Author: Merritt K

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Zolar: The Roleplaying Game 🌭

Hey, glad you could make it. Turns out the rest of the crew couldn’t be here, though. Yeah, Jessie’s got a stomach thing, Kareem’s dogsitting, and Dave got grabbed by ICE. It’s cool, though. I picked up this new one-shot game we can play instead of our regular campaign. I know, I really wanted to see how the party dealt with the Sex Gnomes of the Underfuck too. Hopefully we can bust Dave out next week. But for now, let’s try Zolar: The Official Roleplaying Game!

You remember Zolar, right? The made-for-TV movie? Maybe you didn’t see it. I think it only ever aired once on Canadian television in 2004. It might have been one of those tax things you hear about. But don’t worry, you’ll pick it up as you go. I’ll be the Game Master, and you’ll be Zolar. Here’s your character sheet.

As Zolar, you have three stats: FRIENDS, SKATE, and BLUE. You’ll use these to overcome the various challenges set out before you. For each point, you roll one Official Zolar: The Extreme Sports Movie: The Roleplaying Game die. Each Zolar face represents a success, while other characters are failures. If all three stats are reduced to zero, you fail in your quest. Ready? Let’s get started! Or, as Zolar might say, blueyeah! That’s one of his catchphrases.

Your name is Zolar. For as long as you can remember, you have lived with a laconic man named Skip in his oversized van. Skip discovered you as an infant lying in a crater one night, and like Pa Kent and Son Gohan before him, decided to raise you as his own son. Unfortunately, you don’t blend in with the population quite as well as Superman or Goku — you have blue skin, a large, bulbous nose, a braided topknot, and fins for ears. You grow up in the wilds of British Columbia, drawn to extreme sports from a young age.

You have never known another life, but some nights, laying awake in your adoptive father’s carhome, you wonder. You wonder where you came from. You wonder what it would be like to have friends. You wonder if your alien genitals are compatible with those of earth lifeforms.

And then one day, everything changes. You watch from within the van as your father goes out to greet a group of kids your age. They’ve been sent by pro skateboarder Jason Ellis to seek Skip’s coaching, because they want to be extreme athletes but they fucking suck at skateboarding. Your dad agrees to train them under one condition — that you be allowed to join their team. This is your chance. Roll BLUE to impress your new best friends and teammates.

Damn. You burst out of the van looking like a colloidal silver-poisoned Shrek. Not only are these kids not impressed with you, they’re actually laughing. You don’t have much of a baseline for how human beings might react to seeing a real-life alien, but laughter feels hurtful. They’re not even afraid of you. One of them, this little weasel named Brett, openly says that he doesn’t want to skate with an alien because he thinks it’ll tank the team’s already-dismal cred.

Have these kids seen a lot of aliens before? Has your Skip dad been keeping you away from a society that would in fact have no issue with your existence? You have so many questions. But they’ll have to wait — Brett’s bailed, so there’s a spot on the team open. You immediately dub the group “Team Zolar” despite being the most junior member and everyone just kind of rolls with it. Maybe they really are afraid of you?

But there’s someone who isn’t. While you’re skating and goofing off with your new human pals, a man watches from the distance through high-tech goggles. He— yeah, you don’t know any of this in-character. Just think of it as like, a cutscene. He leers at your antics and informs his superior, Hedion, that you are forming an army. Hedion looks like, uh, imagine C. Thomas Howell with a ton of red shit on his head and a finger for a nose. Kind of like that.

Hedion’s a little smarter than his goon, Prentiss. He says that you’re just making friends. Prentiss makes a crack about how you don’t have any friends. Ouch. Hedion muses that Zolar is one of the most powerful beings “on the universe” but doesn’t know it yet. Remember though, no metagaming. You — Zolar — don’t know about your godlike powers at this point.

You do a lot of training, during which your SKATE increases to 4. We can skip over that, though. It’s two weeks later, and it’s time for the Big Skate Tournament. Your teammates rack up pretty solid scores. Skip’s coaching has paid off. Now you’re up.

You stand on the edge of the halfpipe, nervous energy rushing through you. You can do this. You’ve been training for this your whole life. Roll SKATE to pull off some sick moves.

Jeez. Zero again, huh. I’m not going to mince words: you eat shit. Repeatedly. Nobody seems to notice that you look like an anaphylactic Gillman. All they can see is the dishonor you’re doing to the Skate Gods, and here in their temple, no less. This is bad. Skating is all you’ve got. You’re going to get kicked off the team. You need a distraction.

Lucky you! You get one, in the form of a portal opening above the halfpipe and unleashing magical lightning that stops time for everyone but you and your team. Before you have a chance to wonder what’s going on, grinning Dark Skaters appear and begin to chase you!

Quick, roll SKATE again to evade them!

Not bad! You’re able to stay ahead of your mysterious pursuers. But skating alone isn’t going to get you out of this one. Roll BLUE!

You did it! As you form the image of a wish in your mind, a slumbering power wakes within you! Surrounded by a shield of glowing blue energy, you batter your foes into submission! You gain 1 BLUE from the battle! But it’s not over yet. A hideous-looking alien appears to rally his troops. It’s Prentiss, the guy from earlier, in his true, disgusting form, equipped with Combat Tracksuit, Silver Medal, and Power Glove!

Prentiss and his skate-soldiers open fire on you with deadly alien beams! Roll BLUE again to stop them from killing you and the closest thing you’ve ever had to a friend group.

You halt the lasers with a magic force field and then weaponize it against your attackers to knock them unconscious! But with only one success, you ruin the moment by doing a stupid dance and rambling about how great you are while your teammates look on in baffled disgust.

Later, around a burning barrel down by the docks, Skip tells the kids your big secret: you’re an alien. They seem genuinely surprised, to the point that you wonder if some of them might have incurred traumatic brain injuries from all of their bails. But nonetheless, they decide to stick with you for the sake of possibly winning a skate competition. Congratulations, your FRIENDS stat has increased to 4!

Resolve strengthened, Skip drives you all to the home of professional freestyle motocross rider Mike Metzger, whom he says will have useful information. Mike, it turns out, is an alien.

In fact, he explains, most extreme athletes are aliens, and extreme sports are coded versions of alien rituals. Are your friends then appropriating religiously significant performances whose meaning they could scarcely guess at? Maybe! The important thing is, your meeting with them wasn’t by chance. This was all arranged by aliens to give you, Zolar, friends your own age! But that’s not all. Mike Metzger reveals that you hail from a world named Zorcania, where everyone has a power called “Sirrus.” When you take it offworld, Sirrus becomes the most powerful force in the universe. Hedion found out about this and came after Zorcania, but your planets invested all of their alien chi into you and launched you into space. What? Yeah, I guess that does sound kind of a lot like Superman. The revelation of your origins grants you a deeper understanding of your latent powers. Increase your BLUE to 4!

Still, you’re reeling from the news that you once had biological parents. I guess you never thought about that before. But then you hear something unexpected — two voices calling your name. You step outside and see two blue adults who can only be your parents smiling and beckoning to you! The timing is a little suspicious, given that you literally just heard about how they exploded on their home planet years ago. Unfortunately, you don’t have any stat that might let you detect a possible deception. You immediately decide to give up the only life you’ve ever known for the uncertainty of the stars. Saying your goodbyes, you depart with your parents for New Zorcania.

Your parents lead you to a pavilion in the center of a public park. They seem kind of businesslike, ushering you forward and into a room dominated by two large reclining metal chairs that face one another. Roll BLUE to try and intuit the use of these devices of Zorcanian manufacture.

You’re still too excited about meeting your parents to focus properly. Your Sirrus merely inflates your big, stupid head until your mom tells you to cut it out. There will probably be a lot of these kinds of interactions in your future — you goofing off, your mom telling you “no head inflating at the dinner table.” You relish the thought. For now, though, get those shoes off. Your dad says that the ship is controlled by the union of two bare sets of little piggies.

What? This is not exactly like the time you had to tonguebathe the feet of Garzobol the Sex Gnome to get the secret directions to the Underfuck. I didn’t write this! It’s in the adventure. Look, I’ll prove it. Here’s what it says next:

[As you press your cerulean tootsies against those of the man who spawned you, a curious energy cascades across your body. Suddenly, his feet transform into the grotesque talons of a chicken as he moans in orgasmic pleasure.]

See, dude? I know. It’s fucking weird. Let’s just push through this and move on. And sorry, but it’s more bad news — that machine drained your Sirrus! Your BLUE stat drops to 0 as your power is transferred to your “father,” who is another alien working with Prentiss named Geommer! Things look bad. Roll FRIENDS to see if your pals rescue you even after you immediately abandoned them at the first sign of something better!

Alright, three successes gets you a little girl with Barbie nunchuks and a projectile skateboard! Geommer is bowled over by the attack, but now it’s his turn. Instead of staying to fight, he activates a time bomb and teleports away, leaving you and Prentiss to be consumed by the explosion! With no BLUE left, you’re too drained to do much else but lay there like a half-dead Smurf on human growth hormone. Your friends drag you and Prentiss away just in time.

Hopelessly outmatched by four children, Prentiss spills the beans. Geommer was hired to steal your power for Hedion, just like him. But he’s decided he’s going to keep it for himself instead. And to keep Hedion off his trail, he’s going to kill you, Prentiss, and everyone else in the town by focusing his Sirrus energy to create a massive death ray!

But for that to work, he has to head to the highest point in town, atop a snowy peak. You’ve got to get up there and stop him. Just one problem: you’re all out of BLUE, which is the only thing that can defeat Geommer! But I’ll let you recover some if you succeed on a FRIENDS roll.

Goddamn! Your BLUE hits an all-time high of 5, generating an enormous shockwave of Surrus energy. You only ruin it a little by saying “I got my blue on,” and “blue-yeah!”

This is it. The final conflict. Geommer’s set up with another alien dentist chair attached to his death ray. But before you go out there, your friends have one last trick up their sleeves. They sent Prentiss out to try and trick Geommer by shapeshifting into Hedion. I’ll roll using Prentiss’s DECEIVE stat.

Oof. Geommer sees right through the obvious ruse and blasts Prentiss with the death ray, launching him off the mountain to his demise.

Your friends respond with light laughter, as if they’d just seen a man sit on a whoopee cushion rather than witness a sentient life erased in the blink of an eye with godlike power from beyond the stars.

You’re up, Zolar. Roll BLUE one last time.

Blue-yeah! Let me just check on the Surrus power table… it looks like you emit a devastating explosion that annihilates Geommer! Or… do you? The day is saved for now, and you return to your friends. But elsewhere, a heavily burned-up Geommer communicates with Hedion. He has a new plan, he says, as he morphs into Brett, the kid who left the skate team at the beginning of the movie!

Was he Brett the whole time? Did he kill this child and assume his identity? I don’t know. I think they were going to answer that in the next release, but it never came out.

Well, that didn’t take as long as I thought it would. There’s a little epilogue to the adventure if you’re interested? Yeah? Ok, let’s do it. For this one, you’re going to be playing as Nicki Clyne, the 21-year-old actress who portrayed the girl Keiko.

Nicki has three stats: GASLIGHT, GATEKEEP, and GIRLBOSS.

You are Nicki Clyne, Canadian actress. Things were going pretty well for you for the last few years. You moved up from roles like “Girl Student #2” to making named guest appearances on shows like The L Word, and you even landed a regular gig on the Battlestar Galactica miniseries, which looks like it might get picked up as a series.

But last year, something went terribly wrong. Your agent got you a role in this dogshit Canadian made-for-TV movie called Zolar that was directed by a guy who worked on Vampire Academy and Big Wolf on Campus. Bizarre CanCon stuff that gets zero distribution in America. As an up-and-coming actress, you shouldn’t be doing Canadian TV — you’re trying to get to Hollywood! It just seems so impossible to break through. There are so many other women with the same goal who are better connected, prettier, who went to acting school. And just when things were taking off for you: Zolar.

It’s November, and the foul weather isn’t helping your depression. You’re willing to try anything to take your career to the next level. So you decide to go to an intensive workshop put on by a company called Executive Success Programs. It’s a lot of people talking about maximizing your potential and achieving your goals. Roll GIRLBOSS to see if this is just bullshit.

It seems legit! Everyone’s so friendly and they all seem to have their shit together. You start going to more and more ESP events. One day, you meet the owner of the company, a handsome American in his late 40s. He’s charming and magnetic, and you become involved sexually. You feel like things are finally starting to go your way. Battlestar came through and you’re spending more and more time with your lover, helping him build his organization and getting other young women involved, helping them just like the group has helped you. But some people end up leaving and making some pretty gross accusations. Roll GASLIGHT to convince everyone else that they’re full of shit.

Obviously these girls are just jealous of you! I mean, the Dalai Lama presented your lover with a scarf onstage! The Dalai Lama! It’s not like he’d be a part of any organization that turned a blind eye to abuse!

But things manage to take a turn for the worse. In 2019, your lover is convicted on charges of human trafficking and sexual abuse. What do you do? Surely, now you want to step b— you want to double down on your support for him? Well, alright… roll GATEKEEP to try and pull it off.

You go on CBS News This Morning to defend your lover, claim that the FBI framed him, and stage a weird dance performance outside the Brooklyn prison where he’s detained. It mostly just makes you look really sad — except for the parts that make you look evil, like when you threaten to publicly identify the women your lover abused. This isn’t going great. The last acting gig you had was voicing a character in a motion comic in 2010, and you’re a defendant in a civil suit. You’re going to have to GASLIGHT yourself if you want to get out of this one.

Congratulations! You, Nicki Clyne, somehow didn’t slink away in shame after years of defending sex criminal Keith Raniere and his NXIVM cult, in which you played a major role. Instead, you’ve reinvented yourself as a brave truth-teller slash woo-woo influencer who rails against woke culture, hangs out with James Lindsay, and brutally abuses MLK Jr. quotes.

Yet there are days when a bitter truth worms its way to the surface of your psyche. Not that you enabled and assisted the mass abuse of women — you’re fine with that — but the fact that no matter what you do, what you accomplish, you will always have played a girl named Keiko in a movie called Zolar about a blue space monster who can sort of skateboard.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: John McCammon, who never learned to skateboard and now has zero interest in rectifying that. Another childhood dream ruined thanks to Canadian TV.

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Gene Simmons’ Firestarter Cover

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Holy Spirit Miracle Academy

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Peachtree Carnivore 🌭

Explaining what I do here at 1-900 HOT DOG has proven difficult lately. Telling less online friends, prospective romantic partners, and cab drivers that I write about “uh, like old stuff? But funny. Like it’s weird, you know? Snailiens, haha. That one stupid Olympics mascot?” is getting tiresome. I’m pivoting: from now on, no more hemming or hawing. I’m a literary critic.

It sounds important. Not The New York Times Book Review important — the New York Review of Books important. But what work to discuss for my first column? I’ve recently read and enjoyed one new and one upcoming title from my Hot Dog colleagues, but I would hate to be accused of bias. (It’s about ethics in literary criticism.) Instead, I’ll consider Peachtree Carnivore, a text brought to my attention by esteemed community member Agent of Fortune. It is available exclusively in PDF format and doesn’t have a cover, but I’ve taken the liberty of creating one based on the image that graces the first page of the file.

Many of the great works of literature deploy narrative in service of a social argument. Madame Bovary rails against the romantic delusions of the bourgeoisie. Brave New World warns against a future where humanity is enslaved by means more insidious than punitive repression. And Ready Player One passionately urges us to never, ever forget Ghostbusters.

Peachtree Carnivore by Mark Mitchell is such a work. Its argument? That the all-meat diet which put Jordan Peterson into a coma is not only healthy, but indeed extends the human lifespan and transforms its adherents into erotic dynamos. Its author informs us that it is “not for the faint of heart.” Regretfully, it seems that he has fallen into the vogue of deploying “content warnings” for the overly sensitive modern reader. But perhaps this was merely a small concession to prevailing literary sensibilities. Onward.

It is commonly supposed that whatsoever a character is doing the first time we meet them should tell us about what kind of person they are. Economy of storytelling, etc. When we meet Jack, the narrator of Peachtree Carnivore, he is doing two things: thinking about meat and analyzing the hips of a woman he’s just met vis-a-vis their birthing capabilities.

Boy meets girl. A timeless foundation of fiction. Boy is Jack Mason — sixty-something, unemployed, living off the inheritance provided by his abruptly deceased parents. Girl is Gladys Clayton, personal assistant to Jack’s dear friend and ethical billionaire Sam Grayson. Sam has sent Gladys to retrieve a book from Jack, but their introductions quickly take a turn for the libidinous.

Lest you think that our protagonist is motivated solely by the carnal pursuits, Mitchell is quick to point out that he is rather brainy as well.

And neither is he the sort of jobless senior citizen who is attracted solely to women forty-five years his junior. No, he can appreciate the beauty of a woman merely twenty years younger than him, especially one who herself cannot discern her charms for herself.

But what of the book? A Shakespeare first folio, which you may recognize as being doubly superlative — the rarest edition of a work by the most famous author in the English language. Note how Mitchell contrasts the high-brow context of the Bard with the bawdy actions of his characters, perhaps a commentary on the transformation of Shakespeare from ribald popular entertainment in his own time to dreaded, stuffy high school text in ours.

Needless to say, these two lovers find themselves tumbling into one another’s arms. Of course, sexual congress is famously difficult to write. What is erotic to the author may be repulsive to the reader. Mitchell slices this Gordian Knot by handwaving most of the actual acts themselves, preferring to describe the preliminaries and post-scripts.

Note the use of the term “gob.” An unusual choice in such a scene, to be sure. Slang for the mouth, it is typically used in gustatory — rather than amorous — contexts. But Mitchell repeatedly deploys it here. “Gorgeous gob,” “exquisite gob,” and so on. Grotesque? Parody? Or a sly elision of consumption and consummation?

It certainly did! And with the oral examination complete, Jack and Gladys move on to the main course. Gladys was, of course, a virgin up until this encounter. And now, the two are deliriously in love.

They decide to marry immediately as they are both of the conservative, traditional persuasion.

But first, Jack offers to coach Gladys on moving away from the SAD (Standard American Diet) and embracing the carnivore lifestyle which has granted him vitality atypical of his advanced age.

Jack’s carnivore diet is responsible for not just his youthful looks and healthy physique, but a clean-smelling breath and fine-tasting emissions.

As the couple feverishly makes plans for their future, Mitchell provides an early twist: this apparently chance meeting was in fact engineered by Sam, Gladys’s employer and Jack’s closest friend. Jack informs Sam and his wife Clara that he and Gladys intend to wed, being staunch moral traditionalists who have known each other for less than twelve hours and have already had intimate relations out of wedlock.

Many a male author stumbles when approaching the task of writing female characters who are believable, multi-dimensional human beings. Mitchell, thankfully, accomplishes this with gusto. Consider this passage, in which Clara and Gladys discuss the latter’s upcoming nuptials.

Note also Mitchell’s unconventional use of the characters’ names at the beginning of each line of dialogue. A mark of a literary nonconformist, as is his alternation — seemingly without rhyme or rhythm — between present and past tenses.

Unrealistic? Absurd? Contemptuous? Certainly the woke literary establishment would have you believe as much. But consider that in addition to her voracious hunger for seminal fluids, Gladys has another, quite intellectual hunger.

Yes, Gladys is a magnificent speed reader. So-called “scientists” may be skeptical of claims of reading more than 1,000 words per minute, but said scientists also believe that a diet consisting solely of meat and eggs is “unhealthy,” rather than inspiring the kind of sexual power that most men can only dream of.

Jack has interests beyond boluses, however. He quickly introduces his wife-to-be to his suitably impressive home stereo setup.

No buffering! Jack is a man of means. And broad taste, besides.

No divas, boy bands, or rap. Uncharitable readers might detect something of a commonality between two of those three genres, but recall that Jack is a conservative thinker. It’s modernity he despises, not any particular racial group. And while he’s certainly had detailed sexual thoughts about his best friend’s wife, he finds the notion that she might want to bed him quite surprising.

Yet at their wedding, Gladys proves to be somewhat less traditional than she initially made herself out to be.

Then again, Clara isn’t the only woman Gladys embraces in such a manner:

Is it “untraditional” for a man to analyze the cup size of his new wife’s mother? Is it “not conservative” for a woman to kiss her elderly mother on the lips? Mitchell ironically juxtaposes these scenarios with his characters’ disgust towards degenerate, craven wokeness. But they live in a world ruled by the socialist agenda, which at some point in the past made multiple marriage legal.

Jack demurs. He’s attracted to Clara, no doubt, but demonstrates the courage of his convictions in his reluctance to act on those feelings. The law does not determine what is just.

And yet.

Less than an hour later, Jack is achieving simultaneous (heterosexual) climax with his best friend. How to explain this apparent reversal? Stranger things have happened in reality. Is it not unfair to expect fiction to follow staid, predictable character arcs? In day-to-day life, people make irrational decisions which run contrary to their stated beliefs all the time. And let it not be said that anyone in this erotic configuration is homosexual.

The two couples fall into a sort of double marriage. And while Jack may study the precise length and girth of Sam’s phallus, muse on the shape of his body, and plunge his own member into the depths of his wife only moments after his companion has reached climax inside of her, he is emphatically heterosexual.

Jack meets Gladys’s parents and explains his carnivorous lifestyle to them.

He assures Gladys’s parents that she is in good hands. Jack has more money than he knows what to do with, looks forty thirty five, and knows a great deal about dietary science.

Convinced by his extolling of the benefits of the carnivore diet, Glenn and Martha gradually take it up and find that their health improves rapidly. The family is also able to move Glenn’s eighty-something-year-old father, Carl, into a private nursing home which is amenable to Jack’s special diet. Previously suffering from cognitive decline, he begins to make a miraculous recovery as a result of ditching carbohydrates.

If Jack had an easy time communicating the benefits of the all-animal lifestyle, it is another thing altogether to explain his marital arrangements. Clara assists by explaining that what seems like leftist moral dissolution is, in fact, a deeply traditional and conservative arrangement.

Martha is intrigued — recall that she herself is a kisser.

A fair objection from Gladys, who draws the line in their sexual experimentation at voyeuristic incest. But passion knows no boundaries regardless of what the leftist world government might try to impose on us, and Martha is overcome by Clara’s discourse on her deepest desires in this life — being penetrated constantly by whichever penis happens to be on hand and having babies until she is no longer physically capable of doing so.

Mitchell knows women. It isn’t “DEI” to admit this, but this is what we’re actually like! We have to pretend otherwise due to the pernicious efforts of feminism, but deep down, all women are secret bisexuals whose fondest wish is to break records for most offspring produced by a nymphomaniac carnivore.

The introduction of Gladys’s parents into their orgiastic home life complicates matters somewhat, but not too much.

And recall that Jack is a conservative man who despises the “gender lunacy” and “social idiocy” of our deeply progressive moment.

But a hero does not balk at a challenge. Did the hero of Atlas Shrugged, Atlas, back down when confronted with the difficulty of hefting up the earth over his head? No. And neither does Jack, plunging — if you’ll pardon the pun — ahead into greatness. And in her own way, Gladys does as well.

Characters overcoming trials is one of the cornerstones of fiction. Here, Gladys overcomes her resistance to having conjugal relations with her biological mother, while her biological father muses on the same with her. Should we recoil in disgust? Accuse Mitchell of unbelievable characterization? No. We should recognize that these characters are so so empowered by their rejection of the dictates of the criminal gangster FDA that they have become fully self-actualized, able to transcend the petty taboos progressivism imposes against fucking your parents.

Peachtree Carnivore continues on past this climax to detail the addition of two final members to the Mason-Clayton sextuplet. First, Jack entices his family doctor to join them with a direct proposal.

The last member — and I use that term in both senses — is perhaps the most surprising of all.

Our eight partially blood-related lovers spend their years, we are told, producing a bounteous wealth of offspring, including some which are no doubt the product of congress between Gladys and her father, or between Gladys and her father’s father.

But readers of Peachtree Carnivore will recognize that I have conspicuously omitted something of great importance from my review up until this point. That something is, of course, the automobile — which is the subject, by my estimate, of roughly a quarter of the book.

It is tempting to dismiss the great deal of Peachtree Carnivore given over to the discussion of cars and the customization thereof as a weakness of the work, a diversion from the core thrust of the text. In fact, the inclusion of this theme echoes that of carnivorous consumption and sexual licentiousness. For what is the car but a glorious extension of the body? And what is fuel but the meat of the car? Electric cars, it should go without saying, are equivalent to those Americans who consume plants — tools of the woke.

Lastly, I must attend to one objection that the reader may have mentally raised during this review. “Surely,” I hear you contend, “this is a work of parody, for it neither titillates nor makes a compelling argument for an all-meat diet.” First: you are a craven swine. Perhaps if you hadn’t deadened your mental faculties with carbohydrates, you would be able to appreciate Mitchell’s passionate plea to create a world of meat-fuelled incest monsters. Second, if this is a “bit”, to use the vernacular, then he’s been at it for at least seven years.

That’s right: Mark Mitchell has been an adherent of the carnivore diet for at least seven years. And if he’s seen the health benefits of such a lifestyle, then I can only assume that like his protagonist, he’s also become an impossibly wealthy, pussy-crushing ubermensch rather than a lonely old man writing 9 Chickweed Lane fanfiction on his Blogspot. I salute him and his dozens of beef-powered children.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: DeltaFoxTrot, who would thank you very much for not besmirching the good name of their Amos/Alistair fanfiction.

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Batman: Claritin Allergy Special Issue

As America enters its Century of Humiliation, its political leadership is hard at work trying to make the country as unattractive as possible to potential tourist dollars. Consider that this may have the incredible result of creating a wave of embittered, ex-theme park employees with stolen mascot costumes, easy access to firearms, and a grudge against the administration. If trends continue, the guy who plays Tigger may soon have the opportunity and motivation to do one of the funniest things of all time.

Visitors who nevertheless brave the visa fees and harassment by border goons to visit America’s scenic landscapes, famous cities, and plentiful strip malls may experience culture shock, whether it be from the size of restaurant portions, the lack of public transit infrastructure, or the random daylight kidnappings by masked men claiming to work for the government. But it was ever thus. One comment I’ve heard expressed incredulously about America, over and over again, is “yew ‘av advertisements fer medicines on the telly?”

Buddy, we have way more than that. We have goddamn A-lister superheroes shilling allergy meds.

Published in 1999, Batman: Claritin Allergy Special Issue #1 was a sort of tie-in comic to The New Batman Adventures, which was a sequel show to the Primetime Emmy-winning Batman: The Animated Series. That places it in the awkward teenage phase when superheroes had moved past selling Hostess Fruit Pies but weren’t yet on the level where they could star in three minute long short films promoting Audi.

It seems like a more naïve time, looking back. I can imagine the executives selling the Bat Family/Claritin partnership to the creative team, arguing that the Rubicon had already been crossed long ago. Batman had already pushed McDonald’s, Diet Coke, and even, in 1987, a chain of discount stores.

I can’t tell if that tagline is supposed to be a bit, like a French guy saying “they’re open non-stop ’til Christmas?” Regardless, they resurrected the ’60s Batman and Robin to convince shoppers to buy products at Zayre. Not Burt Ward and Adam West, mind you, and not the original costumes, either. But it’s wild to think that you could already do Batman as a nostalgia play in the 1980s. And for the record, Adam West did do at least one ad as Batman during the run of the ’60s show. It was for U.S. Savings Bonds.

Anyway, the comic. This guy invented a “white orchid” and Bruce and Tim Drake are standing watch at a big gala celebrating his achievement, because obviously if you do anything with plants in Gotham City then Poison Ivy is going to come after your ass. You’d think all the botanists would have gotten the message and moved to Metropolis by now. Also, I’m pretty sure white orchids exist? Whatever, I’m putting too much thought into a set-up for a drug pitch.

A couple of things. First of all, “chum?” It’s been a long time since I watched the ’90s Batman cartoon, but it’s really difficult for me to imagine Kevin Conroy talking like Adam West did while calmly explaining to Robin how the Siamese Human Knot was going to break every bone in their bodies. Second, “Tammy” is really pushing the envelope of how DTF you can be in a twelve page promotional comic about antihistamines.

Poison Ivy attacks! Tim is caught by a vine because he was too “groggy.” Interesting. But hold up, let’s talk about the credits. Christopher Priest has written stories for Conan, Deadpool, and Black Panther. Joe Staton created the character Huntress and drew for Dick Tracy, Green Lantern Corps, and Guy Gardner. Mike DeCarlo inked Batman: A Death in the Family. Rick Taylor did colors on a number of DC, Marvel, and Dark Horse joints. And Paul Kupperberg has edited over 1,000 comics. Between them, the men that created Batman: Claritin Allergy Special Issue #1 have accumulated four Harvey Awards, two Inkpots, and an Eisner.

Kind of makes Batman’s stilted dialogue about Tim’s OTC antihistamine-induced drowsiness hit differently, doesn’t it?

Batman and Robin fight Ivy but she electrocutes Robin because their suits are statically charged and the protective case of the flower is too? I don’t know. She gets away, is the point.

Ivy ransoms the orchid and Batman goes to get it back. But this time, he tells Tim to stay home so he doesn’t fuck everything up again with his pussy-ass allergies.

I know that this comic only exists to sell Claritin. But maybe Batman and Robin weren’t the best picks? Like you’re telling me Batman, the guy who has a flying tank, exploding boomerangs, and Bat shark repellent isn’t equipped to deal with ragweed? So if Mr. Prep Time develops hay fever one day, that’s it, the whole operation is fucking over? They could have picked anyone for this. Make it the Flash and if he sneezes he turns a half-dozen nearby pedestrians into red mist.

Thankfully for Tim, Alfred shows up to deliver some copy from the brief. Tim and Alfred go to a late-night on-demand doctor — being a billionaire’s ward has its perks — and the doctor prescribes him something.

I don’t get why we’re being all coy about this when we get to the money shot. Let the guy tell Robin that only CLARITIN gives you fast-acting relief from allergy symptoms without drowsiness, so you can get back to being tortured and brainwashed by the Joker. Like, the cover already says Claritin. Did DC draw the line at having the name come out of a character’s mouth? Or was there some kind of law preventing them from actually saying it? Well, there actually might have been. We’ll get to that later.

Meanwhile, Poison Ivy’s going to kill the guy who invented the flower she stole and take his money when Batman and Batgirl arrive. She attacks them by hurling potted plants and spraying them with pollen. It isn’t pollen that makes you horny or fall asleep or makes trees grow out of your skull or anything, though — it’s just like, really bad regular allergy-causing pollen. Nonetheless, Batman and Batgirl succumb to fits of sneezing. I wonder if it pained Christopher Priest to write Batman as such a dipshit. Grab a Bat pollen protection mask out of your utility belt, asshole! Use a Bat fan to blow it away! Hold your goddamn cape up over your face! All looks lost, until…

Robin shows up.

You might not be aware of this, but sneezing famously makes noise. So Ivy’s line here implies that this pollen is going to knock Robin out rather than merely aggravate his sinuses. But the power of Claritin has rendered him immune to seemingly all of Poison Ivy’s plantological warfare. Seems like cheating, but whatever. Turnabout is fair play, so Robin gasses Ivy right in her stupid, sexy face.

There was never a second Batman Claritin comic, which I think is a shame. They could have expanded this out into a whole allergy-based run. Have Tim scarf down a bunch of Benadryl to beat Poison Ivy again — only this time he’s taken too many and he starts having hallucinations. Batman vs Hat Man!

The existence of Batman: Claritin Allergy Special Issue #1 is strange in its own right. But it gets weirder. See, there weren’t always pharmaceutical ads featuring knowingly smiling men in their 60s or sexually indistinct sad blobs being followed around by rain clouds on American television.

In fact, it wasn’t until the late 1900s that a young hotshot ad executive proposed that the main customer for drug companies wasn’t doctors, but consumers. I bet you’re picturing a Don Draper type, but her name was Liz Moench, proving that women, too, can innovate in ways which make the world worse.

The first televised direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical ad aired in 1983, for a pain med called Rufen. Almost immediately, the government told the company to take it off the air — which seems weird, considering that they weren’t promoting seed oils or saying that women were people. But remember, this is when we had an FDA that wasn’t run by a worm-addled bridge troll. They told drug companies they had to spell out side effects in TV ads, which made them much less attractive as marketing tools.

But then in the mid-90s, a company called Schering-Plough got an idea. They started advertising a new medication on television without actually saying what it did. All they really said was “ask your doctor.” The name of that drug?

Yes, Claritin, the very same drug that helps the Boy Wonder fight crime. And in 1997, the FDA, frustrated by these kinds of slippery tactics and possibly “encouraged” by well-meaning multinational drug conglomerates, decided to slough off the chains of censorship. From then on, drug companies could omit all the extra information they used to have to put in their ads as long as they had a website or a phone number consumers could call to get it. They were also allowed to start making specific claims about what their drugs did.

Drug companies won. Between 1995 and 2006, their spending on DTC advertising increased more than tenfold to $5 billion. The Batman Claritin comic was an early part of the drug advertising boom in the US, which remains one of only two countries in the entire world that allows the practice. The other is New Zealand, but they haven’t produced a decent supervillain since Sauron.

On that note, Liz Moench went on to have quite a career in the pharmaceutical advertising industry. Among her accomplishments, she was partly responsible for making Voltaren (diclofenac) the most-prescribed NSAID medication in the late 1980s. Diclofenac is prescribed for both people and animals, and was widely used throughout the ’90s on livestock in India. In the early 2000s, after scientists realized that a huge vulture die-off was occurring in that country, they narrowed down the cause to diclofenac prescribed to cattle. The vultures that ate the dead cows experienced liver failure, and over 99% of all vultures in the country died as a result.

Vultures eat dead animals, and without them around, there were a lot of rotting carcasses spreading disease. The absence of vultures also allowed the feral dog population to boom, causing tens of thousands more human deaths from rabies.

Would it be uncharitable — absurd, even — to say that Moench was responsible on some level for the Indian vulture crisis? Perhaps. But I think you lose the benefit of the doubt when you go to work for the industry that created the opioid crisis. On the flip side, she is indirectly responsible for a kind of funny comic where Batman gets mad at Robin for having allergies. In conclusion, the Batman Claritin comic can’t exist in the same universe as 40,000,000 alive Indian vultures.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Doug Redmond, who makes a killer cocktail with like seventeen claritin and two bottles of vodka. Ok it’s less a cocktail and more a cry for help, but Doug nails it.

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: White Cobra Diamond Fox vs The Golden Eye 🌭

I think it was Simone de Beauvoir who said that we will know feminism has achieved its aim precisely when women are allowed to be as deranged, incompetent, and generally mediocre as men without it reflecting on their sex as a whole. And from that perspective, perhaps those women who doggedly pursue lives of self-obsessed madness are to be celebrated for their role in inching us ever closer to that world.

To say that Deuandra T. Brown is merely one of those women would be to do her a disservice. She is a multi-hyphenate artistic lunatic — a filmmaker, writer, model, singer, actor, and dancer. Regarding her cinematic output, the easy reach is to call her the female Neil Breen. But need we compare a woman genius to a man? Can we not simply appreciate it on its own merits?

Today I want to talk about White Cobra Diamond Fox vs The Golden Eye, Deaundra’s most recent film. It is a sequel to the film Diamond Cobra vs The White Fox, which told the tale of an ancient Egyptian woman whose sister stole her true love.

Furious, the spurned woman sought out the aid of a witch/pirate, who granted her a necklace that transformed her into a big snake.

Centuries later, the Diamond Cobra and White Fox necklaces were found by two long-lost twins, Diamond and Targella. One of them was possessed by the ancient Egyptian snake lady, so we’re kind of doing a Yu-Gi-Oh! only instead of playing children’s card games, the Egyptian ghost starts killing people by spitting snakes at them.

The sisters meet, have a Birdman or Dragon Ball Z beam battle depending on your generational point of reference, and laser blast a cop investigating them into space.

Then they merge into one person, like Dragon Ball Z or Steven Universe depending on your generational point of reference, and a goblin man on a huge iPad says that the curse has been broken.

I have not seen Diamond Cobra vs The White Fox. I only know all of this because the first ten minutes of White Cobra Diamond Fox vs The Golden Eye is footage from the first movie. Now we’re all caught up, and all questions about snake women, laser battles, and iPad goblins have been resolved. Onto the sequel!

Deuandra T. Brown loves smash cuts, and every one of them hits like an After Effects energy beam to the face. We have so much to get through, but let’s just take this in for a minute. Papyrus. Inexplicable colon. ZEPTUNE. What is clearly a fucking spaceship and not a planet. Beautiful. Wonderful.

That’s Targella Diamond, the fusion of Targella and Diamond. I don’t know why she looks like she just got out of bed to try and catch a bat that flew into her house. I don’t know why it’s ten years and six months later. I don’t know why we cut to a bald man wearing accent lashes hanging out with some aliens who start nuking earth. Maybe that recap should have been twenty minutes long.

Targella Diamond wanders around this spaceship, and then this happens.

I called her the female Neil Breen earlier, but I think Deuandra T. Brown might actually be closer to Jodorowsky. We’re on some The Holy Mountain shit right now.

A big snake who is also the Golden Eye Queen tells Targella Diamond to find all of the pieces of the Golden Eye jewelry in order to break the curse, which was broken when Targella and Diamond merged in the last movie. Maybe this is a second, different curse?

Earth looks different than I remember.

Meet Travis. He’s played by a guy named Maxxx Payan, who is inexplicably not a porn actor despite having the name, facial hair, and build of a guy whose top credit should absolutely be Stepsister Suckfest 6. He’s at a rave in Arizona, where he meets the eyepatch woman from the first movie. She has now transformed into a young woman whose role in the plot appears to be doling out pieces of Golden Eye jewelry at random to various people, inevitably bringing them great misfortune.

Travis asks her “who may I say I’m speaking to today” like he’s calling her about her long-distance service rather than trying to crush ancient Egyptian pirate pussy. But she’s into it. Where will the night take them? Well, we— SMASH CUT to Jade, 30s, rideshare driver, on the phone with her brother.

Their mom went missing and Harlem is working with the Russian mafia to get answers. SMASH CUT to New York City.

Film is the art of the cut. Inserts, reverse shots, close-ups — these are the basic building blocks of filmmaking. Some artists cut far too little. James Nguyen, the creator of Birdemic, is notorious for his long establishing shots of cars arriving and parking at their destinations. If Nguyen is one end of the spectrum of cinematic excess, Deaundra T. Brown is at the other. Cuts across time and space just happen every few seconds and if you’re lucky you get a Papyrus title card telling you where and when you are. The effect is one of disorientation, confusion, and anxiety. You could achieve the same experience White Cobra Diamond Fox vs The Golden Eye‘s editing produces by smoking PCP then running into your therapist at the grocery store.

A rare two-shot. Most of the movie is filmed with single actors centered in front of a green screen. Here we get an actual location, which I initially thought was a hotel room until I noticed the coin-operated bleach and fabric softener dispensers on the left. What is this impossible space? Are we in the backrooms? At least there are some context clues here — we know the guy on the right is a detective, on account of his badge and magnifying glass sitting next to his laptop.

“I can’t find your missing brother and dad,” he tells this woman, Riley. “The case happened in Arizona. It’s outside of my zone, he replies” My man, you’re a cop. Cops have jurisdictions. Sonic the Hedgehog has “zones.”

Riley asks him again and he completely changes his mind. We’re up to eight characters now, but let’s meet some more. Southland Tales had seventeen major players. I think Deuandra can beat that. It’s time for a White Cobra Diamond Fox vs The Golden Eye character lightning round!

Here’s Jennifer and Raspberry. The former is a news anchor, which we learn when she says “I gotta go report the news.” Her last name? It’s normal.

Later, Jennifer Townhall shows up on TV to deliver exposition wearing her dead friend Raspberry’s fur coat.

Dead? Yes. Raspberry is murdered by Harlem, who is Jade’s brother. Remember her?

Harlem killed Raspberry on the orders of Alexei, the Russian mobster he’s working for in order to get answers about his mother’s disappearance. For this deed, Harlem learns that his mom was caught up with the “Donnie Barbeque gang.”

My favorite thing about Alexei is that he has a sticker on his phone that says “MILF Hunter.” It’s little details like that which transform otherwise stock roles like “Russian mob boss” into living, breathing characters. Like, maybe he wanted his wife dead because she wasn’t MILFy enough.

While all of this is happening on earth, Jade and Harlem’s mother and Riley’s father are being held captive on the Planet: ZEPTUNE by an alien named Azulon. He looks like this.

He wants the Golden Eye ring, or maybe the bracelet or earrings or necklace, because Deaundra T. Brown read one screenwriting tip about MacGuffins and decided that if one MacGuffin is good, then four should be given congratulatory oral sex. It’s unclear why Azulon thinks that holding these people hostage will help him get the jewelry. It’s like he forget a step between “torture earthlings with diamond magic” and “get ancient artifact.”

It’s also unclear why he wants it. I’m not sure even he knows. I think he just looked around and saw everyone else chasing after some gaudy ancient Egyptian accessories and decided that’s just what people do. And I can only assume that this scene, in which the editor has conspicuously left the green screen backdrop in the movie, is a clever reference to the hollowness of Azulon’s life, defined solely by what society tells him he should value.

That’s twelve characters so far. We are barely halfway through the cast.

So: Targella Diamond goes to Travis’s concert and fucks him afterwards.

I was shocked to realize that this is the only instance in the film in which the director/writer/star sleeps with one of the many characters who look like ketamine dealers. She does get to perv on another guy in the shower at one point, though.

That’s Ahsan, a member of the Moroccan mafia who kills Alexei to get the Golden Eye ring from him. Targella Diamond does not fuck him, but rather turns into a big snake and bites him to death. I kind of appreciate that — it takes restraint to say yes, my twin-souled ancient Egyptian space heroine bangs the emaciated guitarist/weed dealer who sings “Smooth” by Santana Featuring Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 to himself alone in his sad kitchen, but not the jacked North African dreamboat. Or maybe there just wasn’t enough time for two sex scenes — we’ve got more characters to introduce!

Dice, everybody! He’s a techwear doofus who works for Alexei. Here’s his sister!

She gets the Golden Eye Necklace from a beautiful stranger in Egypt, which looks like the shattered ruins from the end of a Dark Souls game where the world is collapsing in on itself.

Alas, she’s killed by Honey Q, who is, of course, the niece of Donnie Barbeque.

Well, not by Honey Q, but on her orders. She’s actually executed by Honey Q’s goon, Dream.

Honey wants the Golden Eye earrings, because they are “with magic” and are worth “over a billion dollars.” On the basis of a dream she had about them, she sends out two other goons to raid Travis’s house to recover them. Travis is dead or in space now because Azulon blasted him with his eye lasers after he tried to explain that he had a one night stand with Targella. In response, Azulon literally says “what is this ‘one night stand’ you speak of?” It feels like he’s making fun of the movie and it’s so unbelievably stupid that for a moment I thought maybe Deaundra T. Brown was a long-term performance art project by the world’s greatest fabulist.

Azulon’s got a friend slash subordinate! Her name is Topaz.

She tries to bash Targella’s head apart in Ireland, but is defeated by an ancient Egyptian laser blast.

There’s also a third, unrelated space monster in White Cobra Diamond Fox vs The Golden Eye, Ezul. We saw him earlier. It goes without saying, but he wants the Golden Eye jewelry. He’s bald, has fabulous lashes, and tries to kill Targella by teleporting in front of her moving vehicle, responding to her rude comments by saying “I love you too,” then blowing a kiss that’s a fireball at her. Sir, you are clearly a Kano and not a Sonya Blade.

He does this on two other occasions, in contexts that make no sense. He just shows up on someone’s laptop or in their mirror, they’re confused or frightened, and in response to nothing he says “I love you too” and explodes them. Maybe it’s an alien power word and it’s just one of those weird linguistic coincidences, like how there’s a filler term in Mandarin that sounds a lot like an English racial slur. Like a nice version of that.

Christ. We’re at nearly two thousand words and I still have a half-dozen characters to get through. Here’s a quick one.

This guy appears in a single shot and is never seen again. He symbolizes all of the strangers in our lives, the faces we see but once before they vanish again forever into the mass of humanity, forming part of the backdrop of our lives yet, impossibly, each with their own inner worlds and realities. It’s that, or this is a stock footage shot Deaundra liked enough to put in the middle of one of her expositional rap montages, which feature some pretty impressive guest verses!

Fuck. I can’t get distracted. There’s still so many more guys to talk about. There’s a whole subplot where this guy Mario is working for Honey Q but used to work for Alexei and Alexei wants him back? But then he falls in love with a cop named Maria and she makes him wear a wire to spy on Honey Q. Also he wears a Jay Kay-style giant furry hat.

Honey Q kills him when she realizes his betrayal.

Maria tearfully vows revenge.

Targella goes to Milan for basically no reason. Forgot Jodorowsky, Adam Sandler is more apt. Think about it — she’s using her self-indulgent movie as an excuse to travel around and put a bunch of her friends onscreen. I think she might just be an independently wealthy madwoman who is living her best life. Unlike Detective Morales, a CIA agent whom Targella evaporates with a laser blast.

Again, the cuts in White Cobra Diamond Fox vs The Golden Eye are incredible. But this, I think is my favorite one.

This is the shot introducing us to Travis’s sister. She looks like someone doing transgressive Dr. Horrible cosplay, which is maybe the meanest thing I’ve ever said. Obviously she wants the Golden Eye jewelry, which she describes as “very, very rare” like it’s a drop in an MMO instead of a one-of-a-kind amulet of the cosmic gods. Anyway, Targella kills her by making her stab herself to death when she comes looking for Travis.

She’s not the only one who can do that, either. Ezul kills Honey Q by manifesting in a cloud portal above her dining room table and forcing her to shoot herself in the head before doing the kiss of death thing to Dice.

Deaundra isn’t precious about her mind-children. Anyone can die in this movie, and nearly everyone does. Whether they’re run down by a Toyota Corolla, stabbed to death by their own hand, or immolated by a heat ray, the cast is winnowed down significantly as we near the end. This might actually be a slasher movie where the slasher is a Mary Sue reincarnation of a space queen.

Travis, Travis’s sister, Honey Q, Dice, Dice’s sister, Alexei, Ahsan, Mario, Topaz, Morales, Raspberry, and the detective are all dead. Most of the survivors meet up in Phoenix, then teleport to Zeptune. They fight.

Targella wins, of course, and gets all four pieces of the Golden Eye. She’s taken to space, where Lady Iris gives her the fifth piece — the glasses.

She transforms into Queen Golden Eye, which is also the name of the worst performer at a millennial gaming nostalgia-themed drag night.

Queen Golden Eye explodes Azulon and Ezul. Two months later, the white cop guy is prowling the stock art streets when Queen Golden Eye appears and explodes him, too.

The end. I’m not kidding. That’s the last shot of the movie. My sincere hope is that everyone had fun working on this, but in an interview for the prequel, one actor says that she didn’t even know what the plot was because there had been over seven hundred script drafts. With anyone else, I’d say she was exaggerating. But I believe in Deaundra T. Brown.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Greg Cunningham, who didn’t even need to read the article because HE LIVED IT! WHAAAAAT?