Category: LEARNING DAY

Develop Your Psychic Powers 🌭

Post author By 1900HOTDOG
Post date 09/21/2020
1 Comment on Develop Your Psychic Powers 🌭

I’m pretty pissed I spent over thirty years unaware that I could get psychic powers for the same price as endless shrimp at Red Lobster. That’s right, for just $15.99, you could own a real VHS tape that will teach you how to be psychic! I only have exactly $15.99 to spare, and it was a tough decision, but I know from past experience that the phrase endless shrimp is a misnomer. There is a point at which Red Lobster will stop giving you shrimp, or will run out of shrimp, but there’s not a point at which having psychic powers ceases to be fucking radical.

Looking at this cover, you may be wondering if Litany Burns is actually a world-famous medium and clairvoyant and, well, Gwyneth Paltrow seems to think so! That’s right, friends, Litany Burns is a GOOP approved medium listed in the top three mediums of Goop‘s guide to energy healers, intuitives, and mediums. According to that guide, she worked with the police on the Son of Sam serial killer case in the ’70s. Today she mainly uses the medium of VHS tapes to teach people if fruit is angry. She commands the dead to clip in her hair extensions. She prepares star charts for Gwyenth Paltrow’s labradoodle. That’s right; I have a litany of burns prepared for Litany Burns.

Develop Your Psychic Powers is divided into eight sections, the first three of which can be quickly summarized like this: Congratulations, you’re psychic. No, purchasing this VHS does not unlock the premium version of your brain. Everyone is already psychic. Every thought you have is correct. If someone says something negative to you like, “You’re not psychic” or “What you’re doing right now is extremely illegal” or “Ma’am, I can’t ethically give you more shrimp,” they’re wrong, and you are right.

The video doesn’t really start until section 4, Clairvoyance. Litany shows you a handy exercise wherein she lays a series of items out and moves them around off-screen, then asks you to use your clairvoyance to predict their new positions.

At first, this exercise was challenging for me, but luckily, Litany said to practice, you could just rewind the tape and try the exercise again! After rewinding the video and working on the exercise several times, I found that I could accurately predict the arrangement of the objects 100% of the time. I did it! I’m Clairvoyant!

Honestly, becoming clairvoyant is probably worth $15.99 all by itself, but the tape goes on! In section five, Litany explains the different types of aura’s, including spiritual, mental, and physical. She shows an example using a model who, like all of the actors in this video, looks like she’s getting paid in being let out of Litany’s basement alive.

Then Litany asks you to practice your new aura reading powers. You might expect to practice on yourself, or Litany, or another terrified looking actor, but that would make too much sense. No, you’re supposed to read the Auras of two fruits.

If you look closely at the fruits and then at the provided list of possible aura’s, you’ll immediately see that the melon is confident, and the pomegranate is horny.

It’s been helpful in my grocery shopping to know how all of the fruits are feeling. A lot of them are horny. I don’t eat much fruit anymore. Speaking of which, I have scurvy now, but I think Litany anticipated this issue because the next section is Psychic Healing!

Litany comes from the Talk To The Hand Because The Ears Are Bleeding school of psychic medicine.

Yes, once again, you may be surprised to hear that the secret to psychic healing is merely believing that you can do it. I know it’s difficult to accept, but your inability to believe in stupid bullshit is all that’s holding you back in life.

I have to give Litany Burns a modicum of credit for telling her viewers to see a “qualified health practitioner” if their symptoms somehow persist after psychic healing. Um, I’m sorry, I paid $15.99 for this video, and you’re saying that doesn’t make me a qualified health practitioner? Lame.

All you need to do to heal someone is wave your hands over their body and think about healing them. Do you hear that Johns Hopkins? It’s been that easy the entire time. You can practice basic psychic healing on your old dogs and sad children, as shown here.

That girl totally knows that dog is about to die, right? That’s ok because thanks to this videotape’s genius structuring, the next section is Mediumship. If you kill someone with your “psychic healing”, you can contact them in the afterlife to say “my bad!”

Litany begins this section by going over a typical day in the life of a medium. “In the morning, you wake up, and you get on the bus, and you pick up someone’s nervousness sitting two seats behind you. In the afternoon, you’re in your office, and someone’s angry, and you feel frustrated. By evening you’re at a bar, and you feel confused. That’s the life of a medium,” she explains. I know lots of people who are familiar with ending their evening in a bar feeling confused. There’s a program to help with that, and it has nothing to do with being psychic.

Then we move on to a warning about how Ouija boards are not toys, something everyone but the Hasbro corporation seems to be aware of. Litany has been not playing with Ouija boards for a long time, and she has a spirit she regularly talks to. She uses her spirit board to let him say hello and tell us that he’s been dead for two thousand years. She doesn’t tell us his name, but don’t worry; it’s listed in the credits. Do you think the ghost of Jakuma can get SAG credit for this?

I have some questions for the 2,000-year-old spirit of Jakuma, but we have to move on because it’s finally time for Telepathy!

This is the section I was most excited for. Apparently, once you develop telepathy, you can use it to talk to babies and remind your husband to bring home milk from the grocery store. I will probably use it to get the song “Wild Thing” stuck in Lin Manuel Miranda’s head every morning.

Telepathy via VHS is hard. Litany tries to teach it by showing you a series of five simple symbols she has translated onto flashcards. She looks at 25 flashcards, and you try to receive what she’s seeing. If you get more than five correct, you’re considered telepathic! I got six correct, and I plan to use my new telepathic powers to plant the idea I’ve already paid my $15.99 into the heads of the waitress at Red Lobster. So, I’ve got mind powers AND all of the shrimp I can eat. I’m unstoppable.

I have to mention how funny the credits of the VHS are. I decided to stroll over to IMDB and check out the director Victor Milt’s past work. Can you believe the same guy who directed Develop Your Psychic Powers also worked on Sex Wish, Sherlick Holmes, and Run Stinky Run?

Another notable member of the crew was Countess Veronica Of Stonewall, which is also the fake name I give when I don’t want someone to know I’ve been involved in making something.

Sadly, the Countess Veronica of Stonewall was never heard from again after participating in the psychic healing section. When contacted via medium she said she was fine, having met a 2,000-year-old spirit with a SAG card who’s happily showing her the ropes in the afterlife!

To avoid her psychic vengeance, follow Lydia on Twitter.

Tags 2020, Free, Guest Writer, Lydia Bugg, psychic, videos

LEARNING DAY

Cracked Remaster: The Most Efficient Way To Do Everything

Post author By Robert Brockway
Post date 09/14/2020
7 Comments on Cracked Remaster: The Most Efficient Way To Do Everything

Once, long ago, there was a comedy website that only wanted three simple things: to make people laugh, to teach them a few things, and to make enough money to buy a company hovercraft. It succeeded in two of those goals, before getting piledriven into the dirt by corporate scavengers. Some of its archives have been deleted, some of them have been corrupted, and some just suck. You decide which one this is. It’s…

We all want to be more efficient, so I’ve found as many quick, easy methods to streamline your life as I could threaten Google into giving me. And so you’re sure there’s actual merit to all of these practices, I’ll also be testing them out first. Hopefully nothing goes horribly awry here! Why do I hear a violin sting every time I say that?

Day 1:

Most Efficient Way to Sleep

Every night, we bend to Big Slumber’s twisted whims, sacrificing perfectly good video game and pornography time just to lay completely motionless in week-old laundry for eight hours. We must destroy sleep. And for that, we turn to something called polyphasic sleeping. The basic idea is that there are five stages to normal sleep, but only one of those is actually important: the REM phase, where dreaming happens. By cutting out the bullshit sleeps, you can shake down your brain until it gives up and learns to slip directly into REM the second you close your eyes. It’s basically mugging the shit out of your own mind to steal its dreams. It’s fucking awesome.

There are several types of polyphasic schedules, but for the purposes of this test, I will be using the Uberman system, which consists of sleeping only 20 minutes per session, once every four hours.

Ideally, once you’ve grown accustomed to that schedule, you’ll only need a total of two hours of sleep for every 24-hour period. I started this last night, and it’s working pretty OK so far. I’m a bit tired now, but I find that the naps refresh me just enough to keep going. However, it is supposed to take roughly a week to retrain your brain, so this is more of a passive test. We’ll see how it progresses as time passes.

Day 2:

Most Efficient Way to Stir Liquids

According to the Japanese, everything you’ve done today, you’ve done completely wrong. They are to efficiency what Wade Boggs is to whatever Wade Boggs does — some kind of marsh monster, I’m assuming? Like the secret identity of Swamp Thing? Shit, I don’t know: Sleep deprivation is making it kind of hard to focus.

Anyway, there’s a Japanese method that’s about to call into question everything you know about stirring powder into liquids. It’s going to turn the powder-dissolution world on its fucking ear! Are you sitting down? Are you ready for this? The best way to stir a powder into a liquid is actually by using lateral motions, not the conventional circular pattern we all know and love.

For those of us who frequently stir powders into our drinks and the drinks of others, this method could save literally dozens of seconds every month! Hey, speaking of stirring powder into things …

Most Efficient Way to Take Adderall

This sleep schedule is killing me. I just put the milk outside and tried to drink out of the dog. Something must be done. Luckily, the drugs forum (the best forum) has a more efficient way to ingest our recommended daily intake of Vitamin A(dderall): Just take a teaspoon or two of baking soda an hour beforehand. See, the effectiveness of amphetamines depends largely on the pH of the stomach, and alkaline agents like baking soda help speed the initial absorption, as well as decrease the efficiency of the elimination process.

In short: takes effect sooner, lasts longer. Technically, this works on all amphetamines, but of course a quick Google search tells me Adderall is the most widely available legal one, so let’s all just assume that’s the thing I’m stirring into my Grape Flavor-Aid.

Most Efficient Shoe Lace Knot

I don’t know if it’s the polyphasic sleep finally paying off, or just the Ol’ Nippon Swish kick-starting my amphetamine cocktails, but I really feel like I could (and should) fight some kind of snake right now. The closest thing I have to that on my agenda, however, is tying my shoes. Let’s do the SHIT OUT OF THAT!

This is the Ian-knot, so named for the intertwined duality inherent in the many roles of Sir Ian McKellan and holy shit I can type so fast look at this! You can just tell that sentence was fast, right? By reading the words? They read fast as shit, right!?

Hey, OK, task at hand: Begin with a normal starting knot, cross the two laces and tuck one under and through. Then you do th…

… w-what is this, witchcraft? I don’t – Listen, I don’t have time for this. The website says you do this:

“The right (blue) lace is held between the right thumb and forefinger whilst the left (yellow) lace is held around the left thumb and forefinger, using the other fingers of the left hand to hold the lace taut. This move creates two loops, one with the loose end behind, the other with the loose end in front. Use the middle finger of the right hand to push the loose end of the right lace behind, whilst the left hand simply rotates forwards to swing its loop across to the right. This next move crosses the two loops over each other. Use the left thumb to push its loose end over to the right, whilst the right middle finger continues to push its loose end all the way between the left thumb and forefinger to end up inside the left loop. This tricky move requires each hand to use the two fingers inside its own loop to grab the loose end of the other hand’s loop. Use the left thumb and forefinger to grab the loose right end, then the right thumb and middle finger can grab the loose left end. This final step simply completes the knot by pulling the loops tight.“

See, efficiency is already paying off! Copy/pasting those directions was way faster than explaining them. Found the process a little incomprehensible? So what!? You don’t need to understand shit, buddy; you’ve got fucking witch shoes now. Oh, and as a bonus, not only is this the fastest common knot, but it will almost never come undone — even while kicking dozens of furious snakes!

Get off my feet!

GET OFF MY FEET, SNAKES.

Day 3:

The Most Efficient Way to Drink

I have found the Uberman schedule to be astoundingly effective, and if a few of the neighborhood cats want to give me disturbing orders as a side effect, so be it! However I now find myself, if anything, a bit too awake. I can actually see through people’s intentions, and I cannot emotionally deal with the things they truly think about me. Maybe it’s just an adjustment period in the sleep schedule, or maybe I wasn’t supposed to factor this Japanese meth-punch into my new routine, but regardless, I need to dial it back a little. So this is as good a time as any to explore the most efficient way to have a nice relaxing drink or 12 (and without consequences!).

In 2004, a double-blind, placebo controlled crossover trial found that prickly pear extract inhibits the production of inflammatory mediators associated with the symptoms of hangovers, if consumed approximately five hours before drinking alcohol.

Further, most negative effects of alcohol are only caused in the first place by toxins called congeners, which mostly show up in dark liquors like red wine, bourbon, whiskey and tequila. Clear liquors have significantly fewer toxins. So if pear extract counteracts the effects of congeners, and clear liquors have the least to start with, then does pear vodka theoretically cancel itself out? I’m going to assume yes.

I’m going to assume yes forever!

Most Efficient Way to Peel a Potato

For maximum efficiency, I have started Nippon Swishing whatever legal amphetamine I said I was taking right into the pear vodka. Now I want — nay, need — a potato, for reasons that are unclear to me at this time.

As with all things, we must do this as efficiently as possible.

Step 1: Cut a thin slit around the circumference of the potato.

Step 2: Boil until soft.

Step 3: Plunge into a bowl of ice water for 10 seconds.

Step 4: Grasp skin by each end, and pull off.

Step 5: Become the thing you fear.

Day 4:

Most Efficient Way to Move

Walking is proving difficult, and I assume that’s because I’ve become too efficient to do things suboptimally. I have sown the Google, and reaped this: The most efficient way to run is heel-striking. The key is to simply contact the ground with your heel first. This was a little awkward, walking on just my heels, and I ended up kind of stilting around like Jack Skellington.

But eventually I nailed it. (PROPTIP: Think of it less like “walking,” and more like “repeatedly stabbing the Earth with your feet.”)

The most efficient way to move in general is called slipstreaming, and the beauty of it is that it’s beneficial to all parties. When an object travels in the slipstream — a kind of air wake left behind by another object — the rear object requires less power to maintain its speed, while the leading object actually moves faster, because the rear object reduces the low pressure region behind it. Of course, the two objects have to be moving at a pretty fair clip and nearly touching to achieve this effect, but I haven’t found that to be a problem: Every single time I disjointedly doll-walk right up behind somebody, they take off like a fucking shot.

BUT I CAN ALWAYS KEEP UP WITH THEM.

THANKS SLIPSTREAMING!

Day 5:

Most Efficient Way to Boil Water

Did you know that a drip brew coffee maker is seven percent more efficient than even a high end electric kettle and I really wanted to put a question mark back there but it’s like I can’t actually catch up to my fingers so I’m trying to trick them into stopping with an exclamation point!

Most Efficient Way to Pack

Roll

everything.

ROLL.

EVERYTHING.

Most Efficient Way to Fold a T-shirt

Hi Japan! I love you so much, you crazy archipelago! Actually I love everything because everything is fantastic and I am riding on a boat of euphoria cresting a wave of endorphins that’s about to crash down and utterly obliterate a coastline of contentment. Hey, what’s this shit about T-shirts? Fuck yes, let’s do whatever this is as hard as possible!

So I set the shirt down flat, front side up. Then I grab this side just off center, pinch the top edge right above that, then I … fold it …

… inside of … itself?

No.

No, that’s not right. It’s wrong. All wrong. Everything is wrong.

Something has turned. Japan just violated my universe and nothing is going to be OK. Nothing is ever going to be OK again.

Day 6:

Most Efficient Way to Think

Thinking is a boulder I can no longer push up this hill. I type now only because somebody (a mad man, perhaps?) told these fingers to start, and now they won’t stop. I pray for the brief moments of respite that periods grant me. They are an oasis of relief in a desert of empty, worthless words. I need some help figuring a way out of this mess, and so I turn to mind-maps: Allegedly, a more efficient way to think.

Mind-maps are diagrams representing words, ideas, and the various ways the DMV is trying to track your emotions. The key to mind-mapping is to intuitively align whatever concepts are in your mind along a series of branching paths, each ending in madness and death (except one that ends in candy, seen here).

And I’ve got to say, this practice really has helped. Before, I was plunging headlong through a thick miasmic fog full of clowns and bastards, each wanting to simultaneously entertain and fuck me. But now I have reached out and grasped the universe just off center, and at the top edge, I pull. I am folding the universe into itself into itself into itself. The center cannot hold, because the center is a pussy. We will not yield — not to bastards, not to clowns — because now that we have a mind-map, we need only follow it to its inevitable, and in retrospect, obvious conclusion.

Most Efficient Way to Kill a Man

The number 9 is the most sinister number. It wants you to think it’s a six, but it can’t quite pull that trick off; even if you flip it upside down there’s something just slightly wrong about its presentation — like the flat deadness you see behind the eyes of every single stewardess. Clearly, if any number knows how to kill a man, it’s 9. Here is a brief list of efficient murder: Mostly temple-blows and neck-smashing. But wait, what’s that down there — the 9th most efficient way to kill a man?

“The Coccyx: A powerful blow to the tail bone. Fatal.“

Yes.

I say again: Yes.

In Conclusion:

I have hopefully just slept for 65 hours. That time is gone, and sleep is the best explanation for its absence. I do not know where I am. I suspect it is a Denny’s, by the sheer volume of palpable sadness and pancakes. I have no idea what all of this was for; I just wanted to tie my shoes faster. That’s all. Just shave a minute or so from my footwear routine. Now I’m looking at like … like some kind of Bizarro map of Candyland tattooed on my chest?

I don’t want to make too many assumptions here. The last … however many days have passed are naught but a series of rapid, disturbing still images, devoid of context or morality — like attending a slideshow where your parents have accidentally mixed up their amateur porn with the vacation photos. But it’s this section here in the upper left that’s really troubling me.

Listen, don’t say anything out loud — never trust a Denny’s — but if, at some point during my disappearance, the actor Judge Reinhold suddenly died from mysterious ass-related injuries, blink twice.

Wait, no, blink once; more efficient.

Tags 2020, cracked, Free, Remaster

LEARNING DAY

How to Catch Fairies

This book is called How to Catch Fairies which you might think to mean something like “how to find the magic inside yourself” or “craft shopping on a budget,” but it’s exactly what it sounds like. The author and witch, Gilly Sergiev, seems to really believe the night is filled with mythic creatures you can abduct and molest.

To be more clear, you won’t be catching a lot of fairies. The title is a lie, or at best, a 2002 book store’s version of clickbait. Most of the fairies can’t be captured, and from her descriptions, they can’t be seen or touched either. What Gilly does include is a lot of traditional spells which my research suggests she made up and added the word “traditional” to. These usually involve mixing a few herbs together and performing some self-delusion exercises while pretending really hard there are magical sprites nearby. Let me get even more clear: the author of How to Catch Fairies is very stupid, but thinks you, the reader, are even stupider.

As you’d expect, every type of fairy requires a different hunting technique. For example, it’d be absurd to think you could capture a Mist Spriggan with a trap made for a Night Santa. Unfortunately, the instructions for catching them are always dangerously incomplete and printed in a tiny, unreadable cursive font, sometimes on a background of the same color. Go ahead and try to squint your way through these instructions on catching a dwarf before he’s escaped and reported you for a hate crime:

Assuming the creatures known as “dwarves” are real, you catch one by writing your name and your problem on a piece of paper and burying it. This would explain why the author’s neighbors keep finding little notes in the cul de sac that say “GILLY – LONLY” and “GILLY – WISH WAS SMART AND DWARFS ARE REAL.”

If you did it right, and who would fucking know if you did, a dwarf will appear! Or your problem will be solved! Gilly assures you “you will know instantly when the magick starts,” which means you can only catch a dwarf if you decide one was responsible for something good in your life and the only reason such an unlikely thing could ever happen is magick. I’m not saying this book is only for delusional losers, but the logic is clear: you have to be one if you’re going to make this dwarf-catching plan work.

Catching a hobgoblin is a little bit more humiliating than catching a dwarf. What you want to do is have a picnic, but leave a seat open for a hobgoblin. Make sure none of your friends sit in the hobgoblin’s spot which should contain a glass of beer in a ritual circle of puka shells. Now you just party, with the kind of people who party with fairy catchers, and keep checking back in with the empty place to see if a hobgoblin has joined you! Your friends may laugh at you and never speak to you again, but at least when you’re arrested for having an open container at the park you can tell authorities it was the hobgoblin’s, it was the hobgoblin’s, let me go aiiiiiieeeeee it was the hobgoblin’s.

Okay, let’s stop screwing around with these weak ass mini fairies. Let’s catch something more dangerous. Let’s catch a… holy shit, there’s one for catching a Giant?

Okay, Gilly seems to know giants don’t exist, so the best you can do is ask a mountain to fill your life with the “safety and goodness” of a giant. Which begs the question, which goddamn fairy tales are Gilly going off of? Giants, to my understanding, are just large people who eat the normal-sized. Since when do they merge with volcanoes and offer nebulous “goodness” to people who put candles in bread? This is nuts– you wander around a mountain watching bread candles flicker until you find a spot with no wind and walk in a circle? And the only way you know if it worked is if you kind of feel like you might have more “giant qualities?” You didn’t catch a giant, you idiot witch. You just lit your lunch on fire during a nature hike and had your wish of “indeterminate feelings” granted. I get we’re not doing science here, but how is this “spell” any different from “nothing?”

We should catch something dark and serious next. Like a… whoa, a banshee!?

It turns out banshees, spirits who wail horrifyingly at corpses, are good actually because it helps verify your loved ones are truly dead. Plus, if I’m reading this correctly, battling one for your life is a refreshing pick-me-up! These are the types of points Gilly makes in between tips on building merman traps.

We all sort of live in our own little worlds with their own subjective rules. Maybe you think cats can see ghosts or that vaginas have “g-spots.” It’s hard to tell what’s regular real and what’s the real you wish was real, but one way you can measure reality is to consider the consequences of being wrong. If it turns out your cat can’t see ghosts or there actually is a secret place you can “poke” to “assemble an orgasm,” what would happen? Well, in the example I’ve given, being wrong means you die from ghost ambush and none of your exes like you enough to attend your funeral. Now that you know the stakes, you check all available data. So buy as many papers as you can and check to see how many sad ghost ambush obituaries there are. In my test run, about 8% of them were, which means cats see some ghosts, and one in every 12 and a half women experience pleasure.

Maybe I’m not explaining it well. What I’m trying to say is that Gilly is provably a dumbshit, but maybe there’s a way we can test if she’s also a liar. Does she believe this nonsense herself? Well, it seems anyone who believes in magical creatures of lore must also believe there’s a certain amount of danger in fucking with them. So let’s look at one of the rituals for catching something less benevolent than a party goblin or a mountain feeling and see how she deals with the potential danger of a reader really seeing one.

So if you’re hunting a harpy, you “hang around” on the beach, singing and whistling. That’s it, that’s the whole ritual, but wait, she does mention, “If you’re a male, prepare to meet your doom.” Holy crap, my doom? T-there’s not, like, a magick move I can do or an apology whistle? The men reading your book are just dead from something you told them to do? Jesus, Gilly.

This is what I mean. Maybe she’s a murderer, sure, but if this witch truly believed invisible monsters were out in the water waiting to kill whistling men, wouldn’t she devote more than half a sentence to harpy safety? This dingbat knows you’re not going to meet a siren, but I’m not sure if it makes her book less pathetic or more pathetic. Speaking of pathetic, she seems to be catching a lot of these imaginary creatures so they can fuck.

Meet the fairshee, a tiny fairy man so beautiful you can’t help but fall in love with him. “It can be great fun to spend time with them,” types the fairy book author into her Microsoft Word document.

“It looks like you’re writing too horny to be writing,” suggests Clippy, her virtual helper. “Upgrade to the Office Pro Suite for over 30 high-resolution (640 x 480) pictures of balls!”

If you’re interested in catching a fairshee, it’s actually pretty easy if you have no self-respect and a lot of imagination. First you have to play it cool. They are not into desperate witches. So you spend a week very deliberately thinking about fairshees and then really, really not thinking about them. If you do it right, one will appear in your dreams. Then you… well, I guess your subconscious starts sucking and fucking. To be clear, the best case scenario for this lengthy magickal ritual is you have a dream where you get laid by a very small man dressed like your starting level bard.

If you’re looking for a sexual fairy relationship while you’re still awake, you’ll want to catch a nymph. They appear to you if you go into the woods with a “deep need.” And I know what you’re thinking, amateur witches: “DEEP NEED!? DEEP NEED DOES NOT BEGIN TO DESCRIBE WHAT MY YEARNING BODY IS READY FOR.”

Okay, I hear you and you’re in luck. Gilly says if you “have particular need,” what you’ll want to do is find a natural shrine and put some of your clothes on it. Maybe you were expecting some kind of herbal ointments or mushroom circles, but no, you only need to go into the woods -very horny- and start getting naked. It’s how the pros fuck ghosts in the forest.

Now, to catch a gnome Gilly says you… hold on, this is just a story about a water stain on her wall that sort of looks like little men. And, oh. Oh, she named them. She named the shapes on her wall and after she talked to them she realized how lucky she was to have them as friends. This is quite something. You don’t normally see a writer capture loneliness so crushingly outside of a suicide note. I don’t know if I have a joke for it. I think I’d better Google this author and make sure she’s still alive.

Oh.

Not only is Gilly alive, but she has been desperately sexless for quite some time writing books about how to summon cock. She can’t stay focused on any other subject. As we’ve seen here, even when she sets out to publish a book on fairy kidnapping, she always ends up writing about her true passion– wishing really hard something would fuck her.

This post was brought to you by Hot Dog Supreme patron, Nick Heyman, who thinks about Fairshees so rarely they have sex with him in his dreams every night.

Tags 2020, books, fairies, Free, how-to

LEARNING DAY

Alex Schmidt’s Favorite Manly Hot Dog Man 🌭

Post author By Alex Schmidt
Post date 08/24/2020
2 Comments on Alex Schmidt’s Favorite Manly Hot Dog Man 🌭

First of all: WOW. Thank you for supporting 1-900-Hot-Dog! When Robert and Sean launched this thing… I gotta admit, I thought it’d fail. I didn’t think the Internet could support a daily publication covering the latest news, challenges, and innovations in the hot dog industry. It’s like, hello, Frankfurter Nahrungsmittelindustrie exists!

But look at all of you backing this thing. I guess das ist nicht die clüsterfick I assumed it’d be. I might even consider reading one of the articles (been busy eating) or calling the hotline (need seventh digit). And in the meantime, I’d like to contribute to modern hot dog journalism in my own cocktail weenie-sized way. I’d like to tell you about my favorite manly hot dog man.

This is Dick Portillo. Take a look at his picture. Then tame your arousal. Then ask me the question I know burns within you: “how can Dick Portillo be real?” How can one man possess the masculine trifecta of J. Jonah Jameson’s skull, Joe Biden’s megachompers, and the silver mane of a time-jumped Mad Men fella? Believe you me, I’m still processing it myself. I’m not even allowed to show you the rest of his body unless you sign a waiver.

If you grew up in the Chicagoland region, the name “Portillo’s” is tattooed across your heart. Portillo’s is a magical restaurant chain where the three top menu items are beef, beef, and beef. It’s where chocolate cake becomes a milkshake. It’s where loose meats become something you want shoved in your mailbox. And I’ve driven two hours each way (with traffic) to eat there.

Now that you’ve heard of Dick Portillo, it’s time you admired Dick Portillo’s story for its breadth, depth, and girth. Because Dick Portillo is a living legend. Dick Portillo is a tall tale made flesh. Dick Portillo is secretly incredibly fascinating, one might say, if one chose a random descriptive phrase, totally random phrasing, please subscribe to my new podcast.

Every story you are about to behold comes from Dick Portillo’s autobiography, as summarized by The Chicago Tribune. FAIR WARNING: The Chicago Tribune is a house of lies. It claimed Dewey defeated Truman, claimed hecklers are the best part of stand-up comedy, and let its top columnist publish (((Soros Stuff))) last month with zero consequences. However, the “Trib” did celebrate Dick Portillo’s life story, and I think they didn’t goof it up too bad. So please enjoy my favorite highlights, plus annotations:

🌭 Re-read this paragraph. You’ll find that “enlisted in the Marines a week after high school” is somehow the least testicular phrase.

🌭 Let us celebrate the humble brick. To a man, it is a construction resource. To a manly man, it is a weapon. To Dick Portillo, it is a bribe enhancement.

🌭 Unless someone confirms otherwise, I choose to believe Dick Portillo ran past the stop sign on foot, and then Action Comics #1’d a Buick.

🌭 There is nothing more masculine than founding a business without knowing what you are doing.

🌭 There is nothing more masculine than not bothering to know how to cook a hot dog.

🌭 In our age of commercialized, vapid James Bond movies, it’s easy to forget that the sexiest form of espionage involves Midwestern pickle relish trade secrets.

The tiered pyramid of romantic masculinitude is as follows:

🌭 BOTTOM: miscellaneous

🌭🌭 MIDDLE: marriage

🌭🌭🌭 TOP: playboy

🌭🌭🌭🌭 TIPPY TOP: marriage to high school sweetheart

🌭🌭🌭🌭🌭🌭🌭🌭 PORTILLO LEVEL, FLOATING ABOVE THE PYRAMID LIKE THAT EYEBALL ON THE FREEMASON THINGY ON THE DOLLAR BILL: marriage to high school sweetheart, squeezed in between mid-20th century gang fights, followed by achieving omniscient wisdom about your own violence

🌭 Football-sons are the one reason for tears permitted by masculinity (Also permitted, but less acceptable: wedding-daughters, wounds, finale of ‘Band Of Brothers’ on Blu-ray on a TV you hated setting up).

🌭 Chicago food is 80% chopped onions, and I’m still confident this is the only time Dick Portillo has ever generated tears.

🌭 Mike Ditka. That’s the highlight.

🌭 Men in Chicago go to church so they can pray, genuflect, and worship at the feet of a figure almost as respected as Mike Ditka.

🌭 Mike Ditka almost ran against Barack Obama in the 2004 U.S. Senate election in Illinois. Mike Ditka says he would have won. He is probably not wrong.

🌭 This conflict deserves a statue.

🌭 Until researching this, I had no idea this conflict happened. It’s like learning Godzilla and Rodan beat each other up on your front porch, while you gazed out the front window.

🌭 Maybe I’m stupid but this cannot be how addictions work? That’s like trading alcoholism for fluent Japanese. That’s like trading a gambling problem for telekinesis.

My theory: Dick Portillo achieved human perfection at 5:10p.m. on Nov. 10, 1981. He didn’t want the rest of us to feel lesser-than, and made up this cover story for how he ~transcended~ nicotine.

ONE FINAL STORY, FROM WEST SUBURBAN LIVING DOT NET, BECAUSE YET AGAIN THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE CAN’T FIND ITS OWN HINEY WITH BOTH HANDS AND A FLASHLIGHT:

🌭 Maybe a crime?

🌭 “I’m a WWII buff” is one hell of an understatement.

🌭 I think you’re allowed to dig this stuff up but it still feels disrespectful and maybe a little crime-y.

🌭 He lubed us up for this story with a mid-sentence “God bless America”. And that is the most American thing I’ve ever read.

🌭 Yeah this is some light graverobbing, i.e. a crime. That’s what this is right?

🌭 Please listen to my podcast.

Alex Schmidt is the former host of The Cracked Podcast, and a former doer of everything else you can do at Cracked.com. He now hosts his own podcast called Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. Hear it here: https://linktr.ee/sifpod Support it here: http://sifpod.fun/ Ask him about wiener marketing principles on Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexschmidty

Tags 2020, Alex Schmidt, Free, Guest Writer, manly

LEARNING DAY

Let’s Read: How To Be Cool

Post author By Seanbaby
Post date 08/10/2020
3 Comments on Let’s Read: How To Be Cool

Godless nerds, listen: for only $7.99 you can own a book containing all the secrets of being cool. This guide on being cool was published in 2018 and it’s called…

There has never really been a book like How To Be Cool by Todd Marcell. This is more like a hastily written speech for a preacher speaking in the background of a Tyler Perry scene. It’s fifteenish random bits of wisdom an uncle you’ve just met would say to you at your middle school graduation. It’s only 36 pages long (I had to count them by hand because there are no page numbers) and five of them are completely blank. Todd then used one page for a dedication, four to list the names of jobs, one for the table of contents, one for his email and actual home address, and one for a picture of a street sign at the intersection of Success Ln and Failure Dr. If you had every country in the world send their 50 coolest representatives to some kind of international council and they voted on the coolness of every picture ever taken, I firmly believe the fucking intersection of Success Lane and Failure Drive would be declared the least cool thing possible by Earth’s duly-elected Cool Council.

If you’re looking to un-nerd yourself, step one is looking at this radforsaken image and recognizing it as the opposite of cool. This is a PowerPoint slide in a presentation made by Satan for dead murderers who hate PowerPoint presentations. A person capable of opening a book called How To Be Cool with the least inspired business stock photo should not be trusted with adjectives. If this man calls something “sexy” you should assume that could mean anything from diarrhea to yesterday’s diarrhea. For a Coolness Author, dedicating an entire page to this picture is functionally no different from dedicating an entire page to a story about getting sent home from camp after a lifeguard had to pull a Garfield pool toy off your dick.

We haven’t actually started the book yet, and already you see two of the other notable features of How To Be Cool. The first is that Todd Marcell isn’t quite sure how to use punctuation or capitalization. In a time of ubiquitous spellchecking, in this “Revised Edition” of what is effectively a 23 page book, he randomly throws commas and capital letters into walls of misspelled words like the coolest kid at camp scattering tears onto the Garfield pool toy that won’t let go of his penis. The other thing you might notice is how Todd managed to stretch his very brief thoughts on coolness into 23 pages by using the biggest font the church computer had. If one more kid in this article fucks a Garfield toy, I will have written more words about How To Be Cool than the author included in How To Be Cool.

Weird Fact: Todd Marcell dedicates this terrible mistake to his father, William Smith, which is the same name of another author who wrote a book called How To Be Cool. Will Smith’s is a sarcastic “funny” book about dorkiness because anyone deciding to call their book How To Be Cool has no goddamn idea what that means. A book called How To Be Cool is like printing “Pussy Destroyer” on an XXXXXXL Cleveland Browns jersey. The product, by the very nature of its existence, will always be a ridiculous lie.

If you were hoping we’d eventually get to some tips on impressive ways to cross your legs or uncool condom flavors to avoid, sorry. This book is mostly about God. That might not sound super crazy, but let me remind you the first sentence in this guide on being cool is demanding the reader join the author’s religion, and the second is the author asking the reader what “cool” means. Assuming the picture of the intersection of Failure Dr and Success Ln only counts as one strike, STRIKE TWO, Todd Marcell.

The intro was about “Finding You,” but Chapter 1 is all about “Finding Self.” This is done by dropping whatever you’re doing, right now, and asking yourself who you are for the one million and first time. It’s not too late. I’m not sure something this poorly thought out deserves a joke. This is the first draft of a script where Tony Robbins swaps bodies with Adam Sandler. You would cut away from this rambling nothingness to a shot of Tony Robbins getting fucking annihilated at Adam Sandler’s rodeo clown job.

Chapter 2 is all about Confidence. I think Todd said it best in the first words of his chapter on Confidence, and I quote, “Confidence Confidence what is confidence? Confidence.”

Everyone has their own idea of cool. And while I don’t think anyone should define too much of their personality by this type of thing, I’m Generation X, so coolness to me usually means an ironic silliness that exposes the hypocrisy of a tired, broken establishment. And it’s hard to get a more elegant example of that than a religious author praising the power of “Communication” with 8 inches of incoherently punctuated gibberish. I think I have to take a lot for granted regarding the author’s intent, but this, by my own rules regarding silly irony, is cool as fuck. I dream about the day I’m cool enough to type an entire page without thinking about it or proofreading it and then end the whole thing with In the

If you want to know how uncool I am, I spent thirty minutes adding and removing a period to “In the” and thirty more worried you’ll discover that little boy with his dick in a Garfield was me.

I mentioned earlier how four pages of this is a list of jobs, but it’s important you know there was no more to it than that. He finishes the final chapter by saying, and I quote again, “I’m telling you it is a feeling like no other and that’s real talk so being cool isn’t so bad after all uh,” and then there is suddenly a bulleted list of jobs under the header List of Careers. So if the man who made 11 spelling mistakes in his 700-word chapter called “Educate Your Self” has inspired you to start a cool career, maybe check out Glazier or Lodging Manager. Or Customer Service Representative! Travel Agent! Derrick Operator! Chef! Even Cook!

Since Todd took this strangely short list of jobs from a Webcrawler search of “all jobs ever please +cool,” they are underlined like hyperlinks. Well, except for the two he clicked on before he copy and pasted them. Apparently Todd was interested in being a Ski Instructor and a Veterinary Technician. I normally wouldn’t bother including such a useless, jokeless observation, but in addition to forgetting where, to put commas I have no idea what’s cool anymore probably ski instruction? Anyway, thanks every, one and In the

Tags 2020, books, Free, how-to

LEARNING DAY

Terminal Madness, Terminal Madness!

Post author By Robert Brockway
Post date 08/03/2020
4 Comments on Terminal Madness, Terminal Madness!

Terminal Madness was a mini-documentary about computers released in 1980, when basically nobody cared about computers. It was made in and for Madison, Wisconsin, where basically nobody cared about computers. It was created by people who did not care about computers, for people who did not care about computers. It was half an hour of newscasters talking about a thing they didn’t give a shit about to people who did not give a shit about it either, but also didn’t understand it and didn’t want to hear about it. It was sort of a commercial for computing in general, sort of a warning about an incoming future the audience would not understand, and sort of a long elaborate burn on the people who did actually care about computers. Terminal Madness mocks more nerds from a barely polite distance than Waffle House employees during Dragon Con.

The early minutes of Terminal Madness need to do a lot: They have to introduce the very concept of computers to their intended audience, which seems to be ‘apathetic Wisconsites in the midst of a seasonal depression so crippling they can’t even get up to change the channel.’ Then the show has to convince them to not only care enough to learn, but to learn enough to buy one instead of a used car, or a delicious new shotgun.

So it’s too bad that Terminal Madness has no interest in doing any of that, but would rather play crude CGI skits and boop out screeching computer calliope music that sounds like robots tried to put on a circus but got everything murderously wrong.

I know you can’t hear that gif, but if you pretend that you can, you will be correct. Terminal Madness sounds like that gif looks: juddery and ill-defined, distinctly painful in a weirdly playful way, like puppy teeth, or a child who is also the devil.

Terminal Madness gave primary host duties to Jerilyn Goodman, who proudly does not understand computers…

Then recruited computer expert Nicolas Johnson, so they could ask him: “What can you do with computers?”

HIs answer: An extremely long, convoluted analogy about how people once asked that question of the engine — they asked, “what can you do with an engine?” and you could say “it drives a car” and they’d be like “cool, it drives a car.” But then you’d say “it runs a lawnmower,” and they’d be like “cool, it runs a lawnmower.” And anyway, the point is it was impossible to answer that question, just like it’s impossible to answer this question.

Even the computer gets sick of his shit, and starts heckling him:

Nick talks for five minutes about hypothetical people who have never heard of engines and the asshole time traveler that refuses to explain them, but does not list a single thing you can do with a computer. Not one.

Please remember: This is the co-host that knows about computers.

Back to Jerilyn, pretending to listen (not hard).

After not explaining anything and hinting at a thesis statement that might be “computers are impossible,” Terminal Madness smashcuts to this screen:

Woops, that’s the symptom checker to find out if you’ve been possessed by Algebracadabra, The Number Sorcerer, and turned into one of his shambling Combinatorial Explosives. Quick, factor for the human heart before he uses you against The Kidz Crew, in his quest to make learning no fun!

No, that’s actually the insane way Terminal Madness chooses to break down the main questions Madisonians have about computers, after “c-computer?” and “can you leave me alone?”

They are:

Do your eyes glaze over when someone mentions computers?

Do you worry they will explode?

Do you think they are only for math wizards?

It’s obvious that Terminal Madness has no idea why you should be interested in computers, so they don’t even try to answer their own first question. Jerilyn jumps right ahead to the second one, since it’s clearly the most pressing. 20% of her audience just heard the word ‘computer’ and threw the TV in the fridge before leaping out the window. She attempts to console people who only use the microwave from behind a welding mask by saying “don’t be afraid of computers… there might be computers in your home you don’t even know about!”

And that’s a good way to destroy half of Madison, Jerilyn.

That’s seriously her only answer for people who are afraid their computers might kill them — “it might already be too late!”

This explains the Great Wisconsin Tech Riots of 1980, in which four Radio Shacks and one Sentry (sounds roboty) burned to the ground.

Anyway, on to the third question, which is what the rest of Terminal Madness is about: “Do you think they are only for math wizards?”

Wrong, buddy! Computers are not just for nerds!

And Terminal Madness is going to prove that… by talking to the biggest fucking nerds they can find!

Jerilyn introduces everyone in the next segment as “regular computer users,” then she pauses to put extra stress on every syllable of this: “who, by the way are NOT geniuses.”

Now we’ve established that these people might be dorks, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re smart, the rest of this documentary is about breaking down what the progenitor nerds did with computers (it sucks).

This guy is going bald like a fjord and argues that it’s “fun” to enter his expenses.

Jerilyn follows this up by asking if computers have made his life easier, and his whole existence crawls to a halt.

After a long silence he answers, “easier? … … … … no.”

Computers have destroyed this man’s life somehow, and we get no closure on that. We just hastily cut away to a guy who uses his PC to make setlists for his band.

Hey! Holy shit, that’s kind of almost cool!

Wait wait, remember where you are.

His band’s name is “Wheatstone” which doesn’t sound rad, but don’t worry: It’s probably named for the Wheatstone Bridge, a type of circuit used to measure resistances!

Wheatstone is the least cool band name since Gary Goodtime and The All-Narc Allstars, and the only word this guy misspelled on his setlist was “coccaine.”

Wheatstone’s groupies are called The Moms of Wheatstone. Wheatstone’s riders all dictate two cases of Flonase in the green room. This band exclusively plays weddings between a man and a bodypillow. I promise you that every show Wheatstone ever played has ended in an apology to the people who tried to dance, and a sincere thanks to the soundtech for not beating them up again.

Somehow our proto-nerds get even stranger: Little Martha here says she enters FAA data for fun.

She’s been doing it since she was four!

I’d make a joke about how Martha is either insane, or an alien, or an insane alien, but Martha’s face beat me to it:

George Martin used his computer to make a remote control house!

It does everything! It turns on his lights, it starts the coffee, it harasses his wife into doing her chores at all hours of the night! He keeps saying he set it up to switch on the lights and set off alarms so “we get up to feed the baby,” but even in the reenactment that’s a lie. It’s only his beleaguered wife that rolls out of bed at the computer’s cue, probably so the housebot doesn’t get mad at her again and spike the temperature on her next shower.

In fact, George Martin programmed his home to raise his child for him almost exclusively:

George Martin will not technically be murdered by robots. It will be their guiding claws that teach his child to hate all flesh. But it will not be the robots that kill him. Not technically.

This guy, on the other hand, is absolutely going to be murdered by robots.

In fact, he’d prefer it.

He built out a little program that allows him to voice control his computer. Here’s what he taught it to do, in order: Nod its head ‘yes,’ shake its head ‘no,’ shriek to the heavens with impotent fury, and aim a laser gun.

Terminal Madness ends on a warning, and it is shockingly not about how programming a rudimentary AI to scream and shoot at the sound of your voice is a surefire way to become the first footnote in the history of Skynet. Nor is it about how letting your robot-house raise your child will net you a kid who always takes out the garbage at exactly 9:37AM and does not understand why you cry when it stabs. No, Terminal Madness’ dire warning about the dangers of computing comes in response to this teen:

Who says he likes computers better than TV because it’s “like havin’ someone to talk to.” Even the computer can’t believe how sad that shit is:

To be clear, he’s not referring to the internet. He talks to the computer itself. Like it’s his only friend. Apparently all the nerds do.

And so Terminal Madness ultimately posits that the true danger of personal computing is that birth rates will plummet once all the nerds stop trying to be social, and instead opt to spend more time with their machines.

You idiots. You god damn morons. You think dorks don’t fuck? Every single nerd in that image is working furiously at finding other nerds to bang. My first internet was a local BBS system and every single user had fucked every single other user so many times that one of the nerds wrote a program to try to track who’d fucked who and there was a huge fight… about his code.

Nerds don’t fuck? My god. You reach a hand into the great writhing orgy-mass that ends every COMDEX and if it comes back unfucked I will give you fifty bucks, which in 1980 was enough to buy a modest robot house and send your kids away to a nice boarding school once it turned them murderous.

Tags 2020, computers, documentaries, Free