regarding some distressing imagery I have mostly had on my hard drive since 2012:
Tails HAS to stay outside. Tails is not ALLOWED in the house on Christmas.
it is imperative to keep tails as far away from your drink as possible, especially if tails is wearing a bowtie.
do not exert yourself to help tails out of peril, no matter how corny his facial expression gets; tails can FLY and is just doing this for attention.
do not follows tails’ instructions. tails is not a member of the technical support team. Tails has been cursed for his deeds and imprisoned inside the computer. If you do what he tells you there is a risk of transferring the curse to yourself. if you must talk to tails do it by telephone, away from your keyboard, or at least while wearing protective gloves that prevent precision key presses.
be sure to keep those gloves on when disciplining tails since foxes, even meeply ones, are known to carry rabies.
trying to gain retribution against tails by blocking his vision in an aircraft will needlessly endanger yourself and not affect tails since he doesn’t look where he is going anyhow. also as has been previously noted, tails can FLY without aid of a vehicle.
tails is not even authorized to pilot mine carts.
also do not respond if tails attempts to pull you over in your own aircraft. tails flunked out of sky patrol academy. if he shows you a badge it is counterfeit. regardless of the lettering on display,
tails is in fact illegal in japan. do not be fooled!
tails also cannot dance. reports are yet unconfirmed as to whether he will steal your money but I think it is safe to assume that you should not give him any.
ALSO unrelated to tails but if you listen to that song, cut it off after the second verse; that chorus is NOT good enough to hear twelve times
and as weird as the video is, Will Vinton studio isn’t creative enough beyond the novelty of using clay to to do anything but simply animate mouths in increasingly creepy ways if there are no further written instructions.
is there anything else to be concerned about?
no I absolutely REFUSE to acknowledge this
yes let us all celebrate women’s sports. I don’t have an interest in men’s sports either
–unless racing randomized versions of old final fantasies counts as a sport, and it probably shouldn’t.–
and find men’s sports’ media saturation obscene even without any proximity to people who do watch them, so they ought to be held in equal esteem to womens’, sure. However I don’t think giving the Cracker Jack kid a drag makeover is going to accomplish anything except alienate old people who learn about this via the fox news outrage vine or a surrogate and I have never seen a young person eating this stuff nor heard one mention it outside the context of the Take me out Ballgame song, and definitely not recently.
you know what else isn’t helping women
if you can’t make “women” character without putting big lips and ludicrous eyelashes on them then you aren’t flipping any quos regardless of what kind of shoes you put on them. In fact obsessing over their shoes is even quoier. To the brand’s credit, I finally saw its actual announcement and it DOESN’T MENTION the dingdang shoes.
foremost Tucker “couldn’t REALLY be worse than Sean Hannity, right?” Carlson, akkka the world’s second worst use of a bowtie, who LOOKED at the 1 minute video in which the characters don’t even appear until after a 45 second long corporate hokewave, and NOTICED the shoe changes and made a fuss over it, and then arguably more legitimate journalists fussed over that fuss.
and this garbage, I only found today when trying to find proof of the previous thing I linked to, which, again, was primarily evident through terrible “news” articles being written about it. But in this case there is no defense to be made of the source ditzinformation; everything about it is stupid. “We didn’t think anyone would notice” is a profoundly disingenuous statement; it was ALL meant to be noticed, just with better balance. and apart from the disingenuity of the statement that the “spokescandies” were taking a “pause,” it isn’t even true, because it was put out in January and I still see these awful things all over the place. Well gosh they weren’t even paused within the context of that picture of text.
I am an enthusiast of discounted holiday candy; generally that is the only time m&ms cost little enough relative to other bad American candy that I will consider buying them, and I came into possession of this one this very month, and there’s smugsa verde right on the bag. It must be noted though that the creature appears to lack feet entirely on this occasion.
And as tacky as the feminizing is, the red one is still the worst character because it is still the default character and it still has no character. It might have been on the bag of “m&ms eggs” I also bought and that tasted almost exactly the same as the hershey brand “eggs” and neither was as good as the cadbury eggs that weren’t available because people actually bought those before they went on sale.
I am so hyper aware of this because *I* like to draw garbage like this too. Little enough that it didn’t need to be mentioned back when I first started griping about how lazy it is from a design perspective but it became a bigger problem. Generally problems do not get smaller around here; even the smaller monitor with a dope on it in this entry’s second picture is in fact my PRIMARY monitor.
this picture actually immediately preceded this one of the world’s worst use of a bowtie three years ago. I never show these sorts of “characters” here or in my major personal projects because i KNOW the designs are stereotyped tacky trash. And consequently people assume all my neutrally-defined characters are he him male and that I must want to look at phalluses and characters which have phalluses and those are the only things they want me to draw. Because most people are idiots. And you already knew that. And so did I. Why are we here? All this could be avoided if I simply learned to stop needing to eat and thus no longer needed to visit grocery stores. I tried but I only got about 3 videos into the tutorial series.
a great deal of junk has been affixed to my refrigerator by other parties, and I rarely pay close attention to it. As someone who uses the appliance to store food and also eats food periodically, I am more concerned with its interior regions. However recently however by chance I happened to more closely examine a bit of the out-side and was rather disturbed
I don’t understand why I have to put up with this nonsense in my own house.
the magnet for “clinton little league” and also some boat club were still on the refrigerator from its previous owners when we moved into this house. The punchable cat mermaid was not. These things seem to follow me around. I can’t stand it. It looks like it should be wearing a bowtie. no! no, it shouldn’t. never-mind. i didn’t mean that. PLEASE…
oh fiddle deef deef I fell for it again.
this sure took a while to make! too many moving parts for this many angles. no more ribbons on these weirdos. hopefully anything else I need this one to do can be done in three or fewer frames per viewpoint. My hopes are typically misplaced.
in fact these angles don’t match very well and there is a hard break between front and back views rather than them being evenly spaced from each other, but that is unlikely to be evident in action, and unlike most things that are unlikely to be evident in action that I want to fix, this one I cannot fix so I must accept it or even better forget it!
The hat is put into the “game” separately from the rest of the body, and, due to a frustrating oversight, the shadow for its hat also. however, the discovery that I can assemble individual sprites without needing to separate them by angle after drawing them greatly cuts down on the time necessary to insert all these dumb little things and simplifies the process of updating those graphics if I see something fixable other than what I already said I couldn’t. Having the hat separate –I determined it was the element most feasible to keep separate, the shadow issue not withstanding– allows for the creation of an alternately-powered hatless or alternately-hatted version, once I draw another set of hats. or
this might be TOO stupid.
Having this settled for the moment I hope also to have another comic page completed before the year ends, because it would be depressing not to. it may also be depressing to do so by virtue of containing the virtually virtueless meepmere along with a pathetic lizardoid that isn’t angry at meepmere, but not to the degree that a dope with a recycled hat doing the world’s stupidest dance is.
a helpful person from my web host asmallorange was able to, as far as I can tell, alleviate the total breakdown afflicting the “art” gallery website subsection. It will probably break again if whatever broke it this time happens again, and it well might since I still don’t know what broke it this time, but for the MOMENT it is unbroken. a different person with a different approach took on my comment form issues:
That is certainly different! I looked around, the only file that seemed to have been altered was “php.ini,” which I had not noticed there previously, but inside it was only
fix errors by hiding anything that has an error in it, ungenious! I should have suggested that when I had my car brakes checked the day before.
Admippedly the brake check and pad(s) replacement cost me more than the web hosting does in four years and the car people weren’t able/going to fix another problem in the catalytic converter without doubling the price and implementation time it was originally expected to be.
from that perspective my not getting the assistance I required from this source makes sense. Thus I would prefer the support person to have said “it isn’t my job to fix your code even if it isn’t your fault your code broke,” rather than “magic! all better! happy now.” I would still complain but it would be a more evolved complaint. I am an idiot about php but that doesn’t mean I am simply an idiot. Whatever does mean that is much more complicated to hide.
und so today I “fixed” the comment form by replacing the troublsome “ereg” with the somehow less objectionable “preg_match”… I found another person’s webpage indicating that I should do this weeks ago, but it includes so much extraneous information that I figured there was more to it than I could grasp and didn’t mess with it until I had checked on the possibility of undoing whatever caused this mess. Unfortunately this present comment form doesn’t alternate the colors on each comment anymore. Or did I never get the color alternating to work to begin with? Or that stopped working at some other point? I can’t remember. Whatever I have now at least is better than the default comment form and heaps better than having an obnoxious error there, and yes it is even better than there simply being nothing at all because the error got hided.
why am I able to see this?
an attempt to convert some creatures of that sketchbook page into a remotely coherent composition. It did not work! But I felt artistically fulfilled for a few hours.
the website that links to is evidently not being used to its greatest potential by me but it seems to function in the capacity of displaying my only just slightly edited for the purpose of clarity scanned sketch book pages without me feeling self-conscious about the minimal level of value they seem to be perceived as having, which I have been unable to accomplish on other trendo sites.
the green thing did not initially make any statement about its appearance nor even wear glasses but I could tell it thought it looked like spike lee. Initially the words just floated beside the creature as if it was dialog but I do not think that is aesthetically functional in this sort of image, but fortunately it seemed plausible that this creature would have a sign made with this pronouncement written on it that the creature would pose in this presence of.
In the upper left is an incredibly corny looking, tiny dopey teapot that was a recurring element in the painting classes I had when pursuing a largely superfluous bachelor degree. I could tell the teapot was profoundly proud of itself and that it thought it was the honorable Horace T. Teapot. it probably also has a sign announcing that just out of the frame. It might as well be wearing a bowtie. You could probably make ONE cup of tea in that dumb teapot. I have NO idea what it is so proud of. I thought for certain I had explained all this years ago but apparently I did not which is why the world is in such a dire situation.
this about sums it up
treco de gallo conducts an independent inquiry into the authenticity of claims made in mortimewde stapleton meepmire’s latest product endorsement
On december 1 2019 my niece Vackshfump was watching “ralph breaks the internet” Yessir this 5-year-old really needs to see a cartoon full of comedy celebrities talking about loot farming and ebay. I was only near it twice and was vividly reminded of this foxtrot strip except imagine it cost 175 million dollars and bill amend owned toaplan and taito.
“all your base are belong to us” is one of the earlier meme “phenomenons” before people described it with the terminology “meme.” Bill Amend was lazily referencing it in this comic strip for nerd credibility despite it already having been considered old at that point and this not really having any angle on it other than to observe that it exists, and of course it takes 6 weeks for newspaper comic strips to get published, or at least did for most of their existence.
And what is my problem, then? The ralph movie is even older now than the all your base joke was then. But I am not doing this for credibility! If I was going to have any I would have gotten it a long time ago. I was never going to watch this cinemagony on purpose when it was new, much less pay for the right so that I might offer a timely criticism. Having a small child in my life is bringing along with it a great deal of unfortunate media the likes of which I would greatly prefer to not be aware of, because it does THIS to me. I don’t have time to write these things, do you have time to read them?
You can say “WELL it’s not FOR KIDS just because it’s a CARTOON!” but it shows up in the netflix “kids” mode that hides countless other mildly to substantially less stupid things, and also prominently features the official non-parody disney princesses which exist primarily to extract money from parents of this specific captive audience, with the aim of turning those kids into willful captives and likewise captors when they produce their own children.
also on netflix kids, Jerry Seinfeld IS “The Bee Movie,” Adam Sandler’s entourage in Hotel Transylvania and Alec Baldwin as the only character he plays now inexplicably drawn as Boss Baby, all three brightly colored celebrity wank jobs devoid of kid-comprehendable content (plus numerous other equally ugly items I am glad have not been put on in my presence yet). I don’t think bee movie even has one kid character. Of the four I have named, only bee movie my sister refuses to put on, and i don’t understand where this line is drawn. I acknowledge that seen here is boss baby the spinoff baldwin-less netflix series, but I know the full film is there also because I had to deal with that last year. It was boring and pointless but not an exercise in brand awareness disguised as something other than that. The trash culture fetishizing of hotel transylvania is deplorable and its character designs only seem bearable in the proximity of minecraft but I will admit the animation itself is occasionally funny-looking, which I can’t say for the others I have mentioned. I think Trolls the movie is a crime against humanity and demi-humanity but it is unmistakably a children’s film and not visible here so citing it would not aid my cause.
if you are curious about the netflix kids setting, this is how customizable it is. You can’t tell it to include or exclude certain titles. You can’t personally select and omit every movie that has excessive belching or flatulence in them, for example, and I presume there are a surprising number that don’t. Of course as a parent have the power to NOT put on a movie you don’t like, but when kids are bred from birth to want disney-y trash and you are granted no means to tune it out you end up having to fight your own child to avoid it.
and maybe you deserve it if you cede the authority to a moneymaking business to decide what is “age appropriate” and harbor absolutely no other categories of appropriateness.
If I was the parent I would browse it myself in advance and choose some things that weren’t too horrible but most people aren’t like me and netflix specifically isn’t really big on giving users control anyway. it automatically plays trailers for whatever is selected including whatever it suggests to you first and complacently refuses to let you disable that.
As indicated, I was near it twice; two days later, ralph was on again! it is legitimately upsetting to me. I don’t know how to co-exist in a world where this is considered valid entertainment. It makes me depressed. I can’t have happiness if this is what people want. if i have consolation it is that it made ONLY half a billion dollars and that is now considered a disappointment to the Disney organization so there probably won’t be a third, but everything is like that now to some/many degrees so it isn’t going to stop.
everything i guessed about it is not only true, it’s twice as bad. the princesses aren’t in the whole movie but they are in much more than I was expecting. they show up about the same length into the film that optimus prime does in the transformers movie and get about as much screen time. (incidootily my least favorite part about 2006 transformers was also the unnecessary pandering references to the internet) This movie cannot stand on its own, and nobody cares. imagine if “meet the spartans” made much more money and put a curse on mentally-challenged movie critics to say nice things about it. that series got killed when writer producer jackasses seltzer and freberg became too greedy and decided to distribute subsequent movies themselves and suddenly couldn’t get into theaters. That is not a reliable circumstance for me to hope for with disney.
in this movie websites are places, otay. this one is called “ohmyDISney” and the character who says it pronounces the heap out of the DIZ. it is supposed to be a disney fan site because this communicates that consumers also accept that star wars and marvel just ARE disney, not established worlds with their own identities that disney simply purchased relatively recently within our lifetimes. and also this isn’t corporate excess this is what WE the proles WANT. Like this is MY fault.
that’s “oh my disney” as in “oh my god” without the god because plainly there isn’t one but that doesn’t mean you can’t receive doctrine and arbitrary commands in its name and worship it. Also it has its own hotels because of the allegory of an internet as a physical place that looks like a real place and real places have hotels and EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS MOVIE IS MORONIC
I don’t consider pixar in the category of stuff disney just bought and assimilated because pixar’s public identity has always been synonymous with disney, and in many ways the current disney was assimilated by pixar. The same sap morality, fake comedy, california/celebrity worship and computer graphics addiction, and also John Lasseter has been in some way involved with every disney movie since way too long and was only kicked out after he, like every entertainment media figure who gets held up as incapable of error, turned out to be a sexual predator. Since that occurred people other than me have been complaining about disney movies again, which I can only hope means disney is actually getting better, but the Lion King bookended both sides of the Lasseter era and I hate it in any case. it’s still d-d-DIZney, turning a profit targeting schmucks, even if its hypnotism of the reporting media is slightly less complete.
Anyway this whole segment of the ralph movie is just to remind you that disney owns stuff and intends to mash it up in disgusting ways, it must be stated that all the specific video game references in the film are 20-40 years out of date or generic, but the oh! my disney segment includes real brands and absolutely reflects whatever disney wanted to project of itself in 2018. The princesses all know and get along with each other and wear contemporary slob fashions despite coming from different time periods and countries and don’t exhibit any traits that could be perceived as negative, because blind complacency is never treated as negative.
The climack scene with the princesses saving Ralph, their proprietary musical themes playing as each appears, is the biggest i have mouth-painfully-agaped since the animaltopia preview. When moana ducked into the frame and smugly said “you’re welcome” I wanted to scream. I don’t talk about moana on this website, I hate everything about it so much without reservation and I already did that too much with the lion king, and now moana, and more importantly irritating references to the most irritating song from any disney product can just be in any other property that they manufacture. That whole thing, it almost made me cry. I wasn’t just annoyed, I was depressed. Because this has been out almost two years and I have never seen a word of complaint or displeasure about this. Everybody who has seen this film thinks this is acceptable, and would presumably be comfortable with disney owning every commercial property there is and making every movie a potential cross-franchise rule-free orgy of pandery idiocy that pretends it is smashing through once unbreachable cultural barriers.
whaaaaa? how did BART SIMPSON get into this AD for DISNEY PLUS to deface it? That is so SUBVERSIVE and actually not criticizing disney in any way and disney incidentally owns the simpsons now and it hasn’t been subversive for decades! It continues to exist for the same reason that the lion king remake took in over a billion dollars even though everybody i know who saw it didn’t like it and would probably go pay to see lion king remake part 2; brand loyalty that supersedes all reason for products that will never stop coming and has no incentive to get better.
also: if oh my disney is synonymous with oh my god then disney + can be seen as disney christ. The major difference in divinity is that it was possible to kill Jesus, at least for a little while.
A major thing that bothers me about Kevin Smith movies is how often characters are loitering around talking about other movies, but at least in that case they aren’t movies that Kevin Smith has a financial stake in, and if you skipped those parts, the other parts would still function as well as it was going to.
it’s like those sketches on saturday nuhlive where the actual person being parodied walks into the sketch and oh ho ho how droll aren’t we all having good fun NO it isn’t a real parody if the victim is in on it. You need to be able to criticize it in a way that it would not criticize itself, that its owner would not permit to be criticized.
also if you will only criticize a public figure without permission via special guest stars who are themselves beneath contempt and not even cast members then that doesn’t count either.
Gosh why even watch the show? It is much more satisfying to read a sycophantic summary of how “hilarious” the opening 20 minute parade of smirklejerk “woke” celebrities and applause breaks is. also my use of “woke” doesn’t mean right wing conspiracy schmucks are controlling me, it means a force beyond my control finally invented and agreed on a word for something i have been screaming at for what feels like centuries.
I had a tragic falling out that he is not aware of with stephen colbert over the shift from comedy to this “woke”ness but gosh at least he is devoted to his own show, whatever that show may be, and too busy to do stupid trash like this. James Corden’s show isn’t even in new york.
I don’t even hate Paul Rudd but he happened to get named in that headline and I don’t think he will suffer for it.
Also! Immediately before the rescue scene, Ralph falls through another character’s rescue vehicle, and rather than expressing alarm or anything organic, the character, who is unmistakably voiced by Saturday Night Live handoff Bill Hader, just talking normally, despite Hader’s greatest talent being to disguise his voice, emotionlessly states “wow that didn’t work.” Yes obviously it didn’t work! You saying that doesn’t make the fact that it didn’t work funnier! I really miss the laugh track convention from bad old sitcoms because I knew I wouldn’t hear it in a feature film, but smugly reacting on my behalf can be and is in everything. And why does disney bother buying ABC and FOX if it inherits all its actors and writing conventions from NBC? Because NBC is owned by Viacom which probably doesn’t want to sell it, but if dismey makes itself synonymous with nbc there is no NEED to buy it. It is [currently still] illegal to own all competitors in a field anyway, but not to indenture them. Although copyright law was changed specifically to let Disney keep owning mickey mouse so maybe it will get a law changed to let it keep owning more networks as well, and then another law changed to ban technology that increasingly makes tv networks irrelevant.
and this over here: note that it says “the muppet show” despite that predating disney’s definitive ownership of the characters by 30 years because despite all the muppet products since then The Muppet Show is still the last one that doesn’t come across as attempting to cash in on how popular the muppets USED to be. I did say I liked the muppets most wanted film but i wasn’t aware –first of all, how ubiquitous and tiresome the tina fey brand of comedy would become within a few years when all other american comedy had morphed into diluted imitations of it– and worse of the disgraceful “viral”-ready videos of
muppet versions of bohemian rhapsody and the like being made to promote the film. I am able to believe that the “brinksmanship” that got steve whitmire fired in 2016 from controlling kermit involved him protesting and blocking as much degenerative disney energy as possible (and maybe not, because he also performed and CREATED rizzo the rat which only got more tiresome and inclined to steal time from more interesting characters INCLUDING kermit as it went along). If you haven’t seen it, good. this was another of Vackshfump’s fixations about a year ago. it is “only” just under 5 minutes long but each lame muppet video connects you to more lame muppet videos, usually with obnoxious teasers built into them that show about 20 seconds out of context and then you see that again when the video actually goes on.
and i can’t say “jim henson wouldn’t have allowed this” because he allowed muppet babies which i hate most prominently and also thought selling to disney was a good idea, but at least those were cartoon non-“real” muppets so nothing they did actually happened.
It shouldn’t make a difference to a little kid what song the muppets are singing along to, yet the content is so moronic that I, a non-kid, feel embarrassed being near it. And that Bohemian Rhapdoder was chosen specifically so that adult children my age or older, who all this stuff is really made for, would recognize it and be taken in by the woah hey remember wayne’s world remember the 90s quotient. Even though the song is from 1975, 20 years earlier, i definitely never heard it before wayne’s world but heard it loads after that.
I remember in fourth grade a kid who had the song on a tape and would get other kids to do his bidding by saying “i won’t let you listen to my bohemian rhapsody” in the event they did not comply, and that WORKED
This video, it is so bad. It takes a song that is already overexposed and irritating from tired fake parody homages, and covers it with ancient muppet-related nongags lifted straight from that muppet show without any context. Context is VERY important to me. The entire first section is sung in earnest with unchanged lyrics by Gonzo, and Gonzo is not good at singing. The “joke” is that gonzo is accompanied by three chickens who are worse singers and maybe that is funny to somebody for about 5 seconds and it goes on for a minute. ha ha ha haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. the lyrics only change at the part about mama killing a man because the muppets are disney and family and disney doesn’t kill people except villains and parents. Then instead of “we will not let you go” the elderly hecklers say, in unison, “we do not like your jokes” to fozzy bear because see they DON’T like fozzy bear’s jokes and therefore it is funny for them to say that just for no reason amidst this song that otherwise does not concern fozzy bear or jokes or fozzy bear’s jokes.
It reminds me of the ten year period where i hated the muppets because of stupid trash like that and apparently that never actually ended.
AND you can say that the muppet show itself was largely comprised of muppety covers of existing songs. It was, but the intent was not to shoehorn in as many disparate muppet gimmicks as possible. They often featured original or unnamed puppet characters that had nothing to do with the established trademarked ones. They were content to be themselves without desperately trying to remind anyone of themselves. Also disney didn’t own them!
Anyway I don’t believe any muppets actually appear in Ralph’s movie beyond Kermit’s enormous disembodied inanimate head but obviously just the logo is enough to get the point across to somebody such as me, possibly only me, that muppets equals disney, and it all happens in about three seconds. None of this has plot relevance to Ralph since there is no plot to be relevant to. True enough to the title’s promise of wrecked internet, it is sort of like watching the moronic video content of a wrecked system sapped of its potential by soulless opportunists and corporate synergy, except there isn’t a perky brain-damaged narrator’s enormous hands taking the characters out of eggs while the words “here i am here i am how do you do” echo in the distance.
Maybe this dumb frog wearing a bow tie would find it acceptable.
12-31-2019 104am
I just rediscovered this page from nearly ten years ago that I wrote after seeing Avatar and How to Retain your Dragster, in which I make loads of the same complaints. For the sake of my own free time and the few people who don’t yet think I hate them because I hate everything they like, I absolutely need to become less aware of new crummy movies. Even without media influences and truly shoddy friends encouraging these things at me I am not safe without working at the avoidance, and that would be less work than writing another page like this! I could drop dead at any time and I don’t want to risk there being a picture of Josh Gad on my screen when it happens and whoever finds my body weeks later thinking I wasn’t thinking something condemnatory because they definitely aren’t going to read any of this!
This website has not been very fun lately! It takes too long to write fun things, and then miserable bits always creep into them. And I have made no further progress on the automated “store,” and wonder if I will. I have difficulty focusing on things for which I cannot constantly have results to look at. It does not feel like my “destiny.” When people try to get me to write “a children’s book,” that does not feel right, either.
Apparently amateurish looping animations of other peoples’ characters is my “destiny.” Or maybe that is a non-destiny less apart from what is, and easier to justify and manage the short term effort in.
for scraner, this happy, dorkular figure, with an ear that I was told looks like a feather but is not a feather. It has difficulty fitting in due to its unusual appearance and acts out in a sometimes inappropriate manner in an attempt to get attention. Unlike other recent “icon” commissions, this was drawn in Flash SWF format, and it certainly looks like it was.
Yet I have to display it as a gif with three times the file size and reduced color fidelity since modern browsers are increasingly hostile toward efficient vector-based drawings — in fact SWF means “small web format” — blocking them by default and requiring manual, two-step permission to show one, from viewers who might assume anything blocked by default with no explanation is inherently dangerous. Mobile systems never even bothered to implement support for swf. It is 1996 technology, after all. So instead we use gifs, which are from 1987. Where were these pocket overprotectors back in 2004 when every corporate website was using SWF to play obnoxious laggy noisy pop-up videos without permission? Now that big money scumbags are done with them, NOW we get to acknowledge that creeps can embed viruses in them.
Now that I am the last creep using them. Now that I have a computer powerful enough to actually have a animated flash swf open on a page without everything else getting screwed up. Now that I have stopped posting links to my website on forums full of people I would actually want to inflict viruses on were I competent to insert one.
We can all agree that punches to bow tie meeps would be highly inadvisable to block, in any decade.
Concurrent with the 512×512 pixel matter, I offered drawings at smaller sizes, with 100×100 resolution being the most common request. I did not realize what a big deal it was to be able to draw like this until I realized how many people could not. Eventually they started paying me to do it. Not enough that I could feel like I had done something with my life, but at present I can buy more pizzas than I can eat, which feels important.
Icons that I initially used for myself. None is especially excusable.
Fastest gun in the wasp, November 2013
A character called Miso for a person called Miso but who presumably does not look like this, stuffed into a tiny 100×100 pixel box but not at all deterred. This was before I gave people many/any options so theoretically I could come up with a better pose than this.
You shall meet with my raccs, 2014 or sooner
Relaxingdragon wanted these at some point. Rare examples of the 200×200 size, which is still small enough that I do not totally lose my mind with it, although I did not develop the habit of losing my mind on pixel-level work until 2016, so that may be a presumptuous statement.
Icon see you’re upset June 9, 2016
pengosolvent recently inquired about a new representative 50×50 pixel symbol but something alarming has occurred. These are smaller, only 50×50 pixels, because the deviant-art website restricts user representations to that size. And I drew four because I usually give people 2-4 different layouts to choose from, but need to color them in, to some degree, for them to be legible, and on this occasion colored in all four fully without being asked to.
The pickax papers, December 17, 2015
A newer Miso, also for Miso. I had been asked to make an icon similar to the old one, and took that as permission to be equally boring with the poses. And again I could not restrain myself from finishing all example versions! The upper left is the one we went with, and therefore it is slightly more “finished” than the others. Appropriately enough it is considerably more proud of itself. The creature this is derived from is called a tawny mining bee, and I took THAT as permission to add mining implements, including an all important flannel shirt, even though those are more stereo-type associated with logging, because it seemed unlikely somebody would send a logging bee my way any time in the near future.
Clippity-clopsicle October 20, 2016
For kinn-katze, a horse creature named Ryno ponders something likely unrelated to being named after a different species, since that is the type of thing you generally have to sort out early in life.
who do lu think lu are? November 17, 2016
100×100 and 50×50 pixel icon robisions of a flagrantly asymmetrical creature called Lulu known to Fairyartery
I just realized I use that “finger touching mouth” gesture way too often. Although I always give people the opportunity to request a different gesture!
is that who i think tiz December 8, 2016
Ah yes, ’tis Tiz, from something called Bravely Second, for boooey.
After this I decided every icon I make should have something resembling a backdrop, even if the buyer personally uses a version that doesn’t, because some sites are very stupid about transparency. And some sites aren’t but stuff looks bad on them anyway, hint hint.
robb from the pix to give to the four, December 22, 2016
a hoofless yet horsely creature named Robbie, unrelated to Ryno’s horsely creature, in fact for boooey again. The hair changes its mind based on whatever eye it feels is more fashionable to show at any moment. Also, after examining the previous two items, it became conscious of the possibility for vision problems resulting from prolonged obscured vision of a single eye.
hotel kotel holiday inn, January 5, 2017
for Kotel First is a bat creature also called Kotel, with and without wings, and a more opussummy figure called Obeah whose enthusiasm has been taken out of context to pertain to the winged bat’s error, potentially a consequence of trying to escape from a 100×100 pixel space.
therefore four hares, January 19, 2017
100×100 pixel icons of a hare creature named Lewis for Arito, who was pleasant to work with; I wish I could say the same for this devious dirt-dweller.
After THIS point I realized that flat colors were inadequate for “something resembling a backdrop.”
A progress video of a sort, showing approximately how I colored this
goat tell it on the mountain, January 26, 2017
A goatly creature called Lutka, pixel-styled for trufours. Seems to be having a rough day.
let that synx in, January 26, 2017
another pixel drawing for :icontrufours: of Xiu, who is a synx, and apparently there are more synxes in the world than I thought! Initially there was somebody called Chimerasynx who came up with and drew these things and they have no spines and can twist in silly ways and have more teeth than is reasonable, and at some point they got franchised out, I suppose. This one looks friendly enough, fortunately.
I hope you are not getting sick of these; there is another bigger one coming!
well-financed flop, February 2, 2017
More pixelry for arito, this time of Shani, an apparently easily-worried saber cat. Plus a rinkity dinkity background I added quickly at the end for reasons already cited! Of course I don’t have a video showing this, the one part people have expressed to me sincere bafflement at how to produce.
do the rat thing, February 16, 2017
For kjorteo. There looks to have been some disconcerting events recently! And then this happened.
rats and beans, February 16, 2017
also for kjorteo, whose requests’ shape necessitated separating it from the other one! This looks to be alarming news for the protagonist. Although clearly it had been seen from quite a way off!
tanuki tea look-see, April 20, 2017
For perikaryon, showing a raccoon-dog investigating a hot drink. It is probably coffee but there is a chance it is tea. Possibly there is a better tool to use in determining the drink’s nature.
Amitz all this people started asking me for animated icons, which take 4-8 times as long to make, but I can charge 3 times as much for them without potential buyers recoiling in horror and abandoning the idea! That is real progress. Still less time than it takes to put one of these website entries together, but nonetheless I am done with this one for now, and hopefully for some time afterward, and so I shall exhibit those here on another occasion.
part one
part two (sort of)
And now a third Shop Rite post! You only get one Star Wars movie this year but I have provided a whole trilogy. Unfortunately I got it at Shop Rite.
Good old African-American Friday. I actually meant to post this that day, but while you were taking a luxurious trip between now and midnight to save $800 on an ex-box, me, I was camping outside Shop Rite to “beat” the rush to save 30 cents on beets and pork and beans.
I commented on this situation previously but neglected to link to the video, which I think is very important.
The Shop Rite Can Can sale happens every year, sometimes twice, and people swear by it. The same recording of the song and the same animation have likewise been recycled, in increasingly edited form, as modern regulations for showing anything outside shoddily edited snippet form require it. According to recently declassified documents, my parents were once invited to spend a week with some let’s call them friends in a cabin in let’s say Maine. One, I will call him Pol, since his name was Paul and I am changing his name to protect his identity, learned that my mother was a vegetarian, but assured her not to worry, since Pol was going to do all the cooking, to “give the ladies a break,” having stocked up at the Shop Rite can-can sale. It should be a heartwarming story but it isn’t because I thought it was the funniest thing I ever heard once I heard it. Shop Rite made me laugh at kindness!
Also, the unseen announcer in this ad from 198x is the same person who still does it. I can only conclude that just IS Shop Rite talking. We do not need to get into the most recent advertising because the latest ends with the on-camera actor proclaiming “now that deserves a happy dance,” one of an ever-increasing number of recent ads inexplicably invoking “happy dance,” and many of them are not even for Shop Rite, possibly indicating a deeper conspiracy that is outside my present jurisdiction.
The “rite” in the name may not merely be “right” misspelled and misapplied… what a fool I have been! The answer is much simpler: Shop Rite refers to an aspect of a ceremony for a religion based on shopping. Without proper shop rites, we will be denied shop salvation.
Shop Rite is so cheap that it doesn’t even give you a chance to call bow tie pasta by its proper name, farfalle.
Shop Rite assumes if it calls the pasta farfalle, none of its intended customers will know the pasta is bow-tie shaped.
Consider that shoprite crumpetitor Shop & Shop has a rinkity dinkity store brand of pasta and a “fancy” brand that is exactly the same but costs more and has a picture of string on it so I’m supposed to think somebody actually giftwrapped this cardboard box of overpriced rinkity dinkety pasta. Imagine if it was your birthday and somebody gave this to you. Anyway, neither of these calls the stuff “bowties.” Also, even though almost everything at Shop Rite is denoted as being marked down, it is often more expensive than the same item at another store. The cheapo Shop Rite bow ties from my trip in 2012 cost 40 cents more than the same quantity box of cheapo Stop & Shop bowties with a less cheap name from this month, and the Stop & Shop is in Madison, the town where my neighbors react with disbelief when I answer no to “this is just your summer house, right?”
Back to bow ties, even knowing that, of course, we are supposed to associate bow ties with classiness, and shop rite is the LAST store you would want claiming responsibility for yours, it is worth observing that- oh deben, something awful just occurred to me. Would you let me see that sign again?
AW NAW! Get it away! Before…
There seems to be a deeper Shop Rite-Bow Tie connection than I ever suspected. I have lost the will to scream. One screams because one wants help and I think none can be forthcoming. This is most worrisome. I may have to go into hiding until next year.
Nonetheless, that bowl has shown no intention of ending. In honor of this, I continue my annual tradition of not going to Olive Garden.
And I say that as somebody who has agreed to go to Chip’s Pub, the restaurant with this menu, on numerous occasions. It is not as if I have standards. Honestly I can’t be waiting around for that bowl to end all day.
Oh right (wrong), I was complaining about this thing. What a pathetic dajinni! It has to carry its own teapot! Why is it wearing a HUGE turban? Does it think it is exercising religious purity? Does it think it will attain salvation and that I will be cursed for eternity because I do not wear a turban? Does it think it is better than me? Arrrf I want to wish for its freedom just so I can trap it in a box. But it can’t grant wishes!
Guess what, frimp: the gods have forsaken you! They made you live inside a teapot and have smoke for legs. You can only come out when somebody deliberately lets you out, and the only person who WOULD let you out would be something just as pathetic and meeply as you are! And worse, you were made you into some dumb unholy animaloid instead of a regular unholy human. You wear a turban as an accessory only and are therefore guilty of cultural appropriation, which according to the internet is problematic.
Regarding bowtie imps, some years earlier, I recalled a fragment of dream after awaking, and it featured a pathetic little creature correcting me “not meepmire, meepmere!,” as I had evidently mistaken it for the initial bow tie fool, “Mortimewde Stapleton Meepmire.”
To respond, first of all, I will call you whatever the meep I want! You’re lucky I even chose to get the first part right! Everyone hates you! Foul, wretched meepmere!
I could not recall the exact nature of meepmere and struggled to visually depict it. I can’t remember the last time I hated a beast so much before I’d even seen it. Unlike “meepmire,” it doesn’t even have a first name. It just is meepmere. It is a cut rate bootleg version of meepmire, despite having no legs, just feet, thus rendering it incapable of wearing a boot. Do you have any idea how hard it is to be a low-budget version of rubbish?
Stupid 2 cent garbage disposal animal. At one point in the pre-meepmere era, roughly mid-2005, back when I owned the world’s bloodiest television box, an advertisement for Galaxy Discount Carpet was repeatedly aired on local television, featuring a corny un-animated space ship floating through a real rug store accompanied by appropriately corny sound effects. Try and imagine the horror if you were standing on the street and you saw THAT THING appear from the sky and come toward you, totally unanimated. Would you shop at a store that IT shopped at? I was known to remark, possibly involuntarily, “AHHHHH TOO CHEAP! IT COST ONE CENT TO MAKE!” repeatedly in an incorrigibly high-pitched voice that would probably scar my vocal cords if I tried it now, thus making Galaxy Carpet the only thing that costs less than meepmere. The people responsible collectively received half a meepmere. The question, then: was it the meep or the mere?
During december the ad had a likewise cheap holly leaf overlay, that I will argue did not raise the budget since it was most certainly pulled out of someone else’s trash can. I understand that I am meant to be enamored with the cheapness, to assume “the carpet prices are surely also low!” but I don’t think I would want a carpet which was THAT cheap. It is probably made out of seaweed and diapers.
Galaxy Discount Carpet is SO cheap that its website has a different name than the store and they just figured oh well and displayed the wrong name directly beside the right name. They guarantee to beat any competitor’s price on the money they spend on advertising! They thought I would be impressed that they aligned the second, alternate-fonted instance of the telephone number to the roof, even though it only matches one of the roof parts that it touches. That phone number has no idea how cheap it is. I bet galaxy carpets don’t even fly! Perfect for today’s genie to keep inside its forbidden cave. The cave is forbidden because it is too stupid.
Some people get epiphany, life changing, prophetic visions in their dreams. They become inspired to create great paintings, novels and symphonies. All I got was MEEPMERE. And then I had to figure out what meepmere was! What a chore! Meepmere thinks it gets to control my life like that? Meepmere is sub-pumpkin! That genie probably started out as a meepmere. Meepmere isn’t superior to a doughnut! That is why in my completed displayable art there are two pictures of doughnuts and no meepmeres. I do not even like meepmere on a leap year. Meepmere is among my least favorite meeps, and I hate a lot of meeps!
I wrote something terribly boring. I will look it over on Sunday and see if I can make it any worse.
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page 23 of that
Another redraw, but with an added technological development. Adope Illustrator (and flash, to a degree) can “trace” low resolution images and convert them to vector mode, which can be endlessly upscaled. It is a corny, obvious conversion, but it is less obvious than a simple pixel upscaling. So if I only draw over important areas, something that I miss will be less obvious. This is thus theoretically faster than my previous redraw method. It is still not as good as a totally fresh, non-traced redraw, but by this point I like the old drawings, so am in less of a hurry to re-interpret them. This way can also preserve some color, but I forgot to increase the number from the apparently default value of 6, and I considered that having contrast and shadows emphasized would be sufficient and I would only add color sparingly to have more striking and less garish artwork. That was incorrect, since this still took forever to work over and I absolutely need to have yellow green and purple everywhere. Next time I will try keeping the original color, or at least Adobe Illustrator’s cmyk conversion of that so I can reach full ugly more quickly.
That it seemed like it should have been easier ought to have been my first clue that it would be harder. Or perhaps just so dull a task that it seemed harder. The next page I make, whenever that occurs, will be for the “newer” part. it is about the only thing in my life that is not fixed in place, cyclical or getting worse, and I find it highly suspicious, and therefore intriguing due to that.