More fun weird-o animations

Hey, kids.

http://www.frashii.com/wldo.swf

http://www.btinternet.com/~david.st/b3ta/

Bon appetit!

When it rains, it pours

I feel like I’ve been scooped. On Monday, Salon.com ran an article about the “camgirl” phenomenon. In a nutshell, the trend is young girls – aged, say, 15 to 21 – setting up websites that have a daily blog, not unlike my own, and a webcam image that is updated a few times a day. Many of these girls also link to Amazon wishlists, and generous lonely old perverts purchase items for them, which get shipped anonymously. The article makes a few good points, but it is largely one-sided with the “Who’s Exploiting Whom?” angle. I think there’s a lot more to this than exploitation. More in both the positive and negative senses. And the article sensationalizes that these girls “show skin” – some do, but as a generalization it is wrong. (One of the girls profiled, Katneko, had other issues with the article… read them at her site.) So anyway, this article is run, and now they’re talking about it on MSNBC, and these girls are getting booked on Ricki Lake and Jenny Jones, and here I am in the middle of writing a script, one which I spoke of a few weeks ago (THE INADEQUATES was the working title at the time; I don’t know what it is now), about a meek 16-year-old girl whose parents get her a new computer for her birthday, and it all goes downhill from there… and now I’m all, FECK! I’m just following a trend now! KRAP! You can see the position I’m in. I mean, I think that my take on the thing might be unique enough to still be interesting, and my character doesn’t have much in common with most of the girls mentioned in the article, but it’s no longer a subject that’s all mine to plunder.

If you steal any of my ideas, I will beat you.

Hatten är din [hatt-baby] revisited

Remember this?

I was poking around through a few search engines, trying to find some way to get that music on CD, because it was very addictive, and I turned up a translation of the lyrics. Reprinted from http://www.geocities.com/pommesrotweissx/:

The lyrics very strongly give me the impression that the whole thing was made just to be freaky. And I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s more romantic to think that other cultures can be so different from America that such a bizarre thing can have a deep intrinsic social/psychological explanation.

In a similar vein, I also turned up an interesting animation here. This one is from Japan, apparently. I read somewhere that while the Japanese have a tendency to employ non-sequiturs and absurd cultural references in their entertainment, they do not do so because they get more understanding out of them, but because they think the crazy little absurd things are funny. But I cannot decide for certain whether this animation is an authentic wacky Japanese production or a parody of same or some combination of the two. I honestly think it was made by an American, or possibly a Brit – if you watch it, you will understand why. Not that it matters much, because it’s very well done either way, and will drive you just as insane on repeat viewings.

I have been redesigning my web page all afternoon. I have been redesigning for so long that my shoulder hurts and that my fingers and wrists ache with carpal tunnel syndrome. This is an awful lot of hard work for something from which I will enjoy little to no reward. YES, I WOULD LIKE SOME CHEESE WITH MY WHINE.