100 years of wonder? I have only been wondering why people accept and buy into the cultural indoctrination for 30!
and true enough the oldest character design on this box is tinkey bell from 1953 and it isn’t even a cel from the peter pan movie. They don’t show Peter because this box is also trying to communicate “100 years of diversity,” rather than 85 years of conventional american sexism and whiteness + 15 years of selective rehabilitative marketing. And gosh Tiana the flagship Disney representation character spends most of her own movie as a flappindappin frog and unlike Elsa front and center didn’t get a sequel. I was going to call elsa “the content creator and influencer of the disney canon,” irresponsible, selfish and impervious to criticism, rewarded just for existing and given a second movie just to exist some more but i have mercifully not been exposed to it and I will take that.

Mickey mouse is an older character than Tinkler, but this isn’t the 1923 design, because that is now public domain! And would have been sooner if the us government didn’t contort itself and the country with it to put disney above the law while disney was upholding conventional american heteronormative sexism and whiteness. Disney CAN still use the design but since I also can use it disney has disowned it in effect. Anything that disney does not have exclusive rights to isn’t good enough for it. I think this is the design used for the fairly recent meme-styled digitally animated cartoons which 1920s audiences absolutely would not have tolerated.
to be “fair” dumbo and alice of wonderland are on the side of the box. as is the guy from Soul– I don’t know his name but I presume it is Sammy Soul–, the [horrid] red car from [horrid] cars and for some reason another character from Toy Story because i guess that is more marketable than the bug life, inside doubt or up characters that disney also owns and tried just as hard to convince me I cared about.
also I don’t HAVE to be fair to the side panel because when I saw this box in a store the other day only the front side was visible and apart from that cereal boxes have rarely been fair to me.

also right in front, my least favorite cowboy, and I hate most cowboys, even before i knew its face to have been enlarged for the horrifying facade of this whatever this is (and longer still before irritating voice actor Tom Hanks came out in favor of having computers put his irritating self apart from his voice into movies at the expense of everyone except his progeny once he dies, meaning we could have a forrest gump sequel that is 100% manipulated archive footage.) All this is good for is proof for anyone who wants to correct me and say “uh those are PIXAR movies, not disney movies.” disney considers them disney movies. And I don’t trust anyone who begins arguments with “uh” apart from that.

by the same token-ism I noticed in my rubbish bin this disney-branded princess-head cannibal-in-training snack cracker package, with the very white cinder ella beside the non-white moana and non-white jasmine even though jasmine and her fingernailless escort have been ambiguously caucasian in official imagery, products and vhs box covers in the past.

And I don’t mind if they want to make the character seem definitively brown now, but if you’re celebrating the legacy of the disney company, this is part of that. Because contrary to the image it gets to present by appearing relatively benign beside the mascot for the more outwardly evil men in Florida, willfully elected by residents of Florida to govern it, an overwhelming majority of disney’s existence was spent run by, catering to the desires of and being protected by people like him, and still very much is.

yeah ha ha get em disney. this Connecticut place of business is literally putting a for-profit corporation over a state in the union and gloating about it. Not over the state’s governor, not the governor’s political party, not the state’s contingent of proudly aggressive proudlier ignorant voters, but Florida itself. Dumb trash scumbags. This is also the place that in 2012 charged me $24 to put a crummy piece of foam board over a[n admittedly scrappy] painting when i went in there and couldn’t justafford $112 to have it framed and they would probably want to charge three times that now. of course they support glorification of money makers of dubious merit. Ironically if they had printed out and displayed a newer version of mick e mouse on their store or their house without consulting a lawyer first and paying for proper rights and arranging for proper legal disclaimers to be shown they would probably get sued for this act.

how many kids request “disney brands” for their birthday presents but are disappointed when they cannot hold the brands in their hands?
i can hardly process how transparently capitalist and worthless and targeting people raised to think that is noble this is. “60 minis.” mini WHAT? Mini BRANDS! to COLLECT. not to play with, just to buy and have. except you don’t actually get told which you get, so you actually have to buy more than 60. disney is profiting from legalized gambling aimed at children. Disney did not invent this but disney hasn’t really “invent”ed anything in decades. it just identifies trashy stuff other people do without being criticized that it can appropriate and exploit for maximum profit.
I don’t understand how you can tout the rarity of something that you 100% control the rarity of and not get called out for it unless it’s disney who could market sweatshop produced hand grenades shaped like epcot center and sell them at walmart and the only controversy would be that the grenades were gay or not white enough somehow and disney would get extra media points for that despite not actually having made the grenades gay and them being very very white as if they are actually funneling money into dipwit far-right groups to toss out and publicize asinine accusations that actually make them look better.
I suppose I should be glad this eminently suspicious box doesn’t mean “brand” in the cattle marking sense. Not until morons on the tik-tok website take it upon themselves to take that upon themselves. And then disney appropriates and sells and gets congratulated for that too. Because ultimately both disney and the republican party are surrogate religious cults for and by rich privileged boneheads who only look out for themselves.

The heart of their disagreement is whose out of control unneutered dogma gets to bark loudest, and I don’t want to be in the house with either of them.

if you tell me to then I probably do not want to!

welcome to denver

I didn’t even know about these, I just now looked up “drunk airline passenger,” wondering if it supported my taking issue with the amount of alcohol ads in the airport, and found this many from within a month. If I worked on an airplane I would be furious to walk through the airport and see so much encouragement for passengers to blotto up prior to boarding. You can as well purchase alcohol on the airplane but the flight staff will have more direct awareness of who is getting it and how much, and people STILL get drunk off of that. And I have to think most of the time these incidents aren’t widely reported on or the drunk people quite insufferable enough to get the flight diverted. For example, on the flight which followed my seeing these a passenger near me ordered at least two little vodka bottles and got way too into family feud on the little television screen his seat forced him to look at. I was not HARMED by this but it sure was depressing. Although this makes me consider how many of the crummy movies advertised on these screens think they are being funny and I didn’t hear a single laugh that whole flight except after a baby started imitating
the trash-collecting flight attendant’s bored, droning calls of “traash… diggity traash…” while proceeding to the rear of the vessel. I missed the prime example but did manage to preserve the primary trash.
I noticed one other person nearby block the screen with the aircraft safety card, as I also had prior to realizing that the screen could be turned off by pressing the reduce brightness/OFF button about 15 times. Initially the button seems to do nothing at all. The controls are intuitively placed on the arm rest and not explained at any point. There is an equally unexplained headphone port on the narrow end of the armrest, which always faces away from passengers, and there isn’t space between it and the seat in front to ever navigate your head to a position where you could see it, and therefore it is totally invisible, and no headphones are provided anyway. Consequently numerous passengers just let the screen BRIGHTLY play the same ads –most prominently for the 300th “updated” version of Cinderella released in my lifetime– on a loop, [mercifully] silently for the whole four hour flight either because they don’t know how to operate the thing or just don’t want to bother with it. Also if you do manage to shut it off but then rest something on the armrest, like an arm, perhaps, the screen will go back on to full brightness and need fifteen more OFF presses to disable again. How is the electricity expenditure of this plus the innumerable electric billboards shilling wine and craft beer in the airport justified? It isn’t. Not here or anywhere else. We’ll just waste and drink and get advertised at, telling us to waste and drink and keep watching until the earth turns into massive ball of tar.
People watch bad tv and crummy movies on the screens because the screens are THERE but they don’t care. Or otherwise simply endure the screens’ presence because they have resigned themselves to sad choicelessness, and maybe that is a deliberate system to keep them paying for expensive expired poison and drinking it until they pass out or clobber someone. I should be GLAD this dork enjoyed families feuding so much and without hurting anyone else, except possibly my mother who had this guy’s seat reclined into hers from the beginning and occasionally bouncing around. But I’m not because it isn’t good, it is simply bad in a different way.

this isn’t selling beer but clearly every person involved with conceiving and producing it was inebriated, mentally challenged or both. You can’t just put the word “flight” any old place and have it work as a clever or even hacky pun. You might as well say racquetball of sausage or agatha of polenta. Also according to their website those three little pancakes cost $12.25 altogether, and the ones at the airport location definitely cost more than that. Or maybe they were only permitted to set up inside the airport because they were selling little pancakes for four dollars each.

And I know they are little because a plate shaped like a banana wouldn’t fit on their awkward circular tables unless it was of underwhelming proportions.
I’m kidding I have proof that the corned beef hash I ordered for $13.75 costs more than their website says it does, another $12.25, and twice as much as the local diner whose hash that was only as good as charges so the pancakes probably go similarly but I am tired of posting pictures of sad expensive places I didn’t want to be at.

i should have a drawing to post on tuesday. I should also have had it on sunday but it is a tricky drawing. everything is tricky these days! even that nemitz picture which was simple became very tricky and unpleasant once I attempted to talk about it so ideally i will say very little on tuesday.
////////////////////////

a needlessly nemity variation on a widely circulated image of uncertain origin

I am fascinated by this image, and plainly a lot of other people also are, often altering it to suit their needs. The envelope is apparently from 1895! I found this using the tineye reverse image search. Once in a while that actually works, yes. So I presume the picture is from before then, though how much before then I am unaware.

At my home from 1985 to 2001 this game was in a bathroom closet that never seemed to be closed, maybe it couldn’t be closed. I never saw the game be played, in fact I don’t believe I even saw the back of the box until I found it for sale on e-bay, but I always remembered the drawing.

I see now that Word Of Mouth’s is the only version to have a hat and non-clenched hands, and after comparing them I saw that its hands indeed had a more casual 1960s low budget school house rock animation sort of style to them than the rest of the drawing.

It was only years later, some time after the feature film was released, that I became aware of Sweeney Todd using a very similar drawing. I was only able to compare them recently, and saw that Todd’s is drawn by a different hand. I appreciate that Frank Verlizzo’s Sweeney Todd version redrew it outright to make the alterations less out of place and to match the Angela “Murder She Not-Yet Wrote/Did” Lansbury mutant that had to be drawn fresh. Also back in the 1970s fewer people assumed you could just change something on another person’s drawing or song and copyright it exclusively for yourself forever.

Another odd bit is that the one on the left was drawn to resemble Angela Lansbury but obviously the one on the right just is that same guy it was before. He does VAGUELY resemble the drawing but only as much as any other large 19th century man with his hair parted in the middle would, and yet that was enough. Verlizzo didn’t even incorporate the suspenders and nobody ever thought to ask: does this drawing actually look like the character?

Ironically, the Johnny Depp Todd DOES look like the drawing, wearing a vest and striped pants with messier side hair but the film never used that artwork in promotion. Presumably there was concern that Helena Bonham Carter looked less realistic than the cartoon Angela Lansbury.

unlike Todd’s, the collective soul version of the very angry man edits the an imprint directly and poorly and it is obvious (and the print itself is somewhat shoddy, as if somebody scanned a t-shirt that it had already been printed on). The whitish glow and white (or actually green)-tinted shadow against an inappropriate-colored backdrop resembles a vintage geocities gif and the mouth looks like somebody drew it with a mouse in GIMP. However, gimp and geocities didn’t exist then. Somebody had to work much harder to make an edit this bad in those days.
My older brother Colberon had this album and I had to ask him what album it was that had the Word of Mouth man on the cover, and fortunately he remembered. I don’t know what the MUSIC sounds like; it probably isn’t good if they think this cover looks good.

ohhhhhh it’s THAT song, the heaven let your light shine down band.

neh nehneh nehnehneh nehnehneh nehneh neh

yeah

I forgot Colberon used to listen to slightly more palatable garbage off the radio before he was actually in bands. I figured it was some mopey cheaply produced garbage like I used to find in our shared Kazaa folder years afterward. “Sparta’s” singer sounds like a sick puppy and the music sounds like what I hear while passed out when I am sick myself.

ehhhnyway, wikehhhpedia sez:

The title is claimed to be just lines lifted from that annoying Paul Simon song about wanting me to be his body guard. Why name your entire debut album after irrelevant lines in somebody else’s song? How can you have any respect for a band about which you believe that? That would mean the bums weren’t even trying. And the “fact” has been on the page so long that obviously loads of folks are quite willing to believe it is true, while I seeing that statement for the second time knew I needed to look it up. AND the actual Simony lyrics, apart from being fairly strangleworthy, don’t include the “and things left unsaid part.”

I am tired of garbage like this. I used to think it was funny when I found dumb lies on wikipedia but now it just makes me mad because people who know nothing will paraphrase those lies to prove they are smarter than and dismiss someone like me when they don’t know a ding dang thing, and then hundreds of other fandom wikis and automatically generated clickbait landfills will copy all the same junk and then after being established long enough each can be cited as sources by any other.
I don’t even care about this album and I easily proved both these statements to not be provable. I went there because I was angry about one thing and then became angry about something else in the same paragraph.
I don’t need my edits to be permanent, but I like knowing that anybody who goes to revert them will have to become aware of how annoyed I was. I was in a bad enough state to not realize I derisively used the word “bit” twice. I haven’t been that angry since somebody claimed [adventures of] Lomax was voiced by Kath Soucie, even though Lomax has the exact same voice as every other character in the game and only says things like “oh no!” and “let’s go” that sound like the same pitch-shifted probably sound-effect guy voice samples used in Lemmings 2.

I was kidding, sort of, with the manner in which I present these objections, yet this sort of thing really is a problem.

Soucie is an actor popular for squeakily voicing female often animal-based cartoon characters that became the target of lascivious affections from viewers, some of them extending their taste in animated wank fodder on to soucie herself. I don’t know WHY such a person NEEDS her to be Lomax’s voice, but now it is phrased countless different ways out there, so that each is harder to identify as copied from a casual falsehood on wikipedia, and I doubt Soucie remembers every single character she has given a voice to and every name that character has been known by, and maybe eventually she will also believe she voiced something called “Lomax.” But she didn’t! True enough, real lemmings don’t voluntarily run off cliffs to kill themselves, but 70 years ago Disney’s crew filmed some lemmings being deliberately shoved off a cliff just because they thought that was interesting, and real people younger than me still believe that happens so in comparison the lomax matter perhaps seems like a relatively benign invention.
Some people just NEED trash like that to be true for their lives to have meaning. And I get angry about it because my life also has no meaning because everything is run by imbeciles who trust fiction written by nobody to dismiss real people in their own orbit. msg, gmo, qanon, nft, sjw, inherited lies and stupid abbreviations everywhere. Even over stupid inconsequential trivia. Perhaps especially over that. I am a pariah across all the lands because I don’t trust anyone who tries to tell me who to trust, and that is typically a condition for peaceful coexistence.

I of course blame nemitz.

Popeye’s Island Adventures, the worst Popeye cartoon I never heard of. I alluded to it briefly at least twice in the past, thinking it better to not dwell on, the more recent time receiving comments –and I often don’t receive any– to the effect that the commentators had heard even less of it than I had, so perhaps I ought to say SOMETHING about it. I seem to have far too much to say about it.

in 2018ish I had been aware of the notoriously low-quality cartoons that King Features produced to try and capitalize on the high returns of 1930s popeye cartoons that had begun being broadcast on television in the 1950s. King Features actually owned Popeye but had licensed the character to Fleischer Studios and then Paramount, but was missing out on big buck$ due to not owning the animated cartoons. And so King endeavored to make hundreds of its own cartoons on the lowest budgets possible with the dumbest Tom and Jerry ripoff plots ever, their only legitimacy coming from employing the same three voice actors who had most recently been associated with Popeye, Olive Oyl and Bluto in the Paramount cartoons. Which also tended to have moronic one-dimensional plots but at least were well-animated. So then inexplicably King Features’ awful cartoons turned out to also be popular, and also for, honestly, no good reason, renamed Bluto to Brutus and changed his design in a superficial manner that could easily be written off as a consequence of the budget reduction, which led to an entire generation of television viewers being confused about what Popeye’s recurring foe’s name was.

Anyway I was finally looking those up, and surprisingly they were on youtube, which had for years been deleting uploads of Popeye cartoons, but these were on the “OFFICIAL popeye and friends” youtube account, and indeed they were awful and formulaic, with occasional bits of surrealism and intensity that unfortunately are subordinate to the formulaicness. I had been writing obsessive notes about a particularly abysmal entry, name of “Hoppy Jalopy,” and at the end observed:

even if the animation and art didn’t look like they cost 2 cents to make this might be the worst popeye cartoon you (you being me) have seen, although the uploading account has a number of videos labeled “popeye for kids” that look to be at the level of the “capn crunch show” that you avoided some years ago.

“Popeye for Kids” turns out to be an unofficial title for Popeye Island Adventures but that even the official account for uses. This official Popeye youtube account had uploaded all those old cartoons legally as a way of establishing legitimacy for the new series it was trying to push. It chose the 1950s King ones because those are the ones it owns, and also that its new series looks better when compared against, and yet still not better than.

Everything about this is dumb. How are diesel and punk more ‘eco friendly’ than a character born before the invention of mass-production?
This text dump seems like something somebody would come up with as a parody of the aimless mega-liberal boredom sources that continually rise in modern cartoons. also Popeye has a whistle instead of a pipe. Why he needs a whistle was less important than him not needing a pipe, and if he simply was not given a pipe OR a whistle viewers might possibly have not noticed and then the writers couldn’t pat themselves on the back for being so progressive.
But why does the new Bluto seek Popeye’s spinach if Popeye doesn’t get strength from it and Olive is the strong one, quite without needing spinach? The only reason Bluto would assume spinach was a source of strength would be if he had been watching better Popeye cartoons.

Variations on this nonanimated graphic appear during the extremely, for lack of a better word, gay closing theme song. “you NEVER seen a nuther sailor DO the things he can,” says the song with nothing to say, that only talks at all after the wordless cartoon to make sure the intended audience knows what it is called, I suppose. That it sings the words “Popeye the sailor man” rather than “Popeye for kids” or “Popeye’s island adventures” may indicate uncertainty on the part of the hack song-creating algorithm about what this cartoon was called or what purpose it was meant to serve, or possibly a profound awareness that it ultimately has no purpose.

something is really off about bluto and I had to look in the comments (which have since been disabled by the page owner) to realize that he is missing a beard. How is a BEARD offensive? I realize I said blippi’s beard was offensive to ME but first of all it isn’t a real beard and presumably he has the same target demographic as this. I suppose they wouldn’t want to give the “nu-male” beard to a character who is not meant to be a role model, and perhaps real beards are just illegal, or retroactively proclaimed to be appropriation of religious customs, or feared that in the near future they might be.

And ah ha ho ha if Olive is supposed to be so strong and independent, why is she put into this weakling feet-pointed-at-each-other anime waifu pose? Unless she is about to fall down or do the Charlie Brown Christmas dance there is no justification for this. Hey why don’t corporate entities ever try to make Peanuts media For Kids? I don’t know anyone under the age of 50 who cares about it. Olive’s eyes each also have a tiny little line jutting off the tops of them, hinting at false eyelashes, a trait not traditionally associated with Olive’s character design except late in the Paramount era when she was made into a shrill Minnie Mouse style character and meant to be conventionally attractive rather than independent or even funny. Island Adventures Olive ends up not being any of those things.

The yellow creature is Eugene the Jeep and is in fact an authentic Thimble Theatre/Popeye character from EC Segar’s comic strips, and the automobile brand “Jeep” is even named after it. Eugene did appear in a few late Fleischer Studios cartoons (Popeye describes it as “a magical dorg”), but didn’t work well with the less storyline-driven formulas and rarely, if ever, appeared until the 1978 bad Popeye cartoon where it at least appears in the opening sequence. Though I enjoy the Popeye comic strips they are entertaining for a different reason than the animated cartoons are when they are, and so it is of not much surprise that the more the cartoons try to incorporate elements from the comics, the less they work.

Despite being a near-irrelevant mascot character in Popeye Whyland Nonventures, that actually makes it considerably less unlikable than the ostensibly more important figures. As far as I can determine, J Wellington Wimpy does not appear at all. With his most noteworthy trait being how much he annoys other characters, his omission in this subtlety-free positivity fest is also not surprising. If I said his most noteworthy trait was his fondness for hamburgers, I would be yet less surprised that he wasn’t in this cartoon. 2018 Wimpy may even canonically STILL eat hamburgers and just have given up trying to mooch them off of anyone who IS in this cartoon.

Even the lack of dialog is cited as a culturally progressive trait. So it will be “as funny in bangladesh*” as elsewhere. Except it isn’t funny anywhere and the new premise still has to be spelled out, since I did not pick up on the concept of Popeye growing spinach and saving rainwater nor of Olive being an “independent woman” until I read that these were the case in a press statement. One of the funny things about popeye has always been how he talked. Also how he looked and behaved. What IS popeye without those things? Just some guy who likes boats and spinach. Or if you go back to Segar’s 1929 Popeye, just some guy who likes boats. Maybe that is a better “role model” but there is no reason to care enough to want to emulate this Popeye, much less watch him do things other than like boats and spinach.

*Unfortunately I cannot locate now the specific press statement which used this line but I insist it exists. I would not have thought up that stupid an excuse myself and not remembered I had.

The videos, in addition to having their comments hidden, have also had their own descriptions removed in the time since I initially sloppened upon them. They aren’t anything especially incriminating, and you can still find them through archive.org, though nothing behind the “SHOW MORE” button, but their subsequent deletion functions as evidence that the property owners, conscious of the intense negative reactions, even from people that aren’t me, have attempted wherever possible to make the aura about these things more ambiguous, since they failed to achieve one that was pleasant.

Oh there’s that again! Never in my life have i heard or read someone say “You know what i love most about Popeye cartoons? The ‘squash and stretch.'” That the 1950s Popeye cartoons lacked it entirely and still were successful and comparatively less stupid and pointless than Popeye Island Adventures testifies to that. People like the violence, the dialog and the amusing absurdity. Some more recent enthusiasts may appreciate its detachment from modern society since it is so thoroughly stuck in another time period. I wish the Island Adventures gang were stuck in another dimension.
ALSO “squash and stretch” in this instance is misleading because stretching or squashing a frame of cheap digital cutout animation is extremely easy and handled by the software. The artists aren’t individually drawing those frames, and so individual elements do not react to being stretched or squashed, and everything has a uniform line weight and so still looks flat and lifeless.

popeye looks so awkward moving around; he is behind an object one moment then immediately in front of it, like an old nintendo game. His individual parts all are moved but do not look like they are moving. Which is fine, for budget animation, so long as you don’t try to put this budget animation on level with something that is leagues superior to it.


Even the completely unauthorized “Popeye’s Takeaway” in Blackpool, England, is a more faithful and interesting use of the character than “Island Adventures.” King Features can’t do anything about it because, apart from the King’s authority only being ceremonial there, governments other than the United States’ don’t bend over backward to indefinitely prolong corporate copyrights on lucrative characters, although I can imagine the totally unrelated Popeyes (no apostrophe) fried chicken restaurant

having a problem or getting a problem if they ever try to expand into that region. I absolutely believe the decision to feature fried chicken on the window was made after confused tourists came into the store and asked for fried chicken rather than because the people in charge knew how to prepare it. Even in England the Eastern-Europe-style takeout joint motto is “put everything on the menu and use someone else’s pictures.” I am impressed they bothered to have someone paint that one awkward Popeye on the left, holding a can of spinach like he intends to drink it.

back to the cartoon, since I wrote allll this garbage, is it fair to issue an assessment based on a single two minute episode? yes because it isn’t popeye, it is rubbish that i wouldn’t have watched even one episode of if it had not claimed to be Popeye. It is like a video game made by Ocean. And then I felt GUILT about saying that and watched another. If something promoting itself to be a continuation of something else does not quickly establish itself as worthy of what it claims to follow, then I owe it no further attention, particularly something that hasn’t been interesting in almost 80 years, and should have been made public domain before now. The longer it isn’t, the more diluted and pointless it becomes.

Every decade gives “kids” less respect, and material that purports to be “for” them gets dumber.

yes I consider 2021 to be the next decade.
If you think it is irresponsible to show kids cartoons of fake people beating each other up and engaging in other uncouth behaviors, just don’t show them those cartoons.

There doesn’t neet to be a demographically prescribed version of every ancient character. Assuming this is meant to be a muppet babies-style companion to regular popeye rather than a replacement, I do find it less objectionable than muppet babies in any form, but I still wouldn’t recommend any of them to anyone.

Even in the 1930s Popeye was being watered down by corporate interests worrying about “the kids,” which is the sole reason Popeye’s creator EC Segar had him start eating spinach instead of big unseasoned lumps of beef to begin with.

(and also stop swearing at and physically assaulting hospital workers) and even after that happened Popeye didn’t depend on spinach to solve all his problems. It was only turned into an effective recurring gimmick in the animated cartoons because the Fleischer studios had good writing and production values. After Paramount kicked out the Fleischer brothers and took over the studio, they demanded a more disney-like product and the writing eroded immediately; popeye became a one-note, spinach-addicted loser who couldn’t do -anything- without it, Olive turned into Minnie, as I mentioned earlier, and perhaps most critically, voice actors had to stop ad-libbing lines. Ironically, it was trying to imitate Disney’s feature length productions that put the Fleischers into debt in the first place, as their shorter cartoons, foremost those featuring Popeye, had continued to come out on schedule and be lucrative. Anyway when King Features made their own cartoons the budgets caught down with the writing.

the next logical step was then, in any other situation objectively illogical, were offerings from Hanna Barbera in the 1970s and 80s, in which Bluto and Popeye were already forbidden from punching each other but not yet from speaking, being old or having beards. The trend continued in 2005’s “Popeye: Rush For Spinach” where characters still looked the same but in addition to not fighting didn’t do anything else either apart from occasionally awkwardly appropriating youth culture they didn’t understand. And now in Popeye For Kids they finally add looking totally different on top of acting totally different. I am not even sure why the latest Popeye even needs spinach if there is nobody for him to fight. Although, as noted, the spinach wasn’t even necessarily EC Segar’s idea. So by now the character has been robbed of everything that WAS segar’s idea and is exclusively comprised of an accumulation of the managements’ ideas. Segar himself got dead in 1938 at the age of 43 from liver disease AND leukemia and never had to see this happen, but couldn’t do anything to stop it, either.

I suppose it speaks to the strength of his creation that it took 80 years from the time of his death for the work to reach rock bottom.

although I like to believe Popeye was actually replaced by an impostor ages ago and escaped with at least whatever dignity he ever had.

following from far off land of last month, I can’t get over how much I hate this. if i saw anybody wearing this i would throw a car radiator at them. you might think this is silly to get angry about when police brutality but police brutality didn’t just get invented two weeks ago, that’s the point of the protests. I did in fact write this PRIOR to that, so THEN you might say i DID get over it, but in fact I only deferred my not being over it!
the text seems to indicate this is a best seller but that just means masks in general sold out; they print these to order. I still don’t know why anybody would buy ANY of these. To me the idea of paying to have a designer mask made says “I like wearing a mask during mundane activities!” and I would not say that.

Of course a twit who condescends at others to ‘do your part’ boasts about supporting predatory corporations while small businesses go to hell. Tell me to shut up and stay in my house while you go to star bucks every single day to pay 5 dollars for a cup of stimulant prepared by someone who doesn’t have the choice to stay home to help you stay alert while you watch garbage designed for children and think that makes you a free spirit even though every single opinion you have is based on receiving the most obvious promoted thing and liking it and that buying ‘proceeds go toward’ rubbish makes you a generous free spirit even as you shill for free for evil billionaires who would charge you to breathe if they could.

my expectation is the vast majority of products offered on a website like this are never purchased by anyone but this is on page 3 of 277 which suggests at least SOMEBODY bought 1 to put it toward the front. the two previous pages also feature numerous items that mention disney products. and indeed -every- item offered by “Galactic Threadz” leeches off disney. and also star wars for no other reason than disney owning it now. in fact the tagline is “disney inspired.”

the very first item is again about coffee. this time generic coffee but d-d-d-DISNEY is still specific. the person-like entity who buys this probably posts daily reminders of when their birthday is and thinks saying “stay safe” is a profound kindhearted gesture and that a stay at home order is the same thing as a quarantine.

i checked it again today and to its “credit” it isn’t trying to capitalize off of black lives matter, as far as I can tell; considering the possibility that something which did might get complained about and removed, however there are sixty two additional designs. nobody makes 62 designs in two weeks, even if every element is ripped from another source. Very likely the designs themselves are ripped off or carried over from previous similar ventures; I assume we have all been seeing this for years, and so obviously they wouldn’t reflect any current event. Coffee and forced smiling dead-inside compliance and paying to advertise your participation in it are always current, though.

there’s never a drive-by shooting around when you need one. Surely those gang signs are an insult to SOMEONE apart from anyone with taste.

I wrote something for march seventeenth. is march eighteenth now. probably better to wait, then. I don’t trust it.

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

Another inadvertent two week absence. My ability to pay attention to things has been waning, but by May I should either be back to some temporary regularity or have progressed to the next phase of irregularity. But for now, where were we?

That is understandable. I do not necessarily recognize me, either. I promise not to make you look at me. This website is for looking at things I have critical opinions of, but only when I can stand to look at them.

Something I always feel good about seeing, a doctor who looks to 1998 AOL email forwards for decoration inspiration.
No, there would not be peace, because those women would likely resent the roles they had gotten stuck in of having to do all the work, often work that nobody asked for but were feared to be silently expecting, and not get money or recognition for it.

I realize this sort of thing is a joke and not meant to be interpreted literally, but the people who write them, male or female, have no interest in peace. They think there is a “battle of The sexes” that, regardless of whether it can be won, must be “fought” forever, but primarily in trivial competitions that demean both sides, and they demand two “sides.” They never stop thinking men wearing dresses (or just underwear) and talking dogs are funny (hence the previous 20+ years of cinema comedy). They must always honk a car horn twice and knock on a door in a “shave and a haircut” rhythm. These are the millions who watch super bowls for the advertisements and may claim to “not like football” and think I will be fine with that explanation. Closeminded twits who are only impressionable when something is tacky.

For example, here is an advertisement advertising a real business that says “COVER YOUR ASSets.” See [or don’t, because my camera objected and refused to aim directly at it] it says ASS but then it says ets so it’s not REALLY saying “ass” even though “ass” is the implication, and it focuses on the posterior areas of the people in the photograph. If it had just said “asses” it would be deemed obscene by the uppity people in town, and even though it actuality does say and imply ASS, since it legally “doesn’t,” this satisfies morons, because their only objection to anything is one that they have learned. Since they learn primarily through advertising, such as this, or heavily sponsored garbage with the same values, they consider it oh ho ho just good fun. They never saw anybody be bothered by “assets” so they will not be bothered by assets, even though if “asses” legitimately bothered them, this ought to count as the exact same thing, for it very much intends to. You see? You shouldn’t! It makes no sense!

Consider the fact that this movie exists. I would rather not, even apart from the reason I am going to gripe about, but that makes it a more functional example.

If it was called “little fvckers” its name would have been changed long before this point and we would never have known that. If hypothetically it was called that anyway and advertised in every possible place where advertisements can survive, with that name, everybody involved would have been fined. However, since it is called “fockers,” it can use the exact same tacky non jokes as the previous 2 films in the series and instead of having to pay 300 thousand dollars it gets paid 300 million dollars. See? No! It’s ridiculous! Our censorship system is a sham that serves nobody and can’t even be bothered to pretend it does. All it does is empower and entertain morons who think “getting around it,” even if for no other reason to have gotten around it is the most noble act.

Tee hee hee! I got a swear in public! Victory! Everyone shall congratulate me on my achievement. Let us put this on every flat space that doesn’t already have a Pepsi ad on it (unless we have a sponsorship deal with pepsi. Does Owen Wilson drink any Pepsi in this movie?).

Hey hey heyyyyyyyyyyyyyy! Violation! Anarchy! That O was protecting our family values! That was America’s good time O! Think about Our Kids! What if Our Kids saw that O with a section taken out of it? O tempora, o mores!

If almost swearing doesn’t hurt anybody, then neither does just swearing, but pretending there is a huge difference hurts my mind. There is no vulgarity Beetlejuice who you’re going to save us from by changing a letter but meaning the same thing. Likewise, having almost sworn is not an accomplishment in itself, worthy of recognition for any reason but to point out how stupid it is.

Here is another example. It is terrible. The photograph of it is terrible. Things are in accord, for the moment (although I am concerned about how opinionated my camera is getting).
It is the “words” yippie ki-yay mother russia” in transparent type over Hudson Hawk’s head and possibly a scarf.

I understand that somebody in the film movie called die hard says the line yuppie cayenne mother meet the fockers, at some point for some reason, but I don’t understand why I am supposed to accept this fabricated story that the line is a crucial part of American culture that everybody is familiar with and loves, when I’ve only ever heard reference to the phrase made by people on bad tv shows or in advertisements for other bad things, and these have outnumbered the amount of times I have encountered “yippie ky yay” sans mother or whatever in a sincere cowboy related context, which is a single time, in the opening to the 1989 tv show Hey Dude, but even that was only referencing the fact that cowboys supposedly said it, but nobody on the show was a cowboy.

A total of my experiences
yippie ki yay used sincerely: none
yippy keye yaya sisterhood in actual die hard movies: none
skippie pie ray used outside of die hard movies as reference to die hard movies: any at all which means too many.

and then an additional time when my roommate was watching godawful rubbish in the next room and some man whose life had no meaning contentedly spoke “welcome to the yipee ky yay post game show” because the new die hard movie had paid the post game show to be called that, but not to be called the “die hard sequel post game show.” or even the “that football game was 5 hours why are you going to spend another hour watching miserable twits wearing suits who weren’t playing talk about the football game you just watched? I at least am paid to be here what’s your excuse post game show.” The die hard people probably copyrighted the stupid phrase with the hope of getting royalties if anyone else says it but since nobody does unless the opposite case is in effect it went unnoticed.

Some years ago I inadvertently became aware of a critical review for Live Free or Die Hard, one of the previous die hard sequels, and the reviewer complained that since the movie was rated pg13 instead of R, Di Hardy (I assume that’s the main character’s name) only gets to say “gaza strippy ki yey-” and then gets conveniently cut off before he can say the rest, every single time. I want to complain that somebody is complaining about that asinine catchphrase that isn’t even good not being honored, but I also think implying profanity by interrupting it is pathetic. I also complain when I have to choose a complaint.

Anyway, CJ in the USA was X-Rated and that doesn’t mean it was good.

I remember yet another advertisement for one of the new computer Alvin + Chimpunks abominoids and at one point one of the things says “zippy kai yay mother-” and then is conveniently cut off by hitting a wall or a record scratch sound effect, maybe both. When you’re a cgi chipmunk every sound effect might as well be a record scratch and bumpable piece of scenery might as well be a button that plays a record scratch sound effect (because I don’t believe there is a record player on the set, nor even a computer generated 3d model of one). I’m supposed to think oooooooh the chipmunks are hard corn because they swear in REAL LIFE but just HAPPENED to get cut off during this one scene from their existence. Cgi Chipmunks are BAD AA-*record scratch* because they swear and reference Die Hard! Jeepers I hope they also hint that they know what sex is without saying the word “sex!” That would be really dangerous (but all in fun)!

Or how about the time when that titash ripoff from The Lion King keeps almost saying “ass” but then it turns into ahhhhhhh. I hate those “jokes for the parents” in films markerted at children. That’s so sleazy and lazy. Sleazy for adding vulgarity where it isn’t necessary, and lazy for writers not being able to find other ways of developing characters’ “rebellious” personalities now that they aren’t allowed to show people smoking anymore. I can understand doing the joke and moving on, but they always have to dwell on it. Ey ey wink wink did you see what I did? And people raised on that now think it is appropriate to respond with the smug monotone response “I see what you did there” in varying degrees of typed english. A joke, to these people, succeeds not because it is funny, but because they become aware that it is a joke. Congratulations on your humor attempt. But since bad movies can’t see who responds, these oafs say that to me, instead. It is like cool dude scumbag code for “i don’t think you’re funny but I am.” They render me sick!

I appreciate that it is more descriptive than responding with “fail,” like you’re MS-DOS. Not ready reading drive joke. Abort retry fail? I realize “fail” is not a new thing anymore, and I should be glad that nobody within my awareness still says “woot.” However, I did hear somebody boldly call out “yolo” but at nobody but in my presence at my questionable education facility, and I don’t even know what that one is supposed to mean other than “HELLO I KNOW WHAT INTERNET IS.” so we only lose a trendy degenerate memeword when another one replaces it, which means there is no net change. It is the same net as before and the grime of groupthought tackiness is steadily accumulating.

So now there is a poster that just says “popeye time yay mother russia” on it. I looked up this better version of the picture to make absolutely certain I hadn’t missed some hint as to the film’s title or any detail about it. I think I like the other one better because at least I could imagine a scarf which made the matter considerably more interesting, and also could hardly read the stupid letters on it. So we have a poster at a movie theater, advertising a movie, that doesn’t actually say what the movie’s name is. Just Yippie Ki-Yay™®(c)all rights reserved [variable]. I don’t know what the significance of “Mother Russia” is; something to do with Eastern European nations and maternal figures, which are either completely irrelevant or only relevant so that they can serve as a truly wretched sound-alike for “mother feckur,” which means the script was written to match the tag-line, which isn’t even a good tagline, and I only know what film series it is alluding to at all on the technicality that I am painfully aware of things I resent. I wish I didn’t know, because whose-ever idea this was trusted that I would, and it’s a daft idea and I probably hate that person. The characters in the film (assuming there is one) still probably aren’t going to say “fvcker,” which is fine, because I get enough of that without trying, so if they did say it, that would not enrich my experience, but they have to tease at it in public either way for some reason. I am meant to be excited about this allusion to a catch phrase that means nothing to me.
So in summary, corny people expect peace, but they cannot manage any peace but a piece of

Whoahhhhhh there pardner! Watch your mouth! There’s ladies present! *bops u* Not in front of the kids! Even though if you are in front of them I am also in front of them and insulting their intelligence by suggesting that they don’t know what I’m talking about and that if they really didn’t they wouldn’t wonder now that I’ve mentioned it. Howdy
I was going to say a piece of toast. Toast is a mediocre thing that many people keep in their lives. However, anything that can survive as a piece is probably worth eradicating entirely.

Additionally, it is probably unfair of me to criticize the computer-made chipmunks, since their awfulness is consistent with that of the awful hand drawn chipmunks of the 1980s, which much like the Smurfs were awful even then, regularly includeded a the battle of the sexes as a major rot point and had their roots not in comic books but in the novelty song fad of the 1960s, which also appealed primarily to corny people, even if they had superior cover artwork.

I am not at all surprised to learn they were also the masterminds behind the Transportation Security Administration.

Were you aware? The LucasFilm company has been sold to the Disney company.

Eyyyyyyy! What is dizzzz!

It’s true! A sequel was promised immediately, because the last few were so good and Neville forbid we stop trying to reenact the 1980s with hip smirky scumbags. Some people like this news, some people do not. Nobody should be surprised, though. Do you remember when George Lucas announced an intention to place all five *nsync members into New Star Wars, and how mad people got? He didn’t even ask “is this a good idea?” because he is not a person to whom self-doubt occurs.

Expect a lot of announcements like that. Justin Bieblesworth already looks like the 1970s Luke Skywaffle. They may even bring Hilary Duff out of the Disney Vault for this one. The new movie is going to have 7 Jar Jar Binxes and they’re going to sing. Chewbacca will speak perfect english and be played by Jack Blaque, and have a “love interest” chewbacca-type played by Quinn Latifer. C3puh will be all computer graphics and voiced by Robin Willyums in a Latino accent for some reason and will ALSO have a female robot “love interest,” also played by Robin Williams. R2Deetu will then refuse to appear in the film and will be replaced by an iPad. Andrew Hussy will be in it; he won’t make a cartoon, he’ll just be there himself and people will pledge money at him. In fact the whole movie will be guilt-funded through kickstarter even though the Disney gang has so much money that it can spend 4 billion on a totally solvent and profitable company on a lark. All the concept art will be done for free by “contest” entrants who get no financial stake in the anything. Also, the Pirates of the Carribbean and Harry Potta and the Witch and the Wardrobe and Lonely Island and Ron Paul and and Loki and Kony and Tony Toni Toné and a cat with imperfect command of language and an animated gif of Dr. Who and whatever else that’s popular now that Disney can buy and edit in before the premier are all going to be in it. And don’t say “This. Is. Awesome” like it’s three statements to try and slow down and prolong my exposure to your degenerative dialect. People who talk like that always think asinine mixups of “epic” trash are a good idea and that’s why we keep getting movies like Snakes on a Plain, Cowboys and Alienated Indigineous Peoples and Abraham Lincoln: Stunning Vampire.

Even if they were good I would assume they weren’t and prevent myself from watching them because they remind me of garbage off the internet. All that nonsense I just said as a joke because I believed it functioned as a joke is being pitched sincerely and having hundreds of millions of dollars invested into it because diluting the effectiveness of ridicule flung against you is evidently worth that to major movie companies. “You think my movies about sports betting, talking dogs and predictable romances are dumb, huh? Well watch me make a REALLY dumb movie that YOU can’t come up with any hypothetical thing dumber than!” We have a film industry increasingly fueled by dares. And they still make money, even when, or perhaps especially when they fail to exploit the full potential of an absurd idea, so now there’s no incentive to NOT be asinine.

I would report this as an abuse twitterer even if it WASNT a robot wasting random peoples’ time. The word “awesome” has NO MEANING because almost everything is “awesome” to some people. Or worse, “kind of awesome [guys].” I think the word you’re looking for in that case is “good” or “adequate,” and it isn’t even that!

One thing I like about the Star Wars films is the absolute absence of references to contemporary society, especially television and the internet. There is advanced scientific technology all over the place but nobody sends stupid text messages. The first Star War was waged in 1977; It would have been so easy and obvious to hire the Bee Gees to provide the soundtrack and have all the fights disco-themed. Even when George Lucas alienated/fired/imprisoned all dissenters in the company and started making goof-fests like Willow and the Star Wars prequels, he avoided linking his movies (that is, the movies themselves and not the external promotions) to junk outside of them that I hated. Can the “actual” Disney employees keep that up? Probably, but that doesn’t mean they will and I like pretending they can’t because I am compulsively contrary. I had the same fears about the recent Tintin film in something I wrote that I may or may not have posted before that last movie. I was worried he’d have an iphone and be posting facebook updates, either because facebook paid to be in the movie or because the sloths in charge thought that would make Tintin relatable, but that was mercifully not a factor in the end. One of Tintin’s strengths is that he remains relatable (provided it’s not one of the books with black people in it) even though he clearly belongs in the 1940s, and he doesn’t need to be a smug jerk and the captain doesn’t need to loudly belch and have a Scottish accent to remind people of other things that make money. Eh nobody is perfect. This imperfection makes it relatable. In the interest of awareness I should acknowledge that my spell-checking apparatus is greatly displeased by my use of “relatable.”
Still I will probably watch the sequel because I like the original property. So hopefully you can see why i need to limit the amount of properties that I like.

breaking news: Robin Williams to have supporting role in Tintin sequel following up on his terminally acclaimed performance in Star Wars 7.

I have a tumbler.eh page. I wish I didn’t. Not because of this, just because of it. In fact that’s irrelevant beyond explaining where I had taken this picture from. A person asked me this question. I do not dislike this person for this question. However, my dislike of the topic and of some others I associate it with throbs like a toothache to the extent that it is not clear what bridge I am burning today. Know that I burn no bridges, and if I break one it’s only by myself driving a truck over it in disregard of the posted weight limit, and it is reasonable to guess that sooner or later I am going to learn to drive.

But a question, of a television program based on a commercial franchise I don’t care about, from a decade I’ve been sick of for a decade, that airs on a tv channel I’ve never heard of and has repulsive character designs. So the only way I’d become aware of it is if it is it if of it is it being the focus of an obnoxious meme torrent that I would ignore out of spite absolutely whatever it was. Oh and did I! (yes)

Friendship is Magic, they call it. They call it a lot. Too much for me. I resisted making a complaint about this because I felt like I shouldn’t even know about it and half the people that will talk to me on the internet are fond of it. However, by now half of them don’t talk to me either (not after this, certainly), so I like to hope the remaining quarter only choose to remain because they must have accepted me and must have expected me to do this.

One who did not was a very good friend in fact, but who had happened to be developing a curious hobby of marginalizing my personal value a few months before the thing premiered. By the time it had, friendship was not so much magical as an occasional convenience easily explainable through basic logic and social science. Fox news enthusiasts would not even doubt that sort. So having accumulated increasing numbers of such enchanted friend types by blatanter and blatanter professions of admiration for stuff that it was fashionable to like, he no longer needed the ones that were harder to please than that. Also apparently I’m not over it yet. I’ll probably mention it again. I’ve probably already done it. I’ve probably already written the next one 79 times since January.

But the cartoon! It really needed to get made, since there weren’t enough hilarious pictures on the internet like this already.

I can’t vouch for the writing on the cartoon itself, but the people who produce tribute material are about on-level with every other popular rubbishoid which is to say they veer toward the stupid. I remember feeling left out during my family’s Soporanofest a few years back, myself somehow being the only person who’d not watched nearly enough of the program to be obsessed with it, and I got along with the perpetrators afterward. But for this there is no afterward, because people on the internet are not the same as regular human beings who can get over things, or have other layers to their lives apart from these things. I did not get endless waves of daft gangster-sonas in my art queue for nine solid months.

The worst of it is over it by now, so it’s receded to the level of a mere annoying fad, but I scrawled all these complaints about it and don’t know what else to do about them. Forget them and move on? Do something productive? Me? Never!

Tumblir is very good for not allowing me to get over things. Do you have nothing to say? Good news, you can just copy what somebody else says, and sooner or later somebody I know will also have nothing to say and I’ll see something like this (you’ll have to click on it to see it, as I’ll not display it; otherwise I welcome you to assume that what I am saying may be construed as valid under proper circumstances). Even if you disagree with a tumble you need to copy it onto your page to say something to it, and the original copier in the chain still gets points for it, and if nobody bothers to read your print they’ll assume you do agree. Tumblr? More like Stupidlr ha ha.

See see look, this character is WEIRD and THIS character is a NERD and THIS character is DUMB! This should be titled “if you put a stock character in a stock situation.”

I didn’t even GIVE the thing a cube. Somebody who wasn’t necessarily me left it in a place where the beast would find it. I think I have some impractically designed characters, but these are quadrupeds with fine motor skills. They can manipulate objects with their “hands” but are cursed to not ever be able to do so while in motion or stably balanced. Ha ha get it stablAAAAAARGH I’VE BEEN STAPLED
Using a mundane setup to exhibit personality variations, certainly I do it; most aspiring creative people have and do, but I do this with my own characters and I wouldn’t go out of my way to make it look like I used a template when in fact I implemented my own layout.

This artist actually directly sources facial expressions and poses from stills of the cartoon. I know this, because most of these artists do and I’ve seen these ones before. And not in a funny way, either, like in those Tintin pastiches, where the characters are ludicrously out of character, throwing bricks through windows during labor riots or having debaucherous holidays at the same location as everyone else they know also is, all while cursing indiscriminately in near-english. They’re just playing with a dumb old rainbow cube.

And then he used the exact same gag twice (while making sure another character[‘s head fragment] appeared to explain the gag). Frippits, twelve ding dang years ago I drew an equally dopey looking “tribal” character (an elpsoid) painting a rubik cube, and nobody cared, because I never showed anybody because I realized it was a really bland idea. And I still can’t show anybody because that page seems to have mercifully escaped its holding place,

but here’s a subsequent page with a frogfrimmed can of spam on it. That’s the kind of cleverness it takes for this.

They’re rewarding and praising this guy for matching old jokes with old artwork. Even the Pokemon fan-drawingers relegate the frame copiers to middle-tier, but since most of these people are frame-copiers there’s nowhere else for them to go. They literally have no talent. I don’t have to watch the program to know this derivation is garbage. However, I suspect watching the program has an impeding effect on people’s ability to determine that this is garbage.

This is intellectually worse, though; at least a rubik cube has a classical charm to it that this association cannot harm and that likewise does not make the pony-fans who like the combination any dumber for its part. When you are paying lazy homage to lazy bands and lazy cartoons at the same time then you’ve squared the twit appeal and fractioned the creative effort involved. I initially linked to a different band homage by a different person whom I ultimately decided wasn’t fair to single out… the original drawing was of REM as the ponies, which was, at least, the only drawing of REM ponies. I shouldn’t have to settle for least (and I must confess I have slightly more scorn for REM than the Beatles). However, I found countless Beatles-as-ponies examples, in under three minutes, often with the exact same color scheme, as if there are canonical Beatles ponies whose composition cannot be challenged. There isn’t; these people just aren’t even so clever that they can pull off a palette swap without being ordered to. I have no idea who those culprits were so I’ll feel no guilt for scorning them in a place they’ll never find out about.

The absolute worst thing I remember seeing, somebody had drawn the let’s say main character’s heads floating around the logo for the tv show Friends, against a white background, and called it a day. I was so ashamed for both of us that I won’t direct anyone to it unless I am challenged to.

I remember for a while years ago everybody who was cool had to draw their already mundane character as an utterly unremarkable sillouhette dancing against a solid colored background to pay homage and worship before a bloody COMMERCIAL ADVERTISEMENT for eyepods, but most of them didn’t do it more than once. I guess they must have, but I successfully avoided knowing it.

It’s always lucky for people when something that’s really easy to copy gets popular. Pog forbid we have a well-drawn animated series on television.

Hacks love their little ponoids. They memorize the shape of this one little horse and can draw different hats on it and bazoinga! ORIGINAL CHARACTER! It’s like Bob and George fan-authors, except Dr. Light and Rush ALSO look like Megaman.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE GAY SEAMONSTER???
Nobody draws the seamonster so it doesn’t enter into my reckoning. It may even be from a different show that I failed to elude awareness of.

It has JOKES that KIDS DON’T GET!!!
That’s the same lure you put out to get me to watch Shreck/every remotely animated thing that got made since Shrek made money, and that didn’t work, and it’s a secondary characteristic at best! When I was twelve I used to listen to a late night radio program where people called in to ask for advice about sexual relations and I only did so because of the funny sound effects, and I was an idiot.

It has REFERENCES and MUSICAL NUMBERS!
Congratulations, you invented The Drew Carey show? I’m not swayed by this sort of spiel and I never will be! If the best you can muster is that it’s a less vulgar South Park that’s easier for you to wank out to you won’t succeed and I shouldn’t feel bad about complaining at it!

BUT didn’t YOU make THIS?
Yes! I wish I hadn’t! I felt dirty when I did and the person I made it for just assumed I made it because I wanted to because he couldn’t grasp the idea of anybody else not being as into the show as he was. In fact I only made it so he would talk to me, and he did, that time! And realizing that I did indeed have to do that to get him to talk to me made me mad. And then I didn’t do it again and he never flippin’ talked to me again. I suspected I might have transferred my annoyance at him to annoyance at the cartoon, but half a year later I want to punch them both in the nose so they may well both deserve it. Similarly I theorize that neither cares.

Why don’t you just WATCH IT?
Because I don’t have to! Unless this is a condition to get my financial aid or my passport renewed then I don’t have time to do stuff I don’t want to do that I don’t need to do. Yet I tried! I got through one and realized I would never want to like it, given everything about it and the way in which it had been brought to my attention, and its refusal to leave. This is like reading one of those “remember when?” pages out of somebody else’s high school year book. It’s like that picture of the corny floating head with a pipe in his mouth or referencing a “flying spaghetti monster.” It’s never going to be funny to me because I’m not in your club and it isn’t.

I know one person who insists the program is bringing femininist ideas to people who would otherwise not be concerned with them. And maybe this message is more important than how badly drawn or annoying it is, or whom I resent and why. I hope that is the case. My problem might that I know very few people and I have trouble letting go of the ones that really aren’t going to get any better. Lazy fan immersion is itself the total absense of ideas, and something these people have been doing their whole lives. I give the management credit for devising a template that is even easier for the least creative to insert their egos into than anything we’ve had previously.

For all their blank slate adaptibility, Sega style hedgehogs are kind of hard to draw, what with their messed up proportion and conjoined twin cell eyeballs, as this box art specialist proves.

Hi I have a psychological disorder in which I think I’m persecuted despite being in an insufferable majority that gets whole websites devoted to it and takes over others. See also: war on christmas. or “if we allow gay people to have rights then everyone will be gay and humanity will stop reproducing.” In fact it’s such a powerful majority that I was afraid to complain about it. That really isn’t fair at all, considering the lack of kindness I’ve displayed toward the favorite television programs, musical acts and films of people I’m far closer to than anybody who has a web page with red text on it.

Consider even just the website name “ponychan.” That means this one topic was so overwhelmingly popular on the oldest and most notoriously hornetly imageboard that it attained sentience and split off into a new entity. Saw never did that. There is no “saw chan.” At least it’s not a chan that I saw. When you get really popular and obvious, people are more inclined to look for and point out your faults. That’s just what happens. Our most profitable news media is kept in business by this alone. And for the record I don’t see much about friendship in those which are the subjects of my gripes. It’s simply “this character exists. Look at it a lot.” I don’t have a problem with people watching a cartoon. Not this one more than any other I’ve whined about, certainly. If it came down to little ponies, the shirt tales, the snorks and muppet babies, I would recuse myself from picking the winner. I have a problem with people never shutting up about it under any circumstances, unwilling to accept that some others just don’t want any part of it, and cannot be made to, and further that the harder you push them the harder they’ll resist. I don’t fleeplezeep how “well written” and referency a program is if its fundamental sensory components are idiotic and embarrassing, and those get the most mileage.

Eh but if I liked something a lot, and knew there were forces massing to decry that I did, certainly I would defend my position. Wouldn’t I? I have no idea. I’ve never liked anything that was so beloved that I could say so and have there be 309 people standing by to statistically agree with me.
I prefer melodic music without vocals. I avoid referring to myself with pronouns. I walk in the rain and look drunk. I know what it’s like to be chronically not-gotten on a daily basis. The pony craze is very much gotten, and I wish I might be so into something that was, someday. That would be so great, to have massive corporations just pumping out trash I liked by the week, for free, and be friend-branded-acquaintances with ten thousand other idiots who liked it, who also drew the same stuff that due to my willing suspension of disbelief I could pretend wasn’t totally inane degenerate drivel, and is worthy of the source product I liked to begin with, in the event that was good.

Me mad? Yes! I’m furious! The absolute worst people on the whole internet love the dumb rainbow horses more than anything. It would be unfair inductive reasoning to claim that makes it inherently bad; that only keeps it inherently impossible for me to want to like at this point.
My mother watched American Idol but she didn’t draw, quote or otherwise invoke Brian Dunkleman every day for a year. And if she had and I’d told her to stop she wouldn’t have accused me of being some kind of pop culture gestapo trying to censor her rights and freedom. And if she had she’d be a krippendorfing maniac.

So that was that. But eventually…

AND What the hack is this thing? It looks like somebody bought a lion king coloring book and just used whatever crayons they felt like on Scar. In every picture it has the exact same expression, and I’ve seen about fifty of them despite never once looking for one and the thing not bloody existing three weeks prior [to when I wrote this sentence]. The regular characters feature the full range of emotions from happy to douchey but this one is only douchey. I understand that villainous sorts are supposed to be less than friendly but one assumes it may get upset when inevitably foiled, and in any event there should be something to distinguish its bad smirkiness from the good smirkiness of the protagonists.
This is, I think, seven different people doing lame fan-traces based on the exact same shot, or simply reposting the frame verbatim as an original work and subsequently submitting this to the “group” gallery I found them in, since the cartoon had not yet aired, but some official images had been posted online from it, I guess? That’s so bad that I don’t even care that only the last one is unmistakably douchey at this size.

This first person had the clever insight to mirror the frame before tracing it. Ah and “good” here’s some passable douchiness. Even when these people try to think outside their own tumblr mandates all they can come up with is “He’s the puppet master!” or “he has them all on a chessboard!”

“Q trolls the ponies.” I saw a bunch of such remarks. The uninspiration hath folded in on itself! The thing people use as a pathetic launching point, to borrow characters from to use in their own stories, is itself borrowing characters? Is that what I’m to conject from this? Nerds love this stuff. Ah didn’t I once say that I loved that? I like when one writer finds a means of reusing their own characters in another situation where intellectual property restrictions seek to prohibit them from doing so. I don’t like when a point of nerd idolatry safely assumes, and REQUIRES that its audience be familiar with another bastion of nerddom. I’m not terribly proud I made that pointless page of video game references. But at least they were varied and over quickly. it wasn’t a drawn out reverent tribute to one series. Good gorf star trek. This IS just like Bob and George.

I hate alllllllllll these people! I can’t recall when last I loathed so many non-murderers because I self-administered shock therapy to forget that.

That’s everything they do. They consume, and imitate what they consume. Of COURSE they’ll love stuff that itself consumes and imitates. Does it matter if the program can stand on its own merit if you can sync it up to audio from The Big Ol’ Bowski? and then link it at me out of context after I already plainly didn’t care about the last six contextless clips you sent amidst not even asking me how I’m doing? One of the reasons I dislike Kevin Smith films is that there’s sure to be 10 to 20 minutes just of people talking about other movies. And this conversation will be the same every time you watch.

Also: do we truly require in this comic store a mal-configured widecreen tv to put Kevin Smith on? Isn’t he fat enough already? And why did the angel order alcohol if he can’t actually drink it and presumably never could? How would he have developed a taste for it? How does he even enjoy that?

If you had asked me but a week before this what my least favorite thing about the collective Star Trekkion was, I might have responded that it’s sterile, bland and slow-paced and there was no excuse for it to be that way after Star Wars* got made, much less in four consecutive series other than people themselves being boring. Further down the list might have been that invincible douchabix guy who I want to strangle that’s in some episodes, regardless of the series, for no reason, that isn’t a Romulan. I can’t stand Romulans. They’re such jerks. And at some point I gripe that the most exotic aliens at best have weird foreheads and funny skin colors. Right but the one guy I hate, apparently that’s the favorite character of everybody else. Especially furries. Why? Because they have no sense of subtlety and the smuggest, smirkiest character will always be their favorite. I was surprised when I found out anybody liked Spyro. I am no longer surprised.

*Star Wars the film, not Star Wars the Kevin Smith reference interlude. I grant all reference interludes the same right to be scorned.

One complaint that supposed little pony detractors commonly give is that this is a cartoon aimed at children, specifically heteronormative female children. That hurts their case, and if that’s the only case they can produce then they’re just as weak. I would question if in fact it is! I would then also question whether children comprise a majority of the total viewing audience. No reasonable child –apart from one making just such an advertising niche jump– could possibly care about a minor star trek character or that this show was mentioned on Jimmy Kimmy’s own abomination. I have never encountered this cartoon in the context of anyone under the age of 17 or off the internet*. Through being successfully targeted and then fudnuddling merchandise dollars and ad revenue into the enterprise, adults on the internet are the main audience. Additionally, by the show creators acknowledging the internet adult popularity and working to incorporate or be fully compatible with things they like, those become the target demographic, I say.
*excluding an embarrassing convention I attended, because those are essentially gatherings of real people acting out the internet.
**and then on September 29, some inconsequential loiter gang within my audible proximity at my university’s loiter area mentioned the cartoon, asking “is it at Hot Topic yet?” and they moved on within two minutes without anybody saying “bro.” Bro anything is bad news.

And I go to a school in which people talk about zombie apocalypses, hold “bake[d] sales” on April 20, wear shirts branded “winning” and all sorts of horrid rubbish that nobody should think is clever.

I have an unnatural, almost instinctive resistence to stuff that got too popular for no clear reason. This has surely saved me tens of thousands of dollars through the years on trendy clothes, music albums, cigarettes, beer, tomagotchis, furbies, skip-its and xboxes. I see no reason to give up on it for something that looks like this and that makes people act like this.

I’ve never encountered anybody who accepts video game music as a legitimate art form off the internet either, but I scarcely encounter them ON it unless I seek them out, and in any event it’s much more reasonable that something just one person likes should be a fringe matter; there are thousands of these pony dipes who exist exclusively in imaginary places. Sometimes I wish I was imaginary, but I am increasingly afraid I am.

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It did once come to my attention that somebody thought I made that, as well. I can thankfully remark that I did not, as much good as that would do for my public standing in the eyes of people I don’t want to be seen by. It’s not the worst in that gallery, but the worst in that gallery is enough to make me not want any. It might be well done but it’s nothing I want to look at.

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The next entry, on, let’s say, December 4, 2012, promises to bring a shocking exposing which you already knew.

drat it all, I got some inspiration. I will have to wait until tomorrow, then.

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Nurvmembo furf:
I will see about posting something later. It will probably be very short.
Oh no actually today’s still legally the third. I no longer have any natural concept of what day it is.

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Nubembor thoid:
as far as I am yet aware the spray-paint didn’t give me cancer, but I’ll be a monkey’s umbrella if this superglue leaves me with any fingerprints in the end. Although in such a state I would be an unlikely suspect in any police proceedings anyhow so it is unlikely my print condition would make much difference. Time for a crime spree.

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November foist:
Oh bixby, another seven days with no update.

This only makes it worse.

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Why does livejournal still remember the birthday of an account that was deleted five years ago and what does it expect me to do with this information?

Why did I not allow my mother to continue believing that I had, in old times, refused to play Battletoads?

Why did I wake up September 5 2010 to find a used twinkie wrapper in my bedroom when I’ve not eaten or touched a twinkie in my life nor known anybody who does?

2008. This was not consumed out of youthful foolishness by a previous tenant. Somebody ate this within the past three years. Maybe someone I know. Why did this person eat that? Why do I know this person? Why do I have this person’s trash?

Very good. You have acknowledged the trash can. What comes next?

Splendid. Just be more discrete about it, lest you rouse to action

OH NO! TRASH GORDON! We do have one option. It’s worked before…

Back off, Gordsy. I’m very afraid to use this but I will if it becomes necessary. Yes indiddly, we truly do live in an age of unprecedented prosperity. Now anybody who can afford to may have the luxury of defeating Flash Gordon. Logically this also ought to work on people whose names rhyme with his.

Beets to it all, I was not prepared for such cowardice and deception! I fear we have not seen the last of this villain. He knows he cannot compete with my arsenal. No doubt he has sought the monetary assistance of his influential aristocratic ally

GILES RUBBISH. This rules out getting Scruffy the Dumpster Slayer on my side. And this is too stupid to continue. Good day.

popular with the robots, rubbish rage | How to lose a guy in (4) days | !

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At least this many.

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How many more of these can I fit in here?

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LATER…
11 pm-ish:
That was an educational experience. I don’t know if it was worth $60 in train fare, 10 hours of time and reaffirm-ment of my own insignificance, but the whole point of education is to learn things you did not previously know.

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Anybody coming to this site for the first time should strongly consider not trying to read this entry.

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Unless something goes wrong (and it has every right to) I will be visiting the Late Night With Conan O’Brien program during one of its final exhibitions on Wednesday. I applied for tickets, not expecting to even be acknowledged, and so did not consider the various factors that would keep me from enjoying a multi-hour event in an environment I cannot intermittently excuse myself from and where somebody will check my belongings before I go in.

(Alas, this is a long one.)
Aw naw!

Awww, dee! The super-bowl was today?! Toodle gumdrops.

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What makes me mad about the forced digital tv conversion is the way ‘they’ try to make it seem like it’s being done entirely as a favor to me and not because it’s more lucrative for everyone but me, me being for whom it will cost just the same or more. In fact, digital is SO much better that by law, all broadcast HAS to be digital by 2009
No, that’s not what it is at all. Having Sassy Invisible Tramp Lady say it should make no difference. She is not going to materialize and pay you tribute if you believe her. Similarly, believing the same words from the creepy “wake up with the king” voice sleazo isn’t going to make Burger King not wake up with you.

That’s a dumb thing to get mad about, but it reminded me of other topics and that’s what most of this is.

I don’t fully understand what the frequencies are to be used for in the future, and surely the organizations who bid for control of them would prefer I not know, and it bothers me rather a bit. What I know it does mean is more power for Verizon and the historically meek and non-ambitious At&t, and more money for underachieving pay tv providers just because. Though I give the latter party’s representative credit for having its own sassy tramp lady actually go so far as to promise lewd conduct.

But don’t try to sell me such an obvious and shallow lie, about the tv. Or, I mean, you did but you should not have. That makes it seem like you’re hiding something. That would be like the government forcing everybody to stop using V C Rs immediately. No, that would be like the government forcing everybody to stop going to casinos which it wouldn’t do because casinos make a lot more money for states which allow them than basic broadcast signals.

Why would anybody buy clothing which expresses such a sentiment? If you’re enough in control of your mind to realize paying $500 to touch an ace of clubs that every other grub fiend has also touched then why would you pay more money for a thing which makes fun of you for it? BECAUSE YOU’RE AN IDIOT WHO QUESTIONS NOTHING. Excuse me. What I meant is that you’re an idiot who questions nothing.

Forcing use of digital televisions because the more expensive variants are capable of displaying a higher resolution picture which is theoretically an improvement over the old one would be like the government forcing everybody to stop eating meat. Which, again, would never happen, because meat is big business, and it’s easier to keep making new pigs and chopping them up forever than to find a new use for some farm land. It could easily be argued that farmers are already paid for enough of the things they aren’t selling.

Often the same people who think the right to slay anything which cannot ask them not to is one bestowed upon them by Mr. God see no irony at all in dousing the eventual product with Velveeta brand cheese product, smothering it between two atrophied round fragments of bleached, nutrient sapped bread product and then drowning the masticated particles with an astounding 32 ounce megavial of Mountain Dew brand green liquid product. I don’t see why a transition from meat would be a difficult one, really.

It isn’t hard to synthesize the taste of meat, or at least it wouldn’t be if people really put some effort into it. It’s not like it’s fruit or anything, where there are just so many reasons to not eat it. Yeah, nice try fruit lobby. I’ll take my chances with scurvy, thank you. Fruit is easy, anyway, because it lacks a nervous system and doesn’t need to convert a few tons of vegetation into wonderful methane before you can slice each individual item into shapes unidentifiable as a thing that once lived. Also, due to rampant pesticide use people are more accustomed to the industrial flavor. It’s an acquired taste. The most logical solution, to ensure a smooth transition™ then, is to start submerging chickens in RAID right before we chop their heads off. In markets where places of slaughter lack the facilities to accomodate suitably sized vats, casual dining establishments may apply to recieve free trichlorobenzene buffalo sauce and dichlorvos honey mustard. It has been judged that these are the common meat accompaniments in which the change would be least obvious. With all the barbecue-ing and deep frying and dipping and dabbing all over the place I have to question how many people do in fact know what meat tastes like.

But I think I was talking about something else. Yes, so, there are a limited amount of radio frequencies, and somebody wants to free them up or something. It’s probably not for an ultra powerful mind control robot that can’t function with cbs and nbc all up in its wavelength, but at least if it is I won’t have to worry about these things anymore.

If it improves communication between public entities, then great. If it gets The Government more short term money to burn in a dessert, oh well, they’d have gotten it one way or the other. That’s probably better than borrowing from China. Even if Chinese businessmen are revealed as the true buyers of the signals at least it’s a proper transaction, and will give them one more thing to do instead of substituting melamine for protein in various food exports. You’re a couple paragraphs late, China.

Eh, please don’t make me become one of those “oh, really? I didn’t hear about that trivial gossipy factoid because I don’t own a TV” people. I already have that reaction to far too many things, despite what might be inferred by my ability to acquire the image directly above here. While I certainly wouldn’t miss trivial gossipy factoids about people with one name, it has been my experience that people don’t like other people who they think hate stupid stuff they like.
I already have digital television service, but I watch few programs, and their contents are easily obtained through internet. So were I the master of my own hovel destiny I would likely forgo television services entirely, but it’s important that the world know whether this is out of fickle spite or simple sensibility.

Bob Barker talks about the digital tv he will not be a part of. I’m surprised they expect anyone simple enough to buy that turducken of an explanation to be both old and smart enough to remember who Bob Barker is. Who’s that? Me not remember thing happen last year! Although he appears here on a stereotypical analog television box the likes of which I haven’t seen since The Clapper updated its ads last year, so maybe his fading relevance is supposed to represent that. Sending it to Antarctica was a tad excessive, I think.

I have read that United Statia has been notoriously stubborn, in comparison to other televising nations, regarding the changes and such. I suspect this spot was filmed and intended to be aired while Mr. Barker was still hosting The Price is Right, with the implication “if you’re still watching this TV when the signal is shut off Bob Barker will die inside it.” By now, of course, we know that the plan was to kill him all along.

Really, why bother wheeling out Barker, trying to appeal to the elderly folk who traditionally struggle with tecnhology being forced upon them, if you won’t make new shows they’d want to watch anyway? That is, I assume you aren’t making those, because I have attained less than half the official retirement year requirement and you don’t make new shows I want to watch, and I understand that visibility to advertisers diminishes with age. You should have Bob saying “If you are seeing this, it will mean that I have failed. Have you considered taking up knitting?”

Seriously, I thought Estelle Getty was like a-hundred and twenty.

I will think of her every time I don’t purchase beef jerky.

Addendum: content controlled food-product packaging is less of a threat to humanity than Rubbaducks, especially ones which ally themselves with antisocial prefabricated mug covers. Yerbofe has spoken.

Apparently this nation is in the midst of a cookie shortage.

Have you seen these things? They put a couple little, air-filled cookies in a bag, put a few bags of that in a box you could fit a pair of shoes in and charge you as if the box was full. There’s probably more weight in shiny plastic in there than anything edible. Oh oh, if I buy a FULL box of cookies I’ll eat every one! Did you ever think that relying on major food production companies to dictate your habits to you is what caused your problem in the first place? While I’m hardly in a position to criticize people for not working hard, this seems like a seriously dopey solution. Are you a child? You need an unquestionable authority figure to give you less cookies? And you pay extra money for this? Eh, maybe you do. Somebody keeps spam-robot marketing profitable (I decided that was more plausible a jump than suggesting anyone reads Cathy). There are financially independent, home owning adults with weaknesses entire branches of business are maintained by the exploitation of. I remember when Snackwells sold out everywhere even though all they were was bad chocolate cookies and everyone who bought them who was fat stayed fat. And apparently people besides me knew the things tasted bad, but kept buying them anyway even though one eats snacks for the taste, because people are irresponsible buffoons who enjoy being irresponsible buffoons. There should be a law prohibiting sale of Snackwells to snackers who cannot fit in a well.

This example I really wouldn’t mind so much if it was priced for what it contains and there wasn’t such a plastic-to-cookie ratio. But without that there’d be no money incentive for businesses to claim they had the solution to your cookie issue and pretend to offer it to you. And there’s always plastic. There’s more plastic than ever and people still weigh more weight than ever. Maybe they should try eating plastic.

Again with the 100 Calories (which due to thoughtless terminology creation is equal to 100,000 lowercase calories)! Calories aren’t fat, you know. They are units of energy. While certainly excess energy can be harmful, in itself that is not the problem, and its presence need not indicate lack of nutritive value. Your problem might be soda and cookies. Or maybe I just wanted to show that I know what Calories are because it makes me seem like I know lots of things even though I only know a few things about Calories.

Yes, so, many major soda brands now market half sized cans. There may be occasional situations under which this is called for, but in general what you’re going to end up with is somebody just taking two cans, and then who will adorn our Froot Loops boxes? Alright, marmite, let’s say you’re trying to “cut back” and you don’t want to feel obligated to finish your whole drink (and if that’s the case I invite you into my home to see that many people don’t feel obligated to do that at all, hint hint accidentally knocked over 2/5 full caffiene free diet pepsi why is that here I don’t even drink that broken keyboard wailing tears), why are there half sized water bottles?¹

Water has zero calories. No one ever foiled their health as a result of consuming 16 ounces of water every day. The only way to get dead prematurely drinking water is to be specifically allergic to it or to imbibe such a very large amount that you win admission to a fraternity, and I have to think any other liquid would do it just as well.

But some people are always going to be helpless.

¹Ehhh, assuming there is reason to buy brand name pre-bottled water in any size in a section of a nation in which sanitary water is available on-tap, which that picture was taken in. How long before oxygen is being sold back to us?

Nehhh…

How long before “we” think it’s a good idea, I mean. And that charging 20 dollars for little bottles of an essential basic component of life isn’t scummy, even in the unlikely case there’s reason to assume both that it’s possible to trap pure oxygen in a little can and that they’re doing it. They don’t list the price for the magic ogo water, which suggests to me it’s either laughably ludicrous, even in context, or of indeterminate legality.

Many people today are buying bottled oxygen and oxygen cans online because it’s not easy to find Oxygen Products at the supermarkets.
Oh, is that why!

Have you considered increasing the oxygen content of its imbibing fluid?

And this news article is full of lies.
Theater carnies don’t need to raise popcorn prices to stay in business. They “need” to raise popcorn prices to maintain the same ridiculous profit slope they’ve had going since they first shouldn’t have. That article tries to make these bozoinks seem like heroes for fighting to save my popcorn. Yeeh, you’ll pay “whatever it takes to get popcorn planted,” because whatever that takes will still end up being less than what you charge for it, you redenbastid.

I don’t read the Los Angeles Times. I don’t read the any times. I don’t have time for times because I get so mad about things written in them that it takes me six greedeen hours to assemble my rage into incomprehensible messes like you see before you. Someone else must have found that link and told me about it. But ehhh:
Two years ago, a farmer charged about $10 for 100 pounds of popcorn. Today it’s about $20.
A ridiculous increase, sure, assuming absolutely no fabrication and projecting have taken place, but that’s still two dollars for ten pounds (in other words: the approximate opposite of the current US-UK exchange rate). I know there’s transportation, storage and disgusting fake butter which makes the entire purchase inedible not included in that cost, but how does one dollar for five pounds become five dollars for… I can’t even tell. I was going to say “half a pound” but I think that’s mostly the non-recyclable wax-paper container. Popcorn doesn’t weigh very much at all. I don’t know the exact figures, but they probably get like five-thousand bags of popcorn from one pound of the hard brown things and, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but some of them don’t even pop.
These kookaburras wouldn’t have told you two years ago that they were paying one dollar for ten pounds. At that rate, we ought to have been getting complimentary popcorn.

“If we didn’t charge as much for concessions as we did, the tickets to the movies would cost $20,” said Mike Campbell, chairman and chief executive of Regal Entertainment Group, the nation’s largest theater chain with 6,300 screens.
So charge twenty dollars, you pith. This scrum-bum admits his business practices are deceitful. I doubt he invented this practice, but I also doubt he ever questioned it. Maybe tickets would cost $20, but it would be obvious to everyone they wouldn’t need to. That also suggests popcorn only costs 2-3 times what it ought to. Maybe they should close the six thousand three hundred big loud expensive wasteful movie display systems they can’t afford and just sell popcorn since that’s clearly so much easier to overcharge for.
Gargoyles, you know why tickets don’t cost 20 dollars yet? Because if prices don’t rise at a steady incline we don’t get to name a new HIGHEST GROSSING MOVIE OF ALL TIME which may not necessarily be the same as the HIGHEST OPENING WEEKEND OF ALL TIME! every fiddling year, putting THE MOVIES back on THE FRONT PAGE.

The price of pop-corn in theaters hasn’t a thing to do with the cost of actual corn. Ehhh, unless you’d have me believe the raisinet and soda crops are getting replaced with ethanol fodder, too, because that can’t be had for less than four dollars most places, either. “Beverages provided by coca cola” my beanbag. Beverages provided by my dollars. Ooh dis. That stupid line is the only thing I remember about the pre-preview rule rundown. Which is unfortunate, because that means I yell at the screen, don’t turn off my telephone and make my garbage into stylish hats instead of disposing of it in the indicated garbage can. When will I learn?

For years, popcorn manufacturers have offset their rising costs by developing new hybrids that expand more. A few years back, a typical popcorn kernel expanded about 35% in volume when it was cooked. That figure has reached nearly 50% today, but the expansion rate can’t really get much higher, as movie audiences would essentially be eating little more than salty air.
This plan gets put on hold until the time comes to convince consumers they should buy their air.
So despite its intended message, the article admits that the kernels are popped harder than they used to be so they expand more, filling more space, requiring a lesser quantity of corn to fill the container. And yet prices did not go down when less corn was used! It has also recently been revealed to me that in some cases it is not corn at all but

the shrunken heads of white-haired bearded men, which I guess are cheaper to obtain? I don’t want to eat that!

Even with such an admission that article is still a parcel of porridge, because tickets around here don’t cost seven dollars. They cost seven dollars and fifty cents. Ha, ha! Oh, and after 6 pm, they are ten dollars. I could buy 50 chicken nuggets for that! Maybe I will. No no, not nuggets. I will get popcorn chicken. That costs less than real popcorn, and birds have to be murdered to get that, and those ate corn. All the cruelty and irony would overload my brain and I’d fall under a coma for three years/ever during which I wouldn’t have to worry about these things.

Regal regal regal. In the event you can’t tell from the poster pimping the immenent hostile occupation by SHREK THE THIRD (because you’ve undergone therapy to block it from your mind), I took this picture over a year ago. Who’da thunk popcorn cost SEVEN DOLLARS before my wallet was getting bites taken out of it? Verily, the 7 dollar order is a moderately decadent bucket you could probably wear as a helmet in the event you were blind and not in serious need of protection, but the 5.50 purchase is a standard sized paper bag (with wax coating). If greater corn economics were a concern, the three sizes would have more disparity between them to encourage the buying of less popcorn for more money. Instead, you get to thinking “gee biz, it’s only a dollar fifty more, and look at how much extra pop corn I get!” because regardless of how much they sell they still have more corn than they can give away, so they might as well sell a huge bucket that most people won’t finish, even accompanied by something resembling proper butter.

Thanks to holding a massive inventory of uncooked popcorn, the Regal theater chain won’t have to raise its popcorn price immediately but probably will have to eventually.
Whoa, thanksh a bunch there! That means for some time it will continue to be only seven dollars! Let the good times roll! I mean pop! Deeeeeeee!

but probably will have to eventually. “The prices will have to go up a bit,” said Campbell.
URRRRGH! I just imagine the smug, smirky face he said that with. The prices will HAVE to go up. They have no choice in the matter. Modern movie theaters aren’t bloated, inefficient wastes of space, they just don’t charge enough for popcorn.

You’re so smart, howard we gonna stay in business if we don’t overcharge for popcorn, then?
You could sell a big glump of ad-time prior to all movies, set up to resemble a sub-Entertainment Tonight glib-fest which goes behind the scenes of imminent releases that have already gone out of previews and that will soon be inescapable during television commercial breaks! And you could give that ad its own commercial breaks so I forget it’s all just one big ad and possibly think you’re doing me a favor by bringing it to me! “And now back to the big ad!” Thank you so much! Yes yes, and after that you can show actual normal preview ads anyway! Huh? I mean, like, Hwuh? You already do that? And you still don’t make enough money to fund your twelve ludicrous theater rooms that I don’t think I’ve ever seen filled to capacity? Howzat now? You could always blame dvds and big television sets, and hope I don’t realize those existed six years ago when you cut down the great deku tree to build this place. Ehhh, it’s probably my fault for hiding a bottle of water in one of my big coat pockets instead of paying you three dollars for an eternally plastic water bottle I’d be just as likely to vomit into as drink out of.

Concession sales are a theater’s lifeblood, accounting for as much as 45% of profits at the nation’s largest chains. Popcorn offers one of the biggest returns on investment for exhibitors, because the unpopped kernels used to make an entire bucket of popcorn cost just a few pennies.
Great gimpity, and now it’s going to cost even more pennies! How will these people feed their families? Not with corn, definitely.

What monstrous, unscrupulous fiend would allow this disgusting sequence of events to take place?

I could cry.
This problem is bigger than popcorn, naturally: it’s not being replaced with crops that aren’t corn and demand less pesticides, just other kinds of corn, for ethanol, which I’ve never seen a reasonable person suggest is a good idea. Also, that article links to more articles. I don’t want to read them; you saw what the first one did to me. Essentially, it doesn’t matter how much better ethanol is than gasoline because coal is used to make the ethanol, and coal is worse than gasoline, and we can’t put the coal mines out of business because then we won’t get to say it’s a miracle when all the miners get trapped but look like they’re going to survive but then don’t. The only real difference is that there’s more stupid corn getting grown and more dipstipple republican gooselivers getting to collect money while pretending they give a bunkbed what happens when they’re dead. I’m sure if you do the research it all goes back to Jesus not liking gays. It always does.

I hope we run out of popcorn. I can live without it, you can live without it. The only people who seem to need it are the graboopis selling it like Leonardo DiCaprio smuggled it out of Africa. I don’t think he did!

Fake butter on movie theater popcorn: have you tasted this? Well you probably will because it’s just that horrible that it will never go away. It wouldn’t have come into use at all if some twipe in a focus group didn’t say in sentence fragments which will appear between quotation marks in marketing for it “Can’t taste the difference! Same great taste!” I’m not talking about margarine or the poisonous diacetyl in the microwave rubbish. Whatever this is, it’s worse than that, except that I don’t necessarily know the smell of it can kill me.

Anytime something cheaper and less good gets invented it tries to take over. Like when all the lime candy started turning into “apple.” Or whatever happened that allowed the largest pizza chain in the world to have originated in Kansas and the second largest Michigan. For some reason, you’re not allowed to expand unless you make tasteless slab cheese orange sauce cardboard crust ellipses of dread. I can’t stand it. The previous invention of microwaving technology left the theaters safe, and for all I know gave them yet another excuse to raise their prices once the ability to pop corn properly in a domestic environment had been bred out of common folk.

And this time the theaterbies thought
“hey, we can cut corners here, at the butter churn, too, and people will stay pay as much as we say for it, probably.” Of course this was supplemented by a “Bow-Tie-Cinema”-produced ad for their kernels of punishment prior to the actual movie. It sheweth old-timey footage of popcorn plopping up in a pot and intermittently flashes black screens with FRESH! and REAL! printed on them. These people think that will be enough to convince me. I was not convinced!

Microwave popcorn, I don’t like it, I won’t pay for it, and I won’t feel inclined to eat it, but if I mistakingly eat a piece, I can chew and swallow it. THIS I had to force down with water. I couldn’t even taste the corn itself, just its otherworldly coating, like I’d drank a cup, or rather a vial of it. I don’t remember the flavor, just thinking at the time that it tasted really orange. Not like the fruit, just the color. It tasted like something orange that should not be orange. Like if a dorito was made entirely out of its preservation dust but was also wet. I’ve never tasted styrofoam, but I imagine if I had and it was orange and a liquid it would have the same effect when poured over once palatable snack products.

I had to blow my nose at several points during the production I was screening, and I was suddenly very repulsed by the smell of the restroom soap on my fingers, and for some reason it reminded me of the tiny bit of turned popcorn gel I had just ingested and the burning, ringing sensation it left within my nasal passages. Perhaps they come from the same source. They definitely both emerged via the same pump-action goop distribution method. It actually made the sound “goop” when it was dispensed. That is one popcorn related omonaontonpaiea I could do without. I thought right then and there how glad I was that the other person was getting popcorn and I wasn’t, but a couple minutes later I had forgotten and was both surprised and grateful when without being prompted at all he offered me a chance to partake of his mysterious possession (this was the same person I shared that dangerous pizza with two weeks later. He may be trying to destroy me). I should have known better when he said “I’m probably not going to finish this.” And I ate one (1) popped corn unit, and for one brief shining moment I felt less than dead. What was it? My recent re-examination of the picture above, which I only took because I thought it a bit odd to bring popcorn into a restroom, is the first opportunity I’ve had to really look at it, and aside from the fact that it appears to be glowing I can’t make out any unusual poperties.

This was like something they’d give to the army. This was like something invented by dow chemical in the 1950s that no one on the consumer end knows causes cancer yet. This was like a failed 80s cost-reducing experiment I’d have to read about on the internet because it happened so long ago and was abolished so quickly that most people old enough to know about it have forgotten. This was like something people would film themselves dropping Mentos into. Like an hour later, still preoccupied with the popcorn I thought to myself that it could not possibly have been as bad as I imagined it was, and also that I really did want some popcorn, and took two pieces instead of one. I actually gagged. The only time I usually gag is when I try to eat something my mother likes. I shouldn’t gag on snacks. The whole point of snacks is that they taste so good I’d rather eat them than nutritious vegetarian brodinger. Did somebody replace the butter with yellow triaminic? That’s almost orange, I suppose.

Hey, if I see this guy eating cold pork chops after passing out drunk and waking up in his personal bowling alley and I become envious, that’s not good.