Category: UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: r slash celebeconomy🌭

Post author By Merritt K
Post date 05/07/2025
7 Comments on Upsetting Day: r slash celebeconomy🌭

The evolution of online culture has achieved a rapidity we never could have imagined in the 2000s. Back then, we had to subsist on what we called “internet fads” for months or even years. We supped upon a thin gruel of Hampsterdances, All Your Bases, and Hello My Future Girlfriends. Mr. T Ate Our Balls! He ate our balls, damn it.

Even on the recently-compromised then more-recently restored 4chan, memes had a relatively long shelf life. In those days, “meme” was a little-known word that actually referred to a repeated and gradually transmuted image or phrase. Later, it became shorthand for “image macro.” Today, it basically just means any kind of joke you see online.

The average internet user in 2025 sees more “memes” in a single hour of browsing their timeline than a child in 2005 would have seen in an entire year. Inevitably, these trends tend to peak then recede from the public consciousness. Like, remember the Twitter craze of posting a grid of characters or real people with dollar amounts attached and asking your followers to build a team from them with a certain budget?

Well, some people never forgot it. And, it should go without saying, they incorporated it into an incredibly baroque system of masturbation.

I don’t remember how I stumbled across r/celebeconomy. I told Sean and Robert that I wanted to write about it on March 2nd, and they approved the pitch, though Robert noted that while it would make a good article, it would also make him sad. When the time came to actually write this piece and I braced myself to delve into the subreddit to gather material, I was confronted with an unexpected setback.

r/CelebEconomy, like r/RedScareForCisHetMen before it, had been struck down by Reddit, leaving its 81,000 members without a place to call home. I was crestfallen and confused. Do we truly live in a world in which men cannot publicly gamify the fictional purchase of famous women for the purpose of sex? It’s political correctness gone mad! And more importantly, it’s getting in the way of me generating content. But fear not — though the subreddit is gone, its legacy lives on. Specifically, it lives on on weird off-brand porn sites focused on still images that presumably exist to serve lonely Arctic researchers who have to make do with fifteen minutes of internet access a day on a Starlink connection.

I had to see an animated pop-up of Dale and Peggy from King of the Hill fucking for this. The things I do for you. It doesn’t even make sense! Dale is a happily married cuckold! Bill’s the one who’s obsessed with Peggy! Sorry, I’m stalling. But I think it’ll become clear pretty quickly why that is. Let’s try and start with something relatively tame.

Simple. It’s a grid of well-known, attractive, mainly-white women, each assigned a dollar value, with serviceable graphic design. By the time you’ve finished reading this article, this will seem quaint to you. Why would anyone participate in this kind of thing on a public forum? I suppose it’s a slightly more evolved form of the old “who would you rather bang” question with some light gamification. A kind of rules-light RPG that provides a scaffolding for storytelling versus a free-for-all jackoff improv.

I’m a little confused by the “negative $1 discount” for wifing, though. Does the double negative signify an increase in price, which would be expected given the value proposition of sharing your life with one of these women rather than a single night of passion? Or are we meant to take it as a true discount, given that whomever made this almost certainly hates women and for whom the prospect of being married to one, even an accomplished and/or famously beautiful one, rather than pumping and dumping her is a kind of hardship for which he theoretically deserves recompense? I’m stalling again, because things are about to get worse.

Ok, kind of a jump in mechanical complexity here. This time we’re running through a list of famous attractive women and assigning them various “materials.” Would it be churlish of me to point out that “bikini” and “shiny dress” aren’t materials, exactly? I suppose “nude” is, technically, if you consider it to mean “flesh.” But hey, we’re not talking about cutting a woman’s face off to create a terrifying death mask.

Oh. Oh no. This isn’t great, and it’s actually worse than it seems at first glance because we’re not just picking one, as the instructions suggest. We have a budget. We’re shopping for lady faces and we’re going to stitch them together into something new and terrible. We are the villain in a Thomas Harris novel. Can we get a silly one?

Baldur’s Gape. No notes. Of course Shadowheart, the stern goth mommy with a secret heart of gold is valued most highly here, since she was built in a lab to appeal to shut-in gamers. Speaking of gamers, maybe you want something a little more intellectual?

Jesus Christ. This looks like the puzzle on the back of a box of Weinstein-O’s. But we can get more complex.

Here we fucking go. We’re practically into complex European board game territory now. Anyone who seriously engaged with this graphic has gone beyond horny and has discovered something else. And you know what? I think we might have fucked up by making hardcore pornography so freely available. A culture without 24/7 access to the most extreme kinds of filth imaginable doesn’t produce images like this. We’re looking at the work of a mind so inured to an endless stream of genitals in various configurations that it had to invent a means of making it more difficult to jack off. But hey, I just noticed there’s a transgender woman and a model with vitiligo on there. Welcome to the #resistance, horny guy who made this image.

Next up is Tour de Fuck. Tour de Fuck, everybody! It’s a cutely-themed French choose-your-own-fuckventure! I regret to inform you that they’ve actually all been relatively cute up until now compared to what’s coming. Aside from the face one, I mean. Let’s get nasty.

Now we’re talking. The player of this game is invited to imagine himself engaging in specific sex acts with each of his choices. This is a game of strategy and also imagined insemination, much like Warhammer if you’re playing the forces of the Chaos God Slaanesh. Sidebar: the phrase “slow and passionate deepthroat” is an instant tipoff that you’re in the presence of a serial killer. Distract him with sexual grid puzzles and effect a hasty retreat from the situation.

I shouldn’t have mentioned Chaos earlier. Now we must walk its Path, which happens to be lined with an unexpected number of Korean pop stars. Do you think this guy maybe has a certain type? And additionally has psychosexually imprinted on Amy Adams? I had to cut this one off since it went on for like a dozen rows, but spoiler: yes, and yes. Speaking of overlong images…

This one is called “The Last Men Alive,” and it bills itself as not just a game, but a story. Let’s dive in.

Incredible. We’ve got amnesia, we’re making choices, and there are stats involved. This is practically a Bioware game already. I’m going to roll with Miranda Cosgrove, since I think the Sociability skill is low-key underrated in a post-apocalyptic scenario, which this is, I think?

Right, right, the Devastation. Promising breeders. Underground bunkers. “DSL.” Cute. It’s a Sex University where the administration disappears you if your evaluations fall off. So basically regular university, if you’re an adjunct.

Things kind of go on like this for a while. I picked Camila Mendes as my Assistant for another +1 to Sociability and someone named Victoria Justice as my Planner for +1 Duty. My enforcer is Chloe Moretz, just because that’s a really funny image to me. She gives me another +1 Sociability. But things get interesting when we get to “Housekeeper” (sexual).

We’ve got unlocks now? Of course I’m going with Fouz Al Fahad. Let’s scroll down to the list of perks and see what that gets us.

Haha wait, what’s that last one? Haha. Wow, ok, I think I’m good on pursuing this any further! Let’s just move on to the scoring.

My Sociability is 5. My Duty is 1. My Libido is 0. That means we have failed! I guess the UN is going to kill us. The guy screaming incoherently on the corner downtown tried to warn me!

Wait, what? Yes, for the crime of not taking this very seriously, we are now forced to imagine ourselves being sexually dominated by Alison Brie, Jessica Chastain, or another woman who appears on all of these that I haven’t heard of before.

What a journey that was! And it’s not the only one like this, either. Before r/celebeconomy went down, you could have spent all of your time just running through these things. It’s like browsing un-playtested solo tabletop RPGs on itch.io, only with more tits. About the same amount of depression, though. Here’s a bit from another one where you’re a king assembling a royal court.

Hey, Susan Sarandon! That’s nice. Having a woman over fifty in one of these fantasy fuck leagues is the social justice equivalent of America electing a gay President. I think it’s kind of fucked up that if you pick Christina Hendricks you steal her nipples from your children, though.

Of course, it wouldn’t be an article about a weird subset of the porno enthusiast community without an incredibly specific premise. Go on, guess what it could be. Staffing a sexual daycare for adult babies? Castle of female Draculas? TikTok house passing around a pizza boy? It’s none of those, and I’m furious that someone who isn’t me is going to make millions off of Reverse Gangbang TikTok House.

Years ago, I did some phone sex work. It wasn’t for long, but it was enough that very little surprises me anymore, carnally speaking. Most people’s fantasies, even the ones they think of as uniquely despicable or strange, are actually very common. I only ever came across one desire that was actually novel: a guy that wanted someone to pretend to be his mother, who was also his martial arts sensei, and karate chop him to completion. The image I’m about to show you is, I think, actually more out there than that.

I have to say, as large as the AT&T girl’s breasts are, I do not think that paying her $4 million dollars to play professional basketball would be a wise investment. And did you catch the stuff about mouths and ball-handling? It’s pretty subtle, so I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. Just in case it went over your head, the creator provided a helpful little key at the bottom of the graphic.

Now, there’s an obvious question here that I’ve been eliding up until this point. If you take celebeconomy posts seriously as a sort of game design — and the over 80,000 members of the subreddit certainly did — then how do you determine a celeb’s relative value in a given game?

Does it just come down to personal preference on the part of the creator? A gut feeling? My, my, how naïve. No, like the mainstream video game industry, it’s all about data. Activision and EA are constantly gathering metrics to determine how often to dole out loot boxes for maximum engagement in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6: 2, and likewise the denizens of r/celebeconomy compiled vast quantities of survey information to help would-be designers craft well-tuned fuckmatrices.

And boy, do they get granular.

I had some trouble accessing these sheets — I had to pull the links from an archived version of the subreddit, and I think the Google account they were associated with might have gone down with the ship. Eventually, Google Sheets just started yelling at me in Swedish while refusing to do what I asked, which I think costs $5 from Alicia Vikander and grants a +1 to your Meatballs stat. Get it? Meatballs? It’s like testicles. Because of sex.

When I dove into the archives to find these charts, I also took a look at the subreddit rules and guidelines. They are extensive, containing documentation helpful to anyone trying to start a career in whatever this is.

There’s bidding on some of these? I joked about European board games earlier but we’re essentially dealing with a Reiner Knizia once we’ve added auctions into the mix.

Twine! Old friend, is that you? I published a book on Twine a decade ago. To see it recommended as a tool for crafting Sophie’s Choice-style dilemmas over which Instagram model you’d rather have join your starship crew as Chief Cockwarming Officer raises some complicated feelings. It’s got me in a contemplative mood, thinking about what all of this has meant.

What have we learned today? We’ve learned that fantasy fuckball no longer has a place on woke Reddit. We’ve learned that men will go to extraordinary lengths to create barriers between themselves and jacking off with the goal of getting more out of the experience rather than just cooling it for a while and going to the gym or something. But most of all, we’ve learned that selecting Fan Bingbing — star of the live-action Mulan remake — as the sexual negotiator for your harem not only grants you a +1 to Sociability, but also unlocks the Tax Evasion ability.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Good Satan and His Hot Witches, red pill stockbrokers of the fleshnet who see past charisma stats into pure harem optimization theory.

Tags Fantasy Fuckball, Free, Merritt K, reddit, tour de fuck

UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Dead Pet

Tags books, Lydia Bugg, pet funeral etiquette, pets

UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Boobs🌭

Two weeks ago, I showed you something called The Fart Video. It was an unrelatable series of observations about farts that have never existed; a unique artifact written by a man with no butthole or sense of humor. It would have taken more effort and been funnier if it came with a blank tape and a note saying, “Sorry I didn’t finish the fart video. Cancer.” So now I have a question. What would you say if I told you its creator, Herbert I. Kavet, was one of the most prolific “comedy” “authors” of all time?

A. God damn it.

B. I don’t like where this is going.

C. Please, I’m not ready for another of whatever The Fart Video was.

D. Fuck you, sir.

You’re right! Here is a tiny, tiny sample of Herbert’s body of work:

For decades, Herbert I. Kavet has been guessing wrong about how jokes work for books about farts, sex, or farting. And while all of those titles are fascinating in their own way, one of them caught my eye. Computer: isolate and enhance quadrant sector Boobs.

It’s only the word “boobs.” It’s not “the udder-ly ridiculous book of” them or anything. Just Boobs. And the cover is a child lost in an ocean of them. Why? What part of a man’s brain says, “Forty titties isn’t quite a joke. There needs to be some kind of contex– wait, I’ve got it. An abandoned child leering at two of them. You know, like a real horny toddler. And don’t expect some breast-shaped sand castle gag. I’m saying I will not draw anything more than a tiny boy staring at tits. How long are you going to let me talk? What the fuck does an illustrator need to do to get arrested in 1989?”

If the front wasn’t unappealing enough, this is what the back cover looks like. It’s barely the start of a titty idea. It looks like a shameful Hanna Barbera pitch for something called Lady Harlem Globetrotters. Any attempt to understand it is frustrating. You can tell Boobs is probably a list of different kinds of boobs, but not in a way your planet’s people would know as silly. And it does not bode well that of the four boob examples they give, one of them is already a repeat.

The book opens with, “What’s the deal with the attractive force between objects? When ladies lay down, WHERE do their boobs GO!?” It’s a textbook example of desperate Seinfelding, a technique used by inexperienced comedians where the setup requires both you and your listener to be stupid beyond reason. Herbert tries something unique by not adding a punchline at all and simply soaking in that faulty premise for two more sentences. He could have said, “I tell ya, gravity changes a woman. My wife lays down and suddenly she’s a ten-year-old boy choking out two water balloons, oh!” You add an exploding watermelon or a “cowa-bunga” to that, and you’re an ’80s sensation. But this? This is an incurious virgin asking questions with obvious answers. I promise this whole article won’t be me giving comedy writing notes to a man confused about boobs 40 years ago. Maybe it will help if we calibrate the rules of Herbert’s universe. Let’s check out page 2:

So Herbert’s idea of a standard boob is a swooping tube with a nipple at the end. Like a big toe you can milk. So far, I’d say this man has only seen boobs in two places– Penthouse magazine comics and dead bodies. This is a comedy book about boobs and the author is doing everything he can to communicate two things: I don’t write jokes, and what exactly are boobs.

So now we get where he’s coming from. It won’t help! Up next: Hard Boobs!

“What’s the deal with boobs getting harder these days, fellas? Must be the present fitness craze, right? What? I’m probably thinking of breast implants or push-up bras? No, stop interrupting! You’re ruining my joke about how nursing a baby after aerobics makes them s-strong? Never mind, that’s dumb. You know, you’re right, I might be thinking of breast implants. Sorry, I’m new to boobs and this is only my 78th humor book!”

– Herbert I. Kavet, probably

“I’m just going to say a bunch of random shit for this one, so draw whatever. Sure, inside out nipples on a very sad woman could work! Maybe add a teenager trapped in her cleavage? Yeah, nice. In fact, unless I say otherwise, let’s add a guy getting smothered, just surrendering to the oblivion of titty, in all of these.”

– Herbert I. Kavet, definitely

I’m starting to get this book. Pillow Boobs are the kind of boobs where a pervert author wants to return to the safety of mother’s bosom, to be absorbed by her milky flesh, to crawl into a world where only yummy mommy is. But at the risk of changing tones, va va voom, the busty owner of these fun bags doesn’t need to worry about a date on Saturday nights, zowee, when she swallows all of you in her womb, her loving cervix closing around you, the last of your suffering a shrinking point of light.

Sometimes you can’t tell what boobs look like because of sweaters or jackets, and it sucks. The author of this book must know: can a man sleep forever between your heaving breasts or are you just warm!? You can’t ignore your destiny forever, Enigma Boob!!!

You’re right to not know what’s going on. This went from a list of cartoon boob archetypes to trivia about a specific pair of real-life boobs Herbert is making up. And it wouldn’t be a good story if it was true. It is a haunting rant about mad doctors building a nest inside a woman’s torso. It’s a monologue you’d give to a hitchhiker as you inflated their chest with a bike pump for your murderous tableau. This is not how fucking books work, Herbert.

Oh no.

Herbert is already out of boobs.

Anyone with any foresight should have seen this coming. The second you realized what he was doing you should have thought, “Okay, types of boobs: big, small, hard, soft… pointy… let’s see… the biggest pair formed by the hubris of science, of course. Then… oh no, this is not a concept capable of filling a book.” You can feel the struggle here, the frustration of Herbert’s dull mind as it refuses to cough up boob jokes. Look at this subhuman shit. “Technically, Hidden Boob is different than Disappearing Boob!!!” is a thought a cow might have long after it’s been torn apart for food and industry.

As someone who has submitted many pitches across all types of media, I can tell you one of the worst things a writer can hear is, “Sounds good. Write it up!” It’s what someone says after they’ve heard your ideas and selected the emptiest one, the one you never thought they’d pick. But like most wisdom, it can’t be taught. It can only be earned. Before he pitched Boobs, Herbert never considered a titty joke book would be this hard. If you told him coming up with forty-six kinds of funny boobs and a little cute paragraph for each of them was fucking impossible, he wouldn’t have believed you. This book is a task a madman gave himself, and we are watching him fail catastrophically. If this was a magic trick, it would be like David Blaine never making it to the block of ice because he died a week ago between two tits and his final words were “This is the 9th time I’ve had diarrhea this week, oh look! Tits!”

His brain has run out of tit shapes, so in a panic, Herbert invents an entirely new kind of boobs. Then he gets to work describing them, badly and matter-of-factly. If any part of him notices he’s writing humorless observations from a universe that does not exist, he doesn’t care. Saucers: they’re like plates, but boobs, I guess. “Let the readers try to find meaning or joy in this bullshit,” Herbert thinks, for each paragraph puts him one step closer to freedom, to being able to get started on his next book. Which is, oh God no, 2002 Farts For Over 40 Cat Lovers.

Guys, you ever go out with a lady whose boobs are made out of unspeakable lumps? You know the type. The kind who puts on a thick sweater like we won’t notice. Girl, we know you’re hiding swarms and swarms of furious rats in those titties. Psh. We know your chest is is going to chew our face off while we lay down to rest forever in the serenity of your pillowy motherhood.

This won’t help make it any funnier, but Herbert was over fifty when he wrote about this “lovely young thing” and got super frustrated when her high school boobs never popped out of her dress. In a way, I appreciate how he’s keeping his terrible urges in check, but I’m so distracted by the wrongness of the line “In the history of the world… no boob has ever popped out of a prom dress.” It’s exactly the opposite of the logic of a prom dress joke. If someone said, “We need to get out of here like titties in a prom dress,” you’d know you were both sex criminals in a ’90s Jerry Bruckheimer movie, but you’d also know they meant “go fast.” I know I said I would stop giving comedy writing notes, but come on, you can’t fuck up a prom joke this hard unless you were breast fed through high school.

This nightmare might be as close to a joke as Herbert manages in this book, but I’m going to try to find one that isn’t about child boobs.

Okay, here we go:

Herbert can barely bring himself to write about saggy boobs, which is a problem because they are now the only thing he can think about.

“You are in a flopping titty prison of your own design,” hisses a voice behind Herbert I. Kavet’s eyes. He tries to think of something else, anything else. “Flopping titties, flopping titties,” laughs the voice.

Herbert concentrates. Curse these flopping boobs. With everything he has left, he forces his mind to imagine round boobs again. “Sure,” says his mind. “Two round boobs coming up! Flopping on the end of two long ones!” Herbert shrugs and gets to work describing them. He wonders if hanging upside down could fix them, then accidentally types that where he intended to write a joke. It seems so long ago those days when he thought a boob joke book could be fun. Herbert sits there for hours, trying to imagine something other than these insane ball-on-a-string boobs…

… and Herbert fails.

A sudden inspiration hits Herbert. What if they went the other direction, these boobs!? It still wouldn’t be funny, but he had long since given up on that. So he creates a fake girlfriend named Ellen who had high boobs. She got married and never left Hempstead, end of fun story. I’ve also met an Ellen, end of punchline.

These are the kind of boobs Ellen would have had if she was real. Oh, perfect Ellen. Eat that ice cream all day, my pimpleless, high-boobed queen. By this point, it had to have occurred to Herbert that he had used up the last of his meager creativity. He was changing the names on weird tits and writing self-insert fiction about the women attached to them. So he did what everyone incapable of creating does– he destroyed.

He came up with “Nubbies,” which are “small boobs of no particular shape.” Mathematically, it’s as close as a boob idea can get to the absence of a boob idea. “These boobs are probably on children,” Herbert says. “Damn it, you outsmarted us with that probably,” replies his local district attorney.

Herbert I. Kavet knows he’s (probably) on to something with Nubbies, the non-boobs of young girls, so he is now adding to the lore. He suggests “Ninnies” as the name for not having boobs should you continue not having them. This is no thought of a human mind. This is a scent an insect would secrete to convince predators it was dead. “Without boobs, you could go topless at gay beaches!” Herbert’s brain suddenly vomits in a fascinating misjudgment of all things. After many hours of staring at Herbert’s work, I thought of a cute way to put this: if you’re worse at anything than Herbert I. Kavet is at writing joke books, you deserve to rot in Hell.

Herbert has spent so much time building the featureless worlds of Nubbies and Ninnies that he’s having trouble picturing boobs again. “Hrrk!” his imagination grunts as it squeezes tiny tits onto several kinds of racism. “There, there,” Herbert says to comfort the woman he’s picturing with the tiny breasts. A lot of comedy writers wouldn’t think to do that. And in that spirit, nice try, flat-chested ladies. You did your best.

Sure. Muffins are community-minded, soft-nippled boobs for green shirts. I won’t entertain the idea of trying to engage with this like it means anything. Why bother? In a million years Herbert couldn’t explain why he said any of these words. He is writing jokes like a trapped coyote chewing its own leg off. My dentist is funnier than this on the security footage of him groping me.

A burst of inspiration! What if boobs were far apart! Herbert couldn’t come up with a funny angle on the idea, but he bought himself some time to think. All he has to do now is come up with something other than “far apart” that boobs can be. Come on, think, Herbert. You can do it.

God damn it, Herbert.

T-these are the same boobs only bigger. You goddamn son of a bitch, Herbert. We all see what you’re doing!

You stupid piece of shit, Herbert I. Kavet. I’m going to end this article before you inflate these tits out of control and crash an elevator.

No! Herbert! You won’t get away with this, Herbeeeeerrrrrrrrrt!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Supernaught, who could easily come up with 80085 more boobs without even trying.

Tags boobs, books, Free, Seanbaby, titty taxonomy

UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Dorbees: Making Decisions

Post author By Lydia Bugg
Post date 04/14/2025
5 Comments on Upsetting Day: Dorbees: Making Decisions

Tags dorbees, Jesus Christ Pose, Lydia Bugg, Tiny little balls

UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos, Part 2🌭

Post author By Robert Brockway
Post date 04/03/2025
9 Comments on Upsetting Day: CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos, Part 2🌭

Last week I wrote about CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos, the epic tale of triple-doc Dr. Daryl Daxler, a community theater puppetmaster who solved the Fermi Paradox with racist puppets, In Part 1, I focused solely on the art of Robert J. Gold, a maniac spending his retirement years on this CGI porn asset cinematic universe. It’s sort of like a horny Skibidi Toilet for boomers, if that helps.

“Huge tittied woman has a lot of real problematic puppets” has not historically been a dealbreaker in my personal life, but this idea had its time and place, and that time was 1993, and that place was the clearance bin in a KB Toys. Any reasonable person would discard this premise as the misfiring of dying neurons, and decide to stop huffing paint. But these puppets ate Robert J. Gold’s brain until all that remained was lust and puppet scat. He wrote a 70 page graphic novel, a 136 screenplay, and a 70,000 word novel of the exact same story. Just the Hand Puppet Commando origin story over and over again, and it all looks like this:

Absolute visual poison. Glossolalia for the eyeballs. A lens flare siphonophore held together by a network of beams, bolts, and rays. It somehow reads exactly like it looks:

That’s enough to medically diagnose a hyperactive child. It’s what a Decepticon tells his dementia nurse before transforming into a rhombus. I can tell you with authority that reading this is what it feels like to get hit on by Ernest Cline. Robert J. Gold has spent years of his life writing a faithful transcription of a car wash. But, remember, horny.

This is a comic book, screenplay, graphic novel and animated trailer that could’ve been a math doodle. It’s somehow both not enough and way too much effort. Robert J. Gold has been working on this for, let me check-

Twenty years. Two decades of bothering his wife and co-workers with puppet accents he swears are ironic. A quarter of a lifetime spent tweaking the computerized feet of a virtual model meant to be plowed by Sonic the Hedgehog. I’d say this is a man in love with the first and only idea he ever had, but nothing could be further from the truth. Robert J. Gold is literally an idea man.

That’s exactly the Photoshop I would’ve made as a punchline for the obsessive puppet guy’s life. But that’s a real book. Not only that, Simon & Schuster published it. They’re one of the Big Five, the largest and most prestigious traditional publishers in the world. That doesn’t mean it’s legitimate, just that Robert J. Gold got paid actual money for it. It’s important to remember “inventor” has always been a polite term for grifter. If somebody told you they were an inventor in the 1990s, that meant they were going to sell you a headscratcher for $40 and skip town. Not so with Robert J. Gold, he spun that one book into an empire, culminating in the most prestigious of 1990s publications: the interactive CD-ROM.

Suddenly, the design sensibilities of CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos make total sense. It does have “1995 Educational CD-ROM learning to fuck” vibes. The weird thing is, when you drill down into Robert J. Gold’s actual inventions, they get very boring. A 1990s grifter usually claimed to have invented a working hoverboard or a cancer preventing straw. Robert J. Gold claims to have invented a flat panel display controller and a new kind of energy bank. Boring shit. Legitimate sounding shit. But then there’s this-

That’s the grifter we want! Scam inventors love to say they worked for the military, and it’s not always a lie. DARPA owns a lot of hilarious patents because some charismatic weirdo came in with a slick PowerPoint presentation about a Battle Whistle. Let me guess, Robert J. Gold tried to sell DARPA some kind of beam-based weaponry.

Wait! Laser puppet.

Wait! Racist laser puppet.

Once again, that sounds worryingly legitimate. There’s no way the horny CGI puppet guy actually invented a real flashbang grenade in use by SWAT teams and militaries. Let’s track down that patent.

No mention of lasers, beads, or magnets – the holy trinity of ‘90s grifter inventions. This might be real. There’s one way to check how legitimate a patent is, and that’s to see who’s cited it. Check who might be using elements of the invention outside of the owner. If it’s a patent for some stupid scam device, the only thing in the citation section is the original inventor wearing a fake mustache, trying to run the scam again under a different name. Here’s the citations of Robert J. Gold’s flashbang grenade.

That’s too many for a scam. Let’s pull out just one:

So he really did invent an influential form of the modern flashbang grenade back in 1992, it truly was used by military and police forces around the world, and it’s still relevant decades later. Normally when I go looking into sexual puppet maniacs all I find are crusty felt holes and unhappy churches. The occasional cannibal. I have never found a real life weapons designer. But it makes sense. It’s all there in the work: Each and every racist puppet has a bright beam, a stun ray, or a novelty grenade. Like all the best authors, Robert J. Gold is subconsciously writing his past trauma into his current fiction.

Hold on, “trauma” is a spoiler.

Before we find out what that trauma is, we have to start at the beginning. Flashbang grenades existed for a very long time, but they did not work very well, and they weren’t used often. What you think of, when you think of a flashbang today – that all started with Bill Nixon, who invented a more stable version in 1988. He filed his patent and began widespread distribution in 1990. Flashbang grenade usage skyrocketed around the world, but especially in the US. And Robert J. Gold rode this wave right behind Nixon, with his own patent just a couple years later in 1992.

Flashbangs aren’t fun and harmless like in video games. They’re a modern plague. They were only meant to be used sparingly, in very specific scenarios. If you have to incapacitate a hostage-taker and only probably but not definitely kill the hostages, you use a flashbang grenade. That’s pretty much it. There just aren’t many times where throwing an explosive at somebody is the safe option. Flashbang grenades are still bombs.

After people like Bill Nixon and Robert J. Gold made them mainstream in the ‘90s, military and police started tossing flashbangs around like party favors. This resulted in at least 50 deaths, but probably more like hundreds.

Considering that statistic only goes back to the year 2000, it may be thousands. What was once used solely by elite military forces in hostage scenarios, was now being used by yokel cops to detonate the local Boy Scout troop. Did you think that was a fun joke example? That’s not a fun joke example.

Oh, good. He only exploded himself, and not the troop of Boy Scouts. Because those were the two options he left himself in that scenario. Real quick: Why do Boy Scouts need to know how to deploy a flash grenade? Do they work on bobcats? Troop 187 may not have learned the proper way to stun and disorient a chipmunk, but they did learn a little something about the militarization of the American police force that day.

This motherfucker was so desperate for 12 year-old nerd respect that he gave himself stun grenade leprosy. Somehow that was the last straw for inventor Bill Nixon. Ten years after his invention started exploding minorities, he helped turn a cop into a flashbang zombie and that was his Oppenheimer moment. He got out of the game.

If teaching Boy Scouts what the Rapture will look like weighed heavily on Bill Nixon’s conscience, the time a cop threw a flashbang into a baby’s crib must have ruined him.

This kind of guilt destroys a man’s soul. Bill Nixon must have built a Silent Hill in his mind because of that shit. He probably spends every dreaming moment sneaking past Boy Scouts with beams for eyes, trying to collect shredded baby clothes.

Look, I know this is darker than you want to go in a comedy article. I’m sorry. The line isn’t always clear, but for future reference it helps that we found it. It’s right here, between a cop blowing himself up in front of a Boy Scout troop, and exploding a baby. Both things made possible by the modern flashbang grenade. They’re truly an atrocity. The State Supreme Court of North Carolina recently classified them as “weapons of mass death and destruction.”

Which should theoretically make their use on civilians a war crime, but that’s American Exceptionalism at work.

We’ve lost track of Robert J. Gold’s whimsical puppets a little bit.

We needed all this groundwork to establish that flashbang grenades are a disaster, that their reckless use should probably be a war crime, and is for anyone but American police officers. But flashbang grenades are still a tool, and misuse of a tool comes down to training. Who’s training these cops?

The manufacturers, of course. Usually for a lucrative government contract fee. Ideally, that training would teach police to use flashbangs only in situations where it’s absolutely necessary, and not to huck them at protestors or air-drop them from helicopters.

Which I only mention because they’re two specific citations of intended use in Robert J. Gold’s patent application.

We all know the best people to teach how and when to use a potentially lethal product are the ones who make money every time it’s used. If it’s good enough for the pharmaceutical industry, it’s good enough for handgrenades. Robert J. Gold not only invented and sold grenades to the police force, he was responsible for some of that training everyone agrees was reprehensible. Some men are consumed by guilt. Some men stick in guilt’s throat. Bill Nixon is over here in Flashbang Hill fistfighting Pup Tent Head, meanwhile Robert J. Gold has this on his LinkedIn profile.

Accuracy Systems, Inc. of Phoenix, Arizona is where Robert J. Gold taught, and presumably learned flashbang safety himself before going on to start his own facility, First American Counter-Terrorist Systems. Let’s look into his alma mater:

Ooh, you don’t love to see headlines about explosive decapitation in your handgrenade certification school. This happened at Accuracy Systems, Inc. in 1989, just before Robert J. Gold filed his patent in 1990. Gold doesn’t list a date of employment, but the timeline implies our beloved puppet maniac was working, training, and possibly building his own future curriculum under Accuracy Systems owner, Chuck Byers, before Byers’ incompetence exploded a man’s head off. That’s me being generous, because the alternative is after.

You better believe we’re going off on a Chuck Byers tangent. If karate movies taught me anything, it’s that you can kill a guy by slapping him in the nose. If I learned two things, it’s that the student is only as good as his teacher. Robert J. Gold learned his Flashbang Style from Handgrenade Sensei Chuck.

First day, straight to grenades! Most places don’t let you work the cash register. If 1/7th of a Wendy’s Grill Skills program doesn’t sound like enough training to assemble sensitive explosives, you’ve got more foresight than Chuck Byers.

Somehow, this is not the decapitation story. This is what most places call criminal negligence, but in the grenade world is known as dramatic foreshadowing. By “grenade world” I mean “Arizona.” Not only did Chuck Byers not learn to change his ways from this, he told the recently exploded man to walk it off.

Put some dirt in those stumps and get back to work, pussy. In my day, we exploded ourselves to work at the grenade factory, where we exploded all day and then blew ourselves back home to our terrible wives, who were just a collection of handgrenades stuffed into a dress.

Why didn’t it stop there? Why would anyone watch a fellow employee explode themselves over the treeline, and still clock back in after lunch? Cult! The answer is cult.

Holy shit, I think there was some actual karate in there. This story truly has everything. We started at harmless horny puppet maniac and somehow wound up here, in an Amateur Handgrenade Karate Cult. A marketing team’s favorite thing to ask new clients is “describe your brand in one sentence.” 1900HOTDOG does not have a marketing team, but we do have our answer.

The one good thing about a 1980s Amateur Handgrenade Karate Cult is that they mostly just blow themselves up. Maybe some ninjas. Not the case with Chuck Byers and Accuracy Systems, Inc. They became a national threat.

Throughout the late 1980s, UPS was shipping boxes full of live handgrenades without so much as a FRAGILE sticker. That’s a Naked Gun gag. It feels like we’re veering off into slapstick.

Imagine slipping on a banana peel while carrying a box of live grenades and filing a workman’s comp claim for a tweaked back. The clerk would think they’re on a prank show. They’d start looking for hidden cameras and BAM! That’s when you explode. In the comedy world that’s called an Arizona Misdirect.

Eventually the government would catch up to Handgrenade Sensei Chuck…

And slap him with a fine slightly less than the cost of a well-loved jetski.

If you know anything about right wing maniacs, you know that “a minor fine laughably inadequate for their crimes” is enough to drive them completely insane. Here’s a letter Chuck Byers later wrote to congress about the worst military aviation crash in history, the Gander Air Disaster. It killed 248 American soldiers. In the letter, Chuck Byers spins up a conspiracy about a nuclear backpack bomb and a secret Iraqi sabotage mission-

All pretty standard right-wing nutjob stuff, down to the obligatory Oliver North. So what did Chuck Byers want out of this? The bad kind of attention? Backpay for the top-secret backpack bomb he developed? To cut a novelty rap single with Oliver North where they rhyme “and I’d like to say” with “handgrenade?” Nope, all Chuck wants is credit…

For killing the American soldiers.

Byers claims that an LAPD Bomb Squad officer recognized the explosive that blew up the Gander flight, and that Accuracy Systems, Inc. manufactured it. Byers wants congress to know he totally did that. He built the bomb that exploded the plane and killed those troops. It’s just that he thought it was for the CIA. Now, you might be asking yourself: What kind of lunatic wants this? What kind of absolute face-chewer wants false credit for 248 murders? What could he possibly get out of this?

He’s trying to get out of the accidental death charge at his explosives factory! Chuck Byers, Amateur Handgrenade Karate Cult Maniac, thinks the best way to prove his innocence in a single accidental death charge is to implicate himself in a CIA conspiracy that killed 248 US soldiers and also, just for fun, the attempted assassination of the President of the Philippines. It’s like trying to clear yourself of a trespassing charge by saying you’re a 9/11 hijacker who jumped out right before the plane hit.

Because this has all the hallmarks of a political thriller, you’re probably picturing a fancy bomb at the heart of this scandal. Something with tubes full of blue liquid and multi-colored wires. No. Chuck Byers wants credit for putting napalm in a Coke can.

Okay, that’s enough about Chuck Byers. I only mention him to prove- I’m sorry. I’m being informed that’s not enough about Chuck Byers. He would eventually be convicted of a kickback scheme with the military unit who killed Osama Bin Laden.

Okay, now that’s enough about Chuck Byers, I only bring him up to talk about-

Hold on. Sorry, again. I just learned Byers sold his Amateur Handgrenade Karate Cult compound without removing the grenades, and it’s still exploding people decades later.

We got off track again!

The important part is that Robert J. Gold, the horny racist puppet guy, probably got his grenade training from Chuck Byers, and definitely worked at his explosive decapitation factory. Gold used that knowledge to start his own flashbang grenade training facility, and the one thing everyone agrees on is that flashbang grenades are a disaster that cost many American lives due to the dogshit training methods around them.

Just knowing he was responsible for burning the shape of an exploding cop into the retinas of a Boy Scout troop was enough to do in Bill Nixon’s conscience. Robert J. Gold followed in Nixon’s footsteps back in 1992, and his products were likewise responsible for the surge of flashbang deaths in the ‘90s and beyond. He’s apparently cool with it. He’s still got it on his LinkedIn profile. He proudly lists his certification in Booms at Sensei Chuck’s Huckin’ Hut to this day. He worked for and studied under a guy who wants you to believe he blew up 248 American soldiers with Napalm Coke. Somewhere in there was an exploding baby.

Whether you acknowledge it or not, this kind of thing fucks you up. The inventor of dynamite started the Nobel Prize to try to make up for it. Oppenheimer resigned out of guilt. Bill Nixon is on GameFAQs right now looking up how to beat the gunpowder zombies in his mind. Robert J. Gold used his American war crime money to obsessively recreate the same story over and over again. A story full of stun rays and novelty grenades. A story where the tiny, vulnerable creatures are actually strong warriors who would never be blown apart in a crib. A story about puppets, and beams, and bright lights, and beams, and explosions, and more beams, and regret. And titties.

Fetishes are birthed from trauma.

I’m not saying I can prove Robert J. Gold’s weird puppet gigantism kink comes from a repressed brain trying to absolve itself of explosion guilt. I’m just saying puppet research always goes like this.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Jared Clack, who only has enough room in his heart for one Amateur Handgrenade Karate Cult.