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Microsoft announced their new Xbox console (the Xbox One) on Tuesday, which boasts amazing new technology that will make your entire entertainment experience significantly worse.

I’m not talking about specific games here, because they didn’t really mention them. The presentation was an hour long, and the first shot of actual gameplay came 57 minutes in — it was a brief glimpse of Call of Duty: Ghosts …

It looks like this.

… with a side-by side comparison of that game versus the last CoD game on the 360, to show off the advances in graphics:

The differences are so startling, I don’t even need to tell you which column is which.

Instead, they spent the whole presentation explaining how the system will take over all of your favorite electronic hobbies and make you hate them.

#5. You Can’t Loan Games to a Friend, and Used Games May Require an Additional Fee

The good news is that you don’t need the game disc to play an Xbox One game — every game is required to be installed on the system’s hard drive, and you just play it from there. The bad news is that there would be no way to keep people from just passing around the same disc and installing it on every system in America. “What?” you say, “That sounds like GREAT news!” You didn’t let me finish — to keep you from doing this, every time the disc is put into a new machine, the owner of that account will be required to pay full price before they can play.

“It’s not our fault, we spent all our money designing the console’s exterior!”

So no, you can’t loan a game to a friend to let him try it — once a disc is registered with one machine, it can’t be used on another without that person paying full price. So is that the end of used games as well? Nobody knows — Microsoft only told Wired that they “have a plan” for used games, but would offer no further details.

But, to make it up to you, they also announced that the Xbox One won’t play your existing Xbox 360 games.

#4. Yes, the System Requires an Internet Connection

The good news is that while you do have to have the Xbox One connected to the Internet, it will only check once a day, so in theory, if your connection goes down, you could still play a single-player game for a bit … but they said game makers are allowed to require a constant connection on any game they sell. But surely EA will make the right choice here, right?

Not to get too technical, but developers have the option of using Microsoft’s cloud computing service to borrow some of its horsepower to run their game. Which sounds great, but that means when their servers go down (you know, the way the PlayStation Network once stayed down for more than three weeks), your game stops working completely — even single player. Same if your Internet connection goes down. “We use the cloud to help run the game!” was the excuse for the SimCity disaster, in which millions of players paid $60 for the game, only to find that they couldn’t play single player due to long EA server outages.

Thus the one-and-a-half-star rating on Amazon.

#3. Watching TV Will Require Waving Your Arms and Shouting at Your Screen

Microsoft stated that their goal was to make the Xbox One a “single device to provide all of your entertainment.” As such, the console will let you watch live TV (oh, you’ll still need your current cable box, too) and use state-of-the-art technology to overlay a never-before-seen feature called a “guide” that lets you see what’s playing on each channel.

Which before now science had declared impossible.

To control all of this, every Xbox One will now come with a Kinect, the gadget that lets you control the device with hand motions and voice commands. That’s why the game console requires the Kinect to be on (with its camera watching you) at all times.

“I’ll have seen a million cocks within the first hour.”

Now, instead of the incredibly laborious process of pushing your thumb down an eighth of an inch to press a TV remote button, you can use your hand to swipe through menus using a “smacking that ass” motion:

Or you can simply say “watch Game of Thrones” and it will switch to that show. That is, until somebody else on the sofa says, “Hey, did you watch the Ryan Lochte show last week?” at which point the system will presumably detect the “watch Ryan Lochte” command in the middle of that sentence and change the channel. If you are playing a video game, the system will flip to TV with the simple voice command “go to TV” — before now, this was an impossibly convoluted process that required you to climb onto your roof and re-route several cables.

EDIT: I have been told that actually you can do this now just by pushing the “input” button on your remote control.

Of course, you will presumably only be able to watch TV up until the point where someone else in the room says a phrase that sounds like “go to game.” That’s not a criticism of the system’s voice controls — they may be very good. It’s just pointing out that the Kinect is not yet a mind reader (although it can detect your heartbeat).

#2. The World Is About to Be Full of Bad Video Game TV Show Adaptations

Quick: What’s the worst part of video games? Playing them, right? What’s the best part? The story and voice acting, of course. So clearly the next step in the evolution of the medium is to just strip it down to the latter.

So, about 40 minutes into the presentation, we heard from former president of CBS Studios Nancy Tellem, who said Microsoft would be developing TV shows for the console (the first being a Halo series) and that she would bring to them the same edge and innovation she brought to CBS with shows like, and I quote, “the CSI franchise and Survivor.” Also, Steven Spielberg will be involved somehow, so there’s that.

#1. You and Your Friends Can Accidentally Watch Each Other Masturbate

As we mentioned, the Kinect will always be on, and it will have a high-definition camera that lets it see everything that is happening in the room in front of it, at all times. The implementation Microsoft seemed most proud of was Skype, which would let people call you and plant their big stupid face right onto your screen while you’re trying to watch a movie (the example they used was breaking into your friend’s football game to taunt him about it):

So … you can call people with voice commands, and you will always be on camera. Which means you’d better hope that in the throes of sofa s#x you don’t shout anything that sounds like “call Grandma.”

Anyway, if you don’t have time to watch the conference video, somebody on YouTube boiled it down to its essence:

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Hasbro recently announced a My Little Pony spinoff movie, titled My Little Pony: Equestria Girls, which will hit theaters next month. In Equestria Girls, all of the ponies are transported to another universe where they transform into teenage girls to face the trials of high school life, because without question that’s what every fan of a magical universe of talking ponies wanted this movie to be.

“The magic of friendship never changes, except when we change the whole thing into Bratz. Then it actually is pretty different.”

The fact that the movie will be impossible to follow because the dialogue will be drowned out by the deafening cheers of a legion of grown men delighting over their favorite ponies finally being blessed with canonized t##s and miniskirts isn’t the only reason a My Little Pony movie is a disaster waiting to happen.

Picture the three key groups of MLP fans: little girls, “bronies” (i.e., adult male aficionados of the show), and furries. Now, picture all of those people intermixing in the same dark movie theater. It’s tantamount to tossing kids into a haunted house full of loud, self-important 20-somethings and terrifying s#xual fetishists.

Christina House / Los Angeles Times
“Mommy, are we in the wrong theater?”

It’s no secret that a big part of the My Little Pony fan base is adult men — every fifth message board thread on the Internet devolves into a brony argument, not to mention the 500-percent-funded brony documentary on Kickstarter and the constant media attention these baffling young men receive.

Philadelphia Bronies / Equestria Daily
“Dad, I’ll need to borrow the car this weekend. There’s a, uh, rugby tournament.”

But what we tend to forget while either relentlessly condemning or defending this raging tornado of misplaced hormones is that My Little Pony is a franchise that was originally created for and marketed to little girls, and those little girls are still a considerable portion of the My Little Pony fan base. This isn’t even the first My Little Pony movie — there was one back in the ’80s, it starred Danny DeVito as “The Grundle King,” and it was 110 percent intended for little children.

Up until now, these demographics have been kept apart — the bronies stick to their own conventions and streaming sites, whereas the kids stick to the TV (and hopefully never browse Google for My Little Pony stuff with SafeSearch turned off). But now that there’s a theatrical release, moms across America will have to wait in line and sit their 5-year-old girls in frigid, shadowy rooms filled with these guys:

My Confined Space

And those guys are just regular bronies, in all likelihood — we haven’t even touched on the fourth demographic: those people responsible for the oceans of My Little Pony P#RN currently available on the Internet.

As we noted previously, among the throngs of adult male My Little Pony fans are those who take things a little too far. Case in point — a few months ago, a story concerning a man claiming to be Twilight Sparkle’s fiance made the Internet rounds. This fellow wrote a DeviantArt user a several-thousand-word letter demanding that the artist stop drawing pictures of Twilight with semen all over her face. Here are some candid shots of the man with his bride-to-be Twilight, who is a doll. Of a fictional character. That is a pony.

The Engagement and Marriage of Twilight Sparkle

The Engagement and Marriage of Twilight Sparkle
American Girl dolls never had to put up with this shit.

And next month, we’re going to be ushering little girls into theaters with such fetishists, along with a bunch of harmless but overly enthusiastic men wearing pony costumes and clutching plush toys. And it will be impossible to tell the two groups apart! Those little girls are going to have many, many questions, and many of the parents they’ll be asking will be just as clueless, because they will have had no idea until that very moment that there even was such a thing as bronies or MLP erotica. Ladies and gentlemen, the world may very well have just set up the most awkward moment in cinema history.

Check out XJ’s $0.99 science-fiction novella on Amazon here, with the sequel coming out very soon. And of course, you should look at his writing blog and poke him on Twitter.

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For most Westerners, the thought of eating a beetle or an ant triggers a gag reflex. We’ve been trained to hate and eliminate six-legged creatures of all kinds, even the ones that are good for us. But according to a recent U.N. report, our days of not eating six-legged creatures are probably over.

#4. Everyone Else Is Already on the Bug-Eating Bandwagon

AFP / Stringer / Family
“Peer pressure tastes crunchy.”

Unless you’re an unsupervised toddler or a contestant on Fear Factor, you’re probably going out of your way to not let bugs down your gullet. But that’s a specifically Western thing — everyone else on the planet has been fine with eating insects for a while now. In fact, there’s even a word for it — “entomophagy.” There are 36 African countries that are entomophagous, 29 in Asia, 23 in the Americas, and 11 in Europe. And remember, these guys are eating bugs on purpose. As in, there’s a whole industry of bug harvesting and preparation thriving everywhere else but America. And that’s good, because the U.N. thinks bugs are the missing ingredient in the recipe called “Not Letting Poor People Starve.”

#3. The U.N. Wants Restaurants to Serve Insects

It used to be that when you picked a restaurant, your choices were Chinese, Mexican, Italian, or burgers. Fancy restaurants served man-sized portions, and no one would dream of putting foam on food. Fast forward to today, and everyone is an Iron Chef-educated foodie demanding exotic and interesting new ways to get sustenance. The U.N. wants to capture that passion by encouraging restaurants to create insect delicacies. And they’re right — if Americans see enough caterpillars on enough menus, we’ll stop thinking it’s weird. After all, someone had to make the first cornbread-battered hot dogs on a stick, right?

Mark Ralston / AFP / Getty
Is this any grosser? Yes. But not by much.

#2. You’re Probably Already Eating Insects Anyway

The FDA already allows bits of bug parts and rat hair in your food — just in tiny amounts. So unless you’re a strictly organic, no-processed-foods-allowed-in-the-house kind of person, you’ve been ingesting insects all along. In fact, take a look:

The butt spikes are the best part.

That’s a cochineal insect, which lives in cacti. When it’s ground up, cochineals make an edible dye that has been used in everything from Starbucks coffee to ice cream. So not only are you already eating roach legs that accidentally slipped into your peanut butter, you’re probably eating pulverized bugs that were knowingly included in your food. We might as well just go whole hog and recognize what we’ve been eating all along.

#1. Apparently, They Taste Good

Somehow, despite all the stigma and resistance, some bugs actually taste pretty damn good. Cicadas, for example, spend 17 years eating a lot of tree sap, so they end up tasting like crunchy maple syrup. Bees that are still in their larva stage have a nice sweet aftertaste and have been compared to peanuts. Stinkbugs are said to have an apple flavor, which is far less fecal-y than we’d expect from something called “stinkbugs.” If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last few decades, it’s that Americans haven’t met a flavor we won’t pour down our throats.

Hemera Technologies/PhotoObjects.net/Getty Images
“Can we turn this into a Slurpee?”

Evan V. Symon is a moderator in the Cracked Workshop. He can be found on Facebook.

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Summer blockbuster season has begun, and so has the flood of ham-fisted movie tie-in advertising. We have Star Trek into Darkness implying that we’ll all be using Acer laptops in the far-flung future and Tony Stark test-driving Audis instead of drunkenly steering them off the side of the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier.

But every now and then, a commercial you can actually respect comes along — in this case, it’s the National Guard’s Man of Steel ad, which was directed by Zack Snyder and wins points in our book for depicting Superman as one big crazy jackass.

This minute-long spot begins with soldiers out of uniform, going about their mild-mannered lives. But just like Clark Kent, they ditch their civilian duds when it’s time for action.

“It’d be nice if we didn’t have to wear fake glasses whenever we aren’t on duty.”

But wait! Why exactly do they need their uniforms? The ad goes on to tell us just that.

Voila, Superman! And it looks like the friendly alien is walking out of a bit of rubble. No biggie — he’s always strutting out of an OSHA violation after a big rumble. So what did he smash?

“Child-Man, my old nemesis.”

Oh! It’s — it’s a child? At least that’s what the ad cuts to in the very next scene, as the National Guard saves the young kid from an early, concrete-induced demise …

Wait a minute — is this not the same rubble Superman just waltzed out of? It sure looks like the same rubble from moments before, because they F*CKing cut from that rubble to this rubble, and your average commercial isn’t long or complex enough to support a narrative with multiple piles of rubble. So did Superman just, like, smash a building and bounce? Where did he even go?

“Soldiers can handle the trapped children, I’m getting superlaid!“

Oh! OK, Superman was just saving Lois Lane! (The only reason we know this is because we paused the commercial, as it’s some blurry camerawork.) Let’s continue on to the next scene.

A disaster Aquaman would actually be good for, and the goldbricking National Guard snipes his save.

All right, the very next shot sees the National Guard rescuing a little girl. This confusing scene is supposed to reinforce the heroic parallels between Superman and the National Guard, but, courtesy of some incredibly dubious editing with the prior Lois Lane sequence, it looks like Supes dumped the poor kid on the roof in the middle of a flood and F*CKed off to the troposphere to do some sky yoga.

See? Sky yoga. Either that or he’s mere moments away from turning his body into a human shadow puppet of a cock and balls to project onto the side of the United Nations or Lex Luthor’s patio or something. In any case, let’s analyze the next scene, which lends further credence to our theory that the National Guard’s primary duty is to clean up Superman’s manifold messes.

He can fill tall buildings with corpses in a single drunken mistake.

Behold, it’s Superman, demonstrating to audiences that he is in fact faster than a speeding bullet. He’s tearing across the Earth’s surface, grimacing for reasons that are unexplained. Perhaps the G-forces loosen his bowels; perhaps they massage his Kryptonian physiology in ways that are inappropriate to discuss on a family website such as this. What is clear is that a caravan of National Guardsmen is following in Superman’s wake.

Again, the commercial aims to imply that — just like Superman — the National Guard rushes toward disasters with heroic abandon. Instead, it looks like the National Guard is chasing the superhero down for shattering every window in the tri-state area.

And what’s that fire in the distance? Did Superman smoke an entire tobacco field in a futile attempt to edgy up his character? Did he get drunk and have to fight his subconscious in a junkyard again? What wacky japes did the last son of Krypton get into now? One thing’s for certain — if the National Guard rebranded itself as “The Superman Revenge Squad,” it’d see a huge uptick in applicants.

“Dear Mom: Today my drill sergeant told me that Superman is a fictional character. Thinking of suing the government.”

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Cursed objects generally stick to the realms of movies, books, and extremely passive-aggressive birthday cards. But sometimes these foully magicked items slip through the cracks of reality and show up in our corporeal world to scare the hell out of us. Like so …

#3. A Cruise Ship

In February, a Carnival cruise ship with the fate-temptingly hilarious name Triumph was ushering passengers on a lovely cruise through the tropics when a fire crippled the ship, leaving it dead in the water. This would’ve been scary enough on its own, but then the sewage system decided to break down, raining shit down the walls of the boat onto everyone trapped inside. The passengers then sat for five goddamn days with nothing to eat, save each other and poop.

AFP / Stringer / Getty
Considering what we know of most cruise passengers, the poop would probably be more nutritious.

When rescue finally came to tow the dismantled Triumph back into port, the towline broke, leaving the ship stranded yet again. They finally reached port five days later, but the next day a bus carrying many of the rescued passengers broke down and stranded them on the side of the road, because the world is cruel.

In April, the ship was in harbor getting work done when it broke free from the dock, floated downstream, and smashed into a cargo ship, killing a man. Apparently the Triumph was cobbled out of bones dredged up from a mermaid burial ground.

Jeff Gammons / Getty
“Well, how do you build a boat?”

#2. A Hot Spring

In Australia — aka the only country on this planet that would boast an evil whirlpool — there sits a hot spring called Devil’s Pool. According to an Aboriginal legend, a woman drowned herself in the pool after her new lover was taken away from her by his tribe. Nowadays, she drowns any young male tourist who dares to go swimming in the spring, claiming at least 20 lives over the past 50-odd years (that number may be higher, as life insurance companies generally don’t accept “curse” as a cause of death). Scientists argue that these deaths are more likely a result of swimmers unfamiliar with the pool being overwhelmed by its strong currents, but that explanation sounds like a lot of big-city lip-wiggling to us.

Andrew Watson / Lonely Planet / Getty
How could this be dangerous? Rocks are nature’s pillows.

#1. A Painting on eBay

Back in 2000, a couple put an allegedly cursed painting on eBay with a slew of warnings about its powers, which were admittedly limited to “being a creepy painting of a child with rickets and his life-sized doll playmate/murder practice dummy.” The painting went viral (as this was the Internet prior to XXX tube sites, thereby leaving nobody with anything better to do) and the price skyrocketed, which was probably the sellers’ plan all along.

Stoneham Studios
“I mostly wanted to get this creepy thing out of the house as fast as possible.”

But people viewing pictures of the painting online started to report weird phenomena — children would scream when they saw it, printers would relentlessly chew up paper if they tried to print it, and one poor soul claimed to hear a stentorian voice and feel a gust of fiery air on his face as he gazed upon it. All of the victims blamed the painting, with nobody pausing to consider if the free AOL CD-ROMs they got in the mail were haunted.

The seller even posted webcam videos taken of the painting at night, which allegedly show the doll pulling a gun on the little boy. The painting ultimately went for $1,050 to a man who quickly began selling prints to people who enjoy terrible artwork that is appreciated by evil spirits. The weirdest part of all? Nobody who took part in any of these transactions paused and asked themselves the obvious question: If the painting really is haunted, why the hell would you want it in your house?

Josh wants to be your friend on Facebook. Read his column, This Ain’t Amateur Hour, on Man Cave Daily, where he will teach you how to be awesome.

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When the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper needed a new building for their headquarters, they turned to a professor of architecture, Zhou Qi. Little did they know that Zhou had every intention of building an enormous erect penis of a building. And the best part? Everyone involved should have seen it coming. (Pun intended.)

#3. The Architect Has a History of Mocking China’s Funny-Looking Buildings

There were plenty of people willing to design this building. It was a juicy government job, and there was ample competition, but the man who won out in the end was Zhou, who also happens to have a habit of pointing out and mocking various Chinese buildings that look inappropriate. Take this skyscraper that looks like a giant pair of underpants, for instance:

Dan Lewis News
“I see London, I see France, I see China’s giant, expensive, skyscraper underpants.”

According to reports, Zhou had no problems with poking fun at this sort of thing, but the Chinese government is clearly willing to do anything to stop people from doing so. And yet somehow, with his reputation, Zhou still landed the job of designing a tower that was impossible not to mock. Either they chose him at random with no background checks, or Zhou is the most persuasive man to ever build giant genitalia. For someone who is always looking at buildings and seeing suggestive imagery, this was not accidental. Zhou planned this.

Dan Lewis News
Cocks find a way.

#2. He Did It With a Straight Face

So Zhou was hired for the job of a lifetime and he got started. At no point during the pre-building stage of this project did any of the higher-ups catch on that the blueprints looked suspiciously like the male organ.

Rex Features, Telegraph
This seems above board.

Either Zhou secretly substituted blueprints for a totally normal building before the thing was built, or Chinese people don’t actually know what a penis looks like. In either case, Zhou must have had dozens of meetings where he suppressed cackles while passing off his vision as a legitimate, serious design that he had created to please his bosses. He must have, otherwise they would have caught on and fired him. So meeting after meeting, discussion after discussion, he stayed calm. All the while he knew in the back of his head that he was going to be the creator of the world’s largest boner. The man has to be a master of self-control.

#1. It Really Is the Most Penisy Building Ever Erected

Just look at the building. Take all the time you need.

Dan Lewis News
And you thought the Washington Monument was phallic?

There’s the glans part and there’s the shaft. It’s such a penis that the ground itself is proud to host it.

Beijing Cream
We’re not even joking, it is physically impossible to not see a penis in this picture.

In many situations, such as the underpants-skyscraper above, there is room for interpretation. A structure might be vaguely shaped like something, and from the right angle, some people might see the resemblance. This is not one of those situations. Imagine working on the top floor, presumably where there’s a beautiful skylight to complete the design. How do you even look yourself in the mirror when you work near the pee-hole of a dick?

Given the reputation of his government, the harsh punishments they’re known for, and how seriously they take everything, Zhou must have some giant stone testicles to go with that tent he just pitched. Not only is he the greatest troll who ever lived, but he’s the ballsiest, too.

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