Recently in Random Shit On The Internet Category

UPDATE: David Remnick, Editor-In-Chief of the New Yorker has written me a brief e-mail in response to the video:

First post for a new segment I like to call Suggested by Smolinski:
Rumor has it that when you slow down Mr. Goldblum by about 30% he sounds drunk.
True? You decide.

For the past two weeks or so, the site has been in various levels of down-ness. I hope the main site has been accessible and readable to the outside world, but posts haven't really been possible and comments were probably b0rked too. I tried to move the site to another server, but the MT scripts consistantly maxed out the CPU load on their servers and I don't have the balls, know-how, or time to debug it.

So we went back to our old hosts, IX, and had them bring us up to the latest versions of php and mysql and stuff, but it was a hassle to get the DB back up for reasons too boring to get in to here.

Anyway, with any luck the site is back for real for a while and I'll start my post-a-day regimen up again.

I miss everyone! I hope we talk soon.

From the unpublished archives:

Last night the White House Radio TV-Correspondents Dinner was off the hook.

So, the site looks a little weird. I know. And some stuff might not work. I'm sorry about that.

But we're now running on Movable Type 4! Which is very exciting. But we're still getting frequent 500 errors, so I may be shifting the hosting to another company. I thought the update would fix that problem but, alas, it didn't.

Please excuse our dust and enjoy...

JAPANESE BUG FIGHTS!!!!

Japanese animal clothing store "The tailor of a cat CAT PRIN" and Cat Wigs will both blow your mind. Seriously blow. Like the wind, movies about cocaine, sexual euphemisms, etc.

In blogging about progressive political theater, I've increasingly wondered what "other side" (there are probably a few other sides, Venn diagram-like) is (are) thinking. So I googled "Republican blogs" and looked at a few top results. Here's what I found, in the order I found it:

1. This was a top result, an old lady in Texas who likes racist cartoons and reports, regarding terrorists within the U.S., "We're all probably better off not knowing." Wow. You see, every time I give the far right a chance to make sense, it comes up with racist cartoons and contradictory points about "security" that alternate between nuke-worshipping and head-in-sand-burying. One racist cartoon:

2. A site that's currently down called "BoottotheSkull.com." I mean, does it matter what's on the site, if it's a political blog invoking boots to the skull? One flashes back to curb-stomping in that Ed Norton movie about Nazis, soccer hooligans, Abu Ghraib, The Siege, etc. Let's hope the barbarians who run the site don't read this post and find Steve and steal his cute dogs.

3. This is the worst of the bunch, partly because it's the most reasonable (unreasonable as it is), and it's authored by the youngest blogger - a mere 18 year-old, a kid who hasn't had time to look at all the philosophical positions in America yet. He does have crazy typoesz ("...the election’s still a ways off, and I’m there’s a conservative out there somewhere who’ll step up..."), so that makes him more of a crazy internet kid, right? But he also has a right wing/Christian magazine called "Regenerate Our Culture." (Not currently in print, as the kid's off to college. The homepage invites you to "pursue our archives," lol.) Overall impression: Not so hateful, but not a great source for real educational or political material. These are top results. This means these blogs, for whatever reason, by whatever magic feat of SEO and Digging, have had lots of hits, at least in the last few years. They span from young to old, heartland to coast, but they all seethe with undisguised rage - rage you'd never find here, as Ryan posts about Assassin's Creed or I post about giant scorpions or Harry Potter.

The Republican blogs, these random samples, don't challenge my views via argument or information.

I love what my friend Garrett Heaney at Wishtank stresses about information. It's harder, actually harder, to change someone's mind by arguing simply from an emotional or even an abstractly logical standpoint. And if you personally differ on views ("Well, I was raised as a...;" "I don't think all men are such..."), what can you do besides argue your emotion or lay out an ideal logic? Well, you can provide data. You can back up your words with sources. You can do research and keep telling people "look at these numbers!" or "look at this video!" until someone looks.

Well, or at least not have such crahze typoes whne you'r talingk about infallible dietys and how stupid liberls are.

So, I know it's been forever since my last post.

Months, literally. I know.

And I'm going to post something real.

Soon. I promise.

For now, please watch this video.

"You're in your living grave, fuck those neon lights. That's just how I behave riding my bike." Had an extraordinarily awesome bike ride through PTown with Zach last nite which involved weaving quickly in and out of tourists who love to jump in front of you to gawk at sea-themed baubles, seeing the drag queen Dina Martina on her bike doing the same, stopping at Town Hall to watch a guitar player busking with backing looped samples, Zach being toppled by John Waters, pizza and booze. Made me think of this song. Made think of how I love playing Name That Tune with friends. I would have completely rocked that game show. Check the live orchestra memebers in the background, and the guy on the right's face when the host says, "Tahiti." Check the unbelieveably arcane references to pop culture lost on us kids today. This show is so rad.

There are literally dozens of hilarious cereal mascots, most of which are invented animals who like to hug children, especially as the children are trying to eat.

The above bizarre Critters aside, I think the whole cereal mascot meme ("hmm... cereal" = "delicious singing invented animal wants to hug me") is one of those things we'll just never be able to explain to Martians.

This is an open call for new contributors to That's Plenty!

Due to a few lapsed memberships and two of our fiercest bloggers turning in to a splinter group that hates America, we're now looking for one or two more people to join the team and keep the blog going.

We're looking at all age ranges, all topics. We're most interested in getting people on board that have a wide range of interests, and someone looking to blog their creative process would be a plus.

Please send a writing sample to sbruckert |nospam| gmail.com.

Thanks!

Check it out here.

Even more exciting, I think, is the little speaker button next to the word.

Click the speaker to hear the dictionary say 'crunk' in a dictionary voice!

Hotlinking images is rude. It uses up my bandwith, and is just generally bad form.

I've told Dylan and Michelle this about 100,000 times, but they always say the same thing.

"We're laaaazy. We don't want to go to the trouble of downloading and uploading."

Well, the trouble with hotlinking is that you're giving someone else space on your website. Like one gentleman who saw the lovely post Karen did about finger moustache tattoos and decided to make his own post about it on his own blog.

Which has, as a result given me a 'back door' into his website.

Care to see what I can fit throuh his back door?

(And in case he fixes my little h@xz0r, terrible, terrible screen cap of his new blog post, courtesy of me, after the jump.)

Steve inspired me to stretch my journalistic tendons and find articles about a cat who survived an arrow attack to the neck. This did not prove difficult.

But I also bring our dear Reader's eyes gently to a rather ungentle article, this an account of a monocular reptile attacking a hapless golfing Floridian.

As the golf course dude says:

"Unfortunately, that's part of Florida," course general manager Rod Parry said. "There's wildlife in these ponds."

My sincere hope is to one day own a successful alligator/ocelot ranch outside New Orleans whereat my animals will have to prove themselves impervious to archery, loss of binocular vision, and golf. Anyone (read, "investors") interested in raising huge animals in the swamp, please be in touch.

Ahhh, yes, we are again reminded that, sometimes, the best news is bad news (for the monkey).

As Henry "Big Pookie" James once said (I paraphrase): "Cats and monkeys, cats and monkeys... All you need to know of human life you can learn from cats and monkeys."

And poisoned plague squirrels, it turns out.

(Steve, this sounds like a board game we need to invent right now: Zombie Squirrels of Catan.)

Anyway, read the article, it's hilarious. And the monkey's name was Spanky!

So it has come to my attention that maybe people haven't seen LOLcats. LOLcats, according to wikipedia, are

"photos of cats with humorous captions... a type of image macro, and are thus also referred to as cat macros"

Whenever I need to be happy, I go to the best source for all things LOLcats (and LOLrus, for the bucket enthusiast in you), which is a website named for a popular LOLcat caption, i can has cheez burger?.

Nothing makes me laugh this hard. Ever.

So... This showed up on my myspace tonight. What would a feminist ringtone sound like? Would you really want quotes from The Feminine Mystique screaming out of your pocket every time Gr00nd rings you up for a beer?

In what can only be considered a staggering defeat for the wretched media virus known as DRM, the code necessary to decrypt every HD-DVD currently on the market has blown up all over the internet.

Posts containing the code were censored by digg.com and removed from their pages in compliance with DMCA requests, but righteous nerd outrage broke out and overwhelmed digg.com with posts about the code faster than the employees and moderators could take them down. In the end, the people won out and the founder of digg has gone on record as saying that they "... won’t delete stories or comments... and will deal with whatever the consequences might be."

Which is pretty ballsy considering they could get sued into nonexistence.

Whatever the fate of digg.com, the game is over for the code and (for now) HD-DVD encryption. The purveyors of software designed to lock legitimate users out of their own purchased content have heard the market speak: DRM sucks ass and nobody wants it.

As of 1:01am May 3rd, 2007, there were about 359,000 pages with the character string on the internet, according to google.

And now, 359,001! Ding!

So Amazon has been spamming me, asking me to write reviews of products that I've purchased from them.

The thing is, if I write a review for them they own my words. Plus I've added value to their site. For free. They want me to work for free.

If you do post content or submit material ... you grant Amazon.com and its affiliates a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, and display such content throughout the world in any media.

Yikes.

So I turned it in to a fun writing exercise with various degrees of success.

I have no idea who started it, but newly started blog Elbow of Justice is totally biting on our style, and fully cops to it.

From their link to our site:

Another bunch of Ex-Bennington students... we totally ripped off their idea for this blog.

We're so fucking elite that people have started to imitate us.

Wait'll they find out how much we've made in ad revenue this year.

As mentioned below, there is some talk circulating around the interwebs regarding a blogger code of conduct co-authored by Jimmy Wales and Tim O'Reilly.

I got started on this little tirade after reading a quote from Mr. O'Reilly in the New York Times:

Mr. O’Reilly said the guidelines were not about censorship. “That is one of the mistakes a lot of people make — believing that uncensored speech is the most free, when in fact, managed civil dialogue is actually the freer speech,” he said. “Free speech is enhanced by civility.”

This sounds like some crazy Orwellian shit to me. 'Censorship enhances free speech' requires the kind of logical jump necessary to believe that ignorance is strength. I asked him, via his blog, to make further comment on it. If I get a further comment, I'll post it here.

Some on Tim's blog have suggested that the code of conduct should be adopted because "Do you know how many people are afraid to post or comment fearing the vitriol. [sic] Their voices are not heard."

Anyone who doesn't speak because they're afraid they'll be contradicted - or worse, insulted - has no place in a conversation.

Only individual blog owners have any business regulating civility.

I've already made it my policy to delete (or edit) comments that I find annoying or spammy. (LIAM!)

Those who agree with this code of conduct don't need it, and those who need it won't adopt it. It's a pointless conversation, a pointless exercise. A conversation starter, and a weak one at that for precisely the same reasons that the code of conduct is worthless.

The only possible application for the above code of conduct is so that a blog owner challenged on their decision to censor their readers can cite a source instead of (gasp) using their own words to convey the strength of their convictions.

And, I say again, people who won't speak because they're scared of someone disagreeing with them, even abusively and inappropriately, doesn't really have a place in a serious conversation.

We should thank our lucky stars we only have to worry about idiots photoshopping our heads into gross or disturbing pictures, unlike so many in the world who actually have something real to be concerned about should they exercise their right to free speech.

And, as Dylan often says, Americans tend to be awful, really just terrible, at risk assessment.

There is a serious dereliction of sense involved in the fear of internet death threats. Does anyone have statistics for the number of people murdered last year over something they wrote on the internet?

How about car accidents?

If we're going to start really acting on our fears, let's do it with some sense.

Kathy Sierra, you can start going to speaking engagements again, but I reckon you'd better walk to them.

The other day, a regular employer asked me my IQ. I didn't know. My parents never had me tested, and I never contested the decision. I think their rationale was that an IQ test was an essentially useless metric that had no real bearing on my potential for success in life. Which is kind of what I think.

But since Simon asked me, I've been wondering. So, out of curiosity, I went to a couple online sites to get tested. I scored 141 and 139 at http://www.iqtest.com/ and http://www.iq-testing-online.com/ respectively.

I want to take the Stanford-Binet test, but I can't find a place to take it online or any place in the city that offers a paid sit-down test. I could buy a testing kit, which would allow me to take the test myself and administer the test to people, but that would cost me $1000.

Which I don't want to pay. I nearly didn't pay the $6 required for the second IQ test's results.

The scores I got were about what I expected. Over the course of my life, people have often estimated my IQ in the 'high 130s to mid 140s'.

After taking the test and confirming their suspicions, I don't feel any different. It's about what I expected, plus it's kind of arbitrary. It doesn't measure my ambitions, effort, or amiability, which are all important factors in personal success.

But now I know.

...and even if you didn't, the Zoological Society of London has launched the most wonderful site, called EDGE (which stands for Evolutionarily Distinct & Globally Endangered). It was created to raise awareness of unique and critically endangered animals that you have probably never heard of. Two-thirds of the top 100 EDGE mammal species are currently receiving little or no conservation attention. Little guys like The Indri, pictured at left The Long-beaked echidna, and The Long-Eared Jerboa could be DEAD FOREVER, but at least their pictures will live on in the Information Super-highway. However, the point of the website is not to delight us for years to come with its funny little pictures of animals soon to be DEAD FOREVER, but to implement the research and conservation actions needed to secure the little fella's future. It's also a place one can donate money to support local scientists in the conservation effort. Specifically, they aim to see that every animal in their Top 100 most endangered receive attention within the next 5 years.

Plus, apparently, a bit of a sissy. I got a 70 on their little test. Ordinarily I don't post shit like this - even if it's just for fun and done by the kids. But this one has a great pictoral test and an introduction starring a true man among men, Mr. Bruce Campbell.

So what if it's just advertising for old spice. I had fun, dammit. What did you score?

The story so far:
Stephen: Hello!
Stephen: So, I encountered something strange this evening.
Stephen: I tried to go to a website, www.serials.ws
Valeria K: Hello, let me know how can I help you?
Stephen: and I recieved a message saying that the website could not be found
Stephen: not my ordinary browser message, but an earthlink page that told me the site couldn' be found
Stephen: I entered the same URL into a proxy website, like anonymizer
Stephen: and the webpage loaded fine
Stephen: responded to search queries, etc.
Stephen: So, clearly, the page is live and on the internet but earthlink will not let me access it.
Stephen: Which means that the page is 'censored' or blocked from me by earthlink
Valeria K: Please give me a moment while I go through the issue.
Stephen: I'd like to know if I can get taken off this filtering, and if I can't, I'd like to know what web pages are blocked/censored by earthlink.

I was preparing to put together some past / present pictures of Lindsay Lohan for an entry about that crazy robot.

I figured that WireImage would be a place for me to get nice clean images to use for the entry. I was going to pay for the use and everything until I read their user agreement, which contains this passage:

CUSTOMER SHALL NOT AND AGREES THAT HE/SHE WILL NOT (i) SAVE, PRINT, COPY OR REPRODUCE THE CONTENT AND/OR IMAGES RECEIVED THROUGH WWW.WIREIMAGE.COM

Does that mean that simply using a modern web browser - which saves images to my hard drive as part of the cache - instantly violates the user agreement?

Yikes!

I guess it's back to taking my chances with google image.

On the subway tonight, Karen asked me about the origins of leet (or 1337). This sent my mind wandering back all the way to the days of BBSs.

In my mind, the origin of l33t (a shortening and transmutation of 'elite') comes from Elite BBSs, where pirated software, plus tips and manuals on hacking and phreaking, were distributed. Back in those days, just as JPEG compression was emerging, people wanted bitchin' color graphics, but didn't have the bandwidth to include photo-quality images as part of the BBS interface (though many BBSs had jpeg libraries that you could search and download pictures from). Even a 640x480 jpeg could take more than a minute to download.

But we all still wanted sweet graphics! That's where ansi came in.

ANSI had an extended character set, including straight lines, corners, and blocks of different shadings. It allowed people to create relatively complex color graphics while still only using simple character sets that could be transmitted quickly between modems.

Aside from splash screens and the occasional menu on BBSs, ANSI art was often included with pirated software as a header for the release group's .NFO file describing what was in the .ZIP file, who the members of the group are, trash talking on other groups who didn't release the cracked game as fast, etc, which you still see sometimes today.

Many of the artists (and the users) adopted the look and feel of ANSI art and incorporated it into their handles (aka usernames) and signatures. Commonly this included substitutions of ph for f (and vice versa), numbers for letters, plus sign for a lowercase T, etc.

Anyway, on the internets of today, there are archives of much of that great ANSI art from back in the day, and a lot of the work is pretty impressive.

Go check 'em out to see how much the artists did with so little.

Bennington Alum and ex-Jonathan Mann, Game Jew, sang one of his Wii songs to the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Communication at Nintendo, George Harrison.

We love you Jonathan!

So, there is this phenomenon. Where, you know, people... not, like, anyone I know or would talk to on purpose but. You know. PEOPLE. You've talked to them before. Who tend to compare people, organizations, or groups that they, the people making the comparison, view as unfavorable or generally 'not good,' these comparison-making people like to compare those 'not good' people, organizations, or groups to a certain historical figure or his, you know, historical nation-sized entourage.

Apparently, there is a name for this phenomenon. It is called 'Godwin's Law.' It has a wikipedia entry and everything. Go on over and read it. I don't want to ruin the surprise.

From the Wish-I-Woulda-Thought-of-That file comes the hilarious Uncyclopedia! Check out the listing for Shaquille O'Neal. Amazing.

Thanks to my boy, Jeff L.

There's a great post today on the Athanasius Kircher Society Blog about ways to ensure that someone was actually dead before burying them in the days before modern medicine. These included a delightful hospitals for the “doubtful dead", also known as waiting mortuaries. These were environments which encouraged the rotting of a dead body (probably very warm, very wet, and with Celine Dion songs playing on a loop)...each doubtful dead would be equipped with a string attached to a bell, so they could be all, "duuude! I'm not dead!" Sadly, corpses have the unnerving tendency to twitch, so these waiting mortuaries were rife with false alarms.

Lots more (including "security coffins" with air tubes and horns for tooting, in case you awake to find yourself buried) at Athanasius Kircher Society.

And if you're into that sort of thing (and who doesn't want to be a Lost Boy, I mean really?) head over to Germany, and check in to Propeller Island City Lodge, a hotel filled with wacky novelty rooms including a coffin room, where, dream of dreams! you can finally sleep in a coffin. The site has pictures of all 45 rooms, and if you've got some spare time on your hands (and I know you do), it's pretty fun to look at. I especially enjoyed the room with the cages hanging from the ceiling.

Ugly Overload never fails to put a smile on my face, especially when I'm feeling misanthropic.

I am quite excited to be featured on www.bedjump.com, a site dedicated to the art and thrills of jumping on hotel beds. The only downside is now millions of people can see my semi pregnant stomach. Six more months and I will have a darling baby boy. I'm going to name him Flubbles.

Watching a 17 foot marionette lick a lollipop has never been so sensual. The three storey elephant isn't nothing to scoff at neither.

This is a cool blog of repurposed stuff, linked to by the MAN "the street finds a use" himself.

http://www.kk.org/streetuse/

http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/a

So, a good portion of Thats Plenty lives in the same building as Four Eyed Monsters, the more-indie-than-indie film makers/video podcasters. Their stuff is crazy entertaining, and they are awesome folks aside from that. That being said, this post is a more general shout out to all Bennington College alumn who frequent Thats Plenty to check out the new episode, as it features one of our own fairly prominently.

This is how they roll during street fairs in Mississippi, apparently.

Somehow I doubt that town has a lot of Mexicans running around, anyway.

Fucking with Mexicans in Mississippi is like picking a fight on the internet. It's easy to act tough and be a douchebag because you're unlikely to ever meet your opponent.

From some guy's blog, located while doing a google image search for UNCRUSTABLES, a Smucker's product which is (this is true) a freezer box of individually-wrapped peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that already have the crusts removed which you merely have to thaw before eating.