We’re an American Band is such a stupid song. You don’t have to listen to it, I will sum it up by quoting it:
I do NOT require assistance partying, in ANY direction. As band, your foremost duty is to perform music. Partying is the rightful responsibility of others.
I am supposed to take from this song:
Like it is supposed to be some kind of protest against bands from other countries.
it just keeps reminding me of American Made, Hulk Hogan’s old WCW theme music, the one that’s designed to sound like his older WWF music but be distinct enough to not infringe copyright. It’s the Mad TV sound-alike version of Real American. He’s American Made in America He’s american-merican, merican! He’s american banned in slovenia he’s american banned!
Whenever I hear American band I have to sing alternate lyrics to it. Apparently this has gone on for quite some time because this list is longer than the number of chorus iterations within the song, and it is MOSTLY chorus iterations.
we’ll come into your town, we’ll knock your birdbaths down, we’re an american band
we’ll come into your shop, we’ll make you party UP we’re an american band
we’ll break into your flat, and not feed your kitty cat we’re an american band
we’ll come into your place, we’ll rub some corn on your face we’re an american band
now it’s getting weird
(I wrote this when Jay Leno was still on television and presumed employed for life so it was at that time more of an accomplishment to pull him away from his regular duties)
what even happened to Marvin “Smitty” Smith, anyhow? HE was IN an american band. this goes to show you what you can get yourself into by associating with the wrong crowd.
(I wrote this when jay leno was still on television but Kevin Eubanks and Smitty were no longer in the Tonight Show Band)
In fact I did not go to this specifically because I could not get a guarantee that Kevin was bringing along Smitty. If only the appropriate alternate lyrics had been applied to “American Band” sooner!
who does this band even think it is? they don’t have the power to do that.
this song can’t help reminding me of hulk hogan’s album; another song on that album is about the “wrestling boot traveling band” and yet one another includes
the phrase “we are the beach patrol, we wanna party, party, party.”
You do not, and in fact I do not want you to listen to either of those, just to be AWARE that
they named the band after a BOOT that goes around to different places. It should be noted that “american band” and “wrestling boot traveling band,” the song, both use the phrase “with the boys in the band,” and I have done so.
I would like to point to the date at which I wrote this as being responsible for all the dated references but that was 2010
I can’t believe it took me five years to post this. Maybe I thought that by now people would have forgotten how trendy it was to trash Hulk Hogan’s album five years before I wrote it. This article, I mean, not Hulk Hogan’s album. I wrote that ten years before then. Thankfully its message is timeless. The article, I mean. The message from Hulk Hogan’s album is set to expire at midnight on March 4, 201… great goopity I think I’d better post this tonight.
ah I just don’t have the gift anymore!
This notice recently accosted me on the deviant-art website. Obviously deviant-art is a silly website full of trash-marketing-vulnerable adult babies, but everything is –we have bred several generations to whom that is normal– so I can hardly be faulted for lingering there if I linger anywhere. While I do gripe at my getting coercion to become an under-compensated advertising vector for a major corporation disguised as a legitimate opportunity shoved at me, but unique to today I will gripe at the content of what I am to be advertising.
A question: How can I sincerely believe that the friendship is “unlikely” if you already told me it happens? And how can I believe that in any event, based on the past 20 years of animated cinema?
I have seen plenty of human children teaming up with, and usually riding on big misunderstood oafs, human or otherwise. These kids need to get stepped on once in a while to make it seem less likely when they do not.
And there are even more such pairings where there is a tiny little thing and a big thing but both are considered to be adults. And I have heard tell this is not even the first time a cartoon apatosaurus has taken on strange companions and journeyed forth. It is a functional setup. I grant its right to happen, but not to pretend it is profound.
I am not even here to fuss at any of these movies, specifically (least of all Totoro, whose film did not get an America hype-job until years after its production). For one thing, I haven’t seen more than promotional material for any of them.* But I doubt that any person who did watch these films would sincerely proclaim: I never expected those two to become friends! That twist took me completely by surprise!
*Actually, the book Where the Wild Things Are was in my house during the pertinent period of my development. I recall not being impressed.
And anyway, in this case, I am being instructed to evaluate the film exclusively based on its promotional material. It will not be released to theaters until November 25, five whole days after the contest entry deadline!
To be fair, dinosaurs generally are not big thinkers.
He is intimidating because I say he is. Even though I also said his scar makes it apparent visually, and I included a picture, and so I don’t need to say anything. But I have space and so I must say and say and say!
The contest page is full of character descriptions, terrible artwork and rogue plot details. Essentially I am to base my masterwork on a webcomic cast list. Many details, very little meaning. And if the event organizers believed for T seconds that any development, not necessarily restricted to friendships, were at all unlikely, they would be cautious about spoiling it for me! They would want me to be surprised. But they actually know that there is no chance I would be surprised. Go into a movie without knowing exactly what’s going to happen? Why that’s Unamerican!
And only americans can enter the contest! I knew a single person who found that Lorax movie at all endearing, and the person lives in Estonia.
My task in this adver-tunity is to donate free promotional “fan” artwork to stir up hype for the thing before it comes out. I am supposed to endorse it, and pledge to it considerable effort, based entirely on stuff I am told about it by another party, without any guarantee of payment, even if it turns out to be garbage that I would not want my name attached to.
How could I, and why should I be a fan of something that isn’t available? How could I know anything about the power of their friendship or the spirit of their adventure? I am suspicious any time somebody has to tell me an adventure happened or is happening.
In fact, another dumb movie where all the exact same stuff as before happens, that you tell me about before I am even eligible to see it: that is the OPPOSITE of adventure. Just as fan art is the opposite of original art! It isn’t even POSSIBLE to do what the contest demands.
Why should I be inspired by what some context-devoid list says each character supposedly is or does? I might as well draw fanart for the Michelin Man. At least that would be by my own inclination. And potentially less ugly. I hate those “eyes too close to each other on the front of the head” pixar character designs anyway, but ESPECIALLY on dinosaurs. “Good” is only in the title as a form of mind control because my natural inclination would be to proclaim these dinosaurs as less than adequate in quality.
The contest also encourages me to view the film’s trailer. Trailers exist to simplify, exaggerate and mislead. And to stop the music abruptly so I know what I am supposed to laugh at. I avoid the Star-Wars previews because I want to see the movie without knowing anything. I avoid the the Good Dinosaur preview because I just plain don’t want to know anything. That does not invalidate my earlier complaint; I probably would not watch the film, but I absolutely would not create a derivative work paying homage to its virtue unless I HAD watched it.
And it probably isn’t as terrible as the advertisement inevitably presents it as, but it most certainly isn’t as good as post-release praise will swear it is. Why try and force me to swallow that in advance? Apart from “because we are getting paid by Disney to hold this contest,” I mean. And that is “we” as in them, not me. Unless I win, which I wouldn’t, because I hate it. “It” as in all that has transpired this evening.
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!
Following from there:
In this morning’s New Haven Register newspaper can be discovered another triumph of my print-ready-file-sending intuition! The painting I am exhibiting was not finished/started at the time when I registered, so instead of that, for my designated 300×300 pixel representation I sent a segment of Cholesteronslaught, one of my historically least hated pictures.
Come see my sickly-colored amorphous blobs at city-wide open studios in New Haven next week-end!
Continued there.
This year’s hope is coming picture.
Tracey Sullivan, the race-runner, opted for a less chaotic setup that better reflects what the money actually goes to: holistic treatments for hospital patients. The hoofed creature here is applying some manner of hand-wavy therapy called Reiki and not in fact contemplating strangling the reptile. I added the dorks behind the trees without asking or being asked to just to make it amusing for myself.
Due to cost matters, the color total was reduced. Since idiots are cheap I was able to keep them all in there.
This was the first sketch. It had, to me all the important elements: the number of years we had been doing it and something bad about to happen. I may miss the point of “hope.” Also of Roman numerals because before I sent it I wondered why I had written eight instead of seven and erased one of the columns, and after sending it realized I had in fact written seven the first time, and that is now said six, and drew the last column back in. And then I told this story and realized it made more sense if I erased the column anew.
It was at this point that Tracey asked me if I could draw someone in a hospital bed receiving reiki.
It was a good question!
I looked up pictures of “reiki” on the internet, and mostly found mildly abstract pictures of hands with explody light coming out, so it seemed reasonable to assume that it was a destructive and chaotic force. However, in the end I was asked to use my upper left design, where nothing was happening! The bottom sketch shows that I still could not help myself and tried to insert trouble into it, but in the end I kept it rather simple, which was probably for the best since I would not want to upset someone so dangerous.
I also deemed depicting reiki being done with a rake, as it is pronounced as if it is, as too obvious.
Gosh look at how corny that guy is. I saw this picture years ago while briefly considering bowling for dollars and all I could think about was his corniness. I declared him King Corny at that point in time and since then have used him as a standard to judge the corniness of others.
For example, Philip Casnoff, who portrayed Frederic Trumper in the sick-fated Broadway version of Chess is Duke Corny. I decided that based on his voice in an audio recording, which does not suit this visual medium, and it is impossible to sing One Night in Bangkok without being corny anyhow, but it establishes that there is a hierarchy.
Captain Corny appeared in the 194eh film Showboat. Observe how he lets other people do the talking while he lingers behind to provide crucial corniness. He is less corny than King Corny, but he is still exceptionally corny.
This film is a remake of an earlier film also called Showboat in which Captain Corny was portrayed by a different actor who was nonetheless still corny. The captain is the one wearing the music-proof hat that says CAPTAIN on it, since he was concerned it was not obvious enough in the picture I just posted, and his astounding corniness has so clouded his mind that he has forgotten that in his timeline, the film I took the other picture from has not yet been made and in fact depends on his own being noteworthy for that to even be considered.
it is rumored that seeing The Hulk turns you corny.
Staff Sergeant Corny appeared in 1970s magazines. I drew a picture loosely based on his life once.
It has been stored in an apparently very smudgy place the last 3ish years but I think his message is still as relevant as it was in the 1970s: you are HIM and affluent and you lounge on your absurdly huge British lawn in gloomy weather just to flout your affluence and 1970sness. Women are someone else, and attracted to your presence, but they act bored once they get there.
He/you may or may not be a secret identity of
Bruno Brazil, akabaka Marquis di Corny. In the 1970s all the action heroes were grey-haired corny men with roughly rectangular-shaped heads.
Of course there are multiple sovereigns in this world. In France there is le Roi Corny.
Pay attention! I just told you.
I found this record in my attic recently, and after of several minutes cracking myself up saying “nat king cole was a merry nat soul” I considered that he might also be Nat King Corny. At that point I started writing this post and it was too significant an issue to be addressed the same day.
He may be related to King Kandy, who is also corny, but not king OF corny. He may hold the ceremonial title of King Korny but that is not officially recognized by the Corny Council. But why, of all possible alliterative candy themed hero names, did he have to be KING Kandy? Why not Captain Candy or Candy Commander or Candytastrophe? And why kandy with a K? Notice how the nerd instantly knows that he has transformed into King Kandy. He stutters while THINKING due to how stupid it is but even though he IS King Kandy and did not exist prior to that moment he has no power to call himself anything else. Not even King Kandy Korn, as an anonymom commentator suggested.
That may konstrue kopyright infringement against Kin Korn Karn anyhow.
These dorky thugs custom made to be beatable by King Kandy know that King Kandy IS King Kandy, with a K, even though all he does is think narration of his present situation and never at any point royally decrees “I am King Kandy.” That rogue band of Bono impersonators better watch out; they’re tangling with someone who can be foiled by carrying a paper towel around.
Recently it came to my attention, though less recently than Nat did, that the film Wreck-em’ Ralph featured a character named King Candy, but without a K, so he does not factor into my life, and shall not be pictured here.
However, Candy Land predates both, and ALSO has a King Kandy, and ONCE MORE with a K. This is a game for children and going out of its way to spell stuff wrong. Also there is no actual player input and you could rig the game by determining the number of participants and sorting the cards before playing, which would be cheating, but if you figure that out at the age of 4 you deserve to win. This King Kandy seems to have substantially altered his appearance at least three times through the years, but each has been more dopey than corny, and in none of those situations has he been a 6 foot tall regular proportioned man who yells/thought-projects out SOCKAMAGEE. However, never once has he spelled his name with a C, either (nor considered amending his diet), so clearly he is not bothered by the potential for mistaken identity.
Consider that candy is notorious for using artificial ingredients, and needing to mispell things like “chocolate” to be legally released from having to include any. King Kandy is so unnatural that he cannot even legally be called candy, and he MAKES the laws!
All Kings [c,/k]andy outrank San Fran Cisco’s notorious Candy Baron, even if he is adequately corny and seems to dress more respectably than any of them. You cannot see his whole body. He may also be covered in pink.
I cannot trust anyone! And worse still, I fear there are more corny stories to come.
Hail, cousin. I am a noted expert on the american footed ball. Behold my official league logo shirt that I wear in public alongside other league enthusiasts! Hooray for this sporting event! I am greatly fervid that one team wins while another does not! With such camaraderie and physical conditioning on display in each, how could I choose but one? Hooray for athletic competition! Hooray for the institution!
I am a woman! Sorry, girl! I spend time with men I mean guys! I am also excited about leagues! I exclaim with great glee. It is significant to me that the players move the celebrated lemon-shaped object in one direction or another! Hooray for the human spirit that lets a group work in accord toward a common goal!
Hi ho dear brethren, I am of the negro race. Or as you might say in more colloquial language, a colored man. I do on occasion look beyond my race association to engage in fond fellowship with default-raced folk while I celebrate the state of this noble league! Up pastime! Up sport! For what is life but a drawn out game in the great metaphysical sport of existence?
And up the number 00! It shows my well-rounded “O”penness in interests and also assures ease of reuse if an alternate configuration of this scene requires that I face the opposite direction.
Hooray for franchise approval in general! And hooray for Light Budweiser specifically!
All kidding aside the figure on the left looks more like he is in pain from stepping in a mousetrap than pleased with the spectacle he is witnessing.
Or maybe he is concerned that Rygar has found his island.
Also, a thank-out to all my new rygar alert subscribers.
Cool dudes not permitted.
In fact dudes in general should keep away from me.
Oh no, floating head graduation hat dudes!
This school is totally rotten! Seriously, the students illustrated here look like meat that has been left in a refrigerator for a month. The situation is ugly, but at least we saved ourselves from
ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRmadillo! The virus is spreading! Soon we will all be dudes
Do not panic! How bad could these dudes be?
No!
It’s World War Dude.
You might be surprised to learn that some people talk to me. There is one person who does it on google plus for some reason, in addition to an unclear number of other people I get updates from whenever they remember they have google plus pages who do not necessarily talk to me. I noticed the update feed seemed to be feeding itself in an unclear order, placing things I saw months ago above things which had been posted more recently. This is done under the pretense of “tailor”ing the experience to meet my desires. Essentially it censors posts which do not get popular enough in favor of stuff that is already popular. An automated system to marginalize unconventional works and people, beyond the marginalizing people already do on their own. Speaking as someone who all evidence indicates is filtered out of existence and systematically ignored on “social media” regularly, I would prefer to not actively engage in that myself. I certainly would not delegate the job to a robot. Facebook does it too, and probably did it first. Google resents anything that controls information badly before it.
Twitter appears to offer a similar function, but I only found out about it via the control panel mechanism that lets me stop it from happening.
I searched for a way to make google+ stop, and I found Auto Aweseome instead.
When did “awesome” come to mean “brandable and roughly adequate?” Condescending advertisers finally killed epic and need another hypey youthful-sounding buzzword to ruin. Certainly they have been trying for at least a year.
Or more like two years
I forgot about this one.
alright it has been happening for a long time! But it subsided for a while.
In fact, I seem to have saved this in 2011. I appreciate google+ for not imposing itself on my experience regularly enough that I realized how much I hated it earlier.
If it can be done automatically it is not an adventure. An adventure should involve the unknown and personal initiative. If somebody else is leading you along, telling you what matters, and what is interesting, that is a tour. And if some robot is just guessing based on largely meaningless figures or nothing at all it is tourash. I saw some bit of between-show filler on one of those cartoon channels showing some barely-drawn figure floating across a landscape pointing out every ostensibly adventurey thing that appeared, as if they were expected, each as stereotyped as possible so that the protagonist could be not surprised by them. And I thought “what rubbish this is, I hope I never see it again.” And then a year later it was called Adventure Time, literally telling you YES ADVENTURE, excitement obtained through taking risks and seeking the unknown HAPPENS AT THIS SCHEDULED PRE-ARRANGED JUNCTURE and everybody liked it and was trying to be derivative of it and its self-aware dot-eyed auto-awesomeness. Bah! Doing things that you expect on time is the OPPOSITE of adventure! Crap’t’n’ Ecoli’s website and its cease-and-desist letter to mine had the tagline “Stand by for adventure!” Adventure is not something that you stand by for! If you are STANDING BY then it is someone else’s adventure!
Everybody on the internet wants to be Napoleon Dynamite except he is more artistically inspired.
I recently heard an advertisement for oatmeal with the slogan “today is going to be awesome.” Oatmeal is NOT awesome! Not even close! And neither are pop tarts! You should not rely on them to impart awesomeness onto you and it is irresponsible for advertisers to advocate such a behavior.
Pop tarts just make me think of playing to the second level of blaster master with the little lava pools that look more like pop tart filling and then having to turn it off to go to school. Blaster Master is likewise pretty bland and school is worse, especially when I have indigestion from eating two pop tarts. I could only get up to level 3 in Blaster Master so having to turn it off early probably fit in with my plans then.
There is, in present circulation, a televisual ad for one of these cereals with some dork eating Froot Loops and pretending to play the demo of Super Mario Brothers, while music as if they were actually playing is dubbed over with an announcer who sounds like he is wearing a neck brace strains out “bring back the awesome.” Froot Loops were NEVER awesome! I just finished saying how non-awesome oatmeal and Pop Tarts were and you found something yet less so. While still not awesome by comparison, they are at least less unimpressive. Froot Loops were just alright, at best. Unless I am mistaken Froot Loops was the big pioneer in spelling the key ingredient’s name wrong on purpose to keep yourself from being legally obligated to use any. But with the “bring back” and the desperate attempt for retro-game approval, these cereals are not being marketed at kids. Not real kids anyway, because this generation’s adults are still children. Children do not desperately pine for “good old days” that were not really all that good. While you’re at it why not “bring back” an 80 pound tv with dials on it, a rotary telephone, chuck your hard disk and chisel a floppy drive in its place, replace all your soft furniture with hard wood and swap your car for a stage coach. Then spend your inheritance playing old video games and eating tiny fossilized doughnuts while your own kids go to work in a coal mine.
With that all said, I am glad to see froot loops and friends finally dropping the pretense that they are food. It is mediocre candy with centrum silver injected into it. Is a double-wide box not enough?
The Kellogg Cereal Company probably saw that most of the ponely audience was 30 year olds, and realized that pandering to real kids was a waste of time when there was another demographic just as fickle and unconcerned for its own wellbeing but with a lot more money to spend on banquet sized stocks of crystalline corn syrup rings. Actual children probably won’t touch the stuff. They probably aren’t allowed to. I know they’d get expelled if they tried to bring it to school. Froot Loops are probably in an offense category with plastic knives by now. But that’s alright, you can eat rainbow dust hoops when you go home, and thanksh to modern innovations such as making the box twice as big, there may even be some left by then.
Here, have a lumpy sack, like something you’d fill a cat litter box with. I admit these are the generic non-kellogg brands, but real Post Cocoa Pebbles are on the shelf. “Real” said with the understanding that being not actual pebbles, their cocoa quoquotient may likewise be called into quequestion. Cocold in here!
In fact I would rather eat fruity pebbles than froot loops, but they ALSO remind me of blaster master!
or worse, jujubes.
Why does food need to be challenging? And what dork asks this question? Who is so devoted to being trendy by doing unpleasant things to themselves that they seek out ones that aren’t even trendy yet?
I beat the cinnamon and ice bucket challenges at the same time by combining them, swallowing a spoonful of ice water in under a minute.
Kidding, kidding. I beat the cinnamon and ice bucket challenges by not doing something stupid for the amusement of hyperbolic childish misanthropes. These are what happen if you combine America’s Funniest Home Videos and the film Groundhog Day.
You could say America’s Funniest Home Videos already had a Groundhog Day aspect, but they sure found a lot of different ways to hit people in the crotchal zone. Ice buckets have a very limited range.
As the great sage Papa Bear once remarked: it’s not supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to be food! Where’s my sweetsie cola?! I put forth that it is not supposed to be challenging, either. If you find food challenging, it might not be cooked properly. Or it might be broccoli or squash. Nobody wants to watch the broccoli challenge. Maybe if you call it Doritos Presents the Jeep Toyota Summer Squash Concert Series Pepsi.
i imagine some dumb meep filling a bucket with water, freezing it, and then just dropping the bucket on someone. That probably would have been a better picture than this one, which is possible to interpret as me “accepting” the “challenge” in a “funny” way when I think it is a very dopey thing. I should have shown a dope doing it.
“but it’s for CHAIRity!” Much like the hop-a-thon, I do not see how the action causes money to materialize so I will not do it. I thought I mentioned the hopathon before, apparently I did not. I did mention the coerced saving of yogurt lids, but the principle is the same. Somebody who has a set amount of money to donate will REFUSE to donate it if I do not perform some totally unrelated, arbitrary act.
I wrote about the hopathon in relation to some “sponsored” video game sessions, and I apparently thought it was too dumb to mention. I never encountered it outside of the stupid venues where I post drawings on the internet, and imagined it would reflect badly on me to exhibit awareness of it. And thus something dumber came along and forced almost everybody to know about it.
In my first grade I was invited to participate in a hopping competition at the school I attended. To date it is the only real, fair contest I have ever won. Supposedly it was a charitable situation. I did not understand how hopping helped anybody but I knew I could do it. What I did not do was sign up any sponsors. That part did not make sense to me. It still does not, but I at least know the mechanics of it. Apparently I, a 6ish year old child, in addition to hopping, was supposed to thuggishly pester outside parties until they agreed to pay money based on how much I hopped, and then not to me. Had that been explained to me I might have asked why somebody needs me to hop before they will give money to someone else. Is that entertaining to them? To hear that a tiny human hopped many times? Are they to feel enriched and satisfied, and pay in appreciation? There were certainly no spectators. I did it in a hallway outside the principal office. The only others present were inferior hoppers and a suit-wearing man monitoring the hopping. I imagine HE got paid for that. He did not hop.
And imagine if even the people who bothered to get sponsored had not hopped. Would no money have been given? And then whose fault would that have been? The people who failed to hop or the potential donators who refused to do so due to inadequate hoppage? I do not understand why so much roundabout effort is put into guilting people into donating money. I didn’t understand it with yogurt labels that hurt no one (except me when I inadvertently see somebody licking one), and I definitely don’t understand it with momentarily exposing yourself to unseasonably cold water. It does not exhibit “devotion” or “passion” because the pain comes afterward, and is brief. When I lived in New Haven, and turned the heat off at night, and then had a shower in the morning, it was pure horror. That didn’t make me feel like donating money to any foundation, nor did it make the neighbors who watched me do it through the window want to donate. If anything it made me want to hoard more money so I was less worried about using so much heat that the monthly bill was difficult to pay, and maybe get some curtains.
You will probably do more for the cause of world health by not eating this pizza than the fraction of the purchase price that possibly gets donated would. That is NOT what this pizza is for! I say that as somebody who probably ate a hundred or so of these across the years (that was from 2005) when I had a functioning oven. If we go by the model of “donate over someone who did nasty things to themselves for no good reason,” then you may go right ahead, but the consequences always came later.
There is more regularly an event called “the penguin plunge” in which dorks jump into freezing water after taking their clothes off. This is just as stupid and has just as little causal relationship to money appearing as hopping or bucketing, but apart from a single local news filler story per year, nobody tries to make it my problem.
In the end, people are supposed to be impressed by your determination, I suppose. If you just jump in a lake or dump a tiny fraction of a lake on yourself it is over pretty fast. And if, in the case of the video game fans, you just do what you would have done anyway, then it is completely meaningless. The person in my example didn’t even show it all. He insisted that he played video games for two hours while offline. Well gosh so did I. I have probably played video games for thousands of hours throughout my life. And remember all the pizzas that I ate, long before any pink ribbons got involved! That is the kind of philanthropist I am.
I think I felt bad for the guy when I realized his other posts were mostly about the effects of his untreated diabetes, so I did not press him on the topic or save pictures of it. But here is a story of somebody who was “paralyzed” and got dorks to give him $20000 to play video games, before accidentally showing he was not actually paralyzed, and then people stopped paying. My question: why does being paralyzed make you eligible to get $20000 to play video games? And why does not being paralyzed make you immediately ineligible for it? It is a scam either way! The man was not playing them with his mouth, for eat’s sakes. Why would anybody donate money because anyone else sat in place and fiddled around for hours, if the fiddling produced nothing? Imagine if I requested donations for this! Imagine if [email protected] was my paypal address. Wouldn’t I seem like a useless hippie bohemian who gave nothing to society? Be glad you only imagined it!
I suppose on some level all entertainment fields are scams, and I should be glad that production companies and record labels do not have exclusive control over collecting money for the distribution of wretched garbage. But this still comes down to gaining your legitimacy through someone else’s product. Somebody else’s gimmick that you inherited or adopted. And from what I have personally witnessed (on the topic of video games), the sight is not all that spectacular. People wear trashy clothes (and you know because the person is recorded next to the game output, for some reason), and they grunt and breath a lot, and are not necessarily very good at the video games, and the deal is shown unedited. I am just supposed to be in awe of them as people, even though they are strictly regular at best. If I am going to observe a stranger poke about with what we should not deny are toys, they had better be gosh darn beebly good at it or uniquely entertaining in the way they do it. And at that point I could probably take it for about 20 minutes at most.
I remember, a few years ago, when I found a video series called “battle of olympus blind run.” I thought, from the title, it meant a blind person was playing the video game called Battle of Olympus, trying to get through it on sound cues and memory alone. That might justify it happening in 32 ten minute installments, and the footage showing the character falling into pits and starting over constantly. And still probably not been too much fun to look at. But no, it was less than that: just some dork who had never played the game before who thought his imprint was so precious that all five hours of it needed to be documented and preserved. And again totally unedited and unrehearsed, despite it not being streamed live. At least when something is live you can potentially interact with the dork you are allowing to waste your living.
I had a HUGE problem with “let’s play video games and FAIL,” but at least those ended fairly briefly, with the no-effort glory-seeking twit giving up in shame. I may even have criticized it for that, so let me clarify: You don’t need to give up at the game, but you don’t need to film your hours and hours of successive failures, either.
It is possible you have seen this picture before, but I have lately typed a heap beneath it.
A series.
I had some difficulty putting this on to stupid art sites. There are no smart art sites. Deviantart, one of the stupidest, with a maximum preview size of 150×150 pixels, displays it like this before it is clicked on:
Most people will NOT click on something that looks like that. Additionally, most people will not click something that I put up, and those two facts work toward a common goal.
The preview image is generated automatically by reducing the image enough that its longer dimension (vertical or horizontal) is 150 pixels long. For an image whose proportions overwhelmingly favor one (vertical in this case) the reduced edition is totally unintelligible.
A custom thumbnail option would be nice. I would make my own preview that showed much of the first section, with a bit of text to indicate that there were four more images beneath it. I believe there used to be such an option. What happened to it?
People would fill their gallery completely with obnoxious icons that gave no information and only said “full view only!” because they were more obsessed with controlling people and increasing their meaningless “page view” total than actually helping people look at their art, because scumbags always win. Instead of visitors having enough information to decide if they should look or not look, they were forced to look just to find out what the ding dang thing was, if they dared to care. In this case, where the privilege was revoked, they won by making other people lose. I prefer to make fictional people lose. I included “death by ice” in this example but somebody else might call it “Frapbi’s frozen frustration” just to ensure it was as unenticing as possible. It also assumes that you know who frapbi is (frapbi is a loser).
These days most minimally informative thumbnail enthusiasts fixate on a face from within the image, giving a viewer a scrap of context but still not enough to know anything apart from “yes this image includes a being with a head.” This is considered an improvement, for some reason, by many people, but I do find it much more helpful. I am not fond of faces out of context. I do not always like faces in context. I may prefer context to faces. If I follow one person and see one new face a day, alright, I can look at that. If I get five hundred faces I do not have time to personally investigate the agoraphobic potential of each. And sometimes the “full” version would just be the face again but bigger! Rage!
Shut your mouthstache, you torsoless hatlump!
One especially gorkly individual used the exact same “full view!” dead-eyed, spider-lashed varmint icon on every picture regardless of what it contained. I presume. I never dared to check what they were hiding. Perhaps it was worse.
Additionally, I had made that recreation there based on my memory of the real one, but with that memory I gradually recalled that long ago I had saved a collection of utterly nonthreatening animal/anime people off of deviantart or worse drawn trying to be edgy or abusive toward their viewers –that is how you build an audience, after ehhh– and that the creature in question was featured therein, and that I should take the opportunity to make my facsimile horribler. The one I drew first looks like rather a reasonable chap by comparison. Although in the interest of fairness I should disclose that it was addressing a remark at “faggots” and not exhibiting a central digit, and that specific the full view demand icon was doing neither of those things, although it might as well have been.
I should make a public exhibition of my collection, although I reckon that some of these pictures are more than ten years old and it is mildly possible the artists realize what silly behavior that is by now. Alternatively, they could be now far worse and would interpret my exhibition as “art theft” and evidence that I wish I had the capacity to be so middle-fingery myself. This would then inspire them to draw more pictures of cartoon characters being angry at all real people, necessitating that I add them to my collection and I do not necessarily have time to make that a full time task.
Also, at some point my awareness of it makes me look bad. I should really leave that without further comment, but
The only thing harder core than drawing/paying someone else to draw an animal shaped like a human adult meant to represent you shoving a middle finger at the viewer is if this character is wearing a plastic disposable diaper and no trousers over the diaper. Folks fantasize about this. “oh MAN I WISH i could take off my pants, put on a diaper and then go around picking fights with people.” They find some acceptance for their personal habits and eventually it becomes a way of life intent on waging war with other ways of life. Coexisting peacefully is not an option. Diaperus iacta est.
I have just realized that I totally neglected to write hidden mouse-over messages for a bunch of these. I have tended to that, then, now.
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Mr. Peanut, our nation’s oldest and most affluent legume, seems to have quite a following on E-Bay. Or perhaps a desertion, considering that everybody who posts a picture of one is hoping to be rid of it. The conspicuous scarf suggests that Mr. Peanut has a cold. Perhaps other ailments if he needs a cane to sit down. And you think I want a sick peanut in MY home?
In fact, when I get an apartment again I am going to buy all of these off of ebay and then put them in every piece of furniture that I can acquire. In the event I convince anybody to visit me the visitors will have to stand.
The enormous absurd object on the left is apparently only $8, not including shipping. Including shipping it comes to about $38! The one beside it costs about $19, with its shipping price reduced to around the same area. Other variants of it have totals that come out to a similar amount or more. I expect that the postal service requires premium packaging for anybody who wears a top hat and monocle. I would further suggest that instead of a truck they use a horse-drawn stagecoach.
Even if no delegates from my family ever stop by, Mr. Peanut’s will not let me down. I perhaps ought to have kept a spot free for myself to be let down into, though.
I think Mr. Peanut is drunk. From the listing: “He is missing his hat. He must have left it at the last party.” Mr Peanut is very irresponsible! And in front of the children, too.
Alright, we are very impressed at your flexibility, but that is quite enough, Mr. Peanut.
Oh, what a tease. Mr. Peanut will be on the cover of every fashion magazine if he keeps this up. But seriously, enough kidding around. I am beginning to worry about you.
When is the last time you shaved, Mr. Peanut? Did you go into work today? Are you feeling alright?
But would you please- Alright, I shouldn’t have yelled. Please calm down. Don’t make a scene here. Why don’t you go to bed?
Alas, fame and fortune were too much, too soon for Mr. Peanut. I should have seen the warning signs. He will be potentially missed, and likely mixed.
Talks are underway to have him replaced with Drew Carey. I had heard Mr. Carey was losing weight but I figured he had enough money that it was unrelated to career-advancement.
What? What is THIS?
ENERGY! BEWARE, I LIVE!
What? It can’t be! You were dead!
MUST REPLENISH MY STRENGTH!
What have I done? Even the police are helpless to stop this vengeful reign of terror. It doesn’t have to be this way, Mr. Peanut! We can get you help!
THESE ARE MY DEMANDS: ALL BOW TO PEANUT!
You don’t know what you’re saying! It’s me you want! Don’t make the innocent suffer!
POWER! MORE POWER! MY REALM GROWS! MY ANCIENT RIGHT TO RULE THE LAND WILL SOON BE RESTORED TO ME.
Hopefully not to be continued
I should consider proofreading this.
I have considered it.
I saw the recentest Muppet sequel a week ago, and wrote this a week ago, but goopness grapeness I am surprised I posted it within a month.
It was pleasantly pleasant, considering the unprecedented degree to which the pre-show adutainment made me feel irrelevant and despised by the world.
Considering that the film is dedicated to Jerry Nelson (Jane Henson also) and there is a song about numbers sung by someone with a vaguely eastern european accent, I was again disappointed to not see my favorite muppet The Count, but again it would not have made sense for The Count to be visible. in fact the vocal was provided by Matt Vogel who currently operates and voices The Count.
As I said following that piece, I thought the previous film was well-done overall and not what the poster implied it was going to be, though definitely there was too much time devoted to people who were not muppets. Walter, the non-muppet who looks like a muppet is still in this one, and still probably more important than necessary, but the story calls for a muppet that does not have a serious psychological malfunction (meaning: a muppet which does not exist to be funny) to sense that something has gone wrong and the orange one with glasses is not important enough that I am bothered when someone tries to take his job, and he is still in this movie a lot so maybe there is room for two muppets that are funny looking but somewhat boring. A good thing about being a muppet is that even with a subdued temperament you still have no choice but to be ridiculous in appearance.
The human non-muppets from the previous film are not in this one at all. There were other humans that I was supposed to recognize; “cameos.” I did not know half of them, but there were enough that I could pick out a few. And even if I couldn’t, since they are just cameos they do not matter.
This movie is not zooming in on Lady Gogga or Dylan “Hornswoggle” Postl and saying “If you have avoided this person’s antics the last four years you are not allowed to relate to anything in this production.”
In fact I ought to have recognized Hornswoggle, the World Wrestling Ederfation’s primary leprechaun during the period when I was really getting tired of the WWE, in part due to excessive, terrible use of characters like Hornswoggle, who started as a silly unannounced, unnamed performer who assisted an Irish wrestler, then inexplicably became a top promoted figure meant to be taken seriously despite him being a leprechaun whose matches could only end in fluke, joke wins that made his opponents look dumb or discomforting losses when his opponents were actually allowed to catch and do, you know, wrestling moves on him. But usually wrestlers play wrestlers in their cameos. Being a leprechaun probably alters that setup somewhat.
And it is certainly possible to be annoyed by Richard Gervais, but he is still second to a muppet. The muppet even tells him that. I like that a comedic actor who knows the importance of being second to a muppet was cast in the part and not just someone pretty or marketable, or statistcally funny due to having appeared on comedy-labeled programs that were not abruptly cancelled. So I cannot fathom how this movie belongs with the ones whose previews it bears.
As occurred when I viewed Doy Story 3, before the film started I considered the sort of trash that would comprise the previews, and this time made a checklist of bad kid-directed-at standbys as a way of pre-emptively working off the usual rage those fill me with. I could not actually check the list since the room was too dark by that point and I mostly wrote them on the same lines, and continued writing them after I was supposed to be watching for them, because I found hypothetical complaining more satisfying than raising my awareness of things I might wish to complain about. But just listening, Rio 2 had most of them. I was not conscious of a first Rio but yeppirroo there is a second. Three of the five previews were for sequels and only one of the five was not computer animated, and that one had a computer animated character in it, and prominently features kids playing with fancy telephone doohickeys anyway. Not that kids don’t do that, but I do not want to watch them do that. But the movie is not for me. Why was it advertised before one that was?
“Unfortunately” there was no new re-make/-boot series that I was supposed to be surprised and impressed by somebody trying to cash in with by making it 3d, ugly and cynical. Can you believe it, there has never been a 90 minute feature film about Chester Cheetah finding that portal to New York City that Underdog, the Smurfs and the marauding 3d talking animal gang that wasn’t from Madagascar used. Maybe we’re about due for a Harry and the Hendersons reboot. The choices are defendless. And oh, nobody has tried to make a live action/computery Pink Panther yet, but maybe there are copyright issues due to the recent-enough Stever Martin non-animal Pink Panther remake. If it had been Mike Myers he would have done them both at the same time and maybe not even with a scottish accent.
In addition to the previews, there was a Monsters University-themed short subject presentation from the Pixar company that included any tackiness that Rio 2’s preview ran out of time to show it also has. I did not see Monsters Ooniversity, but according to evidence presented here, the idea here is that there are normal dumb 1980s college movie kids who like to get drunk and have heterosexual relationships with rigid, binary-gendered companions while listening to indescernible noise and never actually do classwork or have any difficulty finding a niche that accepts them. Except… they look kinda funny! And something about closets because monsters right? According to media dating to even earlier than this concept of college, children believe that monsters live in closets and under beds. I realize that is Pixar’s thing, to put all its effort into a quirky but ultimately tertiary visual element and then be as generic as possible with everything else, and I still dislike it. Especially when it parasites itself unannounced onto another film that I am drawn to specifically because it is the single “general” audience film likely to be receive wide release this year that isn’t trying to load up on pixar’s success being flashy and typical.
And apparently the industry leaders in computer animation still can’t render a remotely appetizing cartoon pizza. Or maybe they risk alienating their core audience of people who eat terrible pizza by showing one that looks like it would taste good. In fact, Domino’s, the worst pizza in the nation became, likewise, an industry leader by delivering to college campuses at a time when other bad pizza companies would not. If you have tried a Domino’s pizza recently and thought it was bad, it was by all accounts worse in the 1970s. If you thought it was good, then it was probably even worse in the 70s! It has been my experience that a good pizza restaurant still will not deliver its product. The orange circle with red circles seen here could be a subtle commentary on that, but since nothing here is subtle that would be impossible.
Sure these are outdated college stereotypes, but what about the outdated Eastern European stereotypes that factored heavily into the main muppety film that I claim to have appreciated? Maybe there are Baltic immigrants who feel insulted that put-on accents, backward Rs and the insinuation that there is a unrelenting year-long blizzard on their entire sub-continent have gone unquestioned and unopposed for too long. Maybe they wonder “why are Americans laughing at the legitimate cruelty and injustice carried out in the Russian legal system? Are they unaware that the US also has secret prisons? Oh they know and just don’t care.” Surely that is possible, but in this case it was not the main characters engaging in that, and the film could still work if that was excised, and the setting changed or the accents not so fake. Like the cameos, that stuff is not crucial to appreciating the film. And this that I am writing is about what annoys me personally, not whose annoyedances are most valid.
By the time the actual feature film- I realize that for something to be featured, something secondary is necessary, but that terminology is also outdated… By the time the actual feature film started I was worn out and miserable and in no mood to enjoy anything. My moods go bad quite easily and often take some time to go good again. I am glad the muppets could overcome that.
Maybe the previews are at the discretion of the distributor, to whom it makes financial sense to ignore the feature’s content beyond whether the ehhhf word is spoken aloud, but the Disney ownerlords ought to have watched this movie and realized “oh gee nobody has getting drunk and attending parties as an ultimate life priority in this movie.”
Monster University, the full length version I am expected to have seen already, entered wide-release last July, when I was in Paris, so thankfully I missed the biggest hype period for that.
Unfortunately, Monstres Academy also opened around the same time. I wrote about it but did not post it because I was too busy doing things dumber and time-wastier than formatting that for display here. I hope to have no other excuse to refer to this matter, so I do it now.
I had seen the title on various unrelated supermarket products prior to then, and been not at all optimistic about another acquiescing pseudo-academic tropefest with advance merchandising deals, but at least was unaware of the ugly character designs until they were taped to every subway tunnel in a city that I would be required to walk through for the next four weeks. Maybe they are “supposed” to be ugly, being “monsters,” but I do not find them ugly in an enjoyable way, apart from a purple lizard thing with glasses that is not worth braving the full crowd for. It was not important enough to be in the barnacle attached to the Muppet sequel, at least. Particularly I dislike that this one character is covered with fur and lacks pants but has a mustache (that one does briefly appear in the barnacle). By my understanding, the lack of trousers works when something is “cute” in a very narrow range of ways. On the body of a chubby middle-aged man-oid with facial hair it is unsettling. There is another creature, nearer the front here, and thankfully blurry, that has a multitude of white cartoon eyes in excess of 2, arranged in a fashion that does not seem evolutionarily sound. Also without trousers and also too grotesque to be cute. Three is about my limit for mammalian eyes in a single vicinity, and they need to be more orderly and practical than that. The effect of just tossing a bunch onto a surface bothers me. It bothers me so much that I am done talking about it.
And I don’t accept for T seconds Billy Crystal yelling about how excited he is to be a college student, because he’s probably about 65 by now. Older people have gone to college but if they yell about it they aren’t filmed.
He is excited just to be a student of a college in general. A college from a stereotype-loaded revenge of the nerds type college, where actually going to classes comprises 1% of the activity and everything else is partying, clubs and sports. Everybody wants a jacket that expresses affiliation with some group. Somebody who has no or wants no involvement with those does not exist. I don’t mean that the person -might as well- not exist, but that script writers can’t fathom of somebody who doesn’t fit into those niches living on the planet. Or even living on an imaginary planet that is supposed to be warped and strange and people who get reblogged at me on twitter will praise for having the message that being warped and strange is A-OK (guys).
Anyway the main character looks too much like Plague, the torso-less [single] eyeball monster that Counts at anybody who attempts to retrieve the White lance in Final Fantasy II IV, which only further emphasizes the lack of Count in the film I came to see. And its name is “Mike.” HAW HEE it is a MONSTER but with a normal man’s name! Great idea and now it’s been named Mike for six years.
It was not the worst looking american film I saw promotion for in Paris, but it seemed the most likely to be approved of by other people, due to being bad in a more socially acceptable fashion, which makes it considerably less pleasant for me. A bad, hated movie will go away. I am not going to see fanart for Google product placement movie, and though the smurfs are certain to return, there is no secret prohibition on protesting them. A bad, beloved movie will come back again and again. As this one did.
I do not accept the excuse that this film is making fun of stereotypes and therefore may freely benefit from them (For one thing, nobody has made the claim that it does anything but benefit from them).
These are supposed to be otherworldly beings that frighten humans but they have rigid binary genders totally analogous to our own. Muppets are strictly male and female too, but I find them entertaining and am less inspired to dissect them for griping purposes, and these aren’t in corny movie college anyhow. I think it is fairly public knowledge that my least favorite cartoon as a child was Muppet Babies, a truly unnecessary effort to dumb muppets down into something consumable by children, even though we already have Sesame Street, which does quite fine with real muppets, so I hardly think I am pulling a dumble-standard here. Monsters [and muppets] are important to me and I dislike these monsters, and that is just the way it goes.
I have read descriptions of theoretically clever things that have happened on muppet babies, but I cannot get past the theme song. I think that part is crucial.
Of course it is a fantasy written by humans and not meant to be thought about very hard, but why NOT make a movie that needs to be thought about? And yes I complained about there being an unusual number of eyes on one or more characters, showing my own silly adherence to routine, but I did not see any evidence that having more than 2 had any effect on the creature’s perceptive capabilities. It is all for show. Everybody still talks through its mouth and sounds like a promoted, non-cameo celebrity.
From a financial standpoint, it makes sense to pander directly to your buying audience of normal people. There really is no good reason for a company to make a movie that does not bother me. And I cannot claim that I require school/gender stereotype trigger warnings or that this sort of material should cease to exist, because I am the only person who has this problem, and at worst it makes me uncomfortable and inclined to spend hours organizing my complaints. And so I shall continue to complain to facilitate me no longer thinking about it.
That is all for today, folks.
Market research has determined that processed artificial cheese goop is not disgusting enough, so this graphic that emphasized its unnatural color and staining properties as well as its unearthly drippy ooze-properties was called necessary.
Like every other bad thing, dyed chemical slop sludge now encourages its users to think they are talented, clever and powerful just for liking it. People don’t criticize cheez-whiz for being a science fiction nazi-like horror that goes against everything your intestines stand for, right? They’re just “haters” who can’t handle how unique and epic it is and that you also are for using it, and having simplified the issue like that you thus need not consider trying to see your behavior from another perspective.
It is true that I hate liquid processed cheese product and that this is not a nuanced issue that I have researched at length. However, some things simply deserve to be hated.
The first frozen burrito laboratory-tested and guaranteed to cause post-traumatic stress disorder. Nothing to hate there. I didn’t say I was going to give examples of hatable things! This cheese flavor is at least non-wet. My disapproval for cheese as colored ooze is enough that I temporarily overlook my disappoval for cheese as colored dust, though not enough that I accept salt-shaker as a funamental factor in nacho creation.
Anyway, which of these bad Barbie Christmas movies should we buy? Be not concerned that you cannot read the labels under this horrible lighting; these covers were not designed for readers.
It is BarbieTM AS Eden StarlingTM. But you know it is really BarbieTM playing the part because BarbieTM‘s charisma and screen presence are unmistakable, and you would know that if you had been watching
The Barbie Channel. Nobody bloops and polls quite like Barbie. The first bloop was likely the sound of Barbie dropping her TM into the pool.
Excuse me, that is Turbie. Totally different. Turbie does not get to pretend to be other people on film. Turbie just wears a folded towel out of a plastic bag on her head and pretends this is an astounding innovation. Barbie only shills for new and wonderful things like Barbie.
Do not be confused since they have both been seen on tv; that could just mean Turbie has been arrested on Cops 2.0 or sold into slavery on QVC. Turbie has never been seen on the Barbie Channel. The Barbie studio guards have been ordered to arrest Turbie on sight, and equip her with an iron mask and escort her to the north tower. You will never be king, Turbie! Your TM shall be confiscated and offered as turbute to the one true bie on the block.
To get back to the main topic, as a psychologically buried alternate personality of Barbie, Eden Starling’s name is marketable and trademarked, despite being a stand-in for Ebenezer Scrooge who caused much suffering during the prime years of his life and is not somebody whom children should emulate, because unlike Ebenezer Scrooge, Eden Starling is Barbie and pretty and perfect and glamorous and doesn’t have a scary name. Eden Starling knows that it’s what is inside that counts, which is why her cruelty did not “freeze [her] old features” as happened to Scrooge. This film shows that you can turn your life around and be positive so long as you’re rich, young, unblemished and Barbie. I am curious how this handles the section in which Barbie orders a peasant to go out and buy Christmas dinner for her clerk costume designer and childhood friend.
“Do you know whether they’ve sold the prize can of Red Bull that was hanging up there? Not the little can; the big one?”
“What, the one as big as me?” returned the boy girl.
“What a delightful boy girl!” said Scrooge Starling. “It’s a pleasure to talk to him her. Yes, my buck doe! That should suffice to keep all the house hold awake all the day and provide ample liquid material to comprise the bileous humours which shall accompany more solid, less desirable nourishments during the traditional post-meal expulsion”
Barbie’s caloric intake fits in well with Victorian London, I now imagine. This is probably the only Christmas Carol adaptation in which the hardened protagonist could abuse people by encouraging them to take better care of themselves.
According to Barbie Movies Wiki, instead of Jacob Marley, Eden Starling is visited by Aunt Marie, whose cruelty in life was forbidding Eden/Barbie to celebrate Christmas. The ghost of Christmas Present informs Barbie that her coworkers tease her but actually want to be like her. In Christmas yet-to-come, Barbie fires her staff and the replacements “fail to live up to her expectations.” Barbie’s former servant became a famous fashion designer but would not help Barbie due to her past selfishness.
The moral of this story: be nice to Barbie, so Barbie can be nice to other people who will become famous so that they can also be nice to Barbie and not leave her to depend on people who aren’t good enough for Barbie, everyone’s idol. Instead of dying alone and having nobody want to go to her funeral and her belongings plundered, with children left to die from her stinginess, Barbie just loses some money and though she receives no charity her former friend will at least acknowledge her existence. I am fascinated by the idea of an official Mattel “visibly poor” destitute Barbie but I could only turn up parody editions while searching for “poor barbie” and I am certainly not going to watch this thing, although if I had done that instead of writing this I would have been done by now and would have been too heart-warmed to dare analyze it.
Barbie Movies Wiki also inadvertently contradicts the hype on the DVD box proclaiming this as the first Barbie Christmas movie, which was actually Barbie Nutcracker. Maybe Ken had the right idea all along.
Ah good, TMothy is back. Yet I wonder: What would happen if Mattel printed the name “barbie” without adding TM afterward? WHAT WOULD HAPPEN? Why does TM NEED to be there EVERY time? We know Barbie is powerful. She can handle it.
No foe has been able to stand up to Barbie since she was bitten by a radioactive box. They try and they fall down laughing.
So cruel, and yet so necessary.
I am thinking only of your best interests, bimshwel. Why will you not do the same for me?
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How am i supposed to succeed in a world where 30 million people would look at this once willingly, or even slightly fewer millions than that more than once?
I don’t know what this video is; the content is beside the point. The point is that I never make it to the content because I don’t want to click on it. The content does not matter, unless multi-million people said to each other “hey watch this video; I swear it is good despite the unsightly punchable shouting scruffbag in the preview.” I did not have a person show it to me, just a lifeless robot that knows nothing of my interests but thinks it does just because it tracks the imaginary things that my mouse point touches.
The fashionably sad “goths” of the 1990s and the marketably sad “emos” they begot for the 2000s have somehow led to a giggly, artifically happy and positive yet somehow consistently vulgar, ostensibly progressive but subtly traditional-gender-role-reinforcing* “cuteness” that would make me vomit if I had a functioning gag reflex.
*I think I was referring to the tendency for those born male to disregard tradition-mandated ideas of what sort of activities and entertainment they should like but still maintain horrible facial hair. They don’t grow full beards but they keep the hair short so it seems more like dirt than something that had a biological function at one point. I can’t get over that they are alright with being men but won’t take advantage of the opportunity to have great wizardly beards. This may be a more irrational gripe than usual. I will let you know if I remember that I meant something else.
But it is worse than goths because it isn’t a subculture and there is nothing conspicuously, obliviously weird enough about it to laugh at. It is too common to not be normal. There is no bizarre wardrobe to go with it. Their fashion is notable for its lack of notability. They wear jeans pants and ugly t-shirts and draw pictures of themselves wearing that and using the internet and drawing pictures of themselves posting pictures of themselves on the internet. They thrive on being totally average, and they thrive on celebrating that they thrive on that.
Do you think I thrive on not liking that? I do not! I want to stop being aware of these things. I know I will never like them. They come looking for me. Because they are proud of themselves and have no self-regulatory functions they are highly likely to shove their existence into everyone else’s and dismiss anyone who criticizes their behavior as a “hater.” They’ve had Barney and Dora and Elmo telling them that they are special and unique and important since before they had any opportunity or means to do anything special, unique or important, so they believe that and will not believe otherwise, and they don’t have to because everyone else they know has had the exact same experience and they relate to each others’ unconditional enthusiasm. It is easy to enjoy life when you enjoy mediocrity. I should wish that I did, but I have had something better and was spoiled by it, and it left me behind. Satisfaction demands that I work for it, and then it laughs at me and goes drinking/clubbing/boring with mediocrity anyway.
I left this behind for two months, not wanting to post in a bad mood, and when I came back to it all i could think was how much I wanted to slap/shave this guy. Then I left it for two more months because I was busy with unsatisfying things but somehow it was still here waiting and taunting me. I am more mad now than then!
This is what happens when “geeks” become “cool.” Everything that’s totally uninteresting and not cool in the slightest amount is potentially “awesome” or “epic.”
What were the old biggest geek stereotypes? They lived with their parents, they didn’t clean themselves, and they had difficulty procreating. Well when everybody is a geek the third one solves itself, but the other two, essentially, acting like children, just get worse.
It probably is not fair to pick on this one fellow because he is probably singing and that’s just a face people make when they are singing, I suppose. Unless you are an anime character with a naturally triangle-shaped mouth, mid-song is the only time when that face should show up. But then the oaf might be yelling “AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH GUYS fuck.” And if he is singing, I still don’t want to look. I don’t want to look at anyone’s vain contextless head inside a room made out of communion wafers just emitting noise, but least of all this one’s. I hate that! You know I hate that! If everything I have said is a total exaggeration, the basic, initial fact remains that I do not want to look at this.
he looks like those stupid advice aliens from the space ship levels of The Lost Vikings.
He looks like Duke from Paladin’s Quest.
He looks like Tina Fey from this weird package of yogurt. What did the photography director say to Tina Fey? “Open your mouth like you are eating the yogurt whose label you are appearing on while trying to look at your own ear.”
This then reminds me of ronald mcdonald ecstatic to be drowning in apples and abandoned and dirty.
He looks like a model for Campbell’s Bag of Douchebag™ soup brand.
That guy back there, he looks like the only opportunity to use an uppercut against Don Flamenco. He looks like Timothy Speed Levitch. He looks like one of those people who every couple of years tries to get me to watch the pilot for “a kitty bobo” on youtube and laments that it was never made into a full series. He looks like someone who knows what dresden kodak is. He looks like someone who acted sad when Billy Mays got dead. He looks like somebody who would be in an “updated” revival of Rent.
I cannot compete with this because I do not understand it. I am going to dig a hole. I am finally going to start living under a rock as hacky writers across all disciplines who think their own self-focused niche is the toast of all towns have insisted I have been doing for the past 20 years anyway.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock to see that I am not there you probably assume I have been living under a rock.