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Nerding Day: DressX đźŚ
I’ve always felt the problem with clothing is that it’s a real, tangible product I can purchase and not a ghostly apparition floating over the general area of my body. I want ghost clothes. Luckily, digital fashion companies were briefly in style when we were all excited about the Metaverse, and a few are still hanging in there, so for only ninety dollars, (a picture of) you too can look like you’ve hunted and killed Grimace and are wearing his intestines as a trophy.
There are quite a few digital fashion companies out there now, but I’m going to focus on one that I think is the most egregious. They charge a ton of money for almost no product, they way overpromise on what they can deliver, and they’ve collaborated with a ton of legitimate brands like Coca-Cola, American Eagle, and Gucci, but I trust them about as much as a guy selling Hefty bags of blood from inside his trench coat.
This look from their Coca-Cola collaboration really displays the level of craft DressX is offering to their biggest brand partners. Their slogan should be, “You too can maybe look like fancy clothing is glitching into existence sort of near your body as long as you don’t move too fast!
DressX likes to talk a lot about how sustainable digital fashion is. Sure, if we could all be naked all the time, that would save a ton of energy and material; unfortunately, since these clothes don’t actually exist, they’re not saving jack shit. Also, in addition to selling digital assets, DressX sells NFTs, Mother Nature’s favorite garrote. So, if you wear a regular outfit with an NFT dress over it, you’re able to spend twice as much money and really kick the planet in the dick. As one TikTok comment said, “Yes, destroy the environment shawty. Go crypto!”
You really have to dig into DressX to figure out what they’re actually selling right now. If you look very, very, hard you can find a teeny, tiny print explanation about DressX’s actual products. It’s, in their own words, close to nothing, but don’t worry– it won’t stop them from selling it to you for sometimes hundreds of dollars.
DressX makes it seem as if what you’re purchasing from them is this amazing piece of clothing you can slap on for live streams, video chats, Metaverse avatars, Instagram pictures, or dating profiles. In reality, it sort of works for two of those things. I’ve seen a few pictures of people standing perfectly still on Instagram where they almost look like their clothes aren’t a cartoon. Since there’s no explanation on the site of how this digital asset will be applied, the only way I could figure it out was to pay DressX a dollar to Photoshop an extremely ugly bucket hat onto my head.
So, that’s where the technology is at right now. You’re paying real money to pretend to wear a make-believe hat. If you pay even more money, you can pretend to wear a diamond-encrusted lizard skin pope hat. However, if you want to wear your diamond-encrusted lizard skin pope hat to a Skype meeting with your boss, you’re out of luck.
One of the DressX applications they advertise is how you can wear the clothing on video streams, but imagine going to a Zoom meeting about the quarterly budget, and your blouse keeps popping off, or your business suit glitches away to reveal your novelty World’s Horniest Christian Grandpa t-shirt. As long as nudity and radical T-shirts are frowned upon in the workplace, digital clothing is worthless for video chat. The technology is currently on par with an episode of the 1999 children’s television program Reboot.
To be clear, this isn’t one guy in a basement running a scam. According to Forbes, DressX got fifteen million in series A funding in March of 2023. They’re the largest platform for digital-only fashion, and I think it’s because they employed a pretty ingenious strategy of making a terrible product that so enraged people they had to scream about it in the comments of their TikTok videos. As we know, the algorithm is stupid and just sees this as engagement, which means they could show investors TikToks of their product with five million views. Sure, all of these views were driven by people commenting, “This looks like shit,” but who cares! Five million people saw this shit.
They often respond to comments about how the clothes look terrible with an overly confident “Oh yeah, does this look terrible?” and then a photo of a woman in another awful dress with a hand twice the size of her head. Then a hundred thousand people respond, “Bestie, it’s giving if Pepto-Bismal didn’t fuck” and another venture capitalist firm FedEx’s them eight million dollars.
Things really took off when they started making TikToks with the headline, “Can you even tell this is a digital dress?” Of course you can. The dress looks like it was pulled off of a character from the creepy CGI Polar Express movie, and it’s blinking in and out of existence every three seconds, but that’s the point.
DressX designers include big names like Crosty, R3N3GADES, Bonko, Spark +Rebel, and if you’re trying to guess which one I made up, it’s none of them. Those are all real DressX designers. I know you assumed R3N3GADES must be fake; why two 3s instead of E, but the third E is just a regular E? I DON’T KNOW, but someone does because they really named their design company that.
They’re now holding design contests where people can use AI to make clothing inspired by famous brands, and then DressX will put them into digital production. However, even the most advanced AI still doesn’t really get the human body, so the clothing these monsters spit out end up looking like the alien from The Thing impersonating a mocap suit. DressX is the best purveyor of digital herpes jackets on the market today.
DressX assured me that the girlies love the vibe, but to me, the vibe is a robot trying to infiltrate my life like a Terminator and doing a terrible job. Can you imagine a scenario where the Nigerian prince asking you for money sent this as proof that they’re a real person? This is the most suspicious outfit I’ve ever seen. How is it possible to make digital clothing that doesn’t fit? I don’t know, but somehow DressX has accomplished it.
Remember earlier in the article when I said I paid DressX a dollar to photoshop an ugly hat on my head? What ended up happening instead was DressX stole a dollar from me. They sent me an email saying my picture was attached and it was not. When I pointed that out, I got no response. I don’t know why I expected just slightly more than that, but honestly, I’m having trouble feeling bad about not having to see what I look like in that ugly ass hat. I would rather have a dollar stolen from me, honestly. Thank you, DressX, for doing me the kindness of not delivering a product.
If you’re one of the millions of people DressX believes are out there waiting to be haunted by the ghost of pants, maybe try another company. It seems like if we can make a random person look exactly like Tom Cruise with the magic of computers we could also fake a decent jumpsuit but the technology somehow isn’t there yet.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Sean Chase, who has bulk plasma for sale if you’re chill.
As they say in Mortal Kombat, welcome back to the stage of history! By now you’ve probably already purchased Mortal Kombat 1 and have spent hours enjoying sharp gameplay and a continued inexplicable use of the letter “k” instead of “c” as a branding exercise. Also, Mortal Kombat 1 is actually Mortal Kombat 12 because it reboots the series in canon. Also, Mortal Kombat 9 was just called Mortal Kombat because it also rebooted the series in canon. So if you’re keeping track, there have been three different Mortal Kombat 1 games: Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat, and Mortal Kombat 1.
Just like the devious shapeshifter and weirdly cool hang Shang Tsung, Mortal Kombat loves reinventing itself. Whether you’re tearing someone’s head off in an enchanted forest or punching someone’s head off in a haunted forest, Mortal Kombat has long explored the diverse world of two people hurting each other in a quasi-spooky place. And, you know what? It’s worked for them. If only all of us could find the peace in our hearts that Mortal Kombat has found ninjas throwing different elements at one another.
With the success of the series, Mortal Kombat has spawned three theatrical releases, in this article referred to as “movies.” Two of those “movies” (or “films” as they’re also called when trying to impress someone on a date who’s losing interest fast) were successes! The first of those successful movies was called “Mortal Kombat.”
The other successful movie was called, and this is going to throw you for a huge loop, “Mortal Kombat.”
If you’re a fan of Mortal Kombat, I’ve got great news: These movies are, in fact, based on that video game series. They have action. They’ve got excitement. They’ve got credits at the end with fun music. I don’t want to spoil it, but our old friends Sub-Zero and Scorpion appear! And they’re both so cool. One throws ice and the other is all about fire but he throws a rope. They’re so cool, mom. Oh, and Reptile is cool too! Acid spit!
Between the two talkies called “Mortal Kombat,” filmmakers decided to try something original and created one called “Mortal Kombat Annihilation.” Whether it’s a good movie or not is lost to time, which means it’s absolutely not a good movie. It turns out that the key to the success of a Mortal Kombat film is having a “story” rather than just pointing to random characters from the video game series while going, “This guy? Right? You remember him? Cool, huh?”
None of the last four hundred words are important.
What’s important is that Mortal Kombat Annihilation has a middle grade novelization that includes pictures from the movie! Whoa! It’s like being able to own the movie before it leaves the theaters! All the disemboweling of the games, but now Ms. Teiss can yell at you for doing a book report on it. What do you expect my parents to do? They bought me the book! It’s their fault, Ms. Teiss!
Mortal Kombat Annihilation is a 59-page-long book. That might not sound like much, but the book is actually way bigger than you think because it includes eight pages of color photos from the film! The crazy thing? They don’t even count as pages. Those 59 pages are all meat. There’s not a wasted moment in the book. Nobody here is trying to fill space here to hit a specific word count to get paid for the assignment. Nobody would ever type a redundant sentence to hit a specific word count to get paid for the assignment. Personally, I find it offensive that someone would type the same idea three different ways while routinely clicking “tools” and then “word count.”
The important thing to know is that Mortal Kombat Annihilation is a direct sequel to the movie “Mortal Kombat” but entirely unrelated to the movie “Mortal Kombat.” That latter “Mortal Kombat” is a reboot that isn’t in canon. It all makes a lot of sense if you’re chugging a bottle of turpentine and slamming a car door on your head.
Chapter one begins with the haunting lines:
The next couple paragraphs specify what “Earth” is, which is nice for people who don’t keep up with video games and/or consciousness. It turns out that, while Liu Kang and Sonya Blade and Johnny Cage had stopped Shang Tsung, that was only the beginning! Shao Kahn has refused to accept the terms of the tournament and now Outworld is invading Earth!
Also, I wanted to make fun of the Rayden/Raiden thing, but the games seemed to also jump back and forth so I can’t really give you anything on that front.
If you’re a fan of Mortal Kombat, you know this means that this story is supposed to be an adaptation of Mortal Kombat 3, which is weirdly called that because it was the third Mortal Kombat game. I don’t get it either. But it also means that Mortal Kombat Annihilation features kameos from some of the koolest kombatants you kan konsider.
Fortunately, an entire interdimensional war based on three and a half games of a long running series can be pretty well reduced to 59 pages. And the space is well used. Here’s a passage that, when you break it down, is about 2% of the entire book’s length:
I’m not critical of the writing. It’s just impressive that that’s genuinely a good sized-portion of the book. If you read that one passage about 50 or 60 times, it’ll have taken about as much time as reading the entire book. And since people on TikTok tend to talk more about how many books they’ve read rather than quality or content, this is an easy one to throw on the list to impress strangers who would gladly plunge their hand into your stomach like it’s the movie Saw for a key that unlocks success.
Speaking of success, I have to take my hat off, then put it back on, and then walk out the door like Grandpa Simpson for the way they write Jax. Jax is black. Which means he has to be written like Gary Coleman was auditioning to play Mr. T. Jax isn’t a bad character in the games. But you do get a sense that whoever wrote or edited this book really… lacked cultural experience. Is that a way to put it? Lacked cultural experience?
Speaking of lacking cultural experience, this book loves telling you who’s beautiful. Jade. Sheeva. Heck, we all know Kitana is supposed to be Liu Kang’s love interest despite the fact she’s clearly better for Bo’ Rai Cho. Mortal Kombat Annihilation has a confused mid-puberty-like horniness. This author really wants to kiss Kitana so much, just right on the face.
What makes this book a delight to read, besides that it ends, is just how weirdly hard it tries to shovel in every Mortal Kombat character possible. To be fair, that is part of the movie. On the other hand, it makes for stellar passages like:
My only note would be that I wished there was an even greater ratio of talking about fighting to actually fighting. That said, it would probably make this book longer than 59 pages, which would ultimately turn it into something closer to a war crime than a middle grade book for children.
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Mike Drucker is an Emmy-nominated comedian, author, and television writer. He’s written for some shows you probably liked. He’s written for some shows you probably didn’t like. He also worked as a localization editor for Nintendo of America and wrote an entire book on Silent Hill 2. His desperation is only matched by his loneliness.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: AnAndy, who is so surprised by this dedication that his mouth is a perfect gaping O.
Everyone wanted in on that sweet Power Rangers heat in the ’90s. And while Saban Entertainment cranked out their share of shows based on Japanese tokusatsu to capitalize on the craze for spandex-clad warriors battling bug-eyed monsters like VR Troopers, Masked Rider, and the horrifying Big Bad Beetleborgs, they weren’t the only ones with their eyes on the prize.
In 1994, DIC Productions, who put out at least half of the American cartoons produced in the ’80s and ’90s, partnered with Tsuburaya Productions to create Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad. If you’re unfamiliar, I bet you’re picturing a Power Rangers-like team of samurai-themed guys. If so, you are wrong. This is a show about four kids in a band called Team Samurai who occasionally go inside their Compaq brand computers to kill monsters devised by a socially awkward outcast classmate and brought to life by Tim Curry.
Sam(urai) Collins and his bandmates Tanker, Syd, and Amp are drawn into battle against the evil Kilokahn, a military AI gone rogue, when a power surge turns Sam into a video game character of his own creation. Sam is played by Matthew Lawrence, who was also Shawn’s brother on Boy Meets World and one of the kids in Mrs. Doubtfire (the one who sees his dad pissing in drag).
Sam’s friends Tanker and Syd were portrayed by Kevin Castro and Robin Mary Florence, respectively, who are best known for… Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad. Amp was played by Troy Slaten, who was in Parker Lewis Can’t Lose and is now a lawyer interested in “ending the scourge of mass incarceration, ending the jail turnstile and ending the school-to-prison pipeline.” Hey, that’s actually pretty cool! Chalk one up for child actors.
But, of course, the real draw of the cast is Tim “Hexxus in FernGully” Curry as Kilokahn. He looks like a cyber-Shredder, he calls human beings “meat-things,” and he craaaaaves power. (Hi daddy.)
Kilokahn makes a deal with Malcolm Frink: Malcolm designs “mega-viruses,” and Kilokahn brings them to life to mess up Sam’s chances with their shared love interest, Jennifer. Of course, Kilokahn also wants to subjugate all of humanity, so Malcolm maybe isn’t thinking this all through, but who can judge what the young do for love? I once allowed a girl I had a crush on to pierce my ears with a sewing needle, and at least Malcolm isn’t getting staph from teaming up with a genocidal computer program.
How does Malcolm fuck with Sam? In the first episode, he creates a virus to stop Sam from calling Jennifer and asking her out. But uh oh! Kilokhan shuts down the entire world’s telephone lines. Sam is sucked into his computer after a power surge and becomes Servo, an Ultraman-looking hero who kicks the virus’s ass, and telephonic communication is saved.
Sam decides to keep all this a secret from everyone except his bandmates — not because he’s worried about the potential dangers or the government tracking him down to weaponize his ability to physically enter computers and do karate stunts, but because he’s embarrassed about it and doesn’t want people to think he’s a computer geek.
Sam sucks. He is, by his own admission, only interested in playing rock music to attract women. He tricks Jennifer into giving him her phone number. And he’s completely uninteresting, a vacant-eyed indictment of the emptiness of American youth culture in the ’90s.
Contrast him with Malcolm — a creative, driven young man who is computer-savvy, a talented artist, and has a cool put-on British accent. Malcolm is the kind of kid who probably got the shit kicked out of him throughout high school for being overly theatrical and wearing black all the time, then landed a great job working for a game developer and realized that he was never all that into Jennifer anyway.
Maybe his rivalry with Sam and his willingness to partner with the computer devil stemmed from his sublimated desires for his all-American classmate whose easy charm and circle of friends represented everything that Malcolm wanted but felt was denied to him because of how different he felt from his peers.
And maybe one day he’d meet someone, a programmer with a shy smile named Jake who could give him what neither Jennifer, nor Sam, nor even Kilokahn could — love and understanding. They would be happy, Malcolm and his husband. There would always be nights when he would wake up in a sweat, feeling sick to his stomach at the horrors he had wrought in his youth: the time he set up an impenetrable wall around half the world to stop Sam from getting to a gig; the time he forced Syd to go on a crime spree by putting a virus in her wristwatch; the time he tried to roast everyone in the school alive by raising the thermostat and locking the doors; the time he nearly made Sam go insane from isolation by trapping him in his video camera; the time he turned the city’s entire water supply into hydrochloric acid. That’s not who you are anymore, Jake would remind him. You’re the man I fell in love with.
And on occasion he might think of Sam, wonder where he was since they’d last seen each other at graduation, made eye contact across the stage and silently nodded, the last gesture of recognition on the part of two worthy rivals parting ways.
Meanwhile, Sam is still living in his mother’s basement and swearing that he’s going to “make it” any day now. Jennifer is a dream from long ago, and when Tanker and Syd come back to town to see their families, they smile weakly when he talks about the open mics he’s playing and how close he thinks he is to getting a record deal. Nobody has the heart to tell him to give up, that it’s not going to happen.
Sorry, I think I just started writing the world’s only Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad fanfiction. But I digress. Aside from the humans, the monsters, and Kilokahn, there’s another character in SSSS: Compaq Computers.
Whenever a character is shown looking at something on a computer screen — which happens a lot — the Compaq logo is prominently visible on the monitor. This seems like a really odd choice for product placement in a show aimed at kids. Was the idea that children would think that Compaq computers had the capabilities to transform them into digital superheroes so they’d beg their parents to buy one rather than a Dell or Gateway?
Or was the idea just to establish brand recognition so that when the target audience was grown up and shopping for a home computer, they’d have some flash of recognition, some positive association with Compaq machines they couldn’t explain? Am I overthinking this and the Compaq executives just went to the same strip clubs as the DIC guys and they made a seemingly senseless, coke-addled deal one night? Yes.
Unlike a lot of similar shows, SSSS is actually pretty close to the Japanese series it draws its action footage from. Gridman the Hyper Agent is also about a bunch of teens who fight virtual monsters with the help of a cyber superhero. In that show, the viruses are also created by a misfit fellow student and brought to life by evil program Khan Digifer. Of course, in the original version Khan Digifer wasn’t played by Tim Curry. Can you imagine? What do the Japanese think of Tim Curry, anyway? Do they think of him as the Copy Machine Wizard because of that time he was in a Xerox commercial?
Unfortunately, Gridman ended with the protagonist dying in its 39th and final episode. That meant that SSSS had to get creative with their material around the same episode mark. After a dramatic finale in which Malcolm turns face and helps save Christmas from Kilokahn (real, that really happened), we got a number of episodes featuring all of the hits of the desperate screenwriter trying to make things work. There’s a mirror universe episode where Malcolm is nice and Jennifer is a nerd! There’s an amnesia episode where everyone forgets who they are! There’s a clip show where it’s revealed that one of the core cast members is an alien who has returned to his home planet!
And of course, there were toys. I only ever remember seeing them at the hardware store and they were marketed with the phrase “SAMURIZED FOR YOUR PROTECTION.”
What the fuck does that mean? I would have asked my dad when he was done shopping for screws or whatever, but one time my family went to stay in this cabin out in Atlantic Canada and my sister and I found a wrapper over the toilet that said “sanitized for your protection” and we thought it was the funniest thing in the world, like the toilet had been sealed off to protect us from the horrors within. Anyway he got pretty annoyed at how hyper we got about it and snapped at us, so I wasn’t going to risk bringing up that memory again.
What was I talking about? Oh, right. A show where the kid from Mrs. Doubtfire (not Mara Wilson or the other girl) fights the digital mind creations of a friendless and possibly closeted goth brought to life by Dr. Frank-N-Furter.
I watched a number of episodes of the show to jog my memory for this piece, but I also referred to the Wikipedia article, which is… extensive. Once again, I’ve stumbled onto a subject obsessively remembered by like six people and forgotten entirely by the rest of the planet. To put things in perspective, the Wikipedia article for beloved and accomplished actor and musician Tim Curry is about 4,600 words. The article on legendary German character Faust, which is linked in the plot section of the SSSS article to describe Malcolm Frink’s deal with Kilokahn, is 5,200 words. The article on SSSS is larger than both of those put together, clocking in at over 12,000 words long.
It’s a trite observation at this point that Wikipedia articles on subjects of relative inconsequence — such as ’90s television shows about teenage cyberwarriors fighting mutant diamond dinosaurs inside Compaq computers for the fate of the earth — receive far more attention than those which most people would agree are more critical to the collective store of human knowledge. I don’t care, I’m going to say it anyway. Hideo Kojima was right in Metal Gear Solid 2. The internet was a mistake.
Ironically, that seems to also be the prophetic message of Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad, a message we failed to heed. And that might be the most interesting thing about Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad — it accurately predicted how fucking terrible the internet and a world of connected technology would be. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some fanfiction to post to Archive of Our Own.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Joshua Graves, lead singer of Daddy’s Damp Stockings, Cleveland’s second best Father’s Wet Pantyhose cover band.
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Nerding Day: American Romance
