Category: REFLECTING DAY

Categories
REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: The Pizza Extra from 2013’s The Internship🌭

1900HOTDOG is six years old, making it one of modern publishing’s most enduring legacies. Thank you to everyone who subscribes, and this Reflecting Day is all about the gift you’ve given to us, and the world. I’ve mentioned this before, but over my long career across every media from TV to movies to video games to magazines, this is by far my favorite job. The second half of this sentence will sound unlikely, but to explain why, let’s look at the 2013 Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson comedy, The Internship.

The movie is mostly a commercial for Google and its importance, which sounds right because their AI search always knows when to ignore my question and tell me I’m being followed. I know you didn’t see The Internship, but it’d be insulting to explain the plot. You already guessed the entire movie from “Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson get jobs at Google.” So I’ll skip to the ending:

The film concludes with a surprise disco sketch from Vince and Owen’s team during a company meeting. You can tell which characters are good guys or bad guys because it’s either the funniest, most outrageous thing they’ve ever seen, or some stupid weird shit. I understand that makes us the bad guys here, and that’s okay! Their universe is obviously wrong. Look at this pizza chaos:

The Internship is not what you’d call a tight movie. You already guessed that, too. No movie producer says, “Our leads are Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, so whatever you do, don’t let them pal around likably.” But the pace really speeds up here at the end. They are desperate to wrap things up, so in the course of a half-minute disco ambush, the film resolves every single character and romantic arc. They’re all happening right in that gif! Josh Brener and Owen Wilson get their girls, Tiya Sircar tells the villain to fuck himself, and since Vince Vaughn hasn’t had any meaningful relationships all movie, his resolution is beaning some nerd we’ve never met in the head with a slice of pizza. It’s technically storytelling and comedy, just assembled entirely out of pizza.

I’m making fun of it, but an ending to this movie must have been a terrifying problem to solve. Among the brightest young minds in the country, the plot needed these two middle-aged fast-talkers to come up with the best tech project through everyman charisma alone. That’s a daunting task for any writer, maybe more so for Vince Vaughn and the writer of the Lego Ninjago Movie, this film’s credited screenwriters. This scene isn’t them failing, though. This is them not even trying. It’s clear that during the brainstorming meeting one of them said, “Fuck it, let’s order pizza,” the other one mistook it for a story idea, then they forgot about it forever.

A lot of big tech companies, including Google, have luxurious amenities. For instance, Google has all the free food you can eat. Viewers know this because Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson take zany advantage of it, several times. So for them to come into a Google meeting with free pizza is like charging into a locker room and singing, “Anyone in the market for another flopping dong!?” It’s like charging into any room and singing that. We’re at Google! Flopping dongs and pizza are the two things we are least likely to need right now, Vince Vaughn!

And with a 2/10 cross-leg spin and a toe kick flourish, Vince Vaughn delivers the finale pizza. This is not how anything works in any world, especially this one they spent 90 minutes building, but I think they won? Wait, go back one graphic. Computer, enhance:

Look at this extra lose her mind over a piece of pizza. I have been thinking about this girl every day since I saw this movie 13 years ago. Look at her snap at it, flopping her arms like a Tyrannosaurus rex who thought her boyfriend was never going to propose. I know how this is going to sound, but I’ve never seen a woman cum this hard. She looks like Steven Seagal jogging through a cheese shop. She looks like the director told her, “In this scene Vince is going to come over and give you pizza,” and she said, “Sir, no disrespect, but I was Child Zombie Trapped in Barbed Wire on episode 47 of The Cocaine Dead. So, uhh, I think I got this.”

And here’s what I love about 1900HOTDOG. This isn’t anything anywhere else. There was a day when “I found this crazy extra in the forgotten 2013 comedy The Internship” could have been a viral tweet, but now it would get you 40 likes and appear between two GoFundMes for patriots who got caught saying the n-word. And yet here, in this magical place we’ve built, it’s my entire week.

One thing I didn’t want to do was a deep dive research project. Other than Pizza Chomper, I don’t know this background performer’s name. I don’t know what she’s been up to for the past decade, and I don’t care. Not in a mean way. I hope she’s doing great. What I’m saying is never has an artist’s art so plainly spoken for itself. She wants pizza, yes, yes, yeeees, yes, she needs pizza, and Eric Andre thinks that’s “nice!”

So best of luck to her, whatever the real Pizza Chomper is out there doing (probably cumming on pizza). There are enough details in the text itself I can focus on. Possibly even shocking ones. Like how when she was chomping at Vince Vaughn like a baby bird born with far too many clitorises, while she already had a full pizza on her lap.

Was there already a pizza on her lap before Vince Vaughn interrupted her work meeting? How did it get there? Did they cut a scene where Vince kept dropping pizza slices on her face until she assembled a whole one? Or, and this might only be occurring to me because I’ve been watching her orgasm on a loop while I type this, did she gestate it? Is this the beautiful thing that happens when a slice of pizza fucks your mouth to completion? I don’t mean for this to sound so sexual, I’m really trying to get to the bottom of it. Computer, go back eleven seconds and enhance:

It must have happened here. Tiya Sircar frees up her bird-flipping hands by dumping her last pizza on this guy. And he didn’t want a full, large pizza, because he’s holding a laptop. At work, where he’s about to give a presentation that decides the rest of his life. At the place with free pizza any time he wants, located next door to the pizza place you walked here from. You fucking morons. You unimaginable assholes. But despite a box of hot food being worse than useless to him, he gives her a sad little nod like she was a 5-year-old handing out pamphlets for her parents’ cult. But you know who could always use more pizza? Yes! Yeees!! The girl in the Cookie Monster shirt who cums when it touches her face! If I’m not mistaken, you can see her starting to reach back and grab it… there! Right there!

And there it stays on her lap, while the movie’s Billy Madison-ass plot tries to wrap itself up. “Nyurr, technically, regulation 498 subsection B states in a disco dispute, it is me who is the winner,” this piece of shit is saying, while Pizza Chomper and her pizza are back there just quivering. Again, I know how this is going to sound, but I’ve never seen a woman so desperate to fuck.

This actress was hired to be some random body in the crowd, yet she brought with her an erotic backstory as thick as the deepest pan pizza.

Hey, no, what? W-where’s the pizza? Is it… no. This is either something the The Internship script supervisor missed (impossible!), or that woman is fucking the pizza right now (impossible?). But how? Once more, I know how this is going to sound, but if I tried to get a full pizza inside me while I was wearing a white skirt, it would look like a Resident Evil boss just died on my lap.

I’m worried that… yeah, that’s the last of my thoughts about this, the extra who was super weird in the 2013 movie The Internship. Which brings me to what I love about 1900HOTDOG. In any other media, you couldn’t print this. My pitch would have been, “I think this background actress stuffed a pizza inside her, and I don’t have a point.” And I’m making it sound too smart! That’s a “no” from every editor and publisher I’ve ever met.

I guess I could have pitched it as part of a list, but what would that look like?

“Sometimes a movie or television extra brings a little something…

extra to their performance. Whether you’re taking your dick out in Russell Mulcahy’s Teen Wolf (1985) or pointing to it in Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future 3 (1990), these are all examples we found in a reddit thread already cannibalized for several dozen YouTube videos, we’re watching all media get strangled to death before our eyes!!”

So then I’d say something about how “this girl looks like Steven Seagal shattered both his knees sprinting to a buffet,” but the words would be hollow because you know I’d just be speedrunning the list to get to the only logical choice for number one: the guy in the background of Mr. Nanny who threw his goddamn dog into the ocean.

What the fucking fuck? That’s the laziest possible way to kill a dog, or teach it to swim, whatever this maniac is doing. Was there no non-dog murder footage they could have used, or is this such a normal thing in Palm Beach you can’t shoot around it? Did someone say, “Hulkster, local activists have sworn to fill the bay with animal skeletons until they get a dog park, but today is the only shooting day before SummerSlam!”

And then Hulkster said, “Dog bones and compromises; that’s Hollywood, dude.”

There’s no way it was an accident, right? I mean, the editor had to have seen it. The only reason you keep this footage of Hulk Hogan wiping bugs out of his mustache is if you see some dog slaying behind him and think, “Finally, something to liven up this goddamn miserable movie.”

I have another theory. Whether this man knew it or not, the soul of an innocent pet was the final component of a dark curse. And completing the ritual during the filming of Mr. Nanny is why every muscle actor, now and forever, must make a movie where they go undercover to babysit sassy kids.

So you get it. A list article would be that type of thing. Let’s see, what else… oh! Before I end this “XX Most Baffling Movie Extra Performances” bit, have you seen the Spider-Man 3 lady? I’ll make you a gif:

Haha look at her go. “Spider-Man! Spider-Man, ohhh!” Trying to hold her brain in while her torso wobbles. She could charge $70 on Cameo to scream your name twice and rock back and forth. But back to what I was saying about how great this place we built is: we are free to make nonsense. Back at Cracked, where Brockway and I met, traffic was sort of the only way to measure success. Financial success, anyway. Our wise editor, Jason Pargin (whose next book, There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel: A Novel of Giant Crabs, is now available for preorder), could have told me to the nearest 100,000 views how much better a list of the worst movie extras would do compared to one about this one pizza chomping background actress I’m obsessed with, chomp-chomp-chomping pizza out of Vince Vaughn’s hand.

The thing about an ad-based, traffic-dependent business model is you need so many normal people for it to work. And normies hate complicated, weird, outsider shit. For instance, let’s say I noticed there was never an official novelization of 2013’s The Internship starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson (there wasn’t), and I decided to make one, using it as a framing device for the entire article.

On any other website, the top comments on that would be “is this real book?” or “what?” And it would get 80% fewer views. That’s not a random guess. Every time I wrote a Cracked article that wasn’t a clear, understandable premise within a predictable format, I knew it was going to get one fifth the traffic. Someone could reasonably argue that each issue of Man Comics I made “cost me” two to eight hundred dollars. They’d have no soul and my foot in their shattered chest, but they wouldn’t die “wrong.”

But back to my excellent point. This monument to joy, our glorious 1900HOTDOG, has grown into a place where every dumb and hopelessly unmarketable idea can blossom into magic. We’ve had articles about Catman frying an egg and Cobra eating a tiny triangle of pizza. Merritt made an RPG out of a Canadian extreme sports alien not one single other person has heard of, and just yesterday Brockway wrote 2400 words about a puppet fight. Real quick, I’m going to make a fake ad for a line of hologram trading cards based on this nameless extra from a Vince Vaughn movie because I can.

We’ve also done other things besides self-indulgent lunacy. We’ve built an amazing team of writers and are able to pay them, without exaggeration, 15 to 20 times better than the other leading websites. We also hired Lockmaster Tom as our technical director to help outsmart the Internet’s crumbling infrastructure, and it turns out he’s a brilliant artist, so now he illustrates our podcast writeups. Speaking of, we also hired an audio engineer, Jamie Kelly, to make our podcasts, The Dogg Zzone 9000 and Bigfeets, sound professional. One of our most precious luxuries here is never having to check analytics, but if I had to guess, our shows are number one and number one across all noises 18-49! Is the instruction manual for a Pizza-Blasting The Internship Squirter 1000™ water gun anything?

No! Not really! But this is the only place where we could have found that out. And is that a Pizza Chomper pog slammer? What am I even doing? Along those lines, what if The Internship spun off into a horror franchise based around the Pizza Chomper character?

It’s okay, but like I’m allowed to say about every single idea because I’m in charge, I think this concept can support one more thing.

There we go.

Thank you again for your support and for letting us bring you Lets Get Chompin: An Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Shaquille O’Neal written for Chomper 9: Part Two: Part Ten in the The Internship’s Pizza Chomper Horror Saga.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Neku104, who is without a doubt one of the top 120 Nekus out there. Easily top 110.

Categories
REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200 is here!🌭

It’s release week for my new book, I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200. You know this. I’ve been threatening you in legally actionable ways for the last year. I will continue to threaten you in legally actionable ways for months to come. If anybody tells me “oh, I didn’t know you had a new book out” I will physically attack them with all of my might.

What you might not know – because my plugs focus entirely on blackmail and harassment – is what the book is about. I probably should have told you that, but if I was good at marketing, I wouldn’t be going to prison for not selling enough books. And I am. I am going to prison for not selling enough books. And I’m going to make it a problem for all of you, but that’s for later. I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200 is about Maksim Ivanov, a broke lowlife who can see imaginary friends because he killed his own as a child. If they discover he can see them, they immediately know why, and will attack him in a berserk frenzy no matter how whimsical or harmless they seem. It’s ruined Ivan’s life and made him unemployable, so he starts taking out Craigslist ads offering to kill imaginary friends for- you get it, we’ve arrived at the title. He said the thing.

The book is also about Kay Washington, an only child, and a latchkey kid suffering from undiagnosed mental disorders. Her imaginary friend, Eddie Video, worms his way into every aspect of her life where he begins to isolate, control, and terrorize her. Ivan is the only one equipped to help, so basically they’re both royally fucked.

I bring all this up for two reasons: First, to sell you a fucking book, dipshit. Good lord, what does it take?! Second, because parts of this setup might sound familiar. All authors write from life, and my entire life for the last five years has been 1-900-HOTDOG. Eddie Video, the temperamental rascal who slowly becomes more real as he turns on his host? Directly inspired by Buster Sales.

The 1990s Blockbuster Video training mascot I wrote about for the site way back in the early days. Buster Sales is kind of a Max Headroom character. A guy stuck in a TV screen who teaches new Blockbuster employees to keep the store clean, make recommendations, and not openly whack it when that scene in Career Opportunities comes on. What made Buster Sales cursed was entirely in the execution: As the training video went on, Buster slowly transitioned from a helper to a menace, becoming more antagonistic and more able to influence the real world as his trainee made mistakes, got in trouble, and generally fell apart. It felt like the production knew it, too. Buster’s actor played him like Joe Pesci about to stab a guy in the neck, the trainee played it like Jennifer Connelly after you tell her Career Opportunities is your favorite movie, and the director framed Buster Sales in every shot like Jason Voorhees standing outside a cabin window in a thunderstorm.

I talk a lot about how horror and comedy are different sides of the same coin, and which one you end up with depends on how you flip it. Buster Sales is exactly what I mean by that: it’s funny to watch this beleaguered training video writer botch Buster’s zany antics so badly they accidentally create a minor video store demon in the process.

But take the same idea, the exact same progression, replace the bumbling employee with a lonely child and the Blockbuster Video with predatory internet culture, now you’ve got a compelling horror hook. Just like the one Buster Sales uses if you don’t upsell snacks.

Like most kids, Kay doesn’t invent her imaginary friend out of whole cloth. Children pull imaginary friends from the world around them in an attempt to make sense of their surroundings. (Side note: My favorite real example of an imaginary friend is from writer and Dogg Zzone veteran Django Wexler’s daughter.)

In my book, the real Eddie Video is a VTuber avatar from a South African children’s slop streaming collective. Try reading that sentence to your grandpa; he’ll hold you down and put your wallet in your mouth. The collective’s Twitch channel records their streams as VODs which Kay watches later on YouTube. (Sorry, stop reading this to your grandpa, he’s getting overstimulated and he’s going to bite you.) Kay likes how the interactive parts make her feel less alone, even though she’s not allowed on Twitch to watch the stream live, and only sees empty silences on the VOD as the actors wait for prompts from an audience she’s not part of. It’s a uniquely modern way to be lonely. The “show” means the world to her, but it’s really just foreign-based VTubers capitalizing on media algorithms to deliver inexplicable, dangerous nonsense. Kay never fully understands the show or what it’s doing to her brain, but she becomes enamored with it anyway.

Of course I’m really talking about Troom Troom.

I may be the world’s leading expert on Troom Troom. I’ve done hours upon hours of research simply trying to figure out one thing: What the fuck am I looking at? I, like all of their fans, have come to no satisfying answer. I only know that it’s a Ukrainian YouTube channel aimed at English-speaking children, full of bright colors, crazy voices, broken language, and tongue-eating insanity. I wrote about their weird obsession with smuggling food and ruinous crafts, both of which show up in my book. I really tried to do it justice. But Troom Troom has its own very specific madness which maps to no human brain in history, like this video about how to decorate a house if you’re a mermaid, ladybug, or dracula.

Actual line from the video, by the way. It’s all positioned to the viewer as a challenge, so the idea is that kids follow along, turn into a mermaid, and decorate a small house to spite Dracula. Try it at home! It’s easy, simply destroy your mother’s CD collection to make the perfect mermaid roof!

Sometimes the videos are timely. One of the malfunctioning flight computers that runs Troom Troom logs trending YouTube search terms in a misguided attempt to land the long-crashed plane it once belonged to, then the computer dictates content suggestions to a dying octopus so it can flail a script onto the broken Garfield keyboard that crushed it. The plane was carrying Garfield keyboards. It’s my best theory.

Here’s another video, this time to help little girls turn themselves into the robot from Squid Game – you know, the one that dictates whether or not dozens of people get murdered with machine guns. Graphically, as they scream for mercy that will never come. That robot.

How does the Troom Troom version manage to look more disturbing than the actual horror show?

The alt text on this image could be for a Babylon Bee political cartoon: “black cloaked masked figure in front of foreign flags opens door labeled SQUID GAME for young girl who has been turned into soulless murder robot.” What kid is this for, Troom Troom? How the fuck are they supposed to do any of this at home, why do you want them to do it, what are you doing, what do you get out of this, what are you doing what are you doing what are you doing-

Sorry, I was in a Troom hole.

Obviously Troom Troom had to capitalize on K-Pop Demon Hunters, just saying the title is a Snow Crash brain hack that makes parents of little girls throw money at televisions. I only watched half of it, somebody tell me if you remember the scene where meth cookie monster harasses a French housepainter with a poster of a hot cop.

Did the K-Pop boy band demon ever wind up partnering with the bird detective to make fun of Rumi’s crotch? I feel like that was foreshadowed some, but I wasn’t sure they’d ever get to it.

Troom Troom is the perfect example of something that is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying to me. When you try to comprehend it, it slips out of your brain with a homemade lubricant called Zoey K-Pop’s Ramyeon Bubblegum Fart Oil Specifically for Mind Wrestling. The true horror comes when you see the viewcount, usually in the tens of millions, and you’re forced to reflect on a future where we let all of our children’s brains be shaped by this.

I guess I’m not one to talk. 1-900-HOTDOG is its own kind of brain poison. Show one of Dennard’s articles to the average CBS viewer and they’ll have you thrown in a hotel room to be deconditioned by private detectives. And I’ve been marinating in this hot dog water for five years. That’s why my new book – which I want to reiterate has received prestigious reviews and been called a challenging meditation on how trauma and neglect shapes children into adulthood – stars the Hot Dog Crew. Your Hot Dog crew. As adorable children. Adorable children that nothing bad will happen to, certainly. They’re not minor cameos, little winks for those in the know. Without getting into spoilers, the writers of this site play a major role in my book.

Here’s Seanbaby as a little boy dreaming up a Flash Gordon-style serial where he knows devastating space karate.

Jason Pargin is an overly serious child who chooses the company of obnoxious flitting birds. It’s a metaphor for our work Slack.

Lydia Bugg is our youngest, most upbeat wiener, so she plays the role of a precocious girl lost in a children’s book she wrote herself.


Dennard Dayle with his skateboard and abs is Hot Dog’s resident cool kid, so in the book he’s an aspiring musician with an imaginary friend who’s equal parts rock star and older brother.

Merritt K knows absolutely everything about Saturday Morning Cartoons, even the ones that don’t completely kick ass.

Alex Schmidt is a brilliant kid obsessed with science, his pet rat Proton, and Beakman’s World. The only thing he wants is to find a way to combine them all.

And of course I put myself in the book. Not as a character, the whole book is kind of me. It’s about growing up the latchkey only child of a single, working parent. About raising yourself on unsupervized media, internalizing loneliness way too early, and struggling for the rest of your life to connect with other human beings in a way that seems so easy for everyone else, but you can never quite get a hold on. I wanted to connect my experiences with kids today still facing essentially the same problems, but now with countless corporations, content creators, and expertly designed algorithms all competing to milk their isolation for engagement. At its heart, I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200 is about growing up with mental illness, letting go of childhood trauma, the inherent injustice of the modern class system, and punching a racist ostrich puppet right in the fucking beak until he dies from it. And 1-900-HOTDOG is an intrinsic part of it all. I wrote it for you, and because of you.

Please buy it, read it, leave it a review wherever you do that, and tell your friends. It truly does mean a lot to me, but I’m uncomfortable with earnestness for reasons well covered by my book, so I will be returning to blackmail and harassment. Buy it or I’ll kill your cat.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Sam Koepnick, who bought seven copies of the book and it still wasn’t enough. Way to go Sam, why didn’t you buy eight?

Categories
REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: Jamie’s Hot Dog Birthday Drinking🌭

My name is Jamie Kelly. You probably know me better as THE DOGG ZZONE 9000’s Jamie “Cut That” Kelly. I’ve officially turned ambiguously old… and I’m on a mission. The perfect drunken night. And because I’m such an awesome friend, I’ll be putting the tenuous weight of responsibility of a perfect night’s libations squarely on the shoulders of my friends. A few days before my birthday, I put a feeler out on the 1900HOTDOG Slack, and slowly but surely I compiled a list of birthday cheer. Cheer is alcohol. You knew that. But where does one drink under such specialized circumstances? No question, a horror themed tiki punk rock bar on the bad side of town in North Las Vegas! Let’s raise the odds of danger, that way if’n I die, my friends will feel especially awesome knowing that they, in no small part, helped to contribute to my sad, frustrating end! To help my chances of survival. I tugged on the shoulder of a local friend and long time producer of countless indignities featuring yours truly, my good buddy, Penny Petals. Before we could head out, it was imperative that we observed the time honored tradition of the professionally broke, the dirtiest of bags, scummiest of fucks… The Pregame.

What follows is a ranking of 1900HOTDOG’s most solemnly suggested birthday libations, as well as my thoughts about how these drinks reflect on those who suggested them to me.

The time is 7pm, (as far as I know.) 1900HOTDOG’S amazing tech support, layout wrangler, store post author, and incredible podcast roundup artist, Thomas Lockmaster, (actual full legal name) suggested our first drink of the night. Thomas is obviously not punk rock and has missed the assignment completely. Raspberry Lemonade. RASPBERRY LEMONADE. Oh hey, Thomas… the phone, it’s for you… guy on the line says it’s AMATEUR HOUR and you were the first on his emergency contact list.

Ok. Let’s be fair. Thomas is a gentle soul. An actual real life adult perhaps. Maybe, just maybe he does get the assignment and wants absolutely nothing to do with it. OR, maybe he meta gets the assignment and, being the first suggestion, is watching out for my safety by starting me off with delicious birthday hydration. Good man. I think I might marry Thomas. Lucky guy.

What’s this!? Our first real entry, (stop crying, Lockmaster, this is no way to start our courtship) we’re easing our way into a night of what no doubt will be total slaughter and unfathomable debauchery… I’d expect nothing less from everyone’s favorite punch hunk supreme and fluffy family man, Seanbaby! Sean is an experienced party demon from way back and knows the rules in legally binding order. Beer. Caffeine/alcohol shot. Sippin’ drink. A three part act I call “Seanbaby’s Orgy.” But I don’t play by ANY ORGY’S rules, so I’m splitting this up. Two for the pregame and a third for the bar. It’s called edging. Look into it.

I’m gonna be honest, I don’t dig on the energy drinks. I stopped playing videogames in 1995. Never developed a taste for the stuff, BUT at the risk of being fired, I’m going to go ahead and choke down god’s very own horse piss/liquified PEZ recipe. The vodka takes the edge off, things are going to be ok.

NOW we’re talking. Robert Brockway comes in clutch as the very backbone of 1900HOTDOG with a drink that’s all spine. Simple. Effective. No jokes. Just like Brockway. A drink after my own heart. It’s perfectly brunette, it’s room temperature, it will potentially make you call your ex in large enough quantities. Just like Brockway.

I’m feeling it. I’m not sloshed, but I’m feeling it. Where’s Thomas? He should be here for this… everything’s so happy… it’s like raspberry lemonade, just like… fun, you know? I love you Thomas. I’mma tell my mom about you. Where’s my phone?

What happens when one of the hottest girls on social media suggests a drink? I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t giving recommendations. Merritt K, lovely as she is, gave me a choice: Dirty martini OR sazerac. I ordered the sazerac… and my bartender said if I’m gonna drop Star Wars slurs, I could get the fuck out. If you want to get a butch lesbian to make soft eyes at you, try ordering a sazerac at a Las Vegas dive bar, and then softly whispering “dirty martini” when she shuts you down. The dirty martini was strong. Merritt K strong. She’s getting into combat sports and firearms, and that’s exactly what her drink tastes like. I had to spend some time with it. Bonus, it came with vegetables! Look at me, I’m getting in shape!

I’m tagging back into Seanbaby’s Orgy and flying in with a Shooting Star Press, just like I do at every orgy. This time I’m landing elbow deep into a big ol’ mug of moscow mule, instead of a Jeep salesman named Brad. Fittingly, this is Sean’s finishing move and I was knocked flat… but not down for the count! I’m distracted by the band, and I don’t even realize there’s a boss battle on the horizon…

I’m a bit embarrassed listing out all these ingredients to a bartender who already thinks I’m a space racist. Luckily I’m blitzed and talking to an ashtray. By some birthday miracle I am handed my drink. Fancy! I don’t have more than a passing acquaintance with Alex Schmidt, (an absolute hero of mine from way back in the Cracked days) so to be able to imbibe this classy amalgamation of spirits-

Scotch. The bitch gave me scotch. Now I’m stuck drinking Europe’s Pinesol.

Anyway, I’m calling this drink “Schmidty The Clam.” It’s scotch.

I’m tagging Penny in… she’s gonna take a few sips of my Pinesol and point me to the cigarettes. This part’s real: Having overheard a private conversation, I used my 30 years experience as a working musician to talk a band of young’uns out of taking a non paying, no soundman gig right in front of the creepy venue owner who was obviously perving on a fresh batch of disaffected youth. Am I the greatest American hero? No, that’s William Katt. But he’s probably dead, so yes.

Finally, the night is winding down. Alex’s bog tea took some time to wrassle, but I put her down. Shooting Star Press, works every time. Now I find myself looking forward to the recommendation of a trusted friend, my other podcast boss, David Bell. I’m to order something called a Dark & Stormy. Sounds ominous. Something a lighthouse keeper would slug back while watching the clouds roll in. It’s- OH! Would you look at that! Is that rum? Ginger beer? THIS is a queer drink! Finally somebody gets the mission. Thank you, David Bell, for suggesting this: the queerest possible drink to end a night. Where’s Thomas Lockmaster? Baby, you are retroactively buying me this Dark & Stormy.

Brockway said I should eat some chickens… but he said it like, dinosaurs. Like chicken in a dinosaur way. Words are whatever, man. Words are just burps you tune with your lips. Did I order the chicken yet? Yes. YES! My spicy dinosaurs are on the way. Doordash guy… you look like a Thomas. You got a Thomas face. I think I’m gonna have the shits tomorrow. I love you. Happy birthday to you. NO. No, to me. Happy birthday to ME. Did you guys see this motherfucker just try to steal my birthday?

This column is dedicated to the memory of William Katt, who is still alive.

*Special thanks to everyone at 1900HOTDOG as well as all the fans for being so gracious <3

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Dean Costello, who agrees with Thomas that a raspberry lemonade is delicious, and a smart way to start the evening! Stay hydrated out there.

Categories
REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: Dominick Giacobbe The Mind Master

To view this content, you must be a member of 1900HOTDOG's Patreon
Unlock with Patreon
Already a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to access this content.
Categories
REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: Hot Dog Shakeup 🌭

Five years ago, we started 1-900-HOTDOG with a simple mission: Make enough money to buy a private island, Ron Perlman, and 30 feral baboons for an interactive remake of Primal Force. We’re not there yet, but we have come a long way. If we wanted to, right now, we could get a budget hotel room, Jake Busey, and 2 orangutans who used to smoke cigarettes in an Arizona dive bar. And that’s pretty close. And that’s because of you.

That was and remains our main priority, and it would be a betrayal of your trust to change that goal now. But there was a second, far less important goal: To build a space where the world’s best comedy writers could be paid very well to manufacture joy while insane robots ate the internet. Hot Dogs, I’m proud to say we did that. The writer thing. Not the robot thing. From the beginning we set our writer’s rates high, and with every other milestone we’ve hit, we’ve given them all raises. We just hit one of those milestones again, so it’s time to give everyone raises!

There’s one problem, and it rhymes with us being bad businessmen, and worse rappers. See, we set this ambitious goal of paying human beings what they’re worth way back when we only had a few humans writing for us once a month. 1-900-HOTDOG started with just Seanbaby and I, and the plan was to each write two 500 word articles doing some surface level riffing on weird media every week. Within days, we found ourselves writing 3,000 word deep dives into cursed artifacts that each required dozens of hours of research. We needed more time, and no matter how fast we ran counter to the spin of the Earth, we couldn’t seem to get more than a few seconds. So we brought those sporadic guest writers on to regular gigs, we paid them well, we gave them raises, we high fived. Job done, back to the Hot Dog archives, pictured below.

Over the years, you’ve helped us fill out our ranks with better writers than we ever dreamed, and that’s thanks in no small part to the total destruction of art as a career in this long slow apocalypse built on coprophiliac algorithms. And in large part to you, and your continued support. We started here:

Just two pixelated boys with moxie and a dream- oh, but we’ve already talked about Primal Force: The Resort.

We arrived here:

Now for that problem I mentioned: We never factored for success. Giving milestone pay raises to one or two guest writers was no problem. Doing it for eight regular writers plus two employees meant us taking paycuts. So we did that! We cut our own pay, we high fived again, and ran off giggling to dive into Scrooge McDuck vaults full of tidbits books. Somehow, despite not addressing it in any way, the problem persisted. We took paycut after paycut until we found ourselves here, not making enough to keep the orangutans in smokes.

That leaves us with two options: We could act like capitalists, cut our writer’s pay, overwork them, fire them, outsource their job to an AI that teaches children how to build bombs when they ask for Play-Doh recipes, then dress ourselves head to toe in money suits. It doesn’t seem to be working great for the world right now. Or we could simply raise prices for the first time since 1-900-HOTDOG began back in 2020, before COVID and runaway inflation. You know, like every single other business did five years ago, and then several more times after that.

Since our start in 2020, the site has changed dramatically. Instead of four, 500-word blurbs a week by just us two lunatics, we have a small fleet of lunatics delivering in-depth essays five days a week. We do bonus team up articles every month, we’ve launched two ad-free podcasts, and created a thriving community of amateur garbage archaeologists. We’ve slowly and quietly added immense value to the site while basically forgetting that money is required to live. They say the best motto in business is “underpromise and overdeliver.” The Hot Dog motto is “forget to promise, vastly overdeliver until you’re in trouble.”

So we’re raising prices, and that’s the bad news. The good news is we’re crippled by guilt over practicing even the most basic capitalism, so we’re also giving everyone more for their money. Here’s what the tiers look like now:

Our entry level tier was $3 a month, and increases to $5 a month. This tier originally got you four short articles a week from the two of us, but now gets you five longform essays from a diverse cast of lunatics. And as of this afternoon, it will also get you access to our community Discord, a thriving place with new events that pertain to your interests (wallowing in insane garbage) nearly every day.

The $5 tier, which originally got you access to one additional article a month, still gets you the bonus teamworking days, but you might have noticed those already expanding to incorporate new and dangerous tagteams like Merrittbaby, Schmitdybugg, and Sissynard. Over time, this tier would also get access to hundreds of bonus episodes from our free podcast, The Dogg Zzone 9000. As of this afternoon, it will now get you into the biweekly Discord Meat Parties, where Seanbaby and I make jokes about bizarre videos with you guys, or just stare in mute shock at what we’ve unleashed, like that movie where big baby Mickey Rooney developed a milk fetish.



That’s the end of the price increases, but not the bonuses! The $10 tier isn’t going up, but now you get access to our revamped Behind the Scenes Discord channel. Every single article will feature cut material, bonus facts, and extra research we loved but couldn’t use for whatever reason. As ever, it still holds the behind scenes banter from our weekly podcast, and anytime we’re really impressed with ourselves in the company Slack.

The $20 tier also sees no price change, and still gets you access to Untubed Sausage, the VIP chatroom full of its own cursed artifacts. It’s just like the British Empire proved: you can have too many artifacts, but never enough curses! In the coming weeks, this tier will also get an exclusive at-cost store, the PoxCo Vaults. All of our retired designs, our limited run shirts, our milestone celebration art – it all lives here forever, for you, at the cheapest price we can list. We make no money off of these sales, and therefore take no liability for what happens to you when you wear these things in public. This store will also update monthly with new designs too insider, too weird, or too vile for mass market appeal. Just like you!

Here’s some of the shirts you’ll find there at launch:

Finally, you can own a shirt celebrating the time a reality show murderer wore a red flag that should’ve saved a life, if anyone had listened. And you can proudly say you supported the fundraising campaign to buy aging pickup artist Don Diebel’s grave!

You’ll also find all the limited-run designs formerly available to Hot Dog Appreciators.

Yes, that’s including both versions of the Punches shirt! Finally, there can be peace between the tribes.

You’ll also get all our milestone celebration designs, including two new ones never before available in shirt form:

Celebrate the many crimes of Mascot and Puppet Week!

WARNING: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE SECRETS OF PUPPET WEEK TO CURIOUS SHIRT-GAZERS.

And of course, our latest milestone must be celebrated as well. We’re going to party the only way we know how – shirtless, with lots of hunks. The upcoming Hunk Week (3/3/25) art will also be available in the at-cost store for a frankly ridiculous bun-to-dollar ratio.

Finally, this tier will get a new Discord channel for merch requests – if we have a design that you want on a different cut, a different color, or even a different item entirely (so long as the store will legally let us sell it, no, just for example, Hot Dog branded feral baboons), let us know and we’ll do our best to accommodate it.

The $50 tier also doesn’t see an increase – you people already qualify for a conservatorship just for doing this. You’ll still get a custom title to live forever on the About page, you’ll sponsor our articles with hand-joked dedications every day of the week, you’ll get cute roll calls from our cutest Hot Dogger at the end of every Dogg Zzone, and you’ll be thanked at the end of both The Dogg Zzone and Bigfeets video podcasts. As of this afternoon, you will also have an exclusive Discord channel to suggest topics for and vote on our next Teamworking Day – that’s right, you decide the direction of the site. That basically makes you our bosses, complete with all the resentment that brings.

We know times are tough, and they will only get tougher until we learn to appreciate the taste of roasted billionaire. So if you can’t stay with us after this, we understand. If you’re part of the Discord already and don’t want to lose access, shoot us a message and we’ll keep you in there – we don’t want to take away anyone’s community right now. And remember, you can use the free tag to see our new free articles every single week, plus our substantial free archives.

Browsing from the free tag will never bug you with pop-ups about pledging, or show you what you’re missing. You can just pretend we became a free weekly comedy site turning out carefully researched long form essays from some of the best writers around, which would still put us way above our remaining competition of AI pun sites and Twitter recaps.

For those of you sticking around, thank you so much, we couldn’t have done any of this without you, we definitely shouldn’t have but you made us, it’s your fault, we accept no responsibility, somebody tell Jake Busey that one of the orangutan’s safe word is BANANAS and the other does a trick where it tears a human face off every time you say BANANAS.

See you in Hunk Week!

Categories
REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: Brockrollers the Home Brockway Game🌭

When I started 1900HOTDOG with Brockway in 2020, there was an implied deal– we would never be apart again. And for many years that was true– we shared ninja movies, fake Gerard Butlers, and the Bitch of Bingh Kan. Like brothers. I told him I could handle things when he said he had to take a few months off, but that wasn’t true. My life is a mess without him, just like yours. But what if I told you there was an exciting home game that could simulate a Brockway any time you needed one!? Introducing Brockrollers®! The Exciting Game of Roll When Brockway’s Not There!™!

Like all of my games, the rules are simple. First, roll two Blue Brockway Cubes™ to get ideas or things Brockway might enjoy. These cubes were made by combining things Brockway says all the time in our work Slack with the top pornographic keyword searches in Utah. It’s like how they give one guy on the firing squad a fake bullet, only with light butt stuff– the exact kind of wildcard move Brockway would have liked.

Once rolled, place your two cubes in DICE ZONE ONE and DICE ZONE TWO on your official Brockrollers® Gameplay Cube Board™. Next, roll one Red Brockway Wildcard Cube™ and put it on the MODIFIER ZONE because a second wildcard element is the kind of wildcard move Brockway would have liked.

Start the 30 minute timer on your Brockway Action Hourglass™ and stare at your three Brockway Cubes™. What do they mean together? How would a madman express them? After your 30 minutes are up, manifest your cubes with an animated gif in the Brockrollers® Winning Gif Gameplay Gif Board™. If you’re right, you win 10 points! First winner to win 150 points without using pornography wins! I’m playing right now if you want to join me!

OVEN ROASTED TURKEY? Something must have gone wrong during manufacturing because that’s zany, but not funny zany. Brockway is going to be so mad if I accidentally designed Cards Against Humanity with his face on it. I’ll roll my second him cube, and if this one sucks we’ll bail on the entire premise.

Oh hell yes. According to the rules, YUM YUM HUNKS! is a Brockway Jackpot™, so I roll 3 more cubes.

Oh no, I might have overtuned the eroticism of this board game. So far I have six guys fucking a turkey, and that’s just A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. Maybe my Red Brockway Wildcard Cube™ can rescue it?

SECRET GUN!? Okay, so I blew it. I made an impossible game. Adding a secret gun to fully nude Latino hunks penetrating a turkey would be easy in Pictionary, but I’m not going to be able to find a gif of that. I give up. I’m going to quit and watch the 1985 film Light Blast by Enzo Castellari. You know him, he directed the Italian TV series, Detective Extralarge. Anyway, sorry! Enjoy this promotional photo from Detective Extralarge while I watch Light Blast.

Guys. You’re not going to fucking believe this…

I found an OVEN ROASTED TURKEY, YUM YUM HUNKS, LATINO HUNKS!, FULLY NUDE HUNKS, FULL PENETRATION, SECRET GUN gif! Certified hunk, Erik Estrada, is in this movie, wearing no clothes and hiding a secret gun in his turkey. Do you know what this means!? It means my game works! I won 10 Brockrollers® Points, and you win this gif! Let’s keep playing.

Okay, I rolled BOXCAR FUCKING and LASER MELT with the wildcard modifier of LASER MELT!. I’m sure it’s identical to the contents of Brockway’s mind most of the day, so in that way it works, but I might have to concede that a gif of this could never exist.

Wait, I just remembered earlier in the 1985 film, Light Blast, a young couple snuck away for some hobo sex in the wrong trainyard– a laser melt trainyard.

If Brockway was here, he’d probably say “this is just a normal way to fuck.” But he’s not, and he’s wrong, so I win ten more points! By the way, Light Blast is a pretty good movie. It’s about a madman holding San Francisco hostage with a death beam that turns LCD billboards into laser bombs. The guy who directed Detective Extralarge made it! It’s my turn again.

I rolled LATINO HUNKS!, SHOT GUN TO THE DICK, and KICK TO THE DICK, which is what’s known as a Brockway Handshake. This is exactly what I wanted from the game – it’s indistinguishable from a work message from Brockway. It really feels like he’s here with us. As for how I’m going to communicate this idea in gif form, I have good news for you, Brockway: the 1985 film Light Blast.

What a glorious way to die, dick-first at the shotgun and foot of an almost nude Erik Estrada. This is what all terminal patients used to wish for before meeting John Cena was an option. Speaking of tens and winners, I win 10 points. My turn again:

LATINO HUNKS!, no problem. SEX VAN, perfect. And my wildcard is… MEDIA CRITICISM? What? That sucks. How am I supposed to express that in a gif? What kind of an asshole would even try? I mean, maybe if I looked everywhere… scoured every corner of human history… let’s see, Latino hunks, sex van, media criticism… Latino hunks, sex van…

I’ve got it! The 1985 film, Light Blast!

That makes it my turn!

Oh, hell yeah. Sexy is back in this Exciting Game of Roll When Brockway’s Not There!™! This was an easy gif to find since all these words are already best friends, but none of them are legal to play in Brockrollers® or civilized society– two very different things, but sharing the same values when it comes to helping stepmothers trapped in washing machines. We’re here to honor you, stepmothers. And to curse you, because if I’m not allowed to use your free, uncensored, amateur action, where am I going to find a HUNK SURPRISE TITTY BLAST featuring MATURE MILFS?

The 1985 film, Light Blast.

It’s my turn again, and my cubes say I need to find a gif describing SUICIDE BY COP and EXPLOSION, but it needs to be NEEDLESS! POINTLESS!. I’m starting to realize this game would be unthinkably dark and lewd in anyone else’s hands– a perfect way to describe Brockway as a writer. Which makes me, once again, the world’s greatest game designer.

In the 1985 film, Light Blast, this cop gently drove away from a pursuit and into a wall of explosive barrels to kill himself on a pile of exploding cars. I have no fucking idea why, but that was the assignment. Ten points for me.

Finding SEXY NURSE DICK ATTACK should be no problem. In fact, Microsoft Bing somehow already knew that’s what I was searching for when I typed “S.” But if there’s one thing I know about dick attacks, and I speak Dick Attack in 14 languages, it’s that you can’t do them forever. ENDLESS is a tough wildcard cube. My winning streak may be over.

Wait! I found it! In an obscure 1985 film, Light Blast, a nurse gets into a kick fight with Erik Estrada’s dick and she wins, and wins, and wins. Just like me. Ten points. My turn again:

I rolled the NEEDLESS! POINTLESS! wildcard again, which is great. It’s the first editorial mandate Brockway and I wrote together. But it does not work well with DEFENESTRATION, one of the most purposeful kinds of attacks which pulls from an entirely different talent tree than EXPLOSION. This round is chaos. I don’t know how I’m going to do this.

In an incredible stroke of luck, I found a 1985 film called Light Blast where a man flies out a window just in time to explode on a car. I can’t tell you why. Two characters never seen before or again watch him do it, and neither of them could tell you what’s going on. One of them might not even know he’s in a movie. And speaking of a flawless combination of stupid and rad, I’m a winner again..

Okay, DICK ATTACK, LATINO HUNKS!… seems easy enough. That’s what Brockway gets me for my birthday and writes on my birthday cards, respectively. But CORPSE THROWING is a nightmare of a wildcard. I cause enough problems in night clubs to know that in Latin Hunk culture, it’s extremely rude to attack someone’s dick after they’ve died. I’m never going to be able to find this one…

… except in the 1985 film Light Blast where Erik Estrada dropkicks a guy in the nuts with a dead body’s legs. “Don’t worry, everybody gets cold feet… IN YOUR DICK!” he didn’t say. It never occurred to him to say, “Rest in balls, my friend,” either. He maybe should have said, “Order up! One cadaver to the penis!” but didn’t. If Brockway was here, he’d get things back on track by having Erik Estrada say, “Toe tag… to the ball bag,” and light a cigarette. And then I would go, “Hey everyone, get in here! This guy’s putting his dong on the dead bodies!” and the bit would die because there’s nowhere to go from there. The real point I’m getting to is my 10 points, which I won the moment this cadaver hit that hunk in the cock.

I’ll tell you the same thing I tell every casino pit boss: I can’t help it if I keep rolling LATINO HUNKS!. And when you add TITTY BLAST and ROWBOAT FIRE, I am one COREY FELDMAN away from my dream music festival. But I can’t make a gif from this ridiculous set of words. Not in a thousand years.

No, wait! In the 1985 film, Light Blast, this guy gets shot right in the titty while Erik Estrada hates a rowboat fire. This movie rules. Just like the zipline business Brockway and I started, at least 40% of it is hunks watching people die.

LATINO HUNKS! and SEXY NURSE with a PUNCH modifier. I don’t know about this one. I might pass. Because like I told Corey Feldman before I punched him, I don’t believe in punching hunks.

I don’t believe in punching nurses either, but in the 1985 film, Light Blast, Erik Estrada grabs one and puts his fist into her brain. He’s probably not thought of as a great actor, but look at this performance. In the time it takes to load up a hockey punch he shows us anger, reluctance, acceptance, regret… this hunk really didn’t want to have to do this! Same here, but ten points is ten points, Erik Estrada!

DUNE BUGGY DUNE BUGGY MANIAC is the character Brockway becomes when he mixes his medication. It’s also his catchphrase and police report. I was hoping to use a second gif from the 1985 film Light Blast, but Light Blast is a morguefighting police procedural about San Francisco lasers. There’s not going to be dune buggies in it.

In the 1985 film Light Blast, Erik Estrada steals a dune buggy and immediately goes dune buggy crazy, power drifting it down the wrong side of the freeway. And if you’re wondering how much it costs for a film crew to shut down a busy Bay Area highway so Erik Estrada can dune buggy into traffic, the answer may shock you– probably nothing! From the way Light Blast was shot, lit, and budgeted, I think a lot of it was made without shooting permits. There’s a good chance these other drivers aren’t “performing.” There’s also a good chance no one told Erik Estrada.

TITTY BLAST, SEXY NURSE, WEIRD FOOT STUFF… we don’t have an HR department here at 1900HOTDOG, so this looks like three ordinary fields Brockway would enter in our scheduling calendar. I miss saying things to him like, “We are WEIRD FOOT STUFF heavy this week, so let’s move Swaim’s column to the 11th. And I’ll save this VHS about pudding stomping for December.” I’m stalling because I don’t have any gifs for this I can show you. I may have finally lost a round of Brockrollers®.

Hold everything, I just found a 1985 film called Light Blast where Erik Estrada uses a foot as a bullet shield then shoots a nurse’s titty off. In any circumstances that’s a victory, and Brockrollers® is no exception.

“DUNE BUGGY DUNE BUGGY UNEXPLAINED,” is the name of the Unsolved Mystery episode they didn’t know was about Brockway. But this is a tough one. UNEXPLAINED does not belong with the word DUNE BUGGY or the word DUNE BUGGY. No one will ever ask for or require a dune buggy explanation. If you saw me jump a dune buggy into a volcano and asked, “Why’d he do that?” I would climb out of the lava and slap you. Because it was cooler than not doing it, dumbass! Do your dune buggy research.

Anyway, this is inconceivable. I’ll never find a gif for this. I guess I’ll add up my points and see h–

Wait, don’t stop the game! I found one. In the 1985 film Light Blast, two identical cars collide in a San Francisco intersection, but that’s not the unexplained part. Erik Estrada’s dune buggy is heading directly for the wreck, and with only plenty of time to drive around, his dune buggy instincts kick in. “Tell physics to fuck off; I’m going to jump these fucking cars,” he told the universe. “Fuck yeah, you are,” the universe said. “And if any beings are using this moment in a game of Brockrollers®, they just earned ten points.”

Guys, this win means I’ve won 140 points. I only need one more win to win!

It all comes down to this. All I have to do to roll a perfect game of Brockrollers® is find a gif combining LASER MELT! with LATINO HUNKS! and PERFECT ENDING. I believe in me! This is for you, Brockway!

In the 1985 film Light Blast, Erik Estrada jumps a dune buggy onto a barge to stop a lunatic from laser-exploding San Francisco with his death ray. It wasn’t what he was trying to do, at all, but he jumps onto the barge so hard the laser gets knocked loose and melts its inventor. Erik Estrada peeks through the hatch and does what he’s been doing the whole movie– he watches a man die. Then, with theatrical timing honed by a thousand CHiPs freeze frames, he just kind of leaves. Roll credits.

It’s the perfect ending to a perfect movie and the perfect gif for a perfect round of the perfect board game. You’re welcome, Brockway. I miss you.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Moexu, and that means 10 more points for Seanbaby.