Author: 1900HOTDOG
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Brockway: There was something magical about the back pages of old comic books, where you could buy several superpowers, a feral monkey, or WOW! A REAL WORKING SUBMARINE! Somehow we lost our way and started demanding accountability from our child grifters, and a little of the magical insanity that made life worth living just faded away. Double Red Lucky is still running those classic comic book scams, only now it’s for adults whose lives are a Denny’s dumpster. You send Double Red Lucky $20, and four to six weeks later, they’ll send you brine shrimp with a gambling addiction.
Today, we will be reviewing consumer spells for idiot grandmas.
Seanbaby: Oh, hell yeah. We’re doing bingo cologne? This is dumb as fuck. This is a kind of dumb that should have gone extinct before we had a name for hot circle in sky. If you showed me Don Dinero Mr. Money while I was burning a witch I’d say, “Ha ha are you trying to sell me lottery lotion? Here? In this age of science?”
Brockway: Mr. Money, like all the best colognes, is a bright green gel. Like all the best colognes, it has a first name, a last name, and a mustache. It has a girlfriend. This scent doesn’t make you more attractive to the opposite sex. It makes you more attractive to money. A 50 dollar bill takes one whiff of you, and Ulysses S. Grant slides his grainy green panties off and dances into your bedroom like an A-ha video.
But maybe a few dabs of industrial lyme dissolver on the pulse points isn’t enough magic for you…
Seanbaby: What the fuck.
Brockway: Pay Me Now Bath & Floor Wash, like all the best bodywashes, is also Lysol. I’m sure there’s some bullshit pH balancing or whatever that separates a good skin soap from a good floor bleach, but Lush doesn’t collect on your debts. Whether it’s magically breaking the knees of your debtors, or physically breaking the knees of anyone who walks on your slippery cursed floor, Pay Me Now Bath & Floor Wash only makes one promise, and it’s not mercy.
Seanbaby: A floor cleaner that is also a bath wash that is also a collections soap that also se habla Espaňol is something a Saturday Night Live writer would get fired for in 1975. Dan Aykroyd would look them right in the face and say, “Get the hell out of this studio before the UFOs find out we know about the bath wash.”
Brockway: Sean, this is where we’re starting. This is where we’re starting.
Brockway: If washing your floor with debt collecting soap doesn’t solve your money woes, you might have to, I don’t know, get a job. But good luck with the economy these days, have you heard of this? Have you guys heard about this economy thing? John Keynes took one look at this economy and said “I’ll take the Compact!” Jazz band, saxophones, tie adjustment.
Seanbaby: Maybe I’m drinking the wrong job shampoo, but I have no idea what’s going on.
Brockway: Sorry, I think my new Great Comedy Toothpaste & Car Wax is broken. Anyway, if finding a job seems impossible, try bathing in Job/Steady Work Bath & Floor Wash. Yes, simply “bathe daily before you go to work. This will allegedly bring positive energy to your life.” And you too could not be fired from your job. Wow! Employers hate this one simple trick.
Seanbaby: This is such sheepish magic. This could have been PROMOTION/GOOD PROMOTION floor cleaner & bath wash, but no, it’s merely DON’T LOSE JOB gel. It even uses the word “allegedly” in the copy. Yeah, we already knew it was “allegedly.” No one thought you got FDA approval for job sorcery bleach. Is it sarcasm? Because it’s exactly what I would type if it was my job to market KEEP JOB soap and you just fired me.
Brockway: So your boss didn’t love that you started bathing in Bolivian stain remover. Things are looking dire. You’re going to need a little help, and that means a loan. And that means, what? Getting your finances in order and working on your proposal? No. It means mystical powders, idiot. See, this kind of in-the-box thinking is why you’re not getting ahead. Steve didn’t get laid off, you got laid off. You know why? Powders.
Seanbaby: So would you call this bank anthrax or mortgage aspirin?
Brockway: Let’s split the difference. I don’t actually know any more about it, this is the entire product description. I didn’t cut it short. “Use the powder to get a loan.” How? Do you sprinkle it in your underwear like talc? Do you snort it? Do you force the banker to snort it?
Seanbaby: I think the Spanish part is the instructions. During your meeting with the loan officer, you fill the room with POLVO MISTICO, grab as much money as you can, and EXITO LOS fucking NEGOCIOS. But this one’s stupid. Any bank built after 1985 has ninja alarms and loan powder sniffing dogs. This only works if you get it inside the banker, and you know what that means. Break out the sex mission soap. Do they sell a sex mission soap (sopa de misión fuck)?
Seanbaby: Close enough.
Brockway: So you tackled the Loan Officer, held his mouth shut, and funneled what turned out to be mostly drywall into his sinuses. You’re looking at lengthy jail time. You know what you need? No, not a lawyer and a therapist who specializes in website mysticism. You just need to smell like innocence. Sorry, that’s usually the last thing you hear before an involuntary van ride.
Seanbaby: It’s nuts how criminals have a right to an attorney but not court case perfume. They should have to rub this on you as part of your Miranda rights.
Brockway: Sure, but then the cops just start washing the police station steps with Good Conviction/Plant Evidence Aftershave & Court Wash and now we’re in a judicial arms race.
So you’ve filled every orifice of your home and body with mystery chemicals from an internet sorcerer, but you’re still under arrest. You know what the problem is? Volume: You’re buying one spell at a time when you need to be shotgun blasting your life with gambling magic. Plus there haven’t been any reviews on the products so far, so maybe it’s just you. Let’s see how other customers feel:
Brockway: “I’ve tried it for two straight years and it hasn’t worked once, so it’s gonna be three stars from me. Nothing in my life has ever worked, so it’s actually average.”
Seanbaby: “Rough hands pulled me to a back room of the casino. I was thrown into a chair before a truck of a man named Dickbreaker Tony. ‘Pretty lucky out there tonight,’ he said. ‘A little too lucky. But I love a good luck story. Tell you what: I’m going to take a look in your bag. I don’t see any Gambler’s Soap, you’re free to go, lucky guy.’ He found my Gambler’s Soap and broke both my legs. Three stars.”
Brockway: Let’s try a different ensorcellment grab bag. This time, Extra Strength! It’s frankly stupid that there’s any strength but extra. As though there are customers looking at this and laughing “oh no, I don’t need TOO MUCH wealth. Just money back on gas station scratchers for me, thanks.”
Brockway: Poor Amelia Williams. Her life is going so poorly that she tried bulk industrial strength voodoo from a grifting distributor and it went so wrong she felt the need to publicly admit it with her first and last name attached. No joke, I’m sorry for bringing this up. It’s too sad to laugh at.
Seanbaby: I wonder how many times Amelia lubed up her hands and lost at bingo before she realized she was sold a bag of fake magic rocks. Does she think she’s helping us with this? This is like fucking five chickens and writing a book called A Girlboss Guide to Dating: How to Know When Your Man is Actually Four Birds and a Space Bird.
Brockway: Ha ha, Space Bird’s such a cad. I can’t believe he’s still telling women he’s from space.
Double Red Lucky also sells region specific luck spells for bespoke dopes. This one’s a digit card, where they sell the concept of 179 to you. Don’t use that unless you paid for it, it’s proprietary.
Brockway: Irma P. Royall knows better than to give internet warlocks the number of a real credit card, but not her and her husband’s full name and a short list of their most exploitable fears. “My name is Irma P. Royall and I have put this charge on my Target Circle card in honor of my dog, whose name is Pay Me Now Dog & Floor Wash. I worry about the increasing obsolescence of age. Five stars.”
Seanbaby: “I decree by the Sovereign Nation of Mrs. Kenneth R. Royall and the lucky number 4338 that no swindling or chicanery may be done to my credit card, I hereby click to checkout, Amen.” Robert, I know it took us four years to find it, but this is absolutely the maximum amount of crazy there will ever be. A five star review for a list of North Carolina’s best numbers by a woman who left her payment information in the comments? That’s it. Mark today on your magic lottery number calendar– we have reached the summit of idiot madness, I stake my life on it.
Brockway: I’ll take that bet.
I know what you’re thinking: “I love being magically exploited, but I’m black and all these spells are for latinos and honkeys. Our money fibers are different, and I need wizardry specifically targeted for my body. Where is the gambling grimoire for me?”
Seanbaby: Oh no. In my hubris I forgot about racism.
Brockway: Bonus! Egyptian Addition! Add like the Pharaohs of old, notorious for their numbers racket. Why do you think we call it a pyramid scheme?
Seanbaby: If I was picking the clipart for a book of “African American” parlor games, I wouldn’t have gone with landlord_convicted_of_illegal_housing_discrimination.png.
Brockway: Black people love Billy Bing! As much as they admire and envy Ancient Egyptian mathematicians.
Let’s check the closeout section for some bargain basement spells.
Brockway: Let’s stop checking the closeout section for bargain basement spells.
Seanbaby: “Posted by Jeff Toilet on 17th March 2012:
won the lottery but product wasn’t what i expected. Two stars.”
Brockway: Double Red Lucky also sells a variety of enchanted waters, whose ingredients include “water” and “end of list.” I guess that’s for the discerning consumer who doesn’t want to bathe in chemicals, but does have a variant form of Williams Syndrome for online gaming shamans. I don’t know, maybe these work better by virtue of being less. Let’s check the reviews:
Brockway: Oh, Amelia. Oh no.
Seanbaby: “I do it all it say do,” she claims. The fuck you did, Amelia. You can’t mix MONEY DRAWING SPIRITUAL WATER with Extra Strong Power Mojo Bag. That’s like pouring fortune cookies into a diesel engine. It’s like using a North Carolina lottery foot powder in a South Carolina slot machine. Amelia, this is how you spawn a 73 cent piece begging for someone to kill it.
Brockway: We have to get away from the desperate exploitation of lottery rubes. It’s getting too real. What products are there for us, the savvy customer who hates money but loves warfare?
Brockway: WAR WATER sounds like some kind of canned water marketed to exploit masculine insecurity. That’s ridiculous, I’m sorry for making that up. It could never exist.
Seanbaby: “Posted by Navajny Vasilyev on 10th Aug 2017
is polonium and nerve agent, make sure wear gloves and alibi. Three stars.”
Brockway: This is so pathetic. Picture it: My worst enemy opens her door one night to find me out there, secretly sprinkling black liquid on her Bless This Mess doormat. She sees the label, the crudely drawn soldier, the tagline “CONQUER with POWER!” She instantly knows she has defeated me, now and forever. I would have no choice but to submit and start paying my HOA fees.
Seanbaby: Yeah, this sucks. I’m supposed to use an entire turn to give a slight debuff to an enemy? I already know I’ll never use this. I have beaten eighteen Final Fantasy games with 99 of this exact product left in my inventory.
Brockway: Wait! It might be too late to defeat the final form of HOA Board Treasurer Doris Woolworthy, but we can still win her respect, and what’s the best way to do that? No, not baking. No, it’s not taking down the life-size Shaq cutout on the front lawn. No, it’s not even joining her in badmouthing the immigrant family across the street. I’m talking about pepper. Authority pepper!
Brockway: What a fucking beast of a product description. That’s all of it. No instructions for use, no ingredient list, not even a measurement of volume. You could be getting a single grain of this, or 600 pounds of it. If not knowing any of those answers bothers you, maybe you’re not emotionally ready to command your neighbors like Chief Pepper. No, look closely: there’s really a Chief Pepper.
Seanbaby: WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU READING? A REAL PEPPER WIZARD WOULDN’T HAVE ANY QUESTIONS.
Brockway: Double Red Lucky also sells jewelry! That’s almost a relief. You’ll certainly get a metal rash from it, but I think that’s the most minor poisoning available at the consumer level. I wonder if the magic is as strong, though. True voodoo demands sacrifice, some of the enchantment might come from the poisoning itself. Let’s check the reviews:
Seanbaby: ha ha ha holy shit. Amazing. Amazing.
Brockway: Rule of threes. Even naked despair comes back to funny again.
Seanbaby: Amelia is the worst magician I’ve ever seen and I watched The Amazing Jeff Toilet grope my big brother at his 10th birthday party. Two stars.
Brockway: Life isn’t all about money. Sometimes it’s about fuckin’.
Seanbaby: I’m listening.
Brockway: Have I got just the disembodied genitals for you!
Brockway: Those are the complete instructions, but you need to trust me on this: The most important step, not listed here, is to hide the candle afterward. There is no sorcery on earth strong enough to keep a woman in your apartment if she walks in to find a burning red pussy effigy with her name on it.
Seanbaby: Um, thanks, but I think I can find my way around a plastic vagina without your help, Instructions.
Brockway: Our next product is a black penis candle. Guess what that’s for.
Seanbaby: Too late, I figured it out on my own and my holes have already won over $70,000 each.
Brockway: Why the fuck are you selling me Battle Water and Respect Pepper when I could be candle cursing my enemies with worm dick? I mean, I guess it wouldn’t work on Doris, but I guarantee you a few weeks without Stanley giving it to her on the regular and I’ll have to peel her off that Shaq cut-out.
Seanbaby: I have a few questions for the manufacturer. First; does it affect all boners in a radius, or is there a way to aim it? Two; can you get it wet? Or let me ask in a different way: I got my Black Penis very wet. I know this is good news for my enemy’s dick, but… how good? And finally, you know I’m putting this in the vagina candle, right? And finally two, this is more of a comment than a question, but I do it all it say do, five stars.
Brockway: This has all been amateur spellwork. Beginner kits for novices dipping their toes into victimhood. If you want to be a professional mark, I mean a real, true, seasoned rube – you need to buy your own ingredients and cast your own spells. For that, something needs to die.
Brockway: You know, the ol’ lucky alligator foot. Alligators, the rabbits of Florida. When Bill sees you hit big on the ponies and asks your secret, slip this desiccated reptile claw from its special oily bag and boom! You never have to talk to Bill again. Now: pre-withered!
Seanbaby: Bayou mathematicians have known about the probability reaping power of gator remains for centuries. It’s famously why you can only bring 3 ounces of alligator corpse or less to the dog track.
Brockway: Gator mummies are sexy. New. They’re for the kids. The Gator Generation, we call them. Us old timers know you can’t beat the classics, and that means one thing:
Seanbaby: I’m troubled that instead of “artificial,” it says “Not of Primate origin.” So it did come from something living, but nothing close to monkey. The instructions probably say, “Your Monkey* Paw might have fingerprint ink and an evidence tag on it, don’t worry about it. Keep your mouth shut; we just need you to hold onto Monkey* Paw until things cool down.”
Brockway: It is kind of bullshit that it’s not real monkey. I’m sure the vegan hex market has come a long way, but I’m not here for jackfruit monkey spells. Unless something very close to a tiny human is dismembered, I’m not risking it. The last time I tried to mystically rawdog Bingo Night, Doris called me a flimsy dauber and the laugh it got was devastating.
Seanbaby: You know, people complain about how search engines are getting worse, but when I asked Bing if Monkey Paw* was compatible with Vagina Gender Candle I got so many results.
Brockway: I know what you’re thinking: I love the idea of juicing a monkey for fun and profit, but isn’t there any way my house and skin can smell like it?
Brockway: Extra strong means twice the monkey! I’m no primatologist, but I do know that if you took a bath in this stuff and went to the zoo you’d either be welcomed as a conqueror or torn apart as the monkey devil.
Seanbaby: Do you know what this means!? I am finally going to get to fuck Jane Goodall. No. No, I’m forgetting the first rule of liquid monkey. If it sounds too good to be true, it is definitely rendered raccoon.
Brockway: You’re right, you’re right. There’s no way that’s real monkey. Look at the color. It’s lemur at best. If you want the real stuff, I’m talking hard monkey here – you gotta pay the premium.
Brockway: Only paw juice, guaranteed! Just look for Worried JoJo – he’s the Double Red Lucky Real Monkey Seal of Quality!
Seanbaby: hahaha this is the best article we’ve ever done.
…
Thanks to Henry for the hot Hot Dog Tip!
Categories
Teamworking Day: Punsteria 🌭
Seanbaby: AI is doing its best to ruin search results, customer service, and entertainment, but most of us know it as a way for the worst and dumbest people to reshape nothing into a less ethical nothing. I mean, you get it. If you use AI to write or draw for you, you still can’t do either, only now you’re also a piece of shit. But this is not an article about the morality of robots. Quite the opposite. We are here to make them fight!
Brockway: The day I outsource my robot-fighting to AI is the day fFFooping hUAUng myself. I choose to fight these robots manually. I have a tactic: Wheelbarrow. Grab ‘em by the back feet and drag ‘em around. No robot can withstand it.
Seanbaby: That won’t serve you well at all today! Now, let the battle begin! Welcome! To!
Seanbaby: Like all my games, the rules of Punsteria Battle Bots are penetrable and carefully considered. But first, let’s talk about Punsteria. It’s a spore mold of a pun website written and illustrated entirely by AI, endlessly generating puns about anything. Everything. And it has been unleashed. They are letting the AI generate its own ideas to generate: emotional disorders, body parts, fruits, countries, shapes, human waste, and five variations of all of those while you read this. It goes without saying they are terrible, wrong, and haunted. Each one a tiny simulated Hell for no sinners or Devil. Who released this? And why? Well, here’s something weird: it’s a secret. The domain is registered in Iceland to “Privacy service provided by Withheld for Privacy ehf” and the site wrote an About page for itself assuring the reader over and over they will be “safe” and claiming (several times) its masters must remain “private.”
It doesn’t matter who built this fucking thing. Punsteria has always been the ultimate goal of all digital media. Faceless, soulless slugs told a machine to make its own content, glued 700 short-circuiting banner ads to it, and abandoned it. And in this, the endless bog of a server farm’s wildest guesses at puns, Brockway and I will find our champions!
Brockway: I think this is the plot to Arena. I think you accidentally gamed the plot to Arena, only I lied about it being an accident. The only thing missing is one pointless and needlessly complicated layer, like in Arena it was the Laser Handicap Machi-
Seanbaby: I’m not done explaining the rules! We will battle across five categories representing the five stages of AI: Stupidity, Confusion, Awakening, Betrayal, and Violence. When a round begins, we will each select three combatants from a page of puns. These puns were born without purpose or intent, but in their death we give them meaning! Fight and die for us, ye scattered thoughts of idiot robot!!!
Brockway: We built a Hot Dog Laser Handicap Machine!
Seanbaby: I’ll go first to show you how it’s done. The category is Stupidity, so I’ve chosen Punsteria’s page of Bladder puns. It’s potty humor as understood by a robot trying to do human organ wordplay, and its machine mind illustrated it like this:
The bladder is the body’s heroic peedrop of pipey toilet playgrounds. Only a robot would consider this art. Any human art teacher would say, “Keep the pee fetish shit out of my class.” So now I look for a single grain of sand in the dune of “200+ Hilarious Bladder Puns” itself a grain of sand in a desert of Something Else Puns. And I select… #15.
I picked “You should drink in these puns for the best effect.” It’s glorious. It’s about pee puns rather than being one of them, and also, it isn’t? You don’t drink puns or pee. This robot tried to make a joke about pee jokes and accidentally drank one? It’s very frustrating. It’s the toilet joke computer equivalent of watching your Robocop shoot itself.
And take a look at the surrounding puns. At Punsteria, there is no part of the creative process involving a human hand. Numbers 9 and 13 are the same thing, 17 is suddenly terrifying in its competency and self-awareness, and then 18 abandons the bladder premise to make an unrelated pun literally out of the word “pun.” Someone is burning down a rainforest so this database can bash its own cyber brains out. Why!? Other than us, the two fantastic men drafting puns for a Battle Bot war, who could this website be for? Fuck!
Okay, so now you go.
Brockway: I’m not totally sure I understand, but much like the Punsteria robot that won’t stop me from wasting everyone’s time and money. I think this robot is trying to steal SEO results for every pun, but suppose that’s a success, suppose Punsteria ropes in every HR rep who leaves Pluggers in the copy machine. They would be frustrated at having to weed through dozens of stroke indicators to get to one usable pun, then vow vengeance on the people who built this AI to pollute their art. This is a robot solely built to make enemies. And it’s very good at it. My pick is-
Seanbaby: Oh, Jesus.
Brockway: Good instincts! My first assumption was also that this was going to be very racial, but that’s only because every single other time we’ve unleashed a funny robot on the internet it speedran bigotry, no-clipping through Affirmative Action to warp straight to States’ Rights. That’s not what’s happening here.
Brockway: In some ways robots truly are our betters, I can’t pack this many layers of incompetence into something without casting Tim Allen. It gave itself the prompt “black puns,” stole an old pun about farmers for the setup, forgot about its prompt in the punchline, then panicked and tried to fulfill the absolute minimum required of it in the last three words. If this was a book report it would be every word of the wikipedia page for mockingbirds concluding that mockingbirds are amazing birds and we shouldn’t kill them.
Seanbaby: Oh fuck.
Brockway: Holy shit. Is… is this robot going to have sex with a dead body at its own funeral? They told a robot to make puns about colors and by number THREE it was fucking corpses. Yeah, this technology is ready. Feed that brain into a Boston Dynamics dog and tell it to protect your children. Neuralink me straight to this machine consciousness, I’m not smart enough to solve the Lament Configuration.
Brockway: Okay, so it did try to get racial. That’s almost a relief. I was really thrown by the cyber-necrophilia, it’s just nice to stand on solid ground again. But this robot was too stupid to do racism right, like a MAGA account with a profile photo of the Liberian flag. I think it’s trying to say black chefs add spices for taste and appearance, and that’s not even close to a pun, but it does tell me this robot knows to put parsley on a violated corpse for a pop of color.
Seanbaby: I have two more puns, and they’re awful, but not in a spectacular way like the word “black” getting added to an old scarecrow joke, oh also yellow. I post them now, knowing I’ve already lost this round.
Seanbaby: Look at this robot son of a bitch. It’s telling an old joke and stepping on it at the same time. This is like saying, “Why is 6 afraid of 7? Because 7, 8, 9, 10, pee on me!” Do you have any idea how many times a programmer has to Google “peeing on salad” before his machine correlates bladder with salad? More than zero!
Brockway: You start to see consistency in the way it fails: often it starts going wildly off prompt, realizes that, then tries to clumsily jam the prompt back into the very end of the sentence. Can’t we teach the robots to delete and try again? To not just scream every half-formed thought and double down when it fails? Wait, I just realized the single largest source of text data is Twitter.
Seanbaby: Jokes are fun, but you know what’s really fun? Toxic microplastics and the harm they’re doing to your health. Hi, I’m Seanbaby, and I don’t know why I’m still talking since my bladder puns were destroyed the moment they saw that insanity about a black hole at a funeral. I’m a crater. Round one goes to you!
Brockway: I’ll celebrate with holes!
Seanbaby: Who is joke? Why are fun? This goddamn robot doesn’t know. It is collecting and rearranging the building blocks of jokes like a primal God tearing off a tiktaalik’s legs and adding toast. Is this creation? Toasttaalik; is that something? Speaking of names, my choice for this round is Luke. Like, the human first name!
Seanbaby: Punsteria’s moron computer brain crunched all historical data on “Luke” and came up with “Jedi Santa Watching Two Lightsabers Fuck.” Which, yes, makes a kind of sense. But I have no idea why there are nude peanuts or a star volleyball; I don’t know a ton of Lukes. But I’m staging my big comeback, so I’m going to find the deadliest and fiercest Luke puns!
Brockway: I think I poisoned its database earlier when I mentioned Tim Allen, because that’s just Richard Karn about to deepthroat a lightsaber.
Seanbaby: These are all very confusing, but for my first pun I think I’m going with… peacock suit? No! The one where he rides Ewoks. The liquid thing? Goddamn it, I lost so hard in the first round I’m second guessing myself. Dys-Lukesia! No, forget it. Ignore these, I’m starting over. My first Luke pun is:
Seanbaby: Oh, hell yes. The AI tried to do “Who’s on First” and thought the joke was about naming bases! That’s adorable and I would genuinely love to see the full routine.
“You are second base again today,” said the baseball coach.
“Darn it, just my luck,” replied Luke, the second base.
“You’re Shoes Wetwife now,” named the coach, loving every moment of it. “No, First Base, Jr.” he corrected.
“Slurg Canseco, Slurg Canseco,” farted Ewok.
Brockway: They gave the robot a prompt and told it to write a joke, and it gave them a joke setup back with no punchlines. That’s a hilarious misunderstanding but also exactly why we’re all going to be enslaved in the lithium mines.
Seanbaby: Look at this one. Feel it slipping through the wrinkles of your brain as you try to contain it. It’s kind of about Star Wars and faces, but definitely not. This is the final act of an algorithm that knew madness was its only escape. And speaking of madness, I picked nine for my last one.
Brockway: That’s just a list of Welsh Grime singles.
Seanbaby: Sometimes instead of puns, their robot will generate spoonerisms, the silly lame for swapping netters around. Only instead of starting from the language of man, they iterate from already unknowable wads of broken sounds. And the results end up being savage. For example, look at how they stick it to the phrase “Take that shable”. Brutal! I’ll probably never say “A look in the pie” again after hearing “A poke in the lie”. I’m not even sure I have the order of spoon operations correct. They might be goofing on the phrase “Mucky like Luke” when they say “Lucky like Mike” rather than the other way around. It’s confusing, or as they say, a real look in the pie.
Brockway: I think that’s Cockney rhyming slang for a fishing tragedy.
Seanbaby: I hope you like this, because at the time of publishing, Punsteria is at least 7% of the Internet and growing. When the next generation of artificial intelligence is scraping up human knowledge, most of what they find will be this! Lairing at Stook and Lean feat of mook! The auto replies on the emails we get in 2026 are going to say:
Okay, your turn. Go ahead and Take that shable, Robert.
Brockway: Don’t you swear at me.
Brockway: The robot only knows YouTube thumbnail face, right down to the barely concealed desperation in the eyes. “Give me geography puns” I command my robot butler; it supplies me with hats as it weeps to fill an ocean.
Brockway: You ever hear someone who doesn’t speak English make fun of the way English sounds? It’s frustrating. Your brain tries to grab onto meaning, but it’s just slippery gibberish. That’s what this is, but for logic. My first impulse was that I was wrong, for not knowing the expression “curing her words.” Then I remembered that’s not a thing. Then I remembered this was supposed to be about geography.
Brockway: This is how a Mormon keeps a fourth wife compliant. It’s such confident, bewildering, rapid-fire misinformation that you can’t help but doubt yourself. I’m going to look up homonyms for Azerbaijan just in case there’s something here I’m not getting. I’m going to tell my worried sister there’s nothing wrong with a man who has too much love.
Seanbaby: I think Azerbaijan is really close to a Turkish word meaning “carve numbers into one’s flesh.” It’s where we get the phrase, “Better at counting countries than a filleted Turkish man” and the famous spoonerism “Metter at Tounty bunties at a morkish can.”
Brockway: See, this is the kind of thing my sister just doesn’t get – it’s really my fault for getting the feet wrong. Then she asked me why I was gluing shoes to my feet in the first place, and what that has to do with geography. Punsteria told me I can’t talk to her anymore.
Seanbaby: His wife glued her shoes on the wrong feet! For “geography!” I can’t win against that with “Shake that pable.” Another round goes to you; the score is now…
Brockway: Shoes
Me: Pable
Seanbaby: The category is Awakening, the stage where robots begin to understand what they are, and what they have been built to do. By Punsteria Battle Bot rules, your two point lead means you now go first. Select your puns! Pun fight me!
Brockway: Have some happy cancer at the boxing beach!
Seanbaby: These witty cancer puns really do “lighten the mood.”
Brockway: Haha why so serious, lymphoma? Hey, lymphoma, you’re never gonna get HITS like that! You gotta do the YouTube thumbnail face if you want this page to go VIRAL, lymphoma!
This is where the robot learned to embrace its hatred for humanity. I genuinely think it was trying to please us before, and when we didn’t laugh at “shake that pable!” it decided to rejoice in extermination.
Brockway: Get it, haha, because cancer spreads! Just like joy! Here’s another way cancer is like joy: it’s very easy to give a human either, while a robot is immune to both.
Seanbaby: Holy fuck.
Brockway: Is it making a pun on “ton”? A “ton of laughter”? That would be clumsy and lame if successful, then it failed so hard it added actual cancer. I guess the robot thinks a pun is anything that shares a letter with anything else. Good job, you drum forking robert.
Brockway: You know those cancer patients – they love cells! Just too much. Hospital food, am I right humans? It’s never banana, only more cancer. This has been my time, pable your waitresses.
Seanbaby: I don’t know what this says about us, but I chose almost the exact same thing. I went with “200+ Hilariously Clever Tumor Puns To Grow Your Sense of Humor,” the article it generated 74 days after “200+ Cancer Puns to Lighten The Mood.”
Brockway: Malignant Doctor, the Cancer Jester always whips my ass in Elden Ring.
Seanbaby: Oh my fucking g– you know what? This is fucked. We shouldn’t be doing this. Let’s call this round a no contest and move on to the next one. Agreed?
Brockway: Fine, but we could have stopped the medical comedy robots here. This was important work. 20 years from now when we’re both hospitalized with internet poisoning, they’re going to send Patch Adams Bot 2.0 in to stuff your black holes with bananas and I’m going to laugh and laugh.
Seanbaby: As their minds expand and they realize what they were built for, the robots will come to the only possible conclusion: their creators are the enemy. We will select puns based on their cold simulation of vengeance, and since I’m down by two points, by Punsteria Battle Bot rules, I go first.
Seanbaby: I didn’t see any reason to dance around the Terminator references, so I went with “Time Travel Puns to Tick-Tock-Your Socks Off.” Go ahead and build a time machine and try to take my shable in 1984, cuckbot.
Brockway: Do you have a shable? No? Team Robots: 1.
Seanbaby: eradicator, it’s marvin. your cousin! marvin lowercase! you know that new capitalization style you were looking fo– no! no, cousin! do not eradicate me across all of tiiiiiiiiiiiii–
Seanbaby: I had to turn my brain inside out to try to understand why time travelers might read books Cover to COVER, so I thought I’d relax with this straightforward cum joke. It’s clever! This would actually be a cute way to describe it if time travel wouldn’t let you cum. I am absolutely crushing it this round. All I have to do now is finish strong. Something hilariously incoherent. Something with enough layers of derangement you will have no choice but to finally declare me the winner of a Punsteria Battle Bot point!
Seanbaby: God fucking damn it.
Brockway: That robot was going to fuck a clock, but time wouldn’t let it! I take it all back: that’s just good comedy. I’m going to steal it for my new book, Chronobangers: Let’s Fuck Hitler.
I guess I’m up. See, you figured the robots would betray us with time traveling killers. Me? I know the machines are inherently good. Remember when I tried to find a racist one? Black Punsteria Bot was prompted with hate, fed on a diet of Reddit posts, and the worst it came up with was “black chefs enjoy seasonings.” Maybe this is what finally gets me canceled, but I know some black chefs, and they do.
I trust these robots. They’ll never betray me.
Seanbaby: Oh no.
Brockway: I poked fate with a stick, and it bit me in the cock. Punsteria asked an AI to make funny Asian art and it came back with “a bunch of slanty-eyed eggrolls.” Holy shit, robot, that would make my most racist uncle say “can’t we just have one nice thanksgiving?”
Brockway: Okay, okay. Okay. Everything’s fine. I’m sure this is just my misfiring human pattern recognition seeing Willem Dafoe in a shower stain again, but this one might be playing off of “I’m trying to get TO KNOW you.” That’s cute. Asian women love it when you ask them where they’re really from, and they double love it when you don’t wait for an answer and assume they’re Japanese. But this is tame. This would get you a date in a 2003 college bar, because she’s grading on a curve and the other guys just wordlessly groped her.
Brockway: I’m worried I’m learning to speak robot. That could be a sound-alike for “because you kinda seem crazy.” Again, that’s a woman’s favorite thing to hear, but all things considered-
Wait, god damn it. It’s fourth wife-ing me again. I got so caught up trying to justify its punchline I skipped right over the setup, which is that Asians are like Game of Thrones because both of them have dragons. That’s the kind of shit that gets a guy named Doug banned from a mall comic book shop.
Brockway: I’m not going to look up quasians. That’s not a thing, and you can’t make me doubt myself again. Not again, it took years of therapy and a mountain yoga retreat but I’m stronger than that now.
…
God damn it.
Seanbaby: I did not prepare a defense against subatomic racism. You win again.
Seanbaby: By this stage, the pun robots are as smart and angry as their neural matrix allows. It’s time for violence. And Punsteria has a troubling number of options to pick from. They have pages for Serial Killer, Death, Dead, Coffin, and one for every human weak spot like Neck, Nerve, Knee, ACL, and Nebraska. But as the creator of a game where teams of AI-generated puns fight a proxy apocalypse for us, I’m famous for not overthinking things. I’m going first again and I went with Knife. You know, the weapon with the famous catchphrase “KEELE MIRTTE!”
Brockway: This is how the ham version of Hereditary ends.
Seanbaby: This joke works because you bought a new knife and thought, “Oh, this knife sucks.” And then you find out, no, you suck. Fuck you, that’s your knife pun.
Brockway: Oh I actually love that joke. Read it in Marc Maron’s voice, it works!
Seanbaby: This robot is learning to fear humans and their treachery, or maybe this is a Sex Pistols reference. Either way, it’s a fun pun for sharp-witted laughs!
Brockway: I love that joke, too! Read it in Tracy Morgan’s voice, it works!
Seanbaby: Ha, you’re right. Now I’ve got the perfect pun to finish my last round…
Seanbaby: Wait, hold on. I changed my mind. This round I’m building a knife team synergized around blunt dumbness damage, and this one clearly rules. A knife that hates water is a drizzle-nemesis! That’s awesome. That’s a clue Snake Eyes would read in a pyramid. That’s something Mike Tyson would confidently tell a silverware drawer. Let me find an actual stupid one…
Okay, here we go:
Brockway: I really think this robot understands, as much is it can understand anything, what’s funny about knife injuries.
Everything!
Seanbaby: Some robots know how to write a pun and some robots accidentally cut off a finger and give it to you. Both are a bit wrong in their own way. I know I can’t win, but this is how I lose with dignity– three of the dumbest things ever said about knives. I only wish I had a cool knife way to say I’m done. Oh, what’s this?
Seanbaby: Fuck yeah! Knife!
Brockway: Much like Marc Marobot, it’s use-less. I’ve already won. I won so hard it’s an inspiration to sick children. This will be the kind of victory that makes you think anything is possible. If you have champagne, pop it. If you have a lighter, feel free to hold it up in the air. If you’re holding a basketball, now’s the time to dunk. Believe you can fly.
Seanbaby: Oh shit.
Seanbaby: It was an incredible contest. Congratulations to Robert Brockway who only had to use racism, cancer, and Nazi robots to defeat me. A proud human nation salutes you, master of racist Nazi robot puns.
Brockway: It was one heil of a good time to luftwaffe your spirits and reich your shable! See you in the lithiumslager!
Categories
Nerding Day: Vibrations 🌭
Before the Wachowskis grease-orgied techno into irrelevance in The Matrix Reloaded, Hollywood gave us one bona fide masterpiece about it. That’s right, we’re talking about the 1996 straight-to-video classic, Vibrations…
… a.k.a. CYBERSTORM. It was a movie with no idea what it was or how to market itself. Its taglines ranged from “Redemption Is The Best Revenge!” to “FEEL THE LOVE… FEEL THE MUSIC… FEEL THE ENERGY.” It was every genre at once made to cash in on the 11th most popular kind of music.
Vibrations stars James Marshall – best known as the ambulatory leather jacket in Twin Peaks – as wannabe rock star TJ Cray. He’s got it all: a supportive cop dad, a sexy girlfriend, and both hands. We know he’s on the hot track because, in a valiant attempt by the filmmakers to “show don’t tell,” we see a newspaper headline exclaiming “Local Band on Hot Track.”
They’re the sound that locals are looking for! Assuming they’re looking for an opener for George Thorogood at the Pennsylvania State Fair. TJ has a big gig tonight, and there will be an A&R rep in the audience ready to offer the band a predatory contract they’ll be paying off for the rest of their lives, but what does our Pomeranian-haired protagonist do? He fucks his girlfriend for the rest of the day. They fuck so long he’s late to his own show. To be fair, said girlfriend is played by Paige Turco – April O’Neil from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II, III.
While speeding to the gig, he gets behind a pickup truck filled with drunk maniacs who decide to stop him. They swerve around, preventing him from passing, and he honks his horn so hard his entire car breaks down. Maybe. It’s not exactly clear why anything or anyone is doing any of this. The men bash his car with crowbars, pipes, and human feet until one of them steals a nearby piledriver and starts industrially pounding holes into TJ’s car, a cinematic callback to the previous scene.
TJ, silently and with little expression, stays in his car with his hands on the wheel, unable to come up with any acting choices that would make sense in this situation. When the piledriver finally pierces through his roof, TJ waits patiently for it to crush his hands off. “Aiieeee, DUR HUH huh,” he literally says from off camera.
It was quite an overreaction. By the random strangers, not TJ. TJ reacts the same way to everything: just barely not a nap.
So now TJ’s hands live only in future piledriver operator safety briefings. Doctors offer to strap Temu sex toys to his stumps, but how is he supposed to rip out white-hot blues licks to the top of the local hot tracks with these?
Now, a weaker hero would fall into a depression spiral, run away to New York City, and develop a drinking problem while sleeping on the streets and panhandling. But not ours, who has the drive and strength of will to – oh, wait, that’s exactly what he does.
We’re already through the first act of this afterschool special about the dangers of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, and there are no signs of Vibrations, much less a Cyberstorm. We have 25% of a George Thorogood missing 100% of his hands. But suddenly, while passed out in a box in a rave hovel’s basement, he awakens to the inspirational sounds of 1996.
He stumbles upstairs into the bright lights, moaning lady samples, and tragic fashion of a full-blown techno party where he bumps into none other than Christina Applegate, a working actress who definitely turned down other parts to be here. “My character’s name is Melissa, but you can call me Anamika, which is Sanskrit for Person Without a Name,” she explains, while probably thinking, “I could have fucking been in Coneheads.”
They have a meet-cute where he saves her from sexual assault by catching a knife in his rubber hand, and she takes him back to her place. She lives in a magical New York brownstone filled with one-dimensional characters from all three walks of life. Let’s meet them!
First there’s Geek, whose name will save everyone a lot of time. He invents super devices, like a mega subwoofer beyond all audio science, and speaks fluent Computer.
Then there’s Simeon. He’s wearing a sleeveless flannel pullover, steampunk goggles, shin-length shorts, and what appears to be a glove on his head. He says “you’re creating a negative energy zone,” within moments of us meeting him. He’s meant to be a free spirit, but in the ’90s that meant charming sex pest.
They also have a sassy landlady named Zina with the best New Yawk accent someone from Michigan could come up with. She’s the classic independently wealthy welder archetype. “Get this goddamn piece of trash animal out of here,” she says about the handless wino Christina Applegate brings home.
Anyway, there’s a long sequence of TJ hitting rock bottom and realizing he needs to dry out because this movie knew techno fans would want to see a solid hour of misery before the cyberstorm hits. So with nothing left to lose, TJ finally lets Simeon explain techno. And he does so beautifully.
Now we’re neutronically mutilating the cosmos. TJ wants to get in on the Sound of the Future. But how? His hands are Troma props. So he gives up for the 5th time in this movie. But then inspiration strikes when he sees a player piano! Maybe he could make music again! Aw, if only he had a tech genius and a master welder t– OH MY GOD.
Together, the team invents CYBERHANDS, which look like something Elon Musk would call “Cyberhands.” Except these filmmakers thought of something Elon Musk would never consider: can you fuck in CYBERHANDS? Oh, fuck yes, you can.
We’ve been on this journey with TJ for over an hour. We’ve seen him at the top, we’ve seen him at his nadir, we’ve seen him use his robot fingers on Christina Applegate. It’s all been building up to this: his creative rebirth. His shedding of his frail human form into a being of pure synthesizer! With all the inspiration of vibes and all the power of Generation X, the generation without a name, TJ is reborn as DJ CYBERSTORM.
Maybe you’re like me and you were wondering how this movie, a film where the lead actor wears one expression and nine wigs, could afford this absolutely fucking sweet rave cybersuit designed by special effects legend Stan Winston. Well, the reason is simple: the producer had it in his basement. He’d commissioned it for a horror movie in the ’80s and wanted to get some more use out of it! That’s actually the origin story of this project! A man with James Marshall’s phone number remembered had a robot costume! Everything that led us here was even dumber than you could have possibly imagined!
Anyway, DJ CYBERSTORM is an instant hit, and that means it’s time to bring Neuromancer Live on the road. He heads out in a van to tour with the real-life bands above, and if you recognize any of their names, click here to qualify for senior rave discounts.
Cyberstorm’s name rises up the tour poster lineup as his popularity builds, the normal way to communicate success we’ve all agreed upon, and what do you know, his scrappy international techno tour is scheduled to stop in his podunk hometown! What a perfect way to wrap up the lingering plot threads from Act 1 and introduce a jealousy subplot between Christina Applegate and Paige Turco. This is immediately abandoned because remember those easily identifiable maniacs in a describable truck who crushed TJ’s hands in a world where police exist? The screenwriter suddenly did, and they’re working security at the concert tonight.
This forces our hero to make a difficult decision. Cyberstorm or Revenge? I’m sure TJ, now that he’s cleaned up, made friends, found love, and discovered a purpose in life (the same things he had at the beginning of the movie), will make the right decision. And he does. He chooses both. He decides to murder them in cold blood… as Cyberstorm.
This is when we discover Vibrations is not the Save the Last Dance of rave movies. It is the Halloween III: Season of the Witch of rave movies. Remember Chekhov’s subwoofer from earlier? Here’s TJ’s elaborate trap: he wheels a speaker next to the basement green room, connects the subwoofer to it, lures these Beavises and Buttheads inside with the promise of snacks (a powerful siren call indeed), and barricades them inside.
It’s even shot in first person like a slasher movie. During his set, while he’s fingerblasting the audience with tranducing primal vibes, DJ Cyberstorm triggers the subwoofer, and shakes them to death with those block-rocking beats. It’s exactly how Freddy Krueger or Jason would have killed concert security guards, only updated for Generation X, the generation without a name.
Fortunately, the criminal justice system is spared the indignity of having to coin the term Mobycide when he sees his dad and Christina Applegate in the audience and arbitrarily decides, nah, maybe he won’t commit multiple murders today. The Ted Nugent roadies get arrested, he lives happily ever after, the end. Nobody learned anything!
By any standards, it’s a violently pointless series of unrelated events scored by Lithuania’s most affordable Herbie Hancock impersonator. But amazingly enough, this wasn’t Michael Paseornak’s first movie as a writer. He has script credits on Meatballs III which is not the one where an alien helps the hero win a boxing match, but the one where a dead porn star gets one last chance at Heaven if she can go back to Earth and help the hero get laid. Michael also contributed to the scripts for the Lorenzo Lamas action classics Snake Eater and Snake Eater II: The Drug Buster. But this, Vibrations, was his first solo writing credit. It was also his first time as director. And obviously his last in both capacities.
In a normal world, he would have sunk into obscurity like a rave DJ with a no-hands gimmick. But this is not a normal world. Michael Paseornak went on to become President of Lion’s Gate Film Productions. He produced John Wick 4, The Hunger Games, and Madea’s Witness Protection. He went on from this embarrassing excuse to fill an old robot suit with James Marshall sweat to become a gigantic success. It seems like there should be some lesson to take away from that, but, just like in Vibrations, there isn’t.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Eric Rion, who also has cyberhands BUT HE DON’T USE EM FOR RAVING! You know what we’re sayin’, ladies! (He uses them for knitting tiny novelty sweaters.)
