March 31, 2015

Strong contender for the most depressing phrase in the English language: "The Official Twitter for Jake from State Farm®"

March 28, 2015
Slimed!

I picked up this oral history about Nickelodeon for pretty cheap and it's a good read... except for the inexplicably boneheaded decision to omit people's job titles, so you have to constantly flip to the back of the book to read the bio for every other person, just to find out they were some stage manager for Welcome Freshman or something.

Here's something I thought was funny:

KEN SCARBOROUGH: The one question I get asked is, "Did you ever put something dirty in there?" Why would I do that? What is the upside of hiding dirty things for children to find in there? In the first place, it's just a gross and weird thing for anybody to do.

(about a hundred pages later:)
WILL MCROBB: That's what Nick wanted, but there was a line. "John, you can't do a blowjob joke on Ren & Stimpy." "But no kid's gonna get it; it'll go right over their heads!" Every time I'd make a counterargument, his response was, "It's not like I'm showing them fucking!"

March 27, 2015

Mallard Fillmore Watch

Mallard Fillmore, 03/20/2015
03/20/2015

Mallard Fillmore, 03/13/2015
03/13/2015

Liberals hate all religions, so clearly President Obama, who can't bring himself to denounce Islam, is not a liberal.
March 18, 2015

Awful Link of the Day - The Slums of Elwood:

The Slums of Elwood is a "Most Peculiar" message board where dorky teens and weird adults chat about the long-running PBS cartoon Arthur. With lax moderation and a focus on "strange and disturbing Arthur-related topics and fan creations," it aims to be to the show's fandom what Weird Twitter is to Regular Twitter. The details are a bit sketchy, but apparently it was formed in the wake of an earlier Arthur board's implosion, partially due to some drama over the concept of a certain tertiary character removing his hat. Sounds like the Arthur fandom was pretty damn weird to begin with.

March 14, 2015

Buying a $500 smartwatch to combat the problem of "looking at your smartphone too much" is the most 0th World thing I can imagine

March 10, 2015

I wrote an obituary for Sam Simon on my Simpsons site's news blog.

I didn't really set out to write serious, hopefully respectful obituaries on my jokey, ironic fansite, I just kind of fell into it. I wrote a quick one for Polly Platt a few years ago because I thought her small role in the genesis of The Simpsons was a neat little anecdote that not a lot of people knew about. And then some other folks died, and I figured, "well, if I wrote all those words about someone who was only tangentially connected to The Simpsons, I'd better write something for them..."

I suppose my overall goal is to just share whatever relevant Simpsons arcana I've had rattling around in my brain for years in the hopes that it might be somewhat interesting to other Simpsons nuts, the kind of stuff that's overlooked by actual news organizations.

March 7, 2015
Hooray I can post this again

March 6, 2015

Awful Link of the Day: /r/WatchPeopleCode

/r/WatchPeopleCode is at the forefront of the perplexing "live coding" trend, where turbonerds record themselves wrangling ones and zeroes and stream it on the internet for other turbonerds to watch in real time. "Think of it as like a ridealong in an episode of COPS, where who knows what I'm going to be running into," teases a Firefox engineer at the start of a 2-hour video about printing in Linux. Yeah, ok.

March 1, 2015
monthly traffic exceeded
Oh, hi, I don't know if you noticed, but rubbercat.net was down for the past eight days, for the same reasons outlined here. I've always been frugal with the amount of disk space I have, but it looks like I've outgrown the "Economy" plan and I'll have to upgrade to the "Business" plan next time I renew my hosting. It comes with an unfathomable amount of space, which can only mean good things for lovers of content!