He came amongst us
So, could anybody stomach the MSNBC interview of Obama? Not me, but I got hung up on the HotAir headline (quoting Matthews): “He came to us. He came amongst us.”
Ick factor: off the scale.
We’re in one of those news cycles when my liver just can’t handle the news cycle. I scan portals, find articles about the news (articles with a soothing, congenial viewpoint), and learn what I know about what’s going on at one safe remove. Slashing at Medusa through a mirror.
Ace’s MacGuffin article nailed the general aura of unreality around the Obama Cult in general (and the Matthews interview in particular) best of all. I know most of you guys are regular Ace readers, but in case you ain’t.
December 9, 2013 — 11:23 pm
Comments: 19
I thought y’all racists needed to see this.
Again and again, until you get it. Y’all need to stop picking on our president of color, like, RIGHT NOW.
If you don’t recognize it, this is a standard internet reaction gif that I deconstructed in P’shop and fiddled with. I just love doing that. I thought about making reaction gifs for a living, but then I thought, “oh, yeah — that shit’s free.”
p.s. Oh, stop complaining. At least I didn’t post it Friday and leave it up for the weekend.
November 18, 2013 — 11:17 pm
Comments: 22
Wooowooooo!
The Obama administration Sunday said it’s called on “the best and brightest” tech experts from both government and the private sector to help fix the troubled website at the root of the Obamacare enrollment problems.
Oh, they are SO boned now.
If you haven’t run across it today, allow me to introduce you to Brooks’ Law:
“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
Which is exactly right, when you think about it. All those new people — no matter how good they are — have to come up to speed. The have to read the code, work out what’s happened so far and what’s gone wrong and plan a way out. And now the managers will have a much bigger team to communicate with. Think meetings, meetings and more meetings.
I think it was also Brooks who said nine women can’t make a baby in one month. Programming jobs can only be diced up in specific ways; you can’t just throw infinite smart people on the fire and put it out faster.
If these guys had ever, you know, actually DONE anything in their lives, they’d know good intentions and a can-do attitude don’t get the job done. Here’s Bruce at And Still I Persist on Lefties and wishful thinking. Good read, AND he got an NRO link out of it.
I’m hoping the website problems last long enough to disillusion a whole new generation on government, but not forever. Because nothing is going to help kill Obamacare faster than a functioning Obamacare.
Please god they get it up and running before the midterms.
October 21, 2013 — 10:26 pm
Comments: 22
*insert metaphor here*
Holy cow — I’ve just discovered that my current Photoshop will import video and snip it into frames for export as animated .gif. That’s…well, if you can’t see how unspeakably exciting that is, I feel sorry for you. I’m having fun, fun, fun.
Well, fun, fun, drudgery, fun. Even a little bitty animation like this runs to 110 frames and takes considerable fussing and fluffing.
This is a clip from an 1897 Edison film called Seminary Girls. In the full version, the headmistress comes in and gives them all hell. Please note, the girl with the longest hair — the one who has her back to us most of the time — is smoking a cigarette. Nice touch.
You can find the whole thing at archive.org (and you can lose whole days of your life to archive.org, fair warning).
October 15, 2013 — 10:18 pm
Comments: 20
Ahhhhhh…
Uncle B had to go into London for some tiresome bidness thingie, so this is pretty much what it looks like at Badger Acres today.
The original is not my .gif — it’s something I loved and snagged off the internet a thousand years ago — but I spent a good hour squeezing it and tweaking it and getting weasel all over it (the eye twitch at frame 35 is mine). The current iteration of Photoshop has some much improved animated .gif tools and I’m just getting around to playing with them. I could swear they weren’t there a few months ago, so it must have been a silent update.
I’ll be thrilled if they’re still updating this thing. Adobe is trying so damned hard to get me on the cloud version of P’shop.
Right. And now I think it’s naked videogame and potato chip time. Good weekend, folks!
October 4, 2013 — 5:46 pm
Comments: 20
You see, it’s like this…
I suppose there’s no point having a friend in Old Blighty (that would be me) if you can’t get insight into current events out of it. Ummmm…so. A lot of American commentators are saying that Brits soured on the Iraq war after it went off badly.
Not so. They hated the Iraq war from the get-go and never wanted any part of it. Why should they? That it went badly was widely seen as inevitable, as the Brits (under both Labour and Tories) have cut their defense budget to the bone. They feel like they threw their boys into a meat grinder for no good reason.
Blair telling them they had to go to war or Saddam would use weapons of destruction right here in Britain was the kind of stupid scary story you tell kids to make them turn out the light and go to bed. That just added insult to death toll.
Oh, and speaking of insult, Barky started piling it on from “hello.” Forget the little things — the stupid bust of Churchill controversy, Her Maj’s iPod stuffed full of the Speeches of Chairman Obama — what really stings is the lack of support in the Falklands. Oh, and Kerry calling France America’s oldest ally tonight, that didn’t help.
So, without even going into Cameron’s failings, Syria was always going to be a hard sell.
I laugh whenever politicians talk about damaging the Special Relationship, though. They think it has something to do with them, and treaty obligations and shit like that. The Special Relationship is that we’re fundamentally the same people. Until almost the 19th C, we were fellow citizens. Well, subjects. We still watch each other’s TV and read each other’s novels in high school and follow each other’s newspapers.
This really happens: strangers hear my accent and come tell me about the vacation they took in Vegas or Disney Land or their kid who’s studying in Massachusetts. Politicians don’t own the relationship, and I get the feeling that pisses them off.
Right, then. Good weekend, all.
August 30, 2013 — 10:57 pm
Comments: 29
For this image, I am truly sorry
Oh, I am sorry. This is Lindsey Graham’s publicity still at full resolution. I swear I did not Photoshop this in any way, other than to make it monochrome. Then I sat down to do the weasel magic, but I just couldn’t…somehow…couldn’t look away from those pale, weird baby blues.
And I wasn’t strong enough to live with this picture all by myself.
So, Lindsey Graham, eh? National Journal reports that Lindsey mused aloud today whether bloggers deserve First Amendment protection. They describe it as a slip-up. Ha! Ha! Of course he knows they deserve First Amendment protection.
Actually, I buy that excuse. Even Graham isn’t boneheaded enough to claim the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply. But then the National Journal guy goes on to say something even stupider than Lindsey: “What Graham really meant to ask was whether bloggers deserve the specific protections of the First Amendment that are granted to the press.”
AHHHHHHHHH!!!! THERE ARE NO SPECIFIC PROTECTIONS GRANTED TO THE PRESS.
Here is the whole relevant chunk of the 1st Am:
“Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”
That’s it. That’s all. That’s the entirety of the text regarding the press in ALLLLL of the founding documents: Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights. DO YOU SEE ANY SPECIFIC PROTECTIONS IN THERE, MISTER?!?
In fact, you could argue that speech — things non-journalists say — is mentioned before the press — things journalists say — and is therefore the more important and double-plus-protected of the two. But that’s just a “Mom always liked me best” kind of observation. Any custom or case law that has accreted around the First Amendment since then has to stand on its own merits, without wrapping itself in the Founders.
There.
Thenk yew.
I feel better.
Let the record show: I misspelled “Lindsey” with an E as “Lindsay” with an A throughout. I’ve just gone back and fixed it. Sorry if I misled you into a spelling error.
June 5, 2013 — 10:14 pm
Comments: 19
incoming!
Before you ask…yes, Photoshopping shit onto my hate objects is incredibly cathartic.
If you think back, it’s like when you were six and you drew your worst enemy with, like, a gazillion knives sticking out of her. And they took you away to the home with the green walls and the metal bunk beds and showed you all those pictures of ink blobs and asked you to make up stories about them. And you didn’t get to go home again until, gosh, junior year of High School.
Like that.
May 21, 2013 — 11:04 pm
Comments: 25
Oh, good. All better now.
After you stare at this a while, the mouths follow you when you move, all over the room. Word.
p.s. I think “the president said some words” is an aceism, but I can’t find it.
May 16, 2013 — 10:27 pm
Comments: 13
You disappointed Him. Again.
Oh, that was sweet, wasn’t it? That look on Obama’s face at the Gun Control FAIL presser? Oooo…the preznit, he mad.
That was the one bright spot in a pretty rough news week.
April 18, 2013 — 11:10 pm
Comments: 27