note: this was originally posted as an article on my newsletter uhhh. this month. lol.

 

this specific section is going to comprise the bulk of this newsletter. it’s going to come with some caveats: 1. this is very stupid 2. it is on-going and 3. i am involved(ish) and thus, a biased participant. so, read this with the grain of salt it deserves but i’ll be forthcoming about what i did. man, this intro makes it sound like i’m about to confess to a terrible crime and reveal where the severed heads are buried.

this is a long story, so bear with me:

a thread on something awful dot com dedicated to remembering stupid moments in goon history had a previously unknown fact shared with it about the goon mutual aid fund:

 

user “ass cobra” in cat jail

 

 

i’m going to use the op of the mutual aid thread to helpfully label some important things you may have to return back to for clarity. or laughs. this is plinkey.

 

 

the mutual aid thread is located in CSPAM, the (ostensibly) shitposting forum for (ostensive) leftists. personally, i think it is comprised of the dumbest collection of self-serving, emotionally-stunted, pathetic, rage-addicted tumblr-circa-2012 rejects that the internet could assemble. it should be no surprise that communists hate each other so passionately.

the first thing i noticed (when i stumbled on this thread ages ago) was the bizarre choice to use patreon as a charity platform. this will become important later for other reasons; at the time i thought it was just a very stupid choice because patreon ends up eating at LEAST 15% of your income. a combination of platform fees, processing fees, transfer fees, VAT, and, as of this year, USA freelance tax will leave you flat fucking broke at the end of the day. source: my bank account.

this might come as a surprise given the comparatively wild west nature of the forum, but the general rule on SA when it comes to salacious gossip is “put up or shut up”. that is, if you are going to make accusations against another poster’s character, you better be ready to back it up. using the (recently repaired) search feature revealed a concerning pattern in plinkey’s post history. get ready to scroll:

 

 

plinkey created the fund in nov 2019

 

this man’s intestinal lining must look and act like a fucking slip-n-slide by now. eating casino food with that much regularity would force the human body to have to adapt rapidly to harsh and unfavorable conditions. it’s possible, and sad, to think this may be the apex of humanity as we know it based on having the digestive prowess of a holstein cow.

if this were it, it would only just be pretty funny that the guy with the obvious gambling problem (who also can’t help but incessantly post about it like anyone is impressed) is the sole arbiter of a fund that gets $3k in income every month. if plinkey exploded tomorrow from overdosing on buffet lobster specials, that $3k would just keep accumulating on patreon forever without anyone else being able to distribute it. it seems kind of reckless to do this and to also be violently defensive whenever anyone brings it up.

plinkey had this to say in this defense:

 

maybe i’m different, but if there was someone who was demonstrably incapable of having the temperament, empathy, humility, or honesty to run a charity, i would not permit them to run that charity on my website. for example, this post reveals that, at the very least, plinkey will lie by omission.

 

 

i guess the novel coronavirus would throw a stick in your spokes when it comes to indulging in your public facing addiction. if only there were a legal way to gamble without leaving the comfort of one’s home…

 

ppv=pay per view. as in, sports streaming. perhaps to bet on. additionally, user smarxist is in hilary jail.

 

BUT EVEN THAT IS NOT ALL. according to the goonfund sob story, the fund runs out of money around the end of the month. we have no way of knowing this because plinkey stopped keeping public records after doing it maybe twice at the beginning of this venture. which is weird, because plinkey used donations intended to buy community members food and pay their rent on a failed democratic candidate/CSPAM pet project that only won 27% of the primary vote. why would he do that if they struggle month to month? why not save it up for goons who need help in upcoming months?

 

only after a LOT of people complained

 

now, i know what you’re thinking: “hey, you can’t use charity for that”. well, you’re right. but plinkey isn’t running a charity, by any standards. unfortunately, this is my contribution to this whole stupid sideshow. imo, there is quite literally only one reason why someone would opt to choose patreon instead of

1. filing the appropriate paperwork to become tax-free and keep your nose clean

2. setting up a charity paypal (not a regular account! they have charity ones!)

or

3. setting up a donation website with wordpress+a plug in that does all the hard work for you, which is what i suggested.

here is what i said:

 

user “fun hater” is in cat jail

 

i said meaner things too, but evidently i didn’t have to try very hard because posting like this has earned me nearly 2 weeks of probation.

 

user “fun hater” is in hilary jail as well.

 

it would take too long to otherwise document the absolutely mountainous pile of terrible posts made in defense of someone who acts like he’s the only person in the world who has ever been scrutinized for their behavior ever. inexplicably, he has some sort of psychic sway over the mods that has caused them to completely forget how to interpret stimuli and information. he and his fan club have been given infinite leeway in their attempts to sabotage a new fund being set up in the style of the one for the UK goons. plinkey has refused to provide any real documentation involving numbers and instead keeps posting emails from people thanking him for making the fund (which he specifically said he would not do, lol). meanwhile, an infinite supply of debate club dropouts scream and cry about how mean you are and how they DON’T CARE if he’s stealing. which is frankly, an insane moral choice for a communist to make.

but, dont just take it from me. you can read this all for yourself if you want here:

1. PYF Goon Sagas&Current Dramas

2. UNOFFICAL GOONBUCKS THREAD, GET YOUR UNOFFICIAL GOONBUCKS HERE

3.The forums slush fund should not be run by a gambling addict.

 

 

EDIT: 11/26/22: plinkey has abandoned the pretense of charity entirely, leaving the goons who were dependent on the fund twisting in the wind.

 

 

look, this was originally going to be just in a newsletter as a stupid thing that goons are throwing money on that anyone else would immediately clock as an obvious scam. it’s funny how obvious it is and how the mods somehow don’t know what the right course of action is. it’s funny how defensive people in the thread are about it. what’s way less funny is fucking over the people who threw down for you for no other reason than faith in their fellow man. this is a winter where people are losing jobs by the tens of thousands and are sharing tips with each other on how to stay warm without heat. fuck this idiot for real. this is putrid shit

there’s no one smoking gun that directly proves that plinkey is misappropriating the funds. but there doesn’t need to be. a reasonable person can look at all of this and conclude that he is, at best, completely unsuited for a leadership position, especially when there is money involved. as the saying goes: it’s not one thing, it’s everything.

this post is originally from tumblr, hence any strange formatting that may occur

 

recent events in the newspaper comic “mary worth” (yes, the one about the old woman you skip over if you’re one of the 50 americans still reading newspaper comics) have been downright thrilling. local despised bastard wilbur finally bit the big one after drunkenly falling off of a cruise ship after another stupid fight with that dumb broad estelle. everyone on planet earth is pleased with this development, most of all the comics kingdom (the parent company) store, which is producing the best merch in honor of this event. i literally need this shirt or i’ll die.

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for a mere $72.00 you can celebrate the happiest moment of your life

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additionally, the 55-80 year old age bracket that reads mary worth (that aren’t ironic/not ironic fans from longtime comics staple the comics curmudgeon) is elated over this development. imagine bloodthirsty posts from the crowd that loves minion memes on facebook. ive done you a service of picking the non-horrifying ones.

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love this discussion on the science of wilbur visiting davey jones’ locker.

but that’s not why i’m here. well, not entirely. i wanted to talk about two other insane instances in newspaper comics in the “modern day”. the first is the like, entirety of the 2017 comic arc of “the phantom”, a pulp hero comic strip about a guy in a purple costume who does both annoying and useful things in a fictional african country that’s been running daily since the 30s. this story, called “the phantom stamp”, involves a guy who is just orson welles but he wants to make a stamp of the local urban legend….THE PHANTOM!!

the phantom doesnt like that.

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his whole thing is not drawing attention to himself unless necessary. so the phantom must arrive to make business negotiations.

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by which i mean “call upon his native friends to have a laugh torturing this guy for 24 hours and repeatedly dousing him with hallucinogens”

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im going somewhere with this i promise. anyway, when its just the phantom and his very high captive, orson is permitted to make his case for his stupid stamp everyone told him not to make.

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which in turn leads to the funniest series of panels ive seen in a long time.

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this last one is much shorter bc to chronicle the entire event would take forever. in 2019, a goon (something awful forums member for baby readers) named vargo who did a moderately critical quote tweet of the combination of the official mark trail and artist/writer james allen’s personal account. of the conservative slant, climate change denial in a comic about a nature lover, and lazy traced clip art. allen self annihilated immediately

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and then repeatedly and endlessly over the next year as he drew an entire story-line where a guy who looked suspiciously like vargo took mark trail and that lady who’s always with him on a wild goose chase looking for a yeti he claims bit off his leg. not-vargo wants fame…and FORTUNE!

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anyway he dies in a bitch way in an avalanche chasing a noise he thought was a yeti and then is memorialized as a sensationalist liar

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james allen was fired shortly after this for making a blowjob joke about AOC for literally no reason. he just did that i guess. no one working comics is known for their brains

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thanks for reading!

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my friend e is right that this is worth mentioning but i will warn people ahead of time that it doesn’t end funny. but it IS wild up until that point.

before olivia james took over nancy, the previous artist was guy gilchrist. guy was a career cartoonist who primarily did work on the muppet comics. you’ve probably seen his work before with this comic, which is unfortunately good (by accident it seems).

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you know nancy if you know comics, so you also probably know her aunt fritzi who takes care of her. you probably don’t know about phil fumble, her boyfriend created by artist ernie bushmiller to be fritzi’s clueless boyfriend.

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fritzi was created by another artist who left her to bushmiller after a few years. bushmiller, who was picked for the job due to his talent/penchant for drawing pretty ladies, created a loving caricature of himself and his wife in the relationship between phil and fritzi

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this is notable because phil is very much just a side character who showed up for gags. but then bushmiller’s playful self-insert was elevated to a different kind of self insert by gilchrist.

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gilchrist’s run is defined by two guiding principles: one, nancy must never ever be funny or tell a joke.

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the other is that aunt fritzi is hot as hell and fuckable (sorry this is for ants)

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gilchrist’s nancy run was like comedy chernobyl. everything he touches withers and rots on the vine. fritzi’s anatomy would become so laser focused that her breasts, hips, legs, and head/hair would all start to dominate the vast majority of panels. she would start wearing shirts with absurdly long (uninteresting) references to random nashville things so that gilchrist would have an excuse to draw a t-shirt straining with huge tits.

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the comic took on a decidedly conservative slant. and not the batshit kind of conservative that’s at least fun to laugh at. the bizarre psuedo-wholesome kind that seem at odds with the man’s barely restrained lust for milf milkers.

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gilchrist’s fritzi’s obsession didn’t start and stop at her honkers. gilchrist reformed fritzi in his own image like a sort of twisted version of genesis, making her the saint of all things held dearly in conservative amber nostalgia for guy gilchrist only. she would opine over the state of media and kids these days, she would express an inexplicable and inauthentic appreciation for music and movies created prior to 1960, and often the resolution of a comic would be “the 80s were good, right?”

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this is really long sorry. i find gilchrist’s bizarre pathological disrespect to the original author and his characters tasteless in a way that’s fascinating. he is a professional 60+ year old man operating on fandom rules at a national scale. i find something immensely repugnant about taking two characters that were light-hearted stand ins for the author/artist and the wife he loved and using them for evident sexual and emotional gratification. he got paid to not tell jokes in a gag a day strip and instead collected a paycheck to, i guess, stir up the dicks of everyone in the retirement home who also want to fuck aunt fritzi from the newspaper comic “nancy”. i cant imagine why an editor let him run wild when it was obvious that his sexual fixation with fritzi was coming to a head with the (aforementioned by my friend lee) sudden leap in height and muscles phil fumble suddenly experienced.

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heres where things are not funny. sorry.

in late 2017 it was becoming obvious that something was coming to a head in gilchrist’s run. phil proposed to fritzi, adopted sluggo and got married all very quickly before gilchrist announced his retirement in jan of 2018.

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when gilchrist was replaced with a woman, the announcement had an interesting sidebar.

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well. that’s the story of guy gilchrist and many other newspaper stories.

what did we learn? cartoonists are severely mentally ill and should be kept in zoos.

Welcome to the wonderful world of working or simply being stuck at home for the unforeseeable future! I have volunteered myself to be your guide into this foreign and strange situation we, collectively as a society, have found ourselves in. For the last 6 years, I have been a work-at-home broke fuck who must scrounge in the Youtube and internet mines for entertainment on a budget that can only afford me better-than-average potato chips as a rare and wondrous indulgence. Today, I am opening up my treasure trove of various internet goodies that you can subject yourself too when you start to feel like Jack Torrance.

If you don’t like what I post then go fuck yourself.

WATCH “THE CARPETBAGGER” – YOUTUBE

 

 

Jacob “The Carpetbagger” has been traveling across the U.S.A. on a personal mission (born from a genuine love of kitsch and Americana) to visit as many unknown, small time, lesser appreciated or outright abandoned tourist traps of many flavors. From museums dedicated to the concept of failure, to pop-up art installations, to (as seen in the above video) abandoned Flintstone theme parks covered in various bleached animal bones, Jacob only wants to take you on a journey to the stranger parts of the American landscape. I appreciate his compassion for the creators of these endeavors and for his sincere respect for the artistry on display in all of his videos. I have long been a proponent of demanding people pay more attention to the bad art in the world and to give it more credit that just something to laugh at. Behind all of these oddities are stories and Jacob will do his best to fill in the blanks for you when he does have that information available.

If you like his work, you can support him on Patreon where $3 will get you a postcard.


watch “TheCrafsMan” – youtube

 

 

Voiced by a man with the most gentle, soothing and pleasant southern accent every emitted by a human being, The Crafs Man Show is a DIY instructional video series on how to make anything from toys to movie props to jewelry and anything in between. The titular Crafs Man is seen as only a pair of hands and a homemade puppet that do their best to guide you step by step on things you really can do from home. Er, not right now though. Unless you have a lot of silicone laying around.

But the videos are soothing and entertaining. Perfect for when you’re trying to lull yourself to sleep or just quell an anxiety attack or throw on in the background while you work on something else. It’s hard not to become enamored with the kind and encouraging host; he seems to have a deep respect for his audience and their abilities to do as he does and ends each “episode” with a kind word to you, the viewer.

If you like his work, you can support “TheCrafsMan” on Patreon.


read the works of Øyvind Thorsby – webcomic

Someone once described the work of Thorby as “just good enough to get the general idea across” and that’s the perfect description of a comic that you may look at and go “I’m not reading this shit”. Well guess what, you judgmental freak? This is probably one of the best comics ever made and you’re missing out on it because people turn up their nose at amateur MSPaint art.

I have been evangelizing about the works of Mr. Thorsby for years and “Hitmen For Destiny” was my entry point to his specific, unbelievably strong brand of humor. Each story is a comedy of errors or a Shakespearean farce filled with bizarre monsters whose intricate and alien biology is almost always central to some sort of horrific mishap the main characters are going to fall into. The plot is a long burning chain reaction in which every possible thing goes wrong. There’s plenty of other comics to read, but my personal favorite is, and will always be, “Hitmen for Destiny”, a story about a woman who stands at the center of a series of prophesies that will save the world and the two extra-dimensional g-men (?) who are supposed to keep her on track without revealing themselves. They fuck it up on the first page. Get reading!


watch “riverdale” – Netflix/Hulu

This is the only thing I’ll add to this list that you’ll have to pay real human money for (unless oh well, you know. You can find a lot of things online is all I’m saying.) and you’re already probably driving to my house to pick me up and dramatically hurl me through a window for even suggesting it. I am telling you right now, from the bottom of my heart, “Riverdale” is the only thing I look forward to in this shitstain of an Earth. Everything about this show is wrong. The tone, the clumsy attempts by adults to try to write characters that are 1/4 their age, the overwrought acting, the ridiculous plots; this is a show that is so bad it wraps back around to good. You cannot predict a single thing that will happen in this show and nothing that happens makes sense or is normal. This is a show made by space aliens. That’s the only conceivable way that this show could exist.

Instead of trying to continue to convince you, I will just list some minor things that happen in this show:

  • Archie accidentally creates ISIS
  • A cult leader dies wearing an Evel Knievel costume next to a rocket he was planning to fly away in to escape police custody
  • Veronica starts a speakeasy for underage teens under Pop’s Chocklit Shoppe.
  • Betty joins a biker gang by doing a pole dance.
  • Archie fights a bear twice. It is not clear if it is the same bear. This happens in two non-consecutive episodes.
  • A Dungeons and Dragons-esque game sweeps through the town plunging it into chaos because teens start committing satanic murders to play the game.
  • Archie has a sexual affair with Mrs. Grundy.
  • Betty and her mom dispose of a body.
  • Jughead dies.

Please watch “Riverdale”.


listen to “We Hate Movies” – https://www.whmpodcast.com/

Bad movie podcasts are a dime a dozen now, but these self-described “fat guys from New York” have been in the game longer than most and have a special place in my heart for being able to consistently make me laugh and giving me something to look forward to every week. Regular episodes are up to 2 hours of content in which the boys take their time slowly ripping apart movies that range from terrible to good bad to the classic category of “you can watch this hungover”. Foul, yet not offensive, the boys dig into movies you forgot (or wish you forgot) from the 80s, 90s and early 2000s.

If you want a good starting point, hunt down literally any of the mailbag episodes in which readers share the most hair-curling stories I have ever heard in my entire life. I cannot believe people experience these things but they absolutely could and that is the most terrifying prospect of all.

You can support “We Hate Movies” on Patreon where they have a huge onslaught of bonus episodes for you to peruse. My favorite is the “Gleep Glossary”, a deep dive into little known and very dumb Star Wars characters.


watch “found footage fest” : http://www.foundfootagefest.com/

 

An enormous trove of carefully and lovingly clipped snippets of VHS movies found in thrift stores, garage sales and flea markets, Found Footage Fest is a love letter to the period of time when anyone could record anything they wanted on a reasonable budget with batshit insane results. There was, in real life, a period of time where there was a market for instructional videos on how to solicit and enjoy cybersex. People once received videos of eligible bachelors being as uncomfortably frank as humanly possible about their personal quest to find their goddess. This is real human history we have to cling to lest we forget that every moment in human history has been weird as hell. Every video is a little grotesque time capsule and snippet of the collective id of humanity. Everyone has been weird, forever, and we can and should celebrate the incredibly niche markets that we could only be privy by the grace of god preserving these tapes. There is nothing but good stuff on this website. Make good use of it. Learn somethin’.


play “space funeral” – thecatamites

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how there’s an entire generation of artists, writers and game creators out there who can credit an enormous amount of influence to the works of thecatamites who spent the entire first half of the 2010s sculpting and tapping into a sense of humor that resonated with a bunch of weirdos (myself included). “Space Funeral” is equal parts despairing, hilarious, dark and shameless. The deliberately garish landscape and grotesque protagonists use the basic, no-frills RPGmaker game systems. The music is as eclectic as the game’s visuals (Japanese noise rock, 1960s electronica, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop) and deeply vital to maintaining the dream-like structure that the rest of the games exudes. The game system keeps it grounded and gives you something familiar to tether yourself to, but everything is, and remains, one of a kind and novel almost a decade later. There is nothing in the works directly inspired by it that captures the same, sincere essence of a pure love of making things that appeal directly to you that “Space Funeral” represents.

“Space Funeral” is free, but thecatemites other games are inexpensive and equally wonderful.


Okay that’s it. Get the fuck outta here.