Quick rundown if you have no idea what’s going on here: VRChat is a MMO social game where users can create and upload their own avatars and worlds that can be viewed in 3D space. It’s basically a lot like “Second Life but VR”. Will has been playing it a lot recently and it’s become an outlet for his old game dev inclinations.
This is Will’s latest project, and we shoved a “thanks to our patrons” sign in the front, so it kinda makes sense we’d show it off here, right? (The world is not publicly visitable yet because of shenanigans.)
Penny’s is based off of Perkins, a fast casual all-day-breakfast restaurant chain that was a favored date location for Will and Paula until 2020 happened. Penny’s is also based off of Denny’s, so, Penny’s.
This is also sort of an interest check for if you guys would be into more VRChat posts, and maybe some behind-the-scenes stuff for this map (like textures and easter eggs).
I really, really, really wanted to like Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie. I don’t know if I can paint a good word-picture for you of just how badly I wanted this movie. Did you know I waited for this movie for 10 years? It’s true. If that sounds crazy, a lot of people were waiting for even longer than I did! But yes, I waited 10 years for this movie.
So why didn’t I like Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie? It was witty and cute, and for the general public it was everything it promised to be. It hit all the notes at a brisk pace and left no questions. All things considered, it perfectly tied the loose ends on a show that many thought was never even going to get an ending. I should have been happy.
But I wasn’t happy. This film promised a deep, long-lasting catharsis that it did not bring. And how could it, anyway? A decade is a long time, and it’s an especially long time to wait for the resolution of an elementary school soap opera. I was a kid when I wanted to see this show end, and I’m an adult now. My wants and wishes have changed a lot, and unfortunately, so has Nickelodeon’s.
So this is my Jungle Movie story. This is my own little slice of what the internet was like for one specific fandom back in the mid-2000s, when YouTube was a site you could watch things on, when the idea of signing internet petitions was celebratory instead of Sisyphean. This is a tale that extends well into my struggles with alcoholism, a topic sadly inevitable when it comes to talking about what was effectively a trauma comfort show for me. And above anything else, I think this is a surprisingly long epic of television executives failing to understand their accidental periphery demographic of little girls, and maybe I should be glad they didn’t blatantly target girls for marketing but dammit I still just wanted my kiddy wish fulfillment movie.
When we started writing this article, we were going to be very, very harsh on KFC. We were fans of the potato wedges, and upon hearing that they were replacing them with fries, we grew very upset. How could they do this? Potato wedges were one of the cornerstones of the KFC menu. Fries are… Nothing. Generic. Bland. They are everywhere,and potato wedges were a delightful way to separate KFC from the rest of the fast food world.
KFC’s appeal wasn’t that it was just “fast food”. It felt like a meal, a real meal that you eat with your family as a thing. KFC has offered quick service meals for our entire lives, but having the platonic idea of “getting a bucket for dinner” is inseparable from KFC as a concept. The wedges illustrated this. They weren’t french fries like what you’d get at a McDonald’s, they were home-cooked wedges just like what you could cook at home. Total difference.
We felt that KFC getting rid of the wedges was the latest awful move in a series of terrible decisions. KFC has been on a sharp and steep decline since the mid-2000s, and nothing seems to be turning their image around. They rely on tacky gimmicks like the new Colonel commercials and outlandish promotional stunts like VR video games and Crocs that smell like fried chicken, but can’t get past the simple fact that their food is not as good as it used to be and their atmosphere is a dump.
We haven’t properly eaten at KFC in what may be years. Them switching to fries seemed like justification that it was the right decision.
Taco Bell is back at it again spitting in the face of their customers by butchering their menu. After the travesty that was their recent decimation, they’ve once again taken the scalpel to their menu and removed classics. The damage wreaked this time is nowhere near as severe as last time, but what’s been removed is… We don’t even have the words.
It seems like Taco Bell is only doing this to be spiteful by now. We have no other explanation why they would continue to do this after the universally negative response last time. But fast food restaurants do not normally listen to their customers that well, and when they do, it tends to end in disaster.
Let’s just get this over with. I don’t know how much more heartbreak I can handle.
Pizza is too expensive! We’ll just say it! It costs too much money to buy a pizza! Having to pay so much damn money for a simple bread, sauce, and cheese is exhausting. In the quarantine environment we’ve been living in for the past seven months minimum, pizza has evolved from an “easy meal” to “life-saving necessity” for us. We know that pizza isn’t cheap - the costs of cheese and toppings adds up quickly, and the margins are razor-thin even in the largest markets.
Still, there’s a saying about bad sex and bad pizza: it’s still pretty good. Sometimes the cheapest pizzas are the best ones, not just for their quality, but for the experiences they provide. Some of our best pizza memories take place in parked cars at Little Caesars, at gas stations, in college cafeterias, getting the Pizza Hut personal pan at Target. Cheap pizza is something that’s worth hunting down and going out of your way for.
When we found a place called Five Dollar Pizza in Minneapolis, we really thought it was too good to be true. Ever since Little Caesars had shut down completely in our area, we had resigned ourselves to pizza costing over twice as much from now on. We didn’t really mind, because Little Caesars pizza really tastes like it was made with five dollars worth of ingredients, so we willing shelled out for our local Domino’s “$5.99 for Two” deals and made do. Seeing that there was another place, an independent place, that offered pizza at a Little Caesars price seemed impossible. But, one day we were up in the area, and decided we simply had no choice but to drop in. For five dollars, what could we lose?
It’s that time of year again! In case you haven’t been out to get groceries in the past, oh, ten or so years, Lay’s has regularly done more “interesting” flavors as limited-time promotions. It all started with the “Do Us A Flavor” contest in 2012, where you could submit your ideas for chip flavors online and the winners would be made into real chips. This ended up giving us such strange chips as Cappuccino and Wasabi Ginger, which were utterly divine and need to come back.
Now Lay’s has released a line of five “Flavor Icons”, chips inspired by famous restaurants around America. No contest here, just five bags of good ol’ American sit-down taste: Chile Relleno from Cocina Azul in Albuquerque; Wavy Carnitas Street Taco from El Torito in Los Angeles; Kettle Cooked New York Style Pizza from Grimaldi’s in New York City; Philly Cheesesteak from Geno’s Steaks in Philadelphia; and finally Nashville Hot Chicken from Party Fowl in Nashville.
We only ended up trying the former three flavors, because grocery shopping sucks. We would have loved to try the hot chicken flavor, but you can’t get everything you want, especially in this hell world we live in nowadays.
So hey, let’s crack open these bags and see what kind of weird shit Lay’s is doing this year.
Chile relleno
First up is chile relleno flavor, from Cocina Azul. We weren’t sure what to expect out of these. Chile relleno is cheese-stuffed peppers so we expected something that would be loaded with fake jalapeño flavor, which Paula cannot stand the taste of. To Paula’s joyous surprise, this tasted nothing like fake jalapeño. To Will’s disappointment, it tasted nothing like chile pepper at all.
Frankly, it tasted like sour cream & onion chips, but better! It was kind of a cross between sour cream & onion and sour cream & cheddar chips. We really loved these, and if they replaced regular sour cream & onion with this, we think it would be a dramatic improvement. This stuff was damn good… but did it taste like a stuffed chile pepper? No, it did not. So if you’re expecting the delicious taste of chiles and cheese, these might not be for you. And as such, they are a failure.
Carnitas street tacos
These are PORKY. Like, wow, they just slap you in the face with pork flavor to the point where it’s kind of distressing. This tastes exactly like the carnitas they serve at Chipotle. We wouldn’t be surprised if they purchased the same spice blend from the same vendor as Chipotle for these chips.
As such, this is the chip that tastes the most like what it’s supposed to be, but is that a good thing? It’s seriously pork flavored. We looked and this actually uses real pork in its flavoring, so if you don’t eat pork, avoid these. These aren’t bad by any stretch of mind, but eating more than a few of them feels… weird. It’s carnitas with none of the textural attributes that we expect out of carnitas: there’s no tenderness, no fattiness, no juiciness, and certainly no tortilla softness. This feels like eating “Carnitas Flavor Pill”, and it’s just weird. I mean, would you want to chow down on a meat-flavored wafer?
Don’t answer that.
New York Style Pizza
Finally we get to the New York Style pizza flavor and, reader, these bore us to tears. Pizza has already been an established chip flavor since like, the 80s. Pizza chips don’t even really taste that much like pizza. No chip can capture the perfect medley of cheese, sauce and bread that a real pizza can conjure up… all you’re left with is the pale taste of oregano and sadness.
But these pizza chips were good, for pizza chips. They were maybe slightly spicier than regular pizza chips, which was nice? They kind of tasted like barbecue chips, heavy on the ketchup, but if you focused you might find the pizza seasonings deep in there. These were also kettle cooked, giving them some serious crunch and texture. We like kettle chips, but these weren’t ones we’d go out of our way for. (It also made it feel even weirder that the chile relleno flavor wasn’t kettle cooked.)
You really don’t need to include pizza in your special limited time flavors promotion. Pizza is a flavor that you can get any time of day. It’s the kind of chip flavor that you get when you’re bored of the Plain-Salt and Vinegar-Sour Cream and Onion-Barbecue quadrilogy. It’s like Flaming Hot or pickle flavored chips, you buy it when you want something different but not new.
In conclusion
In fact, none of these flavors they’re offering really feel like anything new. Sure, the carnitas were weird, and we bet the Philly Cheesesteak would’ve been a bit interesting, but… Pizza? Spicy chicken? The chile relleno was just same old same old when it could have been the most interesting flavor of the bunch. We don’t really know what to expect with this kind of stuff, but we feel like we can expect more from a company that once brought us Chicken & Waffles and Biscuits & Gravy chips.
Maybe it’s just the 2020 blues, but even Frito-Lay seems put down right now. Come on, junk food’s the only thing getting us through this year… buck up a little.
