One of the most embarrassing trends to ever hit the human population in the recent years has been the "Ricing" fad, a trend which has singlehandedly kept the plastic and chrome industry in business. In case you're not as "worldly" and "hip" as I am (for example, I once traveled to Wisconsin and wore those orange-tinted Ray-Ban sunglasses that make you look like a bug from outer space), the term "ricing" refers to the process of turning a crappy automobile into a crappy automobile that's unsuccessfully hidden beneath a layer of sparkly paint, tinted windows, and cannonball-sized exhaust pipes. This trend began back in the early 1990's when a group of inner city youth decided that they were tired of being laughed at when they drove their car, an underpowered 1986 Volkswagen Golf, through the "hood." If you haven't brushed up with your slang recently, the word "hood" means "a neighborhood with a lot more prostitutes and semi-naked minority children on each street corner." These sly and cunning youths stumbled upon the idea to tint their Volksvagen's windows so nobody else could see that they were driving a car which was powered by an engine created by Hasbro to soley power their walking Transformer toy. Their bet paid off and soon enough they were cruising down the streets in total anonymity. Since the inner city youth group had grown accustomed to driving their mysterious car of intrigue, and one of their members had recently gotten ahold of a large burlap bag with a huge black "$" sign stamped across it, the decided to spend all their money on making their Volkswagen Golf become the absolute most "tricked out" Volkswagen Golf since that one guy who decided to put a "BABY ON BOARD" sign on the back window. Oh, and the phrase "tricked out" is inner-city ghetto slang for "ugly." The individuals purchased the following high-cost low-quality imported Malaysian objects and demanded them to be somehow stamped or welded to their car in any means necessary:
Awwwww, how cute! It's a banana that has been shaped into the vague form of a vehicle!
A line of silver-colored-metallic-plastic-coated-aluminum trim that runs around the entire vehicle like the rubber surrounding on a bumper car. This silver lining made the car appear to be a rich person's car, as rich people are known throughout the entire land for being pasting strips of linoleum on their cars and investing in retarded things like backroom cockfights or, worse yet, UGO.
A coat of really fancy paint applied by three different illegal Mexican immigrants hosing cans of All-Ways-Save brand spray paint after each other. The resultant color could best be described as "bottom of the boat blue" and was highlighted by the fact that many particles of crystal meth floating throughout the air embedded itself in the paint and created a pleasing effect not unlike watching reruns of "Alf" after taking painkillers you stole from the dumpster behind the dentist's office.
Hubcaps which were created by replicating various forged UFO photos from the 1970s. The more prongs, holes, and weird shiny protruding objects, the better. They originally pictured their ideal car as being the one from Spy Hunter, the enemy vehicle which had humongous tire-destroying spikes sticking out from the wheels, but the car installation people kept impaling themselves and dying when attempting to install them. I don't think their medical insurance covered that.
Needs more fin. You add a couple more feet to that fin and you'll be able to go 10 MPH faster, definitely. A 60,000-watt stereo system which allowed their music to be heard from neighboring solar systems. Four refrigerator-sized subwoofers were placed in the back trunk so the jealous comments of anybody else on the planet could be drowned out by the soothing sounds of "Beasts of Bass Volume 28: Booty Bass Boost." Certain frequencies actually caused many buildings to explode like in the old "Godzilla" films, only with less short kids standing around wearing bicycle shorts and hats and pointing at something vague in the distance.
A complex and revolutionary custom exhaust system which consisted of "making everything a lot bigger." They actually used a 1920's-era industrial coal factory smokestack as the tailpipe, and a modified iron lung for carbeurator. These were specifically made so huge so their car's rumbling, guttural sound would contribute to the 60,000-watt stereo system and add a special bonus frequency to the bass known as "a really muddy and horrible sound," used to lure the Mole-people out of their underground lairs hundreds of miles below the Earth's crust.
Oh see now this is nice because if feels like I'm getting beamed up to the mothership! Some outrageous plastic boomerage that was welded to the back of the car's hood and dubbed a "spoiler," meaning that "anybody who purchases one of these things to have bolted to their car has obviously spent the last six years drinking spoiled milk." Their ideal spoiler for the original Ricers was one that was so tall it could collide with orbiting satellites, but the plastic industry was having a bad year in 1991 and simply couldn't produce enough raw material to fulfill their dream.
The demand that their car be lowered to approximately one inch above the ground, so that after driving one mile with their brains reverberating around and colliding with their skull nonstop from the bass, they could simply fall out of their car and be rolled down the street to the local crackhouse or McDonalds or tuna factory or wherever these people go.
Now with all those aforementioned horribly embarrassing characteristics of a standard Ricemobile, it's no wonder that they're easy targets for us dorks on the Internet. Making fun of Ricers is the equivalent of beating a mentally disabled coma victim with a boat oar; it's simply too easy and doesn't result in anything but a a person who continues to be retarded no matter what you do. However, I've noticed a unsettling trend among some of the more hardcore Internet nerds around these parts; a tendency to poke fun of Riceboys while simultaneously building their very own PCRice systems.
A normal person, somebody who is neither you nor I, buys a computer, plugs it in, then uses it for a couple years until they realize that it doesn't have the horsepower to play the latest version of "Game Show Deer Hunter Action Edition (AOL Version)," at which point they give it to their eight-year old kid and they purchase a new one from K-Mart. But to the PCRicers, this is simply unacceptable. Purchasing a store-bought, uncustomized computer is to them the equivalent of walking into a Scientologist temple and referring to L. Ron Hubbard as "that fat bald dead guy who wrote the silly alien books"; it's simply something that should never, ever, ever be done. PCRicers never order entire computer systems; they order each and every part and then spend 10 hours putting it together only to realize that it locks up every 10 seconds. Their computer system represents their penis size, and in the bizarre, weird, crazy world of PCRicers, the penis with the most cooling fans wins. The ideal PCRice has the following awe-inspiring features:
Wow, what a fancy fan! This, singlehandedly, will make my computer go at the speed of light! As mentioned above, fans everywhere. Fans on harddrives, fans on graphics cards, fans on motherboards, fans on fans, fans that have blades composed of tinier fans, stealth fans, neon blue fans, fans of all ages... the more fans, the better. The temperature inside a computer case has an inverse relationship to their ego; the nerd in the LAN party with the inside temperature closer to absolute zero is the guy who has the bragging rights and holds all the cards. Everybody else just stares in awe at the guy's computer and wonders if there's any way they can actually breed a mini-fan farm inside their case. The perfect system would shoot out enough air from the back of it that it would routinely be caught by cops tearing down the road at 87 miles an hour.
The cheapest CPU overclocked to the highest speed possible. The Celeron 300A was about the closest thing to an orgasm that most of us computer nerds will ever experience since we overclocked that fucker to 450 MHz. I mean, it's listed at 300 MHz... but IT CAN GO TO 450!!! THAT'S INCREDIBLE!!! PCRicers have this inexplicable need to show off their computer prowess by changing a few jumpers or learning how to switch settings in their BIOS screen. Sure there's no real difference these days, especially since the upgrade from 1.8 MHz to 1.9 MHz just means that Photoshop will allow you to save your doctored picture of Jennifer Lopez chasing a giant squid shooting laser beams about .0002 seconds faster, and just that means you've got an extra .0002 seconds to figure out ways to bolt your computer case onto the top of a huge fan that sits atop a block of liquid nitrogen.
HIGH TECH! I think this was stolen from one of the walls from "Aliens." A computer case that looks like the mutant offspring of Robocop and a car from "The Jetsons." Standard cases are simply so boring; they're colored either beige or grey, have a bland boxy exterior, and a dim power switch that is about as exciting as reading a Slashdot article about... well... any Slashdot article. First up, the power button should be about as bright as your average star explosion. Anybody caught staring directly into the power button should ideally have the core of their brain immolated beyond recognition. We're talking about neon red, pulsating, throbbing, scorching bursts of light that could be used to interrogate prisoners of war. These buttons also double as light bursts used to transmit Morse code up to orbiting satellites that are recording current Counter-Strike game scores which then send them to Angel Munoz, who uses them to wipe his fat ass. These satellites were originally used for the Iridium system, but then they decided to sell them at 80% cost to the Professional Gamers League because if they didn't, Angel Munoz threatened to come over to their houses and sit down and speak for long periods of time until they all fell into comas and caused the souls inside their bodies to flee to a nicer location such as hell or the anus of a man who professionally sits on top of parking cones.
The fastest CPU, RAM, motherboard, graphics card, sound card, and harddrive in existence. While this may seem like a quasi-"normal" thing to do, since a faster system = faster and smoother gamplay, these people actually go into competition games with ALL ADDITIONAL GRAPHICS FEATURES TURNED OFF! Yeah, wow, you're getting 615 frames per second on Quake 2, but the monitor looks as if some vandal coated the screen with bleach and shoved lye soap into the player's eyes. Now perhaps I am crazy and / or stupid, but what's the point in investing all this time and energy into your computer if the result is a game which looks like two ghosts chasing each other through a white pallette factory in the snow? Well technically I guess this could be useful for people who don't want to be terrorized by ION Storm's Nazi Green Colored Lighting Engine, but for most games it's just like the faster these cards go, the more color they drain from the overall picture. This is what's called a "trade off," as in you "trade" the ability to discern colors from each other for the feature of wanting to ultimately turn the game "off".
A case badge that shows off how utterly cool they are, or as how they say it, "K3wL". Case badges reflect the owner's personality and lets the entire world know in one easy step their preferences regarding websites, brandnames, their favorite lame-ass Japanese cartoon kiddie show, or any other asinine thing. Case badges are the equivalent of those huge gold "$" sign necklaces that all the popular hip hop stars like Kriss Kross and Bustah "Leanne" Rhymes wore before they were all gunned down in a drive-by shooting by their lawyers. Some of the hottest case badges this year include: Anime characters, different Anime characters, some other Anime characters, a completely different Anime character, and the name of the owner's shithole gaming website (assuming they can stamp "www.geocities.com/killahgamenewz" that small).
WOW! More fan action! Could it be??? An outside mural that encompasses the entire computer unit, causing it to look like a beautiful, stunning, breathless work of art done by some guy who really likes gigantic robots or 8-year old Japanese schoolgirls with eyes the size of Frisbees. Some of the more hardcore PCRicers do crazy shit like make their cases translucent so you can see the nine million fans inside them, while others cover theirs with shag carpeting and go for the neo-retro look. Either way they all look retarded and the only way to make their computers less outrageous if was if somehow they could disguise them as one of the many rock-computer machines that the professor from Gilligan's Island build from nearby boulders and starfish.
A 50-foot speaker system that is so loud it causes your entire monitor to explode when turned on, throwing pieces of glass, wires, and metal shards into your face. Now that's what I call "Exxtreme 3-D"!!! Suck it up, bitches! Next time somebody launches a Flak Cannon in your face during a heated game of Unreal Tournament, you'll truly feel the pain!
A desktop which looks like no desktop ever seen before. Oh the glories of Litestep! One second you've got the boring, bland, unexciting Windows desktop color scheme, and then before you know it, Litestep has installed some goofy system which has a naked green cyborg lady who turns into gridlines in the background, and you've got garishly horrible icons for programs you've never installed. The next five days are then spent attempted to change the Windows Shutdown Screen into Goku's powerup animation sequence that takes roughly 700 hours to complete. There has to be absolutely NO coherent way to navigate across the desktop or find anything you're looking for; the entire OS should be catered to the one person who created it for the one purpose of demonstrating to all other computer nerds that he too is capable of creating something that has the user friendliness of a porcupine giving birth to babies on your face. If you have a friend who uses Litestep and thinks he's "cool" because of this, I recommend that you punch him in the jaw until he comes to his senses.
While the outside of the computer has to catch the attention from the glasses of geeks across the showroom floor, it's the INSIDE of the computer harddrive which really sets men apart. As a general rule, the more fucked up horrible Japanese rape cartoons you have, the more respect you'll get. I personally never was turned on by the allure of tentacle raping 8-year old girls with eyeballs the size of Ricer hubcaps, but hey, I never said I was hip. Well actually I think I did once, but you can ignore that now. LAN parties are essentially groups of people who normally spend all day playing computer games at home, then spontaneously decide to spend all day playing computer games somewhere else. It's that kind of creativity which has resulted in such wonderful products as rollershoes and the hit boardgame "Mutton Chops."
Miscellaneous crap: all periphrials have to come in the blackest and beige-est colors possible, perhaps chemically bonding to your monitor. Your mouse must be cordless, unless you're an "old schooler" who plays with a mouse produced in 2002 to look like it's "old school." You must have Dolby Digitial 7.34 surround sound and it must be professionally installed by a group of audiophiles who determine the maximum tonal advantages gained from sitting in the middle of the speaker barrage. This matters a whole hell of a lot when you're watching that DVD of "German Cum Vixen Queens" and you're not sure if the girl holding the milky-white clear bowl is to the left or behind you.
As you can plainly see, the Ricers and the PCRicers are almost EXACTLY alike in their insane, nonstop, nevernending battle to soup up their property and impress a bunch of people who aren't even worth impressing. When your typical Ricer blows away the competition in a drag race through the parking lot of a K-Mart, does he just sit in his seat afterwards and think, "boy, I really kicked the ass of that guy who just got paroled and now works as a janitor in an oil change store"? When a computer nerd attends a LAN party and his bling-blingin' computer wins all kind of prizes because there are neon tubes floating around it, fans cooling down the fans that cool down the fan cooling system, and an overclocked harddrive that ejects out of the entire computer case and cuts through the air for about 20 feet before embedding itself in a cubical wall, are they truly happy with themselves? Rice will never die folks, it will simply mutate and take over new areas, assembling them into one core group of idiocy and stripping them of all their creative content whatsoever. Oh wait, I was talking about Gamespy there, my mistake!
A Brand Stinkin' New Feature!
Okay, as all of you well-read individuals leaveing this front page are aware of, Something Awful is a humor / comedy site that make a lot of jokes at the expense of other's morons stupidity. It's been a longoing tradition now and I really can't see if stopping in the neat future. Why do we actually enjoy gethering hate mail? Simple: they're absolute fucking hilarious. I don't think I ever read a flame mail where two concessive sentences made any coherant statement that didn't involve the misspelling of the word "fag".
UPDATE: Damn, I didn't get any flame mail from grammar / spelling Nazis regarding that last paragraph. I underestimated you guys!
So here's where you, the reader comes in. Each week or so, Kevin, Zack, and myself will review three mainstream pop-culture movies and CDs that are currently hot. However, our reviews will be a bit... off. Now keep this in mind: they'll appear to be real, legit, slightly researched reviews. However, we'll misquote lyrics, call characters by their incorrect names, and just make it look like we watched the first five minutes of the movie and then stopped. The reviews aren't meant for the sake of humor but are meant to get all the "MUST FLAME PERSON WHO DISAGREES WITH ME" out of the woodwork to see which one of us can get the most hate mail. It's all a big contest to see who can generate the most hate mail from their review.
What you need to do is send the link to the Radiohead Review to all your Radiohead zealot pals and send the Lord of the Rings review to all of your LoTR psychos. Don't tip them off as to the project of this scheme or the main theme of this site because we want to stock up on as much hate mail as possible and then showcase it at the end of the week, each week. So I'm simply asking you to send a review link to one of your friends who likes whatever is being reviewed, then just watch as his brain explodes. Make sure he emails us in all capital letters.
REMEMBER: To do not hint in ANY way that this review is NOT REAL. Convince them that this is a legit review or else the prank won't work. So your mission today is to round up all your Lord of the Rings fans and the sucker chumps who bought Radiohead's "Amnesiac" and then send them to the appropriate area:
REVIEW: "Lord of the Rings"
REVIEW: "Radiohead: Amnesiac"
Now remember... do your DAMNEST to send the direct URL to the obsessed-fans out there. We're having a competition to see which one of us can get the most flame mail. So round up your hipster doofus pals and point them in the direction of the crap-ass reviews. They'll immediately become furious flaming horrible monsters and a good time will be had by all... except them.
– Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka (@TwitterHasBannedAllMyAccountsEver)
