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You’re in for a great Learning Day, hot dog gang! Because we’re going to learn about all the types of trains and how they work! Nothing will go wrong! How could it?
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This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, Michael Love: who came here to do two things: kick ass and watch you as you realize there isn’t actually a second thing.
Most survival guides are written by the insane or people so much more awesome than the reader their expectations are insane. For instance, I have two books that swear the best way to jump out of a 5th floor window is to do half a front flip and aim for a dumpster. I have 700 books that swear poking tiny pressure points is the best way to defeat an attacking madman. And I have one book explaining how to use a sock to squeeze drinkable water out of animal poop. The point is, survival books are a fun way to fantasize about yourself kicking total ass if something terrible happens to you. I’m not saying you’re wrong, unlikely Rambo; I only brought it up because it’s unusually not so with this book. The Alien Abduction Survival Guide is exclusively for pussies looking for ways to make things easier on their space kidnappers.
First off, this book isn’t a joke. Or if it is, it’s a conspiracy to commit an unfunny prank lasting decades. Michelle LaVigne spends most of her nights in space, yanked there against her will by her best friends who have also tortured her for years. It’s easy to dismiss Michelle as a lunatic or a grifter, but it’s more accurate to say she has every possible emotional and sleep disorder and her only treatment has been blaming space. If you look at this book as a work of fiction, and come the fuck on if you don’t, she has the world building skills of a child saying, “The couch is a racecar and I’m Batman, and you’re Batman. We’re cats.”
It starts off simple enough. Michelle has been abducted since childhood by gray aliens. Hey, maybe you know her gray alien mentor? Hetar? Thin? From outer space? She drew a picture of him if you’re having trouble placing the name.
“You may know him; you may not.” That’s the closest thing Michelle has to keeping a foot planted in reality– being open to the possibility you DON’T know her childhood alien kidnapper. It’s the last almost sane line of the book, and we’re on page 4.
Maybe the most important thing to mention about The Alien Abduction Survival Guide, is there’s not a goddamn thing to “survive.” The worst thing Michelle ever saw in space was someone getting burned during a starship rampage, and the aliens immediately healed him with mind rays. From everything she says, these grays are kind creatures she just baaaarely doesn’t call “dad,” and they put you back right where they found you after some harmless nude experiments. You know what? Maybe the most important thing to mention about The Alien Abduction Survival Guide is how everyone is naked.
Aliens sometimes place prisoners, nudely, into rooms with other humans while they wait to be experiments. Michelle was given a job as an “empath” where she uses her emotion super powers to replace fear and anger in the other prisoners with warm, safe feelings. She thinks this reflects well on her, but this is like telling the rest of the slave ship to relax and enjoy the shade. Michelle is a human Judas cow.
I don’t know if Michelle’s artist is a 6-year-old she met in the stars or if she did the illustrations herself, but they don’t exactly lend credibility to her stories. There are any number of ways she could have recorded proof of her abductions and all she has to back up her story is a child’s drawing of these two, I don’t know, sea monkeys? Filming a porno on a stick of butter with The Unabomber?
Most of Michelle’s book is made up of the kind of vague stories told by frequent liars…. lazy descriptions of how “all abductees” do things or how she’s “even seen some abductees” do other things. She has a deliberate lack of specifics like someone who had sex outside once and “could tell some pretty wild stories” or a guy who got punched in fourth grade and “grew up fighting.” Or maybe like Bill Cosby’s cellmate saying “I have Hollywood connections,” except with Michelle, there’s no scrap of truth from which to exaggerate. I’m not saying she’s lying because space monsters don’t exist. I’m saying she’s lying because she talks like a liar and isn’t smart enough to keep her stories straight. Even if Michelle has been taken into space, she’s still absolutely full of shit.
And while most of her anecdotes are hazy, there is one with actual details. She was sent in to comfort a hostile abductee, which she illustrated with what a chimpanzee might draw if their Pictionary clue was “nude American Idol.” (See Figure 4.) This means in her wildest imagination, Michelle is an Earth quisling working for the aliens to keep her fellow humans in line.
She told him the comforting fact, “You won’t even remember this when you wake up,” and “They’ll take you straight home after.” She doesn’t explain after what, but let’s not play games– creatures don’t steal you from your bed and erase your memory if they’re asking you to taste test potato chips. Michelle fails to calm him down because in her wildest imagination she is an unsuccessful volunteer kidnapper assistant.
The man goes nuts and the aliens stun ray him. He keeps fighting, and they have to stun him again, eventually dragging him only partially stunned into a mysterious room while he curses right at Michelle’s face. She explains to the reader how she felt bad because she promised him he’d be going home. Which means, in her wildest imagination, she met a brave hero immune to the alien stun rays and immediately betrayed him to gain favor with her captors. This is like lying that you were at 9/11, only to say you called the first responders gay and dropped an ice cream cone then selling it as HOW TO SURVIVE 9/11 EVERY TIME.
In the same book where men are dragged against their will to torture chambers, this lonely dingbat talks about how magical and loving the aliens are. “Come dance with me,” Hetar says to the children in Figure 6. And if the kids listen closely they can hear the man from Figure 4 shrieking, “I’ll fucking! AIIIEEE! Kill you for this, you traitorous bitch!” as his anus is harvested.
Not all of Michelle’s survival guide is devoted to pleasing your captors. She also has some tips for staying safe online from cyberbullies and fraudulent UFO researchers. For instance, one issue that has “effected” her is how people go online and pretend to be alien researchers but they’re only joking. You’d think it would be obvious, but some people are so ignorant they can’t tell the difference between dumb fucking idiots making up alien stories for attention and dumb fucking idiots making alien stories up for attention.
Michelle doesn’t just suggest pacifism and Uncle Tommery for abductees trapped in space. She thinks you should let the aliens have their way with you while you’re still in your home. She tells a story about her husband, who used to keep a wooden board by the bed to bash aliens until he almost used it to cave in the head of their four-year-old. Of all the anecdotes in her book, this one where no aliens showed up and her daughter almost got killed by her and her husband’s shared paranoia seems the truest.
If I’m being honest, I think hitting an alien intruder in the head with a stick is a pretty good idea and making sure the alien is not your daughter first requires a pretty basic level of stick expertise. More to the point I’m trying to make, fuck you, alien sympathizer. Step zero in surviving an alien abduction is at least trying to cave in their bitch ass moon heads while they’re beaming into your bedroom. What’s your other advice, Michelle? Establishing a relationship with the creatures and saying “Not tonight, please,” on occasion?
Holy shit, she really did suggest establishing a relationship with the creatures and saying, “Not tonight, please,” on occasion. Michelle claims this assertiveness and intelligence(?) will earn their respect! She thinks she’s very smart and tough for requesting a night off from her job as a naked space coward! Well, if Hetar is impressed by some collaborator sheepishly asking permission to not be abducted, he’s going to really think it’s something when I blast his grinning head off with a stick.
For most of the book, Michelle paints a picture of benevolent creatures who are super cool once you surrender to them completely. She wants you to know how lucky and special she is for Hetar choosing her. But like most attention whore liars, she’d like more attention and different kinds of it, so sometimes the aliens are very bad and you see how brave she is for enduring such hardship. Aliens who dance with children gave this woman a job telling nude men to calm down, and her best friend is a being named Hetar, who you may have met, but here she is complaining about how no one understands the sleepless fear she feels when reliving her abductions. Michelle may not have heard this phrase since she spends most of her time off planet, but pick a lane, you bottomless dumbshit.
You’re probably thinking, “These are balls-naked, easily tricked people surrounded by creatures who do not understand the difference between compassion and involuntary butthole research. There’s some weird sex stuff going on, isn’t there?” I’m happy to answer “Yes.” Very much so, “yes.”
Michelle lists several models of mind wands that give you “fantasies of pleasure or even an orgasm.” So they’re star dildos, but she goes on to explain how they’re also phaser weapons, which has got to be the single most common cause of space death. Even the most incomprehensible civilization would look at death and squirting and think, “Let’s make these two separate beams.”
Michelle talks about a “discovery room” which teaches you things about who you are. Things that would be “shameful” if done in front of others. Things you can’t be judged for because anything goes in the discovery room. And I wouldn’t consider this judgement, but I’m troubled by what sex kinks a woman finds shameful when she’s not embarrassed by putting her name on an alien survival book that’s nothing more than instructions on opening your asshole and saying “thank you, space.”
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This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, Armando Nava: whose name is an anagram of how they were conceived: a rad van moan.Â
WikiHow is a resource site for people so utterly lost in life that they don’t even know how to ask for directions anymore. It’s full of wildly unhelpful guides for basic things like ‘how to speak without vomiting on your own shirt’ and ‘how to park a bicycle.’ It is a site that tells people the wrong way to do tasks that nobody needed instructions for in the first place, but it mostly operates under the guise of being useful. Even if it’s aimed solely at people so anxious they have become a panicking gelatinous cube and somehow forgot how to work a fork, WikiHow at least pretends to help. But How to Avoid Attention knows that you are beyond assistance, and all you want in life is to disappear. Since the mods keep deleting How To Do A Shy Suicide, this is closest thing they’re legally allowed to publish:
It makes me intensely sad to think of the person so emotionally shattered that they turn to WikiHow, the site that fails to explain how to use a ball, to help them recede from society like a meek tide. Look at this wildly useless word collage:
This fucking article is introducing the idea of conformity like it’s a unique concept that has never occurred to you, the reader. Like you’re out there on the streets wearing nothing but tap shoes and a bearskin rug, begging passersby to explain why you’re not allowed on the bus. The author takes a whole paragraph out to carefully define what ‘medium’ is — anxiety isn’t tied to lexical amnesia, you Buck-Fifty-An-Hour Freelancer, why are you pausing to explain basic words in an article already made of basic words?
Also why is there a section advising you to change colors like a chameleon? I’m starting to think I’ve misunderstood the intention of this article but… no, no that’s too crazy. I’m being paranoid again. Let’s carry on.
I’m sure that sounded perfectly reasonable in whatever Theoretical Lab of the Mild Sciences paper you’re referencing, but I guarantee that advising some poor jittery bouillon of a boy to wander into Baltimore and impersonate the way people talk there is going to end with you guys liable for Murder By Endorsement.
Man, something is up with this guide. Look at this:
Who is this for?
I’m clearly approaching this whole thing from the wrong angle. Usually the ‘Recommended Reading’ section at the bottom tells you far more about the intended demographic than you are comfortable knowing, so let’s just scroll down to…
Oh, holy shit.
I have indeed been wrong: This is an introductory textbook for incel murderers. It’s supplemental material for Remedial Manhunting 95. I assumed that, like every single other WikiHow guide I have ever read, this one was meant for shy teens raised in a closet with only an affable pillowcase for a companion. There is something much more sinister going on here. But if it’s just for psychopaths then…
Why are we shown a deliberately median human gazing with confusion at a fork? This isn’t advice for a person trying not to be bullied by unfiltered eye contact… but it’s also not for a lunatic hunting prey at an opera. Even a lunatic would understand these basic human cues by now, if only by exposure.
Yep. Okay. I get it now.
I have somehow accessed Alien WikiHow — the guide for dipshit extraterrestrials who are clueless about their first Earthbound hunting safari. You just had to go and include a section about ‘throttling your own superhuman powers to avoid notice’ didn’t you? You gave away the game, Zapzar, you 0.65-Loobars-An-Hour Space-Freelancer.
Clearly, I am no longer qualified to comment on the quality of this advice. I only have one inhuman acquaintance who enjoys hunting humans, so I’ll hand this over to Vexxox, PoxCo’s Head HR ManTis.
Well shit, WikiHow. Thanks a lot. Now you’ve got me being hunted by the worst enemy our species has ever known: An HR representative.
At least now I understand what the fuck Sophia was talking about.
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This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, Pauli Poisuo: who is called “Baba Yaga” by his enemies and “Double P” by Baba Yagas.
The year was 1995 and a secret war was being fought between the Power Rangers and one man. Phil Phillips, named after his stuttering grandfather, received instructions from God to write a book about the anti-Christian messages in children’s shows. He was never told to stop, so he kept doing it. The Truth About Power Rangers is his 10th version of the same book, and we now how what happens after a Christian man is forsaken by his Lord after scouring 200,000 hours of cartoons for signs of witchcraft or Buddhist philosophies.
I want to get one thing off my chest before we start. Phil Phillips is the roiling, unstable kind of effeminate don’t see outside of closeted Christian husband communities. He talks like he’s workshopping a character called Pastor Bottom LaRue: Unmistakable Homosexual. He looks like a counselor who sells amyl nitrate to teenagers at gay conversion Bible camp. His cheeks tell the story of a man who would lose 12 pounds a day if he gave 4% fewer blowjobs. He looks like a pile of dinner rolls brought to life by fairy magic, which is word-for-word how his wife describes his lovemaking as she becomes visibly sad. There is more semen in a Phil Phillips handshake than in four handfuls of semen. If you showed him a baseball he would compliment the stitching and ask if you needed help pulling out the rest of your anal beads.
I’m having fun, but Phil’s secret desires aren’t super relevant to the book. There are a few mentions of the perfect muscle density of the young Power Ranger boys, but that’s barely gay. The Power Rangers keep it tight and they’re looking good. I bring it up for two reasons. One, he sucks and I genuinely think it would hurt his feelings if he found out everyone can tell, and two, I want to establish the conflict and cognitive dissonance raging inside his brain. He has been lying to himself and his wife for decades in order to trick a being he believes to be the omniscient Creator of the universe. It’s possible his thoughts on Power Rangers are tainted by these deranged and inconsistent beliefs. At the very least, all the hours he spends retching at the thought of his husbandly vulva duties is going to eat into his pop culture analysis time.
Like my article about it, Phil Phillips opens his book by pointlessly describing the obvious. At first, it’s just explanations of morphin’ dino powers and episode summaries. As a primer for curious parents, it’s far, far more than adequate. It’s literally 57 pages long. It might be the longest document on Power Rangers abilities ever written. And aside from one complaint about how teaching karate to unsupervised children is risky for lamps (see below), he doesn’t explain why any of it matters. He’s describing every detail of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, a pretty formulaic kids show with positive messaging, as if it’s a given that the Devil made it. As if battling moon evil with karate is such an insult to God there is no need to spell out why.
Phil brings up a good point in this passage. What is the likelihood of children wearing loose clothes, scoff, in an un-lamped area? VERY LITTLE LIKELIHOOD!!! He’s outrageously pissed at the idea of lamps breaking, but then a miracle happens. I don’t know if it was all the time away from the inside out wrongness of his wife’s female genitalia, or if he was simply starting to enjoy the show, but after this section Phil started cheering up. Soon there was no judgement or moralizing– he was just some weird adult man breathlessly explaining all the awesome things he saw the Power Rangers do. His religion-dulled brain and below average writing skills strained to retell each adventure in as much detail as possible. He explained their puns and got so excited when they morphed. For about forty pages, the TRUTH About Power Rangers was how they were fucking sweet.
Fun doesn’t last forever, though. Eventually Phil Phillips remembered God sent him on a mission to destroy these foolish Power Rangers. He knew one of their crimes against His Plan probably had something to do with violence, so he found some questionable studies, interpreted findings in questionable ways, and came to the conclusion the Power Rangers were bad because they didn’t try running away from evil more often. Phil isn’t exactly a pacifist, but he believes you should let only God do all the karate. Here, I’ll let him explain:
Phil’s first argument against karate is that God is supposed to protect you, so protecting yourself is betraying your trust in Him. This is like telling Christians to run out of a restaurant before paying because the Lord said He would provide. It’s shaky logic even before you consider how weird it is to expect the Power Rangers to follow the rules of the religion in your specific leaky brain when they talk to their own dinosaur gods in a different universe. So I guess forget the restaurant analogy. This is like barging into a Bangladeshi house and telling them to throw their towels on the floor so the staff at the Best Western Plus Kansas City Airport knows to wash them. It’s like Phil Phillips getting mad at his wife for not naming her penis Motorbiscuit. It’s dumb and wrong, but only after it’s first crazy.
Phil explores this theory of agency and self-defense being bad for a long time. I highlighted the spot where he accidentally wrote the thesis statement not for the book he intended to write, but the one he did. Phil Phillips has spent so many years trying to figure out how to hate cartoons, he has lost all perspective on the difference between menacing and annoying. All his perceived threats are imaginary, and his imagination can picture hair on his wife’s back and nothing else. When you think punching your enemies is more of a threat than enemies, you’ve played too many games with words. I get I’m under less stress than a man who knows God can see him when he shops online for dance belts, but I think it’s so easy to be this smart. On my dumbest day, 9 times out of 10, I know standing still and letting karate kill you is bad.
Phil especially hates Alpha’s Magical Christmas, the Power Rangers holiday album. Not because it’s terrible, which would be fair to say, but because it implies all cultures “are equally valid and worthy.” A big part of Christianity is thinking how everyone else is wrong even if you’re a chipmunk-looking fucker who has been complaining about cartoons for twenty straight years and thinks maybe we should all leave evil alone. Phil might advocate for pussiness, but at least he doesn’t spend Christmas accepting and loving others like some kind of monster.
One of the funniest things Phil does is suddenly get furious at ordinary story beats. Here he is, after a brief mention of Power Ranger Ryan’s shiny, eye-catching costume redesign, getting furious at the idea of a superhero rescuing his father from cyberspace:
Phil instantly, and for no reason, thought children would see this dad trapped in the Internet and decide it was their job to reunite their divorced parents. He gets there in one goddamn sentence. This is mind soup. He’s mad at cyber superheroes in an action show for staying too busy? This is like writing an angry letter to bowling for normalizing kindness. It’s like campaigning against fish to fight sunshine. I feel like trying to explain this fucker is making me go c-crascorb dibble crouton hat.
There’s a section where Phil compares the Power Rangers to “gangs” because of their colored uniforms and how they defend their “turf” which he reluctantly admits is “the entire planet.” So to be clear, he’s mad at the Power Rangers for defending the planet because that’s the defining characteristic that makes gangs bad. I think smart people call this specific type of dumb argument the noncentral fallacy, but if I had to put it in terms Phil could understand, I’d say this is like calling yourself a good husband because you sometimes ask the hole in the YMCA wall if it has anal thrush. Phil, this argument is like calling yourself a hero because you pant into a Spider-Man mask when you watch your neighbor’s boys play in the sprinkler.
Phil wrote, where everyone could see it, how one of the risks of Power Rangers is it teaches children to call on demons and “What if one answers?” I don’t have a joke, I just love how after all his paranoia about cultural indoctrination and fear of child karate (the only type of karate), he reveals his true concern: he thinks Dinozoid powers might be real. And it’s terrifying to him. To be clear: this man wrote a book about why you should fear Dino Morphin’ Power Rangers and floated the theory IT’S POSSIBLE THEY EXIST.
In his big finish, Phil makes a list of reasons you should never watch Power Rangers, you know, besides their sinister promotion of heroism, friendship, and generosity. First is Low Production Values, and fair enough, Phil: this show isn’t very good. Second is Only Perfect People where Phil whines about how only one cast member wears glasses and even they are sort of hot. Speaking of hot, the third reason is Sexual Overtones where he complains, and I quote, “The teens regularly wear shorts and tank tops, all the better to show off their perfect muscles.” He also gets mad about the show’s diversity, not because we are losing karate jobs to the non-whites, but for reasons never explained. He’s just suddenly also racist on top of everything else.
He goes on to cite the show’s bias against job creators and its disrespect toward authority as reasons no one should watch it. These are all hilariously inconsistent with values he expressed earlier in the book, probably because God doesn’t assign the task of destroying the Power Rangers to his heaviest hitters.
Of all the final reasons to stay away from the show, nothing beats #5: A Heavy Emphasis on Stereotypes. Moments after complaining about diversity and the dangers of allowing any cultures or religions to exist outside the one he was born into, he’s pissed off at Power Rangers for not being woke.
I think we all agree it’s pretty fucked up the Power Ranger producers made the black one the Black Ranger and the Asian one the Yellow Ranger, but I’m not sure the best messenger for this is the sanctimonious idiot who got pissed off at Christmas songs for being too inclusive and still called Asian people “Oriental” in 1995. I am completely exhausted trying to translate this maniac’s God brain into English, but this is like Phil Phillips complaining that his wife doesn’t appreciate his tidiness to the man eating his ass in her van. If you wrote a book called Zero Muslim Hat Ideas for Easter, Phil Phillips would still have written the dumbest, most pointless religious book of all time.
