Blog update

 AARRRGH, blather, Gah., Hmm..., Meh.  No Responses »
Jun 052023
 

It seems that the issues that caused me to both ramp up use of Twitter and get the “backup blog” continue. It now appears that every weekend the servers at the hosting service get overloaded and I can’t log into the blog until Monday morning when the staff get in and clean things up. Last weekend was a three-day weekend, and the problem persisted until Tuesday. Consequently… no new blog posts on the weekend, it seems. So if you want to make sure to keep up with my thrilling adventures and opinions, this isn’t really the place for it. Instead:

https://unwantedblog.com/

The Unwanted Blog Twitter

 

 Posted by at 9:10 am

Target Targeted

 blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Meh., news, politics, wisdom, Worldwreckers, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 272023
 

It seems obvious by this point that a rational corporation would, when presented with the option of weighing in on politically decisive “culture war” topics, just stick their fingers in their ears and hum real loud until whatever -themed month it is ends, and spend their time trying to sell their normal merchandise to their normal customers. But, no. Due to the insidious and invasive influence of “woke” ideologies and diversity initiatives, companies have been led to believe that they *have* to build up their diversity social credit scores, or else… something.

Target stores are the latest to discover that attempting to appease a small group of weirdos ticks off a far larger group of people who don’t want to sterilize, mutilate and drive insane their children.A lot of customers have expressed outrage; a few by pestering the employees (these are just regular folk trying to earn a paycheck, leave ’em the frak alone); a few others by causing damage (come on, you’re not on the left… the law *will* go after you for vandalism). But by far, from Targets perspective the biggest threat to the corporation are the large number of customers who are simply not spending their increasingly thin dollars there. Apparently Target has lost about nine *billion* dollars so far. So Target has decided to move their displays of child-grooming-friendly products further back in the store where they’ll be less conspicuous. This, supposedly, is in response to threats to the stores, products and employees from customers who don;t like those products.

But now they’re getting threats from the *other* side… bomb threats from weirdos ticked off that Target is now attempting to appease right wingers.

 

You know who’s not getting bomb threats from *either* side? Companies that didn’t delve into goofy identity politics in the first place. There might be a lesson there.

 

Utah Target Evacuated After Reports of Trans Extremists Threatening to Bomb Multiple Target Locations for Removing Satanic Groomer Products

 Posted by at 8:32 pm

There are so few actual white supremacists…

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., Meh., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 232023
 

… that the market for them is being filled by non-white people. There was the “white supremacist” Mexican, and now this guy who was supposed to have tried to ram his U-Haul into the White House:

19-year-old Missouri man arrested in U-Haul crash at White House security barriers

U.S. Park Police on Tuesday identified the driver as Sai Varshith Kandula, 19, of Chesterfield, Missouri.

That’s a weird name for a Whitey McWhiteGuy.

 

 

Behold, modern “journalism:”

 

19 year old who rammed White House barrier threatened president

News of the arrest just feet from the White House comes amid a climate of fear and hostility as Republicans continue to demonize diversity programs while downplaying the threat of white supremacist violence.

 

Yeah. *THAT’s* the big problem plaguing society… white supremacy that’s so

 Posted by at 3:20 pm

“Fine Art”

 AARRRGH, art, blather, Forward!, Gah., Meh., politics, Worldwreckers, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Apr 282023
 

I listened to part of an NPR piece earlier today on the subject of art forgery and the economics of it. Part of the discussion revolved around a case where a museum had a special display of “art” produced, supposedly, by Jean-Michel Basquiat in the 80’s. If you’ve never heard of Basquiat, there are two things to keep in mind:

1) His paintings have sold for over one Hundred MILLION dollars.

2) His paintings look like this:

Yeah. That’s really what passes for “fine art” these days.

As it turns out, this museum exhibition was populated by *forged* Basquiat paintings, which caused headaches all around.

Anyway, the thing that made me laugh out loud was one of the admissions by one of the forgers: the paintings took less than half an hour to create. According to THIS ARTICLE, some of them as little as five minutes. If you can forge “art” that passes *any* sort of muster in a matter of minutes, I gotta question whether said “art” is worthy of any real mention.

 

In the NPR piece, the expert they talked to yammered on about how “important” Basquiat was, along with Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. There’s yer problem: you think *that* is art worthy of remembrance. But where is your reverence for Chesley Bonestell? Norman Rockwell? Robert McCall? You know, artists with actual skill and talent, producers of art that inspired and uplifted… and demonstrated craftsmanship and ᚠᚢcᚲᛁᚾᚷ effort? Artists you couldn’t create “previously unseen” art from in the time it takes to listen to a mediocre podcast?

This is just a part of the uglification of the world, the exaltation of the mediocre, the banal, the bland.

 Posted by at 6:05 pm

Color me stunned

 AARRRGH, art, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Meh., Worldwreckers, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Apr 042023
 

You Didn’t Finish Watching the Lord of the Rings TV Show

…the premiere of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power TV series had 25 million global viewers on the day it premiered. That’s quite a lot! But as it turns out, by the time the first season ended, a shocking number of those viewers as had already given up. In a new examination of Amazon Studios, the Hollywood Reporter mentions that only 37 percent of Rings of Power’s U.S. viewers stuck around through the Prime Video series’ eighth episode.

Yes, I’m surprised. I’m surprised that a full 37% stuck around to the end of that garbage show. I imagine most that did did so, like me, out of pure spite. And to see just how disrespectful the writers/showrunners would be to the source material. Answer: All. All the disrespect. Every last bit.

 Posted by at 12:52 pm

Wow, that’s awful

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Gah., Meh., paleo, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 272023
 

YouTube decided that I needed to see a scathing review of “Dinosaur with Stephen Fry.” So, what the H, I watched it. Not having seen “Dinosaur with Stephen Fry,” I had no opinion of it going in, but I’m always interested in a good dinosaur show. “Walking With Dinosaurs” and “Planet Dinosaur” and “Sea Monsters” and “Prehistoric Park…” the facts may sometimes be dubious, but the shows were always awesome. But there have been a *lot* of these CGI dino docu-dramas over the years, and I’ve certainly not watched them all. I hadn’t heard of “D with SF” before; as I watched clips of the CGI dinosaurs and their “interactions” with green-screened humans, I quickly concluded that this was a show made by the BBC or some such twenty or so years ago. The CGI was dodgy at best; it looked like something that was quickly cobbled together in the wake of “Walking With Dinosaurs” as a cash-grab. But the quick glimpses of Stephen Fry looked… *not* twenty years ago. So I looked the show up.

It came out in February… of this year. 2023.

Yikes.

 Posted by at 11:53 pm

Oscars: I don’t know if this means anything…

 art, blather, Hmm..., Meh.  No Responses »
Mar 132023
 

Wikipedia, unsurprisingly, has a list of all the Best Movie Oscar winners. For no readily apparent reason I decided to look them all up and see how many I’ve watched. Starting in the forties (because why not):

40s: 4
50s: 5
60s: 4
70s: 7
80s: 8
90s: 9
00s: 4
10s: 2
20s: 0 (out of three)

Hmmm. Seventies through the 90’s seemed to make movies I actually wanted to watch. But how about just the movies that were nominated?

40s: 16/50 (32%)
50s: 15/50 (30%)
60s: 21/50 (42%)
70s: 27/50 (54%)
80s: 27/50 (54%)
90s: 32/50 (64%)
00s: 14/55 (25.5%)
10s: 27/88 (30.7%)
20s: 2/28 (7.1%)

It’s less stark here, but again the 70s through 90s won. The outlier is the 20’s… so far it’s looking like a big pile of yawn.

One could argue that the older movies have the advantage, as I’ve had more time to watch them. But in the age of streaming, DVD, Blu Ray, 4k… any movie I *want* to watch, I can. If I haven’t by now, it’s most likely because I’ve seen the trailer or read the propaganda… and it’s just not interesting. Granted, not every movie is for everyone; I’m never going to be a big fan of “chick flicks” or artsy indie flicks about gay cowboys eating pudding any more than some people are never going to be fans of science fiction. But the fact that there seems to be a decline in movies I give a crap about might mean something to someone, I dunno.

Hell, here’s the list of nominees from the 2020’s:

Nomadland
The Father
Judas and the Black Messiah
Mank
Minari
Promising Young Woman
Sound of Metal
The Trial of the Chicago 7
CODA
Belfast
Don’t Look Up
Drive My Car
Dune
King Richard
Licorice Pizza
Nightmare Alley
The Power of the Dog
West Side Story
Everything Everywhere All at Once
All Quiet on the Western Front
Avatar: The Way of Water
The Banshees of Inisherin
Elvis
The Fabelmans
Tár
Top Gun: Maverick
Triangle of Sadness
Women Talking

How many have you actually even *heard* of? And how many, when you look them up, look like unwatchable preachy or artsy garbage?

 Posted by at 11:13 pm

How is this in any conceivable way an issue?

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Meh., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 032023
 

The New York Times “reports” that black people are having trouble riding horses because they are having difficulty finding helmets:

 

Correct me if I am wrong, but aren’t there black people in the Army, Marines, Air Force? Pretty sure they wear helmets there. Don’t black people ride bicycles and motorcycles? Again, they’ve been wearing helmets for decades. Probably even been black skaters and skateboarders, who often seem to wear helmets. How is this a problem?

 Posted by at 6:24 pm

Who the frak is this movie *for?*

 AARRRGH, art, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Meh., politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 032023
 

I’m not a fan of Dungeons & Dragons. Some friends tried to get me to play it going on 40 years ago, and I just didn’t get it (the FASA Star Trek Starship Combat game, though? I was all about that). So I don’t know the lore, settings, characters, etc. But I *do* know that the majority of fans appear to be males. D&D seems to share a lot of the *feel* of Lord of the Rings, which is also popular more among males. And while the males may tend towards the nerdy, the appreciation is for traditional masculine roles… heroes, barbarians, warriors, wizards. Weaklings are not well appreciated in that sort of world view. Even the supposedly week Hobbits turned out to have endless wells of strength and courage and, when called for, badassery.

And thus my confoundment upon reading:

The Dungeons & Dragons Movie Intentionally Emasculates Its Leading Men

The male characters, once again, apparently take a back seat to the females, and are depicted as weak and ineffectual. D&D is a role playing game. The players adopt roles… roles that they *want* to play. Characters they’d probably like to *be.* How many D&D players – the presumed base for the movie – want to see themselves as incompetent, weak, lazy, cowardly, useless? So… who is this movie supposed to appeal to?

I was unlikely to see this movie before reading this. “Unlikely” has transitioned to “statistically insignificant chance.”

 Posted by at 5:59 pm

The comments are worth it

 AARRRGH, art, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., Meh., science fiction, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 182023
 

So there’s this forthcoming movie, “Space Oddity.” The premise is that a guy is selected for a one-way mission to Mars. This is not an unrealistic idea… for every colonization mission throughout history there have been people – lots of people – who went on a one-way trip. That’s how we colonized the entire planet, and that’s how we’ll colonize the entire universe. But instead of the movie being about the boldness of the mission, the braveness of the guy, the vision for the future… it seems to be about the people dragging him down, refusing to let him have his dream. Fark the future of mankind, stay down here with us in the dirt (rather literally in this case).

It’s not entirely clear how the movie will end, but the trailer seems to be one of those that lays out the entire plot. And it indicates that, gosh, love conquers all, including the urge to explore. To that I say: bah. And to my satisfaction, so do a lot of the commenters on the video.

Shymalan spoiler: the girl is from Mars. She needs to keep him on Earth so he doesn’t spread human diseases and wipe out the Mars population. She dies of a common cold in his arms and the movie ends with him packing up her coffin to bring to Mars. He’s part of a secret government organization and his mission has always been to destroy the Martians and harvest all the precious metals on their planet. It’s a horror/thriller.
Can always count on family to guilt you into following their dreams at the expense of your own.
Plot twist: he does end up going, but hits the firmament and discovers Mars is a sonoluminescent luminary body that nobody can ever get to.
man had a dream and got hallmarked

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 2:11 pm
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