my life is screwy lately. not aggressive neighbor nation shooting bombs at my soviet-era concrete housing brick then telling me I am free to leave if I don’t like it but shooting at me as I try to leave screwy, but enough to make me confused. I didn’t get to my computer until 7pm yesterday, which through the simultaneous unannounced updating of the firefox internet perusing device and thunderbird email sorting mechanism plus a bizarre disk hiccup left me unable to access email nor be permitted to recreate the account through which I accessed it,
and then was greeted with this once the website browser finally decided it was ready to load pages.
There is a cartoon character that I cropped out of the image. it will appear in here later and I don’t want to look at it, much less in two places.
This is such an embarrassing attempt to pander to the adult child with money demographic that is hard enough coexist with when there isn’t media aping it. Or SHOULD I say “panda-ing” to and “foxing” it no.
Products do not have emotions and brands do not live “w/” anxiety. They do not “live” at all and they do not have feelings. Meanwhile anxiety has always existed, and just because people didn’t always personally introduce themselves with “um hi um gee I uhhh have anxiety I guess? ha ha blush norly sorry not sorry omg” doesn’t mean it’s new in people or in media.
Likewise Disney did not in 2022 invent Asians.I welcome non-Anglo heroes, but not every time there is one having that be incessantly pointed out like Look how BLACK this princess who turns into a frog is! and how ASIAN this quirky nerd who turns into an A.fulgens is! And how LATIN this grimacing also nerd’s whole magic house family is! And hey isn’t this huge-mouthed perpetually barefoot kid who turns into a fish just SUPER Mediterranean?
If you want to normalize multi-cultural identities in film you have to let them be normal, and let their presences speak for themselves.
yes I know barefoot kid is officially a fish person who turns into a human but in the end it doesn’t make much difference. these characters all relate to the world and other people the same way and aspire to the same things as all the white and casually non-white characters from American cartoons before them who may or may not spontaneously become animals if they aren’t already. And consequently I don’t relate to any of them, which allows me to see that each new iteration giving press-jobs to themselves over how different they are as gratingly disingenuous. AND ALSO, as indicated by the word being circled in red earlier, their RELATEability is their greatest asset. We don’t make movies for people who can’t relate to our characters because people buy merchandise of relatable characters, not good stories.
I do not know if the latest plot’s transformation is triggered by deliberately improbable circumstances like in Ranma or emotions like The Hulk or violent trauma like in The Pagemaster, and I don’t want to know, and am glad that I have not been made to know against my will by anyone in my company so far. But that is only because my niece for the time being is more interested in watching shorter-form braindead videos on her personal tablet than feature films on the big television box that I witness more easily. I increasingly have blocked disney-themed keywords on twitter-sorts of sites as it saturates more and more discourse space it isn’t entitled to, and maybe firefox picked up on that, both wanting to get disney bucks and prevent anyone from being unaware of it.
irefox isn’t bothering to lie about not advertising (apart from boasting about how “independent” it is), i suppose, with no attempt to explain how this trash is justified, unlike back in november when it promoted its VPN at me and presumably other users, and accompanied that with a message about how it doesn’t promote products. it did not attempt to convince me that promoting a disney movie is not promotion, but that could also be due to the general hubris concept that EVERYBODY likes Disneyandpixare so NOBODY WOULDN’T want to see an ad for it!
because LOOK at how GOSH DARN ADORABLE it is! except it isn’t even that. its face is tiny but its head is huge, its body is chubby and I literally can’t tell if this is the front or the back since it is so amorphous.
it looks like dom deluise’s character from the Fievel movies, except without discernible feet at the ends of its limbs because pixar artists are more inclined to fetishize human feet. The only thing I like about the newer character is that it doesn’t look like zootopia, and that is really more of a hate less sort of assessment.
when I was sixish years old a friend of my father gave my family a bunch of bootleg movies on vhs, including An American tale, but it didn’t have the opening credits and I couldn’t read anyway so for years I had no idea it was called that, and I still prefer not to call it that since the word “tale” always bothered me, even when not being punished into “tail” whenever there is an animal-related concept involved. Every episode of “are you afraid of the dark?” was “the tale of…” something or other. Even as a child unconcerned with what anyone else thought about anything the word and its pretentious air irked me.
the only way this film would defy expectations would be if it wasn’t annoying, and it already is. Defying stereotypes by announcing you are doing that is already a stereotype. Ever since princess Jasmin did a pole vault and then I had to look at how SURPRISED Aladdin was and hear the dumbest kids in the room who already saw the movie 50 times say “I’m a fast learner” in synchronization, Disney has been pushing this “look at our TOUGH and competent ladies!” narrative without simply letting them BE tough or competent, and still selling merchandise emphasizing their prettiness foremost. And much like with the racial composition of the characters, if you simply let that BE normal you won’t rile up the rightwing bro brigade to try and ruin the product based on how “woke” they perceive it to be. But I think that is also deliberate, to some degree, like with the shoddy ghostbusters movie some years back, or Black Panther or Captain Marvel. It’s GREAT publicity if you can prove a bunch of morons are trying to pre-emptively censor your product, and also allows you to dismiss any legitimate criticism as coming from that moron bunch. I am not a moron bunch! I am but one moron. Evidently. I think I had mild covid in january and apparently it is related to “grey matter reduction” so I am stupid now, but still not enough to be fooled by disney.
ALso don’t ask me what the gwok a vpn is because I am still not sure despite evidently first trying to find out in 2015. I couldn’t even figure out what the letters stood for. Virtual Private Network but that is no longer relevant to my situation. Using one is supposed to protect you from being caught if you pirate stuff or be tracked by marketers trying to charge you extra money for what you acquire more legitimately, but then you have to pay to get the vpn, and everybody selling one is vague and unclear about every step of it, often using mismatched figures and paper towel math to explain their prices and or requiring longterm subscription agreements, and it comes across like scam marketing in itself. ESPECIALLY when the company selling the vpn is also getting money from the company controlling most of the media and marketing, including subscription services. Imagine you use the firefox vpn to download the “turning red” film –i won’t, hence this scenarior being imaginary– the dollars probably go to the same place, and then they’ll also try to fine you $5000 for piracy in the event the vpn isn’t the magnificent sorcery it purports itself to be.
After I started writing today’s page, firefox stopped working entirely, with this error among others, like it thinks I’m going to apologize and say “wait the image wasn’t THAT bad, come back, please?” I expect it already has its own angry post about how it blocked another hater and it doesn’t even care about all the haters it keeps mentioning. It reminds me that I started using firefox years ago after netscape was purchased by the america online company, and it become bloated and unusable. Since all software is bloated now and Disney for the moment does not desire to own firefox, which is evident through disney not already owning firefox, it settled for simply becoming unusable.
I am for the moment using a very similar browser called Libre Wolf that fulfills the basic criteria of displaying webpages and having a stupid animal name. If it goes well then I will absolutely not say so.
thanksh narc. I’m embracing my true self by not trusting opinions from strangers with memes and declining to watch it while I yet have the freedom not to.
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addendoy for march 13:
entirely unsought bits of information on twitter from people who say things like “not gonna lie” and “bro” indicate that menstruation is what causes the gimmick transformation this time, hence the “red” in the title, and isn’t it PROGRESSIVE that d-d-d-DIZNEE would DARE to do this? Yeh whatever similarly unrequested data indicates that disney declined to release a Ghibli movie from 1991 that it had rights to over the film having menstruation references in it. Because if Disney doesn’t do something first it doesn’t count. Meanwhile the obnoxious firing squad of bullet points firefox showed me did not include “bleeds from vulvic orifice” and I have to see
this grating smugster stupidimposed on my roku front page, trying to get kids to watch it, with no indication that sort of topic is going to come up, and if anyone in my family is going to have a problem with that it would be my mother foremost, and not “men” as twitter’s insufferablest disney shills prefer to gripe. Whatever I am, that is content to dislike this at any time of the month. I don’t consider the mere allusion to blood as unpleasant as having to hear and often “see” flatulence in every cartoon since Ren & Stimpy 30 years ago but I’m not going to praise big D for doing it either as all signs indicate the production is utterly typical apart from that.
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5 sez:
VPN services are actually a complete scam! I am surprised nobody talks about this but you do not get any value at all from purchasing them (well other than being able to access region locked content I guess, but I wouldn’t count it since there are easier and better ways). The truth is VPN companies have been known to gather data they get from their users and sell it to governments and advertising companies (because why the hell would they not?).
These VPN services thusly participate in false advertising by telling you they will make your internet presence more anonymous when the exact opposite is true, in some places (like where I’m from) internet service providers are prosecuted if they try to sell your data (browsing history ect.) to advertisers so subscribing to a VPN service there would make a person way less anonymous (side note: one thing that VPNs do is they don’t let your internet service providers see your data but if you’re subscribed to a VPN service the service gets the data instead.)
If you want the benefits of a VPN (like having your internet service provider not see which websites you got to and allowing you to pirate media) it is much better to set up your own private network by buying a cheap used server or paying a cloud service (for usually much less than a VPN service) to give you a cloud device where you can setup your own VPN like on a physical server, that way absolutely no one other than yourself will be able to look at your data.
Frimpinheap sez:
Thank you for the information! It is not something I am worried about, thankfully.
The singular time there was any issue about that sort of thing was when [someone] tried to get more episodes than Netflix was showing of a series called “Henry Danger” for my niece to watch prior to this tablet phase. in 20ish years of suspicious activities that is the first and so far last time one of my service providers took any notice of anything anyone was downloading, and didn’t attempt to do much about it either beyond try to make the account owner (me) paranoid with a vague report, and I expect they don’t actually have the resources to monitor individual IP addresses that have only been flagged once in a single month.
5 sez:
Ouch, problems with family who isn’t very tech savvy?
You know it doesn’t actually take much resources all to get someone fined for piracy tho it differs from country to country, in Germany it seems it is the most harsh from what Ive researched on the subject, however I would not in the slightest recommend an American to pirate on a non private connection either.
Really, if it is you who is paying the the internet provider or you contribute money to a shared household budget, you should inform all your family to NOT commit such actions as eventually you are likely to face problems (a 5000 dollar fine), perhaps not as likely as someone from Germany but I would not risk it if I were you!
Alternatively if they cannot be convinced I would setup a VPN for you and your family’s internet, I mean one that isn’t sold as a service.
But I do assume you already had a chat with your family about this.
Frimpinheap sez:
nyehhhhhhhhhI am the only person here who knows what a torrent is, so I can’t blame anybody else, but in my lingering paranoia decided it prudent to not issue any such admission as a singular specific statement.
However the emailed threat and the terms of service it linked to made clear, perhaps inadvertently, that they can’t or won’t do anything unless there are multiple caught violations the same month, and I personally have no need for forbidden media that anyone with lawyers are paying attention to.
pandohork sez:
The character just looks so boring! I’m no animal expert but even I know that red pandas have a much more distinctive pattern on their fur than this one has. Since it’s a CGI cartoon, there was no good reason to simplify the design so much, unless the folks at Disney thought this version would make the character more appealing to kids. The human version of the character looks totally lame as well! Somehow she comes off as a bootleg Peanuts character, and I don’t know why Disney thought putting her smug mug on their ad would make her appear likable or relatable, but at least it’s not the Dreamworks face ;)
Frimpinheap sez:
I think you mentioned the deamworks face before and I assumed you were referring to the smug proud expression. I wouldn’t doubt the intent is to appeal to children, even while every smirking twitto pats each other on their backs while they say “Cartoons are NOT ‘just for kids’.”
5 sez:
Say, I never understood the “Dreamworks face” thing, I suppose every dreamworks character doing a smug expression now means that.
But its a weird criticism is it not? I feel most media where characters emote there is bound to be a point where one does a smug expression, or is it just when they show teeth? Ah whatever.
Surely this alone does not ruin media? Or are “cartoons for children” already media you couldn’t possibly stand? Or is it just something being advertised to you that makes you not stand it?
heapinfrimp sez:
The cartoons that are not for children and merchandise from those cartoons are still advertised at children, which I consider disingenuous. And the promotional images are frequently smug-looking. But What I can’t stand foremost is the style of the writing, which varies little among the various american animation companies.
5 sez:
That makes me curious, which media would you recommend? Perhaps you should make a list on this website, or you already did and I am more oblivious than usual.
Frimpinheap sez:
I am not looking to tell anyone else what to watch, only to explain why I do not enjoy the sort of product I so often feel surrounded by, and by acolytes of, who are able to bend into any position to shield the products from criticism. I could make a list of films that I remember enjoying. I do not think it would be an entertaining list to read but have occasionally been concerned that I come across as impossibly negative.
In particular I have found animation produced foremost for american consumption disagreeable except when it gets old enough to be corny. American popular culture has been a tiresome ouroborous to me since the mid 1990s
5 sez:
Don’t like mainstream American animation?
That makes at least two of us haha.
Making such a list would not be telling people what to watch surely, just a list after all.
Bound to be something interesting in there, actually it seems to me somebody surely asked you something of this fashion before, seeing as disliking media seems to be something you talk often about surely that would make people ask you what then you think is good, perhaps they would ask out of spite, me I’m just curious.
Do as you will but such a list would surely at least give a point of reference for people to better understand your gripe with media, which seems to me to be something you want people to understand.