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

12:11:57
12:11:58
12:11:59
12:12:00

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?

Mallard Fillmore Watch

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.

Mallard Fillmore Watch

04/21/2018

The subject of today’s outrage is… a song from 1875 having entered the public domain. I wonder what he thinks about reparations for slavery.

CULTURE CORNER

• Everything I’ve heard about the upcoming relaunch of Mad Magazine, now under the stewardship of longtime Bongo Comics editor Bill Morrison, sounds intriguing.
   
• Cautiously optimistic about Nancy, which is now being drawn by a female webcomics artist instead of some baby boomer. Keeping an ancient strip around long after the death of its creator instead of making way for a new strip is not ideal, but sometimes it can lead to cool stuff like Weird Heathcliff. The blog post announcing the change absurdly treats it like it’s a rebuke of Harvey Weinstein somehow?!?
   
• Got around to seeing Dune and now I finally understand the context for a bunch of internet jokes I’ve seen over the years. I couldn’t get to sleep that night because I couldn’t stop thinking about the wonderful imagery: folding space, those dudes with the big microphone, the blocky boxing, Kyle MacLachlan’s amazing hair. The story on the other hand is ehhh. I think the problem with a lot of sci-fi stuff is that you have to spend a lot of time on exposition explaining the politics and status quo of the world. I suppose one advantage of doing a hundred Star Wars movies is that you can pretty much just jump right into the story: “Look, it’s Star Wars, there’s lightsabers, you know what’s up”