Aug 16

Hostile takeover of Cacti Radio! The Phone Show canceled forever! Cats and dogs living together!

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The Phone Show

Cacti Radio was once the home of the unbelievably cool live show known as The Phone Show, which ran from early 2009 until July 2012. You can click on that link to view the complete archives of The Phone Show and listen to its awesomeness – for the first time ever, the TPS archive is COMPLETE and all 3.5 years of episodes are available to listen to. There will never be another episode of The Phone Show, so quit holding on to hope, you dumb n00bs. TPS had an great run and we did some fucking amazing things and now it’s time to move on.

Hold on to those TPS iTunes and RSS subscriptions, though, because bigger and better things will be happening soon and you don’t want to miss out on an opportunity to hear what I consider to be bigger and better before unsubscribing in complete disgust of whatever I come up with. You’ll also want to keep an eye on PLA’s YouTube, because whatever new stuff happens is sure to end up there. I promise to miss the hell out of doing the show, though, and I’ll miss the whole community thing even more. You guys were all awesome!

So what about the shoutcast stream, you ask? I’ve downgraded the stream to a 50 person capacity and it is now broadcasting PLA and TPS stuff on it 24/7. There won’t be live shows on the stream anymore – not even by cool people like Carlito and R0xy, so please don’t ask me for stream access. The stream is now located in the sidebar of phonelosers.org and it’ll be updated often with new and old PLA material. I’ll be throwing the old Prank Show and Fun Show episodes on there too since they were so closely intertwined with the PLA.

I’m trying to convince Carlito from Madhouse Radio to take the Cacti Radio domain from me so he can do cool, live prank call stuff with it. Until this happens, I’ve forwarded cactiradio.com to his site, to further pester him into taking it from me. If you miss listening to live prank call shows, Madhouse Live is still on every Thursday night, KDK Pranks is on Saturday nights and Friday Night Cranks is on every week, but I forget which day, and then there’s the awesomeness of Zolar’s pranks. There’s a ton of great prank shows out there, and I will see you in their chat rooms.

Luv,
RBCP

NEXT DAY EDIT: Thanks to NotBrad’s suggestion that I set up a feed solely for episodes of PLA Radio (which I did and it’s here), today I spent HOURS creating RSS archive feeds for all 4 years of The Phone Show so you can easily put them all on your iPod or other RSS reader/device. There are 4 feeds, one for each year. Here are the links: 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012. Paste those into your iTunes and all the TPS episodes will magically appear on your iPhone. Very few of the after shows are in there, so you’ll still have to listen to those manually for now. I’ll get those put in there someday, though.

Jul 21

Brand New 2012 PLA Media Pack Released

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Dead Phone

It’s been about a year since I last released a new PLA Media Pack, so I guess it’s about time to do that. This year I’ve completely overhauled the layout of it all. I’ve added categories in the video and pictures directories and I’ve made some changes to the sound directory.

I’ve added a lot of new videos, plus there’s another year of The Phone Show and The Fun Show (RIP Staci). I’ve also included all of the pictures from the PLA Photo album, new songs and I spent an entire evening cleaning up my messy hard drive to find miscellaneous PLA stuff to throw into the pack. There’s even both of the PLA books in various ebook formats so you can stop throwing your money at RBCP! There is an additional 11 gigs this year, totaling 26.4 gigs.

So go download it now! And when it’s done downloading, seed it for awhile if you can. I’ll do my best to seed it myself as much as I can. Below is link where you’ll find the new 2012 Media Pack torrent, along with RBCP’s giant torrent of prank phone calls and Tabachi’s torrent of the 2012 Prank Call Marathon pranks. Share and enjoy!

www.phonelosers.org/torrent/

Jul 15

Hackers On Planet Earth 2012

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Instead of doing one of those silly, old-fashioned PLA panels at HOPE this year, Rob T Firefly organized a 90 minute radio slot on Radio Statler instead. This was perfect for me since I was too shy to leave my hotel room for the entirety of HOPE. We were joined by afreak, Laugh Track Matt, ME, Rogueclown and some others. Good times were had by all, except for the people that we called.

Here’s the show! Listen to it.

Here’s an aftershow we did once we were off the air which RTF and the HOPE crew had absolutely nothing to do with, so please don’t kick them out of New York.

PLA on Radio Statler [ 1:24:56 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (3169)
Jun 03

PLA Paper Archives

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Picture stolen from Legend - click on it to visit his YouTube

Last week I went on a rampage against paper, throwing old documents away and offering you people a chance to take some of them for free. Today I’ve scanned in a bunch of these old PLA things and I’ve put them up on an archive page. You can visit phonelosers.org/media/documents to browse the archive, or choose from a few of the options below.

Thanks, Laugh Track Matt, for convincing me that I should archive this stuff. More things will be added as I find them. All of these scanned documents are now sitting in a pile, waiting to be stuffed into random PLA Store orders. If you’d like to own a specific document, PayPal $1.00 for shipping to rbcp@phonelosers.org and let me know what you’d like me to send you.

I also scanned in other documents that were more personal, but some are loosely related to the PLA or weird phone things, such as this letter where I reconnected a girl’s disconnected phone service. You can browse those documents at notla.com/media/documents.

Jun 02

Own A Piece of PLA Memorabilia

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Here’s yet another post to tell you to watch PLA’s YouTube videos. These two videos might interest you if you’ve been into the PLA for a long time. Since I only have 8 months to live, I’m trying to give away tons of old PLA junk and photos. The first video contains the junk and the 2nd one contains the photos. Unfortunately a lot from the first video has already been taken, but most of the printed pages of stuff is still available.

Also on PLA’s YouTube are 3 more episodes of Sorry I Dinged Your Car and a Geek Squad prank, which are all embedded below. Apparently Geek Squad employees have been alerted to the video where we impersonate them because over 200 hits are coming from geeksquadcentral.com, which appears to be for employees only. If any viewers have access to those forums, please send us some screen shots so we can find out whether they’re LOLing or plotting their revenge.

Wal-Mart doesn’t seem too happy with our photo pranks, according to the memo below. This was spotted by a Wal-Mart employee who follows us on Facebook and was nice enough to snap a picture for us. The memo has done little good, though, because photo employees still give us anything that we ask for.

Attached to this post is the latest episode of The Phone Show, where you’ll find out what the word is if you listen long enough. You can click here to read the show notes. Don’t forget to listen to us live, every Tuesday night at 9pm Pacific / 12am Eastern.

The Phone Show - Satanic Wargames [ 1:17:24 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2848)
May 06

Tons of New YouTube Videos

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Outline of a pay phone

Isn’t that an amazing picture of the outline of a removed pay phone? I took that last year at a gas station, just outside of Corvallis, Oregon. Before they removed the empty pay phone stand, they were hanging advertising banners over the front of it. Did you know it costs around $700 a year to maintain a pay phone, even when that pay phone is only making a couple bucks a month? These are the kind of useful facts you learn by listening to The Phone Show every Tuesday night at 9pm Pacific.

Have you people been to the PLA YouTube page lately? I’ve been spending way too much time on there lately and I’ve uploaded a lot of videos recently, of new PLA material that you can’t find anywhere else. Below I’m going to post a bunch of videos that I don’t think I’ve posted on phonelosers.org yet. You are hereby required to watch every single one of them.

Have you watched them all? Good job! You’re not done yet, though. You still need to watch my video where I fail at hacking a cell phone and then videos of me opening mail from El Gordo Uno and opening mail from Laugh Track Matt.

Oh, so you like videos of people opening mail? That’s great, because lately PLA people have been on a rampage of sending each other random mail and then filming themselves opening boxes full of bizarre stuff. Here’s a video of Trevor opening mail from me, then opening mail from DS, then Laugh Track Matt, and then Tristan.

Here’s video of Laugh Track Matt opening mail from Tristan and here’s video of Evie opening a giant box from Tristan. Ugh, there’s no way I can post all of these so just go to this thread on the PLA Forums and watch our giant collection of PLA unboxing videos.

Just as I did on the last phonelosers.org post, I’m attaching a recent episode of The Phone Show to this post for the podcast subscribers. I don’t have any plans to do any new episodes of PLA Radio, but I’m sure one will happen eventually. The Phone Show happens every week and there’s a separate podcast feed for that, plus all the YouTube videos are kind of in the old PLA Radio format of just being different collections of prank calls SO QUIT COMPLAINING! Oh yeah, nobody was complaining.

The Phone Show (04-17-2012) The Bombfather [ 1:08:03 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (3212)
May 04

Button Contest Winner for April 2012

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Remember back on April 1st, when I post about an amazing new button designing contest where you could win your choice of prizes from the PLA store? The first batch of entries are in and I’m here to judge them. We’ll start with Rappy McRapperson‘s…

Rappy was the only person to draw his buttons with ink pen and submit them via U.S. mail and that is why HE LOSES! The rules clearly stated to email them to me! You get NOTHING, Rappy!

I may have awarded So0ty/Tristan with this month’s prize, but his McDonald’s logo spoof is clearly an attempt to get McDonald’s to sue me. Not cool, especially after the incident with H4rl3y Dav1ds0n earlier this year. Stick to making awesome YouTube videos for us, So0ty!

It looks like Patch used his 486 Pentium desktop machine with Windows 3.11 to design this one. What, you couldn’t find a good AT&T logo to use, Patch?? And did Windows Paint not have a center feature for text? Go to the public library next time and use a real computer!

Forest claims that it only took him 5 minutes to throw the above button together, but I’m thinking he’s full of crap and he spent days in Photoshop, designing it. Nice try, Forest!

Rhys seems to think that grouchy old man looks like a 1950′s housewife. And did Mildred Monday ever use “I’m” to refer to herself? I don’t think so. Mildred is just like Lieutenant Commander Data – she never uses contractions. Way to prove that you know absolutely nothing about PLA! But I guess those, combined with the GO AWAY PLA button, make me like your set of buttons the best and I’m forced to award you the prize of anything you want from the PLA store.

CONGRATULATIONS, RHYS!

Send me your address and let me know what you’d like! As for you other people – out of pity, I guess I’ll keep my word and send you the button that you designed, along with a couple other random buttons and maybe even an OBEY sticker if I’m feeling particularly nice. So give me your addresses, everyone! I want to add them to my giant notebook full of personal information on PLA people!

Thanks for the entries, everyone. Keep them coming because I’m going to extend the contest through at least the next month. I will announce a new winner on June 1st. It’s an easy way to win a t-shirt if you’re too cheap to buy one, so open up your pirated copy of Photoshop and get started!

(Linked to this post is the latest episode of The Phone Show for you podcast subscribers since I never make PLA Radios anymore. Enjoy it!)

The Phone Show (05-01-2012) Whistling 2600Hz [ 1:08:14 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2551)
Apr 10

2012 PLA Tour Shirts Available

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Front of shirt

Back of shirt

Here’s a new PLA shirt that will become obsolete immediately after 2012 has passed. Don’t miss out on this amazing opportunity to be obsolete before everyone else! The front of the shirt has a white PLA bell on it and the back has a list of “tour dates” for important PLA locations, such as the Curtis L. Superhacker Arena and Roy’s Cactus Emporium. If you show up at any of these places on the specified dates, you will win the prize!

The shirts will be in my hands and ready to mail at the end of April or maybe in the first week of May. (The shirts above are Photoshopped – you can tell by the pixels.) Don’t wait to buy these, though, because there is no guarantee that I’ll be printing any more of these. (I might, if they sell quickly enough.) I definitely won’t be printing any more of them after 2012, so this will be a collectors item worth millions by the time you’re dead. This is a guarantee, so think of the $15.00 plus $5.00 for shipping you spend as an INVESTMENT. No matter how bad the economy, your PLA shirt will go UP in value and your children will reap the rewards! Quit being a bad parent (or future parent) and buy one NOW!



Price + Shipping
How Fat Are You?





BONUS SHIRT! You may think you’re getting a good deal on the 2012 Tour Shirt, but here’s a way to make it an even better deal! After you’ve purchased a tour shirt, click the button below to add a Super Secret Special Radical Bonus Shirt to your order for an additional $10.00. There will be no extra shipping, just the $10.00, and you’ll receive another shirt that’s not available in the PLA store (no, it’s not the college-style shirt) with your tour shirt. How can you possible not do this??





Apr 06

Dear Arby: Sudo and RBCP Thwart A Kidnapping (Special Yall Edition)

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Sudo and RBCP at Defcon 19

Because of the numerous articles on phonelosers.org about recording phone calls and figuring out who owns a number and other similar topics, I get a lot of bizarre emails from people. I originally created the page on recording phone calls for the sole purpose of recording prank phone calls, but as you can see from the comments on that page, that’s rarely what the information is used for. And last week, my latest email about identifying the owner of a phone number resulted in the following email:


To: Brad
From: Josh

hey maybe yall could help me out seriously, cps has my friends daughter that was kidnapped when she was a baby by the dad that ended up in prison, now there trying to adopt her out saying tough shit basically. i have 2 of there numbers and the area there in, but there cell phones. was wondering if possable yall could drum up an address would be very helpful thanks drop me an email if yall could help out(address for the 2 cell numbers and a house number if possable to)

These kind of messed-up emails are very common for me and I usually get at least one crazy email per month. Usually it’s from wives wanting to spy on their husbands or parents wanting to spy on their teenagers for having sex, but this is the first one that made me feel like the guy was interested in using my site to kidnap his kids. My first reaction, of course, was to be an complete asshole to the guy, so I responded with this…


To: Josh
From: Brad

When you say “now there trying to adopt her out” you should be using the contraction version of “they are” which is “they’re.” So you would actually type “Now they’re trying to adopt her out.” When in doubt on that one, it’s best to just say “Now they are trying to adopt her out” which sounds kind of robotic, but at least you don’t appear as dumb.

“I have 2 of there numbers and the area there in, but there cell phones” is also incorrect. On the first one, you should indicate possession by stating “I have 2 of their numbers” and in the second instance it’s another contraction of “they are.” The third use is also a contraction of “they are” but it seems to flow better if you just use “they are” instead of “they’re” so the full sentence should be typed as follows:

I have 2 of their numbers and the area they’re in, but they are cell phones.

I’m very glad I could help you.
Brad

I posted his email and my reply on Facebook for us all to laugh at, deleted the email and figured that would be the end of it. Unless, of course, I got a hilarious reply, which I never did. Sudo soon convinced me, though, that I should actually do something about this guy being so sketchy about needing his kid’s address. I mean, there’s gotta be a reason CPS took the parents away from the kids, right?

So Sudo emailed the guy back and said she’d be happy to help him identify the phone numbers as long as he promised that nothing illegal would happen with the information she gave him. The guy responded with two phone numbers, promising that “no1 will be harased” and that he just needed the information for his records. We were totally convinced!

Sudo immediately called up one of the numbers and had a chat with the guy who was in possession of the kids. He told her a few crazy stories about the guy who sent the emails that included hacked Facebook accounts and restraining orders and he was really happy to hear that we were looking out for him. He asked her to forward him copies of the guy’s emails for him to show to attorneys or cops or something.

After forwarding the emails to the guy and telling him how happy I was that that the kid would be raised in a home that respected the rules of basic grammar, I immediately resumed Asshole Mode again and drafted an email for Sudo to send back to the original guy with the results of our search on the phone numbers he gave us. Our lengthy reply included the address of his local police department as the physical address on both of the phone numbers. Hopefully that will result in some kind hilarity or at least a few angry emails from the guy. Keep watching this thread for updates!

To read some similar emails from crazy parents and spouses, visit this thread in the PLA Forums where you can read emails and replies. In some of them, the person’s address is included so you can even give your own helpful replies to them. Thanks for giving me a small taste of morality, Sudo! If only you’d been there for me in Christmas of ’96…

Apr 01

Design A PLA Button Contest (2012 Edition!)

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If you’ve visited the PLA Store in the past 4 decades, you’ve probably noticed the buttons for sale. Many of these buttons were designed by PLA forum members in a 2006 contest that lasted for 23 years. I’m starting up the contest again, only with bigger and better prizes!

This time, not only will I send your button to you, plus a few extra buttons of your choice, but I’ll also pick a winner at the end of each month to receive any item they want from the PLA Store. A shirt, a book, a CD, or whatever other crappy thing we’re currently hawking in an attempt to get rich. I even have some items that aren’t in the store anymore, such as coffee mugs, that you can choose from.


  • You can send me as many entries as you want. You’ll either send them directly to rbcp@phonelosers.org, or just post them in this thread.
  • Entries should have something to do with the PLA, no matter how obscure.
  • I will send most people the buttons that they design. I will choose which ones not to send out, such as the ones that are just random images poorly slapped together or text that could never possibly be read on a 1″ button. I will publicly ridicule the really bad entries this time instead of being nice and mailing them out.
  • If multiple entries in a certain month are especially awesome, I just might pick two people to receive PLA crap.
  • Many entries will become a part of the PLA Store. Others won’t go in the store, but will be regularly given out along with other merchandise that’s ordered. You won’t be compensated, other than to receive a few free buttons and possibly the monthly prize. You can rest easy, knowing that my buttons profits are always negative because I give tons of them away with orders.
  • Yes, I’m posting this contest on April 1st, no this contest isn’t an April Fools Day joke.
  • No, a part of the April Fools joke is not to say that it isn’t a joke even though it really is.
  • GOD, JUST LOOK AT THE OLD CONTEST PAGE IF YOU DON’T BELIVE ME!

I’ve made some templates to get you started on designing PLA buttons. If you’d like to make a small button, then use this template. If you’d like to make a large button, then use this template.

Ready, set, GO!