They have pretty much given up on perpetually extending copyright. Disney now seems to be banking on Trademarks to keep Micky pure. That’s probably why they are running that short clip from Steamboat Willie as their company logo in the newer pictures.
Trademarks already never expire as long as they are in active use.
khn0
Also they have a strategy of sharing the mark. There’s not much left about film studios, but for comics for example they recently made a “by disney” collection (when it’s really “disney by someone else”).
Note, they haven’t been as aggressive in recent years. The internet has put a lot of that kind of thing in a more negative light. Disney is still maybe touchier than some companies, but they’re nothing near what they used to be.
Turns out suing a day-care for a fan-mural is a bad look. Who knew?
This is why taking a victory lap around Mickey Mouse would actually be the most bad ass of victory moves.
annarchy
Rule 34 if it exists there is porn of it.
No standard enough definition of god that exists for anything but the abstract idea. so no way to create a specific image of a god that is both god and porn to all individuals there for no god exists.
Enough images do exist of micky mouse to justify a Consistent enough standard pic to say A micky mouse is a character and is thought of as such character in porn and does exist.
And to think this strip must have been written months ago, before the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida and Disney’s back-door support of the politicians who pushed it into law.
Eh, Disney’s been back-door supporting the “hate-our-gay-neighbors” uber-Christian politicians for a long time, and everyone’s just been shrugging their shoulders and saying “yeah, they’re a big corporation, big corporations virtue signal while simultaneously supporting evil-AF politicians, what else is new?” It might be more visible in the news this month than the baseline, and the shoulder-shruggers are starting to voice protest, but it’s no more or less relevant than it ever was.
Heavensrun
The fact is, everybody pays all the politicians, evil and non, for access, because we have a broken-ass system that allows for legalized bribery in the form of campaign contributions.
Wizard
Bribery? More like protection money in many cases. And campaign contributions aren’t the half of it. Look around corporate America and you’ll see a whole lot of people in cushy jobs whose biggest qualification is being related to an influential congresscritter.
Big names at the company, particularly in TVAnimation, Lucasarts, Pixar and Marvel have come out and said that Disney barely lets them do anything regarding queer content, and most of them aren’t afraid of being fired right now because Disney can’t afford to look worse than it already does right now.
C.T. Phipps
Actually, I remember the Disney Corporation being embargoed by the Baptist Church for a decade because they refused to ban Gay pride events from their park. Disney took a firm stance of, “Paying customers are paying customers!”
Don’t worry about it Dina, you were competing against the walls of your lover’s psychological imprisonment. Those walls are infinitely tall, thick and bleak. Success is yours, and you deserve to feel proud, attractive, loved and loving.
You won’t play me Freebird anymore
Y’all sold out and what for?
I’m still the fan I was before…
But you’re “too cool”
To play Freebird just once more–Todd Steed & The Suns of Phere
Exactly, it’s not a victory against a fictional character, it’s a victory against the indoctrination set instituitions with hundreds or thousands of years of practice, many aimed at controlling and even oppressing people. Well done Dina!
I used to play Mario Kart with my friends all the time and we’d usually do it while drinking. As you can imagine, driving a gokart while intoxicated is difficult to do, even more difficult when it is virtual.
Keeping score against “god” is a pointless endeavor, you can’t win. However, keeping score against stupid religious doctrine? Totally fair and highly recommended.
Nah, turns out god isn’t actually omniscient, they just poked their head in for this particular scene.
(and now I’m imagining god being gender-less and having galasso-level understanding of gender, and being like ‘what’s this gay thing my homo sapiens keep taking about’ XD)
The only part of the bible I’m really familiar with is the story of Joseph. Right after, in the bible I read, is the story of Moses.
So Joseph and the Hebrews come to Egypt, save their sorry asses from famine, everyone is living in prosperity and happiness, then God turns around for like two generations and suddenly they’re all enslaved and the pharoah is murdering babies.
My personal headcanon is that God keeps setting things up for success, looking away for two minutes, then finds a dumpster fire and is like “for fucks sake humanity”.
The new Cosmos talked about how someone invented solar power in like the 1800s – no one wanted it. I can just fully imagine god banging his head against the wall like “What the fuck? What. The. Fuck.”
King Daniel
Don’t forget, God’s also a huge fan of Star Trek: Enterprise.
Needfuldoer
But what do they want with a spaceship?
eh, whatever
That’s not Enterprise, that’s movie number V.
King Daniel
Some of y’all have never read Shortpacked! I guess
(It was a running gag there that God kept demanding for Enterprise to be un-cancelled)
That is how omnipresence works, yes. However, by the modal ontological argument, if a maximally-great God is tagged in even ONE possible strip, He is therefore automatically tagged in EVERY possible strip.
… and since He was NOT tagged in previous strips, it is impossible for Him to be tagged in this one as well. Mystery solved!
I occasionally marvel that people have been willing to kill one another over the question as to whether the omnipresent God is immanent or transcendant. How do they think they can tell?
Reltzik
Traditionally, you can tell who’s right by who manages to brand the other groups as heretics and kill them (or exile them if they’re wusses) over the question. Obviously the most prolific killers must be the most right with God. Why else would He bless them with so much success in their righteous crusade?
At least, that’s how early Christianity sorted out questions like Arianism, Docetism, the Trinity, and the like, thereby shaping the mainstream of Christian faith that we know today, and since few modern Christians even question the conclusions of that method they obviously believe it’s a highly reliable approach to for arriving at correct beliefs.
(/sarcasm… kinda… maybe /satire? /lampoon? /parody? None of those seem right, but it’s in that neighborhood. Kidding on the square, maybe, which I just googled and learned DIDN’T originate with Al Franken. … Oh, and some obligatory #notallchristians and #notalltheists because someone will take exception if I don’t.)
C.T. Phipps
That’s horrible libel and frankly a terrible presentation of history.
Delicious Taffy
Yes, I’m sure the Crusaders and other long-dead violent extremists will be very hurt by this remark. Their feelings also matter very much and we should all be more considerate of the murderous vagabonds going forward.
Reltzik
As I was trying to indicate in the final paragraph, I was “kidding on the square” — making an absurdist joke out of something that was still largely true. Many modern Christians would wholeheartedly disagree that questions over abstract theology should be settled by bloodshed and persecution, and would be morally appalled if that were to occur today. (I would guess MOST modern Christians, but without hard numbers that would just be a guess.) So, no, it’s not fair to assume that a typical Christian that’s the right way to go about it — many would be explicitly opposed — and the dissonance present in framing it otherwise is the source of humor. (#dontexplainthejoke)
But it’s still true that modern Christians HAVE accepted violence and persecution as the standard for how to settle doctrinal disputes. That’s why it’s kidding on the square. To focus on just one of those items, Arianism, for purposes of illustration…
Were Arius and his followers NOT exiled, following their rhetorical defeat at the 1st Council of Nicaea, because the mainline of Christianity had deemed Arianism heretical? Were their writings not order burned? Was everyone who refused to surrender those writings for burning not ordered executed? Was this victory of the doctrine of a con-substantial Son and Father, over Arianism’s Son subordinate to Father, not then made official in the Nicene Creed? And doesn’t the modern centrality of the Nicene Creed in mainstream Christianity constitute, through willful blindness if nothing else, a tacit, implicit acceptance of those methods in practice and the orthodoxy they produced, whatever explicit objections modern Christians might express to those practices in the abstract?
I would say that most (again, guessing) modern Christians don’t understand that this shaped modern Christianity. But that is still how heresies like Arianism were suppressed, silenced, and largely forgotten by everyone save priests and religious historians, Mainstream Christianity has accepted the orthodoxy produced by winnowing out these heresies… and the brute fact of history is that this this point of Christology was settled through the (eventual) orthodox Christians managing to brand Arius and his followers as heretics and exile and/or kill them.
4 of my top 6 most played on Steam are Sports Management, I guess if you squeeze them hard you could put them in one of the first two categories in your poll.
Quick, everyone ignore the last panel and start catastrophising Dina’s definitely serious scorekeeping against Gosh. Make a long comment about it that misses the point entirely for the sake of scolding a fictional character, conveniently leaving out the part where she instantly admits it’s silly. Please, please make Dina out to be a Bad Person somehow, it’s so difficult to do and I don’t know how to function as a human being if I’m not lording my moral superiority over a pretend teenager.
I mean I personally find this degree of atheism very grating, particularly in an mixed-faith relationship. It doesn’t feel like Dina actually respects Becky’s belief in god so much as makes peace with a personal quirk she ultimately assumes Becky will grow out of.
Would I, as a loving partner, hope my partner grows out of religious ideology that seems to be based on shame, fear, and what I understand to be fairytales, which I am personally unfamiliar with, when most of my interactions with it to date have either been seeing it cause somebody I love internal conflict, or led to my partner’s father hunting us with a gun then teaming up with a mob stooge psychopath and kidnapping her and a group of our friends, his becoming an accessory to murder/manslaughter, and leading to his own violent murder, with almost their entire community blaming my partner for this..?
Becky has already moved from seeing the world as a few thousand years old to recognising science and evolution. Dina’s faith that Becky’s worldview will change as she gains more information is based on observed facts.
Honestly, I find Dina’s calm acceptance that Becky believes religion brings her comfort, hope, etc in the face of the evidence to the contrary rather surprising. Most people would – like Joyce has tried – point to all the harm religion has caused them and angrily ask how they could fail to reject it. Dina recognises that Becky is unwilling to throw out the good along with the bad, has experienced way too many traumatic changes in a short period of time, and needs love and acceptance, and time to actually analyse how much “good” she is actually holding onto.
Also, Becky’s number one in terms of her considerations. She is choosing to treat Becky placing what she views as an imaginary sky friend equal or above her in her considerations as a friendly (albeit ridiculous) competition/challenge, rather than a direct insult. Given that said figure is the reason given for the above offences, and she’s not even teasing Becky about doing this because she values Becky’s feelings above Becky acknowledging that Dina’s right, I think that shows a really amazing level of forbearance, consideration and understanding. BEFORE taking into consideration that she may not be neurotypical and only learnt a few weeks/months ago that you’re supposed to look people in the eyes rather than mouths when they talk even though that’s the part that moves.
Gonna bet you didn’t find Becky’s christianity grating when she told other people how Dina would be upset when she died and found out god was real.
C.T. Phipps
Yes, actually I did. A relationship needs to be based around fundamental respect for the partner and their beliefs. If you don’t respect them and try and change them then you shouldn’t be together.
233 thoughts on “Pieces”
Ana Chronistic
do we now need to disprove Mickey Mouse
or, at least, FINALLY get him into public domain
Kyrik Michalowski
Mickey Mouse will never enter public domain. Disney has way to much invested in him to let it happen, legally or not.
Thag Simmons
So what you’re saying is that delenda est Disney.
brionl
They have pretty much given up on perpetually extending copyright. Disney now seems to be banking on Trademarks to keep Micky pure. That’s probably why they are running that short clip from Steamboat Willie as their company logo in the newer pictures.
Trademarks already never expire as long as they are in active use.
khn0
Also they have a strategy of sharing the mark. There’s not much left about film studios, but for comics for example they recently made a “by disney” collection (when it’s really “disney by someone else”).
Needfuldoer
Trademarks also have to be enforced, IIRC. That’s why they have to crack down on places like daycares that illegally use licensed characters to project an air of legitimacy.
Heavensrun
Note, they haven’t been as aggressive in recent years. The internet has put a lot of that kind of thing in a more negative light. Disney is still maybe touchier than some companies, but they’re nothing near what they used to be.
Turns out suing a day-care for a fan-mural is a bad look. Who knew?
Z
This is why taking a victory lap around Mickey Mouse would actually be the most bad ass of victory moves.
annarchy
Rule 34 if it exists there is porn of it.
No standard enough definition of god that exists for anything but the abstract idea. so no way to create a specific image of a god that is both god and porn to all individuals there for no god exists.
Enough images do exist of micky mouse to justify a Consistent enough standard pic to say A micky mouse is a character and is thought of as such character in porn and does exist.
There for micky mouse more real then god.
Stephen Bierce
And to think this strip must have been written months ago, before the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida and Disney’s back-door support of the politicians who pushed it into law.
ThunderNight
“Don’t Say Mouse”
Reltzik
Eh, Disney’s been back-door supporting the “hate-our-gay-neighbors” uber-Christian politicians for a long time, and everyone’s just been shrugging their shoulders and saying “yeah, they’re a big corporation, big corporations virtue signal while simultaneously supporting evil-AF politicians, what else is new?” It might be more visible in the news this month than the baseline, and the shoulder-shruggers are starting to voice protest, but it’s no more or less relevant than it ever was.
Heavensrun
The fact is, everybody pays all the politicians, evil and non, for access, because we have a broken-ass system that allows for legalized bribery in the form of campaign contributions.
Wizard
Bribery? More like protection money in many cases. And campaign contributions aren’t the half of it. Look around corporate America and you’ll see a whole lot of people in cushy jobs whose biggest qualification is being related to an influential congresscritter.
Twitcher
Big names at the company, particularly in TVAnimation, Lucasarts, Pixar and Marvel have come out and said that Disney barely lets them do anything regarding queer content, and most of them aren’t afraid of being fired right now because Disney can’t afford to look worse than it already does right now.
C.T. Phipps
Actually, I remember the Disney Corporation being embargoed by the Baptist Church for a decade because they refused to ban Gay pride events from their park. Disney took a firm stance of, “Paying customers are paying customers!”
Siva
“Don’t Say ‘Back Door'” 😛
Decidedly Orthogonal
Don’t worry about it Dina, you were competing against the walls of your lover’s psychological imprisonment. Those walls are infinitely tall, thick and bleak. Success is yours, and you deserve to feel proud, attractive, loved and loving.
pope suburban
I really adore Dina. She’s just the best.
Arian
Me too. My favourite character by a fair margin.
The Wellerman
Hey now, “God” may very well just refer to the AWFUL institutions that claim to represent him.
But anyway,
You did it Dina!!! You broke Becky’s Chains of Sunday School with the Power of Science!!!!
YEAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!!
? ? ? ??? ? ? ?
*plays “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd on Hacked Muzak*
Stephen Bierce
You won’t play me Freebird anymore
Y’all sold out and what for?
I’m still the fan I was before…
But you’re “too cool”
To play Freebird just once more–Todd Steed & The Suns of Phere
TheLurkerAbove
Exactly, it’s not a victory against a fictional character, it’s a victory against the indoctrination set instituitions with hundreds or thousands of years of practice, many aimed at controlling and even oppressing people. Well done Dina!
Doctor_Who
When Disney eventually buys the internet and all content therein, God and Mickey will officially be the same person to Dina.
Sirksome
Dina was ahead until she realized how stupid competition with a fictional character was and now it’s a tie game!
Nono
I dunno, I felt pretty good throwing blue shells at the CPU in Mario Kart.
Kyrik Michalowski
I used to play Mario Kart with my friends all the time and we’d usually do it while drinking. As you can imagine, driving a gokart while intoxicated is difficult to do, even more difficult when it is virtual.
butts
the gays win again
Kyrik Michalowski
The gay butts can wave flags in celebratiom, or fart the canadian anthem. Either is acceptable.
Darkoneko
Mickey Mouse confirmed for God
Dara
I love Dina so much. xD
Kyrik Michalowski
Keeping score against “god” is a pointless endeavor, you can’t win. However, keeping score against stupid religious doctrine? Totally fair and highly recommended.
CC
The real question is, if you tag God in this one, would you then have to tag God in every strip?
Masumi
Nah, turns out god isn’t actually omniscient, they just poked their head in for this particular scene.
(and now I’m imagining god being gender-less and having galasso-level understanding of gender, and being like ‘what’s this gay thing my homo sapiens keep taking about’ XD)
Z
The only part of the bible I’m really familiar with is the story of Joseph. Right after, in the bible I read, is the story of Moses.
So Joseph and the Hebrews come to Egypt, save their sorry asses from famine, everyone is living in prosperity and happiness, then God turns around for like two generations and suddenly they’re all enslaved and the pharoah is murdering babies.
My personal headcanon is that God keeps setting things up for success, looking away for two minutes, then finds a dumpster fire and is like “for fucks sake humanity”.
The new Cosmos talked about how someone invented solar power in like the 1800s – no one wanted it. I can just fully imagine god banging his head against the wall like “What the fuck? What. The. Fuck.”
King Daniel
Don’t forget, God’s also a huge fan of Star Trek: Enterprise.
Needfuldoer
But what do they want with a spaceship?
eh, whatever
That’s not Enterprise, that’s movie number V.
King Daniel
Some of y’all have never read Shortpacked! I guess
(It was a running gag there that God kept demanding for Enterprise to be un-cancelled)
Reltzik
That is how omnipresence works, yes. However, by the modal ontological argument, if a maximally-great God is tagged in even ONE possible strip, He is therefore automatically tagged in EVERY possible strip.
… and since He was NOT tagged in previous strips, it is impossible for Him to be tagged in this one as well. Mystery solved!
Agemegos
I occasionally marvel that people have been willing to kill one another over the question as to whether the omnipresent God is immanent or transcendant. How do they think they can tell?
Reltzik
Traditionally, you can tell who’s right by who manages to brand the other groups as heretics and kill them (or exile them if they’re wusses) over the question. Obviously the most prolific killers must be the most right with God. Why else would He bless them with so much success in their righteous crusade?
At least, that’s how early Christianity sorted out questions like Arianism, Docetism, the Trinity, and the like, thereby shaping the mainstream of Christian faith that we know today, and since few modern Christians even question the conclusions of that method they obviously believe it’s a highly reliable approach to for arriving at correct beliefs.
(/sarcasm… kinda… maybe /satire? /lampoon? /parody? None of those seem right, but it’s in that neighborhood. Kidding on the square, maybe, which I just googled and learned DIDN’T originate with Al Franken. … Oh, and some obligatory #notallchristians and #notalltheists because someone will take exception if I don’t.)
C.T. Phipps
That’s horrible libel and frankly a terrible presentation of history.
Delicious Taffy
Yes, I’m sure the Crusaders and other long-dead violent extremists will be very hurt by this remark. Their feelings also matter very much and we should all be more considerate of the murderous vagabonds going forward.
Reltzik
As I was trying to indicate in the final paragraph, I was “kidding on the square” — making an absurdist joke out of something that was still largely true. Many modern Christians would wholeheartedly disagree that questions over abstract theology should be settled by bloodshed and persecution, and would be morally appalled if that were to occur today. (I would guess MOST modern Christians, but without hard numbers that would just be a guess.) So, no, it’s not fair to assume that a typical Christian that’s the right way to go about it — many would be explicitly opposed — and the dissonance present in framing it otherwise is the source of humor. (#dontexplainthejoke)
But it’s still true that modern Christians HAVE accepted violence and persecution as the standard for how to settle doctrinal disputes. That’s why it’s kidding on the square. To focus on just one of those items, Arianism, for purposes of illustration…
Were Arius and his followers NOT exiled, following their rhetorical defeat at the 1st Council of Nicaea, because the mainline of Christianity had deemed Arianism heretical? Were their writings not order burned? Was everyone who refused to surrender those writings for burning not ordered executed? Was this victory of the doctrine of a con-substantial Son and Father, over Arianism’s Son subordinate to Father, not then made official in the Nicene Creed? And doesn’t the modern centrality of the Nicene Creed in mainstream Christianity constitute, through willful blindness if nothing else, a tacit, implicit acceptance of those methods in practice and the orthodoxy they produced, whatever explicit objections modern Christians might express to those practices in the abstract?
I would say that most (again, guessing) modern Christians don’t understand that this shaped modern Christianity. But that is still how heresies like Arianism were suppressed, silenced, and largely forgotten by everyone save priests and religious historians, Mainstream Christianity has accepted the orthodoxy produced by winnowing out these heresies… and the brute fact of history is that this this point of Christology was settled through the (eventual) orthodox Christians managing to brand Arius and his followers as heretics and exile and/or kill them.
The Wellerman
Thank you all for filling out the survey I put here last time!
Now to get more data, so I can use the Power of Science to give a little something to all of you! ?
Want to take your mind of things for a bit once more?
Tell me what kinds of RPGs, Strategy and Puzzle games you all like to play!!!
Take the survey here:
https://strawpoll.com/polls/w4nWD0E3dgA
PirateTawnee
Oops, I accidentally voted for 15/17 options, and the genre I play the most wasn’t even there!
The Wellerman
Woops sorry pal! ?
What genre do you play the most?
PirateTawnee
4 of my top 6 most played on Steam are Sports Management, I guess if you squeeze them hard you could put them in one of the first two categories in your poll.
Sara Hysaro
Is it okay that I ticked off Board Games for DnD? I wasn’t sure where to classify that one.
newlland(Henryvolt)
God: I see you driving around town with the girl I love?
Lone Duck
Nice Ceelo Green reference!
newlland(Henryvolt)
I aim to please.
Delicious Taffy
Quick, everyone ignore the last panel and start catastrophising Dina’s definitely serious scorekeeping against Gosh. Make a long comment about it that misses the point entirely for the sake of scolding a fictional character, conveniently leaving out the part where she instantly admits it’s silly. Please, please make Dina out to be a Bad Person somehow, it’s so difficult to do and I don’t know how to function as a human being if I’m not lording my moral superiority over a pretend teenager.
MatthewTheLucky
Becky’s right there
Delicious Taffy
No, she left the room.
The Wellerman
Eh, her hearing isn’t NEARLY as good as Dina’s, plus her mind is in too many eurphoria-soaked pieces to notice.
But yet again, I guess there has to be SOME reason Dina looks so worried in that one April preview panel.
King Daniel
Turns out she just looks worried because there’s a power outage, that’s also why she’s in the dark in the preview panel
The Wellerman
SAUCE?
Needfuldoer
Prego.
Or maybe Ragu.
Newman’s Own makes some good ones, as well.
Opus the Poet
Signature Select. Or maybe Premium, but definitely one of the Albertsons store brands.
Yumi
I like Rao’s, but I only get it if it’s on sale or if I’m planning to feed my friend with allergies (Rao’s Sensitive Marinara, in that case).
Plain Marie
Muir Glen
Florence
Hey now! It’s called analysis!
*goes on to write a 10 paragraph essay on how this will lead Dina to fight Becky on a lava planet*
Spencer
i am being personally attacked
mods help
Florence
I’m on to you spencer!
Z
I mean I personally find this degree of atheism very grating, particularly in an mixed-faith relationship. It doesn’t feel like Dina actually respects Becky’s belief in god so much as makes peace with a personal quirk she ultimately assumes Becky will grow out of.
Miri
Would I, as a loving partner, hope my partner grows out of religious ideology that seems to be based on shame, fear, and what I understand to be fairytales, which I am personally unfamiliar with, when most of my interactions with it to date have either been seeing it cause somebody I love internal conflict, or led to my partner’s father hunting us with a gun then teaming up with a mob stooge psychopath and kidnapping her and a group of our friends, his becoming an accessory to murder/manslaughter, and leading to his own violent murder, with almost their entire community blaming my partner for this..?
Becky has already moved from seeing the world as a few thousand years old to recognising science and evolution. Dina’s faith that Becky’s worldview will change as she gains more information is based on observed facts.
Honestly, I find Dina’s calm acceptance that Becky believes religion brings her comfort, hope, etc in the face of the evidence to the contrary rather surprising. Most people would – like Joyce has tried – point to all the harm religion has caused them and angrily ask how they could fail to reject it. Dina recognises that Becky is unwilling to throw out the good along with the bad, has experienced way too many traumatic changes in a short period of time, and needs love and acceptance, and time to actually analyse how much “good” she is actually holding onto.
Also, Becky’s number one in terms of her considerations. She is choosing to treat Becky placing what she views as an imaginary sky friend equal or above her in her considerations as a friendly (albeit ridiculous) competition/challenge, rather than a direct insult. Given that said figure is the reason given for the above offences, and she’s not even teasing Becky about doing this because she values Becky’s feelings above Becky acknowledging that Dina’s right, I think that shows a really amazing level of forbearance, consideration and understanding. BEFORE taking into consideration that she may not be neurotypical and only learnt a few weeks/months ago that you’re supposed to look people in the eyes rather than mouths when they talk even though that’s the part that moves.
Dina’s utterly amazing!
JBento
Gonna bet you didn’t find Becky’s christianity grating when she told other people how Dina would be upset when she died and found out god was real.
C.T. Phipps
Yes, actually I did. A relationship needs to be based around fundamental respect for the partner and their beliefs. If you don’t respect them and try and change them then you shouldn’t be together.
Delicious Taffy