Category: UPSETTING DAY

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UPSETTING DAY

The Saved by the Bell Reboot 🌭

2:38AM

I woke up in the middle of the night feeling hollow and hungry. My stomach rumbled, so I went to the kitchen to pour some disciplinary bourbon. Fuckin’ stomach will think twice before pulling this crap again. I flicked on the kitchen light and was brought up short by my shadow. There was something off about it. I moved and it moved with me, it still looked like me — I couldn’t place what wasn’t right. Then it hit me: The lights were overhead, but my shadow was sprawled across the floor like I was backlit. Seeing the game was up, the distorted silhouette shivered. Its limbs struggled and began to unstick themselves from the floor with audible pops. My guts dropped out. Cold sweat beaded on me like condensation. It was all I could do to step over the shadowbeast to get to the bourbon. 

I poured three fingers Florida-style (measured vertically) and scooted backwards into a corner.  Something was happening to the monster: Its darkness was — not lessening, but diminishing somehow. Soon it gave way to smooth skin, cut abs, and adorable dimples. The shadow had fully receded from the body before me, pulling back and taking up residence in the eyes. But there, the concentrated darkness stayed. 

“Mario Lopez,” I said, because I have long since learned that it likes to hear those words spoken in fear.

“Broadway!” Mario Lopez cackled. “Long time no verte, mi amigo!”

I almost corrected him, because I was a sleepy idiot pouring bourbon on a burrito-less stomach. But it’s so much better if he forgets your name.

“Why?” I asked instead. “I wrote the books! I acted as your herald, just like you demanded! It’s been years! Why now?”

“Because,” Mario Lopez said, idly chewing his lip until it gushed blood. “We’re doing a Saved by the Bell reboot.”

3:07AM

“In the new show, Zack is the governor of California! Ay ay ay, can you believe it?” Mario Lopez knelt on my neighbor’s chest, stealing the man’s inhalations as he slept.

“I got fired from Cracked!” I pleaded. “Nobody buys my books! I barely have a platform! I cannot serve you! All I have now is half of a little Patreon where I write jokes about things that should not exist in this universe.”

Mario Lopez just stared at me emptily.

“Oh, right,” I nodded. “Carry on.”

“But oh no,” Mario Lopez continued, drumming on my neighbor’s shuddering eyelids. “Zack is in the middle of a huge PR scandal — he’s closed too many low-income schools! So he sends all the disenfranchised minorities to upper-class Bayside! Talk about fish out of water! Like your neighbor here!”

Mario Lopez’s voice fell flat as a wind-dead lake. 

“Gasping like a fish out of water,” he clarified.

“Can you let him live?” I asked, my voice tremulous, my hands tremulous, my whole body tremulous from both fear and lack of adequate liquors. “He owes me $15.”

Mario Lopez rose from my slumbering neighbor’s chest and trod directly on his wife’s face as he crossed their bed toward me. The man sucked in desperate air, and the woman’s nose gushed blood, but neither woke.

“My character, A.C. Slater,” Mario Lopez said, stripping off his too-tight polo shirt and undoing his belt. “Was used to being one of the popular kids, but now he’s a gym teacher.”

“The least respected teacher,” he added. “The kind of teacher who knows that, when others refer to them as a teacher, they hold air-quotes in their hearts. This shows modesty on my part. Modesty is culturally desirable at this time.”

“I-it is,” I said, remembering how hard it was to distinguish questions when he flipped to his empty state. “People like humility.”

“Especially from the old and obsolete,” he had stripped entirely naked, and somehow glistened even in the gloom of my neighbor’s unlit bedroom.

“But you don’t look old,” I ventured, unsure if it was the correct thing to do — praise its vanity, or point out a mistake it was making.

“I paint faint lines around my eyes before I go out in public,” Mario Lopez said, now idly pawing at his limp, yet still truly monstrous genitalia. “I allow the skin on my body to slightly loosen, when others see me shirtless. As they do. Often.”

Seriously, his dick was the size of a Fiat. It looked like that staff thing you see on the sides of hospitals — just two snakes twisting around a massive rod.

“Can you put that away?” I gestured at his naked cock, which was easy to do. I didn’t even have to pick a direction. “I’m not sure if I’m embarrassed or jealous but I literally can’t look at anything else. There’s not enough room.”

Mario Lopez picked up something from the floor and mechanically slid on a pair of the woman’s worn panties. They were metallic purple. It was almost worse.

“Can you put on something else?”

He wrapped himself in the man’s robe and, as an afterthought, plucked a football helmet from its place on the wall. It was clearly some kind of treasured trophy, and my neighbor moaned in his sleep. I could tell he was losing that precious memory by the way Mario Lopez’s mammoth dong twitched.

“The gym teacher role was my idea!” Mario Lopez said, mimicking human cadence once again. “Gym teachers have been in the news a lot lately. That makes it timely content — the best kind of content!”

“Yeah, but it’s always for like molestation charges or something. I don’t think gym teachers are in a real hot spot now, culturally spea-”

He spat in my open mouth and I immediately fell into a violent seizure. 

4:15AM

When I awoke we were on the roof of an elementary school. He was crouched atop an antenna array which should not have held his weight.

“On the show, we make many jokes about how the kids these days are both sheltered and clueless,” his voice once again like an echoless cave. 

“That’s not great,” I said, in between the huge gouts of bloody vomit my system used to try to reject his poison. “It’s a harmful and tired misconception and it alienates what’s got to be your best demographic.”

“The old cast is coming back!” Mario Lopez dropped from his perch and grabbed me by my beard. He dragged me to the edge of the roof and tossed me off like you’d toss paper at a wastebasket. I landed in a dumpster and he leapt after me. I took the full weight of him on my old, shitty knees. How could he be so light just a moment ago, and so heavy now?

“We got Jessie Spano!” He howled.

“We got Zach Morris!” 

“We got Kelly Kapowski!” 

“We got Max — the original Max, remember him? Hahaha!”

He rocketed up and away and he didn’t even disturb the trash. It was almost noiseless. Like the quiet ruffle of crows preening.

“What about Screech?” I poured myself out of the dumpster and tried to hobble after him, across the deserted parking lot. 

“We do not talk of Screech.”

“I saw something about this,” I gasped, noticing that however quickly I hobbled, Mario Lopez moved marginally faster. Just enough to keep my pain perpetually escalating. “You said fans could expect an ‘updated, edgier version of the show.’ Then later you compared it to Game of Thrones.”

He nodded along as I spoke, then confirmed: “Yes, there will be severed penises.”

“It’ll probably be a while before you can resume filming though, right?” It was my only hope: to die before his masterwork could air. “With the pandemic delays and all?”

Mario Lopez pulled to an abrupt stop. He spun and put a finger in the dent between my collarbones. He bored into me like a drill. 

“You are such a weak species. Just because hundreds of thousands of you die, you think you’re allowed to slow. To nurse each other. At least the ants realize they are ants.”

“I-I’m sorry we care that we die!” I howled, and he removed the piercing digit.

“Not all of you do. This is good. The reboot is on pause, but I am not. I am working on another project right now. I posted a video on Instagram. Did you see. I was very proud that we were one of the first productions to resume filming. My crew is expendable. My work is not.”

“W-what’s it called?” I moaned, getting to my feet. 

“Feliz NaviDAD!” He chuckled. “Many will die for Feliz NaviDAD!”

Mario Lopez began to hop in place, eager for something that hadn’t begun yet.

“This interview’s over, gordito,” he said, and I could see the shadow leak from his eyes once again. “I’ll give you a headstart.”

“W-what?” I asked, but my body knew. I was already running. Or trying to.

“10-9-8,” there was mirth in his voice, but with each number it fell away until there was only the void. “7-6-5-4-3-2…”

“Oh shit.” My knees. My god damned traitorous knees. “Oh shit oh shit oh shi-”

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Let’s Read: Cheaters Always Prosper

There are few books more despicable than the one I’m showing you today. I have a wall of books on how to murder men with knives, raise children like Bill Cosby, and electro shock the gay out of your son, but none of them approach the pure piece-of-shittedness of Cheaters Always Prosper – 50 Ways to Beat the System Without Getting Caught.

This is a book for psychopaths stupid enough to need an instruction manual for robbery. James Brazil (not the author’s real name) wrote it in the year 2000 when these low-stakes, obvious grifts were already useless against even the most relaxed store policies. Let’s go through all fifty of these in order:

This dumbshit scheme, along with the rambling, completely fabricated story about getting a milk refund after secretly enjoying cake is James’ first and best idea. This isn’t a book showing readers how to use loopholes to get coupons or government research grants. It is avalanches of stream-of-consciousness text from an idiot who thinks crime is “outsmarting the system.” This moron is spending hours to recoup the cost of one milk. This motherfucker is just adding steps to shoplifting. If you switch the price tags on easily identifiable items and also stash a very strange sack of meat the butcher will remember making for a suspicious dirtbag, I think the store might have a lead suspect in the case of DUMBSHIT, WE JUST WATCHED YOU DO ALL THIS.

If someone is dumb enough to fall for this, you shouldn’t let them handle your food. Anyone fooled by glass in your dessert also believed their meat distributor earlier when he said, “I can get you magical food cream, but I had to transport it at human body temperature, so you’ll need to suck it out of my cock. What? Oh, yeah, it’ll go great on those invisible fish I sold you yesterday.”

This also shows the author’s child-like understanding of how the world works when he suggests a fake blood capsule will help sell the world’s oldest restaurant trick. James Brazil might as well have told the reader, “Here’s a hot tip for saving money at restaurants– before the bill comes, get up and fucking run!” It has all the same ethics, but a higher success rate and less humiliation. The entire goddamn book is dumb lies and crimes like this. When James Brazil figures out you can just stab people and take the things they’re carrying, he’s going to have a hell of a sequel on his hands.

Why not tell the waitress you own the hotel and came to inspect the employee underpants? This is fucking stupid. He’s trailing people as they leave their rooms in order to set up a one-man dinner stealing job? What’s that step for? Is it only so he can say, “I don’t have a room key or ID, and yes, I’m the weird guy waiting outside doors for an hour, but I do know the number of an empty room you can call to prove I’m not there.” It might work! But I do worry many hotels guard themselves against the first trick the world’s dumbest liar would think of after learning you can charge things to rooms. So maybe have a backup plan when they say, “You’ve committed a criminal act for a 2% chance at an appetizer sampler.”

This story didn’t happen, and won’t work, but if it did, you’re investing a day at a car dealership to save $40. In a business sense, you’re hiring yourself as a car dealer fluffer and paying yourself $20 an hour for a very slim chance of driving a car.

Like with all his schemes, James Brazil has some advanced tips in case you run into clever marks. In this case, he mentions how he tried this on a Mercedes dealer who required proof he could afford the car. This didn’t happen, of course, but he lays out a scheme to deposit 75 cents in an ATM, then add five zeroes so it looks like you added $75,000, then go into the bank to clear up the mixup, then keep the receipt. In his wildest fantasies, James Brazil wants you to spend an afternoon wooing a car dealer, go to a second location to perform some light financial fraud, then come back to the car dealer in the hopes of getting a free car to DRIVE TO LUNCH. This shit is like disguising yourself as a nursing home resident for sixty years to get a free wheelchair.

I know you can’t read that, because no one ever should. We’re only at entry number five and James Brazil has already run out of scams and lost his entire mind. This is one for getting free windshield repair. Step one is paying for your windshield repair, and steps two through seventy eight are filling out paperwork to convince your local county they were responsible for the crack in your windshield and they owe you the full cost of the repairs. It’s the same high risk, low reward type of crime as the others, but now there is so, so much paperwork. James Brazil would legally change his name to Nazi Horsefucker for six months just to get a refund on “misprinted” business cards.

This book’s already off the rails. Let’s maybe skim through a bit… Let’s see… fraud, lying, unlikely scam, petty theft, fraud… OH FUCK. OH FUCK.

Jesus Christ, dognapping? His 17th “way to beat the system” is to steal pets and ransom them for $100!? So you steal, what, like eleven dogs a month to make rent and a few more for Internet and utilities? I know you don’t need to worry about food since you know the trick of charging meals to random hotel rooms or pretending to eat glass. Still, people might start to notice after one individual keeps “finding” several dogs a week. This is so beyond the scope of ordinary greed or evil. This might as well say, “A lot of parents will pay anything to get a child back! Simply apply for an ice cream truck license under a false identity you create after killing a man with your complexion and build. If you find a child who hates ice cream, invite them to a zoo given to you after telling the zookeepers you were Montgomery Zoo, inventor of the zoo. Steal towels from the gym to make your own rope to bind them! I’ll take that $100 now, easy mark parents!”

James Brazil is the world’s shittiest make-believe criminal. He goes on to tell the reader how to get free laundry by retrieving quarters with pantyhose. He suggests bringing empty tupperware to all-you-can-eat restaurants and stealing soup. Fucking #21 is using a fake name to hide from Columbia House Records. If you try all these tips, you will have invested 7000 hours into criminal enterprises and walked away with $117, a backpack full of soup, 34 years in prison, and 13 Keith Sweat cassettes.

…
This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, Timmy Leahy: the true meaning of Christmas.

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UPSETTING DAY

Thief in the Night 🌭

Some of you didn’t grow up thinking your neighbors were secret anti-Christians planning to chop off your head in the town square, and it shows. 

I 100% believed that as a child, mostly because of a “technically-fiction-but-it’s-totally going-to-happen” movie series I was made to watch in church. It takes place in Des Moines, Iowa and includes this depiction of a woman being led to a blood-splattered guillotine by her fellow Iowans in the futuristic year of 1975, because she refused to renounce her faith in Christ:

That is from the A Thief in the Night series, one of the most popular film franchises ever made. The first movie, from 1972, has reportedly been seen by 300 million people (so more than the number who saw Avengers: Endgame in theaters worldwide). It also spawned a book series (the Left Behind novels, named after a line from the first movie) that has sold over 65 million copies — enough copies that if you were to stack them vertically, you would have a pile of books 65 million copies tall.

Some version of the above scene occurs over and over in these stories and if you’re thinking that it’s weird that the church was exposing children to this kind of thing, don’t worry — the films themselves actually explain why it’s necessary. It’s in the third movie where the anti-Christian forces tell a captive Iowan they will execute a toddler unless the man gives up the location of the boy’s mother, a Christian who is still at large. The man responds by telling the boy to go out and accept his death. 

“Billy, you’re free … ” he says, “they’re going to take you outside and lay you down. Now you close your eyes and tell them you love Jesus no matter what.” Don’t worry, we don’t actually see the child get his head chopped off, we merely see his blood splattered on the guillotine when the man is led out to his own execution a moment later: 

These movies begin and end with Bible quotes stating this anti-Christian genocide absolutely will happen, and that it will happen soon and without warning. The takeaway for me and my fellow Sunday School pupils was that all of the people we saw on the street — including some members of our own church — were ready to murder us the very second it was made legal. Welcome to Upsetting Day, motherfucker! 

I’m not saying this is the reason I didn’t have a lot of friends in school, but I do think it was part of the reason, in addition to me constantly saying things like, “You’re punishing me for being five minutes late to class, but I thought you counted from the time my dick came through the door, not my balls!” and “Excuse me, I know you guys are busy playing kickball right now but I wanted to let you know that I’m not trying to smuggle a kielbasa and two ostrich eggs in these lycra shorts, that’s my dick and balls!” and “Mike Tyson is accusing me of embezzling money from him because he heard I was Dong King!.”

I also realize this Evangelical Christian End Times stuff is old news to that segment of the HOTDOG readership that remembers keeping a porn stash in the woods. For everyone else, I guess I’m going to have to step back and explain some basic theology. You see, some people’s worldview can be wholly represented by those peeing Calvin stickers you see on the back of pickup trucks: “Everyone outside of my tribe exists only to get coated in gallons of my spite-piss.”

Or, if you want Bill Watterson to actually get royalties from this reference, you can go with this actual Calvin and Hobbes comic in which Calvin becomes so frustrated with the world that he shouts, “I WISH I WAS DEAD!” but then, after a moment of contemplation, revises it to:

This is why I have personally coined this belief system “Calvinism.” There are many different flavors within it and, as you can imagine, the adherents to each bitterly hate each other. But the core belief is that Jesus Christ will return soon and teleport a tiny faction of True Christians from the earth, leaving everyone else behind to die horribly via disease, starvation and worldwide genocide. This event — called the “rapture” — will be a wonderful and good thing and we should do everything we can to facilitate it. As of 2010, 41% of Americans believed the rapture would occur by 2050.

I’m not here to yell at people for their religious beliefs. I think we’ve all got a little Calvin in us and if tomorrow God tore open the sky and announced that he not only exists but has decided humanity has earned a thorough ass-beating, I think all of us would just nod to each other and say, “Yeah, that seems right.” No, I’m here to talk specifically about A Thief in the Night and why it and its sequels wreaked havoc on my young brain, back when I was an impressionable child who made every clothes shopping trip a nightmare for my mother (“It’s weird, Mom, because these pants are also too tight in the crotch! Oh, that someone, anyone, could finally tame this feral hog!”)

The first film opens with a young woman in Des Moines named Patty waking up to a radio news report announcing that millions of people have just spontaneously vanished, leaving vehicles and lawnmowers alike unattended:

The news reader speculates that perhaps the rapture has occurred. Patty then rushes into the bathroom to find that her Christian husband is among those who’ve been raptured and Patty realizes, to her horror, that she has been Left Behind. To have any chance at Heaven, she knows she must reject the rule of the coming Antichrist and die horribly in the process.

“Wait,” you might ask, “wouldn’t all of the children be raptured too, since they can’t really be good or evil?” Nope! If they had been, then the news report would have been something to the tune of, “Folks, every child on earth has just been kidnapped with magic. We’re apparently all just waiting on the wizard’s ransom demand and/or for Batman to learn the location of his lair. It seems like some Evangelicals might also be missing, so maybe somebody can follow up on that once the actual problem is solved.”

Next, we flash back to pre-rapture days for forty minutes of scenes demonstrating why exactly Patty deserved to get Left Behind along with all of the billions of Muslims, Buddhists, atheists etc. We watch as she encounters every form of religious belief one could find in 1972 Des Moines, from passionate hardcore Christians who are destined to be saved, to only somewhat passionate Christians whose souls are doomed. We find out Patty was the latter: she went to church, read her Bible and was an all-around good person, but she had skipped an important ritual along the way, so, guillotine.

We then cut back to present-day Patty listening to the morning news broadcast. The news reader says that in a few hours, the United Nations will be holding a press conference to announce that, as a result of a few million American Christians disappearing, all world governments have been disbanded. The former USA, Soviet Union, China, Japan, the UK, the entire Middle East etc — have all agreed to put aside their differences to form UNITE, the United Nations Imperium of Total Emergency. 

If this seems implausible, remember part of Calvinism is the belief that everyone outside of your sect secretly worships Satan and the religions they claim to follow are just elaborate lies to cover this fact. With the True Christians gone, there is therefore nothing stopping them from uniting under the flag of Evil. Sure enough, within days, citizens around the world, and Des Moines, volunteer to join this godless authoritarian world government and don its red armbands. Feel free to spend the rest of the day listing all of the ways the historical parallel they’re trying to draw there doesn’t work. I’m … just really not up to it right now.

They announce that everyone will be required to declare their allegiance to this government with a tattoo that is placed on the forehead or the back of the hand — an act that Patty knows will actually mark the wearer for an eternity in Hell. She is now part of a tiny, hated minority who resists the mark. She goes on the run, getting chased through the streets by UNITE’s version of the SS (two guys in a crudely painted van, due to budget limitations) …

… but she is ratted out by a pair of her wishy-washy Christian friends who, like most moderate/skeptical Christians, immediately accepted the mark. Take special note of this because therein lies the real message of these movies.

In the climax of the first film, Patty jumps off a dam to her death to escape pursuit … only to wake up and realize it was all a dream. Then she hears her clock radio click on with that same news report about the rapture having just occurred and realizes it wasn’t a dream — it was a vision intended to warn her! But the warning came just seconds before the thing she was being warned about actually occurred, rendering the vision and its lessons moot. Sometimes God likes to pull these little pranks on people.

The second film thus begins with Patty in a facility awaiting her execution along with the smattering of other Christians who are still refusing to pledge allegiance to the godless world government. The others ask how she got there and she is forced to explain she first had a dream that all of her neighbors betrayed her to the forces of the antichrist, then she woke up and all of those events in her dream happened for real, only slightly different (her wishy-washy Christian friends who betrayed her in the dream betrayed her again in real life, just in a different way). Then she gets her head chopped off and the credits roll. 

There are four movies in the series but that’s pretty much the template. Some substandard Christians who were Left Behind try to stand up to the genocidal anti-Christian power structure, only to be betrayed by their fellow Des Moinesiacs over and over. From former friends who radio in their position to the Death Squads …

… to secretaries at clinics who coldly turn away panicked Christian mothers with sick babies because they don’t bear the mark …

… every ally and friend turns out to be a collaborator in disguise. This is the theme these movies hit over and over again. We’re already living in an Invasions of the Body Snatchers scenario, they say, and all of your neighbors are pod people who pretend to be decent and kind but will happily murder you and your children at some point in the actual future. 

That, right there, is the part that broke some part of me, so that I wound up carrying around this misanthropy even while amusing classmates in school with my Chandler impression (“Could my boner BE any more succulent?”). If you live with the belief that everyone else is secretly a shithead, it’s strategically smart to just be a shithead to them as a preemptive strike. 

But I don’t want to make too big of a deal out of this. I obviously grew up to be a well-adjusted adult and I certainly can find no evidence that Evangelical tribalism or malignant conspiracy-mongering has any impact on American society today. I give the A Thief in the Night series three stars out of five. 

Jason “David Wong” Pargin is the ex-executive editor at Cracked.com and is now a full time novelist, his violent sci-fi adventure Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick is up for pre-order now! Or buy one of his previous books, they’re all pretty good.

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UPSETTING DAY

Let’s Read: Children Are No Match For Fire

Hi, 1-900-Hotdoggers! Let’s open this fire safety book called “Children Are No Match For Fire” and see how ridicu– oh no. No, no, no, no, this can’t be right.

…

This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, Lyman: a magnificent youth who brandishes the magical broadsword, Lycheaper!

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UPSETTING DAY

Darktown Strutters: The Cursed Images

Welcome to the second installment of my bold experimental take on Darktown Strutters, a movie. Just like the first installment, we will not be talking about the movie. 

It still counts as a bold experiment even if it’s designed for failure. 

Parts of Darktown Strutters were a lot of fun, but we’ve talked about that. That’s over. Fun has been skinned and rolled in hot asphalt then hit with a truck and left to gasp out in a ditch. This is Upsetting Day. Every single image you will now witness is a still from a Ring-style cursed film that will kill you in 7 minutes. That’s right, minutes. I am force-feeding you a haunt here. Better read quick, motherfucker, or you won’t even be able to see the murderous ghosts about to come out of your own asshole.

Cursed Image #1̵6̶7̶

W-What is this???

This might be a Rule 34 violation of an old-timey Looney Tunes side character who never took off. The Wacktacular Adventures of Horndog Hog, Porcine Pervert may not have found much of an audience outside of pre-furries in the roaring ‘20s, but Pork Hollow, Kentucky still built a statue of him in the town rhombus because in order to be ashamed of something, you need at least one other thing to compare it to. 

W-What’s going to happen to me???

Upon viewing this brutalist statue of a sexually deviant swim-pig, you will be overcome by a sense of justified meta-paranoia. Something is out to get you: Paranoia itself. 

Cursed Image #4̴1̷3̶

W-What is this???

This might be a living painting of an extremely problematic ad from a Jim Crow-era lifestyle magazine. A publication that could not find a way to hawk basic home goods without slipping into hate speech, but has since found an audience with hipsters who are embracing racism ironically at first, yet slip farther into genuine bigotry with every person who does not “get” their “humor.”

W-What’s going to happen to me???

Upon viewing this bizarre tableau of a white man in a bunny costume carrying a giant carrot past two black women — one a nun, the other Aunt Jemima — you will begin to taste a meal you can almost recognize but never describe. It will grow between your teeth, making your every bite of any food Mystery Meal. You will only ever learn one thing about Mystery Meal: It is an extreme diuretic.

Cursed Image #3̵̗̿͊

This might be the “After” picture in a commercial for Clown Community College. All clowns wind up in jail. To be a clown is a jail in and of itself, and you’ll never understand that until you put on the makeup for both the first and last time. Jail Clown was so very careful not to get an ounce of white on his wispy blonde mustache, because he does not want to sully the wonderful shade of red it will become later. 

W-What’s going to happen to me???

Upon gazing through this disturbing telepathic porthole into the buried subconscious of every televangelist, Jail Clown will rise up and charge you, giggling and exposing his penis.

This is what actually happens in the movie.

I am sorry for talking about the movie. It won’t happen again.

Cursed Scene #4̶̡̲͛̐6̵̙̬̀

This might be actual footage from a police chase in modern-day Portland, Oregon. 

W-What’s going to happen to me???

Upon viewing this scene, you will hear engines coming from no specific direction. They will grow louder the closer you are to anything more flavorful than mayonnaise. 

Cursed Image #6̶̻̭̈́,̵̮̦̇͐0̴̮̀̋0̸̧͖̍͛1̷̲̤̂̽

W-What is this???

This might be the cover of the Tower of Power album they were never allowed to release. The one that had to be buried because it would not burn, and then, once buried, would only burn. It is the reason they had to evacuate Centralia, and the reason why nobody with funk in their heart can live in Eastern Pennsylvania to this day. 

W-What’s going to happen to me???

Upon viewing this image, you will be forced to contemplate its meaning forever. Every answer you land upon will be extremely problematic for wildly different reasons, and you will emerge from it like Michael Richards  – harboring a virulent secret racism that you will insist did not, could not possibly have come from you.

Cursed Image #7̶̘̻͗̂͘ͅ,̷͍̜̾̍ͅ4̵̯̔̂̕2̶̭̥̔1̸̺̀,̸͉̙̺͊͘2̴̼̮̆͘3̶̺̗̰͂͋͠4̵̫̙̫̈́̒

W-What is this???

This might be the kompromat footage of Newt Gingrich that They use to make him act that way. It could also be a screencap from literally any David Lynch movie. Possibly any David Lynch interview.

W-What’s going to happen to me???

Upon viewing this image you will become super-fertile, but all of your children will rapidly age and crumble into dust within minutes, learning only enough language to curse your name for bringing them into this world. 

Cursed Image #4̷̪̓̕0̴̢̤̤̝͎̂͌͐̓

W-What is this???

This might be the lowest rated mod in the Skyrim workshop. It might be a screengrab from that one episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse you’re never sure you actually saw. It might be a short glimpse into the mind of every bitter housewife who holds her children back from running to the ice cream man until she can see his face. 

W-What’s going to happen to me???

Upon viewing this image, every popsicle you touch will turn into a pot-sicle. DO NOT CELEBRATE, THERE IS A COST. Every horse you touch will turn into that split-necked undead abomination up there, ceaselessly shrieking for death – your death, its death, any kind of death; it does not discern. It’s just a stupid horse. Oh also all dogs are now horses.

Cursed Scene #1̴̨͔͙̳̼̜̾͋̍̒͑͐̆͐̕͝

W-What is this???

This might be a Gordian Knot of impossibly tangled bigotry. It might be the pivotal scene from Edgelord, the movie whose vicious reviews drove Wrong Dimension Uwe Boll into his frankly inevitable killing spree. It seriously might be the worst five seconds you could ever see if the Rob Zombie in our universe hadn’t started making movies. 

W-What’s going to happen to me???

Upon viewing this scene, you will feel an overwhelming urge to put on a sequin dress and rub shoepolish on your face. If you fight it, you will slowly curl into a ball so tight that you will eventually invert and unbecome. If you don’t fight it, you’ll wind up doing drag in blackface and the only career that will have you is Prominent Politician. 

Cursed Image #4̵̨͉̣͈͚͕͙̳̋̀̀̈́̂̾́̈́ͅ2̴͈̱͋́̽̀͊̄̃̂̒̕͝2̷̪̠̩̖̜̩̬̠̩̥̣̈.̵̨̞̣̩̪̲͖̜͉̻̩̫͐͛͘5̵̞͇̫̜̖̤͚͔̹̳̳̰͋̈͊́̈́̏́͝5̵̨͎̩̩̰̰͉̾̈̎̈ͅ

W-What is this???

This might be the private video you can only access if you become a member of Alex Jones’ Patreon. Or this might be the training video they keep issuing to Florida’s Neighborhood Watch. It might just be what Mall Security looks like to black people whenever they windowshop a Williams-Sonoma. 

W-What’s going to happen to me???

Upon viewing this image, you will shout that exact quote every single time you hear an airhorn. One day you will meet Waka Flocka Flame. This will be the day you die.

Cursed Scene #8̶̛̻͕͕͈̅́̿̔͜7̴̦̩̜̂͆̀̅̉͘

W-What is this???

This might be the music video Smashing Pumpkins made for “Today” if modern Billy Corgan finally finds a way to send his current consciousness back to his 1990s body. This might be the last thing you see after unwisely attending an All You Can Eat Orgy. This might be a Stanford Halloween party. 

W-What’s going to happen to me???

Upon viewing this scene, you will only be able to smell the insides of those pig masks, you will only be able to feel the dampness of those Klan robes, you will only be able to hear the excited erotic huffing of all parties pictured. It will almost immediately drive you to suicide. 

7̵̥̗̫̦̍̀ ̶̭̤̾ͅm̴̖̫̌i̵̤͐̌́n̴̛̲̱̩̭̊̑̅ǘ̶̮͑t̷̛̯̺͎̗̾͂ḛ̶̀͒̔̕s̵̡͕̓̾̿͝.̸̝̊̾

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This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, Hawk: and that’s pronounced with eight additional seconds of silent eye contact.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

The Derangiest Products of Wish 🌭

Lately for whatever reason, I’ve been targeted by an alarming number of Wish ads in my social media news feeds. Scrolling through the insanity has become a part of my daily ritual, which is probably why I keep getting more ads. If you’re unfamiliar with Wish, think of it as Amazon’s registered sex offender of a cousin. Here are the basics. They offer products too good to be true for prices that don’t make sense. For instance, here is a crate full of crack pipes. Cheaper than a pack of gum and with a variety of colors to choose from.

If you have ever seen Wes Craven’s Wishmaster, then you know when things sound too good to be true they usually are. For instance, in the first film, Tony Todd aggressively confronts the Wishmaster, and the Wishmaster, sensing excessive amounts of stress from Tony, asks him if he wishes he could escape from it all. Tony Todd, assuming he meant figuratively, begrudgingly admits he does wish he could escape from it all. The Wishmaster then teleports Tony Todd into a fucking Houdini tank full of water, bound in chains and a straight jacket, where he presumably drowns. 

Listen, I know it doesn’t make sense from a legal standpoint. If Tony’s wish was to escape, then why was he transported into a situation he was clearly not meant to escape from? The lesson here isn’t even “be careful what you wish for.” It’s “be careful of the legal interpretation of your wish and whether or not you will survive long enough to present your case in court.” That’s Wish, the distributor. They aren’t just going to hand you a box of crack pipes at a loss. You are somehow going to pay a mortal price for those savings. Maybe the crack pipes smoke YOU, and your soul leaves your body in the form of gaseous vapor, which is inhaled by Wish CEO Piotr Szulczewski who was the crack pipe the whole time.

I haven’t worked up enough courage to actually purchase anything from them myself because of my aforementioned familiarity with the Wishmaster. However it hasn’t stopped me from trying to guess whatever monkey’s paw fate awaits the foolish mortals who have.

Before I go on, I’m going to quickly point out a couple of things so you know I’m not intentionally omitting relevant information for the sake of comedy. Here is an ad for a John Rick t-shirt, based on artwork stolen from artist MJ Hilben and photoshopped to make it seem as if Keanu Reeves himself has endorsed it. First, there is a price tag and it is firmly in the t-shirt zone. At the bottom there is an item description preview, letting me know I’m definitely being sold apparel and not something else, like a poster of Keanue Reeves holding a shirt with a stolen design printed on it.

The following ad, however, is slightly different.

It is a collage of mysterious possibilities. For starters, there is no price tag, which is my first best guess as to what I’m supposed to be looking at. My next best clue, the item description, is suspiciously missing. All I’m left with is a photograph containing any number of potential items for sale. Is it the Genesis series gas grill? Is it the sugar skull shorts being swallowed by the model’s juicy booty? Is it…is it the juicy booty??? Who knows! Let your mind go blank, click the link and make an impulse buy based on the blood density of your erection, you fool. Let the Wishmaster taste your soul. 

Armed with a better understanding of Wish’s advertising practices, I’m going to list six examples of suspicious Wish ads and try to figure out what’s going on in them. Sometimes I question the actual value of the product. Sometimes I’m not entirely sure who the product is intended for and, sometimes, I’m not sure what is even being sold.

1: “Leather” Sandals

Let’s start off with something fairly simple. At first glance, these appear to be nothing more than some really thick sandals. However, my eye is almost immediately drawn to the cow with the word “cowhide” defensively placed above it. Making footwear out of cowhide is not unusual. In fact, I would guess the majority of shoes are made out of it. What is unusual is feeling like you have to specifically state it in a way other shoes do not.

What’s really going on?

I am suspicious of this leather. Seeing the word “cowhide” has raised the type of red flags the manufacturer was clearly trying to avoid. It makes me second guess what type of hide I’m looking at. It makes me take a closer look at the sandals, where I notice the fat, irritated looking stitches more reminiscent of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre than shoes. Based on the design, it also makes me picture some lame asshole wearing these with socks, because you just know these things were designed to be worn with socks. Fuck these sandals and the nightmare world they imply.

2: Molded Batman Dick Plating

If there’s one area where men have it harder than women, it’s not having enough marketplace options for lying about dick size. Women have whole industries based on lying about their breast and waist size! Why can’t we normalize lying about our dicks! Well, here you go, you insecure, baby dicked weirdo. Someone took what looks like a less protective version of an athletic cup and added a cartoon weiner mold to it. They’re stackable too, so you can easily store a variety of your favorite colors. You know. In case you think there’s a more appropriate color for revealing this kind of lie to another human being. 

What’s really going on?

What you see is what you get with this one. It’s padding for your dick’s bra. Here’s the thing guys may not realize though: women tend to value honesty a little more than men. If I’m lucky enough to hook up with a woman, and she takes off her bra to reveal less than perfect breasts, I’m going to shrug and continue to count my blessings. If a guy pulls his pants down and a cheap piece of Batman armor falls out of his underwear, the night is over and Lady Yelp will hear of this sad tale. Do yourself a favor, accept your dick size and learn to become an expert at mouth stuff. Women will leave you a positive review on Lady Yelp if you’re honest about your dick and good at mouth stuff. By the way, it’s not really called Lady Yelp, but it’s real.

3: Funny Chicken Helmet

I don’t pretend to know much about raising chickens, but from what I understand, they are complete assholes. Nothing I’ve heard leads me to believe any chicken will hold still long enough for you to put an adorable crash helmet on it. Even if you were able to…why would you? Does your egg farm present a higher risk of head injuries? Are you going to put your chickens on tiny motorcycles and have them perform stunts for adoring audiences? 

What’s really going on? 

I’ll tell you why you would buy these. Because you’re into cock fighting and you’re looking to spice up your image. Maybe you’re new on the scene, and you want to make a big splash with your first appearance. Or maybe these cocks mean something to you, and you want to show off their personalities with some fresh gear that tells spectators a little something about who they are. Like Sarge, the grizzled old timer who is one fight away from retirement. You know Sarge! The one with the camouflaged helmet, large patches of missing feathers and half a beak. Or what about Fireball? The one who is going to get dipped in Franks Red Hot if he loses his first match. 

What’s REALLY going on?

These are for your dick. They’re dick helmets. The chicken in the ad is a cock, bro! Get it?! Everything I said earlier about cock fighting might be true, but it wasn’t the intention of the ad. The ad is a nothing more than a douchey high five between you and Wish. There is an upside though. If you’re the kind of person who might have been interested in the fake bulge from before, I promise you’ll have way more success with this. Laughter is an aphrodisiac, afterall, and I’m fairly positive a baby dick wearing a ladybug helmet would fucking kill on Lady Yelp.

4: This Shit

Enough fun, let’s get dark. Full disclosure, I know Wish doesn’t manufacture any of these products. They are a marketplace for independent sellers, and I’m not out here saying Wish is responsible for what people bring to said marketplace. But when I see this shit, I need them to be at least somewhat responsible for quality control. At best. At absolute fucking best, this is some misguided person’s homemade zucchini bread. Even if it’s that innocent, which it isn’t, this still isn’t a good look for Wish. You can tell at a glance the FDA didn’t have anything to do with it. Whoever wrapped it in plastic barely gave enough of a shit to do a good job, do you think the FDA is going to give this nightmare the time of day? Come on, Wish, give me at least a vague idea of what’s going into my body. I don’t care if it’s a handwritten label saying “Made with 100% love!” Give me anything my EMT could use to make their job easier.

What’s really going on?

Alright, let’s lower our voices. This isn’t bad baking. This is a brick of the stankiest hashish, my man. Seriously, there’s no reason to list something this toxic looking if it isn’t literally a toxin. They sell fucking crack pipes! Hash is almost a health supplement compared to that. Wish is down to party, and they put this through the system with no description knowing if you have to ask, then it’s not for you. For eight bucks though, I can’t afford to not give it a try. Just me, my mystery Wish brick and my emergency contact on speed dial. 

5: Clump of Body Horror

At this point I think the Wish algorithm went haywire trying to figure out who I was. It tried to find a correlation between all of the various things I chose to click, and the best it could come up with was a misshapen loaf of bloated flesh. There is no item description, but if there was, I imagine it would be a transcription of the sound James Woods’ TV makes in Videodrome.

I can’t even begin to come up with a reason for this thing to exist, let alone what I’m supposed to do with it. If I was being charitable, I might say it’s prop challah bread being squeezed by someone to demonstrate it’s not real bread because of how good of a replica it is. I’m not here to be charitable though. I’m here to make fun of how weird Wish is, and if it’s not prop bread, then this shit is primo weird.

What’s really going on?

Looking at this gives me cosmic dread. It makes me think I’ve mistakenly seen a part of Wish not meant for my eyes. It makes me suspect Wish also caters to interdimensional beings, and this thing is a bundle of raw material for a human skin disguise. I would love to know more about this item, but I also fear what I might learn, and once I look, I fear something from the other side will be looking back at me.

6: Oh Fuck

Let us end our journey by returning where it began, at Wish apparel. Here we find this fairly accurate reproduction of a mid century military officers cap from Hugo Boss. Great for a variety of occasions, such as alternate history steampunk cosplay, or formal gatherings for people with a very specific type of political ideology. It’s clearly a well made product, but don’t take it from me. Just ask Jake and Lonnie, Wish shoppers belonging to both of the aforementioned demographics. 

What’s really going on?

I’m beginning to suspect the previous ad really was a window to a parallel universe, because I seem to have reemerged in a dimension where nazis aren’t as universally hated as they’re supposed to be. If this is, in fact, a different reality, then I apologize for the confusion. I’m about to make a big deal out of something you probably consider normal. You see, in the world I come from, the nazis got their asses kicked. Since then, movie producers and video game developers could rack up an easy win by depicting said ass kicking as graphically as possible, because we love dead nazis more than we love originality. So you can imagine my surprise when I see steampunk Jake and nazi Lonnie leaving positive reviews for some bullshit I never imagined I’d see in a paid advertisment.

By now you may have noticed more details in this ad compared to any of the previous entries. It’s because this one finally broke me. I downloaded the Wish app to find out for certain what the fuck I was looking at. Turns out it’s exactly what it looks like: a nazi hat for shit heads. Buyer beware, though! Unless your world has giants and Jake is one of them, this hat may be hilariously small. 

I could spend all day talking about my favorite Wish ads, but I can’t risk anymore damage to the temporal fabric. If you need me, I’m going to be scrolling through my Wish app, looking for a product someone from this reality might find insane enough to be a portal back to my dimension. Do you guys have any recommendations for ads that would give a nazi the chills, maybe the onyx fist of Black Hitler’s scepter?

Zak is the co-creator at Auralnauts, a Youtube channel dedicated to slowly ruining your childhood memories.