Sending Things to Strangers on the Internet

Last week I came across a post on Facebook that was sort of like a chain message, only instead of demanding I share the totally true and entirely not fake story of Sally the little orphan girl with no eyeballs who will come into my room and turn my face into spiders and also burn my house down if I don't forward it on to at least ten people before midnight, it was a chain message about sharing books with people.

 
 

Unlike Sally's face-spider/arson letter, I liked the premise of this thing and decided it would be a nice way to spread some positivity in the world. I do not negotiate with haunted orphan terrorists, but I'm totally down with promoting literacy.

About a month ago I discovered the website of one Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, a writer about seven billion times funnier and better at writing than I will ever hope to be. Reading The Bloggess' site has served as a big motivator for me to start devoting more time to creating for AiH: a task which I was surprised to find did wonders for my overall well-being . Apparently if I'm not creating anything, eventually too much clutter builds up in my head and I get super unhappy. It seems drawing dumb cartoons and writing poo jokes remedies that enough that I don't relapse into an uncontrolled World of Warcraft binge where I gain ten pounds and hate myself.

Back in February, Mrs. Lawson posted something called Booksgiving on her site. That post is here. The premise of that event, which I gather was extremely successful, was very similar to the premise of the non-orphan-murderer chain mail I screenshotted above; a bunch of strangers on the internet gift books to one another because it's a nice thing to do and we could all benefit from a little random kindness once in a while. 

I decided that having missed Booksgiving due to not being aware of it, participating in this book share chain mail would be a good way to pay homage to someone who had inspired me, while simultaneously doing something nice. 

I went out and purchased two copies of Furriously Happy by Jenny Lawson. One to send to whatever stranger I got linked up with and the other to read myself.

Please disregard the disembodied dog head, Griff has a thing where he must be in any photograph being taken in his vicinity. You pretty much can't snap a photo of something in my house without his dumb head stuck somewhere in the frame.

I got assigned someone in London to send my book to, which is pretty cool. I don't think I've ever had to mail anything internationally before. 

Off my book goes, along with a little note I wrote and this drawing of a bunch of dinosaurs having tea because apparently that is what I think of England.

 
 
 
 

I'm not gonna bother with what I wrote in the note, but basically I just explained why they were getting a random package and that I hope they liked the book, or the consolation dino tea party if not. Also I may have gotten off on a tangent at one point where I said mean things about Topeka Kansas for some reason.

Maybe this will be the beginning of an awesome old timey pen-pal relationship where we will send each other letters and junk in the mail. I've always wanted a pen-pal. Or maybe my weird book and dumb dino-drawing will make them think I'm a huge loser. One of the two for sure.

You Wont Believe These Disney Princesses, Re-imagined!

You may think you've seen these Six Disney Princesses before, but you've NEVER seen them like this. These re-imagined princesses will have you saying "OH MY!"

It seems like Disney Princesses have been re-imagined in literally every possible way you can think of. They've been made slightly chubbier, slightly skinnier, made to look like pinup girls, given realistic faces, gender swapped, made into tattoo covered hipsters... and...actually that's pretty much it.

With literally gallons of reimagined Disney Princess click-bait articles all circulating the same handful of concept art princesses you would think we might come up with a new cheap attempt at generating site views with worthless content. You might also think people would finally stop clicking on them.

Apparently you'd be wrong on both counts! WE WILL PLASTER YOUR FACEBOOK FEED WITH SLIGHTLY PHOTOSHOPPED PRINCESSES UNTIL YOU BLEED FROM YOUR EYES AND DIE.

As Promised, Here are six Disney Princesses presented in a whole new way, like you've never seen: As Grapefruits.

1. Ariel


2. Cinderella

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3. Belle


4. Mulan

                                                    the joke is that it's a chinese grapefruit.

                                                    the joke is that it's a chinese grapefruit.


5. Snow White

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6. Jasmine

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PS. The lesson here is that garbage clickbait articles are the worst. If you agree, but are also a hypocrite like I am for making this in the first place, please share! Stop the clickbait spam! (except for this one. Spread this one because people looking for Disney Princesses and getting Grapefruit is hilarious.)

PS Also: I am not proud of myself for this.

PS also also: I kind of am, just a little.

I am Weedman

Last weekend the single worst thing that ever could, or ever has happened to a human being happened to me. I received the following text:

 
 

Dear sweet Muppet Baby Jesus, this is my nightmare.

The "who this" text, is like the digital equivalent of a Jehovah's Witness coming to your house. Except instead of knocking on your front door where you can sit perfectly still in the den and pretend not to be home, he came in the side door and started making potato salad in your kitchen before you even realized he was there. 

You just walk into the kitchen because you want some juice and there he is, all "Hey buddy, want some potato salad? Want to talk about Jesus?" You aren't prepared for him and he's already breached the defenses, so the next thing you know you're thumbing through a copy of The Watchtower and eating potato salad. And you weren't even in the mood for potato salad. AND you never get your goddamn juice.

The point I'm tying to make is that I have a hard enough time dealing with people on a day to day basis in places I expect to have to deal with them; I am not equipped to handle the stress of having them pop up within the sanctuary of my phone.

Whilst wrestling with the crisis of the first unsolicited grammatical travesty, mystery texter sent me this follow up gem:

 
 

Whelp, I was having a heart attack over getting a stranger text, but that statement is so ridiculous I decided I was going to have to take action; You don't just double text somebody some "who this" texts with no regard for grammar, punctuation, capitalization or the fact that you shouldn't tell a stranger you have them in your phone as 'Weedman'. We're trying to have a society over here buddy, pull it together.

Here is how I chose to respond:

 
 
 
 

I guess once they discovered that I didn't have any weed they lost interest in talking to me. That or they thought I was some kind of maniac. Either way they didn't text me anymore, so I got what I wanted out of the situation.

Me: 1  

Stranger who learned a valuable lesson about what happens when you text random numbers like some kind of animal: 0

Moral of the story: 

  1. Don't call or text random numbers and have the audacity to ask the person you just phone molested who they are.
  2. If a random number calls or texts you in what clearly seems to be a wrong number situation, don't call them/text them back to see who it was. If it's someone you actually know they'll leave you a message. But hopefully not a voicemail, because people who leave voicemails are almost as bad as people who text strangers. You're just making everything worse for everyone forever so stop it already.
  3. Just be normal and avoid having to have contact with anyone ever like the rest of us.

That will be all.

Also, now I want potato salad.

The Dogs Broke My Wife

Every now and again my wife gets caught in a loop where she find something (usually herself) so goddamn funny that she devolves into hysterics for minutes at a time, laughing at pretty much nothing. 

I took this video a while back when the dogs were being a pair of complete assholes and it launched Emily into what can only be described as a physical manifestation of  a person who "literally can't even".

Maybe it's just me, but I just find these fits of hysteria infectious. Whenever I need a laugh throughout my day I get out my phone and play this video and it never fails to put me in a good mood.

I'll just leave this here in the event that it can brighten up someone else's day just a little.

If that made your day even an infinitesimal amount better, I'm glad that I shared it. If you know of somebody else who might need something to make them laugh at something dumb for a few minutes in an otherwise crummy day send this to them too. Or send them a video of yourself breakdancing while wearing one of those inflatable t-rex suits. Or go to their house and give them an atomic high five. Or do literally anything to make you or someone else just a little less full of rage and disappointment at the world.

 

P.S: I feel like I should apologize for the fact that I shot the video in portrait mode. I wasn't raised by wolves, I know better then that.

I'm Super Famous Now.

I'm proud to announce that I am the star of a smash internet hit video.

I've been a huge Rooster Teeth fan since I was in about 8th grade. Rooster Teeth is a company that makes web content, for those not familiar. They have massively popular shows like Red vs Blue and RWBY, a number of super popular weekly podcasts, and a whole slew of other shows and content.

A few months ago, Rooster Teeth released their first feature length movie, Lazer Team. As a Christmas present for by brother, I purchased two tickets to the premier so we could see it in one of the select theaters showing it opening night.

At the screening, an intro for one of Rooster Teeth's shows Achievement Hunter Weekly Update was shot by a fan. It's a video of the entire audience shouting the intro line for the show, but I think we all know who the real star was. That's right. Me.

The clip was submitted and ended up being used in the video for AHWU #310 a few weeks ago. Thanks to my breakout appearance in the video I am now a famous internet star.

If you want to check out the full video, I'll include a link to it at the end. To save you some time and get down to the real main attraction, I've used the marvels of modern technology to show you just the important part. Here is where I make my youtube fame debut:


First you go to the video, and pause it at 10:24


Enhance

 
 

Enhance

 
 

Enhance

There we are.

 
 

My Brother is the sort of teal colored amoeba and I am the reddish thing that kind of looks like an alien/ Beaker from the Muppets waving it's hands above it's head.

I'm not sure what to do now that I am a huge famous youtube star. I'll probably have to quit my job, move out to LA and start signing lots of autographs. Don't feel bad that you guys are only mere peasants now that I have outgrown you and am a huge important deal.

I'll remember you all fondly.


P.S Here is the link to the original video: AHWU #310

My Friend Had a Baby!

I had a new experience recently. For the first time in my life I found myself in a situation where I actually give a shit about a baby.

Okay, so I realize that sounds bad, but I don't mean it like I'd watch a baby wander into traffic and not get up to help because I was just really into the sandwich I was eating at the time. I'm not a monster. It's just that i'm not interested in babies outside of ones that are actually related to me, unless they are actively doing something amazing like break-dancing, or they are involved in some sort of adorable hijinks  involving the family dog. 

Even though a lot of people won't admit it, I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that feeling either. It seems to be an unspoken rule that new parenthood is just one of those things that we all tolerate people oversharing about on Facebook. When presented with people's babies, either digitally or in real life we l make the appropriate noises, click 'like' or whatever and then get on with our day continuing to give exactly the same amount of a crap about that person's baby as we did before. Which is 0.

I'm at that age where a lot of my friends are getting married and some of them are starting to have children, so my social media is particularly ripe with pregnant people, pictures of babies and other such nonsense. Now, I don't begrudge people for sharing their baby pictures and living under the delusion that anyone cares that Jr. looked particularly cute sleeping today versus when he was sleeping yesterday; I'm going to be a goddamn nightmare when I have kids. I mean, I've got an entire website to fawn over my future children with, so arguably my offspring will be a worse offender of spamming people's newsfeeds than the babies we're all pointedly not caring about now. 

Despite my general disinterest in other people's babies, when one of my oldest friends and her husband had their first baby just a few days ago, I discovered that I actually care about his existence. Not in the fake way that most of us usually pretend to be interested in babies but legitimately. Like, I want to meet him and I want to get him a tiny baby  present and whatever other stuff you do with a baby. Hold him up like Simba maybe.

When she first told me she and her husband were going to have a baby the conversation went like this:

Her: *texts photo of ultrasound* "Hello Uncle Matt"

Me: ...

Me: First of all, Congratulations. Second of all. I will pay you one million dollars to name that baby Volcano-Halfpipe.

Her: Well what if it's a girl?

Me: Last time I checked Volcano Halfpipe is a unisex name. You will have the most epic of babies.

Her: OMG, that is the best baby name I've ever heard and I will for sure name my baby Volcano Halfpipe*

*response paraphrased, but that's totally what she said. For real.

As you can see, we have a special kind of relationship where she can text me with enormous life changing news for her new family and I can immediately insist she name the baby something preposterous. And by preposterous I mean f*#%ing awesome.

The appropriate incubation period later, she sent me the following:

 
 

It's good to see she has at least embraced Volcano Halfpipe as the baby's name, or at the very least accepts the fact that I will call him this for the entire rest of his life regardless of her opinion on the matter.

In my mind that baby is the most metal baby on the planet. I want that baby to do a kickflip off a ramp while jumping over a bunch of other babies and shooting a lazer gun as an explosion goes off in the background.

It's a really weird to think that someone I've known since we were basically kids now has an entire person that they made and are going to teach to be a human. It's even weirder that opposed to the general apathy I have towards other people having babies, I'm 100% thrilled for her and her husband, and am really excited about him.

I don't know what it is that has stirred this change for me. I kind of feel like the Grinch when his heart grows three sizes and smashes that x-ray machine. At first I thought maybe it was just a by-product of the fact that I'm maturing and my values are becoming more adult and complex. I considered that I may be at the point in my life where I am starting to become a mature person with a grown up outlook on life.

Then I remembered that I spent two and a half hours yesterday drawing a cartoon of an anthropomorphic head of lettuce gingerly dipping it's butt-cheeks into a bowl of water, so clearly I've not undergone any personal growth since the fourth grade.

 However, I do think part of the reason is that as I get to the point where having kids starts to appear on the horizon in my own life, it's resonating with me in a way it never has before. Sure with Emily going to vet school it's still at least several years off, but the concept is a lot more real than it ever has been. Its a lot less foreign of a concept than it has ever been before.

Ultimately though, I think I'm just getting sentimental over the fact that it seems like I was just getting dropped off at an amusement park by my parents to hang out with my friend and her new boyfriend who she wanted me to meet for the first time and now they are married and created an entirely new human being. I love them both dearly, and although the extent of my interaction so far with their new son has been a picture sent to me via text I already love him too.

Welcome to the world young Volcano Halfpipe. May you shred harder than any other baby and may you grow up to be an unmitigated badass in all things.

It's the Future.

In case anyone was wondering, and I know you were, quite a bit of time and energy goes into the creation of those longer form stories like The Laptop Charger, Night of 1000 Dog Farts, or Star Wars

It can take weeks to complete one depending on how many pictures I have to do. Part of the reason the process is so arduous is that I do things pretty low tech.

For posts like the ones I mentioned above, the process of doing one drawing from start to finish goes something like this:

First I do an initial sketch.

 
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Next I take that sketch, clean it up and trace it onto a new sheet of paper, getting it just the way I want it.

 
 

After that I ink the drawing and put in the shading.

Trex.jpg

Next I use a scanner to scan the inked drawing onto the computer, to get a .jpeg format image.

 
 

After that I have to crop it to the proper size and upload it to this site which has a few rudimentary tools for editing images. I mess around with the brightness and whatnot to get it as close as I can to not looking like it's a scanned piece of paper.

 
 

If at any point I mess up my lines, get a stray mark on the paper, or the scan comes out kind of funny, it usually means going as far back in the process as re-drawing a new version from my original rough sketch, then doing the whole process over again.

It's kind of a pain in the ass. Not to mention I go through mechanical pencils, micron pens and pads of sketch paper like crazy.

BUT NO MORE!

The future is here and it is in the form of thing I bought called a drawing tablet. 

It's basically a device that lets you draw on it with a stylus and use a program like photoshop to create illustrations. That means I can do my drawings for this site right on the computer and not have to deal with the 432344562 steps it takes to do everything by hand. PROGRESS!

It's a pretty weird experience using the thing as you see what you are drawing on your computer screen instead of under your hand. It's kind of like having to re-learn how to draw. Actually, a better example might be if you remember art class when you were a kid and they did that thing where you have to draw a picture without looking down at the paper? Sort of like that.

 There are about sixteen million features to learn how to use, but it's a lot of fun and at least I don't have to scan two dozen pictures by hand for every post anymore. So yay. 

PORTRAIT.jpg

  And hey, color!

Freempf

Have you ever had a mundane experience where you thought, "Huh, That is the first time this particular event has ever happened to me" and feel like it seems super weird that whatever the thing was has never happened to you before that moment?  

For example: one time I looked down at my feet while I was walking and I saw my shoe come untied. I literally saw the exact moment it happened.

You may be thinking to yourself what a stupid example that is, but consider, have you ever seen the exact moment your shoe comes untied? Like, the EXACT moment it happens? Its not like you go around staring at your shoes all the time in the off chance your laces are about to do something slightly more interesting than hold your sketchers on your foot.  I bet its it's only like, 40 people in North America. My 39 associates and I should start a gang. With Jackets. Or top hats. And jet packs.

Not so smug about my example now, are you? My top hat-jetpack gang turn our noses up at you. But I digress.

Believe it or not, I was going somewhere with this and it had nothing to do with shoelaces. That was just a happy little detour down wishful thinking lane we all just took together.

Where I was going with this was that on more than one occasion I've had the distinct feeling that I'm experiencing something completely run of the mill for the first time ever. Furthermore, after that first occurrence it's as if some cosmic switch was flipped and that weird random thing happens like, twelve times in a row. 

This whole idea kind of seems like one of those hyper-specific feelings that should have its own suspiciously made up sounding term. If you don't know what I'm talking about google "words for really specific feelings" or something similar. Buzzfeed is sure to have at least one list of them that you "won't believe".

It would be like Schadenfreude for pointless life occurrences. The Germans have words for everything, right? Someone call the Germans and tell them to get cracking on this one. Something like Fraufingazen or, Blintzengruben, or Freempf.

I had a pretty Freempfy week this week.

I had a stranger stop me in a parking lot and ask me to help jump his car on Monday. Nothing weird about that in and of itself, but it did occur to me that I've never had a stranger ask me to jump start their car before.

Full disclosure, I may have had a moment where I tried to figure out how a stranger asking me for a jump in the crowded parking lot of a Shop-Rite could potentially be a trick to rob and/or serial murder me, but it all turned out fine. All said and done I felt good about helping somebody, I got the pasta sauce and craisins I had been dispatched to retrieve and there was 0% robbing or murdering.

The weird part is that after having my first experience jump starting a stranger's car, it happened twice more over the next three days.

I went from a 26-year streak of never having had a stranger ask for a jump to having it happen three times in a week. Granted, a good chunk of those 26 years doesn't count, as at no point in my early life did I ever find myself in a hilarious driving-baby type situation. 

The ability of babies to work jumper cables aside, it seems super weird to me that this week was the the first time it's happened and then it happened three times in a row. The first two times it happened, the person who needed a jump had cables in their vehicle.  The third time, which was in the parking lot of Wal Mart, the couple asked if I had the cables, which I did not. 

After telling them I couldn't help them and going into the store, the combination of feeling bad that they were stuck and super weird about the fact that I kept having people ask me for a jump prompted me to purchase a set of jumper cables with the intention of catching them on my way out and giving them a hand. Much like in the story of how I ended up with a box of pulled pork and an avocado, this plan also backfired. 

When I came out of the store, the people who had needed a jump were no longer at their car. The spot in front of them was open, so I moved my vehicle into place so that If they came back I could give them the jump. They didn't reappear though. I figured I'd wait a few minutes, thinking maybe they went in to buy jumper cables themselves and I'd just help them when they came back out.  

After about five minutes, when they didn't return I got super uncomfortable that it would seem really weird that I had purchased a set of jumper cables and then just sat in the parking lot near their car for them.

At eight minutes, paranoid of seeming like a complete creep, I bailed. 

And now I own some jumper cables:

At least it seems purchasing the cables was what it took to break the cycle of Freempf. I haven't been asked to jump anyone's car since getting them.

Moral of the story. Sometimes weird stuff happens. And Jetpack Tophat Gang is awesome.

Happy Easter

With today being Easter, I felt it appropriate to share this picture of my wife my mother-in-law sent me.

Dear sweet zombie Jesus, where does one even begin? I can't decide what the best part is. Is it the Easter Bunny's red, possessed demon eyes? Is it the oversized jean jacket?  The bowl cut/mullet combo that is just perfectly lopsided enough to prominently display some sort of random head wound is a pretty strong contender.

The yellow and white circus tent wallpaper behind them really pulls the scene together in just the right way to complete the nightmare aesthetic. Everything in this picture is point-for-point exactly what what you would expect a serial molester to pick out for some sort of creep wall vision-board in his basement.

 The longer I look at it the harder I laugh. I just can't decide who seems more likely to appear in a meth addicts fever dream hovering over their bed with a ball gag and a scalpel.

Candidate 1:

Or candidate two:

I honestly have nothing else to write about this. There is no post here, it just makes me so happy.

In the spirit of fairness, if I'm going to share this childhood horror of Emily, here is this little gem of me when I was a youngster. Apparently I was Sylvester the cat for Halloween one year.

Happy Zombie Jesus Day.

Eyebrows on Fleek

Sometimes I see things on Facebook and have thoughts.  

I saw this thing on my Facebook a while back as I was just nonsensing around, scrolling through stuff:

All I could think was this:

 
 

I bought and ruined a pair of those glasses with the nose and moustache for this...

On the bright side These bold brows did make my beauty look better. I'm fierce AF right now.