The Old Country's Biggest Blunders

firstbasemanwho I feel like (especially given the reemergence of Fatman and Steve Jobs going all on being an asshole) that a decent chunk of the the all-day Newswire denizens nowadays tend to be people who are angry with the world for whatever reason and need someplace to take it out. That can manifest itself in being an outright abusive asshole, or in just lashing out self-righteously at whatever, or talking endlessly about politics (I typically head to the AVC when I want to escape real news).

That's well put. As if the recent GJI selections from Clickhole and Starwipe weren't incestuous enough.

I freakin' love Clickhole.  The weird glimpses into bizarre little alternate universes you get from their stuff is delightful.

I've been trying to figure out why Michael Bublé doesn't work, and you've pretty much got it. If you're going to cover a song, you should either manage to capture the original spirit and maybe pump it up (Alien Ant Farm's cover of "Smooth Criminal") or try to make it your own (Aretha Franklin's "Respect"). Bublé is just appealing to people's love of the classics in a flat, unmotivated manner.

Clickhole remains fascinating to me in how it creates these whole slightly-off (or very-off) worlds within its articles.

Somehow this thread came to mind when on today's newswire they confused Jesse Owens with Jesse Helms (possibly fixed by the time you click on this).

Edit: They fixed it.

"Transposing a familiar melody from a major key to a minor key or vice versa shouldn’t really make all that much difference. What impact could a few sharps or flats make either way when most of the notes are unaffected?"

Impressively stupid, even for a Great Job, Internet! article.

My brother is a really great musician, which isn't all that important for this anecdote but he is and I'm proud of him so I like to mention it. Anyway I always used to ask him to play the Charlie Brown theme in minor key on the piano and we would laugh hysterically and call it Charlie Brown's funeral march. 

I only check in once a month or so. Has Starwipe gotten any better, or is it still pretty much a disaster?

Was literally just about to bring that up myself.  What the actual fuck?

To echo what I wrote on the post, that whole thing just depressed me.  I fully support having a greater variety of body types in our depictions of characters, animated or otherwise.  It's something I want to see.  And I know that whole thing was written from a starting place of good intentions.  But however great those intentions are, it just falls so hard into self-parody.

Stylized art is OK!  And you can depict a variety of body types with stylized art. To call out something like Daria - a grounded, smart and progressive show about non-traditional teen characters - because you think the particular *non-sexualized* art style they used promotes thigh gap is so counter-productive to *actually* improving body type depictions as to be kind of insulting.

And Shaggy?  Shaggy's a skinny, gangly weirdo stoner dude!  That's what he is!  *That's the point!*  And not only that, but Scooby-Doo basically refutes their criticisms because, well, Velma exists, is objectively awesome, and within the same art style is pretty consistently depicted as a shorter, less skinny, curvier body type.

Came here to post it. Good lord. 

Yeah, I didn't even look at the articles because I knew the comments would be a clusterf**k.

The AV Club: Promoting social progress in the least important ways possible

What I found most bizarre about the Daria article (which, to be fair, I didn't bother reading until I saw everyone on here talking about it) is that the people who made the study were complaining about cartoon characters being stuck in the past, while complaining about characters from the past. They do realize that Daria is from nearly 20 years ago, and Scooby-Doo is almost 50, right?