Category Archives: Uncategorized
Zombie Chase #2
Zombie Chase #3
Zombie Chase #4
Zombie Chase #5
This series of pages wasn’t perfect for Bad For You but it is for Halloween. Click for larger version.
Zombie Chase (end)
These pages weren’t perfect for Bad For You but they are for Halloween!
DON’T BAN A COW, MAN!
The longest-running sit-com in America, The Simpsons, still draws complaints from angry adults worried about its evil influence on kids, demanding that it be censored or removed from the air. (By the way, if those “kids” had started watching the show when it started and were around age 10 at the time, they would be 35 year old parents today!) A cool website, Governmentattic.org, which posts all sorts of weird and obscure documents from the government, got their hands on indecency complaints about The Simpsons to the Federal Communications Commission from 2010-13 (and the FCC is just the kind of government agency that people would complain to about stuff like that). While there’s a few nutso letters along the lines of “This pertains to things being said that I insist are about Me,” the complaints that caught the four eyes here at BAD FOR YOU were crazy in a whole nother way.
Consumer saw cannibalism and murder on the Simpsons. She said that there was a plot by the teacher to kill the father and the kids to kill the teacher.
How horrible! How frightening! Or, how could you miss that it’s all supposed to be funny?
She says that in the episode the whole town goes cannibalistic and begins to eat each other. The mother is advised to kill her daughter, which she does, with the understanding she can apologize to her in hell. The father Simpson is revered as a savior and he sings a song announcing he is gay and advises the population of men to, “find a man!”
They may not make you laugh as much as an episode of The Simpsons – but some of these complaints are pretty hilarious.
HOOLIGANS, HOODIES & HOODS
Yesterdays excerpt at Tor.com was a “Youth-a-Phobic” timeline documenting the mental condition some adults suffer from called ephebiphobia. Never heard of it? Ephebiphobia is defined as “fear or loathing of the young” and the timeline highlights over 6000 years of it (give or take a century). Today, BAD FOR YOU brings the hooligan/hoods/hoodie connection referred to in the excerpt up to date.
ROBBIN’ HOODS?
It all started with kids in the 12th century: English apprentice boys, away from home, would regularly riot (hey, they were unsupervised). When they did, they often wore hoods to “hide their identities” from authorities. Hoods as disguises were common; many states in the U.S. still have prohibitions against them. Currently on the Georgia books: A person is guilty of a misdemeanor when he wears a mask, hood, or device by which any portion of the face is so hidden, concealed, or covered as to conceal the identity of the wearer and is upon any public way or public property.
YOUTH IN HOODS = YOUTHFUL HOODS?
The first known use of the word hoodlum to refer specifically to “a young ruffian” was in 1871 (from the German dialect hudelum – “disorderly”). The related term, hooligans, was first applied to gangs of kids in 1898; their “disorderly behavior” was dubbed “organized terrorism in the streets” by the London Times. “Some people began to associate the hooded sweatshirt with hoodlums in the 1970s as graffiti artists and criminal gang members used them to hide their identities,” according to Slate.com.
HOO-DONE-IT?
Of course, the association most people make today with hoodies has to do with the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida. Martin wasn’t doing anything wrong at the time of the shooting; he was hunted down for being perceived as a criminal – rather than actually being one. One of the things leading to this perception was that Martin was wearing a hoodie that night (also…just maybe, because he was black). When an investigation into the murder determined it was in self-defense, protests against the decision eventually lead to a “million hoodie march” in New York’s Union Square to advocate for the prosecution of George Zimmerman, the man who killed the teenager who he thought looked suspicious. From a symbol of violent youth, the hoodie evolved into a symbol of youth killed violently – for the “crime” of looking scary to an adult.
A crime that, as yesterday’s excerpt shows, kids have been committing for thousands of years.
FEAR OF THE NOW
The current excerpt at Tor.com (and don’t worry – there is still plenty of book left to read once they’re through excerpting) features an overview of a condition some in society suffer from called “Fear of the New.”
While there is a theme running through “Fear of the New” which highlights the ever-evolving nature of communication (from pencils to printing presses to phonographs to computers), that is not the only type of new technology that had folks sweating: plenty were also once afraid of that big scary thingamabob called the steam engine.
As a tie-in with the Tor timeline we offer an update on the latest in terrifying tech: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Built between 1998 and 2008 – and then tinkered with for another five years – the giant device is designed so that scientists can throw particles together really really fast to test different theories of high-energy physics. The most common fear people have over this super-sophisticated (and super-expensive) science experiment is that once activated it would DESTROY THE WORLD!!!
Some (non-scientists) worried that the LHC could create microscopic black holes that would hang around long enough to lodge in the planet’s gravity well, thereby giving this mini-black hole the time and energy it would need to expand into a hole so big it would consume Earth inside out. So far, it looks like that hasn’t happened. But if you want to be sure you can check this website:
http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
Even though the LHC has been fully operational since February, some panicked members of the public are still sending death threats to the poor physicists involved.
So, guess that means some people have a legitimate reason to be afraid.
Swallowed By The Dragon or Laughter in the Dark? Revisiting the D & D Moral Panic
As followers of this blog may know, Tor.com has been excerpting chapters from the forthcoming book BAD FOR YOU (releasing January 7th) as part of Banned Book Week. Now that the “celebration” is over, today’s offering at Tor features a section on gaming and is a bit more downbeat than previous ones. This excerpt focuses on how a pair of tragic events led to a moral panic about the Satanic power of Dungeons and Dragons. Since the original panic was over 30 years ago, we’ve decided to post some Youtube clips on just how silly the situation got back then. First off, does Dungeons and Dragons encourage human sacrifice?
If the process of just how D & D ensnares souls is as blurry to you as that video, it is all laid out in graphic black and white by Jack Chick in his Christian comic:
Hard to believe how scared people used to be about D & D. At least those crazy days are behind us. No one has mentioned how the game could “literally destroyed peoples’ lives.” Actually, that’s a direct quote from Pat Robertson, host of the 700 Club, which claims “approximately one million viewers” daily. A quote from this summer!
So stay away! Far away! Dungeons and Dragons is definitely BAD FOR YOU.
But if you find these warnings unconvincing and even laughable, it’s a pretty good bet you won’t be laughing alone given that comedians Stephen Colbert, Mike Meyers, Matt Groening, Rainn Wilson, Patton Oswalt, Robin Williams, David Cross and Weird Al Yanjovic are all either past or current players of D and D.
NO JOKE!!!
And because every claim can use a little evidence, here ours: Stephen Colbert did gave a tribute to D & D co-creator Gary Gygax at the end of The Colbert Report the day after Gygax passed away, March 5th, 2008. “Gary you will be missed,” Colbert said, then asked, “How much…?” Before he answered, he rolled a d20.
“20! May all your prismatic sprays bypass your targets’ Reflex saving throws.”
Proof that Colbert knows his game.