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?

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

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.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

I think I’m going to be out sick for a while. You probably won’t notice!

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Breaking news: I believe in life after love.

I don’t much LIKE it, but that’s not news!

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

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.

Comedy Central, NBC, et ugh, they never WANTED you to be able to watch video easily. They just wanted to be able to say that they did. They want you to watch these shows on BROADCAST TELEVISION. The people who set it up and signed on to it, I now see, only expected this to be some sort of promotional tool for their actual tv channels. When Hulu actually got viewers, it was expected that the viewers would pay attention to those little notices at the starts of the clips and obey the instructions on future occasions. I have no idea why anybody thought that would work. Oh, right, THAT Tonight Show! I was only watching it on the internet because I didn’t know what time and network it was on! I’d much rather alter my sleep schedule and abruptly abort any activities I might be engaged in to accommodate this every night for five-sevenths of the remainder of my life. The networks prefer you to watch shows at the normal air times because then they are in control, and not you. They will show more ads at better rates and promote their other shows. If all the ratings go to something like Hulu, then the whole system will either need to be redesigned, or worse, risk remaining incredibly profitable but not to as obscene an extent.


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.