Category: NERDING DAY

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NERDING DAY

Rapsittie Street Kids Believe in Santa 🌭

It’s getting to look a lot like Christmas, probably. Somewhere. There’s a plague on, I haven’t checked. But I’m sure somebody’s still trying to put on a Christmas to cap off this horrible, insane year full of garbage and terror, so it’s only appropriate that our Christmas movie be The Rapsittie Street Kids Believe in Santa — a horrible, insane movie full of garbage and terror. If you had to guess when this was made based solely off of the cover, what would you say?

Maybe 1987, with the stipulation that it was programmed by amateur PC enthusiasts trying and failing to prove that computers could do art better than a 2nd grader? Like a Kasparov vs. Deep Blue situation, but for slow children? Nope! This was made in 2002 by Wolf Tracer Studios. That may seem like ancient history for some of our younger readers, whose blood I want to steal to revive this decaying body, but keep in mind Toy Story 2 was 1999. Monsters, Inc. and Shrek were released in 2001. For reference, here’s a screengrab from Shrek somehow looking at the abominations from Rapsittie.

Maybe CGI wasn’t super great in 2002, but it was way better than this. 

Even putting aside that the kid looks like E.T. in blackface and moves like a robot programmed to mock somebody discovering the wonder of dance, this was still an exceptionally bad effort. And remember: This wasn’t an art project by an emotionally scarred head trauma patient trying to communicate the dumb lens of horror through which he now sees the world — this was an actual movie with an actual budget. It had a solid cast: the voices of Belle from Beauty and the Beast and Ariel from The Little Mermaid, Nancy Cartwright from The Simpsons, and Mark Hamill! That’s right: motherfucking Wing Commander himself was in this! 

Rapsittie Street Kids Believe in Santa aired nationally! 

On multiple major networks!

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you’re out there studying your craft and diligently working your way up the Hollywood ladder hoping you’ll one day earn that lottery ticket to maybe get into filmmaking… you can eat shit until you get shit poisoning. These are the movies that get made. 

That’s Ricky “Rhymemaster” Rodgers, and he raps like he graduated from the Will Smith College of Harmless Slang and Funky Noises, where his thesis statement was rhyming “ya boo” with “haha woo!” Ricky isn’t always rapping, but every time Ricky is onscreen these gentle, hesitant beats play in the background, like the music director was a well-meaning racist who thinks he should always be ready in case black people start freestyling.

Here’s Ricky’s great-grandmother:

She speaks every line like she’s voiced by three different old women having an argument, and it comes across like she’s doing a Lil Wayne impression through a stroke. It is never explained why she talks like you’re playing a particularly violent episode of The View backwards to summon a Geriatric Bitch Demon. It is but one of many insane decisions that make up Rapsittie Street Kids Believe in Santa. Here’s another:

Look at those poor children in the last stages of drowning, their little legs twitching uselessly as their brains shut down; as the cold currents whisk them away to an unacknowledged grave.

Those kids are supposed to be ice skating. Not only did Wolf Tracer not animate an ice skating motion, they didn’t bother rendering ice skates, which would be as simple as “line under normal shoe.” It’s not like they spent that saved time on the story. The plot of Rapsittie Street Kids is almost as terrible as everything else in Rapsittie Street Kids. Young Ricky’s main goal in life is to get with “beautiful Nicole” who looks like this:

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that’s good, since she’s got the eyes of a Beholder. Why do all of the children look like 53-year old Steve Buscemi in the ReBoot universe?

That’s Ricky’s best friend, Smithy, who’s supposed to be fat, but that’s hard to render so he’s just a slightly wider tube. Also mouths are hard to render, so he doesn’t have one. He is always carrying a sandwich and all of his lines are about food, but he does not physically try to eat another child, so this is actually quite a sensitive portrayal of an overweight kid by early 2000s standards.

Ricky is plagued by what I think are supposed to be bullies, and here they’re doing what I think is supposed to be laughing. But while real middle school bullies try to carve slurs into the bellies of children foolish enough to display feelings, these bullies mostly mildly heckle Ricky’s hasty raps. It’s a very privileged dickhead’s idea of what bullying might have been like for the people he bullied.

In order to Bang the Beholder (capitalized because that’s obviously going to be the name of my next DnD campaign) Ricky wants to get Nicole the perfect gift. But he doesn’t have any money. This is a problem because Nicole only likes money. Not the things it can buy, or the status it brings. She just likes the idea of stuff costing other stuff. She repeats, several times, that she only likes objects because they may have been purchased at the mall. She also repeats, several times, that she does not like Ricky.

So Ricky, who is poor, and in love with this girl whose only two personality traits are “likes money” and “does not like Ricky,” decides that the perfect gift for her is the old teddy bear that his dead mother gave him. A gift that Nicole is guaranteed to hate, from a person she already hates, that also disrespects his mother’s legacy. Even if none of that was true, a teddy bear is still a terrible gift for any middle school girl who doesn’t have to wear a purity ring with their father’s name engraved inside the band. 

I shouldn’t even have to type this, but of course Nicole throws the bear in the garbage. 

Heartbroken, Ricky runs home to write to Santa and ask for “a videobox,” an old person’s understanding of what a game console might be. Oh, and he also tacks on that he would like the other kids to get good presents, too, and further writes in the bear incident with Nicole, possibly just to lowkey snitch her out. He goes to mail the letter but loses it, and because a Christmas miracle looks a lot like hack writing, it blows over to Nicole who reads it and has a change of heart. She heads back to retrieve the bear from the garbage, only to find Smithy and Lenee already digging through part of a Quake map I made in 1996 that #gameboyzzz on IRC called “pretty bad, even for a f*****t.”

But it’s not there, so they do the next logical thing: head to the school’s basement. Since that’s… where the trash goes? After you put it in the dumpster outside? I don’t know what kind of person doesn’t know how garbage works, and I cannot fathom why their first wild guess as to where it goes to die is the basement of a children’s school, but here’s that cluttered trash-heap with all four of its loose objects.

I hope you appreciated the lushness of that scene. That’s what Rapsittie blew all of its budget on. You will not see its like again.

The bear isn’t down there (it wasn’t in the box, or even on the desk!) so the kids head to the junkyard — again, not where trash goes. This was 2002, we had the internet. Our pornography was unacceptably slow and unbearably puritan with nary a stepsister to be found, but you could still Altavista up what a dump was. Or you could at least ask any other human being what happens to garbage when you’re not looking at it. But no: Nobody involved in the making of this movie knew what to do with trash, which probably explains why they left all of Rapsittie Street Kids in Rapsittie Street Kids.

Only after writing down “EXT. THE JUNKYARD” did Wolf Tracer realize they would have to render maybe six boxes this time. Oh god, two stacks of chairs! A task so beyond their meager abilities they didn’t even try:

What happened here? You couldn’t put together three cars, the objects made out of straight lines and boxes? You couldn’t even find a picture of a car? You couldn’t even find a 6 year old willing to draw you a picture of a car who didn’t have lobster hands and child glaucoma? You really exploited Lippo the Lobster Boy’s poor vision and trusting nature to pay him 40 dollars in monopoly money for this establishing shot of a junkyard starring one legible carblob and two more carblobs that might actually be horseblob and mommyblob, now that I look closer?

You might have spied one of the gentle bullies hiding in that scene, waiting in ambush. Now, if my childhood bully found me in a junkyard I would have to eat a catalytic converter and walk home with my dick out, but their plan is to wait for Nicole, Smithy and Lenee to get there and “find the best junk” so they can “take the good stuff.” There is junk all around you. This is it. This is the whole of the junkyard; there is no backroom. Why is garbage such a mystery to this film that I would have sworn was magicked into life by a Garbagemancer? 

Anyway, Smithy saves the day by hurling his precious sandwich at the bullies, which causes the guard dogs to chase them off. My god, Wolf Tracer. Why do you set goals you have no intention of meeting? 

Those look like leaked screenshots of Spore from around the time when we all started to get worried about Spore. This isn’t just poorly done, it is actually madness. Why do they have eyestalks when they don’t have eyes? How is a paw a suction cup? If you truly can’t draw shit, a paw can just be a round blob – ask Lippo to draw Floofers, his only friend. He’ll show you. Just don’t tell him Floofers is taxidermied. You’ll set off another of what Dr. Bobbi fearfully calls “the pinchstorms.”

The kids find the bear in a weirdly prominent spot, and Nicole returns triumphant. She tries to give back the only memento Ricky has of his dead mother, but he wants to make them eyestalks roll so bad he insists she keep it.

That seems ridiculous even by the standards of Christmas specials, where a murderer’s heart can be changed by a really fancy bow, but wait — we’re going somewhere. Nicole’s grandmother gets her a Videobox. That’s the very expensive gift that Ricky wanted! Nicole, having recently learned the spirit of the season by visiting up to two locations where garbage is not, immediately regifts the console to Ricky. 

And he accepts it! None of this “I couldn’t possibly, your friendship is enough” crap. He yoinks that console with a sinister grin that tells you his plan came together just like he and Nicole will tonight, but her eyeballs never will.

Because this was all his plan. Whose letter miraculously made its way to the rich girl? Who took the bear out of the dumpster, but nothing else? Who put it in a junkyard? In a safe, easily findable spot? That’s the real lesson Rapsittie Street Kids Believe in Santa wants to teach us: how to emotionally exploit the wealthy into buying us videogame consoles. PS5s are still going for like 20 grand on eBay. 

You know what you have to do.

…
This post was brought to you by a Hot Tip from Hot Dog It’s Matthew Byas, and by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Lyman: A level 17 Bangbard whose cantrips are Vicious Muffery and Prestidongitation.

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NERDING DAY

The Thirteen Crappiest Dinosaurs! 🌭

Dinosaurs are awesome, but get less awesome every day. And I don’t mean we all age out of the magic and wonderment of giant lizards. I mean paleontologists, who ran out of cool names long ago, keep discovering new dino species and adding lame ass feathers to old ones. Have you seen a recent velociraptor picture? Every innovation in fossil science makes them look more like a murderer in a Big Bird costume. Let’s really talk about this.

My source for this scientifically essential article is 2016’s THE COMPLETE ILLUSTRATED ENCYCLOPEDIA OF DINOSAURS & PREHISTORIC CREATURES. It rules, but points to a very dark future. Picture one day switching your Citibank-Fritos Environment FilterVisors to outgoing audio so your grandchildren hear, “When I was your age, prehistoric creatures were rad, not 200 versions of the same garbage chicke– Free outgoing audio use expired, please listen to the following sponsored content to continue hearing your grandparent or other complain: New for Disney*All^Ages members only: Filthy Outside Sister Fisting Real, Confirmed Brother Rated PG.” Holy crap, what is going on? This intro is off the goddamn rails. Let’s try again to get started on what should have been a very simple premise to establish:

That’s really what this is and what it’s called! You are in for such a fun treat today, 1900🌭 reader!

Utahraptor is what you change your Latter Day Saints private school mascot to after public pressure forces you to retire the Savage Drunkfoots. This thing has the haircut of a woman who has had sex with two different and entire Motley CrĂŒe cover bands. Utahraptor should be playing stone guitar on a Flintstone’s birthday card that says “To a wonderful Nephew, you were born to BED-Rock!” When Velociraptor sees Utahraptor calling he says, “Oh, my desert trash cousin must need 600 bucks to post bail again.”

Are those little legs, Pachyrachis? You poor, sad thing. Should they have even given this evolutionary misstep a name? This is obviously almost a snake that hasn’t quite let go of its glory days as a lizard. What kind of asshole would even classify it during this awkward point in its genetic development? Pachyrachis is the taxonomic equivalent of immortalizing someone by the moustache they had when they were twelve. This is like writing an obituary for Ice T and using a picture from the movie where he was a kangaroo.

“Jesus, these bones belonged to a really crappy dinosaur. Hey, you know, we should name this one after Duncan. Shit, here he comes.”

“AHOY, GENTLEMEN! AND WHAT ARE MY LOVELY FELLOW PALEONTOLOGISTS TALKING ABOUT ON THIS FINE MORNING!?“

“We’ve discovered a new fossil record, Duncan! And I guess you caught us– we were talking about naming it after you, our respected colleague. Would you like that?”

“UM… HELL-OOHHH!? YES TIMES TEN, NAY INFINITY!“

One Submission to the Commission on Zoological Nomenclature Later…

“OH, REAL MATURE, GUYS. I SAW THAT SPINOSAURID YOU NAMED AFTER ‘ME.’ HIGH-LARIOUS! SO FUNNY I FORGOT TO LAUGH!“

You extrapolated a pretty sweet alligator dog from that handful of teeth, Sir Richard Owen! What are you going to call it? T-titanosuchus? Ha ha was Megalodicklicker already taken? This is what a Platyhystrix bully would call you in Permian school. Titanosuchus is what you would name a full-costume Godzilla porn parody. Wait, never mind, I just thought of Ho-Jira: Queen of the Monstercocks. Look, I think it’s crazy too, but the whole article is this. I’m not faking you out with the top third of a crazy one to surprise you with something good. Ho-Jira: Queen of the Monstercocks was the good.

You’re telling me some ancient earthworm decided to grow a little penis man on one of its ends? How dare it. I don’t care if you believe in God or science, we can all agree that fuck both of them for allowing Sineoamphisbaena to happen. And if either of them had given this thing a mouth and eyes all it would do is look at itself and scream. I believe the fossil records will support my theory that Sineoamphisbaena was uniquely adapted to do nothing except piss inside its own body until evolution invented a bird or fish disgusting enough to eat it. Biology should be fucking embarrassed.

Hey, Chungkingosaurus, what’s it like being a knockoff Stegosaurus named after canned chow mein noodles? You look like a testicle with every injury and disease. If anyone ever lays eyes on you they will absolutely assume their time machine badly fucked something up and go time crazy. Chungkingosaurus is like a mascot the People’s Republic of China would create to teach Uyghur children how to assemble garage door openers at a re-education camp.

“Hello? No, you have the wrong number; you’re looking for StegoSAURus. Right, bony plates, spike tail. No, no I’m the one with rooster legs and dead cat arms with a male pattern baldness skull. No, no, it’s no problem. It happens all the ti– hold on, someone’s calling on the other line. Hello? No, this is StegoCERas you have the wrong number. Right, CER not SAUR. No trouble! Easy mistake, happens all the time! Yeah, you too! Okay, I’m back. You still there? Hello?”

Look at you, you bug-eyed piece of shit. Nature put your legs on upside down so you could kick yourself in the crotch while you wait for something cooler to hunt you. Mesosaurus, you look like a Jurassic Park janitor emptied his mop into the crocodile DNA, and you sound like something Jar Jar Binks would say if he got hit with a dinosaur ray. This whole deal, I insist, is not some metaphor or something. I’m really still writing “The 13 Crappiest Dinosaurs” and the punchline for this entry relied on you remembering how Jar Jar Binks talked.

With the face of a dick and the tail of an uncircumsized dick, researchers had no choice but to give this thing the name Diictodon. And what’s he going to say about it? “Um, actually my name means not a phallus, but ‘two weasel teeth’?” Fuck you, nerd Dickisaur. Go back to the Penis epoch and squirt dino cream out of your face.

Longosuchus? Did the Cleveland Science Center let an XBOX subreddit vote on the name for their robot badger? Ludicrous. I’ve picked up enough Latin from this dinosaur book to know “Longosuchus” means “something a fun prostitute would put on a massage parlor menu.” Longosuchus is the most coveted rank in the Spartan army, not a dinosaur name.

Look at this rat-faced monstrosity. I guess science just started mixing animal parts together until it landed on a fur lizard with a dented skull and no natural defenses other than being too grotesque to behold. And some guy named Eric classified it as Ericiolacerta? Ericio Lacerta sounds like he should be a minor league shortstop sending private Facebook messages to your wife.

Arizona-fucking-saurus? This thing is something your Dimetrodon wife would hatch seven months after Ericio Lacerta rented out your guest room. Its remains were probably found next to a bag of fossilized drugs it was trying to eat before Triassic cops broke down its door. It looks like the star of a movie called Denise Richards Just Marries a Dinosaur and That Should Be Enough. You are dumber for having looked at it. Arizonasaurus is what a Tucson P.D. sketch artist would draw if you described the iguana who stole all your meth, you mean b-books.

The man leaned out the window of the stolen research van at first to vomit, but he decided no, that would be a waste of six kinds of bad tequila and one good scotch. He burped, “Science guys– dorks. Listen. No, fucking listen. This is, okay, fuuuuck I’m drunk. Ha ha no, seriously, listen: whatever bones you find in this bullshit rock? You name that dinosaur after me. After ME.” The stranger flipped off the paleontologists before explosively ramming their van into their dig site.

“We will,” Duncan promised the brave drinker. And a dinosaur scientist can never lie.

…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Hawk: Also called Hawkosaurus, Hawkoraptor, H. Rex, and for a good time on Friday nights.

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NERDING DAY

Let’s Play: Genshin Impact 🌭

Genshin Impact is a freemium Breath of The Wild clone made by a Chinese studio and riddled with gacha mechanics. With a pedigree like that, it should have stolen a small market share from the prime mobile gaming demographics — confused children and desperate perverts — and then imploded into irrelevance. Instead, Genshin Impact made 245 million dollars in its first month, and game journalists were talking about it for Game of the Year. And that’s because Genshin Impact did something absolutely and completely insane for a F2P mobile gacha game: It tried to be good.

Yes, for possibly the first time ever, a developer looked at the classic free mobile game trap, and thought “okay, but what if we put some effort into this?”

Genshin Impact looks beautiful and plays like a dream. It’s like some high-end BoTW mod that replaces Link with 18 squealing teenage girls. If there was a Legend of Zelda anime adaptation where Link turned into a different cartoon stripper every time he saw panties — and I’m pretty sure there was — this is the video game meta-adaptation of that now highly-illegal cartoon.

The elevator pitch for Genshin Impact is that it mashes together modern Zelda games with JRPGs, and while I think they succeeded, they did it in the craziest ways. For example, you explore a beautiful and massive open-world as a single character, just like in a Zelda game, but you also carry a standard JRPG squad of four inside you at all times, like you were molested by a guy in a Moogle suit and your personality had to split to deal with the trauma. You rapidly swap between characters in an instant with no tag-out animation, so every fight scene kind of looks like the death of the T-1000 if he’d assimilated the Hanipotto Junior High School Girl’s Volleyball Team. It’s like some kind of sex criminal remake of The Thing. 

In other words: It’s awesome. 

The fighting system is fluid and deceptively deep, despite looking like your eyeballs got sick and barfed up a Crunchyroll trailer. Here, let me decipher what’s happening in that gif: To start, I switched from the boring graham cracker of a main character to cutesy battle-chef Xiangliang, dropped her fire-breathing red panda to get the goblins burning, then I switched to big-tittied nympho-mage Lisa to hit them with ball lightning so they’d be electrocharged, cast an area storm spell to set off those charges, and finally switched back to the main character to hit all of them with a wind burst, which swirls those elements together to set off explosive reactions. That’s an extremely basic combo. If this were a JRPG, that visual slurry up there would be your “Press A to attack.”

It’s a nuanced system that’s a lot of fun to use, and it feels pulled right from some AAA Japanese game that’s way too weird and complicated to make it over here, but that Deep Nerds with Otaku tattoos would reference twenty years later to prove their dork-cred. It’s Seiken Densetsu 3, basically.

And the whole game is this dense! There are special weapons that alter your gameplay style…

Character growth through skill and stat trees…

An expansive armor system laden with ability augments and set bonuses…

There’s even lore and character backstories to unlock…

You would expect precisely none of this in a freemium gacha game. It’s the very antithesis of the gacha mentality, where gameplay usually consists of swiping in up to two directions, and all the characters are thinly-veiled ripoffs like Ryu But Black and (Slightly More) Slutty 2B. Genshin Impact actually did all the legwork to make a thoughtful, complex, and very good game… and then they wrapped it in an IP lawsuit and deep-fried it in shady microtransactions.

Also just like those shitty gacha games, Genshin Impact is chock full o’ fan service. Most of the characters are sexy anime girls, and they all wear short skirts or sultry lingerie. Since the game also brazenly steals the glider system from Breath of the Wild…

This is your primary method of locomotion — long distance panty-gazing. There are fast travel points, but there are no rideable horses or epic mounts, unless you count Lisa…

This is what it looks like, playing Genshin Impact. Maybe 10% of the time you’re scrolling through item menus reading dry percentages, 20% of the time you’re quick-swap battling through anime gibberish, and then 70% of the time you’re taking long-exposure upskirts of a floating librarian. It is a game designed to instantly lose you the respect of anybody that walks in on you playing it. And you really feel that fan service pandering while playing it. It’s not pornographic by any means. The sex appeal is kept very PG, but it is omnipresent. You just get the sense that every one of these girls was designed by a behavioral psychologist to get some poor budding misogynist married to a bodypillow. This is what it looks like just walking around.

A lot of work went into them knocker physics! In fact, so much effort went into plotting the optimal boob bounce that the developers thought it was a waste to ever have them stop bouncing.

Look at those sentient titties yearning for freedom. That is not a breathing animation. That is two frightened hamsters who took a nap in the wrong bra. It’s like watching stabilized video of a stripclub in an earthquake. 

These gacha games are almost always horny — they know it’s another path toward addiction — but they don’t usually put a lot of effort into it. They’ll slap a CGI ass on the banner ad. They’ll throw a pair of breasts hulking out of a shirt on the opening splash page. They know it’s enough to hint at a nipple and hope you love Breakout. 

But as usual, Genshin Impact goes that extra mile. They want you to fall in love. They write full backstories for every character. Each girl gets a unique moveset, deep skill trees, and extensive dialogue that you can revisit anytime. 

Again, it feels almost clinically exploitative. Like the developers went on a recruiting drive to the James Franco College of Deviant Sexual Psychiatry just before the Senior class had to take their oath to do no harm. 

Some of this unlockable dialogue is from the game, or builds on their backstories —  but most of it is just the girls talking about their favorite foods, what they look for in a man, what they do for fun. Genshin Impact doesn’t have any romance game mechanics, but they sure took every weird relationship hook from romance games and then locked the most loveable girlfriends into plastic bubbles you could only win through gambling. That’s the gacha element: You get new waifus by spending real money on virtual slot machines. Just as with any freemium game, there are supposedly ways to get everything without spending a dime. But whenever you see multiple obscure currencies layered around one simple pay system, alarms should go off in your brain.

Nowadays these “free” mobile games are required to post a disclaimer that explains how their loot systems work. It’s kind of like putting “Smoking Causes Cancer” on cigarette packs. There to pretend like you’ve tried to dissuade people who don’t want to be dissuaded yet. The disclaimer notices are usually presented like a shameful secret – a basic section consisting of a few hundred words and maybe a handful of percentages, wherein a lawyer tries their best not to explain gambling to children and idiots. Genshin Impact once more defies the norms, and puts its disclaimers front and center — the game is downright proud of how deep, strange, and obscure they made their slot machine. Because they know, to a certain type of person, playing with those numbers is its own draw. (That certain type of person is a gambling addict.)

It’s yet another exceedingly clever system designed by some rogue behavioral psychologist who’s one cursed mask away from becoming a supervillain, all to exploit some weird broken mechanic in the nerd brain:

Genshin Impact is densely layered with every addictive progression system from anything designed to hook everyone — from collectors to gambling addicts, from stat-nerds to anime-nerds, from the tragically horny to (most surprising of all) just people that like good games. 

Do you get it? They finally did it: This is the mobile game that all those ads for mobile games were actually talking about. Somebody finally saw that millions of people were clicking on janky, horny mobile game ads that promised epic adventure with no cash up front, and then they wondered: What if you actually delivered on those promises?

It’s finally here: This is the fabled promised ass that the ass-game banners have prophesied. 

Ogle, and despair.

…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Neil Schafer: the rarest and most prized tittyshape of all.

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NERDING DAY PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting Day: Comics Are Stupid Rad with Brendan McGinley 🌭

Nerds! Others! Come listen to EpiSSoDDe FiVVe of The Dogg Zzone 9000, the official podcast of the popular jokes n’ fun browser-page, 1900hotdog.com. Seanbaby and Brockway are joined by gentleman bastard, Brendan McGinley, comic expert and author to help explain the insanity, awesomeness, and goddamn stupidity of comic books.

From the Golden Age, Brendan brings us The Puppeteer, a gentle carver of puppets who works as a Puppeteer selling puppets of The Puppeteer, yet he hides a secret– he is actually the crimefighter and falconer known as The Puppeteer!

From the Modern Age, Brockway takes us on a journey through the mind of a tortured, moronic comic writer trying to make sense of his own script as he tackles organized religion using the best tool to do that — a teleporting elf! It’s one of many things inconceivably written by the comic’s disgraced and dumb-as-fuck author, Chuck Austen!

And from the Bronze Age, Seanbaby talks about the greatest story in the history of literature: The Time All the Avengers Died and Had to Fight Each Other and Also Dracula for the Fate of the Universe.

And of course, Dogg Zzone Ffans, Brendan and Brockway face off in the high-stakes world of SeanBBaby’s BOOk GGame. Who can plan the saddest meal for one in their Microwave? Their instincts, along with the recipes of tragic culinary fishwife, Sonia Allison, will decide! They’re doing battle inside MICROWAVE FOR ONE!

Microwave a nice fish on high for 4 minutes and join us! Don’t forget to subscribe and review, wherever you get podcasts!

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NERDING DAY

The Pac-Man Riddle and Joke Book 🌭

In 1982, Pac-Man was so popular one genre of book was “something, fucking anything, about Pac-Man.” This perfectly describes THE PAC-MAN RIDDLE AND JOKE BOOK. It’s a deconstruction of the entire concept of “something.” This is Plato’s Cave if the shadows on your wall were Pac-Man and everything behind you was Pac-Man. In fact, Plato should have called his stupid allegory “the cave adaptation of THE PAC-MAN RIDDLE AND JOKE BOOK.”

I talked about this book once before in a Cracked article, but never stopped thinking about it. There is not a single sane page within it– not one coherent riddle or joke. This is a decapitated head trying to add the sounds “pac” and “dot” to words with the last of its escaping brain blood.

This one is only to help ease you into what you can expect in THE PAC-MAN RIDDLE AND JOKE BOOK. I don’t have a joke about how Mike Thaler “America’s Riddle King” changed the name of a different video game to make a vague reference to Pac-Man’s own video game. Or maybe I do? Let me try. It’s sort of like if a Star Trek joke book said Captain Kirk’s favorite movie was Star Wars but they meant a star like you’d see in Star Trek, not the “Star” from the title of Star Wars? No, no, I was right. I don’t have a joke about this.

This is the least fun thing I’ve ever seen from the least functional fun delivery system. It is almost suspiciously exactly what I would put in a Pac-Man riddle and joke book if all I wanted to do was hurt children. We all knew what we were getting into, but try to imagine the disappointment of a bright-eyed 1982 Pac-Man fan. They opened this book for joy and saw the inventor of the pasteurization process, punned three different ways with the same word, illustrated by an artist any physical therapist would call, “My quadruple amputee who draws like he’s also missing a fucking mouth.”

Winni-Pac Canadot? More like “Dot-phisticated word-plac!” What’s it like getting annihilated like this, Canada? This is devastating– a masterclass in the power of satire. No matter our politics or beliefs, every lie we tell ourselves gets laid bare once we see something sacred to us get words from Pac-Man mashed into other words.

Nobody tags a joke like Mike Thaler “America’s Riddle King.” Look how he assaults you with his sense of humor. You’re still reeling from “Pac-Pong,” and he adds that, in addition to the pun, you should consider how Pac-Man’s known attributes of eating things and nothing else means he’s bad at the sport name he’s lampooning! There’s not really an industry term for this kind of hilarity combo. It’s the kind of comedy you normally only see when someone says something in Tagalog you can’t understand and then a nurse translates, “The doctor, he say both bullets in your liver. You die here in the Philippines.”

I wasn’t expecting “Pac-Man Goes to the Dentist” to be funny, but I definitely wasn’t expecting the dentist character to immediately reject the joke’s conceit. Why are we here if he doesn’t have teeth? Why would, in a universe where Pac-Men go to the dentist, this not come up until this stage of the dental appointment? This is like saying, “Welcome to the 72nd annual World Fart Championships! I’m Burp Peppers, and thanks for sticking around after the 73rd annual Chili Cook Off!” and having your friend respond, “What? No, I think your name is Frank something and this is an improv show in a bookstore! And it’s not even really that because the guy who screamed ‘fart contest’ is your co-worker! You’re both cops and I’m only here because my parole officer, the fart contest guy, said it would be a bad idea for a convicted child molester to also be an unsupportive friend. So here I am! Do you want me to come up there and, like, make up a song or something?”

Oh, fun; let’s do this one! Number One has got to be Half-“PAC!” And Four is, oh cute! That’s a back-“PAC!” And number 6 is… oh my god. Sperm PAnC? This is a Pac-Man sperm, right? B-but it can’t be from his balls since he’s made of just this one shape, so are you saying Pac-Man himself is one giant testicle? Are you fucking telling me that if Pac-Man turned his gaping mouth toward us, we would see a gnashing swamp of Pac-Man sper– wait. Rat “PAC.” My bad, I see it now. The Rat PAC with, like, I don’t know… Frank Sin-DOT-tra and Sammy BLINKY Junior? PACter Lawford? Dean… Dean Ms.-Pac-Man? Ha ha I can’t do it. It’s why you’re the tops, Mike! The Riddle King, baby!

I think it’s a bad sign when you see an abomination and you think, “Oh, thank God, this creature is part rat, not all sperm.” But these “What Kinds of Pacs Are These?” quizzes continue through the book and only get more perverse and disgusting.

How is Combover Centaur Pac-Man (5) more disturbing than Hairy Gonad Pecked By Bird Pac-Man (3) and Uncircumcised Pac-cid-Man (2). Combover Centaur Pac-Man is not a riddle– it’s a ritual marker for sex druids. It’s the birthmark on a newborn crawling out of a mass horse grave. If a stranger ever handed me this filthy thing…

… I would immediately start fighting for my life. And God help the cursed traveler who finds it on my dead body. My final words to you are these: You have five days to tame The Stallion and his frothing has already begun.

This isn’t all the way “racist,” but it’s as close to the line as I think a Pac-Man riddle book should get.

Here’s the, I guess, official Pac-Man origin? It seems like in 1982 they let writers do whatever the hell they wanted. I’ve written for some big IPs in my career and it’s absurd how many days I spent going back-and-forth with creative directors and their bosses about whether Dolph Ziggler would eat a human heart or if we could make it so Salacious Crumb has three spear-like penises that penetrate anywhere on his lover’s body like a bedbug. Mike just casually adds to Pac-Man’s canon, “he was formed when, I don’t know, a cheesecake came to life and murdered a waitress? suck my ass who gives a shit.”

W-what? So he’s the moon only… only a-also Pac-Man? No. No, I refuse this. As a representative of this Earth, I reject Pac-Moon. I declare whatever -this- is to be the enemy of my people.

Never at any point did Mike Thaler, the author of THE PAC-MAN RIDDLE AND JOKE BOOK, think, “Maybe this one doesn’t work.” If a word had any sound close to “dot” or “pac” in it, it went in. If a word had a “d” or a “p” that was fine too. No thought was given to whether something was funny or clever or appropriate for children. If Mike would have walked past a holocaust museum during the writing of this book, he would haverushed home repeating, “DOTschwitz, DOTschwitz, DOTschwitz, don’t forge– is that a new Pizza Hut? Oh my god, more like Pizza DOT! Don’t forget, Pizza DOT, Pizza DOT…”

I’m sort of being serious. The way Mike handles sensitive subjects with zero context and a childlike understanding of puns is grotesque. It’s like he’s trying to show his wild side in a Marmaduke fan letter. For instance, say someone was famously kidnapped and, after a series of sex crimes, forced to commit armed robbery. What’s the clumsiest way you could handle that with a Pac-Man pun? Oh, that’s an insane thing to try? An unthinkable thing no one would ever do?

Boom. This is why Mike Thaler is “America’s Riddle King” and we’re not. You and I think things like, “What a terrible loss it is when a child dies.” Mike Thaler thinks things like, “PAC-iatric cancer? Whooping DOT? Crib DOTh? There it is. Crib DOTh.”

Here’s a fun look behind-the-scenes of a 1-900-HOTDOG article. That joke is the end result of several minutes of wedging Pac-Man puns into tragic childhood ailments. I was all… “DOT-arrhea, small PACs, PAC-io, unDOTagnosed DOT-ism,” and when I stopped at “crib DOTh” I thought, “Jesus, I’ll definitely come back and soften that. I’m not sure a Pac-Man joke book warrants crib DOTh.” But then I got to this page in THE PAC-MAN RIDDLE AND JOKE BOOK where Mike actually published three of my less funny childhood DOT-sease ideas, and then repeated one of them.

So whether you agree with my criticism or not, here is very literally what happened: I tried to think of a joke the laziest, most humorless, pun-loving piece of shit would write about sick children. That was the task I gave myself. And the author of this book, Mike Thaler “America’s Riddle King,” published, word-for-word, three of the things in my maybe pile. So he’s not the worst writer I can imagine– he’s the deleted drafts rejected by that worst writer. And I’m truly humbled he went beyond my wildest imaginations by writing “Chicken Pacs” a second time, separated only by “Small Pacs.” It’s breathtaking. Beyond any wonder I’ve ever seen.

Psssst, children! Children, do you like riddles? You do? Oh, good! Grand!! Wonderful!!! Listen closely now: What. Pac-Man. Was a famous… murderer. Ha ha ha ha ha haaaa!!! 

What? No, not Jeffrey Dot-mer, but that would have been good. No, not the Zodi-“Pac” Killer. No, I don’t mean A-“Dot” Hitler. O-or “Pac”mann Göring. Okay, stop, it’s not any of the Nazis, okay? Oh, it’s not Charles Pac-Manson but that’s better. Who’s Coral Eugene “Dots?” No, it’s not “Pac” Kevorkian eith– holy fuck what is wrong with you kids?

As you can see, most of the book is Mike performing the minimum amount of wordplay to legally count as a pun, but he eventually launches into a stream-of-consciousness story about what would happen if Pac-Man escaped his arcade cabinet. This could be interesting, right? Pac-Man is an immortal being of infinite hunger with no remorse or understanding let loose in a world of a silly writer’s imagination! Anyway, I’m not a psychologist, but from among the limitless possibilities available to Mike, the first activity his author surrogate selects is, “SNEAK UP ON A FAT WOMAN AND EAT THE CLOTHES OFF HER.”

It keeps going with Pac-Man eating a kid’s yo-yo, a leopard’s spots, a clown’s nose… if it’s roundish, Pac-Man takes it from you with no remorse or understanding. Each event is completely without whimsy. Did Mike Thaler ask a kindergarten class to name things that look like dots and think, “These fools are writing my entire book for me!” Is it a cautionary tale of what will happen when we unleash artificial intelligence? Is it the pornography of a man with a dotless fetish? Because it is not fucking anything close to riddles and jokes.

It is a relentlessly pointless series of events until Pac-Man eats a fruit stand. The cops had nothing to charge Pac-Man with when he was harassing animals and women, but they absolutely went after him once he started harming fruit. Pac-Man evades justice because he apparently brought arcade escape tunnels with him into this world, a terrifying hint at how the breach between our realities could have more serious ramifications than simple clown mutilation. And sure enough, the story ends the only way it ever could: an unstoppable Pac-Man heading straight for our delicious sun with no remorse or understanding. Have a nice “DOT,” I guess!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Timmy Leahy: The PACster of his DOTmain whose PACking a huge DOT.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Ultimate Tag 🌭

Ultimate Tag is a real show that I did not make up no matter how many times I fact check this sentence. Nope, still real. Are you sure? Yeah, holy shit. This is the world, everybody. We’ve reached stupid critical mass here and any further stupid will have to happen in space.

I know talented artists that have struggled their whole lives to land a show on TV. They practice and study, refine and revise and kill themselves perfecting their craft, sure that one day they’ll be good enough for the bigtime. But that’s not how TV works. That’s not how anything works. Everything in this garbage society works like this:

RICH ASSHOLE: We need a new show. It literally doesn’t matter what it is. Pick a thing.

RICH DIPSHIT: What about children’s games? We do them but with huge children.

RICH ASSHOLE: Adults?

RICH DIPSHIT: Yeah, those.

RICH ASSHOLE: Sounds good, do you want to kill a sex worker and blame a minority?

RICH DIPSHIT: Always!

Anyway this semen in the eyeball of quality is hosted by J.J. Watt and several lower Watts who, as I understand it, are football.

Yeah, those are the hosts this show deserves. J.J. Watt’s brothers look like they’re two different species on the timeline of animals that evolved into J.J. Watt. I’m sure somebody’s going to jump in here and tell me they all give huge kidneys to war orphans, but they look like somebody trying to draw Tom Brady from memory and they speak every sentence like it’s a word puzzle.

Everything you need to know about Ultimate Tag’s atmosphere can be described by their theme song. It’s a little number called Ladies and Gentlemen by a band named Saliva, which critics once described as “painfully unnecessary.” That’s the only appropriate anthem for Ultimate Tag, which seems to less pay homage to the ‘90s than to wildly misunderstand what was charming about them in the first place.

The actual game of Ultimate Tag is exactly what it sounds like: It’s tag reimagined by Mountain Dew. There are special courses and alternate rules but it’s important to remember that, at its core, Ultimate Tag is wussier than normal tag because you’re not allowed to touch each other. You pull flags. Flag tag is the pillow humping of playground games. It’s the game you play when your PE teacher can’t afford another ‘incident’ on his watch. Flag tag is the version the mitten-mandatory kids do at the James Buchanan School For Sexually Bizarre Children.

That got a TV show!

Ultimate Tag courses are mostly just repainted Double Dare sets full of extremely minor obstacles for aspiring Influencers to stumble over. Sometimes they branch out and do some pretty crazy setpieces that still manage to be boring, but in the air.

Ultimate Tag was an idea so bad it wouldn’t fly as a MadTV skit, and it was executed worse than Muammar Gaddafi, a Baltimore traffic stop, or a MadTV skit. Ultimate Tag sucks
 but what we’re really here to do is make fun of the Ultimate Taggers.

Yes! They rolled up some American Gladiator characters! To play tag! Holy shit, what a gift for me. Thank you, Ultimate Tag! I take back none of the things I said about you, but thank you for doing my absolute favorite two things in the world: Trusting professional athletes with a creative task, and wildly overestimating the enduring legacy of American Gladiators.

Let’s meet a few of the pro taggers!

This is Horse:

He kind of looks like you accidentally threw away Kit Harington but managed to find him again at the dump, and his persona is that he’s very angry
 like a horse? His catchphrase is “you ain’t never gonna put the horse down” which is just patently untrue. They’re like the easiest animal to put down. Half of all animal deaths in pop culture are horses with broken legs. We put horses down if they look like they have a headache. Horses die just to prove cowboys have emotions. We kill horses for emphasis. They’re like the underline of the animal world.

Here’s Flame:

Her whole deal is that she’s a martial arts and weapons expert, neither of which she is even close to allowed to use in this — again — extremely gentle game of flag tag. She acts like a cold and calculated killer, and then they let her loose to do what she does best
 which is jogging around a Burbank soundstage for twenty seconds while looking mildly annoyed.

This is Viking:

He seems most committed to his character, which consists mostly of him improvising incorrect facts about viking villages. “In my village,” he roars, “the boys would
 you would tend to chickens!” This claim is met with general confusion. “In my village,” he roars again, “we used
 wooden swords! We slapped each other with wooden swords!” The vibe is confused, anxious. “Vikings lived in villages!” He roars thricely, “I looked that up!”

This is Beach Boy:

Whose entire persona is “shorts.” He’s happy, none too bright, and you could probably fuck him in South Padre and not worry that he’ll get all clingy and try to start a long distance thing when you head back to Oklahoma. He will giggle at the “homa” part though. Every time.

Meet La Flair:

The mandatory dickwad who used his own real name as his alter ego. Fuck you, you placeholder of a man. You cardboard cutout audience member. I’d say you’re like mayonnaise but sometimes people notice the absence of mayonnaise. You’re the paladin of Ultimate Tag.

Here’s the Iron Giantess:

Her whole deal is that she’s huge and strong but — again — she’s not allowed to use either of those things in this, a game of tag for children who need safety scissors. In fact, both of those traits are significant disadvantages in a game whose only defining attributes are speed and agility. I think the idea was to have her be like what Andre the Giant was to wrestling, but instead she’s like what Andre the Giant was to heart medicine.

It’s The Caveman!

Hahaha, fantastic. I guess his persona is that he’s been unfrozen into modern society and then thrust into the game of Ultimate Tag? That’s a terrible use for an unfrozen caveman! Bring him to the mall and laugh at his antics. Bring him to the airport and watch him freak out about godbirds. Fuckin’ bring him to high school so he can make you popular — you only get one, maybe two unfrozen cavemen in your life. Don’t burn one on Ultimate Tag.

Now it’s time for Banshee:

She’s the show’s wild card, which mostly consists of her making crazy eyes and embarrassing screeches. Banshee claims to lure men in with her beauty and sweet song only to lead them to disaster, which you might recognize as actually a siren. Listen, some people run good and some people read good. It’s true that some people do both, but if you agree to be on the show Ultimate Tag, it’s safest to assume you’re not one of them and just ask for help with your homework.

And lastly, we meet Geek:

He thought Napoleon Dynamite was really funny, and so did everybody else for like four months. That was the last time he understood society. When they asked him to make up a tag persona, he didn’t have an idea, but he did have an old Halloween costume and a desire to belong again.

Anyway, don’t watch Ultimate Tag. There are like three funny minutes in each episode where they force athletes to do improv, and the rest is just watching Crossfit enthusiasts do some light jogging and deal with mild frustration.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Nick Ralston: whose tag persona is Man With Gun and has never been tagged.