Author: Robert Brockway

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

The Greatest Heroes and Legends of the Bible 🌭

I was born a heathen and I’ll die a heathen, probably in some kind of heathening accident. I don’t know anything about the Bible. If I wanted a story about unlikeable characters doing shitty magic and learning self-evident lessons I’d watch The Magicians. And I did watch The Magicians until they softened up Penny and he became unfuckable, so what do I want with the Bible? But one thing I do understand is cartoons, and there are more cartoons about the Bible than there are about talking animals and friendship put together. Now, they might be old news to you, but being raised entirely outside of its influence, I’m learning about famous Bible tales for the first time and they are very upsetting. Especially the way they’re portrayed in The Greatest Heroes and Legends of the Bible — an animated, kid-centric series about the gnarliest parts of The Old Testament. It’s brought to you by Charlton Heston and lax Chinese labor laws, though I think one of those things is a lie. Let’s see if you can guess which one by the end!

Why not start with the episode on Sodom and Gomorrah? I love Sodomy, and Gomorrah is my second favorite Guardian of the Galaxy. But apparently to get to that story, we have to start with Abraham:

Abraham looks like Steve Perry with a wicked Synthwave aesthetic, and you know I love that, but there’s only so long I can watch him wander the Farmer’s Market and attend lackluster raves:

I know that was probably a fuckin’ rager back in Ye Olden Times, but party technology has advanced so far — a fully clothed woman waving wheat in the air barely gets me hard anymore. 

If this show is accurate to the Bible, then the good book really needs some pacing feedback. We spend fully half of the run-time of this episode just following Abraham around while he knocks things off his chore list. He starts looking into real estate, and God just hovers over his shoulder for twenty straight minutes telling him which neighborhoods have good parking. These days we lament the questionable absence of God in our lives, but He was a hell of a micromanager back in the day. I suppose it’s a bit like playing an RTS game: In the early stages God has like eight guys and he’s invested in every one. Clicking them out into the Fog of War one tile at a time all worried there’s an orc in those woods. Cut to a few thousand years later and he’s got the whole map churning out support units and there’s just no way he has the mental space to give a shit about each and every one.

Hey look at that: five hundred words in and we’re already having a crisis of faith and that’s before I’ve even told you this is a musical. One with rock riffs so tired they were written by a Phil Collins Ambien-daymare, crudely rapped over by a child who had to look up “rhyming” in a soiled dictionary only to find half the definition was illegible, all while we cut to stock landscape footage of out of an Uzbek karaoke video.

When Abraham built an altar I figured it was about to get interesting, since that’s the turn in every horror movie. But no, they just laid an extremely cute lamb on it:

And skipped the ‘prep’ section of the recipe:

If I were writing it, this would be the point in the story where it turns out they got the altar address wrong and didn’t appease their own god, but did accidentally anger the Ram God. Yep, this was all a surprise prequel to The Silence of the Lambs called The Roaring of the Goats. The rest of my soundtrack would just be more bleating and screaming and meatslapping than the last half of Baskin, but in Abraham’s world, burning a cute animal doesn’t do much more than explain why you should never leave Steve Perry impersonators around unattended pets.

Let’s just jump to several decades later, because nothing much of import happens: God promises Abraham a son because his wife is barren, but there’s no mystical birth – he just meant Abe should start banging the maid. Turns out Abraham’s wife hates this for some reason, and takes it out on the girl. The maid flees, only to be told to return to her dangerous situation by Ricky-Joe the Domestic Abuse Angel. Everybody lives in a tent for seventy years and it is only through God’s grace that they aren’t riddled with scabies by the time “the Lord and his angels appear in the guise of three ordinary men.”

Which is to say that three dudes wandered into camp and, when asked if they were gods and “would like their feet anointed,” answered “sure thing, buddy.” That’s just Drifter Code right there: Never turn down a footjob, no matter who offers. While Abe initiates some toeplay with what is clearly an opportunistic hobo, the two angels wander off to massacre a town for ill-explained reasons, as is, again, the Drifter Code.

Well that seems like a perfect segue into a jaunty song break!

Despite this episode being titled Sodom and Gomorrah, that’s all we see of either. They get forty seconds of airtime, then explode and are completely forgotten, just like Tricky in The Fifth Element.

Let’s check in with Abraham and his 90 year old wife, who is now giving birth:

That sounds like a scene they’d cut from a Cronenberg script, but this religious cartoon for children is totally cool with exploring geriatric genital genocide. Because this is a miracle birth ordained by God, the child, Isaac, lives to be just old enough to understand dark irony before God appears again, all drunk and needy. 

“I must know if you love me, Abraham,” he slurs, “if I am first in your heart.”

I’ve played the game long enough to recognize that kind of addled desperation. This here is a booty projection, isn’t it, God?

To prove his devotion, God asks Abraham to kill Isaac, and hey — did you guess that the grim walk to burn your son on the whim of an insecure madman was a rad spot for another song break? 

It is pretty impressive that the show manages to set a chill guitar riff to immolating a child — that’s a rare skill set only featured here and on Danzig’s solo acoustic album: Danzig With Myself.

Abe builds the altar and places Isaac upon it, and something in the Chinese sweatshop children animating this must have really resonated with the idea of a father sacrificing his kid due to forces beyond his control, because they drew the hell out of Abe’s grief. Nothing says “the unexplainable sadness of burning my boy” like this face, which I call “halibut getting a colon exam.”

Of course an angel descends to stay Abraham’s hand, but only once they’re absolutely sure he was really going to do it. Like this was all a mean-spirited prank whose punchline is ‘watching parental love die in your child’s eyes.’ God just jumps out from behind a cloud, busting a gut like “hahaha, holy shit! You were really gonna do it! I can’t believe you were actually going to do it. You shoulda — pffthahah — you shoulda seen your face! Y-you were hgghkkhahaha — you were all:”

…

This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, Dean Costello: The Meanie of Weanie, the First Chair Cello of Hot Dog Jello.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Swords of the Barbarians

To celebrate this Nerding Day, let’s play a round of Pulp Remix. Here’s how it works: I take a real book, steal its cover and jacket copy, then refuse to read any of it. Authors hate this one weird trick where you disregard their entire life’s work on a whim! Instead I will write what I suppose the book is about. Again, I do not change the cover. I do not change the jacket copy. Both of these are real:

…

Brought to you thanks to a tip from LDHaines

Categories
LEARNING DAY

How to Make Trippy Music 🌭

If there’s one group you never want to make an instructional video for, it’s the cool kids. I know all you want to do is teach 4th Graders what a nollie is, or help Somebody’s Aunt learn to rap about her joint pain, but the cool kids will find you. They’ll tear you apart. They’ll start a whole hot dog themed website about you. You’ll be ridiculed into a legacy of shame, and at best you’ll live out the rest of your days as an ironic folk hero. If living as Tommy Wiseau is your best case scenario, is that really living? Ask Tommy Wiseau. He’ll tell you about his Suicide Hotline Rewards Card. 

So really, this video about making “trippy music” for the kids was doomed even before this internet harbinger showed up:

The eHow logo is like the Nintendo Seal of Quality — if you’re lucky it means nothing, if you’re unlucky you just brought home the bronze medal in the Shit Olympics. Here’s our instructor for Trippy Music Class:

The least funkadelic person to ever live.

Coincidentally, this is also the first frame in eHow’s popular How To Spot A Narc video. If somebody walks up to your smoke spot and does this, I promise you they are either wearing a wire or else they’re caught in a Freaky Friday body swap. That is your call to make. It might actually be worth it to smoke them out if you’re banking on a mystical body exchange —  sure you might get busted if you’re wrong, but you also might get to make out with somebody’s mom and score points with their daughter after they learn a lesson about how hard each other’s lives really are and switch back. That’s called the Two Birds With One Stoner Maneuver, and it is as rewarding as it is difficult to execute.

Of course her name is Kendall. She’s wearing that shirt; they only sell those to Kendalls. She talks like the Mickey Mouse Club rejected her for being too disingenuous and she says the word “trippy” like it’s an obscure sexual slur. 

Her very first piece of advice is “let’s just improv!” When a person who looks like this says “let’s just improv!” every muscle in your body seizes in anticipated terror. It’s like PTSD from an event you haven’t experienced yet. It’s Deja Trauma. “Let’s just improv!” has never ended in a worthwhile piece of art, it only ends in a lady named some shit like Kendall ‘accidentally’ saying something homophobic, or a guy named some shit like Ashley ‘accidentally’ taking it too far with his one and only character: Captain Boobgrab.

Sure enough Kendall’s improvised tune is just every vowel she knows in order, moaned into her own throat. 

It’s a whalesong from the loneliest whale who is that way for a very good reason. Kendall will break into song with no warning even though it is legally required in every state but North Carolina. Nobody gets through a short chat with Kendall without her going into a Christina Aguilera-style hand scale.

She describes her own vocals as “breathy and really chilled out,” and again there is so much constrained resentment in her voice. From Kendall, even the simple word “fun” sounds like a vile curse. Like so many people have left because of what happens after she says “fun” that she missed a step between cause and effect and now blames the word itself for her cat family.

About halfway through the video, Kendall suggests that all trippy music could use a little Middle Eastern or Indian slant. 

And now we need to pause for a moment.

There’s a unique facial expression that you will only find on bored suburbanites when they’re about to say something racist. It’s a complicated mix of glee and self-hatred; an eagerness tempered by questionable rage from no clear source. They’re going to say it, you can’t stop them from saying it, and they kind of want you to call them out on it — they’ll coast on the adrenaline rush from that argument for weeks. It’s the only thing that will keep them from secretly crushing the class gerbil on Parent-Teacher Night. That expression looks like this:

Kendall, god damn it. Don’t do it. You haven’t earned enough goodwill to make a controversial statement about the Middle East or India, you-

Oh shit! 

You might’ve been expecting Kendall to throw a curveball eventually, so she threw a fucking dart. She literally changed the game on you. She region-locked your expectations by throwing the Middle East out there first, then nailed you with the Native American racism. And look how fast she’s out of there — two seconds of slashing arteries and she’s moved on before you can even register the damage. That is minimalist, brutally executed, pro-caliber racism. Kendall is the John Wick of Applebee’s bigotry.

When pressed to describe the kind of psychedelic image she imagines as she’s playing, Kendall says “maybe a bird flying in the air or something weird.” That’s so far from weird that I worry I’m mocking a head trauma patient, like she got into a motorcycle accident and left her imagination smeared across the 405. I am sorry that Reading Rainbow taunts you now, Kendall, but trying to defunk an entire generation of budding musicians is a disproportionate revenge. Just tell them to wear a helmet and never fall in love with a man named Chain. You could help instead of harm!

I have this theory that the most annoying people use their neck more than the average human, and Kendall is the only proof I ever need of that:

Those tendons are the strongest material known to man, and they’ve only ever been used to put zany emphasis on words like “stanky.” She can bite rebar in half thanks to the exercise she gets by wildly overpronouncing every other phoneme. Because she says the word “Chinese” with such venom, now no ballgag can hold her.

Take us out, Kendall:

“Enjoy making trippy music! I’ve taught you two classical techniques on a violin and why you don’t like people who describe themselves as ‘on a journey,’ goodbye!”

…

Brought to you thanks to a tip from Br At. 

Categories
FUCKING DAY

Fucking Day: Cracked Slashfic

On the path to fame you will take many small steps. Long before you puke pure cocaine onto your own star on Hollywood Boulevard, you will celebrate minor milestones that feel revelatory at the time: The day a fanpage is founded, your own Wikipedia entry, the first time you get recognized when you really wish you weren’t (disheveled and hungover while ordering the worst thing at a burrito cart for me!) but there’s nothing quite like your very own slashfiction. The day an Internet Morlock writes several thousand words about the way you might fuck is the day you know you’ve made it. That’s why I was so intensely jealous of my old coworkers Dan O’Brien and Michael Swaim, when they were graced with this lovely bit of prose:

Even if there’s no fucking in your fanfiction, your fanfiction is still about fucking. It might be on an esoteric level, but fucks will be had. So any piece of fanfiction would belong on Fucking Day as well as any other day, but bear with me, because there absolutely is fucking here. It’s brief and last minute, as all fucking should be, but it’s here. I will deliver.

This is a tough piece for me to write, because I know both of these people, and it’s tricky to walk the line between keeping a respectful distance from their private lives and making loud, explicit jokes about their dicks touching. It’s a problem I’ve struggled with in literally every single friendship I’ve had, and I have never made the right choice. So I’m going to try to confine my criticism only to the text itself, and not address the elephant dong in the room unless absolutely necessary.

I appreciate the writer trying to mimic the Cracked style, throwing in our casual absurdity and liberal hints of violence. But this is almost the start of two jokes and no punchlines. You can’t just say “he did some heroin in an unexpected way” without further commentary; that’s just an accurate report of what bored junkies do. It’s not funny to explain that drug addicts gonna drug. That’s just an excuse that never works at any of my exit interviews. 

And you can’t just say “he threatened to burn my mom’s house down” and leave it at that — that’s genuinely what psychopaths do. Arson is your foundation, and you have to build comedy upon it. Maybe he made a Molotov cocktail in a zany fashion, like in a sippy cup. Maybe he was being metaphorical, and it turns out he ‘burned your mom’s house down’ with his good, good fuckin’. Maybe your mom flipped the script on him and burned his house down. I guess what I’m really asking is for you to take a second pass on the text after you cum, when the clarity of mind can help you build out the jokes.

This is a novice mistake. It’s what takes so many people out of horror movies. Your protagonist can’t be making so many obviously stupid decisions just so you can move the pieces around the board, then set them on top of each other and make grinding motions. Especially since we’re aware that this is slashfiction — we already know somebody is going to get railed that would probably prefer to not get railed quite so hard. You’re going to have to work even harder to make it look like that might not happen.

There always has to be just a whiff of rape in slashfiction, doesn’t there? It’s never fully consensual. Even if the author later makes it very clear that both characters came to want this, it always has to start like a sketch in a self-defense class. Slashfiction writers think that foreplay is a loophole for consent. The only pickup line slashfiction writers know is attempted kidnapping. Slashfiction writers think the most erotic part of the body is the nose because that’s where the chloroform goes.

Okay, the author gets points back here: I do like how real they kept Swaim’s living conditions. He resides in a modest apartment far from the office, and owns nothing but a small grey couch and a television. It’s like they really get the internet writer’s plight.

You see what I mean? As soon as two people show affection toward one another, a slashfiction author has to dive into their own skull Inside Out-style to see exactly how Lust manages to choke Consent out this time.

I don’t know what human pretzel pornography this author gets off to, but I can tell you with authority that Michael Swaim is not a fuck-snake. He’s not a blowjob boa constrictor, able to keep a man on his lap while also fellating him. He’s like any of us: he has to choose between the two.

It is true that the early columnists all had lube. They got it as a gag gift from a fan, and only used it once for an office Slip ‘n Slide party. 

Wait, did I just fall for the least effort ever put into a cover story?!

The human imagination is a bizarre and terrible thing. That you can look at a regular person making comedy sketches on the internet and be so overcome with inspiration that you simply must pen three thousand words on how they probably feel about anal creampies — it’s almost noble. I am a professional writer and I could only get 1,092 words out of that, at best.

Leaving the door so plainly open for a sequel is always a bold move — it shows a degree of faith and certainty that I have never had in anything I’ve ever done. The blind, hopeless trust inherent in that faulty assumption just breaks my heart. It’s like a disabled orphan believing with all his heart that there’s no way you’ll steal his wheelchair for a third time. People that type “THE END…?” are still waiting for OJ to find the real killer. If you tell them “the check is in the mail” and it never arrives, they’ll go hold up the line at the Post Office just to drag an already broken postal worker over coals they stopped being able to feel long ago. This author was so very sure that the people would clamor for more textual erotica about two awkward internet comedians fucking in a budget Burbank apartment that they couldn’t even commit to a hard stop. But that’s not an epic saga that needs more exploration, it’s just a Tuesday we don’t talk about.

THE END

…?

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Combat Simulation Suits 🌭

I enjoy fighting, but I do not enjoy being fought. Ideally, I would like to attack people from inside the safety of a heavily guarded pillow fort. Where is the martial art for me, the extremely dishonorable vicious coward?

I’ve finally found it:

This is an instruction manual for Combat Simulation Suits — mobile attack pillow forts, in other words. Now, this booklet is supposed to be for teaching instructors how to properly deploy Pillsbury Doughboy Battle Mechs in a classroom situation but I figured it, like all things, can be repurposed for evil. 

I actually might have an easier time corrupting this information than you’d think. Judging by the production efforts put into this sucker, the entire manual was hastily written in a courthouse bathroom to be used as evidence in a mascot assault trial.

Every single picture in this book was taken with a wet Holga and developed in the bathroom of a Greyhound bus. And that’s okay, because even the most professionally constructed of these suits looks like you barely took the ‘Best Try’ award in a prison cosplay contest. They have cool names like “Redman” and “Fist” and nobody can say them with a straight face. They look like original characters from some shitty knock-off comic book imprint that couldn’t get the rights to even the worst superheroes, like some store-brand Alpha Flight motherf — you know what? Let’s stop beating around the bush. They look like Ultraverse characters. There, I said it. Eat shit, Malibu.

The advice in here shoots for ‘casual professional’ and the ricochet hits ‘belligerently insane’ square in the crotch:

“Problems occur when the person wearing the kit starts to feels super-pain and impact resistant. … But with that said I have seen the kit bearer demonstrate this Mr. Invincible syndrome on a number of occasions, against both empty hands strikes and training weapons. … I have seen a feeder in a helmet and an array of padding receive no less than five back handed thrusts to the face with a metal training knife just roar his head off and keep coming.” 

This manual has to set aside time to address the mad feeling of invincibility that almost immediately overcomes you as soon as you put on the Chuck E. Cheese Batsuit. Every single man this instructor trained has sprinted out the door to fight crime with it, and he is sick of losing both expensive padded codpieces and promising young lives. “Remember that guns exist,” should be the only counter this poor instructor needs, and yet he’s had to watch the life drain out of countless eyes as his most prized pupils power-waddle away from sustained police fire.

“I use a similar mentality during un-predictable scenario training by using positive self-talk such as ‘I’m the only f*cking predator in this alley!” This kind of flicks the switch, allowing me to access the state I need to be in, exactly when I need it.”

If a man clad in nothing but crudely taped-together karate mats introduces himself as “FIST,” and goes on to clarify that he is “the only fucking predator in this alley!” you are not in karate class. Repeat: You are not in karate class. You actually took a wrong turn on your way to Take Back the Streets and this is the storage unit Sergei rented to produce his very first snuff film. Don’t worry: You’re supposed to kill him. You are getting out of this alive, but you are not getting out of it without stomping a boner into pulp and erotically throttling a sad Russian dressed in the entire supply closet of an elementary school gym class.

Eventually we get into what every vicious coward on a budget wants to know: how to build your own Combat Simulation Suit at home. “Smurf Suit” isn’t a great superhero name, but that’s because this is our villain:

Look at that god damn nightmare. Everything about it says “you’re going to live in my basement for the next 7 years.” It looks like Freegan cosplay of a Ukrainian folk monster. That’s the last thing somebody who answered a Craigslist personal ad saw, and it’s the first thing the Anaheim Ducks are going to see when they wake up in hell.

“Like many other good instructor’s in this field we avoid expressions in practice such as “aggressor” and “victim” for the role of the pad man and the trainee. … I use one that my friend Mick Coup employs, which I really like ‘MEAT’ This installs the correct mentality for this kind of training right from the start.”

Okay. All right. That’s enough, One Step Closer to the Street. The game is up. This is a fetish thing. Nobody asks you to call them “MEAT” unless the follow-up question is “want to see me deepthroat a baseball bat?” 

Any pamphlet featuring a hirsute man in overalls and a duct-tape helmet, captioned with the phrase “aggressive role play used by the woofer” is only here to instruct masochists on how to take crushplay to the final level. 

To the disappointment of every single man that volunteered to be put in this full-body-diaper suit, the Model Mugging program was not what they thought. Look at that son of a bitch on the right: It looks like a Minecraft porn parody. It looks like the event exclusive Hillbilly Funko you could only get at StrangleCon ‘08. 

The rest of this manual is just grainy incriminating photos of perverts wrasslin’ women while wearing their Lego Man Gimp Suits.

And that’s fine. It’s totally fine if this is what you’re into so long as it’s consensual, which it absolutely does not seem to be. In fact, the vigorous nonconsent of at least one party seems to be a requirement for this Darkweb PornHub category:

But maybe I’m being naive. In this day and age, I could absolutely see young women becoming sexually aroused at the thought of beating the shit out of a chubby guy in a clearance-rack motorcycle helmet. It could provide plenty of safe sexual release for both participants, so I guess I don’t have any issue with this, so long as all parties involved are well past the age of conse-

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Let’s Watch: ASMR Roleplay 🌭

You know what ASMR is: softcore porn for audiophile Quakers. “It’s not sexual,” every ASMR fan tells you, even as they moan at your lip smacking and shirt crinkles. I don’t blame you for trying to pull this con, ear-freaks — I once tried to convince my boss that anime was about more than just panties, but he still wouldn’t let me watch it at work. Maybe that’s why ASMR has given up on playing coy, and its major YouTube channels are now one errant camera pan away from switching to PornHub. They’re all about “ASMR roleplay” these days, and yes, it is definitely sexual… albeit in a deeply lame, deeply upsetting way.

Here’s how your typical ASMR video starts:

And right off, there’s a problem. If this isn’t pornography, why are all of the big stars either cute young girls or terrifying middle-aged men doing everything they can to secure a spot beside the cute young girls? 

She’s doing ‘finger flutters’ by way of hello — wiggling her fingers in front of her microphones so you can hear the sound that flesh makes. We are zero seconds in and this is where I would quit watching if you weren’t paying me to. I hate it instantly. It sounds like gelatin corduroy. It sounds like parasitic moths trying to wiggle their way past your protective earmuffs. It sounds like lotion feels in your belly button. 

ASMR Girl goes right from those saucy little finger-scrapes into a whispered ad for NordVPN. Hope you’ve always wanted to watch an average girl talk quietly about server capacity and — actually, most of you do want nothing more than that. Well, enjoy the next three straight minutes:

No joke: Three minutes of amplified whisper commercials for secure porn browsing. Is this foreplay for a creature I can never understand? Peter Thiel isn’t this hard for capitalism and privacy, and his only goal in life is to start an island society where they don’t prosecute sex crimes.

Only once you’ve explored every orifice of NordVPN’s excellent deals do you get to your low-stimulation pornography: 

Yes, it’s alien play. Softcore quiet alien play. Like the third naughtiest fantasy of an extremely sheltered librarian. 

The saddest part of these ASMR videos is how ubiquitous nitrile gloves are. Like it would just spoil the average viewer’s suspension of disbelief if it looked like a woman was willing to touch them with her bare hands. They’re so far gone from actual human contact that it can’t even be a part of their fantasies anymore. ASMR fans go soft the moment they see cuticles. Right now some poor noble nurse is catching COVID-19 because MRS. ASMR outbid the hospital on the last box of Kleenguards. 

I’m not even through one video and I already feel bad about making fun of the people who watch these. 

Every one ends with the woman begrudgingly admitting that she likes you — not loves you, not wants you, just tolerates. That’s the lowest bar for a fetish this side of Limboner play, which is exactly what it sounds like, but somehow lower.

Here’s the same girl demonstrating that she’s willing to get hit by every obstacle in the nerd’s fetish gauntlet.

Yes, it’s ASMR Shrek Roleplay, in case you were looking for the exact sequence of words to say out loud to get your parents to stop loving you. It’s like a phonetic hack, Snow Crash-style, designed to kill the human brain’s capacity for respect. She does twenty minutes of “non-erotic” whispering in a terrible accent that veers between Scottish, Russian, and drunk Jamaican. It is more than enough time to prove that improv is not her strong suit. 

We dive off into several long tangents about the real estate agent that sold her the swamp-shack, and how you might want to invest in swamp property yourself, and who the fictional real estate agent is married to, and all the while her audience is just waiting for her to whisper “moist” so they can close this incognito tab.

Please notice, even here, the gloves. ASMR fans will tell you it’s nothing dirty — it’s just to augment the noises the fingers make, and then they’ll run a wet tongue over their dry lips and start rubbing the dirty swatch of burlap in their pocket.

There you go: if what you need to finish is a disinterested 22 year-old wearing green makeup and a vest made out of towels whispering you off to lyrics by Smash Mouth, please clean yourself up before you go back on stage at the Douglas County Fair, Smash Mouth.

“Cranial nerve exam porn” sounds like something so hardcore you can only film it in the most Russian parts of Russia. But no, this shit is like the schoolgirl fantasy of ASMR Roleplay: So commonplace it’s barely considered deviant. These videos are as omnipresent as they are perplexing…

It’s always the same — an attractive female doctor gently inquiring if you have something wrong with your brain. It is the single most attainable fantasy for ASMR fans, who could make this a reality by taking two steps: Making a doctor’s appointment, and admitting to why they made that doctor’s appointment.

Here’s a ‘gang-nerve exam,’ which is something I thought I made up for my Shadowrun fan fiction.

Never tell me this isn’t pornography. Look at those usernames: Maybe ‘Seafoam’ can pass for a crystal hippy, but ‘Matty Tingles’ is a man for whom the San Fernando Valley is a way of life. 

You all need to be more careful about what gets you off. What if you head out to ick on some poor doctor and they actually find something wrong? Now you’ve tied a fetish to a diagnosis. Ask any James Spader movie why that’s a bad idea. 

Here’s Lice Inspection ASMR Roleplay:

Finally, a sexual fantasy for the Deep Nerds that involves precisely zero stretches of the imagination.

And these are the ones that pretend at respectability! They’re the Showtime of the ASMR world. Here’s the Cinemax: 

Yes, this is an ASMR video. Yes, it is a Misery-style porn roleplay about lumberjacks. No, don’t look it up even if you think you’d be into that kind of thing. Making an ASMR video doesn’t guarantee you’ve got a good voice, or any acting ability whatsoever. This one is like listening to your dentist do low-confidence bondage.

What if you’re as into furplay as you are out of dignity? Have some ‘Werewolf has you tied up ASMR Roleplay.’

Listen to six minutes of a guy doing a subpar Skyrim NPC impression about erotic maulings. Try not to laugh as he tells you his werewolf name is “Maurice.” Fail when he fucks up the syntax and accidentally rhymes during his climax line, “I think it is high time to embrace you in the night with just one bite.”

Or hey, if you’ve found that the slow dissolution of the civilized world has made you unspeakably horny:

No teasing here. Rest assured, suicidal whisper perverts, you will quietly fingerbang the coronavirus before this is done.