Hard Digest October 16: Early Access Sommeliers, Stephen King, Ian MacKaye and More

Punk Sommelier Can Tell Exact Month Milk in Fridge Went Sour

By Carson Kile 

LOS ANGELES — An astounding display of skill and expertise was observed today as local punk sommelier Evan Weaver correctly guessed the month the milk in his fridge went sour, confirmed amazed sources.

“It really just boils down to experience,” remarked Evan, as he wiped yellow, sludgy milk from his unkempt mustache. “Once you’ve tasted sour milk as many times as I have, you start to pick up on the subtleties between the different stages of spoiling. For example, this particular glass had a strong note of lactic acid on the top, and a distinct, lumpy mouth feel. I took one swig and immediately I knew, March 2023. That was a fantastic month for milk, there was a heat wave in L.A. and our fridge went out for a few days, which gave the milk a certain ‘je ne sais quoi.’”

Weaver’s roommate Leanna Holder believes his unique abilities will never cease to defy her expectations.

“The guy’s just an absolute wizard,” said Holder, as she ate only the bruised parts of a banana. “He can get one whiff of my chair and he knows exactly how long I’ve neglected to wash my underwear. Incredible stuff. I’ve been trying to get him to share some of his endless knowledge with me lately. He’s been showing me the best ways to spoil milk to get that perfect, crispy top. He also gave me this interesting factoid: Apparently, it’s only considered spoiled milk if it comes from the dumpster behind the Food 4 Less. Everything else is technically sparkling yogurt.”

The spoiled-food connoisseur’s boyfriend Brian Franco unfortunately does not share the same enthusiasm for Weaver’s talents.

“Frankly, I find it disgusting,” sighed Franco, with a clothespin clamped over his nostrils. “Why couldn’t I have just found a guy with a normal hobby? He thinks I don’t notice when he comes stumbling home in the wee hours of the morning, absolutely reeking of old dairy. He comes up with all kinds of excuses, but I can tell he’s been out all night ‘sampling.’ It’s definitely started to put a strain on the relationship. He claims his heightened senses can tell him exactly which of my exes I’m fantasizing about while we’re having sex, but that’s because I’m always blurting out their names. I don’t really think he should be allowed to take credit for that.”

At press time, Weaver was spotted in the kitchen having trouble distinguishing between the salt and sugar.

WTF Man?! We Asked Stephen King To Share His Favorite Trick or Treating Memory and He’s Already Said “Cunnie Juice” Like Four Times!

By Dan Rice

We all know Stephen King as the master of the macabre, so we thought it would be fun to subvert expectations and use our interview with him to get a nice clean wholesome Halloween story. We figured a guy who grew up in small-town Maine and invented the word “pie-hole” must have some cutesy-spooky memories of trick-or-treating in the ’50s. King seemed delighted at our request, and we assumed he was eager to show a lighter side of himself. We were wrong.

He’s been talking for the better part of an hour and the shit this man has said will haunt our nightmares for the rest of our lives. He spent 20 minutes describing diarrhea so graphically that I have it now. I don’t even know how we got there! It’s time to get this interview back on track.

The Hard Times: Look, can we just like, reset here? I don’t want to offend you, we all respect you a lot, but I’m not sure you understood the assignment guy. 

Stephen King: I thought you wanted a trick-or-treat story?

Yes, but like, a wholesome one, from your real life as a boy in Maine. So far you have said “Cunnie Juice,” “methamphetamine,” a bunch of really dated words for black people, and the sentence “He could feel a trickle of warm blood dripping down his sex” several times. 

All that really happened though! 

Really? Jesus. Okay well, was there maybe a less macabre Halloween from your childhood? 

Oh! I get it. You wanna lean into the cutesy-cornball side of Stephen King. I’m on board! 

Awesome! Okay so happy Halloween memory, how old are you? What did you go as? 

Well, when I was 10 years old I went trick-or-treating as the spitting image of Michael Landon from “I Was a Teenage Werewolf.” Really went all out, great mask, makeup, the Letterman jacket and everything. 

Oh that’s so cool! 

Yeah, but the most elaborate parts of the costume were the parts people couldn’t see. I really wanted to capture the angst of a boy who turned into a wolf, so I applied fur to my genitals as well using spirit gum. I’ll tell ya you would howl too if you were chaffing like that every full moon! 

O…kay. 

Of course, the real horror came at the end of the night when I pulled the stuff off. Talk about pain. I could feel a trickle of warm blood dripping down my…

Stephen. 

Whoops. Sorry, note taken. To write is human, to edit is divine I always say. 

So what were the highlights of the actual trick-or-treating? Did you get a lot of good candy? 

Oh heck yes, me and my buddy Dennis, he wore one of those dimestore vampire costumes, it was a hand-me-down from his big brother Teddy because his abusive father had recently suffered an agonizing leg injury at the mill and taken to drink, which didn’t leave much money for amenities like Halloween costumes or hot meals every night, we were just delighted as our pillowcases got heavy with mars bars, milky ways, starbursts, you name it! 

Okay, part of that was sweet. 

We could barely carry the dang things by the time we got to the old Cooper place. Crazy Cooper we all called him. Rumor had it he was discharged during the war for making necklaces out of severed German ears, some of them from civilians. He was about the cruelest most cantankerous sonofabitch you ever could meet. We weren’t expecting candy, of course, we just wanted to be able to say we had the balls to ring his bell at school the next day. 

Okay this is getting kinda dark. 

No no no, this one’s a knee-slapper I promise, stay with me. Cooper had this wife Betty, enormous woman! Boulder Betty we all called her. Boy oh boy I can’t emphasize enough how truly fat this woman was. 

Do we really need to focus on that? 

Not really. Anyway Betty was big and fat like a monster. Betty the blob we called her. Rumor had it her stepdad Pete was handsy and it screwed her up bad. Sometimes she would just scream at the top of her lungs in the middle of the supermarket and then just keep shopping like nothing happened. Crazy thing was old man Cooper was the spitting image of her stepdad. They started seeing each other a few months after Pete was gunned down outside a nudie bar in Buffalo. 

Okay so yeah you rang the bell, then what happened? 

Childhood is a funny thing. You have no way of knowing just how fragile and fleeting it is until a big chunk of it is gone. When we rang that bell we expected to hear “Go away!” and maybe the crash of a beer bottle thrown against a wall. We didn’t expect the door to immediately open the way it had, and we certainly didn’t expect what we saw inside to permanently erase an innocence we didn’t even know we had. 

This isn’t really… well, Jesus, what did you see? 

“An angel’s smile is what you sell
You promised me heaven, then put me through hell
Chains of love got a hold on me
When passion’s a prison, you can’t break free” 
– Jon Bon Jovi 

THREE WEEKS EARLIER

Betty Cooper heaved her enormous carriage through the narrow doorway into the kitchen, the chirping of morning birds flaring her migraine like fireworks going off behind her eyes. For a moment she thought she would collapse from agony…

Woah woah woah, you’re flashing back? 

Yeah just for like 40 pages or so. 

How are you even aware of Betty’s point of view? 

Oh, I spied on people. Anyway… 

No stop, look, this seems like it’s not going in the direction we’re looking for. We just want one SHORT, cutesy little story about you doing normal Halloween stuff as a child, don’t you have any sweet little wholesome Halloween memories? 

Okay. The next year I was Frankenstein and  Dennis, our friends Stewey, Suzy, and a black kid named Marshel all went as different Universal Monsters. We got a ton of candy, then we camped out on Stewey’s family farm, sat around a fire and tried to spook each other with ghost stories. 

Okay! Perfect! That’s all we need, Mr. King thank you so much for your time! 

And then we had a gangbang. 

Oh, come on! 

Cunnie juice. 

Ian MacKaye Admits “Straight Edge” Was Originally Meant to Be About Delayed Sexual Satisfaction

By The Hard Times Staff 

WASHINGTON — Legendary frontman Ian MacKaye stunned longtime fans by revealing the song “Straight Edge” was not meant to be an anti-drug anthem, but a song celebrating delayed sexual gratification, confirmed sources questioning everything they once believed.

“I thought the lyrics were pretty obvious when I wrote them. Yes, I reference a bunch of drugs I don’t want to consume, but that’s only because I was waiting to bust. As soon as my partner and I finished, we would always get fucking tanked,” said MacKaye while sweeping the front porch of the Dischord house. “I’ve been trying for decades to tell people the song ‘Straight Edge’ was never meant to start a ‘movement.’ I’ve never intentionally hidden the true meaning, every time someone asked me about it I’d say something like ‘naw, that song is about cumming buckets,’ and they would just laugh like it was a joke. I’ve never told a joke in my life, and I don’t plan on starting now.”

This new information blindsided long-time Minor Threat fan Jerry Constantino.

“My whole life is a lie. I’ve got multiple straight edge tattoos and I feel like a fucking moron. We should have known, why did we just adopt the whole XXX thing without questioning it? I look like a walking billboard for smut,” said Constantino. “I used to scream the lyrics to ‘Straight Edge’ at full blast alone and crying in my car every time one of my Edge friends started drinking. But turns out I was just singing about a dudes boner. My entire personality is based on a guy’s dick. I’m going to move to the woods, I can’t take being around people anymore.”

Punk historian Clara Heintgart says “Straight Edge” isn’t the only anthem that has been misinterpreted.

“Even Minor Threat’s ‘Out of Step’ is another song about sex. It’s about lacking sexual chemistry with your partner and talks about all the things you can’t do together. Ian was a real cooze hound back in the day,” said Hentgart. “If you look at ‘True ‘Til Death’ by Chain of Strength you will see even more straightforward lyrics that are often taken the wrong way. The song was written about culinary school and having substandard equipment, it has nothing to do with drug use. Sometimes I think straight edge people really try to find meaning in things that really aren’t there.”

At press time, MacKaye also revealed he wrote the lyrics to Fugazi’s “Waiting Room” while waiting to be seen at a free clinic to treat a variety of STDs he contracted in the ’80s.

More From The Hard Times:

Every Danzig-Era Misfits Song Ranked By How Much Better They Are Than the National Anthem

Megalopolis Review: Sheesh, I Hope Whoever Made This Didn’t Waste Too Much Time on It

BY Peter Cunis 

One thing I always ask myself when I sit down to review a movie is, “Is everyone who worked on this okay?” The last thing I want is to see the actors, crew members, directors, and writers have their time wasted on a project that just didn’t come together.

And so, while I can’t say I enjoyed Megalopolis, I can’t fault it too hard. It doesn’t seem like it took too long to throw together, so hopefully everyone involved can just collect a paycheck and move on. It’s important to judge movies on a scale, and when you have an indie B-movie that was clearly rushed through production, you have to give it a little more leeway than you would something that took years upon years and over a hundred million dollars to develop.

The movie, written and directed by some journeyman named Francis Copperfield, takes place in a futuristic world that draws most of its inspiration from Blade Runner and Gladiator. Adam Driver plays Cesar, a character named after the protagonist of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Cesar is an architect who can stop time, an obvious nod to X-Men: Days of Future Past, and he wants to use his power to build a utopian city. Copperfield is definitely drawing inspiration from Bioshock, here.

Note that Copperfield is cobbling together a lot of ideas from popular films and video games from the last thirty or so years, so it’s safe to say he’s pretty green to this whole screenwriting thing, and most likely, he was under a lot of pressure to get this thing up on its feet in a very short amount of time. It’s not like he put decades of thought, preparation, and his own money into it. He’s trying his best, guys. Let’s give the kid a chance.

But again, I’m glad he didn’t spend too much time working on this silly project, and I hope the money and exposure he gets from this project gives him the power to work on something he really cares about. I mean, hey! He got to work with Adam Driver! That’s gonna look great on his resume! This movie might not be a critical darling, but I’m sure Copperfield won’t mind once he gets to work on his real dream project.

Megalopolis is in theaters now.

Game Freak Leak Confirms You’ll Never Be as Happy as You Used To

BY Matt Fresh 

TOKYO — Internal documents from Pokémon developer Game Freak have been leaked online, the contents of which have confirmed what many gamers have long since suspected. They’ll never be as happy as they were in their younger days.

“It’s very unfortunate that these private documents were obtained by an unauthorized third party and leaked to the public. We never meant for gamers to discover this information and have the hope that the spark of life would return to be shattered,” said Game Freak representative Konosuke Suzuki in a press statement. “The one thing keeping gamers going through the dark void that is life was the small glimmer of hope that one day they would be happy again, they were never meant to know the truth because that could affect sales.”

The confirmation that gamers will never be truly happy again came from a company wide memo that came straight from the CEO. It read as follows:

“Many gamers feel like the reason they have responded to our games less than enthusiastically is because of our lack of any meaningful innovation and the regression of polish as the years have gone on. And while that’s absolutely the case, the simple fact is that the spark is gone. They think that by playing this children’s game that they played when they were young, it will awaken the happiness they used to feel but the truth is that they’ll never feel that again. They now exist in a perpetually state of depression and anxiety searching for anything that can make them feel. They are the walking dead and as such we should never listen to their demands to improve our games.”

Kazuchika Shibata, one of the lead devs on the last few Pokémon games weighed in on how this leak will affect things.

“We do believe that this leak will affect sales. Children will of course still be buying the games but most of our adult Pokémon fans don’t even like Pokémon. They only bought the games with the intention of reigniting the spark of joy and happiness they had as kids but haven’t felt since they entered the working world. They did this despite knowing the games are undercooked and bad because they were desperate to try and obtain happiness. Now that they know definitively that they’ll never be as happy as they used to be, they have no reason to buy more Pokémon games.”

At press time, Pokémon fans online have reacted in denial, claiming that surely the next game will fix all the problems and make them happy.