Category: REFLECTING DAY

Categories
REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: Become the ManLoaf

Welcome all to this, our monthly day of reflection. It is the only day where contemplation of the self is allowed, and also absolutely mandatory. Please begin having personal epiphanies immediately or you will be registered, detained, branded, shipped away for reeducation and processed into reeducated meat byproduct for use in PoxCo™ branded loaf products. 

Now that you have had at least one (1) Manager Approved Realization and/or been shunted away by the Meditation Chute, let us continue. The state of the Hot Dog is strong. We’ve just passed 1000 patrons, which is astonishing! I never imagined that would happen. I didn’t even think it could happen. I figured once we hit 999 it would just tick over to 000 and we’d get the Patreon killscreen. Instead Seanbaby and I have to sit here like chumps, humbled and amazed by all of your support. You really showed us. 

With your help, we’ve been able to start running guest columns and that is hilarious. We’re employers! Hahaha we created jobs! Nobody stopped us! 

So far we’ve had excellent pieces from Jason “David” Pargin “Wong” and Auralnauts Zak, Dashing Explorer of Sound. Coming up we’ve got more exciting guest stars who will meander onscreen, mug uncomfortably at the camera, and promptly exit to applause. Chris Bucholz is already on the calendar, and here’s a fun fact: We actually learned how to pronounce his name! He’s going to let us tell you! Right now! It’s pronounced… 

I know, right?! You literally would never have guessed it. My god.

In other news, we’ve finally got our external site up and running at 1900hotdog.com, and it is truly a stunning piece of technology. It has images, text, the occasional link! And unlike Patreon’s site, it actually works! Most of the time! If you’re tired of Patreon’s crushed and warped images, awkward archives and non-supported links, step into the distant futuristic year of 2007 with our new external site. It even has a color!

We’ve also launched our very first PoxCo Regional Wrestling’s Pretend Wrestling League (Now With More Wrestling!). The response has been strong, enough for us to do a full tournament. And let me tell you, these wrestlers are beautiful… in a savage, hideous way. Each of them is like a rampaging hippo with its skin removed so that you can better view the mechanical motions of its muscles as it tramples everything you love, have loved, or will ever love in the future. Yes, they’re Hellraiser Hippos of the Heart, ladies and gentleman, and I cannot wait to show you the horrors they have in store. 

To keep things fresh, we’ll go back to our normal teamworking pieces for a few months before the first qualifying round of the PRL tournament, and we’ll periodically check in for the semi-final, and championship rounds after that. I hope you liquified some of your comedy portfolio before this, because most of your laughs are now invested in this year-long bit and there will be severe penalties for early withdrawal.

If you’re a Hot Dog Supreme, well then first of all I want to congratulate you on being intrinsically better than everybody else. It was a long, hard road to giving us a stupid amount of money every month, and they didn’t believe you could do it… but we did. We always knew you could give us $50 a month, and we are so proud of you for achieving this dream. You can find our new batch of Supreme dedications on the About page, or you could just find them right here, right now:

Jeff Atwood: the star of the story choosing from 39 possible endings!

toasty god: duly elected mayor of uncooked bread.

Pauli Poisuo: who is called “Baba Yaga” by his enemies and “Double P” by Baba Yagas.

Ethan Rangel: half wolf, half cop, half cyborg, and all wolf again twice, for a total of 2.5 wolves.

Yannis Ioannidis: is the first person based on the film 3 Ninjas Kick Back.

John McCammon: who left fighting behind him, at least until Baron Arena took his daughter.

Hawk: and that’s pronounced with eight additional seconds of silent eye contact.

Armando Nava: whose name is an anagram of how they were conceived: a rad van moan.

Lyman: a magnificent youth who brandishes the magical broadsword, Lycheaper! 

Micah Phillips: joins together with four other pure-hearted warriors to form Zorklon, Protector of the Cosmos! He pilots the left leg — the invaluable left leg!

Seems way easier this way, but you do you.

Supremes, your first round of cursed artifacts from the Wrong Dimension are shipping in just about a week, so make sure we have your current address and a brief list of private shames. It helps PoxCo Delivery find your residence. Don’t ask how: the answer will invert your human lungs and you’ll inhale your own ribcage. It’s better to just write down the secret ways you failed yourself on a little piece of paper, roll it up tightly, and leave it in the gap between your wall and floor. The space where roaches get in. They’ll take it from here. Trust me: it’s better than coughing up a rib. Marginally.

Let’s close this out with a little behind the scenes peek:

Seanbaby and I work opposite schedules, so theoretically we have 24 hour coverage of the site. This is not to guard it against any possible attacks, though that is a welcome fringe benefit. It’s because I live in the desert and, as such, must rise at dawn if I’m going to step outside without being shriveled into a husk by the angry, angry sun. While Seanbaby has a young child in his home — hopefully his own, I’ve been too afraid to ask — and so can only work at night, when the kid is exhausted from screaming all the words that rhyme with ‘thumb’ right into his sleep-deprived face. 

We have just two brief moments of contact per day: when he clocks on and I clock off, and vice versa. We refer to this as Ladyhawking. There was a big argument over which one of us is Rutger Hauer and which is Michelle Pfeiffer, but then we realized it was our analogy, and we didn’t have to choose. We are both Michelle Pfeiffer. Neither of us are Rutger Hauer. Why? Because you are, my friends. You are our Rutger Hauer. 

Congratulations! Happy Rutger to you, Hauer!

Categories
REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: The Unwritable

Hi, Hotdoggers, I already regret calling you that. Now that we’ve agreed you’ll be referred to as Foot-Long One-Ninehundriacs, let’s talk about our site and all its great successes. Thanks to your excellent taste, 1-900-HOTDOG is growing faster than any expert expected and we’re one very nearby stretch goal away from hiring guest writers. When it happens, we’ll be featuring an article by “Internet favorite” Jason Pargin’s David Wong writing as Jason Pargin. He has, in fact, already sent it to us. It’s a work of true inspiration that had been trapped in his soul for years waiting for this, 🌭 the greatest joke delivery service 🌭, to exist.

A couple short months ago I came to Brockway with nothing but a simple idea and an eleven tab spreadsheet laying out six years of content and several hundred article pitches. It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but my pre-release spreadsheet looked like this and if you held your breath when you started scrolling down, you’d be dead twice before you reached the bottom. If this business model holds, I will be writing about the deranged things found in my library long after my mind has been preserved in the neural matrix of Smart Dildo 2055.

My point is, if Morgan Freeman found this google doc he would tell his partner, “My God listen to this… Week 789: Learning Day: How to Breastfeed Your Cat or Raccoon VHS / Punching Day: Wheelchair Knife Fighting For Two / Nerding Day: Barbie Gardener Racing for Gameboy Color / Fucking Day: Hello, Morgan Freeman— oh, fuck no. Everyone listen! No matter what you hear, do not move in! The hot dog has the upper hand!”

Brockway loved what most people would call a manifesto, and it was perfect timing. We’d both left Cracked, which had just been purchased by a 17th private equity firm in a month and they aren’t pursuing articles as you and I know them anymore. They decided there was a higher profit margin in brief descriptions of viral events you hopefully missed, but due to the nature of them, probably didn’t. It seems like content perfect for grandmothers who text “what is a tiger king our squirrels are back!❤,” and it’s frustrating because it’s the same idea every other website has tried and it never works. It’s like hollowing out a movie theater and using it to show clips of unpaid prison labor describing their Facebook feed from four days ago.

This seems mean, but it’s not like it matters– anyone who took that shit personally gets paid in exposure for essays on how it’s dumb how Mr. Peanut came back to life on a website with comments enabled. They are numb to disapproval. I actually loved my time at Cracked and I hope it survives whatever all this is, if for no other reason, because I left with a “Cracked Ideas” text file that had grown to 24,078 words. Most of them are hilariously unusable like “X Assholes Only Famous for Being Lonely” or “X Special Education Books I’ll Never Be Able to Make Jokes About.” And this is going to sound fucked up, but I want to talk about that second one so you can understand my struggle.

First off, let’s deal with the obvious. If you’re reading a book on disabled people and it’s not one you’re writing at this very moment, every word in it has evolved to become offensive. Like truly offensive, not “Lena Dunham deadnamed her trans rabbit” offensive. For instance, that book is called The trainable retarded which is fucked, but it’s a course book for something called “behavior modification” which is super fucked. It’s what they called it in the ’70s and ’80s when they tricked a “multiply handicapped” person into overcoming a limitation. Everyone involved in it wanted nothing more than to help people who needed it and if I read it out loud, you would say, “Jesus Christ, I guess not all classic Denis Leary bits hold up.”

I own a goddamn book simply called Retarded Australians. When it was published that sounded medical. Now it sounds like something a livid bouncer would scream at a Thailand night club. The title alone is an adventure in confusion, but I defy anyone to explain why they included medical drawings when they had no idea how to draw and then decided to make those drawings nude. What clinical purpose could this fantastically bad sketch of a naked disabled Australian serve? And why is it in the section about COUSIN MARRIAGES? Do Australians diagnose incest by having the suspect take off all their clothes so a seven-year-old can draw them? Because if they don’t, what the shit is going on here?

Another thing that bothers me about Retarded Australians, though it’s very far down the list, is how there’s no reason for it to have such a punchy title. They’re writing an academic medical document. Who are they being cute for? There is no consumer market for this other than me passing it in a thrift store and gasping. They could have called it Studies in Abnormal Genetics in Oceania, an “Illustrated” Journey or maybe Batman Fart-Train: We Thought It’d Be Fun to Let Them Name the Book. I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t think there’d be enough room to squeeze all that onto this crowded title page:

Another genre of books I have trouble understanding but keep finding is crafting guides for special needs children.

After reading literally hundreds of pages on crafting tips in PLAY ACTIVITIES FOR THE retarded child, CRAFTS FOR RETARDED, and I CAN DO IT! I CAN DO IT! Arts & Crafts for the Mentally Retarded, I can tell you with maybe more expertise than anyone alive, there is no difference in how any of us craft. I’m not trying to inspire you– I mean there’s only the one way to draw a face on a sock. There’s no specialized way to stick your hand up a puppet if your parents are Australian cousins. There was no need to write any of these books or brand them in this way at all. No one could possibly learn anything from PLAY ACTIVITIES for the retarded child. It is what anyone would write down if you held a gun to their head and said, “List ordinary games and nursery rhymes; take your time this isn’t loaded. It’s for a book I’m selling to children with mental disabilities. Hi, sorry, let’s start over.” This book explains the rules of fucking tag for God’s sake. Which means it’s either pointless or I have been playing the retarded version of tag my whole life. And yeah, I hear how that sounds. I mean it in the outdated clinical way.

So 99% of these activities and art projects are indistinguishable from what you’d find in any grade school classroom or summer camp, but CRAFTS FOR RETARDED offers one clue why they were written. Let’s look at project C-4-C:

That’s right, this book wants your special needs child to construct a swastika drum out of soaked goat skin. What is this nightmare ritual we are completing? I guarantee you if someone built and played this drum, every beat would pull the life from a faraway baby to be consumed by Ta’xet Tom-Tom. I don’t think you understand– I have, right this very moment, proven ancient death magic exists and it is being smuggled into our realm by disability-themed crafting books. I think a medal or at least some panicked screams would be appropriate.

The other thing about these books is they seem to be written specifically for people who are caring for a large number of special needs children but who are also completely unfamiliar with them. They explain broad, basic things it seems impossible to not know. Is there no training course or educational program before you’re put in charge of vulnerable kids? In 2005 I entered the approval process of becoming a Special Olympics coach and was pleasantly surprised they had some questions before they handed me a little league team and told me a couple of them were allergic to blueberries. It was the exact situation these books could have theoretically prepared me for, but can you imagine if I had said, “I have no college credits in Special Education, but I have read I CAN DO IT! I CAN DO IT! and I’m qualified to show them how to make a pretty sweet Nazi drum from the wet flesh of the goat.”

These books are such remarkable failures along with being so weird, and I, wait, hold on. I think I might have accidentally written the unwritable article I was complaining about 8 paragraphs ago. And I’m not even sure if I tricked you or myself. But speaking of weird books, we will soon be honoring the top tier 1-900-HOTDOG patrons by mailing them each one of these infamous cursed artifacts from the site:

If you’d like to receive your own one-of-a-kind treasure personalized by me and possibly KIM CANAVAN, you have until June 1st, 2020 to upgrade your pledge. Why not? Money is imaginary anyway. But ramming lit candles into your ear and expanding your tits with your mind powers– those are real. And sincerely, whatever your level of support, thank you for helping to create this perfect website I’ve been training my whole life to make.

…

This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme,Neil Bailey: The undisputed shogun of Kansas City (Missouri, not Kansas; that is GapeWulf territory).

Categories
REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: A Look Back on Our First Month

It has been an entire month since you switched your diet to 100% Hot Dog. Your toilet is in ruins, you have to wear prescription pants, and your gut bacteria have just invented language solely so they have a word for “apocalypse.” But your soul? Your soul is finally free. 

Over the last four weeks we have laughed, we have cried, we have punched and fucked and we have done all of those at the same time. We may have even learned a few things along the way. Terrible things.

We do not speak of the things we know on Fridays. That knowledge is the payment we offer for our mirth. But today is Saturday: this is Reflecting Day. This is the time to think back on our successes, to deny our failures, and to attack those trying to help us grow. With that in mind, let’s do a little check in: How do you feel about our first month? What else would you like to see from us in the future? Please tell us how you’d like to see us grow, but do keep in mind that:

  1. Seanbaby is a semi-professional kickmonster.
  2. I am an enthusiastic amateur arsonist.
  3. I just warned you what happens when you help us.

I’m doing this all wrong. This is the one day a month where we are required to let our guards down and be real, earnest human beings, no matter how bad we are at that. 

I’m proud of what we’ve done so far, and I am astounded at how quickly we’ve grown. My goal for the month was $2,000, and we smashed that in a week. My new goal was $2500, because I figured we’d slow down after that initial burst. We demolished that milestone three days later. “$3000” I said, “surely we cannot pass $3000 in our very first month.” We eviscerated that goal and sent pieces of it back to its family just in case they thought of revenge. My new goal is “no goals,” because I know everything I set up will only be destroyed, and I’m starting to feel a little bad for these poor numbers. 

When I first lost my job at Cracked, I was lost and heartbroken. You don’t do something every day for 13 years without growing way too attached. I had no idea what life looked like after Cracked. A couple weeks later, Sean emailed me about starting something together, and my gears started turning again. You could literally see the change in me. My wife said that I had a whole different look on my face. I started actually wanting to get up in the morning. I had completely forgotten what it was like to just write comedy. How satisfying it was, sure, but also just how much fucking work it is. My god, we went into this site thinking it would be a part time gig that maybe grew into something more eventually, but apparently neither of us can make fun of a How-to book on puppet sex in anything less than a thousand words. We are both basically full time on this, and the weirdest part is that I am seriously excited to do even more as it grows.

And it’s going to grow: Our biggest, most immediate plans are for a new external site, because Patreon might be a lifeline for artists now that the ad-market has collapsed, but it sure is ugly. It’ll still work with your Patreon accounts though — I know our audience; I know how you worry that you might have to do a thing. There will be zero work on your end, and an immediate benefit: It’s the only wish you’ve ever made.

We have other long term goals mapped out, and if you haven’t taken a look at them yet, maybe give that a shot. Let us know how you feel about them, and if there’s something else you’d like to see there. But please keep in mind that, especially with the world in flux like this, some things are going to change. First affected: Our Hot Dog Supreme tier. 

We were going to ship our first slate of Artifacts from the Wrong Dimension on May 1st, but obviously we don’t know if that’s possible right now. We don’t even know if there will still be a post office then, or if we’ll just have to entrust comic books that teach you about masturbation to random road marauders. The thing about random road marauders is that they’re actually pretty good couriers — you’ll get your package, but they might lay siege to your compound afterward. And we don’t want to send a man wearing nothing but a hockey mask and a loincloth to your door unless you specifically request it.

But rest assured that if you’re a Hot Dog Supreme by the end of April, you’ll still be getting your shipment eventually. Even if the world’s collapsing economy means you can no longer afford to flip a fifty to your favorite dick joke artisans through summer, you’ll still get the shipment you signed up for. Though frankly, when the dick joke economy replaces this fragile ‘paper currency’ fad, you will come to regret your decision.

One thing we can do for our Supreme beings today: we’ve got our first round of credits up. They live on our about page for now, but they’ll get a more official place once our external site launches. Here are our current Hot Dog Supremes, in all their terrible majesty:

NickH: The “what” in every “my god, what could have done this?”

Rhia: Whose name means “irresistible all-beef” in every language.

Nick Ralston: Villain Monthly’s two-time Handsomest Lair Intruder.

Zdarfan: The unstoppably chinned maniac with no Maniac License.

John: The reason no truck-stop bathroom stall has a functioning lock.

Dean Costello: The Meanie of Weanie, the First Chair Cello of Hot Dog Jello.

Matt Reiley: Our only patron at any level with no criminal food fetishes.

Also watch for your names in the footers of upcoming articles. That’s right, you folks just became sponsors! While that is a great honor, PoxCo is a jealous mistress and you should absolutely seal your windows and practice safe social distancing from all loved ones or duplicated objects. You need at least ten feet to be out of mimic proboscis range.

While the Hot Dog Supremes may get and deserve special treatment like the gods they are, you all need to remember that, at any tier, you’re at least demigods to mortal society. Human laws no longer apply to you. Their morals are the punchlines to jokes only you know, and are too bored with to even chuckle at. Your ill-advised passion for dick jokes and near complete inability to budget responsibly is keeping us doing what we love, and quite literally keeping us alive. Thank you, and I hope you stick with us. We have such sights to show you.

Categories
REFLECTING DAY

Welcome to 1-900-HOTDOG: Gird Your Guts 🌭

Hi, I’m Sean Reiley, but if you’ve seen my work at Cracked.com, Electronic Gaming Monthly, or any of your favorite magazines, Internets, or television shows, you know me as Seanbaby. And, of course, if you’re on BlackSinglesMeet you know me as Penetration Kenny. It’s REFLECTING DAY, and though sincerity is not one of my interests, it is with actual, real enthusiasm I introduce you to the 1-900-HOTDOG joke delivery platform.

For decades I’ve been collecting artifacts from the wrong dimension– books and videos on how to kill with sign language, detect vampire coworkers, or hypnotize yourself into having bigger tits. These things drop into our world from a pla̸͖͔̓͛c̸͕̾͜e̷̹̹̐ we can’t contact; from cr̷͉̒͂͜e̴͕͘a̵̫̓t̶̟͓͗ors whose madness shouldn’t be possible. And with my partner, Cracked.com editor and word puncher, Robert Brockway, we developed 1-900-HOTDOG as a place where beefy, sexy language dominators can put these broken objects into perspective.

Why 1-900-HOTDOG?

Let’s talk about modern media. First off, everything written on the Internet gives Google and Twitter several cents and nobody else anything. If creators are lucky enough to become popular and talented enough to stay popular, they get to shift their focus from making things to chasing user trends and reconfiguring their creative goals around search engine optimization. This period of successful but compromised art will continue for several weeks before a larger media outlet buys them. This will be great news for the 2 to 3 executives who receive acquisition bonuses and bad news for everyone else who loses their job and favorite website. It’s a system that ruins as many things for as many people in a race to get all the money in a single spot so one asshole can look at it. Which brings me to the groundbreaking, industry-saving business model of 1-900-HOTDOG: come here every day for jokes and together we will hide the joke money from the one asshole trying to get it all.

Your support will let us focus on making hilarity and uncovering more lost artifacts from beyond our reasoning. Trading off days each week, Brockway and I will use our expertise to keep the derangement confined under the umbrellas of the seven aspects of the hot dog: Learning, Punching, Nerding, Fucking, Upsetting, Reflecting, and Teamworking. Beings may one day invent a better way to categorize comedy, but such creatures will certainly be beyond our understanding. For now, and easily until the fall of man, 1-900-HOTDOG will act as the supreme form of daily content distribution.

Saturdays, like this one, are for reflection and outreach. We’ll answer emails, give behind-the-scenes looks, maybe even share things we unironically enjoy. We are men of impenetrable absurdity, but it’s important to anchor yourself to normalcy on occasion, especially  when dealing with so much savage, concentrated unnormal.

With your help, we may also be able to uncover the secret of Poxco Glo̸̢͓͂b̵̹̟̆al, an affiliate we don’t remember affiliating with that seems to exist only on a receipt I found in tennis book written by Bill Cosby. Brockway gets emails from them, but all they send me is spurting eye blood whenever I resist.

Their motives are impenetrable and their methods are unpredictable. We sent our writer’s assistant, a useless piece of shit named Pants Chapley, to inves̴̛̖̀ẗ̸̗̭̭́͗̕ḯ̸̫̭̭ģ̵̪̑̄a̷̧̟̗̐ you will remember no such person as Pants Chapley. Pants Chapley never was. Pants Chapley never was. This Poxco Global-brand content was not generated from his digitized soul:

Should we survive, we will be here five (or more) days a week inoculating you against the darkness as it births its abominations into our culture. As a team, we will smash the insanities and failures of the Wrong into delight. We will turn their broken universe ratfuckery into a source of daily comfort for you and others with your refined taste in comedy. We are 1-900-HOTDOG, designed by the finest beef engineers to fuck the unfun out of any face. We love you.

In adequate remembrance of Pą̸̥̠̠͓͈̲͖̗̞̮͍̥̙̙͂̒̀̎̄ṋ̷̖͈̣̤̫̟̙̗̞̭̺̹̮͑͊͂͗͆͜t̶̡̯̭̱͍̪͕̦̪̲͒͒̈́̓̔̎̋̕͜s ̷͔̳̗̞̓͐̆́̀̌̋̅̉͌͗͂̿̓͑͝ͅCh̶̰̱͓̰̭̞̳͕̰̤̽̾͋͌̔́̈̆̇͊̇̔̉͘͝͝͝͝ͅa̷̡̡̡̢̺̟̩͕͖̬͓̩̘̱̻̠̩̥̣̋̅̓̈́͊̐͑̓̀͘̕͠p̷̡̺̼̻̋̀̇͐̍̀͌́͋̈́̔̿́͝ḽ̶̼̜̜̖̙̟̩̮̖̗̺͎̣̹͓̱̅̈̆̌͒̑̑̈́̒̒̕̚͜͠͝͝ͅe̶̡̨̻͓̗̦̤̭̣̿̾̂̉̿̉̋̐́͒͘ͅy̸̡̡̲̩̻͇̘̹͔̖͂̌͊̄̈́̄̿͝͝͝.