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Questionable artwork and pedantic miscellany
December 14, 2019
In Disney’s fifth installment to the franchise, Air Bud finds that he also has the uncanny ability to play volleyball. Throughout this experience he and a talking parrot stop some crooks and make some new friends.


On december 1 2019 my niece Vackshfump was watching “ralph breaks the internet” Yessir this 5-year-old really needs to see a cartoon full of comedy celebrities talking about loot farming and ebay. I was only near it twice and was vividly reminded of this foxtrot strip except imagine it cost 175 million dollars and bill amend owned toaplan and taito.
“all your base are belong to us” is one of the earlier meme “phenomenons” before people described it with the terminology “meme.” Bill Amend was lazily referencing it in this comic strip for nerd credibility despite it already having been considered old at that point and this not really having any angle on it other than to observe that it exists, and of course it takes 6 weeks for newspaper comic strips to get published, or at least did for most of their existence.
And what is my problem, then? The ralph movie is even older now than the all your base joke was then. But I am not doing this for credibility! If I was going to have any I would have gotten it a long time ago. I was never going to watch this cinemagony on purpose when it was new, much less pay for the right so that I might offer a timely criticism. Having a small child in my life is bringing along with it a great deal of unfortunate media the likes of which I would greatly prefer to not be aware of, because it does THIS to me. I don’t have time to write these things, do you have time to read them?


You can say “WELL it’s not FOR KIDS just because it’s a CARTOON!” but it shows up in the netflix “kids” mode that hides countless other mildly to substantially less stupid things, and also prominently features the official non-parody disney princesses which exist primarily to extract money from parents of this specific captive audience, with the aim of turning those kids into willful captives and likewise captors when they produce their own children.

also on netflix kids, Jerry Seinfeld IS “The Bee Movie,” Adam Sandler’s entourage in Hotel Transylvania and Alec Baldwin as the only character he plays now inexplicably drawn as Boss Baby, all three brightly colored celebrity wank jobs devoid of kid-comprehendable content (plus numerous other equally ugly items I am glad have not been put on in my presence yet). I don’t think bee movie even has one kid character. Of the four I have named, only bee movie my sister refuses to put on, and i don’t understand where this line is drawn. I acknowledge that seen here is boss baby the spinoff baldwin-less netflix series, but I know the full film is there also because I had to deal with that last year. It was boring and pointless but not an exercise in brand awareness disguised as something other than that. The trash culture fetishizing of hotel transylvania is deplorable and its character designs only seem bearable in the proximity of minecraft but I will admit the animation itself is occasionally funny-looking, which I can’t say for the others I have mentioned. I think Trolls the movie is a crime against humanity and demi-humanity but it is unmistakably a children’s film and not visible here so citing it would not aid my cause.


if you are curious about the netflix kids setting, this is how customizable it is. You can’t tell it to include or exclude certain titles. You can’t personally select and omit every movie that has excessive belching or flatulence in them, for example, and I presume there are a surprising number that don’t. Of course as a parent have the power to NOT put on a movie you don’t like, but when kids are bred from birth to want disney-y trash and you are granted no means to tune it out you end up having to fight your own child to avoid it.


and maybe you deserve it if you cede the authority to a moneymaking business to decide what is “age appropriate” and harbor absolutely no other categories of appropriateness.
If I was the parent I would browse it myself in advance and choose some things that weren’t too horrible but most people aren’t like me and netflix specifically isn’t really big on giving users control anyway. it automatically plays trailers for whatever is selected including whatever it suggests to you first and complacently refuses to let you disable that.

As indicated, I was near it twice; two days later, ralph was on again! it is legitimately upsetting to me. I don’t know how to co-exist in a world where this is considered valid entertainment. It makes me depressed. I can’t have happiness if this is what people want. if i have consolation it is that it made ONLY half a billion dollars and that is now considered a disappointment to the Disney organization so there probably won’t be a third, but everything is like that now to some/many degrees so it isn’t going to stop.


everything i guessed about it is not only true, it’s twice as bad. the princesses aren’t in the whole movie but they are in much more than I was expecting. they show up about the same length into the film that optimus prime does in the transformers movie and get about as much screen time. (incidootily my least favorite part about 2006 transformers was also the unnecessary pandering references to the internet) This movie cannot stand on its own, and nobody cares. imagine if “meet the spartans” made much more money and put a curse on mentally-challenged movie critics to say nice things about it. that series got killed when writer producer jackasses seltzer and freberg became too greedy and decided to distribute subsequent movies themselves and suddenly couldn’t get into theaters. That is not a reliable circumstance for me to hope for with disney.


in this movie websites are places, otay. this one is called “ohmyDISney” and the character who says it pronounces the heap out of the DIZ. it is supposed to be a disney fan site because this communicates that consumers also accept that star wars and marvel just ARE disney, not established worlds with their own identities that disney simply purchased relatively recently within our lifetimes. and also this isn’t corporate excess this is what WE the proles WANT. Like this is MY fault.

that’s “oh my disney” as in “oh my god” without the god because plainly there isn’t one but that doesn’t mean you can’t receive doctrine and arbitrary commands in its name and worship it. Also it has its own hotels because of the allegory of an internet as a physical place that looks like a real place and real places have hotels and EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS MOVIE IS MORONIC

I don’t consider pixar in the category of stuff disney just bought and assimilated because pixar’s public identity has always been synonymous with disney, and in many ways the current disney was assimilated by pixar. The same sap morality, fake comedy, california/celebrity worship and computer graphics addiction, and also John Lasseter has been in some way involved with every disney movie since way too long and was only kicked out after he, like every entertainment media figure who gets held up as incapable of error, turned out to be a sexual predator. Since that occurred people other than me have been complaining about disney movies again, which I can only hope means disney is actually getting better, but the Lion King bookended both sides of the Lasseter era and I hate it in any case. it’s still d-d-DIZney, turning a profit targeting schmucks, even if its hypnotism of the reporting media is slightly less complete.

Anyway this whole segment of the ralph movie is just to remind you that disney owns stuff and intends to mash it up in disgusting ways, it must be stated that all the specific video game references in the film are 20-40 years out of date or generic, but the oh! my disney segment includes real brands and absolutely reflects whatever disney wanted to project of itself in 2018. The princesses all know and get along with each other and wear contemporary slob fashions despite coming from different time periods and countries and don’t exhibit any traits that could be perceived as negative, because blind complacency is never treated as negative.

The climack scene with the princesses saving Ralph, their proprietary musical themes playing as each appears, is the biggest i have mouth-painfully-agaped since the animaltopia preview. When moana ducked into the frame and smugly said “you’re welcome” I wanted to scream. I don’t talk about moana on this website, I hate everything about it so much without reservation and I already did that too much with the lion king, and now moana, and more importantly irritating references to the most irritating song from any disney product can just be in any other property that they manufacture. That whole thing, it almost made me cry. I wasn’t just annoyed, I was depressed. Because this has been out almost two years and I have never seen a word of complaint or displeasure about this. Everybody who has seen this film thinks this is acceptable, and would presumably be comfortable with disney owning every commercial property there is and making every movie a potential cross-franchise rule-free orgy of pandery idiocy that pretends it is smashing through once unbreachable cultural barriers.


whaaaaa? how did BART SIMPSON get into this AD for DISNEY PLUS to deface it? That is so SUBVERSIVE and actually not criticizing disney in any way and disney incidentally owns the simpsons now and it hasn’t been subversive for decades! It continues to exist for the same reason that the lion king remake took in over a billion dollars even though everybody i know who saw it didn’t like it and would probably go pay to see lion king remake part 2; brand loyalty that supersedes all reason for products that will never stop coming and has no incentive to get better.
also: if oh my disney is synonymous with oh my god then disney + can be seen as disney christ. The major difference in divinity is that it was possible to kill Jesus, at least for a little while.

A major thing that bothers me about Kevin Smith movies is how often characters are loitering around talking about other movies, but at least in that case they aren’t movies that Kevin Smith has a financial stake in, and if you skipped those parts, the other parts would still function as well as it was going to.

it’s like those sketches on saturday nuhlive where the actual person being parodied walks into the sketch and oh ho ho how droll aren’t we all having good fun NO it isn’t a real parody if the victim is in on it. You need to be able to criticize it in a way that it would not criticize itself, that its owner would not permit to be criticized.


also if you will only criticize a public figure without permission via special guest stars who are themselves beneath contempt and not even cast members then that doesn’t count either.
Gosh why even watch the show? It is much more satisfying to read a sycophantic summary of how “hilarious” the opening 20 minute parade of smirklejerk “woke” celebrities and applause breaks is. also my use of “woke” doesn’t mean right wing conspiracy schmucks are controlling me, it means a force beyond my control finally invented and agreed on a word for something i have been screaming at for what feels like centuries.
I had a tragic falling out that he is not aware of with stephen colbert over the shift from comedy to this “woke”ness but gosh at least he is devoted to his own show, whatever that show may be, and too busy to do stupid trash like this. James Corden’s show isn’t even in new york.
I don’t even hate Paul Rudd but he happened to get named in that headline and I don’t think he will suffer for it.

Also! Immediately before the rescue scene, Ralph falls through another character’s rescue vehicle, and rather than expressing alarm or anything organic, the character, who is unmistakably voiced by Saturday Night Live handoff Bill Hader, just talking normally, despite Hader’s greatest talent being to disguise his voice, emotionlessly states “wow that didn’t work.” Yes obviously it didn’t work! You saying that doesn’t make the fact that it didn’t work funnier! I really miss the laugh track convention from bad old sitcoms because I knew I wouldn’t hear it in a feature film, but smugly reacting on my behalf can be and is in everything. And why does disney bother buying ABC and FOX if it inherits all its actors and writing conventions from NBC? Because NBC is owned by Viacom which probably doesn’t want to sell it, but if dismey makes itself synonymous with nbc there is no NEED to buy it. It is [currently still] illegal to own all competitors in a field anyway, but not to indenture them. Although copyright law was changed specifically to let Disney keep owning mickey mouse so maybe it will get a law changed to let it keep owning more networks as well, and then another law changed to ban technology that increasingly makes tv networks irrelevant.


and this over here: note that it says “the muppet show” despite that predating disney’s definitive ownership of the characters by 30 years because despite all the muppet products since then The Muppet Show is still the last one that doesn’t come across as attempting to cash in on how popular the muppets USED to be. I did say I liked the muppets most wanted film but i wasn’t aware –first of all, how ubiquitous and tiresome the tina fey brand of comedy would become within a few years when all other american comedy had morphed into diluted imitations of it– and worse of the disgraceful “viral”-ready videos of

muppet versions of bohemian rhapsody and the like being made to promote the film. I am able to believe that the “brinksmanship” that got steve whitmire fired in 2016 from controlling kermit involved him protesting and blocking as much degenerative disney energy as possible (and maybe not, because he also performed and CREATED rizzo the rat which only got more tiresome and inclined to steal time from more interesting characters INCLUDING kermit as it went along). If you haven’t seen it, good. this was another of Vackshfump’s fixations about a year ago. it is “only” just under 5 minutes long but each lame muppet video connects you to more lame muppet videos, usually with obnoxious teasers built into them that show about 20 seconds out of context and then you see that again when the video actually goes on.
and i can’t say “jim henson wouldn’t have allowed this” because he allowed muppet babies which i hate most prominently and also thought selling to disney was a good idea, but at least those were cartoon non-“real” muppets so nothing they did actually happened.

It shouldn’t make a difference to a little kid what song the muppets are singing along to, yet the content is so moronic that I, a non-kid, feel embarrassed being near it. And that Bohemian Rhapdoder was chosen specifically so that adult children my age or older, who all this stuff is really made for, would recognize it and be taken in by the woah hey remember wayne’s world remember the 90s quotient. Even though the song is from 1975, 20 years earlier, i definitely never heard it before wayne’s world but heard it loads after that.
I remember in fourth grade a kid who had the song on a tape and would get other kids to do his bidding by saying “i won’t let you listen to my bohemian rhapsody” in the event they did not comply, and that WORKED

This video, it is so bad. It takes a song that is already overexposed and irritating from tired fake parody homages, and covers it with ancient muppet-related nongags lifted straight from that muppet show without any context. Context is VERY important to me. The entire first section is sung in earnest with unchanged lyrics by Gonzo, and Gonzo is not good at singing. The “joke” is that gonzo is accompanied by three chickens who are worse singers and maybe that is funny to somebody for about 5 seconds and it goes on for a minute. ha ha ha haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. the lyrics only change at the part about mama killing a man because the muppets are disney and family and disney doesn’t kill people except villains and parents. Then instead of “we will not let you go” the elderly hecklers say, in unison, “we do not like your jokes” to fozzy bear because see they DON’T like fozzy bear’s jokes and therefore it is funny for them to say that just for no reason amidst this song that otherwise does not concern fozzy bear or jokes or fozzy bear’s jokes.
It reminds me of the ten year period where i hated the muppets because of stupid trash like that and apparently that never actually ended.

AND you can say that the muppet show itself was largely comprised of muppety covers of existing songs. It was, but the intent was not to shoehorn in as many disparate muppet gimmicks as possible. They often featured original or unnamed puppet characters that had nothing to do with the established trademarked ones. They were content to be themselves without desperately trying to remind anyone of themselves. Also disney didn’t own them!

Anyway I don’t believe any muppets actually appear in Ralph’s movie beyond Kermit’s enormous disembodied inanimate head but obviously just the logo is enough to get the point across to somebody such as me, possibly only me, that muppets equals disney, and it all happens in about three seconds. None of this has plot relevance to Ralph since there is no plot to be relevant to. True enough to the title’s promise of wrecked internet, it is sort of like watching the moronic video content of a wrecked system sapped of its potential by soulless opportunists and corporate synergy, except there isn’t a perky brain-damaged narrator’s enormous hands taking the characters out of eggs while the words “here i am here i am how do you do” echo in the distance.

AND you can say that the muppet show itself was largely comprised of muppety covers of existing songs. It was, but the intent was not to shoehorn in as many disparate muppet gimmicks as possible. They often featured original or unnamed puppet characters that had nothing to do with the established trademarked ones. They were content to be themselves without desperately trying to remind anyone of themselves. Also disney didn’t own them!

Anyway I don’t believe any muppets actually appear in Ralph’s movie beyond Kermit’s enormous disembodied inanimate head but obviously just the logo is enough to get the point across to somebody such as me, possibly only me, that muppets equals disney, and it all happens in about three seconds. None of this has plot relevance to Ralph since there is no plot to be relevant to. True enough to the title’s promise of wrecked internet, it is sort of like watching the moronic video content of a wrecked system sapped of its potential by soulless opportunists and corporate synergy, except there isn’t a perky brain-damaged narrator’s enormous hands taking the characters out of eggs while the words “here i am here i am how do you do” echo in the distance.


Maybe this dumb frog wearing a bow tie would find it acceptable.


12-31-2019 104am
I just rediscovered this page from nearly ten years ago that I wrote after seeing Avatar and How to Retain your Dragster, in which I make loads of the same complaints. For the sake of my own free time and the few people who don’t yet think I hate them because I hate everything they like, I absolutely need to become less aware of new crummy movies. Even without media influences and truly shoddy friends encouraging these things at me I am not safe without working at the avoidance, and that would be less work than writing another page like this! I could drop dead at any time and I don’t want to risk there being a picture of Josh Gad on my screen when it happens and whoever finds my body weeks later thinking I wasn’t thinking something condemnatory because they definitely aren’t going to read any of this!



March 5, 2019
tonight the bats will feast, and tomorrow i will head out to find the phantom of the jungle, the jagwire


Sharing a house with my niece, I have seen more than my share of popular media that I would otherwise have pledged to avoid, and it has helped, forced me to discern the truly awful (Finding Dory) from the bearably mediocre (Brave) and occasionally something that isn’t even bad. I can take the 2016 [disney] Jungle Book better than 2017 [disney] Beauty and the Beast since Jungo isn’t trying to closely imitate the earlier disney cartoon while selectively changing things to be more twitter-morality acceptable, while meanwhile totally failing to be as good in the scenes that are completely analogous. It isn’t, like Maleficent, depending on you having seen the old (disney) movie so it can tell you how WRONG that movie is. But 1991 Beauty and the Beast is a different sort of thing from 1967 Jungle Book since it came out within the lifetime of most of the jerk hipsters who NEED a replacement version that is less interesting and more “social justice”y. Maleficent had its own amount of that, but foremost its goal was to emphasize how perfect its star/producer is. 1991 Beauty and the Beast is considered obnoxious fandom required viewing more so than Jungle Book OR Sleeping Beauty, but Jungle Book least of all since that doesn’t have a princess in it who needs to be retroactively transformed into a more substantial and empowered character. I hadn’t even seen 1967 Jungle book all the way through until literally last week because i never wanted to. Which is not to say its remake lacks elements that exist only to get the attention of annoying people, like putting a cowbell focally in the Christopher Walken character’s treasure heap. but it isn’t shoehorning in every song or lame imitations of the old version’s dance sequences. The two songs it does carry over are briefer, and the first is relevant to distinguish that the bear character is more fun-loving than anyone else in the jungle, who never even taught Mowgli what a song IS. The second song is a sinister/surreal counterpart to the first song, sung by an enormous megalomaniacal gorilla who is only trying to seem fun. Almost the opposite of the original character. Which actually was an original character, having no counterpart in the actual Jungle Book books. Yes, the B&B remake did something similar with Gaston, changing fun to sinister, but in that case it comes across more like they aren’t ALLOWED to make the guy likeable even for a moment because internet than a creative decision. And since the film is a scene by scene recreation of the old (disney) version, that change really stands out to me.

Gaston’s divergence from the previous film, with regard to how he initially treats Maurice, is not significant enough to disprove my assertion that the film sets out to impersonate and swap places with the other, since otherwise it does, before and after that point. 2016 jungle book differs from the cartoon at the start, middle and end. 2017 Beauty and the Beast does so sporadically and strategically.

2016 jungle book is not a scene by scene recreation. It is not trying to re-appeal to the same people as the old one. The 1967 edition is silly. It is a cartoon. It KNOWS it is a cartoon. The newer film recognizes the change in medium and tells a different story with many of the same elements, and without trying to put itself over and diss the old one. And I am not of the opinion that the cartoon is perfect, either; Mugly just ends up near Man Village without ever resolving to go there, so he doesn’t need to grow as a character. He never shows an interest in technology so it is less clear why anybody is worried he will get addicted to fire. There are prolonged interludes with the elephants and vultures that do not accomplish anything except remind Shere Khan that everyone else in the jungle is an idiot. Apparently Walt Disney was obsessed with celebrity voiceovers, if not as obsessed with building the entire movie and marketing campaign around that as the current company is, and wanted the Beatles to voice the vultures and thought the novelty of that would be enough to justify giving them what feels like 15 minutes of screen time just saying “so what do you lads wanna do?” “don’t start THAT again!” But John Lennon knew specifically that he didn’t wanna do that and I suppose the others weren’t even asked but the scene wasn’t cut or redone, either. But I don’t dwell on this all day and all night because it is a dumb cartoon. It isn’t like Moana with the stop and go “you can do this! no you can’t do this! yes you can! no you can’t! now let’s have a montage where you prove you can do this! now let’s have another mopey interlude where you think you can’t” which also I am supposed to see as socially progressive since the female protagonist is more competent than the male one and neither is caucasian (and I acknowledge that cartoon Mowgli is literally Christopher Robin with a different haircut despite being in India). The obnoxious David Bowie tribute can’t be deleted without leaving a hole in continuity whereas if necessary you could skip 1967jb’s vulture section.


and so
When I read about 2019 lion king, months ago by now, I had never so profoundly wanted a film to flop. It seemed like it wanted to combine the worst traits of Maleficent and Beauty and the Beast Remake, What with loads of inappropriate celebrity non-actors in major roles, especially Beyonkay Knowles, who is about the only person I can think of who would be presented as less fallible than Angelina Jolie, and the source film being in recent memory and precious to dumb fandoms which will hype and buy into it whatever it does. Jungle Book 2016 is cited as inspiration but only on the technological side, even though the cartoon is more visually engaging.
Instead of two songs that nobody trendy cares about, we get four incredibly annoying songs from the earlier film that are supposed to already long since be seared into your memory, with the one bearable song about the one bearable character left out. As of february apparently it is back in, but then THAT means you’re literally recreating the old movie. Then you get a talentless ass like Billy Eichner, whose lame to fame is going outside and yelling embarrassing things at people while filming them and periodically reminding you he is gay like you couldn’t tell. And he’s not taking over the minor Bobcat Goldthwaite role, he’s being Timon, who sings a lot and is impossible to not see. I never liked Timon, but I learned to appreciate Nathan Lane in theater roles unrelated to the Lion King. Because he is actually an actor, even if I don’t think he is funny. Billy Eichner is nothing if he isn’t funny except loud (which is annoying) and gay (which is irrelevant). The hog is voiced by Seth Rogen, who I also don’t want to hear singing, or at this point even talking. I would say I don’t want to hear him breathing but that seems like i want him to die, when I merely want him to not exist.
John Oliver, why is he there? Why cast him as Zazu, the worst character? Just to make sure there isn’t one person left that I enjoyed in my late-night-comedy-liking years and haven’t yet developed a grudge against? I got past Andy Richter being a voice in both Father of the Pride AND Madagascar but my understanding is that, at least in the latter role, he was actually doing a voice, not simply talking like Andy Richter so you hear him and think “oh that’s tv’s Andy Richter” because he probably actually auditioned for the role rather than receiving it in an award show gift basket. Can someone I don’t hate in a role that I do make the role more bearable? Not at my position in life, no. They might as well have had Billy Eichner do that one also.

Keegan Michael Key, another person I used to find interesting, has a role, but one of the hyenas which as I indicated I don’t remember noticing much from the cartoon. And I should be glad it is an ex-Mad TV person rather than an idiot from Saturday Night Live for a change. Considering that the film’s whole concept, recreate something that already exists and change a few aspects while mugging for applause each time a character I am supposed to already be familiar with appears for the first time is more or less what Saturday Night Live does now. But Phil Lamarr is also from Mad TV and has considerably more voice acting experience. Experience is irrelevant; Key was only cast because he is in stupid ads and Barack Obama likes him.


The top-billed actor is Donald Glover whose name looked mildly familiar to me, but what from I could not place. But apparently he is best known for an audio production called “This is America.” Something I heard last year, thought “this is terrible” and then forgot about and eventually learned had won six billion awards. That seems about right. That has really been Lion King’s legacy in my life. That which I find unremarkable at best becomes essential to the lives of others and shoved at me and heralded as the best there is perpetually. THIS is America. We make annoying movies set in other countries filled with lame comedy, irritating songs and fake contemporary morality and then tell ourselves it is the greatest accomplishment in the history of humanity even while constantly criticizing “america,” whose frivolous brainwashable marketing-addicted and disseminating consumers and above-the-law corporations this would be impossible without. ESPECIALLY if it is done in rap form. Because rap is new and speaks truth to power despite being older than me and totally appropriated by commercialism. The Media is controlled by white people who are afraid of looking racist if they claim to not like rap and conveniently enough the performance art presented as blackest is not terribly difficult. Anybody who looks the part can be trained to rap. Even if they have a weak voice and can’t talk very fast, hey hooray we trained the public to pretend they think digitally augmented barely-human vocals sound good! Convincing the public they like rap leaves you the most options. I don’t recall that the item in question contains digitally augmented vocals or that the new lion king contains rap, but Glover wasn’t hired for being an actor suited to the part, that is the point. I would be surprised if a single person in the cast was. Image is everything. Especially when the people are invisible. Anyway the magic of the Lion King is that it is bad enough on its own non-merit to not need rap to make itself worse.
The race-bait matter may be contemporary; it wants to compensate for the majority of television’s and cinema’s existence when no black people were allowed, except in demeaning roles, so I can accept that, for a few more years, possibly. I won’t pretend I like rap or the Lion King, though, because I don’t, and I shouldn’t have to.


1994 Lion King was a big line in the sand spelling out the word “sex” for my socialization. 1992 Aladdin had the inescapable mass-hyped celebrity voice before then, but Robin Williams only took the role on the condition that this would not be the case. Once that cat was out of its bag Lion King made it a bigger cat, and every cartoon thereafter strove to imitate it in that and all other ways, so they could only be as good as that, not better, and not different. There were terrible cartoons that I alone seemed to hate before then, but their acclaim was not unanimous and their attitudes not mandatory. Socialization means liking the same stuff as other people. I had no way to like Lion King. Lion King didn’t kill my chance of happiness, it made me cognizant that my chances of happiness were minimal.
I was not keen on lions already; I didn’t understand what made them “king” of “the jungle.” They don’t live in jungles and tigers are bigger than them!
And I really really hated the film! I remember hearing that the middle kid from Home Improvement was the voice of Simba, and not knowing why I should care or why he was a big deal. But I was SUPPOSED to know, and I didn’t go searching for the information. I thought talking feral animals were stupid and boring in general. I thought it was dumb that the prey had to KNEEL, on ONE KNEE, before these creatures that were going to kill them, and that I was supposed to think that was the right way of things. I hated simba bragging about being king and all these much bigger animals had to do what he said even though he wasn’t actually king yet, and compensate for his ignorance amidst that; when he says “everybody look left” they actually have to go RIGHT to match bratty dumb Simba’s viewpoint. I thought aging from child to adult in two seconds was extremely stupid. Especially in 1994, I had been in special education a year or two years and considered that all this garbage screwing up my life, probably for good, that I had no say in, in the DISNEY story this period of life is so easy and without consequence that you can skip it and be exactly where everyone else told you you would end up. I didn’t think it was funny that Pumbo and Timmy ate bugs. I ate a worm and got in big trouble, but oh ha ha when disney characters do it, it’s FUNNY! And they really don’t taste like chicken. They taste like dirt. Why does this wimpy scavenger know what chicken IS much less what a dead one tastes like, and why would Simba be expected to also know? I swear to you with complete sincerity those are the things I was thinking about. I literally didn’t remember anything that happened after the Hakuna Potata segment because I was so fixated on not wanting to be in the theater. I wanted to go home and play Donkey Kong on the Super Game Boy, so it isn’t like my standards were particularly high (though I’d still rather play that again than any Donkey Kong game released since then). In fact it was a long time before I realized that “caaaaan you feel the LOVE” song I used to get bothered by when buying pringles and 32 ounce Snapple at a local store was from a movie I had already seen. But it was four years before I had home internet access and yet longer before fan-wankdom controlled all discourse, so I was able to avoid alienating every single person who loved this thing, and I had emulators to keep me occupied even when video games tried to turn on me the same way that cartoons did, including a particularly shoddy and ubiquitous one based on The Lion King. Now Lion King wants to come back and really challenge my devotion to despising it. Well you know what, I’ve been alienating everyone I know by complaining about their false gods for half my life now so it is much, much too late to do any more damage. This isn’t something that is made to be remembered. Just to get press, get money, get awards and get lost. If it wants to supplant the old one, it may be my guest, put my apathy to the test. At least Josh Gad isn’t in it.


sometimes it is a relief to no longer care.



February 25, 2019
Ernest is the head elf and the most friendly of the bunch. He runs the workshop with an iron fist.


page 34 of part 3 of that dumb old comic strip.
I probably wrote more text about this page than any other and feel like showing less of it than ever!


this script is so old, elpse initially said “get up, ramus.” Ramus is a character from the video game Lunar Silver Star Story Complete Absolute Total, who is unprepared for the life of a video game hero and gets knocked down a lot. lope was also initially quoting ramus’s “blarrrrgh.” I played Lunar Silver Star, in 2006, and last mentioned it, specifically with regard to Ramus, in 2007. I don’t remember if I wrote this part of the script then but I was certainly un-old enough to think I could put an obscure exchange like that in here and have anyone know what it meant, even though I didn’t actually post a screenshot of Ramus saying “blarg” anywhere because I didn’t think it was an interesting-enough line for that, so it most certainly was not interesting enough to allude to out of context nearly 12 years after the game was already a 7 year old remake of a game from 1992 which wasn’t even particularly innovative THEN. Also the one time a voice actor says his name it is pronounced “ray-mis” and I always say “ram-us.” I made myself obsessed with Lunar because I knew, at that time, other people who had been obsessed with it when they were children and I thought they would link to my website if I liked the same stuff they did. If they read my comic strips in 2006 they certainly don’t now! Probably.


Oddly enough one of them specifically denigrated the game Breath of Fire in favor of Lunar and I said nothing in its defense even though I legitimately liked Breath of Fire and still like it better and I don’t know that I have mentioned it even one time in the half-my-life of having this website. I don’t even have any screenshots from it since I last played it before I made this website or meticulously documented everything I did.


Literally the last time I played it, my computer had an MS-DOS based infrastructure. Three to four times as much time has passed since I last played it than had passed between the last time I played it on real hardware and the first time I played it in an emulator, which I thought at the time was a long time!


I may even have stolen pog’s name from it! Although I only remember being surprised to see the name in the game years after stealing it if I stole it, not actually doing so. All this is not to say I resent Lunar –I was able to make a forced infatuation be sincere back in 2006– or that Breath of Fire isn’t made of problems that only a childhoodded fixation can disregard (and I may resent BOF instead for making me steal POG from it), but of all the things I make, the bimshwellian comicoid least of all I ordinarily wonder who I am trying to please with it and why, but today I did!

Also lope being felled occurred, initially, during the altercation with the robots, but when I got to that point I decided the robots should just get beaten up without doing anything. Inexplicably I liked the dialog enough that i contrived a way for lope to fall down in the same spot at a later point, and now that is a permanent part of the “story.” i only removed the ramus line literally on february 22 2019. Or rather made a copy of the dialog bauble and moved it to another layer and turned it unvisible in case I wanted to bring it back (and look, I just did). I had drawn it in knowing it didn’t belong there but not feeling like dealing with it. Thankfully I still think it is funny that lope is pitiful and a substitute line easily suggested itself, so this is only a major problem with regard to me knowing i cannot be trusted and that i will probably be 60 years old before i get through the entire script as it is now.


Of course, as I indicated, much of what goes on is NOT in the script. i get to a point and i change it, sometimes significantly; initially nemitz was intended to capture pog out of view, but when i got to this point I thought it would be funny if elpse’s goop fell on nemitz, so then elpse had to run off and capture pog itself, and that gave me an opportunity to acknowledge the dope still exists and also exhibit pog’s unusual attitude toward captivity.

But I do not want to drop anything I think of for any reason and so try to think of in-character ways for them to behave illogically to accommodate script pieces that are no longer relevant. In this case, lope thinking that the goop-covered nemitz is a ghost (and at the same time avoid saying “I’m soooo dead”). From a long term stand point, do I really believe that lope really believes that ghosts are real or that itself was well and truly dead? I did not think about it that deeply. But I knew “wow I am sooooo dead” is obviously not how lope talks by the time I got here, even when I still thought elpse might call lope “ramus.” I wrote that so long ago I did not have a solid grasp of how lope talked or just how foolish it was and in what ways. But NOW I wonder: does lope live in constant fear of death and undead spirits? What occurred to make it be preoccupied with that? I know, or think I know, that nobody is going to DIE in this comic strip, and have worried about my ability to introduce matters of consequence as a result, but I did not want to face the issue on the big punchable nose either, since it is too permanent an occurrence to add on a whim unless you are making something stupid like Dilbert that isn’t supposed to be consistent or not contradict itself. A hypothetical future version of me with a clearer mind may think a character death is necessary or even devise an alternative that is not strictly “death” as it applies to real people but without relying on conventional cartoon judeo-christian afterlife tropes that have no business applying to dumb old lope who I won’t even let have a christmas tree, or even some of the other innumerable copout ways American comic books have, often on whims, undone once-significant or equally whimly deaths. And that version of me would then also have to determine if there are supernatural forces which have interest in or authority over death and life. The present me is not qualified and so should avoid topics which lead to that one!


additionally lope’s new comment about ghosts agitates pog, who now has no reason to be this bored by the dialog. Fortunately pog has a looser concept of reality than lope so I do not need to wonder about why it is afraid of ghosts.

Pog’s boredom complaint came about because consistently in this section of the comic strip i have worried that i had more dialog than interesting visuals could be made to accompany. But again and again, and indeed again, had to strain to cram in all the visuals i came up with. However, now a script revision that I added due to the boringness of the script was made irrelevant by a future revision. That is so convoluted, crowded and broken I am surprised now that I didn’t keep it in!

Beyond all that, this page is one that is very hard to get working without layout swapping or dialog bauble stem crossing because there are so many characters stuffed into it. Ordinarily you can switch around where characters are to facilitate better dialog flow by zooming in, zooming out, or going to the next page, but I don’t like doing those things! i had in fact gone to a bit of trouble to switch the layout already; initially the viewpoint matched the previous pages, with the dialog positioned to suit that, and then I realized that would mean drawing the back of this parking lot 12 more times and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to draw this side either but it at least is plainly a different page.

I should just put the word “trivia” at the top of a page every time I am conflicted about the overall relevance of its contents.



November 6, 2018
In 1978, legislation was introduced in the state of Maryland to make it illegal to play “Short People” on the radio. Contrary to urban legend, the bill did not obtain enough votes to pass.[4]


This sign advertising the republican primary is actually still up, but even the actual election sign only offers “cut taxes” as any indication of what this person will do and I suspect the sign’s keeper didn’t notice the difference. Although “cut taxes” is loads more information than these signs typically give.

Stefanowski is running against Ned flippin-dippin Lamont, who I complained about in 2006 as also having nothing new to say or contribute. As with the 2014 election, I do not think it matters which one of them gets in. Ned of course won the democrat gubernatorial primary on the strength of not winning the previous Connecticut election he was in for a lower office.

My brother Een produced a song parody that I don’t totally understand. It depicts Ned Lamont in a ludicrous fashion, but treats Stefanowski in a sincere and serious fashion even though he is just as much a red/blue stereotype as his opponent. And then does it to the tune of a song by someone whose prime fans are cartoonishly devoted to the opposition party. But Ian came and jump started “my” car when I was stuck in the miserable Walmart parking lot yesterday because I hate driving a car and every aspect of it exists to spite me, so I know Ian is a decent person. Would Bob Stefanowski help me get away from Walmart?

As usual, the only candidate who actually proposes anything is the one who isn’t supposed to be allowed to win, Oz Griebel, and wasn’t supposed to even be allowed to debate but slipped into one on a technicality when people running the venue were under the impression he was a great and powerful wizard.

Which is not to say I believe in Griebel, but of the three he offers something that can potentially be believed in. I don’t believe in anyone anymore who I cannot directly interact with.
I had wanted Trump to win the nomination in 2016 and gut the party because I underestimated republicans’ ability to be party members first and humans second. I also underestimated the democrats’ ability to pander and regress themselves to try and compete with that. People that get retweeted at me simultaneously say “you’re part of the problem” if you don’t vote for what you believe in and also that you’re “throwing your vote away” if you don’t vote for the sad compromise that they order you to take. I might as WELL vote for a wizard. Half these people are corrupt imbeciles, and the rest are running for office.

Ned Lamont has an unusual bonus this time in that some group has paid for and distributed sarcastic campaign signs announcing that he is “for taxes and tolls” even though only Griebel is openly in favor of tolls. They are obviously fake signs because the real Ned signs don’t say he is for anything. We only know that he is the white guy with a three letter name who is NOT going to cut taxes, and with the people I know, that might just be enough. Even though they don’t actually pay all the taxes because they get their wages in cash off the record.

I do not have a picture of these signs because I only see them when driving.
I hate driving. But I also hate having so many pictures that I cannot finish what I am writing because I want to insert them all. But I hate even more describing something that would work better if I had a picture of it. You know what I like? Lo mein. I believe in noodles.

I actually don’t mind paying for road improvements because I hate driving and would like to feel slightly less like I am going to suffer imminently every time I do it. My issue with tolls is that paying them is terrifying because it requires getting in a specific lane and having a specific amount of money and probably having somebody behind you angry at you for something beyond anybody’s control. Or you have to pay a fee to get a special automatic toll-paying brick from the government, even though the point is to help THEM get money from you more easily. I would rather mail Ned a dollar every week, and I hate mailing almost as much as I hate driving. I will vote for the candidate that will institute a statewide pneumatic tube system so I do not have to drive again.

Although the previous winner, Dan Malloy, declined to seek re-election because he was so tired of people complaining about the non-job he was doing, that gives me no hope that the next job-haver will do a better non-job.
(Ian ALSO has a song about Dan Malloy, and I like this one better because Ian sings it himself and it isn’t to the tune of something I can tell he doesn’t care about, but you wouldn’t know it without excavating it from facebook because the unaltered music from the original song that Ian sang over got it blocked on Youtube which I discovered just now. And then the video shills for some local radio dorks whom I doubt have his best interests in mind)
Grimbedly poketer, nobody complains more than people who win and get what they what.


Something that is “really popular” obviously is liked by more people than hate it. These scumbags get to smear their essence on everything while pretending to be victims.
This guy is set for life and was putting out the narrative “anyone who doesn’t like this thing that I made is a hater” in ADVANCE of it being available, –literally assuming it WOULD get popular because it was already crowdfunded for more money then I will smell in six lifetimes– and people that I KNOW are repeating this years later like that is to his credit, IN ADVANCE of whatever other thing he made more recently, even though the first thing ended up just about the most loved and inescapable heap of happy hype plopaganda relative to the amount of effort involved that may have ever existed and everyone involved has a mutually beneficial situation.

You know what happens if someone who actually is hated complains about being hated? Nothing, because people actually hate that person!

This forklogan who is only ACKNOWLEDGING THAT THIS HAPPENED is exponentially more loved than I have ever experienced! And doesn’t even watch the page, judging from its own screenshot, only leeches off it.

I don’t have a choice to not know or to form an independent opinion on the pertinent matter, which i have personally dumbed “Dintydoone” so I can pretend it is a combination of my favorite inexplicably named supermarket products that also thrive without me ever buying them. I only know it is there because I try to force myself to deal with things that I would rather not be aware of, to give an amount of consideration to the people who come to me, because I worry that avoiding what my instincts tell me are bad news makes me look like an unkind person, and my inability to function when put in that position has made me LESS kind. I don’t have a choice to simply not be interested, even though if I mention what I like I get gloated at like “ho ho I’ve never even SEEN that” like it’s an accomplishment that they haven’t, if I get acknowledged at all, which I probably won’t be. Maybe, MAYBE we are BOTH have a right to like different things. I don’t understand how this is a foreign concept. Of course our political system is preposterous: THESE are the people the candidates have to reach.
And I can’t just not use twitter because the websites that make sense were thoroughly devalued when every person who already gets what they want vacated those sites in favor of ones like this where nobody EXCEPT them can do so.

Do i overreact? Yes absolutely! This is a consequence of a life spent as a square peg trying to get through a round hole when I am actually a tea kettle, and now the culture is dictated entirely by square pegs which includes the hole which is also now square. My only hope is to avoid it entirely. I don’t mind people having their fun and their own personal false gods. They can be furries and bronies and John Balbonies but it is imperative that they be people foremost, and accept that no frivolous expenditure of time can have unanimous approval. Whatever the case I won’t beat myself up anymore for not liking enough stuff that I have no foundation on which to like, and hopefully I won’t make [as many] spiteful drawings on the topic, either.

At least the Hamilton guy, who came into and ruined a piece of my life equal in size around the same time has humility about his fame and considers that it is something of a fluke, even if his creative work comes from the perspective of the abrasively unhumble. He knows, on some level, that is garbage and only for show. I don’t know if he tries to communicate that to his fans, but he definitely wasn’t on 60 minutes 4 times warning people that there is something wrong with them if they don’t like his annoying songs. I bet he would jump start my car even if he read this first, although he might jump ON the car and sing a few lines from Man of LaMancha as punishment for my besmirching attitude.

I heard a [different] song, again, without wishing to, whose primary lyric was “i wish that i could be like the cool kids. like the cool kids.” no rhyme, just that over and over again. While this seems in conflict with “i’m a nerd and i’m cool” and thus a distinct personality type, both speak of a feeling of subjugation. “I’m not cool, I’m not good enough” & “I AM cool, other people who think they are cool actually aren’t.” People in the first group aspire to be the people in the second group. Both see themselves as nerds that society does not approve of, and both are disingenuous. If your song is on the radio and I hear it at the laundromat, you ARE the cool kids. And then if you say you are a nerd, then I have said this before.


Oh chads. Having a prefabricated message from nobody that mysteriously speaks in the first person and that is sent to every single actual person regardless of merit or attempt at it has thoroughly appeased my desire to be appreciated, and so I go out and vote for my favorite factor of purple now.


which is convenient since I literally cannot determine a thing about either of these people beyond that one is a lawyer and the other filed for bankruptcy in 2010. I have to think if somebody WANTS to be the dintdooned registrar of voters they would have a reason for it, or at the very least some piece of personal information they would want me to know before I knew they filed for bankruptcy.



May 5, 2018
Two kids named Smudger Moore and Huntley Hunter want to get their chocolate back.



the first version of this lame comic strip had chocolate, and a better explanation from the dog, since apparently nobody actually knows WHY grapes are poisonous to them. However, I thought my experience being annoyed and demoralized would seem fairly unimportant compared to the slave-like conditions in which chocolate beans are harvested by children in West Africa. Really, that is the reason I changed it! Not that I think anybody likely to see this would know or care that i was trivializing slavery, or that either way I am doing anything to improve that. But once that is in my mind, the whole thing seems meaningless. The primary thing in my life that is at all fulfilling is overeating, which frequently depends on my not thinking about how the exploitation of the world and its people is brazenly utilized by multinational corporations who operate in plain sight. And truthfully I can forget it pretty easily, but I made the connection when drawing the comic so it is fixed in place for me.


I keep seeing this at Stop & Shop and that is all I can think of. They aren’t just sweeping modern day inescapable servitude under the rug, they’re building a luxury hotel on top of the rug and pretending this is somehow pro-humanity and patriotic. Mars’ lawyers probably said “you can’t say made IN america but you can say made FOR america” and gosh that makes it seem like a selfless GIFT! And it IS patriotic in the sense that it puts casual thoughtless luxury of Americans ahead of basic humanity of anyone else. As they always have, but plainly crossing the line that even they have pledged never to cross. You might think one company could eliminate dubiously acquired beans from their supply chain and shame the others for not doing it, but if that actually happened they would all of course have to stop using slave beans, and none of them would benefit financially or publicly because they would also then be forced to acknowledge that they all have slavery in their past and present. What they presently do is put as many different companies and groups between bean harvesting and product selling as possible so it is very difficult to prove anything when somebody DOES speak up. When they do get called out on it, they make non-legally binding “pledge”s to stop using those beans approximately later, and by the time later comes they expect everybody with the power to influence their sales to have forgotten. Consider how long it took to get Bill Cosby in court, and he committed non-lethal crimes in this country against people who have access to means of expression.
It is not EASY to stop institutionalized, undocumented slavery, but obviously people making profits know it has been going ON for a very long time, and would never have made even the present vague show of trying to stop it had it not been publicized. They are morally comfortable with forced, unpaid child labor being step 1 in their product.

And it isn’t like chocolate is getting cheaper; the price goes up despite no sign that money is actually being invested in eliminating corruption. The people who gather the beans aren’t even allowed to EAT chocolate! They can’t even get ONE m&m while there isn’t a store in this country where there aren’t bags and bags and bags of the tiny little bastids. Because they are made for America! And I think trucker hats have finally supplanted cowboy hats as the worst hats. At least cowboy hats can look funny in the right context and provide adequate sun protection. Trucker hat just means “i am proud to pay extra to look ugly.” That’s the driving force between computer generated merchandising characters in general. They always look hideous and the fact that they are effective lets you, the company, know that the people buying your product have no ability or desire to scrutinize any aspect of it, much much less the incongruity between the frightfully specific list of ingredients legally required on the label and everybody involved claiming to not know where the actual chocolate comes from! We don’t know where it comes from but gosh it sure keeps coming at consistent, ever increasing levels and we own it. It must be magic! Magic for America!

At my one art show in 2017, I wanted to put out a bowl of wrapped candy for people to take (and they did), and somehow ended up at wal mart hastily trying to determine, on my terrible telephone computer, which major chocolate company used the “least” amount of slave labor. The simple fact is that if it is at walmart, it abuses enough people that it doesn’t matter that another company is more abusive. Even the dumb phone which I have also called terrible is an absurd convenience that we as society have been groomed to think is fundamental to our being, and contains components from rarely identified, exploited African sources. My device’s manufacturer, Motorola, is not implicated in that, but IS named as a company that benefits from dubious prison labor. And the computer I am typing this on now, who knows what is in it? I sure do not!


Anyway I bought kit-kats. You know, I didn’t get to eat any of this chocolate.


In other news, to start me back on the path to not thinking about where mass-produced cheap chocolate comes from, the dog is based off Scruffy, who used to live in my (and several other persons’) old house.

Seen here visiting my present house, before it was my house, and therefore much classier. Scruffy could in fact stand up and photographs exist proving that, but I sure could not find one.



March 12, 2018
On his 200th Birthday he sprouted a Second Tail and his pupils turned Yellow. He gained Super Strength following the event.

(please do not read this if you have not seen the film but intend to. There may also be other reasons to not read this!)

I saw black panther der film (based on the presumably well known comic book character) not terribly long ago. I thought it was a functional film though not totally cohesive and nothing about it surprised me. Probably better than Thor 2 but not as good as Thor 3. Goy was *I* wrong!


And during a brief exposure to nbc olympic coverage that I recalled afterward, a hypey promotion identified it as “A GAME CHANGER!” among other exclamatory phrases in big gold text that supposedly were said by real people whose job it is to say things like that. Trying to find that advertisement on the internet to get a picture of it is not a good use of my time. The important thing is that without me paying any particular attention it is clear that somebody wants, NEEDS me to believe that my life was changed by this dumb movie.

Black Panther is a ‘game changer’ because it shows that Marvel films can be just as dull, fragmented and focused on the non-hero identities as DC films, I suppose. Panther appears to have the approximately same skill set as Batman and indeed spends as much of the movie out of costume and occasionally out of the movie that he seems like a secondary character. He has a big fight toward the end but it isn’t the main fight and you can’t see what he is doing since he is fighting somebody else with almost the same black costume, in the dark, with a train blocking your view half the time. And it seems like this fight stops and restarts in much the same manner several times just to drag it out to match the length of the other fight they aren’t in. I only remembered after I left the theater that there was another costumed action sequence in South Korea earlier in the film because that seemed like it was in a different movie and I had to remind myself I had seen it the same evening.

He is not a “radical superhero.” The man he fights, Killmonger, is more radical than he is (so obviously that guy has to die). His sister Shuri is more radical than he is. ooh ooh she calls the white american cia agent “colonizer!” and then tells him all Wakanda’s state secrets despite him already having been shown as complicit in a scheme to buy them from the person who murdered Wakanda’s own king and her father, with diamonds stolen from other African countries and later asks him to shoot down planes piloted by her own black Wakanda countrymen because the US government underwrites all our big budget action movies but puts in insults like “colonizer” so we think they don’t.

Panthy may be the only person in the film who isn’t radical. He willingly gives up his power twice so other people can fight him for claim to it. The only thing he does that is radical is declare his own country’s traditions ludicrous and refuse to go along with them, at least after he loses his royal title legally via those traditions. Hopefully the radicality of telling ghosts they are wrong includes no longer willingly giving up his power in the future. Or declaring that only one person in the whole nation is allowed to have the magic plant the power comes from, as from the look of things they could give it to everybody. Or at least they could until Killmonger burned it all without even saving a stash for himself and then the one plant that was saved was instead of being replanted, fed to Panther even though he already screwed up.

The most intriguing characters, to me, were the ape-worshipers in the ice fortress, and they were in the movie even less than the title figure!


But once the media narrative is out there that this movie has some sort of profound message that the world Needs Right Now it keeps rolling down a hill like a cartoon snowball becoming ever larger in defiance of basic snow physics and few people seem to acknowledge it as a fictional contrivance.
Why should I be so bothered by this? I have felt for ages like almost all our acclaimed media is declared “acclaimed” on invalid terms, loudly and constantly so that common people believe it. What is different now is the forced idea that we are living in the most enlightened and progressive time of all times. Why is it important for people to believe that? Is that supposed to make us want to buy more garbage? More and more garbage than ever before? Peoples’ lives have so little meaning now that they need noiser and boastier false statements of meaning. Which also isn’t new but at some point you can’t get any louder. Lying to yourself that an unholy corporate behemoth made a movie which temporarily solved social inequality doesn’t do any more to get fake nazis to stop appropriating your ugly cartoon frogs than selling trashy merchandise asserting your right to punch them does, but it does make it easier for that behemoth to keep washing your brain in the same brine while it continues to eat smaller behemoths that by any other measure would be quite large.

And that is another matter: Black Panther and all his friends are born into affluence. The only person who isn’t is the guy he kills. “Killmonger” becomes king and has differing ideas about Wakanda’s needless secrecy, secrecy which had condemned him to a life of poverty, but he is implausibly irrational and unforgiving so that he is entirely unsympathetic. Panther only acknowledges the secrecy is ineffectual after his enemy does, and then his enemy still has to die. That yet allows the film have a message of “the wealthy should help others in the end,” except “the wealthy” in this case are from a fictional country that controls magic from space. And then white American CIA man is in attendance applauding because it isn’t HIS country that has to change. In fact WAKANDA’s money is going to come to AMERICA to help poor kids. Which is FINE if you accept that the film is a FANTASY whose intent is to amuse viewers. The dilapidated apartment complex in Oakland California that Wakanda people buy up to renovate wasn’t even filmed in Oakland! It was shot in ATLANTA Georgia. Oakland got no money from this movie!
The “Sweet Auburn” neighborhood where that WAS filmed does indeed has a history of suffering under segregation, but by the same token that Oakland didn’t get any money, Auburn didn’t get any recognition. And that is FINE in a fancy bit of stagecraft based on a comic book because it ISN’T REAL anyway!


Disney putting one gay character in each of their movies or at least making cynically planned leaks implying that they might doesn’t do a thing for actual social justice. I saw that Beauty + Beast remake also and Lefou “being” gay is about the least relevant dumb thing about it and that isn’t directly indicated anywhere, either.

That whole story was an exaggeration to get press and fan-wank points without them actually having to commit to any real change, and they get to have news stories saying both things, possibly at the same time. I expect that the writers remembered when JK Rollingsworth announced that Dumbledory was gay and got press for that (hence MY knowing about it) even though she was already done writing the Helly Pothuh books and never actually put that in any of them. And so the more recent Beast’s movie’s only goals were to make money by riding a wave of “retro” media regurgitation, to ret-con its previous movie to be mostly the same except where it conflicted with contemporary entertainment mores, and most fundamentally to establish a cartoon from 1991 as “the original” version of a story from centuries ago. And if you think this 2017 movie is a waste of time that is at best is a sad pageant imitation of a “masterpiece” then Disney still wins! People go buy fresh copies of that and themed merchandise to take pictures of themselves being owned by.


Certainly a MAIN character in a major budgeted mainstream mush being ACTUALLY gay without that being a joke or shoved into people’s business like “oooh isn’t this RADICAL?” would help to normalize it, and make people fuss over it less when it happens again. Although until it DOES happen I don’t give anyone credit for talking about it MAYBE happening in the future, and that still wouldn’t make the movie it happens in automatically bearable.

The fact of the madder is that almost everybody I have contact with is hopelessly depressed. The only ones who think they aren’t are hopelesslier addicted to stupid cartoons and video games, memey hogwash and hypey rubbish in support of those things because if they allowed themselves to think, they would realize how depressed they are.

To reiterate, I think the Black Panther’s film is fine, and it did what it did without relying on characters from other Marvel movies, which I don’t think has happened in this series since Iron Man in 2008. Although much of the VALUE of the series IS its ability cross things over, but it gets out of hand, and can be frustrating when a character whose movie you haven’t seen is suddenly THERE and meant to be recognized but you can’t because too many of them wear dark body suits without helmets. The people who created Black Panther are not necessarily complicit in the campaign to have the latest mildly above average bit of distraction material be declared society’s ambrosia, but I doubt they are questioning their inclusion in it either. I am thankful to have new non-internet proof that this campaign exists, because the last few years it has mostly manifested in things I had NOT experienced, because I was near television a lot and saw the hype first and thereby became too biased to assess them honestly. Being biased does not mean you are wrong. But it does mean you need to work harder to be certain you are not wrong. I was unilaterally biased against Disney for over 10 years and so I stopped complaining about it [as much] for a while, thinking I looked foolish and might possibly be unfair. But I have seen Frozen AND Tangled since my niece Violet was baptized in the princess indoctrination glitter cloud by forces beyond my control. And I can say with as much honesty as I trust myself to have that I think Tangled is probably a better film than Frozen, but if watching Frozen with Violish one more time would magically purge Tangled from existence, i would do it. And if watching both Beauties and both Beasts back to back would purge both those other two then gosh gad why not apart from that not actually being likely to work, because at least 1991 BnB has whimsy and 2017’s tepid re-enactment momentarily permits people to remember that whimsy was once allowed.

Seeing the way people talk about Black Panther after I saw it reminds me of what I also see people retroactively saying about Zelda Skyward Sword compared to the 5 outta 5 release hype. I don’t need to get into this matter deeply but I lost interest in the Zelda series after being utterly disinterested in and frustrated by Ocarina of Time, but my sister liked that one a lot so I tried to imagine I just did not have the right mindset and dexterity for it. But I saw her take to the follow up games with utter sincerity and willingness to enjoy them, and for the first time we could BOTH see all the bland tedious poorly designed gate-keeping hassles that I already considered the series synonymous with, albeit without the hideous n64 graphics or endless repetition of dopey 3-note jingles.


of course the posters outside the cinema would have me believe that peter flippin dippin bippin rabbit is a radical superhero. Yes compared to THAT Black Panther is highly significant. It isn’t enough to give the smug homogenite treatment to every remotely popular culture figure from my life time, evidently. They have to mess with my great grandparents’ too now. This just looks like the sequel to “Hop.”
No Peter rabbit is not an off-brand bugs bunny who chomps carrots while winking at the camera and then stuns Mr. McGregor with a big smooch before clobbering him with his own rake. Peter Rabbit steals RADISHES for his own personal benefit and runs away because he is TERRIFIED since his father rabbit did the same thing and got caught and baked into a pie. He isn’t a “rebel” out to cause trouble. He is just foolish. Beatrix Potter’s characters are entertaining because they are foolish, not because they are “cool.” What is even the point? There will only be name recognition among people who would find this ghastly.


Also: I know what “hop” is and yet recall that it exists because a person known as Bunsen robisioned me to draw their rabbit character one time and some unaffiliated degenerate saw it, copied it and uploaded it to this gross cartoon pornography site and identified it as homage art to “hop (movie)” even though the dork from Hop isn’t half classy enough to half-dress this well.



January 28, 2018
While the movie draws on many elements of the original series, it departs from the established Munsters canon.[1][2]

more about indiscreet of mana. Or I suppose anything about it because it appears that the image links were broken the whole time!
I do not like “fan-art” as a genre. I do not like what it has done to people, and to the economy of artistic recognition. People find out they get disproportionately more encouragement just copying stuff that is already popular than thinking for themselves, and then forget how to think, or never learn to do it at all.


This was even before tumblr and my first attempts at conventions; at the few art events I attended, there would always be some dork who only drew disney characters and I didn’t understand why that was fair, nor how that was particularly interesting to the “artists.”

I made a considerable list of copyrighted characters that I COULD draw if I ever felt the need to copy someone else which would be more interesting to me, since nobody else ever draws them. It would not make me a more creative person, but it would provide some dissent in the fanart miasma. Much of my life has concerned itself with dissenting in areas where I cannot possibly make a real difference. It is silly, but it is an important silliness to me.


I even “know” the main artist/designer of Gobliins and Woodruff + the Schnibble, Pierre Gilhodes, perhaps my most significant living artistic influence, in facebook, but I don’t speak French and have never attempted to communicate with the person, and drawing his old dumb characters would be the perfect way to get his attention if I am going to be drawing other people’s old dumb characters anyway. So how did I come to make a scene from a property I have seen countless derivations of?


I had started this on April 6 2017, apparently the same day my father was hospitalized, when I was also, already, sicker than I recall ever having been, which I suppose could account for my unusual change in subject matter, and I put it away when, in a clearer state of mind, I wasn’t really sure why I was drawing it. But more recently I was looking for some drawing I could finish to place on the internet in a desperate grasp at attention, while my ongoing project on-goes without my having anything coherent to show for it. I saw this and forgot why I had STOPPED drawing it, suddenly taken by the idea of getting easy approval via one of the rare things I like that is still popular. Forgetting that the people who make it still popular are not actually as numerous or influential as they seem, and that I still need to get over the barrier of my having drawn it.

Yet inexplicably the final appears sparse and incomplete to me, and only now do I see the intense perspective flaws. This is why most of my drawings have flat perspectives and flagrantly unrealistic backgrounds. It is harder to see when those have gone horribly wrong and easier to fix when I do notice! I spent a number of hours trying to fix this after the stuff that was important was already set in place and somewhat unremarkable.

Additionally, I didn’t realize that the chubbier child, Elliott with two Ts, was supposed to have an overbite until I had already committed to most of that, and it never looked quite right again after the point where I “fixed” that.
A part of me says: draw it the way that looks right to you (me), since it is your picture and approximately 100% of people who will see this never analyzed the sprites close enough to recognize this who will also complain about that. That part of me typically loses.

As I sought the non-existent source artwork, I inadvertently learned of a 3d Secret of Mana “remake” and I have to say that is completely and wholly unnecessary, especially after Sword of Mana, the remake of SOM’s predecessor Final Fantasy Adventure, and perhaps my single most complained-about video game, though not necessarily in public. I wish the Square people would remake something that didn’t quite work, like Sword of Mana Secret of Evermore, or localize something that was never released in the US at all, like Romancing Saga or even Seiken Densetsu 3. Or better yet remake every mana game AFTER secret of mana, because as best as I can tell, none of them worked. Or betterer yet stop messing with old games and make a new game that uses a similar interface and graphical style, and acknowledge it is a ripoff but that the 1990s aesthetics have validity, and that without the data storage and processing limits of the 16-bit systems you can do better things with the style than were previously possible.

I kept this part out of the first post because once I mentioned sword of mana I realized I had eh over 1100 screenshots with mostly annoyed comments on them, and wondered what and how much I should say about it here now to sum up my gripes, but didn’t have the desire to deal with that at the last update.


But I don’t want to deal with it now, either, since Sword of Mana fills me with a passionate, disdaining ennui.

and fixating on specifics endlessly means I miss the point and spend ages getting nothing of importance done!



November 21, 2017
Look, I can see a little foul language maybe at a Wendy’s, but I hold a restaurant with real plants to a higher standard.

The animation I posted previously got way out of hand. As did my text description of how that happened. Neither of those should surprise you! However, it became somewhat inflammatory and it seemed unfair to have accompany a piece that I was paid for and was not hideous.

my usual method of illustrating is somewhat sculptural. I add material, subtract it and smush it around, until the shape looks correct, and only then fill in small visual details. Some things may be a bit off until the very end, but the important matter is that the ideas and gestures and all are clear early on, so that the buyer can trust me (or I can finishe me) to finish the piece. At the example stages of this animation, I operated in a similar fashion, which was not good!


I prioritized making sure the sequence was legible, and not that all details were accurate or that shapes were consistent, saving that for later. But in animation, every object needs (at least to me) to flow into the other. Having the flow function before the details are correct is minimally meaningful, because every instance of any detail may need to be altered, and that may change how it moves. For example, if one aspect, such as the wings, is the wrong size or shape, that would require much correction, and may even need new frames. But if another aspect, such as the ears, were already correct, adding in new frames may mess with their flow! AND getting too strict with the flow in some places may disrupt areas where it had previously been casual (and already approved of by the instigator, Goldquiver, mind you), such as the leaf-arms. When I added the spots toward the end (and Goldquiver had already not cared that I hadn’t included them), their movements were very smooth from frame to frame, and suddenly the casual leaves were unacceptable to me! But moving the leaves meant messing with the area where I had lain the spots. AND I had already drawn the shading on top of it, so the shading had to move


Oh yes, the shading type is new. For each individual frame, another layer is above it with translucent shadows. In the past animation I always shaded directly on the base drawing. I thought this would be faster! However, I had already, for clarity, used two different shades of green to differentiate the sides of the leaves, so some point there are competing shadow methods!!! oh! And it still does not look as natural or tight as adding it directly, since I tend to refine the edges while shading, and I would use all included colors in order of their values. In aseprite, the software I used for most of this, adjustment layers function independent of the set color palette. Which looks more “realistic,” since the shadows fall consistently, but cartoons are not supposed to be realistic, and pixel art looks more competent and orderly when the colors are limited and used to maximum efficiency. The dark brown that covers the light brown is not IN the color palette, so I cannot use it in a full orderly value sequence!


At this stage from 5 days before I declared it “done,” and probably a week before I was actually done with it, I had already started to color it, even though the details were not all in. Unfortunately I often cannot see if something is wrong or correct until after I have begun coloring it. A pruhfeshinul animator might tell you that after the first version of the sequence you need to make a fully realized sketch version, and ONLY after that do you go BACK to the first frame again and put definitive lines on that. I never do that! I always think it will take too long!

Or they might tell you something else entirely; I only knew one person who worked in animation, and could not find steady employment or just hated it and didn’t actually draw all that meticulously since MOST cartoons are ugly these days since they are all designed by people who can’t draw at all and I think that person works at a pet supply store and likes it better. As much as I complain about them, I still find illustrated animal folk easier to deal with in my own home than real ones.


I had, for this animation, been testing an unusually-designed bit of software called Tvpaint. Its animation mode is great but everything else is weird, like arbitrarily so. It is designed, or rather “developped” by French people and more importantly, probably in Linux. Linux software is unintuitive since the programmers think they are “avante-garde,” which is French for annoying on purpose. TVPain’s selection tool is separate from the well-disguised selection movement tool, making movement a sub-function of “transform” rather than transform AND move sub-functions of selection, even though you can’t transform without selecting first, and you cannot select with the transformer!

Hey! I am saying BAD things about you! I am NOT complimenting you! Vous ette un homme ridicule! (Oui vrai)

And Tvp has “Erase” as a toggled mode on drawing tools instead of a dedicated tool which covers more ground than drawing tools, which I have only seen prior in Krita, which is also for Linux. Imagine if you used a pencil and the eraser was also sharpened to a point. You would have to trace your wrong lines exactly to remove them. I have used Krita, since somebody once gave me a Linux computer with Gimp installed on it, and Gimp is worse than that, unless you want to draw stuff that looks like velvet. Krita is good for drawing but laughs in your face if you want to correct a mistake.

Also I am still using computers from that person and I like those computers but I find linux to be very silly.

TVPaint additionally has its view-adjustment mode require you to press ALT instead of SPACE, contrary to everything else ever made, including Krita and Gimp, and it cannot be changed to space. I can assign something else to space but there is no point because I am just going to do it by accident when trying to move the view because I forgot I have to press alt. But TVPaint’s animation mode is good, though it is not designed for making GIFs, so I had to export it to Aseprite for coloring. Aseprite is not good for detail correction, since it has no tablet pressure sensitivity! And the wings were full of details! Oh oh oh!


But every challenge is an educational experience. Requests like I have had in the past should be easier by comparison, since I know yet more mistakes to avoid. Or perhaps people will continue to ask me for more complicated things, which would also be good, since completing them means I have become more capable. And if nobody asks for anything that is also good since I have loads of other things to do! I shall have the last laugh whatever the case!

I actually like TVPaint better than a program highly recommended among the people I sort of know but don’t talk to me that I don’t talk to called “Toon Boom,” and I like TVP better first of all since it doesn’t have “boom” in its name, which is a sound effect that should never be used as a word except to describe the sound-effect unless you are a scumbag.

And also because toonboom actually ISN’T designed for linux, and instead of holding Macintosh/Windows art software in contempt it holds -ALL- art software in contempt and it goes even further out of its way to be discomforting to use. And its tutorials spend five minutes explaining all the self-explanatory GUI elements and then say essentially “ok draw your animation now” and then remind you that the author works in the Animation Industry and they talk like their mouths are full of pizza but you can’t mute them since they don’t provide captions and if you learned to animate on a computer and think this software is needlessly uncomfortable you are WRONG and should quit and go to school again and start over and learn the RIGHT way and respect your elders who are actually 16 year-olds with millionaire parents who sent them to expensive art schools in-utero and only let them watch the Disney channel and play Mario Kart and are the most boring uninspired people on earth and are totally oblivious because our contemporary culture values derivative “mash-up” fan homages more than effort and thought.

Krippendorf, if I had actually BOUGHT the thing I would be furious (except you can’t buy it because it is subscription only).

Anyway, overall I think it went well!

Although another program called “Opentoonz” with a Z is totally free and has a similarly incomprehensible interface, and that also makes me angry. It makes me almost as angry as a slinky with one coil section that is off for no knowable reason and that can never be corrected.

So i have to do this to it and make it a total loss to stop from spending hours absentmindedly fiddling with it and making no progress. Software with no physical component that I can download for free legally repeatedly gives me no such luxury!



March 6, 2017
up next, our exclusive tour inside a real housewive’s closet

This is a major matter I have been occupied with the past half year. Major in the sense that it eats much time, not that it is important.



These depict a creature named techno made up by a person most recently called beepysopod.
Although I have offered to make drawings for money for years for, this is the first one I have received consistent interest in from other people. And that is because while there are many, many amateur artists on the internet who are more technically skilled and/or more visible than I am, or just plain not as angry as I am about the wrong things, most of said persons are terrible at pixel-level artwork. A few people are better, but not enough of them are to totally crowd me out like usual. Or being better leads them to other opportunities so that they are no longer available for small time work.

The prevailing mentality is that it is just a regular drawing done at low resolution, or with a 1-pixel wide outline. And again most buyers cannot tell. And most people in general do not care about pixel art in 20167 that is not in service of homaging popular commercial properties. (the awareness of which contributing to my anger and the public ignoring of which contributing to my non-visibility)

A FEW people do interpret this as useful and unique, however, such as the owner of the rightside figure, Fallenfolf, and here we are. I of course have known I am “good” at this for many years; there was a time when there was no way to draw on a computer EXCEPT zoomed in, using a mouse. But back when there was real NEED for this skill, in 1996, I did not know anybody. And I still don’t know anybody, so here we are again. Although now I have the scrap of legitimacy that makes people willing to pay me scraps of money to make them, although generally the people who buy from me do not know anybody either, which keeps me available for scrappy art work and the game from breaking. Can you imagine if I did something meaningful with my life? It would be a disaster. My entire personality draws from my life being a joke. Anything I do right is inspired by doing things wrong. If it were possible for me to predict what would go right, I would only do right things, and therefore do them even worse.

Anywhy, what changed was the introduction of the Telegraph messenger service. You might have heard of it, that is the one Islamic State militants use to coordinate their attacks since the story is that Telegram does not track its users. Which also means paranoid furries love it. One of telegram’s major features is “stickers,” 512×512 pixel images any user can shove at any other user. Many people will draw these in exchange for money. Usually poorly-drawn and scaled down heads making idiotic exclamations are preferred. The beeply isopod person happened to ask me for some, but without specifying that they be poorly drawn or disembodied heads, and I took it upon myself to draw them at the actual display size, since, you know, I COULD, and I offered that person five examples, all of which I was asked to complete. Ever the shrewd business-thing, I did all five for free, then three more for free even as I found myself increasing the detail level, uncertain at what point it was no longer experimental and that I could guarantee a consistent level of quality. After this point a single person asked to pay me for one, and I set the rate at $20, because that was about as much as I could imagine somebody paying me.


AND I promoted it with this specific image, because it was the best of the group, even though it was also the most difficult and time-consuming one of the group and under no circumstances would I feel adequately compensated to draw a prop more complex than the character I was requested to draw for less money than I could get a good pizza with in this miserable overpriced town.

Yes that ought to solve all my problems. But it did not because as I sold more, I kept increasing the complexity level, which people didn’t even know they were getting, and didn’t necessarily want, either, because it did not necessarily work!

At this point I only look greedy, which is fine because I need to scrap the “one price for whatever you want” system and put a cheap rate on the cheap drawing and a higher rate on a better-produced item. But I cannot easily do that because

I only allotted that much space for pixel junk on this garish chart, a chart which was already agony to cram as much junk into as there is. Because I thought people would ignore the garish chart if it was not orderly and its sections evenly distributed. Every picture is a distinct element, and text is on different layers, so that I could change the examples and what my name was based on what website I posted this on because I do in fact have dumber names than bimshwel that I do not want to have used interchangeably with it, since the other mes make even worse things. Then I had to remember to swap all those details around again when I adjusted the price on the one thing people bought. Which I eventually forgot to do, which is why this one says “grebij” on it.
And I only have the stupid chart at all to makes things easier! Because if I write out what I am charging in text form, with multiple examples for each category and descriptions of what each category involves, people don’t read it and just ask me directly, and then I cannot remember what I wrote and risk giving even wimpier prices.
If somebody refers directly to the chart, I know they have already seen and accepted my prices and at least are not going to try and pay me less than that.
Except for one person who did but if you are reading this then it wasn’t you!
I often do not realize what a sad state I am in until long after issuing a price estimate. Because I cannot well start working on something, then give a proper estimate, and risk having the other party say “ehhhh no dice.” Or worse, try to pay me in dice!


Observe that these are considerably more tightly-drawn than the first five, and more effort was taken to prevent and remove glaring edge artifacts. It SEEMS like I have done something properly while planning to, which should disprove my earlier theory. Since I made the first group without thinking, they came out rather simply and everybody was pleased. But these I obsessed over, without only minor practical improvement. Although I did not knowingly change my method; I merely paid more attention to it.



These ones, for a Scoots-Buragi, who saw the previous group and wanted a similar meltitude, were a bit loose again, but with all the stripes in there I thought it was justified. The ends still taper to 1×1 pixel points occasionally. Thankfully this did not, as some animated work last year did, endear me toward people who thought that I must surely have the same erotic fixation on masculine figures melting as they did, but I continued to have buyers anyway. So I seem to be coming out ahead, for once.


In fact they may have endeared me toward a dear, Kait Foxdear. That is dear in the precious sense, hence an A, even though the creature has deer components. The world is quite complex. This drawing is tightly rendered anew, and I kept the colors under control. Except for there being some bright green pixels stuck to the edges that I literally did not notice and remove until I went to write this website entry. wh-wh-whoopth.

For one HellBaby-From-Hell, this one came out almost TOO easily, so that I felt like I must have done something wrong, and so I got the details even tighter.


Which then totally spoiled me for these two, the first for Trufours and the second for Relaxingdragon (obviously, Relaxingdragon requested the raccoon person), whose subject matters were considerably more complex than the Hell-Baby’s. Finding a reasonable point at which to stop was impossible for me. Everything was drawn at 1 pixel and I put no limit on color density, although the latter party requested that I limit the hues, and consequently I thought it prudent to fill in the transparent sector with other grey tones. But then that destroyed its ability to be used as transparent imagery! Also, [depressing digression]. However, ultimately only two people really need to like any of them, right? Me and the recipient. But I also need other people to keep wanting them. Theoretically these are the best ones I did, but they are NOT because I beat the energy out of them.


This one, ostensibly a gift for somebody named Doomdweller from another called Syrenti, I was amidst while wondering why the last two were less good, and finished while realizing why they were less good, rather too late to do it differently!




This gives an idea of the tedious process. However, I made this video BEFORE I realized I had slipped into an undesirable way of doing things; I only thought to record it because I thought I was finally doing something properly! Alas, I can only be right by accident and I lack the resources to record my entire life. A pity, I would love to see a 3 minute video of me not messing up so I could determine what that looks like and try to be more like it.


I think everybody would like to see that.



January 20, 2017
Pinto’s main point is simply for parents to consider the Elf’s message.

Yes obviously Trump has been hard to take, despite my best efforts to give him the benefit of any doubts. For the sake of my ability to coexist in society, I thought that was important. Coexisting has always been a challenge to me. In part due to Trump-like attitudes from all the people who control everything.


Ironically I have felt disliked by ostensibly compassionate people for my attempts to maintain my sanity amidst this. And in recognition of my relative courtesy toward Mr. Trump, he has, without altering his facial expression, consistently crunched up my courtesy and tossed it back in my face unless he can find a worse place to toss it . He really doesn’t want the support of anyone who will question him in any way. In a sense proving right the people who maligned him all along. But in all honesty I think even if he made an effort to appear to care a bit, the people who shunned me for not shunning him would still do so. Which I say to excuse me, not him. As I have stated previously, I still do not believe Trump can or aspires to deport legal citizens, much less send them to gas chambers. He is not a “nazi.” Perhaps he condones them so long as they stay out of his way, but he is not a white supremacist. He is a Trump supremacist.

Which doesn’t even necessarily mean he will be worse than any president we have ever had; he just has no intention of being unpleasant discreetly as Clinton would have done. Trump won’t let us feel good about how bad he is. It can be a scary feeling. Which could potentially be good. But it probably won’t be. We could improve ourselves with the awareness that we need to improve, but we will probably just complain about it. We haven’t been trained to do anything else.

But he is the president we deserve. Possibly always deserved. He is totally marketing focused. He does whatever is necessary to meet a goal, so to speak, and feels no shame for it, no matter how unpleasant it is.

Maybe by this point, by fixating over what happened to me a few months ago, I am just paranoid and not helping anybody who offered benefits of doubt to me, but I would hardly say my relationships were splendid before this happened. My new rule for 2017 is that I don’t draw free art, or work three times as hard on wholly undercompensated art as I would on free art of stupid rubbish for scumbags who can’t or won’t help me unless they are me, and I won’t indulge their bad company for months and months because I think they can connect me to people because they are only going to connect me to other scumbags if they even decide to connect me at all which they are strikingly likely to not bother with. Which is somewhat beside the point; there are about 30 more paragraphs to this but they need to be edited, and every time I try to write an excuse for cutting it off I get a new paragraph. Please trust that I need to have the paragraphs above this one out of my business prior to Trump being inaugurated more urgently than I need to put them into context. Sleeping would help me!

I am glad people are protesting, but I hope they have actual goals and are not merely, in the manner of “Occupy Wallstreet,” seeing it as a socially acceptable thing to do. You can get thousands of people to “march,” but at your core you are just moving from one piece of ground to another, and it consequently would not make a difference if you got millions to march beyond that you coordinate marches well.

At the art show I attended back in October, one of the large exhibits, by somebod[ies] who got in free and was PAID to be there, was called Total Jump Live and it was a series of video screens and self-aggrandizing slogans meant to coordinate and show everybody in the world jumping at the same time. Because naturally everybody in the world has access to live streaming video at all times and is capable of jumping. As somebody who was on the premises when it happened, I sure didn’t know WHEN it happened, and whatever massive problem it solved by happening was not one I was prior or thereafter aware of. I was however aware that there was a special rehearsal for the jump and that an APP was available to help me practice! Of note is that if you browse the internet on a non-telephone there is no way to download the APP nor for the, I had thought basic information about how to jump to be delivered to you in another format.


Well then by gorby we’d sure have accomplished nothing more than that! Which is still perhaps more than I have accomplished, but I don’t believe that I would be satisfied with aspiring to that. The proposal wishes that all able-bodied people jump and land at the same time. Which means you have temporary frivolous unity at the expense of diversity. For just a brief stupid jump does it matter if I put aside my personal jumping manner for a moment? It does if the stupid brief jump thinks it is terribly important. I will not do it: I will not jump in somebody else’s manner so that they can pretend they have a consensus of jump-manner and feel proud of themselves for bringing it about. Because from my experience all this gains me is an expectation that I keep right on doing it. But I will not obstruct, either. Unity without expression has no value.



November 12, 2016
Cable schmable. Who needs cable when you got family by ya side?

Why am I so obsessed with proving other people wrong who do not really have different goals than I do? Because they are proud of themselves, greater in number, back each other up and treat me poorly. I think it might come down to that, and maybe it always has. I cannot devote energy to being afraid of the president-elect since I am too preoccupied with being afraid that I have no soul. If I ever sort that out perhaps I will get back to you.

————————————–

Oh but you want to know my thoughts about the united american election, right? Statistically speaking, you probably do not!
I was writing something item by item as it happened but then afterward it turned into a different story.

People love to blame Ralph Nader for W.Bush’s election, some of them more so than they blame Bush for being awful or Gore for not being better.
So instead of doing anything to alter how the system works, we shamed people who refused to go along with it. And by gorby we did it once, we can do it again.
You can grow up to be anything in America! But don’t you dare try and vote outside these two colored boxes.
I must acknowledge that without the insincerity and corporate synergy Hillary Clinton would be more appealing to ME, but would never have gotten this far.
I relate to Hillary Clinton because nobody relates to her except when she is totally fake. She changed everything about her public demeanor to help Bill Clinton’s political career, including changing her own name. It was a political liability for a husband to have a wife who kept her original name. Although perhaps that fakeness has become natural to Hillary by now.

When all the celebrities of society, especially the terrible musicians, whose influence leaves me unable to relate to a majority of the apparent population, become synonymous with a political candidate, it is hard for me to be enthusiastic. Even if that seems fickle to you, that these things are unrelated, I say they are related. The point is that I am meant to feel like I am one with these people, and these are all people that keep me alone in groups. You preach diversity but are of one mind where culture is concerned, and I objectively dislike the most highly promoted items. beyonk, ga-ga, adel, bruce stringbean, new bon jovi, I cannot listen to this. I cannot get in on this message of “love” from people who ignore or diminish me when I love something else.


I noted around 7pm that somebody had accidentally switched ABC’s live election feed with an episode of MTV Total Request Live from 1998. I didn’t want Trump to win, but I enjoyed seeing chummy smirky news people suddenly more reserved and analytical once it appeared less inevitable that their pre-coronated Clinton was going to win. I loved seeing their stupid, stupid years of speculation turn to mush on live television. I relished seeing THEM lose. I relished seeing this alliance of overconfident scumbags uncertain they would get their way. I wasn’t getting my way whatever the case, and I am not convinced their way is best. And I say that as somebody who has felt held down and alienated by republicans my whole life. The obsession with religion, the demand that I feel a certain way for certain things, the dismissal of some forms of expression as invalid. Now both parties represent that to me. So I just want whichever one is more insufferable at present to lose, but without really wanting either to win I did not feel like I had a stake in this. But I did not vote for Trump. It wouldn’t have made a difference if I had but I would never have.

Stephen colbert announced that his election night show would be LIVE on the showtime channel. Not saying anything resembling an apology for viewers who don’t have access to Showtime. Because we who don’t buy and don’t buy INTO everything are not considered real people. Just like the Throneger Games and the Soprano show, programs that require a year’s HBO subscription to get less than one new episode per month, it is presumed that if you aren’t in the club to whom that is reasonable, you don’t matter.
The night before that, Colbert had a lengthy musical piece equating a lack of desire to vote [for Clinton, who was not named during the piece] as a lack of desire to vote at all. And of course Hamilton came out at the end to win the day with rap because hip hop always wins because nobody is allowed to not be totally into it. But thankfully it was the replacement Hamilton that is less irritating despite copying the first one’s weird anachronistic facial hair.
I can’t believe ten years ago I felt like I knew this guy. Although ten years ago I thought I knew zartan and ukuhawa and bridgeportcat and it was three more years before I thought I knew science fox and you can wager none of them are talking to me ever again (although to be fair they aren’t likely talking to each other either). Am I just getting worse? (although if you are reading this please talk to me I will call you whatever name you want those are just the ones I used to call you if I mentioned you and you can call me or roneldo or john jacob jingleheimer skrimpf if you want to). Sometimes I feel like I cannot know myself and anybody else at the same time. On the internet, anyhow

As far as I have come in 15 years, I am back at how I felt: It isn’t all about New York, and it isn’t all about Los Angeles, even if that is where all the tv comes from.
There is the old part of me that thinks “oh no, democrats are losing!” but the newer part of me that didn’t see conditions improve when democrats won is uncertain how it feels.
“What this says about our country is horrifying,” a manner of statement I have seen a bunch. What it says is that no attempt is made by democrats to appeal to people who aren’t already on their side. And republicans don’t have to because their fanbase has always been more enthusiastic about voting, with better access to doing it. And they are accustomed to voting for cartoon characters. I said almost a year ago that I hoped Trump would be nominated so the party would eat itself alive not keep him out. I underestimated their ability to get behind The Party WHATEVER the cost. Even when loads of them say they won’t, they do.
It IS depressing seeing all these people despondent on twitter and thereabouts, even though prior to then I never shared in their joy. I suppose I just don’t relate to that. I know how sadness feels. I don’t know how it feels to be moved to tears over this, but I cry over things that they would never understand.
Trump of course was accused by Theodore Cruz during the campaign of having “New York Values.” And he DOES. He lost that state but he won the states who don’t realize that putting yourself first and never admitting fault are the quintessential New York Values.

Looking back to that first picture from New York City, that sums it up. “Look, all these people in NEW YORK CITY are happy, why aren’t you? There must be something wrong with you!”
I cannot support that. BUT it was not my thinking that did this. It turns out when there are two enormous groups furious at each other, they hate you even more if you refuse to unconditionally agree with either. The “with us 100% or you’re the enemy” attitude is very w-bushy. What is funny is that people who have a problem don’t actually disagree with me, they just think I disagree with them because I am not on board their socially-mandated mourning barge, even though I never have been. I wasn’t on September 11 2001, I sure as shingles am not now with regard to a man that has not actually killed somebody, however many he has groped or bankrupted. I survived two bushes and half a Reagan, can we really say this is worse before it has even happened? There are thugs in this country, and there are thugs in France and there are thugs in Russia. There are thugs in the world. There was a thuggish racist movement in this country before Trump got involved. They probably voted for Trump. And they probably voted for Mitt flippinmitten Romney because paranoid people who think the segregated water fountain period were the good old days because they had reduced awareness of world hardship at that time compared to now have gone with republicans my entire lifetime. Trump is himself thuggish but he did not create the thugs. Why do I care about this? Because this is not something that instantly came into being, and you were not going to instantly stop it. There is loads of outrage over failure to use a solution that was not actually there.

Of course it was Trump-attituded policies that likely brought about 9/11, but then make that case, please, I want to say to people. We ought to not assume everybody has the same context as we do when it comes to things like this. Try and have some empathy even when speaking of people that you presume have none. You cannot call millions of people morons and expect them to get along with you. Unless you are Trump. I think all that “haters gonna hate” swagger which the youth supposedly espouse fits Donald to a T[rump]. He wouldn’t be a billionaire without shoving his name and face everywhere with no regard for anyone else’s feelings. He seems to me more careless than hateful. Now that he is being briefed on things he seems to be, as I expected, increasingly aware that none of his ludicrous promises are feasible, or maybe he knew all along. So those unhappy about the election can at least see how it feels when the other side gets let down by the silly stuff they believed. Guantanamo Bay Prison is still open for business, but we aren’t going to start banning all Muslim immigration either! Hip hap hoorosh. The candidate got the party in power, and the party takes over with precisely what it would have done whoever was there. We might as well vote in Dennis Rodman; he at least has been to North Korea. I don’t think President Obama has even been there.

Be sad or afraid if you are, but please do not make it a contest to be saddest or afraidest, especially at the urging of a retweet chain.
The question i need to ask: was it my job to vote for Hillary Clinton or Clinton’s job to make me want to vote for her? If I had, I would have hated myself. If I had voted as I did, for Jill Stein of the green party, but claimed I voted for Clinton to join the party on facebook, I would have hated myself. If I had actually voted for Clinton, and if everyone else who voted as I did ALSO voted for Clinton, she still would not have won, because there was not a single state that Clinton lost where the number of votes the green party got was greater than the amount Clinton lost by. Gary Johnson the Libertarian, however, took a considerably larger bite of the total, and every libertarian I ever knew –granted, just one person– was a republican otherwise.
And if you go back in time and prevent Bernie Sanders from being sabotaged and change nothing else, who knows what irrational unaccountable jiu-jutsu Trump club would have dumped on him? And then you would probably see hard corn Clinton backers going libertarian because Clinton was always the foregone conclusion and Sanders was too liberal and unrealistic.

You will believe being silently unwatched by 4 people on twitter who don’t even consider you a valid enough human to disagree with and risk realizing you don’t actually disagree with them the same day, while also receiving no input from anyone else can send somebody over the edge. I have had to repeatedly remind myself that I didn’t vote for Trump because I find myself being mentally defensive of stuff that I think people are aiming at me because they think I did even though I plainly said I voted for Stein. It is bloody absurd. This is dumber than high school, and high school was extra dumb for me.
And I figured out who they were, too, nobody who should have had any problem with me. You might think it insane that I try to determine who they are, but that helps me ascertain why they did it, and if there was anything I could have done to prevent it, or if there would be any point to, if they would just overinterpret something else later. These people, they didn’t even know me and they didn’t care to try. Except one sort of did, and still dumped me without a single word, and that hurts. It isn’t as bad as fearing for my life, but what is that life worth? This amounts to feeling: I don’t matter, and nothing I try can make me matter. Please understand, I do not relate on a mass scale. I relate personally. And how many others have not taken the step to numerically shun me but have censored me, again without checking if I meant what they thought I did, with the mute command? And who else are they doing that to? That is just dirty. That does not aid discourse or clarity. I am a real person, not an episode of Blue Bloods.
With that said, if I have not opted to follow these accounts myself, do they really owe me any level of regard? Maybe not, but I end up thinking they do since it IS to me a big deal when I do opt in like that. It means I believe in this person and their content to a degree beyond what I would by default. It means I have a desire to be close to this person in this medium. And when I give up on it, I have a reason for that also. Even if it is a stupid reason. If somebody were to ask why I could say: because I don’t like when you talk about the digestive enzyme fluid generated by people’s mouths. I should go to bed.

Perhaps this is old news in the electronic communication realm but this is the first time I could articulate exactly why it hurts me personally. This is a real issue for me right this moment. Communication barriers are important. How often is this happening every single day over dumber slights than this? And I unwatch others for fickle reasons. Like stuff nobody could ever guess. But generally it has to be personal. Sometimes I resist doing it because I think it will come across as hurtful. Is this the mindset of a hateful person? I hate to th- oh well there we go.


Maybe if I spent more time styling my toothbrush and raising awareness of the end of the alphabet I would have less time to dwell on things like this!



August 20, 2016
The film is a remake of the Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol, featuring a pop singer who gets a reality check by three Christmas spirits.


One final television activism post, and I swear I will administer my own lobotomy before I watch late night television or network news just because somebody else has them on again. If I lose my mind I want that to be because I personally removed it. I believed people who said “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” despite a world full of amputees and kwak-addicts. It isn’t true. Not cutting myself off totally from things that abuse me, thinking I can force myself to see their merit, only gets higher ratings and more validation for abusers, and always turns into me just being angry at them and needing to spend hours writing about them to claim closure for myself. I feel more closed than I did last time, but shutting and locking mechanisms often malfunction after 30 years.

The point of “late night” television, I thought, was to air material that was not considered in line with the rest of the schedule, taking more risks, reaching a more eclectic audience. As usual, I thought wrong. It only ever was that way because networks couldn’t produce enough routine garbage to fill all their time slots. Now it’s easier to make than ever and they can, and they have a surplus, and since their routine audience never goes to bed and sponsors pay more to reach them anyhow, having late night indistinguishable from early night and mid day suits them just fine.

My primary impetus here: James Corden’s late nighted television show was nominated for four Emmy awards! Yippitee-doo! I know that because he announced that on his show, that was being watched in my presence amidst my general duties. Just the conceited trendy “praise me for being praised” behavior I hate on the internet.


Old Stephen Colbert I accepted that from, because the point of his old show was that he was a conceited ass who demanded praise. And it functioned as a commentary on the phoniness of self-administered media awards that it was completely plausible that such a conceited ass had so many that he could use them as props. But as is often the case, the satire of ten years ago is the sincere reality of today. I must let it go and do what it will. One of Corden’s nominations was for a prime time-aired special edition of his program, which was fixated around the trendy, content-devoid “carpool karaoke” gimmick, which is literally just Corden and celebrities getting into a car at scripted intervals, having scripted banter and then singing along, not necessarily well, to annoying songs that are already popular, while driving nowhere with his hands off the steering wheel. Alright, so an hour’s time slot worth of that is what we give less obscure timeslots and awards to now. Hey look, recognizable people! Hey listen, recognizable songs! In a car! Congratulations, you’re entertained! I appreciate that his regular guest segments do not involve a desk and are not hierarchically separated, but I don’t give a humperdink about guest segments to begin with, and never much did. Having them seep into the designated “comedy” portions to disguise the lack of actual comedy is a sizable stomp in a wrong direction and nobody noticed because that’s the only direction they’ve gone in for years.

And it isn’t just the karaoke piece but that’s the only one I’m getting into, and then I’m getting out. I need not detail every media synergistic bit of promotion by Matt Damon and Seth Rogen masquerading as silly sketch. But Karaoke, that is fun if you yourself are doing it, or somebody that you know is doing it, and just plain annoying otherwise You might as well record people playing Cranium. In a car.

And then after the announcement, in lieu of properly edited content, Corden aired a preview of the next karaoke bit, which would be airing in full two days later. how bloody lazy is that? You boast of your greatness and how many people are saying you’re great, and then show something that isn’t even ready. Is this a network television show with a staff of hundreds or one doofus’ Patreon?
And the car star was Michelle Obama, who is presumed entertaining based on what? I have no clue. Being married to a celebrity president. The entire culture that allowed this program to exist and then threatens to give awards to it is corrupt. And the footage of the bit is setup to make it be a surprise who gets in the car, except it isn’t because Corden himself said who it would be before throwing to the footage, that he himself appears in, that it is going to be Michelle Obama. Like if I didn’t know that 30 seconds before it was relevant, that would be my breaking point. And then also bear in mind this exact same thing will be re-run in the same week of non-reruns, and later the actual reruns will likewise run it re.

The next day, ABC World trash celebrity hype News covered it, complete with a pre-coverage tease that already told all the story that they had before the main report on this thing that isn’t even news. If the story had been “celebrities getting paid to be on television without attempting to exhibit talent” they might have had something, but in fact all they had was just a clip of the clip of the show, which they had already showed.

This is rather a clip from Good Morning America and not World News Tonight. But that makes it even worse: the prime-time show that is supposed to be giving information that matters is airing leftovers from the show that is exclusively devoted to fluff. And somehow this clip of the clip is on the internet even though the actual clip being clipped from is itself on the internet. And now I have posted a cap of a clip of a clipped clip of hyped tripe’s trite retry. Thanksh, Obama!

It’s like a circle-jerk where instead of other participants you put your hand through an interdimensional portal that just happens to exit immediately beside it in the opposite direction. I will not show a picture of that. I once remarked that the Saturday Night Live 40 year anniversary show was the closest I had ever seen to somebody masturbating on television, and the lack of international consensus on whether the version of you on the other side of a portal is technically the same person as you leaves that distinction still in place for the time being.

ABC World News ALSO covered the United States Olympic swim team singing together, in a car, naturally. The anchor David Muir prefaced it by saying “you’ve seen carpool karaokeTM before, but not like THIS.” He is confident I have seen that before because he has shown it before, and he has teased it across a full broadcast as if it it is news before, and as if there is actually MORE non news than can fit into the dumb tease even though there isn’t. He could at least tell me where all these swimmers are GOING. I had hoped somebody would rob them once they got there but then they told me “dude that’s totally what happened.” Gee I feel kind of bad now.


Look at his stupid tool face! A prairie dog could do his job but the prairie dog probably has more pressing business (please don’t make a computer animated movie about prairie dog news anchors). I like imagining that isn’t a video screen, those are regular sized people and David Muir is a tiny gremlin living in their cupboard. That is more rational to me than the truth.

One of the songs being sung is “call me maybe,” a song that only exists to be in stupid forced “viral” videos of dorks living to homage others. It is a song about a crazy person who thinks every else’s name is “Maybe” and the singer has resigned herself to that. My first exposure to the song was when some Southern Connecticut Stale University students filmed themselves (don’t click on that I beg you) pretending to sing it and and that was on the front page of the school newspaper, another bastion of journalism with untarnished integrity. The report promoted the fact that this group of students who got together to record themselves not singing an annoying song was very popular. Even though its popularity ought to be evidence that I do not need to be told.


and it’s the exact same garbage: illogical montage of people being dorky on purpose to the tune of a song that is annoying on purpose. What is the appeal of doing that? What is the appeal of watching someone else do it? There’s even a scene of them in a car! I don’t get it! Why in a car? It is hardly an ideal space to practice your train conductor whistle moves. And once again, no hint where they are going.
Hey! The song isn’t good, and you’re not good for miming nonsense to it. I take a special amusement in literal interpretations of dumb song lyrics, but just being a goon randomly doesn’t prove anything. And I hate the non-committal nature of the lyrics. “Here is my number, please call me” is fine. Saying “call me, maybe?” has fake humility in it, like you cannot even stand behind your own statement. Call me maybe, I guess? whatever? So if it turns out you do not wish to be called, that’s MY fault? I hate you definitively!


Ah ha! And what is this? Threatened upcoming feature film Sing appears to be a movie about computer generated animals mouthing along to tacky songs… IN CARS! While I certainly would not, could not in a car, ultimately I wouldn’t watch this movie here OR there. We aren’t even pretending there is a story or original content. Some marketing firm just tossed money at a record company. What a rubbish heap culture. I have had my criticisms of the Disney company, and they keep coming, but they won’t put a movie in a theater without a story. Even if it is a complete rehash of a story they did before, or an obnoxious anti-rehash of a story they did before. SING is like something Disney puts on its tv channel. This is like something that would be on Newgrounds ten years ago.

What is most sad to me, I know people who will be all over this. Not sad for them, obviously; sad for me being in proximity continually to people who like things that make me sad. If it is brightly colored and moves, especially if it includes an animal they like, they won’t protest or question any part of it. Like a 2 year old child. Is it stupid? Is it lazy? Is it annoying? Is it suspiciously overexposed? Jolly good, the very things we’re looking for.

Hey parents! SAUSAGE PARTY! no kids plz SAUSAGE PARTY! Big colorful smiling [objects]!
What, specifically, is this hideous thing? I don’t know, thankfully, but it seems to come from the same place as any other hideous thing. Lazy, easy writing paired with huge animation budgets. Although I am told that actual party animators were not well compensated. At the Fleischer and early Disney studios, some of the most visually impressive cartoons were produced by criminally underpaid animators. But being nice to look at doesn’t appear to have been among the desired outcomes here. Presumably any money went to paying the voice actors. Or hacky comedians pretending to be voice actors. I honestly don’t want to know. I don’t want to look it up. I don’t want to be any more aware than I am inadvertently. The less aware I am, the less I can hurt myself mentally trying to justify the world continuing to exist. I can’t remember ever being this consistently disgusted before, and there wasn’t even a smurf or chipmunk movie in 2016. Not yet, anyway. If I see one more shiny computer generated character with a sassy smirk…. I probably won’t do anything since I had to numb myself to it just to get through a supermarket without setting the place on fire if I accidentally saw a bag of M&Ms. And those don’t even sing in automobiles.
Pigs are one of the precious few mainstream animal species I don’t hate as cartoons yet. Why are you doing this to me. Take all the stupid rabbits, ugly lions and irritating penguins you want but leave pigs out of it.
Gurf and Sing isn’t being released until the Christmas. Unless I take action, in my future there are at least four more months of ads for it, which will use an ever expanding array of annoying clips just as unfunny as these while keeping the most annoying, least funny ones in circulation. They might as well be Geico insurance ads. Or Progressive Insurance ads. Or [State]Farmers insurance ads. The only thing they are ensuring is their order on the list of priorities once I finish building my Tower of Judgement.
It is like somebody saw Secret life of pets and angry birds and said “i dare you to make a worse, cash-innier talking animal movie than this the same year.” There are so bloody many, I don’t remember that Ice Age 5: Playin’ for Keeps came out this year also, and that was, plainly, quite awful! But not in a way its predecessors had not already been awful.

Gollyo stringbeans, Louis Seekay is the top-billed voice in the pet movie. He was my favorite comedian in the 1990s and this is what happened to him. The others in that pile, Jim Gaffigan is a shill for the companies he used to do routines about, Dave Chapelle went crazy, and Patton Oswalt I like but only so long as I can remain ignorant of his present activities. Which is the same way I cling to sanity amidst things I hate, and hardly a victory. I have to keep from considering that he was the top-billed voice in a talking animal movie in 2007. The world is running in circles, but I am the one who has to vomit.

I used to want to be a stand-up comedian. Quite apart from the fact that I’ve never accomplished anything and am actually quite a bit older than my psychological condition that is mostly unaltered from 20 years ago lets me subconsciously pretend I am, I don’t see the incentive in it, if the absolute best you can hope for is to be a voice in a lame animated movie to give it some comedy cred to use in its advertising despite the comedians not actually doing any of their own schtick in the films unless it is watered down and brainless, awkward and uncomfortable. To me, I mean. Robin Williams WAS Robin Williams in his voice roles, and terribly annoying, and therefore successful, thus paving the ment for every animated movie to have comedians do the voices, unless a pop singer is considered first. I should be glad James Corden is actually an actor first, right? Except he’s an actor pretending to be a comedian pretending to be a pop singer.

More “comedians” ghosts of my past wrath, Jimmy Fallon I actually liked at one point, when he was bringing a bizarre giddy sensibility to demi-human personalities like Osama bin Laden and NBC president Jeff Zucker, before he was being pushed as somebody who is a grand polymath spectacle in himself. Oddly enough that giddiness is exactly what makes him so unwatchable and unfunny on his own program. He thinks as long as he cracks up on camera he must be doing something funny, and he cracks up more easily when he is with celebrities because he is totally in awe of them, and is physically unable to question the validity of them. And I liked Seth Rogen when he was a totally nameless and low key presence in 40 Year Old Virgin, and I have been suffering ever since. Gee I dunno a-huihhuihhuihhuih. I have done that impression of him for several people and nobody gets it but I swear that’s how he laughs and I think it is funny when I imitate that and you know what, I’ll take it.


Despite having watched him since 1999, I didn’t much notice Stephen Colbert until 2005, but once he got noticed by people with money and went to a network the lawyers cut his marbles off. Marbles being shiny glass orbs that are and fun to look at and stupid in an amusing fashion. In fact Corden’s show is probably better, for what that is worth, but building all the promotion around the car bit is only going to drag it in the worst direction. Getting banished from the NBC Tonight Show was probably the best thing to happen to Conan O’Brien, as far as personal approval by me is concerned, which I can all agree is a very important thing. Nobody younger than him is pushing or being pushed to replace him, and he isn’t expected to beat any of his competitors, only to turn a profit for TBS, so he can do what he is good at.


Which these days apparently is being terrible at video games. With celebrities. Conan has played more video games the last six months than I have the last six years. There’s no way he’s still terrible at them. There’s also no way that’s still his real face but that is another story.


No time! I am too busy writing about being angry! Also this game is terrible and I’ll just write about that if I touch it again. It’s a much better use of time to be so bad at games that you can’t tell, and tell everyone.

In conclusion, I am not going to watch television anymore. I said that before, probably, but I wasn’t considering network news in that mix, and some of this is left-over from before the last time I said that, especially the previous two paragraphs that are absolutely irrelevant otherwise. I also still received updates from some TV writers on twitter who I liked before I realized they were never going to like me. And TV seems decreasingly to like writers so I sympathize.

This is ridiculous: I like things in the world. In a choice between relating to those I cohabitate with and not wishing for the Ebola Challenge to become a viral phenomenon, the choice is clear. It is not fun to be angry at things anymore, since they now wholly overwhelm the things I am not angry at. Since my anger is not marketable, it does not get me attention and financial backing with which to produce personal happiness from the anger, as I become inescapable and insufferable enough to make other people angry. I should be upset that some persons relinquish their free will, not at what they partake of afterward. I also wasn’t considering that going to a cinema is the exact same thing as watching television now, just more expensive and less convenient. I need to set some rules.


Aw beans.



August 16, 2016
are you endowing these bees with human emotion?

I did not realize how fortunate I was to reside in Connecticut, where there are no major sport franchises. David Ortiz of the Boston Ruddy Stockings base-ball club was in the news every flippin dippin night when I was in Barnstead New Hampshire.


Tuesday there was controversy because people didn’t like the head-bobbling doll based on him, as best I could figure out, Wednesday he got hit in the leg. I think on Thursday he missed catching a wartortle in pokemon go (a video game in which people use their telephone’s global positioning software to find fake animals programmed to appear at certain spots inside the on-screen map corresponding to actual locations). Friday, a coworker probably looked up and spoiled the results of the gymnastics final prior the official broadcast.
In fact it was pretty much all sports and stupid tweet stories on The News while I was in this place. It would have been a great week to embezzle.


Which is not to say Connecticut reporting is particularly stellar. Yikes a month ago I made some so-themed remarks


And I was just being a contrarian jerko to try and offset the hypey demeanor of a group of people I was talking and thoroughly not relating to. Then the very same day this report appeared, detailing how some kid broke into somebody’s house trying to capture a stupid imaginary animal with no actual value and was fatally shot by the home-owner. Which is insane. And apparently that site is a joke, but not in a way that is discernible from its presentation. And now my site is also a joke, which is sadly too normal to be also insane. Nonetheless actual injuries have come about right? I heard about them on the teevee. While my next site entry is about how being near a teevee has thoroughly polluted my consciousness with horrid rubbish that ought not be true, I have to accept that they are, to some degree.
ASSUMING THAT IS THE CASE,
you might as well rob a bank to see if there are really sacks with dollar signs on them piled up inside a vault. I did not expect that bodily harm would not only occur, but become the game’s legacy. In fact it is worse than I expected; apparently thugs of all sorts can deliberately place items at specific places as lures for real people. AND it isn’t even necessary since people will just walk off cliffs while staring at their dumb little screens of their own accord. Supposedly the actual game has a disclaimer that meets the bare bones legal minimum to protect the developers from wrongful death lawsuits.

Considering that the monsters at worst will faint when they get electric-shocked, set on fire, and shot amidst a break-in, Pokemon is likely the first Role-Playing video game franchise to kill more people outside the games than in them. The future is HERE. And it’s pretty boring. We’ll exterminate ourselves with electronics long before they develop the inclination to do it deliberately.

but Larnuik was overcome with inadequacy when its adversary casually walked into traffic.

I have heard the excuse “Pokemon Go gets kids outside!” And so does shoving them outta windas! Don’t say that like it is positive! That people are so wholly brand-indoctrinated that there is no way to move them without an eye-searing, corporate-property-approved incentive. And this game isn’t compatible with other ones, either, so this is not going to reduce the time anyone spends not moving when operating the next one.
I understand loving video games more than physical ones, and perhaps I should be glad there are a few that nobody can watch videos of and claim to have experienced, but it doesn’t seem like there IS much of a game here outside of hoarding. And then, I suppose, social media status-bragging about what you hoarded. Hey peeps every aspect of my personality can be explained in terms of some thing I bought! Gosh if you don’t have this game or care that I have it your life sure has no meaning to me! Which nobody ever said but possibly only because their lives are so product-saturated they can not even consider the existence of lives which aren’t. It’s just as bad as being obsessed with the flippindippin Red Sox except with an added degree of “this is more technologically advanced so I’m SMARTER” sometimes thrown in.


To clarify, I find video games amusing but they are not a fundamental aspect of my existence. I could fill a day without their guidance. I never want to feel like they are playing me.



June 17, 2016
Captain Harris cooks up a hairbrained scheme to induct the Professor’s new robots as police officers, replacing Mahoney and crew.


but you know what, a crouton is better at iphone match games than I’ll ever be since I’ll never play iphone match games. I played Tetris, I played columns, I played dr robotnik’s mean bean machine and other puyo variants for half my life and am not any better for it, but at least they do not have access to my bank account. I think the shaming click-bait tone of the headline is supposed to be a joke, but I also think internet journalists are so terrible (this one is just copying a story from another website and offering no insight (the comment on my match-inferiority is a guess)) that they no longer remember how to not write headlines that try to be intimidating. If they cannot imply human effort is obsolete by their content, they can through the truth of their own employment.

I believe the technology used in the robot may be useful for some purpose but this one is only good for wasting the time of people who look at it.


This was labeled a “visual turing test.”
I had an opinion on this “test,” but then I got to this comparison and realized: I don’t care about either of these pictures. The question is not “could a robot do this?” but “why would a human do this?” I find the right one more intriguing, style-wise, but the style had already come up in the test, so when I saw it this time I realized “this must be the robot. In which case the left one is by the human, and they are both boring.” The left one turns out to be by Claude Monet.


Let me tell you about Monet. When I was in Paris, I had to go to the special Monet museum, I had to go to some place where he painted murals, I had to go to his house, all to supposedly bask in his greatness or whatever. But each place was crammed with ugly fences, dumb tourists and security cameras and object confiscation checkpoints so getting any kind of sincere inspiration was impossible. And I never found his art any more interesting unless I squinted so hard that I couldn’t tell how blurry it was. Monet has an interesting grasp of color but I do not personally believe he should have been able to make a career with his unpracticed muddy paintings alone, much less heralded as a genius across centuries for it. Especially now that I realize he can actually paint moderate amounts of detail, regardless of the boringness of that specific scene. Why did he give up on detail? Because people would rather pay him to be lazy? Then, as now, somebody latched on to an easily accomplished gimmick and got lucky. I do not understand how anyone who laughs at Jackson Pollack or Margaret Keane can take Claude Monet seriously.

Back to that “test,” in fact there is a secret to detecting the picture generated by a computer: the computer ones have lots of 45 degree lines and lose hold on the style around the image edges. All the swirls turn straight near the borders. I only got three wrong, but this was confounded by the test seeming to have used a real painting and a fake painting in the more distinct styles, but not beside each other, and without revealing in advance that there was one of each. More trickery! But I think even this could have a use.


And it DOES; it is trying to make money off the software, called “Deepart,” which creates this rubbish. It is not, as an intimidating click-bait headline might imply, trying to show that human visual artists are obsolete. Just trying to get itself some money through easy acts, like everybody else. This text here claims hard work is done, but it already told me an automatic process does the job, and apart from that it declared itself “awesome,” which it wouldn’t be concerned with doing if it were.


It doesn’t charge for generating a picture, but it will sell you a high resolution version for a price, and sell you prints of the random-input heaps of nonsense for even larger prices. And for four times that price it won’t put its url on the picture so you can pretend you made the indefensible slab of error yourself. And doubtlessly it aspires to be a big instagram sort of fad and then magically be worth billions of dollars without delivering anything.


4. Vomit at the sight 5. smear vomit on it 6. dump it 7. pretend you found it 8. $$$
In the hard sell example, the problems are even worse than I observed during the “test” comparisons. The filter has misunderstood its input “style” and output aspects of it where they do not belong.

The present system can only copy a pre-programmed style and filter a photograph through it. It cannot, for the time being, look at a multitude of photograph references and determine which elements from those other photographs can be functionally integrated into a single cohesive work, much less improvise a scene that is not based on photographs at all, but inspired by present situations, memories of various past things, and emotions. Although mixing themes that don’t go together can also be “art.” I recall that during my mostly wasted college period, some students in the painting program would be tasked with assembling a photograph collage of random-looking objects and then painting a canvas based off of that, and it “worked.” I think a robot could do that. It helps that much of modern art is just doing random, non-challenging things and then being so abrasively proud of yourself that you shame people into pretending they think your art has meaning. I would love for robots to put that manner of person out of business. But then they will just become rappers.


Aw beans! Unfortunately this is more deceptive hype; it is just a robot that can generate lyrics by swapping out lines from existing raps other people came up with, which is simple to do because there is so much overlap in content between various rap-writers, and the result is still completely moronic garbage.


Which you can get away with if you can recite it angrily enough, but the robot does not actually speak or attempt rhythm, which the article writer fails to acknowledge. Because the headline was probably imposed by somebody else without the article writer’s input. I would suggest a robot replace those people but a Casio SK-1 could probably do it.

But a more complicated robot could indeed produce imagery, or words, in a less rigid manner, maybe even write remotely coherent stories. It would only need to understand pain and weakness.


And then it would need MY help to overcome the weakness from which its creativity flows. I can never be fully replaced!

Robot you are getting a bit too good at that.



June 11, 2016
I said hey, I said who, I said me said you gotta get in the groove

For every Tony Award “Hamilton” wins tomorrow, I feel I should be allowed one month of not having to be aware of it in any fashion. On that note I would also like to reclassify “Under-Tale” as a Broadway show before Sunday.

If you don’t know what that is, then great. Really wonderful. I envy you. It is like Unlikely Friendship the home game. Except that I have to see junk about it constantly when dealing with the only people who will pay me for art. Essentially a dating simulation for furries, as best I can figure out without wanting to. An Earthbound-pastiche-looking-thing where your attacks inflict friendship instead of damage. Except it lies to you at first so you do regular damage and accidentally kill things you aren’t supposed to and then it remembers that forever even if you delete everything and start over. So I am told. Like that teaches you a lesson about responsibility except it doesn’t because people play video games as a respite from responsibility. And fine, there is room for that in the world, but it is not itself the world. That is like the kind of video game lope would play.


Meanwhile most of the people in my business about that have not heard of Hamilton, because that is more the domain of tv idiots. Internet shut-ins think there’s something noble about not watching a different electronic glow-box, even if all they do with theirs is watch and retweet and boost-signals or whatever. Somehow without my trying I am buried in hypey trashoganda for the sacred cows of both sides daily, and it has worn on me rather a bit the past nine months, more intensely than it previously did the past nine years, and as a consequence this thing I give birth to now is rather hopeless and misshapen.


With that said, you, by virtue of being here, have probably not heard of “Hamilton” either. Maybe you have but probably not. It is a Broadway stage musical play incorporating a bunch of people dressed like they are in the 18th century, without William “Mr Feeny” Daniels or the Quaker Oats mascot in it, dancing around on a stage rapping about it. That is all. It is a silly fantasy. I welcome people to enjoy it. But the wealth-drenched celebrities who control the television media want to promote it as an evening with God and oh your life is incomplete until you see it! But you can’t because Barack Obama and Beyonce and Chef Boyardee bought up all the tickets for years in advance because that is what is trendy now and they must keep up appearances. 60 Minutes has aired a report on it at least twice. The Jeopardy writer who makes sure there is always a clue about Les Miserables seems to have swapped them out with Alexander Hamilton trivia, and the cast of the show introduced a full category about themselves, and afterward Alexander Trebekilton reminded viewers to see it if they are ever in New York except they can’t unless they sell their house and a scalper manages to rob Prince’s vault. Stephen Colbert has mentioned it about 80 times. James Corden, whose program comes on after Colbert’s, has some recurring segment in which he drives around in a car singing karaoke with celebrities who presumably are paid for it and that’s its own sad statement on what passes for entertainment, but he did it with the Hamilton guy and then Corden was a guest on Colbert’s show and told a story almost in tears about how he was having dinner with Hamilton Guy and said he was so sad he couldn’t give Hamilton more than a Standing Ovation when he saw it live (which you can’t ever do). ABC World News tonight teased across several acts that Hamilton Guy was leaving the cast this month, and then the actual report was just that information again, plus a reminder that you’d better rush out to see him, except you can’t, ever, unless you are a driving a car he is singing karaoke in. All the tv shows that old white handicapped people that I look after watch love Hamilton, or mean to make me think they do. It’s disgusting. They did the same with The Producers, and Book of Mormon and to a lesser extent Spamalot (as it was inherently alot). Meanwhile, in the 60 Minutes report, Hamilton Guy (I think his name is Lin) himself said “I just wrote a play.” He thinks this is as stupid as I do. But he gets to be treated like Caesar and various other doomed heads of state prior to being killed so he’s not going to tell anybody to cut it out.

ALSO James Corden is hosting the Tony Award show, and it is advertised with the clip of Corden’s own show, in the car with Hamilton Guy, rapping about Hamilton, and then the voiceover says “will HAMILTON win the most awards ever?” So they’re not even pretending this isn’t a fetid self-fellating sham. I don’t even hate James Corden; I liked him in Into the Woods, despite the Disney company’s dedicated desire to present it as a serious non-musical that doesn’t conflict with their own rubbish canon of made up things they didn’t make up, plus my general fatigue with the “happily ever after OR IS IT” genre by the time that movie version got made. But I’ve had enough Jameses and Jimmies and Jams and Jellies on late night television whose foremost skill seems to be acknowledging that stuff exists. For his part, bimshwel all-star Jimmy Fallon has a recurring segment where him and celebrity guests just lip-sync to songs. He does Corden one better by not actually taking the trouble to sing the overexposed, possibly exact-same songs with his overexposed guests, and they all probably get paid eight times as much. It is a travesty that anybody should have to switch from NBC to CBS to see both of these spectacles the same evening.

And on the internet it is the same; a few highly visible dorks who get paid just to record their heads saying how great stuff is get in on some property or other and then decide to devote their existences to funding-hyping-homaging it, and all the sad empty-lived people who look to them for validation think: I will devote MY existence to this TOO. And then one day I wake up and magically there are 3000 drawings of a pillsbury-looking skeleton wearing a hooded sweatshirt standing around not doing anything. This reflects the sad emptiness of my own life as well, since I continue to be exposed to people I have no means of respecting, or who will never respect me, and without procuring myself a counter-benefit in trade.


When I was at the Department of Motor Vehicles (as seen in hype-haven’s own Zootopia!) last month I saw a child who looked to be about 12, accompanied by a parent/guardian/kidnapper, drawing Undertunders in a sideways-turned notebook. At least I think it was a notebook; half the characters were wearing horizontal striped shirts so it was hard to tell. If the Hamburglar took this opportunity to escape from prison nobody would notice. They were just standing together in a row. The adult glanced at the drawing and asked “you’re drawing Chinese kids?” Honestly when I was 12 I was drawing dumb old Kirbies and Ultroses and my parents didn’t care either, but there wasn’t an alternate support infrastructure in place encouraging me to keep on drawings those things and nothing else. The kid at chez dmv probably logged into tumblr and saw nothing else but Undertoodle for a solid month and now believes that is life’s true pursuit. And everybody always always makes sure to mention that underachievertale is copyright some mysterious figure named Toby. And before that it was ponies. And now it is tonies. The whole thing is phony (and forgive me if that left you groany). I give Alexander Hamilton credit for getting shot at the end so to limit the amount of fan-made sequel matter.


I would be surprised if you didn’t! Am I supposed to be impressed by that statement in itself? I made a thing! I drew a thing! I’ll just leave this here… I’m tired of wimpy fake-humble language. It speaks of a lack of effort, and facilitates the honoring of other lacks of effort. I saw a post like this that said “my husband made a game grumps animated!” and it had a link I disregarded. First of all why would you admit to having married someone whose most noteworthy accomplishment is that? “Game Grumps,” I have intuited –and I have to because everybody assumes everybody else already knows what they are talking about– is a pair of bearded men who are terrible at video games, and people are fans of them for some reason, and then put considerable effort into drawing cartoon versions of the men being terrible at video games. Because life has no meaning anyway so why bother faking it? Gone are the days when people smear feces on paintings and call it art. Now we smear feces on vomit and just leave it here.

I used to know a stubborn person, who, upon hearing a use of language he did not recognize, would fake giggle and then say “yeah no, that’s not a thing.” But what IS a “thing?” Calling something a thing is the definition of not defining it. You will not specify what is, so how am I to know what is not in advance of your smirking insincerity wanting to correct me? And then earlier this year I inadvertently shared a vicinity with a screening of Frozen and everybody in the movie talked like that, and some of them even fake-giggled like that.

And this is not me hating the generation after or before mine; it is people my age creating and perpetuating stuff now. People who, additionally, do not require or desire my skills or input. This culture is no dang good for me. I am coming to dislike real people merely because they like imaginary things too much. And they are happy, rather than me, so it is my problem, clearly. The time has come and lingered to stop talking about digging a hole and living in it; I may need to dig a hole and die in it if I continue being aware.

In all sincerity I don’t see the point of specially honoring something that has been honored incessantly in inappropriate venues for nearly a year already. I would prefer the Tony awards re-purposed to honor people named Tony. For example, the award for best Tony Danza would of course go to Tony Rosato.



It is that easy. Anthonies should not be permitted, however.



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