I have almost no information about these marvelous Japanese playing cards featuring some of the most fearsome kaiju monsters, blithely exposing the naked hubris inherent in all of our fancy industrial structures (mostly by tearing them apart).
Judging from the typeface and so forth, it can’t be much later than the mid-1960s, can it? Anybody out there know?
The source for these images is Flickr user ToadLickr, who indicates that these cards may have been made by the Alaska card company.
You can see quite a few more of these great cards at the endlessly rewarding blog Monster Brains.
More of these excellent kaiju playing cards after the jump…...
The pinball arcade was where the boys in leather jackets hung out. The guys into Heavy Metal, Hell’s Angels and books by Sven Hassel. That’s what I recall from growing up. The pinball machines were always situated at the far end of the arcade—past the lines of slot machines with itchy-fingered retirees spending their hard-earned cash and the whey-faced office clerks on their lunch break in off-the-peg suits and white socks.
In those days smoking was permitted indoors—so the back of the room where the pinball machines and the boys in denim and leather hung out was always thick with blue cigarette smoke. Just go down to the back of the room and inhale a few breaths—it saved you on the cost of buying smokes.
For some reason pinball machines were associated with being tough. I was never really quite sure why. Manliness and the ability to use flippers dexterously meant—obviously in some secret code I was unable to fathom—that you were a tough guy. These boys sneered at punk. Tolerated Prog. Hated Glam and Mod—which was strange as most liked Slade and The Who. What they did like was Black Sabbath. Deep Purple. Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow. AC/DC. And The Rolling Stones—post 1968.
Their bravado was all front—like the flashing lights and bells of the pinball machines they played. The pinball was a totem for their nascent identity. In a few years time, some of these boys would be in their own off-the-peg suits playing slot machines during their lunch breaks.
Pinball has always had that macho outsider image—which probably explains why certain hard rockin’ bands and artistes have opted to merchandise their product through pinball machines.
More rock and pop pinball machines, after the jump…
Aftermath of the 1986 Cerritos mid-air collision—this is not going to end well…..
A young man in the Philippines named Allec Joshua Ibay has developed an interesting—and morbid—hobby. Using Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004, Ibay likes to recreate noteworthy airline crashes from the past.
Ibay’s dedication to this hobby is impressive, with upwards of 30 such crashes now documented on YouTube. The tone is uniformly elegiac, with lachrymose music cues, but the videos also attempt to foreground useful information such as the actual dialogue between the doomed pilots and the control tower.
On some level Ibay knows that what he’s doing is creepy. The default video on his YouTube user page is a 9/11 tribute—not to worry, Ibay has done simulations of both UA Flight 175 and AA Flight 11. He seems to have gone out of his way to find FS2004 topics that are a bit less unsettling, as for instance this tribute to Heathrow or this compilation of safe landings on the island of Sint Maarten, where the airport is notoriously much too close to the beach, which has led to some fairly hilarious pictures of volleyball players confronted with a 747 jet landing almost right on top of them. (Last year we took a look at Jet Airliner: The Complete Works, a memorable book of such photos.) Ibay is currently 18, and some of these videos are more than a year old—I’d feel a little more squicked out if Ibay were in his thirties.
After the jump, some of Ibay’s greatest, er, “hits”......
Like many people I have a love/hate relationship with the Internet. Which is a problem if you happen to be in the line of work I’m in. Today, however, is a day that I am in LOVE with the Internet and I don’t care who knows it. Check out this absolutely fabulous board game put out in 1983 that took the Parker Brothers staple Monopoly and gave it a drag queen style makeover. I present to you one of the greatest board games ever to be pulled out of a closet—Gay Monopoly.
An idea conceived by the cheekily named company Fire Island Games out of (natch) West Hollywood it’s hard to say what I like most about this whole riff on Monopoly. Like the game pieces that include a leather cap, high-heeled pumps, handcuffs, a hair dryer and a teddy bear. Or the properties up for grabs on the game board of notable gay destinations and landmarks such as Castro Street in San Francisco, Fort Lauderdale, and good old Tremont Street—and of course Provincetown—in Massachusetts. And of course instead of building hotels on your property in Gay Monopoly you build bars and bathhouses. Of course since this is Gay Monopoly that we’re talking about here, the railroads have been replaced with discothèques. Yes. As I was reading through the insert that helps explain the game I came across some tongue-in-cheek text detailing the “rules” for Gay Monopoly:
Remember that nothing in the rules is sacred. They are not carved in Quiche. Rules are for people “living” in Straight City. When you play GAY MONOPOLY be inventive like gay people always are.
So the next time your boss tries to tell you what to do like “make sure you’re not late again tomorrow” or to “not to drink a bottle of wine at lunch” you tell them that unless those rules are carved in quiche then no dice. As you might imagine this game is a difficult one to track down as Parker Brothers came hard for Fire Island Games and sued them for copyright infringement. As it turns out Fire Island donated the vast majority of whatever profits they made for the fifteen-dollar game to AIDS research and support organizations. I did find a few going for multiple hundreds of dollars over on Etsy and Ebay if you’d like to add this fantastic artifact to your board game collection.
Is this the final nail in the coffin for Pokémon Go? If not, can it be? Please? When you think or least hoped you’ve heard the last about Pokémon Go, lo and behold someone goes and designs Pokémon dildos. Yes, Pokémon dildos.
Etsy shop Geek Sex Toys is making these and has appropriately called them PokéMOANS. We now have Pokémoans on this planet, folks.
‘Bulby’ - A grass type Pokémoan. Bulby has a large seed tip making it a very pleasurable friend to have. It’s seed is 5cm wide and 4cm tall and its body is 16cm tall and 3.5cm wide.
‘Charmy’ - A slightly thinner, fire type Pokémoan with a flaming tail. Standing 18cm tall and 4cm wide at its widest point Charmy gives intense orgasms everywhere it goes.
‘Squirty’ - A water Pokémoan. Squirty has a smooth round head with a large grooved turtle shell on its back. Its bubbly head measures 4cm wide whilst his body measures 6cm wide and 14cm tall.
‘Piky’ - This small electric type anal Pokémoan is a perfect size for the average Pokémoan trainer. Piky is an extremely cute yet essential addition to your team. Its insertable size is 2.5cm wide by 4cm tall and his tail is 8cm long.
Apparently there are only 100 left in stock. So you gotta get ‘em all while you can! A limited-edition set of four will set you back about $270.00 or each one sells for around $68.00. A bargain indeed.
Wow! I really like this giant raven costume by illustrator and video game artist, Rah-Bop. It’s incredibly well-made and the details are impeccable. The costume was designed after Rah-Bop’s D&D character, Rue.
There’s really no additional information about this costume to report that I was able to find. But it’s amazing isn’t it? I wonder how long it took to make?
An Irish YouTube user by the name of Duggy uses the Editor function in Grand Theft Auto V to create his own short video works, or as he puts it, “I attempt to put scenes from my head onto GTA’s world.” His most successful pieces are three shorts, created over the course of the last year, that drop GTA scenes under Carl Sagan’s narration from the original 1980 mini-series Cosmos.
These work surprisingly well, and probably not in the way you might be thinking—rather than relying on a collision of Sagan’s optimistic, wonder-filled exposition against the game’s notorious violence to achieve a cheap, ironic laugh, Duggy plays these straight, and the results are actually quite poignant! So yes, some of their effectiveness derives from a holy-shit-this-is-from-GTA frisson, there’s a bit more more going on than that.
It’s become a ubiquitous cliché following any national tragedy, and wouldn’t we know it in light of the fact that we seem to have a new national tragedy every couple of weeks: some devastating act of human misery is unleashed and the instantaneous response is a collective dash to the Internet to offer “thoughts and prayers.”
Finally, someone has taken that narcissistic, attention-seeking desire to engage a tragedy without actually doing anything of tangible value, and turned it into an action-packed video game.
One of our favorite Tumblr accounts, Christian Nightmares, hipped us to Thoughts and Prayers: The Game, a mindless exercise in which you do your best to offer both “thoughts” and “prayers” in response to an ever-increasing epidemic of mass-shootings.
Gameplay consists of hitting “T” for thoughts or “P” for prayers as a U.S. map lights up with shooting spree after shooting spree. What happens when you hit the “ban assault weapon sales” button? You’ll just have to play to find out. Is there a secret trick to winning the game? You’ll just have to play to find out.
How many thoughts and prayers can you rack up? Play Thought and Prayers: The GameHERE.
In a bit that’s become a modern comedy classic, Anthony Jeselnik breaks down the value of “thoughts and prayers”: “When you offer your ‘thoughts and prayers’ you are doing nothing. You’re doing less than nothing. You’re not giving any of your time, money, or even your compassion. All you are doing… ALL YOU ARE DOING is saying: ‘don’t forget about me today.’”
Despite exaggerations to the contrary, very few video gamesactually portray sexual assault. Sure, there’s a ton of murder, and definitely lots of gendered violence, but games that write in actual sexual violence are quite rare, which is actually sort of surprising when you learn about Custer’s Revenge.
The game, which came in in 1982 for the Atari 2600 and cost a whopping $49.95 (making it the priciest of Atari games then on the market), had a very simple premise: you are a naked, erection-wielding General Custer and you must avoid a volley of arrows in order to to rape a Native American who is—as indicated by the cover art—tied to a pole. Yeah, that’s it.
Custer’s Revenge was an early attempt to create and market “adult” video games, but promotion was difficult, especially since Mystique, the publishers and developers of the game, made it very clear that the game was “NOT FOR SALE TO MINORS.” In order to drum up publicity, Mystique actually showed the game to women’s and Native American groups, who were quick to give them free press with outraged protests. Feminist Andrea Dworkin even argued that Custer’s Revenge “generated many gang rapes of Native American women,” a claim that is difficult to prove, to say the least. Compared to say Pac-Man, the best-selling Atari 2600 game of all time, which sold 7 million, Custer’s Revenge was small potatoes, only selling 80,000 total. Regardless, the backlash most certainly helped move copies that might have otherwise simply collected dust on the shelf.
So how does Custer’s Revenge hold up nowadays? Despite the stomach-turning “plot,” the game actually manages to be so very comically low-rent that it falls very short of anything that is actually visually lurid. I mean you really have to use your imagination to connect those abrupt little pixels to the historic atrocities of the sexual violence and genocide exacted against Native Americans. They just didn’t quite have the technology to really depict any detail at the time, a fact which allowed game designer Joel Miller to maintain plausible deniability, claiming that the woman was a “willing participant” (this despite the game’s title and cover art). Nonetheless, Mystique later released a companion game, General Retreat, featuring the Native American woman attempting to rape Custer under cannonball fire, which, I guess, was an attempt at equality?
Ah, such innocent times! When the libidinal horrors of entertainment were technologically limited to blocky little boners and booties!
It’s possible that protests eventually staved off sales of the game, but what’s more likely is that no one really wanted to play it. PC World magazine named it the third worst game of all time, adding to the obvious objections that it was extremely difficult to play and it just looked terrible. The underground infamy of of Custer’s Revenge outlasted the game itself, inspiring a much more graphic remake in 2008, which was notably protested by a indigenous activists, including a female game designer and a video game journalist. Eventually pressure from activists got the game removed from the internet in 2014 (though I doubt too many people felt its loss).
I love everything about this great deck of incredible playing cards that I found at Flickr, they were put up by a user named taffeta whose real name is apparently Patricia M.
They were made by a company called Stemm in France, or maybe S.L.C. Atlanta was the company and Stemm was the product line? I don’t know. The deck seems heavily influenced by Peter Max and the geniuses responsible for the movie Yellow Submarine but it’s impossible to know.
In France the terms club, heart, spade, and diamond translate to trèfle, coeur, pique, and carreau. Meanwhile King, Queen, and Jack are represented as Roi, Dame, et Valet.
The faces are on the cards are French pop stars including Françoise Hardy, France Gall, Johnny Hallyday, Eddy Mitchell, Sylvie Vartan, Sheila, and so on. I’m pretty hopeless at matching the Google pics of those folks with these pics, so I’ll take their word for it. (Feel free to solve the puzzle in comments.)
In my opinion it’s more fun not knowing who the people are—it turns the deck into a gallery of random 60s swingers…...
