Also, when I referred to the Disney Robin Hood as “the movie that probably turned more kids of this generation gay than any other,” I had written that specifically to amuse myself and meant to remove it, I merely forgot to. I fully acknowledge that it doesn’t make sense. I could say it turned them “furry,” but that’s not generally regarded as a major social demographic and the word isn’t as funny to say people “turned” into it. This is worth acknowledging, also, because I tend to have a big problem when people get all homophobic or apparently so up in the general vicinity of my business and I don’t think I have established my position, to myself or anyone else clearly enough that AGHRRRRRRR I’VE BEEN CASHEWED
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speaking of backs…
OH NO! BAXTER STOCKMAN!
As for where I went,
“Safety” as in me not feeling compelled to search through the 514 pictures I took for sequential usable material, since I’m no good at that stuff these days.
There’s danger everywhere. And this wasn’t even “there;” I saw this near the train station after I got back to New Haven. Be vigilant!
There was a series of these but I assumed, erroneously, that they were blatant and stupid enough for somebody else online to have cataloged them already
Ooh, that thar be the golden gate bridge. I get it, I know where I am now. I must be in a hokey disaster movie.
Take the express to tasty! I think that’s what that says. I know it’s in San Francisco, but “take the express to teste” seems like it would be considered a bit crass. It is a city populated by real people, not tacky movie stereotypes. All the same I choose not to ponder the composition of the white fluid there.
No no, do not go there!
I’m pretty sure this is a JAIL.
Don’t you know, razor wire (which is a genericized trademark) is not for train stations…
Also, do not confuse the fence topping-material with barbed wire; barbed wire came to prominence as a way of deterring domesticated animals from leaving enclosures. Razor wire’s sole purpose is to maim humans.
Oh, OH. Excuse me for KNOWING stuff.
When the movie Dragon Train
This movie also lacks my own arbitrary childhud fixations, the green floaty diamond-shape logo and Sireaganol. The famous Sireaganol.
At one point the bear puts on a different silly costume than usual and approaches the king and introduces himself as that. I didn’t hear “Sir Reginald,” some ordinary noble figure of no import. I heard Sireaganol, one word, some great and powerful name whose significance is never explained, but it must belong to someone important, maybe just BECAUSE it isn’t explained; I really ought to know who it is already. He’s so great that he can wander out from behind some bushes like a tramp, approach a place of royalty without being accosted by guards, announce that he is Sireaganol and sit next to the king. This is particularly notable for being the only scene without swords or bows in it that I had any interest in as a small child, just because of Sireaganol. I had no idea what he was talking about to the king nor why, but Sireaganol is not bound by necessity. Sireaganol and I have much in common, although I dislike mustaches for myself and I wear my monocle on the other side, and only when watching 3d movies.
I often take issue with neologisms, because issues are what I take. Who decided that misheard bits of speech are “mondegreens?” ONE person did, and now everybody has to call it that. Why don’t we call them Sireaganols instead? Because I may decide that it is I who heard correctly, and everyone else who is wrong.
My mondegreen quarrel is similar to my tiff with tv tropes, another baffling website that doesn’t need my help (and won’t get it), in which one infallible oaf arbitrarily decides that a supporting character who wears a gauntlet is a The Quacksmash Sammy and any time somebody makes a sandwich with boomerangs instead of breaded chicken cutlets that’s called Dancing With the Hamburglar and a story about a hunt for treasure that no one gets to keep is a Big Bird Bar Mitzvah. No! I refuse to call them that! I’m also not going to read the three hundred exception-riddled examples of these occurring that all happened to be from shows aimed at five year-olds as analyzed by people two decades outside the target demographic. No spriggety, Fairy Oddlyparents is full of lame cliches because it’s not meant to be watched by people who already have a quarter century of cartoon viewing experience. Anyway, back to talking animals in a medieval England devoid of death, disease and monarchs who actually live in France.
It’s curious that even with my own spelling of Sireaganol is so close to “Sir Reginald” I didn’t quite make the connection until somewhere around twice as old as I was then or half as old as I am now. Even after that I continued to keep it in my memory. At the time when the thing I call nemitz was “Chesterfield Snapdragon McFisticuff,” I imagined that the thing I now call elpse might have been “Sireaganol Rumpole McFisticuff.” I reneged on this because I remembered that anything related to or inspired by Disney, whether they did it deliberately or otherwise was and is evil, and also that nobody liked green chesterfield anyway and thus a grand name the likes of Sireagonal would be inappropriate even if it hadn’t been invented in a Disney movie, and I’m never going to stop using Ms DOS based operating systems. You might also detect by the repetition of McFisticuff that I intended for the characters to be related. I did. I’m not sure if they still are. Possibly. I’m certain they’re not really really Scottish, however. I know they’re a bunch of uneducated bog-dwellers, but the mere thought of the annoying exaggerated accents they would need to have if I made a cartoon version forbids that.
One thing I am certain of which I discovered today is that the governess hen in the movie is named Klucky. With a K. Although the obvious error in Sireaganol’s name above and
“hand her a bouquet” being transcribed as “under a bookcase” may give me reason to doubt the accuracy of the captioneer’s work, I cannot deny that I heard something very much like “Klucky,” which is reason for alarm whatever consonants are involved.
If anything that’s Miss Klucky to you. The discreetness with which you conceal your ears does not distract me from your obvious lack of discipline.
Regarding the floaty green diamond-shape thing introduction sequence, I linked to the one I did because I like how defiantly the symbol freezes on the screen for about thirteen seconds, just long enough for you to resign yourself to standing up and seeking out the fast forward button because your vcr didn’t come with a remote control object only to have it end abruptly once you initiate action, followed by the longest youtube comment quasversation about absolutely nothing and without any racism I’ve yet encountered.
The thing I remembered so fondly was an old even then, and I now realize incredibly cheap “Disney Classics” home video line logo. It is commonly referred to as the “black diamond logo,” but both of us can see it’s clearly blue, so let’s not argue about that. Despite my familiarity, I never owned a copy of Robin Hood on VHS. Although I must have made my parents rent it enough times to cover the cost, I now realize that if they had bought me a copy it could only have been of the later edition, which I would not have tolerated, and as someone with two younger siblings who had their own favorite movies that we DID own copies of, I reckon if I’d had such easy access my own older brother would have hated me a few years earlier than I actually turned retarded around 9 or so.
I couldn’t read, but the cassette itself always had a tiny version of the pertinent logo printed on its label, so I KNEW before it even went in the VCR. Dangerous times. The later version of the tape had a different opening which featured a blue speck leaving a stain in the shape of the ol’ Walter’s name, flying off from the presenting hand of an immobile Mickey Mouse dressed like a druid. I already owned tapes with that logo on it! Unsatisfactory. Of note is that the green, cheap logo’s appearance features several blatant backward ‘S’es, things that would taunt me in successive years, but I did not notice them then; I was too preoccupied with what an entertaining anecdote this all would make twenty years later. I may even mention it twice. In fact, this was such a great story I don’t even feel like transitioning into the me-not-liking-normal-people’s-music themed material I threatened you with last time. Golly!
But speaking of dragons,
I am not afraid of this one. In fact, I’m generally not impressed by any gold thing that I can buy for five dollars. You will serve ME. You will do MY bidding! And you will also deliver my seller feedback.
The wimp isn’t even as big as that dumb bird! It’s so ashamed that it wants to vomit. Hey bird, how would you like to come work for me? I’ll pay you $7.50.
The only thing that could be cheaper than golden dragon is…
OH NO, FLAPSAIL
I apologize in advance if FLAPSAIL does not attain the same cult status within my mind as Deadly Armor.
I still don’t hear a D in Sireaganol.
Speaking of backs, I will be on Monday, but for now I must go. Oh, ho ho die.
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Good old Mxy “Maxwell Yezpitelok” Frebunkulus of the Bizarre Webcomic had a clever thing which he wrote posted on the website of the apparently now solvent crack’d. You may pretend some of the half million or so views on that were due to my pointing it out.
Speaking of dragons, because I was last time and just put that other note first because my leech sense tells me to mention people I sort of know who get exposure on popular websites although not that time Bridgeport Cat did it because she was writing under a pseudonym although that’s also a pseudonym and in any event AAAAACH I’VE BEEN PICKLED
speaking of dragons, I’m not, because this is at the end of the entry, but originally it was at top, and I did go on to say something about them dumb lizards, but I took too long getting there so I re positioned this at the end, where it is currently.
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I’ve been awake too long.
Right, so I saw that avatar movie. I wrote something pretty mundane about it but I discovered I referred to it in what I wrote about another movie I saw more recently so I may as well put it here. Unless you have a better idea. If you do you’d better tell me quickly! No, too late. I doubt I’m the first person to make an Ultima joke in reference to it, so may I please be the last?
I like weird looking plants, but they are nothing new to me. I growed up seeing them all over the place, in a very similar context: inside big rectangles I could not enter.
Rygar had floating islands, Chrono Trigger had floating islands, Legend of Dogoon that I SLAMMED last week (in February) had floating islands. I like floating islands but James Cameron didn’t invent them. I found the Spindizzy Worlds more engaging than Pan Dora. It may have helped if my glasses and / or left eye had been calibrated properly; the whole film was blurry. I could see layers, but they were like viewmaster layers; some things stood out but they stood out by uniform amounts, and if they were near an edge of the screen they looked weird. Also, no attempt seemed to have been made to compensate for the darkness caused by the polarizing lines on the spectacle lenses; everything was just a little bit dark. No, excuse me, not EVERYthing…
the bright green EXIT signs on both sides of the screen were at full luminance and at least one was visible to me the entire time. Also, lights on the floor and behind me to the left.
The presentation itself was alright. Nothing that will change my life or that I’ll always remember. As any amount of people have mentioned the story and the characters are nothing new. The angry guy among the pure people who hates outsiders for good reason but that has to be proven wrong is especially played out, to me, though I must admit I liked that character better than some others. You can’t go wrong with bad science men vs good forest men. Maybe I’ll have an easier time siding with the forest men when they’re not all enormous, hostile Captain Planets.
I don’t mind the navies as long as they are presented exclusively as space aliens, with no allegorical implication that everybody would be better off living that way. The na-vi have no art, no individuality, no curiosity for that which they do not know. That suits them fine, but it does not suit me. Although that’s just as well, as anyone with a physical or mental defect is liable to be beaten to death or left to starve in a culture like that.
I think the 3-d may actually have detracted from the experience, to me. Without that I could have viewed the thing at full brightness, without stupid glasses, and without the picture being blurry. I found myself wanting to close the less accurate eye, a lot. A question struck me: do I normally do that? Do I view most films with the less good eye closed? Does being prevented from doing that for fear of losing part of the “experience” actually do more to ruin things for me? If I closed my left eye, the right’s vision was clear (but dim). I could have watched the whole movie like that, but I kept hoping I’d suddenly figure out a way to make the full picture less blurry, and so I kept both vision orbs in use for nearly the entire time. I’ve long suspected my actual vision was less than perfect with regard to things lining up in both eyes. If I really pay attention to a thing, I notice that there are two slightly different versions of it front of me. I assumed that was normal. Maybe it isn’t! It works alright for me, because I know nothing else, and nobody has suggested that a certain aspect of it is supposed to be a certain way (aside from when I’ve been accused of being colorblind), because it’s normal and nobody thinks there’s anything to say about it. However, once I start looking through a preconfigured mode of alternate vision, my alternate mode of function becomes clear. I may need to have a special corrective monocle made for myself that I only use when viewing three-dimensional films. I can squeeze my less good eye a certain way to make it focus properly, but I fear that will damage the thing further, and the eye is difficult to access with a plastic frame in the way, besides.
The film was filled with scenes – more than I can remember seeing in any other film – that I have watched – whose only purposes were to show off stuff. Unfortunately, if it looks blurry to you it gets annoying and you want it to hurry up and be done. Don’t you understand, I WANTED to like that. I wanted it to be the greatest thing I’d ever seen, but it wasn’t because I’m a broken human. I am doomed to enjoy less things than others and to be alone while I do it. This makes me sad.
And so I saw the dragon film. I don’t think I told you about the time I watched avatar, so I posted my contextless summary above here… The 3d worked better for me this time because I was closer to the screen, but it still wasn’t perfect. A pity I couldn’t get an imax screening. One person at whom I described my D-related woes after both these movies responded both times “you might need glasses.” Well I was already wearing glasses, they were just dorky 3d glasses. As for NORMAL spectacles, I don’t NEED them if the only thing I can’t see and only on one side properly are 3d movies that use the polarization method. And besides either way the thing would still be dim the whole time.
I noticed that the main human, Wesley or Herbie or whoever his name was didn’t have perfect teeth. Obviously the fat frubby Scotch Norsemen who comprised the bulk of the figures in the movie wouldn’t, but I was surprised that the thin characters were allowed to get away with it. They also were allowed to get away with talking in standard American accents. I’m not about to accuse that overweight people are intentionally made to look funny and sound funny in comparison to “normal” thin people because I honestly didn’t consider that until now and look we’re not even half way through this. So I’ll just imply it for the moment.
The movie did its job. It developed characters, it featured non-developed semi-characters which could be merchandised, progressed plot and waited to bore out most of its plot holes until the height of tension, when I would feel least inclined to consider them, and such and such. It did this without any pop culture references or overt sex innuendo and kept bad-smell-based “humor” to a minimum, which I didn’t know was allowed in animated movies these days. At least nothing bad enough that I felt compelled to make a note reminding myself to complain about it. And so I will complain about another thing.
The music was nice. A pity, since I’d have love to watch this in silence with closed captioning rather than hear the voice acting. Maybe I can get a version dubbed into Chinese with English subtitles. The technology exists, though it needs work before it can be employed without launching abysmal internet memeys. The kid, what was his name, Danny or Milo, he sounded completely bored the whole time, even when he was doing stuff that had my eyes been properly configured to see through 3d lenses would look fairly exciting.
One thing I like about watching cartoons from other countries is that there’s very little chance half the characters will sound like people from Saturday Night Live or Glee or whatever dominant white-people entertainment was hot at the time they were cast. Just in the previews I heard Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Steve Carrell and Jack McBrayer, and I saw Will Ferrell and Tina Fey’s names threatened in letter credits for something or another that I was too busy cringing at to hear the vocal accompaniment to. Three minutes into the actual movie, which was a good 45 minutes after I entered the theater, hey here’s a fat dwarf who sounds like Craig Ferguson, who never even worked for NBC. All these people are on or have been on major tv shows. They’ve made their money. Why do they agree to go along with this? None of them are voicing the characters; they’re just talking in their normal tv voices so that I recognize them. It’s nothing new but I’ve always hated it and I still do, whether they’re people I dislike or the alternative. I merely resisted any pressure to go and see one of these productions until now, and the previews tend to be targeted at whoever the audience is expected to be, in this case children, accompanied by adults, because every movie has to be at least PG, thus more ugly computer graphic movies, thus more boring human voices coming out of bright and shiny animate people. “But Mike Myers is doing an exaggerated SCOTTISH accent and he is CANADIAN!” but even that’s a Scottish accent he’s done before this role, and if we pretend he hasn’t, Shreck trash alone has made it more ubiquitous than his actual voice, and this voice has been imitated by people in other movies (this one, for example) and terrible gum commercials.
In the credits for what I did see, I was informed that Kristen Wiig had talked for someone or another. She was also on Saturday Night Live, and while I was able to find some sketches she was tolerable in before I stopped watching, there was nothing remarkable about the way she spoke. I certainly didn’t hear “her” when I heard the voice in the movie. I just heard A voice that I didn’t much care about, whoever it was. Why cast someone like that? Another character was Jonah Hill, and instead of thinking “oh Jonah Hill I like him in contemporary emotionless stoner movies that are utterly disconnected from this” I spent the entire movie trying to figure out if it was Jack Black, who would also have been distracting. However, I shouldn’t have had to think any of these things because the character was neither of them.
Every movie advertised in the lobby was a remake or a sequel. Again, nothing new, and again nothing I’m content with, either. The one thing that is new is that I neglected to bring my camera into the building and so have no dark and/or blurry pictures of unnecessary things. The previews that I alluded to reflected my lack of excitement or mere optimism for things to come. As these tend to come in superficially similar pairs (Bug Life and Antz, Shark Tale and Finding Nemmy, echt), two of them movies were about “so bad, I’m good” bootleg I M Meens without Warwick Davis in them. One was a blue alien (who ever heard of such a thing?) that reminded me a lot of that horrible alien that gets beaten up by the dogs for crashing into the fire hydrant, except instead of being typical and uninteresting for three minutes we get, I assume, thirty or so cycles of it. These clods have nothing on The Smoggies. Also, please don’t make a Smoggies movie.
The color in these computer movies is always the same. Everything is perfectly lit. The rate of movement, the force of gravity and pacing and such are also always the same. I feel like I’ve seen all these places before. Much like with video games, once they went “3d,” –in the rendering, not necessarily the projection– particularly after 256 color palettes were dropped, everything looked monotonous to me. Plus most of the plasma and spread orb guns turned into regular dumb old army guns. Yes, sure, all ye olde Hanna Barbera street corners looked the same and one Disney castle courtyard is like any other, but I challenge you even to identify but a graphic department by its backgrounds these days, much less a specific film (and if you can give me a day or so to acknowledge it because writing this made me tired). And while they’ve had 14 years to find an appealing way of showing computer cartoon humans, nobody’s done it yet. I hate their big chests and little legs, but I also hate them with realistic proportions. I hate them with huge blobby heads, I hate them with conservatively sized mannequin heads. I hate them with little eyes really close together, I hate them with big eyes that allot space for a nose. In short, I hate. I also hate in long. I’m just as bitter and unpleasable as I ever have been, but I’m getting more specific. Once I’ve identified every problem I will bring my findings before the council and they will abolish things I don’t like.
After a decade and a half of solid regurgitation of stuff from before we’re now starting to re-puke up the stuff we already puked up and re-ate. We’ve already HAD a “new” nightmare on elm street. We’ve already had a “next” karate kid. Toy Story 3 reminds me too much of The Brave Little Toaster for comfort. To be fair, I am rarely comforted by brave toasters of any size, nor little toasters of any demeanor. Even when they have wings.
I am in the process of re-evaluating some of the stuff that I allowed myself to be revolted by in the 90s now that I see it under attack by forces yet less meritorious, and this does, alarmingly enough, include that blasted toaster. I also have it on no authority less than a youtube comment itself that some of the toaster people went on to be involved with the Pixar people, but that doesn’t make the Toy Story any less creepy than it ever was. This one has Kens and Barbies in it. Although the apparent Mattel buy-in likely spares us any overplayed “Ken is a closeted homosexual with no genitals who doesn’t realize he’s gay because he’s the only man in town but he couldn’t act on his urges even if they became relevant” jokes, I think the writers should have the right to include such things should they deem it prudent, rather than to be bound by strict licensing codes of conduct. And you know me well enough to understand that I’d find a way to be annoyed even if Mattel granted Pixar a temporary “Ken is gay” license because I already implied I was comedically disaffected by that. I may just be annoyed at the money flow involved, and it goes both ways, surely, with getting existent products into works of fiction that serve to promote them without doing anything that a free non-licensed stand-in couldn’t. Although in this franchise the stand-in itself would be marketed as an original product and I don’t think I could take that, either. I don’t find “toys doing stupid stuff” funny unless they’re MY toys and I’M making them do the stupid stuff, besides.
You think I have any control over this??
We’ve already flipped and dissected every “stupid,” “hokey,” or “sincere” thing about our dominant consumer generation’s youths. My mother was 35 when that The Brady Bunch movie came out. I’m no fan of the Smurfs, nor was I ever, but I’d love another 8 years to not have Hollywuh pretend it knew smurfs were stupid all along and act like that’s news to ME. It could even be argued, by me, regardless of anything to base it on, that the avatarts were space smurfs who just happened to be bigger than Gargamel. Frimbip, Robot Chicken’s been showing action figures acting uncivilly toward each other ever since Seth Green found web pages from 1998 and realized he could rip them off for free but get paid for it. MacGuyver doesn’t even get THAT honor; it gets, “MacGruber,” a movie about a one joke non-parody of itself, with its origin, shockingly enough, being Saturday Night Live. That may even be a less reprehensible approach, but I’m far from optimistic about it.
I personally can’t stand the Robot Chicken mouth(s), particularly the banana shaped tooth kayak that shows up in every character’s talk cycle and
the bright white square teeth that they alternate scenes with depending on circumstances I don’t care to investigate. Yes, I pay way too much attention to the teeth of animated characters. It’s obvious more time is spent matching the mouth to every syllable than any other aspect of the animation, so who can blame me for noticing? I meant that for this series specifically but it’s true in general. Also, the low-budget amusement which should come from such apparently cheap production values is rent asund when they incorporate realistic explosions, bullet physics and blood (and there’s usually blood). Clearly somebody is spending thousands of dollars on this junk and should be held to higher standards than you-tubewits. Robot Chicken is the inexplicably legalized, advertisement selling television equivalent of bootleg Calvin shirts. Except it actually had a bootleg Calvin sketch, except Calvin was actually called “Calvin” and was a murderer and nobody cared. If I put a picture of Calvin acting in a comparatively courteous manner on this website that I do for free, however… again nobody will care because the Universal Press Syndicate gets its property violated a lot more often than the Shipyard Brewing Company does.
That is, I expect whoever is selling bootleg calvins out of a not necessarily mobile storefront on a main street in the nation’s capital is getting taken down before I am. The only reason Eli Co didn’t thank me for alerting non-yacht owners to the existence of their product is because when we spend $3.50 on 12 ounces of soda we expect to get six cans of it.
Thinking back… Starsky and Hutch, Miami Vice, Inspector Gadget, Dukes of Hazzard, Underdog, The Cat in the Hat, Land of the Lost, Bewitched… has there been one year since this rue wave started that there hasn’t been a nationally distributed hip, new, cynical, utterly off-the-mark take that ultimately nobody cared about on an old concept? (And how many of these had Will Ferrell involved? (the last two (if we don’t include Curious George, which I didn’t get the impression was cynical (oh (yes (stop it (when I feel like it (how about now (I’m considering it)))))))) Even the “original” new movies are full of this intolerable attitude. “Guys, guys! Nah. Nih-nah. Nah, ya caaaan’t… nah. Yeah, no…” I’m tired of every movie having Hal 9000 in it. The movie Hal was IN didn’t have as much Hal in it as one Ben Stiller movie despite being an estimated 4 days long and Hal being the single most referenced concept about it. Nobody ever says “hey, remember that movie where the guy floats through space silently for 30 minutes and then turns into a baby for no reason?” Besides the point.
Nobody can crash into a wall, fall off a bicycle, slip on a potato or otherwise suffer a public indignity without this type of character providing an understated “ooh, ouch.” or “gotta hurt.” “Awkward.” “Busted.” If THAT jackass can tell it hurt, shouldn’t I also have the right to? This is why people [on internet forums] hate Garfield. Garfield tells us what’s funny about something kwazy in the most disinterested way possible. Looking DOWN on me for finding humor in the writer’s work. DARING me to laugh at it. You thought THAT was funny? That ain’t NUTHIN oops out of space. I do this sometimes, but I don’t have an editor, much less a staff of them plus ghost-artists who can redraw a joke that I messed up by liking it so much that I couldn’t RISK you not getting it, even at the alternate risk of making you hostile toward it.
Even the music in these things tends to be judgmental. It likes to stop abruptly when something deliberately stupid occurs. “A little help…?” It’s not enough that the character failed, the soundtrack has to let me know a failure occurred by itself failing. It’s just like a “record scratch” sound effect except the sound people finally realized that by pretending they used analog sound equipment they implied that non-digital technology was adequate and the companies pushing expensive new projectors and audio systems on all the theaters wouldn’t like that. At least somebody finally cleared all the crickets out of here.
I tell you, those things are malevolent.
I’m afraid we have to go with your first response.
AXE ARMOR. Now that is something I can use. You can never know when you’ll meet a lumberjack with a loose grip or an angry dwarf who mistakes you for a kobold.
However, I don’t know that I necessarily require “messy look paste.”
WHATEVER.
What I NEED is ARMOR ARMOR. To protect me from
Treet? No, something far more deadly…
DEADLY ARMOR! Who even needs weapons when the armor ITSELF is DEADLY?
You are obsolete! Swords are SUPPOSED to be deadly! Nobody expects
DEADLY ARMOR! I ain’t afraid a no sword no mo.
Kee kee keeeeee! You’ve not seen the last of meeeeee!
I’m not even afraid of LETHAL ARMOR now. Despite my research team’s findings that lethal and deadly are synonyms, the fact that deadly armor requires neither weapons nor heads to do me in is quite frightening. Lethal armor was too complacent. It was NOT PREPARED for another dangerous form of protection on the block, and thus it was bewildered. Plus off-guard. Armor, GUARDING is what you DO, even when you’re NOT lethal/deadly. You know what the problem is? I think you’re YELLA.
Oh, uh oh. Somebody’s sensitive, huh? Who’s this new friend of yours you’ve brought in? Am I supposed to be afraid of this guy? He’s not wearing armor at all! Nor much of anything, for that matter. Although he DOES have a cape. A baby-excrement-green and jaundice-flesh colored cape. He rubbed that green on [by] himself, judging by the hands. So just because you’re friends with a sick naked unwashed executioner who smears his human-skin-made accouterments in human waste bye.
I said I was going! Don’t pretend it was your idea!
We shall continue this later.
Or maybe we won’t.
SMEDLEY SNORKEL!
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I am one of the most boring people in the world.
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I think I will be witnessing that dragon movie tonight after all. It had a month to get out of theaters but it’s still showing through the week. What else could it be waiting for but me? The last full length cartoon I saw in a theater, if you don’t count Star Wars: Attack of the Clones was Pokemon: The First Movie. This would have to be more coherent than that, I think. For one thing, its title lacks a colon.
Above everything else I’ll finally know if this person on a horrible website who considered one of my asinine aliases a name worth dropping meant it as an insult or not.
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Howdy. I will see about Wednesday.
No? How is Thursday, then?
It is a regrettably widely-perpetuated myth that deserts do not receive much rain.
For the title I also considered “Desert Storm” and “Fall Festival,” but they didn’t sound stupid enough when I said them.
Remind me to tell you about raisins sometime sometime.
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Can that detection system truly be at all reliable if this shady character can climb right through the not-allowed symbol without anyone noticing? Clearly this is not the service to protect your mailbox with.
Now nobody’s safe. Even the trees are after our mail.
Our precious frozen mail crystals. This stuff is important!
Our top story: a snowflake done showed up!
Well it SHOULD. These laws are outdated and irrelevant! The international community is doing NOTHING to address the threats of modern times.
After them, you fools! Are you truly going to let them get away with it? He can’t possibly hit ALL of you with his ninja stars! Arrgh, they think they’re so cool!
Once again it’s up to the blessed corporations of the world to make the best of a bad situation.
Now all that’s left is to proofread this to make sure it forms a coherent narrative. So hopefully I’ll get to that one of these days.
Aw, bacula, three hours exposed to sunlight across a week and I have freckles again.
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also of bloat: a rambunctious gang of colorful images you’ve possibly seen before.
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Good dag to you, behold and be abhorring page 8 of that. See if you can spot every missed opportunity for background shenanigans! Maybe it will be different when page nine comes around. For now my fingers are feeling less than dexterous.
The lizard’s predicament is different than it was on the previous page. I like the appearance of that way but it did not lend itself well to redraws. Eight-and-a-half years ago I had tied two socks together and drawn from that. Two months ago I didn’t feel like mixing two socks again. This month I did, so we’re back to that. I considered amending the page seven appearance to match the socks but it doesn’t look as interesting, and I just noticed the size doesn’t match either, so fleedle bidle budle. And then the usual trouble with space allotment. This process needs to change!
Those other frames I remember drawing, but for a reason I cannot recall I did not use them in the old version. Nor can I find scans of them apart from this one that I once used on a web page entirely out of context back when I was using a computer that I guess I had the scans saved on its drive. This is all probably very unimportant.
Otay, fine. I’m old enough now that I’m used to being told somebody I’ve never heard of is the world’s newest and greatest humanoid. Hillary Dorf, Lindsee Lohan, Paris Ilton, Zach F. Ron, Jennifer Anniston, Bennifer Lopez, Beneful Love Hewitt, Tim Conway… It’s happened before, and it will happen again. I don’t know who or what Justin Bieber is, but I do know that’s about the ugliest professional photograph I’ve seen on a magazine front since that one cover of that magazine that was in my bathroom for two years showing Matt Damon brushing his teeth. This guy doesn’t look like he’s smiling, he just looks like he’s breathing heavily. This guy looks like a 1950s ventriloquist puppet. He looks like a nutcracker. He looks like that Peter Pan guy whose website everybody made fun of 12 years ago. He looks like The Partridge Family. He looks like Final Fantasy X.
Well gee, excuse me for not being famous! I’m busy getting stuff DONE!
Nice try, but i already know how.
There are a number of questions that arise when an image such as this appears, such as why that kid ate the neck of his guitar. Foremost among the others: shouldn’t he be playing/eating a piano? Also, this aisle is not cat specific; this sign could have said “Bennie and the pets” and had a better rhyme. Although that depends on this actually being a reference to the Elton John song “Bennie and the Jets” and this kid having any idea who Elton John is, but not knowing enough about the song beyond the title to realize “Bennie” is supposed to be a female person because I didn’t raise no sissy. In any of these situations, assuming one of these figures is Bennie, there is only one other accounted for who the pet could be, meaning it should be singular! Ha ha! GOT EM.
OR, perhaps the “BENNIE” IS the cat and the “CATS” is…
That is not so bad. It’s only from 2002! What IS bad: the amount of rubbish I write in a week would have gotten me through four months back then!
I feel like I learned a lot, but not as much as I should have. I hope there won’t be a test.
I wish ALF was on this quiz. THAT would be tough to guess.
Well I do NOW. Thanksh a bunch. They should provide a “forfeit knowledge” option.
Oops. If I’m forgetting my own birthday, is it at all responsible business practicing to let me use a credit card online?
You put on a brave face, but I can tell you’re concerned.
I can’t access bimshwel.com at the moment, so that means I can’t… oh, hey, what do you know. Dee, I wish I’d noticed that sooner. Well maybe I’ll write something tomorrow, then!
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On the subject of corporate attempts to de-evolve internet video, here are some more ads I’ve seen while dealing with that. Yep.
“Double pits to chesty,” which is about the worst name I’ve ever seen for anything, and also
This, I don’t understand. Always in the capital letters, like it’s important or a thing otherwise worth being said. Clearly, none of these elaborate constructions do anything but fall apart as they are being pushed into a river. Why would anybody participate or watch this? Much less for free? Why work to build something that just breaks? This is like something that only drunken morons would watch, yet Red Bull has no alcohol in it. The company has patented a liquid stupidity with no intoxicating effects that it can market to kids without pretending it isn’t. Like the beverage equivalent of Christian rock: all the shoddy lack of merit as before with a side of self-righteousness. This self righteousness has not, to my knowledge, been put into use by anybody, but I know they’re thinking it.
And these fluggity things, it’s not as if they are all that INTERESTING to watch break; I’ve been seeing related advertisements for a few years and for all I know it’s been the same footage every time, because it’s just the same thing happening over and over. It’s like any athletic competition, except it’s not athletic or competitive. It’s just morons pushing heaps of wheels and papier mache into water, and, I presume, leaving it there.
Supposedly there are judges who rate things and the objects are required to be made of “environmentally friendly materials.” Well I still don’t like it! My remarks to the contrary of the data I just supposed were secondary to my main point that I dislike the advertisements and the impression they give me of the thing they are promoting. And twenty [or so] years of America Idahhhhhhh in my business haven’t convinced me that the presence of judges proves that garish freaks are committing entertainment.
I’m not above posting a dreadful image and telling you how dreadful it is, but nobody will be paying me for the privilege of recapping it later and I’m not pretending I think what I do is about anything but myself. Ooh there’s not even a joke on that one, that must mean I’m serious!
If I said that nobody would care because any idiot can say that, and I’d literally be any idiot. I strive to be the main idiot, and I am serious.
But I am feeling better now.
That suggests the caption only applies to one of them, and the chances are I won’t even be in the picture, since I’m a psychotic introvert in addition to my other qualities.
You have to be the center of attention, don’t you!
You know where to find me, guy. And also orange hats.
You agree with me that 1 am is way too late for the idiots a block over from me to be blasting corny music all over the place, don’t you?
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Dear loyal bimshwel customers: I’m deadHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH APRULFOOOOUHAGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHG I’VE BEEN SHOT
HA HA NO I HAVEN’T!GOTCHA THAT TIME AYPRALLL FOOOOOOOOHHHHHHNOOOOO I’VE BEEN SHOT AGAIN!
NOPE NOT REALLY! HA HA HA HOOOGOSH DEAR FLOOPITY I’VE LAUGHED SO HARD I’VE CAUSED MYSELF MORTAL INJURY NO I HAVEN’T
HA HA HA HO NOW IS THE TIME WHEN I LAUGH NO IT ISN’t YES IT IS HA HA HA H
And now I am sad.
YES INDEEDNO NOT REALLY
page 38 of this. Does it look to you like 80 hours of work?
I like the fur-style of the second nemitz. So why did I draw it like a werewolf in the rest of them?
I fear 20+ years of stupid side-scrolling video games has caused my skill at staging multiple characters to develop in an odd fashion.
Also, sometimes the things I do as meaningless gags mess with the things I intend for people to remember.
My inking really ISN’T getting any better. Every time it’s miserable at first and then I start to like it better toward the end. THIS time, though, there’s no excuse for that eleventh frame. Peff. I will use bigger paper next time. That will either make things slightly easier or a lot harder for a variety of unrelated reasons.
I like to think I’ve improved a little bit in eight years.
Unfortunately I had to start eating again. A pity. It eats so much time.
“”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””
I haven’t eaten, and I haven’t had my sob fit yet today, but my nose continues to be just as inclined to stuff itself as usual. Just what AM I allergic to? Dust? Walls? Pixels? My own insufferable dullness?
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How do I still have solid excrement to pass? I haven’t eaten a proper meal in almost two days and the last substantial thing I remember ingesting made the complete tour fairly quickly.
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I think I’m going to be out sick for a while. You probably won’t notice!
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Breaking news: I believe in life after love.
I don’t much LIKE it, but that’s not news!
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I saw Shutter Island on Sunday. I have nothing to “spoil” for you, just that I’m rather sick of movies trying to pull that kind of trashbag on me. Also, prior to the show, between a coke ad about time travel that clearly cost way too much money to make for a stupid ad, a trailer for a movie about a time traveling uh hot tub that would NEVER have been MADE before the internet gave a bigger voice to the professionally retarded and ANOTHER trailer for ANOTHER movie about a time traveling pocket knife, I want to take a voyage in my own chrono-kayak to however many years in the future is necessary for everybody to get this out of their systems. That and the “ha ha, ’80s!” mentality that’s been ironically marketable now for longer than the 1980s themselves lasted.
Speaking of skulls, what on earth is going on with Comedy Central’s internet video ownership-designator? And why is some angry man shouting “DIH! DIH!” at me? Is he a mentally-imbalanced murderer who thinks my extracted head-bones are funny and he laughs in monosyllabic outbursts? Is he related to the guy who shouts “come on, yall!” and “HIT me!” for no reason? Are those both challenges at me so that the guy can make his deeds seem like self-defense?
Were the skulls the invention of the same master of design and draftsmanship and unnecessary clenched teeth who invented these? I hope the monkeys are better at building things than whoever built them. I will admit they did a good job digitally removing the notebook lines.
Oh incidentally I don’t see that little sequence anymore since comedy central withdrew its shows from the hew-loo I eventually came to watch them on, out of disgust for comedy central’s own website and video player, to be seen exclusively on its own website and video player, where instead of dih men I see ads for stuff like the eternally infallible South Park and what I showed after the monkeys because Todd forbid we have a prime-time animated series that doesn’t evoke Beavis and his posteriorcephalic companion or the opening sequence from Juno in some aesthetically repugnant way (although I understand that Todd’s cool).
But it’s GOOD to remind me of Maniac Mansion, right? It was so ZANY and INNOVATIVE! And it had the worst interface in the history of item-quest adventures. Or at least it did if you’ve only played the Tandy and NES versions, in which one must use standard four way directional arrow keys to control a mouse cursor to select nine different variants of “USE.” All of that is beside the point because I don’t get to make that guy get murdered for bragging about his recording contract to a jealous tentacle or blow up the mansion by pressing random buttons on the security keyboard and other stuff I’ve read you can do in that game that I never figured out. And anyway I was just commenting on how dopey the guy looks standing like that. I could be little less concerned with the actual content of the program.
This show is called Ugly Americans. And it’s ugly. And I don’t care. I don’t even feel like going through the ad and explaining point by point why each hilarious gag makes me mad. Here’s my tip to you, aspiring artists who don’t aspire to anything greater than aspiration: those free-floating black lines you use to indicate muscles in skin, folds in clothing and texture on various inorganic surfaces don’t look like anything else but black lines. I bet the artist has sketchbooks full of legless big-shouldered torsos. Which doesn’t mean anything to you but I once saw a sketchbook by someone who drew like this and it had a lot of legless big shouldered big necked male torsos in it and I was certain there was something to that. If there isn’t may I please be permitted to dis-remember it?
Not that this is any day for me to be criticizing the visual quality of sketchbooks.
Years ago, specifically on the very last line of this otherwise mystifying page from 2003, I scoffed, I sneered at the idea that internet video was then, or could ever be a replacement for television, but that was back when I had dial-up eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…eeeeeeeeeeeeeee oreorocfffeoroghcffgghhghg nyurrrrng, nyurrrrng internet at 50% functionality via america online or compuserve and compression algorithms were less sophisticated. Watching streaming video then was an unbearable hassle. It was slow, it was buggy, it was blurry, it was small, it couldn’t be viewed fullscreen. Some sites still won’t let you do that, but the holdouts are dwindling. When they try to force me I will start the video, pause it, wait for it to load in its entirety, copy the data from my browser cache and then watch it in a different program. Ha HA, I sure showed nobody!
I remember a while ago reading some news article about the reasons Conan O’Brien’s latest television endeavor was canceled. Apart from Hugo Chavez I can’t name a single South American head of state, I don’t know who my own comptroller is and I’ve never even seen proof that my garbage isn’t taken away by fairies every week but I know why some dork who was on tv for a really long time now won’t be for a little while. One line bothered me, though, and I took note of it and complained about it without recording where I had found it or who had said it:
“Add to all the other issues the fact that Mr. O’Brien’s young fans did not really have to watch television to see him. His shows were made available later on Web sites like Hulu. And his best comedy bits would frequently be posted on other sites — and passed around by fans — shortly after they appeared.”
Then why was it ON Hulu if being watched there did not count? And why is that my fault? Nevermind that this could easily have been revealed prior to the program being removed. Once people have been liberated from timeslots, they won’t go back unless you force them to. And yet if you try to force them, by revoking their privileges, they still probably won’t go back. I know I won’t. But I won’t go back to watching anybody’s tv show at 11:30[5]. I gave my television box away back in August or thereabouts because my parents’ machine was broken and most of the shows I watched I could now get through the internet. It was not a supplement to normal television viewing; it was a replacement. It is hard to turn people away from a new convenience and you should never assume that you’ll be able to do it. That’s why pro-environmental legislation is worthless. And also because most of our business depends on wasting things.
Howevah, even in a relatively non-wasteful field of decisions, such as one electricity inhaling broadcast media or another, stepping “back” is hard to convince consumers to do. A week or two ago I made myself buy a music album thing online that I had been listening to illegally distributed digital recordings of for a few years. I felt like I had wasted my money, even though that was the proper thing to do. Right. Just 3000 more to go, then. For most of the games that HAVE sound tracks, the things have been out of eh print for years, possibly eh decades by this point, and the cost to make honest men out of them often seems to rely on paying off weirdos who will be charging for rarity, age and the fact that the things are imported. It was never meant that I in Americonia be able to have heard this stuff, but the people who made the games never assumed anyone would care about the music later. Which is also why they never provided clear credits, I reckon.
S. BIG LAND, will your identity never be revealed?
This is understandable; I have become accustomed to an illegal practice that is, in essence, cheating. Hulu is totally legal and partially owned by NBC. It is completely unfair to blame people for using it. I even used it after complaining about its stupid name and creepy ads. Why spend so much money on a commercial thing that does not earn money?
I also watched Colbert’s Report with that thing, with which the more interesting part of Conan’s show was competition, and that’s still on the air. But not on Hulu. Hulu is lethal, evidently. It’s not a plot to destroy the world (for one thing, it blocks users from other countries), just its own business partners.
Science Fox is some guy that I was on very good terms with when I initially posted this and also the keeper of the bird creature roundabout that period. The other dork is entirely my fault, but that doesn’t stop me from berating it. All the same this is the only picture I ever made with colored pencils that actually looked nice once the computer had eaten it so that much is special.
I am working on something, but I have to go now!
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I guess I have to update this thing on Sunday. It has been difficult lately. Gosh. A stairway!
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First of all, whose friends are they? They wouldn’t be mine if they really thought my dumb, would they? I know it’s bad thing to have my dumb be thought, because it has a sideways sad face next to it! And it has an equality symbol rather than a colon, so it’s stylized, like it was drawn in the 1920s or something. Has my been dumb for that long?
I’d think 100 percent would fail because vampires are FICTIONAL.
I will come clenly and admit that I don’t know a whole lot about vampires beyond what I just said, since their non-existence didn’t inspire much urgency to read up on them.
Who’da thunk it! So now I know plenty.
This has got to be one LONG book. I may not live to see the end, but on the positive end that also means I won’t ever have to start on that Goosebumps volume over yonder.
Vampires also know the Romans had filthy mouths. They were around, they remember. They also remember the Romans were very democratic. Vampires may live forever, but they can’t deliver the content you need without your precious delicious oozing votes.
Incidentally, I believe having an open mind is important, but it will take a bit of doing to convince me that drinking blood is expressing an opinion of some sort.
ANYwuh, what we have seen is merely an inexplicable update on another old standard, the easy question that you’re supposed to feel special for knowing the answer to despite the fact that some unknown entity is trying either to sell you an unknown thing that it has been determined you’re best not knowing too much about in advance or merely to shove more ads at you on a different page that IT gets money for. Look at that, “buffalo” isn’t even capitalized, like it’s the animal rather than the city, because you’re so smart you only need two real choices. These days you’re even specialer because 97% of some group of people that also is not specified can’t figure it out, and you’ll go through the ad JUST to PROVE how brilliant you are because you already know! It feels good to be among the elite few, doesn’t it?
Huff, well I never! Don’t you know, this is the OFFICIAL quiz[.com]! This is the one the government uses to recruit for its official vampire hunting squad! This is the same one Sarah Michelle Gellar used to get off All My Children! Now she is an international superstar!
And then I had her arrested on pedophilia charges for getting all my children off.
All because of the official quiz! Do I hear a thank you?
Do you see the skulls? Do you see anything BUT skulls? Angela Lansbury must be coming for a visit. I understand that unlike some people she has a new product to promote, too.
In other news, I give praise to any handless conjoined twins who can pull off a successful burglary. It’s a shame they’re about to be murdered.
Is this site still here? I could have sworn I threw it out last week.
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I honestly have no idea sometimes.
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I think this is boring, but I already told somebody I’d write about it, and now I have to.
A few people seemed to think I had missed the point of a ubiquitous trend in internet advertising which I have complained about recently: that the things are supposed to be ugly. I believe now that there is no point to miss, and the absence of one is what worries me. It is true that I did not consider that the ugliness may be deliberate, but now that I have, I find it yet less forgivable.
The New York good ol Times website, which apparently doesn’t force me to log in anymore but still uses crazy click-tracky urls, had a story about the weird ads over two years before I could no longer contain my indignation. Yes, the ads get people’s attention. So does murdering them and/or wearing a suit made entirely of pizzas. Not all attention is good. And unless they’re from Sbarro there’s a good chance you ruined those pizzas.
Of course, that’s just the lower m’bills gang; the “get ripped” people are probably ripping off (oh ho) the proven winner. And so the thing that was unique five years ago is now irritatingly common in addition to sickeningly unsightly. In that not-mine article, the company also claims credit for the “click the icon representing your state” series, which I hate more than most other things. That one was so ugly it literally made me itch. It was like Chakan. The fifty tiny icons with state abbreviations on them presented as kernels of corn or large eyed ladybugs, bobbing around at the same time. 100 creepy eyes really close together and instead of mouths or pincers they had pairs of letters. It made me ill, as well as my computer, which struggled to render so many separate objects at the same time in a flash file. If my computer could vomit, I’d wish it wouldn’t.
So, anyway, ads are ugly, and they know it, and they like it.
Across six decades, television ads evolved from happy-go-lucky-go-shoppy hokeyness to cynical, market-researched “yeah, no…” scrumsack panderthons, but they’ve always been selling a product or a service. Even the Angry Gumball. I’ve been on and off the internet for over ten years, and banner ads have always been surreally disgusting and they’ve never had much to offer beyond vague schemes. Fill out this survey and win! Hit the monkey and win! No, forget that peef, you ALREADY won!
They don’t even bother with an asterisk most of the time. I don’t understand them and I don’t trust them. When similarly shifty operations like Cashcall show up on television, they resemble banner ads. Somehow, there is a lucrative category of customer who can be brought in entirely through blind curiosity over an ugly thing. This is not surprising; I never seem to get over it, but since the early 90s, cartoons have gotten uglier and uglier (or stayed as ugly while ones which were less ugly deaded out), and more and more kids have grown up watching more and more ugliness. They have been bred to be fond of the repulsive. The fact that anybody can be persuaded to drop dollars like this sickens me. It’s like in a feel-good-movie-of-the-year where some idiot will be taping triscuits to his socks or something and a billionaire happens to be passing by and says “that’s just the sort of ingenuity I’m looking for! Come work for me! Here’s $50000 regardless!” Why I oughtta!
While lover-my-bills actually does have a thing that it does, which is referring people to companies which in turn pay that website for the referral, I naturally assume the recommendations are less than the best possible advice and that LMB is more likely to refer to companies that pay it more for referrals. In part because its method for drawing customers is insincere, in part because it’s on the internet. The internet, where you can get music, movies and 600 dollar software for free, but actually attempting to pay somebody for something can cost you your live’s monetary savings because you paid the wrong people (or merely because your credit card was compromised when the 973rd “insecure connection” warning your computer didn’t bother to show you actually meant something). Which is a stupid generalization, and probably one that has been made before. Lowermebills probably isn’t a scam, but it acts like one, and actual scams act like it. I can’t myself conceive of how a nice looking advertisement for that company would look, though. They either have to be the ugliest or not succeed, because all they’re selling is dubious advice. It’s not my job to investigate what services are legitimate and which aren’t. There are places you can get information like that, and you should, if you give the slightest consideration to giving credit card information to a site you came to through a non-sequitur advertisement designed by first-graders.
The American Family Publishers were notorious for informing people that they “may already have won” millions of dollars as a way of enticing those people to buy trashy magazines through the mail. Do you know what happened to that? People sued the company out of existence because it was LYING. Publisher’s Clearing House was worse, but it scammed a lot more people, and so the amount that didn’t bother to sue it back collectively still bought enough magazines it didn’t want to keep the company in business. Or something. I read the wikehhhpedia page about a year ago so don’t use me as a source when you write a research paper for your sweepstakes studies class. People could have avoided being fooled if they’d paid more attention, but it never occurred to them that in this country there were large groups of people actively working to scam them out of their money. These days, of course, that happens on a much grander scale with companies scamming the government itself while simultaneously convincing the same government to pass more and more laws that allow bigger and bigger scams. And so compared to that, a decade’s worth of colorful flashing lies controlling the internet doesn’t seem as bad. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stand back and watch them flash and lie without a fight, either.
I’m glad uh someone believes in me.
If you have a PROBLEM I’d appreciate if you’d just say so.
What does THAT mean? Is it some sort of a warning? Or a threat? Arb, I hate not knowing!
Renk, I have to talk to some dumb monster now? Forget it, I don’t WANT to know!
I said I don’t want to- oh fiddle dee diaper.