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Army on The Cracked Blog

Fucking military has fucking Ray Gun. Fuck.

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

raygun.jpg

At least that’s what the attention screaming headline of a recent 60 Minutes piece recently declared. if you click on the link you can actually see the 60 Minutes clip in question. I’ll briefly explain its contents here, although I should caution that the speakers on my computer are broken, so I couldn’t hear what was happening:

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Two men meet in a secluded field, in what is quite clearly a pre-arranged sexual rendezvous. One of them is dressed in military fatigues, indicating his aggressive and dominant tendencies. The other fellow has the elongated nostrils of a classic bottom.

services.jpg

A short distance away is a dark van, that looks a little bit like it was designed using the 1980’s era Lego Space collection. The van proceeds to shoot the bottom with some kind of invisible beam, causing him to shudder in ecstasy, his limbs akimbo. The process repeats several times until he screams the safeword, “Candace Bergen.”

Several other people receive the same treatment, including a police officer, a woman, the police officer again, then several men in their underpants. The clip ends before they can disrobe further, the editors at 60 Minutes ever-conscious of the children who might still be watching at this early hour.

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The pedants among you will surely have pointed out by now that this isn’t a ray gun so much as it is a truck mounted distance-tickler, a device that surely can’t be difficult to come by on the streets of downtown Japan. Although it has worthy uses (crowd control, pet-obedience, sabotaging synchronized swimming events) it isn’t really a “ray gun” in the classic sense - i.e. it doesn’t conjure up any images of a Futuristic Sci-Fi Utopia where people walk around in form fitting metallic unitards, while robots serve drinks and pleasure our wives.

So, as a friendly service to 60 Minutes, and the rest of the mainstream media, if you ever want to call something a ray gun again, it should look at least something like one of these:
collage.jpg

Failing that, it should at least be able to put a fucking hole in something.

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Chris Bucholz is a writer and a robot. His personal blog, robotmantheblog.com contains a great deal of other humor articles, all of dubious quality and taste.

Sam Fisher Drinks Ovaltine, and so Should You

Friday, October 19th, 2007

Look out behind you, Sam! It's...it's horrible!

I’ll bet you think those Army ads that show young cadets zooming over impoverished nations in choppers and earning a degree at the same time are aggressive propaganda. And you probably think that game the Army made is just a cheap way for the military to suck in the bottom ten percent of High School graduates. Well, let me ask you this: If the armed forces weren’t so adept at roping in our youth, where the hell would we get our troop surges from? Huh, smart guy?!

Why do I bring this up? Well, turns out the British analogue to our CIA is now posting recruitment ads in the virtual world. Yes, the GCHQ, a government intelligence “organisation” (fucking Brits) has begun to advertise on digital billboards inside of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent.

Admittedly, ads recruiting web-savvy grad students to play spy is a far cry from the Army, but it’s only a matter of time before we’re seeing ads like these in…well, Far Cry. And from there, I’m expecting WoW servers to be overwhelmed with virtual recruiters within a few weeks.

Aside from the broad implications of in-game advertising—Master Chief chews Bubblicious? Who knew?!—I am sad to say I find one fundamental flaw in the logic behind this strategy, at least from the point of view of the armed forces. Namely, it assumes that gamers are the type of people who should be running long distances carrying live weapons.

Just because S3nator_B33r can consistently snipe people in the head at a hundred yards in Call of Duty 2, that doesn’t mean he can do the same in real life. In fact, all it really means is he is a spawn-camping dick. I also can’t shake the image of an Army recruit, after his first kill in Iraq, running over to a dead insurgent to squat repeatedly above his head. Your shields won’t withstand their rockets, frat boy.

The lesson here? The next time someone in a video game asks you to “undertake a valiant quest to safeguard the liberty of all peoples in this land,” just make sure you don’t sign anything. In the meantime, let us all rejoice at the thought that yet another sphere of our existence is about to be invaded by product placement and obnoxious ads.

I’m just hoping the industry’s got enough juice in it to resist succumbing completely. If not, look forward to rooting through your WWII-era pack to pull out a ration of delicious Chicken McNuggets or equipping your Red Mage with a staff of ReMax.