Modestly Hot Sites

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> Ugly websites are good business!

> Ugly websites are bad for business!

This whole debate on whether bad design is good business or not makes me think of two things:

  1. Filipino rapper Andrew E’s classic hit Humanap Ka Ng Panget, where he advises men, “Kung gusto mong lumigaya ang inyong buhay, humanap ka ng panget at ibigin mong tunay,” that is, go out with an ugly woman and love her truly.
  2. Strong Bad Email #99, A Different Town, where towards the end, he sings about Homsar, “And this little weirdo would be a modestly hot girl to help me through the hard times, you know, the kind that are only sorta hot so they don’t mess around with other guys.”

That said, I find it easier to make modestly hot sites than ugly ones.

“Gospel of Judas” Roundup

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To summarize, an old Coptic manuscript of the Gnostic Gospel of Judas was discovered in the 1970s and found its way to National Geographic. It’s a remarkable archaeological artifact, with great value for historical study of the literature and beliefs of spiritualist cults in the second to third centuries AD.

The mainstream press outlets have been taking advantage of the Holy Week season and upcoming Da Vinci Code movie to publicize the manuscript as though it were a revolutionary new finding to shake the foundations of Christianity. It really isn’t all that, however, and their positioning it as such — backed up by such fringe historians as Elaine Pagels — is a discredit to the true historical value of the Coptic document. A few links and quotes on the issue follow.

  • Here’s my original post on it.
  • GetReligion: The gospel of ignorance. “Before I criticize the ridiculous ignorance of the media in covering this very old story, let me offer a critique of the church. If Christians knew anything about their history, if they knew anything about how the New Testament canon came to be formed, I doubt these stories would be met with more than a yawn.” Followup: Work That Rolodex.
  • Internet Monk: The Stupids Do New Testament 101. “We’ve reached a point with DaVinci madness where nothing is too comic for the mainstream media to report with a straight face. Ideas about New Testament studies that wouldn’t appear on a freshman pop quiz are now tossed about the main stream media as if they are established facts.”
  • Ben Witherington on the Judas texts: Part 1 and Part 2. “This document has no material which could or should shake the faith of Christians in what is said in the NT about Jesus and Judas for the very good reason that it comes from a much later source, and one that not even its advocates are really suggesting is written by the historical Judas.” Also see his posts on The NPR Discussion, and The Sad Truth about Judas.
  • Stand To Reason: An Ancient Manuscript Sheds New Light? Number of canonical New Testaments manuscripts: 5,366 separate corroborating Greek manuscripts. Number of “Gospel of Judas” manuscripts: 1 secondhand Coptic translation.
  • HolyOffice: Newsflash, Judas was Shakespeare! “Bard College’s Bruce Chilton sounds like he’s trying to explain to a non-baseball fan why hitters don’t run to third base first when he says the Judas gospel ‘never set out to provide historical information and to pretend it does is a distortion.'”
  • Adam Kotsko: Thoughts on Gnosticism. “Everything you hate about Christianity was present in Gnosticism, except worse.”
  • Passing Open Windows: “The hype surrounding this “discovery” has been more about financing the dig than about uncovering the truth.”
  • Lots of stuff from Jesus Creed’s exploration of the manuscript’s content: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. “This is a good time to explain that this ms [manuscript] was actually discovered in about 1978, but its owner at the time wanted more money than museum curates, etc., were willing to pay. To make an involved story short, the ms ended up in a safe box in a bank, and in the process it had been folded to fit into a box and frozen to protect it — neither of which were good ideas.”
  • Ignatius Press Blog: Shaking in my slippers. “The bottom line is that this line of marketing (which is what it is) has been used before about The ‘Gospel’ of Thomas and other gnostic texts. Wild claims are made, pseudo-histories are written, conspiracies are created. Yawn, yawn, yawn. Sadly, it does work: on numerous reporters and those with an axe to grind with Christianity and, specifically, the Catholic Church.”
  • Michael Barber has some basic info on the Gnostics and their “Lost Gospels.”
  • Christian Science Monitor: A gospel’s rocky path from Egypt’s desert to print. Interesting article about the manuscript’s own adventures through outrageous pricing and theft before it came to National Geographic for dating and translation.
  • Christianity Today Magazine: The Judas We Never Knew. “Let’s put it this way: This new text tells us nothing more about Jesus’ relationship with Judas than does Jesus Christ Superstar.” (Although I would argue that we actually stand to learn more about it from “Jesus Christ Superstar” than from the Gnostic Gospel of Judas.)
  • J.P. Holding: Another Garage Sale Gospel. “The story is virtually the same each time on of these ‘new’ documents is uncovered: The much better attested canonical Gospels are treated as the bad guys and ignored, while the new kid on the block who can barely walk and chew gum at the same time is asked to all the parties.”

Problogging Interview with Yuga

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Pinoy Problogger: Paulo Ordoveza. That’s my email interview with Yuga on “problogging.” I really don’t have too much fame to claim for my single pro weblog attempt so far: Cheap and Tiny. I’m just not sure where profitable niche-content weblogs will fit into my grand scheme, so my follow-up on that particular enterprise has been lackluster over the past year.

I don’t plan to abandon the idea altogether, as I have other content-driven ideas in the pipeline, but it may mutate, depending on what tools become available in the near future, and how much spare time I’ll have on the side to make things work. That’s why I recommend against leaning too much on latest buzzwords and formats: by staying adaptable, one may find that other formats may serve the target audience better and generate larger profits. For example, I’m starting to think that a well-optimized online gadget store with witty copy and affiliate content may be a better suited venue for my needs, rather than a gadget weblog swimming in a sea already saturated with other gadget weblogs. Think Woot.

Now, the fun part about my above interview with Yuga is that via the comments, I found Kutitots, the weblog of Gail, one of my freshman graphic design staffers back in my GUIDON editor days, who would later fill my editorial boots better than I ever did myself. I gave a talk to her design staff in `01, and haven’t heard from her since. All this time, she had no idea that the “Brownpau” she’d heard of was the same graphic design editor under whom she had gotten her start in The GUIDON — until she saw Yuga’s interview. Now she’s preparing to get married to her sweetheart, and another of her friends, also one of my design staffers and later a GUIDON editor as well, is already married. These kids, *sniff, tear* they just grow up so fast!

Update: Gail’s more verbose history. Wow, this brings back memories. I still cringe at the idea of her predecessor having been a graphic designer after me.

DC Metro “Flipbook” Ads

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WMATA recently installed flipbook-style advertising — a series of stills in slitted lightboxes which produce a motion effect due to your own persistence of vision as the train speeds by. The ads are installed in tunnels between Metro Center, Gallery Place/Chinatown, and Judiciary Square on the Red Line to Glenmont. (More on that from WaPo, NBC4, and DCist.) Here’s my very messy and compression-artifact-laden attempt to catch the ads with my mobile phone’s video recorder:

Update: Much better video of the ads from Life Outtacontext, who likens the tunnel flipbook format to a “21st Century Zoetrope.”

Downgrading my DSL

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Remember the time I got DSL a year ago? I got it at Verizon’s promo rate of $29/month for the first year, with the first month free. It sounded pretty good at the time — until their $14.95/month promo rate was introduced a month later, at which point I was locked into the prior deal for a year. I know it’s been a year because I got two renewal notices last week, one by mail, urging me to renew at the continued promo rate of $29/month; and another one by email, urging me to do the same for $14.95/month. Both were quite insistent that I do so before the regular rate of $37/month kicked in on the May deadline date.

I called Verizon and, after a surprisingly short wait on hold, asked the sales rep which rate I should be getting. It turns out that the $29 plan is for a 3.0 Mbps download speed, while the $14.95 plan is for 768 kbps. I really don’t need 3.0 Mbps of throughput, so I asked to be downgraded to the cheaper deal on renewal. They complied quickly and without any fuss. So, here I am, paying half of what I’ve been paying for DSL, at a speed of less than 1/4 what I used to be at, and I feel no discernible difference, as I rarely engage in high-bandwidth activities like BitTorrent and viewing of excessively long movies.

(The extra $15 per month I now have from the downgrade will go into my “Get the Star Trek Original Series DVD Set” piggy bank — which, I now admit, actually serves to offset the cost, as I just won a secondhand ST:TOS DVD set on an impulse eBay auction.)

On the “Gospel of Judas”

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Update: Also see my Gospel of Judas roundup.

Gnostic Gospel of Judas, they say! Hot on the heels of Christ On Ice and the, er, “newly discovered” Gospel fragment, the news outlets are currently drooling all over National Geographic’s recent conclusive dating and translation of surviving fragments of the Apocryphal Gospel of Judas, now dated to about 300 CE. The text is classically Gnostic, emphasizing a duality splitting Christ’s “spiritual” and “fleshly” natures, as opposed to Christian orthodoxy’s belief in the Incarnation.

Looking beyond the wide-eyed “OMG THIS WILL REVOLUTIONIZE CHRISTIANITY AS WE KNOW IT” sensationalism, Internet Monk asks if a 300 year-old apocryphal biography of George Washington would be regarded as authentic were it discovered in 1970. James F. Robinson, an expert on ancient Egyptian texts, regards the Judas Gospel as mostly a dud, produced by Cainite Gnostics who took it upon themselves to “rehabilitate” villians of Bible mythos. Even if you don’t believe in the account of Judas, there’s no denying his contributions to the Christian narrative. Truly a historical icon.*

[crossposted to Metafilter]

“V For Vendetta” Alphabet Review Roundup

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I actually haven’t seen the movie yet, nor have I read the graphic novel, but the chance to see if there was a movie review for every letter of the alphabet was too good to pass up. I stumbled over K, X, Z, and V (heh) and had to resort to Livejournal and MSN Spaces a few times, but there we have it, 26 “V For Vendetta” movie reviews along the same theme: some verbose, some versed, some vacuous, some vindictive:

Outage

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Sorry about the overnight outage. The site was hit by a “XANAX” comment spam attack, prompting a well-justified overnight lockdown from Site5. The spams came in at a rate of about 2-5 comments per second, from a botnet — a network of infected PCs — with machines mostly in the 212.138.64 range. This meant multiple IPs from various locations were simultaneously hammering mt-comments.cgi, and since I use static files, each comment meant a db entry and a static file rebuild. Doing this hundreds of times per minute meant intense load on the machine, so that the comment spam flood effectively operated like a DDOS attack, slowing down all the sites on the server.

Since old open comments are usually the target of these attacks, I’ve reinstalled MTCloseComments to block off entries older than a month, and scoured my access logs for all the IPs in the botnet to add to my blacklist — a mostly imperfect solution, but returning 403’s to spam bots should be enough of a stopgap for now, I guess. Pity; I was hoping I’d be able to keep older comments open for more discussion, but the spam is just too much trouble. Hence the spam aspect of the tragedy of the commons — spammers, in their overpowering thirst for inbound links, will drown out conversation and disrupt the flow of communication for the chance that 0.1% of their victims are gullible enough to buy cheap fake drugs or click links on their ugly, keyword-littered websites.

What I’m wondering is, if a weblog spammer’s aim is to boost a site’s search engine rank with multiple links to the site from multiple pages, what use is it if his rampant posting of those links just brings down the target site, making it impossible for search engines to crawl, defeating the purpose of the spam anyway — even without considering that I’m already using nofollow in all comment and trackback links? It just goes to show, as I’ve said before, weblog spam might make a lot of money for the spammers and botnet operators, but money can’t buy them brains.

Pickles and Pandora

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IMG_6062.JPG IMG_6065.JPG

Separate photos, since I didn’t want to try and get the cat and the parakeet together for a group shot. I can assure you, however, that Pandora does not care a single whit that there is a squawking parakeet in the room, as you can see from her nonchalant drowsiness.