Beastly Bomber Blowups

I've written this post as an accompaniment to a TektonTV vid launched today that's branded as part of a series titled Beastly Bomber Blowups. It requires some background explanation.

The subject of the series is a fundy atheist who is one of that select breed (like Farrell Till once was) who loves to see their name in lights, so to counter that, I grant them some sort of substitute identity. (It's appropos, too, because this fundy atheist used to be one of Till's groupies.) So I had designed a character to represent this fundy atheist that i call the "Pett Bomber" (pictured here) -- a tiny, tempramental, arrogant fuzzball with a puny voice and a chihuahua bark. His signature move, as it were, is that at the end of an episode, the little fuse attached to his head lights, and he explodes like a bomb -- representing his failure as an anti-apologist.

I've had an off and on history with this non-entity, who over the years has figured that he might win some attention by going after me. It's failed him miserably, even though he tried a couple of different venues for getting famous enough to earn a living off of anti-apologetics, including the Secular Web. He had a website at one time, but in the past few months, it disappeared, and it's not hard to see why: According to statistics sources, it was getting as many visits a month as my article on Mithra alone gets every 15-30 days. No wonder these guys always whined for me to link to them, as I always say. (He's also playable like a violin: Since I made this post, he's restored the site, and has done other things that are clearly reactionary to this and other things I have done. Dance, boy, dance. )

In YouTube, he did find some of the attention he craved, though that doesn't mean much either, in a context where a conspiracy theorist like Alex Jones can have as many as 127,000 subscribers, and a low-talent, low-scholarship hack like NonStampCollector can have as many as he does. Summed up, it's not hard to grab an audience at YT when so many lowbrow elements reside and subscribe there, and as I once noted, fundy atheists in particular would be expected to flock to a venue where everything is in pictures.

Back to the Bomber, though: he decided to take on my vid on 2 Kings 2:23-5, and I just recently finished a series in reply, which he says he intends to reply to after a month-long vacation in July. Um hm. Well, I've started this new series in part to make sure he returns to find a lot more to do.

The Blowups series will pick through his vids addressing claims that are both brief and within my area of study. Today's release was on the subject of Tacitus -- one of my specialty areas of study. And yes, he put his foot in it big time there. The purpose of the series will be to demonstrate the depth of both his ignorance and his critical thinking skills -- even with regards to quite simple matters -- as well as make life harder on him. Which frankly, needs to be done for more than one reason: As a producer, he's not only an academic fraud, but also a creative failure. His own vids are almost entirely composed of film clips, music, and graphics lifted -- often beyond what could be reckoned as fair use -- from other sources, including commercial films by major studios that would likely have his wallet in their pockets for the next 30 years if YouTube ever appeared more prominently on their radar.

The point on his thievery raises another explanation. In this new series, my "fursona" interacts with what is a mechanized version of the original "fuzzball" I created. This substitute is not there just to represent that the "real" fundy atheist is on vacation, though that happened to fit it with what I was doing. It also highlights another instance of his thievery. The mechanized version reflects a stolen version of the original "fuzzball" that he instituted. Back in mid-May, he produced a short "news" vid for his subscribers announcing his vacation plans, and the announcer was a parody version of my "fuzzball".

It wasn't his sole thievery in the vid. He has also used a background graphic from a news graphics site that he should have paid for, and with which he obscured his thievery by covering up a watermark on the graphic with other props. I made light of this in one of my own reply vids in the Elisha series, a day after he released the bowdlerized "news" vid. Interestingly, his "news" vid then disappeared a day or so later -- without any explanation. Nothing says "guilty conscience" quite so eloquently.

At any rate, since the Bomber is MY creation, I took the liberty of taking it back for the new series. His own version was itself a sort of animated freak, that had apparently been created not with any real effort, but by applying to a service (or software) like goanimate.com. He had hinted to tease his subscribers that he planned to use the bowdlerized Bomber in his responses to me. (Note that this is in spite of the fact that just a few weeks before, this fundy atheist had accused me of using a "juvenile" cartoon format to "soften" the Elisha story. Apparently once you become a hypocrite, it's no longer a "juvenile" or "softening" format.)
His version of my "fuzzball," though, had a computerized, unnatural voice, and didn't move at all other than the mouth -- and one of the two mouth positions looked absolutely idiotic, as though it had grown a trumpet. So my own re-parody has it depicted as a mechanized rendition, with the same mouth movements -- quite suitable to the lack of care shown by his own composition.

Sure, it was intended as a parody of my character. But that's not the point. The point rather -- as I state at the end of the vid linked below -- is that this combined with his other thivery of material shows that it's not because of parody that he made the bowdlerized version -- it's because he's too mentally ossified to come up with his own ideas.

Adding to his public disgrace, several of his subscribers praised him for inventing the character -- which is demonstrative on two counts: 1) he never corrected them (that had to be done by other users, one Christian, one a less hostile Skeptic); 2) his own subscribers, who praised him so heartily for allegedly defeating my original Elisha vid, obviously were unaware of my own replies using the character. That certainly says a great deal for the backwards and oblivious mentality of his subscriber base.

I'll still have plenty of other TektonTV projects over the next month, and all of my treatments of this shameless craven will be brief and relatively simple compositions. They will, however, have plenty of bang for the buck, and will leave him squirming for many months to come -- and longer, as he'll find out I've designed my vids to be easily added to, so that if he ever does reply, I'll have my own responses up within 48 hours...or less.

Hey, it's how I drove Farrell Till into relative silence -- why not do it to one of his groupies, too?


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