tired, queer, and pissed off

Or how spending hours on the phone to a friend a long way away, then hanging up and ringing another one, was a cliche for "the teenager" since pretty much the dawn of mass adoption of phones and only died as they moved from the landline to the mobile and then to MSN...

[Images- one photo per decade from the 1940s-1990s of a teenager lounging on the phone]

this is the Phoenix zoo, she's got plenty of outdoor space 👍

“Welcome in what can I get you”

“I want a plain black coffee”

“All rights wha-“

“No sugar or cream or flavor or anything else.”

“Okay, got it, wha-“

“I don’t want no caramachmocha flippy-do’s or frappachina-what-it’s. Just. A plain ol regular black coffee”

“That’s great sir, now please wha”

“Just a old fashioned stright up coff-“

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?

That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:

When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didn’t actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvin’s skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jackson’s hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than he’d expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.

The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (I’m not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and “working” for another few hours on a second, “toned-down” version, and it worked every time.

The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isn’t some extant physical rubrick of what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s the idea that they can have absolute power over someone else’s creative work. It’s about the social dominance of the interaction.

There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.

The tadc / simpsons crossover that no one asked for

A Nervous Old Man (right) and his Emotional Support Violence Machine (Left)