Author: Jason Pargin

Categories
FUCKING DAY

Fucking Day: Fat Hen Farms 🌭

Look at the below screengrab and tell me the first thing you notice:

“That is a man showing off his tiny baby birds,” is the response from exactly 100% of you, “I see the hatchlings on the lower right and this appears to be from a TikTok account called ‘Fat Hen Farms.’ This is very wholesome and I thank you for showing it to me, Jason. I am constantly sickened by the crass depravity on this site and, just between the two of us, I think literally everyone here but you is an irredeemable piece of shit.”

Not so fast. See, there is something curious occurring in the–let me double check here–nine thousand comments under that post:

That’s right: though you totally failed to notice it, the viewers are almost entirely focused on the bulge in the farmer’s shorts, hinting at the kind of hog that would take home the blue ribbon at the county fair followed by a lifetime ban from competition. Take it in, friends, for what you are gazing upon is the future:

Before we go any further, Jason’s controversial novel I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is finally out in paperback, get it at Amazon, B&N, Bookshop or wherever you like to buy books.

This gentleman, who lovingly raises various birds on his small farm and writes children’s books about them, has ridden this glorious rocket to five million followers across multiple platforms, or about 20% of what he deserves. His TikTok is the big one where, every few days, he posts a new video of his most adorable birds, usually Button Quails. They’re placed on a floor or bed so they can adorably chirp and stumble fuzzily around their owner’s legs…

…followed by a comment section populated entirely by oblique references to the farmer’s towering dong:

With many posts spamming, “ain’t nobody looking at those damn turtles!” which has become a meme among his fans:

The owner of that farm and schlong is Bernard Henry, he is my personal hero and if you are worried that I am objectifying this poor man who just wants to raise his birds in peace, here’s his OnlyFans:

And now some of you are shocked because, as a platform, TikTok is so famously prudish that it gave us teen slang like “unalived” and “seggs” specifically to avoid filters that suppressed even mildly PG-13 content. But that’s part of what makes Mr. Henry such a hero, he is upholding a proud tradition of slipping a certain kind of art past the narrow-minded prudes. Let’s pause here for a totally unrelated 1943 magazine ad for Cannon Towels:

“Hold on,” you ask, sensing that I am restraining myself from whipping out some kind of existential horror that will totally ruin the mood, “what exactly is the business model here? Is this guy using his frankly alarming shaft to prop up his farm, which is more of a hobby? Or is he only doing porn out of desperation until he can get the quail business off the ground? Or is he a dedicated porn guy who, knowing how most platforms treat bulge content, started raising the baby birds purely as a fig trunk to disguise his true intentions?”

Well, I didn’t talk to the guy because I’m not a journalist and also didn’t want to make it weird (and I would have made it weird), but I can say that using porn to subsidize your true passion is now so common that it’s one of the final pillars holding up the economy. “Aella” is a writer and data scientist who lives off the millions she has made as a camgirl and escort. Zara Dar is an engineer with a Master’s Degree in Computer Science who gives lectures about neural networks on Pornhub. A guy named Sean Gatz grew a following doing home renovations, then added porn to his portfolio and immediately made Lamborghini money.

This is what we’re here to talk about today.

Obviously, I am not judging any of these people. If their true passion is erotica, then they’re engaging in literally the oldest form of performance art and the second thing humanity invented after clothes. If they’re doing it purely for financial reasons, then I’m judging them even less. This system will grind you up and spit you out and if the only thing you’ve got to wedge into the gears is a thick, beautiful pecker, then you’d be a fool to let social convention hold you back. Modesty and restraint didn’t build this machine and it sure as hell won’t save you from it.

But, also, I think this has to be in the top five most cyberpunk dystopia trends playing out right now, right behind parents having to explain to their children that their doll died because the AI company supplying its personality went out of business.

In Jack the Ripper-era England, 1 in 16 low income women were sex workers and nobody throws that number around as a sign that things were going great. It has been estimated that 1 in 50 American women under age 45 now have an OnlyFans creator account (OF doesn’t release their data, no one knows the real number) and I think it’s a mathematical certainty that many of them are not pursuing it as their true artistic passion. Also note that the vast majority don’t earn enough to pay for a single DoorDashed meal a month. Again: This is about the game, not the players. The only way you’re going to survive this system is to become the kind of thing the system wants. “Not me!” you say. “I shall rebel!” That’s perfect, the system loves rebellion most of all. Our most profitable film franchise is specifically about communist aliens overthrowing evil capitalists and you can take your whole family to the theme park for only a few thousand bucks. Sorry, I know things are getting too heavy, let’s calm ourselves with some subtle, tasteful bulge:

In fact, go ahead and stop reading now if you don’t want to see me get all worked up about the state of the industry and just want to spend the rest of your day daydreaming of fuzzy hatchlings and swaddled tubesteak. Tell yourself this was only an article about a social media farmer whose cash crop is bulge and let that delight you.

…

For the rest of you:

Any creator in this current media landscape can tell you how hungrily the world tries to peel you away in layers.

Not to make this beautiful bulge article all about me, but some of you know that I worked anonymously for the first several years of my writing career beginning in the late 1990s (working under the pseudonym David Wong), then reluctantly let them put my real face in an author photo, then even more reluctantly let my voice be heard on the Cracked podcast (which definitely took some convincing). A decade or so after that, I let myself be talked into trying my hand at video and today have about 1.5 million followers across TikTok, FB, Instagram, YT and several others. Not one in 10,000 of my viewers know I have ever written a single word of text. I literally have the exact same job as The Rizzler.

Sure, I’m not filming bulge content, yet, but to a private person that’s what the “put your big stupid face right into the camera” era feels like, discarding one layer of privacy at a time in the name of keeping butts in the seats. The first layer is the end product of your work, the next is your personal identity and the next is the private, vulnerable truth behind that identity:

The audience always wants more, to keep peeling away. The tougher the rind, the more desperately they want to wedge a fingernail under it. Strangers look up my address, they want to know if I’m married, or have kids, or if my physique is natty. The more guarded the boundaries, the more they (wrongly) assume there must be something fascinating just on the other side. They want to force themselves to whatever level of intimacy is the one I didn’t invite them to, the metaphorical leaked nudes. And I’m saying this knowing that, as an unremarkable 50 year-old dude, the audience’s ravenous desire to breach my walls is about 1% of what I’d be experiencing as, say, an attractive young woman.

I’m not trying to make my fans all sound like obsessive stalkers, I know some of it is just natural human curiosity and some just (incorrectly) think my personality will be more interesting than my work. I’m the same way; I follow celebrity gossip and dig for dirt about messy breakups just like everybody else, only my obsession revolves around old cable shows where elderly men hunt cryptids.

But, not to be overdramatic, there is a certain tiny percentage of the audience that wants to kill me and eat my corpse. At least metaphorically; I see them sniffing around for any hint of controversy, digging for old offensive jokes or disgruntled former acquaintances. I get their weird messages full of shrieking insults and inscrutable demands, doing everything they can to get some kind of a reaction. All of it is just an attempt to peel away what they see as the final layer, to get me to lose control and show a side of myself I hide from even my loved ones, to see what I look like when I’m enraged, or terrified, or powerless. And again, this is coming from someone who has it easier than 99% of the creators out there. Sorry, let’s again try to reset the mood with some soothing bulge action:

Earlier, I said the above bulge was the future and I meant it. That’s because that bulge is, both literally and metaphorically, the one element of the creator economy that can’t be stolen by AI.

The robots can spit out competent books and paintings in seconds but they can only reproduce those first couple of surface layers, they can’t give the audience the vulnerable flesh-and-blood human behind it, the “authenticity.” This means any artists who wish to continue getting paid will have to thus prove their humanity by letting those layers be peeled away. You’ve already seen how painters who used to just post pics of their work to Instagram now upload videos of themselves doing the painting, and how the algorithm only boosts the artists who look hot while doing it. If you’re an attractive woman today making literally anything from cosplay to cupcakes, your inboxes will fill with creeps asking for your OnlyFans, rooting around for the bonus material the machines can’t provide.

“That’s not true,” you’re saying, “AI can absolutely generate nude babes and girthy hogs, I’m looking at hundreds of both right now! And have been for hours!” No, you’re still not getting it: The thrill for the audience isn’t in seeing skin, it’s in the violation, the crossing of boundaries, the sense of power and ownership. AI has no such boundaries to violate. And I’m desperately trying to keep things light here but the dark side of sex work isn’t just the fact that a certain percentage of sex workers are doing it out of desperation, but that many of their customers get off on knowing that. When the creeps message creators asking for their OF, an angry response is just as good as the nudes. They still managed to peel off a layer.

And that, dear reader, is the genius of Bernard Henry. Yes, his carefully-chosen shorts are, for many, performing the same function as Mae West’s wink-wink double-entendres. But part of his game is knowing that most viewers don’t know it’s a game at all. They don’t know he’s a porn guy; they enjoy the bulge because they think he doesn’t know they’re looking, that they’re seeing something he didn’t intend for them to see. They think this gives them the power in the relationship and he’s happy to let them think that. And, hey, a little bulge-gazing never hurt anyone.

But not everyone can play the game so deftly. If you know my work, you know where this ends: Once the audience expects the inner layers of the artist’s humanity to become part of the content, then those inner layers must be reshaped and repackaged accordingly. Instead of a person who makes content, you go about turning yourself into content, optimized to the core. Eventually, even your inner thoughts are just processed feed for the algorithm, the equivalent of that YouTube thumbnail face:

And at that point, the “authenticity” itself will be so algorithmic that the machines will finally be able to replicate it and we humans will finally be free to turn off our screens, go outside, and touch bulge.

Jason’s controversial novel I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is finally out in paperback, get it at Amazon, B&N, Bookshop or wherever you like to buy books.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Eric Christian Berg, who was gracious enough to allow us to document his tiktok videos for this article.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Andrew Tate’s Morning Routine🌭

Here is a man who was caught in the act of cranking his hog at the moment Pompeii was incinerated by a volcano:

If our civilization should fall, the equivalent discovery would be this mesmerizing 23-second video depicting manosphere influencer Andrew Tate’s morning routine.

WARNING: By watching that video, you are generating revenue that Tate will likely use for evil. I know that even by mocking it, I am giving him what he wants. Ignoring him is also giving him what he wants, because we are not his target audience. This is the trap they have built for us. This is the trap we have built for ourselves. All I can do is examine the video in excruciating detail to see if it can help us unlock the secrets of the universe.

Before we go any further, my standalone novel I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is $2.99 in ebook form for the month of June 2025. If you only know me from my wonderful podcast appearances and always assumed my books were a bunch of bullshit, here’s your chance to try one for the price of two bites of a cheeseburger.

“Who’s Andrew Tate?” asks at least one reader, unaware that he is about to lose an ignorance more precious than jewels. I could answer with this frame from three seconds into the aforementioned video:

But no, I can’t just throw you into the middle like that. Let’s back up. Until a few months ago, I thought Tate was just one of those D-list celebrities who figured out they could make two hundred bucks a month posting anti-woke ragebait on Twitter. Then I heard pundits referring to him as one of the most influential people in the world and found out that, apparently, every other teenage boy I pass on the street worships him.

Tate is a former kickboxer who attempted to prolong his fame by appearing on the British version of Big Brother in 2016. He then pivoted to various crimes (his legal cases require their own Wikipedia page) before realizing he could get much richer by telling young men that all of their worst hormonal impulses are good, actually. He has a podcast and sells online lifestyle courses that alone earn him–let me just double-check this–about $70 million dollars a year. To put that in context, that’s more than twice what this entire website makes.

So this video, posted to X, takes place in Tate’s mansion in Dubai. The camera begins on the opposite side of the room, setting the scene over inspirational synth:

“I don’t see the big deal,” you say upon viewing the video’s opening second. “This appears to be a nude muscular man doing three reps with 25-pound dumbells while executing shitcoin rugpulls with his cock. This is exactly two variables away from my own morning routine.”

But then the camera swoops in and we get the frame I showed you earlier, and it is here where I must pause to explain the most important thing in the world, which is the Halloween Costume Hack.

It is well-established science that if you want to override the logic centers of the public’s brains, you simply become a Halloween costume. If you assemble a distinctive and memorable combination of hair, clothing and props (that is, become something so recognizable that kids could dress as you for Halloween), people will listen to whatever dumb shit you have to say. This is why most of you could improvise a Donald Trump costume with what you have around the house (a suit, a messy yellow thing on your head, something tan to smear on your face). You could turn yourself into a recognizable Hitler with nothing more than a sharpie.

Seriously, look around. Have you seen Mark Zuckerberg recently, with his new t-shirt, chain and poofy hair combo? He’s not having a midlife crisis; he’s doing the Halloween Costume Hack.

To be clear, I’m not saying this is only used for evil. One of America’s most treasured content creators, Mark Twain, intentionally created a costume for himself once he figured out that being a full-time celebrity paid more than writing books.

So if it seems like the world recently became a flailing orgy of clownish derangement, that is the result of several million influencers all figuring out this hack at once. The problem is that in the era of total audience access, they’re never allowed to take off the costume so, inevitably, the mask eats the face.

Everything becomes part of the costume: the diet, the decor, the philosophy, the language made up entirely of trademarked catchphrases. When you have to eat, drink and sleep the kayfabe, that’s just who you are. The world becomes a circus in which every other clown is John Wayne Gacy.

Anyway, we’re now four seconds into this video and when the cameraman reaches the sofa, we realize we’re observing a man who has become a costume. Here is a creature birthed from a simultaneous desire to create envy in his fans, outrage in his haters, and car-accident curiosity in everyone else. We see someone famous for his rabid homophobia wearing white slippers and gold-trimmed shorts, sucking on a glittery hookah. Not only does he want us to make the obvious joke, his business model depends on it.

Instead, I’m going to talk about the fact that health and fitness influencers these days have to find ways to be original, which is impossible if you stick to the same boring old advice people have been spouting forever, due to it being true. Tate, therefore, leans heavily into calling nicotine a “miracle drug” and insisting that smoking it prevents homosexuality. Again: he’s daring you to make the joke.

He also boasts that he drinks 10 cups of coffee in the morning and eats tons of meat. He wants you to yell that this is a recipe for a heart that detonates before 50, because all that yelling is engagement and engagement is money. This is the madness of the modern age, a twisted four-link chain of logic that goes,

A) “You should live your life how you want, even if it makes the haters mad!” Therefore,

B) “You know you’re living life right if your haters are mad!” Therefore,

C) “Your goal in life should be to make your haters mad!” Therefore,

D) “You should sacrifice everything else in your life to make your haters mad!”

Kids in trailer parks thus swarm to Tate’s defense in the face of any criticism, wallowing in the anguish of the haters who are spouting petty bullshit like, “Please do not do this to your body, you want to live long enough to see your children grow up, you have so much to live for, we love you.” Sure, those teenage boys can observe that Tate’s advice hasn’t resulted in any of their friends owning a mansion in Dubai, but it has resulted in causing distress to the haters and that is what matters most when all other aspirations feel unattainable. We’re nine seconds into the video.

The camera has now swept around Tate to get a glimpse of his carefully-arranged breakfast table. A cappucino, a steak with three fried eggs that kind of look fake, a bucket of canned Perrier. Something else is hidden behind his laptop stand, intentionally placed as to hold the reveal until the end. This has all been planned and/or storyboarded in advance.

If you know the manosphere, you understand why nothing green can appear on that plate. Boys tend to hate vegetables and have spent their lives arguing with mothers who wouldn’t let them leave the table until they at least took a bite of the broccoli. “Actually, eating nothing but meat and eggs is heroic!” says the influencer. “All of your base preferences are sacred! Every primal urge from your hormonal brain is just your inner hero shining through! Anyone who tries to direct you otherwise is a literal traitor to the species!”

Next we see Tate taking a pull from his hookah, then downing a bunch of cappuccino at the same time, as if attempting to mix the smoke and coffee in his mouth.

This made me a bit sad and, to understand why, you need to pause here and go watch the entirety of the show Severance on Apple TV (plus? Is there a plus at the end? Eh, probably).

Welcome back, you no doubt noticed the way the camera in that show dramatically swings all around the room to symbolize the inner turmoil of the actors or some shit. This is accomplished with a rig on a robot arm and it makes life hell for the performers, who have to carefully time their actions and facial expressions to the pre-determined movements of the giant robot shooting the scene. It can take months to perfect a single sequence.

So when we see Tate awkwardly juggle his hookah and coffee, I am very confident that we are watching at least the twentieth attempt to get this right. I think at some point they realized that the camera movement wouldn’t allow time for him to separately smoke and then take a drink, so they kept compressing the actions until he was inventing the new activity of smoke-drinking, presumably coughing himself onto the floor the first time he tried it. I’m also confident that the plate of steak and eggs went uneaten, as it was likely cooked purely to be a prop for the shoot. I don’t know, I could be wrong. Maybe his dogs got it.

Finally, the camera swings around and zooms down on the breakfast table to show that next to the plate is a stack of cash in various foreign currencies and a carefully-arranged pile of watches. I’ll admit that it wasn’t until my 73rd viewing of the video that I noticed the watches are all set to different times and none match the time on the watch Tate is wearing. This would be a wonderfully whimsical bit of detail if this were a video intended to satirize a fictional character, which of course it is, if you think about it, which you shouldn’t.

I realize this 23-second video leaves us with several hundred unanswered questions, so I’ll end this with a brief Q&A:

Q: “What exactly is this video promoting, again?”

A: Andrew Tate and the perfect male life he is living.

Q: “Right, but is he selling classes that he claims will teach men how to have what they see in the video?”

A: Yes, but that’s the wrong question. The real question is, what are they seeing in the video? What is the thing he is actually selling?

Q: “The costume. He’s offering to teach men how to project a certain lifestyle, regardless of whether or not they are actually living it or if it even reflects their own preferences. He’s offering to teach them how they can make others feel the envy they are feeling toward Tate, because knowing they have created envy in others is the only true riches in the social media age. Is that right?”

A: Almost. You need to go a couple of layers deeper. Do you really think anyone who takes Tate’s classes actually thinks they will wind up even with the appearance of his life, with the muscles, mansions and Bugattis? Do you think that’s the part teen boys envy?

Q: “You’re saying they actually envy that he’s in a position to piss everybody off and get away with it. Because that’s what so many young males wish they could do, escape the confines of public shaming and social convention.”

A: Exactly. “With my training, you will have a mindset that allows you to ignore critics.” And now we must ask, what is the specific activity that those critics will be criticizing the most?

Q: “Spending hundreds of dollars on Andrew Tate’s classes and overpriced merch that promises it ‘SENDS A SIGNAL TO THE WORLD.’ He doesn’t have to deliver results because for those teens, making everyone mad is the result. Right?”

A: Yep.

Q: “But don’t they see that no ‘alpha’ would submit to another male by parroting his catchphrases and paying him for the right to be branded with his logo? Do his fans seriously not notice the contradiction? ‘Real men don’t play by the rules, so let me show you the even stricter rules you need to play by in order to not have to play by rules anymore.’”

A: Not only do they not see it, but there is still one more layer to the madness. Ask yourself: If Tate wanted to change his lifestyle, to shed the costume and admit it’s all a sham, could he? Maintaining his wealth and influence requires him to give his audience what they want. Remember, he carefully crafted this image based on engagement, this video is him meticulously recreating a fantasy he gleaned from the algorithm. Knowing that his vicious fandom will turn on him the moment he tries to pivot, is he locked into this to the bitter end? Cult members escape all the time, the leaders almost never do. Note: This is what Fight Club was actually about.

Q: “So all of them are trapped in the same psychotic labyrinth, the flock mimicking the shepherd who is mimicking the expectations of the flock, until some kind of tragic disaster finally breaks the spell?”

A: Yes. All of us are.

Anyway, the new book is three bucks this month.

Jason Pargin still writes old Cracked-style columns at his Substack. He is famous on TikTok.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Russell Bauman, who doesn’t wear watches or acknowledge the existence of time. That shit is way beneath him.

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Jason Pargin’s Victorian Boner Alarms! 🌭

We’re coming up on the spooky season, so allow me to share with you the creepiest — and arguably most hilarious — series of images on my hard drive. These get worse as they go, which means that, just as in life, the real shit awaits you at the end. 

Below is an actual patent for a “surgical appliance” from the year 1900. Can you deduce how it works? If you can, you likely have the kind of hobbies that require using the “secret basement” filter on Zillow:

If you guessed, “An apparatus designed for a man to wear on his penis so that if he gets an erection, a switch will be flipped causing loud music to play,” then congratulations on getting it exactly right and also on surviving whatever upbringing replaced your imagination with a dark labyrinth of psychosexual horror. For those who need it spelled out, the diagram is a side view; see that mushroom-shaped part at the bottom? 

That’s a little cushion that goes behind the scrotum. The strap leading off to the right goes up the butt crack. The whole vertical mechanism to the left houses the user’s penis, so that it will remain caged when erect. “Wow, Jason, the proportions imply they’re expecting the wearer to have quite the hog!” Yes, but we shan’t get distracted by that right now. As for why such a device existed, well, buckle up…

Jason’s “horror but in the 1900HOTDOG-style novel, If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe is out now at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Bookshop! Finally! Fuck! It’s part of the John Dies at the End series but they’re not serialized, you can just start with this one! Do whatever you want! Some of you have been waiting for this for several years!

The above apparatus isn’t some wacky internet urban legend; the actual 1900 patent is right here. It’s designed to be worn to bed to prevent any kind of ejaculation by slamming the door on the devilish engorgement that precedes it. Here’s the key phrasing, straight from the government’s own archives:

“…as soon as an erection of the penis takes place the sliding rods will be forced outward and caused to engage with the adjustable contact-posts, thus closing the electric circuit and causing the bell or other device to be operated, thus awakening the sleeper…” via, “… a belt connection with any form of motor used to operate a graphophone, phonograph, or other instrument.”

That’s right; not only will this appliance play music to wake you up during a night-boner, you can pick your own theme! Reply in the comments with the song you want to play every time you get aroused. Mine would probably be “Du Hast” by Rammstein but I won’t explain why.

Anyway, here’s what the rest of the mechanism looked like; remember this is 1900, so the machinery needed to pull off this simple task probably occupied half your bedroom and sounded like a locomotive chugging uphill:

At this point, you’re probably expecting a history of the weird pervert who invented this device, but the reaction from the patent office at the time would’ve been something akin to, “Oh, it’s another one of these.” If this gadget never went into production, it’s only because the marketplace was already too crowded with similar ones. 

This was due to a widespread belief that peaked in the Victorian era that masturbation and other expulsions of semen caused madness. But don’t worry, this brief fad which terrorized millions of young men only persisted for, oh, about two hundred years. That’s why in the 1800s, devices such as this simple-but-surely-effective spiked ring could be purchased for the semen fiend in your life:

But then came the industrial revolution and the accompanying belief that all societal problems could be solved by some kind of steampunk contraption, usually one that was simultaneously whimsical and ghastly. Note that the boner-music patent doesn’t specifically say it’s to prevent the patient from cranking their hog, but it’d be awfully hard to do so without accidentally blasting Turkey in the Straw throughout the house. Many of these devices only boasted of preventing involuntary nocturnal discharge, not because manual discharge was okay, but because it’d have been insulting to suggest it was even a danger. That’d have been like selling a smartphone app today that reminds you once a minute not to expose yourself on the bus.

Here’s a patent for another device from 1899 and this time the illustration helpfully draws in the patient’s balls, to make it extra clear what it’s for:

I know what you’re thinking. “Wow, the proportions of the tube once again implies a patient with an especially long, girthy, succulent cock! Or… or is that normal?” Well, it’s adjustable to the patient’s genital size, see the little plunger inside Figure 1? This, of course, means that at some point it had to be fitted to the patient, which would presumably mean giving the patient an erection and maintaining it for the duration of the fitting process. Then, once fitted, it presumably required at least one test boner to make sure the alarm sounded properly. Parents were buying these for their sons!

Now that I think about it, the inventor presumably had to test all of the failed prototypes on his own engorgement, presumably having to endure several awkward trips to the emergency room in which he had to convince doctors and nurses alike that he wasn’t trying to design a steampunk Fleshlight. 

The premise of this device is mostly the same as the first, and in fact the patent declares it is simply an iteration of the “general class” of gizmos that perform the same task: When the patient gets a sufficient hard-on, the head of the penis will press a button that triggers an alarm (please imagine one of those AWOO-GAH!! alarms from old cartoons, or perhaps an air raid siren). This, it promises, will save the patient from, “…consequences which would otherwise occur.” 

Those consequences, as I mentioned, were the terrible effects on mental health caused by ejaculation. Clearly, if you want your lustful young man to grow up with a normal, healthy psychology, the best option is to strap a giant brass dick-sheath to his abdomen. And be sure to tighten the little straps that go under his balls! You don’t want him to be sexually weird when he grows up, do you, mom?

But that just brings us to the real horror, the reason I saved this column for the Halloween season. This final patent is from 1903 and you can see how the tech has advanced in the few years since the others. It’s clearly a sleeker, more modern design. 

At a glance, it appears to be more of the same, with a couple of notable additions. First, the hard-hog containment pipe sticks straight out from the body, presumably protruding from the fly of the pants in a way that likely would not escape notice on the playground (and yes, it was intended to be worn during the day). Second, you’ll note a wire coil that loops below, just big enough to ensnare the wearer’s scrotum. If that looks like it’s made to conduct electricity, you’re right! But we’ll get to that.

See, this patent is a little more explicit about its goals, that it’s not just about stifling nocturnal emissions, but also, “…as a preventive for self-abuse or masturbation frequently practiced by weak-minded boys or young men.” And unlike the first two, which were intended to be worn to bed, this improved device is, “…adapted to be worn at all times, permitting the patient to urinate without its removal.” But don’t worry, it of course still comes with, “an alarm to indicate the involuntary erection of a sleeping patient.” It does everything! It was the iPhone of mechanized tumescence snitches. 

As for that little coiled scrotal loop:

“When desired, the electric belt may be made considerably broader than shown in the drawings, so as to generate a current of electricity strong enough to assist the cure of sexual diseases, and the spiral suspensory 13, which is placed around the testicles, imparts a mild current of electricity to these parts.” 

“Wow,” you say, “to think that people were so paranoid about ejaculation that they voluntarily wore this stuff!”

Ha. Yeah. Maybe you should stop reading here. Seriously. Turn off your gadget and go buy several copies of my book. 

This is your last warning.

All right, see these little protrusions here?

I’ll let the inventor explain those:

“At the inner edge of the tube and projecting toward the body of the patient is a series of short points or brads (22). These are of sufficient length to cause considerable annoyance and pain to the patient should any attempt be made to manipulate the penis by means of the tube, thus serving to prevent weakminded and insane patients from practicing self-abuse.”

Yeah, this was designed to also be strapped onto patients at mental hospitals. The logic of doctors of the time was, “All of the young male patients in our asylum seem to occasionally want to masturbate, which must mean their masturbation is what caused their mental illness! We need a torture device to prevent this!” The logic was infallible, if your goal as a physician was partly to maintain the fiction that this activity was highly abnormal and that you weren’t polishing your own knob every day on your lunch break. 

That means this fucking thing was more in the category of a straightjacket, the patent noting that it can be, “…buckled in place, or the bands may be of sufficient length to be tied in difficult knots to prevent a weakminded patient from removing the device.”

When doctors are guided by puritanical superstition, horrors are wrought.

Don’t get me wrong, the whole thing is still absurd, in the same chilling and grotesque manner as the last seven years of headlines. The irony of living in a mad world is that sometimes the only sane response is to cackle at it like a maniac. For example: I bet you think all of these “surgical appliances” were invented by some kind of medical expert, maybe physicians going off what they observed in their own clinics or hospitals. Nope! 

The wacky inventor archetype that gave us Doc Brown and the dad in Gremlins was alive and well in the Victorian era. This last device, for example, was from an inventor named Albert Todd, who four years later would be granted a patent for a “Detonating Burglar Alarm.”

It’s amazing to think that people back then were living in a world in which even cutting-edge technology operated via wacky cartoon logic. Only, here’s the thing: when I say “back then,” remember that there are people who were alive when this patent was granted that are still around today. 

Or, to put it another way: You’re all familiar with Blade Runner, and some of the folks who made it are still in the industry. So it was a while ago, but not that long. Well, people in 1982 felt the same about events in 1942, and people in 1942 felt the same about this era of steampunk hog-tattlers. You’re only three Blade Runners away from practices so barbaric and insane that some of you still think this is a wacky joke article and that I had Sean create these patents with photoshop.   

Attitudes toward sex and masturbation didn’t start to come around until the Alfred Kinsey era in the 1940s and 50s. My parents were alive then. And, of course, that enlightenment was only in certain parts of the world — if you grew up without suffocating institutional stigma around your sex organs, you dodged that fate by a millimeter, via pure luck. And who knows how radically the situation can change just one Blade Runner from now? It is only through vigilance that the forces of ignorance and superstition are kept at- wait, I think I want my boner alert song to be “Word Up” by Cameo, is it too late to change it? 

Jason’s novel, If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe is finally out on shelves everywhere, or if you don’t want to leave home, order it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Bookshop! 

…

Seanbaby and Brockway started 1900HOTDOG as a way to grift government processed meat subsidies, and along the way accidentally assembled the best comedy team in novelty phone number history. This week all articles are free in honor of the fantastic columnists that make this site a place to be treasured and feared in equal measure.

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: YouTube’s Pervert Bar 🌭

The oldest joke on the internet is to say, “I bet this is somebody’s fetish!” when doing something totally innocuous, like filming a woman smearing the makeup off a clown’s face with her bare feet. But the truth is, nobody making non-porn wants to know if the audience is secretly using their work to facilitate masturbation. You might be just absolutely going to town on your meat the entire time you’re reading my books but I don’t need to hear about it. 

And yet, in an ongoing effort to worsen the lives of every creator on its platform, YouTube has implemented a “most replayed” feature to answer the question, “Are my viewers pleasuring themselves to this?” When you mouseover the play bar at the bottom of most videos, a waveform of hills and valleys now appears:

The hills are where previous viewers saw something that made them pause and/or go back. “But what does this have to do with viewers strumming the ol’ flesh banjo?” you ask. Well, YouTube didn’t come up with this idea on their own, they stole it from Pornhub. No, really — you can see the same waveform below on Pornhub’s erotic massage vignette, “Sensual Suite -Ella Hughes & Laz Fyre *FULL VERSION* Passionate oiled PAWG”:

That little gray hill that our orange playback bar is about to reach is where the lady and her masseuse will take their relationship to another level. That “frequently paused/replayed” feature is specifically for their users to skip right to the “good parts” of a porn video, if they’re not into all the backstory or are simply too pressed for time. You know, like maybe they’re a masked vigilante and, before racing to a hostage crisis, need to quickly finish cranking their hog.* 

So on Pornhub, it’s essentially an “Audience Cranked Their Hogs Here” meter and on YouTube, an “Interest” meter. Or, you know, an “Audience Cranked Their Hogs Here” meter. Warning: we’re about to go down a rabbit hole that is not easily escaped.

If you search YouTube for, say, massage techniques to treat sciatica pain, you might get this video from a pair of chiropractors working on a patient in severe discomfort…

…but then you’ll see the replay spike where one of them kind of puts his hand near her crotch…

…as if viewers seeking sciatica relief thought that just maybe they were about to get the same plot turn they enjoyed in “SSEH&LFFVPOP” above. Spoiler: the patient instead recoils in pain, because what he’s doing hurts a lot (unrelated, but note that chiropractors are practicing a form of alternative medicine that many believe to be a scam).

Once I noticed this cursed feature, I became obsessed. On every video I watched, I observed where the interest spikes were, asking myself the same question over and over: “Are people cranking their hogs to this?”

Now, obviously not every single popular replay moment is prurient in nature. On that show where they interview celebrities while forcing them to eat increasingly spicy chicken wings, the replay spikes are right when the guest nearly vomits from eating the hottest wing. On the Hydraulic Press Channel, it’s when the object they’re pressing shatters and nearly kills everyone in the room. In those bizarre animations for toddlers, it’s typically some broad joke like this baby filling its outfit with five pounds of its own feces in “Baby Huggy Wuggy & Baby Player Are So Sad With Poppy Playtime Best Animation Compilation.” 

Speaking of which, do you want to know why kid-favorite YouTubers like Logan and Jake Paul just randomly start screaming, for little or no reason? “I’m thinking it’s cocaine, Jason.” I mean, maybe, but it’s also because their little viewers love it. Almost all of the replay spikes you see below are somebody, or everyone, suddenly screaming their lungs out:

But as you probably suspected, what you mostly find is a population that, despite living in an ocean of infinite free pornography, is desperately horny in ways that surprised even me. In this popular YouTuber’s video about thrift store tips, this first spike I’ve captured below is simply other people pausing/replaying to read the on-screen text…

…but then you notice a bigger replay spike later in the video, and…

…it’s exactly ONE SECOND of cleavage, and viewers carefully scrubbing back and forth  to catch and preserve that elusive, precious moment forever. In this video about a chainsaw demonstration, one of the hosts wore tight leggings and you can see spikes where viewers paused to look at her butt (in case you think I’m engaging in wild speculation here, just read the top comment): 

But, hey, it’s 2022, where else are you going to get a chance to see a woman in leggings? “Jason, we need even sadder examples!” is what none of you are saying and to that I reply, you’re in luck. Accumulating and interpreting internet analytics data is my fetish. 

One of my favorite film analysis channels is Pop Culture Detective, they do extremely smart, even-handed examinations of sexist film tropes like this excellent video about movies that treat non-consensual voyeurism as charming. So, of course, the big replay spike is viewers pausing and rewatching one of the clips they use as a negative example of sexist voyeurism, because it features exactly two seconds of a woman’s butt in a modest two-piece swimsuit:

Meanwhile, their most popular video is about the problematic, “hot girl is too naive to know what sex is” trope. The big replay spike on that one is viewers carefully going frame-by-frame to see if they can glimpse a nude Amy Adams in the 2007 PG-rated Disney film Enchanted, because there’s a gag where she’s briefly naked behind a towel…

…and who knows, maybe you’ll be the first guy in fifteen years to notice the editors accidentally left in two frames of vulva. 

Okay, enough of that — let’s just accept that any glimpse of female skin, regardless of context, is going to trigger a hog-crank spike. 

Instead, let’s move on to ASMR, which I’ve always assumed to be intended as relief for uncranked hogs, but I actually don’t see replay spikes where there’s the equivalent of a “money shot” (the spikes I find are always when the speaker whispers too quietly and the viewers go back to try to hear it). But then in this one, there’s a moment where the whispering young woman scratches a match for a while and then, finally, lights it. And there’s your replay spike: 

Is… that a thing? Are there people who crank their hogs to… fire? Matches? Women lighting matches on fire? Here, let me google it:

Oh, so it’s a whole genre. Huh. You learn something new every day. So, if you’ve ever made a video where you lit a match, go look at your replay trends! Or don’t!

All right, let’s spin the wheel again. What’s the least-sexy activity you can imagine? Wood carving? Great, let’s try it. In this video about a guy making a bowl, the replay spikes are whenever he cuts out the inside of the bowl with a chisel:

Now let’s randomly grab another bowl-carving video and see if it’s a trend. Yep! There’s your spike!

People are just straight up scrubbing around to find the “Chiseling out the bowl” money shot. Let’s try this video about the carving of a big wooden spoon — do we find a big replay spike at the point he chisels out the part of the spoon that’s kind of a bowl? We sure do!

“But Jason, are you saying people are cranking their hogs to this, or just that they just enjoy that bit the most?” My brothers and sisters in Christ, I do not know. Once again the internet has granted me just enough insight into my fellow humans to be tormented, but not enough to be enlightened. Side note: In any kind of video dealing with clay/sculpting/etc, the replayed money shot is when they cut the clay by slicing it with a wire. 

…which incidentally is also true for cheese-making videos. Again, only a very crass person would suggest that viewers are closing out of those videos the moment they put the wire away, sweaty and spent. That person just happens to be me.

And then you have Mukbang, the enormously popular genre in which hosts eat gigantic piles of food. This is a known fetish for some and, sure enough, you can always find replay spikes at the exact moment the host shoves a big sloppy wad of food into their mouth.

Nothing weird about that. But then I switch over to what is unironically my favorite YouTube channel, the one with the kid in vintage suits who reviews fast food. And then I see that the first big replay spikes are when he bites and chews. Not when he gives his review verdict, or even when he shows off the food — it’s specifically when he bites it.

Again: Are people cranking their hogs to this? I don’t know! In this outdoor cooking channel’s “Ultimate Steak” video, the only big replay spike is when the guy feeds a hunk of meat to his dog. Not the finished product of the recipe, not the prep — the money shot is a close-up of the dog chewing some meat. Is… is that a thing? 

“Speaking of dogs, go look at the replay trends on dog grooming videos!” says a strange voice from the darkness outside my window. Sure, why not. I would predict the money shot there would be the part where they show off the freshly-cleaned dog, or some other satisfying moment of accomplishment. Or, you know, it could be the moment they lift up the dog’s leg to shave its crotch:

I don’t know, man. Maybe they just wanted to see the technique. I’m sure it’s not easy to shave a dog’s crotch, especially if you’re planning to do it as a prank on their owner or something. Either way, I’m done. Feel free to start tracking these trends yourself and report the results in the comments. This is your problem now.

*Masturbating

Hey, for the very first time I am offering SIGNED COPIES of my upcoming novel (no extra cost), If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe. Normal unsigned hardcover or ebook copies are at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Bookshop. Or anywhere else they sell books.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: The Eddie Vedder Margarita 🌭

I guess we have to talk about this.

Sometimes you build up an image of a celebrity in your mind and then, in a single moment of lost control, they slap it to pieces. Since celebrity worship is literally the modern American religion (and don’t even bother arguing with me on that), a moment like this can be felt by the public as actual trauma. But, a little time has passed now, so I feel like this is a good opportunity to try to process it. Let’s watch the clip, walk through it moment by moment, and try to understand.

For those of you who’ve been living under a rock, I’m obviously talking about this infamous incident in which rock legend Eddie Vedder drunkenly makes the worst margarita of all time. WARNING: If you’ve never seen this video, it takes an abrupt, upsetting twist near the end.

Before we continue, Jason’s new book is up for pre-order on Amazon, B&N and Bookshop! Yes, this is the latest from the New York Times bestselling John Dies at the End franchise! Holy shit! Here’s the cover, only real small!

The clip is from a lockdown-era Zoom gathering, a livestreamed substitute for the canceled Ohana Music Festival in September of 2020. Eddie hosted it from his kitchen (or maybe it’s just the wet bar in his music room?) and immediately it’s clear that what Eddie is about to make is by no means his first drink of the day.

“In honor of my favorite group…” he slurs before pausing, smiling and briefly forgetting where he is, “well, one of them, but from Seattle for sure, my favorite group Mudhoney, this is gonna be my last margarita for the summer.” A bold proclamation to make on September 24, Eddie!

Into a plastic cup of ice he pours all of the tequila that remains in one bottle, finds another bottle that he believes also has some tequila in it and pours all that in, then finds a third bottle and says, “A little bit of this, whatever the fuck that is.” Finally, he grabs a bottle of Pineapple juice and says, “A little bit of this, to sweeten it up a bit” and dumps in about two cups’ worth. He drunkenly sings, “Suck… you dry…” as he grinds it all up in his Magic Bullet blender, then takes a sip directly from the blender cup:

“Whew! Jesus…” he exclaims. “It needs a little lime and I just went all through the place to find a lime and I don’t have any limes.” While saying this, he glances around as if he did, in fact, search his entire home for a lime, because he exists in a space in which no lime’s discovery, regardless of location, can ever be considered a surprise. He takes another drink and, in what I believe should be featured in future textbooks as an example of drunk logic, shakes his head and says, “It needs somethin’ green.” He hunts around and finds the only thing green in his Margarita Room: 

A fucking jar of pickles.

Pleased with his good fortune, he enthusiastically slaps one down on the counter, looks around for something to cut it with, reaches down…

…and, without hesitation, confusion or comment, grabs a full-size ax: 

Rock legend Eddie Vedder then proceeds to chop up the pickle with his ax in a way that suggests he has done it many times, then plops the entire chopped-up pickle into his margarita. He takes a drink, sounds like he is crunching one of the pickle chunks, and says, “It ain’t that bad!” before ending the segment by holding up the cup, saying, “Here’s to Mudhoney!” a band which, based on the context, he apparently hates.

Now, readers under a certain age might be a little confused. “From what I gather, this ‘Eddie Vedder’ gentleman appears to be a cross between Jimmy Buffett, The Dude from The Big Lebowski and Homer Simpson from the ‘Flaming Moe’ episode…”

“…that is, he just appears to be a chill old guy living his best life, refusing to let the troubles of the world spoil his ‘I define the beach as wherever I happen to be!’ vibe. I kind of wish he was my dad.” Unfortunately, explaining the significance that this video holds for someone like me requires a brief history lesson and a bitter preview of the cold, treacherous wilderness that is middle age. So, buckle the fuck up.

First, note that cultural trailblazers always get watered down with time, and here I mean “watered down” in the sense that the Grand Canyon is the result of granite getting “watered down.” That’s why some of you only know Dr. Dre as the Beats headphones guy instead of a gangsta rap pioneer, and it’s why when Robin Williams passed, the internet was full of, “Oh, no! Not Mrs Doubtfire!” 

In the case of Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam, we must briefly rewind to the mid-1980s, when rock music had seized on all of the satirical tropes from This is Spinal Tap and turned them up to 11. Sorry, I need a moment to reflect on the fact that the “This goes to 11!” joke is nearly 40 years old, so for today’s kids it’s the equivalent of the ancient WW2-era Bugs Bunny cartoons I watched as a child in elementary school. Huh.

Anyway, that was the state of rock when I was a kid.

The music was shallow, stupid, sexist and theatrical to the point of absurdity. Then, in the early 90s, a pack of bands from the dreary Northwestern USA blasted onto the scene in a cloud of flannel and unwashed hair. The music was honest, stripped-down and emotionally raw. Mindless lyrics about partying with underage groupies were replaced with heart-wrenching tales of abuse, depression and longing. They were the proverbial ax to the glam metal scene’s pickle.

The most celebrated of these groups was Nirvana but the most commercially successful was Eddie Vedder’s Pearl Jam. Vedder was thus plastered on the cover of TIME magazine as the face of the movement:

“‘All the Rage?’ Is that supposed to be some kind of ironic joke?” says my hypothetical young reader. “The Eddie I just saw looks about as angry as a heavily sedated capybara.” But the younger version of the grinning, middle-aged sentient pickle margarita you saw earlier once hit the scene with a voice that seared itself into the zeigeist like a fucking branding iron, combining thunderous arena rock with lyrics that displayed his innermost trauma like a vivisected animal pinned to a dissecting table. Pearl Jam’s first album arrived when I was 17 and some of these songs hit me so hard that I couldn’t listen to them. I couldn’t handle it. There’s no joke here; I emotionally couldn’t make it through some of these tracks without finding it hard to breathe. 

This man took all of my most closely-guarded self-loathing, dragged it out into the light and set it to music so haunting and piercing that I couldn’t believe it existed. It felt illegal. No artist has touched me that way before or since. “This man,” I said tearfully to my disapproving parents, “wants no part of your artificial, shallow, picklerita world.”

On stage, he glowered and trembled, seemingly struggling to hold his fragile sanity together. In interviews, he brooded and mumbled, hinting at his dark past and how music was his escape. “Some day,” I said in awe, “I hope they make a Batman like this.” 

But there was always this hint of negativity behind the scenes, the other Seattle-area bands frequently making snide little comments to the press. For you see, Eddie Vedder was not from there, he was a surfer kid from San Diego who, some claimed, made the move to the Seattle scene specifically because that’s where the most lucrative deals were getting done. Further, some enjoyed pointing out that the brooding, tortured act vanished the moment he was out of the public eye, Vedder instantly becoming a smiling, life-of-the-party goofball.

And where Kurt Cobain absolutely did come from a troubled background of abuse, addiction and homelessness, it didn’t take long for music journalists to figure out that Eddie Vedder’s similar claims were a real surprise to the people who’d actually known him. Rolling Stone interviewed a bunch of his old classmates who pointed out that young Eddie was maybe the most popular kid in school, a star drama student who took the lead role in every play; a joyful, magnetic personality who was clearly going places. The tortured grimacing you saw on stage, the article implied, was the work of a trained actor playing a character, a career-minded striver who simply figured out where the market was going. If he’d been born ten years earlier, maybe he’d have been up there in teased hair and leather pants, singing about how he wasn’t looking for nothin’ but a good time.

“Back up,” you say, “I feel like a few minutes ago I was watching a dude chop a pickle like a limp log, how the fuck did we wind up here?” 

Good question. To bring the point around, let’s turn our attention to one of the guys you probably thought I was going to talk about at the top of the article: a longtime standup comedian who, to the kids, is probably only known for his animated voice work. I am of course referring to Larry the Cable Guy. It has to be confusing for any youth finding out that the cartoon character Tow Mater…

…is credited to “Larry the Cable Guy”…

…when of course “Larry the Cable Guy” is also not a real person, but a cartoonish redneck character played by comedian Daniel Whitney. In other words, it’s a character played by a character played by a guy from Nebraska who was educated in one of the top private schools in the country. I realize no adult should be surprised to find that’s not his real accent or personality, but it’s still startling to see him do interviews out of character (though not as alarming as hearing Gilbert Gottfried’s real voice). That’s when you realize that, unlike his co-stars, when Whitney leaves the studio and goes out into public, he can’t really be himself — he can only pull back one layer, to yet another character. That has to be weird, right?

But then you think, wait a minute, is it possible that all of his peers are doing the same thing? Is everyone in the public eye just playing a role they’ve carefully developed in front of a mirror, the way Eddie Vedder was accused of consciously practicing his “deep, disturbed artist” mannerisms? I mentioned earlier that some kids today only know Dr. Dre as the Beats headphones guy and/or Eminem’s grouchy mentor, but really old-school fans remember that before he was a gangsta rapper, he was the DJ for the ‘80s electro dance group World Class Wreckin Cru. That’s him, in in the red vinyl suit:

“But Dre really did grow up in South Central LA! Gang violence was so rampant he had to change schools!” Sure, but my point isn’t that these people are all phonies (though you have to wonder where Dre would be today if he’d successfully gotten the job at Northrop Aviation he applied for out of high school); my point is that it has to be a kind of prison, feeling like you have to play a character every moment you’re in public. The lingering suspicion no one loves or cares about you, but only the costume you wear, must be suffocating. Hell, can you even fully drop the act in private?

And even worse, for some reason we have no trouble believing the seemingly happy dude is secretly tortured, but really struggle to grasp that some do the opposite. That’s the paradox of Eddie Vedder; it was liberating for a young me to hear that I didn’t have to perform being happy, that I could talk about my trauma and openly allow it to be a part of who I was. But at some point, it became cool in our culture to be the brooding depressive. As a society, we started to equate sadness with thoughtful intelligence and happiness with blithe ignorance. Now, it’s like you’re not cool unless you have trauma — we demand that even our Superman struggle with PTSD. If a TV character smiles too much, then their happiness needs to either be the result of vacant obliviousness…

…or a mask to disguise a tragic past:

That, for me, is the lesson of the incident the press would come to call Pickleritagate. The initial shock implied that somehow Ten-era Eddie Vedder had tricked us into thinking he was a deep, thoughtful artist instead of the ukulele-plucking Spicoli he was behind closed doors. But why can’t a fun-loving goofball also make profound, emotionally complex art? Why can’t we acknowledge that all of us are playing roles for the public, especially in the social media age? Why can’t we feel it as relief when a superstar drops the mask, even if we don’t like what we see? Especially if we don’t like it? 

After all, aren’t those the moments that put cracks in our collective delusion that these people are somehow larger-than-life demigods instead of regular human beings with extremely specific, lucrative talents? I say the sooner we shatter that delusion, the better. Let’s be very frank here: There’s only one “celebrity” you should be “worshiping” and you won’t find them in Hollywood. 

You know exactly who I’m talking about: It’s this sassy disabled raccoon food critic on TikTok.

The new book is called If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe, pre-order on Amazon, B&N or Bookshop and get your future self a surprise gift! It’s the latest from the John Dies at the End universe but you don’t have to have read the previous books or seen the movie to get it, they’re all a bunch of tangled, incredibly upsetting nonsense.

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Jason Pargin’s Alpha Success Method 🌭

In all 50 American states, asking someone to read your novel is considered a form of assault, an act that can legally be responded to with force. Approaching a stranger to request they consume 150,000 words of your awkwardly creepy fantasies is a great way to wind up in the emergency room with a rolled-up manuscript wedged all the way up your ass (and in 31 American states, hospital staff legally would not have to treat you). 

So for me to show up here and ask you to not just read, but pay money for, the brand new novel I have up for pre-order on Amazon, B&N and Bookshop would literally be considered a cybercrime in some jurisdictions. Yes, this is the latest from the New York Times bestselling John Dies at the End franchise. Yes, the previous three books have almost perfect customer ratings on Amazon across some 7,000 reviews and no, you don’t have to have read any of them to understand this new one. None of that matters, since only a piece of shit would even bring it up. 

Instead, I’m here to offer something that many of you have been requesting for months, if not years. I don’t normally like to flaunt my success, but strangers can’t help noticing my lifestyle. They see my kitchen and say, “What is that on the counter? Can I have one?”

Friends, that is a Cuisinart Digital AirFryer Toaster Oven and no, you can’t have one, unless you emulate the Jason Pargin Alpha Success Method. See, this website has had a grand old time mocking self-help books, which are either A) lazy cash grabs by writers who’re remarkable only for their grotesquely low opinion of the book-buying public or B) the deranged rantings of mediocre zealots who lack the charisma to start a cult. But as a demonstrably successful person who owns a Ninja blender with the smoothie attachment (not shown)…

…I will walk you through the steps to attain the Jason Pargin Alpha Lifestyle Mentality for free, with no obligations, as long as you pre-order a copy of If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop). The 1,001 Steps are below, but DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU HAVEN’T ORDERED THE BOOK. It would be literally against the law for you to do so. “But the novel doesn’t come out for like nine months!” you say. I know, but authors like me depend on pre-orders, so just think of it like a pregnancy: We’ll have this encounter that you’ll quickly forget, then this fall, a stranger will arrive at your door with a beautiful bundle that will ruin your sleep for years after.

Here’s your last chance to say goodbye to your old, beta life.

Alright, buckle in:

Steps 1-5: Accept That All of Your Heroes Are Full of Shit

Your heroes aren’t gods, they’re just regular people who probably got good at one thing by neglecting literally everything else. Sure, Elon Musk is a genius at Twitter, but have you seen his shitty cars? So if you’re intimidated because you can’t live up to the standards set by your heroes, try looking up their most hilarious flaws. Then compare yourself to that, instead.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it yet but I’m an author, so as an example, I’ve assembled five indisputably great writers and the silliest facts I know about them:

1. In Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, there is, no-shit, an entire subplot about a love affair between a man with a gigantic penis and a woman with an equally large vagina. When the man with the massive hog (Sonny Corleone) dies, the woman (Lucy Mancini) hooks up with a doctor who arranges for her to have vagina-shrinking surgery to accommodate his normal-sized dong. None of this is a joke; go grab a copy of the book and read Chapter 22. 

Can I write anything on the level of The Godfather, in any medium? Fuck, no. Can I slam the brakes on a novel’s plot to talk about a character’s impractically giant tallywacker? I can, and I have.

2. James Joyce, author of masterful “So good they’re almost impossible to read” classics like Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, also wrote a series of fart festish letters to his wife, Nora, which included such passages as,

“You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.”

And signed off one letter with,

“Goodnight, my little farting Nora, my dirty little fuckbird!” 

I haven’t read any of Joyce’s novels, but I assume they’re basically just the above, only longer. Could I write such a novel? I can, and I have.

3. Literary giant and Nobel prize-winner John Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men and other works considered to be the finest ever produced in this country, also wrote an unpublished novel called Murder at Full Moon that is straight up about a detective on the trail of a werewolf. It was a young Steinbeck’s desperate attempt to sell a mainstream thriller, one he was so ashamed of that he had his agent submit it under the pseudonym Peter Pym (no publisher wanted it). The novel won’t appear on shelves because Steinbeck’s estate is honoring the author’s wishes to never let the masses view his embarrassing secret (the few critics who’ve seen a copy have mostly just mocked it). 

Could I write my own The Grapes of Wrath? It doesn’t seem likely. Could I write a monster transformation novel under a pseudonym so as not to bring shame to my family, then spend years failing to find a publisher before discovering other ways to get readers on my side? I can, and I have.

4. Raymond Chandler, one of the inventors of the “hard boiled” detective genre, created the character Philip Marlowe and, along with him, a whole bunch of tropes you’ve definitely seen parodied even if you never read the thing they’re parodying. 

Chandler also totally lost track of his plots while writing. The Big Sleep (the first Marlowe novel) was created by mashing together four unrelated stories he had lying around and just swapping the character names to make them match. When the book was adapted for film, the screenwriting team noticed that one central mystery was never actually solved in the novel (the murder of chauffeur Owen Taylor) and they wired Chandler to ask who killed him. The author admitted he had no fucking idea. 

Could I write novels so filthy with attitude and atmosphere that they help define a genre for generations after? I doubt it. Can I have entire books make it to print, and even get turned into films, without noticing glaring plot inconsistencies until months or years later? I can, and I have.

5. Author Anthony Burgess said his groundbreaking masterpiece A Clockwork Orange was, “…a jeu d’esprit knocked off for money in three weeks.” He mostly just seemed pissed that this “less famous than the film” novel was the only thing he’d ever be remembered for, but by far my favorite work of Burgess was his increasingly elaborate lies about the novel’s nonsense title. 

As this hilarious summary on Wikipedia demonstrates, Burgess gave at least half a dozen completely different, contradictory explanations for what a “clockwork orange” was, because he couldn’t just admit that it was either a random pairing of words he thought sounded cool, or that he had copied a misheard phrase and nobody noticed that it wasn’t a real thing people said until it was too late (I think something similar happened with Breaking Bad). Instead, each explanation doubled down on the supposed profound symbolism behind those two nonsense words. If you think about it, human free will is like… a machine… made of… fruit.

Could I build a fictional world that still resonates a half-century later, inspiring a blockbuster film worthy of four Academy Award nominations? Who knows? Can I make up a bunch of bullshit in interviews to justify creative decisions I barely remember? I can, and I have.

Now that you’ve seen the technique, you can apply it to the greats in your chosen field. Remember, if you are as good as a person at their absolute worst, then you are also as good as them at their absolute best. This is irrefutable logic and, once embraced, will allow you to march forward with Total Alpha Confidence.

Steps 6-10: Let Your Haters Motivate You

People like an underdog story. The Jason Pargin Alpha Life Achievement Technique is not just about overcoming your opposition, but about exaggerating your opposition so that your achievements sound even more Alpha. Just to be clear: All that matters in today’s world is making yourself sound as besieged as possible, even if you’re the CEO of a company with your father’s name etched above the door. You should wake up every day looking to spite your haters and if you don’t have any haters, then buddy, you’d better fucking find some. Here are the five ways my detractors have driven me to Alpha Success:

6. I was born in an economically depressed small town in Illinois in which there were exactly two pastimes: 1) Kicking ass and 2) Getting your ass kicked. When I was born, the nurses all gathered around. “This baby is different,” they said, “and we hate anything that’s different. Let’s throw it in the parking lot and hit it with a rake.” That’s when I realized I’d been born into a beta world that was full of haters who fear the Alpha.

Soon, at an age when other children were playing with blocks, I was reading novels. “That’s nice,” say my haters, “but surely any signs of intelligence at that age were purely due to genetics. You can’t claim something you did as a toddler was a credit to your own grit and determination.” Translation: “We betas fear what you may become if we do not undermine your confidence.”

7. I attended elementary school in the 1980s, which was exactly like Stranger Things in that it sucked. While other kids were doing normal kid stuff like running around their yards playing Piss Tag, I liked exotic “nerd” stuff they could never understand, like Star Wars and Nintendo. “We didn’t hate you for liking those things,” say my haters, lying. “It’s just that most of us couldn’t afford an NES because in 1987 they were really expensive, when you adjust for inflation. Piss Tag was our Metroid.” In other words, they wanted me to conform. But Alphas do not conform to anything other than advice given by fellow Alphas.

8. My childhood was rough. Poverty was rampant in our town; my father was an alcoholic. “That must have been hard,” say my haters, sneering, “but in that town, it would have been weird if he wasn’t an alcoholic. And the sheer fact that both of your parents worked full time, and are still alive, means you were more well-off than probably 80% of your classmates.” Translation: “We are jealous, because your Alphaness is a form of riches that we will never possess.”

9. In high school, I once got a D in English class. “I’m going to be a published author someday!” I said to the teacher, an elderly hater. “That wouldn’t surprise me,” she replied. “Millions of people write books. It isn’t that hard, if you have literally nothing else to do with your time. But right now, you need to actually turn in your homework if you want to improve your grade.” For you see, she may have mastered English, but she could not speak the language of the Alpha, which is mostly a series of refusals to do as told. 

10. Twenty years after graduation, my dream came true. “Look!” I said to the haters. “My book got turned into a movie and put me on the bestseller list! I bet you regret excluding me from your little reindeer games!” 

“We constantly invited you to things,” they’d respond, through their jealous scowls. “You just rarely showed up and when you did, you acted like a dick. And to be frank, the world needs more healthcare workers than authors, so if anything, you should be ashamed of every dollar you make.” Translation: “We wish that we, too, had pursued the Jason Pargin Methodology For Alpha Goal Accomplishment.”

Steps 11-15: Learn To See Your World From An Alpha Viewpoint

11. The Alpha remains cool at all times. Emotions are weakness. Whenever someone else becomes frustrated or distraught, make it a point to tell them how calm you’re being in comparison, and how this proves that you are operating via pure logic, like a cool robot, instead of via irrational emotions, like a whiny triggered crybaby. This will make them even more upset, further proving your point.

12. Alphas must also establish at all times that they are not to be challenged. You must therefore never let an insult or disagreement go without an overly aggressive response (note: disagreement is simply another form of insult). Everyone should be walking on eggshells the moment they enter the room. Existing in the same space as an alpha should make them feel like they’re in a cage with an enraged gorilla, which is scientifically nature’s most Alpha animal, feeling nature’s most Alpha emotion. 

13. If it sounds like Rule #12 contradicts with Rule #11, that means you are still approaching this list with a beta mindset. The rule is that Alphas must remain cool compared to other people. This is easily accomplished by constantly making everyone you encounter angrier than you are, then pointing this out to them as a sign of your superiority. Hey, do you want to know how I feel about vaccines? It’s whatever would make you angriest. “Wow, that kind of makes me hate you!” you reply. Exactly. Hate is nothing more than the sensation created when a beta encounters an Alpha.

14. The Alpha must simultaneously have total confidence while also always striving to improve, which means you must believe in your greatness while also hating everything about yourself. The most efficient method is to loathe yourself while loathing other people even more. If you and another person fail in the exact same way, you can establish your Alphaness by reassuring yourself that your failure resulted in more self-loathing than theirs. Anyone who seems to feel better about themselves than you is, by default, inferior.

15. Find the thing you are already naturally good at, and declare it to be the one trait by which all humans are to be judged. Do you enjoy working out and keeping fit? Then spend all of your time thinking about how what’s really wrong with society is that everyone has become fat, lazy slobs. Do you take pride in your sense of humor? Then endlessly ponder how everyone these days has become either humorless scolds or easily-amused barking seals. Remember: You are the ideal  person and everyone else is just trying and failing to be exactly like you to varying degrees.

Steps 16-25: Follow The Jason Pargin Daily Alpha Schedule for Total Alpha Life Domination:

4:00 AM: Wake up, because you have to piss. 

4:01-4:59 AM: Lie in bed because you are too exhausted to get up but have to piss too badly to get back to sleep.

5:00 AM: Go to the bathroom, then go back to bed.

8:00 AM: Wake up again because your wife is making noise in the kitchen. 

8:30 AM: BREAKFAST. Maximize your time by eating whatever is within arm’s reach of where you happen to sit down. This morning I ate four miniature Reese’s peanut butter cups and a handful of tortilla chips, along with an Ultra Sunrise Monster Energy Drink.  

9:00 AM: ALPHA WORKOUT: Maximize your time by exercising your brain and body simultaneously, so look for a podcast you can use to distract yourself on the treadmill. Spend 30 minutes searching for one while you lean on said treadmill. Once you’ve found a suitable podcast, run for 8 minutes until the bouncing makes your airpods fall out of your ears.

10:00 AM: GET IN TUNE WITH YOUR WORLD by scrolling through Twitter and Reddit until you find something that makes you extremely angry. Remember: If you’re not Angry, you’re not Alpha. 

1:00 PM: Look up from your phone to realize you still have not taken a shower. 

1:30-2:30 PM: Take a shower using the Alpha Shower Method of staring at the tiles and dissociating until the hot water runs out.

3:00 PM: Eat a sandwich using the Alpha method of standing over the trash can in the kitchen.

4:00 PM Until Whenever You Are Too Sleepy To Sit Upright: Do work that will make you extremely successful and financially independent. Drink caffeinated liquids the whole time to keep your brain operating at maximum Alpha levels.

4:00 AM: Wake up, because you have to piss. 

Steps 26-1,001: 

Repeat the above until you have achieved your dreams or died. 

Congratulations, and you’re welcome. Here’s another chance to pre-order my next novel (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop) or to buy the previous ones. Goodnight, my farting, dirty little fuckbirds.

Follow Jason on his Twitter or get his more serious columns at his Substack blog/newsletter.