Hey

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I sort of posted that, but then hid it because I wasn’t sure if it was interesting or not. Now I have had time to think about it and have decided that it isn’t, and I appreciate the closure. Yes so they took some annoying thing that had been floating around the internet for a few years and decided “let’s make this everyone’s problem suddenly and think ourselves clever.”

Deviantart was really late (by a standard that is for the moment not pertinent to my own variety of lates) to declare “ha ha, NINJAS and LLAMAS!” also, but at least either were funny in one context at one point in time.

Ninja tools, incidootily, are forbidden. The is the first time I haven’t been glad Mitt Romney is not a ninja.

I have never seen the “troll face” symbol –so named because it doesn’t let gruff goat faces cross bridge faces– invoked by anyone I didn’t want to force-feed aluminium foil and detergent cakes. If the troll would only let the goats across they would eat the stuff with less trouble.

In case you’re not acquainted with that particular floating head, then great. Floating heads, in general, are bad news.

Unfortunately, I will explain anyhow. The idea is that since some people get way too visibly upset over stuff that doesn’t matter, nobody else can ever be upset about anything deliberately done to annoy them ever again. If you do then legend has it anyone who is aware of your upset assumes this painful-looking expression and has triumphed in some way.
I’m not mad because you “got” me. I’m mad because you THINK you did and are proud of yourself for it! I’m pretty sure we went over this last time.

Kristof, my personal favorite inside joke is Wanderers from Ys and I would never call that “beloved.” In fact I’m ashamed and we’re estranged. I don’t expect anyone else to find that as funny as I do. They couldn’t possibly and I wouldn’t trust anyone who claimed to.
Inside jokes only work when you’re INSIDE. When you jump on a joke, or really anything that you are outside of and try to make it institutionalized and ubiquitous it’s just obnoxious and annoying.

Like when advertisers started using the phrase “bling” in earnest and later when they used text message jargon ironically. They can’t win. It isn’t their place to do these things. Even if Deviant Art is in some way inside this, and if it IS then I have less respect for it than I did, I most certainly am not in it and I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to see the troll face, I don’t want to see Chuck Norris, I don’t want to see badly drawn Luigi, I don’t want to see Doug bangin on a trashcan or whatever unless I take the initiative to see these things. Don’t act like you’re Marco Polo stepping off the canoe from China with a barrel full of spaghettios, because you’re not bringing me anything special, and in any event I can’t eat mudkips. And unlike a usual annoying internet fad I can hate this on its own non-merit because the idea behind it is inherently antagonistic. A business that operates for profit with thousands of customers is getting behind the bullies among its by and large childishly oversensitve userbase for a reason I can’t fathom. It’s so unfathomable that a page was set up in an attempt to justify and explain the “joke,” which a functional joke oughtn’t need. And now I’m explaining it again. That’s surely even worse.

Hey! Hey! Look! I’m cool! Somebody who can afford to have stuff custom made yanked something another person made off me once! Deviant Art pulling out the troll face and talking about interwebs is like an eight-year-old buying Big League Chew and saying “damn!” a lot. It’s like the gangs from the West Side Story jumping in the air and just shouting “COOL!”
I started to feel silly when an examination of the original image suggested exactly what I’ve been saying, and that I missed the point entirely by thinking it meant the opposite. But that has the exact same effect! You can’t get mad at it because it doesn’t mean what you think it means, even if it’s used in a way which implies that! Deviantart knows its prank is lame and ducks responsibility by admitting the prank is lame!

It’s the “lazy artist” webcomic excuse! But you can’t get mad at it if it means the opposite either, even if it’s used incorrectly by someone who doesn’t understand! Everybody involved has everything both ways and is just as satisfied and insufferable with their deeds!

But then I got distracted when I realized that the “joke” which everybody on the website was subjected to was primarily an excuse to shove merchandise at people.

once you’ve pasted something over Che Guevara’s face and tried to sell it to me for $20 you lose any ground to claim I’ve missed the point.

Why would a business align itself against its whiny customers? To tell them they can be IN on it TOO for a few dollars. I was wrong. Most paying deviant art subscribers wouldn’t be disappointed; consider what theyir parents are paying for. No, I don’t know either!

You could say “no ads,” but this IS an ad, isn’t it! They pay a monthly fee to get a little star next to their name that tells people they pay. They’ll be OVERJOYED for an excuse to give more money.

And then I got further distracted when I saw that troll+face was one step removed from a rape joke

whose most trusted information source was one of the world’s worst websites [that was recently replaced by a website that is worse through being a soulless tepid sellout version of a merely soulless collage of misery that at least was unique in its anarchic approach to archiving anarchy].

Do you remember “rickrolling?” Well I hope not. A rick roll is the third worst roll after tootsie and honor. It was when somebody would post a link to a video and say it would be one thing but it would turn out to be another thing. HA HA! I LIED! Except rather than being something that would personally communicate to me that I had been made a fool of, that was relevant to my existence or that of the link poster or the topic at hand in some way it would just be the same thing that some other mythical idiot deemed was funny. I’m tired of the industrialization of comedy.

Posting a rick roll or a troll face or an oh, really? bird is the same thing as going to Pizza Hut. Sure it’s ubiquitous and successful, but it’s not the best and you should know better. However, unlike relevance, making a pizza is a mildly complicated process. I quit some forklogan’s video game project not because he had no initiative and wouldn’t say one specific thing he wanted done or do anything himself but draw sketchy “concept art” (I SHOULD have…) but because instead of answering me when I asked “so what precisely is it I’m supposed to do here?” he posted a picture of Captain Picard with a hand over his eyes and some serif-fonted caption telling me I was stupid. We go out of our way to make our insults seem mass produced. Sure it’s cheaper than buying a greeting card at Spencer Gifts but it’s still lazy. It’s like the olde myspace fake surveys or those “this user is a:” icons on wikehhhpedia. I wrote a few hundred words on that topic once and luckily for you it didn’t get as far as this. I’d love to receive a handwritten letter that explained in detail why I specifically was an imbecile. I was accused once of being a schnorrer by a post-delivered note but this was typed.


Next time: I don’t make any hint as to what I think I’ll do next time because inevitably it won’t go as I like and I’ll put up something else.