Category: NERDING DAY

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Mojses by Qumm 🌭

There was once a convention called E3 where everyone involved in video games would crowd around a competitive spectacle of screens, announcements, and bikini girls. But deep in the basement of the LA Convention Center was a magical room called Kentia Hall where the deranged and foreign game developers held a sick impersonation of the upstairs party. It’s where Malaysian Best Storage might have a booth next to StyleRings For Marry Game Boy, LLC. And nearly twenty years ago, it’s where a small man eagerly handed me this:

“Ha ha what am I looking at?” I muttered to myself. “Is moJses made out of cum?” The man nodded excitedly. I was right –precisely right– but not in the way I meant.

You’re probably confused. It’s crazy, but simple: QUMM, which stands for Qualified Uuiou of MobileMan, owns moJses, a head company of QUMM, sometimes known as “the QUMM,” and when they say “MobileMan,” I think they mean “mobile video games.” According to Google, they don’t exist. According to Bing, horny moms need it, free trial. And in 2004, someone from either moJses or the QUMM handed me this catalog of their 72 titles. It is the only record that exists for them or their games, and from the way it quivers, I don’t think it likes being in our universe.

It opens with a letter from the CEO of both companies making it clear this is not a catalog for consumers or retailers to buy his games. He is looking for a publisher to turn this ragtag collection of partly coherent, mostly finished ideas into products three shell companies removed from any legal liability.

The first thing Andrew Suh needed was a single person who could turn Korean words into English. After the failing of largest tuna diaper, he moved on to his second goal: telling American publishers about his games. This would be a pointless, humiliating endeavor without finishing that first task, but Andrew was a go-getter. Maybe? Let me look him up.

I don’t know if Andrew Suh is a very common Korean name or a very cursed one, but Google thinks he’s either a murderer or a taekwondo molestor, and it’s 100% positive he was never the CEO of a MobileMan company. None of this is important, though. It’s a hell-damned pamphlet from a man shadow. What really matters are these, the hottest 2004 moJses mobile games from QUMM!

Battle Bugs might be what you expected from a 2003 mobile game from a company that never existed(?)– an incoherent bug-on-bug(maybe) fighter(probably) set on leaves(definitely). Battle Bugs is Game Type: Stand-alone and Color Depth: 256 Coloręś›, but I’m not kidding when I say so is every single one of the other 71 QUMM games. QUMM, if they’re all Stand-alone and 256 Coloręś›, shut up about it. This is like the Domino’s Pizza website adding “Diabetes: Yes” to everyone’s information.

I personally love authentic Engrish like this, back when it was done by confused maniacs who lied themselves into a translation job. But it’s more than that. This is also terrible copy. The person selling this had nothing to say long before they realized they had no way to say it. Two of their six bullet points are about pushing bugs off of leaves, which is pretty unnecessary given the title. No one heard “Battle Bugs” and thought, “Wait, how the FUCK would that work!? Leaf pushing!? Did I hear that right!? I DID!? Okay, wow, that was a hell of a presentation.”

This is a street basketball game only it’s set inside and has an exception about “normal two-point or three-point shoot.” So Street Basketball might not be either of those words? Honestly, I knew less about basketball after each bullet point, but I want to say it was quite a technical achievement to get six moving basketball(?) players onto a phone designed to be thrown away after calling your meth supplier. Though, it seems strange that after working so hard on something you’d let a gym coach dying of a snake bite name it and describe it.

After strangling the English language to death trying to explain the basic premise of basketball in Street Basketball, they decided to take it easy with their actual street basketball game, Power Dunk. The bullet points are: One, has a title. Two, moving sprites. Three, you control it. This is how you would describe a video game you’ve never played on its discount headstone. Jared Fogle, today, would be better at selling sandwiches than this person is at selling Power Dunk.

In Taxi Driver you’re a taxi driver, sure. But you’re also a caveman saving up to buy a wife? That can’t be right. Hold on, I’m going to see if I can search through the Internet graveyard and find out more…

… okay, here we go, from a 2004 snapshot of the long dead moJses by QUMM website:

You don’t marry anyone at all! The taxi money is for buying beer to drink alone, and if you drink enough beer, you can look at a girl. Then some other guy said, “Oh, crying into beer near a woman? In English, the word for that is marriage.” So these maniacs were trying to make Flintstones Taxi, but they accidentally made Flintstones Honeymooners, which is just Double Flintstones. This is way too complicated. Didn’t they make any phone games about fucking ninjas?

Yes! YES! I said “fucking ninjas” and QUMM gave me Ninja Porker! It’s like a monkey paw tried to betray me but accidentally improved my wish. Suck it, monkey p— wait, did they just spell “Poker” wrong? This is… I’m not sure I’ve ever felt heartbreak like this. And the idea of adding little ninjas to cards is so worthless they barely mention it. Their sales pitch is basically, “Poker is a popular board game, and this is close enough. If we had to categorize it, I guess it’d be Puzzle (Like Shooting)? Caution: the ninjas are cute, but do not pork.”

In the same way Ninja Porker was based on the popular board game “Poker,” Wizard Stone is based on the “popular character of a wizard.” It’s also based on the popular character of a princess, but she doesn’t look like she’s a big help as she weeps from underneath evil bricks. I might regret this, but let me run her screenshot through a translator:

“I grabbed it with Volmo?” Is Volmo the blue one? Is the whole pile of blocks Volmo? Do I really want to know? This is an artist who rendered the pleasure on the face of every block crushing the princess and gave careful detail to the tear falling from her eye, then said, “Fuck it, seven blobs counts as hands.”

At first glance, Santa looks like an ordinary Santa game. Even through the Engrish, you can’t misunderstand “Giving a gift to children by being a Santa Clause.” But then it gets weirdly hot. Santa is joined by cute Santa boy and sexy Santa girl, and you don’t hand a gift to the children– you dance it at them. So this game is about sexy, pumping Santas for kids? Those words should only be said right before, “and may I remind you, Sex Crime Kevin, you are under oath.” 

This is getting dark. The next one better be awesome, moJses by QUMM.

Oh hell yes. From the darkest corners of the HardThrash comes A Scray Game! That title is the Scottie Pippen of fucking up– a world-class, multi-faceted fuckup from anywhere on the court. Naming your horror game A Scray Game is like trying to put on a condom and accidentally wrapping a broken balloon around your wife’s head. It’s like filing a police report that says “suspect Attempt the Wiffe Ballon.” A Scray Game is like trying to shrug, but throwing out your shoulder and dying.

Even in 2004, Just Barely Not Tetris was a tired genre. The Magic Pangpang people took a look at the shitty little almost-Tetris they had created and thought, “at least we got the sound effects to play without stopping the music?” And look, I’ve worked on enough video games to know this was probably hard. But it’s also a baseline expectation. If a movie poster said, “Dog is cop, Color backgrounds, Expertly covered up times Jim Belushi farted with car horn,” you’d think duh. That’s what sound design is for. How bad is this movie if you’re bringing up the internal awards you handed out to the Jim Belushi fart team? Answer the question, makers of K9: Fartcop!!!

Magic Pang Pang 2 was also in the book, only it was given the name Minumaru Adventure and it had so much less to offer they spent half of their sales pitch changing “neighboring 1 coins” into “1coins.” Language barrier or not, this is fucking crazy. These people just started multiplying numbers! And the exchange rate never changed! 5 neighboring 10 coins is still only worth 50coin! This is like sending Jim Belushi on a press junket to tell reporters, “In K9: Fartcop 2, one fart equals a fart, two farts equals two farts, and five farts in a bushel is a five bushel partyfart. Also, it’s now called Fartufarto’s Bar Mitzvah.” Perfection, in other words.

Sometimes it’s clear what the Engrish is trying to say, but it’s still funny. The word “well-written” is such an absurd choice when describing your source material. It’s almost an apology. Like they’re saying, “Okay, it wasn’t a bestseller or anything, but before we turned it into a flip phone game and called it Sword Man, it was fine.”

I think the moJses by QUMM copywriter is losing their confidence. And rightfully so. They are an amateur trash salesman looking for a fraud co-conspirator in a language they do not speak. In other words, the plot to Jim Belushi’s Fart Shop.

Okay, this is real salesmanship. They say this Final Fantasy knockoff was awarded the title of “The best promising game” by the goddamn Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Amazing! And unlikely since that is not an award the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism gives out, nor would it seem appropriate to give to a video game they themselves funded. This has all the credibility of Fruit Ninja claiming it won a Latin Grammy for “Tallest Fun.” Still, what a brag improvement it is from “Game feature: 3 coins equal 3coin, no listen, let me explain the coin exchange system again across the next four bullet points.”

They’re going to answer your main question first. Yes, Cronous is The Cronous, adapted for phone from the hit full 3D game, ‘the Cronous’. It has all the characters you love. Dalof. Seduce. And if you’re wondering about the interaction of data? It’s coming. Assuming you, the reader, are a huge American publisher and a big the Cronous fan who wants to show them how to do that. What else is there to say? Oh, right. It’s Stand-alone and 256 Coloręś›.

Were you wondering what is the real action game? Fucking enjoy the real action in Combat Troopers. Or wait for Combat Troopers XV, because this is only the first in a series. How could it not be? Combat Troopers (1) has 4 entire stages, they are all Jungle, and we are banking on the creative team behind those things having a lot more ideas in the tank. Do you hear us, future? Combat Troopers and their various items and weapons are coming!

Chicken Run is hard to explain. First, it’s actually called Chicken House. Second, consist of 3 plates and each plate is circulated and change plate. You get it. Alright, let’s do one for the ladies.

Musical Performance Game is a Stand-alone Musical Performance Game (256 Coloręś›) designed to appeal to women by including characters. And sure, they’ll love the round, orange nothing without a name. They’re women. But Musical Performance Game takes it a step further by letting those ladies become a handsome prince and kiss a princess. A magically hypnotized prince if I’m understanding it correctly. I’ve seen some bad English speakers, but these lunatics tried to describe a rhythm game about a ball and inadvertently wrote a gender-swapping sexual assault starring two unrelated characters. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of the final day of shooting K9: Fartcop when Jim Belushi said, “That’s a wrap on Q*Bert’s Hamlet! Great job, everyone!” Hold on, wait. God damn it, yeah, I think I’ve lost my mind. Let’s do one more.

What the shit? This is a game about a high school teacher choosing beautiful girls? This reads like a criminal confession hidden inside a list of game features. “My princess plays various sounds… as you watch the little girls grow up.” “My princess has a convenient interface… for choosing one of the beautiful children.” It’s like someone wrote an AI to describe games and it went rogue and tried DMing you for foot pictures.

What happened here? Every other game was satisfied being a generic throwaway imitation. They were like, “It doesn’t matter if any of these are good. Pump out a couple basketball ones, an Ikari Warriors, a Tetris or two, Dance Dance Revol— and oh! We should do a uniquely branching narrative graphic adventure sim about grooming high school girls spanning their entire childhood! What else? Maybe one with chicken plates?”

I don’t want to end on that one. Let’s do one more. I know this is a lot of madness to expose yourself to, but it’s not like any 2004 Korean mobile game sales pitches can get any worse.

Ohmygod, no! It’s worse! It’s worse!!! Take your pamphlet back to hell with you, moJses by QUMM!!!

…

These artist have unbecome foot sponsor HOT DOG cream Supernaught standard color 256n qum images make one1:50 fun porker. For you. YOU!

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Charmed’s “Twice in a Blue Moon”

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Adult Only Practical Jokes

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Nerding Day: Clobberin’ Time! The Marvel OverPower Game Guide

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Mark Millar’s Nemesis 🌭

Tired of amoral Superman parodies? The Batman ones are worse.

This cover’s untouched by Photoshop or editorial. Meet Nemesis, one of my favorite things ever printed. I need pain to feel alive, putting Nemesis among the worst crimes preserved in ink. Somewhere between Cheney’s Visual Guide to Nation Building and The Punisher Breaks Your Arm in Real Life.

It’s a neurotoxic miniseries drawn by Steve “Better Than This” McNiven and written by Mark “Perfect For This” Millar. Some writers are consistently good or bad, and Millar finds that shit boring. He has comics of every letter grade, generally concentrated around the Bs and Fs.

The first cover sets the tone:

I’ve never raised an eyebrow in real life, but that tagline’s tempting. I liked Kick-Ass. It tapped vigilante fiction’s appeal and pratfalls with a fresh voice. Hearing “I see you were into all that character stuff or whatever, but we’re done with that cuck shit” makes me nervous. I’ve lost kneecaps in the MillarWorld casino before.

That inconsistency grates more than outright incompetence. I know the author of Pick-Up Lines for Lost Souls couldn’t write Superman: Red Son. A Mark Millar fuck-up feels like a choice. When I read Nemesis, I know that less/more/better drugs could have elevated it to a B and spared America’s brain another polyp.

The festival of edge opens in Japan, one of the six countries that exist in action media. The mysterious Nemesis gloats, unlike his later scenes where he is bragging and boasting.

This might take a while. Since we’re in a future film, let’s fast-forward.

Give him a moment.

In the above mess, Nemesis executes a simple plan: commit Payday 2 heists across Tokyo, announce the police chief’s time of death, kidnap said chief, leak his location, blow up his fakeout location, hit the chief with a train, derail the train into an orphan factory, and explain every beat to awed minions and/or victims. That’s a migraine-inducing sentence, but you need it to understand the concept: combining the plot armor of Batman and The Joker into one mistake.

I tell students there’s no wrong way to write, because I’m a liar. It’s the easiest thing in the world to fuck up. For example, the second worst way to make a character cool is having them declare their radness. The worst is having someone else do it. Every page of Nemesis does both.

After blowing up Japan, BatJoker turns his eye on DC. His gimmick is hunting elite cops, presumably as research for the ultimate drill album. Leading to our star:

Blake Morrow, the middle point between an electable Bush and mid-franchise John McClane. He even has a diversity sidekick. A second draft’s title would be Batman vs. Die Hard. Hopefully DC gets to that idea before Discovery turns them into an NFT marketplace.

Only Blake’s not really our star. He’s a medium for BatJoker, who kidnaps the President from Air Force One.

Absorb this moment. Whether you’re in or out, the comic peaks here. It’s the purest power fantasy, with the least gloating or pointless gore. My inner child can’t reject a gunman surfing a plane. I’d even accept him kickflipping it.

Keep the 2010 publishing date in mind: the target is neither senile nor addicted to snow/Twitter/his daughter. For once, we don’t have to be told BatJoker is cool. He just does something interesting. It’s a hard beat to ruin.

There we go.

As the Cabinet’s current supercop, Blake searches for information. This hunt has dramatic potential, so BatJoker directly exposits his origin.

Remember, Batman has the most widely riffed-upon origin this side of Batman. Parodies, tributes, and shameless copies of the Dark Knight anchor their own blockbuster franchises. Hotep Batman made a billion dollars in theaters, Depressed Batman saved Netflix, and Depressed Hotep Batman is my next book. If you commit to a 21st century Batman parody, you have to come correct. Here’s what Nemesis delivers:

The takeaway: Batman would be a worse person if his parents were death row sex criminals. This is a special species of dumb, rarely seen in the wild. The logic chain and conclusion are fine. The base question is so stupid that thinking about it hurts your headsponge.

While we’re on Batman: did you consume anything between The Dark Knight and The Batman? It was a golden age. Not for any nation on our dying planet, but for plans where the villain intended to get caught. 

The world held an openweight cop-out tournament, and Mark Millar won. While mortal creatives waited five or six minutes before revealing their villain’s genius, Nemesis gloats on the same page.

I want this page in a museum. It’s a scene too attached to one power fantasy to set up another. We’re at the end of issue two, the ancestral home of the cliffhanger page. For flow, Nemesis just needed one page without BatHogan resting a testicle on God’s forehead. Instead, he plants both.

Six pages later:

I can’t criticize a Dynasty Warriors rampage through Corrections. My rom-com pitch had two. But imagine the impact if BatJoker spent six pages on the ropes. Or two. Or a panel.

Then again, we’re not in the restraint game.

The magic of Nemesis (and the nearly identical Wanted) is that it’s exactly what my Mom thought comic books were like. Decades after proving three homophobes in one suit invented the Comics Code, the industry produced this. IP violations kidnapping presidents, decapitating riot cops, and rigging womb bombs.

Hold on, rigging what?

I’m getting ahead of myself. Narratives are about the journey to the womb bomb. The quiet moments between genital implosions. In this case, a costumed game of Truth or Dare. Sleepover games are a little mature for this reading level, but it’s good to challenge the audience.

After waltzing out of prison, BatJigsaw kidnaps Blake’s kids and demands the hero’s darkest secrets. Which, to his credit, Blake nails. Brass balls are the only heroic trait Nemesis respects, and Blake’s clang together when he walks.

The abyss is staring back into me here. It’s hard to confess to our more forward-thinking readers, but I’ll be honest. In my heart, I assume most marriages work out this way. No matter how much you love and trust someone, BatLecter will steal your kids and make you both podcast about cheating. It’s the simple human truth.

Years later, I still can’t read this panel without choke-laughing. I wish I knew why. It’s not as regressive in context: Millar pins Blake as old-fashioned from the jump. It’s much less outlandish than Batman kidnapping the president. It might be the simple brevity, the stilted wording, or the one-two punch of “I can’t fuck” and “My son can, but blasphemously.”

Okay? That’s not how escalation works. A bombless abortion can’t compete with the rest of this book. Pre-lunacy, the CDC reported 194 abortions per 1000 live births, and zero buildings gassed by Batman. You’ve set a higher standard for edge–three pages ago, someone’s teeth got punched out from the inside. This is like a Mortal Kombat sequel about couple’s therapy.

Now, let’s get back to what matters.

“But why?” Strap in.

When I cover a book, I have one scene in mind. Here’s the Nemesis edition. While spamming the words womb bomb, I’ve left out “incest.” Thank you, Lucifer Morningstar, for helping me type “incest womb bomb” before a once-trusting audience. I enact your will in this world, master. The genitalia of the Elohim shall burn in your light.

I’ll never say that Mark Millar isn’t an artist. Art makes you think and feel. And I’m full of searing emotions and searing-er questions. Why a womb bomb? Was that a last minute idea, or is this entire comic written around the womb bomb? Why didn’t I come up with the womb bomb? Is this commentary on abortion, or just thoughtless? Are there real womb bombs? Are there testicle bombs? What is the CIA hiding? Am I one Lee Harvey Oswald joke away from my junk exploding like Mount Vesuvius, and not in the fun Spring Break way?

That’s a stupid idea, because I’m stupid now. This comic made me stupid, and I needed to pass it on to you. With my junk shredded by bat-shrapnel, it’s the only way I can reproduce.

Surviving Maury unlocks the last level. BatMengele holds the president hostage in the White House, which should be a commentary on something and isn’t. As the boss arena loads, Blake’s black sidekick emerges as a mole, gets shot, and falls back out of the story. Then the ensuing cutscene reveals the twisted, unimaginable, boring truth.

And more gloating. There’s always more gloating. Nemesis would thrive if it stole Batman’s “stoic silence” schtick.

That origin I dumped on earlier? Millar didn’t like it either. BatJoker’s real origin is no origin. Which is the Joker’s origin. He’s the Joker with triceps.

This is getting complicated. Let’s sketch this plan out.

Doable.

The president sacrifices himself to stop JokerJoker. That doesn’t sound dull, but life finds a way. Imagine gloating interrupted by a campaign ad and you’re there. I’m here to talk about the denouement.

After surviving a Saw and Air Force One crossover, Blake Morrow retires to raise his inbred grandchildren. Until he gets a note with the real, original origin of Nemesis. Picture a nesting doll made of smaller and smaller brains. Now put the smallest brain on Air Force One and tre flip it into a mountain.

Nemesis is a vacation package for billionaires. A clever commentary on Batman’s…nothing. This says nothing about Batman. Or society, beyond the fresh observation that “the rich are less than pleasant.” If Bezos tried ghost riding a plane, we’d still be laughing at gifs of him hitting tarmac. With one page left, I can’t imagine making this dumber.

Ten years? Amateur hour. I’ve plotted my revenge for twelve.

Parody’s fun. I know a website with some solid ones. Yet Nemesis doesn’t touch Batman’s bizarre ideology or platoon of child soldiers. It’s laser-focused on preptime, an element that doesn’t matter. Even a little. This is a four issue deconstruction of Aquaman’s haircut. Whether you love Bruce Wayne or think clowns have Miranda Rights, there’s more to work with.

As parody, Nemesis falls short of this:

That’s assuming there is a real parody here. Vegas odds say there’s nothing smarter going on than “what if Batman killed people?” An idea DC mined to death themselves:

We live in the best of all possible worlds, because a Nemesis screenplay is marching along. I believe in the project. I need that pain to not only feel alive, but transcend God’s failed creation altogether. The ritual begins. You nerds can enjoy dodging water thieves in The Wastes, I’m out.

Until then, I’m calling two shots. If in vitro incest makes it onscreen, it’ll be the last meme. Bane can’t compete: we’ll quote BatManiac until the sun and jokes are long dead. That said, if the rest of Nemesis makes it onscreen, it’ll be the last superhero movie. Not because of the deconstruction, but simple failure as a story. Cats killed musicals by non-Spielbergs, and Nemesis may divorce capes from the American imagination. This is the stumble that buries spandex next to disco, arena rap, and bipartisanship.

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Max Baroi, who will forever be associated with the search terms “incest womb bomb.”

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Barbie MAD LIBS 🌭

MAD LIBS are already one of the saddest ways to VERB with human language. They are designed to let pedestrian minds manufacture NOUN by clumsily beating reason to death– like putting on a play about laughing at a badly translated FOREIGN FOOD menu. But with a little effort they can still be ADJECTIVE, right? MAD LIBS are like an AI generating CONCEPT INCLUDING PREGNANT HULK HOGAN PLAYING TENNIS. They won’t replace real art, but what’s the harm in letting chaos VERB your silly idea? I guess what I’m saying is you get out of them what you put into them. It’s not like the author of a MAD LIBS book could PERSONALLY FAIL, right? I guess we’ll VERB ENDING IN “ING” see.

A woman named Stacy Wasserman wrote this book decades later than you’d imagine, in 2021. Her only previous published work was Royal Family MAD LIBS, so Barbie MAD LIBS may have been her punishment for violating lèse-majestĂ© laws. It is as uninspired as an intentionally unfinished book of Barbie quotes can be. It’s one of the lowest forms of art made worse by indifference and stupidity. Still, let’s try to have a(n) ADJECTIVE time!

While navigating Barbie MAD LIBS, we’ll be using the three pillars of auto-generated comedy– silliness, unexpected horror, and wanton lewdness. I call this The Pizza Dismember Penis Gambit, and I’ve designed a tool that allows me to randomize even the randomness of this groundbreaking MAD LIBbing system:

The book includes a full page explaining how to fill in blanks and another defining adjectives and nouns, which is pretty revealing about its intended audience. If something markets itself as a “word game” and the first thing it does is explain words, you’re either too good for it or a below average ape. So with that in mind, this fucking thing is for FUCK ENDING IN “ING” idiots, let’s read “TRUE FRIENDS” by Stacy Wasserman.

This sucks. No matter what noun or adjective you pick, this “World’s Greatest Word Game” won’t mean anything. Barbie’s friends might mean the CHEESEBURGER to her. Or the INTRUDER’S ERECTION. Or the FAILED AIDS CHARITY. It doesn’t matter. Part of the MAD LIBS fun, maybe the only kind of MAD LIBS fun, is trying to ruin its intended fun. Which isn’t actually fun when the coherence is this poorly guarded. Unless you put in exactly the words WORLD and SPECIAL, it’s PROBABLY NOT FUNNY gibberish. So fun-wise, this is a hail mary– a desperate prayer that the reader puts in a hilarious sex act or gets tickled by gently wrong syntax. This is the comedy equivalent of looking around the room and saying words. Fuckin do better, Stacy.

What the shit is Stacy doing here? Barbie’s friend Teresa VERBs with excitement, but the thing she gets excited for is very specifically “mold?” What the fuck kind of tactic is this? Are you trying to do the silly part of the MAD LIBS for us, Stacy? It was a nice save there at the end to let me choose the animal and what they do at night. Because giraffes? Going antiquing at night? Get. Out.

The first blank in Renee Chao’s backstory seems suspicious. You don’t throw the word “motor” in front of a random body part unless you mean for that to get dirty. Even Stacy Wasserman should have had the foresight to know “motor-PART OF THE BODY” was going to end in either a turbo sex hole or mild confusion. Like what, is Renee going to be a motor-elbow? A motor-tooth? Fucking stupid. Stacy, you made Barbie’s other friend an amateur mold historian. The least you could do here is clearly establish Renee has an internal combustion vagina. But I guess I have to do everything, so here: “she’s UNHAPPY a lot. Renee JACKHAMMER-FUCKS up any room she’s in.”

Daisy is Greek, so she will VERB anywhere. This one is great! It has a high potential to be funny, and now you know if you have any problematic biases against Greek culture.

Barbie’s last friend is Nikki, who can VERB anything. This swings hard away from meaningless incoherence. Most verbs you put here will simply make sense in a mundane way. Unless you’re deliberately throwing penises in her path, Stacy Wasserman is laying the groundwork for a eulogy. She has the comedy instincts of a gas leak. She made Nikki a/an ADJECTIVE entrepreneur! That’s scientifically the least silly place you can put a blank in that sentence. That’s like saying “Nikki’s grandmother watched her sick cat finally die on HOLIDAY*.” You can’t hope for a miracle on every single blank, Stacy.

* FORD MOTOR DAYS SALE.

Let’s try a different one. “BARBIE AND KEN’S FAVORITE RECIPE.”

This is more nonsense. Barbie and Ken VERB each other’s recipes? Aside from squirt and strangle, what verbs would work here? And look at the last two blanks. Does that say “SILLY WORD?” And EXCLAMATION!?” Are you telling me the other words weren’t supposed to be silly? What the goddamn fuck are we even doing here, Stacy? And then, after that, you want me to give you an exclamation to be placed all by itself and used as an exclamation!? That’s not MAD LIBS, Stacy. That’s not goddamn anything, Stacy. “DuRr, reADER, tHiNk of an eXPreSsioN yOUrseLF and ThEN sAy iT!” Get back to Hell, Stacy.

Oh, this will kill. “One and a half cups of COLOR sugar?” Holy shit, what if they pick green? Or mauve!? And oh my god, “NUMBER teaspoons cinnamon?” Any number!? Can you imagine if they picked the funny one! If the military developed a PSYOP to destroy an individual’s sense of humor, it would look identical to the Barbie MAD LIBS manuscript. There’s a good chance they’d give it that code name too, and wait, hold on, I may have solved the mystery of Barbie MAD LIBS.

So Stacy finishes her SARCASTIC WORD comedy recipe by telling you to bake the cookies for NUMBER minutes. Really, Stacy? NUMBER again? In your wildest dumbshit dreams, is there a funny number of minutes to bake cookies, Stacy? Are you hoping someone cheats and puts in BONER SEVEN? Because that’s what I did. And I still hate it. Serve that with whipped INNOCENCE and enjoy!

Let’s do another! “SELF-CARE DAY!”

Stacy might have completely lost her mind. She’s having us insert a random LETTER OF THE ALPHABET into acronyms. Stacy, where you’re from, are there alphabet letters that are hilarious on their own? Ha ha, W, maybe? Are you hoping some random letter will be so evocative of a word that the reader’s brain inserts it into D-I-BLANK to create a joke? Are they going to see an S, somehow think “sex with stepfather,” and continue on this long train of thought to decode the acronym “do-it-sex-with-stepfather” in their head? That’s bad therapy, not bad comedy. Stop giving us your weird shit to unpack, Stacy.

But seriously, ADJECTIVE work with the last sentence here, Stacy. “Take NOUN!” No matter what you plug in, how could that be anything other than a limp drive off a cliff? What noun were you imagining your readers would take? Soup? Abortion? Anal, for example? The best -the best- case scenario here is that you have beloved pop culture icon, Barbie, screaming “Take titty!” Honestly, it isn’t a bad catchphrase.

I made a butthole mask out of ritually murdered yogurt and edible panties juice, which means Stacy has finally constructed a proper MAD LIBS sentence. Unfortunately, she simply cannot resist letting her readers fill in a hilarious blank NUMBER. Oh, do I rub tragic wet yogurt on my asshole for 11 minutes, Stacy? Terrific. That really puts a button on the gag. And good luck finding a punchline where you “VERB with cold water.” Juggle? Ejaculate? Interrogate? Never mind, those are all very silly. Nearly competent job, Stacy.

Combine half a cup of sea Nazi with four tablespoons of vomiting olive oil and two teaspoons of breast milk zest? Stacy seems to be getting better, because this is easy-to-steer madness. She can never quite land it, though. She ends this chain of potentially fun nonsense with “scrub ADVERB?” In what magical universe of possibilities are there silly ways to scrub, you stupid CAREFULLY NON-GENDERED INSULT?

Let’s do one more. “BARBIE’S GUIDE TO VLOGGING!”

Barbie is an internet PIZZA! A MISSING vlogger with over BONER SEVEN subscribers! This one is off to a good start. Even Stacy’s deranged need to include a blank NUMBER on every page sort of works here, because it’d be sort of strange if Barbie only had, for instance, BONER SEVEN subscribers. And I like how the final blank has the potential to disrupt the entire narrative. Barbie could give her personal tips for successful KIDNAPPING, or ABRUPTLY STOPPING.

There aren’t a huge number of verbs that can sensibly BLANK an audience. But all the big ones are there. Fuck. Mutate. Waterboard. A skilled MAD LIBber could make this work.

Jesus Christ, this went off the rails. SOMETHING ALIVE (PLURAL)? What the fuck, Stacy? Why do they need to be alive? Are you worried if Barbie interviewed UNIDENTIFIED REMAINS or OLD DIAPERS it would disrupt the tight fiction you’ve put together? Let her talk to a stapler or a ghost; it’s MAD LIBS. And nice job on “PART OF THE BODY (PLURAL)-up.” The purest soul in the world would instantly and confidently write “balls” for this, and only find out later an interview with their uncle is going to get “lots of balls-up.” Gross, Stacy.

And for the record, Stacy, adding the word “furry” to the front of yet another random NUMBER probably isn’t the secret code to unlocking its hilarity. Here, I’ll show you: furry 9/11.

By this point of the book I had lost my temper and I was filling in “fuck” for every blank. I knew it was going to cheer me up, but I could have never expected the magic of “Consider FUCK-off like ‘FUCK YOU!’” That’s a world-class catchphrase for any occasion. Imagine a newscaster signing off by saying, “FUCK-off like ‘FUCK YOU!’ ZOINKS! Keep FUCKING!” You would VERB ENDING IN “ING” shit. So on behalf of everyone here at 1-900-🌭, we thank you for your continued support, and FUCK-off like “FUCK YOU!”

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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Chance McDermott, who is the USURPING-est example of BRATWURST we have ever BUTT.