Pretty interesting guide.

From the comments: “Everyone in England makes bread that way.”

Cracked’s Lex Friedman sent me that.

I get asked the same question in every single interview I’ve done (that is, both of them): Who were my influences growing up? Who do I aspire to be?

My first answer, without hesitation, is Mr. Awesome:

“OK, poop is coming out.”

From the forums.

There I am, at Borders book store, on the shelf next to real authors:

Positioned so the whole cover shows and everything.

That is so, so wrong.

This just goes so completely, hilariously wrong.

As crazy as this guy is, I have to credit him for giving me my new band name:

Pussy Renaissance.

That’s part of a ring of guys claiming calling themselves the TFL movement (True Forced Loneliness) where they believe they have been forced to live lonely sexless lives due to a vast conspiracy of females who are intentionally shutting them out to make them miserable. See the related videos for more.

It’s either the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen, or one of the most awesome internet hoaxes of all time. There’s this whole ongoing plot where the movement has split into factions and then the guy in the above-linked video got ousted because I believe he had sex with a woman, thus undermining the entire movement.

There’s something really profound to be said here, about the nature of humanity at its lowest and how self-centered we become when we’re desperate, believing the whole world revolves around our failures. But the whole thing is bumming me out to the point that thinking about it makes me sleepy.

Wondermark takes a book idea I had and distills it down into a single comic strip.

What’s your hit album?

The first article title on this page is the name of your band.

The last four words of the very last quote on this page is the title of your album.

The third picture shown here is your album cover.

We’ve been doing this in the forums for months, and the results are six kinds of awesome.

And then, some people take it to a whole new level.

I think everyone likes a good clusterfuck. Like when the trailer for Bevery Hills Chihuahua hit, it was like watching a train full of syrup barrel down the tracks toward a stalled truck full of turkeys. Horrible? Yes. But yet you await it with a kind of nervous anticipation that is not at all unpleasant. A part of you just wants to watch a great disaster unfold.

Thus, Capcom has just released what has seriously got to be the most politically incorrect two minutes of video in the history of everything. It’s the brand new (released yesterday) trailer for the zombie survival horror/African genocide simulator Resident Evil 5.

If you’re confused, you may not remember last year when the first teaser trailer appeared and drew some outrage because, well, it depicted a strong, muscular, handsome white man killing hundreds and hundreds of mindless African savages.

Well, this trailer makes it about ten times worse.

“I knew it from the moment I arrived. There’s no reason here. No humanity.”

This is so hilariously, amazingly wrong. I am told the Japanese just culturally don’t have a grasp of why this sort of thing (or casual racism in general) is a problem. But there have to be people inside the company patiently explaining why the symbolism there isn’t going to fly. And I’m picturing programmers staring back with blank stares and saying, “But… they’re zombies! And of course they’re black! The game takes place in Africa!”

Well, right… but you made that choice, Capcom. Same as if some game took place in a girl’s school, and the premise of the game is that all the little girls are possessed by evil spirits and the only way to defeat the demons is with your penis. It would be laughable to defend level after level of sodomizing children by quoting the fictional framework that set it up (”But.. they’re possessed by demons! It’s the only way to save them!”) as if it was completely out of your hands.

YOU are the ones who set things up so the child raping would happen, and you’re the ones who created a scenario where the gamer finds Africa to be full of bloodthirsty savages with sticks and stones, and the only way to win is to mow them down with your state of the art weaponry.

If this game becomes a hit - and judging from the buzz, it’s going to be a monster - then the shitstorm that erupts over this game is going to be something to witness. See, there’s an x-factor here, too, and you can only get it by actually watching the video linked up there. These people you’re killing are absolutely photo-realistic. They may be the most realistic humans ever killed in a game.

And thus we have the second paddle in our shit-stirring apparatus: the fact that we’re very, very close to games where you can finally kill somebody who looks as real as your next door neighbor.

It won’t be until the next generation when we really get there, to women whose blood gets matted and clotted in their blond hair when you blow their brains out, and men who twitch and shit their pants as they lay dying, air whistling as they try to suck breath into a punctured lung, stray bullets that kill toddlers. And, hell, maybe that’ll be the point where the upward surge in realism flattens out, where publishers realize we only want so much of it in our games.

But first, we have 2009 to look forward to, which is when RE5 comes out, and the mainstream news media will do their usual clumsy, laughable job of trying to cover anything gaming related, only with the added bonus of endless civil rights activists fighting over camera time, most of whom will have never touched a console controller in their lives.

It should be awesome.

If you didn’t have a credit card or for some similar reason haven’t ordered a copy of my retarded horror novel John Dies at the End online, you can finally walk in off the street and just buy a copy.

Borders has ordered a shitload of them to stock on their actual shelves of their actual brick-and-mortar book stores. Sure, up until now we’ve had a few small shops here and there stock a couple of copies, but otherwise all of our sales have come through the online sellers.

If anyone spots them on the shelves, snap a picture for me. Post it or send it to davidwong@johndiesattheend.com. It’s kind of a big deal for me and I like to celebrate every little thing because it makes me feel like I’m better than everybody else. Try to get your balls in the picture too if possible.

No, this is not the mysterious announcement I’ve been hinting at. Speaking of which, let me remind you…

THIS IS A LIMITED EDITION. Buy it while it’s available. Buy extra copies and then sell them on the black market at inflated prices later. Shit will be like Beanie Babies.

Meanwhile, the charity we started on the forums (see below) has raised more than $3,000 to loan to entrepreneurs in impoverished nations. If you want to help us fuck poverty in the asshole, here’s the details.