Author: Seanbaby

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Dear Nintendo My Life is a Goddamn Mess Part II

Welcome back, 1-900-HOTDOG readers! We now rejoin my responses to Nintendo Power’s reader mail responses already in progress.

Oh, here’s a fun letter sent to Nintendo Power from a Wisconsin boy named Joe Harrison who lost his home to a stove fire!

When your job is working in a Nintendo building with Nintendo employees on a Nintendo magazine reading letters sent to you from Nintendo fans, I imagine it’s hard to maintain perspective on the importance of Nintendo. But when you get a letter from a little boy who refers to a burnt Super NES as the “death of a family member,” you shouldn’t think, “Yes, of course an affordable piece of consumer electronics is exactly this important; praise Father Mario, The Tanooki-Suited.”

If you sent this letter to the child who assembled that Super NES, whose fingers would have been removed and mailed COD to their parents if they misaligned a Game Pak contact, they would have said, “Kid, take it easy. It’s just a Nintendo.” 

Joe praises and thanks God for not forsaking two of his games, and “Hala Luya” for He was listening when Actraiser called His name from the flames. I’m not super religious, so maybe it’s normal to thank the thing you worship for destroying only your copy of Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball and your home. But at the end of the letter, Joe asks the game enthusiast magazine, “do you think that my Super Nintendo and games went to heaven? I hope so.” This is sadder and dumber than a human should be capable of being. This is what you would get if you asked a brilliant writer to work backwards from the prompt, “The one question that would make Jesus Himself tell you to fuck off.”

The editorial staff at Nintendo Power would sometimes try to bend the Player’s Pulse section to its will by asking for specific types of letters. Here they asked readers to send in wacky humiliations they would endure to get a Super NES, and oh boy did they disappoint! Jamie Overstreet from Mobile said he would, get this, dress up like a chicken and sing a royalty free song!? Ha ha ha, can you imagine!? I get there’s no reason for anyone to expect this part of the magazine to be good, but try to think of any single way this could be less entertaining. I wouldn’t give you a wet sack of used Billy Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball ashes for this idea, Jamie. I mean, someone had to have told Nintendo Power, “I’d kidnap children from the park until I found one whose parents had $199. Then I’d suck off the dad for 67 of those dollars and repeat the process two more times. Pilotwings looks fresh!”

As you can see from the other response, many readers had the same knee jerk idea of “silly costume + patriotic song” because we’ve apparently always known in our hearts that being American was one of the more embarrassing things a person can be. Nintendo Power probably received 7000 variations of these exact responses, but I like how revealing Jason Destroismaison from Tynsboro’s answer was. When he thought about what he’d do for a SNES, the first thing that popped into his head was “Wear my sister’s clothes WEAR MY SISTER’S CLOTHES AND LET FISH FUCK ME IN THE EARS! USA! USA! U!S!A!!!” I hope you got that Super Nintendo, Jason.

Let’s change things up from letters about things that might happen to letters about things that fucking absolutely didn’t happen:

So let me understand this situation, David Landers from Richmond. It was 2am and you were about to ritually drive over Final Fantasy Legend for the Game Boy with your 18 wheeler. And “this guy” runs up to you, at 2am, who recognizes exactly what you’re doing. And this guy spying on people in a truck stop parking lot had all the maps and secrets of Final Fantasy Legend for the Game Boy either memorized or with him. And then he sat there waiting, at 2am, for you to load up your save game and implement his strategies? David. Come on, David. Maybe your wife and Nintendo Power believe this excuse for why a strange man got into the cab of your truck at 2am, stayed there for half an hour, and then left a hero, but come on, David.

The less fun among you might be saying, “How do you know this is a lie? How do you know he has a wife?” Because duh and I found his obituary. He died 25 years after he told Nintendo Power this unlikely story and if his wife ever figured out what he really meant when he said he was “Heading out for some Final Fantasy Legend with the boys,” it was not brought up alongside his surviving family and final resting place.

I’ve mentioned this before, Nintendo Power, but you can just not print some of these letters. This idiot kid invented the idea of going door-to-door and asking for free money. In a state where people spend their days digging meat out of crabs and, maybe partly because of that, murdering. And Nintendo Power didn’t say, “Stop this, Nick. You idiot fuck.” They were like, “Giggle, you’re quite the card!” He might have done this. There’s a decent chance Nintendo Power killed Nick Fulton of Maryland. That may sound like a crazy thing for me to say; however, look at it like this: I am strongly against murder, but ask me again if there’s a knock on my door and it’s some asshole asking me to buy him a Nintendo game. He’ll probably be okay, but I walk away from that less against murder.

Okay, this entire concept has jumped the shark. Masando Jenson from Port Orchard wrote to Nintendo Power to tell them their envelopes taste like carrot juice, nothing else, and they printed it without a response. The Nintendo Power letters section just opens these windows into worlds where a lunatic might be somewhere in Washington sucking off envelopes like a Final Fantasy Legend expert in a truck stop men’s room. Who benefits from knowing this? What need, what fetish does it fulfill? If you lived in Sarasota, screamed “Bayou Billy” into a jar, and told Nintendo Power it had no effect on the mayonnaise would it have any less meaning? Could it help you understand what’s wrong with Masando, this monster searching for the tastiest glue? I don’t know if my mind can take another letter like this, so the rest of the article will be reviews of cakes sent in by readers.

Jason of Corfu, this looks like the last act of someone who died from being terrible at making cakes. “Happy Birthday, kid. It’s a lopsided Mario, but I didn’t have time to draw it all so you have to imagine that’s not a skeleton hand waving a dildo.”

Jason of Corfu, your friend’s mom decorates cakes so badly her ex husband brings it up during family court. And speaking of the law, if you asked a grocery store for a Mario cake and they made you this, they would legally have to sell it to you as dog food.

Happy 41st birthday, Phillip! Are you the cake being held by this 60-year-old sexual solicitation suspect?

You’ve lost control of your life, Phillip J. Vanover from Mesa, Arizona!

I hope you were ready for MORE BAKERY A C T I O N ! Joshua Blalack, named after me trying to explain which Joshua I’m talking about when the other one is white, celebrated in action with this soggy tangle of shapes. Hey, Joshua’s mom, when you’re making a novelty cake, how do you fuck up the rectangle part?

Happy birthday, Jose from Lufkin. Nice Street Fighter II cake you got. Fucking piece of shit looks like a courtroom sketch of Chun Li on trial for trafficking counterfeit cakes. This is a Fightin’ Spirit or World Heroes cake at best, two expertly selected references you can’t even look up because your cake was so dull you fell asleep swallowing it and choked to death.

Hey, Matt Smith of Dayton, did your mom bake this on the engine of a moving tractor? This looks like you’d cut it open and find old pets that went missing. It looks like something the President would use to call an airstrike in a Ghanaian action movie. Anyone who gets a cake like this should be proud their mother was able to overcome so many security measures meant to keep her out of her psychiatric hospital’s kitchen.

You really came close to making frantically smeared infant shit look like a Game Boy screen, Matt’s mom. Fun fact: this 2.0 score is out of a possible 150.5. This is an autopsy photo of a Game Boy corpse found in a swamp, Matt’s mom!

I was making fun of that kid earlier for asking if his fire-damaged Super Nintendo went to Heaven, but seeing Bread Boy makes me think there should be an afterlife where vengeful gods can punish game consoles for crimes against humanity. Giorgio and Daniele, your terrible baking has spawned a thing not bread nor boy, but an abomination violating the laws of both.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Dear Nintendo, My Life is a Goddamn Mess, Part 1 🌭

Many years ago, I put a thing on the Internet called “Seanbaby’s NES Page” which featured a section called “Dear Nintendo, My Life is a Goddamn Mess.” It was about weird letters fans wrote to Nintendo Power magazine which they somehow chose to print. And here’s something fun: That’s what we’re doing today!

Before we start, I want to update you on the main character from the original. You might remember Mark Discordia, a Connecticut plumber who loved Mario so much he asked people to give him the nickname “Mario!” He wrote in to brag about his Milon’s Secret Castle score and to say how he encouraged local children to be the best at video games by staying drug-free!

I ridiculed Mark, which anyone familiar with the word ridiculous would agree: was fair. But Mark did not have a sense of humor about my bullying, so he sent me a series of hate mails. The main theme of them was that he was wealthy, a frequent drug user, and just crushing ass, so in fact, he was the bully in the situation. I guess I can’t prove he was lying, but he told Nintendo Power about a Mario shirt he made, wasn’t handsome or smart, had a violently short temper, and spent his days unclogging toilets and volunteering as a video game coach for children that weren’t his. For him to take the angle of “You nerd, I fuck more than you,” is like a man biting into a dead rat and challenging anyone to bake a more, aiiieeeee, a more delicious pie.

For the record, ladies, I confidently rate the legacy of my sexual conquests somewhere above the winner of “New England’s Least Desirable Middle-Aged Mario Cosplayer (Plumber and Under Division).” Anyway, as time passed, me-readers emailed Mark to offer kind words or to ask for Mario tips, and he responded to all of them. He sent back deranged insults which, over the course of many different people, turned into death threats which turned into accusations of sexual abuse. Eventually he settled on a story about me getting arrested for an underage girlfriend in Seattle, a thing that didn’t happen in a state where I didn’t live, but it’s hard to be sure since the details were half-formed and spread across emails to all these different people. So my point is, if it looks like everyone who writes in to Nintendo Power is psychologically troubled, that’s because they absolutely are and I have proof. Let’s get started!

At first glance you might think, “Is this what it was like to live in the late ’90s?” No, for most of us, it was not anything like this. This is really stupid. This is the opening line about a movie where a warpdrive sends a ship into a dimension made entirely out of stupid. This is a letter you would write to a parole board to prove to the state you can’t be held responsible for marrying a horse. This guy wrote a letter to a magazine hoping it would get selected for their reader mail section months later so he could get an opinion on the difference between two websites, one of which was free to the world while the other was available on a service whose free trial was included with the purchase of literally any product at any retail location. This is like putting “Should I try the new gordita crunch?” in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean.

Think how lonely Edward must have been. He didn’t have a single person in his life he could ask to look up “Nintendo” on America Online? That means all four of his grandparents were dead. It means every single one of his classmates said, “I already told you to get out of my life forever, Edward.” And when this Nintendo magazine, the closest thing he had to a friend, finally responded to him, they said, and I quote, “NOAGeoff, our online honcho says: ‘We’ve recently revamped and jazzed up our Web site… Zip to WWW.NINTENDO.COM!'” So after all this waiting, hoping against hope his question would get noticed, this piece of shit asking a simple question about the Internet gets told to go check the goddamn Internet. This is the tragic legacy of Edward LaRusic, Nintendo Power reader.

Mike Gallagher isn’t here to ask questions– he’s here to give warnings, and he only has one: don’t poke random “unlicensed products” into your Super Nintendo! Warning! Warning! Warning! Not everything inside your electronics is meant to be poked by “unlicensed products!” Warning! Warning! Do not have sex with the Official Super NES-brand Game Pak entertainment port! Warning! My used (VG+) Nintendo game system is broken, dripping! Gooey! Warning, this is less important, but I’ve damaged my mint-in-box penis as well! Warning!

One of the best things about the Nintendo Power letters section is when they checked in with the winners of their weird contests. They would send kids on fantasy dates with celebrities with a high potential for disinterest like golfers or NASCAR drivers. In this one, they sent three children on a Hudson Hawk scavenger hunt, based on the rated-R action comedy of 1991 starring Bruce Willis and Danny Aiello!

Some movie characters endure forever. We all remember how Indiana Jones hates snakes, how James Bond can never turn down pussy, and of course, how Hudson Hawk is always looking for a cappuccino! “Hey! Where can we get a cappuccino?” says Nintendo Power, referencing our collective love of Hudson Hawk always wanting his favorite drink! Terrific!

â–² “Who’s Handsome Hawk?” asked contest winner, Ross Moskowitz, as he walked right past the first clue in his once-in-a-lifetime Grand Prize Hudson Hawk’s Da Vinci’s Lost Treasure Scavenger Hunt Adventure.

â—€ “Why would anyone do this?” asked contest-winning Ross’ father, who told Nintendo Power he had to use three unpaid sick days to fly out for this amazing experience. He raved, “You’re telling me with all that Segasonic Hodgemonster money I’m payin’ for, you couldn’t afford the licensing fee for something more kid-friendly like Barbra Streisand’s Prince of Tides? Maybe they don’t cover this in video game magazine school, but you can’t feed fuckin’ kids cappuccino! I’ve never seen the boy this bored with anything and he was once accompanied by me to a screening of Hudson Hawk.”

â–¶ In the end, the lucky team didn’t manage to solve the mystery or decipher a single clue about Da Vinci’s lost treasure! Better luck next time, contest winner Ross Moskowitz! Hope you at least managed to get that trademark cappuccino!

I actually worked in video game media for many years, so I can say with some expertise that printing a picture of a young child holding up a magazine by a wall of human remains with the expression of a hostage’s proof-of-life is fucking crazy. I’ve also read enough issues of Nintendo Power to know their response of “We’d much rather see piles of creepy bones than the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre or something really ho-hum like that,” is a very specific FUCK YOU to young Raymond Camarillo from San Jose, California who mailed them this photo:

â–² Nice skeletons, Raymond. Oh, there aren’t any? That’s why you look like a little asshole.

– Nintendo Power

Another theme of Nintendo Power contests is having celebrities come to your home and try out mediocre games their agent sold their likeness to. And if there is a way to make sports stars look like they’re having fun getting their ass kicked at SNES games by a teenager, Nintendo Power never found it. Charles Barkley looks like he’s suffering through a Hudson Hawk Scavenger Hunt safety orientation. He looks like he’s saying, “Good game, Mamp. But jokes on you, Monty, because I bet your mama $18,000 you would beat me. Ha ha. I’m not playin’, Melt. Go get your mama’s checkbook, or some people gonna come in here and break both our legs.”

From the darkness came a cough followed by a wretched, pathetic voice. “Please… give me free underpants, I have included a drawing of them.” Seriously, Nintendo Power, what the hell are you doing? You can choose not to print some of these. The section editor didn’t even bother to respond to it. They just let this weird idiot in West Virginia’s request for free boxer shorts fall there without comment like the leader of a tour group calling out, “I don’t need to tell anyone here what awaits us at the end of our Officially Licensed Hudson Hawk Scavenger Hunt…

…

…

…

…

… that’s right! A… cappuccino!”

Nintendo Power often called for Top 10 Lists, but not about anything specific. It was only the format that was important to them, and they had no editorial standards when it came to publishing them. Deranged, neglected children from around the country would mash together vaguely video game-related words and Nintendo Power proudly shared them all. Was the theme of your Top 10 list just “crime?” Okay, Karl Warsop of Gastonia, North Carolina. Was one of the “jokes” in its entirety just the name “Secret of Mana” except “Secret of Murder?” Fine. Did it open with a parody title referencing the World Trade Center bombing? Jesus fucking Christ, Karl.

This is a magazine about the whimsical and exciting world of Nintendo games and they printed this brain vomit from a future serial killer. If you handed this “Top 10 Crime Games” list to the creative director of a Laffy Taffy knockoff for death row inmates, he would say, “It’s a no. This is actually the kind of lazy shit we’re trying to get away from here at Bitchkiller Sour Chews.”

Ugh, Debby, this is worse than the kid listing felonies next to partial video game titles. Did “Someone took it” make the Nintendo Power editors laugh, or were they only trying to finally give a voice to Surinamese children writing jokes about stealing from Blockbuster Video?

10. My machete says Best of the Best: Championship Karate is now mine, coward.

9. Eat this shit instead. My life of hardship does not reward honesty or kindness.

8. Outer space aliens took it!

7. Bouterse’s soldiers are here in my home.

6. They are asking questions for which I have no answers.

5. They do not believe m

4.

3.

2.

1.

Is there a single coherent play on words in any of these? Hey, Ben Salinas from McAllen, Texas, did you learn English from the inside of a Hong Kong shipping container? You write Top 10 lists like the copy on an OK Fun-System Supergame 2000 (19.99 $USD). “16 bits of quality! It is not Sega!” You should be ashamed of yourself.

And look at what you’ve done, Joel Self from California. These aren’t “parodies.” This is nonsense. Did you really fucking write down, “Porthole Kombat: Adventures on the High Seas” and send it to Nintendo Power? I spit on the inbred Santa Clara bloodline that spawned you. I wouldn’t write that cursed series of words on the grave of someone named Porthole Kombat who died feeding flood-displaced refugees with his non-profit, Adventures on the High Seas, Inc.

I think I need to move on to letters with a happier tone than these miserable Top 10 lists Nintendo Power used to fill space between maniacs posing with human remains or asking for free underwear.

No, that’s not what I was thinking. At all. But speaking of AWESOME TWOSOME, this article is one! Come back this Upsetting Day for Part II of Dear Nintendo, My Life is a Goddamn Mess!

…

This article is brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Mike Stiles, who only writes to Nintendo the normal way: Erotically.

Categories
REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: Seven Months of Hot Dog

It’s been 7 months since we started this website– an oasis of fun designed so two incredible men could produce short bits of daily hilarity. But we are not men of short bits. Our mighty hands type jokes by the thousands. Our strong backs hunch over to Photoshop by the hectares. So it has become this: more comedy than any world deserves. The people have told us things like, “This is good, thanks,” or “You should cover my fetish of shrunken women trapped in fart balloons one of these Fucking Days, because you see, ever since I was baby, I kn–” but most commonly they say, “This impossible. I sorry for English but you men incredible are make too many laughters.”

Well, here we are, seven months after we started writing far too many jokes, and the real joke is on you, cowards– all it has done is made us stronger. We are now among the top 1% of Patreon pages, putting us in the prestigious company of “Podcast About The Show Cop Rock, But Not The Main One” and “Drawings of Tiny Ladies Trapped in Toot Balloons (Fantasy, NSFW).” Look upon all the joy we have created from the trash media of grifters, lunatics, and the horny. And speaking of looking upon things, that’s what I want to talk about. We commissioned an artist to help you do that!

To celebrate seven months of hot dogging, we hired game designer and pixel artist, Julia Minamata, to hide references to us in this CGA masterpiece. Through her brilliance, you can now relive your favorite 25 moments of early 2020 in one image! If you can’t find them all, head over to the brand new Archives Page on 1900hotdog.com for a quick refresher. Maybe you can also help solve a fun puzzle!

Other Breaking Pixel Art News: Lydia Bugg has her own 1-900-HOTDOG Play Instructions banner since she’s signed on to write bi-weekly articles for us! As you probably know from the several things she’s done here, she’s funny, likeable, and fluent in Wrong Universe. Visit her Twitter to congratulate her before she’s driven mad by article research and sending me Slack messages like, “need help: too drunk to decide if transformers fuck as robots or cars, AND FUCK YOU if you think it’s robots NO FUCK YOU EITHER WAY” the way Brockway does. He and I, no bullshit, spent the month’s talent budget on a German version of our podcast theme song and neither one of us has a bit planned for it! We just both thought it was a funny thing to do! We’re really counting on Liddy being any kind of a voice of reason in our lives!

I’ve told you before during our intimate Reflecting Days how fun it is to be doing this website, but I actually thought of a way I can show you. First, I’m going to need a picture of Mel Gibson jumping into a pair of pantyhose.

That’s from the already rebooted 2000 film, What Women Want. It’s a movie about a man who can hear the thoughts of women like when Helen Hunt thinks, “OH I JUST LOOKED AT HIS CROTCH!” and then “OH I JUST LOOKED AT HIS CROTCH AGAIN!” which I’m not making up. It’s one of many movies about a very dumb, magical concept which means the writer(s) had to explain how the main character suddenly had fantastic powers. In this one, Mel Gibson is trying to “get inside the female psyche” to be a better advertising executive, and his idea is to go home and try every female product. And I don’t mean only lipstick and exfoliating strips. He waxes his legs. He tries out pregnancy tests. They put that in the movie– the main character pees on pregnancy tests to help figure out what ladies need to hear to buy nail polish.

So, of course, the next scene is not him going back to work armed with the insider lady knowledge that it sucks to pee on your own hands or be the one taking the tombstone piledriver when someone screws up their end of a standing 69. He doesn’t sit a client down and say, “Ladies, shut the fuck up for a second. I’m not like the other guys. I know balls are smelly and pantyhose are hard. I know the heartbreak of peeing on a stick only to have it say you missed another chance; you’ll never be a mother.” Instead, Mel Gibson(‘s less hairy stuntman) slips on bath beads and falls into the tub with a blow dryer and at least five used pregnancy tests– so many more than a 44-year-old man should need.

When he wakes up from his head trauma, he can hear lady thoughts! So, okay, what does this have to do with anything? I’ll tell you! I sometimes remember this movie exists where the main character gets woman telepathy because he was electrocuted while touching too many female products. And it’s so goddamn stupid to me. It’s an idea you’d float to a room full of cats and then ask, “So unless anyone can top it, we’re going with the electric pregnancy test accident?” This is worse than not explaining it at all. It’s absurd to imagine anyone watching this movie and thinking, “How is this guy magic all of a sud– oh yeah, he was touching pantyhose when he almost died. Of course.”

I spent many years at Cracked, so when something like this sparks inspiration, the rest of my brain reflexively starts playing Trivial Pursuit to build it into a List. You don’t need to be an SEO genius like Jason Pargin to know The X Dumbest Explanations for Fantastic Movie Powers is going to be a fucking hit. In fact, I’d probably Google that title 25 different ways to make sure no one else had already written it. And assuming no one had, yay, now 85% of my article is about shit similar to but not the thing that inspired me to start it.

So let’s imagine what that would look like. I’d probably consider including Big, where Tom Hanks grows up by wishing on a carnival machine. It’s dumb, but it’s also cute and everyone liked it. I went into this so pumped to write jokes about Mel Gibson dying from every ’90s gender stereotype at once and now I’m going to spend an equal amount of time explaining the conceit of the movie Big to you? Fuck you; you’ve seen Big.

Now I’m thinking, “What else, what else… in Black Knight, Martin Lawrence traveled through time by finding a magic amulet at his work.” That’s dumb as shit, but dumb as shit in the good way, right? Like, that’s the writer’s equivalent of saying, “You guys saw the back of the box or the Netflix thumbnail or whatever. We don’t need to waste a bunch of time with an electric bathtub thing.” So now I realize I need to focus my thesis. Am I doing “fucking lame” stupid origin stories or “fucking awesome” stupid origin stories? I only want to make fun of Mel Gibson dying in ladies panties!

Jesus, remember Mannequin? The Mannequin got her powers in ancient Egypt when she asked the gods for help avoiding an arranged marriage and then, unrelated to the first half of this sentence, she is a mannequin who comes to life when only Andrew McCarthy is looking. So that’s in, for sure, but hold on. All these amazing abilities led her to being some guy’s, I guess literal, sex doll. Could I be writing about feminist tropes where supernatural powers are used almost exclusively for fucking ladies? This was another side effect of Cracked growing so big– there was an unspoken pressure to make articles “important.” So I might have spent a few hours of research filling out a “X Movie Characters Who Got Amazing Powers and Used Them To Problematically Fuck” list. Maybe there’s something there? And, of course, there is. Flubber, Spider-Man 3, Next, Hollow Ma- no wait, that’s unfunny dark… Aladdin maybe… ha ha Shallow Hal, kind of? Okay, this is getting nuts. I think I’m plotting out an Anita Sarkeesian video, not a me article. Which I think would go something like this:

The point is, a few years ago I would have taken that dumbshit decision made by the writers of What Women Want and turned it into two weeks of research, then struggled for 30 hours to figure out how to make Rob Schneider’s ancient, magical body-swapping earrings from The Hot Chick funny. I’d figure it out– I’m that good, but I’d push that deadline at least ten times. For a month I’d wake up with “take screenshots of Rob Schneider in a bra” on my calendar and decide a day off would be healthier. So now you see why I love this place. Writing an entire article about just three ridiculous minutes of a twenty-year-old romantic comedy is refreshing as fuck. And I can tell fellow Cracked legends, Robert Brockway and Jason Pargin, feel the same way because they’ve written articles here about the time The Dirt Bike Kid gave a handjob to his dirt bike and nothing else, and the time when Cobra ate frozen pizza with scissors and that’s all, respectively. 

So you see, with your help, we’ve created a comedy writer’s utopia from the ruins of this many-times-destroyed Internet. Bye!

Categories
FUCKING DAY PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting: Godek’ing with April O’Neil 🌭

In man’s quest to get his dong into things, he has tried an infinite number of options. A romance “expert” named Gregory JP Godek made it his quest to list them all then spent decades boiling it down to one– fuck on pizza. On today’s Dogg Zzone 9000 Podcast, we’re joined by adult film star April O’Neil to discuss the hilarious tragedy of Godek’s career.

Hear how Godek went from best-selling author and love guru in the early ’90s to nothing else despite three desperate, embarrassing attempts!

Witness him take ideas from 1001 Ways to Be Romantic and repackage them in different books for 30 years in increasingly less successful ways!

Listen to Seanbaby explain, in exhausting detail, why it’s okay to hate this pitiful naked man who makes his wife’s birthdays special by letting her pick the toppings on their sex pizza.

Hear Brockway and April compete for Seanbaby’s love in the hottest, most romantic Seanbaby’s Book Game the Dogg Zzone 9000 has ever seen!

After your throbbing settles, no wait -during the throbbing- be sure to subscribe, leave a review, or do whatever else helps our podcast which condensed the life of one of literature’s worst monsters into one hour of pizza fucking jokes. Seanbaby wrote 42 pages of notes for it, which is nearly the amount of work Godek puts into getting the bra off his cheese-filled wife, and over 9000 times the amount of work he puts into writing one of his bullshit advice books.

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

The Stunts of Steven Seagal’s Kill Switch

Today is my 15th 1-900-HOTDOG Punching Day article, and according to Punching Day tradition, this is the anniversary where I give you, my lover, the gift of Kill Switch. Kill Switch is, of course, the 2008 direct-to-video “action” movie “starring” Steven Seagal. You will fucking hate me for it, which is perfectly in line with our hot dog traditions.

There is no academic framework to discuss the Steven Seagality of a film with this much Steven Seagality. It’s as if a moderator showed a focus group three hours of a fat man taking a nap, asked them to describe what they didn’t like about it, and Steven Seagal mistook their notes for an action-thriller script. Kill Switch is something that would get an Uzbek father to say, “The death of your mother saddens me, but this is an adequate Steven Seagal parody you have made in a weekend, my impoverished children.” Explaining everything hilariously, Steven Seagalably wrong with Kill Switch before the last of our civilization burns down will be impossible, so I’m going to focus on the stunts— the one element in this film that never, at any time had anything to do with Steven Seagal. It might be myopic enough I can get out of here in less than 20,000 words.

You’re going to think I’m kidding, but this movie opens with Steven Seagal, Memphis homicide detective, investigating a woman who has a bomb planted in her boob. He knows the bomber is in one of the nearby apartments watching, so he goes inside it. I’m not leaving anything out. He immediately walks into the unlocked door of the apartment containing the villain. There’s a timer on the titty bomb, so even in the fiction of this universe what he’s doing isn’t possible. It’s like a scene you would write if the only book you’ve ever read was half a Steven Seagal movie. 

It’s so embarrassingly stupid it would land like a mean-spirited joke if the editor chose this moment of peak absurdity to put the “Written by” credit.

Oh, fuck. Oh, Jesus fuck. Do you see what I mean now about how we’re never getting out of here if I’m going to talk about every deranged detail of Kill Switch? Steven Seagal wrote a movie where he plays a genius serial killer hunter. So he walks right in, growls a one-liner too wordy and stupid to repeat, and just beats the fuck out of him. Steven’s stuntman makes his first of many appearances to choke the guy, smash his head into a wall, and fireman’s carry him into generously explosive furniture. This exact sequence of moves repeats, without exaggeration, seven more times. The fight choreographer knew one attack Steven Seagal could do without moving, and two that hid his stuntman’s face, and it’s a true inspiration to the stupid that he was able to fill ten minutes of a fight scene knowing nothing else.

Steven Seagal’s brain is made entirely out of action movie cliches, so in his script, the bomb squad calls him during the fight to say they have the titty bomb wires narrowed down to two. He beats the bomber until he confesses which wire to cut, but Seagal tells them to cut the other one. He was right. He saved… oh my god, ha ha I just now realized the first thing Steven Seagal wrote was the hero, himself, using torture to literally rescue the tits of a nameless damsel character. Ha ha ha that’s so goddamn ridiculous. Ha I just realized how often this happens. Ha ha ha ha noticing shit like this all the time must be why feminist critics are always having so much fun.

Anyway, Steven Seagal goes to arrest the suspect, who we’ve established has no chance in a fight against him, has implicitly confessed to an act of terror, and has already been beaten mostly to death. The writer of this movie, Steven Seagal, decided this character would scream, “Fuck you!” and attack. So Seagal kicks him out the window. I swear, I didn’t edit this animated gif. This is precisely how Steven Seagal’s Kill Switch chose to edit this scene and how it appears in the final cut:

What the fuck kind of filmmaking decision is this? That’s, what, eleven times he went out the same window? Why? For what reason? They only shot it from three angles. Was it a mistake? Is he a time traveler sending Morse code? Did the editor hear “It’s working, but one ain’t seem like enough– I want at least ten of these defenestrations,” when Steven Seagal actually mumbled, “Workin’ on a new blues song called ‘Ain’t Enough, and Dat’s Not De End of Mah Pizza Frustrations.'”

What happens next is maybe more crazy. Steven obviously has to say some kind of one-liner after a thing like this. A man falling out a window lends itself to virtually unlimited wordplay. Guess he had a flight to catch. He shoulda taken the stairs. Cleanup aisle DEAD. You might fuck like Peter Pan, but you sure ain’t fly like him, baby. Sorry, dead guy, but I’m insecure about my age and obesity. Flight pants? More like regular pants, dumbass. But instead of any of these perfectly acceptable choices, Seagal says, and I quote, “Hey. Looks like he got da hiccups. Somebody get that guy a glass of watah.”

So wait, wait. No, wait. He’s referencing the guy jump-cutting back and forth through time? Does this mean Steven Seagal can… see the movie? I know it sounds nuts, but hear me out. After he delivers this exit line, to the amusement of no character or viewer, the scene doesn’t end. The camera stays on him, he looks around in frustration, and he lets out an audible “buuuuhhhhh.” For homicide detective Jacob “Lightnin'” King, recent titty rescuer, it makes no sense. But for writer/performer Steven Seagal, who can see how badly this movie is turning out, it’s a very appropriate reaction.

Oh my god, we’re 1000 words in and we’re only just now starting Stunt TWO? I knew this was going to happen. Luckily, the second big stunt of the movie is the serial killer asking a prostitute to help him put a baby into a car seat when this happens:

For context, this is the serial killer in a battle of wits with Steven Seagal, who is completing some kind of moon ritual with his murders. He taunts Seagal with mysterious astrological codes carved into the bodies, so they call him “The Grifter,” a name not really related to what he does or the things he’s into.

Steven Seagal is the kind of man who writes “EXT. NIGHT– THE GRIFTER bludgeons PROSTITUTE #4 with a toy baby, instantly killing her. She thought it was a real baby, which was a grift, The Grifter’s signature activity.” But he’s apparently also the kind of man who forgets things, so when her body arrives at the morgue, the coroner describes her death, which you’ve seen in its entirety, as a long and painful punishment. Kill Switch‘s writer wisely knew it was a medical examiner’s job to make wild, elaborate conclusions about the personality and intent of an attacker from each of his victim’s injuries.

While he’s at the coroner’s, fucking up the plot of his own movie over the topless corpse of a baby-murdered prostitute, Steven Seagal finds a symbol carved behind her ear. It’s a big help in decoding The Grifter’s secret code, which a nerdy seven-year-old might recognize as a substitution cypher, or the kind of cryptography you’d expect to find on a box of Honey Combs. It’s the codemaster’s equivalent of putting your email in Wingdings font. Still, it lets him finish translating a message in a second, unrelated code he… wait a second. Let’s zoom in on this code.

Are you sure that’s right, Steven Seagal? I only read one of The Da Vinci Code books, but you have “Omega, 9, H Fucking Cantalope, Triangle, M Holding Spear, and another H Fucking Cantalope” meaning both “AT THE EDGE OF” and “IS THE TRUE.” You might want to have your prop guy take another pass at that. Oh, damn it. I thought I would only be telling you “the killer’s outrageously silly murder weapon was a fake baby,” and here I am making fun of Steven Seagal’s code-breaking skills.

Steven Seagal goes to a bar where they recognize him from TV as the homicide detective investigating the murder of their friend. Then they, and I promise I’m not leaving anything out, attack him. Several men take turns trying to punch him in the face which causes the movie to speed up right before they jump into the nearest breakable object. This happens a few more times, in exactly the same way, until one of the guys gets the idea to murder this cop with a broken bottle. There’s only one problem.

He can’t hit him! He’s aiming at a 380 pound target and about 30 of those pounds are rattling pill bottles for his angina, back, reflux, and penis. He stabs and slashes, but can’t seem to get the broken bottle anywhere near the barely moving blob taking up half his bar. It goes on like this forever, and Seagal seems almost bored with it. His jacket pockets contain so many notes from his doctor to stay off his knees he knows a glass knife could never penetrate it.

You might notice the abrupt change in Steven Seagal’s figure and hair when they’re filming him from behind. That’s because Steven Seagal not only doesn’t do his own stunts, he doesn’t even do his own fretting and wiggling anymore. If you have a keen eye you can tell when his double is doing the slight waddling because he’s a third Steven’s size and age, and he’s wearing a Princess Jasmine wig instead of two cans of spray-on hair.

That isn’t to say Steven Seagal has given up martial arts completely. They often edit in shots of him waving his hands or looking cranky into these shots of different men missing each other. For instance, here’s a fight where Steven did his own backhand slap, but had his stuntman perform the much more dangerous elbow strike from a diner bench. No matter what country he’s filming in, there are strict union rules about Steven Seagal performing near food. Bratva Cleanmoney Productions lost an entire day of shooting when Steven found a wedding cake on the set of Killed to the Death 2: Geoff Gets Married.

Even in his prime, Steven Seagal ran like a Tyrannosaurus losing control of its hula hoop. Now that he’s an elderly man hiding his mass under a two-person centaur costume, the idea of filming him in a rush is unthinkable. So whenever he’s hurrying, the film replaces his movement with flashes of him teleporting across the screen. So when he’s in a chase scene it abruptly changes from a film about a cop chasing a killer to a stop motion animation about the ghost of a rock n’ roll pig haunting the dark alleys of Memphis, Tennessee. As with the others, I did not edit this gif in any way. This is from the actual final cut of Steven Seagal’s Kill Switch.

I did not count the misses in Kill Switch, but it’s definitely a contender for the most inaccurate gun fighting outside of a G.I. JOE cartoon. Steven Seagal and his enemies stand still and empty clip after clip into nothing. Normally the editor puts these shots together one after another to create what any artist would interpret as a brilliant commentary on the pointless, endless cycle of violence. But when Seagal and The Grifter have their shootout, it becomes a dreamlike sequence where two lazy men can’t hit fucking shit with their guns. They miss in hallways where each of them is the only thing for a bullet to go into. Steven Seagal’s bullets are the same as his hairline — fake, and smeared all over the wrong spots by a fat idiot.

The Grifter escapes 200 clips worth of Steven Seagal bullets and hides. After Steven runs past, he knocks him down with a pipe and walks over to give a villain speech. He doesn’t hold him at gunpoint or tie him up, or have him at any disadvantage really, so the movie does something unpredictable — nothing dumb. Steven simply grabs the much smaller man who can’t fight and fucking bashes the face off his skull with ham fists.

He does this for minutes. He is mauling this tiny man, bringing all his weight onto his chin again and again. It is nothing other than twenty fist murders placed end-to-end. A UFC fan watching this next to a wife with two black eyes would be pleading for someone to stop this savage, ceaseless beating. But The Grifter uses the one move Steven Seagal has no defense against — leaving at a mildly brisk pace. Look, I wish we lived in a world that made sense too, but this movie was written by Steven Seagal and his assistant transcribed, “After takin’ 1,000 unanswered super punches from Aikido punchin’ master, Jacob Lightnin’ King, Da Griftah get up an’ he jus’ sorta walk away.“

Don’t worry, though! The Grifter drops his wallet during his casual escape. Plus, Seagal recently learned he managed the house band at a bar where everyone knows him as a local celebrity named Lazarus who opened fire on a cop in front of several hundred witnesses, but with ‘dis wallet? Murda police Jacob King might have what he need to crack ‘dis case wide open, pardnah. You know, I guess I shoulda mentioned by now — Steven Seagal, he be doin’ a Cajun accent ‘dis whole movie, baby.

At The Grifter’s serial killer murder house, Seagal finds a star map that corresponds to Memphis hotspots. With it, he easily predicts his next kill and goes there to slap and shove him for several minutes. I have no idea if you will believe me or even believed me any of those other times, but this is the actual final fight scene from Steven Seagal’s Kill Switch.

There has never been a main character in less danger than Steven Seagal in a Steven Seagal movie, but this villain is especially hopeless. The debris gently brushing up against Seagal’s elbow in that gif is the cleanest shot Grifter lands the entire fight. It has all the tension of a Garfield reader worried the lasagna might win.

Hold on, that wasn’t the real final fight! Billy Joe, the titty bomb guy from earlier is back! The Supreme Court, after twoish days, has dismissed his case because of all the police brutality. I think the writer, Steven Seagal, doesn’t know a lot about court proceedings, and also may have injected some of his personal politics into the story because when his partner hears about the court’s decision he says, “That animal should be put to death!” And then, to prove himself right, he wrote, “BILLY JOE stab his own lawyer to death in da car ride from prison. Dat animal ain’t even wait five minute to kill again. CUT TO: He at Jacob’s house and he stab Jacob’s girlfriend to death too. Lord have mercy.“

It’s weird for Steven Seagal, a known source of sex crimes, to embrace this kind of “Criminals need to be put down” moral objectivism, but anyway, after batting around the serial killer for 40 minutes, Detective King has to spend the denoument avenging his girlfriend’s murder. Sorry I never mentioned her — he barely paid attention to this girlfriend character in two scenes totally unrelated to the plot and 100% doesn’t give a shit she’s dead.

Like each of the other fights, this one features a helpless but durable man getting shoved through things. Jacob breaks every piece of furniture in his house with Titty Bomber’s flying body until he finally pulls out a knife and stands chest-to-chest with him for a gentleman’s stab missing contest. It’s silly beyond reason, but I think this is what it looks like when 2008 Steven Seagal gives a fight scene his best effort. Look at these bobs and weaves!

He is the unslashable. Steven Seagal moves with all the speed and grace of a woman trying to watch Bones with a grandson on her lap.

With ten minutes to go in the movie, there’s a sudden subplot where an FBI agent thinks Steven Seagal is the serial killer, so he leaves town to go back to his… wait — his never-before-mentioned Russian family? So the dead girl in his house… he was cheating on his wife with her this whole movie? Anyway, his sudden Russian wife sends their kids away and strips naked. The whole thing is the flimsiest excuse I’ve ever witnessed to see tits, and I own 17 VHS tapes on how to breastfeed. Did he maybe get a tax break for giving a topless part to Putin’s niece? I guess in a way, beginning and ending your movie with unnecessary titties has a kind of poetry to it. No one gives Steven Seagal, sex criminal, enough credit as a writer.

I know this isn’t a stunt, but I’m not going to make this gif of Steven Seagal nodding at a naked lady and keep it to myself. Please enjoy:

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Yannis Ioannidis: the Steven Seagal’s stuntman of lovers.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Let’s Read: The Prison Alphabet 🌭

Here in America, we’ve designed an easily corrupted, very racist justice system. Then we incentivized everyone involved in that system to be the maximum amount of lazy and evil. After that, we declared it a virtue for you to put all your trust into it. It has not gone well. This Upsetting Day, we’re talking about THE PRISON ALPHABET.

A fun way to determine if your country is fucked is if there are 2.7 million potential customers for your educational coloring book specifically for children of incarcerated parents. This is obviously a cursed abomination created by people with good intentions. And to their credit, they seem to know what they’ve done. It’s the only coloring book I’ve ever seen that opens with two pages of small-font apologies and explanations. There is maybe some perfect tone appropriate for a kid’s coloring book on this dark subject matter, but Bahiyyah and Muntaquim Muhammad did not find it. This shit is crazy.

Maybe it’s for adults who didn’t know that in prison “D stands for Dentist?” Maybe it’s for prisoners who love to color? Maybe it’s for kids to frame and display on their bedroom wall? They honestly have no idea which direction they should take this very, very bad idea. This is like building a whoopie cushion that blows out the words, “Inoperable cancer means you have to say goodbye forever!” instead of farts. It’s like hiring a magician to play the cello at a miscarriage party. No, I’m serious: THE PRISON ALPHABET is legally the same category of thing as a laser tag pet funeral.

This is fun, right? ARREST– The thing that certainly went well for your parent! There has to be an A-word that maintains this high level of education without reminding the prisoner or their child about the terrible moment already burned into their brains. Why not “ASS– Your mommy better watch hers if she’s going to run her fucking mouth.” Or maybe “AMENDMENT– The 13th one created a loophole that let us keep slavery!” I don’t know, I’m probably the worst person for writing coloring books. Well, okay, obviously not the worst.

It’s a common misconception that prisoners sustain themselves with a large communal salt lick or by constructing hamburgers out of snitch hair. Let me educate you: they are given a thing called “FOOD” to eat. “FOOD” is served for each meal, and we are approaching the limits of man’s understanding of “FOOD.” The only way you can get your own “FOOD” is to poison a boyfriend like your mommy.

I’m sure the children of the incarcerated can appreciate this nice pro-authority spin on handcuffs. They’re to keep your dad from killing himself, kid. You see, the system that took his dignity and freedom is only here to help. There are a lot of perspectives you can have about the penal system, but this HANDCUFFS entry seems to accidentally reveal the one held by the authors. This could have been Hh for HOOCH or HANGDOG HANDJOB, but they chose the H-word where your parents get chained up and then the coloring book takes the side of the prison. That’s fucked up. And a few handcuff-eyed Amazon reviewers picked up on this too.

Alan Mills, a top contributor for Fantasy Books, looks like he has every reason to side with the status quo and even he knows you shouldn’t try to get children of the incarcerated to root for the handcuffs.

This anonymous Amazon Customer bought this coloring book to learn and it only took them 8 letters before they realized, “This is either a joke or total bullshit.”

Debra M. finished the entire alphabet and her takeaway was not “I know a lot about prisons now.” It was, “I hope the author consults with reputable psychotherapists next time publishing a book to purportedly help children.” I don’t need to tell you Debra is, ugh, the worst, but she’s probably right. Do you have any idea how shitty you have to be at making coloring books if you’re a professor of criminology named Muntaquim Muhammad and some random Debbie has a better take on the prison industrial complex than you? This is like Lena Dunham getting body acceptance explained to her by a guy named Footslut Jake.

Pp is also for PRIVACY which your parents won’t have! Plus, Pp is for PROFIT because unchecked capitalism has turned even your mommy’s love for you into a revenue stream!

Jesus, Ss is for SADNESS. I’ve had a lot of criticism about the artistic decisions made in this coloring book, but good luck representing the soul-crushing monotony of losing your freedom better than this page, all future art.

As a parent, I’ve been exposed to a lot of alphabet-themed media, so I’m used to xylophones and x-rays being brought up in wildly unrelated premises. But what the fuck is this? “X-rays are taken by prison doctors who check inmates for broken bones?” If you have to make up crazy shit, just skip the letter, Muntaquim. The only way American prisoners get access to a radiologist is if the guards can’t remember which inmate they left their baton inside.

They really did it! Zz is for fucking ZOO! Color the stated metaphor for how your daddy is an animal, kid. And look, I know THE PRISON ALPHABET is nothing more than a series of regrettable mistakes and it’d be best to ignore it and never think about it again. Still, for not being able to draw tigers for shit, this artist is saying a lot with this zoo picture. These animals are living in harmony inside one giant enclosure. Giraffes share a pasture with tigers along with a baby elephant who gets to grow up surrounded by the love of its family. Coloring children, these caged animals have it better than your parents. Let’s skip to the About Page to see what in the hell is going on with the publishers of this book.

Oh my god, there’s an entire THE PRISON ALPHABET universe with child superheroes? Which, wait, means they have fantastic powers but believe their criminal parents were justly imprisoned and should be left there? I need to see what in the goddamn fuck is going on with these Project Iron Kids. It says for more information on them and upcoming books, visit www.projectironkids.com and… oh, there’s nothing there. Maybe their parents paid their debt to society and they lost their powers? T-that can’t be right. Let me see if I can find out more.

In the About The Authors section, a normal thing for a coloring book to have, it says Mr. and Mrs. Muhammad’s next book “100 Questions Children of Incarcerated Parents Ask” will be published Spring 2014. So I’ll just search for that and… okay, it doesn’t exist. Which means, and I don’t know if this is a happy ending or not, THE PRISON ALPHABET was so terrible it undid the life’s work of its authors. To put it another way, if you lived in a universe where children of the incarcerated had adequate educational material, this exact coloring book is what you would send back to erase your timeline from existence. And that’s a banana you can suck on, kemosabe!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, The Artist Formerly Known as Devon. C stands for Champion, Devon! Oh. Oh no, sorry. It’s Crack. C stands for Crack.