Mouth Dreams, as reviewed by the panic attacks it gave me

Neil Cicierega, also known by his band name Lemon Demon, is an internet sensation. In my opinion, he’s the internet sensation, because he and his friends basically shaped the internet as we know it today.

It’s hard to avoid his influence online, whether your feelings are positive or negative. That’s why when he released Mouth Dreams in 2020, it changed the trajectory of my life – for the worse or the better, I cannot say.

Mouth Dreams is the newest in his series of inexplicably Shrek-themed mashup albums, alongside Mouth Sounds, Mouth Silence, and Mouth Moods. You may remember Mouth Dreams as a funny novelty, or if you have a sense of chronological linearity not marred by trauma, you might even remember it as one of the few enjoyable things to come out of 2020. Unfortunately, I remember it solely as one of the largest and longest panic attacks I have ever had.

Today, I am here to take you on a tour of exactly what happened to me on the evening of September 30, 2020.

One year of COVID-19!

Happy one year anniversary! It’s hard to believe it’s been a full year, huh? I know, it feels like it was just yesterday. Oh, you don’t know what it’s the anniversary of? Well, it’s been one year since Will and Paula contracted COVID-19! That’s right! We’ve been long-haulers for a full year now! Man, how time flies. Remember when we thought all of this would be over by July? Ha ha!

Man, having COVID sucks. It was one of the worst experiences of our life. But we were the first people we knew to contract COVID-19, and to this day, we still don’t know anybody else who has gotten it. And we caught a very mild case, mind you. We didn’t even have to go to a hospital about it. But in a way, it’s our little piece of history, just for ourselves. In our lungs. And in our immune systems. Though our antibodies have definitely worn off by now and we still need to get our vaccinations.

Roundup: 2020’s Most Foods

One of the fun little perks you get of being subscribed to us on Patreon is that you get free blog articles weeks in advance! Unfortunately, we blogged a lot last year due to not really having anything else to do, which means we’ve built up a sizable backlog of small articles that aren’t really worth wasting a whole calendar day to publish separately.

This marks the start of our roundup series, where we publicly premiere some of our articles that you may have missed. Please note: if you have not pledged to us on Patreon, these are new articles! Not just a bunch of rehashed content.

Limited Run’s Chex Quest Chex Warrior Edition was worth the wait

We. Love. Chex Quest. It’s one of the best games of all time. It’s certainly the best Doom game of all time. AND it came with a free box of cereal – you can’t beat that for a bargain! In the classic shooter community, Chex Quest has always had a tiny but dedicated core of fans who have clamored for years for more cereal-based shooter content.

Limited Run is a company of game merchandise makers that, by no small coincidence, caters to small fandoms by making fun feely packs with trinkets and shirts and fun things like that. And wow, they made a CHEX QUEST BOX! Real Chex Quest merch for real Chex Quest fans! It was an instant buy, even if it cost 150 dollars. And so, in April of 2020, we placed our order the second we saw it. It was our little quarantine gift to ourselves. It would be worth it.

And so we waited. And waited. Just like how we were waiting for quarantine to end. 

Our order did not arrive until January of 2021. Nine months later. We know it was a pre-order, we know there was a Dang Pandemic on, but oh man, that’s a long time to wait. We were almost at the point of giving up completely on this ever arriving when we finally got the notification it had shipped. Now it’s here, and has cemented us as Real Chex Quest fans. So why not go over it, and take a look at everything that came in it?

2020 in review

What a fucking year, huh?

Christ. We have no idea what to say. This year feels like it’s lasted a decade in itself but went by in a flash. All years feel like that to us, but this one was especially bad. I mean… coronavirus am I right?? Quarantine??? LOCKDOWN???? Whoo-ee. In the words of literally every commercial, these are unprecedented times.

We’d like to think that we made the best out of a bad situation, because we spent 2020 trying to do our damnedest to work on our web presence! We blogged, we streamed, we played games and ate food and wrote as often as we could considering we’re both disabled and very broke all the time and also THERE WAS A PANDEMIC GOING ON! Like, holy shit! A world-wide pandemic that is killing real people! But even then, we kept our noses as close to the grindstone as we could afford to.

This is our first time doing a Year In Review Best-Of Type Article, because it’s our first time we’ve really had enough articles to do something like that. Our blog has grown a lot! Our whole web presence has grown a lot… We’re doing so much more than we even thought possible for ourselves. And we have you all to thank, you people out there reading us. In the eternal words of PBS, Thank You.

So hit the jump, and let’s travel back to the beginning of 2020, the worst year ever, and reminisce… on just how much damn blogging we did.

The Grilled Cheese Burrito doesn’t redeem Taco Bell, but we’re eating there again

The Grilled Cheese Burrito was introduced at Taco Bell back in like, July, and it wasn’t until now that we’ve decided to review it. It’s not like we hadn’t had it since it came out – we’ve eaten it several times and, spoiler alert, find it really good. We’re just still bitter about the Taco Bell Menugeddon that happened around the same time period. We don’t want to give Taco Bell much attention right now.

But like a siren, the Grilled Cheese Burrito calls to us. We hear its song. The promise of crisp cheese on the outside of the burrito, and a filling almost but not exactly like our old favorite, the Beefy Fritos Burrito. We cannot resist. We must, must have this burrito. And so we did. And we had it again, and again, and again.

We broke our own oath over this thing. We pledged that we would stop eating at Taco Bell, that they had hurt us for the last time. But we knew we couldn’t stay away. It’s too, too hard. Hit the jump and you can find out what makes it so irresistible for yourself. 

Cheetos Mac ‘n Cheese is okay.

When does irony stop mattering?

Advertisers understand that irony has been a powerful marketing force for years now. Just look at the state of many products: marketers no longer try to assure us that their products are superior, or quality, or even good. They openly and unabashedly embrace the idea that their goods are bad, strange, and comedic. “Honesty” is valued above anything else – so what if the product is garbage? You know you want it, you slob!

And we – I specifically mean food reviewers, including us here at Eggware.XYZ – fall for it every time. There’s almost nothing we can do to keep ourselves from eating these awful foods, talking about how bad they are, how absolutely awful these things are, what were they thinking? The companies that produce this garbage love it when we do this. There’s no way to actually and accurately communicate something is bad anymore. “No such thing as bad publicity” has been actively weaponized. The more we mock them, the more we insult them, the more we bemoan their terrible practices, the stronger they get.

So it’s with a heavy heart that we have decided to review the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos Mac ‘N Cheese today. We know just by acknowledging this product’s existence, we’re letting Frito-Lay score a win over us. We don’t care anymore. To paraphrase Allen Ginsberg, you can’t win, you can’t break even, you can’t even leave the game. The world has to know how awful this stuff is.

NEWS: Thanksgiving Is Also Cancelled

It’s that time of year again: Thanksgiving! And you know what that means? Thanksgiving has been cancelled this year! There will be no Thanksgiving this year, because going to Thanksgiving is probably the most lethal thing you could possibly do. 

How is this possible? Well, earlier this year you might have remembered a little something called Coronavirus happening. But what’s that, you say? You thought that ended back in June, and you’ve been licking each others’ eyeballs like old times? Well, you stupid little moron, you’re completely wrong and also an idiot. Coronavirus never went away. It has always been there and now is going to get worse than ever, due to it getting cold and everybody will start wanting to sit inside by the fire and cough and sneeze and breathe really hard towards the fire, causing huge numbers of coronaviruses to fly around in the room and kill them. This is unacceptable.

So, in our authority ordained by all living kings, we are banning Thanksgiving. This has been a long time coming – let’s be frank, Thanksgiving is a holiday commemorating genocide in a buckled hat, so there wasn’t much good reason to celebrate it in the first place. But now, Thanksgiving has moved past “merely” being offensive and distatestful, it’s outright lethal. We have to take action. It falls on us to make the decision that others were too afraid to do. There will be no more Thanksgiving. Ever.

What about next year, when the virus crisis has hopefully cleared up? Nope. No more Thanksgiving. We gave you all the chance. You could’ve washed your hands and wore the masks. And even if you did, did the government do jack shit to help? Nope. Two hundred thousand people are dead and we are taking Thanksgiving away from everybody to give you all some time to think. 

We hope you will learn an important lesson from all this. Don’t kill your grandparents. Wash your hands and wear a mask. And seriously, do a little research on American holidays. A lot of them are celebrating genocide in one way or another. Look it up.