friskywoods

...and that's all I have to say about that.

(WARNING:  History's greatest monsters and diapers are discussed within.)

Okay, that's not exactly breaking news, but it bears repeating.  There was an artist on DeviantArt and FurAffinity whose work I really admired, until she made an unexpected and unwelcome transformation into a Hitler hag.  When she started making Care Bears characters with red swastikas on their bellies, I held on for a little while, trying to convince myself that she was being ironic and that I was just missing the joke.  It took about five or six of these drawings before I came to the realization that she was serious about her love for Germany's micro-mustached maniac, and that my only intellectual failing was not dropping her from my watch list sooner.

The only thing worse than her chocolate-and-peanut-shells combination of Care Bears and the Third Reich was the rabid defense of her fans, which had become exponentially louder, ruder, and more sympathetic to indefensible causes.  The artist had gotten pretty nasty herself, informing her once faithful audience of babyfurs that they were sick, disgusting perverts and that she had no regrets about abandoning them for her new, testicle-impaired crush.  Granted, this was in response to someone who had threatened her life (to paraphrase: "My grandfather killed two dozen Nazi soldiers in World War II.  Please, by all means come to France so I can finish his work!"), but damning an entire community over the actions of one person is painting with a pretty wide brush.

This was followed by a handful of her supporters joining in the "babyfurs are perverts" chorus, informing us that we were all pedophiles (citation needed) and offering a defense of not only the artist, but her twisted political philosophy as well.  Not all of them identified themselves as Neo-Nazis, but it's pretty easy to know where someone stands when they deny the holocaust with shaky statistics while cursing those sneaky Jews in the same breath.

This all happened a few months ago (happy birthday, Jesus!  Hope you like crapheads!), but I reopened the wound when I went back through the thread while in a Skype conversation with some friends.  One of those friends dropped from the call, clearly uncomfortable with the topic, and in hindsight I regret even mentioning it.  It's not just because he didn't want to hear about it, but because leafing through the comments on the offending submission uncovered a lot of hostility directed toward me that I missed the first time, and didn't really care to read.

So I'm posting this to vent about it, really.  But also, I wanted to point out some patterns of behavior that I've noticed from the Nazi-inclined.  The first is that they really, really, really want to believe there was no Holocaust.  You know, the same Holocaust with reams of documented proof (including video footage of bulldozers pushing bodies into mass graves) and survivors who experienced its horrors first-hand.  I can understand the rationale behind the denials... if I were a murderous asshole, I'd do everything I could to cover up my past assholery too.  Nevertheless, facts is facts, and six million dead Jews can't be wrong.

Some jerk in the thread was throwing around a bunch of weaselly, unverified statistics claiming that the six million killed by the Nazis weren't actually Jews, but soldiers from other countries and various undesirables.  Even if that were true (cough cough no), I'm not sure how that justifies killing six million people, especially when Hitler was engaged in a bloody campaign to take Europe by force.  Not your countries, can't has.

Also, it brings up an especially frustrating tentpole shoved up the ass of the Nazi political strategy.  First, you take a small group of social outcasts nobody likes, and since you can't choose yourself, you pick... oh, pedophiles instead.  Hey, everyone hates pedophiles!  You can use them as the symbol of everything that's wrong with the world today, demand their heads on a pike, and get a lot of people to take up your cause.  Okay, now that those poor saps are dead, you can pick another target... I dunno, used car salesmen, or tax collectors, or deadbeat dads.  The people who took up torches and pitchforks for your last culling of the herd will surely be onboard for the next one, so you can inch along steadily until you can reach the brass ring... Jews.  Or Homosexuals.  Or blacks.  Or anyone who doesn't strictly conform to your rigid view of society.  A winner is you!

In short, Nazis bait you with a treat you can't resist, then reel you in until you're flopping around in a cooler marked Auschwitz.  It's what they do.  It's what they've always done, from the 1930s on.  They champion an issue everyone loves, using incendiary rhetoric that switches off the reasoning part of your brain, then lure you into their special brand of mad extremism that you'd quickly reject under normal circumstances.  It works.  It usually works on the very dumb and very angry, but it even ensnares people who you wouldn't think would take the bait.  People who, say, draw cute critters in dayglo colors.  It's why we still have Nazis, seventy years after crimes against humanity that should have swept their dangerous views into the dustbin of history.

What really infuriates me is the frequently repeated mantra that all babyfurs, infantilists, diaper lovers, et al are just glorified pedophiles.  You got proof for that?  Oh wait, you don't need PROOF when you're a Nazi!  You just say whatever dumbshit thing that comes to mind, to slander whoever you don't like.  Jews came from the planet Murderon-5 with their exploding matzo balls to take over the galaxy!  Shaking a black person's hand spreads the virus that causes blackness!  The Netherlands kills its old people to cut costs on health care!  (Wait, that was that Santorum guy.)  

It's just tiresome how they keep making these outrageous accusations and tenuous associations with reality.  Not all babyfurs are class acts, but they're by and large decent people, and very, very few are sex offenders.  About as many as Catholic priests or basketball coaches, which is to say that the perception is ugly but nowhere near in line with reality.  True to form, Nazis throw out the reality and cling desperately to perception, because it's all they've got to justify their berserk views.

I just have to keep reminding myself, nothing a Neo-Nazi can claim about babyfurs could ever be worse than the reality of who they are and what they believe.  I have fun wearing diapers.  A Neo-Nazi supports the deaths of millions but is too gutless to admit it, or even that it happened.  Game, set, match.

The best Bond, objectively, is Sean Connery.  We all know this.  However, if we're going to have fun with this survey and color outside the lines a bit, let me just say that the most fun Bond was Roger Moore.  I liked his tongue-in-cheek approach to the source material... a character as overblown as James Bond is always in danger of being taken too seriously, and Moore's injections of light humor kept the character from becoming too wooden and unlikeable (case in point: Golgo 13!).

Worst Bond?  Timothy Dalton, no question.  George Lazenby is the easy choice, but come on, dude only starred in ONE MOVIE.  I bet he could have found a place in the hearts of fans if given time.  (Also, his starring as a recurring character in Batman Beyond gives him immunity from being chosen as the worst of the bunch.)

It's gaming the system, but I say no.  There was an old episode of The Golden Girls where Dorothy asked her mother an uncomfortable personal question, and insisted she answer truthfully.  Sophia snapped back, "It's none of your business, and that's the truth!"  I tend to agree.  Just because someone demands an answer from you doesn't mean you owe them one, especially if it casts you in an unflattering light.  That's why we have a fifth amendment in this country.

Wario.  Because he has a similarly dim world view but he's smart and greedy enough to make the most of any situation.

Runner ups include Protoman and Knuckles, because they're the enigmatic loners in their respective series.

I didn't stop.  Santa Claus is based Saint Nicholas, a historical figure born a few hundred years after Christ.  He didn't have supernatural abilities like the ability to squeeze down chimneys, deliver toys at 500 homes per second, or command an army of short people in tights, but he was extremely generous at a time when life was difficult for all and charity was not always rewarded.  Legends passed down over hundreds of years have made him larger than life, but there's a very real man hidden under the many layers of fantasy.

...or so says the news media in another desperate ratings grab. Actually, the headlines aren't quite that alarming... a study performed by the trade magazine Pediatrics claims that children lose their focus after watching a frantic cartoon, like the kind you're likely to find on Nickelodeon at any given moment.

Predictably, Nick protested the findings, claiming that the study was hardly fair or scientific. That's to be expected, since cartoons with the pace cranked up to eleven are the network's bread and butter.

However, I challenge the study as incredibly shortsighted and simplistic. Sure kids can't keep their minds on some menial task after watching a good episode of The Replacements, or The Misadventures of Flapjack, or Making Fiends. They've been stimulated. They're trying to catch up with the episode, playing it back in their heads to fully appreciate every joke.  Do you think they're going to want to drop pegs into holes when there's something far more entertaining happening in the backs of their minds?

I also deeply resent the doctors treating the kids in this study like lab rats. Children aren't guinea pigs, and their reaction to cartoons can't
be boiled down to stimulus-response. The increased heart rates and loss of concentration is temporary, fleeting, of no significance in the long term. What remains with a child for the rest of his or her life is the quality of the show; the thought put into the storyline and the care put
into the artwork.

Dubious studies like this and the kneejerk reactions to them by helicopter parents aren't just going to undermine the creative integrity of cartoons. They're going to make the childhoods of millions a lot less memorable, and a lot less fun. I'm sure there's at least a dozen moments from cartoons you watched as a child that have stuck with you forever. I'd also wager that exactly zero of them came from educational, supposedly child-safe pap like Calliou or Wonderpets.

I'm not saying that producers should be discouraged from making shows that are both fun and educational, and PBS has done a pretty good job of meeting that need with shows like WordGirl and Fetch with Ruff Ruffman. However, there's just as much of a need for animation that serves only one purpose... entertainment. The attempt to whitewash and vitamin-enrich cartoons resulted in the animation wasteland of the 1970s and the painfully preachy, thoroughly awful Captain Planet. For the sake of kids everywhere, let's not go through that again.

(Reposted from FurAffinity)

To give my artistic muscle a workout and put some much-needed cash in the old coffers, I've been doing Fighting Spirits badges for Megaplex attendees.  What is a Fighting Spirits badge?  Well, for the not-shabby-at-all price of ten dollars, I draw your character as one of your favorite martial artists from a versus fighting game.  As long as the character hasn't already been chosen, the sky's the limit... choose any fighter from any game you like.  I'll have these finished in a hurry (about two days after payment) and you can print them out as a badge, to thrill and amaze the other MegaPlex attendees.  Or if you prefer, just stay home and admire the drawing on your computer... it's totally your call.

If you're interested, note me at FurAffinity, DeviantArt, or InkBunny and I'll get started right away!

In a recent report on gun control, the CBS Evening News used the term "mental defective" to describe the mentally ill.  Normally, I'm not the type to declare war on people who use politically incorrect language (having dabbled so often in it myself), but really?  We're still using a loaded, derogatory phrase like that in this day and age?  You don't even need to know the history of "mental defective" to be profoundly uncomfortable with it... it's ugly right on the surface, leaving the bitter taste of eugenics weighing heavily on the tongue.  After all, what do you do with something that's defective?  You discard it, so it can be taken away and destroyed later.  Do we really want to brand people as society's rubbish?  I'm not okay with that... and CBS shouldn't be either.