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Hard Digest June 21: Early Access Joe Rogan, Chappell Roan, The Crusades, Credit Card Debt, and More
🕑 Added 2024-06-22 00:00:07 +0000 UTCJoe Rogan Accidentally Books Mindforce After Mistaking Them for Supplement Company
BY TIM GRAHAM
AUSTIN, Texas — Hardcore band Mindforce appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast after they were mistaken for a brain-boosting supplement, according to confused, kettlebell-curling sources.
“We were psyched to be getting that kind of exposure,” said Mindforce singer Jay Petagine. “But once the interview started, it was pretty clear a mistake had been made. He started asking us about whether our product was organic and if it could help with focus for bow hunting. We said we’re a band, not a vitamin company. He looked confused, and then launched into some boilerplate Rogan schtick about gut biomes, then the conversation transitioned to him asking us if we think a chimp could fuck up an orca or if they’d be friends. Eventually, he and I bonded over kickboxing and that pretty much saved the episode.”
Joe Rogan himself claims that the booking was intentional, and that he’s a big fan of hardcore music.
“I love that shit, you kidding me?” said Rogan while doing a cold plunge inside a sauna. “Hell yeah, I want to have more hardcore bands on the show. I used to be into all those heavy groups like Godsmack, Disturbed and Papa Roach. Roaches, man… have you ever really thought about cockroaches? They’re the craziest motherfuckers in the world. It’s wild that you’ve got these little armored creatures that can survive a nuclear war running around people’s kitchens at night, trying to find crumbs while they wait for their chance to take over. I saw this video where some scientists put a little circuit board on a cockroach and controlled it like a robot. Jamie, pull that up.”
Seasoned talent booking agent Lester Stetson says that blunders like this are bound to happen once in a while, but can be avoided.
“Research!” said the chain-smoking, polyester-clad Stetson. “You’ve always got to do your research. A little due diligence can easily prevent this sort of fiasco. This reminds me of the time Dick Cavett had the band The Stooges on, thinking they were the Three Stooges. All of Dick’s prepared questions were in regard to pie fights and their vaudeville days. Even more embarrassing was when Regis and Kathie Lee booked some knucklehead named GG Allin instead of Steve Allen. They were scrubbing excrement out of the set for weeks!”
At press time, it was reported that Judd Apatow accidentally invited Joe Rogan to his birthday party when he’d intended to invite longtime friend Seth Rogen.
Want To Feel Old? The Crusades Were 900 Years Ago
BY CHARLES BILL
In the words of Steve Miller and his band, time keeps on slipping into the future. Do you want to feel old? Well, guess what? The Crusades were 900 years ago.
That’s right, I bet it feels like just yesterday that Pope Urban II put out a papal bull calling for all good Christians to take up arms and reclaim the Holy Land from the heathen Saracens. But it was 900 years ago! Ugh, time needs to start slowing down or we are going to lose our minds.
You’re probably are thinking “well sure, that’s the First Crusade, but I remember Richard the Lionheart going into battle against Saladin, that had to be only two or three years ago right?” Nope. That was 800 years ago. If you can believe it, Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, and even the leper king Baldwin IV are now dead! It makes it hard to go back and look at the mosaics depicting the events without feeling a bit of bittersweet nostalgia about the whole thing.
We certainly can’t forget the day that Enrico Dandalo, Serene Doge of Venice, sacked Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade. We were pissed. We all were chanting ‘resist’ and wanted to vote that blind bastard out for what he was doing to Eastern Christendom, but he just kept sacking. And then we live to see it repeat itself with Donald Trump. Time’s a real bitch, and it makes fools of us all.
Nostalgia can be a dangerous thing. It’s easy to look back and yearn for the days of capturing Damietta, or resisting the Turks in Malta, or even being turned into an immortal vampire in Dark Ages Romania, but we need to look forward. A lot of people peaked during the Crusades and now spend their lives trying to chase that high again. But despite the calls for another Crusade, lets say we just let it be in the past.
Also for you younger folks, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated 160 years ago. Wild.
Man To Be Honored at GLAAD Awards for Giving Bisexual Girlfriend a Ride to Chappell Roan Concert
BY LOS ANGELES – GLAAD, the world’s largest LGBTQ media advocacy organization, announced that local boyfriend Noah Simms will receive a Vanguard Award for his work giving his bisexual girlfriend and her friends a ride to lesbian singer Chappell Roan’s nearby concert.
“My girlfriend Chelsea got me into Chappell Roan and we’ve been blasting her queer anthems non-stop. I thought it would be sweet to surprise Chels with tickets to the next show, but then I imagined her having to sing along to the bridge of ‘Good Luck Babe’ while I was standing next to her. I couldn’t do that to her, especially during Pride Month,” said Simms. “Bi girlfriends should be free to tell other girls they’re so pretty too and sing about regretting marrying a man. So, I gave the tickets and a ride to her and her best friends to right my wrongs of putting her in a hetero-normative relationship in the first place.”
GLAAD President Shanoor Arora sees this as a call to action for other boyfriends of queer women.
“With the current political climate and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments on the rise, Noah Simms displayed a brave act of allyship. It’s time to get behind the wheel, boys,” said Arora. “Rideshare and venue parking fees are a bitch. And frankly, Chappell’s concerts are not about to get cheaper, considering she went from 2M to 22M monthly listeners on Spotify in the course of six weeks. So it’s really up to the brave men who support their bi and pan ‘gfs’ to utilize their privilege accordingly.”
Chappell Roan was invited to present the award to Simms but turned it down, offering a message to Simms instead.
“Boyfriends shouldn’t be receiving any awards when their girlfriends are out there in my crowd, bereft of an iced coffee, staring longingly at a woman they will never know carnally. But I guess this guy should get some tiny speck of recognition. What if their girlfriend’s gay asses are craving Taco Bell after my show? Then I guess men like Noah need to be there with the car running for their partners now more than ever, babes,” said Roan. “It’s a perfect opportunity for them to literally stay in their lane.”
At press time, Simm’s received a text from his girlfriend asking for him to drop her and her crew off at a hotel for a “super cute slumber party.”
I Lived Every Day Like It’s My Last and Now I have Crippling Credit Card Debt
BY We’ve all heard the adage that one should “live every day like it’s their last,” but what does it really mean? I’ll tell you. It means $300,000 in credit card debt and more than one antibiotic-resistant STD.
Like any self-respecting Millennial trying to find their way as they come of age at 34, I obsessively followed life advice from out-of-work Gen Xers on Instagram. I kept seeing this same idea, so I decided to take it seriously. My new morning routine was to have a friend call me and pretend to be a doctor telling me about a terminal diagnosis.
My friend Marian was the best for this. She spends a lot of nights on WebMD. Every morning she would tell me that I had precisely 24 hours to live, and I would spring into action, ready to reap the benefits of living life in such a way. Boy oh boy, was I not ready for the reaping.
Most mornings, after recovering from the shock of the news by taking a Xanax, I would think “Well, if I’m dying, I should do all the things I’ve been waiting for.” This included things like traveling all around Europe, quitting my job to spend time with my family, eating at Michelin restaurants, and getting more than half a tank of gas at once. It was fun, at first.
I started getting calls from collections agencies who didn’t seem to care that I was terminal or that I was just living life how we were apparently supposed to. Suddenly, it seemed, I had a mountain of debt I wasn’t able to pay off, not to mention a pretty intense Xanax dependency and a lot of discharge. But every morning I got the news that I’d be dying soon, so once again it didn’t matter. I’d go back to spreading the clap among all the aging rockers I’d never been able to see before money didn’t matter. Some days I would respond to the news by hiding in my closet and sobbing intensely. These days were cheaper.
I have decided that perhaps this advice is not meant for those who assume that other people use words properly.
Despite my struggles, I am finally on my way to paying off this debt with a deal for my debut self-help book “Live Every Day While Remembering That You Could Die Sooner Than You Think Due to a Variety of Factors, and Therefore You Should Keep Your Values, Goals, (And Budget!) in Mind.”
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Nobel Prize to Be Awarded to Forum User From 9 Years Ago With Same Niche Problem
BY MATT FRESH
STOCKHOLM — An internet hero was finally awarded for their work this week as the Swedish Academy has announced they will be giving the Nobel Prize in Literature to the forum user from nine years ago who had the same niche problem as you.
The Swedish Academy held a press conference announcing the decision and the rationale behind it.
“It is our great privilege to announce that we announce this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded to forum user jellygiggler69,” exclaimed Academy chairman Sven Olsson. “While we usually don’t announce winners until closer to the ceremony later in the year we felt that this user deserved immediate recognition for their work. Their writings have provided valuable contributions to the betterment of humanity through education and self-reflection. No matter what problem you may have been facing or how little information there is about it online, jellyjiggler69’s years-old posts have always been there to guide us into the light.”
Olsson gave a personal anecdote as to how jellyjiggler69’s work has affected him that resonated with people worldwide.
“Even recently here at the Sweedish Academy, we’ve been helped by reading the astounding work of jellyjiggler69. Just this week we had a problem with our internal systems that no one in IT could figure out and online searching yielded only results for completely different problems. But then we discovered a forum post from nine years ago in which jellyjiggler had the same problem and he managed to fix it. We followed what he said and low and behold it worked. An impossible problem solved and our minds enriched.”
Upon the announcement, people from all walks of life came out in support of the decision while regaling tales of how jellyjiggler69 has helped them.
“This one time my capture card started warping the audio sporadically and I searched for hours on how to fix it. Customer service couldn’t figure it out, there was no one online who knew what the cause could be and then I discovered a forum from 5 years ago where jellyjiggler69 solved my issue. No one deserves a Nobel prize more than them,” wrote Twitter user MarkMan.
“I bought this game during a Steam sale and at one specific cutscene it would bug out and freeze and not a single other person online had ever had this issue. I thought all was lost until I discovered jellyjiggler’s 12 year old GameFaqs post detailing how they fixed it. Truly the greatest writer of our generation,” wrote Twitter user StankJerky420
At press time, the Swedish Academy has yet to figure out jellyjiggler69’s identity but is hopeful one of their old forum posts will provide the answer.
Stardew Valley’s New Hardcore Mode Deletes Your Farm if You Open the Wiki
BY SAN FRANCISCO — The Stardew Valley community expressed a mix of outrage, and heartbreak today after the release of a new hardcore mode that erases your save file if you open the wiki.
“I’ve never felt so betrayed in my life,” said Stardew veteran WillyWrangler. “It’s like ConcernedApe doesn’t even know his audience. The wiki is vital to maintaining an optimal farm, knowing when and where to catch each fish, and remembering what gifts Clint hates so I can ruin his birthday.”
However, despite initial reassurances that the mode was entirely optional, hundreds of players were stunned to discover that hardcore mode had been enabled by default, resulting in a combined loss of tens of thousands of hours of playtime.
“It’s all gone,” wept Stardew masochist ArgonMatrix in a heartbreaking TikTok. “All of it. My enchanted Iridium tools, my perfectly arranged farm, all because I wanted to check my wife Hayley’s favorite gemstone. Nine in-game years we’d been together, and loading up a new farm to find she didn’t even know me? It rips your soul in half.”
Many players took to messaging ConcernedApe, believing this to be some sort of bug. They would receive a response just a few hours later.
“Lmao, git gud,” tweeted ConcernedApe. “If you Sebastian stans can’t figure out how to seduce that basement nerd without the wiki, then you don’t deserve him. If you can’t handle the inferno that is this relaxing, chill farming simulator, then maybe you should get out of the furnace.”
ConcernedApe would later tweet a short video of his character consuming a Starfruit, revealing that it reminded him of the taste of player tears.
Stardew Historian Michael Williams weighed in saying this new update was part of a pattern.
“This isn’t the first time this year that a Stardew Valley update has unleashed strife among the player base. 1.7 added a subplot involving mass starvation across Pelican Town after shopkeeper Pierre jacked up his prices and poisoned the player’s crops.”
At press time, ConcernedApe managed to quell much of the dissent by revealing the update also includes seven new unique scenes involving Mayor Lewis’ shorts.
