Category: UPSETTING DAY

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UPSETTING DAY

Let’s Watch: ASMR Roleplay 🌭

You know what ASMR is: softcore porn for audiophile Quakers. “It’s not sexual,” every ASMR fan tells you, even as they moan at your lip smacking and shirt crinkles. I don’t blame you for trying to pull this con, ear-freaks — I once tried to convince my boss that anime was about more than just panties, but he still wouldn’t let me watch it at work. Maybe that’s why ASMR has given up on playing coy, and its major YouTube channels are now one errant camera pan away from switching to PornHub. They’re all about “ASMR roleplay” these days, and yes, it is definitely sexual… albeit in a deeply lame, deeply upsetting way.

Here’s how your typical ASMR video starts:

And right off, there’s a problem. If this isn’t pornography, why are all of the big stars either cute young girls or terrifying middle-aged men doing everything they can to secure a spot beside the cute young girls? 

She’s doing ‘finger flutters’ by way of hello — wiggling her fingers in front of her microphones so you can hear the sound that flesh makes. We are zero seconds in and this is where I would quit watching if you weren’t paying me to. I hate it instantly. It sounds like gelatin corduroy. It sounds like parasitic moths trying to wiggle their way past your protective earmuffs. It sounds like lotion feels in your belly button. 

ASMR Girl goes right from those saucy little finger-scrapes into a whispered ad for NordVPN. Hope you’ve always wanted to watch an average girl talk quietly about server capacity and — actually, most of you do want nothing more than that. Well, enjoy the next three straight minutes:

No joke: Three minutes of amplified whisper commercials for secure porn browsing. Is this foreplay for a creature I can never understand? Peter Thiel isn’t this hard for capitalism and privacy, and his only goal in life is to start an island society where they don’t prosecute sex crimes.

Only once you’ve explored every orifice of NordVPN’s excellent deals do you get to your low-stimulation pornography: 

Yes, it’s alien play. Softcore quiet alien play. Like the third naughtiest fantasy of an extremely sheltered librarian. 

The saddest part of these ASMR videos is how ubiquitous nitrile gloves are. Like it would just spoil the average viewer’s suspension of disbelief if it looked like a woman was willing to touch them with her bare hands. They’re so far gone from actual human contact that it can’t even be a part of their fantasies anymore. ASMR fans go soft the moment they see cuticles. Right now some poor noble nurse is catching COVID-19 because MRS. ASMR outbid the hospital on the last box of Kleenguards. 

I’m not even through one video and I already feel bad about making fun of the people who watch these. 

Every one ends with the woman begrudgingly admitting that she likes you — not loves you, not wants you, just tolerates. That’s the lowest bar for a fetish this side of Limboner play, which is exactly what it sounds like, but somehow lower.

Here’s the same girl demonstrating that she’s willing to get hit by every obstacle in the nerd’s fetish gauntlet.

Yes, it’s ASMR Shrek Roleplay, in case you were looking for the exact sequence of words to say out loud to get your parents to stop loving you. It’s like a phonetic hack, Snow Crash-style, designed to kill the human brain’s capacity for respect. She does twenty minutes of “non-erotic” whispering in a terrible accent that veers between Scottish, Russian, and drunk Jamaican. It is more than enough time to prove that improv is not her strong suit. 

We dive off into several long tangents about the real estate agent that sold her the swamp-shack, and how you might want to invest in swamp property yourself, and who the fictional real estate agent is married to, and all the while her audience is just waiting for her to whisper “moist” so they can close this incognito tab.

Please notice, even here, the gloves. ASMR fans will tell you it’s nothing dirty — it’s just to augment the noises the fingers make, and then they’ll run a wet tongue over their dry lips and start rubbing the dirty swatch of burlap in their pocket.

There you go: if what you need to finish is a disinterested 22 year-old wearing green makeup and a vest made out of towels whispering you off to lyrics by Smash Mouth, please clean yourself up before you go back on stage at the Douglas County Fair, Smash Mouth.

“Cranial nerve exam porn” sounds like something so hardcore you can only film it in the most Russian parts of Russia. But no, this shit is like the schoolgirl fantasy of ASMR Roleplay: So commonplace it’s barely considered deviant. These videos are as omnipresent as they are perplexing…

It’s always the same — an attractive female doctor gently inquiring if you have something wrong with your brain. It is the single most attainable fantasy for ASMR fans, who could make this a reality by taking two steps: Making a doctor’s appointment, and admitting to why they made that doctor’s appointment.

Here’s a ‘gang-nerve exam,’ which is something I thought I made up for my Shadowrun fan fiction.

Never tell me this isn’t pornography. Look at those usernames: Maybe ‘Seafoam’ can pass for a crystal hippy, but ‘Matty Tingles’ is a man for whom the San Fernando Valley is a way of life. 

You all need to be more careful about what gets you off. What if you head out to ick on some poor doctor and they actually find something wrong? Now you’ve tied a fetish to a diagnosis. Ask any James Spader movie why that’s a bad idea. 

Here’s Lice Inspection ASMR Roleplay:

Finally, a sexual fantasy for the Deep Nerds that involves precisely zero stretches of the imagination.

And these are the ones that pretend at respectability! They’re the Showtime of the ASMR world. Here’s the Cinemax: 

Yes, this is an ASMR video. Yes, it is a Misery-style porn roleplay about lumberjacks. No, don’t look it up even if you think you’d be into that kind of thing. Making an ASMR video doesn’t guarantee you’ve got a good voice, or any acting ability whatsoever. This one is like listening to your dentist do low-confidence bondage.

What if you’re as into furplay as you are out of dignity? Have some ‘Werewolf has you tied up ASMR Roleplay.’

Listen to six minutes of a guy doing a subpar Skyrim NPC impression about erotic maulings. Try not to laugh as he tells you his werewolf name is “Maurice.” Fail when he fucks up the syntax and accidentally rhymes during his climax line, “I think it is high time to embrace you in the night with just one bite.”

Or hey, if you’ve found that the slow dissolution of the civilized world has made you unspeakably horny:

No teasing here. Rest assured, suicidal whisper perverts, you will quietly fingerbang the coronavirus before this is done.

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UPSETTING DAY

Fuck Will.i.am’s Entertainment Tonight Theme Song Remix

Art is subjective and fluid. It’s transformed by intent, viewer, and hindsight. So when someone says, “That’s the worst art ever made,” even if they’re right, it won’t be true for you or when put into any other context. Until 2012. In 2012 a vast, well-funded undertaking produced the worst piece of art ever under any circumstances and for all time.

I’m of course speaking about the time Entertainment Tonight commissioned Will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas to remix their theme song.

At the time, Will.i.am was a touring, Grammy-winning pop performer and by the show’s estimation “the biggest star in music,” so he was certainly paid well for this project. The show put the full might of its publicity engine behind it teasing it over and over and over with behind-the-scenes segments. Yet with all these motivating factors, when they asked him about his vision for remixing the song, this is all he had prepared:

He was fine with that take and didn’t suggest a second one. They aired it on TV. I don’t think anyone should put their full heart into a behind-the-scenes look at their Entertainment Tonight theme song remix, but this fucker didn’t even think about what he might say during the town car ride to the studio. If he gave a single thought to a single talking point in the make-up chair before the shoot it would have been more professional and coherent than this. He was given hundreds of thousands of dollars, weeks of lead time, and all he had to offer when asked about his remix was “REMIX,” and “WASHED OFF. BUBBLE BATH.” If a birthday clown left with one of your sons and drove into a river, you would say, “There goes a man better at his job than Black Eyed Peas frontman, Will.i.am.”

All videos associated with this monstrosity, especially the finished song, are scrubbed from the Internet as quickly as anyone might link to them. If you’ve never watched it, it’s a grim humiliation. Entertainment Tonight spent so much time and money to make a functional utility jarringly unlikeable. They would have been better off developing a food delivery app that adds “Go back to Mexico” as a special request whenever you order from a Brazilian restaurant. So instead of embedding a video that will be gone before you read this, I’ll be telling the story of the Entertainment Tonight Will.i.am remix through trading cards.

Seriously. What the goddamn shit was Will.i.am talking about with the FRESH manifesto? It’s like an evil gamesmaster put a camera on him and cackled, “Mr. i.am., the bomb you are sitting on is set to go off if you ever stop saying words you loosely associate with FRESH. And your powers are already waning! ‘BUBBLE BATH? FRESH GETTIN’ READY TO GO!?‘ Nonsense! Imbecilic nonsense! Your time is almost u– wha!? The rest of the breakthrough sensations The Black Eyed Peas!? Fergie! Taboo! apl.de.ap!? H-how!? I saw your Best Friends Mystery Van fall into the crocodile chamber!”

To make matters worse, this corny fuck delivers every word with a fruity sass that seems carefully designed to conform to the least generous expectations of an Entertainment Tonight viewer. He drags out each vowel with a head revolution like Whoopi Goldberg reading for the part of “Impatient Airline Passenger.” Is that what he thinks Nebraska grandmas find fresh and def? Because it’s hard to believe Will.i.am walks around all day doing a mean-spirited JackĂŠe impersonation.

Entertainment Tonight knew the final video was him with his hands in his pockets looking like a dumb shit while he listens to the now worse Entertainment Tonight theme song through headphones. And they thought you wanted to see how they made that! Well, guess what, flyover states: they stuck him in front of a retractable green screen while he looked like a dumb shit. Hollywood magic revealed.

Normally when a show gets a new intro song viewers think, “Hey, is this a ne– oh, what’s this any other thing much more interesting?” Entertainment Tonight doesn’t have that same healthy perspective. Entertainment Tonight will bring on three guest hosts for a panel about Dean Cain building a snowman and what it means for the rumors of Mark-Paul Gosselaar’s new Malibu bicycle. They do not have a handle on what’s interesting or important. Obviously, since they thought “Asshole adds drumbeat to theme song” was worthy of weeks of content.

But no one has ever misjudged potential value quite like this. If you left Hooters thinking your waitress wanted to both marry you and invest in your Brazilian food delivery app, you would be better at gauging other people’s interest than Entertainment Tonight‘s producers. These sneak peeks into each and every moment of Will.i.am’s creative process revealed a man attacking a project with all the passion of a Chuck E. Cheese chef assembling a full pizza from unfinished ones. Dogs watch their own gallbladder surgery with more enthusiasm.

“How can I take a piece of American culture and… translate it ’cause you know, that-that theme song… represents families sittin’.” – Will.i.am 

The relentless interviews with this bored man each revealed less than the last. There was almost a courage to it, like watching an old man fight his way out of an iron lung to excavate the empty mine that gave him emphysema just 713 more times. But it was also cruel, like holding a gun to a baby’s head and demanding it write a three act play about its filthy diaper. No one should know with such certainty that Will.i.am is an empty-souled idiot, yet Entertainment Tonight spent outrageous amounts of resources to demonstrate only that.

Every few segments, Will would turn to camera and talk directly to the viewers to try to help them wrap their heads around exactly what he was doing. You see, he was taking a theme song, which is a fancy term for a piece of music specifically for a TV show, and making small changes t– you know, I should let him explain. Here’s how he put it (weird pauses are his):

“Nah’m… the re-mixer. Producer. Reeee… flipper? … Spicer-bringer.

For this great.

…

E.

T.

American. Anthem.” – Will.i.am

It’s important to remember these events were not suddenly thrust upon Will.i.am. He knew this entire procedure would be under scrutiny. He knew he would be expected to speak on the topic of his musical and remixing abilities. But the man is incapable of expressing a single coherent thought about what should be his main area of expertise. He is so bad at this. If Will.i.am and a gorilla speaking sign language were up for the same music teaching job, not only would the gorilla get it, every administrator who came into contact with Will would forget why they ever loved music in the first place. Over the course of these 13,000 behind-the-scenes interviews the only thing I learned about Will.I.am’s artistic inspiration is that it’s functionally the same as flatlining on a toilet. When you are hungover and waiting for a Pop Tart to come out of the toaster thinking, “Almost Pop Tart, headache, butt itches…” you are operating at a higher level than 22 Will.i.ams.

After the editing vultures had picked dry the skeleton of Will.i.am’s stupid fucking sound bites, Entertainment Tonight moved on to the scrapbook slideshows. These were literally severals of photos of people taking pictures of Will.i.am in the same tiny studio as all the interviews. So like a more stationary version of what they’d already shown you, but without any sound. It’s the very limit of what a human mind might call “something.” And to anyone unironically interested in the photos taken during the talking about the making of the 28th revision of an entertainment news program’s theme song: how do you function? Is everything your manatee mind looks upon a fascinating wonder? When you see a triangle do you stop for hours to wonder what it is and how many men it would take to count all its many sides? Will.i.am fans, I am ashamed of my disgust for your effortless contentment.

All of this, all of it, led to the final reveal: forty seconds of an embarrassed man dancing off-beat to a tune you never considered could be ruined. Millions of dollars and thousands of hours were spent on a journey to get a bored channel surfer to think, “Nothing good is o… wait, was that always the song? It sounded shitty as f- oh, rad: Bloodsport! And the kumite hasn’t started yet!!!”

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Let’s Read: You Wouldn’t Want to be a Sailor On a 19th Century Sailing Vessel! 🌭

Not every Upsetting Day will be about accursed children’s books, but a lot of them will be, since nobody hates the playful innocence of the young like the people who write books for them. In descending order, here are the top three creatures who are most harmed by the pure giggle of a toddler:

3.) Vorgeth Lightsbane, Devourer of Innocence and Archduke of the Scorching Sands of Hell, Tenth Ascension of the Screaming Plane, The Orphanmaker, He Whose Sword Is Never Sated

2.) Betsy DeVos

1.)The fine folks at Salariya Books

A lot of Salariya’s offerings are pretty standard fare. They hate children in a superficial, almost charming way. Their books are mostly about kids making Cursed Monkey’s Paw-style wishes that teach them to appreciate zinc.

Billy: “Gee, without windows to keep out mosquitoes malaria sure did kill everyone I love, Giggly the Glass Sprite. You’re right, we can’t live without glass! But my little brother just broke his arm falling out of a tree. I bet we could live without those!”

Billy: *painful suffocating gasps*

Salariya did not invent this cruel game, they merely enjoy it. Every other educational film strip made before 2006 was about some dipshit kid finding a genie and indulging in some inexplicable grudge against sodium. Salariya truly takes their disdain to the next level in their “You Wouldn’t Want To Be” series. 

Now, admittedly the idea behind these books is that they’re a bit on the darker side. They’re meant to appeal to the weird kid who always finds some excuse not to stand up for a while after dissecting his frog. But Salariya is very clear that these books are still meant for young children. Specifically, ages 7-12. 

I want you to keep that age group in mind as we delve into You Wouldn’t Want To Be A Sailor On A 19th Century Whaling Vessel. Already I have questions: Which unsuspecting child is this in the face of, Salariya? There’s no rash of second graders pestering their borderline alcoholic teacher about their wish to travel back in time so they can stab whales. This must be a very specific, personal vendetta. This is clearly just a thin excuse to drag a piece of glass across one particular kid’s soul, and boy howdy, does Salariya know how to gouge.

The book is written in second person, framed like a Choose Your Own Adventure story where every choice is wrong and they’re all made for you, which, to be fair, is a pretty accurate representation of a child’s life in the 19th century.

And yes, all of the art is like this: It’s clearly meant to be in the Mad-magazine style, but taken to some crazy extreme where every single character is some sort of inbred monkey beast who looks like they’ve just discovered that some holes are for fucking and they’re eager to test the others.

This is the second paragraph:

If a children’s book tries to warn you of the horrors to come, you better listen. That’s like Leatherface breaking character to tell you to run — this mercy is not often given, and the only thing that’s certain is that if you ignore it, you will find out what a tongue feels like on exposed muscle.

Why, that last cabin boy layed for the captain for two straight years and he barely made enough to afford a new prosthetic wooden asshole. I swear I’m not trying to force the dark jokes in here — there’s a lot of weird sub/dom implications between ‘you’ and the captain. 

Listen, if you don’t want to take the assless overalls and powdered wig from him, that’s fine. He actually likes it best when you’re smelly.

This is like 50 Shades of Gray for the 19th century whaling scene. Maybe I am seeing things that aren’t there, but it doesn’t help that every single character is drawn like they’re actively imagining the smell coming off the vat of acid they’re going to dissolve you in when you’re “cashed.”

After exploring the complicated sexuality of every bosun on board, we finally get to the whaling itself, and it’s pretty visceral.

“Chimney’s afire! Haha, y’see? Fer all the blood geysering into the air? Ah, ye got tae make your own fun out here on the sea. Oi, listen boyo, what do y’say ye check out the inside of this vat for me, eh?”

Yes, this book goes into very deep detail about the process of utterly demolishing what most 7 year-olds only know as ‘Pearl Krabs.’

Seriously, they go full Hellraiser on this poor whale. Not only am I not exaggerating, I now think 19th century whaling diagrams were the aesthetic inspiration for the Cenobites. Look at this shit:

Your Second Grader definitely needs to know how to peel a whale like an orange. Ignore the tears; tell him again where the chains attach. This world is a harsh place and he will never thrive if he doesn’t understand exactly how you skin majesty.

And this complete whale inversion isn’t even where the dark turn comes in. If lil’ Suzy thought she might never sleep again after you taught her what ‘horse pieces’ are, slip that bitch some pickled ginger because she’s going to need a palate cleanser for all the new horrors she’s about to taste.

Oh no! The last time the captain called you into his cabin, did you accidentally cry out “I need a boyfriend who won’t take it easy on me!” in whalese?! 

Halfway through this book about whaling, your ship sinks and you become stranded on the high seas. Don’t worry: We gloss over nothing.

“Hey Terry, did you write that wacky caption about corpse decomposition?”

“Sure did, Jim! Now what say we head on down to Chuck E. Cheese and piss in the ballpit?”

“Ah, the ol’ Jersey Cereal Bowl. You got yourself a date!”

Yes, in this book intended for 7-12 year olds (13 is too old! They will be jaded by then! The psychic wounds may heal without scarring!) you wind up eating your dead. The silly Mad cartoons just fail to capture the existential horror of that moment when you first see your friends as food.

Like here: Owen is displaying a Scooby-Doo level of scared, when we need him at least at a Hereditary.

At some point, the Little League team you coach is going to learn about sucking the marrow from the bones of their friends. If it’s not from you, it’s from the street. Do you really want them learning the grisly details of cannibalism from some pervert? What if he doesn’t even do the marrow slorping noises right? That’s a risk you can’t afford to take!

Look how mystified those two are — like they just can’t believe a little cousin-eating is society’s line. 

“Did ye explain about tonguing the marrow, Young Tom?”

“Of course, cap’n! Like licking a jagged honeycomb, I told ‘em.”

“And still they shun us? This world has gone soft, boy.”

“Mayhaps it’s your hand in my back pocket they find disconcerting, sir.”

“Back pockets haven’t been invented yet, Young Tom.”

“…”

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Let’s Read: A Doris Sanford Special Feature 🌭

Doris Sanford wrote illustrated children’s books for every conceivable trauma a child might go through. She wrote a book on being a loser, one about making friends with the Japanese soldiers guarding you in a prison camp ,and one on the struggles of getting rubbed with chicken in a Satanic pre-school. Ha ha, what funny joke concepts, right? Those are real. Those are faithful summaries of actual books she wrote. So get the fuck ready because it’s UPSETTING DAY at 1-900-HOTDOG and Doris Sanford is an abusive clown riding a molested elephant through a shit-your-pants-in-class circus.

Let’s look at two of her books from the HURTS OF CHILDHOOD SERIES, because a week of reviewing products from the wrong dimension has already left me unable to feel the pain from just one devastatingly illustrated tale of childhood anguish. We’ll start with Something Must Be Wrong With Me: A Boy’s Book About Sexual Abuse, and it’s worse than it sounds. If a Costco factory chicken had anything like a beak left on its featherless, shit-covered head, it would describe Something Must Be Wrong With Me as “a bit too sad for me.”

Normally, Doris Sanford likes to write a lot of details about her main characters before she traumatizes them. We get to know the children, and maybe learn about their hobbies a bit before they get abducted by a human centipede scientist or pulled apart by robots. Something Must Be Wrong With Me moves a little faster than her other books. It’s about a boy named Dino who loved bask– Dino’s basketball coach takes nude pictures of them together in the showers. Sorry, that’s how fast this anguish unfolds. We know Dino for exactly six sentences before Coach Tom is rubbing him in the shower. This is the second page of the book:

Doris usually works with an illustrator named Graci Evans who has a gift, or maybe a curse, for drawing intense, longing stares. Whenever two of her subjects are looking at each other, there is a palpable sexual magnetism and it is never appropriate. This woman is obviously a romance cover specialist, but her career ended up taking this path and now she draws wet molesters staring into the eyes of little boys. Dino should look afraid or confused, but Graci’s colored pencils can only render one thing– unrestrained desire. I am not comfortable explaining any of this, and any number of people in the publishing process could have stepped in and said, “Proofs look great, Graci. One note, though: Can you make it so every single character doesn’t look like they’re quivering in anticipation of true love’s kiss?”

Another strange thing Doris likes to write into her books are talking animals. The main character, even if they have parents, therapists, or any other kind of loving support system, will run off to be alone with their trauma and get visited by a wise animal. The artistic intent of this isn’t is clear as Graci’s illustrations insisting every character is about to fuck. Is it magical realism? Hallucinations? Each of these books seem so delicately designed to be used as bibliotherapy for one very, very specific trauma, so it seems irresponsible to throw in something as batshit crazy as, for instance, a sexual abuse advice pigeon.

The “amazing” sexual abuse advice bird who visits Dino at night to tell him which touches are good or bad is named LOVE-DOVE (capital letters theirs). He’s not named Your Body Your Choice Dove or It’s Not Your Fault Bird. He’s named LOVE-DOVE. It’s weird, right? It’s like telling a kid his parents died in a drunk driving accident and leaving him in a room with the amazing BEER-DEER. I just think a bird speaking in the tongue of man is the last thing this kid needs to help wrap his head around the concept of love. And speaking of love, here’s how Graci drew LOVE-DOVE and Dino’s last goodbye.

People search their whole lives for someone who will look at them like a little boy and bird look at each other in a Graci Evans illustration. How did she make the bird look so horny? You can’t train this. There are no aviary anatomy books on how to draw yearning in the red eyes of a dove. It’s something Graci has in her soul. She couldn’t draw a sexually uninterested bird if you held a gun to her head and said, “If the pigeon wants to fuck I pull the trigger.” That’s not a LOVE-DOVE, that is a THIS HOTEL ROOM WILL NEVER BE CLEAN AGAIN-DOVE.

It’s nice to think all this incoherent narrative illustrated by longing gazes between a boy and his sex bird helped some kids. I can’t speak for the others, but my copy was previously owned by a community center library in Whitehall, Michigan where it was only checked out one time. So I hope the woman named Narngry Illegible didn’t find it as uselessly ridiculous as I did.

For Your Own Good, A Child’s Book About Living in a Foster Home is upsetting for a few reasons. One, the main characters, Jerome and Jamin live a terrible life of neglect and abuse before being taken by the state and placed in foster care. Two, it’s a sad tale of mostly nothing. And three, Doris is not exactly equipped to write black characters. I’m sure she would be quite surprised to discover this, and have a few objections, but it’s pretty racist.

At first the racism is subtle. The main character be narratin’ without ever endin’ any verbs with a “g.” This may not seem like much, and it isn’t, but I have the library of a madman, so I own all 20ish of Doris and Graci’s books. This is the only one with this type of narrative voice. Suspiciously, it’s also the only one with an African American lead. She was right not to pull the trigger and go full, what was called in 1993, “Ebonics” but what she certainly would have called “Jive,” but her decision to have Jerome narratin’ his struggles like ‘dis is a tough thing to look at.

Before they meet, of course, a talking dog, Jerome and Jamin have a tough time adjusting to life in the foster home. For instance, they don’t like to wear or seem to understand clothes, and Jamin instantly destroys the shirts he’s given for school. Look, I’m not saying that the only black people Doris had ever seen were on National Geographic and Def Comedy Jam, but it would explain why the other things her black characters couldn’t wrap their heads around were “how to use the silverware at dinner,” and “how to do things on time.”

The story is a nightmare. Jerome and Jamin are bumbling fish-out-of-water fuckups in every situation and their deadbeat mother doesn’t bother to show up to their scheduled visitations. And look, as a white with a country upbringing and at least 73 untreated concussions, I’m not immune to racism. For instance, when I meet an Asian stand-up comedian I say, “Based on the two things I know about you, 10 minutes of your act is screaming in your mother’s accent.” And every Asian stand-up comedian I have or will ever meet thinks I’m Sherlock Holmes. Also, I am barely kidding when I say if I was a black crime fighter my superhero name would be Karate Ivory Wayans. So yeah, I get not getting it, ethnics. I so wholeheartedly don’t get it that when Starbucks writes “Let’s talk about race” on my cup, I do. And I always ask why I’m not allowed to say it. Always. So if you’re writing a kid’s book about foster homes and I, the man who typed this paragraph, say, “Hold up, this shit is racist,” you fucked up.

Luckily, not many illustrations called for characters to look into each other’s eyes, so Graci Evans kept her colored pencils in her pants for most of the book. I say most of the book because it does end with this picture of Jerome and Jamin with their foster dad sniffing them like he wants their scent to be his everything. SNIFFFFF…

I started tellin’ Bob “I love you… ‘Dad,'” but all he said in return was “SNIFFFFFFFFFF.”

Jamin was gazin’ into his beard the whole time. Just fallin’ in love like a straight up sex pigeon. “SNNNNFFFFFF,” Bob continued.

“SNIFF. SNIIIIIIIIIFFFFFF.”

I tried breakin’ the silence. “We should be gettin’ go–“

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH,” Bob interrupted with a 40 minute sigh before starting again. “SNIFFFFFFF...” The nearby animals were ordinary, non-talking ones. No one was comin’ to help us.

INSPIRED BY DORIS SANFORD AND GRACI EVANS with apologies to, I guess, everyone else

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Fanfiction Showcase: My Little Pony – Cupcakes

When our generous, wise, only slightly acidic sponsors over at PoxCo (Spread the Pox!™) first assigned me the fanfiction beat, I immediately tried to commit ritual suicide. The knife penetrated, I saw the blood, felt the pain, but there was no sweet release of death. The wounds sealed shut before my very eyes. The head HR mantis, Vexxox, informed me of three things: that death simply does not work that way in the Wrong Dimension, that instead of my life I had actually just cost myself the ability to feel one human emotion, and that my first assignment would be Cupcakes, a My Little Pony fanfiction by Sergent Sprinkles. I would say that’s an adorable name, but apparently it was the ability to find things cute that I lost. Is that even a human emotion? I always thought ‘finding things cute’ would be categorized under ‘love.’ Have I lost the ability to love altogether? Let’s find out! 

Okay, you know where this is going. All fan fiction starts like this: We’re going to enjoy a lovely snippet of normalcy that could come straight out of the show, and then Harry Potter poofs in, waves his wand around and says “Ponium Pantieus Vanishera!” Cut to one masturbation session later and boom! — you can feel shame again. We’ll skip through the next section, which is just about Rainbow Dash, who looks like this:

Hurrying to meet Pinkie Pie in her bakery:

Man, you almost can’t blame the Deep Nerds from jacking it to this stuff. Those are halfway to pornstar names, and the artists gave the ponies makeup. Listen, I’m not saying it’s right to want to fuck a cartoon horse, but I am saying that if you slap a miniskirt on one you lose the right to be surprised when a 34 year-old anime enthusiast puts it on a bodypillow. 

So here, they meet up in the bakery and…

Right. Exactly as expected. I’m certainly not going to blame the victim in this scenario, but if somebody invites you in and insists you eat something, then gets super coy when you ask why, you were actually already roofied from touching the doorknob and I’m sorry I could not get this warning to you earlier. 

All right, well, here we go. I guess we’re doing this. Let me just check real quick to make sure suicide doesn’t work and nope — still here. Think I just lost the ability to feel sunshine on my face which, again, I wasn’t aware was an emotion. Is that under ‘happiness’? Did I just lose all happiness? 

Yep, it was all happiness.

Look, fine, I’m going to unzip, but I’m not going to be happy about it. I literally can’t.

Wait, what? What in the unholy scrabbling fuck? I thought I was prepared for this. I was prepared for such terrible sights, but not in the Hellraiser sense. I never thought I’d be disappointed that a cartoon pony is getting out of this scenario with its hymen intact, but here we are. You’ve taken another thing from me, Internet.

Hold on, I need to know whether or not this is…

Yes, this is several thousand intricate words of My Little Pony torture porn. 

That last sentence should not be. It reads like a thesis written by an AI to justify its eradication of the human race. I never thought I would type those words in that order, but I also thought I would be an astronaut, when the closest I’ve ever gotten to drifting aimlessly in the void is right here, right now, reading this:

Solid comedy bit, Pinkie Pie. Do we really need to take a torture break to try out riffs from your Seinfeld spec script? Many is the time I’ve wished for physical maiming instead of having to attend a friend’s improv class, but I never thought it would be inflicted upon innocent ponies instead. Truly this monkey’s paw has curled down three fingers and left me with the middle one.

I write horror for a living and I am finding this My Little Pony story to be a bit much. I will say: good job on channeling a basic injury we can all relate to — the torn hangnail — and incorporating a hardcore version of it into this children’s story meant for little girls (and boys still figuring some things out). I thought MLP was already about as polluted as a fanpool could get, since a grown man in a My Little Pony shirt is how nature signals you to shut down your genitals, but this is worse. 

I’m not going to subject you to the thousands more words there are of this, so hopefully what you’ve seen so far has been enough foreplay and the recap alone will help you finish:

Pinkie Pie cuts pieces off of Rainbow Dash, then makes her eat herself, drives hot nails into her hooves and then runs an electric current through them, and finally guts Dash, all while running her tight five minute comedy routine because an audience is an audience. There’s way too much loving description and needless urination here to say this is entirely non-sexual, but if you do find yourself aroused just know that this is the step between killing small animals and hunting prostitutes on a private island. 

Take us out, Pinkie Pie. 

Honestly, there’s no surprise here. This was the only way to close Pinkie’s arc. Taxidermying her pony-friend is just basic storytelling structure. Like Tom Joad marching off to change the world, there was no other way this story could end. And until Eli Roth finally signs on to the Care Bears remake, this is going to have to tide you over, anthropomorphized cartoon animal torture fetishists. 

As for me, I’m pretty sure I can still be exploded or incinerated, so it’s not like I don’t have hope. 

Oh, no — turns out I cannot be exploded, and I have quite literally lost ‘hope.’