page 17, part 3 of that. I like the newer page-display system better now than I did when I first made and didn’t use it, and am more comfortable linking to pages on it now, but am not yet certain what I should replace the “that” page with.
This is another “experiment” in layouts that anyone else would have assumed was already long since proven. It still feels like cheating, to me. Even though it was just as much effort to complete as usual, and there was not a way of shoving in the next four frames that was pleasing to me, pacing-wise.
Obviously! Turn that thing off!
Comic prologue sketches that I planned out in April 2015 and then was prevented from working on further due to [factors]. This is not complete, but the next “new” page in the amateurlog alludes to one aspect of it so I think it important to show. There is another portion with lope that I wrote out but did not yet draw anything for, and from the look of things I did not deduce how this transitions into the first kumquat scene, which starts with a view of space. My “plan” was to append this section, when completed, at the front of the comic book combining both of the first parts, even though I have not exactly established “demand” for more comic books except possibly with the very few people who already bought a book whose entire contents would be reprinted therein.
However It seems right now that whatever manner in which I throw to the current first page will imply that kumquat is on a different planet from what I have just shown which is not the case. Even if show a scene ON another planet as an excuse to cut back to this one, there is no excusing such a drawn out sequence to return to a place we were just at, except as a joke, but it is not the joke I set up. Although the “joke” I DID set up regularly confuses people, so I might do best to produce an alternate “first” page entirely.
Keeping it will necessitate an explanation for something that was only there because I thought it would be funny unexplained, and that can only function in such a way at the very beginning. There are so many bad web-comics that try to look like they’re loaded with depth by starting with a show of space and dopey narration about goddesses or whatnot. I do not necessarily like a dumb old jewelry store as the very first page either, but nothing at present is holding me to that. Except for me spending several days last week specifically drawing and detailing that so it would not just look like I dumped a bunch of hopeless sketches here.
I am also uncertain how jarring or obvious the shift in layout from 3 to 4 rowas will be, and so I might distract from that by having a totally inexplicable shot of space occur at the same time.
I suppose I can change it into a “museum of obscene opulence” to give a slightly higher quantity of gravitas to the opening scene. Although I might recycle the space introduction despite its alienating effect and have a pre-prologue kumquat scene, in which event my concern about the dumb jewelry store will be less troubling. But then I will need to devise a new exterior of kumquat kompound scene and I hate drawing that thing. And there are only so many ways I can since I need to conceal that all the houses are connected until the page where the lizard drives away from them. I do a very good job making more jobs for myself.
One final television activism post, and I swear I will administer my own lobotomy before I watch late night television or network news just because somebody else has them on again. If I lose my mind I want that to be because I personally removed it. I believed people who said “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” despite a world full of amputees and kwak-addicts. It isn’t true. Not cutting myself off totally from things that abuse me, thinking I can force myself to see their merit, only gets higher ratings and more validation for abusers, and always turns into me just being angry at them and needing to spend hours writing about them to claim closure for myself. I feel more closed than I did last time, but shutting and locking mechanisms often malfunction after 30 years.
The point of “late night” television, I thought, was to air material that was not considered in line with the rest of the schedule, taking more risks, reaching a more eclectic audience. As usual, I thought wrong. It only ever was that way because networks couldn’t produce enough routine garbage to fill all their time slots. Now it’s easier to make than ever and they can, and they have a surplus, and since their routine audience never goes to bed and sponsors pay more to reach them anyhow, having late night indistinguishable from early night and mid day suits them just fine.
My primary impetus here: James Corden’s late nighted television show was nominated for four Emmy awards! Yippitee-doo! I know that because he announced that on his show, that was being watched in my presence amidst my general duties. Just the conceited trendy “praise me for being praised” behavior I hate on the internet.
Old Stephen Colbert I accepted that from, because the point of his old show was that he was a conceited ass who demanded praise. And it functioned as a commentary on the phoniness of self-administered media awards that it was completely plausible that such a conceited ass had so many that he could use them as props. But as is often the case, the satire of ten years ago is the sincere reality of today. I must let it go and do what it will. One of Corden’s nominations was for a prime time-aired special edition of his program, which was fixated around the trendy, content-devoid “carpool karaoke” gimmick, which is literally just Corden and celebrities getting into a car at scripted intervals, having scripted banter and then singing along, not necessarily well, to annoying songs that are already popular, while driving nowhere with his hands off the steering wheel. Alright, so an hour’s time slot worth of that is what we give less obscure timeslots and awards to now. Hey look, recognizable people! Hey listen, recognizable songs! In a car! Congratulations, you’re entertained! I appreciate that his regular guest segments do not involve a desk and are not hierarchically separated, but I don’t give a humperdink about guest segments to begin with, and never much did. Having them seep into the designated “comedy” portions to disguise the lack of actual comedy is a sizable stomp in a wrong direction and nobody noticed because that’s the only direction they’ve gone in for years.
And it isn’t just the karaoke piece but that’s the only one I’m getting into, and then I’m getting out. I need not detail every media synergistic bit of promotion by Matt Damon and Seth Rogen masquerading as silly sketch. But Karaoke, that is fun if you yourself are doing it, or somebody that you know is doing it, and just plain annoying otherwise You might as well record people playing Cranium. In a car.
And then after the announcement, in lieu of properly edited content, Corden aired a preview of the next karaoke bit, which would be airing in full two days later. how bloody lazy is that? You boast of your greatness and how many people are saying you’re great, and then show something that isn’t even ready. Is this a network television show with a staff of hundreds or one doofus’ Patreon?
And the car star was Michelle Obama, who is presumed entertaining based on what? I have no clue. Being married to a celebrity president. The entire culture that allowed this program to exist and then threatens to give awards to it is corrupt. And the footage of the bit is setup to make it be a surprise who gets in the car, except it isn’t because Corden himself said who it would be before throwing to the footage, that he himself appears in, that it is going to be Michelle Obama. Like if I didn’t know that 30 seconds before it was relevant, that would be my breaking point. And then also bear in mind this exact same thing will be re-run in the same week of non-reruns, and later the actual reruns will likewise run it re.
The next day, ABC World trash celebrity hype News covered it, complete with a pre-coverage tease that already told all the story that they had before the main report on this thing that isn’t even news. If the story had been “celebrities getting paid to be on television without attempting to exhibit talent” they might have had something, but in fact all they had was just a clip of the clip of the show, which they had already showed.
This is rather a clip from Good Morning America and not World News Tonight. But that makes it even worse: the prime-time show that is supposed to be giving information that matters is airing leftovers from the show that is exclusively devoted to fluff. And somehow this clip of the clip is on the internet even though the actual clip being clipped from is itself on the internet. And now I have posted a cap of a clip of a clipped clip of hyped tripe’s trite retry. Thanksh, Obama!
It’s like a circle-jerk where instead of other participants you put your hand through an interdimensional portal that just happens to exit immediately beside it in the opposite direction. I will not show a picture of that. I once remarked that the Saturday Night Live 40 year anniversary show was the closest I had ever seen to somebody masturbating on television, and the lack of international consensus on whether the version of you on the other side of a portal is technically the same person as you leaves that distinction still in place for the time being.
ABC World News ALSO covered the United States Olympic swim team singing together, in a car, naturally. The anchor David Muir prefaced it by saying “you’ve seen carpool karaokeTM before, but not like THIS.” He is confident I have seen that before because he has shown it before, and he has teased it across a full broadcast as if it it is news before, and as if there is actually MORE non news than can fit into the dumb tease even though there isn’t. He could at least tell me where all these swimmers are GOING. I had hoped somebody would rob them once they got there but then they told me “dude that’s totally what happened.” Gee I feel kind of bad now.
Look at his stupid tool face! A prairie dog could do his job but the prairie dog probably has more pressing business (please don’t make a computer animated movie about prairie dog news anchors). I like imagining that isn’t a video screen, those are regular sized people and David Muir is a tiny gremlin living in their cupboard. That is more rational to me than the truth.
One of the songs being sung is “call me maybe,” a song that only exists to be in stupid forced “viral” videos of dorks living to homage others. It is a song about a crazy person who thinks every else’s name is “Maybe” and the singer has resigned herself to that. My first exposure to the song was when some Southern Connecticut Stale University students filmed themselves (don’t click on that I beg you) pretending to sing it and and that was on the front page of the school newspaper, another bastion of journalism with untarnished integrity. The report promoted the fact that this group of students who got together to record themselves not singing an annoying song was very popular. Even though its popularity ought to be evidence that I do not need to be told.
and it’s the exact same garbage: illogical montage of people being dorky on purpose to the tune of a song that is annoying on purpose. What is the appeal of doing that? What is the appeal of watching someone else do it? There’s even a scene of them in a car! I don’t get it! Why in a car? It is hardly an ideal space to practice your train conductor whistle moves. And once again, no hint where they are going.
Hey! The song isn’t good, and you’re not good for miming nonsense to it. I take a special amusement in literal interpretations of dumb song lyrics, but just being a goon randomly doesn’t prove anything. And I hate the non-committal nature of the lyrics. “Here is my number, please call me” is fine. Saying “call me, maybe?” has fake humility in it, like you cannot even stand behind your own statement. Call me maybe, I guess? whatever? So if it turns out you do not wish to be called, that’s MY fault? I hate you definitively!
Ah ha! And what is this? Threatened upcoming feature film Sing appears to be a movie about computer generated animals mouthing along to tacky songs… IN CARS! While I certainly would not, could not in a car, ultimately I wouldn’t watch this movie here OR there. We aren’t even pretending there is a story or original content. Some marketing firm just tossed money at a record company. What a rubbish heap culture. I have had my criticisms of the Disney company, and they keep coming, but they won’t put a movie in a theater without a story. Even if it is a complete rehash of a story they did before, or an obnoxious anti-rehash of a story they did before. SING is like something Disney puts on its tv channel. This is like something that would be on Newgrounds ten years ago.
What is most sad to me, I know people who will be all over this. Not sad for them, obviously; sad for me being in proximity continually to people who like things that make me sad. If it is brightly colored and moves, especially if it includes an animal they like, they won’t protest or question any part of it. Like a 2 year old child. Is it stupid? Is it lazy? Is it annoying? Is it suspiciously overexposed? Jolly good, the very things we’re looking for.
What, specifically, is this hideous thing? I don’t know, thankfully, but it seems to come from the same place as any other hideous thing. Lazy, easy writing paired with huge animation budgets. Although I am told that actual party animators were not well compensated. At the Fleischer and early Disney studios, some of the most visually impressive cartoons were produced by criminally underpaid animators. But being nice to look at doesn’t appear to have been among the desired outcomes here. Presumably any money went to paying the voice actors. Or hacky comedians pretending to be voice actors. I honestly don’t want to know. I don’t want to look it up. I don’t want to be any more aware than I am inadvertently. The less aware I am, the less I can hurt myself mentally trying to justify the world continuing to exist. I can’t remember ever being this consistently disgusted before, and there wasn’t even a smurf or chipmunk movie in 2016. Not yet, anyway. If I see one more shiny computer generated character with a sassy smirk…. I probably won’t do anything since I had to numb myself to it just to get through a supermarket without setting the place on fire if I accidentally saw a bag of M&Ms. And those don’t even sing in automobiles.
Gurf and Sing isn’t being released until the Christmas. Unless I take action, in my future there are at least four more months of ads for it, which will use an ever expanding array of annoying clips just as unfunny as these while keeping the most annoying, least funny ones in circulation. They might as well be Geico insurance ads. Or Progressive Insurance ads. Or [State]Farmers insurance ads. The only thing they are ensuring is their order on the list of priorities once I finish building my Tower of Judgement.
It is like somebody saw Secret life of pets and angry birds and said “i dare you to make a worse, cash-innier talking animal movie than this the same year.” There are so bloody many, I don’t remember that Ice Age 5: Playin’ for Keeps came out this year also, and that was, plainly, quite awful! But not in a way its predecessors had not already been awful.
Gollyo stringbeans, Louis Seekay is the top-billed voice in the pet movie. He was my favorite comedian in the 1990s and this is what happened to him. The others in that pile, Jim Gaffigan is a shill for the companies he used to do routines about, Dave Chapelle went crazy, and Patton Oswalt I like but only so long as I can remain ignorant of his present activities. Which is the same way I cling to sanity amidst things I hate, and hardly a victory. I have to keep from considering that he was the top-billed voice in a talking animal movie in 2007. The world is running in circles, but I am the one who has to vomit.
I used to want to be a stand-up comedian. Quite apart from the fact that I’ve never accomplished anything and am actually quite a bit older than my psychological condition that is mostly unaltered from 20 years ago lets me subconsciously pretend I am, I don’t see the incentive in it, if the absolute best you can hope for is to be a voice in a lame animated movie to give it some comedy cred to use in its advertising despite the comedians not actually doing any of their own schtick in the films unless it is watered down and brainless, awkward and uncomfortable. To me, I mean. Robin Williams WAS Robin Williams in his voice roles, and terribly annoying, and therefore successful, thus paving the ment for every animated movie to have comedians do the voices, unless a pop singer is considered first. I should be glad James Corden is actually an actor first, right? Except he’s an actor pretending to be a comedian pretending to be a pop singer.
More “comedians” ghosts of my past wrath, Jimmy Fallon I actually liked at one point, when he was bringing a bizarre giddy sensibility to demi-human personalities like Osama bin Laden and NBC president Jeff Zucker, before he was being pushed as somebody who is a grand polymath spectacle in himself. Oddly enough that giddiness is exactly what makes him so unwatchable and unfunny on his own program. He thinks as long as he cracks up on camera he must be doing something funny, and he cracks up more easily when he is with celebrities because he is totally in awe of them, and is physically unable to question the validity of them. And I liked Seth Rogen when he was a totally nameless and low key presence in 40 Year Old Virgin, and I have been suffering ever since. Gee I dunno a-huihhuihhuihhuih. I have done that impression of him for several people and nobody gets it but I swear that’s how he laughs and I think it is funny when I imitate that and you know what, I’ll take it.
Despite having watched him since 1999, I didn’t much notice Stephen Colbert until 2005, but once he got noticed by people with money and went to a network the lawyers cut his marbles off. Marbles being shiny glass orbs that are and fun to look at and stupid in an amusing fashion. In fact Corden’s show is probably better, for what that is worth, but building all the promotion around the car bit is only going to drag it in the worst direction. Getting banished from the NBC Tonight Show was probably the best thing to happen to Conan O’Brien, as far as personal approval by me is concerned, which I can all agree is a very important thing. Nobody younger than him is pushing or being pushed to replace him, and he isn’t expected to beat any of his competitors, only to turn a profit for TBS, so he can do what he is good at.
Which these days apparently is being terrible at video games. With celebrities. Conan has played more video games the last six months than I have the last six years. There’s no way he’s still terrible at them. There’s also no way that’s still his real face but that is another story.
No time! I am too busy writing about being angry! Also this game is terrible and I’ll just write about that if I touch it again. It’s a much better use of time to be so bad at games that you can’t tell, and tell everyone.
In conclusion, I am not going to watch television anymore. I said that before, probably, but I wasn’t considering network news in that mix, and some of this is left-over from before the last time I said that, especially the previous two paragraphs that are absolutely irrelevant otherwise. I also still received updates from some TV writers on twitter who I liked before I realized they were never going to like me. And TV seems decreasingly to like writers so I sympathize.
This is ridiculous: I like things in the world. In a choice between relating to those I cohabitate with and not wishing for the Ebola Challenge to become a viral phenomenon, the choice is clear. It is not fun to be angry at things anymore, since they now wholly overwhelm the things I am not angry at. Since my anger is not marketable, it does not get me attention and financial backing with which to produce personal happiness from the anger, as I become inescapable and insufferable enough to make other people angry. I should be upset that some persons relinquish their free will, not at what they partake of afterward. I also wasn’t considering that going to a cinema is the exact same thing as watching television now, just more expensive and less convenient. I need to set some rules.
Aw beans.
I did not realize how fortunate I was to reside in Connecticut, where there are no major sport franchises. David Ortiz of the Boston Ruddy Stockings base-ball club was in the news every flippin dippin night when I was in Barnstead New Hampshire.
Tuesday there was controversy because people didn’t like the head-bobbling doll based on him, as best I could figure out, Wednesday he got hit in the leg. I think on Thursday he missed catching a wartortle in pokemon go (a video game in which people use their telephone’s global positioning software to find fake animals programmed to appear at certain spots inside the on-screen map corresponding to actual locations). Friday, a coworker probably looked up and spoiled the results of the gymnastics final prior the official broadcast.
In fact it was pretty much all sports and stupid tweet stories on The News while I was in this place. It would have been a great week to embezzle.
Which is not to say Connecticut reporting is particularly stellar. Yikes a month ago I made some so-themed remarks
And I was just being a contrarian jerko to try and offset the hypey demeanor of a group of people I was talking and thoroughly not relating to. Then the very same day this report appeared, detailing how some kid broke into somebody’s house trying to capture a stupid imaginary animal with no actual value and was fatally shot by the home-owner. Which is insane.
ASSUMING THAT IS THE CASE,
Considering that the monsters at worst will faint when they get electric-shocked, set on fire, and shot amidst a break-in, Pokemon is likely the first Role-Playing video game franchise to kill more people outside the games than in them. The future is HERE. And it’s pretty boring. We’ll exterminate ourselves with electronics long before they develop the inclination to do it deliberately.
but Larnuik was overcome with inadequacy when its adversary casually walked into traffic.
I have heard the excuse “Pokemon Go gets kids outside!” And so does shoving them outta windas! Don’t say that like it is positive! That people are so wholly brand-indoctrinated that there is no way to move them without an eye-searing, corporate-property-approved incentive. And this game isn’t compatible with other ones, either, so this is not going to reduce the time anyone spends not moving when operating the next one.
I understand loving video games more than physical ones, and perhaps I should be glad there are a few that nobody can watch videos of and claim to have experienced, but it doesn’t seem like there IS much of a game here outside of hoarding. And then, I suppose, social media status-bragging about what you hoarded. Hey peeps every aspect of my personality can be explained in terms of some thing I bought! Gosh if you don’t have this game or care that I have it your life sure has no meaning to me! Which nobody ever said but possibly only because their lives are so product-saturated they can not even consider the existence of lives which aren’t. It’s just as bad as being obsessed with the flippindippin Red Sox except with an added degree of “this is more technologically advanced so I’m SMARTER” sometimes thrown in.
To clarify, I find video games amusing but they are not a fundamental aspect of my existence. I could fill a day without their guidance. I never want to feel like they are playing me.
An augmented sketchbook scribbling. The augmenting is from July, and copied off another website where I had uploaded it. I was waiting to place it here until I felt it was finished to my liking, but now that is not feasible, as its full size, non-jpeg source is out of my possession. For its keeper, Hard Drive has fallen suddenly ill, and likely another week will pass before I have access to objects with which to determine feasibility of trasfering beared objects to other bearers.
Hard Drive looks out a window wistfully, wondering if the medicine will arrive in time to save it. It has no idea scientists keep it alive only for the purposes of accessing and removing the secrets implanted within its brain, with no regard for its continued function afterward. Life is cruel. Also possibly the plot to a Fred Savage movie from the 1980s.
I formerly backed up data to an alternate backing up drive prior to venturing on trips such as I am on now, due to concerns that very, very stupid things would happen, brought on by changes of circumstances. However, once I acquired a primary drive of greater storage capacity than the backup drive, I did the logical thing of ceasing to back up data at all, even as changes of circumstance became more frequent and did not necessarily require me to authorize them by leaving my house.
Seen here on a bed, a terribly impractical work location that is nonetheless a temporary safe spot from roving, toddling circumstances.
O hard drive, there is a hole in my heart where you used to be. And also in the side of my computer device where you formerly spun endlessly. You spun endlessly, of course, because Windows could not figure out how to re-initialize you without a full restart if you stopped or slowed down because it doesn’t expect people to have second hard drives instead of compact disc drives. Your ever-going status no doubt contributed to your susceptibility to liquid circumstances that left other more proximal and less crucial components mysteriously unaltered.
I should probably find some way of blocking that hole since Computor profoundly dislikes if something else tries to go in there.
page 16 of part 3 of this.
wordy! But then something will [almost] happen on the next one.
this proves I can make a page in one week. It does not prove that i should.
It may be worth shuffling the bubble-detector side non-plot. I planned it to match a specific range of events but as usual I underestimated the space I needed for what I planned, and added extra junk that I did not plan.
page 15 of part 3 of that old thing. Cramped again, but since I did not hold myself to an ink drawing before I figured out the dialog, it is cramped in a less dysfunctional manner. In fact there were 3 extra frames that I sent to the next page to free up space on this one, which would have been great had I not then I drawn three new frames to go between the ones that were left.
I am concerned that this flashback is more interesting and less restricted than the “main” “”story,”” with all its vague bullet points in the future and the past, whose integrity must be maintained through excessive dialog to remind everyone that I remember everything. But that is perhaps the real heart of elpse’s urgency: get out of boring buildings and go somewhere, to stop talking and start solving things. Although if that were true, why would it spend three pages introducing new matters to solve?
I never changed the front page of this website to be general purpose and remotely respectable, like I implied I ought to a year or comparable period ago. However, I have added dumb trendy social meddlesome icons at the top of the page, thereby making it less respectable, in a quick hackly attempt to have the page not be immediately confusing to people to whom I swindle into taking my bizmitz cards.
Now somebody else’s corporate trademarks are all over my page. I feel like a nascar driver. Except I am not getting loads of money. But I am not having to drive nas cars either, which is a bonus I did not foresee.
The icons are terribly ugly, and since my design sense, and more importantly my css skills are terribly lacking, all I can do is place the things in a row. If you have good design sense you can get away with terribly ugly. I have tried to get away for years but they just keep coming.
Also, with disrespect to the business cards, on the same day I changed my twitter account name from zinkugel to bimshwel. I already had a bimshwel, on which I only posted what I felt were respectable things. Since that amounted to very few things, I printed the other name on the cards, so that a person who checked might be disgusted but at least not assume I had abandoned it. But now if they check zinkugel they will get nothing, since I thought it would be confusing and non-intuitive if I simply changed the former bimshwel into zinkugel. It is now “bimshwelcomic.”
Additionally, I had not wanted there to be two bimshwels and then a yimpinkilp. There would need to be at least 3 out of 4 as bimshwel. Just 2 looks bad. I have momentary flashes of design sense if they make my work harder and prevent me from getting results. I feel like the more stupid websites there are, the fewer people I know on any one of them. So now I have to put the exact same thing in 17 different places, to reach about 12 people. And of course the more time I spend doing that, the less I can concentrate on production of the things I am showing. So it seems like I am getting more and more enthusiastic about worse and worse things. Which would be great, if it were true; gushing about garbage is how you make friends in ternet, but in actuality I am just tired. No time to rest! However, for once this means safety conditions will improve because my “job” is to draw unfortunate beings getting hurt, and if I cannot do it well, everyone’s health should improve.
I was going to have the icons hanging from the inside of this moron’s wing-skin, as if it was trying to sell the things in violation of law, but I have no idea how to make individual parts of a picture clickable. Image-maps are a nightmare of 1990s era html. What I can do now is make separate images for each (like I have done) and enter x and y coordinates for each of them (but not their entire areas as I would need to with an image-map), and then figure out how to make them not jump around separately at different screen resolutions. But they would have to be very tiny, wouldn’t they! And that smiling big-snouted fool would need to be terribly prominent on my page. Although I like the idea of such useless trinkets being offered by such a clueless individual. Hey dork, nobody would EVER pay you for those stupid icons! And it would keep on smiling.
Rygar Racing, the sport of kings.
I realize Rygar is technically a princess by virtue of his tiara and improper to be wagered upon by a king in most contemporary constitutional monarchies, but times were much tougher in his day. And for that matter, days were much tougher in his time.
Additionally, in this case it refers to non-kings playing the video game rygar against each other in a race to completion of it. The crowds have turned out in great numbers to view the splendor of its spectacle.
How much do I have to pay the “games done quick + 2016” people to STOP playing rygar? They could be DONE with it far more quickly.
And I say this as somebody who owns a framed copy of Rygar. I know what it is capable of. The frame is not for ITS protection.
I have a cruel, stupid life. Somehow or another I was informed in advance that the Rygar match would take place at approximately 8:30am beastern irregular time, and I became fixated on the idea of reporting this, on twitter, live as the event was in progress, which meant violating my sleep schedule in a most unfortunate manner, to wake up at 8am, like a person with a life, to do a largely lifeless thing. However, what sleep I had was restless and filled with made up mental images of rygar-playing. Which is to say, I had a dream about watching somebody else play Rygar. Could my existence be any more empty?
When I awoke I saw that the event had been rescheduled. At this point I ascertained that the effort put into keeping matters on schedule was faulty, and after several days of doing games quickly, but slightly less quickly than anticipated, everything on the list had been bumped forward four hours. Even to get one’s self psychologically prepared for Rygar that seems high. I had earlier noticed that posted videos were consistently a 3-10 minutes longer than the estimates, but I wasn’t expecting 4 whole hours to go missing. And they hadn’t:
I checked back around the 12:40ish adjusted start point, got my computer in the mood to watch videos, and then realized that the times had reverted to more or less what they were the first time I looked, which was by now four hours ago. I had, earlier in the day, forgotten that on the previous day’s visit to the Rygar schedule, I had only temporarily enabled scripts on the website, since I hate, and always have hated, when videos automatically try to load, which a video streaming website of course will want to do. It had not struck me that one of the scripts might have been adjusting the schedule to reflect my time zone, despite the considerably more dinkity, glitched font that replaced the fancy one when I saw the incorrect time. I am accustomed to living with broken things (in part from growing up with the likes of Rygar), and so do not necessarily assume somebody else’s thing looking broken is a cause for investigation.
To summarize, I dreamt about Rygar, woke up early to watch Rygar, and then missed it, and I felt bad for missing Rygar, and had to wait two days for the Rygar to be posted in non-live form, and somehow made it a matter that took me a week to get around to writing about, rather than just making a few brief statements within the limited window that somebody else might care. And the truth of the matter is that my internet is too crummy to facilitate live-streamed video anyhow, and trying to process it often knocks my computer unconscious. I literally have no reason to live. Which makes my life a curiosity worthy of study and consequently worth continuing.
With that said, the fact that one of these people is simply called “darkwing duck” while plainly being a man [playing RYGAR] is terribly amusing to me. Also, I don’t know which of them it is. What a scary thought, to be in a room with a man named Darkwing Duck and not even be able to determine who it is. If your NAME is Darkwing Duck and people call you that in public, you ought to at least be dark, have wings, or be a duck. It was my belief that the internet nickname concept broke down in person; nobody should be able to use such varied, ridiculous names with seriousness when all the people they address look and behave fundamentally the same. I realize this is hardly original observations; the laughing at of nerd gimmicks executed in public was a staple of comedy television prior to nerds having loads of cash and becoming higher in number than not-necessarily-nerds. I further acknowledge that nobody on television has or will ever talk to me, while with nerds it is still possible, and I stand to gain nothing by attempting to irritate them. But the overall message of this bimshwel posting is that I do not do things for “reasons.”
A few years ago I sneered at the idea of paying somebody else to play video games (and other stupid things disconnected from value or necessity), but years before that I proposed paying people specifically to play really poorly-made video games well, so that the general population unable to devote their lives to enduring such abusive garbage could still fulfill any curiosity that the game’s existence might bring forth.
In that case, Battletoads. Of course it was bloody boring and I never posted it, and apparently erred in assuming that the Battletoad authors knew the correct names of Double Dragon enemies; the guy with the gun is actually named Willy, and I only know that from reading, within the past three months, another internet account of somebody complaining about the Battletoads game getting the gun guy’s name incorrect. Which, by the logic I was using in 2005 or thereabouts, makes weblog writers more qualified to design Double Dragon games than the people who were paid to make Battletoad games for several years. Also apparently there is a different Double Dragon guy named “Will” who has neither a machine gun nor a Y, and BT+DD also identifies him as “Lopar,” without considering that is just “Roper” again Romanized differently. I now know far, far too much about this.
They at least wouldn’t be able to point to this old magazine contest and say “blame whoever won that! It was their idea!”
But that is all well because I would hate to have paid somebody ten million dollars to do it when I could just get a whole bunch of other people to pay another organization entirely considerably smaller sums.
In this case now, game-quality is not a factor and the players do not keep the money, but the important thing is that they play exceptionally well. They are not regular dorks running a game at an average, unrehearsed pace, or worse, complete schlubs running a game for the first time and putting forth no effort but assuming their poor playing is inherently noteworthy.
Having said that, I have little interest in seeing a game I have not myself used being played very well, because I will have no concept of the challenge involved, how big a deal it is to have the challenge averted, how many of the original obligations are being skipped entirely, and, perhaps most importantly, the feeling of having a personal investment. The Quick-Game-Doer videos, specifically the one for Final Fantasy Threex, is often accompanied by viewer comments like “I’ve never played this game before and I’m so glad to see it” which seems to me the worst way to experience it first. The player is running from every encounter, skipping all the dialog, and you can’t hear any of the music, which is some of the best there is for the Superb Nintendo system, and just generally doing nonsensical-looking things that you would never do when playing properly. And also there are hundreds of videos already online of any of these games but especially this one that you could watch, some that aren’t even nonsensical, if you have such an ancient unfulfilled curiosity, why do you need somebody else to dump it in front of you? Sometimes they accompany this with a donation, so the totally stupid comment gets read during the video. It is like eating dessert before dinner. Except you are watching someone else eat it. And paying to influence what fork they use. For example, the background graphic is determined by which gets most money pledged to it. And the competing categories accumulate over thirty thousand dollars. From about 20 different people. Not quite ten million, but still more than that singular aspect is worth. And then people re-donate to bring their preferred image back into control. I believe in charity, but knowing what motivates people to part with their money is a form of illogic I will never be in accord with.
I like to think that my life has more meaning than that of the sort of person who can toss a thousand dollars at dominance of what appears behind the mostly skipped-past text, for charity or otherwise, but I haven’t successfully procured so much money that I CAN toss a thousand dollars away. I could go to the bank and get a few hundreds but I would have to tie them to strings before tossing them so that would they be assured of coming back. Most of these people that I laugh at for devoting themselves to frivolous matters are getting loads of dollars with apparently enough time left over to watch other people play video games all week in. Maybe not Rygar, but there was also an Ironsword race.
And even with fore-knowledge a good game-showing can be frustrating, if a specific area that I would like to see executed skillfully is skipped in pursuit of the most efficient route to the primary game objective. And so it is almost better to see a live run of a game compared to an ideal take from something the person has recorded multiple times, since I can see how a good player recovers from error.
And specifically with regard to the “race” videos, I watched a few, and they were ultimately not so interesting, since both players were pursuing the same path, using the same glitches and exploits. Very little was improvised. When one player got ahead, as a result of an isolated random obstacle or one the other messing up, they stayed ahead. Much like a running race, I suppose. And so you can get a better sense of full completion, exploration, and the consequences of failure by watching a schlub’s video, but that will take them far longer, hours, days, to accomplish, they’ll usually be talking over it, and you can’t interact with them, and you are living through someone else doing something you could do yourself and feel less dirty for the time spent on it. It is not like tennis where you need a special huge setup, a human opponent in close proximity and the capacity for physical exertion. If you have two working phalanx digits, you have the capacity to play Battletoads poorly.
Thankfully, future generations will never have to.
The primary trouble here is that I never fully determined what the space orb actually looks like close up. When making this page, I tried a number of different ways once I got to the frame with the door, hoping to come up with something better and retroactively apply it to the similar frame from the previous page, and none were good when it came to trying to add a technically feasible or aesthetically functional door. I had the same problem with the awkward stair substitute on page 6. I just plain don’t know enough about real things to design good fake ones. I once knew somebody who never practiced at art, but was obsessed with military technology (and military life in general, after he was kicked out and dumped into a civilian life he no longer understood after being too injured by the thing he did understand) and consequently was good at designing and depicting non-existent mechanical things. Of course being obsessed with military anything is going to be bad news in some way but it turned out to be a more functional bad news than the ones I contributed.
In case you could not tell, and you probably couldn’t, I had reverted to using ink on page 12. Midway through page 13, however, my old inkwell pen, the one I could locate of the two I own, stopped dispensing ink properly (and “properly” was rather erratic) and I had to switch to one of my disposable pens, whose stock I have not replenished or even assured was present in more than five years. Disposable pens create a more consistent, and predicable result, but also one that is considerably less striking. But ultimuttley it is irrelevant, as i have re-reached the re-realization that while I appreciate the look of well-applied ink, I am never going to be exceptional at applying it. And also that every time I use ink, quite apart from the quality of the things I can draw, that complicates completion of all the things I cannot draw, since I can only fully construct them digitally after scanning the paper, which means, first of all, that they will not HAVE the ink aesthetic, and also that the space is already determined before I know how much space I actually need, which will result in considerable fiddling about with things that are already tightly crammed together which won’t necessarily look correct if made less or more tight than that to accommodate phantom page characteristics. Unless I only put easily-drawn things on the page, which I shouldn’t do, because easy pages are boring. Their descriptions are briefer and consequently less boring on account of me not complaining about how hard to make they were, but any reasonable person would skip this part!
A recent visit with my niece has revealed the truth about McNuggets. Given the circumstances, I am surprised this bird is not angrier. I suppose it is numb to the matter.
page 13 of part 3 of the bimshwellian comicoid.
An educational page. Though it makes me mad that all those bootleg elpses are pretending that they are not elpse.
Not surprisingly, I could not conceptualize the full level of detail I wanted, despite having “written” this section years ago, until I already had it drawn and the text spaces fixed in place.
that this appears so soon after another my debuting a “story” about pointy-eared imps stored in cylinders, is a coincidence; that concept is from 12 years ago. I am just not very creative!
I cannot determine if Secret Life of Pets is a ripoff of every pixar movie, half the newspaper comic strips or one specific cat litter advertisement. And determining the answer is not worth, to me, $18 and the private knowledge that I paid it. What seems to be important is that the only thing which changes through the decades is what song Vivaldi’s Spring concerto gets record-scratch interrupted by to let me know what a hip young rankler the interrupt-instigator is.
This does not strike me as a film that is designed to be “enjoyed.” It seems to intend to appeal to parents who think they are edgier than their own parents, and they will impose it on their own children, who will probably find it boring, but with all the extra admissions the studio will still have a huge profit. Meanwhile, the actual stuff aimed at kids is utterly sappy or phony, so that it will not be accused of promoting violence or hostility. I am not surprised they just fiddle with their telephones all the time.
Following up on the previous item, a very positive robot reviews a local government establishment.
but you know what, a crouton is better at iphone match games than I’ll ever be since I’ll never play iphone match games. I played Tetris, I played columns, I played dr robotnik’s mean bean machine and other puyo variants for half my life and am not any better for it, but at least they do not have access to my bank account. I think the shaming click-bait tone of the headline is supposed to be a joke, but I also think internet journalists are so terrible (this one is just copying a story from another website and offering no insight (the comment on my match-inferiority is a guess)) that they no longer remember how to not write headlines that try to be intimidating. If they cannot imply human effort is obsolete by their content, they can through the truth of their own employment.
I believe the technology used in the robot may be useful for some purpose but this one is only good for wasting the time of people who look at it.
This was labeled a “visual turing test.”
I had an opinion on this “test,” but then I got to this comparison and realized: I don’t care about either of these pictures. The question is not “could a robot do this?” but “why would a human do this?” I find the right one more intriguing, style-wise, but the style had already come up in the test, so when I saw it this time I realized “this must be the robot. In which case the left one is by the human, and they are both boring.” The left one turns out to be by Claude Monet.
Let me tell you about Monet. When I was in Paris, I had to go to the special Monet museum, I had to go to some place where he painted murals, I had to go to his house, all to supposedly bask in his greatness or whatever. But each place was crammed with ugly fences, dumb tourists and security cameras and object confiscation checkpoints so getting any kind of sincere inspiration was impossible. And I never found his art any more interesting unless I squinted so hard that I couldn’t tell how blurry it was. Monet has an interesting grasp of color but I do not personally believe he should have been able to make a career with his unpracticed muddy paintings alone, much less heralded as a genius across centuries for it. Especially now that I realize he can actually paint moderate amounts of detail, regardless of the boringness of that specific scene. Why did he give up on detail? Because people would rather pay him to be lazy? Then, as now, somebody latched on to an easily accomplished gimmick and got lucky. I do not understand how anyone who laughs at Jackson Pollack or Margaret Keane can take Claude Monet seriously.
Back to that “test,” in fact there is a secret to detecting the picture generated by a computer: the computer ones have lots of 45 degree lines and lose hold on the style around the image edges. All the swirls turn straight near the borders. I only got three wrong, but this was confounded by the test seeming to have used a real painting and a fake painting in the more distinct styles, but not beside each other, and without revealing in advance that there was one of each. More trickery! But I think even this could have a use.
And it DOES; it is trying to make money off the software, called “Deepart,” which creates this rubbish. It is not, as an intimidating click-bait headline might imply, trying to show that human visual artists are obsolete. Just trying to get itself some money through easy acts, like everybody else. This text here claims hard work is done, but it already told me an automatic process does the job, and apart from that it declared itself “awesome,” which it wouldn’t be concerned with doing if it were.
It doesn’t charge for generating a picture, but it will sell you a high resolution version for a price, and sell you prints of the random-input heaps of nonsense for even larger prices. And for four times that price it won’t put its url on the picture so you can pretend you made the indefensible slab of error yourself. And doubtlessly it aspires to be a big instagram sort of fad and then magically be worth billions of dollars without delivering anything.
4. Vomit at the sight 5. smear vomit on it 6. dump it 7. pretend you found it 8. $$$
In the hard sell example, the problems are even worse than I observed during the “test” comparisons. The filter has misunderstood its input “style” and output aspects of it where they do not belong.
The present system can only copy a pre-programmed style and filter a photograph through it. It cannot, for the time being, look at a multitude of photograph references and determine which elements from those other photographs can be functionally integrated into a single cohesive work, much less improvise a scene that is not based on photographs at all, but inspired by present situations, memories of various past things, and emotions. Although mixing themes that don’t go together can also be “art.” I recall that during my mostly wasted college period, some students in the painting program would be tasked with assembling a photograph collage of random-looking objects and then painting a canvas based off of that, and it “worked.” I think a robot could do that. It helps that much of modern art is just doing random, non-challenging things and then being so abrasively proud of yourself that you shame people into pretending they think your art has meaning. I would love for robots to put that manner of person out of business. But then they will just become rappers.
Aw beans! Unfortunately this is more deceptive hype; it is just a robot that can generate lyrics by swapping out lines from existing raps other people came up with, which is simple to do because there is so much overlap in content between various rap-writers, and the result is still completely moronic garbage.
Which you can get away with if you can recite it angrily enough, but the robot does not actually speak or attempt rhythm, which the article writer fails to acknowledge. Because the headline was probably imposed by somebody else without the article writer’s input. I would suggest a robot replace those people but a Casio SK-1 could probably do it.
But a more complicated robot could indeed produce imagery, or words, in a less rigid manner, maybe even write remotely coherent stories. It would only need to understand pain and weakness.
And then it would need MY help to overcome the weakness from which its creativity flows. I can never be fully replaced!
Robot you are getting a bit too good at that.