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Sunday, 4 August 2019

It Appears Cara Delevingne And Ashley Benson Are NOT Married And I'm Sad

He said: "They were sure about what they are doing and they were sure about what they mean to each other. They were clearly devoted to each other and they had the biggest smiles on their faces. You could see that they were serious about what they were doing but having the most fun. They wanted it simple, quiet and easy."

The Aliens Are Not Real, And Also They're Total Cowards

Screenshot: Mac and Me (Youtube)

Maybe you have seen the news that ... well, what, exactly? Near as I can tell the “news” is that lots and lots of Navy pilots have seen UFOs, but that somehow none of them have recorded anything but grainy, indistinct, Classic Arts Showcase–ass video of blurry dots which we’re meant to believe are traveling very fast and/or making extreme flight maneuvers at speeds that ought to be impossible. I guess the aliens designed their high-performance ships to look like frickin’ cotton wads?

Anyway the takeaway seems to be: Aliens. Many of my anus colleagues here at Deadspin have latched onto this idea. They are saying things like “Then explain why there was no EXHAUST PLUME” and “Explain why the pilots wouldn’t have been turned to goo by the G-forces” and “Aliens get shot at every day I bet.” They are evaluating alien theories, such as that these aircraft are capable of nimble hypersonic maneuvering because of alien alloys, or that these are the robotic sentry drones of an advanced spacefaring civilization, or that shooting at the UFOs likely would spark an interstellar war and therefore is a bad idea.

Well guess what, you bunch of bozos! I have a frickin’ theory, and it’s that the aliens are not real, all of this is a bunch of baloney, and also that the aliens are total cowards who are afraid to show their ugly faces to an actual good-looking species, the humans! You know I’m right, because the aliens have not revealed themselves to disprove this very blog, which I am certain they would read if they were real, which they are not. Where are they? They don’t have the guts and/or physical existence to show themselves!

What are those pilots seeing up there? It’s probably nothing. I’m sure somebody just threw a frisbee too high in 1946 and the jet stream caught it and it’s been circling the earth erratically ever since. Or like a tin dinner plate from some old-time mining camp. A tornado shot it up into the stratosphere in 1851 and it’s just zipping around up there confusing pilots. Hell, there’s probably like at least 15 frisbees up there by now. Just buzzing around, hovering and then rocketing off in random directions, riding the air.

These objects are much bigger than frisbees and plates, you’re saying. Also there’s no reason why a frisbee and/or a plate wouldn’t just fall back to earth, due to gravity. Also frisbees and plates can’t make high-speed aerial maneuvers. Okay fine. They’re aircraft of some sort. Big whoop! I’m sure it’s just military drones or whatever. No way the aliens developed aircraft capable of that kind of flying. Aliens? No. I think not. Those guys are losers; you’re expecting way too much of them. Also they’re not real.

Listen. You’re getting lost in the weeds, here. I am a big-picture kind of guy. The big picture here is that it’s not aliens, which are an optimistic yet childish fantasy for silly doofuses who wish not to be alone in the cold, dark universe, and who also, as a species, lack the courage to disprove these claims by landing a flying saucer in the level part of my driveway this evening and submitting themselves to being photographed by me.

That makes no sense, you’ve moved onto saying. How can aliens be both not-real and also cowards? It’s not my responsibility to sort this out! The burden of proof is on the (fake) aliens, to prove that they not big chickens! All I am saying is that they do not exist, and also that they are shivering ninnies pissing their space-diapers at the thought of confronting me in my driveway this evening, preferably before sundown so that the conditions will be favorable for good photography. Their pathetic cowardice sickens me. They’re not real, and also the shame of the universe. Their (fake, imaginary) mothers’ neighbors ask what the kids are up to these days and she just says “They died” because the truth is more embarrassing: That they don’t exist at all, and also have no balls, or whatever organs a purely hypothetical, non-existent interstellar alien species would use to produce male gametes and hormones for bold and aggressive behavior, given that they would possess those or would even broadly possess analogues for earthling sexual reproduction. Or whatever! I am not a biologist!!!

In conclusion, I could kick the ass of any alien, no problem.

Which Ear Is Your Phone Ear?

Photo: Keystone/Getty

I recently became deaf in my right ear thanks to a sudden brain hemorrhage, which is a freakish life-threatening injury that I highly recommend avoiding. The good news out of this, apart from me not being dead, is that it turns out my surviving left ear is my phone ear. I didn’t even realize it was my phone ear until I made a phone call with single-sided deafness for the first time and realized that the phone ear had been spared. I can make all the voice calls I like, which is a huge morale boost to me, a man who actively despises voice calls of any sort.

For real, this was a small relief because I don’t use a Bluetooth earpiece or talk on speakerphone like a dick. I hold the phone to my ear, sweat all over it, and then short out the call in the process. That’s my thing. I’m too old.

I told my wife about the morbid serendipity of my left ear surviving and she like was like, “Oh wow, I use my right ear for phone calls.” I’d never noticed this about her. I’ve been married for 16 years, and while my wife loves to give me shit for not being chatty enough (never a problem for me online … perhaps there’s a lesson there), I know her well enough, well enough to be surprised that I did NOT know this about her. I didn’t know it about me either, so I guess that evens things out.

I’d like to say I deliberately CHOSE the left ear/hand for phone use so that my dominant right hand could be free to grab chips or write shit down or beat a political prisoner, but no. I chose it out of some weird primal instinct, and most other people do as well. If I tried answering the phone with my right hand, I’d feel like I just took LSD. I am a freak in that research shows that people tend to use their dominant side for phone calls, meaning that I should be using my right ear for calls since I’m right-handed. But, on the flipside, science ALSO says that creative people tend to favor the left ear for phone calls. I’m one of those people! NICE. Also, there may be benefits to using the left ear in terms of phone function AND protecting yourself from phone radiation. Given that my brain already exploded, I guess the latter is beside the point now.

Regardless, I remain fascinated by people’s tendencies regarding a communication habit is now already hilariously obsolete. That’s why I want to ask you which side you use for calls. Could you switch to the other side if you tried? Are you ambi-ear-strous? Do you have a moral opinion on the matter? Do you stand to wipe your ass? I demand to know it all. Vote now, comment in the large intestinal tract of Kinja below, and sate my curiosity.

Google's Smart Compose Is Shitty And Definitely Evil

Photo: Leon Neal (Getty)

Not satisfied with foisting predictive text and Smart Replies upon an unsuspecting public, Google rolled out a new Smart Compose feature for mobile Gmail two months ago that, like your significant other interrupting you, storms right ahead and puts words in your mouth. Like so:

Smart Compose is the result of Google AI doing a whole lot of machine learning (learning that is presumably overseen by subcontracted employees who are worked down to the nubs) so that Gmail can do an imitation of your voice that’s close enough to the real deal for you to go along with it. “‘See you later’? Sure, that sounds like me.” Tech media, as is their wont, went right ahead and salivated over the remarkably minimal potential upside of a feature people never asked for but will likely end up being too lazy to disable. Here’s CNET, in an article that featured a Google Assistant pop-up ad when I clicked on it:

Hate writing emails? Us too... Hopefully [Smart Compose] will eventually cut back on the amount of time you spend typing out mundane emails.

Here’s Engadget:

It risks leading to cookie cutter replies, but it could also save you time when writing perfunctory business emails or confirming a lunch date.

Here’s Workfront, featuring an inevitable cameo from Mark Cuban:

I find that it saves time to just hit Tab and complete a sentence. Since email is something that often gets in the way of the work I want to be doing most, it’s a welcome feature. Mark Cuban, business expert and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, agrees, saying “it adds at least 30 minutes to my day.”

And here’s The Verge:

The new ability arrived on Gmail today, moving us slightly closer to a future where we just use bots to replace our more mundane communications.

I am a supremely lazy man. I would always prefer that the ball be in someone else’s court. In fact, I’d prefer that no ball be in play at all. I don’t wanna send emails to anyone, and I’m not alone in that, given that social media and texting and apps like Slack have conspired to render email outdated, no matter what kind of flourishes Google adds to their product. In theory, Smart Compose was designed with someone like me in mind.

But I can write my own fucking emails. I do not need the email equivalent of the GPS lady ordering me around when I’m typing out “Happy Birthday!” to someone. I’m already doing the least I can do. I should probably not be angling to find ways to do even less than that. If Smart Compose can save me 30 minutes a day—the way it does for grandiosely self-important busyfolk like Mark Cuban—I would just waste that 30 minutes taking some other kind of AI-directed shortcut to nowhere.

There’s a pattern to those excerpts I plastered up above. They all imply that typing out a full email is busywork, which it can be. It’s “mundane,” “perfunctory,” and “gets in the way of the work I want to be doing most.” Those are all acceptable complaints about email. Smart Compose saves you time the same way reaching for an emoji does an adequate enough job of conveying your point to save you from shitting out a proper text message. But welcoming Smart Compose, whether enthusiastically or with a touch of seemingly obligatory caution, is basically an admission that it’s easier to just not be human.

Because being a human is a massive pain in the ass. You have to pay bills. You have to do work. You have to do chores. You have to floss your teeth. There’s allure in outsourcing as much of that tedium to a machine as you can, and modern industry is built on selling you myriad ways of doing so. Google Assistant has a whole “Make Google Do It” branding campaign—a good one—built upon that very notion. The pitch is that they’ll take care of all the bullshit, so that you have more time for all the good things in life. Your life will be distilled into its purest, most silken and livable form.

That’s a lie. I can’t believe Google lied, but it’s true. Google doesn’t want you to have more time for you. They want you to have more time for THEM. Like keeping their employees late at the office by plying them with free food and other goodies, tech companies hope that the more their services aid you, the more you’ll use them and rely upon them. [Bong hit] They WANT you to be machines. They want you to be as quantifiable and predictable as the algorithms they’ve designed to emulate you. Every new feature is designed to hasten that grim Singularity. Your data is not enough. Lord knows that Smart Compose represents an effective and invasive way of learning all about you and your tendencies, but that’s hardly the end of the con. They want you to give all of yourself away. And so this’ll hardly be the last time they design a feature or an app that’ll prove such a viable substitute for you that you can push a button, let the artificial you take care of it, and then just continue to sit there like a bag of crackers. By opting for the cookie cutter reply over and over, you become the cookie cutter. That’s the rabbit hole they’re beckoning you down.

There’s not gonna be a ton of active resistance to this. This isn’t some Skynet shit; the machines won’t have to wage war on mankind to get it to submit. I’m already an old man for bitching about all this. I know it. I’m not gonna dam this river on my own. I turned off Smart Compose but I still gleefully use Gmail and Slack and tons of other services whose mission is to have more of me be left to the cloud than not. I am aiding them in their efforts. But I’m still willing to hold out and do SOME things on my own, even if it’s rote nonsense like replying “I’ll see you next Wednesday!” to an acquaintance.

That roteness IS life. That is part of what goes into your identity. There is an intangible joy in such mundane rituals, aggravating as they may be. If you skip all those rituals, you skip the bulk of existence. There’s a fucking Adam Sandler movie with this lesson, it’s so obvious. Take enough autopilot shortcuts and soon there’ll be no you left. Mankind is engineering its own obsolescence and Smart Compose is a tiny but grating example of those efforts. Fuck that and fuck Google. I got enough people telling me what to do as is. Last thing I need is some goddamn email window doing likewise.

Why Your Children's Television Program Sucks: The Garfield Show

Illustration: Jim Cooke

A look at the awful children’s programming you’re forced to endure before you can finally kick the kids out of the TV room to watch sports for eight hours. Image by Jim Cooke.

The Show

The Garfield Show

The Theme Song

[alarm clock rings]

[sax solo opener]

BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA BA BA BA-BA

BA-BA BA BA BAAA BA-BA BA!

The Mythology

Created decades ago by cartoonist Jim Davis, who saw a commercial opportunity for a comic strip about cats because there were so many comic strips strictly about dogs, Garfield has become so popular and widely read that you almost certainly know the particulars and players in the Garfield Cinematic Universe, even if you’ve only encountered it via internet gags. There’s a cat. This cat is real fucking slovenly. He loves lasagna and hates Mondays. He’s more self-centered than the President but half as orange (ZING!). He’s the OG Grumpy Cat. His owner is a pathetic schlub named Jon Arbuckle who routinely dukes it out with David Seville for the title of Most Thoroughly Emasculated Owner Of Cartoon Animals. There’s a dog that slobbers a lot in the household as well. Somehow this adds up to hijinks.

I loved Garfield as a child. I owned every Garfield comic strip book, including the Treasuries, which were printed in color. I even owned the first Garfield book, back when he looked like a state senator from Kentucky. I laughed at all the jokes, even one-liners about Beau Brummel and Brigitte Bardot that I didn’t understand. I owned dozens of Garfield stuffed animals. I had one with a pull string where the Garfield would say things like, “Color me unimpressed” every time you pulled it. Just like a real Internet commenter! Back when AJ Daulerio ran this site, he randomly gchatted to me one day, “I bet you had a lot of Garfield toys when you were a kid” and I was like HOW DID YOU KNOW? There was a Garfield book called Garfield Takes The Cake and I once thought up a SONG for it in my head, skipping to the bus stop and being like ♫ Garfield, Garfield! Taaaaakes the caaaake! ♫ I was not the most popular kid at school.

I also watched the original Garfield & Friends Saturday morning cartoon, with the title character voiced by the late Lorenzo Music. Davis once said that Music never let anyone see his face, which sounds dark and mysterious until you do a Google image search for “Lorenzo Music” and see his face pop up multiple times.

That show ended back in 1994, and it was replaced over a decade later by The Garfield Show, an all-CGI animated showcase that seemed tailored specifically to people who were like, “I wish they could bring back the old Garfield show, only cheaper!” My fellow Garfheads, I am happy to report that they indeed did just that. I’m gonna celebrate by mailing Nermal to Abu Dhabi.

Episode Format

Pretty much every episode of The Garfield Show involves him doing something selfish and lazy (eating all the pizza in town, for instance), which then precipitates a chain reaction disaster (oh no, Vito’s pizza is-a now out-a the pizza because of that-a crazy cat!). This is followed by Garfield audibly moaning and then reluctantly un-fucking everything—“Fine, I’ll force Odie to build Vito a second pizza oven,” for example—so that he can at last go back to being fat and lazy.

That’s all foreseeable. It’s just the kind of shit you’d expect from a comic strip franchise that’s worked over the same jokes for decades now. But treating my man Garf, particularly in this iteration, as shopworn pablum for the masses fails to recognize just how deeply fucking WEIRD the broader Garfield universe is. It all feels so strange. It all is so strange. The characters all look like they got left on the cutting room floor of the Homer Cubed vignette from Treehouse of Horror. It’s a highly canny valley they occupy.

And in this universe, Garfield spends entire episodes doing things like harnessing the power to stop time, negotiating with lasagna-shaped space aliens, or capturing wild turkeys. You can tell that the writers on this show get bored even more easily than the title character does. “What if we had Garfield fuck a robot elephant?” The familiar Ugh It’s Monday jokes are merely the base of the show. Generous ladlefuls of LSD are then poured on top. Everyone’s tripping balls out here.

Characters

Garfield: Without voice-over help from Lorenzo Music or Bill Murray (who infamously voiced Garfield in the movie version because he claims he was under the mistaken impression that one of Coen brothers had written it), the showrunners picked veteran animated voice actor Frank Welker to play Garfield. You might remember Welker from The Simpsons, or from the new Scooby Doo. Like Music, Welker lends a laconic, oddly charming affect to Garfield’s monologues as he bashes alarm clocks to pieces and fills Jon’s bathtub with Hawaiian punch. I can’t believe I’m talking about this shit so seriously. BIG FAT HAIRY DEAL.

Jon: Just your average perpetually single cartoonist (real stretch in character development with that occupation there) who spends every episode bitching about how his cat has made him an indentured servant, but then turns around at the end of those same episodes and is like, “I love my fat male dominatrix cat!” Hard to believe he can’t find a woman to share his horrible life with. In a twist, it is JON who the pet! O HO HO BET YOU DIDN’T SEE THAT COMING! What a powerless dipshit.

(sees dirty dishes still in the sink)

Oh shit the missus will NOT be happy if she sees those. I better wash them and then wash them again just to make sure they’re right.

Odie: The dog. Drools all the time and is very happy and stupid. Just like every other dog, really. Odie is also blindly loyal to both Jon and to Garfield, and routinely gets enlisted in Garfield’s shenanigans, always to his eventual detriment. Hey Odie, go fight that saber-toothed tiger. Hey Odie, go whizz on that electric fence. Hey Odie, hold this pistol and tell the cops it was a heat-of-the-moment thing. Odie deserves better. Come live with me, Odie. I won’t trick you into tarring the roof when I accidentally burn the house down.

Nermal: Acknowledged by everyone (including himself) to be the cutest cat in the world. I’m not seeing it, personally. Even if Nermal really were the world’s cutest cat, it’s still a fucking cat, you know? It’s not like I’m beholding an $850,000 Bugatti. Garfield despises Nermal and routinely attempts to murder him. I like ol’ Garf’s go-getter style in that regard. Nermal’s an asshole. Also, he’s got a weird name. I read it as “Normal” for a good eight years at first.

Liz: Veterinarian whom Jon routinely harasses every time he drags Garfield to an appointment (you’re not gonna believe it, but Garfield hates going to the vet WHAAAAAAAAAA?). And yet she still agrees to go out on dates with Jon! She should blow the whistle on that pitiful, cat-afflicted mope. Instead, karma has inflicted a different fate upon Jon: in the Garfieldverse, Jon is stuck in an endless loop where he gets rejected by the same girl over and over and over again. Why, it’s just like my teenage years HEY-OOOOOOOOOOOO.

Doc: Jon’s brother. A farmer. Hates being called “Doc Boy,” so Jon always calls him “Doc Boy.” Some enterprising Redditor out there has definitely drawn Doc Boy jamming a pitchfork into Jon’s chest, which admittedly beats the other artwork you’ll find at that site. Hey Jon, did you ever consider that, by trolling your brother like a fucking dweeb, you’re modeling poor behavior for your cat, hmm? Of course you didn’t.

Pooky: Garfield’s bear. His Bobo, if you will. At this point I’m making Simpsons references just to keep you interested. Garfield loves his bear, which means that it winds up in mortal peril roughly every four episodes. Garfield inevitably ends up having to drop Odie into the middle of an Albanian gang dispute to rescue the thing from a band of opium smugglers and whatnot. The gag here is that Garfield treats everyone and everything like shit except for one inanimate object. Whatever.

[my kid shoots a Nerf gun at the TV]

YOU THINK THAT’S FUNNY, BOY? THAT TV IS WORTH MORE THAN YOU ARE!

Eddie Gourmand: Vile food critic who can make or break restaurants with a review, because it’s still apparently 1996 in this show. Anyway, Eddie is selfish and fat and arrogant, but not in the CUTE way that Garfield is all of those things. Honestly, this man is nightmare fuel. He’s distressing to see and hear. There’s lots of trippy nightmare fuel in this show!

Drusilla and Minerva: Two little girls who occasionally visit to torture Garfield and poor Odie by dressing them up and shrieking at them. Ever watch one of those old Tom & Jerry cartoons where Tom’s little girl owner pretends he’s a baby and punishes him by forcing him to take castor oil? That girl was a fucking abuser. Anyway, this show has two of her.

Vito: The pizza guy. No one let Sal Paolantonio see how this show depicts Italian-Garfieldians. Madone.

Best Episode

There’s one episode where Jon takes Garfield onto a TV show called “Pet Matchers” to see if the two of them are truly compatible, and the show reveals what’s obvious to everyone except Jon: that he sucks and so does his cat. The host then splits the two of them up, because we all know that TV hosts are legally allowed to determine pet custody. Then Garfield figures out that the host is a big fucking fraud and exposes him, which means that he and Jon can get back together again and continue to be utterly miserable forever. Yay?

Worst Episode

Those Drusilla and Minerva episodes are brutal. Trust me when I tell you that those two are as annoying as Garfield says they are. Really, any episode that features ancillary characters like Drusilla and Minerva or Doc Boy is going to be unbearable. The Garfield Show has a dozen Scrappy Doos waiting in the bullpen to derail virtually any plot. Really, the only good side character is Nermal, and then only because Garfield roasts his cutesy ass every five seconds. And what better way to raise children than to expose them to low-level insult comedy?

Pros

I’m biased here because I was little snot who used to love Garfield, but I’m fine watching this show with my kids when they queue it up on Netflix. God, that fucking sax solo is burned into my mind. It’s livin’ rent free in my noggin and bakin’ lasagna for the visitors. It’s in my head right now! GAHHHHHHHHHH!!!

I can be as cynical as Garfield when it comes to Garfield, but I’m also a sucker for easy nostalgia. One look at that pink nose and those bigass eyes and Garfield’s clown-sized feet and I’m right back in elementary school in Orono, Minnesota, where kids beat my ass in tetherball and made fun of me for wearing prescription lip balm. Also, girls would cover their mouths to snicker anytime I walked past them in the halls. Truly, those were glory days. At my folks house, there are STILL Garfield plush toys lying around somewhere. Crack one open and a family of scarab beetles attacks you.

Anyway, Garfield sometimes learns lessons on this show. They even have little PSA interludes, which your kids will invariably skip.

Cons

Why do you think I am the way I am? What do you think happens when you subject a child to a cartoon character who has shitty manners, cares only about himself, thinks perpetual cynicism is an endearing quality, never gets up, and constantly bitches about everything? Me. You get me. Turns out the Garfield was ME all along. Disgusting.

You could easily argue, as I am about to, that Garfield is what’s wrong with AMERICA. He thrives despite his own monstrosity. That’s here! That happens for shitty people here every five seconds! Again, look at me! I have a job. I don’t deserve a fucking job. I should be scavenging for food in the dumpster outside Vito’s. Instead, I get to broadcast my dumbest thoughts onto the Internet for money. America is a crime, and Garfield is why.

And yet, I let my kids watch this shit. I’m like, “Aw, they like Garfield the way I do!” instead of being like, “OH SWEET BABY JESUS ON A CORNCOB NO, THEY LIKE GARFIELD THE WAY I DO!” The cycle begins anew. Don’t let this happen to YOU. Turn your kids on to more responsible fare. This US Acres book is only nine bucks!

Rosa Salazar Wants to Play Alita For Literally the Rest of Her Life

Image: 20th Century Fox

Frankly, I think we should let her.

Speaking recently at the TCA, Rosa Salazar addressed her role as Alita in Alita: Battle Angel and her penchant for playing hybrid animated/live-action characters. As reported by Comic Book Resources, she said of her role as Alita, “I would play Alita ‘til my last breath, I would, and thanks to the performance capture technology, I probably could.”

As for her getting her wish, though, it’s complicated. “Yeah, I mean, they had a crazy merger,” she said. “People are gaining jobs, people are losing jobs. The whole Disney/Fox acquisition is so involved, this isn’t the right time to call Alan Horn and be like, ‘Hey, bro, I know you got a lotta stuff going on, but like what about Alita 2?’”

Alita: Battle Angel was a controversial movie, and didn’t review fantastically, but it’s garnered a cult following and a lot of people I know were big fans of it. And Salazar’s performance, no matter what you think of the CGI eyes, was incredible. Salazar has a real talent for playing characters like this, that straddle the line between physical performance and digital effect.

“What I’m really excited about right now, in my own career, is this sort of new thing I’ve tapped into where I get to fully lose myself in a character because I’m animated,” she said, about her role as Alita but also her upcoming work in the rotoscoped show Undone. “These characters, Alita and Alma [from Undone] are almost their own people because they are in their own dimension. So I get to completely transform not with prosthetics, not necessarily with makeup or hair, but through this other animation project.”

Alita: Battle Angel was a strange but compelling adaptation of a great manga, and I’m glad to know that at least one other person is with me in hoping for a sequel.

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