The director of the movie "You're Next" applauded this 'homage'.

So wonderful

The Simpsons’ couch gag has become a great place for innovative filmmakers and artists to show off their take on the iconic nuclear family and the many denizens of Springfield. From the creators of Rick And Morty, to Don Hertzfeldt, Guillermo Del Toro, John K., and many others, all have left their individual stamp on the opening of the classic show and its opening segment. Now another artist has thrown his hat in the ring, albeit unofficially, with a gruesome blending of The Simpsons with Adam Wingard’s film You’re Next.

Lee Hardcastle is an experienced stop-motion animator that has applied his craft to a segment in The ABCs Of Death, a mash-up of Frozen and The Thing, and even a music video for the group Gunship. Now Hardcastle has brought that same off-kilter horror sensibility to his proposed couch gag for Springfield’s first family with a possibly NSFW-ish (due to clay violence and gore) and fairly disturbing short. Hardcastle’s couch gag opens serenely enough before devolving into a home invasion pastiche just like You’re Next—much to the appreciation and applause of Adam Wingard himself. It’s unclear although unlikely that Fox will actually use this couch gag on screen, but maybe it will help boost Hardcastle’s chances for crafting a Treehouse Of Horror intro/segment.

So you make up out of thin air the most depressing story of what this guy's life might eventually turn out to be, use words of divisiveness (look! he's scrounging off the taxpayer everyone!) and use that to justify pre-emptively killing mentally ill people who fit the definition of "dangerous" by your Dickensian outlook.

You want to talk about people scrounging off the taxpayer then let's talk about corporate welfare and dodgy tax havens, about how starbucks, google and amazon get away with paying no tax when we are taxed on our earnings. You call this ill man a scrounger, when george osbourne's family no less has a dodgy 6 million offshore tax deal to name but one of a million examples.

Or let's talk about this guy's parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters who paid into the social system, earning potentially millions for this country. In return they only ask that their son is cared for with respect and dignity in spite of the nature of his illness, and the social system would still have made a net surplus off their family.

How about we talk about the recovery he made as a counsellor for PTSD sufferers or other mentally ill people? Or how in ten years time he ends up as a lollipop man helping kids cross the street to school. What about all the tax he eventually paid on his subsequent and previous earnings, does that matter?

Your dim, dark prediction and understanding of mental illness AND socialism is fucking archaic. Were you frozen in Victorian Britain and thawed out last week or something? Go back to watching the idiot box, i'm sure the latest episode of benefits street will keep you distracted while cameron and his cronies swindle this country. I don't mean to make this overly political but this is EXACTLY what the politics of divide and rule is all about. The TV programs, the newspapers - with shows and stories about benefits and migrants - they all conspire to convince person A that they should blame person B, meanwhile person Z is laughing their way to the bank. And you lap it up and take it to the extreme of putting PEOPLE to sleep!?

In this country, we all contribute to the social system so that everyone can be looked after. It drives me potty hearing someone complain about taxpayer's money going to ill and unfortunate people when all it would take is one single bad day for that same person to suddenly need all that help and more.

This is super awesome!
Reminds me of a dream I had where I tatooed frozen Tigers with Matt Damon. It got really weird once I accidentally stung myself with a tranquilizer dart, got high and watched the movie of that while I was in it. Matt was super nice, though.

I ♥ you.

Thank you very much for that.

And I love the guy's link to the 4-year-old's reaction to the big "father" reveal. My big boy is 4, but not quite ready for this stuff. He doesn't even like sitting through stuff like the Lego Movie or Frozen.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Kristen-Bell-Sings-Live-Love-is-an-Open-Door-from-Frozen

Kristen Bell Sings Live "Love is an Open Door" from Frozen has been added as a related post - related requested by lucky760.

Grocery shopping has become too complicated lately it seems to me. Used to be not all that long ago that you just got what looked good at the big chain grocery store and then made the odd trip to specialist shops for particular things on occasion. Whole Foods does have some good stuff, but it's way too expensive to just buy everything there. Trader Joe's has decent quality and prices but very limited selection. The local hippy organic grocery store/coop is in a similar situation to Whole Foods but with different stuff, and then there is the still the big chain grocery store with good prices on things that don't really vary much in quality. Oh, and of course there are still the delis and butcher shops and whatever else for the particular things they do well. Also, they went and knocked down the Pick 'n' Save that was three blocks away and are building a Metro Mart, which in my experience is exactly the same thing but with fancier decor and higher prices.

I have like five different grocery lists now. So, the end result is that I actually have access to much higher quality food at not unreasonable prices and yet somehow I'm ending up eating frozen pizza a lot more than I used to when it was Pick and Save or nothing.

Too bad it tastes like frozen milk instead of ice cream. Nowhere near enough milkfat in 2% milk to make good ice cream.

Pure quality by John, as usual.

There are a few points I'd like to add, in order of appearance.

5:10 – Greek default or Grexit could be manageable by the rest of the EZ, economically. Italy looks a bit shaky and Spain still looks like shit, so things could spiral out of control, but chances would be better now than they were in, say, 2010.

However, Grexit would be a political nightmare. EZ membership is supposed to be irreversible, so Grexit would reduce the Euro from a common currency to a peg when viewed from the outside. That's open season on the rest of the PIIGS. If Greek then rebounds, other people might very well decide to give Germany the finger and leave as well. If Greece fails, you have a NATO member turn into a failed state, which not only gives NATO the shivers, but also buries any notion of solidarity within the EU. This union survives because of the promises it makes, which include increasing standards of living and solidarity among different peoples. Without it, we're left with... what exactly?

And nevermind the humanitarian catastrophe taking part in Greece. We've conditioned ourselves to block out the pain and suffering of people in Africa. We even manage to shrug at the cesspool of corruption that is Kosovo. But if we do that to Greece as well, what little moral authority Europe might still have left would be gone then.

5:32 – The last payment Greece received was in August, long before Syriza took over. The previous government was in disagreement with the Troika and therefore transfers were frozen.

5:57 – Troika payments are required to service previous debt obligations. They are separate from what the Greek banks require to maintain their liquidity. That would be Emergency Liquidiy Assistance (ELA) from the ECB, which is a different thing entirely, even though it comes from a member of the Troika.

The ECB is bound by law to maintain and ensure the stability of the banking system(s) within the EZ. If a bank runs into liquidity problems, support is provided by the national bank of the respective country, which funnels funds from the ECB to the troubled bank. That's ELA, and a limit on ELA is a limit on the amount of funds that banks can draw from through this process. If an illiquid bank is cut off from ELA, it goes belly up. Bad idea.

Some argue that the ECB should not provide ELA to those Greek banks anymore, since they are insolvent, and ECB rules forbid ELA to insolvent banks. But as Varoufakis said, even the ECB's own Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) department, which is the new banking oversight, declares the four large Greek banks to be solvent. So there is no reason for the ECB to cut ELA to Greek banks. It's all political, and the ECB is designed to be outside of politics. That's also a reason why its membership in the Troika is so controversial.

The political argument for cutting off ELA is that Germany et al. are on the hook for the total amount should Greece itself go belly up. Somewhere along the line, someone made the glorious decision to install the ECB as a currency issuer without providing it with the attributes of a regular currency issuer. If the Bank of Japan or the Bank of England racks up losses, noone cares. They issue their own currency, they cannot go bankrupt, whatever debt they have in their books is irrelevant, for this discussion anyways. But the ECB has to balance its books, it has to receive funds from its members to balance losses, and in proportion to their economic size.

They made sure that politicians can scare the demos by pointing out how they have to foot the bill for this shit, even though it's the one entity where debt truly doesn't matter at all.

By the way, the funds that Greece is hoping to acquire are meant, primarily, for two purposes: making debt payments and to provide financial room to convert ECB(?) debt into EFSF debt (4% interest down to 1%). That's all. No spending.

6:54 – "Printing" money is generating demand out of thin air. There is a shortage of demand throughout the entire continent. So yeah, if the folks at the ECB could type in a few numbers, that would be swell.

Even Germany has a shortage of demand. We are merely hiding it behind the €200b+ of demand that we steal from other countries, i.e. our current account surplus. But the infrastructure and investment spending over here is at all time lows. We'd need an additional €200b+ just to get the infrastructure back to the state it was in a decade ago.

There is no productivity growth in Europe. The UK actually lost a lot of productivity by its introduction of zero hour jobs and other forms of slavery. Without sufficient demand, there is no need to improve production capacities – they can't even sell what they could produce right now.

There is a similar phenomenon in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. Around dusk every day in the springtime, a 'tidal wave' of fog flowing eastward from the coast would hit the western foothills of the peninsula, and arc gracefully over the 280 freeway like a massive, slow-motion crash of water. From 20 miles away it looks like a tidal wave, capable of wiping out all of silicon valley, is just frozen in place at the edge of civilization. Up close, it's like surfing your car through the barrel of an enormous wave.
It's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life, and it happens almost daily there.

There MUST be a miswording there, or bold faced, outright lie.
As temperatures rise, frozen underwater methane (methyl hydrate)is melted and RELEASED, not trapped. Not only that, as the ice on land disappears, it exposes permafrost that, as it melts, also emits methane. It's been happening for a while now, and is accelerating. Methane is FAR more damaging to the atmosphere than CO2, for longer times, so once this cycle takes off, we can expect exponential increase in the temperature rise.
It's POSITIVE feedback loop, not a negative one.
EDIT: Perhaps they mean when the Atlantic currents are disrupted and the lower ocean becomes colder...at that point it will have the ability to store more methane, but not the ability to capture it from the atmosphere since the upper ocean will be far warmer.
As for your misunderstanding of CO2, removing all CO2 production tomorrow won't remove any in the atmosphere, it will be there for quite some time before it could be absorbed in the ocean/forests, and that time period extends daily as the ocean becomes more acidic (making it impossible for diatoms to use the CO2 to make their shells) and the forests are removed. Once the ocean stops absorbing CO2, even the amount naturally created will be far too much for the atmosphere, and temps/CO2 levels will still rise even if we produce absolutely none. The tipping point was in the 70s-80s when we could have stopped CO2 production and made a difference. Now, it's too late unless we find a way to trap CO2 and keep it trapped. The systems are quite slow to react.
As for people "thriving", that's just ridiculous. There's been a food shortage world wide for quite some time now. The water shortage is becoming a bigger threat, and that's expected to increase exponentially as glaciers, snow packs, and aquifers rapidly disappear. Ocean harvests have drastically decreased, as have natural foods. We are thriving in the same way locusts 'thrive' when they swarm...but note that 99.9% of them die of starvation in the end.

See, this is why it needs to be shown the rise in joules, and a total energy rise in the entire planetary system, not just some arbitrary surface temperature rise....because people like you (no insult intended here) genuinely see the small relative figure and think...eh its no big deal.

Its a huge deal.

We are losing gigantic chunks of the otherwise permanent ice shelf in south and north arctic areas.

With those gone, we have otherwise what would have been massive mirrors, which reflect light...now acting as big old heating blankets (the water is effectively a black body to sunlight, absorbs it like no other..).

That right there is called a positive feedback loop. You start with something small, and within no time (geologically speaking), its in runaway growth.

The frozen tundra in greenland is home to enormous pockets of trapped methane....not for much longer. (source: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v8/n1/abs/ngeo2305.html)

Methane's impact on global warming (i.e. energy RETENTION within our planetary weather system) is 25 times greater than an equivalent amount of C02. (source: http://epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.html).

Further to this video, when you heat up the ocean systems beyond a certain threshold, the natrual pumping systems which circulate warm surface water to the deeper parts of the ocean for cooling, just flat out stop working. (source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19895974), leading to the slow heat-death of a vast swath of temperatue sensitive biomes....which, when they are active and growing healthily, actually contribute to c02 depletion (carbon based lifeforms 'use up' carbon to be 'made').

...I could go on, but you see....even just a cursory glance at some of the 'smaller' impacts is pretty compelling enough to consider the phrase 'no big deal' a bit of a misnomer.

Do your research....it is catastrophic, and it is likely to happen in your lifetime (if you are under 30 atm).

Your grandchildren and great grandchildren will be living in a drastically different global environment.

No biggie though, cause we got electric cars coming online in the next 30 years or so

*promote (got me by 5 min)

When a man doesn’t love a woman very very much
He signs away his paternal rights and jizzes in a cup
Then with lots of money and scientific genius
Hormones, pain and of course, um… Jesus

The process begins the way god intended
With a transvaginal ultrasound
With a wand longer than a ukulele
When it comes out of my body, it makes this sound (pop)

I give myself daily intradermal injections
An acute blood thinner and estrogen concurrence
Cryopreservation through hormonal activation
And none of it’s covered by insurance

Then I’m knocked out and you’re removed
And combined with a stranger’s come
And as the saying goes
You win some, you lose some/you dispose of the defective ones in a hazardous waste bin

And then you’re frozen until I’m certain
It’s time to unthaw you into a person
Then you’ll expire or you’ll make the grade
And that, my darling, that’s how babies are made
(It’s so easy and natural)

CHORUS:
Hush little egg baby don’t say a word
Mama’s gonna freeze you til she gets rich

And when that day finally arrives
You’ll be constructed in a petri dish
With sperm donor 8w6-3
The silent partner of our family

So hush little egg baby don’t be sad
Just because I never fucked your dad

VERSE 2:
I know there are orphans everywhere
But I’m going to pretend that isn’t real
Don’t look at me like that just cause I admit it
You had kids and you knew the deal

Yeah I feel guilty about overpopulation
And ruining the environment for forever
But Osama Bin Laden had 20 kids
So fuck you or whatever

Sadly procreation is not a meritocracy
And we need to prevent a real life Idiocracy
Though it may be the ultimate form of narcissism
It’s also a way to re-reverse reverse Darwinism

Gonna mute the sound of that ticking clock
I just need the sperm now I don’t need the cock
My ovaries are like hey girl I’m over here
And I’m all like shhhh

I want all the stuff I don’t need a bucket list
It doesn’t make me greedy it just makes me feminist
Now I’m thinking back through all the guys I’ve dated
If they heard this song they’d fucking hate it

CHORUS:
Hush little egg baby don’t you cry
You’ll have the best genes mommy can buy

I don’t want to wait until I get in dire straights
My friends say if I want kids I should go out on some dates
But these working bitches don’t have time to leave it to the fates
The world deserves more Riki’s and the world deserves more Kate’s

So hush little egg baby dad’s are overrated
He did what mattered when he masturbated

BRIDGE:
Hush little egg baby just hold firm
Mama’s gonna buy you designer sperm

And if that sperm gives you random traits
Mama’s gonna test your dna

And if your dna doesn’t make things clear
Mama’s gonna just have to live in fear

And if that fear turns into guilt
Mama’s gonna hold onto what we built

And if I hold too tight as to suffocate
I’ll buy you lots of things to overcompensate

And if that overcompensation’s too transparent
I’ll pretend it’s somehow better with no male parent

And if you say but mom who’s my dad
I’ll say I don’t know and it’s just too bad

And if that badness forms a hole in your heart
I’ll want to make it up to you but won’t know where to start

I’ll probably start by saying it’s just you and me
And there’s no such thing as a normal family

So fuck being normal and let’s do this shit
Momma’s gonna freeze you til she… gets…. rich

I liked the sound the apple made when frozen.