Spending most of my free time playing the new Zelda game, which has been an incredible experience. I love exploring caves and the underground depths. I am keeping a diary of my progress on my game blog.

Blondie Watch

Before she married Dagwood Bumstead, Blondie’s name was Blondie Boopadoop. That’s what Wikipedia says, that’s what King Features Syndicate says, that’s what the Library of Congress says. But… was it? Out of curiosity, I looked into it, and while “Boopadoop” had been used in official promotional material dating back to 1930, I have yet to find it used in an actual comic strip. A few caveats: my search was by no means exhaustive (it would be nice to have the collection IDW put out) the OCR might have missed something, or maybe there are some gaps in the archive. I would assume “Boopadoop” came from creator Chic Young, or at least had his approval, but it’s odd that he apparently never put it into the strip, so while it’s offical enough, it’s not 100% Comic Strip Canon. Not that the strip was necessarily super-strict about continuity, mind you, just ask the Woodleys’ missing children.

Below are some of my findings; it’s interesting that some of the comic strip’s storylines would also play out in the letters section.

Belleville Daily News Democrat, August 18, 1930

Santa Fe New Mexican, August 23, 1930

Lebanon Daily News, October 8, 1930

The Windsor Star, March 12, 1932

Tampa Bay Times, December 20, 1942

Steel #1 (1977), via 13th Dimension

Maybe things were different in 1977, but in most Batman stuff I’ve read or seen it’s implied but never outright stated that the commish knows a secret identity or two, so I laughed at how blunt this answer is.

I watched the announcement that HBO Max is rebranding as just “Max.” I get it, on a basic level people don’t associate HBO with kids and family stuff, and they might reasonably assume HBO Max is just HBO and not all the other stuff they also have. I’m not sure renaming it “Max” fixes those issues, and dropping HBO – the 50-year old brand people already associate with “TV you have to pay for” – from the name of your streaming service seems like corporate malpractice. The most inexplicable decision to me is ditching the color purple in favor of blue. Everyone uses blue. Purple was fairly unique, it was key to the service’s identity, and it’d create continuity with the old service so millions of subscribers don’t go “wha happen?”

When they were talking about family shows they showed a graphic of Cartoon Network’s Summer Camp Island in the background, kind of a dick move considering they unceremoniously purged it from the service last year.

Presumably Payne would’ve made a cartoon based on whatever movie won Best Picture, so I’m going to take a stab at the other nominees:

All Quiet on the Biden Front: Biden napping while a tank labeled Inflation crushes taxpayers

Top Gun Malarkey: Biden about to crash a fighter jet labeled The Economy into a mountain

EPAtar: The Regulation of Water: Na’vi versions of Biden and AOC standing on a beach, talking about the need to protect the environment with burdensome regulation, unaware that a massive tidal wave labeled Red Wave is about to wipe them out

The Failmans: Biden sitting on a couch saying “Great movie, son!” as Hunter shows him a pornographic home video

The Banshees of Bidensherin: Biden looking distraught as he cradles a dead donkey labeled Democrat Party in his arms

Wokeness Talking: Biden dressed as a Mennonite woman saying things like “there are more than 2 genders”

DisasTár: Biden conducting an orchestra with the various instruments labeled Debt, Crime, Critical Race Theory, Wokeness, etc.

Triangulation of Badness: People on a cruise ship vomiting after seeing a Biden 2024 poster

Evilness: Biden dressed as Elvis during his comeback special saying he’s bringing back inflation

Mallard Fillmore Watch

3/5/2023

Mallard Fillmore voluntarily giving a generous handout to someone less fortunate??? Has the world gone topsy-turvy?!?

02/16/2023

Some surprising continuity in today’s Blondie… they did indeed wed on February 17:

02/17/1933

Another important date in Blondie lore…Baby Dumpling’s birthday is April 15th, fitting for a kid named after Alexander Hamilton:

11/07/1934

I didn’t intend to become a Blondie blogger, but I’ve accumulated too much knowledge from doing research and I need to share my findings. Fair warning, expect more in the future.

Made the New York Times today, no big deal.

Very funny to me that Pepsi’s answer to Sprite has to keep changing its name every 20 years, from Teem to Slice to Sierra Mist and now to Starry. Also funny that “Sierra Mist” is just synonyms for Mountain Dew, very Poochiesque.

RIP to Tweetbot, my most-used app. It made looking at Twitter bearable and even quite pleasant. I liked it so much I got a shirt with the company logo on it, and because the material is so nice and soft it became my favorite shirt (my second favorite shirt that I own, by the way, is Empty Taco by Ryan Dell). Whenever people complained about some new godawful Twitter feature, I could be content in the knowledge that I wouldn’t have to experience it, but now those days are over.

Tweetbot, along with other third-party apps, was unceremoniously killed in the middle of the night, which Twitter did not publicly acknowledge until five days later, citing “long-standing” rules that were added two days later.

Among its features:

• A non-algorithmic chronological timeline that let you read oldest-to-newest and kept your place, with an inline search that only searches your timeline. This also applied to lists.
• Being able to mute someone for a certain period of time, useful if someone’s being annoying. I didn’t even realize this was a Tweetbot feature and was dismayed to see it’s not in the official app.
• Ability to hide everyone’s display names so you can actually tell who people are instead of trying to remember who’s behind some stupid, truncated jokey name that they change every 3 days.
• Better support for multiple accounts. If you held down the retweet button, you could easily retweet something from another account. I see something cool and Simpsons-related, I could instantly retweet it from my rubbercat.net/simpsons account without switching. As opposed to… saving the tweet somehow, switching profiles, finding the tweet again, and then retweeting it.

There are probably more I’m forgetting. Now that I’ve been using the official Twitter app for an extended period of time it’s a bitter reminder of how much shittier the internet gets every day and the total contempt social media companies have for their users.

As for Mastodon/the Fediverse… I think things are getting better. Prior to Musk buying Twitter, whenever I looked at the “Federated” tab it was usually hentai, edgy chan-style humor, and tech people talking about how they self-programmed their toaster or whatever. Then post-Musk it was posts encouraging the use of content warnings for pictures of people making eye contact and scoldy posts about how it’s too white. It seems to have gotten relatively normal as things have died down. I came across some Fediverse drama recently and now it finally feels like an actual internet forum to me.

2022 FILM IN REVIEW

My quest to watch all the Blondie movies has catapulted director Frank R. Strayer to the top of my Letterboxd statistics

I also made an ancillary list of stuff I watched but don’t regard as films or otherwise didn’t want to log: miniseries, specials, TV shows, Looney Tunes, etc.

Best film I saw in 2022: Drive My Car

Best film I saw in 2022 that was released in 2022: Tár

Worst film I saw in 2022: Black Adam

Films I saw in 2022 for the first time:

1. Limelight
2. The Rescue
3. The Master
4. Millennium Actress
5. The Super Bob Einstein Movie
6. Robin Hood (1973)
7. Gremlins 2: The New Batch
8. All About Eve
9. The French Dispatch
10. Mean Girls
11. 13 Going On 30
12. Technological Threat (short)
13. From Up on Poppy Hill
14. Long Day’s Journey into Night
15. The Tragedy of Macbeth
16. A Patch of Blue
17. The Artist
18. Bed and Board
19. Robin Robin (short)
20. The Irishman
21. Spider-Man 3
22. Coda
23. The Wind Rises
24. Nightmare Alley (2021)
25. West Side Story (2021)
26. Don’t Look Up
27. Drive My Car
28. Wolfwalkers
29. Belfast
30. Turning Red
31. Come and See
32. Licorice Pizza
33. The Power of the Dog
34. Spider-Man: No Way Home
35. The Velvet Underground
36. King Richard
37. The Tale of Princess Kaguya
38. Nude on the Moon
39. Last Action Hero
40. Moonshot
41. The Bank Dick
42. The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part
43. Death on the Nile (2022)
44. The Fox and the Hound
45. Peggy Sue Got Married
46. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
47. The Eyes of Tammy Faye
48. Super Mario Bros.: The Mission to Rescue Princess Peach!
49. Modern Romance
50. The Batman
51. Band of Outsiders
52. When Marnie Was There
53. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run
54. Everybody Rides the Carousel
55. Early Man
56. Long Way North
57. Coonskin
58. Scoob!
59. Veliki provod (short)
60. Teen Titans Go To The Movies!
61. Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers
62. The Rescuers Down Under
63. Apollo 10 ½ : A Space Age Childhood
64. Perfect Blue
65. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
66. Star Trek: Generations
67. The Atomic Café
68. Queer Duck: The Movie
69. Immoral Tales
70. Off His Rockers (short)
71. It’s Pat
72. Slacker
73. A Stupid and Futile Gesture
74. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
75. Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe
76. The Lost Weekend
77. The Joy Luck Club
78. The Quick and the Dead
79. St. Helens
80. Please Murder Me!
81. Irma Vep
82. Top Gun
83. The Worst Person in the World
84. PlayTime
85. The Personal History of David Copperfield
86. The Bob’s Burgers Movie
87. Blondie
88. Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
89. The Hateful Eight
90. The Parallax View
91. Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn
92. In the Line of Fire
93. Walker
94. The Loves of Hercules (MST3K)
95. Roma
96. A Matter of Life and Death
97. Mad God
98. Prey
99. Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World
100. The Incredible Hulk
101. Blondie Meets The Boss
102. Not Okay
103. Air Doll
104. The Running Man
105. Deck of Cards
106. Elvis
107. Kings Row
108. Dick
109. Jumping (short)
110. Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie
111. La Chinoise
112. Blondie Takes a Vacation
113. Broken Arrow
114. In the Loop
115. True Lies
116. Funny Girl
117. American Psycho
118. Willow
119. Licence to Kill
120. The Silence of the Lambs
121. Alphaville
122. Planes, Trains & Automobiles
123. Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead
124. Thor
125. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
126. Blondie Brings Up Baby
127. PAW Patrol: The Movie
128. High Noon (short)
129. Frankenstein
130. Barbarian
131. GoldenEye
132. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
133. Don’t Worry Darling
134. Tár
135. Fire Maidens of Outer Space (MST3K)
136. Clueless
137. Crimes of the Future
138. Vulvine, Reine d’extase (short)
139. Mickey: The Story of a Mouse
140. Catwoman: Hunted
141. Bestia (short)
142. Blondie on a Budget
143. Paprika
144. God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty
145. Rain Man
146. Naked Gun 33 1⁄3: The Final Insult
147. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
148. Tarzan (1999)
149. Eddie Murphy: Raw
150. Ravenous
151. Black Adam
152. Snow Day (2022)
153. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
154. Blondie Has Servant Trouble
155. Love on the Run

HOLIDAY SPECIALS I WATCHED

(Green for first-time watches, red for re-watches)

The Wonderful Autumn of Mickey Mouse – I enjoy the modern Paul Rudish Mickey stuff, but this is the weakest of the four season-based specials they’ve done.

Rugrats: “Channukah” – I respect how very Jewish this is, makes the controversy over Grandpa Boris look silly.

Mickey Saves Christmas – A bit more younger-skewing than I was expecting but that’s on me. Minnie and Daisy are voiced by Kathryn Roebuck (the official replacement for the late Russi Taylor) and Debra Wilson (who apparently is now Daisy whenever Tress MacNeille is busy), both of whom are credited as “Additional Voices”

Rugrats (2021): “Traditions” – Kind of insane how little story there is… Didi is stressed out over the first night of Hanukkah and Christmas Eve being on the same day, and then everything just… works out. I’ve seen a handful of other episodes and I don’t think they ever mentioned Betty is Latina until now.

South Park: “Mr. Hankey, The Christmas Poo” – Never really got into South Park, this was new to me. It’s alright.

Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special – It’s fine. I’d either forgotten some stuff or didn’t see some of the movies so I kept thinking “oh that’s what that character’s deal is?” and “the dog talks now?”

Rugrats: “The Santa Experience” – There’s so much more going on in this one than the modern one, like there’s multiple subplots happening but it never feels rushed.

Rocko’s Modern Christmas – The version on Paramount+ doesn’t have the end credits at all so it misses the little tag at the end where everyone throws out their trees! What the hell!

Hey Arnold!: “Arnold’s Christmas” – Not to dismiss this very touching and melancholy episode, which is probably my favorite Christmas episode of anything, but why didn’t Mr. Hyunh go to the agency as soon as he arrived in the city. OK, sure, the system is more likely to listen to a couple blond white kids than a Vietnamese immigrant with broken English, but still…

Invader Zim: “The Most Horrible X-Mas Ever” – Hadn’t seen this before. Didn’t care for it. Everything is just… too much.

The Adventures of Pete & Pete: “O Christmas Pete” – Garbageman rules. I like when he’s in the Wrigleys’ house and the camera is tilted like an episode of Batman. Oh to be a villain in an episode of Pete & Pete.

Ziggy’s Gift – I hadn’t realized this Christmas special about the world’s lamest comic strip was animated by Richard Williams. Pretty charming, actually.

A Wish For Wings That Work – It’s lavishly animated but fell flat for me. Don’t really care for Breathed’s stuff when he’s in cutesy-poo mode. I kinda wish Steve Dallas and other Bloom County characters had showed up. Guess I’ll have to wait for the Fox series…

Rugrats: “A Rugrats Kwanzaa” – I never knew they updated the opening sequence to include Dil and Kimi, it sucks! It’s nice that they did this episode but it’s too didactic to be entertaining. Also it’s funny that this episode produced with such cultural sensitivity also includes a slur against the Romani people

The Adventures of Pete & Pete: “New Years Pete” – A joy to look at. It’s regrettable how “shooting things from interesting angles” has become a lost art in the world of childrens television.

Mallard Fillmore Watch

12/13/2022

I always knew Mallard Fillmore was an eggnog hater…

Twitter Files 1: twitter deleted some dick pics
Twitter Files 2: twitter gave special treatment to libs of tiktok, who is somehow the victim here (?)

This stuff is completely incomprehensible to me but apparently it’s the journalism scoop of the century and you’re an NPC if you disagree. Oh shit, I’ve just uncovered evidence of a senior Twitter executive attempting to influence an election and instituting shadowbans pulitzer please!!!