Author: Alex Schmidt

Learning Day: The Ugly Truckling 🌭

Post author By Alex Schmidt
Post date 09/05/2024
14 Comments on Learning Day: The Ugly Truckling 🌭

The Tesla Cybertruck: wait, stop, where are you going. Come back. I applaud your blanket aversion to CyberTruck HorseHockey. But look at this thing I found:

The Ugly Truckling: The Story Of My Cybertruck is a children’s book. It’s a children’s book about the Cybertruck, and the difficulties faced by poor helpless Cybertruck owners. The premise is that Cybertruck owners are demonized, because the Cybertruck is shaped different from other trucks. Society’s superficial cruelty attacks the Cybertruck, like The Ugly Duckling before it.

You may think the discourse around Cybertrucks is not just vehicular body-shaming. The Ugly Truckling thinks differently. It asks why people are so mad at itty bitty widdle Cybowtwucks. Y R U buwwying the Cybowtwuck fow wooking diffwent??? They’re only shaped that “ugly” way so they can achieve good design goals, like a trunk that downsizes your fingers. “Wow,” you are saying, “the book title’s allusion to The Ugly Duckling is flawless. The Ugly Duckling didn’t choose to be born that shape, and the Ugly Truckling didn’t choose to burst into flames during a car wash.” I’m glad you understand this metaphor so well. I probably don’t even need to show you the book’s title page. The title page clarifies this metaphor with a powerful fist, of ham.

Sincerity time: this premise could’ve been an okay web cartoon, in the hands of a satirist. It also could’ve been written better in its sincere form. But no. Our universe’s eldritch Ideas-God placed this premise in the hands of Diego Martinez. I’m here to poop on Diego, but also feel grim sorrow for him. We’ll get to why I feel bad for him later.

For now, My Dear Hotdogger, consider what a children’s author should do with the premise of “Ugly Duckling Cybertruck”. If they do the sincere version of that premise, their Truckling should be a Truckling. The truck should be small. A baby truck. Like what I assume happens when Pixar’s Cars characters make a baby and it’s born baby-sized and it’s not grown up until Cars 7. That’s what a Truckling book should depict. Then the Truckling is the correct size for a child to befriend it. The Truckling can be their puppy. Then both the child and the Truckling get comfortable with their own flaws and foibles as they age into self-awareness.

Now let’s draft the satire. In that version of the idea, the baby Cybertruck grows up, and becomes a seven thousand pound monstrosity. The Truckling develops all the faults of a Cybertruck. A real Cybertruck is Cybertrickedout with faults. You depict its true status as an expensive, unsafe electric pickup. Then, at the end, it runs the kid over. Edgelord Jonathan Swift bit complete.

I don’t like either of those book ideas. Diego has an even worse third idea. He tells the story of a Tesla-pilled dad Tesla-pilling his regular child about a regular Cybertruck. I’m not adding that concept. It’s there from jump:

Are you aware of the genre of children’s entertainment that depicts flawed dads? There are many books, and entire Sesame Street storylines, for kids whose dads are divorced or jailed. That’s good! We’re overdue for that. But we needed one hundred further “troubled dad” books before we needed one book about CyberTruckJerkDads. I respect the complexity of divorce, and criminal justice, and owning any of the Teslas that debuted long before Elon Musk both mischaracterized and committed election fraud. If you bought a car-shaped Tesla a while ago, I get it.

I do not get Cybertruck buyer’s remorse. The Cybertruck is an innovative new idea, in the sense that Ford and GMC had that idea first but aren’t narcissists. The Cybertruck also debuted five years AFTER Elon Musk called a stranger a pedophile for fun. Every Cybertruck purchaser had enough alternatives and information to not buy a Cybertruck. They also have the option to roll up their windows and tune out the haters. You can own a Cybertruck. It’s fine. Your only punishment is some of us frowning about it. I know a set of rich Internet men believe that is “cancellation”. But you don’t need a Cybertruck AND universal adulation. And you don’t need to purchase a children’s book to read to yourself, to soothe yourself, while your child sits there like a prop. When you read this book at your child, you read about a dad lecturing at his child. Story Dad lectures Story Child about Elon Musk. Then the child likes Elon Musk and Cybertrucks and by extension their dad.

“Now read that page to me”, said too many childrens’ fathers. “Read. It. To. Me.”

Hey kids: have you heard of the most prominent character in this book? His name is Elon Musk, and he’s saving the environment.

I’m conflicted about Elon Musk’s role in electric cars. Apparently most of his work at Tesla involved lowering safety standards and harassing/impregnating subordinates. Other people founded the company. Other people designed the cars. However, Elon Musk was an effective cheerleader and rodeo clown for the concept of electric cars. A well-written Ugly Truckling could celebrate that. Elorm helped the environment. However, fun fact, the main way to acquire this children’s book is to make Amazon Dot Com print it on demand. Amazon drop-shipped this to my door in less than 24 hours, and I am not an Amazon Prime member. Much like Kanye West cookbooks and creepy “captivating” histories, the final page of The Ugly Truckling bears the Amazon print-on-demand Mark Of The Beast.

The book also has multiple extra blank pages before the last one, for no good reason. Turns out the Cybertruck fandom’s carbon footprint has an oscillating shoe size. Anyhow: The Ugly Truckling is an astounding achievement in Elon Musk Criticism. The Ugly Truckling is more devastating than every leftist, online, correct statement about Musk. It wrecks him because it doesn’t mean to. It’s written by a Musk fan. The Ugly Truckling opens with a lot of generic factoids about Cybertruck impressiveness. Did you know the Cybertruck is as powerful as 805 horses? It is! That’s almost as powerful as the good-looking Teslas!

Then the book celebrates a key feature that sounds good, if you forget other humans exist. The Cybertruck features all kinds of features to keep you safe. You, individually, will be safe. Also you might not be safe if you drive the truck too fast, or shut any of the parts without tumbling clear of their blade-sides. But the Cybertruck is so safe from disasters. Disasters like blackouts, and floods, and other crises this book depicts just one child surviving while their community struggles. Readers see people’s food spoil and homes flood while the protagonist #cybers along. It’s like if the I Survived series covered our dystopian future. It’s like if the emperor Nero cybertrucked while Rome burned.

Also, did you know some people in the world have guns? Yes! Guns might seem like a romantic element of the Old West. But they’re still with us today. Good thing the Cybertruck protects you from that gun problem. A problem which there is no other way of addressing.

The Cybertruck also gets pitched as For Kids. The child and their peers hang out in it. After all, the Cybertruck has a screen and speakers. Much like most living rooms, or rooms you carry a laptop into. But hey, why not experience that in Cybertruck? Cybertruck! There’s truly no better childhood treehouse than a Cybertruck. Especially because the last good Tree Fort Tree got chopped down to print and package this book.

Other than this Emilio part, the story is didactic and flat, because that’s propaganda for you. Did you know a Cybertruck can power a tool for welding? Just like a generator? And/or an extension cord?

Entire pages get devoted to Consumer Reports-assed fantasies of owning the first-ever truck impervious to minor besmirching.

There’s also a big spread about the production reasons for the body of the truck being shaped that way. I did not know that stuff. It’s pretty much the pages you’d find in a good version of a Truckling book.

There’s one totally wild claim in this book. I’m convinced it’s a lie. But I’m open to the possibility that it’s depicting the personal experiences of the book’s author.

That’s an easy page to gloss over. But it’s depicting a schoolteacher getting in trouble for showing their students their Tesla. I could not find evidence of this ever happening. No teacher’s ever been disciplined for demonstrating a Cybertruck, or another “S3XY” Tesla model. Has that ever happened? If you can find evidence, please share it. I’ll badger Robert and Sean and we’ll update this bit. So far I can only find people feeling Musk-induced Tesla Remorse, for the real reasons and not for Cybertruck Body-Shaming.

More refined googling led me to weirder stuff. There’s one truly wild story about a teacher facing criticism for Teaching Tesla. However, they did not teach about the car brand. Did you know there is a scientist with that same last name? He built stuff like coils. An Oregon teacher demo’d one such “Cybercoil” by firing it up in their classroom and zapping the words “I <3 Mom” onto students’ skin. The marks were temporary-ish. One kid’s skin had lingering redness and swelling. The teacher got in the newspaper for doing this, and for not facing any disciplinary action from the school, and for being arrested by police but then released without charges. The teacher also has One Of Those Faces. I do not say that cruel thing to be cruel. I say that to wonder how our flawed justice system did not jail him on a conviction for Worst-Degree Vibes, or execute him for Possession Of Cabin-Fella Stare.

I struggle to imagine there’s a world where a teacher gets CANCELLED for half-assing a Cybertruck parking lot “field trip”, yet this hard-to-justify Nikola Tesla lesson goes unpunished. But maybe the author is describing himself. Maybe he got punished or canned for walking his students into the parking lot, and toward the maw of his future truck. This brings us to the tragedy of The Ugly Truckling’s author. I did not try to contact or speak with Diego Martinez, because I am a coward. I did read his biography in the back of this book. His biography is positive.

I also fact-checked that bio a little. The facts are true, and depressing. Diego Martinez founded a private middle school. It opened its doors as I type this. It has a professional website. It has 10 followers on Instagram. Based on every picture on both those webpages, I know Diego Martinez’s plan for launching a school. His plan was to purchase a Cybertruck, put stickers on that Cybertruck, and drive in circles until his community realized science is cool.

You and me are Internet users. We know there’s a Musk Cult out there, railing against Deep State Forces that are the Real Reason his website don’t work good. So it’s easy to forget about people who aren’t so online. Diego Martinez only seems to know Elon Musk is “the electric car guy.” Diego only knows “Cybertruck robot shape is the most Science.” That is a dangerously shallow understanding of Cybertrucks, placed in the hands of a dreamer. Diego Martinez heard about the Cybertruck. He got hyped up about it for earnest, child-like reasons. And when a little bit of backlash about the Cybertruck pierced his bubble, he did not ask where it came from. He drove 110 miles per hour toward a solution. He presumed the solution is a little bit of scicomm and a whole lot of love. That progression is why this book exists.

Imagine if those were your only thoughts about the robot shaped truck. If that is somehow all you knew, you could’ve written The Ugly Truckling. The book is a hopeful tribute to something poisoned by culture wars and bad men. I’ve been racking my brain for a parallel example. All I’ve got is a thought experiment. Think about the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag. Our militant sovereign citizens ruined that flag’s vibes long before J6 ruined it. If you did not know that stuff, you could spin a yarn about The Little Snake That Could. Or if you only knew scraps of the flag’s 1700s origins, you could doodle the tale of a Revolutionary War toddler who dyes cloth the exact shade of French’s brand mustard, despite his British Haters. Is that a nicer headspace to be in? Maybe that’s a joyous path to (wait for it) tread. Maybe it’s nice to not know anything beyond “snake cool!” and “truck cyber!” and “idea haver just likes Blade Runner a lot!” In that worldview, any dad who feels that same way is more nerdy than evil.

The dramatic irony here is cursed. I feel cursed emotions for the entire creative team of The Ugly Truckling. They stumbled into making an evil book for benign reasons. And I don’t know any more than the next fella about how we should lead our lives in this vale of tears. I just know Diego Martinez is sitting in the empty lobby of his STEM middle school waiting for kids to pour through the front doors. They’ll stream into his classrooms any second now. They’re about to do that. They’re probably not here yet because they’re running late. They’re late because their parents’ non-cyber trucks can’t drive fast. Yeah, that’s why. They’re on their way, he hopes. And when the hours tick by, and the real reason for their absence becomes clear, I don’t want that realization to crush Diego. When disappointment slices its Cybertruck’s Cybertrunklid through his Cyberknuckles, I hope Diego only loses his Cyberdigits, and retains his Cyberzest for life.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Craig Lemoine, who is raising awareness for the non-profit group Divorced Assholes Devoid of Fundamental Understanding for Cybertruck Knowledge, Education, and Recognition.

Tags best of 2024, books, children's books, Free, internet

LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: I Survived 9/11

Post author By Alex Schmidt
Post date 08/14/2024
4 Comments on Learning Day: I Survived 9/11

Tags books, children's books, history, tragedy

UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Sylvester Stallone’s Chaos Pen 🌭

Post author By Alex Schmidt
Post date 07/11/2024
5 Comments on Upsetting Day: Sylvester Stallone’s Chaos Pen 🌭

Sylvester Stallone made a branded luxury snake/sword/skull “Chaos” pen. Somehow that fact is less embarrassing than the pen’s trailer.

You should really watch the pen’s trailer.

After you clicked “play”, your life changed. You now throb with desire for a Chaos pen. You must possess it. You wield money before you, like a lantern splitting the darkness, seeking a path to a life of Chaotic scribbling. But I am sorry, My Dear Hotdogger. It is no longer possible to buy this pen. They sold out all four versions of Sylvester Stallone CHAOS WRITING INSTRUMENTS.

I love knowledge. I also resent the imposition of knowledge of luxury products. Luxury product information hijacks a functional brain. My head’s whirring Noggin Gears process any input. This often serves me well. My thoughts stop me from falling through open manholes, or watching films lacking Pierce Brosnan.

However, my brain also processes the most obscene fruits of capitalism’s tree. If you show me the pricing for Chaos Writing Instruments, I will optimize it. I’ll leap from never conceiving that these items existed, to thinking “silver is mid.” After all, one golden Chaos Pen is worth a dozen silver Chaos Pens. That is true, because of math. But I should not feel like Sylvester Stallone sells the silver pens in friggin’ egg cartons, or soda twelve-pack cardboard, or some other shame packaging for the hoi polloi. The beautiful precious metal silver is valuable. Luxury Brain sneers at it like it’s a grade school crafts project by Not Your Kid. I was happier, yesterday, without that mindset. Yesterday I felt like a new baseball hat is a splurge. For real: I was wracked with angst about the expensiveness of a minor league baseball hat, even though my approach to making TikToks makes it a business expense. But that was the Old Me. The plebeian Pre-Chaos Pen Me. Now I question anyone using a silver (yuck) Chaos Pen. You bought the silver pen, [spoken in a kleptocrat voice where this phrase has the opposite meaning] in this economy?

Anyway that’s the products in the trailer. Er, most of them. There’s also (spoiler) a wristwatch. Here is how the trailer for Mostly Pens begins:

IDEAS. Ideas are what these pens are all about. Your current pens are trash because whoever made them forgot to think about big ideas during pen-ufacturing. Have you noticed when you pick up your current pen, and write something, the thing you wrote is not a BIG IDEA? That’s because the pen came from a factory assembly line with zero nozzles to squirt-insert concepts in its shaft part. A shaft of squirty ideas, narrated by the voice of Sylvester Stallone. Because the pen is “designed by Sylvester Stallone.” The trailer says so, in the most normie font possible, beside an illegible haunted hayride special effect title of the word “Chaos”, probably.

I wanted to make GIFs of the funniest transitions, smoke-fades, and whirligigs of this trailer. That was impossible. I’d have to make hundreds of overlapping GIFs of every second. Just watch it, please. It’s a journey. You will often think the video peaked. Then you’ll look at the YouTube progress bar. Then you’ll steel yourself for the next four-fifths. This trailer is wall-to-wall MOMENTS. It flies us through gloomy sagebrush under a full moon to behold a desert skeleton, and THEN it starts getting wild.

I never thought I’d miss the calm, measured stability of a crystal skulls book by two Floridians who broke off their situationship between UFO sightings. Those former lovebirds took their time. They titrated out their skulls tantra-style. Sylvester Stallone’s pen partners reject this philosophy. They barrel forward into their chief design motifs of snakes, skulls, skull-swords, snake-swords, whatever combinations are left over, and lizards.

I math’d the timecodes. That image comes 40.7% of the way through this trailer. The giant burning snake/sword/skele-pen is, in a dramatic sense, an early step of Act Two. On with the show:

Thank you, close-ups of the previous close-up. I wasn’t sure how many reptile motifs and bone molds we’re dealing with here. Also is that skull being blessed by the exact reptilian paw of The Geico Gecko? Still: this is powerful filmmaking. They allow the WRITING INSTRUMENT to SPEAK FOR ITSELF. It’s that old maxim of “show don’t tell.”

Sure. Let’s also tell. Show AND tell! Maybe bring this to grade school “show and tell”, if your plutocrat divorced dad has you that week. At the very least, show it to me. Despite how many times I’ve watched this trailer, I’ve barely seen the actual pen. Instead of filming or photographing the pen, they poured a vast yet insufficient budget into CGI-ing it. It’s as if McDonald’s stopped advertising pictures of their food, and started making cutscenes of it. Why not show me the pen in real life? The next minute-plus of trailer is closer and closer shots of a computer animated replica pen. The polygons are inescapable.

Sincere question: is purple fire a thing? Can you burn specific chemical elements to generate it? I refuse to look it up. MONTEGRAPPA faked some purple fire with Italian Adobe software, and I refuse to let that prompt me to research my question’s answer. I’m busy. I’m busy trying to figure out whether the actual ballpoint pen is this basic-looking on its writing end.

Banks have more interesting pen tips. I’m flabbergasted. This pen costs thousands of British quid, and THAT’S what’s under the cap? Awful. And fantastic. I love that, for everyone but the pen’s owner. Every one of these pens causes an exquisite unboxing letdown, because this pen has a cap. Imagine a customer receiving their CHAOS PEN. Marveling at its CHAOS DESIGN. But then, they open the CHAOS CAP, to discover a COMMONPLACE, CUSTOMARY, CAPITAL ONE CAFÉ-ASSED BALLPOINT. Many congratulations, Chaos Pen Owner. Each time you uncap this pen, its surface area turns forty percent more ORDERLY.

In the trailer’s next shot, they reveal this little skull on the cap clip. The skull has wings. I think. That’s what they’re going for. But it looks like the skull of Bozo The Clown, in a universe where skull protuberances dictated his hairstyle. Which bozo designed this pen anywa–

Oh right. That informative shot leads to rapid shots of Pen Parts, plus purple fire, and soundtrack escalation. It’s a lot. It’s too much. And I found the next shot informative, because my mind spilled all its information several “insert → text → ugly” software commands ago.

This hints at one challenge for the trailer. The challenge: the product is a pen. People have pens. Selling someone a luxury pen is like selling someone an extra clothing pocket. I walked out of the house with enough pockets on my person. Or I have a bag. Either way that’s bad news for your sales pitch. Once you’ve got that hill to climb, you might as well draw a weapon and rob me. Robbery is a crime. But it’s more likely to get my money than selling me a luxury pocket, with a pitch about The Power Of The Car Keys Not Falling On The Ground.

After that we “transition → fireball → low res” to the pen version of a Microsoft Solitaire victory screen. They unfurl as many Writing Instruments as possible. It looks like the gun-knife peacock thing on the poster for the first Expendables movie. That parallel suggests creative involvement from Sylvester Stallone. That’s the biggest surprise of this trailer. Don’t get me wrong: Sly’s recycling an idea. He copy-pasted it for the Italian pen guys long after that movie came out. When this trailer dropped, Stallone was two films into an Expendables franchise. He was and is a star. He made a big movie every year of the 2010s. So I doubt he delayed pre-production on Creed 1 or Exp3ndabl3s or A 5th Friggin Rambo Movie to hop on a transatlantic Skype brainstorm about pens. He let the pen guys fly solo from here. They solo’d a next beat of “the pen visits Ancient Rome.”

There is more than an entire minute of trailer to go. They fill twenty seconds of it by repeating all the “pen visits Ancient Rome” shots, in reverse order. This is a terrible choice, because sometime around the Ancient Rome part, the animator found the “3D → rotate → too fast” command in their dropdowns. This sequence is nauseating, and THEN it pulls a directional switcheroo mid-carnival ride.

That’s the next beat after the Roman Vomit Comet. The pens get disintegrated by Lasers But Boring. Then, the trailer recycles those lasers as they recycle some text.

Those text splashes are two separate messages. The trailer follows a text splash of “And Now…” with a text splash of “And Now…”. You cannot be this discombobulated in front of an audience. Those are the exact words and pacing of a magician who swears the trick didn’t get stuck like that when he practiced it one of the times.

Abracadabra.

Abraca-more skulls. Feel the CHAOS of the INTERIOR BONUS SKULL, impressing a skull on your sleeve! Or that wrist brace you wear sometimes!

Did you know they don’t make good watches in Italy? I sure didn’t! But these guys drove north a few hours to a better country to get their watch gears, because…CHAOS. IDEAS! RECYCLING THE RECYCLED EXPENDABLES IDEA FROM BEFORE!!

Honestly? Good for Sylvester Stallone. He got this opportunity by being a movie star. He became a movie star by outworking full-time writers, and making at least one movie my dad loved. Sly is himself a dad. A dad to countless faildaughters, according to the Paramount Plus ads they make me watch because I didn’t buy Deep Space Nine on physical media. Sly isn’t just working for his own enrichment. He’s supporting Sylvestra and Sylveena and Stallette. Cashing in on Skullwatches and Snakepens is better than the other ways he could fund his family. So I sincerely want what’s best for Sly. I’ve also never checked if he’s cancellable and I’ll ride that blessed ignorance for a while. And here’s another thing I mean sincerely: Sylvester Stallone is too talented to associate with this pen company. He’s a legitimate filmmaker with basic competence. But I dug a tiny bit deeper into his partners, and watched the next listed video on their YouTube account. Turns out they’re the least competent luxury brand on all of social media.

If you’re a luxury brand, media is your entire job. Media in all its forms, from going viral online to generating “Devil Wears Prada”-type fashion spreads. My Dear Hotdogger, MONTEGRAPPA is so far below the level of every fashion thing you’ve ever seen. MONTEGRAPPA’s trailer for MONTEGRAPPA is lower quality than the last hundred YouTube videos you’ve watched. I linked the video before and I’ll link it again but don’t watch it. Or maybe watch it with the sound off? About 80% of the shots do not have sound that lines up with the picture. It’s that busted. The guy’s mouth doesn’t move in time with his own voice. I also learned something watching this, because I’ve never seen a video where 80% of the sound isn’t synced. I’ve only watched videos where 0% or 100% is offline. It turns out an 80% misalignment feels far worse than 100%. If this video was always messed up, I could pretend this is a spaghetti Western with that funky dubbing that’s kind of its own aesthetic. But in this case, you can’t play that game. Just when my brain recalibrated for the problem, and implemented my headcanon, I got jolted out of it by a rare shot they fixed.

According to this video, Montegrappa makes their pens in a beautiful villa. The CEO tells us this as they cut to… a suburban medical building plus loading dock.

Then the CEO says they’ve made pens in this location for more than a century. I am a bit of a historian myself. So I tried to remember if anything significant happened between this video’s upload date (2013) and the previous hundred-plus years. I believe the years that start with “19” feature a few significant Italian political choices. Before I could google to check, the CEO shared an interesting take. He says they assembled their pens through Italy’s difficult times. Even the times when, direct quote, “Italians heroically defended their country during two world wars.” The next shot is footage of guys fighting – “heroically” – in World War Two. This pen sales video is capital-F Fascist.

Next, the CEI (Chief Executive Il Duce) says Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos swung through Montegrappa’s region during World War One. Therefore, “legend says” those novelists were the first users of Montegrappa pens. Then the CEI’s words, and eventually his mouth, welcome you to a shot of a worse showroom than your tri-county Nissan dealer.

Behold the showroom’s “Icons” pens. These pens celebrate Frank Sinatra, Muhammad Ali, Bruce Lee, and other men whose estates signed on the dotted line.

Guess what style of music soundtracks that Bruce Lee pen, and no other part of the video. You guessed right! And one Montegrappa celebrity partner stands above the rest. Mostly because they stood up a UPS Store banner of his face in the lobby.

The video gets more disappointing from here. It disappoints with its celebrity tie-ins AND its geopolitical preferences. Did you know Montegrappa sells a branded pen for the Paulo Coelho novel The Alchemist? I’ll bet that fits that novel’s message! Next up: a Montegrappa pen played an exciting role in world history.

That’s right: they PROMOTE their role in Boris Yeltsin signing legal documents that put Vladimir Putin in charge. Are you going to ponder that for even a split second? No! You will not! This video whisks you to a next shot of the CEI. They also leave in a first part of the shot where he’s waiting for his cue before he starts walking toward the camera. Also, his mouth is multiple entire seconds ahead of his voice. So as the CEI tries to look cool in the pen workshop, his voice and the captions laud this century’s worst authoritarian.

Then there’s one more shot, featuring Signore CEI’s office…

…which might not be nicer than your bosses’ office, at your job. If your boss has one desk toy AND a Formula 1 poster in a generic frame, he’s as glamorous as this Italian executive who ran out of Sylvester Stallone pens.

Does the CEI thrill you with passion style and sophistication that make up the soul of Italy? Are you transported to a higher realm of Italian luxury? Yes? You are? Excellent. Now give this man forty thousand American dollars, in exchange for getting that money back minus transaction fees, because Rocky Pens With Bozo Clips are out of stock forever. Nothing says “luxury” more than that…and I’d like to see PoxCo TRY to prove me wrong.

Special thanks to Cyberzone for the hot dog tip.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Sean Chase, designer of Nitrate, the only pen that’s just a hot dog. It writes with genuine hot dog water for as long as the dog stays wet. $12,000 USD.

Tags action movies, best of 2024, commercials, Free, products

FUCKING DAY

Fucking Day: Acquaintance Cards 🌭

Post author By Alex Schmidt
Post date 06/20/2024
3 Comments on Fucking Day: Acquaintance Cards 🌭

Acquaintance cards are a fad of the late 1800s. They were like business cards, but for initiating romance, in a time of sexual repression. If you wanted to initiate the merest prelude to the precursor of a first coffee date, you purchased a box of cards like these, and wrote your name on one, and handed it to a second person.

I’m starting us on the poetic end of the acquaintance card spectrum. Also the amphibious end. Expect weirder messages and fewer frogs as we go along. Either way, people in the 1890s carried these cards on their person, every day. They kept them in their wallet or purse or iron underwear. Then, you gave them to somebody. Somebody you wanted to speak to, or pork, or anything in between. The cards are fun because they were secret messages, for initiating a range of secret activities. Potentially prurient activities! Yet they were printed by ordinary companies. Like if Walgreens sold boxes of the first word of a conversation, and/or full-on sexts.

Watch out: the purchaser of this custom acquaintance card offers repeated, explicit sexual solicitation! Even more lurid: his surname is German! Don’t let that not-yet-white outsider give you a Muellich!

These cards are both more and less horny than you might expect. The late 1800s United States was a peculiar mix of strict Victorian propriety and lascivious Victorian erotica. It was long before the era of free love and feminism and women’s liberation, and also lustily inventing that era. Acquaintance cards straddle (giggle) the line of both rejecting and beginning casual sex culture. For every card offering to compliment you with gracious, cap-doffs-man-ly polite-itude…

…there was another card with the guy’s entire legal name custom-printed on it, surrounded by promises to Hugtite you till you Squeezemburg.

The Anglo-American fury about our own urges is older than both countries put together, plus Canada. Britain is a damp isle of erection shame, franchised globally. Along with militant Spanish Catholicism, it’s the biggest exportation of boner guilt in world history. It’s in all our heads to some extent. It boggles said head. I examined an era when Americans assumed/wished delivery men also delivered sex, and sang a chart-topping song about that wish. An entire culture harassed the guys who kept food cold. That was normal and popular. And it matches this. Acquaintance cards are from the same era as Sexy Icemen, and acquaintance cards are even sweatier. They work far harder to sublimate the Grover Cleveland Era’s primal urges beneath wacky wordplay.

Behold: the alphabet. A visual ballet that’s almost 26 genitals. From its phallic “I” to its vulvular “U”, it’s heaving with letters you can repurpose for beautiful “booty = full?” messaging. Also congratulations to this card’s artist on scoring a paid gig without being able to draw hands. Hands are hard. Get that bread. Also can you draw bread? Baguettes are as phallic as the letter “I”, with bonus French overtones.

As you can see, some acquaintance cards featured leather-play devils. That Devil Daddy’s so prominent, there’s not really enough room to write your name. That said, this card works fine. Let’s cut the designer a break. We have to judge the past by its own standards, which included no standards for daytime alcohol intoxication or 24/7 industrial fumes. I’m surprised half those artists could sit upright to draw.

Never mind. No more slack for these nutjobs. What’s happening here. Help me. Is this cypher a threat? Also is the second word of the puzzle “am”? That’s an “am”, isn’t it. This is a puzzle where the clue for the word “am” is a capital “a” hitting the back wall of a capital “m”. That’s the worst excuse for a puzzle I’ve even encountered. I’m so angry. I’m also angry on behalf of this guy named “Uriah”. His love life was enough of an uphill battle. He deserved a legible, joyful puzzle to wingman his wooing efforts. I’m so mad just from this one card, and there’s so much column to go. I am going to put my shoes on and take a walk, in real life, to calm down, before looking at the next acquaintance card.

Okay I’m back from really doing that. I saw a house finch. Good bird. Next card:

A lot of these cards don’t even clear the low bar of “alphabet puzzle where two letters slide head-first into home plate, sexually.” An actual child can write an alphabet quiz. Worse writers settle for rhyming. Any dullard can rhyme. Especially if you live in an era of obviously fake filler words like “aught”. That’s poetry’s easy mode. Syllable shortage solved! This card stinks. Also, most of this card’s visual space is an advertisement for the Crown Card Co Of Columbus O. Who’s putting the moves on this lady anyhow? Maybe she should turn down her suitor, and go for a roll in the hay with the card company owner. What can the suitor even offer? The card executive can send her home with a complimentary “Roll In The Hay” card depicting an agricultural croissant or whatever.

This card’s artist and writer can’t stand each other. Whoever did their bit second ignored the first guy’s contribution. The art is two people with a severe case of Political Caricature Head, frowning at each other, in the rain. The layout person did not bother to let the art display regular-ways. Meanwhile, over there in The Poemmzzone 1900, we get lovelorn blather that’s so disjointed they wedge a “ne’er” in at Word #2. You couldn’t budget enough beats for a full ‘never”? Had to truncate after the first pronoun? Disgraceful. Dis-erection-ing. I don’t know how this era created a next generation of Americans.

Here’s where I spin around and start celebrating these cards. They are good, one way. When deployed well, acquaintance cards ran counter to every social rule of their despicable era. In particular rules for women. The 1890s were so restrictive for women, British doctors invented a health crisis to cudgel anyone riding a bicycle while doubly X-chromosomed. Experts pretended exhaustion, headaches, depression, insomnia, heart palpitations, and “bicycle face” loomed for any woman who dared to pedal a pedal. Men worried about women riding bicycles for a real reason. They worried bicycles made women an eensy teensy weensy bit freer. Freer to find a good mate, or flee an assailant. Acquaintance cards were another way to skirt patriarchy, by choosing. A woman could receive an acquaintance card and (gasp) say no. Or (gasp) say yes. She could even (heart palpitation) give an acquaintance card. She could even (terminal form of Bicycle Face that rots your whole body) give an acquaintance card to a fellow non-male person. Acquaintance cards allowed lesbian or non-binary romance. We still have one of the cards that did that!

Yeah! That’s a real one. You know who else is a real one? Alice Ramsey. She wrote down physical evidence of either a mental illness or a crime, depending on which jurisdiction/year she wrote this in. And this resource was easy for her to acquire. She didn’t need to buy her blank cards from a covert dark web Lesbian Diagon Alley. She wrote Miss Smith’s name on the same kind of mass produced junk every waistcoated wuss bought at the dime store. You could use these cards for anything. That means some of them were the entire difference between people winning love and surrendering to loneliness. One card changed two lives. It’s like if we all still gave out Power Rangers Valentines to all our classmates, and by doing that some of us destroyed Big Brother. That makes these cards amazing. So much was happening here! And that was clearly a strain on the acquaintance card manufacturers. These cards were the “GoFundMe as health care system” of their day, for love. No generic stationery can carry that much social weight. You can’t ask the greeting card “Maxine” character for more than quips. 1890s America asked theirs to fulfill every outlawed erotic dream. I feel like this card captures that:

Prince couldn’t have said it better. Admittedly, he did say it better. So did Sinéad. Also, whoever drew this either hates dogs or hasn’t seen one outside funny medieval illustrations. Still: your suitor would die 4 U. He might actually die 4 U if your parents or leaders or cops think he’s a different race from you, or if your genders are a repeat. That’s how committed he is. He’d even [squinting at the art] [squinting harder] [giving up and guessing] get bitten by a shoe that’s also an alligator 4 U.

Acquaintance cards were also named “escort cards”, by the way. Does any individual word sum up our society’s split sexual personality better than “escort”? It’s somehow the word for paid sex work, and for sharing a walk’s trajectory. And the word for every secondary ally character in Star Fox games. Also don’t google those characters. You’ll see fan art. Fan art that’s further evidence of the overpressurized urges I’m talking about. So it’s relevant. But you don’t need that psychic toll. You get it already. You’re smart! Smart, unlike this card. This escort card has it all: animal art! Flirtation about walking! Poetry-ish text! And one quotation from Hamlet. In a way that’s not profound. Also the quote’s gotta be outside of its actual context. I refuse to open the book and check. But I’m confident Hamlet didn’t say “look at two pictures!” to Ophelia while showing her a wacky “Nunnery? Yea/Nay” proposition-scroll.

This drawing is Tuberculosis Slenderman and the words aren’t better. Next card!

I know this is only the tenth most interesting part of the card, but, did Elmer Fudd ruin the name “Elmer”? I think Elmer Fudd ruined his own Christian name. Elmer Fudd is a “Hitler’s Mustache”-sized event in culture. That feels unfair. Fudd’s just trying to hunt or mate with a funny hot rabbit. Aren’t we all? Unfair. Gonna ponder that injustice on my next birdwatching self-soothe stroll. In the meantime: “ragtime millionaire” was probably game worth spitting, back in Rag Time. I like that. I respect Scott Joplin Swagger. But each corner of this card fails. Each corner explores a worse and more terrible way of hitting on someone. Clockwise from top left: 1) limp hello 2) regular statement tailed by a jarring “psych!” as if that makes it comedy 3) harried fuckboy 4) drooling boob-fixation. The last one’s so out of pocket, it almost horseshoe theories its way into being good. I could see it working, one time, as a bit. You’d need to be in a specific variety of committed relationship. Deeply connected. Borderline psychic pipeline between your whimsical minds and your even more whimsical intercourse pipes. Also there’s a slight Dumb And Dumber quality to “knockers” and I haven’t seen that movie in too long. The “hooters” bit probably holds up and this is kind of that. Do they sell that orange tux online? They have to, right? Maybe we should move on before I talk myself into this being an all-around good card. It’s bad. Only the “Ragtime Millionaire” part works and I’m Zazzle-ing that asap. Now what’s left on the card pile? Looks like just one more–

Oh no.

We’ll come back to that left panel. Don’t think I’m not upset about the poem on the right.

The title is clearly the one French phrase this publisher’s ever heard. They heard it by eating ice cream. Ice cream wasn’t impressive in the 1890s United States. Ice cream was normie stuff by then. They invented ice cream cones within the next decade. Moving beyond the weak Francojerk title, the poem’s text is… stolen? The gist feels lifted from every other one of these cards. At least, that’s how I feel. Learning about these cards changed me. I’ve seen a million of them. Which is too many. I now share the mindset of an exhausted Victorian-American bachelorette. I see the world through their eyes. I’m corset-brained. I’m frill-pilled. And I refuse to read one more card from one more lad offering me a walk to my father’s front gate. If I have to mentally square-dance with one more Protestant businessman failson, I’m gonna switch teams and wreck a home and steal Miss Smith from her “Boston marriage.” Shuffle on down the (horse-poop-strewn) road, fellas. Bram Stoker wrote Dracula yesterday, and I want to finish reading it before I cough one last foreshadowing blood splatter into my handkerchief. I’m going to die a spinster at twenty-three. You boys gotta get your YUM YUM elsewhere.

This image is perfect. No card tops this. Here’s what I am sure happened: a paper novelties printer hired the most affordable artist in America. They tasked them to draw kissing, without drawing it. Artist solved that riddle by drawing the pen and ink equivalent of clone-stamping a lady’s bonnet across two entire heads. Also, he is unfamiliar with any pop culture sound noises more impolite than “eating”. Good comics weren’t invented yet. Heck, bad racist comics were barely invented yet. So he made two heads “YUM YUM” and let America fill in the yum-blanks. It’s great. It’s the whole era in one picture. And as eras/pictures go, it’s better than it could be. Somebody got paid to make this. At least one couple probably got to yum-yum, and experience future happiness, as a result. And that couple might’ve connected despite social strictures against most combinations of humans. For what these cards are, they were freeing. That’s one good thing. And I think that’s all we can ask pop culture to provide. We should ask for more. But when it comes to mass-market novelties, any real increase in joy is a win. I’ll yum-yum to that. And with that sentiment in my heart, I’ve never been prouder to finish typing and leave the end of my article to PoxcOH GOD

This article is thanks to a hot Hot Dog Tip from Agent of Fortune.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: EveryZig, who ere til now has been discreet, tho cannot help but think you’re neat, perchance two lonely hearts could meet, come on girl let’s suck those feet.