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Hard Digest November 8: Early Access Matt Skiba, Serial Killers, and More
🕑 Added 2024-11-09 01:00:04 +0000 UTCMatt Skiba Stares Out Rain Flecked Window Wondering if Mark and Travis Think About Him Too
By Matt Oriente
CHICAGO — Former Blink-182 guitarist Matt Skiba was seen staring out a window on a rainy day this past week while wondering if Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker think about him too, confirmed sources.
“Yeah, of course I’m happy for Tom and the guys, and I know there are no hard feelings,” said Skiba without breaking eye contact with a raindrop on a nearby window. “But sometimes I wonder if it’s something I did. Could I have played those three chords better? Did I not have the right nasally intonation on ‘All the Small Things’? Not enough dick jokes on stage? I just find myself wondering what they are doing right now and whether they think about me like I am of them right now.”
Current Alkaline Trio band members and road crew have noticed Skiba’s growing tendency to find the nearest window during rehearsals and shows.
“Matt’s been distant for a while, and as soon as he posts up by a window on a dreary day, I know what kind of night it’s going to be,” said bassist Dan Andriano. “You can’t help but feel inadequate and less than. It’s hard to compete with playing arenas with fully stocked and luxurious green rooms. We let him sit there and work things out on his own, but when he looks over and asks things like ‘Do you think they still play anything off ‘California’ or ‘Nine’?’ How do you answer that? Because we all know the truth.”
Therapist Dr. Ryan Coe, who specializes in band member relationships, notes this behavior is common among musicians who’ve gone from smaller bands to larger, more affluent ones.
“What Matt’s experiencing is a classic case of displaced loyalty,” Coe explained. “It’s not unusual for him to crave reciprocation, but in Matt’s case, he’s projecting feelings of closeness onto Mark and Travis, who—no offense to him—are probably debating which mom jokes to use on stage tonight or talking about the hundreds of thousands of dollars they made on one show of their tour. In all likelihood, they remember him as Mike Skiba by mistake.”
In a bittersweet twist, fans have reported that Alkaline Trio has added “I Miss You” to their set list, with Skiba singing both Hoppus’ and Tom DeLonge’s parts.
Opinion: Why the $10,000 Prize I Won on “America’s Funniest Home Videos” in 1989 Was Not Worth Having My Left Testicle Ruptured by a Wiffle Bat
By It was August of 1988, and I was attending my nephew Brett’s 4th birthday party in Leoni, Michigan. I was just planning on spending a wonderful summer day with my family, but little did I know its events would change my life forever. While teaching Brett how to swing the yellow wiffle bat I had purchased him, he accidentally hit me in the testicles, causing me to clutch at my groin and collapse onto the freshly mown lawn behind my brother Andy’s house.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, fast forward 15 months, and there I was sitting in the studio audience for “America’s Funniest Home Videos” as the moment of my ultimate shame captured by Andy on his Sharp VHS-C HQ camcorder was replayed for millions of people. The audience guffawed as the most traumatic experience of my life was dubbed with hackneyed cartoon sound effects coupled with Bob Saget’s appalling impersonation of Brett’s voice. I ended up winning the $10,000 prize, but to say it wasn’t worth it is an understatement.
A ruptured left testicle requires the placement of a plastic scrotal tube to drain excess fluid. Six months of agonizing physical therapy costing thousands of dollars. Still more thousands of dollars in lost wages from my job as a construction foreman. These are the tolls the incident cost me for which the $10,000 was paltry and insulting recompense. I like to think the audience would not have laughed so heartily had these facts been known, but to be honest, the whole ordeal damaged my faith in humanity almost as much as it did my testicle.
Moreover, my relationship with my beloved nephew was completely shattered, and truly has never fully recovered. 36 years later, and I still instinctively cower in fear with my hands covering my genitals every time I see him. Worse yet, my family hasn’t grasped the emotional damage I incurred at the party, and will intermittently replay the clip on YouTube as I force a pained smile while biting back tears. No grand prize could possibly be worth such torment.
So go ahead and laugh, America, as you drink from my seemingly endless supply of misery. You’ve been doing it for the past three decades, so I hardly expect you to discover you’ve had your fill anytime soon. Just know that your spirit and sense of humanity have fallen in much the same way I did after being struck with the wiffle bat on that cursed afternoon so many years ago.
Nation’s Families Announce Plans to Sit Next to You at Restaurant While All Looking at Devices at Full Volume
By MASSAPEQUA, N.Y. — Families with young children across the country announced their plans to find you in a restaurant and sit at an adjacent table while each member watches something irritating at full volume, sources who may never leave their house again report.
“As a proud representative of every family in America who can’t seem to hold a conversation with their loved ones in public places, I’d like to declare our intentions of finding you having a nice quiet night out at your favorite place to eat and sitting right next to you while all of us remain silent and blast the worst kind of content we can find,” said Cheryl Lamondala over the din of a TikTok makeup tutorial playing on her phone. “We’ll be any place you go from a shitty Applebee’s to a five-star restaurant and we’ll be bringing our devices as well as our complete lack of situational awareness. See you soon!”
Some say they are confused why every family in America feels the need to do this and question why they are even bothering to go out at all.
“I took my girlfriend to a nice romantic spot for dinner we love to go to and were having a great time when suddenly this family of four sits right next to us and immediately breaks out all their iPads, Nintendo Switches, and Amazon Fires without even talking to each other,” said Matt Burton. “One kid was playing some kind of game on a tablet while the other one watched cartoons with the mom scrolling through Instagram Reels and the dad watching a baseball game. Couldn’t they have just gotten DoorDash and stayed at home and just made each other miserable in their own home?”
Local restaurateur Chris Santiago says he has noticed an uptick in the amount of annoying families visiting his establishment but has plans on how to help manage the situation.
“Yes, we get these kinds of families in here all the time and as terrible as they are, they currently make up about seventy-percent of our revenue so we can’t really say anything to them and risk losing business,” said Santiago. “So instead of letting them know that they are bothering the other customers we’ve just given all of our waitstaff megaphones so that they are able to take orders over the shrill cacophony of everyone’s phones playing some bullshit.”
At press time, every family in America also released a statement saying they will be sitting right behind you on a long-distance flight as their youngest child kicks the back of your seat and the parents pretend not to notice while arguing with each other.
Life Hack! This Serial Killer Got a Crucifix Tattoo To Ensure He Still Gets Into Heaven!
By We all know the rules: try your hardest to be a good person and spend your life committing honorable deeds to be rewarded with an eternity in paradise when you die. Those of us who were raised Christian have had this lesson ingrained in our brains from early childhood, and hopefully it’s motivated us to do some good in our communities or turn the other cheek to those who mean us harm. However, one crafty person has found a way around this holy doctrine and ensured himself a seat at the right hand of the Father despite spending his life causing nothing but pain and suffering!
Whoa! Is this for real?
You bet it is! Meet 44-year-old Brock Wesley Dunn of Plainfield, Wisconsin. An accountant by day, Brock has chosen to spend his free time torturing and murdering hitchhikers he’s picked up in surrounding communities. While such an, erm, alternative lifestyle would typically earn someone perpetual torment at the hands of Satan’s hordes of sadistic demons, Brock has found himself a loophole by getting a crucifix tattoo on his right bicep, and in so doing proven his allegiance to God!
Pretty cool!
With this hastily-designed and poorly-executed cross adorned with the word “FAITH” emblazoned on his arm for the rest of his life, Brock has managed to skirt cosmic laws and earn himself a place in the divine kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! Of course, this is small consolation for the poor hitchhikers trapped in his basement awaiting their certain doom (especially because Brock has recently discovered his proclivity for skinning people alive,) but we’ll gladly receive uplifting news wherever we can get it in today’s world. Hooray for Brock!
Let this be a lesson to those of us who have spent our time donating to the poor or volunteering at food banks that there’s an easier way. While millions try to curry favor with God by wasting their time with these costly and boring activities, Brock gets to indulge in his demented practice of donning his deceased mother’s nightgown and dancing in front of the dozens of shattered mirrors distributed amongst his house until he’s hit peak sexual arousal, at which point he can descend into the basement and extract specimens from his still-living victims for his macabre arts-and-crafts projects! That’s certainly not the way we’d choose to spend our leisure hours, but who are we to judge someone who’s so cleverly circumvented the wishes of his Maker?
While we most certainly hope to never have the privilege of meeting Brock, we can’t help but applaud his ingenuity. One thing’s for certain: there are billions upon billions of damned souls currently having the flames of hell lick at their flesh who would’ve loved to be in the know on this one!
Your Department of Education Free Trial Period Ends January 2025
BY Hello America,
We here in Washington D.C. hope that you have been enjoying your free trial of the Department of Education. This is a friendly reminder that your free trial period ends January 20, 2025, and we would hate for you to lose access to the Department’s great features that will totally still be there after inauguration day.
As you have been such an ardent supporter of our services for nearly 45 years, we would love to extend to you an offer to upgrade your subscription to our premium package. We just know you’re going to appreciate what we have in store for you and your families.
With the free version of our service, you may have noticed that some public schools weren’t all that well funded, and that is in no way due to systemic inequities resulting from tying public school funding to local property taxes. These places are just inherently bad and they’re there to serve bad kids, and by “bad” kids, we may or may not mean kids that happen to be “poor”, or “brown”, or “had their limbs shot off by an AR-15 in 3rd period English class”. If you upgrade to our paid service today, we can find an empty spot at the almost-fancy private school that our buddy runs and your child can learn about our lord and savior Jesus on the taxpayer’s dime away from all those woke freaks. That’s if you’ve already got the money, of course; education is a privilege and not a human right, after all.
But hey, what if you actually are one of those poor weirdos? We’ve read all of your suggestions about our free trial’s “Student Loan” feature, and we are happy to report that starting next year, this feature will be fully privatized. That means in just two short months, the payments you’ve been making for the entirety of your post-graduate lives while working two jobs that refuse to pay you overtime will be overseen by a team of loving businesses. And as we all know, large corporations historically always meet the needs of the working class! Expect low interest rates especially once the profits from the 80s finally trickle down which is definitely going to happen any day now!
But that’s not all! On top of all these new and exciting benefits, our team is hard at work developing further updates for our Department of Education services. Please look forward to future releases that will aim to:
Remove protections for those privileged gay and trans kids.
Institute monthly book burnings.
Optimize the school-to-prison pipeline.
Thank you for continuing to work with us after all this time; it truly means the world to us—you know, the normal parts of the world. Not the parts with the immigrants that are poisoning the blood of our country.
Don’t miss out on this amazing offer!
The Trump Administration
Lionsgate Announces New Saw Prequel “Young Jigsaw” Starring Tobin Bell
BY Nick Coffman
LOS ANGELES – Fans of the Jigsaw killer and the Saw franchise are getting another prequel that goes back even further into the origin story of John Kramer. Called Young Jigsaw, the film will follow an adolescent Kramer, played by the ever spry, Tobin Bell, as he learns the tools of the trade that eventually lead to his life as Jigsaw.
CEO of Lionsgate Entertainment, Jon Feltheimer, confirmed the existence of the upcoming prequel during Lionsgate’s latest earnings call.
“The one constant in Lionsgate’s history, aside from me of course, is the superb Saw franchise that our partners at Twisted Pictures have continued to surprise us with,” Feltheimer said, before the 73-year-old CEO busted out 20 body squats in the middle of the video presentation. “Saw X took us back to Jigsaw’s early days. With Young Jigsaw, we’ll go back to John Kramer’s middle school days and answer the questions viewers have been asking since the series began, like ‘how’d John get into civil engineering’ or ‘why does Tobin Bell look like he hasn’t aged a day over 21?”
Feltheimer continued the call singing praises for the talented cast of Young Jigsaw. His most glowing words were reserved for Tobin Bell in the titular role.
“I’ve seen an early cut of the film, twice. Both times someone had to point out Tobin to me,” Feltheimer said, switching from body squats to jumping jacks. “We had a lot of background middle schoolers in the movie and Tobin just blended in with them like it was nothing. At this rate, I don’t see why we couldn’t follow Jigsaw through high school, and all four years of his undergrad program at NJIT.”
To end the call, Feltheimer brought out his grandson, who he introduced as the future of Lionsgate.
“I love my grand dad, but I am going to be honest, he don’t got the rizz,” the nepo baby said before removing his flat bill hat and revealing he was in fact Tobin Bell putting on a masterclass in acting. “In all seriousness though, I love working with Jon and hope we get to keep making these movies until they put us both six feet under.”
At press time Bell was spotting Feltheimer on the bench press as the CEO proceeded to rep out 225-pounds for a set of three to wrap up the earnings call.
