I liked Google+. It had a ton of problems like its initial crusade against pseudonyms, it never lived up to its early promise of “a better Facebook,” and Google Reader was axed in favor of it which destroyed blogs. However, I found a semi-active community that posted interesting links, and so it was neat to check in on and share something every once in a while. In this era of megaplatforms that are just overwhelming you with content, I think there is room for “mini social networks.”

REVIEWS OF VARIOUS THINGS

Monty Python’s Flying Circus – Only a few episodes in. So far there’s a number of sketches where the premise is “what if working class slobs had a liberal arts education” which seems like the 1960s version of “Let’s intellectualize rap music!” message board threads

Downsizing – It’s fine. About a year ago I saw someone livetweeting it saying it was great and then followed up half an hour later about how it took a total nosedive. So I was waiting for some big awful twist that never really came

A Star is Born (1954) – I got a digital version of this as an apology gift for being a former Filmstruck subscriber (joke’s on them, I was only a participant in the free beta test!) which includes long-lost audio footage awkwardly inserted, which makes a long and tedious film slightly longer. It’s time to hashtag-cancel Judy Garland for her cultural appropriation song.

Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend – Conan O’Brien is such an incredibly funny guy in this podcast. I just wish a third of it wasn’t ads (they’re funny, but, y’know). The relatively few other podcasts I listen to are Patreon-supported so I’m not really sure: do all “mainstream” podcasts have this many ads?

Conan – I watched the first episode of the “revamped” half-hour show and the funny Conan from the podcast is nowhere to be found. It’s funny when talk shows make a big deal about GETTING RID OF THE DESK like it will solve all their problems.

OK KO! Let’s Be Heroes – This show is incredible. It “premiered” as a mildly entertaining phone game like a year before the show did and I kinda forgot there even was a show until the What A Cartoon podcast mentioned it was on Hulu now. I see Geneva Hodgson in the credits as a storyboarder/writer a lot; I’m so glad that the members of Cartoon Book Club are all extremely powerful now.

Sorry To Bother You – It’s very fun and entertaining but also a big mess. It’s like the writer got bored and started making a new movie with a new magical conceit every 20 minutes. For some reason it really annoyed me that there’s a character whose name is bleeped out just because it’s ~wEiRd~ or whatever.

Batman The Animated Series – 3 of the past 4 episodes I’ve seen feature people being transformed into genetic abominations (cat people, werewolf, Man-Bat). Just what was going on over at the studio…?

Snickers With Creamy Peanut Butter – I think they’re playing fast and loose with the abstract concept of a Snickers bar. Just how much can you alter a Snickers bar before it ceases to be a Snickers bar?

I put together a page for the relatively few posts on my Tumblr that were flagged by their adult content algorithm. Sorry deviants but it looks like you’ll have to go elsewhere for your Steve Wozniak gifs.

The ban on adult content is disappointing and I’m sad to see some of the artists I was following leave because of it. I’m gonna keep using it though because I still find it useful as a “look at this thing I found” engine.

Tumblr was (is?) a great way to keep up with comics and illustrators and its customizable design is incredibly flexible. I don’t fully understand why artists seem to have migrated to Instagram which has similarly draconian policies and none of the flexibility. That’s just where the people are, I guess.

Edit (one hour later): I just logged in and they changed the color scheme from “pleasant” to “active assault on my eyeballs”… maybe I should rethink this “gonna keep using it” thing

I watched FYRE FRAUD on Hulu and learned about Fuck Jerry, which appears to be an Instagram account that mainly posts screenshots of stuff teenagers wrote on Tumblr or Twitter. And somehow they managed to parlay that into a million dollar PR firm???

This leads me to a new theory: You can summarize the past two decades of the internet by dividing it into four different “eras” defined by content aggregators: eBaum’s World, I Can Haz Cheezburger?, Buzzfeed, and Fuck Jerry.

Mallard Fillmore Watch

12/17/2018

Mallard Fillmore bids farewell to President George “Home Work” Bush, who was the comic’s biggest fan:

Bruce Tinsley, creator of the conservative comic strip Mallard Fillmore, remembers feeling stunned when the fan letter showed up in February 1998. After all, his strip— featuring a right-leaning TV newsman or, more accurately, newsduck—was still in its relative infancy. Yet here was George Herbert Walker Bush declaring that he and Barbara turned to Mallard, “sage duck that he is,” first thing every morning. Even more gratifying, the former president thanked Tinsley for taking on “that horrible Doonesbury” and its creator, liberal icon Garry Trudeau, “a guy that tore me up in a vicious, personal way strip after strip.”

I didn’t realize Bush’s distaste for Doonesbury ran so deep until I read this article by Matt Taibbi. Nowadays newspaper comic strips are thought of as this weird relic of a bygone era so it’s wild to learn about, like, Mort Walker being ambushed by a feminist on Phil Donahue or that four panels could reduce The Most Powerful Man On The Face of the Earth into a fuming volcano of rage:

A few weeks later, the Doonesbury comic strip — which was a big deal in an age when everyone read newspapers — ran a cartoon playing on the theme of Bush’s “manhood problem.” Cartoonist Garry Trudeau had newsman character Roland Hedley Jr. doing a standup outside the White House, announcing, “In a White House ceremony today, Bush will formally place his embattled manhood in a blind trust.”

The Bush family never got over the Doonesbury thing. “He’s been reduced to a cartoon,” fumed son Jeb in a 1987 Newsweek cover story called “BUSH BATTLES THE WIMP FACTOR”…

After the “Wimp” cover, Doonesbury doubled down — among other things, depicting Bush as literally invisible, which caused the Bushes to overreact in historic fashion. Bush himself admitted in an interview that he wanted to “kick the hell” out of Trudeau dating back to 1984, and his sons George and Jeb actually reached out to the cartoonist, who was a Yale classmate of W. This is in Poppy’s recollection:

″Trudeau says to our son, ‘Well, I hope your family doesn’t take this personally.’ And George says, ’They don’t take it personally, but my brother (Jeb) wanted to come up and kick your ass all over New York.”

This all seems absurd now, but Bush spent the rest of his political career beating back the wimp/manhood thing.

Back in 2011 I said I was going to do annual galleries of “pictures I made or at least modified over the past year but didn’t post on this site for whatever reason,” and then I just plain forgot about it for, uh, eight years. Well, it’s back now, for 2018, with photoshops, gifs, and screenshots and commentary.

→ 2018

FAVORITE TWEETS OF 2018

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:

Mallard Fillmore Watch

11/05/2018

Not pictured: elephant armed with an AR-15 ready to mow down some Soroscucks

Mallard Fillmore Watch

some guy on flickr uploaded a million pictures of his dick and put a simpsons quote in the description for all of them and it's really messing with the search results

— rubbercat.net/simpsons (@rubbrcatsimp) October 27, 2018

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!