Wordpress, the system that manages this website content, is agony.
Do you see the list of recent posts on this page? That truly basic, unimpressive list? It took me all yesterday to implement. I thought it would surely be faster to find an automatic method to make the system check for new posts and order them by date than for me to manually manage that list myself.
I sought out the wordpress forums, and turned up old posts on the topic. At each stage I found an existing request for help with my problem:
Everybody gives the scantest possible amount of information to get rid of you, and then the junk still does not work. At that point I would need to find a post that simultaneously requested a solution to the base problem, the sidebar problem and the appearance problem, as a prior request does not exist. In the case when I asked about a problem for myself, nobody answered and the topic was closed despite being unresolved, because they only have easy answers and would rather ignore something that confounds them than admit to not knowing. Or maybe I seemed like somebody who would call out an easy answer for being useless.
I should explain that wordpress uses “themes” to allow users to change their sites’ appearances easily from a guided-user-interface, without editing code. But that only allows certain basic changes. “Widgets” were a later addition to themes that allowed even more changes, but could not themselves be changed. And still only worked on sidebars. “Plug-ins” are different from widgets, because they are not integrated into the wordpress code, which ironically makes them easier to force to work WITH wordpress the way I want them to. So I need to dig into the code anyway, every time, for everything, and test it 800 times until it works or I find a disappointing but functional compromise to fall back on, which I hate doing, which is why I use the same graphics for months or years at a time instead of one month each like I formerly did before I installed wordpress. The whole thing barely works and needs constant encouragement.
Why is a basic reasonable thing: having a list of posts NOT be on the SIDE of the page, so improbable and impossible that the developers did not anticipate it being necessary and none of the dorks who understand this stuff in their spare time ever saw a need to figure it out? The exact same garbage happened for my automated comic strip site-section (although it was over the number of pages displayed at once and not the folder issue), and the coppermine art gallery mechanism. And for Zdoom, ten years ago, which is why I never finished the dingdang thing and still mentally fixate on it. Every time every time every time. the thing I want is always just outside of permissible, for no reason that is apparent. So I have to figure it out or leave it behind.
I have had various diagnoses throughout my life; tourette syndome here, asperger syndrome there, high functioning autism, disco fever, what-have-you-ever. These mean that I need help with some things. But if nobody can provide help, is it really me who is disabled? Outside the internet, I am surrounded by people who drink themselves sick, smash their expensive telephones, misplace their cars, will not read their own mail, will not let themselves become aware of their bills, stereotype and condemn anyone whose opinion differs, adopt pets they cannot look after (and dump those pets on me), buy junk they cannot afford, and then do not use or return the junk. Am I disabled just because I cannot instantly bond with any yahoo off the street over my own screwups? Hey I broke my wrist assaulting a piece of architecture too! That makes us normal! Let’s go spend $300 on two cups of beer!
Technology that is supposed to make life easier and be so “professional”-looking becomes itself such a massive burden that we give up on things that we might have finished had the technology not insisted on becoming so gosh darn convenient. And when I persevere it is only through hacky patchwork repairs that look uglier than if I had just stuck with the outdated thing I was replacing. The outdated thing that has all its data in one file, in one folder. Then a useless idiot happens along and tells me I should have been using this or that BETTER miracle system from the beginning.
Once again the only way to get what I want is to edit the actual wordpress files outside of the theme stuff. Which are in different folders, and inevitably lead to copies downloaded and new versions uploaded to the wrong folder amidst all the folder switching I will have to do trying to bring the css and php into accord. And when wordpress has a new version, it updates itself, quite without asking, and thinks nothing of overwriting my changes outside the theme folder, even if it has not itself changed the files that I edited. So I may end up needing to fix it every time the version changes. But I am capable of changing it! I am capable of fixing it! For the time being I have control. That is what life is about for losers: you find a way to co-exist with things that are set up to make you give up. You do not win, but you keep yourself from losing completely. And watch out for widgets that pretend to be your pal but just want to hold you back and expect rewards for it.
And I may in the end decide that the “page” view does not work for me anyway, and opt for something outside of wordpress, to which I can add some customized mechanism that reads wordpress excerpts without messing anything else up because it is not itself built on wordpress. But I will have dropped the wordpress option because I thought it looked bad, not because dorkhnical support refused to support me.
This is not a mopey entry. This is how I conquer mopiness.
A possible back cover for the hopefully imminently imminent self-published first volume of the bimshwellian comicoid. In fact, the exact same volume that was hopefully imminent a year ago. That plan got shoved behind other things, which then got shoved behind other things. After 11 months of such shoving, the management got confused and accidentally shoved the first shoved item in front of something else, and my intention is to act on it before ARRRRRRRRRRRRRGHGHF I’VE BEEN SHOVED
On this occasion, I wanted to give potential viewers a sense of the content without needing them to have any existing idea of the characters, and without having to read much. And also none of the actual pages work on their own anyway whatever your casual tolerance to mass wordage is.
Next comes an alternate version, that while personally amusing to me, distracts from the one joke, that I need to get out without dwelling on, because it is not very special and has almost certainly been done in some form previously.
Also, Yibrik may ultimately be too strange to appear within my best-attempt-at-normal-person bait. Further, within what is to be the book, yib only does appear in one frame, unacknowledged, and speaks in one other frame, unseen, so nobody would have any reason to attempt to figure out what its problem is.
However, I may use some variation on this version for the interior pages of the third/sixth chapter (keeping in mind that book part-1 will only be half of internet part-1), by which point yibrik’s strangeness will be more welcome, and the spectacle of kumquat going shopping at a conventional supermarket, with pog and yibrik, will be more apparent as strange, and likewise welcome in its strangeness. I meant it here to be strange, but now realize it is likely to be taken in the Pixar mundane-conditioning sense of strange, where we see monsters going to a normal-looking school or deformed insects driving in normal looking streets and aren’t even supposed to think there is anything silly about that, which will work in my favor because as I said I need to get normal people to look at what I made, because weird people usually do not have as much money, except when they want me to draw something else.
Of course usually only weirdos read comic books, but you know what I am committed to this and need to do it just to stop fixating on it, so I desire that you stop second-guessing me!
This year’s hope is coming picture.
Tracey Sullivan, the race-runner, opted for a less chaotic setup that better reflects what the money actually goes to: holistic treatments for hospital patients. The hoofed creature here is applying some manner of hand-wavy therapy called Reiki and not in fact contemplating strangling the reptile. I added the dorks behind the trees without asking or being asked to just to make it amusing for myself.
Due to cost matters, the color total was reduced. Since idiots are cheap I was able to keep them all in there.
This was the first sketch. It had, to me all the important elements: the number of years we had been doing it and something bad about to happen. I may miss the point of “hope.” Also of Roman numerals because before I sent it I wondered why I had written eight instead of seven and erased one of the columns, and after sending it realized I had in fact written seven the first time, and that is now said six, and drew the last column back in. And then I told this story and realized it made more sense if I erased the column anew.
It was at this point that Tracey asked me if I could draw someone in a hospital bed receiving reiki.
It was a good question!
I looked up pictures of “reiki” on the internet, and mostly found mildly abstract pictures of hands with explody light coming out, so it seemed reasonable to assume that it was a destructive and chaotic force. However, in the end I was asked to use my upper left design, where nothing was happening! The bottom sketch shows that I still could not help myself and tried to insert trouble into it, but in the end I kept it rather simple, which was probably for the best since I would not want to upset someone so dangerous.
I also deemed depicting reiki being done with a rake, as it is pronounced as if it is, as too obvious.
This was in a previous entry, when I got temporarily on to the topic of passive acceptance of victimhood, but it was not meant to be the primary topic, but it was very boring. I will surreptitiously insert it here immediately before I post something slightly more interesting, so that I can know I posted it without worrying that anybody might have read and been bored by it.
Shia LaBeouf, during a performance art piece in which he would not speak, and his collaborators who arranged the exhibition report that LaBeouf was raped during the performance. By someone who had already been “whipping” him for ten minutes, and there were lots of people around, and the whipping raping psychopath was allowed to escape afterward. Am I supposed to accept that not speaking in the name of “art” is more important than calling for help, trying to protect yourself from trauma, or are people so terrified of appearing critical that they won’t ask for additional details that will make this seem less ridiculous? Did the person have a gun, even though there were guards checking for that? Was there a threat first? Piers Morgan is a jackass. His sentiment is not mine. There is no excuse for raping, I should not need to say that. And he also spoke from the perspective of inherited outrage, because that is also popular: to be the first to get offended on behalf of another party*.
But you might as well have a performance art project where you stand in the Lincoln Tunnel and then lament your plight that somebody in the world was mean enough to not drive around you. Morgan himself, on Morgan’s own tv program let Alex Jones yell at him for 20 minutes. They are both jackasses that deserve each other.
The first article ends by suggesting that LaBeouf did not get police involved because he was ashamed the he couldn’t defend himself and so kept the story to himself, except he didn’t because two other “artists” on the scene knew something was up and we know about it now well within the statute of limitations.
Is the word “rape” the problem? If we say the woman whipped Monsieur TheBeef for ten minutes, then stripped off his clothes and dumped a vat of pudding on him without raping, then would we be allowed to think that silently letting somebody do that to you, and then silently not telling your co-dorks that somebody did that, is peculiar? We have a fear now of discussing rape that we don’t have with murder, even though murder is worse.
It is not easy to sit in a room for hours, not knowing what people are going to do to you. But if you do it on purpose because you fancy yourself an “Artist” then I have difficulty feeling sympathy. Conversely, I have no sympathy for artists who put in no effort at all. Art is pretty stupid. It is one of our great fame lotteries. How many gimmicky boneheads have we made millionaires out of just because nobody with money will acknowledge that everything they do is ugly?
Rachel Dolezal, who famously passed herself as being of African descent when she was not: I have no problem with her identifying with another culture more than the one she was born into. I have a problem if she invented fake hate crimes against herself so that she could publicize that they occurred. It means she wants to be black because she finds glamour in being of a discriminated-against social class. She wants to be a victim.
She was initially discriminated against, while openly-white, because people THOUGHT she was blackish. Society laughs at that sort of claim, I think unjustly, and so Dolezal redevoted her life to accruing discrimination she could get sympathy for. We raise people to seek exploitable victimhood.
Gorf it took me two weeks to get remotely comfortable with posting this, and in that period I have added a further portion that I once again am not sure I want to post, and am so deferring for later consideration. That is life. Except I explicitly concluded it by saying I was not going to write any more depressing entries, and so until I post that depressing entry I have nothing in place to prevent me from writing more.
so is earnestly trying to appreciate wrong-headed remakes for stuff that worked without being remade, so I can at least swear off doing that.
Portable Texas
Because a showdown can occur in any location at any moment.
(filmed on-location in Portable Texas)
You might possibly have encountered this older version.
I wanted to touch it up for printing, but I had some issues with the background. First of all, it does not demonstrate Portable Texas well to show it being used in a Texas-like environment.
Also, it was from a period when I was obsessed with creating the impression of otherworldliness through the color-shifting of commonplace things, until I got around to coming up completely with non-common things. So grass became yellow, tree trunks became blue, rocks became purple and all that. But these were not necessarily aesthetically pleasing, since all natural objects have a flow to them that my arbitrary shifts lacked, and in fact real grass can be yellow, real tree trunks can be blue and real rocks can be purple, given the proper circumstances and lighting. So it just looked like I had no grasp of light. On this occasion I seem to also have decided that cactuses should be red, even though I already shifted another green object to yellow, so the ugliness was not even consistent, and that desert rocks were green, so that people would just assume I was taking a lazy shortcut to drawing grass, because nobody else would know that I only drew YELLOW grass. I cannot trust people to do their research so those needed to go!
The original probably is funnier, because the more I work over a drawing, the less sincere positive energy it has, but at least less people will think I do not know how to draw grass.
Without even reading this story (and I did) I see the real problem.
Maybe I am so far out of The Loop that I no longer realize there is a loop and am unprepared to defy gravity going around it, but why is it expected that a Zelda game should provide a female hero? Apart from Wand of Gamelon, one never has up to this point. Many series do provide them, but it is not a reasonable expectation that everybody now do that. This is not like restaurants having clean restrooms; it is a made up waste of time. A female chief executive or president might be revolutionary, and take steps that a man never would, but a video game character still obeys the whims of the developers, who are still mostly men.
We can make the industry more inviting for women developers, I suppose, but I do not believe we are entitled to play video games with protagonists that remind us of ourselves, and I do not believe that would even be an ideal turnout in many cases.
I suppose the difference is that this is supposedly a customizable character beyond just the red link, blue link and original recipe link in the picture, but considering the childlike figures and Diana Prince circa 1968 outfits, I would still say testosterone isn’t what’s winning the war here. if you had told me those were female links, I could not have challenged it. You can claim the Link in the first game is female, since the art is vaguer and nobody in the game indirectly refers to the hero. You could claim Megaman was female were it not for the second half of his name. Obviously if Capcom were to designate a female Megaman it would have long skinny legs, bambi facial features and hair flowing out of the helmet even though as a robot it is neither male nor female
exactly.
And I would say that misses the point, if there is one, which there might not be. I think hyrule’s hero could very easily be designated female, but it wasn’t, and oh well.
Nintendo’s original female hero, Samus, was stripped of her armor and sent out into space dressed like an aerobics instructor/mermaid (depending on the in-game time taken) the second the “this is a woman” reveal was made, because we really cannot trust male game developers to develop a female hero that is not a tightly-bound sex object. I am not saying “give up on female heroes,” just to treat the ones we have better and not take an affirmative action approach to producing new ones. I am sure our noble fan-artists can “fix” any that they find inadequately-insufficiently-covered afterward.
I have never heard anybody say “I like the Metroid series and do not like the Zelda series at all because I identify with female heroes better.” Anyone who did would be an absurd person. That nobody knew Samus was female at first shows that on a fundamental level, this is irrelevant to the game portion of the game. But maybe “game as game” is going out of style.
This reminds me of the situation a year or more years ago around Game-I’ve-Never-Heard-of-That-People-Assume-I’ve-Heard-of-#739 where presumably prospective players were disgruntled that the game did not permit homogayxual relationships. It came at me in crumbumblr, which studies have shown nothing that I respond to positively will come at me in.
Does the mii system even let you choose to be neither? I bet it doesn’t. That would mean no personal representation in ANY game that used them. Although again I would probably never play any of those games, and if I did I would rather my figure look like someone else. Still hardly ideal, but it is my own problem.
I think gay people have a right to complain about lack of representation, and in many ways their fight is my fight, but I do not have a huge heap of sympathy on this one. I do in the sense that it seems like this would be a basic thing to change and to have it not changed is frustrating, but I can handle if it never is changed, and it probably will be anyway.
And if you got through that, it was probably the first time anybody read it. You get popular on tumblr either by being widely liked or widely hated. I am too angry to be liked but not angry enough on the right topics to be hated. I know of somebody who gets regularly abused for having an uncommon sexual preference, but he also responds passively to the abuse as he posts the evidence. You get support online by looking weak and exhibiting your weakness. The dominant culture thinks this is enough; criticizing a consciously weak person for not taking any step in the direction of self-defense is “victim-blaming” and worse than actual abuse.
Then a long interlude here about Shia LaBoeuf that got too complicated, but it ended with pudding.
I used to let scumbags push me around on [every] forum [I used between 2002 and 2007], enduring mobs of people I hated to follow one or two that I liked that wouldn’t even tell their friends to cut it out, and I hate myself for it. “Oh you’re gay because ha ha you’re gay fag (smiley face.)” They would say this when I had usernames like “cupcake” and used a butterfly for my avatar, thinking “gay” is a good insult.
Now I stand up for myself and explain my points in detail, and “detail” is not a fun reaction for anyone to read, so they give up. My personal ambiguity leads to tiresome situations but is ultimately not interesting enough for anyone to try and victimize deliberately. Now this here seems like it wants to present me as a victim because it might seem like I imply someone else’s situation is easier, but I am GLAD I don’t respond passively to antagonism. I am glad people don’t think I will let them tear off my clothes and dump pudding on me. That remark no longer makes sense now that I have removed the interlude I mentioned earlier.
And my existence needs some work but I am glad I don’t need an imaginary human on a computer screen to be said to do sex a certain way to validate it. While you have a gay pride parade I will have an ambiguous repressed sexuality shame walk inside my house that I am afraid to leave in the daytime. My skin burns easily. However, I can go out, and when I do, I cover my vulnerable regions instead of cursing the sun.
Reflecting back on this matter a full summer month after the initial posting, I think that I would indeed curse the sun, but I would still protect myself first.
More to the point, I probably need to make real friends and be less aware of ones who play video games all day every day, or worse, just watch video of someone else playing poorly, and then chain-complain about aspects of them that really aren’t important. A multiplayer Zelda game would necessarily have most of the depth cut out of it, and a “life-simulator” isn’t a game at all so I welcome people to be dissatisfied with them for any reason they can get, and so give up playing them faster.
And then get back to drawing idiotic fanart for better games.
And a gay man drew that.
page 39 redrawn from the first part of that
This one has been too-long coming. I drew it differently than the other pages I have been redrawing, where I vectorized and upscaled the line-art. This one had no lineart to vectorize, rather some scribbly experimental technique that while not totally hideous, it was partially so, especially since I changed how I did it halfway down the page, and I dropped it immediately, but never bothered to bring it in line with the pages around it, so I had to redraw it fresh, so it STILL looks out of place, just not as jarringly. There are a few more pages coming where I tried to use pencil lines but I at least used solid colors and less heaps of limbs and so interpreting them should not take nearly as long.
You are no longer a misguided self-insertion so that doesn’t help!
As I suggested a few years ago, my experience with hotel morning food has not generally been positive. I never had a free complimentary continental breakfast where I imagined I might pay for the service were it not free. I like orange juice, in differing doses depending on the quality, and muffins (not as much as some people), but doubtlessly this is covered by the room fare to some degree and therefore not truly free, and I have need for the presumably more expensive items that are usually not included anyhow.
Yar ho har tee hee har, a waffle machine! Waffles are good, right? I liked the freezer-borne Eggo variant of my bygone days slightly less than Pop-Tarts, but those were not FRESH BAKED! Apparently you can call something fresh baked when the waffle batter itself is prepared, probably from a frozen mix, and dispensed sickly from a tube, because I put the sickly batter into the machine and oversee its operation myself. You get to lie to me about freshness and give me an errand at the same time! How fresh.
Notice that illustration for steps 1 and 2 on the diagram are exactly the same, so that without another person demonstrating I might think I only need to turn the device part way. That is not the case. Thankfully there was another waffle machine beside this one, and another person came along to use it properly without any confusion whatsoever before I had stood in front of this one for four solid minutes waiting for it to do nothing.
The more detailed instructions provided by the hotel also only show the machine turned part-way. The WORDS say to turn it all the way, but gosh I’m only standing here for three-and-a-half minutes while my machine does nothing; I don’t have time to read all that. And if I had, I might have reached the end and noticed the word CAUTION followed by no more information, suggesting that the person writing the instructions succumbed to the force being warned against prior to finishing the warning, and I would have departed the premises with haste and cowardice.
But in my ignorance I persevered and opted for an undersized waffle. A waffle is the sort of food object that I need to look at before I commit to eating a large quantity of and also if I messed up the construction, I would not force myself to eat as much damaged food. My personal rule is that I must eat anything I make myself as long as I can do it without vomiting. Some part of me hates the other parts. I must work to thwart it without directly opposing it.
With that said, looking at this makes me sad in a way that a full waffle would not, regardless of whether I wanted to eat it. With THAT said,
These waffles should not be served on polystyrene plates, for I might confuse the two and bite the wrong one. My presumption is that the waffle is at least digestible, or capable of being expelled without uncommon internal damage.
It occurs to me that waffles are the sort of food that people get accustomed to covering with other gooply materials that are easier to make and of more uniform flavor. Therefore I am more likely to be victimized by a bad waffle. I am not an advocate for meat as a necessity at all meals, but in this case bacon would be essential to make this pleasant, since I dislike goop. Sausage is also acceptable under some circumstances.
not all circumstances. A self-serving station providing these materials was present, though I did not take a picture of it at the time, but its appearance was similar. I overheard a child’s voice speak nearby: “it looks like barf.” Again, not in all circumstances! Certainly, if you consumed it, your future barf would be similar in composition. But I suspected I could not eat it without vomiting, which would violate my earlier rule in addition to proving right the child I just corrected. I am a person of honor.
On future days of my tenure, solid sausage objects occupied the space of the barf-alike. I thought they were decent and functional but this website is no fun if I have a good time of anything. Website overrides honor. It is much better if I do not eat.
Better for my enemy! Oh were I only not so particular about food! What a hero I would be.
You know what, laughing at me doesn’t help. In fact it is quite hurtful. My self-deprecation is in jest and not an invitation for you to join in!
Oh how can I be cross with such a jolly fellow? I always have such a great time with drunk people and am sure history will regard him highly. When you have a name like “Dong” you have to be a nice guy to get through life or else you turn into somebody who digs up the bodies of people you don’t like so you can break their bones and toss them into the street.
I am sure it was a very pleasant and well-tended park!
Why is a regular baseball hat considered fashionable outside of sporting contexts, but I never see any non-baseball-players casually wearing the reinforced plastic version? This is much better defense if somebody throws a pine cone at you trying to knock off your stupid hat.
A crummily-constructed advertisement that conveys basic information and subtly implies the matter I addressed very non-subtly on the previous post that went on between when the picture was made and the lettering was added.
You are welcome to come, even if they are not! There is no reception; just show up if you feel inclined to and are in the area within the month. I assume you will not be, but that is alright since I probably won’t be there either! I drop stuff off and then the pictures are there. They have better social skills than I do.
Some times I wonder if somebody is out to get me, but is lacking for details about my life and so has to go about messing with it in an indirect fashion.
The situation at present is that I have an art exhibit of unprecedented size to set up on July 1. I intended to prepare 6-10 pictures I had not previously printed, most of which were near displayability, which I only seriously delved into last Saturday, believing a week-and-a-half plenty of time to finish so many near-finished things and also send them to a remote location for printing. My computer sternly disagreed and the following morning refused to turn on. This behavior was repeated on subsequent mornings and other distinct day-periods following. Instead of asking for a postponement of the exhibit opening or resigning myself to make do with the considerable quantity of art junk I already have ready, I had every intention of doing precisely what I set out to do prior to events which rendered it undoable, even though it was already barely doable.
Try to imagine you have an important engagement, or a terribly unimportant engagement that only seems like it is due to your utterly meaningless life, and your automobile explodes, melts, or otherwise becomes inoperable immediately before you are due for this engagement: in most cases, due to the isolation of your meaningless life, you will just have to not go, and deal with that. However, if your automobile melts but you have a seesaw-action minecart standing by, you might consider “I bet I could get there on the minecart” and then cause yourself more trouble trying failurely than you would have just accepting failure from the beginning and doing something else with your time. Also, along the way you have to let other people ride the minecart for a while because it is a popular minecart and the trendy little tricycles the people bought for themselves instead of getting minecarts are ultimately even less practical. And it’s your fault anyway since you never thought your car would melt and that you would need to use your minecart for anything serious and encouraged the people you are now complaining about to use it so that it was not wasted. Also I just remembered that you are trying to sell your garage andthe pieces of melted carrRRRRRRRRGH I’VE BEEN PUDDING’D And furthermore I must say your metaphor is rather hard to follow.
This picture actually does not prove anything. It is a laptop computer with the large empty front piece turned over. It looks more complicated than it is. Also, I do not advocate positioning a laptop computer on the top of your own lap since that can lead to back or neck strain. It is better to find someone taller whose lap you can borrow for the occasion.
All I did after putting the computer like this was slide out the hard drive, hidden beneath the lower right section, temporarily load the hard drive into the tiny computer lurking in the distance, whose own drive I removed to accomodate this act, booted it from a remotely adequate, somewhat judgmental version of linux, because it was the best my crummy internet could procure, off of a flash drive, and copied a few things from the hard drive to “work” with in a comparatively less inadequate version of linux that nonetheless lacked the ram quantities, screen size and bearable software I was accustomed to while I waited for a replacement computer more like my accustoms, generously provided by Mr. Pez of Springfield PC and Advanced Telemetry Systems, who also provded my previous units and advised me on hard drive swapping, that I could re-place the slid-out hard drive into, and resume with minimal issue. Well it seems complicated when you say it all at once like that.
You may have noticed that I described a number of things but used far fewer pictures than usual, and also put “work” between quotation marks, and further, have jumped from my usual unstated “six days without updates” minimum to seven. That ought to indicate to you that the situation has been just about as irritating as my implications and run-on sentences imply it might be, that would not be entertaining to read about with more specifics and punctuation added in. But if it does not then it probably is not a matter of great significance outside of my personal experience across the previous week. And golly feeble at least I didn’t get shot at. And yes the rumors I started are true: this website is on some level intended to be amusing.
I know sometimes it comes across like an inept assemblage of random details, however,
Find your name on a Coke. If you discover that your life suddenly has meaning where once there was none, well gosh, congratulations. That is much healthier than drinking the stuff. Why even bother selling a product, really? You are rather fortunate; when Donald Trump was your age, he could never find his name on a Coke, and I don’t think it was good for him. Bow hoydy am I topical! I admire Donald Trump. He says something crazy, and people laugh. I say something crazy, and people get legitimately worried, even though I do not actually have the fiscal resources to DO anything crazy. There is a man who knows his stuff.
My favorite kind of sharing is when I don’t actually have to, and these two agree. Although with their conspicuously perfect and plentiful teeth and just about full bottles, they do not owe their states of barely-human ecstasy to being Coke drinkers. Snorters, maybe. Or perhaps they derive their extreme enthusiasm from “sharing” the fact that a bottling plant printed statistically probable names onto labels, which is hypothetically impressive and a reason to purchase a single unit at a rate inflated beyond what multiple units would cost if purchased at once. It is actuality not.
It is however a perfectly valid reason to purchase cheapo signs to convey crucial information to Santa Claus. Otherwise he isn’t legally obligated to obey. Also, a vaguely religious figure with a long beard, unnaturally long life and weakness for fermented beverages who pals around with livestock? Santa IS Noah.
No, you should not. And the longer you ponder that, the greater the potential there is for hardship. The object could melt, or you could realize you are not biologically fit to grasp it, and drop it, or that you have your spectacles fastened under your ears instead of over. I imagine you have a frustrating and difficult life. Have you considered finding “Elephant” on a coke? I suppose it is judgmental for me to assume that this is Elephant and not Piggy just because it superficially resembles an elephant more than it resembles a pig. Who am I to say that “Piggy” must necessarily be pig-like in appearance? Just because people who advocate freedom to choose one’s name, gender, religion and whatnot act like you like you poisoned a reservoir if you want to change your ethnic identity? The figure IS wearing Piggy’s Specs, after all.
Caitlin Jenner not getting 100% universal respect for a conspicuously public and expensive makeover, there is a tragedy worth taking to the streets over. I have my own jennder issues, and maybe I am sensitive about it, but I acknowledge that it is STRANGE and that there are things to laugh at there. Fribbity boppity everybody with a tv show was laughing at the guy’s ridiculous surgery before he announced he was a woman. Do not pretend you were behind this issue all the way if you weren’t, and do not pretend you are behind this issue now if a mangling of superficial body properties is a requirement for you to accept somebody’s mental state.
Also, this was originally midway through an uncomfortably large digression in that entry about the deaths of celebrities. Hopefully it will be slightly easier to read without this conspicuously not-relevant portion in it!
I shall honor the recently dead Christopher Lee by posting these pictures of him laying down the law while clutching a ridiculous over-sized vegetable pod and some manner of questionable imp looks on. If there were pictures of me in the same situation I would want people to know while I was still alive, however.
I do not think there is anything sad when a world famous celebrity gets dead at the age of 93, however, especially ones that have appeared in over two hundred films.
If Casey Kasem’s death was sad, it was because there was an unresolved dispute in his family, and the man’s final days were probably stressful, with lingering stress for those who could not fix the problem. It is NOT sad because it made Shaggy “Norville” Rogers, who is a fictional character, cry Mountain Dew Baja Blast-colored tears, when he went to some oddly sparse cartoon graveyard where nobody else is buried.
Much stranger are scenes showing just Scooby Doo weeping at the weird cartoon grave, as if the voice actor dying means the character is dead, even though four people apart from Casem have voiced Shaggy since 1998 in [wholly unnecessary] newer cartoons, and the initial Scooby Doo voice Don Messick has been dead since 1997, with Frank Welker doing the replacement, and he also has always provided the voice of Fred. It might be appropriate to show Fred rubbing his hands in treachery as he plots to take over more of the cast. In a weird cartoon graveyard.
With Messick’s death predating deviantart, I was sadly able to turn up far fewer creepy drawings of his gravestone, which is nonetheless a considerable achievement considering that he was cremated. Kasem meanwhile was buried in Oslo, Norway because his wife was crazy, which as far as I know is accurately depicted in the crude green-carpeted voids seen in these drawings. In another twist, Shaggy is alive again.
Just kidding, they are both actually dead. Gosh it is almost as if cartoons are not real people and thus are neither dead nor living and this sort of illustration has very little reason to exist.
A true mystery: Shaggy and Scooby at Casem and Messick’s imaginary graves, but this time there are two additional graves whose inscriptions cannot at this time be read. Is the implication that man and dog are next, with no reason to go on never-having-lived? Or has this person who couldn’t even be bothered to crop the digital camera picture of this lightly-stained ten minute drawing so that it is at least the center of attention put more effort into rendering a populated graveyard than any of the people who sprang for crayons?
My favorite shows Scooby Doo AND Bat-Man –who of course know each other; this partnership is not in itself notable– at a Kasem grave, Kasem having voiced Batman’s assistant Robin in Hanna Barbera cartoons. Even though those versions of Robin and Batman were based on the ones from the 1966 non-cartoon television series, which starred Burt Ward as Robin, who is not dead yet. Meanwhile, Olan Soule, the first voice (and my preference) of animated Batmen, has been dead since 1994. And once again the live Batman, Adam West*, yet lives. All the while, creepy oversized ghost heads float nearby with contented expressions showing they are oblivious to or quite proud of the suffering and confusion they have caused.
*West himself took over the animated Batman’s role later, but he and Scooby were no longer on speaking terms.
In other news, Ken Spears and Joe Ruby, the writers who actually conceived the Scooby Doo concept and characters, and presumably introduced Scooby Doo and Batman to each other, are also both still alive. Maybe they can get a pair of typewriters to cry at their hastily engraved resting places later.
There were a staggering meepload of these for Robin Williams. But in a week/month/year of tributes to a supposed comic genius, the hardest I laughed was coming across this, cartoon characters at a grave for a man they can’t plausibly have known existed, who was cremated, and didn’t actually voice them. Shouldn’t the grave say something like Cloppin Fillyums on it, given the alternate allegorical stupid horse-pun-based universe they inhabit?
That is true; otherwise this scene is completely serious and logical. But according to the image description, which regrettably was written, and regrettabler glanced at by me, the person who posted it didn’t even draw it; the person just assembled the elements from other drawings from other people, and only accomplished this much. So even if we are lost enough to imagine these characters are real and an acceptable vector for our own emotions on completely unrelated topics, at best they are faking it in front of a green screen on some other occasion. The animated franchise with the greatest potential for instant dork fame after spending the least amount of time learning to draw like it, and this person couldn’t even manage that, and still gets more recognition weekly than I ever had for almost any one thing my entire life. I felt bad making fun of the artists earlier, who clearly were not getting much respect as it was, but this kind of self-sustaining garbage is hard to coexist with calmly, even after five years.
But at least Robin Williams gets some scenery and a stylish mound, and a cheerfully inappropriate font.
That was rather odd, but could we possibly get a bootleg pikachu leaking Tide detergent onto a creepy cartoon grave that you stuffed five dead people into, four of whom certainly never had anything to do with Pokaymon plus one I never heard of?
I knew I could count on you.
I think these originated with Mel Blanc’s death and a widely-circulated drawing of Bugs Bunny and the et als, whose most distinguishing traits are the myriad ways they show no respect to anyone, looking mopey beside a spotlit microphone with the heading “SPEECHLESS.” To this day, prints of it are sold as if they haven’t been being cranked out for 25 years for apparent profit for the Time Warner company to people who would gladly pay to remember someone who made them glad with something that wants to force them to be sad. It seems the only thing better than institutionalized misery is spending money to take part.
This one for KC Case ’em at least makes a dorky joke on the topic that clashes with the intended air of reverence.
When Leonard Nimoy got dead I saw online remarks from people saying things like “I was driving when I heard and I had to pull my car over and cry for a while,” like this was someone they had met and knew very well, who had made a direct, personal investment in their lives. I am told he participated in his cult fan-dom, and had a “fatherly aura,” but he hardly left a great deal of business unfinished in his life. This level of attachment to celebrity is lost on me.
I remember when George Carlin did it, there were months of tributes to him, and I did not really see the prolonged public justification. But I accepted that; I did not seek out standup comedy, generally, and most of the tributes were from people who had worked with him or seen him perform who just happened to have high-profile television jobs but didn’t feel like doing him any favors while he was alive. I also remembered that when Bernie Mac went dying there was hardly anything within my radius, but I accepted that I mainly watched shows with mainly white people on them. Steve Jobs, alright, I never liked Apple-computer-brand stuff. Even my i-pod, which I did like, felt needlessly hard to use just to seem innovative. Literally, Apple’s slogan of the period was “Think Different.” No need to think better, just arbitrarily turn practical 2-direction control into a wheel and give it a plug that nothing else already uses or potentially will ever be able to use. And try to force me to reconfigure my operating system outside the i-pod while you are at it.
But with Robin Williams: he himself, not just people who knew him, was in films, and on television, stuff that I saw, and the effect of his death on me was about the same as any others I mentioned. I saw tributes from people of my approximate social status to the effect that they felt like they lost a family member or a piece of themselves forever even though the stuff he did has been preserved in the exact same form it was first encountered in (unless you saw him perform live, which none of these people have (maybe they WANTED to, and now know they cannot ever, but how much emotional difference does that make?)). So now I know I do not belong. It was not the society-wide media-mandated mourning of the World Trade Center attack, but this was just one person, who had made quite a bit of money and, at the very least, knew he was about to die, and not a few thousand done in without warning.
In this country. Who cares if hundreds of thousands die or are driven from their homes somewhere else? Nobody is expected to care about everyone else in the world; it would probably kill any of us if we tried. But certainly we should take stock of what we are losing our marbles over. I have breakdowns all the time due to very personal things; in fact they rarely involve any unconnected figure’s hardship. I could not mentally afford that. It would never let up. I can’t even handle birthdays.
I was wondering what yet-living public figure has made the biggest impact on my life. But they, at least the ones we make celebrities out of, almost always work in groups, and rarely produce a totally unique, non-imitated/imitating product, and no singular product sums up my life, or would cease to sum it up if one of the people who made it stopped living. And I say that as someone with very little social contact, who theoretically should have all the more reason to fill my empty life with far off Hollywud horsegoatradish.
Back to Williams, it WAS sad to me, because it was a suicide, and in fact I never had any ability to relate to Williams prior to knowing he had a depression issue –yes, I have also acted like an idiot for attention, but with far less encouragement– and could barely stand him at all until he took on a more subdued persona post-heart surgery, but he will not quickly be forgotten if we don’t rush to say he won’t be.
And Leonard Nimoy has contributed to about 536 Starry Trek-related productions, probably enough where if you watched them all in order you would have forgotten the first one by the time you got to the end and you could start over. He lacked the potential that Robin Williams had to take on future significant projects, and hardly needed it by the time of his not-quite-deadness. And I am not advising to forget the creations and participations of people who appeal to you, but to quote somebody I hated during My Childhood, take a chill pill, get a grip.
In fact I did not see anybody freaking out over Christopher Lee but apparently I deleted this text from an earlier post, presumably the one I just linked at, and this seemed like my best chance to use it. For the love of MacGuffin, if you like something somebody did 20 years ago, please tell them before they die, because afterward that is going to be a lot less important to them, and undoubtedly someone else you know could use the attention more by that point. And please don’t put me in a box in the ground in a sad grave. ESPECIALLY if you like what I did while alive, don’t ruin your or anyone else’s day unless you truly have to. Put me in one of those cadaver museums or feed me to needy owls, or something useful.
Flash does not seem to like my trails effect a whole lot. Which I could understand if were not so welcoming of dopes.