Well Cat My Dogs, Jim!

Sure he looks cute, but he's impossible to live with. Like me, only he's cute.

It is 5:00 AM and you are listening to a dog barking. Well, I am, at least. You see, I like animals. I think animals are great because they're just like little people who are covered with fur and walk around on all fours while biting objects and trying to share their precious gift of rancid urine with any and all objects they encounter. So I guess they're like Gary Coleman with slightly more hair and elevated future employment prospects. My love of animals, combined with the bottomless void in my heart which I futilely attempt to fill by purchasing living creatures and electronic devices made by foreign people who eat such living creatures in a foreign country, recently caused me to purchase a Golden Retriever puppy to complement my existing collection of "two cats and billions of microscopic mites which live on my face and eat off my flesh while I sleep." Since I had never personally owned or taken responsibility for a puppy in my life, I figured it couldn't possibly be that difficult. If you ever needed an excuse to question my remarkable stupidity, and let me assure you that I provide enough opportunities for you to do so on an hourly basis, this whole dog fiasco should permanently concrete my entry into the Idiot Hall of Fame, which I'd be too stupid to find in order to give my acceptance speech.

DISCLAIMER: Today's update, as you can probably guess, is about pets and animals. Certain readers seem to have a real difficult time dealing with these types of updates, often sending me emails which refer to me as "a fag" or the infinitely more creative alternative, "a really, really big fag." I would like to take this opportunity and explain that my love of animals does not make me homosexual; my unquenchable desire to place penises in my mouth makes me a homosexual. Thanks for allowing me to clear this up.

There are two great things about puppies that I'd like to share with you. First of all, static photographic images of puppies are wonderful. Secondly, not actually owning a puppy is fantastic as well. Those two highlights sum up nearly everything positive about adopting a small, young dog who will eventually grow up into a big, old dog. Canines have a very unique life span, much like those flying spy camera robot drones that the military is constantly throwing into the air above Iraq and hoping they don't accidentally blow up a wedding reception full of orphans with leukemia. When a puppy is young, he has unlimited energy and is zipping all over the place, annoying people and generally making a nuisance of himself, just like the US military spy drones. However, when the dog grows older, it immediately runs out of fuel and comes crashing to the ground, often making a mess and serving no functional purpose except as an overgrown paperweight. You know, just like the US military spy drones. There is no middle ground in a dog's life; these pets are either spastic as all hell or they're lifeless and elderly, possibly dead. Additionally, dog owners will always wish their pet was living in the opposite stage of their life; they'll wish for a mature dog when they have a puppy, and they'll wish for a puppy once the dog reaches maturity. I'm sure this phenomenon ties into something remarkably scientific like Maslow's hierarchy of Whatever or that pyramid which features a cartoon image of bread on top and drawings of red meat on the bottom next to yogurt, but I'm too goddamn sleep deprived to research anything more complex than my last bowel movement. Also, now that I look back on it, my analogy to the US military spy drone was pretty incoherent and unnecessary at best, so let me apologize for that as well.

Jake, seen here thinking about food or where he can get food or how much he enjoys food or how he could possibly bark in order to receive food.

Jake, my seven-week old Golden Retriever puppy, has been corrupted by the dark lord Lucifer himself so he can wear me down and weaken my spirit to the point where I will finally give in to my urge to drop my pants and make out with the Dale Earnhardt Pepsi machine inside the Piggly Wiggly down the street. I can count the hours of sleep I've gotten each day on one hand, often by using only three fingers. Jake's current fulltime schedule of 'being a puppy" is as follows:

1:00 AM - 2:00 AM - Sleep.
2:01 AM - 2:48 AM - Begin relentlessly barking at imaginary creatures who exist in some otherworldly dimension and pose an incredible threat to his livelihood.
2:49 AM - 3:02 AM - Sleep.
3:03 AM - 4:45 AM - Alternate between sleeping and chewing on the inside of the kennel, because it's a well-known fact that compressed plastic tastes just absolutely wonderful.
4:45 AM - 5:00 AM - Begin emitting barking sounds so loud that cracks begin to develop in the house's foundation. If this plan fails, then make this "AAARRRROOOO" noise which emulates the screeching of an elderly man being crushed to death inside a trash compactor filled with broken glass and exploding piranhas.
5:01 AM - 5:45 AM - Act all happy because that stupid fucking idiot owner Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka is walking him around the block and allowing him the opportunity to eat rocks, tree branches, and scent atoms which recently passed out of nearby dogs' asses.
5:46 AM - 1:30 PM - Eat mulch, pee on the carpet, bark at enemy sound waves, run into solid objects, stare intensely at things which are hundreds of miles away and probably stopped existing in the 1700s, and randomly fall over to sleep for 19 seconds.
1:31 PM - 5:59 PM - Think about how much he really wants to eat food.
6:00 PM - 6:00:03 PM - Ingest an entire bowl of dog food in the time it takes to blink an eye. He shouldn't bother chewing anything, as that just slows him down, and puppy scientists have conclusively proven that food vanishes if you fail to eat it within an allocated five-second timespan.
6:01 PM - 8:59 PM - Think about how much he really wants to eat food (continued from before).
9:00 PM - 9:45 PM - Act happy once again because famed village idiot Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka has decided to strap on his leash and parade him around the neighborhood in an invariably failure-ridden attempt to wear him out and decrease his amount of energy by at least 1/10000th of one percent. Make sure to sniff any object that has come into contact with any type of living creature along the way.
9:46 PM - 11:30 PM - Run around the house and collide with walls that suddenly came out of nowhere and decided to block his progress.
11:31 PM - 12:59 AM - Fake sleeping. When that glutton for punishment Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka invariably comes by to put him in his cage, proceed to launch himself at Mach-3 speeds in the direction of Iowa.

As I may or may not have written earlier in this update (I can't remember and my eyes are blurring to the point that all text here resembles the aftermath of a squid inside a blender), I've only gotten three hours of sleep each day for the past week now. This lack of rest has caused a radical shift in my personality, making me cranky, irritable, and prone to curse loudly at the slightest provocation. This is different than I normally act because usually I don't only curse loudly at the slightest provocation, but I additionally try to punch things as well, preferably doors and pregnant women.

The only thing keeping me from murdering myself at this point (besides the lack of enough energy to load a handgun of my choice) is the knowledge that one day in the distant future this dog will pay off and become a productive member of animal society. I know his enjoyment level will begin to rise in the next few years, so I'll just have to wait it out. One of the major differences between dogs and cats is this aforementioned progress timeline, as shown in this handy graph I recently produced while viewing hallucinogenic images of SARS-ridden bacteria floating around my desk:

This line graph clearly demonstrates the glaring disparity between dogs and cats. First of all, the "dog" line is blue while the "cat" line is red. If you'll kindly recall, the GI Joe's laser guns were blue while Cobra's laser guns were red, and you really can't get any more diametrically opposed than that. Wait, maybe it was the other way around. I don't remember, and my there are enough neurons misfiring in my brain at the moment to make me actually not loathe the episodes where Serpentor tried to pollinate the entire Earth with those alien spores which turned ugly people into progressively more ugly people with scales and noticeable speech impediments. Anyway, my scientific studies and Photoshop drawings clearly indicate that while cats start out strong, they eventually lose a lot of their Beckett Blue Book value and turn into what most industry experts dub "hairy furniture." On the other hand, dogs start out as obnoxious little bastards who routinely expel a large portion of their nine brain cells during excrement, but eventually blossom into full-figured women with child-birthing hips and Southern drawls. No wait, that's girls who live in Alabama. Puppies turn into dogs, and these dogs are a lot more friendly and outgoing than cats of a similar age, especially after you've sprayed them with a garden hose. Pet owning is all about tradeoffs and fair balancing, much like the player classes in TFC or the races in Warcraft, so if you're ever playing a computer game that revolves around owning and raising a pet, you should keep this in mind. You should also probably question why you purchased a pet-raising simulator in the first place.

Stupid checking out Jake from a safe distance. NOT SHOWN: J. Edgar Hoover's ghost.

One of the reasons Jake never sleeps during the day (or night) lies in the fact that there are many, many things for a puppy like him to do around my home. His favorite pastime is currently chewing on anything and everything which doesn't immediately spray urine in his face. Jake has chewed on table legs, carpets, rugs, steel poles, appendages of enemy children foolish enough to approach my house, grass, trees, rival dogs, doors, and automobile tires. Keep in mind that these were just the objects he's chewed on; the list of items he's actually eaten is probably much larger and more disgusting. Jake's current favorite delicacy is the mulch outside my patio, as it provides the valuable "Vitamin Dirt" which is necessary to keep him in prime puppy performance. He makes a beeline for the mulch pit the moment I let him outside, opening his tiny jaw and trying to shovel in as many filthy twigs as possible. After a brief buffet in the dirt trough, Jake moves along to greener pastures; that is, he starts consuming more grass than a forest fire. Eventually this grass performs its intended job and the hapless puppy begins to retch up whatever revolting objects he consumed within the past six hours. If that wasn't utterly fantastic enough, and let me once again assure you it is, Jake often takes this opportunity to then consume his own vomit. No, I am not kidding here, this is like the single most endearing thing I have ever witnessed in the animal kingdom, and if I knew my pet would come with such wonderful features then I would've instead saved my money and invested in a few self-trepanning courses at the local community college.

Having no experience raising a puppy myself, I've been reading a lot of kennel training books which advocate teaching a dog how to shit outside by trapping him inside a box. One might claim this could be labeled "Learning Box" training, but I think that assertion falls flat unless you remember to make ghost sounds and throw disfigured heads of lettuce into the box. The essential theory behind kennel training revolves around the idea that dogs don't like to sleep in their own poop, which is true about almost every animal except Louie Anderson. If the puppy is placed in a medium-sized crate with no way to escape, then it will refuse to crap until it is let out. Once again, this is an excellent theory, but the trainers who came up with this forgot to consider one key canine feature: their ability to be really, really, really annoying. Jake barks and howls so loudly inside the kennel that I'm getting complaints from the people who will move into my house once I sell it a decade from now.

When I raised my two kittens, the most difficult thing I had to teach them was resisting the urge to murder me in my sleep. After I jumped that hurdle, it was pretty much downhill from there. However, training a puppy is remarkably different than the whole cat experience. Jake is a shitting, eating, non-sleeping machine that is hellbent on turning me into a living zombie unable to do anything except open doors for him and proceed to shout, "please, for the love of god, just take a dump and stop eating that car mat, you retarded dog." However, I remain convinced that my training efforts will pay off in the end and Jake will eventually become a fun, intelligent, well-behaved creature who permits me to sleep more than three hours a day. If he doesn't become this type of animal very shortly, then I'm going to give up with him and instead try training the billions of microscopic mites on my face to consume me.

Roll that Beautiful Breast Idol Footage

Zack "Glass Elevator" Parsons here with an ALL NEW feature here at Something Awful called "The Horrors of Pornography". You see I've nearly run out of English language Hentai Games and that unfortunately means I need to start spacing the articles out a little more. Being the resident Something Awful slumlord I've gone to the only thing worse than Hentai games for a new review feature: horrible porn. This debut I bring you part one of a two parter on the movie entitled "Cosplay Beautiful Breast Idol -- Nao Oikawa".

Being a set designer for a porno movie must be pretty similar to being an interior decorator at a coal mine. You've got nothing to work with and the people you're supposedly helping are probably hostile to your efforts. Not to mention your set design budget consists of the money you have set aside to feed your meth addiction and a few coins that fell out of the producer's pocket and into the love stained couch he was on when he got a blowjob earlier. That said the set designer for this movie has obviously put a lot of effort and some really impressive 3rd grade art skills into creating believable backdrops for creepy hardcore sex.

Trust me folks, it's as bad as it sounds. Put on your favorite ski mask and cruise on over to the shady underbelly that is "Cosplay Beautiful Breast Idol -- Nao Oikawa".

– Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka (@TwitterHasBannedAllMyAccountsEver)