I know pretending I think SOPA is “SOAP” is really lame and obvious. I assumed it was, thinking I might have a decent angle on it. However, I legitimately do wash my hands in the dark and like imposing my weird habits on people. I have showered at least twice. Interpret that sentence any way you like.
This is a primary reason why I talk about pointless topics others don’t care about; I can have all the dumbest jokes to myself and not be concerned what lazy idiot I’ve never heard of already did it poorly and annoyed someone else I’ve never heard of in some never ending, never starting MC Escher gauntlet of unplacatable judgment of crimes which don’t matter (stop me if someone else on the planet has mistaken Escher for a rapper from the 1980s at some point in history). In fact the less people I’m aware of, the less I want to scream at. I’m a worse judge than anyone and can’t handle it very well, since I’d rather not yell at anyone louder than me. Additionally, when I see “hurr” or “derp” in a simulation of another human I lose my ability to consider it in a rational manner.

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The thing that is currently blocking wikehhhpedia is really wimpy and easy to turn off. Or am I missing the point? Or does my going to wikipedia with the intent to see what its blocking measure looks like and if I can get around it exhibit a fundamental missing of many potential points of my existence?

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I recently learned that some people were blacking out their internet in protest tomorrow of SOAP, the notorious remover of blessed and peaceful blackness through the centuries. Well it’s about time I say. With that in mind I upload some particularly grimy watercolor objects from last year, confident that as few people as possible will see them. Although I keep up the fight every day by washing my hands in the dark, I’m used to people taking years to catch up to my trendsetting ways.

Notice that neither of these is doing anything but they’re both not doing it in approximately the same fashion, and both deserve our harshest retribution for it. The one on the right is probably only slightly worse.

Every thing it does is an atrocity. Every act is reprehensible. Every deed is dirty. The bow tie animal could be one of the spaceballs. All it does are dirty deeds. This is interfering with my right as a citizen to protest cleanliness. It is outrageous that that THING is still on the streets. I mean, it should be on the streets. It should be tossed out of a window onto a street. Perhaps out of several windows onto several streets, and perhaps motor vehicles will more closely acquaint the animal with the streets. It’s THAT bad. The thing is horrid. HORRID. horr-id. Can it be stopped? I honestly do not know. Every day it gets horribler and horribler. Truly it is atrocious. Can anything really be THAT bad? Yes. But a little stupid animal? Yes. Do not give it any appreciation. Do not even pretend, to get it to shut up. It will not shut up. It’s so dumb it will think you mean that and think that means it should continue talking about its bowtie or its feet or whatever stupid thing it might talk about. You can only win by not letting it win.

How about this: I’ll cut them off and toss them in a field and then you’ll have to find feet. The bowtie animal is a bozo. i would call it a bonehead, but i suspect it lacks a proper skull. It looks too punchable to have a skull, and if it has a brain surely a skull would have prevented the extensive damage which has no doubt occurred. Oh mushrooms I’m over the deadline by a minute. Now I’m a traitor and don’t support not supporting censorship. All because of feet. In fact I do support censorship but primarily of the elements close at feet at hand.

Thank for the help, wordpress.
This explains a lot, and yet I know less than before. Prior to now I’d only encountered stories of this helpful notice’s existence. You may assume any error page that isn’t a depressing shade of green or that lacks any flippant text has eluded my ability to discover, much less rectify the cause of, for what nothing that’s worth.

Looking through my files now I definitely wrote an alternate version of that message in the pertinent file but this ever so helpful upgrade must have overwritten it and been so proud of the deed that it also decided to make the page appear more often.

I also evidently changed another message that I never even encountered. I doubt I’d be here to tell this story if I had.

I should probably make a new entry out of this considering that it now has several images and requires excess time travel to make sense of in the context of the main items.

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Maybe I should just draw wings on them.

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I wrote this in 2010. I never posted it. Or so I say. Look, see, at the url. “http://bimshwel.com/?p=341.” Last week’s was 439. That PROVES that my website entries have numbers assigned to them. I reckon I could repost three solid years of old bimshwellians that I never found occasion to link back to at any point and say I hadn’t already posted them, when I had, but nobody would notice. Likewise if you were to hack into this (I doubt it’s hard) and repost them yourself I wouldn’t notice either.

What does RED mean to ME? I don’t know what it means. I don’t think about stuff that way. I can’t get punched in the nose at Shop Rite and then come home and fling paint angrily at a canvas for three hours and have something I think is great. Red, to me, is just a color which some things are. So I thought of some red things and made a picture with those in it. And then I added other irrelevant, distracting stuff that would confuse people. The person who sent the email said I didn’t have to deal with the THEME if I didn’t want to. Which meant I really had to, now, just to prove that I could. And like usual I figured it would take a lot less time than it did.

Not bad, but not great. I wished I had started sooner, but really the sooner I start working the sooner I start procrastinating. I thought I could pull off something this complicated because before this I made a pixelly version that I thought looked pretty nice.

Well I thought it did. Making computer stuff is considerably easier for me than real stuff. Hence why I did it there, first, but I figured I could copy it well enough. I also probably grossly overestimated how much time New Haven art enthusiasts spend watching the intro sequences to old Sega Genesis games.

Hmmmyes… fascinating.

Well maybe the picture isn’t ideal but it’s good enough. Anyway, this isn’t at the small space gallery like last time.
You remember the small space gallery, don’t you? Well I do. It’s a place that is not really an art gallery at all, it’s somebody’s office with a few pictures stuck to the [evidently incomplete] walls. THIS time, though, my object was going up in the Sumner McKnight Crosby Jr. Gallery. Things are getting a might bit fancy now.

Yaztaplazca! It’s the old switcheroo! I ought to have been fooled by nothing less than the new switcheroo!

Darth Snack Mix returns again. This may even be the same bowlful from last time and nobody dared to move it.

This is actually my third run-in with the snack mix. I didn’t tell you about the second because it must not have struck me as interesting at the time. It seems really exciting now, though.

I think I was the youngest person in there and the only one whose goals were in any way absurd or narrative-y. While it’s nice to not feel old, for once, if the only fellow ar teests who “get” what I do are kids I’d rather be around them than pretentious snobs who honestly think smearing red paint on a rectangle and taping newspaper headlines to it is worth charging $500 for.

I did like this red clock, even if there’s no apparent reason why it should be red as opposed to purple, periwinkle or a normal clock color. I think the label says Michael Johnson. I suppose I ought to have read it at some point. The title of the piece appears to be “Mullet Trap.” Alright so the guy’s name might not be Michael Johnson.

I thought since I had actually painted something and was offering the actual thing I’d made rather than a copy, I should have a proper frame for it, rather than look for a cheap one at walmart that the thing would fit within. The fancy frame would have cost $112 somehow. So I decided not to have a frame. This is but a matte and only cost $24. Much like with my digital prints the bottom edge was cut off, but unlike my prints that is because this is actually for a reason and the person who did it was conscious of where my signature was. I wouldn’t want to bring shame upon the famous E. Cunni by associating it with this anyhow.

That fool has some talent!

Beans that settles it. I’m going somehwere else to get my prints made.

And then I’m coming back again.

I saw this reflected on the inside doors of the elevation chamber when I went to drop this off (the elevator was shiny) and observed that the large figure’s head is incredibly lopsided. Not that it’s turned to one side; it actually appears to be melting. the ears and the eyes are both at different heights. The pine cone is tilted, to the left, the opposite direction that the other stuff seems to be going in. I was trying to compensate for the right shift without realizing it. I don’t have an easel, nor space for one. All “real” things that I do are seen almost exclusively flat on my desk. Distorted. Always. And this thing is going to hanging up until september. Urgik.

I called it “vegnarok” because the only other thing I could think of at the time was “vegarmageddon.” I didn’t realize that invoking ragnarok implied one side was evil. The point here is that both sides are victims. I later decided “Saladnarok” was a much better title and requested that the name be changed, but I apparently only succeeded in altering one letter.

None of these names, in fact, are accurate, because the stuff shown is actually produce; much of what is involved is fruit, but I was not thinking with efficiency, and in any event I couldn’t find some way to work in any part of the word in which it was evident that was the word I had used. “Warduce?” “Broduce vs broduce?” (this was the year before I declared war on “bro”) Nothing good. “Folic Heroics?” “The seeds of war?” Oh that one’s almost clever. “Salad Oppressing?” “You war what you eat” alright that one’s just stupid. I eventually thought of “Ragnarcrop,” but I didn’t like the way it sounded. Which doesn’t make any sense because “saladnarok” puts emphasis on the “lad” which one doesn’t do when pronouncing “salad” unless reciting a poem about fads and doodads (putting emphasis on the lad sounds illegaler than it is).

I also thought of “farmageddon” but a quick google search revealed two different things calling themselves that, one of them a non-existent yet perfectly hypey computer cartoon series based on a comic strip that ran somewhere, allegedly, for two years in the early 90s with a wikipedia page written by the authors four years ago, and I suddenly thought of myself as considerably less clever. The animals talk, though.

I was required to prepare a typed “artist’s statement” in order for the thing to be displayed. I didn’t know how to do that so I supplied this instead.

Hello! I am called Brendan Cunningham. I make pictures sometimes. Many of them can be found on bimshwel.com, which is a website.

I am fond of stupid things happening to stupid looking creatures. I don’t, in general, “understand” art beyond what I immediately see in it, so I avoid attempts at symbolism and “meaning” in my own output as best I know how. You are welcome to your own interpretation, naturally! My primary goal is the amusement of myself and potentially others.

I primarily deal with pixels and other digital nonsense, but I envy those who use paint and ink. I’m only allowed to display one piece here so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to misrepresent myself with a work in a medium I have no experience or comfort with.

In this scene the adherents of beets and the partisans of tomatoes have reached a moment of great potential conflict due to the vile trickery and sculduggery of Pinot Conio, the fiend whose upper portions float menacingly above, violating the laws of physics and perspective, as often occurs in uninspired film posters. My hope is that taking inspiration from the uninspired will overload the uninspiration meter and cause it to register a more favorable reading.

I think you’ll agree that this is incredibly stupid. However, despite it being the first serious thing I’ve ever attempted with this mysterious gouache substance, I am fond of the painting and have thus given it a ridiculous price to discourage any sensible person from purchasing it (I’m kidding, of course; no sensible person would take this for free!).

That’s done! My artist statement! It wasn’t so bad. I was worried I’d get myself in trouble. People are so easily offended in a dumpstervania like New Haven.

I didn’t include the last line.

I was trying to be as sincere as possible without seeming boring. The problem there is that in actuality I am both boring and insincere.
I discovered later that the artist’s statements were not displayed anywhere near the art or indeed anywhere near anything so it would not necessarily be clear what I was talking about when the time came for somebody to see this. So I was boring, insincere and irrelevant. I astound myself.

This is the best painting I have ever done, which would be a significant statement if I had ever made a good painting.

I should stick with acrylic paint, though, I think; that is the paint for indecisive mistake-makers who draw in pencil first. This is gouache. And after four days of looking at it I have a gou-ache.

^{And I know it’s not pronounced like that but it is spelled like that.}

I can’t believe I didn’t put a pumpkin in here. It would have been much more clear than the coconut-with-orange-slices-attached-to-it mace in the upper right quadrant.

Here’s another idea I almost had. I say almost because I never figured out what it potentially might mean. Unless… gah what a fool I’ve been! It all makes sense: the store deliberately priced the frames out of my range to cover-up that nemitz stole them all. Ironic, since it’s impossible to frame nemitz for a crime because anything bad you accuse it of it probably did. The fiend’s already started a war, for beet’s sakes. Alas beet didn’t realize that the war in fact did nothing to improve its own sake. For no obvious reason we have chosen to imprison nemitz inside both the windows 95 pipes and 3d maze screensavers at the same time. It’s good that nemitz is in jail but it never lasts and in any event the crime was still done.

on the positive side I now have one more thing I can do badly.

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Also I “upgraded” word-press, the system which this website would function through if it could be said to do so. The tacky presenting imps now float above their bases. I don’t suppose they look any less dignified than before but they do look less deliberately placed so they will have to go. They had to go anyway, I suspect.

An add-on which is designed to remove garbage comments which would not work without me upgrading now works at last. However, the upgrade also broke the thing which allows me to open entries to comments which I had closed, because all the comments coming in were garbage, which amounts to the same thing, except if the add-on doesn’t actually work than I can’t close anything new either.

page 47 is it now? Of that, I think it was.
I may be getting a little bit better at ink application. Not better enough, and certainly not any FASTER, but perhaps this means that will eventually be feasible.
It finally occurs to me why comic artists use blue pencils; because it’s a different color from the ink and so selective color detection can automatically remove it. I obviously haven’t used one here. It hasn’t been my experience that colored pencils’ marks are terribly compatible with erasers but I never considered testing it by color. Anyway that won’t do a thing about the grain of the paper or the unending hassle that is layer switching plus the increased save period which makes me reluctant to do it as often which is a terrible idea when using outdated image manipulating software.

If the government has the power to give itself more power, then doesn’t it already have that power? The fussing and video linking I encounter decreasingly have meaning to me.

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If I’ve learned one thing in twenty-eight years clearly I have not been holding myself to a very high standard.
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2011 in Pictures

Usually I post this in my liverjournal but I haven’t read that in two years so I can’t reasonably expect that anybody else has either.
Also, usually I try to limit the list to one picture per month but I never succeed so this time I didn’t bother. I think you’ll agree that all of this is absolutely relevant.

January

February


March


April


May


June


July

August


September


October


November

December

This really helps you to see at the big picture; you can now easily compare them all to see which it is.

I don’t understand how people can reserve scorn for Justing Beepy Eeper when that “catch a grenade for ya” guy is still on the loose.

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Perhaps you have wondered what, apart from my championship ego-mania and being the first person to ever have a relationship go badly have prevented me from maintaining a regular update schedule. And perhaps not; I’ve had quite enough of it.

It started out easily enough. I was to create a “series” of painted images with some sort of unifying theme. I couldn’t think of one in the time I was given because it coincided with the inadequate time I was given to do several other tasks I wasn’t qualified for. I decided to show a pointless creature going on a pointless journey, which would make the lack of a point the point. I was not enthusiastic about that idea but also figured that I could change my mind and construct a point while I was making the first. I could not.

The second image is a version I made on the computer first to assist in making the first actual painting, so in fact this came first but I chose to show it second. It occurs to me that I have referred to this image and the third image, the second painting, as simply “the second,” and that is most confusing. Ah fiddlesticks.

People on the internet statistically liked the fake unfinished one I did in a few hours about as much as the real one that I did across two weeks, but as the fake one is more directly compatible with the internet, and I’m used to not being impressed with what people on the internet are impressed with anyhow this is probably a personal triumph. Though I say “people on the internet” with a derogatory implication I am obviously not talking about you. You’re so pathetic I know you couldn’t handle it.

Nonethefewer the painting looks nice enough in person. Impressive considering that at 24×18 inches, it was four times 11×9, the size I’m used to not being comfortable working at. It even merely looks like I didn’t feel like mixing paint, rather than my having no idea how to do it.

The specifications of the second image are the same, apart from being perpendicular. I do not feel this functions as well, overall. I am accustomed to making pictures with horizontal orientations, two dimensional layouts, stage perspectives, in deserts, that have nothing to do with the pictures that came before them. I am accustomed to snow but not recently. The only things I was comfortable with were the balloon and the goat, those being the most out of place elements.
The biggest difference between this painting and the first is that regardless of art website approval points nobody but me cares about the first actually looks better than the grubby computer version I made to assist in the painting’s creation. Assisting its superiority was that I was so preoccupied with inventing a resolution to appear in the next painting that I forgot I didn’t need to compulsively obey the pixel arrangement. I made it to help and now it’s just being a jerk. Also I never arrived at a resolution.

This painting I did not even want to go to the trouble to scan in 5 parts. That does it slightly better justice than digital camera interpretations, but I do not feel it is entitled to justice. It is a reprobate ne’erdowell. I didn’t want to scan it until I had fixed the parts that I didn’t like, but once I had done that it would be another month before I could place that into the scanner without damaging one or both. Though I can’t say that neither deserves it.

Initially I wanted a sunset, but then that would mean the figures would be backlit, which I imagined was undesirable. So I had to depict the side of the sky opposite from a sunset, the boring side. It being still pinkish but less interesting. It didn’t occur to me that sunlight reflects, rather powerfully, off snow-covered surfaces, and further that nobody cares what direction cartoon characters are lit from. Also that this goat is in fact a sorceror of black magic who is immune to light sources.
The picture on the whole needs more “light.” However, at the time, I lacked the time to give it light before I started the third painting. Now I have the time but despise the deed. Anyway here comes another.

This one, thankfully, benefut a great amount from the scan procedure. I again tried to take photographs of it, but the noirish-mixture reacted to light in a consistently inconsistent manner apart from the other colors. However, the bland uniformity it takes from the scan isn’t so splendid either. Alas, lamentation, woe and whatnot.

Since it was supposed to be a “series,” and I knew I had no goal, the only way to grasp at cohesion was to put as many elements as possible in all three images. By the third, this largely prevented me from including anything else! Yet it is clear that I tried. It’s clear I tried because I said I tried and if I was going to lie about myself I’d tell better ones than that.
And now I’m annoyed at myself for not working the goat into this one. The goat seems reliable.

Aw beets you know you’ve run out of ideas when you have to put your dorks in space. Even the Leprechaun and the Critters didn’t take their pointy-toothed ghostly floating heads there until their fourth respective, respectable films. I can at least assure you that my fourth and fifth paintings are already “done” and neither conspicuously takes place in The Hood.

Oh now we’ve done it. Wonderful. My paintings officially remind me of Rygar. Now you know the real reason I’ve been depressed the last few weeks.

Moon scenes work when they are desolate and peaceful. My paineding is incapable of being peaceful because it is full of little objects of all different colors (and also that honorable faceless warriors the likes of Rygar are unemployed during peace time). The lighting doesn’t make sense because I imagined most of the light was coming off the earth-like planet orb, and so the shadows should go away from it. Yet if they did then the foreground figure would, once again, be backlit which wasn’t what I wanted. My solution was to light the characters from the front and the terrain from the back. Which isn’t a solution at all because it just looks like I have no idea how light works. Rather, I have a weak, ineffectual grasp. And yetter if the Earth is lit that’s only because the sun shines at it, and the earth’s light is a mere reflection, so in fact the shadows should be reversed. And yettest to face the sun directly while in the minimal lunar atmosphere would be painfully blinding and there’s no way this creature can read its map. Yes that’s supposed to be a map. Although it is lost so clearly it cannot read its map. Conclusion: This isn’t one.

As for the sky itself, again realistic references were a problem. None of them showed any stars. None of them showed any galaxies or color variation. The stuff that makes space fun to look at. The stuff that makes space fun to fill!

Here is a photograph of the stupid moon car taken on the moon. Very grey, no stars, no atmosphere, painful unfiltered light, obscure shadows.

Here is a crummy online representation of a painting that somebody more competent and compositionally imaginative than myself made prior to technology allowing cameras to go to the moon to take photographs from on it. Lots of stars, reasonable light, lots of shadow, lots of temperature. If I’d looked at this kind of thing instead of photographs I’d have done fine.

In fact I DID look at made up silliness but only for the sake of copying and didn’t consider the thought involved in the collective context within which I located the object to be copied. So I’m a hypocrite and a lousy copier. I’m also a terrible dancer.
Fahhhb. And for all I know this kind of thing is more accurate anyway and the cameras just mess stuff up when used outside on sunny days.

In which event my painting is still true to life. Life is often disappointing.

except when it’s worse.

Which being consistent with my expectations is not a disappointment at all and therefore not an exception. Which means Windows 95 isn’t going to lock up today, which is very good news, considering that I’ve already condemned myself to Rygar dreams after I post this.

Well that was quite a week, wasn’t it!

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No this is about something else!

I had a half-hearted complaint about fox television [back in September] and realized I hadn’t posted this where I said the same stuff better. It’s old but time increasingly has no meaning to me.

from the creators of arrested development comes another ugly, ugly, vulgar lecherous cartoon. Usually they can say from Mike Judge or Seth McFarlane or Matt Groening, established ugly cartoonists who just happen to have had success in the field. Arrested Development was not an ugly cartoon. Why, if they were to transition into animation, would they choose to have their product be ugly if the possibility existed that it did not have to be? Footooraba at least has some competent background design work, even if it’s no less derivative of 1950s science comics than any live action shows of the 1980s. THIS, if I am accurately informed uses no background design at all and just swaps in photographs. It appears to take place at an academic institution of some sort, if I had to guess, and I do because I’ll never watch this advertisement with the sound on or again, I’d say it’s a High School, because America['s broadcast masters] can’t get enough high school. I’ve been avoiding tv shows and movies set at high schools my whole life. There have been so many, that I could watch a few regularly and still miss enough to claim to have avoided them.
After a bit of reading I probably definitely shouldn’t have bothered with, I discovered that far from creating this, Mitchell Hurwitz merely copied the idea from ANOTHER show from Australia and then pitched it to networks after the American The Office got popular, and it was only the Fox channel in the end who demanded it be a terribly drawn cartoon. The character designs, incididdly, are by Mo Willems, of whom this page claims “His illustrations, wire sculpture, and carved ceramics have been exhibited in galleries and museums across the nation” Of COURSE they have.

Somewhere there’s an exclusive club made up entirely of multi millionaires who had absolutely terrific times in high school and want everyone to know it.
Glee, I saw the first episode, and no more. Maybe that’s not long enough to form a proper judgment but it should be long enough to make me want to watch again and I didn’t even want to finish. It was a mildly entertaining rehash of the same old high school-themed junk I’ve been sick of/utterly unable to relate to for most of my life. It didn’t do nearly enough to bring me back for a second show, but the dorkwash of praise around it was plenty adequate to keep me away. That stuff is 100% market research. People will watch anything if it has high school or kids singing at the screen in it.

I simply have no interest in people playing sports and falling in love and losing sports but then winning sports and going to classes sometimes in highschool, regardless of whether they’re the first black anything. No part of high school for me was easy and definite enough that I would let it pass in a montage. This was related to some movie that came out a few years ago that I almost wrote about but I can’t remember what it was, but it’s worth saying, because they make that one a lot. I don’t suppose anybody wants to watch a television program about filling in worksheets, twice daily hour+ long busrides, or a year long speech strike resulting in expulsion, including me, and my situation(s) are so unusual that I shouldn’t expect anybody with money to know, much less care, much less gamble a pilot on it. But what they show instead is such a fallacious fantasy that after a few tries loses its novelty value and we realize it’s not meant to be novelty value but they think that’s reality.
I’m sick of “anti-hero” nerds. I’m at the point where The Most Unlikely is always exactly who I expect it’s going to be. Being a nerd must rule. You actually understand course material and there’s an established clique of like-minded gorkachus who share your interests. To date the only depiction of high school I’ve seen that I relate to that I recall occurs in Billy Madison, one of the least realistic movies ever made, even by Adam Sandler stadards, assuming he has any, in which at one point Billy starts yelling out the corny lines (Chlorophyll? More like bore-o-phyll!) that made him popular in grade school the week before and suddenly nobody thinks he’s funny anymore. Thankfully he only had to be in high school for a month. Forrest gumping Gump got through high school and college in about three minutes evidently without any stress or emotional crises, dropping only some narration of the length it time it took in non-montage time, five years, that’s supposed to make him seem like a twit for not realizing that’s longer than it’s supposed to take… I’ll be lucky to do it in six, not including the four year break in the middle! Clearly I’m not going to find fictional underachievers more pathetic than myself unless I invent them.

How is this at all fair? Even they get to have a dumb club.

Golly goopity I typed “gleek” into google to get a picture of that dopey blue monkey so I could post it here and pretend I was confused, not expecting gleekitude was an actual THING that people have taken upon themselves. I can’t tell if the television marketing ad executives invented it or if the viral marketing ad executives invented it, but it’s awful enough for either. Ha ha look we are proud to call ourselves an insulting name! We are very fond of labels! Please sell us official authorized merchandise with this word on it!

Alfight so I wrote most of that last year… by now this trope processing plant’s been on television for about a year and a half and it already has [at least] seven albums –depending on whether the two christmas albums are included in that total– presumably all covers, performed by the exact same people. I don’t even think Now that’s what I call an album title that’s annoying to use in a sentence was chudding them out that fast, and they weren’t presumably also producing a quasi-weekly and one imagines scripted national broadcast at the same time. Why indeed even make the television show? Glee Christmas II: Return of Durant has twelve songs on it. Unless the program has already degenerated to the point where every week is a christmas episode, it seems most likely a majority of the recordings were produced exclusively for the album, which unlike the TV show people have to pay for in currency apart from their souls and I am meant to think they do. Maybe the price is worth it to be able to imagine the singers aren’t in tv high school.

My theatre class ah teacher let’s say pronounced me a “gleek” when I stated that Michael Crawford from the film edition of A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum went on to play the Phantom of the Opera, after she posed the question of what Crawford was best known for. First of all, if I’m anything, it’s because I know Michael Crawford starred as Phineas in the London West End production of Barnum in 1981 and while I admire his linguistic speed and ability to walk across a fleeping tightrope while singing I still prefer Jim Dale’s official Broadway cast album version of the same songs because his put-on American accent sounds less like Regis Philbin.
But second, I object to having my awareness of things that predated my existence summed up in terms of a tacky sponsor expo that’s younger than my external hard drive. If I’m older than Glee but share some of its passions then perhaps glee is a meek. Ha uh oh no.

If this smarm mill is for establishment nerds who aren’t cool enough to like Kidz Bop, the muhponies of a few weeks ago may be for those not cool enough to like Glee. Whether or not that is true it lets me transition into the next bit which isn’t looking to be relevant again soon.

I can’t tell if this is a gag or not. I no longer have any concept of what’s funny and what’s serious to these people (“these people” being the users of the website with that or similar layouts or other websites used by them dissimilar in appearance). If you’re unacquainted with the orange-horned albinos that’s well enough but they tend to manifest their presences in the exact same way as the diminutive equines. This person isn’t against obsessive fans; just obsessive fans for other properties. Although I suppose merely having a ripoff character that you represent yourself with is a long way from the extreme of obsession, and this person has a considerable list of obsessive traits that he does not possess. So I am instead concerned that he possesses an obsession obsession. I am concerned because I saw what that affliction did to me.

However, is there a club for me if I’m also anti-random tough guys with mustaches? Must I align myself with the Ice Road Truckers to express frustration with something? Must I stand behind Animal from the Legion of Doom to have a say in this?

By Skipper I don’t feel safe in this company. Gleek’s not going to be any help against the Legion of Doom; the Wonder Twins were cut from that series!

Whatever am I going to do about pink-shirted, booted men in gargoyle poses flying through space by their own power?

No, not compose an ode of praise!

A more important question, perhaps: does this make me an obsessive Superfriends fan? If it’s possible to ask the question, to be in my presence without this becoming immediately apparent then we probably don’t have to argue about it.

Furries, glecowafers and their ilks are very much like the people in Flatland, a book about a world that exists entirely in two dimensions (there’s an inaccessible bit for my math class), in that they are incapable of looking at matters as a non-furry would. They can’t be “against” any overpromoted entity for breeding monotony because they’ve never been “for” anything that didn’t.
But I was here to talk about Glee and the gleek army specifically, right? (sort of) Well good news I’m done. They may live and do as they please.

But good news for whom?? Oh deef. Well I hope somebody managed to learn something from all this.

I also look forward to next year’s means of being dumber than this one.

Shall we meet again on Wednesday (Thursday)?

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The best parts about lying awake trying to sleep while sick are the relaxing and enchanting dreams about lying awake trying to sleep while sick.

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Last time I mentioned some gay stuff.
Was it truly news? Indeed a few years ago I referred to a creature holding my old camera (and to date the only camera I’ve had that would allow me to take a picture in the dark) as a “gay wizard,” but I never identified it as me. And I still haven’t!

The line about “odd fondness” from the previous notice I wanted to redact; I don’t like the idea of people thinking I’m even capable of an odd urge for anything, imaginary or otherwise. I wanted to prove it was possible, that odd focuses didn’t have to rule everything. Anyway, back in the past, even after one note’s worth of caveated gayness I already doubted that I was in a good situation, as the one which followed it exhibits, somewhat more mopily, after what interval I cannot guess:

2009, 2010 or thereabouts
At last I understand. I don’t like it, but I understand it. It seems like such a waste of time, and like such an easy thing for one person to take more seriously than the other. “Sweet nothings.” I always hated that phrase. Meaningless statements that do nothing more than reaffirm a person’s validity to itself. That sort of thing shouldn’t be necessary. I tried to keep myself from soliciting it. Yet once I started getting something that resembled it I felt entitled to it, and worthless when it was cut off. And why? Since I never deserved it to begin with, short of the other person coming to its senses I don’t know what changed. Apparently now I need someone to say nice things to me and create the impression that they are meant, and fairly regularly.


I do not want to need this. It makes me feel psychotic. It makes me want to interrogate this other person as to why it is “avoiding” me, and once you’ve shown that you’re suspicious you can never yourself be trusted again, I don’t think. And the truth is that I’ve been suspicious of just about every “friend” I’ve ever had. This one just hurts more, and so I feel more desperate to take actions I will regret. This is not good. I have actual problems that are already hard to solve. Saying “I cannot solve this problem because somebody won’t return my calls even though obviously he’s around because I see him leaving comments on other people’s pages who do they think they are,” is not a proper way of handling them.

Love? I do not want to love this person. We both have more important things to do, and I don’t think he thinks he’s gay. I don’t think I am but over purely semantic disagreements. English is a stupid language that is hard to learn because it uses one word to mean a bunch of things. “Sex” can refer to simply biological characteristics but also to an act that I find repulsive, and thus I avoid both of the word’s uses, as well as any word which contains it.

“*hugs*” That was new to me. I thought that was a special thing. It isn’t. Everybody gives *hugs* to everyone else. I only wanted to give *hugs* to one person. I only want *hugs* from a person I would actually like to hug.

I understand that if a person who made you, I, me, feel like the best thing in existence suddenly appears to feel differently, how morale can suffer. However, I am old (26 years at that point) to be experiencing this for the first time. I have no resistance to it. Howeverer, I am also too sensible to convert this into aggression against others, and I’m too optimistic that I’ve misunderstood to challenge the person who is making me feel this way, and so I have no proper release for this raging lamentation.

In a way, it was all I had. Loving another was not a thing I expected to happen, and I don’t expect it to happen again. I acknowledge it is possible, but when it happened it was highly unusual. It was like tripping over the tip of a complete dinosaur skeleton buried in the ground when I walked outside to get my [household's] mail. I don’t think there are many complete dinosaur skeletons still buried anywhere, much less right underneath the surface in a densely populated area below sea level. I can currently not remember what it was that drove me forward just a year ago, before I had known the good part. And I get little enough done as it is.

I can’t hate him. Writing this I still believe I have possibly misunderstood. Even if I haven’t, and it’s true, I know he suffers a lot. A lot of pain, a lot of sickness, a lot of misjudging, a lot of psychotic people on the internet (some like me, some not so much). I know that I have little to offer beyond awkwardness and neediness. I thought he was comfortable with that. I felt welcome. I felt needed. I don’t know that I can forget that unless it happens again. Although this recent thought of mine suggests that the acceptance and approval, and above all the special position of note were in part imagined by me and not deliberately made to seem that way by the fellow, I enjoyed the delusion. It was real-er to me than some blurry 3-d movie might ever be.

He did some things I thought were questionable, and he gave some justifications that I found questionable, but I could usually get my mind around them. I like to think I am not a proud person, but I suppose I am. However, this pride is easily melted.

The love is nice while it lasts, but devastating when it’s done, much like “food” from Taco Bell. Any amateur dietician will tell you should not eat the taco bell stuff. Popular consensus is that Taco Bell is bad while love is good.
There are a lot of lonely people out there. I’m glad there are people who will listen to them, but they should not let it go this far. We want very desperately to be loved, and will misinterpret anything we can. I’ve seen this before, but this is my first time from the inside.

it’s sort of like that 2004 King Kong movie, where the gorilla loves the tiny little human even though there’s no possible way they can consumate the relationship, and the human has to act like she loves the gorilla because the script tells her to. So at this point, I’m already far enough up the empire state building that falling off will kill me, but I am determined to do more damage when I fall than I currently would. Also, I just remembered that I’m only a regular sized gorilla that can’t finish college and that nobody really cares about one way or another.

By here I clearly have realized that I am writing a personal disaster memoir. Still a solid year before the dumb pony mishaps. Most of my haps are mishaps. It has lost all attempts to be amusing, though what I followed it with might still be sort of interesting for the truly perverse, and I don’t even say “raging lamentation” again. Fortunately I’m not desperate enough for their interest today to seek it, and so I shall cut it off here. Ideally it won’t be seen again.

I received a few messages of support after last time; I very much appreciate those, but I hope it did not appear that I was depressed! I was, but due to an accumulation of a number of factors, and this whole thing just happened to have resurfaced, it came to find me in the midst of them during November, two months after I had been glad it was “done” before my classes started, and at one moment the thought struck me that I absolutely had to get this stuff out “now,” but it’s nothing at all new. Yet I’d like to leave as much of it in 2011 as possible. I had three rather stressful classes, and the one easy class, introduction to theatre, which late into the semester required me to read the text of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which is astoundingly not actually about that. Rather it tells of a disabled, ambiguously gay introvert surrounded by people with funny names and who won’t talk to his becancered father and who can’t be with the person he loves. In fact it’s worse than that, since the the “friend” Skipper kills himself over the gayness, and in the film version, which won’t acknowledge that gayness exists since it was made in the 1950s (which was kind of the point of the play, that these people are marginalized and made to feel ashamed, but rhubarbrhubarbcatroof), Skeepah is simply an all-around failure, and I couldn’t decide which of the pair I had more in common with, but somebody’s dead and it’s either me or my fault. I’m awful.

In fact the object of my afflictions is still alive, thankfully…I may have inadvertently implied that he wasn’t when I said I never had an opportunity to say how I felt; the issue there was that he always had a remarkable way of not getting messages, or setting things up so that he could say he hadn’t.

Even when we were on good terms too often I’d be talking to him -not even “away”- in a message thing and then he’d disappear, and then reappear the next day and be unaware of everything I’d said. Even if I’d just said “hello,” that kind of thing gets draining after a while. And he doesn’t read his email, so the only way to make absolutely sure he sees something is to post it in some sort of public space where
Oh that’s no good. But the automatically generated notice at least is totally tactful and reasonable, in the usual vein, o lucrative memetrepeneurial art site.

I still do not hate him. I wish I could! If he called me today I would become ludicrously cordia and probably back down considerably from any unpleasant things I typed herel, which was a theme brought up in The Sound of Music, another film I watched while upset. (I wonder if my choice viewing material isn’t my real problem; I also caught myself sympathizing with King Arthur and Enry bloody Iggins (Judas as well but I don’t think he was supposed to have been in love with Jesus at any point)) Hating would be much easier. To have no doubt, to be confident I had done the right thing, or the rightest thing which was at the time feasible. I am moreso than I was but I never totally conquered it. Reliving being “blocked,” like right now, by going to his page to take a picture of the block notice, and also seeing who else he’s been talking to since it first arrived, isn’t helping.

Still I’m grateful for the anger sometimes, and hindsight now leaving me thus rather than sad. It makes getting over the situation (or absolutely not getting over it but coexisting with it without hating myself as much as I have potential to) easier. I’d hate to look back and see stuff I’d did that was awful and that I regretted. Which I know because I spent the first half of this year doing it! So next time I will resume attempting to be interesting, unless something else stupid happens.

This is most distressing!

Blaf, now I have time to write things again. I suppose I had best get around to that within the next day or so.

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Monday, the after-twelfth:
I’m going to be very disappointed if I get off the bus at the ghetto Popeye’s at 10:30 am after my final math test and they try to sell me “breakfast.” I’m not finishing these huge dumb oil paintings by wednesday on a few fleeping egg sandwiches. They know why they’re in business; I can’t be the only person who wants 8 pieces of chicken with biscuits all to themselves before noon; the world wouldn’t be so messed up if I was.

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Sunday, the twelfvth:

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I fear I might be crazy, but fortunately that fear ensures that I am not. My confidence therefore worries me.

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I witnessed the new muppet film. The prominent folk on the sign weren’t as bad as they could have been, and I wouldn’t have gone if I had thought they’d be. I have more faith in my initial assumptions regarding the thoroughly atrocious rabble previewed prior to the thing I came to see and I’m rather bothered that anybody thinks muppets have a thing in common with the goddumped 3d chipmunks, much less anybody with money to ensure the association. More then likely the same people who make muppets heap in the back in promotion for their own movie.

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I mentioned something last [occasion of updating]. If you read it you might have thought it odd how bent about I was becoming due to a “friend” and wondered if I am a totally unstable maniac. I am but that’s not why I said that. In fact it was, to me, a love sort of thing toward the masculine pronoun’d friend. And right now you might be saying hey i didn’t know you were- and first of all yes you did, and second it isn’t how you might think.
Perhaps I might be gay in some emotional capacity, but I have no fondness for very gay imagery any more than very “straight” imagery.
My open-mouthed grimace of disgust is not a thing that I bother to fake, much less while alone, yet I know it well.

While my infatuation was going on, I greatly wanted to say so publicly, but feared to, worried that the target might be embarrassed, or would not fully reciprocate it. And when it was over (meaning a year before I understood that it was) I again feared to say something because I had never made it relevant, and also because he might change his mind if I kept quiet and it would not be over, but it would definitely be over if I brought up my grievances, I thought. Rather convenient for him, I now suppose, who continued to confide in me some rather difficult things for another few months after I felt I had personally ceased to matter before he found another to take the job and I was reassigned to stable chores. For convenience let us call him “W.” It’s probably not difficult to find out what his actual name is and that it is devoid of Ws and yet he must be called something and that is the letter I chose.

It has nothing to do with this image; he only answered about 3 of the 47 or so calls I made during the relevant time period and I’d have been as fortunate to get such a frank summation of which behaviors of mine were undesirable.

Though the exact contents vary by the season, I have been having cyclical arguments in my own mind fairly consistently for the past two years as the relationship gradually dissolved into nothingness and then continued in motion to re-form into something unpleasant and indescribable because I absolutely could not let go of it. It may be the case that I must display such unbalanced vitriol and misanthropy in this place to totally ensure that not W or anyone would ever wish to deal with me again. I will be better for it, as will they.

I think the section below is mostly from 2009. A pity there is no date on it and the only image referenced prior to my finding and putting it here is from before even then (and I have forgotten who I stole it from). I kept something of a like, dislike-themed journal in a text file but neglected to record any dates. It is interspersed with personal messages for W, or pieces of them, which I never sent, prior to my devoting a separate file exclusively to messages I did not send once I no longer had anything to say to myself. Those are harder to read, because first of all just the way people talk when they’re in love is disgusting whoever either of them is, and then imagine how much more daft and infantile this is when only one of them actually is in love. But the sight of myself treating W in a merely diplomatic, sometimes reverent manner is now even highly upsetting, as is the thought of my not unloading every bit of honesty, of love or of distaste, at the soonest possible opportunity. For in the end I never had a chance to do either, which means I have to tell “you” or it will never go away, and I can’t do that without trivializing the issue with ludicrous edits and pictures, because I would think it boring otherwise, and I won’t post something that I think is boring!
Unless I absolutely have nothing else. Guess which today’s is? Thankfully I need to know somebody can read it more than they actually have to.

On Sunday, my mother asked me if I ever thought that I might be gay. I wanted to say I was worried that I might not be! But that is not what I really worry. I worry that I might be one or the other. “Gay” is a synonym for “homosexual.” I am not sexual. I do not want to be. I think naked people objects are horrible. I can experience love for people without that being a requirement. It is a stronger desire for companionship than a mere friendship, and that is why I thought it was love, but you can’t tell people that without them demanding a stronger confession. Nobody believes it. The only way I’m sleeping my way to the top will be if I take some Rufinol on a ferris wheel. That joke might be pretty gay.

Have I CONSIDERED it? Certainly, when you’ve had antagonists angrily informing you that you are for more than half your life you must have considered it.

Whatchoo lookin’ at, fag?

It had been deduced by some of my behaviors that I loved a man, and from some old biological evidence that I myself should have been one by this point. It may also have been considered that I went to a “furry” convention last year (the year before 2010), even though by and large I find that embarrassing. That is relevant because we met there. I was so glad to do so that it triumphed over my embarrassment for the first time in my life that I can remember.

No, of course I’ve known I’m “different” for a long time. I find “faggot” offensive because it’s a hostile word, and I find people who willingly embody the stereotypical “mmm-hmm oh thnap” connotations of the word embarrassing, much as I regard the “man up, toss me a beer uh oh THE GAME is on” oafs at the other end. This does not constitute me “coming out” of anything because it doesn’t make my life any easier. I do not feel liberated. I feel just as behind schedule and under-achievy as before.

Being GAY would be easy! Not as easy as being “straight,” but it’s easier than it’s ever been at any point in history. There is a clear cut niche in society for it that more and more non-gays are perfectly alright with having be there (and they’ll be ridiculed if they let it become apparent that they aren’t). There are entire towns for it. There is gay FOOD. There are gay PETS. If I were a gay, I could enjoy the highest rated program on television. All of these are stereotypes, but if I were gay I could get offended by them!
If I were gay I could pretend that many of the nation’s highest ranking celebrities were pretending to care whether or not I was legally entitled to marriage. And yet just as with furries, as with the aspies whom I’ve aborted at least two articles about, I do not feel one with the gays. I may share some of their fights, but I do not belong with them. I want to belong to something, but I have yet to find a thing that will have me and that I similarly wish to be had by. Many people do not find this in life, but force themselves to go along with whatever seems like it might work, and that may be my destiny.

In fact, I have more out-coming to do before I will feel any relief, THAT one isn’t going to happen except by accident (unless me from the future goes ahead and puts a potentially pertinent picture that I haven’t even made yet above this paragraph), and anyhow at that point I will still be a be an under-achievy behind-scheduler. I have odd fondness for things which do not exist which I cannot tell anybody about. Thankfully, their feelings cannot be hurt. And before you skip to conclusions, I do not spill fluids over the comics I upload here. But if I did that would never be the point and you wouldn’t know when. I really shouldn’t have said that.

The person that I appear to be “gay” at is not gay. I told him that I loved him, in a letter that I wrote (on real paper even), but I had to add disclaimers to the effect that it was largely deprived of meaning… I wanted to deprive it of the meaning that I did not intend, but I lost more than I wanted to. I wanted to say “I would like to see you every day and know everything about you,” but that’s weird. It’s like the “uncanny valley,” with artificial representations of human beings. It’s endearing up to a point and then it gets really creepy if it goes too far but doesn’t quite connect. The “valley” is the drop in tolerability between “sort of real” and “real” when viewed as a two dimensional line graph. That’s why nobody likes Cyclops. He’s the only one that’s really into being such an uncanny ex-man. I like his stupid poses in the unwinny-ble Super Nintendo X-Men game, though.

He (no not Cyclops (as far as you know)) knows I “love” him in the letter but I cannot casually insert “I love you” into conversations. I assume. I don’t want to risk it. I have historically been oblivious to when my own tolerability has run out, and now I take so many preventative measures that those become even less tolerable.

For example, though this memorrhoid continues, I am taking the measure of temporarily concluding it here instead of trying to edit the second note into comprehendability. It will be less effective when I do show it because I’ll have to spend three paragraphs setting it up again. And so I have failed. Who has won?

It would be the first time!

Sunday the december 4 expects to bring a shocking exposing that you already knew.

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“Arrrgh” is not a word. It is a noise.

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Is that it? Are we doing it every two weeks now?

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It did once come to my attention that somebody thought I made that, as well. I can thankfully remark that I did not, as much good as that would do for my public standing in the eyes of people I don’t want to be seen by. It’s not the worst in that gallery, but the worst in that gallery is enough to make me not want any. It might be well done but it’s nothing I want to look at.

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I have a tumbler.eh page. I wish I didn’t. Not because of this, just because of it. In fact that’s irrelevant beyond explaining where I had taken this picture from. A person asked me this question. I do not dislike this person for this question. However, my dislike of the topic and of some others I associate it with throbs like a toothache to the extent that it is not clear what bridge I am burning today. Know that I burn no bridges, and if I break one it’s only by myself driving a truck over it in disregard of the posted weight limit, and it is reasonable to guess that sooner or later I am going to learn to drive.

But a question, of a television program based on a commercial franchise I don’t care about, from a decade I’ve been sick of for a decade, that airs on a tv channel I’ve never heard of and has repulsive character designs. So the only way I’d become aware of it is if it is it if of it is it being the focus of an obnoxious meme torrent that I would ignore out of spite absolutely whatever it was. Oh and did I! (yes)

Friendship is Magic, they call it. They call it a lot. Too much for me. I resisted making a complaint about this because I felt like I shouldn’t even know about it and half the people that will talk to me on the internet are fond of it. However, by now half of them don’t talk to me either (not after this, certainly), so I like to hope the remaining quarter only choose to remain because they must have accepted me and must have expected me to do this.

One who did not was a very good friend in fact, but who had happened to be developing a curious hobby of marginalizing my personal value a few months before the thing premiered. By the time it had, friendship was not so much magical as an occasional convenience easily explainable through basic logic and social science. Fox news enthusiasts would not even doubt that sort. So having accumulated increasing numbers of such enchanted friend types by blatanter and blatanter professions of admiration for stuff that it was fashionable to like, he no longer needed the ones that were harder to please than that. Also apparently I’m not over it yet. I’ll probably mention it again. I’ve probably already done it. I’ve probably already written the next one 79 times since January.

But the cartoon! It really needed to get made, since there weren’t enough hilarious pictures on the internet like this already.

I can’t vouch for the writing on the cartoon itself, but the people who produce tribute material are about on-level with every other popular rubbishoid which is to say they veer toward the stupid. I remember feeling left out during my family’s Soporanofest a few years back, myself somehow being the only person who’d not watched nearly enough of the program to be obsessed with it, and I got along with the perpetrators afterward. But for this there is no afterward, because people on the internet are not the same as regular human beings who can get over things, or have other layers to their lives apart from these things. I did not get endless waves of daft gangster-sonas in my art queue for nine solid months.

The worst of it is over it by now, so it’s receded to the level of a mere annoying fad, but I scrawled all these complaints about it and don’t know what else to do about them. Forget them and move on? Do something productive? Me? Never!

Tumblir is very good for not allowing me to get over things. Do you have nothing to say? Good news, you can just copy what somebody else says, and sooner or later somebody I know will also have nothing to say and I’ll see something like this (you’ll have to click on it to see it, as I’ll not display it; otherwise I welcome you to assume that what I am saying may be construed as valid under proper circumstances). Even if you disagree with a tumble you need to copy it onto your page to say something to it, and the original copier in the chain still gets points for it, and if nobody bothers to read your print they’ll assume you do agree. Tumblr? More like Stupidlr ha ha.

See see look, this character is WEIRD and THIS character is a NERD and THIS character is DUMB! This should be titled “if you put a stock character in a stock situation.”

I didn’t even GIVE the thing a cube. Somebody who wasn’t necessarily me left it in a place where the beast would find it. I think I have some impractically designed characters, but these are quadrupeds with fine motor skills. They can manipulate objects with their “hands” but are cursed to not ever be able to do so while in motion or stably balanced. Ha ha get it stablAAAAAARGH I’VE BEEN STAPLED
Using a mundane setup to exhibit personality variations, certainly I do it; most aspiring creative people have and do, but I do this with my own characters and I wouldn’t go out of my way to make it look like I used a template when in fact I implemented my own layout.

This artist actually directly sources facial expressions and poses from stills of the cartoon. I know this, because most of these artists do and I’ve seen these ones before. And not in a funny way, either, like in those Tintin pastiches, where the characters are ludicrously out of character, throwing bricks through windows during labor riots or having debaucherous holidays at the same location as everyone else they know also is, all while cursing indiscriminately in near-english. They’re just playing with a dumb old rainbow cube.

And then he used the exact same gag twice (while making sure another character['s head fragment] appeared to explain the gag). Frippits, twelve ding dang years ago I drew an equally dopey looking “tribal” character (an elpsoid) painting a rubik cube, and nobody cared, because I never showed anybody because I realized it was a really bland idea. And I still can’t show anybody because that page seems to have mercifully escaped its holding place,

but here’s a subsequent page with a frogfrimmed can of spam on it. That’s the kind of cleverness it takes for this.

They’re rewarding and praising this guy for matching old jokes with old artwork. Even the Pokemon fan-drawingers relegate the frame copiers to middle-tier, but since most of these people are frame-copiers there’s nowhere else for them to go. They literally have no talent. I don’t have to watch the program to know this derivation is garbage. However, I suspect watching the program has an impeding effect on people’s ability to determine that this is garbage.

This is intellectually worse, though; at least a rubik cube has a classical charm to it that this association cannot harm and that likewise does not make the pony-fans who like the combination any dumber for its part. When you are paying lazy homage to lazy bands and lazy cartoons at the same time then you’ve squared the twit appeal and fractioned the creative effort involved. This person has been drawing her personal creatures into boring album cover homages before, but at least her own characters, in her own style. I shouldn’t have to settle for least. (this image is considerably more popular on the other website but I like to pretend that doesn’t control my life and thus I link to this one)

The absolute worst thing I remember seeing, somebody had drawn the let’s say main character’s heads floating around the logo for the tv show Friends, against a white background, and called it a day. I was so ashamed for both of us that I won’t direct anyone to it unless I am challenged to.

I remember for a while years ago everybody who was cool had to draw their already mundane character as an utterly unremarkable sillouhette dancing against a solid colored background to pay homage and worship before a bloody COMMERCIAL ADVERTISEMENT for eyepods, but most of them didn’t do it more than once. I guess they must have, but I successfully avoided knowing it.

It’s always lucky for people when something that’s really easy to copy gets popular. Pog forbid we have a well-drawn animated series on television.

Hacks love their little ponoids. They memorize the shape of this one little horse and can draw different hats on it and bazoinga! ORIGINAL CHARACTER! It’s like Bob and George fan-authors, except Dr. Light and Rush ALSO look like Megaman.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE GAY SEAMONSTER???
Nobody draws the seamonster so it doesn’t enter into my reckoning. It may even be from a different show that I failed to elude awareness of.

It has JOKES that KIDS DON’T GET!!!
That’s the same lure you put out to get me to watch Shreck/every remotely animated thing that got made since Shrek made money, and that didn’t work, and it’s a secondary characteristic at best! When I was twelve I used to listen to a late night radio program where people called in to ask for advice about sexual relations and I only did so because of the funny sound effects, and I was an idiot.

It has REFERENCES and MUSICAL NUMBERS!
Congratulations, you invented The Drew Carey show? I’m not swayed by this sort of spiel and I never will be! If the best you can muster is that it’s a less vulgar South Park that’s easier for you to wank out to you won’t succeed and I shouldn’t feel bad about complaining at it!

BUT didn’t YOU make THIS?
Yes! I wish I hadn’t! I felt dirty when I did and the person I made it for just assumed I made it because I wanted to because he couldn’t grasp the idea of anybody else not being as into the show as he was. In fact I only made it so he would talk to me, and he did, that time! And realizing that I did indeed have to do that to get him to talk to me made me mad. And then I didn’t do it again and he never flippin’ talked to me again. I suspected I might have transfered my annoyance at him to annoyance at the cartoon, but half a year later I want to punch them both in the nose so they may well both deserve it. Similarly I theorize that neither cares.

Why don’t you just WATCH IT?
Because I don’t have to! Unless this is a condition to get my financial aid or my passport renewed then I don’t have time to do stuff I don’t want to do that I don’t need to do. Yet I tried! I got through one and realized I would never want to like it, given everything about it and the way in which it had been brought to my attention, and its refusal to leave. This is like reading one of those “remember when?” pages out of somebody else’s high school year book. It’s like that picture of the corny floating head with a pipe in his mouth or referencing a “flying spaghetti monster.” It’s never going to be funny to me because I’m not in your club and it isn’t.

I know one person who insists the program is bringing femininist ideas to people who would otherwise not be concerned with them. And maybe this message is more important than how badly drawn or annoying it is, or whom I resent and why. I hope that is the case. My problem might that I know very few people and I have trouble letting go of the ones that really aren’t going to get any better. Lazy fan immersion is itself the total absense of ideas, and something these people have been doing their whole lives. I give the management credit for devising a template that is even easier for the least creative to insert their egos into than anything we’ve had previously.

For all their blank slate adaptibility, Sega style hedgehogs are kind of hard to draw, what with their messed up proportion and conjoined twin cell eyeballs, as this box art specialist proves.

Hi I have a psychological disorder in which I think I’m persecuted despite being in an insufferable majority that gets whole websites devoted to it and takes over others. See also: war on christmas. or “if we allow gay people to have rights then everyone will be gay and humanity will stop reproducing.” In fact it’s such a powerful majority that I was afraid to complain about it. That really isn’t fair at all, considering the lack of kindness I’ve displayed toward the favorite television programs, musical acts and films of people I’m far closer to than anybody who has a web page with red text on it.

Consider even just the website name “ponychan.” That means this one topic was so overwhelmingly popular on the oldest and most notoriously hornetly imageboard that it attained sentience and split off into a new entity. Saw never did that. There is no “saw chan.” At least it’s not a chan that I saw. When you get really popular and obvious, people are more inclined to look for and point out your faults. That’s just what happens. Our most profitable news media is kept in business by this alone. And for the record I don’t see much about friendship in those which are the subjects of my gripes. It’s simply “this character exists. Look at it a lot.” I don’t have a problem with people watching a cartoon. Not this one more than any other I’ve whined about, certainly. If it came down to little ponies, the shirt tales, the snorks and muppet babies, I would recuse myself from picking the winner. I have a problem with people never shutting up about it under any circumstances, unwilling to accept that some others just don’t want any part of it, and cannot be made to, and further that the harder you push them the harder they’ll resist. I don’t fleeplezeep how “well written” and referency a program is if its fundamental sensory components are idiotic and embarrassing, and those get the most mileage.

Eh but if I liked something a lot, and knew there were forces massing to decry that I did, certainly I would defend my position. Wouldn’t I? I have no idea. I’ve never liked anything that was so beloved that I could say so and have there be 309 people standing by to statistically agree with me.
I prefer melodic music without vocals. I avoid referring to myself with pronouns. I walk in the rain and look drunk. I know what it’s like to be chronically not-gotten on a daily basis. The pony craze is very much gotten, and I wish I might be so into something that was, someday. That would be so great, to have massive corporations just pumping out trash I liked by the week, for free, and be friend-branded-acquaintances with ten thousand other idiots who liked it, who also drew the same stuff that due to my willing suspension of disbelief I could pretend wasn’t totally inane degenerate drivel, and is worthy of the source product I liked to begin with, in the event that was good.

Me mad? Yes! I’m furious! The absolute worst people on the whole internet love the dumb rainbow horses more than anything. It would be unfair inductive reasoning to claim that makes it inherently bad; that only keeps it inherently impossible for me to want to like at this point.
My mother watched American Idol but she didn’t draw, quote or otherwise invoke Brian Dunkleman every day for a year. And if she had and I’d told her to stop she wouldn’t have accused me of being some kind of pop culture gestapo trying to censor her rights and freedom. And if she had she’d be a krippendorfing maniac.

So that was that. But eventually…

AND What the hack is this thing? It looks like somebody bought a lion king coloring book and just used whatever crayons they felt like on Scar. In every picture it has the exact same expression, and I’ve seen about fifty of them despite never once looking for one and the thing not bloody existing three weeks prior [to when I wrote this sentence]. The regular characters feature the full range of emotions from happy to douchey but this one is only douchey. I understand that villainous sorts are supposed to be less than friendly but one assumes it may get upset when inevitably foiled, and in any event there should be something to distinguish its bad smirkiness from the good smirkiness of the protagonists.
This is, I think, seven different people doing lame fan-traces based on the exact same shot, or simply reposting the frame verbatim as an original work and subsequently submitting this to the “group” gallery I found them in, since the cartoon had not yet aired, but some official images had been posted online from it, I guess? That’s so bad that I don’t even care that only the last one is unmistakably douchey at this size.

This first person had the clever insight to mirror the frame before tracing it. Ah and “good” here’s some passable douchiness. Even when these people try to think outside their own tumblr mandates all they can come up with is “He’s the puppet master!” or “he has them all on a chessboard!”

“Q trolls the ponies.” I saw a bunch of such remarks. The uninspiration hath folded in on itself! The thing people use as a pathetic launching point, to borrow characters from to use in their own stories, is itself borrowing characters? Is that what I’m to conject from this? Nerds love this stuff. Ah didn’t I once say that I loved that? I like when one writer finds a means of reusing their own characters in another situation where intellectual property restrictions seek to prohibit them from doing so. I don’t like when a point of nerd idolatry safely assumes, and REQUIRES that its audience be familiar with another bastion of nerddom. I’m not terribly proud I made that pointless page of video game references. But at least they were varied and over quickly. it wasn’t a drawn out reverent tribute to one series. Good gorf star trek. This IS just like Bob and George.

I hate alllllllllll these people! I can’t recall when last I loathed so many non-murderers because I self-administered shock therapy to forget that.

That’s everything they do. They consume, and imitate what they consume. Of COURSE they’ll love stuff that itself consumes and imitates. Does it matter if the program can stand on its own merit if you can sync it up to audio from The Big Ol’ Bowski? and then link it at me out of context after I already plainly didn’t care about the last six contextless clips you sent amidst not even asking me how I’m doing? One of the reasons I dislike Kevin Smith films is that there’s sure to be 10 to 20 minutes just of people talking about other movies. And this conversation will be the same every time you watch.

Also: do we truly require in this comic store a mal-configured widecreen tv to put Kevin Smith on? Isn’t he fat enough already? And why did the angel order alcohol if he can’t actually drink it and presumably never could? How would he have developed a taste for it? How does he even enjoy that?

If you had asked me but a week before this what my least favorite thing about the collective Star Trekkion was, I might have responded that it’s sterile, bland and slow-paced and there was no excuse for it to be that way after Star Wars* got made, much less in four consecutive series other than people themselves being boring. Further down the list might have been that invincible douchabix guy who I want to strangle that’s in some episodes, regardless of the series, for no reason, that isn’t a Romulan. I can’t stand Romulans. They’re such jerks. And at some point I gripe that the most exotic aliens at best have weird foreheads and funny skin colors. Right but the one guy I hate, apparently that’s the favorite character of everybody else. Especially furries. Why? Because they have no sense of subtlety and the smuggest, smirkiest character will always be their favorite. I was surprised when I found out anybody liked Spyro. I am no longer surprised.

*Star Wars the film, not Star Wars the Kevin Smith reference interlude. I grant all reference interludes the same right to be scorned.

One complaint that supposed little pony detractors commonly give is that this is a cartoon aimed at children, specifically heteronormative female children. That hurts their case, and if that’s the only case they can produce then they’re just as weak. I would question if in fact it is! I would then also question whether children comprise a majority of the total viewing audience. No reasonable child –apart from one making just such an advertising niche jump– could possibly care about a minor star trek character or that this show was mentioned on Jimmy Kimmy’s own abomination. I have never encountered this cartoon in the context of anyone under the age of 17 or off the internet*. Through being successfully targeted and then fudnuddling merchandise dollars and ad revenue into the enterprise, adults on the internet are the main audience. Additionally, by the show creators acknowledging the internet adult popularity and working to incorporate or be fully compatible with things they like, those become the target demographic, I say.
*excluding an embarrassing convention I attended, because those are essentially gatherings of real people acting out the internet.
**and then on September 29, some inconsequential loiter gang within my audible proximity at my university’s loiter area mentioned the cartoon, asking “is it at Hot Topic yet?” and they moved on within two minutes without anybody saying “bro.” Bro anything is bad news.

And I go to a school in which people talk about zombie apocalypses, hold “bake[d] sales” on April 20, wear shirts branded “winning” and all sorts of horrid rubbish that nobody should think is clever.

I have an unnatural, almost instinctive resistence to stuff that got too popular for no clear reason. This has surely saved me tens of thousands of dollars through the years on trendy clothes, music albums, cigarettes, beer, tomagotchis, furbies, skip-its and xboxes. I see no reason to give up on it for something that looks like this and that makes people act like this.

I’ve never encountered anybody who accepts video game music as a legitimate art form off the internet either, but I scarcely encounter them ON it unless I seek them out, and in any event it’s much more reasonable that something just one person likes should be a fringe matter; there are thousands of these pony dipes who exist exclusively in imaginary places. Sometimes I wish I was imaginary, but I am increasingly afraid I am.