page 38 of this. Does it look to you like 80 hours of work?
I like the fur-style of the second nemitz. So why did I draw it like a werewolf in the rest of them?
I fear 20+ years of stupid side-scrolling video games has caused my skill at staging multiple characters to develop in an odd fashion.
Also, sometimes the things I do as meaningless gags mess with the things I intend for people to remember.
My inking really ISN’T getting any better. Every time it’s miserable at first and then I start to like it better toward the end. THIS time, though, there’s no excuse for that eleventh frame. Peff. I will use bigger paper next time. That will either make things slightly easier or a lot harder for a variety of unrelated reasons.
I like to think I’ve improved a little bit in eight years.
Unfortunately I had to start eating again. A pity. It eats so much time.
“”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””
I haven’t eaten, and I haven’t had my sob fit yet today, but my nose continues to be just as inclined to stuff itself as usual. Just what AM I allergic to? Dust? Walls? Pixels? My own insufferable dullness?
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How do I still have solid excrement to pass? I haven’t eaten a proper meal in almost two days and the last substantial thing I remember ingesting made the complete tour fairly quickly.
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I think I’m going to be out sick for a while. You probably won’t notice!
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Breaking news: I believe in life after love.
I don’t much LIKE it, but that’s not news!
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I saw Shutter Island on Sunday. I have nothing to “spoil” for you, just that I’m rather sick of movies trying to pull that kind of trashbag on me. Also, prior to the show, between a coke ad about time travel that clearly cost way too much money to make for a stupid ad, a trailer for a movie about a time traveling uh hot tub that would NEVER have been MADE before the internet gave a bigger voice to the professionally retarded and ANOTHER trailer for ANOTHER movie about a time traveling pocket knife, I want to take a voyage in my own chrono-kayak to however many years in the future is necessary for everybody to get this out of their systems. That and the “ha ha, ’80s!” mentality that’s been ironically marketable now for longer than the 1980s themselves lasted.
Speaking of skulls, what on earth is going on with Comedy Central’s internet video ownership-designator? And why is some angry man shouting “DIH! DIH!” at me? Is he a mentally-imbalanced murderer who thinks my extracted head-bones are funny and he laughs in monosyllabic outbursts? Is he related to the guy who shouts “come on, yall!” and “HIT me!” for no reason? Are those both challenges at me so that the guy can make his deeds seem like self-defense?
Were the skulls the invention of the same master of design and draftsmanship and unnecessary clenched teeth who invented these? I hope the monkeys are better at building things than whoever built them. I will admit they did a good job digitally removing the notebook lines.
Oh incidentally I don’t see that little sequence anymore since comedy central withdrew its shows from the hew-loo I eventually came to watch them on, out of disgust for comedy central’s own website and video player, to be seen exclusively on its own website and video player, where instead of dih men I see ads for stuff like the eternally infallible South Park and what I showed after the monkeys because Todd forbid we have a prime-time animated series that doesn’t evoke Beavis and his posteriorcephalic companion or the opening sequence from Juno in some aesthetically repugnant way (although I understand that Todd’s cool).
But it’s GOOD to remind me of Maniac Mansion, right? It was so ZANY and INNOVATIVE! And it had the worst interface in the history of item-quest adventures. Or at least it did if you’ve only played the Tandy and NES versions, in which one must use standard four way directional arrow keys to control a mouse cursor to select nine different variants of “USE.” All of that is beside the point because I don’t get to make that guy get murdered for bragging about his recording contract to a jealous tentacle or blow up the mansion by pressing random buttons on the security keyboard and other stuff I’ve read you can do in that game that I never figured out. And anyway I was just commenting on how dopey the guy looks standing like that. I could be little less concerned with the actual content of the program.
This show is called Ugly Americans. And it’s ugly. And I don’t care. I don’t even feel like going through the ad and explaining point by point why each hilarious gag makes me mad. Here’s my tip to you, aspiring artists who don’t aspire to anything greater than aspiration: those free-floating black lines you use to indicate muscles in skin, folds in clothing and texture on various inorganic surfaces don’t look like anything else but black lines. I bet the artist has sketchbooks full of legless big-shouldered torsos. Which doesn’t mean anything to you but I once saw a sketchbook by someone who drew like this and it had a lot of legless big shouldered big necked male torsos in it and I was certain there was something to that. If there isn’t may I please be permitted to dis-remember it?
Not that this is any day for me to be criticizing the visual quality of sketchbooks.
Years ago, specifically on the very last line of this otherwise mystifying page from 2003, I scoffed, I sneered at the idea that internet video was then, or could ever be a replacement for television, but that was back when I had dial-up eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…eeeeeeeeeeeeeee oreorocfffeoroghcffgghhghg nyurrrrng, nyurrrrng internet at 50% functionality via america online or compuserve and compression algorithms were less sophisticated. Watching streaming video then was an unbearable hassle. It was slow, it was buggy, it was blurry, it was small, it couldn’t be viewed fullscreen. Some sites still won’t let you do that, but the holdouts are dwindling. When they try to force me I will start the video, pause it, wait for it to load in its entirety, copy the data from my browser cache and then watch it in a different program. Ha HA, I sure showed nobody!
I remember a while ago reading some news article about the reasons Conan O’Brien’s latest television endeavor was canceled. Apart from Hugo Chavez I can’t name a single South American head of state, I don’t know who my own comptroller is and I’ve never even seen proof that my garbage isn’t taken away by fairies every week but I know why some dork who was on tv for a really long time now won’t be for a little while. One line bothered me, though, and I took note of it and complained about it without recording where I had found it or who had said it:
“Add to all the other issues the fact that Mr. O’Brien’s young fans did not really have to watch television to see him. His shows were made available later on Web sites like Hulu. And his best comedy bits would frequently be posted on other sites — and passed around by fans — shortly after they appeared.”
Then why was it ON Hulu if being watched there did not count? And why is that my fault? Nevermind that this could easily have been revealed prior to the program being removed. Once people have been liberated from timeslots, they won’t go back unless you force them to. And yet if you try to force them, by revoking their privileges, they still probably won’t go back. I know I won’t. But I won’t go back to watching anybody’s tv show at 11:30[5]. I gave my television box away back in August or thereabouts because my parents’ machine was broken and most of the shows I watched I could now get through the internet. It was not a supplement to normal television viewing; it was a replacement. It is hard to turn people away from a new convenience and you should never assume that you’ll be able to do it. That’s why pro-environmental legislation is worthless. And also because most of our business depends on wasting things.
Howevah, even in a relatively non-wasteful field of decisions, such as one electricity inhaling broadcast media or another, stepping “back” is hard to convince consumers to do. A week or two ago I made myself buy a music album thing online that I had been listening to illegally distributed digital recordings of for a few years. I felt like I had wasted my money, even though that was the proper thing to do. Right. Just 3000 more to go, then. For most of the games that HAVE sound tracks, the things have been out of eh print for years, possibly eh decades by this point, and the cost to make honest men out of them often seems to rely on paying off weirdos who will be charging for rarity, age and the fact that the things are imported. It was never meant that I in Americonia be able to have heard this stuff, but the people who made the games never assumed anyone would care about the music later. Which is also why they never provided clear credits, I reckon.
S. BIG LAND, will your identity never be revealed?
This is understandable; I have become accustomed to an illegal practice that is, in essence, cheating. Hulu is totally legal and partially owned by NBC. It is completely unfair to blame people for using it. I even used it after complaining about its stupid name and creepy ads. Why spend so much money on a commercial thing that does not earn money?
I also watched Colbert’s Report with that thing, with which the more interesting part of Conan’s show was competition, and that’s still on the air. But not on Hulu. Hulu is lethal, evidently. It’s not a plot to destroy the world (for one thing, it blocks users from other countries), just its own business partners.
Science Fox is some guy that I was on very good terms with when I initially posted this and also the keeper of the bird creature roundabout that period. The other dork is entirely my fault, but that doesn’t stop me from berating it. All the same this is the only picture I ever made with colored pencils that actually looked nice once the computer had eaten it so that much is special.
I am working on something, but I have to go now!
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I guess I have to update this thing on Sunday. It has been difficult lately. Gosh. A stairway!
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First of all, whose friends are they? They wouldn’t be mine if they really thought my dumb, would they? I know it’s bad thing to have my dumb be thought, because it has a sideways sad face next to it! And it has an equality symbol rather than a colon, so it’s stylized, like it was drawn in the 1920s or something. Has my been dumb for that long?
I’d think 100 percent would fail because vampires are FICTIONAL.
I will come clenly and admit that I don’t know a whole lot about vampires beyond what I just said, since their non-existence didn’t inspire much urgency to read up on them.
Who’da thunk it! So now I know plenty.
This has got to be one LONG book. I may not live to see the end, but on the positive end that also means I won’t ever have to start on that Goosebumps volume over yonder.
Vampires also know the Romans had filthy mouths. They were around, they remember. They also remember the Romans were very democratic. Vampires may live forever, but they can’t deliver the content you need without your precious delicious oozing votes.
Incidentally, I believe having an open mind is important, but it will take a bit of doing to convince me that drinking blood is expressing an opinion of some sort.
ANYwuh, what we have seen is merely an inexplicable update on another old standard, the easy question that you’re supposed to feel special for knowing the answer to despite the fact that some unknown entity is trying either to sell you an unknown thing that it has been determined you’re best not knowing too much about in advance or merely to shove more ads at you on a different page that IT gets money for. Look at that, “buffalo” isn’t even capitalized, like it’s the animal rather than the city, because you’re so smart you only need two real choices. These days you’re even specialer because 97% of some group of people that also is not specified can’t figure it out, and you’ll go through the ad JUST to PROVE how brilliant you are because you already know! It feels good to be among the elite few, doesn’t it?
Huff, well I never! Don’t you know, this is the OFFICIAL quiz[.com]! This is the one the government uses to recruit for its official vampire hunting squad! This is the same one Sarah Michelle Gellar used to get off All My Children! Now she is an international superstar!
And then I had her arrested on pedophilia charges for getting all my children off.
All because of the official quiz! Do I hear a thank you?
Do you see the skulls? Do you see anything BUT skulls? Angela Lansbury must be coming for a visit. I understand that unlike some people she has a new product to promote, too.
In other news, I give praise to any handless conjoined twins who can pull off a successful burglary. It’s a shame they’re about to be murdered.
Is this site still here? I could have sworn I threw it out last week.
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I honestly have no idea sometimes.
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I think this is boring, but I already told somebody I’d write about it, and now I have to.
A few people seemed to think I had missed the point of a ubiquitous trend in internet advertising which I have complained about recently: that the things are supposed to be ugly. I believe now that there is no point to miss, and the absence of one is what worries me. It is true that I did not consider that the ugliness may be deliberate, but now that I have, I find it yet less forgivable.
The New York good ol Times website, which apparently doesn’t force me to log in anymore but still uses crazy click-tracky urls, had a story about the weird ads over two years before I could no longer contain my indignation. Yes, the ads get people’s attention. So does murdering them and/or wearing a suit made entirely of pizzas. Not all attention is good. And unless they’re from Sbarro there’s a good chance you ruined those pizzas.
Of course, that’s just the lower m’bills gang; the “get ripped” people are probably ripping off (oh ho) the proven winner. And so the thing that was unique five years ago is now irritatingly common in addition to sickeningly unsightly. In that not-mine article, the company also claims credit for the “click the icon representing your state” series, which I hate more than most other things. That one was so ugly it literally made me itch. It was like Chakan. The fifty tiny icons with state abbreviations on them presented as kernels of corn or large eyed ladybugs, bobbing around at the same time. 100 creepy eyes really close together and instead of mouths or pincers they had pairs of letters. It made me ill, as well as my computer, which struggled to render so many separate objects at the same time in a flash file. If my computer could vomit, I’d wish it wouldn’t.
So, anyway, ads are ugly, and they know it, and they like it.
Across six decades, television ads evolved from happy-go-lucky-go-shoppy hokeyness to cynical, market-researched “yeah, no…” scrumsack panderthons, but they’ve always been selling a product or a service. Even the Angry Gumball. I’ve been on and off the internet for over ten years, and banner ads have always been surreally disgusting and they’ve never had much to offer beyond vague schemes. Fill out this survey and win! Hit the monkey and win! No, forget that peef, you ALREADY won!
They don’t even bother with an asterisk most of the time. I don’t understand them and I don’t trust them. When similarly shifty operations like Cashcall show up on television, they resemble banner ads. Somehow, there is a lucrative category of customer who can be brought in entirely through blind curiosity over an ugly thing. This is not surprising; I never seem to get over it, but since the early 90s, cartoons have gotten uglier and uglier (or stayed as ugly while ones which were less ugly deaded out), and more and more kids have grown up watching more and more ugliness. They have been bred to be fond of the repulsive. The fact that anybody can be persuaded to drop dollars like this sickens me. It’s like in a feel-good-movie-of-the-year where some idiot will be taping triscuits to his socks or something and a billionaire happens to be passing by and says “that’s just the sort of ingenuity I’m looking for! Come work for me! Here’s $50000 regardless!” Why I oughtta!
While lover-my-bills actually does have a thing that it does, which is referring people to companies which in turn pay that website for the referral, I naturally assume the recommendations are less than the best possible advice and that LMB is more likely to refer to companies that pay it more for referrals. In part because its method for drawing customers is insincere, in part because it’s on the internet. The internet, where you can get music, movies and 600 dollar software for free, but actually attempting to pay somebody for something can cost you your live’s monetary savings because you paid the wrong people (or merely because your credit card was compromised when the 973rd “insecure connection” warning your computer didn’t bother to show you actually meant something). Which is a stupid generalization, and probably one that has been made before. Lowermebills probably isn’t a scam, but it acts like one, and actual scams act like it. I can’t myself conceive of how a nice looking advertisement for that company would look, though. They either have to be the ugliest or not succeed, because all they’re selling is dubious advice. It’s not my job to investigate what services are legitimate and which aren’t. There are places you can get information like that, and you should, if you give the slightest consideration to giving credit card information to a site you came to through a non-sequitur advertisement designed by first-graders.
The American Family Publishers were notorious for informing people that they “may already have won” millions of dollars as a way of enticing those people to buy trashy magazines through the mail. Do you know what happened to that? People sued the company out of existence because it was LYING. Publisher’s Clearing House was worse, but it scammed a lot more people, and so the amount that didn’t bother to sue it back collectively still bought enough magazines it didn’t want to keep the company in business. Or something. I read the wikehhhpedia page about a year ago so don’t use me as a source when you write a research paper for your sweepstakes studies class. People could have avoided being fooled if they’d paid more attention, but it never occurred to them that in this country there were large groups of people actively working to scam them out of their money. These days, of course, that happens on a much grander scale with companies scamming the government itself while simultaneously convincing the same government to pass more and more laws that allow bigger and bigger scams. And so compared to that, a decade’s worth of colorful flashing lies controlling the internet doesn’t seem as bad. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stand back and watch them flash and lie without a fight, either.
I’m glad uh someone believes in me.
If you have a PROBLEM I’d appreciate if you’d just say so.
What does THAT mean? Is it some sort of a warning? Or a threat? Arb, I hate not knowing!
Renk, I have to talk to some dumb monster now? Forget it, I don’t WANT to know!
I said I don’t want to- oh fiddle dee diaper.
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Somebody recently gave me a compliment to the effect that the stuff I write here now is an improvement over what I used to because it tends to be more focused and less about jumping around between unrelated items I felt like mentioning.
Mmmm, tastes like sox! The packaging purports this to be the “official ice cream of the Boston Red Sox,” The Boston Red Sox being a professional baseball team. I know you don’t use ice cream while playing the game, and you don’t do it while training to play the game… Obviously, everybody uses steroids these days, but they still need to moderate their diet and exercise regularly, two habits which ice cream considers strictly against its principles.
The official severed, plucked, preservatized, frozen, reheated chicken wing of professional Futbol at least has protein in it. All the teams can agree on that, it seems. And while there is always, for it exists outside time, the official pizza of Nascar, Nascar is the only “sport” of the bunch that is done while sitting down, which is conducive to pizza eating.
Ha ba, I used to think that page was long.
Despite millenia of accumulated knowledge, many mysteries yet remain in this world. For example:
Why does this box of corn flakes have a recipe for Rice Crispies treats printed inside it in Spanish?
“Oops,” facebook? You’re used by millions of “people” every day and sell more ads than an xbox game with a flat surface in it, and the best you can do when something goes wrong is say “oops?” You could at least tell me that imbecile yella animal on the left had something to do with it. I would accept that. I wouldn’t FORGIVE it, but I would better understand how things came to be this way.
Meet Robert Pattinson, the world’s most photogenic hobo. He seems a bad choice for a calendar, though, as I get the impression he has no idea what year it is, much less the specific day. I assume this guy is an actor in one of those vampire movies, since for one reason or another men who look dirty are good at distracting tweenfidels from horrible scripts. Yeah, guy, the bow tie isn’t…
I know it’s about teenagers, but this seems like a bad time to get casual with the language.
Headshot: it’s like getting your brains blown out with bullets! What’s next, curb-stomp brand fruit snacks? Why, that’s about as appetizing as construction equipment and building material.
You shouldn’t eat snacks all the time, anyhow.
How about some rusted tow truck soup?
Or perhaps this, the only soup that you risk having eat you first.
Is this commercialization and masculine/feminization of every possible thing necessary or truly desirable, o supermarket?
I used to think it was pretty neat that I could have fruit snacks with numbers on them and canned soupoid substances containing things shaped like sharks, and look how I turned out. A gender-dysphoric, anti-corporate whiner who hates to buy unnecessary things. And nevermind.