Author: Robert Brockway

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Night Man 🌭

Night Man is a superhero TV series that debuted in 1997: the year the ‘90s finally went too far, and we all realized they had to be put down. The show is about Johnny Domino, which is the most ‘90s name I can possibly imagine, and he is a professional saxophone player, which is the most ‘90s profession I can possibly imagine. It’s like the producers of Night Man knew that the ‘90s were winding down so they had to pack every trope they’d been too embarrassed to use into one show, because they just felt that this was the last year you could unironically wear Hypercolor and it was sort of like the moment you realize an old dog is on the decline.

If Night Man feels like a cheap store-brand ripoff of Batman that’s because this is a Malibu title, and Malibu is the Malt-O-Meal of comic imprints. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Eat shit, Malibu. I know the company is defunct, I know that society and good taste and justice have won out, but this is like hunting Nazis in 1960s Argentina. You’re not allowed to just commit atrocities and retire. This is Hunters shit, and it’s not over until I knock on your door with a copy of Mantra and a pistol.

Anyway here’s our protagonist:

There is no need for time capsules: That image explains everything about the ‘90s in the most brutally honest way possible. Back then we liked generic, hairless men stripping down and struggling with basic communication. I blame the unrealistic standards Van Damme set in the ‘80s. Look at that zany window graphic: You could put a photo of the Armenian Genocide in that frame and saxophones would play while it answers a phone in a towel. It is an inevitability.

I’m pretty sure the rippin’ saxophone theme is supposed to be Night Man himself playing — remember, that’s not only his profession, but his passion. Here he is just hanging out and noodlin’ a “sexy night in the big city” style sax riff in the middle of a crowded cable car.

If you play an instrument on public transport, you are a fungal infection in the dicktube of society. It is literally a captive audience and you are exploiting it for attention you obviously could not earn fairly. If there was any justice in this world, God would strike you down for doing this kind of shit, and there is justice in this world, because that’s exactly what happens.

Night Man is almost immediately struck by lightning, which sadly does not fuse his saxophone to his lips so that he becomes a jazz monstrosity, and racks up a lifetime of tired nurses explaining to horrified newbies that one â™ȘDOOTâ™Ș means Sax-face is hungry while two ♫BLATS♫ is for ‘full diaper.’ 

Instead, the accident grants Johnny psychic powers. Well, psychic power. You see, now his brain is tuned to the frequency of evil, like evil is a radio station and Night Man is a knob in the other sense of the word. I’m not making any of that up — the creator of Night Man is barely making that up. That only technically counts as imagination, and would earn you a C- on Reading Rainbow even though none of the other children are getting a grade. 

Here’s the face Night Man makes when he listens to KEVL.

He looks like you just told him for the very first time that some letters can represent numbers. He looks like the news just broke into Baywatch to announce that the president cancelled surfing. That’s the expression you’ll find on every personal trainer’s face when you tell them you’re not interested in a free session. 

‘Evil frequency detection’ is his only innate power, but you will still see Night Man flying, going invisible, and firing lasers because at least one producer realized ‘fuckably dumb dude discovers the concept of subterfuge’ only worked for Burn Notice. The whole pilot revolves around Night Man gaining his superpower, then immediately using it to go after a suit that gives him better superpowers. And it’s the suit that really draws the Batman comparisons Night Man is in no way prepared to make. Johnny Domino is clearly supposed to be a suave Bruce Wayne-like figure, but his every expression is ‘unfrozen caveman encountering robot dog’ and he drives a Plymouth Prowler: The official car of regret. 

Prowlers were only bought by paunchy old white men in the early stages of dementia who’d temporarily forgotten what cool looked like but still felt pressured to take a hasty guess. Prowlers look like John Waters turned into a car, Turbo Teen-style, but lost all of his charm in the transition between man and machine. 

Hyping up the Prowler as a bitchin’ new supercar really nails down the window this show operates in: The world was only stupid enough to think Prowlers were cool for like two weeks in the Spring of 1997, and never again, and then so far the other direction that it actually undid those two weeks and I started off this sentence telling you the truth but now it has become a lie.

It’s clear they got that Prowler for free in a promotional deal, because Night Man had a budget of “whatever Hercules: The Legendary Journeys didn’t use” and they might have been… proud of it? Most other shows in the ‘90s had just discovered two things: CGI and the fact that they had no budget for CGI. Most of their rendered abominations were backgrounded, blurred, darkened — Night Man had no such shame, which should surprise none of us after Hunk McPecs answered a phone in a towel then hopped in a Prowler. 

Here’s Night Man bringing its fire to the pilot episode:

That would earn you a “Pass” on your proof-of-concept midterm in a computer animation class held by the Night School program at your local YMCA, and Night Man is so proud of it. It’s almost touching. It’s like they couldn’t bear to hurt the feelings of the special effects department, who might have failed out of ‘coloring time’ in kindergarten but it never stopped them from trying. It is very weird how prominently and unnecessarily Night Man uses CGI — they set their show in San Francisco then filmed it in Canada and rendered every set piece in the barn-studio of Bulgaria’s lowest bidder.

It doesn’t surprise me that Night Man couldn’t afford stock footage of the Golden Gate Bridge, but it does surprise me that they couldn’t even afford “overhead establishing shot of railing and water.” 

You couldn’t afford to be on any bridge? You couldn’t even afford to put a bannister next to a river? Maybe you shouldn’t be making a show then, Night Man. Maybe you should be saving up for the bulk box of Hot Pockets — yes, it sucks that they only have Philly Steak and Cheese, but it saves you 20 cents per Pocket and you can use those savings to buy the film rights for a better Malibu franchise.

Night Man has the craziest priorities in both budget and writing. He hardly ever uses his powers for Nightmanning — he’ll fly to a crime but not during one. He’ll shoot a laser to knock down a ladder so he can climb a building to punch a guard even though he has a laser and can also fly. Night Man reserves his powers exclusively for mundane insanities, like creating a holographic duplicate of himself playing saxophone and then abandoning it:

Really, the only subpar ‘90s staple this show is missing is…

David Hasselhoff agreed to be the central villain of Night Man’s two-part pilot on two conditions: One, that he only has 14 seconds of screen time and two, that nobody mentions his character exists, even when they’re talking to him. I don’t think he even has a name, and he does less than nothing before he dies. Hasselhoff shows up at the very end of Night Man to say one and a half things, then be thrown out a window in a way that makes it look like he slipped on a rollerskate they didn’t have to CGI, but also couldn’t afford to.

And the show ran for two seasons!

So the answers to the questions I know you’re asking right now are “yes, I will be writing about Night Man again,” and “no, I won’t stop just because this column doesn’t do well,” and “yes, this is how I’m going to be for the duration of the site, even if you threaten to quit paying me because of it.”

I will absolutely sacrifice my own financial stability just for the chance to dunk on Malibu some more. I’m not the hero you need, but I’m sure as shit the hero you deserve.

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-