page 27 of part 3 of that, featuring a surprise guest: the rarely seen non-couch side of lope’s apartment’s non-kitchen zone.
one of an impressive variety of delays on the second comic book involved me abruptly feeling the need to reletter almost every dialog bauble in the 34 contained redrawn old pages (and two non-old pages) . I could not understand how prior to that point I thought any of it would be legible. I am reminded of that when I look at the NEW page I uploaded here last month compared to this one now, which is made to my new legibility standard-like-thing. Which consequently means I must reletter every dialog bauble I have ever put anywhere, including somehow the ones in the first book I have already printed and sold at least twelve copies of.
bow and arrogance
A rather large (230×230) pixel commission for Egger Righteous of a creature who believes that archery is not challenging enough.
(I also forgot to draw anything holding the quiver in place, don’t tell)
The last time I posted an unusual animated gif I made for somebody other than me, I mentioned that I appreciated the variety, ended up going on about how if I post too many drawings that are similar, people who are sexually aroused by it assume I also am and talk to me in an unpleasant manner and possibly send me pictures of themselves unprompted. I want to avoid doing that again because shortly afterward that specific person sent me MORE creepy pictures of himself or or somebody unprompted, and if I keep going I will actually show one and I don’t want to do that. It isn’t explicit but it is ugly and I do not want it on my page.
in fact I did not even want that person’s icon in my telegram lump so I added a bunch of fake drafts to other people I was NOT sending messages to just to scroll it out of view. I of course cannot remove the person completely since telegram deletes your message history if you remove contacts and I need evidence of the full story in case I am murdered and do not want to actually LOOK at that evidence for the purposes of making copies at this time.
I was having difficulty choosing a new solid state drive but I think all my problems are solved.
The mistake most manufacturers make is assuming i want to put the drive into my computer. They do not guess that I want to tape it over my eyes and punch the air with both hands at the same time like The Question.
If you are not familiar with The Question, the important things you need to know are
1: he ain’t got no face.
2) he is an expert at saving time.
3; he won’t give in to what is wrong and we refuse to stand up for what is right!
4, his best friend Prof is controlled by two puppeteers, one for his head and body and one for his hands, so he can perform coordinated actions, similar to Rowlf the dog.
this person is actually named “Tot” but I call him PROF because that is what his mug says and it appears like this is extremely important.
5? the answer is murder!
6! if he goes to Germany he HAS to dress like a nerd
Anything else?
I probably will not link to this post there!
the first version of this lame comic strip had chocolate, and a better explanation from the dog, since apparently nobody actually knows WHY grapes are poisonous to them. However, I thought my experience being annoyed and demoralized would seem fairly unimportant compared to the slave-like conditions in which chocolate beans are harvested by children in West Africa. Really, that is the reason I changed it! Not that I think anybody likely to see this would know or care that i was trivializing slavery, or that either way I am doing anything to improve that. But once that is in my mind, the whole thing seems meaningless. The primary thing in my life that is at all fulfilling is overeating, which frequently depends on my not thinking about how the exploitation of the world and its people is brazenly utilized by multinational corporations who operate in plain sight. And truthfully I can forget it pretty easily, but I made the connection when drawing the comic so it is fixed in place for me.
I keep seeing this at Stop & Shop and that is all I can think of. They aren’t just sweeping modern day inescapable servitude under the rug, they’re building a luxury hotel on top of the rug and pretending this is somehow pro-humanity and patriotic. Mars’ lawyers probably said “you can’t say made IN america but you can say made FOR america” and gosh that makes it seem like a selfless GIFT! And it IS patriotic in the sense that it puts casual thoughtless luxury of Americans ahead of basic humanity of anyone else. As they always have, but plainly crossing the line that even they have pledged never to cross. You might think one company could eliminate dubiously acquired beans from their supply chain and shame the others for not doing it, but if that actually happened they would all of course have to stop using slave beans, and none of them would benefit financially or publicly because they would also then be forced to acknowledge that they all have slavery in their past and present. What they presently do is put as many different companies and groups between bean harvesting and product selling as possible so it is very difficult to prove anything when somebody DOES speak up. When they do get called out on it, they make non-legally binding “pledge”s to stop using those beans approximately later, and by the time later comes they expect everybody with the power to influence their sales to have forgotten. Consider how long it took to get Bill Cosby in court, and he committed non-lethal crimes in this country against people who have access to means of expression.
It is not EASY to stop institutionalized, undocumented slavery, but obviously people making profits know it has been going ON for a very long time, and would never have made even the present vague show of trying to stop it had it not been publicized. They are morally comfortable with forced, unpaid child labor being step 1 in their product.
And it isn’t like chocolate is getting cheaper; the price goes up despite no sign that money is actually being invested in eliminating corruption. The people who gather the beans aren’t even allowed to EAT chocolate! They can’t even get ONE m&m while there isn’t a store in this country where there aren’t bags and bags and bags of the tiny little bastids. Because they are made for America! And I think trucker hats have finally supplanted cowboy hats as the worst hats. At least cowboy hats can look funny in the right context and provide adequate sun protection. Trucker hat just means “i am proud to pay extra to look ugly.” That’s the driving force between computer generated merchandising characters in general. They always look hideous and the fact that they are effective lets you, the company, know that the people buying your product have no ability or desire to scrutinize any aspect of it, much much less the incongruity between the frightfully specific list of ingredients legally required on the label and everybody involved claiming to not know where the actual chocolate comes from! We don’t know where it comes from but gosh it sure keeps coming at consistent, ever increasing levels and we own it. It must be magic! Magic for America!
At my one art show in 2017, I wanted to put out a bowl of wrapped candy for people to take (and they did), and somehow ended up at wal mart hastily trying to determine, on my terrible telephone computer, which major chocolate company used the “least” amount of slave labor. The simple fact is that if it is at walmart, it abuses enough people that it doesn’t matter that another company is more abusive. Even the dumb phone which I have also called terrible is an absurd convenience that we as society have been groomed to think is fundamental to our being, and contains components from rarely identified, exploited African sources. My device’s manufacturer, Motorola, is not implicated in that, but IS named as a company that benefits from dubious prison labor. And the computer I am typing this on now, who knows what is in it? I sure do not!
Anyway I bought kit-kats. You know, I didn’t get to eat any of this chocolate.
In other news, to start me back on the path to not thinking about where mass-produced cheap chocolate comes from, the dog is based off Scruffy, who used to live in my (and several other persons’) old house.
Seen here visiting my present house, before it was my house, and therefore much classier. Scruffy could in fact stand up and photographs exist proving that, but I sure could not find one.
On other websites and the side-bar here, at least until future entries scroll the text out of existence, I identify this comic strip with the title “the grapes of asp.” I initially titled it “the grapes of rasp,” not realizing that “rasp” was not actually a snake, but merely the name of a snake-headed rulon crony in Dinoriders, and also the name of a robot I and Jerry Caro came up with in first grade that we imagined traveled around stealing chocolate brownies while saying “RASP…RASP…RASP…” Rasp as in “I have you in my rasp” instead of grasp because kids are dumb. Then (now) I remembered that “asp” was a snake, and it seemed odd that asp and rasp would be near synonyms. This is a pointless bit of trivia. There is a more poignant bit of trivia about this comic page that also concerns chocolate, but it is depressing and I will defer it to a future posting, which means I will probably never post it, which theoretically suits me, who can only survive by not being aware of things I know that bother me.
A highly not-yet-finished picture called “hats coming to visit.” there is an accompanying music piece… or rather i made some stupid minimally remarkable music, absentmindedly named it that, and then constructed a picture of a literal interpretation of those words. It is easier to post unfinished drawings and not feel bound to them than it is with unfinished music. The only reason the music is unfinished is because that dumb comic book is also
I have a heap of resentment for people that I don’t consider to be “real artists” who post loads of drawings with minimal thought, effort or restraint on to the internet. By perhaps not chance, several of them play musical instruments or engage in digital audio tomfoolery. Sometimes I wonder if I am a hypocrite, for being a visual artist and occasionally pretending to be a musician. But I’m not because I assure you I spend loads longer on my noises than they do on their scribbles. You can’t be a popular music artist just by having an ugly squirrel/raccoon/dog thing for a mascot.
No actually probably you can; if you buy the expensive version of fl studio there are enough default filters that sound exactly like trash off the radio with minimal user input that an actual squirrel could probably design a hit track but I am obviously not doing that because those are all marked “demo” (and rather difficult to purge from and wholly unwelcome in my USABLE instrument list) in my version so it isn’t the same.
I do not mind there being demo versions of fancy music effects; I object to them not being able to be removed from a version of the program that is NOT a demo.
Try to imagine a middle finger in my face that cannot be removed from the vicinity of my face, that I paid $160 for, dangling a sign that says “gimme another hundred!” If you successfully imagined that, you may have a future in software development.
This is also the one year anniversary of my father’s demise, and the ten month anniversary of my not finishing the second post I wrote about that. although that isn’t really significant for an unposted piece around here until it reaches the ten year mark. In any event I think he would be glad to know I am just as unaccomplished and unfocused in my pursuits and just as inclined to blame people who did not cause my problems as when he was alive, were he alive, because that would mean he proved the impermanence of death, a matter sought after and never attained through the entire known existence of humanity, if not all life as we understand it. Of course THEN I would be disappointing by comparison to THAT, but everybody else would be, also, and my shortcomings would be less acute.
Look, there! He is imploring us to look there at a windmill. How could he do that if he were dead? The crushed ant corpse that I evidently neglected to notice was stuck to the photograph until a year after scanning it, THAT is what a dead being looks like.
page 26 of part 3 of something or other
Not totally ready, and it doesn’t prove anything, (I will probably undo the one unusual development in a disappointing way on the next page) but it is mostly legible. I have to wake up “early” tomorrow for a dentist appointment so this will have to do for now! All the dentists want to come meet with me so I can tell them how to deal with dopes. Dopes have no teeth, which is extremely frustrating.
i still have to print that comic book of a part long before this one, right? Yes, and in fact I did, and there was so much stuff wrong with it that fixing it is yet ongoing. I needed to be needlessly obsessive compulsive about an actual new page to remind myself I am not just reliving the same years while my body turns to decrepit mush, hence the new page. Talking about what I still need to fix on the old pages makes me tired. Great I need to go to my sleep heap anyhow. Good night and goop muck.
You see this? Don’t try to read it. Not even there where it is legible. This is ALL blowhard wikipedia writers citing and comparing statistics of the money Finding Dory accumulated relative to other movies of various time periods across various time periods and NONE of it will matter once the next Avatar, Avengers, Frozen, Meet the Deedles sequels have come out, except to make their own bullshingle statistics sections longer. And this doesn’t include the NON-domestic grosses. It is gross wherever it goes.
This contextless blurb “Perfect May Be An Understatement” on the back of the box, attributed to Mark S Allen of “ABC” which incidootily is owned by the same company that produced the film, and what I initially came here to complain about, “perfect”ly illustrates what is wrong with the state of our mass media. 5 stars, 10 outta 10, 100% on Rotten Tamaytas and even the word “perfect” itself have been used so often to describe things that are just kind of good that they are now treated as if they are not good enough when a production to be rated is marginally better than kind of good. Our superlative language is just as inflated as our currency. When I declared Black Panther to not be radical I was presenting my opinion, but perfect CANNOT POSSIBLY be an “understatement” because the singular purpose of the word is to describe a thing which is as good as it possibly could be. Being better than perfect is only possible if perfect doesn’t mean what a dictionary says it does. In which event it is a pointless word because there are already words to describe kind of good whose meanings are less debatable.
I mean not to accuse that Allen is biased because ABC pays him to say nice stuff about disney-owned properties. I mean ABC wouldn’t hire somebody who has any remotely divergent or considered opinions. He has a wikehhhpedia page with a big smiley unblemished soulless picture of himself and a huge list of awards he has won but no indication that he ever had a thought in his life or even A life outside of being visible and awarded for being visible. Like Ryan Seacrest or Regis Philbin, he only exists to be in California and on television and radio and to like stuff that he sees and be quoted saying so by whoever requires a quote.
Just to be certain I looked up Regis’ morning show, which is in fact filmed in New York City, the only other place this sort of person is allowed to be, but EVIDENTLY Ryan Seacrest now has Regis’ old cohost spot. I believe these people spent a year “searching” before they found Ryan flurpindurpin Seacrest like I believe perfect may be an understatement.
And beyond that I know Finding Dory isn’t perfect because it still features the voice of Albert brooks — look at that orange fish in the shot just accidentally, I could tell before this was even screened in my presence that the fish was saying something scratchy and abrasive I did not want to hear. And every other male voiceover sounds mysteriously similar in jerk raspiness quotient, including a manta ray, an octopus, a beluga and a clam that is so grating and fake-comedic that even the other grating unfunny characters don’t like it. And even the ones that aren’t raspy are still obnoxious and neurotic and phony but then suddenly abruptly serious with sad music and from a non-voice actor just like every voiceover in every animated movie made since shrek came out and constantly throwing immersion-breaking “real world humor” at viewers like every cartoon since 1994 aladdin even though in aladdin it came via a being with magical time-transcending power who ultimately is a ripoff of daffy duck, who ceased being a bankable character around the same period (and also gilbert gottfried but he at least sounds inhuman and the remaining actors weren’t cast so their names could be advertised). It lacks the pacifist carnivores in a selective context that is presented as if it is plausible and sustainable that the first film irked me with, but there is about 3% effort put into making any of the characters sound like characters and not actors talking into microphones. I appreciate that it has less Albert Brooks than the other film but there is still a gorkload of albert brooks and people who talk the same way. And the obnoxious nebbishy dialog-
NEBBISH I said. I was trying to avoid saying “Jewy” but you have forced my hamlessness. I think the hurriedly talking over each in other in calm but annoyed voices and constant instances of “sorry” is supposed to make the characters seem “real” but real people aren’t like that unless you live inside an episode of Dory-voice Ellen Degeneres’ 1994 sitcom “Ellen,” which I as a child actually enjoyed, it being a tv show with live actors rather than a cartoon with talking animals, but for the sake of my example I shall say “Seinfeld.”
Which is how that “bee movie” got made eleven gosh darn years ago but that flopped because it actually presented itself as for scumbags instead of pretending it wasn’t because people don’t want to admit they are scumbags. Finding Bory isn’t a movie for children. It constantly jumps backwards and forwards in time, like it thinks it is Watchmen with fish. It heavily features the conventionally dreary heard-in-ads songs “What a Wonderful World” and “Unforgettable,” for crying out hopelessly. This is a movie for adults who think they are creative and open-minded because they watch movies for children. And Disney markets to THEM because they have more money than children and more contacts on the internet to hype-vertise at, but if they have children will also impose it on their children and think they are GOOD PARENTS for doing so.
I believe there should be cartoons for adults, but I think the pixar approach is disingenuous.
Findor Doingy also features Ty Burrell doing his best impression of the creep from archer after his character turns from also sounding like Albert Brooks partway through. I had to look up who it was just to be sure it wasn’t; that is H. Jon Benjamin. I know that’s his only voice but it confounded me to think that somebody else would be hired to try and sound like him. But the continued success of things that I hate indicates that confounding me is, from a business perspective, a very good idea.
Additionally, computer graphic technology has advanced to the point where environments look totally real, great, so you might as well just use real environments and superimpose the characters over them like Walter Disney himself and indentured friends were doing back in the 1940s without any computers, and contrary to now where it means the budget is 200+ million dollars, those filmmakers did it to SAVE money since so many of the art-laborers had been drafted into military service. I do not see the point. But these things all do a billion in sales, big buck$, inflation notwithstanding, because toddlers have no taste and adults live by rituals, and toddlers grow into children with their own rituals based on parents directing their toddler tastelessness toward stuff that they the parents like. I have been on deviantart long enough to see that hasn’t lead to a generation of more sophisticated children. Thankfully Violet (the niece) tends to lose interest midway through these things and wants to paint or play with playdough instead, and says nonsense that she makes up instead of movie quotes, but without my searing hatred for the companies that make the movies so hopefully she will have an easier time later in life being surrounded by people controlled by them than I do, in the event those people and/or those companies don’t overtly run the government by then.
The First Steps Toward Worship
featuring Adol “Born Again” Christin. There is no way that Adol’s deliveries can be over.
I think that is awfully presumptuous of you, but I suppose you know you better than I do.
I didn’t need proof that March Madness is as boring as any other start and stop start and stop 3 hour regulation-choked sponsor-stricken modern sport exhibition, but the fact that these red and white lumps of rubber are more exciting by a considerable margin was nonetheless revealed to me. Oh yes and there are shoes, also.
There is a video for it. I have not watched the video. I do not want to know more about it. I do not have room in my brain to accommodate all the other ways this and its marketing is screwed up.
Anybody who uses the phrase “pause live tv” is already beyond reason, and is testing to see if you also are. Once you PAUSE a broadcast, it is no longer live. I thought that was obvious but I have heard it used in sales pitches for years. Maybe it is still CLOSE to live if you de-pause within a certain period but the fact of the matter is that words are supposed to have meanings, and when somebody trying to sell you a product can alter those meanings and not get called out on it, they know they are free to insult your intelligence in other ways. Just like the Disney corporation can literally non-euphemistically state that its theme parks are made out of magic. Hence shoes that order pizza.
i cannot imagine a scenario in which it is easier to press a button on a shoe than just about any other object in your house. Nor can I conceive of any occasion in which i would wear a shoe which looked like that or would eat a Pizza Hut brand pizza, much less pay for the privilege of wearing that shoe and not being able to order another kind of pizza with it and all but assuring I get myself permanently placed on every twit-targeted marketing mailing list for the rest of my life. The amount of laziness necessary for this to make sense is at odds with the sort of person who wears shoes indoors. When will they come out with an ugly black t-shirt that orders pizza? A long time ago my father wore shoes indoors. They were not sneaker shoes, much less bright red ones, and he did not eat pizza. And if he ate pizza it wouldn’t be this pizza. And he already had a biological handicap against being able to identify an edible pizza on account of being English.
But consider that this is made for people who already pay whatever cable companies tell them to for dumb exclusive sport packages and whatever Best Buy tells to them for whatever latest imperceptible buzzword type of “hi def” that came out this week –that no programming actually broadcasts in EXCEPT the sports that collude with tv companies to insist is necessary and ensure is economically viable to put into production– but think they need to save money by purchasing/ pledging their lives to cut rate pizza. This is for slobs who think they haven’t done enough to lower other peoples’ opinion of them. As much as i personally like the idea of dressing like Ronald McDonald and eating a competitor’s product, I don’t see pizza hut offering the yellow jump suit.
Yikes I remember when this kind of shoe was implied to be crucial for athletic performance. Now that playing video games is considered athletic competition, companies are looking for ways to market exclusive designer slobwear. Not that eating pizza, even a good one, is conducive to operating a control device with both hands, but maybe next year there will be a shoe with a button that tells your live-in nurse to shove a slice of pizza in your mouth. And then the next year there will be a shoe with a button that pumps power diarrhea directly into your toilet.
I stole that from an old Late Night With Conan O’Brien “in the year 2000” line but it is fine since that one was about Taco Bell.
the article does say that only 50 sets of shoes are being made and no price is set, which means this is not a product realistically marketed at consumers. This is something for human-shaped sewage golems like Jared Fogle and Martin Shkreli to buy before they get sent to prison. This is something used to get Pizza Hut and NCAA free publicity in the form of “tech” websites reporting on the moronic audacity of it but pretending they are neutral by not saying so, thereby indicating approval of the system from whence it came. This article is literally an advertisement for multinational corporations just in and of themselves, openly admitting in the first line that it is a “publicity stunt,” and also that this is not the first time this specific publicity stunt was stunted, and it is disgusting that any website will accept money to cover it, and probably even worse if they do it for free.
oh oh yes we geeks are so wonderfully weird in the way we get total garbage marketed at us and then we buy it and tell other people to buy it because we’re so quirky and new and not mainstream in our utter empty spineless ventriloquist dummy normalcy. I don’t know how you can have “opinionated apple buying guide”s in the plural because you can accomplish that in one word: “don’t.” If you call yourself a “geek” and your only gripe about this shoe story is that it implies you watch sports then congratulations, I am sure life is very comfortable for you apart from that because The Matrix is real and really lame.
our basic homo sapien dignity isn’t a product, right?
In the end it doesn’t matter if you think pizza shoes are stupid or a good idea unless you can afford them. On a grander scale it doesn’t matter if you think ANYTHING is stupid if you can’t afford these stupid hideous foot-cocoons to honor orange slop on a disk of glue. And the megabillion dollar college sport associations that don’t pay any of their players want you to remember that, and that is why we will go extinct ages before the earth crashes into the sun. No price is too high to flaunt your ability to pay any price for objects of no worth.
I have many stories to tell and pictures for most of them but no energy to pound them into coherence.
a animated pixel commission icon for bats of, what else, a chicken person named Bwengo, who does not appear at all pleased about it.
I thought at first that I would not be able to draw this at all, especially considering the state of the reference images which had been illustrated by a third party who is obsessed with drawing gross things, or non-gross things in a gross way. People eat that up. I don’t know why. I can’t eat something that looks gross. Which of course can be in your favor when you resemble a chicken, but once again I seem to be in an extreme minority here. But I found a way to draw it which was not gross, and since there are almost 0 chicken human hybrid enthusiasts on the internet this animation will not be circulated among them so that I get a superficial increase in viewership whose goal is to find the part of the drawing(s) about which I am least comfortable and try to convince me to quadruple down on it for them for less money and then either shun me when I refuse or worse, NOT shun me and keep at it. This isn’t one of the stories I am too tired to tell! This is one of the stories that contributes to me being too tired to talk about anything more potentially entertaining! Creepy people used to be FUNNY to me. But now that they are creepy directly TO me, to try and make ME creepy, my only defense is to become BORING instead!
Yes this was almost two years ago, when melt-fetishists thought *I* must be a melt fetishist because I drew animations of things melting because I thought it was funny, and I have kept future incidents from happening with foot fetish people who thought *I* was a foot fetish person because I thought feet were funny, but I kept them from happening by changing into a boring person who says nothing strange or ambiguous, and I stopped THINKING in a strange way, even in venues totally unrelated to me trying to get money for artwork without pursuing it through legitimate channels. Even though the fact that people read my humor as perversion and my actual perversion as banality is the strangest thing of all.
I was talking to this person for hours just because it was so bizarre and I could hardly believe that somebody was sending me all these weird pictures and videos, mixed in with totally innocuous clips of stuff filmed underwater and from a helicopter. And I subconsciously changed my entire public persona just to stop that from happening again. Bloody rubbish. Please don’t send me pictures of bloody rubbish.
The fact of the madder is that “normal” people get really weird when they are sexual, and under just the wrong circumstances, they interpret my latent aversion to typicality as eroticism.
Gosh looking at this now it appears that I only drew half of the nose ring during the pecking part. Oops. I merely forgot to finish shading it but the effect is the same since it is visible so briefly that its impression is partly subliminal. It seems like there is one big dark nostril on one side and not the other. I had been trying NOT to look at the animation between when I declared it done and this point since I was worried I would see something that I had a little problem with and treat it like a huge problem. But this IS a BIG problem. But I already posted this on the sharing sites; anybody who was going to see this already has. If I fix that, nobody will ever know! What a tragedy. Except for you dear viewer! For you and for me I will fix it. Yes yes yes. In fact I already did. There is no reason to have the picture of the wrong frame here! Get that out of here!
(please do not read this if you have not seen the film but intend to. There may also be other reasons to not read this!)
I saw black panther der film (based on the presumably well known comic book character) not terribly long ago. I thought it was a functional film though not totally cohesive and nothing about it surprised me. Probably better than Thor 2 but not as good as Thor 3. Goy was *I* wrong!
And during a brief exposure to nbc olympic coverage that I recalled afterward, a hypey promotion identified it as “A GAME CHANGER!” among other exclamatory phrases in big gold text that supposedly were said by real people whose job it is to say things like that. Trying to find that advertisement on the internet to get a picture of it is not a good use of my time. The important thing is that without me paying any particular attention it is clear that somebody wants, NEEDS me to believe that my life was changed by this dumb movie.
Black Panther is a ‘game changer’ because it shows that Marvel films can be just as dull, fragmented and focused on the non-hero identities as DC films, I suppose. Panther appears to have the approximately same skill set as Batman and indeed spends as much of the movie out of costume and occasionally out of the movie that he seems like a secondary character. He has a big fight toward the end but it isn’t the main fight and you can’t see what he is doing since he is fighting somebody else with almost the same black costume, in the dark, with a train blocking your view half the time. And it seems like this fight stops and restarts in much the same manner several times just to drag it out to match the length of the other fight they aren’t in. I only remembered after I left the theater that there was another costumed action sequence in South Korea earlier in the film because that seemed like it was in a different movie and I had to remind myself I had seen it the same evening.
He is not a “radical superhero.” The man he fights, Killmonger, is more radical than he is (so obviously that guy has to die). His sister Shuri is more radical than he is. ooh ooh she calls the white american cia agent “colonizer!” and then tells him all Wakanda’s state secrets despite him already having been shown as complicit in a scheme to buy them from the person who murdered Wakanda’s own king and her father, with diamonds stolen from other African countries and later asks him to shoot down planes piloted by her own black Wakanda countrymen because the US government underwrites all our big budget action movies but puts in insults like “colonizer” so we think they don’t.
Panthy may be the only person in the film who isn’t radical. He willingly gives up his power twice so other people can fight him for claim to it. The only thing he does that is radical is declare his own country’s traditions ludicrous and refuse to go along with them, at least after he loses his royal title legally via those traditions. Hopefully the radicality of telling ghosts they are wrong includes no longer willingly giving up his power in the future. Or declaring that only one person in the whole nation is allowed to have the magic plant the power comes from, as from the look of things they could give it to everybody. Or at least they could until Killmonger burned it all without even saving a stash for himself and then the one plant that was saved was instead of being replanted, fed to Panther even though he already screwed up.
The most intriguing characters, to me, were the ape-worshipers in the ice fortress, and they were in the movie even less than the title figure!
But once the media narrative is out there that this movie has some sort of profound message that the world Needs Right Now it keeps rolling down a hill like a cartoon snowball becoming ever larger in defiance of basic snow physics and few people seem to acknowledge it as a fictional contrivance.
Why should I be so bothered by this? I have felt for ages like almost all our acclaimed media is declared “acclaimed” on invalid terms, loudly and constantly so that common people believe it. What is different now is the forced idea that we are living in the most enlightened and progressive time of all times. Why is it important for people to believe that? Is that supposed to make us want to buy more garbage? More and more garbage than ever before? Peoples’ lives have so little meaning now that they need noiser and boastier false statements of meaning. Which also isn’t new but at some point you can’t get any louder. Lying to yourself that an unholy corporate behemoth made a movie which temporarily solved social inequality doesn’t do any more to get fake nazis to stop appropriating your ugly cartoon frogs than selling trashy merchandise asserting your right to punch them does, but it does make it easier for that behemoth to keep washing your brain in the same brine while it continues to eat smaller behemoths that by any other measure would be quite large.
And that is another matter: Black Panther and all his friends are born into affluence. The only person who isn’t is the guy he kills. “Killmonger” becomes king and has differing ideas about Wakanda’s needless secrecy, secrecy which had condemned him to a life of poverty, but he is implausibly irrational and unforgiving so that he is entirely unsympathetic. Panther only acknowledges the secrecy is ineffectual after his enemy does, and then his enemy still has to die. That yet allows the film have a message of “the wealthy should help others in the end,” except “the wealthy” in this case are from a fictional country that controls magic from space. And then white American CIA man is in attendance applauding because it isn’t HIS country that has to change. In fact WAKANDA’s money is going to come to AMERICA to help poor kids. Which is FINE if you accept that the film is a FANTASY whose intent is to amuse viewers. The dilapidated apartment complex in Oakland California that Wakanda people buy up to renovate wasn’t even filmed in Oakland! It was shot in ATLANTA Georgia. Oakland got no money from this movie!
The “Sweet Auburn” neighborhood where that WAS filmed does indeed has a history of suffering under segregation, but by the same token that Oakland didn’t get any money, Auburn didn’t get any recognition. And that is FINE in a fancy bit of stagecraft based on a comic book because it ISN’T REAL anyway!
Disney putting one gay character in each of their movies or at least making cynically planned leaks implying that they might doesn’t do a thing for actual social justice. I saw that Beauty + Beast remake also and Lefou “being” gay is about the least relevant dumb thing about it and that isn’t directly indicated anywhere, either.
That whole story was an exaggeration to get press and fan-wank points without them actually having to commit to any real change, and they get to have news stories saying both things, possibly at the same time. I expect that the writers remembered when JK Rollingsworth announced that Dumbledory was gay and got press for that (hence MY knowing about it) even though she was already done writing the Helly Pothuh books and never actually put that in any of them. And so the more recent Beast’s movie’s only goals were to make money by riding a wave of “retro” media regurgitation, to ret-con its previous movie to be mostly the same except where it conflicted with contemporary entertainment mores, and most fundamentally to establish a cartoon from 1991 as “the original” version of a story from centuries ago. And if you think this 2017 movie is a waste of time that is at best is a sad pageant imitation of a “masterpiece” then Disney still wins! People go buy fresh copies of that and themed merchandise to take pictures of themselves being owned by.
Certainly a MAIN character in a major budgeted mainstream mush being ACTUALLY gay without that being a joke or shoved into people’s business like “oooh isn’t this RADICAL?” would help to normalize it, and make people fuss over it less when it happens again. Although until it DOES happen I don’t give anyone credit for talking about it MAYBE happening in the future, and that still wouldn’t make the movie it happens in automatically bearable.
The fact of the madder is that almost everybody I have contact with is hopelessly depressed. The only ones who think they aren’t are hopelesslier addicted to stupid cartoons and video games, memey hogwash and hypey rubbish in support of those things because if they allowed themselves to think, they would realize how depressed they are.
To reiterate, I think the Black Panther’s film is fine, and it did what it did without relying on characters from other Marvel movies, which I don’t think has happened in this series since Iron Man in 2008. Although much of the VALUE of the series IS its ability cross things over, but it gets out of hand, and can be frustrating when a character whose movie you haven’t seen is suddenly THERE and meant to be recognized but you can’t because too many of them wear dark body suits without helmets. The people who created Black Panther are not necessarily complicit in the campaign to have the latest mildly above average bit of distraction material be declared society’s ambrosia, but I doubt they are questioning their inclusion in it either. I am thankful to have new non-internet proof that this campaign exists, because the last few years it has mostly manifested in things I had NOT experienced, because I was near television a lot and saw the hype first and thereby became too biased to assess them honestly. Being biased does not mean you are wrong. But it does mean you need to work harder to be certain you are not wrong. I was unilaterally biased against Disney for over 10 years and so I stopped complaining about it [as much] for a while, thinking I looked foolish and might possibly be unfair. But I have seen Frozen AND Tangled since my niece Violet was baptized in the princess indoctrination glitter cloud by forces beyond my control. And I can say with as much honesty as I trust myself to have that I think Tangled is probably a better film than Frozen, but if watching Frozen with Violish one more time would magically purge Tangled from existence, i would do it. And if watching both Beauties and both Beasts back to back would purge both those other two then gosh gad why not apart from that not actually being likely to work, because at least 1991 BnB has whimsy and 2017’s tepid re-enactment momentarily permits people to remember that whimsy was once allowed.
Seeing the way people talk about Black Panther after I saw it reminds me of what I also see people retroactively saying about Zelda Skyward Sword compared to the 5 outta 5 release hype. I don’t need to get into this matter deeply but I lost interest in the Zelda series after being utterly disinterested in and frustrated by Ocarina of Time, but my sister liked that one a lot so I tried to imagine I just did not have the right mindset and dexterity for it. But I saw her take to the follow up games with utter sincerity and willingness to enjoy them, and for the first time we could BOTH see all the bland tedious poorly designed gate-keeping hassles that I already considered the series synonymous with, albeit without the hideous n64 graphics or endless repetition of dopey 3-note jingles.
of course the posters outside the cinema would have me believe that peter flippin dippin bippin rabbit is a radical superhero. Yes compared to THAT Black Panther is highly significant. It isn’t enough to give the smug homogenite treatment to every remotely popular culture figure from my life time, evidently. They have to mess with my great grandparents’ too now. This just looks like the sequel to “Hop.”
No Peter rabbit is not an off-brand bugs bunny who chomps carrots while winking at the camera and then stuns Mr. McGregor with a big smooch before clobbering him with his own rake. Peter Rabbit steals RADISHES for his own personal benefit and runs away because he is TERRIFIED since his father rabbit did the same thing and got caught and baked into a pie. He isn’t a “rebel” out to cause trouble. He is just foolish. Beatrix Potter’s characters are entertaining because they are foolish, not because they are “cool.” What is even the point? There will only be name recognition among people who would find this ghastly.
Also: I know what “hop” is and yet recall that it exists because a person known as Bunsen robisioned me to draw their rabbit character one time and some unaffiliated degenerate saw it, copied it and uploaded it to this gross cartoon pornography site and identified it as homage art to “hop (movie)” even though the dork from Hop isn’t half classy enough to half-dress this well.
This looks familiar. I thought it prudent to find a way to make this look dumber so I could post it on faceboof, where animated gifs are justifiably not permitted.
The lizard of two evils
in the disrespect that it looks very stupid and is also animated.
The dumbest thing is that the lizard thinks it has to change its pose to a broader stance with its arms crossed, like that will impress people, which is NOT the case. What that absurd moron fails to recognize is that nobody on earth or elsewhere is impressed. Not elpse. Not even the dope! nemitz, maybe, but i think we should all aim for better than that. It also seems unaware that its head is disproportionate to its body until it falls down since the square boundaries are difficult to optimize for an upright-standing figure. Or even a degenerate bow-legged dork like this one.
i absolutely did not need to make this. I considered that i had not animated anything recently, and also that my most-appreciated overall artwork have been low resolution pixel icons.
And apart from one that made before I knew what I was doing, they all feature other people’s characters. Some of which I do not like at all. Not necessarily any of those, though not necessarily not NOT any of those. And those that I dislike inspire other people with equally bland or worse requests to come to me instead of ones I could potentially find a mutually beneficial situation with. Which is not to say that i APPROVE of either of the morons that I am showing today, but i disapprove of them in a way that amuses me. Nor do I mean to suggest that I think drawing dumb garbage like this and then waiting is going to solve any problem, but I was starting to think that anything by me with wiggling creature toes being used as even a remote representation of myself, as I had done with the second icon here, was creating problems.
I could not tell you WHY there even is a problem that exists which is caused by that. I have lived a strange and unrealistic life, and that has its consequences.
If only life could be such a fantasy! It would surely be my final, were i to believe in it.
The presumptive back cover to the perpetually oncoming second bimshwel comic book. As always, you may click on it to get a bigger version. I do not always say this, and I realize, despite sometimes forgetting that I realize, that usually means almost nobody knows it, and in this case it is crucial to having an idea what the text says, and some of it matters.
It took longer than usual, as little grasp as I currently have on what “usual” is, since initially i drew elpse in it.
(do not bother clicking on this one) and elpse was the most-drawn thing on it at that point! Because initially the idea was just the first three frames, which I drew in a sketchbook years ago, with pog and elpse. I imagined it went into the comic book somewhere, but forgot about it when drawing the part where elpse is actually in that place. After I remembered it for this, it seemed like it could function as abstract in space and time, like a stand-alone illustration, but then I did not know what to fill the rest of the page with. And so I extended it, and it felt then less abstract, and more like it would be seen to contradict a not-yet-drawn comic page from the near future (which admittedly I thought was in the near future a year ago) in which pog and elpse have not been properly introduced. In my MIND, this and the first comic book’s back cover happen at some point in the future (comic future, not actual future, though it would also be that, if it was anything). But with elpse here I would have to explain THAT, but only once I get to the point of the apparent contradiction, and it would seem like I just screwed up and made an excuse! I have plenty enough aspects of my life to give lame excuses for without adding new ones that actually aren’t excuses because I meant them to happen that way.
Anyway the reaction, telling pog what to do, then scorning pog without acting or commenting further, suits yibrik better than elpse. Of course in addition to drawing in the character I also had to go back to every prior yibrik drawing and give tails to them since apparently I never did. The only time I ever drew yibrik with a tail previously was on the other book’s back cover! I saw it recently and didn’t remember having drawn it. But a bit later when I thought to replace elpse, I remembered that I SAW that, and decided one tail ever indicated adequate past intent to justify permanent tailage (since I no longer remember why or what I thought about any thing I did more than a few weeks ago). Of course I might decide, if I WANT to insert this somewhere later, it will be in a story about kumquat giving out tails. But then it isn’t funny for kumquat to just out of nowhere offer to give pog one. Right? Sure. So I don’t have to go and erase all those new tails I just added and fill in the background around them. Good, I was worried for a moment.
I think, if I were to go through and redraw and rewrite all this a third/fourth time, and I would roller skate on an airport runway wearing a suit of armor made out of pizza before I did, I would make yibrik a more visible character, since the way I think of yib now, argumentative but potentially harmless, is considerably different than how I thought of it back in 1995, as likely villainous, which influenced how I introduced it here eleven years after that (twelve years before now).
Does all that make sense? It shouldn’t! I work this hard so that the nonsense behind my motives does not need to be discussed.