Ron Mexico Productions: Comedy Blog

Adam Vinatieri mixtape

2010-08-11T12:24:00.000-07:00

I've noticed a phenomenon where nearly all athlete highlight reels and tributes on Youtube are set to angry rap songs. It's fitting enough for videos of halfbacks running people over, linebackers completely fucking shit up, or a basketball player slam dunking in the helpless faces of smaller, whiter defenders, but it doesn't work for everything sports-related. For example, it wouldn't really work to set Shawn Johnson's pommelhorse routine to a militant Public Enemy ballad, and it would probably be just a bit silly to set a record-breaking swim by Michael Phelps to an Eminem song about killing his wife.

Even though angry rap songs clearly aren't magical potions that you can add to any sports video editing stew to create something pulse-pounding and awesome, some people still try their damndest to insert them into places where they clearly don't belong, like a mentally challenged 8-year old jamming a third Cheez Doodle into his nose. The phenomenon is so prevalent that Deadspin has an occasional feature called Incongruous Athlete Mix-Tape Theater. It's thanks to that feature that I've been treated to this gem:

There's certainly nothing wrong with making a highlight reel calling attention to the work of Gordon Hayward. He isn't a flashy slam dunk machine, but I appreciate a white guy contributing to the game with solid fundamentals, proper shooting form, and hustle as much as any racist sports journalist, but the whole production reaches an almost sublime level of stupidity when you have footage of a dude shooting free throws set to Straight Outta Compton by NWA.

I took this as a challenge. A few nights ago I loaded up my video editing software with one humble goal in mind: to create the worst video tribute to an athlete ever made. Faithful reader, I believe I have succeeded. The only athlete I could think of that's even less deserving on an angry rap tribute than a player like Gordon Hayward is a kicker. They are not real athletes, and they earn seven-figure incomes to participate in roughly six plays a game. I grabbed some footage, pictures, and interviews with Adam Vinatieri and set about making my masterpiece. The most insane and angry rap song I could find was "X is Coming" by DMX, off of his album It's Dark and Hell is Hot. It's a charming little ditty about DMX coming to a man's house, killing his wife, and then forcing him to watch DMX do terrible things to his 15-year old daughter before finally killing him.

But I didn't want to terribleness to end with merely setting inappropriate music to field goal kicks. That's why I decided to include random photos and a banal postgame interview over the hook. There's also only three actual kicks shown over the course of the video. Eat your fucking heart out, Gordon Hayward. Behold the worst highlight reel ever made. Honestly, don't watch it. You will lose IQ points like a sumbitch.

I really have no reason to be proud of this.

Forbes' 16 best fanbases in sports

2010-08-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, Forbes released a list of the 16 best fanbases in sports. According to them, they determined which teams were worthy of this list by three measurements: home and away game attendance, merchandise sales, and in-market popularity. I'm not surprised that a classy, business-oriented outfit like Forbes would have this kind of criteria. Unfortunately, I am not Forbes Magazine. I rate how good a fanbase is on factors like not being an unbelievably obnoxious cock, not denying a team's existence during a losing season, and not making me want to choke you whenever I look at you. That's why I take issue with nearly every fanbase on this list being considered among the best in sports. Let's take a closer look...

1. Boston Red Sox - They're obnoxiously self-important to the point of making me want to slit my wrists. Nobody's happy for you when you win, because we'd all rather see our own teams win. Get that through your thick, racist skulls. Fuck your curse. I've got a novel idea for you: maybe part of the reason why you went so long without a championship is because you didn't let any black people play for the team until 1960. Willie Mays tried out for the team in the 50's, but he was rejected because he was black. Do you think one of the five greatest players of all time might have helped a little?

2. Pittsburgh Steelers - Bandwagoners, all of you. The reason why Steelers fans are all across the country is because half the population of Pittsburgh fled the city to escape crippling economic depression. Thanks for sharing your sadness with me, Pittsburgh.

3. Detroit Red Wings - What is a hockey team doing on a list of major sports teams?

4. Indianapolis Colts - I'm a Colts fan and being a member of this fanbase embarrasses me. Just try to find any Manning-worshiping NFL analysis on the internet written by a Colts fan without punching your monitor three sentences in. I agree that Peyton Manning is the best quarterback in the NFL, but I'm don't think he died for my sins.

5. New England Patriots - Smug, arrogant, obnoxious, insufferable, and bandwagoners to boot. The worst fanbase in all of sports and the worst human beings to ever draw breath.

6. Pittsburgh Penguins - So far this list is 33% hockey. Don't the Forbes people get that the NHL is a money hemorrhaging disaster that's only posing as a sports league?

7. Boston Celtics - What's worse? Watching them cheer for the gang of mercenaries they brought in for a championship, or seeing them cry for sympathy and act like they're a bunch of hard luck underdogs through the 90's and most of the 00's despite having more championships than any other team.

8. San Antonio Spurs - I don't know any Spurs fans, but I do know that based on before and after pictures of Eva Longoria with and without makeup, I'm pretty sure I could look like a hot chick if I had three hours with a professional stylist.

9. Dallas Cowboys - Oh fuck off.

10. St. Louis Cardinals - I hate the city of St. Louis and the Cardinals, but the fans actually don't seem that terrible.

11. Montreal Canadiens - Fake sport and country

12. Los Angeles Lakers - When you riot and destroy the city over a sports team winning a game, it really takes away from the impact and meaning when the people of LA riot over issues that actually matter. After Rodney King I found myself thinking, "Man, this puts a spotlight on serious issues that we'd rather sweep under the rug then actually face," but after the latest championship riots I found myself thinking, "Man, these fuckers just like to break shit."

13. Cleveland Cavaliers - I'm sure the city's enthusiasm for basketball will be the exact same next season as it was last season

14. New York Yankees - If you live outside of New York, you're guaranteed to have at least one friend who's a Yankees fan despite never setting foot in the state of New York. When you confront them for being a bandwagoner of a team that buys championships, they'll seriously try to argue that having $200 million of payroll doesn't help them that much, if at all. They'll usually mention three players that they drafted and developed themselves, completely failing to notice that having enough money to retain those players when they become worth $20 million a year still kinda qualifies as having an advantage.

15. Philadelphia Phillies - Philadelphia sports fans drink the blood of children

16. Chicago Black Hawks - I grew up in Chicago sports country and I was in town for the Stanley Cup finals, and I assure you that nobody there had a goddamn clue that Chicago even had a professional hockey team until May 29th.

So there you have it. The most notoriously bandwagoning fanbases in all of sports are honored, and the Blackhawks are more widely supported and beloved in Chicago than the Cubs. Editors of Forbes magazine, instead of crunching the numbers and reading surveys, how about you get out and talk to people to get a real sense of who the best fans are.

Gender-Based Dodgeball

2010-08-06T22:56:00.000-07:00

Last night I went with some friends from work to a goth bar in downtown Cincinnati. The place was weird and clearly not my scene, but for the most part the experience was way less miserable than expected. However, I did get a chance to prove my theory that no matter how innocent or non-malicious my actions are, I spread misery and pain to everything I touch. I'm kind of like King Midas, only I turn things I touch into shit instead of gold.

One of the surprisingly cool features of this place is a beach volleyball court. My group was considering playing, but the DJ abruptly decided to organize an on-the-fly dodgeball game in the sand using the soft volleyballs as the weapons. To make the game more interesting, he pitted the men against the women. Roughly 15 women lined up against 9 guys. The DJ thought the women outnumbering the men would make the match even, but the men completely dominating in the first two matches proved that a few more bodies doesn't exactly make up for the fact that a vast majority of women are very small and they suck at throwing things.

In the third and final game, the DJ split up the men and women 50-50 to try to create an even playing field. As the game began, a strong-looking guy pulled his arm back and let loose a bafflingly softly thrown ball in my direction. I easily caught it and went on the offensive. I tried to fake out the opposition by staring an opponent directly in the face and throwing the ball at someone else. I employed this strategy with a pretty good degree of success. Whenever I flex my muscles people laugh their asses off at the toothpicks that I'm trying to pass off as biceps, but for whatever reason I generate a good amount of force when I throw shit.

My surprisingly forceful semi-blindly thrown attacks took out a few women on the other team. My friends taunted me for going after the girls, so I aimed my next throw for a guy who was standing out in the open while his girlfriend hid behind him for protection. I brought my arm back and whipped a rocket at his chest. At the last second he jumped out of the way and my throw absolutely drilled the girl who was originally behind him in the head. Chest level for the boyfriend was equivalent to head level for her. She left the field of play crying and the hundred or so people who witnessed it called me a monster for what I did.

Clearly I did nothing wrong here. I felt terrible after delivering the hit and I immediately ran over to the girl to apologize, but I did nothing wrong. The guy deserves most of the blame for doing such a shitty, cowardly job of protecting his woman, and if the girl is the type of person who cries after getting hit with a volleyball, she probably shouldn't have joined the fucking game in the first place.

But that didn't matter. Regardless of the facts, I was the monstrous asshole who drilled a poor, defenseless girl in the head on purpose. I had friends pretend they didn't know me. I was genuinely worried that someone would follow me out to my car and kick my ass. The boyfriend sure as hell wasn't going to do it because he brazenly displayed what a fucking pussy he is, but he could have sicked his friends on me.

In the end, that one bad moment didn't define the whole night, I had a decent time, and the girl forgave me when I apologized to her, but there's something to be said when my actions while attempting to have some innocent fun managed to completely shock, outrage, and piss off an entire freaky goth bar. Being nonchalant and not reacting strongly to things is one of the defining traits of a goth for Christ's sake. I have a gift for shitting all over things without even trying. It's not a very desirable talent, but it's a talent nonetheless.

Which high costs the most?

2010-08-04T10:39:00.001-07:00

We all know that life sucks, and the way we cope with that is to get high on something or other. Unfortunately, many of us are upset because we're poor, and that means getting fucked up on a budget. Maybe we wouldn't be poor if we worked and saved what what we earn instead of wasting all of our money and time on getting fucked up, but I'm not here to offer rational solutions. I'm here to give you a cost analysis of all of the major types of highs so you know which ones are the most and least affordable.

Cocaine

Cost of an 8-ball: $175
Cost to replace the glass coffee table you smashed your fist into: $149.99
Total cost: $324.99

Heroin

Cost of a single dose of quality heroin: $25
Cost of another dose 4 hours later: $25
Cost of another dose 3 hours later: $25
Cost of another dose 75 minutes later: $25
Cost of another dose 40 minutes later: $25
Cost of another dose 15 minutes later: $25
Cost of another dose 1 minute later: $25
Cost of five doses simultaneously stuck into two arms, two feet, and your ass: $125
Total cost: $300

Marijuana

Cost of an ounce of really good pot: $400 (Seriously? Where do they get the money for this shit?)
Cost of a shitload of Taco Bell: $7
Total cost: $407

Miller High Life

Cost of a 12-pack of Miller High Life: $7.99
Cost of 12 rolls of toilet paper to deal with the unbelievable amount of shitting you'll be doing in the morning: $10.19
Cost of air freshener to mask the mythically inhuman quantity of painful, booming farts you'll be ripping the entire next day: $4
Cost of a plunger when your bloody diarrhea that still won't go away after three days clogs the toilet: $7.99
Co-pay for an appointment with the doctor because you're beginning to fear that you've developed a serious medical problem: $20
Cost of topical anesthetic to treat potential anal fissures: $16.50
Cost of stool softener: $6.99
Price of corrective surgery because your shitty health insurance won't cover a lateral sphincterotomy: $1,244

Total cost: $1,317.66

Here are the final rankings, listed from cheapest to most expensive:

1. Heroin
2. Cocaine
3. Marijuana
4. Miller High Life

As you can see, if you're absolutely strapped for cash, you should only use heroin, if you're willing to open up your budget a little more you can move on to cocaine and marijuana, and you should only resort to drinking Miller High Life if you have an incredibly high amount of disposable income. Thank you for your time.

The 10 Most Awesome Intros on TV Today

2010-07-31T23:45:00.000-07:00

How do you like the new redesign? After having this blog for over two and a half years, I finally decided to go with a layout that doesn't fucking cut off a significant portion of the embedded videos. I'm a genius. Anyways, instead of hating on everything and treating every writing opportunity like a cry for help against my myriad personal issues, I feel like being more positive today, and that means showing some appreciation for the most badass intros in television today.

10. Community

Community is a hilarious freshman series on NBC's Thursday night lineup. In my opinion it was the funniest new comedy of the fall, but it got lost in the shuffle because Glee and Modern Family were getting their dicks ridden so hard. I suggest you check it out while you still can, because CBS has The Big Bang Theory scheduled in the same time slot next fall. Community is going to absolutely crushed and cancellation is inevitable. I don't have a strong opinion on the animation of this intro, but the song absolutely rules. Most episodes didn't use the full intro. It's a shame I didn't get to hear the song as much, but it comes with the benefit of 27 more seconds of jokes, so I'll take it.

9. Weeds

Weeds used this sequence for its first three seasons. It's a shame the original opening credits were abandoned when the setting shifted away from suburbia. It's also a shame that the show became a morally reprehensible, unfunny piece of shit that wrung every last drop of relatability and redeeming value from all of its characters at the same time, but that's a topic for another day. The intro music is the classic protest song "Little Boxes," and every episode from the second and third seasons features a different cover of the song. This rap version shows how much versatility and mileage they got out of it. It's also the only fucking Youtube video of the intro that didn't have embedding disabled, so it gets face time on the blog by default.

8. Dexter

Dexter is a show about a serial killer who channels his murderous instincts into only taking out other killers. This intro sequence is really creepy and does a great job of showing how his murderous nature is always lurking just beneath the surface. This is probably the most artistically accomplished item on the list, but it's also 2 friggin' minutes long and seriously loses its impact after the fourth time you see it, and is downright annoying by season 4, so that drops it a few spots.

7. Rescue Me

The song, "C'mon C'mon," the visual style, and the imagery could not do a better job of fitting the perpetually angry tone of Rescue Me. The show is funny as hell and stops for serious introspection from time to time, but at its core this is a show about deeply damaged, pissed off drunken men shouting, punching shit, and raging on everyone they see, and the intro nails it.

6. Chuck

It features a goddamned Cake song. It could be a still image of a man shoving a baguette up his ass set to a Cake song and it would still get an automatic bid on my list.

5. Mad Men

Again I'll have to apologize because every single video of the original credits on Youtube has embedding disabled, but this version is identical with only the background images changed. Now, I hate Mad Men. It has to be the slowest, most boring, overrated piece of crap in television history. I would have given up after the pilot, but this title sequence is so cool that it had me convinced I was watching something better, and I made it all the way to episode 4 before I returned the DVDs to the video store. There's something to be said when a stylish animated intro can get me to waste three extra hours of my life.

4. Treme

I'm sorry you had to watch that. The song will now be stuck in your head for at least the next 10 days. I usually tend to be predisposed against intro sequences that run over a minute and a half. HBO series are huge offenders. There seems to be a rule from management there that all dramas are required to have opening credits that can qualify as feature-length movies on their own. It's a fact that the opening credit sequence from Big Love has the main cast ice skating for 52 minutes and the actual show is only 8 minutes long. However, in Treme's case, it takes a special kind of awesome for me to actually look forward to an overly long credit sequence. This adequately prepares you for the other 6 badass musical numbers you'll be hearing in any given episode.

3. Justified

This shit gets me so pumped for the show. Virtually all of the dialog in Justified sounds like a prelude to a bar fight, and Timothy Olyphant shoots at least one motherfucker per episode. When you listen to this song and look at those images, you know shit's about to go down.

2. The Boondocks

The Boondocks is far and away the angriest and blackest show in television history. It's not a terribly competitive field, but that doesn't take anything away from how overwhelmingly angry and black this show is. The only thing Aaron McGruder loves more than satirizing black culture with razor sharp wit is anime. Both come together beautifully here.

1. The Wire

Okay, The Wire isn't on the air anymore, but this is my list so suck it. It's no surprise that the best show in the history of American television would also have the best intro. It's not everday that hearing a religious-themed song can make me get up and dance. Religious songs normally make a searing lightning bolt come down from the heavens and set my flesh on fire, so this is much better.

New Cartoon

2010-07-30T18:00:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago a young woman saw one of my cartoons and decided that I was a bad racist person and that she didn't want anything to do with me. I was devastated. I'm not exactly a social butterfly, but I had no idea that I lost touch to such an incredible degree. I thought I was just having fun with my cartoons and videos and stuff, but not interacting with people enough has clearly caused me to lose perspective to the point that I have no idea what type of material is or isn't acceptable. Sometimes I don't even know who I am anymore. Where did I ever get the idea that making such racially offensive material is okay? I'm a white man. Making light of these issues that have plagued our country from the first day it was settled is wrong and irresponsible. Finding humor in the fact that we have different skin colors is the height of ignorance. I've spent a lot of time looking at myself, trying to understand where this horrific racism comes from, and figuring out a way to truly better myself.

It's with a heavy heart that I write this blog post.

Nah, I'm just fucking with you. Here's my newest cartoon. It features a man who is so black that he has his own physical gravitational pull, and by the end he will have murdered another man with a pair of breast pumps.

Facebook Fighting

2010-07-25T00:26:00.001-07:00

I recently made Facebook friends with a couple who has a penchant for fighting on their respective walls for everyone to see. Instead of fighting in the comfort of their own homes or at least in private messages, they made their disagreements as public and detailed as humanly possible. Obviously I don't need to tell you that this type of behavior is completely fucking insane. I showed the public fights to my friends from work, and the experience inspired a work friend and I to stage a fake fight for our own personal amusement and to combat boredom. This was the result:

Me: You've got a lot of fucking nerve. And don't give me that bullshit where you act like you don't know what I'm talking about. I don't have the fucking patience for that shit.

Me: Are you going to sit there and say nothing like a little scrotum licking bitch?

Friend: I can't be sitting at facebook constantly watching for people to log on like you do. if you got a life of your own maybe what i do with mine wouldnt be so much of a problem to you.

Me: Oh, okay. Apparently eating pretzels, drinking beer, and jacking it to reruns of Charmed 9 hours a day counts as having a life.

Friend: you left those charmed dvds at my place months ago, i offered to give them back to you, but you said i could keep em. what i do with them now is my own fucking business.

Me: I also left a sandwich at your place. Are you going to start jacking off to that too?

Friend: yeah, sure, im gonna jack off to a fucking sandwich. fuck you and your fucking holier than thou sandwich, alright? im just so sick of you acting like you know how i should live my god damn life.

Me: You can live your life however the fuck you want. You can join the circus and wipe up elephant shit for all I care. Just leave my mom out of it.

Friend: we've been over this. that was only the one time and it was before i met you. how the fuck was i supposed to know your dad had just died the week before? It's not my fucking fault that (my mom's name) was looking for a good grief-fuck and fell in love.

Me: I didn't know you at the time, but I sure as fuck got to know you a lot better when you sent me a copy of the tape.

Friend: well why dont you just grow the fuck up and move out of your moms fucking house and stop opening her mail?

Me: I open her mail because I want to use the free perfume samples she gets from Avon. I want to smell nice. Pardon the fuck out of me.

Me: Oh, but getting back to the topic, I'm still totally mad about the whole sex with my mom thing.

Friend: and for the love of god, stop blowing up my fucking phone.

Me: Whatever. I'll have you know that I am moving out of mom's house because she's so pissy all the time and I can't stand being here anymore. Maybe if you were better at having sex with her she'd be in a better mood.

Friend: your mom loved it. she's pissy all the time cause i stopped having sex with her out of respect for our fucking friendship, but maybe now that youre gonna be an asshole about this shit, ill start again. then you can call me "dad."

Me: I'm out of places to take this pretend argument. You win.

Other friend who saw this on her news feed: well, that was weird...

Uwe Boll: A True Hero

2010-07-23T16:24:00.000-07:00

If there is any one man who has garnered more hatred from gamers than Jack Thompson, it's Uwe Boll, the infamous director of video game movies. We all know that movies based on video games aren't exactly the most respected films in existence. Hell, I would go as far to say that with the exception of movies that tackle racism in the most overblown way humanly possible with all the subtlety of a fucking bulldozer and score Oscars by preying on liberal Hollywood's guilt, and movies whose titles begin with "The No" and end with "tebook", video game movies probably make up the worst genre of film in modern cinema. I thought about including a chapter in this book that was just a list of the ten worst video game movies ever made, but a quick Google search showed that I was beaten to the punch as that subject was done to death about five years ago. Considering the negative rap video game movies have and have had for years, we know going into a video game movie that it's more than likely going to suck.

Despite the fact that our expectations are immediately plummeted to rock bottom the moment we catch a whiff of the words, "based on the hit game," the video game adaptations brought to us by Uwe Boll draw such hateful, venomous responses from audiences that it appears rock bottom is a lofty goal that he could only hope to achieve. Before we get into just how hated and how villainous he is to the gaming subculture, let's get to know the man a little better.

This picture was probably not taken in Germany.

Uwe Boll was born in Germany in 1965. After studying at the University of Cologne and the University of Siegen, he earned a doctorate in literature. After completing his first two major film releases, he turned most of his energy and focus to directing movies based on video games. His first video game film was 2003's House of the Dead, followed by Alone in the Dark and Bloodrayne in 2005, In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, Postal, Bloodrayne II: Deliverance in 2007, and Far Cry in 2008, in addition to an upcoming sequel in the Bloodrayne series, and he's even been flirting with original material as of late. According to popular online movie review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the highest approval rating one of his video game movies has ever received was 8% for Postal, while all others scored lower than 5%, meaning when his video game movies are at their most endearing, only 11 out of 12 critics dislike them.

The internet and gaming communities have had similar negative reactions to Dr. Boll's work. One angry viewer bought up the domain name Uweboll.com, which once linked to nothing but a blank white screen with the message, "please stop making movies." An online petition formed begging him to retire from working in film. At the time that I write this it has accumulated a little over 350,000 signatures. (Interestingly, he's agreed to retire if the petition reaches one million signatures.) His numerous vicious critics have made fun of the poor box office performance of his movies and the fact that they only turn a profit because of a loophole in German tax law that was designed to reward investment in German film. Also, based on the fact that he funds movies through his own company instead of through Hollywood studios, his critics have started a rumor that his movies are funded with Nazi gold, because apparently it's hilarious to imply that all Germans have deep personal ties with the Third Reich.

Ha!

That's some pretty intense hate to throw at a guy. The question I find myself asking is, what exactly is it that Uwe Boll is doing that's so wrong? Why does he deserve to be the most hated man among all gamers, and why are people actively conspiring to destroy his career? Although I'm posing these questions, let me be abundantly clear on this: I agree that his movies suck. They suck harder than the combined effort of an entire platoon of US Army specialists trained for years in the act of sucking. For the purposes of researching this chapter I watched all of his video game adaptations and felt IQ points seeping out of my ear and splattering on the floor, never to be regained again. They're so bad that the next time I'm receiving a root canal while the dentist blasts The Doors greatest hits (I fucking hate The Doors and their retarded lyrics and seven minute interludes that sound like elevator music) while a pyromaniac child burns my toes and melts my right big toenail and watches it seep down my foot and lower leg, giving me blisters all the way, I'll still smile and say "At least it isn't an Uwe Boll movie."

I'm including brief reviews of his video game adaptations to express this in more particular detail.

House of the Dead: With this feature Uwe Boll immediately has something in common with Oscar winning director Ron Howard. You might be really impressed with this until you realize that the thing they have in common is that they're about the only two fucking directors on Earth willing to cast Ron's brother Clint in multiple movies. I could explain how the editing that actually splices footage from the House of the Dead video game into the movie is dumb as fuck, the acting is laughable, the production values are awful, and the writing is retarded, but I think this excerpt of dialogue between the main character and the bad guy tells the story:

Rudy: You did all this to become immortal. Why?

Castillo: To live forever!

Alone in the Dark: Fucking Tara Reid is cast as a scientist. Even the normally delusional Uwe Boll himself has expressed embarrassment at this casting choice. That's all you need to know. You may be thinking that The World is Not Enough made a similarly insulting decision to cast Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist. The only problem is that The World is Not Enough surrounded Denise Richards with Pierce Brosnan, who is surpassed by Sean Connery and Daniel Craig but is at least undeniably better than Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton, the great British actor Robbie Coltrane, Oscar winner Judi Dench, the absurdly hot Sophie Marceau, and John Cleese, one of the greatest comedians to ever grace the human race with his existence. Alone in the Dark surrounded Tara Reid with Christian Slater, star of The Wizard and 3000 Miles to Graceland, Stephen Dorff, the bad guy from Blade, and CGI monsters who, despite 19 years of cinematic technological advancement, still manage to look like complete and total shit next to the monsters from Aliens. Advantage: Bond.

Bloodrayne: This film about Rayne, a vampire woman who was a circus freak who broke out of her cage and now she fights bad vampires or something. It features much better actors than the previous two films listed (including Ben friggin' Kingsley), significantly better production values, and just an overall more technically competent film. Of course the writing is still terrible and the action is still incompetently staged, so instead of something hilariously awful like House and Alone, we get something that's just regular awful. His first two movies are two of the worst ever made, but they proved to be entertaining as hell for sheer Mystery Science Theater 3000‑type entertainment. Now he's just boring. Seeing as his whole career is built on making nothing out of something, it shouldn't come as a surprise that improving as a filmmaker actually makes his movies less watchable.

In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale: About any hope I had of developing an emotional connection to the main character played by Jason Statham (who is one of my favorite actors) was dashed about a minute into the movie when I saw that his character is a farmer and his name is Farmer. That kind of shit may have worked in There Will Be Blood when the protagonist who has a plain view of the world was named Daniel Plainview, but Uwe Boll isn't Paul‑Thomas Anderson, and as much as I love Jason Stathan, he ain't fucking Daniel Day‑Lewis. The movie itself features lots of battles in fields, tons of helicopter shots of people walking through the countryside, elfin woodland things, two kings on opposing sides, armies of black creatures that look exactly like orcs, a simple protagonist who becomes involved and plays a key role in the greater story, and the guy who played Gimli, but don't call it a Lord of the Rings ripoff. That would be completely ridiculous.

Postal: You might remember this as the movie that features a bunch of really tasteless jokes about 9/11 and couldn't find any theatrical distribution in this country. Uwe Boll went apeshit, screaming about how people can't handle his uncompromising creative vision, and called out popular American directors such as Eli Roth and Michael Bay, stating that their movies are for retards. Boll never considered that maybe the reason why his movie couldn't get distribution has less to do with Americans being afraid of his fearless comedic genius that holds a mirror up to our own hypocrisies, and more to do with his movies sucking and never making any money. He reacted like comedians who blame the audience for being stupid when their jokes bomb. No, Dennis Miller, we aren't stupid assholes for not getting your ridiculously obscure reference to a minor character from Dante's Inferno, you just need to get off your ass and write more relatable material.

The movie that was too hot for American theaters contains such shockingly sophisticated material as graphic footage of a fat woman getting fucked, two 9/11 hijackers arguing about how many virgins they'll get after they die, Dave Foley's penis, Verne Troyer getting raped to death by a thousand monkeys, digs at Christianity, jokes about how George W. Bush is dumb (original!), and multiple Holocaust jokes. Uwe Boll's belief that this is the most shocking material ever made reminds me of that asshole you know who tells a joke that isn't particularly offensive and then goes, "You don't have to tell me I'm going to hell, I already know." Nobody was fucking going to tell you you're going to hell for saying that, you shit. Nobody is mortified that you joked that black people are poor and lazy. I'm not in awe of your fearless wit because you said the word "nigger" to a bunch of your white friends. Have you ever wondered if you're an asshole and you just don't know it? If you've ever said "You don't have to tell me I'm going to hell, I already know," at any point in your life, the answer is an emphatic fucking yes. Watching Postal and hearing Uwe Boll talk about it was like seeing every delusional would‑be comedian I've ever met all rolled into one and given $15 million to make a movie.

Uwe Boll's reaction to Postal not getting distribution is shockingly similar to how Carlos Mencia would react. Come to think of it, I've never seen the two of them in the same place...

On the plus side, as I researched this essay I found the Myspace of Zack Ward, who plays the main character in Postal, as well as the bully in A Christmas Story and the brother on Titus. I sent him a message saying I love nearly all of his non‑Uwe Boll work (I actually do), and based on his reply he seems like a very nice man.

Bloodrayne II: Deliverance: This sequel, taking place 100 years later and featuring Rayne (played by a new actress) in the Old West battling the undead gang of a vampiric Billy the Kid (Zack Ward again), did not manage to gain theatrical distribution and went direct‑to‑DVD. Much to my disappointment, this one didn't come with Boll screaming about how America can't handle wild west vampires and how his horror movies are brilliant while The Ring and Dawn of the Dead are for retards. Oh well. We live in eco‑conscious times, so wasting bandwidth explaining the various reasons why a direct‑to‑DVD movie about a vampire woman fighting a bloodsucking Billy the Kid and his cowboys sucks would be a grievous waste of resources.

Far Cry: Unfortunately, I didn't see this one because it came out between the time that I wrote this book chapter and right now as I'm reposting it on this blog, but based on the three reviews I read, it's an extremely generic 80's-style action movie complete with a macho lead guy, a female romantic interest that he shares no chemistry with, obnoxiously "wacky" comic relief supporting characters, Canadian woods that are somehow supposed to double for a tropical forest, and competent but not exactly thrilling action sequences. Uwe Boll continues the seemingly impossible task of his movies getting less entertaining the more technically competent he gets.

So I agree that Uwe Boll has no equal for the title of worst director working today. Every cinematic abortion he punishes audiences with is more putrid and menitent than the last. (When I was nine I invented the word "menitent," which means "having breath horrible enough to kill small animals." It never really caught on.) Still, I wonder why he's so passionately hated and why so many people (358,060 as I type this sentence) think he should be stripped of his right to work. If making bad movies is a crime, Michael Bay and Eli Roth deserve to be banned from Hollywood as much as him. I know I criticized Boll for being in a glass house when he trashed on Bay and Roth, but he's still absolutely right, their movies are indeed terrible and designed for retards.

This is Eli Roth as "The Bear Jew" in Inglorious Basterds. This acting role comprises the greatest contribution he's ever given American cinema. The contribution of the movies he actually wrote and directed ranks somewhere below an amateur porno my parents made in 1981.

And even though he's making such abominable cinematic exercises in diarrhea, he's not fooling anybody into paying money for something they thought would be really good. Uwe Boll's name is so notorious that anyone who pays money knows going into it exactly what they're getting. You really can't fault him for stealing well‑earned dollars from moviegoers who were expecting the most devastating social satire ever made and got Postal. Hell, as a publicity event to promote that particular film, Boll staged five boxing matches in which he fought some of his most brutal online critics. Any notion that he's fooling people into thinking his movies are great is thrown out the window when he builds an entire publicity event around the fact that people really, really hate his movies.

He kicked the shit out of all 5 opponents. Who knew a German could be so competitive?

If you want to go after some serious cinematic criminals who are truly guilty of stealing money from moviegoers who were expecting something else, go after the people responsible for the Jarhead trailer. The trailer portrays the film as a Gulf War version of Platoon or The Deer Hunter, in which constant slaughter, explosions, and killing in a foreign country smashes a man's psyche to bits. Literally every moment of the trailer is filled with either hilarious soldier hijinks or intense footage from battles. The actual movie has almost no action. Actually, the complete and total lack of action is the entire goddamn point of the movie. The movie is about a sniper on mop‑up duty after US airstrikes have already devastated the Iraqi army to the point that there's no one left to fight, and how being trained to kill and not actually getting to kill anyone, resulting in a tremendous amount of mental buildup with no release gives his killing instinct blue balls and destroys his mental state. It's a pretty good movie, but sure as hell not what audiences paid to see.

Similar jobs were pulled with the trailers for About Schmidt and Grosse Pointe Blank, which portrayed those movies as wacky fast‑paced comedies when they were really grim, dark, deliberately paced films with only a few choice comedic moments. And don't even get me started on Say It Isn't So, the 2001 incest‑themed comedy that was advertised as being "from the guys who brought you There's Something About Mary." Thinking that it would be another hilarious comedy written and directed by the Farrelly Brothers, you actually got a piece of shit that they only produced, with the director being the guy who was the first assistant director of Beverly Hills Ninja who was making his lead directing debut, while it was written by two guys with no film writing credits to their name.

Although to be fair, when all the poster has to offer is Heather Graham in a short dress and a lame vagina reference, people should have assumed something was up.

Surely these are all far greater sins than anything Uwe Boll has ever done. So what is he doing that's so evil? Maybe it's because he's destroying the names of popular video game series by adapting them into bad movies. Yeah, I'm sure that's it. As a matter of fact, in reading posts about him on video game message boards, he's almost always criticized for not being true to the source material. After all, very little of House of the Dead takes place in a house, the Bloodrayne movies take place a couple hundred years before the games do, the main character in Postal never actually goes postal like his video game counterpart and does nearly all of his killing out of self‑defense, and as far as I can tell the Dungeon Siege and Alone in the Dark movies don't have a goddamn thing to do with the games with which they share a name.

I really hope that isn't why some people hate him and want him to stop making movies. As far as I'm concerned that's a terrible reason. I agree he's hurting the reputation of these series of games, but they hardly represent the pinnacle of video game achievement, and they aren't the types of games we hoist upon our shoulders and display as astounding achievements that prove once and for all that video gaming is an art form and Roger Ebert is a douche for saying otherwise. Allow me to go back into list form and take a closer look at the game series that Uwe Boll is allegedly destroying to make my point a little more clear.

House of the Dead: Odds are you've played at least one of these games before. More than likely you popped in a couple quarters at the HotD machine at the mall arcade, ran out of lives about halfway through the first level, and never played it again. The home versions of these games are similarly minor diversions as they only take about an hour to beat. The games are known as much for being fun shooting games as they are for some of the most hilariously poorly acted cutscenes in video game history. It was neck‑and‑neck with the Resident Evil series for a while until RE finally stepped its game up and actually tried to tell better stories, yielding the honor to HotD. Apparently, Uwe Boll is a bastard for hurting the reputation of a game I once played for ten minutes because I was bored and waiting for my girlfriend to get done at Victoria's Secret.

Alone in the Dark: The original trilogy of this game began in 1992 and finished in 1994, and has a slight amount of importance in video game history as it's officially credited with inventing the 3D survival horror genre of games. After the third game the series was dormant for seven years until the 2001 release of Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare for computer, PS2, and Dreamcast. The game was quickly dismissed and forgotten as a mediocre Resident Evil ripoff. Most recently a fifth game was released in 2008, which has received largely negative reviews and upset longtime fans of the series as your character is very rarely alone or in the dark. The movie version sucked, but it only sullied the name of a game series that hadn't been relevant in well over a decade, and the most recent game in the actual series was as far off from the content of the original as Dr. Boll's masterpiece.

This is a screenshot from the newest Alone in the Dark. Call me crazy, but I have a feeling driving outdoors on a well-lit street isn't quite consistent with the intended spirit of something called Alone in the Motherfucking Dark.

Bloodrayne: It's Blade with a chick. That's all you need to know. Oh, you want more? Okay, well, aside from being the exact same character as Blade only female and hot, instead of seeking to eradicate the vampire race like Blade, she feasts on the blood of Nazis. Damn you Uwe Boll, you made a video game series about a large‑breasted vampire woman who drinks the blood of Nazis look silly. Shit, I mean at least he brought an Oscar winner to the table.

Apparently people are pissed that Uwe Boll didn't give this material its proper due. Yeah.....

Dungeon Siege: This actually is a pretty well‑respected series of games whose newest installment came out as recently as 2005, but the movie adaptation came out at the point that Uwe Boll was no longer hilarious‑bad and was simply just bad‑bad. A movie simply being dull, interesting, and too long isn't going to have the same reputation destroying effect that an offensively terrible movie could have. I'm glad to report that the Dungeon Siege games with all of their endless hacking and slashing will survive Uwe Boll unharmed.

Postal: Some people say that Postal the movie doesn't live up the main spirit of Postal the game. They say that in the game the character is a guy who snaps and goes on a rampage, killing everyone in sight while in the movie the character is a guy who gets framed for a bunch of crimes and runs afoul of some bad guys and has to kill the villains and crazed townspeople out of self‑defense, and him still being completely sane by the end of the movie goes against the idea of the game. I say that Postal is a bad game that could only gain attention by intentionally courting the inevitable controversy that will come with forcing you to slaughter hundreds of civilians, while Postal is also a bad movie that could only gain attention by intentionally courting the inevitable controversy that will come with making a whole bunch of deliberately tasteless 9/11 jokes. In that sense they're a perfect match.

Do not adjust your monitor. This is an accurate screenshot displaying how in Postal 2 you can shove a gun barrel up a cat's ass and use the cat as a silencer. When you find yourself defending a game where you shove a gun barrel up a cat's ass, do you ever stop and wonder, "Why am I doing this?"

As you can see, these aren't exactly the types of definitive games that changed the world. I take way bigger issue with the people who turned culturally important games such as Super Mario Brothers, Street Fighter, Doom, Wing Commander, and Resident Evil into cinematic urine‑soaked towels than Uwe Boll for hurting the good names of disposable arcade shooters, irrelevant PC games, and big‑breasted vampire chicks.

Somebody rubbed the shit known as Freddie Prinze Jr. onto Wing Commander, and you have the fucking nerve to get mad about Bloodrayne?

Also, I don't think there's much need to worry about him getting his hands on a really good game series that actually has potential to make a great movie. The people who own the movie rights to these games know they have something potentially special on their hands, and they're not going to pass it off to Boll anytime soon. Despite rumors surfacing at different times that he was set to direct or looking to direct film adaptations of Halo, Metal Gear Solid, and World of Warcraft, the right people have wisely kept him away. 20th Century Fox has kept Boll off the shortlist of potential directors for the upcoming Halo movie, Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima has stated in his blog in response to rumors that Boll was looking to direct the MGS movie and was given a script to read, "Absolutely not! I don't know why Uwe Boll is even talking about this kind of thing. We've never talked to him. It's impossible that we'd ever do a movie with him." Finally, when Uwe Boll recounted a story about his attempt to acquire the rights to make a World of Warcraft movie, he said, "I got in contact with Paul Sams of Blizzard, and he said, 'We will not sell the movie rights, not to you... especially not to you.'"

Long story short, the people who own important series that deserve a good movie are doing the right thing with their property and waiting until a good offer comes along. To be honest, other then the fact that Bloodrayne probably destroyed the gorgeous Kristanna Loken's shot at being a big star, the actual damage he's done seems to fall somewhere between non‑existent and minimal. I will admit that the man is an asshole. He's an arrogant, delusional, ignorant, obnoxious, moronic, completely intolerable shit. At the Postal boxing event he honest‑to‑goodness kicked the shit out of five contenders who were expecting a painless publicity event, he honestly believes in all stereotypes about Asian women being bad drivers, and in his classiest move of all, he makes fun of Owen Wilson's suicide attempt on the commentary track of the Postal DVD.

However, while he's an unbelievable asshole, he's also an incredibly entertaining one. His insane ranting, impotent scuffles with more powerful and likable Hollywood figures, his delusion, his bluster, his bigotry, his insistence that most people love his movies and his critics are just a tiny and vocal number, and everything he does to make the world just a little more insane makes him a complete joy to watch. On top of that, for all of his detestable qualities, he's surprisingly charming and funny in interviews and public appearances. I don't like that he's an asshole and pissing people off that he personally encounters, but sometimes that's the price you have to pay for an entertaining public figure. If the price for seeing Barry Bonds and Albert Belle hit tons of home runs is them being jerks and making their 25 teammates hate their lives, that's a price I'm willing to make them pay. If Eddie Murphy being a dick and pissing off entire movie sets is what it takes for me to see him don a fat suit and fart, so be it. Uwe Boll is not a very respectable man, but he always commands my attention and he always makes me smile.

So for these reasons I ask all of you not to sign the petition. I don't want it to hit a million signatures. I never want Uwe Boll to go away. He isn't hurting video games, he isn't harming anyone, and the worlds of video games and movies will never be the same without him. Let him box as many of his critics as he wants, let him make more insane paranoid rants about how he's a great artist who's being screwed over by jealous rivals, and let him pump out terrible movies to his heart's content. We've always had terrible video game movies. For over a decade before Boll made his first appearance we've endured depressingly awful live‑action adaptations of games, but this is the first time the whole process has been any fun. To the critics of Uwe Boll, just enjoy the show and don't take the man so seriously. His movies are terrible, but they're really not much worse than 1993's Super Mario Brothers starring John Leguizamo or 1994's Street Fighter starring Jean‑Claude Van Damme. And to the man himself, keep up the bad work. I've never seen a man have so much fun reveling in public infamy, and I salute you. Ich liebe dich, Uwe Boll.

I ain't drunk, I swear

2010-07-21T00:15:00.000-07:00

I hate a lot of things. I can't walk from one place to another without thinking about at least a dozen things or people that I hate. Then I hate myself for being so hateful. I literally hate my own hate. I project my hate outward and it comes back and smacks me in my own face. My hate would be like a metaphorical boomerang if it weren't for the fact that boomerangs never fucking work and never goddamn come back to you like they're supposed to, and it doesn't matter anyway because I live in a major metropolitan area so where the fuck am I going to find enough space to safely play with a boomerang? Fuck I hate boomerangs.

So with that in mind, I hope you don't take it lightly when I say that the one thing I hate more than anything else in this whole wide world is being reminded of stupid and embarrassing shit I said or did while drunk. Most of the time when I drink in a social situation, I don't do anything terribly bad. Maybe I'll make one inappropriate joke, or maybe I'll tell a girl that I think she's hot and regret divulging that, but we aren't talking about anything akin to social suicide. I'm guaranteed to do at least one stupid thing, but odds are nobody will care because my offense was incredibly minor, and somebody else drunker than me did something way worse.

However, there are times when I do truly horrible things. A few times in my life I did something so bad while drunk that to this day I still can't look certain people in the eye. One morning I woke up covered in Steve McNair's blood. And that wasn't the first time I woke up with evidence that I had murdered a former football great. True story: thanks to my alcohol use, I've killed more retired football players than diabetes. And it's because of those situations that whenever I drink in a social situation, I spend the entire next morning feeling an emotional cocktail of fear, shame, and dread. I just know the next time I see that group of people I'm going to be bombarded with all kinds of crazy, emotionally pathetic shit I did last night that I don't even remember. The few times I pieced together what happened during a blackout-fueled rampage and just a general discomfort with being seen in a state where I'm not in complete control make me genuinely scared of having so much as a six-pack even if it's stretched out over a long night.

For that reason I get extremely defensive when I'm accused of being wasted when I'm not. Last week somebody at work threw a pool party. Over the course of the whole night I had six beers. Toward the end, we were all watching a video. Somebody commented that one of the guys in the video was cute, so I instantly replied by saying something to the effect of, "Oh sure. I know I'd fuck him."

Now, anyone who knows me well knows that I say this kind of shit when I'm sober all the time, but a vast majority of people in the room didn't know me very well, and they responded with confusion, indifference, or accusing me of being wasted. Of course I began insisting that I wasn't wasted, and that never really works since by the time everyone in the room thinks you're hammered, you're going to have a really hard time convincing them otherwise, especially if you have a beer in your hand at the time. Of course after falling asleep I spent the whole morning terrified like always, and when I got to work I found out that somebody did something way worse than I did and almost nobody cared about what I did, like always.

However, I was confronted by the guy who hosted the party about my "I know I'd fuck him" comment, but this time other people who knew me well were present and vouched for me when I said that I make comments like that while sober all the time. I felt vindicated. I said something so completely stupid, embarrassing, and horribly inappropriate for the situation that somebody felt the need to confront me about it, but goddamit, I said it because I wanted to, not because alcohol made me. I didn't pathetically fall victim to alcohol. I'm this crass, rude, and off-putting all by myself. FOR SOME REASON I THINK THIS IS A VICTORY!!! WAHOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Chad Likes White Women

2010-07-14T14:31:00.000-07:00

This is Chad Ocho Cinco getting grilled by Wendy Williams for not having enough black women on his VH1 dating show. I watched the first episode last night, and the first half hour consisted of him whittling 85 women down to 17 by having them all on a football field and eliminating them based on their looks, how well they hugged a tackling dummy, and their improvised touchdown celebrations. He would eliminate women by cutting them like they're players and he's a football coach.

I guess the first question that needs to be asked here is, "Bitch, you think black women are being disrespected by not taking part in this? Shit, really?" Beyond that, Chad made his initial cuts from 85 to 17 based pretty much entirely on how how hot he found the girls. Accusations of racism and browbeating are not going to change how his penis feels. He likes white and Hispanic chicks more. What's wrong with that? Am I a sexist against men because I'm straight?

And most importantly, I'm fucking glad that Chad likes white and Hispanic women more than black. He's extremely physically fit and still pretty young, he's a millionaire, he's a famous professional athlete, and he's oddly charming. I've got him beat in the brains department seeing as how he's one minor head injury away from falling into full-blown retardation while I solved a level 4 Sudoku once, but he's overall far more desirable to women, and the longer he stays away from black chicks, the better my chances are of wooing That's So Raven.

Someday you'll be mine

This is a post for the ladies...

2010-07-12T21:53:00.001-07:00

A little while ago I got an attractive woman to check out my blog. Dude, fucking seriously. I'm not even making this up. It helps that I work with her and she's forced to socially interact with me whether she wants to or not, but that's neither here nor there. She finds my public access show moderately amusing, so when I told her that I have a blog she loaded it up and checked it out. She read a page or two of one of the book chapters I posted here. I mentioned that I believe that the book is good enough to publish. She then pointed out two typos that she noticed within the first 5 minutes of reading. When everyone else in the room was done laughing at me, she realized that 50% of the recent posts were about video games and lost interest.

This opened my eyes to a serious problem. 50% of all people and 8% of all successful people are women. That's a large market that I've left completely untapped. Everyone knows that the cornerstone of being successful on the internet is appealing to women. In an effort to broaden my appeal and increase this blog's viewership, this post is for the ladies. I sent my crack research team to find me pictures of things that pertain specifically to women. I'm going to talk about these pictures and I sincerely hope you'll understand by the end that I truly understand women and your gender shouldn't stop you from appreciating my work.

I'll admit that I didn't do any research on this stuff before writing this blog post because honestly, what's the point? How different could woman stuff possibly be? Deep down we're all the same. Obviously this is a stock photo of a self-defense weapon to protect against attackers. When a woman pulls back on the string and lets go, a dart or some sort of projectile fires out the front to subdue any potential mugger or rapist. It's a pretty clever device that requires only minimal munitions training to master.

For 44 out of the last 45 months I've had a girlfriend. One thing I learned from that time is that women are terrible at video games. The small screens with simple geometric shapes in the picture above makes it very apparent that this is a sort of beginner's video game that serves as a stepping stone before women try to get into Xbox. Master those red lines, ladies. You'll be blasting the Covenant in Halo in no time!

The people who sent me this picture referred to it as a female feeding collection device. Feed is a term often associated with microphones. Women are smaller than men and have softer voices and this is clearly an amplifying microphone to make sure they're heard. Everyone tells me that I have a naturally obnoxiously loud voice that carries long distances. You'd better believe I'll be picking one of these up for my next girlfriend.

I can't say I'm a fan of this thing. It's probably true that men are more into paper airplanes than women, but giving women a pre-made paper airplane model is downright condescending. I mean jeez, look at the attached wings. You think a woman can't figure out on her own that an airplane needs wings? One time I heard somebody call this thing a Blood Mop. Man, I wish the names I came up with for my paper airplanes sounded that badass.

If you leave a bag of Sweet Tarts in front of me, it's pretty much guaranteed that I'll eat all of them within a few minutes. If I was able to load my candy into a device like this and schedule my consumption of sweets, I might not have put on the freshman 15.

This is a douche. Women fucking rinse out their vaginas with it.

A Day in the Life of a Production Technician

2010-07-11T21:49:00.000-07:00

I work as a production technician for a TV station. Fuck you, I'm not telling you which one. It is my job to operate cameras, run teleprompter, load and display graphics, set up the studio for the news, and floor direct so that the news anchors know where they need to be and when to be there. It took a long road to get here. A road paved with ass rashes.

After graduating college, I was forced to wait tables for nearly two years before I finally locked down a decent job. Maybe it was because of the economy. Maybe I should have lived in a city with a stronger job market than Cincinnati. Maybe my job searching techniques were too haphazard and disorganized. Maybe I should have cut the number of racial slurs I used in job interviews to a more sensible number. Like 3.

Whatever the reason, all that matters is I have a decent job now, and there's nothing that any filthy boomerang chucker Australians can do about it. I absolutely love my job, but they never told me how ungodly difficult it would be. I thought I understood hard work when I was waiting tables 12 hours straight without a break. You see, restaurant managers are uniquely special little flowers on God's green earth who see things a little differently than you and I. We see labor laws as a code of rules handed down from the government that carry punitive consequences if disobeyed. Restaurant managers see them as very gentle suggestions.

I thought I knew what a hard day of work felt like when I'd come home with my feet pounding, my psychological state frayed to its last nerve by the Northern Kentucky White Trash All-Stars, and an unbearable stinging pain inside my ass. Walking nonstop for 12 hours and constantly coming in and out of a hundred degree kitchen will make sweat run down your asscrack, your body parts rubbing together will rub that salty concotion into all of your sensitive skin, you will quickly be met with unbearable pain with every step, and when you get home, you will not be able to walk comfortably for the next 48 hours, so don't get out of your chair unless it's absolutely necessary.

When work is so hard that you accept blisters on your inner asscheeks as just another part of life, you think you've seen it all, but it ain't got shit on being a production technician. Let me just walk you through a typical 8-hour Saturday night shift. Remember how sad you felt when you saw Precious? I'm about to make that shit look like Ghostbusters.

3:40 - Show up at work and check e-mail

3:50 - Get on Facebook. Andy thought Once was a good movie? ZOMG ME TOO!!! I am SO giving that status a like!

4:00 - The second half of The Goonies is on AMC? Sweet!

5:00 - Shit, nothing's on TV. Hey, I have an idea! Let's take a Nerf football, throw it at a wall, and see which way it bounces off. Footballs are oblong. You never know what those crazy bastards will do next.

5:30 - Gossip time!

5:45 - Check today's MLB scores

5:50 - Time to make our way to the studio for the 6 o'clock news. Now I'll shoot the shit about sports with the other production technicians until the show starts.

6:00 - Time for the news! Here is where I set up the shot for my camera and keep it in the same place for 8 minutes.

6:08 - My camera doesn't have any shots in this next block. Time to take a poop.

6:30 - The news finally comes to an end. I had to work for a whole half hour with time for only one bathroom break. Now it's time to debate where we're getting dinner.

7:00 - Go to Panera Bread. Ten bucks will get you a cup of soup, half a sandwich, and a drink. It's a really hearty meal if you happen to be a 90-pound girl or 8 years old.

7:45 - Nap time!

9:00 - Scattergories! Friendships will be tested when someone puts "Burma" for countries starting with B. One person will insist that it shouldn't count because it's called Myanmar now and demand that a point be taken away. I die a little inside.

9:45 - Look at the wall

10:15 - Look at another wall

10:30 - Power nap!

10:45 - Remark that we really need to get to the studio for the 11 o'clock show right now.

10:54 - Get to the studio and set things up

11:14 - My camera isn't being used for the rest of the show. It's been a long day. I'm going home early.

Anal wounds have nothing on this job. Do you have any idea how much it hurts your brain to come up with Scattergories answers for the letter K? Fucking nothing starts with K. I can't believe I have to do it again tomorrow. I want to play Apples to Apples but I probably won't get to. That's some bullshit.

Hard Work is for Suckers

2010-06-27T13:25:00.000-07:00

And now the excerpts from my new book which is actually 20 months old continue. In this installment, I'll tell you how I learned at a very young age that hard work will never benefit anyone.

When I was 14 I landed a job with my hometown newspaper, the Michigan City News‑Dispatch, as a video game critic. I joke about what I loser I am that my greatest writing achievement is getting a job at a small town newspaper whose reputation for journalistic excellence has earned it the nickname "The News‑Disgrace" from just about every sentient person in Michigan City (and even a few News‑Dispatch employees).

Being self‑deprecating is charming and all, but I actually am pretty proud of getting the job. Michigan City isn't exactly a bustling metropolis, but the last census put its population at around 33,000. It's not the fucking Washington Post, but that's still a decent audience to reach. 33,000 people is still 33,000 people. It's also cool that I started when I was 14. Most aspiring writers that age are struggling to get printed in their school newspaper. Also let's not forget that it rules to get paid to write about video games at any age. Who hasn't wanted to tell their parents to screw off when they're nagged about looking for a job or doing homework instead of playing video games?

2,200 of the 33,000 people counted as Michigan City residents are inmates in the Indiana State Prison. My writing has been read by more rapists than yours.

Looking back on the way I landed this job, I learned a valuable (and horrible) life lesson. You see, from the age of 12 to 13, I had a hobby of writing video game reviews for epinions.com and GameFAQs.com. Although both sites have the occasional well‑written, thoughtful, quality review, they are for the most part the places where well‑informed, coherent analysis goes to get raped and stabbed in an alley and left for dead. Looking back I would like to think that my work was a cut above the other trash found on those sites. I'm pretty sure my grammar and punctuation were impeccable, my jokes hilarious, and my analysis thought provoking and brilliant. Then I found all of my old reviews on an internet archive and discovered I was no better. Not only did I rape and stab coherent analysis, I smashed its head against the concrete, robbed it, poured sugar in its gas tank, and then I farted in its face. Here are some of excerpts to show you what I great writer I was in junior high. All of the original grammatical and typographical errors have been left in place.

Excerpt from my review of the Sega Dreamcast

"This thing is powerful. Wile people have been fooling themselves into being wowed by the PS2's graphics, they don't seem to have realized that DC's graphics are just as good. Take a look at Jet Grind Radio or better yet, Soul Calibur if you don't believe me. "

Yes, my love of the Dreamcast actually did render me completely blind. Thanks for asking!

This image is from a Dreamcast game. Clearly it created the most aesthetically pleasing graphics in gaming history.

Excerpt from my review of Crash Bandicoot: Warped

"Crash looks better then ever, animation rarely slips below the 40 fps line, and is most of the time much higher."

When I was 12 I wasn't going to let the fact that I didn't even know what a frame rate was keep me from completely pulling graphics-related stats out of my ass. Things have changed since then. For example, I can tell from looking at this screenshot that Crash Bandicoot: Warped was rendered at a rate of 64% polygonicality.

Excerpt from my review of Ape Escape

" Ape Escape centers around Spike and his quest to catch misbehaving mondeys that put on brain‑enhancing helmets. These mondeys were enhanced by means of a once good monkey turned evil by putting on a brain‑enhancing helmet that made him a genius. As part of Specter's plan, (If you couldn't already draw an inference, Specter is the monkey) he has put brain‑enhancing helmets on all of his monkey minions also, although the normal monkey's helmets aren't as powerful.(It puts them at about Keanu Reeve's brain level) Specter sent the monkeys back in time to screw everything up, and guess who has to catch them, Spike!"

Tell me your brain didn't fucking explode from reading that.

When I was in junior high I referred to this man as "Keanu Reeve" and insulted his intelligence by saying he's as smart as a "mondey." Pot, meet kettle.

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I thought I was a damn good video game critic, and it was time to fulfill my boyhood dream of being one of those professional video game reviewers who look like they have so much fun. I contacted the News‑Dispatch entertainment editor by e‑mail. He's a very nice man who escaped the clutches of Judaism and converted to Christianity. I don't give a motherfucking fuckity fuck about religion, but the fact that he's put a lot of thought into his religion shows he takes his spirituality seriously, and I guess I respect that on some level. He also has a great wife and kid, he didn't shitcan me over those first couple years like he definitely should have, and I still use him as a job reference today.

In the e‑mail I completely kissed his ass, telling him that I love the News‑Dispatch, I love his section, and I love everything he writes. I finished the e‑mail with a sample of my writing, copied and pasted right into the fucking body of the e‑mail because I didn't understand what attachments are. I pasted my epically long review of Crazy Taxi, which is pretty thorough and is probably the least retarded of my early stuff.

The editor hit me back saying that the e‑mail I wrote was very nice he would love for me to write columns about video games because I had won the county spelling bee and competed in the National Spelling Bee the year before, so the regular readers of the paper knew my name and he felt they would like to read what I have to write. In other words, the reason why I landed this job was completely irrelevant to the quality of my writing.

Pictured: Journalistic credentials

I scored a paying gig writing about video games. Not only that, the newspaper reimbursed me for Hollywood Video rentals I made researching for my reviews. I got this by kissing the boss's ass and having name recognition in Michigan City. My early articles were eye‑bleedingly terrible. One of the first ones I wrote was a treatise calling for the abolition of all violence in video games because I was shellshocked by 9/11. I also continued to write reviews for Dreamcast games well into the winter of 2002, a good long while after Sega officially announced its death. I believe I was allowed to continue to stink up the pages of the entertainment section just because readers still knew me from the fucking spelling bee. I eventually improved and enjoyed close to six years with the paper before I left partly due to contract disputes and partly because being a full‑time college student working a part-time job on the side and getting drunk with my frat brothers five nights a week just no longer left me enough time to write an article with any regularity.

Hey, check out this hot new game I found!

Today I am a college graduate with a double major from Ball State University with nearly six years worth of published newspaper articles to hand out as samples. Not only that, the last two years worth of writing were actually pretty good. I've applied to various newspapers, magazines, and other publications looking for work as a video game writer and have been soundly ignored by all. I haven’t heard back on any of the applications I’ve sent out for more traditional writing work either. So with a decent education from a good university with the better part of a decade of real writing experience, I can't land a job writing about games, or any writing job at all, something that I easily did as a 14‑year old with no experience and a sub‑retarded level of writing skill. And it's there that I learned a horrible, backwards life lesson: kissing ass and name recognition always trumps integrity and hard work.

To those of you reading this looking for advice on how to make something of yourself, I have this to say: Why the fuck are you looking for life advice in a collection of ranting essays from a video game addicted 23‑year old who waited tables his first two years out of college? I also have this to say: tell the boss he has a really nice tie. Tell him you're a huge fan of his work. Don't be that moron who refuses to join the ass‑kissing parade thinking the boss will recognize and appreciate your integrity! Start screwing the boss's daughter and have her threaten to join the Peace Corps if he doesn't make you VP of marketing. Throw a bag of kittens into a lake. Then call the local news station and rescue the kittens so the footage of your heroism ends up on the 6 o'clock news. What CEO wouldn't want a kitten rescuer in upper management? If I was a more attractive hire as a nut‑fuck high school freshman and admittedly adorable former spelling bee champion than I am as a moderately intelligent college graduate, imagine what a dozen safe, adorable kittens will do for your career. But whatever you do, for the love of god, don't waste your time with hard work.

One of these things is worth 60 credit hours.

Making Stephen Strasburg Better

2010-06-22T12:58:00.001-07:00

This is Washington Nationals rookie phenom pitcher Stephen Strasburg. He's so awesome that all kinds of sportswriters declared him one of the best pitchers of all-time before playing a single major league game. In his first three starts he's posted a record of 2-0, an ERA of 1.86, a WHIP of 0.78, motherfucking 32 strikeouts, and opposing batters are only hitting .149 against him. I'd compare him to Jesus if it wasn't so horribly offensive to do so. Implying that Jesus holds a candle to him is an unforgivable insult against Strasburg's greatness.

I assumed it was impossible to make him any better, but I was wrong. In my recent visits to the GameFAQs baseball message board, many of us have been actively participating in a topic where the goal is to take the above picture of Strasburg and use the magic of MS Paint to make him better. The results were stunning. Check it out:

Philumcious Phil infused him with Tyrannosaurus power:

I made this one. I feel it's a shame Strasburg has to live the life of a mere mortal baseball player when he was clearly meant to be a Greek god:

MantleNotMouse served up this gem, and then shouted "Cowabunga!", ate a shitload of pizza, and made sarcastic comments for good measure:

Philumcious Phil fired right back with this:

aLpHaTaBs_V2 was also on an 80's nostalgia high:

I always knew the Brady parents were disappointed as shit with their kids, so I made this image to give them the awesome child they wish they had:

SpyroNinja delivered this piece of Spartan-themed win. Despite being created with MS Paint, the muscles somehow manage to look less fake than the painted-on abs that the stars of 300 rocked out.

This is also from SpyroNinja. As far as he's concerned, pitching in a Major League Baseball game is no reason you can't get wet.

sktgamer_13dude believes that embarrassingly misspelled embroidery should be reused instead of thrown away. Way to go green, brother.

Courtesy of "the wheel", if admitting that their old pizza was shitty doesn't rehabilitate the image of Dominos, this certainly will.

aLpHaTaBs_V2 understands better than anyone that you don't fucking need to field balls when you strike everyone out.

This is another masterwork from yours truly. You know, as far as I'm concerned, as long as Strasburg continues to get over 10 strikeouts per start, he's earned the right to chop Shelley Duvall into as many pieces as he wants.

Warning from aLpHaTaBs_V2: Prolonged exposure to Stephen Strasburg may cause bouts of epileptic seizures.

Darth Rustito's masterpiece needs no introduction.

VerySikTodayII gives us a harrowing look at what could have been, had Montreal been allowed to continue to befoul a game that's as American as apple pie, bald eagles, and bombing brown people.

I could write an iPod-related pun for this one, but the one SpyroNinja provides is better than anything I would have written, so I'll leave it alone.

Another piece from the wheel. I have a feeling that ball might not be regulation.

Baseball is a sport where over the course of a season you play the same game over and over 162 times, and some guys do it professionally for over 20 years, but that's somehow considerably less repetitive than being the guy from this picture I made:

Not even a talent as pure and beautiful as Strasburg is immune to douchification, as aLpHaTaBs_V2 so ably displays:

There is a powerful hidden meaning to this series of images from SpyroNinja, but it will take at least 6 hours of study and contemplation before you see it.

In this image I made, Strasburg makes us all wish Turok would put his dinosaur hunting skills to better use.

Is there dirt or pine tar on this baseball? I'll eat my own shoe before I believe that Philumcious Phil could ever tell the difference.

This isn't fair, aLpHaTaBs_V2, and you know it.

And we finish with one last picture from my favorite artist: Me. Stephen Strasburg can tell that Torgo is a bad guy because of his enlarged knees.

Video Games Are Better Now Than They've Ever Been: A Stunning Development

2010-06-20T22:41:00.000-07:00

Way back in the days of the NES, we played an altogether different type of game. For one thing, the plots of our games rarely if ever made a lick of goddamn sense. If you're the type of guy who has to point out every single inconsistency and plot hole in a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, please stay far, far away from an NES. Expect many questions to ensue, such as "Bionic Commando's arm is cool and all, but wouldn't it be a good idea to send a guy who's at least physically capable of jumping?" or "Did Samus really think bringing nothing to the hostile alien planet but a gun that only fires four feet in front of her was enough?" or the ever‑popular "Since when did plumbers shrink to half their size when they get injured?"

She's done such a shitty job arming herself that I'm honestly betting on the walking Bart Simpson heads to win this one.

One of the most egregious examples is Contra. Here we have a game where an evil alien army is doing some really bad stuff off on their remote island base, preparing to invade and probably enslave Earth. The chips are down and to be quite honest, things have never looked this bad. I imagine that this situation resulted in a lot of scientists dramatically removing their glasses and proclaiming "My god...." in a soft voice that still carries all of the weight of a truly apocalyptic scenario.

We are all standing on the brink of destruction. Everyone knows they have only one day to live, and they're trying to make the most of it. Husbands are telling their wives they love them. Overworked office employees are telling bosses to suck their balls. Children are finding out what happens when you pee on an electric fence. This is truly our darkest hour. Humanity has slipped in the shower, sustained a serious spinal cord injury, and fallen into a coma. The human race is on life support, and all of the Christian protestors in the world aren't going to stop this alien army from disconnecting the feeding tube. It's judgement day.

The United States government knows they need to do stop this threat. What will they do? How about a tactical nuclear strike? That would be brilliant! The entire army is holed up on one island. You could win this thing in a few minutes and still have time to fu....... oh, you're not going to do that. So what are you going to do? You're going to send men? That's a great idea! We'll send an entire platoon of the most hardened marines we have to offer by boat, and after the fighting begins we'll drop hundreds more via airplane! With the sea troops and paratroopers combined, they'll never know what hit them! Yeah, we're gonna win this thing!

Alright, let's go! We're go....... oh, you aren't sending thousands of soldiers? Budget cutbacks, I understand. How many are you sending? Two? Only two thousand? That wasn't as many as I was expecting, but it should still work. Oh, not two thousand. Two hundred? Wait, you're only sending two as in literally two guys? I get it, you're sending the two best stealth infiltration experts you have, and they're going to sneak into the compound and assassinate the alien leader. It like it! Oh, they don't do stealth. That cool, I saw a movie once where a jaunty African American and a paranoid Jew stole a UFO and used it to give the aliens a virus. It was one of the most asinine plot developments in Hollywood history, but they were only two guys. It could work. Crap, Will Smith asked for too much? What's the plan then? They're going to just stroll onto the beach, shoot everything in sight, and hope for the best. And they're shirtless. Okay, I'm gonna go get my will in order now.

If these guys aren't available, who the fuck is going to punch the aliens in the face and go, "Welcome to Earff" now?

Not only are these guys the center of the most poorly planned military operation in history, they're also a lot weaker than you would expect a couple of Rambo clones to be. If they're going to be sent to take on the entire army with only a crappy rifle, you would expect them to be superhumans who can kill alien lifeforms with their bare hands, heal wounds with gunpowder, and the ability to behead enemy soldiers with their steel boners wouldn't be a bad touch.

Unfortunately, these guys are complete and total pansies who will die not only from the most minor of injuries, but also seem to drop dead from anything that even slightly irritates them. One hit from any type of enemy will kill them instantly. I can accept them dying from a crushing blow delivered with inhuman force by the swinging spiked pseudopod of a towering alien guardian, and although it would be nice if these alleged badasses could take more than one bullet before kicking it in, I can accept that a bullet to the head would get the job done.

But it doesn't stop there. Touching the body of an alien soldier instantly kills you while the soldier keeps charging forward like nothing happened. Making contact with a mounted gun barrel will cause instant death even if it isn't firing at the moment. Hell, the friggin' bottom of the screen causes an instant meeting with the reaper. If these clowns actually managed to kill off the alien leader I would be afraid to pat them on the back for a job well done out of fear that the force of my hand would completely rupture their spinal cords.

To be fair, I'd also be concerned about messing up that sweet flat top.

That leads right into the next main characteristic of old‑school games: holy fuck were they hard. As you might expect, surviving a game environment that is completely packed with enemy soldiers with bullets whizzing around in every imaginable direction and spike traps randomly popping up as a commando who is so prone to dropping dead from minor injury that he makes Mark Prior and Ken Griffey Junior look like iron Howitzer tanks by comparison isn't particularly easy. Contra is so hard that one of the first ever cheat codes in gaming history was created specifically for this game.

Contra isn't the only game from that era that drove children to contemplating seppuku as a more palatable option than trying to beat them. Battletoads is a game that is supposedly about humanoid amphibians who fight their opponents with devastating punches and attitude, but we could never know that for sure. As far as we know the last ten levels of Battletoads are about getting drunk in a bear suit, punching a few clowns, demolishing a Honda Civic with a green and purple sledgehammer, and topping it all off with beating off to a rerun of Charmed. We'd never know because no gamer in the history of mankind has gotten past the fucking speedbike section of level three.

Oh, and you'd better believe it doesn't stop there. Ask any male in his twenties today and he'll more than likely have a story about how his NES gave him hypertension at the age of six. Ask them how easy the bosses are in Mega Man when your character has only slightly less mobility than a recent stroke victim. Whisper the name "Bo Jackson" to someone who played Tecmo Bowl and watch them go into a psychiatric episode. Find someone who tried and failed to beat Ninja Gaiden, look into the eyes of his shattered soul, utter the words, "Level 6‑2" and watch him collapse into a quivering, catatonic heap.

Jetpack ninjas??? Are you motherfucking kidding me?

Old people like to talk about everything that they overcame in their time. My grandpa always used to brag about how his generation overcame the depression in addition to kicking both Jerry and Tojo's ass in one war. Well guess what? My generation has overcome more than you could ever hope to accomplish. I single handedly defeated an entire alien army with only two buttons! Not only that, you didn't die instantly just from touching a Nazi. Suck on that, old man! You think the haunting dreams you still have about your buddies being ripped to shreds with Kraut machine gun fire is bad? Try seeing the face of Bo Jackson every single time you dream about football. The worst part is if you change the dream from football to baseball, Bo is still fucking there. Adolph Hitler may have been one of the most frightening madmen to ever live, but he sure as hell wasn't a multi‑sport athlete.

I'll tell you which way: Right into my fucking nightmares.

The brain‑melting difficulty of games didn't just stop with the strength of the enemies and the design of the levels. That wouldn't be punishing enough. If you wanted to save your progress, you would have to copy down absurdly long passwords, and that was only if you were lucky. Some games wouldn't even give you that option and just force you to beat the whole thing in one sitting. Are you upset that you ran out of lives and you wasted two hours of your time because you have to start all over? Well tough shit, you should have played better.

Passwords were more forgiving, but not by much. If you ever wanted to pick up where you left off in Metroid, you would have to copy a 24‑character case sensitive password and enter it when you came back to the game. In another example of how much harder the NES was than World War II, you didn't have a Navajo Windtalker to help you enter the code. If you messed up even one letter, you were completely screwed. Did you mistake that lower case L for an upper case I? Again, the NES says tough shit. You should have paid more attention. I never found school to be very difficult because no teacher has ever been as hard on me as my NES was, and I filled a lot more slips of paper with 24‑character passwords than I did with spelling tests.

This is a password entry screen from Rambo for the NES. It is literally twice as long and intricate as the password I use to get into my online bank account.

Old‑school games were also marked by a great level of simplicity. The Atari 2600 had a joystick and only one action button, while the NES had a directional pad and a whopping two buttons to press, not counting select and start. In Castlevania, you could walk around, jump, and whip. In Contra, you could walk, jump, and shoot. In Super Mario Brothers running, jumping, and spitting fireballs was the extent of your physical capabilities. Elaborate button combinations that allowed you to execute dragon punches, kill fools with a charged plasma pistol / battle rifle combo, or bang hookers were unheard of.

The final characteristic that drastically sets old games apart from the modern ones is length. In the days of the NES most games were incredibly short. Contra may require hours upon hours of intricate memorization of level layouts and the movement patterns of the bosses in order to get to the end of the game in one piece, but the truth is that if you were to turn on an invincibility code and run through the whole game, it would take less than a half hour to get the job done. The whole game is eight levels long and none take longer than five minutes to run through. (Note from the author: Right after writing this paragraph I loaded up my copy of Contra and beat it in 22 minutes. I did this because I want every sentence of this book to be impeccably well‑researched, and it most definitely wasn't because all of this talk about Contra gave me a serious itch to play it.)

And if you heard me screaming, "Suck my spread gun, you tentacled alien cocksmoking faggot!", I assure you it was just part of the research process.

All of these characteristics of old‑school games stand in stark contrast to what we have today. As far as length goes, it has become more or less unacceptable for a full‑priced game to take less than ten hours to complete. Some games take the length to ridiculous, unnecessary extremes, but that's for another chapter. But getting back to the subject, ten hours is an absolute bare minimum. If a game dares to be that short, it had better offer incredible graphics, a great story, interesting characters, wonderfully realized gameplay mechanics, and it would be nice if it would babysit your children once or twice a month. If a game like The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay wants to be that short, the only way game reviewers and the general public will let it off the hook is if every other aspect of the game is a heartfelt apology for the length. And we're talking about a game that is literally over twenty times longer than Contra.

Also changed is the plot. While most current video games still have a long way to go before matching the fully realized storytelling of Hollywood, there is almost no measuring how far they've progressed beyond the simplistic afterthoughts that were the storylines of old‑school games. In the past the plots were handled by the developers themselves, who were hardly literary geniuses. For many NES games they put about as much thought into writing up the story for their games as you would writing a check. Sometimes your only reward for all of the blood and sweat you poured into mastering a completely difficult game would be a black screen with some text that reads, "(Name of villain) has been defeated. The world is safe." and you would be immediately whisked back to the main menu.

This one screen is the only thing you get for beating Friday the 13th on the NES. I'm not even close to shitting you.

Today, video game developers put real thought into the stories of their games. Most can't match what Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese do, but the ambitious and at the very least technically impressive Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid series show that the medium has the potential to top what movie studios can do. Hell, significant thought is put into the plots of even the most testosterone‑charged and disposable games. If God of War, a game about a bloodthirsty psychotic Spartan who murders everyone and everything he meets can be given a legitimately compelling story, anything can. In 1988 nobody gave a shit if story was non‑existent, while nowadays game reviewers will dock a game points if the story sucks. Game companies are going so far as to hire actual writers and Hollywood actors to bring the stories of their games to life.

Another huge change is in the complexity. Gone are the days of Double Dragon where all you can do is move around and push two attack buttons. Thanks in part to a drastically higher number of buttons on the controller, and partly to more sophisticated design, a character in a fighting game can literally have over 100 moves. Not only does Yoshimitsu from Tekken have dozens of different kicks, punches, throws, blocks, and slice attacks, he can also execute a move where he sits down on the ground and totally makes jerking off motions with his sword.

Fast-Forward to 1:48 for the sword jerking. Yoshimitsu is a weird dude.

However, in my opinion the most drastic change that has been wrought upon video gaming between now and the 80's is a hugely reduced level of difficulty. Today's gamers hate playing a game where one hit kills you, dying launches you all the way back to the beginning of a level and negates over a half hour of work, and puzzles can only be solved by an entire squad of NASA scientists. Although some modern games such as Devil May Cry 3 reach such a miserably high difficulty level that even the most basic enemies in the game kick your ass, and some resemble the cakewalk of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, which can be beaten by most special ed dropouts without so much as a single Game Over screen, most strike a balance and give you a reasonably challenging experience with a few difficult parts in a package that is overall beatable but not so easy that it causes the player to lose interest.

So in today's gaming world we have games that are long enough to justify their price, offer a rich level of complexity, make a serious effort to tell a fully realized, legitimately engaging story, and bring gamers a reasonable level of difficulty that makes video gaming much more of a leisurely activity than a masochistic exercise. There's also the obvious fact that decades of advancement in computer technology has resulted in games that look and sound immeasurably better.

Every single person and object in this picture is gray, but somehow every single detail vividly pops. Yeah, I don't understand it either.

These are all good things, right? Shouldn't we celebrate better‑looking, more enjoyable, and more immersive games? According to some people, the answer is a resounding "hell no!" These people are the self‑proclaimed old‑school gamers. They're the ones who think games were meant to be short and tough. They believe cut scenes outlining a story are stupid because games shouldn't try to be movies. They think developers should be arrested for spending a lot of time trying to make a visually attractive game because it's time that could have been spent refining the gameplay. They think any remotely lengthy game is padded, today's gamers are coddled by low level of difficulty in games, and Nintendo is the devil for aiming the Wii at the casual gamer market.

Aside from a few personalities such as George "Maddox" Ouzounian, there are less and less high‑profile proponents of an old‑school gaming mindset, and I'm proud to report that a majority of gamers do not fall within this sect, but I have still heard enough of this type of logic that I feel the need to address their main points and show why despite all of their claims to the contrary about how games have lost their soul, the truth is that times are better than they've ever been.

The main idea behind the psychology of the old‑school gamer is that games are meant to be short and difficult, and the long and relatively easy games we play today have missed the point. Along with this they believe that simplicity is a virtue when it comes to game design. This is completely absurd. Games weren't short and difficult in the 1980's because developers had a philosophical belief that a gaming experience should be torturously difficult and offer the player only a minimal amount of content. That is completely and utterly fucking ridiculous.

It's kinda like saying cavemen used clubs to hunt because they just didn't like guns.

The real reason why games were short is because about a half hour's worth of content was about all they could fit in an NES cartridge. These old‑school gamers imagine game designers in the 1980's as cranky old men who could give you a hundred levels if they wanted, but decided to only give you eight because if you get all hundred you'll get spoiled and greedy. It's like they're drunken stepfathers who are really hard on you at a young age and you hate them at the time, but when you grow up to become a successful architect you're thankful he kicked your ass so much. In the eyes of an old-school gamer, a conversation between a gamer in 1988 and the guy who envisioned Contra would go something like this: (For this exercise, the developer will be known as Bill and the gamer will be known as Little Stevie)

Little Stevie: Bill, I had a really fun time playing Contra.

Bill: Why do I give a shit if you liked Contra?

Little Stevie: I just wanted to say thank you for making it.

Bill: I'd rather have a roll of toilet paper than your thanks, you little fucker! At least I can wipe my ass and get some use out of that! What can your thanks do for me?

Little Stevie: Oh gee, I don't know.

Bill: You don't know anything, and that's the problem! Your mother left me raising an empty‑headed little turd!

Little Stevie: Okay, um, those eight levels are fun and everything, but do you think you could do more? I mean I did pay 70 dollars for that copy of Contra.

Bill: You greedy little sack of shit! You want more than 8 levels? You're lucky I developed that game for you at all! Right now I wish I could punch you right in your ungrateful mouth and snatch the 70 clams from your pocket, you fuckin' crotch sniffer!

(30 years later. Adult Stevie goes to Bill's house)

Adult Stevie: Bill, I have a great job and a family of my own, and I just wanted to say thank you. I was so ungrateful when I was seven and all I had was a jungle, two enemy bases, a waterfall, an ice field, an energy zone, a hangar, and the alien's lair. I wanted you to give me more. Maybe a lava level, or a factory, or maybe a city level. Now I realize that the complete lack of length or variety made me a better man. I can't have everything handed to me! I love you!

Bill: Come here, ya little bastard!

(Adult Stevie and Bill share a genuine hug)

That's just not how it was. Developers actually would have loved to make their games longer and prettier, but there was a pretty finite limit on how much could be crammed into an 8‑bit cartridge that has about 48K of storage space. (For those of you keeping track at home, just one JPEG image makes for a larger file.)

This image of Gary Busey is 102 KB. One picture of Gary Busey takes up over twice as much memory as an NES game, which was the absolute pinnacle of home entertainment technology in 1988. Is this an interesting comparison that shows how incredibly far technology has progressed in two short decades, or is it indisputable proof that Busey is the most powerful entity in the universe?

On that same note, this is exactly why games were so difficult. Many of their games only sported a half hour of content, so they needed a way to keep people coming back and playing for hours and hours. Most new cartridge games would cost a wallet‑raping $70, so getting people to play for a long time to justify the purchase was a necessity. The answer was to make the games gut‑wrenchingly difficult. Games that require certain levels to be practiced over and over before they could be understood, and reward the player with slightly more progress that results in them seeing slightly more new content with each play was a clever way to turn their brief games into long‑lasting experiences.

Technical limitations also resulted in the brutal save and password systems. Old‑school gamers believe that modern games that offer copious save points or the option to save whenever you want coddles a gamer (I call it convenient), and they nostalgically remember a time that you had to beat a game in one sitting. Again, this isn't because game companies wanted to punish you in order to make your eventual triumph all the sweeter, it was because the ability to save your game was a technology not yet mastered, and lengthy passwords were the most relief they could give.

Also, what exactly is wrong with games that look good? It seems like only the most contrarian Tucker Carlson or Stephen A. Smith-type cable TV commentator could think that something looking good is actually a problem. Of course gameplay is more important that graphics, and a great‑looking game that's no fun to play belongs in the trash heap, and there are plenty of butt‑ugly games that are fun enough that the visuals don't really matter, but ugly, unsophisticated graphics are not something to be respected. If a game developer in the modern era puts out a game that looks like complete and total ass, they aren't following some sort of old‑school philosophy about the importance of visuals, they just didn't do a very good job.

Only third grade teachers and self-proclaimed old school gamers will actually praise you for making something that looks this shitty.

I'm reminded of people like Quentin Tarantino who have an abiding hatred of CGI and digital effects in cinema. They talk about how movies should be real and don't need artificial computer‑generated monsters and explosions, and you should only see what the camera sees. They regret that more stuntwork isn't being done with human stuntmen.

I say fuck a whole lot of that. CGI is awesome! Without CGI you couldn't have Obi‑Wan completely wrecking Anakin's shit and leaving him to get set on fire and have his face melted on that awesome lava planet. When you do special effects with CGI instead of having a human deliberately wrecking a car he's inside, you also prevent that occasional horrible death that results. To those people who believe that no movie image should be computer generated, what the hell do you think was used to make the credits at the beginning and end?

There are two kinds of people: Those who love the computer-generated, heartwarming Toy Story movies, and fucking coldhearted assholes who I hope die horribly.

I'm completely cool with people who enjoy real stuntwork over CGI action, but why do they have to believe that anything that's not what they like shouldn't be allowed to exist? I think CGI action sequences like when King Kong kicked the living shit out of those three T‑Rexes is generally way cooler than real‑life stuntwork, but I still appreciate Jackie Chan's fights and think these things should be allowed to exist as well.

The same idea goes for these "purists" who hate when games attempt to have serious, involved storylines and have the gall to include cutscenes that you can't skip. Now I get completely annoyed with boring cinematics that can't be skipped and I hate it when games try to force a bad plot upon me as much as the next guy, and the simple or non‑existent plots of old‑school games do have a certain charm, but I think it's ridiculous to say that games shouldn't try. Video games have the potential to be fully immersive experiences that blend interactivity with a top‑notch storyline and memorable characters that come together to engage us on every imaginable level in a way that not even movies can achieve. How in the ever‑loving fuck can that be a bad thing?

Not only do I think developers shouldn't allow their creative visions be limited by the pressure to make an easily accessible game that people can quickly play that doesn't require them to sit through a lot of story to understand, they should run completely wild with their imaginations. They should be encouraged to try absurdly outlandish things. Trying crazy things and failing is necessary for an art form to mature. Shenmue for the Sega Dreamcast was a game in which you were dropped into a virtual city and allowed to do whatever you wanted. There was an overall storyline and ultimate goal to find your father's killer, but for the most part you could play with children, pet kittens, go on forklift races, hang out with the various townspeople, or play at the arcade to your heart's content. The game also played with the concept of the time of the day within the game playing an important role.

I'm sure that during the development cycle that was pressure to make a more fast‑paced game with more fighting and clearly labeled objectives. They could have easily turned this into a straightforward RPG or action game that would gain far more mainstream appeal, but Sega stuck to their guns. The result was one of the most boring games ever made. The world was huge and beautiful, but there wasn't enough to do. The idea of time passing throughout the day within the game was cool, but it resulted in a lot of waiting around for appointments with other characters. Making a game that imitates life was a pretty sweet idea, but the end product only succeeded in reminding gamers that their real lives suck and they didn't want to live through the misery of someone else's life too.

I appreciate what you tried to do, but including slow, plodding forklift races when I'm used to video games where you race in sports cars that top out at 200 mph is like daring me to hate your game.

Shenmue was a failure, but it opened the door for other developers to take the idea and refine it into something more enjoyable. A year later we had Grand Theft Auto III, arguably one of the greatest and most important games of the 21st century. Were the Shenmue development team not allowed to press forward with their mad vision and waste $70 million with their failure, gaming might not be the same today. If developers feel pressured to scale back the story and do something more traditional because that's what gamers are used to, we'll never see a world where video games can consistently match the emotional impact of movies.

Most gamers have incredibly fond memories of the old games they played when they were young. I know I do, but we can't let that nostalgia cloud this very simple fact: games kick way more ass now than they did in the 80's. I'll take Metal Gear Solid 4 over Contra in a heartbeat. I'll burn my copy of Final Fantasy 1 if it gets me a copy of Final Fantasy 13. Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox kicks the ever‑loving shit out of Ninja Gaiden for the NES. The change we're experiencing is good. Sometimes a new idea results in a bloated load of crap that makes us long for older games, but that new idea usually results in something way better when it's refined and improved. Don't be afraid of change, because games only continue to get better.

Electronic Gaming Monthly, my favorite video game magazine of all time, confirmed this opinion when they averaged the aggregate scores of their reviews from every year and found that 2007 was the clear winner. Old‑school gamers can wax nostalgic all they want about how the NES had more innovation in a single chip than the Xbox 360 does in its entire monstrous motherboard, but I'll always know that there is no place I would rather be than here.

Tales From the Video Game Generation

2010-06-20T00:53:00.000-07:00

Way back in October of 2008, I wrote a book-length collection of essays on video games and how they raised me and defined me as the man I am today. This 316-page tome carried the thoroughly marketable full title of "Tales From the Video Game Generation: Memoirs, Opinions, and Rants From a Gaming Obsessed, ADD Afflicted Geek Who Never Knew a World Without Mario."

I enjoyed the hell out of writing it. It's an extremely comedic book and it retains all of my typically vulgar language throughout. After all the time I spent writing, editing, and proofreading, I sat on my finished book and did basically nothing in the way of trying to get it published or represented by a literary agent. I think part of me felt that it wasn't good enough to get published, or that nobody would find it marketable enough to pick up because it's a collection of extremely personal essays from a guy that nobody's ever heard of.

That's actually a recurring theme with my work. I'll eagerly pour time into writing a book, making cartoons, blogging, or producing a TV show, and when the time comes to promote the hell out of the finished work and get the word out, I do absolutely nothing. Again, maybe part of me thinks it isn't very good and I'm embarrassed to hype it. Probably another part of that is my belief that if it's good I won't have to heavily promote it. Videos get millions of Youtube views by going viral, and not because the people who made them did a really good job promoting it. Maybe heavy promotion could get a dud video up to 5,000 views, but if it isn't good it isn't good, so I've just assumed that the reason why I don't have videos with millions of views is because they just aren't funny or appealing enough and left it at that.

Anyway, I don't want this book I wrote to just sit in a box without anyone ever getting a chance to read it since I did put a lot of time into it and literally fewer than 5 people have ever read a word of it, so I'll be periodically posting chapters to the blog. Anything with the tag "Tales From the Video Game Generation" is another chapter. A good friend from high school read the book and left some pretty helpful comments, and maybe if people like what they see here I'll consider putting some real effort into getting this thing sold. It's coming up in the next post. Enjoy.

How to Play Tic-Tac-Toe

2010-06-17T12:09:00.001-07:00

To the average, untrained eye, Tic-Tac-Toe seems like a game that's way too simple to have any kind of discernible strategy. After all, it's a game commonly played by toddlers. There's only 9 squares to work with, and odds are virtually every single time you've played against someone else it's ended in a tie. This blog is here to show you that sometimes there's more than meets the eye. While the game hardly matches the complexity of chess, you'll see that thought can be involved, and a strategy to winning exists. If you follow these simple steps, you will never lose a game of Tic-Tac-Toe in your life.

Step 1:
The first step is as simple as challenging someone to a game. For this exercise, we'll be taking on Susan. Whoever goes first has a distinct advantage. There isn't really a set protocol for who gets to go first other than taking turns when you play multiple games. We're in a sporting mood, so we'll let Susan go first for this game.

Step 2:

Susan has opted to start in a corner. Most players start in the center, but there's nothing terribly wrong with starting in this way. It probably goes without saying, but if you decide to start in a corner, it doesn't matter which one you choose.

Step 3:

Now it's our turn. We're going to put our O in the center. It is by far the most versatile space on the board because the center square can be a part of 4 different winning rows, while the corners can only be part of 3, and the middle sides can only be in 2. This move should allow us to open up our game and give us a variety of options.

Step 4:

Susan has gone for the opposite corner. Most people aggressively attack and try to make a row right off the bat, but she appears to be setting up something more devious. We need to be careful as we plot our next move.

Step 5:

We'll go ahead and choose another corner because those are the second-most versatile spaces. As it stands right now, we have the advantage because we have more possibilities to win than Susan, who has yet to even string two spaces together.

Step 6:

Drat! Things have taken a turn for the worse. Susan has been planning this all along, and we find ourselves in a bad spot. She is set up to win in two different ways, and we're only able to block one on our next turn. We have to put a circle in the middle left or middle bottom spots for a block, but she'll certainly choose the other and win. If you're as committed to winning this game as I am, there's only one choice.

Step 7:

Stab Susan in the neck with your pencil. If you hit the carotid artery just right, she should be spraying a small fountain of blood. Odds are she's panicking and as a result she's thrashing about and getting blood on everything. Don't worry. She should bleed out in a couple minutes.

Step 8:

Good job! You've avoided losing at Tic-Tac-Toe, but you aren't done yet! You've got a murder to cover up. What you're going to want to do now is smear her blood all over the piece of paper you've been using to play the game and write, "THIS IS WHAT YOU GET, BITCH!" in the blood.

You have now pinned the murder on the Tic-Tac-Toe Killer. Susan is his newest victim. The Tic-Tac-Toe Killer is a real serial killer who's traveling the country, and he's surprisingly open to taking credit for other peoples' kills. I've pinned at least 6 murders on him myself.

Step 9:

You're almost there. Now all you have to do is complete the planted evidence with the Tic-Tac-Toe Killer's trademark: semen. Pull your pants up, you silly goose. If you plant yours at the scene you might as well hand the cops a written confession while you're at it. You need to get some from an illegal Mexican who isn't in the police database. Getting some actually isn't as hard as it sounds. I know a guy who can get it for you real cheap. I'll be in touch.

Step 10:

Congratulations! You're still undefeated at Tic-Tac-Toe! Take a bow, champ. You've earned it!

Censoring Supercross

2010-06-14T18:31:00.000-07:00

I am a production technician for a TV station in Cincinnati. During a typical 8-hour shift, I'll be operating a camera or running teleprompter for 2 of them and goofing off for the other 6. The pay for the job isn't exactly all that great, but when you consider that over the last week I was paid livable wages for doing the following:

-Watching copious amounts of baseball

-Honing my talent at throwing styrofoam plates until I got to the level that I could hit a girl in the face over half the time

-Going on a walk through the nice part of town

-Playing Mad Gab

-Playing Life

-Practicing my breakdancing skillz

It's actually pretty fucking phenomenal. Unfortunately, sometimes the job requires you to work odd hours at times when coworkers are too tired or hungover to be particularly sociable, and that means you'll have to resort to watching TV. And because it's during those odd hours such as 8:30 in the morning on Sunday, networks aren't exactly presenting you with their A-game. As a result, sometimes I get the pleasure of watching such well-regarded American cinematic classics as Supercross: The Movie.

Supercross is a shit-soaked 90-minute cinematic tribute to the worst fucking sport in the world. Supercross is a sport where you're on a dirtbike, you're racing a bunch of other people on a track comprised of tight turns and tall mounds of dirt, and the guy who times his jumps right and lands them at the best angle usually wins. I'm sure it's fun to take part in, but as a spectator it ranks somewhere below minor league arena football. The movie follows a positively brilliant plot that we've never seen in movies before. Get this: An amateur has dreams of making it big, he gets his big chance, he makes it big, he alienates his friends because he's changed, man, he resolves his differences, and with the help of his friends, he wins the Big Competition at the end. I don't know where they come up with this shit.

You, the reader, don't give a shit about Supercross and nobody you know does either, so it wouldn't surprise you if I told you that the movie was a box office disaster. On opening weekend it made $820 per theater. It costs a movie studio $2,000 to create and send a film print to a theater. In a movie's first weekend of release, the studio typically gets 75% of the ticket sales. Since the movie opened on 1,621 screens to an opening weekend gross of $1,330,520, Fox made $997,890 yet paid $3,242,000 for prints and distribution. The box office performance of this movie was so shitty that even though Fox paid a great deal of money to produce and market the movie, they would have saved $2.25 million by never showing it in any theaters.

A couple Sunday mornings ago, I didn't have any books with me, none of my favorite websites had any recent updates because it was fucking Sunday morning, and none of my coworkers could be troubled for conversation, so I settled on watching Supercross: The Move on FX. The movie won my attention by default because it was the only thing on TV that wasn't an infomercial or Dragon Ball Z episode dubbed into Spanish. It causes me physical pain to admit to this, but it was actually the second time I've seen parts of it on cable. The first time was because I was flipping through the channels and caught a scene with Sophia Bush, who is so fucking gorgeous that she could convince Kevin Spacey to give chicks a try.

I mention that I've caught Supercross on cable twice because I noticed a subtle difference between both of my viewings. There's a scene where the main character, KC Carlyle, nearly crashes into the bad guy in a race. After they cross the finish line, they get into a fight and this exchange goes down. (I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember the exact dialog and nobody on the internet liked this movie enough to write down lines from it)

Bad guy: Why'd you cut me off?

KC: I'm just racing, bro!

Bad guy: That ain't cool!

(Bad guy rushes at KC and a fight breaks out)

Bad guy: Bitch!

KC: Fag!

Bad guy: Bitch!

KC: Fag!

Bad guy: Bitch!

KC: Fag! Fag!

Bad guy: Bitch! Bitch!

Eventually the fight breaks up and the movie continues to be terrible in different ways. The first time I saw on the movie, which was on a different channel, the constant catcalls of "Fag" were left intact. In the more recent viewing on FX, the word Fag was muted out, and you could only hear the other guy yell "Bitch!" It made for an incredibly bizarre scene where two guys were rolling in the dirt and fighting, while only one voice shouted "Bitch!" over and over.

I wondered why one channel left Fag intact while FX didn't. Odds are it's just simply hypocrisy. A censor decided that repeatedly slurring homosexuals is a no-no, but slurring women just as often is okay. That's probably the case, but I'm a huge fan of FX. I watch literally every single show on that channel and it's my favorite channel on all of television. For that reason I like to think that the geniuses at FX headquarters actually made a conscious decision to improve the movie in ways that never occurred to the morons who made Supercross: The Movie. In my revisionist take on what happened, the suits at FX simply realized that maybe, possibly, having the hero of the movie repeatedly call somebody a fag might make him a tad less likable, so they bleeped him out for creative reasons. Yeah, that's what I'm sticking with.

The 5 dumbest AI Partners in Video Game History

2010-06-14T00:45:00.000-07:00

One oft-used phrase that annoys the shit out of me is, "We can put a man on the moon but we can't (insert problem that one would like solved here)." The idea is to juxtapose a grand human achievement with a failure at a relatively simple task. I could apply the same logic and say, "The military has developed advanced artificial intelligence, but we can't get video game characters who try to get out of the way of bullets?" It's two very different things and it's a stupid comparison to make, especially since video game companies don't have trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to work with.

So I understand that there's a good reason why so many computer-controlled allies in video games are half-retarded, but that isn't going to stop me from bitching about them anyway. Here are the 5 dumbest-assed AI allies of all time, but first we've got honorable mentions.

-Marines (Halo 1, 2, and 3, Xbox and Xbox 360)

Apparently driving Warthogs like Mr. Magoo on acid and standing in the open and getting blown away are parts of Space Marine training.

Natalya (Goldeneye 007, N64)

She’s one of the most brilliant hackers in the world, but she doesn’t fucking understand that standing in front of James Bond as he’s in the process of firing a gun is a bad idea

-Homies in Saints Row 2 (Xbox 360, PS3, PC)

At some point in this game you will have to complete a mission where a computer controlled character drives a car. Their waypointing will go through a wall, they will crash into a wall, reverse, drive into it again, and repeat the same process over and over, they will never try driving around the wall, you will have to restart the mission, and you will throw your own poop in frustration.

-Fallout 3 Allies (Xbox 360, PS3, PC)

Any benefits their assistance adds is ruined by the way that they engage anything within a half mile of you and bring you into all kinds of conflicts that you would rather just avoid. It’s like walking back to the dorms in college with a belligerent drunk friend who wants to start shit with everyone they see.

And now, the top 5:

5 - Grove Street Gang Members (PS2, Xbox, PC)

One of the most hyped features of San Andreas was the ability to recruit gang members. As your respect level goes up, you’ll be able to recruit more and more until you have a full 4-man crew at your disposal. No longer will you be all alone blowing away dozens of enemies all by yourself like some kind of ridiculously unstoppable gangsta Robocop. Now you’ll be doing some serious tactical squad-based gang banging.

That’s an awesomely scary prospect. My mother raised me to fear gangs. Despite the fact that I’m a 23-year old adult, even now she’ll freak out if she catches wind of me coming anywhere near a high-crime area. She’s convinced that if I ever do so much as drive in a bad neighborhood for a couple minutes, the gang members will instantly swarm my car, pull me out, and beat and stab me to death, and then they’ll probably sell my car for scrap to get their next crack fix. I know gang violence is a very real thing, and walking alone in the middle of the night in a bad neighborhood is like signing my own death warrant, but to my mom, gang members are essentially the zombies from 28 Days Later with knives and guns.

The recruitable gang members in San Andreas are like the ridiculous monsters of my mom’s gang-related fantasies times a hundred. The second you try to take them out to take over some territory, they’ll start firing indiscriminately in the general direction of any rival gang member with no regard for what might be between their gun barrels and the guys they’re trying to make dead. Going around or shooting over obstructions will never occur to them and as such, cars, cops, buildings, walls, or your own tender body will be immediately riddled with holes if they happen to be in the wrong place. Because of their tendency to attract huge amounts of police attention by wantonly killing cops, and their penchant for blowing up cars that you’re standing right next to, these guys are more of a liability than they’re worth, and you’re much better off going it alone. It seems weird to say that bringing backup into a gang war is a bad idea, but we’re talking about a group of guys that make the Michael Douglas character from Falling Down look like a calm, quiet, and well-behaved member of society.

4 - Tails (Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Sega Genesis)

Unless you remember to go to the options menu first, Tails the two-tailed fox will follow you everywhere in Sonic the Hedgehog 2, perfectly mimicking your actions. Most of the time Tails is merely worthless and annoying. He’ll jump immediately after you jump, he’ll go where you go, and he’ll act like he deserves credit for hitting enemies a second time. His tendency to get credit for hitting an enemy after someone else has already readily taken them down on their own makes him the Ray Lewis of gaming.

Also infuriating is the way that he brings absolutely nothing to the table despite the ability to fly. The power of flight could open up a whole world of possibilities in helping Sonic defeat the forces of evil, but when Tails is controlled by the computer, he’ll stay grounded 98% of the time. I like to think he does that just to be a dick.

Admittedly, Tails can be helpful in putting a second hit on a boss in the unlikely event of him staying alive for longer than ten seconds, but that’s more than counterbalanced by the fact that when he’s tagging along, bonus levels are fucking impossible. Anytime Sonic jumps, he and Tails will switch place and Tails will get in front and take all of the rings that rightfully belong to Sonic. What a greedy bitch. The rings that Tails collect count towards your total, but anything he’s holding is as good as gone because it’ll only be a matter of time before he moronically runs head first into a giant spike trap and loses it all. Tails is like King Midas, only everything he touches turns into shit instead of gold.

3 - Boomer (SOCOM: US Navy Seals, PS2)

If you were ever in chorus or band in school, you know that the object is to do your part right without fucking up or calling special attention to yourself, and hopefully the output will be greater than the sum of its parts. If there was one member of the group who felt a need to show off how much more talented he is by playing extra loud or fancy notes, or by singing louder and doing more exaggerated hand gestures than everyone else, he’d be a distracting presence that completely fucks up the performance. He will call attention to himself when everyone is trying to blend in, and he’ll effectively ruin everyone else’s work. Age that kid a couple decades, put him through military training, give him a gun, put him in a squad, and that kid becomes Boomer.

Let’s say you’re trying to complete a mission in a stealthy manner. Now is the time to stay quiet, be smart, and play your assigned role. There’s no need for anyone to break out and be a hero because you’re in control of the situation. Faster than you can say “Semper Fi,” Boomer will charge out into the open, guns blazing, giving away your position and ruining any element of surprise you tried to gain. Most operatives with any semblance of cognitive capacity see this situation as a time to stay hidden because it’s the best way to complete the mission as well as keep you and your friends alive. Boomer disregards all of that and sees this only as an opportunity to prove how fucking awesome he is. It’s enough to make you wonder if he’s actually a military trained operative at all and not a cancer patient with an intelligence-sapping brain tumor and being part of a military squad is his Make-A-Wish.

2 - Sheva Alomar (Resident Evil 5, Xbox 360, PS3, PC)

Capcom added this mysteriously light-skinned African character to the fold to make you feel better as you go on a black people murdering rampage through the villages of Kijuju. Whether you want her or not, you're stuck with her "helping" you through the entire journey. The way she wantonly wastes your limited supplies makes you wonder how she could ever survive a childhood in Africa without the leader of her village having her executed for the good of everyone else. While a normal person with a mind for saving shit that you might really need down the line might take out a lone weak enemy with a melee weapon, Sheva will use 50 submachine gun bullets at the least to get the job done.

More savvy gamers quickly realized that Sheva shares John Woo's approach to bullet conservation, and tried stripping her of all her guns and exclusively using her as a pack mule to carry extra weapon clips and first aid kits. Their ingenuity was rewarded with Sheva charging at them and wasting an entire hospital's worth of first aid to fix the first minor bump the player contracted. If you asked her to kill a fly buzzing around your house, she would probably set a giant pile of hundred dollar bills on fire to attract it, and drop a dozen priceless crystal chandeliers and faberge eggs on the area to try to crush the fly. As long as it's precious and valuable, she will gladly waste the shit out of it.

Let's put it this way: For lengthy stretches in Resident Evil 4, you had to accompany a petite, helpless teenage girl with absolutely no fighting skill, and everyone who has played both games unanimously agrees that Sheva is the more cumbersome partner by far. Fuck you, Sheva. You’re the reason why I’m glad that God doesn’t let black people go to heaven.

1 - Dom (Gears of War 1 and 2, Xbox 360)

Dom is the brother-in-arms of series protagonist Marcus Fenix. He is good at exactly two things: shouting about his wife and getting killed. The guys at Epic games should be sued for false advertisement on account of the Gears of War cover art showing Marcus brandishing a gun, because I swear shooting enemies is only a secondary gameplay element to reviving Dom because he got his stupid ass killed again. Dom spent so much time mastering the art of getting killed that anything else that might have been important to learn (shooting straight, getting on the right side of cover, keeping allies safe, not being a fucking terrible soldier, etc.) went by the wayside.

However, Dom is something special in the realm of terrible friendly AI. It’s certainly infuriating to see him get repeatedly killed because of such brilliant acts as running headfirst into bosses a hundred times his size, charging toward a platoon that has him outnumbered to a ridiculous degree, and hiding on the wrong fucking side of a wall. It’s worsened because you absolutely have to risk your life to revive him. If you fail to revive him, it’s game over, so forcing yourself into extreme danger because of easily avoidable mistakes made by Dom is a frustrating inevitability. However, even that isn’t enough to make him the worst. A computer-controlled ally moronically getting himself in danger and forcing you to bail him out is most definitely not a trait exclusive to Dom. He occupies the number one spot on this list because he’s a selfish fucking asshole.

Gears of War is an overall excellent game series, but few things piss me off more than getting taken out and slowly bleeding to death because Dom is too fucking busy to be troubled to help you out. For every one time you need a shot of that magical revival drug, Dom will need 12, but no matter how many times you save him, he won’t show a goddamned inch of gratitude. Until he’s done shooting at whatever he’s shooting at, he won’t even bother to glance at his best friend who’s bleeding to death at his feet. Most decent human beings would prioritize saving their friend over anything else, especially since reviving someone only takes about two seconds. Dom is not a decent human being. He is a shitty ally and he probably rapes puppies. Fuck him.

So there you have it. I'm not going to hold up the lunar landings as evidence that all of these AI problems should be rectified, but I had to give voice to my frustration.

The Tale of the Brown Paper Bag

2010-06-08T23:48:00.000-07:00

From 4th grade until the time I graduated high school, I spent two weeks of every summer at a Presbyterian camp. Even though the tightly scheduled days, happy counselors, and repetition of religious-themed songs were clearly designed to break down our will and finalize our transformations into unquestioningly loyal servants of Christ, they were some of the best weeks of my life.

I made friends in those times that I stayed in touch with for a long time, some of which I still stay in touch with to this day. Well, that's a relative term since by that I mean we read each others' Facebook statuses and we don't really converse regularly or at all, but we are still indirectly communicating on some level, goddammit! Anyway, the point is, camp was fucking awesome and the fact that I never came back as a counselor is one of the great regrets of my life.

It was at those camps that I discovered how much I like making people laugh. Making people crap themselves with laughter at everything I said was a great feeling, and the sheltered religious kids made for an extraordinarily easy audience because uttering literally any swear word, no matter how minor, was shocking and taboo-shattering. Unfortunately, on one fateful afternoon, the fun and games took a dark turn.

The cabins we stayed in had three large rooms: The commons area, the girls' bedroom on the right, and the boys' bedroom on the left. Me and the guys were hanging out in our side of the cabin, and I noticed something strange. On top of a beam that ran slightly below the top of the vaulted ceiling, there was a brown paper bag.

I wondered what it was doing there. It was a good 12 feet or so high, so unless the person who put it there was an incredibly accurate thrower who managed to land the bag perfectly upright on the beam, a ladder had to be used to get it up there. No ladders were readily available to the campers, as far as I knew. The plot thickens.

I absolutely had to know what was contained in the mysteriously suspended bag of mystery. It could be money, pirate treasure, secret documents containing all kinds of spy shit, and if we were really lucky, drugs. Me and the other guys started throwing anything we could find, pillows, shoes, cans of bug spray, whatever, at the bag to try to get it to fall. Eventually, somebody grabbed a broom, reached as high as he could, and successfully pushed that little fucker off the beam. The bag landed on my bed, spilling its contents all over my blankets and pillows.

What did we find? Was it $72,000 in small, unmarked bills? Was it the pistol that killed Huey Long? Was it a hollowed out Bible with a smaller Bible inside? The answer was none of the above, because what was actually previously in the bag and now strewn all over my sleeping area was three crusty, flaky, dried out turds.

I called CSI (Cabin Shit Investigators) to the scene and they determined that the poop had to be many months and possibly even years old, considering how crunchy and aged they were. Yes, that's right. A long time ago somebody decided to take a shit inside a paper bag, then get up on a ladder or maybe even climb on top of a human pyramid and position it high above the cabin bedroom like some sort of demented air freshener.

To this day, I don't know why those turds were there, and despite putting way too much thought into it, I still have no fucking clue what thought process would result in somebody doing that. No matter how long I ponder this question, I still never get an answer. When some people sit and ponder the unknowable, they think about the secrets of the universe. Others wonder what the other side of death may bring us. Still others wonder if the religious texts intended for heaven to be taken literally, of if it is merely an ideal that we should strive to achieve here on earth.

I think about a bag full of shit.

An Interview With Me

2010-06-08T23:26:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago, a woman that I work with interrupted me in the middle of watching an episode of 24 and told me she would be interviewing me. The picture above is not a photo of me or her, but that's neither here nor there. She told me that a class project required her to interview an artist, so she chose me to discuss my cartoons, comedy sketches, and TV show. In the politest manner possible I told her that classifying me as an artist stretches the definition farther than the facial skin of a Desperate Housewives cast member, but she went ahead with the interview anyway. Names have been changed to protect my job.

She posted the transcript of the interview on her Facebook page, and I'm reposting it here. Check it out:

Gentile Golem wears so many hats that at first glance one might think he has a multi-personality disorder. The recent college graduate is the producer, director, writer, editor and talent of his public access show, “Moldy Bagels” and cartoon series, “Crapstick Doodle.” As he chases his pie-in-the-sky dreams of comedic success, he will always remember his humble beginnings on a public access channel in Northern Kentucky.

Tell me a little bit about the videos you make.

I make sketch comedy videos in my spare time. Some of them are cartoons. I don’t know if you would call them animated necessarily because the characters’ mouths don’t move. It’s like still pictures. In a four minute cartoon there might be like 60 or 70 frames which is a bit less than full blown animation. But I do comedy sketches, either animated or otherwise, primarily.

What kind of software do you use to make your cartoons?

I use this super advanced program called Microsoft Paint. It was a rigorous six year training program, (laughs) uh, no. What I do is I’ll find something on Google. I’ll search "restaurant booth" or something and use that as a backdrop and then I’ll draw the characters over it.

I understand that your cartoons are actually broadcast on television. What is that all about?

I have a public access show called “Moldy Bagels.” One of the segments that are in every episode is the cartoon series. The cartoon series is called “Crapstick Doodle.” The title was my girlfriend’s idea. I couldn’t think of one and she said that. I didn’t bother to come up with another one so that’s what I’m stuck with now.

What else is in your public access show?

Just whatever I feel like doing really. Some of it is just me being myself, you know, talking to the camera, reading mail that I got from the viewers or just talking about whatever I feel like. But most of it is scripted, comedy sketches. It will be a lot of me, playing characters, just screwing around in my house. I also make extensive use of a green screen that I have at home. I tape it up on the wall in my kitchen and I’ll do like, fake commercials and stuff in front of that, just having fun.

How did you get started doing this?

It’s something I had talked about for a long time because people would say I was funny in casual conversation. I always talked about it and never did it and I saw the other stuff people put up on YouTube. I was taking video production classes in college, so I was like, I know how to do this and I have access to expensive cameras, so why not? So, I wrote some sketches and got some friends together and we had a lot of fun doing it so I kept making them.

Why do this?

Why not?

Is it a creative outlet?

Yeah, I mean, I’m at home. I could just play video games all the time but I like to actually make something. I like to have a tangible product of the time I spend.

What does your work say about you?

God, I don’t know; that I need therapy.

What is your response from viewers?

If more people watched it, I’d be able to tell you. I’d say it’s generally positive though. I don’t know how many people see it besides my friends who are just being nice. Some of my older stuff was too vulgar for some people. My mom doesn’t like some of what I do but…

Do you have aspirations of making it big in cartoon animation?

Maybe not cartoons specifically. Working professionally in comedy would be great. I really enjoy doing it but I don’t know if I have the all encompassing desire or drive to make that my whole life. I read stories about comedians, these desperate, hungry comedians who barely make enough to live. There will be eight of them living in a one bedroom apartment because they can’t make ends meet. They perform a show and make like 300 people laugh themselves stupid and then they don’t have enough money to buy a sandwich afterward. I don’t know if I want that life. That’s a lot of commitment. I don’t know if I’m ready to hit that level.

Is this about being famous and making a name for yourself?

I guess I might like to be famous.

Any last words?

Don’t do drugs.

Today she told me that she received a good grade on the project and her teacher left a note that said, "Good interview, weird guy." Thanks.

Legal Prostitution

2010-06-07T22:51:00.000-07:00

This is a prostitute. She is engaging in the illegal act of prostitution, which is the practice where one pays another money for sex. I could write a long essay about how two adults having consensual sex being illegal in an allegedly free country is a crock of shit, and I could espouse all of the benefits that legalized and regulated prostitution would bring (more tax revenue, reduced spread of STDs, etc.), but much like arguments for the legalization of pot, there's really nothing new or interesting that anyone can bring to the discussion by this point, so I'll leave that one alone.

Since we're unfortunately operating in a world where prostitution is illegal, I want to share this idea I had once for a prostitution service that I think I could run legally. Imagine this scenario: You walk into a store that sells cheaply made cat figurines. Despite the shoddy workmanship, the store sells them for $200 a pop. After buying one, a woman comes up to you on the way back to the car, tells you that she loves a man who's into ceramic cats and asks if she can go to your place. Then she fucks your brains out while wearing a cowboy hat.

To the rest of the world, this is nothing but a store that sells oddly overpriced cat figurines, and a bunch of crazy women hang out near the store and have sex with all of the customers. Nobody is being paid directly for sex here. There's nothing illegal about selling cat figurines at an extremely high price, and there's certainly nothing illegal about hitting on a guy and having sex with him at his place.

You know what? I'm going to say it: I have invented a motherfucking legally bulletproof prostitution business. Actually, I'm pretty sure this doesn't work at all and there's some law or something that would get me almost immediately convicted if I tried this, and I'm just too stupid and ignorant to know what it is. Somebody e-mail me at RonMexicoProductions@gmail.com to explain how I'd get busted because I'm genuinely curious.

Close your mouth, Kristen Stewart

2010-06-07T22:19:00.001-07:00

Close your mouth, you ungrateful whore. God gave you a nose and you should use it. Not everyone has a nose, you know. Burn victims and people born with birth defects would love to have a nose and here you are taking your blessing for granted.

Okay, I admit, not everyone appreciates their noses every second they're alive. Even I sometimes don't take the time to pause and thank Jesus that I have two holes on my face that can collect air and smell things, but when you spend an entire 130 minute movie without closing your mouth for even a FLEETING GODDAMN SECOND to put those nostrils to work, you're spitting on all of the noseless masses. I was already baffled enough by the Twilight movies. Two hunky, exotic, fascinating men deeply in love with and fighting over a boring girl with no personality who isn't even hot is nuts, but when you consider that she fucking hates disabled people to boot, it's downright insane.

Kristen, there's no excuse for your actions. Quit acting like your shit doesn't stink just because not everyone can smell it.

Bob Barker Controls You

2010-05-19T11:50:00.000-07:00

This is the world famous Showcase Showdown wheel. I was watching The Price is Right at work today (I also watched 2 episodes of 24. Envy me.), and realized a subtle difference between Bob Barker and Drew Carey. Back when Bob hosted, as the wheel was slowing down, Bob would know exactly where it was going to land a full 4 spots before it finished. Drew, on the other hand, has no fucking clue where the wheel will land until it comes to a complete stop. A quarter of a second before the wheel completely runs out of momentum, Drew will still be undecided on whether the arrow will make it to the dollar, or if it'll bounce off the peg and stay on 5 cents.

When you think about it, this makes logical sense. Drew has only hosted the show for 2 and a half years. Although 30 months is a reasonably long time to hold a job, it's practically a probationary period compared to the 35 consecutive years that Bob has held the job. Each episode of The Price is Right has six contestants spin the wheel. When you subtract the contestants that only spin once and add the bonus spins, the average probably comes out to two per contestant. That's 12 spins per show, and with 5 shows a week, he's witnessed 60 spins a week, and roughly 3,000 spins a year. The Showcase Showdown began in 1975, so over 32 years, Bob Barker came close to watching 100,000 spins.

So as you can see, it makes logical sense that he'd be so familiar with the wheel and how much farther it will spin based on the rate that it's slowing down that he can tell you where it'll end up with incredible accuracy. He knows the wheel better than his own family. He's more familiar with the intricacies of the wheel than he is with the intricacies of the wording of sexual harassment suits.

So this got me thinking: Bob Barker developed an impressive understanding of the physics of the wheel just from casually observing it 12 times a day and 5 days a week. Imagine how well he'd understand it if he spent a majority of those 32 years closely observing the wheel, studying, and taking notes, and if we increased the daily number of spins from 12 to 500. I'll bet he'd be able to tell you where the wheel will land the moment it is spun. I'll take it a step further and say he'd eventually reach the point where you wouldn't even need to spin the wheel. He'd be able to look at the contestant, assess his or her bodily dimensions, note the physical strength indicated by bicep and pectoral size, read the subtle bodily cues to determine the contestant's mood and therefore how much of their total physical potential they'd put into spinning the wheel, and use all of those factors to determine where the wheel will land before you fucking spin it.

Think about it. The three contestants will line up. He knows that the pink-shirted douchebag will try to show off all of his strength and successfully turn the wheel 2.64 times and land on 60 cents. Being horribly cocky, he knows he'll spin again and luck out by landing on 35 cents for a total of 95. Bob will then take it a step further and assess how this score will affect the strategy and spinning strength of the woman who comes up next. He will announce a winner before the wheel is even touched. The contestants won't take the predictions seriously at first and spin anyway, only to find that he was absolutely right. As the days wear on, contestants will try to escape the predetermined fate that Bob has laid out for them, only to fail. In a matter of months, they will succumb to inevitability and accept what is laid out for them.

In short time, all Price is Right contestants reach a state of extreme despair as they realize that everything they have ever done and ever will do is already laid out by the way they were born in relation to their environment, free will does not exist, the laws of physics are their true masters, and any choice they thought they made and any change in the world they believed to have been made by a conscious decision on their part was a complete and total illusion.

One day, a college philosophy student will bravely stand up to the deterministic hell that Bob Barker has forced him to face and decide that there is only one way to break free and prove that free will does in fact exist. He will tell the TV cameras that he'll end this cycle by his own decision once and for all, for he is truly in control of his own life. Then he'll pull out a gun, point it at his head, and pull the trigger.

The gun will fail to fire. Bob tells the boy that he knew he'd try to kill himself, so he took the liberty of bending the firing pin. He says that the process of of bending a firing pin is surprisingly similar to neutering a cat. Bob tells the boy that he can never escape the existential carnival of terror that he built with his own gnarled hands. The strings that carry this boy-puppet through the world cannot be cut until Puppetmaster Barker cuts them himself. The boy would scream upon realizing that cold, inevitable death that he can't even enact on his own terms is all that awaits him, but thanks to Bob Barker, he now knows that screaming, like all actions, achieves nothing.

Moldy Bagels: Episode Six (Part Three)

2010-05-16T12:51:00.000-07:00

The joke about the Agro Crag reminds me of one time I was home for Christmas break from college. A couple friends and I watched a rerun of Nickelodeon Guts on one of Nick's satellite channels that only airs game shows, and my friend Craig tried to sing along with the theme song, and completely fucked up the lyrics. This is tragic, because the Guts theme song is nothing but instrumentals periodically punctuated with a few male voices shouting, "Guts!" Whenever I think of that show, I will always think of Craig shouting, "Guts!" only to have the guys on TV shout it three seconds later, followed by laughter and Craig burying his head in shame.

As for the Banana Magnets tag, we have a giant bowl of fake plastic fruit at home. There;s a banana, a lime, a lemon, an orange, grapes, a plum, an apple, and I'm not at home so I can't confirm this, but there might also be a nectarine. I have no idea why we own a giant bowl of fake plastic fruit, but I also can't think of a particularly good reason why we shouldn't have one, so I'll allow it.

Moldy Bagels: Episode Six (Part Two)

2010-05-16T12:48:00.000-07:00

For the love of god, if anybody has any advice on how I can get a handle on my car again, please e-mail me and clue me in, because I'm going to shoot myself in the face with an assault rifle if I have to go another month or so without being able to open my car door. It's very annoying, not to mention that the extra 10 seconds it takes to get into my car will make the difference between surviving and getting fucking eaten when all nerd wet dreams come true and the zombie apocalypse finally happens.

I'm trying to think of more to say about this segment, but I'm finding more and more that the comedy is really self-explanatory, and maybe there just isn't that much of interest to say about it. Actually, after listening to a few DVD commentaries, I've more or less determined that people talking about why something is funny or what inspired a particular joke is the driest, most boring fucking thing a person could possibly be subjected to. You get stunning insights like, "This character's catchphrase comes from something my science teacher said in high school," and in worst case scenarios you'll hear somebody discuss the literary merit and hidden meanings of their comedy, which is every bit as terrible as it sounds.

I don't know if you own any Simpsons DVDs. It's kind of fucking pointless since everyone has already seen every good episode of The Simpsons 12 times, and on any given day you can catch 8 different airings on local TV, but I guess there's something to be said for collectors or fans who have a really strong urge to load up one particular episode. Anyway, I tried listening to the commentary for the Frank Grimes episode, and it was fucking painful. Hearing the showrunner analyze, overanalyze, then overanalyze his analysis on how the episode so powerfully speaks to the relationship between the fiction of the show and reality is like verbal waterboarding. Even Hank Azaria, who plays the character, seems to be in disbelief by the end of the 22-minute session.

So I'll try to can the painfully overlong commentary and say that I busted on The New Radicals because they were awful, the Where's Waldo bit is funny because he's dead, and playing the preacher was fun because I got to stand in my kitchen and scream for extended periods of time.

Moldy Bagels: Episode Six (Part One)

2010-05-16T12:47:00.000-07:00

Here's the first part of the season finale. I just finished logging the length of every sketch in the six episode first season, and I'll be throwing together a Frankenstein clip show to serve as a type of pilot that I'll try to get represented and parlay into some sort of comedy writing job. I can't believe I started doing this show all the hell back in October. It legitimately blows my mind how fucking long it takes to to write and produce 22 minutes of comedy, especially since every episode has at least a few minutes of old material repackaged for the show.

It's funny that I wrote a sketch where I pretend to be friends with a horribly Photoshopped black guy, the joke being that I've never seen a black person before, when the black guys I used to work with at the restaurant have asked me a few times if they could do something for the show. I'm sure I'll include them eventually, but this is a good example of life doing the exact opposite of imitating art.

As for the cartoon, I think it's funny, but damn if it isn't incredibly easy to come up with those jokes. While running teleprompter for the morning news at work, I wrote down jokes for the cartoons during commercial breaks, and by the end of the show I had a list that was about 30 items long. I had to drastically cut them back just because I could pretty easily fill an entire half hour with that shit.

Moldy Bagels: Episode 5 (Part Three)

2010-05-03T21:57:00.000-07:00

Fun facts:

1. My celebrity impersonations are notoriously terrible, but I still enjoy the bit with Daniel Day-Lewis and Michael Caine.

2. I said "Fist Punches" when I clearly meant to say "Face Punches." Much like the Chris Henry debacle from an earlier episode, I am way too lazy to actually correct my mistakes with reshoots. Fuck that shit, this is public access. Let Martin Scorsese do reshoots when necessary. When I'm paid zero dollars, the show airs exclusively in one Northern Kentucky county, and the Youtube uploads all register well under 20 views, all you're getting is some white text, and that's final.

3. This episode still sucks.

4. I was home alone when I shot the mailbag segments, so I didn't have anyone to punch me in the face. I taped a glove around the end of an umbrella and shoved the umbrella into my own face with my off-camera arm. There was a soft glove at the end of the umbrella, but the tip was still metal. It required a lot of takes to get right, and my jaw hurt like hell for a few days afterwards.

Moldy Bagels: Episode 5 (Part Two)

2010-05-03T21:49:00.000-07:00

And this is where the show gets worthless and depressing. I really have no idea what I was going for with the news sketch. Maybe it's supposed to be funny because it's so silly, or maybe it's supposed to be some sort of satire about news organizations overexaggerating news stories and jumping straight to the air to report when they don't even have the whole story, or maybe it's radical anti-comedy. All I know is it doesn't work and the fact that I return to this sketch TWO MORE TIMES over the course of the show defies all explanation.

The cartoon is pretty funny though. Well, it was funnier when I made it over a year ago, but it's worth a revisit.

Moldy Bagels: Episode 5 (Part One)

2010-05-03T21:40:00.000-07:00

I don't know what to say, except that this episode is a complete disaster. As you'll soon see, it takes two bits, the news stories and me reading E-mails, and stretches both of them out to unforgivably interminable length. I spend literally 7 minutes total reading and responding to message. That's a third of the episode. That's awful.

The sitcom at the beginning with the stuffed animals was a sketch that I wrote a really long time ago. I never made it because I just couldn't ever get excited enough about the humor to actually go through the trouble of making it, but I went for it this time because I thought the stuffed animal angle would give it the right tone and approach to make it funny. I'm not sure it if turned out to be particularly successful, but I had more fun making that sketch than I have in a while. As a fun side note, on the final shot where I'm beating the shit out of the stuffed animal, I had a whole inch of plumber's crack visible, and I had to crop and zoom in the shot while editing significantly in order to get my exposed ass out of the shot.

Moldy Bagels: Episode 4 (Part Three)

2010-04-15T09:54:00.000-07:00

Considering some of the things I say and do on the show, I think TBNK, the public access that airs my show, is extremely permissive with some of the things they let me do. Although I bleep out the swearing and tone down the material to a certain extent and they air my show at 11:30 at night, it's still probably more risque than they'd like it to be. Last week I went to the station to hand in the 5th episode on DVD, and in the studio two small children were filming an adorable news show. They were sitting at a desk and reading headlines about how the Covington elementary school teams were doing and what the cafeteria was serving for lunch. I felt a little bad that my show which throws around rape references like footballs is sharing the same channel with that program.

That being said, I still fucking hate that I can't go as all-out NC-17 as I did on my old Ron Mexico Productions sketches, and I enjoyed the section where I bleep myself out whenever I use the word "help" because it's a rare instance in which I got to use the content restrictions of the station to my advantage. If it didn't take place on a TV show where you have to bleep out the swearing, the premise wouldn't really make any sense.

I also had a lot of fun doing the tag where I play the three different characters singing "Save Tonight." The dialog is pretty close to a word-for-word transcript of a conversation I had with a customer at the restaurant. Save Tonight played on the radio, and this redneck said it was a George Clinton song because his voice is unmistakable. By some miracle I managed to completely avoid laughing in his face.

It was a pretty amazingly awesomely terrible exchange that I had to share with the world in some way, and I'm surprised that there haven't been more times that interacting with the Kentucky locals on an almost-daily basis has inspired comedy. It would make me feel better about myself when they leave me shitty tips, which is all the time. Yeah, maybe you completely screwed me over by shorting me on wages that I deserved, but at least I wasn't the loose basis for any widely ignored Youtube videos today! Suck on that!

Moldy Bagels: Episode 4 (Part Two)

2010-04-15T09:48:00.000-07:00

In keeping with the theme of rehashing old stuff, an old joke about doing a three-part series of sequels to 1984 is repackaged into a conversation between Snake and Colonel, and of course an old Crapstick Doodle cartoon follows.

The segment about Manute Bol is the leftover from an aborted idea for a web series I had a long time ago called Person Reviews that I might bring back someday in a different form. Basically, I'd review human beings and give them a score, much in the way critics give scores to movies, video games, restaurants, and whatever else. I wrote one for Manute Bol and another for Hitler and had ideas for a few more, but I didn't feel that the concept had enough mileage for me to commit to it for very long, but I dusted it off because it seemed good enough to fill two minutes of the show.

Moldy Bagels: Episode 4 (Part One)

2010-04-15T09:32:00.000-07:00

You know the drill...

I thought it would be fun to do a self-congratulatory anniversary-type celebration for what's only the 4th episode of my show. It takes well over a month to pound an episode out, and considering the fact that I do literally everything, including but not limited to writing 15 pages of jokes, shooting 5 to 7 individual sketches, drawing as many as 70 pictures for the cartoons, editing 22 minutes of video, acting, and driving three towns over to hand in the completed DVDs to the TV station, sometimes it really does feel like I've done enough work to warrant this kind of thing, although it's still purely sarcastic when it's done on the show. Still, I feel like I deserve some kind of medal for doing over 4 months worth of comedy work without saying "fuck" on camera once.

But honestly, saying that I create 22 minutes of comedy is a bit of a misnomer, seeing as how so much of the show is stuff I've already made, or repackaged material from a different medium. For example, the piece on the Atari 5200 is essentially a slideshow set to a segment from a book I wrote about video games a year and a half ago. Since about 90% of any TV show starring a stand-up comedian is rehashed older material, I think I'm on the right track.

Moldy Bagels: Episode 3 (Part Three)

2010-04-04T19:54:00.000-07:00

The Nine-Juan-Juan sketch from this segment is one I've had an idea for for over 3 years. Seeing it finally come to life is slightly less underwhelming than everything else in life. The most important sketch for this one is the one for Zambran-O's. I could explain at length in this paragraph the response the sketch got, but episode 5 of Moldy Bagels does a more than great job explaining the whole thing. Just enjoy the Zambrano sketch, because as far as I'm concerned it's hilarious.

Moldy Bagels: Episode 3 (Part Two)

2010-04-04T19:49:00.000-07:00

The Prankin' Myself sketch is a shot-for-shot remake of a project I made in my final semester of college. By that point I didn't give a shit anymore and just wanted to get my degree and be done. I think it shows. The "Fight the System" sketch is also a shot-for-shot remake, in this case of one of my oldest live-action sketch comedy bits. Also, the Snake Under Fire bit is a word-for-word recreation of the time I engaged an annoying guy at work in a conversation specifically for the purpose of annoying him. In summary, this segment of the episode contains exactly 0.0% original content.

Moldy Bagels: Episode 3 (Part One)

2010-04-04T19:10:00.001-07:00

I made this episode a long time ago. I actually just finished episode 5, but I swore I'd get around to posting this to the blog eventually. Here's part one of three:

I wrote the cold open because I really wanted to include my amazing talent for spinning trays on my finger in the show. A long time ago I was working at the restaurant on an extremely dead Sunday. I got about one table an hour that day. The day essentially boiled down to killing time, which I can't fucking stand, so I went to the backroom and decided to practice spinning a tray on my finger until I mastered it, because I view any extended period of time in which I haven't learned or gained something as a grievous waste of the limited time we have on this planet. It's a skill that takes all of 20 minutes to learn, but most people are extremely impressed when they see me do it, so I act like it takes years to figure out. Am I a wonderful guy who doesn't want to ruin their illusion, or am I a pathetic, attention-starved asspipe who desperately seeks praise for my tragically ordinary skill set? You be the judge.

If you've seen my CrapStickDoodle cartoons you've already seen the Crash sketch. It's definitely one of my favorite cartoons and I think it's worth watching a second time. As for the Snake Under Fire sketch, I find it more or less unbearable to watch because my greenscreen effects are so terrible. Me and the boxes are bouncing all over the place while the background stays put. For a while I thought it was because the floor in my house is uneven and shifting my weight causes the camera to move. It wasn't until last month that I figured out that my camera's default Steady Shot option makes the camera move automatically to follow me as I shift my body. I've since fixed that problem and now the subject and background stay put. Now I only have to worry about my shitty lighting, acting, and writing.

I originally planned the mailbag to be a feature in every episode, but I had to abandon that for two reasons: First, I tend to turn a single comment into an entire meandering 3 to 5-minute comedy bit. Multiply that figure by three and you have a show that's 70% responding to things people are saying about me, and only 30% actual content. The Colbert Report already has the market cornered on that type of ratio, so I'm hoping to avoid all that.

Moldy Bagels: Episode 2 (Part Three)

2010-02-11T22:37:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to establish a format where each half-hour episode contains two cartoons: One Crapstick Doodle, and one new one. I'm only doing one Crapstick Doodle because I want to cash in on my old work enough to fill a few minutes, but I don't want to get lazy and completely recycle a full half hour of content, because then there'd be no fucking point in making this show in the first place. I want to do two cartoons per episode because I think it breaks up the action nicely. As you've probably figured out by now, I'm doing literally everything alone here because I don't have any friends or willing actors to help out, so 90% of the live action stuff is just me talking to a stationary camera, and 30 straight minutes of that is pretty unbearable to watch. Most people would tell you that 3 straight minutes would be unbearable to watch, but that's neither here nor there.

I wasn't entirely sure if I wanted to go ahead with the Emo Rap Fury idea, but I ultimately went with it because I thought having "Emo" as a Youtube tag would draw viewers to this video like flies to so much warm shit. The whopping 31 views I've accumulated tells me that my blatant buzzword pandering might not have paid off.

The closing part of the video was fun to make. I filmed myself trying to drink beer and talk to nobody, and then I watched the video with a headset microphone on and talked to myself. I like how it turned out because this time it actually sounds like my off-camera voice is actually having a conversation with my on-camera self. This part also marks one of the few times it makes me happy that my girlfriend doesn't watch the show. Normally it hurts my feelings that the person I've been with for 3 and a half years doesn't seem to take any kind of interest in what I do, but this time it's good because she has no idea I spit a mouthful of Foster's on the living room carpet.

Moldy Bagels: Episode 2 (Part Two)

2010-02-11T22:26:00.000-08:00

Hell yeah, bitch. If you've seen my cartoons you've already seen the first sketch in this segment so feel free to skip that one. I like the Movie Forgetter sketch in the middle because it's a fun idea, and I get a chance to rock out my two favorite accessories: my badass White Sox shirt and my pink Razor phone. It's pink because it used to belong to my sister and she gave it to me when my old phone stopped working. People keep telling me that my phone is gay and I need to either buy a new one or buy a new skin, and I say two things to that: Number one, the phone is metallic pink, which is badass. If it was hot pink you'd have a point, but metallic pink rules and is totally not gay. Number two, I firmly believe that being so fashion conscious that you'd spend money to change the color of your fucking phone is way more girly and gay than owning a pink hand-me-down.

When I filmed the Movie Forgetter sketch I was sure the cops were going to come to my house. During the part that I was wearing a hockey mask covered in fake blood while waving around a prop gun, one of my neighbors saw me through the glass kitchen door and just stared at me. I stared back at him, then put the gun down on the counter and waved at him. He backed away with kind of a scared look in his eye. In a stroke of incredible luck, the cops never showed up. I'd be able to easily explain the mask and gun, but the rape slaves in the basement would be a whole 'nother story.

Moldy Bagels: Episode 2 (Part One)

2010-02-11T21:54:00.000-08:00

I go entire months without ever updating this blog because nobody reads it, and nobody reads it because I never regularly update. It's a vicious cycle. It also doesn't help that the blog is unfunny and boring. I'm in the process of writing the fourth episode of the public access show right now, so I'll take a minute to finally post the second and third episodes here. This is part one of the second episode:

Check out the intro. Do you like how our mini-fridge and microwave are both right next to the front door? I finally got around to giving that stuff to Goodwill, but I'll be damned if that wasn't the classiest home decorating decision ever made.

If neither of these sketches work, at least the shot of me belting out Wanted Dead or Alive in my boxers will dispel the grossly wrong myth that I'm really skinny. I asked three people at work how much they think I weigh. Two of them said 160 and another said 165, which are just a tad underweight for a 6'5" man and only off by 50 and 45, respectively. Then again, maybe people will be too blinded by my staggering paleness to even see accurately. The real kicker is one hour in the sun gives me a perfect tan, yet I haven't gone outdoors since 1998. God likes to give gifts to people who don't use or appreciate them because he's kind of a dick.

Moldy Bagels Episode One (Part Three)

2009-11-20T00:10:00.000-08:00

And here we reach the third and final section of the show. The first bit with Mr. Happy on the phone getting kinda sucks. The writing is weak, and I lied before when I said that none of the episode is cringe-worthy, because this part definitely fits the bill. I didn't think it would be painfully obvious at the time I was filming, but I was wrong, because it's really blatant that I'm reading from a script in my lap. I thought it wouldn't be a problem since my eyes go all over the place, but they fixate on my crotch long enough and often enough that the reading is unmistakable.

The bit where I bring out the chart to document my laziness (And the measurement is accurate. Just look at how often I update this blog) is fun although it runs longer than I'd like. My real regret here is how stupid I look for making the joke about Cincinnati sports teams. The Reds are still one of the worst teams in baseball, but this was clearly a bad time to make this joke since as I write this the Bengals are 7-2 with a two-game division lead, and the University of Cincinnati Bearcats football team is more than likely on its way to a BCS bowl. At least I didn't fuck up the continuity with the insert shots.

I wanted to finish strong so I ended with the Boardwalk Hotel sketch. I didn't realize that my head is clearly visible in the bottom right corner of the first shot of the hat, but I'm not sweating it. I always thought this was the second or third best Ron Mexico sketch I made, so I opted to bust it out here. This is the third time I've done this sketch, so anything I'd have to say about it I've already said two years ago. I guess I'll just end by saying that my girlfriend throws a pretty damn accurate hat. The credits show her missing the first four or five times, but the thing was so fucking light and floaty that it's a miracle we got that shot so fast.

Moldy Bagels Episode One (Part Two)

2009-11-19T23:57:00.000-08:00

In this second part we start off with a sketch about porn titles. I don't know why I have such a lifelong fascination that borders on fixation on porn titles, but as god as my witness, this is the last fucking time I'll create a piece of comedy centered around the subject. Maybe I enjoy the subject so much because porn titles are easy to come up with, and rolling off a dozen of them is a great way to feel clever without actually being so. Either way, this bit has some good ideas, but it runs too long and doesn't take off as much as it should.

I like the steak sauce cartoon that follows. As a slave in the food service industry, steak sauce is a subject that's very close to my heart. Steaks that aren't treated properly make me sad. Why somebody would pay well over $20 for a quality ribeye only to order it well done and drown it in steak sauce makes no sense to me. It's like paying $5 million to have sex with Jessica Alba and putting a paper bag over her head while you do it.

I also like the bit because it's the first time that I felt like I literally built a set using MS Paint. I took a rooftop view of the Chicago river, I put a window in front of it, and I put the projector screen that the consultant uses in front of that. I know this is basic shit to you fancy boys with your Harvard degrees and McCafe coffee, but I'm proud that I taught myself how to do something. Fuck you.

Moldy Bagels: Episode 1 (Part One)

2009-11-19T23:28:00.000-08:00

I'll go ahead and throw this up since I haven't updated this thing in months. This is part one of my new public access show that will be premiering in the Northern Kentucky area Tuesday of next week:

I've been talking about putting together a public access show for literally a year now, and I finally got around to it a few weeks ago. After months and months of dicking around and doing next to nothing in the way of creative output, I bought a bitchin' Sony Handicam for $350, wrote up a 15-page sketch comedy script that was about 30% old Ron Mexico and Crapstick Doodle material, and 70% new stuff, and got to it.

What you may notice first and foremost is that I am the only person who appears onscreen, and my voice is the only one you hear. This isn't a deliberate creative choice or done purely out of arrogance so much as it's the inevitable result of not having any friends. Maybe only having myself onscreen will work and be enough to sustain six episodes a year or however many I end up making. Hey, it worked for Andy Milonakis. Okay, well, it didn't exactly work for him because he fucking sucks and his show wasn't funny, but it did get him a job, and that's certainly something.

Comedically I think the show has some moments, although it's clearly rough around the edges. The writing could use a certain degree of polish, and let's face it: anything that stars me is going to leave a lot to be desired in the acting department. However, one area where I'm quite pleased is with the technical stuff. Although I thought most of my Ron Mexico sketches were funny, whenever I rewatch them there's always some serious technical issue or acting gaffe that makes me cringe. Sometimes I fucked up with editing and left a blatant continuity error, maybe I included a line that an actor flubbed, sometimes I forgot to shoot some footage that I needed and I had to use clever editing to finish the job (Fuck if you think I was going to wait a day for the equipment rental desk to open back up and do an hour and a half of extra work to get the footage the next day) and every video has at least one instance of the sound being so fucked up that you can barely hear what the actor says.

I didn't sense any of that in this video. The greenscreen effect when I play Mr. Happy is a little wonky but other than that, I'm pleased with how this one comes together from a technical standpoint. I attribute it to my new camera, which offers little to no shooting options. In that sense it's completely retard-proof. With the PD-150 cameras I used in college you could adjust shutter speed, white balance, gain, aperture, stereo and mono sound, and about a million other audio and video options that gave visually creative students a full range of opportunities to bring their wonderful stories to life, and it also gave untalented idiots like me every opportunity possible to fuck up and create totally unwatchable dogshit. With my dumbass-approved camera, all you do is point and shoot and the camera will make it look pretty okay for you.

I don't really have any interesting stories about the actual making of the show since I shot it completely alone and editing was a ridiculously simple process. I did three takes of each line, threw it into the computer, picked the best take, and that was about it. The only problem I had while shooting was when I cooked a pizza while knocking out a couple lines and the oven timer going off ruined one of my takes. I guess it would also classify as a problem that I intended for the show to only be 15 minutes long and ended up with 22 and a half, but that's mostly because I didn't account for all the time that transitions and credit sequences would add.

Whoopee, that's it! Stay tuned for part 2. Or just go to www.youtube.com/crapstickdoodle if you want to be all fancy about it.

Get it?

2009-09-28T23:27:00.000-07:00

It's funny because he's short! GET IT?!?!?

....I slave over MS Paint for literally minutes, and I demand your undying appreciation!

Splosion Man

2009-09-28T08:57:00.000-07:00

This is the titular character from the totally kickass Xbox Live Arcade game Splosion Man. You use the analog stick to move, and you press any button on the controller to explode. That's all you have to worry about with the controls. The coolest thing about the main character (besides the fact that he fucking explodes every 5 seconds) is the random-assed noises he makes. It's all gibberish, but when you hear it over and over enough times, the brain starts to rearrange the noise into real words.

My girlfriend overheard the noises once, and she asked me if Splosion Man was saying, "Lunch pussy." I started listening closely and I began to hear it. I wondered if anyone else thought Splosion Man says lunch pussy. I thought about going to the message boards on GameFAQs to ask around, but it's well-established that even hinting at the existence of human genitalia is automatic grounds for death.

So I did the logical thing: I did a Google search for "Splosion Man Lunch Pussy" to see if it drew any matches. I learned a valuable lesson: Do not run a Google search for Splosion Man Lunch Pussy. You will not like what you find. I've seen things I cannot unsee.

Don't pee on your phones

2009-09-03T00:27:00.001-07:00

There are a lot of ways to lose or ruin a cell phone. You can leave it in a cab, you can carry it in your pocket and accidentally spill beer all over it, you can lose it at a party, you can get it stolen, you can drop it on the sidewalk and watch it shatter, you can eat a whole bunch of greasy fried chicken while tailgating outside a football game, talk on the phone, have it slip out of your greasy, disgusting fingers, and watch as it falls into the portable deep fryer, or whatever else you can think of.

There's a whole bunch of shit that can happen to phones. However, there is one method of ruining a phone that is so pathetic and so fucking bizarre that you'd never expect to personally know someone who did it even if you lived 500 years. Despite the extremely rare and insane circumstances, I know multiple people who have lost phones this way multiple times.

Full disclosure: I was in a fraternity in college. Fraternities are extremely secretive, so you may not know what I'm about to tell you. It's rare indeed that someone would ever reveal the kind of guarded information I'm about to tell you: Frat guys drink a shitload. Pause for a second while you process that revelation.

People would get mind-numbingly hammered on Jagermeister and beer and pass out on couches and floors on a more or less nightly basis. One time a particularly creative low-functioning alcoholic sat on the toilet while blackout drunk and passed out with his pants down mid-shit, but that's a story for another time. Anyways, people passing out drunk, pissing their pants, and ruining their phones by getting said piss all over them was a disturbingly common occurrence.

People who were temporarily phone-less due to showering their devices in gold would usually ask to borrow other peoples' phones. This always annoyed me because the people they called when they borrowed my phone would inevitably call back on my phone hours later, forcing me to act as secretary. When someone asked to use my phone after his third accident, I put my foot down. Causing $430 of property damage due to pissing yourself at the age of 22 is cool, but $645 is where I draw the line, dammit! Sometimes you have to set firm, harsh boundaries for the people you love.

I was thinking about all of this because last night my girlfriend told me how one of her coworkers lost a cell phone by leaving it in a cab. I brought up the urination incidents from my college days, and then I proudly proclaimed that I've never done it myself. Then I had a sudden realization: This is the kind of company I've kept. Thanks to my peers, my standards for socially acceptable behavior have been driven so low that I think not pissing all over expensive electronic devices is a laudable achievement. Holy shit.

The All-Time Biggest Sports Jerks

2009-08-30T07:51:00.001-07:00

I bought this book from Barnes and Noble on Monday and just finished reading it on the shitter about 5 minutes ago. All of the names you'd expect (Tyson, A-Rod, TO, Vick, O.J, etc.) are represented and torn apart with absolutely no evidence or insight that you haven't repeatedly heard your entire life. When you aren't be dazzled with new and exciting information like "Manny Ramirez is a dingbat!" or "Terrell Owens is selfish!", you're regaled with Michael Freeman's observational brilliance, reasonable opinions, and wit. Here are a few things I've learned from this book:

-Ko-Me is a really clever nickname for Kobe Bryant that should be used at least five times per page.

-Stephen A. Smith is a great sports journalist

-John Daly is fat and drinks a lot. This is extremely funny, and you should make as many references to it as possible, even when it bears no relevance to the subject. Are you having trouble coming up with a wacky comparison to illustrate Terrell Owens' selfishness? Say he cares more about himself than John Daly cares about beer. Here is an actual joke taken from the book's chapter on Daly: "The reason Daly is now one of the worst golfers on the planet is because when he gets on a roll, he stops to eat it." Amazing.

-Last season Eagles receiver DeSean Jackson made an embarrassing error by catching a sure touchdown pass, streaking toward the end zone, and starting his celebration a split second too early, resulting in him dropping the ball on the one-yard line. By doing this Jackson wasn't simply making a silly rookie mistake, he was emphasizing celebrating over doing his job, in effect putting on a deplorable and disgusting minstrel show that brought shame upon all black men in America the moment it happened.

-Mike Gundy is a misogynist because the sports journalist he was yelling at during his infamous "I'm a man! I'm forty!" tirade was a woman. According to Freeman, any circumstance in which a man yells at a woman qualifies as "bullying misogyny". Apparently the proper way to address a woman trying to succeed in a man's world is to give her special treatment because of her gender.

-The Lakers were heavily favored over the Celtics in the 2008 NBA Finals.

-Posting on your blog real names and IP addresses of people who sent you angry e-mails specifically for the purpose of embarrassing them and invading their privacy is heroic, provided that those people hold different political views from you.

-If you've met Michael Freeman, corresponded with him, had him present at a significant moment in your career, or provide him with any other reason to personally inject himself into your story, you can expect to jump 30 or 40 spots higher on the list.

This is the most enlightening book I've ever read.

Episode 17: Drinking

2009-08-27T22:06:00.000-07:00

1. I've felt shitty about a lot of these cartoons because I felt like the writing wasn't great, or the writing was good but it fell apart in execution due to poor voice acting and third grade level production values. Well, this is the first cartoon since Crash: The Board Game five episodes ago that I've actually liked.

2. The joke about how alcohol makes you a great writer is based on a little bit of truth, because I've always noticed that most of the truly great writers, musicians, and comedians that I've held up as my greatest influences are or were total alcoholics and drug addicts. Honestly that's a main reason why I drink as much as I do: because sometimes I feel like sobriety guarantees a failure to create any sort of great art.

3. Case in point: Bill Hicks, George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Chris Farley, John Belushi, Mitch Hedberg, Richard Pryor, The Beatles and Ernest Hemingway were all drug addicts and/or alcoholics, while Dane Cook has led a completely clean and sober life.

4. Honestly, I don't have enough to say about the creative process of making these videos to fill ten facts. You may notice that most of my "ten facts" blog posts are mostly filler, or drunken whining. Here is the process that I go through to make one of these videos:

1. I think up an idea
2. I spend a couple hours writing a script
3. I come up with a list of pictures that will make up the video
4. I draw the pictures
5. I record the sound into my computer and edit it
6. I make a slideshow of the pictures and sound with Windows Movie Maker

And that's about it. Honestly, I'm fucking surprised I've managed to fill ten items this long with such thin material to work with. It would be like an NFL kicker trying to write ten interesting facts about every game he's ever played. He could probably do it, but on average less than two would be about his personal contributions.

5. Yeah, for that reason I think I'll cut this post short.

Episode 16

2009-08-24T21:21:00.000-07:00

Oh dear god, I've actually made a two-parter!

1. Apparently I thought it would be a good idea to take a conflict and premise that wasn't funny enough to sustain one video and stretch it out into a two-parter. Based on my TV viewing experience, this is a first step towards a writing job with Saturday Night Live.

2. I've always been of the opinion that Manute Bol is a failure of a human being. Being a 7'7" athlete with as much range as Tom Cruise's right hook means your only possible recourse for marketing yourself is pointing out hilarious size differences between yourself and others. Manute Bol did a few magazine covers with Muggsy Bogues, and spent the rest of his time doing worthless things like playing basketball, honing his defensive prowess, and fighting for Sudanese freedom. Gheorghe Muresan, on the other hand, immediately realized the moneymaking potential of his hugeness and landed himself a starring role in My Giant opposite Billy Crystal, a hilariously tiny Jew. Because Manute Bol never once considered doing a movie where he pushes Gary Coleman around in a stroller, I have to declare him the unquestioned god of failed potential.

3. I promised my girlfriend I would end this video by making fun of the Buffalo Bills, but then I decided to follow my heart, because although the Bills fucking suck, the Bengals fucking suck exponentially more.

4. This video is frightening realistic. I actually crashed at home last weekend because I came up for a friend's wedding in Chicago. When I got there I saw my dad's laptop (which I allegedly broke) fully repaired and sitting on the dining room table. I was so terrified of touching it that I didn't even push it out of the way to eat breakfast.

5. I was sorta worried about being seen as ripping off Saturday Night Live with the Grape-Nuts joke, but I think I'm probably in the clear since Mike Myers probably wasn't the first person to notice that Grape-Nuts have an inaccurate name either.

6. If you have an Xbox 360, download Splosion Man. You'll thank me.

7. If you don't have an Xbox 360, fucking buy one. You'll thank me.

8. Today I made my exercise bike go 10.4 miles in 30 minutes. I have effectively gone from exercise bike master to exercise bike god.

9. Here are a few of the "Corey touches things and immediately ruins them" jokes that I thought about including but ultimately rejected: Corey touches a porn star's cock and watches in horror as it immediately shrinks to half its size, Corey pats his little sister on the shoulder and watches in horror as she complains that her hymen was just broken, and Corey hugs his grandfather, which immediately kills him.

10. I rejected the first idea because I couldn't think of any logical situation to involve it in the story, I rejected the second because it was too fucked up even for me, and I rejected the third because I don't fucking know how to draw all of that.

The Madden Curse

2009-08-14T23:09:00.000-07:00

You see these guys? They're Pittsburgh Steelers safety Troy Polamalu and Arizona Cardinals receiver Larry Fitzgerald. They're on the cover of this year's edition of Madden. Look at their fucking faces. Look at them hard. Commit the image to your memory, because those faces are going to look like tenderized hamburger in about 6 weeks. Remember the shape of their perfectly sculpted bodies, because they're going to look like starving Rwandans after they get their fucking teeth knocked out and have to drink ribeye steak through a straw. Remember how gracefully they run, because by week 9, their knees will shatter like a champagne glass in the presence of a Castrati chorus singing Party all the Time. Open your ears because I'm about to squirt a Hershey shit of truth in there: These two are going to get fucked by the Madden Curse.

What is the Madden Curse, you ask? It's the mysterious cosmic evil force that causes every Madden cover athlete to either suffer a serious injury or suffer an otherwise extremely disappointing season after appearing on the cover. Ray Lewis failed to record a single interception the year he was on the cover. How fucking terrible does a linebacker have to be to not get even one pick? It's almost as embarrassing as all of those seasons where Deion Sanders failed to get so much as a single sack.

The only logical explanation for Madden cover athletes being more prone to injury is a magical curse. Think about this: 8 out of the first 9 cover athletes were either running backs or running QBs. These players get tackled more than anyone else on the field. That means they're the toughest. The coach wouldn't assign them to a job where they get tackled all the time if they weren't the toughest players on the team. For these players to get injured in the process of getting hit hundreds of times could only be the work of a curse.

You want more proof of the Madden Curse? For the first eleven annual Madden games, John Madden himself appeared on the cover. He's fat, for the past 30 years he's only been able to find work one day a week 5 months out of the year, and on the rare days that he actaully does find work, he finds the work so miserable that he resorts to drawing penises to amuse himself.

You poor, poor, man.

Don't even get me started on how rare it is for a player's production to drop off after having a breakout season. That never happens in football. I hope you love the living shit out of the big fat checks you cashed for appearing on the Madden cover, Troy and Larry. Troy, when you're injecting nutrients into your ass because Willis McGahee crushed your esophagus, and Larry, when you have Dr. House verbally berating his staff for not being able to figure why your testicle exploded, I hope you realize how much you really sacrificed to get that money. If you guys get hurt, it'll be because of the curse and definitely not because you play the most violent sport in America, and it's statistically proven that over half of all NFL players get injured every season, and curses and magic aren't real, and people who bring up the goddamn fucking Madden Curse every year are goddamn fucking dipshits.

Crapstick Doodle: Episode 15

2009-08-13T16:09:00.000-07:00

1. This is the 15th cartoon I've made, and the most views I've ever gotten is 250 for the first one. This is getting just a bit discouraging.

2. Like really discouraging.

3. The thumbnail is the AOL logo grinding mud into a couch while saying "Fuck yo' couch". Back in 2004 when we were fucking inundated with kids quoting Rick James and other such Dave Chappelle brilliance this kind of reference would have been the most annoyingly lame thing I could possibly do. In 2009 it's either a fun throwback that we're okay with laughing at again, or it's pathetically dated on top of being annoyingly lame. I should probably change that thumbnail now...

4. The piles of shit on the map are arranged in a discernible pattern with the exception of one spot in the northeast where there are like 6 piles all on top of each other. That's the Boston area, and it's not a coincidence.

5. With the exception of the silly shit at the end about an evil death box, this is more or less exactly what happened last week when I visited home.

6. Coming up with a fantasy football team name that distills a perfect level of hilarity and shocking offensiveness into 4 or 5 words is about as difficult as writing an entire comedy sketch.

7. Kroger Bistro Salads fucking rule. Their awesomeness is the only thing actually making me stick to my 1,500 calorie diet / daily exercise extreme weight loss routine I've been going through for the last week.

8. Xbox Live is the most distracting fucking thing ever. It's directly responsible for this cartoon taking about twice as long to make as it should have.

9. I'm unbelievably happy that I'm back at my old job. Cracker Barrel had all of this ridiculous shit like customers, rules, and managers who expect you to work hard. It was almost like a business over there.

10. While a fist going up a turtle's ass is funny, it's probably not funny enough to sustain a four-minute comedy video. Lesson learned. Wow, this has got to be the most miserable, self-defeating, not-even-attempting-to-be-funny blog post I've ever written.

From Gentile Golem's diary...

2009-08-11T13:30:00.000-07:00

Dear Diary,

I was driving around Florence, Kentucky and I noticed a small diner whose sign claims that they have the biggest Cookie Burgers in town. I've never seen a Cookie Burger in my life and I have no idea what they are, but here we have a store priding themselves on their Cookie Burgers as the main reason to come in. That's unusual enough, but remember that they claim to have the biggest ones in town, which means there's at least one other Cookie Burger vendor somewhere in the city, and they're probably bitter rivals. They're probably working day and night, dedicating their lives to outdoing and crushing their enemy in the name of pride as well as feeding their families. I'm not saying world peace is a completely impossible dream and we shouldn't even try to achieve it, but in a world where the size of Cookie Burgers can be a source of significant conflict, our chances are looking pretty fucking slim.

A Review of Harry Potter

2009-08-03T21:40:00.000-07:00

The following is a review of Harry Potter. No, this isn't a review of the newest Harry Potter film, it's not a review of the seventh and final book of the series, and it's not a retrospective of the greater cultural impact that the series as a whole has had on the literary landscape. All of that stuff would be distinctly faggy and/or interesting. This is a review of Harry Potter himself, and how awesome or sucky he is as a hero.

Harry Potter is the most respected, heroic, stalwart, and capable boy in the entire wizard world. Don't believe me? Here is a list of just a few of his exploits over the 160 minutes of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince:

-Over the course of the movie he takes interest in two girls he finds attractive, only to do absolutely nothing about it and wait for them to make the first move.

-He spies on a classmate that he suspects of wrongdoing, only to completely blow his cover, get hit with a paralyzing spell after his ass gets found out, and then get his face stomped on.

-He tries to use magic to fight off an attacking horde of Gollums, and when he finds that his magical ability is hilariously worthless, he resorts to punching them.

-Appears on a movie poster that, were we not familiar with the character and series, would look like a poster for a terrible suspense flick about a young serial killer:

Evil comes in all shapes and sizes. Homicidal Patient 6: Killing in a theater near you

-Not once but twice he gallantly charges at his enemies like he's Don Quixote and he's about to kick the shit out of some fucking windmills, and not once but twice the villains immediately slap him down with their hard, throbbing black wands. As the bad guys look over his writhing and helpless body, they decide he's such a worthless sack of mouse turds that pointing a wand at him and saying two words to invoke the death spell isn't worth the effort, so they just leave.

-He hides under some floorboards and just fucking watches a bunch of bad wizards murder his mentor.

-In the only instance in the entire film of him actually being useful, he forces an old delirious man to drink something he doesn't want to drink. This act of heroism puts him on par with anyone who has ever worked as a nurse.

-He makes a little bit of light come out of his wand. I need $1.50 worth of batteries to do this, but Harry Potter can do it for free. I guess he has this slight edge over me, but I can ask girls out on dates.

-With the help of a magical potion that completely guarantees success at whatever you attempt, Harry successfully get one of his teachers drunk and procures information............... that turns out to be completely worthless, since Dumbledore fucking already knew it anyway.

-He passes Potions class with the help of the wizarding equivalent of a Nintendo book of cheat codes.

It's a proven fact that the people of the wizarding world of Harry Potter are a bunch of complete and total gaping pussies. Most of them are so afraid of Voldemort, a wizard responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, that they're terrified of even saying his name. Listen to me, you wand-toting gaggle of fucking nancies: us muggles aren't afraid to say the name of Adolf Hitler, a guy who's responsible for a thousand times more deaths. We're so badass that Mel Brooks made The Producers, a movie that features tons of Hitler-related comedy, less than 25 years after World War II.

Also, we didn't lose our edge as the years wore on. As evidenced by all of the O.J. Simpson-related jokes on late night TV in the mid-90's, we think a beloved athlete and former American hero cutting his white wife's head off is HILARIOUS. That's how fucking hardcore we are. But even by the pussisized standards of the wizard world Harry Potter is an utter failure of a hero.

By the sixth movie I think the dark wizards came to this same realization as well, because the first five movies were all about Lord Voldemort trying like hell to kill Harry Potter, while the sixth movie is all about attempts to kill Dumbledore. With the exception of one run-in with water creatures that try to kill anyone who gets close to them regardless of fame, nobody seems to give even half a shit about killing Harry. He can't get murdered by dark wizards even if he tries. He's all like "Here I am! Come get some! If I die during the fight, so be it!" and the dark wizards just leave out of boredom.

It reminds me of a couple months ago when my parents' house was robbed by a couple heroin junkies looking for shit to pawn to pay for their next fix. They stole various things, including a flat screen TV and all of my mom's jewelry, but my enormous pile of VHS movies, retro video game consoles, and my totally sweet tie collection went untouched. One the one hand I'm glad that my shit wasn't stolen, but on the other I'm bummed that not even desperate penniless heroin junkies thought my shit was worth taking. So while I feel Harry Potter's pain to a certain extent, I still think he's a fucking loser and the single most overrated hero in contemporary literary history. Also, the actor who plays him is woman-sized.

Final score: 1.4/10

Robogeisha

2009-08-02T22:33:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you come across something that beats the ever-loving shit out of you so hard with its fearless insanity that it renders all wacky sarcastic commentary moot and redundant. This trailer for the upcoming film Robogeisha defies explanation to the point that I've given up on describing it to anyone, instead opting to plop their asses in front of the computer and forcing them to watch it because no words can do it justice. I'll shut up now so you can watch it.

Boston Legal: The Lost Episodes

2009-07-30T16:15:00.000-07:00

Boston Legal was one of my favoritest shows ever, but it was canceled by the evil executives at ABC before David E. Kelly could take on all of the hot-button issues he wanted to face. Here is an excerpt from a script that failed to make it into production before the cancellation. Here we see Alan Shore defend the freedom of a teacher whose only crime was caring about her students' education too much. Never before has a show dared to tackle the ills of the school system in such a bold way.

Bailiff: All rise for case number 310UKK2: Frizzle vs. the State of Massachusetts. The honorable Judge Farmer presiding

Judge: Please be seated. Miss Frizzle, you are charged with reckless child endangerment and sexual assault of a minor.

Miss Frizzle: Oh my!

Judge: How do you plead?

Alan Shore: Alan Shore for the defendant. We enter an immediate plea of not guilty and wish to go straight to trial.

Judge: Alright. The prosecution may ask their first question.

Brad Chase: Miss Frizzle, can you tell me about the special field trip you took your students on last Thursday?

Miss Frizzle: Well, I was continuing my series of field trips on the human body. I had so much success showing them the digestive, respiratory, circulatory, and nervous systems, and I wanted to continue that success by taking them on a tour of the excretory system!

Brad: How did you go about taking them on this tour?

Miss Frizzle: I loaded all of the students onto the bus except for Arnold, shrunk the vehicle to the size of a Tootsie Roll, and then flew the bus right into Arnold's body.

Brad: I'm confused here. What do you mean, you flew the bus into his body?

Miss Frizzle: First I showed the students a close-up view of the sphincter muscle, and then we entered the body and continued up the colon.

Brad: So you shoved a vessel full of 24 children up another child's anus?

Miss Frizzle: I frown upon that kind of naughty language.

Brad: So you don't deny that you shrunk 24 children to a small enough size that they could have been killed by a penny, and then you shoved them young Arnold's anus. That's clearly reckless child endangerment and sexual assault in their most heinous forms. What could have possibly possessed you to think this would be legal?

Miss Frizzle: It's not about rules and regulations with me, it's about learning

Brad: Dear god. Your honor, this has got to be the sickest criminal I've ever prosecuted. I recommend a hefty prison sentence, and furthermo--

Judge: Sorry to interrpt, but you standing up in the back with the glasses, I'm going to need you to sit down during the trial.

Arnold: I can't, your honor. My ass still hurts too much.

Brad: For Christ's sake, Miss Frizzle, don't you see anything potentially dangerous, immoral, or otherwise troublesome about surreptitiously entering someone else's body?

Miss Frizzle: Well, one time my bus was really slimy and I had to spend three hours cleaning it. I guess that was pretty troublesome.

Brad: Does the bus being slimy have anything to do with the sex ed class you taught last month?

(Miss Frizzle begins to speak)

Brad: Nevermind. I don't really want to know. Just... fucking.... no. I suggest Miss Frizzle be required to join the sex offender registry and sentenced to at least 30 years in prison.

Alan: Oh please. You want to lock her up? If anything she deserves a medal.

Brad: You can't be serious.

Alan: In America today, most people who enter the teaching profession are gone for good within seven years. It's getting harder and harder to find someone willing to teach at all, let alone someone who genuinely cares about what the students are learning.

Brad: She endangers and rapes children!

Alan: Did you know that only 3 out of 5 Americans can find California on a map? 3 out of 5. Only 2 out of 5 know that there are three branches of government. 2 out of 5! Only 1 out of 5 can tell you who the vice president is. These are our children. Miss Frizzle is a hero for going the extra mile, planning field trips and arranging demonstrations that make a much deeper impact than books. She's making the world a better place for our children.

Arnold: Oh god, it's bleeding again! (Runs out of courtroom)

Brad: I swear to Christ I'm quitting the law profession if one of your speeches works this time.

Alan: When I was a child in public school all that mattered was memorizing lists so we'd get high enough test scores to get more federal funding. I wish I could have been miniaturized and shoved into someone's anus!

(Judge smiles and nods his head appreciatively)

Brad: I'm fucking done. Seriously, I'm so fucking done.

Judge: Miss Frizzle, I agree with Mr. Shore's sentiments. I commend your commitment to bettering our children. I'm dropping all charges and allowing you to return to Arnold's anus anytime you wish.

Miss Frizzle: That's good, because I'm pretty sure I left my purse in there.

More fun with Omegle!

2009-07-28T23:37:00.001-07:00

Here's more fun I've had with Omegle, and if you play your cards right, I might even show an Omegle conversation my friend had too.

Round One: Misunderstanding

Stranger: hey
You: word up
Stranger: m/f?
You: mf?
You: you just call me a motherfucker?
Stranger: male of female?
Stranger: hahah
You: I should kick your black ass for talking like that
Stranger: iz dat rite
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Verdict: Win

Round 2: Metal Gear Awesome

Stranger: Hey
You: Snake? Is that you?
Stranger: Depends on what snake u are talking about
You: I can't get my codec to work
You: Snake? SNAAAAAAAAAAAAKE?!?!?
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Verdict: Flawless Victory

Now at this point I was going to post an extremely long conversation I had in which I pretended to be a girl who barely survived an attempt by a psycho to run her car off the road. The conversation features a very long buildup to the punchline in which I tell the other person that I managed to give the police a description of the car whose driver tried to kill me. I say that the license plate said FRESH and there were dice in the mirror.

Despite what I think is an obvious Fresh Prince reference that most anyone would get, the person continued to act as if I said the most normal thing ever, which leads me to believe the person was just playing along or was merely the dumbest person in the world. Either way, the whole conversation is too boring to post in its entirety, It's likely that I didn't fool anyone, and I'd much rather post this truly epic conversation engineered by my friend Rabbit than waste more space talking about my boring labored Fresh Prince reference:

Stranger: hey
You: I am so pissed right now, dude
Stranger: aw, explain
You: Get this
You: I'm at work, right?
You: And this lady comes up to me and asks where we have the dogs (I work at a pet store)
You: I punch her in the dick and tell her to get bent
Stranger: good for you
You: And my fuckin manager comes out of nowhere and starts bitchin at ME
Stranger: woah wtf
You: Long story short I get fired
Stranger: for what!?
You: Some stupid shit
You: I don't even know what the term was
Stranger: that is fucked up
You: I know, right?
You: Such bullshit
You: This is the worst day ever
Stranger: go cock slap that bitch
You: Even worse than when I got fired from McDonald's
Stranger: oh tell me about it
You: Some kid was sassing me asking for another happy meal
You: So I throw him in the boiling oil/grease shit we use to make fries
Stranger: good, stupid sonofabitch
You: Next thing I know the kid FUCKIN MELTS
You: and ruins the batch of fries
You: and his parents have the audacity to fuss at me
Stranger: wtf not the fries
You: despite the fact that their kid was responsible for fucking up my fries
Stranger: HE RUINED THE FRIES?
Stranger: no
Stranger: inexcuseable
Stranger: unforgiveable
You: I fully agree
You: Thanks for playing along and not disconnecting immediately, hun
You: <3
Stranger: hehe<3 np
Stranger: thats what im on here for XD
(At this point it's hard to declare Rabbit the winner since although he's being hilarious, the other guy is playing along, making it very hard for this conversation to qualify as a traditional Omegle-type contest. But then Rabbit shatters expectations by busting out this eviscerating deathblow)
You: You're a fucking loser. I hope you die in one of the above incidents. Faggot.
You have disconnected.
(Suddenly we have a winner after all)

Beer Review: Hard Creamer

2009-07-27T19:47:00.001-07:00

Internet comedy legend Seanbaby recently observed in an article for Cracked that 63% of all comments from hack would-be internet comedians invariably involve comparing something they don't like to sticking their dick into some type of whirling blades. This caused me to have a quiet moment of reflection as I realized that I've been guilty of this cyber comedy transgression more times than I can count. I've compared the pain of sitting through the preachiness of Crash to sticking my cock in a blender. I've equated wading through the turgid boredom of the average episode of Mad Men to ramming my member into a meat grinder. I've compared slogging through the generic variety starved corridors of Halo to slamming my dong into a sliding minivan door. For me changing the tool for self-induced cock injury from multiple whirling metal blades to a single slab of metal counts as mixing things up.

From that moment on I swore to try harder with my comedy. I would no longer resort to such lazy and tired comedic similies. Maybe the next time I encounter something I don't like I'll try a classier and more cultured penis-related analogy. Perhaps I'll say that it's worse than having my penis cut off and sold like Napoleon's. Maybe I'll declare that it's worse than sucking the syphilis-infested cock of Frederich Nietzsche. I might condemn a particular video game as less fun than being the penis of Louis XVI of France. I promised myself that my days of being a comedy hack who compares things to sticking my organ into spinning metal blades were over. Then, I purchased a six-pack of Hard Creamer.

Hard Creamer is another in a long line of wussy malt liquors for people who puke if they smell hard liquor and need chasers with their Bud Light. What makes this one special is that the alcohol is mixed with dairy to make it some sort of spiked cream soda. Last Thursday I picked up a six-pack for $8.29 to celebrate finishing my last day at Cracker Barrel and to kick off my two week vacation before I start my next job. To commemorate I decided to buy the silliest-looking, most ridiculous alcohol I could find. Any product with the gall to call itself *snicker* Hard Creamer seemed more than ridiculous enough for my purposes, so I picked it up along with a six-pack of MGD as a fallback option.

As I opened the first bottle of Orange-flavored Hard Creamer I was a little excited. Seeing as how I don't have a vagina and I'm over the age of 16, I pretty much never buy sugary malt liquors such as Bacardi O3, Smirnoff Ice, or Boone's Farm, but I do enjoy the rare occasions that such things are available to me, because while society requires me to project the image of an old, manly, experienced drinker in any party situation so as to avoid ridicule, there isn't anything inherently wrong with alcohol that takes like pop, and sometimes it's fun to feel like a kid again. I expected Hard Creamer to combine the diabetic shock that all of the best thick cream sodas deliver with all of the uninhibted joy that comes with 5% alcohol by volume to make for a memorable night of drinking. I raised the glass, gave an imaginary toast, took a sip...... and immediately spit it the fuck out.

Holy shit, it tasted like a cocktail of Sunkist, three cups of sugar, an entire bottle of cough syrup, a few shots of 99 Bananas, human blood, rancid expired milk, with a small sprinkling of piss. I couldn't believe a beverage that foul could ever make it past product testing and into stores. I took another sip just to make sure I didn't imagine it. This time I gagged. I tried shaking it up and taking a sip and gagged again. This is where I have to break my "No dick grinder metaphor" vow. Trying to drink that shit was like the scene in The Wall where the children are falling into the meat grinder, only instead of children falling victim to a fascist totalitarian regime, they were my penis. Every attempted sip was like my penis falling into that meat grinder over and over. I dumped out the bottle in disgust.

I did the only sensible thing and went straight for my MGD and tried to pretend that I hadn't wasted over 8 bucks on bottled cancer. After going through all six of my actual beers, I was feeling tipsy and brave, so I cracked open another Hard Creamer for round 2. Although it was still every bit as disgusting, I was drunk enough that I didn't care as much. After an hour of taking tiny sips I finally successfully finished a bottle.

The whole reason malt liquor exists is so timid drinkers can actually take in enough alcohol to get to the point that they're able to tolerate the taste of real beer and hard liquor. Hard Creamer is the first malt liquor to ever require you to get drunk off of real beer until you can stand its taste. It's the most ass-backwards product in the history of alcohol. It's like a smoke alarm that only detects smoke that emanates from wood that's already burnt to a crisp. It's like an e-mail spell checker for your sent items folder. It's like a can of mace that only deploys after you've already been raped. It's like the worst consumer product I've ever tasted in my life.

Fun with Omegle!

2009-07-25T20:40:00.000-07:00

Omegle is a delightful website that was introduced about four months ago that pairs you up with a complete stranger and puts you in a chat. It's a lot like the dark ages of AOL. Obviously in an age where there are thousands upon thousands of internet communities dedicated to common interests ranging from the drearily banal to the completely insane, nobody is going to go to Omegle for actual conversation when a quick Google search will find you, no matter what a sick, depraved sack of shit you are, dozens of people who like the same shit you do.

In that last sentence I was going to write "Cats" in parentheses as an example of a banal interest, and "Hentai Tentacle Rape" in parentheses as an example of insanity. Then I realized that Hentai Tentacle Rape is such a played out subject of humor that nobody who reads this would find that reference shocking or insane enough to understand what I'm trying to convey. My point is the internet has made us so at peace with our inner freakishness and communities have united under common interests so fucked up that the average person would have read that sentence and said, "Japanese cartoons about tentacles raping women? Ho-hum. Come back when you have something truly bizarre to talk about."

As you can see, nobody is so fucked up, so singular, and so isolated that they can't find someone on the internet to talk about common interests with. That's why nobody would ever legitimately use Omegle, and that's why 99.4% of all of its users are people trying to fuck with the person on the other side. For this reason Omegle has surpassed the shit out of anything Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft could bring me and has become my new favorite game. Here's the deal: treat every Omegle conversation like a game, and treat the person you're talking to like an opponent. Here's the rules:

How to win:
-Say something so random and fucked up that you get your opponent to disconnect out of horror or disgust
-Convince your opponent to actually believe the ridiculous shit you say
-Get them to leave by legitimately pissing them off
-Leave the conversation because you find their antics boring

How to lose:
-Concede to your opponent that they're funnier/more obnoxious/most disgusting than you
-Have your opponent leave because they find YOU boring
-Actually get angry. Anytime you actually get angry at the internet you fail.
-Believe a single word that comes out of their mouths

These are the rules that determine if you win or lose, but the most important rule is to never back down or feel bad about what you're saying. Anyone who turns to Omegle for real advice, conversation, or emotional support only has themselves to blame for the consequences, and if they claim to be depressed or seeking a friend you're probably falling into the brilliantly devised gambit of a truly seasoned Omegle Grandmaster.

I got drunk and played the game for the first time a couple nights ago. As you may have guessed, "You" is me, and "Stranger" is my opponent. Here's how I fared: (I will cut in and narrate in a couple key spots)

Round 1: "Gentile Golem: Australian for Win"

Stranger: hi 19/male/usa looking for a naughty girl \
You: I sucked off a kangaroo once
You: The child was in the pouch watching but I didn't care.... lol
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Verdict: Win

Round 2: "The Plot Thickens"

Stranger: hii
You: yo
Stranger: how re u
You: you could drive a John Deere through my anus after the gangbanging I took
(Here I attempt the "Shock and Awe" gambit, expecting my opponent to be immediately driven away by a quick and decisive anal sex reference)
Stranger: ohh okay
Stranger: are u girl??
You: I used to be, but now I'm a woman
(At this point I believe this comedy writer-type snappy comeback tipped my cap that I was not actually a girl who just lost her anal virginity)
Stranger: )
Stranger: ohh
Stranger: ı wish ı fucked u first
Stranger: how ol re u?
You: The first to fuck me was my dad
You: are you my dad?
You: be honest
(Backed against a wall with defeat imminent, I desperately try to shock my opponent with a incest-rape trump card. He is unfazed.)
Stranger: noo
Stranger: ı am not your dad
Stranger: )
Stranger: can ı fuck u
Stranger: ı want to fuck your vagina
Stranger: and your ass
Stranger: )
Stranger: ıwant tooo
You: I've been out-trolled
You: congrats to you
You have disconnected.
(I graciously admit defeat)

Verdict: Loss

Round 3: "A Special Hanukkah Episode"

Stranger: sexy tiiiiiiiiime
You: You a jew?
You: If you're a jew, disconnect now
Stranger: hellllllllll naw
You: good
You: now cybersex may commence
Stranger: lol
Stranger: wtf
You: I wanna stick my dreidel in all your holes
You: at once
Stranger: doooooo it
You: Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, I stuck you in this guy's ass
You: Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, this fun will never pass
Your conversational partner has disconnected.

Verdict: FLAWLESS VICTORY

And my first night of Omegling ends with a 2-1 lifetime record. It's not a great start, but it's something to build on. I'll bring you more highlights as I sharpen my skills.

Crapstick Doodle Episode 14

2009-07-21T21:44:00.000-07:00

Boink!

1. This video actually directly pertains to the current #1 movie in the country. Holy shit, it has potential to get as many as 200 hits!

2. Yes, I know the verbal similarity between "Negro" and "Knee Grow" isn't exactly untapped comedic ground, but I'm relatively confident this is the first time it's been used in this context. Is this because I'm an original comedy genius, or is the idea simply so fucking stupid and strained that no talented people have bothered to come up with it?

3. Totally the second one

4. I lied when I said last Friday was my last day at Cracker Barrel, but this time I'm 100% sure Thursday will be the last day I work there. I will then launch into a few weeks of self-imposed unemployment in order to visit my family, move into my newly purchased house with my girlfriend, and just generally take some time off to find some direction and somewhat get my shit together. But before any of that, I'll celebrate my unemployment by getting really hammered on Thursday on a variety or ridiculous drinks I've never had before. I'll definitely be buying a pack of Hard Creamer, and I'll try at least one Irish beer that requires a knife and fork in order to be consumed, and I demand suggestions for what else I should buy.

5. In keeping with watching shows from the 90's and early 00's that were canceled after one season, I blew through The Tick as well as The Dana Carvey Show. The Tick is pretty good. However, it's not quite as good as Action, and nowhere near as good as the fanboys calling for the ritualistic suicide of Fox executives who killed the show would have you believe. The characters are pretty awesome, particularly the sexy latino sensation Batmanuel, who is played by none other than the guy who plays Richard Alpert on Lost, but they just aren't given that many amazingly hilarious things to do. I'd give it a 7.5/10, where I was glad I watched it, but knowing it was canceled and I'll never see those characters again didn't make me want to punch walls until my hands bleed like it did with Action.

6. As for The Dana Carvey Show, it captures the spirit of Saturday Night Live: Fresh, hilarious, imaginative sketches that don't outwear their welcone, and eight shitty sketches that take an idea that wasn't that great to begin with and proceed to pound it into bloody submission for each of the good ones. You also can't feel too bad that the show was killed after 8 episodes when you consider that the opening sketch of the first episode (which followed Home Improvement) featured Bill Clinton breastfeeding puppies. I couldn't come up with something more off-putting if I was fucking trying to get a show canceled. It's interesting to watch just to see what the hell Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell were doing before The Daily Show, as they're regular cast members on this show, but I'd recommend staying the hell away for the most part.

7. For those of you keeping track at home, I just cricized someone else's comedic work in the same blog post in which I posted a comedy video where a black man gets irrationally angry, fucks a white woman, and cooks crack. No tired, offensive stereotyping here.

8. I know it's just a movie, and looking at it won't make me instantly die in real life, but I still get a little weirded out by looking at pictures of the Basilisk.

9. I finally saw Bill Maher's Religulous today, and while I see what people are saying about him beating up on easy targets and overall not saying many new or interesting things, I think his point about how terrifying it is that religious people are looking forward to the end of the world is right on, particularly since we actually have the means to end the world if we really try. Just yesterday at work a few people were discussing the (bullshit) theories that the world will end in 2012, and a hardcore Christian girl told me her theory that on December 21st, the flames of the sun will expand outward and engulf the entire surface of the planet in fire, and the end times will begin, and she told me this with the genuine excitement of a child on the day before Christmas. I'm still a little afraid to talk to her again.

10. It's obvious who Harry and Ron are in this cartoon, but I have no idea who the kid sitting next to Demetrius is supposed to be. He's whatever the Harry Potter universe's equivalent of Wedge Antilles is.

CSD Episode 13

2009-07-16T21:53:00.000-07:00

Talking incessantly about myself and stupid videos I make as if I'm the imaginary subject of an Onion AV Club interview is pretty much my favorite thing to do. So let's go! 10 facts!

1. This is based on my best friend in high school. Anytime I expressed even the slightest annoyance with anything, be it a word, song, noise, insult, or I didn't like the way he'd flick my ears in study hall, he'd make sure to rub it in my face as much as possible, usually in front of as many witnesses as possible. One time I went completely ballistic and attacked him, punching him in the face and stomping on his balls as many times as I could, and after I was physically removed, I spit on him too. Yeah, we aren't friends anymore.

2. I know it seems like a ridiculously fast and extreme reaction to resort to shooting someone just for being annoying for two minutes, but imagine spending six years in close vicinity with someone who's so obnoxiously insecure that his only goal in life is to piss you off and humiliate you as much as possible. As far as I'm concerned, fatal gunshot wounds aren't extreme enough.

3. I (obviously) don't have much experience with drawing, but that orgasm face that Murph makes has got to be the creepiest thing I've ever committed to a screen.

4. I thought I invented the work cockwheel, and I was very disappointed that a Google search netted me 1,450 results.

5. While we're on the subject, I think it's time we come together and admit that inventing compound words involving "Cock" is no longer clever or edgy. According to Google, Cockwheel gets 1,450 matches, Cocksmuggler pulls 615, Cocktard gets 1,940, Cocksnuggler gets 192 results, and in a search that completely blew my mind, a search for Cockplatypus greeted me with 216 fucking results.

6. Everything I just recounted above perfectly encapsulates why I feel so completely overwhelmed whenever I make a serious effort to create something truly comedically unique and special. What the fuck could I possibly have to say about sex and relationships that hasn't already been said by the tens of thousands of comedians out there? Everytime I log onto Youtube I find a new 8-member sketch comedy group I've never heard of, where each member is individually funnier than me, and those guys will be toward the bottom of the totem pole in view counts. I just Googled the main joke in the next video I'm working on and pulled 30,600 results. For Christ's sake, I'm the 217th person in the world who thought of the word Cockplatypus. How can originality even exist anymore?

7. Gonad the Barbarian: 8,540 results

8. Tomorrow will most likely be the last day I work at Cracker Barrel. What exciting career opportunities shall I pursue next? Well, I'm going right the fuck back to the job I had before.

9. Youtube is trying to be cool and do the Hulu thing. Aside from letting you watch new episodes of shows whenever you want, arguably the most badass feature is letting you watch the entire series of awesome shows that dickbag (40,400 results) TV executives cancelled after the first season. I've torn through Action, The Tick, Andy Barker P.I., and The Dana Carvey Show. Go to this link right now: Action Episodes and watch all of them. Even if you hate Jay Mohr, and I'm pretty sure 98% of all Americans do, you'll think it's awesome. How the fuck a show that filthy and ruthless ever got on a major network is beyond me. Action is like Entourage if it was made by the most hateful human being on Earth. Peter Dragon makes Ari Gold look like a Care Bear.

10. Jailtracker is an internet database of 33 correctional facilities in the state of Kentucky. Fortunately, my county is on the list, and that lets me look up the arrest records and mugshots of everyone I work with who has a record, which is all of them. Yesterday I managed to make a girl who's served time for DUI, reckless driving, resisting arrest, and assault completley hate my guts. When the fists start flying at work tomorrow, I'll have two options: Get my ass kicked by a mentally retarded waitress who's half my size, or defend myself, get arrested, and find myself sucked into the vortex that is the white trash penal system. Either way, I'm in for quite a shitty day.