beet 2, again, with marginally redrawn visuals that took much longer than is justifiable for the level of evident difference, with very quickly altered audio that is substantially more obvious
possibly not quickly enough, since though I changed my mind about some of those percussion effects, then my electricity went out in a storm so i could not post upload a video at all and the sound program fl studio responds yet less favorably when my computer machine only feeds it battery power.

this gif attempts to show the state of a largely empty section of my music compositional space in the 2017 version of the music versus the 2024 version of the music. The only thing limiting me from piling in even more was me subconsciously not wanting to go beyond the vertical extent of this space and thankfully I did not think about it hard enough to consider: I can extend this space infinitely. Most critically affected seems to be the “they come from far off distances part” because I must have thought the singing sounded worst there, and so as much distraction from that as possible without blocking it entirely (or singing it better) seemed to think it was in order.
I could add proper sound effects to the cartoon but it seems like i would rather add every drum noise possible to the music, with my typical level of organization. since I am just dropping them on the time line rather than assigning them to a drum slot, it is difficult to keep track of which ones I have used, and likewise difficult to control them if they turn out to not be in the composition’s best interest. if I can’t quickly find one to replicate I will often just add a new one from the collection of 5000 or so that I downloaded back in 2015. Ideally I would use my own recorded noises, since I have just as many or more of those but since those aren’t integrated into the flstudio interface and my hard drive is organized worse than this timeline I generally give up searching after adding in about 3 of them. Very likely I could have them integrated into the software but aRRRRRRRRRHHH I’VE BEEN PEGGIOED
it is the beet 1 cartoon that really needs help, and especially to have its comically low-resolution youtube edition replaced –at the time it was the most I could upload on my crummy internet and I encouraged people to watch the native vector infinitely upscalable SWF flash video instead and HAW HA HWA that used to be possible– but I had wanted to reupload this one since the original export had some idiotic setting applied accidentally that for whyever reason I needed years to notice. i could have simply disabled that setting but I seem incapable of doing anything simply.

1-10-2024 229am:
I wanted to push that off the top of the page but the weather apparently liked this post enough to knock over a much larger post and break the local electrical distribution therefore screwing up my computer machine’s inclination to manipulate internet and this dumb phonoblock would probably shrivel into a Game.com if I tried to leach mobile internet out of it
////////////

this is of last year and is visible very briefly in that video. I was not sure if it should go here at all, but if it should, there is no sense in delaying it, because if I decide later that it should not have gone here I will want it as far in the past as pawsible.

2023 in pictures

january:


february:


march:


april



may


june


july


august


september


october


december

if anything else happened it probably was not important.

a video of every drawing from 2023. naturally i spent more time making the title animation than assembling the slide show, which itself took several days because there is apparently no program that can batch export .clip files and the keyboard shortcut for exporting singular files in xnview hasn’t worked the last few versions. Also thanking people who gave me three to eight dollars altogether and then were never heard from again and who won’t see this video ought to alienate the last few people who have made prolonged attempts at supporting me in more meaningful ways who didn’t get thanked in this video. It ought to but since none of the names are legible due to flash animating this more slowly than it appears when output most of the time and the screen being packed with irrelevant junk, some of which appears in FRONT of the names, so I hope you can enjoy this curious mess of unreadable scrolling letters.
oh! the music was mostly made in 2004-2008. It was chosen for this due largely to the length and the fact that it had not already been used in a video. Then mostly “today” i tried to rehabilitate it with drum noises, more midi trumpets and a conclusion, then also an introduction due to the extra time from the conveyor belt animation, and I swear curse and profane that it sounded REALLY nice five hours ago, when I was listening to individual parts of it through one ear bud while sharing a room with wrestling documentaries and legendary zelda tears on a moderately sized television box before going outside to do an improper superstitious year-switching ritual in honor of a dead person whose incorrect version of the ritual is inexplicably important to me to keep repeating even though it hasn’t yet worked. although since I keep doing the ritual I don’t actually know what would happen if I DIDN’T do it. I certainly won’t suddenly not have poisoned a coherent fake sitar tune with fake trumpets and sound effects

AND SO after sleeping i reduced the volume of the new trumpets and corrected one minor animation matter that I kept dwelling on, and so now THIS version is roughly adequate.

in its 1993 release Liberty or Death, the computer game company Koei recognized that preserving the essence of Banastre Tarleton’s stupid hat was a crucial priority, above even getting his nose and eyebrows correct.

Why is this no longer deemed important three decades later? What were our founding fathers and uncovering uncles fighting for if not freedom from foolish haberdashery? I bet kids these days aren’t even taught that Benedict Arnold switched sides exclusively so he could wear a sillier uniform. I also wasn’t taught that but I was in special education so I wasn’t taught anything else either

apart from “the length of this bus puts you at the bottom of even the dumbest and wimpiest of adult baby social hierarchies for the rest of your life,” which is what made it so important for me to determine the facts on my own.

I got/was allowed to get this cereal one time. I remember not being able to tell the difference between the two sides. Even description-wise I am not totally certain how berry isn’t fruity. Maybe it is just describing mario’s pose.

What I did not know until now was that it had multiple box designs. I wonder what is going on with the weird KICKING Link figure which Ralston kept recycling; it shows much less awareness of what link looks like in-game, or in anywhere, than the first box’s. The geru serpent and scenery in the zelda 2 boxes are accurate, and presumably weren’t part of the original plan, so why didn’t they draw a new Link, too?
only one of the marios is recycled.

i notice the marios somewhat resemble the ones from the “super mario world” bootleg of a bootleg sega genesis “super mario world,” possibly due to their consistent lack of necks

There isn’t anything to retroactively explain this link, though. In breath of the wild he can do all sorts of things he couldn’t in the past but kicking still isn’t among them. Is he auditioning to be a rockette? He would never pass the rigorous auditions, isn’t tall enough anyway, and he’d probably get better pay continuing to scavenge for rupees people dropped in tall grass. Maybe he accidentally glued his boot to his shield. Which would be pretty pathetic. I assume considering that and weeping is what Tears of the Kingdom is about.

yes indeed i cheated ANOTHER update out of this same thing!

i suppose that is that for now. Unless it isn’t. It could be worse. Which I know from wanting to fix something wrong with it every time I look at it and that one component subsequently being less wrong the next time I look at it.
which also means I am impossibly critical of part 2 now. i had already started on redoing part 1 but had not expected to feel that way about both of them. 2 does have to be reuploaded regardless since the one I posted a few years ago inadvertently had some awful interpolation filter on it (placed on -every- video piece by unchangeable default, alas) that fades between EVERY frame and inadvertently makes the whole thing look like a $1 “digitally remastered” public domain cartoon dvd. somehow I only NOTICED that last year, and seemingly only considered “hey i can turn OFF that dumb filter and REPLACE that” within this week.
I changed the fake ending because I didn’t want a piece of someone else’s video within one of my “important” videos, but weird 1960s Harry Secombe pickwick may yet return the next time I have difficulty deciding what part of my candles to set on fire.

ah ha! sound effects it could use. but i cannot spare 2 or 3 more days of putting them in and constantly noticing more visual problems for the time beaning.

I am fascinated by Earnest Evans. I have been on the internet so long that I have developed aversions to other people’s hive mentality about what “retro” games are “good” and “not good” and worth hoarding the original ephemera for and trying to impress your grandchildren with.
or even simply stating awareness of an old game as a point of your religion,

and it wears on me beyond reason.
Evans is hilarious to me, but since I never knew of it before I saw internet folk mocking it, I have worried that me thinking it was funny was inorganic to me and hypocritical, since I find their cycles of praise and mockery equivalent to what the previous generation of media did with the likes of britney spears.
However basic taste isn’t necessarily any individual’s fault. And also the judgement toward me tends to not be as harsh as my judgement toward others or myself, because while a lot of people think dumb things are important I generally think different dumb things are important.



However I refreshed myself with it and despite its interesting programming it still feels fairly irredeemable. Even save state cheating I apparently couldn’t get anywhere years ago, and trying it now* I still couldn’t.
*in september
but the important thing is I had an excuse to post that image I started with and also this stupid gif, since initially I made it after dwelling on my declaration of evans as “horrible” in response to arguably more worthless content on the twittor website. I give far too much effort to the crafting of remarks and imagery that nobody will see on there. I would much rather nobody see it here, where I can actually find it later.

And where I don’t risk losing followers for saying “obsequious mario fans aren’t just scum but also extremely boring” because the I don’t have followers here, and in fact the concept doesn’t even exist. But the real question, is it possible to be an obsequious fan of anything without also being scum and boring? probably not but that is what I get videos shoved at me about, generally. I should be glad their idiot fandom economy is largely created by them rather than the entirely corporate papacy that exploits obsequious american football fans or the crypto currency criminal pseudo-psience-pselling aspiring murderers who exploit obsequious mixed martial arts fans, but I don’t know any of them on twitter now that my brother is banned again. He also moved into my basement yesterday so I suppose I will know if he sees this.

and a third: this may result in the sparsest “year in pictures” yet but i WILL get that dumb cartoon out. or outer than it was. I finally got annoyed enough at the beet beast’s flat face to try and make it more angular. i may have subconsciously been channeling kumquat when i should have been thinking about more of a rotund lope. maybe i was sub-subconsciously averse to that since I still have not concluded or explained the rotund elpse in the comic strip for the past few years / hour of comic strip time.
///////////////
and a second updirt: i underestimated how treacherous the larger character’s whiskers have been. the rudimentary way I have them drawn the first 30 seconds look more like “whiskers” but less like whatever weird bulb-ended things I decided to draw them like in the later 30 seconds more recently. And now I must choose one!
///////////////
indeef, now that I am looking at the animation from even two years ago it confounds me that i ever thought it was acceptable! even on the easy-to-draw purple imp, some of the movements are awful, and I have no choice but to improve them. I wish that meant I was good at animating now, but it only means I was worse at animating before.
///////////////

more of this. it feels to me like cheating to use this as an update since the effort I put into cleaning the animation and backgrounds is mostly obssive compulsive in nature and impossible to discern unless you have been seeing the dirtier yet once-acceptable contents constantly like I have. AND i still need to apply that habit to whatever perceptive dirtiness may have accumulated since the last time I had the first half open for editing.
as possibly previously mentioned, I needed to separate 3beet.fla into two files some time back, since it was taking prohibitively long to make saves, with auto-saves a particular nuisance but that I did not dare disable since flash has historically been the most crash-prone program I use as of 2006 when I stopped being able to use Ben Morris’ Doom Construction Kit in after I switched to a windows xp computer and could no longer use dos applications except through emulation and decided I finally needed to learn how Doombuilder worked.

goop lorp was that 17 years ago?? how old AM I? And this level still isn’t finished.

I definitely need to re-record the audio, even if it is destined to eventually be re-recorded by someone else because the line “roundabout this time” especially sounds bad. I don’t have underbreathed enunciation issues when I practice singing it in the bathroom so presumably I could do it better now. i could even just re do that part and paste it in where it belongs. But I haven’t yet because audio editing requires, from me, a different state of mind than tedious image editing does, and asking other people to record is several layers worse. But I try to optimistic; I always believe a situation can get worse.

I tried to make these in recognition of my mother’s birth day since she likes pictures like this more than the regular garbage I come up with, especially these days when I get so obsessive about my real projects that even basic updates take weeks or months, so the stupid characters that I draw based on internet people or worse seem like all I am doing. I need to show once in a while that I can do far worse.

I am not sure who this is, but it looks like trouble

and now we have bigger problems. whoever these people are, they seem to be faced with challenges that I feel fortunate to avoid and I admire their attempts to persevere despite those challenges.

11-23-2023
oh nuts I totally lost track of what day this was updated. i had best force something out
////////////////////

yes this again, but now all its movements are filled in! not all fully shaded and I would like to make them look more cohesive and fish-like, but for now i can focus more on the beet crony. and also displace that text heap from last week that was not meant to be such a heap or have a week’s worth of prominence. i occasionally worry that this blue creature looks too much like the gobliins 2 character winkle even though i feel like i have considered and dismissed this before. i don’t want it to be yellow because then it looks related to the larger creature. green and red feel too generic, though. meepwhile grey and brown are too boring and orange simply doesn’t suit it.

winkle has a similar skin tone, head point and sharp nose, although its nose is not a beak, it lacks a tail and wears clothing. winkle has a mischievous nature and of the two heroes is the one more likely to annoy another character and be physically abused on account of it. Although the frog in my example yells at both of them. I used to collect sprites from this game a long time ago in windows 95 before the dosbox emulator existed, and goblins 3’s odd use of the video mode made them too scrambled to grab when windowed, but the collection was one of few pictures I accidentally deleted! I attempted to remake it via proper screenshots once I knew how to do that but I did not feel as inspired and consequently it is lacking in gobliins 2 poses.

indeed

Sheeran was exonerated for copyright infringement, or something of that nature, supposedly. I certainly hope so, I can’t fathom that he heard songs this bad and decided THESE are what I will lie about having made.
But that is fine if YOU like them, if you actually bothered to read any of this. You are real to me and i appreciate you for that.

//////////////////

JOHN LEGEND

AN EVENING

WITH

_{A NIGHT
OF SONGS AND STORIES}

when I saw this last week my eyes rolled so hard i almost went off the road. It is trying so hard to seem folksy and humble that it is obviously neither. he gives his stage name as “legend” for fleep’s beep. yet he isn’t creative enough to not be john.

I went to the website for foxwhoops (the casino at which this event is to occur) trying to find a picture of the billboard since, at that time, I thought it would be unsafe to take a photograph while driving, and later realized it was just ineffectual. but THAT says

JOHN LEGEND
AN EVENING WITH JOHN LEGEND
which comes across as somewhat less pretentious, if redundant.
However it shows the same “humble piano player with back to viewer in monochrome” photograph, and makes sure I know how many egots he won. and also that he is the first African American Man to win one
obviously I am not in the target audience, since even with Johnny Leg’s disco graphy in front of me, I don’t recognize any songs. That may even be in his favor to a degree but I still don’t want to pay twenty four thousand dollars or less for the right to hear them in person.

it reminded me of when I ended up on a terrible “screenrant” page last week

“the room is terrible” says conan o’brien
what a vague bizarre headline. it tricked me. it was designed to trick people and shove ads at them, not inform or entertain them. i disapprove of that business model. then the content of the story is like:

conan o’brien, the iconic, award-winning talk show host, sat down with the iconic, award-winning musician ed sheeran to discuss the iconic, award-winning cartoon series the simpsons

the simpsons, the iconic, award-winning cartoon series, has had many writers over the years, such as the iconic, award-winning talkshow host conan o’brien, who sat down with iconic, award-winning musician ed sheeran recently.

ed sheeran, the iconic, award-winning musician, recently sat down with the iconic, award-winning talkshow host conan o’brien and turned the tables on the iconic, award-winning talk show host to ask a question about the iconic, award-winning animated series “the simpsons.”

the phrase “award winning” instantly turns me into a skeptic if I wasn’t already. It is very much a phrase for marketing and for bad writers to fill space with. Do you have nothing to say? Just verbally lick the hindquarters of celebrities and list off their awards and other celebrities they have met, and you’ll have six intellectually barren paragraphs to surround your one scrap of new frivolous information in doh time. I even like Conan and have taken inspiration from him in some ways but I know from direct experience of hearing an offensively low effort generic bad song, looking it up out of pure anger and learning Sheeran was responsible, multiple times, that Ed is aggressively talentless.

breaking news: marginally talented irritating charlatans have a vested interest in keeping each other’s gravy trains going
I might become a “flat earth” adherent just to protest this piece of global news.

Everything about this guy has the aim of conditioning people to accept and pay for mediocrity. In 2019 in a london tube station I saw an enormous poster presented in this exact manner, presumably regarding the same product, but I did not photograph it since I didn’t want to seem as if i approved. also i was following nine other people, hauling excessive quantities of baggage and likely holding somebody else’s coffee cup and/or water bottle with the hand that should have been free and definitely wasn’t going to hold everyone up for dumb old ed sheeran when he doesn’t even care.
Why doesn’t he? And why should thousands of people trying to get to their trains have to be told that he doesn’t care? What he DOES care about is getting his name and the name of his mediocre cronies listed as frequently as possible.
He cares so little that he just “drops” shoddy songs and expects me to pick them up. I appreciate him linking himself to bruno mars though since the last time I heard a bad sheeran song in the supermarket I assumed Mars was responsible and only when seeking proof learned it was sheeran. it is extraordinary that I can see photographs of them beside a supposed musician wearing a cowboy hat and I complain about them instead. I assume the headline has been truncated and he doesn’t simply have the stage name “Chris,” but I am not angry enough at him to look it up.

I can appreciate that Mr. Legend can play a pianoforte instrument. I do not know if he does that especially well but there is definitely POTENTIAL there that Ed’s brand of bland unaccompanied acoustic guitar sappy moaning lacks. My Sheeran references happen to be several years old since it was precisely encountering songs like his that extra-emphasized the need for me to carry earphones in my personal satchel at all times. even if I do not take the satchel out of the house for a few days and need the ear phones for other tasks, I always store them in the bag because when I DO go to a place where I am at risk of hearing those songs, I WILL bring the bag, and if the ear phones fail to be in it I will quite lose my mind when struck by unblockable audio awfulness in public. It happened this summer with the beyonk “halo” song and that was hopefully enough to scare me straight for another few years. That and Sheeran’s too cohOOold outside crumbling like pASTEries are absolutely the worst songs I have ever heard that I remember right this moment. But Sheeran is a man with white celtic lineage similar to my own so there is no cultural or social “privilege” anyone can accuse me of having benefat from that he didn’t also so I feel more confident in declaring that he is absolutely horrible and without merit. Also Beyonce can dance or could at one point in her career. I don’t think I’ve seen a picture of Sheeran verifiably standing up.

look at that smirk. why stop with one cut?

hey guys we’re all unblemished rich privileged chums who get paid to be lazy together and call ourselves beautiful. I hope everyone involved with this dies immediately. But I know they didn’t because I saved this picture in January 2021 and I know at least Sheeran is still alive since the screenrant article that mentioned him was from more recently. It also didn’t mention him being permanently scarred by a sword attack so I assume that didn’t amount to anything either.
in retrospect I think he had no involvement with this but the convention of listing as many singers who need their faces looked as possible in the title confounded me initially. I only see two in the picture so the other two in the title are there for name-drop purposes foremost. And also perhaps so you don’t assume it is the beautiful people marilyn manson song, even though I would be more likely to listen to it if I thought it was the case that these ai-generated-looking forklogans were covering that raspy absurdity than whatever low energy misery Ed approved of, assuming “Khalid” didn’t bring anything new to that table, and really Sheeran has no financial incentive to allow that and I have no auditory incentive to consider that he might have. It might haven taken less time to check the song than to explain why I did not, but I would then be at risk of remembering it which I prefer to reserve the right not to. Good night!

I presume accidentally getting cut by nighto is even more embarrassing.

november 8 updeet: another wordy site entry is coming, which means it is late
////////////////////////////
generally I am disinterested in decorating but halloween suits the awkward old toys that tend to accumulate here fairly well.

There were also some proper decorations but I did not take any decent pictures of those.

however I have a shot of this rotting pumpkin that my niece carved or assisted in carving. she had kicked it off the front steps to get rid of it on account of its recent mold harboring but I thought that made it eligible for an upgrade to the front of the walkway.

the kermit is debatably creepier without the mask but that would not fit on most of the display candidates

Another scrap of beet beast animation. I believe I am more than half done with this creature and after that theoretically progress could be if not faster at least more linear, with fewer multi-layer characters using multi-layer furniture that they are both in front of and behind. This seems a bit out of synchronization with the audio. as long it is out of synch consistently, moving it back in is simply a matter of dragging rectangles on a grid. the bootleg sony vegas that I use for video assembling –crucial, since the flash video data is presently in four different files, and two just for this part– tends to stutter at the start of clips so it is hard to match video to audio with precision without a few tries.
HM and that black spot in the center I thought was on my screen when I first noticed it a few minutes ago but evidently it is in the video! I wonder when it appeared. I hope it doesn’t mean what it does in Treasure Island, that pirates are coming to murder me, because I don’t want to die with my bedroom so untidy.

gosh what a monster

and I can hardly comprehend what an anti-semite my nine year old niece must be to own TWO of these.

for context I have never bought into the media cult around Thunberg, but rallying people against greed and corruption is ultimately doing something good. So when someone else looks at that work, ignores the actual message and evidence and seeks only what nits can be picked from it in order to dismiss it, I am disinclined to give their remarks much weight. Ha HA! An OCTOPUS which doesn’t resemble this in the slightest was used to discredit jews a long time ago! Therefore climate change is a hoax and one government which has Jews in it deserves to claim whatever territory it wants any way that it wants for all time. And if that comes from the same person who always says after a mass shooting is “too soon” to talk about gun control,

You can say that we need to consider that Hamas struck first, cruelly, without regard for the most basic human decency, but that doesn’t justify indiscriminately eradicating the population kept in the same scrap of land as Hamas as revenge. And this isn’t the first time for this unbalanced revenge. This conflict did not START two weeks ago. This is the same Gaza whose notorious stripping constantly dominated news I didn’t pay attention to growing up. No, the people who started it are all dead and we ought to be able to do better than to continue it forever, cheering for whichever “side” we were born into to “win,” like it’s championship figure skating or badminton.

when he says “both countries,” he means Israel and the US. He and the Israel government doesn’t consider Palestine to be a country and will do and say nothing in support of it becoming one, because that would require both admitting any level of fault in its policies and also ceding territory it claimed unjustifiably, which “both countries” here never do.

A criticism I see of Israel criticizers is that they don’t condemn Hamas. My initial thinking was, it isn’t necessary to condemn hamas, it was widely condemned immediately. The first and easiest reaction is to condemn hamas. But I also know there are people out there, too many in my own family, who believe in “the deep state” and will gladly tell you the evils of “the Rothschilds” and all that involves. So just to be clear, I now today condemn hamas, I curse hamas, I sneer at hamas. You can’t cure systemic oppression by beheading and raping people who have nothing to with it any more than you can cure a headache by punching someone who doesn’t appear to have a headache over your frustration at being unjustly denied ibuprofen.
Hamas has been funded by crypto currency since 2019. That alone is reason enough to shut it down.

this continuing text goes around in circles. I could cut it off here but I want to know it is SOMEWHERE even if it is repetitive. I put something roughly equivalent into facebook but evidently that was inadequate to getting me over it. There were no reactions whatsoever to it, even critical ones, which made me suspect the facebook machine simply hid my remarks since I mentioned a divisive topic but without being particularly inflammatory despite the large quantity of words used, so eventually it all came out of me again.

An irony with the gripe against Thunberg is that by insisting that someone who criticizes Israel must be attacking jews in general, it is you who makes the association, the same way someone who attacks jews in the US might accuse them of being agents for Israel just by the basis of their religion. That is absurd, and that would happen even without the stupid cephalopod there.
It needs to be possible to consider one separately from the other. Just as it is necessarily to consider people in Israel, many of whom are not Jews at all, separate from the government of that country, whose actions are not approved of by a staggering amount of those people. Not being able to differentiate these groups, or not caring to, is a big part of how these stupid conflicts get so intractable. so many ignorant belligerents live for nothing more than symbolic revenge against what they consider to be representatives of what has actually wronged them. The bosses who order soldiers into war are not harmed by nasty guerrilla attacks on civilians perceived to be symbolic of the bosses, and instead the bosses gain more leverage for their own bigger symbolic re-revenge.

Personally, I think the entire area should be vacated. That will never happen. Muslims, Christians and Jews all consider that “the holy land” and their least rational behaviors can always be traced back to ludicrous scriptural notions. A harmonious world will never be achieved when men with guns think god or gods told them they are right. And it’s usually men because god is usually also telling them to dominate and punish women much as they do heathen men. The Chinese communists ostensibly eschew religion but the government acts in a way that is consistent with one directed by religion.

The US had its own big terrorist attack in 2001 that you might have heard of, and also like Israel ignored reports it received that such an attack was coming. In fact the US just spent two decades trying to get revenge for that, and that made everything worse (though deliberately confounding the facts so George W Bush could cram in his own bonus revenge against Saddam Hussein did not help), and now the US is supporting another country trying to do the same, but with more volatile potential consequences. Stupid stupid stupid.
As much as idiots who voted for him may have WISHED for it, Bush was never going to and lacked the authority to blast Iraq off the map, even while that war killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The Benji Netanyahu gang on the other appendage have a much smaller target entirely within their country’s border and are entirely capable of killing everybody in Gaza and have tried to sell that as an admirable outcome. That’s not good! Even if it ended there it wouldn’t be good but it won’t possibly end there. These wars cannot be “won.” And if they inexplicably destroy just Hamas it won’t end there either since they’ve already ensured the next generation of revenge-seekers whose existence they will use as justification for more oppression. It’s too late to stop this one. But it might not be too late to prevent the next one.
A sickeningly common right wing mantra after mass shootings is that it is “too soon” to talk about gun control. But they were disingenuous and meant to never talk about gun control and just hoped for another topic to come up, and sure enough we never talked about gun control. Now we have mass shootings every week now, meaning it is perpetually “too soon” after one. But it is never too soon for them to talk about gun USAGE.

I am glad to see more people unafraid to stand up to that thinking but I worry it might be too late.
Israel’s treatment of its own citizens, notably women, is superior to many of the countries in that region, and plenty outside of that region. I don’t see stories about Izzy trying to kidnap travelers at airports and as far as I know it is not punishable by death to renounce the state religion. But that is stuff NO country should be doing, so being better than them is not enough.

Hamas is a terrorist organization, and we condemn it. So regarding it as we do, we ought to hold ourselves to a higher standard than them, not merely exterminate them whichever way its fastest and say it’s done. Nothing is ever “done” just because a loud person declares it is.

This website entry probably isn’t even done, but I am trying to be quiet about it.