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Nerding Day: Pokemon Training Video
Author: Lydia Bugg
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Once long ago, I thought I learned about the saddest book of all time. It was called Microwave Cooking For One, and I couldn’t think of a sadder thing than that until I discovered:
I don’t know what a normal hobby is, so sometimes I like to purchase and read magic spell books on Kindle. If you have Kindle Unlimited, you’ve probably got access to hundreds of magical spells for ten dollars a month. Kindle, your number one spot for occult magick! This is an ad. They paid for this and specifically said, please really hit the occult part. We here at Kindle want to be associated with that.
The people writing these Amazon-approved spells are genius con artists. They’re super short documents, sometimes as little as ten pages, and go for anywhere from three to ten dollars outside of Kindle Unlimited. So even if you only sell two copies, that’s nine to twenty dollars an hour. And that’s not bad– those are Target part-time seasonal employee numbers.
To become a Kindle spell writer, all you have to do is add Mystic, Mage, or Magical to your name and write a bio that says you’ve been a “professional practicing witch for decades,” because who’s going to verify that shit? Dumbledore? He can’t because he’s dead. Oh no, spoilers for Harry Potter guys.
These spells are often rated super high. Candle Magic for Beginners has a five-star rating with 700 reviews. This will never cease to blow my mind. Seven hundred people bought this book about magic candles and somehow got exactly what they were expecting? That seems impossible! I can’t even get candles to perform the magic of making my house smell less like a dog, and that’s all I want from them!
Sex Magick for the Solitary Practitioner has a solid 18 reviews that are mostly positive, with my favorite being:
It came in! Just by showing up, the book has done its job in this customer’s opinion. That’s how insatiable people’s thirst for magic spells is, even if the spells are kind of wrapped around the idea you’re going to die alone. If you can’t convince someone to have sex with you even when the sex will literally create magick, that certainly doesn’t speak very well for your romantic potential overall, right?
You might think Charles Mage, the writer of Sex Magick For The Solitary Practitioner, would be at least mildly embarrassed to be the author of a book about no one wanting your magic dick, but he’s not! He printed his name in the intro four times, lest you forget his involvement. He also includes a legal disclaimer in case you hurt your genitals by doing too much solo sex magic to them, which is something I’m sure ER doctors have some stories about.
After making sure you’ve read his name four times and know you can’t sue him for anything that might happen to your genitals on this harrowing masturbatory journey you’re about to embark on, Charles Mage then reveals to you this isn’t his only book. He is the Stephen King of sex dorks, having written forty seven other books, including Dowsing The Casino: Make Money Dowsing, Life Lessons From A Butterfly, and Fun Things To Do With Your Energy Ball, for when you have successfully created an otherworldly ball of energy, and now you’re like, well fuck… this is boring.
The book opens with Charles telling us that, for years, people have been searching for a handy (hee hee I see what you’re doing there, Charles) manual that offers clear instructions on solitary sex magic. He says, “Although done in solitary, it should be noted that the techniques in this book can pace away to a great and immeasurable divine power that you can harness for whatever purpose you need.”
Seeking a great and immeasurable divine power is the coolest slang for jerkin’ it I’ve ever heard. If there’s one thing I appreciate about this book, it’s that it makes masturbating sound like a Jules Verne adventure story. Journey To The Center Of My Balls, if you will. Around the World in 80 Anal Beads, maybe.
Charles starts by explaining that it’s actually really cool to do sex magic by yourself, like all of the cool kids are doing it, and it’s way cooler than sex magic with a partner.
So actually, if you have sex with another person, you’re kind of doing it wrong. The downside of sex magic with a partner is it merges your “soul and energy” with that person, which means you risk merging with someone who has a corrupt and immoral soul. Charles Mage, grifter author and masturbation sorcerer, strongly advises avoiding people with “dirty souls.”
Right off the bat, this is starting to sound a lot like the mystical version of a central Illinois sex education class. It’s definitely the most anti-sex occult sex magic novel I’ve ever read.
Now that we’ve established that having sex with other people is bad, let’s see what else this book thinks is bad! Ah yes, ejaculation.
No, Billy, ejaculation is for LOSERS. You are only allowed to have ghost orgasms. Oh, please allow Charles Mage to explain:
The scheduled Journey To The Center Of Your Balls has been canceled. It’s ok, though; because you can have multiple orgasms without ejaculating. How, you ask? It has something to do with energy? The book is firm on that. Like most books on magic, this book is very big on energy. Now what that means is… it’s something. Let’s let Charles try to explain.
Get it? All is energy, if you look at, inside of the, because we all, and then that’s what how we go to the energy. Right? Then when you orgasm, just do that thing with the energy? Cool.
It’s so fucking boss that Charles Mage started to write this book, and then after basically the intro, peaces the fuck out of it. He explains what sex magic is and that you shouldn’t ejaculate from it and then leaves “the universe” to teach you the rest, which is the most mystical way to do nothing. Imagine if a magician took the stage, put a lady in a box, pulled out a saw, and then left. “The universe will complete the trick for me everyone goodnight POOF. No refunds POOF.”
That’s not the actual end of the book. It’s only where Charles stopped pretending to give a fuck. He goes on to give some tips and advice, but they are things like…
He knows what he’s doing here– totally referring to a three-man orgy where one has had a terrible accident. Which is a weird wink to give in a book about how sex is bad, and if you’re going to do it, please don’t ejaculate, ew.
Then, in case, for whatever reason, you decide to use your newly discovered masturbatory powers for evil, he caps off the spellbook with a warning.
This magic spell sucks. It should at least pretend to give you some words to chant or something, right? The most you get out of this book is a recipe for making an energy ball in the section after they explain what energy is, and even those instructions only amount to “wave your hands around, pretend to have an energy ball, and great! Now you do!” How am I supposed to have fun with that!? Some weird, boring energy ball?
Ugh, fine, I see the long con Charles Mage is playing here. I’ll buy your Fun Things to Do with Your Energy Ball book, Charles! Who would have thought I’d be bested by the horniest, least ejaculated sex wizard on Earth.
You can follow Lydia on twitter for more advice on where to find horny sex wizards.
Categories
Upsetting Day: The Switch ðŸŒ
There’s a sacred relationship between fan fiction writers and fan fiction subjects whereby the person having fan fiction written about them agrees to pretend they don’t know it’s happening. Can you imagine a person so desperate for attention that they would read a fanfiction about themselves, enjoy it, and then advertise it on their personal website? The person you have just imagined is named Laura Loomer and the fan fiction is The Switch: Loomered.
The Switch takes place in a fictional world where Laura Loomer is a journalist and not a person who shows up at public events and screams incoherently until she gets kicked out and then asks people to pay her $4.99 to do it again. Calling Laura Loomer a journalist is like calling Bugs Bunny a close personal friend. You can say that, but I’m going to assume you’re crazy.
I hate Laura Loomer but I can’t expect everyone to be familiar with each of the alt-right supporting characters. She’s an idiot who embraced Nazi ideology despite having the head DNA of three old pumpkins and a Protoceratops. I figured I should include a picture of her for context, and this is how I looked that up:
And this is what Google came up with. Thank you, Google.
The Switch isn’t your typical fanfiction because it’s not a romance. It’s an action/spy thriller about Laura Loomer, an FBI agent, and a hero police dog named Lucky going after a Peruvian communist cult that’s teamed up with a group of terrorists to free a female cartel leader, blow up telecommunication towers, and kidnap CT&T’s CEO.
There’s also a plot point where the main character, FBI Special Agent Maria Quintana-Deon, and professional Assassin, Melissa Margarita Calderon Ojeda, were switched at birth. That’s why it’s called The Switch. There’s a lot going on, and none of it makes any sense, but to be fair, it has to have been written in about thirty minutes in a truck stop bathroom while passing an especially painful trip to Shooters Grill.
I was surprised to find that after reading chapter 13 of The Switch, I was once again reading chapter 12, which was followed by chapter 13 again, and then, of course, as we would all assume, Chapter 16. I should explain: they are different chapters, but the chapter headings were just mislabeled. And instead of fixing it, the author decided it was fine. Even the table of contents lists it this way.
The author, Julie Reichwein, probably thought, “Oh well, I’m publishing Laura Loomer fanfiction, it’s not like Laura Loomer is going to find this, and like it, and promote it on her website. No need to correct this error. That would be weird. As a Laura Loomer fan, everything I do is legally chimpanzee research anyway.”
Julie Reichwein also wasn’t sure what the rules were about mentioning a company’s name in your book. Especially if, say, you’re going to imply that the company is corrupt and out to get very real journalist Laura Loomer. Unfortunately, Reichwin is also terrible at coming up with fake names. YouTube became Friendtube, Facebook… Friendbook, Instagram… Friendagram, Twitter… Friendbird. I’m just kidding, it’s Jitter. And I’m frankly shocked at that burst of creativity.
The Switch has one hundred and three total chapters, some of which I’d estimate are around 200 words long and the longest is probably 2,000. Multiple characters come and go. It’s told in the first person, but lots of people have access to information they shouldn’t have, like what people they can’t see are doing, making everyone into all-knowing Gods. One guy narrates his own death.
Thanks for letting us know that you died, DEA agent Juan Quintana. That’s the entire chapter, and this is a major character in the book. He’s the adopted father of the main character and the biological father of the main antagonist. The fact that his death scene is just him saying, I died and then the chapter abruptly ends is truly amazing.
All of the action is like that. Julie Reichwein wants to get across that terrible things are happening but talking about them is icky, so she ends up doing a grocery list description of the action. I need to get milk and pickles, and Raul cut this guy’s arms off and drowned him in his arm blood, and… dill, I think?
This is the most cartoonishly violent scene imaginable. A woman cut out another woman’s breast implants and then shoved them down her throat, and it’s pretty boring to read, actually. It’s like describing the day as sunny and then swallowing the penis you bit off while the day was being described.
By the way, this chapter opens with my favorite two sentence combo in history. “I was a Maoist, Marxist, Leninist, and I would be until my last breath. In celebration of our attacks, I treated myself to the spicy chicken at the Sepahua hotel.” Even terrorists love spicy chicken! This is such a humanizing trait for Comrade Angela. Sure, she kind of ruined it by feeding a woman her own boobs thirty seconds later, but at least for a minute there, I had someone to root for.
Here’s a passage where the terrorists successfully destroy a major cellphone tower:
What happened to the tower? MELTED next question, please. Can…can we maybe get a better description of the towering inferno of steel as the explosion consumed the, NOPE. It melted. We’ve got fifteen other storylines to get to, NEXT.
Part of the issue might also be that Julie Reichwein, despite being an obvious piece of shit, isn’t very creative in coming up with unique ways for people to torture or bully others. It’s a lot of parts getting ripped off of bodies. Or to put it in a more exciting way, melted off. Anyway, the assassin seems pretty badass in the beginning when she says:
But then she immediately turns around and is like…
What, you’ll give them a lovely craft? “Look out, guys. I’ve got memorial soccer balls for days. I will lovingly embroider them because I take the time to make sure my enemies are terrorized Etsy style! That’s the lady assassin guarantee.”
There are literally sixteen different characters telling the story. And anytime the author gets bored, the character loudly announces, “And then I died!” and disappears forever, never to bother the plot again.
Despite taking up half the cover, the role Laura Loomer ends up playing in the book is tiny. It seems like a distinct possibility that to get more eyes on her book, Julie Reichwein threw Laura Loomer in at the last second and Loomer took the bait.
The Loomer of this book is a Pistachio Disguisey type trickster who works directly with the FBI. Most prominently, toward the beginning of the book, she disguises herself as the captured cartel assassin. How does she pull this off? With the help of an FBI tattoo artist, of course.
So, Laura Loomer now has permanent tattoos all over her body that match known murderers, and she will have them for the rest of her life. Seems like a bad plan. It’s not one small tattoo either; it’s a lot of tattoos. Here’s the complete list!
That’s a lot of body-altering for one mission that is one chapter long. You also may have clocked by now how weirdly thirsty The Switch is for the assassin character. We know two things about her: she’s tall and has big boobs, which gets repeated over and over.
This, combined with the fact that a woman is forced to eat her breast implants, makes me wonder if the author has some kind of big boob complex? Does she think breast size is directly linked to terrorism? Is the world just full of big titty terrorists looking to maul America with their breasts of doom? There’s a planned sequel to this book, and I bet Breasts Of Doom is the title. Maybe Escape From Chichen Titza. Wait, no, Santa Fe Nights, Carlsbad Knockers.
So there’s obviously a lot of racism in this book. Other than the general badness of a cast full of brown people running around using children as human shields and drinking the blood of their victims, there’s weird stuff too. The author will often write a phrase out in Spanish and then translate it to English to stretch out the book. These phrases are made to sound like folksy Mexican expressions, except they make no sense.
A face like a busy telephone? I can’t even begin to imagine what that looks like? Is her face blinking? Is she screaming, “Beep, beep, beep?” This reference is so weird and dated that realistically some of the younger people reading this book have probably never even heard a busy telephone. God, I hope no one that young is reading this book.
Is this supposed to be a religious version of before she has a cow? I’m not sure, but it was written by a woman who thinks “bronze skin” protects you from mosquito bites, so it’s probably bad.
Does she realize it’s not literally bronze? Does she think mosquitoes starve to death when they leave the suburbs? Who knows? Julie Reichwrin claims the book was inspired by a 1993 trip she took to Peru. So this is a woman who has seen the world and decided she hates it.
It ends with a lot of people dead, but the terrorists mostly come out on top due to the corrupt American government. It’s such a confused piece of writing. It’s like, “Fuck the police, except for the uncorrupted police who are so few, but man, those few are heroes! Also, screw the liberal media, except mainly what Laura Loomer does is “expose corruption” to the “liberal media” who then pressure politicians to act?
I guess the overall message is something about how terrorists have really big boobs? Hey guys, I was going to come up with a good ending for this article, but then I died in a pool of my blood.
You should follow Lydia on Friendbird!
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