Category: LEARNING DAY

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LEARNING DAY

Wow, A Talking Fish!

Let’s learn about other cultures through the only medium we have the attention span for: Cartoons! I don’t know what to expect from Russian cartoons. I guess I expect them to be pretty much like any other cartoon, except with sadder eyes and more track pants. 1984’s Wow, A Talking Fish! does not set out to prove me wrong. 

I want to be clear that, despite the tension between our governments, I hold nothing against the Russian people. Same goes for the Chinese, Venezuelans, Iranians — really anyone but the Luxembourgers, natural nemeses of the Hot Dog. I believe we’re all just people trying our best, and if our governments want to set us to conflict, they’re the enemy. So it is in the spirit of togetherness that I say: This guy is more Russian than election interference. He’s a Lada being pulled by a donkey. This is the human form of that moment when a really bangin’ EDM track comes on in the troll farm. The only reason those aren’t track pants is because this is supposed to be like 1432.

He’s here to tell you a fish tale:

Only there’s a twist: It’s about a talking fish! 

Hey, I remember how this one goes — the fisherman flips out because selling a talking fish will make him rich. But the fish promises him a wish if he lets him go, or like one day the fisherman almost drowns but the fish saves him or something, right?

Right.

Only even the fish here look like they just got out of the gulag for dancing to American music…

And this fish doesn’t promise the man a wish, it just gives him a lecture about how good deeds are their own reward. Hey, you know what’s a better reward than a lecture? Talking fish meat. 

Except there’s another difference from the tale we know: This fisherman is so emotionally abraded that he actually doesn’t give a shit about a talking fish.

This is the third talking fish he’s caught today. On the way to the beach he passed two talking chipmunks and one singing wolf, and not a single one of them could tell him why little Sasha had to die last winter. So the fisherman throws the fish back not out of kindness, but because he thinks it’s a useless piece of shit. 

Well, that’s… not quite how I remember this fairy tale going. But I guess that would be the Soviet version of it. 

The fisherman takes a seat, exhausted by the useless whimsy of this whole situation, and sighs. That’s the wrong move, because every time you sigh in Russia…

A nonsense monster explodes out of the ground to scream at you.

No, Ekh. He said it as one part of a longer sound. It was a single syllable in what was probably going to be a fourteen syllable sigh of weariness before your Zheltyy Submarine ass popped up. “Ekh” is just a verbal interjection in Russian, it means something like “wow.” So I guess this nightmare beast is doing about eighty million appearances a day, and that’s why we have all those dashcam videos of Russians just utterly unfazed by passing comets and sewage explosions. They’re not innately a sad and stoic people; they’re suffering from acute whimsy fatigue.

Oh, also he’s Santa Claus.

Hey, remember how I said there wouldn’t be track pants because this takes place in a 1430s fishing village? I’m sorry I lied to you.

I feel like I know that dude. Yeah! He asked me if I wanted to fuck his sister for some cigarettes in a laundromat in Southeast Portland. Good dude. He did not like Parliaments.

Ekh is the violent creative ejaculation of Soviet-era animators all pent-up from drawing nothing but gray mice in concrete buildings crying over a piece of bread wasted by the Bourgeoisie. More effort went into ten seconds of Ekh’s screentime than went into every single episode of He-Man put together. Every part of him is constantly transforming into something else, and since it’s Russia that includes a man who wants to sell you a sick dog at least twice.

Hey, there’s the guy that ran the laundromat!

Ekh offers the fisherman a magic table that generates free food when you knock on it. Listen, in 1984 Russia a good day was one when your mother didn’t lose a foot, so the standards for kickass enchanted items are way down here. Never wanting for a sandwich again was the Soviet equivalent of finding all the Dragonballs. 

The fisherman couldn’t give a shit about a talking fish, but sometime after Ekh’s foot turns into a lady-baby and rockets into the sky, he grabs that table and…

Fucking books it like a KGB honeypot just started playing “Don’t Stop Me Now” and he can’t go back to Dance Gulag again.

He sprints back to his wife, and this being a Russian film in the ‘80s, she only gets two lines and all of them are about suffering. But she steals the show anyway. Here she is after he explains the whole magic table thing:

My god, that sad smirk tells you everything: It tells you this is not the first time her husband has pulled this shit. It tells you that she remembers when he brought back a footstool that made shoes, and a nightstand that always refilled your glass of water. It tells you she still has not forgiven him for the magic underwear.

But the fisherman knocks three times anyway, and the table produces a feast! One that immediately turns into Ekh:

Who tells them he will come by at midnight and ask them riddles until dawn, which sounds like kind of a shitty theme night at a nerd bar, but a fair deal for a table that will always burrito. 

Here’s what the wife thinks about this mystical nonsense in her sensible home:

Just before midnight, a strange guest arrives! 

Haha all right, I definitely know this one now. Look at that guy. He’s different parts of eight dudes and he’s wearing fuckin’ Adidas in the 1400s. That’s really Ekh, and if they treat him well or pass his test, everything is cool.

Only there’s another knock at the door…

In this tale, the guest steps outside to greet Ekh and whatever you think comes next, you are probably not right. And if you are right, you need to get to a hospital right now because this is the visual equivalent of smelling toast:

I’m not skipping anything — the guest opens the door and just starts screaming gibberish as fast as he possibly can. Ekh, like any reasonable person, completely hates it. 

It’s not some kind of magic spell, it’s not an answer to Ekh’s riddle — he never even got to ask one. This dude barely answered the door before he launched into the worst kind of ‘lol so random’ verbal diarrhea. He’s an entire Invader Zim fan forum in one guy, in two minutes. 

This scene goes on for so long! Again, it’s because the animators love it — the animation is legitimately amazing, and you can tell the animators know it’s possibly the only fun they’ll ever be allowed to have, so they really want to explore the space; tell the grandkids about the one time they were just straight unproductively horseshit for an entire week — but for the viewer, it’s like all three hours of going to see your roommate’s improv troupe condensed into 180 seconds.

I always want to allow for the idea that I’m just missing some kind of cultural context. When I don’t understand something in anime, I assume it’s referencing niche Japanese folklore I don’t know, and there’s actually a very good reason those panties can talk, and turn into a shy boy every time somebody mentions steamed buns. 

Is this the Russian version of that?

Because it seriously looks like an irritating hipster doofus bothers a shape-shifting magician monster like a sugared-up toddler for a few minutes…

Until the monster gets sick of it and explodes into the sky. Again — not because he’s been tricked, or his weakness is exploited, just because he fuckin’ hates this wandom so much it’s not even fun anymore.

And did you guess the twist? If you did, tell the toast doctor you can slide left if there’s not a cat nearby — your misfiring brain will turn that into “It’s too late for me, I just don’t want it to hurt anymore.”

That’s right! The 14th-century hipster — who looks like the kind of guy that freestyle raps at the bus stop and really hits those hard Rs — was actually the talking fish from earlier! 

So I guess the lesson here is that if you do a good deed, it’ll come back to you. Except… immediately after he helped the fish, the fisherman received a magical reward that turned out to be a curse. So… maybe it’s “be careful what kind of gifts you accept?” But I think he got to keep the table after the fishipster dorked the everything-beast back to heaven. So the moral is… don’t fish? Stop trusting tables? Wait, this is a Soviet cartoon: The moral is ‘fuck the west, don’t complain about stuff.’ Nailed it!

See you next time!

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Science 4 for Christian Schools – Teacher’s Guide 🌭

Two Learning Days ago we looked at Science 4 for Christian Schools, a textbook training children to kill the moon. It also covered tubed and untubed plants along with the latest confusion about the mysteries of electricity. I think we can all agree I, top-rated Internet’s me, was a delight when I made fun of it, but I’m not sure it’s fair dunking on a book made entirely out of stupid questions. So let’s take a look at a book made entirely out of stupid answers because, lucky us, I own a copy of the teacher’s guide for Science 4 for Christian Schools.

This homeschooling book lays a great foundation for a future in volunteer border patrols or cautionary zoo deaths. It seems to have been produced by taking a regular 4th grade science program and adding several chapters on how the moon can’t possibly be true, thus proving all science is fake. It’s something a mother would only teach her children if she was trying to get their brains soft enough to join her multi-level-marketing business.

The very first lesson the book is, you guessed it, using the moon to prove the limitations of science. If science can’t touch it, hear it, or taste it, science should shut the fuck up. And was science there to taste it when the moon was born? ANSWER ME. Oh, it wasn’t? Well then you’re done with Lesson One: Theories About the Moon’s Origin. None of this, and I mean all of this, means anything.

The 17th strangest thing about Christian education is how after they prove it’s pointless they keep going. So we are given a series of questions you as the teacher can ask your children about the moon. For instance, we all know the moon sucks and can’t exist, but what are the three ways it glorifies God? (holds messages, tells time, lights) And which type of God could magically make a whole universe? (a great one!) Those aren’t jokes! Those are Christian sciences!

Not all of the questions are fun, though. Question #7 is: What’s the point of this stupid fucking moon? The answer is, and I’m paraphrasing, to one day turn red and kill you. This is a fantastic type of crazy, and if I’m being honest, I don’t understand how homeschooled Christians didn’t end up being the coolest genre of people. If someone asks me about the moon I bore them to death with crater facts. A graduate of Science 4 for Christian Schools will tear off their shirt and scream, “Did you say moon!? Hurry! It can’t see you if you’re nude, wait, who sent you!? Show me the birthmark!”

Like all good scientists, we know disproving the moon’s origin isn’t as simple as saying “you weren’t there, checkmate.” What you need to do is, wait, this seems weird… send your child into the back yard and tell them to spin? Throw balls at them and discuss? I’m not even sure what angle to take to ridicule or debunk that. This is like declaring the sun is a hoax by gesturing at an unfinished game of Candyland. And then gesturing at it again and again before saying, “You know, this would make a great science textbook in honor of His majesty, Jesus Christ, help there are too many bees behind my eyes.”

I started off thinking this book was pointless, mainly because its first lesson was how all knowledge was pointless, but now I worry about handing knowledge this powerful to a child. If a game of dodgeball proves man is wrong about the moon, could tennis undo the cotton gin? Would not frisbee golf threaten to unravel our understanding of time? Secular science is completely lame in the face of these fantastic possibilities.

If you read the student version of this book, you know their section on electricity was a long complaint about how electricity is an invisible mystery no one can explain, and also a shout out to hair dryers. In order for you to teach this valuable lesson to your kids, ask them four questions:

One: Where does electricity come from? (No one knows for sure.)

Two: Can you see electricity (no)

Three: Where does electricity come from? (No one has figured it out since last time you asked.)

And Four: What are some times electricity has hurt you? (No right or wrong answers– this one is just for fun.)

It’s hard to think of any way a teacher or a student could fuck this lesson up. This is a group shrug (for beginners) with a lesson plan. I expect the section on Photosynthesis will just suggest I pull a knife on my kids and tell them they’re asking a whole lot of questions about photosynthawhatsits.

Speaking of questions, there are a few more regarding the moon.

Let me summarize. Here’s the science you know about the beginning of the moon, dipshits: none. Here’s who would know the science on that: um, maybe someone who was there? And let me check if that was fucking you: no. So using logic so plainly obvious it seems strange they bothered to write it down, the only one who could know where the moon came from is the unknowable being who conjured it. Whether or not He told someone about it is how we can tell fact from theory. Theories, if you can prove them, can become laws, but they can never become facts. And unprovable facts, or facts, are this science we’re discussing, but not science. Science is your enemy, help, the skull bees are back; free me from their terrible bites.

Very briefly, I want to review Plants with Tubes. As you recall, our lesson included how plants with tubes are true plants, liverworts may try to trick you, and nothing else. There is one thing to add, though. Liverworts are named after the ancient belief that they could cure liver disease, but science says maybe not. So now it’s a question of who we distrust more: science or the word of an untubed plant. Discuss this with your child (missing).

Now that we’re finished with biology, let’s get back to the moon. It moves around the Earth, but what if it didn’t? (We don’t have to guess because it happened.)

Discuss how awesome His marvelous power must have felt to the people of the book of Joshua while a stationary sun boiled them alive. (so awesome) Emphasize how God really did that shit. (Jesus Christ!) Ask them to name a single human who would even try something like that. (Hitler, maybe some Batman villains, answers may vary) Think what He might do to you if you refuse to accept the Sudden and Unexplainable Moon Theory (keep pushing Him, you goddamn kids, I dare you).

Welcome to Lesson 25: The Throat. I guess these Christian educators figured if none of this mattered, you and your children might as well build a fuckable robot mouth out of garbage?

We’re almost done, but there are a couple more things we need to discuss about the moon.

The Bible is vital to a Christian’s study of science, so don’t be afraid to use it to answer tough questions. For instance, what ingredients did God use when making the moon? (none) What kind of idiot would think the moon was made of something? (unsaved, foolish) What was electricity again? (fuck you, I don’t know) Thank you for your standing-sure-forever counsel, God. ( … )

Oh, sweet. There’s a Lasers chapter. And… it’s oddly comprehensive. There’s a lot of actual laser science and no mention of how they’re fake or an optometrist conspiracy to print Satanic messages on Lutheran corneas. So when your child graduates from Science 4 for Christian Schools, they will know two things: how nothing means anything, and how to build a real lightsaber. Five stars. 🌭🌭🌭🌭🌭

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LEARNING DAY

Captain Video vs. The Space Idiots

Captain Video and his Video Rangers was a 1950s sci-fi TV series that absolutely pioneered the burgeoning art of not giving a shit. They barely named the characters. Captain Video’s first name was Captain and The Video Ranger’s first name was “The.” He had generic adventures in space and the show was so low-budget they couldn’t afford to make all of it so they showed clips from other shows to fill the time. That’s no joke – large chunks of early Captain Video episodes were just somebody watching a better show and explaining “all the people you see are really undercover Video Rangers.” 

In keeping with that grand tradition of drunken apathy, Captain Video’s Children’s Activity Books were 7 pages long and half of one of those was a form you had to fill out. You colored things like “the commissioner’s radio” and “an unadorned wall.” You could listen along to a custom album for each book, presumably with all eight words on it. You could cut out your own puppets which, in true Captain Video fashion, don’t even fold up right and fall off your finger when you move them, thus ruining the daily play you put on for your dogs because it is the plague, and shit is getting weird.

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LEARNING DAY

Science 4 for Christian Schools 🌭

There is no shortage of knowledge out there. A woman named Annie Hawkins-Turner has the world record for biggest tits, for example. Yet there are so many mysteries left unsolved. Trees? Electricity? The fucking moon!? Name a single thing other than God that can explain them. Let me show you more answers inside the pages of Science 4 for Christian Schools.

We’ll be looking at the 1998 edition of Science 4, which remained unchanged since its first printing in 1976. As we get into it you’ll see why Bob Jones University Department of Science Education had no reason to update anything after 22 years. They nailed all science on the first try, which is pretty impressive when you consider they were just guessing at how any of this shit works. I’m not sure what the stakes are when you’re publishing a Christian science book, but I imagine convincing your reader that science is the work of imbecile liars who don’t trust the moon only makes the case for God stronger. Which seems to be exactly what they were going for.

The faculty of Bob Jones University have stood for the “absolute authority of the Bible since 1927” and their amazing toll-free number, 1-800-BJ-AND-ME, still works. Jesus Christ, this means their business model of making dumb people dumber for money has been working for over 90 years. And speaking of something almost one hundred years old, let’s talk about the moon.

Bob Jones University goddamn hates the garbage piece of shit moon. They open with an exhaustive look at how everybody’s wrong about the moon and it sucks. This book, which covers all of science, seems to be focused entirely around ranting about the moon.

The theories presented in Science for Christian Schools are framed as poorly worded arguments against the very things they’re trying to teach. So they give you enough details about the bitch ass moon’s shitty orbit so you can scoff at it and be satisfied anyone trying to figure it out is stupid. It’s ridiculous, especially when you consider the moon is an egg and its coming hatching makes all other knowledge effectively pointless.

The author’s frustrations with moon theories continue until page 8 when they finally explain how this confusing bullshit thing came to be. It’ll seem obvious after you hear it, but God made Moon instantly because it was better than Not Moon. If it occurs to you that instantly explains anything, maybe you now see the appeal of Christian Science.

So we’ve graduated, right? After 8 full pages of education we’ve learned magic is real and it’s a much better, faster answer than any fussy theory. If we’re not done with all learning, we’re at least done with the moon, right? Right!?

After a few more pages debunking moon facts, the author goes off the rails and starts hammering questions into her typewriter. “Why did God even make the moon!? Or you!? Non-whites!? W-why did God make anything!?” This leads us into our first homework assignment: explain three ways the moon proves God is awesome! Did you guess lights, lights, lights, LIGHTS, LIGHTS, LIGHTS, ha ha HA HA HA HA HA LIGHTS!!!? Close! It was werewolves three times! Look, I’m losing my mind. I think we’re good on The Moon. I’m going to jump ahead a few pages…

Oh Jesus, I think the moon knows we’re trying to stop learning about it.

This is, by any standards, fucking crazy. Why is this an entire page? I can’t picture anything less useful to a 4th grade science student than hearing how God is going to kill them, but not to worry because He’ll blow up the moon first. They don’t even know what horses or wheels are yet! Maybe save this advanced shit for Science 5 or 6? I’m going to go back and check the table of contents to see if there are any non-moon chapters in this goddamn thing…

Okay, good. It goes: moon, insects, electricity, plants, measuring, digestion, moon. That means only two out of the seven sciences are Moon. Let’s keep going!

I want to make sure you understand this isn’t a bit. The author of Science 4 for Christian Schools spent the first 16 precious, outlook-forming pages going over the full history of the moon from its origins of “suddenly made by God” to its final moments of “God is done with it,” and almost all of it is written in the form of questions. Even they don’t know why they did it. If you replaced fourth grade with a season in the NFL, it would do less to fuck a kid’s brain up. They’ve presented all other scientific knowledge as the bad guesswork of protracting fools who could have simply screamed into the night for the answers they sought.

If you presented this book to Joseph Goebbels he would say, “Zis is close to vat I vanted, but I asked for a ridiculous plan to make ze American children stupid, not a stupid plan to make ze American children ridiculous. Two stars.”

Let’s see if the lessons get any better in Chapter 2: Insects, Arachnids, and Myriapods!

This is word association madness. This is something you’d stammer at Denise Richards if she was your biology teacher in Topless High 3: Maximum Nipplage UNRATED BONER POOP EDITION. I get that not every first draft is good and 1976 Christian Science was still mostly Moon Fear, but they had twenty two fucking years to go back in and change this to something, anything resembling knowledge. Maybe the next chapter, Electricity, is better.

Oh, okay. It’s a mystery. They can’t say what it is or what it does or where it comes from; only that it makes telephones ring. I’m starting to see the limitations of using God as the answer to all things since He might refuse to talk to anyone for a couple thousand years. If you’re a Christian Science researcher who wants to write a book about electricity, all you can do is go out into a rainstorm and hold up big metal questions. And even then, He can only say yes or no and one of those answers kills you. So until God tells us how to interpret the leavings of the gloriously electrocuted, there’s just no way of knowing what “electricity” is. Let’s move on to the fourth school of science: Plants.

The first classification of plant, of course, is called Plants with No Tubes. This includes fungi, which leads the author to several questions and observations. For instance, what the shit is a fungi? How do the fungi eat? Are you why strawberries betray me, fungi? Fungi! How do you eat!? You tubeless abominations, tell me how you get foooood!

After Plants with No Tubes, God had a second idea. It was, you guessed it– pediatric diseases! Then inspiration hit– God would take the thing everyone hated about Plants with No Tubes and get rid of it. And that’s the story of what we now know as Plants with Tubes. This is a fascinating classification of plant, but the giant picture of “some unlabeled plants of indeterminate tubing” didn’t leave a lot of space for text. Luckily they were able to squeeze in four Plants with Tubes facts including the most important one: “liverworts have no tubes.”

One thing I’ve noticed as we get further into the book is how the smugness the author had back when she was disproving mainstream moon science is gone. She is now basking in the wonder of the Lord our God, Maker of Tubes. The section on light is basically “can you believe how fucking amazing eyeballs are!? FUCK!”

Scientists don’t even know what’s going on with eyes. They look at eyes and shit. They pull their eyes out of their own skulls hoping it will blind them to science’s lies, but they still see them when they dream. And hey, let me wrap both hands around your neck and scream, “Have you ever thought about trees, or as you may know them Tall Plants with Tubes!? Use the wonder of your self-repairing pocket telescopes to see the majesty of God’s tree science!”

I think this book was written by someone with good intentions who merely wanted to disprove the moon to children, but something happened while they were writing it. Maybe there was a gas leak in the BJ-AND-ME office. Maybe this is what happens to any brain when it gets too close to unmitigated truth. In other words, you can learn to classify trees.

The best thing about Christian Science is how there are sort of rules, but you can turn them on and off when you need to. So if someone points at a big, stupid canyon and says “By the measurable rules of erosion, this is older than the Bible,” you can say, “Not if you account for the Earth Softness of, I don’t know, 1753?” These fuckers saw a child win at tag by saying they had a force field and based an entire field of study around it. In other words, you can learn to classify trees.

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Meet Buster Sales! Meet Your DOOM! 🌭

Blockbuster died so hard that today it’s a joke: a punchline whose setup is how terrifyingly fast new technology can destroy whole industries. But back in the day, Blockbuster was King Dick of Fuck Island, and everyone knew it. Working at Blockbuster was the dream job of every teenager and thirty-something burnout who’d seen Clerks too many times and told his girlfriend he was “definitely more Randall than Dante, maybe 72/25 — no, haha, I’ll be honest, it’s probably 60/40.”  But even that was a lie, wasn’t it, Brandon? You’re not even Clerks. You’re Mallrats and that’s what keeps you up at night, staring into the void. Asking it why you even live. Begging it to give you a way out of this Mallrats life. Hoping today will be the day it answers.

Anyway, that’s why Blockbuster’s training videos were top notch. Welcome to Blockbuster University!

You’re going to major in “how about some Mike and Ikes today?” And you’re going to minor in “sir, we know exactly which scene in From Dusk till Dawn is too worn down to watch. We’ve already offered you a refund; do you really want to drag this into the light? Now, how about some Mike and Ikes today?”

Here’s Marie, our training video protagonist:

And yes, that is her normal face. Her resting expression is one of passive, uncomprehending mania – like she opened the front door and instead of finding her home on the other side, it’s a faerie circus. She likes faeries, she likes the circus, but her world is gone and the only thing keeping madness at bay is the certainty that this is all a dream.

That’s that exact expression, and I will brook no arguments. 

Here’s Buster Sales:

He’s our magical training video host. He’s got a kind of offputting mookish presence, and he lives in the TV — like if Max Headroom was the manager of a local carpet store that couldn’t keep any female employees for reasons that are not discussed. He lives in a non-dimension whose totatility is the carpet they use in airports, and he wants to help Marie be a better corporate shill. 

He is the very avatar of aggressive capitalism, and it’s his mission to show Marie that every time she thinks she’s helping a customer, she’s really costing Blockbuster up to $6.50 in upsales. He actually first describes himself as “a professional opportunist,” to which Marie wisely responds “that doesn’t sound very nice.” And I’m not shitting you, there’s a weird split-second of crazy rage from Buster:

Before he laughs and explains “not like that.” 

What is that expression? That’s the face Bilbo makes in the six frames before he monsters out on Frodo. If somebody makes that face at you for a second and then laughs, know that they just briefly imagined what your organs taste like. I’m clearly reading something into this that’s not there. It’s just that Buster really fucks with me. I don’t know. That scratchy nothing dimension. His weirdly contrasting fashion sense from an era that never happened. All of his mannerisms are somehow subtly menacing to me.

That’s not a guy telling you how to talk a customer into a soda — that’s a painting of Christ askew in a church. There is something wrong here and you just don’t understand what it is yet, but you better start guessing before Mass starts. It might be short for something.

Buster starts off talking to Marie about customer interactions she had, but halfway through the video he suddenly steps up his game and becomes telepathic. Now he alerts Marie of ‘opportunities’ before they happen. He doesn’t tell her what they are, or what to do, he just warns her a second before a customer talks to her. In order to… do what? Fuck with her?

Then something happens. Something I don’t think should have happened. Buster butts in during a conversation to prompt Marie and the customer actually stops the training skit to ask: “Hey, are you okay? You look a little freaked out.”

I’m not being cute. That’s a direct quote. Marie staggers — lil’ trapeze elves doing backflips in her head — and points back at the now blank TV. She mumbles something about just checking the monitor, but Buster is gone and she’s thrown off her game.

This is an insane turn for a training video to take!

Earlier, Buster expressly promised Marie that nobody could hear them talk, so she wouldn’t look crazy. And it did work that way at first, but then Buster… revoked that promise? Just to make her look crazy? Why?

The arc of a training video is usually that of a harried employee who receives instruction that makes their lives steadily easier. That is not what happens here. Marie starts off happy and in control, then Buster puts her in weirder and weirder scenarios that she doesn’t know how to handle. He starts bringing up boys she might like, and boys that might like her. He starts hinting about things she can get if she listens to him. Here Marie is being stalked through the aisles by a superdork:

And Buster doesn’t advise her on how to deal with unwanted attention in a professional manner: he pushes them together and encourages Marie to get close to him, so she can learn his desires:

Later, a regular customer named Mrs. Simpson comes in with her son, Doug. Buster knows that Doug likes Marie, but she doesn’t pause to question why Buster suddenly has access to the personal details of her life. She only says “Doug’s a nerd,” to which he answers — again, direct quote: “Maybe so, but Mrs. Simpson is an opportunity.”

That’s some weird shit! Why include that in the video? The only possible implication to draw is that Marie should, at the very least, tolerate the kid’s advances so his mother spends more money at Blockbuster. W-what?

Buster doesn’t even chime in with advice during this interaction. He just starts laughing insanely, making pig noises and crazy faces behind Marie. 

I’m not leaving out context. It’s not a joke, or a setup for something. It’s just ominous and vulgar and distracting. The filmmakers make sure you can see it in Marie’s body language! I do not know how this trains you for a day-to-day life renting Baywatch tapes to tweens in sweatpants!

Around this point in the video, Buster turns aggressive for no reason. Marie isn’t ignoring his advice, or even arguing with him. She happily does everything he says, and still he starts ambushing her by screaming, or blowing whistles and banging cymbals when she’s not paying attention:  

Again the training video takes a few seconds out to specifically show us the real world consequences of this. Marie yelps in pain and covers her ears, and all the customers jump at her reaction, pausing to see if she’s okay.

None of this should be in a training video. I held every minimum wage job out there for about two weeks each. I have rapped along with Wendy’s and watched men burn alive just to learn where Chevron keeps the emergency pump shut-off switch. This is not normal. This strange escalation is not a training video trope, but it does mirror the classic signs of possession. 

It all fits. Step by step, in exact order.

Infestation: The stage in which an entity merely makes itself known and familiar, like Buster’s early interactions. It can even feel helpful. Comforting.

Oppression: After you accept the entity’s presence, it will soon turn aggressive — random, small attacks designed to mess with you. Loud noises, harassment, distraction that affects your daily life. Not harming you, so much as wearing you down. 

Obsession: You become fixated on the demon, your every interaction becomes about them. Listening to them, talking to them, arguing with them, it doesn’t matter. The more you solidify its realness, the realer it gets. The weaker you become, the stronger they do. Until the attacks stop being psychological, and become physical…

Marie, fuck. Get out of there! I know throwing popcorn seems like a small thing, but the rules have changed. He’s showing you he can affect the physical world now. He can get to you. He can bother you. He can hurt you!

I don’t understand why Blockbuster would put these moments in an innocent training video. How does it help a new employee to see that monitor silently flicker on behind Marie? To watch Buster smugly harass her? To see the wounded, angry look on her face as she spins around? To watch Marie’s customers and friends question her sanity? What purpose does this serve, if Buster Sales is not some sort of Training Parasite — an evil presence using naive young employees to exert his influence on the world?

Because that’s the last step: 

Possession. The entity takes control of you. 

I’m very sad to report that Marie did not catch the signs in time. This video ends with Buster Sales fading out and Marie slowly slipping into an unfamiliar posture. She rubs her hands and says, “I guess now… I’m the opportunity expert.”

He told us from the start what he was. 

His secret name.

He is The Opportunist. 

And he is free.

Categories
LEARNING DAY

WikiHow: How to Overcome Lust

“Do you want to fuck them? Do you want to fuck them all? It’s up to you whether or not you fuck the whole world. But I’ll warn you now: You’ll have to work very hard not to.” 

That sounds like the introductory narration to a banned porn parody of Conan the Barbarian. It sounds like the start of a dangerous manifesto posted to a Reddit hatesub by a man whose bodypillow just left him. That’s the shoddy translation at the start of Emmanuelle 17: Emmanuelle in Space that launched a million very confused boners in 1987. But no, I just slightly rephrased the introductory paragraph of WikiHow’s “How To Overcome Lust”:

“How to Overcome Lust” does not know horny like you or I know horny: To its author, every single boner is a biological weapon out to destroy, at the very least, your life. At the very least!

This person has some absolutely insane ideas — not only about how to overcome lust, but about what might cause lust, and certainly about the magnitude of tsunami that will arise if an awkward kid thinks about fucking once near a pool. This author knows one thing for certain: every single person alive is a sexual werewolf, and every ass is a full moon.

So here, you sexual werewolves, let’s learn to defeat the genitals not just in our pants… but in our minds.

Listen, I know this is a religious thing. For a lot of people, sex and shame are all wrapped up together like the grossest Combo, but I’m telling you this article goes beyond that. You’re hoping to stay chaste? Simple:

Don’t drive on highways, you whore. 

Because of the steady vibration, I guess? If you’re driving on rumble strips because Jesus left roadcumming out of The Bible, you are going to have a very hard time explaining to a jury why you killed that cyclist. This is not the widespread societal problem you think it is, author of “How to Overcome Lust.” Nobody’s taking Smooth Ave. because it’s just been repaved and they know it’s like the graham cracker of streets now. Housewives do not sit in their CR-Vs dreading a detour onto Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard because they know the city doesn’t maintain it and all the potholes are like getting reamed by a pavement golem. 

This is your very specific, very insane kink and the fact that you put “don’t fuck highways” at Tip #1 sets the wackiest tone for the rest of this article. If most women orgasmed just from taking the American highway system, I feel like Van Halen would have told me about it by now.

Don’t want to have sex for religious reasons? Find a different religion! 

This is how a shitty AI would solve the problem of religious abstinence. It’s assuming so many crazy things about people that anybody who has met people would immediately recognize as untrue. “People are very attached to religion, but it doesn’t matter which type. Catholicism won’t let you jam? Just switch to The Handlers of the Secret Virgin and it could be your turn to fuck Savior David every third Saturday!”

This author talks about having sex like 12 year olds talk about karate battles. Surely, karate will be everywhere you go. You must be prepared for karate at all times, you must have a karate plan. Lady, if you have to strategize how not to fuck an entire Quizno’s every time you go out for lunch, proper game theory is not your issue.

If you have a problem with looking at butts too much, try not to look at butts. Solid advice! Phrased in the weirdest, most obscure way I can imagine. “Bounce your eyes” takes more time to say than “look away,” with the additional factor being that you have to explain what the fuck you’re talking about every time you say it, and while you’re doing that little Jareth has already stuck his dick in the Chuck E. Cheese robot and needs the fire department again.

That’s… that’s terrible advice. If you feel yourself being overcome with lust, just make heavy eye contact with the person you want to bang? That’s not going to deter anybody, unless you’re being a total creep about i-

Oh, okay. Yeah, if you get unspeakably horny just preemptively ruin all your chances with everyone around you! That’s a hot tip. If you’re worried about having sex, just wear a Pennywise mask and loudly quote posts from the Joe Rogan Experience forum. Nobody wants to fuck that except for Joe Rogan, and I hear he’s a surprisingly tender lover.

Or it’s a good way to start an orgy. Didn’t the introductory paragraph promise to address not only the concerns of the micro-horny, but also the macro-horny? Telling a crowdfucker to seek out groups is a surefire way to turn this church study group into the subject of Pastor Ted’s next passive aggressive sermon. 

Wait, this can’t just be me. It looks like those people want to fuck, right? Maybe it’s because the suspension on my station wagon is shot and I’m all horned up from the grocery run, but those drawings look way more fuckly than the earlier ones. Right?

Not if your grandmother was a nasty freak and hold on, this is the picture for that entry???

There is nothing “friendly” about that image. If they were friends before, they’re not going to be after the things they’re doing to one another’s holes beneath that Denny’s table. They’ll have to leave town. Ordering a Moons Over My Hammy during toe penetration is a shame you don’t live down. So I’ve heard. From a friend. 

Former friend.

Something fucking crazy is happening with the art in this guide. I think the artist openly rebelled halfway through this stupid article and just drew everybody clearly trying to fuck each other, if not actively fucking each other just out of frame. This is the actual art for “Do Not Touch Them.” I didn’t cut any text. I did not photoshop that lollipop into his hand. The lollipop was never mentioned and yet it changes everything.

Are you kidding me? According to every movie ever made about an all-girl school, that’s where you go to learn how to make a girl cum without alerting a nun. If you can’t control your lust, join the military? The military is the single horniest place I can think of. Everybody fucks in the armed forces. People join the military just to bang in different parts of the planet. Half of the reason we have a military is to run a never-ending fuck tour of the globe. It’s like psychological warfare through drunken boning. On top of upending everything in your life, joining the army in the hopes of never having sex again is like joining the army to help people: Somebody is going to exploit your laughable naivete to fuck you, and it honestly would be your best case scenario if I meant that literally.