Commentary on bureacracy...

...from 1886:

"The story of Ivan Ilyich's life was of the simplest, most ordinary and therefore the most terrible.
"He had been a member of the Cort of Justice and died at the age of forty-five. He was the son of an official whose career in Petersburg in various ministries and departments had been such as leads men to positions from which, by reason of their long service and the official rank they have attained, they cannot be discharged, although it is obvious that they are unfit to perform any useful duty, and for whom, therefore, posts are created, which though fictitious carry salaries from six to ten thousand roubles that are not fictitious and on which they go on living to an advanced age."*

(I was going to put a political cartoon up above it, but I just realized I've never like political cartoons all that much)

What a terrifying thing to find in a short story. What's more terrifying? That this is a real staple of human productivity. The list of examples is staggering. The process of dealing with it is soul-crushing.

-kev-rock-racy

*From: Tolstoy, Leo (1886). The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Penguin Red Classic edition, 2006


PS. My sister is a beautiful bride if such a thing ever was.

A couple of things America...

...got right: absurdity, and obliviousness to that absurdity.

BEHOLD!



Holy shit that is ridiculous. And hilarious. And we are all schmucks.

I can't believe that was actually on tv,
-keverican revolution

some facts....

...about lizards. More specifically, facts about short-horned lizards (check that dude out...so majestique!)

Yesterday, my truck was towed and impounded. The people at the impound were jerks. I was bored and hot and sad because they wanted lots of money to give me my truck back. I didn't know what to do.

Then, i remembered i had the internet on my phone. I still didn't know what to do. The cursor just sat there in the phone Google search box. Then, i knew what i wanted to type. This is what i typed:

'facts about lizards'

This is what i learned about horned lizards (from onlinemathlearning.com- Amazing animal facts):

"Can horned lizards spit blood out of their eyes?

Yes, at least four varieties of horned lizard do spit blood out of their eyes as a message for predators to back off! When threatened, a horned lizard has a detailed escape plan. First, it runs and stops suddenly, trying to confuse the predator. If that doesn’t work, its next line of defense is to puff up its body and show off its spiny scales. As a last resort, the lizard will increase the blood pressure in its head until small blood vessels in its eyes rupture. This causes blood to squirt out in a stream that can carry for up to three feet. The blood confuses the predator and tastes really bad, too—or at least canines and felines seem to think so.

The horned lizard is popularly called a "horned toad," "horny toad", or "horned frog," but it is neither a toad nor a frog. The names come from the lizard's rounded body and blunt snout, which make it resemble a toad or frog (see the picture above). The spines on its back and sides are made from modified scales, whereas the horns on the heads are true horns with a bony core.

The horned lizards have other ways of avoiding predation besides shooting blood. Their coloration generally serves as camouflage. When threatened, their first defense is to remain still and hope to avoid detection. If approached too closely, they generally run in short bursts and stop abruptly to confuse the predator's visual acuity. If this fails, they puff up their body to cause its spiny scales to protrude, making it appear larger and more difficult to swallow."

Look at this video!



First, the lizard's like, "MMMMMM...ants in slo-mo!" Then, this fox gets all up in his shit. And the lizard's like, "Get off me fox!" And then he gets all crazy and squirts blood on him.

Lizards are badass.

-horned kevin

cartoons,...

...i like them better than pretty much anything else i could watch.

I also really like reading comics.

My reasons are pretty simple. First and foremost, I remain pretty childish. I still enjoy the shows from Nickelodeon that were created and aired in the early an mid-90s. My best friends and I watched cartoons that were intended for 11 year-olds well through high school. I also liked the wildly popular "Adult Swim" lineup, but not as much. I guess i just never stopped liking weird non sequiturs and absurd exaggerations?

My second reason is more substantive. I believe that at their best, cartoons are more expansive in their presentations. Animated television shows, movies, and video games come directly from the minds of their creators and illustrators. Even in "direct" representation of life around us, where cartoons simply give us the stories of people, cartoon television, movies and comics can materialize fantasies and emotions, making life more vivid. In less traditional illustrations of life (my favorite!) we might get an insight into the lives of aliens, personified objects, or animals as people.



Removing the limitation of simply capturing and then potentially manipulating the world around us gives people who create cartoons near unlimited potential in exploding the realm of possibility in storytelling. Their only limitations are what they might be able to fathom and then channel through their hands or their computer machines (again, my preference is hand drawn as I feel like computer illustrators have a tendency to strive toward 'life-like' instead of away from it).

In terms of storytelling, regardless of who they are intended for, cartoons are most often created by adults. As a result, audiences either get adult takes on reminiscences of their own childhoods/adolescences, animated representations of adulthood (see: Rocko, above), or stuff so removed from anything we've ever seen or heard that it could only drawn. This in and of itself should remove the 'cartoons are for kids' stigma.

This Scrooge McDuck comic from (from Videogum) sums up a lot of what i mean about imagination and stories.



You can read the whole comic here.

For a lot of people, the move Inception seems to represent an incredible example of innovation in the 'heist' concept, where dreams might be a place to commit theft given the weakness of the victim in a dream state. Still, making this idea stick in the 'real world' didn't happen until 2010, and when it finally happened, it was wildly popular.

Amazingly, this idea was printed and distributed to children in the 1950's. Even the 'kick' concept, if not directly ripped off from the comic, was already done:

.

To sum up, it strikes me that the most innovative storytelling, at least in the realm of fantastic cinema and television, is drawn. Unfortunately, animation doesn't sell like live action film or animation that's supposed to get really, really close to mimicking live action (see: the suck that was Avatar). I don't know why cartoons can't be marketed more effectively to adults. For me, Batman the Animated Series, a highly acclaimed Batman cartoon that appeared on the Fox Network while I was in elementary school was nearly as dark and just as compelling as the more recent and wildly popular Batman films. A feature-length cartoon, however, would never have been marketed so heavily nor as popular in theaters. The same is true of the new Scott Pilgrim movie, which, volume-length aside, is very unlikely to do justice to the original books. Nonetheless, it gets huge billing, television, internet, and print ads, a big name in Michael Cera, and probably (relatively) big box office numbers.

Me, i'd prefer it were a cartoon. Shit, i wish everything was a cartoon.

-kevillustrated