Disney princesses as war criminals, film noir and Adventure Time characters

Walt Disney’s princesses are a source of endless amusement and creativity for pop culture artists.
Most of the princesses are based on public domain characters, but artists like to play off the family-friendly versions that Disney created.
What follows is my latest roundup of interesting revisionist depictions of the Disney princesses.

Artist Astor Alexander recently reimagined the Disney princesses as film noir-style femme fatales.
He titled his works as though they were pulp-fiction novels. Snow White is featured in “Miss White and the Unlawful Seven” and Princess Aurora is cast in “The Long Sleep.”
“I am a fan of badass female characters, and that was the main goal of this series — to turn these Disney characters into badass detectives AND criminals,” Alexander told BuzzFeed.

Artist Artemii Myasnikov depicted the Disney princesses as tough-as-nails warriors in an art series. His works reimagined Ariel, Aurora, Cinderella, Jasmine, Snow White and more. (See article by GeekTyrant and the artist’s Instagram page.)

New York-based artist Leon Chang showed what it would look like if Disney princesses were tried for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials. (See the humorous art series on Twitter.)

Artist Maritsa Patrinos drew the Disney princesses as if they were princesses on the animated television series “Adventure Time.” (Check out her work on BuzzFeed.)

Pakistani illustrator Maryam Safdar drew Disney princesses as if they were Japanese anime characters. (See article on Bored Panda.)

The Pure Costumes blog posted an Oktoberfest graphic showing Disney princesses and their favorite beers.

And finally graphic designer Matt Burt depicted Disney princesses as career women. “Sleeping Beauty” Aurora is the CEO of a coffee company and Elsa and Anna from “Frozen” are climate-change scientists.
(See article by BuzzFeed and Imgur.)

Related article:

Revisionist Disney princess depictions in review (March 21, 2018)

Snapchat, Yahoo not built to last

Google’s recent decision to shut down its social network, Google Plus, got me thinking about which internet services are built to last and which aren’t.
I’ve used a lot of internet services over the years and quite a few didn’t survive. In most cases, there were competing services available to fill the gap. In the case of online content, those failed websites just disappeared.
When I think about online services that likely won’t stand the test of time, two come to mind: Snapchat and Yahoo.
If Snapchat disappeared tomorrow, I don’t think anyone would really care. The multimedia messaging app for smartphones is getting its butt kicked by Facebook’s Instagram. Snapchat user growth has stalled and parent company Snap has made a bunch of missteps.
Instagram just surpassed Snapchat as the most-used social media app among U.S. teens, according to Piper Jaffray’s latest semiannual Taking Stock With Teens Survey.
In its third-quarter report last week, Snap said it had 186 million daily active users, down 1% compared with the prior quarter. So, it looks like the service has peaked.
As for Yahoo, it was fading for years when Verizon Communications bought Yahoo’s core internet businesses in June 2017. I’ve noticed a marked decline in the quality of Yahoo’s services including Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Finance over the past few years. The Verizon purchase didn't stop the decline.
Verizon rolled the Yahoo assets into a new company with the former AOL and called it Oath.
Last week, Verizon said Oath revenue fell 7% year over year to $1.8 billion in the third quarter. It also acknowledged that it is unlikely to meet the longer-term targets it set for Oath.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Verizon ends up selling off Oath piecemeal. After all, in April, it sold Yahoo’s Flickr photo-hosting service to SmugMug.

Telemarketers, scammers and advertisers have ruined modern communication

Unless I recognize a caller’s name on caller ID, I don’t pick up the phone at home. The same goes for calls on my cellular phone.
That’s because most of the calls I get are business solicitations of some sort or charities real and bogus trying to get donations.
My home answering machine is full of mostly hang-ups as well as political ads and scammers pretending to be from the IRS or Microsoft.
Federal “do not call” lists don’t seem to help because scammers ignore them and charities and others are exempt.
The commercial calls are making their way to my cell phone, too.
The rate of scam calls to U.S. mobile users is increasing so fast that by next year nearly half of all mobile calls will be fraudulent, according to a report by First Orion. First Orion works with carriers and offers technology to identify and block spam calls, according to RCR Wireless News.
Scam calls made up 3.7% of total mobile calls in 2017. That percentage jumped to 29.2% in 2018. It is projected to reach 44.6% in early 2019, First Orion said.
Google recently announced a new feature built in to its Android operating system called Call Screen. The service is Google’s latest attempt to curb telemarketing calls on smartphones, Business Insider reported.
Scammers and marketers long ago cluttered email inboxes with spam. But at least Google Mail and other services have done a pretty good job filtering out the unsolicited commercial email.
If there’s a new form of communication, such as social media, marketers and scammers will find a way to abuse it.

Photo: Caller ID on my home phone. (Patrick Seitz)

Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame one of 42 music halls of fame you can visit

The Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame opened a new museum and concert hall on Saturday in Owensboro, Kentucky.
It is one of at least 42 physical halls of fame devoted to music in the U.S. and Canada. There are halls of fame devoted to rock and roll, country, rockabilly, blues, gospel, funk, polka and classical music, among others.
Of the 42 music halls of fame, 27 are regional or state halls. States with their own music halls of fame include Alabama, Colorado, Minnesota, Oregon and Virginia.
Other music halls of fame are in the works. They include halls devoted to hip hop, rhythm and blues, heavy metal and folk music.

Related link:

Halls of fame in the U.S. and Canada

‘Here today, gone tomorrow’ nature of the internet

The demise of Google Plus is another example of the “here today, gone tomorrow” nature of the World Wide Web.
Google announced last week that it is terminating its little-used social network. People who liked Google Plus as an alternative to Facebook and Pinterest are out of luck and their content will be deleted.
Over the years, quite a few online services that I’ve used have gone belly up. You can never be sure which web services will survive the test of time.
The same goes for media online. A few news organizations do a good job archiving their content and making it discoverable online. Many others have let libraries of digital content disappear, creating dead weblinks everywhere.
The Internet Archive announced earlier this month that 9 million formerly broken links on Wikipedia now work because they go to archived versions in the group’s Wayback Machine.
The non-profit organization is working to build and preserve an internet library. It will offer permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.
I applaud the Internet Archive and Wikipedia for the great work they are doing.
Often online articles disappear out of neglect, because an organization changes its content management system and doesn’t bother to transfer over older articles.
More recently social media services have started censoring the information members post to their networks.
Facebook announced last week that it has deleted 559 pages and 251 accounts that it claims were breaking its rules against spam and “inauthentic” behavior. The purge impacted some pages that had legitimate political speech. Those include the Free Thought Project and Police the Police, Reason reported.
This is a disturbing development since so much of the free speech debate today has shifted to online platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Photo: Wikipedia mosaic (Internet Archive)

Google Plus goes bye-bye

Google announced today that it plans to kill Google Plus, its halfhearted attempt to compete with Facebook.
Google Plus was an also-ran social network from its start in June 2011. Tech analysts and journalists wrote obituaries for it years ago and then ignored it as it limped along on life support. (Google stylizes the name as Google+.)
Google decided to end the service after an embarrassing data privacy breach was exposed by the Wall Street Journal.
About two years ago, Google pivoted Google Plus to be more like Pinterest, an online place to share interesting photos and articles. The strategy shift was a way to differentiate it from Facebook.
I created Google Plus Collections on several subjects and amassed hundreds of followers. My collection for robotics news attracted 664 followers. I also had collections related to halls of fame (636 followers), pop star Rihanna (396), post-apocalyptic fiction (113) and fairytale artwork (105). They’ll all be deleted once Google sunsets the service by the end of August 2019.
A consistent theme in my blog posts over the years has been the lack of permanency on the web. Things on the internet can be here today and gone tomorrow. Often it’s individual news articles and sometimes its whole websites and services.
Add Google Plus to the latter.
Even without the data breach, Google was destined to kill Google Plus because of its low usage.
It makes me wonder. Which consumer websites will be next to bite the dust?

Related articles:

Google+ is a dud (Sept. 16, 2011)

Google Plus Collections: An interesting pivot (Nov. 27, 2016)

Trump magazine cover clichés: tweeting, golfing, nuclear bombs, Putin bromance

Donald Trump has been featured on about 600 magazine covers from his time as a presidential candidate until the present. Over those many magazine covers, some definite trends have emerged.
For instance, the hot-tempered chief executive has been depicted as being on fire or burning things on 17 covers so far.
Trump has been illustrated with a nuclear bomb explosion (often with his face as the mushroom cloud) or with his finger on the button 11 times.
He has been shown posting tweets to Twitter on 12 magazine covers.
Trump has been depicted having a romantic relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin on at least 10 covers. They’ve kissed, hugged, exchanged love letters and shared a milkshake.
Trump has been illustrated as a king or emperor on 11 magazine covers.
He has been depicted golfing on eight magazine covers and eating junk food on six covers (two give a free plug to Diet Coke).
Trump has been the subject of a lot of unflattering magazine covers. No doubt about it.
He has been portrayed five times as a KKK member or white supremacist, four times as Adolf Hitler and twice as a Nazi.
He has been depicted nine times as a baby or small child, usually crying or having a tantrum.
Trump has been shown as a wrecking ball or swinging one on four covers. He is illustrated smashing things on five covers. He is a hand grenade on two covers.
He also has been depicted as the devil, a Sith Lord, a pig, a shark, a clown (twice) and a tornado (three times).
To see all the covers for yourself, visit my Trump magazine covers collection on Flickr.
It builds on the work of Media Literacy Clearinghouse, Democracy in Action, Famous Fix and Nick Hilton.