Oh nooo, I hope Namor's okay 😱

still not over the fact that i have polls

slorpcore

Glurp from Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga and its remake.

I had so much fun doing the Lava Piranha that I figured I should do another Mario RPG sprite. I thought trying another Paper Mario sprite would be limiting, so I took a look at the only other Mario RPG I've beaten and picked out the one that thought would be the easiest to translate [for an easy transition ;)] Glurp it is! Glurps are such cuties and interesting enemies for how far into the game they are, all the while creating a weird sense of danger.

I initially thought Grimer would be the base for this sprite, but it turned out that Ditto had a better shape for what I wanted to do. From the ground up, we have Loudred's mouth, Duskull's eyes, and Combee's antennae. Vaporeon provides an excellent blue for this guy, and Jolteon does the eyes. In a strange twist, the last part done was coloring the inside of the mouth- palette provided by Grimer.

I did a new thing...

[ Image description: photo of two fur-and a fleece “Glurp” puppets, with arm wires; one is made of green fur and fleece with golden eyes, the other is made of grey fur and black fleece with darker gold eyes and tufts of fur for eyebrows. End ID. ]

Updated the lad with some eyebrows/tufts/whatever. Trying to cram as much making into the weekend as I can!

(These are “Glurp” puppets from Monkey Boy Productions’ excellent kit. Olive (the green one) is constructed out of kit materials, whereas Gruff (the grey and black one) is made out of purchased material, after MBP sweetly sent me the pattern PDF (my original kit has been Packed to Storage, and I expect we’ll find it next to the Arc of the Covenant).

Bloop!

been sick all week, had a date with my old friend nyquil last night. it went well

I always find it a little funny when people are hanging out at my place and the look at me, a video game player who only owns a Switch, and they ask if we can play Mario Kart or Super Smash Bros. Cause then I always say, "Oh, I don’t own either of those. But if you want a party game I got: a parody of the Olympics, a rhythm game you can't play if you have epilepsy, or a game called Ultimate Chicken Horse that I will not explain".

from what I've seen, there are exactly Three Jobs hiring at any given time. they are:

senior logistics strategist at Hewlett Packard. $140,000 / year. requirements: three separate MBAs, fifteen years of business experience, no "ethnic" grandparents, unearned sense of confidence

"customer success ambassador" at Glurp. $70,000 / year, give or take, since 90% of your pay is based on commission. requirements: associate's degree, no experience, has never heard the phrase "pyramid scheme," no sense of shame

part-time server at Le Bon Mot. $15-$16/hr depending on level of experience. must work weekends, overnight shifts, holidays, while asleep. requirements: you will let customers spit on you.

sorry gay people in my phone i have not set a foot on tumblr.com in forever, i was too absorbed playing ZeldaTOTK(‼‼) and it probably wont get better bc im getting Pikmin 4 later today

kiss kiss

FUCK YAH, IT'S DRINK MORE GLURP NIGHT ON LOADING READY RUN

This past week has been so full of shit, I need three hours of laughing til I can't breathe far more than I need to breathe. Let's gooooooo!

Butthole Surfers — Rembrandt Pussyhorse (Matador)

Photo by Jerry Milton

Given the amount of ink spilled and pixels configured concerning the music and cultural phenomena associated with the Butthole Surfers, it seems a daunting task to find anything new to say about the band — even about a record as excellent as Rembrandt Pussyhorse, first released 38 years ago (say what) on Touch and Go and presently being given the vinyl reissue treatment by Matador. But two things obviate the perceived difficulty registered just above: somehow, someway, Rembrandt Pussyhorse sounds like it could have come out yesterday on some currently über-hip, punk-adjacent underground label (say, Feel It Records from Cincinnati, or London’s La Vida Es un Mus); and for certain, it feels a very particular, vividly upsetting sort of way to listen to these demented, raging and inspired songs in March of 2024, as we struggle and lurch our way toward spring.

For example: Give “Strangers Die Everyday” a spin and try not to think about Gaza. That shouldn’t be a compelling match, of past music with present, all-too-real event. The song features a nigh-histrionic, Bela-Lugosi-as-the-Count organ, plastic fangs chewing on cheap, drywall scenery. Gibby Haynes does some of his bullhorn-mediated vocal antics, and sounds of bad plumbing bubble up into the mix. It’s the Butts in nightmare mode, which was always a vertiginous blend of ruthless ugliness and brain-rattled hilarity, and there is nothing funny about Gaza. Nothing at all. But keep listening. “Strangers Die Everyday” ends up expressing a deranged pathos. The organ is hammy, but the melody is mournful. The glurping, glooping bubbling evokes looking down a mostly stopped-up drain, which is always a bum-out experience, woven into the textures of the “Everyday” world nodded to in the song’s title. It situates the sadness and disgust in a feeling tone. But just exactly where is your everyday world? If you can tune in and make an additional metaphorical leap (to all the drains in Gaza, and in Myanmar, and in Ethiopia, and elsewhere, all of them backed up and drowned by unstanched cataracts of blood, from the bodies of all of those strangers), you will feel a particular sort of weight in your gut.

The Butts’ best stuff always worked the spaces in which earnestness, nausea and a decidedly bonkers mirthfulness overlap. Perhaps “collide” is a better word for the music’s resulting dynamic. In their early recordings, you can hear them bashing and stumbling their way toward ever-more-effective smash-ups of sharply opposing affects: the delirious one-two punch of “Suicide” and “The Revenge of Anus Presley” from Butthole Surfers (1983); the ebullient, anxious, headlong hallucination that is “Dum Dum” from …Another Man’s Sac (1984). The best performance of that sort of collision on Rembrandt Pussyhorse is “Perry,” which initially registers as a hyperbolic parody of the theme music to Perry Mason. Natch, let the laffs commence. The organ is back, but this time it’s in full Phantom-of-the-Opera mode, rollicking and tempestuous, Lon Chaney grinning horribly. Haynes delivers the laffs, howling and whooping himself breathless.

Keep listening. “Perry” takes its turn toward something more than parodic goofiness when Haynes provides a series of anaphoric itineraries: “It’s about coming of age / It’s about learning how to do it / It’s about learning how to experience things the way they ought to be experienced….” And so on. It’s a reckless thing, following Haynes into that improvisatory philosophical space: How, precisely, should things be experienced? What would a Butthole Surfer say? “It’s talking about being the slave boy / It’s talking about giving head when you’re 6 years old / It’s talking about enjoying these things….” You can just about see Raymond Burr blanch, even in black and white — and sure, it’s the Butts being the Butts, invoking a series of transgressive, taboo images, perhaps only for the charge of the transgression itself.

But there are other ways to hear the transgression. We might take the reference to Perry Mason a little more seriously. In the summer of 1986, just months after Rembrandt Pussyhorse was released, the Meese Commission on Pornography published its final report, a Puritanical screed that sought to throw the full moral weight of the Justice Department (yeah, yeah, I know) behind a juridical condemnation and potential outlawing of sex work, porn consumption and kink. The most liberal — in the hard sense of that word — readings of the Report’s recommendations would likely sanction tossing a band called the Butthole Surfers and songs like “Perry” (and “Lady Sniff,” “The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave,” “Moving to Florida,” and later just about every song on Locust Abortion Technician and Hairway to Steven…) onto the pile with all the copies of Hustler and Torso and the endless numbers of VCAvideocassettes — not to mention the models and actors themselves, and all the folks who watched them and looked at them and felt pleasure.

It's not a hard history to uncover when you listen closely. Reagan’s reinvigoration of the American Right in part drew upon Jerry Falwell’s political turn, and the idea that evangelicals could have real power if they participated in the electorate, rather than regarding it as the fallen domain of a lesser law. In 2024, the Republican Party takes that evangelical vote for granted, and its full complicity with the array of MAGA-affiliated constituencies has created a new set of political alliances, issuing in events like January 6 and the Q Shaman leading a prayer service in the evacuated Senate chamber. Not sure even Haynes could conjure that image. Return to the record. The echoes of Raymond Burr’s voice, in full closing-statement declamation, reverberate out from “Perry” to the Butts’ magisterial cover of “American Woman”: “All right, you little creep, come out of there! We know your name!” We’ve got you surrounded! Where’s Mike Pence?

No one would argue that the Butts possessed anything like socio-political prescience when they recorded Rembrandt Pussyhorse. They were too busy experiencing things the way they had to experience them, to make the music that they had to make. And some of us enjoyed it. Still do. That may be reason enough to return to the record — or to reissue it. But the band somehow tapped into some very serious energies circulating in the mid-1980s: the Reagan Administration’s bloody-minded Christian nationalism (read some of his speeches, you’ll hear it); the Israeli Labor Party’s “Iron Fist” policy of 1985 and the accompanying intensification of settler activity, all of which would soon lead to the First Intifada. And here we are: Gaza on fire and self-identified Christian Nationalists like MTG and Tommy Tuberville setting policy. Here we are, in the “Whirling Hall of Knives” Haynes and Paul Leary and the rest of the band set in motion in 1986. Even today, especially today, it cuts deep. It draws blood. Strangers die everyday.

Jonathan Shaw

where the gloop going off???? where the gloink gloink glurp skkrrrt skrrt til i splurg be????? where the fffzzzzt prrrp uurrp on the boof til my glizzy go boom at????????