Zeusthecat

When I was 18 I decided I was going to get a tattoo. I had finally settled on exactly what I wanted but backed out at the last minute when I realized the guy who was going to do my tattoo was a meth addict and douchebag. So I went and got a kitten instead. I was going to name him God cause I thought it would be funny but went with Zeus instead to avoid needlessly offending people. Zeus is almost 12 years old now and developed a nasty habit a couple years ago where he continuously chews off all his belly hair so he has a permanent bald belly. It's pretty gross and whenever he does it it sounds like someone is masturbating so we get to deal with that on a daily basis. Anyways, here's a picture of our other way cooler cat Pima on the other side of our filthy sliding glass door.

Maybe that's really what it boils down to for me then. I prefer a story that presents a situation that is applicable to and can be related to as an adult. So the stuff in Steins;Gate was great because I never felt like their age was a big factor in how that story played out. Sure they were all in the 16-18 range but they could have all been 10 years older and I think the story would have still worked pretty well. With Kids on the Slope, their age and where they are at in life is much more integral to the story. And to contradict myself a bit, as much as I'm not a fan of the high school crush stuff, I actually really like how the quiet reserved kid becomes friends with the tough 'bully-ish' kid (I haven't watched enough to learn their names yet). That stuff is great even though I don't relate to it as an adult so much. So yeah, I guess I'm not very consistent with my pet peeves.

Aren't almost all western cartoons overtly for children? I'm sure there are a lot of exceptions I'm not aware of but I feel like virtually any western cartoon that isn't on Adult Swim or Comedy Central is pretty much geared towards kids. (I expect to be corrected on this) But yeah, I think it's the whole dynamic of a character having a crush on another character and being flirty and awkward around them and beating around the bush that just really annoys me. And anything in a high school setting is inevitably going to have that in spades. I guess cynical grown up me just gets frustrated seeing characters supposedly fall in love, but they are too nervous to tell the person so they get a friend involved, but the girl that the friend likes mistakes the situation and thinks the friend who has a crush on her really has a crush on the other girl. If they just used basic human communication all of that dumb love triangle bullshit wouldn't happen and it would feel a little more relatable to me. Despite that though, it's still a relatively small complaint and I generally really like Kids on the Slope.

4 episodes in to Kids on the Slope and I'm liking it quite a bit more than I expected! It's a pretty big departure from most of the other more fantastical anime that I've watched but I'm finding it surprisingly engaging and interesting. And once again, the music is really great. The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the whole high school romance stuff. With where I'm at in my life and have been for a long time, the whole high school crush falling in love thing is just weird and awkward and unrelatable to me. I definitely enjoy a good love story and don't usually have a problem with that (the romance stuff was one of my favorite parts about Steins;Gate) but when it's in a high school setting like this it just seems kind of cheesy.

Glad to hear you're doing all right. And no complaints here, just clogging up threads with my dumb bullshit as always.

Ucantalas you're alive! Glad to see you back man, how have you been?

First off, Idle Forums is the only form of social media (if you could call it that) that I have ever used so please forgive me if I have a naive perspective on this topic or come off as pretentious. In the years since social media first became a thing, it has been really interesting to observe how discourse between people has changed. Like, it's fucking terrifying if you really think about it. Before the mass adoption of social media (and the internet, but to a lesser extent I think), people had a much smaller sphere of influence and most interactions tended to take place face to face. It actually took effort to maintain relationships and you only had a finite amount of time to spend with the people you valued the most. Trends and fads stuck around for longer and information moved a hell of a lot slower. Now, almost every human being with access to the internet is active or at least exists on some form of social media. The average number of friends some people have on Facebook or following them on Twitter is fucking staggering. Personal and mass communication between friends happens now with minimal effort and fads and memes come and go in the blink of an eye. While I think there are a large number of very positive benefits that have come from social media being widely adopted, I can't help but feel that it is also doing a lot of damage to the way we interact with and understand each other as humans. Interacting with people and presenting opinions through text (often limited to 140 characters) is very different from doing the same thing with other physical human beings. There is just so little room for nuance and much less incentive to exercise restraint. It is much more common for people to be instantly judged as horrible human beings because of vile opinions they may spout on the internet. In a lot of cases, yeah, people that act this way on the internet probably aren't very nice people. But I think the increased tendency for people to categorize other people into neat little boxes based on what they have said on the internet is a significant downside to the broad adoption of social media. Although maybe there is an argument to be made that it is fair for people you have only interacted with on the internet to be fully defined by the words they type. When I talk to people in real life, there is just so much more complexity to the interactions that I think gives me a much more informed and fair opinion on who they are. Hearing people's voices and seeing their body language as various topics are discussed makes for a much richer interaction and makes it much harder for me to instantly write someone off as a shithead. I will often find that I share a lot of the same opinions with a person and get along with them really well only to find out later they like to casually throw around racist remarks and have fairly shitty opinions on a lot of other subjects. When this happens with people I interact with face to face, I find it much harder to just categorize them into that nice little box that I might if I only knew them as a random internet person. They are more complex and there are factors and influences that go into forming their shitty opinions. In person, there is at least some chance of coming to understand some of those factors and maybe even adding your own positive influence to that person. The chances of this happening with some random asshole on the internet? Slim to none.

Hey I liked that one pretty well too. The unexplained talking bear is just pure awesome and I like how it aired more on the side of realism with the way physics worked and everything.

Especially if the glass box is actually just a miniature replica of the popemobile. I really wish I had the motivation to follow through on this but with work and the kids and all my other responsibilities, I just don't think I'm going to find the time to locate a small glass box, put a poop sack on my cat, and drive out to a remote but not too remote desert location to do the deed. And then set up and promote a Facebook page for it. If anyone else has enough motivation to do this, you have my blessing.

Haha, oh man! Very nicely worded. Probably fished out of litter unless I can find the cat version of one of those poop sacks horses wear when they are walking around in residential areas. And on a more philosophical level, will the cat turd only assume the state of being cleaned up or not being cleaned up once the first person shows up to take a selfie in front of it? #Schrodingerscatturd

Okay, so I've been giving this cat turd Facebook page thing some serious thought throughout the day and it is way more of a conundrum than I would have expected. So I'm curious if anyone else here (I'm looking at you Bjorn) could solve this riddle: in what public location could you put a cat turd where people could easily go and take selfies but where nobody would try to clean it up? I do live in a desert so I could just put it in a glass case in the desert and provide exact GPS coordinates but it would never take off that way.

I am going off of pretty limited experience but Space Dandy was the closest I've seen to Space Jesus. Maybe not the most apt comparison but

Oh man, so much potential for mech piloting space Jesus. He could even give matter mass! Yes I know what I said is really cheesy.

Oh man, this Battlefield Hardline article makes me sad. This little nugget especially bothers me.

I have no knowledge of this universe so I'll just take your word for it.

You and me both. I hope they make one of those one day where the chosen one is actually just Jesus piloting a mech.

So I guess they're making Frozen 2. This is very bad news for the Zeus household.

Yes, it is okay when weird explainable shit goes viral. If I can look at a thing and say "Oh, I see why that went viral" then I'm totally cool with it. And come on dibs, we all know poop is a timeless tradition and has many more merits than mini vans.

We must be polar opposites in that regard because I hate when unexplainable shit goes viral. It's a really weird pet peeve I know. I hated the llama thing too. Or maybe there's something deeper going on and I just hate anything that goes viral that comes out of Arizona.

#NeverEver

I'd rather throw on some classic Tom and Jerry episodes. That is one show that never gets old for me.

If I can find a public place to put a cat turd where it will remain respected and undisturbed, then I absolutely will. I just don't want random strangers coming to my house to take pictures in front of my cat's shit.

Finished Samurai Champloo. Those last few episodes were pretty good and I ended up liking the show quite a bit in the end. I honestly did not expect it to end the way it did My favorite episode by far was the baseball episode. I fucking loved that one. I started the first episode of Kids On The Slope last night. Didn't get far enough to form any kind of opinion but it is quite different from anything else I've seen so I'm excited to see how it pans out.

Yeah, I don't really have a problem with people taking photos in front of random things for memories and whatnot. Whatever floats your boat. I've surely taken pictures in front of plenty of dumb things as well. What breaks my brain is just... how does this abandoned van become a 'thing'? I get the Cheese Castle thing to a degree. It is an actual building, there's cheese, it's probably built up it's cheesy reputation over a long period of time. The abandoned van is an abandoned van. An abandoned van. I'm just trying to work through how that happens. Guy sees the same shittily parked van for a couple days, figures its abandoned, creates Facebook page... everyone comes and takes selfies. Of all the abandoned vehicles in the world, why is this one selfie worthy? Because Facebook? The only logical conclusion I can come to is that if I create a Facebook page for a cat turd and call it a Phoenix landmark, people will flock to come take selfies in front of said cat turd.

I am just completely baffled by how a thing like this goes 'viral'. If someone creating a Facebook page for an abandoned van in a Wal-Mart parking lot leads to a new meme where people actually go out of there way to drive down there and take selfies in front of it... I can't even finish this sentence it's so stupid.