Our Bucket Brigadier of 2022 is…

The turning of the calendar is not merely an excuse to make hollow promises to oneself and others, it is also a time to celebrate Greatness in Shitter Hunting and Greatness of Shitters! Today we are here to acknowledge our Bucket Brigadier for 2022 and it is a long-overdue accolade for ILikeSocks, a veteran shitter hunter who is now a decorated Brigadier. Socks has been with the Brigade for many years and has contributed something like over 13 shitters to our museum. Our community is so lucky to have him.

This is the most accurate picture of Socks that I could find. Outside of his hobby as a legendary weaver and baker of breads, Socks is a connoisseur of fine gaming entertainment. What does such a sommelier detect in choice gaming? “I honestly just look for anything to fill the gaping void of time. If it’s scary, or has exploration and/or space I’ll check it out. Also FROMSOFT games. I like finding shortcuts around the world. I guess I just like games where it feels like the people making them actually cared. Low bar 🤷🏻‍♂️”

Games you are looking forward to in future? “First thing I’m looking forward to is ELDEN RING DLC after that in no particular order: RE4 remake, Diablo 4, Armored Core, Starfield, Bombrush Cyberfunk.”

What’s the worst video game you’ve ever played and why? “The worst game I’ve ever played? You know it’s the cesspool that is Elder Scrolls Online. Heel deep gameplay where every class is exactly the same just with different colored spells. Power creep so insane the devs are in a perpetual state of meltdown, small unengaged community full of toxic groups. Difficulty all over the place with only two modes. IM TOO YOUNG TO DIE and We Are Never Going To Clear. Soulless cash machine, the entire game exists to prop up the crown store. There’s a few unlockable things like mounts and pets in the old old old base game content and maybe a few free outfits when you complete the DLC story but for 99% of anything worth having you need to buy it in the crown store. I could rant forever. But ESO fucking sucks.”

Thank you for everything, ILikeSocks! In your honor, $25 will be donated to the World Toilet Organization on World Toilet Day, on behalf of Gaming Thrones.

The 2022 Blue Bowl Award is HERE!!

So it’s finally fucking here, something we have all been waiting for! 2022 is over, everyone always says “Last year was a flaming dumpster fire, good riddance!” but wasn’t 2022 quite a bit better than a couple of them previous years, let’s be honest? We’ve had some great shitters in 2022, yes a lot less than usual perhaps and I completely own that because as you have heard me say a thousand times I’ve been in school and it fucking sucks, dude. If I could hunt shitters for my living, I would do it, but so far nobody has stepped up to be my Shitter Daddy (sorry, I won’t say that ever again). Anyway before we get into the winner (not like you can’t immediately see the image) here’s a breakdown of what qualifies (and quantifies) as a Blue Bowl shitter.

1. The throne itself must give thrills. Effervescence of the brain occurs at its vision before you, something you remember and tell your children about.
2. It tells a story. Has a potpourri of background imagery. A scene is being constructed around the shitter. Bonus if the shitter itself is a quest item.
3. Dungeon/prison shitters or ‘Wilson’/sole companion shitters, for obvious reasons.
4. The Blue Bowl shitter is a $25 donation to the World Toilet Organization, which will be received by the WTO on World Toilet Day.

This Blue Bowl Award is brought to us by our 2022 Brigadier of the Year, ILikeSocks, and it’s from Callisto Protocol. This one slide down the chute just before the end of the year and she is doing the most. This prison shitter gave me the thrills, and the chills! It’s going above and beyond with all that background glitter. Just based on the shitters alone I would definitely play this game, but you know what, honestly here’s a little review of the game from Socks himself, so you be the judge:

“A overwhelming “Meh”. Wait till sale or GamePass. It’s more unfinished half baked combat. The game looks great, spiritual successor-ish to Dead Space. But the combat is melee focused, not a terrible idea in itself but it’s shallow and quickly gets repetitive and when fighting more than one monster the combat falls apart and gets infuriating. Think melee combat as basic as Hellblade 1… maybe moreso, and where the monsters are happy to just gank the shit out of you and you dodge with the left stick for some reason. The dodge and combat break down when fighting anything more than one monster. For me at least, it’s in the same boat as Alan Wake 1. I really want to push forward with the story, I love the genre (Stephen Kingish Sci-fi Horror) but the gameplay is just to basic, repetitive and like pulling out my teeth. Also it’s mostly cheap jump scares and gore. Not really scary. Then again Dead Space wasn’t scary either. Some of the monsters are cool, but there isn’t much variety so far. Also same review applies for SCORN while we’re at it.”

Game quality and all of that aside, the shitter is fucking delivering. I am flush with more Callisto Protocol Shitters of Fear queued up to flash at you, now that I’m on a solid break so please look forward to it! 2023: The best is waiting for us! I am ready for this shit!

The Dr. Boris Habit puppet was created by Romanian puppeteers Gabi & Todi.

They’re flushing the smiles!

Hunty, what the fuck is “Smile for Me”? It’s a creepy and beautiful acid trip made from mixed media and interactive puzzles. You play Flower Kid, and while at The Habitat you meet strange folks, solve problems on their behalf, and get to sleep in a Cowboy Bed. The main objective is to prevent everyone from “losing their smiles forever” to the vindictive yet sensitive, clownish and gender non-conforming villain Dr. Boris Habit. So here’s the shitter.. and look! there’s a smile right inside it! Turns out this is a quest item. This shitter is submitted by Bucket Brigadier Rockin T!

You can always Go Home to a Clean Bathroom

This shitter is brought to us by Bucket Brigadier Rockin T from the game Gone Home which is serving up Indie Vibes with that font. Says our brigadier: “I actually don’t FULLY remember the plot of this game but it’s the 90s and you’re a woman who’s come home to an empty house and you look through it to unravel the truth of your sister’s first love. Essentially while you’ve been away, your younger sister fell in love with a woman and the family wasn’t supportive and everything sorta fell apart so now the house has been largely abandoned.”

Deplorable, shitty family dynamics need not necessarily translate into deplorable bathroom situations, because as we can see this is a fairly spotless restroom, all things considered. Damn. This shitter has witnessed some truly bad parenting, and although it too was abandoned, we are taking a moment to appreciate it once again because look at that elegant, elevated cistern. Not something I would put in my own bathroom but hey the 90s were crazy baby. AND BY THE WAY, that push-button flusher was patented in 1993, so FINALLY we get video game designers who actually do their RESEARCH! (I’m looking at you, Fallout 76).

Mobile Home Park Shitter!

Ever just lose your keys and then think “Of course, I’ve left them in the shitter.” If so, the best advice I can give you for this LIFE is to just not take things out of your pocket while you are in the bathroom. It will make everything much easier for you, you will lose less things and touch fewer germs overall. From Bucket Brigadier ILikeSocks, this keyless entry is from Alan Wake remastered, a horror game that isn’t very scary. Our Brigadier-submitted commentary follows thusly:

It takes place in the same universe as Control and one of the DLCs was related to it. I’m expecting a lot of weird paranormal shit and that won’t make sense. It’s like “Totally Not Stephen King” from the 2010s. All their games are weird AF but I love their stories for some reason. Also it’s clear to me now Remedy is a smaller studio because they reuse all the same voice actors. Not that I mind because they all have 10/10 narrator voices.

Alan wake has the worlds weakest flashlight. The battery drains in like 5 seconds. In this scene, our Shitter Safari takes place as the hero tries to find car keys to get back to the cabin. Your wife is missing (I mean you were probably divorcing anyway) and there’s like evil darkness fucking with everything. Fun Fact: The stall on the right there you can’t open because some nerd is waiting to pop out (I had to reset game because the lights went out and I couldn’t take these glam shots). I’m finding manuscripts I haven’t written yet. and it seems like at this place you can write fiction to be real or something.

Cmon, concentrate! If you could write fiction to become reality anywhere in the world, it should be while on the shitter. Everyone knows the best thinking of the day happens right here, after all the gut is lined with brain-equivalence neurons.

Calisto Protocol Tutorial Shitter: Solitary Confinement!

Bucket Brigadier ILikeSocks is taking us to the major leagues with a collection of Shitters of Fear from the Future. Horror survival game Callisto Protocol thrills us in the first 30 seconds with a prison shitter, which I love to see. Some sage wisdom from Socks:

“I literally have no idea what’s going on in the story yet. It’s basically a dead space game. Which itself was basically Resident Evil 4 in Space. You crash your “Aliens”-style cargo ship, and they are like “Guess you’re in prison now,” then monsters break out. I was supposed to take an elevator up but it went down because it was broken for plot reasons so they have you go through solitary as an alternate route. This is the Solitary Confinement shitter. Everyone loves shitters of fear, but no one wants one in real life.”

Too fucking true, dude. We delight in the beauty of the Shitter of Fear, but rarely admit the utter debacle it has gone through to acheive that beauty. Let’s break it down: This prisoner was evidently a shrewd DIY crafter because look at all those empty TP rolls. Everyone knows you can make many delightful decorations and ornaments with these! This restroom is obviously a MAKERSPACE. Pair that with copy of the Tao Te Ching you see on the shitterside console and your inner anthropological detective begins to form a portrait of who this prisoner was: A thoughtful introvert who just cared too much. And what a comfort it must have been to have this bulletproof shitter, pulling double-duty as a sink, for a companion during their time of great personal turmoil. Shitters of Perseverance!

Dormitory Death Shitter!

Submitted by Bucket Brigadier Rockin T, this shitter comes to us from Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc! A visual novel adventure game, it is exceptional due to the fact that it accounts for the requirement of bathroom breaks in any adventure. This scene shows us the death of Sayaka Maizono, and her corpse is in Makoto Naegi’s dorm bathroom. Her vital fluids are hot pink because this is the cute sort of horror. As told by our Brigadier: “She was killed here trying to frame Makoto for murder by killing Leon, but then Leon tried to kill her instead and she hid in the bathroom, but he managed to kill her with the knife. In this scene, you’re examining the room for evidence! They think the killer is Makoto originally, but you go through the trial and are able to prove that it was Leon! You can’t see it in this screenshot, but behind her, she wrote LEON, but upside-down because she drew it in blood with her finger on the wall so it was facing her. So, it looks like it says 11037 because the line between the N is too smudged. A lot of the trial is figuring out the importance of the code.”

I seem to remember this exact plot from an episode of Matlock wherein a dying woman still had the strength necessary to program her VCR to the time “3:37” because her killer’s name was LEE. She was also upside-down at the time. If you know anything about programming a VCR, it requires every ounce of your concentration plus black magic fuckery and the help of a TI-84 Plus graphing calculator, and a sextant couldn’t hurt, so I have doubts.

The toilet in this scene is very interesting. Fun fact: Contrary to an outsider’s assumption of sheer ignorance, this toilet is NOT behind a transparent partition of performative privacy theater. Rather, this ladycorpse is in a shower, and the toilet could only look on helplessly through the glass as this terrible crime was perpetrated. No one ever asks a shitter to testify, and I think that’s a loophole that killers often capitalize upon!

It’s almost here!

Mark your cal- What am I saying? Surely your calendars are already marked for November 19, World Toilet Day 2022! In previous years, we have joined forces with Omninuts and his Nutsack community, as well as held separate fundraising exercises via third-party fundraising websites, to collectively raise over $1000 for our beloved World Toilet Organization! This year, it’s time for something a little different and Gaming Thrones will be making a donation on behalf of the Bucket Brigade. I hope you will all join me in celebrating this joyous day by participating in the World Toilet Summit, this year taking place in Abuja, Nigeria.

Here’s a little about one of their latest projects, SaniShop Mozambique:

Mozambique is in the top 10 countries in the world in terms of number of people defecating in the open. In addition there is huge inequality in access to sanitation. Nationally only 19 percent have access to improved sanitation, and in rural areas only around 6 percent of the population have improved sanitation. Open defecation rates nationally are around 40 percent, but among the rural poor – it’s 96%!

From 2014-2017, SaniShop Mozambique will be developed in the peri-urban areas of Maputo City. This project is being undertaken in collaboration with Mozambique-based NGO ESTAMOS, ACRA-CCS, and funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In 2014, WTO worked with our partners eKutir, along with ACRA-CCS to train our NGO partner in Mozambique ESTAMOS for the setting up of SaniShop, including two site visits to the project in Maputo.

These are the kind of efforts that you help support when you donate just one dollar to the World Toilet Organization. Gaming Thrones pledges $5 for each and every Bucket Brigadier submission which is donated on World Toilet Day - November 19! I hope to see YOU at the World Toilet Summit! You can register for a virtual ticket at the World Toilet Org website!

Every Toilet has a Twin!

They say that everyone on Earth has a doppelgänger, but did you know that your shitter has one too? Yes, it’s true - in fact, every shitter on Earth has one, and YOU can find your own shitter’s own doppelgänger at Toilet Twinning! Pick from nine rockstar locales and twin your toilet - in exchange, Toilet Twinning will fund workshops which provide training and community-building to teach families to build and maintain their own sanitation systems. It’s a powerful way to elevate opportunities for underserved communities, and you’ll get a cool certificate that you can hang in your bathroom so you can remember that, with each and every flush, you’ve made a difference in the lives of people you may never meet. #Twinning!