Monday Night Rumble of The Discourse - Winter 2024

So if you are the type to fuck around on youtube, or care about the political discourse (or I guess, not care), then I was commanded to begin another 7-week series of The Monday Night Rumble of The Discourse for Winter 2024. Last week was Week 1 of the 7-week series. Tonight at 10 pm EST will be week 2. Plugging it here because I know everybody goes different places to see different things, and I'm a force of chaotic good who always forgets to scatter his nonsense in all four directions. This may end up being the last season because it's not clear if this stupid game is going to work on my computer anymore in two months (part of the side effects of using obsolete machinery beyond its intended lack of usage).

SONG OF THE DAY: My 2600

I’m not sure what the correct term for the hat is but those weird Scottish boxer boy selling newspapers hats, where it’s like floppy but with a brim, and not really floppy, and one loose part comes to the brim part? I have never trusted anybody who wears one of those in the modern day. Those people are not to be trusted, ever. Even if going for ironic style, you’re ironically trying to look like an asshole, and I’m not sure why you’d want to do that, unless you’re an asshole, but trying to temper it with humor. I don’t know.
I’ve been trying not to be a hater on shit as much lately, but goddamn, living in a “culture” where identity is more often than not purchased, and where people either change their identities regularly or become these strange piecemeal hybrid identities of the various phases of consumption they’ve indulged in, it’s hard not to hate. I guess I’m not hating the players though – I’m hating the game.

Monday Night Rumble of The Discourse - Episode 10

Made it to 10 episodes of this ridiculousness. We've expanded the field to 25, because there's too many people that deserve to be up in this bitch. Be sure to consider supporting my patreon (which supports this project).

Monday Night Rumble of The Discourse - episode 8

Monday Night Rumble of The Discourse was an all women's rumble this week, after last week's finish which saw the Twitter Communist beat Super Bluecheck. President Biden signed up to be special referee for this one.

Monday Night Rumble of The Discourse - episode 7

We returned to our abandoned concrete factory repurposed as a battleground for The Discourse last night, after taking last week off in observance of the spring equinox. Comments sent in to our team complained about the lack of female representation, and the fact a woman has yet to win The Discourse. This became a theme in last night’s episode. Drop your thoughts on any of this in the comments.

Monday Night Rumble of The Discourse - episode 6

For the past six weeks, every Monday night at 8 pm EST, we've had a Monday Night Rumble of The Discourse, where a collection of political entities comprised of actual politicians and some political stereotypes do battle in an abandoned concrete factory. I've hyped it on my social media feeds but have forgotten to post it here. Well here you go - the March 15, 2021, episode of Monday Night Rumble of The Discourse.

Previous winners:

Joe Rogan Podcast fan

President Joe Biden

Antifa Black Block

Senator Bernie Sanders

Covid 19

PL4Y1NG C1V1L1Z4T10N...

 

playing civilization 
on a decade old iMac 
in front of a space heater 

SONG OF THE DAY: Grinding All My Life

The historical complaint against history was that the winners tell the story, thus we get a one-sided view of what happened. This is true in all contexts of culture. I say this related to “grinding all my life” because I got to thinking about the etymology of slang grinding, and how the act of slowly wearing something down in laborious act was turned into hustler mantra, as in “rise and grind”  or “grind pray” or all the uses of grinding now used more than people actually use power tool grinders. Here’s the weird thing though – online there was no real solid etymological slang site, just normal dictionaries which would barely mention the slang version. However, there was a significant amount of explanation, including a FUCKING WIKIPEDIA PAGE about grinding as it relates to using this slang in playing video games. At the Wikipedia page, there was actually discussion about how some viewed this as poor game design, while others considered a natural aspect of any quality game, to have a repetitive laborious task to complete certain achievements. And yet, no fucking etymology of the slang use in terms of hustling after dreams through perhaps not entirely legal methods.

This is further example of the gentrification of the internet, and how a certain comfort class knowledge is deeply explored in this medium that claims to be full of all information, when actually it’s just a wide expanse of narrow knowledge. Call it the Genius Syndrome, as in that genius website, which has nerd ass people explicating lyrics to verses, often times in hilariously ridiculous ways. But anyways, shout out to you if you remain grinding towards your dreams – this poison culture is like building sand castles and if you don’t tend that shit daily they gonna wipe you down with heavy tides of bullshit, so you gotta stay grinding at that shit constantly, or else you get swept out to normalcy’s sea, and next thing you know you’re sitting around playing video games, pretending you are active not passive in life, and arguing about shit online because you’re sheltered ass domesticated livestock existence feels more important to you than outside perspectives. Son of Boomer Sports Car White Male is Incel With Sikk Gaming Setup. Poison culture grinds larger than any individual, still, so props to everybody attempting to beat that shit back with various creative and/or illegal hustles. Fuck these devils.

my favorite video

game is slow rot of poisoned

by man forests, no cheat codes

Moon Patrol theme song soundtrack,

draining plastic vodka half-gallons

at back of small town arcade

all your shadows belong to 

us, moon patrol destinies 

manifest, thank you based god

thinking about video

games while at work - this is life

in twenty-first century

with the right motorcycle,

you eat one of these and you'll

blast right past Mario’s ass

TOP TEN WRITING TIPS FOR NOT WRITING ACTUAL THINGS WHEN WRITING BURIED BEHIND THE SYMPHONIC BUZZ

#1: I always laugh at/"video game culture" as/some shit people write
#2: then again, "culture"/is whatever the fuck us/dumbasses make, right?
#3: low-brow culture still/seems too far aboveground &/"lamestream" amirite?
#4: "hacking collective/known as Anonymous" the/hack journalist wrote
#5: lifehack: machete/lifehack: surround yourself with/motherfuckin' trees
#6: there are no elders/to learn from regarding words/so I sit with trees
#7: not to sound racist/but white oaks are impressive/pine trees are trashy
#8: you see so many/pine scrubs, giving birth to more/pine scrubs - disgusting
#9: sometimes I wish we/would kill all stupid pines &/make paper from them
#10: make something useful/out of them, affordable/notebooks, then I'd write

St. Pauli Girl

AFFORDABILITY: St. Pauli Girl is a beer that I've never had the desire to buy because it seemed stupid to me, but in a desire to buy one of those mid-range fake good good beers other than Yuengling, which has been my longtime standby in such matters, I went with the St. Pauli Girl, being it was $5.49. They had Magic Hat Not Quite Pale Ale six-packs for $5.29, but I wasn't quite ready after previous painful experiences to jump back in drunken bed with Magic Hat, so it was either St. Pauli Girl or Moosehead, also at $5.49. Moosehead seems like something I'd get during hockey season, and today the day I drink and I write this is NFL conference championships day, and St. Pauli Girl, though not American, be acting like it's from Germany, and it's in a green bottle, so it made me think that maybe it's a shitty version of Beck's, which I can handle that. Better than being a shitty version of Budweiser. 3 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Honestly, I do not respect the St. Pauli Girl beer at all, because it has a stupid name. My only recollection of it is it being the only beer I ever saw my maternal grandfather ever drink, going to the beach one year, even though he was allegedly a huge interstate hobo drunkard before he settled down to a family. St. Pauli Girl just seems like a stupid beer, in name, in look, in everything. But I will admit that yesterday afternoon, as I sucked back an entire six-pack, it put me on a tilt. Perhaps this is because I haven't been gorging myself with food as much lately, or perhaps it was a perfect storm of football-watching, beer-pounding activity, but I was feeling alright. And luckily, I was home with no one around but my wife and kids, so nobody could go, "Hahaha, you're drinking St. Pauli Girl!" Although my wife did make fun of it, which is probably why I drank them so quickly, because I was a little embarrassed. Maybe that’s the St. Pauli Girl plan to get you drunk, make you so ashamed of the bottling and name that you suck it down as quickly as possible. 4 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: The St. Pauli Girl label is one of the greatest stupid labels of forever. I have documented on this blog before how much I wish there was more historic porn, preferably with historically accurate body types too, as opposed to just pretending to be in Rome with new era fake breast no vagina hair ass women. And what is up with dudes shaving themselves bare in porn now too? Why are we so afraid of body hair? Anyways, that style of outfit the St. Pauli Girl is kicking it in, with the lace up blouse, always a sexy white, with buxom breasts just waiting to bust out, plus the additional accouterments, it's nice. But the one drawback to the St. Pauli Girl label is how cartoony it is. I guess it would be worse if it was a real girl, because it would probably be the aforementioned type of false breastitudes bought not grown. Or grown unnaturally due to too much growth hormone in dairy-producing bovines. You drinka the cow milk unnaturally pumped up and then you becoma unnaturally growed too fast. I have to be careful not to feed my pigs any pork because apparently the same soft brain tissue patterns they find in mad cow disease is what they find in cannibal brains. I don’t want my pigs to have soft brain tissues due to cannibalism and then get all crazy and attack me or have polluted meat. Man, this world has gotten way off kilter. Why can’t you just have food and beer? Why all the chemicalization and complication of everything? I feel like getting drunk now because of such thoughts, except I am trapped inside a long-sleeve shirt with buttons. I can’t wear short sleeves because it might expose my tattoos which would be a glimpse into my true personality, then the charade I am living might blow up back into the poverty and chronic unemployment I was born to be part of. Fuck. 4 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: When I write at night at my kitchen table where it's too cold because the woodstove is in the next room, I don't keep the internet hooked up because the buzzing attraction of the internets will waste my whole night with a whole passel of nothingness. So I can't look up who or what entity owns St. Pauli Girl, and I'd like to just pretend a buxom real life chick who's now like 55 owns it, but I know better. If my grandpa drank it the only time I saw him drink a beer, and he's dead, and his house has passed through hands a couple times, and now my youngest sister will move into the house soon enough, which means I can go to my old hometown and watch UFC at the Buffalo Wild Wings she works at, get drunk as fuck, and sleep it off on her couch, and catch a ride back to my beat up truck the next day. Too bad UFC doesn't have super awesome tournament PPVs anymore. Nonetheless, I know St. Pauli Girl is in all likelihood owned by suits and ties with one of their tentacles reaching in the pocket of the Tri-Lateral Commission. 0 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: The St. Pauli girl is like playing a bunch of Mario-based video games... it’s something that you may enjoy and could probably do for hours upon hours every week of your life, but come on man, there’s no pride in that. I mean I guess a lot of motherfuckers have no shame (or self-esteem... funny how it could mean either) and would rock the Super Mario Brothers Wii all night long at age 42 or something, but I’ve got parameters of manhood I can’t bust up in such manners. St. Pauli Girl falls outside of those parameters as well, as it just seems like a corny ass beer that maybe a crew of corny ass old men might successfully rock without looking like chumps while they play canasta for a nickel a point in the park on a Sunday afternoon, but for the most part it’s straight chumpenstein style. 1 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 2 & 2/5 STARS!

Widmer Hefeweizen

AFFORDABILITY: The Widmer Hefeweizen is not the cheapest beer on the market, and the fact that it’s name sounds like a perverse sexual move a balding old bear homosexual dude would do to me after knocking me out with some animal tranquilizer in my drink, I don’t like it, not even slightly. The sides of my thighs get bruised just thinking about it. 0 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: I was playing the Super Mario Wii while drinking these motherfuckers, so I was too preoccupied with conquering castles to truly get the full, straight to the gullet effect of the Widmer Heffalumples. But, judging from how slowly I felt like drinking, even after boosting up with multiple extra lives, I would say the Heffalumples is lacking in the superior taste bud stimulation necessary to get your proper back road drunk driving swerve on the budget cuts second gen asphalts. 1 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: STOP THE PRESSES! I had a couple Widmer Hefeweizens last weekend out because it was the only good beer on tap really other than stupid Starr Hill Jomo Lager, and they brought it to me in the big ol’ pint glass with an orange slice in it and it was such an aesthetically pleasing color and tasted great with the orange in it and I enjoyed it so thoroughly that it made me think perhaps I gave it a raw deal the first time, or didn’t just drink it right. Nonetheless, I shall arbitrarily pump up their remaining categories to atone for this change in my heart’s attitude towards the Widmer Hefeweizen. But to be honest, their label is not that bad to me, as it looks like an outer space alien’s soccer jersey. Or futbol jersey. (Side note: it is okay to take notes constantly about everything at my new job because it makes it look like I care, so I do. Yesterday we were getting some sales pitch from some dude who I think might’ve been a Brazilian scientist about a machine we were gonna buy and he said, “I’m not a radioactivity guy, to be honest.” I wrote it down right away because that seemed a funny thing to hear someone say to you in your life, and no one thought it odd I wrote it down because they probably thought I was taking relevant notes for later when usually I’m just doodling out stupid shit to put into words elsewhere at later time when not confined by circumstances.) 5 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: I'm not even gonna look it up because I'm sure it's in actuality owned by Anheuser Busch and the grandson of a Nazi scientist smuggled to Brazil by the U.S. government, and he's the reason Becks bought Budweiser, and now they also smuggle South American sex slaves into high end European brothels because the regular clientele have gotten kinda sick of all the Russian girls. 1 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: So what is it, the holiday beer left in my fridge that I hated upon, or the on-tap pint I boughted with a slice of orange that I loved? Shit or perfection? Very easy, braddah, it's both. Yin and yang man, everything is 69ing with itself to achieve that perfect balance, the snake in the grass eating his own tail. They used to carve that shit into cave walls before they even knew people could make magazines out of it. Everything is good and bad. You can get really affordable mountain bikes for your kid at the new Wal-Mart Supercenter and people at Whole Foods are scrunchfaced assholes. But you can get organical foods for cheap at white people grocery stores, but cheaper American grown ground beef at the ghetto supermarket. Balance and chaos. Which means this beer's short term interaction in my life, hitting both ends of things, at different times, free in my fridge while I was unemployed (and it sucked) and at a premium price at the stupid restaurant in Scottsville with an orange in it making me feel frou-frou as fuck (and it ruled), it is perfect. So 5 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 2 & 2/5 STARS!

September O.C.D. #3: Madden Football

Usually as professional football seasons starts up, I dig out whatever Madden variety I have to fool around with it's time-wasting foolishness. Used to be Madden 01 had a solid run for half a decade, because usually I buy last year's game when this year's comes out. But Madden 08 (Vince Young's career was ruined by the cover) has been pretty enjoyable, so I probably won't even look for Madden 09 this year. My involvement with Madden though, is probably about as minimal as possible, because I don't like spending an hour per game to actually play the shit out. At one point, I had reduced myself to only being the GM and picking the players every year or signing free agents, and all I'd do is let the game sim any playoff games the Redskins won and watch them in the background as I worked on other projects on my laptop. But this time, cranking up the game, I decided even that was too much, so all I did was sim seasons, and hire the coaches, and let any Redskins playoff games sim in full while I half-watched and worked on other projects on my laptop. Oddly enough, I've found this highly enjoyable, most likely because fake computer Redskins, about 20 years into my franchise, became a very successful organization, continuously contending for the Super Bowl. Meanwhile, in real life, it's more of the same Dan Snyder-related frustrations, with no sign of ever getting better since he's a very wealthy man and has access to finest health care around and will in all likelihood outlive me, making my adult life of football emotional attachment a complete waste of my time, and actually shortening my lifespan honestly, considering how worked up I get.
I have to say, after a few NBC games this year of the NFL, I miss John Madden. I'm not joking either. I think his reputation for saying stupid shit was overblown, because he always said stupid shit. I think what killed Madden off was not so much Madden becoming more senile but him not working with Pat Summerall anymore, who had that deadpan play-by-play style of a golf announcer. Once Madden was paired up with Al Michaels, it was over, because Michaels believes his own P.R. too much about being an all-time great, which he used to be, and he's always making corny ass jokes or telling stories that really aren't all that interesting. This was what killed Madden, because when playing off some schmoozy asshole telling corny jokes like a wedding reception, Madden seemed forced and cornier by attachment.
I saw him sitting there at the Cowboys game with former President Bush though. You know them dudes were talking about some food. Plus, what a fucking dumbass Jerry Jones is.
Oh, in my Madden interactions this time, I am in year 22 or so of the 30-year maximum, and after that runs it's course I'm sure I'll think up some other dumb, time-intensive, obsessive-compulsive way to use the game to kill off my life. I could list a few other "ideas" I've done through Madden football, but it kinda embarrasses me to think about it, much less admit it to computerized strangers.

August O.C.D. #4: Dirt Track Racing video game

This is a computer game that probably nobody on earth still plays except me, but it’s just a shitty race car game based on dirt tracks. You can race regular stock cars (which has three classes), or pro stock cars where you can customize bullshit (with five classes), or bonafide late models just like at Eastside Speedway (with four classes). But rather than just play the game, I have to be all parametric about it and set up a plan for conquering it, or at least immersing myself in it, which I’ve done on two other computers as well, but just in the past five weeks set the bitch up on my latest computer (I think the game’s from around 2000 or so).
Basically, each class year-to-year has its own schedule with its own set of dates, sometimes conflicting with other classes, so what I did was just start with the lowest stock class and run the three lowest classes I’d never won first place for the year in, going with the lowest as most important, marking them off my list as I finished first for the year. I am deeper into the game this time than ever before, having won all three stock classes, and beaten the first two pro stock classes in the same year (which is amazing dork game accomplishment, right up there with finding the perfect way to run through the Pac Man final screen on the Atari 2600 one day when I was ten, but having to abandon to go to All-Star practice, even though all I was was the shitty left fielder on the All-Star team), and am about four races away from finishing my sixth year, where unless I become retarded from a car accident but still play video games, I’ll beat another level of pro stock. That means I’ll start doing the late models, which go too fast for dirt, so you have to do the illogical thing of turning your wheels the opposite way of what you’d think to control your slides through curves. Luckily, the last pro stock class is a figure eight one, to learn you about using the right turn arrow cursor as well. I used to always use #69, like anybody with my limited cultural upbringing would choose, but this time I went with #0, all into that Agent Zero mantra by Gilbert Arenas (who is putting a million dollar shark tank into his house, with three sharks because that’s all the guy who would get them for him said he’d climb into feed). It was after this that I noticed with the computer drivers, usually the guys with the lower number (which starts with #1) do the best in each class. So I have been working under the assumption that I actually benefitted myself with computer love (you know how games will just screw you over oftentimes) by having the lowest number possible.
I can see this falling off the list pretty quickly though, as just like in real life, once football season starts, I don’t give a fuck about race cars. My newfound retarded Madden ‘08 project will probably preempt Dirt Track Racing dorkery. So hopefully this computer won’t become dead or poisoned by devils like my other ones (I now have a shitty cheap laptop that I relegate all questionable things like music stealing and masturbatory inspiration searches to, which keeps my main one more pure) and I can pick up again next spring.