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Shrekt: Not half bad for a band doing metal Smash Mouth covers

The guy is short but wide, wiry long hair with goatee, half in a cheap Shrek suit and fiddling with his amp, sweating under the stage lights. A glorified Smash Mouth metal cover band but with stupid costumes, the height of originality. Better get out of here before they set up, or go to the back and binge on some Puzzle Fighter. But you lean in and get to the meat of the conversation, before it’s too late.

“She has the same obnoxious laugh as the stalker chick, the one who tried to fashjacket me. I can’t stand to watch her stream for more than a few minutes. It’s kid’s stuff. But I like her.”

There’s a squeal of feedback from Shrek’s half stack and curses from the drummer. Jimmy grimaces. “You’ve been talking about her all night.”

“Well, fine, I’m obsessed with her. Thinking about her takes me somewhere else. It’s like being in love, but only one way.”

“There’s no such thing. It has to be mutual. That’s just a crush.”

“No, I’ve had crushes. This is something different.”

“Right. You’re on a rebound. Still not over that Q chick.” Jimmy taps his fingers and looks at the ceiling.

“I was in voice with her the other day, the streamer chick and some neanderthal freaks spitting propaganda. They’re everywhere these days.”

“Don’t you know it.”

“QAnon took my baby away. Poor, poor pitiful me.”

“Amen.” Jimmy is nodding. “Amen.”

“Said she’d be on the podcast, talk to me about anything. Sounded like she was daydreaming out loud. ‘Anything…'”

“You’re fantasizing. Wishful thinking. She’s chasing after the next gig, a little publicity, typical streamer.”

“Maybe. She’s so… She seems so vulnerable. Always putting herself down. It’s unattractive. That’s what is so different, why it’s not a crush. So much about her is unattractive to me.”

“She’s gorgeous.” The drummer is adjusting his toms, testing some fills. Shrek is hunching over an array of pedals, letting loose static and the distant sound of angry AM talk radio. “I’ve seen her instagram. You’re just shallow, that’s all.”

“As far as looks go? I admit it. She’s perfect. Out of my league entirely. But so is every other streamer chick. And I’m not obsessed with any of them.”

“Well just pay the money already. Subscribe. She’ll send you the big titty goth girl photos you want and maybe even play some video games with you. Win-win.”

“No. I’m not a simp, not a fan. I told you I don’t even like her stream. Why would I subscribe? I wouldn’t. That’s parasocial.”

“What about her art? Her social media presence. Commission her to paint your portrait.”

“I thought of that. I could do that. No, I remember now. I can’t. To have someone paint my portrait? I’d hate that. I don’t even like having my photo taken. And anyway that’s no way to get to know somebody. Same with her idea about the podcast. I couldn’t interview her. I’d turn her down anyway because hell, I can’t bring someone on the show to flirt. It’s disrespectful to the whole process, to her.”

“You just need to get laid, man.”

“No. That was Petrarch. This is real… It’s 2021. The generation of swine. Shit-ass Gen Z, the end. The slick prosper and the true perish. We are seduced where we should be disgusted and disgusted where we should be seduced. It’s the condition of our time. Of our world.”

“Sure… Sure… I dig it.”

The grizzled, aging bassist hobbles onto stage and picks up his instrument. The mask is on Shrek and beyond the blastbeat and shrieking guitar a scream of agony can be heard: “Somebody once told me / the world is going to roll me.”

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Little boy REACTS: ‘Why are puppet shows still a thing?’

record scratch. freeze frame.
record scratch. freeze frame.

Soooo, yeah. I bet right now you’re probably wondering how I got here, huh?

VHS footage rewinds through an entire, shitty puppet act, and

I’m staring, like a stoop, at someone who should not exist, an adult who plays with dolls, in front of me, for money.

Mom and Dad fight a lot. I escape into videogames and youtube videos – changing by the minute – on a 6th-generation iPad handed down to me from Aunt Judy. A single iPad does little to muffle the gut-wrenching snarles of hatred coming up through the floor, but it does minimize their impact on my sensitive brain.

For some reason, though, Mom and Dad are pissed off that I’m on it all the time. Over the weekend, Dad entered my room without knocking. I expected him to kneel down at my eye level, comfort me, and maybe even let me know they are not getting a divorce. Instead of comforting me, Dad took away my videogames and explained they have decided to enrich my life by taking me down to the community theater, where a balding man in suspenders would introduce me and a pack of Latch-Key kids to a miniature stage and his troupe of ancient puppets. Was this some kind of sick joke?

Let me tell you, folks. This shit is real.

So out comes the puppet act. I’m sitting here watching some Gallagher-looking burnout, and he’s dancing his little puppets around – marionettes, he calls them – and you can tell he’s been doing it a long time, since before I was born, because these little wooden bastards are creepy looking. But they are not supposed to be. He never once acknowledges it. Also, he never tells any jokes, or does anything remotely entertaining, whatsoever. At no time do I enjoy this. Still, he just keeps going.

I can even see his shoulders. The guy is right there, behind the stage! I give Dad a sidelong glare, and he looks back at me, nodding, as if to say, “Son, this is from before iPads and shit.”

So I figure ‘whatever.’ I’m giving this lanky beatnik the benefit of the doubt. I mean, this guy has committed his entire life to this material, so it must be some entertaining shit, right? Wrong! This guy’s puppet material is the least relatable thing I’ve seen since Dad introduced me to Henny Youngman.

Maybe I exhibit awareness beyond my years, but I only just learned how to read, and I still need more than a three-word setup, and one-word punchline, Mr. Youngman.

Anyway, back to the puppets: Do you realize how desensitized I am? OK, I am five years old, and I have access to close-up, hidden camera massage parlor pornography, alone in my bedroom. You’re going to have to do better than jangling two limp puppets in front of me like a set of car keys. Oh, they have personalities! Do they? Do they, really? Which one’s the funny one? Which one is more entertaining than electric football?

Now I’m back at home. My parents’ failing marriage has once again stolen the show, and I am back on the iPad. I found a neat 8-hour unboxing video of a product that does not even exist, and is just there to edge me closer and closer to the ultimate dopamine release, which sources tell me is right around the corner.

Watch:

This is the Waiting for Godot of unboxing videos. Surely the dopamine will hit soon.

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Sega Dreamcast is the Best Gaming Console of All Time – OF ALL TIME!

The Sega Dreamcast is hailed by legions as the best videogame system ever created. Gaming fans new and old revered Sega’s final foray into the competitive market of console gaming as their greatest achievement yet. The Dreamcast was more than just a gaming console – it represented a defiant protest of century-old Nintendo, a last stand against the staying power of Sony, and stood out as the ideological opposite of the soulless, ball-less piece of three-headed Hydra shit Microsoft calls an Xbox.

The Sega Dreamcast had the best repertoire of first- and third-party games of any console, the first mainstream integration of online play, and clear, beautiful graphics. Many games boasted 60 frames per second (FPS), making racing games and shooters like Unreal Tournament very exciting, and leading many to wonder, “Wait how many FPS was it before?”

Dreamcast even had a web browser (with an upgraded 2.0 version!) so young children, who didn’t yet know how to delete their browser histories, could safely download pornography without fear of parental retribution – right on their very own standard-definition TVs!

Behold, The Legendary Sega Dreamcast

Sega Dreamcast

To the average mouth breathing redditor, this looks like your average videogame console with a sexy Dreamcast logo on it. But what would you know? Part of the Dreamcast’s charm is in its subtlety. The Dreamcast had a little orange light that, when the system powered on, glowed bright orange and inspired the original design scheme used by the mysterious and fabled Elf Wax Times publication which – according to legend – reigned supreme for a better part of the previous decade. But who knows for sure? The system advances through several stages of power until its fans kick on and Phantasy Star Online bounces to life. Oh yeah, but if your VMU battery is dead, the VMU screen will appear faded, and Dreamcast itself will scream at you by emitting a long, ear-piercing tone from a tiny speaker built into the console. This is a gentle reminder to change your VMU battery. The tone gets longer based on how dead the battery is. You change it because you do as you’re told, and you don’t want to hear that noise anymore. Sega thought of everything!

What’s a VMU battery?

Upon closer inspection, the most observant of retards may notice there is a tiny screen on board the Dreamcast controller, which was revolutionary at the time. Dreamcast controllers also feature two analog triggers that fit nicely in the hands, like dual-wielded pistols with clitorises for triggers. Useful as a heads up display, the removable memory device known as a VMU (Visual Memory Unit) powers the tiny screen, which changed to fit whatever needs game developers chose for it. Oftentimes it displayed ammunition data, hit points or even jokes and small bits of game lore. Admittedly, it sounds kind of gimmicky. Fortunately, there’s more to it than that. You could download games onto that bitch, straight off your Dreamcast game discs, then jerk it out and play it like a fucking GameBoy. No shit. Look:

VMUSega just didn’t give a fuck. In the game Sonic Adventure, you collected Chao eggs. You can load eggs – or a hatched chao – into your VMU and then when you go to school, or work – where you no doubt suffer as a result of being apart from the Dreamcast – you can play Chao Adventure on the VMU, leveling your Chao’s stats to make him stronger for when you load him back into Sonic Adventure. Now that’s metagaming!

PowerStone contained three games available for download. There were fighting games, gun games and puzzles. There are a bunch more but that’s all I can remember off the top of my head. As a kid, I worked for my own videogame (and weed) money, so I didn’t have every game. Sorry, cunt.

If the VMU had anything going against it, it was the watch battery in the back that’s always dying, trying to meet the demands of all the awesomeness inside our VMU. When you needed a new one, you had to walk up to some sad person at Wal-Mart who acted like he was doing you this unspoken favor of constantly supplying you with these flat, quarter-sized watch batteries. It’s not opium, Rajiv. It’s just a fucking battery. I don’t remember what they cost.

Probably the coolest thing about the Dreamcast was just owning a god damn Dreamcast.

Tell you what, that’s the end of this game review, and there’s no looking back now. Now fire up your Dreamcasts and put on Slave Zero.

Masturbate, don’t procreate.