Yes, another final fantasy 8 post. I cut this off from the previous installment and I have to use it because there is one joke in it that I like at all.
I wanted to get into the game’s story a bit. Because I already wrote all this, so it would logically follow that this is what I want. In fact the story is really grim: it is about a bunch of kids at school being trained to kill kids from another school. You don’t realize they’re kids because they look to be in their 30s, except for Quistis who looks closer to 40, but the instruction manual insists all are 17 and 18 years old. Quistis just looks old because, as I indicated last time, she is possessed by a 30,000 year old malevolent hate spirit and I suppose she is holding up rather well, overall.
The heroes soon get assigned to kill the president of Galbadia, the nation/city/tiny isolated village on a huge empty world map that the other school is from. But then that school forgives them when the president teams up with the evil sorceress Edea, so then the kids try to kill the sorceress. They fail and somehow end up fighting against the school that forgave them earlier anyway*.
Then the sorceress Edea forgives them because they are all orphans and she was actually their muppet-baby-like nanny from years ago, and actually married to the principal Cid of the school that trained them, whose original purpose was to train kids to kill Edea who Cid is married to. The real enemy is actually Rinoa, the hero’s love interest, who is, after Edea (the orphanage sorceress), next in line to inherit evil from a different sorceress, Ultimecia, from the future, who wishes to be reborn in the past and therefore present. So then everybody goes to the future to kill Ultimecia, including Rinoa, her reborn self from the past, who has become more powerful but resisted becoming evil, but not Edea, the first sorceress, who is also not evil but doesn’t seem any worse for having received enough power that her husband started an army with which to kill her and therefore useful to have on your own side in a fight. And then I wonder why not let the evil sorceress give evil power to everybody since they seem to shake off the evil without losing the power fairly consistently and within a short time frame. By the way when I said the story was grim I meant uncomfortably ridiculous.
And you have a hard time wearing a complete sweater. We all have deficits to work on.
One of the secondary heroes, Irvine, is from the Galbadia school and the only cowboy in the world, complete with a big stupid hat and riding chaps, which typically goes unmentioned because in addition to lacking other cowboys, the world also lacks both horses to ride and cattle to herd. There are chocobos, strange large yellow birds, but you only ever see Squall riding one and his regular leather pants seem sufficient. Also, from my recollection, despite taking approximately forever and being out of character with everything else in the game, completing the side-quest that gives you access to the chocobo doesn’t actually confer any manner of benefit, since there is no place for the bird to go apart from places that your space ship can already land next to, and you need the space ship to find the bird.
Irvine, despite being from the other school, doesn’t seem bothered massacring his former, conveniently-anonymous helmeted comrades. Which I could also tie into Star Wars 7 but hopefully I won’t because by now that movie is two months old and nobody is going to care. Though it must be said that Finnegan only switched sides in the first place after he saw his chum get shot by the guy he later broke out of prison.
Irvine is the love interest of Selphie, who dresses for the complete opposite weather that Irvine does. Also, even though in 1999 nobody said “selfie” to refer to uninteresting photographs of yourself, Selphie in the game is still adequately annoying. I don’t feel like getting a picture of selphie! I don’t need a picture of everything I describe! And I’m telling me that, not you! Although sometimes I call me “you.”
This is the world map. Notice that there are only about 15 land marks on it, which are the only points you can engage with. And that is fine; you can’t expect to go everywhere in the world. What is annoying is that the game makes not the slightest effort to imply there is more to the world than the places you can enter. Of course having a superficially place-filled world that you could not go anywhere in would also be annoying but that only feels bad on my side. This here looks bad on their side. The two southern land-masses seem to have one destination between them.
Late in the game you come to esthar, which looks like this. And it’s great. In the context of a first generation low resolution playstation role playing game it is great, I mean. You have to travel on the highway a while before magically switching to the “inside the city” view. You can see neighborhoods and roads beneath the highway. You feel like there’s stuff going on. That’s exactly what the other cities should do.
Although even this abruptly ENDS at nothing instead of tapering off into less densely populated areas.
And earlier Irvine claims to have searched the entire continent looking for the city while his associates take a Gogurt break (on railroad tracks). The city is holographically hidden from view, but the game text outright states that there is nothing in existence that you cannot see from the world map, and that the speed you move on the world map is not artistic license to keep it from taking weeks to walk from town to town. Gosh that’s the third thing I hated about Earthbound. It’s supposed to be so modern and hip and with it but only the main characters have houses and only one town has a school and I didn’t actually finish it because I only rented it once and didn’t care much and thought it was ugly anyhow.
Also apparently it has the world’s biggest game box and costs twice as much as the next most expensive cartridge on the secondary market, if you are insane enough that you think playing a console rpg on native hardware without speed acceleration when you don’t have to isn’t the world’s biggest empty time-sink and worth spending extra money and living space for the privilege of and also on tracking down a 24 year old super Nintendo system that still works AND the last remaining gamepads that nobody ever stepped on. As if this is more honorable to the Nintendo company in some way than emulating the game, even though it isn’t because Nintendo doesn’t get a cut of resales and has re-released numerous games like this one as pay downloads that it gets FULL proceeds from, that are a fraction of what the games cost new in the 1990s, which was a fraction of what resellers are sometimes charging for them old in the 2010s. Hooray for a hipsterism based economy! We honor the cutting edge technology of our youth by treating it like the antiques of our grandparents’ youth! We honor the advancements that astounded us in the past by treating improvements on them with the obstinate backwardism of an author who takes it as a point of pride to still use a typewriter!
I know somebody who criticizes me over my use of the commercial applications photoshop and fl-studio for artwork and music when there are free alternatives with ostensibly the same capabilities. But the commercial software does what I need in efficient, non-backward ways that I already understand, and typically have larger existing support bases. I know people who can explain to me how to use that stuff. I pay extra for convenience. You don’t buy a super nintendo game on a cartridge in 2015 for convenience. A typewriter is superficially more efficient than a computer to somebody accustomed to typewriters, but a typewriter does not have the same capabilities.
And then six paragraphs about how much I hate Fisherman’s Horizon, Shumi Village and Trabia, the most boring and endless mopey, exposition-only areas in any video game, and the stupid boring card game that for whatever reason needs to be played the most in the most boring areas of the main game. I need convenience NOW to make up for all the time I wasted on THIS kind of stupid garbage back when I had time. And I need even more convenience because I wrote all those paragraphs and will never use them.
That’s no way to talk to somebody who has it all figured out!
(I put the paragraphs here)
In the interest of honesty, I like the character Squall, from the video game Final Fantasy 8, that I alluded to the notorious moodiness of in a previous item.
However, I am aware of the popular criticism that he is a self-centered and terrible hero and I think it is funny. I think it is funny but ultimately it is someone else’s joke. “Maybe I’m a Lion” is not something that Squall ever says but it is the title of some music that plays during one of his heroic moments near the end of the game, possibly based on the composer misreading Squall’s last name “Leonhart” as “Lionheart.” Although Squall also can acquire a replacement sword-gun that is called Lionheart. You’d have to be a complete nerd to know what any of the music is called, of course; even somebody who knows his last name is Leonhart and that his sword is Lionheart and that welsh rarebit is his favorite type of rarebit wouldn’t necessarily have studied all the backstory on the soundtrack, so anyone I want to think I am clever probably does not.
Popular culture commentary in illustrated form is never going to be for me since I take too long to draw things and do not reach the right conclusions that will have people know what I am trying to say, unless I personally do not agree with those conclusions, which means I will not be properly invested. And while on this occasion I managed to care enough about the biggest movie of the year while it was still in theaters, I tied it to something else from 15 years ago and even worse, offered a criticism, which means fans, the only people who would care, would not,
unless they missed my point, meaning they would be uninterested in anything else I did that couldn’t be interpreted as a dumb fandom homage, and I should not have bothered if I wasn’t getting money, and I wasn’t. This was by far the most popular “art” I ever put on the crumbumblr website, and yet it still wasn’t all THAT popular, and didn’t lead to any engagement with my other pictures. It won’t mean anything unless I keep drawing star wars junk, and the more I do, the less of me there will be in it and the less of me there will be in anything. The same as happened when I got conscripted into the “furry” gang. Nobody cares about thought or effort, just well-polished compliance. And as a result I became an angry person incapable of being positive or making friends, and even my compliance was shunned, and with it having no personal meaning to me, I only got more angry, and probably have written the same thing here about twice a year since 2011, which I forget, because I only write it to stop thinking about it, which means if the topic comes up again it will be fresh. Fandoms are a trap. And there is less immediate incentive to free one’s self from a fresh trap than an obviously old and sour trap.
The same person who forwarded my picture also forwarded this. I cannot well coexist with the 50 thousand people (assuming most of them both “like”d and “reblog”ged, therefore accruing a score over 100,000) for whom a drawing of chummy, angle-bodied, out of costume, ostensibly star wars characters but who knows, in a void, doing nothing, was the best thing they saw all week. This might as well be the cast of Streptococcus Paiella. Hey how about the next Star Wars movie is just a 3 hour Dawson’s Creek reunion, would you like that? You, as a fan of interesting characters, thought the ideal course of action was to reduce them to boring fans of themselves. That is to say, boring but POSITIVE, socially COMPLIANT fans of themselves. And an army-sized group agreed with your decision despite the mumbling fake-humble introduction you gave it. More people openly endorse turning interesting into mundane than the entire population of Monaco. How am I losing to this? I lose because I seek approval from people who approve of rubbish.
Back to my main afterthought, dismissing Final Fantasy 8 just because one character is moody and noncompliant misses the whole point of why the game doesn’t work. I did own and use a copy of the game when it was newish, unaware of the criticisms of others, and discovered afterward that mine, while numerous, differed. Alright, so why am I letting them control how I refer to it in retrospect?
Even people in the game complain about how moody Squall is! Which doesn’t excuse it, but that means, if that is your sole criticism, you need to say more than that. His whole character development is that he learns to stop being as much of a jerk but without making any implausible leap of temperament or pretending to be happy in his miserable video game sword murder quest. So him being a jerk is not the reason the game is dumb, and ultimately not even true!
I think Squall’s less conflicted “friends” are lacking in emotional depth and send mixed messages. They hassle him to go on unusual journeys and then complain when he does. He tries to leave them behind, and they they know it, and instead of stopping him they magically get in front of him and mock him for leaving, and drag him back into their toxic psychological abyss. They would toss Squall in a ditch and laugh if he wasn’t good at murdering. Also I suddenly have an odd premonition that I should warn you I named Squall “Cupcake” on my most recent play-through.
Or Quistis would, anyway. Quistis is the most manipulative and entitled person around. In recognition of that, the game’s writers gave Quistis a fan club. In recognition of rubbish, Wikia writers wrote about it.
And through that I have learned that there are actual Quistis fans, and it shocks me that they can’t find a real person to treat them so poorly.
Thanks for standing back and telling me I FAILED, you who has never tried anything that looks challenging, such as putting that word into a sentence. I’m sure dresses made out of salmon meat are actually very trendy where Quistis comes from so I doubt she is standing against a crowd with that fashion decision. At least her crony, Zell, (the one in the middle) legitimately wants to be helpful and just lacks any personal ambition, but Quistis is a wretch.
But again, bad characters aren’t at fault. I was looking through my old screenshots for this and it just reminded me of QUISTIS everywhere. The fault is on the hokey writing, that would be funny if the characters were not supposed to be more realistic than previous games in the series. But I can live with them. The problem with the game is that it is a big glossy box of unfulfilled promises that somebody clearly intended to fulfill at some point in the process. I can see a framework for a very good game, and having that frame so empty in the end is more frustrating than something that is just lazy, like its contemporary Legend of Dragoon, and more likely to have a player dwelling on it 15 years later. Of course it helps if that player is out of touch with games that came afterward and looks for any opportunity to connect a new experience to it in an attempt to grasp some sense of belonging in a culture they hate but bafflingly want to be liked by, so long as they don’t know what else the likers like.
It looks as if I compared my dissatisfaction with final fantasy 8 to my dissatisfaction with Star Wars in one of my oldest existent website entries, and without clarifying, so apparently I need to do that now or risk writing something even longer than this when I am 45ish. And it looks like I, again, went with the crowd and blamed everything on a few characters, Jar Jar Binx and whiny bowl haircut Anakin, even though fault truly lies with bad writing, running time that exceeds content time, and the few good things being promptly forgotten or killed. And I more than likely knew that when I wrote that. But I lacked the foresight to consider “15 years from now none of the people pretending to like me, that I pretend to be likable by them for now are still going to bother.” Eh I thought I would be comfortably wealthy and widely respected for my bold opinions on current topics and uniquely profound artwork by 2006.
Finally, somebody who UNDERSTANDS me!
This is a very thematically incongruous website!
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This was already half-written when I posted the last one. Backing out was not an option.
I suppose my previous item is more a criticism of “news” in general than the individual humans I mentioned. I am meant to take “news” more seriously than “tabloids” or tv shows about boring people in mansions, but it has no journalistic standards. It promotes the two party political system and the associated agenda of fearmongering. CBS news was on that day instead, but presumably ABC did the same thing: When reporting on the recent, widely publicized San Bernardino murders, carried out by supposed Isis sympathizers, beside the reporter were displayed pictures of convoys of dark-hooded people in deserts riding in jeeps carrying huge guns. San Bernardino is not in a desert! The shooting was done by TWO people, who look JUST THE SAME as anybody else, in a NORMAL city like any other, just as we have HUNDREDS such mass bullet murders yearly. One of those people is from HERE, United Statia. And the other had been here for a solid year, and was considered a permanent resident. We have a murder problem HERE, done by people who live HERE. 3000 angry druids did not drive jeeps across two oceans and start firing freedom-seeking missiles as soon as they touched blessed American dirt, and if they continue to not do that it will not be because Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump or Ronald McDonald stood at The Border, like that is a place, and stopped them.
This San Bernardino mention, I should add, came amidst a story about a man with a KNIFE and a FAKE BOMB who ran into a POLICE STATION in Paris. That idiot had a note declaring allegiance to Isis. That’s the dumbest story I heard all year, and even half a month in that’s saying something. I could duct tape a colecovision to my chest and get shot, too. That I tried doesn’t prove anything, and that you shot me to death only proves that I cannot be questioned. You could shoot me first and write a note that says “I is Isis I hate good guys signed me ps. only true patriots can stop me and prevent forest fires” and I couldn’t stop you. When The News is going to report on stuff like that, they need to present it so that I don’t assume they made it up.
Just this week there was a suicide attack in Istanbul. Isis supposedly claimed credit. First of all, since it was a SUICIDE attack, the attacker is dead so Ladysmith Black Mambazo could claim credit. This story I saw back on good old ABC again, and the graphic showed TANKS this time. Isis is not driving 50 tanks into Southern California to back up those jeeps it also isn’t sending! When are we going to stop thinking of these conflicts in World War 2 terms? This is not us vs them. It is us vs him and him and him and mostly him and her and him and on like that. There is not an organized military infrastructure to target, that tells you when it is coming, and that is itself all on the same “side.” USA is obsessed with world war 2 because that is the last war that it looked good in, because that was the last war it understood at all. Millions were dying in Europe for years and the US came in late to be heroes. It had casualties but not on the level of any other country involved, and consequently learned nothing from the conflict except “we’re always right and we’re always the strongest,” which it already believed. And so all our policy makers grew up continuing to believe that. Network news programs showing me armored hoards advancing in formation in daylight when it talks about murderers hiding in crowds and blowing themselves up has two purposes: to make me afraid, and to make me seek safety in conventional western military counter-measures, and likewise to trust the reports I get of that military’s accomplishment.
Even Nazi Germany was a western power, which used western tactics and western rules. The US does not know how to engage what is actually out there now, but its military industrial complex knows how to keep getting paid to make big dumb expensive things that can fly around and kill random people, and then boast about all the “enemy combatants” that got blowed up. We bombed crucial Isis installations! We killed Al Qaeda’s number 2! We GOT the BAD GUYS! So why are there more bad guys than ever? Either we aren’t really getting anyone, or whatever we are getting is making more guys go bad. We hear about French or Turkish forces striking back after recent supposed Islamic State attacks, but why is there anything for them TO back-strike? Why did they WAIT, and why didn’t they finish?
And we don’t even necessarily have real pilots involved who can personally verify or be held accountable for anything. We are sending robots to kill and trusting whoever runs the robot to tell us what they thought the robot saw.
Even scarier is considering that such an absence of outcome is deliberate, that there is no intention of resolving or concluding conflict. So I am scared anyway, doubting the people who try to make me afraid. And they are afraid. Always terrified that some other country not aligned to American interests will build an atomic bomb, and convinced that any country with the means to do so will, since that is what Americans would do. Americans are afraid of the force that they set the precedent for using.
Which is not to say the US is alone in perpetuating warfare to keep its own interests on top, but as the one with the most soldiers and the most distance and safety from the countries it is trying to control, when this stuff goes wrong we suffer loudest and venge least discriminately.
These are the conclusions I reach, quite on my own, when my information is delivered so clumsily, and the clumsiness seems deliberate. And if
Strictly regarding frivolity that I understand, I previously griped about ABC news devoting extensive coverage to “leaked” Star Wars junk that could only possibly have been leaked by the people who tell ABC news what to report on. Incoming kardashian trashian facts are also desirable, and if there aren’t any, that is still a story. Each winter they report that it’s cold outside. Unless it isn’t cold outside yet, which means they report that it isn’t cold. When Pope Francis was in the US this September, that was the top story for a whole week even though Mr. Pope did the same thing each day of the week, which was to get driven around and address an audience. In fact the same exact stuff he does when he isn’t in the US. No other head of state gets that kind of coverage, but no other head of state has that many followers. So the story wasn’t what the pope was doing or does, just that he EXISTS and how popular he is. And people still think The Media has an anti-christian bias. That’s not it at all. The Media has an anti-substance bias. I pledge to you: If I have nothing to say, it will be nothing about me or nothing of personal relevance. I will not share the nothing of others, and will not ask others to distribute my own nothing.
I posted this on my secret personal facebook page last night.
And when it refers to that night and the night before, it therefore actually means the night before this one and the night before that one. I hope this has been minimally deformative. The personal facebook page is “secret” because I primarily use it to manage my non-secret bimshwel page, and my last personal page got shut down for having a stupid name. Since this one has an even stupider name I seek to minimize awareness of it.
This mostly summarizes what I months earlier shoved not completely relevantly into a long boring post about being tired of watching television that I forced myself to watch. Oddly enough this summary of that paragraph is longer and boringer than it. Although that is consistent with my past behavior and therefore not very odd at all.
Another debate pageant tonight. You do not need to read this, I just need to post it!
Doris Kearns Goodwin, a presidential historian, was a guest on the Late Colbert Show last night, remarking on the fact that Mr. D Trump has not been overtaken by “mainstream” presidential candidates yet. What makes Trump not “mainstream?” I hate to accept that somebody who studies this stuff as a lifestyle can look at the non-Trump candidates and think “it is the natural and correct order of things that one of these buffoons be one step away from the national presidency.”
To summarize what I have been squawking elsewhere the past few months, the modern republican party needs to die, good and dead. For the values it espouses, and allows the democratic party to also espouse in an effort to draw support away from republicans, and worse, still look good in comparison to. The worse the republicans get standing for the worst things, the better our wimpy, principle-devoid democrat party looks standing for nothing at all. We should not be forced to see that as the good choice.
I dislike Bernard Sanders less than the other candidates, but first of all that is based on the same kind of internet hype that made me prObama, which ultimately let me down. And also, running as a democrat forces Uncle Bernie into the democrats’ box, which wants its candidates to drop any topic that does not meet that box’s terms of service, and also agree not to oppose Hillary Clinton after a certain point. Indeed, that box wanted everyone to stop opposing Hillary Clinton after November 2011. That ending was written before the story started. We’re living in a perpetual frustrating prequel, like Smallville or Gotham or whatever. Nothing can happen to disrupt something in the future whose status is totally arbitrary, no matter how long the prequel goes on, and how many details develop that we didn’t have in mind when we wrote the ending. Ha ha ha, let’s laugh at Lincoln Chafee for having a funny name and wanting a measurement system with more order and less random numbers to memorize, regardless of how many other countries use it (most of them). And we can laugh at Dennis Kucinich for looking like a character from a Fievel movie. But please don’t dismiss them entirely for that.
What I think we need is a legitimate force to oppose these two parties, even a force with “no chance” to win. I think a lot of us do. And we could use a major news organization, with infrastructure behind it, to not tacitly back the policies of any party. Not just sporadic obscure advocacy that can be ignored for 20 years and later presented with “look at who predicted our garbage present!” Imagine if ABC news worked as hard at digging for facts behind the terrorism threat threats they get from the government as they did at digging for new Star Wars trailers. You’ll have to!
Sanders himself was an obscure advocate. You can look up video of him, in 1991, when he was a US representative, predicting prolonged US entanglement in Mesopotamia if it invaded Iraq, (Dick Cheney, as well). Why wasn’t that a story THEN? Or in 2003? Why can somebody offering an informed reason to not do something that cannot be undone be taken seriously? Because our major news organizations, funded by corporations, would have lost sponsors if they gave weight to anti-war arguments. Anyone found guilty would be forced out, like Phil Donahue. I would say Dan Rather as well but you could point to sloppy inability to defend or back up his own story about George Wuh Bush that lost him his CBS news boatholder job.
Anyway, what I want at this point is for Donald Trump to be nominated by his party and then have the “mainstream” republican candidates refuse to support him. I do not want any of them to be president, but this would undermine the whole convention process, and reveal more publicly how dumb this all is. Reveal that “the people” don’t really decide who they vote for, or even who they are allowed to vote for. Trump represents horrible things, but he is the most sincere reflection of actual American voters in his party, apart from having loads more money. The other candidates present no basis for denying that. If they really believe in telling people what is “right,” they’ll stop pretending we don’t have a gun problem, a bank problem, a pharmaceutical problem, a meat problem, a pollution problem, a pumpkin problem, a church problem, a surveillance problem and on and on. We need to stop pretending persecution, misdirected aggression and divinity of the famous are not core American values going back to the country’s founding so we can actually do something about them.
I do not share the Isis standpoint of “hurry up and destroy the world,” but I also do not believe in condoning mediocrity. Condoning mediocrity, doing something just because a lot of visible, impatient loudmouths demanded it done allowed Isis to exist!
I feel it is owed to my state, Connecticut, personally, after Joe “Mortal Kombat will turn our children into homicidal palette-swapped ninjas” Lieberman refused to back Ned Lamont, who won their democrat senate primary, and ran instead as an “independent” and ultimately got re-elected to the senate by harnessing the collective ignorance and dumb fear of both permitted sides. If we can do that to keep boneheads in office, we can certainly do it to keep boneheads out of office.
Hardly a collection of complete thoughts; I hate being “topical” because there is not time to think about things at length. There is not even time or space to finish or scan that terrible drawing I put on this just so somebody would notice it. But if this was my JOB, I would make certain I did so. I wish we had not created a world that demanded immediate uninformed emotional responses all the time. “Why hasn’t the president condemned Joe Bones’ outrageous remarks yet?” Because outrage doesn’t accomplish anything!
Howdy.
I will have a terrible story to tell you soon.
page 40 of this’s redrawings.
I am disappointed that these are not getting any easier even though the base drawings are less incomprehensible overall. There is less figuring for me to do, but just as much redrawing, alas. And still not NO refiguring, since I seem to have kept up cramming in dialog baubles wherever they would fit, and wherever they would not fit long beyond a reasonable time period. Some people can draw a whole comic book in a day, I can barely draw one old page in a month.
However, I have received the proof prints of the first book, all printed and properly bound together for the first time, and it seems like doing that in greater numbers is a viable operation. All this may amount to something, even if not a whole lot.
Minutae:
Somehow, I only noticed after I had redrawn the thing that I never explained, to myself or anyone else, how kumquat has closed the door in the last frame here. The next page certainly does not explain it; kumquat points at a control unit that was clearly not being touched when the door shut. This note is to remind me to shoe-horn in a clumsy retroactive explanation for that next.
Compared to the old version, I had to change the dialog because it was terribly out of character for elpse to not scream at or attack somebody who admitted to hurting nemitz on purpose.
The lizard’s first appearance is also out of character, but since that takes up two rows, it is hard for me at this point to think of something else that should go there. Since I inserted a page before here where elpse gets angry at someone for hurting nemitz who did not even do so, this page is harder to ignore.
Although maybe I would have made more success if I didn’t try to justify everything and just wrote an anarchy story. Nobody ever said to me: I like this comic strip but sometimes the characters have inconsistent personalities. But generally if people don’t like something they just keep quiet so I have to anticipate what they are having a problem with.
One good thing to come of the print attempt that I can apply immediately, is that it forced me to figure out exactly how much space I “have.” A long time ago I measured a comic book that I had and based my space usage on that, not considering that the book I measured might have had a reason for not printing to the page edges. And as I changed the paper I drew on, and its orientation several times, my proportions got further warped. Now I match them to a template provided by Ka-Blam, the print company, which I presume is consistent, at least, with what other north american printers are using.
The version I had here for years is either too narrow when scaled to the height of the template, leaving “live” space on the sides, or too tall when scaled to its width, entering the forbidden margin zone. Narrow is actually fine, since extra live space will be filled in exactly the same as the margin space. What is wrong with drawing in the margins? They MIGHT be cut off, due to natural shifting while printing or cutting across many documents. And the bleed WILL be cut off in any event. So why can’t the computer just choose to NOT print into the bleed since it knows exactly where that is? Don’t bother to ask anybody that question, since they will pretend you are asking something else and treat you like you are rubbing a doughnut on your face. They guard this sacred knowledge like it’s the Davinci Code. You just have to live with it, or you die for it.
So I can leave the page narrow. Except I drew way too big originally, and had to cram in the dialog awkwardly around the drawings that I could not comfortably reduce. Therefore, I ought to widen the page, and claim the live space that is rightfully mine to try and declutter the wordage, right? But I had already been widening the redrawn pages based on my latest guess at correct page proportions prior to using the template, which actually ends up being too wide or too short for proper printing!!! I went too far!
Scandal! Look at all that free live space! I long to see it captured and slaughtered. Having it be marginalized is inadequate punishment.
But too short, like too narrow, can go unnoticed. Since I arranged the words reasonably this time, nothing more needs to be done. In the printed book, therefore, most pages are too short. For once I left things alone! I only talled up a few toward the end of the process, and superficially altered a few others immediately prior to printing by increasing the size of the gaps between frames.
One of the taller pages with enhanced gaps beside one of the shortest, that you may already be acquainted with. The disparity is already not great, and since they do not actually appear together,
and a real book doesn’t lie flat, the issue is almost invisible.
Does that all make sense? It shouldn’t! Printing technology is still stuck in the 1940s. We can electronically send a sandwich into space but we can’t know exactly how a computer image is going to show up on paper right in front of us, and the machine responsible may break in one of many ways trying to do it. It took me so many years and so much rage to figure all this out and get used to it, I have no CHOICE but to keep printing books. For once I know everything that can go wrong and have prepared for them all. The books came out perfectly and I succeeded. I can not be held up further!
ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGHHHHFFFFFH I’VE BEEN BORDER-LINED
Another tv host that I watched is done with, and I am not looking to pick up new ones.
I did watch the deely show during its previous transition, eh seventeen years ago, but I was very set in my ways then, and had not at that point been watching it for nineteen years. My sincere hope is to not make it to twenty, one because I obsess over seeing every incidence of the program, and two because I write about them, resulting in what an informal poll of my anxiety suggests are my most boring posts.
Aiding me in this stoppage is that I also stopped reading Mark Evanier’s website, in which he talks about TV hosts a lot, after I deduced that he wasn’t reading the emails I sent him simply because the name I signed them with looked fake. Which is true, but so pathetic of me that I thought it would be funny to mention. Against me is that I happen to share responsibility of assisting my father, whose physical state renders him only able to watch television and read books for hobbies, and we run out of books faster than we run out of television! It is impossible for television to run out. Curiously, it is the same person who ten years ago had the responsibility of handling my transportation to college classes because my mental state rendered me unfit to obtain a car-driving license, and I was then, as now, continually spurred to write endless commentary based on the broadcasts I encountered. Our roles have switched, but since I still prefer to not impose on others my viewing/listening preference, and in these cases, to not have the machines on at all, control of them default to any present persons who prefer them on. After that, my obsessive compulsion takes over: I MUST watch every episode, and I MUST seek them on the internet if I miss the initial broadcast, even if my connection is atrocious and inclined to battle me endlessly. Seventeen years is too long to live like that.
I do not want Trevor Noah, the next replacement host, to fail; I want him to succeed in a way that only appeals to other people, like the XBox, but not to so many people that I feel like the world is running away from me and wants me to die, so more like the Wii.
And as soon as Jon Stewart was off the air, punditry appeared to present him as someone who saw through hype and was always mentally grounded in reality and truth, an impeccable model of integrity and unmatched prowess whose likes would never be seen again through all the times. Which in saying, you become exactly the idiot Stewart devoted his program to criticizing, which means you missed the point of what you claim to appreciate him for.
But Crossfire came back! And the same sort of garbage debase debating thrives on the internet!
But Jim Cramer didn’t cause a recession! And financial garbage kept happening!
But only the ones that came on the show! And then only kind of because they are slippery, and he admitted last month that these were mostly pointless endeavors!
By treating people like deities, exaggerating their achievements and forgetting their errors, you invite more disasters in the same vein.
Gorf and yabbering resumed about “what’s stephen colbert gonna do? He isn’t “The Character” anymore!” But he is! He just did it on this show now! David Letterman, whose show Colbert is replacing, was in character. Glen Beck is in character. Gordon Ramsay is in character. Alex Trebek is in character. Your local news anchors are all presenting artificial personalities to a degree. Literally the only difference between Colbert and other entertainment show hosts is that others don’t pretend to have political views contrary to their personal beliefs. Conan O’Brien has a number of personas that go on and off to suit a situation, and has repeatedly given false yet consistent biographical information to viewers. He claims his real name is Chip Whitley, he went to the Harvard Driving School instead of the university, his mother is Edith Bunker and that Andy Richter saved his life in Vietnam. He blames Jay Leno for pushing him out of the job that he pushed Jay Leno out of. He doesn’t get to be two people. He may not even be one real person.
The previous The Daily Show host Craig Kilborn is not a comedian so much as a very strange man. His 8 second pre-taped cameo on Jon Stewart’s final show should have been funny, where he says something like “I always knew you’d run it into the ground,” if Kilborn played it straight, but he chose to film it in his wine cellar bunker wearing a ridiculous grid-lined suit, which was so odd that I was still fixated on how odd it was when Kilborn delivered his line. I had to watch it two more times before I realized Kilborn wasn’t wearing a bathrobe. Although maybe that was supposed to be part of the joke: Kilborn assumes Stewart has been fired because Kilborn lives in a wine cellar and has very little contact with the outside. And then it was just weird that Kilborn was on the show at all. Not that he was banned from appearing, but he makes people uncomfortable. And I relate to that. Never being quite sure what joke I am going with, and so I use everything, and they are often at odds, and people do not realize I have made a joke at all. Alright so why don’t I have money with which to dig a hole and live in it?
I admit that the fact that Kilborn got almost no recognition from the audience colored my awkwardvision. It wasn’t that nobody recognized him, since Vance Degeneres, who hasn’t been seen in the years since he left the Daily Show, and Mo Rocca, who hasn’t been funny, clearly got a reaction. And Dan Bakkedahl, paired with Matt Walsh, was probably the least recognizable of any of them. Literally the only thing I remember Matt Walsh doing was appearing in a best-of special (the show used to put out 4 or 5 of those a year) of his own segments, with a wrap-around sketch where he was antagonized by his own evil twin, who proclaimed near the end “now it’s time for evil twin to evil WIN!”
Dan Bakkedahl I just remember due to his name being said, and Joel McHale of The Soup (another tv show, which nobody else here watched after I donated my television, thus relieving me of my own duty to do so) mispronouncing it as Bake-a-doll. Anyway, if the studio audience recognized this gang, it recognized Kilborn; it just felt no reason to appreciate Kilborn.
There are Vance and Mo, as I said. Nice to see Vance is recovering from his stroke, not nice to see that his public appearances have been so minimal since leaving the Daily Show that evidence of one of my six all-time wikipedia edits are still on his page.
Seriously, you chose cat in tree over porkchop fire? Philistines. Also, ‘apparatuses’ is correct. Go jump in a dumpster, user:Alan_Smithee.
Celebrity Jeopardy non-winner Josh Gad’s not-necessarily-funny loudness was consistent with past appearances despite his cited salary to the contrary (and no longer being as fat). He provided a voice in the animuted film Frozen, which my father has seen but I have not. A few weeks after this show criticizes D. Trump for making his presidential pitch as “I’m rich,” this Gad that I’m supposed to like comes out and yells “Disney money, BITCH!” The difference, of course, is that Josh said “bitch.”
Stacey Grenrock-Woods, whose Daily Show reception was similar to Gad’s, did not appear, but did not appear in Book of Mormon either. She did have many more segments aired, however — 55 in total, if imdb.com is to be believed, and it is not always, since it only lists one for Gad, and I know he appeared at least four times, including this one.
By the roy, I am glad Donald Trump has the attention he is getting. The American republican party has been led by a kangaroo court of irrational loudmouth cartoon characters with no solutions as long as I have been casually acknowledging politics, long before Fox News streamlined our access to it. The party created this opportunity for somebody like Trump, and deserves everything that Trump does with the opportunity, and the party deserves to not be able to control Trump. They did not learn anything from Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sarah Palin, and this is the next stage of that. Now that the American public widely supports homosexual rights, believes in evolution and other similarly “blasphemous” endeavors, the republican party has lost Christian moral authority as a means to prop itself up, which is all it ever had, and nobody believes it anymore when it claims it’s actually talking about science instead of religion, either. Without that they just have to get more and more ridiculous to get attention. The Jon Stewart exit aired the same night as the once-recent republican debate… One of these indistinguishable dumb shows that the Daily one had little impact on the continued creation of, interviewed a focus group after the debate, because that’s safer than actually expressing an opinion for yourself, and one member chosen to speak on camera claimed to have formerly been a Trump supporter, but no longer! I cannot think what put the guy off: Trump’s total consistency with past behavior, that made him the party frontrunner and got him in the debate among the sponsored politicians to begin with?
I would love for the republican party to self destruct and allow a competent group to take its place and challenge democrats on legitimate topics instead of the some old non-topics both sides mutually agreed to fake-argue about so they could maintain their rubbish party-based electoral college system. Which seems a naive thing to say, and polls don’t amount to a hill of beans in an election over a year away, but I appreciate not knowing exactly what is going to happen next and finding an opening to have naive hopes in.
Back on topic, the less daily-like shows I view, the less aware I will be of polls and therefore the less likely I will feel the need for that manner of interlude.
Wordpress, the system that manages this website content, is agony.
Do you see the list of recent posts on this page? That truly basic, unimpressive list? It took me all yesterday to implement. I thought it would surely be faster to find an automatic method to make the system check for new posts and order them by date than for me to manually manage that list myself.
I sought out the wordpress forums, and turned up old posts on the topic. At each stage I found an existing request for help with my problem:
Everybody gives the scantest possible amount of information to get rid of you, and then the junk still does not work. At that point I would need to find a post that simultaneously requested a solution to the base problem, the sidebar problem and the appearance problem, as a prior request does not exist. In the case when I asked about a problem for myself, nobody answered and the topic was closed despite being unresolved, because they only have easy answers and would rather ignore something that confounds them than admit to not knowing. Or maybe I seemed like somebody who would call out an easy answer for being useless.
I should explain that wordpress uses “themes” to allow users to change their sites’ appearances easily from a guided-user-interface, without editing code. But that only allows certain basic changes. “Widgets” were a later addition to themes that allowed even more changes, but could not themselves be changed. And still only worked on sidebars. “Plug-ins” are different from widgets, because they are not integrated into the wordpress code, which ironically makes them easier to force to work WITH wordpress the way I want them to. So I need to dig into the code anyway, every time, for everything, and test it 800 times until it works or I find a disappointing but functional compromise to fall back on, which I hate doing, which is why I use the same graphics for months or years at a time instead of one month each like I formerly did before I installed wordpress. The whole thing barely works and needs constant encouragement.
Why is a basic reasonable thing: having a list of posts NOT be on the SIDE of the page, so improbable and impossible that the developers did not anticipate it being necessary and none of the dorks who understand this stuff in their spare time ever saw a need to figure it out? The exact same garbage happened for my automated comic strip site-section (although it was over the number of pages displayed at once and not the folder issue), and the coppermine art gallery mechanism. And for Zdoom, ten years ago, which is why I never finished the dingdang thing and still mentally fixate on it. Every time every time every time. the thing I want is always just outside of permissible, for no reason that is apparent. So I have to figure it out or leave it behind.
I have had various diagnoses throughout my life; tourette syndome here, asperger syndrome there, high functioning autism, disco fever, what-have-you-ever. These mean that I need help with some things. But if nobody can provide help, is it really me who is disabled? Outside the internet, I am surrounded by people who drink themselves sick, smash their expensive telephones, misplace their cars, will not read their own mail, will not let themselves become aware of their bills, stereotype and condemn anyone whose opinion differs, adopt pets they cannot look after (and dump those pets on me), buy junk they cannot afford, and then do not use or return the junk. Am I disabled just because I cannot instantly bond with any yahoo off the street over my own screwups? Hey I broke my wrist assaulting a piece of architecture too! That makes us normal! Let’s go spend $300 on two cups of beer!
Technology that is supposed to make life easier and be so “professional”-looking becomes itself such a massive burden that we give up on things that we might have finished had the technology not insisted on becoming so gosh darn convenient. And when I persevere it is only through hacky patchwork repairs that look uglier than if I had just stuck with the outdated thing I was replacing. The outdated thing that has all its data in one file, in one folder. Then a useless idiot happens along and tells me I should have been using this or that BETTER miracle system from the beginning.
Once again the only way to get what I want is to edit the actual wordpress files outside of the theme stuff. Which are in different folders, and inevitably lead to copies downloaded and new versions uploaded to the wrong folder amidst all the folder switching I will have to do trying to bring the css and php into accord. And when wordpress has a new version, it updates itself, quite without asking, and thinks nothing of overwriting my changes outside the theme folder, even if it has not itself changed the files that I edited. So I may end up needing to fix it every time the version changes. But I am capable of changing it! I am capable of fixing it! For the time being I have control. That is what life is about for losers: you find a way to co-exist with things that are set up to make you give up. You do not win, but you keep yourself from losing completely. And watch out for widgets that pretend to be your pal but just want to hold you back and expect rewards for it.
And I may in the end decide that the “page” view does not work for me anyway, and opt for something outside of wordpress, to which I can add some customized mechanism that reads wordpress excerpts without messing anything else up because it is not itself built on wordpress. But I will have dropped the wordpress option because I thought it looked bad, not because dorkhnical support refused to support me.
This is not a mopey entry. This is how I conquer mopiness.
This was in a previous entry, when I got temporarily on to the topic of passive acceptance of victimhood, but it was not meant to be the primary topic, but it was very boring. I will surreptitiously insert it here immediately before I post something slightly more interesting, so that I can know I posted it without worrying that anybody might have read and been bored by it.
Shia LaBeouf, during a performance art piece in which he would not speak, and his collaborators who arranged the exhibition report that LaBeouf was raped during the performance. By someone who had already been “whipping” him for ten minutes, and there were lots of people around, and the whipping raping psychopath was allowed to escape afterward. Am I supposed to accept that not speaking in the name of “art” is more important than calling for help, trying to protect yourself from trauma, or are people so terrified of appearing critical that they won’t ask for additional details that will make this seem less ridiculous? Did the person have a gun, even though there were guards checking for that? Was there a threat first? Piers Morgan is a jackass. His sentiment is not mine. There is no excuse for raping, I should not need to say that. And he also spoke from the perspective of inherited outrage, because that is also popular: to be the first to get offended on behalf of another party*.
But you might as well have a performance art project where you stand in the Lincoln Tunnel and then lament your plight that somebody in the world was mean enough to not drive around you. Morgan himself, on Morgan’s own tv program let Alex Jones yell at him for 20 minutes. They are both jackasses that deserve each other.
The first article ends by suggesting that LaBeouf did not get police involved because he was ashamed the he couldn’t defend himself and so kept the story to himself, except he didn’t because two other “artists” on the scene knew something was up and we know about it now well within the statute of limitations.
Is the word “rape” the problem? If we say the woman whipped Monsieur TheBeef for ten minutes, then stripped off his clothes and dumped a vat of pudding on him without raping, then would we be allowed to think that silently letting somebody do that to you, and then silently not telling your co-dorks that somebody did that, is peculiar? We have a fear now of discussing rape that we don’t have with murder, even though murder is worse.
It is not easy to sit in a room for hours, not knowing what people are going to do to you. But if you do it on purpose because you fancy yourself an “Artist” then I have difficulty feeling sympathy. Conversely, I have no sympathy for artists who put in no effort at all. Art is pretty stupid. It is one of our great fame lotteries. How many gimmicky boneheads have we made millionaires out of just because nobody with money will acknowledge that everything they do is ugly?
Rachel Dolezal, who famously passed herself as being of African descent when she was not: I have no problem with her identifying with another culture more than the one she was born into. I have a problem if she invented fake hate crimes against herself so that she could publicize that they occurred. It means she wants to be black because she finds glamour in being of a discriminated-against social class. She wants to be a victim.
She was initially discriminated against, while openly-white, because people THOUGHT she was blackish. Society laughs at that sort of claim, I think unjustly, and so Dolezal redevoted her life to accruing discrimination she could get sympathy for. We raise people to seek exploitable victimhood.
Gorf it took me two weeks to get remotely comfortable with posting this, and in that period I have added a further portion that I once again am not sure I want to post, and am so deferring for later consideration. That is life. Except I explicitly concluded it by saying I was not going to write any more depressing entries, and so until I post that depressing entry I have nothing in place to prevent me from writing more.
so is earnestly trying to appreciate wrong-headed remakes for stuff that worked without being remade, so I can at least swear off doing that.
Some times I wonder if somebody is out to get me, but is lacking for details about my life and so has to go about messing with it in an indirect fashion.
The situation at present is that I have an art exhibit of unprecedented size to set up on July 1. I intended to prepare 6-10 pictures I had not previously printed, most of which were near displayability, which I only seriously delved into last Saturday, believing a week-and-a-half plenty of time to finish so many near-finished things and also send them to a remote location for printing. My computer sternly disagreed and the following morning refused to turn on. This behavior was repeated on subsequent mornings and other distinct day-periods following. Instead of asking for a postponement of the exhibit opening or resigning myself to make do with the considerable quantity of art junk I already have ready, I had every intention of doing precisely what I set out to do prior to events which rendered it undoable, even though it was already barely doable.
Try to imagine you have an important engagement, or a terribly unimportant engagement that only seems like it is due to your utterly meaningless life, and your automobile explodes, melts, or otherwise becomes inoperable immediately before you are due for this engagement: in most cases, due to the isolation of your meaningless life, you will just have to not go, and deal with that. However, if your automobile melts but you have a seesaw-action minecart standing by, you might consider “I bet I could get there on the minecart” and then cause yourself more trouble trying failurely than you would have just accepting failure from the beginning and doing something else with your time. Also, along the way you have to let other people ride the minecart for a while because it is a popular minecart and the trendy little tricycles the people bought for themselves instead of getting minecarts are ultimately even less practical. And it’s your fault anyway since you never thought your car would melt and that you would need to use your minecart for anything serious and encouraged the people you are now complaining about to use it so that it was not wasted. Also I just remembered that you are trying to sell your garage andthe pieces of melted carrRRRRRRRRGH I’VE BEEN PUDDING’D And furthermore I must say your metaphor is rather hard to follow.
This picture actually does not prove anything. It is a laptop computer with the large empty front piece turned over. It looks more complicated than it is. Also, I do not advocate positioning a laptop computer on the top of your own lap since that can lead to back or neck strain. It is better to find someone taller whose lap you can borrow for the occasion.
All I did after putting the computer like this was slide out the hard drive, hidden beneath the lower right section, temporarily load the hard drive into the tiny computer lurking in the distance, whose own drive I removed to accomodate this act, booted it from a remotely adequate, somewhat judgmental version of linux, because it was the best my crummy internet could procure, off of a flash drive, and copied a few things from the hard drive to “work” with in a comparatively less inadequate version of linux that nonetheless lacked the ram quantities, screen size and bearable software I was accustomed to while I waited for a replacement computer more like my accustoms, generously provided by Mr. Pez of Springfield PC and Advanced Telemetry Systems, who also provded my previous units and advised me on hard drive swapping, that I could re-place the slid-out hard drive into, and resume with minimal issue. Well it seems complicated when you say it all at once like that.
You may have noticed that I described a number of things but used far fewer pictures than usual, and also put “work” between quotation marks, and further, have jumped from my usual unstated “six days without updates” minimum to seven. That ought to indicate to you that the situation has been just about as irritating as my implications and run-on sentences imply it might be, that would not be entertaining to read about with more specifics and punctuation added in. But if it does not then it probably is not a matter of great significance outside of my personal experience across the previous week. And golly feeble at least I didn’t get shot at. And yes the rumors I started are true: this website is on some level intended to be amusing.
I know sometimes it comes across like an inept assemblage of random details, however,
A question lately occurs to me:
A lot of people sure seem to think they have!
And what is more, they think it noteworthy that they think they have seen it. They honor the deed by listing products and brands and calling it a day, except when they copy each others’ lists of contextless product acknowledgments and go home early. Remembering further back than five years is HARD.
I had high expectations for this one; it was going to go back in time and CHANGE my Childhood, making all the other lists inaccurate, and thus not my duty to disprove, but then it was just a bunch of fan drawings stolen off of deviantart without any credit to the admittedly uninspired but none-the-less credit-worthy artists, but with ample space to give the thug dork who copied them credit for doing so. Granted, no name is supplied and none of the social media scripts on the page WORK, but it has a heaping hamburger helping of advertisements, many of which do work, so it ultimately serves its purpose: getting real money to scumbags who have no discernible skills. This is the kind of person who insists critics “need to stop the hate” and then blocks all from replying.
I realize brainbread lists are nothing new, and people have gotten paid for the task of acknowledging that things exist and selling advertising on it for about a decade now. Half a millennium ago you gained fame by traveling around the world, gathering wonders that had never been seen in your homeland before. Now you don’t go anywhere and show people stuff they already had and got rid of, and there is actually more demand for this. My gripe is the fixation on the word “childhood,” specifically MINE. Certainly weak-willed dorks have been lamenting the ruination of [their] childhood(s) ever since Marco Polo brought back erotic fan fiction from the Far East; MY childhood this, MY childhood that, but only recently when this was turned around into YOUR childhood, (akaaaa mine), did I take personal offense. If you want to sum up your entire history of conscious functioning as a system of stagnant, staring inaction you may, and furthermore declare this unremarkable period of subservience to sponsored sludge and the sponsors themselves as something pure and infallible, but I refuse to have mine defined with anyone else’s! If My Childhood is anything special, it could surely not be summed up with a photograph of a bag of Keebler Ripplins. And if it can be, then it was wasted and is not worth discussing!
Pizzarias were better, anyway.
But not as good as “pizza,” that I can still buy, so I do not lament the facsimile-chips’ loss.
These things seem to be in agony, however.
You might notice, browsing those lists, that a Ninja Turtle product from 1989 will appear alongside some weird fad toothbrush from 1998, and wonder how those could simultaneously define the same childhood 9 years apart. In fact “your childhood” just means “potential childhood period of anyone currently in the 18-35 year old target demographic favored by advertisers.” That means in three years (as of yesterday) my childhood will officially no longer exist. And I almost believe it, because that is less important to me than my currenthood anyhow. It also means that the original websites from 18 years ago which literally just posted pictures of He-Man action figures and said “hey remember these?” are possibly part of someone’s childhood. I am lucky perhaps to not have gotten so hooked into having my nostalgia packaged and sold back to me by an outside party that to have it no longer available will be a painful blow. 25 OCCUPANTS FROM LISTS ABOUT YOUR CHILDHOOD THEY DON’T ACKNOWLEDGE ANYMORE
25. Saturday Supercade. Hey, remember when Saturday Supercade used to be on these lists? Well the people we want to see these lists don’t!
24. Handi-Snax. Gosh these were terrible! You should be GLAD nobody wants to convince you these were great anymore!
23. Juiceboxes. Nope! People who presently were kids in the past only had nutrient-free fake juice skittle-water in BAGS!
22. The pinball machine on Sesame Street. Better download the 5000 clips of this from youtube now that they aren’t relevant enough to be uploaded 5000 times! And hopefully these lists will be out of style before we get to the point where youtube is on them.
You know what I wanted to do as a child? Stop going to school. Now I am not in school, and I am glad. I cannot even drive a car and I like this better. I miss my grandmother, emergency broadcast system tests, being able to hear rain through my bedroom window and still having the capacity to be excited by the thought of the future, but overall I prefer this now, and look at how angry I am!
Entertainment made for people who were then the age I am now emphasized how much I would wish to be a kid in school once I no longer were. But now I can buy any weird cookies I want that my mother would never buy and can play every stupid Nintendo game on my own computer without having to hoard impractical lumps of plastic and stick a Lincoln log in the disk drive to hold one in place. I have the freedom to kill myself eating bacon pizzas, and maybe I will, if I enjoy that.
Alternatives to pizza do not look like that! A big heap of vegetables is not going to make me magically not want a very specific pizza! Maybe that is My Childhood’s fault, for getting me chemically dependent on horrible food! My Childhood is an irresponsible creep! How dare you remind me of it!
Here is a brief list of things I do not miss about the 1990s:
Roberto Benigni
the Dave Matthews band
the dos prompt
floppy disks
boot disks
Red Baron being the only frozen pizza
AOL busy signals
AOL
Video games that broke and/or needed to be paid for
When I ate pop tarts and hot pockets
Going to school (I told you!)
Not having a means to listen to whatever music I wanted and having to rely on radio stations or whatever CDs I could find, and thinking that was all there was.
Having to watch tv shows when they came on
Wanting to watch tv shows
Having to seek out and hoard vague pictures from tv shows to prove that they existed.
Elmo
Needing to use film to take photographs
Pop-up advertising (specifically, not being able to block it easily)
Tomagotchi-alikes
Molly Shannon
Real-player
Rwanda Genocide
Crash Bandicoot
I found that after I conquered nostalgia on my own terms, it was harder and harder for me to have a similar experience of rediscovery, and I just had to stop. But once something is monetized, it must be pushed and pushed until it explodes. As consumers become desensitized to incessant nostalgia-baiting, content regurgitators will have to dig deeper and skew yet vaguer and more generic.
13 non-food items you put in your mouth
7 jiggly rainbow keys that match no known locks
9 ingredients in your bottle formula that are more dangerous than anything your parents are worrying about in their own diets
18 Gametes You Wish Had Hooked Up!!
46 chromosomes that literally created your childhood! Unless you have Klinefelter syndrome or something
Nostalgia-baiting is this generation’s version of “when I was your age” except it is more like “When YOU were YOUR age” because they just pass it between themselves since nothing happened and they have no one to pass it to. It cannot be used to tell kids how easy they have it because part of the process is emphasizing how AWESOME it is, and much of what would be cited has not changed in 30 years anyhow because now a lucrative commercial property is never allowed to die. These people have NO STORY to tell because the whole point is that I was there too! So they just mention items that might be in the story. Perhaps the next generation’s childhood will just be their parents’ childhood and they can save themselves some trouble.
I first witnessed the film Ghostbusters as a six-year-old. I only vaguely recalled the storyline and made an asinine “parody” comic of it as a twelve-year-old based on the vague memory and titled it “Grossbusters” based on a specific memory of a Mad Magazine article I could not possibly have read beyond the title that I ripped off. I believe the book I drew that in is presently in a storage unit a few towns over from here. Whether for its protection or yours is yet uncertain.
I can understand how, as a child having viewed ghostbusters, my ability to construct a coherent story may have been adversely affected. I finally re-watched it a year or so ago, and it seems to be unexplained how the Ghost-Busters transition from bumbling oafs who run when they meet a ghost into professional oafs who have the means and skill to operate the means to restrain and capture the ghost. It’s even less clear why Dana the lady falls in love with Peter the ghostbuster, who is a total creep and didn’t even find the ghost he was hired to remove. I suppose this is a natural follow-up to Indiana Jones, the 1980s icon who established beyond anything that a highly paid male lead is irresistible to women however self-centered, unfeeling and barely-acted he is. I also don’t understand how Bill Murray WAS the lead; he’s billed first and probably gets the most screen time, yet he doesn’t seem to have any idea what any of the other characters are doing nor to care. It surprises me little to learn that he adlibbed most of his lines. The film moves along despite him rather than because of him. I was surprised to learn that Bill Murray only read the Ghostbusters script on the first day of filming, for from his performance I assumed he had not read the script at all.
I do not HATE Bill Murray; he reminded me of my cousin Bill, who was, at a time when having the same name was a strong association for me, “my favorite person,” but is Murray a “comedy genius?” Not for what he did in Ghostbusters.
It is probably a better movie than it would have been had all the actors been held rigidly to a script, and the lack of fun in some big budget movies after this one was a primary factor in co-star Rick Moranis getting out of the business, so hooray for Ghostbusters! But it is not my favorite movie.
The environmental protection agent, the man I am supposed to hate, has a point. These dorks are storing ghosts quite illegally. Although he also doesn’t have a point since he believes the busters ghost have not truly captured anything, which means they are not storing anything illegally.
Why do towns-folk cheer when the ghostbusters are released from prison? All the ghosts they were paid to bust are on the loose all at once, likely with vengeful attitudes after having been cruelly imprisoned. Real citizens would be furious that they paid to have these ghosts stopped and now the brutes are back. They wouldn’t care if you told them somebody ELSE messed with the ghosts, even if you managed to convince them of that. They would tell you
Ray is baffled when Winston suggests that the ghosts are spirits of dead people. I thought that much was implicit in the terminology “ghost.” Even considering this, neither has any regret or remorse about continuing to trap these lost, unfulfilled living desires in a box, and then transferring them to another box, for, presumably, ever.
It is still an entertaining movie that is not held back by its plot holes and I can see the appeal in it. Not the overpowering nerd-dom, but I never do. The costumes and made up technology are neat, I suppose. There is good stuff here for an extended series. But these two movies do not fill me with desire to see more like them, and I recall being underwhelmed by the tie-in animated show.
Through being a “comedy” it can better get away with its science not making sense. Although it is just barely a comedy. If not for Rick Moranis and Bill Murray playing themselves in the movie it wouldn’t have been. If, when Moranis was being chased by the gozer dog (whose function, if it is explained, I missed), he had been shouting “Help! I’m Rick Moranis!” the scene would have worked just as well. If the police officer who finds him later had said to Egon “here, we caught Rick Moranis wandering around. Why don’t you keep him” it wouldn’t have made a difference. The funniest thing Harold Ramis did was hold up boxes of Cheez-It and cans of Coke from time to time. He was still alive when I wrote this and I never got around to posting what I think about the film Groundhog Day so this should not count as slandering his legacy. I have no posthumous quarrel with him!
And that song, gosh that Ghostbusters song is awful, whether it’s a Huey Lewis ripoff or isn’t. Bustin makes me feel goood!
Well how do you think it makes THEM feel?
I, personally, only bust out of necessity.
The most peculiar aspect (of several) in the official music video is that Ray Parker Jr himself is a ghost, meaning that he is inviting for himself to be busted. He follows some lady around insisting that she make this happen. She fails to get the deed carried out. Now we all have to suffer.
That actually did not require much editing. I am not sure what I was waiting for. Not the announcement of a new all-lady Ghostbuster cast, but that was enough. Another dumb nontroversy I would not be aware of if I lived alone.
Do I care that there would be an all woman ghostbusters cast? Do I care that there is a female Thor? Do I care that there is any Thor? I am more bothered that at least 3 are from Saturday Night Live, the most complacent inescapable and self-fellatingly uncancelable television institution of our times. A show that I have liked things on, but that I do not need repeated in or influencing any other context, which of course it never stops doing. I am bothered that we can’t just leave the Ghostbusters or anything else alone that belongs in the 1980s. If this movie can be made without requiring fawning 80’s themed advance-nerd-dom from its audience, then we still aren’t going to know for another year so what is the point of getting worked up over it now? I don’t even care about the new star wars, and I LIKE star wars, even when I hate it. Thankfully they do not yet have the means to produce Star Warses on a weekly basis.
Two of the initial ghostbusters were from Saturday Night Live, of korf, but Ghostbusters was their concept (or their inventive take on somebody else’s older gorilla suit employing concept), so they can be from wherever they want. I permit it.
And I realize I mentioned Mad Magazine earlier, which is even older and setter in its ways but nobody else I am within influence rage of cares about it, so I have the option of forgetting it for a while if I need to. And nobody is going to give Dick Debartolo a nightly tv show in which he pays audience members $10 to lick things and then that’s the whole bit, and then somehow be given an even more visible show a few years later based on that. Also Lorne Michaels hates bald people.
But it is my fault for knowing any of this, or being exposed to people or things that talk about it. Especially people who present it in the form “hollywood is FINALLY catching on that woman are funnier than men.” No no no that angle only exists to make people argue, cannot be proven, and helps nobody. I am tired of THE battle of THE sexes. Nobody can win. If you changed “funnier” to “better at math” you would get fired immediately, even though that’s equally inflammatory and actually nearer to possible to get a real statistic on. Why is it not permissible to examine something in a reasoned manner?
We have woman ghostbusters because that is a gimmicky casting choice designed to get attention. Otherwise the story would just be that the new ghostbusters cast had been announced. Or the movie itself would be the story, and we would wait for it to exist to decide if it was quality material. If we weren’t after dumb attention for the dumbest reasons possible we would make less stupid “reboots.” Media is obsessed with gender. You can change all the characters into talking ducks and nobody is the slightest bit surprised, but swap some crotches around, something we actually have the science to do, and professional boneheads wet themselves with fury and giddiness.
I am going to start an online petition to get Dogtanian and the 3 Muskethounds changed back into people. This is BLASPHEMY!!! Coming up next, TWITTER WEIGHS IN on the all dog musketeers! Hollywood is finally catching on that dogs are better flamboyant chocolate bar infantry than men!
I wish I could install a program inside my television that made it immediately turn off whenever a smirking nimrod said “twitter weighs in.” True enough I could just smash the thing but somebody else in the house might catch on.
It is unfortunate that it took the death of Harold Ramis to put a stop to Stephen Colbert stealing his identity. And also that it took that to get people to shut up about forcing out a Ghostbusters 3. Even though Ghostbusters 2, made when the actors were still in their primes (and willing, and alive) was criticized in its own time for not doing a whole lot to differentiate it from the first film. I personally do not mind more of the same if I like the same, but as I said the first one did not feel as special as it wanted to. I do prefer the Bobby Brown Ghostbusters song to Ray Parker’s, but apart from the goofy rap breakdown and the more conventionally terrible music video, it has nothing to do with and could have existed without the film. And so could I!
It has been said, possibly by me, that if we compare the amount of people simply shot with firearms, deliberately or otherwise, in this country, guns whose current state of regulation may not be touched, except to make less so, without strong public and corporate protest, it greatly overwhelms the number killed by “terrorism,” which we are regularly forced to forgo civil liberties as part of the “war on.”
To me, organized terrorism differs from the usual mass shooting we get in the US, because “mass shooting” often involves the perpetrators shooting themselves at the end, and it is difficult to determine what they thought they could accomplish. The recent Paris murder-fest was planned in advance, threatened about in advance, the people who did it knew exactly who they came to kill, and they got away. By NOW they have mostly been captured (by death by bullets), but the fact remains they intended to go on living afterward. Is that justification for monitoring my telephone calls and humiliating me at an airport? Not at all. If anything, I think the abuse of citizens by their own government is more valid justification for criminal acts than insulting drawings. But it proves these matters should not be considered the same thing. It is not just plain old murder. It is as bad as murder, but simply getting mad and sad at the idea of “terror,” a basic emotion that all people can experience, is not going to solve the problem. I do not know what will solve the problem, but I feel obligated to think about it, since I did not have an emotional reaction, but observed many such reactions.
Why are depictions of Muhammad banned? Allegedly because they might lead to iconography, worship of the symbol. Muhammad did not care how he was shown, he just did not want people to worship it. Or, rather, one segment of his followers thought he did not want his image, and possibly any images, worshiped, and then across a few centuries some subgroups remembered the main part of the rule but forgot why and got really serious about it. Would anybody worship an INSULTING picture of Muhammad? Of anyone? Killing over it makes no sense, even from a fundamentalist perspective. In fact this seems like the opposite of the prohibition’s intention, since you are holding the ban as sacred and infallible. The Law is your idol, your god, and you cannot be convinced that whatever you think it says is wrong.
It is difficult for people from non-fundamentalist-islam backgrounds to grasp the iconography issue, because so much of our culture is defined by ancient art, that was generally financed by religious fanatics, because they had all the money.
The odd thing about iconography, to me, is that this would seem to be descended from similar judeo-christian bans, bans which really did not stand the test of time, despite two iconoclastic periods in Byzantium and an entire dark age in which people were just too impoverished and miserable to make art. Consequently nobody actually knows what any of these constantly depicted figures looked like and Christianity’s number one symbol, the +-shaped cross is highly unlikely to have been the implement of Christ Christy’s crucifixion; evidence and records favor an X. Anything that shows a t cross is automatically wrong.
At some point The Church realized that its rituals and LATIN masses made no sense to the lay people, who all spoke mangled mixes of french, german and elvish, so then we had elaborate paintings, stain glass windows, decorated facades, all of ostensibly instructional value, plus gold to instruct peasants that the church is better than them. All in all a general business of exploiting people for money to pay for opulence for the church, forcefully financed by church patrons who probably cannot even afford to bury their kin who die of ludicrously preventable diseases. And they liked it! Or thought they did. They would travel all across Europe to visit all the churches and church relics, often body parts of saints, or just boxes that they were told contained such things. It’s really the thought of Saint Francis’ mummified trachea that counts. It is only the newest pope who finally considered, hey maybe the amount of money us popes hoard is totally incongruous to the message of humility and generosity we teach/name ourselves after.
And then this week, in a story that I admit I only read in the first place for a totally different reason, ol’ popey will be attending an event in Manila, in which people parade a statue of that darn Christ through the streets, a statue that supposedly has magical power to heal the sick and whatnot, and bring “good fortune.” Idol worship, witchcraft, greed, incontinence, all sorts of nonsense going on. It is ridiculous and has nothing to do with church doctrine, and yet it is a happier celebration than the mopey Catholic stuff I grew up with. Although I am also inclined to believe the home lives in any society so focused on a religious ritual is probably solidly patriarchal, abusive and opposed to change (but they always get cranky when they need one so no sense putting it off). We need to separate our joy from religion, and we need to separate our mandated misery from it. If Catholicism had been more jolly maybe I would have stuck with it and never gotten to the point where I realized there was no need for it. But if I did not have the freedom to quit church, or access to parts of life unrelated to church, and had been forced to believe in stuff that was made deliberately arcane and impossible to fully grasp, and thus impossible to question any aspect of, I might well have become the angriest, murderiest person on the planet.
And this was in the era of “Jesus loves you.” Jesus did not always love the proverbial you.
“Christ Pantokrator.” I know it is called that. I had to memorize what this was during my ill-advised art education. But what is a pantokrator? I do not know, but I presume it describes someone who does whatever jesus does when he makes that face.
Who cut this tin can in half and glued it to my plastic wig? Just because that knife you bought off the tv CAN cut a can that you subsequently attach to Christ does not mean you SHOULD. Christ is displeased. Thou shalt be pantocrated.
Religion, in general, does not wish the best for us, I think, overall. If you grow up thinking God is angry, and you aren’t allowed to think about anything else, you will be very very angry. There are indeed nations, entire countries, where it is ILLEGAL to quit the local brand of Islam. In United Arab Emirates, the punishment for trying is death! Like it is not enough that Allah will hate you and condemn you for your deed, you have to die NOW. In 2015! Or at least in 1996, which is when wikipedia’s source dates from. But the shooters, they were my age. I lived through 1996. Don’t think I don’t remember when RENT and that third Mighty Ducks movie came out. This stuff didn’t happen so very long ago.
And there probably are Christians today who think all depictions of Jesus are evil. They just do not get angry or motivated enough to shoot anyone. Over that reason. Maybe they will shoot you for being gay. But arbitrary conditions for slaughter is certainly a part of their Christian history. It is part of American history. This nation is as backward as it is because we “won” all our wars and were never forced to pay for our bad history by people badder than us. A murderer is a hero in a land claimed by murdering. Beside the point!
And I wonder, for people angry enough to plan a spree-execution like our recent one in such detail over insults, past the point of reasoning “hey I GOT to France, nobody has the legal authority to kill me for not being angry here” what makes them happy? If they believe the path to salvation involves wholly forgoing joy or whimsy in life, perhaps killing is the only fun they have, and the only fun they learned to have. This article‘s writer thinks the shooters actually are not so bothered by cartoons and just want an excuse to shoot people and jumpstart retaliations toward Muslims in general so that they can plan more counter-retaliation attacks. That almost makes more sense. Since up to that point nothing made sense, I will go with that idea. In fact I know somebody who thinks the Newtown, Connecticut shooting, a few towns over from where I am, was arranged by the US government as an excuse to take away The Guns and/or encourage a race war for some reason. Which does not mean I also believe that, but there are people out there who think a race war is really coming or could come, and maybe they would do what they could to encourage it if that sounded like fun to them.
I wish they could find more socially acceptable ways to have fun!
I have been on the internet too long, because this comes across to me like the person being interviewed is way too into the idea of people wearing diapers. This can be read as if he is issuing a general recommendation for all people to wear diapers in their every day lives.
I like the statement that he will “try” to wear one also. As if to suggest it is a challenge that only the most worthy and dedicated may take on, and he wants to pretend he has not been doing it all along and looking for an excuse to pretend it is someone else’s idea, then pretend to be surprised when he takes to it really well.
He is turning into a Charmin bear in my mind and that is really not what I came here to-
Cease this talk at once! And don’t you dare try and touch my sequined copy of my book about me! Pantocration is imminent!
I first posted this on twitto, where my good ideas go to get truncated into misery so that they want to die.
In an attempt to be more useful to people, I have tried to be nearer to them recently. This means also being near their influence device, the television, which makes me aware of things that are incredibly non-relevant to my existence.
More things than usual.
For example, did you know there was a movie called The Interview that was going to be dropped into cinemas, but then was not going to be? In fact it was not about Interviewing; interviews are not cinemized unless they are with Vampires. In this case, some characters are sent to the magical land of North Korea under the pretense of conducting an interview with the leader, Kim Jong Uh, but are actually in town to murder him. It is a comedy. You are meant to assume it is a comedy because we are meant to think North Korea is a big ol joke because the people are repressed by such bizarre despots. You generally do not aspire to despotism unless you have a problem.
I tell you this not because I assume you do not know, but sometimes I reread things I wrote ten years ago in which I assumed the reader DID know something, I and I have by now forgotten.
And you can make a film [ostensibly] about killing a real person so long as he is far off and has no power to stop you. If he has it, then oops. You have little excuse! Fortunately for this crew nobody asks them for an excuse, because they think they are entitled to make that film, and call a revocation of that entitlement censorship.
Supposedly the owning corporation of the film, had a big hack attack by people angry about, among other things, the Interview film being released, specifically due to the north Korea/murder connection and not because they are sick of Seth Rogen and his “gee I dunno a-heuh-heuh-heuh-heuh” facial expressions.
Following some threats to destroy theatres that screened the film, theatres refused to show it, and the distribution company decided to abort the release (but not the TV ads for it). Actors in and out the film called it an assault on free speech.
I believe in “free speech,” but if you wanted to make a major feature film about killing MC Hammer you would likely have to ask permission or change his name. Now, is threatening to blow up movie cinemas on MC Hammer’s behalf a reasonable reaction? Probably not.
Just think, if we had this political climate 22 years ago Hot Shots! Part Deux might never have been made. Not only did its “story” promote a non-historical, overt military mission by the United States to kill Iraq’s then ruler Saddam Hussein, the advertising promoted Saddam Hussein as himself. In fact there was no controversy at all. Maybe Saddam Hussein did not have internet access in 1992. Also, that one was a bit more obvious as a comedy. The poster shows Charles Sheen holding a bug-eyed chicken as an arrow in a bow, for beets sakes. Perhaps not FUNNY to everyone, but no cultural divide could mistake that for a sincere sentiment. Considering that in real life we cut off their beaks, genetically alter them to not grow feathers and make them live their whole lives in darkness, ankle deep in their own filth before we kill them anyway, robin hooding one in a combat situation is benevolent by comparison, and patriotic besides.
What we generally have in our present day comedy cases are situations that are meant to be plausible and we are just supposed to find the awkward banter and dude!ly reactions funny. Dude! You just said something weird! Dude! Your masculinity is of questionable purity! Yeah, no, dude, bro. Just no. I just. Half of Anchor Man 2 was comedy and the other half was somebody in the film reacting to the comedy as if they knew it was comedic, then explaining why it was so.1 It is somewhat like the laugh track on Full House or The Flintstones except viewers who complain about that stuff pretend it is dissimilar.
Still, I do hope the United Kingdom follows North Korea’s example and starts taking action when an animated film has an out of place Scottish accent in it. Maybe that will calm some of the pro-secession fervour.
Is there proof that the North Korea government itself ordered or was capable of the attack? not necessarily, but somebody either supports the regime or wants to incriminate it. Maybe it is a mega marketing campaign, meant to make an ultimately tame and unadventurous movie seem shocking and enticing. And I wouldn’t want MY movie to open the same day as Robin Williams’ last major film appearance, unless it had nemitz in it and I was deliberately trying to reduce mitz market share. In any event The Interview’s stated premise is tacky. In fact at this point I would not even recommend making a movie about killing Mike Korea without consent.
Thank you Mxy Rimpfrixidy also for letting me post this without asking.
OR MAYBE, could this be a deliberate distraction from the recent torture report? I did notice that the ABC television network’s World News Tonight by last night had dropped the torture story while continuing to find means to bring up the Bill Cosby story, which is even older and longer media-ignored than the torture story, but less incriminating of crooked government, so possibly. Possibly, but if people were going to be outraged about it, they ought to have started long before then, or you could have been outraged that they were not outraged sooner sooner.
Maybe you were! The United States kills with robots, detains indefinitely without trial, makes destitute people homeless for missing payments while billion dollar profit corporations pay no taxes whatsoever, and uses chickens as weapons. I cannot keep up with what everybody is angry about, thinks I should be angry about, or thinks I have no right to be angry about while I ought to be angry about something else. This country is built on centuries of genocide. I have to periodically NOT think about that to get anything done.
I flip out when I cannot figure out what the creature (the younger cat) wants at 3am. I can get angry very easily. Knowing what to do about it is another matter. It can be cathartic to take apart an issue that is too stupid to matter in my life while things that ought to be addressed linger un.
And I heard about The Interview intervention on World News Tonight, the same nationally broadcast information program that broke the story that Froot Loops of all colors have the exact same flavor, this year, half a century after Kellogg’s didn’t bother denying it. If you want real insight, don’t watch something with commercial breaks that comes on before Wheel of Fortune. And if you get stuck near it without trying, don’t form an opinion and obsess over expressing it on websites where people want you to have more important problems.
The CIA report is not even the first torture admission this year. This one came in August. That is the face you make when talking about the torture of folks and folksy torture. Speaking of torture, I forgot I wrote a footnote about Anchorman earlier, so this page isn’t over.
1A designated stupid character would make an absurd statement and another character would point out how absurd it was and then dwell on it. Ron Anchorman would say, probably yell, something like “I drank half a bottle of ketchup because I thought it was [some alcoholic beverage whose mention got a laugh]!” The other character would respond “really? because half a bottle is six or seven gulps. You should have known after the first gulp.” In a scene with Ron and his chum Brick, Ron would suddenly have the ability to detect and point out absurdity and perform the straight-man function that he formerly and futurely required someone else do for him. “Brick, you realize nobody but you remembers your dream, right?” I believe the delivery of such a correction was meant to be an additional joke and not a clarification for audience members who did not detect the initial absurdity, and maybe the repetition of these exchanges was meant to be a running gag, but it is not a very good gag. Not twelve times in a production with a script, certainly. If you ever saw the mid 1990s Nickelodeon program All That, it was a bit like all this, just with less “really?” And if you never saw All That, that’s all right, and that’s all.
Except there is also a professional wrestling heel/face turn aspect to this and the first film. How many times can Ron Burgundy alienate everyone he knows and then have a big comeback without ever making amends? He does it in the first movie, and twice in this one. He should try what I do, and not bother with the comebaAAAAAAAAAAACK I’VE BEEN ANCHORED
I was not sure whether to have the 5th panel being laugh sincerely, which works better, or sigh dismissively, which is more realistic. This way, however, is ambiguous, which leads to the other party uncertain if it had or had not been understood, and if not, if this topic should be tried again, and in the anxiety over the uncertainty, decide not to, which is yet more realistic.
I did have a few jubilant women of apparently similar age and appearance, unrelated to themselves or me, proclaim at me “you’re gonna be an uncle!” And first of all, if THEY know that, then I know that. Once the unit was out, I was alerted by an actual relation in the form of “you’re an uncle.” Not “your sister has given birth at last” or even “the danged thing is out,” since I knew whose it was. For whatever reason people want to present it in the form of me turning into some gendered word and permanently affixing it to the front of my name, even though had I been dead this process would have carried on unhindered. They mean it is a favor to me, surely, and there is no way to tell them I am discomforted by it without making it a bigger problem than it ought to be. Congratulating me is also upsetting, considering that I actually make things through my own effort that the same people routinely have no interest in or interest in having interest in. Things better than THIS one that you are reading, I mean!
This congratulation means as much as the Big Why supermarket congratulating me on successfully using my free Big Why card while paying for my purchases and receiving one of their weird plastic fake coins for it.
Or at&t uverse congratulating me on being found by their obnoxious automated email and its unnecessary creepy video with a robot voice saying my given legal name that I only gave it because it is legally my name, but not what I want anyone calling me if I have a choice. I bet it would call me UNCLE if it knew and could see two years into the future since undoubtedly it has ways of knowing. It would be easier and less discomforting, for me, to just be allowed to READ the instructions, but I am not allowed to argue with the robot. Human beings are thus going to have to deal with me.
I have probably said so before, but maybe not, since I have not convinced myself I am entitled to harbor the feeling, and in any event this can be taken as my official declaration: I do not consider myself, I am not emotionally comfortable with the idea of me being a “man.” I am a gender-indecisive being. I was born as one thing and did not like it, but I did not want to be the “opposite” either.
It would not be convincing and would require bizarre over-compensatory effort, that would likely result in some people unenthusiastically humoring my effort while others would simply be cruel.
Birdo isn’t even real, and lacks descriptive biology entirely, and still nobody accepts its choice. What chance would I have? Having a perpetually OH NO shaped mouth is fine, but don’t you dare pretend you never had a phallus that you never had.
My body barely works as it is; I do not want to mess with it and risk screwing up and having constant pain roundabout something I would prefer to pretend was not there at all. Though I feel like staying what I started as is lying to myself, trying to be the other would be lying to everyone else. I just want it not to matter. But oh how it insists on mattering.
Male is a statement that makes me uncomfortable. Female is a statement that would make others uncomfortable.
Ordinarily, I can privately not-acknowledge it, and keep me from making it anyone else’s hassle. This week’s matter forces that out and has presented some difficulty. I realize that my problem is not the primary concern of the pregnancy, but it is a concern I will have to deal with alone and without talking through entirely, since none of the exacerbators see it as anything but imaginary, unsatisfiable attention-grabbing. And I start to believe it IS because I always watch for that stuff in others, and am inclined to doubt myself. And thus I hate myself for a feeling that nonetheless occurs, and then hate myself for that.
But my sister Salgorpsponce is fine. The fluid and the tubes are out. There are middle-aged women waiting in line to empathize with her. I can imagine feeling worn out by all the attention. Raising a child is never easy or worry-free, but there is precedent for it. S does not need this website entry to be about that. I am therefore free to talk about my own weird issue.
Of the three siblings, I have been perhaps closest to this one. I knew the two brothers longer, but they became more distant, as they went and lived with/off others, developing disparate extreme political viewpoints, at one point refusing to speak to one another despite both independently concluding that a majority of international heads of state and subordinates should be brought before firing squads (and shot at). They are both comfortable calling themselves and me uncle. They do not know me well enough to have any idea that would irk me. Or perhaps they did but thought I would “get over it.” I am not an over-getter of it. Usually I get around things or go off in another direction. I can survive on private denial, if I may be left to it.
Should I show this to them? I would hate for anyone to read this entry FIRST. I almost hate for anyone to read this at all.
It is one thing to be called by a name. A name is usually more abstract than a word. It may be a man’s name, commonly, but I do not know men with the name. I will not call myself by the name, and will officially change it as soon as I become decisive enough for that, but I became accustomed to hearing it before I developed this specific gendereal issue, so said aloud by someone else (whom I have met already and who is not a condescending robot), it is mostly just a noise by this point. As long as I do not have to say it myself, I can live with it. “Uncle,” however, is very specific, gender-wise. It is like “mister” but more likely to occur outside of scumbagly “business” situations where I can hate the using party for additional reasons, such as including my middle initial, sending me credit card offers or requiring me to use a password that I cannot possibly remember, locking me out of my own account and then acting like that is done as a favor to me, and I ought to be grateful. People who were comfortable calling me an abstract name my whole life want now to put some man title in front of it. And people who only just met me want to do it also. People who barely know me are introducing me with man words to people I have never met at all.
And yet “uncle” is non-specific outside of the gender respect. Rather than a specific person, it is a man out of many men. One of the earlier people I spoke of wanted to use the vague man word in substitution of my name entirely. We do not have a gender-vague word for a parent’s sibling that does not sound like it came from a naive wishy-washy internet forum, because they do, and me insisting on one’s use would be just as dismissable to the people I am having difficulty with as asking for no word. I found advocacy of “pibling,” ostensibly a contraction of “parent’s sibling,” sounds like a little rainbow colored candy that tastes like Mr. Pibb soda. I certainly do not want anybody calling me Mr. Pibling. I might as well try and have people call me skittle or nerd, and I will at least deserve one of them.
It would be the same if we invented our own word, but I would rather have no word.
I know once the baby is in the house there will be other issues, and I will not be at risk of the baby calling me the word for some time, and by that point outside parties should be less excited about tossing it in where it does not belong, and I can ask the one person who matters to not call me that. And then I reckon I have until the age of 7 or so before the child realizes I am a complete loser who needs accommodations at every stage to keep from crumbling into a weeping heap, and starts using the word deliberately to annoy me. I was terrible to my own mother’s weird brother, but he fortunately never had an issue with the binary tree. Or if he did, it did not keep him from functioning.
The creators were able to procreate because they accepted what they were and acted on mutually functional biological impulses. What are my impulses? I have an impulse to create imps but it is not biological, hopefully.
I have been asked: “how’s it feel to be an uncle?” It does not feel like anything! Should it? I am worried at worst and indifferent at best. I suspect the asker did not really care about my answer, and thought it would be interpreted as an upgraded form of “how are you?,” the base level question askers do not want answers to. For them to fulfill a request to stop would be a challenge, since it seems to occur as a thoughtless reflex, just as my negative reaction does, though I am fated to dwell on my reflex afterward.
Clearly I am more affected by adults trying to re-frame my life in the context of this other person’s baby than anything the actual baby did in less than a week. I will admit that I find this baby less ugly than the “adorable” babies I am exposed to in trash media, but this one is usually asleep, with mouth shut and nothing leaking out. This baby would not be in a gross-out cartoon (id est: ANY cartoon) or used to sell products. I am glad to know someone with integrity.
‘Crotch-chops’ and ‘why’ do not mix.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Why is it the mopey things that get stuck up here for longer than a week?
I saw Maleficent, the 180 million dollar fan-fiction some time ago. I have no idea what movies are playing but I enjoy a cinema visit now and then if someone else I know is also going. “Now and then” means long enough that I forget how much I disliked my last visit.
This cinema sold meals instead of just snacks. Not a bad idea! I would much rather pay twice as much as I should for tacos than six times as much as I should for popcorn.
I was planning to bring a pizza and full serving apparatus like I usually do but the sign said no.
I need to do what I can to keep this place in business so they can keep their terrible posters illuminated and homeless vagrants informed about classics like Blended and
other movies from the guys all night every night.
As to the motion picture the group viewed, Maleficent attempts to humanize and validate an underdeveloped villain by putting her against a different underdeveloped villain, making sure to write him to be totally unsympathetic, so to save us another retcon 50 years from now that shows how perfect and slighted he is. In fact nobody else is sympathetic either. Everybody is stupid, weak and ugly. Except Maleficent!
I almost feel like Maleficent’s movie was made because business sense says she is too pretty to be evil. What that’s not right. Can’t we do something where all the mean stuff is actually done by somebody else? And look at how pudgy and elderly those colored fairies are! We NEED to make a movie where they are stupid and useless. And we’ll change their names to be dumber, too, so everybody gets it. Get me Alfred E. Neuman on the phone.
The only humanoid who understands the greatness of Maleficent is Aurora, because she is pretty, too! You ugly people just can’t relate.
I say, if you want to have a “bad ass” hero, you need to allow the hero to have some psychological or physical shortcoming. Maleficent is like if Bugs Bunny had wings and shot Elmer Fudd and killed him and then was congratulated by Elmer’s family. And instead of giggling goofily Elmer just sulked and acted like he wanted to die anyway. I cannot even think of a metaphor where Maleficent occupies a villain role because nothing about the tone of this film suggests I should ever disapprove of anything she does, except about ten minutes midway through, that seem there only to make content for the trailer. It’s like the ten minutes at the end of a superhero movie where the main characters actually wear their costumes and solve a problem, except in the middle and causing a problem that goes largely unsolved.
Do we put this classic villain in a better light by giving context to her seemingly negative actions? No, we just change the story so she didn’t really do that stuff! So why should anyone care? It is a different character with the same costume and name.
Angelina Jolie executive produced the film and also portrayed the title character. If you executive produce and star in a movie where every other character is uglier and dumber than you, you can fly, curse and kill whoever you feel like, and survive to the end without any valid opposition, the viewing of that movie is likely to be a frustrating experience, and people will assume you set it up that way.
The premise of this film no doubt started with somebody asking “why wasn’t Maleficent invited to the party at the beginning of Sleeping Beauty?” The answer the writers came up with was “because they’re haters. U mad?”
That should be enough but I wrote about six pages of junk about this.
Maleficent is not a bad film but it put swerving people familiar with the previous Disney story ahead of entertaining them. There were plenty of points at which it could have done something that would have made sense and been satisfying, but since the original Sleeping Beauty film had already done it, the script has the OPPOSITE occur just to mess with the audience, and it got really annoying.
Why did you set that up, then? Why did you introduce that character? That is how you write a parody; you use familiar source material and show how ridiculous it is. And then Maleficent not only survives, she gets back the magic power beyond her already unmeasured magic power whose removal was symbolic of her pain, the primary slight she was angry over. She had no consequences or regret about anything in the end. Yes, I hate when a heroic, redeemed or generally likable character in a film dies in a lazy attempt to make the story seem “deep,” but some poetic balance is in order here. In this situation the protagonist has cursed a family, which being a royal family thus cursed the kingdom that served the family’s whims, out of simple revenge that she changes her mind about, but then doesn’t care enough to notify the secondary victims of.
No doubt it caused great anguish for the kingdom to have what appears to be a significant part of its economy destroyed, judging by the number of thread spinning wheels smashed, heaped and burned by man-folk trying to beat Maleficent’s silly, arbitrary curse. It’s no wonder the Luddites got violent when automated textile mills showed up. She might have saved the kingdom from Rumpelstiltskin, but only inadvertently, and since Rumpelstiltskin isn’t pretty he would have joined the other side anyway, scoring another point for contrarian plot twists.
I have my own problem with doing something primarily because it seems like too many people do the opposite. That is why my stories all have terrible endings or are impossible to conclude. Don’t tease me by making 1/3 billion dollars in profits!
Perhaps to make up for the spinning deficit, Maleficent’s noted, unexplored, unquestioned tendency to be scalded by iron inspires a boost in the kingdom’s production of it. However, that causes a massive plothole beyond the illogic of sending your newborn child to live with a trio of idiots you never met before out of fear of something that is not going to happen for more than a decade and a half (the spinning wheel curse-sleep). I am to believe that men producing and operating means of war full time, overtime, for 16 years cannot make any progress against their enemy. Meanwhile this enemy is lounging about in plain view watching a child and some bumbling, sniveling old ladies (written without any redeeming characteristics, naturally) the whole time, never in fear or anxiety for a moment. Is Maleficent a fairy or a god? Intermittently she wanders over near some soldiers –soldiers that are only attacking her because she cursed their king’s family, because the king cut off her wings instead of killing her, which reduced her destructive power by approximately 0% and prevented other hunters from coming after her because they assumed she was dead until she showed herself to deliver the curse– and effortlessly beats them up, smiling and elegant the whole time. She does not pause and consider “these men are out to KILL me using the only substance that can harm me. It is a sad state of affairs. Maybe I should tell them I changed my mind about the curse that caused this so we can both have some peace.” Even the vampires in Twilight were more morally-conflicted super beings. Maybe I am over-analyzing it, but when the goal of your movie is to look clever by showing up some other movie, then you invite examination of your cleverness.
If she could have gotten out of this without killing anyone, or if she helped more than Aurora (the princess), one victim of hers out of thousands, I would say let her live, but that was not the case. Aurora’s mother had to die, though, for no reason, and offscreen, too!
Sleeping Beauty is kind of a stupid story, but since that (the 1959 cartoon version) is also a Disney property, that viewers of this are expected to be familiar with and like, this film is not really in a position to take that apart like it needs to be taken apart for the self-aware, swervy approach to work.
Not only did Maleficent kill the king, she killed the previous king as well. Not directly, but she did use magic power to toss an old man off his horse and he never walked again. And worse, he probably coughed. If you cough in a movie then you have to die.
The king-strike was in defense, of course. But a hero is defined by more than self-defense and revenge. Maleficent does not prove herself more heroic than the men who persecuted her and cut her largely superfluous wings off. If she does, that occurs between the climax and the epilogue and is not shown. She does prove herself better than a single act of malicious intent, but since it was her own act, undoing it only makes things even.
Instead of bringing depth to an old, simple story, it removes what depth there was to ensure that the studio’s desired interpretation is the only one possible, and to make the non-sense fantasy more “realistic.” This is usually how you turn a video game into a movie, not another movie. This film has little value on its own, and it degrades its source to obtain its value. This is also what I hear “Saving Mr. Banks” was about. Not to tell an untold story, just to redefine and emphasize Disney’s preferred image of something, in that case Disney himself.
As if we do not have enough movies where the BAD people are really the GOOD people! Monsters are GOOD! Dragons are GOOD! Despicable Me is not actually me! (I am despicable) Make a film with a “message” if you want, but do not pretend this approach is novel or inspired, or that declaring opposite day on a few elements results in a story that makes sense. Maleficent is one fourth of Rashomon stretched to be four times as long.
I wrote all that two weeks ago but did not post it right away since I was too busy to format it, which was bad because I kept thinking about it and it kept getting longer. Then I read a positive review that claimed the film was “feminist.” Do I look anti-feminist to complain about it? So I had to dwell on that awhile. Between now and then, an openly male individual I talked at on another topic frustratedly suggested I was talking like a feminist, so I may need to consider that “feminist” is often used to dismiss or exalt something without giving an explanation, and may have no real meaning when examined. I do not claim to be any sort of -ist. I am what I am and I ist what I ist.
I will say no (for example), it is not reasonable to expect or demand that women will play professional America foot’s ball on the same green rectangle with men (in fact I question whether men should play football with men). “Equality” is not possible, or necessarily ideal for all things, and the topic requires that we be reasonable. However, it is indeed feasible to make a better film about a flying woman with magical powers than this one. If this film has some feminist concepts, they are independent of how foolish the plot is. Idiocy is not tied to eex or gender. Women and men have the same right to make a stupid movie. A movie where a mother dies for no other reason than to show that her husband is bad for not caring, while nobody else cares either, is consistent with the non-feminist scripts this is supposed to be an improvement on.
Conan the Barbarian is a man who wins many fights and gets revenge, but there is no subtext that he is a decent person, or misunderstood. Conan is entertaining because of how awful he is. His oafiness is comical, whether that is the intended interpretation or is not. He wins fights but there is always a chance that he might not. His movies are incredibly stupid and barely plausible, but they are honest about what they are. And like before, I do not demand a female Conan equivalent. “Female version of” a male something is derivative and secondary, and like M’s movie will have a lot of changes done just to be contrary and not necessarily because they are functional. It should have a bigger goal than that. Also, this almost invariably incorporates sex-appeal toward demographically-charged males, rather than intimidation appeal toward foes, as a core element. If that is a factor for Conan it is not deliberate. I think we can have female adventure heroes without needing them to be glamorous and perfect, and without their lack of “perfection” being used as a comedic element. Or if we make them perfect we should give them more interesting or capable adversaries. Maleficent might be a good foe for Conan. He is enjoyable to see get beaten up.
Next week: If I see a movie I don’t like then I tell somebody right away before I have a chance to figure out why.