Category: NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: The Conservation Corps 🌭

Post author By Merritt K
Post date 02/23/2023
9 Comments on 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.

Tags 1990s, cartoons, comic books, Free

NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Tricks to Pick Up Chicks 🌭

Post author By Seanbaby
Post date 02/17/2023
11 Comments on 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.

Tags books, Free, how-tos, romance books, Women

NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Vampire Jokes and Cartoons 🌭

Post author By Seanbaby
Post date 02/10/2023
5 Comments on 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.”

…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Rachel, the old bat from Great Neck, New York who sucks. Blood.

Tags books, Free, horror, Joke books

NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Buster Brown 🌭

Post author By Brendan McGinley
Post date 01/26/2023
9 Comments on Nerding Day: Buster Brown 🌭

You know how our grandparents’ Halloween costumes are chilling for the wrong reason these days? Some kid’s rabbit mask was cute in the Depression, but looks like the hotel-ghost of a serial killer now. That was Buster Brown. He was early 20th century’s first go at a gleeful twerp, but modern eyes have seen enough internet obscenities to recognize a psychophage. I don’t know why we’re making horror movies about lovable teddy Winnie the Pooh when Buster’s been the creepy giggling coming from the public domain attic for years.

Created in 1902 by R.F. Outcault as a reversal of his popular slumrat The Yellow Kid, Buster was an apple-cheeked rich kid whose beauty belied his insufferable antics. He assuredly grew up to be the jerk who tosses women into the pool at Gatsby’s parties. Buster’s sidekick was his Cheshire dog Tige, and there were a bunch of other characters we don’t care about, because none of them is seventeen poltergeists fighting to animate the corpse of a drowned child.

Not counting that one nightmare you keep having, the Yellow Kid is most recognizable these days as the inspiration for Sin City’s sexually undeterrable Yellow Bastard. Let me tell you the original kid, aka Mickey Dugan, was way more prone to racism, considering he was an Irish stereotype whose appearance barely qualified as human:

These two imps first appeared together on a 1904 postcard, but by that token, Batman and Superman first teamed up for a World’s Fair cover even though they never dueled over Martha within its pages. So it wasn’t until 1907 that Buster and Mickey met in a dream-tale that is likely comics’ first crossover and also its first homage to Little Nemo in Slumberland.

If you only read the normal comics, you’d think Buster was just a fancy Dennis the Menace. But by 1907 the comics would be the last way to encounter him, because Buster was the Garfield of his day. Pick five random Buster Brown comics, and six of them will advertise Buster products and productions. See, speaking of the World’s Fair, Outcault had spent 1904 in St. Louis at the peak of its “Meet Me in…” popularity, where he sold Buster out as an ad mascot to 200 licensees.

As 1-900-HOTDOG’s own Lydia Bugg conclusively proved, cartoon licensing scours a mind of sanity. For every one of these products, Buster’s glazed stare says chloral hydrate, but his wicked grin says cathinone to the grave. Whatever they dosed him with to move product, it opened The Red Door. Buster in the strip is drawn as a normal kid, but Buster in ads looks like the meat-stuffed gunny sack you give to a couple mourning a misplaced reborn doll. Whereas The Yellow Kid had dots for eyes in his goblin pug-mug, Buster was a perfect child, and therefore bore the smooth features of White God Himself: pert jowls, the least amount of nose possible, and huge, expressive eyes.

In fact: too much expression and eyeball for comfort. First stop: the famous Buster Brown Shoe Co.!

Is Buster tweaked out of his gourd or do these shoes come with a free case of Graves’ disease? If his eyes open any wider they’re going to turn into hyperspheres, yet they’re sunk so deep in their sockets time slows down near their surface. It’s almost like the devil-skeleton inside can’t grow his flesh past the age it possessed him. There’s nothing here but stretched skin and glazed jelly.

To avoid selecting for bias let’s start with a control: Wikimedia files. This is a crowdsourced series of exemplary images measuring Buster’s life and crimes. Leaving aside the strip where he talks about dead souls, there are eight gallery images:

Right out of the gate comes this…well, I guess you can’t call it a threat, since once you’ve seen it nothing can save you. Relax: the violence is already done, the chaos egg laid within your brain. Close your eyes while their lids still work. You’ll see his leering face slowly become your own. You’re a vector for Bustration now. See that flesh-colored wall behind him? Nobody ever said he was bursting through plaster lathe.

Oh. Okay, this is pretty normal. This is just a comic strip about a boy and his talking dog mailing out party invites. Hey, do me a favor real quick: start enumerating people who talk to a dog that only they can hear?

I made that list in under a minute and 75% of it was murderers, 2.5 of whom were satanically motivated. Behold their Gilgamesh. Still: this being a strip and not an ad, it’s not explicitly terrifying.

Maybe I spoke too soon! Ma’s face twists with revulsion: no! No, not a second one! What if it grows up to be the antichrist to Buster’s splendid blond beast? Or worse, what if it’s normal but one day, her attention slips long enough to leave it alone with…this elder thing? Too late! It has seen the bundle at the door. “I’ll take care of her,” the unchild tells her, attempting to calm her in as much as it can understand human emotions. After all, it wouldn’t do to have the neighbors making note of her increasing instability. Not yet. No, not until the blood-moon eclipse. But still: the phrasing is deliberately ambiguous.

I don’t care what time, place, or culture—anyone who came home to find this dripping down the walls would understand too late what the iron scent in their nostrils had already warned them about: Buster has breached the circle of salt, and now we comprehend why so many corpses around Murray Hill have been found with their hearts removed.

“I’m not a Pinhead” is EXACTLY what a Cenobite would say, and Hellraiser II already proved they’re not above recruiting kids for their prog rock album.

And just like that we’re back to normal, even if Buster still hasn’t grown a nose. It’s nice that this victim of the world’s first acid-on-baby attack still loves Christmas—perhaps because the soft, twinkling lights are easier on his vision? It takes his eyelid muscles ten times the force you humans use to blink.

Honestly? This is the best one. It’s a sweet picture of three friends sharing a laugh. Unless that kid in the porter’s uniform is weeping. Why? I don’t know, maybe his parents were found with their eyelids gnawed off by two sets of dental prints, one canine, one human. These are the possibilities.

This looks like a menu but it’s the French cover to one of the earliest comic books, a collection of Buster’s mischief (painting resolutions on walls). Please note that size and scale have no meaning, because reality breaks in the Demon Tige’s personal distortion field.

Okay, with that baseline, let’s study the clearest scans from image search:

Tige’s wordplay can’t distract from this child with an elephant gun. Buster is barely old enough to read. His mother still dresses him in dandywear. How did he get this rifle? What is he going to kill? This pun only works if Buster will be shooting within range of Jack, or the police will get involved. Nothing about this is okay.

Buster grins maniacally at you, patient zero of a laughing disease that ends with you drowning in your own tears.

“Oh, hello! I didn’t see you there. Why yes, this marvelous red liquid blackens as it dries! It’s the first of seven riddles that will unseal my true father’s prison when the submind corrupts itself to comprehend them.”

Most real-life productions either give normal Buster with sex-party Tige, or normal Tige with David Lynch’s Buster Brown. When they cast an actor without proptosis, proptosis will be given to him. (Protopsis means “explosive eyeballs” in Dutch.)

Despite this, we know the twerp has eyelids because the Buster Brown Shoe logo winks at you badly. He’s not used to closing his eyes because Buster never sleeps.

“Resolved! That the prettiest girl is the one I want to pin my tie on…Buster Brown.” –Buster Brown

“Funny place for a necktie!” –Tige

“Saliva samples tie the Brown boy to this series of corpses with their tongues pulled through their slit throats. GUILTY!” –Judge Parker

Every time Buster writes on a wall his facial topography averages out a little more. When the final trumpet sounds, he’s just going to be a volleyball with a pageboy haircut and a deadpan leer. But I guess I shouldn’t make fun of a kid with whatever the opposite of ichthyosis is. Let’s just be thankful the crew of the Event Horizon did such a good job gluing his eyeballs back in place after Buster gouged them out to stop the visions.

At first glance, it seems like Tige ate a child. But those are all Buster’s trademarks, and the longer I stare at this, the more I think he’s ghost-riding his familiar.

In a vanishing instance of Buster [With Nose] but a recurring one of Buster [Without Eyebrows] we see that he becomes a haunted marionette of every woman on an over-50 dating app’s Duluth results. The real error was giving him irises to emphasize his pinprick pupils. Buster is higher than God’s hairline. His peepers look like the painted stones Romans used to keep rigor mortis of the eyelids in check.

Not all of these were drawn by Outcault, but it’s telling that all artists characterize Buster’s as different stages of unembalmed corpse. This is a before and after argument for Botox treatment of Cushing’s syndrome. And let me save you some googling on that joke: Buster is allergic to oxygen, since in his dimension they breathe ultra-condensed sulfur. The result is a Tales From the Crypt where the disobedient kid who wanders away from the tour group ends up stuffed in the museum exhibit.

Poor fool, his mark is upon you now. You will pray for death as the world turns its face from your decay. You are become unto The Brown Men, and hell followeth.

Buster goes to see the Buster Brown musical, which itself was an ad for Buster Brown-Branded Great War Throwing Grenades. Tige attacks Stage-Tige, because the Left Hand Path demands one destroy oneself to obtain worldly desires. The Rite of Capitalist Sin-Ergy is complete.

Jack’s gun wasn’t a one-time thing. Buster is armed at all times, but it’s not what you think. He keeps trying to kill himself only to wake up surrounded by torn pieces of meat.

The shattered heart, the fresh, dripping red medium, the declaration of inarguable intent…if you have virgin daughters, kill them now as a mercy.

This is a later work, after a surgeon split Buster’s corpus callosum in a vain effort to isolate his evil right brain in sensory deprivation forever. Tige, being an extradimensional entity unbound by laws of space, shrinks here to dance quite literally on the head of a pin.

Jesus, he looks like the grandchild spawned from two Dick Tracy villains marrying off their kids in a failed bid for peace. This is what that Samuel Johnson meme looked like back when he was young enough to believe this shit.

Gaily marching to our destiny, la di da! Suddenly, Buster’s eyes swell as his neck swivels to shatter the fourth wall. “Nothing can stop us,” he chuckles. “Not even the fiction-membrane.” An icy finger traces your spine like a whispered promise.

Buster makes each pair of shoes himself, using locally sourced leather from previous customers. Say what you will about the ethics, but it’s ecologically admirable. Until 2010 you could still find Buster Brown Shoes not far from where Outcault lived in Queens. This blog wants you to believe it closed in bankruptcy, but isn’t it more likely it was one of those magical shops that vanishes when you go back to return the Wishing Spats that have killed the very sweetheart you wished to impress with your foot speed?

Come Christmas, even Buster thinks he might have oversaturated the market. As his comp merch piles up, compare the normal kid with his cardboard cutout’s thousand-parsec stare. Ad Buster has watched universes die in a sandbox of dust.

Oh no! He’s out of paint! Winking at you like a stroke victim trying to morse code “Running makes your fear taste better,” he then stretches his neck to unnatural lengths. The form of a python is the only way he can crush you for easier draining. Behind him, Tige has shrunk small enough to climb down your throat and begin extracting your bones for his own purposes.

Come on! It’s not even in its socket at this point! Kill the boy! KILL HIM FOR ALL OUR SAKES!

Oh God, no. You shot it six times, but it sat right back up, laughing. Quickly, reload the cylinder before it cackles the true name of despair. Our troubles have just begun!

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