By popular demand, we're foregoing our 3-4 comic a week allotment and finishing off Livewire Latte now!

 

 

VIDEO RELAY ACTIVATED...

DEFAULT VIDEO LOADED:


HAPPY EIGHTH OF JULY.

 

 

It's the same shit you bought last year, just with an even crappier framerate and three new enemies. It still has only five levels, no strategy outside of sitting in the corner and hitting the melee button over and over again, the worst player community of all time, and the same shitty broken multiplayer. But then, it serves you right for paying full price for an expansion pack to a game that you got tired of after six hours. Enjoy Left 4 Dead 3 in four months, sucker!

 

 

So you've busted up a few caves full of rats and made the ten dollars you need to buy a tire patch for the last spare tire for miles and get out of your hick home town, finally. Now its time to make some real dough for once, how about that, kiddo? That patch isn't going to hold that tire together forever, and certainly not the whole three hour trip to St. Whiskeydick or Stain Valley or whatever shitty city you think you'll hit it big in. Little do you know that theres lucrative business to be had right in the very woods you cursed for being so devoid of things worthy to slaughter. You need to hunt that which you did not know was even there, fight the unknown brotherhoods that lurk all around you and stab wildly at powers that you cannot hope to comprehend. What you need to do, adventurer, before anyone will ever respect you enough to give you a decent paycheck, is discover, track, locate, and exterminate a cult.

Before you begin, consult this handy checklist for recommended equipment:
-A Car*
-A Newspaper
-A weapon (unless you prefer to use your fists)
-A 12-pack
-A fifth of any liquor
-Your wits (or really dark sunglasses)
-Buddies, at least 2, no more than 6

Step one, discover the cult. Before you go running around in the woods looking for dudes wearing deer antlers in a drum circle, you first need to confirm one even exists in your area. One does, most definitely, but knowledge is your best weapon in this task, as the more you know about a specific cult, the less likely you are to be sacrificed to its god. Any newspaper will contain any recent kidnappings in the area, and the most basic resource a cult needs is sacrifices to its god. Put the two together, you can figure it out. Locations with a high frequency of kidnappings may tip you off to the general location of their temple, but you could be looking for days and if your tire blows, you're out of luck. The next thing to look at is who they are kidnapping. If it's primarily nuns and virgins, then you can bet whatever change you have left from the tire patch that their temple is going to be any old abandoned church in the woods, and if you've read page 77, "Maps are for Pussies", you'll have no problem finding the gigantic stone building sticking a middle finger out of the forest with a noisy ass bell in it, and you can almost always expect demons (page 666). However, if most of the kidnappings are livestock, then you will be looking primarily for caverns, which are easily identified as gigantic goddamn holes in the earth (pg. 77). Please note that gigantic goddamn holes are the only ones suitable to house a cult. Small caves, which you are already duly familiar with, house mostly venomous bites, bearholks, and stashed dogman loot. Due to this type of cults location and kidnapping preference, you will most likely be confronted with animal worshipers (pg 665), or possibly Neanderthals (if you find Neanderthals, then you have wasted your time). Lastly, kidnappings of children usually mean slave labor camps, and cleaning up slave labor camps is charity bullshit that you don't have time for.

Step two is Track the cult. You know their probable temple location, their primary kidnapping locations, and their peak activity time (ALWAYS at midnight, and more active on full moons, eclipses, solstices, equinoxes, scientific aural disturbances, volcanic eruptions, planetary alignments, thunderstorms, and the days their paychecks go through). Set up a few tracking bugs in the woods, or do it the old fashioned way and lay in the back of your truck under a tarp and look for groups of five or six robed guys shuffling around in the dark. Go ahead and kick the shit out of them, and if you're lucky enough to leave one alive, you can attempt to interrogate him for details such as who their god is, what their leader dictates, and when their next party is going to be. What they will never tell you is where their temple is exactly located, because their god would instantly vaporize them. If you've done your research, then thats not important anyway. We recommend you talk them in to giving up the location, its fun to watch. After kicking the shit out of them, freeing any towed sacrifices (or grilling them up in the case of livestock), you can then follow their tracks to their nearest Jamboree. Cultist Jamborees serve as temporary holy grounds to quickly process sacrifices and gain converts. Average jamborees will have live music and a beer tent, but larger ones can include cheap merchandise such as silk screening booths, snow cones, corn-dogs, and dudes selling glow sticks among other things. This is where your buddies and the booze will come in to play. Jamborees are full of cultists at their weakest, power-drunk off the vibes of their weird manipulative god, the music, and the beer. Be sure to drink only your own alcohol, as the provided hooch usually contains mind control tachyons. Use this opportunity to gather more information on the cult. Observe their rituals, listen to their dogma, clap along to their band and act like you're 100% for the introduction of a gigantic scabby six limbed bipedal lizard in to our world. Now, even though they tell you what he looks like, you are still not prepared to see him. This is going to be hard, but when they offer any sacrifice that you didn't free for street cred a small portal will be opened. Ready your wits or dawn your shades (darker the better) and prepare yourself for the ugliest thing you've ever seen. Keep in mind you are viewing it through a portal to a realm which scientifically doesn't exist. It's like watching car crashes on T.V., they are much more awesome in person, and what you see through that hole is much more ugly close up. Now get the hell out.

Step three is Locate. If you did well on your research then this should be no problem. Get your weapon and your car (which you should not have driven at all until now) and check all probable locations of their temple, it should be easy. Very carefully and gently slam your vehicle in to the temple, jump out, and be ready for a fight. They will hit you with their music and chants, they will summon servants of their god which, while ugly up close, are still not as ugly as their god would be on TV. If you haven't succumbed to the intense mind control radiation of the temple (jamborees inoculate you against this unless you partied too hard with them), and if you are not vomiting from the intense stench of the underworldly servants, then you are ready to move on to the next step:

Extermination. Kill everything, take the good parts. This is the easy step. Be on the look out for the cult leader, he's the one with the coolest looking robe, and most importantly: car keys. Congrats, now your ride isn't a rusty old turd with a shitty tire, just remember to scrape the bumper stickers off before someone accuses you of being a cultist. Be sure to load all goodies in the temple in to the car, and be on a look out for the most important piece: the object of power.

For information on dealing with cults who have successfully called their multi-tentacled fanged eyeball lord in to this realm utilizing an object of power, see page X.

 

 

So adventurer! You're all set. You're pumped and amped and ready to go out into the wilderness to collect heads and make a nickname for yourself (more appropriately, nicknames are made for you. See page 487, "Nicknames"). Your backpack is full of various incendiary and jagged items, your satchel full of water and meat, and your stomach full of butterflies. And also meat. This is it, you're ready to kill and thrill. Right?

Wrong. Where's the booze?

The world before you, adventurer, with its promises of murder and mayhem, requires you stay hydrated. Alert. And maybe drunk enough to be numb to the surely intense pain you're about to go through. You don't need to pack water bottles and gauze and band-aids. Throw all that shit out. It's bulky, it's boring, and it's for pussies. If you want to survive the pain of puncture wounds and insults about your male status, you're bringing some alcohol. Don't be a pussy. You'll get fucked.

Booze serves several purposes already alluded to. Most of it is common sense. But since common sense tends to only save a handful of you sad sacks, we'll write it out for you anyway.

First, booze is tasty. Rum, beer, fermented street-chimp blood mixed with freshly squeezed oranges (an orange-a-la-tang); pick your poison. Don't overlook the joyous taste of a good drink. Since you're going to wish you were dead often and without fail, the sweet taste of a shot is much more enjoyable than the sweet release of death. Pleasures like that will elude you.

Secondly, booze keeps you hydrated, alert. It helps you heal from your various battles and other activities, like wrecking your car or punching an elephant minding his own business (of course, booze will also cause you to do many of those things, but more on that later). At the very least it makes you feel like you're healthy. Which is usually enough. No need for a "first aid kit", and what the hell is this "potion" bullshit? Fuck that. If you've got a keg you've got a nurse. At least until you need limbs re-attached or organs put back in place. Then you need a scientist (See page 778, "Science!"). Being drunk gets you through the day, at least without crying like a little girl.

Thirdly, booze helps you be a badass. It gives you courage when you need it. You're going to be facing a bunch of terrifying and daunting shit out there, adventurer. Be prepared, or prepare yourself, with booze. Down some before you head into the main room of that underground gauntlet home of the Muskrat King. Share a beer as you take part in your first major radio station raid. Before, during, and after intense activity, enjoy a beer. Especially after. Because you just earned rad cred.

And speaking of cred, lastly, booze is the drink of legends. Not only does any alternative make you seem like a total tool, being a man who can down gallons of alcohol a day gives you cred. And the frontier before you rewards men with cred. Be the Fonz. Don't be a spigot (n., a little bitch who will probably be spraying blood by the end of the day).

Here are some hot booze tips to help you out on the open road, adventurer:

• If you've got a crew, rotate the dude at keg duty: the guy hauling the keg or cooler of beer or assortment of alcohol. This guy tosses drinks out when a dude calls for one, whether during a rough battle, before, or after. This is important, and essential to any group of jackasses going for broke.
  
• Speaking of crews, find a bartender for yours, or train up yourself. And have anyone with tending skills teach the rest of the crew, too. Booze knowledge is very important, because with the right touch you can get some amazing drinks.
  
• Which means, try any and all booze you can find. Different drinks have different effects, especially if a scientist got his hands on it. Go for it. You may find a cocktail that gives you temporary speed boosts. Or a secret brew that keeps your bones solid like steel. Or maybe just one that gives you intense liquid shits. Don't be a pussy, adventurer! Drink up!

Above all, adventurer, have a drink on hand at all times. You never know when you'll need it. Especially to give yourself a final toast as you go toast.

If you'd like to learn up on the scientific branch known as bartending, quit wasting time and go read that article, page 67, "Brewin'".

 

 

well screw me we have a...
VENTRILO MUMBLE SERVER
so we can call eachother names with our voices!

Dig it, it's voice chat. Feel free to come in and be a dick. It'll be hilarious!

CONNECTION INSTRUCTIONS:
connect to "lardpirates.com" you dolt

WHAT TO EXPECT:
- Inapporpriate comments. Sit on a bulging rod. You jerk.
- Ridicule. We're going to insult you. It's only what we do.
- Shit-losing. We play games okay. We get angry.

This used to be a Ventrilo server but Maid made me switch to Mumble because it's "easier" and "better". What it is is a pain in the ass. Fuck Maid.

 

 

VIDEO RELAY ACTIVATED...

DEFAULT VIDEO LOADED:


QUERY: WHAT KIND OF GUY ARE YOU ARE?

 

 

Someone apparently thought combining urban culture with ancient Japan, despite being completely different and anachronistic in almost every way imaginable, was a cool idea. They were wrong.

Mugen: Hi, I'm the protagonist of this show, and all I ever do is start fights with random people and kick their asses using my stupid breakdancing sword style, then brag about how awesome I am. Needless to say, you're going to be fucking sick of me by the end of the second episode. Also, the director apparently has a huge boner for Spike Spiegel, because I look exactly like him and even have the same voice actor.
Jin: I have no personality whatsoever. Despite this, I am the other protagonist. We must fight for no reason.

The battles are slow, drawn-out and animated at a constant 3 frames per second, which they desperately try to cover up by wobbling the camera all over the place throughout. But even if they were decently animated and lacked the cheap Braveheart shaky-cam effect, they'd still be boring because they all center around the two most forgettable heroes in any anime, ever, and you simply don't care who wins or loses. Their fight gets interrupted when some ugly bastard burns down the building they're fighting in (for no adequately-explained reason) and they get blamed for it.

Fu: I decide to rescue them because nobody else will help me in my quest to find my father. Then all I have to do is find something to bitch about incessantly every single time I'm on camera, and I'm set! Oh, and you two aren't allowed to kill each other until this happens.
Mugen: You do realize we're just going to throw down anyway the second you turn your back, right?

At least one episode steals a script from Cowboy Bebop practically line for line, but aside from that absolutely nothing happens for most of the rest of the show; it's all just bland filler that has fuck-all to do with finding Fu's dad. To try and offset this, the show paints the protagonists as some important, unwritten figures in history to make them seem more interesting.

Spoony: I hope they only impact they ever have on history is as a textbook example of how NOT to write interesting characters.

As the show goes on, it only gets stupider and stupider. One episode features baseball. Yes, baseball. A game that wouldn't take form as we know it until the early nineteenth century, which this show is set roughly two hundred years before. And they're playing against a team of bad American stereotypes a century before America was even founded. Wow.

Another features guys beatboxing into a sword hilt and impromptu rapping.

Spoony: He's beatboxing into a fucking sword hilt. Beatboxing. Sword hilt. Why? Why would anyone, in the history of the world, ever beatbox into a fucking SWORD HILT? Seriously. I cannot begin to even articulate how completely and utterly stupid this all is. I can't even explain why I'm still watching it; it's so god damned boring and doesn't have a single unique idea or interesting character in it anywhere. Even the battles are about as exciting as watching moss grow.

On with the show. More coma-inducing fights ensue with a guy wielding a six-shot revolver (who gets built up as some enormous badass, only to die anticlimactically in a fight that lasts less than thirty seconds) and every quirky villain copied directly from every swordsman hero movie you've ever seen anywhere. It quickly becomes apparent that the only original fighting style in the entire show is Mugen's combination of break dance and ape spasm.

Spoony: The worst combination of anything since a lame Tim Allen sitcom and the Super Nintendo, I might add.

The last episode comes, and the crew, realizing that they spent the entire budget writing and animating filler while drinking heavily, have little choice but to hamfistedly resolve everything in the last fifteen minutes of the last episode. Fu finds her dad, he dies, Jin and Jerkoff duke it out, their swords break, they collapse on top of each other like the end of Rocky II. They both mumble about how they didn't want to kill each other anyway, then go their seperate ways. Hooray for another dull cop-out ending that doesn't satisfy on any level.

Spoony: If only Spike's obnoxious clone had died, this show may have had one redeeming factor. Two if it was a horrible, gory demise. Forget this crap.

 

 

[/i]I'd say "Transformers" was the only decent toy/cartoon/movie franchise, but even that's been systematically ruined with one terrible remake after another.

Kiyo: Grr angst angst angst, I am a child genius who became an asshole because everyone made fun of me in middle school.
Zatch: I come out of nowhere with a pair of boxer shorts clumsily Photoshopped onto myself! Somehow this is a huge source of contention for the show's fans, which would seem to indicate that they are all pedophiles!
Kiyo: Who the fuck are you?
Zatch: Gash Zatch Bell. I'm a mighty demon even though I look like some kind of retarded wooden puppet, am named after slang for female genetalia and wear a dress. Here, have this book that lets me shoot lightning out of my mouth when you say some magic words.
Kiyo: What kind of worthless demon has to get some random kid to activate all his powers for him?
Zatch: Every demon on the show, of course.
Kiyo: Great. They could have made this show halfway entertaining by just writing out all the human characters that never do anything but stand around and shout magic words back and forth, but no, of course not.
Zatch: Oh yeah, there's about a billion other stupid-looking demons with slightly different powers running around too, and we have to kill them all so I can become the demon king.
Kiyo: Oh, I get it now. It's another formulaic collect-them-all commercial anime that's little more than a vehicle to sell toys and merchandise.
Zatch: Pretty much.

Within the span of two episodes the entire "angry teen" characterization is forgotten and the show turns into another villain-of-the-week anime where every single battle is exactly the same. Then, once everyone is tired of the coterminous storyline and toy sales fall off, it gets canceled without even a proper conclusion and ten more worthless copycat shows take its place. Fucking lame.

 

 

Bearholk
A 3-foot wide mass of knotty fur sporting a multitude of wet, goopy eyeballs atop four nasty bug-legs tall enough to bring it up to eye-level, so you just cant look over the thing and pretend its not the grossest thing ever as you throw a Molotov at it. Hanging from under its hair and eyeballs is a jawless mouth that contorts and flops around like a black leathery tentacle. Its bite is harmless, but once the mouth touches something edible it begins to pour out approximately a bucket-full of nasty smelling digestive fluids. While not acidic enough to cause any permanent damage under normal circumstances, Bearholks do hunt in packs of about 4 to 12 and approximately 3 could overwhelm an Adventurer and drown him in bugpuke.

Also comes in Polar, Grizzly, and Circus varieties.

Froggum
A race of exceedingly annoying frog men that nest in three to six foot deep holes that they dig wherever they damn well please. When possible, they will steal garden hoses and use them to fill their pits with water. They stand about four feet tall and wear ratty human-made clothing, purchased from garage sales whenever they can afford it. They fiercely defend their pits when anything comes too close, but mostly just ask questions and follow you around when you encounter them outside of their territory.
They have been known to use small weapons and makeshift armor, but these are usually rusty pieces of shit due to being stored in a mud pit.
Froggums often breed in their pits before leaving for a new one, with the potential of breeding up to a hundred more Froggums. This can be prevented by pissing in the Froggum hole.

Rumblesnake
A species of rattlesnake whose rattles contain compressed lead filings, so heavy that when it shakes its tail, it causes a small earthquake in the immediate area. When its target is off-balance, it then springs out and "punches" them. Adventurers hit by this "punch" have all claimed to see a gigantic fist coming at them like a rocket and terrible nightmares of soaring through the air as their faces swell up. The Rumblesnake's bite is nearly fatal, but it never bites its targets because it considers that cheating. In the case that you DO get bit by a Rumblesnake, the only cure is to kill the snake that bit you.


Silverback Cougar
Imagine the speed , piercing roar and tearing bite of a cougar, but in the terrifying muscular frame of a silverback gorilla, complete with hands that can grab and tear off limbs. Silverback Cougars, unlike their close relatives the common Tree Gorilla, live primarily to beat the living piss out of everything they meet. They are not to be fucked with. Even if you manage to hold off the assault from its tree-trunk arms, you have the snarling face of a pissed cougar snapping at your neck as it slowly overpowers you.

Sub-Ops Groundhogs
Highly skilled groundhogs that work as a group to quickly dig tunnels underneath threats and erupt from the dirt to kick off-guard adventurers in the head. They live underground, and also are hoggers, so watch any valuables you happen to set down on the ground. They wear tiny little army helmets and speak this hilarious little rodent version of combat orders to one another. Despite their appearance they can and chances are will kick your ass and send you packing. They prefer not to kill their targets, because they know that living with the shame of being pushed around by a handful of furballs is more than enough to keep most adventurers away.

Sub-Ops Groundhog Captains are also highly skilled in hand-to-hand combat, disarms, and submission holds.

Pine Goblins
Tiny little men coated in pine sap and needles, they attack their prey by jumping on them and slowing them to a crawl by turning the sap in to amber almost instantly. When their victim is completely encased in amber, they drink its blood by driving a syrup tap into the victim's leg.
Pine goblins also mark their property by coating it in their sap. In their society, anything not caked in gunk is up for grabs, and this means anything. Some adventurers have awoken from camping at night to find that every square inch of their tent had been claimed by one pine goblin. These stories are also accompanied by the same goblin attempting to lay claim to the campfire