I tried to write three different updates today, Saturday. And so I finished none of them. I did successfully bathe, however, and almost combed my hair. The goal is to gradually yank out so much that hair that anything over a certain length is gone and the oldest hair yanked out has by then regrown to more a more reasonable length and I never have to cut it again so long as I keep up the process.
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You seem upset. It seems like you’re asking me “AREN’T you READY for the football YET??! It’s been out here WAITING. What are you DOING up there?” I would appreciate more patience and courtesty!
I will spare you my personal bus fare woes and do my best to assume $50 is actually really cheap for interstate round-tripe transportation and admission to a foot-ball contest, even if the thought of allocating 7-9 hours beyond that for such a thing profoundly depresses me. I would prefer to just give you $50 and have you tell me what a great time I had. However it would be more convincing if you said I was miserable the entire time and was nearly arrested for walking in a strange place.
I think it’s your job to tell me, and before I make time to go look at it. Also I think I know who took your question mark.
I thought I had a better picture of this, but I must have merely intended to take one after I brought this newspaper page to my home with the specific purpose of scanning it. Months later I found it jammed beneath my bureau and wondered why I still had it, since surely I had already scanned it, and decided to make waste of it to clear out needless clutter. And then today I looked and it was still there. So:
What it is: a front page notice for an internal feature on the Top Ten 1990s animated series. What could this possibly be bigger news than?
A guide for matching underwear to outer clothing, Useful if somebody throws a cartoon bomb at you that shreds your clothing so that all layers are partially visible but leaves you otherwise intact to complete your day’s mission once you’ve wiped off the blackface soot caricature. Written by an infantile twit who thinks “undies” is a word worth printing under some circumstance. I could understand if the author had some compulsive clothe-matching disorder. In fact that’s about the only context in which I would be curious. I still wouldn’t want to read about it.
Also, Bear in Underwear and Duckling Gets a Cookie?!?!?!? Young readers are being primed for tumblr posting. I think this is the same creative team that handles the university mass emails.
By your admission, everyone does this, so you come into the matter expecting no one to care. I shall now care harder than you deserve.
1. They’re frighteningly drawn, the background music is annoying, it employed one of the voices from Country Crock ads. Don’t ever challenge me to dislike something. That’s even the one 90s cartoon on the list I ever watched because I wanted to.
2. Great, you watched the intro. I couldn’t get past the smug saxaphone music. I didn’t know music COULD be smug until Hey Arnold. That music just thinks it sums up urban living. Hey we’re just trying to get by, man. You don’t need no fancy swimming pool and fax machine man. We got the music and the feeling and the bonds of our community. I want to punch that music for being so satisfied with itself and its universal life lessons that consistently left me bored and unmotivated and its infallible traditions mixing all the worst of the old country and the old religion that breed monotony and ensure anyone who’s a bit peculiar will be most unwelcome. I remember I went to a school (Cedarhurst) with “community meetings” in 199x and those were comprised of the most evil people I’d ever met talking about their feelings. It was disgusting. And all because of Hey Arnold’s smirky saxaphones. The cartoon was pretty lousy, too. That’s probably why the Cedarhurst students watched and imitated South Park instead.
Also, fire your typesetter. Not because of the truly basic error committed in letting the latter portion of a hyphenated word be on a line by itself, but because I don’t believe you employ a typesetter and am disparaging you in a roundabout fashion.
3. Here are some names. They prove nothing. You think you’re doing a public service just by reminding me they exist. You’re like those people who upload static pictures of copyrighted characters to youtube and only ever contribute the commentary “memories.” Remember that time we looked at the glowing box?
4. Was it hard to find utterly mundane dialog to quote that makes no sense out of context that will do nothing to inspire any interest in what you’re talking about? That’s only barely odd.
5. Ha ha ascots are hilarious, right? Just saying “ascot” gets you a Jimmy Kimmel pass on your comedy routine. You ought to add a treatise on the box art for the first Megaman game and FOR SCIENCE for science good measurement (measuring is more of a mathematical matter). I consulted my list of topics that are always safe but I was distracted when a ferret with an unusually detailed manly facial expression rode by on a unicycle.
6. Yeah those were the days, weren’t they. Why say anything? You have NOTHING. A crouton could do your job. That program is notable for definitively signalling the era of cartoons inspired exclusively by stereotypes of existent cartoons with no connection to nature or real human emotion. Nobody ever needs to learn to draw ever again. Splat sproing eye-poit awkward silence catch-phrase exaggerated vocal intonation blue-tinted glasses. Or maybe I just thought it was ugly and never really watched it. My disdain for it is also a stereotype, of what I usually hate cartoons from this period for. Which I could be criticized for, and would therefore be a more intellectually stimulating use of this space.
7. All you got from the program is that the titular character has a food service job?
8. Good work, you actually gave me some information. However, you didn’t even notice that the main character on the previous show was a sponge so a protagonist of unlikely biological composition may not be an inherent designation of quality.
9. Evidently this is not an animation at all but an audio recording which brought shame onto a lyrical void-filler from the 1950s. I assume Ray Mundo is the asteroid-headed cavern-mouthed round-toothed goon on the show who writes utterly daft newspaper columns. Rocket Power’s inclusion is the most promising aspect of the list, though, as far as sincere or unique thoughts go, because prior to now I’d never heard of anybody liking Rocket Power at all.
10. “enough said” is NEVER enough, unless you say nothing at all, but you already didn’t. You shouldn’t have needed nine practice attempts to realize you were irrelevant.
It is an article that computes the value of an obscure character by the amount of crummy internet image-repeating non-gags based on it. I should be as annoyed by it but I never found it waiting for me beside the entrance at a place that I paid money to attend.
Is it fair of me to criticize the cartoon list without presenting a counter-list? Yes. It is nothing less than benevolent of me to spare the internet one more arbitrarily enumerated countdown. I’m not sure there are even 10 1990s cartoons that I’ve watched enough to make a definitive rank for, much less that I liked. I remember watching lots of Ninja Turtles during the period but it would greatly sadden me to presume there are at most nine things better than that. Hey Arnold definitely isn’t one of them. I realize the ninja turtles moving picture program premiered in 1987, but this author’s criteria seem to only require that something aired in the 1990s, which makes the limited range of entries seem all the more myopic. I want to see this bofis’ top ten 1990s video games list. It’s probably all the Tony Hawk titles, Croc and one of Namco’s annual full-price rereleases of Ms. Pac Man.
This is the editor’s note. this is the part of the newspaper that is at the sole discretion of the person in charge. If it’s assembled from reader or staff input, that would be less of a non-story (and so some of my ire less justifiable, but it would also be less cruel and personal and thus equally justifiable) but it doesn’t say even that. “Dear readers, there is something important I have to tell you: my parents locked out all but 2 channels and I couldn’t find any hints in a cartoon about people wearing bell-bottom pants who drive around in a psychedelic-colored van that place it firmly and unquestionably in the 1960s because my upbringing was so sheltered and I just take pictures from wherever I feel like.” The image adorning the section is watermarked “g99fr9Ak.d9viAntArt.com” and filled with what appear to be stock images or pointlessly on-model renditions of various characters from the 2 cartoon channels.
There it is, that didn’t take long. I’d love to tell the artist this school newspaper just ganked it off her page without permission, but evidently this wasn’t the first such incident and it’s just a heap of boring copies of hideous characters anyhow (also, now it’s on MY page, and twice). This appears to be, by far, the most popular work in her gallery, which is comprised otherwise of realistic human portraits dissimilar to this (apart from them also being close copies).
I should have taken advantage of this to complain about how offended I was, but then I’d probably be invited to write the subsequent edition of the newspaper, and then I would have to motivate myself with the horrifying thought that somebody might be reading it regularly.
I generally do not associate with readers.
Everybody knows how much I love the website “tumblr.” Everybody is also occasionally confident of erroneous information. “Tumblr radar” is a section of the website layout for identifying “hot” circulating objects, as a convenient and benevolent means to ensure popular stuff gets more popular. However, in practice it generally just shows really bad artwork from a limited range of grotesque styles.
This is the first thing I remember having a problem with. “why the heck is this artless piece of trash on the ‘radar’.png” I asked, unaware in May of 2011 that this was the radar’s primary function and that we would continue to regard each other in the same way for the duration of our relationship. I had a minor rainbow breakdown in November of that year, and didn’t even need to incorporate this picture because it’s so consistently done and unoriginal and so consistently praised for being original.
I’ve seen rainbows come out of every possible orifice, but almost nobody ever eats one. Although it is difficult to tell which direction this one is travelling in, the idle teeth suggest involuntary action. For decades the Skittles company has invited us to taste the rainbow but never to overindulge to the point that we can no longer contain it within ourselves. This picture is “original” in the respect that the protagonist does not have a horse-like shape.
1-6-2012
Afterward I had this labeled “tumblr radar tops itself by tunneling beneath the worst thing it showed me previously.” I don’t seem to have kept a record of them prior to this. Now I reevaluate my position because though it took absolutely no effort and brings me no joy to look at, i can at least swallow a piece of food while it is visible. Even if it is a rainbow excretion orgy it’s being run on Atari 2600 hardware before they figured out how to make those gradient backgrounds.
1/7/2012
This is literally a picture of typed characters. Why do i bother? Even the infinite monkeyss at typewriters would be disgusted to have this shoved at them as an example of success.
1-22
I’m not proud of you for remembering something that somebody else said! Even if that person’s name rhymes.
3-19
Oh I just noticed that says “explodingdog” on it. I’m not looking to know what that is but I’ve seen that particular random combination of words before. Sure that and toasty frog and flying omelette and dresden kodak and
There’s no subject matter that people who can’t draw and can’t think like better than coffee (except rainbows issuing from bodily orifices and food with faces). Coffee + bad art + high exposure + underlining how lame it is = MORE exposure.png. Yes the whole internet must know that somebody approves of coffee (and bagels, the world’s least exciting food after wheatabix). Rather than stand up to their expensive addiction or peacefully coexist with it they gleefully pay homage to it. It’s the exact same way cigarettes were treated in the 1950s. Except cigarettes are only expensive now because of unfair taxes on them; coffee is obscenely overpriced just because the people who sell it feel like obscenely overpricing it. Maybe 20 years from now there will be anti-coffee campaigns, taxes and lawsuits and trendly sorts will have a replacement religion based around waiting in line every singular day-length-period to pay to have themselves punched in the stomach while experts assure everyone there are no longterm health detriments to doing that. I eat ice cream because I like the way it tastes, but I’m not nearly proud of myself for doing so.
Have you heard? I quit.
5-30
If you’re too late to be fashionably quirky, you can always get by on pointlessly disgusting (but don’t forget the teeth). An entire generation of animators who watched Ren and Stimpy and never found a fault in it have proven that.
At this point I considered that it might be necessary for me to disable the radar entirely. Tumblr provides no means to do that, but browser extensions have been designed to do the deed. I never installed one because I also considered that I would probably write something like this and might want a better horror selection at such a time. I hate/appreciate me. Having fulfilled that, I have today concealed the thing. I am a questionable entity.
6-7
What the orp even IS this thing? I had to look at the large size version to figure that out, and I still couldn’t tell. Is it cells under a microscope? Is it a geographical map with the color balance altered? Is it a dirty kitchen floor? Is it a spoiled wheatabix? What I do know is that it looks like nothing I want to see, and digging and doing research to find out what it IS wouldn’t change that. However I suspect if I went outside and dug I’d eventually find something this reminded me of.
7-6-2012
I see this same artist or somebody utterly indistinguishable far too often. The same hemispheric line mouths with the same large dot eyes directly at the ends, the same parallel, turned-on-the-side feet that would be incapable of bearing weight. If you see a piece of food or a popular electronic trinket with limbs and a face it’ll probably be one of these, especially if it’s printed on a shirt. And fine, one person can have a style. But copying it bothers me. I consider art “better” during the ages of guilds and mass apprenticeship because people who could copy but not create had a greater standard to silently adhere to. Unfortuantely all they were allowed to paint were Jesus and hills. Now people are free to draw any sort of things, such as bands they’ve been ordered their whole lives to think are great. Or at least as long as their recent marketing surge has persisted. Do you remember what a huge deal it was when the Beatles songs were at last at first available on utines? Even though Beetols have had every single album of theirs available at every single record store since they existed? And that even stuff that they didn’t finish or remember they’d made was just as hard to not find? Well I hope not; I’ve currently forgotten if I put that complaint in an entry already and I’d hate you to know I was repeating myself.
When did people get the idea that it was alright to draw feet like that? 1493bc in Thutmose’s tomb? This is the “I’m about to fall over and twist my ankle” pose. Hopefully those little saran wrap box toes don’t brush up against any flesh in the process.
In fairness to the radar, somebody reblogged this at me, after several thousand other people expressed, I’ll assume, approval. I reduced the size for the sake of consistency and a misguided belief that nobody has a problem with me copying their pictures if I keep them tiny, but I should make clear that for every basic large natural detail that mystified the artist there is a tiny fully rendered round tooth protruding from the mouth (and then a strip of three stuck together). These people love to draw teeth. I had to stop looking at my queue entirely because even people I liked invariably liked stuff I hated enough to tell everybody about it with such regularity that I could no longer look at my flow of updates at all without getting so mad that I wrote a brooding paragraph about it each and every time. This wasn’t even one of those things, and look at what a state I’ve entered over it.
8-14
Ah great, back to getting mad at people I have no tangential relationship to. Is there a law against being able to draw and getting on here? I figured out from the comments that one or both of these floating torsos is from a television show. I couldn’t tell what and didn’t care to remember. The drawing is still not a thing of such magnificence to be broadcast all across the land. You don’t need to upload everything you thoughtlessly doodled on an envelope during a telephone conversation. The second one at least shows an attempt to be done better, but it comes across as creepy because there’s so much no detail and suddenly heavy cheek lines, a bloody-lipped semi smile and eyes that don’t appear to be facing any direction. I suppose it’s progress that I have a clue where to start complaining, rather than being baffled into irrelevance..
9-yesterday
I dare you to put a picture by somebody who can draw on there. Although now that I have turned the thing off I’ll never know if my dare is received, and thus it may be. I am selfless and beneficial to society. And so tonight I will sleep and not worry what innocent person I’ve needlessly wronged by complaining about what they made and exhibited for free and never asked to have shoved in my business.
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Friday the 28 – Saturday the 29 interval: Good news! I have a word heap that will be ready to display in the morning, which needs merely to be proofread with a mind clear enough to see errors but not enough to know better. The bad news is that I was kidding about that being good news.
Asterix and Cleopatra, 50 bc (English translation, 1969)
Beat em and Eat em, 1982 (note that Dynacom owns the registered trademark of all video games)
Asterix and Cleopatra, superfluous English retranslation, 1995
Soup and Rainbow Duck, 2012
What does this prove? Morals have slipped through the ages, to the effect that eating beets in public, forbidden in the ancient society of 50 bc, has been reinterpreted as a positive so now fools flagrantly flaunt their bow ties and order singular beets on plates in the company of ducks in our finest restaurants. I mean the wretch went to a restaurant and ordered one plain, uncooked, unadorned beet on a plate. That is all. It could have gone to the beet market and bought one beet and eaten that in its own home on its own plate and not had to have gotten into anyone else’s business, but it enjoys dominating people and lacking scruples. Even Bat-Man, known to associate with some crooked sorts
too cowardly to reveal their identities, could not stop this horror.
He hasn’t been seen since. He definitely wasn’t in that Dark Knight Rises movie. Yes between that and the new Spider-Man I’d say both could benefit from having Bat-Man in them.
Yes, an almost direct redraw. Nothing [new] is going on, and I don’t have time to fully detail it this moment, due to educational resumption, and in fact I suppose that’s the end of this (and that) then until December, but somehow it is more visually interesting than the first few redraw pages, so that is good, idn’t? There is only one more major “rewrite” after which I can probably just enlarge and trace these. Ideally, the additional material I need to add will be equal to one full page length overall so that it fills in the numeral gap that’s been there since I added the first redraw pages, that consolidated 4 into 2 and added an extra 1, resulting in apparent gap in the sequence that jumps up one every time I add something. I shall spare myself the two minutes of going through the list and lowering all the remaining numbers by one. Look at this, I even forgot that the real “new” pages are supposed to be “this” and only the old new pages are “that” and now I need to fix the last few new updates to say this because currently they say that. Oh what a life.
And then I also have to remove that “joke” with the vibrator because I don’t think most of them look like that (I recall that the variety I chose was in a dishonored minority), I don’t want to draw what they do look like and I don’t like that there’s a vibrator joke in there, even if it’s in a fictional context within my own fictional context. Anyway, time for not bed because I also have to do some other dumb thing for somebody else now.