Cheap Fighter II, The World's Worst Warriors!

Watch as I prove every single person who said I wouldn't get paid for practicing the screw piledriver wrong! A solid decade of beat-em-up hatred refined into one pure parcel of humor, for your delectation and delight. If you've ever been appalled by Eddy, shoryukened out of the sky, or were tricked into playing Killer Instinct, this one's for you.


Read! Enjoy! Digg!

Awfulchievements

I score achievements every day: "having fun" and "playing games." Some people manage to screw that up.


Windows 7 Installation

More material over at Cracked, where we look at the very latest in Operating Systems and ask "Why bother?"

Bonus: Even Windows has fanboys! Behold comments furiously denying that Windows 7 was inspired by OS X or that many installs wipe every file on your computer. Despite links to Windows staff admitting "it was inspired by OS X" and the known fact that an install from anything other than Vista, which most people didn't buy, require you to format your entire hard drive.

Close Encounters Of Numbered Kinds

Do you believe aliens exist? Do you believe they're hiding on Earth? Amazing how a 'yes' to two similar questions can imply wildly differing levels of intelligence. Rejoice in the fact with my chart on Types of Alien Encounter at Cracked!


Go! Enjoy! Digg!

Want to stay single forever? There's an app for that!

In fact there are several. I write about techno-lunacy over at Dial-a-Phone every week, to the point where they don't even care if it's about phones, though this week it is. Specifically, it's about the iPhone's attempts to end human procreation:


Both of those apps exist. People programmed them, and people download them, though we can at least assume that no-one who uses the first gets as far as the second.
The linked site has been reorganized, removing this link.

Anatomy Of A Honda Civic

The latest from Cracked, where I break down barriers by daring to describe how boy racers are retards. Join us next week for my Pulitzer-prize column on the deal with airline food!


(It's actually pretty good. You should go read it to find out what all those pretty colors mean.)

Dancing With The Stars: The Most Dangerous Game

I recently watched Dancing With The Stars for a Cracked article, and until I go undercover in al-Queda as a star-spangled banner it will remain the most dangerous assignment I've ever taken. It's also why my fee for future reality TV articles will be "counselling, a liquor store, and restorative massage by no less than three Milla Jovovii*."

*Yes, this will require cloning, and no, I can see no better use of the technology



The article that endangered my sanity

Until someone builds a kitten chew-toy out of napalm-covered grenades nothing will ever utterly destroy two nouns as thoroughly as "Dancing With The Stars." I thought it was uncharacteristically nice of the opening credits to list the dancers until I saw "Lil' Kim"* and realized "Holy shit, these are meant to be the famous people!"
*I'm not sure where "ballroom dancing with a white gay man on national television" ranks in rap circles, but suspect it's somewhere below "ratting people out" and only slightly above "Being Vanilla Ice."
It went on to more people I'd actually heard of, but that was like going from wondering "what's making that noise?" to finding out it's Jason Voorhees sharpening a knife. Steve-O, Steve Wozniak and Holly Madison (the latter at least knew why she was picked, bouncing in like she took a wrong turn on the way to "So You Think You Can Pole Dance For Your Uncle?") The whole thing's a horrific collision between people falling into obscurity and the wretched F-list things that live here. Things for whom "no hidden camera in the bathroom" was a relative plus for this gig, had they needed one, had they not been primitive moth-human-hybrids attracted to cameras instead of lights.
Every episode is the same thing repeated X times, where X is "the number of contestants left"/"the number of layers Hell has this week."
1. The Preparation
First there's the worst reality show ever made watching two people with a narrator constantly repeating how they "did well/badly last week and are really trying very hard" until words themselves start to lose meaning. Endless restatement is a known psychological technique for breaking down the human psyche, rendering viewers susceptible for the main event: The Holy Shit This Show Is Really About Watching People Who Can't Dance Dancing.
2. The Dancing
This is the exact moment your hope for humanity dies. It's where you realise that a seven-figure population of people is watching a real dancer strapped to an artificial personality with teeth instead of skill, and they're cheering for the latter. Where you realise that a show that just had the people who could actually dance would have been cancelled halfway through the pitch meeting's first sentence. Where an entire culture not only rewards a lack of skill but actually insists on it.
It's pretty hard to continue from there. I managed because I'm a professional, because it's my job, and because I was drunk - by the end of the first couple I'd had double drinks, and paused twice to do pushups as my body's "fight-or-flight" emergency response had flooded my body with adrenaline in an attempt to get my away from the screen. I'm not saying the people who watch this are twenty-two million arguments for eugenics - I'm saying I have glands smart enough to avoid this show.
3. The Fallout
The rest is a floodlit parody of "Have a GREAT day!" North American-ness. Watching Denise Richards taking shit from a midget Italian ballerino is priceless: the first thing you (or any approaching aeroplane pilots) see is a blinding expanse of white, a vast panel of grinning glare which could be used to communicate with the International Space Station if she learned to open and close her lips in Morse Code. The second is hatred so intense it'd make Cobra Commander chill out and hug the Joes.


She is three seconds from her skull exploding in screaming judge-eating snakes
Every second of shit she takes, she's remembering those two weeks she could have had him bought and ground into gravel, paid someone else to park a Mercedes full of manure on him, and played "dodge the paparrazi" for the rest of the day. Now it's a pit stop on real American TV before going back to cameos on Bollywood romance movies about stuntmen, and that last bit was not hyperbole. That really happened.
Then it's backstage aka "Support group for terminally grinning has-beens trapped in a limbo undeath of dancing for hooting spherical TV absorbers ." Micheal Irvin used to dodge human tanks for a living, and now you get the special treat of him acting grateful for three screeching stereotypes he could pulp with one arm giving him shit about dancing.
After X lobes of your brain have been shut down the show just ends - you have to come back later for the results edition, which is on par with going back to the dentist thinking "maybe he'll use anaesthetic this time".
The only hope is that this is part of some radical emergency plan to re-educate America - watching less and less famous people do duller and duller things that would not interest the public in any other way, moving from "Dancing With The Stars" to "Living With The Minor Celebrities" to "Basic Finance And Hygiene With The Nice People In The Little Box."

Beer Magazine

There is a wonderful, magical world where I not only drink beer: I can get paid to drink beer while telling people how robots and genetic engineering will make beer better than ever. And that world was Earth all along!


Yes, Issue 12 of Beer Magazine (Sep/Oct 2009) features "The Future Of Beer" by me (or more accurately, me laughing maniacally at how my dreams are actually coming true.) I'm now paid to write about both beer and videogames - I don't know if there's a cheerleader-testing publication, but if there is I'm sure they'll contact me shortly.

Pick it up, and if you can't find it in real life, be aware that Beer Magazine (smart people, upstanding citizens, fine judges of writing character) are also intelligently available online at Zinio.

Do I Get To Wear A Vest?

Imagine being one of the most profitable badasses in history, then waking up and deciding "I'd like to be the voice of Roseanne Barr's baby brother." Welcome to the unknowable world of Bruce Willis.

Cinemasochism: The Legend Of Chun Li

This time we look at the worst missed opportunity since they started hiring female cheerleader coaches. In honor of its video-game nature, the article is over at Bitmob.

Gears Of War 2 Secret File

One for fans of chainsaw-guns, blowing up monsters from the inside, and telling people who've just been disembowelled by a rocket to stop being such pussies. In other words anyone who matters.


(and Reddit it if you're into that sort of thing)

The Lottery of Truth

Another article up at Cracked, wherein the Lottery is subjected to the intense critical analysis of anyone with average intelligence. Also includes Tom Cruise. Read!


eBook Insanity: Female Psychic Attack!

Female Psychic Attack is written by Ross Jeffries, can be read online here, and on a parallel world where I invented English people don't say his name instead of "creepy delusional loser." The very first word is "Bros" and it's the only time in history when talking about 80s sensations Matt and Luke Goss would be less embarrassing. Using the plural of "Bro" is bad; doing so in writing was thought impossible; but pretending to be a fratboy when you look like Popeye after a few years at Spinach-eaters Anonymous?
Ross Jeffries. On his own site. This is what he uses to represent himself in public where everyone can see.
Ross was raised on a world of Amazonian warrior-bitches who slept with M1 battle tanks, so he acts like every conversation is an arms deal with Basque separatists. He also wages unending war against grammar, apostrophes, and captilization, but since he's already declared the entire X chromosome his enemy that's only a minor skirmish. And expecting the author of a book about girls and their mind-blasting cooties to be good at communication is like demanding an Alien facehugger respect your personal space: by evolution, intent and innate sucks-to-be-near-them they just can't.
The intended audience is announced by the unexplained use of "AFC" in the first sentence. If you don't know what that is? Well done on being a real human being who can approach the opposite gender without a strategy guide. This text is intended for high-level students of online misogyny lectures, since the term is never defined. Googling it results in "American Football Conference", "Asian Football Confederation" (both of which would beat this guy up) and "Ambassadors For Christ in Canada" (who could also likely also beat him up, and probably get laid more often.)
The catalog of disaster that is the Fast Seduction 101 acronym page eventually reveals AFC as "Average Frustrated Chump." Yes, theirs is a world where the average state of males is sexually frustrated. Unsurprising since theirs is world where acronyms are involved in dating and they unsarcastically use "HB" for "Hot Babe."
Here's an example of the advice you'll get from a man who thinks women can telepathically blast your testicles:

Problems:
  1. That'd get Robin Williams beaten on the set of a romantic comedy even if it was in the script. And the only things that use "laff" are christmas-cracker joke-writing robots in their quest to destroy human joy.
  2. It's still better than the second suggested response
My imaginary dungeons & dragons wizard only has ten ranks in fucking insanity so I can't quite follow the train of imaginary thought here - but I can tell it's crashed through a psych ward and into a hall of mirrors. There are levels of desperate delusion here that'd make the Joker try to talk him down, and if I'm reading it right his advice is "If the girl doesn't want to stay late be extra-aggressive about wanting sex." That's not romantic advice, that's Daterape for Dummies.
It gets worse. Watch as a single sentence leads to enough passive aggression to doom a thousand marriages:
Here he responds to a lack of phone calls by accusing the girl of being a dumb slut and/or fucking dumb sluts, depending on her ability to parse what happens to grammar after multiple concussions. In Jeffries' fantastic alterna-world this barrage of insults, ellipses and shouting has the woman desperately wondering how she can best please him. As opposed to two timezones away and still accelerating.
(Please be warned that the man who typed "HA HA HA HA!" like that is still at large and should not be approached by either gender.)
The final example in the eight-page opus is a masterpiece of denial insanity, which I can't do full justice without just copying it here and standing behind a lead-lined anti desperation field. It involves a case "sent to me in email by a Bro", the dating-advice version of a letter to Penthouse written by "a friend of mine from Canada youwouldn'tknowher", a recommended reply which would make Bizarro Superman look like a tender lover, and the girl actually breaking up with presented as a successful result.
Jeez, man, if you're going write a book about made-up not-dates at least have her dump you because she found you in bed with fourteen zero-gravity cheerleading rocketeers. That way you're at least pretending your psychic woman-hunting anti-voodoo works.

Why Video Game Movies Suck

I turn turning video games into movies into a video game. (That grammar works, I checked).


See the whole thing over at Cracked.

eBook Insanity: Knife Throwing Techniques Of The Ninja

Page 2 contains everything you need to know about Knife Throwing Techniques Of The Ninja:



First off, that's not a ninja. That's what happens when a kid is so irretrievably fucked they don't even bother the Make-a-Wish people, they just change his pajamas and tell him he's a silent assassin and should practice being ignored. In the book it appears exactly like that - no caption, no figure, no reference in the text, just some guy in black cloth with more tassles than a stripper and a target market which honestly that kicked ass. That couldn't kick a kitten in a boot-testing factory. Because this was in 1986, just after Karate Kid and American Ninja, when the common sense part of every brain under fifteen was destroyed by shurikens.

Now it's been brought forward in time by the eternal-mistake-preserving technology of the internet. So if Facebook got your ass fired for flashing at a frat party, don't worry: it's making up for it by mutilating Naruto fans. This book is extremely popular again on torrents, and a decades-old resurrectee hasn't maimed this many people since the Halloween movies.

If you've spotted that knife-throwing is the worst self-defense mechanism possible, felonious enough to get your ass arrested while ineffective enough to ensure the police have to scrape you into the cell, this author agrees with you - if only subconsciously. Even in his own book dedicated to blade-hurling he starts off with a fan-fiction, set in the days before guns, and still need six pages to invent a situation where throwing knives comes in handy. If you're a fan of "reading" you'll want to skip this part: It makes the average Harry Potter/X-Men crossover seem well-written, and is probably most brain-damagingly bad piece of literature short of being hit in the head with a hardback DaVinci Code.

After showing his homeroom English teacher that he can-so-too get published Mr Peters gets on to the real meat of the book: advising psychotic shut-ins to start carrying knives. This is it starts moving from "crappy cash-in" to "check you don't live near the author." He advises all readers to throw their knives six hundred times a week, which sounds like a great way to turn Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder into a horror movie script, and then carefully explains how knife-throwing is obviously useless unless you carry knives with you every waking moment.


The book also handily removes the readers from the gene pool, because any "date" who hangs around after seeing this picture in your flat is an undercover police officer.

The advice ends up exactly neutral for the non-stab-fan: there's the scary way he tells amateur knifologists to make sure they're always armed, but it's perfectly cancelled by the insane hiding places he comes up with: in your armbands, within your sash, or tucked into your headband or mask wrappings. So any newly-bladed practicioners are already avoided in the street by anyone not currently studying for a Doctorate in Crazy. Besides, anyone walking down the street in a full blade-stuffed sash and Naruto headband had better hope the police find them before anyone else.

Unless, of course, they meet another ninja!

Of course you have to train for various situations where you might meet another ninja - though if you're both really ninja, the chances of seeing each other are on par with two Kate Mosses being in the same Dunkin Donuts. This guy is really preparing for a life of ninja combat - it seems a shame to be so far into a world of delusion without getting a jetpack or a cheerleader. But at least it's encouraging the audience to meet each other, practice knife combat, and help evolution on a little.

This is where I realised the publishers behind this book are geniuses. The author might need to be restricted to sporks, but they're selling this insane crap to people who will never be able to complain. Because you need fingers to work phones, or type, and the sort of person who learns knife throwing out of an online book is about twenty self-assertiveness lessons from the confidence to order at a drive-through. Never mind complaining about someone who owns knives.

It's still the most irresponsible printing since "My First ABC of Cleaning Products That Look Like Fruit Juice," but they've made sure that there are hundreds of miles between them and the involuntary injury machine they've unleashed. In fact, it may be the reincarnated spirit of Charles Darwin working to assist natural selection after deciding - as any intelligent person must - that the first to be purged from the modern world must be white people who say "Bakka".

I have to believe that this secret eBook cabal is working to improve humanity. The only alternative is that author "Michael E. Peters" is a real person walking around loose.

The Article That Would Not Die!

The Internet Safety Signs, the very first paid article I ever did, keeps surging back like a horror movie villain who's forgotten his keys.


It's fun to see it reposted every few months, even if people seem pyschotically incapable of crediting the poor original site, with the most recent reanimation is up to over 3000 Diggs. Again.

Oh, internet, flattery will get you everywhere.

Quentin Tarintino Explained

More at Cracked, this time assisted by the awesome Jack O'Brien!


"Tarantino believes moving understandably from beginning to end is for Sesame Street and the fuckin' alphabet." and more, right here for your reading pleasure.

Dancing With The Stars (destroying two words at once)

Some think that drinking while being hilarious is the easy option. Those pansies don't know jack - I've stared into HELL and written jokes about the torment:

Go, see what scarred my psyche - and Digg me for valor!

Iron Man Explained

Cracked collaborating with Stark Industries to explain exactly how Iron Man was engineered.


Read it, Digg it, even enjoy it if you have time!

The Social Networking Cycle

Everything you need to know about Facebook, Myspace and Twitter over at Cracked.



Go read the rest, and just think: Digging a website about websites could be most meta click you make all day!

Don't Touch My No-No Square

More evidence that abstinence education is an attempt to disprove evolution by forcing it to run backwards: a Mississippi summit on sex education's main strategy to prevent hot teenage boning was a jingle. A JINGLE. Five thousand teens were lined up and made to rap “Stop, don’t touch me there! You know this is my no-no square!” I want you to know that I copy and pasted that phrase because my brain threatened seizure if I actually typed it.

Jingles are for selling detergent, not fighting the base urges wired into humanity, and I don't know if you've noticed but 90% of all advertising is based on how much we want to fuck each other. Using ads to fight sex is like using Carlos Mencia to combat idiocy. If you're wondering if this rap came complete with stupid acting out of the lyrics, hell yes it did! Teens danced around drawing an invisible square box around their crotches with their fingers, singing a rap written by someone so white and old they're probably mummified and only dimly remember sex as "something bad like wetting the bed but there need to be two of you."

When you won't even refer to genitals without infant talk like "no-no square," you may be ill-equipped in a battle against hot throbbing sex. Those teens aren't prancing along because you've overridden the fundamental drive of all organisms: they're obeying because it genuinely isn't their problem yet. When the hormones hit their brain a battering ram of XL nuclear warheads your precious little jingle'll work like a toilet-roll umbrella: those kids will be soaking and covered in stringy white goo. You are sending them into a battle against their own bodies unarmed, and it's only even a battle because you told them so.

Cinemasochism: Dolemite!

WARNING: This article uses language like a motherfucker with his dick in a mousetrap, because discussing Dolemite without swearing is like talking Tom Cruise without saying "screamingly insane". The motherfucking is so intense you'll finish the movie with a new sibling. My wife had to spend a fortnight training me out of calling our cat a "rat-eating motherfucker," despite both parts of that statement actually being true for most cats.
WARNING: Poster may feature better choreography than actual film, motherfucker.
This is Dolemite's story, and not just because it's named after him: because he's the only one in the entire production who has so much as placed a phone call before. Incomparable expletivist Rudy Ray "Dolemite" Moore writes, produces, directs, stars, and fills every position he couldn't physically do himself with people he picked up off the street at the corner of Prostitute Drive and Drug Addict Alley. Most of the "actors" look like they just regained the power of speech through experimental surgery, and the boom mike makesdaring raids to claim scenes as part of the Gloriously Crappy Sound Man Empire.
While some cinematic experiments have been recorded in one take, Dolemite was written and produced in that take too. People arrive on screen with absolutely no idea of what they're supposed to be doing, many looking like the concept of "pretending to be someone else" is being explained off screen in sign language several seconds after the cameras started rolling. This explains why a "Fuck you"/"No, Fuck YOU" exchange can take upwards of twenty seconds.
It's still a priceless window into the most motherfucking soul on the planet. The plot is Dolemite framed, Dolemite released, then badly-paced VENGEANCE, but even within such a complex plot they find time to reveal Rudy's opinions on:
Fashion!
The only whiteys Dolemite will tolerate are tightey-whiteys.
His adoring audience.
His first action on release from prison is to strip out of the square prison-issue clothes, with the entire male population of the prison watching, and get into pimp gear. He then gets into a limo and starts taking the clothes off again. This is one of the many, many scenes that obviously seemed badass inside Dolemite's head and nobody else was allowed (or even able) to speak. For example: if I was portraying a badass ladies man his first action would not be "Performing strip-tease for a male convict population."
Romance!
Rudy Ray Moore wants you to know he's successful with women, and he thinks “insinuation” is something white people do because they’re impotent. If he wishes to imply a lady likes him, the only reason you don't see shaft is because the cameraman can't get the lens into the molecule-thin gap between his crotch and the refurbished prostitute/actress impersonating a face-shaped vacuum cleaner.
Every single woman in this movie would ride you like a train and give you change from a coupon. The only time they look comfortable on screen is when they're licking people. I tried to imagine a life so tragic that the best moments in it are licking Rudy Ray Moore, which is why I'm dictating this article to the suicide negotiator on the street ten floors below me.
This remains the only movie I've ever seen where a full backhand slap romances a woman, and this is a real full on pimp-slap (as in "Oh, THAT'S why pimps are considered a cross between humanity and sewage") leading immediately to sex. Horrific, horrific sex.
Stephen King once had a nightmare like this but was too scared to write about it
A still image really doesn't capture the horror, and because I'm not Cthulhu I can't put it into words. I was going to make a gif until I remembered my strict vow of "NOT measurably increasing the amount of terror and pain in the world." I've seen more romantic scenes in Hellraiser. I don't know exactly how long the grunting goes on, because I was screaming the first time and will lose my remaining eye if I go back to check, but recall it being approximately Forever Times Torment.
Violence!
That's actually the kick on the way up. Dolemite won' let martial arts, or basic human anatomy, get in the way of kicking ass!
Dolemite is often called upon to dispense ass-whooping, which is unfortunate as his kung fu make William Shatner look like Yoda with a lightsabre-firing machine gun. His primary attack is arthritically wiggling his leg at people until they remember they're supposed to fall down.
Music!
If you ever see this it's too late to run - your only chance is to Stop, Drop, and Roll While Smashing Your Head Into The Ground To Render Yourself Unconscious. (Yes, this music requires three times as much warning as nuclear weaponry.)
Rudy Ray knows drug addicts. Rudy Ray knows whores. Rudy Ray knows a surprising number of rat-soup eating motherfuckers, but RR does not know any musicians. The excrutiatingly extended music scene - one of many methods used by Mr Moore to extend his twenty minute plot into the hour and a half demanded by The Man - features a band who can only have been hired as reverse blaxploitation. Not only do they destroy the stereotype of black people having rhythm, they cast serious doubt on the stereotype that black people can even hear.
Language
Rudy does not speak English. He speaks Motherfucker with some English mixed in so us honkies can understand. Every character swears like a sailor on shore leave from the S.S. Tourette's, with the exception is the preacher, who balances things out by running guns through his church and boning woman so fat he could choose any fold at random and call it an orifice - yet he refuses to say "motherfucker." That is an extremely specific moral line you've drawn for yourself, preacher man.
I still can't call Dolemite a bad movie, in the same way you can't call the charge of the light brigade a failed military engagement: by any sane definition it really absolutely is the worst one ever, but its level of failure so far transcends the original concepts involved it takes on immortality. And any movie which guarantees you watch the sequel, even in sheer disbelief, can't be called a failure. Because I'll be back for: THE HUMAN TORNADO!

I Win At Nerd!

Winning at nerd is moderately cool. Winning when that's your entire job is cooler. But this; this is Shaft chillin' out in a liquid hydrogen jacuzzi cool:



The Zen of Gaming Sexism

A piece up at Bitmob looking at Tecmo's absolute ultimate objectification: TITS ON A WALL. Nothing but breasts on a big blank expanse, aka "A terrifying glimpse into the mind of advertising executives."

Comedy, videogames, and getting paid - how awesome would thate be? Click the link to find out!

Street Fighters By Boss Ball Size

Vital scientific street-fighting findings over at Bitmob!
If you know what a dragon punch is you'll probably want to check it out.

NASCAR Safety

Not that I'm encouraging it, mind you, but I did look at NASCAR Safety over at Cracked.

Want to see the rest of the image? If only there were some way to do so.

The Future

Skateboarding Safety

Another article over at Cracked. describing skateboarding's most suicidal stunts and other reasons why non-Ninja Turtles probably shouldn't bother.

Harry Potter Insanity


I was going to write about the new article over at Cracked, telling you how people have gone insane over Harry Potter, but really, LOOK at that image.

That's real. College age, running around clutching broomsticks and pretending to fly.

Disastvertising: The Worst In Gaming PR

Another article up at GameSpy, where we explain how somebody can take the job "Sell videogames to videogamers" and totally screw it up. And there's no Daikatana at all! Yes, only things that actually happened within the last eight years! Read Disastvertising here.

They were even kind enough to make some images for me, even if they sometimes get the words in the wrong order.

Back To The Future Timeline Of Disaster

A timeline of terrible mistakes up at Cracked.com.
You missed the parts where they hired a rapist, or decided Doc's dog was more important than Marty's wife? Go!

Jackie Chan Injury Map

Once more unto the Cracked, dear friends, where I have a color-coded chart of Chan-breakage. It's a rainbow of self-mutilation that would make a suicidal GAP commercial look monochromatic.

Biker Body Map

Another image over at Cracked, explaining exactly how bikers appear to medical professionals, firefighters, and other people who know what happens when you create a flesh-asphalt boundary at 100 kph.

Robots In Crap Disguise

Before they had Michael Bay to disguise them as retarded golden shower enthusiasts, Transformers had to find their own terrible disguises. And they did! Head over to Cracked to read all about it.

If this looks like ANYTHING to you, wake up before Cthulhu arrives.

Top-Notch Tazings

Do you like reading about the electrocution of idiots? Of course you do! Get on over to Dial-a-Phone and read about sheep-zapping, bringing a lightning-bolt to a knife fight, and our new electrical overlords.