The story of Brides In Love begins where so many great love stories do– in prison. Charlton comics started when a guy who went to jail for selling books of song lyrics without the writer’s permission met a lawyer (presumably not a great one because he was also in prison). Together, they decided to start a publishing company that specialized in, among other things, comics for broads.
To decide on titles, they stuck the words love, marriage, teen, romance, bride, and secret into a sack, shook it up, and whatever popped out was the name of their next comic. What they ended up with were things like I Love You, Sweetheart Diary, Romantic Secrets, Romantic Story, My Secret Life, Just Married, Teenage Love, Teen Confessions, and Teenage Confidential Confessions.
I don’t know what gave Charlton comics the idea that this was what women were looking for in comic books. I would be way more likely to pick up a comic titled Teen Confessions: I Fell Into A Vat Of Nuclear Waste, or I Love You, and I Fight Crime, With My Six Extra Arms, or My Secret Life As A Six-Armed Monster Hunter.
However, a think tank of -certainly no women- decided that what ladies want in a comic book is a hero who is a woman, a villain who is her husband, and a solution to their conflict that is they have to stay married because it’s 1963. Instead of doing battle, they make up, and usually, the woman apologizes and admits that she was a dumb idiot all along. Then they all live happily ever after, which for them is, like, ten more years until they die of lung cancer, or gout, or one of those other diseases you get from having too much fun.
Since Brides in Love is an anthology series, we get to see this same scenario play out over and over again like we’re stuck in the misogynistic romance comic circle of hell– a magical land where a woman can go from wanting to end her marriage to being ready to apologize in one panel because she took a nap.
“I don’t know why I told my husband that I wanted to divorce him. Probably because I was on my period or some dumb shit like that; remember me from exactly two panels ago? What a friggin bitch!”
The story featured on the cover is called “JUST FOR KICKS,” but for some reason, they recolored the whole thing to change the woman from a redhead to a blonde.
The main character in it is super pissed at her husband because he keeps making her go to parties, and she’s tired. Which, wow, I would kill for 1963 problems.
One day she leaves her husband and goes to a hotel where she naps and eats a bunch. So basically, she’s living the dream, and all of the men around her are like, “A woman? Eating? Send her to the insane-atorium! Blast her with a firehose until the ghosts leave her uterus!”
But it isn’t a uterus ghost that’s making her crazy. It’s a baby, which is much scarier! She went to a hotel and ate hotdogs, not because she’s insane, but because she’s insane from pregnancy! Which is fine. When she finds out, she wishes her husband were there, and he is! He tracked her down and is standing over her bed in a posture that is not all threatening, calling her a little idiot.
It’s not just the writing that suffers in Brides In Love. They could have hired an artist who doesn’t use twins conjoined at the head as a model for two people kissing.
Seriously, that one is the most terrifying but all of the kissing pics have the same vibe as the drawings of elephants from the Middle Ages done by monks who had never actually seen one.
It’s like every illustrator for Brides In Love was a graduate of The Art Institute For Male Virgins Who’ve Never Even Met A Woman.
I look at this, and I can hear the artist saying, “Kissing? Sure I can draw kissing. That’s uh, um, that’s when the girl puts her whole mouth around the boy’s lips so that his mouth is in her mouth, right? No, I’m not sweating. YOU’RE SWEATING.”
This artist has a problem with mouths in general. For instance, there’s the last panel of the third story, which is about a woman who marries a much older man. Her new stepdaughter, who is her age, for some reason, refuses to call her “Mom.” The woman ends up inheriting a bunch of money, which she gives to her husband to help out his failing business. This convinces her stepdaughter she’s not a gold digger. Then they all do this for some reason:
You know, just a stepmom and her new daughter, hanging out with their mouths open and tongues slightly out. It’s like someone wanted to draw a comic for women but forgot women have eyes.
Since this isn’t your typical comic book, it doesn’t have your typical comic ads. Most of the ads in Brides In Love are for weight loss, hair extensions, and nursing school. But on the very back is the kind of insane ’60s shit that makes me vaguely miss a time when everything was legal. It’s an ad for a photography studio that promises to send you 20 coupons, and if you get them 20 clients, they will give you a live miniature monkey. The ad is sure to note the supply of monkeys is limited, which makes me picture a man sitting in a stinky room with nine monkeys begging God for some kid in Yonkers to sell enough portrait sessions.
Do I wish I were alive in the sixties? No. Nothing has made me happier to be born in an era where women have some creative say in their lives than reading this comic. But do I also wish I were alive in a time when you could win a free monkey from a comic book? Hard yes.
Lydia will send you a live miniature monkey if you follow her on Twitter.
Nerds! You god damn nerds! Paying money for jokes on the internet is the nerdiest thing possible, and that’s including both card tricks and ukelele covers. But you nerds are precious to us. We appreciate every second you spend reading our comedy instead of a six-thousand word thinkpiece on which Doctor Who would fuck which other Doctor Who. We treasure every moment you spend with us instead of an anime body pillow that says your name in broken English when you squeeze it. We value every glasses-fogging, asthmatic giggle we tickle out of your soft bellies straining at the edges of T-shirts advertising old video games. This, then, is your day: Nerding Day. And these are the best Nerding Days you’ve had all year.
There are, without hyperbole, several too many jokes about insects on pizza in this book. Something happened to this author, probably seeing an insect on pizza, that caused him to find insects on pizza outrageous. This information isn’t particularly interesting or funny, but when someone does something as strange as drawing this many bug-infested pizzas, I take detailed notes. It might make for a bad comedy article, but it will definitely help catch the man authorities will one day call the Papa John’s Killer.
At least one time in his career, a cruise director has told Fred Newman’s agent, “We’ve already booked our headliner and I don’t think the ship needs a second Dave Coulier.” Jesus, I need to step away for a second because that’s the fucking meanest joke I’ve ever written.
Sean has promised me that this won’t be one of our public columns, so I feel safe admitting this only to you, our loyal patrons: I have always wanted to be a magical girl.
Foam rubber muscle suits just don’t hold up when they’re flesh-toned. It looks like Lion-O is mostly tumor and sass. This is what the melty guy from RoboCop would look like if, instead of being hit by a patrol car, he was hit by the theater bug.
It’s tough to do even one ‘Hero Resists The Call’ right, and Jetman is doing four at once. The end result is less like we’re being introduced to a reluctant cast of would-be heroes, and more like everybody in the world is already aware of, and fucking hates Jetman.
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.
Michael Caine is in The Last Witch Hunter for a grand total of about 3 minutes, before he’s put into a magical coma and replaced by Elijah Wood, who should also be too good for this film but is miraculously not.
For every second of his screen time, it is so very clear that Michael Caine just has no patience for this shit.
But no joke, that basically looks like a video game. Like if you showed this to your grandpa, he’d say it’s a videogame and then look at you pityingly, wondering where it all went wrong with our generation. Maybe it was a mistake to stop spraying pesticides over schools. Maybe it softened us up too much. “Grandpa?” you’d ask, but he’d just ease the brakes off his wheelchair and roll quietly backwards down a hill.
… This article was brought to you by our fine sponsors and Hot Dog Supremes: Yannis Ioannidis, John McCammon, Armando Nava, Lyman, yossarian, Josh S, and Ken Paisley. Together they form Ultrazorb, who defends the cosmos mostly against Ultrazorb’s drunken rampages.
The definition for “nerd” changes 12.7(π)² times faster than any other word. For instance, in our lifetime it has bounced between “panty unmoistening,” “socially unacceptable,” and “dangerously obsessive.” It can be confusing! But good news: I think I’ve found the Center of Nerd– an activity so dorky it anchors all variations or nuances of Nerd to a single constant:
In 1997,an original copy of DEVIL STICK on VHS retailed for $20 at JUGGLING CAPITOL. I assume today this mint-in-plastic copy is priceless, or was before I unsealed it after 23 years. DEVIL STICK is the no-budget project of Neil Stammer, a man who brags how much he loves an old Chinese toy called “devil sticks” though he mentions there was a mistranslation and they are, um, technically “flower sticks?” Neil loves devil sticks so much he moved to China for the proudly stated goal of getting better at manipulating them. Which brings me to my first criticism: Never has so much work gone into getting good at something so unimpressive. If you went on a decades long pilgrimage through Ukrainian factories to become the greatest sex doll sterilizer, your story would have a broader appeal than the man who moved to Asia to dedicate his life to twirling carnival sticks.
The first twenty minutes of the video is Neil alone, far from any microphone, in front of a black curtain. He has all the charm of a forensic pathologist explaining a morgue’s policy on outside snacks. If this doesn’t sound unpleasant enough, the soundtrack is entirely harmonica. On top of that, the video includes a steady hissing noise almost as loud as Neil and the harmonica. If you could die from being bad at producing VHS tapes, Neil Stammer’s body would have shattered into parts the moment he thought, “I should make a vide–“
The basics of devil sticks are simple– you bounce the devil stick back and forth between the two hand sticks. Neil warns it should take you a few days to a week to get the hang of this, which should be enough time to decide if you should really dedicate all this time to eliminating all sexual opportunities. Neil, arguably the world’s leading enthusiast for this hobby, doesn’t bother selling you on it. All this struggle to get to the endgame of “being able to devil stick” is like saying, “Digging through the garbage can be sad and messy, but every 72 hours you find an old yogurt lid!” Fucking use that as a pull quote on the DVD release of DEVIL STICK, Neil. Or this: Neil juggles batons with all the lifeless despair of a Ukrainian sex doll getting unsanitized.
Neil gives virtually none of the tips or advice you’d expect from an instructor of such a delicate art. Instead, he silently completes all the several possible tricks you can do with these things. It’s barely, barely better than secretly filming some asshole at a Renaissance faire and nowhere near as helpful as asking him, “Yon juggler, mayhaps you can illuminate me in the ways of these witchful sticks in exchange for watching me lay with my wife in the drench of her moon blood?”
Okay, this Under the Leg trick is pretty good.
Oh shit, Neil. Have I been wrong about how cool devil sticks are this whole time? If you picked up three sticks in front of a girl and said, “Oh, hey, I’ve seen these before. You kind of hit them back and forth?” and then you pulled this high kick? She would howl. Her uterus would fall out of her trying to get to you. She would die confused and horny and when the paramedics asked what the shit happened you would say, “I’m not sure. I was just hitting these sticks together and did a little, you know, kick like this.” And they would see it and all the flesh of their genitals would engorge together, dragging their shrieking, pain-wracked bodies toward your enchanting expression of talent.
Twelve minutes in and Neil is still robotically powering full speed through tricks. In many ways it’s pretty impressive. He’s got a passion that helped him create what has to be one of the top five most important works of devil stick media. He’s the best devil sticker I’ve seen, the only one I can name, and I feel so fucking bad for him and every choice he’s ever made. And with every trick chained together like this, you start to see how limited your options are when clacking a stick around. He’s like a Taco Bell chef putting a burrito inside another burrito, adding Cheetos, and giving the various states of this process 73 different names.
After fourteen minutes, Neil has run out of ideas and he’s been reduced to doing kickflips with the small sticks. It’s cute, and technically showmanship, but feels desperate. I don’t want to diminish how uniquely lame this is, but it’s like watching a modern dunk contest. Mankind finished inventing dunks decades ago, so dunk innovations are limited to adding a pointlessly weird bounce or putting on a cowboy hat first. Tricks like this tell a story more about the performer’s creative struggle than their amazing ability. And in one quarter of an hour, Neil Stammer has convinced me, passionately, that he and now we have seen everything devil sticks will ever offer. It is a tragedy. We are watching a man’s soul crawl further and further away from all meaning and joy while giving the limp sales pitch of “This Could Be YOU.” This VHS tape should be called Le Vide de L’ambition and screened in the Louvre.
Sure, I guess you haven’t wiggled the stick back and forth with one hand yet, Neil.
The first surprise of the film comes seventeen minutes in when Neil admits he never had time to think of a name for this trick other than “My Favorite Trick.” Which is silly because this is obviously “Mr. Juggler’s Cry for Help” or “The Talented Masturbator.” Neil, “Advanced Useless Endeavor, Behind the Back Variation” was right there. You could have called it “The Virgin Helicopter” or “Release Me From This Terrible Cycle, Devil Sticks (8 Minute Scream).”
I’m not sure Neil meant for this part to be left on the tape.
After showing you, just, fucking every possible trick, Neil goes out with a flaming, showstopping finale combining some of them. It’s a triumph! An inspiration! If you start now and dedicate yourself to devil sticks, this is the life you could have! So take that with you as you jou– wait, hold on. We’ve got these fire sticks and this dark driveway. You know what would make a fucking sweet ending for this video?
Oh, yeah. That’s a finale, Neil. Fire blow to darkness, fade in on JugglingCapitol.com, and that’s how you devil stick the crowd. By the way, I checked JugglingCapitol.com to see how they’re holding up in this post-devil stick interest world, and it’s very strange. This is either the new headquarters of some kind of juggler alternate reality game or the site owner handed over control to a WordPress robot and let it run wild. Here’s what it looks like today:
Indrani is a boring supermodel child of divorce who can’t process food in the daylight and JugglingCapitol.com has put her in charge of defeating a killer shark? This is nonsense. It’s nothing. For this I screwed up Neil’s perfect ending? Let’s pretend this never happened and backtrack a little. We’re going to go out Neil style:
Fuck yeah! Awesome!!
UPDATE 12/16/2020 11:00am PST
Jesus fucking Christ, it turns out the story of Neil Stammer’s devil stick did NOThave an awesome ending at all.
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.
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 Crüe 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 Monstercockswas 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.
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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.
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