Every single one of my friends has told me to watch Rick & Morty. I’ve never seen this much accolade from so many different people since South Park, so that alone is a testament to how good Rick & Morty supposedly is. Being a lazy and cheap butt munch, I don’t have cable nor a Hulu subscription, so unless I scour the web, I won’t be catching up on the new ‘best show of forever’ anytime soon, and that’s a shame. I’ve seen plenty of clips online, all which I’ve enjoyed immensely, and having done the same shit over and over the past month, I’ve been seriously entertaining the idea of getting a Hulu subscription just to catch up and introduce some new blood into my life.

How unfortunate, then, is it that as soon as I convinced myself that two-plus seasons of great cartooning is worth the obscene price of the cheapest World of Warcraft subscription plan for something I will probably never get the same amount of enjoyment per hour out of, thus making it a very cost-effective purchase, that I find out that the team behind Rick & Morty just went out of their way to not only do a ‘diversity hire’ binge, but are now bragging about it, are getting praise in the media, and the third season supposedly fucking sucks?

I’ve never heard of the Hollywood Reporter, but by its name alone, it fucking sucks. Hollywood is one small section of a much bigger city, and an incredibly small and exclusive section of society and the world at large. If you’re covering the people who are directly and indirectly associated with such an exclusive club, then you’re probably paparazzi, which means you’re dumpster-fire trash. The Hollywood Reporter also sucks, even without this obvious chain of logical thought, because they auto-play their videos when the page loads, which is an archaic hold-over from the internet from ten years ago, when video content was the golden goose. All news websites do this, and ESPN is the biggest offender that people can easily think of, although it makes far more sense on a sports website since sports highlights need to be seen, not described. Anyways, the point is that doing shit like this means you aren’t in touch with modern society and how the modern internet works, and if you can’t keep up with trends, you should probably not be writing articles about those modern trends.

This be some disgusting-ass formatting right here.

If you’re following along on the actual article from the actual website, which you shouldn’t be because you’re giving a cesspool the lifeblood they need to continue existing, then this box appears right next to the starting sentence of the actual article. That’s horrific formatting, which I can only assume was done to make it flow like a comic book, but it doesn’t work. The archived version I’ve provided remedies this, and I can’t tell if that’s the way the article was meant to appear in a browser, or if it’s the result of how Archive’s personal layout works. In any case, one more thumbs up for the creator of the Internet Archive; congratulations, you mad lad, you.

Also, what does this whole sentence even mean? The only thing I get from this is that Dan Harmon clearly doesn’t like any of this. If he did, why the fuck would he use such a negative statement to describe the situation at hand? Anyone with a brain will read this and realize this does not bode well for the show’s health.

Wow, so brave.

It’s sad that what used to be a standard fare is now newsworthy and a ‘major change’. It’s also hysterical that women and feminists supposedly want all this power and agency, yet the way this shit gets talked about and reported, it’s pretty clear the only way this makes sense is if women don’t have those.

That decision screams ‘corporate’.

I didn’t really follow the show that much, but wasn’t the 2011-2012 season of Community the reason why NBC cutdown the episode order from what was ostensibly a half-year show (two seasons of twelve episodes) into a single season? I definitely don’t remember as many people talking about Community season four and beyond than the the first three seasons.

‘Near herculean’? Are you serious.

All this tells me is that women, at least these ones and those applauding this ‘change’, believe that writing is a difficult thing to do, including comedic writing for an age group that, for the most part, hasn’t fully developed as a human and loves dick jokes, fart jokes, and ‘yo mamma’ jokes. I guess the subset of comedic writing could be slightly more difficult to be successful, but writing itself is not hard. I’ve written as a hobby well before I even hit puberty; it’s a requirement to exist in modern society. If you are someone who believes doing a basic human action for modern survival is ‘herculean’, then you should probably just end your life where you’re currently at, because there is no possible way you’ll be able to survive any longer.

Holy fuck, a logical thought!

It’s sad to applaud this, but in a sea of people who don’t give a fuck at all about their fellow man and who have been quoted to say that they know their friendships/relationships are facsimiles and that they don’t care, the mere acknowledgement of essentially being given the keys to a Ferarri 458 and knowing you have to treat it right is a welcome sight.

Never mind, I take back my praise.

What the fuck does ‘how are we going to keep watching this show’ even mean? Does that mean you’ll be so embarrassed that every time Rick & Morty comes on, you’ll have to change the channel because you’ll start crying? Does that mean that mean you’re going to be boycotting the show and Adult Swim just because they didn’t hire you?

Seriously, what fucking kind of ego is this? It’s either as fragile as a sugar-glass window, or the size of a star about to go supernova. Does it ever occur to these mooks that there are indeed other people out there that are possibly more qualified for the job than they are? Does the thought of being hired just because they have a vagina and not because they’re good at writing enter their brain-meat?

There’s a photo following this bit, and good lord, what happened to women who gave a fuck about their appearance and what they looked like in a photograph? Why do girls these days have to make such stupid fucking faces when someone takes their picture. It doesn’t make you look cute, it makes you look like you have Down’s Syndrome. Also, if you wear a Pax Prime shirt, or any shirt from a big, corporate-laden event, that’s not solidarity with that community, it’s just fucking bragging that you went to a thing. The only difference is that wearing a college shirt, or a shirt to a place like Disney or Cedar Point communicate that you cared about that experience so much, you were willing to spend money to commemorate it.

Every time I go home to visit the family in the summer, we always go to a seafood restaurant near the beach that the whole family has frequented since I was a kid. Their food is fucking delicious and they sell taffy and merchandise, and I always buy a butt-load of taffy, sweets, a couple shirts and hats on top of that dinner. The whole experience is worth it for me, plus they’re mega-cheap, so I’d probably at least get a shirt anyways, but my point is that you spend money on shit you want. A Pax Prime t-shirt is a fucking free t-shirt they give away. I went to Pax East one time years ago, didn’t care much for the event, and haven’t gone back since. That shirt became my go-to shirt for when I was doing something that would get me dirty or fucked up, like mountain biking, hiking, painting, woodworking, etc. If I cared about that shirt, no way would I use it as my veritable sweat rag.

What?

Having never seen the show in its normal format, I can’t give an opinion outside of that the snippets I’ve seen are funny. Plenty of my social network tells me I should watch The Wire because it’s the greatest show ever made, and I still haven’t because there’s no way the show is that great, and while it’s probably good, there’s no way it can live up to the hype, so it makes no sense for me to watch it and then get a double dose of disappointment. I think that South Park is the greatest show ever made simply because it’s always relevant, topical, and humorous. I know plenty who disagree with me. The point is that you feel this show is the best thing since sliced bread, and that’s fine. You can still think that even while being the writer of the show. The fact you think you’re bragging tells me that you don’t care about the quality of the humor on the show or even the show quality itself, you just care about being a part of the staff. It also tells me that you probably aren’t that funny, because people who focus on being funny don’t worry about coming across as a braggart. Ironically enough, you calling attention to the fact that you think the show is the bee’s knees, then trying to downplay it by saying, ‘But now that I’m working on the show, I won’t say that because then I’m bragging’ is a fucking humble brag, the worst kind of bragging you can do.

If I had still been squarely on the fence about the show and then read that one quote, it alone would’ve put me off watching the entire series. People who humble brag are the absolute worst people in society because they have a such a big ego made out of the world’s thinnest glass, evidenced by the fact that they can’t just fucking brag outright; they have to downplay their good fortune by trying to seem unworthy or like a regular-ass, down-to-earth person, when they’re not. If you’re reading this, Erica Rosbe, fuck you.

Shooting for the stars, I see.

First, based on her later quotes, I’m personally now going to attribute all the bad sketches to Gao because nobody funny would focus any bit of their time and effort on what she complains about. It’s likely incorrect and unfair, but if you care more about sex balance in the workplace than you do being funny, you shouldn’t be doing comedic writing.

Second, this is the professional equivalent of saying ‘FIRST’ in any comment section. Being the first only matters when it comes to something that changes the landscape of something, like Rosa Parks being the first black woman on a bus to say ‘Fuck y’all, I ain’t givin’ up my seat for nobody’. There have been plenty of female writers before this woman, and there will be after. Thinking like this is childish and does not bode well on any front.

‘Some kind of Asian’ is not a color, you dipshit.

You know, as someone who is, by the definition used by social justice crusaders, a ‘person of color’ and also a person who is probably the most deserving of the coveted ‘minority’ title based on population statistics, you’d think I’d understand this fucking telepathic wavelength thing that these motards keep talking about, and yet I have never experienced it once. On the contrary, I have experienced a similar telepathic wavelength that happens when someone says some stupid shit, you pick up on how dumb it is, and then you look to someone else in the room and, in that moment, both of you realize the other understands that what was just said was fucking retarded and you both share a tiny moment of clarity. I guess this ‘sense’ Gao is describing is like that, except instead of it being a shared moment of kinship, recognition, and clarity of the situation, it’s a sense of blind camaraderie simply because you both have tits and vaginas.

Anyways, the last person I want on my writing staff is someone who takes pictures of cats butts, retweets hyper-liberal garbage about hating Trump, Republicans, and how people who don’t agree with the super-left are Nazis, and shitty ‘comedians’ making fun of American food staples with the clear undertone that our food sucks and their food is better. I’ve had real Chinese dumplings before, and they’re not that good. Neither is that Japanese pork bun y’all weaboos praise like it’s the fucking sun. Not to mention that these fuckers will still eat this food while shitting on it, being the exact same moron as those people that shit on mediocre cartoons like Steven Universe and Teen Titans Go!, despite obviously following them and watching them. Hey retards, if you don’t like something, don’t partake in it, and stop tweeting about how good non-GMO foods are. All your food is genetically modified; you’d know that if you paid attention in Biology class or even took it. Still, it’ll be nice when these morons drop dead at fifty from eating too much of these ‘healthy alternatives’ and spending all their time constantly being ‘triggered’, effectively forcing their bodies to overdose constantly on cortisol at rates and amounts that are inhuman, so something to look forward to.

Punched up = ham-fisted

I don’t get why there’s such a push to flesh out characters these days. One of the most highly regarded television shows, Friends, was centered around six complete fuck-ups that never grew in any meaningful way at all. More emotions don’t make a show better. What makes a show great is character growth, which Rick and Morty has in spades. However, the second you go out of your way to put more ‘feels’ into your show, the more likely you’re going to fuck up because emotions are absurdly difficult to describe properly. It requires subtlety and nuance, so advertising it defeats the whole goddamn point of emotional growth. It also requires you understand the characters at their core, and from all that I’ve read thus far, none of the lasses understand the first thing about this show. I wouldn’t be surprised if they fell in love with it just because it’s quirky and Morty is a great character to project themselves onto, and not for the clever satire and commentary.

No, you really don’t.

I love how the default line these days for diversity hiring is ‘different experiences’. You gals grew up in fucking Los Angeles, California. To even live in that city, you come from people who worked hard and make good money. Every person I’ve met from Los Angeles is the fucking same: valley accent, way too much usage of the word ‘like’ and the phrase ‘oh my god’, hysterical over-reactions to average-ass things, excessively involved in their phones even during conversations, and a need to be the goddamn center of attention because they live in LA and it’s ‘the best’. They’re the west coast version of New Yorkers, with the only difference being they swear less.

You don’t get different experiences in a city where you make up the majority of the people who live there. You get different experiences by living in different places, and through fiscal standing. I have friends who grew up in the same town as me, some with much worse lives and some with much better, and the amount of success runs the gamut from being completely townie failures to astrophysicist researchers. Many of them didn’t even go to college, and many who did gave up halfway through. I know of more successful people who never went to college, let alone a California university (which are still only highly regarded based on name alone and not quality of graduates), who have gone on to have great lives than people who went to to a university.

Hell, my close friends comprise a military nerd who plays way too much League of Legends, a social justice ginger who keeps being diagnosed with more and more medical problems, a chubby, glasses wearing psychologist who works with and studies the elderly and their behavioral patterns, a vet-in-training who has hysterically racist grandparents and wants to go to developing countries to help animals while building good infrastructure to help speed up the development, and a lazy Paki girl who spends her time gaming and reading 4chan. If we all decided to write a sitcom cartoon, it would be fucking hysterical because we all come from different walks of life, have actually gone through different hardships and experiences, and thus wouldn’t need to go out of our way to hire for diversity to appease our Human Resources overlords. Speaking of Human Resources, I love how they force diversity hiring, and the majority of HR departments I’ve worked with have almost been exclusively female and typically spend their day on the computer watching YouTube videos and participating in ‘leadership meetings’ and fucking crap like that. Diversity of skin/genitals/ethnic background is not the same as diversity of nurture and ideas, and the fact that these people don’t get that is a sign that they are not worth the salt they claim to cost.

So what’s the problem then?

If the dudes writing the show were already doing a great job, in your own words, then why do they need you neophytes to ‘make them better’ and ‘vet them’? On what planet would a series about science and inter-dimensional travel be something you could ‘vet’? We haven’t gone back into space for ages now, let alone try and break a possible dimensional barrier. I also don’t get how you would’ve been able to say ‘Where are all the Beth episodes’ when merely moments ago, you were panicking over whether or not you’d still be watching the show simply based on whether the team hired you or not. Why can’t writers just write engaging and entertaining stories anymore? Why does it have to be about getting every point of view from every possible side to make sure you’re including everyone? What a colossal waste of time and effort.

Saying something isn’t something doesn’t make it not that something.

When did it become normal for people to brush away the elephant in the room? When my uncle’s bipolar disorder reared its ugly head while I was a teenager, everyone kept ignoring it and hiding it from everyone, and as a result the man eventually was divorced, left on a limb alone, berated constantly, and he eventually took his own life. Sure, part of that can be chalked up to the disease, but a large portion my family never likes to talk about is how poorly they handled it. I’m not saying there weren’t moments where they didn’t try, but fucking hell if they didn’t write him off the moment they could. I don’t know if he’d still be alive today, but it’s a pretty good possibility had there been more effort put into trying to help him out. Either way, not addressing the obvious change doesn’t suddenly make that change go away.

Also, is Roiland a fucking moron? The reason why they got more female scripts is because they have females working on the staff now. I honestly don’t know if what he’s saying has to do with scripts written by the girls or scripts about the girls in the show; this quote is really difficult to parse properly. Part of me thinks it’s because people, in general, don’t give good interviews and part of me thinks it’s because whomever got this quote mined it down to make it deliberately confusing and to sound very in favor of ‘teh wahmens’. There’s also no clarification of when this shit happened. The article is making it sound like the team hired the gals recently, but this quote comes from some 2015 interview, which was the second season of the show. The link clears most of this up, but it shouldn’t need to, and it’s only details about the scripts, not the hiring process. That’s not useful when talking about the work of new hires. What a poorly constructed piece this is.

Oi vey.

First, if you don’t think a hiring process should be based on meritocracy, or the idea that whomever is the most skilled and best-suited for the job, you should get a boat, go out to the middle of the ocean, and just wait to die. Meritocracies are how greatness gets fast-laned, and nepotism/quotas, which is clearly what Gao is referring to being in favor of, ensure that the bottom of the species gets to benefit just like the top without having to sacrifice anything to get to the top. We need classes; know your role.

Second, the idea that the person who decides who is the ‘funniest’ is not the person running the company. It’s the people watching the show. Every single episode that gets produced has good chance of being a total fucking trainwreck that ends up murdering the show in its wake. If the people watching don’t laugh, they won’t come back, and the show gets cancelled. Your job isn’t to please the guy at the top, it’s to please the fuckers sitting behind the screen because both your jobs are reliant on our reactions to your product. We decide, not you.

Third, the fact that Gao thinks all people who are white and middle-aged and grew up in middle/upper middle have the same sense of humor is astoundingly bigoted. My boss, who was middle-aged and grew up in the middle class loves black comedians, especially ones who have understand that white people and black people don’t always have the same experiences all the time, but a lot of those experiences are shared and ripe for poking fun at. He also loves the Jerky Boys and the Trailer Park Boys, which are very distinctly aimed at the lower class. The only reason Gao thinks something this retarded is because that’s what she grew up around, essentially confirming her upper-middle status, and doesn’t understand that there are people outside her tiny circle of fart-sniffing affluent asshats. It’s so mind-blowing that it’s okay for her to be so judgmental and bigoted just because she’s a woman and an asian woman, even though she embraces fucking Californian garbage, garbage that’s produced by people in a state in the US, so readily.

Hard? Really?

How does being under-represented make everything ‘hard’? I’ll never understand this notion, and it probably stems from the fact that I was born outside native US soil in a very poor country, was adopted, raised in a small, fairly lower-middle town, and am one of only two other people that I know of who are my race and ethnicity. I’m sure there are others like me, but when I say I’m in the minority, it’s statistically correct. There’s no-goddamn-body who represents me, and yet at no point have I ever felt anything was ‘hard’ because of that. That’s probably because I was raised by actual parents who taught me to value myself, my work, my skills, and to keep improving to become a better commodity to myself and others, whereas these girls likely grew up without having to care about anything and spent their time whining about social non-issues that wouldn’t affect them even if they didn’t succeed in life.

I really wish Becker just said, ‘Yeah, it really sucks to be alone’, because that’s the clear underlying tone here. I can relate to that completely, and I think anyone would be able to, but relating to the idea that because you don’t have a mob in your corner that means everything becomes insurmountable? That’s far harder to get behind, especially if you’ve come from nothing and made something of yourself, or went through actual hardships and found friends and fellows who give a shit about you and not the plights you feel you suffer from.

Why change?

“Saddened by the comments’? How are these comments saddening and incorrect if you guys can’t make it in without a helping hand? I wouldn’t say I totally agree with Lazzo because it’s a highly speculative statement, but it’s fair game when y’all complain about stuff being hard because it’s a meritocracy and how bullshit that is, or that being alone just makes things impossible and that you can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps without having everyone in your corner. Thank god I don’t watch syndicated television anymore because it’s poised to be going straight down the drain if you get emotionally shattered by a comment that’s completely innocuous.

As for ‘changing things’, do me a favor and don’t. Adult Swim is one of the last bastions of actually good programming that I tune into when I visit the folks. I’d rather not lose that if I can help it, but if you want to ruin it because you guys can’t do anything without being given a free fast-lane pass, go ahead. I won’t be watching, unless it’s on some streaming site that isn’t related to you, so as much as I would prefer you not to, it’s no skin off my bones.

Feck off, eh?

I will never understand how these women and others are all about showing how women are ‘strong’ and ‘powerful’, and yet they can’t somehow manage to cut the same path as men and others did before them on their own; they can only make headway once other people have established something and then they show up demanding a fucking business suite. Fuck you, Jessica Gao. If you don’t like the ‘boy’s club vibe’, which doesn’t even exist in reality and is something you invented to give you a boogeyman to constantly fight against, then go make your own goddamn club. Nobody is stopping you, least of all men, and certainly least of all men like me who can’t fucking stand people like you.

Good shit gets respect, ya know?

Holy fucking crap, I just noticed that this ‘professional news outlet’ spelled the word ‘paid’ wrong. Are you kidding me with this shit?

Anyways, the Good Game mentioned here is some new series that’s preying on gaming culture like The Big Bang Theory preyed on general nerd/academic culture and ground it into mincemeat. It screams of a mix of Pure Pwnage and The Guild, with the biggest and most important difference of how it’s clearly taking itself seriously, thus ruining itself before it even gets going. Just like the Australian TV show of the same name, it looks like it’s going to suck big, floppy donkey dick and be a show that gaming culture parasites/wanna-bes watch as an attempt to fit in when, in reality, they would’ve been able to do this if they just, you know, played fuckin’ video games. The series looks bad, feels cheap, and exudes ‘lame’, so perhaps Lazzo was spot on with his speculation; I guess there is something to this meritocracy thing.

Problem?

What problem is there? That Adult Swim has succeeded because it focused on making good shows and not shows that make everyone feel like a snowflake? Why do you ladies think that just because you exist, you not only deserve to be show-runners but that you have experiences and abilities that nobody else does? Becker, the lack of women creators, writers, and staff isn’t a problem with Adult Swim or anyone else, it’s a problem with you. You social justice, feminist, forced acceptance culture pushing morons are only doing this because you subconsciously know you suck at everything you do. What’s worse is that, instead of getting better, you just fuck with the established rule-set so that it fits you because you’re afraid of changing and challenging yourselves and thus can’t rise to real greatness; you instead strive to get all the benefits of greatness without any of the work. What a selfish and cunty thing to want.

So much for hopping on the fan-wagon. I guess now I’ll never get any of the great inside jokes about Mr. Poopy-butthole people keep making.