Sesame Street: Unimaginably Hard Mode
Dear Reader,
It's been nearly two years since I first documented the story of Sesame Street: Hard Mode. Two beautiful years in which I did my best to recover from what I saw. Two wonderful, perfect years in which I lived in the illusion of getting better.
But, just like the Count's clock, when he threatened me to Solve his Shit or die those two years ago, I'm afraid my perfect illusion has run out of time.
Because, Dear Reader, I found another tape.
I found a third part to Sesame Street: Hard Mode.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'll try and explain quickly.
I am what you could call an adult fan of Sesame Street. I'm not one of those weirdos who spends every day religiously screaming on the internet that Elmo ruined the show and demanding some kind of fuckin' crusade, but I do enjoy the show from time to time. As such, I occasionally enjoy a bit of discussion, usually online where fellow fans are easier to find, about the show. One time I was on one of the weirder places to find such discussion (probably fuckin' 4chan, you know how it goes), and I found a few people discussing something called "Sesame Street: Hard Mode".
Just the name alone was some weird shit. What the fuck was the point of a Hard fuckin' Sesame Street? The fuck did that even mean? Hard Mode? Like Mike's Hard fuckin' Lemonade? Was it fuckin' alcoholic? Were they fuckin' drunk? Was that why Oscar the Grouch lived in a fuckin' trash can? Was HE a fuckin' alcoholic, just like Stephen King? Did Oscar the Grouch enjoy a fat rail of cocaine every now and then?
I guess we'll never know.
Well, I managed to get a download link to this mysterious "Hard Mode", and it was horrifying. The video was able to interact with me in real time and various Sesame Street characters threatened to literally fucking kill me if I couldn't answer their questions.
Then, a second time, I found something called "Very Hard Mode", which was...perhaps even more horrifying.
And that was it. For two years, two beautiful, wonderful years, the story of Sesame Street: Hard Mode was over.
This morning, dear Reader, that all changed. It started out a morning like any other. It was a Saturday, and after a particularly grueling work week, I was relaxed in bed scrolling through some emails, just to make sure I didn't miss anything.
And that's when I saw it.
A strange email was sitting in my inbox, from an sender labeled "Your Friends At Sesame Street".
This couldn't be what I thought it was. I tried to tell myself I was overthinking it. Probably just an email from Sesame Workshop about some stupid product for children that I had no interest in. Maybe I got on their mailing list somehow.
But when I opened the email, I knew this wasn't an ordinary message.
Inside the email was an image of many of the famous Sesame Street characters. It looked like a pretty old photo. On the image there was fancy, handwritten text which read "You Found Us!"
Attached to the email was a single file.
"Unimaginably_Hard_Mode.sesame"
Oh, shit.
The fuck was a .sesame file?
Dear Reader, I could've just clicked away. I could've deleted that email and ignored the fact that I had ever learned of the existence of a third Hard Mode video.
But if I did, I'd be stuck in the shadow of Hard Mode forever.
The only way to truly get better, to really recover, was to confront Sesame Street: Hard Mode one last time, and end this once and for all.
I clicked the file.
My computer, having never seen a .sesame file before (I mean, fuck, has anyone?) asked me what program I wanted open the file with. The computer suddenly detected a program I'd never installed before called "CountReader" with an icon of The Count's face.
I knew that CountReader was the only program that could actually open the file. I don't know how it installed itself on my computer, but for now, I played along.
Immediately, the video came to life.
The Sesame Workshop logo appeared, but it was accompanied by the sound of someone shitting. I'm pretty sure it was The Rock. It sounded like The Rock, specifically, taking a fucking shit and moaning.
I'd heard his new song "Face Off" recently, but this was more like "Pants Off", if you ask me.
Before I had time to even process that, Elmo fucking burst onto the screen in front of a flat blue background, but he had fucking changed his name to "Haggar". I knew this because he was wearing a name tag that said "HELLO, MY NAME IS" with "Haggar" shittily markered on.
Elmo (or was it Haggar now?) started singing in a deep, gruff, unintelligible voice. It sounded like he was singing in some fucking made-up bullshit language.
Suddenly, a prompt appeared on my computer screen.
"What is he saying?" it read, along with a box for me to type the answer in below.
I honestly couldn't fuckin' tell. The audio seemed to distort more and more as I listened to it. At one point it literally sounded like a fucking violin coming out of a human's mouth. What little lyrics I could make out were all in Mandarin Chinese and translated to extremely crude phrases like "My balls are bigger than the Sleeping Bear Dunes" and "Your mother is a world famous whore".
I tried to type as much of it as I could make out into the box and nervously pressed enter.
Suddenly, Elmo/Haggar/whatever stopped singing and stared into the screen. I have never seen a fucking puppet express such rage before.
He fuckin' LURCHED forward and screamed in an incredibly insensitive Chinese accent:
"WRONG! YOU WRONG! YOU FUCKIN' DUMB! YOU SO FUCKIN' STUPID! YOU WRONG ASS! NO DINNER FOR YOU!"
Elmo then whipped out a fucking knife and threw it at the camera.
I nearly expected the fuckin' thing to hit me.
Why did I still flinch? All of this was taking place on the other side of my computer screen, and yet every time I participated in Sesame Street: Hard Mode I legitimately felt as if my life was in some kind of danger. Why did I feel like these characters could actually harm me?
Probably because my fucking PC exploded after Hard Mode #1, but I've tried to convince myself that never happened after a couple years of therapy.
The next scene was.....bizarre. There was no prompt, no question, nothing. It was just a scene of Telly in a dimly-lit basement sitting on a fuckin' couch watching Bojack fuckin' Horseman on TV.
Suddenly, the TV lost power and fuckin' crapped out right in the middle of the show.
Telly let out a deep sigh.
"What the fuck?" he whispered almost inaudibly as he slowly crept over to the TV.
Telly then proceeded to fuckin' SMACK the side of the TV with all his might. He started hitting it so FUCKING hard that bits and pieces of the fuckin' ceiling started raining down on his head.
Telly then accidentally struck a little too hard, SMASHED through the fuckin' side of the TV, and screamed "Ah, SHIT!"
Telly then walked up some stairs, RIPPED the fucking door to his basement off the hinges, walked into the kitchen and took a shit in the fucking sink.
He then look at the screen and said
"Better to shit in the sink, than to sink in the shit."
An EXTREMELY loud fart noise was heard as rotten fuckin' bananas started blasting out of the sink and the scene abruptly changed.
Ok, what the hell? The fuck was even the point of that being included? There was no challenge, no sense, no FUCKIN' point. All I did was watch Telly SHIT in the fucking sink just like I was SHITTING my life away by sitting here watching this SHIT.
We then see Guy Smiley, who I guess is a more obscure character these days. He was hosting one of his game shows, but instead of the name being "Here is Your Life", like usual, the name of the game show was "Fuck You".
"Welcome to Fuck You, and FUCK YOU!" he yelled.
Alright, really? Was this REALLY fuckin' necessary?
"The rules of the game are simple." Guy began. "First, let's-"
Guy then vomited a fuckin' onslaught of black worms everywhere as the screen began to shake from the force of his fuckin' chunking.
What the FUCK?
Guy cleared his throat.
"Excuse me. As I was saying, the rules of the game are simple. If you answer my question correctly, you don't fucking die. If you DON'T answer my question correctly, I'll blow up the fuckin' shit-ass Dell computer you're watching this shit on!"
What the fuck? Could Guy Smiley really blow up the fuckin' computer? Who knows what the CountReader software was capable of.
"My question is.....If a bucket is seen dropping past the 6th floor of a building traveling at 3.8 meters per second, how many floors does the building have?"
How the fuck was I supposed to even answer that? COULD you even answer that? Was this just a fuckin' death trap orchestrated by Guy Smiley to take me off the fuckin' board?
Obviously the building had to have at least 6 floors. 3.8 meters per second tells me the bucket was travelling at around 9 miles per hour, which means that there were probably at least a few floors above the 6th. But what floor would it be? There's so fucking many options.
This question.....
Was fuckin' impossible.
What the FUCK was I supposed to type? I didn't know the FUCKIN' answer!
"TIME IS RUNNING OUT!" Guy Smiley fuckin' SHRIEKED as intense music began to play.
I still didn't know what the fuck to type.
Suddenly, the curtains behind Guy Smiley parted and the fuckin' Rhino from the Amazing Spider-Man 2 started charging at me and screaming.
I shit myself. I kid you not, I fucking shit myself. I didn't just brown my pants a little.
I fucking blackened them.
Frantically, I typed "9" into the answer box.
The scene changed.
Did I get it right?
Guy Smiley was gone.
The next scene was a simple white background.
Suddenly, a fuckin' CGI Sharpie Marker with angry slanted eyes and a mouth flew into the scene, started fucking screaming, and scribbled a bunch of nonsensical shit all over the background.
It wasn't even good CGI, it was the kind of shit you'd expect from a PS1 videogame, if that.
It disappeared in an explosion of ink that left a large blotch on the screen in what was probably graffiti that spelled out something obscene.
Roughly 2 seconds of a women's perfume commercial cut in untill the footage resumed and we now see Oscar the fuckin' Grouch standing in front of the background.
"The 4th dimension is a complicated thing". Oscar said. "In this vast multiverse, we cannot hope to discern what is truly real. They built the bridge. That much is clear. They built the bridge, that is how you can see us. I knew that the Illuminati was real, didn't you? They're watching in every universe."
What in the HELL was he on about? Fuckin' Philosophy Oscar was NOT my cup of tea.
Suddenly, fucking pictures of biblical angels and shit started flooding the fucking screen.
A text box appeared below with a simple prompt.
"Explain."
What? What the FUCK? Explain what? Explain all of this?
I typed "I was hoping you could do that for me" into the box.
Instantly, Oscar began to morph into a shape that could barely even be described as Oscar anymore. He looked like an Eldritch horror which I cannot even begin to describe. He had no face, and yet everywhere was his face as he began to speak.
"Spoost." He said in the voice of every human alive at once.
The fuck? The FUCK did "spoost" mean?
"Nonsense is the only sense that makes any sense at all." Oscar said as my eyes became uncontrollably glued to the screen.
I saw two children in a grocery store. One of them picked up a bag of Sesame seeds.
"Sesame Seeds! Don't you know? Grover sells these!" a young boy said.
"Innocence was yet to be lost, and all was simple." Oscar said.
I then saw a succession of scenes that didn't really make a lot of sense to me, other than a voice that continued to yell "Don't you know? Sesame Street doesn't really exist!"
"Sesame Street must exist." said Oscar. "The balance must be maintained."
Words began to cover the screen.
He Cannot Stop Here, they said over and over again.
The text box appeared again.
"Explain."
I typed "Sesame Street Must Exist" into the box, and the scene changed.
The last thing I heard was Oscar's distorted voice saying "Good...." before everything switched to an old castle.
Oh, fuck.
I already knew who would be waiting for me here.
There, in the center of the scene, was my old nemesis, the avatar of my nightmares.
The Count.
I looked around the scene a bit and noticed that there were mathematical equations frantically scribbled across the walls. The Count also had less hair than he usually did. It looked like he was beginning to go bald in the center of his head. He was laughing to himself in his usual Count way, but the laughter was quiet, and came out in uncontrollable bursts. It was like watching the fucking Joker or something.
The Count looked up at the screen.
The minute he saw me, a burst of wretched laughter erupted from his mouth.
"Hello! It is time for our relationship to end." said the Count.
The fuck? I really didn't care for the Count's wording, to be quite honest. Me and this sick FUCK did not have a "relationship".
"This will be our last meeting. Observe the following question." The Count said as he wheeled out a chalkboard and started writing down the opening steps of an EXTREMELY complicated strong induction modular arithmetic proof.
"Finish THIS!" the Count HOLLERED.
Suddenly, a timer appeared on screen.
2 minutes.
2 minutes? 2 FUCKIN' minutes? That was IT?
EXTREMELY intense fuckin' hard rock music began to play, which made it really hard to fuckin' focus. To make matters worse, a fucking rock guitar descended from the ceiling of the Count's castle on a metal wire and the Count grabbed it and started fucking playing along with the music, making the most RIDICULOUS facial expressions with his stupid fucking puppet face.
The fact that he was trying this hard to hype up his own shit was honestly just really fucking cringe-worthy.
"SOLVE MY SHIT OR DIE!" the Count screamed as usual, in a sing-song tone of voice.
Y'know what?
Y'KNOW WHAT?
NO!
No more of this shit. I pressed the power button on my computer.
It didn't shut off.
"YOU CAN'T DO THAT SHIT, ASSHOLE!" the Count screamed.
Fuck. Only 1 minute left on the timer now.
Well, it was nice having this computer while it lasted.
I put my computer on the ground and punted it straight out the fuckin' window. Halfway on the way to the ground, I heard the Count scream "FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE!" and the computer exploded like a fuckin' bomb.
I wasn't afraid anymore. Sesame Street: Hard Mode couldn't hurt me. Not anymore, in any event.
Honestly, after everything, I decided to just fucking go back to bed.
Have a good night, Sesame Street fans.
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Credited to Chimichangar
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