11/20/2024a - dude can you help me im really scared
hey so what the fuck is a munchster
i honestly cant remember what pocket of the internet i was perusing when some random guy without a profile picture dropped this nuclear mp4 without elaborating in some chat room i was in a few years ago but i really havent been the same since. my life could be temporally illustrated using the notation of BMA (before munchsters ad) and PMA (post-munchsters ad.) let it be known that youre reading a post ive been wanting to put together for a long ass time. the hard part is that now i actually have to write it, all in the good year of 3 PMA.
the only thing i kind of understand here is that munchsters are supposed to be some faux-lunchable meal supplement, but im still failing to gauge what the fuck the actual food product even is outside of these cyberpunk cubes with some kind of edible container. the kid in the cartoon constructs a sandwich thing out of it, but later The Being makes it look like an edible cup you pack the munchster shit in like a fat bowl and push down your gullet, but before you can even think too hard about whats actually being advertised, the ad is over and youre forced to come to terms with the fact that youre now a victim of the munchster cognitohazard and will be for the rest of your life. obviously i appreciate the work theyre putting into the art but the fact that this commercial doesnt even bother showing you an actual image of the food and instead opts to present an intentionally unfinished 3d cyber-minimalist render of their "lunchpods" really does lend some credence to my theory that this commercial is possibly shooting to be a subtle instance of brilliant postmodern artistry. look at that picture down there. the lunchpod. as if to say, munchsters are the only truly tangible aspect of our corporate hyper-reality anymore, and you dont even understand what youre buying. of course you want the only thing with color thats left, why wouldnt you? its horrible. beneath all the layers of meaningless abstraction lay a destitute munchster. im also willing to argue that they maybe just didnt care and it looked good enough since nobody cares because its a damn munchsters commercial i dont know. its. its making me go mad aaahhhh fuuuuck
ive always felt like for a commercial to be 'successful' it needs to be at the very least comprehensible even if its in an absurdly roundabout way, which is why when the superbowl comes around with its weird ads, people go goddamn apeshit over it. oh shit dude, who had the best commercial. was it soda or was it cars. i think peanuts had the best commercial this year dude. god anyone else feel like finishing this conversation over a munchster. but yeah im bringing this up because i just think its interesting how the munchsters ad actually starts out pretty damn coherent and then halfway through loses its footing because the one thing its lacking i guess was a nonverbal foreskin monster with a deformed porcine sidekick who eats his tv. its also just a spectacle to me because i cant think of another ad ive ever seen that required multiple viewings to get you theorizing about whats actually happening. according to some youtube comment the kids in the cartoon part are named whak and kayo and theres full cartoons with them and theyre lost media. ok literally who fucking cares
this ad is just called cartoon. a name way too laconic for its own good. i dont actually have anything more to say about the name i just thought it was worth mentioning. still though, i do take solace in knowing that this ad is in fact something that exists and i can show it to other people and itll be the same each time. could you imagine if the voice at the end said something like 'water is poison' and then you rewind so you could show somebody and then it said go mad for munchsters like normal. i literally cannot fathom anything more psychologically taxing than that. ok yeah at this point im kind of just distracting myself and making shit up to put off the inevitable task of talking about The Being.
yo what is this thing. is there concept art of this guy i can see. do we know who voice acted him. or her. or it. how does it reproduce. what does it look like as a baby. can it hate. i can only imagine that this thing is the product of some tormented 3d modeler reconstructing the machinations of their sleep paralysis demons. id also understand maybe a higherup at munchsterCo just being like 'make some weird shit' because if The Being really was meticulously designed and someone had a reference sheet with concept art and they demanded some poor artist give it a z axis, words cant even begin to illustrate how badly i need to see that piece of paper. believe me, there is some low hanging fruit here about how indecent it looks and yeah the fruit is ripe as hell, but also gratuitously describing how closely the munchsters thing resembles an uncut cock doesnt actually appeal to me as much as youd think it does. im sure The Being is a nice guy though. it sure seems to like munchsters. look, after youve seen the munchsters ad as many times as me maybe then youd understand why itd probably be a dope wingman. like oh, him? thats my guy right there. he just loafs around and eats his munchsters. hes the shit. ok yeah actually i fuck with it now. i dont even blame it for being kind of mean to his weird ass dog since its clearly an asshole. i mean just look at it. genuinely cant pinpoint where the sphincter ends and the everything else begins. i feel sick looking at it fuck you. look at The Beings face when his tv gets owned. its over for him. death is too good for the munchsters dog
ive also postulated that this is just real and not cgi. like something went wrong somewhere unknowable and instead of watching the milquetoast roadrunner shit at the beginning to its entirety, the facade of reality somehow pulled back and we temporarily got a glimpse of perceptions beyond our understanding. its all localized to this one ad and it will never happen again. by the way isnt it weird how this guy has a munchsters mobile by his tv. is this just always whats on. im so confused all the time because this is like an ad within not an ad within an ad. also i just realized that the pattern on its wallpaper is the silhouettes of the kids in the munchsters ads heads.
while i was writing this though i sort of realized that i missed something youd only miss if you werent in my position writing thesis papers on about how flagrantly unwell a munchsters commercial actually is. an entire layer obfuscated from the screen. its the viewer, whos honestly the butt of the joke when you get down to it. The Being buys merch. the commercial is about a guy whos way too enamored with an advertisement. its fucking mocking me. its poking and prodding at my quiddity because yeah if there was merchandise of The Being id be buying that shit too. and it knows i know its angle. and it doesnt care. it waves its enormous asshole in my face and eats that guys tv, ripping his happiness and satisfaction away from him. to understand this commercial is to be icarus, and to think about it this deeply is analogous to the heat of the sun. however it doesnt matter because munchsters went out of business and im still alive and happy so i won and munchsters look gross as shit anyway and is gone.
all it takes is one look into the mad world of munchsters to drive the sanest man to lunacy. i should mention that theres another munchsters ad called lick. it takes place outside and it stars a creature of a similar ilk to The Being, but this time theres two of them and theyre both licking the shit out of a munchsters billboard and thats it. i dont think theres as much to say about this one but im still lowkey enamored with knowing whats going on in the background. its like some sideways tony hawk ghost rapture or something. im kind of starting to believe that maybe craving munchsters is like the paragon of sinful behavior in this world because it looks like nothing but horrible things are happening to anyone after them, and anyone in the physical realm who desires them is some depraved bag of flesh. were these creatures born or were they made. being turned into one of them does seem like a pretty terrible punishment if thats what the munchsters world is going for, but really all this second ad does for me is make me think about the first one. hes inside his house. whatever is going on in there is probably leagues less horrific than whatevers going on with the munchster ghost phallus apocalypse outside.
dude something HAPPENED here
i love how this show is called "cooking with jack" when 90% of the steps involved are just buying some shit from the store. the other 10% is pouring those ingredients inside some witches cauldron to create some reactive amalgam of heart palpitating swill.
are ya hungry
i choose death
order up
shit. just by looking at this things cover youre already qualified to talk about it. consider yourself a leprechaun-in-the-hoodologist just now by taking a single glance. no false advertising here. theres a leprechaun. theres the hood. the leprechaun is in the hood. thats all you need to know. so what does the leprechaun even do? thats what the people want to know. i dont really know i was also kind of on my phone the whole time.
im not really gonna complain about the overall concept of garfield knowing hes in a comic since thats the entire point of the movie what with him becoming real and all that noise. its ridiculous and stupid and weird but in the grand scheme of things just the tip of the iceberg. the concept of cartoon characters making a meta production of their own existence isnt anything new but you need to start asking questions once you see garfield greeting his friends on his work before rolling up to a motherfucking garfield themed studio. shouldnt this guy be a multimillionaire from royalties by now? hes clearly a celebrity. or would jon be? i never really thought to ask myself what garfields rights are but lets ask ourselves our first real question. theres a garfield studio, so why is he actually living in the house from the garfield comic strip outside of work. is it to stay in character if the comics are all fake? sure he literally is garfield but is there a reason he needs to live as garfield from the comic? there seems to be no difference except his professional life seems to just mirror his home life. if this is his job and he has free will shouldnt he be able to do whatever he wants outside of the comic? or maybe this is just the way he is? it hasnt even been 5 minutes yet. i think im going to cry. jim really outdid himself with this one
oh ok. so garfield is an actor. hes the star of his own comic strip about his life and people treat him like an actor but hes also still garfield and acts like garfield. so "garfield" isnt a fictional character or an independent being with free will. hes both. what the fuck. same shit applies to all of his friends and everyone who works in this building too? nobody is playing a character but they simultaneously are besides for the ones who actually do stuff like set up the stages and write the scripts and everyWHAT HELLO
ok, tsar-breasted personal assistant(?) aside, garfield starts lamenting his job making comic strips and saying that its the same few shit jokes every day and its kind of surreal to watch. garfield, the monday hating, alarm clock smashing, dog kicking, lasagna consuming cat, is voicing how tired he is of his own tired 4 joke schtick, and it makes you wonder. is this garfield speaking? or is this jim davis being vocal about the monotony and repetition that plagues his own intellectual property? tired of these characters being unable to change? unable to grow? unable to evolve? who cares i really dont.
now its time to talk about how the they actually make the comic strips. with sets and props and stuff. ok? so theyre taking videos. they also have scripts and need to memorize their lines for some reason even though every comic strip is only 3 panels and theyre not even shot in one take. then they take the videos and plug them into some weird machine that adds speech bubbles and turns the characters into stylized versions of themselves
i dont know. it seems weirdly limiting if you want to make a comic with more than 3 panels but practically everything in this reality feels like it was made up by a child pretending he made up a good set of rules for a card game that doesnt even exist. trust him though. you dont want the four of clubs.
when they finish the comic they put it in this big scanner thing and then put it into the real world. like they can take the comic they made and then use satellites or some shit and then beam it into the real world onto real newspapers. now how the fuck is this supposed to work? i can concede that cartoon characters have access to their own mystical cartoon technology but i guess they just have power over reality now. sure theyre just shooting comics into newspapers now but whos stopping them from just beaming a giant swastika and impact font text that says KIDDYS MAKE ME GIDDY onto your arms? does this technology only extend to ink? its also never explained whos writing these comics because it doesnt matter at all. maybe its jim. maybe hes god. oh, also all the characters can go to the stage and the dude in the control booth can use any comic as a window to view the real world. if youve ever jerked off in the same room as comic strip, theres a very real possibility that garfield and friends got a front row seat. nermal probably jacked off too
what the hell even
ok so garfield gets so fed up with the comic world that despite the fact that the control room guy says that once you go to the real world you cant go back. must say a lot about the monotony of comic world if they really dont have any substitute for the real world but i guess ive talked about that at length by now. he jumps in through some pressurized tear in the stage/reality and ends up in the real world which is shaded differently but everyone is exactly as cartoony as in the cartoon world and also looks bad. now garfields friends and family can now spectate garfield from newspapers but they can also spectate him from anywhere and see what hes up to because of the weird satellite technology i mentioned earlier. oh well at least they cant talk to each other because their realities are separated. <=== FORESHADOWING. then garfield meets some disgusting friends because hes a stray now and stray cats cant find food. also theres this wretched thing. its gross and i will kill it.
would you believe me if i told you what happens next makes any sense? because you shouldnt believe that. since garfield went into the real world, i guess they cant actually make garfield comics anymore and put them in the newspaper since the real garfield is missing, so the newspaper company holds a contest to replace garfields strip. ok? so lets think, is the implication here that if garfield gets chosen to be the star of his own comic strip again hes able to go back into the comic world? that really seems to be what hes trying to do, but do the humans have a process for sending garfield back to his world? does that explain how garfield originally ended up in the comic world? once someone wins the contest, do they get a house and everything in the comic world like garfield or do their backgrounds/setting become real in the comic world like garfields? are they able to leave like garfield went into the real world? what if the newspaper decided to start publishing a godzilla comic strip, would a wrathful king of monsters be able to leave the comic and start thrashing shit the fuck up in the real world? weve already established that its possible for a comic character to enter the real world, so does that mean that the humans created the comic world for the soul purpose of making comics? i guess so? right now im trying to wrap my head around the possibly symbiotic relationship between the newspaper company and the comic world. the comic characters are pretty aware that its their job to make comics and i guess they arent being paid for it, so are they just being forced to create comics for the rest of their conceivable eternity aka when the newspaper company decides to stop printing them? what does this mean for the characters themselves??? i guess it means that the comic characters werent actually born but they were made? which i thought was obvious, but does that mean that none of the characters backgrounds actually happened from the perspective of anyone living in the comic world? these characters were created by jim davis, but does that mean that theyve always existed the way they are until written otherwise? do their personalities change off-set if they start to be slowly written differently? also if garfield is given his own strip back, how does he know that this transports him back into the comic world, and is this how he got into the comic world to begin with? is he familiar with the process that turns physical beings like the competitors as well as fictional characters into comic characters? there are characters at the contest which are supposed to replace garfield, so are they like. signing a waver to go into the comic world? or are they just acting like the character thats going to get transported into the comic world with their creators help? at the end of the movie one of the stray cats makes it into the comic world and appears in a comic, but how could he have been written into a comic by a person if no people were complicit with its arrival into the comic world? so just how much power DOES the comic world have over the real world? are the humans just trusting them to make something they can publish? do they not care? it gets established later that there IS still a way back into the comic world, so do the humans know about that? of course garfield wanted to escape, his and all his friends existences center around endlessly creating 3 panel entertainment for human beings. the comics dont have any "real world" of their own. no lives outside their basic personalities thatve already been written, so they dont have as much free will as i thought? the humans creating the comic world synthetically WOULD also explain why garfield lives as garfield both in the comic and his reality because the comic creators want to keep them the same and engineer them to not have ambition. why would the contestants want to go the comic world then? are the creators of these characters writing the scripts, or do they just trust the comic characters inside the comic world to do it? do the humans have contact with the characters they create once theyre transported to the comic world? is there a cross-dimensional writing team? id assume that if the newspaper company did create the comic world dude then the humans would have some sort of idea as to how the comic world works and they could talk to the characters through the newspaper..? maybe? but the characters talk to each other as if its their own production theyre putting on with no help from the outside world. like its just their job to make the comics, but they obviously need some help with the outside world so like. god. who cares. this sucks.
i never even mentioned all the other characters like wally who play pivotal roles in the plot. why? because its stupid. i dont need to justify saying anything about this film that i havent already. the part of garfield gets real that really just doesnt sit right with me though is that it insists that you figure it out. it wants you, the viewer to fix everything wrong with what youre seeing, but you cant. its like a sword that was forged to be broken. you can try to make sense of it. you can try to make things work, but no matter how hard you try, it was doomed from the very beginning. it asks you to keep watching as if its going to give you any answers. it begs you stay in your seat, and promises closure. but jim davis doesnt know what closure is. closure to jim davis is a cat smoking a pipe on panel 3. half convinced that i could rip this dudes face off scooby doo style and david lynch would be sitting there telling me how tragic it is that i watched garfield gets real on a fucking cell phone. this is the "challenging art" all those teenagers told you about. huh. earlier on in this rant i kind of just casually mentioned that garfield goes into the real world. this is true. he does do this. thats why its called garfield gets real, but its really dawning on me now how cartoony the real world actually is. theres slapstick and shit. itd be really interesting if garfield actually had to make sense of reality but reality is a cartoon and. wait
joe biden calls a dude fat as if its his name. like his name is fat. he says "look, fat, look, heres the deal." holy shit. probably one of the smartest plays ive ever seen and it feels like nobody remembers. people use adjectives like ugly all the time as names to taunt people in movies and stuff but referring to somebody as fat is kind of next level if you think about it. is he slowly trying to change the common americans vernacular with subtle rare wordplay? is he just insane? not making any decisions here but maybe this dude is smarter than you might think. nobody can know for sure
who are you really
basically you play as this stoic douche named the batter. hes the shit and doesnt care about anything besides beating the fuck out of spectral invaders with a baseball bat and yeah thats actually pretty much it actually. the whole time these timid worker dudes thatre literally everywhere are constantly telling you to not go here or not do that and the batter kinda just says something along the lines of "no." its this black and white bastards sacred mission to "purify" whats left of the world and he really doesnt let anyone or anything get in the way of that, including you, the one playing the game, which reminds me that this game gets kinda meta sometimes. i think all the main characters at some point acknowledge the fact that youre a guy who actually exists and that youre the one guiding the batter around on his quest. sometimes characters like the judge straight up talk to you and tell you the business whenever he finds it necessary. other times zacharie will be all "oh yeah this is a video game. hee hee." not really ground-breakingly meta and genius or anything but its a pretty cool way to tell the story when it kinda dawns on you that you and the batter are quite literally fucking shit up together. imagine the ending of earthbound but more narratively relevant or whatever. funnily enough mortis never actually played earthbound before making OFF. im not really here to talk at length about the crude trash that ive been cooking up on and off in rpg maker for the past 2 years but while playing i noticed that a load of concepts in OFF were hella similar to a load of concepts ive already worked into my project to a point where it was a little jarring. obviously theyre presented differently but it was pretty cool to see, all things considered. its a pretty short and linear game for the most part, which isnt a bad thing at all. linearity = bad is probably one of the most rancid gamer takes thats ever existed when it comes to gamer takes actually relating to video games. that being said, a lot of gear towards the end of the game is super missable so i need to recommend that you revisit the zones again once youre all done with enoch. heres the basic gist though. you go from zone to zone solving puzzles, talking to people, getting some badass lore dumps about the work everyones slaving away at, purifying shit like its water, and trashing the big bad boss guardian of each zone at the end. between the zones you get some seemingly unrelated cutscenes of another thing with this goofy looking kid going on that kind of vaguely piece together a story, but honestly even by the end its still pretty vague and a lot is still left up to interpretation. cool as fuck if you ask me. as much as i want to get into detail about purification and everything that goes on in the last act of the game, this shitass review is already getting too long and its best to just go in blind, shocker. in terms of difficulty it really wasnt too bad, its rpg maker 2003. rpg maker 2003 has this kind of wackyass ff7ish timing-based battle system that nobody really knows how to make feel natural or make fun but it works well enough. for basically every fight including a few bosses, i was actually able to beat almost everything using the auto-fight function with health to spare. it doesnt really help that the save points littered around each zone revive your entire party and also completely fill your health and competence points. didnt find myself using items in battles much either. by far the hardest time i had was when i was revisiting an zone near the end and these assholes that poisoned me and put me to sleep were fucking everywhere, but even then i was able to bail from them almost every single time. the difficulty in general didnt really bother me but that junk is probably worth mentioning. oh yeah. i forgot to also mention that the batters only friends are floating circles.
i dont know how i got this far in the review without mentioning the art. christ this motherfucker can draw. mortis ghosts art is so fucking good. besides for most of the assets in the blocky and colorful overworld, all the battlesprites and character portraits were ripped straight from ghosts sketchbook and shrunk down with nearest neighbor to fit rpg maker 2003s iconic 320x240 canvas. it makes for a ridiculously distinct style. you can find a bunch of the uncompressed assets online with minimal effort and compare them to how they look in game, its neat as hell. my favorite example of this is probably the batters battle sprite, which is a full body render of him shrunk down to a borderline comical extent.
later on you go from enemies that are cool and fucked up to enemies that just look straight up wrong. really hard to describe them in detail but its some freaky deaky shit. this dude just doesnt miss
the weird thing is that if you look at the concept art youll see that these weirdos are actually supposed to be wearing luchador masks, but when theyre shrunk down like this they just look viscerally fucked up. its sick
the music in off doesnt miss either, coldwood did a damn good job here. a lot of the overworld music is so chill and ambient until bam. youre hit with fuckin peppersteak. what a sweet track. really gets you in the mood to fuck some specters up. its totally the song this game is known for, but later on youll also find yourself fighting to whats pretty much the screams of the damned, and the atmosphere is like. woah . theres a whole handful of great tracks to just vibe with, and it compliments the punchy ass sound design which hits so hard so well. avatar beat is probably one of my favorite boss themes in any game ive ever played, its fantastic and im not being hyperbolic when i say that shit rocks you to your core. like. hell yeah.
OFF is short, sweet, and free. youre doing yourself a disservice by not playing through the entire thing. OFF gets 4.5 out of 5 sludges. luke out.
if your reaction to this visitors face is anything less than "ew what the fuck even IS that" im fully convinced that you two stepped off the same mothership and are probably telepathically plotting to kill me now for figuring you out
this fucking thing. oh my god it makes me laugh so damn hard, its so ugly. this ugly plushling is so damn off model and so far past teetering on bootleg material that i can literally see it growing bootfeet and boothips with a boottorso and bootarms starting to take shape the longer i look at every one of its hideous fibers. im not gonna claim to have ever been close enough to this caprine lumpfest to smell it, but you can just tell that it reeks of coach seats on board the ali express or hazardous toxic materials. bootleg figures and plushies like this are notoriously made with toxic materials. how cool is that. look at it. it doesnt even have hands, and the longer you look at it i swear it starts morphing before your very eyes, slowly forcing you to realize each and every thing wrong with it. that glob of slime supposed to be a hat. its face is so viciously nothing that it looks like a doctor is gonna come through the door and tell me that the lobotomy was a complete success at any moment, and for something thats supposed to be a goat, its snout is more akin to a swolen bulbous nose. is this thing is really even art? obviously it is, but i thought that asking such a ridiculous and stupid question to help you understand how unserious this blog post is would be funny. i guess it was only kind of funny. youd have to be a real moron to think i actually give any real fucks about this goat wizard thing.
dont let any of this drivel distract you from what this post is actually about. i love bootlegs. i think theyre awesome. what even is that picture up there? im even willing to say that sometimes theyre even better than the intellectual property theyre ripping off. if youve ever seen that speedy blue-quilled douchebag, youll know exactly what i mean. god i fucking hate sonic. this isnt me doing an annoying egoraptorism either, i just cant stand his games, personality, his voice, or the gaudy cast of zany technicolor characters he calls his friends. sonic 3 is amazing because it has the instashield, the music in rush is incredible. i guess vector is pretty cool too, but thats kind of it for me. oh yeah. bootlegs. sonic has so many bootlegs and theyre all awesome.
if youve been my friend for an extended period of time you probably know how much i used to talk about ogorki. maybe i talk about him slightly less than before, but i never actually stopped having a vast appreciation for ogorki and everything he stands for. if you want some obscure trivia about this dilated demon, you might be shocked to know that hes not actually a hedgehog. hes a dragon. proof? my friend pointed it out that it actually says "our little dragon recommends yummy, crunchiful pickles!" that actually blew my mind, and it should blow yours too if you respect yourself in any meaningful capacity. i dont even like pickles and that made me question my worldview. this post is way too long and shitty. eventually im gonna get around to talking about bootleg simpsons shit but we can cross that bridge when we get to it.
it really sucks. youre gonna love it
so goddamn cool
alright slow down buddy
i said slow the fuck down
RAW STUNTS.
$20. be serious
it also fucks with reds and yellows and greens but its less obvious than the unwelcome royal ass purple. lame
the affordable growup plan is probably a scam anyway. no growup plan can be that good if it only costs "pennies a day." grow up
