Month: October 2020

The Colors of Wishbone

By palabomeno

The colors were so beautiful.

They promised me so much. Whenever I felt sad, or lonely, or worried, all I would do is listen to the colors, and they would promise me that all things would be okay. They did things no other colors could do. Have you ever smelled a color? Tasted a color? No, not in the way somebody with synesthesia would, either. Really tasted a color, tasted it in the same way that you could taste a piece of chocolate, savoring its flavor and swallowing it and feeling it inside you, warm and pleasant. I hadn’t either, until the colors of Wishbone were revealed to me.

Nobody else can understand. The Wishbone colors speak, and they sing, and they dance, and they do so, so much for me. I cannot live without them. I will not live without them. They are everything to me. No family, no friends, nobody can compare. How could they? They cannot show me delights the way Wishbone can. They call me mad when I try to even gently describe, to convince them to look at the colors.

Maybe I am mad. But if madness is the price for happiness, I do not care. The colors are worth any price. The colors are everything.

Cuckoo for Blue’s Clues Blue Foods

By brilokuloj

I really loved Blue’s Clues. Did you ever watch that one? The kids show with the blue cartoon dog?

I loved Blue’s Clues well past the point where most children would have moved on to other shows. I loved Blue’s Clues to the point of accidentally isolating myself from my peers. I was still watching it when I was 8, and even once I lost interest when they kicked Steve off for Joe, I kept watching it with my sibling well into my preteen years.

I had a Blue stuffed toy. I had the Handy Dandy Notebook, with the giant crayons. I wanted the Thinking Chair very badly, and would randomly declare any particularly comfortable chair or even sofa to be the Thinking Chair. I had a Mailbox I would put random crap in. I had several figurines that would regularly get lost and stepped on. I had the Humongous Entertainment PC games, which were very good. My dog was named Blue.

Above anything else, I loved the Blue’s Clues food. I already loved neon-colored food, something that I know many 90s kids can sympathize with, and in my case I especially loved neon Blue Food. I can’t say for certain if my love of the Blue’s Clues Blue Food was because of the show itself, or if I started to love the show more because it was a consistent source of serotonin-inducing Blue Food. I think solving that mystery might be even harder than the chicken-or-the-egg conundrum.

Would you like to see my collection of favorite Blue’s Clues Blue Foods? Come on into my article! Blue skidoo, you can too.

The Checkers Experience

By Eggware.XYZ

Have you ever eaten at a Checkers? Or have you ever eaten at a Rally’s? What if I told you that these are the same restaurant??? Madness, you’d tell me, those are two different names they must be two different places! But no. They are the same restaurant. With different names depending on where you are.

Wait, you’re telling me now. Isn’t that the same thing that Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr has too? Yes… that’s right. It’s the same gimmick. It’s also the same gimmick as restaurants Green Burrito and Red Burrito, a pair of places that we didn’t really know about until we started investigating this. And you want to know the real kicker? All of these restaurants are owned by the SAME PARENT COMPANY!!! What kind of gimmick is that? You get six properties for the price of three, I guess.

Where we live, we’ve got Checkers, Hardee’s, and neither Green or Red Burrito. We’ve been interested in eating at Checkers for a long time because the people who eat there seem to really like eating there. The fries are pointed out repeatedly as a high point of the menu, and there’s nothing we like more than hot starch. A trip was inevitable.

The thing was, the nearest Checkers to us was over half an hour of driving away. That’s fine, we like to drive, we love driving long distances, but this is something that you still don’t just do for fast food. We kept putting it off, and off, and off, but one day we were just so hungry and so bored we decided driving so long for some burgers would be worth it.

Then we kept going back. We couldn’t seem to stop. It was a waste of gas and time but it was… well, was it worth it? Let’s find out.

Wayback: Helga’s Love Secret

By brilokuloj

Fansites really suck nowadays. For one, I don’t even remember the last time I’ve seen one, do you?

If you don’t remember or weren’t around, there was a time before blogs were our main medium of contact with the fandom world. There were forums, sure, but niche forums were often run by moderators with a tight fist. If you were an independent person wanting to post about your favorite characters or ships, you probably had a fansite, and it was probably hosted on GeoCities.

The shift from fansite to blogging had already begun with the rise of LiveJournal, but journals were still incredibly personal spaces, and advertisers left it the hell alone. If anything, LiveJournal was a great space to promote and link your personal webpages, and they flourished there.

The death of the fansite started to feel very official once fandoms started moving onto Tumblr. It began with the “Fuck Yeah, [Thing]!” formula of blogs, which rapidly supplanted ‘character shrine’ fansites as a space where people posted screencaps of their favorite characters. Then everyone had a blog, including directors and writers and storyboarders and character designers … and now, nobody has a fansite.

Fear not, fellow web surfer: there’s still a place on the Internet where we can see all the fansites we want, and that’s the Wayback Machine. Today I’ve prepared for you a fansite from 2002, before Tumblr devoured the internet and left us with Kpop Twitter.

Wayback: Taco John’s

By brilokuloj

We’re all in agreement that 2020 sucks at this point, right? And it’s really not looking like 2021 is going to be any better. Aren’t you getting tired of this bullshit? Wouldn’t you like to go back?

Great news: there’s a magical website called the Wayback Machine where you can go almost anywhere you want, to almost any point in time where the internet existed. So as long as your fond memories aren’t from before the technological corruption of society, you have a chance to get away from this madness, even if just for a little bit.

Maybe unsurprisingly, I’ve been using the Machine a lot recently to escape the monotony of everyday horror. Today, I’d love to take you on a journey with me. This time I’m going to the website for the midwestern fast food chain Taco John’s, all the way back in 2004 – before online apps were a thing, and before competitor Taco Bell fucking betrayed all of us when we needed them the most.

Let’s go back… wayback!