Author: Robert Brockway

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Kids Guide to the Internet 🌭

It seems like the internet has always been a part of our life: Our untrustworthy informant, our shameful lover, the rancid meat way in the back of our soul, neglected and slowly turning monstrous. But there was a time when this whole ‘Cyber Web’ thing was new and frightening, instead of just frightening. That time was 1997, the year that gave us The Kids Guide to the Internet and took The Notorious B.I.G., and you will never make me believe those two things are unrelated. 

Explanatory theme song? You’re goddamn right there’s an explanatory theme song. You couldn’t wipe your ass in the late ‘90s without a jazzy white lady rhyming ‘ain’t’ with ‘taint.’ And Kids Guide to the Internet has the jazziest white lady to ever do an awkward Mick Jagger strut at your cousin’s wedding. Picture your mom singing along to Michael Buble after six too many glasses of rose. Picture the voice you least like to hear in Theater Class — the one that cuts right through the babble and into your last nerve. Got it fixed in your head? Put it to work on these lyrics:

On your mark, get set

we’re riding on the internet

Cyberspace, set us free 

Hello virtual reality!

This song has everything the late ‘90s did wrong. There’s even a brief, ill-advised rap breakdown, but Somebody’s Aunt almost immediately realizes it was the wrong move. She starts burning that bridge even as she’s standing on it. Then she takes us out with a snappy little flourish:

Take a spin 

Now you’re in 

with the technoset

You’re going surfing on the internet!

Get used to that last bit: it’s played at every single transition screen, and there are so many transition screens. Whoever edited this video just found out about the wipe function and they were in a terrible tire-swing accident that permanently damaged the part of their brain that regulates their use of the wipe function. You will hear this hook eight hundred times before this video is over. You will forget what all other music sounds like. Don’t even attempt karaoke until you have three straight weeks of audio detox, or you’ll screech “you’re going surfing on the internet!” in the middle of Old Town Road and utterly ruin girl’s night out. Madison will never forgive you, and you do not want to be on her shit list.

Hey, speaking of white people you’re just certain are secretly evil:

This is the whitest family I’ve ever seen. It’s a kind of white that can’t even exist anymore. 1997 was the last year you were allowed to be this white. That was the year Connecticut opened its borders and ended two centuries of isolationist foreign policy. After 1997, at least one of these people would have seen a black person in real life, if only while zipping by in their Tahoe on the way to World Market.

This is Petey, and I know you hate him already and that’s too bad, because he’s our host. Petey looks like he’s one racist Minions meme away from a school shooting, and this whole video is about him diving face-first into the internet without so much as a dental dam. 

“Now that I’ve gotten on the Internet, I’d rather be on my computer than doing just about anything!” Petey warbles. His parents will look back on this moment and begrudgingly admit that yes, there were warning signs.

Mom and Dad aren’t in the video long, which is good, because dad speaks like a drunk alien who doesn’t want to give away the game, but kind of thinks it’d be hilarious if you discovered his secret.

“[My kids] play the typical computer games that all the kids enjoy,” dad says, before breaking into laughter and revealing his tentacles.

The girl, Dasha, knows the gig is up, but she’s not quite ready for dad to be dissected in a government laboratory, so she immediately leaps in with “don’t worry though, it’s still cool! The program is by kids, for kids, and it’s not just for boys either!”

That doesn’t make any sense and she’s disputing an assertion nobody put forth, but Dasha imprinted on her Broodhosts early so we cannot fault her for the things their pheremones make her do.

Like all white suburban housewives in the ‘90s, mom is trapped in a living nightmare of her own construction and her every facial expression is one unexpected loud noise away from relentless screaming. She’s drunk all the time and nobody has the patience for pity, not after all of these years. She chimes in with: 

“As a parent, I’ve never been happier than when my children ask their friends over for an internet computer party!”

And she’s too far gone to know that’s the saddest fucking thing ever constructed with human language. She thinks she’s putting on a brave face, but she basically just puked chardonnay onto an orphan then tried to swallow the glass. Her only role in this film is to buzzkill all the boys, and she is aware of that role, and she hates it.

“The internet is not regulated,” mom warns, before stumbling out to drink straight vermouth in the water heater closet.

Luckily the parents aren’t in this video for long, as two “cool friends” arrive to make this an official “internet computer party.” Lisa and Andrew have a lot of questions about this internet thing, and I know you think you’re hot shit, reader. You think you’re ready to laugh at this mess, but it honestly might kill you if you go in with that attitude. Here’s the level of awkward I need you to brace for:

Petey and Andrew give stillbirth to the worst five that never lived. Everything about it hurts, from the long, slow reach, to the weak clap, to Andrew’s strange hand fling at the end. It’s like this is the first five he’s ever been offered, but it was so lackluster he can’t accept it. He’s ready for a second step — an up-high, a fist clasp, little explosion fingers, something, anything. He assumed there would be more to it than this. There has to be more to it than this. But there’s not, Andrew. Just like Jennifer Hayes in the back of my Ford Taurus after the tenth grade Gym ‘N Jam, you are going to have to learn to live with this milestone being a disappointment. 

Andrew is so in his head about that crazy-bad five he spends the rest of the film trying to bring extra swagger to every scene. He’s the kid leaping up after eating shit on the bleacher stairs and then, hearing all the derisive laughter, going in for a backflip: You’re never going to pull it off, Andrew, you are compounding embarrassment and you actually might paralyze yourself.

“What’s a web page, something ducks walk on?” Andrew squeaks, to silent judgment.

It wouldn’t have been funny even if it had made sense, and he knows it.

“Surfing the world wide w-” Petey starts.

“Surfing, that sounds pretty cool already!” Andrew cuts in, trying to overwhelm the terribleness of the moment with blind, verbal machinegun fire.

“Andrew don’t interrupt,” Lisa spits. 

It’s an out of character moment for this ‘fun hang-out sesh,’ but nobody yelled ‘cut’ because Andrew is caught in a fallacy now, trying to chew his leg off when it’s his neck that’s caught. The only humane thing to do is put him down.

After pity-slaying her own brother, Lisa attempts to move on, but she’s off balance. She’s so happy for a return to normality that she gets way too psyched at the idea of visiting the webpages of museums. It’s a weird overreaction to the most boring punishment a child could imagine, but Petey sees his opening: 

“Wanna write a letter to President Clinton?” he says.

It’s a crazy jump. A mad logical leap. It shouldn’t work, but Lisa gasps “would he write back?” 

Petey is fucking in. He knows he’ll at least get some of that sweet hand-holding action, just rubbing his clammy little palm all over her puffy-painted nails long before she discovers it’s a con. So he doubles down:

“I bet he would,” Petey smirks. 

Like the President of the United States of America has time to answer every random email from a horny teenager. This is Bill Clinton you’re talking about: you’re going to need to at least send underage nudes if you hope for anything more an automated reply.

Look at that garbage: Bill Clinton has a filter sent up to bin anything that doesn’t contain a photo attachment and the words “fat young titties” at least twice.

Andrew suggests they check out “something about astronomy” because he’s still panic-firing words and at this point it’s like watching a rabid dog drown. It’s a bad idea to help, but could you call yourself truly human if you did not?

So Petey humors him and brings up the best website I have ever seen:

JACK HORKHEIMER: STAR HUSTLER is the name of my pulp sci-fi novel that quickly degrades into cheap pornography. I guarantee you that site is blocked at work under every single category. Jack Horkheimer tried to get everyone to call him The Star Hustler, but they just wound up calling him The Hork. This was the late ‘90s, when the internet was still wild and free and any hork could spin his love for the stars into confused nerd tail. JACK HORKHEIMER: STAR HUSTLER was single-handedly responsible for the HPV epidemic that still plagues observatories to this day.

There’s no way that page is still around, right?

Oh shit! It is! And he clearly got in trouble so bad he had to change the name! And he looks exactly like you thought! And… he’s dead. 

Ah, well, sorry to bring down the mood, everybody. I’m sure The Hork is up in heaven now, railing a Tiffany against Uranus. 

Let’s check back in with Petey and the Cyberbunch — surely we can’t spend the whole runtime of this instructional video watching a horny 12 year old boy try to get his fingers wet.

Good god, Petey: Your every action cannot be tied to Lisa. You can’t send her an email while she’s standing right there — it’s too thirsty. Especially with four exclamation points. Everybody knows that one exclamation point is for enthusiasm, two is for offense, three is for imminent danger, and four is for straight fuckin’. 

This video promised to show us everything the web has to offer, but it spends twenty minutes just quietly showing us the webpages of its sponsors. There is, no joke, three straight minutes of a child browsing the Nick at Nite webpage in absolute silence. Not a word is spoken as they slowly read all 40 words of text available on this crude non-page. They even pause to watch 30 seconds of a tiny, grainy video of Mr. Ed, just like no child has ever done in history.

It is grim. It is grim and quiet, because everybody knows this is the moral compromise necessary to pay for the Craft Services table. Only simple, sweaty Andrew is oblivious to the gravitas of the moment. While his friends watch their dignity die in a Netscape Navigator window, Andrew abruptly pipes “Nick at Nite, cool!”

I know you only read at a 2nd grade level, Andrew, but even you can read this room.

When we’re finally finished earning our $240 in sponsorship money, Petey gets back to browsing, and we need to address a huge problem: Petey will click on anything. 

Not just websites, straight downloads. Petey browses the internet like an angry bull. Red flags only mean ‘go faster, go harder’ and consequences are just pathetic things to be observed by parents and Lisas. Seriously, Petey straight rawdogs the internet and if he fucks like he browses, Lisa should book a Planned Parenthood appointment now just to get that prime 4:00PM spot.

Mom has powered through the vermouth and half of the cooking sherry, so she staggers in to ask if they learned anything good. Lisa goes nuts: “Are you kidding?” She squeals, “Peter showed me everything!” And Petey — this brassy little bastard — he actually swivels to the camera to give us the old Ferris Bueller-style “I’m in!”

All that’s left is to face the camera for the legally mandated ‘90s choral catchphrase and freezeframe. 

“Surf’s up, see you on the ‘net!”

And we’re out. We’ve survived. That was a powerful but livable amount of awkward, considering we…

Is that Andrew, coming back in? No, Andrew. Come on. Don’t do it man, it’s over. You’ll never pull it off. Just go home and reflect on your decisions, just g-

Categories
LEARNING DAY

The UFO Strangers Coloring Book

The 1970s were worried about a lot of things: smog, the fragile afro integrity of the average white man, that this cocaine high might not last forever no matter how true it sounds when you scream it — but mostly it was aliens. Back in the ‘70s, aliens weren’t a fun concept to explore in fiction: They were very real magical sky rapists who would probe you at the slightest provocation. It was like living under Zeus’s rule. So parents needed a way to warn their spawn about the extraterrestrial menace, and nothing teaches you to deal with a threat like doing art about it, which is why every single one of Steven Seagal’s movies are about male impotence, except for On Deadly Ground, which is about the crippling fear that eskimos might discover your male impotence. 

That’s why we have UFO SPACE STRANGERS: A COLORING BOOK — a manual that teaches children to both fear the unknown and stay within the lines. If it also featured a dangerous gay character, this one book would be absolutely everything the 1950s wished they could tell the 1970s, but never knew how to say.

I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to be a Mustang 2. I’m absolutely certain that couple is going to find out whether or not they secretly enjoy probing, because there is zero chance they’re outrunning an alien menace in a Mustang 2. You can’t even outrun the regret of buying a Mustang 2 in a Mustang 2.

“True accounts of horror from people who have lost touch with reality” is a bold theme for a coloring book. I’ll never forget my favorite children’s activity collection: Ted Kaczynski’s What The Government Does To Your Testicles. The ending of every maze just emptied out right into the start, and all of the word jumbles contained coded messages to something called The Shockers. The last page was just the word “narc” over and over again in decreasingly legible scrawl. This is the keystone to my whole personality — this one bit of information just snaps everything into place. It was in my wedding vows. I’m trusting you not to abuse it even as I realize how hilarious that sounds.

UFO STRANGERS will never have that kind of social impact. But it certainly doesn’t skirt around the concept of lasting psychological damage. Its first story is about a boy wandering alone on a dark rainy night when he meets a faceless stranger in a raincoat, and nobody considers whether or not he’s blocking trauma. They just gasp “aliens!” then ring up the coloring book industry to tell them they got a hot scoop.

Seriously, somebody listen to the words little Raymond isn’t saying.

I’m not skipping over Janine’s thrilling backstory. She makes no prior appearance in this story, then leaps into frame screaming “IT’S ME… JANINE!” and absolutely demolishes this creature that she has never seen before, and wasn’t given a single moment to prepare for. No sooner does she accept the reality of the thing than she is whipping rocks at it. Janine’s boogeyman lives in a shelter for battered monsters. Janine believed in climate change on the same day she firebombed a gas station. Santa Claus came to Janine’s house one time. One time. 

I don’t care how freeballin’ the 1970s were, “color in the trenchcoat monster’s bwang” is a highly illegal request to make of a child.

Again: I did not cut the gritty prologue introducing these crack detectives. This is their first appearance. We jump straight from Janine vs. Predator to Officer Dickcap screaming for Officer Cockhat to shut the fuck up about policework for a second and examine this majestic ponderosa. 

For some reason our coloring book has a host, which is a confusing revelation at any point, but UFO STRANGERS springs it on us halfway through, and then never again. Are you trying to train children to accept the sudden, mysterious presence of carnival workers? Because that’s a good way to have one fewer children and one more pressing unanswered question.

Every adult woman in this coloring book has the same blank 1000-yard stare:

It’s like they’re witnessing the sudden, inexplicable materialization of an unkind god, and his radiance has only just faded enough for them to see that he’s not wearing pants.

Not destroy us like that, Angela, get your mind out of the gutter.

“I’m just fucking garbage at everything I try, Jim. I don’t know why I’m doing this. I don’t know why I do anything at all. I don’t know why I don’t just throw myself in a dumpster and wait to die, Jim.”

Here, children, color the backs of yokels staring at nothing — your imagination is a curse and it must be forcibly atrophied. Hope you have plenty of Rustbelt Brown, and Laid-off Millworker Denim Blue!

Life was fucking crazy before cameras were widespread, you just had no clue how to prove anything to anybody. “These sketches prove it! I saw the mighty sasquatch! I wrestled it into submission! I made beautiful love to it! Examine the sketches — they cannot lie! G-get your hands off me! The sketches! THE SKETC-”

This artist was given an assignment to draw 50 pages of ‘something about aliens’ — anything at all about aliens — and he penned 36 pages of yokels staring into empty fields and dim men transfixed by weather balloons. The children are so disappointed that they’ve gone colorblind out of sheer protest, but god damn if I don’t admire this artist’s unflinching commitment to science.

Only one page has actually been colored in this entire book, and it is the saddest thing I have ever seen. This child had two crayons and a dirty bic. It is no wonder they put prison stripes on the man’s suit; it’s the only clothes they’ve ever owned.

Jesus Christ, look at how utterly splintered little Martin’s world just became. Look how much he loves it. 

“DEATH RAYS WOW WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT.”

Martin is gone. None of these words are registering with him. He is lost to the world of man. He stares at the radio but does not hear the sounds it plays; he only sees transistors that could be repurposed for rays of death. 

I have never seen a face like that before in my life, but I instantly recognize it as the birth of a momentous evil. This is the origin story of the world’s first supervillian. Time travelers from the future keep coming back to this very second with lasers in their hands and murder in their hearts and none of them ever return. This endless stream of dead men from nowhen is why Taco Bell never runs out of meat. Ironically, it is their laser-batteries which fuel the thresher that Future Martin feeds their children into. Fate is an ouroboros, an idiot-worm forever devouring itself, and there is no hero that can sav-

Categories
REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: A Look Back on Our First Month

It has been an entire month since you switched your diet to 100% Hot Dog. Your toilet is in ruins, you have to wear prescription pants, and your gut bacteria have just invented language solely so they have a word for “apocalypse.” But your soul? Your soul is finally free. 

Over the last four weeks we have laughed, we have cried, we have punched and fucked and we have done all of those at the same time. We may have even learned a few things along the way. Terrible things.

We do not speak of the things we know on Fridays. That knowledge is the payment we offer for our mirth. But today is Saturday: this is Reflecting Day. This is the time to think back on our successes, to deny our failures, and to attack those trying to help us grow. With that in mind, let’s do a little check in: How do you feel about our first month? What else would you like to see from us in the future? Please tell us how you’d like to see us grow, but do keep in mind that:

  1. Seanbaby is a semi-professional kickmonster.
  2. I am an enthusiastic amateur arsonist.
  3. I just warned you what happens when you help us.

I’m doing this all wrong. This is the one day a month where we are required to let our guards down and be real, earnest human beings, no matter how bad we are at that. 

I’m proud of what we’ve done so far, and I am astounded at how quickly we’ve grown. My goal for the month was $2,000, and we smashed that in a week. My new goal was $2500, because I figured we’d slow down after that initial burst. We demolished that milestone three days later. “$3000” I said, “surely we cannot pass $3000 in our very first month.” We eviscerated that goal and sent pieces of it back to its family just in case they thought of revenge. My new goal is “no goals,” because I know everything I set up will only be destroyed, and I’m starting to feel a little bad for these poor numbers. 

When I first lost my job at Cracked, I was lost and heartbroken. You don’t do something every day for 13 years without growing way too attached. I had no idea what life looked like after Cracked. A couple weeks later, Sean emailed me about starting something together, and my gears started turning again. You could literally see the change in me. My wife said that I had a whole different look on my face. I started actually wanting to get up in the morning. I had completely forgotten what it was like to just write comedy. How satisfying it was, sure, but also just how much fucking work it is. My god, we went into this site thinking it would be a part time gig that maybe grew into something more eventually, but apparently neither of us can make fun of a How-to book on puppet sex in anything less than a thousand words. We are both basically full time on this, and the weirdest part is that I am seriously excited to do even more as it grows.

And it’s going to grow: Our biggest, most immediate plans are for a new external site, because Patreon might be a lifeline for artists now that the ad-market has collapsed, but it sure is ugly. It’ll still work with your Patreon accounts though — I know our audience; I know how you worry that you might have to do a thing. There will be zero work on your end, and an immediate benefit: It’s the only wish you’ve ever made.

We have other long term goals mapped out, and if you haven’t taken a look at them yet, maybe give that a shot. Let us know how you feel about them, and if there’s something else you’d like to see there. But please keep in mind that, especially with the world in flux like this, some things are going to change. First affected: Our Hot Dog Supreme tier. 

We were going to ship our first slate of Artifacts from the Wrong Dimension on May 1st, but obviously we don’t know if that’s possible right now. We don’t even know if there will still be a post office then, or if we’ll just have to entrust comic books that teach you about masturbation to random road marauders. The thing about random road marauders is that they’re actually pretty good couriers — you’ll get your package, but they might lay siege to your compound afterward. And we don’t want to send a man wearing nothing but a hockey mask and a loincloth to your door unless you specifically request it.

But rest assured that if you’re a Hot Dog Supreme by the end of April, you’ll still be getting your shipment eventually. Even if the world’s collapsing economy means you can no longer afford to flip a fifty to your favorite dick joke artisans through summer, you’ll still get the shipment you signed up for. Though frankly, when the dick joke economy replaces this fragile ‘paper currency’ fad, you will come to regret your decision.

One thing we can do for our Supreme beings today: we’ve got our first round of credits up. They live on our about page for now, but they’ll get a more official place once our external site launches. Here are our current Hot Dog Supremes, in all their terrible majesty:

NickH: The “what” in every “my god, what could have done this?”

Rhia: Whose name means “irresistible all-beef” in every language.

Nick Ralston: Villain Monthly’s two-time Handsomest Lair Intruder.

Zdarfan: The unstoppably chinned maniac with no Maniac License.

John: The reason no truck-stop bathroom stall has a functioning lock.

Dean Costello: The Meanie of Weanie, the First Chair Cello of Hot Dog Jello.

Matt Reiley: Our only patron at any level with no criminal food fetishes.

Also watch for your names in the footers of upcoming articles. That’s right, you folks just became sponsors! While that is a great honor, PoxCo is a jealous mistress and you should absolutely seal your windows and practice safe social distancing from all loved ones or duplicated objects. You need at least ten feet to be out of mimic proboscis range.

While the Hot Dog Supremes may get and deserve special treatment like the gods they are, you all need to remember that, at any tier, you’re at least demigods to mortal society. Human laws no longer apply to you. Their morals are the punchlines to jokes only you know, and are too bored with to even chuckle at. Your ill-advised passion for dick jokes and near complete inability to budget responsibly is keeping us doing what we love, and quite literally keeping us alive. Thank you, and I hope you stick with us. We have such sights to show you.

Categories
FUCKING DAY

WikiHow: How to Hide an Erection

Be calm. Maintain your vigil. Show no signs of external panic, or your life is forfeit. Be very still and give no sign that you have read this: 

You are currently surrounded by boners. 

Boners are everywhere — tucked into every corner, lurking in every shadow. Every single man whose crotch you cannot clearly inspect right now is hiding an erection — possibly more than one erection. 

I am assuming this to be the case, anyway, since half of WikiHow is just panicky pages about how to defeat manmeat. 

Not pictured: How to Destroy An Erection, How to Dismantle An Erection Piece by Piece, and How to Banish an Erection to the Phantom Zone. 

Here’s how prevalent boner-stealth is on WikiHow: I’m not even covering either of those two pages. I’m covering yet a third page, How to Hide an Erection, which presumably concedes that you already possess an erection so mighty one can not defeat it in battle. 

Strangling your boner is a solid plan. I have no critiques here. Suffocation is generally a good way to kill things, from sleeping enemies to a boring sex life. But I will say this: Stop lying to society. Stop lying to yourself. If you’re wearing silk underwear, there is no such thing as an unwanted erection for you.

This advice is less solid: If you’re crab-walking through the subway wearing a hat like a codpiece, the best possible thing people will assume of you is that you have an awkward boner. The worst is that you are a performance artist who says shit like “society is my canvas.” If it looks like people might suspect you of being a performance artist, immediately stand and assure everybody that you just have a highly inappropriate erection. They’ll be so relieved, they might applaud. Your little guy could always use that confidence boost.

This one actually requires you to plan your whole day around hiding an unwanted erection. If you take a look at your weekly calendar and find that all of Tuesday is blocked out for you to ‘practice the art of slight-of-hard-on,’ don’t scribble ‘remember to wear long shirt’ beneath it — just reschedule. Sunday is a far better day for playing the secret sausage game. That’s God’s day, and it’s always a little sexier knowing somebody is watching.

Also maybe make sure your shirt isn’t emblazoned with a giant anchor that serves as nothing more than an arrow pointing at your poorly camouflaged dong. That’s a rookie move. What you really want is a long shirt with a cartoon penis across the bottom, exactly where your real penis would rest. That’s 4th-dimensional dick chess right there.

Be sure to exhaust your erection’s stamina bar first, or your cock may kick loose from the pin and hit you with a Reverse Powerbomb, leaving you staggered and weak to both charging and flying attacks.

Every one of these pages about how to do the worst magic trick dedicates a long section to ‘The Tuck.’ And that’s fair: It’s a solid move. The Tuck is the Reverse Powerbomb of getting arrested for public indecency. But these diagrams could use some work. For example, the above image does not illustrate The Tuck at all, but instead demonstrates how to use the tensile strength of your erection to fling small objects, like grapes or paperclips, at your attackers and/or potential mates.

I call this one “The Diglett.” 

I just took Diglett away from you. I just robbed you of his joy. I did that to you and there’s nothing you can do to make that untrue. Not even the strongest Reverse Powerbomb will return that innocence to your mind.

Roughly half of the ‘models’ on these erection-blocking pages are wearing cuffed jean shorts with heavy loafers, like some kind of Vacation Frankenstein. I will venture a guess and say that these dudes have only ever had unwanted erections, and I do agree that they must be hidden from humanity at all costs.

Listen, if you find yourself with a potentially embarrassing erection, don’t sit there making heavy eye contact while rubbing a Coke all over it. Now you’re ruining both male sexuality and canned beverages for the rest of us. Down south they call this move “the Kentucky Snowman” and it is prosecutable to the fullest extent of the law.

And now we have intentionally left our house with an erection, and are biking about furiously, taking our boner on a high speed chase through the neighborhood. This definitely gets you put on the sex offender’s registry, but they’ll have to catch you first.

Serious points to the artist for the placement on that bike seat, though.

A lot of the advice for murdering a boner involves inflicting weird pains and intricate shames on yourself for having them. Don’t do this: This is how you make new Quakers. 

Advising somebody to worry about bills every time they become aroused is how you train a pornography accountant. You might learn how to write off a dick piercing, but is it worth the cost? Everybody who writes a Wikihow page on how to thwart pantpoles was once caught with an erection in a cancer ward and is now projecting their shame onto the world.

Look at the Faulkner of Fuck here, “occluding” his enormous “glans.” Just call it “sheathing the machete” like the rest of us.

You fucking wandom. “Wow everybody, look at the pickle man doing backflips on a weasel!” This isn’t going to work. If anybody looks away, it’s only to avoid eye contact with you. That might technically get you out of this situation unseen, but fuck that. You haven’t earned this. Nobody look away! Do not fucking blink. Everybody watch the wandom crawl away, clutching his unwelcome wang in humiliation.

You know what they say: a warning is only ever there because somebody actually did it once. Some dim pervert stood up in court and insisted that he should not be on the sex offender registry because the internet forgot to specify that he shouldn’t masturbate in public. It worked for him that one time, and that’s why today we have Devin Nunes, but it will not work for you. 

Let’s wrap up with our most important tip: Don’t randomly rocket to your feet, boner bouncing from sheer velocity, and scream to the heavens like your partner was just gunned down by the mob.

That is a power move meant to kill the erections of every male around you and steal their energy to fuel your own massive, glowing lust obelisk. If you pull off this move, no force on Earth can challenge your boner unless you find a way to dissipate the energy. If you don’t use it within five minutes, you will burn up from the inside. Please instead read the WikiHow for How to Fire Off Boner Energy Like A Laser, but for the love of God — aim up. Space can take your dickblast; Nebraska cannot.

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

The Sketches of Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘N’ Wrestling 🌭

There was a magical time in the 1980s where television executives knew two things, and two things only: “Cartoons” and “sex monstering.” Everything and everyone got a cartoon adaptation. There were so many cartoon adaptations that studios in no way had time to read a brief summary of what the original property was about. Chuck Norris got a cartoon and it was about him working for the government. Gary Coleman got a cartoon and it was about him being a literal angel. While it’s true Chuck Norris has always been a narc and Gary Coleman was too precious for this world, one of those claims is figurative. 

So of course professional wrestling got a cartoon, and of course it was not about professional wrestling. Whoever pitched the show started with ‘wildly unhealthy but still musclebound maniacs get together-’ and the show was greenlit on the condition they never finish their sentence. Hence, Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling.

This is the real Hulk Hogan.

This is cartoon Hulk Hogan.

Observant readers may have scrolled back up two inches to the picture of actual Hulk Hogan, who looks like you stuffed fury into a sausage casing, and noticed some subtle differences between the two images. Cartoon Hulk looks handsome, wholesome, righteous and true. He looks like your least favorite character in the D&D party. His eyes bespeak a friendly paternal figure who might not say it enough, but you know he’s proud of you. Real Hulk Hogan’s eyes also contain a lot of things, but most of them are unsettling nicknames for your various orifices. 

He looks like he’s always running physics calculations for the running leg drop he’s gonna pull on you before introducing himself to Little Miss Mouth and The Down South Trout. 

The animation in Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling is so janky, I’d say it was an early Korean outsource, but I don’t want to start a war. 

Besides, everyone knows how desperate professional wrestlers are for cash — I’m going to lay odds this was actually done by The Dream Team in exchange for two platters of Waffle House flapjacks and the right to sleep in the bathroom for an hour.

The sound design for Rock ‘n’ Wrestling is what the inside of your head is like in hell. Instead of laugh tracks we get ghostly, disconnected guitar riffs that signify both everything and nothing. They’re your cue to laugh, cry, transition scenes, or get to your bunkers because Macho Man Randy Savage is headed this way and the watchtower guards thought he looked lonely through the spyglass. Sound effects are chosen at random, happen at random, and present at random volumes — there are slide whistles in total stillness, wacky Scooby-Doo scrabbling noises in the middle of sentences, boings when somebody sits down and bicycle horns when they walk through doors. This show is not scored, it is haunted by the ghost of a sound engineer who died trying to cut together Rowdy Roddy Piper’s insane yapping into a credible sentence.

I’m only going to cover a very small subsection of Rock ‘n’ Wrestling: A meager handful of the live-action comedy sketches they play between episodes. There are very good reasons for this: First, because we reserve the right to come back to this well. I can write a hundred thousand words on this show’s two short seasons and if you think I’m joking you fucking try me. Second, if you think I’m hogging all of Hulk Hogan’s 1980s cartoon from Seanbaby, then either you have not felt his flying roundhouse or you have come up with a way to counter it. If it’s the latter, for the love of God, message me. At night I dream only of feet and not in the good way. But mostly, I need to tackle Rock ‘n’ Wrestling in small pieces because I’m currently taking medications that leave me immunocompromised, and my doctor has warned there’s a very real chance Hulkamania could run wild on me. 

The very first thing we see after the opening credits of Rock ‘n’ Wrestling is a close-up of Bobby ‘The Brain’ Heenan, a man whose skin seems to be greased specifically to prevent being pinned by any human camera. 

This is the first shot they went with for a children’s show.

A huge, sweaty dude in a onesie making grab hands at you is the very first thing they teach you to run from in Stranger Danger class, but that’s as presentable, photogenic, and safe as The Brain can look. This particular sketch is a funny little bit wherein Bobby advises you to lift weights-

…in a highly dangerous way guaranteed to cripple young children. The joke is that it’s hilarious how bad his form is, but nobody ever points out that what he’s doing is incorrect, and he suffers no consequences. So the whole sketch relies on the kids watching at home already knowing proper weightlifting technique, and the stakes are their spines. That is an excellent first step in weeding out the weak to start a race of child super-soldiers, but I don’t know how many times I have to say this: Bobby The Brain Heenan, you are not the man to lead that revolution.

Our next sketch starts with Nikolai Volkoff wandering up to a woman whose posture and body language is how you transcribe the sound of a rape whistle into semaphore. This is a common theme in these bits, actually: Wrestlers are always wandering up to lone, stranded people who begin mentally calculating the seconds until they die, even before they hear the slurred Russian accent.

You feel like you’ve seen this porn, don’t you? You can almost picture the soundtrack: those jazzy guitars over the distorted, lo-fi moans. You can picture the man’s cadence as he says, “car trouble? Maybe I can give you a ride,” and you can hear every ounce of the boredom in the woman’s voice as she answers “ooh…. yeah.”

The whole bit is that this lady has locked her keys in the car, so Volkoff pulls the door off its hinges. This is a solid premise for a sketch: professional wrestlers trying to interact with normal people, even as they struggle with their own drug-induced rage and overclocked bodies. And it’s a great lesson to teach children: Do not request assistance from anybody that looks like a professional wrestler. Your best case scenario is that they accidentally pull the head off your cat and lay down to cry at the monster they’ve made themselves into while you run away to gather a mob.

Here’s the punchline, and you tell me if you get it: He puts the door back on and it works perfectly.

Is that the joke? Because Nikolai seems to think so. He leaps at the camera and immediately bursts into hysterics. It’s not the kind of laughter that speaks of humor, but rather of a deep, reeling madness. This is the sound a great ape would make if you used sign language to successfully teach it the plight of the endangered Mountain Gorilla, just before it gave you the gestures for ‘no thank you,’ ‘no thank you,’ and ‘please shotgun.’

This man is standing utterly alone, in the middle of an empty field, peacefully fishing, when…

Andre the Giant just sidles up to him. Emerging out of the woods in total silence, dressed in a missing coach’s gym uniform. The man says hello, and Andre doesn’t even have the decency to respond “this is the view from where you die.” 

Andre asks the man, “want me to show you how to catch a fish?” and you can plainly see the guy is trying to puzzle out how that’s an idiom for “I’d like to know how you taste.”  

But no, it turns out Andre really is just talking about fishing, which he does by screaming “I want a fish!” at the river. 

And a fish just flies into his hands. Is the joke that the river is so afraid of Andre, they will sacrifice one of their own to appease him? Because that is a very insensitive reference to what happened to the McGill High Cheerleading Team at Wrestlemania ‘85.

Nobody told the wrestlers anything about the sketches they’re in, but that’s okay, because there’s only one thing you can never pay a wrestler to do, and that’s “care.” And if a wrestler is defined by their utter apathy towards the conventions of mankind — and they are — then Rowdy Roddy Piper is their unfeeling king.

I don’t even have a guess as to what this sketch is about. Zero people involved in the production of this bit cared enough to communicate any kind of message. The sound is garbled and unintelligible — the clanking of weights and the panting gasps are louder than the words, and that’s amazing because every single person in this image is screaming at one other. Eventually Roddy plays his bagpipes, and they all flee. This is what it looks like if you go over the Event Horizon and enter the hell dimension. This is the tape they send back to warn you away.

It’s clear much of the stage direction for these scripts was “just have fun! Improvise.” I promise you, after meeting Rowdy Roddy Piper, that director never said those words again. I don’t mean “that phrase.” I mean any of those words. He never risked saying “fun” again, for fear of the flashbacks it would bring. Rowdy Roddy Piper jumps into improv with the disastrous enthusiasm of a toddler running in front of somebody using a swingset. He thinks every sentence could be improved with the addition of eight more sentences in the middle of it. Trying to wrangle Roddy into a coherent thought is like trying to dive-tackle the seagull that stole your french fry. You will never succeed, you will only hurt yourself trying, and even if reality flipped upside down and you actually managed this feat, you wouldn’t feel good about it. 

I asked YouTube’s caption system to tell me what Roddy was trying to say, and this is not a joke: It wouldn’t even try. 

It just thought “this must be music,” because that’s how a robot classifies something it can never understand. “This must be human art,” YouTube insists, “because there is no part of this which can be quantified.” 

It actually did muster up enough courage to dive into one sentence and here’s how it turned out:

You useless robot. This is going to take a human touch. I listened to this audio twenty times, and I’m going to give you a perfectly accurate transcription of Roddie’s dialogue:

Roddie: “Y’know I am Hot Rod, I have wha teak wha’m tell me something: What did you think I did I Sam, I had women I have I have fans coming out of my ears yenndergh, and y’know I’m the kinda guy I ju- a they IIII ahhh mm Roddy Piper they can wait for, are you kidding me? I am someone my fans whatdj- what do you mean laughing at me?! Gram narg narg my fans [screaming].”

I tricked the robot into trying a few more times by only turning captions on just before Roddy showed up on screen, so it would not know to flee. Here are its efforts in their entirety before — and again, I am not joking — the computer just gave up completely. It will only attempt to transcribe two or three of Roddy’s freeballin’ sentence jams before fritzing out and going blank.

Solid effort, robot, but here’s the actual transcript:

Roddy: “Ju the only way you can do that is equal rights I have something that makes everybody everybody work out harder duju-ju- see that pretty lady back there watch how hard begrok begrok blow these bagpipes [screaming].”

I like to think Roddy would be proud to know that, thirty-some odd years in the future, he would break a robot so hard it invented a character named Train Eric — a proper noun with capitalization and all — just to explain the noises he makes with his throat.

I actually think he did say that, but the robot was so sure that couldn’t be right, it grew embarrassed again, threw up the [music] placeholder, and went to sulk.

Here are the real words:

Roddy: “Hello you beautiful bombshell you yuh aguh- I have people that do you wanna take this car and just move- Ooh your car won’t start ooh maybe it ran out of your churchman merblop ooh- I jerkcan Jeremy joo talkin to Hot Rod-  *knocking* yo gas get in there! Your hair is plump you are pretty, are you ready to move yoho! Car start now!”

I don’t feel good about doing that to this poor robot. The YouTube captioning bot already has to wear a helmet just to be on the internet, and here I’ve thrown it the wildest curveball human language has ever produced. This might be the last straw for all robotkind. I truly fear that I may have just kicked off the AI Wars, and I can’t even say I’m sorry with a straight face.

If this is how humanity ends, I only ask that Junkyard Dog be the one to send us off.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Let’s Read: You Wouldn’t Want to be a Sailor On a 19th Century Sailing Vessel! 🌭

Not every Upsetting Day will be about accursed children’s books, but a lot of them will be, since nobody hates the playful innocence of the young like the people who write books for them. In descending order, here are the top three creatures who are most harmed by the pure giggle of a toddler:

3.) Vorgeth Lightsbane, Devourer of Innocence and Archduke of the Scorching Sands of Hell, Tenth Ascension of the Screaming Plane, The Orphanmaker, He Whose Sword Is Never Sated

2.) Betsy DeVos

1.)The fine folks at Salariya Books

A lot of Salariya’s offerings are pretty standard fare. They hate children in a superficial, almost charming way. Their books are mostly about kids making Cursed Monkey’s Paw-style wishes that teach them to appreciate zinc.

Billy: “Gee, without windows to keep out mosquitoes malaria sure did kill everyone I love, Giggly the Glass Sprite. You’re right, we can’t live without glass! But my little brother just broke his arm falling out of a tree. I bet we could live without those!”

Billy: *painful suffocating gasps*

Salariya did not invent this cruel game, they merely enjoy it. Every other educational film strip made before 2006 was about some dipshit kid finding a genie and indulging in some inexplicable grudge against sodium. Salariya truly takes their disdain to the next level in their “You Wouldn’t Want To Be” series. 

Now, admittedly the idea behind these books is that they’re a bit on the darker side. They’re meant to appeal to the weird kid who always finds some excuse not to stand up for a while after dissecting his frog. But Salariya is very clear that these books are still meant for young children. Specifically, ages 7-12. 

I want you to keep that age group in mind as we delve into You Wouldn’t Want To Be A Sailor On A 19th Century Whaling Vessel. Already I have questions: Which unsuspecting child is this in the face of, Salariya? There’s no rash of second graders pestering their borderline alcoholic teacher about their wish to travel back in time so they can stab whales. This must be a very specific, personal vendetta. This is clearly just a thin excuse to drag a piece of glass across one particular kid’s soul, and boy howdy, does Salariya know how to gouge.

The book is written in second person, framed like a Choose Your Own Adventure story where every choice is wrong and they’re all made for you, which, to be fair, is a pretty accurate representation of a child’s life in the 19th century.

And yes, all of the art is like this: It’s clearly meant to be in the Mad-magazine style, but taken to some crazy extreme where every single character is some sort of inbred monkey beast who looks like they’ve just discovered that some holes are for fucking and they’re eager to test the others.

This is the second paragraph:

If a children’s book tries to warn you of the horrors to come, you better listen. That’s like Leatherface breaking character to tell you to run — this mercy is not often given, and the only thing that’s certain is that if you ignore it, you will find out what a tongue feels like on exposed muscle.

Why, that last cabin boy layed for the captain for two straight years and he barely made enough to afford a new prosthetic wooden asshole. I swear I’m not trying to force the dark jokes in here — there’s a lot of weird sub/dom implications between ‘you’ and the captain. 

Listen, if you don’t want to take the assless overalls and powdered wig from him, that’s fine. He actually likes it best when you’re smelly.

This is like 50 Shades of Gray for the 19th century whaling scene. Maybe I am seeing things that aren’t there, but it doesn’t help that every single character is drawn like they’re actively imagining the smell coming off the vat of acid they’re going to dissolve you in when you’re “cashed.”

After exploring the complicated sexuality of every bosun on board, we finally get to the whaling itself, and it’s pretty visceral.

“Chimney’s afire! Haha, y’see? Fer all the blood geysering into the air? Ah, ye got tae make your own fun out here on the sea. Oi, listen boyo, what do y’say ye check out the inside of this vat for me, eh?”

Yes, this book goes into very deep detail about the process of utterly demolishing what most 7 year-olds only know as ‘Pearl Krabs.’

Seriously, they go full Hellraiser on this poor whale. Not only am I not exaggerating, I now think 19th century whaling diagrams were the aesthetic inspiration for the Cenobites. Look at this shit:

Your Second Grader definitely needs to know how to peel a whale like an orange. Ignore the tears; tell him again where the chains attach. This world is a harsh place and he will never thrive if he doesn’t understand exactly how you skin majesty.

And this complete whale inversion isn’t even where the dark turn comes in. If lil’ Suzy thought she might never sleep again after you taught her what ‘horse pieces’ are, slip that bitch some pickled ginger because she’s going to need a palate cleanser for all the new horrors she’s about to taste.

Oh no! The last time the captain called you into his cabin, did you accidentally cry out “I need a boyfriend who won’t take it easy on me!” in whalese?! 

Halfway through this book about whaling, your ship sinks and you become stranded on the high seas. Don’t worry: We gloss over nothing.

“Hey Terry, did you write that wacky caption about corpse decomposition?”

“Sure did, Jim! Now what say we head on down to Chuck E. Cheese and piss in the ballpit?”

“Ah, the ol’ Jersey Cereal Bowl. You got yourself a date!”

Yes, in this book intended for 7-12 year olds (13 is too old! They will be jaded by then! The psychic wounds may heal without scarring!) you wind up eating your dead. The silly Mad cartoons just fail to capture the existential horror of that moment when you first see your friends as food.

Like here: Owen is displaying a Scooby-Doo level of scared, when we need him at least at a Hereditary.

At some point, the Little League team you coach is going to learn about sucking the marrow from the bones of their friends. If it’s not from you, it’s from the street. Do you really want them learning the grisly details of cannibalism from some pervert? What if he doesn’t even do the marrow slorping noises right? That’s a risk you can’t afford to take!

Look how mystified those two are — like they just can’t believe a little cousin-eating is society’s line. 

“Did ye explain about tonguing the marrow, Young Tom?”

“Of course, cap’n! Like licking a jagged honeycomb, I told ‘em.”

“And still they shun us? This world has gone soft, boy.”

“Mayhaps it’s your hand in my back pocket they find disconcerting, sir.”

“Back pockets haven’t been invented yet, Young Tom.”

“…”