Category: NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: The Last Witch Hunter 🌭

Post author By Robert Brockway
Post date 04/29/2020
6 Comments on Nerding Day: The Last Witch Hunter 🌭

I like to think of myself as a nerd ally — I only mock nerds relentlessly because I am one, and this distinction comes with so very few benefits that I try to take full advantage of each and every one. I’m not the particular subspecies of nerd that likes to fuck fluffy line drawings, but you better god damn believe I use my discount card for 10% off anime body pillows at Walt’s Waifu Warehouse. So it is with great love and respect that I say this: Vin Diesel is a fucking nerd.

He’s just the first nerd that actually followed through after telling the whole class that his goals over the summer were to start working out and see a vagina in real life. Once the derisive laughter subsided, Vin Diesel got to work, and now everyone who knows what a Yoshimura is looks up to a Level 20 Dweeb. But there’s only so long a nerd can go without slipping up and screeching something well over the line of societal dork tolerance. Vin Diesel wound up blowing his carefully constructed geekoflage when he got too excited and pitched the dorkiest movie of all time: The Last Witch Hunter.

Guys, it’s about his Dungeons and Dragons character. And not in a broad strokes, Conan-esque kind of way — this is a movie about his actual character sheet. Plus his character is nerdy even for D&D — Vin Diesel is the guy that refused to play a drunk barbarian or a well-hung bard like the rest of us, and instead spent hours arguing to the DM that he could never ride RAW. He wanted to pull an experimental third-party class from a magazine and here’s the craziest part: It worked.

And not just with the DM, which is honestly where this should have failed — your average DM says “no” to more unreasonable roleplay requests than any woman who’s ever met Logan Paul. This shit actually worked on Hollywood: They made a movie about an obscure unauthorized D&D character — and it wasn’t even an interesting variant! As the movie title should have given away, this guy doesn’t like witches and Vin Diesel stole his name from The Silmarillion. That’s the character. That weak shit would get you laughed out of an Adventurer’s League game, Vin. Adventurer’s League.

But Vin Diesel never met a bad premise he couldn’t franchise, so his story got made. I was so excited to write about this abomination. I woke up every day looking forward to making fun of somebody else’s hard work, and then the time finally came, and the movie was nothing. Just a blank spot in the world. Not good enough to be enjoyable, not bad enough to be funny.

But that’s okay, because much like Vin Diesel with the first draft of every single idea he’s ever had, I was not willing to give up on this. So I went dumpster diving in the Carl’s Jr. Expired Horsemeat Disposal Chute of mass media — the press junket.

There was a lot of weirdness here: Vin Diesel was strangely adamant that Michael Caine had to be in this movie — and because Vin Diesel once tricked a leprechaun into saying its real name aloud, Michael Caine is technically in The Last Witch Hunter.

Technically.

Knowing Bumblejig O’Dangleberries might get your wishes granted, but you will feel his reluctance in every detail: 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 screentime, it is so very clear that Michael Caine just has no patience for this shit.

He doesn’t understand it, he doesn’t care to, and he’s counting the mumbles between now and paycheck day. In one interview, the intern who drew the short straw at MovvvieZapp or whatever mentions that Vin Diesel once taught Dame Judi Dench to play Dungeons and Dragons on set, because she is a nice, patient lady and Vin Diesel burns through leprechaun favors like there’s not a curse barreling toward him as they run out. So the intern wants to know… did he get Michael Caine to nerd up?

Vin chuckles. He blushes. He does a godawful Michael Caine impression — somehow worse than the one Michael Caine has been doing for the last fifteen years — and says “‘e didn’t want te play!” More hurt laughter. “Couldn’t be bovvered!”

That’s his Michael Caine face, because that’s the only face Michael Caine ever made at him.

It is strange to watch Journalism School dropouts coerced into asking about obscure third-party D&D variants — forcing the normals to pretend to care about Arcanum is like nerd struggle-porn, and you can’t blame Vin for getting off to it. But for the most part he’s actually pretty charming. He’s as normal as a dork walking the knife’s edge of cultural acceptance can be, until this interview:

Where he is so clearly rolling deep with both Kelly and Molly. He won’t take his sunglasses off, he gets lost in sentences like every noun is a wardrobe to lexical Narnia, and he’s doing constant mouth gymnastics.

And normally that would be fine: Nobody watches press junket videos except for press junket reporters reliving their worst moments after the gin runs out. So Vin Diesel stumbled in fairy-slapping and expecting to face a few hours of softball questions… but this interviewer is German and she is not open to mitigating that fact. She came to pepper Vin Diesel with heavily accented questions predicated on existential absurdity and Vin Diesel is in no state to answer the door, much less backwards-worded queries about the nature of remembrance.

Right out the gate the interviewer says she’s very fascinated by witchhunts, which is your first sign to stop hitting on the goth girl in the airport bar, and Vin is in so much fucking trouble: He thinks this interview is a singalong and he knows all the lyrics to the questions she’s about to ask.

She asks him how much of this movie is influenced by events that happened in the real world, and the correct answer to that is shameful giggling and the ruffling of a character sheet. But Vin Diesel is so flipped that he thinks the lights being too bright means he should whisper. He quietly agrees “so true, this has been happening in the real world.”

This should be a cue to dial it back a bit because Vin is lyrically flaccid right now, but the interviewer presses him: She insists there has to be a sequel to this film about Vin Diesel punching magic because there’s just so much to say about the world with his character, which is a preposterous leap from a German film intern who should be more worried about talking Frank Furious out of this K-hole. Vin is overcome with emotions that came out of nowhere and feel less like sadness and regret and more like hot pink and slippy cold, so he quietly whispers, “there is so much to say.” Hushed breath, awestruck sincerity: “There’s just so much to say.”

Yeah, Mr. Diesel? Like we’re really going to go out on a limb and tackle the unjust persecution of women in The Last Witchhunter, in which your character does kill several witches, including the Witch Queen, whom your movie says was actually responsible for the Black Plague? This poor son of a bitch showed up utterly flattened to an interview with a barely comprehensible woman who throws him wild curve balls like “there is a memory bar in your film, so if there is a good memory bar of your films which memory bar would you like to go back to?” That is not a sentence, it is a word fight. It’s a syntax dare, and Vin Diesel did not show up ripped to the gills to a press junket about his Dungeons and Dragons character to play linguistic double dutch.

He desperately needs a minute, so he starts downing water which is a smart move in that it buys you a few seconds of not talking and also oh my god isn’t water the fucking best? How do we forget it’s the best have you guys ever had water holy shit try this water-

When he’s finished, she asks him about his fans, and he says “I trust them, uh, I’ve, I’m prime of them?”

He somehow stops short of clarifying that he is ‘Optimus Prime of them’ followed by forty minutes of blathering about the Autobots, so whatever else we take from him, at least know that Vin Diesel handles Kitty Flipping better than I do.

Finally, when asked about the progress on another project of his, Vin Diesel claps like he’s excited, then relays a fun anecdote where somebody else asked that same question and nothing — that’s it: somebody asked the question and he didn’t have an answer for it then, like he doesn’t have an answer for it now.

Here’s how the interview ends: In rapid-fire order, he asks nobody off camera what’s happening with his own project, quietly prays to the ceiling, and then oddly whispers while slam-pronouncing every syllable: “I’m working towards getting that dream realized.” Then the interview smash-cuts out of there so fast that Vin Diesel absolutely just leapt to his feet to reveal he’d been naked from the waist down that whole time.

I had such a struggle with this column. I just knew in my soul that this movie should not exist in an entirely correct universe, but the actual product was unmelted Velveeta. It was a block of room temperature calories, and it broke my heart. But I needed to experience that pain to get me here, where I was always supposed to be: in this bonkers interview between Bob Bloodshot and the Manic-Depressive Pixie Dream Girl of Das Uproxxen.

So true. I’ve emerged from it changed, like a white girl returning from India: I don’t actually know what I’m talking about and it will certainly make knowing me a worse experience, but I won’t have to think of a new topic of conversation for the rest of the year. I can just tie everything back to that one trip I took, when I visited the birthplace of mouth-yoga.

…

This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, Eric Spaulding: The only man alive who remembers the Berlin Foosball Massacre from an erased timeline. Pity him as much as you envy him.

Tags 2020, Free

NERDING DAY

The Teenage Mutant Hero Turtle Joke Book 🌭

Post author By Seanbaby
Post date 04/22/2020
4 Comments on The Teenage Mutant Hero Turtle Joke Book 🌭

In 1990, a London publisher put out a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle joke book and it ended up being a mass grave for concepts that once brought children joy. It took riddles and made them meandering, barely explainable things. It stole classic, well-known jokes and crammed pizza and Krang into them by any means necessary. It ground up words into mangled piles of hyphens to form limp, desperate puns. Through a combination of author failure and British slang, it’s 96 pages of confusing mess, only a sad confusing mess like a pile of human feet or abortion paperwork. Okay, I think you’re ready for The Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles Joke Book:

This is an example of both the keen sense of humor of the author and the lengths he’ll go to to make a pun. Sure, as wordplay, “sewer-cide” is fork-your-own-eye-out clumsy, but more notable is how he has no problem killing a man with sadness to get to it. The book is called “Teenage Mutant HERO Turtles” because they didn’t trust kids with the word “ninja,” but they’re going to show them a man who chooses to die in shit rather than suffer this cruel world? And let’s not play games– the fall doesn’t have a prayer of killing this guy. At best he’ll break his legs and die from toxic shock in five days, and that’s only if he remains undiscovered and resists calling for help. So I guess I’m saying this gag wouldn’t work even if the premise was better than “what about a guy ending his life in a sewer?” And speaking of sewers, does this joke take place in a universe where manhole designers get one shot at writing “SEWER” and that’s fucking it? Go ahead and add this goddamn manhole to the list of reasons this isn’t very good.

I don’t think it’s splitting hairs to mention pizza is not served with mustard, “waiting for mustard to cool down” is not a sensible punchline, and masks don’t get black eyes. This is like walking up to a man in pants, asking why there are bite marks on his penis, and him replying, “mayo no mistake– the cool cat relished a bite of my hot dog!” It asks you to make so many accommodations for important details being left out and weird mistakes left in. By the time you’ve asked someone to imagine a mustard pizza only it’s a special kind of mustard too spicy for a ninja to eat and also he’s the kind of ninja confused by the very concept of spiciness, your joke might as well be, “Please laugh; all my children are dead. Hot mustard is something my boys will n-never again… please, I’m begging you to remember: hot can mean two different things.”

All it takes for this routine to work is for one turtle to have never heard of bees and, unrelated to that, have no peripheral vision. The issue I have is not that this is absurd, it’s how the punchline isn’t. A bug on a pizza, whether it’s funny to you or not, is something so much more conceivable than everything leading to it. These extraordinary circumstances ramped up to nothing. How many laws of our universe had to break for this author to get a bug on some pizza? It’s like watching a wet madman fall from a hole in the sky and saying, “Hey, the cloud next to that guy’s portal sort of looks like a boat. It is Wednesday.”

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.

This is legally a joke. I could see a pair of armadillosaurs deliver these lines to each other after Fred Flintstone ran them over. But like everything else in this book, it’s only the faint echo of comedy from a dark void of inexplicable decisions. Raphael is completely disfigured by the car accident, but seems to be relaxing and having a conversation? Why was the line about how he was feeling given to Leonardo? Raphael must have been delivering this punchline in an earlier version, which –holy shit– means the author made at least a second pass on this book. Holy fucking shit, it means he was trying.

Finally, a clear concept without any confusing missteps by the author: the other three Ninja Turtles want to cook and eat Donatello. And they illustrated this with Donatello cheerfully thinking, “My hungry pals want to skewer my flesh! Hey, my own bo staff might do the trick!” Again, it’s not a great joke, but this will be a useful document to one day inspire a detective to think, “My god, what if the Papa John’s Killer and the Night Kebabber are the same person?”

“Welcome to my bathroom, Turtles! Too bad for you, I’ve made a CLEAN getaw– oh, shit. I see what I did, Turtles. I mistook an idiom for something literal and then ignored the important half of it. I did the opposite of it, in fact. So really, what I’m doing doesn’t even make sense in the internal logic of my buffoonery. This is like if the Family Circus was less coherent, Turtles!”

Before any of them are cool but rude or doing machines, the defining personality trait for each Ninja Turtle is their love of pizza. The author knows this. A third of his goddamn book is the word pizza. So why does this Ninja Turtle not know how pizza works? And it sets up no clever snap– Michaelangelo is simply describing the event which should not be happening and has no reason to. Functionally, it may as well have been this:

You don’t so much have to plan on explaining this joke as you do committing to a series of apologies. Fuck you, Ninja Hero Turtles Joke Book. Fuck the pain and mistakes that caused you, and fuck the God who watched it happen from the stars and did nothing. If an entire civilization fell into the ocean whenever a child laughed at “turn turtle and run,” the survivors would watch from the shores knowing the suffering was deserved.

This is a masterclass in betraying a joke structure for no payoff. The idea of a riddle is that abstract thinking will lead you to a satisfying answer. So why does Krang file his teeth? Maybe because he keeps losing them? Maybe he thought he was looking a little long in the tooth? The answer will never be funny, but at least a clever one will be something close to cute. The answer, “So Krang can bite tin cans!” is nothing. It’s a stupid toddler’s guess from a realm where there are cans but no can openers. And the “joke” here, that space genius Krang doesn’t open food cans before eating them, is only vaguely suggested, and not by the joke teller but the joke recipient? The author, Peter Eldin, got every detail of riddles wrong not to defy our expectations but because 72 pages into his 110th children’s riddle book, he still has no idea how they fucking work.

This is too wordy to be coherent, but if you were delivering a baby and stuffed a cat up the mother’s ass, this Krang joke is what you would show the Guinness committee to avoid the world record for Wrongest Dumb Fuck.

This one is special because the illustration undermines the joke’s entire conceit by showing at least one situation where a turtle can absolutely get mashed, but I mostly picked it to illustrate Peter’s other approach to riddles. Before I make another case for this book being quite bad, I want to say I’ve got nothing against this comedy structure. For instance,

How is this book the same as naming your snake “Pussy Magnet?”

Because every element works independently to perform the exact opposite of its intended purpose.

Peter Eldin doesn’t do that. He asks a question that seems like it has some kind of puzzle element, but instead of a solution, the answer is an idiot’s first guess. It would at least be a swing at a fun surprise among coherent, normal riddles, but when all of them are like this, it reads like a transcription of a long car ride with a four-year-old. In fact, one tiny change makes every line in this book suddenly make sense:

Some jokes, like the one about Krang eating tin cans or the guy killing himself, are illustrated since they wouldn’t work without seeing the unopened cans and existential fear in the man’s eyes, respectively. However, most of the illustrations are generic TMNT clipart slapped randomly between lines. And as you get further into the book, as the jokes become more desperate, the clipart starts growing in size. Soon, a recurring picture of a tiny turtle eating pizza might take up an entire page. It’s the punchline to the unspoken setup, “What’s the dumbest way a hack author can satisfy his publisher’s demand for pages?” Anyway, here’s an irrelative word from our sponsor:

Tags 2020, cartoons, Free, Joke books

NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Swords of the Barbarians

Post author By Robert Brockway
Post date 04/15/2020
3 Comments on Nerding Day: Swords of the Barbarians

To celebrate this Nerding Day, let’s play a round of Pulp Remix. Here’s how it works: I take a real book, steal its cover and jacket copy, then refuse to read any of it. Authors hate this one weird trick where you disregard their entire life’s work on a whim! Instead I will write what I suppose the book is about. Again, I do not change the cover. I do not change the jacket copy. Both of these are real:

…

Brought to you thanks to a tip from LDHaines

Tags 2020, books, fantasy, Free, pulp remix

NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Captain America vs. The Bullshit Robot 🌭

Post author By Seanbaby
Post date 04/08/2020
3 Comments on Nerding Day: Captain America vs. The Bullshit Robot 🌭

Over the decades, the character of Captain America has been imagined nearly five different ways– werewolf, regular, one-armed unfrozen teen, and secret Nazi. It is with great honor I add “man with realistic limitations and personality disorders” to the pantheon of Captain America adaptations with this fun-for-kids coloring book.

Tags 2020, coloring books, comic books, Free

NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Kids Guide to the Internet 🌭

Post author By Robert Brockway
Post date 04/01/2020
5 Comments on Nerding Day: Kids Guide to the Internet 🌭

It seems like the internet has always been a part of our life: Our untrustworthy informant, our shameful lover, the rancid meat way in the back of our soul, neglected and slowly turning monstrous. But there was a time when this whole ‘Cyber Web’ thing was new and frightening, instead of just frightening. That time was 1997, the year that gave us The Kids Guide to the Internet and took The Notorious B.I.G., and you will never make me believe those two things are unrelated.

Explanatory theme song? You’re goddamn right there’s an explanatory theme song. You couldn’t wipe your ass in the late ‘90s without a jazzy white lady rhyming ‘ain’t’ with ‘taint.’ And Kids Guide to the Internet has the jazziest white lady to ever do an awkward Mick Jagger strut at your cousin’s wedding. Picture your mom singing along to Michael Buble after six too many glasses of rose. Picture the voice you least like to hear in Theater Class — the one that cuts right through the babble and into your last nerve. Got it fixed in your head? Put it to work on these lyrics:

On your mark, get set

we’re riding on the internet

Cyberspace, set us free

Hello virtual reality!

This song has everything the late ‘90s did wrong. There’s even a brief, ill-advised rap breakdown, but Somebody’s Aunt almost immediately realizes it was the wrong move. She starts burning that bridge even as she’s standing on it. Then she takes us out with a snappy little flourish:

Take a spin

Now you’re in

with the technoset

You’re going surfing on the internet!

Get used to that last bit: it’s played at every single transition screen, and there are so many transition screens. Whoever edited this video just found out about the wipe function and they were in a terrible tire-swing accident that permanently damaged the part of their brain that regulates their use of the wipe function. You will hear this hook eight hundred times before this video is over. You will forget what all other music sounds like. Don’t even attempt karaoke until you have three straight weeks of audio detox, or you’ll screech “you’re going surfing on the internet!” in the middle of Old Town Road and utterly ruin girl’s night out. Madison will never forgive you, and you do not want to be on her shit list.

Hey, speaking of white people you’re just certain are secretly evil:

This is the whitest family I’ve ever seen. It’s a kind of white that can’t even exist anymore. 1997 was the last year you were allowed to be this white. That was the year Connecticut opened its borders and ended two centuries of isolationist foreign policy. After 1997, at least one of these people would have seen a black person in real life, if only while zipping by in their Tahoe on the way to World Market.

This is Petey, and I know you hate him already and that’s too bad, because he’s our host. Petey looks like he’s one racist Minions meme away from a school shooting, and this whole video is about him diving face-first into the internet without so much as a dental dam.

“Now that I’ve gotten on the Internet, I’d rather be on my computer than doing just about anything!” Petey warbles. His parents will look back on this moment and begrudgingly admit that yes, there were warning signs.

Mom and Dad aren’t in the video long, which is good, because dad speaks like a drunk alien who doesn’t want to give away the game, but kind of thinks it’d be hilarious if you discovered his secret.

“[My kids] play the typical computer games that all the kids enjoy,” dad says, before breaking into laughter and revealing his tentacles.

The girl, Dasha, knows the gig is up, but she’s not quite ready for dad to be dissected in a government laboratory, so she immediately leaps in with “don’t worry though, it’s still cool! The program is by kids, for kids, and it’s not just for boys either!”

That doesn’t make any sense and she’s disputing an assertion nobody put forth, but Dasha imprinted on her Broodhosts early so we cannot fault her for the things their pheremones make her do.

Like all white suburban housewives in the ‘90s, mom is trapped in a living nightmare of her own construction and her every facial expression is one unexpected loud noise away from relentless screaming. She’s drunk all the time and nobody has the patience for pity, not after all of these years. She chimes in with:

“As a parent, I’ve never been happier than when my children ask their friends over for an internet computer party!”

And she’s too far gone to know that’s the saddest fucking thing ever constructed with human language. She thinks she’s putting on a brave face, but she basically just puked chardonnay onto an orphan then tried to swallow the glass. Her only role in this film is to buzzkill all the boys, and she is aware of that role, and she hates it.

“The internet is not regulated,” mom warns, before stumbling out to drink straight vermouth in the water heater closet.

Luckily the parents aren’t in this video for long, as two “cool friends” arrive to make this an official “internet computer party.” Lisa and Andrew have a lot of questions about this internet thing, and I know you think you’re hot shit, reader. You think you’re ready to laugh at this mess, but it honestly might kill you if you go in with that attitude. Here’s the level of awkward I need you to brace for:

Petey and Andrew give stillbirth to the worst five that never lived. Everything about it hurts, from the long, slow reach, to the weak clap, to Andrew’s strange hand fling at the end. It’s like this is the first five he’s ever been offered, but it was so lackluster he can’t accept it. He’s ready for a second step — an up-high, a fist clasp, little explosion fingers, something, anything. He assumed there would be more to it than this. There has to be more to it than this. But there’s not, Andrew. Just like Jennifer Hayes in the back of my Ford Taurus after the tenth grade Gym ‘N Jam, you are going to have to learn to live with this milestone being a disappointment.

Andrew is so in his head about that crazy-bad five he spends the rest of the film trying to bring extra swagger to every scene. He’s the kid leaping up after eating shit on the bleacher stairs and then, hearing all the derisive laughter, going in for a backflip: You’re never going to pull it off, Andrew, you are compounding embarrassment and you actually might paralyze yourself.

“What’s a web page, something ducks walk on?” Andrew squeaks, to silent judgment.

It wouldn’t have been funny even if it had made sense, and he knows it.

“Surfing the world wide w-” Petey starts.

“Surfing, that sounds pretty cool already!” Andrew cuts in, trying to overwhelm the terribleness of the moment with blind, verbal machinegun fire.

“Andrew don’t interrupt,” Lisa spits.

It’s an out of character moment for this ‘fun hang-out sesh,’ but nobody yelled ‘cut’ because Andrew is caught in a fallacy now, trying to chew his leg off when it’s his neck that’s caught. The only humane thing to do is put him down.

After pity-slaying her own brother, Lisa attempts to move on, but she’s off balance. She’s so happy for a return to normality that she gets way too psyched at the idea of visiting the webpages of museums. It’s a weird overreaction to the most boring punishment a child could imagine, but Petey sees his opening:

“Wanna write a letter to President Clinton?” he says.

It’s a crazy jump. A mad logical leap. It shouldn’t work, but Lisa gasps “would he write back?”

Petey is fucking in. He knows he’ll at least get some of that sweet hand-holding action, just rubbing his clammy little palm all over her puffy-painted nails long before she discovers it’s a con. So he doubles down:

“I bet he would,” Petey smirks.

Like the President of the United States of America has time to answer every random email from a horny teenager. This is Bill Clinton you’re talking about: you’re going to need to at least send underage nudes if you hope for anything more an automated reply.

Look at that garbage: Bill Clinton has a filter sent up to bin anything that doesn’t contain a photo attachment and the words “fat young titties” at least twice.

Andrew suggests they check out “something about astronomy” because he’s still panic-firing words and at this point it’s like watching a rabid dog drown. It’s a bad idea to help, but could you call yourself truly human if you did not?

So Petey humors him and brings up the best website I have ever seen:

JACK HORKHEIMER: STAR HUSTLER is the name of my pulp sci-fi novel that quickly degrades into cheap pornography. I guarantee you that site is blocked at work under every single category. Jack Horkheimer tried to get everyone to call him The Star Hustler, but they just wound up calling him The Hork. This was the late ‘90s, when the internet was still wild and free and any hork could spin his love for the stars into confused nerd tail. JACK HORKHEIMER: STAR HUSTLER was single-handedly responsible for the HPV epidemic that still plagues observatories to this day.

There’s no way that page is still around, right?

Oh shit! It is! And he clearly got in trouble so bad he had to change the name! And he looks exactly like you thought! And… he’s dead.

Ah, well, sorry to bring down the mood, everybody. I’m sure The Hork is up in heaven now, railing a Tiffany against Uranus.

Let’s check back in with Petey and the Cyberbunch — surely we can’t spend the whole runtime of this instructional video watching a horny 12 year old boy try to get his fingers wet.

Good god, Petey: Your every action cannot be tied to Lisa. You can’t send her an email while she’s standing right there — it’s too thirsty. Especially with four exclamation points. Everybody knows that one exclamation point is for enthusiasm, two is for offense, three is for imminent danger, and four is for straight fuckin’.

This video promised to show us everything the web has to offer, but it spends twenty minutes just quietly showing us the webpages of its sponsors. There is, no joke, three straight minutes of a child browsing the Nick at Nite webpage in absolute silence. Not a word is spoken as they slowly read all 40 words of text available on this crude non-page. They even pause to watch 30 seconds of a tiny, grainy video of Mr. Ed, just like no child has ever done in history.

It is grim. It is grim and quiet, because everybody knows this is the moral compromise necessary to pay for the Craft Services table. Only simple, sweaty Andrew is oblivious to the gravitas of the moment. While his friends watch their dignity die in a Netscape Navigator window, Andrew abruptly pipes “Nick at Nite, cool!”

I know you only read at a 2nd grade level, Andrew, but even you can read this room.

When we’re finally finished earning our $240 in sponsorship money, Petey gets back to browsing, and we need to address a huge problem: Petey will click on anything.

Not just websites, straight downloads. Petey browses the internet like an angry bull. Red flags only mean ‘go faster, go harder’ and consequences are just pathetic things to be observed by parents and Lisas. Seriously, Petey straight rawdogs the internet and if he fucks like he browses, Lisa should book a Planned Parenthood appointment now just to get that prime 4:00PM spot.

Mom has powered through the vermouth and half of the cooking sherry, so she staggers in to ask if they learned anything good. Lisa goes nuts: “Are you kidding?” She squeals, “Peter showed me everything!” And Petey — this brassy little bastard — he actually swivels to the camera to give us the old Ferris Bueller-style “I’m in!”

All that’s left is to face the camera for the legally mandated ‘90s choral catchphrase and freezeframe.

“Surf’s up, see you on the ‘net!”

And we’re out. We’ve survived. That was a powerful but livable amount of awkward, considering we…

Is that Andrew, coming back in? No, Andrew. Come on. Don’t do it man, it’s over. You’ll never pull it off. Just go home and reflect on your decisions, just g-

Tags 2020, Free, guide, internet, kids, videos

NERDING DAY

Shaq Fu (The Novelization) 🌭

Post author By Seanbaby
Post date 03/25/2020
4 Comments on Shaq Fu (The Novelization) 🌭

In 1994, EA published Shaq Fu, a terrible fighting game about Shaquille O’Neal traveling to another dimension to rescue a boy from a kung fu mummy. It’s, to this day, the most bad ideas anyone ever had at once without dying. It’s absurd, but a dark, clinical type of absurd like a birthday clown who can only do impersonations of your grandparents’ last words. Needless to say, I have been captivated by Shaq Fu for many years and adapted it into the children’s book you’re about to fall in love with.

Fans of the game may notice I’ve taken some liberties in The Unauthorized Child Novelization of Shaq Fu in order to help the reader explore what it means to be Shaq on a kung fu rescue quest. For instance, you, the reader, are Shaq. It’s not the first Shaquille O’Neal book I’ve written in the second person, but it is the first one written for someone who was not specifically Shaquille O’Neal. As he, his publicist, NBA great Horace Grant, and several housekeepers already know, I’ve been writing the exciting You (Shaq) & Me (Seanbaby) series for over 30 years.

Tags 2020, Free, shaq, Video Games