Score: 10

"Woah, Woah there"

submission: a very relevant statement

date: January 14, 2009

The cake'll make ya body quake, make no mistake. I hate, to think about fate of so much cake. It's more than I can take with the end-less, con-fec-tions.

Word is born.

Score: 10

"For further seasonal derangement,"

submission: Santa's Visit

date: January 2, 2009

See the outstandingly demented and surreal film 'Christmas Evil' (AKA 'You Better Watch Out!'), and the sort of semi-clone and it's sequel made a couple years later, 'Silent Night, Deadly Night', though those two aren't as good as the brilliant original. They are the closest relatives to this animation, featuring Santa Claus serial killers, and there's also another more recent, and amazingly corny one with the wrestler Bill Goldberg as an evil Santa with real super powers, 'Santa's Slay'. There are plenty of other Christmas theme horror films, though, like the classic 'Black Christmas', the sort of banal and mediocre Halloween ripoff 'He Knows You're Alone', and the Charles Band film, 'The Gingerdead Man', which stars Gary Busey! There's also a film about a killer snowman called 'Jack Frost' (NOT the Michael Keaton cinematic coma) which has a sequel, as well as a couple I haven't even seen yet, like 'Don't Open Till Christmas' and one which I assume is about a cat monster santa (?) Or something, 'Santa Claws'.

There are lots of tasteless ways to add some worthwhile genre experience to your holiday season, so I suggest you do so!

Score: 10

"MEH, MEH, MEH!!"

submission: Prime Minister Address

date: November 27, 2008

MEH MEH! Fag, effort is for fags! Ideas are GAY, I crave only what I have seen already! I am but one in a string of assholes following behind the previous one, completely convinced by the odour of the farts coming from the anus directly in front of me! No other processions of anuses exists on the entire planet by my own, I know not of the smell of their farts!

There was never a giant purple monster attacking an Australian city according to history books, so this premise is entirely fabricated and I am unable to make an abstract association in my mind of something fictional and something real. MEH, MEH, MEH! Poppycock, as if a giant lizard ever attacked Tokyo, or a giant ape New York, absolutely fallacious! You've misrepresented the literal reality of the world we live in with your fictional yarn, hogwash!

You must be a fag!

Score: 8

"Very decent work"

submission: Diagnose +1 Ep1

date: November 25, 2008

Ah, your last submission is even better now that I have seen this. The background art has a sort of crappy Jackson Pollock mess about it, haha.

Anyway I like the combination of deliberate cheapness, and the fact that it doesn't take itself too seriously. This is very funny and also uniquely compelling at the same time.

Keep working at it, you aren't wasting your time.

Score: 7

"Keep at it"

submission: Diagnose +1 Ep2

date: November 25, 2008

This shows some potential for sure.

The storyline is not developed but seems quite interesting. In a visual sense it has presence and a sort of raw mess about it, which could also become very interesting if you sharpen the craft a bit.

Obviously it isn't completely realized, but it's excellent rough work with good ideas, so keep at it.

Score: 10

"Great game, important awareness"

submission: Super Chick Sisters

date: November 20, 2008

Anybody can say, "well this cause deserves more attention than your chosen cause", it's a very familiar form of non-logic. It also almost exclusively comes from people who do absolutely nothing for ANY cause and want to make sure others who actually are making an effort feel like they aren't any better than them. They are utterly useless people. You never hear it from people who actually are productive and constructive in their lives, they know better. The fact that they KNOW things in general sets them apart, haha. Of course we only try to spread awareness and promote compassionate reason to feel superior, at least that's the popular media spin on it.

The game is really well designed and programmed as far as I can tell. I know very little about such things so I wouldn't assume to criticize. I am not a gamer, but I am a fan of anything retro.

I am also not a member of PETA. They are a good group who are, as expected, completely misrepresented by popular interest groups, and all the potentially dodgy associations they may have, no matter how loose the connection, are obsessively exaggerated and singled out, out of context, and none of the great things they do for animals are every talked about. "Peta kills more animals than it saves" type factoids will always float around with any awareness campaign, they always do, and they are always utter nonsense. You can do that with anything of course, if you have an agenda, it's simple enough. You can dig something up to make bananas or reading look bad out of context, haha. You have to be really dishonest or ignorant, or both, but it's easy and expected. Like, Hitler was a vegetarian. Carnivores use that a lot, and of course it's as irrelevant as it is a half truth. Again it's primarily from people who do nothing but fill their fat faces with garbage and fill their fat heads with ignorant misinformation and propaganda. It's the overall effect that matters, and PETA is overall good. I always find the names they come up with for celebrities who wear fur really clever and amusing. I remember them using the term "Trollson Twins" recently, haha, I had a laugh at that.

I do wonder though, could you not find a better representative? For a cause championed by the likes of George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, Einstein, Tolstoy, DaVinci, Plato, or Ghandi, to name a few, you put Barb Wire on your posters?? That's absolutely mental to me. Even if you feel compelled to go with a more aucourant personality, you can do so much better. I'm sure she's serious about the cause and is a nice lady, but it undermines the message when your lead ambassador and mouthpiece is famous primarily for her tits and her sex tape. It attracts too many fashion-vegetarians, and it makes it too easy for people to dismiss the cause. Maybe if you encouraged your members to conduct themselves in a slightly more dignified way you might attract some more credible associations as well, like Thom Yorke or something.

Anyway, keep up the good work!

Score: 10

"You are truly an unreasonable person"

submission: (Twisted) Cooking Mama

date: November 20, 2008

People play video games for mindless escapist fantasy, by engaging in simulated violence, misogyny, or empty tedious repetition, and ideally a combination of the three. If you had your way, everybody would learn to be thoughtful and conscious of their actions, instead of blindly feasting on their own immediate shallow indulgence.

I could list dozens of significant philosophers, scientists, artists, and humanitarians from history and present who are noted for their brilliance and indispensable contributions to their fields and our culture, all staunch practitioners of vegetarianism, but that doesn't mean anything to these people. And even more who were early revolutionaries of animal rights. There are also great thinkers who did eat meat, and it would be supremely irrational and anti intellectual of me to dismiss them entirely because if it, but that is the common mentality today. Of course, this is a matter of real education, and comes from a desire for real awareness. These are not people concerned with knowledge, and certainly not awareness. They don't know what intellectual honesty means. They think knowledge and education comes from purely factoidal television news propaganda, and the nonsense of corporate research studies. A whole culture designed around people who are too brainwashed, lazy and dumb to acquire their own information, think everything they say and do is special and want to be treated as such, but also live in abject terror of thinking anything even remotely unconventional in any meaningful way.

Of course when we are talking about animal ethics, we are talking about ethics period. What is an animal ethic? The term is a redundancy. How we treat a turkey or a cow, or a cat, or a horse, is not just about how we treat a turkey, or cow, or cat, or horse. Our cultural designers know this, the ones who manufacture and sell our environment to us. Fend for ourselves, survival of the fattest, get rich quicker, slim down faster, alienate intellectuals. With what we know now about nutritional science and anthropology, being a vegetarian or vegan in a first world country is a non issue, it should be outrageously absurd to think of, to any serious person that is. But then, you have to first know. We are influenced a great deal more by what we overhear, as opposed to what we hear, and we are far less concerned with what something is, than how something appears to be. All this animosity towards activism and informed consumption, it comes from the same place as patriotism and xenophobia, and other such wonderful things. I think you know where that place is.

"As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields."
-Leo Tolstoy

"A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses."
-George Bernard Shaw

"Truely man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds theirs. We live by the death of others: we are burial places! I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men."
-Leonardo da Vinci

Score: 10

"Truly inspiring"

submission: - The Worlds -

date: November 19, 2008

I don't think there's anything basic about it, it is some of the sharpest dream logic/surrealist art I have encountered, especially on newgrounds. It's perfect, everything about it is interesting and organic. There are no heavy handed contrivances or bullshit, just a pure and unfiltered stream of consciousness. What a wonderful piece, it's just packed with brilliantly interpreted spontaneous thought. A towering artistic achievement.

Score: 6

"Eh, sex and porn are not the same issue"

submission: America Hates Sex

date: November 15, 2008

You're alright, though. I think about 70 percent of this was wise and showed a healthy level of critical thought, but the whole thing isn't so black and white as all this. I think you go too far to one extreme to avoid the other, and you should always be more measured and restrained about such things. A common mistake.

Not everybody opposing "porn" (staged film and print depiction of sexual humiliation) are uneducated rednecks, religious extremists, or fascists. It's of course always problematic when you begin to legislate morality on a federal level, I would never suggest otherwise, but you didn't take that position so much as you said "anybody who has objections to porn on any principle is unreasonable and stupid, and just believes what they are told to". So we agree completely on this key aspect.

But somehow, I can't picture a single one of the great anarchists, humanitarians, philosophers (except maybe Nietzsche, but he was a bit of a misogynist dick) or feminist intellectuals advocating the virtues of pornography. I can't see Kropotkin or Emma Goldman, or Einstein, or Plato, or Chomsky, or Buddha, or Kierkegaard, or Kant.... and so forth and so on, getting off on a donkey punch video. I rather think they would find it enormously degrading to everybody involved. It's a rather sick state for a society to be in where anybody has to sell their sex for a living. I equally wouldn't want to be the one getting jizzed on or doing the jizzing for a living.

I don't think this is a sex issue at all, nor a matter of sexual repression. In my mind, it's quite the opposite, as many studies being done prove how stultifying ubiquitous hardcore pornography can be to the development of a child's sexual awareness, and the general compassion and attitudes people have towards one another. Of course I do not believe prostitution, drugs, or pornography should be "illegal", that would be irrational and dense considering the very obvious damage such laws inflict on society. We could go a long way to talk about that. Prostitution may be one of the world's oldest trades, but we can't validate by existing precedent alone, otherwise we could bring back slavery without any qualms. Critical observation of anthropology isn't about blind default justification.

In general the spirit of this animation is right on, I like to see more skeptics around. If you aren't cynical in a society like this, you are not thinking. The problem as I said, is you go too far to one side to avoid the other, and you lose your ability to reason. So it's not the spirit of the message I have conflict with, it's the details and specifics of your treatment, which I definitely think is hasty and undeveloped intellectually. I think you are right in the sentiment "American Hates Sex", but if you really examine the concept you realize how the mixture of repression and general immaturity towards the subject can be tremendously unhealthy when you combine with an abundance of confusing, violent, and degrading sexual exploitation (this is an unfair blanket statement, I just can't be specific enough with the comment constraints here). Obviously I do not support any kind of censorship.

I don't think Orwell was at all misapplied here. If you do in fact read 1984 and understand it, the parallels are remarkably uncanny and scary today. Read Brave New World, though, it sort of applies the opposite critique of sex in society. As opposed to repression it explores how it can be used as a decadent distraction to objectify. And if you look at advertising and popular culture now, like television and music, sex is very much used to that end. It's just something further to think about.

Keep it up, and be well,
-Gord

Score: 5

"Glossy, and not much else."

submission: Fallen Angel Ep. 1 (Pt1)

date: November 1, 2008

My honest feelings about this are sort of neutral, but leaning towards negative. There are bad cliches abound, but taken way too seriously, and what it comes down to for me is a totally wasted opportunity. All this time and effort put towards a really laboured, cheaply stylized, generic nothing. It may look relatively high end and polished for something done in flash, but that only takes time, and only gets you so far. Otherwise I see very little creative innovation, and artistically it's very weak, very bland. It just isn't interesting, because it looks not like the work of a real artist so much as a commercial product.

Apparently every guy thinks that the only people who'll survive a nuclear apocalypse are blonde imbecile porn stars. You do your credibility a great disservice by going too far to sexualize your heroine, it's low-minded and it makes the whole thing a very silly affair. To see her bouncing around in an uninspired prepubescent fantasy of skimpy tank tops, big guns, and tight hip riding cargo pants, is totally ridiculous and juvenile. So maybe I can take the leap, suspend disbelief, and buy that one of the only few dozen female civilians to survive such a global catastrophe just HAPPENS to be so cartoonish and impractically built, but to represent her as the only one with adequate wits and survival instincts to fend off an entire heavily armed, combat trained military force of men, or become anything more than a mere masturbatory rag doll is just pure unalloyed stupidity, a totally mindless, base Hollywood cliche. It would work as a parody of itself almost, or a goofy Italian exploitation film of the 70s. But at least those films had some quirky charms, and they were honest about their sleazy appeal. While frequently misogynistic to an extent, they at least sexualized real women, and (often) in an empowering way. Not just "I'm a walking caricature and a sex object, come conquer me". No, your sexism is far more irritating, because not only do you not realize you are being a shallow pig and a cretin, but your idea of "sexy" is informed by the phony, insipid, plasticized Western media and advertising stereotype.

The storyline itself is strikingly rote and pointless. The theme of nuclear warfare is relevant and fertile, but you treated it with such profound superficial banality, it washes right off in the laundry. I don't understand the mentality, as an artist, where you have the opportunity to say and do anything you want, and instead you choose to just clone everything vacuous and mind-deadening about current mainstream Hollywood Action/Disaster treacle, and import it into a different medium. This is what Michael Bay would make if he were to work in Flash. Every science fiction work doesn't have to be 1984, but fuck, at least THINK a LITTLE BIT, and ask your audience to do the same. What a complete waste of time. I understand your range of influence and perspective may be limited, but this is just broad and pedestrian pandering.

Also, I know it is a personal creative choice, but the vector style animation does nothing for me, and it looks like flat CGI circa 2000. It reminded me of that retro Robocop game for the PC, except that was well fun. Again you labour towards shallow mimicry of something already empty and devoid of creativity.

The sound design was impressive and rich, but the music was obvious and cloying.

I'm sorry to be the poop in your punch bowl, you do show some obvious raw talent, or if nothing else, patience.

Keeping working at it, and immerse yourself in a wider range of artistic and cultural experiences.