Poland Spring to Bring Back Original Recipe Water

Posted on by Dan Rice

PORTLAND, Maine — Poland Spring executives announced yesterday that they will re-release their flagship, original recipe water for the first time in over 100 years under the banner “Poland 1876.”

“We’re going back to our roots,” confirmed Poland Spring Social Media Chief Sabrina Cartwell. “People don’t want a clear, tasteless liquid that stops them from dying every day — they want authenticity. They want a sip of the way things used to be. Poland 1876 delivers just that.”

The company’s brownish, sediment-laced throwback will forgo many of the modern sanitation treatments of traditional bottled water in favor of “bold water flavor” and “authentic grit,” thanks to trace amounts of gingham, stag’s blood, and cocaine.

“Drinking water isn’t supposed to be some sterile, scientifically streamlined hydration routine. It’s supposed to be an experience,” Cartwell added. “You’re not supposed to just gulp this stuff down like some gluttonous athlete — you gotta hold it in your mouth and let the flavor profile unlock itself. That’s why the original recipe calls for a bunch of little things floating in there.”

While many are enthusiastic about the launch, some call the release nothing more than a marketing ploy.

“O.K., yeah, it’s great that we can go to the store now, grab a bottle of water and think, ‘Here is a life-sustaining substance untainted by typhoid, dirt, and little rocks.’ But I ask you, where is the craft? Poland 1876 is the direction we need to be heading in,” tweeted food critic @Real_Deal_Veal. “Last I checked, they didn’t have plastic bottles in 1876. Real water needs to be cellar-aged for a minimum of three seasons to acquire the right notes. How am I supposed to mature this water without glass and corkwood?”

Despite criticism from a vocal minority, Poland Spring is very confident in the re-launch. “Honestly, this couldn’t have come at a better time,” Cartwell said. “We’re almost totally out of the clear stuff.”

“The Queen’s Gambit” Inspires Millions of Young Girls to Play 30 Seconds of Online Chess Before Seeing What Else Is On

Posted on by Freelancer

MADISON, Wis. — The breakout Netflix show “The Queen’s Gambit” has reportedly inspired millions of young girls around the globe to take up chess for roughly 30 seconds before realizing the game is incredibly boring and leaving to find a more entertaining hobby, sources who prefer Chinese Checkers confirmed.

“Beth Harmon showed me I can accomplish anything I put my mind to,” said Annie Hoshevet, 13. “At first I was like, ‘Oh, this little orphan girl isn’t going to amount to anything,’ but I kept watching and, like, wow. That last scene when she beats Borgov and he hands her his king? I was so inspired, I opened an account on Chess.com that instant. But then I actually played and realized this game sucks pretty bad — like, the castle piece can only go up and down? What is this crap? None of the pieces light up, and I can’t get any upgraded pieces to weaponize my board. This seems like something people did before fun was invented.”

Annie’s mother, Karen Hoshevet-Pahot, recalled her daughter’s half-minute in the world of chess fondly.

“It’s really hard being a parent these days. We’re always fighting for our kids’ attention, but we’re up against these hyper-addictive platforms like Facebook and Netflix. So I’ll take any small victory I can get,” Hoshevet-Pahot lamented. “I’ve tried signing Annie up for guitar lessons and dance classes, but all she ever wants to do is stare at those damned screens. So when I looked over her shoulder and saw her playing chess for a few seconds, well, I don’t mind telling you I put a little feather in my parenting cap that day.”

Chess expert Dmitri Tamimsky thinks that shows like “The Queen’s Gambit” could mean exciting, new frontiers for the future of chess.

“Indeed, this is a tremendous day for chess,” gushed Tamimsky. “Though it doesn’t come through in the series, chess is actually unimaginably dull and tedious. But if streaming platforms keep churning out high-budget chess series about attractive characters getting laid while overcoming adversity, I estimate that up to 1 out of 100,000 Americans will be able to sit through an entire game by 2034.”

At press time, a spokesperson for the International Chess Federation was struggling to explain how knights move to a group of uninterested, “TikTok famous” Gen Z-ers.

Hallmark Christmas Romance Movies Set Unrealistic Expectations for Having Any Human Interaction Ever Again

Posted on by Shea Strauss

WILMINGTON, N.C. — Hallmark Channel’s signature Christmas-themed romance movies reportedly promote an unhealthy expectation of any kind of human interaction, according to a new study by the University of North Carolina.

“The popular media follows the same basic formula: boy meets girl, girl and boy fall in love through the spirit of Christmas, and boy and girl live happily ever after,” said Dr. Lara Pascal, the university’s lead researcher. “Even though we may understand intrinsically these are works of fiction, emerging evidence suggests we may be more influenced than we realize. How are the two romantic interests ever supposed to meet as rivals at a bake sale, let alone share a dry kiss under a suspiciously well-placed mistletoe, in the middle of a never-ending pandemic?”

“That’s not to say that ‘the one’ isn’t out there waiting to meet you,” she added, “but viewers need to understand that rather than saving an orphanage, they’re more likely to be at home masturbating compulsively to anything with skin.”

As part of the study, 100 subjects were asked to watch the Hallmark movie “Second Base Christmas,” while a second group was assigned to watch Tom Hanks’ 2000 film “Castaway.”

“We discovered that, compared to our control group, holiday romance viewers were more likely to believe that face-to-face human interaction is possible, even inevitable,” warned Dr. Pascal. “This media sets people up to be disappointed, since they’re incapable of having any form of human relationship again. No amount of cocoa or unexpected snowfall will change that.”

Leading psychologist Dr. Dorothe Shahid agreed that the movies’ ideas could have dangerous, lasting effects on the public.

“Many clients come to me, influenced by the media, with the false belief that a magical holiday vaccine will return us to some cookie-cutter Hallmark world,” said Dr. Shahid. “This fails to account for the increased social issues and collective trauma we’ve all faced that will inevitably lead to continued human disconnection. I suggest consuming more realistic media, like horror movies, where interaction leads to death.”

The researchers’ next study will examine the effects of pornography on impressionable young minds, who may develop beliefs that two strangers can be maskless indoors together and mere inches apart.

The Next Frank Black? This Bald Guy Is Shouting Nonsense

Posted on by Ben Friedman

With the deluge of “suggested” bands thrown at us through music app algorithms, it seems like it’s become harder and harder to organically discover something new and exciting. I discovered the Pixies in college and honestly, they set the bar so high I never thought anything could compare. Did it matter that I didn’t understand a goddamn thing Frank Black was talking about? Hell no, as long as he was screaming like a mental patient about talking to fish or slicing up eyeballs, I was hooked.

Without realizing it I had given up on finding new music that excited me. Then, just the other day I was walking home from the pharmacy and chanced upon Frank’s heir apparent: a random bald guy on the corner of the street, screaming nonsense at anyone who wandered into this field of vision.

This guy was good. He was treating everyone within earshot to a one-man show, and I for one was hooked. He turned to me and yelled, “MY BRAIN CAN SEE THERE’S A PHALLIC KEEPING/LEMURS LAND AND I MAKE SLUDGE!” It may not seem like an earworm written down but I swear to god it’s been stuck in my head all week. What hat the fuck does that even mean?! Who cares, just add some late-80’s alt-rock guitar and it might as well be “Doolittle.”

I couldn’t really decipher if he had a setlist of if this was all off the cuff, but I think he at least had one song called “Face” because he kept slapping himself and screaming “FACE” about 400 times in a row. The only explanation I could think of was that he was some kind of artist, what with the spray paint cans he had with him.

I can’t say that my fellow pedestrians recognized him as the next Frank Black the way I did, but I think the parts of his performance that weren’t about incest or murder really intrigued people.

The moment I knew I was staring at the next coming of Black Francs was during a seven-minute rant about a trip to New Jersey: I FELL INTO A FIRE HOLE I DIDN’T KNOW/THIS REAL UNDERWATER TURNS ME INTO GARDEN STATE!” I don’t know what happened to him in New Jersey, but it must’ve been epic to come up with a line like that.

I wanted to stay longer but he started throwing stuff into the crowd, which was clearly to indicate we’d come to the loud part of the song since he didn’t have a guitar. I came back to that street corner for a week straight but he wasn’t there, but I asked around and apparently, he’s a part of some group called Qanon? Gonna have to check them out.

Meditation Upgraded to Nap

Posted on by Dan Rice

LOS ANGELES — A 10-minute exercise in mindful meditation for musician and Trader Joe’s crew member Adrienne Tuckman evolved into a full blown episode of unconsciousness lasting almost three hours late yesterday afternoon, according to sources.

“When I came home, Adrienne was laid out on a yoga mat in the living room with her eyes closed, and the whole place smelled like nag champa and weed,” recalled Tuckman’s roommate Kristen Hall. “I went into the kitchen, came back a few minutes later, and the motherfucker was dead asleep on the floor. Pretty sure she was drooling. She stayed like that for almost two hours, even through me running the blender and everything.”

Upon awakening, Tuckman offered further insight into her experience.

“As my mind began to clear, I just reached this like, place, you know?” she explained of the act of clearing the mind to gain peace, calm and personal insight, which has been practiced by thinkers and spiritual leaders for nearly 8,000 years. “And in that place, I realized, ‘Holy shit, I could totally just fall asleep like, right now,’ and rather than resisting like a Westerner would, I just let it happen. That’s the whole thing about meditation, you know — you just have to do whatever, and then it’s done.”

“I’ve been reading a lot about the mental and physical benefits of daily meditation. From what I can gather after watching the movie ‘Inception,’ these benefits must be three times as effective while asleep,” she added. “I feel so completely reset that I could actually go for a cup of coffee. That’s how deep I went.”

Those close to the self-proclaimed “monk in a former life, probably” expressed some skepticism to Tuckman’s claims.

“This reminds me of the week she decided she was going to get way into yoga and bought books and a mat and a ton of stretchy clothes,” friend Rocco Balari recalled. “She started stretching, and 10 minutes later, she switched to some hot sauce taste test video series on YouTube and just binged that for like, two hours. She’s still trying to sell those clothes on Depop.”

At press time, Tuckman was dismissing the latest alert from Duolingo to practice French for five minutes.

If You Think All TV Remotes Should Be Controllers, You’re a Fucking Idiot

Posted on by Andy Holt

There’s an article going around today, making the ridiculous argument that all TV remotes should actually be gaming controllers. I haven’t read the article—I don’t want to validate these kinds of ideas—but it should go without saying that this is wildly off base. If you think all TV remotes should be controllers, you are an absolute fucking idiot.

Remotes and controllers are two different things. Arguing otherwise is harmful to television watchers, and more importantly, it threatens the very existence of gaming. Let me explain.

Remotes are designed to send short messages to the television. They’re for navigating menus, pausing, skipping ahead, that kind of thing. Most of the time, you’re just pushing a few buttons. Once you get to the thing you want to watch, the remote goes away—onto the coffee table, or (probably) between the couch cushions. Television and film are passive mediums. The remote is a crude tool for a crude task, designed to get the job done and get out of the way.

Controllers are designed to forge a fluid connection between Gamer and game. They pick up on every twitch, every click, every little change in pressure, continuously, until the device disappears and the player becomes one with the game. Gaming is an active medium. The controller is a highly sensitive instrument, designed to complete an extremely complex task, perhaps the most holy task an object can perform: playing video games.

You wouldn’t use a rake to dig a hole. Why is this case any different? The qualities that make a TV remote feel “clunky”—rubber buttons, slim shape, lightweight—are the very things that make it good at its job. They’re why the remote can slide between the couch cushions without pausing The Sopranos. They’re why you can bump it when you reach for your drink, and you won’t accidentally exit to the main menu, just when the movie was getting good. Try doing the same with a controller, which is purpose built to pick up every single movement. It’s simply the wrong tool.

More than that, this is a matter of honor. To equate the remote with the controller is to slap the gamer in the face. Gamers are active. Gamers win. Gamers get owned. Gamers argue with the squad about who fucked up, rage quit, log on and do it all again. Our controller is our weapon. It’s razor sharp. Dodge, parry, strafe, attack. It has no place in the tepid world of streaming apps, where simple remotes spit out dull commands. Up, down, select, cancel.

If every TV remote becomes a controller, the consequences will be dire. Manufacturers will inevitably make controllers work better as remotes, which is the very opposite of making them better controllers. They will dull our weapon, so the novices don’t hurt themselves. In the process, Gamers will lose track of what makes us special.

Gamers and non-Gamers are two different things. More is at stake than just a couple pieces of hardware — this is a battle for our souls. Which side are you on?

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It’s Time to Admit That All TV Remotes Should Be Controllers

Posted on by Jeremy Kaplowitz

As our technology gets better and better, people become attached to the familiar. Old interfaces become the preferred, retro designs come back into play, and the obsolete retain their status far longer than they should. Well, it’s time the tech world give itself a cold, long look in the mirror and come to the obvious conclusion that we all know deep down in our hearts: it is time to replace all television remotes with controllers.

Gaming is no longer just a hobby or a joke for people to “cringe” at. Gaming is a billion dollar industry with trillions of people worldwide spending quadrillions of dollars on quintillion video game devices each year. As we push into the future of technology, you are just lying to yourself if you ignore the sound of the march of sextillion gamers pushing our culture forward. 

And yet, the device that allows us to view our games and entertainment, the television, is controlled by a relic of a past most of us never even lived through. Why? We need to admit it’s time to move on. It’s time to move forward. It’s time to heal.

Too many times we have heard the harrowing stories of gamers going home for the holidays, trying to watch some streaming TV on their parents’ devices, and being forced to deal with cumbersome, awkward remotes. Pushing awful and stiff arrow buttons to navigate around virtual keyboards that were clearly designed for control sticks. Our nation has the money and ability to solve this problem. We are capable of putting this behind us.

Together, we can eradicate the mistakes of those who came before us. It’s going to be difficult. Hell, it’s going to be downright frightening at times. But we need to be brave enough to join together and say enough is enough. We have a moral obligation, as a society, to replace TV remotes with controllers.

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The Top 5 Comments on Hard Drive Articles This Week

Posted on by Owen Crowlie

It’s the holiday season, everyone! And you know what that means: more of the same, except it’s colder, and there’s more pressure to act like you’re having a good time. It’s that time of year where gamers engage in annual rituals such as crashing the Steam store, growing their game libraries by three times in a single day and roasting EA for all of their failures over the year. And because I’m feeling the holiday cheer, I thought I’d give you guys an early present of five great comments from this week!

Those Cyberpunk 2077 delays took everything from me. I can’t drive because of the yellow lines on the road, I froth at the mouth whenever I see bananas, and I kicked my TV screen in when an episode of The Simpsons came on. They may fix the game, but I don’t know if they’ll ever be able to fix me.

Here’s Hard Drive’s official guide to make Cyberpunk 2077 run well on modern hardware:

Step 1: Unionize CD Projekt Red’s development team. Mismanagement is one of the biggest bottlenecks for all video games, and crunch often results in underperformance.

Step 2: Allow the developers sufficient time to polish. While making them work faster may seem like it will make the game run faster, this is actually a myth.

Step 3: Include free RAM upgrades with every purchase of Cyberpunk 2077. It worked for Donkey Kong 64!

Much like how Warhammer is an excuse to explain away collecting toy figurines, Dungeons and Dragons as a game is a mere rationalization for collecting the same 7 geometric shapes over and over again. I know people who are so extreme in their dice spending that they nearly have enough to play pen and paper Shadowrun. 

Joseph, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that your blood pressure is high enough for you to shoot blood as a projectile to defend yourself. That bad news is that you’ll probably only be able to pull it off once.

It’s important to remember that art is subjective, and that no one can truly be “right” about what a piece of writing means. Objectively, though, we know that no one has read the Dragon Ball manga, so I’m afraid that Odie Etsy is wrong.

Thank you so much to everybody who commented this week! If you want a chance to be featured in next week’s column, be sure to leave a comment on any of our posts across social media. Have a great week everyone!

Twitch Bans All Mentions of Virgin Mary and Incel Joseph

Posted on by Twitch Plays Hard Drive

SAN FRANCISCO — Just before Christmas, video streaming platform Twitch has banned users from making any mention of the Virgin Mary, the Incel Joseph or any of the Three Wise Simps.

“There’s a War on Christmas, and we just shot out our first blast,” said Twitch CEO Emmett Shear. “At the end of the day, we would love for our viewers to discuss these important religious figures as much as they would like. But it is ultimately impossible to have even the friendliest of conversations without using these derogatory ideas. Mary is a virgin, ugh, Joseph is an incel, boo, and the Three Wise Men are all awful simps, no thanks. It upsets me deeply.”

The news quickly went viral, garnering criticism from various religion-based streamers.

“I play Santa’s Big Adventure 3 every single day on Twitch. How the fuck am I supposed to play to my audience without mentioning that incel fuck Joseph?” said popular streamer JezusFreek94. “I’m a raging angry Christian streamer and I am being grabbed by the fucking balls here, Bezos.”

“I was just about to host my speedrun event of King of Kings: The Early Years, an actual NES game about, I guess, a prequel to Jesus,” said Twitch user kingofkingofkings. “I don’t think it’s possible to have this event without constantly talking about the Three Kings being just big ole simps for Mary. I mean they were just giving her gifts and shit, crossing a whole desert. And it’s like… first of all there’s three of you. Second of all, she’s dating GOD. Like actual GOD. How are you gonna sling better dick than the big G?”

At press time, an internal memo from within the Twitch offices leaked, revealing that the ban was actually a result of Bill Gates calling Twitch owner Jeff Bezos a “little virgin incel simp.”

I’m Not Just Selling You a Home, I’m Selling You a Venue

Posted on by Yancy Lee Crawford

Buying your first home is one of the biggest decisions of your life. It’s important that you choose the home that’s right for the person you are today, but you should keep in mind the life changes you’ll make in the future. Life changes like finally starting that bitchin’ ska band and throwing mad shows here, dude. We are going to fucking rage until this basement collapses! …Just after you sign these closing papers, of course.

You’re seriously still thinking it over? Okay, let me run you through this one more time and you’ll be sure to make the best decision of your life this afternoon. Because I’m not just selling you a house. I’m selling you a venue.

Dude, putting an offer on this house today would be so fucking punk. I mean, just look at all this rehearsal space! Even the sidewalks out front are perfect for doing slappies and flatground tricks over manhole covers. Rodney Mullen was actually just asking about this place so you’re gonna want to move on it quick before he casper-slides his innovative ass through that front door.

And can you believe the schools in this district are more than 1,000 feet away from the property? This place has it all!

Outside you’ve got some curb appeal but it’ll be a lot better after you bust that streetlight out. Don’t worry, I’ll keep a lookout. Then the parking in this neighborhood will be perfect for grabbing car beers and smoking a joint or two between bands. It might not hurt to open a vegan-friendly coffee shop in the shed to give the straight edge crew a place to do pushups and slam poetry. But this place will never have a marquee because this ain’t the fuckin’ House of Blues.

Now, let’s talk about the master suite: the basement. First, you’ll need to tear out this ornate fireplace to make room for merch tables. Next, we’ll move the water heater into your bedroom to create an open concept mosh space. You know what? I’ll go ahead and ask for an upgrade on the electrical in the closing agreement. What good is a house if it blows a breaker every time Sunn O))) plays your living room? Even if the owners don’t agree to it, your neighbor’s garage is probably close enough to run some extension cords through the window.

Ultimately, there’s no better way to support the Terre Haute punk scene than by turning this house into a disgusting eyesore that pulls the entire neighborhood down with it. But keep your bathrooms clean for Christ’s sake, we’re not animals.