Author: Seanbaby

Categories
PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting Day: Hardcase with Lydia Bugg 🌭

It’s Podcasting Day! And this week on the Dogg Zzone 9000, we are joined by our own Lydia Bugg to discuss something you should never find further information on: Malibu Comics. We all read Hardcase. It’s the story of a reluctant superhero, but not reluctant because of morals or ethics. He’s just a coward who doesn’t know how to fight and also has a busy schedule getting bullied as a wealthy movie star. You’ll hate him! Listen here, or wherever you get podca–

Hardcase had super strength, invulnerability, and no regard to where his wild jumps might take him. He fucking sucks! And Sean found the blog (o-rama) of Hardcase’s writer, an unpleasant man who died ranting about Taylor Hicks and White Replacement. Malibu Comics was not the first publishing company made up entirely of sex criminals, fraudsters, and racists, but it will always be the most ’90s. So the next time someone says you’re toast, tell them forget that noise– you’re the one making breakfast.

Real, Actual, Unaltered Footnotes:

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: That Bank Teller From Dragged Across Concrete 🌭

In 2018, writer/director S. Craig Zahler released a movie called Dragged Across Concrete. You might know him as the guy who made Bone Tomahawk which you might know as the movie where savage natives hack a naked man in half in front of Kurt Russell. He also wrote a movie about nazi puppets. The point is, he’s a man of subtle, artful presentation and he, probably by accident, filmed the darkest comedy scene that will ever be. Let’s talk about the bank teller who gets executed in Dragged Across Concrete.

When I describe Dragged Across Concrete, it’s going to sound like I’m a film genius inventing the least likable movie. The two heroes are cops in trouble for racially motivated police brutality, which isn’t a misunderstanding. We see them do it. They stand on a suspect’s neck and then rough up his girlfriend. She’s deaf, nude, and Mexican, and they take deliberate care to mock all three of those things. They’re played by Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn, who for different reasons, are each perfect answers to the question, “Who is the worst person in the world’s favorite movie star?”

The stakes of the film are that each of these cops want more money. Mel Gibson wants it because his daughter keeps getting white hate-crimed in their black neighborhood, which again, is not a misunderstanding. Someone wrote that and filmed it. Vince Vaughn wants more money because it would be nice for him and his girlfriend. So our heroes are bad, racist cops trying to steal money. Most of it takes place in Mel Gibson’s car, and it’s almost three hours long.

But it’s pretty good! Anyway, the part I want to talk about starts an hour and twenty minutes in. We leave our main characters to meet a woman trying to get on a bus. It’s Jennifer Carpenter who was paid to act anguished and was having a closing sale. If you tell Jennifer Carpenter to pretend to be in pain, she will lay an egg on an electric chair and say, “Something like that?”

She is being emotionally tortured by the bus, and we don’t know why yet.

The battle continues. Whether you’re Team Bus or Team Lady, the film stays with this conflict long enough the viewer is forced to take a side.

Which side are you on, reader?

Woman or machine! Who will claim victory in this battle of wills?!

Bus wins! Bus wins! But we still don’t know why they were fighting. If you had to guess based on the politics of the rest of the film, she probably got kicked off one for some unwritten rule about screaming racial slurs. “I learned that the hard way; the global elites, and you know who I mean, use city buses to traffic children to gender-affirming surgery,” her co-star Mel Gibson definitely told her when they met. I guess what I’m saying is when the movie Dragged Across Concrete shows you a person and nothing else, you are going to assume they are terrible in complicated ways. But you’re wrong! She’s wonderful, and cartoonishly so!

Defeated by bus, the mystery woman stabs at the elevator buttons to flee to her apartment, maybe.

Some guy asks her to hold the elevator, but she does the opposite. She tries to help the doors close like a tiny child might understand elevator doors. It’s visual language for, “I am desperate, not capable. I have one purpose, and it is not elevator door science.”

She gets to her apartment (maybe) and struggles with the lock. Jennifer Carpenter is in sheer panic, as if the guy she didn’t hold the elevator for is coming up the stairs with a knife. Which, again, is the tone of this movie. If she was stabbed to death right here, her name in the credits would be “Murdered Bystander #11.”

Like the filmmaker, I’m making a deliberate choice here– the same one we saw at the bus. I’m taking so long building to something you have to take a side: this is either very important, or very silly.

You’re right, I’ll get to it. The fastest way to say it is this: Jennifer Carpenter has been locked out of her apartment by her husband because she loves her baby too much. There is very literally nothing more to this character than that. Her baby is in there, she loves it, and leaving it causes her pain. She’s a baby junkie, and it’s no secret. The husband put the chain up because he knew she’d come right back up the elevator and pull this shit.

She starts pleading, threatening, bargaining to be let in.

I can’t stress enough how much time we spend doing this.

It is fucking sloppy and insane. She tries everything to get to that baby. It’s not just too much, it’s outrageously too much. It raises the question: is this a powerful dramatic moment or did a prankster give Jennifer Carpenter money in exchange for snot?

This is a filmmaker trying to communicate “she is a loving mother” with absolutely no restraint. It’s how an unlicensed monkey scientist would do it. I’m not saying it’s artless, I’m saying it is every artistic weapon pointed in the same direction and we are watching them blast a hole in a smoking crater that was once an idea.

At these dramatic heights, you’re one wrong step from falling into comedy. This is the first time I’ve seen a hysterical new mother beg her husband to let her skip work to play with her baby, and it’s already a parody of the genre.

So the husband won’t let her in, and he knows all her tricks.

They argue for a long time, and we learn nothing more. She wants to be with her baby like it’s a disease, and the people in her life are very patient and accommodating. You don’t need to hear all the details; I’ll skip ahead t–

I’ll skip ahead to the end of their argument where she negotiates for kissing the baby’s foot through the crack in the door and stealing one of its socks.

She gets back on the bus where we see her wallow in childless misery. The writer of Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich thought, “I must show the audience this mother loves her baby,” and nailed it. Maybe even overdid it. We continue to watch that auteur bring his vision to life.

She was on maternity leave for two months, and then skipped work for another four weeks to stay home with her baby. And now, here she is: 90 minutes and one month late for work and she gets paralyzed by another door. For the fifth time, we watch this character emotionally struggle to change locations.

She finally manages to go inside, and if you thought they were done establishing the importance of her love for her child, that’s cute.

Her boss knows her whole deal, and he’s more than okay with it. He greets her at the door with magical prophecies about her boy’s potential. He believes in the boy. The bank believes in the boy. He says to her, “Your absence was a weight upon us. Your return is a divine blessing.” There’s really nothing like it. The director of Dragged Across Concrete is warping the rules of his entire universe to demand we know how much this supporting character loves her baby. For an entire month the employees of this bank have been waiting for this clinically insane mother to return while maintaining fresh flowers and balloons in a shrine to her newborn son.

We met this character ten minutes ago, and since then the entire gritty crime drama has been about her overclocked maternal instincts. That’s not an exaggeration. We’ve been learning and re-learning about her single personality trait for a quarter of an episode of The A-Team. If you were watching that instead, Mr. T would already be building his third battle truck. Artistically, I can’t put this into perspective any harder than that.

“A small token. A miniscule manifestation of our affection,” her boss calls the baby shrine. This is not how people talk. This is not how anything wo– hold on, what was going on in the main movie we left so long ago?

Oh, right. Crime!

The bank is being robbed by three casual murderers whose personalities are silent, silent, and racist. Through a recorded message, they ask if anyone is in the back of the bank. The tape says, “If you are mistaken, your testicles will be removed with this,” which is the cue for one of the robbers to hold up an ordinary knife. It’s adorable, like a big part of the heist planning went into choreographing this little play.

Sorry, Jennifer Carpenter, I got distracted by characters with a second detail. I’m worried this robbery isn’t going to go well for you, and a lot of time and effort has gone into making me feel that worry.

We are on an emotional train being driven by someone who had to look up love on Wikipedia. The tension is so far beyond parody that even the biggest sap is asking their TV, “Wouldn’t it be funny if after all this they shot her?”

While she’s handcuffing the other employees, one of them signals to his computer. He’s started an email to the police telling them they’re being robbed and wants her to hit send. The two of them wordlessly argue about whether or not the police will make the situation better, and you’ll never believe which side the white lady is on!

Jennifer Carpenter is a great actress. With what only looks like five lifetimes of agony, her face can form any shape, so she has no trouble silently communicating, “Aiiieee, no, I’m not going to sacrifice my baby’s mother, my precious baby’s mother, no no no.” But you don’t get ahead in banking by listening to women. He goes for that enter key.

She tries to shove him away from the computer with the same technique she used to speed up the elevator doors…

… and the robbers are already shooting. They’re watching the same thing we are and nobody can miss Jennifer Carpenter’s facial expressions. There are passing jets who can see she doesn’t want this guy to hit send so she can get home to her baby.

When we cut back, the new mother we’ve now spent a lifetime with is standing carefully still with mannequin arms.

They shoot her hand off. Which reminds me of a dele–

Sorry, there’s a d–

Okay, in 1997, the DVD release of Austin Powers included a d–

There was a deleted scene in the first Austin Powers where Austin Powers runs over a henchman with a steamroller and it cuts away to his loving family. They talk about missing him… how he’s become like a father to his stepson. It’s sort of a basic gag about how it’s ridiculous to imagine all the nameless victims in movies as actual people with full lives. And 26 years ago, the producers of Austin fucking Powers knew it was a hack joke they should cut. Yet this movie, with two monstrous ham hands, was doing the same bit in 2018 with full sincerity. And it wasn’t done.

She hits the floor and goes digging for the sock she stole from her baby. Not to treasure him one last time before her life drains from the spurting stumps, though. It’s sadder than that, or at least more pathetic than that.

With almost one total finger, she holds up the sock and politely asks, “Will you make sure my baby gets this? His name is Jackson.” I was already suspicious that S. Craig Zhaler learned how to write characters from Skyrim NPCs, and as if to prove it, this one gives a quest to the first maniac stranger she sees.

We’ve been building to this moment for a truly deranged amount of time. Across five locations, a filmmaker has put the full force of a $15 million budget into making us feel for this character. And never has anyone’s artistic motivations been so naked. This is how a wild horse would try to get an audience worried that Female Bank Employee is about to die.

Obviously, obviously, she barely finishes her sentence.

Her entire head explodes with the timing of a cannibal finishing a knock knock joke. It’s horrific, but way too absurd to be serious. This is like someone collected the DNA of historical murderers to create a vaudevillian comedian. This character existed only to die and an unmoderated madman said, “What if that was sad? For instance, what if she has a kid? No no, I mean like this lady really fucking has a kid. Quadruple what you’re picturing, at least. Medical science has no name for how much she has a kid. I’ve got it: picture a very long, premise-heavy Saturday Night Live sketch, only it has a button. That is the emotional impact we’re going for. I want this extra’s death to be so extravagant she gets featured on the Blu-ray menu.”

After stalling out the film and having no effect on the plot, we never see her again. Bank Teller is most of a torso squirting from three holes and memorializing a lack of creative discipline far from the main characters’ concerns. She was a joke pitch made by a serial killer who snuck into a brainstorming meeting and she stood next to the director at red carpet events!

Years ago I read an interview with Alan Spencer who was inspired by the stilted, phony toughness of Dirty Harry. He couldn’t understand how anyone could take it seriously, and he made a parody called Sledge Hammer!. It was an amazing show that ended with the main character trying to disarm a nuclear bomb and destroying a city. I bring it up because while misfiring drama is funny to some people, a lot of people interfaced with this art as it was (maybe?) intended– as, wow, feeling the super serious effects of death. When you elevate a situation so far beyond normal, it can become a Rorschach test, but this is like baking fifty cakes that say “INVEST EMOTIONALLY IN SAD MOM” and slowly hitting you in the face with each one. If you didn’t see the punchline coming after all that setup, you’re a dog left in front of the TV. I have no idea how to end this article, no wait:

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Jaber Al-Eidan who we love so much, they’re everything, oh Jesus it hurts every second we’re not looking at them hold on, there’s a bear at the door-

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Once I Was A… 🌭

Doris Sanford and Graci Evans create illustrated guides to childhood problems, and no one has ever done it worse. They solve abuse with insanity and foster care with racism. They solve divorce with Satan and AIDS with strangling. And in 1990, these passionate and dog-brained ladies published a series of four books called ONCE I WAS A ________… and You’ll Never Guess What Happened.

We’re going to start with ONCE I WAS A BULLY… because it’s the only one I have with all the accessories. Each book originally came with a paper doll of the main character you could slide into little slots in a way the most generous five-year-old would call “pointless.” I’m not even sure what they were going for. A weird boy peeking through an unrelated hole in the universe? It’s nonsense. It’s something an AI would generate if you asked it to write your seminary school paper. Anyway, this paper doll is a dick and he picks on a boy named Jason.

Honestly, Jason seems fine. “Fuck you and fuck this,” he says to our bully, and that’s it for the bullying part of the book. I want to be clear on this: after one page we are done with the exposition, character development, and plot. It’s time to learn our lesson.

The very next page, the bully goes to a monster movie and dissociates in fear. It has nothing to do with Jason because Doris and Graci don’t think like normal children’s book authors. They think more like a salmon getting slapped out of the air by a grizzly bear. If you put a human head in a dryer and asked it how to solve friendship, it would scream a Doris Sanford book. Like how our bully now imagines he is kayaking in a sewer and then gets swallowed by a shark.

What does this have to do with bullying or bullying consequences? Nothing. This is the world’s worst dad shrugging his way through a bedtime story. The shark spits him up in, fuck who cares… Japan, I guess?

The bully takes in a sumo match which Doris explains is sort of like a place where fat guys get together to make fun of girl haircuts. They could have called this “I’m Just Todd, And This is Just Some Dumb Dream I Had… A Just Nothing Book For Dull Idiots” and it would have been fine. But they sold this like it would teach us something. In fact, the back of the book specifically states how critical it is to not fail at this task they are carelessly fucking up.

This was supposed to teach children to treat others with respect? How? The boy went straight from bullying to the movies to a dreamscape of adventure. He is one page away from having toys magically come to life.

I wasn’t kidding. Our hero is learning his lesson by meeting a group of rad dinosaurs and hot ladies. Things could not be going better for him. If I know anything about bully dreams, and I think I do, things are about to get steamy.

That’s not what I meant, but okay. This is such a cute encapsulation of the broken wrongness of Doris Sanford and Graci Evans. Like, what is this? Forget how far we are from the stated goal of the book. This is a slot for a paper doll to make it look like he’s standing in his own back pocket while a dinosaur head is down his pants. This is how a ’90s movie would CGI a black hole appearing in a child’s brain– the final violent thoughts of Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Boy.

“So then, uh, robots attack… nutcrackers,” adds the very good writer looking around her apartment. If we’re being charitable I think our bully is supposed to be learning about the nature of fear, possibly to understand what it would have been like if he had frightened the child who dismissed him on page one. It’s a stretch, but the alternative –these crafty ladies are fucking stupid– is too predictable to consider.

As quickly and as pointlessly as it started, the adventure ends. Whew! Our bully almost had to see a nutcracker get torn apart by robots during a fun hallucination at the movies. Those couldn’t have been the stakes, yet they were. It’s the first book written entirely during a 20 minute electrocution and drawn during a 70 year virginity.

What? That’s it? Nothing here ever got related to a second thing. Are there even words to help understand what has been done here? This is like teaching children politeness by awarding a historic pizza “Best Fish.” The book failed every step of the way here and then blew it on the final lesson. Because, one, being scared is clearly super fun. And two, look at Jason. He’s got his own clothing line. Jason doesn’t give a fuck about you. Why would he? It seems outrageous I need to say this, Doris Sanford, but thinking about random things while watching a movie by yourself isn’t an apology. If a loaf of bread grew this, you’d say “wow, this mold almost looks like a story.”

Let’s see if they do better with the next one.

ONCE I TOLD A LIE… and You’ll Never Guess What Happened originally came with a paper doll of a little blonde liar, but someone in Mrs. McKinnon’s class tore her off and lost her. Again, every page has a hole for no coherent reason. Again, it’s like the dumbest caveman tried to invent a pop-up book. Again, it’s because the only real thing this series has to teach us is how books cannot defend against a chisel attack.

After an undisclosed lie, a daughter is sent to her room. To represent her, I’m using the bully from the last book– the grouchy bastard who learned nothing. This insufferable little shit.

The liar immediately jumps out the window…

… and goes on a wild adventure around the world. She goes to many disconnected places, learning nothing and doing less. Sometimes it’s fine. Other times it’s only okay. The liar ends up in a “deep cave,” “Africa,” and “Iowa.” She starts to have fun when she meets some friendly native North Polians because Doris is an elderly white woman in 1990…

… but gets mistaken for a small fish in Miami because most of Doris’s skull was hollowed out by parasites in 1989.

In a weird move for a little girl learning the dangers of lying, she takes thirty pounds of snacks up to the counter and tells the cashier, “I’m not paying for any of this.”

She’s arrested, and you can see this isn’t a good story. It’s a series of bland “and thens” ad-libbed by an amateur encyclopedia owner. I don’t care, and who would? It’d be like criticizing a cow for digesting grass in the wrong stomach compartment. Abomasum? Ha, nice fucking choice, cow. No, what’s frustrating to me is how much it absolutely isn’t a lesson about lying. It’s a story about an aimless girl wandering honestly, and yet here is the lesson it was leading to:

She’s decided to NEVER, NEVER, NEVER lie again? Why? She took a roadtrip to a failed candy negotiation, and it was either a magical adventure or an attic hallucination. None of it taught anyone anything. I’d say this was like teaching someone the power of honesty by blurting out “I went to Iowa before getting arrested for ice cream,” but that’s literally what happened here. That’s what we just read.

So, gasp, it was all a trick? The fictional child didn’t travel around the world and spend a weekend at the north pole in an afternoon? She was a liar, here are some more of her lies, the end? But wait, if none of it happened, why Iowa? Less importantly, why any of it? This is, with scientific precision, the least a book could teach you about the consequences of lying. If you think it’s easy to make a children’s book, ONCE I TOLD A LIE… and You’ll Never Guess What Happened will make you say, “My God, what else am I wrong about.” Reading it is like watching someone get out of a cab with most of a dog and whispering, “I trained this horse to count,” only for kids.

Our next book is called ONCE I WAS OBNOXIOUS… and You’ll Never Guess What Happened. It was supposed to come with an Asian school girl paper doll, but her pouch has long since been torn off. She was gone decades ago. We all know the terrible world we live in. No one has ever said, “This detachable Asian school girl paper doll will certainly be safe here: on this public library book.” So we’re going to have to use the bully prick again.

The obnoxious girl and her friend, Millicent Ann Louise, write mean notes like, and I quote, “ROTTEN ROBERT, I HATE YOU!” and “HA HA HA HA HA ON YOU.” She thinks these are devastating, so like the bully, our hero might be overestimating the effect of her cruelty. Seriously, obnoxious girl, the recipient of “HA HA HA HA HA ON YOU,” doesn’t need you to atone. There’s no victim here. “Rotten” Robert sees this like a chimpanzee accidentally giving him the middle finger.

Like the pattern we’ve established, we learn about the hero’s personality disorder and immediately follow them on some imaginary journey. But this time it’s at least related to the problem because she and Millicent travel around the world being very obnoxious. It’s a book about two girls being insufferable dicks in different locations, and it’s the clearest artistic vision Doris and Graci have had in years.

They go to the moon and Egypt, where the author forgets to make them obnoxious, but they make up for it by visiting the Great Wall of China and spitting on the locals. Next they take a caravan to the zoo, partly because nothing here means anything, partly because these worldly authors thought Chinese passenger vehicles were still donkeys in 1990.

At the zoo, the girls pelt a hippo with rocks until it agrees to take them to a sunken treasure boat. I’d argue this did not help them learn why being obnoxious is bad. They cut in line to get on a hang-glider and take it to the Natural History Museum where they really raise the stakes:

“What are the statues at the entrance to the Natural History Museum? Gerbils?” asked illustrator Graci. And writer Doris replied the same way she always did: “I tried to swallow a hot dog, and set the hospital record for longest time spent legally dead!”

The two girls finally go too far when they touch a “DO NOT TOUCH” sign. Not the thing it was telling viewers not to touch, but the sign itself. We can’t be sure if this is a cute joke or another fundamental chunk of brain missing from the author.

They are sentenced to four years of solitary confinement with a number of strange details written by a person trying to be silly and, like in all their other efforts, failing.

Because of their good behavior, the girls get to finish their prison time with adult criminals, singing in the choir and making license plates. It’s so goddamn weird. They’re locked up in prison for a third of this book. I guess the judge knew he couldn’t get a hippo stoning or China spitting conviction, so he came down on the girls hard for the sign touching charges.

I can’t imagine anyone or anything improving from any of this, but at least something bad is happening to shitheads. I’m American enough to call that a win for the justice system. This is a pretty decent effort, Doris and Graci! You even remembered to include a real moral:

“Hi, Robert. It’s been… wow, five years since I wrote HA HA HA HA HA ON YOU. Well, I’m out and I’ve had time to refl– what do you mean, who is this? This is Millicent Ann Louise, Snitch Killer of Cell Block D! I tormented you all through third gra– he hung up.”

So okay, we’ve now read about bullying, lying, and obnoxiousness with Doris and Graci almost making a case against the last one. But moral relativists could argue those concepts are too abstract to solve. Let’s see if Doris and Graci can teach children about something more objectively wrong. Let’s see how they handle stealing.

In a storytelling choice I personally wouldn’t have made, the star of ONCE I WAS A THIEF… and You’ll Never Guess What Happened is a young Latino immigrant. But this book has ironically been stripped of its thief doll, so we’ll have to use the bully again. The little paper son of a bitch.

The thief took $1.74 and some snail remains from Robert. I don’t know if all children in this universe choose Robert as their victim or if Doris is using her art to work through some things involving a treacherous Robert in her own life. Speaking of the author, can you see the mistake she made here? That’s right! In the very same paragraph we learn of the crime, we also see the solution and the aftermath. Doris accidentally finished the story on the first page! Whoops!

So with nothing left to do, the hero takes a nap.

It goes about as disastrously as a nap can go.

“What’s the deal with hospital food, am I right? Could there be a more wild assortment of various foods?” jokes Doris. “We won’t know the full extent of the brain damage until we get all the hot dog out of her lungs,” say her nearby doctors.

After stealing fourteen lunches from his nurses, the boy escapes to Brazil where Doris and Graci agree they speak Spanish. And the birds there can tell what he’s done. “Señor Thief! Señor Thief!” the parrots squawk, in perfect Spanish, the native tongue of Brazil. It’s like the Tell Tale Heart only with higher stakes.

He stays one step ahead of the police by fleeing to the sky, Australia, and Mayan Indian ruins before ending up in a Korean sweatshop. He works there for three weeks, but our hero, further referred to as Señor Thief, can’t resist stealing a paw squeaker from the assembly line. You know what happens next.

That’s right. Thirty two fucking years of hard labor filling tear buckets at a royal llama farm.

Señor Thief’s father is the king, and he’s here to see if the boy who learned his lesson on page one learned it again after all this nonsense bullshit.

Señor Thief’s dad, THE KING, comes up with precisely the same solution as when Señor Thief was awake. Yeah, we know, book. Give the stolen things back and apologize. Am I fucking crazy? You said it twenty pages ago. I guess the book’s lesson is yada yada, sure, don’t steal, but if you do you need to relive a more surreal version of the crime while you’re asleep. It’s the only way to free yourself from the guilt. Speaking of free…

“Oh fuck yeah,” is what Graci Evans says when you ask her if she can draw “FREE!”

“We forgive you,” shouts everyone! From the hungry, peach-headed nurses here in America to the owners of squeakless teddy bears deep in the mysterious Orient, all the lives shattered by Señor Thief are whole again. I can’t imagine a more wonderful ending. Stealing solved, five stars.

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Joseph Searles, who once talked during a movie and went on a magical journey where he romanced a tiger and then died in prison.

Categories
PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting Day: Threatin with Rodney Anonymous 🌭

This week on the Dogg Zzone 9000, we welcome the great Rodney Anonymous from The Dead Milkmen for a spectacular musical detective game we can only play this one time. Listen here! Or wherever you get podcasts!

It’s one of Seanbaby’s games, so it barely makes sense and requires a bit of explanation. To start, this is Threatin:

Threatin is a boy who faked a metal career with no foresight or guile. He made up lies like an ancient baby inventing the concept of deception. “I am a real musician,” he would post on Facebook. “You are my favorite real musician, I’m a beautiful woman,” he would then post on Facebook. “Me too, I’m a totally different one,” he would add, for several hours every day. Which leads us to our game:

Rodney Linderman, with his decades of music industry experience, and Robert Brockway, with his trapped raccoon-like cunning, will hear all these embarrassing details and try to match or out-lie Threatin at every stage of his phony career. Are they better liars than the worst dummy to ever try it? Or are we simply a part of the illusion? Gasp, What Even Is Truth?

On the bonus podcast, Patrons (please be one of those) can listen to Rodney and Brockway play a second, more tender game, where they compete to be The Kissmaster. It’s one of Seanbaby’s games, so the rules are erotic and the stakes are confusing. To put it another way, What is Kiss Master? We turned a terrible book about kissing into an international best friends kissing party. If you are reading this, you are now the kiss master.

Hey, speaking of grifters and beastly eroticism, there’s a new episode of BIGFEETS out this week! The podcast where Robert Brockway, Seanbaby, and Jason Pargin watch every single episode of Mountain Monsters, a show about hillbillies hunting cryptids and getting bested by them at every turn.

Categories
FUCKING DAY

Fucking Day: Make Your Own Sex Toys 🌭

There’s no gentle way to break this to you. It’s time to:

Make Your Own Sex Toys was written and illustrated by a middle-aged British man in 2007. But before we get into that, let’s slow down here and try something. Knowing only what you know, I want you to really search your soul for your Make Your Own Sex Toys expectations. This book has 50 “quick and easy do-it-yourself projects” inside. What could they be?

Take as long as you need before you scroll down.

Did you guess “daycare administrator offering you the gaping asshole of his pumpkin”? Because that’s real. That’s how the book starts. The vibe of Make Your Own Sex Toys is dark and gross, and it has no idea. It thinks it’s being adorable. It is greeting card jokes stapled onto the sex life of someone squatting in a junkyard. It is a book about dangerous masturbation traps where women seem to only be an afterthought– nuisances made up of confounding parts and motives who have no place in the world of sex. Make Your Own Sex Toys is the work of a pumpkin fucker trying to walk among us and failing.

Every pen stroke of those illustrations burned a tiny bit of innocence from our universe. “The creatures shall blind themselves in the yarn of filth and fuck the unfucked,” this author’s art supplies hissed. And while the title could not have been more clear about what this is, the author still feels it necessary to go over some things before we start.

Surprisingly enough, the things he wanted to go over were not liability and safety. I was expecting at least three pages explaining how no homemade anal beads stuck inside you are the author, or the author’s publisher’s fault. There are homemade anal beads in this book, by the way, and they seem perilous. The first reader to take Make Your Own Sex Toys seriously is going to die asshole-first, filled with poorly fastened ceramic balls. But instead of these concerns, the author is more excited to tell you about the history of sex toys. From prehistoric fertility statues to cock rings made of ancient Chinese goats, they present us with the least interesting facts a 2007 Wikipedia search had to offer. There are also a lot of tips for measuring your dick.

It’s a simple eight step process where you take down measurements over the course of three days of maintaining a full capacity erection. But there are no crafting projects in the book that would require this type of precision. If you’re knitting a dong cozy tailored to the millimeter, you’ve made a tourniquet, you maniac. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Anyone who needs seven tiny suits perfectly tailored for each stage of their boner already knows to get them made professionally. The important thing to note here is how the author chose to illustrate this with rotten bananas. Every artistic choice says something and I think it’s meaningful that the author chose to represent his penis with a mushy piece of forgotten trash. Let’s get started with crafts! First up, obviously, are the For Him projects. And we lead off with…

It’s a dick hole in a bar of soap. I’d argue none of us knew what to expect going in, but sincere, detailed blueprints on how to fuck a bar of soap was not it. This is nothing. This is a failed techbro trying to reinvent the Handful of Bubbles. But assuming you and your soapy urethra simply preferred this authentic recreation of the human pelvic floor, this is a sex toy exclusively for people who are and will always be alone. Guests and roommates cannot catch you with this. Everyone who uses your bathroom will see this and know exactly what you’ve done. If you make a Soapy Suds, you need to take a three hour shower and fuck your Irish Spring to completion to hide the evidence.

Or, “Fancy That,” the author says, after you’ve worn out the vagina on your soap, you can still use its shameful remains as soap. Oh, really? Is soap still soap after you fuck it, you fucking soap fucker? This is only the first project and I feel like he’s mentally and creatively exhausted. He is explaining what soap is to someone in a literal sexual relationship with it. It’s so goddamn sad. It is a shower masturbation hack that leaves you with a prop that would make even the kindest person say, “Monster, you are no longer welcome at this YMCA.” Oh, good. The next project is “Fuck a Pumpkin.”

I wasn’t kidding! The author tells you how to fuck a pumpkin! It’s simple, and sorry if this sentence is too alluring, but refer to the mushy banana statistics you took earlier to scoop out the right amount of pumpkin slime for your girth and then pound off into your food. When you’re done, sit quietly and listen as the wet hole whispers of the love you’ll never know.

This is horrible. This is how you get a garbage man to write a note he doesn’t know how to start. And look at all the cuteness sprinkled through this surgical explanation of how to inseminate the flesh of melon. This is written like a horror movie. The author sounds like a wise-cracking melon fucker who turns out to be the murderer. What’s next, jerk off into a sock?

Oh my god, the third sex toy is putting on a condom and jerking off into a sock. I get that self-pleasure is not a shared experience and none of us have any idea what the rest of us get up to when we’re alone, but I don’t think any reader is hearing about jerking off into a sock for the first time here. We are lubricating things from around the house and fucking them like a boy whose parents think he’s old enough to not need a babysitter. And like he did with soap, the author added several hundred dogshit stupid words about socks, as understood by an ordinary foot owner. “Use your lubricant and semen filled sock to mop up your mess,” is not a tip! That’s something you tell a prisoner if they ask for a napkin.

So we’ve made love to soap, pumpkins, and socks. It’s time to move on to actual trash. Fill some bubble wrap with toothpaste. You can also fuck a shirt or a towel, the author says. So, again, you are grabbing the nearest garbage, the nearest lubricant, and porking it. And again, there is no advice worse than this. This isn’t how you explore any kind of healthy sexuality. This is how to masturbate when you’re on the run from the cops. This is how to die less horny in a trash compactor. And he has some follow up advice to “fuck a wet tube of something, anything”:

Rinse it off and do it again! Build a real relationship with that wad of packing material. Or relax by crushing your new lover’s blisters with your fingers. It’s all super helpful, thanks.

So we’ve had sex with most of our debris and food, now what? Maybe… m-maybe dick sweater?

The author acknowledges knitting a tiny sweater for a human penis is a big step up in production from stroking yourself with a moist t-shirt, so he suggests visiting your local library. Which sounds crazy at first, but I bet “help free things I can fuck help” is the top Internet search at every local library. I genuinely don’t know what this is for or who it could be for. It’s a condom designed by a madman to keep his couch cushions from getting pregnant. Is it for someone who wants to add a little naughty fun into their job scrubbing out the vulvas of livestock? If you came into the bedroom with this on your dick your lover would think you had been cursed by some kind of yarn imp. Even the author of this stupid book is like, I don’t know, maybe it’s for warmth?

Wrap your crotch in this jeweled “posing pouch,” made of felt scraps by the pumpkin patch’s loneliest masturbator. The intended reader of this book is absolutely a mole man. These are the plans for homemade underwear. There’s a caption that says See My Thong and it’s about how hard it is to not expose yourself to your realm’s intruders. He called it a “beautifully crafted posing pouch.” Do you know who has sex with people who build their own underwear and call it a posing pouch? Loose socks, abandoned pumpkins and nothing else.

This is something Batman would have to escape after being Caught in the Clutches of… the Crafter! These are homemade handcuffs. And stunningly unerotic ones. It’s worth looking back on what we’ve seen so far to try to paint a picture of the author. He has collected trash to have sex with and construct panties out of, and now he’s built at least one pair of restraints. And he describes these restraints by saying, “Ronald Reagan was wrong! Let me tie you up, let me penetrate you like a warm watermelon, behold my pouch, my pouch, I can hide it no longer.” This is a mole man book!

The author suggests building your own cock ring out of elastic. “You’re a real man now,” the author tells you under the word “Bingo!” I think we all knew this book adaptation of a failed clickbait article wasn’t going to be good, but could anyone have expected this madness? The author is claiming the treatment for Moleman insecurity is wrapping an old underwear band around your dick, and I’m barely kidding. If you’re not a feral teen living in a garbage truck, every bit of this advice is crazy.

It is the 9th entry, and he’s officially out of ideas. This is just a Chewbacca version of the author’s underwear band cock ring idea. And am I crazy, or is this a lot of length to give up? Like, don’t worry about me, ladies, but when you have three inches of carpet around your junk, is there enough shaft left to reach your pumpkin’s g-spot? Or are you supposed to thrust the whole thing into your partner, cock belt and all, and hope physics isn’t paying attention? I don’t know, I feel like when they heard this pitch the publisher should have asked, “You have had sex with human holes before, right?”

I can’t fucking believe he made a Star Wars version of the dick sweater too.

Okay, hear me out, sex-havers. What if there was an anime girl titty mousepad YOU COULD EAT? This shit is off the rails. The author is making Jell-O boobs and suggesting you feed them to your wife’s parents? We have to assume it’s a joke, but it’s definitely a “ha ha I’m kidding… unless you think your mother and father might WANT to fuck this Jell-O with us” joke. This copy is a nightmare. Read this out loud and every word will feel like a spider in your mouth. “Nevertheless, the fleshy sensation is similar, as the jelly wobbles into glorious submission.” This was probably his second draft after his publisher had some notes on “Butt of a Frozen Dead Body.”

Sure, add some pornographic needlepoint to your pillowcase. That should improve your sex life. Everything in this book is an off putting, deal-breaking warning sign to a potential lover. If you walked into a man’s home who has carved dick holes into every object and has cleaned them all with used jizz socks, nothing would be more important to you than fighting your way back out. But let’s say you stayed, waded through the wet garbage to the bedroom, and saw this: a “stunning erotic” pillowcase embroidered in “2 hours” by an amateur junkyard masturbator. You’d finally know you fucked up, right? Well, this virgin necromancer and sex book author thinks your makeshift porn pillows will be a hit! “It’s sure to impress any bedfellows,” he says, probably wrongly.

Oh, good. This again. I guess in the world of homemade sex toys, adding earbuds or jingle bells to the dirty sleeve already turning your balls purple counts as a whole new project.

This book finally has an idea I can use. With only a curtain ring, five minutes, and the trash from a child’s birthday party, I can make my genitals look like one of Mr. T’s ears!? I’m glad we found a good one, because now it’s time to move on to the “For Her” section, which is not the author’s area of expertise. First off, we have…

Put a condom on your phone and slide the whole thing inside you. Now, and this is the complicated part: call it using a different phone. There’s a picture to help you girls if you’re confused. This entire plan is incredible. It’s like a Little Rascals scheme adapted for dildo. If you told me this plan, I’d expect the next words out of your mouth to be a crab hunting for a larger human shell. This is advice you only take when you’re a wonderful mother and your life insurance pays triple if you die from a cervical obstruction.

Here’s the author’s second idea for the ladies: fuck something electric. Whether it’s covered in old mouth bacteria or spinning blades, it doesn’t matter. Rub it on your vagina, bye, that’s the whole thing. Time to Create: 1 minute. Skill Level: Beginner. You Will Need: Debris, Carefree crotch.

“I don’t know, sit on a water balloon, you lonely cow.” – Author of Make Your Own Sex Toys, no Seriously

The author’s fourth crafty idea, For Her, is to have sex with fruits and vegetables. You can wrap it in a condom if it’s too rotten to hold together, or carve canals into it to add a fun risk of leaving most of it inside you. And look, I know how to party. I’ve lost a salad or two inside a lady. Still, I can’t believe how cavalier this book is about hole safety. He’s dressing it up a bit, but at no point is the author’s advice anything more complicated than to emerge from the shadows and put your genitals on or around a precious piece of Moleman treasure.

I sort of implied the author hates women a couple times, but I don’t think you’d suggest carving a full size totem to a Gnomish god and tell someone to sit on it if you liked them. Look at the scale of Wooden Woody. This is no dildo. The text even says it “doubles as a personal safety device.” This author, this beast who thinks filling up a water balloon counts as Making Your Own Sex Toy, knows this is closer to a deadly weapon than a marital aid. This is like being fisted by a Shaquille O’Neil golem, the highest of honors in Moleman society, but a tough funeral to plan in ours.

I don’t think there’s a fun way to spin this one. The fucking idiot glued a second layer of padding to a ping pong paddle and really thinks he did something profound. He says, and I quote, “your world may never be the same again.” I never thought I’d have to say this a fourth time in my life, but: you stupid, trash-fucking piece of shit, you have made a ping pong paddle out of a ping pong paddle.

The author knows what you ladies want out of a sex toy. Take your tits out a-and cover them in gold? I guess between this and the ping pong paddle you have the starting gear for a character about to embark on the worst sex adventure anyone has ever seen. And when they are defeated and looted, someone will say, “Whoa, I found six cellphones and thirteen half-eaten carrots on this level 1 pervert.”

Exhausting all his ideas For Her, the author moves on to ideas For Couples. Because couples, like women, are a thing this virgin wearing only a homemade dick sweater understands completely.

You could, with your partner, make a quilt out of beaver closeups and squirting dicks? That’s a reasonable thing a human couple might enjoy. “It’s cold, honey. Can you get the one thousand pictures of genitals? Oh, who’s at the door? We have guests, like all owners of crotch quilts! Saquille O’Neil golem! I’ll moisten my holes with the nearest fluid, hiss.”

Another thing couples love is to back their assholes together around a cudgel. This is absurd, and of no use to anyone. If Johnny Knoxville married Grace Jones and they were playing Truth or Dare on their anniversary, no one would have sex with this. If you wrote “sex toy” on this, archeologists would decide you came from a race of giants that gave silly names to their boat anchors.

I’m not wired for leather humiliation play, so I can’t be sure, but I don’t think that fetish translates to crochet. Again, I’m not 100%, but this makes the whole thing go from “kinky sex slave” to “I found an old muppet in the swamp.” And the author knows. See how he’s trying to shield himself in cute? But look at his idea of a gag– telling you to give the knitted sex mask to your grandparents? It is such try-hard zany perversion that overshoots funny and hits elder sexual abuse. It’s a joke pitch the producers of America Pie 11: The Last of This Fuckable Debris would call “a big yes,” and Eugene Levy, age 98, will somehow make it work.

This is called the Strap-On Salami, but it’s not a clever name. The author’s plan is to take an actual salami and attach it to a shoulder pad with a curtain ring so your Moleman wife can peg you with meat. This is the safest of all the book’s sex toys because if it breaks off, there’s no masking the smell. The next time you sleep, the vermin in your trash nest will crawl in and remove it from you whether you like it or not.

This is a Moleman altar of powerful perversion. It’s a pipe organ of toilet paper tubes filled with fucked waste. If you came upon this, you would frantically radio dispatch to say, “John Doe has the upper hand!” Anyone with this in their home does not care if they live or die. All they know is a sad erection scratching against a smear of the same brown, seeping garbage arranged into different shapes like Taco Bell menu items.

Fellow mole people! Keep your treasures in this box adorned in dicks, titties, and bush! Honor our Shaq protector by entering the code dick, inverted dick, pubic hair, tits, inverted pubic ha– Hark! Is that an unfucked old shampoo bottle I CLAIM IT! I CLAIM IT BY RIGHT OF WOODEN WOODY COMBAT!

…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Jim Salter, who has to double his pledge to get his name removed from this article.

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: The Mr. T Game 🌭

Here at this delightful 1900HOTDOG website, I’ve written two hundred and eighty (280!) articles about maniac cops, horny witches, and diseased grifters. That’s a lot of curses I’ve exposed myself to, so today let’s do something nice. Maybe something better than nice– the Mr. T Game. It’s “an exciting race against time” based on the cartoon where celebrity Mr. T leads a “child vigilante army.” You and I, best friends, are going to face off in this 1983 board game for ages 6-12! Nothing could go wrong!

This is not how I remember this cartoon about gymnasts fighting crime. The board is a pleasant suburb built around a Mr. T city center with well-kept, harmless locations along a bus route. And the manual says the object of the game is to “run your errands and reach the airport BEFORE time runs out.” So we’re not going to be jumping onto any escaping speed boats or recapturing an escaped zoo animal. This is going to be something closer to Mr. T’s teen friends returning some library books. Or exactly that if you want to be a dick about it. They don’t even say why we need to get to the airport. We’re probably just picking up a Toblerone for Mr. T while he’s off in some board game with stakes.

Okay, let’s get started. There are four game pieces and none of them are Mr. T. We’ll also need the bus game piece because we get to take turns controlling it. The complications of this bus take up 80% of the rules, and I would argue our adventure would be cooler if we weren’t commuting to it with local public masturbators. The point is, if you’re making a Mr. T board game, every player is a Mr. T and on your turn you roll to see which fools get punched, and which fools get pitied. If you find yourself explaining arcane bus movement rules for a little boy’s trip to the post office, you fucked up somewhere. Anyway, I’m Jeff. You’ll be Robin. Sorry, Kim and Woody. You’re staying in the box.

The first thing we need to do is draw MR. T cards to get our errand assignments. Because again, someone took a show about gymnast kids battling alongside Mr. T and made it about picking up his dry cleaning while he was out of town. This is like making a game where sad paramedics pull ladders and mops out of dead bodies and calling it Jackie Chan Adventure Cards. Has it been your turn this whole time? Come on, we’re all waiting on you to draw your MR. T card.

Wow, Mr. T gave you a terrific errand! If you believe in yourself with all your heart, you’re already done and ready to take the bus to the airport! Now I’ll draw mine.

This must be some kind of weird misprint. I’m going to draw another one.

It seems really important that I get to the grocery store for Miss Bisby. Your turn!

You rolled a 3 and landed on the bus which means you double your roll to move the bus, but you can only depart the bus if you stop o– you know, what? I’m going to just draw you a BUS card.

I don’t understand this game at all, but maybe your fun trip will give me time to catch up. I’m drawing a TEAM card because the city’s only bus is in South Dakota. I’m not sure what they d-

Oh no. This is terrible because you still have the bus and get to draw a BUS card. If you move forward just one space you’ll reach the airport and win the game! Let’s see!

You are so good at the Mr. T Game. I’m still stuck at Jeff’s house with a growing list of errands and missing children. Here I go. TEAM card, draw!

What? B-but this isn’t how cards work. How could i–

I’ve decided to stop asking questions. It’s still my turn, and I draw…

Oh no.

Oh no.

Yes! Awesome! Awesome!

If you hired Mr. T to load crates in your warehouse, this is exactly what he would be doing by lunch. This game rules! It’s still my turn!

Still my turn.

This seems… I don’t think I read the instructions carefully enough.

How d– did nobody shuffle?

It’s… it’s still my turn.

Oh fuck. Okay, something has gone very wrong here, but I’m worried it’s only going to get worse if I don’t draw. So here goes.

I think I’m getting better at the Mr. T game. It feels like I’m really turning things around.

I’ve got this.

Damn it.

God damn it.

The sea’s dark gifts have checked off half my to-do list! It’s still my turn.

I don’t know how to stop this.

No.

Release me from this, Mr. T!

Okay, I love the game again, but I’m worried it’s going to betray me.

Sweet!

Oh.

Rad!

Is it still my turn?

Oh my god, I did it! I finished my third turn in the Mr. T Game! You can go! Draw a BUS card!

You won! You really did it! It looks like you’re coming in a little fast, though.

Oh my god, oh my god.

I… I guess you left a while ago and no one was driving the bus. I don’t blame you, what the shit happened here? What the shit is going on!?

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Neil Schafer, whose beard draws scorpions and whose mutton chops command the locusts.