Category: NERDING DAY

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Balloonatiks 🌭

Who were your favorite superheroes in the 90s? The Power Rangers? The X-Men? How about the Balloonatiks? What’s that? You don’t remember the Balloonatiks?

Maybe you could be forgiven, considering that I am literally the only person on the planet who does. The Balloonatiks were a superhero team with a difference. Unlike, say, the Avengers, they were made out of balloons instead of the more traditional meat and bones.

You’ve got Flator, the macho jock of the bunch. He can inflate or deflate himself, but apparently can’t entirely control his power — he literally grows or shrinks in response to praise and criticism, respectively. He also wears huge sunglasses and pump-up sneakers, because he’s a totally cool ’90s dude– a terrible affliction when your super abilities are powered by compliments. Is there a darker backstory than this? Flator needs love to survive, and he’s the fucking worst.

Next, there’s Airhead. He’s your typical brainy character and he kind of reminds me of Widget the World Watcher. His power is inhaling and exhaling with great force. I guess you could say that Airhead both sucks and blows. I could have said the same about Flator, but that would have killed him.

Ballooney, whose name means Humaney in our language, is the joker of the crew. He can bounce around and roll himself into a bowling ball, which is apparently not only his special ability, but his hobby. It’s outrageous that any creator would see Ballooney and think, “Yes, this idea is coming together. I should keep going.” But they did.

Every ’90s superhero group needs The Girl, and The Balloonatiks have Squeeker. You know how balloons are squeaky? Well, that’s Squeeker’s power. Her bows are “supersonic superspeakers,” so you know she means business. We’ve covered all aspects of the balloon so far: insecurity, blowing, bowling, and noisy. What could be next?

It’s Stretch. He’s… well, he’s a cowboy balloon. He says cowboy stuff, like “y’all jus make me wanna rope a goat.” Is that something a cowboy would say? The Balloonatiks would certainly have you believe it to be. Stretch can, as his name implies, stretch out. He also has a sentient water balloon companion/gun that lives in his holster. The mask covering his face has its own face, and I think that’s worth repeating. The mask covering his face has its own face.

The Lex Luthor to the Balloonatiks’ Justice League is The Needler, a man in a shiny suit who is by all accounts a balloon fetishist. You know how there are poppers and blowers? He’s a popper. Just unashamedly horny for popping in his bio.

He’s accompanied by “Secret Agent” Barb Wire and here I want to point out that The Balloonatiks predates the Pamela Anderson movie by five years, though Barb Wire had already been the roller derby name for every city’s Barbaras for over a decade. Barb considers herself the “Queen of Pop,” which means ruining balloons makes up most of her personality. Their minions are the robotic Pinheads: Sticky, Tacky, and Al, a naming convention absolutely not ripped off of Pac-Man’s ghosts.

The Balloonatiks launched in 1991 with a single comic issue, written by the franchise creator as well as then-Chairman and CEO of Balloonatiks International, Inc, Tony DiIoia. Unlike the Conservation Corps, which I was able to find online, no scans of The Balloonatiks exist on the internet, so I had to purchase a copy myself in order to read it. The issue came packaged in a plastic envelope sealed with a sticker informing me that this was a Collectors Edition of Balloonatiks #1 and retailed for $4.95 US. With shipping, I paid nearly double that, so I guess it’s retained its value.

Removing the comic from its sealed packaging felt like a momentous event. For all I knew, nobody but the people who worked on this thing had ever seen it. The excitement drips off the first page, printed in all-caps and informing us that this issue is only the beginning of the adventures of the Balloonatiks. It’s even signed and individually numbered by DiIoia — I’ve got 853 of 1000. They really had high hopes for these sentient latex golems.

The comic begins not with The Balloonatiks themselves, but with The Needler and Barb Wire celebrating as they watch the Pinheads popping the tires of cars, their ultimate plan. And these low stakes are making Barb extremely horny. All in all, it’s a perfect intro. May it give everyone prickly heat.

Meanwhile, Dr. Sigmund “Pop” Swellhead, the world’s only “latexologist,” is working in his lab when he and his assistants/maybe grandkids find out about the traffic situation on the news. What’s a balloon-obsessed scientist to do? Why, put out an inter-“gallactic” S.O.S. on the “balloonicator,” of course!

Far away on the planet, sigh, Noollab, the Grand Exalted Windbag has a problem: The Balloonatiks. I have to admit, it’s a pretty bold move to have your superhero team be introduced as so fucking terrible that their home planet wants them gone. They’re apparently causing all kinds of problems on Noollab, so the G.E.W. is more than happy to pawn them off on Earth when he gets Pop’s distress call. 

The Balloonatiks don’t seem to get along very well, either. Flator blames Airhead for their predicament, while Squeeker goes off on Flator for being a meathead. And here’s something I hadn’t considered going into this: when a water balloon calls your balloon mother a whoopie cushion, is that a slur?

Regardless, The Balloonatiks travel to Earth and land in Dr. Swellhead’s balloon store. Swellhead goes by the nickname “Pop,” but they have no time to take the bait for this obvious dick joke. They’re terrified of the fleshy creature that stands before them. And who can blame them? They’ve gone from a planet where everything is made out of clean, colorful rubber to one where people and animals are made out of wet, filthy muscles and guts. If The Balloonatiks had been a bigger property, we definitely would have gotten an IDW reboot in the 2010s where one of them develops a compulsion to purge the world of unclean flesh.

Pop says he’s filled the Balloonatiks with “balloon juice” and gives them a supply to keep on hand. It is never explained what balloon juice is or why it is necessary. Is it required to stabilize The Balloonatiks on Earth due to the different atmospheric conditions of our planet versus Noollab? Is it a lube? Is it some kind of food? Is it a chemical Pop invented to keep The Balloonatiks under his control, which is why he’s so insistent that they consume it everyday? Is it a sexual lube? We will never know. But I feel like we landed on balloon sex lubricant.

While this transpires, The Needler watches from his villainous base of operations, the Haystack. He’s pretty committed to his bit, I’ll give him that. He’s apparently somehow already familiar with The Balloonatiks, but decides to take the fight to them in order to use their powers to take over the world. I thought his deal was that he was just an extremely specific kind of Joker who liked popping things, but I guess he’s got bigger ambitions. Good for him.

At this point in the comic, we get a two-page spread informing us of the exciting Balloonatiks products to expect in the future. I have no idea whether there were ever Balloonatiks toys, keychains, “Flator’s footwear,” or drinks (???). I do know, however, there was Balloonatiks bedding, because my parents bought it for me from a Costco in the early 90s, and it’s the only reason I’m familiar with them. Thanks, mom and dad — I wouldn’t be here without you.

The Needler sends his Pinheads to attack the Balloonatiks, so I guess his plan to use their powers to take over the world still works with their ruptured remains? Flator makes a snide comment about not having been deflated yesterday, which raises some questions about the Noollabian reproduction process. Some details seem intentionally wrong as if to wink at adult readers, “Yes, this is all a sex thing.”

The Needler bursts in with a static ray gun because everything here is exhaustingly on theme, and we learn his origin story. Pop popped a balloon in his ear at his 10th birthday party, and now he’s obsessed with the sound. This sounds pretty weak, but to be fair, consider that the most famous comic book villain’s most well-known backstory is “fell in some chemicals.”

Things look bad for our heroes, but then Squeeker says she “needs” Flator and calls him a “handsome hunk of He-Man,” which makes him get bigger. I’m not sure they considered the implications here. Or they very much did and their intended audience is, ngghh, almost there.

Flator pumps up his shoes, because it’s the early ’90s, and he and the rest of the crew kick The Needler’s ass and somehow reinflate all of the popped tires in the city, which again, were the stakes.

The Needler and Barb Wire (who didn’t get to do much) re-state their intention to destroy The Balloonatiks, and we’re out. It was an utter bankruptcy of ideas before they finished a single issue.

Balloonatiks #1 came with a poster and map of Noollab, featuring locations like “Big Knot” and “Inflation Station.” Moving on.

The comic also included a balloon featuring a print of the Pinheads on it, but when I tried to pull it apart to inflate it, the decades-old rubber, which was sticky and probably toxic, tore. They should have gotten some of Dr. Swellhead’s non-deflatable latex!

We never got another issue of The Balloonatiks comics, but the franchise didn’t die there. There was a Balloonatiks float with some Pinhead balloons in the 1992 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and Mr. DiIoia has tried to resurrect the concept a few times over the decades.

During the first effort to bring the Balloonatiks back in the mid-’90s, some of the character names and details were changed, as evidenced by the archived Balloonatiks site. Flator and Airhead are pretty much the same, but the other characters got some added details. Squeeker’s bio, for instance, explains she can not only crack glass or hypnotize her foes with her sonic powers, but also “turn on fax machines.” Even for the ’90s, that’s pretty lame. Creatively speaking, it has real “looking around the room at my day job” energy.

Perhaps because they realized that “Ballooney” was a terrible name, that character became “Bouncer.” In this iteration, he’s a big round guy who apparently gets picked on for being fat. First of all, not cool, other Balloonatiks. Second, he’s literally a balloon. Balloons are round! Bouncer can still roll around, but he can also impersonate people now, which feels less like a superpower and more like a weak party trick.

Finally, Stretch became L.A. Tex. His name doesn’t make any sense unless he’s like, a Texan transplant who lives in the valley, but that doesn’t matter — there are balloon puns to be made, damnit. Tex’s bio informs us that he “wishes he was born a cowboy instead of a balloon,” which is an immensely depressing sentence.

This revised Balloonatiks line-up starred in a 1996 cartoon Christmas special on Fox Kids in which The Needler and Barb Wire kidnap Santa Claus. The Wayback Machine’s snapshot of the official site around the time also features some newspaper-style comic strips featuring Flator and the gang. They are tragic. They’re like Family Circus if it was more sexist and -for absolutely no reason- everyone was balloons.

These efforts were evidently not enough to win America over, and The Balloonatiks once again sank into obscurity. But even this, this catastrophic failure, was not the end of The Balloonatiks. According to an old press release, DiIoia relaunched them in 2006. These new Balloonatiks were, as was the style in the 2000s, teens who transformed into CGI balloon-based superheroes.

Flator, Bouncer, and Squeeker were still there, though they’d been completely redesigned. Airhead had been turned into “Airbrain,” an objectively worse name. And L.A. Tex/Stretch? He’d been obliterated, stricken from the pages of history. In his place was Sparky, a second female Balloonatik with powers over static electricity. There was also a balloon frog.

As far as I can tell, the CGI teen Balloonatiks show never aired, but there were a few DVDs produced around 2010, and you can watch some clips as well as the intro — which is allegedly by Ray Parker Jr. — on YouTube. And that appears to have been the last hurrah for our inflatable friends.

The Balloonatiks site seems to have finally gone down in 2021. What happened to Tony DiIoia? Who is he, and why was he so passionate about balloon-based superheroes? Are we going to pretend we don’t know it’s a sex thing? Where did the money for all of this come from? We may never know. DiIoia has a LinkedIn account, but hasn’t posted in a while. (His experience is listed as “ceo” of “Kids projects.”) It seems like he’s possibly involved in an animation studio that does NFTs. Balloonatiks NFTs when, Tony? At the very least, give us that gritty reboot I mentioned. I don’t want to have to write Balloonatiks fanfiction, but I will if I have to. Consider yourself warned.

Merritt K is a game expert and designer. When praised, she can inflate in order to blow down enemies and doors.

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Marty Party in Space

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: MYFAROG 🌭

Now that we’ve sprinted past Cyberpunk 2077, I need a new escape. To watch megacorporations feed a civil war, I can open a window. So I’m going back to my roots: tabletop games, our culture’s unpaid interns. In terms of ideas making other people rich, pen-and-paper RPGs are right between Nikola Tesla and black people.

What’s sold and tacitly supported by Amazon these days?

That looks fine. But let’s try a different book. Didn’t Dungeons & Dragons just pump out a Harry Potter ripoff? That could be fun. People like Hogwarts more than each other.

Stop zooming in.

Varg Vikernes? A true modern polymath. Musician, author, and convicted Nazi murderer. He added “game designer” to that crowded resume in 2015. Because shame, like credit, is out of reach for the people that need it.

MYFAROG stands for “mythic fantasy action role-playing game.” For readers new to speculative gambling, that means “placeholder, replace later.” It kind of evokes the fan-favorite GURPS (Generic Universal Role-Playing System) to attract some swastika-free clientele. Or at least the classic failure FATAL, which is its own article. I’m not explaining celebrity arson and FATAL’s “anal circumference” stat in the same piece.

Varg’s game is a race between ambition, laziness, and hatred. It’s close. But with each stock quote pasted above an unedited aryan fairy tale, laziness inches ahead.

First, let’s break down the gameplay. It’s D&D.

I don’t mean one of those fancy games updating D&D’s ossified foundation, or putting it in space. I mean that Varg screencapped an old Player’s Handbook, gave it a pharma name, and called it fresh product. MYFAROG moves most stats to the left and gets rid of all the classes people like. Leaving time for extra race science.

Consider, but make no attempt to comprehend, this linear algebra test from MYFAROG:

It’s a kissing cousin of this old D&D quarterly earnings report:

Don’t sweat the details of these number mazes, and save “racial modification” questions for later. Reading this means you pay for entertainment, and need that energy for A) work, B) dynastic family politics, or C) panicking. Just know that this is very familiar. In a sea of copycats, MYFAROG distinguishes itself with nothing.

Of course, I could be full of shit. Changing “Wisdom” to “Will” and hitting print might be the height of creativity. The author of “Zany Neuromancer” shouldn’t throw stones. Once people remember Mark Twain wrote a fantasy novel, I’ll be panhandling.

Besides, MYFAROG isn’t about the mechanics. It’s about the world. And to understand that bugshit world, it helps to understand Varg. Varg is the person sane death penalty advocates think of. He has a flashy crime, zero apologies, and a legion of like-minded observers.

But he’s also a dork.

Black metal artists (the subgenre, not my dead dreams) stereotypically worship Satan, and that stereotype is true and awesome. Nothing’s keeping me from a Behemoth tattoo but future interviews/family hugs/I have two. The problems start when they drift from Satan.

Take Burzum’s Louis “Varg Vikernes” Cachet. He ignores our father below to worship paleness. Varg spent 15 years in Norwegian prison (about six American) for pentagram-free homicide and arson. Specifically, bandmate murder and church arson. He’s a white nationalist that has exclusively destroyed white people, culture, and property. Life is strange.

Granted, it’s been a while, and he’s served his time. When an artist burns down one church, there are natural questions about forgiveness, redemption, and online reenactments of The Scarlet Letter. But Varg burned down two churches. Just kidding: three. My favorite things are sacrilege, fire, and tremolo picking, and I still think he should’ve locked himself in first.

Given his race war scorecard, it’s unclear what Varg thinks subalterns will do in the Great Uprising. Cut him a check? Trade him for three first round draft picks? Varg’s done more damage to white people than talk radio. The Uprising’s chat is pretty calm these days:

Naturally, his fans buy anything he touches. If Varg kept his first matchbook, he’d be retired. Instead, we have MYFAROG, one of the strangest cash-ins in master history. It replaces power fantasy with white power fantasy.

Though, in Varg’s defense, I’m probably illiterate. We should let him introduce the game in his own words.

See? You’re safe. You know because Varg told you. Just keep the fire escape clear.

The setting’s called Thulê, which is a better name. If he’d called this game Thulê, people without backup copies of Mein Kampf or black stepdads would play. Publishing would just pasteurize Myfarog’s message into quirky trivia, like Warhammer 40k naming a subliterate warmonger after Thatcher.

That’s not a random shot: here’s the fearsome orcish warlord Ghazgkull Mag Uruk Thraka:

This school of satire’s known as “screaming at the television until the cops show up.” Which is my main hustle. Andy Chambers denies it today, because death makes old feuds awkward. Fair enough. I already have a book covering my ass locked and loaded.

My point? Varg isn’t the first guy to use dice as a soapbox. In fact, he highlights MYFAROG’s educational potential:

I love learning! Let’s learn more about Thulê.

Thulê’s coastal Norway without judgy prisons ruining the scenery. I’m down for that, but I’d introduce my Aryan paradise with a little more sizzle. Tolkein set the tone by putting the slam poetry before the textbook. A screaming specialist should care more about aesthetics.

There’s the juice. As far as worldbuilding goes, cheating spouses do better every day. But there’s nothing awful here. Odds are it only gets lighter as this article goes on. Maybe I’m bullying a reformed man for the crispy churches of his youth. What kind of people fled the Ettins?

Perfection. I came ready for all black people to be magic gorillas or whatever. Fine. That’s what I get for pirating paying lots of money for Dungeons & Darkies. But all black people being pirates or land pirates? That’s fucking awesome. I’m in. Hoist the black(er) flag.

I’m never using real slurs again. Going forward, friends are my Darklings. My drinking anthem is Real Darkling Role Call. Fistfights between grandpas and blind men are Darkling Moments. And no, Thulêans can’t say it.

If the combat didn’t suck, I’d run a blaxploitation campaign instead of writing this. The villain would be the square root of Shaft, Killmonger, and Blackbeard. Sadly, two rounds of MYFAROG take longer than writing and pitching that movie. Wish me luck.

As for Weaklings, the texture’s less fun. While Darklings have a bonus to spear-throwing–which my local gym records confirm–Weaklings have a bonus to…trickery. According to my 5th Edition Monstrous Manual, that’s a +3 dogwhistle for–

There it is.

For the aspiring hatemonger, anti-semitism’s like dribbling. You drill it to a reflex, early and often. MYFAROG wants to give youth a real shot at pro fascism, instead of languishing on the bench like Varg. It’s his way of paying it forward to the next generation. If this metaphor seems odd, my brother’s a big fan of Kyrie Irving. And can’t take a punch.

Eagle-eyed readers might notice Khemetian instead of Weakling. Jewish stereotypes are split between the two. While Weaklings are the cartoony Putty Patrol, defeated en masse by the White Power Rangers, Khemetians are closer to the shadowy coalition your brother tweets about. Okay, my brother, but you know what I meant.

There’s a version of Christianity in here too, which is confusing if you only track Murdoch-brand reactionaries. On the metal isles, some resent Christianity displacing local flavors of theocrat. Fair enough. This is Varg’s chance to win me over, and he botches it by channeling everything I hated about Baptists.

That said, Varg’s worldbuilding isn’t all about race. He covers finance as well.

Varg’s tenth-biggest problem is staying focused. MYFAROG is, in theory, a game. This tidbit of redundant anti-semitism doesn’t help players fight black pirates, or add flavor to their band of identical heroes. The entire point of making Blondes & Barbarians is brainwashing me with mechanics, not getting mad at fictional subprime loans. Gamers and antisemites hate one thing: reading. Spend your words more carefully.

That’s better. This character generator gently encourages you to only play native Thulêans. In fact, it’s physically impossible to roll an untermensch. D&D may have rules for playing giants, talking trees, lobbyists, content-starved podcasters, and endless dwarf subspecies, but MYFAROG lets you choose between five shades of white.

In case it’s not obvious: Thulêans are perfect. They’re honorable sons of Odin from which all honor and guitar solos flow. They have serfs, but they’re cool about it. Every time a Thulêan sneezes, a darkling sees the error of his breathing ways and dives into the sea. The swimming table is a page long, so I’m guessing they can’t.

According to the website, Thulêan greatness is MYFAROG’s best selling point. From the “Why MYFAROG?” page:

Festive. I’ll honor my i-Mockery heritage with some close reading. Note the term “Native European.” It has a certain flavor. Some readers may check their bugout bags by reflex. Your grandfather might ask if “the Krauts are acting up again.” Because some phrases, while technically bland, inspire instinctive panic. Carbon monoxide. Tectonic friction. Native Europeans.

It fits: Varg’s not a literal Nazi in the white nationalist Pokedex. He’s an electric-type worshiper of the Æsir, who most of you know as “Thor and character actors.” Hence the myth in “mythic fantasy.” If those subgenre distinctions seem meaningless, keep in mind he’s a metalhead. Never confuse Post-Blackened Slamcore for Pre-Slam Blackcore. See: the comment below calling Behemoth blackened death metal.

Anyway, that’s enough education from Varg. Who’s ready for mythic action?

Fuck.

God, I could be recapping Oriental Adventures. A stellar HotDogger even sent me a clean copy. That game’s dated in a fun, admiring kind of way. It’s like a stoned cosplayer described Japan to Gary Gygax in a third language. Which, in Gary’s defense, is the history of cultural exchange.

Instead we’re stuck with action-adventure hate speech. And Varg forgot the action.

“It’s a society where leeches are healthcare, what’s wrong with feeding Baldur a few deviants?” There’s a world between Varg’s mythic fantasy—where the traits of noble society are sweet and good—and fantasy where society sucks the normal amount. Lurid or not, Cersei Lannister’s naked jog comes with a tone of “this is sub-ideal.” Varg is a hundred percent on board with every pre-Charlemagne hate crime. For him, Vinland Saga is a fun guy’s devolution into a spoilsport.

It comes through more clearly on polygamy, which is very important for fighting orcs:

The overlap of Akon, church arsonists, and Mormons is small, but extant. You might wonder how this helps you fight skeletons, but Varg can’t hold your hand through everything. Except prostitution. There’s plenty of time for the history of prostitution.

There’s been one society without prostitutes, and it was made of tiny blue Native Europeans. Even they toed the line with Sugar Baby Smurf and Paypig Smurf.

Alright, maybe I’m addicted to wedge issues. Here’s some less loaded nostalgia wank:

We have a new standard for optimism: seeing the lack of toothaches or allergies in cave paintings, and not assuming everyone with them just fucking died. For all the edge Varg built a career on, that is a gumdrops and sugarplums version of Earth. After three years of madness, I’ve never seen vaccines blamed for love handles.

These mythically pointless asides might seem like filler. That’s because of vaccination. Uncuck your immune system and embrace premodern science:

I’m experimenting with subtlety, so I hope MYFAROG’s first twist is coming across. The propaganda game by a convicted Nazi rockstar murderer is somehow fucking boring. Not leftie subtweet “I can’t admit I’m offended” boring. Six-hour mycology seminar boring. Wherever the line between studying and fetishizing the past lies, MYFAROG sprints past it like a darkling at a Burzum show. 

Forget basic morals for a bit, and consider tone. Chasing realism (or its edgy understudy) undermines MYFAROG’s mission. The title makes two simple promises: mythic and farog. “Mythic” plays poorly with reminders that your heroes wipe with moss.

I don’t think there’s a Blind Guardian song about that. 

It creeps into the combat too. All the prose poems about blonde greatness go for an Arthurian vibe. But you roll to avoid fleeing every turn you take damage. That’s fine for big-picture strategy games, where a teenager’s self-esteem isn’t invested in Space Marine #482. But in this hero simulator, your mythic champion’s favorite spell is Summon Urine IV.

Still, avoid thinking of Varg as a stupid fuck. MYFAROG hits its only real goal: a whites-only table at the RPG club.

In the lore brick, rampaging ettins pushed godless outsiders into holy Thulê. E.g.: global instability sparked tense migration into Europe. Varg melted fantasy cliches into a National Front PSA.

More proof his brain exists: this bit of careful cover. Heroes can battle the Thulêan Klan:

“See? I hate bigotry. You can fight whatever you think bigots are. Run an all-inclusive dungeon crawl with your half-breed friends, while the rest of us fight white genocide.” The same section has four Khemetian “trickster” cults plotting from the shadows.

I’m extra skeptical because the lore’s thin by MYFAROG standards. I know what color spear a darkling carries to steal Thulêan brides on Wednesday (purple), but I don’t know who runs The Gardeners.

That half-assed deflection has a quarter-assed layout. While Varg’s not a stupid fuck, he’s a verified lazy fuck. His moss trivia has zero presentation. That stands out in a game manual, which is basically a vision board for wizards.

Fantasy visuals aren’t free, since even AI art costs dignity. So Varg gives each page plenty of Lebensraum, and fills white space in MYFAROG with cliches. I don’t mean fantasy tropes. I mean literal stock phrases, reprinted without context or purpose in every blank corner of the book:

That’s the first quote, and closest to fucking relevance. Most are pointless enough to make me appreciate on-message xenophobia.

Here’s a few of the non-thoughts filling gaps in MYFAROG:

I cherry-picked for hilarity. It’s mostly shit like “If you fear death, you are already dead” and “Why won’t my son talk to me?” It reflects vast reading and negative literacy.

We have a “book dumb” stereotype of bigots, because it makes us feel smarter. Well, that and well-read bigots bought their way out of Pickett’s Charge. But let’s focus on ego.

Varg’s not book-dumb. He’s memorized heaps of white history month articles, and condensed them into the skeleton of a game. There’s more research and intent behind MYFAROG than any good game you’ll ever enjoy or purchase. Thank Satan he never finished it.

Despite everything I say, think, do, or experience, I’m a silver linings guy. MYFAROG has an interesting idea!

It’s vanilla-flavored karma, passing traits on from dead player characters to properly min-maxed murder machines. You can think of it as the struggle up the ladder of reincarnation, or Rogue Legacy for nazis. Dealer’s choice.

That lone creative spark? Steal the fuck out of it. It’s a tabletop game, no one will stop you. Netflix churns out six World of Darkness shows a year. D&D movies never work out because Hollywood already made them without Beholder puns. My next book is Dark Sun, Plus Headspins. Take Varg’s idea and run to the bank.

Or use the name for medication. Baphomet knows it fits.

…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Neku104, who would play a Mystical Canadian if they played MYFAROG, which they don’t.

If these images are borked, you can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: The Conservation Corps 🌭

In the ’90s, most children knew the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from their TV show or traveling musical act. Or their toys, video games, or snack crackers. Maybe their clothing merchandise or gelatin dessert, but there was a whole other world of ninja turtles running parallel to ours no one knew about. The Archie Adventure Series’ Eastman and Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a place where ninja ideas unfit for pasta shapes were sent to be rendered into nunchuck lubricant. Case in point: the Conservation Corps.

Playing into the milquetoast environmentalism that solved climate change in the 1990s, the Conservation Corps is how a grandmother might remember the Captain Planet episode where she had to be defibrillated. We first meet them when the turtles prank their ninja master with water balloons (impolite plus an unthinkable environmental crime) and see a news report about a massive oil spill:

They immediately decide to head over to try to help. The question of how four mutant turtles with ninja weapons are going to meaningfully assist in such an ecological disaster is left to the reader.

The alien, a generic Abin Sur nerd named Benevolence, arrives on Earth to help spread the good word of eco-friendliness. Unfortunately, he immediately crashes. His first act of environmental outreach is becoming a pile of burning, biohazardous waste. His second is sending out his “Enviro-Pods” to transform normal animals into ecological superheroes. They are: Water Buffalo, Firefly, Stone Hedgehog, and Green Horn (he’s a rhino).

It’s a foolproof plan. “Star creature, you have a one day lifespan and a brain that recognizes only threatening movement or edible poop. I give you the power of unlimited fire!” Anyway, the confused living weapons soon find themselves helping the ninjas with an oil spill. Which is lucky because, again, the turtles and Splinter brought four stabbing weapons, five sticks, and a rowboat to deal with a million gallons of crude oil in the deep sea.

Speaking of threats, a superhero team is only as good as their nemesis. The turtles had the fearsome Shredder and his Foot Clan, plus Krang, the Rat King, and a whole mess of memorable minor antagonists. So who do they need the Conservation Corps’ assistance to defeat? Who is the threat the turtles have to job against to get the Conservation Corps over?

Oily Bird. I’m not kidding. He’s a bird who got some oil on him, which somehow transformed him into a giant creature capable of controlling oil all over the world. How the Corps even get to the scene of the turtles’ fight with Oily Bird is wild in itself — they’re taken into the mouth of a transdimensional being named Cudley the Cowlick that appears as a giant floating cow head and spat out near Splinter and the boys. Being eaten and squirted across time by the living embodiment of cow judgment was the ’90s TMNT comics version of “yadda yadda.”

Oily Bird’s final gambit is to try to launch the Earth towards the sun by propelling it with an enormous oil geyser, but they manage to foil his incredibly unlikely plan with the power of teamwork. And when I say teamwork, I mean everyone took turns hitting him in the eye with weapons and rocks. There’s no clearer way to describe their plan than “Let’s go beat the shit out of that fucking duck.”

Cudley the giant floating cow head takes him back to the alien’s home planet of Danopaulus which sounds stupid and is going to sound worse when you learn the series creators are named Dan Nakrosis and Paul Castiglia. Ah, but Benevolence had sent out a fifth Enviro-Pod and there are only four present members of the Conservation Corps, so they say their farewells to the turtles and go looking for their lost “brother.” They don’t seem to have a choice here. It’s worth mentioning they call the drunk driver who rewrote their DNA this morning, “Sire.”

From there, the Conservation Corps got their own short comic series at Archie Comics. And if you go into these thinking there aren’t a bunch of short strips inserted throughout where Archie characters get terrorized by recycling fairies, you have made a terrible mistake.

In the first issue, the Corps are transported back to Danopaulus and we learn Benevolence attempted to warn his fellow citizens of the consequences of their exploitation of nature, but nobody listened. No one listened to his rants on window slits shouted from his space bed! “Limp right wing talking points,” they replied!

This is a species with intergalactic teleportation technology and orbs that turn any animal into a loyal, fuckable superman and they’re bickering about how clean air regulations might hurt the economy? This could have been a substantive take on what beings would do with unlimited muscled buffalo men, but no, they just do a cartoon fascism. They arrest Benevolence, the Corps, and anyone else opposing the empire. That’s the cliffhanger– sanctimonious knockoffs thrown in jail on a world that makes no sense. And they wrapped it up with an announcement for Conservation Corps trading cards. They really thought these guys were going places, huh? There’s also a couple of ads for something called Brach’s ROCKS. It was a candy named “ROCKS” that looked so much like rocks that 80% of its marketing was dedicated to explaining to the consumer it wasn’t, like, really rocks.

In issue two, Water Buffalo finally discovers the Corps’ lost brother, and it turns out it isn’t a brother at all! It’s a humanoid, female shark. With breasts. Some might say luscious ones.

Sky Shark is immediately suspicious of Water Buffalo and the whole Corps nonsense, but he takes her back to Danopaulus, where remember: Benevolence and the impossible animal superheroes have been captured by the government. Their evil plan? They’re going to convince the public that everything is fine through the use of devices generating subliminal messages that trick people into seeing beautiful landscapes instead of the blasted hellworld their planet has become. The villain is basically Space Reaganomics with a very dumb magic trick added.

I understand not everyone has the vision of “what if a shark had tits,” but you’ve got technology that can cause mass hallucinations and this is what you’re doing with it? You could have convinced the population to eat Brach’s ROCKS and then made Brach’s ROCKS out of factory runoff, wait, did I just figure out the Brach’s ROCKS origin story?

How is the government going to deal with Benevolence and his mutated animal squad? The same way the sister of a protagonist in an Ari Aster movie might do a murder-suicide on her family: with deadly, odorless carbon monoxide. Sky Shark and Water Buffalo locate the Corps and rescue them, but they’re not out of the woods yet because Sky Shark reveals she wants to fucking eat people. It’s played for… laughs?

Jesus Christ, someone who worked on this book was really horny for this shark. It’s very distracting, but with the help of the people who were inspired and not at all horrified by a bunch of talking animals, they rise up against the government and destroy the subliminal transmitters. But we’re not quite done yet. Remember Oily Bird? Someone named Malevolence turned him into a cyborg, and he’s now Robo-Oily Bird! The confrontation has to wait until issue three, however. We’ve got kids to scam with an ad for the Olympia Sales Club! Remember that? I can’t imagine being an adult in the early 90s and having every nephew, niece, and neighbor’s kid try to sell you stationary so they could get a Game Genie or copy of Mall Madness.

By issue three, things are getting real. The Conservation Corps must do battle against the first foe they ever faced, now souped-up with radicool robotics. “How did we beat the duck last time?” they think. “Oh, yeah,” they remember.

Even the zero Conservation Corps fans would expect this to be an issue-spanning epic battle, but it’s actually over pretty quickly. Robo-Oily Bird tries ’90s misogyny at Sky Shark, she asphyxiates him, and we’re out. 

We learn that Malevolence is Benevolence’s brother, and the Corps return to Earth to prevent it from heading down the same path as Danopaulus. Based on everything we’ve learned, the simplest way to do this would be to lead a coup against governments around the world, but since it’s the ’90s and papa Archie likely wouldn’t approve of a comic promoting ecoterrorism, they’re going to encourage kids to sort their paper and plastic instead. Basically, the message is that we will only meaningfully fight climate change when it is a sexist duck.

But the issue’s only halfway through! Now we get a frame story where a horrifying-looking kid named Frankie is telling us all about how he met his pals, the Conservation Corps. Who’s Frankie? Why, he’s the human friend of the Conservation Corps, of course! Here, I’ll let him explain it. Well, not “it,” but literally all other things starting with dinosaurs.

Frankie tells us about a meteor crashing into Kearny, New Jersey and somehow reviving a T. rex skeleton, which reforms itself using a styrofoam cup. The champion-named Strannofoamus Rex then goes on a rampage across New Jersey, and we get some pretty funny reactions from around the country. You’ve gotta feel bad for New Jersey at a time like this — they get hit by a meteor, then have to deal with a rampaging dinosaur skeleton, and the White House is joking about nuking the place. Even the Corps doesn’t want to help. Our national policy for a New Jersey emergency is to pitch jokes to Jay Leno.

Of course, they eventually do show up to take on the ecological menace. Firefly wants to roast the bastard to death, and I can’t say I blame him — if I could light things on fire with my mind, that would probably be my go-to solution as well. But Water Buffalo, that wet blanket, points out that burning styrofoam is bad for the environment. Firefly had no idea– a troubling reminder that these powerful beings are only a few days old and just one of them knows not to eat people or burn toxic waste.

But no fire means, shit, then how are they going to deal with the situation? We will never, ever find out, because issue three ends on a cliffhanger. The cup dinosaur is killing New (ha ha) Jersey, Frankie is getting called away by his off-screen mother, and there was never an issue four. It was as predictable as it was not disappointing. The Corps were left frozen in the early ’90s forever.

I should mention that this was not a low effort production. In every issue of the Conservation Corps, well-known guest artists were called in to illustrate the characters in their own styles. Some of these are pretty fun, like Fred Hembeck’s art of the Corps playing golf.

This means the batch of guest art at the back of issue three is the last time anyone ever saw the Corps. So, how did Archie see these characters out? Did we get another scene of them with the Ninja Turtles? Maybe a fun illustration of them helping out at a local recycling program?

No, it’s a pin-up of Sky Shark by, I’m fairly sure, Amanda Conner. Statistically, this was the sexual awakening for at least one furry, right? I desperately want to meet the person who realized what they were into through a mini-series about environmentalist anthropomorphic animals who team up with the Ninja Turtles. On second thought, maybe I don’t.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Tricks to Pick Up Chicks 🌭

Pick the three words you’d use to describe the perfect seduction artist. If you’re like most women you said, “Married. Middle-aged. Magician.” Rich Ferguson is all three of those, and in 2010 he self-published the culmination of all his cervix-opening techniques in a book called Tricks to Pick Up Chicks.

This book has everything you could need to interrupt a woman on a night out with children’s games and riddles. There are high effort criminal schemes, low effort sexual assaults, and a real “just kidding” attitude to all of it. Grifting women is harmless fun! And if it’s not, no harm done! Maybe I’m not explaining it very well. I’ll let Rich give it a try in his zany disclaimer:

We’re not at full crazy yet, but this gives us a pretty good calibration of Rich’s sense of humor. He’s always “on,” but never funny. He should be “considering the consequences of his actions,” but wants money for adapting card tricks into sex crimes. I’m not even sure what he thinks he’s doing here. Does this protect you from liability if one of your readers follows your instructions to the letter and gets arrested for pulling a knife on a woman he licked? Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Before we get to the concealed knives and stranger licking, let’s read the introduction (I think he meant “foreword” (Rich is not a good writer)).

Whoever this person is has amazing things to say about the author. “He’s not very remarkable, but I’ve seen others tolerate him. He’ll walk right up to good people as if he’s one of them.” I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a less inspired foreword. It’s written like ad copy for an inflatable doll. Let’s continue…

This person might have gone a little too far on the salesmanship. Instead of saying “this is sort of a dorky way to meet new people, but let’s have fun,” they’re talking like they got an early manuscript of the book and used it to crush ass up and down the Vegas strip. “Guys, listen: these zany jokes and straw wrapper gags are for champion poontangists. You go out without these card tricks, don’t forget one thing: a good supply of unused penis.” Seriously, who the fuck wrote this? Some business major after getting punched in the head for 30 yea–

Oh. Well now I feel bad. And I’m about to do the same to you! We’re going to move on to the introduction, or as Rich calls it, FOREWORD.

If you were worried this magician might have some kind of personality disorder, here he is comparing himself to Spider-Man because he sometimes knows what card you picked. Luckily for “the world,” he only uses his powers for good. Unluckily for the world, he thinks calling a woman fat when she won’t sleep with him is “good.” Let’s stop and appreciate what’s happening here. This man wrote a groping manual for lonely alcoholics and the first thing he compares himself to is a superhero famous for noble sacrifices. He called us, the rest of the world, “lucky” for this choice.

So the origin of this heroic idea is the children who ask him which card trick gets them sex. And he combined this idea with his “vast experience of observation.” Is there anything less than this? Like across the entire scope of the universe, has any idea had less of an origin story than “I’ve met many horny teens and adults, and have spent my life looking at things.” It’s like saying “I got started in panty sniffing by really, really being from Tacoma.” I’m so fucking pissed at this book and I haven’t even told you Chapter 1 is called “Quickies.”

This next part is real and I’m not making it up. I understand you won’t believe me, but I promise this is the first trick of the book. Stop and imagine the worst thing it could be and then read this shit.

I bet even in the darkest imagination of our darkest reader’s soul, no one actually thought the first Trick to Pick Up Chicks would be to sneak something into a woman’s drink, and it’s called “Suck.”

I’m genuinely awestruck by this. The act of explaining why this is a bad idea seems insulting, as if anyone would need it. This is the Chuck “The Iceman” Liddell, Champion Fighter of bad ideas. But out of respect for Mr. Ferguson, let’s think about it. Let’s say you switch this woman’s straw for one with a knot in it. In a perfect world, perfect in this case being a world where you put something in a stranger’s drink without being detected, she won’t be able to use her straw. No problem, she’ll sip from t– why is there a strange man laughing at her? Oh, he did something to her drink. That’s fine then.

You know what women love? Knives and knife deception. Ha ha you thought I was kidding earlier when I mentioned concealed knives, but look here! This trick is to hide a knife! In the low stakes world of hitting on imaginary women, it’s hard to fuck up harder than this. He is slipping things into drinks and pulling knives. It’s like his virginity is trying to get him killed.

I understand I have a natural advantage over the author because I’m tall, handsome, and not a magician, but anyone who has talked to a woman knows they’re harder to trick than this. This is a swindle you’d read about in a turn of the century novel about a man who died alone. “You own me a drink,” says the creep touching your hair. “Fucking swoon,” you say. Anyway, this is a real innovative trick, “The Ice Breaker.” What’s next? Tie a cherry stem into a knot with your tongue? You fucking idiot?

Just walk up to a girl and reach into her food or drink. Do a thing widely regarded as the most cliche thing a desperate man can do, but make it a lie. Maybe it won’t work or maybe it won’t, but the joke’s on her because you already smelled her hair.

So if I’m understanding this one correctly, you… and I want to make sure I’m getting it exactly right… you steal her phone to get her information and then pretend to be a telemarketer. This is a genuine maniac’s idea of an idea. How does this conversation go in his imagination? “Ha ha, I’m not actually a telemarketer. You fool. I am the man who stole your phone and got your number. Look behind you. See that middle-aged magician touching you? He is me and he has a knife.” No, but I’m being serious: what is going on? What the fucking shit is next? Severed baby doll heads?

Oh my god.

So right alongside all these tips from The Elderly Stalker’s Guide to Bitch Slaying are these wacky party tricks for someone’s 7th birthday. This is supposed to be a book about seducing adult-aged ladies and he is running up to strangers at the park and blasting water out of his nose. And then what? What conversation happens after that? “That didn’t really come out of my nose. Hi. The name’s Rich. Give me your phone, I have a knife.”

I hate this more than anything, and I recently read “loose doll heads are a great way to meet women.” So I want to be as clear as I can with my words here: this is Garfield trying to do a rape joke.

Give her a lingering, finger stroking high five. No one will know. If she complains, call her a liar. You can do anything you want to a woman if it’s just hand touching stuff because it’s technically legal and you’ve already smelled her hair.

“Women love bee attacks, and you don’t even need real bees,” says knife hiding author of Tricks to Pick Up Chicks.

“Here’s nothing, you cow. You clumsy whore, I’ve taken your coin!”

I don’t know how these are still surprising me, but Jesus Christ. Rich Ferguson’s seduction advice is to wait for a woman to drop a quarter, bend down to not pick it up, and then leave. Why would anyo– oh. I get it. Looking up her dress and masturbating to it later is such an ordinary part of this guy’s life he didn’t even think to mention it.

This is going to sound insane, but there is still a lot of Chapter 1 – “Quickies” left. Rich moves on from violating the personal space of women and the rules we all live by to list some pick up lines that don’t do anything. Those are his words, not mine, but I agree.

By now you’ve realized Rich doesn’t have much respect for women. Imagine writing any of this if you thought women had any intelligence or agency. “I tied your cherry stem in a knot, real person with no defenses against the endless siege of losers exactly like me.” But Rich also has no respect for men. Here he is explaining to those poor fools, those many men who believe pick up lines are sorcery, that they are not. Again, we are so lucky this mighty trickster only uses his powers for good. I can’t get you ready for these, but you are going to hate them.

This fucking guy set up this section by saying, “I know you think this stuff works every time but it might not.” And then he tells you to hold up a pack of sugar, tell a woman she dropped her name tag, “immediately laugh,” and do a sugar pack magic trick. This is how a grandpa tells you he’s running out of time, not how you seduce a woman.

I like the idea of walking up to a stranger and guessing how big her tits are, though. “Because your s-shirt says GUESS,” you could explain while she’s deciding the best way to handle another awful stranger.

“The moment you let your guard down someone like me will kill you,” reminds Rich Ferguson to every woman he meets.

She might not really take off her clothes, but the jokes on her because you’ve already pictured it. To make no difference whatsoever in the seduction progress so far, place a small clutch of spider eggs on her shoulder.

Wait, no. No. This motherfucker is just reading the mugs out loud in a Spencer’s Gifts. What am I supposed to say about this? When it’s someone’s job to come up with pick up lines and they are literally telling you bumper stickers they saw outside a lingerie football league game, there are no ridiculous directions to take it. Its failure is already beyond any hypothetical concept. “Fuck this soulless monster,” is my joke.

That panties one is a Gallagher line. I’m not kidding; it really is. Which means Rich Ferguson was watching a Gallagher special and thought, “You know if you take out the exploding watermelons, a lot of what this racist man is saying could be quite seductive to women.” Here, let me find an original one. Okay, here we go:

This is somehow worse than approaching women to tell them about Hot Topic shirts you’ve seen, but it may comfort her because it has the subtext of, “Don’t worry, young lady. I was chemically castrated by the state in 1975.”

No one is going to believe this book is real. You could buy this book on Amazon, open it up and see I didn’t doctor any of this and you would still be mostly sure I’m pulling a prank.

Rich starts a new section called “One Liners.” Like the “Pick Up Lines” section, it is a random list of buttons found on a passionate grade school librarian’s signature vest. I cannot imagine why these are two different sections. I’d normally insult something like this by calling it two identical lists of half-remembered Gallagher jokes, but that’s proudly what it is. That’s how this magician fucks.

“Fake tits!?” you stammer at your dream girl. “Because y-your shirt said GUESS,” you add as you pee your pants, you piece of shit. Another notch on the Rich Ferguson futon slat. Ha. These breasted fools are practically asking for it by wearing a shirt with a word on it.

This is the perfect opener when you’re following a woman to her car or grabbing her ankle from a sewage drain.

Is it a red flag when a man’s opening line contains the word slut and bitch? I hope not, because this is a great line for picking up a confused woman with no sense of humor on her first day outside, and that’s my type.

“YOU ARE NOT SAFE, MY DEAR,” implied the magician to the missing girl.

What’s the deal with this flawed premise with an obvious, actual answer? And why do they call it airplane FOOD when you can shape it into a human vagina probably better than the real thing?

This will sound unthinkable. Impossible. But we aren’t done with Chapter 1 – “Quickies” yet. Rich has included a series of insults you can preload for those rare occasions when chloroform jokes don’t land. Most of them are pompous references to seventh grade biology because women aren’t like us fellas getting Gallagher jokes mostly right. They’re stupid.

“You plebeian wench. You shall never again know love like the time I said to your chest, as you may remember, IMPLANTS?”

This is almost an idea. It would take a miracle for someone to take this as an insult and there will never be a situation where it makes sense, but it has the rhythm of a joke. It might be an appropriate thing to say after a bachelorette party tells you to fuck off and you proclaim, “Very well, I shall leave you with this!”

“Fine, I guess you can kill me, mister,” she replied.

“It’s your own fat fault for being in public,” hissed the world renowned pick up artist known as “The Ice Breaker” as he slid the chain of scarves back into his mouth. “Fucking waste of scarves!” he complained.

At this point, why are we dancing around it? Just punch her in the face, Rich.

The Ice Breaker sat at his typewriter and tried to condense his vast experience of observation into a tidbit of wit. He had it. He had it. “Go where you’re not wanted and stay there. Say something fucking meaningless.” Elsewhere, a forbidden hole leading to a world of darkness grew larger.

I have some bad news. We aren’t done with Chapter 1 “Quickies.” After his section on awesome shit you can say to women rejecting you, he wrote a section on awesome shit you can say to women rejecting someone else!

And if you’re standing behind Rich you can say, “The bird and mouse are gone, the third opossum gets your panties, your stinky whore panties.”

Wait, hold on, stop. Did Rich recycle this murdery “One Liner” to use as a “Line if She Blows Someone Else Off?” How? And I don’t mean how could a writer be this careless and lazy, I mean how brain make cuddle line choice? Are you supposed to deliver this after you witness a mauling? “Um, I can’t help but notice you are receiving unwanted attention; I shall like to throw my hat into the ring as well, m’lady.”

“Boy, some of the guys in here are real creeps. I’m sorry you had to go through that. Au chante, I’m Rich Ferguson. Magician. You won’t believe the poop joke I once saw on a refrigerator magnet, and nothing else.”

“So by my logic, ladies, which is quite formidable, that means my penis is off the clock.”

We did it! We made it! This is Chapter 2 – “One Night Stands!”

This chapter is mostly old magic tricks with pervy names and insufficient instructions. For instance, here is how you seduce someone by weaving a tourniquet around your fingers with rubber bands. “Rubber Penetration,” you call it to help women understand, okay, this magician in the bar is hitting on me, not panhandling.

Rich, you idiot. If a woman agrees to a stranger’s request to “pull my finger and close your eyes,” she has already been kidnapped by one of the other murderers.

This might work if you told her, “You dropped your name tag, Karate.”

I’m not trying to be difficult, Rich, but this is bullshit. This has never and could never work and if you were capable of talking a group of women into giving you their phones and playing a rigged calculator game, you would have already talked them into sex.

YOU DROPPED YOUR NAME TAG, KARATE STRAW!!!

There isn’t a woman alive who wouldn’t immediately see through this, but that’s not the point. The point is, you want to trigger a woman’s adrenaline as quickly as possible because it gives her flesh a richer flavor.

Tell your dream-girl, “and that’s how you make nine dollars, you thirsty bitch.”

This is going to be one of those where I don’t make a joke because this guy just suggested you tell a woman you’re not going to put your mouth on her, and then you do, but you also tell her she’s not worth a dollar, only in a fun way to let her know you have a great personality.

Enough of this sincere bullshit. Let’s move on to “Scams.” Here’s a good one where you… wait, this is another one where you grab a stranger and put your mouth on them. “Oh my, I thought you were my friend. She also has very gropable breasts, what a mixup. Hi. Rich Ferguson. Fucking obvious sex criminal.”

“No, see, it’s a hundred dollar bill. Only not the kind you’re thinking of, dummy. The kind where you owe me one hundred dollars. And you agreed, so you have to. Let me explain it again because sometimes my superior intellect confuses lesser life forms. Sometimes ‘bill’ means a second thing and I led you to believe the wrong one, you yeasty, imbecilic animal. The name’s Rich, but they call me ‘The Ice Breaker.’ You remind me of my mommy, I hate you.”

This is the plan of a child who learned what “drunk” meant a moment ago. Rich’s idea is to pretend to be drunk until you’re alone with her and then “instantly become sober?” That’s a fucking horror turn in a movie you thought was a college romp. Can you even call this a scam? This is lying to a woman and then no one sees her again.

We all love a night out with our friends, teaming up to lie to women. Let’s read Chapter 3 – “Threesomes.”

This might have worked on the day they invented women, but it seems almost embarrassing today. It also requires someone to be worse at hitting on women than you, and I would honestly love to see what Rich Ferguson’s idea of picking up a girl would look like if you were trying to tank it. Do you accidentally strangle her rather than joke about strangling her?

You already knew this next one would eventually show up:

“You can change your shirt in front of me. If you w-want. Also, did y-you know that blowjobs are how you say hello in Blind? Help, I’m a character from an ’80s comedy, how did I get in your world? Call me Ice Breaker. Sagittarius. And, oh yeah, I can’t see.”

This whole book has been a collection of criminal-adjacent schemes to rub your elbow up against a furious woman’s boob and call it a sexual conquest. And now, after all that, Ferguson’s whole plan is “send your liar friend over to meet and befriend a whole group of girls and talk them into playing board games. Ah, but here’s the key part no one tells you– choose the one you want to fuck!”

Like every pickup artist, staring at women who won’t talk to him has made Rich Ferguson think he’s good at reading body language. And like every person who runs out of sexual wordplay ideas after three, Rich Ferguson has named this chapter “Chapter 4 – Body Language.”

Like every pickup artist, shaking a woman’s hand and her leaving his life forever has made Rich Ferguson think he’s good at decoding handshakes. “Here are some things that may or may not be true for reasons you couldn’t possibly know,” says the absolute dipshit.

After 11 tips about handshakes and foot placement, Rich Ferguson remembers smiles. “Smiles are good, reader, I’m helping you,” says the goddamn total fucking dipshit.

As the man faking disabilities to invade the spaces of women, this shouldn’t come up often, you are going to want to look out for open signs of contempt. If a woman is pantomiming her disgust at you, Rich says you have three options. One, harass her friend. She won’t care, she knew what she was getting into when she sat next to your first choice. Two, draw attention to your failure. Everyone! This tease heard almost all of a Gallagher bit and now she’s pretending she’s not into me! Three, do something amazing. No need to elaborate, you’ve always had this option for when the Gallagher stuff didn’t work. Or four, leave her hanging as you leave. Walking away after humiliating yourself is a real power move. I’m leaving, me, because this whole group of man-hating lesbians are the ones who can’t tell a Gallagher joke! If there are any other body language experts in the bar they will know you are the real winner when you slink back to your girl-watching shadow.

Sometimes women bump up against you, but this is never an accident. You must follow them. Or pretend to be offended. Please try anything, this is the closest you have been in years. She touched you, not the other way around this time! You, the main character of the universe! The sexy big boy who could have any woman he wanted but doesn’t because the world is lucky he only uses his powers for good!

“Chapter 5 – Rules of the Game” is not that. It’s a violently random list of 60 things Rich Ferguson thinks he knows about what he thinks is dating. It is sixty phrases a sleeping prisoner would mumble if he was being held on charges of chicken sex.

It only took him five entries before Rich made the rule “When what you want doesn’t match up with what a woman says, she’s wrong.” Oh no, this is a really bad one for me not to add a joke.

“thankyou for the large penis sex prize you awarded to me, lady mayor. i trust my secret identity of karate vigalante is safe with you.”

“oh no this was meant for someone else. hi, this is blond guy from the bar. the one with the knife who recited a poop bumper sticker for you.”

“* blind”

“lol the dumb female is buying it”

“wait that one really wasn’t meant for you”

The last ten entries are Rich coping with the reality of his situation. He wrote an entire book about picking up chicks and it was several pages of 1950’s best fart jokes and the Revenge of the Nerds scenes they had to cut from the television broadcast. It has taken such a toll on him he can no longer get laid in his imagination. “She’s the one loosing out on someone with a great personality,” he weeps, spelling the word losing wrong for the 11th time with his terrible personality.

“Be sincere” says the stranger groper at the end of a book about deceiving women. “She technically can’t reject you if you’re lying,” says the man who just told you to be sincere. I have so much more to say, but like a desperate lonely man insisting you let him do a very long calculator trick and refusing to go away, I’m going to leave you wanting more. Always.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Vampire Jokes and Cartoons 🌭

The year was 1974. “Fuck it,” said a comedy book editor. “Fuck everything.”

Vampire Jokes and Cartoons is the skeletal remains of an idea picked dry by mindless boneworms. It was edited by Phil Hirsch, a giant in the dead horse kicking genre. Keen-minded hot dogs might remember him as the man responsible for 101 Hamburger Jokes and two different boob joke collections. He has the sense of humor of an Anne Frank House tour guide, and Vampire Jokes and Cartoons is him on an off day.

“Something about necks, come on think… neck…” is the entire writing process for most of the book’s jokes. And speaking of writing processes, the first thing I do when I read these things is to find the patterns. Authors always reveal secrets and weaknesses when they lazily attack the same problem, and that’s where the magic is. So I started keeping a tally of nonsensical neck references. Blood bank jokes. Misunderstandings of how vampires work. Misunderstandings of how comedy works. I’ve never learned less. Vampire Jokes and Cartoons is the spilled intestines of a beast feeding only on stupid. Two of the categories I was tracking were “Huh?” and “Fuck You” because I thought I could do some kind of “The Only 6 Kinds of Vampire Jokes” bit. But no way. Without exaggeration, 80% of the jokes in this book were “Huh?” or “Fuck You.” Let me show you.

Oh, a vampire lemonade stand? I get it. The lemonade would be blo– hold on, the customers are also vampires? And they… don’t recognize the taste of blood? They thought they were buying tomato juice? Even though they only drink blood? You dumb fuck, did you forget what vampires were in the middle of this? This is like a cartoon of two dogs, but one of them is a psychiatrist and the other says, “You are a dentist, camel.” Pathetic. An embarrassment.

What’s the joke supposed to be here? This is a group of vampires going to see a movie about a vampire. I suppose they would do that if they existed. Are you fucking telling me this cartoonist wants me to imagine a world where vampires are real and nothing else is different and something about that would magically be funny? Maybe if they were buying tickets to Two Hours of Diabetic Cowards Bleeding Out, you’d think, “Oh, I get it. Undead monsters would enjoy different entertainment than us.” But this? This is nothing. Only a goddamn idiot wouldn’t know that, Phil Hirsch.

Later in the book they do try to come up with funny vampire movies. It is catastrophic. Shameful failures cowering under the shadow of a mouse drawing. “A SCAR IS BORN?” How? On what? The dead body you were sucking on? Dead bodies don’t heal! Or do you think there’s a coroner out there referring to the gaping fang wounds on a desiccated corpse as “a scar?” And what the shit kind of sad effort is “GRIEF ENCOUNTER?” And don’t start with the excuse of “oh, the family of the guy the vampire ate will feel grief, and that’s why the hilarious pun works.” I’ve heard it all before, you fucking hack. You wrote this in 1973. You only had to flip one letter upside down and you could have had Cleobatra Jones. It was right there, you trash.

Are you starting to see what I’m talking about? What could this mean? Is this vampire sarcastic? Or in this world of vampires, are movies about vampires always funny? And if so, why? Do they get “real” vampires wrong? That can’t be it, because the authors and readers of this book are using those vampire movies as a reference, which would make this joke literally impossible to understand. No human mind should have been capable of a thought this pointless. Which means, okay, this is going to sound insane but here’s my theory: this book is for people who find vampires hilarious. Under any circumstances and in any context, to them, “vampire” is a complete setup and punchline. With this in mind, let’s continue.

“Could it be that easy? Am I already done?” asked the man staring at the words VAMPIRE SNOWMAN. He was.

“I really need some time to set this gag up,” decided the man staring at the words REFRIGERATOR FULL OF BLOOD. He didn’t.

What!? Aiiiiieeeee, WHAT!? No no, we can figure this out. Okay, I think a group of men wrote a letter to this unnamed bureaucrat about a vampire balloon that scared them. So far, amazing. Perfect premise. Next, the letter arrived and the important man finished every task with a higher priority of “some guys scared by balloon.” Finally, he called his secretary into his office to take down his reply. It’s a great joke and it works perfectly except for one thing: there’s no way all of this could happen while the parade was still going. Checkmate, Phil.

Take off your Daredevil Doug Safety Goggles™ and let’s get started, Little Scientists™! With your parents’ help, mix 5mg of aluminum sulfate with three drops of the menses of an innocent. You fool, you have summoned Dracula.

I get this cartoonist is going for irony, but a vampire writing a vampire book in a world where vampires exist would be subject to the same criticisms as a human writing a human book in our world. The only thing that happened here is a dipshit tried to imagine a world where vampires were real but then accidentally didn’t. A better caption would have been: …the handsome vampire’s fangs slid easily into the engorged penis like two penises penetrating a blood-filled penis. A passing parade startled him from his penis feast, leaving twin crimson geysers erupting from the penis like two ejaculating peni– “Jesus Christ, this is HOT. I don’t need to read another word, the receptionist job is yours.”

The book makes a few attempts at “real” jokes, but Phil was so lazy he couldn’t remember which punchlines had already been used. Sometimes they used classic jokes with a vampire twist, but they couldn’t quite get them to make sense.

This is one of the rare times you can’t just change the word “gorilla” to “vampire.” Because “anything it wants” isn’t the answer to the question of what you feed a vampire. It always wants blood, you dumb shit! It’s the only thing it eats! Which means at least one person contributing to this vampire joke book lied on their resume when they checked the box “I know what a vampire is.”

Well, yeah, you dick! What else would he do? 

And now you’re telling me that after being bitten by a creature of the night and given the power of bat, snowman, and chemistry set, he’s still a “panhandler?” So he feasts on the blood of the living, but only after begging them for change. What a desperate stretch. You’re humiliating yourself like this, and for what? For two thirds of a joke you already told? People can fucking see you, Vampire Jokes and Cartoons.

“I kind of remember something about wooden stakes through the heart,” thinks the cartoonist accidentally drawing a vampire murdering his wife. Or maybe this was no mistake? In which case, ha ha ha die, wife!

This is… I’m not sure who the Vampires of America are spoofing. The Boy Scouts? A plumber’s union? I think the audience needs more to go on to understand the punchline, which is just a song about night, which is when vampires go outside. As a framework, there is nothing lazier than inventing a vampire organization and calling it “Vampires of America” so you can reference any of the thousands of ones about night time. Nothing will ever top it and I’m not setting up a bit.

It was a bit. I have betrayed you. As the book goes on, American vampires register different corporations and LLCs to allow for some barely Dracula creed or theme song. The author thought they’d found the cheat code for infinite vampire jokes the same way a pumpkin owner thought they’d found the cheat code for infinite sex.

This is something you should only say if a doctor is telling you, “Most of your brain was destroyed by what we’re currently calling bat AIDS.” Anyway, I think you get the idea. Let’s get back to the other kinds of botched vampire jokes.

Forget that there’s no punchline because as a premise, this one is incredible. A child is keeping a vampire in the attic and has brought him so many bloody marys his mother is getting suspicious. How many did it take? From the word choice it has to be at least three, right? I think it’s fair to ask why this woman made her child even a single cocktail much less many. “Another bloody mary!? Hmmm… you’re almost suspiciously tying one on for a 4-year-old. Either you have a vampire upstairs and you’re both confused by simple concepts, or you’re a very functional alcoholic. Celery or no?”

If I could speak directly to the author for a moment, bitch, did you mix up vampires, the one thing you’re supposed to be writing about, with mummies? What kind of stupid asshole types “OF HUMAN BANDAGE” during a list of BEST-SELLING VAMPIRE BOOKS? Are you telling me your desperate mind fluttered around and landed on the wrong monster before it landed on The Novelization of Cleobatra Jones? Fuck. You.

Sure, it’s a witch humorlessly reading a list of dead nursery rhyme characters to a goblin. I don’t think it’s going to get a laugh, but the author had a clear vision. He pictured a world where the undead ruled the night and tried to imagine what their children’s books might look like. He never got past the dumbest idea, “all the popular characters are dead, dead, drained of their blood,” but at least there aren’t any mistakes here. Nobody forgot what vampires eat or whether or not they’re mummies. And why just look at the detail in this… torn asunder baby?

My point is, it’s an improvement from earlier, where a miserable dumbass was working backwards from “Fangs for the Memory.” Let’s see if they can keep it up!

I have betrayed you again. It was a bit.

“Maybe Batman is a bat man? Oof. That’s pretty bad. Hopefully I can top it before tomorrow when I’m to be executed by the state.”

So the vampire is looking for a job as a “body snatcher.” And the punchline is, “yes, it’s confusing here in this fictional world as well, reader.” I don’t even know what to do with it. It’s all lampshade. It might as well say, “Unusual situation being pointed out, but poorly. I think vampires are mummies but the only thing eternal is parade.”

I sort of love this one because it wouldn’t be much of anything elsewhere. However, in this vampire joke book it’s a startling subversion of expectations. It somehow jumped right past vampires and hit baseball? It’s like watching The Sixth Sense and Bruce Willis turning to camera and saying, “Nobody’s dead or anything weird. I just always seem to know what my cat wants.”

This family is watching their son walk into the darkness with an eel-handed ghoul and they say, “I think it’s time for Junior to have a little brother or sister.” What could it mean? Do they know he’s never coming back? This is something that would make a clown’s wife say, “You know, you don’t need to tell me about every dumb little fucking dream you have.”

This cartoon requires you to know a doggie bag is for bringing uneaten food home, yet somehow be mistaken that you have to bring your own empty one to the restaurant. But if you ignore this tiny flaw in the punchline, the idea of sneaking into a woman’s bedroom and tearing her into leftovers is a solid joke.

As crazy as this sounds, a lot of the jokes in this book suffer from overthinking. The author knows vampires do blood stuff, and so do doctors, and knew there could be something there. So he pictured a hospital. The doctor is talking to a patient… he’s mostly nude, getting massaged by a busty nurse. Normal stuff, but also a vampire…

… who is great, no notes. However, instead of a “joke,” the author dedicated all eight words of his caption to establishing this conceptual link he found between doctors and vampires. They both take blood, you see. But no doctor would use a vampire for several obvious reasons. One, monsters. The list goes on. You can skip past this fundamental understanding and make a real joke. The caption could be “If you have payment questions see our new financial administrator,” or “We found the maniac who took your hair,” or “this is our new thoracic motorcycle surgeon, Hepatitis Mike.” It doesn’t matter. What I’m trying to say is, you’re overthinking it. Try a vampire joke where you go from your gut.

Yes! Perfect! It’s stupid as fuck, but the right kind of stupid as fuck.

No! God damn it, no! I warned you about this. See, you took the term “blood money” and rolled it around in your brain until it had lost all meaning. And instead of abandoning it, you sent a vampire to the IRS offices to talk about his blood money deduction, a thing no one does at a place you wouldn’t do it. This is a failed adaptation of the riddle “How does a vampire buy his bow ties?” If this is a world where vampires pay taxes and can’t deduct blood money from their taxes, why is he doing it? How confused is he? How confused are you? You’re telling me this guy turned into a bat and flew to Washington, D.C. during vampire-exploding business hours to get lectured on tax evasion by his food? The only joke here is you. Wretched.

What. You’re telling me this vampire doctor keeps up his medical certification so he can go to his patients’ homes, leave a clear paper trail, and eat them? Are sick people that much more delicious? You know what? Let’s say we ignore how this is a terrible idea and you’d be outed as The Fucking Vampire Doctor immediately. What’s the joke? That a vampire doctor would make house calls? To whom would that be funny? That sounds like a test to see what part of your brain is impaled on a fence. If you whispered that into a child’s grave, their parents would forget they ever existed.

Oh, great. The old business man with a bat gnawing on his neck asking the operator to connect him with God gag. If you’re not going to try, Vampire Jokes and Cartoons, I’m not going to either.

“Hey, Nancy, you live in a world where children, possibly dwarves, set you up on blind dates with vampires, but you’re the only person who can recognize them. Here’s one now drawn with a really different pen than me. Oh, did you drop dead rather than exist in such a world, Nancy? Because we haven’t gotten to the punchline, Nancy. I was going to say he wants to borrow a cup of blood, Nancy.”

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