Nerding Day: Foamy the Squirrel

FreedomLand has 1.9 million prisoners at press time. More when you read this. Decriminalize what you want: where there’s a sweatshop there’s a way.

One of them is animator IllWillPress/JiM/Prisoner 247681-Z. He’s committed no crime, save the fame hunt that infests everyone alive. Yet Foamy the Squirrel’s still yelling at the screen, and that prison’s as real as any four walls. Unless he’s sold nuclear codes or been black downtown, that’s not fair. That’s not right.

Foamy lives.

Technically.

Right, some of you were outside in 2003. Or didn’t exist. Or had taste. Or watched better garbage. If you’re confused, be proud.

Foamy the Squirrel was a popular–am I doing this? Am I really alive? I have choices. Piles of Confederate children’s books, sitting on my desk like a loaded gun. There’s lighter, less crushing failure in reach. Am I defining Foamy the Squirrel?

Oh fuck that. Meet Foamy.

The proper title was Neurotically Yours. A flash cartoon where what are you doing Foamy, a talking squirrel with a pitched-up voice you went to fucking Princeton talks about everyday annoyances/nothing. Foamy hates stupid people, unlike the rest of us, who generations of struggle, wasted love stupid people. This resonates in junior homeroom, where every god is disappointed in you no one understands your genius.

Foamy radiates 2003, and I’m not insulting him yet. “Angry goth squirrel” embodies that year’s tone, content, and effort. When Texan Nero rents an aircraft carrier and says “nailed it,” you don’t seek subtlety. You seek motion tweens.

Those shots are twenty years apart.

What’s a motion tween? Fair question. It’s 2024. They’re out of your life, since Flash died after teleporting user savings to Lagos. Tech’s unpredictable like that. Pagers faded, jpegs became securities fraud, and toy helicopters found a taste for blood. Foamy remains.

And his friends! Like Meth Squirrel, who’s pitched a notch higher. This ADHD gag was not built to survive multiple eclipses. It barely survives introduction. Doubling down on Foamy’s pitch and tween speed sounds like an idea from an enemy.

Meth Squirrel also looks similar to Foamy. Mocking that sloth died before I could drive. The same goes for Punk Squirrel.

Less so for Black Squirrel.

He’s all-original. New props, new outline, new accent. Half-assed would’ve been better.

My thoughts on black squirrel? JiM deserved to draw Foamy until 2013 for that. Maybe 2014. We’re a decade past cruel and unusual punishment for black squirrel. The Katt Williams impression carries entirely different implications. Free JiM.

There’s also Sex Prop.

Prop, not object. Sex objects are gaffes. Open windows to a creator’s search history. A prop’s strategic. Sex Prop jiggled before we could pronounce “algorithm.” A forward-thinking hack of viewer isolation, and hint of dances to come. She feels a bit like a pistol in a samurai flick.

Though perhaps not too smart. Neurotically Yours hits are, at a glance, focused rants about airline food. Half the potential audience seems averse to Sex Prop’s voice.

There, that’s Neurotically Yours. Still marching along. Here’s this week’s encore image:

On second thought, a retro episode should help. Context and all that.

For all the Suicide Girl antics, the most popular feature’s the rodent yelling at the screen. Wobble is temporary, web gurus are eternal. To generate a Foamy rant:

Love tips bring out the best in talking heads, so I’ll start there. “Dating Advice” came out before its audience could date. Obama was a senator, “cuckold” was SAT vocab, and phones produced net joy. The YouTube version’s snowballed 1.9 million views.

Foamy breaks out a new look:

Fine, the same look. But the voiceover’s eager this round. Sometimes you know you have a (ratings) winner.

I miss ironic cults of personality. They shred deadlines. You can draft that shit in Notepad. Foamy starts with men to avoid:

Not bad at all. This pettiness has specificity. In a lane flooded with “hoes, amirite,” it’s nice to see Foamy pull ahead. He suggests shooting out their tires, which is standard escalation. This gets an acorn.

Next, Foamy suggests women to avoid:

Return the acorn.

The rest is less hacky, more stick figures chasing a mammoth. Digital soapboxes still had some novelty, and fashion takes weren’t hotlinked to militias. The stakes felt different–they didn’t exist. Elections ignored the pained wails of the unfucked.

I’m not immune to context. In 2004, I tilted a book that made Eragon look like Candide. The file’s gone, along with the laptop holding it. And building. Most of us get to bury early flubs. JiM, like Gregory MacGuire and Jack Dorsey, is welded to a first draft idea.

For scale: right now, someone with passable rhythm and abs can harvest attention doing the macarena. If they dress like Chi-Chi, they can convert that to a little money. Imagine twenty years of the macarena. Not another dance, song, or outfit. The macarena, as Goku’s forgotten wife.

That’s Neurotically Yours. A series that can adopt its target audience. You can imagine the rest.

Jesus. I’m twenty years behind on squirrel takes. Let’s catch up together.

Hey, wasteland scavengers! Alien explorers! Neo Beijing grad students! Need primary sources on Late Americana? Try Foamy the Squirrel. He narrates each year of The Unwinding.

Nothing’s too big, small, or overdone. Foamy’s our cultural rock. How about peak Twitter? That’s a large, soft target.

That scamp! What chaos?

Oh.

Well, everyone dicks up. If you look past the caricature, and listen past the worse impression, the rest is air. And Foamy owning a nation. Dubstep, microtransactions, racial tension, and posers get the same treatment, but let’s go back to our roots. Foamy’s dating advice needs a modern update.

Righteous, Foamy’s owned art school and deviants in one bank shot. I’d say we’re ready for his 2016 election song. Foamy sings his opinions too, roll with it. That year was satire on no-clip mode, so get ready for bushy-tailed heat. All you had to do to nail the mood was scream, and JiM had trained for a decade.

Middle road air. And owning vote-nerds with a voice like Chip strangling Dale. Neurotically Yours has scads of videos about music, and it might be best to avoid the topic after this.

Let’s get off politics. Late Foamy has rich thoughts on mindfulness, light ice cream, acting stupid, people being stupid, stupid acting people, and…fuck it, let’s hit politics. This is all Mencken for Kidz anyway. What’s JiM got for the republic?

Ah. The squirrels and waifu are ageless. But JiM is getting old. At least the style’s changed up.

Our visual style. The words are still air. Except owning…someone. This episode’s odd: in my trawl of hours of Foamy the Squirrel videos, he’d hugged the middle path for dear life. And keeps going after this. Foamy curses, but with your dad’s opinion. Even the art school sketch came out while biphobia was zany enough for TV. The horde’s not coming for Foamy. The horde doesn’t remember Foamy. There’s no edge to his edge.

Surely you’re thinking: “What else does this squirrel think about the culture war?” I’ve got you.

Nice! Sometimes you set up hell, and get more air. Except for Foamy owning Foamy. He’s decades into complaining and shrieking online. Just from the average position. Not the middle, as the author boasts. The average of an ad agency opinion poll. It’s the difference between “goalie” and “hit in the face with a puck.”

Now, surely Foamy has some thoughts that aren’t Bill Maher on tranquilizers.

Didn’t we just do that one? Keep it fresh. How about this: the plague armed the generation gap. How’s Foamy own the hatred simmering beneath civility?

Don’t panic. JiM’s done this for twenty years. He can write a real argument, for real thinkers. Let the squirrel cook.

Wind in an empty valley. And owning two generations at once. I might have enjoyed a Foamy alt-spiral, but JiM’s too dull to get worse. Foamy’s staple-gunned to middlebrow non-thought.

While we’re on age: eternal Foamy’s a great case for a social safety net. Mathers drew his first angry squirrel in 2003. These should be an artifact, not a lifeline.

Earth is a prison.

No.

There’s a Foamy podcast! Time for the Foamy podcast.

Well, there was a Foamy podcast. 144 episodes of it. They dragged on.

You see, JiM hasn’t sat still. No one would. It’s been twenty years. New Foamy rants share a channel with a vampire VTuber persona, chibi “Bits” sketches at TikTok-friendly length, and Squirrels & Robots. The latter’s the podcast, where JiM talks to himself as all four squirrels and a “mildly homicidal A.I.”

It’s pop news on autopilot.Though the posthuman waifu’s sharp. My soul, held down by gravity, wouldn’t bother with a pinup mascot in audio. That extra mile is a veteran play. JiM knows traffic hexes lost to young content mills.

I’ve listened to Squirrels & Robots. Recall that I, like all life, will fade. The hourglass never refills. I’ve spent precious moments on the FoamyCast. Here are my notes:

As for streaming: it turns out JiM vigorously edits his thoughts. He’s pared shit down like Joan Didion. The unedited streams melt reality. Five sessions have one squirrel rant’s content. Including a fun Johnny Depp ramble, but I don’t want to virtue my cancel triggers.

It all reminds me of Compu-toon. Just more coherent–painfully so. Each second screams that we’ll work every day until we die. And after, if you’re an actor, musician, or pretty. Turns out cameras really steal a piece of your soul.

Life’s one long, petty insult. Foamy’s finally home. A nightmare worthy of any horror anthology.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Alex Knollenberg, also known as Frothy the Groundhog (lawsuit pending).

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