Category: REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: 1900🌭 Should Not Exist 🌭

Post author By Robert Brockway
Post date 03/02/2023
17 Comments on Reflecting Day: 1900🌭 Should Not Exist 🌭

Year 4 of 1900🌭 has begun. Can you believe it? We’re no longer plucky young comedy rookies hoping to make an impression on the chief, but seasoned veterans of the Hilarity Wars nursing whiskeys to block out the memories. This is an establishment now. An institution. One more year and we can start growing fat and corrupt, earning our inevitable comeuppance!

This place could exist nowhere else, and in no other way. Look at this ragtag crew of rough ridin’ motherfuckers.

In year 3 of Hot Dog, Seanbaby wrote an article entirely about his friend’s weird puzzle collection. Imagine pitching a comedy article about going into the basement of a friend’s house and making fun of the pictures on old puzzle boxes. Absolutely nowhere else on the internet would allow him to do this. There’s a contingency in place to blackball you if you even try.

In year 3 of Hot Dog, Lydia Bugg wrote a followup piece on the man driven completely insane by Garfield-themed food. I know it only ran a couple days ago, but it’s fucking crazy! We not only accepted an article about a dude who invented an off-brand Garfield fursona to wage war on Garfield, but a followup about that story like we’re reporting on a town poisoning. The people need to know!

In year 3 of Hot Dog, I brought you Billy Karate. Let’s break down what a bad idea that was: I asked an audience of non-filmmakers to read a screenplay, a format never meant for public consumption, and I asked that they do it for fun, which nobody – including and especially filmmakers – will do, and then I gave it to them five pages at a time over a period of months. Pitch that idea to any other publication and they’ll take your Writing Badge and Normal Gun. But here everybody loved it, it landed me representation. I had to pull it because it may be a movie someday. Impossible, laughable!

In year 3 of Hot Dog, Seanbaby and I teamed up for our first and only piece of SEO friendly, timely content. We wrote about Elden Ring while it was still hot! We dedicated the entire article to making up shit about Elden Ring that sounded like it might be true, but wasn’t. We are full-throatedly spitting in the face of success.

In year 3 of Hot Dog, Tom Reimann discovered his passions, which were the year 1997, and weirdly horny Mormon Doom novelizations. Go sell either of those things to our surviving competitors, all none of them. See if they accept “1997: The article. No? Okay, how about this: a long-forgotten video game tie-in book by a closet Mormon about desperately wanting to fuck, but not fucking – never fucking!”

In year 3 of Hot Dog, Brendan McGinley realized he couldn’t make fun of wrestler Kevin Nash’s comic book hard enough without actually making a Nash comic of his own. That’s an insane amount of effort to land a few excellent punchlines, and nobody else would ever authorize it. You’d have to explain the idea to lawyers who would hilariously insist you couldn’t violate the Nash IP like that, as though it wouldn’t be twice as funny to be sued by Kevin Nash for this!

In year 3 of Hot Dog, Alex Schmidt discovered that all he wants to write about is Pierce Brosnan movies. You’re hired, we love it, said nobody except us.

In year 3 of Hot Dog, Sissyneck wrote a piece about visiting the museum of Frank Frazetta, the godfather of van art, and it wound up being a touching exploration of family businesses and failing legacies. Lots of places would accept that article. “And then it’s written borderline illegibly, as though transcribed from the ramblings of an exploding tire injury victim recovering in the back room of a Jiffy Lube” is less likely to be accepted.

In year 3 of Hot Dog, we added Dennard Dayle to the tubed meat crew, and many respectable publications are proud to host his brilliant, intelligent, viciously funny work. Would they accept his multi-thousand word essay on the 1970s pulp novel about black staff waging war on a country club? That was his first piece for us. “It’s perfect!” We told him. “Never leave us!”

In year 3 of Hot Dog, Jason Pargin, respected and critically acclaimed author, wrote us a substantial column about how you can track exactly when people jack it to YouTube videos.

In year 3 of Hot Dog, we did Anime Week! We don’t talk about Anime Week. We certainly don’t link to it.

In year 3 of Hot Dog, we podcasted for the first time about Mountain Monsters, the reality series about hillbillies fighting bigfeet. Other podcasts wouldn’t even mention that. We dedicated a whole podcast to a single episode, and then did it again. We’ll keep doing it, there’s no accountability! We got Ty Franck, co-creator of The Expanse – one of the biggest original science fiction properties in the world – on our show. So what did we talk to him about? The Grabowski Shuffle, Mike Ditka’s bizarre direct-to-video attempt to ape the Superbowl Shuffle. We got Josh Barnett, former UFC champion, on the podcast: We talked to him about Lone Tiger, an underground martial arts movie about how all wrestlers must murder a hobo to become a pro. We sang the weirdly romantic theme song to him. He loved it.

In year 3 of Hot Dog, our store hosted AI generated comedy shirts whose entire point was how bizarre and incomprehensible they were, and then we gave all the profits to charity. Fuck you, profit! We added a site mascot that we deliberately did nothing with. We didn’t even name him! This was always the plan, because we thought it would be funny. You literally cannot force us into a viable business model.

You guys got in on it, too: In year 3 of Hot Dog, you motherfuckers ruined Paul Dano’s entire life. We actively encouraged our fanbase to harass a beloved celebrity! To this day, if you search “Sensei Rainbow” on Twitter you’ll find Paul Dano fans responding with bewilderment and betrayal. No corporate lawyers ok’d this – in fact, if you tell a lawyer we did this, we’ll fucking find you. That’s a 1900🌭 Guaranteed Actionable Threat!

What a journey it’s been. And it’s not over, no matter what the haters say – if we had them, which we don’t, because we’re so beloved. The beauty of 1900🌭 is that it’s a place for comedy writers to shine, not beholden to traffic, to metrics, to ad dollars – we are only beholden to you wonderful freaks and I think I’ve just proven you’ll let us get away with anything. We can talk about whatever the fuck we want. For example, I’m going to pause in this recap of the third year of our amazing independent comedy site to write about why I can’t write about Coleman Moore.

Before you do anything else, watch this video for Coleman’s pop ballad, “Origami.”

We’ve trained you to think source material is optional in our articles, it’s not here. You have to watch that whole video to understand anything that’s going to follow.

Okay, you saw that, right? I’m serious. Don’t continue until you do.

What you saw was an insufferable hipster sucked into a cult recruiter’s Myst clone.

He dances like this.

And I don’t think you’re supposed to laugh at it.

The video is full of self-indulgent, pretentious tropes like Coleman singing woundedly straight to camera with a third eye painted on his face.

An old man replaces him to sing the next line, because that’s like saying something, anything, about youth. Or maybe time. Elder abuse? Whichever gets you the most handjobs in the green room.

The lyrics are terrible, but they’re not over the top bad. You see what he’s getting at. It’s almost an elegant way to say “you undo me” – but just clumsy enough to be hilarious.

So here’s the catch. You decide, right now: Is this a joke?

Is this a very well executed parody, or is this a genuine effort by a parody of a human being? You commit to your decision this second. Joke or real?

I thought it was sincere, and that it was extremely funny in its oblivious earnestness. This is the realest art Coleman Moore could make, and he’d literally never understand the words out of your mouth if you did anything less than praise it.

The comments prove my point.

Or wait, holy shit is that comment a parody? What’s with the fake-out at the end? Why would you fake-out a compliment in a comment? Is he false flag attacking his own video? I am losing my grip on reality and it was never firm.

All right, now that you have your decisions recorded, watch Coleman Moore’s video for “Precum.”

Right from the title it’s a joke. It’s somehow the same vibe, but executed to a degree that has to be parody. Here’s a shot from that as he makes goofy precumming faces while he sings the chorus.

Here’s that chorus:

“I did not make a move / but I got precum all over from cuddling all night with you / these unintended spoon feels / honey I can hardly deal / dark stains, party jeans / your face, a memory…”

So is that a joke? Probably yes. Maybe yes. I’m not sure anymore. Here’s where it gets crazy. If that’s a joke, does that mean “Origami” is now a joke? Is the whole thing a bit, or is he wildly veering between sincerity and parody with absolutely no cues to distinguish between the two? Because that is also a completely insane thing to do.

I know what’ll help. Here’s his bio on Bandcamp.

That doesn’t help at all!

Here’s another wrinkle: If it’s all a joke, it’s one he’s been making for five straight years.

To an audience of 88.

He has 88 subscribers. Start a YouTube channel right now, tomorrow you’ll have 75 bots subscribed. This guy is creating music videos with decent execution and reasonably high production values for an audience of 13 real people and four of them are me. These videos have 500 views and 400 of them are also me. If it’s a joke, he’s been doing it for five god damn years with nobody, not a single person, ever getting the punchline until right now.

Maybe!

Jesus. That kind of unrewarded dedication is too crazy to contemplate. It speaks of a supernatural madness. That’s Lovecraft shit. So it can’t be a joke, right?

Right. I have changed stances. You might have, too.

Now here’s a documentary about Coleman Moore that he filmed himself. It’s only 15 minutes and you’re committed now, just watch it. No really, it’s vital. You can be the 335th view in three years.

All done? Good. This is a good use of your time.

In the film, Coleman meets and pitches himself to a prospective agent… who dresses like John Waters making fun of Chuck Norris, and walks like a necromancer animated his skeleton but not the rest of him. He moves like his bones are steering his flesh.

They grab a mall pretzel together.

Here’s how Jack Skellington trapped in a meat prison sits down.

Here’s one of their conversations.

AGENT: “You got that shirt-open mentality. And I um, wanted to ask you. Don’t your torso get cold?”

COLEMAN: “Yeah my belly button. It activates.”

AGENT: “It activates your belly button?”

COLEMAN: “Yeah. It tingles.”

That conversation is immediately followed by one about how Coleman is a serious person at heart, and he wishes that being playful came more naturally to him, but there’s nothing goofy about his art. This deadpan conversation about Coleman’s feelings on art and sincerity right after the bellybutton activation shit serves as a perfect setup/punchline… if this is all a Best in Show style gag. If not, it’s pure psychopathy.

So, vibe check. What do you think now? Is this real, is it a joke? Is it somehow both? Is it crazier if it’s both, or neither? Do terms like “sincerity” and “parody” even apply to whatever this is? It’s a comedy mystery that’s haunted my brain for months and I have no idea what the answer is.

I can’t write about it because if it’s all real, this is just a quirky queer boy doing art the best he can and I don’t want to publicly mock that, even if his leprechaun dance gives me giggles every single time I see it. But if it’s a joke, then it’s a savage and cutting one that deserves more attention. It’s completely surreal and executed brilliantly, a high-budget effort spanning five years to an audience of exactly nobody.

Except me.

And even I’m still a maybe!

This is impossible to write…

For anyplace but 1900🌭. And even then only as an aside to show you the kinds of things your patronage allows me to get away with.

So thanks for making this beautiful, bizarre, lawless portal to comedy Valhalla possible. And for telling all your friends about it constantly, which we assume you’re doing. Because if there’s one thing year 3 proved, it’s that we’ll never let success, profit, or job security get in the way of a good joke. That’s why you love us, that’s why we deserve to be loved by you, and it’s also why we will die in the gutter if you don’t keep getting people to sign up for this. We’ll never do it!

And thanks for sticking around for year 4: the year we finally rally our 2000+ Hot Dog army to attack and invade a small coastal American city!

Tags 1900HOTDOG, Free, music videos, Year 4

REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: Tormented Robo-Shirts for Charity! 🌭

Post author By Robert Brockway
Post date 10/13/2022
4 Comments on Reflecting Day: Tormented Robo-Shirts for Charity! 🌭

You’ve seen those Artificial Intelligence artbots, right? You feed them a prompt and they crawl all the artwork in human history to remix it and spit out what you want. Or more often, what you hilariously don’t want and have no possible use for. It’s fun, but the legality of the whole process is questionable, and the morality is answerable. It’s “no.”

The AI is just savvy enough to cost good artists work on bad projects, but not savvy enough to authentically replace human joy, so it’s a lose-lose scenario built only to reinvigorate jaded lawyers looking for a new challenge. Still, it’s damn good fun to fuck with a robot. The first guy to kick one of those Boston Dynamics dogs could tell you that, before they started putting guns on them and he had to google how long robots hold grudges. So how do we automate art and still survive with our human souls intact? It’s an impossible philosophical question that we completely solved. No problem.

We torment the robots with bizarre prompts, laugh at their flailing confusion, then sell T-shirts as monuments to their anguish and give the proceeds to charity!

It’s the perfect scheme, and it helps so many: It helps the charities, it helps you put sweet nonsense on your body, and it helps our precious human artists by poisoning the minds of the AIs forever. Every robot you teach to understand Hulkamania can never again understand the Baroque Movement. That’s art fact!

We wish we could take full credit for this scam, but the whole thing started and continues to live on our Discord, where Mo first tried to teach a robot to Hot Dog.

It’s wonderful. It’s the best attempt by thousands of years of technological progress to understand tubed meat. And it’s not even close. It’s a 1986 Food Engineer’s cocaine nightmare that inspired a terrible new kind of microwave sausage technology. “Is this a hoge?” The robot asked. “Does it hange?” And the only answer it got was our derisive laughter.

There will be plenty of crypto-scum to shamelessly profit off of this kind of thing in the future, but Mama Hot Dog raised us right. We put this sucker on a T-shirt, and let Mo choose the charity that all profits would go to. He picked the Chattanooga Trans Liberation Collective, and we left them a deeply confusing memo with our donation.

It was only available to the Discord, and only for a limited time – but if you want to Hange Hoge baby, all you gotta do is click here. In fact, we’re making all of our anguished AI shirts available for one week only. And again, all profits go to the robo-inquisitor’s charity of choice.

Like when Adrienne tried to teach the text robots about Popsicle Pete:

And my god, they understood. They understood so well. They spat out horrific poetry and it was a marvel, a feat of understanding. We taught a robot to fear.

And then Mo fed its terror to the artbot again so we could mock its revelation.

The AI could only understand those haunting words as some kind of Hungarian arthouse horror flick where a vampire ice cream man banishes nosferatu with his ghostpop. “Vatetie, Pepe!” He cries, either summoning or perhaps banishing the albino cat-mimes.

Of course we needed that on a shirt, this time benefitting Adrienne’s charity of choice, Neighborhood Legal Services.

Juho skipped the middleman (which is me, I think? Jesus, am I already obsolete?) and asked the robot for a pre-made Hot Dog shirt.

Seanbaby joked that this is swag from his Kazakh taco shop, but we figured out what the robot was really trying to say.

We’ve long said that the goal of any good comedy site is to attack and dethrone god. We needed our mission statement on a shirt, and Juho chose to benefit the Transgender Law Center.

We like to court hubris, so we figured we’d organize this pure relentless chaos. We let the community start officially submitting and voting on confusing hot-dog related AI shirts. The first round was simple: Let’s keep trying to teach a robot to Hot Dog until they get it.

They did not.

But we can all learn a life lesson from that robot, which fucking completely does not have it but never stops swinging for the fences. The vote was close but Mo’s Hatter Doghouse won out, with these profits going to Heifer International.

I finally gave in and wandered into the robot den myself. I knew the AI struggled with people, so asking for any specific celebrity could only result in a nightmare-faced double goblin. And yet I thought of a cheat code. “Robots,” I called out to the echoing steel cavern, “Do you know… Andre the Giant?”

They!

Fucking!

Do!

They fucked up a little on the last one, interpreting Andre the Giant as a Davy Crockett-like character adventuring through the wilds challenging polar bears to guitar solo competitions, but wait did they fuck up? Because that’s actually the most correct thing I’ve ever heard.

The Discord agreed, voting that the right and only choice was “In the Lair of the Shred Bears,” with proceeds going to Make Way for Books.

You’ve got until 8AM ET on Friday, October 21st to buy one or all of these shirts, with 100% of profits going to their respective charities, and then they’re going away. You will have officially missed your chance to torment a robot in the name of human generosity. Your torso will be naked and explicable. Nobody will look at you for a long time across a crowded bar before finally, reluctantly approaching to ask “what the fuck is that shirt?” And that was it, that was how you met. That’s the moment you fell in love and started the rest of your lives together, and you missed it.

OR DID YOU?

If you want in on the ground floor of this movement, you must join our absolutely hoppin’ Discord to submit and vote in future AI shirt-mess competitions. This is how we fight back against the robot scourge! With weaponized absurdity!

Tags Best of 2022, Free, robots, shirts, store

REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: Exploring the Mysteries of the Mind using The Sims 3 🌭

Post author By Seanbaby
Post date 07/08/2022
15 Comments on Reflecting Day: Exploring the Mysteries of the Mind using The Sims 3 🌭

Before 1900🌭, there was another beloved Internet comedy site with an all-star cast. The name of it escapes me, but here is the tenth column I wrote there. From 2009, rescued from a garbled stack of misaligned text, banner ads, and missing images comes the fully restored, visually enhanced 2009 psychology thesis that probably went on to be taught in leading universities, “Exploring the Mysteries of the Mind Using The Sims 3.”

Every scientist dreams of a world without ethics. Whenever a scientist sees a set of twins, he or she secretly wonders what would happen if you surgically swapped their faces. They already have a chamber set up to harness the power of their screams as they gradually realize what has happened. Every day, ethics barely prevent experiments like this from being carried out. But what if we didn’t have these ethics? When Nazi doctors were let loose during WWII, the incredible rate of their discoveries were matched only by the inadequacy of words to atone for them. They might have been monsters, but without them, we never would have discovered the yield elasticity of the elderly, or learned what part of a prisoner’s tongue detects the taste of angel meat. The Sims 3 is computer game based on these Nazi scientists that offers us a world of moral ambiguity, free to perform psychological experiments away from the leering eye of ethics. Which is exactly what I did. Here are the results of my findings.

The main focus of my experiment is a man known as Subject Beef. An artificial intelligence created for the purpose of playing video games, he’ll find out that he’s also a cog in the unfeeling machine of psychiatric progress. Some people might get squeamish at the idea of torturing an AI just to write down what happens, but look at it this way: Any day now Japan is going to fuck up and finally build the robot that can make decisions and run on blood. As it starts tearing into my human people, the least I can do is make that an act of vengeance. Without me and this experiment, all that robot murder is going to just be senseless.

Body: I made him as fat as possible since food in the game costs money, but packing a blubbery energy source into his love handles is free here in the character creator. It will also hinder any of the subject’s escape attempts. There’s a reason ranchers don’t have a term for it when all the veal cows make a break for it.

Accessories: In prison, a teardrop tattoo under your eye tells people that you’ve killed someone. Outside of prison, you say the same thing with clown makeup. Before they were torn apart, many scientists wondered if it’s clown makeup that causes a person to commit murder, or if it’s murder which causes people to wear clown makeup. That’s one of the things we’re about to discover.

Personality: I went to six years of middle school, so I know proper scientific method requires a control group. I also know that knowing what this means is for fucking nerds, so I didn’t include one. Instead, I gave my subject unpredictable personality traits like Insane, Hydrophobic and Can’t Stand Art. This almost felt like cheating since it saved me the trouble of causing the subject to go crazy, so I evened the odds by giving him Genius and Computer Whiz. Now he has the tools to discover what he is and what I am doing to him. I got this idea from Star Trek where some asshole said the wrong thing in the hologram room and spent the rest of the episode fighting an evil super hologram. I’m hoping for at least that.

The personality tools of The Sims 3 are very robust. I was able to select his favorite food as pancakes, and his favorite music as Kids. Finishing up, the game even gave me a list of Lifetime Wishes to select from, and one of them was, and I quote, “Creature-Robot Cross Breeder.” I picked the hell out of that. How dare they even include a second option. The idea of a tortured clown fusing robots and animals together sounds comically impossible, but that’s probably what some tortured clown thought right before he invented anal beads.

No doctor in the world would look at Subject Beef and say, “Sure, go ahead and stand near that.” Unfortunately, his psych profile got mixed up with NBC’s fall comedy lineup, and his landlord signed a —record scratch— baby to the lease! The baby was given only one personality trait: Brave.

His favorite food is sushi and his favorite music is Latin. I knew it was only a matter of time before it was destroyed, so I wanted to name it after something I love. Since I never learned how to spell pizza, I decided to go with either slam dunks or Dolemite. I went with a combination of both, by naming him after a dunk by the Dolemite of basketball, Darryl “Chocolate Thunder” Dawkins. There wasn’t room to type in “The Chocolate Thunder Flying, Robinzine Crying, Teeth Shaking, Glass Breaking, Rump Roasting, Bun Toasting, Wham Bam I Am! Jam,” so I settled on “Turbo Sexophonic Delight” or Turbo Sexophonic for short.

I took one last look at him. As soon as the naming stops and the leaving-him-with-a-madman begins, he is so dead. But that’s probably what some guy thought one minute before watching his prisoner invent gorilla anal beads, and two minutes before winning the Congressional Medal of Right.

I constructed my asylum with the default Sims 3 tools, without the help of any mental institution expansion packs. This meant a little bit of improvisation.

1. Crappy Fence – Surrounding the compound is a non-electrified three-foot metal fence. This is more than enough to keep anything in the game from getting in or out as robots can’t climb. And if I’m wrong, I plan on repeating these as my last words while I hug my own legs at the top of a building being climbed by robots.

2. Computer – In the center of the off-limits computer yard is a single personal computer. Installed on this machine are all the secret codes and Internets an artificial intelligence would need to Lawnmower Man into our world. It’s not password protected, but the on-switch is labeled “TRAP.”

3. Treadmill – A simple treadmill blocks the only entrance to the computer yard. The only way past is to jog faster than eight mph on a zero degree incline. Or, to translate that into Subject Beef, “IMPOSSIBLARG, WHERE IS THE TACO BAR.”

4. Cake – OK, I’ll join you in fantasy land. Say the subject somehow breaches the treadmill security– these birthday cakes will act as a secondary deterrent. With a man this size, four cakes only buys us a second. But a second is all I need.

5. Teddy Bear – This toy bear watches the treadmill from the safety of its little pants. It’s programmed to see everything and mock nearby failure.

6. Kitchen – The sink works, but the oven is only a toy. Opening it only makes the teddy bear on the other side of the wall snicker at you. He’ll fucking hate that bear.

7. The Refrigerator Canal – Knowing the subject has a fear of water, I installed a hallway with a water floor. If he wants something to eat, he has no choice but to flail and shriek across the pool for it. Teddy bears line each wall, their ceaseless gaze judging him.

8. The FunZone – The only way to enter the FunZone is down the FunSlide. There is no way to exit the FunZone. It is completely and unsafely surrounded by propane barbecues and contains toys and games for up to one toddler.

9. Toilet Alarm – This is a state-of-the-art alarm system set to go off any time someone uses the outdoor and only toilet. It speaks 25 languages, and unlike my computerized medical subject, is programmed never to betray me.

10. The ToiletZone – Flanked by 15,000 watt searchlights, the outdoor toilet comes equipped with an audience of gnomes. To add to the shame, a yellow arrow on the ground helps subtly draw the eye towards any men in clown makeup who might be shitting outside under spotlights and sounding alarms.

11. The Isolation Chamber – A simple booth of mirrors from which there is no escape. The walls will bring your reflection with them as they close in on you.

I moved my subject and his young companion into the compound. Left to his own devices, the inmate went straight for the food but couldn’t gather the courage to swim across the pool to the refrigerator. Trying to look like he intended to do it all along, he picked up one of the sentry bears. I tried to make him eat it, since it’s what a coward deserves, but the only option was renaming it. Very well. Dark Lord the teddy bear, meet Subject Beef, the pussy.

I soon learned there was a flaw in my design schematic. The wall of propane barbecues wasn’t baby proof, and Turbo Sexaphonic squeezed right through them. Subject Beef stood over the toddler and, to its delight, chose to speak to him through the Dark Lord. He did this for 14 hours without interruption. Then he put the doll down and walked directly through a barbecue for no other reason than to show me he could. The sun was setting on day one, and the three of them already seemed to be making progress on an escape plan.

How far would you go to survive? Subject Beef had to make a choice–cross his deadliest enemy, a pool, for food, or let his metabolism eat his body down to a recognizable shape and slow death. He was content with option B, so I clicked the wall of gas stoves that recently replaced the very pregnable barbecues and told him to make food for himself and the baby. He ignored this command, so I ordered him to Talk to Self, hoping he’d be more convincing. He had a violent conversation with no one, changed into hot pants, and jumped in the pool. While shouting the international symbol for “I am drowning,” he swam across for macaroni and cheese.

This experiment showed us two things: 1) survival instincts are more powerful than phobias; and 2) diapers are not to be used with macaroni and cheese. I’d like to see you try to prove either of those with ethics.

Observation: Subject Beef eats all his meals on the toilet, his body acting like a steady pipeline of disaster. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it’s almost like he’s trying to get back at water. You stupid fool, water isn’t your enemy. Your enemy is me: science.

While the test subject had dinner boiling on the stove, I interrupted to issue an order for him to go kick over a gnome. It was a test to see if his absurd surroundings were having any effect on his short-term memory. They were. With the adrenaline rush of the fresh gnome kill, he forgot all about his dinner, now a roaring wall of flame. His artificial behavior circuits analyzed the situation and selected “panic.”

The baby was trapped safely away from his aimless panic inside the burning ring of ovens. Also, trapped safely away from the fire was the local fire department, whose robot brains could only watch the facility burn from the other side of the tiny but robotically unbreachable fence.

How did they get there so quickly? Well, apparently there’s a malfunction with my compound’s toilet alarm that causes it to go off during fires. I may have to reread the directions on some of this equipment.

After the fire burned itself out, a child services woman named Linda Duran magically appeared and sent Turbo Sexaphonic away. My experiments were going badly enough without interdepartmental meddling. To make matters worse, the government’s demonic use of sorcery went haywire when facing off against my fence technology. The toddler was warped away, but Linda was stuck.

Pinned to one spot, she refused to interact with Beef or me, almost as if the game forgot she was there. But Beef still knew. He refused to use the bathroom from the moment she arrived. He howled a picture of a toilet at her over and over, and she responded by staring through him until his bladder detonated where he stood. Just to fuck with us, she showed she could move the whole time, and turned her back to give Beef privacy while he mopped up his shame.

I’ll have to watch out for this woman… she’s pushing his fragile mind in directions I don’t have protocols for. Speaking of, since the government took the child away, I began removing toys from the home while Beef sleeps. I want him to think that maybe the kid was never there to begin with, which seems like an inadequate mind game now that ghosts are forcing him to pee on himself.

Our anomaly Linda glitched more or less peacefully through the compound for a day and, despite her only partial existence, it seemed like she could still smell Subject Beef since she pantomimed disgust whenever he got close. But maybe if Linda doesn’t like the smell of fire-roasted pee, she shouldn’t have fucking locked herself in a ToiletZone with a clown afraid of showers while she was stealing our baby!

Luckily, Subject Beef had a plan. Remember, I programmed Beef to be a genius and a computer whiz, so he figured out a way to get rid of Linda when I couldn’t: deliberately starting a house fire.

Linda and nearly everything in the facility was destroyed by flame, except for the immaculate toy oven in the kitchen. It’s so not an oven that it couldn’t even start a fire while an inferno crawled over it. It’s so not an oven that its momma has to brown toast with a paint roller! It’s so not an oven that it thinks a pilot light lets you read while you fly the plane!

I might have overestimated my ability to control this world. The gateless fence continues to wreak havoc on the lives and intentions of the other artificial intelligences in the game. The neighborhood paper girl appeared in the ToiletZone for only a moment to howl from between worlds and vanish.

If I was a scientist in the real world, I wouldn’t be allowed to keep filling endangered species with different smokeless propellants until I found the one that ignites from inside a panda. But in the Sims 3, if I want to test a floor sealant, there’s no regulation against forcing a fat clown into a mirrored booth where he watches himself wet his pants to death. I found that there is also no regulation on the human spirit, even a video game simulation of it.

Day after day went by, and Subject Beef stood in that booth and refused to die. He babbled at the mirrors, glared at a bunny painting when I told him to, and every two minutes he would try to perform an activity described as “Contemplate Surroundings.” I had my finger on the trigger to click that away as quickly as possible. If he figures a way out of this, I fully expect him to be standing behind me in my world. I designed the booth to be inescapable, but I don’t trust that word anymore. I noticed four of the gnomes in charge of watching him on the toilet had left their post to surround his isolation booth. I don’t remember doing this, b-but I must have, right?

The subject survived over six days (his time) inside the booth with no water, food, or sleep. The strange thing is that at the moment of his death, he still had a full Fun Bar, which is technical jargon for a bar computerized beings use to measure how much fun they’re having. What did he enjoy about his slow starvation in a vertical coffin? I’ll tell you one thing: If it’s not the idea of killing me, then I’m a shitty scientist.

The Grim Reaper descended onto the corpse and made him into a ghost, which did wonders for the 380 pounds of baby fat he was still carrying. The slimmer, undeadier Subject Beef floated through the smoldering ruins of his former prison, and as I turned the game the fuck off, as if that would save me from this cybercurse… I could have sworn for a moment that I saw Linda.

When you create a Sim, it records a copy of them. This allowed me to go back to the menu and start the game over with a fresh genetic clone of Subject Beef and Turbo Sexaphonic. With science marching along next to me, I moved them into the burned-out, haunted remains of my old facility to recreate our grand experiment. What happened next is a true story: the clone rummaged through the trash for exactly 25 hours, then ran to the pool to sink and die. It’s like the first thing he did after being created was remember what I had done. Going over all this data, I can conclude that science and all the dark-sided Gozar-summoning magic it brings with it can kiss my ass.

Tags cracked classic, Free, Video Games

REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: Let’s Ruin Paul Dano! 🌭

Post author By Robert Brockway
Post date 05/19/2022
8 Comments on Reflecting Day: Let’s Ruin Paul Dano! 🌭

1-900-🌭 is a special place. It’s the last holdout in text-based internet comedy, an art that died years ago and was rightfully damned to hell. Outside of these walls, text-based internet comedy means writing 300 word summaries of trending Twitter topics capped by an NFT scam. You, our patrons, are the only thing keeping us from that. You fend off the siege. Your patronage mans our bulwarks and keeps our catapults full of only the most diseased sheep corpses.

You, the community.

And the amazing things you do.

That are entirely outside of our control. I’m talking about those wonderful actions you take of your own volition that have never been legally endorsed by 1-900-🌭 in any way.

Like that time you ruined Paul Dano’s life.

Let me explain.

Like many vendettas, this all begins with 1984’s “Karate Rap.” It was a novelty song and subpar rap from the era when every white person said “rap? That’s just like talking, watch this: WEEEELL my name is-”

Karate enthusiasts Sensei Dave and Holly made a low budget hip-hop video about how much karate rules, and it seems weird to condemn them for that when I celebrate Partners in Kryme for the same thing. Perhaps Sensei Dave stacked one more brick than he could break, but my livelihood literally depends on wrongheaded karate masters making mistakes. I thank them for their sacrifice.

It should have been a wonderful abomination for all to enjoy, yet something terrible happened: Sensei Dave and Holly both suffered horrific simultaneous frontal lobe damage that froze them in that moment of time forever.

I like to think that if a time traveler were to jump out of a portal and warn them that, from this point on, their entire lives would be devoted to “Karate Rap,” they would’ve done something else. Maybe figured out that Kung Fu rhymes with Love You and spent the next forty years teaching couples to make love Tiger-Style.

Clearly I wasn’t content just making fun of “Karate Rap.” I mercilessly tracked the Seegers down like Lance Henriksen might hunt a Van Damme. And when I found them, god bless them, god bless their souls – I realized that karate rap success had driven them completely insane.

It’s important to note here that “Karate Rap” was not successful.

It would eventually go minorly viral in 2012, but before that it was nothing. They chased ironic success for thirty years and it took their entire lives away.

I discovered that Sensei Dave was from a long and storied line of pop culture garbage architects. Dave Seeger’s father made hilarious garbage in the ‘60s, Dave himself carried on the tradition in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and then he married “Karate Girl” Holly and had children who make hilarious garbage to this day. The Seeger dynasty has given us novelty songs, attempted viral videos, shot pilots for shows nobody would ever see – they even made a movie!

It fucking ruled. Go watch Sister Sensei. Sensei Dave dies right at the start and becomes a Ghost Dad trying to bang his sister with karate spirit magic from beyond the grave. If there’s a better logline than that, it must surely add a speedboat. Of course “Karate Rap” played throughout Sister Sensei. Of course they reused footage from the video, even though it didn’t fit at all. Sensei Dave’s whole life is just one long remix of a novelty rap video he made forty years ago and I both envy and pity him for it. You know The Simpsons episode where Marge finds a fancy dress and just remakes it over and over until it’s physical nonsense? That’s the Seegers and “Karate Rap.” They had one idea to share between two lives.

But to understand why we had to hurt Paul Dano for this, we have to talk about Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids.

Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids was a pilot for a children’s show based on karate. More specifically, singing and karate. If you guessed that “Karate Rap” would make its way into this show retooled for the kids, you get no points. You’re right, but it’s just worth nothing.

Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids was so bonkers that it might have actually been a coded message to activate sleeper agents. It was about teaching kids the magic of karate, and by that I don’t mean using martial arts to instill shy children with confidence. I mean there was an extended section where Sensei Dave healed wounds and made butterflies with karate and then told the kids they could do it, too. The show featured rampant delusion, nightmarish claymation dragons, custom gis for the kids in Cult Saffron, the ghost of “Karate Rap,” plenty of trademark Seeger desperation… and Paul Dano.

I didn’t even spot the celebrity cameo in the article! For some reason one of our patrons, Javo, was rewatching Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids. We are living through the long slow end of western society. Do not judge how people find their comfort. Anyway Javo brought this revelation to the Hot Dog Discord and with a reasoned perspective and a measured heart, we decided we must use this to destroy Paul Dano.

You see, Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids wasn’t on IMDB. Why would it be? It was barely on film. Before I highlighted it, the YouTube video had less than two hundred views. Now it has two thousand. That’s not… that’s still not a lot, but we did that! So nobody knew that Paul Dano has always been a Dojo Kid. What’s more: We looked at the release dates and realized this would have been Paul Dano’s first role… by years.

Our most twisted Riddler! This is his origin story!

We knew we had to get Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids on Paul Dano’s IMDB profile. The first credit is the most important on any actor’s page. The most recent credit, no matter how high profile, will move every time they take another job. The top is always waiting to become the middle. But the first role? That’s the anchor. People scroll to the bottom first thing to see where an actor “got their start.”

Is it fair to say that Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids is responsible for the talents of Paul Dano? No! It might be a crime! But if we’re successful, one day Mario Lopez will open Access Hollywood by saying the words “Paul Dano, from Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids-” and my entire life will fold in on itself like a paper crane. This must happen. We had to do this. We all agreed. Only one problem: It sounded hard.

So we didn’t!

Well, most of us didn’t. Two loose cannons risked their badges to go on a rogue mission of justice. Javo and fellow 🌭er DeltaFoxTrot went after IMDB. They endured weeks of bureaucracy and pedantics, rejection after rejection, form after form, request after request. They had to tackle it in stages: First, get IMDB to recognize Dave Seeger, which anybody who’s made eye contact with him at a party could have told you is a terrible mistake. Then get IMDB to acknowledge Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids as a show, which it barely is, and finally to affiliate the two. This sounds like a lot, but it was actually the easy part. “Who gives a shit?” Some IMDB drone muttered, and clicked approve so he could get back to working on his screenplay about a Ghost Dad trying to bang his sister with karate spirit magic from beyond the grave on a speedboat.

They didn’t know. They didn’t know the storm was coming.

The next request came in, and alarms went off. The entire IMDB office went dark, a klaxon sounded, the higher-ups pulled their glasses off and stared out the window to whisper “my god…”

They really, really didn’t want some fucking Hot Dog goofballs to edit Paul Dano’s profile.

To change a major star’s IMDB page? Nearly impossible. To do it during the release of his biggest role yet? Completely impossible. To change his very first credit? To something called Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids? That means war. IMDB wouldn’t let it happen. They couldn’t. They fought it tooth and nail. But they don’t know how far the 1-900-🌭 community will go for a joke. We’ll kill ourselves and all of you if it means landing the perfect punchline, and those plans are in motion.

In the meantime, we beat IMDB.

Paul Dano’s very first acting role is now Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids. It’s already working to poison the zeitgeist. This all went down just a couple months ago and you can see people on Twitter losing their minds as they stumble on it. Anybody that sees The Batman and thinks “I’d like to know more about this Paul Dano guy” will now utter this sentence:

“What the fuck is Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids?”

This is how we do it.

This is how we ruin Paul Dano’s life.

I don’t know why we want that, but we’re doing it now and it’s too late to stop.

Heroes aren’t born, they’re made. DeltaFoxTrot? Javo? You have built a legacy for yourselves. Your fellow 🌭s don’t know how to show our gratitude. We don’t know what gift says “thank you, thank you so much for attacking this man for reasons we’re not 100% clear on.”

Oh wait, yes we do.

This astounding movie poster by M.V. Bramley is for the inevitable gritty reboot, Sensei Rainbow Vs. The Dojo Kid – the one where Sensei Dave grows corrupt with power and pursues a now-grown Paul Dano to the ends of the Earth for no apparent reason. Surely that’s not a metaphor for something. Javo and DeltaFoxTrot get Easter Eggs in the poster, producer credits in the text, and of course copies have already been sent to the both of them. But you? You reading this right now? You get the ultimate honor. You get to pay for it!

It’s up right now in the PoxCo store, and it won’t be there for long because we’re not entirely sure why you want it. The art is amazing, and like all the best jokes it requires eight layers of increasingly obscure nested knowledge just to land a medium laugh, but why does it speak to you? We just don’t understand.

Regardless, the art rules, this moment rules, this community rules – you! All of you! If you’re here, if you’re contributing to keep this 🌭 thing going – you’re giving Javo and Delta a community to interface with and a place to hatch their dire plans. And you’re paying us to foster wild grudges against karate rappers and major celebrities based on nothing! Absolutely nothing! We couldn’t do that without sponsors like you! And we make each and every one of you this promise: If you destroy a major celebrity for us, we will commission a poster for you, too.