I have seen people promoting 2016 as the worst year for all humanity ever on the basis of all the celebrities that got dead, such as legendary Breath-Assure pitch-man George Kennedy and Zsa Zsa Gabor, and also Donaldo Trump’s presidenty election (even though he had yet to institute any executive orders). However, there is definitely an insufferable undercurrent of hyperbole to all the commentary I observe.

Regardless, most years-in-review focused exclusively on entertainment, and tried and yet try to suggest we are in the happiest, most talented, most gol-durned glorious period of all human existence, and consequently anything we don’t like must be the worst ever. And it just isn’t true. There is just more forced happiness and more push to not criticize something that is politically aligned with you than ever.

Yes I am still irritated about stupid hamilton. But it isn’t ONLY hamilton. However, seeing hamilton’s existence in the context of the forced enthusiasm makes me disinclined to doubt myself exclusively on the basis of my tendency to doubt myself. I saw the new Star Wars movie, and I saw the one last year, and both are nice, but are either special? Not really. Although I do not necessarily think the originals were the best movies of all time, but they weren’t desperately trying to remind me of themselves. Every movie that is made now wants to be thought of as existing now in today, the ultimate point of all times.

Lord of the Rings 3, there we go, something I like that won a record setting or matching number of osc-awards. Including “Best Song” despite my not having any recollection of any singing, background or otherwise, in the film, because it only plays over the credits, which makes it a matter apart from the film, really. As if the only reason the song is there at all is to be award-eligible. I am to believe this 11-award winning film is superior to films that just won 10 even though one of the awards is for something that isn’t even IN it. You might as well give an Academy award for best preview, best red carpet premier or best bootleg back of box summary. And maybe we will once we run out of records to advertise that we broke. I liked the movie but would not call it significantly superior to the other two. My favorite part is how long it is, which is the thing other people hate! Anyway all that was 13 years ago by this point, so we need to hurry and give even more awards to La la la la Land! Only the stuff that we like NOW can have the most awards! Best La! Best Land! Best title word duplication!

Although having said that, if La La Land does not at least win the best song award, and observe it is in there TWICE, that means Sting, Justin Timberload or Lin-Manuel Miramilton is getting one, so we keep it in the family whatever happens. Breaking news, somebody I’m already tired of gets more attention! I appreciate that Sting has the one song on there that by its title does not seem to be about forced smiling optimism, and furthermore does not have a page written about it already. Also, Sting at least is old. It makes sense that I am tired of him.

Gimme a break! They only GAVE that to you because you’re already famous!

There HAS been public figure-provided resistance to La Land Land, but primarily on the basis of it being “white people” entertainment. Which it IS, and I suppose we allow that since white people can presumably “take it,” but how much of that are they required to take before it is no longer considered a “dangerous” fascist viewpoint to criticize a decidedly non-white product for not being white enough? In fact Hamilton itself expressly forbade caucasian actors from even auditioning. Because it wanted to tell a story with non-white people (ignoring the fact that in terms of personal mannerisms and skin-tone, Lindy himself, praise be upon his name, is just as white as I am (in fact I might claim I am less white than he is since I didn’t go to private kindergarten, neither of my parents are doctors and one even stole a bunch of stuff)). And fiddle-dee-doodle it is allowed to do that. The only people who go out of their ways to be offended by that are INSANE. And as somebody who had to spend the 1990s pretending I didn’t hate the Beastie Boys to keep myself sane, I can tell you their annoyance to me was not owed to them being white. It was because they were tone-deaf screeching cretins. I don’t give a barbecue if one of them is dead now or supported great causes. If you would have me believe that La “The La” Land would be a perfect movie if it had all the same dialog, same songs, same dances, same smiles, but none of the actors were white, you would be just as much part of the problem as anybody. It is fun to call stuff “white” as a joke but we ought not accept that as a valid journalistic explanation for mediocrity.

Michael Phelps won the most gold medals of anybody, which is an objective accomplishment in a skill-based venue, whom nobody wants to disqualify on basis of extreme whiteness, and I got sick of him, even. The “greatest olympian of all time” ? Not really. All he did was swim (non-synchronously), and in an artificial environment. And it seemed like he got another medal each time he did it. in contrast to pentathlon competitors who need to do five different things that have nothing to do with each other (including Show Jumping on a dingdang HORSE), or team sport competitors who need to win four lengthy games across a week, thereby preventing them from competing in anything else, to get ONE medal. And of course Phelps worked for the Wenited States, who consistently have the most money and best resources for training, and the second-largest vat from which to pull eligible competitors. They almost consistently win the most gold medals in general. Only China doesn’t have an excuse for always losing (and it DID get the most gold at least in Summer 2008). I am past past past the point of caring if an American is the best at an athletic frivolity. If Michael Phelps won ONE swimming gold medal AND a badminton gold medal, by finkeldy then I would be impressed.

But Hamilton guy acts AND writes AND composes! And he drifts into songs from “Camelot” during interviews just like I probably would! THAT should impress me, right? No, because I hate his stupid beard. (also as of 2019 I have been forced through Moana multiple times and can say with total sincerity that I think its songs are awful)

I like Game of Thrones. Is it the best tv show ever? I would not say that it was. However, I have not seen every tv show ever. And to be fair, the format was greatly limited for a very long time. The 1980s and early 1990s were dominated by syndication, which likes to be able to air episodes in any order at any time of day and it wants a huge mess of the things, while reserving the right to dump any that it doesn’t like. There was less potential money, and consequently more difficulty in procuring investment in programs with limited numbers of episodes that don’t make sense unless all are seen, one after the other. Realistically it is only valid to compare Thronegame to shows made within the past twenty years, and I haven’t seen all of them either!

But people will tell you with total doubtless confidence that it is best ever and best there ever will be, and ignore that they ever said that when the next trendy manly abusefest comes along. I think it could have been made with less cruelty, and less contrariness for the sake of being contrary. But I appreciate that it was permitted to be as cruel as it thought it needed to be. YES I watched all 60 episodes of it across a few months. But I could have lived without it. And I DID live without it for the first six years of its existence. And I am probably better for not having made any attempt to interact with the dumb fan cult around it (or anything). And also for the huge sacks of cash it would take to subscribe to the Hibbo network for ten or fewer episodes a year. I can get the dvds for free from a library! Or other ways.

There is no real fantasy in film anymore. Every one wants me to believe it is real, and filled with real people, and realer and nower than what came before it. Even when something is ludicrous from the outset, with your sharknadoes, snakes on planes and cowboys vs aliens, they are not sincere works of expression by filmmakers. They mean for you to think they are “badass” in how awful they are, like all those oafs with tv shows about them eating huge heaps of rancid meat. I remember being surprised when I learned Guy Fieri was a chef; I literally thought he was just some GUY, hence the name, who drove around shoving awful things in his mouth. And not because it is entertaining but because and I’ll have to get back to you on that. Because this is AMERICA. We don’t need to do something awful to ourselves for a reason. Once again, we have the president we deserve.

There is no fantasy in film anymore. Every one wants me to believe it is real, and filled with real people, and realer and nower than what came before it.
When the film Spider-Man was released in 2002, that was a new fast paced realistic spider-man unlike all past spidermen. Then in 2012 there was another spider-man even newer than that one. And apparently now there is a third newest spider-man and I am completely desensitized to it. What is he going to do that the other spidermen didn’t do which makes them obsolete? Is he going to save Uncle Ben? Is he going to get power by biting a spider? Is he going to skip the dumb origin story and trying to live a Normal Life for 75% of the movie and get to the point for once?

For that matter, I have completely lost track of or interest in swervy altered or updated “fairy tales.” And I had ten years ago. Every movie coming out looks like something I’ve seen before even though each one is purporting to be a new version of something I have seen before.
Just in my lifetime I have seen 3 spidermen, 5 batmen, 26 Cinderellas, 8 ghostbusters, not including extreme Ghostbusters or Filmation Ghost-hyphen-Busters, plus 4 Colonel Sanderses. None of these things function without presuming familiarity on my part.

For the last 2.5 decades solid, live action films are never rated G unless they are garbage for toddlers. Everything else must have realistic violence, abusive language, real sadness and offense emotion, and sex oh teehee.
Although I must note that the 1940 Errol Flynn feature film “The Sea Hawk,” which I inadvertently witnessed a piece of recently, is openly rated G as determined by a film review board that came into existence long after it did, despite the production showing whipped slave labor, death by musket, death by cutlass, presumed death by drowning and disdain for another nation on the basis of it being one. The British men I am meant to want to win try to board the Spanish ship by throwing Rygar grappling hooks, one of which catches a Spaniard in the neck. There is no blood but the recipient is plainly in pain and not able to get it loose. And of course all the important people are white men. Nonetheless the film is unmistakably a fantasy: everybody talks in a funny way, they are not afraid of the danger they are in and the music is jolly despite mass mutual deceasement for the parties depicted. I am meant to enjoy the depicted exploits without believing the on-screen characters share my culture, goals or fears.

It is possible older films would have been less fantasy-like if they had been permitted to do so by the standards of their times, but I think also film-goers appreciated escapism in a way that present American audiences don’t, or are not encouraged to. War to 1940s Americans wasn’t just something that other people had to deal with. Ironically of course there are American troops right now in more countries than ever. We offer this to them in lieu of medals!

Good news, you get as many gold arches as you can fit on your side of the wall!

page 19 of part 3 of the dumb comic strip. I am glad these dark scenes have been moderately colorful.
Following this is an interlude with secondary characters that looks like it is going to be three terribly cramped pages. When I years ago drew in the requisite background data which this interlude as following from, I imagined it would be important, but it may ultimately be superfluous because I have realized while writing it that neither character thinks the interlude is all that special. In fact, the only important thing that happens in the interlude is the first mentioning of yet one other character whose appearance I have, as before, not written yet, and will not arrive at for rather some time. I go to great lengths to disguise the fact that I invent most parts as I get to them! Still theoretically easier than having a plan.

Yes obviously Trump has been hard to take, despite my best efforts to give him the benefit of any doubts. For the sake of my ability to coexist in society, I thought that was important. Coexisting has always been a challenge to me. In part due to Trump-like attitudes from all the people who control everything.

Ironically I have felt disliked by ostensibly compassionate people for my attempts to maintain my sanity amidst this. And in recognition of my relative courtesy toward Mr. Trump, he has, without altering his facial expression, consistently crunched up my courtesy and tossed it back in my face unless he can find a worse place to toss it . He really doesn’t want the support of anyone who will question him in any way. In a sense proving right the people who maligned him all along. But in all honesty I think even if he made an effort to appear to care a bit, the people who shunned me for not shunning him would still do so. Which I say to excuse me, not him. As I have stated previously, I still do not believe Trump can or aspires to deport legal citizens, much less send them to gas chambers. He is not a “nazi.” Perhaps he condones them so long as they stay out of his way, but he is not a white supremacist. He is a Trump supremacist.

Which doesn’t even necessarily mean he will be worse than any president we have ever had; he just has no intention of being unpleasant discreetly as Clinton would have done. Trump won’t let us feel good about how bad he is. It can be a scary feeling. Which could potentially be good. But it probably won’t be. We could improve ourselves with the awareness that we need to improve, but we will probably just complain about it. We haven’t been trained to do anything else.

But he is the president we deserve. Possibly always deserved. He is totally marketing focused. He does whatever is necessary to meet a goal, so to speak, and feels no shame for it, no matter how unpleasant it is.

Maybe by this point, by fixating over what happened to me a few months ago, I am just paranoid and not helping anybody who offered benefits of doubt to me, but I would hardly say my relationships were splendid before this happened. My new rule for 2017 is that I don’t draw free art, or work three times as hard on wholly undercompensated art as I would on free art of stupid rubbish for scumbags who can’t or won’t help me unless they are me, and I won’t indulge their bad company for months and months because I think they can connect me to people because they are only going to connect me to other scumbags if they even decide to connect me at all which they are strikingly likely to not bother with. Which is somewhat beside the point; there are about 30 more paragraphs to this but they need to be edited, and every time I try to write an excuse for cutting it off I get a new paragraph. Please trust that I need to have the paragraphs above this one out of my business prior to Trump being inaugurated more urgently than I need to put them into context. Sleeping would help me!

I am glad people are protesting, but I hope they have actual goals and are not merely, in the manner of “Occupy Wallstreet,” seeing it as a socially acceptable thing to do. You can get thousands of people to “march,” but at your core you are just moving from one piece of ground to another, and it consequently would not make a difference if you got millions to march beyond that you coordinate marches well.

At the art show I attended back in October, one of the large exhibits, by somebod[ies] who got in free and was PAID to be there, was called Total Jump Live and it was a series of video screens and self-aggrandizing slogans meant to coordinate and show everybody in the world jumping at the same time. Because naturally everybody in the world has access to live streaming video at all times and is capable of jumping. As somebody who was on the premises when it happened, I sure didn’t know WHEN it happened, and whatever massive problem it solved by happening was not one I was prior or thereafter aware of. I was however aware that there was a special rehearsal for the jump and that an APP was available to help me practice! Of note is that if you browse the internet on a non-telephone there is no way to download the APP nor for the, I had thought basic information about how to jump to be delivered to you in another format.

Well then by gorby we’d sure have accomplished nothing more than that! Which is still perhaps more than I have accomplished, but I don’t believe that I would be satisfied with aspiring to that. The proposal wishes that all able-bodied people jump and land at the same time. Which means you have temporary frivolous unity at the expense of diversity. For just a brief stupid jump does it matter if I put aside my personal jumping manner for a moment? It does if the stupid brief jump thinks it is terribly important. I will not do it: I will not jump in somebody else’s manner so that they can pretend they have a consensus of jump-manner and feel proud of themselves for bringing it about. Because from my experience all this gains me is an expectation that I keep right on doing it. But I will not obstruct, either. Unity without expression has no value.

an attempt to practice at a different art software, Clip Studio, which I acquired for a stupid reason and feel obligated to make use of. I could finish this drawing. Yes I absolutely could!

I still had to open up ye olde paint shopped proe 6 and use the mouse to clear up that which is there. I thought I had the PSP cd but I apparently only have Kid Pix, my original impossible to draw in except zoomed in really close since consumer art tablets did not exist back in 1994 software. I initially used it at the understaffed daycare for dumb kids that legally counted as “school” which I attended and then made my mother buy it for me after I got a home computer but eventually I had to concede that windows 3.1’s built-in and free pbrush.exe had more practical features with which to draw poorly using a mouse.
And I must say I have never gone through the hassle I did replacing my broken art tablets the past two years to get a replacement for my stupid old mouse, even if it is apparently highly controversial to sell me one without a keyboard.
For rather a few years I was curious about the likes of adope photoglop but never had a machine strong enough to run it well until 2009 or thereabouts. By the time I was decent at it, everybody I knew was trying to convince me I should use Sai or Manga Studio or flippindippin Gimp. I would ignore them at first but eventually see other people’s great results and think I was missing my chance to to do better, and then do far far worse trying. I may have to accept that I was correct all along in rejecting higher functioning software; I can only draw dumb stuff with dumb stuff!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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