Who's Laughing Now?!

April Fools' Day. That's what this informal holiday is officially called. Fools', with the apostrophe after the s in Fools. There are numerous movies and books called April Fool's Day, but apparently those all use the apostrophe in an inappropriate way, because the day doesn't belong to just one fool, but to all fools, everywhere. It's an all-inclusive holiday, man. I don't particularly care how you use the apostrophe in the phrase April Fools' Day, however, because who really gives a shit?

This is the one day of the year where it is socially acceptable to be pointlessly cruel to other people, and that's kind of a fucked up thing if you stop to think about it. April 1st is a little like that movie The Purge, except there's much less murder, unless there's actually more murder. I haven't checked any statistics, so I don't know. But that movie The Purge was more than slightly awful, so I guess it has that in common with April Fools Day.

This "holiday" is a bag of dripping shit that brings out the worst in people, and the advent of the internet has only made it so much worse. Every asshole with wi-fi thinks they're the next Ashton Kutcher, and they take such pleasure in tricking some hapless schmoe that Half-Life 3 is finally being released in time for Christmas, when we all know damn well that Half-Life 3 is never coming out.

I have no patience for this garbage holiday, so I've decided instead to share with you, Dear Imaginary Reader, a little thing called THE TRUTH. It goes a little like this...

Once upon a time, I had a YouTube channel. And on that YouTube channel, I posted some videos. None of these videos were any good, really, and nobody watched them. Technically speaking, that last part isn't true, but the view counts were so small that when one included the entirety of the world's population with internet access, basically nobody watched any of my videos. The difference is negligible. I'm not attempting to garner any sympathy from a pitiless (and most likely imaginary) audience, I'm just stating a simple truth.

 Most of the videos on my channel are what I call "photoplays", which are really just a montage of still images set to music that tell a simple story that only I really find funny. They're not worth watching, and I will not speak of them further. If you have more than a passing familiarity with my blog, and I know you don't, then you may know of some of my other videos, namely the Christmas-themed entertainments you can find here. I had higher quality versions of these videos over on blip.tv for a few years, but after the service closed my channel without warning, coupled with a hard drive failure that deleted my original files, the only versions of these videos still available are the low quality clips on my YouTube channel.

But that's not important, because the real reason why I'm writing this post is to bring to your attention two particular videos on my YouTube channel that I think are worth slightly more than absolutely nothing. Back in 2010, feeling slightly ambitious, I called up my ever-suffering cousin Ky and arranged a little brainstorming session. The result of this tense, shout-filled evening was a video entertainment called The Melony Vine Story, the first episode in what I envisioned to be an ongoing series of faux television news exposé programs under the banner The Real Face Of America, hosted by two fictional, clueless narrators played by myself and Ky.

The technical quality of the video is absolutely terrible, with the primary issues involving our narration recorded on a malfunctioning microphone originally manufactured for the video game Rock Band, and being almost completely drowned out by what was meant to be ambient music in the sound mix. It's a special brand of terrible.

A few months later, we reconvened with our mutual friend Titus to create the second chapter in this saga, subtitled The Night Ranger Murders. This episode was much bigger in scope, nearly double the length of the original video, featuring numerous live-action segments, including portions of a lengthy, improvised "prison interview" with the Night Ranger killer himself, played by Titus.

Once again, the final audio mix favored the ambient music over the narration, because I am not very good at all this post-production stuff. The same microphone-related issues also carried over to the new video, because none of us had the money to buy a new recording device. But we did eliminate most of the popping p's by covering the microphone with a (clean) sock... which unfortunately also served to slightly muffle the already difficult-to-hear narration. Progress!

Eventually I learned a little more about sound mixing with my primitive editing software, and was planning on revisiting my cherished RFA videos for a little remastering, but the aforementioned hard drive failure put a premature end to all of that. So, like my The Christmas Miracle duology, the best versions of my RFA videos are the ones already uploaded to YouTube, and they'll never look or sound any better than that.

I'm still pretty proud of them, however, and I'd like you to give them a second chance, not just for me, but also for my collaborators, who put a lot of work into these videos all for the sake of your entertainment. Well, not your entertainment as much as our entertainment, really, which is the only reason why any of these videos are made. But there's always a chance somebody else out there might find these profiles of madness funny, or at least oddly fascinating for several minutes.

With that in mind, I humbly present to you both chapters of The Real Face Of America below for your edification, starting with the first installment, entitled The Melony Vine Story...



And here is the second installment, entitled The Night Ranger Murders...



They're not the most polished entertainments available on the web, but they're not the worst thing out there, either. My dreams of an ongoing series of oddball comedy profiles (sponsored by the omniscient Hill People Insurance Company) that would gather more views than Rebecca Black's infamous Friday video and go on to conquer the internet may have evaporated, but I still have these two deformed, inbred children staggering down the soft shoulder of the Information Superhighway, causing the occasional traffic accident when a curious motorist rubbernecks for too long, and that's almost as good. These videos were made by the fine folks here at Fenderman Inc., and they will always hold a special place in our withered, blackened hearts.

Thanks for stopping by!