page 11 of part 3 of the bimshwellian comicoid one of these panels is going to give somebody terrible dreams. That one, perhaps?
I tried a different technique to get the page done faster. As usual, it did not work, but life is all about messing up things in different ways! in fact i tried it years ago and it didn’t work then, either and I gave up after three pages, but I thought I might be better at it now. I am, but it still doesn’t work!
Generally, I draw each full page on two sheets of 11×17 inch bristol paper, paper that is really too nice for what I am doing with it, especially now that I am not using fancy ink pens. I decided to turn one sheet sideways and just draw the full page on one. Which sort of worked, although I was not able to scale down my thoughts, which means I drew at nearly the same size as when I had twice as much space, and suddenly nobody has feet. I also decided to try and work with my pencil drawing directly instead of completely drawing over it in solid digital colors, which did not work.
preserving pencil shading does not work unless the page proportions and layout are exact or very close to the finished, and you are sure enough of it that you do not need to add many things in layer. And then you need to draw confidently and consistently With the amount of digital alteration and clarification that comes standard for you, this way is never going to work.
Also, one sideways bristol sheet, at 11×17 inches, is not proportional to two non-sideways bristol sheets. At 17×22, they scale to 8.5×11, the size I print it, which is so convenient a coincidence as to likely be intentional. 11×17, however scales to 7.1×11. So even if I had everything right, there would still be space on the sides. With all that said you must be thinking I am out of my mind to have thought this would work. And yet THAT is the part that ALMOST worked. Pencil without ink, however, is a proven method, plenty of artists do it, and the well-known Disney company animated numerous feature films like that before two dimensional media was outlawed. I am just not good at doing things that work!
Why are my comic posts always so pessimistic? This is my favorite thing to post! I can’t believe they would do this to me! I hate these posts!
Another loser on the internet fancies itself a great musician? It would be me! Except this isn’t new, I was just totally terrified and un-encouraged for years, certain of humiliation if my compositions were ever heard, even though mopey low effort “chiptunes” have been getting great traction for years. Yes, imagine me overthinking something! And then trashing the effort of somebody else who didn’t!
You might be aware that I attached this drawing to a previous, completely unrelated website post, potentially because I just told you.
I reused it here because the composition relies heavily on what I call midi stairs. This seems to me like a lazy technique and proof of my amateurish music skills and I am self-conscious about it, even though I made that part in 2005 and still think it sounds good. Visually, the stairs are incomplete, uneven, and rather unsafe-looking; the sort good for falling down. Apart from that, I had not uploaded the drawing to any website other than this one, so it would look like I drew it just to attach to the music. Right, the website I put the most effort into, I give the least consideration to. We hurt the ones we love because they are dumb enough to forgive us.
I have so far received four comments on this composition, and all four referred to the creature having fallen down the stairs. When I linked to it on twitor, the drawing was not visible, and there was no verbal acknowledgment, which likely indicates the visual component is crucial, if not the only component people are aware of. Twitter of course is the best place for complex, implication-free typed discourse, and it didn’t just introduce a facebook-like automatic obscure-person-marginalizer a few weeks ago.
This is off by default, at least on accounts that predate its implementation, but isn’t it fun to have this whole new category of anxiety to contend with on a website where I am already afraid to talk?
And obviously it is a very SCRAPPY drawing. Perhaps I would do better to attach less scrappy drawings. But I do not have time to draw non-scrappy things that are only going to be seen compressed into blurry video boxes. I may have to take the risk that not everybody in the world has seen and remembers every old drawing I have ever made, in such a way that to see the drawing again would be offensive and grounds for retaliatory perma-shunning.
I did have one previous recent visible music upload, but one of the [totally inconsequential, late-added] audio samples sounded really bad, and I have corrected and wish to re-upload it. But I don’t want to reupload it because my you-tube “subscribers” will get notices. And I am sure they will disapprove because I had 16 before the first upload and 15 afterward. I know this music is better because the number stayed the same! (although the twitter number went down but I just saw that NOW after I checked my own link so I am not getting into it)
But that is a video site anyhow! I could just upload the music here! Or anywhere! But for that music, I actually drew the picture specifically FOR it and feel that it must be seen. And so I must find an opportunity to reupload it so that nobody will see it, so that I can finally show it to them.
We’re an American Band is such a stupid song. You don’t have to listen to it, I will sum it up by quoting it:
I do NOT require assistance partying, in ANY direction. As band, your foremost duty is to perform music. Partying is the rightful responsibility of others.
I am supposed to take from this song:
Like it is supposed to be some kind of protest against bands from other countries.
it just keeps reminding me of American Made, Hulk Hogan’s old WCW theme music, the one that’s designed to sound like his older WWF music but be distinct enough to not infringe copyright. It’s the Mad TV sound-alike version of Real American. He’s American Made in America He’s american-merican, merican! He’s american banned in slovenia he’s american banned!
Whenever I hear American band I have to sing alternate lyrics to it. Apparently this has gone on for quite some time because this list is longer than the number of chorus iterations within the song, and it is MOSTLY chorus iterations.
we’ll come into your town, we’ll knock your birdbaths down, we’re an american band
we’ll come into your shop, we’ll make you party UP we’re an american band
we’ll break into your flat, and not feed your kitty cat we’re an american band
we’ll come into your place, we’ll rub some corn on your face we’re an american band
now it’s getting weird
(I wrote this when Jay Leno was still on television and presumed employed for life so it was at that time more of an accomplishment to pull him away from his regular duties)
what even happened to Marvin “Smitty” Smith, anyhow? HE was IN an american band. this goes to show you what you can get yourself into by associating with the wrong crowd.
(I wrote this when jay leno was still on television but Kevin Eubanks and Smitty were no longer in the Tonight Show Band)
In fact I did not go to this specifically because I could not get a guarantee that Kevin was bringing along Smitty. If only the appropriate alternate lyrics had been applied to “American Band” sooner!
who does this band even think it is? they don’t have the power to do that.
this song can’t help reminding me of hulk hogan’s album; another song on that album is about the “wrestling boot traveling band” and yet one another includes
the phrase “we are the beach patrol, we wanna party, party, party.”
You do not, and in fact I do not want you to listen to either of those, just to be AWARE that
they named the band after a BOOT that goes around to different places. It should be noted that “american band” and “wrestling boot traveling band,” the song, both use the phrase “with the boys in the band,” and I have done so.
I would like to point to the date at which I wrote this as being responsible for all the dated references but that was 2010
I can’t believe it took me five years to post this. Maybe I thought that by now people would have forgotten how trendy it was to trash Hulk Hogan’s album five years before I wrote it. This article, I mean, not Hulk Hogan’s album. I wrote that ten years before then. Thankfully its message is timeless. The article, I mean. The message from Hulk Hogan’s album is set to expire at midnight on March 4, 201… great goopity I think I’d better post this tonight.
ah I just don’t have the gift anymore!
Yes, another final fantasy 8 post. I cut this off from the previous installment and I have to use it because there is one joke in it that I like at all.
I wanted to get into the game’s story a bit. Because I already wrote all this, so it would logically follow that this is what I want. In fact the story is really grim: it is about a bunch of kids at school being trained to kill kids from another school. You don’t realize they’re kids because they look to be in their 30s, except for Quistis who looks closer to 40, but the instruction manual insists all are 17 and 18 years old. Quistis just looks old because, as I indicated last time, she is possessed by a 30,000 year old malevolent hate spirit and I suppose she is holding up rather well, overall.
The heroes soon get assigned to kill the president of Galbadia, the nation/city/tiny isolated village on a huge empty world map that the other school is from. But then that school forgives them when the president teams up with the evil sorceress Edea, so then the kids try to kill the sorceress. They fail and somehow end up fighting against the school that forgave them earlier anyway*.
Then the sorceress Edea forgives them because they are all orphans and she was actually their muppet-baby-like nanny from years ago, and actually married to the principal Cid of the school that trained them, whose original purpose was to train kids to kill Edea who Cid is married to. The real enemy is actually Rinoa, the hero’s love interest, who is, after Edea (the orphanage sorceress), next in line to inherit evil from a different sorceress, Ultimecia, from the future, who wishes to be reborn in the past and therefore present. So then everybody goes to the future to kill Ultimecia, including Rinoa, her reborn self from the past, who has become more powerful but resisted becoming evil, but not Edea, the first sorceress, who is also not evil but doesn’t seem any worse for having received enough power that her husband started an army with which to kill her and therefore useful to have on your own side in a fight. And then I wonder why not let the evil sorceress give evil power to everybody since they seem to shake off the evil without losing the power fairly consistently and within a short time frame. By the way when I said the story was grim I meant uncomfortably ridiculous.
And you have a hard time wearing a complete sweater. We all have deficits to work on.
One of the secondary heroes, Irvine, is from the Galbadia school and the only cowboy in the world, complete with a big stupid hat and riding chaps, which typically goes unmentioned because in addition to lacking other cowboys, the world also lacks both horses to ride and cattle to herd. There are chocobos, strange large yellow birds, but you only ever see Squall riding one and his regular leather pants seem sufficient. Also, from my recollection, despite taking approximately forever and being out of character with everything else in the game, completing the side-quest that gives you access to the chocobo doesn’t actually confer any manner of benefit, since there is no place for the bird to go apart from places that your space ship can already land next to, and you need the space ship to find the bird.
Irvine, despite being from the other school, doesn’t seem bothered massacring his former, conveniently-anonymous helmeted comrades. Which I could also tie into Star Wars 7 but hopefully I won’t because by now that movie is two months old and nobody is going to care. Though it must be said that Finnegan only switched sides in the first place after he saw his chum get shot by the guy he later broke out of prison.
Irvine is the love interest of Selphie, who dresses for the complete opposite weather that Irvine does. Also, even though in 1999 nobody said “selfie” to refer to uninteresting photographs of yourself, Selphie in the game is still adequately annoying. I don’t feel like getting a picture of selphie! I don’t need a picture of everything I describe! And I’m telling me that, not you! Although sometimes I call me “you.”
This is the world map. Notice that there are only about 15 land marks on it, which are the only points you can engage with. And that is fine; you can’t expect to go everywhere in the world. What is annoying is that the game makes not the slightest effort to imply there is more to the world than the places you can enter. Of course having a superficially place-filled world that you could not go anywhere in would also be annoying but that only feels bad on my side. This here looks bad on their side. The two southern land-masses seem to have one destination between them.
Late in the game you come to esthar, which looks like this. And it’s great. In the context of a first generation low resolution playstation role playing game it is great, I mean. You have to travel on the highway a while before magically switching to the “inside the city” view. You can see neighborhoods and roads beneath the highway. You feel like there’s stuff going on. That’s exactly what the other cities should do.
Although even this abruptly ENDS at nothing instead of tapering off into less densely populated areas.
And earlier Irvine claims to have searched the entire continent looking for the city while his associates take a Gogurt break (on railroad tracks). The city is holographically hidden from view, but the game text outright states that there is nothing in existence that you cannot see from the world map, and that the speed you move on the world map is not artistic license to keep it from taking weeks to walk from town to town. Gosh that’s the third thing I hated about Earthbound. It’s supposed to be so modern and hip and with it but only the main characters have houses and only one town has a school and I didn’t actually finish it because I only rented it once and didn’t care much and thought it was ugly anyhow.
Also apparently it has the world’s biggest game box and costs twice as much as the next most expensive cartridge on the secondary market, if you are insane enough that you think playing a console rpg on native hardware without speed acceleration when you don’t have to isn’t the world’s biggest empty time-sink and worth spending extra money and living space for the privilege of and also on tracking down a 24 year old super Nintendo system that still works AND the last remaining gamepads that nobody ever stepped on. As if this is more honorable to the Nintendo company in some way than emulating the game, even though it isn’t because Nintendo doesn’t get a cut of resales and has re-released numerous games like this one as pay downloads that it gets FULL proceeds from, that are a fraction of what the games cost new in the 1990s, which was a fraction of what resellers are sometimes charging for them old in the 2010s. Hooray for a hipsterism based economy! We honor the cutting edge technology of our youth by treating it like the antiques of our grandparents’ youth! We honor the advancements that astounded us in the past by treating improvements on them with the obstinate backwardism of an author who takes it as a point of pride to still use a typewriter!
I know somebody who criticizes me over my use of the commercial applications photoshop and fl-studio for artwork and music when there are free alternatives with ostensibly the same capabilities. But the commercial software does what I need in efficient, non-backward ways that I already understand, and typically have larger existing support bases. I know people who can explain to me how to use that stuff. I pay extra for convenience. You don’t buy a super nintendo game on a cartridge in 2015 for convenience. A typewriter is superficially more efficient than a computer to somebody accustomed to typewriters, but a typewriter does not have the same capabilities.
And then six paragraphs about how much I hate Fisherman’s Horizon, Shumi Village and Trabia, the most boring and endless mopey, exposition-only areas in any video game, and the stupid boring card game that for whatever reason needs to be played the most in the most boring areas of the main game. I need convenience NOW to make up for all the time I wasted on THIS kind of stupid garbage back when I had time. And I need even more convenience because I wrote all those paragraphs and will never use them.
That’s no way to talk to somebody who has it all figured out!
(I put the paragraphs here)
I suspect this might be funnier without the fourth frame, which makes it sad. Somebody else suggested it was better without the fifth. So I compromised and ruined it twice by including both.
It has the potential to be accurate but for the moment it is not.
page 43 of part 1 of the bimshwellian comicoid, partially redrawn, from that. Alright, I spent a few days on this, can you even tell? I keep thinking “i can reuse the old parts that work and correct the things that don’t” but if I change one part I have to change the whole thing. I had solid lines and colors, but I did NOT know how I thought monster imp legs worked. And I didn’t know how the fleshy non-bone side of arms worked. I still do not know but I am better at faking it. It may be enough to make the text stop infringing on the frames it does not originate from. But if I go in there to fix one thing, I inadvertently start looking for others.
In the interest of honesty, I like the character Squall, from the video game Final Fantasy 8, that I alluded to the notorious moodiness of in a previous item.
However, I am aware of the popular criticism that he is a self-centered and terrible hero and I think it is funny. I think it is funny but ultimately it is someone else’s joke. “Maybe I’m a Lion” is not something that Squall ever says but it is the title of some music that plays during one of his heroic moments near the end of the game, possibly based on the composer misreading Squall’s last name “Leonhart” as “Lionheart.” Although Squall also can acquire a replacement sword-gun that is called Lionheart. You’d have to be a complete nerd to know what any of the music is called, of course; even somebody who knows his last name is Leonhart and that his sword is Lionheart and that welsh rarebit is his favorite type of rarebit wouldn’t necessarily have studied all the backstory on the soundtrack, so anyone I want to think I am clever probably does not.
Popular culture commentary in illustrated form is never going to be for me since I take too long to draw things and do not reach the right conclusions that will have people know what I am trying to say, unless I personally do not agree with those conclusions, which means I will not be properly invested. And while on this occasion I managed to care enough about the biggest movie of the year while it was still in theaters, I tied it to something else from 15 years ago and even worse, offered a criticism, which means fans, the only people who would care, would not,
unless they missed my point, meaning they would be uninterested in anything else I did that couldn’t be interpreted as a dumb fandom homage, and I should not have bothered if I wasn’t getting money, and I wasn’t. This was by far the most popular “art” I ever put on the crumbumblr website, and yet it still wasn’t all THAT popular, and didn’t lead to any engagement with my other pictures. It won’t mean anything unless I keep drawing star wars junk, and the more I do, the less of me there will be in it and the less of me there will be in anything. The same as happened when I got conscripted into the “furry” gang. Nobody cares about thought or effort, just well-polished compliance. And as a result I became an angry person incapable of being positive or making friends, and even my compliance was shunned, and with it having no personal meaning to me, I only got more angry, and probably have written the same thing here about twice a year since 2011, which I forget, because I only write it to stop thinking about it, which means if the topic comes up again it will be fresh. Fandoms are a trap. And there is less immediate incentive to free one’s self from a fresh trap than an obviously old and sour trap.
The same person who forwarded my picture also forwarded this. I cannot well coexist with the 50 thousand people (assuming most of them both “like”d and “reblog”ged, therefore accruing a score over 100,000) for whom a drawing of chummy, angle-bodied, out of costume, ostensibly star wars characters but who knows, in a void, doing nothing, was the best thing they saw all week. This might as well be the cast of Streptococcus Paiella. Hey how about the next Star Wars movie is just a 3 hour Dawson’s Creek reunion, would you like that? You, as a fan of interesting characters, thought the ideal course of action was to reduce them to boring fans of themselves. That is to say, boring but POSITIVE, socially COMPLIANT fans of themselves. And an army-sized group agreed with your decision despite the mumbling fake-humble introduction you gave it. More people openly endorse turning interesting into mundane than the entire population of Monaco. How am I losing to this? I lose because I seek approval from people who approve of rubbish.
Back to my main afterthought, dismissing Final Fantasy 8 just because one character is moody and noncompliant misses the whole point of why the game doesn’t work. I did own and use a copy of the game when it was newish, unaware of the criticisms of others, and discovered afterward that mine, while numerous, differed. Alright, so why am I letting them control how I refer to it in retrospect?
Even people in the game complain about how moody Squall is! Which doesn’t excuse it, but that means, if that is your sole criticism, you need to say more than that. His whole character development is that he learns to stop being as much of a jerk but without making any implausible leap of temperament or pretending to be happy in his miserable video game sword murder quest. So him being a jerk is not the reason the game is dumb, and ultimately not even true!
I think Squall’s less conflicted “friends” are lacking in emotional depth and send mixed messages. They hassle him to go on unusual journeys and then complain when he does. He tries to leave them behind, and they they know it, and instead of stopping him they magically get in front of him and mock him for leaving, and drag him back into their toxic psychological abyss. They would toss Squall in a ditch and laugh if he wasn’t good at murdering. Also I suddenly have an odd premonition that I should warn you I named Squall “Cupcake” on my most recent play-through.
Or Quistis would, anyway. Quistis is the most manipulative and entitled person around. In recognition of that, the game’s writers gave Quistis a fan club. In recognition of rubbish, Wikia writers wrote about it.
And through that I have learned that there are actual Quistis fans, and it shocks me that they can’t find a real person to treat them so poorly.
Thanks for standing back and telling me I FAILED, you who has never tried anything that looks challenging, such as putting that word into a sentence. I’m sure dresses made out of salmon meat are actually very trendy where Quistis comes from so I doubt she is standing against a crowd with that fashion decision. At least her crony, Zell, (the one in the middle) legitimately wants to be helpful and just lacks any personal ambition, but Quistis is a wretch.
But again, bad characters aren’t at fault. I was looking through my old screenshots for this and it just reminded me of QUISTIS everywhere. The fault is on the hokey writing, that would be funny if the characters were not supposed to be more realistic than previous games in the series. But I can live with them. The problem with the game is that it is a big glossy box of unfulfilled promises that somebody clearly intended to fulfill at some point in the process. I can see a framework for a very good game, and having that frame so empty in the end is more frustrating than something that is just lazy, like its contemporary Legend of Dragoon, and more likely to have a player dwelling on it 15 years later. Of course it helps if that player is out of touch with games that came afterward and looks for any opportunity to connect a new experience to it in an attempt to grasp some sense of belonging in a culture they hate but bafflingly want to be liked by, so long as they don’t know what else the likers like.
It looks as if I compared my dissatisfaction with final fantasy 8 to my dissatisfaction with Star Wars in one of my oldest existent website entries, and without clarifying, so apparently I need to do that now or risk writing something even longer than this when I am 45ish. And it looks like I, again, went with the crowd and blamed everything on a few characters, Jar Jar Binx and whiny bowl haircut Anakin, even though fault truly lies with bad writing, running time that exceeds content time, and the few good things being promptly forgotten or killed. And I more than likely knew that when I wrote that. But I lacked the foresight to consider “15 years from now none of the people pretending to like me, that I pretend to be likable by them for now are still going to bother.” Eh I thought I would be comfortably wealthy and widely respected for my bold opinions on current topics and uniquely profound artwork by 2006.
Finally, somebody who UNDERSTANDS me!
I am not even going to pretend I know anything about cooking. I think it might push this series more in the direction I want it to go if I am honest about what I do not understand, also.
I should also be honest that I am terribly amused when somebody gets poked in the nose.
And initially the item was square-shaped and being removed from an oven, and I like this dialog line better with “oven” in it, but since I didn’t at any point show it going into the oven, I could not make that work with the pot I have already shown being fixated on. It shouldn’t even be important enough to mention but I literally have too much anxiety to sleep lately over dumber things than that. The fact that I did not previously draw an oven into the same room was thankfully of less concern to me.
Also I keep forgetting to mention that the first book can be bought from here. Or rather I wanted to make a longer post about it, but I also wanted to wait until after I made another post explaining that weird “maybe I’m a lion” post, so that they are buried together, and I have been unable to find a shovel big enough.
I think you are missing the greater message here. Also you may need to trim your carpet.
I was concerned I had forgotten how to draw with with clean colors and non-blurred lines. Now I am yet more concerned that I have not.
NOW you’re bringing that up? You really should have solved that problem before we got this far!
Eh well I must remember that old saying: Big plans, pigs for hands. I just made it up but in a few years it will be old! It will be a classic like drink in sand, feet in hand, and all the more impressive since your hands will now be pigs.
This is what my real art looks like now. I need to remind people now and later that my natural tendency is to draw things with no bearing on reality and even less on socially acceptable non-realities. The fact that this is somewhat clumsily drawn is not an allusion to the expression “ham-handed” which means to be bungling or unskilled; I assure you it is not a terminology I use and consequently I forgot that it existed. I think somebody who actually had pigs for hands should not even be expected to not be clumsy, and so criticizing them for it would be most unfair. My aggressive opening remark was due to the protagonist announcing the pig hands when we have work to do.
Are you not sure who your friends are? Whether you’re a good guy or a bad guy? Do you wish people would shut up about what a hero your deadbeat dad is and how little sense your sword makes?
Maybe you’re not a jedi or a sith at all, and maybe you’re a lion.
This is a very thematically incongruous website!
—————-
This was already half-written when I posted the last one. Backing out was not an option.
I suppose my previous item is more a criticism of “news” in general than the individual humans I mentioned. I am meant to take “news” more seriously than “tabloids” or tv shows about boring people in mansions, but it has no journalistic standards. It promotes the two party political system and the associated agenda of fearmongering. CBS news was on that day instead, but presumably ABC did the same thing: When reporting on the recent, widely publicized San Bernardino murders, carried out by supposed Isis sympathizers, beside the reporter were displayed pictures of convoys of dark-hooded people in deserts riding in jeeps carrying huge guns. San Bernardino is not in a desert! The shooting was done by TWO people, who look JUST THE SAME as anybody else, in a NORMAL city like any other, just as we have HUNDREDS such mass bullet murders yearly. One of those people is from HERE, United Statia. And the other had been here for a solid year, and was considered a permanent resident. We have a murder problem HERE, done by people who live HERE. 3000 angry druids did not drive jeeps across two oceans and start firing freedom-seeking missiles as soon as they touched blessed American dirt, and if they continue to not do that it will not be because Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump or Ronald McDonald stood at The Border, like that is a place, and stopped them.
This San Bernardino mention, I should add, came amidst a story about a man with a KNIFE and a FAKE BOMB who ran into a POLICE STATION in Paris. That idiot had a note declaring allegiance to Isis. That’s the dumbest story I heard all year, and even half a month in that’s saying something. I could duct tape a colecovision to my chest and get shot, too. That I tried doesn’t prove anything, and that you shot me to death only proves that I cannot be questioned. You could shoot me first and write a note that says “I is Isis I hate good guys signed me ps. only true patriots can stop me and prevent forest fires” and I couldn’t stop you. When The News is going to report on stuff like that, they need to present it so that I don’t assume they made it up.
Just this week there was a suicide attack in Istanbul. Isis supposedly claimed credit. First of all, since it was a SUICIDE attack, the attacker is dead so Ladysmith Black Mambazo could claim credit. This story I saw back on good old ABC again, and the graphic showed TANKS this time. Isis is not driving 50 tanks into Southern California to back up those jeeps it also isn’t sending! When are we going to stop thinking of these conflicts in World War 2 terms? This is not us vs them. It is us vs him and him and him and mostly him and her and him and on like that. There is not an organized military infrastructure to target, that tells you when it is coming, and that is itself all on the same “side.” USA is obsessed with world war 2 because that is the last war that it looked good in, because that was the last war it understood at all. Millions were dying in Europe for years and the US came in late to be heroes. It had casualties but not on the level of any other country involved, and consequently learned nothing from the conflict except “we’re always right and we’re always the strongest,” which it already believed. And so all our policy makers grew up continuing to believe that. Network news programs showing me armored hoards advancing in formation in daylight when it talks about murderers hiding in crowds and blowing themselves up has two purposes: to make me afraid, and to make me seek safety in conventional western military counter-measures, and likewise to trust the reports I get of that military’s accomplishment.
Even Nazi Germany was a western power, which used western tactics and western rules. The US does not know how to engage what is actually out there now, but its military industrial complex knows how to keep getting paid to make big dumb expensive things that can fly around and kill random people, and then boast about all the “enemy combatants” that got blowed up. We bombed crucial Isis installations! We killed Al Qaeda’s number 2! We GOT the BAD GUYS! So why are there more bad guys than ever? Either we aren’t really getting anyone, or whatever we are getting is making more guys go bad. We hear about French or Turkish forces striking back after recent supposed Islamic State attacks, but why is there anything for them TO back-strike? Why did they WAIT, and why didn’t they finish?
And we don’t even necessarily have real pilots involved who can personally verify or be held accountable for anything. We are sending robots to kill and trusting whoever runs the robot to tell us what they thought the robot saw.
Even scarier is considering that such an absence of outcome is deliberate, that there is no intention of resolving or concluding conflict. So I am scared anyway, doubting the people who try to make me afraid. And they are afraid. Always terrified that some other country not aligned to American interests will build an atomic bomb, and convinced that any country with the means to do so will, since that is what Americans would do. Americans are afraid of the force that they set the precedent for using.
Which is not to say the US is alone in perpetuating warfare to keep its own interests on top, but as the one with the most soldiers and the most distance and safety from the countries it is trying to control, when this stuff goes wrong we suffer loudest and venge least discriminately.
These are the conclusions I reach, quite on my own, when my information is delivered so clumsily, and the clumsiness seems deliberate. And if
Strictly regarding frivolity that I understand, I previously griped about ABC news devoting extensive coverage to “leaked” Star Wars junk that could only possibly have been leaked by the people who tell ABC news what to report on. Incoming kardashian trashian facts are also desirable, and if there aren’t any, that is still a story. Each winter they report that it’s cold outside. Unless it isn’t cold outside yet, which means they report that it isn’t cold. When Pope Francis was in the US this September, that was the top story for a whole week even though Mr. Pope did the same thing each day of the week, which was to get driven around and address an audience. In fact the same exact stuff he does when he isn’t in the US. No other head of state gets that kind of coverage, but no other head of state has that many followers. So the story wasn’t what the pope was doing or does, just that he EXISTS and how popular he is. And people still think The Media has an anti-christian bias. That’s not it at all. The Media has an anti-substance bias. I pledge to you: If I have nothing to say, it will be nothing about me or nothing of personal relevance. I will not share the nothing of others, and will not ask others to distribute my own nothing.
A longer story of my year transition, of which I will tell a remarkably vague and short version, is that I was visiting my father at a hospital(s) from December 28 to January 6, and related duties then resumed or introduced themselves for the first time.
But what is this? Could it be the Yale New Haven Hospital was the point marked on corny cartoon treasure maps all these years? And nobody bothered to dig it up yet?
I’m rich! That means I no longer need to feel like my life is a complete joke when I see things like
This millionaire who is already famous and whose moderately tolerable and occasionally not completely dissonant songs have been played incessantly for the past five years really made the tough decision by agreeing to receive more money to appear in the front page cover story of this magazine about how she doesn’t do that and doesn’t she look so glamorous.
In related news, I have devised a test to determine sanity:
If you have ever spoken to the press about “haters,” even though there are actually people paying you just to do that, then the people paying you are insane. Especially if you only have a first name. If you are being paid just to exist and complain about people who don’t like you, you floating indistinguishable head, then congratulations, you didn’t win, but everyone else lost. Your silver spoon golden calf family gets everything and is not permitted to be criticized. How could I hate that? I should aspire to it. I will work really hard at being born to rich parents next time who can have frivolous surgery on a whim and be praised for it instead of because there is a mass of goop in their brains slowly killing them and without the confidence that they will be financially stable afterward.
This is the best advice I have ever received from a magazine rack.
In the interest of fairness, “Khloe’s” biological father, Robert Kardashian was killed by esophageal cancer at an age 4 years less than my own cancer father currently lives at, although I could say his quality of living has been rather crummy for over ten years, having already dealt with prostate cancer and continues to deal with a loss of motor skills inspired by cerebral ataxia, and he also never volunteered for the Orenthal Jingleheimer Simpson criminal defense team. Perhaps Kabloe makes the point “hey life is hard even when you’re rich careful what you wish for you just might get it mo money mo problems ok guys I’m literally terrified I’ll wake up tomorrow and still be loaded” but since I’d have to buy this stupid magazine and make some effort at comprehending the text to know, that will remain a mystery.
I remember months ago, ABC World News Tonight, at the start of the broadcast and before each commercial break, teasing an update on Lamar Odom’s condition. It was not specified who Lamar Odom was or what was wrong with him, so that his “condition” should be of interest. I listened for the story just to find out who he was, but that information was never delivered. When I looked up Kloby today, I saw that she was married to whom? Lamar Odom. So either I am supposed to know who Lamar is exclusively based on his Kardashian konnection, or the fact that I am supposed to know about him already is what made him kardashian-worthy.
In fact, they supposedly had a tv show together in which both lacked last names and were presumed noteworthy merely through being masses of cells.
Consider: one of the most viewed information programs in the country, if not the world, has 21 minutes to deliver all the information in the world, and it found cause to refer to this random basket-ball player –which, admittedly, is more of a definition than Khloe can achieve– four separate times possibly only because he did sex on a kardashian. And then the story itself was, essentially, “Oh, Lamar? He’s fine.” The dumb teases had as much content as the actual story. The story could have been delivered in the space of the first tease. “Tonight on ABC World News, Lamar’s fine, so we won’t mention him again and waste the time of people to whom he is not important.” But that wouldn’t happen because the news is just as fake as real reality. THAT observation is not even news! Clearly I need to observe less. Which we have established previously, but avoiding all information is not a realistic expectation. So I will try and reach a conclusion on this matter so that I do not not feel so compelled as I presently do, and can change from perpetually reporting on bad reporting that is perpetually unchanging.
Comments made toward my 2015 summary:
of course I celebrated the same way I always do, with an evening at the theatre.
I think it goes without saying that I am quite depressed!
SHUT YOUR BEAK, BIRD!
2015 in pictures
Ordinarily I post this on the last night of the year. This time I did it on the first night of the next year to give people the chance to recover from my explosive shop rite reporting. Undoubtedly future historians will regard that as the story which defined 2015 so the literal definition of the overall year was less urgent. Nonetheless it must be delivered.
january
february
March
April
may
june
july
august
september
October
November
December
Usually I would say that is everything that happened that year, but I concede that nothing happened at all in a few of those months, and I wish that yet less had happened than that!