The Continued Integrity Spiral Of The Media.

In this weeks installment of “is this satire, or reality”, media has officially lost the last bit of credibility it may have had left.

The media has officially:

LostMind

They went on quite the tear yesterday, practically bending over backwards to praise North Korea, specifically the first lady of tyranny Kim Yo-jong, with tweets like this:

CNNProNorthKoreaWhy exactly is this “problematic”?

Well for starters, North Korea is practically one giant human rights violation. The country currently has over 100,000 of its own citizens contained within prison camps, that have catchy names like Camp 14, Camp 15, and Camp 16. In addition to hard labor, other activities that regularly take place within these camps include fun things like torture, starvation, rape, and outright murder.

North Korea employs “Three Generations of Punishment”. This means that if a citizen were to be convicted of a crime, not only do they receive the punishment, but three generations of their family do as well. What better way to prevent citizens from stepping out of line than to hurt the ones they love. What a progressive and welcoming country, deserving of the western media’s affection and accolades.

Kim Yo-jong, the sister of Kim Jong-un, is the vice director of North Korea’s Workers Party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department. That isn’t a satirical title. She is literally in charge of state-sponsored propaganda, including maintaining the cult of personality that surrounds Kim Jong-un. The media praising her is like if the media had praised Eva Braun during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Of course this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the media’s increasingly loose moral compass. What with the complete fabrication of events to push narratives, constant pushing of conspiracy theories, and outright romanticization of murderous dictator types (see Castro, Guevara, etc).

This is the very same media who increasingly glamorizes Communism in droves, like the gaggle of edgy, poorly educated children so many of them are increasingly turning out to be. Mind you, this is the same Communism responsible for levels of death, oppression, and human tragedy that far outnumber those of the Holocaust and slavery combined. We’re talking magnitudes of difference here.

Human dumpster fire and dumb person’s intellectual Jeet Heer posted the tweet below, before arrogantly disparaging all who took issue with it, and attempting to justify his idiocy with a 14 tweet barrage of damage control.

JeetHeerThis tweet is fairly par for the course in Jeet’s world though. The guy’s entire career is predicated on writing sensationalized, hyperbolic anti-Trump articles and tweets. Unfortunately, nothing Trump or Pence could possibly do will ever make Kim Jong-un or his family look good in comparison. Not even Jeet’s Trump-fueled hate boner will change this fact.

Champion of the wealthy privileged class masquerading as blue collar savior Michael Moore had this to say:

MichaelMooreThat sure is a hot take there, Captain Cholesterol. A murderous (communist) regime awkwardly unifies (strictly as a PR move) with its free capitalist counterpart to the south, and all you can see through those grease-soaked goggles is an anti-Trump event. Never mind the fact that the Koreas didn’t “come together”, so much as the south was merely being diplomatic in letting the nuisance to the north share in the Olympics (North Korea tried to have a joint Olympics in 1988 in Seoul, but were denied). Also, never mind that in spite of the hippy hug-fest John Lennon karaoke, that after the Olympics are over, North Koreans will still not have the freedoms that any other country at the Olympics get to enjoy.

Those are just two arrogant loud-mouths opining on the events however. Let’s look at some of the brilliant commentary that the actual media was laying down.

ABCNorthKoreaMatching outfits and synchronized chants? How cute! Except they didn’t get together and pick matching outfits and work out a routine to look cute. It’s unlikely that any of these women even had a say in whether they were to be at these events or not. Everything about their visit would have been dictated and controlled by the North Korean government. Their entire presence was a carefully orchestrated P.R. move, the headmaster of that propaganda being the aforementioned Kim Yo-jong.

Those whimsical masks are of a young Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-un’s grandfather. The man responsible for establishing North Korea’s current prison-state and lovely policies like the three generations of punishment. Every North Korean is legally required to display and maintain a picture of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il within their homes. These masks are akin to China showing up with Mao masks, or Italians wearing Mussolini masks. There’s nothing remotely cute about it.

NewYorkTimesKoreaWhere to even begin with this one.

For starters, it’s obvious whoever wrote this tweet had both a deep hatred of Pence and a complete ignorance of Kim. Pence is guilty of having antiquated views on homosexuality. Kim is guilty of helping run a murderous prison-state. The two aren’t even remotely comparable by any metric. Frankly, only a complete dipshit would consider anyone in the Kim family to be more diplomatic than any sitting or former U.S. president or vice president. Based on the response-to-like ratio on this tweet, most people were rational enough to feel the same way.

Keep in mind, that perhaps the reason Pence didn’t act “diplomatic” towards anyone from North Korea might be due to the fact that only eight month ago, a U.S. citizen (Otto Warmbier) was killed by Kim’s regime.

ReutersNorthKoreaReuters apparently didn’t want to be left out of the stupid tweet club. Once again, North Korea is a murderous, fascist regime, and there is absolutely nothing remotely diplomatic about them. If anything, South Korea were the diplomatic ones for letting a country implicit in the kidnapping of hundred of its citizens join them in their hosting of the Olympics.

CanadaNorthKoreaHey guys! It’s me, Canada! Let me get in on this tone-deaf posturing too!

Alright, North Mexico. What do you have to add?

North Korea sure is diplomatic!

Did you just cheat off Reuter’s homework, Canada?

No.

Are you sure, Canada?

Look over there! Trudeau’s hair looks really nice today!

Entertaining Spam Comments

Anybody who hasn’t used WordPress might not be aware that it has quite the horrible spam problem.  So much so, that after downloading and installing it, you are prompted to download a spam-filter plugin to make the experience a little more bearable.

I didn’t install an anti-spam plugin right away, because a) I’m a chronic procrastinator, and b) quite frankly, I don’t like software telling me how to live my life.  After my first 4,546 spam comments came rolling in, along with the disappointment of realizing that not a single one of them was legit, I decided to install that plugin.

I still procrastinate on updating my filter to the latest version however, so every six months or so, a few tasty bits of spam still make it into my pending comment box, awaiting approval.

Here are a few I recently received:

“Roxie” wrote: Slam dunkin like Shaquille O’Neal, if he wrote intmroafive articles.

You can tell right off the bat when a comment is spam because the comments are always full of grammatical errors, regardless of how short or simple the comment is.  Literally 100% of them completely mangle up really simple words.  You’d think that a bot creating and littering the internet with comments would have the capacity to perform a basic spellcheck at some point before posting.  Wrong.  Impressive Shaq reference however.  I’ll take that as a compliment, “Roxie”.

“Lucinda” wrote: This shows real exstierpe. Thanks for the answer.

…on a post that was just a picture of me giving a can of chili the middle finger.  I have no idea what that mangled word was supposed to be, but I’ll assume it was something flattering.  I also apparently answered some sort of deep philosophical question they had via a single image, so that’s validating.

Finally, “Cheyanne” wrote: I love that your dining room has a sense of family history, it makes such sense for a space used for family gatherings and cetbiraleons! I definitely need to add some personal touches to our dining room – that seems to be a problem for me throughout our house for some reason. Your dining room looks fab!!

Don’t get me wrong… I appreciate that “Cheyanne” recognizes the work I’ve put into the dining room I don’t even have, but this was left on a post for my video “Punching Evil in the Face”.  Sometimes the spam comments at least relate to the content in the article, but this one was way off.  I appreciate the sentiment however, so your comment is getting approved, “Cheyanne”.  I look forward to future comments from you.

Welcome To Hell MeatGoblet.com

Excuse me everybody *clink clink*, I have an announcement to make.  I have decided to change the domain name of my website.  When I originally chose the lame-o name “liquidribcage”, it was borne out of the desperation of needing to register a domain before I could start posting my nonsense.  I’ve always been a big fan of assonance (please don’t tell my parents), and desperately wanted a two word title that harnessed its glorious power.  I passed on numerous word combinations like “digital milk” “noodle juice” and “faucet sauce”, because they were either already used by someone else in some capacity, or didn’t quite fit the content I was planning on writing.  That content of course being half-assed, sophomoric, internet scribblings.

After vomiting all sorts of brain droppings on this site over the course of 2+ years and 60ish posts, I’ve started to desire some type of palpable readership, which I will never get with my complete lack of promotion, combined with the fact that over a billion other websites exist out there.  I’m horribly inadequate in the field of self-promotion, but figure my site should have a somewhat memorable or marketable name before I start dumping effort (or money even) into promoting it.  Liquidribcage sounded like the name of a terrible goth band or something, whereas MeatGoblet sounds like an awesome place where magical, delicious things happen.  Regardless of whether it’s a fitting name or not, I’ll be keeping it due to how much of a hassle it was to change, including needing to retool my wordpress and manually re-link every single image in every post on my site.  I should probably actually put some effort into coming up with a bitchin’ color scheme and design as well.

So welcome to the same thing with a different name.  Hopefully anybody who actually bookmarked or frequented this site is able to find their way back to it.  I never check the analytics on my various endeavors, so for all I know nobody has ever viewed this site, save for the one fella who actually left a comment.  Hence the aforementioned need to engage in promotion, primarily so that I can rattle off large numbers to impress other people.  That’s all I got.  Later.

That Time Angel Soft® Fucked Up

A few months ago, for Father’s Day, Angel Soft tried to be obnoxiously progressive, and it blew up in their faces.  On June 15th, the toilet paper company, who for whatever reason actually has a youtube account, posted a video called: “Happy Father’s Day, Mom”.  Now, anyone capable of rational thought wouldn’t even need to view this video to see where they went wrong right out of the gate.  Obviously, we have a day called Father’s Day for fathers, and a day called Mother’s Day for mothers.  Equality.  No heavy-handed, try-hard, progressive agenda needs to be applied to this situation.  If there only existed a Father’s Day, the premise of this video would actually work.  This isn’t the case however, so the video fails, and hundreds of thousands of eyes collectively roll.

In case you weren’t able to deduce what the video is about yet, it is a series of heartfelt, dramatic testimonials from various individuals, telling stories about how great, and appreciated their mothers are.  In a Father’s Day video.  Not a Mother’s Day video, mind you, but a Father’s Day video.  Why on Earth would a company do this?  After all, it’s sort of like celebrating Black History Month by releasing a video of people giving examples of the accomplishments of white historical figures.  It completely undermines what the entire month or day was created for altogether.  Maybe we can start celebrating Chanukah on Memorial Day, or Halloween on Martin Luther King, Jr Day.  I’ll make sure to thank my toaster for it’s service the next time Veteran’s Day rolls around.

It seems what Angel Soft was trying to do here is cash in on all that popular social justice feminism hashtag gluten madness.  That same madness that is allegedly carried out in the name of equality, all the while exhibiting the very properties of inequality.  Somebody at the company probably thought to themselves: “What hot new trend is going around out there in the streets that we can use to make toilet paper sexy again?”  After 2 minutes on twitter, they found their answer in aimless third-wave entitlement feminism.  “Ah yes!”  The toilet paper lackey exclaimed.  “We’ll take any given situation and focus solely on the female, and write the male out whenever possible.  It’ll be a smash hit!”  Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite the smash hit that Angel Soft has hoped for, and they learned an important life lesson that day.

People were none too thrilled with their fatherless Father’s Day message, and took to the company’s social media profiles to let loose.  Their facebook page, which would receive maybe two comments on each post on a good day, was flooded with over a thousand comments, most of which overwhelmingly criticized the ad for downplaying the importance of fathers on the very day set aside to celebrate them.  Not only that, but facebook users took the opportunity to go back though Angel Soft’s profile and leave snarky comments on all the previous posts.  Posts of children’s art would have comments like: “Is that a mom calling a dad a deadbeat?” or “she’s probably tired from wishing her mom a happy father’s day.” on a posting of a sleeping child.  Many of the posts are quite hilarious.

The barrage of comments continued for a solid month after the Great Father’s Day Debacle of 2015, before tapering off, back to the 2 or 3 comments lonely housewives were previously leaving on the toilet paper company’s facebook page.  It seemed like things were back to normal, with the posting of children’s artwork and constant influx of comments asking about toilet paper coupons, when Angel Soft fucked up again.

On Labor Day, they posted an image of a father (They had started to acknowledge fathers by this point) playing with children on a bed, with the caption “Not All Workers Get Today Off.”  It was by no means the shitstorm of three months earlier, but nonetheless another influx of comments greeted whatever poor individual has the job of handling social media for the dookie paper company.  Some people complained that parenting is a blessing and not a job.  Others complained that plenty of them had to work that very day.  Somebody even played the deployed servicemen card.  Normally, all this social media complaining wouldn’t catch my attention, but I couldn’t help but feel that by this point, people were just waiting around to find things to chastise the company for.  I find that spitefulness to be very funny.

In the end however, I guess any publicity is good publicity, because the company that makes paper to wipe booty holes has over 300,000 likes on facebook.  The Father’s Day joke posts have all but ceased at this point, and people other than lonely middle-aged women are actually posting on their page now.  The funny thing is, the company never once acknowledged any of the angry posts, and seemed to act like they didn’t even exist.  They obviously saw them however, because most of the image posts they’ve put up since actually have men in them, or revolve around fathers.  I have no idea how to end this post.  So, uh, bye I guess.

Ten Tips For Indie Band Success

Hey there Indie music person!  Having trouble making it in the Indie music game and getting your music out there for everybody to hear?  Good.  I mean…  that’s too bad.  But fret not, because there just so happens to be a convenient list of 10 things you can do to remedy the situation, and make hundreds of hundreds of dollars.  Read on and become ridiculously successful.  And also, you’re welcome.

 

1) Pick an Adjective + Noun Band Name
To start with, your name should probably consist of an adjective, followed by a vowel.  Gleaming Bowls,  Fiery Protractor, or even Glistening Doorjamb.  Better yet, a color followed by something otherwise mundane.  Silver Baguette, Turquoise Toasters, or maybe Chartreuse Pigeon.  If you’re shooting for a top-tier Indie band name though, you gotta go with a combination of a mineral and an exotic place or group of people.  Crystal Mongolians perhaps.  Bengali Pyrite hasn’t been taken yet.  Cambodian Sodium anyone?  Stick with a name of this sort, and you’ll be getting good reviews on Pitchfork in no time.

2) Misspell Words on Purpose
While we’re on the topic of names, another thing you should keep in mind is that you should try your hardest to arbitrarily drop vowels out of words for no reason at all.  Every one else is doing it, and so should you.  This works for band names i.e. TRSH SNDWCH (trash sandwich), or GBLN MSTRD (giblen mosturd), but it also works for song titles.  Generally, for song titles you want to keep it simple, such as spelling “your” as “yr” to retain legibility, yet still net you that Indie Cred™.  Make sure to fool around with capitals and lowercase letters too.  That trope isn’t only for nu-metal bands. A name like neOn sOdOmy or SKuNK DuST is sure to look great on a t-shirt.

3) Pick Terrible, Boring Artwork
This one is extremely important, so listen closely.  You HAVE to have album art that consists of either terrible artwork that looks like it was done by a child, or a blurry, uninteresting photograph.  If you’re going to go the route of having a painting serve as your album cover, go with something like a few different colored lines on a plain background, or a bunch of neon green dots on a diarrhea brown background.  If you choose the photograph option, use that photo your grandmother has lying around of when she tried to take a picture of her left shoe when she was 5, but never got around to throwing in the trash.  If the photo is a Polaroid, all the better.  Polaroids are the most analogue and vintage of all the photos, and therefore will net you more Indie Cred™.  Just remember, you don’t ever want to seem like you actually put any thought into the artwork, because that’s what mainstream radio sellouts do.

4) Create Terrible Packaging
After choosing your favorite terrible artwork, you need you keep the train rolling by making sure the rest of the packaging is equally terrible.  Now what you’re going to want to do is make the CD packaging out of recycled cardboard you found out in the dumpster behind a New York bodega.  None of that fresh new cardboard or any other nice material, like brushed aluminum or a fancy crushed velvet.  The purpose of the packaging isn’t to protect the disc after all, it’s to project indifference and lack of initiative.  When your fans go out and buy your album, they want the discs to have scuffs and dried glue all over them from your shitty packaging decisions.  After all, you need to be able to project eco-friendly with your CD packaging, while still being extremely wasteful with your overly-exuberant Vinyl packaging.  Nobody’s going to call you out on this hypocrisy, so don’t even sweat it.

5) Make Sure Your Music Is Lo-Fi
Keep it lo-fi.  You aren’t writing the soundtrack to Schindler’s List here.  You’re writing pretentious slightly-out-of-tune jangle-pop.  Your recordings should be slightly noisy, and rough around the edges, if not extremely noisy and capable of eliciting headaches.  Imagine what all your friends will think if your music sounds well-produced like all that mainstream radio garbage.  You really shouldn’t have to worry about you music being “over-produced” though, since your friend Cooper is recording your album for $80 and a gram of weed.

6) Have an Unhealthy Preoccupation With Vinyl
As previously mentioned, you’re going to be releasing your albums in multiple formats, but you always need to favor vinyl.  The format should always take precedence over the content.  Even though you paid the homeless guy down the street to record your songs in all their lo-fi, bland, dynamic lacking glory, you just know they’re going to sound sooooooo much better on vinyl.  Wave your vintage fetishism flag high and pay an arm and a leg to have your lackluster jangle-pop pressed to vinyl so that your fans can pay an arm and a leg to satiate their vintage fetishism for lackluster jangle-pop.  Of course you should pull out all the stops on your vinyl editions.  You should settle for nothing less than 320 gram records in a quintuple gatefold.  If your vinyl packaging isn’t completely negating whatever materials you are saving on your chintzy CD packaging, you aren’t Indie banding correctly.  Please try again.

7) Include Weird Instruments In Your Songs
If you’re shooting for ultimate Indie Cred™, writing music solely using bass, drums, and guitars isn’t going to cut it.  You’re going to want to throw some bizarre oddball instruments into the mix.  This might involve adding an extra three of four members to your band, but you’re going to need to do what it takes in order to make it in this cut-throat Indie game.  So pile into your van and head on down to the local swap meet and buy a Balalaika or a church organ and start shoehorning them into your songs.  Keep in mind, you don’t need to write complex parts with your weird instruments, but you should play them well enough so that you look good in your music video.

8) Dress Like a Member of Dexys Midnight Runners
This probably doesn’t need to be stated, but you can’t be a member in a top tier Indie band in this day and age and rock a t-shirt and jeans.  Philistines and plebeians wear t-shirts and jeans.  You’re an artist, and as such, you need to look the part.  Things like suspenders, cummerbunds, leg warmers, cod pieces, top hats, penny loafers, scarves, and vests are sure fire articles of clothing to throw on in order to look like an artistic type.  Nothing says “Hey everybody!  I’m to be taken seriously!” like showing up to an interview wearing a monocle, pork pie hat, and ruffled bard shirt.  If your music is bland and unmemorable, you always have the option of doubling down on a memorable image.  Always remember to dress like you just stepped out of 1843.

9) Be Completely Devoid Of Personality
Your bland music should always do the talking for you.  There is no need to project an exciting or interesting aura of personality while in an Indie band.  If it doesn’t come across that perhaps the entire band is on lithium and bored with life in general, you’re doing it all wrong.  In interviews, you should always be quite and meek and perhaps even speak in a monotone.  Tortured artist types are either completely withdrawn or extremely brash, and being brash requires a delicate balance in order to not come across as being all flash and no substance.  Being no flash and no substance is the better alternative here, so go that route if need be.  If people can tell the difference between you and someone from the myriad other Indie bands out there, you are showing too much personality and need to seriously consider dialing it back a little.  Your spirit animal is the department store mannequin.

10) Write Terrible Music
Sure, you could follow all the above tips and still write excellent music despite everything attached to it being subpar at best, but then you’d never make Pitchfork’s best music of the year list.  You do want to make a Pitchfork top ten list don’t you?  Of course you do.  So what you’re going to want to do, is make sure you write terrible music.  Simple enough, right?  You do this by throwing away everything you write that is well written or entertaining, and only release the material that is bland and boring.  You’re aiming for songs that Coldplay deemed unfit for release on albums.  Not even Coldplay B-sides mind you.  You wanna release Coldplay D-sides.  Your music needs to be indistinguishable from any other “hit” Indie song out there.  This concludes this paragraph, and ultimately, this article.

Official Ferguson Social Justice Meme

The events that transpired in Ferguson Missouri were obviously quite tragic, but instead of writing yet another opinion piece on the subject to add to the sea of blogger articles already out there, I’ll instead post a meme.  This meme is a visual representation of precisely 70% of all facebook posts on the subject as of late.  Enjoy.

Liberal Guy

 

original image © Sam Guerrero

Even Google Hates On Syfy

I recently did a google search for “terrible syfy movies”, and this is the result I got:

Syfy Terrible

Google corrected me.  Evidently I meant to search for “horrible syfy movies”. Even Google thinks your movies are complete shite, Syfy Channel.  You should feel bad now, and maybe try to do a better job in the future so that Google stops punking you on the internet for everybody to see.