Go For It! Productions Blog

2007-01-20T10:45:00.000-08:00

Whew! I really haven't been doing a very good job in updating this thing. Anyway, all that you need to know about what's going on in the comic is on the front page of the site. Hopefully I can start using this space as a place to put my doodles and art experiments, as a way of producing some kind of content. Unfortunately, a lot of the figure drawing is a bit too large to scan and post, so you'll have to settle for doodles or tablet practice for now.

For now, you can check out some of my photograhy below!

Let's see if I can keep my promises here!

2006-03-05T13:55:00.000-08:00

Boy, I really have been avoiding this blog for way too long. Sorry about all that. Things have been quite hectic for the past few months. This semester, I'm taking computer animation. This class has a lot of studio time, so there hasn't been much of an opportunity to draw comics or much of anything. Art classes, ironically, don't seem to offer much recourse either. While the opportunity to use them for figure drawing experience is a wonderful thing, the lack of constructive input or clear direction from the instructors is not.

As far as my main 3 stress-subjects these days go, each one is a new and difficult challenge.

1. Portfolio - I doubt I can really put a good portfolio together while at my current college. Hopefully, my plans for next year will allow me to gain more experience in the art field. Even though I won't need a real portfolio for a couple years, I'd like to become competent enough by that time to gain acceptance into a decent art school for some classical animation training.

2. Schooling Abroad - My university has a large emphasis on studying abroad. Hopefully, next year, I'll be at the London College of Communication in their Media Studies programme. It will be nice living in the middle of a cultural center, as well as a chance to see if I can take some drawing courses at the University of the Arts London, of which the LCC is a part of.

3. Internships - Gaining connections is probably one of the most important things in successfully gaining a career in any field. It's a mix of skills and who you know, really. Internships are a great way of not only gaining experience, but of getting to know people in the industry. However, most of my internships that I'm applying for are for pretty high-profile places. Even though the chances are relatively low, I'm going to shoot for the stars. Luckily, most of the responsibilities are almost exactly the same ones I had when I worked for DC Comics, so I know I'm qualified enough. It is a numbers game, though, and a lot of people are likely to be applying. Wish me luck!

I'm hoping Spring Break (starting on the 10th) will be a good time for me to collect my thoughts, get my next few years hammered out, and get back into the comic-making mood. Also, it'll be a time for me to catch up on the work I missed due to a recent illness.

Maybe I should start updating this more often, as some form of twisted entertainment for you people. Schadenfreude and such.

2005-11-28T17:32:00.000-08:00

Well, it appears that I was a little too ambitious with my goal of making a good animated episode of "Go For It!". As it stands, I really don't have the right skills to produce a satisfactory work yet and rather than subject people to an inferior product, I've decided to wait until I have the proper skills to attempt such a venture. Hopefully within the next couple weeks, I'll have the time and energy to get back to making comics as a defeated husk of the human being I once was. This, of course, means the sarcastic content of my comics will increase tenfold.

Thank you all for keeping up with me during this difficult period.

2005-11-10T08:31:00.000-08:00

Sorry for not having posted in a good while, things have been quite busy here at school. In fact, in order to keep producing work and stay in good academic standing, I had to quit the comedy troupe. Well, that's only half-true. There were some creative differences that led to the decision as well.

Anyway, onto comic-related news. I've been attempting to get into more character-based humor, but hopefully not to the exclusion of social commentary and pop-culture perversion. At the moment, backgrounds are still really troubling, and despite their low quality take a long time to do. This should hopefully change in the future.

Updates might be a little sporadic during November as I'm working on the very first animated episode based off of the series. I'm working on finalizing the script by tonight, and hopefully recording the voices on Friday and Saturday. The animation will hopefully be finished by the end of Thanksgiving break. I'm looking forward to producing my first animation, and hope to make it better than average. If the quality isn't up to par, however, I'll probably spend winter retooling it before doing a full online release.

Casting this project is going to be very interesting, I think. I can do lots of voices, but there's a limit to what one person can do.

That's all the news that's fit to print. Tune in next time for possible visual excerpts from the first episode, or maybe script tidbits.

2005-10-08T09:47:00.000-07:00

A Christian charity is sending a film about the Christmas story to every primary school in Britain after hearing of a young boy who asked his teacher why Mary and Joseph had named their baby after a swear word.

Source: Times Online

2005-10-07T10:20:00.000-07:00

It's been a rough two weeks, and my schedule really isn't helping things. Usually, I'm very consistent with updates, but due to the fact that I have early-morning classes combined with really late hours of homework and extra-curriculars, the sleep deprivation isn't making this much easier. I've also been working on trying to assemble some plans for something we call Junior Year Abroad. Right now, I'm planning to do a Summer Program in Japan, and a year-long program in either Australia or England. Unfortunately, I'm having trouble locating good programs in Japan for summer. Most of them don't have classes at the level that I'm working at, or don't have very good housing programs, or they're Christian/Jesuit institutions. Some of them are just very expensive programs. The problem here is that the deadlines are coming up soon. Throw in the approaching midterms and you have a pretty stressed-out webcomic author.

Hopefully I can maybe get a buffer going during the weekend, or perhaps create one during my week-long vacation in October.

2005-10-03T18:40:00.000-07:00

Today I learned that I should never use the word "kapok" as a punchline ever again. For those of you not in the know, kapok is sort of like a cotton substitute that you find in most cheap hotel, hospital, and airplane pillows. It's sort of like sleeping on some fiberglass insulation covered in McDonald's napkins. Nonetheless, it is impossible, or at least very difficult to smother someone with a kapok pillow, since you can effectively breathe through it, and it doesn't bend enough to close off the face, allowing the victim to turn his/her head to get air. Perhaps they use these crappy pillows in hospitals to make sure that nobody attempts to re-create "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". God knows that some kid saw the movie on TV and then decided to try it out on their friends. Damn kids.

In the end, I'm not sure what's more sad, the fact that I thought strangulation is funny or the fact that I know the logistics of smothering people with pillows.

Because I can't think of much else to say, here's a classic Darwin Award:

(3 March 2002, Sheffield, England) As Kim Fontana, 32, and Paul Cowley, 40, left the pub, they noticed that a streetlight was burned out, creating an attractive pool of darkness on the road. Unable to rein in their passion, they began to canoodle on the asphalt outside the pub.
Witnesses said the couple was lying right on the white line, kissing and cuddling. The passionate pair were warned of the danger of their chosen position not once, not twice, but three times -- by a car driver, a bus driver, and a pedestrian.
An off-duty paramedic honked three times and shouted, "You want to get up, or otherwise you'll be run over." The man simply said "Cheers, mate," and the paramedic heard a female voice laughing. A bus driver swerved to avoid them, and drove past with wheels on the curb. A concerned pedestrian shouted to warn them that another bus was headed their way.
Despite these disruptions, Kim and Paul continued, oblivious to the approach of a small, single-decker Nipper bus. The bus driver mistook the undulating shape for a bag of rubbish in the poorly lit street, and was unable to stop in time. There was a dull thud...
Kim and Paul were struck and killed at midnight. Paramedics found Kim lying on her back with her jumper pulled up, and Paul between her legs with his trousers pulled down.
The only downside to this timely removal of lunacy from the gene pool is the fate of the bus driver. Despite the couple's own actions, and a police investigator's statement that "one can expect a pedestrian walking or running in the road, but to expect a driver to anticipate a pedestrian lying in the road is out of the ordinary" -- a judge felt that "his driving fell below the standard one would reasonably expect of a prudent, competent driver."
The bus driver was fined for careless driving and his license was revoked for six months. Fortunately, his employers consider him an excellent employee, and plan to give him other duties for six months. Relatives of the victims said they were glad the driver had kept his job.

2005-09-26T11:41:00.000-07:00

I'm back, and because I love you all so fucking much, I'm staying up and having horrendous hours just to finish the comics for you all. In all honesty, I'm actually having fun with this. I haven't really talked about the storyline much, nor have I really made any clear-cut distinction about my actual beliefs on the issue here in the blog or explicitly in the strip itself. (Remember, there are plenty of times where I have clear distinctions between Alex's beliefs and my own, even though he is often my mouthpiece.) Although some parts of his rants in this storyline ring true in my mind, and even he can't agree with the extremist backlash at the end of the storyline.

I am not a believer in social promotion. Just because it might make a kid feel bad that he's getting left behind a grade is no reason to move him up and hold the teacher responsible for his lack of intellect, curiosity, or motivation. In fact, this emotional impact might give the lil' dumbass the kick in the pants he needs to get off his ass and actually work. Otherwise, you teach them that they can skate by through life because threatening to be emotionally damaged by administrative action is much easier than real work. Children are like any other group of people, there are a few amazing individuals, plenty of average, and a whole bunch of losers who are not going to go anywhere in life, whether it is out of their own laziness or stupidity.

Normally, I wouldn't have a problem with this bullshit but it brings our education system down when educational policy is made just to cater to these struggling students. Classrooms all become remedial education because they have to play catch-up all the time to get everyone to the same level, even though it is only a few students out of the many who were struggling with the concepts. At that point, they need to go to summer school or repeat the grade again. It didn't used to be such a problem, but ever since the idea of self-esteem got into the school system, things have gone to hell.

Administrators often talk about self-esteem as if it is the end-all be-all grace or deficit for a human being's success in life, like it will do a kid any good to feel good about himself with no marketable skills. I believe that over-confidence is far worse than any other kind of esteem issue. If you feel unnaturally good about yourself and your abilities, you're not very likely to take the time to think about your actions or re-evaluate your situation. People need to operate on a functioning level of understanding where they realize that they can and sometimes will be wrong and have to correct themselves. Sometimes being taken down a peg is a good thing.

Oddly enough, this "bringing people down" concept can also be applied to fandom. Maybe, in fact, by making fun of all these geeky losers, I'm performing a public service by making them realize how unhealthy their activities are. Yeah, there's some good ol' justification for you.

2005-09-14T10:52:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was my first day of physical therapy, and it only took 4 entire hours of filling out insurance forms to get there. As you can see, making the comic has been pretty difficult these last 2 weeks due to the shitstorm of incompetence and idiocy inherent in the US medical system. Not only that, but the work I do with my comedy troupe takes a lot of my time. This is especially a hectic time because we have just held our auditions for new members, and are in the process of making the final cast list. Last night, we had a 3-hour meeting and still hadn't come up with a complete final list. God damnit.

Anyway, expect a comic maybe on Friday or next Monday. I don't have many excuses for missing a Friday comic.

2005-09-07T11:01:00.000-07:00

Some of you more observant readers may have noticed a lack of comics this week. This is because of a horrible knee injury acquired last Saturday. You may wonder why I'd have difficulty drawing a comic with a knee injury instead of an arm injury. Well, it's not necessarily the knee itself that's causing the problems. The issue here is dealing with the US medical system. Up here in Poughkeepsie, where my illustrious liberal arts college is located, I don't have a car, so getting to the emergency room is a complete clusterfuck of frustration. Campus security don't even dare leave the campus to transport us to medical centers, so most of us are left to fend for ourselves in the city where crime rates are higher than New York City and Detroit.

On Sunday, when I finally got there, I had to sit in a waiting room for a decent amount of time, listening to some jackass saying that he was going to get a ton of money in a lawsuit against the hospital because they left a stitch in him, which they promptly removed and ruined his entire case. So, they get my x-rays and prettymuch scoot me out the door without giving me a copy of the films or the report. They then tell me to see an orthopedic doctor in a few days. Well, that's great. Only thing is, I need the fucking x-rays and reports to even see a goddamn doctor!

So, my school medical center was able to get a fax of the report, but I have to bum a ride off a friend to pick up the x-ray films so I can make an appointment so I can later take a crappy taxi ride down to an orthopedic office so they can look at the same x-rays and look at the report and say "well, I know they said your bones and tissue are fine, but let's stick a huge fuckin' needle in there anyway".

So, dealing with all this red tape and insurance bullshit has been taking up my time, let alone giving me little opportunity to even finish my homework.

With luck, the strip will be back on track next week, and will update regularly as I usually do. It's too bad, though. I had 21 weeks straight of consistent updates. Oh well. Hopefully I'll have something funny to say next time around.

2005-08-26T14:36:00.005-07:00

For those of you not in the know Dan Quayle was the media darling of the early 90's. Of course, this really wasn't a good thing for him because he became famous for being a complete idiot. Then again, saying a politician is an idiot is a tired repetition of an already-known fact of life. The event that probably sealed the deal for the re-election campaign of the Bush-Quayle ticket occurred during an elementary-school spelling bee, attended by the Vice President as a photo-op. As the kid was writing the word "potato" on the board, Quayle urged the poor child to add an "e" at the end, despite the fact that he was holding the goddamn card with the word spelled on it. It's this sort of genius that makes you feel secure about the leadership of your own nation.

For any of you who have followed the old TV series Murphy Brown, he was a constant figure of satire and ridicule, and probably for good reason. Quayle previously came under heavy fire after an admonishing speech about family values and Murphy Brown. Apparently, his issue was the fact that she was a single mother and decided to raise the child without a father. While the role of the father can be helpful for a child's development, it probably isn't very wise to lambast people who like to find their own value outside the boundaries of relationships and marriage. This is even a dumber move since the womens' sufferage movement allowed this section of American society to vote. Besides, children are pretty fucked up with both parental figures anyway. What these people fail to realize is that the gender and number of parents is completely inconsequential to children, it's the quality of the parenting that matters the most. There are plenty of single mothers and single fathers that can have well-adjusted children.

What's the most disturbing thing is how invasive the government has gotten in regards to people's personal lives. These public figures keep on telling us how to run our lives when they don't seem to be doing a very good job with theirs, or even running the country which is their goddamn job title.

Don't even get me started on the oil crisis. Maybe people should rise up and storm DC, because obviously the current set of people have royally fucked the citizens of this country. Ironically, there's a nice passage about this sort of thing in the Declaration of Independence.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

I promise something funny in the next entry. Or something. May I never get political again.

2005-08-22T12:30:00.000-07:00

Today, we've reached the 100th comic. I also redesigned the entire site from the bottom up. Unfortunately, there's still a few bugs to work out and the changes probably won't be seen until later today because of the delays with the hosting service. Hopefully the site looks nice. I decided that flat colors fit in well with the flat-color style of the comic.

Some people wonder what my position is on video game violence. You see, I don't think the video games make kids more violent than the children of previous generations. I just think the kids of this generation are dumber. Seriously, the problem isn't that the games are violent, it's that the kids don't differentiate the mechanics of games from reality. When people murder each other over some rare sword in an online game, or kill someone for beating them at Counter Strike, you get the idea that people don't realize that there isn't a respawn in real life.

You know whose fault this is? Parents. They are the ones who are supposed to teach kids that there's a difference between violence on TV and in real life. And if they've done that, maybe their kid is just dumb and good ol' natural selection culled them out of the gene pool. Seriously, it's not that much of a loss when a ten year old jumps off a building with a towel tied around his neck, because anybody that age that doesn't know better must be pretty fuckin' dumb.

Perhaps the video games are helping the evolution of humanity by giving dumb kids bad ideas. TV wasn't efficient enough.

2005-08-17T15:42:00.000-07:00

This is a section that I call Artibtrary Stereotypes.

Sanctimonious, fear-based Catholic Midwesterners who live in homes with 13 garden gnomes, a duck-shaped postbox, a "bless this mess" welcome mat, Thomas Kinkaid paintings in their bathrooms with extra-large toilets with handlebars on the walls because the stretch-pants wearing, cheesecake-eating, Oprah-watching, Bible-thumping woman that lives there with her even fatter husband doesn't have the strength to lift her 400 pound frame off the john by herself because she's been on the Atkins diet and doesn't have any ready-use energy on hand, but the handlebar is rickety because the man of the house has to lean on it all the time because he gets winded taking a dump, but luckily they can afford to repair it because the state pays them welfare since being overweight is considered a disease these days.

15-year-old, female, grossly overweight pagans who wear indian beads, dream catchers and crystals on strings over their black "wolf-in-the-snow-in-the-forest-at-night" t-shirts without any understanding or belief of the cultures they're dealing with, with their boxes of vampire-themed tarot cards stacked in tow with their art books of smarmy fairy paintings, who try to cast their "magick" spells on people who are more popular and attractive than they are, and spending their evenings constructing mental universes where they aren't hideously disgusting on the outside AND inside, living in their upper-middle class, suburban Californian gated communities.

Birkenstock-wearing, pot-smoking, anarchists in Abercrombie & Fitch clothing in high school who believe that shitting on paper and using the word "man" after every sentence constitute as intellectual literary analysis, trying their best to sound intelligent with their proclamations that beat poetry isn't dead and that it's very different from getting high next to a typewriter, while at the same time hoping to someday become filmmakers within the corrupt capitalist system of Hollywood by making skater films with their homogenous skater friends showing them doing the same goddamn unimpressive move fifteen times in a row, frequently interrupted by glowing neon text that informs everyone that it's time for the cast to get a cheeseburger, followed by clips of horrific accidents involving them injuring their testicles on ramps.

2005-08-05T14:42:00.000-07:00

One of the most interesting things about the internet is the sheer amount of drama it generates. While all of this is quite hilarious, it makes me wonder how people can get so emotionally wound up by things people say on the internet. Crying over what some idiot writes in an e-mail, or IM, or forum post is just plain retarded, because it's just some guy. Usually, the grieving process involves various angry e-mails, IMs to friends with quotes of what "the insensitive jerk" said, LJ posts with the names changed to creative titles like "person A", and cries for attention on public forums. It's absolutely incredible the amount of energy people spend this way. Perhaps the best way to illustrate the absurdity of this is to make a real-world comparison.

Bob, an everday office peon drives home from a long day at work, when suddenly he is cut off on the freeway. And he sees that it is Mike, from accounting! Bob, hurt so deeply inside by his co-worker's insensitive actions, quickly drives home and then cries for hours into his pillow. His sadness quickly turns to anger and a desire for pity, so he crafts 200 passive-aggressive post-it notes that he'll attach all over Mike's cubicle in the morning before work. Still not satisfied, Bob calls everyone he has in his address book, playing up the situation as a battle of good versus evil, that jerk Mike doing this horrible thing even though Bob has never done anything to Mike before. He absorbs the awkward sympathy from his friends, who don't really care but want to at least appear like good people, so they pretend to feel just awful about Bob's situation. All of these people will be buying caller ID the next day. As he hangs up the phone, Bob looks out the window and sees his neighbors sitting down for dinner. Oh boy, an audience! As the loving wife passes the mashed potatoes to her daughter, a mysterious stranger busts through the kitchen door, sobbing widly about a highway and accounting. He throws himself on their table, sobbing heavily and covering himself with their dinner. This lunatic's sobbing becomes so heavy that he proceedes to throw up all over their kitchen and inside their turkey, garbling something that sounds like "Ike" and "asshole" between vomits. The father of the household, realizing that they're dealing with a crazy person, tries to talk him down, much like attempting communication with a schizophrenic in the middle of a psychotic episode, while the mother makes a signal to her 8 year old son to call 9-1-1. In about 10 minutes, the family has convinced Bob that they are sympathetic to his problem, until the swat team arrives and fills him with enough tranqs to drop an elephant. Shortly before being shoved into the padded van, he shouts "Mike runied my life!", followed by a final vomit that lasts about 2 minutes, a new world record. The next day, the family sells their house and moves away, closing this dark chapter in their lives forever. And in the end, it wasn't even Mike who cut him off. It was John from procurement.

So next time you see someone on LiveJournal or on your favorite forum being a drama whore, remember the story of Bob.

2005-07-28T00:11:00.000-07:00

So the name has switched to ComicGenesis. To be honest, I don't really know why the powers that be felt it necessary to change the name, but knowing doesn't really change anything. According to KeenSpot, the reason for the change was to avoid brand confusion between KeenSpace and KeenSpot, which are owned by the same company. Now, being the naive optimist at heart, I don't believe people are stupid enough to confuse the words Space and Spot. But apparently, people did, so now we all have to change our names because being associated with a free comic hosting service is such a grevious misconception that slapdash policy changes are necessary. No, I'm not bitter.

Overall, changing the site over wasn't that complicated, but there were a few bumps in the road. The big problem now is that all the places that have linked me need to change their links eventually because the redirects will only last for a certain amount of time. Then there was the fun process of trying to find every listing of my comic and change the address. Thanks to the glut of sites where everyone in the internet flocks in to whore their comics, this process took quite a while.

Anyway, back to the blog.

You might have noticed a slight quality change in the art of the comic between Monday's comic and today's comic. The lines are much smoother now thanks to a process I've developed. The trick is to export the line art to Flash and use the trace feature to make it into vector art, this eliminates the miniscule imperfections in the lines. If you look really close at ink on paper, there's slight blurring and inconsistencies that can muck up the look. It can also fix some of the slight errors I make when inking my artwork. So after I have the lines auto-traced, I import them back into Photoshop as an Illustrator document where I color and assemble them into the comic.

Sure, it takes longer, but it's worth it for the fans... fan... okay, nobody. Even I don't read my comic. Great, you just made me sad. I hope you're happy.

2005-07-20T13:09:00.000-07:00

I never thought it would be necessary to explain a gag before, but oh well. You see, diaphragm is not only an organ used by singers to help their projection, but also an older contraceptive method. They are spelled the same and thus are "puns". There, joke ruined successfully.

ComicCon was interesting, and from it I learned a very valuable lesson; for as much as I dislike anime and manga fans for their obnoxiousness, it has become readily apparent that Adult Swim fans are the most irritating group of people on the face of the earth. I went to both the Pitching Panel as well as the official Adult Swim panel. Both were laden with idiots. First at the pitching panel, you get dumb questions that aren't about pitching, instead they're from angry fans demanding that certain shows be brought back. Then there are people who wanted to pitch them a show over the microphone, despite the fact that they had gone over the fact (multiple times) that they couldn't accept pitches until they had a contract signed to protect their work. Otherwise, that panel was fine, and I learned a lot about what they look for and how to pitch them a show in the future.

When the official Adult Swim panel came on, however, the idiocy tripled. You see, these fans seem to have a few misconceptions about reality. They think that their encyclopedic knowledge of Williams Street Shows is a sign of superiority. They believe that their slavish devotion to these TV programs is some form of virtue. And they mistake their clever references and shouted lines like "Mooninites forever" as sharp wit. In reality however, they are just losers with more time than brains. Seriously, going up to the microphone isn't an invitation to sit there and rant at the producers of a show for 10 minutes because you didn't like the music they used in the background of a segment between shows. Nor is it nice to sit there and make a long-winded insult against a show in front of an audience of hundreds of people, possibly in front of the creators of said program. The worst part is the smug sense of superiority they have in their voices.

Let's get this straight: YOU ARE NOT BETTER PEOPLE FOR LIKING A PROGRAMMING BLOCK. You may think that being a fan of Adult Swim makes you unique, but in fact, you are just like thousands of other people who have TV sets. So stop trying to score geek points over each other and just enjoy the shows. It's not that hard.

2005-07-13T22:37:00.000-07:00

Just came back home from Preview Night of ComicCon International 2005. Normally, I spend preview night going absolutely everywhere, in order to get a good scope of everything. However, I instead spent more time hanging out in what I called the "Webcomics Pavillion". This is where KeenSpot, Graphic Smash, Dumbrella, and the PA guys have their booths. However, Scott McCloud, who was scheduled to have a booth next to PA, apparently decided to not have a booth. (He will be at his scheduled panel, though.) I spent most of the evening having a great conversation with T. Campbell and Bob Stevenson.

It was really nice to have an involving and intelligent discussion on webcomics, something difficult to find not only in real life, but online as well. I hope to be able to have other discussions with them later on in the future. I just hope I didn't talk their ears off, as is my tendency as the opinionated jackass that I am.

Other highlights included meeting with the guys I used to work with at CMX in the DC Comics booth, although it was really interesting to hear of the changes to the staff. Oh well, I'll have to check in sometime next week at the office.

I also got a picture of Rachel over at Poseur Ink with Seth Green of Family Guy and Robot Chicken fame.

I'll be around the convention, maybe hanging out some more at the Webcomics Pavillion, so if you think you see me, let me know by shouting something obscene in my direction. It's always fun to disturb others.

More to come tomorrow.

2005-07-08T21:45:00.000-07:00

Today I mocked the FCC. The FCC, for those of you who don't know, is the government agency responsible for keeping television "decent" under the outdated value system created in the era where people thought that Victorean values were a good idea to bring back. You know, the era where married couples couldn't have their beds shown less than 5 feet away from each other. The era of shitty programming like Leave it to Beaver. But I digress.

If you haven't noticed on the TV, the warning boxes for TV programs have at least doubled in size. The problem is, if parents didn't pay attention to them in the first place, what makes them think that making them larger is going to change anything? Besides, aren't the parents supposed to be watching their kids in the first place? The only reason children are stupid enough to imitate what they see on TV is because nobody is telling them any better. There's no point to putting warnings on anything if nobody is going to follow them be it CDs, games, movies, or television. It's irritating to see Peter Griffin's face cut off by a black box.

When researching the guideline system on the FCC website, I noticed something interesting in their "For Kids Section": THEY PLAGIARIZED DORAEMON. Doraemon is practically a national icon over in Japan. He has over 20 movies, 2000 episodes on TV, and was the mascot for the postal service for a few years. Doraemon has also been running strong for over 4 decades. So it was interesting to see a government agency take one of the Doraemon designs, add a thumb, add a striped sweater, and rename him Broadband. What the name "broadband" has to do with children's television has evaded my sensibilities at the moment, so instead I'll reply with "WHAT THE HELL?!"

See for yourself:

Now normally, I'd show you guys the yellow Doraemon design, but I wanted to give you guys a good idea of his typical shape. Even then, you can see the striking similarities. On the FCC site, I was not only amazed by the ripoff, but of the overall poor quality of the image. Come on, if you're going to plagiarize something, at least make it look good.

I think the FCC deserves to get in trouble for once. So spread the word.

2005-07-01T13:57:00.000-07:00

If you thought I made up the "kid named Sephiroth" stuff up, you've got another thing coming. Seriously, I don't think ANYBODY could make this shit up. Some parents actually decided to name their child after the famous Final Fantasy 7 villain, who is usually the star of terrible fanfiction. If you want to see how far America has fallen down the society shitter, just look at the most popular baby names. The doctors should have slapped the parents when he found out about the name. But seriously, there is just something that needs to be asked here: WHY? Why would you name your child after a video game villain, a Final Fantasy character of all things?

This is the kind of bullshit that 6 year olds go through when they think it would be awesome to name their kids after superheroes or video game characters. But then they turn 8 and they realize how stupid they were and go on with their lives. This leads me to believe that the parents were either retarded or worse... a fanboy and a fangirl that somehow procreated out of desperation. However, fanboy/fangirlism is typically at its prime in the early teenage years, so perhaps these loser pregnant teens decided to get it on because they came to the realization that nobody else would ever have sex with them without being either dead or drugged first.

Perhaps they were angry about their childhoods, so out of resentment for the limitless possibilities of their child, they decided to inflict double the bullying they recieved when they were kids by giving him such a shitty name. Seriously, all the bullies have to do is print out bad homosexual Final Fantasy 7 fanfiction from the internet, and read it aloud and you have a shitty childhood in the making right there. Then again, growing up in the household of otakus can't be good for his mental development. I have a prediction of his future screen name: PARENTKILLER8345

Let's just hope he succeeds.

Is it just me or have Cocoa Pebbles commercials stopped making sense altogether? Seriously, why does Barney Rubble have clones? What's even better is that the producers of the commercial really don't feel the need to explain where they come from at all. So we're to assume that somehow in the stone age, Barney Rubble, a frequently-unemployed half-mongoloid retard, has somehow figured out how to magically duplicate himself in order to steal breakfast cereal from his angry, alcoholic neighbor. What the fuck is this shit? At least the older commericals established the process behind the schemes, like Barney building a machine, or learning a magician's card trick or some other inane crap. At least we could, in a cartoonish sense, believe what was happening. Now they've just let it ride into insanity with no explanation whatsoever. Seriously, what the hell?!

2005-06-29T15:11:00.000-07:00

Today I just had to make fun of InuYasha fans, specifically. But to be fair, I had to throw in a reference to DragonBall Z as well. Why single these series out? Experience shows me that most people who are fans of these "animations" have severe mental problems. I use the word "animation" lightly because there is nothing animated about any of these programs. InuYasha is basically a bunch of still images with mouths animated onto them, with intermittent speed lines thrown in to create the illusion of actual movement. But what truly makes these shows special are the diehard fans.

One day my brother and I were standing in line at the Sam Goody, waiting for the non-english speaking cashier to ring up another teenybopper's Britney album, and my eye caught sight of the bargain bin, filled with InuYasha memorabilia; posters, figures, and even a bunch of the DVDs. This prompted a discussion between my brother and myself about the overall quality of the series. You see, during my brief employment at DC Comics in their CMX Manga department, I had to do tons of research on not only series, but of authors and their related works. Rumiko Takahashi is probably one of the most famous and wealthy comic artists in Japan. Unfortunately, every character in her works seem to oscillate between "angsty love-smitten depression" and "angry". There is no middle ground EVER. So keeping in mind the overall poor quality of the show from not only an animation and story viewpoint, but also from a FUCKING HORRIBLE VOICE ACTING side as well. Every episode comprises of two characters shouting each other's names in 2-frames per second mouth animations. Back to the story, the overall conversation ends with me saying "InuYasha anything is a bad idea."

Apparently, this discussion didn't settle well with the people in front of us. So the lady WITH SUBTLETY says to her friend in a loud voice, "Gee, I didn't know we had a couple THESPIANS in our line." Now, normally I would have called her on her use of the word "thespian", which boggles me to this day as to what she believed it meant. However, after seeing that she was a typical InuYasha fan, I realized that God had punished her more than enough. She was short, fat, had a face that her mother probably didn't even love, thick glasses, a pentagram on a string, and she was wearing one of those black shirts that has the wolves in the snow in the forest at night because that is so spiritual and natural and it shows how in tune with nature you are despite living in suburban California. The hardest part was not laughing in her face.

2005-06-25T16:54:00.000-07:00

Tom Cruise needs to shut the fuck up. It's amazing that people give so much credence to celebrities. Really, we should stop asking these people about their opinion on shit and instead ask the experts. Julia Roberts does not know shit about deficit spending, nor does Britney Spears have a clue about the moral issues facing China. Stop asking them, they're actors.

However, this isn't stopping the Scientology nut from proclaiming himself an expert in all things mental. (Surprisingly, if he did know so much about human psychology, he wouldn't be a part of the "church" of Scientology to begin with. Stuff like that is in the same veign as Jim Jones and Heaven's Gate according to psych textbooks.) He also isn't making a good case for himself after jumping all over Oprah on national TV, as well as denouncing Brooke Shields and all people who need medication to help their clinical depression. So then Cruise goes on the "Today" show, and attacks Matt Lauer on the issues of psychiatric medicine as opposed to talking about something he knows about, like... gee, I dunno...HIS GODDAMN MOVIE.

"You don't know the history of psychiatry. I do."

Yeah, Tom, you are a psychiatric expert. That's why you're jumping up and down like a fuckin' maniac on speed, making an ass of yourself and pissing off the director of your movie because you're spending you time lambasting a large percentage of the US population with your insanity rather than promoting the film. Maybe he needs Ritalin. But wait, he can't take Ritalin, as he attacks Matt Lauer again, who was trying to bring up the point that he personally knew people who were helped by the drug.

"Matt, Matt, you don't even--you're glib. You don't even know what Ritalin is. If you start talking about chemical imbalance, you have to evaluate and read the research papers on how they came up with these theories, Matt, OK. That's what I've done."

Yeah, Tom. You've read scientific papers on actual university testing. It's scientific, just like Scientology. No, wait, it's NOT LIKE SCIENTOLOGY, YOU DUMB FUCK. Look, nobody is going to believe you. They've seen your shitty movies, and there is nothing leading any of us to believe that you ever graduated preschool. Seriously, have you SEEN Mission Impossible 2? Again, you're hardly making a good case for yourself.

Tom, and all you goddamn celebrities out there: SHUT UP. Nobody cares. You're actors, not experts. Shut up and let experts talk, because they know what they're doing. You are just a bunch of shmoes who happen to be in movies, that's it. Grow up out of your stupid little high-school construct you guys have created and get a life.

And to the American public: Stop caring about these people and what they have to say. Maybe if they realized that their opinion doesn't matter any more than anyone else's, they'd stop trying. Stop reading People and pick up the New York Times. Your brain will thank you for it.

2005-06-24T01:54:00.000-07:00

Alright, today I must once again consult Wikipedia for some fun and interesting material about my current target in today's strip "And So Nobody Cared". Today's source of satire is David Blaine. Many people remember Blaine for his famous stunts of "staying alive in a box of some sort". The most famous of these is the time he was suspended in a glass box over London. What made this such a special event was not the fact that he survived 44 days only on water in a glass box suspended up in the sky, but the ways in which people attempted to aggravate him during his trick.

Newspapers reported that eggs, lemons, sausages, bacon, water bottles, beer cans, paint-filled balloons and golf balls had all been thrown at the box. One man was arrested for climbing the scaffolding supporting Blaine's box and attempting to cut the power and water supply to the box.

I can't believe someone took the effort to actually climb up on a tower just to do that. And as if this wasn't enough, some other people got a little more creative.

A hamburger was flown round the box by radio-controlled model helicopter.

Going to these sorts of lengths takes a special kind of deranged human being. As if tossing food at him wasn't enough, they have to find new technology to DANGLE food in front of him. This type of asshollery is an art and by george do the Londonders have it mastered. For as much of a douchebag as David Blaine is, these people really knew how to return it in kind.

However, I find it funny that he could be dead in a box in the middle of a high school quad for 5 months, and nobody would even do anything. Am I the only one to find this sort of callousness hilarious? Probably.

Right now it's really late, so I think I'll post my daily "bitch subject" tomorrow.

2005-06-22T13:55:00.000-07:00

I hope people remember who Lorena Bobbit is, because I referenced her in today's comic "Made by Mattel". Lorena Bobbit is a woman who became a news sensation for castrating her husband. Thanks to the magic of the internet, and wikipedia, a seemingly limitless spew of information can be found on the subject.

On the night of June 23, 1993, Bobbitt cut several inches off her husband's sex organ with a kitchen knife as he lay sleeping in their Manassas, Virginia, home. She then drove off with the severed appendage and flung it out her car window. Police performed a diligent search and located it, and it was then surgically reattached.

The sad thing is, this isn't the most disturbing aspect of the entire affair.

John also faced charges stemming from accusations of assault against Lorena. He was acquitted of a charge of marital sexual assault in September of 1993. After his reattachment surgery, Bobbitt briefly became a porn star, appearing in the movies Frankenpenis and John Wayne Bobbitt … Uncut, in part to finance the operation which reattached his member. In "Frankenpenis," Bobbit played a character who was made with spare parts, much like "Frankenstein" whose penis unexplicably comes off during a rousing session of intercourse. Bobbit then moans, "oh no, not again." Siskel and Ebert gave the movie two thumbs up.

I guess this just goes to show the overall tastelessness of America at large. Did some porn director just walk up to him as he was recovering in the hospital, saying "Yo, Johnny, baby! I heard about your accident and I just thought right away, 'this man has a career in porn!'" I guess there's a market for a guy who had is FUCKING PENIS CUT OFF. Who in the hell gets aroused by that crap? It sounds like a bad 80's sitcom replete with a retarded catch phrase "oh no, not again". But that's not the most disturbing part. Why in the hell were Siskel and Ebert reviewing a movie called "Frankenpenis"? The only reason I can think of is that they felt compelled to mention this national-scale shame because of John Bobbit's status as a pseudo-celebrity.

Well on to other matters...

Williams Street must be stopped. Someone needs to tell them that they're not funny, for their own good. After watching 12oz Mouse last Sunday, I started to question my own sanity. "No, a TV network would never knowingly broadcast a show of such poor quality. I know some shows are bad, but nothing this apocalyptically terrible! NEVER! WHY GOD?! WHYYYYY?!" Hell, even Aquateen Hungerforce has its moments, but this was 15 minutes of an awkward pause. They took the time and energy to produce a show out of bad art that appears to have been drawn on a bar napkin, and then apply written dialogue so devoid of humor that Rugrats is witty in comparison. Seriously, just because Home Movies got some humor from the awkward situations of everday life doesn't mean you can too. The entire thing reads like an inside joke, and you can be sure that the guys at the offices were laughing their asses off, completely unaware of the fact that nobody outside that room (who isn't on drugs) will be amused. All of the awkward pauses are just an excuse for being lazy with your writing and animation, which seems pretty damn effortless to begin with. My god, this show is even worse than Tom Goes to the Mayor. I never thought it would be possible.

Do us a favor and stick with showing episodes of Family Guy and Futurama, because they know what the hell they're doing and they're prettymuch entirely responsible for your success. If you want to sink your funding into original programs, at least invest is something good like Robot Chicken and the Venture Bros. Because those at least require effort.

2005-06-20T14:09:00.000-07:00

In today's comic: "International House of Bullcrap", I not only made fun of the insanity of "holy manifestation", but also referenced an older program called "The Carol Burnett Show". It's quite surprising how few people in my generation remember this one, and it's quite a shame. This program was made back when variety shows were actually funny. The improv work of Harvey Korman and Tim Conway were top-notch and it was actually entertaining in that "I don't want to take a bath with an electrical toaster after watching this show" sort of way. See, we don't have anything like that anymore. No, instead we get shit like Saturday Night Live and MadTV. While I will have to admit that I enjoy MadTV more than SNL, it's the equivalent of saying that I'd rather freeze to death and suffer the sleepy demise of hypothermia, rather than burning alive under the hot sun in the desert. Watching an episode of SNL these days is like watching a corpse of a former great star being manipulated on stage by a retarded puppetmaster who had too many people tell him that he was funny. You know, like those Dirt Devil commercials with Fred Astaire dancing post-mortem in the most shameful display of marketing ever conceived. Saturday Night Live sustains itself on nostalgia for the time that it used to be amusing. It was the time back in the days when we had the first George Bush in office, back when the show didn't have the luxury on riding the success of the past, puttering across the finish line. MadTV at least has the balls to be edgy without being completely stupid. (Note the use of the word "completely".)

Let me ask this question: Has Jimmy Fallon ever been funny? Seriously, Family Guy really pegged him well in that episode a couple weeks ago. When you're acting on a TV show, or in a movie, DON'T LOOK AT THE FUCKING CAMERA, YOU RETARD! And don't laugh at your own goddamn jokes, it makes you look like a tool. It's nice to know he moved on to the next level of most post-SNL actors: failing at a serious acting career in Hollywood. If "Taxi" is any indication of his abilities to choose a script and act it out, I'm pretty sure he'll be running back to the "small pond" mediocrity of the SNL stage very soon.

What the hell has happened to "Weekend Update"? Come on, Norm and Colin did better jobs than the current shit we see now. If I wanted to see someone mock the current news, I'd watch The Daily Show, where it's funny, insightful, and current. Guys, you get a whole week to write a joke. Don't you think that with a whole week you could do a better job than John Stewart, who only gets less than a day and still manages to be hilarious? Seriously, Penny Arcade is more current that you guys, and they only cover video games.

Didn't Saturday night used to be a great night for television? Now I find myself wasting my time on Cartoon Network with their anime bullshit, or Comedy Central, or Nicktoons Network where I can map out specifically where Nickelodeon became the depressing, empty husk of a network that it is today. Even better, I can always switch over to Court TV and watch people get murdered for an entire evening.

I guess all I can say is this. Please, Mrs. Burnett. Please come back to television. We miss you. We miss you and Harvey Korman and Tim Conway and Vicki Lawrence and all the other people my generation can't be bothered to remember. I'd even welcome you guys back if you were potatoes.

2005-06-20T13:53:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the "Go For It! Productions" Blog. Here's the place to see the behind-the-scenes world of "Go For It!" and various other future productions. For the most part, this is the place for all the extra notes for the comics and various rants on subjects that feel pertinent and/or amusing (yet not long enough to be a rant on the main page). Read, enjoy, and comment if you please!