I need to stop writing things like this and forgetting them. I like this one, and its references are not completely out of date yet. I no longer have my father around watching network television all night; in fact I no longer have satellite dish “service” and the local reception here is awful, so I am drifting back into complete unawareness of what goes on the air. I am not glad my father is dead at all; I look at the box of ashes every day and keep thinking about the day he went to the hospital and I couldn’t even get him into the bathroom since I was so sick, but there are some habits that I am relieved to be without. My own habits do quite enough damage on their own.

I am so glad “Uncle Buck,” the 2016 tv series, got canceled. Every idea there is terrible. The initial movie was mediocre, the worst example of John Hughes’ fondness for dumping comedy in favor of desperate sappiness pretending to be comedy. And then you changed all the white people to black, which is always a desperate, cynical grab at looking hip and socially conscious. And you make Buck himself skinny instead of fat, bearded instead of shaven, and wearing a dorky hat, so it is a totally different character. Then you switch the time period ahead thirty years, and switch from a stand-alone premise, Buck looks after the kids for a week, to the standard continuity-less sitcom format, so that Buck’s role is necessarily different, so apart from the name “Buck” there is really nothing in common. The film is hardly regarded as a classic by anyone except extreme doofuses, so you wouldn’t have people under 30 generally aware of the source material, so they wouldn’t care about the allusion. And people who were aware, and also actually would want more Uncle Buck der film, would be offended that you changed so much stuff.

And it bothers me that this series was conceived by Steven Cragg, who was the head writer on Mad TV in 2005 or thereabouts, its least-completely misguided late season. Cragg is only credited as writer on 3 of the 8 Buckisodes but that should be enough if it was a good idea.
wikehhpedia cites a rotten tomator who says

not enough laughs for what? To be true to the legacy of the film? Because the film is only marginally funnier than Ghostbusters, which is only marginally funny, but has other elements apart from that to keep it interesting and me from dwelling on its social implausibility.

no it hasn’t! The cited article is just an interview with two of the actors saying how great John Candy and John Hughes were. Not every mediocre movie from the 1980s is a “cult film!” Uncle Buck was, by the preceding statement’s own admission, a mainstream box office success during its initial release.
I would believe Canadian Bacon, also starring John Candy, is a cult film, because it flopped on its initial release and has truly bizarre elements to it, but since it wasn’t written or directed by John Hughes and came out in the 1990s it doesn’t fill in enough of the corporetro buzzword bingo card and actually gets correctly identified as a dumb old movie that may safely be not-cared about.

And a few months ago the cast of Blackish was the cast of Good Times! (and DIDN’T get cancelled) Everybody programming at abc is a brain-robbed twit stuck in the 1970s, except they think they are smarter and edgier than the 1970s. With “new” versions of 25cent pyramid, match game, muppets, battle of the network stars or whatever else, I swear every ad for Goldbergs or Blackish just shows them homaging this or that old intellectual property. Hey look they’re talking about THE BREAKFAST CLUB! Hey look they’re dressed like BATMAN AND ROBIN from the 1960s! Who cares? How is that funny?
I remember The Wonder Years… I also remember hating The Wonder Years, but the premise was never Kevin busting into his house and telling everybody about this great new movie PLANET OF THE APES! and then his family act like they have never heard of it and ha ha! this is FUNNY because EVERYBODY knows what planet of the apes is! And then Charlton Heston shows up but NOT playing himself but that’s the JOKE and everybody falls asleep and dreams about being Apes on the Planet of the Apes.
As a child of the 1980s, do you know what my favorite movie was? Robin Hood, the Disney version from 1977. And Disney even owns ABC but wouldn’t make an episode about that because it doesn’t tie into their contemporary marketing since they have no live action adaptation of it planned and their version never thoroughly supplanted every other version of the character in popular culture. My older brother liked Transformers: The Movie, but the Goldbergs can’t talk about transformers because a rival conglomerate is making billions with that. My younger brother liked The Land Before Time, and the Goldbergs can’t talk about Don Bluth dinosaurs because a rival conglomerate is making surely tens of thousands off of that.

I wrote most of this last October, but literally last week, May 2017, the Goldbergs episode was about Back to the Future. And presumably involved dressing like the characters and acting out scenes from it with a forced-jewy spin on it. They would probably have Christopher Lloyd pull up in an actual DeLoreon but I think Big Bag Theory owns the current rights to having every nerd celebrity guest star as themselves acting like the characters they are associated with and in reality probably spent years trying to get disassociated from. Whatever the case, our tv writers seem to have been replaced by automated trend aggregators.

This headline I found while searching a for a background to draw behind the unspeakable dope on this page, and somehow just having read it made me feel dumber than drawing the dope did, and I declined to investigate further.
Literally Sheldon Kuper is the rudest most entitled jerk on earth and it is supposed to be entertaining to watch the world bend over backward to allow him to live out geek fantasies even though he is implied to be rich and appreciated for his skills already. Also, there are about five women in all existence and one of them is in love with him??!
You used to have to watch Nick Jr. to see plots this contrived, and you could accept that programming for toddlers will err on the simplistic and predictable side. The comedy on Peppa Pig is more sophisticated than network sitcoms. I almost ended that statement with “now” but then I remembered Full House and Growing Pains. Maybe knowing I was writing this killed Alan Thicke. And also Kevin Meaney, who starred in a different failed sitcom remake of Uncle Buck at the same time Full House was airing and became dead less than two months before Thicke did.

Getting back to the Buckture, plainly the point is that Buck is a darker skinned gentleman, and I should be interested in this revived concept based on that. Can you imagine if the ABC network put on a TV series based on The Color Purple or Roots in which everybody was white? No, they wouldn’t do that, because everything that exclusively features black characters has blackness as a central component to it, and they emphasize that. John Hughes stories have whiteness as a central component. Steven Cragg is very white. Loading black people into white concepts to make the cast seem “diverse” just makes trouble.

I can understand doing this in the recreation of an old theatric play, if it was lacking in elements tied to race and presented initially during a period in which only white people were permitted to audition or perform. That was not the case in 1980s film. In my limited period of access to plays, I have seen productions of Richard III, Three Musketeers, Romeo AND Juliet, plays written by and about white people, but staged with black actors in leading roles, and it worked because the scripts weren’t messed with with to try and draw attention to the blackness of the actors. But if you set it in contemporary society and are changing the personality and ethnicity of a role heavily associated with an actor still presumed to be in collective social memory, because you wouldn’t be remaking the film if it wasn’t considered heavily recognizable, you try and force people to accept how “real” it is, and it isn’t any more real like this! White people really do exist! And they really do occur in quite large numbers in this country. I don’t care if you make a cartoon series about an anachronistic stone age society that fixates on a dark-skinned family that is written to act like contemporary people act. But don’t call them The Flintstones because the Flintstones are a specific group of characters that act like middle-class white people from the 1960s.

I remember when Cedrick das Entertainer was doing a publicity tour for the completely needless and cinemized remake of The Honey-Mooners, how self-congratulatory he was for having recontextualized everything. How Ralph Cramden’s outburst “to the moon!” was no longer an insincere yelled threat of violence said in frustration but a calm and sincere statement of love. Which means he was playing a different character, and telling a different story. Cram Ralphden is a frustrated low-class oaf. If you are worried he will offend contemporary advertisers, you shouldn’t put him in a movie!
The play “Annie” was remade as a film, with all the white characters played by black actors, but since the original story is set in the 19th century and the show a musical-type anyhow, it is already somewhat abstract, and the character personalities already removed from reality, assuming the songs weren’t screwed with to seem more sassy and hip-hoppety. Whatever the case, don’t call it “color-blind casting” when it is deliberate. You want me to think that skin color played no role whatsoever in filling the role, which is a lie. You wanted me to notice the blackness, just like you wanted me to notice the ladyness of the more recent Ghostbusters. And people did, and you pretended it was their prejudice that made them notice. Please stop doing that!
I accept the idea of remakes, taking a functioning concept and putting it into a fundamentally different context, but without trying to obscure the original from existence. I don’t accept replacement characters with the same names who behave in fundamentally different ways.

It must also be noted that “The Great Outdoors,” another thoroughly unremarkable John Hughes/John Candy feature, is also being remade, and while I admit I haven’t seen it, and that Kevin Hart is certainly uninspired and irritating and coasting on an inexplicable media-wide assumption that he is funny so-that-he-needn’t-attempt-to-be enough to replace Dan Aykroyd, you could easily make a movie about two families going camping and coming into conflict without anybody saying “hey, isn’t this a ripoff of that all-time cinema classic The Great Outdoors?,” even if you hadn’t taken the precaution of making sure the cast had fewer white people in it. There is just no reason for any of this, I don’t get it, I never got it before, and I expect I shall continue not to get it.

I thought I had griped about John Hughes in the past, but if I did it isn’t on this website. without even remembering that he was responsible for Baby’s Day Out.
I remember seeing promotion for a video game based on the movie before I even heard of the movie, and then the game didn’t actually get released, but the movie did, and somehow I saw it.
Oddly enough, the titular baby has just the sort of aristocrat entitled parents that Hughes always shows ostensibly-relatable schlubs triumphing over in his other movies. And now I suppose they all have jobs producing lame movies and tv shows that reference his lame movies.

I had placed this illfrustration at the end of the “video” I posted last week without realizing I had not prior to then exhibited it on this website, even though it seems to originate in August 2015.
Initially inspired by editing wordpress themes (what this website runs on), but it could as well apply to trying to use hulu, trying to use linux, trying to install windows over linux, trying to use a Hewlett Packard printer, trying to use toon-boom software, or any number of things that don’t work while priding themselves on how well they work.
This may have been the first middle finger on the deviant art website not being directed at the viewer.

This goes back to 2006. What have I done with my life? And how is it that many of the artists I have observed these from over the years have done more with theirs?

Additionally, this image and

this image appeared, for a deliberately short period of time, because they are pretty bad if you have time to analyze their details, but I did not have any other “character” for which drawings existed both of wearing earphones and of pressing down on a ridiculous cartoon detonator.

What the horehound is horehound? The look of this packaging makes me think the company only chose this as a flavor so they could act wise and worldly by elevating themselves above people who have never heard of it. “Why, you’ve never heard of horehound? Well sit right down there and let me spin you a tale.” I hate the word tale! Why do people have to talk in ways that make me mad!

Well mice it is about time. I can finally end my hunger strike. Because you know apparently i couldn’t have “that” old fashioned wild cherry flavor before (No not that one, the other one). Or maybe I just wouldn’t because cherries are terrible, and artificial ones more so. Cherry pies are cherrible. Strawberry is much better. Even raspberries and cranberries are better. Certainly I doubt old fashioned fake cherries are more pleasant than new fashioned ones. This probably tastes like Robitussin. Arrrf i can hear in my mind the deliberately, proudly glib bland appalachian announcer telling me to “try some today” without a slice of emotion. This is supposed to appeal to people who see billboards for Cracker Barrel that say garbage like “Come in and sit a spell” and think “now that’s REAL america.”

This one said “eats, treats treasures,” and the treasure is apparently their boring peg jump game. It is an interesting thing to have at your table, I suppose, for a restaurant, for three minutes, but nothing that entices me to pull off the road. My camera refused to take a better picture under threat of throwing itself under the wheels of the next truck that came along.
Here are better pictures that other people took using cameras with less self-respect.

Hey you driving a car presumably to a destination, wouldn’t you rather, instead of doing something with your life, like to stop and play a game of checkers over a storage container while the anxiety that you are wasting your precious minutes of free time on something that takes forever and is boring slowly burns away at your last scrap of sanity? It’s like living with a toddler on purpose forever. Please observe that n’ has an apostrophe but dumplins does not. The barrel is gradually crackin’ away at our language so that it becomes not necessary to acknowledge when you spelled something a stupid way on purpose.

Wowie al-zarkawi, I get to PAY to eat GREEN BEANS. Or maybe I just get to pay for the right to strain them. Gosh I am supposed to believe this ad won an award. I think it was the bored award.

Cracker barrel is so cutting edge in being deliberately regressive that I cannot even make its terrible video full screen. Can’t have me stealing their secrets after all by seeing their logo at a legible size (But I can play its depressing banjo fiddle music as loud as I want). Yeehaw let’s have a hoedown at cracker barrel. Let’s all settle in for old fashioned country cookin’ and dysentery. Let’s eat like we live in a covered wagon –excuse me, waggin’– and don’t have access to anything that is designed to stay edible in a non-refrigerated environment. Biscuits again? Oh boy oh boy oh girl get in the kitchen.

cracker barrel is really rackin’ em up. Here its nationally distributed supermarket cheese that is most of a certainty constructed in a thoroughly modern factory facility has won an award for another cheese having won an award. You might say: hold on there skrimpfy, the cracker barrel cheese brand is owned by Kraft, and unaffiliated with the restaurant chain, which it actually predates, and that only isn’t obvious because the Kraft logo disqualifies a product from accolades of any sort. And I would tell you for beets sake stop calling me skrimpf five years ago!

The very same Kraft which coonskin cap pioneered the Creep ‘n Crackers self-application process. They will need a barrel to carry all the awards this deserves. Hopefully not the one I am hiding from them in.

page 18 of part 3 of the bimshwellian comicoid. This sure took long enough to get to, and finally resolves a matter that has been up in the air for too long. And now I must go back to the past to rework old pages because it was my intent last year to have the second small book version complete within this year. I have within this year tended to a number of long postponed matters, and ordinarily would consider that justification for postponing a less postponed project, but I actually printed inside the first book that the next one was “Available 2016″ so that makes it closer to law. Even though I added *hopefully” afterward. Hopefully does not mean “no self-imposed psychological consequences for failure!”

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:
“we’ll come into your town, we’ll help ya party down, we’re an american band!”
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: We’ll do whatever we want! you can’t tell us what to do we’re an american band!
Like it is supposed to be some kind of protest against bands from other countries. “SLOVENIAN bands will not subsidize your parties! US, on the other hand…”

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
we’ll steal your piano replace it with jay leno we’re an american band

(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)

we’ll come into your city and we’ll bring along smitty

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!

we’ll come into your home, we’ll prank call paul prudhome
who does this band even think it is? they don’t have the power to do that.

we’ll modify your suit, we’ll add a wrestling boot, we are the beach patrol

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.

we’ll come into your factory, talk trash about Tony Slattery

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

we’ll come into your daventry, astound you with our gallantry, we’re an american graham

we’ll come into your dump, make you play Rallo Gump, we’re an american trashbag

we’ll come into your towns, get mad at jews and browns, we’re an american klan

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.

we’ll come into your Hyundai, make you occupy a wildlife refuge with Ammon Bundy

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.

On the topic of terrible genies, I would NOT be friends with some dumb big eared animal genie that could NOT grant wishes. I would not be friends with any big eared dork that would voluntarily be friends with bow tie imps. This genie has failed in numerous ways. True enough, bow tie imps should be prohibited from having their wishes come true, since they would only wish for everyone to respect their bow ties and to also wear bow ties, but not larger than their own. I am rage-filled! Can I wish for the bow tie imbecile to get stuck inside a lamp without it receiving consolation magic powers?

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.

The Vizier from this indeterminate version of Prince of Persia is not himself the prince of Persia, but he IS Prince Corny. He is so preoccupied with being corny that ignores the wizard who just jumped in his window.

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.

candy allsorts, kings, Not Being Cool | How to lose a guy in (4) days | !

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.

Not Being Cool, rygar | How to lose a guy in (5) days | !

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

Why my good citizen, but it’s just like the inscription on the tomb! It was written: I shall be a dude, he shall be a dude, she shall be a dude; we shall all be dudes. The prophecy is coming true! Great scott, we’re all doomed.

Do not panic! How bad could these dudes be?

No!

I dare say those are some of the WORST dudes I have yet encountered.

It’s World War Dude.

Blogroll, Not Being Cool | How to lose a guy in (5) days | !

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.

This suffices. The picture bores me by now. And that is just after seeing it twice!

“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.