Author: Seanbaby

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REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: Exploring the Mysteries of the Mind using The Sims 3 🌭

Before 1900🌭, there was another beloved Internet comedy site with an all-star cast. The name of it escapes me, but here is the tenth column I wrote there. From 2009, rescued from a garbled stack of misaligned text, banner ads, and missing images comes the fully restored, visually enhanced 2009 psychology thesis that probably went on to be taught in leading universities, “Exploring the Mysteries of the Mind Using The Sims 3.”

Every scientist dreams of a world without ethics. Whenever a scientist sees a set of twins, he or she secretly wonders what would happen if you surgically swapped their faces. They already have a chamber set up to harness the power of their screams as they gradually realize what has happened. Every day, ethics barely prevent experiments like this from being carried out. But what if we didn’t have these ethics? When Nazi doctors were let loose during WWII, the incredible rate of their discoveries were matched only by the inadequacy of words to atone for them. They might have been monsters, but without them, we never would have discovered the yield elasticity of the elderly, or learned what part of a prisoner’s tongue detects the taste of angel meat. The Sims 3 is computer game based on these Nazi scientists that offers us a world of moral ambiguity, free to perform psychological experiments away from the leering eye of ethics. Which is exactly what I did. Here are the results of my findings.

The main focus of my experiment is a man known as Subject Beef. An artificial intelligence created for the purpose of playing video games, he’ll find out that he’s also a cog in the unfeeling machine of psychiatric progress. Some people might get squeamish at the idea of torturing an AI just to write down what happens, but look at it this way: Any day now Japan is going to fuck up and finally build the robot that can make decisions and run on blood. As it starts tearing into my human people, the least I can do is make that an act of vengeance. Without me and this experiment, all that robot murder is going to just be senseless.

Body: I made him as fat as possible since food in the game costs money, but packing a blubbery energy source into his love handles is free here in the character creator. It will also hinder any of the subject’s escape attempts. There’s a reason ranchers don’t have a term for it when all the veal cows make a break for it.

Accessories: In prison, a teardrop tattoo under your eye tells people that you’ve killed someone. Outside of prison, you say the same thing with clown makeup. Before they were torn apart, many scientists wondered if it’s clown makeup that causes a person to commit murder, or if it’s murder which causes people to wear clown makeup. That’s one of the things we’re about to discover.

Personality: I went to six years of middle school, so I know proper scientific method requires a control group. I also know that knowing what this means is for fucking nerds, so I didn’t include one. Instead, I gave my subject unpredictable personality traits like Insane, Hydrophobic and Can’t Stand Art. This almost felt like cheating since it saved me the trouble of causing the subject to go crazy, so I evened the odds by giving him Genius and Computer Whiz. Now he has the tools to discover what he is and what I am doing to him. I got this idea from Star Trek where some asshole said the wrong thing in the hologram room and spent the rest of the episode fighting an evil super hologram. I’m hoping for at least that.

The personality tools of The Sims 3 are very robust. I was able to select his favorite food as pancakes, and his favorite music as Kids. Finishing up, the game even gave me a list of Lifetime Wishes to select from, and one of them was, and I quote, “Creature-Robot Cross Breeder.” I picked the hell out of that. How dare they even include a second option. The idea of a tortured clown fusing robots and animals together sounds comically impossible, but that’s probably what some tortured clown thought right before he invented anal beads.

No doctor in the world would look at Subject Beef and say, “Sure, go ahead and stand near that.” Unfortunately, his psych profile got mixed up with NBC’s fall comedy lineup, and his landlord signed a —record scratch— baby to the lease! The baby was given only one personality trait: Brave.

His favorite food is sushi and his favorite music is Latin. I knew it was only a matter of time before it was destroyed, so I wanted to name it after something I love. Since I never learned how to spell pizza, I decided to go with either slam dunks or Dolemite. I went with a combination of both, by naming him after a dunk by the Dolemite of basketball, Darryl “Chocolate Thunder” Dawkins. There wasn’t room to type in “The Chocolate Thunder Flying, Robinzine Crying, Teeth Shaking, Glass Breaking, Rump Roasting, Bun Toasting, Wham Bam I Am! Jam,” so I settled on “Turbo Sexophonic Delight” or Turbo Sexophonic for short.

I took one last look at him. As soon as the naming stops and the leaving-him-with-a-madman begins, he is so dead. But that’s probably what some guy thought one minute before watching his prisoner invent gorilla anal beads, and two minutes before winning the Congressional Medal of Right.

 I constructed my asylum with the default Sims 3 tools, without the help of any mental institution expansion packs. This meant a little bit of improvisation.

1. Crappy Fence – Surrounding the compound is a non-electrified three-foot metal fence. This is more than enough to keep anything in the game from getting in or out as robots can’t climb. And if I’m wrong, I plan on repeating these as my last words while I hug my own legs at the top of a building being climbed by robots.

2. Computer – In the center of the off-limits computer yard is a single personal computer. Installed on this machine are all the secret codes and Internets an artificial intelligence would need to Lawnmower Man into our world. It’s not password protected, but the on-switch is labeled “TRAP.”

3. Treadmill – A simple treadmill blocks the only entrance to the computer yard. The only way past is to jog faster than eight mph on a zero degree incline. Or, to translate that into Subject Beef, “IMPOSSIBLARG, WHERE IS THE TACO BAR.”

4. Cake – OK, I’ll join you in fantasy land. Say the subject somehow breaches the treadmill security– these birthday cakes will act as a secondary deterrent. With a man this size, four cakes only buys us a second. But a second is all I need.

5. Teddy Bear – This toy bear watches the treadmill from the safety of its little pants. It’s programmed to see everything and mock nearby failure.

6. Kitchen – The sink works, but the oven is only a toy. Opening it only makes the teddy bear on the other side of the wall snicker at you. He’ll fucking hate that bear.

7. The Refrigerator Canal – Knowing the subject has a fear of water, I installed a hallway with a water floor. If he wants something to eat, he has no choice but to flail and shriek across the pool for it. Teddy bears line each wall, their ceaseless gaze judging him.

8. The FunZone – The only way to enter the FunZone is down the FunSlide. There is no way to exit the FunZone. It is completely and unsafely surrounded by propane barbecues and contains toys and games for up to one toddler.

9. Toilet Alarm – This is a state-of-the-art alarm system set to go off any time someone uses the outdoor and only toilet. It speaks 25 languages, and unlike my computerized medical subject, is programmed never to betray me.

10. The ToiletZone – Flanked by 15,000 watt searchlights, the outdoor toilet comes equipped with an audience of gnomes. To add to the shame, a yellow arrow on the ground helps subtly draw the eye towards any men in clown makeup who might be shitting outside under spotlights and sounding alarms.

11. The Isolation Chamber – A simple booth of mirrors from which there is no escape. The walls will bring your reflection with them as they close in on you.

I moved my subject and his young companion into the compound. Left to his own devices, the inmate went straight for the food but couldn’t gather the courage to swim across the pool to the refrigerator. Trying to look like he intended to do it all along, he picked up one of the sentry bears. I tried to make him eat it, since it’s what a coward deserves, but the only option was renaming it. Very well. Dark Lord the teddy bear, meet Subject Beef, the pussy.

I soon learned there was a flaw in my design schematic. The wall of propane barbecues wasn’t baby proof, and Turbo Sexaphonic squeezed right through them. Subject Beef stood over the toddler and, to its delight, chose to speak to him through the Dark Lord. He did this for 14 hours without interruption. Then he put the doll down and walked directly through a barbecue for no other reason than to show me he could. The sun was setting on day one, and the three of them already seemed to be making progress on an escape plan.

How far would you go to survive? Subject Beef had to make a choice–cross his deadliest enemy, a pool, for food, or let his metabolism eat his body down to a recognizable shape and slow death. He was content with option B, so I clicked the wall of gas stoves that recently replaced the very pregnable barbecues and told him to make food for himself and the baby. He ignored this command, so I ordered him to Talk to Self, hoping he’d be more convincing. He had a violent conversation with no one, changed into hot pants, and jumped in the pool. While shouting the international symbol for “I am drowning,” he swam across for macaroni and cheese.

This experiment showed us two things: 1) survival instincts are more powerful than phobias; and 2) diapers are not to be used with macaroni and cheese. I’d like to see you try to prove either of those with ethics. 

Observation: Subject Beef eats all his meals on the toilet, his body acting like a steady pipeline of disaster. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it’s almost like he’s trying to get back at water. You stupid fool, water isn’t your enemy. Your enemy is me: science.

While the test subject had dinner boiling on the stove, I interrupted to issue an order for him to go kick over a gnome. It was a test to see if his absurd surroundings were having any effect on his short-term memory. They were. With the adrenaline rush of the fresh gnome kill, he forgot all about his dinner, now a roaring wall of flame. His artificial behavior circuits analyzed the situation and selected “panic.”

The baby was trapped safely away from his aimless panic inside the burning ring of ovens. Also, trapped safely away from the fire was the local fire department, whose robot brains could only watch the facility burn from the other side of the tiny but robotically unbreachable fence.

How did they get there so quickly? Well, apparently there’s a malfunction with my compound’s toilet alarm that causes it to go off during fires. I may have to reread the directions on some of this equipment.

After the fire burned itself out, a child services woman named Linda Duran magically appeared and sent Turbo Sexaphonic away. My experiments were going badly enough without interdepartmental meddling. To make matters worse, the government’s demonic use of sorcery went haywire when facing off against my fence technology. The toddler was warped away, but Linda was stuck.

Pinned to one spot, she refused to interact with Beef or me, almost as if the game forgot she was there. But Beef still knew. He refused to use the bathroom from the moment she arrived. He howled a picture of a toilet at her over and over, and she responded by staring through him until his bladder detonated where he stood. Just to fuck with us, she showed she could move the whole time, and turned her back to give Beef privacy while he mopped up his shame.

I’ll have to watch out for this woman… she’s pushing his fragile mind in directions I don’t have protocols for. Speaking of, since the government took the child away, I began removing toys from the home while Beef sleeps. I want him to think that maybe the kid was never there to begin with, which seems like an inadequate mind game now that ghosts are forcing him to pee on himself.

Our anomaly Linda glitched more or less peacefully through the compound for a day and, despite her only partial existence, it seemed like she could still smell Subject Beef since she pantomimed disgust whenever he got close. But maybe if Linda doesn’t like the smell of fire-roasted pee, she shouldn’t have fucking locked herself in a ToiletZone with a clown afraid of showers while she was stealing our baby!

Luckily, Subject Beef had a plan. Remember, I programmed Beef to be a genius and a computer whiz, so he figured out a way to get rid of Linda when I couldn’t: deliberately starting a house fire.

Linda and nearly everything in the facility was destroyed by flame, except for the immaculate toy oven in the kitchen. It’s so not an oven that it couldn’t even start a fire while an inferno crawled over it. It’s so not an oven that its momma has to brown toast with a paint roller! It’s so not an oven that it thinks a pilot light lets you read while you fly the plane!

I might have overestimated my ability to control this world. The gateless fence continues to wreak havoc on the lives and intentions of the other artificial intelligences in the game. The neighborhood paper girl appeared in the ToiletZone for only a moment to howl from between worlds and vanish. 

If I was a scientist in the real world, I wouldn’t be allowed to keep filling endangered species with different smokeless propellants until I found the one that ignites from inside a panda. But in the Sims 3, if I want to test a floor sealant, there’s no regulation against forcing a fat clown into a mirrored booth where he watches himself wet his pants to death. I found that there is also no regulation on the human spirit, even a video game simulation of it.

Day after day went by, and Subject Beef stood in that booth and refused to die. He babbled at the mirrors, glared at a bunny painting when I told him to, and every two minutes he would try to perform an activity described as “Contemplate Surroundings.” I had my finger on the trigger to click that away as quickly as possible. If he figures a way out of this, I fully expect him to be standing behind me in my world. I designed the booth to be inescapable, but I don’t trust that word anymore. I noticed four of the gnomes in charge of watching him on the toilet had left their post to surround his isolation booth. I don’t remember doing this, b-but I must have, right? 

The subject survived over six days (his time) inside the booth with no water, food, or sleep. The strange thing is that at the moment of his death, he still had a full Fun Bar, which is technical jargon for a bar computerized beings use to measure how much fun they’re having. What did he enjoy about his slow starvation in a vertical coffin? I’ll tell you one thing: If it’s not the idea of killing me, then I’m a shitty scientist.

The Grim Reaper descended onto the corpse and made him into a ghost, which did wonders for the 380 pounds of baby fat he was still carrying. The slimmer, undeadier Subject Beef floated through the smoldering ruins of his former prison, and as I turned the game the fuck off, as if that would save me from this cybercurse… I could have sworn for a moment that I saw Linda. 

When you create a Sim, it records a copy of them. This allowed me to go back to the menu and start the game over with a fresh genetic clone of Subject Beef and Turbo Sexaphonic. With science marching along next to me, I moved them into the burned-out, haunted remains of my old facility to recreate our grand experiment. What happened next is a true story: the clone rummaged through the trash for exactly 25 hours, then ran to the pool to sink and die. It’s like the first thing he did after being created was remember what I had done. Going over all this data, I can conclude that science and all the dark-sided Gozar-summoning magic it brings with it can kiss my ass.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Why Mommy Carries a Gun 🌭

I’m an American, so watching people be wrong and crazy with a gun is a big part of my life. It’s almost expected. So if you write a kid’s book about the importance of having guns everywhere, that’s not crazy to me. That’s like a book about having a friend in corn syrup. Save the ink, maniacs, you already won. But if you write a children’s gun book with no plot, resolution, or moral? That’s starting to get interesting to me. And I’m sorry, did you say they were all furries? Like very clearly, no possible other thing, fucksuit animal people? Holy shit, okay, let’s read it.

WHY MOMMY CARRIES A GUN (2018) is the second book in the AMERICAN SHEEPDOGS universe, and you already know what it says inside. It’s all the disappointing things terrible people say after tragic events, illustrated by a pervert for an editor too Christian to know that.

It was written by the author of Bulletproof Marriage, Army Lt. Col Dave Grossman, and a woman who is not his wife, Stephanie Rogish. Dave Grossman trains in gun karate and literally teaches classes on what it’s like to kill. These are just fun facts, but also worth keeping in mind as we read how in this great nation where you’re free to do anything you want, Dave Grossman has only ever chosen to kill people, imagine killing people, and teach others about killing people. This book will try to do all three, but statistically speaking, has the best chance at the first one.

As I mentioned earlier, you already know what this book’s going to say. God made the 2nd Amendment so your assassin can be killed with a nearby gun, and this is all settled freedom science. Again, these arguments are background America noise. They’re the terms of service we all signed when we agreed to Hulk Hogan’s Pastamania. So let’s talk more about Lt. Col Grossman. He’s a top killologist academic as I mentioned, and is very proud to have coined the term “sheepdogs.” See, “sheepdogs” are armed civilians who kill “wolves” who are armed civilians in order to protect the “sheep,” who didn’t bring their gun to Burger King. It’s kind of like how you’d describe people on a Grindr profile, only for murder? For instance, I protect my liberty with throwing stars, so I’d be a “porcupine,” but I shave down the skin, so I’m also a “wet daddy otter” who “will spit in your dirty mouth.”

Now let’s learn even more about the authors of WHY MOMMY CARRIES A GUN.

Oh, Dave’s co-author is married to a cop. So then MOMMY CARRIES A GUN because there’s a man in her home who tries to de-escalate every conflict with a chokehold. She’s also looking forward to getting back to America and her gun rights, which means she’s not carrying a gun? What country is she in? Why won’t they let her have a gun!? Isn’t she disproving her own book every moment she doesn’t die in that gunless shithole? Ha ha that smug joke combined with America’s never-ending gun violence to change her mind, right? No? Shit. Well, maybe there’s something ridiculous enough to talk about inside the pro-death manifesto for kids featuring furry versions of American gun heroes Stephanie co-wrote with a black belt in “the martial art of the gun.”

Despite making the most notable contributions to this project by far, the illustrator barely gets mentioned on the bio page. They say this book was the first step toward Jacob achieving his dream of being a professional Animation Artist, but Google tells me he works at an airport and never drew a second thing. So young illustrators, when you’re four years out of art school and your first paid gig is a right wing children’s book, and then you accidentally make it look like a storyboard for a werewolf porno, you might have what it takes to be an assistant workforce administrator at Spirit Airlines.

I mentioned WHY MOMMY CARRIES A GUN had no plot or moral, and I wasn’t lying, but it does sort of try to tell a story. It starts with a dog monster named Mrs. Shepherd who hears a knock on her door and gets uneasy. Like any good gun owner, she solves this feeling of unease by drawing her fucking gun. Keep in mind this is a work of fiction written by people who want us all to have guns. This world, where doors are answered with guns and dogs have human tits, is the best, most correct universe they can imagine.

With her handgun next to the wagging tail poking through the crotch hole of her skintight jeans, Mrs. Shepherd prepares to shoot her visitor dead. She thinks about what she’ll tell her husband when he gets home. “Get inside, fuck, fuck I killed the fucking neighbor right in front of the boy,” probably.

It turned out to be nothing, which seems like a good time to bring something up. Out of all these “sheepdogs” who are hoping to execute a home intruder, roughly 100% of them will die of loneliness or gun accident before they get the chance. But it feels like they won’t. This dog minotaur bought a gun and is so desperate for there to be a reason for it, she will pull it on knocking doors. Every stranger is a potential threat. Every suspicious movement is a justified kill. And while it’s scary these people hold life and death in their hands, I feel like we can trust the judgment of someone who sees gunfighting furries for kids and thinks, “This book represents my values, what was that noise, I have an idea, shoot it.”

My point is, pulling a gun might be an overreaction to “KNOCK KNOCK.” At least two times out of three.

As she tucks Max into bed, he casually asks if she had to kill a man. Which, wait, that means this kid watched her dig her pistol out of her purse and then left to go to bed? How often does this lady pull a gun on visitors that her kid is like, “I’m calling it a night, mom! See you when you’re done with this. Let me know if this one turns out to be a murderer! Oh, haha, I guess I’ll hear the gunsh– hey, I’m taking the last of the milk!“

Despite him not being a bad person, Mrs. Shepherd still tells her kid about how she would have absolutely, happily shot him. She kisses Max and explains the man wasn’t a threat, but oh my god, imagine how dead he’d be if he was, and again he wasn’t a bad person, but maybe mommy should go hunt him down just in case because mommy has spent a lot of time imagining him hurting her little pup, and only a crazy mommy would do that if he was innocent, and mommy isn’t crazy, mommy would die for her pups, mommy isn’t crazy.

The potential hostile tango at the door turned out to only be a salesman, and I disagree with this book even more. A door-to-door salesman at 8pm? Pull the trigger, dog lady. Leave the body where it lands and tell 123FriendlyPane Window Treatments to come pick up their trash. If I answer the door at 8pm and you’re holding a stack of pamphlets, you’d fucking better be there to kill my family. I will lay down my life to make sure your final sales pitch is the sound of your bones snapping!! Whoa, is this what being a sheepdog feels like? This feels amazing.

What’s so great about this gun nut fantasy is how, aside from the dog people, they’re hilariously careful to keep things realistic. No one foils a convenient store robbery or puts a round into a kidnapper. They walk around with their guns, talk about their guns, sometimes pull out their guns, and it’s all for nothing. Or maybe less than nothing, since now the ice cream shop won’t let them inside. “Open carry lunatics like us aren’t welcome in most places, son! But they’re the wrong ones, not us! Ice cream is safer w– hey, are you looking at my son!? Halt for citizen execution! Halt or I will open f– damn, they escaped in that school bus. What was I saying, Max? Oh, right. Those ice cream sons of bitches with their little sticker will fucking wish we ignored stickers when some madman with a gun does show up!”

Max, who was raised by two of these deranged dog people, has already rationalized getting kicked out of the ice cream shop. Buying a waffle cone without a gun wasn’t worth the risk, he decided. Max won’t be one more child lost to ice cream shop gun violence eternally asking, “Where were all the other guns!?”

So Max and his unwelcome father “decide” to go to the park instead where they discuss guns, crime, and guns. “He is feeling safe,” decide the authors. Surrounded by potential snipers, he pictures his father pumping bullets into the head of an ice cream robber and rests against the bulging warmth of his loaded gun. “You’re sex fetish monsters,” Jacob the illustrator reminds them.

By the way, here’s the answer key to the book’s hidden Bible verses. It’s not exactly the Da Vinci Code, though. It demonstrates Stephanie and Dave’s faith in their reader’s intelligence when they explain “Luke 11:21” is a coded reference to the Bible verse “Luke 11:21.” It’s as if they’re saying, “You’re dumb as shit, a straight up tooth-brained idiot, but everyone is safer if you have a gun. Wait, does that make sense? Hold on one second. God, are we right? Okay, never mind, God said we’re right.”

Guns are necessary and right, which has been proven from Max’s mom almost killing a solicitor, his dad getting kicked out of an ice cream shop, and somehow God, so now it’s time to look at the downside. In some situations, guns can be a little bit dangerous! For instance, Max is over at the Barkers’ house and their dad left one of his handguns out on the kitchen table. To be fair, his phone did ring and it’s hard to assign blame in exceptional circumstances like these. But what this means is that the most passionate gun advocates, while trying to convince you how safe it is to have them everywhere, still think, “Oh for sure, you can’t even answer your phone with these things around. Chatty people are definitely going to want to have a few backup kids.”

You have to admit, Stephanie and Dave are not glamorizing the open carry furry lifestyle. These people are shunned, living in constant fear, and just absolutely gaping with holes.

Those are the three stories included in the book! “The Unshocking Case of the Guy At the Door,” “Sir, I Told You You Can’t Fucking Come In Here With That Gun,” and “RING RING BANG BANG: I Miss My Curious, Furry Boy.” The next eight pages are just the dog children reciting talking points the authors remember from a few hundred mass shootings ago. Maybe they’re right, though. Maybe the guns will be safe in the hands of the extremely paranoid people who can’t tell this book is nuts.

Dave and Stephanie’s closing argument is that guns are great because they’re the same security the President uses! Then Jacob makes the hauntingly strange decision to draw an x-ray shot of every dog’s hidden firearm. It’s the utopia we’ve always dreamed of… secret guns inches away from every impulsive child in the belts of much, much more impulsive adults. “Sometimes it feels like my Butch is still here with me,” says Mr. Barker at the boy-sized empty space beside him. He tries to make it look like his lips aren’t moving as his voice raises in pitch. “I ann, hather! I cane dack to horgivhh you!”

“Get away from my baby or I will shoot you dead,” replies a sexy nearby collie. Her voice raises in pitch, “Yes, a righteous kill is the only way to consecrate the gun that killed ne, nother!”

Alright, look, we’re all having fun with the ventriloquist ghosts of the dog children taken from us too soon, but things are about to get serious. WHY MOMMY CARRIES A GUN ends with a section called FAMOUS AMERICAN HEROES WHO WERE SHEEPDOGS, and most of us will die in an ice cream shop gunfight before we ever again see this many bad, random, and horny ideas collide.

This is precisely what you expected and yet it’s still hard to believe it’s happening, isn’t it? A black belt in gunkata wrote a little bio for revered WWII hero, Audie Murphy, and then Jacob drew Audie’s fursona killing Nazis from a burning tank. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman teaches adult killers how to deal with the trauma of taking a human life, and at least one of them knows he did this. That’s got to be like seeing your therapist sprinting into the emergency room with his dick stuck in a bowling ball.

Cris Kyle, who usually spelled it Chris, shot a lot of people in Iraq and Afghanistan, then came home and shot a lot more in Louisiana and Texas. Maybe? A lot of his kills turned out to be lies. He lied so much he cost his widow $1.8 million in defamation lawsuits (reduced to an undisclosed amount after appeal). “We should leave that stuff out of the Chris Kyle bio,” suggested Stephanie. “Mmm, Cris was a naughty little Shiba Inu,” replied Lt. Col Dave Grossman.

Another great American gun owner honored here is Eleanor Roosevelt. “Make her fursona a little bit less fuckable than the others, out of respect for the office,” the authors told Jacob. And if I’m understanding this correctly, she had no idea how to use a gun, had no permit for one, yet the safety professionals sworn to keep her husband alive gave her a pistol and “begged her” to carry it? Is history sure they got all the details right on that? Anyway, what a tribute. The first lady of the United States as an Old English Sheepdog Mr. Rogers firing blind into the North Lawn with a revolver. They’ll never top it.

Oh no. This picture of furry Harriet Tubman means the authors brainstormed on what kind of dog Harriet Tubman would be, and instead of realizing this was all a mistake, they decided on “the blackest one.” Maybe their choice has nothing to do with race. Maybe “sexually open to whatever Rottweiler” is the best way to represent this American hero. I’m not saying I have all the solutions. I’m only saying I’m smart enough to never put myself in a situation where I have to answer, “What kind of furry would Harriet Tubman be?”

There are many heroes they didn’t have time to honor, so the authors included this blank page. Is there someone you admire who has taken a life and whom you would have sex with as a dog? Let them know by drawing them with a gun, as a dog! Exactly as Harriet Tubman would have loved!

…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Patrick Herbst, who would be a Shih Tzu with a grenade launcher and we all know it.

This article is thanks to a hot Hot Dog Tip from the Hot Hot Dog Tipline. Thanks to MetalInside, GDC, and whoever else posted it. You were right, but you see why we fought it.

Categories
PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting Day: The Amico Grift with Pat Contri 🌭

Imagine a box in your own home that could play computerized video arcade games! Now imagine they were outdated, poorly made, and designed under oppressive restrictions written by a Nazi’s coolest friend. Also, that box I mentioned? It doesn’t exist, but you can pre-order one with a $100 deposit. Also, that box you pre-ordered? It got delayed! Sorry, we meant canceled! Today on the Dogg Zzone 9000 we try to make sense of the extremely cursed Intellivision Amico with Internet Nintendo Game Champion, Pat “The NES Punk” Contri!

Listen here, or wherever you podcast!

Pat is a true podcasting professional who brought his own sound clips and far more knowledge than Sean’s pathetic ten hours of research managed to uncover. And thank the dunk shoots of Flazer, because the Intellivision Amico’s fall from bad idea to failure to embarrassment to scandal to fraud has spanned several years and 280,000 hours of YouTube drama. You will be astonished at how many bad ideas it took for Tommy Tallarico to turn 17 million dollars into nothing. Speaking of astonishingly bad ideas, patrons get a bonus podcast where Pat and Brockway try to decode the language of foreign phone games from 2005 in a very special Seanbaby’s Book Game.

Like or Rebound us on Flazer! More fun is added as listeners Review Shoot us!

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Bowl Better Using Self Hypnosis

Throw the ball at the pins. A second bowling tip. These are the traditional ways people do bowling. But what if I told you your very mind held the secrets to even more bowling success? What if I told you your brain could be rewritten to achieve anything and yes, yes, that includes better bowling. Better bowling! What fool would squander this gift on anything else!?

HOW YOU CAN BOWL BETTER USING SELF-HYPNOSIS by Jack Heise, author of HOW YOU CAN PLAY BETTER GOLF USING SELF-HYPNOSIS, is a 1961 guide on tricking your subconscious into playing your favorite sport for you. And yes, I know that sounds dull. “This doesn’t sound crazy at all,” you might complain to the recent critic of NINJA MIND CONTROL and HOW TO MAKE THAT BITCH SQUIRT. You’re wrong, though. As you’ll see, the author of this book is filled with the most shrieking demons, but first, look at the back cover:

Since the title already explained the book better than perfectly, Jack Heise had no more words to sell you on the idea of hypnotizing yourself to bowl better. So for the back cover, all he did was put eight frames of Buzz Fazio over the words “Buzz Fazio in action.” “Dear fucking God I’ve created a masterpiece,” he must have said. “I will give this child the name of a star pirate in a bowling cartoon,” Buzz Fazio’s parents must have said. “It’s a no on Strike Dakota: Bowling Commando,” Hanna Barbera must have said.

Speaking of Buzz Fazio, like I will be for the rest of my life, the book opens with bowling tips from the bowling stars. Buzz tells readers to relax, but to never give up in the battle of wills against the pins. Buzz Fazio has seen too many spineless weaklings give up before the ball has even been thrown, and has no further advice. Buzz Fazio comes complete with ball and war saddle; Tenpain the Bowlsteed™ sold separately.

Next we hear from Therm Gibson, which is what a FAMICOM SUPER BOWLING programmer would call you if you were the 9th reserve member of USA BOWL STAR TEAM.

Therm Gibson (Member, Brunswick Advisory Staff of Star Bowlers)’s bowling advice is complicated, but if I’m understanding him correctly, he thinks you should knock over the pins you goddamn idiot. And if you don’t get them all at first, get the rest next time you fucking son of a bitch. And also like Buzz Fazio, Therm Gibson says you should relax because I don’t think there’s a lot of bowling tips available. Once you know which direction to throw the ball, you’re mostly done learning. All that’s left is to look within… to find that which isn’t bowling, and destroy it. But first, Don “Anxiety Hunter” Carter:

The author of this book asked “Mr. Bowling” Don Carter for some soothing hypnosis tips and got back a declaration of war against Tension. Strangle it with your concentration! Relax until it’s begging to die!! “Mr. Bowling” Don Carter never really came back from World War II!!!

Jack also asked honorary “Queen of Bowling” Marion Ladewig for her take on concentration. And since it was 1961, Marion said, “Us dames don’t think we can do anything right, and maybe we’re right. Not about most things, but probably that. What was the question?”

You’re maybe wondering, “What does any of this have to do with self-hypnosis? These are dry bowling tips from 63 years ago!” Slide a bayonet into that tension, pal. Sometimes crazy hides in a dark maze behind 63-year-old bowling tips.

After the celebrity bowling essays, Jack includes several pages of basic bowling instructions. If you’ve ever had bowling star Therm Gibson impatiently tell you to, just, knock the fucking goddamn pins over, you know all these, so we can skip to page 27 which is when Jack finally begins Chapter 1: Here’s A Promise For Better Bowling.

As someone who has recently read the distilled wisdom of every top mid-century bowler and a twenty page bowling manual, I find myself instantly out of my depth. Three paragraphs into the first chapter, I’ve discovered I don’t understand about 40% of bowling words and I was expected to have had multiple bowling instructors before reading this. This is like opening your lovemaking book with, “Look, we’ve all unmonned a pubis during a double penetration. Maybe your wife can’t sit still on strangers or the chili was room temperature. Hi, I’m Buzz Fazio.”

What I’m getting at is author Jack Heise is absolutely certain every person reading is a Grand Ballsman or higher bowler. He’s also pretty sure you are terrified of bowling in front of people, so the first chapter is mostly about the coward living inside you.

Not to make it sound too scary, but Enrico Marino, who is named both Hank and Bowler of the Half-Century, says the fear of competition will “make a bowler a stranger to himself.” That’s where the obvious and only solution, self-hypnosis, comes in. You have to go deep inside your own mind and plant hypnotic bowling suggestions. You have to put yourself into a trance science can’t explain and replace your anxiety with strikes.

Here is where Jack starts to reveal what’s wrong with him. He knows you don’t believe in this hooey, so he’s going to prove it works. Not by teaching you how to bowl, but by teaching you how not to stand up.

So now you either can’t get out of your chair or Jack has shattered your faith in his mind powers. And it’s a great example of how the rest of the book is laid out. An avid bowler struggling to overcome his bowling insecurity with hypnosis gets very insecure about whether the reader is believing him, so he’ll pivot to desperately proving himself. For instance, he thinks bowling scores are determined by mental focus alone. Which means the next twenty pages are him explaining how there is no correct way to physically throw a bowling ball. It’s like stopping halfway into a book on lovemaking to say, “I’ve asked around, and no one knows what any of these holes do.”

Lee Jouglard, holder of the 10-year best average, and Eddie Lubanski, accolades unlisted, both teach bowling, and both agree you shouldn’t listen to them. This is only a small sample of the anti-bowling data Jack has collected. He is working backwards from the conclusion that hypnosis is the key to bowling, and he doesn’t care how many pages it takes to prove it. It’s what a logician might call “inductive foolishness” before smugly countering your fireball sorcery. And while I have you interested, ladies, let’s get a woman’s take on things.

Both women bowlers told Jack the same thing. “We’re not strong, or good at bowling, but our disproportionate interest in dance makes us strong bowlers!” It’s not a great point, but it supports Jack’s theory that the only measure of skill in this sport is how well you can hypnotize yourself. In fact, if good bowlers tell you they aren’t hypnotized, they’re liars. I’m not doing a bit. We’re at the point of Jack’s logic where unhypnotized bowlers actually are, even if they don’t know it.

This is madness, and may explain why Buzz Fazio and Therm Gibson’s essays were so strange. I think Jack asked them for hypnosis tips rather than bowling tips since he’s decided the latter is useless for bowlers. He’s now spent about 60 pages trying to prove it. This is like a book about making love with 11 chapters dedicated to drawing Sonic the Hedgehog, and what do I mean by that?

A: It absolutely works.

B: It might work, but not how or why you think.

C: Something terrible happened to you in a bowling alley.

D: You’re still hypnotically stuck in the chair from earlier and can’t quite get his ears right.

As I mentioned earlier, Jack is very insecure. He’s worried you might not believe him when he claims every bowler who isn’t hypnotized is lying. So now his book is about that.

“Those fools think relaxing and coordination aren’t hypnosis,” Jack complains. I mean, how else would someone get good at bowling? Rhythm? Like a woman!? Jack can’t fucking believe the reader is still arguing with him. “SELF-HYPNOSIS IS THE ONLY ANSWER,” he screams. This is the angriest a bowling book has ever been with me, and I left Marion Ladewig’s Adequate Bowling For Sad Girls at the altar.

Jack eventually wraps up his argument that all success is hypnosis even if you don’t call it that or it’s something else.

So to sum up: nonsense, incoherent straw grasping, insanity, IT’S THAT SIMPLE don’t MAKE JACK REPEAT HIMSELF. So now that you know there’s only one secret for better bowling, self-hypnosis, let’s move on to Chapter 7: Here’s the Real Secret For Better Bowling.

Do you know why Bobby Layne of the Pittsburgh Steelers was a good bowler? You have until after 1.5 Buzz Fazios in this sentence to guess, which means Buzz F– THE ANSWER IS SELF HYPNOSIS. All athletes use it, especially the ones who say they don’t, which gives them an advantage in bowling no bowler would have. This point is reworded more times than most people would consider possible, until finally Jack moves on to actual, real hypnotic techniques. On page 79, Jack finally gives three tests you can do on yourself to see if you’re capable of hypnosis: making your hand heavy, putting yourself to sleep, and desperately needing to swallow. Together they are the three pillars of bowling skills. And maybe it’s all this mental focus, or maybe it’s because his book is finally doing something, but this chapter has given a surge of confidence to our once sheepish author:

“I’VE SEALED YOUR THROAT AND GIVEN YOU UNLIFTABLE HANDS, MAYBE STOP ASKING ME FOR PROOF,” says Jack. And good for him. Unfortunately, this conviction doesn’t last long.

Jack is worried most bowlers won’t have time to induce a coma before every frame, and you might try to just “picture” bowling better to save time. First of all, nice try– that’s self-hypnosis, dummy. And second of all, m-maybe time isn’t constant? Oh no, Jack is losing a weird argument to a strawman. That means it’s time to spin it off into its own chapter:

TIME MOVES DIFFERENTLY WHEN YOU’RE HYPNOTIZED! This means you lose again, ceaseless voice telling Jack he’s wrong about bowling, wrong wrong about everything. And this time Jack has indisputable proof of how time distortion exists and will help your bowling score! Well, not proof, but some very convincing anecdotes. Okay, one anecdote, and it isn’t about bowling. Or sports. What Jack has is a Linda Darnell story about a time she ran lines with her doctor before a play:

Jack never provides another example of time dilation other than an actress flying her Beverly Hills physician halfway across the country to read her a script. “Oh, it felt like time was just dragging? Yeah, that was definitely some… metaphysical aspect of t-the, the hypnosis!” said Rosemary Casey, writer of Late Love.

So we’ve established all bowling success is determined by self-hypnosis, and all things are self-hypnosis when you think about it. Also, self-hypnosis slows down time because one -only one- actress used it once. “The bowlers will still fail,” hissed a voice from inside author Jack Heise. “No! You’re not listening! You don’t get it!” Jack howls at the reader.

Jack has explained this basic concept as many ways as he can. He’s answered every single one of your goddamn questions. So he’s only going to do it for one more chapter. And then another. He has lost the argument over whether this exists, and if it does if it works, a thousand different ways. You might be thinking, “Wouldn’t this drive a person crazy?” Yes. And finally, on page 119, his mind has had enough.

Jack ends his book like he wrote it. By screaming at some ignorant fool who knows he’s a liar. HE IS DONE ARGUING WITH YOU, UNHYPNOTIZED BOWLERS. Hold on, it looks like there’s an addendum where he… oh my god, no. No. It’s an entire chapter where he answers difficult questions he imagines the reader is asking him. This was already your whole book, Jack! WHAT ARE YOU DOING, JACK!?

Is Jack “certain” self-hypnosis is this simple? Um, try “absolutely certain.” Go ahead and check the other books! Any of them! They’ll all tell you the same thing: THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BOWLING BETTER AND A SECOND THING! aaaiiiIIIIEEEEEEE!!!!

Imaginary reader, I have imagined a friend for you, but they have called our powers IMPOSSIBLE! Oh, is “science” now “impossible!?” THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT! STOP FUCKING LISTENING TO THEM, THEY’RE IGNORANT! I SHOULD NEVER HAVE IMAGINED THEM IN YOUR LIFE!!!

He shouts at himself like this for eight more pages. Eight. And then, without warning, he informs us this was all some kind of crucible and we are now members of Bowling League, a fraternal hypnosis free bowling league. The book has a third ending and it’s a reveal this was all a trap!

Congratulations, Bowling League brothers and sisters! We watched a man wrestle his demons and lose for an entire book, but we leave not with pity. We leave with official documentation of how we’ve “attained the upper level in bowling thinking.” Oh, and I bet you think that’s nothing? Well, IT’S NOT NOTHING MAYBE IF YOU’D OPEN YOUR MIND TO BOWLING SCIENCE YOU’D LEARN IT’S EVERYTHING ELSE THAT’S NOTHING, OH, TORRAK SHALL HEAR OF THIS, I KNOW YOU THINK TORRAK IS NOT AMONG US, BUT YOU’RE WRONG; YOU AND YOUR FRIEND WHO QUESTIONS TORRAK WILL ANSWER TO TORRAK.

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FUCKING DAY

Fucking Day: A Bluntly Titled Sex Manual

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PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting Day: Moment of Truth with Alex Schmidt 🌭

In our ongoing series of ’00s reality shows that took all the fun out of immorality, the Dogg Zzone 9000 takes a look at Fox’s The Moment of Truth with beloved scholar and funnyman from the Secretly Incredibly Fascinating podcast, Alex Schmidt!

Alex is our most kind-hearted and positive friend, so we invited him on to discuss this lie detector-based interrogation show designed to humiliate families and mirthlessly reflect our own darkness back at us! Listen here! Or wherever you get podcasts!

Thanks for listening! If you want to support the podcast, please like and subsc—

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