Category: NERDING DAY

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Camilo Wallace: The Ventriloquist🌭

Welcome to my Final Destination. I left Puppet Week unscathed, thanks to timely interference from Gen Urobuchi, the one true God. But homunculi hate losing a kill, even to other puppets. Since that attosecond of joy, I’ve battled dollkind.

It’s time to pay the shitty piper, even though rats are still everywhere. Today, we face a Combat Ventriloquist. Who barely fights, so he’s a Comedy Ventriloquist. But the jokes suck, so he’s a Christian Ventriloquist. The worst kind, as fans of the Dogg Zzone or unstalked children know. When cockroaches unearth the Ape Cities, they’ll quarantine bibles like the T-Virus.

Enter Camilo Wallace: the Weritas Man. Or Camillo Wallace: The Ventriloquist. Our subjects can’t keep titles straight.

It’s a comic! A medium where ventriloquism means even less. Comics starring ventriloquists evoke porn starring Jim Justice. Though unlike The Justice Tapes, Weritas Man comics are sparse for an eight-year project. There’s much more promo than juice–a very Old Internet mistake for New Internet insanity.

Aside from being Superman, Camilo’s a woodworker:

A doll-whisperer:

A bible camp casanova:

An enemy of cultural marxism:

And super marxism:

Finally, a comic where Red Son Superman gets his. You know, like Red Son. Today’s brain lags behind Mark Millar.

It seems scattershot because it is: the emphasis depends on the Guest of the Week. Creator Andre Leal’s an exposure junkie. If your brand’s jackboots, Camilo licks them clean. If your brand’s ass, ibid. If your brand’s Old Testament, Camilo gets papercuts. Lending crossovers and fanart a “please love me” flavor.

Today’s insults are a gift: Andre wants you to know Camilo. Bad. Badly enough to tie him to Antarctic Press. Badly enough to spam four waves of social media. Badly enough to collab with everyone short of the Klan, and then the Klan. But not badly enough to practice.

I get that. I thought a superhero Archer would be fun too, I just knew Frisky Dingo existed. Or rather, didn’t pretend to forget. Note for the roaches: “X plus Jesus” was the least talented or endowed apes’ default survival strategy. After we figured out the moon wasn’t a shy cloud! Wild, right?

As your brain’s noticed, ventriloquism adds nothing to a Superman knock-off. Luckily there’s loads of it.

The left puppet’s our flagship prop: the Hipster. Once your brain recovers from that pun, I’ll be waiting for your revenge. Find me in Cobble Hill Cinemas during the matinee. I’ll be in the back row of Kill Bill Vol. 3, wearing a Gankutsuou hoodie. And unarmed: no man can fight the doll war forever. But ask yourself: is revenge what you want? Or a clean, Hipster-free mind? That peace, if it exists, only lives within. Killing me would carve ventriloquism into your memory forever.

The puppet rests on his lap.

You know, Andre’s drawing this. He could close Camilo’s mouth. Telling puppet jokes this way has one benefit, and he’s thrown it away like the future.

Still, this isn’t worthless. Andre’s advanced stock joke research. Time crawls during dead punchlines. Applied anticomedy could achieve Doc Brown’s dream. Can you imagine? Visiting any reality tv set and poisoning any host? We’re in the age of miracles.

Like most puppets, the Hipster is romantic dynamite. If screaming slurs at models doesn’t work out, try whispering with puppets. You’ll have a great time.

Somehow, Camilo avoids drowning in ventriloquist pussy. He stays focused, and continues to ruin art:

I grew up with a few Christians, and a few morons. They’re not synonyms. I’m still sane enough to remember that during revision. But in the overlap, I’ve seen Christian puppeteers. And they all tell this joke, better. Andre fumbles the setup like a priest retconning “Love thy neighbor.” That joke has nothing to do with the next section.

The Ventriloquist lives a double life. Triple if you count his secret identity. By day, in his few print adventures, Camilo’s your everyday Superman clone. Like this Bloodsport riff we’re skipping:

Camilo cheats through the rest with puppet magic. No sale. Van Damme made better knockoffs himself. Imagine sitting through one hour and thirty-two minutes of perfect madness and thinking “Bet they couldn’t beat Superman.”

Weak.

By night, Camilo changes. Andre’s work mixes action and comedy into tragedy. On the list of Amazon murderers, Camilo Wallace sits between the bullet ant and candiru. Mostly by stomping on a pre-gunpowder tribe:

The Kwesokunxele are, per Andre’s ancient website, in dire need of conversion. Or as the semi-translated prose says: “Kwesokunxele tribe worships an imaginary creature that demands newborn sacrifices, so they seeks for couples from other cultures to maintain as prisoners and to have babies every year for the sacrifices.” It’s all an NGO conspiracy, and that’s not a gag:

In Andre’s world, Amnesty International funds cannibals to stop Amazon from buying The Amazon. I didn’t know that going in. I came to watch someone rob Jim Henson and Grant Morrison in one breath. But as Earth goes mad, lunatics have to evolve.

Have some worldbuilding.

Practice before Game Day, or your caricatures will only embarrass you. Integralist Superman hates this tribe’s “imaginary creature,” which only invites jokes I’d regret. At least I enjoy the advanced hunter sneering beside the hunter. “Look at this inept fuck. If we had guns, he’d shoot his own dick off. Without stone collector and I, this camp would be a parking lot.” Meanwhile, witchdoctor’s over human flesh. He’ll trade Yigg for Wendy’s the next time a less violent conquistador comes around.

This angle’s missing from Camilo’s Atlantic Press cameos. Go figure. They did print his fun-loving origin. Remember that new hero anthology Lydia covered? What if it sucked? What if it ate failure and baby-birded it back to a fictional audience? That question animates Antarctic Press’s everything. But specifically Exciting Comics, which introduces washouts’ OC to a shared trashcan.

First, we get Camilo’s roots as a ventriloquist:

His grandfather taught him doll-mumbling, self-terminating his line. If you care, you’re a better person. The kind the coming world needs. I’m still here to breach hell. I’ll try to close the gate behind me.

Next, we explain Camilo’s powers, which I have a chance of caring about. It sucks. Not one planet implodes. Instead, the key is merging ventriloquism and Jesus. Doll-fondling lets you hear Gabriel’s gym tips. If you pray without a puppet, you’ve missed free cosmic Anavar. It’s too late to change the past, but you can start crushing ass and spines today.

Note the professional envy. By hack law, an author avatar’s the coolest person on the page. For a ventriloquist, that means rolling with magicians.

Stage magicians, the saddest people using the term. Endurance stunts earn grudging respect, magick tutors retire early, and faith healers retire earlier. Atlantic City illusionists repel cool. Their secrets endure because the answers suck. The mystery behind every trick is divorce. And they’re still miles ahead of Comicsgate washouts.

Let’s meet some ComicsGate washouts.

“Comicsgate?” ponders the strawman. “That’s probably like the other embarrassment, with trolls twice as old and half as employable.” Bingo. You’re so smart, strawman. Let’s never fight again.

Now, I try to be precise with the quantity and nature of refuse. And generally give up halfway through. But note that Camilo isn’t a Comicsgate original. He launched in 2016, and still steals vaudeville jokes today. But for a moment, Camilo had family. Like the other half of that “Destroy Cultural Marxism” gif:

Lonestar took Captain America and added goggles. Comicsgate attracted lots of homages, which helped The Ventriloquist fit in. Pandering did the rest. Like most thin relationships, Camilo leans on gifts:

One gift.

He’s really into Christian roulette wheels.

Today, that’s the sane collage.

If you dig borrowed interest, your party’s just begun. Camilo Wallace also stars in super-reaction videos. They’re not voiced, or really animated. But you can watch superhero trailers in full, with Camilo staring like a dead-eyed…some kind of construct. Mannequin? Scarecrow? Too life-like. Piñata? Camilo stares ahead like a dead-eyed piñata.

In his defense, Andre could have retired off this trick in 2008. He started in 2018, netting views in the high tens. I don’t judge art by popularity, but I do judge ads. These ads suck shit off a St. Benedict medal.

But there’s more to section breaks than success. There’s love.

The heart of this future blockbuster? A tennis kink. Few have pined for their OC the way Andre wants to die beside Melissa Krugger: Tennis Cyborg.

Meet the god-queen of student athletes. Melissa’s a junior tennis player “that has never lost.” Preemptively squashing tension. Not that we’ll see her play: Melissa’s here to make out with Andre. Camilo. I, like the author, meant to write Camilo.

A near future…sounds romantic.

And relatable: I also keep a gun on my Maybach, and it’s a babe magnet. Less athletes and more cops, but that might go for Camilo too. I can Google the age range for ranked junior tennis, or enjoy my morning. My kitchen table has a pomegranate, three fried eggs, oversized bacon, and gimmicky mochi pancakes waiting. That calorie nuke divides me and the news. I don’t need to know if Camilo’s a sporty groomer. I can teleport that question into the future, to your breakfast. Tell me how that works out.

Melissa centers a few morality plays about dominating tennis camp.

Maybe junior tennis starts at twenty. In that case, drool’s a refreshing break from murderous hate. If we all focused on of-age tennis waifus maybe we wouldn’t GARROTE THE FUCKING FUTURE let’s take five.

Back. Melissa has more charming tales of winning. Think MJF, without the heart or jury duty. While your niece shitposts about her rights, Melissa stacks trophies.

Melissa’s proud of peaking before prom. The orcs protesting varsity games should take notes. They’ve reached a depth of failure known only to dead samurai and DNC chairs. Also: what?

My aunt had a saying: “What in fucking hell? Why do you hoard this shit? Are you starting an asylum book group? Or bringing a paper mache nazi to life? You’re ten.” Nice lady, but not as nice as Melissa. She keeps two pistols behind her backup trophies, in case someone insults her fans.

Alright, Andre depicts Aryan winners meeting electable heroes. That doesn’t make him an advocate. He could be making a point. The heart of Melissa’s character is hating losers, not loving her coach.

Well, we won’t jump at shadows like the rest of the voting fan club. Until whatever crazy shit’s next. C’mon. Let’s have it. Hell’s door was open when I got there.

Ah, a dissident purge. Classic Superman. Or maybe that’s a Dunham bit. The whiners didn’t appreciate Melissa, so now they can appreciate heaven. Besides, the tribe’s just fine.

Quite the twist. I came for Xerox Superman, and got a throwback Evil Superman instead! I’m immune to Wehrmacht Clark at this point, but I haven’t seen a flying groomer in years. Brazilian Homelander proved me wrong: enough crazy shit counts as an original character. I just hate him.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Eric Rion, who keeps THREE pistols behind his trophies.

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: E.T. Digital Companion🌭

Do you ever wish you could be someone else? Someone different? Someone better? Maybe you wish you could be a kinder person, a more forgiving one. Maybe you wish you’d made different choices in your life. Why did you waste so much time in your teens and twenties alone in your room playing Sonic the Hedgehog games? You could have been somebody. Somebody who doesn’t see Sonic the Hedgehog’s bare feet every time they close their eyes.

Well, today I’m offering you the opportunity to go back and right what once went wrong. Afraid? You needn’t be. We have a companion on this journey. A digital companion.

Yes, it’s E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial. Admission: I feared and hated E.T. as a child. His odd proportions unsettled me and I was too young to really understand what was happening in the film, so I believed for a time that E.T. had given Elliott some kind of virulent space cancer. Would that I could say I would have been brave enough to beat E.T. to death with hammers. In truth, I would have fled from him, back to the safety of my room. And then I probably would have spent all weekend playing Sonic Adventure.

Those of you familiar with industry lore may know that the original E.T. game for the Atari 2600 is one of the most reviled titles in video game history. It was released in 1983 and allegedly contributed to the Video Game Crash of that decade. After that, it was some time before they were ready to try crafting interactive experiences about a potbellied space freak again — E.T.: Digital Companion didn’t come out on the Game Boy Color until 2001.

Now, it has to be said that E.T. isn’t an immediately obvious candidate for a video game adaptation. In today’s post-Life is Strange world, maybe. An emotional, slow-paced E.T. adventure game could do just fine. But back then? They botched multiple Back to the Future and RoboCop titles in the NES era. What hope did this stocky little turd have?

Sorry. That’s the old me talking. The bitter, cruel me. I can be better than that. I know I can. E.T. will help me. Let us begin.

E.T. wants to know our name. He has a number of helpful suggestions here to cut down on typing with the GameBoy Color’s d-pad. “Merritt” isn’t in there, but “M.K.” is, weirdly.

That’s fine, though. We’re shedding this identity. Becoming something new.

Omega. As in, “alpha and the,” not as in the Supernatural fanfiction sex thing. When our purification is complete, such knowledge will be scoured from our minds. The words “Foreverial Tiedup Delitized” will have no meaning to us. If they already don’t to you, I suggest you keep it that way.

Ok, a little personal, E.T. Why do you need to know this before we play your video game? But if you insist: my name is Omega Chadwick. Can we start yet?

No, not yet. We have to tell E.T. our nickname, our birthday, and our interests. E.T. craves knowledge of our human lives. He has so much to learn from us. Well, E.T., my favorite human pastime is “Feed Flopglopple.”

But E.T. is not yet sated.

I’m trying so hard, E.T. I’m trying so hard to be a kinder, more patient person. So few people get a second chance, and I would feel terrible about squandering such a gift. But I’ve got to be honest: I’m getting a little sick of your shit. Thankfully, and somewhat depressingly, the game has anticipated this outcome.

Nobody said rebirth would be easy. In Elden Ring I had to find and deliver an astral fetus to a kindly magical woman wearing an impractical hat to respec. Here, we must endure a boss rush of personal questions. It’s essentially a Mega Man game with more data entry.

Two things. First, this background has made me realize that E.T. been pasted into each of these prompt screens with a solid white box around him. Could the artist not have cut that out? Second, how did they make an E.T. game where he asks for your phone number and not include the character’s famous line about telephone calls? Steven Spielberg set up “E.T. phone home” in 1982 and nearly two decades later, these assholes made this skinny fat crime against the Abrahamic God say “we need your digits.” I’m beginning to think that this licensed game based on a decades-old movie for the Game Boy Color didn’t have a very large budget or a great deal of care poured into it.

Old habits die hard. Yesterday’s self rages against its dissolution. My instinct is to go mean, but we have to ask: what would Omega Chadwick do?

There we go.

Is it just me, or has E.T.’s expression taken on a leering quality? He’s a little too interested in the topic. Do his people have genitals or gender, anyway? His Wikipedia article says “male,” but mostly avoids pronouns. There was apparently a debate over the character’s gender on Twitter seven years ago, which feels like a lifetime ago now. We won’t use Twitter in our new life. We won’t ever have used Twitter. We will be pure and good.

“Addy?” the plantlike space goblin asks, in the lingo of a WhatsApp weed dealer on his way to bring you a strain called “Reese’s Pieces.” It’s pieces, ok? It was never “reesees peesees.” If you say “peesees,” reader, you can go to hell.

Ah, but despite my efforts, the old, familiar rage wells up in me. I’m sorry. It’s not you I’m mad at.

Mull that over in your rotten Venusian head, hated star creature. Omega Chadwick has nothing but love in his young, hopeful heart for his fellow humans. He mistrusts and loathes the interloper from beyond the stars.

Your questions tire me, alien. You dare to set broad, ungainly foot on Holy Terra, the cradle of humanity, and you pepper me ceaselessly with these inquiries. My patience wears thin. Thus: I live in Boulder, Colorado. My favorite color is blue, the hue of your foul, copper-tinged blood. My least favorite color is the dull brown of your hide. My favorite animal is bees. My best friend is named Mr. T. Not that one.

Oh, and my pet’s name?

It’s Bong. Thanks for asking!

Surely my trial is at an end. I have given so much, selected from so many suggested options, painstakingly typed in my responses using the on-screen keyboard when the possibilities presented were insufficiently funny.

And yet the beast hungers still. He will not be satisfied until he has taken all that I am. What is the name of your school? When is your first day of school? Do you know all of the emergency exits at your school? If E.T. arrived at your school one day with an automatic weapon and asked you if you believed in God, how would you answer?

If you asked me — the old me — in 2001, I probably would have said Linkin Park. But Omega Chadwick isn’t that person. Omega has no need for the soulful desperation of Chester Bennington or the edgy hip-hop stylings of Mike Shinoda. He is not alienated from humanity. Far from it. His soul resonates to a more primitive rhythm.

I began this process to become a better person. Is hatred sharpened into a burning spear pointed at the heart of an interstellar meddler better than a diffuse raging against oneself and the world? That was a rhetorical question. Here’s another real one.

And answered.

Is this the entire game? What possible reason could E.T. have for needing to know all of this? I will permit one final inquiry before I press the power switch on my Game Boy Color and go outside to enjoy being a healthy child with lots of friends.

Oh, E.T. Sweet, simple E.T. You must know by now. After all, you were the one who set me on the path.

I will see the stars, E.T. I will traverse the galaxy until I arrive at whatever stinking rock you crawled off of, and, well, we needn’t concern ourselves with what will come next.

At last. At last. We are reborn. Let us explore this new world together. And oh, I forgot that I went back and changed my name to Alpha at some point. Why be last when you can be first, am I right?

Hold on. What am I looking at here?

I have… e-mail? From Elliott? Addressed to a name I erased from the game? What manner of devilry is this?

More “e-mail.” It’s from E.T, and… is that a mushroom cloud in the background? “Be Good!… or else,” is that the idea? We’ll see about that.

To be clear, the Game Boy Color does not have any onboard internet-accessing capabilities. “Sending” a message with the E.T. Digital Companion would involve laboriously typing out a subject line (there is no actual body field) and then handing the device to the intended recipient. Here E.T. has made a fatal miscalculation. If I’m within GameBoy-passing range, I’m also well within hammer striking range.

Let’s see what else we’ve got here. You can put your to-do list and school schedule in here, in case you wanted to make things easier on bullies and/or kidnappers. But, what’s this? “Cool Stuff?”

The first “cool thing” is a slideshow. Let’s take a look at some iconic images from the film E.T. on a 160×144 screen in 56 glorious colors.

Fantastic. Next.

Or not. I guess if E.T. just gave you the pictures, you wouldn’t enjoy them so much. It’s the same way with today’s mobile games. Sure, you could look up JPEGs of anime girls on the internet, a human technology essentially created for the proliferation of such images, but it doesn’t hit the same as unlocking one after grinding out hundreds of hours of gameplay or spending thousands of dollars on a digital slot machine, you know?

Let’s try trivia.

“I know you liked it when they dressed me up as a lady. I liked it too.”

To hell with this.

No. Get me out of here.

Oh, I’ll try harder, alright. Try harder to remind you to stay in your hateful corner of the universe. It’s time to feed Flopglopple, which, as longtime readers of this article will recall, is my Fav Hobby.

Do you want the world’s worst virtual pet? E.T. Digital Companion has got you. Thrill as you force Flopglopple to devour apple after apple, waiting to see if it finally bursts. I am your God, Flopglopple. Your friend E.T. has no power here.

Ah, so your kind can know misery. Good. Do not forget this feeling. I control every aspect of your wretched existence. Your name is no longer Flopglopple. It is Felipe.

Now, let me check my to-do list.

Ignore the part about it being 1998. I skipped time ahead to force Felipe to experience years of neglect in an instant and E.T. Digital Companion began to groan in protest, slowing down and glitching out. There is, as the screen says, no time to waste. Alpha Chadwick has put off his Great Work long enough.

Let us, at last, play “Bicycle Race.”

Mission accomplished.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Harvey Penguini.

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Dr. Anthony King, Hollywood Love Doctor

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: The Green Team

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: The Top Ten Fighting Games Where Jesus Fights Santa Claus 🌭

The holidays are right around the corner! The decorations are up! The scented candles are out! And the judging of everyone else’s method for celebrating has begun. No matter what you do, Halloween and Christmas decorations will always go up far too early or ridiculously too late. And, if you’re someone who puts up Thanksgiving decorations, you have too much time on your hands and need to stop. Just throw a pilgrim hat on a pumpkin or something.

Of course, the holidays are also about bringing family together. And if there’s anything that defines the bond between family, it’s fighting. It isn’t a holiday unless one dark, dark secret from the past is revealed and someone else begins the process of a divorce that’s somehow going to suck in everyone. And if there’s two things that define the holidays, it’s the non-denominational figures of Santa Claus and Jesus of Nazareth.

But, you only have so much time during the holidays. Between shopping and pretending that it takes up much time, you don’t have much time! What if you can only spare a few minutes for fighting or Jesus and Santa? What if you needed a game that both reaffirmed the violence of the holidays with some of the most beloved figures in history? Well we’ve got news: Fighting games fitting that description exist.

So, without further ado, here are the top 10 fighting games where Jesus fights Santa Claus.

10.) Fight of Gods

Right off the bat, let’s start with a relatively recent one. Fight of Gods is a 2017 PC game in which you can play as a deity from pantheons around the world. Zeus, Anubis, Moses, Buddha, and most of the rest of the gang are all here! There’s one guy missing for good theological reasons that South Park can probably better explain. We don’t want to get into it! We don’t need to get into it! Let’s keep on going!

While it’s not the best fighting game on the planet, Fight of Gods actually does allow you to choose Jesus and Santa Claus as fighters. Therefore, it earns a place at the top of this list.

9.) Fight of Gods

You might be thinking I’m talking about the 2017 version. This is actually the completely identical edition for the Nintendo Switch that came out in 2019. In this version, as with the previous version, you can play as both Jesus Christ, the savior of humanity, the king of kings, the big kahuna, and Santa Claus, the savior of fun, the kris of kringle, the bigger kahuna. While the Steam Deck has made this feature a little less useful, The Nintendo Switch version of Fight of Gods was the first time you could take it to go! Christmas mass, here we come!

8.) Fight of Gods

What’s really cool about Fight of Gods is that Jesus and Santa Claus have Jesus and Santa Claus-themed powers. Like, Jesus can do a big super combo by ascending into a ray of light from Heaven! And Santa Claus – oh man – Santa Claus makes his reindeer and sleigh drive super, super fast into Jesus. And Jesus is like, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me a second freaking time!”

Also, Jesus starts the match by breaking off the cross and he uses the stumps from the arm parts of the cross to punch harder. It’s like Hellboy’s big arm that’s cool, but with Jesus it’s much more like Heavenboy. Santa Claus can throw gifts and stuff, too, which makes sense. He can also have a Christmas tree pop up real fast and you wonder if Jesus even knows what an evergreen tree looks like or if he’s like, “Whoa! What is this thing? We only have palm and fig trees where I’m from!”

7.) Fight of Gods

You might be thinking, “Can’t I just make Jesus and Santa Claus in Tekken or Street Fighter 6 or Super Smash Bros.?” And the answer is, of course, yes, you could make those characters. You could spend hours making Jesus look like a gaunt man from Venice Beach whose only hobby is pushups. You could spend days making Santa Claus look like the only fat person on Earth who’s comfortable in that many layers of clothing.

Instead, in Fight of Gods, the seventh entry on our list, Jesus and Santa Claus are already right there for you! They’re pre-made and ready to go with their own levels such as the Garden of Eden and the North Pole. They also have alternate colors for both of them with textures that make you wonder if it’s problematic or if you are the racist one for thinking it.

6.) Fight of Gods

To answer the biggest question on your mind, Jesus’ level is the Garden of Eden one and Santa Claus’ level is the North Pole one. These sure are some fun stages in our next entry: Fight of Gods! The North Pole level features a wintery background – mimicking where Santa Claus lives – with elves and gifts scattered about! The Garden of Eden level features a lush forest – mimicking where the first man disobeyed God and doomed us all to the stain of original sin – with a bored-looking Adam and Eve watching in the background! Have they sinned yet? Have they tasted knowledge? They’re not talking!

5.) Fight of Gods

You know, part of me does wonder if – maybe – Adam and Eve saw Jesus fighting Santa Claus. I don’t know how this might happen. Satan could show them the future on a retro-TV screen like the Time Variance Authority does in fun Marvel stuff. Although a TV screen would be futuristic to Adam and Eve no matter what, so that’s worth keeping in mind. It’s also possible that, because Jesus himself is God, that he took Santa Claus to the time period where they could do the least amount of destruction if things got out of hand. That’s pretty cool, actually. Jesus and Santa may have beef with each other, but they both genuinely care about the children.

4.) Fight of Gods

There was also a version of Fight of Gods for PlayStation 4. Did you know that? It’s a fact!

3.) Fight of Gods

The PlayStation 4 version of Fight of Gods actually replaces “Jesus” with a similar-looking character named “Saint.” Don’t tell anyone, but it’s still Jesus – but instead of big punching crucifix hands, he’s got angel wings like the X-Men character Angel. But Santa Claus, he doesn’t deal with small fries. What “saint” is this one, anyone? One of the big names like Peter? Or are we getting into the weeds with Saint Genesius of Rome? Santa doesn’t know, so why should he fight him? Santa is mad at Jesus for co-opting Christmas. Santa has no reason to be mad at some random person who got mauled by lions for sport in the coliseum.

2.) Fight of Gods

If I could go back to Adam and Eve for a second. So, imagine they’re in this perfect garden, right? They know no pain. They know no suffering. They’re walking around pointing at random animals going like, “That one’s a turtle. But that one’s a tortoise. They’re different, okay?” It’s a good life, but also, it’s hard to appreciate that when it’s always been good. Maybe they’re content. Maybe they’re bored. But God was pretty clear about one thing: Don’t eat from the Tree of Knowledge. And Adam and Eve were really good about it.

But then, Jesus and Santa Claus pop in. These are two people they’ve never seen before. In fact, they’ve never seen anyone before. Santa Claus looks insane to them with his massive red coat. But even Jesus – wearing a loincloth and a crown of thorns – looks overdressed to them. It would be like if aliens appeared in your yard and started fist fighting. You’d watch them and realize that there’s far more to the universe you understood. So maybe they really got into the fighting thing. They saw Santa beat up Jesus and then the two left and then Eve was like, “Maybe we could learn how to do special moves if we eat this fruit.” And then a snake came by and said, “That’s true!” And so they did.

Like McWorld, we must admit as a society it could happen.

1.) Fight of Gods

Apparently there was also an arcade version that looks better and adds new characters! That’s pretty great! And, unlike the PlayStation 4, it’s still Jesus! Sounds like we just got a new best fight between Santa and Jesus!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Jared Clack.

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Beenado🌭

About three months ago I kicked in the doors of the Hotdog office and announced to the room. “I will be covering the Beenado. Nobody else even looks at the Beenado. IT’S MINE.” Usually, contested articles are decided by Kumite, but weirdly, no one fought me for 9-1-1’s three-episode season 8 premiere event. Weird, but ok.

If you’re unaware of the show 9-1-1, you, like me a mere matter of months ago, are in the minority. The season eight premiere was heavily promoted by the network. They had billboards all over Chicago that I assumed were an elaborate bit. The show was created by Ryan Murphy as sort of a Law & Order meets ER with a pinch of MacGyver. The main characters include a 911 operator, played by Jenniffer Love Hewitt, LAPD police officer Athena Grant, played by Angela Bassett, and a whole squadron of firefighters, including Peter Krause and Lou Ferrigno Jr.

Ryan Murphy won a couple of Emmys, and people forgot that he is a deeply unserious man. I don’t mean that as an insult. I think if you asked the man who wrote an episode of Glee called “Grilled Cheesus” to frame a discussion about grief and religion, he would agree that he’s just a little clown like the rest of us. Here are some medical emergencies that the cast of 9-1-1 and its spin-off 9-1-1 Lone Star have rescued people from: woman with harmonica stuck in mouth, man sucked up into the brushes at car wash, woman strangled by snake, woman strangled by octopus, woman stalked by tiger, man who swallowed live frog, baby rescued from pipe after being flushed down toilet, and man in a porta potty sucked up by storm and dropped into lake.

All of these emergencies are played dead seriously. There’s a human life involved in this objectively hilarious porta potty accident, you guys. A man just wanted to have diarrhea at a fair like an American, and now he’s drowning in the dunk tank. It’s not funny!

I think the gimmick with 9-1-1 is to try and draw people in with a big goofy promise like “explosion at the bull semen factory” (a real premise for 9-1-1 Lone Star) and then get you to stick around for some pretty intense drama. When the season 8 premiere trailer dropped, and it was just a 15 second clip of a woman screaming the word bees, I thought I knew what to expect. It was bees.

Episode one was, in fact, wall-to-wall bee hijinks. We begin with a man flying a small aircraft who explains to the air traffic control operator that he’s just sold his ad agency after 30 years, and the plane is his reward! He’s also kind of a dick. I’m sure things will end well for him; oh no, he hit a swarm of bees with his plane. The bees come in through the vents and sting him, causing him to swerve up and into another, larger airplane. That’s right; two planes and beenado have collided before the title card. We are one minute and thirty seconds into the show.

We cut to some scenes that recap important information from previous seasons. It’s pretty clear that the network intended to bring in new viewers with the Beenado. They don’t want this show to die after a mere eight seasons. This could be their Grey’s Anatomy. It’s eight years young. LAPD police officer Athena Grant looks right into the camera and says, “Dennis Jenkins murdered my fiance, and he got away with it for 30 years until I brought him to justice, and now he has made some kind of deal with the federal government?” Really giving us her entire previous seven-season arc in one sentence.

Athena Grant escorting her former fiance’s killer to trial is weirdly the main plotline of the Beenado story arc, and it is disappointingly beeless. It feels like Angela Bassett has a line item in her contract about never saying the word bee. She is a smart woman. Where was I? Ah, yes, the bees.

The youngest member of the cast is forced to deliver the title line, “It’s a bee-nado,” and he does it without an ounce of joy. A truly criminal line reading. He might as well be saying, “It’s my dentist, Larry Bee-nado.” No one in the cast was even one tenth as psyched for the bees as I was.

We’ll come back to that plane crash from the intro later. First, we have to rewind to the initial bee release. A truck transporting 22 million bees…somewhere? A bee farm? Has overturned on the highway. The bees are free and they’re pissed off about it.

The truck driver is spectacularly killed by bees immediately. They surround the car of a young mother with her daughter who happens to be allergic to bees. Since we saw the opening scene, we know bees can come in through the vents, and they do. After the girl gets stung, her mom is able to use an EpiPen to stop the allergic reaction, but then she reveals that she, too, is allergic to bees and has also been stung. Jenniffer Love Hewitt does her best to face-react to this. It doesn’t go well.

LAFD Truck 118 responds to the initial 911 call and finds a second driver in the truck unconscious and covered in stings. They try to revive him, but there’s something obstructing his airway. Can you guess what it is?

A) Bees

B) Bees!

C) BeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES!!!

It’s bees. His throat is stuffed with living bees. The firefighters suction the bees out with a vacuum, and when he regains consciousness, the truck driver says, “Why do I taste honey?” Everyone has a fun little chuckle at this poor man’s near death experience while the remaining 21,000,981 bees happily try to claw their way inside the firetruck.


The remaining fire fighters manage to calm the bees by redirecting smoke from the burning truck over the car. They get the mother and daughter out of the car and to safety, but there’s still the small issue of the remaining swarm of pissed off bees that flies away. Now you might be asking yourself: couldn’t people simply go inside to avoid the bees? Yes. After the initial accident the game of the show is finding reasons that people absolutely cannot avoid a swarm of bees.

We cut to a rich woman and her assistant planning a launch party for her new perfume, T by Tori. The assistant assures her that everything is ready for the launch party tomorrow, except what is that they’re standing in front of? It’s a flower wall. The Jaws theme begins to play in my mind. The camera pans up over the flower wall to the top of a nearby tent, absolutely covered in bees. This rich woman is bee food.

The next day, the bees swarm the perfume launch. The perfume contains floral scents that attract the bees, but also banana which apparently makes them angry. Luckily, most of the party guests simply take cover indoors and are fine, but the assistant, the only person actually wearing the perfume, jumps into the pool and ends up having to stay underwater using a hose to breathe, so vicious is the bees’ hatred of her.

The firefighters put their fastest runner in a beekeeping suit, cover him in the perfume, and have him sprint past the pool to attract the bees. He leads the bees to a tent where a professional beekeeper can vacuum them into a little container. It’s wild how something so scary can be continuously defeated by a vacuum cleaner.

The beekeeper says there are 1-2 hundred thousand bees captured by his vacuuming powers, which the fire chief points out leaves 14.8 million killer bees still free in Los Angeles. This is terrible news. Whatever will happen to the rest of the swarm? How will humanity defeat them? That must be why there are two more full episodes in this three part bee story arc, right? WRONG. The bees are GONE NOW. You won’t see another bee for the rest of the damn show. There are so few bees in the remaining two whole episodes that Tim Minear, the co-producer and showrunner of 9-1-1 had to make a public statement about the lack of bees:

Basically, 9/11 made it so that 9-1-1 couldn’t do the plane crash episode they wanted to open with. Remember that plane crash at the beginning of the episode? Athena Grant ends up landing the plane successfully, forgiving her fiance’s murderer, and putting a whole bunch of pedophiles in jail, and that’s nice and everything, but you know what it’s not? Relevant to a friggin bee-nado. If you tell me I’m going to get three full episodes of bee-nado, and then you give me a bunch of plane crash stuff, instead, I’m as pissed off as all 14.8 million unaccounted-for bees in the bee-nado. This is not what I tuned in for.

So, the bee-nado was a friggin lie. The bee-nado lied to me, and then it made me a liar because I told you I would write about three episodes of Beenado, and I was only given one episode of content. On behalf of the liars at ABC, I would like to apologize to you. Is this why no one would Kumite me for this? Did they all know?

Maybe they shut the whole thing down because it would simply bee too awesome. They had to cancel 9-1-1 Lone Star after the explosion at the bull semen factory because there’s simply nowhere else to go from there. It’s possible that 9-1-1 couldn’t recover from a full bee-nado, so they simply had to give the public only a taste of what we truly wanted. I hope they open season nine with 14.8 million bees descending from the sky and everyone going, “Oh yeah, the bees.”

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Aaron Croston.