Before we get this started, I just want to mention that, no, this is not an AdVsAd, and yes, we will probably actually do one of those… tomorrow. I won’t spoil any secrets, but it’s so we can use commercials from this year’s Super Bowl! Oh… wait. Shit. Anyway, on to your irregularly scheduled article.

Bacon. It can be your friend, or it can be your… No, wait, that’s retarded. Bacon is a delicious meat food. That’s all there is to bacon. It can be undercooked and horrible or overcooked and ash-like, and when paired with guacamole it creates some sort of amazing science that doubles as an amazing flavor. That’s all well and good, but I think that these days people make WAY too fucking big of a deal out of bacon. Here, how about a quick list of things that bacon should not be:

• Hats
• Wallets
• Ice cream
• Miniature boats
• Gloves
• Full-sized boats
• And, most DEFINITELY, bacon should NOT BE TURNED INTO board games

And yet, what is it we have here? A board game based on bacon named “Mr. Bacon’s BIG Adventure”. According to the Archie McPhee (the publisher) website, “This is by far the most mouth-watering meatcentric board game ever created!” Which is very possibly true. You know why? BECAUSE NOBODY FUCKING MAKES GAMES BASED ON MEAT!

Recently I had a chance to play Mr. Bacon’s Big Adventure (well, to be honest it was quite a long time ago and I was drunk and I only remembered now because I found the pictures on my phone) as the next in the long line of horrible board games Ian manages to find somehow. And boy howdy, let me tell you about this game! It sure was… exactly Candy Land but with meat instead of candy.

Instead of drawing cards, you have one of those terrible little plastic spinner things that you flick with your finger that break under extended use (not that that’s really an issue with this game) and… well, there are also cards which do game-breaking things like take you to the end or beginning. Fun. Instead of bright colors that are easy for kids to distinguish for the spaces, there are little pictures of various types of meat. As far as I could guess, you get things like baloney (which is how it would spelled for this particular instance), that disgusting stuff that comes with little chunks of green whatevers in it, something horribly brown and crusty (bacon?) and… different baloney, I guess. And instead of fanciful lands like the Peppermint Forest, you get really disgusting areas like the “Weiner Wasteland” and the “Sausage Sea”. Bleaugh.

While the game itself is pretty unremarkable, it is worth noting that it is PATENTLY DISGUSTING. I mean, just think about it, you’re a little man made of bacon travelling across this greasy 45 cent meat product land (including a little shack made of Vienna sausages), and the goal of all this is to get to the frying pan at the end of the road, so you can happily be fried and eaten by some gigantic monster who lives in meat land and who probably excretes cooking oil.

I guess you may not share my views on really fatty, greasy food as being something nice every once in a while with a bunch of other stuff to absorb it’s drippings, but at the very least I think you share this view with me: There is not and has never been a call for a game similar to Candy Land but with different foodstuffs. As a closing thought, I’d like to mention that the website displays a prominent “choking hazard” warning. That in itself is funnier than anything else I could write about this game.

Ever since I was a teenager, I have wanted to play a part in shooting a man into space. Oh, sure, I’d love to work for NASA, but that’s a different fantasy. This one doesn’t require so much math ability that I don’t have, or working for a government agency, or anything like that. I just want to strap Jimmy Buffett to a rocket and watch his asphyxiated corpse burn in the cleansing fire of the sun. I want it SO BAD.

The Dark One rides in on a wave of mediocrity.

For those of you who aren’t aware of his work, Jimmy Buffett is the antichrist. That’s really all you need to know about him. In the late seventies and early 80’s he toured nonstop and released a number of successful albums including his greatest hit, 77’s “Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude” which contained his unavoidable single “Margaritaville”. Buffett has maintained an image of beach-bum chic, an association with island escapism, tropical drinks and the like that means you can’t go into a tiki bar without hearing some of his songs. This is only one of the many reasons I hate the monster so thoroughly, as I love tiki bars and tropical escapism. But I hate Jimmy Buffett. He is the Antichrist.

I was first exposed to the work of The Man of Sin in high school, when my “chemistry for dumb kids” teacher who sold snacks and sodas out of his room would pipe these sounds of damnation in to “help us” study. Perhaps it was some kind of scientific experiment, to see if the average young person could concentrate on their work while the sounds of unbearable torture were being blasted at them. I failed this test, as most of my time in that course was spent imagining different scenarios where Buffett was being eviscerated by gardening tools. Really, I knew I was being punished. I should’ve studied harder in the smart kid science classes, then I would avoided that pit. I never worked harder than I worked to get out of there, so maybe Mr. Orton was on to something. But the price… oh the price.

Because I hate Jimmy Buffett so, so much, I thought today I’d review his first greatest hits album, 1985’s “Songs You Know By Heart”. It contains the “big 8″, which are the “fan favorite” songs he still plays at every concert and has for thirty years like the teetering, talentless drunk phony he is. If we’re to understand my hate, this compilation is a great place to start.

“Songs You Know By Heart” starts, like most other cases of  rape, with the false security of familiarity. “Cheeseburger in Paradise” is a song you’ve probably heard on one of those “classic” radio stations as you ride in your uncle’s car. This is the only way to really hear Jimmy Buffett anymore, in the company of his only fans: sad uncles. “Cheeseburger in Paradise” is a monotonous, nonsensical (but not in the charming way), repetitive little dirge that must be heard coming out of the wood paneled dashboard of an RV, or in a dive bar with piles of dead silverfish in each corner, to be fully appreciated. Anywhere that hope has no place to take root, that’s the place you’ll hear it. The album follows up with “He Went to Paris”, “Son of a Son of a Sailor”, and a few other songs that are less known in the mainstream yet equally insipid, before it gets to the inevitable black hole of “Margaritaville”. You know it, admit it. “Wasted away again in Margaritaville” it starts, and if there’s a shred of decency left in your being then you jump out of your moving car and pray for sweet sweet death. “Searching for my lost shaker of salt” it goes on, hopefully to an empty car that’s careening through traffic before crumpling into a fireball on the highway margin. Otherwise, you’ll envy the dead.

Oh, so you think I’m being over-dramatic, huh? You think Jimmy Buffett’s not so bad, that he’s kinda folksy, a slacker idol of sorts? Fuck you. Fuck you with knives, the rest of “Songs You Know By Heart” starts at the dangerous depths of atrocity that are the “classics” and just keeps digging. Songs like “Pencil Thin Mustache” and “Grapefruit- Juicy Fruit” carry within them something truly magical, some indescribable force that boils unborn babies in their mothers’ wombs and leaves only little dried apple dolls with their fingers in their ears and their eyes clamped shut in a grimace. “Why Don’t We Get Drunk” is a song so bad that the dead cry blood when it’s played. Every single song on this album is a capital crime.

I would put a few samples from this album in this article, but really that would just make me part of the problem. You can look them up if you want, but I’m warning you, reader. Every time a Jimmy Buffet song is played, dark gods rip more from the Earth’s collective life force. Every customer that enters his theme restaurants is sustaining the father of all lies, every case of his atrocious “Land Shark” beer that’s sold is another sign of the apocalypse. “Songs You Know By Heart” is, admittedly, a good best-of album in that it encapsulates the artist’s style very well. Simplistic little guitar riffs that an autistic person with clubbed hands could play, maybe some background instrumentals by studio musicians who’ve sold their souls for the right to feed at the filth trough, and little “flourishes” in the lyrics sung by a man with the vocal range of Stephen Hawking. If you’re a fan of this bile, then all the following apply to you:

You were hewn from the purest kind of failure, Jimmy Buffett fan.

1- You don’t just have no taste, you have the opposite of taste. Your choices of what to listen to are little gouges in good taste, they take away from the ability for anything to ever be good again.

2- You have never heard actual music. “Music” is understood to you the same way “emotions” are understood by sociopaths, as a foreign concept they’ve correlated a separated familiarity with due to context. You can’t feel, you’re not actually a human being.

3- You are divorced, several times over probably. Nobody can love you, and this is a saving grace of man. If you somehow still have a lover in any capacity, then it’s a ruse. They’re going to kill you and take all the money you made at that baby-aspirin factory or whatever other crushingly depressing job has warped you out of a once viable mind.

4- You should be required by the state to tell your neighbors about your perversion when you move to a new place. Go door to door and tell them you like Jimmy Buffet so they can keep their children away from you and spray paint hate messages on your door. You deserve it, you husk.

The list goes on and on. If you like Jimmy Buffett, then you are a lizard person who stumbled into some human clothes and has deluded itself into believing the cheap mockery. Scramble back into the bog you belong in.

Of course the fans aren’t where the blame should really lie. No, Jimmy Buffet himself is the badly aging, bleach-blonde concentration of shame that holds the real guilt of his career. After listening to the entirety of “Songs You Know By Heart” all I can think of is the great connundrum: what punishment could possibly match these crimes? What sentence short of the Norse Gods lashing him to a rock in the center of the Earth as poison drips into his wounds would fit? Can “Margaritaville” truly be accounted for with just one pathetic old man’s remaining lifetime spent being battered with hammers as he’s dragged from a helicopter through a field of landmines filled with pig offal? Would filling his eyeballs with chlorine via syringes clenched in rabid bulls’ anuses every day until our machines can no longer artificially support his failing corpse be enough? Probably not. But a man can dream, goddammit. A man can dream of scalping Jimmy Buffett with a broken bottle, running his brain through a cheesegrater and gouging all his hairs out with fireplace-tending tools as he’s forced to watch footage of children telling him what a failure he is in super slow-motion. CHEESEBURGER IN PARADISE DEMANDS NOTHING LESS OF A PUNISHMENT. I WILL NOT REST UNTIL JIMMY BUFFET IS A PILE OF ASHES STILL HOLDING THE FORM OF A MAN BEGGING FOR MERCY BEFORE THE WIND BLOWS IT AND ALL COPIES OF HIS MUSIC INTO THE CALDERA WHERE TIMBERWOLVES WILL SNAP AT THE TINY SPECKS OF MEAT THAT SURVIVED. HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE.

Pant, pant… oh man, I gotta go… gotta go vent doing something constructive. Here, here’s a new desktop. Wow, my head hurts…

Hey there Confusionauts. Sorry we haven’t had an NRF in a couple weeks. Turns out that SOMEBODY thought it would be funny to unleash the NES game that I like to call “THE MADDENER” and it completely put the Nintendo out of operation for a couple weeks while we were de-sanguinating it. We’ve got it mostly fixed now, except that the only game that it’ll run is this Flintstones game called “The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy”. So… I guess that’s what today’s NES ROM Friday is going to be, then. Great.

If you’re like me, you LOVE the Flintstones! Also, if you’re like me, you apparently have nothing in common with me. Funny how that works out. Anyway, I started this game being totally confused as to just who the fuck “Hoppy” was supposed to be. It’s just like that stupid “Tom & Jerry & Tuffy” game all over again. I’ve taken the liberty of singling out this “Hoppy” in the diagram to the left. Do any of you recognize a weird little dinosaur with anime hair buns for a head that apparently lived on top of the Flintstone’s house? I don’t. Not at all do I remember that.

Anyway, the long backstory to this game is way cooler than the seven minutes I spent playing it (isn’t it always?). Apparently the main cast of the Flintstones was standing around outside when a Super Nintendo graphic attacked their pets! And their “friend” the Great Gazoo, who’s supposed to be so fucking fancy just floats there looking disgusted at the whole affair. In fact, just about everybody’s face here is great. Wilma and Betty are surprised, Barney is terribly confused, and Fred is PISSED THE FUCK OFF. “NO FUCKING SPACE SKULL THING IS GOING TO ADD COLOR TO MY WORLD SLASH ZAP MY ANNOYING PET I HATE YOU MOTHER FUCKING REJECT FROM CHRONO CROSS!!!”

It turns out that the guy inside the completely out-of-place graphic is the craft of “Dr. Butler” who is from the 30th century. I think that’s even farther in the future than the Jetsons, man, that’s crazy. His terrible mastermind plan involves stealing prehistoric pets so he can… make them pets in the future. Not to put them in a zoo because they’re extinct or anything, just to change ownership of the pets. And they’re not even the same species or anything (are they? Oh god, is that a lady Dino?)… I guess my point is that this plan just has all sorts of holes in it. Dr. Butler destroys the Great Gazoo’s time machine before he leaves, of course, and now Fred has to go collect all the pieces of it so he can save his pet.

And that weird sequence is what gets us to the nice sidescrollin’ standard of collect all the X’s in my Y. Sigh. The gameplay is pretty much exactly what you’d expect. You’re Fred Flintstone and you can jump and hit things with a club and there are a bunch of birds and dinosaurs and other cavemen you have to ruthlessly slaughter in order to get back some parts for this omnipotent guy’s time car. Why can’t Gazoo do this himself? Is it because he’s just THAT much of an asshole? Yeah, probably. I got through the first level, up until the boss who was a big dinosaur that breathed fire and killed me. I didn’t really care enough to “continue”, so… yeah, that’s all you get for today. You’re welcome.

Suspension of disbelief is central to all fantasy, whether the players are riding literal rockets or figurative ones. If not for our ability to switch off reason for a while, to willfully accept the fantastic and implausible for the sake of emotion, the world of fiction would be a lot less successful, and a lot more banal. Who wants to watch movies where everything is perfectly reasonable, where the extraordinary plays no part in a story that explores realistic lives, trials and tribulations? Film-nerds like me, that’s who. And we don’t count.

Believe it or not, there's a science to this stuff.

Obviously, I know, err,  nothing about pornography, but the psychological phenomenon of suspended disbelief is perhaps nowhere more present than in porn, as Slovenian sociologist Slavoj Žižek ascertains in his Freudian analysis film “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema” and his earlier book, “Organs Without Bodies”.  As the outlet for a very prominent and primary urge the sizable influence of sexual imagination over the other components of the average person’s fantasies is obviously reflected in media trends, which is why pornography (or erotica, as the times permit) has historically been the first form of content to  establish a functioning presence. This is true in just about every new media since the days of Gutenberg, and it stands as proof of the massive psychological and sociological impact that pornography holds. It is that same depth of impact, plus its taboo nature, that creates such a need in porn for suspension of disbelief, as distractions prevent the full immersion the genre has required from the days of fertility idols to Tijuanna bibles to stag films to Deep Throat to internet porn, all throughout the genre’s multifaceted timeline.

… but obviously I know nothing about pornography. The subject of today’s article was brought up in a conversation I had with some very progressive and savvy nuns I was helping to reroute traffic away from some baby ducks. Yeah, that’s the ticket. I was frankly shocked by the sisters’ language, but those baby bunnies needed help. I mean, ducklings, whatever. Thanks for reading the site, mom.

The obvious question arises: if suspension of disbelief is so integral to porn, then why do the stories in porn often come across as so ridiculously far-fetched? We all know (I mean… YOU all know) that porn is often laughably unrealistic; horny adulteresses and co-eds welcoming suspiciously postured pizza delivery men into their homes are a lot rarer in day-to-day life. But this is accepted because the viewer is assumed to be distracted (Žižek holds that it actually has to do with the uncanny valley effect, but I won’t go into that because I don’t hate our readers THAT much). Whatever these cockamamie (or mommy, sometimes) stories are, they’re abandoned in favor of footage of intercourse quickly enough that nobody really notices. The story of a porno has a small window before it overstays its welcome- we’ve all been there. I mean YOU’VE all… never mind.

This image is a remarkably tame example. You're welcome.

One very successful online pornography production company (whom I shall refer to today as “the company” to avoid the billion porn-search results a real name would get us) stands as an excellent example of what can happen when suspension of disbelief falls apart for porn. The company is actually a key player in the development of a very successful business model in the online porn industry informally referred to as the “tree model”. The tree model has been in effect for more than a decade now and will most likely filter down to more meanstream media companies in the next few years as the importance of the internet media market bludgeons them to death. It’s a great example of niche marketing: many specific fetish sites operate under the same company, each catering to a different pocket demographic of porn viewers. Cougars and MILFs, mock lolitas, teacher and boss fantasies, plus far, FAR weirder avenues (of which if you are unaware you may wish to remain blissfully ignorant. So throw away your computer right now), all of these preferences are catered to by one production company through a multi-tier distribution plan which often utilizes the same stars through several subgenres. It’s remarkably similar to how early mainstream cinema was produced in the 1910’s and 20’s, but if you want to know more about that then you still probably won’t want to read my treatise “Charlie Chaplin to Christy Canyons, 100 Years of Factory Entertainment and Gold Digging”. It’s dense and unappealing, very academic.

They do a plain MILF series and a teacher fucking series, and many times one actress will do installments in both. The episodes are titled in a set fashion- in both cases the actress is referred to as “Mrs.” and then her last name. A  porn actress will therefore be credited as “Mrs. Stevens” or “Mrs. Roxxx” to lend a slight sense of authority and age to the admittedly shallow character they’re portraying. It’s also worth note that it’s always “Mrs.” and never “Ms.”, which probably relates to some alpha-male instincts that play into adultery fetishes, for whatever reason. If it works it works, and this obviously does, as they’re both very popular series. However, if you’re the sort of person who cares about nerdy film things, and admitting to be so is I think only slightly more shameful than publicly admitting you have a thing for interacial gramma gang-bangs etc., then there’s something odd you might notice about The Company’s mom-and-teacher-fucking lines.

If you think 69X2=fun, then how the hell do you figure out general relativity? I'm starting to think you're under-qualified to teach this course, ma'am.

A few years ago, The Company changed the naming convention for the teacher-fucking series from “Mrs.” to “Dr.”. This is a sensible shift, as having the same episode title for two films made by the same company and starring the same actress probably led to some confusion. However, the convention changed again after only a handful of films, this time to feature “Professor Rockets” where once there would have been a “Dr. Rockets”, despite the latter being a far catchier name. What was the reason for this shift? I’m shameless enough to admit that I noticed it, and it was distracting to the degree that’s the point-of-no-return for porn. It… um… interrupted the process.

By which of course I mean I couldn’t concentrate on the baby ducks, whatever. Filthy nuns.

Why did The Company stop titling its films with the doctor title? A little digging provided the answer to this conundrum: as it turns out, the state of California has a law that requires works of fiction to feature disclaimers regarding the status of characters as doctors. At first I thought this was nonsense, as there are thousands of TV shows and movies that feature fictional doctors, but as it turns out the law only applies to online media. This makes more sense, as the internet runs on a backbone of pharmaceutical scams and the like, although I doubt it’s a law that’s very often enforced (and most likely won’t remain on the books for long as internet distribution continues to skyrocket). However, one of the first rules of the sex trade and all its offshoots is that a company has to remain as legitimate as it possibly can, as they fall under far greater scrutiny by authorities. Therefore, to avoid any inquiries at all into the matter, The Company didn’t even bother with disclaimers and just started calling their porn stars playing teachers “professor”. Problem solved.

Dr. Sprinkle, PHD. Yup.

Actually, the best part of all this is that there’s still an actress billed as doctor, industry legend Annie Sprinkle. Ms. Sprinkle actually has a PHD and therefore appeared in one film credited as “Dr. Sprinkle”, though she had a non-coitus part. The film actually appeared just after the Dr./Professor shift and was Sprinkle’s first pornographic film in years, so I think we can assume it was a surprisingly sly act of rebellion. The real irony is that Annie did another picture ten years earlier, still technically a doctor, but billed as “Mrs. Sprinkle” while portraying a naughty nurse. I wonder if she saw this as a professional slight, a “I didn’t go to eight years of school to be called “MRS. Sprinkle, thank you very much” sort of situation.

Obviously this is all very film-nerdy and can hardly be considered a massive derailment for most people, but I like to think that the average regular customer of The Company’s mom-fucking and teacher-fucking lines noticed something of it. How does one maintain his (and I guarantee it’s a “his”) suspension of disbelief when the same 28-year old porn actors who are still regularly in high school detention halls every week go from bending “Mrs. Blossoms” over her desk to tossing “Dr. Crystal”’s salad up against the chalkboard? Obviously the boys finally graduated, and we followed them as part of some unseen narrative- they’re in college now. But the college was discredited, probably for all the porn stars they hired giving blowjobs to students every day, and the quality of the staff education level dropped dramatically. At this point I half expect Rodney Dangerfield in a Hawaiian shirt to start cracking jokes and pulling pranks on the dean, but that’s not… well, like I said, there are a lot of fetishes out there.

Really that’s the only explanation, but at least there is one. Without it, one’s thoughts are shooed away from “sex good, she look good for sex, yaay sex happens” and towards “Wait, why is there an ABCs banner pinned around the walls of Professor Legz’s high school geography class?” and that’s just no good. Suspension of disbelief is key.

Well whaddya know, Confusionauts? Nothing? BWA HAHAHAAAA!!! Ahem. Anyway, it’s time for everybody’s favorite cop-out article I do that requires only blind rage at search terms. That’s right, it’s———–

WOW! I’m PUMPED! WOOOOOOO!!!

1. honey dolls – Sigh. Okay, it’s bad enough that we keep getting all these damn searches for creepy Japanese sex dolls, but this month honey dolls was by far the top search, with over TWO HUNDRED searches. I guess that other creepy sex doll they revealed earlier in the month made a rise in creepy sex dolls or something. And… that’s not as dirty as it sounds. Or wait, yeah, it probably is.
2. paget brewster – Yep. That lady.
3. honeydolls – YES, thank you.
4. amelie gillette – OKAY, I FUCKING GET IT!
5. ichurch.com reviews – I did a review last time this search string came up, and I was drunk then so it was pretty much guaranteed to be funnier than anything I could come up with now.
6. honey dolls japan – It’s times like these when I wish I just lied about our top ten searches.


Quorn, I guess?

7. quorn products – Oh man, not this aga– Wait, what the fuck is this? A search string I haven’t seen a hundred times before?! Amazing! Now… I just have to figure out what the fuck “quorn” is. Sounds like a Star Trek alien.
8. honey doll vagina – Oh good, that classes things up a bit. Let’s specify particular orifices of the disturbing sex dolls. Thanks.
9. ianfu – Haha, what is this? Does Ian have his own martial arts program now? Actually, it’d be easier to believe that Ian just made a hack of the game Shaq Fu and replaced Shaq with himself and replaced all the basketball imagery with… I dunno, swirly shapes and frogs or something. I would play that game.
10. that1guy packs a wallop review – Well, there we go, a legitimate search that actually resulted in something good! If you haven’t read it yet, make sure to catch Ian’s review of That 1 Guy’s newest album. And if you don’t, GET THE FUCK OUT RIGHT THE FUCK NOW!!