#shazaam did exist | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

doctor-hoolock · 4 years ago

Text

THIS MOVIE DOESN’T EXIST

Recently the Mandela Effect regarding the supposed 1994 film “Shazaam” (or “Shazam”) starring Sinbad as a genie has been making its rounds again and I am here to remind everyone that this does not and never has existed!

Debunking the “proof”

I have seen dozens of people claim to have a physical VHS copy of this movie but miraculously not a single one has provided photo or video evidence that is undeniable. All have been proven to be fake. There are several photos of VHS boxes and a movie poster that get circulated as “proof”.

This photo uses the hand/main box from this photo (which itself is also homemade/photoshopped) and the torso of WWE wrestler Chavo Guerrero, as well as this 2 Day Rental sticker.

These images are almost always being connected to a $500 listing on the selling platform OfferUp. However, the image originated from the company ThinkGeek. Every year they post products on April Fools Day that don’t actually exist. This was one of the products in 2017 (the last time the conspiracy of this erased movie was really going full steam ahead. Several other places posted things on this same day, but more on that later). Here is a list of all the April Fools Day products from 2017, Shazam is number 4 on the list.

This is often shared as being a poster for the movie. However, it is a compilation of various elements. The hat and ribbon both came from this photo - the hat was turned upside down and color edited whereas the ribbon was flipped horizontally. The gold vest came from here and was flipped horizontally. The genie lamp is from here, and the photo that Sinbad’s face is from can be found here.

I came across this screenshot from 2017 from someone saying they found information on the movie’s cast on a Hong Kong Movie Database, but after searching the site myself on the current page and via the wayback machine I was unable to find anything of the sort.

People often refer to this YouTube video as “proof”, but this is a skit created by the comedy channel College Humor and released on April Fools Day in 2017. Some say the video is archived/old footage of the real film, but if that were the case then the children in the movie would be around 40-years-old by now. The cast from the video is provided in the video description and you can easily look up the children and see they are both still children/young teens. In addition to that the entire video is littered with nods to other popular Mandela Effects such as Curious George having a tail, a newspaper reading “NELSON MANDELA DEAD”, A “Bearenstein Bears” book, and a KitKat wrapper with the name of the candy being spelled “Kit-Kat”. The entire video was made for comedic purposes and is NOT footage of a real 90s film.

A common question asked to those who vividly remember this movie’s existence is who else was in it or what specific scenes do they remember. The only answers I have personally seen answering these questions are either pulled from the ThinkGeek cover (people saying Jonathan Taylor Thomas was in it), that College Humor video, or they could conveniently only provide the names and scenes mentioned in this article posted by Culture Sonar on April 1, 2017. The Culture Sonar article states Ally Walker was in “Shazaam”, but this is a nod to her being in the actual film “Kazaam” starring Shaquille O’Neal - none of the other people mentioned in the article have been in a film called “Shazaam”, “Shazam”, OR “Kazaam”.

Many people also claim that Sinbad has confirmed he was in the movie but that he has denied it and buried it because he only did it for drug money when we was desperate. While he did confess this, it’s clear the people making that claim did not watch the entire video because he also makes clear comedic remarks about how he had to do lots of yoga and use Crisco to get in the lamp (injuring himself in the process) as well as using his connections to have the government help him retrieve every physical copy in existence and use mind-control. This is yet another video Sinbad was a part of to poke fun at the people who so continually and wholeheartedly believe that he was in this film that he himself has denied ever making. Doing the film for crack money became a running joke from Sinbad the year prior in this video.

I also just came across this movie review site that seemingly has a “Shazaam” review from May 20, 1994. But it’s obvious this was also created as a prank and to fuel the fire of those who think it was a real thing. Every review of theirs uses the same photo except that one, which uses the photo of the photoshopped gold VHS case (see above). There are thousands of reviews on this site and aside from “Shazaam” NONE of them are from before 1998. And when you search the website’s creation the domain name was not even acquired until June of 1999.

#Shazaam #Sinbad #Kazam #Shaq #Shaquille O'Neal #Movie #90s #Genie #Mandela Effect

5 notes · View notes

pinermatter · 2 years ago

Text

Shazam with shaq

#Shazam with shaq movie#

While 20-year-old VHS films can be hard to come by, the internet hasn’t offered up even a single shred of evidence - no posters, no clips, nothing - that this particular movie ever existed. “I want to be able to make it known that the movie is indeed real,” he told New Statesman. One man interviewed in the article has offered a $1,000 reward on Craigslist to anyone who can show him a copy of Shazaam, bootleg, rental, or otherwise. Everyone says I did,” he joked in 2009.) And according to Tait, one Twitter user or another still mentions that Sinbad genie movie “nearly every day.” The article doesn’t contain a comment from the comedian himself, but Tait dug into Sinbad’s tweets, which show that he’s been refuting the existence of this film for years. Related: ‘Jingle All the Way’ and Two More Christmas Shopping Movies to Stream The writer also discussed Shazaam‘s appearances on a Reddit community dedicated to “the Mandela Effect,” the Matrix-like theory that we live in a timeline or parallel universe that has been altered in some way: a fringe explanation for shared, false memories like the Shazaam movie (or the idea that the Berenstain Bears was once spelled “Berenstein”). So why are hundreds of people apparently convinced that they’ve seen it? Reporter Amelia Tait went deep into that question, diving into internet conspiracy theories and interviewing several people who described the film to her in detail, citing specific scenes, characters, and memories of watching it. There’s just one troubling fact: The movie doesn’t exist. Comedian Sinbad onstage at Muhammad Ali’s Celebrity Fight Night XXII on April 8, 2016, in Phoenix (Photo: Mike Moore/Getty Images for Celebrity Fight Night)ĭo you remember an early-��90s movie called Shazaam starring Sinbad as a genie? If so, you’re not the only one: According to an article in the British magazine New Statesmen, many people have vivid recollections of seeing this wacky family comedy.

#Shazam with shaq

0 notes

upsmagazine · 3 years ago

Text

The movie that doesn't exist (and the fans who think it does) - Audio Long Reads

The movie that doesn’t exist (and the fans who think it does) – Audio Long Reads

It started with an innocent question posted on Yahoo! answers in 2009, and snowballed into a thriving subreddit community: did anyone remember an American movie from the early Nineties called Shazaam, starring the comedian Sinbad as an incompetent genie who grants wishes to two children? Thousands of people did, vividly – and yet there was no trace of it. In this compelling long read, culture…

View On WordPress

0 notes

orriswitch · 3 years ago

Video

youtube

Did the robber emoji truly exist? I attempt to discover

I gazed at the image and thought, "It's basically impossible that it shouldn't exist." I can swear on my life that I've seen an emoji of a robber similar to that some place on my iOS emoji console. I swiped through the a wide range of emojis available, and when I passed the police emojis I imagined that the robber emojis ought to be there some place. Incredibly, the robber emoji I thought existed… didn't exist.I wasn't the one in particular who was amazed. The answers were overflowed with people who are persuaded it existed previously. There is likewise a string on Reddit of users attempting to sort out where they saw it, and attempted to track down it-however with no avail.

Could it be the Mandela effect?

To anybody not that acquainted with the Mandela effect, it's something wild. It alludes to bogus recollections that can be imparted to various people, and it's undeniably more normal these days with web-based media and the web.

The name came from a bogus memory peculiarity from 2010 when self-depicted 'paranormal specialist' Fiona Broome said that the demise of South African pioneer Nelson Mandela was during the 1980s. The claim was a long way from reality as Mandela was as yet alive in 2010. Nonetheless, Broome claimed that the 'memory' was shared by "maybe thousands" of others.

Other bogus memory peculiarity models incorporate recollections of the "Berenstain Bears" being spelled "Berenstein", and the existence of a 1990s film named "Shazaam" featuring Sinbad as a genie (which I for one truly do accept I've seen a banner of it in a magazine when I was more youthful!).

Some conjecture that the Mandela effect peculiarity may be proof that we are living in a substitute reality. In any case, researchers recommend that bogus recollections can be molded by a combination of erroneous recollections, bogus news reports and misdirecting photos.

1 note · View note

zombieyume · 7 years ago

Text

Here's some fun facts for you!!!

Do you remember in the movie The Empire Strikes Back Darth Vader said "I am your father." Here's a fun fact. He never actually said that. Luke cried out about Darth Vader killing his father. He actually says "No I am your father." Did you know Jiffy is not an actual brand? The real brand is called Jif feel free to look this peanut butter brand. Have you seen Shazaam? You probably remember the main character Sinbad right? What if I told you that movie never existed. But the movie you were thinking of was actually called Kazaam who stared Shaquille O'Neal as the genie. Mind blowing right? If you don't believe me feel free to look up the titles

3 notes · View notes

bunnyearswebstuff-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Did Collective Soul Actually Exist?

Hey, '90s kids, do you remember Collective Soul? They had a number of hit songs that no one can definitively pin down but everyone agrees was a large number between approximately 1994 and 1999. They totally rocked, but never too hard. They definitely had some albums that sold a million copies. But then, like so many other '90s bands, once the 2000s rolled around, they disappeared. How come? Well, what if I told you that Collective Soul never actually existed? Name a Collective Soul song. Tell me about your experience at a Collective Soul concert. Produce the name of a member of Collective Soul. You can't.

This could be Collective Soul. But it isn't. So how do we explain this common knowledge of Collective Soul despite their obvious lack of existence? Me and the other guys on the SoulTruthers subreddit have our theories. It's A Mass Hallucination

This is not Collective Soul. It's like how millions swear they grew up reading Berenstein Bears books (it's actually "Berenstain") or that Sinbad starred in a genie movie called Shazaam (he didn't). The notion that a popular '90s pop-rock band called Collective Soul existed is another example of a shared false memory. But where did it come from? We think there were so many middling rock bands in that era that the world mentally lumped them together. We conflated elements of Matchbox 20, Live, and the Goo Goo Dolls and then got all of them confused with Soul Asylum. It's An International Conspiracy

Is this Collective Soul? You don't know. "But Collective Soul is playing my county fair this summer, and I'm sort of thinking about going, maybe," you offer. Well, the only people who will "rock" your fairgrounds under that name are a group of hired musicians. You see, the most lucrative line of business for the old banking families of Europe is booking bands at county fairs. It's entirely possible that they created Collective Soul in 2013, made us believe by dosing our chicken nuggets with memory-implantation drugs, and put them out on the road, making millions from the suckers who attend these nostalgia-driven shows. We Needed Them

There are no photos of Collective Soul. This one is a heartbreaking but indisputable possibility: We created Collective Soul as a coping mechanism. Amidst the rapid change of the '90s -- the rise of the Internet, sheep cloning, multiple nights of Must See T.V. -- we needed something blandly comforting to see us through uncertain times. And so, the human race turned to what got it through the '80s: the instantly forgettable, perfectly fine music of Mr. Mister and Cutting Crew. Our brains updated it a little, and we all clung to this band until we didn't need it anymore. That was around 2000 or so, when Limp Bizkit got big. Images: Pixabay, Pixabay, Pixabay, Pixabay, Pixabay Read the full article

1 note · View note

elrhiarhodan · 8 years ago

Link

I am astonished these days by the bold-faced ballsiness of the Republican hypocrisy.

My jaw is perpetually on the floor. It’s not even attached anymore. It’s just a jawbone resting at my feet, as my tongue flops and flips around my rent-open face in moist gesticulations that fail to properly explain the sheer what-the-fuckery I’m forever feeling.

It’s probably always been there, this hypocrisy. Maybe it was better hidden, once upon a time. And certainly no political entity is without its duplicities and insincerities — but what we’re seeing now, what is paraded before us daily by both the administration and by Congress, is like satire written by an angry eight-year-old. It’s so clumsy, so on-the-nose, that no one would ever let the story air because it feels like a chimpanzee’s attempt at parody. Irony is dead. It’s six-feet-deep. Political humor is harder now than ever, because how do you make fun of a clown?

Every time I turn on on the news or even glimpse at Twitter, I see more and newer hypocrisies whipping fast past my eyes, scrolling like the list of side effects you’d get on a commercial for dick pills. It’s dizzying: an ever-growing display of towering horseshit so vertiginous that to attempt to climb it would be positively fucking Sisyphean. You’d never make it to the top. You’d forever be sliding back down as another shovel-load whaps you in the face.

They say they care about families, but then they rip them apart and deny them aid. They call women “hosts,” removing their personage, their choice, their access to care. They love unborn kids but somehow hate the women that give birth to them. Eat shit, Moms. They only want what’s in those uteruses, not the uteruses themselves. And once you’re born, ha ha, double fuck you, kid. Fuck your education. Fuck your health. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, they say only after they’ve bought up all the bootstraps for themselves and closed the bootstrap factories and what the fuck is a bootstrap, anyway?

They speak about individual responsibility, but can’t even show up for their own fucking town halls. They won’t be accountable to anything or anyone, but you, you have to be accountable for everything — even for them. When they say individual responsibility, they mean fuck you, do it yourself. Fuck the safety net. Fuck the general health and well-being of the nation. They got theirs, man. They mean that they won’t help you. The government’s very job is one of communal responsibility, but they have absolved themselves of that role and given it only to you. And how far down does that rabbit hole go? Will we be our kids’ only teachers? Are we our own doctors? Is the road outside my house mine and mine alone to build and to fix? They want to hold only their enemies accountable. They’ll investigate Hillary for decades after she’s dead, but they won’t cast one suspiciously-slitted eye toward Trump, toward Russia, toward every pay-for-play drip of corruption that erodes the bedrock of our government’s ability to self-regulate.

They talk about freedom, but the freedom they want isn’t for you. The freedom you want is the freedom to be able to drink clean water, to breathe clean air, to buy products that won’t kill you, to buy insurance that won’t bankrupt you, to invest in a future that helps you instead of hurts you. The freedom they want is for themselves. The freedom they champion isn’t yours, it belongs to big business. They want businesses to have the freedom to poison your air and your water, to lie to you, to tie you up with loopholes like nooses, to savage your investments and your future earnings. They want the freedom to take advantage of you, and they’ll sell that as your freedom, too. Don’t you want the choice to be lied to, to be cheated, to be ruined? What freedom! What choice! Ah, yes, just as our Founding Fathers wanted: the liberty of empowering others to fuck you from every angle. Isn’t that in the Bill of Rights? Can we get it in there somewhere?

They talk about being fiscally conservative, but then they spend money like they can just print more. (And our president thinks we can just print more.) It’ll cost more for our Comrade-in-Chief to go golfing than for the entire National Endowment for the Arts budget. The president has the fiscal discipline of a drunken gambling addict.

They talk about being stewards of the land, then take a flamethrower to the EPA, try to sell off the national parks, refuse to acknowledge climate change, and eradicate environmental protections — including streams. Because fuck streams, right? Streams have had it too good for too long.

They want you to pay your taxes, even though our president is proud of having never paid his.

They bark about voter fraud, then gerrymander the shit out of everything, rigging the game with a hundred thumbs holding down their side of the scale.

They climb to their seat of power on a ladder whose rungs are fashioned from fake news, and then once they’re up there, they look down at you and say, you’re the fake news. Everything you want, fake. Everything you are, fake. You don’t even exist if you disagree. Did you protest? You were paid. Did you show up at a town hall? You’re not a constituent. You’re a unicorn. A snowflake in need of a safe space.

And yet, they call us snowflakes, but melt under the tiniest light of scrutiny, under the smallest agitation. The moment anyone disagrees, they retreat to their own safe spaces, close and lock the doors, turn off all the lights, lower all the blinds so they can peer out until we’re gone.

The evil circus peanut who sits in the highest chair in the land decries liberal Hollywood elites while being himself a liberal Hollywood elite. We must do more with less, the man says as he goes to one of his like, seven fucking White Houses to hold a rally for an election in four years that doesn’t even have an opponent.

They talk about making America great, as if Americans weren’t already great.

They vilify illegal immigrants, as if we weren’t all illegal immigrants — as if this isn’t a country built first on native land that wasn’t ours, then second on the backs of black slaves who we stole and enslaved and tried to treat more like livestock than as human beings. They try to demonstrate how great this America is, but then those who come here to share in its greatness are cast aside, are sent away, are rounded up and torn from their families and told they don’t belong here. They claim to serve an America for all Americans, but it’s not — it’s for a very narrow slice, for the richest and whitest and straightest, for the healthiest, for the abled, for the men, for the companies, for themselves. Even the white working class gets fucked even as they’re told they’re not, because they still have to drink the water and breathe the air. They vote for the right to poison the water, you drink the water, you get cancer, but fuck your health, and fuck your kids if they’re born with a defect, that’s America, now, buddy. The freedom they want is to get what’s theirs from your pocket and pay no price for it even as you wither and weep at their feet. The freedom they want is to rob you blind then point to The Other and say, they did it, over there, it wasn’t us. We look just like you. You could be rich someday. Wouldn’t that be nice? It’s them over there. The welfare queens. The foreigners. The terrorists and the rapists. Not us. Never us.

They make hats and shirts that say AMERICA but whose tags say CHINA.

All the while, that word America in their mouths like a Bible verse on the tongue of the Devil. God Bless America, they say as they pick up their axes and chop at the roots of this tree. We’re good Christians, they say, as they do yet another un-Christian thing, because I’m sure it was Jesus who said fuck you, I got mine. Piss on compassion. To hell with empathy. These hypocrites cut away at the foundation of all the things we need to be a smart, healthy, successful country. They attack science. They hack at education. They want to chop your healthcare to splinters. They destroy debate. They slit the throat of every fact they don’t want you to know. They call the media the opposition, the enemy. They claim that truth is fake. The truth that we are at greater danger from white nationalist terror than from radical Muslim terror? Fake. The truth that we have nothing to fear from refugees, and that they are already extremely vetted? Fake. The truth that transgender individuals are not the harassers but in fact, the harassed? Fakeity-fake-fake, they say. The sky is red, ham is a fruit, pray for the family of Shazaam Berenstein, a survivor of the Bowling Green Massacre who then went on to die in the Swedish Event.

Their hypocrisy only grows — swelling like a tumor, diverting blood-flow away from healthy organs and to itself, because that’s how a cancer grows. A cancer is your body in rebellion. A cancer is rogue cells bypassing the checks and balances of your biology. This is that. Their hypocrisy is a symptom, though. And like with all symptoms, we must not ignore it.

We must treat the disease. Inoculate against the bullshit.

They will not hold themselves accountable.

So we must.

We must demand they do better.

We must demand our media be the watchdog.

We must resist their duplicity and their lies.

Courage in this strange time, folks. Stay frosty. Remain vigilant. Hang together.

Comments closed because, really, c’mon.

2 notes · View notes

whatthehelloh · 8 years ago

Link

I am astonished these days by the bold-faced ballsiness of the Republican hypocrisy.

They talk about freedom, but they freedom they want isn’t for you. The freedom you want is the freedom to be able to drink clean water, to breathe clean air, to buy products that won’t kill you, to buy insurance that won’t bankrupt you, to invest in a future that helps you instead of hurts you. The freedom they want is for themselves. The freedom they champion isn’t yours, it belongs to big business. They want businesses to have the freedom to poison your air and your water, to lie to you, to tie you up with loopholes like nooses, to savage your investments and your future earnings. They want the freedom to take advantage of you, and they’ll sell that as your freedom, too. Don’t you want the choice to be lied to, to be cheated, to be ruined? What freedom! What choice! Ah, yes, just as our Founding Fathers wanted: the liberty of empowering others to fuck you from every angle. Isn’t that in the Bill of Rights? Can we get it in there somewhere?

They want you to pay your taxes, even though our president is proud of having never paid his.

They bark about voter fraud, then gerrymander the shit out of everything, rigging the game with a hundred thumbs holding down their side of the scale.

They talk about making America great, as if Americans weren’t already great.

They make hats and shirts that say AMERICA but whose tags say CHINA.

We must treat the disease. Inoculate against the bullshit.

They will not hold themselves accountable.

So we must.

We must demand they do better.

We must demand our media be the watchdog.

We must resist their duplicity and their lies.

Courage in this strange time, folks. Stay frosty. Remain vigilant. Hang together.

Comments closed because, really, c’mon.

#chuck wendig #republicans #hypocrisy #insist #resist #demand #fight

1 note · View note

barbosaasouza · 5 years ago

Text

How 'Shazaam' Went From Nonexistent Genie Movie To Full-Blown Mandela Effect Conspiracy

Do you remember a fantasy film from the 1990s in which Sinbad played a genie? Well, it never existed. The Shazaam conspiracy is an internet phenomenon that all started with an innocent Yahoo! Answers question inquiring if anyone else "remembered" the movie. A film named Kazaam starring Shaquille O'Neal as a goofy genie did come out in 1996, but Shazaam truthers are adamant that not only were they two different films, but that Kazaam was simply a cheap knock-off of the brilliance that was Shazaam. In reality, this is all part of the concept known as the Mandela Effect: the collective misremembering of an event. Read on to learn more about how thousands of people remember vivid details from a movie that never existed. How 'Shazaam' Went From Nonexistent Genie Movie To Full-Blown Mandela Effect Conspiracy published first on https://superworldrom.tumblr.com/

0 notes

lifeonashelf · 5 years ago

Text

CKY

Do any of you remember a film from the ‘90s called Shazaam?

Allow me to refresh your memory: Shazaam was a vehicle for C-list comedian Sinbad, who is perhaps best known for starring in a 1994 sitcom that was creatively titled The Sinbad Show—which I never watched because the show starred Sinbad. The Sinbad Show didn’t even last a full season on the FOX network (probably because the show starred Sinbad), but sometime either shortly before or shortly after that program was cancelled, its namesake landed the lead role in a film entitled Shazaam, a part which allowed him to stretch his acting chops by playing a wisecracking genie who acted exactly like Sinbad.

I distinctly remember seeing the trailer for this cinematic tour de force. To the best of my recollection, the plot revolved around two precocious children—one girl and one boy, naturally, to ensure that twice as many kids would beg their parents to buy the tie-in merchandise that would inexorably be produced if the film was successful—who one way or another encounter a djinn named Shazaam. Though their initial meeting befalls as a startling surprise for all parties concerned, they quickly become the best of pals and Shazaam subsequently convoys his youthful comrades through a rote series of comical PG hijinks. The specific nature of their shenanigans has been lost to the haze of time, but those details don’t matter much; a mid-‘90s movie built upon that scenario and geared toward that audience sort of writes itself (I doubt there was a subplot about Hungarian sex traffickers, for instance). I’m sure Shazaam helps the moppets surmount some sort of reasonably benign conflict and everyone learns a lesson about the true meaning of family by the time the credits roll. I’m assuming a clever dog is also involved in some fashion, and I’m confident the film features at least one protracted flatulence gag. Mind you, this is all just speculation; I can’t verify any of it since I never actually watched Shazaam (I decided not to because the trailer revealed that the film starred Sinbad).

Perhaps you already know where I’m going with this, but in case you don’t: Shazaam likely qualifies as the least successful celluloid offering ever concocted, because it is a movie which literally nobody watched. Oddly, this dearth of viewership didn’t have anything to do with Sinbad starring in it; the main reason nobody watched the film Shazaam is because the film Shazaam doesn’t actually exist. And I have a real difficult time wrapping my head around this, because not only am I ABSOLUTELY FUCKING CERTAIN that I remember viewing the trailer I’ve described, I can also readily visualize the VHS case for this movie that was never really a movie on the shelves at Blockbuster Video (imagine my incredulity when I learned that Blockbuster Video never actually existed, either). And even stranger, there are evidently thousands upon thousands of people who recall the existence of this movie that does not exist as vividly as I do.

If you kept up with the brief internet furor about this topic which arose a couple years ago, you’re undoubtedly aware the Shazaam phenomenon has been explained away as some peculiar mass delusion known as the Mandela Effect—apparently, so many human brains muddled the title and star of the ill-advised Shaquille O’Neal genie flick Kazaam that our collective hive-minds fabricated an illusory film to match our erroneous memories. (Of course, this begs the question: do those of us who remember Shazaam subconsciously wish there was a film in which Sinbad plays a sassy, flatulent genie…?). This clarification makes a kind of sense, even though my vague recollections of the corporeal Kazaam and my lucid recollections of the false Shazaam differ substantially (in my brain, Sinbad never raps or does karate in his movie, yet both disciplines factor into major plot-points in Kazaam—and Shazaam doesn’t meander into a baffling second-act detour about Hungarian sex traffickers like Shaq’s film inexplicably does).

So here’s the reason I’m bringing this up here: when I sat down to write about the band CKY, the paramount thing I intended to delve into was how I was introduced to their music. Do me a favor and keep that in mind—this information will come in handy later.

When I was a twenty-something in the very late 1990’s-slash-very early 2000’s, I worked at Domino’s Pizza as a delivery driver, which was a really excellent gig at the time. I had almost no bills and gas was a buck a gallon, so I only needed to work about 20 hours a week to earn enough money to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle. And like most twenty-something males who make their living as pizza conveyance professionals, when I wasn’t on the road, my comfortable lifestyle mainly entailed spending inordinate amounts of my free time listening to a bunch of punk rock, smoking a bunch of pot, and playing a bunch of video games.

[To be clear, not all of my co-workers at Domino’s did even one of these things. There was Dennis, for instance, who to the best of my knowledge did not enjoy punk rock, marijuana, or video games. He did, however, regularly come into work with cartons of expired baked goods that he extracted from the dumpsters behind Vons, which he would then rinse in the sink to make them “fresh” again. The prevailing rumor about Dennis’s backstory was that he was a former surgeon who had a nervous breakdown after losing a child patient on the operating table. I’m not so sure that was true, although I am very sure that he once brought in a plastic grocery bag filled with vomit instead of pastries and attempted to rinse that in the sink, too—which is why I tend to lean more toward believing Dennis was probably just fundamentally insane. There was no preamble to his unambiguously unhinged act; the dude simply strolled into the prep area at the start of his shift and said “hey, Taylor” to me like it was any other day… except he was carrying a sack of upchuck with him, clutching it right below the straps, as if girding the parcel to ensure he wouldn’t spill any of his cargo. My manager sent him home when she saw what was in the bag, but Dennis came back to work the very next afternoon—sans puke satchel—and the incident was never spoken of again. To this day, I cannot fathom how Dennis accumulated all that vomit, why he was hauling it around in his car, or what he was hoping to accomplish by soaking it in the same basin where we washed our pizza pans. Anyway, what I was getting at is that he didn’t especially fit the stereotype I outlined. We got along okay, though; I always made it a point to be really nice to the guy—you know, considering his alarming derangement and all.]

One of the staples of my Playstation habits in those days was the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series. Despite having only spent a combined total of maybe zero-point-three hours on an actual skateboard in my entire life, my best friend Andy and I logged approximately 19,000 hours guiding the avatars in those seminal games through a multitude of gravity-and-logic-defying feats which no human being could ever possibly achieve with or without a skateboard. In the real world, I probably couldn’t even pull off an elementary trick like an ollie—but in the realm of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater I was a four-wheeled fucking god who could effortlessly grind up the side of a building, soar off the opposite edge, perform roughly nineteen twisting flips on my way back down, then execute a perfect landing on the downslope of an opportunely-placed ramp so I could launch off that and catch enough air to do nineteen more flips. Though I have never been an aficionado of that particular sporting pursuit, the Tony Hawk games were incredibly fun and offered endless replay potential due to the almost pornographic extremity of their facets. The conscientious city planners in THPS’s utopia were mindful to randomly insert dozens of half-pipes and empty swimming pools all over their towns, and none of their edifices featured a single surface that could not be utilized for some sort of astonishing aerodynamic exploit.

Instead of composing an original musical score for the series, the developers of the Pro Skater franchise rather ingeniously opted to license fifteen-or-so songs by relatively popular bands for each installment. These tunes supplied the background inspiration during gameplay, and were ostensibly chosen because they represented genres which the skater demographic enjoyed—unsurprisingly, the soundtracks predominantly relied on crowd-pleasing punk and hip-hop material (although one of the sequels featured a song by Powerman 5000, whose fanbase was roughly equivalent to the number of people who have watched Shazaam). However, a cycle of only fifteen tracks doesn’t go a very long way when it’s entirely feasible to play 100 rounds in one sitting—as Andy and I regularly did. So as you might suspect, we ended up hearing the same song-batch an incalculable number of times throughout the course of any given session, which inevitably burned every one of those tracks permanently into our brains. This is how I became intimately familiar with the band CKY, whose cut “Flesh Into Gear” appeared in one of the Tony Hawk releases and was consequently submitted for my listening pleasure hundreds upon hundreds of times.

Luckily, “Flesh Into Gear” is a really cool tune, a prime slice of appealing proto-metal with an insidiously catchy chorus and a snaking stoner-rock guitar riff that would undoubtedly inspire anyone in their right mind to rail-slide across a chain of forty conveniently-equidistant park benches. I could hardly believe a song this excellent and shrewdly-crafted was coined by an outfit like CKY, since the group’s foremost point of notoriety at the time was their drummer’s family ties to one of the cast members of Jackass—an obtuse reality television showcase for the misadventures of a squad of unabashed idiots whose misguided testosterone impelled them to launch bottle rockets out of their rectums, drink animal semen, and obsessively scour the ends of the earth searching for various objects to pummel each other’s testicles with.

My persistent exposure to “Flesh Into Gear” via Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater eventually motivated me to purchase CKY’s 2002 release Infiltrate-Destroy-Rebuild, the album the track was borrowed from. I have been spinning that disc repeatedly since I started writing this, and—while the rest of the band’s material is satisfactory but un-extraordinary—every single time “Flesh Into Gear” comes on, it instills me with a rush of delightful nostalgia. I cannot remember the last time I played any of the Pro Skater installments, but with “Flesh Into Gear” navigating my recollections just like it navigated my board-wielding avatar seventeen years ago, I can still clearly visualize the games’ indelible imagery and virtually weave my way through the vast intricacies of those levels I traversed countless times back then. And these evocations are accompanied by a flood of additional splendid reminiscences, snapshots from a far simpler and more idyllic time—perhaps my very favorite phase of my life—an era free of real jobs and real responsibilities, when on any given day my best friend and I could unreservedly spend endless hours engrossed in Playstation, and the most critical concerns in our purview were what combination of toppings we should order on our pizza and whether or not we would be able to track down an eighth so we could smoke a bowl before watching that evening’s new episode of South Park.

This is the true and immeasurable splendor of music. Even this many years removed, I can still listen to “Flesh Into Gear” today and instantly be enveloped in those potent and wonderful memories, transported back to a comfortable living room in Lakewood, sitting in front of a big-screen television beside someone who is closer to me than a brother, our fingers frenetically tapping on the joysticks which control our destinies on the monitor, beautifully oblivious to the evaporating hours because we are twenty-one and our time seems infinite and our futures are wide open and we have a whole lifetime of escapades ahead of us. On these glorious occasions, Andy and I weren’t just mindlessly zoning out on some silly skateboarding game. We were ardently devoting ourselves to having fun, pure and unadulterated fun, the kind of serene merriment you only get to have for a woefully short yet richly blessed period of your existence, the kind of immaculate and untroubled amusement you don’t realize you won’t ever experience again until that phase of your life imperceptibly cedes to the next and the ravages of the real world begin to methodically devour your body and your soul. We were also laughing, a lot, often so vigorously and exuberantly that our giggle-fits overtook us in irrepressible paroxysms that brought tears of elation to our eyes. Simply by being in the same room with each other, we were celebrating just how special a friendship that spans literal decades truly is, and how singularly magnificent it feels to spend time with people whose mere presence has the ability to make you happy. So, it didn’t ultimately matter how many times we heard “Flesh Into Gear”. I never got sick of that song. Who could ever get sick of laughter and happiness?

The list of CKY’s quantifiable merits isn’t an especially long one. Nevertheless, they created something which conjures a surge of jubilant memories that I will never forget, and would never want to. Thus, they will always occupy a warm place in my heart, a place where they are inextricably tied to one of the most joyful epochs of my life: those euphoric and carefree days when my best friend and I had all the time in the world to listen to “Flesh Into Gear” over and over and over again while we were playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

Okay, are you ready? Here comes the Sinbad part…

In the interest of accuracy, I went online to look up the Pro Skater series and clarify which installment this particular track was used in. As I said, each of the Tony Hawk releases featured a different assortment of songs, and since Andy and I enthusiastically immersed ourselves in all of them as they came out, we heard and re-heard the music on all of those playlists accordingly. I was fairly certain “Flesh Into Gear” was part of Pro Skater 3’s soundtrack, but I wanted to verify that it hadn’t instead appeared in one of the previous games before I started waxing nostalgic here.

What I found out is this: CKY’s song “Flesh Into Gear” did not appear in any edition of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. The band did indeed supply a track to THPS3, but it was an entirely different cut called “96 Quite Bitter Beings”, which I do not have in my collection because it isn’t even on the same album as “Flesh Into Gear”. This means that for the last however-many years, I have been assigning a reverent sentimental significance to a song that, for all intents and purposes, has absolutely no relevance to the detailed web of memories I have snuggled around it. The crystal-clear recollections I have of guiding a pixilated daredevil through a labyrinth of nosegrind-ready obstacles while “Flesh Into Gear” churned in the background never happened.

Shazaam.

For the record, Andy is still my best friend, and has been for 33 years and counting. Our lives have changed significantly since our Pro Skater era, but our bond has not. Though we are only able to hang out every couple months or so at present, whenever we do, we still play video games. And we still watch South Park. And we still approach ordering pizza like the medley of toppings we select are variables in an intricate and vitally-imperative equation. And we still laugh a whole fucking lot.

Sure, I miss the old days—anyone who doesn’t miss the old days obviously wasn’t doing the old days right. Yet, despite only seeing Andy a handful of times a year and having to drive two hours to Oceanside to do so, I never get so wistful for the way things were that I neglect cherishing the way things are now. I love Andy’s wife, Neisa, and I love having a front-row seat to the incredible and inspiring marriage they have built together. I absolutely adore the two remarkable humans they created, Shae and Nixon, and I consider it the most profound honor of my life to be their Uncle Taylor. There are plenty of things I would change about my own contemporary reality, but there isn’t a single thing I would change about theirs.

Still, every now and then, I do find myself wishing I could revisit that living room in Lakewood, settle down in front of that big-screen TV with Andy, turn on the Playstation, and feel as infinite and invincible and utterly content as I did back when I was a twenty-one year-old pizza conveyance professional whose universe was far too harmonious and secure to generate even an inkling of anxiety about the present, let alone the future. If I did return to that time and place, it wouldn’t be so I could instigate any sweeping amendments or pass on some sage piece of cautionary wisdom to my younger self. No, I think I would let the pages of that chapter turn exactly the way they did. Because, all things considered, spending entire days on end doing something as enchantingly frivolous as playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater with your best friend in the world isn’t really all that irresponsible—it’s probably precisely what life is all about. And, you know what, it wouldn’t matter to me one bit which CKY song was on the soundtrack, just as long as Andy and I were having fun while we listened to it.

I hope you enjoyed this piece. Even though it starred Sinbad. If you don’t mind, I’m going to go ahead and roll the credits here on that poignant note. I’ll save the story about my run-in with Hungarian sex traffickers for another time.

July 21, 2018

0 notes

jaunitamanns134-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Senior citizens Discover how to Clear Mess As well as Scale down The Easy Means

Ornate vegetations in your house, office or even outside the patio, backyard. whether the bugs are actually less or not, they can harm your landscape, even your wellness. Fast lane status attends to additional constant communications along with the FDA review crew and a moving customer review of the Biologics Certificate Application (BLA). The ideal community includes value to your house; purchasing a house in a great community is a huge assets. You can easily set up your own Open Residence like a Real estate professional would certainly (make certain to bake some cookies for an excellent scenting home). Nobody's selling a magic wand you merely swing around - as well as Shazaam, you don't should recognize the best ways to house train your dog given that - astonishingly - your canine has become immediately potty educated. Here are actually some residence hosting recommendations that may aid your home resemble an appealing and also welcoming residence for your possible customers. Pumped to develop and expand out the FAST & FURIOUS world in a trendy, interesting technique with our @sevenbucksprod, writer/producer Chris Morgan, producer Hiram Garcia and also lead manufacturer and my greater identical twin, Neil Moritz. The advantage is this does not take a whole lot of initiative to educate our own selves and remain in a position to earn an easy windmill at your home and create multiple ones if requirement be. You do not have to be a technological specialist to do any one of this. Along with an effortless condescension, and kind abstinence in the direction of our nonsense - which, to his purchase of thoughts, have to possess seemed little bit of except criminal activity - would certainly he forth-with, by merest touch of his finger, make the incomprehensible as clear as daytime. Properly, several house proprietors like the modus operandi from our home acquiring business and are actually delighted to market their property without must deal with or restore the numerous architectural issues of your home. This's a primary concern for Democrats, yet through agreeing to contain a ballot on this that's distinct coming from the fast-track costs, all of it however promises the House is going to certainly not have that up. Thus if you are coating the inside of your residence, this is encouraged to make use of water-based paints, while solvent-based paints are suggested for coating the exterior from your residence. I perform certainly not warm my property in the day in winter, yet when writing in your home I wrap a blanket around my legs. They are going to take you through the entire technique, thus do not panic if you have actually certainly never marketed a residence before. It is actually fairly basic, my buddy; pretty much everything you possess within the rest of the house you could possess down in the basement. One more terrific feature of timber play houses is actually that they are actually effortless to broaden any sort of existing timber play structure.

Since our team did nothing to gain this cash besides reside in our outdated house for 5 years, that really feels a little unreal still - but we intend to handle that http://fit4you-kateblog.info/onycosolve-prijs-zie-prijs-bijgewerkt as one thing special and guard this if our experts can, in the hope that it will definitely enable us even greater financial versatility as well as safety and security in the future. An effortless to see instance of this particular is actually the property market in San Francisco, where average revenue earners can easily certainly not manage average homes - in all. Eliminate whatever up against your home that may be chigger sanctuary as well as keep this out.

PHOTO: Two instances of Pennsylvania Property eating chairs that sporting activity varnish overcoats administered with the Unicarb System. Not only are you incapable to pay the mortgage loan due to joblessness, selling your home will not also cosmetics the variation of what you are obligated to repay the banking company.

0 notes

touristguidebuzz · 8 years ago

Text

Chefs+Tech: The Tricky Business of Comparing Delivery Apps

Grubhub sends more orders to restaurants daily than any other service. Grubhub

Skift Take: You can't judge the success of a food delivery app by counting the number of users who simply open the app.

— Kristen Hawley

Editor’s Note: In September we announced that Skift was expanding into food and drink with the addition of the Chefs+Tech newsletter. We see this as a natural expansion of the Skift umbrella, bringing the big-picture view on the future of dining out, being fanatically focused on the guest experience, and at the intersection of marketing and tech.

Bonus: We now publish C+T every Monday and Wednesday.

Comparing Apples to Oranges, or: UberEats to Everyone else

A slightly misleading headline from Eater recently extolled UberEats, comparing the service with other top mobile-order delivery companies GrubHub, Caviar, and DoorDash. Instead of comparing the number of orders delivered (or total dollar amount spent, or any other metric touting actual orders), the comparison of monthly active users (MAUs) refers to unique people who opened the mobile app any time during one month. This is standard practice in the tech world, and a good way to measure engagement with a content app like Twitter, or a product like Evernote. This is less accurate, though, when determining the popularity of a delivery service. While the article itself notes the metrics by which they compare, this comparison is not the best way to determine who rules the market.

Uber is a privately-held company and can keep its metrics close. Grubhub, as a publicly traded company, offers more insight into its business. Specifically: more than 60 percent of Grubhub/Seamless orders are placed through mobile devices. Using the data provided to Eater, we estimate Grubhub’s combined desktop plus app MAUs at closer to 5.9 million. Grubhub also releases its quarterly active diner numbers. In Q1 2017, 8.75 million people ordered from Grubhub, a monthly average of 2.9 million people. By this logic, at least half of the reported monthly active users don’t actually place a food order. Applying this formula to the reported UberEats numbers nets about 4.3 million active diners per month. (Uber did release a website for order placement, but this wasn’t released until Q2 of this year, so does not apply here.) This math includes some assumptions, and I don’t purport them to be these companies’ actual numbers.

UberEats, which does not release numbers, does tout 40,000 restaurant partners in 71 cities — 37 of them in the US — to Grubhub’s 50,000 US restaurants in 1,100 cities. According to a Grubhub spokesperson, “Our more than 324,600 orders per day is more volume than anyone else sending orders to restaurants.” (The spokesperson did not clarify the identity of “anyone else.”)

This is anecdotal evidence at best, but illustrates that comparing food delivery companies, especially publicly-traded vs. privately-held delivery companies, is tricky business. Determining the performance of a company’s app does not translate into tracking the actual business of food delivery. So, sure: comparing unique app opens may be the only way to judge apples to apples. The open rate of an app says something about its marketing, its messaging, its rate of adoption — but in this case does not prove its success.

David Chang on the Challenges of the Business

Speaking of the challenges of delivery, fresh off of Maple’s closure last week, early investor and collaborator David Chang is interviewed by The Ringer, where he talks about many of delivery’s challenges, from what not to deliver (fish) to paying a living wage (it’s complicated). The business of restaurants is established. It changes and evolves and adapts to the current landscape, but it’s established.

The business of delivery, though, is different. It’s growing, changing, morphing into something different entirely. So it’s easy to think a restaurateur as successful as Chang would have it figured out. Instead, he’s vocal about what he doesn’t know: how to delivery great food at a fair price for chef, delivery person, and diner; whether it’s better to hire and maintain a delivery staff (the Maple model) or partner with an existing service (Chang’s Ando uses UberEats). “It’s an extraordinarily difficult business that someone is going to win, and it’s something that I’m really fascinated by. It seems like almost every place delivers food that’s not meant for delivery,” he says. There’s a reason that pizza rules the delivery game, he says — because it’s the perfect delivery dish.

“Shazam for Food” Is Real

Microsoft was recently granted a patent for glasses that track when and what you eat. If this sounds like a ridiculous Hollywood script, it’s because it is — “Shazaam for food” was parodied on a recent episode of HBO’s “Silicon Valley.” (In fact, a few real-life investors went on the record saying the idea could be fund-able in real life a day before the real patent was awarded.) It “includes mixed-reality glasses that can monitor sight, sound, location, temperature, and motion. These sensors help the glasses identify food in front of the wearer and analyze its nutritional content.” It could also help the wearer steer clear of allergens, certain ingredients, or high-calorie foods. Of course, a patent does not equal a product, but still, ha.

Digestifs

The true history of the paella emoji (unsurprisingly, it involves Jose Andres) — Food & Wine

The Los Angeles restaurant scene: so hot right now — NYTimes

Chicago’s iconic Portillo’s now delivers its hot dogs. Peak delivery? — Eater Chicago

0 notes