GOD. DAMN. IT.

There’s a copy of a SkyMall catalog sitting in the seat pouch of every seat on every plane in the United States. Seriously. SkyMall’s pages are full of bullshit so inane the only way they ever make any money is by boring you to fucking death. When you’re in the middle of a three-hour flight the only way to waste time is to dare a conversation with the person sitting next to you, tamper with the smoke detector in the bathroom, or read the magazines sitting in the pouch in front of you. The in-flight proprietary magazine is always crap and all of the articles are about places you’ll never visit or musicians you  introspectively correct yourself on because you thought they died a decade ago. That leaves SkyMall, and the only way a 7-way car charger would ever look enticing is if the only other available option for entertainment involved jumping out of a moving plane.

After one SkyMall-enhanced flight too many I realized I had enough. No more SkyMall. I found myself cynically bashing and berating every product in the magazine while sniveling and coloring peoples’ eyes in. And then I had an epiphany. I should make fun of this shit online.

During the flight I formulated the idea for what would become the website “The Sharperer Image“. I decided to visit SkyMall.com and download a couple hundred product pictures that I found personally appealing and began altering their ad copy to something a bit more spiteful, sentient, disgusting, and deplorable. My goal wasn’t to make fun of just The Sharper Image (an actual American company who sells things through SkyMall) but to instead parody it with a company that seemingly knows their products are total shit and unabashedly produces them anyways knowing people are too stupid to know any better. I only settled on a name based off of The Sharper Image because it was the easiest to mock (and because nobody in their right minds can fucking spell “Hammacher Schlemmer”).

Is the company the “sharper” image? Hell no. They’re not even the sharpest. They’re sharper than sharpest; they’re sharperer.

Stay classy, SkyMall.

I even invented a whole mythology for the fictional company. In 2004 the actual Sharper Image company faced lawsuits from their Ionic Breeze air ionizers due to the fact that they produced ozone as a byproduct. Ozone is great and all, it’s in our ozone layer (hence the name), but ozone itself is incredibly toxic to living things. It can straight up kill small animals, damage and scar plants, and in humans can cause respiratory illnesses and even failure due to prolonged exposure. In 2008 the company went bankrupt, and that’s where the story of The Sharperer Image begins.

Cited from The Sharperer Image’s company profile:

The company was rapidly falling apart but in the midst of the chaos of the bankruptcy a new brand was formed: The Sharperer Image. Spearheaded by a nondescript and unknown sentient force The Sharperer Image permeated the factories and production lines of the former Sharper Image facilities and began autonomously churning out the same high quality white collar products that originally made Thalheimer a millionaire with the sole exception of translating every products’ ad copy into a bizarre mish-mash of insults, pop culture references, and blatant hatred for humanity.

Yes, a haunted factory; one that produces terrible products that are sold in airport catalogs and to elderly retired people who don’t know any better.

The website itself is relatively knew, but it looks promising. It’s an authentic GatorAIDS/Twilight Foundry venture, so the people running The Sharperer Image are the same people you know and love from GatorAIDS. If you have a Tumblr, follow us. If not, bookmark us and check us out. The “update schedule” shows the average work week of the company. As it stands for the month of April we’ll have a new product every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On Sunday we post fake meeting notes summarizing the numbers, highs, lows, and other odds and ends from the week prior. Saturdays are “Q&A” days where readers can submit us questions, comments, or product concerns for the company to look at and address. (You can submit questions throughout the week, but we only post answers on Saturdays.)

If you’re curious as to what gets produced by The Sharperer Image, then continue on. Below are some of the better submissions in the short time we’ve been online:

"Fart Recorder"

The product that started it all, the “Fart Recorder”, was based upon what I think was some kind of steam-therapy system for people with asthma or something to that extent. I looked right at it and in an instant said “she’s probably smelling a fart in that” and from there an entire website idea was born.

"Hair Laser / Table Locator Combo"

SkyMall sells a ton of stupid “LED laser” (an oxymoron, literally) hair regrowth products. I would imagine -4 of them perform their intended duties. If you showed this to me, without any logos or text on it, and asked me what I thought it was I’d tell you it was one of those coasters they give you a TGI Friday’s that buzzes and chimes when your table is ready, so that’s exactly how I spun this item.

"Teller Lookalike"

With this product I knew what was actually being sold: that giant nylon chair. They put a little guy in it to introduce it as a “novelty” but it’s actually just a nice way of saying “this giant chair is for obscenely fat people and can hold up to 600 pounds without ripping apart”. When I looked at the picture I decided to take a different route: sell the guy sitting in it. He looks like Teller (of Penn & Teller fame) so I figured why not? Then, as a joke I underhanded in the original chair with its own item number just because.

"Skittle Guardian"

Part of the hilarity of SkyMall’s tat is that when you take away the name of a product and just show someone the picture sometimes it’s incredibly hard to guess what the original product was. Taken out of context, this item (which was a motion-detecting dog food bowl) looks like some kind of radar device with poorly Photoshopped food pellets in it that happen to look like Skittles candies being activated by a dog. Therefore, it’s just that: a device to let your dog, and your dog only, eat Skittles. It kills everything else.

"Cetacean Translator"

This is another one of those “what the hell am I looking at” things when you take it out of context. Obviously it’s a pair of swimming goggles, however the confusion arises when you look at all the buttons and dongles hanging off of it and wonder just what the hell its purpose is. It’s actually an underwater MP3 player (stupid, I know hur hur) but I looked at all the controls and buttons and said “you know that would be better off as something that lets you understand dolphins”.

"Poverty Puzzle Cube"

This product right here was an instant hit with our growing audience. It originally was a ridiculous puzzle cube that you put money inside of to give as a gift to someone; they can only get the money out if they solve the puzzle. I looked at this and saw an easy sick Republican joke in there, something about “making people work for their money”. One thing led to another and the ad copy turned out being hilariously spiteful, but unfortunately spot-on as far as American politics are concerned…

The Sharperer Image is something I’m really proud of and very excited about, and it’s kind of where I’ve been for most of the period that I’ve been MIA from GatorAIDS. Please check us out, and please pass us along to your friends. I’m very new to Tumblr so I’m learning as I go, but the response so far has been very reassuring!

- Dracophile

“NO, GOD, PLEASE NO! HAVE MERCY!! I HAVE A WIFE AND KIDS!!!” You continue, lying about the last part.

Your cries fall on deaf ears. You will not see mercy tonight. Your favorite television show ends and after the credits scroll you witness the face of Satan in it’s purest form:

FUCK IT'S SOPA, no PIPA, no wait ACTA!!!

You cannot escape. The synth chords reverberate against every fold of your brain, the blank screen stares directly into your very soul, and then “it” comes. The V. It approaches, slowly, but gradually picking up its pace. A strange smell fills the room; you have soiled yourself once again, just like all the other times. Will tonight be the night the V breaks free of the constraints of your television and drags you down to hell with it? A hell full of hollow DMCA violation notices and shitty reality TV shows? No. The V disappears. Tonight is not your night. But tomorrow might be.

If the above excerpt caused you to run in fear while the crotch of your pants adopted a suspiciously darker color then this isn’t the article for you and you should turn back now lest you avoid adding some #2 to go with that #1. However, if you find it hilarious and absurd that it’s possible for someone to be afraid of a television logo then look no further, you’ve come to the right place. “Telelogophobia”, as it’s called, is a fear of TV production logos. Yes, this exists, and more than likely “telelogophilia” does as well.

The website CLG Wiki is a place where “logo enthusiasts” can gather and talk about the finer points of everything you and I fast forwarded through on VHS tapes in the 80′s and 90′s. While strange, it’s to be expected I guess. The real kicker, however, is they frequently use their forum to talk about logos they seem to be genuinely afraid of. The result? A meticulous (and hilarious) break down, usually second-by-second, of every terrifying logo along with horrendously stupid nicknames for all of them (that they actually use in idle conversation) plus a “Scariness” rating.

I’m still being 100% serious here. Here’s a beginner’s guide to terrifying TV logos.

In 2010 GatorAIDS’ editor-in-chief Dracophile was billed for a stand-up show at the Realmscon anime convention. In it he performed as his alter ego “CFMM” and approached the show with the intentions to be as unsettling and unrelatable as possible. One of the first things he said to his audience was, “Was anybody else scared of the ending credits to Rugrats? Nobody?” I’d link you to it on YouTube but it appears to have been deleted, so you’ll have to just take my word for it. I reference this performance because something as obscure and non-threatening as the credits to Rugrats couldn’t possibly scare anybody. Just as Dracophile assumed this was something he said specifically to alienate the audience; there are more people out there who can relate to “white people be all _____ but black people be _____” than “autistics _____”. Or so he thought.

Klasky-Csupo is an animation company headed by Arlene Klasky and Gabor Csupo, two people who apparently sell themselves on having names that piss off every single form of document spell checking ever created. They produced Rugrats. This was their logo:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

This video was uploaded by a guy on YouTube who calls himself YoshiLove5OOO. One can infer from his channel design, content, and selected username that this guy is probably 16 bits shy of a Super Nintendo. I wanted to learn more about the mysterious psyche of those who adore closing logos but I took one look at his testament to the bane of beginners’ HTML (his YouTube page) and decided it wasn’t worth attempting to read the page while mashing CTRL+A to let me see the text. I genuinely do not care. I received all the insight into YoshiLove’s mind with this comment he left on the Klasky-Csupo video:

How cute, YoshiLove thinks he’s an expert on establishing normality when he’s the one fawning over poorly animated television bumpers. This isn’t the pot calling the kettle black, this is the pot calling the kettle and all of Africa a nigger.

So why is this logo supposedly terrifying? Let’s consult the CLG Wiki for the lowdown:

Scare Factor: For the [animated version], high to nightmare, the bad animation and the face looking at us and smiling as if it accomplished something is an even more unsettling sight. The black background and unexpected transition from the credits to the logo is also another reason why this variant is scary. It can be decreased to medium for those who expected this.

CLG rates logo “scariness” on a scale including none, low, medium, high, and nightmare (occasionally with emphasis added). Supposedly Klasky-Csupo’s dadaist approach to animation along with the face smiling “as if it accomplished something” is what causes this logo to be scary. Yeah, its “accomplishment” factor. Leave it to a group of shut-ins who more than likely failed an elementary art class collage assignment to be afraid of something potentially signifying “accomplishment”.

Paramount Pictures is a name I’m sure you’re familiar with. They were “big” in the business of television and film before “big” had a chance to be defined. Tons of shows carried the Paramount name, and now most of them carry Viacom’s name instead since they bought out Paramount Pictures (we’ll have more on Viacom later). Much like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s iconic lion that was shown before their films Paramount became synonymous with their majestic mountain. What better way to celebrate it than with this fine logo:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Whoa wait a second, what the fuck Paramount? What kind of game are you running here? Is that mountain about to stab me in the kidneys and rape me? Am I actually saying this logo is scary? No, but if you’re of the disposition of being frightened by a disembodied face with a robot voice saying “KLASKY-CSUPO” then you’d sure as hell be terrified of this fucking thing.

“Honey, we’ve got to get to our dinner reservation!”

“Okay,” you reply. “I’ll be right there just after the episode of Happy Days is ove- oh god honey get me some new slacks CODE BROWN CODE BROWN!!”

I don’t understand the irrational fear behind logos, but if you pointed to this thing and said “that, fucking that; I am scared shitless by that fucking mountain flying forward at me while the cut version of the goddamn Psycho strings play” I would look at you, then at the flying mountain, then finally back at you and explain that I understand exactly where you’re coming from. I would then take the soundbite from the logo and set it to a bunch of inappropriate things. What’s CLG’s take on this?

Scare Factor: [Low to medium.] The mountain drawing, the zoom, and the very dramatic fanfare can scare more than a few.

Really? Medium at best? Something with legitimately sudden and striking music and sudden moves — two things movie directors frequently incorporate into fucking horror films — passes as “medium” in the world of Closing Logos? For fuck’s sake the only reason these people are afraid of the aforementioned MGM lion is because “it’s a lion”. That’s the best they could come up with. It’s not even a lion in the same room as you, it’s in a TV. Not even a 3DTV. There is absolutely no illusion that the lion is coming toward you to rip your face off Siegfried & Roy style like the Paramount mountain is clearly trying to do. I bet these motherfuckers are also afraid of the lion cub from the “MGM Kids” line of movies. Oh wait, they are?

Pictured above: "Low". Equally as scary as a goddamn zooming mountain.

Well at least we know they aren’t furries. What’s next, are they going to say they’re afraid of something that looks like the Mona Lisa?

Fuck me, this is going to be the Mona Lisa, isn’t it? Because I called it?

Close enough.

The still above is a capture from the bumper to a production company known as Renaissance Pictures and is nicknamed by CLG as “The Evil Portrait of Death” demonstrating that they apparently hire kindergartners to assign witty nicknames to everything. Evil Portrait of Death, really? Really you guys? “Evil Portrait” and “Portrait of Death” are both names acceptable for this picture as well as Castlevania games. Combining the two doesn’t double the scariness, it just makes you look retarded. Speaking of retarded:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Okay, I think I get this one. These guys are afraid of women, right? I mean, because Renaissance Pictures produced both Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, a couple of medieval-themed action series complete with all kinds of crazy sword fighting and horses and lightning and whatever pseudo-homoerotic scenarios both warriors landed themselves in. I think the company is well within their rights to use fucking lightning and era-appropriate artwork in their bumper probably because for the 59 minutes leading up to it you’re blasted with just that: loud noises, lightning, and women that kinda look like men.

Scare Factor: Nightmare due to the thunder, lightning, ripping/tearing animation FX, and the Tibetan monk chant soundbite. This logo is no doubt one of the scariest ever made. Especially the abridged and short versions.

Because as we all know Buddhist Tibetan monks are fucking scary, right? I mean, what with their matching robes, bald heads, and proclamations of peace and all; those assholes and their inhumanly deep voices sure are scary. Please. Apparently Mona “Lightning” Lisa is just as scary as our Klasky-Csupo robot friend from the beginning of this article. What do these have in common? A face. It’s a well known fact people with Asperger’s can’t read social cues. I call bullshit.

If Klasky-Csupo was the first part of this whole “face” charade then that makes Renaissance Pictures part 2 and the Oz Film Company the equivalent of The Return of the King. Unless you’re incredibly well versed in contemporary American literature you may not be familiar with the Oz Film Company, and you sure as hell have never seen a movie by them; I can almost guarantee that. The Oz Film Company was a short-lived film studio that existed from 1914-1915 solely for the purpose of making Oz movies (if you couldn’t infer that from their fucking name). They didn’t have a logo, probably because they weren’t around long enough for anyone to realize “oh shit we’re missing a logo you guys” so their films were introduced with a woman nicknamed “Lady Ozma”:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

I’ll give CLG the benefit of the doubt, there’s a certain eeriness to this “logo” but it isn’t because this is a scary logo due to some wacky animations or suspenseful sting music. It’s because Lady Ozma, and every single person who ever originally saw this logo in a theater, is dead. The Oz Film Company was created almost one hundred fucking years ago; everybody involved with it and everybody who’s ever seen it is 100% irrefutably dead, and if they somehow aren’t dead then they’ve got to be coffin shopping right about now. It also doesn’t help that Lady Ozma is a dead (hah) ringer for a female Aphex Twin.

There is too much gender confusion in this article.

Oh right, CLG Wiki probably has something to say about this logo, don’t they?

Scare Factor: Medium to nightmare; the rather cold, lifeless stare of the woman may freak some people out, especially the “close-up” variant, where it’s “in your face” style.

What is it? I’m not going to bother looking. Is it more about faces? Knew it. Apparently any face = nightmare fuel to these people because bellowing lions and screeching mountains are only worth 1 Terror Point on their sliding scale of idiocy.

I’ve made the conclusion that every goddamn logo that involves a face is somehow nightmare material to these people, therefore I’m done showing anything with a face or anything that even remotely resembles one. On that note, here’s a bunch of spinning diamonds courtesy of ITC Entertainment Group. ITC was a British television production company Americans might be familiar with due to the fact that they produced movies like The Last Unicorn and The Dark Crystal (and The Muppet Show TV series). Their production bumper was this monstrosity that looks like something from a shitty (but color) Vectrex game:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

ITC was around for almost 50 years and they never once changed that fanfare. However much they paid for it, which I can’t imagine was substantial, they really got their money’s worth. I haven’t seen someone string a penny out that far since the age of people picking the coin box lock on 1 cent porno viewers. This logo is apparently terrifying because of those spinning gems which leads me to believe nobody on CLG Wiki has ever completed a Sonic the Hedgehog special stage and lived to tell the tale. Also diamonds? Am I the only one who fails to see “diamonds” and instead sees a spinning Phlat Ball?

Go play the fanfare again and stare at this thing.

Scare Factor: Nightmare, probably about as scary as you can get without causing fatal injury. This logo, even though it is not talked about as much as the other well-known scary logos (such as the S From Hell and V Of Doom), is probably one of the scariest logos ever made, thanks to “in-your-face” animation, a dark mood, and that evil music!

“As scary as you can get without causing fatal injury”?! Cry me a fucking river, CLG Wiki. I refuse to believe this is a scary logo and that it’s “scare factor” rating was assigned by a solitary person who can’t watch a Justice music video without shitting himself. It’s “not talked about as much” as the other logos because, surprise surprise, it’s not fucking scary. It looks like a goddamn carnival ride in space. Also, this logo and Lady Ozma  are “in your face” when Paramount Pictures and Renaissance Pictures aren’t? How the fuck does that one work?

The more research I do for this article the more I realize that there’s absolutely zero consistency with any of this website’s content and that their entire notion of “fear” is constructed around one central “idea” that anything signifying the end of Autism Power Hour is inherently “bad” and thus should be feared.

Before I begin I want to first state that being afraid of Viacom and being afraid of Viacom’s logo are two completely different things; one is more socially acceptable than the other. Viacom is an incomprehensibly large media conglomerate whose primary products and services include Jersey Shore, copyright infringement claims, and SOPA. I take pride in knowing that if you had no prior knowledge of the company before today that I’ve already soured them in your thoughts with a single sentence. Back before Viacom’s board of executives was replaced with humanesque-shaped burlap sacks of hundred dollar bills and minced chunks of dead prostitutes they actually served a purpose as a television production company. Since 1971 they’ve featured almost a dozen new logos. Apparently, this one from the early eighties is the scariest:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The Viacom “V of Doom” has become somewhat of an in-meme online. There are people who are afraid of it that weren’t even alive when it was originally used who fear the logo solely because Viacom is god tier nightmare fuel and they’ve repeatedly been told this is a scary logo so to fit in they join the others in fawning over just how OMG TEH SCARY it is. I don’t see it, I don’t get the “fear”. For fuck’s sake, GatorAIDS even has a fucking thread tag that reenacts the zooming V of Doom. This thing is everywhere.

Scare Factor: Nightmare for the filmed and videotaped variants [...] because the music and “V” zooming in had been a source of bad dreams and nightmares for many. The filmed variant’s general quality is also poor. One of the scariest logos ever created along with the “S from Hell”. Though this logo is less scary for those who are used to seeing it.

So people actually had nightmares about this logo? A single stylized letter of the alphabet? I don’t get why it’s scary; are they thinking this is going to happen? Appropriately enough the “scare factor” entry for Viacom’s voracious V alludes to another spooky letter: Screen Gems’ so-called “S from Hell”. Let’s take a look:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

What’s doing it here? The high-contrast red on yellow? The inclusion of a shitty synth chord like Viacom’s V of Doom that sounds like someone playing a trumpet with their ass? The shape of the logo? The only thing I’ve collected from this logo so far is virtually every nickname these people come up with is some variant of “(description of logo) of Doom”. In fact, their naming scheme is so atrocious that both the Screen Gems and Renaissance Pictures logos share the secondary nickname of “The Personification of All that is Evil”. I’m fucking serious. They can’t even be original with their elaborate and flamboyant displays of hivemind-manufactured grade school pants-pissing faux terror.

Scare Factor: Medium to nightmare for the full music variant. Numerous people have very un-fond memories of this logo, mostly due to the creepy theme music combined with the animation, which is very in-your-face (though it’s less scary for those who are used to seeing it). Possibly one of the scariest logos ever made.

Possibly one of the scariest logos ever made, or THE scariest logo ever made? You be the judge. Here’s a short documentary from the 2010 Sundance Film Festival called The S From Hell.

THIS IS WHAT CLG WIKI ACTUALLY BELIEVES.

Fuck it. I quit.

- Roastmaster

(Obligatory link to the GatorAIDS forums. Witty remark about the content of the article on this page.)

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Gator Bites officially debuts on GatorAIDS today! (Our “spooky house” episode was a teaser.) CFMM is late to present a Valentine’s Day special but that’s only because conversation hearts do not go on sale until the 15th. Tardiness is required, and in this episode CFMM samples 9 varieties of heart candies from five different companies and reports back with the results (spoiler alert: they’re bad).

This is our debut episode so it’s a little longer than we’d have liked to make it; it’s 38 minutes long. Future episodes will be less than half of that.

- Dracophile

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

CFMM takes you inside the house where GatorAIDS’ new series Gator Bites is being filmed and provides a simple tour of the property, pointing out the various nuances of 1950′s decor and design while toying with the analog timer clock on the house’s oven. The majority of the show will be shot in the “taping room” mentioned in the tour, the rest of the house will go largely unused with the exception of one-off cutaways and brief intermissions.

This isn’t the actual structure of Gator Bites nor will it be a sketch comedy or Ghost Hunters parody of any sort. It’s more of a sit-down comedy with crappy toys and bad candy.

- Dracophile

Spoiler: The one flying through the air lost.

In the five seasons of BattleBots aired on Comedy Central there were a number of fights showcased that were laughably and ridiculously in favor of one of the competitors for a myriad of reasons. Maybe their opponent was built out of tin foil. Maybe they were broken from a previous fight. Whatever the reason in between nail-biting back and forth bouts between the series’ heavy-hitters there were always some fights in the mix that stuck out like a sore thumb. These are the seven most one-sided battles in the [televised] history of the sport.

The Obvious Winner: Ziggo

The One-sided Fight: Ziggo was a lightweight robot built by a closet furry that was renown in the sport for two things: destroying its opponents in a few quick blows or being bumped into the wall and stop working altogether. Ziggo was the robotic embodiment of a cat, it’s a small spinning dome covered in blades; that’s all it ever needed to win. The Missing Link, on the other hand, was a more elaborate and robust-looking robot sporting a wider chassis and two big rubbery tires. In its official BattleBots photograph The Missing Link is seen sporting a Craftsman chainsaw, but in this fight the driver smartly replaced his gas-guzzling tree killer with — and this is the best part — a phone book covered in nails. There’s a certain kind of crazy required to take a look at your opponent, Ziggo, and say “you know what would beat that? A phone book. With nails.” The guy who built The Missing Link possessed it.

At the start of the fight The Missing Link proudly floors it across the arena and starts gently caressing Ziggo with the yellow pages. Its strategy is pretty obvious: push Ziggo onto the section of the arena where the bots are loaded in and get it stuck there. That’s a great idea. The bad idea is attempting to do so with what amounts to a phone book on a yard stick. This is not a precision device. It doesn’t take long for The Missing Link’s replacement weapon to come apart and it also doesn’t take long for Ziggo to get in close and pop The Missing Link right in its wheels, ripping them off. And then this happens:

All of The Missing Link's hidden fireworks go off.

Holy shit. In a shot that could have only have been one in a millon Ziggo strikes the remaining wheel on The Missing Link sending the robot skittering across the arena floor. The wheel makes a half turn in one direction, then a half turn the other, and beautifully falls off. Then out of nowhere the Killsaws rise up from the floor and throw The Missing Link a few feet forward while spraying sparks everywhere.

This was the first fight BattleBots ever aired, and I personally believe it’s the reason why the show lasted five seasons. You don’t get an ass-kicking of this caliber anywhere else.

The Obvious Winner: Complete Control

The One-sided Fight: Complete Control was a newcomer to BattleBots in this season (2) and this fight was its television debut. Complete Control was a middleweight built by a guy from SomethingAwful armed with a clamping device geared down to ridiculous proportions. It’s sleek, blue, and Canadian design let it effortlessly glide across the arena, slip under opponents, and pick them up. Super Chiabot was a “super” version of the previous season’s Chiabot despite the fact not much changed between the two. The robot was basically a box covered in fake plants that had a large spinning disc in front and shit miniature robots out of its backside. The minibots, as they were called, did absolutely nothing in the fight and one of them was even crushed by Super Chiabot when it was tossed away by Complete Control.

From the start Super Chiabot appears to put up a fairly commendable fight by getting right into the gears of Complete Control wherein a horrendously loud grinding sound can be heard as the Canadian robot’s armor is eaten away by the plantbot’s flywheel. It’s worth mentioning that for being an incredibly ballsy move it was also incredibly stupid; Super Chiabot drove straight into Complete Control’s weaponry which didn’t break from the impact at all. Without missing a beat Complete Control clamps down on the ghillie suit-wearing Chiabot and deadlifts it completely perpendicular to the floor. The move is considered to be one of the most iconic moments in BattleBots history.

GIVE 'EM THE PEOPLES' ELBOW!!

Complete Control then proceeds to throw the entire robot over its back and promptly hooks itself into Chiabot and goes over with it. It then proceeds to grapple and tug at Super Chiabot in a manner that makes it look as though its attempting to rip its opponent’s broken weapon straight off of its face. Even when upside-down the thing is still capable of MMA grapples. The fight is stopped and both robots are rolled back over but when the buzzer sounds again it’s readily apparent Super Chiabot’s weapon is completely trashed and it loses to Complete Control by a landslide.

It’s worth noting Super Chiabot was built by Will Wright; the guy who created SimCity. He would have had better luck building a replica of the $1 bulldozer from that game instead of this mess. Let me put it this way, remember The Missing Link from earlier in the article? That thing managed to beat the original Chiabot.

The Obvious Winner: Nightmare

The One-sided Fight: People who are only familiar with BattleBots in passing can recognize Nightmare because it was one of the “poster robots” of the sport. Nightmare was a two-wheeled heavyweight robot sporting an inhumanly large vertical disc with two well-defined teeth on it. Its unique appearance and memorable blade decorations permanently burned it into the collective memory of the sport. Even though its history with BattleBots up to this point (season 3) had been shady and full of cheap losses this would be the first time we’d see Nightmare really shine. Slam Job, a pyramid-ish box with an ice pick hammer, was a rookie competitor in this tournament and was built by an average college guy who wanted to experience robot combat firsthand. Oh, he would experience it alright, and would need a change of pants afterward.

This fight IS BattleBots. It’s also only ten seconds long. Slam Job holds back on leaving the blue square and instead lets Nightmare come over to its side of the arena, its blade already roaring at full speed. Both robots do a half turn to face one another and Nightmare lands the only hit of the fight. This single hit was all it needed because in the blink of an eye Slam Job is hurled into the air head over heels eloquently erupting into at least a dozen pieces.

Pictured above: Slam Job reaching the Event Horizon.

This one hit knock out victory is easily the go-to moment for anyone who is or was a fan of the sport. Watch the slow motion replays of it from the fight. Go on. You get to see it from three goddamn camera angles because that’s how memorable this fight was. This fight lasted ten seconds according to the official timer on the screen. Ten seconds. The disconnect between the two robots in this fight was palpable. On one hand you had Nightmare, built by a serious and seasoned competitor, and on the right was the lowly Slam Job, built by some guy in college. Both builders no doubt pulled out all the stops and put forth 101% effort with the tools available to them but that just wasn’t enough; Nightmare fucking erased Slam Job from history. Had this fight not been videotaped nobody would even know the robot ever existed. Not even the driver.

The Obvious Winner: Wedge of Doom

The One-sided Fight: Wedge of Doom has always been a pretty basic robot throughout its entire BattleBots career. Every incarnation of the robot featured a wedge design with some form of lifting device and this inaugural run of Wedge of Doom is no different; it’s a wedge with a lifting arm. The Wacky Compass, however, was a little bit of a mystery. It’s introduced as having a “spinning wacky bar” but when we see The Wacky Compass itself it appears to be missing its weapon; a little known fact about this battle is that The Wacky Compass won its previous fight in a knock out, but broke its weapon in the process. Instead it has been reduced to a waddling heap of metal with various cardinal directions scribbled onto it. It looked like a total piece of shit, in other words.

And piece of shit it is. The Wacky Compass can’t even get out of its starting square before Wedge of Doom has already smashed into the side of it, bent up the “NE” corner of the bot, and thrown it onto the arena saws which promptly finish off several of the other pieces of “armor” adorning the robot. By this point The Wacky Compass is dead; it’s still visibly functioning to an extent but its armor is bent up and preventing it from moving around. Wedge of Doom wastes no time and promptly shoves the dysfunctional stomper under the hammer wherein the broken machine gets flattened immediately.

Funny, "SWW" is also the sound this thing made as it was smashed.

The greatest thing about this fight is how much of a mismatch the two designs were. Team Delta, the team behind Wedge of Doom, has never once built something that wasn’t 100% streamlined. All of their robots could probably fly if you put wings on them. Believe it or not The Wacky Compass weighs almost exactly the same as Wedge of Doom, perhaps even more if it still had its weapon, but since it was removed I’m guessing both robots weighed about 60 pounds (walking robots received a special percentage of additional weight in each class). Wedge of Doom is completely refined and enclosed on every side. The Wacky Compass literally looks like a walking crab trap stuffed with electronics and pieces of scrap metal. It was so flimsy it was completely knocked out after two nominal hits. You know you’ve got a shitty design when you can bend the sheet metal around the edges and it prevents you from moving.

The Obvious Winner: Mechavore

The One-sided Fight: I wanted to go this whole article without featuring two losing robots built by the same guy but I just couldn’t help myself with Towering Inferno. Towering Inferno comes to us from the same guy who brought us The Missing Link. Though this battle takes place three tournaments later (season 4) it appears that our driver here hasn’t learned much. The guy who built Towering Inferno originally built the first model of the robot using Legos. That’s how you know it’s a quality machine. I’m guessing somewhere on the chassis of Towering Inferno is a “CERTIFIED IN LEGO” sticker. Its opponent Mechavore was a no-frills destroying machine inexplicably featuring a cobalt blue fiberglass top. Its weapon was a hellacious cutting disc that made short work of former BattleBots poster robot Vlad the Impaler. That’s right, Mechavore beat Vlad so bad it was forced into retirement.

The moment the arena lights turn green the most ear-shattering mechanical screaming is heard as the gasoline engine powering Mechavore’s cutting disc roars to life and the disc immediately takes off spinning at physics-bending speeds. Towering Inferno takes a moment to mosey on over to Mechavore and proceeds to stab the robot’s cutting wheel with one of its flimsy hammers (the red one) which is promptly sheared off. The impact also completely destroys the drivetrain for that side of Towering Inferno. At this moment Mechavore can safely sit on the sidelines and take a standard knock out victory over Towering Inferno, but the driver isn’t the least bit interested in that at all. He decides to teach Towering Inferno a lesson on why having triangle-shaped wheels is a fucking stupid idea.

"They're called circles, you should try 'em sometime."

The icing on the cake is the fact that Mechavore isn’t quite done utterly humiliating its opponent on national TV. Mechavore was never the type of robot that would continuously beat on a crippled opponent until they were counted out; that’s considered bad sportsmanship in the realm of robot combat. The guy who built it, however, owns a giant party boat. He knows how to laugh at everything and not give a damn while he’s sailing off into Margaritaville. Mechavore approaches the giant hunk of metal it ripped off of Towering Inferno, lines up a slap shot, and uses its weapon to blast the piece of scrap metal directly at Towering Inferno.

It then comes in and slices off the robots orange hammer, you know, to make things even.

The Obvious Winner: Vladiator

The One-sided Fight: Trimangle was a behemoth of a super heavyweight sporting a low chassis, four big tires, and a massive spinning triangle-shaped blade powered by the same kind of motor running Nightmare’s disc, and we’ve already seen what that thing was capable of doing in a single blow. Vladiator was a giant metal brick constructed by the builder behind Vlad the Impaler, a legendary fighting robot responsible for a number of knock out wins and tournament championships in the heavyweight division. Vladiator took everything that made Vlad deadly and bumped it up a weight class. It’s weapon was this tiny little pneumatic lifting spike that theoretically is supposed to dead lift 300+ pound robots (don’t worry, it can) but it got by just fine.

Going back to our geometry-laden friend, Trimangle was proof of concept that Team Loki has never built a single thing that will ever work properly except for that one time their robot Surgeon General won a few fights. Even though I just discredited everything they’ve built Trimangle looks beastly at the beginning of this fight; it floors it forward and its spinning triangular blade looks five kinds of wicked. It seriously looks like it’s about to bust some heads until the robot’s biggest flaw becomes apparent: Trimangle can’t fucking turn. This isn’t some Zoolander-esque “he can’t turn left” nonsense; Trimangle is literally unable to turn. It only does so when Vladiator rams it. Trimangle gets one solid hit in with its blade and manages a second glancing blow that actually shears the lifting spike right off of Vladiator.

Circled: Vladiator's spike. Not circled: Trimangle winning.

So how is Trimangle the “obvious loser” here? With the exception of not being able to turn it is clearly winning this fight by disabling the weapon of its opponent. Despite scoring loads of points with the judges this was a bad move because by castrating Vladiator Trimangle has effectively reduced its opponent to a 300 pound box that can hurl itself across the arena at speeds of up to 35 MPH. Thirty-five fucking miles per hour. That’s fast enough to get pulled over in a school zone. Let’s crunch some numbers here. Force equals Mass times Acceleration, right? That’s 300 pounds multiplied by 35 MPH. I get 10,500 as an answer. I don’t know how to apply this number because I’m not a physicist but I am officially labeling it as the number of ass kickings Trimangle has just unleashed from Vladiator.

Vladiator lines up one shot — one single shot — and plows straight into Trimangle’s weaponry and breaks it, probably while shouting “I CAN DO THAT TOO MOTHERFUCKER”. Vladiator is past the point of giving a shit, it has gone into a berserker rage and its only mission objective is to make Trimangle its bitch which it proceeds to do after doing flips off of the arena hazards like they’re nothing at all. From doing nothing more than repeatedly bashing its opponent Vladiator manages to noticeably screw up two of Trimangle’s four wheels and even causes the robot to begin belching out copious amounts of smoke all without having any weapon whatsoever. To finish off a fitting bout demonstrating the horrors of domestic abuse and battery Vladiator mounts Trimangle’s smoking and beaten carcass and parks there until the timer runs out.

The Obvious Winner: War Machine

The One-sided Fight: Mark Setrakian is a maniac. He took the idea of “fighting robots” and ran with it until his legs just couldn’t take it anymore and then he threw the idea like a javelin as far as it would go and killed a small child with it. Let me just quote myself in a previous robotics article:

BattleBots was a sport filled with wedges and rammers and boxes until this guy showed up. Setrakian didn’t just think outside of the box, he stomped the box into the ground and drew his robot plans on it with his own blood.

That’s Setrakian in a nutshell. His robot Snake, just like Mechadon, was the embodiment of nightmare fuel. When you hear “snake” in a robot name you might be expecting a reptile-themed paint job, not a robot that looks like a snake. Well guess what? Snake is a goddamned robot snake. It had a large Graboid-from-Tremors mouth and its ass was a spinning drill. War Machine was simplicity realized. It’s a ten-wheeled box with a single piece of steel bent into the shape of a plow mounted onto it. For reasons unknown it also had two small pieces of wood stuck on top of it along with a holographic blue sticker. This has bothered me for almost a decade.

It’s pretty obvious that Snake isn’t much of a fighter, it’s more or less trying to sell itself on intimidation alone. Apparently, though, Snake won its previous fight by knock out; and I’m assuming his opponent rolled forward and spontaneously burst into flames because I cannot see Snake being dangerous to anything if you’re more than five feet away from it. War Machine lines up a shot and almost like a reflex Snake assumes this really creepy attack stance that actually makes its opponent flinch. War Machine actually stops when Snake throws its pose. It doesn’t work a second time, however, and War Machine pounds Snake right in the gut and throws it against the wall causing the mechanized reptile to being smoking and shooting sparks out of its abdomen.

"ARGH, MY DEFENSELESS AND EASILY REACHABLE STOMACH! MY ONLY WEAKNESS!"

I might be a reptile expert, but I’m no robo-reptile expert. Despite this I do know that it isn’t a good thing when a robot starts smoking and War Machine’s low blow easily took the wind right out of its opponent. Snake never leaves the wall for the rest of the fight and instead writhes around uncomfortably against the arena spikestrip and does things like trying to eat the Pulverizer and attack the crowd or something. For such an amazing robot Snake failed because its weak point can be described as “anything that isn’t its head or tail”. It lost to the equivalent of a bomb-disposal robot.

The Obvious Winner: The Crusher

The One-sided Fight: Stewbot. Stewbot, Stewbot, Stewbot. There is nothing I can say about this robot to fully give you an idea of what this thing was, so here’s a picture of Stewbot in all its former glory to do the explaining for me:

EIGHT-TIME BATTLEBOTS CHAMPION.

That is a red monster truck towing a platform trailer full of Legos. Whereas the whackjob behind Towering Inferno built his first robot models out of Legos here is a robot that is actually built out of fucking Legos. Hold on I’m not done yet, you haven’t even seen the team behind this thing:

how do i battalbot/

I’m not going to make fun of Stewbot or its team too much because these guys weren’t there to win the championship. These two guys were the hosts of ZDTV’s Computer Stew and they were there to promote their show. They were trolls, in other words, and Stewbot’s maiden voyage into the arena wasn’t televised either, so that’s why they’re here as an Honorable Mention. They lost in the most brilliant manner imaginable, though:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Goodnight, sweet prince.

- Dracophile

(Join us on the GatorAIDS forums to geek out about BattleBots and robot combat all you want!)

Not pictured: Kinect, PS Move, 95% of the games for the Wii.

Having to cower away and bury your trash in the ground is about as ultimately defeated as you can get. Nobody even does that anymore these days, but they should (on principle, we can be less environmentally destructive than that today). What’s so different about Americans from the 80′s compared to today that prevents them from saying “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore“? Why is it that something as deceptively simple as a small handful of trashy games from a leading video game company can cause a market crash in the eighties yet in today’s world Nintendo has free rein to greenlight more trashy shovelware than we have trucks to carry it all to an unsuspecting landfill? WHY?

The Wii may be the gold standard in ninth-rate garbage “video games” but their portfolio of shame is nothing compared to these five current business practices that are destroying the market and in some abstract form have got to be some kind of illegal.

“DLC” is industry shorthand for “downloadable content” (e.g. bonus characters/players, extra missions, MMO expansions). Obviously, “download” is the keyword here. This is some kind of add-on that does not come on the game disc and is something you have to purchase separately and store on your console’s local hard drive before you can play it. Again, I’m stressing the fact that this is a game expansion that doesn’t come on the disc. Developers, however, are still selling “DLC” that amounts to nothing more than a suspiciously small file (around 180KB on most Xbox 360 games) that couldn’t possibly contain the data for additional characters or missions. Hell, one high-res JPEG picture can surpass 180KB by leaps and bounds, so what exactly does this “DLC” do?

It unlocks something already on the disc.

It's basically backwards DRM.

That’s not “downloadable content”, that’s “I’ve already paid for this so why are you making me pay for it again content”, and it’s presently completely permissible in the industry even though it’s shadier than Guy Fieri wearing two pairs of sunglasses while standing under an umbrella that’s under a pop-tent under a tree when it’s overcast outside. The counterargument to this bogus DLC is simple: when you paid $60 for that game you paid for that disc and everything on it. It’s yours to do whatever you please. What developers are doing with these DLC “unlock codes” amounts to your favorite band selling their new album but charging you extra fees to unlock the second half of the CD.

The good news is not all developers are fond of the idea of these predatory nickel-and-diming practices. That still doesn’t change the fact, however, that developers such as 2K Games and Capcom have been busted using on-disc “DLC” and hawking unlock codes online. Not even Street Fighter is exempt from dealing under the table, but honestly if you paid the $15 required to unlock character outfits you probably deserved to have been duped as such.

Quickly, what’s the best way to beat your competition in a market? That’s right, make a better and more available product. Or you can do what Electronic Arts has done with their football games and score an exclusivity contract with the NFL effectively shutting out any and all competition in the market. EA originally signed this deal in 2004 for the duration of five years, but they have routinely extended their agreement enough times that it is currently set to expire in 2013 which I only assume will be met with another extension when its expiration rolls around again.

It is no secret that I hate sports games more than I hate myself but for the first time in my life I’m siding with the people who buy these games rather than calling them mean names.

Not pictured: A quality assurance department.

It’s pretty obvious why this isn’t right. Competition is what drives companies to make better products, to take chances and risks in an effort to outperform their competitors. When you nix all competition from the equation you also remove the necessity to execute a quality product, especially when we’re dealing with a game franchise that is essentially the same thing every single year. Football is football, but when it comes to expanding upon what amounts to running a ball back and forth the real deciding factors of what football game you’ll buy revolve around the presentation of the game. What kinds of neat “little things” did the developers include? Is it a massive replay/camera system? Impeccable voice-overs and fluid commentating? Maybe they focused on in-depth player/roster interactivity? Topless cheerleader mode?

You can throw all that out the window when there’s only one company working with such an open-ended idea. You’ll get their regurgitated shit and you have to like it because there’s no other competition and there won’t ever be so long as Electronic Arts maintains their contract with the NFL. For once I honestly feel badly for people who follow sports as a lifestyle as no other genre of games gets shafted as hard as sports titles has, but this isn’t Electronic Arts’ only shameful action, oh… no.

Remember what I said earlier about buying a game and being entitled to everything the game has to offer? Not only is “unlock code DLC” an example of shady dealings but our friends at EA again decided to take things a step further. Their latest dick move is called an “online pass”, a “product” featured on many of their games such as Battlefield 3, Need For Speed, and every single game on this list at Wikipedia. But just what is this “online pass”? Well, if you can’t be bothered to read the literature I’ve provided I’ll spell it out plain and simple:

If you bought a game used, then you can’t play it online without spending another $10 to unlock Multiplayer mode.

I'm just going to use this picture again.

The reasoning behind EA’s wonderful idea is they believe they’re losing money on used game sales and providing a service to people who aren’t paying for it. This is complete bullshit. When the Original Owner of a game buys it at $60 he’s paying for the game and all associated fees for servers, online play, and whatever additional content is provided to him by the developers. When he is tired of using these services and transfers the product to Secondhand Owner he is no longer making use of them, it is  now Secondhand Owner using the services. They are still paid for by the original purchase. Customers aren’t exponentially multiplying and people aren’t mass producing copies of games without paying for them. It’s not happening.

This kind of bullshit DRM should not be working in the market, but the terrifying thing is that it clearly is. Electronic Arts has made at least $15 million dollars of free money at your expense and offering absolutely nothing in return other than online functionality that should have been yours for free to begin with. Stop buying into their shit; call them up and demand a complimentary online pass, and if they refuse to give it to you then inform them where they can shove their should-be-illegal scheme and also tell them that football sucks while you’re at it. Additionally, you can also inform EA that the last good game they ever released was Road Rash 3 on the Sega Genesis.

This is simply unacceptable. Games that feature a one-time key for unlocking online play are the equivalent of a self-destructing message from Inspector fucking Gadget. The number of markets this scam intrudes on is staggering to say the least. I’ve already established how it ruins the used games market by effectively adding a $10 tax to a product and discussed how it also destroys lending to friends, but in a similar vein what about video game rentals? You can’t rent a game like Battlefield 3 to give a test run to see if you like it; you won’t get the full experience. Any kind of business model built upon secondhand merchandise is effectively screwed with EA’s worthless online pass.

Some of our website traffic isn’t domestic, so here’s a description of GameStop to our foreign friends who mercifully may not have to put up with their horrendous business practices in their countries. GameStop is an American retailer of used and new video games and assorted gaming merchandise. They presently possess a slice of the “secondhand video game goods” market somewhere close to monopoly proportions. They have done this by purchasing all of their competition. Software Etc? Bought it. FuncoLand? Bought it (and received the hilariously biased in-house publication Game Informer with it). Electronics Botique? Bought it. Rhino Video Games? Bought it. The only retailer they didn’t buy was Game Crazy, a subsidiary of Hollywood Video, that went bankrupt in 2010 with its parent company.

The point I’m trying to make is there’s little competition when it comes to GameStop and just how massive they are. They have thousands of stores in multiple countries; their “competition” such as Play N Trade has under 200 stores in the US and Canada. Clearly there’s a rift between the operating income of these two companies. Other corporations such as Best Buy and Toys R’ Us attempt to compete with GameStop in some wacky imitation of the obstacle course from American Gladiators but these big-box retailers aren’t dedicated video game stores. They just happen to also sell video games.

Also GameStop apparently has very poor trade-in rates or something.

Companies like Play N Trade can’t compete with GameStop because GameStop has so much money and so many assets in different markets that they can afford to operate in the red with “loss leader” products and incentives and simply make that money back. Play N Trade doesn’t own a shitty magazine that fellates every big-name game that’s coming out and only mocks the ones everyone else are mocking (read: Duke Nukem Forever) and they don’t own an online gaming website full of sellouts either (read: Kongregate). They can’t afford to be stupid with their money and they sure as hell can’t match the offers and incentives that GameStop has intertwined into the market: pre-order bonuses.

Sometimes when you pre-order a game you get a shirt or a goofy little figurine and most outlets who accept(ed) reservations would have one to give to you while supplies last. GameStop goes beyond the standard incentives and has managed to procure deals with various developers to net them exclusive bonus content codes that you can only get if you do business with their company. Sure, these incentives are arguably stupid and worthless — the awful Goldeneye re-remake included the cheat for Paintball Mode — but the fact remains that you’re getting free DLC, sometimes of the suspicious “unlock code” variety, for giving your business to one giant corporation that holds the reins on the market and can now continue to do so all because you wanted to shoot pretty colors in Goldeneye (which is something you could have unlocked yourself on the original Nintendo 64 release if you didn’t suck at it).

Through all of the following practices I’ve covered in this feature all of them in some way or another can be chocked up as “suitably annoying”. You’re getting shafted on DLC purchases, you’re getting reamed on football games, you’re getting cheated on used multiplayer games, and you’re getting robbed by GameStop’s pricing schemes for all of the above. At least you can still play games in some basic form, right? At the end of the day you can still go to GameStop, get the EA-only version of the latest NFL game, and spend an extra $10 because you bought it used, right?

Not when the new Xbox rolls around, apparently. Rumors are circulating like wildfire on the Internet right now stating the newest Microsoft console will simply not play used games at all.

They call it a "720" because when you see it you do a 720 and walk away.

Imagine, if you will, any other decade of gaming out there. With rampant international piracy on the Atari 2600, developers of unlicensed NES games reverse engineering the console’s lockout chip, and import game dealers offering regional keys for a variety of systems, a single feature that would effectively end it all. Everything. One game. One system. One player. Want to loan that game to a friend? Fuck you. Want to save yourself $20 and buy it from a GameStop? Fuck you. Want to do anything other than pay full price for a game and fly blind into a title that may or may not turn out to be a total let down?

Fuck. You.

“Life finds a way” is a nice sentiment from Jurassic Park and it explains the situation of generations of consoles gone by. Nintendo didn’t want unauthorized third-parties on the NES, but they showed up anyways. Sony wanted to split the Japanese and North American PS1 markets, but they were eventually bridged. Surely there will also be a way to “jailbreak” your Xbox 720 and get it to play used games but since the console doesn’t come pre-modded the release of such a monumental piece of trash as this would effectively destroy the “white market” for Xbox games (as if Kinect didn’t already open that can of worms).

As it stands right now, the Xbox 720 is the worst thing Microsoft has ever created. Windows ME was crap but at least it didn’t punch you square in the dick and bang your mother like the 720 does.

Get mad. Get really mad. Go out and tell your friends just how stupid the average video game consumer has become to let the market slowly trickle down into this. The American economy is circling the toilet right now but one thing is absolutely certain: we need another video game market crash. This has to end, and the only way to stomp it out for good is to make it end in the most spectacularly destructive way imaginable. Tell EA exactly how much you enjoy their “online pass” by coercing free ones from customer support. Don’t buy “DLC” that comes pre-loaded on the disc; don’t give the developers the “okay” to keep doing this. Stop supporting companies who practice such ridiculous highway robbery and criminal dealings.

And then maybe, just maybe, the market will explode and everyone will lose money and the market will return with a few less assholes. Companies like Electronic Arts deserve to die; the lowly employees don’t deserve to be unemployed, but it’s time for the company to go away now.

- Dracophile

(Join us on the GatorAIDS forums if you want to rage about shady business dealings in the gaming industry. Or just play Minecraft.)

The last time that happened I… well, let’s just say there’s a reason why MC Hammer suspiciously spent all of his money.

It says "Robert Maestro" under the red shit, okay?

Wait a second does that say “3 FREE GIFTS” with a “4″ written next to it as if the “3″ were a completely unintentional mistake at the St. Joseph’s Indian Free Gifts Factory? Holy shit. It does.

WELL SHIT THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING.

I tore this bad boy open and they must have really screwed the pooch at the Wannamakeanike tribe homeland because I got not 3, not 4, but 8 goddamn prizes (of varying quality) and I love prizes.

In the lore of Lakota Indians the notepad is a very sacred symbol. It is said that when the tribal chief would perform his rituals and sacrifices that he would frequently need to recollect his thoughts and required the assistance of a tablet to keep track of the steps of the rites. “Notepad” comes to us from the Indian words natto (meaning “to write down”) and pa (meaning “what the fuck was I just talking about”). That’s why when the Wannamakeanike tribe sent me two goddamn notepads I knew they were being serious. There’s enough pages represented between the two of these things for me to perform at least 120 sacrifices.

Think of all the reminders I could forget to write!!

The notepads themselves are rather mundane as seen in the picture. One is bigger than the other and they both feature clashing fall-themed imagery. Seriously, nothing on either one compliments the other; they don’t even use the same fucking shades of orange. Both of them say “a note for you” (which is a retarded sentiment, who else would it be for?) but one of them has it in a generic serif font and the other looks like what would happen if Curlz MT went into rehab. Our favorite picture of the little Indian boy shows up on the larger notepad but the picture is so blurry and the contrast too low that I seriously thought it was some kind of fox with a birth defect until I realized “oh it’s just little Mountain Dew Drinker giving us a bewildered expression while holding his feathers”.

Also, the cardboard backs of the notepads feature painfully generic Indian trivia… like some bullshit about eagle feathers and the fact that “pemmican” is a brand of beef jerky or something. Between the time I took that picture to when I started writing this article I managed to lose the back of the larger one. Surely it will become the lost tome of Lakota wisdom someday and will be discovered by archaeologists in the year 8000 so they may finally understand what mail fraud is.

Whenever an Indian mysteriously leaves you a calendar that’s bad news. Remember what happened when the Mayans left us their calendar? We’re still shitting our pants over it thinking the world is going to get sucked into a vortex to Hell or whatever it is that’s supposed to happen when their calendar rolls over. It’ll be like Y2K except instead of computers reaching “00″ it’s just the opposite: a rock hitting “00″. I have learned that as a species mankind only operates in extremes. There is no middle ground.

This calendar actually includes December 22 – 31 so it looks like we’re in the clear (until 2013). I’m more willing to take advice from a shady charity sending me random shit in the mail than I am a formerly established and presently lost civilization that had a firm grasp on astrology. The Mayans never sent me any fucking notepads in the mail. Assholes.

Oh hey look who it is! It's little Mountain Dew Drinker!

This calendar is also the first of many instances you’ll see of St. Joseph’s Indian School & Casino putting my name on fucking everything. I assume it’s in case anybody steals this calendar and I later see it in their house so I can go “hey, you’re not ‘Roastmaster’, give me my fucking calendar back!” Also the calendar is approximately half the size of a sheet of printer paper. It’s not big enough to write anything on and it’s too big to fit anywhere convenient as a reference. It also now has a water ring on it from me inadvertently using it as a coaster.

The reverse of this thing is solid blue and has the phrase “WAKAN TANKA KICI UN” emblazoned on its center. I’m not sure what that means, but judging by the surrounding photographs my best guess is that it roughly translates to “seven pictures of kids wearing racist depictions of Indian garb that we stole from the Facebook pages of a high school drama club”.

Whether you’re 7 or 77 a sheet of stickers means only one thing: badass. Two sheets of stickers, though? Stop the fucking ride for a second, I think I’m going to have a stroke here.

These stickers are where it gets weird, though, assuming some mismatched notepads and a calendar loaded with pictures of children who may or may not be getting raped by St. Joseph’s staff this very moment (I bet you thought I was kidding) weren’t weird enough. Firstly I have no idea what I am going to do with a double-sided sheet of return address labels bearing my legal name and retarded iconography of Mountain Dew Drinker. Secondly I will apply that exact same logic to a sheet of generic inspirational stickers with sentiments ranging from “a gift for you” and “love you” to “missing you” and “take time to dream”. Seriously what the hell; there’s a sticker for every single possible scenario and all of them have tacky Indian imagery that I swear they just Photoshopped the iStockphoto.com watermark off of.

Enough stickers for five burial ground Trapper Keepers.

Now is as good of a time as any to bring up a sample of Lakota jargon these people really fucking love: pilamaya. It supposedly means “thank you”, as in “thank you in advance because we know you’re totally going to pay us back for all of this cool shit we’ve sent you”. Both sheets of stickers are adorned with the “pilamaya” phrase as well as the explanation “thank you for your help”. As if. Despite their ill-advised and preemptive gratitude the most confounding thing on these sticker sheets is the phrase appearing underneath both warm (fake) sentiments of thanks: “The enclosed stickers are a gift to you, and I’m sorry I am unable to fulfill additional requests.”

The fuck?

Who’s sorry? You better be apologizing for the fact that your custom stickers suck shit through a straw instead of not giving me enough of said stickers. For fuck’s sake, half a sheet of these tacky things is more than enough. I don’t think I have enough handwritten letters to people I hate to use up all of these address labels, and as far as getting extensions on late bill payments by posing as a senile old woman I think I still have two dozen too many sunflowers and buffalo. What the fuck am I going to do with all of these goddamn stickers? Write everyone from my high school graduating class a fucking letter?

Fuck those people.

Here’s a thought, what’s the best gift you can give someone when you know nothing about them? Gift certificates in the most random fucking denominations possible, but ones that nonetheless add up to $35. That’s right, three gift vouchers. One valued at $8 for meals, another $12 for beds and linens, and $15 for clothing. I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like a lower class Wal-Mart poverty shopping spree with my name written all over it.

Sure, the “gift vouchers” are made out to “A Lakota Child” and the “From” section has my name in a pseudo-handwritten font but who’s to say I’m not “A Lakota Child”? Maybe that’s a pseudonym. Like Roastmaster. I don’t really care what you have to say about the ethics of taking money from needy kids but to me this is lunch at Subway, a new pillow, and a new T-shirt with some tacky Wal-Mart humor on it all on someone else’s dime. Wal-Mart honors competitors coupons, so that means they have to honor $35 in Lakota Fun Bucks.

PILAMAYA my ass. More like BLING BLING MOTHERFUCKERS.

Turns out they don’t, because I asked, and then was promptly asked to leave the store.

The side of the coupons say “wopila tanka” which I’m told means “many thanks”. That makes some sense considering “pilamaya” means “thank you”, so we can infer that “pila” means “thank” and the prefix “wo-” denotes something plural and “tanka” therefore means “many”. I’m hitting you with this grammar quasi lesson because the back of that fucking calendar says “wakan tanka kici un” which actually does have a translation: “may God bless”. Right. “Tanka” shows up in both of these, and they apparently mean different shit. I am almost certain these dickheads are just plugging random fucking things into an online Dungeons & Dragons language translator because this spam’s intended audience doesn’t know any better.

The best part about these vouchers, save for the fact that they’re printed in Reader’s Digest-sized font, is that the entire backside literally just says “PILAMAYA – THANK YOU!!” on every single voucher. They’re also separately detachable because you’re supposed to put each one back in the return envelope (of which these assholes didn’t prepay the postage even though they sent me fifty bucks worth of fucking return address labels) so they can throw them away at the Indian school or something. Only idiots would assume these things have actual cash value.

And then they’d take them to Wal-Mart.

You know what’s great about charities involving kids? When those kids send you those letters talking about how great their 11 cents a day rice tastes. Wanna know how to make those letters even better? Download some off-beat kids’ handwriting font, type up a painfully generic bippity-boppity bullshit letter, stick a stock headshot of a kid on there that looks like it was Xeroxed from a Xerox of another Xerox made from a missing child report that was faxed somewhere, throw on some “hand drawn” hearts for good measure, and finally top if off by making the “printed date” September 11th. No, I’m not shitting you; this letter was “printed” on “Sept11″.

It’s a fake letter from a fake kid. To you this probably isn’t a gift or a prize, but fuck you for trying to tell me otherwise. This is just as much of a prize as the notepads on sheer comedy value alone.

Sorry I can't understand you. I don't speak bullshit. Pilamaya!

The kid’s name is Aurora, and in her letter she talks about how people cannot believe what she’s been through in her “life” at the reservation. She says that people “drink too much and don’t treat each other with respect”.

Whoa whoa whoa wait, where’s my hypothetical money going again? You’re just drinking it up? Are you shitting me? Why don’t we just cut out the middle man, Aurora? How about instead of sending back your stupid goddamn gift vouchers I just bribe the guy driving the Budweiser truck with a $50 bill and tell him to deliver the beer straight to the reservation instead? I’ll just put you on notice right now, I’m also going to tell him it’s a labor camp where children are sold as sex slaves so you better make with your half of the bargain if you want unlimited firewater, capish?

This next prize is kind of a bummer. It’s a serious letter from Friar Stephen Huffstetter (hereafter “Friar Steve”, because that’s how he signs his fucking name). I can tell it’s a serious letter because it’s not written in some crazy typeface from ZillionsOfFreeFonts4U.net.

Friar Steve proceeds to vomit pathetically about the various Lakota kids happily dreaming away in their beds apparently failing to see the glaring flaw in his childcare practices if the kids are happier when they are asleep than awake. For what it’s worth he executes the appeal for cash with the eloquent bullshitting skills of a high school sophomore half-assing a paper on the American Revolution. I give him a 4/10.

What is this? A summons to the Court of Pilamaya?

He kinda fucks with his credibility a bit, however, by starting the letter with “You could be a dreamcatcher” and ending it with “Will you please become a dreamcatcher”. Yeah, hold that thought Friar Steve; I’m just getting up to go glue a bunch of beads and feathers onto myself and get tangled up in a spider web. Fucking moron.

Friar Steve talks a lot about dreamcatchers, though I’m fairly certain he’s only getting his facts from what’s said on Wikipedia because the wording of the Wiki article and the vocabulary of the letter seem to corroborate one another pretty well. Either Friar Steve is the go-to guy for dreamcatchers and the Council of Aspergian Wikipedia Editors consulted him for the article’s contents or someone’s just a big fan of CTRL+C and CTRL+V with minor syntax alterations. I’m not sure who to believe. Friar Steve really tried hard making his “signature” look like he actually hand-signed it with a ballpoint pen. Or he got a six-year-old still learning cursive writing to do it for him. One or the other.

I love this hollow award. It’s an award for my alleged “generosity to the Lakota children whose lives will be happier and futures will be brighter”. Keyword: alleged. The award is a goofy certificate that I can hang anywhere and brag to houseguests about how I helped save some kid named Aurora’s life by sending her beer and child predators; the certificate doesn’t define “what” the generosity was in regards to. Hell, maybe I sent them smallpox blankets. That seems to be the truly sincere American way to help out Indians in their time of need.

Maybe I'll go visit the school in South Dakota and take 'em all for a long hike!

This “award” is 7″ x 8.5″, the same size as that retarded calendar. Most people who get a certificate of accomplishment for something generally have it framed; go to any doctor, teacher, dentist, or politician’s office and they’ll have their degrees, awards, and honors neatly framed and presented for the world to see. One thing you’ll never see on their trophy wall, however, is an awkwardly sized award proclaiming how fucking loose they are with their cash. If this certificate graces any wall of your house or office for any reason that isn’t the least bit ironic even by the longest stretch of the term then you deserve to have your identity stolen and your dog (because I’m assuming you have one if you’re this stupid) raped by furries.

Also nobody fucking sells frames that are 7″ x 8.5″, not even matted ones. If you wanted to hang this up with more grace than what a staple gun has to offer you’d have to have a frame made specifically in these dimensions. If you have the money for frivolous custom framing jobs for an award from a fake charity then you should be giving your money to causes that don’t do shit like selling your personal information to other advertisers (again, I bet you thought I was kidding). The only thing this award symbolizes is the fact that you’ll give money to anything because you suffer from white collar guilt.

And if that’s the case may we interest you in the GatorAIDS Gator Rescue Fund? (See “Donation” link to the right.)

For all this talk of dreamcatchers and whatnot imagine my surprise when I reached into the envelope and pulled out an entire fucking dreamcatcher.

Actually I guess I was more stunned by the actual item than the fact that they were continuing forward with this stupid ass “dreamcatcher” motif.

No, I'm fucking serious. AN ACTUAL DREAMCATCHER.

And we’ve come full circle; a circle that’s wrapped with cheap string and adorned with gaudy feathers, cheap plastic beads, and windchimes tied on with what appears to be fishing line because as we all know  putting windchimes on something that hangs flat against the wall is a genius idea. That’s like castling in chess on your fourth move. Oh I’m sorry, you assume that because all of my pictures are taken on a Crossfire board that I know nothing about chess. Fuck you.

I don’t know what in the hell to say about this thing. This is easily both the tackiest and greatest thing a charity has ever thrown into the trash by proxy. Think about how much it would realistically cost to have thousands of these things made and compare that to how many people actually send money to St. Joseph’s Indian School. Think about it, the cost may not be that much on an individual basis but even the cheapest of dreamcatchers will add up quickly when you multiply that by a few thousand mailers. Hey, Friar Steve, why don’t you fucking buy some butter to put on the kids’ rice instead of sending out a million reasons why Native American heritage has been devalued in this country? Do your goddamn job.

Even better, how about you only send dreamcatchers to people who actually donate? This is a rhetorical question but I’m about to answer it in a second anyways.

I’m really handing it over to St. Joseph’s Indian School pretty heavily but that’s  because these people are deserving of nothing but unrefined contempt for their shady “business practices” and questionable ethics. It takes some huge balls to send out guilt mail, balls that I’m sure were probably paid for with the money people sent in with honest intentions, even if said donators were tricked, manipulated, or flat out guilted into doing so by receiving a shitload of gifts. (Fun fact: “Guilt mail” is illegal in the United Kingdom.)

This charity’s target demographic, as you might have guessed, are elderly people. Wealthy, retired, and admittedly stupid/oblivious elderly people. People who want to do something with their nest egg to feel like they’re giving back to the world after having worked so hard through their entire lives. Take a look at what was included in this mailer:

• Notepads: Old folks forget shit all the time. My grandmother had an entire spiral notebook of reminders.
• Calendar: Okay, you got me on this one. Count the days until you die? I don’t know.
• Return labels: Who still sends traditional letters in the mail? Your grandmother.
• Vouchers: They give a sense of duty when they’re put in the donation envelope, a feeling retirees lack.
• Kid’s letter: It’s an emotional appeal that’ll work on the older generation because…
• Friar’s letter: …the Friar’s letter supports and validates the pleas of the kid’s letter.
• Certificate: It’s a symbol of your duty and ties back into retirees feeling left out and worthless.
• Dreamcatcher: 100% guilt appeal. Through and through, see the below picture:

Click this picture to enlarge it. No, really. Do it.

The donation ticket is the last thing you see when you’re making the decision to give away your money, and look at that title. “Dreams of Hope for the Children.” Wow. Dreams and hope for children? Fuck, I’m in my 20′s but sign me up for that! That title is so trite and meaningless it could be anything; it is only there for guilt appeal. Of course you want kids to have hope and dreams. They’re fucking kids. You’re not supposed to be crushingly depressed and hating life until you’re at least however old Dracophile is this year.

So off to the left under that you have the generic empty response bubbles for the  gift vouchers attached underneath the ticket. When you list them that way of course people are going to go for the $35 option. Who the fuck would look at that and say “well kid I’ll give you a taco and and a beanbag chair but as far as clothes go psssshhht… you’re going naked buddy, tribal style”.

But even if you don’t have $35 to spare look off to the right. There’s a box acknowledging the fact that you’re unable to properly contribute at this time but you want to reimburse Friar Steve for his stupid dreamcatcher at the cost of $5. I guess now is as good of a time as any to point out that the dreamcatchers were made in fucking China. Five bucks? No way, Stevey. Here’s fifty cents. Now shut the fuck up and get out of my face.

Dreams do not exist where that dreamcatcher was made.

It gets worse when you flip the donation ticket over. Not only is there a little checkbox to show Friar Steve exactly what not to pray for in your name but there’s a box where you can willingly hand over your credit card information to a shady “charity” that just sent you a bunch of worthless tat completely unannounced. On top of that you can give these jerkoffs permission to charge your card on a monthly basis and if that’s not alarming enough might I point your attention to the highlighted line annotated with “HOLY SHIT”?

I am considering St. Joseph’s in my will. Do not, and may I repeat do-fucking-not say that line aloud or John Redcorn will materialize in your house and kick you square in the dick.

Here’s my final words on this charity. The Better Business Bureau has a list of 20 “standards” that they judge charities on. Friar Steve has managed to fuck up six of them. That’s teetering pretty damn close to half. In their defense a lot of them come down to simple things like missing paperwork and poor syntax, but the one I’d like to draw your attention to is Standard 8, the BBB standard that details a certain percentage of a charity’s received donations must be spent on the actual causes outlined in their literature. Friar Steve sang his sorrow song to the tune of fifty-two million fucking dollars in 2010. That number alone makes me want to vomit Exorcist style while liquefied crap simultaneously fires out of my ass like a Super Soaker, but here’s the kicker: half of it was spent on business expenses.

They spent $26,000,000.00 on fucking return address labels in 2010. 

- Roastmaster

PS: I would like to thank the blog Something Better To Do for their help with the preliminary research for the charity in this article.

(Been guilted into forking over money to a shady charity? Share your story on the GatorAIDS Forums. Or talk about Skyrim instead. Whatever works.)

"From Miniclip with love."

And through all of this we are still alive today as a testament to just how resilient a group of old friends can be when banded together. We came forward and put on a live performance (CFMM: In 3D). We released a book (Nintendon’t). We were featured on industry-leading gaming blogs (Bitmob). I would like to extend a personal “fuck you” to each and every person who attempted to put us down and assume that we would stay there like beaten dogs. We are more than that, and despite adverse launch conditions we laughed with one another and produced dozens of memorable articles to share with the world. We are GatorAIDS, and we are here to stay.

We’re looking forward to 2012 with open minds and eager hearts. We’ve had six months to get our things together and we’re ready to go balls-out this year. In the meantime, here’s the best of what we produced in 2011. If you’re new to GatorAIDS or looking to share our site with your friends & family this update is the place to start!

5 Things Kinect Can’t Do (That Project Natal Said It Could) (by Dracophile): In 2009 Microsoft brought to E3 a video preview of their famed “Project Natal”, a motion-sensing, voice-activated, thought-reading device that would revolutionize gaming as we know it. In 2010 this device was unleashed into the world as “Kinect”, and one year later this article was written to compare the original trailer to what the Kinect is actually capable of doing. The results, unsurprisingly, are staggering. This article was featured on the popular gaming journalism site Bitmob where it was crowned the #1 most read article of August 2011.

The 7 Freakiest Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow Glitches (by Dracophile): In our most-shared article on Reddit Dracophile revisits the original generation of Pokemon games in a way most people never even knew existed in such depth: horrible, horrible, terrifying glitches. The mystery of MissingNo is entirely passe and played out, but how would you react to glitches capable of infecting and propagating inside of your save file? What about a glitch that periodically shifts the destination parameters of every door in the entire game? How about a glitch that can exist and not exist at the same time? The dark side of Pokemon Red/Blue is like a Hellraiser puzzle cube of doom, and we blow it wide open.

BattleBots Update: RoboGames 2011 (by Dracophile): BattleBots is a legendary relic of television history, a motorsport unlike anything the world has seen and was something that could have only existed during the Y2K boom of technological armageddon. That’s why when the series had its sixth season announced in 2010 GatorAIDS excitedly adopted the defunct “BattleBots Update” column from RFSHQ.com. When that series didn’t make it to TV, though, the column was revived for a special one-time Science Channel event called Killer Robots documenting the 2011 RoboGames tournament. This article made its way into the hands of the event organizers who responded with absolute delight and secured it a spot in our “best of” list.

Team Impact: 2% Parlor Tricks, 98% Church Sermon (by Roastmaster): What’s the best way to get someone’s attention? Break something. What’s the best way to get someone to unknowingly listen to a sermon about Our Savior Jesus Christ? Break something while quoting the Old Testament. Team Impact is a performance group that utilizes the ages-old “bait and switch” method of duping people into attending a church sermon and they do so in the most testosterone-laden and flamboyantly pseudo-homosexual way possible. Team Impact visited Roastmaster’s hometown so he did the only rational thing an Internet comedian does when faced with an awkward evening: dive in head first.

The 7 Most Retarded Collectible Coins Ever (by Dracophile): Coins. They’re money, they’re commemoratives. Most countries mint currency depicting landmarks or iconography concurrent with their cultural and domestic history, but the United States is one of the few who have a industry based solely around creating the tackiest and most predatory “commemorative collectible coins” possible and hawking them to senile old people. Remember the 9/11 pop-up coin? That and six other hate crimes are featured in this article.

I Fucking Love TrueSwords.com (by Roastmaster): When GatorAIDS was forced to start running ads from AdBrite after we were banned from Google AdSense we immediately became inundated with banner ads for a “TRUESWORDS.COM” offering “REAL METAL SWORDS” and “ANIME SWORDS”. One month into using AdBrite we had seen more TrueSwords ads than everything else combined and multiplied by five. Roastmaster finally broke and paid TrueSwords a visit to see what great products they had for sale and wrote about his findings.

Review: Sushi-Go-Round (Nintendo DS) (by Dracophile): This article was created solely as underhanded and passive-aggressive slander against a company that Dracophile formerly worked for until he was unceremoniously laid off. Miniclip produced an online game called Sushi-Go-Round and decided to port said game to the Nintendo DS. The end result was an unplayable mess of crap that spawned the creation of an article that, all things considered, did not turn out all that bad considering its inspiration.

The 6 Most Valuable Games Ever (Quantified by NBA Live 1995) (by Dracophile): The idea behind this article came from humble beginnings: what is the most valuable video game of all time? Once this was established the opposite then came into effect regarding what the most worthless game of all time is, and with some mathematical theory this game was discovered to be none other than NBA Live 1995. This article takes a look at the rarest games in the world and offers cool trivia regarding how many copies you’d need of a forgotten basketball game to “trade up” to it.

As a bonus, since they never received formal announcements of their own, here’s our best work from both 2010 and 2009, years that we were in operation but not running at full capacity.

128 Ways to Ensure You Will Never Get Laid (by Dracophile): For an article that sounds like a bulleted list of every X-Files episode this article is instead a hilarious look at some advice from the cat lovers’ publication 128 Ways to Say “I Love You” to Your Cat. From implied bestiality to child neglect this book has it all, plus a parting message meant to troll anybody who dares make fun of the book.

What Your Fursona REALLY Says About You (byRoastmaster): The first step of becoming a furry is choosing a spirit animal that represents who you are. This spirit animal will then be subjected to various fetishes and rape scenarios of your choosing, according to Roastmaster. Unknown to most furries the animal they “choose” actually speaks more about them than they may realize. Roastmaster whacks you with some pseudo-science and firsthand observations of the furry fandom in this hit article.

Nickellennium Retrospective: Dracophile’s Book of the Future (by Dracophile): On January 1st, 2000 Nickelodeon aired a special documentary titled Nickellennium, a six hour long show featuring interviews with inventors and children talking about their dreams, hopes, and ideas for the future. Nickelodeon released a slew of Nickellennium-brand content including a time-capsule book. Dracophile obtained a copy of this book, filled it out, and opens it up in this installment to 10 Years After.

The Problem with Pokemon (by Dracophile): It’s a known fact that Big Church has always hated Pokemon. They hate whatever is currently popular because it has a better ability to snag up young little Johnny Somebody and detract them from the ways of God by using flashing lights and dragons and magic, which in the eyes of Jesus is of course witchcraft, witchcraft, and witchcraft. This installment of 10 Years After takes a look at an old religious broadcast titled In Focus, the episode “The Problem with Pokemon”.

GMO2: Who’s Ready For Street Date Violations? (by Dracophile, FpS Ref1ex): Out of the entire 2010 season of GMO2 we decided to choose one episode that we felt was the best out of everything we’ve done. We took a look at things such as content, audience reached, sharing, and feedback… and looked no further than our prerelease episode of Monster Jam: Path of Destruction. It was the perfect storm of material: we had a game not yet released and we made inappropriate jokes about dead children that caused rednecks to send us violent threats.

Stupifyingly Bad Album Covers (by Dracophile): You might not realize it, but there’s a ton of music out there that isn’t in the mainstream media (we hope the sarcasm was applied liberally to that statement). Most of this indie music is experimental, niche, or forgettable, but what isn’t are the absolutely atrocious album art (and we use “art” loosely here) that accompanies each record. Some of these musical acts you may never have heard of before, or in the case of Black Sabbath maybe you have.

DragonPlay: Vaporware Lifetime Achievement Award (by Dracophile): DragonPlay, as it was announced by its dev team years before this article was written, was meant to be a kids’ MMO game similar to the wildly popular Club Penguin. By “similar to” we of course mean “direct ripoff of”. Two years after the article’s re-publication on GatorAIDS the DragonPlay dev team hunted us down and trolled the forums, earning this old article a posthumous inclusion in the Greatest Hits vault.

10 Years After: Pokemon The First Movie (by Dracophile): What happens when the fondest memories of your life age into the double digits? Well, for starters you go back and revisit them as best as you can because immediately afterward you start to experience the first feelings of what it’s like to get old. Dracophile recounts his days in middle school as a Pokemaniac in this memorable installment to 10 Years After.

Most Disorganized Website of 2009: Lockerz (by Dracophile): What do you get when you mix equal parts trendy and Web 2.0 with Chuck E. Cheese’s and referral spam? You get Lockerz, a website that encouraged users to invite friends to be a part of their “elite” secret community where you can earn points to redeem for prizes. The problem? They never once had their shit together and the only “prize” ever in stock was a copy of a crappy Star Wars game. For the Wii.

Thank you for being a part of GatorAIDS and for helping shape us into the ever-growing community we are today. Every linkback, every Facebook share, every Tweet, every forum post, each and every one of them is truly appreciated. We’re here doing what we do for each and every one of you. Thank you for supporting us in 2011 when we needed it most. We aim to become an even more active, stable, and entertaining website in 2012. The best part is even if we fail it doesn’t matter because the world’s going to blow up anyways.

We hope to see you there, and that you’ll bring your friends too!

- Dracophile

(If you’ve enjoyed everything we’ve done this year be a good sport and post this article to your Facebook wall or Twitter profile. Or Tumblr if you’re a hipster fag. Likewise, if you came here because of said social media links visit the GatorAIDS forums so we can persuade you to stay with us forever.)

Proving that we exist solely to do nothing more than rip on Miniclip I’ll start this brief introduction off by pointing out that Miniclip’s mascot, a caricature of the CEO they affectionately call “Big Rob”, is the scariest fucking mascot in the history of global marketing. Seriously, just look at their fucking Christmas video. I bet you squirted a little in your pants, and not in a sexual way. That THING is horrifying. How a custom costume like that can be produced and not one person going “well now this is just pants-shittingly terrifying” boggles my fucking mind.

That voice. That… FACE. Big Rob rivals the kinds of crazy shit seen in Japanese horror films and surely once Miniclip has had enough of GatorAIDS collectively bashing them that creepy blood-soaked grin on Big Rob’s face will be the last thing me, Dracophile, Payton, or anyone else will ever see.

So, in true Christmas spirit I stole Miniclip’s Christmas video and remixed it into Roastmaster’s X-Mas Special. Enjoy the nightmare.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

- Roastmaster

Ask anybody what the best part of Christmas is and they will unanimously tell you “the presents”. Yes, there is nothing quite like getting a bunch of boxes of either completely useless items or something incredibly awesome. Most people are pretty easy to shop for. Kids, for example, will eat up anything (literally) with small parts or dinosaurs. All dads like socks and ties, all moms want a Snuggie, guidos want spray tan (yes even in December), and drug addicts want their next hit.

But what about furries?

ScotchGuard. Lots... and lots... of ScotchGuard.

Furries can be notoriously hard to shop for. After all, what exactly are you supposed to get someone whose hobbies include masturbating to The Secret of Nimh and dressing up like a fox? DVD’s, art supplies, and comic books? Joke’s on you because they probably already have all that. If you’re shopping for a furry then you have to think creatively and outside of the box. It is a medical fact that all furries are clinically insane, so here’s five Christmas gift ideas (poorly timed and posted on December 25th), that you can take to heart for the special furfag in your life.

You know what even furries have to wear? Clothes. Furries, mercifully, wear clothes. Thanks to the advent of generic Internet humor anybody who has even a fraction of a percentage of an identity can buy an entire wardrobe to broadcast to the world exactly who they are on the inside whether that person be a cynical asshole writing editorials on Christmas, a reincarnated dragon, a Dungeons & Dragons nerd, or even a serial murderer.

Somewhere, Jam-Master Jay's ghost is weeping.

Yes, that is a Run-D.M.C. shirt and yes, that is a shirt made to look like the band’s logo except it reads “FUR FAG”. It also happens to be the least offensive article of clothing being worn in that picture.

Why is this shirt a perfect choice for a furry gift idea? Because depending on who you are it can either be a backhanded insult or a term of endearment. “Furfag” is a term coined by Internet trolls looking to get under the skin of the furries they creepily stalk; I even used the word in the opener to this article. It has become a part of the Internet’s collective nomenclature. Much like the black community taking back “the N-word” furries have decided they want to steal the colorful version of “fag” that people have used to keep them down.

But I still don’t think you should wear the shirt in public.

I’ll be out with it, the furry fandom is sex-centric, and don’t let anybody else tell you otherwise because they are lying to you. “Sex” is to “furry” as “water” is to “required to make urine” and I’ll irrefutably prove it to you: when was the last time you went to a Star Trek convention and saw a vendor’s booth selling silicon Klingon dicks? Exactly.

That’s where Bad Dragon comes into play; they sell nothing but dragon-themed sex toys (and then some).

Yes, that is a box of fake dragon dongs.

Nothing says “I respect and/or tolerate you and your perverted obsession with mythological creatures” quite like a 12+ inch long dragon dick that was more than likely sculpted by the late Athus Nadorian. (Bet you weren’t expecting that kind of reference to show up in this article, were you?)

They also make female toys if your special furry is still in the closet.

Actually on second thought don’t do this. This is a bad idea. See next point for a better option.

Furries ruin everything.

Don’t get a furry an animal of any kind. Laws will be broken. You can instead get them a plushie version of whatever their favorite creature is so they can hug and molest it all they want without having an ASPCA nightmare on their hands. Normally stuffed animals are created with children in mind but much like the case with My Little Pony it’s a market that comes with unintentional demographics.

This can't possibly be sexual in any way. Nope.

See, there’s a whole ulterior market for plushies where furries buy them, slice a hole in them, and install meticulously tailored sleeves inside of them that are colloquially known as an “SPH”, or “strategically placed hole”. Seriously.

The wolf pictured above? IT IS UNCLEAN.

Not everybody is into plushies, though. Some furries have a thing for inflatables (e.g. pool toys), well you can bet your furry ass there’s a market for that too. And guess what? They also come with an “SPH” or two (or three) if you have the money.

So we’ve come this far in the article to an entry titled only “Thor”. We’ve seen shirts, dragon dongs, and safer venues for expressing bestiality via plush wolves and vinyl orcas. What else could possibly be next?

How about what is known in the fandom as “the granddaddy of all toys”? This is your last chance to avert your eyes. Below this sentence is a picture of a horse dildo twice as big as the arm of the guy holding it.

It's so offensive the entire background had to be censored.

You should have seen that coming, really. That there is “Thor“, a production of Zeta Creations (now operating as Zeta Paws). Before Bad Dragon showed up to start kicking everybody’s ass Zeta owned the market for toys and they were raking in what amounted to free money. You heard correctly, this was a lucrative business even before the Internet was a majorly affordable commodity.

Just looking at that toy is enough to make you cringe in discomfort. It’s supposed to be a novelty, but I’ll be damned if that product page doesn’t advertise it as a something intended for serious use.

There’s even a popular urban legend in the fandom about a group of furries who brought Thor into a Denny’s restaurant and were promptly kicked out. This story is acknowledged and reflected in the “Kicked Out Of Denny’s” achievement on the Zeta Paws website. They owned up to it.

So there you have it. Five (alright, four three because Thor is mercifully no longer in production) gift ideas that you can let stew in your head for the next year until it’s inevitably Christmas again… unless the world blows up on December 21st, 2012 in which case nevermind. I’ll ride my inflatable orca into the great beyond. See you there.

- Dracophile

PS: I would like to thank my friends (yes, friends) at Kitty Loves Monster, Bad Dragon Enterprises, Fetish Zone, and Zeta Paws for their support in making this article possible. Realistically, if you’d like to bring a smile to the face of the furfag in your life, you should take a look at what they have to offer in a non-mocking manner. No, this article wasn’t paid for (but Kitty Loves Monster provided the wardrobe for CFMM: In 3D).

(Want to spread the yuletide cheer with other cynical bastards? Come on down to the GatorAIDS forum where our Christmas party is the best Christmas party on the Internet. Or not.)