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.
I shall honor the recently dead Christopher Lee by posting these pictures of him laying down the law while clutching a ridiculous over-sized vegetable pod and some manner of questionable imp looks on. If there were pictures of me in the same situation I would want people to know while I was still alive, however.
I do not think there is anything sad when a world famous celebrity gets dead at the age of 93, however, especially ones that have appeared in over two hundred films.
If Casey Kasem’s death was sad, it was because there was an unresolved dispute in his family, and the man’s final days were probably stressful, with lingering stress for those who could not fix the problem. It is NOT sad because it made Shaggy “Norville” Rogers, who is a fictional character, cry Mountain Dew Baja Blast-colored tears, when he went to some oddly sparse cartoon graveyard where nobody else is buried.
Much stranger are scenes showing just Scooby Doo weeping at the weird cartoon grave, as if the voice actor dying means the character is dead, even though four people apart from Casem have voiced Shaggy since 1998 in [wholly unnecessary] newer cartoons, and the initial Scooby Doo voice Don Messick has been dead since 1997, with Frank Welker doing the replacement, and he also has always provided the voice of Fred. It might be appropriate to show Fred rubbing his hands in treachery as he plots to take over more of the cast. In a weird cartoon graveyard.
With Messick’s death predating deviantart, I was sadly able to turn up far fewer creepy drawings of his gravestone, which is nonetheless a considerable achievement considering that he was cremated. Kasem meanwhile was buried in Oslo, Norway because his wife was crazy, which as far as I know is accurately depicted in the crude green-carpeted voids seen in these drawings. In another twist, Shaggy is alive again.
Just kidding, they are both actually dead. Gosh it is almost as if cartoons are not real people and thus are neither dead nor living and this sort of illustration has very little reason to exist.
A true mystery: Shaggy and Scooby at Casem and Messick’s imaginary graves, but this time there are two additional graves whose inscriptions cannot at this time be read. Is the implication that man and dog are next, with no reason to go on never-having-lived? Or has this person who couldn’t even be bothered to crop the digital camera picture of this lightly-stained ten minute drawing so that it is at least the center of attention put more effort into rendering a populated graveyard than any of the people who sprang for crayons?
My favorite shows Scooby Doo AND Bat-Man –who of course know each other; this partnership is not in itself notable– at a Kasem grave, Kasem having voiced Batman’s assistant Robin in Hanna Barbera cartoons. Even though those versions of Robin and Batman were based on the ones from the 1966 non-cartoon television series, which starred Burt Ward as Robin, who is not dead yet. Meanwhile, Olan Soule, the first voice (and my preference) of animated Batmen, has been dead since 1994. And once again the live Batman, Adam West*, yet lives. All the while, creepy oversized ghost heads float nearby with contented expressions showing they are oblivious to or quite proud of the suffering and confusion they have caused.
*West himself took over the animated Batman’s role later, but he and Scooby were no longer on speaking terms.
In other news, Ken Spears and Joe Ruby, the writers who actually conceived the Scooby Doo concept and characters, and presumably introduced Scooby Doo and Batman to each other, are also both still alive. Maybe they can get a pair of typewriters to cry at their hastily engraved resting places later.
There were a staggering meepload of these for Robin Williams. But in a week/month/year of tributes to a supposed comic genius, the hardest I laughed was coming across this, cartoon characters at a grave for a man they can’t plausibly have known existed, who was cremated, and didn’t actually voice them. Shouldn’t the grave say something like Cloppin Fillyums on it, given the alternate allegorical stupid horse-pun-based universe they inhabit?
That is true; otherwise this scene is completely serious and logical. But according to the image description, which regrettably was written, and regrettabler glanced at by me, the person who posted it didn’t even draw it; the person just assembled the elements from other drawings from other people, and only accomplished this much. So even if we are lost enough to imagine these characters are real and an acceptable vector for our own emotions on completely unrelated topics, at best they are faking it in front of a green screen on some other occasion. The animated franchise with the greatest potential for instant dork fame after spending the least amount of time learning to draw like it, and this person couldn’t even manage that, and still gets more recognition weekly than I ever had for almost any one thing my entire life. I felt bad making fun of the artists earlier, who clearly were not getting much respect as it was, but this kind of self-sustaining garbage is hard to coexist with calmly, even after five years.
But at least Robin Williams gets some scenery and a stylish mound, and a cheerfully inappropriate font.
That was rather odd, but could we possibly get a bootleg pikachu leaking Tide detergent onto a creepy cartoon grave that you stuffed five dead people into, four of whom certainly never had anything to do with Pokaymon plus one I never heard of?
I knew I could count on you.
I think these originated with Mel Blanc’s death and a widely-circulated drawing of Bugs Bunny and the et als, whose most distinguishing traits are the myriad ways they show no respect to anyone, looking mopey beside a spotlit microphone with the heading “SPEECHLESS.” To this day, prints of it are sold as if they haven’t been being cranked out for 25 years for apparent profit for the Time Warner company to people who would gladly pay to remember someone who made them glad with something that wants to force them to be sad. It seems the only thing better than institutionalized misery is spending money to take part.
This one for KC Case ’em at least makes a dorky joke on the topic that clashes with the intended air of reverence.
When Leonard Nimoy got dead I saw online remarks from people saying things like “I was driving when I heard and I had to pull my car over and cry for a while,” like this was someone they had met and knew very well, who had made a direct, personal investment in their lives. I am told he participated in his cult fan-dom, and had a “fatherly aura,” but he hardly left a great deal of business unfinished in his life. This level of attachment to celebrity is lost on me.
I remember when George Carlin did it, there were months of tributes to him, and I did not really see the prolonged public justification. But I accepted that; I did not seek out standup comedy, generally, and most of the tributes were from people who had worked with him or seen him perform who just happened to have high-profile television jobs but didn’t feel like doing him any favors while he was alive. I also remembered that when Bernie Mac went dying there was hardly anything within my radius, but I accepted that I mainly watched shows with mainly white people on them. Steve Jobs, alright, I never liked Apple-computer-brand stuff. Even my i-pod, which I did like, felt needlessly hard to use just to seem innovative. Literally, Apple’s slogan of the period was “Think Different.” No need to think better, just arbitrarily turn practical 2-direction control into a wheel and give it a plug that nothing else already uses or potentially will ever be able to use. And try to force me to reconfigure my operating system outside the i-pod while you are at it.
But with Robin Williams: he himself, not just people who knew him, was in films, and on television, stuff that I saw, and the effect of his death on me was about the same as any others I mentioned. I saw tributes from people of my approximate social status to the effect that they felt like they lost a family member or a piece of themselves forever even though the stuff he did has been preserved in the exact same form it was first encountered in (unless you saw him perform live, which none of these people have (maybe they WANTED to, and now know they cannot ever, but how much emotional difference does that make?)). So now I know I do not belong. It was not the society-wide media-mandated mourning of the World Trade Center attack, but this was just one person, who had made quite a bit of money and, at the very least, knew he was about to die, and not a few thousand done in without warning.
In this country. Who cares if hundreds of thousands die or are driven from their homes somewhere else? Nobody is expected to care about everyone else in the world; it would probably kill any of us if we tried. But certainly we should take stock of what we are losing our marbles over. I have breakdowns all the time due to very personal things; in fact they rarely involve any unconnected figure’s hardship. I could not mentally afford that. It would never let up. I can’t even handle birthdays.
I was wondering what yet-living public figure has made the biggest impact on my life. But they, at least the ones we make celebrities out of, almost always work in groups, and rarely produce a totally unique, non-imitated/imitating product, and no singular product sums up my life, or would cease to sum it up if one of the people who made it stopped living. And I say that as someone with very little social contact, who theoretically should have all the more reason to fill my empty life with far off Hollywud horsegoatradish.
Back to Williams, it WAS sad to me, because it was a suicide, and in fact I never had any ability to relate to Williams prior to knowing he had a depression issue –yes, I have also acted like an idiot for attention, but with far less encouragement– and could barely stand him at all until he took on a more subdued persona post-heart surgery, but he will not quickly be forgotten if we don’t rush to say he won’t be.
And Leonard Nimoy has contributed to about 536 Starry Trek-related productions, probably enough where if you watched them all in order you would have forgotten the first one by the time you got to the end and you could start over. He lacked the potential that Robin Williams had to take on future significant projects, and hardly needed it by the time of his not-quite-deadness. And I am not advising to forget the creations and participations of people who appeal to you, but to quote somebody I hated during My Childhood, take a chill pill, get a grip.
In fact I did not see anybody freaking out over Christopher Lee but apparently I deleted this text from an earlier post, presumably the one I just linked at, and this seemed like my best chance to use it. For the love of MacGuffin, if you like something somebody did 20 years ago, please tell them before they die, because afterward that is going to be a lot less important to them, and undoubtedly someone else you know could use the attention more by that point. And please don’t put me in a box in the ground in a sad grave. ESPECIALLY if you like what I did while alive, don’t ruin your or anyone else’s day unless you truly have to. Put me in one of those cadaver museums or feed me to needy owls, or something useful.
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 will have something nice next week. Comparatively.
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Bimshwel: five years of ehhh, three years of ah? and two years of oh.
Just think, in ten years bimshwel has gone from an irregularly updated personal weblog angry about stuff that doesn’t matter, maybe a little obsessed with old video games, written by an unemployed student with delusions of being a successful cartoonist and read by a few people. It all goes to show that if you work hard on something you love and never give up, you too can alienate the people around you.
I had absolutely nothing planned for this occasion apart from that sentence. I have been overwhelmed with deadlines for arbitrary tasks and only just realized “today,” Friday, gah, here is another one, and my own fleeping fault, this time. I knew this was coming. I had ten years to prepare. But there is nothing.
It has been my experience that when somebody tells me to give them something two weeks from now, at the end of two weeks they may remark “you had two weeks to do this!” More likely I had a few isolated hours across two weeks, during which I was incapable of coherent thought. And so, with all my deadlines recently, not one’s task was completed to my satisfaction. I am both difficult to satisfy and lacking in the skill to produce satisfaction. However, those also were externally assigned tasks that were not of personal importance to me. The things I make that matter to me, the ones I have tended to tell myself “no one else cares about,” that I do without deadlines turn out the best. They also get shoved aside when I do the bidding of others. So ducks to your birth-date, bimshwel. I shall speak of it when I deem prudent and some day when you’re older you’ll know I was right. Now get back in your room and play the piano! I want to hear those scales! Now! Stop crying! I didn’t raise no sissy website!
Lizard? I HAVE NO LIZARD.
I’ll see to it that nobody else has one either, if you keep that up.
Five years ago I appear to have questioned that I could still possibly be doing this five years from then. I wonder if I sincerely believed that I would not. Around that time I had only recently entered into online art-sites and displaying my pictures on them. I did not mention it here because I was ashamed that I had, at last, publicly become involved, even though I had been browsing the things for a few years. So when I did post my own nonsense I did it under names that I thought didn’t sounded like I came up with them because I didn’t want anybody from here to find me there. Now I have links to the things on the side of this page. It seems that no matter how ashamed I become of what I do, I follow it up with something else that makes it seem forgivable by comparison. I suppose I’ll start linking to that without even thinking to comment in another year or so.
I mentioned new websites that quickly got more popular than my old website. I reckon few of them are still updated, if they even exist. So I win. Nothing. Now I have the same gripe about the relative fame of users on the dumb art sites. Someday I will win nothing on them as well, merely by being so socially immobile that I linger long after most people stop caring.
Look there, 900! That’s a lot! Especially for me! I should be overcome with emotion at the approval. This proves that people like what I do. However, there are also 30 different oafs in the same vicinity who have drawn the exact same dog-thing over and over again for years with minimal creative ambition who easily have twice the approval. Three times as much if it’s a dog-thing from a bad video game or hideous cartoon and multiply either by 1.8 if the dog thing is a dragon thing. I have checked and verified these figures. It means nothing.
Not everybody really wants to be creative, anyhow; they just do it for fun. Fine for them, rageful for somebody who sincerely tries.
Half of this 900 lot probably don’t even go to the website anymore… which helps me in my quest for victorious nothingness but also implies that they are better than you (you being me), for their having left first, the scamps. A third of the remnant are ready to drop you at any moment, and eagerly anticipate a reason. Or perhaps they want you to watch their page. Not you specifically, but anybody at all who will increase their always-visible point total. Perhaps it even happened out of pity. Or maybe they like your drawings but find you despicable. Or perhaps just like the last thing you put up, or someone who means more to them than you mentioned you. It seems fashionable, for the moment, to acknowledge you, but by and large you are of negligible importance. It is necessary to build absurdly large support networks because the actual units of support have so very little meaning. Anybody can suddenly hate you at any moment And by beanbags I’ve done it myself. The personal weblogs can no longer be imagined by me to threaten me, but fleeting, fickle nothingness yet thrives. Those who are truly dedicated to the site or their cliquey support networks don’t have any more use for me than I for them. But I like it better than twitter. I have no hope in that nothingness. 300 or so who potentially might care is pretty good, even in a really dumb place. After all, they defeated the Persians and more importantly inspired a really lazy meme that prospered among the same sort of people.
Porridge, I spent three weeks writing some mopey introspective thing like that for a class that is now done. I don’t need to recreate it here. I may pull out some relevant bits and impose them on you later. I had to turn that in precisely when it was due. Bimshwel is never due. Bimshwel is not concerned that I acknowledged such a major anniversary a day late or that I talked about other websites than it the whole time. I broke its spirit years ago. It may have shamed itself into forgetting what the day was. You probably didn’t know either. I could say it is today, and nobody but me would know. I miss every birthday in my real family; quite finkly it would be rude of me to make an exception for this distasteful abomination.
I spend too much time thinking about nonsense. I am three years older than Napoleon and my realm is pitiful. But I maintain my composure because these are trifling issues. I don’t need to be the “best.” I have a narrow appeal, since I have such difficulty or unwillingness to latch on to other people’s gimmicks. I am not a winner. I am not good enough at anything that enough people do to have a contest over to even compete for the victory. I might have a chance of winning a contest whose goal was to be me, but if there were other people who could conceivably be me then there would be no point to it. I am as isolated by choice as necessity. And that is perfectly all right. The sooner I accept that the sooner I can enjoy my existence. The needless jealously and pointless aspiring to meaningless smalltime niche digital fame cease today!
ARRRGH I’LL GET YOU, YOU INTOLERABLE GINGERBREAD MANNEQUIN! YOU THINK YOU’RE BETTER THAN ME JUST BECAUSE YOU DRAW POKEMON AND HOMESTUCKS AND CLEOPATRA 2525! I’LL BEAT YOU I’LL SHOW YOU! I’LL LICK THE WHOLE KABOODLE USING JUST MY NOODLE! MY ORIGINAL DERIVATIVE CHARACTERS ARE (C) ME!!!
I SHALL AVENGE THE MARSHMALLOW PEEPS SLAIN TO MAKE YOUR CLOTHING! Come to me, winged cronies! I have been slighted! Do my bidding and I’ll give you *hugs* with lots of extra asterisks on the sides! Otherwise I’ll know who my REAL friends are! I need to clean out my watch list soon HINT HINT
My hubris shall be my downfall.
I have a tumbler.eh page. I wish I didn’t. Not because of this, just because of it. In fact that’s irrelevant beyond explaining where I had taken this picture from. A person asked me this question. I do not dislike this person for this question. However, my dislike of the topic and of some others I associate it with throbs like a toothache to the extent that it is not clear what bridge I am burning today. Know that I burn no bridges, and if I break one it’s only by myself driving a truck over it in disregard of the posted weight limit, and it is reasonable to guess that sooner or later I am going to learn to drive.
But a question, of a television program based on a commercial franchise I don’t care about, from a decade I’ve been sick of for a decade, that airs on a tv channel I’ve never heard of and has repulsive character designs. So the only way I’d become aware of it is if it is it if of it is it being the focus of an obnoxious meme torrent that I would ignore out of spite absolutely whatever it was. Oh and did I! (yes)
Friendship is Magic, they call it. They call it a lot. Too much for me. I resisted making a complaint about this because I felt like I shouldn’t even know about it and half the people that will talk to me on the internet are fond of it. However, by now half of them don’t talk to me either (not after this, certainly), so I like to hope the remaining quarter only choose to remain because they must have accepted me and must have expected me to do this.
One who did not was a very good friend in fact, but who had happened to be developing a curious hobby of marginalizing my personal value a few months before the thing premiered. By the time it had, friendship was not so much magical as an occasional convenience easily explainable through basic logic and social science. Fox news enthusiasts would not even doubt that sort. So having accumulated increasing numbers of such enchanted friend types by blatanter and blatanter professions of admiration for stuff that it was fashionable to like, he no longer needed the ones that were harder to please than that. Also apparently I’m not over it yet. I’ll probably mention it again. I’ve probably already done it. I’ve probably already written the next one 79 times since January.
But the cartoon! It really needed to get made, since there weren’t enough hilarious pictures on the internet like this already.
I can’t vouch for the writing on the cartoon itself, but the people who produce tribute material are about on-level with every other popular rubbishoid which is to say they veer toward the stupid. I remember feeling left out during my family’s Soporanofest a few years back, myself somehow being the only person who’d not watched nearly enough of the program to be obsessed with it, and I got along with the perpetrators afterward. But for this there is no afterward, because people on the internet are not the same as regular human beings who can get over things, or have other layers to their lives apart from these things. I did not get endless waves of daft gangster-sonas in my art queue for nine solid months.
The worst of it is over it by now, so it’s receded to the level of a mere annoying fad, but I scrawled all these complaints about it and don’t know what else to do about them. Forget them and move on? Do something productive? Me? Never!
Tumblir is very good for not allowing me to get over things. Do you have nothing to say? Good news, you can just copy what somebody else says, and sooner or later somebody I know will also have nothing to say and I’ll see something like this (you’ll have to click on it to see it, as I’ll not display it; otherwise I welcome you to assume that what I am saying may be construed as valid under proper circumstances). Even if you disagree with a tumble you need to copy it onto your page to say something to it, and the original copier in the chain still gets points for it, and if nobody bothers to read your print they’ll assume you do agree. Tumblr? More like Stupidlr ha ha.
See see look, this character is WEIRD and THIS character is a NERD and THIS character is DUMB! This should be titled “if you put a stock character in a stock situation.”
I didn’t even GIVE the thing a cube. Somebody who wasn’t necessarily me left it in a place where the beast would find it. I think I have some impractically designed characters, but these are quadrupeds with fine motor skills. They can manipulate objects with their “hands” but are cursed to not ever be able to do so while in motion or stably balanced. Ha ha get it stablAAAAAARGH I’VE BEEN STAPLED
Using a mundane setup to exhibit personality variations, certainly I do it; most aspiring creative people have and do, but I do this with my own characters and I wouldn’t go out of my way to make it look like I used a template when in fact I implemented my own layout.
This artist actually directly sources facial expressions and poses from stills of the cartoon. I know this, because most of these artists do and I’ve seen these ones before. And not in a funny way, either, like in those Tintin pastiches, where the characters are ludicrously out of character, throwing bricks through windows during labor riots or having debaucherous holidays at the same location as everyone else they know also is, all while cursing indiscriminately in near-english. They’re just playing with a dumb old rainbow cube.
And then he used the exact same gag twice (while making sure another character[‘s head fragment] appeared to explain the gag). Frippits, twelve ding dang years ago I drew an equally dopey looking “tribal” character (an elpsoid) painting a rubik cube, and nobody cared, because I never showed anybody because I realized it was a really bland idea. And I still can’t show anybody because that page seems to have mercifully escaped its holding place,
but here’s a subsequent page with a frogfrimmed can of spam on it. That’s the kind of cleverness it takes for this.
They’re rewarding and praising this guy for matching old jokes with old artwork. Even the Pokemon fan-drawingers relegate the frame copiers to middle-tier, but since most of these people are frame-copiers there’s nowhere else for them to go. They literally have no talent. I don’t have to watch the program to know this derivation is garbage. However, I suspect watching the program has an impeding effect on people’s ability to determine that this is garbage.
This is intellectually worse, though; at least a rubik cube has a classical charm to it that this association cannot harm and that likewise does not make the pony-fans who like the combination any dumber for its part. When you are paying lazy homage to lazy bands and lazy cartoons at the same time then you’ve squared the twit appeal and fractioned the creative effort involved. I initially linked to a different band homage by a different person whom I ultimately decided wasn’t fair to single out… the original drawing was of REM as the ponies, which was, at least, the only drawing of REM ponies. I shouldn’t have to settle for least (and I must confess I have slightly more scorn for REM than the Beatles). However, I found countless Beatles-as-ponies examples, in under three minutes, often with the exact same color scheme, as if there are canonical Beatles ponies whose composition cannot be challenged. There isn’t; these people just aren’t even so clever that they can pull off a palette swap without being ordered to. I have no idea who those culprits were so I’ll feel no guilt for scorning them in a place they’ll never find out about.
The absolute worst thing I remember seeing, somebody had drawn the let’s say main character’s heads floating around the logo for the tv show Friends, against a white background, and called it a day. I was so ashamed for both of us that I won’t direct anyone to it unless I am challenged to.
I remember for a while years ago everybody who was cool had to draw their already mundane character as an utterly unremarkable sillouhette dancing against a solid colored background to pay homage and worship before a bloody COMMERCIAL ADVERTISEMENT for eyepods, but most of them didn’t do it more than once. I guess they must have, but I successfully avoided knowing it.
It’s always lucky for people when something that’s really easy to copy gets popular. Pog forbid we have a well-drawn animated series on television.
Hacks love their little ponoids. They memorize the shape of this one little horse and can draw different hats on it and bazoinga! ORIGINAL CHARACTER! It’s like Bob and George fan-authors, except Dr. Light and Rush ALSO look like Megaman.
BUT WHAT ABOUT THE GAY SEAMONSTER???
Nobody draws the seamonster so it doesn’t enter into my reckoning. It may even be from a different show that I failed to elude awareness of.
It has JOKES that KIDS DON’T GET!!!
That’s the same lure you put out to get me to watch Shreck/every remotely animated thing that got made since Shrek made money, and that didn’t work, and it’s a secondary characteristic at best! When I was twelve I used to listen to a late night radio program where people called in to ask for advice about sexual relations and I only did so because of the funny sound effects, and I was an idiot.
It has REFERENCES and MUSICAL NUMBERS!
Congratulations, you invented The Drew Carey show? I’m not swayed by this sort of spiel and I never will be! If the best you can muster is that it’s a less vulgar South Park that’s easier for you to wank out to you won’t succeed and I shouldn’t feel bad about complaining at it!
BUT didn’t YOU make THIS?
Yes! I wish I hadn’t! I felt dirty when I did and the person I made it for just assumed I made it because I wanted to because he couldn’t grasp the idea of anybody else not being as into the show as he was. In fact I only made it so he would talk to me, and he did, that time! And realizing that I did indeed have to do that to get him to talk to me made me mad. And then I didn’t do it again and he never flippin’ talked to me again. I suspected I might have transferred my annoyance at him to annoyance at the cartoon, but half a year later I want to punch them both in the nose so they may well both deserve it. Similarly I theorize that neither cares.
Why don’t you just WATCH IT?
Because I don’t have to! Unless this is a condition to get my financial aid or my passport renewed then I don’t have time to do stuff I don’t want to do that I don’t need to do. Yet I tried! I got through one and realized I would never want to like it, given everything about it and the way in which it had been brought to my attention, and its refusal to leave. This is like reading one of those “remember when?” pages out of somebody else’s high school year book. It’s like that picture of the corny floating head with a pipe in his mouth or referencing a “flying spaghetti monster.” It’s never going to be funny to me because I’m not in your club and it isn’t.
I know one person who insists the program is bringing femininist ideas to people who would otherwise not be concerned with them. And maybe this message is more important than how badly drawn or annoying it is, or whom I resent and why. I hope that is the case. My problem might that I know very few people and I have trouble letting go of the ones that really aren’t going to get any better. Lazy fan immersion is itself the total absense of ideas, and something these people have been doing their whole lives. I give the management credit for devising a template that is even easier for the least creative to insert their egos into than anything we’ve had previously.
For all their blank slate adaptibility, Sega style hedgehogs are kind of hard to draw, what with their messed up proportion and conjoined twin cell eyeballs, as this box art specialist proves.
Hi I have a psychological disorder in which I think I’m persecuted despite being in an insufferable majority that gets whole websites devoted to it and takes over others. See also: war on christmas. or “if we allow gay people to have rights then everyone will be gay and humanity will stop reproducing.” In fact it’s such a powerful majority that I was afraid to complain about it. That really isn’t fair at all, considering the lack of kindness I’ve displayed toward the favorite television programs, musical acts and films of people I’m far closer to than anybody who has a web page with red text on it.
Consider even just the website name “ponychan.” That means this one topic was so overwhelmingly popular on the oldest and most notoriously hornetly imageboard that it attained sentience and split off into a new entity. Saw never did that. There is no “saw chan.” At least it’s not a chan that I saw. When you get really popular and obvious, people are more inclined to look for and point out your faults. That’s just what happens. Our most profitable news media is kept in business by this alone. And for the record I don’t see much about friendship in those which are the subjects of my gripes. It’s simply “this character exists. Look at it a lot.” I don’t have a problem with people watching a cartoon. Not this one more than any other I’ve whined about, certainly. If it came down to little ponies, the shirt tales, the snorks and muppet babies, I would recuse myself from picking the winner. I have a problem with people never shutting up about it under any circumstances, unwilling to accept that some others just don’t want any part of it, and cannot be made to, and further that the harder you push them the harder they’ll resist. I don’t fleeplezeep how “well written” and referency a program is if its fundamental sensory components are idiotic and embarrassing, and those get the most mileage.
Eh but if I liked something a lot, and knew there were forces massing to decry that I did, certainly I would defend my position. Wouldn’t I? I have no idea. I’ve never liked anything that was so beloved that I could say so and have there be 309 people standing by to statistically agree with me.
I prefer melodic music without vocals. I avoid referring to myself with pronouns. I walk in the rain and look drunk. I know what it’s like to be chronically not-gotten on a daily basis. The pony craze is very much gotten, and I wish I might be so into something that was, someday. That would be so great, to have massive corporations just pumping out trash I liked by the week, for free, and be friend-branded-acquaintances with ten thousand other idiots who liked it, who also drew the same stuff that due to my willing suspension of disbelief I could pretend wasn’t totally inane degenerate drivel, and is worthy of the source product I liked to begin with, in the event that was good.
Me mad? Yes! I’m furious! The absolute worst people on the whole internet love the dumb rainbow horses more than anything. It would be unfair inductive reasoning to claim that makes it inherently bad; that only keeps it inherently impossible for me to want to like at this point.
My mother watched American Idol but she didn’t draw, quote or otherwise invoke Brian Dunkleman every day for a year. And if she had and I’d told her to stop she wouldn’t have accused me of being some kind of pop culture gestapo trying to censor her rights and freedom. And if she had she’d be a krippendorfing maniac.
So that was that. But eventually…
AND What the hack is this thing? It looks like somebody bought a lion king coloring book and just used whatever crayons they felt like on Scar. In every picture it has the exact same expression, and I’ve seen about fifty of them despite never once looking for one and the thing not bloody existing three weeks prior [to when I wrote this sentence]. The regular characters feature the full range of emotions from happy to douchey but this one is only douchey. I understand that villainous sorts are supposed to be less than friendly but one assumes it may get upset when inevitably foiled, and in any event there should be something to distinguish its bad smirkiness from the good smirkiness of the protagonists.
This is, I think, seven different people doing lame fan-traces based on the exact same shot, or simply reposting the frame verbatim as an original work and subsequently submitting this to the “group” gallery I found them in, since the cartoon had not yet aired, but some official images had been posted online from it, I guess? That’s so bad that I don’t even care that only the last one is unmistakably douchey at this size.
This first person had the clever insight to mirror the frame before tracing it. Ah and “good” here’s some passable douchiness. Even when these people try to think outside their own tumblr mandates all they can come up with is “He’s the puppet master!” or “he has them all on a chessboard!”
“Q trolls the ponies.” I saw a bunch of such remarks. The uninspiration hath folded in on itself! The thing people use as a pathetic launching point, to borrow characters from to use in their own stories, is itself borrowing characters? Is that what I’m to conject from this? Nerds love this stuff. Ah didn’t I once say that I loved that? I like when one writer finds a means of reusing their own characters in another situation where intellectual property restrictions seek to prohibit them from doing so. I don’t like when a point of nerd idolatry safely assumes, and REQUIRES that its audience be familiar with another bastion of nerddom. I’m not terribly proud I made that pointless page of video game references. But at least they were varied and over quickly. it wasn’t a drawn out reverent tribute to one series. Good gorf star trek. This IS just like Bob and George.
I hate alllllllllll these people! I can’t recall when last I loathed so many non-murderers because I self-administered shock therapy to forget that.
That’s everything they do. They consume, and imitate what they consume. Of COURSE they’ll love stuff that itself consumes and imitates. Does it matter if the program can stand on its own merit if you can sync it up to audio from The Big Ol’ Bowski? and then link it at me out of context after I already plainly didn’t care about the last six contextless clips you sent amidst not even asking me how I’m doing? One of the reasons I dislike Kevin Smith films is that there’s sure to be 10 to 20 minutes just of people talking about other movies. And this conversation will be the same every time you watch.
Also: do we truly require in this comic store a mal-configured widecreen tv to put Kevin Smith on? Isn’t he fat enough already? And why did the angel order alcohol if he can’t actually drink it and presumably never could? How would he have developed a taste for it? How does he even enjoy that?
If you had asked me but a week before this what my least favorite thing about the collective Star Trekkion was, I might have responded that it’s sterile, bland and slow-paced and there was no excuse for it to be that way after Star Wars* got made, much less in four consecutive series other than people themselves being boring. Further down the list might have been that invincible douchabix guy who I want to strangle that’s in some episodes, regardless of the series, for no reason, that isn’t a Romulan. I can’t stand Romulans. They’re such jerks. And at some point I gripe that the most exotic aliens at best have weird foreheads and funny skin colors. Right but the one guy I hate, apparently that’s the favorite character of everybody else. Especially furries. Why? Because they have no sense of subtlety and the smuggest, smirkiest character will always be their favorite. I was surprised when I found out anybody liked Spyro. I am no longer surprised.
*Star Wars the film, not Star Wars the Kevin Smith reference interlude. I grant all reference interludes the same right to be scorned.
One complaint that supposed little pony detractors commonly give is that this is a cartoon aimed at children, specifically heteronormative female children. That hurts their case, and if that’s the only case they can produce then they’re just as weak. I would question if in fact it is! I would then also question whether children comprise a majority of the total viewing audience. No reasonable child –apart from one making just such an advertising niche jump– could possibly care about a minor star trek character or that this show was mentioned on Jimmy Kimmy’s own abomination. I have never encountered this cartoon in the context of anyone under the age of 17 or off the internet*. Through being successfully targeted and then fudnuddling merchandise dollars and ad revenue into the enterprise, adults on the internet are the main audience. Additionally, by the show creators acknowledging the internet adult popularity and working to incorporate or be fully compatible with things they like, those become the target demographic, I say.
*excluding an embarrassing convention I attended, because those are essentially gatherings of real people acting out the internet.
**and then on September 29, some inconsequential loiter gang within my audible proximity at my university’s loiter area mentioned the cartoon, asking “is it at Hot Topic yet?” and they moved on within two minutes without anybody saying “bro.” Bro anything is bad news.
And I go to a school in which people talk about zombie apocalypses, hold “bake[d] sales” on April 20, wear shirts branded “winning” and all sorts of horrid rubbish that nobody should think is clever.
I have an unnatural, almost instinctive resistence to stuff that got too popular for no clear reason. This has surely saved me tens of thousands of dollars through the years on trendy clothes, music albums, cigarettes, beer, tomagotchis, furbies, skip-its and xboxes. I see no reason to give up on it for something that looks like this and that makes people act like this.
I’ve never encountered anybody who accepts video game music as a legitimate art form off the internet either, but I scarcely encounter them ON it unless I seek them out, and in any event it’s much more reasonable that something just one person likes should be a fringe matter; there are thousands of these pony dipes who exist exclusively in imaginary places. Sometimes I wish I was imaginary, but I am increasingly afraid I am.
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It did once come to my attention that somebody thought I made that, as well. I can thankfully remark that I did not, as much good as that would do for my public standing in the eyes of people I don’t want to be seen by. It’s not the worst in that gallery, but the worst in that gallery is enough to make me not want any. It might be well done but it’s nothing I want to look at.
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The next entry, on, let’s say, December 4, 2012, promises to bring a shocking exposing which you already knew.
Hey
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I sort of posted that, but then hid it because I wasn’t sure if it was interesting or not. Now I have had time to think about it and have decided that it isn’t, and I appreciate the closure. Yes so they took some annoying thing that had been floating around the internet for a few years and decided “let’s make this everyone’s problem suddenly and think ourselves clever.”
Deviantart was really late (by a standard that is for the moment not pertinent to my own variety of lates) to declare “ha ha, NINJAS and LLAMAS!” also, but at least either were funny in one context at one point in time.
Ninja tools, incidootily, are forbidden. The is the first time I haven’t been glad Mitt Romney is not a ninja.
I have never seen the “troll face” symbol –so named because it doesn’t let gruff goat faces cross bridge faces– invoked by anyone I didn’t want to force-feed aluminium foil and detergent cakes. If the troll would only let the goats across they would eat the stuff with less trouble.
In case you’re not acquainted with that particular floating head, then great. Floating heads, in general, are bad news.
Unfortunately, I will explain anyhow. The idea is that since some people get way too visibly upset over stuff that doesn’t matter, nobody else can ever be upset about anything deliberately done to annoy them ever again. If you do then legend has it anyone who is aware of your upset assumes this painful-looking expression and has triumphed in some way.
I’m not mad because you “got” me. I’m mad because you THINK you did and are proud of yourself for it! I’m pretty sure we went over this last time.
Kristof, my personal favorite inside joke is Wanderers from Ys and I would never call that “beloved.” In fact I’m ashamed and we’re estranged. I don’t expect anyone else to find that as funny as I do. They couldn’t possibly and I wouldn’t trust anyone who claimed to.
Inside jokes only work when you’re INSIDE. When you jump on a joke, or really anything that you are outside of and try to make it institutionalized and ubiquitous it’s just obnoxious and annoying.
Like when advertisers started using the phrase “bling” in earnest and later when they used text message jargon ironically. They can’t win. It isn’t their place to do these things. Even if Deviant Art is in some way inside this, and if it IS then I have less respect for it than I did, I most certainly am not in it and I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to see the troll face, I don’t want to see Chuck Norris, I don’t want to see badly drawn Luigi, I don’t want to see Doug bangin on a trashcan or whatever unless I take the initiative to see these things. Don’t act like you’re Marco Polo stepping off the canoe from China with a barrel full of spaghettios, because you’re not bringing me anything special, and in any event I can’t eat mudkips. And unlike a usual annoying internet fad I can hate this on its own non-merit because the idea behind it is inherently antagonistic. A business that operates for profit with thousands of customers is getting behind the bullies among its by and large childishly oversensitve userbase for a reason I can’t fathom. It’s so unfathomable that a page was set up in an attempt to justify and explain the “joke,” which a functional joke oughtn’t need. And now I’m explaining it again. That’s surely even worse.
Hey! Hey! Look! I’m cool! Somebody who can afford to have stuff custom made yanked something another person made off me once! Deviant Art pulling out the troll face and talking about interwebs is like an eight-year-old buying Big League Chew and saying “damn!” a lot. It’s like the gangs from the West Side Story jumping in the air and just shouting “COOL!”
I started to feel silly when an examination of the original image suggested exactly what I’ve been saying, and that I missed the point entirely by thinking it meant the opposite. But that has the exact same effect! You can’t get mad at it because it doesn’t mean what you think it means, even if it’s used in a way which implies that! Deviantart knows its prank is lame and ducks responsibility by admitting the prank is lame!
It’s the “lazy artist” webcomic excuse! But you can’t get mad at it if it means the opposite either, even if it’s used incorrectly by someone who doesn’t understand! Everybody involved has everything both ways and is just as satisfied and insufferable with their deeds!
But then I got distracted when I realized that the “joke” which everybody on the website was subjected to was primarily an excuse to shove merchandise at people.
once you’ve pasted something over Che Guevara’s face and tried to sell it to me for $20 you lose any ground to claim I’ve missed the point.
Why would a business align itself against its whiny customers? To tell them they can be IN on it TOO for a few dollars. I was wrong. Most paying deviant art subscribers wouldn’t be disappointed; consider what they
You could say “no ads,” but this IS an ad, isn’t it! They pay a monthly fee to get a little star next to their name that tells people they pay. They’ll be OVERJOYED for an excuse to give more money.
And then I got further distracted when I saw that troll+face was one step removed from a rape joke
whose most trusted information source was one of the world’s worst websites [that was recently replaced by a website that is worse through being a soulless tepid sellout version of a merely soulless collage of misery that at least was unique in its anarchic approach to archiving anarchy].
Do you remember “rickrolling?” Well I hope not. A rick roll is the third worst roll after tootsie and honor. It was when somebody would post a link to a video and say it would be one thing but it would turn out to be another thing. HA HA! I LIED! Except rather than being something that would personally communicate to me that I had been made a fool of, that was relevant to my existence or that of the link poster or the topic at hand in some way it would just be the same thing that some other mythical idiot deemed was funny. I’m tired of the industrialization of comedy.
Posting a rick roll or a troll face or an oh, really? bird is the same thing as going to Pizza Hut. Sure it’s ubiquitous and successful, but it’s not the best and you should know better. However, unlike relevance, making a pizza is a mildly complicated process. I quit some forklogan’s video game project not because he had no initiative and wouldn’t say one specific thing he wanted done or do anything himself but draw sketchy “concept art” (I SHOULD have…) but because instead of answering me when I asked “so what precisely is it I’m supposed to do here?” he posted a picture of Captain Picard with a hand over his eyes and some serif-fonted caption telling me I was stupid. We go out of our way to make our insults seem mass produced. Sure it’s cheaper than buying a greeting card at Spencer Gifts but it’s still lazy. It’s like the olde myspace fake surveys or those “this user is a:” icons on wikehhhpedia. I wrote a few hundred words on that topic once and luckily for you it didn’t get as far as this. I’d love to receive a handwritten letter that explained in detail why I specifically was an imbecile. I was accused once of being a schnorrer by a post-delivered note but this was typed.
Next time: I don’t make any hint as to what I think I’ll do next time because inevitably it won’t go as I like and I’ll put up something else.