By now, many on the Internet have heard the story of Nasubi (“eggplant” in Japanese), the Japanese comedian and unwitting game show participant on Denpa Shonen that endured nearly a year of total isolation and nudity during his time on the show. Forced to fulfill the mandated goal of winning 1,000,000 Yen through the constant entering of various contests, Nasubi was broadcast on television with little more than an eggplant graphic carefully following his genitals on-screen most of the time. (It should—or maybe shouldn’t—be noted that during the course of the show, however, he did win a contest for women’s underwear which he unsuccessfully tried on.)

Really, though, that’s not the story here. The story is that they actually turned the slowly degenerating mental faculties of this poor guy into a game—and a simulation, no less. Given the high ratings for the show, the bright minds at Hudson (a major Japanese game developer and publisher) decided to bring the experience of slow-simmered insanity to gamers’ homes in “Nasubi no Heya” (aka Denpa Shounen-teki Kenshou Seikatsu: Nasubi no Heya, a mouthful to be sure) for the Sega Dreamcast.

Let’s just get this straight; this was a game that mimicked the activities of Nasubi’s day. This generally consisted of a few things (if the show was any indication):

• Entering dozens of contests
• Talking to yourself
• Eating (provided food was available)
• Sleeping
• Finding a suitable place place to defecate
• Writing
• Prancing around in women’s underwear once in a while
• Lots of waiting

Stranger still, the game had an ‘on-line mode’ where if you won items in the game during a specified time and punched in the code number on the Nasubi no Heya website, you too earned the chance win prizes. That is, of course, if you hadn’t offed yourself by then from the sheer banality of it.

Let’s face it, if you’re in your mid-20s or older, you probably still remember when card collecting wasn’t just a hobby—it was a cool hobby for millions. In the late 80s and early 90s, baseball and football cards were glutting the market as fast as companies could print them in order to satiate the market. Among the more famous errors from that era was a very peculiar one, found early on in packs of 1989 Fleer baseball cards: The infamous Billy Ripkin #616.

If you were among the lucky few to have the first iteration of Billy Ripkin’s card, it seemed fairly innocuous at first; that is, until you actually looked at the bottom of the bat. Right there, in black letters readable to the naked eye, read “FUCK FACE”.

Parents everywhere were stunned, kids overjoyed at their newfound lucre, and Fleer decided it’d make things right immediately. Well, that was the theory, anyway.

Not only was it a massive lack of oversight on Fleer’s behalf (and perhaps one of the greatest errors in baseball card collecting history), it would take upwards of ten subsequent and blundering changes to the card for Fleer to finally correct the error to everyone’s satisfaction.

At first, Fleer used a marker to crudely rush out a new version, then in later revisions used a variety of other techniques (including an airbrush and common office white-out) until finally they decided to stick a black box on it and call it a day.

So, you’re probably asking yourself at this point, “How could this happen in the first place?” Ripkin finally admitted it was the work of teammates, but even this didn’t convince many that it wasn’t deliberate given the various levels of review each card was subject to. Whatever the case, the error and its variations remain collectible cards to this day.

Sometimes the derivatives of Internet memes are even funnier than the original itself. The “Chocolate Rain” phenomenon making the rounds for the past couple of weeks really failed to grasp my attention…until this bizarre trainwreck involving an old McDonalds commercial surfaced: