Author: Seanbaby

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Blips! 🌭

“Pshoooooooo! Pshooooooo! Blam blam! Blamblamblamblam,” said the desperate man who agreed to write an entire book of video game jokes while only knowing only two things about them: arcades do the bloop, and Pac-Man does the eat. If this book screamed for help for 80 pages, it would be twice as honest and three times as funny:

Blips! by Jovial Bob Stine (1983) claims to be “THE FIRST BOOK OF VIDEO GAME FUNNIES,” which I can prove to be a lie four different times by walking across my office…

…or fucking five if you count how it’s not funny.

So not only did Blips! fail to be first-to-market, it fundamentally misunderstood how comedy, video games, and even books worked. Let me give you an example of it doing all of this at once. The book opens by telling you to put a quarter on the page because that’s how video game fanatics think all objects work, and then Bob explains the joke, because that’s how comedy fanatics think jokes work.

Besides explaining jokes, one of the best things you can do as a writer is invent your own mental disorders and then make fun of your reader for having them. You know, the same way you think cats can’t pee unless you hook them up to an air pump. But maybe stop pumping your cat, that’s a fish by the way, and listen: This shitty idiot doing everything wrong? Jovial Bob Stine? That’s one of the pen names of R.L. Stine, who is one of the most successful authors of all time. Nine years before he wrote the first Goosebumps novel, he was blindly mashing words together to make this trash.

For his introduction, Jovial Bob reuses the same idea he had for the title and book jacket– random sound effects and nothing else. Then he reuses the same idea he had for the quarter thing– blaming it on the dumb reader. He is already pumping air into a peeless cat, and it’s still the intro. This fucking blows. Do you want to know what I was expecting here, Bob? Donkey Kong puns that suck shit. And you didn’t live up to that. This is like worrying the drive-thru was going to screw up your order and opening the bag to find your wife’s head. It’s like expecting an apology from Arby’s for killing your wife but getting a note that says, “Pshoooooooooooo! Pshoooooooooo! Blam blam! Blam blamblamblam!”

This is the first cartoon in Blips!. It’s a Pac-Man pun you’d expect any popsicle stick manufacturer to land on two to five seconds after beginning the Pac-Man pun-writing process. But the fact that he’s laughing at his own joke and then calling attention to it reveals a crippling insecurity. Bob has fucked up every single thing so far, exhausted his video game knowledge, and now realizes he’s in trouble. In other words, what did Bob Stine’s wife say to Pac-Man? My husband doesn’t have a dick either! HA HA HA HA! GET IT?

The next cartoon is a fully illustrated version of the joke on the book jacket. It’s about a boy on the stage of a well-attended community anti-video game essay contest awards ceremony, which is already a very long walk, but then the kid wants the $50 prize in quarters? From the context of this book, but not this cartoon, we have to assume these quarters are to play arcade games which means Bob either botched the joke’s premise, or the joke is how this kid tricked the essay judges, a group of people who are both inconceivable and not pictured. It is a wrongness casserole baked by a beast with diarrhea hands. If I was Satan, these two pages are how I would let a dead cartoonist know he was in hell.

In another relatable, conceivable setup, two children run into each other at the arcade to talk about an upcoming history test. “I use quarters to start all things and I believe the points in video games directly translate to non-video game numbers,” thinks one of them, expressing it in an even dumber way. It’s another long journey off a cliff, but it’s not like it would work if it was punchier. This is a faulty conceit squeezed from a brain stuck on the vague concept of “points.” That “100” on the history test is a percentage, you dumb fuck. You shovel-beaten ape. You keep constructing these mazes of impossible stupidity and walking into your own walls. God damn it, Bob, did you give this kid a score of 212,857,944,2? That’s not even where you put commas, Bob. Jesus Christ.

Okay, this one works. If you assume home video games in 1983 could be mistaken for realism and also that hearing about this would instantly convince a person that the game would create a second source of the physical pain they’re already feeling. To be fair, maybe the joke is how this kid’s broken leg was from a recent skiing accident and the realistic new video skiing game would retraumatize him. And yes, that’d be hilarious, but at the risk of exposing some personal biases, is a black 9-year-old with no visible ski equipment the best way to communicate “skiing accident survivor?” This punchline only really had a shot if the girl ran into the room saying, “This personal home arcade game is about how silly it would be if crutches only went up to your knees!!” In your face again, Blips! illustrator.

So far, Bob has covered Pac-Man eating, sound effects, quarters, sound effects, Pac-Man eating, quarters, points, and skiing. I’m not leaving anything out or being unfair to him in any way. Those things are, without exaggeration, the end of his expertise on this subject. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that his next bit was about Pac-Man eating. The nicest way to put it is that this is all premise and no punchline. What if Pac-Man’s physiology was governed by the same rules as a human digestive system? Fine. Now imagine fucking that idea up worse than this. Bob literally spelled it out for the reader across three pages and then kind of gave up before anything funny happened. He had a ghost from the game Pac-Man get sick from hearing about Pac-Man’s diet, but they share the same maze, Bob. He’s a many-times-over dead spirit cursed to watch Pac-Man devour these things forever. He knows what he fucking ate today. This has all the whimsy of a toxicology report for a bachelorette who died of alcohol poisoning.

I’m not kidding when I say Bob bailed on his main concept after 14 pages, four of which were about Pac-Man eating, to start an entire new thing. The next third of the book is THE VIDEO GAMES HALL OF FAME, a collection of nonsense characters who have played video games, a thing he was not prepared to write jokes about. This allowed him to explore hilarious ideas like Rex I. Site, a boy who isn’t good at Asteroids when he’s blindfolded, and get thi– oh, Bob is done. That’s the whole bit. Well, I’m sure the next one will be better…

… it’s not. In fact, Hart F. Heering is basically the same bit– what if someone was in an arcade and had a disability, but didn’t know they had a disability? Maybe these are references to some short-lived medical panic only Bob fell for? “Makes you blind and deaf” might be a fourth thing Bob thinks he knows about video games.

So this girl’s name is Delia Cards, which is a red herring. Forget about it, there’s no joke about cards anywhere. Delia is in the book because she claimed an arcade was easier on her eyes than reading, which is either nothing if you’re normal, or one of the looser types of ironies if you believe arcades make you blind. So now I know the code. You have to think like a dumb, wrong person writing for their idea of a stupid person. Now make someone blind, and there’s your joke.

Chip Beef, again, think nothing of it; it’s not a reference to anything, is also in The Video Games Hall Of Fame for a dubious claim. He says he was going to the arcade to get fresh air, but arcades are where people fart? Maybe smoke? It’s unclear. The gas mask seems to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting as far as storytelling goes, and this is the only reference to (maybe) arcade smog in all of Blips!. The most generous explanation is this is 70 typos in a row under an unrelated drawing printed in the wrong book. This is gibberish. It’s a joke you’d tell a bored fish during your final moments of asphyxiation.

Bob is starting to learn he’s not great at coming up with funny situations or funny names. He stares at the blank page and takes a wild guess at comedy. “Red Redrobbin? And he is out of quarters, like a red robin would be?” Bob is now panicking. You don’t write something like Red Redrobbin the Guy With No Pocket Change if there’s anything left in you. But Bob has so, so much more to space to fill. So Bob summons the last bit of his imagination.

“Uhh… w-what about a guy named Bob B-bob bob bin? And he writes his name Bob, he writes his name Bob! Bob Bob Bobbin. Bobby Bob! His hat says Bob, the belt is BOB. Bob!” Bob nods to himself. It’s a good one. He’s still got it. He rewards himself with a seventy minute scream into a mirror.

I don’t know why I included this one. It’s a gorilla who cheated at Donkey Kong by being a gorilla, and then got his championship sash taken away when they tested him for gorilla. It’s a perfect comedy bit, executed by a writer at the top of his game.

Is an arcade cabinet still a person if she and everyone else thinks she is a video game? How many video games out there are people who have simply forgotten who they are? What great writing. This is a half-formed Robot Chicken pitch Seth Green would type into his Notes app to confuse himself the next morning, but to Jovial Bob Stine, it’s a full page of his book. If this was meant to be a joke, you’re not done, buddy. All you did was put a mentally ill child in terrible danger.

Ha ha, that Mormon ass Donny Osmond doesn’t even know how electricity works. Eat shit, Donny Osmond. Okay, where were we? Oh, right. Video game jokes! Brrzzt! Bloop! Hold on, is that one?

It’s nice to see Bob has given up the pretense of video game comedy and embraced the forbidden un-language of his madness gods. “This boy makes sound effects, like one of the pillars of arcade game jokes. Blorp, blam blam, if you insist on the telling of one. It shall be the last sanity you know before your ears suffer the formless mouth of TINJESHT.”

Holy shit, this one is just a donkey-faced monster on a bicycle rampage. No, listen: R. L. Stine wrote a book of arcade game funnies and one of them was “Ha ha, here’s a donkey-headed murderer, the end.” Which means, and I know how this is going to sound, I think this book rules? He’s somehow so wrong with every instinct he’s managed to steer into genius. Imagine if you were in a brainstorming meeting for Donkey Kong puns and some guy suggested DON KEYFACE, a non-gorilla beast who runs things over on its bike. You would stand up and applaud as your face melted off your fucking skull. This is sincere insanity. You can’t fake DON KEYFACE. And Bob knew it was his masterpiece. He ended the whole The Video Games Hall of Fame bit here and got back to regular cartoons.

Well, not regular cartoons. He started a section where he made up his own outrageously zany video games. For instance, um, LUNCH MEAT!? But, and I don’t think I’m the world’s greatest thinker to point this out, this was 1983– games were about lunch meat. Doing an inexplicably silly thing in an arcade game was as ordinary as losing it to a DON KEYFACE attack. You fucking Normal Al Yankovic’ed Burger Time, Bob.

Ha ha ha, what if Space Invaders was haircuts, you fucking kids?

No no, kids! Kids! You goddamn pieces of shit. Ha ha ha what if Space Invaders was ha ha Merv Griffin!? 

Both of these preposterous, batty ideas are real games, so again: great work, Bob. But Bob does make a good point about Richard Dawson. He put his mouth on a lot of families. And while it seemed friendly, those mothers and sisters must have felt a lot of social pressure to do it. Maybe a Richard Dawson interceptor missile is the kind of satire that leads to meaningful discussions of consent. Wow, y– oh my god, I hope this doesn’t mean DON KEYFACE was about ugly women’s voting rights or something.

Bob’s ideas for fake video games went from games that exist to games that exist (with pop culture references), and now he’s reached the same place he gets to with all his bits– mirthless suffering. “Fuck the jokes,” thought Bob, and not for the first time. “I’ll just write down something unpleasant. Homework. A lonely nothingness,” he decided. And then he typed those ideas, exactly as they were, into his book with no twist or irreverence. “Something about nuclear holocaust,” he thought. Ha. He knew he had the start of something…

… it turns out it was the entirety of something.

The best jokes are the ones where Bob takes an ordinary scene from a game and then spices it up with the perfect word balloon. “What’s all this fighting!?” asks the soldier stationed on a battleship. That’s enough already, but he also screams, “THEY PROMISED US SHUFFLEBOARD!” It’s a reference, of course, to the famous catchphrase, “I promise you shuffleboard.” It’s funny because think how many things had to go wrong in Bob’s brain and life to place words in this order and mistake that for doing something. Ha ha ha it’s fucking absurd.

Bob has made it as clear as he can: he does not know what he’s doing. This is another joke about a kid who can’t tell the difference between video games and the other parts of the universe. It’s beyond a mere contempt for the subject matter and his readers. What has Bob seen that made him like this? When he’s waiting for his pizza, does he scream, “YOU’RE NOT REAL, MS. PAC-MAN! AND I’M THE ONLY ONE WHO SEES IT!” It is batshit nuts. It’s like writing a baseball riddle book and having 40% of the jokes be, “Take a bite. Because I bet you think you’re supposed to eat baseballs, you trash. Yum yum, fuck you.”

Oh, this should be good. A how-to guide, only intentionally wrong. Wet electronics? That wouldn’t work at all. What a card. Let’s see where he goes with this…

… and for seven pages Bob reworded “take apart your electronics and wash them in water.” Blips! is the story of a writer shattering against the smallest obstacle. These are the thoughts a veal cow would have if you carried a Nintendo past it once.

This is stunning. It seems almost impossible to write this many words and not accidentally make a joke at least once. These are genuinely childlike answers to the question, “Can any of you first graders help me finish my book? It’s supposed to be funny, but don’t worry about that. We gave up on that a long time ago.”

When a cartoonist is running low on inspiration, they can put a character in a therapy session. It’s hack, but it’s a classic way to re-frame everyone’s perspective. Yet even there, Bob’s only Pac-Man joke is EAT.

Wait, is that the end? A fist fight over Warlords and Asteroids? Huh. I think I like this one.

Bob is doing some kind of paper arcade game. So is this going to be, like, a Choose Your Own Adventure thing?

No… it’s much less. It’s five pages of a make-believe fly swatting game with no jokes. I honestly don’t know what to make of it. What could you even call it? Arcade fan fiction? How a child thinks game design works?

Do I feel silly? I guess, Bob. This is stupid as shit. What are you doing?

Wait, so the seven pages of you pretending your book was a video game was a prank? On the reader!? This is like writing FREE CANDY on a chemical toilet and locking yourself inside. It’s like tricking a map by wandering into the woods to starve. Bob opened and closed his book by mocking the reader, a person literally reading a book, for not understanding books. If it was anyone else, I’d think they were joking, but if there’s one thing I know about Bob Stine, it’s that he never jokes.

…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Benjamin Sairanen, who plays every Hot Dog article like a video game and is undefeated with a score of 000,000,00,1,7.

Categories
PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting Day: Piledriver with Dennard Dayle 🌭

“Sometimes love, it’s like a slow dance. But sometimes love… it sounds like a fight. It sounds like an argument, it sounds just like a piledriver.” Are you wondering who said these hauntingly romantic words? Could it have been Emily Brontë? “The Bird Man” Koko B. Ware? Shakespeare? Wait, stop. Go back. You were right the second time. Great work! So you must already know what we’re talking about!

We invited our dear friend, contributor, and wrestling historian, Dennard Dayle on the Dogg Zzone 9000 to discuss the 1987 WWF music video collection: Piledriver: The Wrestling Album II.

Listen here! Or wherever you get podcasts!

You might be wondering, “Wrestling music videos? What, is it like recordings of their entrance music?” Oh my god, no. You’re not even close. These are standalone songs written for this. Songs you’re expected to enjoy(?) that are sort of about wrestlers or inspired by wrestlers or performed by wrestlers, and in one case, written about an unrelated thing after a frustrating phone meeting with wrestlers.

Editor’s Note: We did not change a syllable of this or edit the screenshots in any way. Enjoy the pure, Tito Santana and Rick Martel approved song about not wrestling, but “Girls in Cars.”

If you love this type of high-impact wrestling music, review us on iTunes! Koko us on bWare! Girls us in Cars! 

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Mojses by Qumm 🌭

There was once a convention called E3 where everyone involved in video games would crowd around a competitive spectacle of screens, announcements, and bikini girls. But deep in the basement of the LA Convention Center was a magical room called Kentia Hall where the deranged and foreign game developers held a sick impersonation of the upstairs party. It’s where Malaysian Best Storage might have a booth next to StyleRings For Marry Game Boy, LLC. And nearly twenty years ago, it’s where a small man eagerly handed me this:

“Ha ha what am I looking at?” I muttered to myself. “Is moJses made out of cum?” The man nodded excitedly. I was right –precisely right– but not in the way I meant.

You’re probably confused. It’s crazy, but simple: QUMM, which stands for Qualified Uuiou of MobileMan, owns moJses, a head company of QUMM, sometimes known as “the QUMM,” and when they say “MobileMan,” I think they mean “mobile video games.” According to Google, they don’t exist. According to Bing, horny moms need it, free trial. And in 2004, someone from either moJses or the QUMM handed me this catalog of their 72 titles. It is the only record that exists for them or their games, and from the way it quivers, I don’t think it likes being in our universe.

It opens with a letter from the CEO of both companies making it clear this is not a catalog for consumers or retailers to buy his games. He is looking for a publisher to turn this ragtag collection of partly coherent, mostly finished ideas into products three shell companies removed from any legal liability.

The first thing Andrew Suh needed was a single person who could turn Korean words into English. After the failing of largest tuna diaper, he moved on to his second goal: telling American publishers about his games. This would be a pointless, humiliating endeavor without finishing that first task, but Andrew was a go-getter. Maybe? Let me look him up.

I don’t know if Andrew Suh is a very common Korean name or a very cursed one, but Google thinks he’s either a murderer or a taekwondo molestor, and it’s 100% positive he was never the CEO of a MobileMan company. None of this is important, though. It’s a hell-damned pamphlet from a man shadow. What really matters are these, the hottest 2004 moJses mobile games from QUMM!

Battle Bugs might be what you expected from a 2003 mobile game from a company that never existed(?)– an incoherent bug-on-bug(maybe) fighter(probably) set on leaves(definitely). Battle Bugs is Game Type: Stand-alone and Color Depth: 256 Colorꜛ, but I’m not kidding when I say so is every single one of the other 71 QUMM games. QUMM, if they’re all Stand-alone and 256 Colorꜛ, shut up about it. This is like the Domino’s Pizza website adding “Diabetes: Yes” to everyone’s information.

I personally love authentic Engrish like this, back when it was done by confused maniacs who lied themselves into a translation job. But it’s more than that. This is also terrible copy. The person selling this had nothing to say long before they realized they had no way to say it. Two of their six bullet points are about pushing bugs off of leaves, which is pretty unnecessary given the title. No one heard “Battle Bugs” and thought, “Wait, how the FUCK would that work!? Leaf pushing!? Did I hear that right!? I DID!? Okay, wow, that was a hell of a presentation.”

This is a street basketball game only it’s set inside and has an exception about “normal two-point or three-point shoot.” So Street Basketball might not be either of those words? Honestly, I knew less about basketball after each bullet point, but I want to say it was quite a technical achievement to get six moving basketball(?) players onto a phone designed to be thrown away after calling your meth supplier. Though, it seems strange that after working so hard on something you’d let a gym coach dying of a snake bite name it and describe it.

After strangling the English language to death trying to explain the basic premise of basketball in Street Basketball, they decided to take it easy with their actual street basketball game, Power Dunk. The bullet points are: One, has a title. Two, moving sprites. Three, you control it. This is how you would describe a video game you’ve never played on its discount headstone. Jared Fogle, today, would be better at selling sandwiches than this person is at selling Power Dunk.

In Taxi Driver you’re a taxi driver, sure. But you’re also a caveman saving up to buy a wife? That can’t be right. Hold on, I’m going to see if I can search through the Internet graveyard and find out more…

… okay, here we go, from a 2004 snapshot of the long dead moJses by QUMM website:

You don’t marry anyone at all! The taxi money is for buying beer to drink alone, and if you drink enough beer, you can look at a girl. Then some other guy said, “Oh, crying into beer near a woman? In English, the word for that is marriage.” So these maniacs were trying to make Flintstones Taxi, but they accidentally made Flintstones Honeymooners, which is just Double Flintstones. This is way too complicated. Didn’t they make any phone games about fucking ninjas?

Yes! YES! I said “fucking ninjas” and QUMM gave me Ninja Porker! It’s like a monkey paw tried to betray me but accidentally improved my wish. Suck it, monkey p— wait, did they just spell “Poker” wrong? This is… I’m not sure I’ve ever felt heartbreak like this. And the idea of adding little ninjas to cards is so worthless they barely mention it. Their sales pitch is basically, “Poker is a popular board game, and this is close enough. If we had to categorize it, I guess it’d be Puzzle (Like Shooting)? Caution: the ninjas are cute, but do not pork.”

In the same way Ninja Porker was based on the popular board game “Poker,” Wizard Stone is based on the “popular character of a wizard.” It’s also based on the popular character of a princess, but she doesn’t look like she’s a big help as she weeps from underneath evil bricks. I might regret this, but let me run her screenshot through a translator:

“I grabbed it with Volmo?” Is Volmo the blue one? Is the whole pile of blocks Volmo? Do I really want to know? This is an artist who rendered the pleasure on the face of every block crushing the princess and gave careful detail to the tear falling from her eye, then said, “Fuck it, seven blobs counts as hands.”

At first glance, Santa looks like an ordinary Santa game. Even through the Engrish, you can’t misunderstand “Giving a gift to children by being a Santa Clause.” But then it gets weirdly hot. Santa is joined by cute Santa boy and sexy Santa girl, and you don’t hand a gift to the children– you dance it at them. So this game is about sexy, pumping Santas for kids? Those words should only be said right before, “and may I remind you, Sex Crime Kevin, you are under oath.” 

This is getting dark. The next one better be awesome, moJses by QUMM.

Oh hell yes. From the darkest corners of the HardThrash comes A Scray Game! That title is the Scottie Pippen of fucking up– a world-class, multi-faceted fuckup from anywhere on the court. Naming your horror game A Scray Game is like trying to put on a condom and accidentally wrapping a broken balloon around your wife’s head. It’s like filing a police report that says “suspect Attempt the Wiffe Ballon.” A Scray Game is like trying to shrug, but throwing out your shoulder and dying.

Even in 2004, Just Barely Not Tetris was a tired genre. The Magic Pangpang people took a look at the shitty little almost-Tetris they had created and thought, “at least we got the sound effects to play without stopping the music?” And look, I’ve worked on enough video games to know this was probably hard. But it’s also a baseline expectation. If a movie poster said, “Dog is cop, Color backgrounds, Expertly covered up times Jim Belushi farted with car horn,” you’d think duh. That’s what sound design is for. How bad is this movie if you’re bringing up the internal awards you handed out to the Jim Belushi fart team? Answer the question, makers of K9: Fartcop!!!

Magic Pang Pang 2 was also in the book, only it was given the name Minumaru Adventure and it had so much less to offer they spent half of their sales pitch changing “neighboring 1 coins” into “1coins.” Language barrier or not, this is fucking crazy. These people just started multiplying numbers! And the exchange rate never changed! 5 neighboring 10 coins is still only worth 50coin! This is like sending Jim Belushi on a press junket to tell reporters, “In K9: Fartcop 2, one fart equals a fart, two farts equals two farts, and five farts in a bushel is a five bushel partyfart. Also, it’s now called Fartufarto’s Bar Mitzvah.” Perfection, in other words.

Sometimes it’s clear what the Engrish is trying to say, but it’s still funny. The word “well-written” is such an absurd choice when describing your source material. It’s almost an apology. Like they’re saying, “Okay, it wasn’t a bestseller or anything, but before we turned it into a flip phone game and called it Sword Man, it was fine.”

I think the moJses by QUMM copywriter is losing their confidence. And rightfully so. They are an amateur trash salesman looking for a fraud co-conspirator in a language they do not speak. In other words, the plot to Jim Belushi’s Fart Shop.

Okay, this is real salesmanship. They say this Final Fantasy knockoff was awarded the title of “The best promising game” by the goddamn Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Amazing! And unlikely since that is not an award the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism gives out, nor would it seem appropriate to give to a video game they themselves funded. This has all the credibility of Fruit Ninja claiming it won a Latin Grammy for “Tallest Fun.” Still, what a brag improvement it is from “Game feature: 3 coins equal 3coin, no listen, let me explain the coin exchange system again across the next four bullet points.”

They’re going to answer your main question first. Yes, Cronous is The Cronous, adapted for phone from the hit full 3D game, ‘the Cronous’. It has all the characters you love. Dalof. Seduce. And if you’re wondering about the interaction of data? It’s coming. Assuming you, the reader, are a huge American publisher and a big the Cronous fan who wants to show them how to do that. What else is there to say? Oh, right. It’s Stand-alone and 256 Colorꜛ.

Were you wondering what is the real action game? Fucking enjoy the real action in Combat Troopers. Or wait for Combat Troopers XV, because this is only the first in a series. How could it not be? Combat Troopers (1) has 4 entire stages, they are all Jungle, and we are banking on the creative team behind those things having a lot more ideas in the tank. Do you hear us, future? Combat Troopers and their various items and weapons are coming!

Chicken Run is hard to explain. First, it’s actually called Chicken House. Second, consist of 3 plates and each plate is circulated and change plate. You get it. Alright, let’s do one for the ladies.

Musical Performance Game is a Stand-alone Musical Performance Game (256 Colorꜛ) designed to appeal to women by including characters. And sure, they’ll love the round, orange nothing without a name. They’re women. But Musical Performance Game takes it a step further by letting those ladies become a handsome prince and kiss a princess. A magically hypnotized prince if I’m understanding it correctly. I’ve seen some bad English speakers, but these lunatics tried to describe a rhythm game about a ball and inadvertently wrote a gender-swapping sexual assault starring two unrelated characters. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of the final day of shooting K9: Fartcop when Jim Belushi said, “That’s a wrap on Q*Bert’s Hamlet! Great job, everyone!” Hold on, wait. God damn it, yeah, I think I’ve lost my mind. Let’s do one more.

What the shit? This is a game about a high school teacher choosing beautiful girls? This reads like a criminal confession hidden inside a list of game features. “My princess plays various sounds… as you watch the little girls grow up.” “My princess has a convenient interface… for choosing one of the beautiful children.” It’s like someone wrote an AI to describe games and it went rogue and tried DMing you for foot pictures.

What happened here? Every other game was satisfied being a generic throwaway imitation. They were like, “It doesn’t matter if any of these are good. Pump out a couple basketball ones, an Ikari Warriors, a Tetris or two, Dance Dance Revol— and oh! We should do a uniquely branching narrative graphic adventure sim about grooming high school girls spanning their entire childhood! What else? Maybe one with chicken plates?”

I don’t want to end on that one. Let’s do one more. I know this is a lot of madness to expose yourself to, but it’s not like any 2004 Korean mobile game sales pitches can get any worse.

Ohmygod, no! It’s worse! It’s worse!!! Take your pamphlet back to hell with you, moJses by QUMM!!!

…

These artist have unbecome foot sponsor HOT DOG cream Supernaught standard color 256n qum images make one1:50 fun porker. For you. YOU!

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: The Princess and the Kiss

When it’s your life’s work to keep people away from sex, you’ve chosen a path of humiliation and frustration. You’re selling a thing no one wants, and your only possible customers already had virginity explained to them by God. But despite it making her look like a sad dummy, author Jennie Bishop has dedicated herself to purity. She wants you to know your poundable holes are God’s precious gifts, and in 1999, she turned that sentiment into a children’s book.

The Princess and the Kiss is a story about one thing– a princess saving her first kiss for her royal wedding. There’s no age suggestion, but I feel like saving a first kiss for her wedding overshoots even the most optimistic expectations of your Christian daughter’s chastity, so the book must be for people old enough to understand it’s an allegory for penetration. But it might not be! This might literally be a book about the spiritual trauma of unmarried kisses.

Jennie dedicated The Princess and the Kiss to her home-schooled daughters, Vashti and Christianna. She does not mention how their innocence inspired her writing or her life, but instead calls for them to spend their first kisses well! Let them die dryly against the lips of a nerd for God’s glory! This is so goddamn weird. This is how a witch would curse a chapstick thief. It’s what every priest tells you the second you’re alone. It’s the least romantic line from a video cassette called Church Camp Hunks.

The story starts with the birth of the princess. When she was born, the king and queen gave her a very special gift from God, her first kiss, and something already seems off. Does this mean they put their mouth on her, or very carefully didn’t put their mouth on her? I get we’re talking about making sure your daughter never has sex, and I think every father sees the appeal in that, but why put it like this? Tell your stupid kid a wizard filled every penis with hot mustard, and cockroaches can’t resist hot mustard. You’re already inventing a kingdom of precious magic to indoctrinate her, you coward. There’s no ethical difference in explaining how insects are waiting to devour her crotch.

A page after giving the princess the very special gift of her first kiss, the king and queen give the princess the very special gift of her first kiss. Which means I’ve either gone insane, or this is not a well-written book. They lead the princess to a secret room where her kiss is stored, and if you thought her kiss was going to be a magical energy trapped inside a bird cage, congratulations:

This is an oversized children’s book, so the above illustration spans 26 inches across with no text. Representing your first kiss as a pet ghost your parents keep in a safe is beyond childlike. If you asked me, “What if fucking was like a lamp?” I would catch your words in a jar and label it “THE DUMBEST THING ANY STUPID FUCK HAS EVER SAID.” But even as a fan of trapping abstract concepts in glass, I can’t believe Jennie Bishop thought this dogshit stupid idea was powerful enough to warrent a full splash page. Did she imagine the reader would be so blown away by this reveal they needed to bask in it? Take the whole concept in? Even if it wasn’t spoiled by the cover, a two-year-old would stop you and say, “Let me guess: it’s, like, a glass cloche holding a light? Psh.”

And since we’re here looking at it, let’s talk about how this image unravels Jennie’s entire world. This is an open room on top of a thirty foot tower. This “secret kiss storage” is visible from at least five different windows. Any pervert could climb in there and take it. Her virginity has been curiously probed by a dozen squirrels every day for the past 18 years. By the rules of her own fiction, this princess has made love to at least six hundred birds. It should be called Princess Pigeon Fucker, Yes You Read That Right.

So now, despite this being, just, so deadass simple, the princess has the gift of her first kiss spelled out for her again. It’s the only thing that has happened on any page of this book, and this one is no exception. Remember, this was written by a woman who home schools her children. At this rate, we’ll be having virginity explained for another 80 pages and it will be 2049 before her elderly daughters graduate Beginner Shapes for Latter-day Saints.

If you filled a pillowcase with cottage cheese and took out television ads to tell everyone they weren’t allowed to have sex with it, your story would have richer characters than The Princess and the Kiss. This passive dingbat lives to get fucked, some day, but only once and in very specific conditions. She is a bottle of champagne for a special occasion, but with less autonomy and a noisier pop. Wait, go back one. Sorry. This book has me really cranky.

Now the book pivots to the princess refusing her kiss to suitors. Princes come from around the kingdom to offer themselves to her. The first is Prince Peacock, who is a great jumper, but you know, knows it. That’s a deal breaker for Princess… holy shit… I guess she was never given a name. Anyway, as a nameless woman whose goals, personality, and education are all described as “not kissing,” she knew she couldn’t give herself to a prince conceited enough to bring salesmanship to a princess courting.

Her next courter is Prince Romance who seemed interesting, but maybe too interesting? The princess, her insecurity honed from a lifetime of being told her first vaginal entry was the only thing she had to offer, knew this was too much man for her. “This sex machine is going to know I can’t fuck the second he gets it in,” she thought. And she was right. They should have really explained the princess’ deal to Prince Romance before he drove all this way.

For a writer, this next suitor is pretty embarrassing. His name is Prince Treasurechest, and he’s rich. But the princess, who again, was never named despite being written by a world class character namer, knows this guy is also too much for her. With all his money, why would he care about her sort of clean mouth? No, she needs a man who’s perfect. Not desirable, successful, adventurous, or experienced… someone who aspires to meet a woman who keeps her vagina under a dome and no second thing.

Many more suitors came, but the courtship ended with the princess choosing no one. “Why won’t God bring me a husband?” she demanded after every manner of man came directly to her home to offer her everything they had. Her mother comforts her by telling her even if God forsakes her, at least she’ll die with that first kiss, glowing lustily in a nearby tower. “Oh, that’s a good point,” the ape-brained virgin idiot thought.

But what’s this? A common man approaches the castle? Surely this lowborn scoundrel would not insult the princess’ honor by… no. He wouldn’t dare.

With all the charm of an Instagram follower asking for a farty pair of your panties, the common man tells the princess he has no money or talents, but he has been watching her. This is exactly the type of creep she and her parents are keeping her virginity locked away from, but they love him. He has them in the palm of his incel hand when he finally reveals the only very special gift he can give her. You already know what it is, but here are 26 inches of silent illustration anyway:

“My lady, I offer you this old leather pouch of not knowing how to fuck,” he says to her without words. “Crrrr-eaaaa-aaaa-kk,” reply the atrophied muscles of her widening cervix. They are the perfect couple– two bumbling dummies who have built their lives around leveling up their celibacies for one brief Pokémon battle.

Like someone did on every other page of this book, the common man explains virginity to the princess and her parents. It’s the perfect sales pitch for these weirdos, and they agree he is the one for whom the princess has been waiting. But is he? Should this woman with unlimited options and presumably some responsibilities make a lifetime commitment to the first virgin stalker to get past her security? Like, are you teaching a valuable lesson to young girls when you tell them a man’s greatest gift is an unmoistened penis? This shit is bonkers. If I was this author’s husband I might ask myself why a woman created an entire fantasy world in order to say, “The best ladies choose unremarkable men with no sexual experience.”

So in a victory for “nice guys” everywhere, the common man and the princess get married and exchange kisses (not pictured). A drawing of a husband and wife kissing would look like an amateur gang bang video in this context, so Jennie does her best to describe it with the majesty it deserves– sun streams through the windows while all the kingdom and the actual God sing. So everyone watched them learn how to kiss together, which, Jesus fuck, means the very special gift was really only a kiss the whole time? It wasn’t an allegory! They still have at least three secret magical orbs to reveal to one another before they’ve consummated this thing.

“Princess Unnamed-Common, on our anniversary I have one last very special gift to give you. It is my will-o’-the-wisp of never having a thumb up my butt.”

Categories
PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting Day: Beat ‘Em Up with Rusty Shackles 🌭

In arcades, as in life, whenever you ever see 2 to 4 men punching their way through mohawks, you are guaranteed a good time. It’s Dogg Zzone 9000 Day, bad dudes, and we welcomed our very own website’s illustrator, Rusty Shackles, to discuss the greatest of video game genres: ’90s beat ’em ups.

Like getting you and your brother’s girlfriend back from the gang who stole her, the rules of our beat ’em up discussion were simple. If you want to play along at home, here are the controls:

You can listen here or wherever you get podcasts, but if you’re a real shadow warrior Patron, you can listen to the bonus podcast where Rusty and Brockway try to identify a series of increasingly insane video game quotes. If you want to avoid spoilers for the main show, don’t look at these kickass arcade flyers for our badass top choices! Like us on Review, and Double us on Dragon! Thanks!

Footnotes:

This stupid thing…

… and this goddamn stupid thing.

Podcast novelization cover by Brett Ellefson

Categories
FUCKING DAY

Fucking Day: The Hunk Boat 🌭

Let’s talk about the 1995 film THE HUNK BOAT. It’s about “five hot frat buddies” sharing a houseboat for a weekend where clothing is not just optional, it’s penis! Where the waves aren’t the only loose, wet shapes growing mold on a boat! Sorry, these aren’t great loglines. The front of the box screams, “SET SAIL ABOARD THE U.S.S BEEFCAKE FOR THE HUNKIEST CRUISE OF ALL TIME!” which was already a masterpiece of salesmanship.

Maximum hotdoggers may recognize THE HUNK BOAT from the last time I tried to review it and the tape didn’t work. Well, I fixed it*. Which means buns. Which means possible flopping dongs. Which means if someone comes up behind you while you’re reading this, those are the two things you’ll be talking about. The title THE HUNK BOAT is not a trick. If anything, it says too much.

* Don’t ask me how, but I could only get the cursed cassette to play through a h̴̡͍̙̏̉͐o̶̺̥͛l̴̟̩͍̈́̓ę̸͖͍͐̄ in a 1995 hunk calendar.

We open on Warren Scott, nudely practicing his “What I Did Over Summer Vacation” speech. Warren is 31 years old, so this is either a 4th grader who was held back 22 times or a strange way to frame your sex boat video.

With the oratory skills you’d expect from someone who saw this set and decided to take off his clothes and stay, Warren asks, “Can you imagine… five rowdy guys? All alone. In the middle of nowhere?” Then he pauses. Much longer than you’d think. Longer than it should take to imagine even six rowdy guys. “I’m not going to be able to tell everything that happened in this report,” he finally adds, the emphasis on all the wrong words. He wants this to suggest all these best pals were fucking, but the real subtext is, “Reading is a struggle for me; I’ve always been more of a moist hole learner.” The important takeaways are these: these idiots are really committing to the creepy school report bit and all sexual intimacy will be, at best, vaguely implied. Welcome to THE HUNK BOAT.

“No hardcore action.” It’s the final sentence on the back of THE HUNK BOAT‘s box, and it inadequately prepares viewers for its chaste, almost childlike approach to nudity. It’s like someone at a Lake Mead Tourist Board meeting jumped up to suggest, “Let’s add more taints, right? Confused, naked dummies and the backs of their balls!” before remembering they were the entire Lake Mead Tourist Board.

Before we get to that, let’s do a hunk roll call.

Warren Scott you’ve met. His four “frat buddies” are Michael Golden, Joshua Matt, Robert Allen, and Tico Cordova. That’s five men, eight first names, and zero romantic chemistry. This video looks like five dudes having a normal weekend at the lake except they said yes to a guy at the water ski rental place who offered them eight hundred bucks if they did it naked and let him film it.

I’m not sure why they’re so coy about things. Maybe it was so they could market this obviously softcore gay pornography to stupid women? But, I mean, this was 1995, not 1992. They could just make gay pornography. There was no need to create this secret beef code to sneak it into a fishing video. The entire first ten minutes is a series of excuses to get them, five regular joes, to take their dicks out. For instance:

They get the dongs started by having Warren stand on the deck of the U.S.S. Beefcake, waving wildly at a couple on a nearby boat. “Hi, guys! Hi! I’m Warren! I’m 31 and three quarters and I got a B in vocabulary! Sometimes my friends pull down my swimming trunks to show everyone my no-no tube! Uh oh! Like I was say-ing!”

And look, I’ve been on enough lake trips to know how hard it is to transition into a boat orgy. You can’t just rip the shorts off the dumbest guy and hope for the best. And sure enough, Warren’s flopping hog does nothing to get things going. The bros and dudes go back in the cabin and play a few hours of no-stakes, platonic man poker. It is objectively bad television, but then they come up with the inspired decision to have the guy with the worst hand get naked and “get out there and do some jumping jacks, bro. Right now.” Which means we are two penises into an all-male adult film and everyone is still pretending to have never heard of Gay.

Here’s what’s crazy. The couple in the boat are still there! Have they been hanging around for three hours while the hunks played poker hoping to see some more dick? If so, a naked Robert bursting into the sunlight to shake his junk at them has to be a better-case scenario than they could have hoped for. Think of the victory this must have been for one of them. “Honey, leave the anchor where it is. We’re not fighting about this anymore! There are five studs on that boat and it’s only a matter of time before another one of them gets out on that deck and shows us what he’s got. I don’t care when your mother was expecting us ba– see!? See, right there! Look at that fat dick! I fucking told you so.”

And that’s it for the first day of this erotic houseboat journey. They cut to the next morning, where Warren is sleeping alone. He has no covers and like Winnie the Pooh, he is wearing only a t-shirt and a boner.  Through voiceover, he jokes about how his big, dumb erection gets in the way as he sleepily gets some juice. He says he isn’t embarrassed, though; because he learned on this trip that the other guys get them too. So holy fucking shit, these 30-year-old gym buddies are… what, learning about their bodies?

I can’t keep track of this fiction. They know they are gay men, the viewer knows they are gay men, the consumer was hoping they were gay men, and here they are pretending to be The Straight Bro Puberty Squad solving spooky clues in “The Case of the Sticky Erection.” Like, the box made it clear this wasn’t going to be a poop deck view of a Lake Mead suckfest, but I figured the stars of THE HUNK BOAT wouldn’t be learning about their penises for the first time. This is the first and last erection of the film and Warren presents it to us like a shy girl ordering a corndog. It’s pathetic. Quaker pediatricians paint sexier pictures with words than Warren Scott narrating his own throbbing cock.

Up next is the outdoor shower Robert rigged up for a fourth flimsy excuse to get naked. So far we’ve gotten nudity from a pantsing, a dare, and a man discovering boners. Now we’re watching a man act like it’s normal to clean yourself by shivering soaplessly under a rain gutter. Robert paws at himself with the exact sexuality of an eyeball in an eye washing station. Who knew it would be so hard to make the thing after they came up with the idea of THE HUNK BOAT?

Still struggling to figure out a way to get this party started, the boys go back to playing cards. This time they don’t even remember to make it hunky. They just each draw a card and the low man has to clean the place. Tico loses and gets to work in the kitchen. Not for an insane amount of time, but much, much longer than it takes for a viewer to think, “Are they really going to stand here and film this guy doing the goddamn dishes?”

But after a few minutes, Tico gets an idea on how to make it sexy:

And with Tico’s butt, they are now 25% done with the video and completely out of ideas on natural ways to get men nude. Jumping jacks, showers, housework… that’s it. What else do hardbody studs do naked? Oh, right! Snorkeling!

The bros flap around the lake like beautiful mermaids, as close to free as their manly hearts will let them soar. Warren has long since run out of things to say, so this part is set to five minutes of jazzy saxophone while their waterproof camera, which should have air quotes around both those words, does its best to center everyone’s balls. You know the difference between art and pornography when you see it, and while this video is never pornography, it is now finally art.

Okay, enough swimming. Let’s heat things up. It’s time for Mike and Josh.

Warren explains, “Mike and Josh would often go off on their own.” Then he playfully waits a deranged amount of time before adding, “We never knew exactly what they did out there.”

He pauses again, thinking he’s building some kind of tension. “Together,” he coos, so long after saying the previous sentence they don’t even seem related. I know I’m making fun of Warren’s narration a lot, but he is worse at implying gay sex than Tim Allen in a Kevin Spacey biopic. I can barely tell what he’s getting at like a joke about Tim Allen starring in a Kevin Spacey biopic.

Back on the boat, the other three studs are blowing it with frisbees. So let’s check back on the ocean of passion crashing against the cliffs of Mike and Josh.

Oh. I guess Josh dropped Mike off on some barren shore and left him there to jerk off? He gets naked to his boots and builds a little chimpanzee nest out of his clothes and rocks. His heart is not in it and it looks uncomfortable. For everyone involved. No one in the cast or crew seems to know if we’re here to watch this man pleasure himself or lay down and die in the gravel, so he gets up and lumbers off, pawing at himself as absent-mindedly as his wandering. And I get it, this is weird. I didn’t know I would have so many notes about how Mike masturbates either.

Mike never finds anyone or anything, which is lucky, because a nude hulk with a third of a boner climbing onto your property is exactly what Nevada gun laws were written for.

Far from Mike’s beefquest, Warren, Tico, and Robert are back on the boat trying to figure out organic ways to get each other’s clothes off. Warren suggests jumping off the boat again, but naked this time. “Naked alrightalright let’sdoit,” someone replies, very naturally. They nudely climb the ladder with the exact same sense of personal space and desire to be there as a human centipede.

After another long underwater penis sequence, we go back to Mike who is dressed and waiting for Josh to pick him up. Whatever he needed to do is done, and all we know is that it was something he had to do by himself, he couldn’t wear clothes for it, and it had nothing to do with masturbation. Which rules out everything other than witchcraft and coyote sex. Anyway, he climbs aboard and gets naked again so he can read some old magazines Josh found in the boat debris.

Warren had a kitty cat purr in his voice when he said these two kept running off and getting up to God knows what, and I guess that could legally include “absolutely nothing,” but from the intended audience’s perspective, this is bullshit. Half of their speedboat time was spent apart, and the rest was spent adrift, flipping through old Fisherman Quarterlies. Straight, gay, or first cousins, it is very weird none of these bored, naked men have put forward the idea of having sex. I’ve never seen anyone this not horny, and I spent the last two days telling my wife about THE HUNK BOAT.

Speaking of, back on the houseboat, the other three hunks remain nose deep in each other’s buttholes as they climb to the roof for more naked diving. They all towel off, sharing small talk about the beautiful day. Aside from the hanging balls, it’s pretty uneventful. So uneventful I was starting to think these hunks weren’t even bad boys. But then it faded out on this shot:

Oh, SHIT.

The romantic leads of THE HUNK BOAT can barely tolerate each other and no one else seems to have heard of sex, so at this point of the video it seems like everyone has given up. “Are we still doing this? I’m trying to read,” says fully-clothed Robert. “Oh, that’s good. We’re leaving that shot in,” says the editor.

It feels more like we’re embedded with nudists than making smut. At this point Warren himself says, “In a couple of days, nobody even seemed to notice we were running around naked. As much as we were dressed.” So then what are we doing here, Warren? As if to answer, Warren smiles and says, “When Josh and Mike went off on the speedboat. Doing who knows.” And then there’s a long pause here for whatever reason. “What. The rest of us would get our turn.”

Okay, so that sexy boat from earlier that gave us a madman wandering the wastelands in only his boots and another one regrowing his hymen is now in the hands of the bad boys! Ladies! It’s! Time! To! Fuck!

Wait, no, they’re tubing. To be fair, he is only wearing a life vest, so if you’re into it, know that somewhere in the bouncing blur of that VHS footage are some unsecured testicles. Meanwhile, the hottest couple on the U.S.S. Beefcake, Josh and Mike, are back to doing what they do best: going their separate ways and not fucking. There’s a moment here I want to share with you at about 33 minutes in, where the director seems to finally remember what they set out to do and they ask Josh to make it sexy. It’s a hilarious disaster:

If there was an award for revealing your pink thong in the sexiest way, Josh would not only never win, he would be arrested for sarcasm crimes. This is, without question, the worst I’ve ever seen someone take off pants, and I spent the last two days trying to pantomime THE HUNK BOAT for my wife. Josh makes taking a nap in a chair look like a goddamn Irish famine documentary. And while I’m giving notes on his butt, some of these closeup decisions should have been made after verifying all of Josh’s holes were camera-ready.

A synth piano plays “Somewhere Out There” while a camera man pervs out on Josh’s hairy buns, and I simply can’t bring myself to add joke elements to something so already absurd. The video is now maniacally jump cutting between slow pans down Josh’s flaccid penis as he does the splits to three bros getting their bottomless water ski on. We are watching reason and sexuality die together, here on the fading magnetic oxide particles of this hunk tape.

I admit I don’t have the keenest gaydar, but the Straightness of this video can’t be overstated. Aside from the hairy dick flapping somewhere in that spray, this would look like three guys out on the lake in between the times they spent never kissing a boy. Warren constantly tries to make things sexy, but no one takes him up on it. For instance, when Tico comes in from the bottomless tube ride, Warren asks, “Did you almost reach an orgasm!?” And instead of saying something cute like, “Maybe you could help me, hunk,” he goes, “Ha ha beat up my balls too, man!” They literally have no idea this was meant to be sexy. Robert only uses his penis to open beers. If you sat down and explained to Tico what intercourse was, he would ask if it’s coming out for N64.

Unfortunately, it’s time to go home. Warren says, “Like all good things… My summer vacation.” And then after some time he adds, “Finally had to come to an end.” The gang says goodbye like all bros do after they were hired to fuck on a boat for a weekend: with every single type of handshake.

I love it. It’s such genuine, secure masculinity from such a weird mix of buff virgins and gay porn actors. They’re all going home with some great shared memories and very even tans. Then we are brought back to the grim reality that all of this is taking place inside the show n’ tell presentation of Warren, a 31-year-old grade schooler.

We cut back to the shot of him on his bed where he says, “We all had so much fun. We decided to do it again.” And after some time he continues, “Get together over Christmas Break.” A pause. “I think we’re gonna go snow skiing.” An unexplained hour of silence goes by. “Up in the mountains,” he adds. Still not done, he waits a good amount of time before emphasizing, “Snow skiing. Naked.”

“What a rush!” he decides after a long deliberation. Then he rolls over onto his back and starts massaging his flaccid penis to no effect. Like a gorilla accidentally killing her pet caterpillar. The perfect ending to 1995’s Most Failed Boat Orgy, Hand Stuff & Under Division.

Bonus Content for Hunk Lovers Only: There’s an ad on the end of the VHS for the production company’s flagship series, America’s Hunkiest Home Videos. It is nothing more than amateur footage sent in from nude maniacs splashing water on themselves. Most women recognize this as their least wanted Instagram DMs, but in 1995, it was a thing you could buy! Nude dads mowing lawns, lonely guys in bathtubs… it even featured Unnamed Ginger Creep Making Love to His Garden Hose!

And splish splash, ladies! It’s fan-favorite, Unnamed Mook Swatting Bath Water Onto His Dong! Speaking of, I know we’ve all sort of reached our limit for flopping penises today, so I’ll carefully censor this one. Thanks, everyone! Hope you enjoyed the hunks!