TUMBLR and the HOLY TRINITY: Obsessed Ep 55

Singer, songwriter, producer, and all around amazing person Angela Webber of The Doubleclicks has a dual obsession with Tumblr and The Holy Trinity of YouTube–Grace Helbig, Hannah Hart, and Mamrie Hart! Discover how the world would be different without animated gifs, how to ship human beings, and the power of positive drinking! Plus, Angela gives Joseph a great new tagline to advertise his Patreon!

AWOOGA! Obsessed is now a part of Feral Audio! Go to Feral now to listen to this episode and subscribe for new ones!

Listen, rate, review, and subscribe to OBSESSED on iTunes.

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A Man and His Boring Tweets

For more than a year I’ve been doing a series of daily tweets. First tacos, then monkeys, then daily affirmations, then daily etiquette tips, then incorrect quotes, then fake TV shows, horoscopeshorrorwriting tipsholiday tweetsresolution tweets, Hey Girl tweets, Urban Myth tweets, pastry tweets, and now amusingly boring tweets! This month went a little off the rails. Enjoy!

You can also follow me on Twitter to enjoy June’s series of Social Media tweets!

Day One – I saw a dog

Day Two – Orange Julius still exists

Day Three – Like a lot of people in America, I don’t own a pony

Day Four – Eating food!

Day Five – Jack Bauer has a gun and is often angry

Day Six – It’s still Tuesday

Day Seven – Einstein’s hair was big

Day Eight – Kinko’s has been called FedExOffice for a long time but everyone still calls it Kinko’s

Day Nine – Hot dogs are sometimes made of meats

Day Ten – I read a factual error on the internet and didn’t correct anyone

Day Eleven – I just had a thought I didn’t tweet but then I tweeted about not tweeting

Day Twelve – I’ve thought about James Franco three times today

Day Thirteen – I have 3000 opinions per second about Batman

Day Fourteen – A lot of people remember the 90s

Day Fifteen – Weather exists

Day Sixteen – You can fry eggs in pans or on streets if it’s hot and you want disgusting street eggs

Day Seventeen – Two people you know on twitter are talking about a TV show

Day Eighteen – I saw a Prius

Day Nineteen – Here Are Twenty Seven Fairly Normal Things. The Fifth One Will Make You Shrug Or Nod Maybe

Day Twenty – Someone posted a picture of a baby on Facebook

Day Twenty-One – I just saw a guy do a thing

Day Twenty-Two – Hugh Jackman plays Wolverine but he can also sing and dance and not kill people

Day Twenty-Three – I ate a burrito in 1997

Day Twenty-Four – This one time, I wasted my entire life looking at the Internet

Day Twenty-Five – Coca-cola is a drink made of sugar and acid that is sometimes advertised by polar bears

Day Twenty-Six – This one time I used my smartphone to call someone

Day Twenty-Seven – Charlie Brown has a dog and existential dread

Day Twenty-Eight – I just refreshed twitter 3000 times but I still don’t feel whole as a person

Day Twenty-Nine – Most pizza already has sauce on it but it also comes with dipping sauce people really like sauce

Day Thirty – Let’s do a kickstarter to make a sarcastic thing!

Day Thirty-One – I’ve put commas in weird places you, guys

Yours in existential boredom,

Joseph

If you enjoy my work, you can check out all the comedy words and things I’m making via Patreon.

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The Amazing Year 2022

This comedy blog post was made possible by Patreon. One of the rewards for becoming a Patreon backer is suggesting a topic for the blog. A kind patron named Jesse McClusky gave me the fun, exciting, terrifying, and funexerrifying suggestion of thinking ahead to our future. To the amazing year of 2022!

2022 is less than a decade from now as I write this in the ancient, backwards time of summer 2014, but I suspect the world will be a very different place by 2022. I believe humankind will discover the ideal number of bullet points for a listicle is exactly 25. So please enjoy these 25 predictions about our future!

2022

Social Media

There will be many new and different social media sites and apps. You will get messages like this and they will make perfect sense to you: Hey! Your netherport just got jazzled by a froolee on TimeFukr!

Spider-Man Age

A movie detailing Spider-Man’s origin story is released every two to three months. People no longer tell one another how old they are in years. We speak about our age in relation to how many Spider-Man reboots have been released in our lifetime. In 2022, I am 87 Spider-Man Reboots Old.

Who Farted?

All personal mobile devices come pre-loaded with an app that lets you know who in your immediate vicinity has farted. Strangely, this has not stopped humans from loudly asking, “WHO FARTED?” and enjoying the thrill of shaming other humans for a normal bodily function.

Food Free

There is a new diet craze called “Food-Free.” Some people on Facebook who read some studies once finally realized that eating food was the cause of all of our health and appearance problems. It’s commonly agreed in polite society that eating is gross and weird and no one should ever do it. That said, the world is covered in “secret,” illicit food speakeasies. Common passwords include “What the fuck is wrong with us?”, “I’m dying”, and “I would kill everyone I know for a taco.”

People are still mad about Star Wars

Not a lot to explain about this one. Some things never change.

Reality Goggles

There’s a special piece of headwear that blocks out screens of any kind. All you can see is the beauty of the real world–the soaring server cathedrals, the grand canyon physical media dump, and the strips malls full of Forever 21 (still around!) and the personal fracking stations. There is a glitch where the goggles think cats only belong on the internet and shouldn’t exist in the real world so the goggles also make it impossible to see or hear actual real life cats. These goggles are only available to the very rich.

Swear words

“Comcast” is now the most offensive thing you can call another human being.

Taco Bell

Because of our new understanding of food, Taco Bell no longer sells tacos. They sell bells. Bells are a common form of communication for pundits on CNN. When a plane goes missing or something, cable stations will now air weeks of people angrily ringing bells at one another.

Time Travel

Time travel exists. You can only jump two or three seconds back into the past. Time travel is mainly used to manipulate the accuracy of the “Who Farted?” app.

Toilet Talk

Every single object you use in life will instantly send a message to all of your social media accounts updating your friends on your activities. The devices will also speak to you. Every morning, your coffeemaker will ask you want it can do for you. Every human in the world answers the same way: “Make me some coffee, for fuck’s sake!”

Phone Calls

The calling function on our mobile devices is now referred to as The Mother’s Day App.

Memes

A lot of memes are very old now. No one can remember how some of them started. For example, when you get married the photographer automatically adds a caption to the bottom of every photo of the couple that says #TrueDetectiveSeason2. No one knows why, but hey, it’s tradition. And tradition is important.

NSA buddies

The future is not a lonely place. Every living human is assigned an NSA Buddy. It’s understood that everything you ever do will be monitored, recorded, and possibly used against you by the United States of America and Time Warner Cable’s elaborate government apparatus. But voter/content consumer comfort is the USATWC’s number one concern so every day we get a call on our Mother’s Day App from our NSA Buddy to shoot the breeze. It’s kind of nice, really. My NSA buddy’s name is Sheryl and she also enjoys getting mad about Star Wars.

Earbuds

Earbud cables are the leading cause of death. Every year, two million people are caught in a cascading tangle of earbuds. It’s sort of like that old video game Katamari Damacy but with earbuds and death. The problem is particularly bad down in the subway tunnels where the trains used to run and the mutants now live.

Netflix is a dating site

Netflix’s complex algorithms determine not only what TV show we would like to watch, but who we should marry and/or have sex with. The suggestions were weird at first: I see you’re interested in straight men. Perhaps you’d also like to try married women, a Benedict Cumberbatch body pillow, or dying alone. Eventually, Netflix got pretty good at it though and now all couples are pretty happy because you’ll never end up with someone who doesn’t want to watch all of Buffy The Vampire Slayer in one sitting.

Intelligence Captioned

Everything that is broadcast is captioned so even the stupidest people know what’s happening when they watch old episodes of Game of Thrones with their Netflix assigned partner. It’s pretty fun to watch the CNN bell-ringers with the intelligence caption on as it just repeatedly reads, “This jack-ass is ringing a bell.”

Cat Pictures

Cat pictures MUST be posted daily on facebook whether you have a cat or not. This is not mandated by any law but by common societal agreement.

Dinosaurs

The dinosaurs came back. It’s a long story about chemical spills and a horrible accident with the development of the time travel app, but it’s cool. The dinosaurs don’t usually come into the cities because they’re afraid of the earbud traps.

The Environment

The Polar Ice Caps melted. But we stopped it. A fundraiser was staged in which everyone in America was forced to sing “Let It Go” from Frozen at the exact same time. It made the top page of UberReddit. We’re told that fixed the problem.

Equality

People are still jerks to one another, but for the most part we’re much better about treating one another with kindness and respect regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age, etc. That said, we’re total assholes to one another based on dumb personal preferences recorded on social media. Over 10,000 people and their triceratops steeds lost their lives in the Soft Shell-Hard Shell Wars of 2019. It seems like no matter what, humans will find stupid ways to divide themselves. I posted that sentiment on Google Plus and 17 people +1’d it, so I know I’m not alone.

Lightsabers are real

We discovered the technology to make actual lightsabers. Fifty percent of the population immediately cut their own arms off while making YouTube videos. The technology is now banned. It was only available and legal for four hours.

The Middle Class

There is no middle class. You are on Team Poor or Team Rich and that’s it. Our economy is entirely based on a complex system of TheoryCredits administered by PayPal and Chipotle so we all just kind of keep living but we’re not sure how. There is a shit-ton of bell ringing about that on CNN.

Google Plus

Everyone still hates Google Plus, but we all have to post to it at least once a day or they’ll send a Google Drone to our house and destroy it with their patented death device–the Google Fun Times Correction Integrator.

Religion

We kind of have separation of church and state. Not as much as I would like, but it’s a step in the right direction. Politicians still invoke their religion all the time, but it’s now bleeped out. So during campaigns you’ll hear people say things like, “I was compelled by (bleep) to lower taxes!” As you can imagine, it gives us a lot to tweet about.

Fun

I think I’m starting to make it sound like the future is a bad place. Full of totalitarian social media regimes, forced interaction, horrible violence, mysterious subway mutants, and talking toilets but there are a lot of good things, too!

We still have families. We still have friends. In fact, one of the most popular social media apps is RealFriendster where you only add people you actually care about. It’s weird and beautiful.

We also still engage in a lot of great physical activities. We all learned to run when the dinosaurs came back. We all learned to be really good climbers during the sudden sinkhole craze of 2016. We have jetpacks but no one bothers to use them because of the acid cloud.

We still experience love. We still pine for the past and hope for the future. Most of us have cool cybernetic replacement limbs as a result of the lightsaber menace.

And we still spend a lot of time outside. The number one hobby in the world is Social Media War Re-enactment. A lot of us spend holidays and weekends out in the woods edutaining ourselves about the great battles of the past. Everyone argues about who gets to play Patton Oswalt. Everyone is bummed out when they have to be Ann Coulter. No one knows why we go out to the woods to do it. It seemed like a good idea to someone and the rest of us ran with it.

I’d like to say more, but I really don’t think I’m going to find a better sentence to explain the future than the sentence I just wrote above.

It seemed like a good idea to someone and the rest of us ran with it.

Thanks and enjoy the past!

If you enjoyed the post, check out my Patreon page! Thanks again to Jesse McClusky for the suggestion and thank you for reading and sharing the post!

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80s HBO FILMS: Obsessed Ep 54

Comedian, podcaster, and co-founder of SF SketchFest, Cole Stratton, spent a lot of quality time with HBO in the 1980s. Discover how such classic films as the one about the manure lawsuit, a unicorn played by Mia Farrow, and Ferris Bueller blue balls, shaped the psyche of Mr. Stratton. PLUS thrill to Cole’s a cappella rendition of the HBO Feature Presentation theme!

AWOOGA! Obsessed is now a part of Feral Audio! Go to Feral now to listen to this episode and subscribe for new ones!

Listen, rate, review, and subscribe to OBSESSED on iTunes.

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MAPS and INFOGRAPHICS: Obsessed Ep 53

Game designer and Table Top producer, Boyan Radakovich, is obsessed with maps and infographics. Learn what Hunger Games district you live in! How to kill Hitler with a map! How to lie to people about the geography of Los Angeles! PLUS: Joseph and Boyan update you on which Hunger Game districts are best for upcoming live comedy!

AWOOGA! Obsessed is now a part of Feral Audio! Go to Feral now to listen to this episode and subscribe for new ones!

Listen, rate, review, and subscribe to OBSESSED on iTunes.

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OBI-WAN KENOBI’S ZERO STAR REVIEWS

ObiWanZeroStars

I’ve been obsessed with Star Wars for a long time. Every few months, specific lines from the films will lodge themselves in my brain. Recently, while waiting in line at the DMV, this line popped into my head:

“You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” – Obi-Wan Kenobi

Cranky, truth-bending Jedi Knight, hermit, and professional asshole, Obi-Wan Kenobi, said this to Luke Skywalker. He was describing Mos Eisley and its Cantina.

It only recently occurred to me how harsh it is. The Cantina really isn’t that bad. It looks pretty clean, Luke gets his drink quickly, the music is GREAT, and not so loud you can’t have a conversation over it.

“Wretched hive of scum and villainy” is a pretty shitty Yelp review for a place where you can openly slice people’s arms off, everyone just shrugs it off then goes back to smoking their space hookahs and shit.

It made me think Obi-Wan Kenobi would be an absolute menace if he wrote reviews online. So here are some of that crazy old hermit’s pithy zero star reviews.

For maximum enjoyment, read them out loud in your best Obi-Wan Kenobi voice.

CrankyObiWanChipotle

CrankyObiWanTWC

CrankyObiWanIkea

CrankyObiWanRadioShack

CrankyObiWanFacebook

CrankyObiWanTuesdays

CrankyObiWanLedZeppelin3

CrankyObiWanDexter

CrankyObiWanPinkberry

CrankyObiWanBlogPost

Now, for even MORE enjoyment go back and read them in your worst Obi-Wan Kenobi voice and compare!

Also, if you’d like to know how Obi-Wan might review your favorite restaurant, social media site, album, day of the week, etc. leave it in the comments and I’ll reply with a review! A cranky, crappy review.

If you enjoyed the post, check out the Patreon page that made it possible! Backing as little as $1 or $2 a month helps tremendously! Thank you!

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A Man and His Pastry Tweets

For more than a year I’ve been doing a series of daily tweets. First tacos, then monkeys, then daily affirmations, then daily etiquette tips, then incorrect quotes, then fake TV shows, horoscopeshorrorwriting tipsholiday tweetsresolution tweets, Hey Girl tweets, Urban Myth tweets, and now Pastry tweets! Enjoy!

You can also follow me on Twitter to enjoy May’s series of tweets!

Day One – The collective noun for pastries is shame. Today I ate a shame of donut holes.

Day Two – Things you can inject into pastries: jelly, jam, custard, your dreams, smaller pastries, cocaine.

Day Three – If you eat a cupcake every day for seven years, you will turn into a pony. Try it.

Day Four – I ATE A CRONUT. IT WAS FULL OF SUGAR. I CAN SEE ETERNITY. DONUTS ARE A FAT RAISED CIRCLE. I AM ONE WITH LARD. GOOD TIMES.

Day Five – I predict the next pastry craze will be an entire turkey dinner gently drizzled on top of a danish.

Day Six – The world would be a better place if Girl Scouts made donuts with whatever drug they put in their cookies.

Day Seven – These are all real pastry names: Bacon Maple Death Log, French Surprise Roll, The Widowmaker, Trendy Trendy Dough Hole.

Day Eight – Plain Cake Donuts are the Charlie Brown of the pastry world.

Day Nine – If you eat donuts for the entire time you listen to Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, you probably shouldn’t.

Day Ten – Movie idea: Baker’s Dozen. Aging action stars join forces to eat donuts for 2 hours. Sometimes they punch stuff. Rated R.

Day Eleven – Long Johns are my least favorite pastry because I don’t want to eat something named after underwear worn by lumberjacks.

Day Twelve – My next band will be called “…And You Will Know Me By The Trail of Donut Hole Crumbs.”

Day Thirteen – A donut is a deep-fried hug you can eat with your mouth. I hope the donut overlords will hire me to write copy now.

Day Fourteen – If I had donut for every donut I ate, I would know the unfathomable joy of recursive donut eating.

Day Fifteen – You are what you eat. I am seven donut holes. Fear me.

Day Sixteen – I would try a donut that has hot coffee in the center at least once.

Day Seventeen – A donut is a donut by any other name. Unless you spell it doughnut, then you are a horrible monster.

Day Eighteen – There should be more meet cute scenes where beautiful young people accidentally start eating the same cruller.

Day Nineteen – Sometimes an eclair is just an eclair. Other times, it’s a French pastry shaped like a human penis.

Day Twenty – “Give me liberty or give me death or, third option, I would also take a maple bacon log.” -Patrick Henry’s actual quote

Day Twenty-One – Not all social media posts need to be relevant. I ate two bags of mini-donuts in August of 2003.

Day Twenty-Two – Pastries would get more respect if they had serious names like Maturity Treat, Somber Holes, Edmund, Adult Buns, etc.

Day Twenty-Three – Sometimes when I’m sad I picture a shirtless Benedict Cumberbatch slowly eating an apple fritter. Try it!

Day Twenty-Four – A donut hole a day keeps the doctor away ha ha ha this is funny because eventually I will die of donut hole abuse

Day Twenty-Five – Most pastries have names that sound like strippers which is why there are so many pastries called Tracy or Stephen.

Day Twenty-Six – I want a hip, trendy pastry called “my feelings” so I could be more honest about what I’m eating in the morning.

Day Twenty-Seven – Top sins of the modern world. 1) Murder. 2) Game of Thrones spoilers. 3) Putting raisins in caramel rolls, you monsters.

Day Twenty-Eight – Today I invented the Waffle Burger. It’s 2 waffles with a 3rd waffle in the middle. It is an excuse to eat 3 waffles.

Day Twenty-Nine – We can put a human on the moon, but we can’t create a donut that makes your pants fall off when you bite it? Bullshit.

Day Thirty – My recipe for the ULTIMATE pastry: Lard, Sugar, Repressed Feelings, Lemon Curd, Tears of a French Chef, Bacon, Hubris.

Your pastry devouring friend,

Joseph

If you enjoy my work, you can check out all the comedy words and things I’m making via Patreon.

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THE SIMPSONS: Obsessed Ep 52

Singer, songwriter,and comedian Allie Goertz is an expert on The Simpsons–a show that has been on the air for her entire life. Thrill to such discussions as: What is “the original trilogy” of The Simpsons? Can you communicate with another human using only Simpsons gifs? Is everything really coming up Milhouse? Would Krusty the Clown be a good guest on @midnight? PLUS: A Simpsons character comments on Joseph’s Patreon!

AWOOGA! Obsessed is now a part of Feral Audio! Go to Feral now to listen to this episode and subscribe for new ones!

Listen, rate, review, and subscribe to OBSESSED on iTunes.

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LET IT BURN!

This comedy blog post was made possible by Patreon. One of the rewards for becoming a Patreon backer is suggesting a topic for the blog. Two different patrons, Jen Manna and Jim Crider, suggested discussing the Midwestern perspective of Los Angeles. Jim wondered about how I would adjust as a  Minnesotan. Would I be treated as a “fish out of water?” Jen expressed valid concerns about “Asshole Weather Updates” bragging about the sun and lack of snow. This is a frequent problem when a midwestern person moves to my new home, Los Angeles. Here’s a story that sums up a deep misunderstanding of both my old and new homes! Enjoy!

Let It Burn

My wife and I moved to Los Angeles primarily for career reasons. But on top of that, I was personally incredibly done with winter and the snow.

Here are the some of the jokes I posted on twitter to try to cope with the winter:

  • Snowflakes are falling. They are all unique. And yet they are all assholes.
  • Did you know Minnesotans have over 72 different swear words for snow?
  • My wife is RAKING snow off of our roof. Where’s your damn song dreaming about that, Bing Crosby???

I had to move, if no other reason, because I was running out of ways to express my personally being done with the winter.

When I posted that I was moving to Los Angeles, I was lucky enough to receive mostly positive, supportive feedback. Although there were some nasty things said about both the Midwest and Los Angeles.

But a couple of people said something that struck me as very odd. I’m paraphrasing, but they said, “Okay. You might be escaping the snow by moving to Los Angeles, but you’re just trading it…FOR FIRE.”

I understand it gets very dry and fires are a real concern in Southern California. But comparing fire to SNOW to a person from MINNESOTA made something break in my brain.

Having now lived in both the Midwest and Southern California, I’ve noticed there are several CRUCIAL differences between fire and snow.

I’m pretty sure that here in LA, the sky is not going to RAIN FIRE ON ME FROM ABOVE for six to seven months of the year.

I’m  probably not going to make plans with friends and then be unable to get there because my car got stuck in the fire. Sorry, guys! I tried to push it out but the tires exploded.

Since I moved to Los Angeles, I have spent exactly ZERO MINUTES of my life scraping an inferno off of my car’s windshield.

I don’t have to put on layers and layers of flame retardant hats, coats, scarves, boots, and mittens every time I step out of my home.

You don’t hear people in Los Angeles say, “You know the fire is so beautiful when it first comes. You know, right around Christmas, you look outside and your neighbor’s house is just engulfed in flames? So beautiful! And the kids are outside throwing fireballs like they’re Super Mario? And the little ones are inside singing that great Disney power ballad LET IT BURN over and over again! It’s all so romantic! But then around March, you’re just like GO AWAY FIRE! YOU’VE BURNED EVERYTHING I’VE EVER KNOWN AND LOVED AND I WANT TO GO TO TRADER JOE’S WITHOUT IMMOLATING MYSELF!”

In fact, did you know that native Angelenos have over 72 different words for fire?

Fire, flames, heat curtain, infernonado, super hot juice cleanse, the REAL burning man. The list goes on and on.

Anyway, I have not yet burst into flames in Los Angeles. I’ve enjoyed the weather, but I’ve enjoyed it in the spirit of the Midwest–quietly, calmly, and without posting asshole comments to my friends back in Minnesota.

And so far, all the Angelenos I’ve met have been welcoming and kind to a newbie from the Midwest. Even the guy who decided to hit on me at 11 pm on Sunset Boulevard.

A man who like me was wearing a jacket (thus being grossly overdressed for LA) approached me. I thought maybe he was a fellow Midwestern human. Before he could reach me, the wave of alcohol hit me like advance troops storming the beach. He started to say something and I said, “I’m sorry. I’m not interested.”

I turned to walk away and he yelled something else. I thought there was no way I could have heard it right so I turned back and asked, “What?”

He repeated himself. He yelled, “It’s okay! You can trust me! I’m a presidential candidate!”

This was funny to me on a minimum of two levels.

I laughed to myself and continued down Sunset to walk back to my new home in Los Angeles. A home that I knew was not buried in eight feet of fire.

The man yelled one more thing.

“I REALLY LIKE YOUR JACKET.”

Maybe he was from the Midwest after all.

If you enjoyed the post, check out my Patreon page! Thank you!

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GREASE 2: Obsessed Ep 51

Writer and theater professional Kayla Cagan loves Grease 2. A movie featuring songs about sex in nuclear bunkers and a guy named Brad! Learn how the movie taught Kayla to laugh at sex, eat french fries aggressively, and just be yourself. Thrill to discussions of subjective versus objective and the pitch meeting for The Human Centipede! PLUS: A brief song about Joseph’s Patreon!

AWOOGA! Obsessed is now a part of Feral Audio! Go to Feral now to listen to this episode and subscribe for new ones!

Listen, rate, review, and subscribe to OBSESSED on iTunes.

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