Violence. Speed. Momentum.

by Dr DisRespect

  And if you’re like, “But, Doc, I’m only twelve years old, I wasn’t even born when the Razor was around,” then look it up, punk! Oh yeah, and when you Google—it’s “Razr,” no “O.” No vowel at all between the “Z” and the “R.” I have no idea why, but for some reason that makes the phone a ton cooler, all right? It’s like someone took a razor to the word “razor,” the ultimate conclusion of Occam’s razr.

  Once you do just a minimum of research you’ll see just what made the Razr so damn unforgettable. Thin. Sleek. Shiny. Sharp.

  I look at it and think, “Careful, Doc, you could cut yourself on that baby, it’s so fucking sharp.” Probably because I actually have cut myself on my Razr before, which might have to do with how surprisingly sensitive my perfect skin is.

  Whatever it is, it’s awesome, and it’s Doc’s choice of flip phone for when he’s stepping out on the town and wants to make a call—and a great impression on the hundreds of paparazzi who follow him everywhere he goes.

  Oh, and the keypad looks like something out of Tron. The original, badass Tron, not the bullshit sequel. So yeah, cool keypad too.

  The Razr was, as everyone knows, followed by the Krzr. The Krzr was longer, narrower, and had exactly zero vowels. But honestly, it wasn’t quite as cool as the Razr. Just trying a little too hard, you know?

  Don’t get me wrong, I still own seven Krzrs. I mean, I’m rich—so why not? And they’re still pretty cool, just not as cool as the Razr. I own thirty of those. Each one is a different shade of black.

  What’s less well-known is that Motorola also developed a whole shit-ton of experimental next-generation Razr prototypes. Me being me, I own every single one of them. I use ’em depending on my mood or outfit on any given day.

  Lazr: A black, one-of-a-kind, laser-powered flip phone that shoots actual lasers, and guess what? The laser beams are also black. Seriously, black laser beams! I don’t even know how the fuck that’s possible, but it is. This thing would’ve cost a normal person over $1.3 billion, but I won it in a game of Street Fighter II with Motorola’s head engineer. Pretty sure I got him fired, but hey—no one forced him to play me. Anyway, I use my Lazr whenever I attend a movie premiere put on by my bud Chris Nolan, just to remind him I’m the bigger visionary.

  Tazr: Specially made for cops, it can fire a charge of thirty thousand volts into a person of interest. I use this one when I feel like leaving my Kalashnikov and serrated bowie knife at the Top Secret Command Center and going less-than-lethal. So, I don’t know, never?

  Phazr: I got this one because I was like, “Whoa, I bet this is like a flip phone combined with a super–top secret Star Trek phaser weapon!” Turned out it was just preprogrammed with William Shatner’s phone number. And you know what? Pretty nice guy!

  Mazr: I pull this model out when I’m feeling trapped in a labyrinth of my own ennui or whenever I watch Labyrinth, the iconic 1986 film starring David Bowie’s incredible Goblin King mullet. Slap that baby, make him free!

  Blazr: I throw this one on when I need to look business-casual on short notice.

  Hazr: This ultra-rare and ultra-expensive model is two prototype plastic cups connected by a prototype string. Part of me wonders if this is a joke at my expense.

  But also, guess what?

  The guys at Motorola were so blown away by my excellence, dominance, and success—plus the fact that I’m the only living person on this earth who still uses flip phones—that they actually created one just for me: the Dctr.

  The Dctr flip phone isn’t just a work of science. It’s not just a work of art. It’s on a whole other level, a spiritual revelation of portable telecommunications. Like, if Motorola had released this flip phone seven or eight years ago, they’d probably still be a real, authentic American company instead of just some bogus brand name owned by Lenovo. (To make my new customized flip phone, the entire original team behind the Razr came back together, led by the same head engineer I got fired years ago. Not like he had anything better to do.)

  The Dctr is so thin I can slide it into my jet-black sealskin wallet and it makes less of a bulge than my black Amex. It’s so sleek that if I could drive it, I’d take it over all fifty of my Lambos. It’s so smooth that when I flip that baby open it almost disappears into thin air.

  I’d say it’s black-on-black-on-black, except there is no “on.” It’s a two-dimensional, highly glossed, highly polished black plane. No screen, no numbers, no perceivable interface at all. If I want a specific button, I just push… and it’s there. Nothing but pure, strong, glossy black everywhere except for the cover, where, etched in a matte-black finish, is the silhouette of my flowing mullet, my cunning specs, and Slick Daddy.

  And guess what? The Dctr can be yours, right now, at InterdimensionalChampionsClub.gg, for the incredible price of—

  Nah. Just kidding. This one is all mine.

  Nokia

  I mean, what can I say? The Two-Time only accepts the best, and the best is Motorola.

  But maybe for some weird reason you want… not-best?

  Is there even a word in the English language for “not-best”? The very idea is so strange to my mind, so foreign to everything I stand for, that I seriously don’t know. Oh wait. Waaaaait. I think I… Yep, that’s it. That’s the one: “loser.”

  So let’s talk about Nokia.

  In the battle for flip-phone supremacy, these guys are the only ones who even come close to the Motorola Razr. And by “close” I mean they’re about five light-years away. Sure, they’re reliable, they’re stylish, and they’ve got reasonable prices. But they’re number two. And because they’re number two, they are, by definition, poop.

  That’s just a fact.

  The only other fact you need to know about Nokia is that they’re from Finland. Don’t get me wrong, the Finns, the Swedes, the Nords, and all those really tall, pasty white people who eat lingonberries and meatballs—they’re good at lots of shit.

  Like vodka, shipbuilding, and berserking.

  All right, I guess that’s pretty much it. Oh, and making cheap furniture that ruins relationships. But the only cool thing they’re good at is conquering Britain.

  And you know what? That should be more than enough. You got your sacking, you got your pillaging, you got your big-ass helmets with horns and your god of thunder named Chris Hemsworth. Bro, you even got Golden Axe, one of the coolest classic arcade games ever!

  We’re talking sixteen bits of side-scrolling hand-to-hand combat. We’re talking broadswords and battle-axes and an angry magical dwarf called Gilius Thunderhead. We’re talking gaming history, gaming lore, that never would’ve existed without the Vikings.

  And you know who developed Golden Axe for Sega? A dude named Makoto Uchida. One guess where he’s from, and if you say Finland, I’m smiting your ass like Thor.

  So I’m sorry—hahaha, no, I’m not—but the Nords were not put on this earth to make flip phones. They were put here to have big shaggy beards and to have cool names like Bjorn Irönside and Eric Bloodaxe.

  And that brings us to…

  Ericsson

  Nords, come on, learn to quit while you’re ahead! Fuck!

  These dudes are Swedish.II And at one point, they’d actually made more flip phones than anyone else in the world.

  And I know, because as the greatest international gamer of all time, I’ve been to every single country on the globe, no matter how mysterious, no matter how insular—just so I could say that I dominated there. Djibouti. Nauru. Kyrgyzstan. Texas. I’d touch down on some deserted field in my Kamov Ka-27 attack chopper, hop out with my Super Nintendo, find some local champ to destroy in Mortal Kombat, and fly away again. It was awesome.

  Awesome, that is, except for one thing. Every human being in every one of these little cutthroat badass countries owned the exact same Ericsson flip phone, the T28. No joke. There are millions of them still floating around out there in the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s truly the people’s phone, the ultimate equalizer. Cheap enough to be b
ought by anyone, anytime, anywhere.

  WHO THE HELL wants a phone that literally everyone on the planet already has??

  The purpose of a champion’s life is to be special. It’s to be different. It’s to be superior.

  It is not to have a knobby antenna and storage for 250 contacts.

  Seriously, you can own a Nokia flip phone, and we can get along, all right? You can buy an old LG or a Samsung or even a fucking Alcatel flip phone—none of them remotely interesting enough for me to write about here—and I’ll still have a tiny bit of respect for you. Like minuscule.

  But if you own an Ericsson flip phone? Dude, you’re not even dead to me. It’s like you never even existed. Unless you find out my phone number, because to be fair, Ericssons do work pretty well and your calls will go through with no problem at all.

  More Badass Tech Bonus Content

  When the Two-Time is following his own path, when he’s running against the crowd, blazing his own trail in the arena of technological combat, he doesn’t just stop at flip phones.

  Does the Doc ever stop at anything? Hell no.

  So that means you’re gonna get to find out about VCRs and some other cool shit too.

  Betamax VCRs

  Remember these incredible machines?

  Of course you don’t. You barely even know what a fucking DVD is. Well, look it the fuck up!

  Back before Netflix, back before DVDs, even back before Blockbuster in all its VHS glory, there was Betamax. The original VCR tape. Smaller than the VHS tape, with longer potential runtimes and a higher-res image, the Betamax was superior to VHS in literally every way.

  And it was made by Sony. Sony! The gods of tech! The same geniuses behind my experimental prototype night-vision scopes, not to mention the incredible Trinitron TV.

  Yet the mighty Betamax got its ass kicked by VHS, becoming completely irrelevant a few short years after its release as VHS dominated the market.

  Why? How the hell should I know? I’m not a historian.

  But I keep an original Sony Betamax player in my top secret lab, right next to all my cutting-edge, advanced, multimillion-dollar audiovisual technology, to remind myself that if you let down your guard—even for a millisecond!—even the very best competitor can lose.

  And also because I have a rare, first-edition original recording of Dolph Lundgren in Masters of the Universe on Betamax, which I watch every night before I go to bed.

  Microwave Ovens

  Fuck these newfangled microwave ovens with their digital displays and their rotating plates and their pussy-ass radiation-proof casing.

  When I zap my frozen dinners, I want the complete classic all-American microwave experience. We’re talking original 1947 Raytheons. We’re talking six-foot-tall, seven-hundred-fifty-pound Cold War beasts. We’re talking a cute little bell that dings when your leftover pork chops are still frozen solid, and lymph nodes the size of watermelons from all the gamma rays.

  That’s the experience I want when I’m microwaving my Orville Redenbacher popcorn for my nightly viewing of Dolph Lundgren in a blond wig and leather Speedos, all right?

  Sony Discman

  Now, I know what you’re thinking.

  You’re thinking, “Doc, what about the Walkman? Isn’t that more iconic, more retro, than the Discman?”

  As usual, your question shows just how ignorant you really are. The point isn’t to embrace shit that’s iconic. And it damn well isn’t about being “retro,” whatever the hell that means. Do you see me lugging around an old Bell rotary phone wherever I go? Of course not!

  The point is to be different! To go your own way!! And to look incredibly cool doing it!!!

  Any dumb skinny punk hipster can walk around with a Walkman on his belt. And why not? They’re the most revolutionary advance in portable audio of all time! They’re small, they’re lightweight, the sound quality is top-notch, they never skip or scratch, and you can drop those fuckers a thousand times and they still work. Also they’re made by my boys at Sony, who totally deserve a win after all that Betamax bullshit.

  But that is exactly the problem, man. It’s too easy, too sensible, too accessible to be truly worthy of the Two-Time.

  The Discman, on the other hand, is technology for the sheer sake of technology, advance for the sheer sake of advance. It’s not nearly as reliable as the Walkman: It skips. The discs get scratched. The laser gets smudged. It breaks if you fucking sneeze on it (to be fair, I have a superhumanly powerful sneeze).

  But man—it looks so fucking cool. It’s sleek, it’s smooth, it’s all curves and beveled edges where the Walkman is a dumpy little box. It’s powered by its own little internal mini-laser! Who cares how well it works?? And it’s also made by Sony!

  When I’ve got my original Discman strapped to my powerful thigh in the middle of my sixth set of twelve three-hundred-fifty-pound squats, I look fucking incredible, baby. So what if it skips every third note on my rare, first-edition original CD of the Masters of the Universe soundtrack, composed by the brilliant Bill Conti (Rocky, The Karate Kid, all the greats)?

  Good looks, style, dominance, success, excellence, uniqueness—people, you gotta work for these things, you gotta sacrifice. Unless you’re like me and you’re just born that way. In either case, it’s Discman all the way.

  Nintendo Entertainment System

  Remember all that stuff I said about how you gotta work and sacrifice for everything?

  Yeah, well, sometimes rules are proved by exceptions.

  The original NES is actually incredibly, ridiculously easy to buy. Find that shit online and it can be yours in days, which makes it pretty ordinary. But you know what? It’s worth breaking my champion’s creed for one simple reason.

  Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!

  I mean, look. I love multiplayer shooter games. Why shouldn’t I? I dominate them. I got rich dominating them. I built an empire dominating them. Also, they’re badass.

  But there’s simply no question that Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! is the most awesome video game ever created. Period. We’re talking fluid, intuitive, lightning-quick gameplay. We’re talking graphics that are still fun and entertaining even by today’s standards. We’re talking top-notch iconic characters like Von Kaiser and Don Flamenco and Great Tiger and Soda Popinski, and the kind of hilarious unironic ethnic stereotypes you could only get away with in the late eighties. We’re talking the poignant hard-knocks story of Little Mac and Doc Louis set to an electronic rendition of the song “Look Sharp/Be Sharp March” that still gives me a lump in my manly throat to this day. And most of all, we’re talking the one, the only, Mike Tyson, the greatest heavyweight champion of all time, an almost impossible-to-beat boss—except for me—and a dude who in real life bit off Evander Holyfield’s motherfucking ear on pay-per-view TV.

  Did you hear that?

  HE BIT OFF A MAN’S EAR IN REAL LIFE ON PAY-PER-VIEW.

  Soda Popinski. Little Mac. Mike Tyson. Bitten-off prizefighter ears.

  This is a game that is the purest incarnation of VIOLENCE… of SPEED…

  Of—

  FUCK.

  Holy shit, can you believe this? I haven’t heard from Nigel the Editor in days—TBH, don’t miss the guy at all—but now he’s pinging me on AOL Instant Messenger.

  Sorry, guys, this right here is an official…

  Real-Time Update

  Whoa whoa whoa.

  All right, so this is definitely Nigel the Editor’s AIM that’s coming through—I mean, he’s the only dude I know who uses AIM anymore, so that’s no surprise—but something tells me this isn’t actually Nigel the Editor…

  It begins, Doc—this is not Nigel the Editor. See what I mean?

  Wait, another AIM is coming through: Stop writing your stupid book and pay attention.

  Wait, how does this mystery person know I’m writing a book? (And it is not stupid!)

  It is absolutely a stupid book. And we know because we know all. We have ears everywhere. Eyes everywhere. Spies everywhere.
We are… the Brotherhood.

  The Brotherhood?! Oh shit!

  Didn’t see that one coming, did you?

  I mean, if I’m being honest…

  Bullshit. This was a total surprise and you know it!

  Whatever you say, Carl the Hunchback.

  But you saw me plummet to my doom in the icy depths of the ocean! And you KNOW that nickname is insensitive!

  Dude, everyone knows that the evil archenemy who plummets to his doom isn’t really dead. We all knew you were coming back. Like, all of us. And it’s not my fault you have a hunchback. I mean, go to a fucking chiropractor or—

  Enough! I’ve been waiting for this moment. My chance to get my vengeance for what you did to me, to the Brotherhood, to the ancient KEFVGAAIR tournament, and to our entire global criminal enterprise. I’ve been planning, plotting, scheming, then planning some more. And now, after all these years—

  Yeah, yeah, we get it! I know what you’re gonna say, all right, man? You kidnapped Nigel the Editor, and now you’re using him as bait to lure me into combat so you can kill me and finally get your revenge blah blah blah.

  Damn, was it really that obvious?

  I mean, as soon as Nigel the Editor told me he was going on vacation to Hong Kong, I thought, “Shit, that stupid Brotherhood and Carl the Hunchback are gonna kidnap his ass and try to force me into some badass final showdown.”

  We told him he won an all-expenses-paid first-class trip! He fell for it completely!

  I’ll think about it.

  What?

  I said I’ll think about it, all right? I’ve still got a ton of work to do on this book! Which is awesome and not stupid, BTW. I got all these deadlines coming up, and this new editor the publisher gave me—his name is Milton—is a real fucking ballbuster. And look, it’s not like Nigel and I parted on the best terms, you know? All that shit he gave me about selling my merch and what I’m actually a doctor of and not writing a whole chapter that consisted only of the world’s longest yayayayayayayayyayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayayaya—