Hilary Branske is dead. It is very relevant to me, and also to this website! Some of what follows is roundabout and redundant, but I had difficulty organizing my thoughts on the matter, so watch out. Also, it is roundabout.

I knew Hilary since 1999. She was the closest thing to an “idol” that I had at a crucial point in my life, and unlike the others that came before and later, she was and remained a friend. I liked knowing that even though we were not currently conversing, she was always possible to reach out to, and would have a unique and sincere thing to say. Outside my immediate family, I have not known, that I was able to stay in contact with to any degree, anybody longer than Hilary, and she had a profound impact on me as a consequence. Every year I remembered her birthday. I could not even reliably predict my mother’s birthday until fairly recently. Which I assure you is not a slight against my or anybody else’s mother.

I never was much able to keep up with ANYbody over facebook, where our primary contact was after a certain period, and I wish sincerely that I had worked harder at making that possible, with Hilary and the people I knew through her; this here would be a more informed piece, and less fixated on what I assume is a fairly narrow aspect of Hilary’s personality, and I might have fewer regrets overall, but nonetheless what I DID experience was very important to me. Most of what I know goes back quite a while, back to when I insisted on calling myself “roneldo,” which I assure you is not something I would ever like to be called again, but Hilary was welcome to call me that. I also took turns at being volcabbage, transfestunerix and eels macinstrudel when I knew Hilary, but she was always Hilary, with one L, from New Lenox with one N.

There were online nicknames like “spam,” (a hilarious word in the mid-90s) “Krunk” (which predates and is dissimilar to the contemporary conception of “crunk”) and “Annie Lennox” with (two Ns) but she was not hiding from or afraid of anybody.

Hilary had a a way of thinking about things, and of speaking, and a gift for functionally absurd statements that I had up to that point not seen from anybody else. For example, an instruction page for creating a soft drink called “Froofy” directed readers foremost to “Find and capture a wild santa claus.” Yes whatever it looks stupid HERE, but I didn’t realize that sort of statement EXISTED. I could not fathom it.
And Hilary had refreshing sort of darkness, a dissatisfaction with the insincere, commercialized happy face put on by the dominant culture. I had never known anybody who openly criticized the religion-based social conventions I had always struggled with. She also always wrote little messages on pictures, that you could only see by hovering your mouse cursor over them. There would be a picture of a largely incidental person holding up a piece of cheese and the hidden text would say “this cheese is on sale.” So stupid, and yet to me that was just perfect. I still do that. I might be the last person on the internet who does. And those are often the best part of my pages! Of course having said that, the one on the next picture is lame so this is a bad time to start looking for them.”

I didn’t know anybody else who watched Conan O’Brien’s program either (I possibly learned of her existence via her old website about the topic) so that might speak more to my not knowing many people, but what is important is that I shared interest with Hilary that I was not able to share with others who were not on the internet. And in those days, a lot of people were not on the internet!

I wanted to have a website because of Hilary’s websites, The Spam Headwound, primarily, with such a ludicrous title that very much appealed to the me of the period, across its various urls, nlenx.com/spam, twne.com/spam, spam.towne.net, and gigglebounce.com. There was also lincolnway.com, which she registered specifically to annoy the Lincoln Way high school she had attended, after having been punished for other students loading her relatively outrageous personal website on school computers. As best I can figure out. I still use html code that I copied and eventually memorized off of her pages more than half my life ago. Most of the old, admittedly nonsensical pages are still acknowledged at the gigglebounce vault but some do not work quite properly, and many are simply not there at all! The archive.org version unfortunately got confused by the netscape-style frames and only has a single page saved multiple times, with none of the frame data. But I will always remember.

Also: from june 25 1999, this watery screenshot of the site not displaying correctly in America Online, from a thankfully brief period during which I thought it was a good idea to save my screenshots as jpegs.

In fact, my oldest “normal” website entries here are ripped directly from the source of gigglebounce.com during a period when Hilary granted myself and a few others the ability to place updates on the website, and it appears that the earliest dated one has a picture of Hilary in it, which I had quite forgotten about. Likewise I cannot remember how long that version of gigglebounce lasted, but I, plainly, kept going, without much considering why I did. Records indicate I may even have been the last person doing so. This does not get me money or recognition, but I like making these things, and Hilary got me started. But I am here to talk about the GOOD things she did.

I didn’t know art people growing up, or until quite after I was mostly grown. Between those points I apparently found something of a muse in Hilary’s uncompromising distinctness. I did not develop my technical skill much but I think the ideas are more important, even if they are very stupid. Hilary helped me want to be stupid in a new way.

I believe this was her livejournal avatar, derived from an inexplicable default mouse cursor in certain versions of windows, fighting the Yellow Ant from the computer game Simant, which I must have made a big deal about at some point. Neither is being considerate of the environment.

I still use phrases that Hilary used, probably only once, that I thought were funny, such as “thank you for your time and consideration in these matters” “yes, very much so, “mein augen” and “laeta bovis.” One of the characters that I draw is even named “laeta,” based on that, if not pronounced the same way. I still think the name “Gretchen” is funny. It seemed to be a recurring element, quite apart from that picture I just showed. For example, there was a page titled “temporary gretchen fix” with just a picture of notebook paper from what looked to be a high school writing assignment, with a teacher-written criticism of “inappropriate sentences.” I apparently transcribed it, because it was hard to read, and still have THAT, though the original image seems to be lost.

1. Aegis – protection, sponsorship
Gretchen was happy Lincoln-way was the Aegis for the Nazi dance.
2. Amazon – A female warrior
Gretchen was proud to be an Amazon.
3. Aurora – The dawn or similar luminousity
Gretchen took many pictures of the aurora borealis.
4. Odyssey – Extended journey
Gretchen packed some digestive bisquits for her odyssey
5. Paean – Song of thanksgiving
Peetah sang a paean about the Spanish Inquisition.
6. Palladium – Safeguard
Gretchen kept a statue of a Palladium next to her bed.
7. Plutocrat – A wealthy person
Bill Gates is a plutocrat and Gretchen isn’t.
8. Siren – A bewitching or irresistable women, fascinating
Gretchen acted as a siren by luring the small children to the fire.
9. Valhalla – hall of feasting heroes
Gretchen was not invited to the Valhalla.
10. Ambrosial – fragrant
Peetah could smell the Ambrosial children boiling.
And now it will have to be a permanent Gretchen fix.

Gretchen was also the name of the lion tamer in “The Spam Story,” which I also cannot now locate. Although I learned that as of 2007 Hilary had been a vegetarian for a year, which is almost as impressive as convincing lions to do your bidding.

I started writing this without even realizing that my facebook name IS Gretchen. That is how deeply ingrained Hilary’s influence is. And I used gretchen as a sound effect in a completely unrelated long-standing unreleased project of mine. Certainly I would have liked to be influenced by the later, responsible Hilary who examined patents in her spare time and achieved a G-13 pay scale according to federalpay.org and perhaps have made something more of myself.

Although threatening people’s sparkle dots amidst serious (ninjas notwithstanding) results for your life as a Washington DC national government employee is Hilary Classic on a grander scale.

She had ferrets as pets; I believe this is based on a photograph of one, and the wood sprite that I opened this site entry with.
we never talked as much as I wanted to afterward. I never showed her much of my artwork but she was always supportive when I did. Again, I didn’t have many people to show it to, and was slow to develop what skill I had. In a very rare gesture, in December of 2007, I mailed a pencil drawing strikingly similar to the one near the top of this entry, that I made of/based on Hilary to her home address, and several times afterward, without my having mentioned it, she claimed to still have the dumb thing, having put it in a frame, even, and I wish I could have sent something better, later! I made up one of my crummy holiday cards more recently, and included some tiny bizarre drawings whose inspiration I can no longer recall, but never got around to sending it. And maybe I should hold on to it, since it is the only physical space souvenir I have that is Hilary-related (also, I eh lost it again). She had mentioned across a few years having a box that she meant to send to me but could never get around to it. I wish I had asked what was in the box!

I keep showing these things. On Hilary’s website there was a “webcam” page, but the image only updated once a week or so, and generally showed a staged viewpoint. I saved a bunch of them, I wish I had saved more! Maybe it makes me seem like a creep, but in fact the more I have worried about coming across as creepy, the fewer friends I have had.

Right, just what I was saying.

I believe at one point three other people named Timmy, Lars and Jose also had similar webcameras featured on the page, plus the webcam of the not-yet published icon to misogynists who didn’t realize he was kidding Maddox, hotlinked off his own website, until I think he specifically disabled that on his end.

before I had my run-in with the Shipyard Brewing Company, Hilary had viewed and commented on the original version of the troublesome article, and I had meant to ask if she had for some reason preserved the pictures I deleted in a paranoid panic after the cease and desist letter, as if other people did that. Parts of that experience made me question if my work had any real value, but anything I did that Hilary liked was something I had done right. She was also the first person to sign my orenthal, even though it was a ripoff of her elf.

From 2000 to 2002, maybe, Hilary ran a message forum “The Blabby Board,” and I can honestly say that was my most positive and probably longest consistent internet message board experience. It was not without complicated points and eventually ceased operation, but I had always wanted to have something like that again.
The last time we were both available for what could be considered a conversation, which sadly was in April 2016, I mentioned some of the screwy things that have been in MY life and the sort of people I dealt with since the two of us had been regularly acquainted. And Hilary LAUGHED (in a typing sort of way). She didn’t get worried and declare in seriousness that I should give up and get away from everything, or get bothered and set to justifying every other parties’ actions, like I am a puzzlewit with no empathy. She knew why I complained the way I did. Sometimes life is just frustrating and ridiculous, and you want to share that with somebody who sees it for what it is. With Hilary, I momentarily went from being the only person who had a problem to one of an uncommon few who did not.

We were “planning” to make a video game together. I do not know when; one of us was always too busy. It was already eating me inside that I had not done real work on it beyond sketches and descriptions of circumstances, just for myself, but now I need to, for both of us. Right? If that helps me get it done, sure. I pledge to give it a much better gretchen sound effect.

I was always looking forward to a hypothetical point in the future when we could exchange ideas freely. I wish I could asked about more of the circumstances that inspired the strange things she wrote about. I did not realize how much time had passed until I started writing all this. 1999 to 2003 seemed like a huge expanse of time, then 2003 to 2007 was another, and suddenly I misplaced a whole decade without noticing. I wanted to resume what we had. Or more likely, start over entirely. Hilary always lived in an interesting way, and fixating on what had already occurred was unnecessary.

We never met, unfortunately. We came tantalizingly close, but to be brief, for once, since it hurts just a scrap too much, a meeting was not feasible. I was quite sad, in fact sadder than I expected to be. But I imagined there would be plenty of opportunities to arrange a proper meeting. I ought to have tried to arrange a visit earlier but for many years I was not very mobile. Was this a form of love, perhaps? I think it was, and I wish that I had expressed it. I did not think I was worthy, perhaps. I certainly was somewhat to highly jealous of any more forward or proximal person that she seemed to hold in favor at any point across a longer span of time than is usual. I loved dumb old science fox but do I care who he likes now? Probably, a little bit, but I am not going out of my way to find out. Not far at all. I am glad that I was able to tell him how I felt so that he could do something to no longer deserve it.
Hilary would have been the first person that I really developed that for. “crushes” I might have had momentarily in grade school were based on nothing more than me seeing tv shows and thinking I was supposed to do that.

Hilary was engaging, mentally, and I think I wanted to look like her. I still want to look like her. Not like a… but to be elegant without making a forced show of it.

Could I pull that off? Absolutely not. Yes, otay, this is from 2007. I don’t feel like I am entitled to show pictures that I only saw years after they were taken or uploaded, by people who might not necessarily have any clue who I am. I barely have any clue who I am so it is not like I could introduce myself.

Alright, here is one from 2015 taken by Hilary’s close companion Bobbert Hyman, don’t tell. Yes, I would very much like to meet the person in this photograph. Also, I consider little bowls of rice and beans to be people, but I would also like to meet the person eating the other person.

I have had such a mental connection with somebody, or thought I had, perhaps nine times, and as I became older it seemed more like love. And love is good, supposedly. This was a very difficult thing to write, especially so soon after the last one, (aw BEANS look at the line I ended that with, I had no idea) but I suppose this is preferable to my being indifferent and not wishing to write anything. In fact this was more difficult to write, in a way, because while I have more regrets about my father’s final years than I can list, I believe that he forgave me for my role in that, and I knew where I stood with him, and I was able to get some degree of closure. And also he was 65, not 34. Hilary liked a few things I did, but did she like me, as a person? When she laughed at my tragic adventures in fuzzyland, was she really laughing at ME? When she said I made her terrible day ten times better, did she mean ten times better at being terrible? I will quite possibly never know. I even just said I wanted to look like her, for beets freeps. That might have been deemed a hilarious notion. But I would take it, if she wanted to give it.

Oh well that’s just rude!

My father James Thomas Cunningham is dead. And has been for a month. Well it was supposed to be a month, which actually would have been marked yesterday. Well WELL at first this was to be within the first week but hrm hah urm. I had difficulty writing something readable on the topic. Nonetheless I have embedded appropriately inappropriate messages within the images for if you hover your mouse cursor over them, like always.

Ever since it happened, or at least the first two weeks, I occasionally wrote a little note about it, in the hope of making a proper public post on the topic. But it never came together, because I did not want it to be depressing. I already make the positive updates depressing! But I do not feel like this was a good death, either. He deserved better, from me most of all. From November 1998 onward I did not speak to him, or in any place where I thought he could hear me. Not out of hatred, but simple, or rather complicated psychological blockage. And people generally did not accept this. I could not explain how it worked, and how their suggestions for how to fix it were totally non-applicable. And I would say now, looking back, it drew directly from the absence of fundamental human decency I experienced at the school I attended at that time, Cedarhurst in Hamden Connecticut curse them to heaping heck. Initially I stopped speaking there, and my father had the job of bringing me to various doctor appointments and one hospitalization that those monsters forced me into under threat of custody revocation, and without deliberately meaning to I transferred my speech prohibition to any time I was in his company. And gradually through the years following, owing to one illness and illness treatment side effect after another, the quality of my father’s life declined. It was only after I returned from an apartment I had in New Haven, and became his more or less constant in-home companion that the guilt from not talking began to overpower whatever force kept me from speaking, succeeding at last maybe in mid-2015. He did not even have two years remaining. And by that point he was almost more obligation than parent to me. Our relationship was healing, finally, after far too much sadness, but I do not feel like we finished the job. It was hard to be with him without resenting the job to some degree. I tried to ask him things nobody else would ask, and understand what he went through, and do things for him that nobody else would think to, assuming he had little time left. But I thought I would have more notice than I did, since the reduction of his physical abilities had always been gradual. One day he could speak, eat and move through the house with some level of assistance, and the next he could do nothing at all, confined to a hospital bed with tubes down his throat, on account of his myocard infarcting. Not even related to the prostate cancer, cerebral ataxia, immobilizing tremors, rib and spine injuries, but those things meant that he was not expected to survive heart surgery. There was no chance to take inventory of what we never got to and deal with it. No time to do something as simple as ask what his favorite movies were so that I could get copies of them and let him watch all that stuff instead Bones and Law & Order reruns he had already seen 4 times apiece. He was legally alive another two weeks, but not in a consistently coherent state, owing to more weird medications and stress, presumably, and not in a place that I would call comfortable.

We could even have finished watching Breaking Bad; we had the dvds, and had started to watch it, with my mother, also. But eventually their schedules diverged, and by the time they verged again we also had the Game of Thrones dvds and those had the higher pointless death to minute of airtime ratio and therefore took precedence.

Yes so we shared that, but the show wasn’t finished, was it. Presumably there will be closure in that somewhere, eventually.

Somebody in East Haven, Connecticut, actually wanted to pay my father to make methamphetamine. He was a chemist who could make stuff other people couldn’t. Certainly I don’t think he aspired to be a Walter White sort of person but he appreciated the subject matter –he liked to identify the element symbols used in the opening credits– and to some degree I have to think related to the character more than most people would, including having cancer and not being appreciated for his skills; he started a business with a partner who eventually cheated him out of it, and there are ASPECTS of the television character which might be seen as fantasy fulfillment.

I wondered if I should mention this on the internet at all. It is important to my life, and affects, and has affected what I do, but I hate dealing with people reacting to it in a rote manner. At the funeral wake thing, one after another people I barely knew approached me to say “sorry for your loss.” Why? Who are you? Why are you sorry for MY loss? The poor man whose crushed bone dust is in the box over there lost more than I did! I do not know what to say to people except “it is alright, it was not your fault.” Or “eh it is part of life. And death, I suppose.” Most of them probably did not want to say the line to me, but they SAW me, and thought: “oh pringles we made eye contact. if I don’t say ‘sorry for your loss’ to THAT one now it will blab to the people here that I actually need to like me.”
I appreciate that persons want to be helpful, but I think very few of them sincerely do.

It is the same reason I keep my birth date a secret on the internet; I hate dealing with rote reactions from those whom I barely know, and then feeling like I owe each of them a unique, non-rote response, and then worrying that I now owe them unique birthday wishes when the time comes, and I do not have the energy for it. And I would be even worse at condolence-issuing. Fortunately in person nobody can see that I already gave the same reply to the person before them, so that at least I kept under control. The funeral scene is not for ME. The death was six days ago by that point, and I had grieved before then, before the death occurred, even. Afterward, getting the funeral to happen and visitors coordinated and met and all that, plus local family grieved with and reassured and all that, I was gosh darn exhausted by the time of the semi-public event. And then that was not even the end of it since there was a large dinner gathering following it, and people who had traveled to attend all this were still around a few days following that. However much I surprisingly enjoyed their company, it was tiring. I do not want condolences, just a break.

But until then wishing me well is meaningless, especially if it comes, as it did plenty, from somebody whose life would be no different were it me who was dead. And I am not demanding special attention, either; I just wish we all could spend less time pretending.

And less money on mopey parties for people to pretend at. Did you know that even a non-frilled cremation costs over three thousand dollars? And somehow having a little ceremony for it, a newspaper notice and a box to put the bone dust in costs $2000 more. And it isn’t even a FANCY box. We could have bought a fancy urn but there was concern about being permitted to bring it on an airplane if we wished to transport the ashes someplace else. Obviously this is because you could easily hide three ounces of water inside one.

We should not force ourselves to be sad because we think etiquette dictates it, and we certainly should not dive deeper into debt for the opportunity. I am terribly fortunate that whatever arbitrary force made my parents feel like they had to put all their children into Catholic schools was not in effect by the time half of them were dead and it allowed us to have a traditionally incongruous karaoke conclusion.

This is the picture that got placed on the ash box. It is a good picture, and it occurred during our 1989 visit to England, my father’s native country, but I have no idea whose dog that is.

Perhaps my foremost regret is that I never communicated how important he was, or had been, in introducing me to some of my favorite things.

Even if I did not always like the same things; I never liked futbol, Harry Potter or fish+chips, but definitely stuff that I knew of on account of him stuck with me my whole life following their introductions. For example, Rupert Bear books had been sent by my English grandmother to my family for several years in the 1980s (and for longer to my father’s brother’s family, who were a bit older), and I never got rid of them. I enjoyed John Harrold’s artwork, and it inspired how I drew a few things, long after the books’ initial acquisition. I am told I even once had a sweater with Rupert pictured on it that this grandmother made for me, but I have no evidence of this.

My appreciation for classical music started with my father. And I hate to condense centuries of artistic expression and styles into a single “genre” but that is beside the point for now. On his last day of open communication, Friday the 21, when he was done with life support and yanked all the tubes out, so at least he could speak and take liquid sustenance again, I quickly set up a playlist of music that he had used to listen to that I had always kept track of –he asked only for “Beethoven” and I knew precisely what he meant, and he seemed glad to hear it, and sadly I did not get through the list before Jeopardy came on

(Jeopardy! I still watch that), and he was still calling out answers to the end, and afterward he preferred the quiet. But being able to share that back was meaningful to me. I didn’t get to Smetana’s Moldau, one of the primary pieces, with Beethoven’s sixth symphony and Holst’s Jupiter, among others, that remind me of my father. Or rather I started it, but since the beginning is so subdued I think he didn’t recognize it, or maybe he did, but it reminded him of the Canals of Mars level in the NES version of Toobin’. So rather than try and jump to the distinct part I skipped it entirely.

That was a joke, but my appreciation of certain video games, Dragon Warrior and Romance of the Three Kingdoms foremost, two of the slowest, more inaccessible titles on the NES ever to be localized, I saw my father playing first, and eventually took a liking to, and I thought I was quite a bit smarter than anybody who thought those were boring, and this led to continuing fascination with that sort of thing. I even at some point read the original [translated] Three Kingdoms novel that inspired the video games, which is to date the longest thing I have read. I believe I also first saw him playing Landstalker (or trying to), my perhaps favorite sega genesis game, but that is only appropriate to mention with regard to a screenshot I ended up putting in this entry too late to be relevant to this paragraph. My father’s general Britishness struck me, as a small child, as being in some way superior to common American habits, and even if that was not accurate, it helped me to look outside a box I might otherwise not have. I even said so on one of my earliest terrible but preservable web pages back in whenever that was.

And I have alluded to all these things on numerous occasions throughout my years of frivolous website production, and I think my father, of all people, might have appreciated it, especially when I was not able to speak to him –So many of the strange quotes I adorn my entries with and that surely confound of those who attempt to read the dumb things, come from strange old movies that my father would have on the television, or the stranger advertising– but by 2001 or so, before I was writing regularly, and long before I was writing half-competently, he no longer wanted, or no longer could use a computer and certainly would not have had time to read my rubbish weekly. And it was never my way to impose nonsense on others. I wouldn’t go and print out pages and pages of this and assume it had a purpose. Occasionally when I had art prints I might show those, but a great majority of my drawings have never been printed, and my sketchbooks are messy and incomprehensible, even for me, who does not require spectacles.
Indeed for the most part my father probably had no idea what I was doing. And he was supposedly proud of me anyway. That does eat at me inside: He was content with me being totally worthless and I never got to prove that I wasn’t!

One tribute to him, in a sense, that I am sad to say he did not know about, and that to my knowledge nobody else did either, even though I drew it just over ten years ago, is the way the creature “kumquat” types on its computer device is based on how my father did back when he could still use a computer. One finger at a time, alternating. Even by early 1998 (prior to my problem) when we first had home internet, my father’s coordination was not stellar. It was not long before he was asking me to type out replies for him when another user of the AOL trivia whatsit accused him of lurking in the game for long enough that the questions looped around. He had me explain, in considered detail, that while he had observed that behavior in others, he would not do such a thing, and he knew the answers he knew because of this this and that, but the person had already logged off, not concerned with whether they were actually right (and, I have to think, probably lost the trivia game due to THAT tendency) and in those days that meant you just plain could not send a message to the person. Argh what a scumbag! My one opportunity to fight for my father’s trivihonor and I wasn’t fast enough. My only hope is to make that incident into a bit of useless trivia itself.

In fact, that I recall, I do not think I ever drew anything for my father, except a really crummy photograph imitation watercolor painting of a pelican. In 2012, before I could speak to him in person, I had become able to speak over the telephone, and I asked what his favorite animal was, thinking that I could imitate photographs of animals in physical media in a way that is pleasing, and that would be easier than any other thing my father would possibly want art work of,

based on my experience with this manner of product. I had not considered that I chose this picture not due to there being birds in it, but rather to its suitability to the task of imitation by me, due to an abundance of vague but colorful details. The pelican scene featured complicated but specific feathers, a limited range of colors and a view of the sea where the light reflection made it seem mostly white, but the imitation to look like I have a fundamental, pre-school-level misunderstanding of what water looks like.
It was so bad that i never showed it to its intended recipient until that last Friday, in the hospital, since I had such massive guilt about what I just told you. A bit later somebody had propped it against a wall in the room with the wrong side up. That is how bad it was. I became the classic delusional artist joke, where two people take turns turning the canvas around to try and determine which orientation is correct. The stuff that I knew how to draw well I was always embarrassed by. Nobody in my family has a “fursona.” And thank goodness but for people who do, it is at least much easier to figure out exactly what to draw, and usually not very difficult.

February 26 of this year, the last time my father went to a restaurant. Zhang’s Madison, the closest restaurant to our home, since he did not like to travel at all by this point. But his sixty-fifth birthday had been on Tuesday, the 21 of February. “Oh two, two one, five two,” as I heard enunciated as clearly as he was able in countless doctor waiting room visits. often multiple times the same trip since the people in that building don’t communicate, and don’t realize you already proved your sanity once to them today. Anyway, something moderately special seemed called for. He is seen here drinking his customary “Coke…. NO ice,” with the latter part usually appended just as the server is leaving. In fact he preferred Mountain Dew, but through the magic of corporate contracts those two are mutually exclusive offerings in any food service establishment. I think he possibly learned that habit from me. Before I stopped speaking, he took me to and from therapist appointments, and I remember stopping at the McDonalds on the highway and ordering the then new “crispy chicken deluxe,” and with none of the customary unspeakable goop on it, which the employees could handle, and a large coke with no ice, which they could not handle. With no ice because nobody can drink ice, but I could drink a lotta coke, and you can fit more in there without the ding dang ice. Presumably the ice is to save THEM money on soda, even though that is probably the cheapest to produce thing in the entire store, a category in which there is fierce competition at a McDonalds. And sometimes servers aren’t mentally equipped to process “no ice” and assume, through what seems to me a more strenuous stretch of logic, that I must have meant “no sugar,” and I end up with a huge undrinkable cylinder of diet coke, just about as undrinkable as the ice in there with it. This all seems to be mostly about me, but I have few coherent memories from when I was on good terms with my father and he could actually do things. Everything afterward has regret attached, so I will take what i can get.

I am fortunate that the recent deceased got to 65 years; many people lose parents at younger ages, and without even the little amount of awareness that it is coming which I had. Not everybody has a father, and some have no parents who love them at all. This could have been worse. Much as this entry could have been much longer; I removed or did not attempt to implement several parts that seemed attached to a different narrative, and perhaps I will see those later.

But right now I need a break! Preferably to do something non-depressing in.

Thank you for your time and consideration in these matters.

hello there. I have somehow ended up in a house without internet for the week. However, if I walk five minutes along the road and sit on a bench beside it with no homes in view I can get it just fine. Which sounds good but consider this regrettable thing that it has allowed me to post now instead of considering if is a good idea for six more days.

Graveyards are profoundly depressing in the respect (RESPECT I say) that even in death you will be defined by your personal monetary value, or what your family struggles to make its value appear to be. The people with the highest social rank have the biggest, most elaborate graves, even though they are no more dead than anyone else trapped in a box and hidden there. This is the grave yard near Yale university, which means it’s full of decorated military leaders, government officials, deans and professorial types. It’s no smarter or talenteder than any other cemetary, but it sure seeks to convince me that it is with these huge grey rocks. Oh mab I wish *I* had a huge grey rock! I’m so jealously reverent!
I have visited graveyards before. I always have a good time and a positive attitude.

The rich dead even have fences to keep out the poor dead.
I entered the cemetary because I was looking for a more efficient walk toward my apartment from destinations that seemed to lie in a direct line from it but that I always needed to take etch-a-sketch-esque-a-skesque routes to get to and from. The local google map showed that I could walk directly through the yard, but there was no door at the other end (it probably got dead and is buried in there somewhere), which I did not realize until I was at the place where it ought to have been, resulting in my taking a full graveyard tour and even longer to get back where I came from than usual. I should not complain for google misleading me as there is an underpass near my home that has been blocked due to “road work” for almost two years, and I regularly witness cars drive toward it and come back 30 seconds later, because, I assume, some electric direction system or another told these motorists they could go that way, because in theory it was unblocked at one point, and I find that amusing. The time I was almost arrested for being too close to the highway at a place I could walk to from my apartment, the police driver dropped me off at a place that I could not walk to because she didn’t realize the road was blocked, and it might be ascertained that she or her car lives in town.

If I have a grave I want it to have a practical function. Something that would have value to people who are still alive and have feelings. Maybe I can have a stone conveyor grave that will help people get out of the cemetary faster.

I don’t want a grave at all, but if I had the money to make a big stupid expensive grave I would want it to be as tacky as Falco’s. Something that people could laugh at in a miserable place like this that was deliberately laughable.

But I do not wish to have a grave. Don’t make me deal with your pets, don’t give me a sandwich with white goop on it, don’t identify me with “mister” or my middle name initial letter and think you’re endearing yourself to me, don’t toss unlabeled video links at me and expect me to click them, don’t bury me when I am dead unless you murdered me and are hiding the evidence. That’s just sensible. Consider this my will if you kill me before I write one.
Although if you want to be safe, rent a boat and go out to sea and toss the body overboard. Most likely the corpse will arrive at a shore far from the murder site long after you did it.

A parking space for a deceased’s automobile. That wooden obstruction is to keep a really dumb goat from escaping.

Bird, you’re too heavy! You are knocking that stone over! SHOW SOME RESPECT, BIRD! This is hello’d ground! That means it is fully saturated with greetings and doesn’t need your empty chatter. Do you know what will happen if you disrespect a wealthy dead person from two centuries ago who had lived in comfort among a repressed population of peasants? Somebody alive now will get really self-righteous about it for some reason!

Here lies Eli Whitney, famous for every street in town being named after him. He also invented the cotton gin, which helped inebriate cotton-picking slaves so they would temporarily forget that the effort-eliminating invention didn’t actually give them a break in any way. (note to self: look that up once you have regular internet access again to see if it’s historically valid (note to ross ice shelf: please thank ross for giving me a place to store my ice))

Rinkety dinkety graves for meeply folk. These may not even be secured in the ground. I think they are propped against the wall. These are the most interesting graves to me, though, because they are in all different shades of brown. Unlike eli the whitniest, their roaming undead spectres can’t afford to pay someone to clean off their demise mark once in a while.

Nobody is named Henrietta anymore. Whenever I see the name I immediately think of anthropomorphized farm animals. I can’t imagine anybody named Henrietta that isn’t a cow or a pig. Even this has a picture of a bird on it. The person got dead recently, in 2007 but seemed to have lived a long life, since 1916 and was appreciated enough to get this generous sized granite lump and so I think can handle such treatment from me, even if she wasn’t rich enough to get a fence.

I like this place because there is no pavement and it reminds me of the video game Hexen. This is one area that might actually resemble how the grave zone initially looked and doesn’t have any crass modernism mixed in. Of course Hexen is a video game about slaughtering undead wizards and wraiths (sadly, no skeletons) and I actually shouldn’t find anything comforting about that and in any event it was made in 1995. Even by video game standards that is only the equivelant of one century. But this does make something significant occur to me.

Suppose there was an undead uprising. For all the respect their retainers demand the dead themselves show little to us in rudely screeching when they see us and detaching their heads from their bodies to spit fireballs, or worse, keeping their heads and throwing bones at us. We should not bury them intact all close to each other! And we should be suspicious of anybody who defends their right to not be dismembered.

Also note there are ALWAYS imps present. I didn’t bury no imps. Who let this happen? We really should prohibit imps from entering cemetaries. Any imp that tries should be forced to present its papers. Obviously imps don’t carry paper around and aren’t licensed to exist anyhow. That should keep them out.

I went somewhere. Somewhere other than the previous occasion. I also came back.

===========================================================================

I’m tired of “badass” works of media. That’s how hardcore I am.

===========================================================================

During the last time I slept, I experienced a dream in which there were terrorism attacks or major riots or plain old world-ending going on outside and the first thing I did was try to prove to myself that it was a dream, but I failed, and so it was real. However, I never attempt to do that outside of dreams and so it must have been. I have no doubt of my consciousness while in its presence.

===========================================================================

Welcome to Target.

An actual scene from inside my refrigerator. This is precisely what I want to find waiting for me when I go away for a week. In case you’re wondering, I was in hiding…

AH NAW! Sausage found me.

AHHHHHHHHHHHH NAWWWWWWWWWW! Mexican sodee pop! Get me out of here! No actually build a wall and send THEM home.

Why I don’t reckon I’d have any respect for them Mexies if they didn’t send THIS back to US with a stern reprimand if the situation arose.

I think you broke it | How to lose a guy in (2) days | !

Howdy. I do not have local electricity at the moment! This prevents my computomatic from from participating in many tasks. While I borrow the electricity of others I foolishly neglected to bring my mouse, which prevents me from doing everything else!
==============================

Last.fm is yet another one of those websites with a stupid name that exists soley to collect personally identifiable information about users for the purpose of directing advertisements at them. Information which people gladly give up because it’s easier to get popular by liking stuff that already exists than by making your own stuff. So once I realized this site wasn’t getting me anywhere, I waited five years and got my own last.fm page. Naturally I can’t excell at last.fm either because the only stuff I like is stuff that nobody I like likes.

This then causes stuff that I don’t even like to like me.
Anyway last.fm is pertinent to whatever we decide is music. I considered putting a little gizmo from last.fm on this my page here which would show you whatever thing I had listened to most recently that lasty had agreed to acknowledge. However, as much as I’d love to impose my obtuse musical tastes on every person in the universe, it wouldn’t do ANYbody much good to know I was listening to “Stage 3” by “Sakamoto, Takenouchi, Fujio.” Fortunately, I am a compulsive wreck and it turns out that I enjoy having a sorted list of the noises I choose to hear. This also now means I will deliberately not listen to a specific piece by someone if I’ve statistically listened too often, if the site cannot count it at all due it being in an incompatible sound format, or I just don’t know who made it, and thus cannot label the file appropriately. So then I spend a considerable amount of time seeking out accurate titles and author data, and then reseeking them when I suddenly decide what I have “seems” wrong. It’s the most work I put into anything that nobody cares about if we exclude the webpage I wrote about Pac in Time.

Since the site content is largely determined by users, it takes on a few negative wikipedia similarities, such as asinine edit-revert battles and inconsequential gags interpreted as canonical fact.

Meanwhile, any of the 71,270 or so purported listeners who end up at this page will see this inexplicable fragment of your petty argument in the absence of actual information. Do you know what an accomplishment it is to make the site’s-point-missing totalitarian bonehead whose entire music collection is credited simply to “nintendo,” including an inestimable number of tracks named “Title Theme” seem sensible by comparison? (I think that you do not)

As it wasn’t fashionable to acknowledge video game staffs in 1987, Castlevania therefore contained joke credits. That the composer is listed as “James Banana” in the joke credits does not mean the real composer uses that as an alias or was ever actually known as that to anybody. After initially getting ornery at the intro line there I considered it may have been inserted facetiously and that I should feel bad for composing such an elaborate complaint without an alias, but a visit to the Videogame Music Database website, where I get most of my compulsion feeding data –my dealer, in effect–, reveals a lively argument over whether James Banana is an “alias” or a collaborative “unit.”

How can I trust you if you won’t even face me, coward!


If James Banana gets to be a unit then Green Stranger should be a module, Cafebar Read can be a cafe bar and Christopher Bee is a hatrack. The only unit I have time for is Unit 7 in my first grade math book because it has clocks in it.

I am going to keep talking about this.

By the presented logic, the game’s data must have formed over millions of years through a natural geotechnical process, because there are no artists or programmers in the credits at all, because the credits are 100% FAKE. In the breakthrough interview where Yamashita revealed that she didn’t create the ubiquitous “Vampire Killer” theme (maybe you should take a minute to let that sink in before continuing) and only seemed to have implied so in the past because like a normal person she doesn’t know what the “titles” of any video game music is, the inquisitor wastes time asking why she is credited as Jimmy Bans. Asks this before anything else, in fact.

The PROPER question would be “why aren’t you credited at all?” Or “why are you credited as James Banana when nobody else on the Konami staff was afforded a precious joke name? Was that a stipulation in your contract, that you get first pick of all the non-acknowledgement? Who do you think you ARE, anyway? Oh right, James Banana.” It appears that most of Yamashita’s online correspondence with Americans is from people trying to find out which specific songs she made, just so they can tag their mp3s properly because the only people I have anything in common with are embarrassing nerds.

NO YOU CANNOT BE MY FRIEND

Artists who collaborate on a project are different than either of them credited separately, and often just from themselves.

Jun Chikuma seems to be jealous of herself. Although to be fair the regular one did the music for Faxanadu whereas Chiki enjoys continual success rearranging the same 10 note tune in endless Bomberman titles. Both of these examples leave me surprised that the composer can play a flute. Perhaps she just likes to pose with it.

Faxanadu, incibiddly, has the only game music that I can play on my verizon telephone.

Yes I’ve been using computers for 18 years why do you ask?

I don’t mind last.fm converting my romanized japanese names into fancy symbols, but I don’t appreciate the green splat icon showing up every time I play one of these, telling the imaginary world that looks at my page that I have “misspelled” someone’s name. They actually expect me to go through my entire collection and replace “noriyuki iwadare” with some characters that I cannot type and that I cannot read. I have no concept of what means, even if it’s directly beside While there appear to be two Kenji Yamamotos whose names are spelt differently in their native print, that hardly justifies splotching rotten tomatoes all over my play-lists.

These two clearly have it in for me today.

De-dei-de-de-deih dat’s all, folks!

Next week I will post weird pictures to distract from the boring stuff I type about.

how did this take hours to do?, I can't... move!, I think you broke it | How to lose a guy in (2) days | !

A person from the internet recently alerted me to the existence of Freddy Milton, whose Danish comics about a trio of dragons called Gnuff appeared translated in the allegedly long-running “Critters” comic compilation book in the 1980s, a publication which I heretofore never cared to care about. I meant to talk about this on another site better geared toward the discussion of critty sorts but then I kept adding words so it could really only go here, where I don’t care if I get no comments, so I hope you’ll excuse me if this seems more sincere and less abusive than usual.

Have you heard of him? Maybe you have but I hadn’t until recently and he is what this is about. I’ve spent irresponsible quantities of the last six days scouring this material and it’s the sort of thing where now that I’ve almost run out I have to impose it on somebody else. Thankfully, there are no ill-advised video grames for me to play through this time.

There are a bunch of links here to pictures because in an odd twist of irony I actually like this fellow’s work and so don’t dare display it on my page as long as I’m linking to his. I was well educated in my yufe about the perils of Freddy coming for you.
Ehhh well he’s probably not watching, but one can never know what vigilant force is.

He seems to have done a lot of Carl Barks sort things. Or at least mentions Carl Barks a lot, and is something of a Danish authority on the subject. Carl Barks being a cartoonist who popularized increasingly outlandish adventure type comics featuring Donald, Scrooge, et al [Mc]Ducks and inspired many creative folks in his day. Barks was largely responsible for getting Disney comic artists and writers (or at least himself) proper credit where once all had been anonymous, for his ways were too distinctive for anyone else’s to pass as his. Milton doesn’t try to do that but clearly holds dear many of the destined duck depicter’s key principles. Right, so, I never heard of Carl Barks until maybe 2004 or so and he’d been dead since 2000. Herge got dead two weeks before I got birthed and Franquin met his demise before Barks did. Freddy Milton is still alive and from what I can tell maintaining his own website. I greatly approve of this development. This is the sort of person I need to scoff at me.

Alas, as far as I can figure, most of Milton’s output is only available in north-European languages which I cannot read (as opposed to the other European languages I can’t read), but there are a number of complete-seeming comics in English on the website, appropriately enough located in the section “English Stuff.” In fact, the English ones are the only complete long comics there, from what I can tell! Still, you get to ask questions like RIG ELLER AERLIG? I don’t know the answer but it has something to do with fat birds in trenchcoats smoking cigarettes. (It is also worth observing that a buck-toothed proto-gnuff is a recurring element in this series.) Rats really seem to hate the flamboyant flautist. Despite the predominance of human characters, that series looks to be the most saturated with avant-garde weirdness. That is, before the time comes to learn about the activities of disturbing anthropomorphized sausages. Although at least sausage is made from animal matter and can take on instinctual tendencies to flee from peril. They never had a chance!

I’m too amused by the fact that one of the gnuff dragons has a striking, if better-designed resemblance to the lope creature I draw a lot (and I think this is why the topic was mentioned to me) –including wonderfully punchable facial expressions; look at the floating head in that fourth frame. I don’t think I’ve ever been that happy about anything in my entire life– for me to approach that series rationally. I like the Woodrow Woodpecker comics, which the gnufflings aren’t in, so that thankfully suggests maybe there’s merit beyond my fondness for pitiful lizards (we can discuss CROCKY DYLE another time). I haven’t seen any fan-art of them on any of the, admittedly, Amero-centric websites I tend to find embarrassing fan-art on, so I assumed that they are still fairly obscure to English speakers. Or maybe just nobody is a fan of them. I might have sought to rectify this if that were the sort of thing I did.

Though it might seem as if the glorious civic chaos concludes with the woodpecker stories, I found a very incomplete “Critters” torrent which included an excerpt from a gnuff story about some enormous trees once again toppling the fragile local government, in under ten pages! But that isn’t on the website, unfortunately, so I don’t know how it ends. I assume the trees get mistaken for giant broccoli and a giant George Bush Sr. with a dog nose shuns them out of existence.

I’m not sure what the gnuffs’ relationships are to each other. The translated text identifies them as “siblings” but I wonder if that’s just because the Americans thought it would be weird to show a married couple that slept in separate beds. But then in the Orva story, about an unstoppable graffiti artist who gets the national guard deployed, these bird people are clearly in the same bed and nude so I should just trust the translation, even if it did change the peculiar name “Gnip” into the unimaginitive “Gnicky.”

I’m too pleased to observe the constant crossing-over of characters between the various series even when obvious copyright matters seem like they shouldn’t allow it. The W. Woodpecker antagonist Buzz Buzzard becomes a [some other bird] when he’s a Gnuff antagonist but he wears the same old-timey aviator costume and flies the same airplane. A glance through the danish cover gallery reveals that this replacement bird appears again, suggesting that Milton never forgets a useful character. I love that sort of thing.

It’s like when Dick Dastardly became the Dread Baron but still had the same airplane and sounded like Paul Winchell when Hanna Barbera made Yogi Bear and the Spruce Goose which if you’re lucky I’ll never mention again. You can further help this along by not attempting to chastise me for leaving out that he appeared in Laff-a-Lympics first. Give me a break. You’re like a little kid with all this cartoon geekery. We’re talking about Comic Books starring talking animals here.
Even the gnuffs themselves are primarily obvious –acknowledged at that– stand ins for more or less generic ducks and woodpeckers, because the story is more important than who’s in it (compare this old drawing with the updated one on Mr. Milton’s site). For all I know the sausages were replacements for the California Raisins. Which doesn’t bode well for my own prospects, which favor main characters that have massive personality disorders who don’t accomplish much and are hard to draw, especially when the guy doing it properly claims to not make a squeam of a lot of money now that print in general is less profitable, (due to the downfall of reprint venues like “Critters,” for one thing) but I won’t give up soon [enough].

And then uh some of the things are really well drawn. The guy makes lots of corny cartoons but he also draws difficult things like automobiles, banisters and non-psychedelic clouds, and boring things like circuses and an astounding quantity of supermarket scenes, all with perfect perspective and in a manner I don’t find repulsive or boring. I admire people who can work in so many different styles. I can’t comprehend it. It’s humbling. I want to cry. I can’t even draw a potato. I’m used to being inadequated by artists… increasingly kids a fraction of my age who won’t acknowledge me, but rarely professional comic people, because the technically proficient ones aren’t funny or I rationalize everything with “but their ideas are unoriginal tripe.” This is not always the case, obviously, and when that happens I can either hide from it or deal with it, and despite the part of this paragraph that I removed after I posted it I’m not hiding today. I can’t. I made those three pictures and I need some context here to justify their existence. I intend to write Mr. Milton a very embarrassing e-mail at some point. Oh right and practice drawing things I don’t understand more, naturally. Of course a week is the general length of my mega fascinations, and coincidentally my now common length of time between updates. Who will be next?

Perhaps I will make it two weeks and claim my prize!

===============================

Alkaseltzer is far and away the best antacid named after a notorious maximum security prison. If I had TIME to give you an update don’t you think it would better than that?

===============================

I’m worried that enough people have asked google if worrying burns calories that it’s one of the suggested search strings for questions about worrying.

If I get cancer for this class from using spray paint I had better be given at LEAST a b- out of it.

============================

Friday, October 8: I bought a glue gun today. I did not, however, update this website.

============================

Don’t eat this enigmatic cholesterol lump because somebody dared you to.
I will probably eat a KFC double-down before I die. I just don’t want it to be immediately before or why.

First of all, does anybody really clench their tongue out the side of their mouth like that? I never do that. I would know if I did. I know when a wet thing touches my epidermis.

Walter the hobo… I’m supposed to be afraid of this guy but I can’t when he does that.

More to the point, is it truly necessary for the two lower guys to hold up the bagel while the third one cuts it? They are endangering the cutter, and endangering themselves by being so near the path of the blade. Apart from creating unsafe work conditions and unnecessary liability, they are themselves unnecessary and should be fired immediately. The cutter should also be fired for walking on the food. All three should be required to take a neckerchief management class. Fire the bagel, too; they’re boring. The knife may stay. I approve of its stripes.

But nobody ever listens to me, does they? Last year I repeatedly reiterated my belief that every one of them should also be fired immediately, yet here they are again. In fact they are even more numerous than before. That less is going wrong does not change that just as much is going right.
The mouse creature, curiously about one fourth the size of the squirrel creature (the one in the grid-pattern jacket. YES that’s supposed to resemble a squirrel GOSH), was initially sitting on a conveniently placed curb-edge from the reference picture found online which I started with, but when I actually visited the place I saw that there was no curb at all, just a brief slope. Thus, a banana.

And who’s this? This is the character that I had to remove from the picture to preserve balance. You can see how well that worked out. I wasn’t entirely sure what he was wearing, anyhow. I could have switched him with the tall kid, but that kid was at least tall, whereas this one is about the same size as the dopey tail-ed miscreants.

I hear the actual 5000 event occurred while I was safely out of the country a few weeks ago in August. However, when I initially created this image, I faced the fears and apprehensions of those who initially misread the lettering to believe that DOPE IS COMING. Permit me to emphasize:NO dOPES ARE COMING AND NO dOPES HAVE COME. That needed to be said. I had nothing to do with that.
This makes me think that I should devote a page to all the times other people have drawn stupid things like dopes and dope sympathizers. Not because I think you care, but just so I don’t forget. It’s happened a few times by now and I’m starting to worry.

In other nopes I was forbidden to take pictures of this building, even to use as guide for a picture intended to represent a charity for patients at this very hospital. And so I stopped taking them.

In the event you are curious, the charity is to raise money to help the patients get treatment, not to give them cancer.

We’re trying to run a business, after all.

Right, so I saw that avatar movie. I wrote something pretty mundane about it but I discovered I referred to it in what I wrote about another movie I saw more recently so I may as well put it here. Unless you have a better idea. If you do you’d better tell me quickly! No, too late. I doubt I’m the first person to make an Ultima joke in reference to it, so may I please be the last?

I like weird looking plants, but they are nothing new to me. I growed up seeing them all over the place, in a very similar context: inside big rectangles I could not enter.

Rygar had floating islands, Chrono Trigger had floating islands, Legend of Dogoon that I SLAMMED last week (in February) had floating islands. I like floating islands but James Cameron didn’t invent them. I found the Spindizzy Worlds more engaging than Pan Dora. It may have helped if my glasses and / or left eye had been calibrated properly; the whole film was blurry. I could see layers, but they were like viewmaster layers; some things stood out but they stood out by uniform amounts, and if they were near an edge of the screen they looked weird. Also, no attempt seemed to have been made to compensate for the darkness caused by the polarizing lines on the spectacle lenses; everything was just a little bit dark. No, excuse me, not EVERYthing…

the bright green EXIT signs on both sides of the screen were at full luminance and at least one was visible to me the entire time. Also, lights on the floor and behind me to the left.
The presentation itself was alright. Nothing that will change my life or that I’ll always remember. As any amount of people have mentioned the story and the characters are nothing new. The angry guy among the pure people who hates outsiders for good reason but that has to be proven wrong is especially played out, to me, though I must admit I liked that character better than some others. You can’t go wrong with bad science men vs good forest men. Maybe I’ll have an easier time siding with the forest men when they’re not all enormous, hostile Captain Planets.

I don’t mind the navies as long as they are presented exclusively as space aliens, with no allegorical implication that everybody would be better off living that way. The na-vi have no art, no individuality, no curiosity for that which they do not know. That suits them fine, but it does not suit me. Although that’s just as well, as anyone with a physical or mental defect is liable to be beaten to death or left to starve in a culture like that.

Which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing in one example I can think of, but I believe in general it would be. They’re probably closer to harmony than we are now, and it’s good to keep in mind possibilities for alternate ways of living, but there is no perfect society, nor has any ever existed. Perhaps there can be one, but it won’t be like that.

I think the 3-d may actually have detracted from the experience, to me. Without that I could have viewed the thing at full brightness, without stupid glasses, and without the picture being blurry. I found myself wanting to close the less accurate eye, a lot. A question struck me: do I normally do that? Do I view most films with the less good eye closed? Does being prevented from doing that for fear of losing part of the “experience” actually do more to ruin things for me? If I closed my left eye, the right’s vision was clear (but dim). I could have watched the whole movie like that, but I kept hoping I’d suddenly figure out a way to make the full picture less blurry, and so I kept both vision orbs in use for nearly the entire time. I’ve long suspected my actual vision was less than perfect with regard to things lining up in both eyes. If I really pay attention to a thing, I notice that there are two slightly different versions of it front of me. I assumed that was normal. Maybe it isn’t! It works alright for me, because I know nothing else, and nobody has suggested that a certain aspect of it is supposed to be a certain way (aside from when I’ve been accused of being colorblind), because it’s normal and nobody thinks there’s anything to say about it. However, once I start looking through a preconfigured mode of alternate vision, my alternate mode of function becomes clear. I may need to have a special corrective monocle made for myself that I only use when viewing three-dimensional films. I can squeeze my less good eye a certain way to make it focus properly, but I fear that will damage the thing further, and the eye is difficult to access with a plastic frame in the way, besides.

The film was filled with scenes – more than I can remember seeing in any other film – that I have watched – whose only purposes were to show off stuff. Unfortunately, if it looks blurry to you it gets annoying and you want it to hurry up and be done. Don’t you understand, I WANTED to like that. I wanted it to be the greatest thing I’d ever seen, but it wasn’t because I’m a broken human. I am doomed to enjoy less things than others and to be alone while I do it. This makes me sad.

And so I saw the dragon film. I don’t think I told you about the time I watched avatar, so I posted my contextless summary above here… The 3d worked better for me this time because I was closer to the screen, but it still wasn’t perfect. A pity I couldn’t get an imax screening. One person at whom I described my D-related woes after both these movies responded both times “you might need glasses.” Well I was already wearing glasses, they were just dorky 3d glasses. As for NORMAL spectacles, I don’t NEED them if the only thing I can’t see and only on one side properly are 3d movies that use the polarization method. And besides either way the thing would still be dim the whole time.

I noticed that the main human, Wesley or Herbie or whoever his name was didn’t have perfect teeth. Obviously the fat frubby Scotch Norsemen who comprised the bulk of the figures in the movie wouldn’t, but I was surprised that the thin characters were allowed to get away with it. They also were allowed to get away with talking in standard American accents. I’m not about to accuse that overweight people are intentionally made to look funny and sound funny in comparison to “normal” thin people because I honestly didn’t consider that until now and look we’re not even half way through this. So I’ll just imply it for the moment.

The movie did its job. It developed characters, it featured non-developed semi-characters which could be merchandised, progressed plot and waited to bore out most of its plot holes until the height of tension, when I would feel least inclined to consider them, and such and such. It did this without any pop culture references or overt sex innuendo and kept bad-smell-based “humor” to a minimum, which I didn’t know was allowed in animated movies these days. At least nothing bad enough that I felt compelled to make a note reminding myself to complain about it. And so I will complain about another thing.

The music was nice. A pity, since I’d have love to watch this in silence with closed captioning rather than hear the voice acting. Maybe I can get a version dubbed into Chinese with English subtitles. The technology exists, though it needs work before it can be employed without launching abysmal internet memeys. The kid, what was his name, Danny or Milo, he sounded completely bored the whole time, even when he was doing stuff that had my eyes been properly configured to see through 3d lenses would look fairly exciting.

One thing I like about watching cartoons from other countries is that there’s very little chance half the characters will sound like people from Saturday Night Live or Glee or whatever dominant white-people entertainment was hot at the time they were cast. Just in the previews I heard Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Steve Carrell and Jack McBrayer, and I saw Will Ferrell and Tina Fey’s names threatened in letter credits for something or another that I was too busy cringing at to hear the vocal accompaniment to. Three minutes into the actual movie, which was a good 45 minutes after I entered the theater, hey here’s a fat dwarf who sounds like Craig Ferguson, who never even worked for NBC. All these people are on or have been on major tv shows. They’ve made their money. Why do they agree to go along with this? None of them are voicing the characters; they’re just talking in their normal tv voices so that I recognize them. It’s nothing new but I’ve always hated it and I still do, whether they’re people I dislike or the alternative. I merely resisted any pressure to go and see one of these productions until now, and the previews tend to be targeted at whoever the audience is expected to be, in this case children, accompanied by adults, because every movie has to be at least PG, thus more ugly computer graphic movies, thus more boring human voices coming out of bright and shiny animate people. “But Mike Myers is doing an exaggerated SCOTTISH accent and he is CANADIAN!” but even that’s a Scottish accent he’s done before this role, and if we pretend he hasn’t, Shreck trash alone has made it more ubiquitous than his actual voice, and this voice has been imitated by people in other movies (this one, for example) and terrible gum commercials.

In the credits for what I did see, I was informed that Kristen Wiig had talked for someone or another. She was also on Saturday Night Live, and while I was able to find some sketches she was tolerable in before I stopped watching, there was nothing remarkable about the way she spoke. I certainly didn’t hear “her” when I heard the voice in the movie. I just heard A voice that I didn’t much care about, whoever it was. Why cast someone like that? Another character was Jonah Hill, and instead of thinking “oh Jonah Hill I like him in contemporary emotionless stoner movies that are utterly disconnected from this” I spent the entire movie trying to figure out if it was Jack Black, who would also have been distracting. However, I shouldn’t have had to think any of these things because the character was neither of them.

Every movie advertised in the lobby was a remake or a sequel. Again, nothing new, and again nothing I’m content with, either. The one thing that is new is that I neglected to bring my camera into the building and so have no dark and/or blurry pictures of unnecessary things. The previews that I alluded to reflected my lack of excitement or mere optimism for things to come. As these tend to come in superficially similar pairs (Bug Life and Antz, Shark Tale and Finding Nemmy, echt), two of them movies were about “so bad, I’m good” bootleg I M Meens without Warwick Davis in them. One was a blue alien (who ever heard of such a thing?) that reminded me a lot of that horrible alien that gets beaten up by the dogs for crashing into the fire hydrant, except instead of being typical and uninteresting for three minutes we get, I assume, thirty or so cycles of it. These clods have nothing on The Smoggies. Also, please don’t make a Smoggies movie.

The color in these computer movies is always the same. Everything is perfectly lit. The rate of movement, the force of gravity and pacing and such are also always the same. I feel like I’ve seen all these places before. Much like with video games, once they went “3d,” –in the rendering, not necessarily the projection– particularly after 256 color palettes were dropped, everything looked monotonous to me. Plus most of the plasma and spread orb guns turned into regular dumb old army guns. Yes, sure, all ye olde Hanna Barbera street corners looked the same and one Disney castle courtyard is like any other, but I challenge you even to identify but a graphic department by its backgrounds these days, much less a specific film (and if you can give me a day or so to acknowledge it because writing this made me tired). And while they’ve had 14 years to find an appealing way of showing computer cartoon humans, nobody’s done it yet. I hate their big chests and little legs, but I also hate them with realistic proportions. I hate them with huge blobby heads, I hate them with conservatively sized mannequin heads. I hate them with little eyes really close together, I hate them with big eyes that allot space for a nose. In short, I hate. I also hate in long. I’m just as bitter and unpleasable as I ever have been, but I’m getting more specific. Once I’ve identified every problem I will bring my findings before the council and they will abolish things I don’t like.

After a decade and a half of solid regurgitation of stuff from before we’re now starting to re-puke up the stuff we already puked up and re-ate. We’ve already HAD a “new” nightmare on elm street. We’ve already had a “next” karate kid. Toy Story 3 reminds me too much of The Brave Little Toaster for comfort. To be fair, I am rarely comforted by brave toasters of any size, nor little toasters of any demeanor. Even when they have wings.

I am in the process of re-evaluating some of the stuff that I allowed myself to be revolted by in the 90s now that I see it under attack by forces yet less meritorious, and this does, alarmingly enough, include that blasted toaster. I also have it on no authority less than a youtube comment itself that some of the toaster people went on to be involved with the Pixar people, but that doesn’t make the Toy Story any less creepy than it ever was. This one has Kens and Barbies in it. Although the apparent Mattel buy-in likely spares us any overplayed “Ken is a closeted homosexual with no genitals who doesn’t realize he’s gay because he’s the only man in town but he couldn’t act on his urges even if they became relevant” jokes, I think the writers should have the right to include such things should they deem it prudent, rather than to be bound by strict licensing codes of conduct. And you know me well enough to understand that I’d find a way to be annoyed even if Mattel granted Pixar a temporary “Ken is gay” license because I already implied I was comedically disaffected by that. I may just be annoyed at the money flow involved, and it goes both ways, surely, with getting existent products into works of fiction that serve to promote them without doing anything that a free non-licensed stand-in couldn’t. Although in this franchise the stand-in itself would be marketed as an original product and I don’t think I could take that, either. I don’t find “toys doing stupid stuff” funny unless they’re MY toys and I’M making them do the stupid stuff, besides.

You think I have any control over this??

We’ve already flipped and dissected every “stupid,” “hokey,” or “sincere” thing about our dominant consumer generation’s youths. My mother was 35 when that The Brady Bunch movie came out. I’m no fan of the Smurfs, nor was I ever, but I’d love another 8 years to not have Hollywuh pretend it knew smurfs were stupid all along and act like that’s news to ME. It could even be argued, by me, regardless of anything to base it on, that the avatarts were space smurfs who just happened to be bigger than Gargamel. Frimbip, Robot Chicken’s been showing action figures acting uncivilly toward each other ever since Seth Green found web pages from 1998 and realized he could rip them off for free but get paid for it. MacGuyver doesn’t even get THAT honor; it gets, “MacGruber,” a movie about a one joke non-parody of itself, with its origin, shockingly enough, being Saturday Night Live. That may even be a less reprehensible approach, but I’m far from optimistic about it.

I personally can’t stand the Robot Chicken mouth(s), particularly the banana shaped tooth kayak that shows up in every character’s talk cycle and



the bright white square teeth that they alternate scenes with depending on circumstances I don’t care to investigate. Yes, I pay way too much attention to the teeth of animated characters. It’s obvious more time is spent matching the mouth to every syllable than any other aspect of the animation, so who can blame me for noticing? I meant that for this series specifically but it’s true in general. Also, the low-budget amusement which should come from such apparently cheap production values is rent asund when they incorporate realistic explosions, bullet physics and blood (and there’s usually blood). Clearly somebody is spending thousands of dollars on this junk and should be held to higher standards than you-tubewits. Robot Chicken is the inexplicably legalized, advertisement selling television equivalent of bootleg Calvin shirts. Except it actually had a bootleg Calvin sketch, except Calvin was actually called “Calvin” and was a murderer and nobody cared. If I put a picture of Calvin acting in a comparatively courteous manner on this website that I do for free, however… again nobody will care because the Universal Press Syndicate gets its property violated a lot more often than the Shipyard Brewing Company does.

That is, I expect whoever is selling bootleg calvins out of a not necessarily mobile storefront on a main street in the nation’s capital is getting taken down before I am. The only reason Eli Co didn’t thank me for alerting non-yacht owners to the existence of their product is because when we spend $3.50 on 12 ounces of soda we expect to get six cans of it.

Thinking back… Starsky and Hutch, Miami Vice, Inspector Gadget, Dukes of Hazzard, Underdog, The Cat in the Hat, Land of the Lost, Bewitched… has there been one year since this rue wave started that there hasn’t been a nationally distributed hip, new, cynical, utterly off-the-mark take that ultimately nobody cared about on an old concept? (And how many of these had Will Ferrell involved? (the last two (if we don’t include Curious George, which I didn’t get the impression was cynical (oh (yes (stop it (when I feel like it (how about now (I’m considering it)))))))) Even the “original” new movies are full of this intolerable attitude. “Guys, guys! Nah. Nih-nah. Nah, ya caaaan’t… nah. Yeah, no…” I’m tired of every movie having Hal 9000 in it. The movie Hal was IN didn’t have as much Hal in it as one Ben Stiller movie despite being an estimated 4 days long and Hal being the single most referenced concept about it. Nobody ever says “hey, remember that movie where the guy floats through space silently for 30 minutes and then turns into a baby for no reason?” Besides the point.

Nobody can crash into a wall, fall off a bicycle, slip on a potato or otherwise suffer a public indignity without this type of character providing an understated “ooh, ouch.” or “gotta hurt.” “Awkward.” “Busted.” If THAT jackass can tell it hurt, shouldn’t I also have the right to? This is why people [on internet forums] hate Garfield. Garfield tells us what’s funny about something kwazy in the most disinterested way possible. Looking DOWN on me for finding humor in the writer’s work. DARING me to laugh at it. You thought THAT was funny? That ain’t NUTHIN oops out of space. I do this sometimes, but I don’t have an editor, much less a staff of them plus ghost-artists who can redraw a joke that I messed up by liking it so much that I couldn’t RISK you not getting it, even at the alternate risk of making you hostile toward it.

Even the music in these things tends to be judgmental. It likes to stop abruptly when something deliberately stupid occurs. “A little help…?” It’s not enough that the character failed, the soundtrack has to let me know a failure occurred by itself failing. It’s just like a “record scratch” sound effect except the sound people finally realized that by pretending they used analog sound equipment they implied that non-digital technology was adequate and the companies pushing expensive new projectors and audio systems on all the theaters wouldn’t like that. At least somebody finally cleared all the crickets out of here.

I tell you, those things are malevolent.

Next week, I compare How to Train Your Dragon to the Disney version of Robin Hood, connect this to amateur singing competition tv shows somehow and complain about them again.

I’m afraid we have to go with your first response.

You agree with me that 1 am is way too late for the idiots a block over from me to be blasting corny music all over the place, don’t you?

==================================================

Dear loyal bimshwel customers: I’m deadHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH APRULFOOOOUHAGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHG I’VE BEEN SHOT

HA HA NO I HAVEN’T!GOTCHA THAT TIME AYPRALLL FOOOOOOOOHHHHHHNOOOOO I’VE BEEN SHOT AGAIN!

NOPE NOT REALLY! HA HA HA HOOOGOSH DEAR FLOOPITY I’VE LAUGHED SO HARD I’VE CAUSED MYSELF MORTAL INJURY NO I HAVEN’T

HA HA HA HO NOW IS THE TIME WHEN I LAUGH NO IT ISN’t YES IT IS HA HA HA H

And now I am sad.
YES INDEEDNO NOT REALLY

 
 

I wish I could say that when I’m too busy to post something for a few days, rather than just slacking off, that it is a good thing, but it never is.

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

I forgot I could do this, too.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Apparently sensing both my lack of direction in the world and my lack of wistful longing for the past, The Church of Latter Datter Jesus now brings me the nostalgia bible. Yes, it’s true!The Bible is coming out of the Jesus vault! All it’s missing is a doctored down grey bible to pose this one next to on a split-screen.

I remember that everything about my Cathorific religious instruction, supposedly derived from The Bible and the various sectual exceptions and alterations made over the centuries, made me feel scared. I never felt loved by Jesus so much as threatened by eternal suffering if I complained about the giant creepy statue of his hanging dead body stuck to the wall. Or merely did not memorize some weird poem or sit and stand in a weird room for an hour every weekend. And this was before I was aware of the parts about Angry God destroying people before they otherwise would have died (and then suffered) just because he felt like it. The modern, commercial approach to spreadin’ the word that the late saints take seems opposed to just about everything left that might be labeled as “pure” about western religion. Sure, I think it’s all silly made up stuff (I must be the first person on the internet who does!), but I don’t understand how anyone else could not start to think that when they see paid ads for it on television or above their email. This summer: Caffeine is The Devil. Media.fastclick.net is a-o-k, however.

I would like to make an attempt at reading a bible at some point, but not because people I don’t know, oblivious to how crazy they come across told me to.

Truth restored! Digitally re-lorded! We took out some of the lies that may or may not have been a fundamental basis of our faith!

“Oh, but that’s just the Mormons. We don’t like the Mormons. They paid the marriage company in California to ban gays and they don’t drink coffee.” Yet were they to collectively decide “okay, God changed His mind. Gays can play too,” would there be any sensible reason to just accept that from them? Saying that what they’ve been doing since whenever hasn’t actually been the path to salvation until right just now? I hate the way faith-folk resist change, but their ability to disregard change entirely when it happened before they were brought in is ever impressive. But really this isn’t about religion or Mormon religions and I just hate stupid ads.

Stupid ads, I said. This is a horrible ad. It’s an empty trashy garbage homage to other trashy homages to some scene in some movie that most of its product’s target demographic has never seen and only knows at all from rubbish reverent near-religious homages to just that specific scene. That movie was called Risky Business and it came out in 1983, the same year I came out, of a womb. You might as well make an ad that references my umbilical cord. They can say “oh it’s parody” but if they do I’ll know they’re lying because nobody who needs to explicitly label their work as parody has done it properly. And who’s that guy in the front? Does he really expect me to believe he wears such big underpants? No, he just thinks if he doesn’t have the upper halves of his legs totally covered on tv he’ll magically turn gay which is a fate worse than this, apparently. He’s seen enough Snickers ads in the same timeslot to know that. You don’t get to be the best selling chocolate bar of all the times by letting customers turn gay, after all¹.

I remember there were something near eighty ads exactly like this last year, suddenly, for no reason, all ostensibly for that guitar game (even though I assumed most of them were the exact same ad, and so why have bothered with so many?). I can confirm this because some wikipediphile has listed all of them on the page for Risky Business as if they were isolated occurrences or particularly relevant to the film. Of note (whaddaya mean? If it wasn’t notable it couldn’t be in there, right?) are that it mentions the cartoon Doug (Aka My Name is Earl the animated series²) and the film Mrs. Doubtfire, two things of which I came to not be fond through direct experience without even knowing they had done Risky Business ripoffs. I could block those bits with my mind and still have enough ennui-disgust smores left over to do the deed.

And then midway through itself page section mentions an ad with Metallica that I saw but doubted in which instead of doing the thing they kidnap other people who looked like they were going to do it, because that foyer film set is a theme park attraction or something, and then Metallica Guy says, in the ad, that they won’t do the ad and then the house explodes, just on it’s own, I guess, as the Metallicites walk away from it. Oh, go die, Metallica. You were still in the ad and accepted Activision’s dirty money. You’re just about as bad-ass as those letters kids used to send to EGM magazine with Sonic the Hedgehog beating up Mario drawn on the envelope. You’re so pouty, you wouldn’t let your songs be in the game unless you got a special version with no one else’s songs in it sold at the price of a new game. But Aerosmith, the world’s third worst old band after KC and the Sunshine That and Kiss outpouted you and did it first. That is the interpretation this presentation has led me to and I feel you are not owed a thorough investigation, even though this vague disclaimer seems to indicate that I gave you one anyway.

I can appreciate how Metallica, among other overstated modern bands that just come at me constantly, used its fame to demand that it be allowed to make really long songs, not adhering to arbitrary standards regarding length and repetition. Yes. Maybe. But I still don’t want to listen to them for hours, continuously, much less while holding a toy guitar and staring at rainbow dots. I would have those dots coming at me in my sleep if I did that, which would interfere with my normal schedule of dreaming about people not liking stuff I said on the internet.

¹ I realize that makes no sense but I laughed when I typed it so it stays.
² That makes perfect sense.

Somehow every night this week I have not been able to “wake up” for an extra two hours beyond what is considered the usual. Productivity is challenged, but I still hope to get the next installment of stupid comics done before the year ends. Also, CLUMPD RUMF WUB DOP DOP DOP DOP DOP D’DOP D’DOP D’DOP D’DOP…

I have just spilled water on my “desk” after viewing a particularly rambunctious choke-slam on a television program which shall remain unnamed. This could set things back a bit.

Oh doe, now the oven’s on fire!

Gaaak! My home has been burgledlarized!

Gideon Yago! Now someone’s picked up rocks off the ground, stuffed them into little bags and tried to sell them to me!

By the wheels on the bus! Someone gave Frank Caliendo his own TV show! Whatever shall I do! Besides “watch it,” I mean.

I think you broke it | May I have a word with you? | !

I can’t blame software developers for focusing on new projects I don’t give three beans about when mass amounts of people besides myself are willing to give many more beans than three. My primary gripe at this time is with the few people willing to go to the trouble to make new levels, for old games, for free, who always feel compelled to out-impossible each other.

Do I? If I didn’t, could this have been avoided? I just wanted new levels.

I’d much prefer that to attempting to decipher some French “RPG” quack-job that from as best I can figure out isn’t that good with the best comprehension,

and inane Flash games that are even worse.

By the way, when I was going through a bunch of hacked metroid ROMs, just to see which changed this bit of text, a great joke occured to me. What is Samus’ favorite occult-influenced English heavuh metal rock band?

Black Zebeth!

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA H AH A HAH AH AH AHAH AHAH AH A HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA H

This reminds m whoopth. I forgot to undo the font tag. Good thing I caught that in time. Let me start again. This reminds me of oh gosh, I left the italics on too. Now then, this reminds me that… What reminded me of what? I forgot.
Oh, a couple of times, back on gigglebounce I copied long stretches of text about Timecube and I made the font really big and forgot to close the tags and the whole page got huge, and Timmy said it was like World 4 in Super Mario Brothers 3 and I edited the post but then the system told me I needed to “rebuild the files” but I couldn’t because I wasn’t an administrator, but later Hilary gave me administrator access because I was always whining about not being able to rebuild the files, but I never messed up the font again and I felt bad for mentioning it, and I still don’t know what “rebuild the files” means. I never have to rebuild the files here. I might need to rebuild this paragraph, though. Remind me later.

With Metroid, I understand that the one available editing machine does not allow for the altering of key locations or their specific functions, nor the creation of additional room types. The extent to which you can be original pretty much ends with stupid mazes. I understand that. No, it’s the Legend of Zelda nerds I’m mad at.

There’s a thing called… ehhh… pardon me, remembering how I ruined that page with a giant font has made me most unwell. I cannot continue.

oOH, here’s another one: what did Samus say after finding out that she had to go through a whole new zone to reach Ridley?

Hey, Norfair!

AH HA HAHAHA HA HA HAHA AHAH AHA HAH Aiche.

I feel better already.

Taste my wrath!

Graaaaaaaaargh!

Suffer for the crimes of your ancestors!

Ha ha ha, ho ho ho, hee hee hee, heh heh, heh…

. . . . . . . . . . . .

I have depressed myself. I have to go lie down.

I think you broke it, Intendo tapes | How to lose a guy in (2) days | !