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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: S Rob Magic

We all have our problems. I used to take SSRIs until one day I realized I could google ā€œtactical + anythingā€ and turn my mood completely around. 

Don’t abuse this. When your brain chemistry mutinies and you find yourself thinking ā€œI’m not suicidal, but if I could be cryogenically frozen and then just never unthawedā€¦ā€ Well, then it’s time to google ā€œtactical barbells,ā€ expecting only bars with absurd grips and getting so much more. 

I’m serious. Save this for special occasions and use it in moderation. Just like ketamine and Chinese lithium mines, you might go in for a good time and give your entire life to that hole. There’s a very real danger that you’ll push this too far and start, say, Amazon searching subgenres of books for the word ā€œtactical.ā€

You are rapidly approaching the point of no return. Instead of a quick joy-zap to kickstart the broken lawnmower that is your brain, you’re about to lose a whole week to the comedic failures of toxic masculinity. Here, let’s redirect. My other favorite trick is to browse wacky Occult and Paranormal Books – sort by least popular, of course!

Under no circumstances should you combine these tips-

Did you feel a little twinge behind your ear? That was your brain destroying part of itself to make room for what’s about to come. I’m serious. 5th grade Social Studies – try to remember it. Nothing, right? It’s gone. Me too, I now think the Magna Carta is an anime robot because my brain napalmed one full square inch of itself when it saw Tactical Pen Occultism.

This can’t be exactly what it sounds like. Tactical pen guys are the biggest dorks of the military wannabe set, and that’s the most hotly contested category of dork outside Web 3.0. And pretend battle sorcerers are the least respectable magicians, way behind filthy Alan Moore fuck wizards, really only holding one spot above erotic hypnotists. So this can’t exist, it’s too perfect. This book cover is the exact photoshop I’d make to mock a Scott Adams tweet, it can’t be real. 

It’s real.

Haha this is the worst start to a book I’ve ever seen and God’s Debris by Scott Adams starts like this-

S Rob was given a chance to thank anybody who helped him with this book, in life, or just ever, even in an abstract fashion. He looked around, saw nobody and nothing, then thanked make-believe sorcery for being so generous. 

Wait, there’s also a dedication-

So he does have family! Maybe? Are… his parents named S Rob, too? This is amazing. We are two total sentences into this book and already the madness is impenetrable. Imagine being given the opportunity to thank your parents and saying ā€œI hope all me-names gain in power so they might multiply.ā€ Like best case scenario he’s hoping his family gets Jamie Madrox mutations, worst case he’s wishing himself success in starting a breeder cult.

There’s no way this is real. Tactical Pen Occultism is too much to ask for from the universe. And if it is real, it can’t be exactly as crazy as it sounds-

That…

That is some prime madness.

The biblical references, the mass repetition, this is an actual crazy person. I cannot in good conscience write this article unless this lunatic is also an incompetent grifter, so if you’re reading this – good news! I got there eventually.

Let’s get back to the book:

Oh! It’s more of this.

S Rob wrote four sentences about trying to gaslight a demon into thinking it already likes you, then did a find/replace on its name. I don’t know where the tactical pen part comes into this. I can only imagine he’s standing naked in his room air-stabbing his bullies with a Bic while shouting that nonsense.

I didn’t have to imagine it.

So real magic is just listening to heavy metal lyrics while shadow-fighting your imaginary enemies with household objects? If I’d known that I would’ve called myself a sorcerer in middle school and never learned those painful lessons about hiding enough dork shit to fit into polite society. 

Let’s skip ahead-

Oh no, is this it? This book was only ever 57 pages long. It was technically a grift on the grounds of format alone. It can’t really be four sentences with slight variations for 57 straight pages-

It’s the kind of unhelpful boilerplate spell you’d get by searching ā€˜magic’ with ā€˜Creative Commons licenses only’ checked. And then 56 variations on who does that spell and where it’s pointed. Yes, this is the book. The same thing repeated for each god and each part of the body you wish you were courageous enough to attack with a pen. By page 56 we’re asking the ancient Egyptian god of medicine to do foot stuff. 

God it’s perfect, it is two lunatic premises and the funniest weapon combined with brazen Amazon book scams. It’s the perfect Hot Dog artifact. I think it’s word for word the mission statement we started the site with.

Nobody could ask for more than this but holy shit there’s more than this??

There’s…. SO MUCH more of this.

S Rob is the Holy Grail. An internet tough guy magic maniac and sad Amazon grifter with a more prolific output than some entire languages. There are more S Rob books about mystical stabbings than there are Croatian language books about anything. 

This is already too much to ask for.

Let’s ask for more. 

Let’s… let’s click on his author bio. There’s no way it’s that easy. I have a lot of experience going dumpster diving in pop culture, and it’s always work to find the true gems. Every catalytic converter is buried beneath six loose diapers and a broken Furby stuck in attack mode. Nothing is easy, nobody ever looks inside themselves and says ā€œyes, if you’d like to know all the other ways I’m hilariously deranged, just go here!ā€ 

Except S Rob.

He just lists them. I’ve trained my whole life for this. I’m ready to track pseudonyms, delve into court records, hit the dark web to trade horse drugs for old screenshots from dead homepages and he just… lists them.

Right there in the Amazon author bio, he gives us his own webpage, his YouTube channel, his hold on IMDB credits?? His IMDB credits.

Ancient Alien Birdmen! (Short)!

When Dog Headed Men Attack! (Fucking Documentary Short)!

It’s like a broken SEO bot trying to warn the future about societal collapse. Magnificent.

This man’s very existence is doing me a personal favor. All of my instincts had me ready to deep stalk his life to find meager scraps of madness scattered across deleted social media accounts and he just, he just gave it all to me. I need to start a religion just so I can saint him. 

Well, he didn’t give it all. I guess, I guess I had to dig a little bit to find the Lulu account where he sells many, many, many other books about using pretend magic to do everything from conjuring chocolate to cheating a leprechaun, you can be a superhero, you can- 

What-what the fuck?

Dog-Headed Men again? That wasn’t a fluke? In a sea of inexplicability, I still managed to dash myself on the rocks of true insanity. I can’t even fathom what Dog-Headed Men Magick might be. I’m picturing a Final Fantasy-style summon that beckons the Dog Police. 

So that’s what this article is about now. I know it was about Goofy Tactical Products and then Tactical Occult Pen Battle Tactics and then, briefly, it was going to be about Ancient Alien Birdmen. God, remember when it was just about Ancient Alien Birdmen? What an innocent time that was, four paragraphs ago. But it’s this now, the article has to be about whatever the fuck Dog-Headed Men Magick is – unless I click over to one of these other tabs and find out it’s really about S Rob’s webstore where he sells freelance dick ensorcellment.

I can’t believe I caught ADHD from this article. I never realized it was contagious, much less self-inflicted.  

S Rob is truly a one-stop shop for bush wizardry, he’s like the Dollar General of mystic conmen – you can buy a wack version of anything, from the devil’s war-pen to a bigger cock and the sexy naked ghost to use it on. He’s a prolific grifter-shaman, which is my favorite type of liar mixed with my favorite type of drug addict.

But there’s something here I don’t understand. Like… beyond the several levels of incomprehension I’ve Inception-ed myself into already. On his website, S Rob also seems to sell DVDs of old movies that have nothing to do with him.

Let’s read that closer: ā€œS Rob performs a ritual to manifest the films?ā€ 

Is he selling these DVDs and just no longer has the language to explain that in a normal way? In the same way he would explain staying at home Friday nights to masturbate to Disney feet as ā€œinvite the Goofy to step through the gateway MAKE UP AND DOWN GROIN ATTACKING MOTION LIKE THISā€? 

Or is this a ritual to bring the movies to life, assuming somebody has always wanted to live in the lush universe of The Killer Shrews

Or is this a spell for YOU to follow along and manifest the physical DVDs in your living room, because the Wal-Mart bargain bin is all the way in the back of the store and you personally broke all the mobility scooters trying to turbo charge them with pen magic?

Are you paying to watch footage of S Rob doing a spell to create Attack of the Giant Leeches DVDs in his own room, or wait! It’s a spell to make the movies exist backwards through time and the fact that they do exist is proof it works! That has to be it. 

I guess he could just be using the framework of amateur magic to slip through some sort of copyright loophole, which holy shit, we’ve come so far that sounds like the boring answer.  

Good lord we haven’t even gotten to the YouTube channel.

Thank god, thank god he wears those sunglasses all the time. He looks like the Butterball Cenobite back when it was alive. And I’m so grateful for him cataloging every second of his existence. Look at that army of clones all trying to explain The Matrix to a frightened gym receptionist. Print that screenshot out, tack it to a circle and spin it: You just made an incel zoetrope.

There’s an entire series called S Rob Doorway where he just reviews books in a doorway, which is a quainter kind of crazy. But his editorial videos are a bit spicier, like ā€œKILL WITH MAGICā€ where he argues that because nobody believes magic is real, it’s legal to murder with it. 

That means we could – nay, must! – use internet spells to supernaturally execute pedophiles. Which he calls pedia-philes. I don’t know enough about regional British accents to know if that’s how they pronounce it. I feel like it’s not, but after what they did to ā€œaluminiumā€ I’m not willing to put money on that. Sure fucks with the YouTube captions though, which think this man is advocating for the psychic slaughter of baby doctors because nobody closed the UK wizard loophole. 

And we haven’t even gotten to the movie!

HE.

MADE.

A.


MOVIE.

This article is literally going to go on forever. I’m just going to keep typing and hit post whenever I pass out, then wake up tomorrow and do it all over again because I’ll never reach the end of it. This is our eternal dance, S Rob creates the madness and I mock it and he has a 50 year head start. But every race starts with one step- 

Hold on.

I see it now. This is a trap. This is too much. At every turn my wildest wishes have been granted with no resistance. This is one of those police scams where they promise bail jumpers a free boat and arrest anyone dumb enough to show up. Well I don’t believe your free hedge warlock, you fucking arcane narcs – you’ll never catch me!

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Titanic 666 🌭

I recently visited the Titanic Museum Attraction in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, because there aren’t many options for celebrating your birthday in Tennessee that are more fun than commemorating a national tragedy. The museum was pretty cool, but my favorite part was the gift shop where you could process your grief over the loss of fifteen hundred human lives by purchasing a sparkly, teal, heart-shaped pillow with the name of their watery grave on it. 

The Titanic gift shop made me think about how Americans are terrible at processing grief through any lens other than capitalism, but boy, are we good at expressing our sorrow via merch. Sure, calling someone the captain of the Titanic doesn’t come off as a compliment in our modern era, but you can purchase a Titanic captain’s hat for your Captain & Tennille cosplay and hope nobody notices the grim reference! 

After September 11th, people sold so many country songs, American flags, and Never Forget t-shirts, partially because we never wanted to forget but also, more cynically, because you can’t copyright a national tragedy. So when something terrible happens and everyone is talking about it, and mourning over it, sometimes that’s great news for the makers of 9/11 tribute shirts designed to look like a rap battle between Osama Bin Laden and George H.W. Bush. 

When the Titanic movie came out and was a huge hit, the U.S. copyright office was flooded with requests to attach the name to t-shirts, restaurants, perfume, and even a line of iceberg lettuce. Dark! 20th Century Fox even had to go to battle with a guy who owned an army surplus store who had filed for the use of the name Titanic on clothing. I’m not sure if they got the rights or if they had to go with their second choice, Sea Burial Swimwear.

That trademark for Titanic remains up in the air, which is why in 2010, The Asylum was able to make a terrible disaster movie called Titanic II without getting sued by James Cameron. If you’re unfamiliar with The Asylum, they’re the production company that makes “mockbusters” like the Sharknado series and Snakes On A Train. They’re movies specifically designed to suck and maybe fool your grandmother into thinking she’s buying you that silly movie where Sam Jackson says that motherfuckin’ cakes on a motherfuckin’ train line you like so much. 

Titanic II performed so adequately that ten years later The Asylum decided to try it again but this time somehow even more gruesome and terrible. ā€œWe haven’t spat in the face of a national tragedy that showed the massive issues with inequality in America by drowning a bunch of poor women and children,ā€ someone at The Asylum must have said before sucking a big ol’ loogie out of his nasal cavity and spitting out Titanic 666

This’ll be the one that makes it! 

It’s a zombie movie where the men and women who died on the Titanic are raised from the dead to seek vengeance on the people trying to ghoulishly profit from their tragic deaths, which is, you know, exactly what The Asylum is doing by making this movie. It’s as if they made a movie about how terrible it is to hunt whales and killed seventeen whales in harpoon accidents during production. 

The biggest star in the movie is AnnaLynne McCord, the actress who went viral for writing a poem about how if she were Putin’s mother and had hugged him, he wouldn’t have started the war in Ukraine. She’s playing an unbearable influencer named Mia, a role she was made for, but she’s not the main character, even though the movie follows her almost exclusively for the first thirty minutes

Mia and her husband decide to sneak into the scary abandoned warehouse on the Titanic for some primo content but end up stumbling upon stowaway Lydia Hearst performing what is clearly a demonic ritual. However, there wasn’t much of a script for Titanic 666. You can tell they wrote about three lines for every scene and asked the actors to improv, which they absolutely would not do, so instead, they repeat the three written lines over and over again, which in this scene means they kept saying, “is this part of the entertainment?” “Is this some kind of show?” As Lydia Hearst drank her own blood.

According to IMDB, Lydia Hearst’s character’s name is Idina, but I don’t think they came up with that until way post production. She’s playing the great granddaughter of the captain of the original Titanic, who is psychically connected to the victims of the Titanic, somehow. She gives a speech about this at one point, but it must have been added in reshoots and edited into the story way too early because everyone she meets is like, “who are you? Why are you doing this?” Even though she immediately told everyone her whole deal. 

There’s an evil Indiana Jones on the ship who’s selling artifacts from the Titanic for a bunch of money. He’s even ghoulishly showing off the Captain’s wedding ring, which he presumably pulled off a frozen corpse and now wears around. He’s the only one who has something like a hero’s journey where he learns a lesson and grows as a character, but he’s also the inconsiderate evildoer who kicks off the whole problem in the first place as it’s his grave robbing that upsets the captain’s granddaughter so much. There are just no good people in this thing to root for, not a single hero in sight. Are we supposed to be rooting for the zombies? Because I am. 

Thirty minutes into the movie, Mia becomes the first victim of the Titanic zombies. She’s a pretty unconvincing scream queen. Her look of terror when seeing the zombie reads more like she’s stoned at a drive-thru and desperately trying to remember her Taco Bell order. 

To be fair, the zombies are pretty confusing. They appear and disappear in mist and have some sort of telekinetic powers, so I don’t know if these are actually supposed to be zombies, ghosts, or just lost members of My Chemical Romance. I’m pretty sure this movie’s special effects guy was a TikTok filter, so something might be getting lost in the CGI.

Mia is scared to death by the ghost and her husband is sucked into a cloud, so suddenly the entire movie shifts to a new protagonist– the captain of the ship. She’s more sympathetic than anyone else, but she’s also a woman who signed up to captain Titanic 3 after what happened to Titanic’s one and two. I’m sorry, but you know what they say, Titanic one shame on you, Titanic two shame on me, Titanic three, you deserve the zombie.

The rest of the movie is a series of jump scares as the crew runs around trying to stop the obviously ghost-related shenanigans. They do this as if the only direction they were given was to act like they’re on the Titanic and it’s full of ghosts! They need to stretch the run time so badly and with so little budget that there are multiple scenes where we watch a group of people watch cell phone footage of an earlier scene in its entirety. 

Eventually, the Titanic III is steered into iceberg city like Titanic’s I and II before it and surprise, surprise, it sinks! The Captain tells the evil Indiana Jones guy to help load people into the lifeboats, and he does, but the lifeboat line is cut by ghosts and all of the people plunge into the water too fast, breaking the boat and killing everyone. 

He ends up alone in a lifeboat. We hear a tapping on the side and just when you think he’s about to get ghosted, the captain appears. She tells him that by helping people into the lifeboats he’s ā€œsquared up with God,ā€ and he peacefully freezes to death, then becomes a zombie ghost and lunges at the captain, ending the movie. Literally the entire cast dies, which is fine because they don’t need anyone left to make another Titanic movie. The Asylum has done a Titanic disaster movie and a Titanic zombie movie, I’m assuming their next feature will be a Bollywood musical where a dancing captain accidentally chorus lines into the throttle and causes the boat to hit an iceberg.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Greg Cunningham, who is writing, directing, starring in and doing craft services for Titanic 4: Titanic Panic!