Pepsiman Review (Sponsored Content)

Greetings to all my readers, new and actual. I’m here today to announce an exciting new prospect for all of us* here at Genericide Entertainment! We’re expanding our horizons and shifting paradigms into an incredible new avenue of fresh possibilities and dynamic opportunities. In other words, we’ve gone corporate! That’s right, Genericide Entertainment is now ad-sponsored content! This is sure to be an exciting new era of community connection, exciting innovation, fan-author synergy and exciting new realms of quality products. I’m excited. But before I could embark on this exciting new journey, I needed to get a sponsor in the first place.

*Me

This was difficult, since these days long-form text articles are about as lively as your favorite Everquest server. Most of the focus is on YouTube channels, a fact I was happy to exploit until I remembered I don’t have one of those. Unfortunately both Crunchyroll and Audible required I have at least 5 subscribers before sponsoring me. Despite my best efforts, they were not swayed by a potential 5 subscribers. Loot Crate was though. Expect the unboxing video to come up whenever I can figure out how to work my phone’s camera.

Cold Smokes and Metaphors, Part 2

11:16 PM, December 24th. South Personificationsburg, Abstractia.

Shifty Simmons was leaning back onto an alley dumpster, entangled in a moth-ridden trench coat three sizes too large for him. He held a stack of bills in his hands, passing them back and forth like a deck of playing cards and taking in the crisp yet crumpled scent of Legitimately Acquired legal tender. Sighing contentedly, he stuffed the bills back in his pocket and smoothed down the dusky patchwork spider web he called hair. As he rose back to his intimidating peak of four foot ten, I decided to speak up.

“Evening, Sim.”

“AH!” Simmons jump earned him more hang time than an 18th century pickpocket. The landing, however, was a mere 3 out of 10.

“D-D-Donny! What a s-surprise!” he wheedled like a clarinet filled with equal parts phlegm and sawdust. “What, ah, eheh, brings you to my neck of the woods?”

I stepped out of the shadows and rolled my eyes, vision glowing with a six pack of cigarettes rubber-banded together.

“Please, Sim. Even you can’t be that dense. Why does anyone come to you?”

Cold Smokes and Metaphors, Part 1

9:42 PM, DECEMBER 24TH. PERSONIFACTIONSBURG, ABSTRACTIA.

The dark enveloped me like a cold, lifeless blanket. Streetlights left stark orange holes in the fabric, casting harsh rays of visual perception on a snow-covered cityscape. Legs stiffly pumping as they seized up in the breeze, I crunched through the weighty white blanket towards the scene of the crime. I already used blanket. Shoot. Well, it fit better for snow anyway. We’ll retcon the darkness into a cardigan or something.

Turning at the corner of 5th and Simile, I came face to face with tonight’s job. It was a grizzly scene, and not the kind you see fishing for salmon. The stiff was sprawled out on the concrete behind that taught tape TP of the local PD. The chief was already there, looking down his wobbly, grim-faced lip-fur at the blood on the snow beneath him. Well, the stuff wasn’t actually on the snow. It was mostly along the curb, mixing with the filthy gutter slush for a sort of spotty dark brown color. I knew that on top of everything else, the killer had a profound disrespect for the conventions of visual symbolism.

The 31st

On March 31, 2016, I was sitting in my cubicle at the job factory when a strangely insubstantial finger tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around to what I’d think was someone in a crappy grim reaper costume were it not for them being literally half-transparent. I don’t know many transparent people, so this narrowed down names to remember quite a bit. Their face appeared to be enveloped in all-consuming shadow beneath their hood, so that meant I couldn’t guess who they were off of, say, a distinctive nose. But most tellingly, they were adorned in a series of chains weighed down by boxes of obscure Korean MMOs.

“Herbert C. Ghost?” I asked with a bewildered expression.

“Ah, good, you remember me. Saves me the time of explaining myself again.”

“A few holidays ago you visited me with memories of three awful MMOs past, though it turned out to be just one at the time. Then I recycled that awkward holiday special set-up next year by visiting you directly. I got tired of your awkward shtick, which is why you weren’t in this year’s crummy game special.

“I JUST said you didn’t have to explain that! Also, blaming me for that ‘shtick’? Immature and a little hurtful actually, thanks for that. Only not actual thanks, because I hate you.”

“Then why are you here?” I said, turning my swivel chair back towards my desk. “I have very important, very boring work to do here and we’re months out from Christmas from either direction.”

Oblivion Adventures Halloween Spooktacular

Little notice before we start. I played an indie game this week called Undertale. I heard of its release over a month ago, but was too busy to play it. From what I heard, I expected it to be some fantastic triumph of a game that I would remember for years to come. It was. The combat is fun, the writing is fantastic, the music is excellent, and it has its own style not quite like anything else. I don’t yet have enough to say on it to fill an article, so I’m saying here: Undertale is an amazing game and I sincerely recommend people play it. We now return to your regularly scheduled rushed holiday special.

“Well it looks like we’re stuck here for a while” said Martin glumly, sittin down on de curb next to Shush.

It were just after Shush an Martin left de inn at Skin-guard. When Shush had gone to da gate de guards said dey couldn’t pass. A wanderin herd a cows was blockin de gate an dey needed some time to shoo dem away. Since Martin seemed a bit grumpy bout dat, Shush tried to cheer de guy up.

“Hey, Shush have an idea!”

“And what would that be?”

“We can tell each other scurry stories ta pass de time!”

Principles of Persuasion Mini-Paper

So as has sometimes happened in the past, I was suffering writer's block for a paper I didn't want to write, and in an attempt to alleviate this wrote a fake paper instead. It didn't do much to help my productivity, but it was pretty fun to write. It can be found below, unedited.

***

An Unrestrained Ramble on the Inconvenience of Icicles

…this was probably a bad idea.

These were the thoughts of our stalwart hero, me, as I stared directly into a pit of razor-sharp, pointed icicle stalagmites (stalagmicicles, if you will). I was suspended upside down on a thin cord of rope, whose two ends were attached to opposing walls of a very tall, icy chamber. I could tell you immediately and promptly whether or not I made it across the deadly pit to the ledge that was sticking out of one side. In fact, if you stop munching on narrative tension long enough to take a refreshing sip of common sense, you can probably deduce the answer right now. But it would probably be more satisfying if I put off that impending tension for a bit while I dodder off back to how this all began, right? Shut up, it so would. So let’s go back in time a bit…

An Unrestrained Ramble On the Unreliability of Doctors

It all started a single couple of few months ago.

I was hanging around in my room, relaxing after a recent bounty hunter job wherein I slew a horde of a thousand furious gargoyles. But enough about my boring personal life. The point is I was doing not much at all but hanging around, basking in the midday sunshine streaming in through my window. I was also thinking about how I would probably update my blog soon because I am clearly (but for a few rare exceptions), incredibly punctual and not at all lazy about these things.

It was at this point that I felt a strange sensation in my upper chest. As I wondered if my diet of snack food and chocolate might actually be causing what it logically should all the time, the sensation worked its way up my throat. There was a very brief pressure in my mouth and…

*ZAWUMPH*

An Unrestrained Ramble On The Slaying of Sand Beasts

“…well fuck, this will really screw up my updating schedule on the blog.”

This was one of the primary thoughts on my mind as I lay trapped in a steel container buried below the desert miles away from civilization, as I could feel the vibrations of a hundred hungry sand beasts burrowing towards my iron coffin. The other main musings on my mind concerned ways to escape a steel container buried in a desert of hungry sand beasts, the amount of oxygen a vaguely human shaped steel container contained, and related matters. I mean, granted, that wasn’t all that was going on up there. I was also considering whether or not I’d had left the lights on at home. In the back of my mind I was also remembering that one song, y’know, that one that goes “dah nah daah duh nah daah nuh, dah nah daah duh nah daah nuh, daah nuuh dah”, or something along those lines. And I think I was also absentmindedly noting how I kind of had to pee at the time and…

…I feel I’ve gotten off track somewhat. What was I talking about again?

Oh right, the desert! And the steel box. And the giant robot. No wait, that last one was a different time.

An Unrestrained Ramble on the Forging of Words

Well well well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? As is becoming an embarrassing trend with this blog, I seem to have gone a fair period of time without updating it. I’m sure my readers would be very disappointed in my long absence were it not for the fact that I talk to all of them like every other day. My hefty hiatus has been horribly heinous, but fear not, more content is on its way. But beyond that, my good reader, I must say I had a really good and not at all fictitious reason for not updating, which I will now describe to you in excruciating detail.

Our story begins several days after my last update about impressive organs. It was a dull, average afternoon of me practicing my chainsaw juggling routine. I was right in the middle of doing the tricky bit with the behind-the-back on-a-unicycle portion when suddenly I stopped, causing only minor property damage in the process. For you see, my Blog Sense was going off like something that was going off with an unprecedented amount of vigor! Focusing my Hyper Sensitive Blog Alignment Temporal Determinant Sensor know to some as “knowing about the passage of time”, I realized that it had been too many days without updates for the world to handle without resorting to cannibalism or whatever it is you people do when you go too long without hearing a random individual make jokes about butts in between talking about decades old video games.

A Paper on Environmentalism

Earlier today I was struggling with an assignment for an unnamed class in which I had to identify a problem related to the class being green and offer a solution. I was not fond of the assignment, so I did something I've done once or twice before to amuse myself: I wrote out a fake, comedic version of the essay. Normally I only write these for my own amusement, but upon showing it to a friend they said I should post it on the blog. Given that school and my own laziness is keeping this blog as empty as usual lately, I figured why the hell not. So here, presented for your amusement, is some unedited, off-the-cuff madness from a bored and frustrated paper writer:

An Unrestrained Ramble On the Nature of Time

            So when I started this blog I made a solemn, concrete promise to not hold myself to any promises about updating. By all accounts, I have succeeded in upholding this noble goal. In other words, my rate of updating has generally toed the line in between “somewhat inconsistent” and “taking place in a dimension completely unrestrained from human understanding of time”. Though it is kind of impressive that I was able to apparently bend the time stream to my will purely for the purposes of updating out of schedule, it isn’t necessarily a good thing. Because although the Genericide update calendar may be a twisted, gnarled husk of temporal confusion, my internal guilt clock runs on a tight, consistent schedule.