Sad to hear about the passing of SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg at such a young age. He was a pure soul who loved the ocean and Laurel and Hardy shorts and managed to combine the two to great success. I remember the day after SpongeBob premiered (following the Kids Choice Awards) and we were talking about it at lunch: I was ABSOLUTELY INCENSED because it was a COMPLETE RIP-OFF of Rocko’s Modern Life and how dare they! I learned later, of course, that it was made by most of the same people (Hillenburg had basically taken over for Rocko creator Joe Murray in the last season). Years later I was in an animation program and they screened his shorts, including “Wormholes” which is apparently considered “lost” because it was never uploaded to the internet. Honestly I only vaguely remember it and these notes I took only add to the mystery:
11/05/2018
Not pictured: elephant armed with an AR-15 ready to mow down some Soroscucks
This, coupled with Flickr’s recent announcement that they’re just going to delete your shit if you’re over a 1,000 photo limit (when it used to be 1 terabyte) … not a great start for Flickr’s new owners!
I was going to tweet this:
mad at star wars, not for chud reasons, but because it killed off any hope of disney rebooting the black hole
but then I thought, “oh, better google this to make sure they’re not actually rebooting The Black Hole,” and SURE ENOUGH they are.
EMMYS RECAP 2018!
Watched the Emmys for about an hour, looked and sounded like it was on public access, really insanely bad even by awards show standards, never heard of any of the winning shows, thankfully avoided seeing David Lynch lose to the creator of Glee
WIRED: Google Wants to Kill the URL
“People have a really hard time understanding URLs,” says Adrienne Porter Felt, Chrome’s engineering manager. “They’re hard to read, it’s hard to know which part of them is supposed to be trusted, and in general I don’t think URLs are working as a good way to convey site identity. So we want to move toward a place where web identity is understandable by everyone—they know who they’re talking to when they’re using a website and they can reason about whether they can trust them. But this will mean big changes in how and when Chrome displays URLs. We want to challenge how URLs should be displayed and question it as we’re figuring out the right way to convey identity.”
Google made every site get a security certificate and nags at you if your design isn’t mobile-friendly which is a bit cumbersome for simple-minded hobbyists like me who just want to put words on a screen. They can take my URLs from my cold dead hands
Remember when I was the big bad guy because I had shady dealings with Russian oil guys or whatever?
thought i blocked u
And then this Trump fella comes along… hoo boy! I may have been evil and incompetent but even I had my limits! #Resistance #NeverTrump #CharlesLoganDidNothingWrong
god
dont talk to me ever again
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Twitter seems mondo messed up these days: the Alex Jones fiasco, the brilliant idea to curb “fake news” echo chambers by promoting “alternative viewpoints” in your feed (how would this even work? Do you get shown tweets from Roseanne if you have a rose emoji in your display name?), re-banning people who shouldn’t have been banned in the first place, archives being weaponized by ghouls, etc. I use the third-party app Tweetbot which gives me quick access to lists and gets rid of most of Twitter’s junk (posts people liked, “in case you missed it,” incessant suggestions of people to follow, stupid display names) but Twitter is hellbent on wrecking that too. Some people are signing up for something called Mastodon, but it’s a joke and has apparently has its own problems. All that aside, I still get value out of Twitter (I made Maude Flanders laugh!) and I’m just going to hope everything will magically fix itself.
Also, I never got any sort of e-mail or notification that the service Storify shut down due to GDPR. Luckily I’d already saved Geoff Johns’ Cereal Adventure. I’m going to try to see if I can recover others with wayback machine archives. Never Trust A Web Service
Been thinking about theme park lands lately. I hope someday I get to visit the “King’s Row” area of Toon Lagoon at Universal before they eventually retheme it because it’s a weird mausoleum to a bunch of old comic strips owned by King Features Syndicate nobody cares about. In other words it sounds like an incredible paradise to me. They made statues for Little Nemo and Krazy Kat! There’s a Marmaduke photo spot! A Mark Trail/Family Circus crossover! A gift shop based on Gasoline Alley! A giant Dagwood Bumstead head! There is also a couple Nancy displays even though the strip’s not owned by King Features (I was trying to figure if it ever was but Google is unhelpful). Shh!
Maybe I’m underestimating its popularity but it is absolutely mind-boggling to me that Wayne’s World was once considered big enough to sustain its own theme park land.
If Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox is approved, they absolutely need to build an actual version of the Fox logo and make it the centerpiece of California Adventure’s Hollywood Land, assuming it won’t have already been turned into Marvelville by then.
I reread Romneyduke, which is one of my favorite things I’ve done, in light of the latest Papa John’s controversy (a previous controversy is alluded to in the third comic). Man, I’d forgotten some of those campaign issues. Remember when tax returns were a thing that mattered?
07/09/2018
I seem to recall right-wingers flipping out because one of Obama’s daughters wore a shirt with the peace symbol on it, but yes, I agree, the focus on Melania’s jacket was a dumb distraction from a far more important issue…
07/10/2018
That’s right, the uncivil behavior of the boorish Left. Mallard Fillmore will still be talking about Red Hen/Whataburger in 2020.
