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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robot you are getting a bit too good at that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, another final fantasy 8 post. I cut this off from the previous installment and I have to use it because there is one joke in it that I like at all.

I wanted to get into the game’s story a bit. Because I already wrote all this, so it would logically follow that this is what I want. In fact the story is really grim: it is about a bunch of kids at school being trained to kill kids from another school. You don’t realize they’re kids because they look to be in their 30s, except for Quistis who looks closer to 40, but the instruction manual insists all are 17 and 18 years old. Quistis just looks old because, as I indicated last time, she is possessed by a 30,000 year old malevolent hate spirit and I suppose she is holding up rather well, overall.

The heroes soon get assigned to kill the president of Galbadia, the nation/city/tiny isolated village on a huge empty world map that the other school is from. But then that school forgives them when the president teams up with the evil sorceress Edea, so then the kids try to kill the sorceress. They fail and somehow end up fighting against the school that forgave them earlier anyway*.

Then the sorceress Edea forgives them because they are all orphans and she was actually their muppet-baby-like nanny from years ago, and actually married to the principal Cid of the school that trained them, whose original purpose was to train kids to kill Edea who Cid is married to. The real enemy is actually Rinoa, the hero’s love interest, who is, after Edea (the orphanage sorceress), next in line to inherit evil from a different sorceress, Ultimecia, from the future, who wishes to be reborn in the past and therefore present. So then everybody goes to the future to kill Ultimecia, including Rinoa, her reborn self from the past, who has become more powerful but resisted becoming evil, but not Edea, the first sorceress, who is also not evil but doesn’t seem any worse for having received enough power that her husband started an army with which to kill her and therefore useful to have on your own side in a fight. And then I wonder why not let the evil sorceress give evil power to everybody since they seem to shake off the evil without losing the power fairly consistently and within a short time frame. By the way when I said the story was grim I meant uncomfortably ridiculous.

And you have a hard time wearing a complete sweater. We all have deficits to work on.

One of the secondary heroes, Irvine, is from the Galbadia school and the only cowboy in the world, complete with a big stupid hat and riding chaps, which typically goes unmentioned because in addition to lacking other cowboys, the world also lacks both horses to ride and cattle to herd. There are chocobos, strange large yellow birds, but you only ever see Squall riding one and his regular leather pants seem sufficient. Also, from my recollection, despite taking approximately forever and being out of character with everything else in the game, completing the side-quest that gives you access to the chocobo doesn’t actually confer any manner of benefit, since there is no place for the bird to go apart from places that your space ship can already land next to, and you need the space ship to find the bird.

Irvine, despite being from the other school, doesn’t seem bothered massacring his former, conveniently-anonymous helmeted comrades. Which I could also tie into Star Wars 7 but hopefully I won’t because by now that movie is two months old and nobody is going to care. Though it must be said that Finnegan only switched sides in the first place after he saw his chum get shot by the guy he later broke out of prison.

Irvine is the love interest of Selphie, who dresses for the complete opposite weather that Irvine does. Also, even though in 1999 nobody said “selfie” to refer to uninteresting photographs of yourself, Selphie in the game is still adequately annoying. I don’t feel like getting a picture of selphie! I don’t need a picture of everything I describe! And I’m telling me that, not you! Although sometimes I call me “you.”

This is the world map. Notice that there are only about 15 land marks on it, which are the only points you can engage with. And that is fine; you can’t expect to go everywhere in the world. What is annoying is that the game makes not the slightest effort to imply there is more to the world than the places you can enter. Of course having a superficially place-filled world that you could not go anywhere in would also be annoying but that only feels bad on my side. This here looks bad on their side. The two southern land-masses seem to have one destination between them.

Late in the game you come to esthar, which looks like this. And it’s great. In the context of a first generation low resolution playstation role playing game it is great, I mean. You have to travel on the highway a while before magically switching to the “inside the city” view. You can see neighborhoods and roads beneath the highway. You feel like there’s stuff going on. That’s exactly what the other cities should do.

Although even this abruptly ENDS at nothing instead of tapering off into less densely populated areas.

And earlier Irvine claims to have searched the entire continent looking for the city while his associates take a Gogurt break (on railroad tracks). The city is holographically hidden from view, but the game text outright states that there is nothing in existence that you cannot see from the world map, and that the speed you move on the world map is not artistic license to keep it from taking weeks to walk from town to town. Gosh that’s the third thing I hated about Earthbound. It’s supposed to be so modern and hip and with it but only the main characters have houses and only one town has a school and I didn’t actually finish it because I only rented it once and didn’t care much and thought it was ugly anyhow.

Also apparently it has the world’s biggest game box and costs twice as much as the next most expensive cartridge on the secondary market, if you are insane enough that you think playing a console rpg on native hardware without speed acceleration when you don’t have to isn’t the world’s biggest empty time-sink and worth spending extra money and living space for the privilege of and also on tracking down a 24 year old super Nintendo system that still works AND the last remaining gamepads that nobody ever stepped on. As if this is more honorable to the Nintendo company in some way than emulating the game, even though it isn’t because Nintendo doesn’t get a cut of resales and has re-released numerous games like this one as pay downloads that it gets FULL proceeds from, that are a fraction of what the games cost new in the 1990s, which was a fraction of what resellers are sometimes charging for them old in the 2010s. Hooray for a hipsterism based economy! We honor the cutting edge technology of our youth by treating it like the antiques of our grandparents’ youth! We honor the advancements that astounded us in the past by treating improvements on them with the obstinate backwardism of an author who takes it as a point of pride to still use a typewriter!

I know somebody who criticizes me over my use of the commercial applications photoshop and fl-studio for artwork and music when there are free alternatives with ostensibly the same capabilities. But the commercial software does what I need in efficient, non-backward ways that I already understand, and typically have larger existing support bases. I know people who can explain to me how to use that stuff. I pay extra for convenience. You don’t buy a super nintendo game on a cartridge in 2015 for convenience. A typewriter is superficially more efficient than a computer to somebody accustomed to typewriters, but a typewriter does not have the same capabilities.

And then six paragraphs about how much I hate Fisherman’s Horizon, Shumi Village and Trabia, the most boring and endless mopey, exposition-only areas in any video game, and the stupid boring card game that for whatever reason needs to be played the most in the most boring areas of the main game. I need convenience NOW to make up for all the time I wasted on THIS kind of stupid garbage back when I had time. And I need even more convenience because I wrote all those paragraphs and will never use them.

That’s no way to talk to somebody who has it all figured out!
(I put the paragraphs here)

In the interest of honesty, I like the character Squall, from the video game Final Fantasy 8, that I alluded to the notorious moodiness of in a previous item.

However, I am aware of the popular criticism that he is a self-centered and terrible hero and I think it is funny. I think it is funny but ultimately it is someone else’s joke. “Maybe I’m a Lion” is not something that Squall ever says but it is the title of some music that plays during one of his heroic moments near the end of the game, possibly based on the composer misreading Squall’s last name “Leonhart” as “Lionheart.” Although Squall also can acquire a replacement sword-gun that is called Lionheart. You’d have to be a complete nerd to know what any of the music is called, of course; even somebody who knows his last name is Leonhart and that his sword is Lionheart and that welsh rarebit is his favorite type of rarebit wouldn’t necessarily have studied all the backstory on the soundtrack, so anyone I want to think I am clever probably does not.

Popular culture commentary in illustrated form is never going to be for me since I take too long to draw things and do not reach the right conclusions that will have people know what I am trying to say, unless I personally do not agree with those conclusions, which means I will not be properly invested. And while on this occasion I managed to care enough about the biggest movie of the year while it was still in theaters, I tied it to something else from 15 years ago and even worse, offered a criticism, which means fans, the only people who would care, would not,

unless they missed my point, meaning they would be uninterested in anything else I did that couldn’t be interpreted as a dumb fandom homage, and I should not have bothered if I wasn’t getting money, and I wasn’t. This was by far the most popular “art” I ever put on the crumbumblr website, and yet it still wasn’t all THAT popular, and didn’t lead to any engagement with my other pictures. It won’t mean anything unless I keep drawing star wars junk, and the more I do, the less of me there will be in it and the less of me there will be in anything. The same as happened when I got conscripted into the “furry” gang. Nobody cares about thought or effort, just well-polished compliance. And as a result I became an angry person incapable of being positive or making friends, and even my compliance was shunned, and with it having no personal meaning to me, I only got more angry, and probably have written the same thing here about twice a year since 2011, which I forget, because I only write it to stop thinking about it, which means if the topic comes up again it will be fresh. Fandoms are a trap. And there is less immediate incentive to free one’s self from a fresh trap than an obviously old and sour trap.

The same person who forwarded my picture also forwarded this. I cannot well coexist with the 50 thousand people (assuming most of them both “like”d and “reblog”ged, therefore accruing a score over 100,000) for whom a drawing of chummy, angle-bodied, out of costume, ostensibly star wars characters but who knows, in a void, doing nothing, was the best thing they saw all week. This might as well be the cast of Streptococcus Paiella. Hey how about the next Star Wars movie is just a 3 hour Dawson’s Creek reunion, would you like that? You, as a fan of interesting characters, thought the ideal course of action was to reduce them to boring fans of themselves. That is to say, boring but POSITIVE, socially COMPLIANT fans of themselves. And an army-sized group agreed with your decision despite the mumbling fake-humble introduction you gave it. More people openly endorse turning interesting into mundane than the entire population of Monaco. How am I losing to this? I lose because I seek approval from people who approve of rubbish. IT’S A trap, I say!

Hey it’s okay, man.
Back to my main afterthought, dismissing Final Fantasy 8 just because one character is moody and noncompliant misses the whole point of why the game doesn’t work. I did own and use a copy of the game when it was newish, unaware of the criticisms of others, and discovered afterward that mine, while numerous, differed. Alright, so why am I letting them control how I refer to it in retrospect?

Even people in the game complain about how moody Squall is! Which doesn’t excuse it, but that means, if that is your sole criticism, you need to say more than that. His whole character development is that he learns to stop being as much of a jerk but without making any implausible leap of temperament or pretending to be happy in his miserable video game sword murder quest. So him being a jerk is not the reason the game is dumb, and ultimately not even true!

I think Squall’s less conflicted “friends” are lacking in emotional depth and send mixed messages. They hassle him to go on unusual journeys and then complain when he does. He tries to leave them behind, and they they know it, and instead of stopping him they magically get in front of him and mock him for leaving, and drag him back into their toxic psychological abyss. They would toss Squall in a ditch and laugh if he wasn’t good at murdering. Also I suddenly have an odd premonition that I should warn you I named Squall “Cupcake” on my most recent play-through.

Or Quistis would, anyway. Quistis is the most manipulative and entitled person around. In recognition of that, the game’s writers gave Quistis a fan club. In recognition of rubbish, Wikia writers wrote about it.

And through that I have learned that there are actual Quistis fans, and it shocks me that they can’t find a real person to treat them so poorly.

Thanks for standing back and telling me I FAILED, you who has never tried anything that looks challenging, such as putting that word into a sentence. I’m sure dresses made out of salmon meat are actually very trendy where Quistis comes from so I doubt she is standing against a crowd with that fashion decision. At least her crony, Zell, (the one in the middle) legitimately wants to be helpful and just lacks any personal ambition, but Quistis is a wretch.

But again, bad characters aren’t at fault. I was looking through my old screenshots for this and it just reminded me of QUISTIS everywhere. The fault is on the hokey writing, that would be funny if the characters were not supposed to be more realistic than previous games in the series. But I can live with them. The problem with the game is that it is a big glossy box of unfulfilled promises that somebody clearly intended to fulfill at some point in the process. I can see a framework for a very good game, and having that frame so empty in the end is more frustrating than something that is just lazy, like its contemporary Legend of Dragoon, and more likely to have a player dwelling on it 15 years later. Of course it helps if that player is out of touch with games that came afterward and looks for any opportunity to connect a new experience to it in an attempt to grasp some sense of belonging in a culture they hate but bafflingly want to be liked by, so long as they don’t know what else the likers like.

It looks as if I compared my dissatisfaction with final fantasy 8 to my dissatisfaction with Star Wars in one of my oldest existent website entries, and without clarifying, so apparently I need to do that now or risk writing something even longer than this when I am 45ish. And it looks like I, again, went with the crowd and blamed everything on a few characters, Jar Jar Binx and whiny bowl haircut Anakin, even though fault truly lies with bad writing, running time that exceeds content time, and the few good things being promptly forgotten or killed. And I more than likely knew that when I wrote that. But I lacked the foresight to consider “15 years from now none of the people pretending to like me, that I pretend to be likable by them for now are still going to bother.” Eh I thought I would be comfortably wealthy and widely respected for my bold opinions on current topics and uniquely profound artwork by 2006.

Finally, somebody who UNDERSTANDS me!

more of this!

This is a very thematically incongruous website!

—————-

This was already half-written when I posted the last one. Backing out was not an option.
I suppose my previous item is more a criticism of “news” in general than the individual humans I mentioned. I am meant to take “news” more seriously than “tabloids” or tv shows about boring people in mansions, but it has no journalistic standards. It promotes the two party political system and the associated agenda of fearmongering. CBS news was on that day instead, but presumably ABC did the same thing: When reporting on the recent, widely publicized San Bernardino murders, carried out by supposed Isis sympathizers, beside the reporter were displayed pictures of convoys of dark-hooded people in deserts riding in jeeps carrying huge guns. San Bernardino is not in a desert! The shooting was done by TWO people, who look JUST THE SAME as anybody else, in a NORMAL city like any other, just as we have HUNDREDS such mass bullet murders yearly. One of those people is from HERE, United Statia. And the other had been here for a solid year, and was considered a permanent resident. We have a murder problem HERE, done by people who live HERE. 3000 angry druids did not drive jeeps across two oceans and start firing freedom-seeking missiles as soon as they touched blessed American dirt, and if they continue to not do that it will not be because Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump or Ronald McDonald stood at The Border, like that is a place, and stopped them.

This San Bernardino mention, I should add, came amidst a story about a man with a KNIFE and a FAKE BOMB who ran into a POLICE STATION in Paris. That idiot had a note declaring allegiance to Isis. That’s the dumbest story I heard all year, and even half a month in that’s saying something. I could duct tape a colecovision to my chest and get shot, too. That I tried doesn’t prove anything, and that you shot me to death only proves that I cannot be questioned. You could shoot me first and write a note that says “I is Isis I hate good guys signed me ps. only true patriots can stop me and prevent forest fires” and I couldn’t stop you. When The News is going to report on stuff like that, they need to present it so that I don’t assume they made it up.

Just this week there was a suicide attack in Istanbul. Isis supposedly claimed credit. First of all, since it was a SUICIDE attack, the attacker is dead so Ladysmith Black Mambazo could claim credit. This story I saw back on good old ABC again, and the graphic showed TANKS this time. Isis is not driving 50 tanks into Southern California to back up those jeeps it also isn’t sending! When are we going to stop thinking of these conflicts in World War 2 terms? This is not us vs them. It is us vs him and him and him and mostly him and her and him and on like that. There is not an organized military infrastructure to target, that tells you when it is coming, and that is itself all on the same “side.” USA is obsessed with world war 2 because that is the last war that it looked good in, because that was the last war it understood at all. Millions were dying in Europe for years and the US came in late to be heroes. It had casualties but not on the level of any other country involved, and consequently learned nothing from the conflict except “we’re always right and we’re always the strongest,” which it already believed. And so all our policy makers grew up continuing to believe that. Network news programs showing me armored hoards advancing in formation in daylight when it talks about murderers hiding in crowds and blowing themselves up has two purposes: to make me afraid, and to make me seek safety in conventional western military counter-measures, and likewise to trust the reports I get of that military’s accomplishment.

Even Nazi Germany was a western power, which used western tactics and western rules. The US does not know how to engage what is actually out there now, but its military industrial complex knows how to keep getting paid to make big dumb expensive things that can fly around and kill random people, and then boast about all the “enemy combatants” that got blowed up. We bombed crucial Isis installations! We killed Al Qaeda’s number 2! We GOT the BAD GUYS! So why are there more bad guys than ever? Either we aren’t really getting anyone, or whatever we are getting is making more guys go bad. We hear about French or Turkish forces striking back after recent supposed Islamic State attacks, but why is there anything for them TO back-strike? Why did they WAIT, and why didn’t they finish?

And we don’t even necessarily have real pilots involved who can personally verify or be held accountable for anything. We are sending robots to kill and trusting whoever runs the robot to tell us what they thought the robot saw.

Even scarier is considering that such an absence of outcome is deliberate, that there is no intention of resolving or concluding conflict. So I am scared anyway, doubting the people who try to make me afraid. And they are afraid. Always terrified that some other country not aligned to American interests will build an atomic bomb, and convinced that any country with the means to do so will, since that is what Americans would do. Americans are afraid of the force that they set the precedent for using.

Which is not to say the US is alone in perpetuating warfare to keep its own interests on top, but as the one with the most soldiers and the most distance and safety from the countries it is trying to control, when this stuff goes wrong we suffer loudest and venge least discriminately.

These are the conclusions I reach, quite on my own, when my information is delivered so clumsily, and the clumsiness seems deliberate. And if
addendum for 12-31-2016: I have no evidence of ever having completed that sentence nor recollection of starting it. If I intended to conclude on “and if,” I have no idea why I did so.

Strictly regarding frivolity that I understand, I previously griped about ABC news devoting extensive coverage to “leaked” Star Wars junk that could only possibly have been leaked by the people who tell ABC news what to report on. Incoming kardashian trashian facts are also desirable, and if there aren’t any, that is still a story. Each winter they report that it’s cold outside. Unless it isn’t cold outside yet, which means they report that it isn’t cold. When Pope Francis was in the US this September, that was the top story for a whole week even though Mr. Pope did the same thing each day of the week, which was to get driven around and address an audience. In fact the same exact stuff he does when he isn’t in the US. No other head of state gets that kind of coverage, but no other head of state has that many followers. So the story wasn’t what the pope was doing or does, just that he EXISTS and how popular he is. And people still think The Media has an anti-christian bias. That’s not it at all. The Media has an anti-substance bias. I pledge to you: If I have nothing to say, it will be nothing about me or nothing of personal relevance. I will not share the nothing of others, and will not ask others to distribute my own nothing.

I posted this on my secret personal facebook page last night.

And when it refers to that night and the night before, it therefore actually means the night before this one and the night before that one. I hope this has been minimally deformative. The personal facebook page is “secret” because I primarily use it to manage my non-secret bimshwel page, and my last personal page got shut down for having a stupid name. Since this one has an even stupider name I seek to minimize awareness of it.

This mostly summarizes what I months earlier shoved not completely relevantly into a long boring post about being tired of watching television that I forced myself to watch. Oddly enough this summary of that paragraph is longer and boringer than it. Although that is consistent with my past behavior and therefore not very odd at all.

Another debate pageant tonight. You do not need to read this, I just need to post it!

Doris Kearns Goodwin, a presidential historian, was a guest on the Late Colbert Show last night, remarking on the fact that Mr. D Trump has not been overtaken by “mainstream” presidential candidates yet. What makes Trump not “mainstream?” I hate to accept that somebody who studies this stuff as a lifestyle can look at the non-Trump candidates and think “it is the natural and correct order of things that one of these buffoons be one step away from the national presidency.”
To summarize what I have been squawking elsewhere the past few months, the modern republican party needs to die, good and dead. For the values it espouses, and allows the democratic party to also espouse in an effort to draw support away from republicans, and worse, still look good in comparison to. The worse the republicans get standing for the worst things, the better our wimpy, principle-devoid democrat party looks standing for nothing at all. We should not be forced to see that as the good choice.

I dislike Bernard Sanders less than the other candidates, but first of all that is based on the same kind of internet hype that made me prObama, which ultimately let me down. And also, running as a democrat forces Uncle Bernie into the democrats’ box, which wants its candidates to drop any topic that does not meet that box’s terms of service, and also agree not to oppose Hillary Clinton after a certain point. Indeed, that box wanted everyone to stop opposing Hillary Clinton after November 2011. That ending was written before the story started. We’re living in a perpetual frustrating prequel, like Smallville or Gotham or whatever. Nothing can happen to disrupt something in the future whose status is totally arbitrary, no matter how long the prequel goes on, and how many details develop that we didn’t have in mind when we wrote the ending. Ha ha ha, let’s laugh at Lincoln Chafee for having a funny name and wanting a measurement system with more order and less random numbers to memorize, regardless of how many other countries use it (most of them). And we can laugh at Dennis Kucinich for looking like a character from a Fievel movie. But please don’t dismiss them entirely for that.

What I think we need is a legitimate force to oppose these two parties, even a force with “no chance” to win. I think a lot of us do. And we could use a major news organization, with infrastructure behind it, to not tacitly back the policies of any party. Not just sporadic obscure advocacy that can be ignored for 20 years and later presented with “look at who predicted our garbage present!” Imagine if ABC news worked as hard at digging for facts behind the terrorism threat threats they get from the government as they did at digging for new Star Wars trailers. You’ll have to!

Sanders himself was an obscure advocate. You can look up video of him, in 1991, when he was a US representative, predicting prolonged US entanglement in Mesopotamia if it invaded Iraq, (Dick Cheney, as well). Why wasn’t that a story THEN? Or in 2003? Why can somebody offering an informed reason to not do something that cannot be undone be taken seriously? Because our major news organizations, funded by corporations, would have lost sponsors if they gave weight to anti-war arguments. Anyone found guilty would be forced out, like Phil Donahue. I would say Dan Rather as well but you could point to sloppy inability to defend or back up his own story about George Wuh Bush that lost him his CBS news boatholder job.

Anyway, what I want at this point is for Donald Trump to be nominated by his party and then have the “mainstream” republican candidates refuse to support him. I do not want any of them to be president, but this would undermine the whole convention process, and reveal more publicly how dumb this all is. Reveal that “the people” don’t really decide who they vote for, or even who they are allowed to vote for. Trump represents horrible things, but he is the most sincere reflection of actual American voters in his party, apart from having loads more money. The other candidates present no basis for denying that. If they really believe in telling people what is “right,” they’ll stop pretending we don’t have a gun problem, a bank problem, a pharmaceutical problem, a meat problem, a pollution problem, a pumpkin problem, a church problem, a surveillance problem and on and on. We need to stop pretending persecution, misdirected aggression and divinity of the famous are not core American values going back to the country’s founding so we can actually do something about them.
I do not share the Isis standpoint of “hurry up and destroy the world,” but I also do not believe in condoning mediocrity. Condoning mediocrity, doing something just because a lot of visible, impatient loudmouths demanded it done allowed Isis to exist!

I feel it is owed to my state, Connecticut, personally, after Joe “Mortal Kombat will turn our children into homicidal palette-swapped ninjas” Lieberman refused to back Ned Lamont, who won their democrat senate primary, and ran instead as an “independent” and ultimately got re-elected to the senate by harnessing the collective ignorance and dumb fear of both permitted sides. If we can do that to keep boneheads in office, we can certainly do it to keep boneheads out of office.

Hardly a collection of complete thoughts; I hate being “topical” because there is not time to think about things at length. There is not even time or space to finish or scan that terrible drawing I put on this just so somebody would notice it. But if this was my JOB, I would make certain I did so. I wish we had not created a world that demanded immediate uninformed emotional responses all the time. “Why hasn’t the president condemned Joe Bones’ outrageous remarks yet?” Because outrage doesn’t accomplish anything!

Howdy.

I will have a terrible story to tell you soon.

page 40 of this’s redrawings.

I am disappointed that these are not getting any easier even though the base drawings are less incomprehensible overall. There is less figuring for me to do, but just as much redrawing, alas. And still not NO refiguring, since I seem to have kept up cramming in dialog baubles wherever they would fit, and wherever they would not fit long beyond a reasonable time period. Some people can draw a whole comic book in a day, I can barely draw one old page in a month.

However, I have received the proof prints of the first book, all printed and properly bound together for the first time, and it seems like doing that in greater numbers is a viable operation. All this may amount to something, even if not a whole lot.

Minutae:
Somehow, I only noticed after I had redrawn the thing that I never explained, to myself or anyone else, how kumquat has closed the door in the last frame here. The next page certainly does not explain it; kumquat points at a control unit that was clearly not being touched when the door shut. This note is to remind me to shoe-horn in a clumsy retroactive explanation for that next.

Compared to the old version, I had to change the dialog because it was terribly out of character for elpse to not scream at or attack somebody who admitted to hurting nemitz on purpose.
The lizard’s first appearance is also out of character, but since that takes up two rows, it is hard for me at this point to think of something else that should go there. Since I inserted a page before here where elpse gets angry at someone for hurting nemitz who did not even do so, this page is harder to ignore.
Although maybe I would have made more success if I didn’t try to justify everything and just wrote an anarchy story. Nobody ever said to me: I like this comic strip but sometimes the characters have inconsistent personalities. But generally if people don’t like something they just keep quiet so I have to anticipate what they are having a problem with.

One good thing to come of the print attempt that I can apply immediately, is that it forced me to figure out exactly how much space I “have.” A long time ago I measured a comic book that I had and based my space usage on that, not considering that the book I measured might have had a reason for not printing to the page edges. And as I changed the paper I drew on, and its orientation several times, my proportions got further warped. Now I match them to a template provided by Ka-Blam, the print company, which I presume is consistent, at least, with what other north american printers are using.

The version I had here for years is either too narrow when scaled to the height of the template, leaving “live” space on the sides, or too tall when scaled to its width, entering the forbidden margin zone. Narrow is actually fine, since extra live space will be filled in exactly the same as the margin space. What is wrong with drawing in the margins? They MIGHT be cut off, due to natural shifting while printing or cutting across many documents. And the bleed WILL be cut off in any event. So why can’t the computer just choose to NOT print into the bleed since it knows exactly where that is? Don’t bother to ask anybody that question, since they will pretend you are asking something else and treat you like you are rubbing a doughnut on your face. They guard this sacred knowledge like it’s the Davinci Code. You just have to live with it, or you die for it.

So I can leave the page narrow. Except I drew way too big originally, and had to cram in the dialog awkwardly around the drawings that I could not comfortably reduce. Therefore, I ought to widen the page, and claim the live space that is rightfully mine to try and declutter the wordage, right? But I had already been widening the redrawn pages based on my latest guess at correct page proportions prior to using the template, which actually ends up being too wide or too short for proper printing!!! I went too far!

Scandal! Look at all that free live space! I long to see it captured and slaughtered. Having it be marginalized is inadequate punishment.

But too short, like too narrow, can go unnoticed. Since I arranged the words reasonably this time, nothing more needs to be done. In the printed book, therefore, most pages are too short. For once I left things alone! I only talled up a few toward the end of the process, and superficially altered a few others immediately prior to printing by increasing the size of the gaps between frames.

One of the taller pages with enhanced gaps beside one of the shortest, that you may already be acquainted with. The disparity is already not great, and since they do not actually appear together,

and a real book doesn’t lie flat, the issue is almost invisible.

Does that all make sense? It shouldn’t! Printing technology is still stuck in the 1940s. We can electronically send a sandwich into space but we can’t know exactly how a computer image is going to show up on paper right in front of us, and the machine responsible may break in one of many ways trying to do it. It took me so many years and so much rage to figure all this out and get used to it, I have no CHOICE but to keep printing books. For once I know everything that can go wrong and have prepared for them all. The books came out perfectly and I succeeded. I can not be held up further!

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGHHHHFFFFFH I’VE BEEN BORDER-LINED

Another tv host that I watched is done with, and I am not looking to pick up new ones.
I did watch the deely show during its previous transition, eh seventeen years ago, but I was very set in my ways then, and had not at that point been watching it for nineteen years. My sincere hope is to not make it to twenty, one because I obsess over seeing every incidence of the program, and two because I write about them, resulting in what an informal poll of my anxiety suggests are my most boring posts.

Aiding me in this stoppage is that I also stopped reading Mark Evanier’s website, in which he talks about TV hosts a lot, after I deduced that he wasn’t reading the emails I sent him simply because the name I signed them with looked fake. Which is true, but so pathetic of me that I thought it would be funny to mention. Against me is that I happen to share responsibility of assisting my father, whose physical state renders him only able to watch television and read books for hobbies, and we run out of books faster than we run out of television! It is impossible for television to run out. Curiously, it is the same person who ten years ago had the responsibility of handling my transportation to college classes because my mental state rendered me unfit to obtain a car-driving license, and I was then, as now, continually spurred to write endless commentary based on the broadcasts I encountered. Our roles have switched, but since I still prefer to not impose on others my viewing/listening preference, and in these cases, to not have the machines on at all, control of them default to any present persons who prefer them on. After that, my obsessive compulsion takes over: I MUST watch every episode, and I MUST seek them on the internet if I miss the initial broadcast, even if my connection is atrocious and inclined to battle me endlessly. Seventeen years is too long to live like that.

I do not want Trevor Noah, the next replacement host, to fail; I want him to succeed in a way that only appeals to other people, like the XBox, but not to so many people that I feel like the world is running away from me and wants me to die, so more like the Wii.

And as soon as Jon Stewart was off the air, punditry appeared to present him as someone who saw through hype and was always mentally grounded in reality and truth, an impeccable model of integrity and unmatched prowess whose likes would never be seen again through all the times. Which in saying, you become exactly the idiot Stewart devoted his program to criticizing, which means you missed the point of what you claim to appreciate him for.

But he got “Crossfire” canceled!
But Crossfire came back! And the same sort of garbage debase debating thrives on the internet!
But he told off Jim Cramer!
But Jim Cramer didn’t cause a recession! And financial garbage kept happening!
But he told off Bush administration officials!
But only the ones that came on the show! And then only kind of because they are slippery, and he admitted last month that these were mostly pointless endeavors!

By treating people like deities, exaggerating their achievements and forgetting their errors, you invite more disasters in the same vein.

Gorf and yabbering resumed about “what’s stephen colbert gonna do? He isn’t “The Character” anymore!” But he is! He just did it on this show now! David Letterman, whose show Colbert is replacing, was in character. Glen Beck is in character. Gordon Ramsay is in character. Alex Trebek is in character. Your local news anchors are all presenting artificial personalities to a degree. Literally the only difference between Colbert and other entertainment show hosts is that others don’t pretend to have political views contrary to their personal beliefs. Conan O’Brien has a number of personas that go on and off to suit a situation, and has repeatedly given false yet consistent biographical information to viewers. He claims his real name is Chip Whitley, he went to the Harvard Driving School instead of the university, his mother is Edith Bunker and that Andy Richter saved his life in Vietnam. He blames Jay Leno for pushing him out of the job that he pushed Jay Leno out of. He doesn’t get to be two people. He may not even be one real person.

The previous The Daily Show host Craig Kilborn is not a comedian so much as a very strange man. His 8 second pre-taped cameo on Jon Stewart’s final show should have been funny, where he says something like “I always knew you’d run it into the ground,” if Kilborn played it straight, but he chose to film it in his wine cellar bunker wearing a ridiculous grid-lined suit, which was so odd that I was still fixated on how odd it was when Kilborn delivered his line. I had to watch it two more times before I realized Kilborn wasn’t wearing a bathrobe. Although maybe that was supposed to be part of the joke: Kilborn assumes Stewart has been fired because Kilborn lives in a wine cellar and has very little contact with the outside. And then it was just weird that Kilborn was on the show at all. Not that he was banned from appearing, but he makes people uncomfortable. And I relate to that. Never being quite sure what joke I am going with, and so I use everything, and they are often at odds, and people do not realize I have made a joke at all. Alright so why don’t I have money with which to dig a hole and live in it?

I admit that the fact that Kilborn got almost no recognition from the audience colored my awkwardvision. It wasn’t that nobody recognized him, since Vance Degeneres, who hasn’t been seen in the years since he left the Daily Show, and Mo Rocca, who hasn’t been funny, clearly got a reaction. And Dan Bakkedahl, paired with Matt Walsh, was probably the least recognizable of any of them. Literally the only thing I remember Matt Walsh doing was appearing in a best-of special (the show used to put out 4 or 5 of those a year) of his own segments, with a wrap-around sketch where he was antagonized by his own evil twin, who proclaimed near the end “now it’s time for evil twin to evil WIN!”

And it would seem that nobody else ever did.
Dan Bakkedahl I just remember due to his name being said, and Joel McHale of The Soup (another tv show, which nobody else here watched after I donated my television, thus relieving me of my own duty to do so) mispronouncing it as Bake-a-doll. Anyway, if the studio audience recognized this gang, it recognized Kilborn; it just felt no reason to appreciate Kilborn.

There are Vance and Mo, as I said. Nice to see Vance is recovering from his stroke, not nice to see that his public appearances have been so minimal since leaving the Daily Show that evidence of one of my six all-time wikipedia edits are still on his page.

Seriously, you chose cat in tree over porkchop fire? Philistines. Also, ‘apparatuses’ is correct. Go jump in a dumpster, user:Alan_Smithee.

Celebrity Jeopardy non-winner Josh Gad’s not-necessarily-funny loudness was consistent with past appearances despite his cited salary to the contrary (and no longer being as fat). He provided a voice in the animuted film Frozen, which my father has seen but I have not. A few weeks after this show criticizes D. Trump for making his presidential pitch as “I’m rich,” this Gad that I’m supposed to like comes out and yells “Disney money, BITCH!” The difference, of course, is that Josh said “bitch.”

Stacey Grenrock-Woods, whose Daily Show reception was similar to Gad’s, did not appear, but did not appear in Book of Mormon either. She did have many more segments aired, however — 55 in total, if imdb.com is to be believed, and it is not always, since it only lists one for Gad, and I know he appeared at least four times, including this one.

By the roy, I am glad Donald Trump has the attention he is getting. The American republican party has been led by a kangaroo court of irrational loudmouth cartoon characters with no solutions as long as I have been casually acknowledging politics, long before Fox News streamlined our access to it. The party created this opportunity for somebody like Trump, and deserves everything that Trump does with the opportunity, and the party deserves to not be able to control Trump. They did not learn anything from Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sarah Palin, and this is the next stage of that. Now that the American public widely supports homosexual rights, believes in evolution and other similarly “blasphemous” endeavors, the republican party has lost Christian moral authority as a means to prop itself up, which is all it ever had, and nobody believes it anymore when it claims it’s actually talking about science instead of religion, either. Without that they just have to get more and more ridiculous to get attention. The Jon Stewart exit aired the same night as the once-recent republican debate… One of these indistinguishable dumb shows that the Daily one had little impact on the continued creation of, interviewed a focus group after the debate, because that’s safer than actually expressing an opinion for yourself, and one member chosen to speak on camera claimed to have formerly been a Trump supporter, but no longer! I cannot think what put the guy off: Trump’s total consistency with past behavior, that made him the party frontrunner and got him in the debate among the sponsored politicians to begin with?

“Hey I thought he was gonna change his tune and pretend he had believed stuff all along that he obviously didn’t once he became a viable candidate. Why, that’s against the rules, old boy! I say, this isn’t cricket. Color me mad.”

I would love for the republican party to self destruct and allow a competent group to take its place and challenge democrats on legitimate topics instead of the some old non-topics both sides mutually agreed to fake-argue about so they could maintain their rubbish party-based electoral college system. Which seems a naive thing to say, and polls don’t amount to a hill of beans in an election over a year away, but I appreciate not knowing exactly what is going to happen next and finding an opening to have naive hopes in.
Back on topic, the less daily-like shows I view, the less aware I will be of polls and therefore the less likely I will feel the need for that manner of interlude.

With a barrel-chested swagger and cocky, confident air, not to mention his lusty handsomeness and obvious athleticism, 6’4″ brawny baritone Jon Stewart had Comedy Central’s loveliest songbirds swooning helplessly for over a decade in what were some of the finest fake news ever produced.

Wordpress, the system that manages this website content, is agony.
Do you see the list of recent posts on this page? That truly basic, unimpressive list? It took me all yesterday to implement. I thought it would surely be faster to find an automatic method to make the system check for new posts and order them by date than for me to manually manage that list myself.
I sought out the wordpress forums, and turned up old posts on the topic. At each stage I found an existing request for help with my problem:

How do i show a list of recent posts?

use this bit of code

Great, but it only works on the sidebar. How do I put it in the main post space?

use the recent posts widget.

My theme is outdated; how do I enable widgets?

put this piece of code in one file, and another piece of code in another file.

Widgets ALSO only work on the sidebar.

get this widget-manipulator plugin.

Drat, the widget is showing up on every page instead of just one page

get this widget manipulator-manipulator plugin

Wonderful, now it is on just one page. How do I change the appearance of the post list?

don’t use widgets. Just add a little bit of code to your sidebar. Also this is from 4 years ago so you can’t reply and tell me that the whole point is to NOT use the sidebar. CLOSED. SOLVED.

Everybody gives the scantest possible amount of information to get rid of you, and then the junk still does not work. At that point I would need to find a post that simultaneously requested a solution to the base problem, the sidebar problem and the appearance problem, as a prior request does not exist. In the case when I asked about a problem for myself, nobody answered and the topic was closed despite being unresolved, because they only have easy answers and would rather ignore something that confounds them than admit to not knowing. Or maybe I seemed like somebody who would call out an easy answer for being useless.

Oh yikes, this person actually explained a problem in detail, that means I can’t offer a dumb non-solution and be proud of myself. Without being criticized for it.

I should explain that wordpress uses “themes” to allow users to change their sites’ appearances easily from a guided-user-interface, without editing code. But that only allows certain basic changes. “Widgets” were a later addition to themes that allowed even more changes, but could not themselves be changed. And still only worked on sidebars. “Plug-ins” are different from widgets, because they are not integrated into the wordpress code, which ironically makes them easier to force to work WITH wordpress the way I want them to. So I need to dig into the code anyway, every time, for everything, and test it 800 times until it works or I find a disappointing but functional compromise to fall back on, which I hate doing, which is why I use the same graphics for months or years at a time instead of one month each like I formerly did before I installed wordpress. The whole thing barely works and needs constant encouragement.

Why is a basic reasonable thing: having a list of posts NOT be on the SIDE of the page, so improbable and impossible that the developers did not anticipate it being necessary and none of the dorks who understand this stuff in their spare time ever saw a need to figure it out? The exact same garbage happened for my automated comic strip site-section (although it was over the number of pages displayed at once and not the folder issue), and the coppermine art gallery mechanism. And for Zdoom, ten years ago, which is why I never finished the dingdang thing and still mentally fixate on it. Every time every time every time. the thing I want is always just outside of permissible, for no reason that is apparent. So I have to figure it out or leave it behind.
I have had various diagnoses throughout my life; tourette syndome here, asperger syndrome there, high functioning autism, disco fever, what-have-you-ever. These mean that I need help with some things. But if nobody can provide help, is it really me who is disabled? Outside the internet, I am surrounded by people who drink themselves sick, smash their expensive telephones, misplace their cars, will not read their own mail, will not let themselves become aware of their bills, stereotype and condemn anyone whose opinion differs, adopt pets they cannot look after (and dump those pets on me), buy junk they cannot afford, and then do not use or return the junk. Am I disabled just because I cannot instantly bond with any yahoo off the street over my own screwups? Hey I broke my wrist assaulting a piece of architecture too! That makes us normal! Let’s go spend $300 on two cups of beer!

Technology that is supposed to make life easier and be so “professional”-looking becomes itself such a massive burden that we give up on things that we might have finished had the technology not insisted on becoming so gosh darn convenient. And when I persevere it is only through hacky patchwork repairs that look uglier than if I had just stuck with the outdated thing I was replacing. The outdated thing that has all its data in one file, in one folder. Then a useless idiot happens along and tells me I should have been using this or that BETTER miracle system from the beginning.

Once again the only way to get what I want is to edit the actual wordpress files outside of the theme stuff. Which are in different folders, and inevitably lead to copies downloaded and new versions uploaded to the wrong folder amidst all the folder switching I will have to do trying to bring the css and php into accord. And when wordpress has a new version, it updates itself, quite without asking, and thinks nothing of overwriting my changes outside the theme folder, even if it has not itself changed the files that I edited. So I may end up needing to fix it every time the version changes. But I am capable of changing it! I am capable of fixing it! For the time being I have control. That is what life is about for losers: you find a way to co-exist with things that are set up to make you give up. You do not win, but you keep yourself from losing completely. And watch out for widgets that pretend to be your pal but just want to hold you back and expect rewards for it.

And I may in the end decide that the “page” view does not work for me anyway, and opt for something outside of wordpress, to which I can add some customized mechanism that reads wordpress excerpts without messing anything else up because it is not itself built on wordpress. But I will have dropped the wordpress option because I thought it looked bad, not because dorkhnical support refused to support me.

This is not a mopey entry. This is how I conquer mopiness.

This was in a previous entry, when I got temporarily on to the topic of passive acceptance of victimhood, but it was not meant to be the primary topic, but it was very boring. I will surreptitiously insert it here immediately before I post something slightly more interesting, so that I can know I posted it without worrying that anybody might have read and been bored by it.

Shia LaBeouf, during a performance art piece in which he would not speak, and his collaborators who arranged the exhibition report that LaBeouf was raped during the performance. By someone who had already been “whipping” him for ten minutes, and there were lots of people around, and the whipping raping psychopath was allowed to escape afterward. Am I supposed to accept that not speaking in the name of “art” is more important than calling for help, trying to protect yourself from trauma, or are people so terrified of appearing critical that they won’t ask for additional details that will make this seem less ridiculous? Did the person have a gun, even though there were guards checking for that? Was there a threat first? Piers Morgan is a jackass. His sentiment is not mine. There is no excuse for raping, I should not need to say that. And he also spoke from the perspective of inherited outrage, because that is also popular: to be the first to get offended on behalf of another party*.

But you might as well have a performance art project where you stand in the Lincoln Tunnel and then lament your plight that somebody in the world was mean enough to not drive around you. Morgan himself, on Morgan’s own tv program let Alex Jones yell at him for 20 minutes. They are both jackasses that deserve each other.

The first article ends by suggesting that LaBeouf did not get police involved because he was ashamed the he couldn’t defend himself and so kept the story to himself, except he didn’t because two other “artists” on the scene knew something was up and we know about it now well within the statute of limitations.
Is the word “rape” the problem? If we say the woman whipped Monsieur TheBeef for ten minutes, then stripped off his clothes and dumped a vat of pudding on him without raping, then would we be allowed to think that silently letting somebody do that to you, and then silently not telling your co-dorks that somebody did that, is peculiar? We have a fear now of discussing rape that we don’t have with murder, even though murder is worse.

It is not easy to sit in a room for hours, not knowing what people are going to do to you. But if you do it on purpose because you fancy yourself an “Artist” then I have difficulty feeling sympathy. Conversely, I have no sympathy for artists who put in no effort at all. Art is pretty stupid. It is one of our great fame lotteries. How many gimmicky boneheads have we made millionaires out of just because nobody with money will acknowledge that everything they do is ugly?

Rachel Dolezal, who famously passed herself as being of African descent when she was not: I have no problem with her identifying with another culture more than the one she was born into. I have a problem if she invented fake hate crimes against herself so that she could publicize that they occurred. It means she wants to be black because she finds glamour in being of a discriminated-against social class. She wants to be a victim.
She was initially discriminated against, while openly-white, because people THOUGHT she was blackish. Society laughs at that sort of claim, I think unjustly, and so Dolezal redevoted her life to accruing discrimination she could get sympathy for. We raise people to seek exploitable victimhood.

Gorf it took me two weeks to get remotely comfortable with posting this, and in that period I have added a further portion that I once again am not sure I want to post, and am so deferring for later consideration. That is life. Except I explicitly concluded it by saying I was not going to write any more depressing entries, and so until I post that depressing entry I have nothing in place to prevent me from writing more.

so is earnestly trying to appreciate wrong-headed remakes for stuff that worked without being remade, so I can at least swear off doing that.

Some times I wonder if somebody is out to get me, but is lacking for details about my life and so has to go about messing with it in an indirect fashion.

The situation at present is that I have an art exhibit of unprecedented size to set up on July 1. I intended to prepare 6-10 pictures I had not previously printed, most of which were near displayability, which I only seriously delved into last Saturday, believing a week-and-a-half plenty of time to finish so many near-finished things and also send them to a remote location for printing. My computer sternly disagreed and the following morning refused to turn on. This behavior was repeated on subsequent mornings and other distinct day-periods following. Instead of asking for a postponement of the exhibit opening or resigning myself to make do with the considerable quantity of art junk I already have ready, I had every intention of doing precisely what I set out to do prior to events which rendered it undoable, even though it was already barely doable.

Try to imagine you have an important engagement, or a terribly unimportant engagement that only seems like it is due to your utterly meaningless life, and your automobile explodes, melts, or otherwise becomes inoperable immediately before you are due for this engagement: in most cases, due to the isolation of your meaningless life, you will just have to not go, and deal with that. However, if your automobile melts but you have a seesaw-action minecart standing by, you might consider “I bet I could get there on the minecart” and then cause yourself more trouble trying failurely than you would have just accepting failure from the beginning and doing something else with your time. Also, along the way you have to let other people ride the minecart for a while because it is a popular minecart and the trendy little tricycles the people bought for themselves instead of getting minecarts are ultimately even less practical. And it’s your fault anyway since you never thought your car would melt and that you would need to use your minecart for anything serious and encouraged the people you are now complaining about to use it so that it was not wasted. Also I just remembered that you are trying to sell your garage andthe pieces of melted carrRRRRRRRRGH I’VE BEEN PUDDING’D And furthermore I must say your metaphor is rather hard to follow.

This picture actually does not prove anything. It is a laptop computer with the large empty front piece turned over. It looks more complicated than it is. Also, I do not advocate positioning a laptop computer on the top of your own lap since that can lead to back or neck strain. It is better to find someone taller whose lap you can borrow for the occasion.

All I did after putting the computer like this was slide out the hard drive, hidden beneath the lower right section, temporarily load the hard drive into the tiny computer lurking in the distance, whose own drive I removed to accomodate this act, booted it from a remotely adequate, somewhat judgmental version of linux, because it was the best my crummy internet could procure, off of a flash drive, and copied a few things from the hard drive to “work” with in a comparatively less inadequate version of linux that nonetheless lacked the ram quantities, screen size and bearable software I was accustomed to while I waited for a replacement computer more like my accustoms, generously provided by Mr. Pez of Springfield PC and Advanced Telemetry Systems, who also provded my previous units and advised me on hard drive swapping, that I could re-place the slid-out hard drive into, and resume with minimal issue. Well it seems complicated when you say it all at once like that.

You may have noticed that I described a number of things but used far fewer pictures than usual, and also put “work” between quotation marks, and further, have jumped from my usual unstated “six days without updates” minimum to seven. That ought to indicate to you that the situation has been just about as irritating as my implications and run-on sentences imply it might be, that would not be entertaining to read about with more specifics and punctuation added in. But if it does not then it probably is not a matter of great significance outside of my personal experience across the previous week. And golly feeble at least I didn’t get shot at. And yes the rumors I started are true: this website is on some level intended to be amusing.

I know sometimes it comes across like an inept assemblage of random details, however,

A question lately occurs to me:

A lot of people sure seem to think they have!

And what is more, they think it noteworthy that they think they have seen it. They honor the deed by listing products and brands and calling it a day, except when they copy each others’ lists of contextless product acknowledgments and go home early. Remembering further back than five years is HARD.

I had high expectations for this one; it was going to go back in time and CHANGE my Childhood, making all the other lists inaccurate, and thus not my duty to disprove, but then it was just a bunch of fan drawings stolen off of deviantart without any credit to the admittedly uninspired but none-the-less credit-worthy artists, but with ample space to give the thug dork who copied them credit for doing so. Granted, no name is supplied and none of the social media scripts on the page WORK, but it has a heaping hamburger helping of advertisements, many of which do work, so it ultimately serves its purpose: getting real money to scumbags who have no discernible skills. This is the kind of person who insists critics “need to stop the hate” and then blocks all from replying.

I realize brainbread lists are nothing new, and people have gotten paid for the task of acknowledging that things exist and selling advertising on it for about a decade now. Half a millennium ago you gained fame by traveling around the world, gathering wonders that had never been seen in your homeland before. Now you don’t go anywhere and show people stuff they already had and got rid of, and there is actually more demand for this. My gripe is the fixation on the word “childhood,” specifically MINE. Certainly weak-willed dorks have been lamenting the ruination of [their] childhood(s) ever since Marco Polo brought back erotic fan fiction from the Far East; MY childhood this, MY childhood that, but only recently when this was turned around into YOUR childhood, (akaaaa mine), did I take personal offense. If you want to sum up your entire history of conscious functioning as a system of stagnant, staring inaction you may, and furthermore declare this unremarkable period of subservience to sponsored sludge and the sponsors themselves as something pure and infallible, but I refuse to have mine defined with anyone else’s! If My Childhood is anything special, it could surely not be summed up with a photograph of a bag of Keebler Ripplins. And if it can be, then it was wasted and is not worth discussing!

Pizzarias were better, anyway.

But not as good as “pizza,” that I can still buy, so I do not lament the facsimile-chips’ loss.

These things seem to be in agony, however.

You might notice, browsing those lists, that a Ninja Turtle product from 1989 will appear alongside some weird fad toothbrush from 1998, and wonder how those could simultaneously define the same childhood 9 years apart. In fact “your childhood” just means “potential childhood period of anyone currently in the 18-35 year old target demographic favored by advertisers.” That means in three years (as of yesterday) my childhood will officially no longer exist. And I almost believe it, because that is less important to me than my currenthood anyhow. It also means that the original websites from 18 years ago which literally just posted pictures of He-Man action figures and said “hey remember these?” are possibly part of someone’s childhood. I am lucky perhaps to not have gotten so hooked into having my nostalgia packaged and sold back to me by an outside party that to have it no longer available will be a painful blow. 25 OCCUPANTS FROM LISTS ABOUT YOUR CHILDHOOD THEY DON’T ACKNOWLEDGE ANYMORE

25. Saturday Supercade. Hey, remember when Saturday Supercade used to be on these lists? Well the people we want to see these lists don’t!
24. Handi-Snax. Gosh these were terrible! You should be GLAD nobody wants to convince you these were great anymore!
23. Juiceboxes. Nope! People who presently were kids in the past only had nutrient-free fake juice skittle-water in BAGS!
22. The pinball machine on Sesame Street. Better download the 5000 clips of this from youtube now that they aren’t relevant enough to be uploaded 5000 times! And hopefully these lists will be out of style before we get to the point where youtube is on them.

You know what I wanted to do as a child? Stop going to school. Now I am not in school, and I am glad. I cannot even drive a car and I like this better. I miss my grandmother, emergency broadcast system tests, being able to hear rain through my bedroom window and still having the capacity to be excited by the thought of the future, but overall I prefer this now, and look at how angry I am!
Entertainment made for people who were then the age I am now emphasized how much I would wish to be a kid in school once I no longer were. But now I can buy any weird cookies I want that my mother would never buy and can play every stupid Nintendo game on my own computer without having to hoard impractical lumps of plastic and stick a Lincoln log in the disk drive to hold one in place. I have the freedom to kill myself eating bacon pizzas, and maybe I will, if I enjoy that.

Alternatives to pizza do not look like that! A big heap of vegetables is not going to make me magically not want a very specific pizza! Maybe that is My Childhood’s fault, for getting me chemically dependent on horrible food! My Childhood is an irresponsible creep! How dare you remind me of it!

Here is a brief list of things I do not miss about the 1990s:
Roberto Benigni
the Dave Matthews band
the dos prompt
floppy disks
boot disks
Red Baron being the only frozen pizza
AOL busy signals
AOL
Video games that broke and/or needed to be paid for
When I ate pop tarts and hot pockets
Going to school (I told you!)
Not having a means to listen to whatever music I wanted and having to rely on radio stations or whatever CDs I could find, and thinking that was all there was.
Having to watch tv shows when they came on
Wanting to watch tv shows
Having to seek out and hoard vague pictures from tv shows to prove that they existed.
Elmo
Needing to use film to take photographs
Pop-up advertising (specifically, not being able to block it easily)
Tomagotchi-alikes
Molly Shannon
Real-player
Rwanda Genocide
Crash Bandicoot

I found that after I conquered nostalgia on my own terms, it was harder and harder for me to have a similar experience of rediscovery, and I just had to stop. But once something is monetized, it must be pushed and pushed until it explodes. As consumers become desensitized to incessant nostalgia-baiting, content regurgitators will have to dig deeper and skew yet vaguer and more generic.

13 non-food items you put in your mouth

7 jiggly rainbow keys that match no known locks

9 ingredients in your bottle formula that are more dangerous than anything your parents are worrying about in their own diets

18 Gametes You Wish Had Hooked Up!!

46 chromosomes that literally created your childhood! Unless you have Klinefelter syndrome or something

Nostalgia-baiting is this generation’s version of “when I was your age” except it is more like “When YOU were YOUR age” because they just pass it between themselves since nothing happened and they have no one to pass it to. It cannot be used to tell kids how easy they have it because part of the process is emphasizing how AWESOME it is, and much of what would be cited has not changed in 30 years anyhow because now a lucrative commercial property is never allowed to die. These people have NO STORY to tell because the whole point is that I was there too! So they just mention items that might be in the story. Perhaps the next generation’s childhood will just be their parents’ childhood and they can save themselves some trouble.

I first witnessed the film Ghostbusters as a six-year-old. I only vaguely recalled the storyline and made an asinine “parody” comic of it as a twelve-year-old based on the vague memory and titled it “Grossbusters” based on a specific memory of a Mad Magazine article I could not possibly have read beyond the title that I ripped off. I believe the book I drew that in is presently in a storage unit a few towns over from here. Whether for its protection or yours is yet uncertain.

I can understand how, as a child having viewed ghostbusters, my ability to construct a coherent story may have been adversely affected. I finally re-watched it a year or so ago, and it seems to be unexplained how the Ghost-Busters transition from bumbling oafs who run when they meet a ghost into professional oafs who have the means and skill to operate the means to restrain and capture the ghost. It’s even less clear why Dana the lady falls in love with Peter the ghostbuster, who is a total creep and didn’t even find the ghost he was hired to remove. I suppose this is a natural follow-up to Indiana Jones, the 1980s icon who established beyond anything that a highly paid male lead is irresistible to women however self-centered, unfeeling and barely-acted he is. I also don’t understand how Bill Murray WAS the lead; he’s billed first and probably gets the most screen time, yet he doesn’t seem to have any idea what any of the other characters are doing nor to care. It surprises me little to learn that he adlibbed most of his lines. The film moves along despite him rather than because of him. I was surprised to learn that Bill Murray only read the Ghostbusters script on the first day of filming, for from his performance I assumed he had not read the script at all.
I do not HATE Bill Murray; he reminded me of my cousin Bill, who was, at a time when having the same name was a strong association for me, “my favorite person,” but is Murray a “comedy genius?” Not for what he did in Ghostbusters.

It is probably a better movie than it would have been had all the actors been held rigidly to a script, and the lack of fun in some big budget movies after this one was a primary factor in co-star Rick Moranis getting out of the business, so hooray for Ghostbusters! But it is not my favorite movie.

The environmental protection agent, the man I am supposed to hate, has a point. These dorks are storing ghosts quite illegally. Although he also doesn’t have a point since he believes the busters ghost have not truly captured anything, which means they are not storing anything illegally.

Why do towns-folk cheer when the ghostbusters are released from prison? All the ghosts they were paid to bust are on the loose all at once, likely with vengeful attitudes after having been cruelly imprisoned. Real citizens would be furious that they paid to have these ghosts stopped and now the brutes are back. They wouldn’t care if you told them somebody ELSE messed with the ghosts, even if you managed to convince them of that. They would tell you “I don’t care. Just get this ghost out of here or I’m suing.” I know this because I have an aunt from New York City and that’s exactly what she would say. She has no interest in the reason anything went wrong. Therefore ensuring a life of the same things repeatedly going wrong. In my life I like to have a different thing breaking down every week but this is a digressionary topic. I should keep this relevant.

Ray is baffled when Winston suggests that the ghosts are spirits of dead people. I thought that much was implicit in the terminology “ghost.” Even considering this, neither has any regret or remorse about continuing to trap these lost, unfulfilled living desires in a box, and then transferring them to another box, for, presumably, ever.

It is still an entertaining movie that is not held back by its plot holes and I can see the appeal in it. Not the overpowering nerd-dom, but I never do. The costumes and made up technology are neat, I suppose. There is good stuff here for an extended series. But these two movies do not fill me with desire to see more like them, and I recall being underwhelmed by the tie-in animated show.

Through being a “comedy” it can better get away with its science not making sense. Although it is just barely a comedy. If not for Rick Moranis and Bill Murray playing themselves in the movie it wouldn’t have been. If, when Moranis was being chased by the gozer dog (whose function, if it is explained, I missed), he had been shouting “Help! I’m Rick Moranis!” the scene would have worked just as well. If the police officer who finds him later had said to Egon “here, we caught Rick Moranis wandering around. Why don’t you keep him” it wouldn’t have made a difference. The funniest thing Harold Ramis did was hold up boxes of Cheez-It and cans of Coke from time to time. He was still alive when I wrote this and I never got around to posting what I think about the film Groundhog Day so this should not count as slandering his legacy. I have no posthumous quarrel with him!

And that song, gosh that Ghostbusters song is awful, whether it’s a Huey Lewis ripoff or isn’t. Bustin makes me feel goood!
Well how do you think it makes THEM feel?
I, personally, only bust out of necessity.
The most peculiar aspect (of several) in the official music video is that Ray Parker Jr himself is a ghost, meaning that he is inviting for himself to be busted. He follows some lady around insisting that she make this happen. She fails to get the deed carried out. Now we all have to suffer.

That actually did not require much editing. I am not sure what I was waiting for. Not the announcement of a new all-lady Ghostbuster cast, but that was enough. Another dumb nontroversy I would not be aware of if I lived alone.

Do I care that there would be an all woman ghostbusters cast? Do I care that there is a female Thor? Do I care that there is any Thor? I am more bothered that at least 3 are from Saturday Night Live, the most complacent inescapable and self-fellatingly uncancelable television institution of our times. A show that I have liked things on, but that I do not need repeated in or influencing any other context, which of course it never stops doing. I am bothered that we can’t just leave the Ghostbusters or anything else alone that belongs in the 1980s. If this movie can be made without requiring fawning 80’s themed advance-nerd-dom from its audience, then we still aren’t going to know for another year so what is the point of getting worked up over it now? I don’t even care about the new star wars, and I LIKE star wars, even when I hate it. Thankfully they do not yet have the means to produce Star Warses on a weekly basis.

Two of the initial ghostbusters were from Saturday Night Live, of korf, but Ghostbusters was their concept (or their inventive take on somebody else’s older gorilla suit employing concept), so they can be from wherever they want. I permit it.

And I realize I mentioned Mad Magazine earlier, which is even older and setter in its ways but nobody else I am within influence rage of cares about it, so I have the option of forgetting it for a while if I need to. And nobody is going to give Dick Debartolo a nightly tv show in which he pays audience members $10 to lick things and then that’s the whole bit, and then somehow be given an even more visible show a few years later based on that. Also Lorne Michaels hates bald people.

But it is my fault for knowing any of this, or being exposed to people or things that talk about it. Especially people who present it in the form “hollywood is FINALLY catching on that woman are funnier than men.” No no no that angle only exists to make people argue, cannot be proven, and helps nobody. I am tired of THE battle of THE sexes. Nobody can win. If you changed “funnier” to “better at math” you would get fired immediately, even though that’s equally inflammatory and actually nearer to possible to get a real statistic on. Why is it not permissible to examine something in a reasoned manner?
We have woman ghostbusters because that is a gimmicky casting choice designed to get attention. Otherwise the story would just be that the new ghostbusters cast had been announced. Or the movie itself would be the story, and we would wait for it to exist to decide if it was quality material. If we weren’t after dumb attention for the dumbest reasons possible we would make less stupid “reboots.” Media is obsessed with gender. You can change all the characters into talking ducks and nobody is the slightest bit surprised, but swap some crotches around, something we actually have the science to do, and professional boneheads wet themselves with fury and giddiness.

I am going to start an online petition to get Dogtanian and the 3 Muskethounds changed back into people. This is BLASPHEMY!!! Coming up next, TWITTER WEIGHS IN on the all dog musketeers! Hollywood is finally catching on that dogs are better flamboyant chocolate bar infantry than men!

I wish I could install a program inside my television that made it immediately turn off whenever a smirking nimrod said “twitter weighs in.” True enough I could just smash the thing but somebody else in the house might catch on.

It is unfortunate that it took the death of Harold Ramis to put a stop to Stephen Colbert stealing his identity. And also that it took that to get people to shut up about forcing out a Ghostbusters 3. Even though Ghostbusters 2, made when the actors were still in their primes (and willing, and alive) was criticized in its own time for not doing a whole lot to differentiate it from the first film. I personally do not mind more of the same if I like the same, but as I said the first one did not feel as special as it wanted to. I do prefer the Bobby Brown Ghostbusters song to Ray Parker’s, but apart from the goofy rap breakdown and the more conventionally terrible music video, it has nothing to do with and could have existed without the film. And so could I!

It has been said, possibly by me, that if we compare the amount of people simply shot with firearms, deliberately or otherwise, in this country, guns whose current state of regulation may not be touched, except to make less so, without strong public and corporate protest, it greatly overwhelms the number killed by “terrorism,” which we are regularly forced to forgo civil liberties as part of the “war on.”
To me, organized terrorism differs from the usual mass shooting we get in the US, because “mass shooting” often involves the perpetrators shooting themselves at the end, and it is difficult to determine what they thought they could accomplish. The recent Paris murder-fest was planned in advance, threatened about in advance, the people who did it knew exactly who they came to kill, and they got away. By NOW they have mostly been captured (by death by bullets), but the fact remains they intended to go on living afterward. Is that justification for monitoring my telephone calls and humiliating me at an airport? Not at all. If anything, I think the abuse of citizens by their own government is more valid justification for criminal acts than insulting drawings. But it proves these matters should not be considered the same thing. It is not just plain old murder. It is as bad as murder, but simply getting mad and sad at the idea of “terror,” a basic emotion that all people can experience, is not going to solve the problem. I do not know what will solve the problem, but I feel obligated to think about it, since I did not have an emotional reaction, but observed many such reactions.

Why are depictions of Muhammad banned? Allegedly because they might lead to iconography, worship of the symbol. Muhammad did not care how he was shown, he just did not want people to worship it. Or, rather, one segment of his followers thought he did not want his image, and possibly any images, worshiped, and then across a few centuries some subgroups remembered the main part of the rule but forgot why and got really serious about it. Would anybody worship an INSULTING picture of Muhammad? Of anyone? Killing over it makes no sense, even from a fundamentalist perspective. In fact this seems like the opposite of the prohibition’s intention, since you are holding the ban as sacred and infallible. The Law is your idol, your god, and you cannot be convinced that whatever you think it says is wrong.

It is difficult for people from non-fundamentalist-islam backgrounds to grasp the iconography issue, because so much of our culture is defined by ancient art, that was generally financed by religious fanatics, because they had all the money.
The odd thing about iconography, to me, is that this would seem to be descended from similar judeo-christian bans, bans which really did not stand the test of time, despite two iconoclastic periods in Byzantium and an entire dark age in which people were just too impoverished and miserable to make art. Consequently nobody actually knows what any of these constantly depicted figures looked like and Christianity’s number one symbol, the +-shaped cross is highly unlikely to have been the implement of Christ Christy’s crucifixion; evidence and records favor an X. Anything that shows a t cross is automatically wrong.
At some point The Church realized that its rituals and LATIN masses made no sense to the lay people, who all spoke mangled mixes of french, german and elvish, so then we had elaborate paintings, stain glass windows, decorated facades, all of ostensibly instructional value, plus gold to instruct peasants that the church is better than them. All in all a general business of exploiting people for money to pay for opulence for the church, forcefully financed by church patrons who probably cannot even afford to bury their kin who die of ludicrously preventable diseases. And they liked it! Or thought they did. They would travel all across Europe to visit all the churches and church relics, often body parts of saints, or just boxes that they were told contained such things. It’s really the thought of Saint Francis’ mummified trachea that counts. It is only the newest pope who finally considered, hey maybe the amount of money us popes hoard is totally incongruous to the message of humility and generosity we teach/name ourselves after.

And then this week, in a story that I admit I only read in the first place for a totally different reason, ol’ popey will be attending an event in Manila, in which people parade a statue of that darn Christ through the streets, a statue that supposedly has magical power to heal the sick and whatnot, and bring “good fortune.” Idol worship, witchcraft, greed, incontinence, all sorts of nonsense going on. It is ridiculous and has nothing to do with church doctrine, and yet it is a happier celebration than the mopey Catholic stuff I grew up with. Although I am also inclined to believe the home lives in any society so focused on a religious ritual is probably solidly patriarchal, abusive and opposed to change (but they always get cranky when they need one so no sense putting it off). We need to separate our joy from religion, and we need to separate our mandated misery from it. If Catholicism had been more jolly maybe I would have stuck with it and never gotten to the point where I realized there was no need for it. But if I did not have the freedom to quit church, or access to parts of life unrelated to church, and had been forced to believe in stuff that was made deliberately arcane and impossible to fully grasp, and thus impossible to question any aspect of, I might well have become the angriest, murderiest person on the planet.

And this was in the era of “Jesus loves you.” Jesus did not always love the proverbial you.

“Christ Pantokrator.” I know it is called that. I had to memorize what this was during my ill-advised art education. But what is a pantokrator? I do not know, but I presume it describes someone who does whatever jesus does when he makes that face.

Who cut this tin can in half and glued it to my plastic wig? Just because that knife you bought off the tv CAN cut a can that you subsequently attach to Christ does not mean you SHOULD. Christ is displeased. Thou shalt be pantocrated.

Religion, in general, does not wish the best for us, I think, overall. If you grow up thinking God is angry, and you aren’t allowed to think about anything else, you will be very very angry. There are indeed nations, entire countries, where it is ILLEGAL to quit the local brand of Islam. In United Arab Emirates, the punishment for trying is death! Like it is not enough that Allah will hate you and condemn you for your deed, you have to die NOW. In 2015! Or at least in 1996, which is when wikipedia’s source dates from. But the shooters, they were my age. I lived through 1996. Don’t think I don’t remember when RENT and that third Mighty Ducks movie came out. This stuff didn’t happen so very long ago.

And there probably are Christians today who think all depictions of Jesus are evil. They just do not get angry or motivated enough to shoot anyone. Over that reason. Maybe they will shoot you for being gay. But arbitrary conditions for slaughter is certainly a part of their Christian history. It is part of American history. This nation is as backward as it is because we “won” all our wars and were never forced to pay for our bad history by people badder than us. A murderer is a hero in a land claimed by murdering. Beside the point!

And I wonder, for people angry enough to plan a spree-execution like our recent one in such detail over insults, past the point of reasoning “hey I GOT to France, nobody has the legal authority to kill me for not being angry here” what makes them happy? If they believe the path to salvation involves wholly forgoing joy or whimsy in life, perhaps killing is the only fun they have, and the only fun they learned to have. This article‘s writer thinks the shooters actually are not so bothered by cartoons and just want an excuse to shoot people and jumpstart retaliations toward Muslims in general so that they can plan more counter-retaliation attacks. That almost makes more sense. Since up to that point nothing made sense, I will go with that idea. In fact I know somebody who thinks the Newtown, Connecticut shooting, a few towns over from where I am, was arranged by the US government as an excuse to take away The Guns and/or encourage a race war for some reason. Which does not mean I also believe that, but there are people out there who think a race war is really coming or could come, and maybe they would do what they could to encourage it if that sounded like fun to them.

I wish they could find more socially acceptable ways to have fun!

I have been on the internet too long, because this comes across to me like the person being interviewed is way too into the idea of people wearing diapers. This can be read as if he is issuing a general recommendation for all people to wear diapers in their every day lives. Life would just be so much BETTER if you wore a diaper. *smiles* The police are REQUIRED to wear diapers. They have no CHOICE. Oh yes the news was well received. *big smile* Who knows maybe they’ll like it *laughs*

I like the statement that he will “try” to wear one also. As if to suggest it is a challenge that only the most worthy and dedicated may take on, and he wants to pretend he has not been doing it all along and looking for an excuse to pretend it is someone else’s idea, then pretend to be surprised when he takes to it really well.
Well if you say so maybe I’ll give it a whirl *giggles* Hey maybe someday we won’t be allowed not to. Might as well hop on the bandwagon! *chortles*

He is turning into a Charmin bear in my mind and that is really not what I came here to-

Cease this talk at once! And don’t you dare try and touch my sequined copy of my book about me! Pantocration is imminent!

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