerged from the bath and is cat-crawling across the courtyard as if to remind you, who has been rendered idiotic by lust, what an animal is.

How can you just leave me standing

Alone in a world that’s so cold? (So cold)

Maybe I’m just too demanding

Maybe I’m just like my father, too bold

Ah, this is also important to understand about Prince: Sometimes you get all set for a thorough gaping — you’ve emerged into the courtyard, beheld the violets, the requisite animals have sensed your fuckmusk and agreed not to attack you until you cum — and then Prince wanders off to talk about his father.

Don’t worry, as soon as he’s done gazing at his dad, and then himself in the mirror, back to his dad, back to himself, and then puts on the hat, he’ll strip naked once again and return to savage your holes. Try to stay primed by watching the animals. See if you can find a salamander: Nature’s penis.

Maybe you’re just like my mother

She’s never satisfied (she’s never satisfied)

Why do we scream at each other?

Whoops, hold on. This happens, too. Sometimes you start off fucking Prince and then you wind up fighting him for a while instead. This is to be expected. This was actually what Purple Rain was all about.

This is what it sounds like

When doves cry

Okay, we’re coming back around. We’ve got the animals involved again. There are some doves now. They were intrigued when they sensed your sex on the wind and knew you two were about to pound, then they wept at the fuckfight that ensued, but now they’re ready for love again.

Let’s check in with the video:

Oh, sorry. You gotta remember this video was also a tie-in with Purple Rain, so it’s intercut with unrelated scenes from the movie. Mostly B-Roll of Prince riding his motorcycle around. That’s Prince’s motorcycle outfit.

Touch if you will my stomach

Feel how it trembles inside

You’ve got the butterflies all tied up

Don’t make me chase you

Even doves have pride

Shit, shit! We missed something vital. Okay, while we were watching footage of Prince fopping his deep purple motorcycle through a shuttered steel factory…

The real Prince employed his shapeshifting abilities. I know the doves were only watching you before, but now one of them is Prince. You’ll have to find it, but don’t worry: Most doves eat dogshit out of ruptured plastic bags that fell out of the garbage can. You just have to find the one with pride and we can get this sex parade back on the street again.

No, no, you took too long. This is always a danger with Prince: See, Prince is so sexy and so horny that nobody wants to fuck him more than himself. Right now he doesn’t just want to fuck you, he wants to fuck himself while fucking you. I know you kind of want that too, so I hope you can shimmy like an erotic worm because we’re going to need to bait him back to the bang-zoo before-

Damn it. God damn it. We’ve lost him. If Prince gazes too long into his own eyes he will enter the Prince-Space — a lavender null-dimension that at once exists inside Prince, and also contains Prince. Unfortunately, he’s brought you in with him.

You need to pay careful attention, because the stakes here are dire. This is no longer about fucking — or well, it is about fucking, but it’s a kind of fucking that will unravel who you are as a person. This is a dangerous sexual arena ruled by Prince and his Four HorsePrince of the Apocalypse:

You must remember their names. When you become lost in The Erogenous Zone, you have to first identify the things fucking you before they will show their true forms. If you cannot name them, you’ll be fucked apart until you dissipate into the purple ether, losing coherence as a singular identity and instead becoming just another violet-in-bloom in the ocean that rings Prince’s Sexual Courtyard.

All right, from left:

This is the Anal Aviator, dashing explorer of forbidden territories.

Next up is Prince himself, who is dressed like your grandmother’s couch because he’s so jaded with seduction that he sets himself fun little dares.

Behind him, in the back, is Rainbow Rikki — a being made of pure light so that it can penetrate the tightest holes on your body: The pupils. I know they’re not technically holes. They technically will be if you look at Rainbow Rikki without protective eyewear.

On the right is Lake Minnetonka, the human avatar of a mystical and ancient body of water. She has power over, and can become, all fluids. Yes, even those. Especially those.

Last, of course, is Doctor Fingerbang.

If you don’t carefully track each of the many penetrations and orgasms bombarding you at all times within the Prince-Space, and then quickly assign them to the proper HorsePrince responsible, they will overwhelm your senses and begin to dissolve the thin film of ego that you use to hold your body together. You’ll-

Fuck! You already missed a penetration! Your thinking is too narrow. That sensation of implacable brightness, like looking at the sun through a closed eyelid? That was Rainbow Rikki slipping it in you. You have to be careful: This is how it begins, the dissolution of self. You start to recognize that these creatures are not their bodies, that they are more and less, one and the other, themselves and you and what is sex but the joining of flesh to flesh, body to body, two constructions losing distinction and becoming-

No, it’s not too late!

I know the temptation – God knows I do – but do not split the self you hold inside as true from the self you present to the world, and then let your two selves fuck each other while Prince whispers what sounds you will make as you orgasm seconds before you make them. If your mirror-selves cum at the same time they’ll shatter the pane that separates reality from perception and you’ll see the lie behind the truth that-

No, I’m sorry.

I’m so sorry.

That was it. You entered the Prince-Space and did not properly guard against the metaphysical orgasms of the HorsePrinces, so Prince guided your mirror-selves into a simultaneous orgasm and you ejaculated the last vestiges of conventional humanity. You will lose yourself to the purple now, becoming one more soft fiber on the velvet panties of Prince.

Look, Prince never wants this kind of thing to happen. It’s his curse and his nature. He is both the scorpion and the frog, stinging himself and being stung. All he wanted was to fuck you on a concrete floor atop a bed of wet flowers, but instead he absorbed your psychic essence into his sexual maelstrom. Now he must once again retire to his ancient bathtub, mourning your sacrifice even as he waits for another.

And anyway that’s what “When Doves Cry” is about, if someone asks.

Tags 2020, Free, Music

PUNCHING DAY

Malibu’s Mortal Kombat Comics 🌭

Post author By Robert Brockway
Post date 11/17/2020
6 Comments on Malibu’s Mortal Kombat Comics 🌭

Back before comic books and video games were taken seriously, the lowest form of either was the video game comic book. Absolutely nobody looked forward to reading all 17 pages of the gripping origin story of Bonk: Headbutting Cavebaby. But if there was a dollar to trick out of a sad nerd-child, Malibu Comics was there. It might surprise you to learn that Malibu somehow got the rights to the Mortal Kombat franchise, since Malibu’s company car was a bus transfer good until an hour ago, and they considered a power lunch to be one with food. But if it seems like Mortal Kombat should be out of Malibu’s league, that’s because you’re thinking of the games now. Back when Malibu first secured the rights for it, Mortal Kombat was just a shitty Street Fighter ripoff for problem children. And that was prime Malibu territory, son.

Now, I know that all fighting game plots are utter garbage. They’re exceedingly complicated nonsense there to explain why two people who entered a fighting competition want to fight each other. So I will try not to give Malibu too much shit for the story of Mortal Kombat, which is kind of like Lovecraft doing running commentary on a bathroom fistfight at DragonCon. That might legitimately be the story of Mortal Kombat, but the only way to verify it is to listen to some dork who cares about the Mortal Kombat story, so we’ll never know.

Malibu gets a pass on a lot of this shit, even though I’m pretty sure Sub-Zero doesn’t have a business card, like he sells ninjitsu door-to-door:

And I don’t think Sonya’s dad was really Herman Blade, no matter how hard it makes me laugh:

And it’s super crazy that their little trading cards list everyone’s legal status, like the organizers of Mortal Kombat are as worried about evil trees as they are about ICE raids. Especially considering that like 80% of Mortal Kombat fighters are ghosts from another dimension, or the soul of a guy possessing a ninja, or just the front half of a centaur.

Maybe that’s all canonical Mortal Kombat horseshit. So we’re not going to pick on Malibu for the story… not when we have their hilarious art to mock!

This is the cover of their very first issue with a hot new property, and Malibu hired their little brother who is great at abs but can’t do poses yet. Sonya’s giving firm grumpy mom energy, Johnny Cage and Liu Kang look like they’re fully cooperating with the Fist Inspector, while Raiden just heard the opening chords to “Y.M.C.A.” only he’s not entirely sure — it could be “Do the Hustle.” Just… nobody has any idea what to do with their hands here. It’s like a 6th grade school dance. It’s like the opposite of a crowded Japanese train.

It is frankly amazing how much trouble Malibu get themselves into:

Why do you fuck yourself so violently, Malibu? Can you not channel your self-hatred into drink or cutting? Why must you torture yourselves with your own art? You chose what to draw here! Why did you try to pull a bunch of cool tricks with perspective when you knew you couldn’t deliver on any of them? This doesn’t scan as “Goro is reaching out at you,” it scans as “Goro has three big hands and one small one, like a Chinese Rolex.”

This cover of, again, the very first issue of a spin-off series about Baraka…

Looks like it was drawn in the margins of a science test that somebody’s stoner friend definitely failed. It looks like it was colored by a meth addict who dreams of being a tattoo artist doing the very best they can with the shitty crayons they give children at Denny’s.

Apparently even Malibu got frustrated with this whole drawing business, and they asked the most regrettable question of the 1990s: “How hard could this whole computer thing be?”

That looks like a good first try at ReBoot fan-art. It looks like you made a racist meme with Garry’s Mod but the punchline got muddled because you’re more of a text racist. That’s the kind of art they proudly display in those for-profit Design College ads that run at 2AM.

A Malibu artist draws like they just found out a family member died halfway through every panel. This one forgot most of a dude in a panel featuring three dudes and nothing else.

Never ask a Malibu artist to draw something as complicated as a face. Sometimes Liu Kang looks like a stoned Asian guy, sometimes it’s bee-stung Keanu Reeves, sometimes he looks like a face you can kind of see in a potato if you squint, and sometimes it’s all three.

Here’s sexpot Sonya:

Looking like she’s transforming into the guy next to her. She looks like a Mad Magazine caricature of the guy who played the T-1000. Good job finding an excuse to not draw a background, Malibu, but what did you use that time for? Brainstorming six new Wolverine rip-offs to capitalize on the runaway success of The Ferret?

Also maybe don’t ask a Malibu artist to draw something as complicated as “environments.” Set a scene in a rainstorm and you’ll get…

A bukkake explosion inside a cocoon. You still won’t get a usable face, either, seeing as how Sonya has a Lego head and Jax looks like Handsome Quasimodo.

Here’s Baraka after they kidnapped his adopted daughter, which I’m sure seemed like a powerful emotional moment in the script…

But in practice it looks like Voltron mid-transformation when the little head just starts to pop up. These are fangs drawn on a paint can. Did Baraka anger a witch doctor? This guy gave Baraka flying squirrel flaps, ab-tumors, and 1/3rd of a head, and Baraka gave him the greatest gift one can give a Malibu artist: an excuse not to draw feet.

I’m not picking on a single artist, or even a single era. Malibu did Mortal Kombat adaptations for decades, and they never did find somebody that has seen human bodies before, and is aware of how they do stuff. Here’s Sub-Zero looking like a breakdancing crab.

And here he is with a backwards arm, a sideways leg, and missing half his torso.

If you can’t draw a jumpkick without committing an atrocity just ask to be reassigned to Malibu’s Deep Space Nine adaptation. Nobody ever jumpkicks and if you fuck up a face you can just say it’s Odo.

This total inability to remember what a human body looks like or does is most apparent when Malibu artists try to get sexy with things. And because we’re talking about comic books and video games and the ‘90s, we will be getting very needlessly sexy with things. Well, we’re going to try.

Here’s your favorite Mortal Kombat character, vampire Pamela Anderson, proudly displaying both her taint and one giant ogre foot.

A Malibu artist can draw up to two things, as long as one of them isn’t a face and the other isn’t a background. So you’d think they’d nail the comic book softball: masked woman doing sexy jumpkick through void.

But no, in their absolute desperation to get both tits and grundle into this shot they have obliterated that poor woman’s spine. She looks like she’s being wrung out by an invisible giant. If there’s some kind of human dishrag fetish, I assume somebody is cumming to this right now.

Here’s a fun optical illusion! Study this image and tell me which leg is doing what.

Oh wait, my bad, I actually do have an explanation for this one:

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Doug Redmond: Who has never had any problem getting both tits and grundle in the same shot.

Tags 2020, comic books, Free, malibu, Video Games

REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: New Art, New Tiers, New You!

Post author By Robert Brockway
Post date 11/11/2020
13 Comments on Reflecting Day: New Art, New Tiers, New You!

Welcome to Reflecting Day! The one day a month we’re free to drop the punchline shield and just be earnest and honest with you. Free to wax philosophical about the state of the Hot Dog (strong), and occasionally dive off into tangents (long and weird) that confuse and alienate our readers (sexy; you). I’ve got one prepared about how the Internet should have never moved on from the GIF stage, and the ability to see and hear people in real time is directly responsible for the downfall of western civilization. But there’s no time for that today! Today we have to be all business, because we have a lot of business.

First and most importantly, let’s welcome our new Hot Dog Supremes:

Ken Paisley: The Shogun of Slam, the Daimyo of Damn, the Tenno that’s a straight ten, yo.

Dr. Awkward: The 5th dentist when they say “4 out of 5 dentists recommend Crest.”

Benjamin Sairanen: The hidden secret face unlocked when you beat Mount Rushmore.

Jamie Gordon, who was not listed in the UFO papers and would like for it to stay that way.

Doug Redmond, Voted “Most Likely to Actually Be a Shark” by Suspicious Anchovy Magazine.

Thank you, and welcome. I believe you’ll find the status this new title grants will bring you everything you’ve always felt missing in your life. And if I’m wrong, what are you gonna do about it? At any point in my day I know eight really good hiding places and I’ve seen Jackie Chan kill a man with furniture seven hundred different times.

Hey we’ve hit over 1500 patrons! I’ve lived in multiple towns smaller than that. If it comes down to one huge group fistfight between this community and Port Orford, Oregon – we could take them!

We should take them.

But that’s another Reflecting Day. Because today we need to talk about big updates to the site!

We are changing up the tiers. Your beloved tiers! Don’t worry, if you’re already a Hot Dog, you are only getting more.

Hot Dog Hero

The $10 Hot Dog Champion tier used to only offer Discord membership. Now we’re dropping Discord membership into the $5 Hot Dog Hero Tier! If you’re already a Hot Dog Hero, check or start a Discord account. You are now part of the most exclusive club this side of that weird Yale one that fucks gourds in the woods every full moon. You know, the one every president and CEO belongs to? Our Discord community has always been healthy, active, and able to lift seven times its own bodyweight in the Clean and Jerk. Now you’re a part of it, and you can say all those things you’ve always wanted to say to our faces. Well, avatars of our faces.

Hot Dog Champion

The $10 Hot Dog Champion tier is now getting access to our new Meat Party Discord channel, where you can talk with Seanbaby and I while we host events in the Grand International Meat Ballroom every other weekend. We’ll watch movies with you that will almost certainly be terrible, we’ll play games with you where we’ll almost certainly do terribly, or we’ll do livestreams where you can judge our terrible dancing! That’s what the kids do now, right? They just dance and eat ass, pretty much?

Hot Dog Appreciator

There’s a new $20 tier! This one grants you access to our Untubed Sausage channel, where we’ll post all of our behind the scenes stuff: cut content, scrapped ideas, fun facts about the making of our columns. You’ll get a look behind the curtain at the Hot Dog team, hear snippets culled from the Dogg Zzone 9000 podcast, and we’’ll even do special exclusive mini-podcast episodes just for this tier! At this level or above, you’re also going into our T-shirt club! As long as you’re a member for at least three months before shipping, you’ll get a free yearly T-shirt exclusive to this tier. That design won’t ever be for sale, and there will be a new one annually. That makes these T-shirts several orders of magnitude rarer than diamonds, so each one will obviously be the most valuable thing you own. You may want to invest in a good T-shirt safe. Please rest assured this T-shirt will be of an extremely badass nature. For example…

I’m not saying that’s the first year’s T-shirt; I’m not saying that’s NOT the first year’s T-shirt — I’m just saying we do rad shit and I can prove it.

That’s our new site art, and the work of the amazing Michael Vincent Bramley, who operates exclusively in the medium of awesome stuff that blasts your eyeballs out of the back of your stupid head. You can find more of his work here, and you’d better hurry: the value of an artist’s work skyrockets after they die, and Michael lives every day like it’s Free Knife Day at the Monster Truck Rally.

Look at that beautiful monstrosity! That’s my actual motorcycle, ramping out of that explosion! That’s Lydia’s precious harpoon gun, which you’ve heard so much about! Those are Seanbaby’s real tits! Look how Michael completely nailed the weary skepticism in the eyes of the Jason Pargin head-in-a-jar! Each of those little scenes up there represents a day’s theme — from the rainbow-surfing owl of Learning Day, to the animorphing wizard of Nerding Day, to the orphan-destroying robot of Fucking Day. Oh wait, that’s Upsetting Day. Sometimes the days bleed together, like huddled orphans who don’t want to die apart.

God damn it, there’s more?!

We’ve got a new bonus day! This one is called Hot Dog Appreciation Day, and it will happen every other week. It’s all about the fans. We’re going to try to stay out of your way here, because this day is yours: We’ll highlight some of the awesome interactions you have, the best of your comments, and the insane things you bring us in the tipline. There will even be prizes!*

*Prizes have no legal, emotional, or sentimental value.

And if giving you your very own special day also gives us slightly more time to write, because we started this site thinking we were going to do a few hundred words a few days a week, but it turns out we keep writing multi-thousand word epics about assfucking and karate games, each packed with dozens of images, gifs, and custom-made comics – well, that’s just a coincidence and is not grounds for a class action lawsuit. Please don’t try.

Tags 2020, art, Free, hot dog business

LEARNING DAY

Wow, A Talking Fish!

Let’s learn about other cultures through the only medium we have the attention span for: Cartoons! I don’t know what to expect from Russian cartoons. I guess I expect them to be pretty much like any other cartoon, except with sadder eyes and more track pants. 1984’s Wow, A Talking Fish! does not set out to prove me wrong.

I want to be clear that, despite the tension between our governments, I hold nothing against the Russian people. Same goes for the Chinese, Venezuelans, Iranians — really anyone but the Luxembourgers, natural nemeses of the Hot Dog. I believe we’re all just people trying our best, and if our governments want to set us to conflict, they’re the enemy. So it is in the spirit of togetherness that I say: This guy is more Russian than election interference. He’s a Lada being pulled by a donkey. This is the human form of that moment when a really bangin’ EDM track comes on in the troll farm. The only reason those aren’t track pants is because this is supposed to be like 1432.

He’s here to tell you a fish tale:

Only there’s a twist: It’s about a talking fish!

Hey, I remember how this one goes — the fisherman flips out because selling a talking fish will make him rich. But the fish promises him a wish if he lets him go, or like one day the fisherman almost drowns but the fish saves him or something, right?

Right.

Only even the fish here look like they just got out of the gulag for dancing to American music…

And this fish doesn’t promise the man a wish, it just gives him a lecture about how good deeds are their own reward. Hey, you know what’s a better reward than a lecture? Talking fish meat.

Except there’s another difference from the tale we know: This fisherman is so emotionally abraded that he actually doesn’t give a shit about a talking fish.

This is the third talking fish he’s caught today. On the way to the beach he passed two talking chipmunks and one singing wolf, and not a single one of them could tell him why little Sasha had to die last winter. So the fisherman throws the fish back not out of kindness, but because he thinks it’s a useless piece of shit.

Well, that’s… not quite how I remember this fairy tale going. But I guess that would be the Soviet version of it.

The fisherman takes a seat, exhausted by the useless whimsy of this whole situation, and sighs. That’s the wrong move, because every time you sigh in Russia…

A nonsense monster explodes out of the ground to scream at you.

No, Ekh. He said it as one part of a longer sound. It was a single syllable in what was probably going to be a fourteen syllable sigh of weariness before your Zheltyy Submarine ass popped up. “Ekh” is just a verbal interjection in Russian, it means something like “wow.” So I guess this nightmare beast is doing about eighty million appearances a day, and that’s why we have all those dashcam videos of Russians just utterly unfazed by passing comets and sewage explosions. They’re not innately a sad and stoic people; they’re suffering from acute whimsy fatigue.

Oh, also he’s Santa Claus.

Hey, remember how I said there wouldn’t be track pants because this takes place in a 1430s fishing village? I’m sorry I lied to you.

I feel like I know that dude. Yeah! He asked me if I wanted to fuck his sister for some cigarettes in a laundromat in Southeast Portland. Good dude. He did not like Parliaments.

Ekh is the violent creative ejaculation of Soviet-era animators all pent-up from drawing nothing but gray mice in concrete buildings crying over a piece of bread wasted by the Bourgeoisie. More effort went into ten seconds of Ekh’s screentime than went into every single episode of He-Man put together. Every part of him is constantly transforming into something else, and since it’s Russia that includes a man who wants to sell you a sick dog at least twice.

Hey, there’s the guy that ran the laundromat!

Ekh offers the fisherman a magic table that generates free food when you knock on it. Listen, in 1984 Russia a good day was one when your mother didn’t lose a foot, so the standards for kickass enchanted items are way down here. Never wanting for a sandwich again was the Soviet equivalent of finding all the Dragonballs.

The fisherman couldn’t give a shit about a talking fish, but sometime after Ekh’s foot turns into a lady-baby and rockets into the sky, he grabs that table and…

Fucking books it like a KGB honeypot just started playing “Don’t Stop Me Now” and he can’t go back to Dance Gulag again.

He sprints back to his wife, and this being a Russian film in the ‘80s, she only gets two lines and all of them are about suffering. But she steals the show anyway. Here she is after he explains the whole magic table thing:

My god, that sad smirk tells you everything: It tells you this is not the first time her husband has pulled this shit. It tells you that she remembers when he brought back a footstool that made shoes, and a nightstand that always refilled your glass of water. It tells you she still has not forgiven him for the magic underwear.

But the fisherman knocks three times anyway, and the table produces a feast! One that immediately turns into Ekh:

Who tells them he will come by at midnight and ask them riddles until dawn, which sounds like kind of a shitty theme night at a nerd bar, but a fair deal for a table that will always burrito.

Here’s what the wife thinks about this mystical nonsense in her sensible home:

Just before midnight, a strange guest arrives!

Haha all right, I definitely know this one now. Look at that guy. He’s different parts of eight dudes and he’s wearing fuckin’ Adidas in the 1400s. That’s really Ekh, and if they treat him well or pass his test, everything is cool.

Only there’s another knock at the door…

In this tale, the guest steps outside to greet Ekh and whatever you think comes next, you are probably not right. And if you are right, you need to get to a hospital right now because this is the visual equivalent of smelling toast:

I’m not skipping anything — the guest opens the door and just starts screaming gibberish as fast as he possibly can. Ekh, like any reasonable person, completely hates it.

It’s not some kind of magic spell, it’s not an answer to Ekh’s riddle — he never even got to ask one. This dude barely answered the door before he launched into the worst kind of ‘lol so random’ verbal diarrhea. He’s an entire Invader Zim fan forum in one guy, in two minutes.

This scene goes on for so long! Again, it’s because the animators love it — the animation is legitimately amazing, and you can tell the animators know it’s possibly the only fun they’ll ever be allowed to have, so they really want to explore the space; tell the grandkids about the one time they were just straight unproductively horseshit for an entire week — but for the viewer, it’s like all three hours of going to see your roommate’s improv troupe condensed into 180 seconds.

I always want to allow for the idea that I’m just missing some kind of cultural context. When I don’t understand something in anime, I assume it’s referencing niche Japanese folklore I don’t know, and there’s actually a very good reason those panties can talk, and turn into a shy boy every time somebody mentions steamed buns.

Is this the Russian version of that?

Because it seriously looks like an irritating hipster doofus bothers a shape-shifting magician monster like a sugared-up toddler for a few minutes…

Until the monster gets sick of it and explodes into the sky. Again — not because he’s been tricked, or his weakness is exploited, just because he fuckin’ hates this wandom so much it’s not even fun anymore.

And did you guess the twist? If you did, tell the toast doctor you can slide left if there’s not a cat nearby — your misfiring brain will turn that into “It’s too late for me, I just don’t want it to hurt anymore.”

That’s right! The 14th-century hipster — who looks like the kind of guy that freestyle raps at the bus stop and really hits those hard Rs — was actually the talking fish from earlier!

So I guess the lesson here is that if you do a good deed, it’ll come back to you. Except… immediately after he helped the fish, the fisherman received a magical reward that turned out to be a curse. So… maybe it’s “be careful what kind of gifts you accept?” But I think he got to keep the table after the fishipster dorked the everything-beast back to heaven. So the moral is… don’t fish? Stop trusting tables? Wait, this is a Soviet cartoon: The moral is ‘fuck the west, don’t complain about stuff.’ Nailed it!

See you next time!

Tags 2020, cartoons, Free, Russia

FUCKING DAY

Inseminoid

Alien changed the horror movie game so much that it was the only movie anybody made for years. Alien… but it’s a robot. Alien but underwater. Alien but multiple aliens (that one was pretty good). Alien but Canadian. The problem is that Alien was intelligently made, and that’s a high bar for the kind of lazy idiot that wants to rip off Alien. The rape and pregnancy themes of Alien exploited a sort of psychological terror loophole in our brains. The British rip-off saw all those disturbing metaphors and thought “okay… but why metaphors?”

They called it:

Hahaha, holy shit! They’re totally serious about that title, but that’s probably the hardest laugh you’ll get today. I’ll do my best to beat it, but I know Inseminoid and friend: I’m no Inseminoid.

The rest of the credits blast at you from a shot of stars made to look like cum, or a shot of cum made to look like stars. And through that grossly Milky Way drifts…

Sir Run Run Shaw, the infamous British Rap Baron? The callous aristocrat who single-handedly monopolized the rap game of Victorian England, and worked thousands to death on his cruel colonial rap farms? How could he possibly still be — oh, oh it’s the Chinese philanthropist. Okay. That makes more sense. Little disappointing, but that’s on me for assuming.

Hey, here’s the cast of our movie, coming straight from a 1985 Bon Jovi concert, bloody comatose friend and all.

Inseminoid saw that Alien was kind of about the working class of the future, and they just left out the future part. We got a solid bunch of blokes and dames here, featuring such thrilling characters as Ricky, Dean, Sharon, Kate, Mitch, Sandy, and yes, even Gary. We’ve got a Space Gary, folks. It finally happened.

Inseminoid rips off Alien very quickly and expediently, with neither competence nor shame. That 3PM pub crowd up there is just hanging out on an alien planet when they stumble across an ancient civilization and unearth an egg which, unbeknownst to them, impregnates a male crew member who finds his way back to the ship. All they know at this point is that there was some kind of minor explosion on one of their excursions, and they have absolutely no faith in their own ability to handle even the smallest problem.

Again, there’s no alien yet. Somebody got hurt in a normal workplace accident, and he’s currently seeing the doctor, and now they all want to go home. That lady is not the naysayer of the crew — the lone Bill Paxton here to discuss the state of the game. Here’s the chief of their… expedition? Lab? Secluded rehab facility for incompetent space pussies? I don’t know what they’re doing here. I only know that they know they shouldn’t be doing it.

“This team can’t do shit, we all know it! Why did we come to space — the hardest place to do stuff!”

Here’s our main character, Mark — a sort of Aldi-brand Steve McQueen — receiving a work order and then asking the dispatcher to do him a solid and send Sandy down as well.

Sandy is not backup. Well, she gonn do some backin’ up YOU KNOW.

So at least Mark has some balls: Asking the work dispatcher to set up a booty call for him on his way to, remember, the work they called to dispatch him on.

The Inseminoid twist is that their alien first possesses its host, so prepare to be space-threatened by a guy named Ricky, who’s too low confidence to even attempt an ambush.

Look at that little pouty run. That’s the “you bullies can HAVE this bike, I’m going home to make a fort and cry in it!” run. It’s a solid move: everyone knows tears don’t count against you in Fort Big Boy.

Are you ready for the first big emergency of the movie? Gail, whose job must be taste-testing mysterious paint samples, gets her foot trapped outside the airlock. Like four feet outside the airlock. Everyone can just see her. It’s not a dire situation. But oh no! Her heat regulator is busted:

Ah, that’s nothing to worry about! Gary jumps on comms to explain how to fix it quickly and easily:

There are two exposed wires she has to touch together. It’s the simplest possible job. Nobody is even all that worried when they mention it to Gail. Here’s Gail’s first reaction:

She pokes uselessly at her wrist-thing and then sighs and slouches over, calling for help like a 1989 grandpa stuck on the depth gauge of his new Casio. Gary, still being quite reasonable:

The airlock is stuck. She knows nobody can get out to help her, so Gail musters up the will to tackle this, again, very simple task that one would normally assign a chimp in a study on which chimps like better: Doing very simple tasks or getting their dicks electrocuted.

Nope, she won’t even try. This scene is ten solid minutes of Gail gesturing at her wrist and the impossible two things she might have to touch there, and then crying. Until finally and for no reason, she gives up, opens her helmet, sticks her oxygen tube in her mouth…

And tries to cut her foot off.

Pay attention to her wrist. Those are the two wires. They’re not even small! If that was a busted cage control panel in a chimp lab you would have to put mittens on the chimps to keep them from freeing themselves and turning their righteous fury on mankind for all the chimp-dick electrocution. But Gail has decided the best thing to do is gnaw her foot off like a trapped coyote — but only after sticking her face into space for no fathomable reason aside from suicidal uselessness.

It is amazing that she had to lose a foot to something this stupid, the rest of the crew will make fun of her for-

And that’s how Gail died. I don’t know why the movie showed us this. The alien was not really involved — it pushed her a little and she got her foot stuck between two things, then Gail basically ate her own shit until she died from it. If you put Inseminoid on trial for this, the judge would rule that you have to pay the alien’s legal fees plus reimburse it for any missed inseminating hours because it was such a frivolous claim.

Inseminoid Ricky doesn’t care. It runs off to somehow impregnate Sandy, maybe through a dream? And while at first she’s freaked out by this sexy abduction scene…

She does start feeling it a little when the penis monster shows up:

Listen, I am not trying to body shame. Sandy is looking positively bangin’ for a 54 year-old heavy smoker, but we don’t need the implied alien sex scene here.

…

Oh, sorry, did I say implied?

Yep, that’s the full alien fucktube egg-creampie — happy Fucking Day everybody! And as you can see, Sandy is super into it. That little eyebrow waggle at the end tells you this ain’t her first rodeo at the Inseminoid Corral. Sandy doesn’t even moisten unless you’re an Alf or greater.

It is at this point you come to the dreadful realization that we’ve already met our main villain, and it’s somebody’s “I’m too young to be a grandma” in yoga pants and a deep-V.

The penis monster is gone. Maybe it never existed. This is the antagonist for the rest of this movie. No, she does not mutate into something cool. She only grows increasingly pregnant throughout the film, but not like… to a monster degree. She doesn’t even change out of her lazy sunday outfit. She looks like a normal woman who is slightly too old to be pregnant, and if you’ve spotted the reason why that’s not a great design for a movie monster, you’re two steps ahead of Inseminoid:

The movie boldly decides that her one weakness is kicks to the belly — Sandy screams and collapses and clutches her stomach every single time like she’s worried about losing her little sunset miracle.

AND OUR HEROES JUST KEEP DOING IT.

It doesn’t matter how much you try to ratchet up the tension when the payoff of your big fight scene is one of our heroes straight blasting a miraculously pregnant nana right out of her Spanx.

Inseminoid actually seems to realize how this looks partway through, and the surviving crew members pause to just talk to each other about why it’s all right that they’re beating the shit out of a proud Kohl’s Klub Rewards Member on the regular…

“I know it looks like I’m uppercutting your kooky Aunt Joyce, but I swear there’s an alien inside her belly, and the only way to stop it is forced miscarriage!”

And they are losing! By god, how they are losing. Inseminoid makes it very clear that these people suck on every axis, and some are sucking through time just because there were no new physical directions left to suck. Here’s Holly:

She’s the no-nonsense head officer of this entire expedition, and that’s the face she makes when you ask her to do a thing. In this scene, her one job is to hold the space-torch on the super-grandma while the doctor sedates her. Here’s how that basic task — hold this item in the general direction of a woman who looks like she’s the scourge of Starbucks — goes for Holly:

After first blinding the doctor, she then trips on nothing and accidentally welds his spine to his belt buckle.

Again, the Inseminoid can’t even be held responsible for this. Any jury would call this gross space-negligence, but tell that to Gramma-blaster Gary and his Prenatal Pumas.

Somehow Sandy makes it through all of this, killing much of the surviving crew out of a combination of luck and the ability to stand out of the way of a hurtling dipshit suicide, and her pregnancy comes to fruition. You can hear her screams echo throughout the whole station, and it’s implied that the alien babies more or less claw their way out of her.

…

I’m sorry I keep lying to you about the implicative nature of things.

She gives birth to alien babies, but they’re not threatening or anything. They just lay there, wet and useless like human babies. Mark strolls right in and hefts ‘em up like he forgot some groceries.

He gives them to Sharon for disposal and Sharon immediately tosses them out the-

Hold on, hey Sharon?

Are you fucking snuggling the monster babies? Look, maybe you don’t want to kill them for science or ethics or some kind of space circus, but even as fetuses these things piloted a feisty grandma like a fleshmech to murder all your inept friends. At the very least, cuddle-wuddles are off the table.

Anyway, after stealing her babies with no resistance, our hero, a savage and filthy Mark, returns to choke the eyeballs out of our villain, Sandy, who looks like 2000s-era Martha Stewart and is visibly exhausted from giving birth moments ago.

I do not feel good about this resolution. Even if that was the point — that the audience not feel good about this resolution — it’s still a gross scene that could have been avoided with like four dollars of evil alien makeup. Or by simply casting a meaner looking lady, or even just giving her a less jaunty sweater — anything so I don’t feel like I watched a snuff film of an Eat Pray Love enthusiast getting strangled out in a sewer.

Hey real quick, let’s check in on Sharon:

I guess you’re supposed to feel horror at this gruesome tableau? The only thing I’m taking away from this scene is that Sharon was so useless she couldn’t take an actual baby.

That’s the last scene of the main story. We cut to an approaching ship a month later, piloted by a smooth-talking space cowboy:

And his crew of surly Russian backup dancers.

WHAT!

Why weren’t these our characters, Inseminoid?! Why did you save these hilarious dudes for the wrap-up, but told us every detail about the life of Abortionfoot Gary, the belly-stomping space accountant?

The only cool characters in this whole movie land to find all the carnage of the aftermath, but the space station empty. No babies, no Mark. They pack up and head home, only for the camera to pan back and reveal a space steamer-trunk(?) in their ship is actually hiding the lil’ Inseminoids.

And that’s how we learn that Mark also lost a fistfight to a baby.

Tags 2020, Free, movies, sci-fi