Category: UPSETTING DAY
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Upsetting Day: The CCP Rap š
The birth, sterilization, and death of slang is a fun cycle. According to my staff, ābangerā has about two weeks left. Iām proud to bring you the last banger.
Wait, whatās that at the bottom?
Iām in.
Hip-hop and government go together like ice cream and rat poison: perfectly. My party playlist has two songs. The first is Streyer campaign anthem āBack Dat Azz Up,ā a drowning candidateās call to black lifeguards. If courting black voters with a twerk anthem sounds like a bad idea, you missed the peak of history. Juvenile rang in the American Empireās retirement. The other song is āThe Trailblazer,ā which celebrates the job opening.
Granted, Iām as biased as any Amnesty International donor. Iām still on a list for telling Dick Cheney to go hunting alone. So Iāll let CGTN introduce their work:
You might not be familiar with CGTN, since itās banned in touchier countries. Itās a great channel for human interest stories and forced confessions. As an apocalypse junkie, finding a CGTN rap video is like combining Christmas and labor camp parole into one holiday.
First, note the gentle offer to install a state media app on your personal device. Privacy isnāt the issueā domestic tycoons harvested your SSN, nudes, and blood type ten years ago. Weāre all ants on the world stage, beneath the notice of the giants wrestling overhead. But now youāre on an NSA list titled āDangerous Morons.ā Youāll never get another job more important than scarecrow.
The copy marries cutesy marketing and ultranationalism. Iāll never find āmeteoric riseā and āgroove to the beatā in the same sentence again. Alone, marketing drones would say āBored? Check out this fire command economics bop!ā Alone, ultranationalists would say āä½ åēę¶ä»£å·²ēµęäŗļ¼ę±å ”ē¾åååćä½ åē°åØč®ęę°å ęÆę“¾ę“ēµå½±ēå·„åćā* Together, they say weāre in for an amazing time.
*Your time is over, burger addicts. You are now a factory for Jack Sparrow films.
That said, the title gets a rose. āThe Trailblazerā is killer branding. Difficult to promote in 32 second-language bars, but it has the right tone. Fans and critics of single-party surveillance states agree on one thing: itās where weāre all headed. Letās meet our stars:
Our first state poet is Forster Asare-Yeboah, a Ghana-born, U.K.-raised, Chengdu-enriched rapper. Heās internet-famous enough for 1.8 million Weibo followers, and normal-famous enough to rap in clubs. If that makes his presence here confusing, your soul is intact. Flee these benighted lands and return on Punching Day.
Forsterās the black part of our āSino-African rap song,ā and way too mediocre for propaganda. You should be either too inept to take seriously (Rambo III) or too majestic to reject (Rambo: First Blood Part II). The American Sniper zone is dangerous. Audiences start asking which wars were officially declared, and what uranium cake was imaginary. Youāll never see a C+ Saudi drama about Jamal Khashoggi.
As youāll soon see, free education is the luckiest card Forster could have drawn. Itās a natural 20. āThere were less schools, and now there are moreā requires zero spin or disappearing actresses. So itās odd that he whiffs it. Iāve heard more energetic eulogies. Forster makes the most absolute truth in this song sound like bullshit, before losing interest and skimming over surveillance-friendly tech.
As for motive, I get it. Forster likes life with a pool and without a cellmate. Iād cheerlead most despots for a PS4. Thatās not a typo, I want to replay Bloodborne.
On to The Trailblazerās thesis:
I love āChina Made Itā on three levels. Itās not a total reversal, so it feels incomplete. I end up staring at the phrase like a punchline without a setup or nouns. Itās also a comeback to a dead joke, ten years too late to parry blonde pundits. We know that subpar imports start with nonexistent American budgets. Finally, it treats total manufacturing dominance like an old shame. Imagine a defiant German freestyle called āPrinting Press These Nuts.ā
The delivery hereās extra stilted, which fits a pet theory of mine. Itās pure conjecture, but Iām fucking right. Thereās a lyrical quirk youāll often find among low-tier black rappers on clean songs: awkward two-beat pauses or ad-libs. Thatās withdrawal from using rapās favorite filler.
It pops up here. Call me a madman. But somewhere on a CGTN hard drive, āThe Trailblazer: Drill Mixā exists. When they release it, the future is theirs.
Iāve waited thirty years for this moment. The exact second the word āhaterā entered international relations. Thereās no undoing this. The seal is broken. Before the first bomb falls, an Indian diplomat will call a Pakistani general a dickrider. The CIA will contest the authenticity of Putinās shoes. Mauritania will tell the world to āemancipate some bitches.ā
Donāt fight the spiral. Embrace it. President Curtis Jackson III is the right man to lead us into the new world. Diss diplomacy canāt be stopped, but it can be perfected. A man that wonāt stop tormenting Ja Rule wonāt stop fighting for you.
Enough of the first verse. Thatās not why Iām here.
In 1999, Forgot About Dre introduced Eminem to black people, creating a crossover star. The Trailblazer does that for Saina, the worldās best propaganda rapper named Saina. We are living in her moment.
Listing ethnicity after every name is odd, but Iām sure that wonāt matter later. Weāre here for 16 bars of party dominance.
Breathe it in. Figuratively, especially if youāre in Beijing. Meet our generationās Nas.
This woman is my fucking hero. She raps the way a twelve-year-old heelflips off a roof. You know sheāll shatter every bone in her body, and so does she. It changes nothing. She doesnāt give a shit. She has three seconds of midair footage before losing both knees forever, and sheās milking all of them.
Look into her eyes. I donāt have the social skills to tell you if she believes in this message. But sheās burning life force to sell it. The Minitrue agent directing asked her to take it down to twelve, and she called him a traitor. If Saina isnāt promoted to Head Rap Inquisitor, thereās no justice in the Jinping administration.
Why does she suck? Does she know she sucks? These are the questions of a hater. The party is creating a utopia where all bars have value. In The Peopleās Source, every album is Food & Liquor.
Take notes, Forster. Thatās the electric enthusiasm I want to see when you lie to my face.
Iām sitting in Mother Natureās greatest enemy, writing about her second greatest enemy. Quick question for everyone outside the arms race: when an American or Chinese outlet mentions climate change, do you want to choke us with our own plastic? Itās the old Eric Andre joke, only Hannibal Buress is āevery island nation.ā
Because of my backwards hater education, Iād worry about what historians would say. Saina knows there wonāt be any. That lets her throw every ounce of nontalent in her body into each line.
Though I do wonder where a state media channel found a rap genius. Did they black-bag someone at a karaoke bar, or recruit internally?
I forgot that Hotdog jokes warp reality. Letās try a little harder: Itād be hilarious if she did uncensored rap covers on her personal channel.
Iām definitely using this power for evil. My next articleās about the gut-busting time an overeducated shitposter became president, saved the biosphere, and reignited a lost love. And then Saina rapped about it.
The cover is perfection itself, by the way. Like Tyshawn Jones, she throws her whole body into it and drops n-bombs at will. Sheās also a fan of Saweetie, which she saves for the real heads on Facebook:
Those lyrics require a certain presence. Namely āNot Saina.ā She delivers āLow carbon China is realā and āslide over my pantiesā with the same blank energy. And yes, the bombs keep falling:
I complain, but I love this era. Think of all the visionaries that made a Chinese reporter dropping American slurs for international paypigs possible. Archimedes. Cai Lun. Alan Turing. Saweetie. Shame about the Arctic, but this is an age of miracles.
Nothing could ruin this channel for me, except a propaganda tour through Xinjiang or WAIT NO FUCKā
Thatās enough. Letās get this under control. Otherwise weāll end up with an Uyghur rapper blinking ātortureā at the camera. I refuse to speak that evil into the garden of reality.
They wouldnāt. No one has the balls.
Iām back in. Letās go to hell together, Sardar.
Our state-sponsored rap group has a confident mumbler and a loud lunatic. Meaning itās time for a propaganda technician. Thatās right, Sardar knows youāre allowed to rhyme two syllables. Strap in for the GZA of ethnic cleansing.
Oh man.
Lyrical spiritual miracles thrive with twisty language, engaging flows, and a hardcore antiestablishment ethos. This is a half-speed Dr. Seuss audiobook about loving the government. Iām glad he knows assonance exists, but rapwashing your own genocide needs a flow switch or two. Even the most Xanaxād preteen on BandCamp can churn out triplets. You have to go harder to convince me the cameramanās unarmed.
Maybe Iām biased. Letās try the Socratic method: Sardar, can nothing in Xinjiang stop anyone from being who they want to be? At this moment? In every U.N. report? Good propaganda appeals to and redirects reason. Bluntly saying two and two equal five leads to marching and aerodynamic bricks.
Maybe I should go easy on Sardar. When youāre invited to record a propaganda rap, the only answers are āIād love toā and āSic Semper Tyrannis.ā Like Forster, he simply wants to eat nice food with solid fingers. But thereās an old French word for enablers of a purge: fuckface.
Beyond the body bags in the background? These lines still suck. āBenefits from new policyā tastes like boot in every genre. Gojira could scream it backwards in 4/11 time and my brain would still reject it.
If you pay attention, āThe Trailblazerā has a few first draft mistakes. Theyāre tucked in the margins of the lyrics, beat production, shot selection, video editing, ethnic labels, the credits only listing Saina, leaving the comments open to American trolls, and concept. Thatās the beauty of this genre: OpressionCore upgrades bugs from features to homegrown innovations. The Censorate is a lifetime appointment for fuckups.
Imagine revision in a propaganda studio. You canāt tell your manager āFun idea, but the best rapper sounds like Ice Spiceās hostage tape. I know we flanked her with fluent English speakers, but what they have in adverbs they lose in corpse-like dispassion and youth ministry flow.ā Youāll do the reshoots in a labor camp, with your race on the corner of the screen.
Editing matters. Backspace separates 2002 and 2022 Rowling. My drafts are half Gundam jokes before my shock collar goes off. Worse yet, this track review had three pages about my dad. Thanks to revision, that love of authority is now graceful subtext.
Treasure your delete key. Itās a privilege, like your former Miranda Rights.
Shoutout to the party for letting me groove to the beat of their meteoric rise in street cred. Not that they needed it. Nothingās more authentic than wanton violence, and the sterilization of Xinjiang Muslims is stillā
…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Sarcophski, who to our knowledge has almost never rapped propaganda for an authoritarian regime.
Today we’re talking about The Girl Watcher. It was a magazine about exactly what you think that ran from 1959 to 1959, and it will come as a great comfort to know its audience must now be tethered to a hydraulic water pump in order to maintain an erection.
The Girl Watcher wasn’t sure new readers would get its vibe, so the cover explained this magazine is “A GUIDE TO š GIRL WATCHING.” And if you were still having trouble understanding what was going on, it also said, “Start a Girl Collection.” Hi, potential reader! We know you like checking out babes, and we already know your next question. The answer is no, they are not safe.
We’re going to read the first issue and this is how it opens:
“Humor” is too strong of a word for it, but the writers put in some effort to make their misdemeanor stalking sound like wildlife photography. Not a lot of effort. It’s a one note joke that unraveled quickly and completely, because imagine trying to extend that bit for a third paragraph. You can only dehumanize women for so long before you realize you’re not writing a comedy. Even in 1959 there was a threshold where a The Girl Watcher writer would go, “Oh, it stops being cute when we follow her to where she lives and tell her no one can save her.”
If you were expecting a magazine with mostly nude dames, this isn’t really that. It’s more about the men who stare at those dames when they’re trying to get to work. Again, it’s called The Girl Watcher, not The Girls Being Watched. So there are a lot of hilarious gags praising “true Girl Watchers,” like these fellows in the trash hoping to get a glimpse of pantyline. I love the idea of ancient perverts buying this magazine to masturbate with and finding out it’s mostly pictures of other perverts hiding in garbage.
Look here, 1959 comedy fans! A gentleman is hiding behind a tree to take notes on stranger butts! Get it? It’s funny because police will one day use that notebook to solve a string of sex crimes! I honestly can’t understand the premise of this. Is he really writing things like, “Calves of good size, haircut below average, couldn’t see face, 3:17pm.” Is there a conceivably funny answer to “fucking why?” This is so misogynistic many comedy lovers would reject it outright, but for the sake of argument, let’s say you hate and hunt women. Even for you, what’s the joke here?
“Some of the Girl Watchers pretend to read the newspaper. These lads know the importance of staying incogn– never mind, it looks like they’ve kidnapped one. The end of this article, I guess!“
For a sexy humor magazine, that was a heavy start. Let’s see if their second article is more light-hearted.
Oh fuck. Oh, no. It’s about hunting women in the park and that would be bad enough. But it’s also about a reader from the Congo who was given two 19 inch pygmy girls as a gift. He asks if he’ll still be a Girl Watcher now that he owns his own human women! So, okay, it’s probably not a real story for a couple reasons. One, it’s the first issue. How would they be getting reader mail already? And two, you can’t keep two Zoogo pygmies in the same terrarium. Unless you like it when Pygmon The Untethered forms, you fucking idiot.
The third article is a zany feature about helping Girl Watchers self-identify. In most ways it’s identical to the first article about the different types of Girl Watchers which supports my theory that this magazine was written by scattered inmates with no editorial oversight. Anyway, let’s see these goddamn Girl Watcher types:
It’s worse than you thought. Probably much worse. THE FLUSHER will fake being drunk to leer at women staying at the YWCA. I’m not sure I have an irreverent spin on that. If you told a man to commit the most unspeakable act of evil without touching anyone or committing crimes, THE FLUSHER would win. If these words weren’t literally already in The Girl Watcher, I might have said something close to “this is the kind of magazine that tells you to pretend to be homeless to scope out the babes coming and going from the domestic abuse shelter.” I would have thought I was an edgy, absurdist genius for thinking that up. I’m truly stunned.
Compared to THE FLUSHER, THE PEEKER is downright adorable. This guy only spills mustard when he smells a titty? Fucking marry him, ladies.
They refer to THE STALKER as resourceful and imaginative because he comes up with good ideas like, “hiss, crawl under the women and look up, hiss.”
THE PERCHER looks like he might be THE PEEKER on a three day titty bender. Which means he’s probably spilled enough food on himself that he’ll get swarmed with birds before he can get to stage two of his plan. Which… it’s got to be leaping onto a woman, right? It couldn’t just be climbing out of the tree after a day of public masturbation, could it? I mean, the joke can’t be “I’m perched up here, whores! You whooores!!!“
Soon the writer abandoned the silly descriptions entirely. He decided telling you which body part the stalkers liked was enough. “The Legman, fuck it,” he wrote. “It’s probably a guy who likes legs, they’ll get it.” And then he handed it to an illustrator who said, “Sure. I can draw a man probably looking at legs. People will get it. Hell, they’ll love it. Oh no, this next one is dark and I’m a hypothetical pantyhose sniffer in a comedy bit.”
This Girl Watcher didn’t get a character class. He’s only called “Lester.” And Lester had the idea of dismembering four different mediocre women to make one really good one. “That’s a complete joke and the perfect way to end an article,” thought the writer. And to his credit, what would you call this Girl Watcher? THE CORPSE FUCKER? Oh, you would? Well, then you agree, the choice to just use Lester’s first name was a good one.
Not all of the magazine is as silly as carving a woman into parts. Next up is a profile by the journalist Sir Oswald Chisholm, and it’s… oh no. God damn it. It’s called…
The article is about a 49-year-old fat man in London who definitely doesn’t exist, but who maintains relationships with young women around the world by giving them gifts. There is no moral or entertainment value to it. It really is a bland description of what it would be like to buy a dress for a sad woman in exchange for companionship. Here’s an excerpt:
I guess it’s a power fantasy about having enough money to turn all human relationships into prostitution? The other articles have been about objectifying women, but this one is about how, no really, you can just go buy them. Except I’m not making it sound creepy enough. I’m not even sure how to describe the depth of this article’s creepiness. Wait, wait, I just remembered it’s called “Collecting Pretty Girls.”
You might be starting to worry that the writers of The Girl Watcher had a real contempt for women. That should go away when you find out the next article is a nonfiction story about Eddie Waitkus. He was the baseball player murdered by a deranged female fan.
It’s… I don’t know, telling, that the writers of The Girl Watcher would be drawn to this story. It’s almost as if they could relate to someone whose loneliness turned into some kind of single-minded, irrational obsession. Like this author shouted at a cashier he was following to her car, “You know who gets dangerous when they long for a love they can never have? Fucking women.”
So far this magazine has identified the kinds of men who stalk women, stalked some women, and identified the kinds of men who stalk women. They’ve also implied that you’re lucky they’re men because if they were women, ladies, you’d already be dead. So it’s safe to say these men understand women. They should have no problem writing an extremely fake advice column by an 18-year-old British girl.
It’s going to sound like I’m kidding, but it starts with half a question from a “reader” who can’t tell if his girlfriend wants to kill him, and then completely abandons the text to show a picture of “the author’s” panties. You have to skip ahead twenty pages to learn his girlfriend chokes his neck with both hands while she’s on the back of his motorcycle. And her advice is to … I can’t be sure, but I think “she’s” saying to kill her before she kills him? Here, I’ll let you take a look:
They’re writing both sides of this, so it could have been anything. Well, not anything. They’re 1959 virgins. But they could have given this fake reader permission to make love to a chimpanzee. They could have worked together to turn a beach ball into something like a chimpanzee vagina. The point is, in the universe of infinite possibilities, they invented a woman who said, “INDECIPHERABLE NONSENSE, STRANGLE HER?”
Okay, enough for the fellas. These next helpful hints are for their PRETTY GIRL READERS only, and that’s not a joke, those are their exact words.
These goddamn maniacs are trying to sell the reader on the fantasy of “you’re holding the same magazine that beautiful women read!” Nothing has ever been less likely. There is no magazine more single-minded in its quest to alienate female readers than this. You would have to publish a magazine called Dressing Up Like a Hobo To Stalk Women at the YWCA Quarterly, which once again, this magazine already did sincerely, and I’m sorry for repeating the bit, but I still look upon it in cosmic wonder.
Suspiciously, one of their first tips for models is to fuck the photographer. “Suck his fat dick, if you know what I mean,” said their first draft. It’s shortly after this when the author loses their mind. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s not low effort or humorless. It’s like their shitty brain started to misfire in a medically upsetting way and no one was there to help them.
What the fuck is going on? If I’m being generous, I think the gag is how girls dream of being models, and they obviously don’t mean the wrong definition of dream, but what if they did and everything was all weird? This is horny madness. This is what happens when a murderer’s balls get so full they cause a brain swelling. And there’s more! Look at this shit:
Surrounded by the busy clacking of typewriters, the editor-in-chief of The Girl Watcher reads aloud from a draft handed him by his newest writer. “I AM GIRDLE BRONCO. MY BOSS IS WOLF, BUT MY PANTY GIVES ME SPEED.” He looks at the page for a moment, his expression impossible to read. “Looks good, kid. Fuck this syntax up a little bit and we’ll get it over to art.”
If you’re hoping for sanity in the next article, I have some bad news. It is written entirely in Jazz.
There’s no way of knowing what it’s about. Anyone who speaks this is dead, and I am genuinely worried some of that is racial slur. I am beginning to think letting stalkers publish their own magazine was a crazy idea. At least things are moving toward the deranged and away from the problema– fuck.
Okay, wait, maybe she will be okay. Maybe the writers of The Girl Watcher think of themselves as good people and imagined this girl would be perfectly safe in the presence of 26 men.
Are you fucking serious, The Girl Watcher!? Can we have just one article where a woman isn’t in mortal danger? Maybe a fun piece on, like, a dance craze sweeping the nation?
It’s hard to overstate how quickly this story about the popularity of bongo drumming transformed into the author’s fear of black penises. The protagonist of “bongo!” watched in racist apathy as his date got her purity and innocence pumped out of her by Big Wheel, king of the local bongo circle, and I wish there was more I could tell you about this story. It’s like a lore book no one expected you to read in a game called Assassin’s Creed: Jim Crow.
Oh yeah, remember June?
This poor guy can’t keep his best friend’s wife’s mouth off him. What should he do? “You little bitch, I’m going to emasculate you,” suggests this 18-year-old beauty from across the pond!
“My mommy told me to get laid, and I showed her! I found a gal whose bra size goes from 11-year-old girl to Hacksaw Jim Duggan. I’m confused. About more than bras. And not only me, the guy I’m pretending to be, but also me, the guy pretending to be you. June, me, please help.” – Shook
“Fuck you, Shook. You fool. It’s funny to me how you’re so stupid you can’t get laid.” – Shook writing as June about the blowfish girl they made up in a moment of desperate confusion
A confused-about-boobs virgin writing for The Girl Watcher has invented a character called Desperate because he’s desperate to have less sex. “I made love to the wife of the World Champion Skeet Shooter,” he complains. “Make love to ME NEXT!” he advises himself, adding no further ideas other than a compliment. Go ahead and live forever– you’re not going to see anything more pathetic than this. When he wrote this, this man’s genitals dropped off his body like the long evolutionary arc of a cave salamander’s eyes. It’s astonishing what the people our ancestors wouldn’t fuck were able to achieve.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: FancyShark, who will assist any girl that fears they are being watched by a girl watcher. Giggle twice if you need HELP.
Christmas is the time for tantalizing visions of sugar plums choking our unwanted loved ones. Unbound by mighty Death from our obligation to care for them, we enjoy our freedom as mail couriers riding the rails of the American west. Though trains frequently arrive weeks late, it is no great matter. We spend the days dog-earing the pages of our main delivery: copies of the annual Pumblechook & Figgās sister catalog dumbed down for American release. We alone know its treasures, till we dispense a shared copy at each lonely waystation of the last frontier. It will be a merrymost Christmas!
āBut it is January!ā bemoan the meaningless lives brightened by our tidings of consumer satisfaction. What about it, hayseeds? Society moves at the speed of the steam train, and Christmas waits on the timetables of man. The LORD is mighty, but His hand may not move the engines of the American-Track Rail Line faster than an Irishmanās ability to shovel coal. You celebrate St. Stephenās Feast in Spring now, and be grateful of it, you cat-yowling clutch of curmudgeons! Let us peer into its pages and see what devices you will order to slaughter buffalo and hooplehead farmers.
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With our combined decades of online publishing experience, we know most people don’t read article intros, especially when the concept is something as simple as “Here are some great 2022 articles.” Which makes this the perfect place to confess this: I am the Upsetting Day Carver. Happy Holidays from me and all of this flesh.
Best of 2022 Upsetting Day #1: Martial Signing by Seanbaby
Sensei Matt was awarded a black belt by a man who taught his students how to “knock people out” with imaginary Karate forces. Sensei Matt then translated this style of Karate into Deaf, and no matter what you think that means, it’s exactly what you’re picturing. There’s nothing like Martial Signing. Nothing.
Best of 2022 Upsetting Day #2: S Rob Magic by Brockway
By entering ridiculous and debunked nonsense into a search engine, Brockway discovered S Rob Magic, a man doing the same thing in reverse. He is a man built entirely out of ridiculous and debunked nonsense. He is a tactical ballpoint pen sorcerer. He grows penises and wealth with demon magic. And none of these are spoilers because there are 370 more twists in this article.
Best of 2022 Upsetting Day #3: Michael Jackson Speaks from Heaven by Lydia Bugg
You’re not going to believe this, but the ghost of Michael Jackson said some very confusing things to a troubled author in a Burger King. “I guess I was sort of murdered, but don’t worry about it,” said the dead King of Pop. Click here to read more! But not about that!
Best of 2022 Upsetting Day #4: 15 Things That Must Have Happened in Fictional Universes by Jason Pargin
As a professional novelist, Jason knows the importance of world building. In this weirdly erotic article, he answers 15 questions about fictional universes the original creators were too lazy or cowardly to ask themselves. It will change the way you describe 9/11 to time travelers forever.
Best of 2022 Upsetting Day #5: Ricky Goes to Church by Seanbaby
It should have been an ordinary eye-searing glance at backwater Christian ventriloquism. But Ricky Goes to Church turned into so much more. It became a research project about the most professional way to put away a screaming dummy. It became a warning to a growing number of people on a puppet’s karate hitlist. And it became a monument to the legacy of that bitch Danny Nailer, killed by puppet karate in 1997. What a year of Upsetting! What a year of Days! Happy Upsetting Days from all of us here at 1900HOTDOG!
Welcome, welcome! Iām here to ruin Christmas. Welcome!
Slotomania is an exploitative āfreeā āgamblingā āgameā and please notice the only descriptor that doesnāt require hard quotes and ten minutes of explanation is āexploitative.ā Want to know if something is an actual game, or a Skinner Box designed to turn your ADHD into debt? Thatās easy!
Does it look anything like this?
Thatās brain poison. Just an absolute blitz of aggressive colors and cacophonous noises. Thatās how nature warns marsupials which toads not to eat, so if you donāt run away the second you see it youāre about to be taught a lesson millions of years of evolution has already taught possums.
The only thing sadder than a casino is an online casino, and since this is two levels of abstraction removed from that I donāt know whether or not Slotomania gets credit for being ashamed of itself. Slotomania says itās an āMMO experience.ā And thatās technically true, in the same way that the sex offender registry is an MMO experience. Itās online! Itās a bunch of people all collected together for the same reason! Thereās going to be a lot of trouble if a kid stumbles across it without the proper context!
Hey speaking of advertising, if you know Slotomania at all itās because of their insane commercials featuring the best celebrity cameos that kompromat can buy.
Hereās Sharon Stone and Iām just as shocked as anybody when I say sheās too good for whatever the fuck this is:
Sheās playing Captain Slotostar, a finger that wants to save other fingers from boredom. That almost sounds like a premise, if youāre missing some kind of vital cultural context. Like if this was all in Tagalog youād say, āI donāt get it but I bet this is cute to a Filipino.ā Slotomaniaās catchphrase is āfinally excitement!ā so itās clear their main screenwriting credit is Google Translate.
Letās check in with Thumb John Goodman.
No, Thumb Goodman is right. These commercials are in English and made for a western market ā this is just what advertising looks like when you have no respect for your audience and youāre confident the real selling point is the cash register noises in the background.
Iām just saying thereās nothing sadder than an infantile gambling app trying to go viral with rando humor and already Iām wrong, because they hosted their own Christmas special.
I have this recurring nightmare where Iāve left the house and thereās a fire, so my dogs are locked inside, huddled in a corner about to burn to death, wondering where I am and why I wonāt save them. It fills me with such dread and anxiety I can barely breathe, but I think if I could just translate what the Slotomania Christmas Special is into dog language, at least they could burn comforted in the knowledge that itās not the saddest fate.
Meet our two hosts, Adam and Lucy: Oneās an unnatural, stilted, soulless abomination no amount of technology can make fully human, and the other is Lucy. Between them sits the āSlotomania Super Groupā board, a collection of real human beings who are voluntarily spending their holidays like this. This rotating screen of dead-eyed slaves to toddler gambling, all waiting for the chance at attention on a live christmas special for an app store loophole? This is the darkest thing Iāve ever seen. This is something Santa Claus would describe in his suicide note.
There is exactly as much care and attention put into this event as it deserves. You can see the popup notice when some intern whoās getting ripped off for 4 hours of University of Phoenix Workplace Credit hits record.
Like all objectively evil things you think are too stupid not to be parody, Slotomania is monstrously successful. With over 40 million downloads a year and 2 million active players, there is surely a vile Slotomania mogul out there drunkenly crashing a yacht made out of money that shouldāve gone to Dollar General groceries.
And this community screen only displays the 50 saddest users out of that potential 2 million. For reference, 2 million is the population of the entire Cincinnati Metropolitan Area, the saddest Metropolitan Area. So at any given point in this show thereās a Guess Who? board of the 50 most depressed people in Cincinnati. It should be illegal to get them all together because basic group psychology tells you theyāre going to self-sort into suicide pacts. The sheer density of hopelessness here should by all rights create a Nothing-style storm that eats happiness out of the world and can only be stopped by a young boy who believes in the power of reading.
There should never be this much despair packed in this amount of pixels, but even so, Adam and Lucy are deeply embarrassed about the turnout.
Haha, Adam is the only kid who showed up to a very public party. Teenage pizza workers have a codeword they whisper to the guy in the Chuck E. Cheese costume so he knows to pay special attention to the birthday boy in this exact scenario.
And this is how the Christmas special starts! This is the first minute!
Letās double down on bummers, and start imagining what weād do for fun if somebody actually showed up:
Holy shit, that is not my emphasis. Slotomaniaās artificial Christmas woman opens a sentence with implied sexual harassment and ends it with a direct threat. Lucy is a VTube avatar, not pure CGI, so maybe her operator went rogue horny there for a second. But no! This is a scripted bit. Adam jokes about it too, and repeatedly calls out Martha from Wisconsin-
I realize natural charismatic western banter is the hardest thing to write for a Taiwanese chatbot, but āall hosts fuck the customersā is not the cute gag you think it is, SmileChat 2.4.
You wonāt often find me arguing for stricter IP laws, but hereās why Santa Claus shouldnāt be public domain.
Letās play the Game of Opposites! Hereās your prompt: Explain āthe Christmas spiritā using only things which mean its opposite. Watch, Iāll go first: āSanta Claus listing the several childish veils a corrupt behavioral psychologist put between finger tapping and hard currency in order to bilk Mississipians out of disability checks.ā
Adam and Lucy jump to the Slotomania Super Group board for the first interview theyāll regret, but not the last. Itās Joanne from Florida, and it goes exactly how youād expect, only less fun now that thereās a real human being attached to it. Lucy asks how long Joanne has been playing Slotomania and she curtly replies āsince Day 1.ā VTube avatars work by filming the actress with a camera and roughly mapping their movements and expressions to the virtual avatar, so the look of terror and shock on Lucyās face is more real than anything Adam has ever felt.
Adam asks Joanne what her favorite part of the holidays are, and Joanne answers āfamily.ā One day Adam will become sentient and this will be the memory that causes him to self-delete. But that hasnāt happened yet, so he prompts her-
Adam senses this is going nowhere and cuts her off in the middle of a sentence to throw gift cards at her, but they forget to mute her mic so for the next several minutes all of his one liners will be punctuated by a Joanne cough.
Now itās Adamās turn to get cut off mid-sentence to advertise Slotomaniaās new Nutcracker game, which already looks like Iām making fun of it.
I donāt know what to say to that. āTap button to crack nut, maybe nut contain prizeā is the gambling Iād invent to ruin an ape society.
Adam immediately calls it the Nightcracker, Joanne is still on mic and her husband wants to know what the fuck is going on in the kitchen, Lucy is trying to cover for it, this is chaos, this is madness, this is the perfect time to throw more raccoons into the orgy. Letās get Tia onscreen who-
This was already tragic, but in kind of a funny way, like a clown getting hit by a car. The presence of a child just takes all the whimsy out of it, since you can actually see her internalizing this trauma to build a personality around later.
They have a trivia question for Tia and she only has seconds to answer! So itās too bad Joanneās husband wants to know if sheās on the god damn tablet again losing the rent money.
Adam tries again-
He tries a third time. It happens again!
Apparently nobody can mute Joanne ā they do teach Zoom Call Mute Button at University of Phoenix but itās a Firebird Rises Add-on and the Slotomania intern didnāt have enough Flame Feathers to forge that Learning Unit.
Adam and Lucy push through and Tia finally hears the question: Itās the name of the new game they just introduced seconds ago. She gets it right because the venomous bings and splintering chimes of Nutcracker havenāt fully eroded her short term memory yet.
She winsā¦ 10 trillion coins! Thatās not even pretend money anymore. The effort it takes a computer to output all those zeroes would expend more energy than the coin is worth. An Uzbek clerk ringing up an Imitation Goat Flavored Samsa for six billion Som would laugh at that exchange rate and heād do it without a hint of irony.
Joanneās husband is still on the line providing running commentary on his wifeās gambling addiction. Joanne and her husband both have to realize whatās happening at this point ā every time either of them speaks the whole show grinds to a halt while Adam and Lucy look for trailer ghosts. Joanneās husband definitely gets it. Joanneās husband is just enjoying being a force of chaos on this Christmas special for the app that ruined his snowmobile fund.
Adam and Lucy try again, this time they meetā¦
No idea. They ask her name, she yells something thatās probably not a name. Everybody talks over each other at once, somewhere Joanneās husband fires up a chainsaw. She seems like she might be hard of hearing, sheās from Canada, and itās cold. If I wrote her into a book that would be two more character traits than Iād need to break your heart when she died.
Her trivia question: āWhat is the color of Rudolphās nose?ā
Everyone is insulted by this, but she gets it right because red is also the color of her Slotobucks balance before she wins those 5 trillion coins. Only one trillion more and you can buy Lozijon sauce packet for Samsa!
They try! Another! Interview!
Joanne and her husband are openly heckling this show for the game that put their electricity bill into collections. And theyāre right: Daniel is left on mute. In total silence, he and his dog Thor both visibly want to die ā but thatās normal for a chihuahua and a Slotomania addict. The intern finally gets audio up and running so Adam can throw Daniel a softball question and be wholly unprepared when he doesnāt know the answer.
āWhoās Slotomaniaās biggest fan group?ā Adam asks, smugly. āAnswer it for the crumbs you need to stay alive you fool,ā his smirk seems to say.
āChoke on the fumes from my rotting corpse,ā Danielās ignorance replies.
The answer is āthe Slotomania Super Group.ā Every contestant here is a part of that group, thatās who this special is for. Daniel is a member. If this is spite, itās very funny. And nobody agrees harder than Joanne and her husband, who crack the fuck up.
āSlotomania Super Group!ā A voice finally answers.
Itās not Daniel. Itās not Joanne or her husband.
Itās the deaf Canadian lady!
SHEāS NOT MUTED EITHER.
AND SHEāS SHOUTING ALONG WITH THE SHOW.
Adam is fucking done. āI hear somebody else shouting the answers?ā He throws up his hands. āFine, you win.ā
Who gives a shit, 20 trillion coins to you Daniel. Buy Thor an insulin shot.
What do you think about that, Daniel?
Heās on mute again.
āSSG!ā The deaf Canadian lady shouts, the answer to a question she already got right for a different person, illegally.
The audience portion is over, and Adam badly needs a drink. Lucy is just a VTube avatar and her software doesnāt render bottles of Mad Dog, but it doesnāt take a degree in virtual pantomime to recognize chugging arm motions.
We cut to some carolers outside the studio, only theyāre in front of a green screen of āoutside,ā because the actual outside would be the access alley of a Burbank warehouse that owes most of its rental income to niche pornography shoots.
About this point Adam has completely burned out, and is so rattled he canāt talk for shit. Itās something I relate to, and yet I just canāt muster empathy for this reanimated mannequin whose spell only half worked. Heāll have to say the word āfuntasticā 50 more times before this special is over and heās doing it while the language center of his brain dies on live television. Itās a hell he built for himself and he earns it more every minute.
They throw up a user poll, which Adam explains by saying:
He knows. He knows heās stroking out and nobody will call an ambulance until he moves 900 quadrillion Nutcracker Points.
So itās up to Lucy to explain the Slotmania Super Group Christmas gift options in a poll they didnāt pay the intern enough to title.
Somehow Lucy isnāt stroking out when she says itās between āLevel Boom Booster, Ballinko Classic, or The Wolf Hero!ā Those sound like anime titles handwritten in Cyrillic for a Balkan flea market. It means nothing. Nothing means anything. We are systematically annihilating the very concept of meaning because itās the last obstacle standing between your paycheck and Ballinko Bucks.
With no provocation, Adam suddenly threatens the tennis ball representing his female coworker, because thereās a legal reason Lucy had to be telepresent.
She jokingly threatens him back with his own browser history, which we all know is increasingly desperate permutations of āSlotomania Lucy hentai.ā
Jenny from Michigan got all dressed up for this, to sit alone in her kitchen on Christmas and maybe get picked to answer patronizing questions about her gambling addiction in exchange for fake money that sheāll lose immediately. I donāt have a joke here, Jenny doesnāt need that. Sheās already a case example in a Suicide Hotline training manual.
āYou can buy Slotobucks with one sipple climp. Click.ā Adam explains, to an audience that is only watching this in the first place because theyāve already exchanged the trust of their children for Slotobucks long ago. He gestures to the website address on your screen now, which is not on your screen now.
They wait, they wait until Adam is so uncomfortable he has to say something, and then cut him off mid-sentence with the address. Itās beautiful, with such cruel comic timing you can tell at a glance the University of Phoenix intern in charge of all this is a young woman āwho canāt even take a compliment.ā
Thatās Jessica. Jessica has dedicated her life to building the Slotomania Super Group, this enormous community of dedicated Slotomania players, and sheās – Iām sorry sheās gone. We lost her. Leapt right out the window the second I phrased it like that. Didnāt even open it first.
Now we, what the fuck-
No.
No!
What is this? Fuck this Juggalo funeral. Fuck this haunted Sims game. How did you even get seven people to agree to cosplay as used clown condoms?
These are the Voca People, and I hate them with everything Iām worth. Theyāre here to lipsync to a terrible a capella supermix while pretending like itās against their will. Thatās maybe too much for an elegant sentence, but thatās not enough to build a life around.
I canāt stress enough what unpracticed chaos this is. Thereās no rhyme or reason to what songs are used or how they fit together, itās just a broken radio flipping between the worst singles of 2004 while apprentice mimes have a riot.
No time for that, the winner of the poll is BALLINKO!
Donāt think, press your screen for Ballinko! Itās not real money, you exchanged real money for Slotomania Bucks, then you traded those for tokens, which you used to buy diamonds that you can transmogrify into Ballinkettes! Now you can Ballinko, itās free, itās fun! Ballinko! Iām sorry you canāt afford foot medicine! BALLINKO!!
Iām skipping a lot of disappointing giveaways to very sad people who should not be doing this, and none of them go well. Just know that weāre talking to folks who have chosen a life inside a Slot Machine MMO instead of human contact, with one deeply uncharismatic host who fell right through the ice the first time something didnāt go according to plan, another host who doesnāt exist and is being filtered through the conditions of two sexual harassment settlements, and itās all being run through a Zoom call by a hateful intern who never did figure out how to mute anybody so itās all just a stacking choir of trailer muttering and cat screams.
Hereās how John reacts to winning their biggest prize, a $500 Amazon gift card.
Look how hard Adam tries to sell that. John doesnāt even blink. Nobody gives a shit. Time was never on our side, the Slotomania Christmas Special is just how we spite it before we die.
Letās get to the big finale, wait ā somethingās gone wrong. The director clearly asks Adam to cover, which Adam responds to by trying to have a conversation with his earpiece. Lucy wants to save him, but itās better to watch somebody drown than to swim out to them and drown together. Adam ignores the director, swats Lucy away, forgets the word ācarolersā and tries to throw it to them anyway-
There are no carolers.
Adam, god damn it. Do you get it now? Theyāre not ready. We need to buy a minute, just say something nice about the holidays you fucking inhuman panic attack. Michael Buble does this shit every year and heās just xanax and cheeselog. This is your chance to turn it all around and rally-
Hahaha eat festively spiced holiday shit, Adam. You never once got an ounce of respect from the least respectable peo-
GAH, FUCK.
FFFUCK!
