#even more grossout

[kasumingo]

In other news I rewatched MM and the turtles are cute, but I can't help but be bothered by some details they decided to include...

[variousqueerthings]

and tonight for the first time! we watch the original exorcist!

[d0eteeth]

I keep trying to make sense of tmagp in my head so I'm just gonna ramble about some insights I had.

I'm really starting to think that the whole lore of tmagp is not about desires or hunger but a lot more about the alchemy that keeps coming up time and time again in the story.

At the core of most casements, we have some form of transmutation or transformation: There are the ones where humans merge with objects (the tree man, the coral woman, the coach man fused with the carriage), which I suppose is some sort of chimera. And often there is some insistence on "a new you", on surpassing one's current form, a purification. Then there are the ones where human sentience is instilled in beings or objects, e.g. Newton's dog, hungry building, blood-thirsty violin, Bonzo costume turned sentient. On the other hand, the experiment/ ritual Sam witnessed could be some sort of separation.

Even the other casements make sense with this concept, for example the first episode, since resurrection/ eternal life is a big aspect of alchemy, bringing a loved one back from the dead but wrong makes sense.

This is also why I don't believe the demon baby was a vampire, but rather a homunculus. The woman in the case doesn't remember the pregnancy or birth, which may indicate that the creature wasn't conceived that way and she's just a surrogate to take care of it. Apparently homunculi also feed on blood so it seems like she was just part of someone's experiment.

But that's not even all. In alchemy, there are certain steps of transmutation, varying from 4 to 7 to 14 (interesting that it would be 14) depending on the alchemist, and while these are steps to supposedly creating a philosopher's stone and would all have to be completed in a row, I do see certain steps correlating to the casements we've heard. On one hand there's the aforementioned conjunction, but also one stage is cibation, as in eating something, which makes the grossout restaurant episode make more sense. And there's also calcination, which is essentially purification by fire to achieve a clean slate. Which is basically exactly what the Magnus protocol does

[bogleech]

wait, you wrote for cracked? damn I loved that website so much and it taught me do many things about writing, comedy, life and the human nature! thank you for adding to that!

I didn't write a TON for it and they scrapped or rewrote up to 40% of my text (this was kind of standard for the site) but some of my biggest Cracked hits include...

Nature's 6 Most Diabolical Predators

5 Evil Species of Flies

6 Dark Sides to Adorable Creatures

6 Sadistic Insect Predators

7 Vehicles Built and Driven by Animals

8 Most Terrifying Diets in the Animal Kingdom

9 Mind Blowing Disguises in the Animal Kingdom

Unlikely Partners in the Animal Kingdom

People who regularly read my website and have never read these or aren't too familiar with Cracked will probably find some of the differences pretty jarring; they had us write in a sort of frat-boy persona and would rewrite your text anyway, their editing pushed almost all nature articles towards a horror or grossout angle (which I really tried my best to mitigate) and they were ULTRA particular about final list content in ways that remain mysterious to me; they'd ask me to pad out submissions with more entries than they were going to actually use, for instance, leading to a lot of "filler" where I had to kind of reach to justify something under the article's topic, and then they'd end up keeping some of that filler while cutting what I thought were the most exciting entries.

"Dark sides to adorable animals" wasn't even originally called that, I forget what I pitched it as, but it's the most notorious one in my memory because whoever edited it evidently thought that squid are cyclopses.

[coff-in]

HAII GUESS WHO'S BACK AGAIN!! Ｏ(≧∇≦)Ｏ

can i request ashley with a fem reader (either the same one, or a different one entirely) but with ashley's like... unhingedness and yandere(?) attitude cranked up to the max? like, reader can already hardly talk to anyone else as is but i feel like with that cranked up more than usual, she probably really tries to isolate reader from friends, potential love interests, and even family members to a certain extent. (　���∀＾)

i'd imagine jobs are super finicky too, reader can probably never hold down a job too well because of whatever ashley throws a fit, likely over reader leaving (reader tries to have the discussion that she needs job because job = money!! it probably works at first and then falls onto deaf ears later on (　・ω・))

if reader tries to leave the situation? ashley probably blackmails her into staying with whatever she has for leverage or do the classic old "i'm the only person willing to be by you!!" type shtick that manipulative people tend to do ( ｡ﾟДﾟ｡) if reader does leave successfully you bet there's going to be hell until ashley inevitably finds reader. i am running out of fuel though;; so insert potential dubcon/noncon situation here

i should've specified this earlier and you don't need to rewrite my one req bcs you didn't know but i just ask for no incest in my asks due to some personal reasons ( ＞Д＜；) please don't feel bad, though, since you didn't know!! i'm pretty much open to anything but incest and all the grossout fetishes, though! ^^ again, i am so sorry for the inconvenience on that part!! ( ´д｀､)

also ^^ just assume all my reqs will be fem or gen neutral reader ﾟ+.ﾟ(´▽`人)ﾟ+.ﾟ

- 🕊

notes from coff-in: i'm sorry, i didn't mean to make you feel uncomfortable about the incest (i think it might've been the petplay one? but lmk if i'm wrong if you want to). BUT thank you for telling me this! i'll try to keep it in mind in the future when responding to your asks :) and thank you for requesting! :D there's no smut in here, just some dialogue and me trying to get a hang of their dynamics is all. you can interpret this as the previous [reader] to your other asks if you want :3 lmk what you think

[fem] reader-insert

The phone rings once, twice, thrice. Then once, twice, and thrice again. You're hoping that he'll pick up. You don't know how long Ashley'll stay asleep. Your worry and frustration grows as you notice how cold you're getting, standing outside. The sky is blue but not sunny. It is very early in the morning. You made sure to come out at this time on purpose.

Once, twice, thrice-- and then it picks up.

"Hello?" The voice on the other side is low and groggy. You obviously had just woken him up. Good, you think, he should be awake. I should be inconveniencing him.

"Andrew. It's [reader]." You don't try to make small talk, you want to get straight to the point with this, "Have you talked to Ashley recently?"

He groans, "Yeah... I talked to her yesterday. Why?" The cold air only adds to the apparent bitterness in your voice.

"Can you please tell her that I have to leave the house to work so I can make money?"

There's a tense pause... "What?"

You sigh, "Ashley won't let me leave to go to work. I am politely asking you to talk to her about letting me go to work." You look back at your apartment, where Ashley decided to sleep over for the night. You hope she's still asleep. "She usually listens to you." She used to listen to you, too.

It's Andrew's turn to sigh. "I can't make her do anything, [reader]--"

"At least fucking try! Please..." You add on that last part in order to not sound like an asshole. "I'm sure the last thing you want is her or me asking you for money. I'm trying to support her too, Andrew, but she's not making it easy. I'm asking you to help me." There are cars loudly passing by and you try to focus on them to calm yourself down. You feel... scared. Scared that this won't work. Scared about what Ashley would do if she caught you talking about her like this. You used to not be scared of her. "And I doubt your parents would fucking help me..."

"Bloody hell..." Andrew groaned and shuffled around on his end of the call, "I'll... I'll, uh, see what I can do." It sounded forced from him. Take your fucking time, you scowl at your phone.

"Thank you." You then promptly hang up the call and stuff your phone in your pocket. You stand outside in the cold for a little bit longer. The birds chirp their songs on the bare branches of trees and clear sky contrasts just nicely against the dark landscape of your apartment's parking lot. You like the blue hour.

But like every hour, it comes and goes, and so do you. You turn tail and climb the steps back to your apartment. Walking down the hallway as quietly as possible, you take out your keys and put them into the lock. However, before you can open the door, it opens for you and you're face-to-face with Ashley Graves.

Shit.

"Where were you?" She's staring you down with a death glare, her face dark and pink eyes burning through your skin and soul. She's mad. She's mad and that's never a good thing. You try your best to steel yourself.

"I was downstairs."

"Why? How come you didn't wake me? What was so important that you had to get up and leave without me?!" She was raising her voice as she dragged you into the apartment, violently slamming the door behind you. You held back a frustrated sigh but couldn't stop a frown from appearing on your face.

"I had to call Andrew for help." The mention of his name made her pause for a bit. You took that window of opportunity to explain yourself, "I asked him to help me with my job. I'm-- we're a little tight on money, Ash. You preventing me from working isn't helping either."

"As if you'd be better working with a bunch of fucking floozies!" She yells with her hands balled into fists, "I'm doing you a fucking service by making you stay here! Those no good whore would probably flaunt all over you and make you do all the hard work by yourself!"

"Ashley..."

"Besides, you don't need to work anyways. Why not just ask you parents for money or something? Why not stay here with me?!"

"Ashley!" You yell at her, causing her to open her eyes and look at you. "I have to work! I have no one else to ask for help because of you! I don't talk to my parents, I have no friends to help, and I barely even talk to my coworkers. All! Because! Of you!" You stomp your foot on the floor childishly, but you can't help it. It's all too familiar. You're just going through the motions at this point. "I'm trying my best to be there for you, Leyley, but you make it so hard! I need you to back off! Give me some space to breathe, please!"

She looks at you bewildered, eyes wide and eyebrows bent downwards. She slowly looks down away from you. "You need some space, huh?"

Oh god dammit. "Ash..."

"I get it. No one wants me around them."

"Ashley."

"I'm just the fuck up of the family, aren't I? But guess, what! So. Are. You. We have no friends, no family, not lovers-- we're stuck with each other." She stares at you with intensity, "You chose me. YOU CHOSE TO BE WITH ME!!! No one else is going to take you in! Only I can love you for the fuck up that you are! No one else can love you the way I do! No you whore mother, not fucking Andrew, NO ONE ELSE BUT ME!" She comes closer and tugs on your shirt, your noses practically touching each other. "You have no one else but me. Got it?"

----

coff-in

[drdemonprince]

I fear the fart stock is rising as a part of what I hypothesize to be a post lockdown desire for sensations that can't be found digitally- see how gay dudes talked about armpits in 2022 the way straight people talked about eating ass in 2013 and as a sweaty hole enjoyer who doesn't like the prospect of Oregon trail diseases the Twitter feed has been rough. There's a really high gooning comorbidity and feeding to a lesser extent.

You're blowing my mind right now dog. I have not seen that much fart content at all. Like, nothing since mid-aughts Cake Farts esque grossout-humor novelty kink stuff was circulating in the college dorms all across America. I don't know if what you're observing is a generalizable phenomenon or if something is hella fucked up in your feed. And I don't exactly want to see it, but academically, I am obligated to. But a part of me has gotta respect that all the dudes who have been talking about being nasty pigs for years are wanting to at least actually be nasty, and I don't think you're actually gonna get a pathogen from huffing even a wet fart.

Incidentally, I predict that the gooning stock will plateau significantly this winter, as people grow tired of yet another long languid season of hikikomorying around the house. I think many people's COVID depressions will begin to lift or that they'll grow tired of coping via burrowing, and we'll see far more interest in active, outdoorsy kinks. Fingers crossed that fucking in cemeteries takes off. But I'll settle for more outdoor sex, predator/prey hunting type play, and (because gay men are predictable) athletically inclined stuff.

[garyfischy]

Baffling that there is now a softboy revisionist eltingville club fanbase much like the tumblr south park fanbase- even more so that most of them have never read the comic and only watched the pilot. The pilot, despite airing on adult swim, is completely sanitized of any of the sexual innuendo and slurs of the original (opting instead for slapstick gore and cartoon hijinks) and really feels like more of a cartoon network flick than an adult swim one. It downplays what I like about Eltingville. The grossout MAD magazine esque hijinks that Evan Dorkin's so good at illustrating (yes, i read all of DORK. And the dog comic he wrote. And his 4panels in Best American Comics. And milk and cheese.) are what's the backbone of eltingville's delightfully mean satire. Plus the comic is like, most of the friggin lore of the series! The pilot is one issue of like 10!

I also think the pilot's sudden rise to fame lead to a huge deal of misunderstanding about the characters. In the pilot, Pete sits around and quips. In the comics, he jerks off to drawings of dead bodies. He's utterly repulsive and violent. But he's kind of been woobified in contrast to Josh/Bill because he's not as quick to react? I'm saying this as someone that REALLY LIKED pete when I first read eltingville. Before the final issue anyways. I'd have liked to believe that the character with weird sexual fetishes could have grown up to be somewhat normal. But i missed what eltingville was trying to tell me: if you uncritically absorb the ideals of your favorite media, blocking out the rest of the world, you're bound to become a Pete.

when evan dorkin said pete would probably sleep with underage fans, people were surprised. I still don't get it. His whole arc is him becoming an abuser and exploiting vulnerable women and never growing up. I feel like the fandomization/flanderization of eltingville does it disservice, but hey, it all falls along what we WANT these characters to be, not what they are. They can't be spunky teens forever. They have to face adult decisions and consequences eventually. I think that's what the final issue of Eltingville was trying to say.

[minijenn]

Jen Tortures Herself With Every Dreamworks Animated Movie Ever: The Croods: A New Age

So back when I watched the first entry in The Croods series, I was actually pretty plesantly surprised. But believe it or not, this movie managed to surprise me even more, because not only is it good, its actually, like... really good?? Shocking, I know, so let's get into why I think that.

We rejoin the Croods as they continue on their quest for a new home, eventually crossing paths with the Bettermans, a much more "advanced" family that's just a little more evolved than they are. Initially disliking the chaos the Croods bring to their family and their home, the Bettermans devise a plan to get rid of the cavefamily, while convincing Guy to stay, as his family was friends with the Bettermans and they see him as a perfect match for their daughter, Dawn. From there, well, damn a whole bunch happens, with lots of twists and turns I wasn't expecting as these two incredibly different families buck heads and learn to accept each other.

So yeah, the plot here is pretty solid and very character focused, which is probably why I liked it so much. Like we really do just have so much emphasis on character interactions and dynamics here, with some really great standouts being Dawn and Eep's friendship (they're lesbians, harold) that could have just as easily been a jealous rivalry for Guy, but isn't, the eventual epic bromance between Phil and Grug, Ugga and Hope initially hating each other but eventually coming to terms with each other, Gran just being The Character Ever, and so much more. There's a lot going on here, but there's so much to like about it! I'm impressed!

So yeah, speaking of the characters, I already liked the Croods family in the first movie, but they're even better here. Grug is still the typical overprotective dad trying to keep the family together, but he's way less overbearing about it than he was in the first movie. We also see some good progression in Eep and Guy's relationship, and I think they're a pretty cute and solid couple! The Bettermans are also a lot of fun! Phil and Hope start out as sort of selfish, manipulative jerks who just want the Croods out of their lives, but they go through some pretty solid development and learn to appreciate the Croods and welcome them into their home. Dawn is also a lot of fun, a girl who has spent her life living on the safe side, so of course, she readily takes Eep up on the offer to have some fun the first chance she gets.

The movie doesn't have much in the way of an antagonist, aside from the punch monkeys, which are a pretty funny final act obstacle for the families to overcome. Really though, the conflict here really does center on the friction between the Croods and the Bettermans, and the film does such a great job of developing that friction and naturally bringing both families to a good place with each other.

The humor here is also a lot better than the first movie's. Sure, there's still a handful of grossout jokes here and there, but a lot of the jokes here just come from the characters being themselves (like I said, Gran is a standout for the Crazy Old Lady trope, and also, a total badass in her own right). I think that tends to be my favorite kind of humor with Dreamworks movies, when the jokes lean on these characters reacting to situations in their own unique, humorous way.

The animation has also been stepped up here quite a bit. The character designs look better somehow, and the movement they have to them is very fluid. The film is just bursting with color throughout, with set pieces that are just as creative and pretty to look at as the first film's. The music was pretty average, but I'm fine with that because I was so impressed with everything else.

So yeah, Croods 2. Who could have guessed this was a surprisingly great movie? I certainly didn't, I went into this movie with the barest expectations possible and came out having thoroughly enjoyed it. I earnestly recommend it for anyone who's looking for a fun film with a good story and great characters. It may just surprise you, like it surprised me.

Overall Rating: 8/10

Verdict: LET'S GO LESBIANS LET'S GO

Previous Review (Trolls World Tour)

Next Review (Spirit Untamed)

[rararazaquato]

Tell us more about le cartoon version of Raincode you have please.

Like of other characters appearing and more dynamics, including episodes.

oh BABY you're in for a treat!!!

i have a whole google doc planned out for this thing, despite me having no animation experience gjgkhkh... this is gonna be the Public Lore Dump Post btw, and spoilers for all of rain code will be under the cut.

so the concept for this whole thing came about while watching the animations of youtuber OkayScreamingNow. super cool animation btw, their "psycho teddy" animation moderately blew up but i'm a huge fan of their "everybody likes you" video.

between watching those, a ton of aimkid videos, wince media's meat bun song, and nicktendo's mighty b review, i started feeling really nostalgic for mid-late 2000s animation, the stuff i grew up on. growing up creepie, yin yang yo, kenny the shark, all these were shows i adored as a kid. so, combined with my current rain code fixation, this little au came to be!

the general conceit of this au is that "Master Detective Archives" is a 2008 animated children's program that lasted for 20 episodes and is majority lost media. only a couple episodes exist in the bowels of shitty piracy sites, and even then those sites keep getting taken down. the more screenshots and concept art i make, the more is "revealed" about the show.

one of the things that interests me the most about children's media is how people worked around the censors. a lot of people are familiar with the story of the ren and stimpy adult party cartoon. for those who aren't familiar, when john "god's mistake" kricfalusi created an adult oriented reboot of ren and stimpy, the show was dogshit. with the new ability to rely on the crutch of whatever grossout sexual humor it wanted, it became a massive stain on john k's career (he has had other horrific stains both before and after apc, but i need to stress, no one liked apc).

for a more positive example, i love pretty much all of jhonen vasquez's work, but i find the humor and even some of the horror of invader zim to be more interesting than the same stuff in jthm, because iz was working under far stricter standards and practices.

what i'm trying to get at is that i enjoy the challenge of seeing how i can take concepts and make them more kid-friendly while still keeping the intrigue and interest the concepts originally had. i worked at a summer camp in 2022, and the driving force behind this little project was "keeping rain code camp-appropriate, but also keeping it interesting".

this ethos will hopefully explain some of the Big Changes i made to the story and characters. i do want to stress that i do not think i am improving on the original work. i think rain code is a story that, inherently, works better as an m-rated, gritty, cyberpunk-y murder mystery. i've just always been uniquely fascinated by this particular genre shift.

so, first major change: nocturnal detective agency has turned into nocturnal detective academy. this is a place where young minds, particularly those with supernatural powers, go to hone their craft. or at least... it was. now it's run exclusively by three people: headmaster Zange Eraser, school nurse and therapist Melami Goldmine, and teacher (and everything else) Yakou Furio.

i grew up with a book series called school of fear, which was about a small group of kids with severe phobias being sent to help conquer their fears at a highly rated school. however, it was actually just a kooky old lady and her massive mansion, and while she helped the kids get over their fears, she did it in unorthodox and occasionally darkly humorous ways. i remember a scene in the books where she put the claustrophobe and the kid afraid of death in a coffin for a few hours, and while that is absolutely NOT how exposure therapy works, the idea of a school that's just a few adults running a lowkey scam out of their house has always tickled my funny bone.

so the nda is a school, teaching detective skills and the like. of course, because yakou is my beautiful failwife, he mostly just sends his students out into the city of Kanai Ward to do their own investigative work and report back with what they've learned... as long as they don't get in trouble with Hecksmile or his goons, at least!

yeah, the other big change is that the peacekeepers are more like team rocket than corrupt cops. while i agree that the police suck, and a lot of older cartoons seem to share that sentiment (even some newer ones like gravity falls), having all the villains be evil, corrupt cops seems like a recipe to get s&p on your ass. so now, the cops just don't do anything, and Hecksmile and his goons just wreak havoc whenever they feel like it.

(i've already explained the hecksmile bit in a previous post, but i dont think any of the other names would need changing. maybe if this was the 90s, desuhiko and fubuki would get their names changed to something more eurocentric, but this isn't the 90s and that stuff was cringe even back then.)

there are only seven students at the academy, and i've de-aged these characters to be more relatable to the target audience: our main character yuma, halara, desuhiko, fubuki, vivia, pucci, and aphex. i'll detail them a bit here, because yakou, zange, and melami can all stay pretty similar (actually, melami doesn't randomly feel up strangers to get their clothing measurements anymore, but that's a pretty minor change).

yuma is still our main character, acting as the straight man and audience surrogate. the whole "number one" twist isn't really a thing with how this whole plot is set up, so his awkward and generally "scrunkly" attitude from the game is his natural state here. though none of the ages of the characters are specified, he's often called out as the youngest detective, probably in his preteens or early teenagehood. his coalescence is used for a lot of teamwork-based solutions to problems, but he isn't that great at actual mystery-solving.

this is where shinigami comes in! in the first episode, after some hijinks, yuma accidentally summons a death god. fortunately, he summons a teenage death god. she can only appear in her cool human form in her summoner's dreams, she can't interact with anyone in the physical world except her summoner, and she doesn't even have her reaper's license yet! regardless, she likes having a friend, so she helps yuma see things from different perspectives. i figured death spirits wouldn't be off the table, exactly (i mean, look at billy and mandy), but i think there's a certain humor in a death god not being able to do any soul reaping. i like to think she talks about it like her driver's license. "ugh, i'm not allowed to reap any souls until i'm 16 thousand years old! i'm only 14 thousand!!!" because of her teenagerdom, her human form is going to be far less sexualized. also because i think her canon outfit is a little ugly.

halara doesn't change much from canon. very mysterious and intimidating. no one knows their gender because everyone's too afraid to ask (and to find out, you'd have to pay them about $100 in cash). they still love cats but have an allergy to them, they still don't trust people, etc.

desuhiko changes a lot from canon. he's less actively creepy and more of a wannabe romantic. he has a tendency to fall for grown women, although he has absolutely no chance with any of them. this is played for laughs.

fubuki is another character who doesn't change much from canon. obscenely rich and super out of touch with everything around her. has occasional bursts of intelligence for comedy.

vivia is still everyone's favorite emo sadboy, writing poetry in the fireplace. his passive suicidal ideation, though interesting to explore in media made for adults, is very dangerous to put in a children's show, so we're nixing that. instead, he's just real sleepy and goth. he's also the least interested in doing actual detective work, so when he and yuma are investigating together, it gives yuma a chance to take the lead.

pucci doesn't change much from canon, but admittedly, we don't know too much about her. she's sensitive to noise, very thoughtful and introspective, but very awkward around people being nice to her.

and aphex. what to say about aphex. i don't like aphex for a number of reasons (anyone who played with jpn audio can back me up on this one), but the idea of someone who is initially violent and cruel becoming your (still somewhat violent and cruel) ally is a fun character trope to me. my go-to example is buford from phineas and ferb, and i think that's the role aphex would play. initially a threat, but eventually becomes softer and more well-developed. well, if the show got more seasons.

and that's our main cast! i could talk about kurumi, makoto, and martina, as i have a lot of cool ideas for them, but i have been writing this for like an hour and i think i need to chill ahaha... ty for the ask!!!

[deusluxuria]

how i know for a fact that jjba and the greasy strangler take place in the same universe:

-absolutely shameless and audacious

-not one character is normal and everyone has some weird little caveman habit

-overly explained food ("this is a baguette, it is a french bread that dhsjjfksjdksnjf...")

-grossout humor that makes for the best "out of context" youtube compilations

-even with context, so many things in it just create more questions than answers

-obvious things being narrated/explained as if it's media for people who are less than like 5 years old

-sexey purple jumpsuits that have cutouts in the entire chest and penis area

-undervalued blind character who checks off every stupid stereotype from hollywood's stupid idea of what blindness is like and how blind people navigate the world

-there is a male to female ratio of like 50:1 but the very few women are amazing hootie tootie disco cuties

-random dance scenes that are both hilarious and uncomfortable and also violent in some way

-Fashion™ where you have to ask yourself the complex philosophical question of if the outfit is chic as hell or should be tossed in an incinerator

-girlfriend thievery

-uncomfortable family trauma/dynamics that remind you to schedule another appointment with your therapist

-random little scenes of mundane smalltalk that also happen to be the funniest shit ever

-no romantic chemistry whatsoever (at least... not with the characters who are supposed to be romantic in canon) (at least... not the hetero canon relationships) which makes most of the flirty/seduction scenes just really uncomfortable

-people are just naked for no reason

-has some of the dopest music ever made but also some music that just goes like "wake up feelin SO HORNEY" or "oouwuwoohwuwwoow" or whatever

[fukia]

Random Skullgirls [Crack]Headcanons

Black Dahlia used to be interested in dance, especially tango, before her injuries.

Valentine actually likes to banter with most of the people she has beef with, she values them to some extent due to what she had lost.

Valentine secretly talks to the body in her body-bag as a way of thinking out loud, and because she’s cripplingly lonely.

Painwheel when not in a state of animalistic rage can be a real clever snark and roast[er] - when she dishes it out, it is brutal.

The Skullheart is drawn to certain personalities, namely the possessive strong girlboss types.

Double has more than once tried to undergo mitosis and all times it has ended in disaster. Double doesn’t actually like being called Double, but that’s what everyone calls it when it’s not Agatha, so it kinda just had to deal.

Double does indeed have a constantly fluctuating set of likes and dislikes, but it can voluntarily ‘turn them on and off,’ most often leaving it off.

Filia experiments in cooking but isn’t having the best time with it because whenever she turns around, Samson eats her ingredients.

Samson at some point did fall in love with Delilah but had to repressed these thoughts.

Delilah cared for Samson but not to the intimate extent Filia does. She could’ve at some point but she’d gone and died lol.

Peacock is actually an impressive debater, she can be real articulate if she ever felt like it.

Fortune speaks or understands multiple languages in various extents of fluency, a couple being Feral languages, another being Vietnamese. Parasoul and Valentine are on similar levels of social awkwardness when it comes to genuine romance.

Dahlia and Fukua both have masochistic tendencies and so really enjoy fighting one-another just for fun.

Shamone is a woman because Brain Drain took the souls of two women to make Fukua. Not joking.

Fukua doesn’t normally speak a lot and prefers to emote with her body or facial expression.

Valentine, Annie, Parasoul, Dahlia, and Fukua more than once have had a Girls’ Night Out a la TTG Girls’ Night Out & Lucifer S2E4 where they partied hard, got wasted, and fought side-by-side in multiple bar fights. Valentine is the saddest drunk, Parasoul the wildest, Annie the angriest, Fukua the flirtiest. Dahlia barely even gets drunk and often leaves to do some minor jerkassery and return with shit she got from committing petty theft. Parasoul and Annie both had to don unconvincing disguises to hide their identities, Dahlia too depending on where they go. Fukua and Valentine have had multiple heart-to-heart girl talks about family, friendships, and relationships.

Fukua prefers cats over dogs. Christmas was a little uptight, hence Valentine’s beef with her, besides their whole leadership rivalry thing. Valentine and Hallow enjoyed pulling pranks on Christmas, with the latter taking it too far (in the absurd sense) at times.

Easter was the heart of the group, she brought the most protective loving and especially healing energy.

Squigly has an interest in juvenile and grossout humor which she keeps to herself because of how she was raised.

Leviathan also enjoys dancing. All types but especially the waltz (of course), tutting, and break dancing. He wishes he had regular limbs for that last one.

Fortune has a soft spot for baby animals and young children.

You know what? I might make more of these.

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 25/11/2023

waterwraith pokos

Season 6 Featured on: Transmission Archive ~ The SiIvaGunner All​-​Star Nuclear Winter Festival Collection

Ripped by Sponge Lord

Requested by Anonymous ● Mild NSFW Warning

Man, I'm just...picking the BEST and most popular rips of all time to showcase recently, huh? As described above, waterwraith pokos was an anonymous submission, of a rip that I've earnestly never once heard of - using a joke that was completely foreign to me. There was something truly eerie about it all, and led me down a very...fascinating rabbithole.

I've reminisced several times on how nostalgic the earlier years of SiIvaGunner was, and that was in large part due to just how mysterious it all seemed. Nobody had any clue about how the lore would develop, how the backroom would develop the channel's core set of jokes, and a lot of the minor memes like Bowflex, Eggnog and Nathaniel Welchert didn't even have any internet history behind them: they were full-on inside jokes that the team turned into memes on the channel. There's a lot of fascinating stuff to be found in browsing the SiIva wiki and tabbing from rip to rip, with so many people contributing so many obscure ideas to the table, many of which hardly stuck. For instance, Jiko Music noted earlier this year with Trail on Powdery Snow Halation that they were attempting to make Close Your Eyes from the game G-Senjou no Maou a running joke during earlier parts of the channel, but decided to stop after it wasn't really going anywhere. Basically, its sometimes just as interesting to remember the efforts that didn't amount to much just as much as the ones that get celebrated and remembered regularly by the channel.

All that is to say, that I'd never once heard of the audio source "Foreskin Quarters" before investigating waterwraith pokos. To my understanding, its effectively just another one of the internet's many widely-spread grossout videos, this one involving a British man, his genitalia, and a handful of quarters. Yet what seems to have made this video in particular stick with the small handful of rippers using it is the very, peculiar audio - the man's humming, the sounds of quarters hitting a metallic surface, and his enthusiastic "Jackpot!" exclamation near the video's end. This audio, paired with the already unnerving sound of Submerged Castle, and the faint knowledge of what the video's contents are...it creates a rather unsettling image, yknow? I've never been able to see "Foreskin Quarters" in its original form, yet just the atmosphere the rip sets is enough to get the mind churning.

SiIva's rips, as much as they can make me laugh, swell up in emotion, engross me, and so much more...have an innate ability to grab my interest down the strangest of rabbit holes. Its a distillation of all parts of internet history - including its absolute most bizarre points. And while waterwraith pokos ain't going into any of my playlists, I don't think I'll ever be able to forget it.

Jackpot!

[clevermird]

Review: Space Marine by Ian Watson

When other Warhammer fans told me that Ian Watson's Draco was a bizarre, uncomfortable mess, I didn't believe them. They were right. So when they also told me that Space Marine had everything wrong with Draco and then some, I should have listened this time around.

Because they were right.

Space Marine follows three adolescent boys growing up on the hive world of Necromunda - Lexandro D'arquebus, the spoiled, hedonistic son of an official; Yeremi Valence, as close to middle-class as you get on Necromunda; and Biff Tundrish, a low-hive ganger with a distinctive spider tattoo on his face. For their own reasons, all three apply to join the Imperial Guard and selected as recruits to the Imperial Fists chapter of the Space Marines, where they will be molded into weapons to fight in the name of the God Emperor and a strange, complex bond will form between the three that will be the cause of both successes and failures as they fight their way across the galaxy. 

Oh man. . . where to start. The story itself had a decent setup. A coming-of-age tale following the training and missions of some young Space Marines will likely come to be a classic plot in Warhammer 40k literature, but it is one for a reason. The plot mixes the fantastic and sometimes horrifying realities of life in the 41st millennium with more down-to-earth and relatable relationships between the boys in a way that could have been very satisfying. 

Unfortunately, however, it was not. 

The character development, while intriguing and surprisingly complex in theory, is delivered in a "tell, don't show" fashion where, for the most part, the narration simply informs us how the boys feel about each other rather than allowing them to express their feelings in dialogue or actions. On the other hand, the action scenes have the opposite problem - they're so overwritten that it becomes difficult to tell what's going on in a sea of obscure vocabulary and flowery metaphor. 

All this, however, pales in comparison to the content. As a gothic space opera setting, Warhammer 40k is no stranger to horrific and sometimes gross elements. But Watson plays these up to the point of repulsing the reader not just from the events of the story, but from the book itself, seeming to glory in comparing architecture to genitalia, describing various forms of self-harm, and, most importantly, talking about poop. I lost track of how many times this book finds increasingly convoluted reasons for the characters to touch poop, eat poop, poop their pants, etc., to the point that it's not clear if this was supposed to be some kind of obscure social commentary, a terribly failed attempt at gross-out humor, or simply the author's fetish. 

All that being said, despite the low rating, I can't quite bring myself to hate this book. It's not a good 40k book, it's not a good story, and even at its short page count, it overstayed its welcome, but the absurdity pushes it firmly into 'so bad its good' territory and I enjoyed reading it and quoting some of the more absurd parts to my friends. 

Warnings: In addition to the previously-mentioned frequent references to excrement, the book is full of other assorted grossout descriptions, as well as graphic violence, torture, religious self-harm, and some light body horror.

In addition, the relationship between the three boys is often played for homoeroticism, but the way it’s written makes it clear that Watson thinks this is disturbing and toxic and, intentionally or no, comes off as homophobic

Rating: 2/10

[joelletwo]

crybaby is like. everyone in the world should read it. and also it flirts with every single. hardline grossout turnoff i have for fiction and deftly avoids each one by swerving it into something even more fucked up in a way funner way and a way better idiosyncratic characterization of the two guys kjsfg its like the mr melancholy of novels that understand how to keep relationships fun for an entire plot but for freaks

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Is It Really That Bad?

The 90s were alternately an amazing time for comedies and an absolute wasteland of garbage best forgotten. Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler both rose to prominence during this era, and both thrived in their niches, delivering some of the most well-liked movies of their careers. But it was still the 90s, and the ugly side of comedy of the time was always ready to rear its ugly head. For instance, in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, we have the infamously transphobic finale, the joke the entire film has been building up to and is so shockingly bigoted you’d think it was written by J.K. Rowling. But bad comedies were just like that back then, and even good comedies could fall victim to it.

We’re not talking about a good comedy gone bad, though. We’re here to talk about a film with a solid  1 on Metacritic and that obliterated the careers of its two leads: Bio-Dome.

At one point, it was supposed to be a much more serious film about slackers being trapped and forced to survive in the titular structure, but you know how studio executives can be, and so the film was transformed into a totally radical 90s slacker grossout comedy filled with sex jokes, farts, and other tasteless humor. There are also rumors going around that this was originally supposed to be the third Bill and Ted adventure, but those are just rumors, albeit ones that you can see how one would believe considering how this film rips off that dynamic duo while cranking their idiocy and homoeroticism up to 11.

Whatever the case, what we got was absolutely torn apart by critics, and ensured Pauly Shore would never rise above doing anything more than direct-to-video garbage for the rest of his career, and turned Stephen Baldwin into the black sheep of the nepo baby dynasty that is the Baldwins, ruining his career which then led to him becoming a born again evangelical Christian whose daughter married Justin Bieber (which is still a massive W compared to inspiring GamerGate or actually murdering someone). It’s also the film that Weird Al decided to use to describe the miserable plane trip in his song “Albuquerque,” and the way he refers to it makes it clear the film is worse than the plane exploding in the second worse aviation accident to happen over New Mexico in fiction.

(This one being the worst, obviously).

But hey, maybe the critics were just being too harsh to this dumb comedy that was clearly meant to be enjoyed by stoners. With my tray table up and my seat back in the full upright position, I strapped on in and took a look at Bio-Dome to see if this comedy has a few laughs in it, or if it really is that bad after all.

THE GOOD

Well… The soundtrack is pretty good. They’ve got a lot of solid tracks on it, and Tenacious D actually briefly shows up for a cameo. It lasts maybe three seconds, but it might be the best three seconds in the movie.

There’s also a montage set to “The Safety Dance” near the end of the movie, and it might be the single genuinely funny sequence the film has to offer. I thought a few of the gags in it were pretty good, and it’s the only time the protagonist's goofy idiocy felt charming instead of revolting. And then it leads into the climax of the films, which is actually decent because there are actual stakes instead of random vignettes of these idiots dicking around. Sure, it’s decent by the standards of the rest of the movie, but credit where credit is due.

Finally, William “Walter Peck” Atherton plays a character named Dr. Faulkner, a guy who absolutely fucking hates Bud and Doyle, and thus he becomes the most sympathetic character in the entire film. You will be begging him to kill these two morons by the end. It helps that Atherton is the only person in the entire movie who is actually trying to act.

Yeah, that’s it. Time to shift into Hater Mode.

THE BAD

The fact the entire movie hinges on these two idiots is a joke, and not a particularly funny one a that.

The 90s was littered with all manner of idiot duos, most famously with Dumb & Dumber, but Bud and Doyle are easily the nadir of such characters. The big issue is they are not merely lethally stupid to the point they fuck up a massive science experiment—no, they are horribly unpleasant people. They bumble their way through the titular bio-dome, ruining the work of the scientists at every turn, but that’s not even the real problem. No, the problem is that despite having two girlfriends they supposedly adore, they not only constantly flirt with the women scientists in the dome, and even worse they crawl into their beds while they’re sleeping and start feeling them up. Ah, the 90s, where you could have your protagonists sexually assault a woman and still expect people to sympathize them while playing the violation off for laughs! Ah, but it’s okay, because they feel really bad about it, guys.

Aside from that vileness, the jokes are just as juvenile and pathetic as you can imagine they’d be. You have fart jokes, pee jokes, sex jokes, Baldwin eating Shore’s toenails… Stuff like this has its place and can be funny, but this is really the only humor the movie has. There isn’t more clever than some lame fart a stoner can laugh at while high off their ass.

And maybe this could be forgivable if anyone was actually fucking trying. There are two types of bad acting in this movie: hammy, camera-mugging idiocy (our two leads) and bland, wooden delivery (the female scientists). No one in this film seems like they cared at all, and honestly, it’s not hard to see why. What is there to even give a shit about? Out of the two leads I do think Shore is probably the “better” of the two, but this is better in the sense that being kicked in the balls is better than being shot in the back of the head execution style

IS IT REALLY THAT BAD?

Look, I went into this with an open mind. You all know I’m not above enjoying some nasty, trashy comedies; two of my all-time favorite films are Freddy Got Fingered and Little Nicky, the former film especially being one I hold in high regard. But… No, this one legitimately is as bad as it’s made out to be. Weird Al must be thanking his lucky stars that plane exploded over Albuquerque so he didn’t have to sit through the rest of the movie.

Like, in the movies I mentioned, there’s at least something to latch onto. Freddy Got Fingered is essentially the greatest troll in history, with Tom Green blowing a studio’s money to make the most bogus gross-out comedy ever, and in some bizarre ways it has some artistic merit. And with Little Nicky, there’s some entertaining villains, decent jokes here and there, and just a slew of memetic lines. Bio-Dome has absolutely nothing like that; it’s just two obnoxious, unpleasant characters being played by actors who definitely can’t salvage the material delivering the stupidest gags and jokes imaginable for an hour and a half. This really is the most bottom of the barrel lowest common denominator garbage you could scrape up.

Even still, I can’t particularly say it’s the absolute worst comedy I’ve ever seen, mainly because there wasn’t much expectations it would be good. It stars Pauly fucking Shore, the only guy from Encino Man who will probably never win an Oscar as long as he lives, it being dogshit was expected compared to something like The Love Guru or even The Master of Disguise. Those films starred genuinely talented comedians, while this movie just didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, this is still one of the worst comedies ever made, but it really was something I expected would suck even if I really hoped it wouldn’t.

I honestly don’t know how this managed a 4.4 on IMDB; I get there are some lunatics who actually love this movie, but there can’t be enough to pull this out of the bottom 100 gutter, can there be? It shouldn’t have higher than a 2.5, and that’s just being generous because there is nothing about this film that is so good enough that it deserves higher. 

But that’s also the thing: As bad as it is, it is utterly unremarkable. It’s just the epitome of bad 90s comedy, and while it is the worst among that crowd, it doesn’t really stand out in any notable way other than sucking really hard. This is a film bad in the most generic ways possible, and I think that’s part of why it has fallen to the wayside in terms of “worst movies of all time” lists these days. Like does it deserve to be there? Sure, but there’s just a lot more vile and offensive comedies than this to pick from. This is just a generic bad comedy at the end of the day.

If you want to see the concept done right, and shorter to boot, just watch the episode of Johnny Bravo entitled “Biosphere Johnny,” which is a parody of this film and does every single thing this movie tried to do and better, proving once and for all Johnny is a true Chad.

[dustedmagazine]

Oozing Wound — We Cater to Cowards (Thrill Jockey)

Photo by Evan Jenkins

We Cater To Cowards by Oozing Wound

We Cater to Cowards is the fifth LP from Oozing Wound, appearing 11 years (say what?) down the road from the festival of thrashy hilarity that was Vape and Pillage, the band’s initial release. Back then, tunes like “Autopsy Turvy” formulated the ambivalent mix of headlong energy and smartassery that has consistently and sometimes irritatingly informed their music. The band can craft absolutely riveting experiences (“Hippie Speedball,” for instance, is flat-out terrific) but they have been just as ready to churn out cheap pastiche clad in flashy soloing and mean-spirited snark. As on their previous record, High Anxiety (2019), there’s still plenty of nod-and-wink irony in the semiotics of We Cater to Cowards; check out some of the song titles: “The Good Times (I Don’t Miss ’Em),” “Between Cults,” “Midlife Crisis Actor” (which is pretty funny). But also, like High Anxiety, the clowning is shot through with moments of more gravid character. There’s less petty derision and more emotionally hefty drama. Sonically speaking, this is a different Oozing Wound. We Cater to Cowards is a noise rock record.

That’s not exactly revelatory — the band has always been noisy. But their signature blend of top-speed thrashy chops and a punk-ish ethos has issued in a fairly familiar problem. For the genre-bound true believers, Oozing Wound’s records have been too metal for the punks and too punk for the heads. It would speculate overmuch to assert that the noise-rocking strut of We Cater to Cowards gestures toward a heavy-music third way, a new musical tactic seeking to solve Oozing Wound’s scenester dilemma. Likely the midtempo pace and thumping riffs around which most of the record coheres just felt right to longtime collaborators Zack Weil, Kevin Cribbin and Kyle Reynolds, as they wrote and played the songs. 

Whatever the motivations, it’s certainly the case that “The Good Times (I Don’t Miss Em)” sounds remarkably like Steel Pole Bath Tub, c. 1990. The more impressive trick Oozing Wound pulls off is that the song simultaneously sounds like an organic outgrowth of tunes like “Tween Shitbag” and “Filth Chisel” from High Anxiety. A little slower, a little dirtier, but possessed of the same mean streak and informed by a similar interest in excoriating the band’s own contributions to our current conjuncture. On “Total Existence Failure,” Weil snarls, “I’m the king of cultural waste / On a franchised throne across the space / That binds the world…” There’s more Scratch Acid in that sentiment than there is Anthrax, or even MOD. More notable here is the fact that We Cater to Cowards is a satisfying and sometimes thrilling record. Particularly in its final third, it finds a snarling, crunching groove that slots alongside the general feeling of our current socio-political conjuncture. “Midlife Crisis Actor” and “Old Sludge” are by turns sizzling and pummeling acts of musical mortification. 

An ironic distance from the ugliness represented in the songs was an intrinsic element of the early 1990s’ peak noise-rock moment, populated by bands that had learned their craft from Big Black and the Butthole Surfers. Unsane and Cows were great bands that put out some great records, but they lived and died by the grossout. On songs like “Bank Account Anxiety,” the first and best track on We Cater to Cowards, Oozing Wound seems to be evolving beyond the sniggering takedown. That’s a good thing. The songs still hit hard, and the ideas are hitting harder. 

Jonathan Shaw