Author: Lydia Bugg
Unlock with Patreon
Categories
Fucking Day: My Mutant Heart
I’m always fascinated by the internet presence brands cultivate. Life used to be simple for marketers. Don Draper could get trashed all night and then go make one intense five minute speech about how Arby’s roast beef sandwiches taste like kicking your childhood bully’s ass and make seven million dollars. Now brands have to come up with a constant daily stream of themed content across at least four social media platforms, and it is rough.
Arby’s is just using its Twitter platform to bully people into screaming about meat at this point. The world of online junk food marketing is madness, so of course, I wanted to dive deeper into it. Four months ago, I signed up for the Mountain Dew Dewsletter. I was promised exclusive offers, insider content, fresh news, and epic giveaways in what I assumed would be a weekly email blast from the over-caffeinated sherpas who harvest the Mountain Dew. I haven’t received a single email in four months. Yes, I checked my spam. Mountain Dew ghosted me.
They confirmed that I signed up for the Dewsletter and then disappeared into the night. I feel like a World War I widow awaiting a letter from the front. Where is my beverage? Is it thinking of me?
It’s not like Mountain Dew hasn’t had shit going on. In late June, they reintroduced Mountain Dew Typhoon, which I wouldn’t have known if I wasn’t dedicated to keeping up with Mountain Dew news on my own time. Gee, if only there were some kind of collection of Mountain Dew facts that I could have emailed to me weekly so I wouldn’t have to hunt them down on my own… some kind of… Dewsletter they could call it!
Anyway, Mountain Dew is my mortal enemy now. Most websites are begging to send me emails. I can’t get them to stop emailing me just to say hi, remind me that they exist, and ask for my money. Meanwhile, I’m over here begging for a single sliver of Mountain Dew information like some sort of beverage spy, and suddenly they want to keep their Dewey secrets.
So, I’m going to tell you about the worst thing Mountain Dew has ever done. No, I’m not talking about the time they unwisely decided to try and let the internet name their latest flavor and ended up with top polled results like, Mountain Dew Hitler Did Nothing Wrong, Mountain Dew Gushing Granny, and Mountain Dew Sierra Mist. I’m talking about the absolutely nightmare-inducing recipe section of their website.
In 2020, Mountain Dew celebrated COVID by releasing a limited run of cookbooks on their website that quickly sold out and are now pretty difficult to find thanks to their main audience, people who have lost their ability to taste, recently seeing a huge increase. These cookbooks now resell for around a hundred dollars, and I think the idea of resellers making that much money off their product pissed Mountain Dew off because they’ve been slowly leaking the recipes from the book on their website. I know for a fact that the cookbook featured their recipe for Mountain Dew grilled cheese. The only effective way to ruin cheese, God’s only perfect creation. “Your God is dead,” says MTN DEW® GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICH.
The color and ooziness of that cheese is so profoundly unsettling. It looks like the aftermath of Slimer and Lady Silmer’s date night. It doesn’t just look horrendous, though; it’s also more difficult to make than a regular grilled cheese, and I guarantee you it tastes worse. That’s got to taste like a used nicotine gum sandwich, fucked for twenty minutes by two class five full roaming vapors.
The recipe calls for you to salt butter, a thing that is only milk fat and salt. Also, you need two half sticks of butter. I’m not sure if that means one full stick, or is it referring to half a cup of butter which is one stick, and you actually need two full sticks of butter. I’m sorry that food math is complicated, but I’m trying to figure out how likely this grilled cheese is to explode my heart.
I watched someone on TikTok make this recipe. I’m pretty sure Mountain Dew paid him to because he took the world’s tiniest bite, made a face like he just remembered a witch predicted this was how he would die, then said, “Mmmm, this is delicious.” Plus, he didn’t post another video for six weeks and it was his mother reading an essay called “Things I Wished I’d Done Before I Died of Diarrhea.”
It’s difficult to make a bunch of cheese and double-salted butter taste bad, but dunking it in neon corn syrup probably accomplished it. The principle behind most of the Mountain Dew website recipes seems to be: throw enough butter at Mountain Dew and it will become butter. The obvious problem with these recipes is that they contain Mountain Dew when they should not. Take, for instance, Mountain Dew’s attempt to piss off Italians.
I get what they were going for with this. They replaced the wine you typically use to deglaze your pan in chicken piccata with Mountain Dew, and they took out the lemon because Mountain Dew tastes kind of like lemon, supposedly. To me it tastes like a lemon that gave up on its dreams and started huffing gasoline. It tastes like pancake syrup trying to describe that lemon to the police.
A sentence I never expected to write pre-apocalypse is: there’s a full two cups of Mountain Dew in this chicken piccata! That’s not a small amount of Mountain Dew. Even reduced by half, these noodles will be soaked in it, and this is a recipe that doesn’t usually contain any sugar, which is the primary ingredient of Mountain Dew. It’s wet Mountain Dew chicken and noodles. These maniacs poured a can of soda over their dinner and called it a recipe. This whole thing may be a long con Mountain Dew is playing on their fans. It’s like when a bully in the cafeteria gives you food and then says, “Dude, sick, I can’t believe you ate that!”
The Italians weren’t the only culture Mountain Dew needlessly attacked with flavor. Let’s travel south of the border via an Appleebee’s menu for…
This recipe calls for you to marinate the jalapeno’s in Mountain Dew for an hour. Then you also add half a cup of Mountain Dew to the stuffing. It’s too much Dew! I insinuated before that they were hiding the Dew in butter, and now I want to return to that. They should hide the Dew. They should be ashamed of it.
The audacity of a recipe that calls for you to ruin a package of bacon, in this day and age where bacon costs ten dollars a package, is unbelievable. They may as well suggest that you chuck the bacon into the ocean and watch it float away. The delicate wafting of meat in the waves would give you more satisfaction than eating soggy Mountain Dew-soaked jalapenos.
I could only find one person who attempted this recipe, and he said it was soggy but also pretty salty and good. However, he also poached an egg in Mountain Dew, so I’m pretty sure he’s a deep fake of a man that’s been layered over a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew to spread their propaganda. When I emailed him about this article, the reply was, “I’m his mother, and his family has heard enough jokes about the MTN DEW jalapeno poppers. There is nothing funny about a son dying of diarrhea.”
In case you were worried Mountain Dew left Asian cuisine untouched, have no fear! There’s no dish that Mountain Dew will not desecrate.
The TikToker that Mountain Dew paid to create this dish said, “Trust me, this is on another level.” I’m pretty sure that level is the cenobite dimension, and this dinner is the puzzle box that will summon them.
The Mountain Dew website also has a sangria they claim is haunted, which I totally believe. It combines white wine, brandy, Mountain Dew Code Red, and Mountain Dew Live Wire. There’s a Code Red beef brisket, a Live Wire orange chicken, and even a Mountain Dew Fruitcake, which might not be worse than any other fruitcake!
I’m sorry that I had to do this to you, Mountain Dew. Maybe if you had emailed me like I wanted, all of your dirty secrets could have stayed hidden. Well, guess what? I’m unsubscribing from your little Dewsletter. I’ll get my Mountain Dew news the way normal people do, from the man in the adult Mountain Dew costume I pay to come to my house and tell me I’m pretty.
I’ll live out the rest of my days as an exile from the Dew Nation. A woman Mountain Dewmed to roam the earth unaware if Pitch Black is ever returning to shelves. Nope, I can’t do it; someone, anyone, please email me if Mountain Dew Pitch Black ever returns to shelves!
…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: 3 Finger Louie, who is the Yellow Dye #8b in our Hillbilly Holler taco.
Categories
Upsetting Day: Food Boy!
Categories
Fucking Day: Love in the Jungle
Categories
Punching Day: FaceGym ðŸŒ
I used to think the perfect job was the person at the top of a waterslide who tells people when to go. You get to experience godlike power over another human being’s life for a small amount of time with very little consequence if you do a bad job. However, you probably have to clean up a small child’s fear vomit sometimes. The point is, there’s a downside to everything; no job is perfect, except for the job where rich people pay you to slap them in the face.
The woman doing the slapping in that video has the best job in the world. She works at a place called FaceGym, where slapping rich people isn’t just allowed; it’s a job requirement.
FaceGym is a growing UK skincare brand selling a specialized face slapping technique that I was sure must have been done in by the pandemic. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but something about it didn’t seem pandemic friendly to me. Maybe it’s the fact that their version of skincare is having someone grease up their fingers and rub them all over your mouth and nose.
I’m sorry if I made it sound like they JUST slap you in the face earlier. That diminishes the scope of what FaceGym provides. They also have a service wherein someone wraps their arms around your neck and puts you in a sleeper hold. They call that move the Ichabod Crane. You can’t be ugly if you don’t have a head. They’ll see if they can pop that bad boy right off for you.
The idea behind FaceGym is that by exercising the muscles in your face you can sculpt them to prevent wrinkles without any kind of invasive surgery. That’s right, it’s totally noninvasive! It’s simply painful for other reasons! You can buy FaceGym products online, or you can go into a store where for around a hundred and twenty dollars, one of their employees will smack you around for fifty full minutes.
I feel like now that Botox is widely available enough that even my middle class midwestern aunts can afford it, rich people have to resort to wilder and wilder methods of preventing visible signs of aging. Inge Theron, the woman who created FaceGym, loves to push how natural and body-positive the process of slapping your face fat around until you’re perfectly smooth is. Last year, she told Forbes magazine, “My message is this: you’re already great, but let’s see how we can make you even better.” One of the natural beauty methods FaceGym uses is putting women in a Hannibal Lecter mask that will electrocute them.
You too can get the smooth, wrinkle-free complexion of Uncle Fester from the Addams Family with this four hundred and fifteen dollar device designed to give an instant lift to your complexion. Your face will be up so high after you introduce enough electricity to it naturally.
Inge Theron is a former journalist who covered the beauty and wellness beat. She claims the idea for FaceGym came to her after three years of travel and research. She says she “worked with fitness instructors, dermatologists, facial therapists, and even a Mexican shaman to align ancient wisdom with modern technologies.” I thought the most ancient wisdom we have as a society is not to pay someone a hundred and twenty dollars to slap you in the face, regardless of how dripping wet their hands are.
I know there are plenty of other things that people do to their bodies in the name of beauty that look dorky as hell. There’s a medical procedure called a Brazilian butt lift that’s so popular Amazon sells multiple inflatable beds with recovery butt holes in them so your butt can properly heal post butt-perfecting surgery.
Red light therapy masks are also very popular right now, and they look like misplaced horror movie props that no one was willing to tell Gwyneth Paltrow she’d mistaken for skincare. Everyone understands they look nightmarish, but no one is willing to stop using them for that reason alone. One of these masks could latch onto a face and pull it to hell every full moon, but if you made a case for it being 15% more effective than lotion alone, women would take that chance. Personally, I’d be willing to deal with one to two blood filled elevators, some lights flickering, and the occasional disembodied laughter of a ghost child but not for anything less than twenty percent better visible results.
FaceGym seems extra dumb to me because I have a theory that how much something sucks is directly tied to how branded it is. For instance, if you walk into a restaurant and you’re greeted by a man in a pirate hat who tells you that you “arrrrrr about to have some amazin’ fish and chips,” you’re about to eat the worst goddamn fish and chips you’ve had in your entire life. If the fish and chips were good, you wouldn’t have to sacrifice a man’s dignity to get me into the restaurant. The same principle applies to skincare.
If the facials were good, FaceGym probably wouldn’t have all of their employees dress like personal trainers in workout pants and tank tops. They wouldn’t have you put on an unnecessary little sweatband to start your face workout, and they wouldn’t have a tiny branded exercise ball you rub on your face because it’s something you would see at the gym but tiny for FaceGym!
When FaceGym was founded in 2015, there was a move toward natural beauty, which meant very expensive unnatural things that made you look so good it didn’t seem like you paid money to have them done. Inge Theron was jumping on that trend, but it looks like over time, what she learned is that people don’t want to feel naturally beautiful. They’re more into getting a series of tiny shocks from metal sloth fingers as they gently glide across your face.
Or maybe having your skin flavor-blasted to hell by a jet-powered puff of air and various serums they keep in an IV bag for some reason? I’m sure it’s a holistic IV bag made from the skin of organic soup and beeswax with a hint of mountain spring water filtered through the tear ducts of an endangered elephant (who was made to cry through all natural means).
You might be wondering how this moist, mucous membrane-smearing business made it through the pandemic. FaceGym managed to survive while other skin care specialists closed down because, it turns out, people who FaceGym are more than willing to pay for exclusive online classes to learn how to slap themselves in the face at home. 
This is a still from FaceGym’s Instagram page, showing off their outdoor class. An instructor is teaching these women how to do the old greasy slap. Sorry, I’m being told I can’t call it that because FaceGym has trademarked the term Old Greasy Slap™. It’s their newest treatment! It’s administered in the alley behind the FaceGym by a woman going through a painful divorce and you have to wear a mask that looks just like her ex’s face. It costs nine hundred dollars, but for an extra three fifty she’ll also electrocute you. God, I want to work at FaceGym.
