how now brownpau
The New Testament for New Believers.
The New Testament for Goth Girls.
What other “New Testaments for ___” have you seen?
Update: Pyromaniac has a few more here and here and elswehere, I suppose. Thanks to Valerie for pointing those out. Indeed, it’s where Craig had gotten the “New Testament for Punks” image.
Happy Halloween or Reformation Day! The blood spatter on my site can speak to you of zombies and vampires out for brains or blood respectively, or of the spilled blood of the martyrs for the faith. Read some of Holy Office’s history on the mixed, mostly non-pagan origins of Halloween, and then check out The Dane’s uber-awesome pumpkin carving skillz. And Brandon and Wendy’s too.
Now, here’s how to do a quick and dirty blood spatter effect in Photoshop:
It’s really amateur-looking, certainly nothing approaching the quality of Stan’s blood stains, but hey, it takes two minutes to do — maybe one if you’re quick with Photoshop keyboard shortcuts.
Update: I <3 SideJobTrack. That’s all.
To my dearest SideJobTrack, Livejournal, Ning, Commission Junction, and a few other websites out there:
You are valuable services, and I love you all from the bottom of my heart, but I have an urgent request: please stop hiding your login forms behind javascript show/hide links! I’m very keyboard-oriented, so my first reflex when signing in to a service is to TAB to the login fields, type my username and password, and press Enter. When you require a click on a “Sign in” link to pop up the login form element, you force me to move my hand to the mouse, thus wasting precious seconds I could be spending typing in my info. It all adds up. So please, show your login forms in plain sight.
(And please don’t tell me to set my TAB to go through links as well as form elements. That’s unacceptable; this isn’t Internet Explorer.)
The same goes for you too, Flickr, making me click through no less than two screens (1,2) to get in. I suggest a simple form on your front page with a username and password field, and two radio buttons: one for classic Flickr users and the other for merged Yahoo accounts. Should be pretty easy for that to forward to a script which determines what goes to which login server.
Come on, there’s nothing wrong with showing a few text fields and a submit button on your front page. It’s not a blight on your design, and it makes things easier for your users.
Has anyone else noticed a lot more incoming spam “marketing” email from eBay which turns out to be authentic and not just more phishing attempts? Yeah, me too. Here’s how to kill the spam:
Nothing new. Just like Yahoo “marketing” preferences of yore, eBay has decided to go with the not-wholly unexpected business strategy of using unsolicited direct advertising to antagonize customers, and hiding away the option of turning the junk off. Way to go, BigCo.
So I was wondering what to do with my old whyblog.org domain, which has sat idle and ignored since I used it for my digital art thesis on weblogs and RSS feeds over two years ago.
Then I saw the big-sans-serif-on-white design of Flock, and Mathowie’s parody of it, and I thought about all the wide-eyed “Web 2.0” buzz that’s been surrounding us lately. On a sudden impulse, I wrote up a series of catchy-sounding buzz phrases in a text file, and threw together a PHP script which would grab the text file, split its contents into an array, randomize the order, style, and hyperlinkage of each phrase in the array, then mash it all back together in a lovely remix of bold technological jargon.
Buzz is the result: a dynamic, chaotic, ironic hypertext poem which draws on the starry-eyed breathlessness of newer media’s current utopian moment, all in the big-sans-serif-on-white style I’ve dubbed “White Elephant.” Random phrases will link to search results on various sites so you can see just how real the buzz is. So go check out Buzz, and enjoy. Be sure to refresh. You might just pick up a new slogan for your new Web 2.0 enterprise.
(Also see the “Create Your Own Web Two Point Oh Company” tool.)
Update: Sorry, Haughey isn’t in “White Elephant” mode anymore; he’s now gone back to basics: gray background and horizontal rules. The New really is Old.
I seem to have become the de facto go-to guy for support on del.icio.us daily blog posting, such that even del.icio.us staff in the mailing list have pointed to me when asked about the feature. Me, I got my info on it from the list (how very meta). Later, that entry somehow beat everyone else to the top of Google for the search term.
What can I say? There’s no SEO strategy better than producing compelling and informative content.
(Anyway, this state of affairs will probably change when the feature comes out of beta and gets its own support page. Then I’ll be like one of those unofficial-but-approved online fanlistings.)
Cheap And Tiny is a weblog about cheap and tiny gadgets, exploring the lower boundaries of size and cost in the world of personal electronics. Your writer: Raffy. Your enterprising administrator: me. Check it out. Raffy has started it off with a look at Apple’s new iPod versus the Sony Playstation Portable.
I’ve had “problogging” on the brain lately, and I was formulating plans to start one of those weblog networks with a number of narrow-band topical sites, running WordPress on a shared reseller account with text ads somewhere, meeting some of the demand for certain kinds of niche-interest content while drawing in some modest click-cash. Suddenly, however, AOL bought WeblogsInc, and now “blog network” talk is everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. Now I feel like a late bandwagon jumper-on who waited just a bit too long to get things moving.
Still, better to get things moving anyway than to sit moping, and if one can wait a bit longer to launch a series of quality sites, so much the better. One weblog at a time.
(The real challenge now is to get into that business without resorting to the use of “blog” as a verb.)
Update: Bumped this up for exposure. Apologies to anyone who received multiple or misplaced trackbacks from this entry: there seems to be a bug in WordPress which causes the most recent post to receive a trackback ping when the weblog’s home URL is linked. I might have to turn off MT’s trackback auto-discovery because of this annoyance.
From Yuga’s “What Happened To” series: What happened to MyPhilippines.com?
Those were the days, eh? Tobi Reyes, the founder of MyPhilippines — and of Impact Internet, a dialup ISP which has since disappeared — was building what should have become the ultimate Filipino search engine, content portal, and social hub: driven by its community (founded on the newly acquired Pinoyexchange) and funded by high-visibility product sponsorships and dozens of blinking, flashing, clickable GIF ads.
Mike Palacios of Pinoyexchange had invited me to join the revolution. I was already a politics and religion forum moderator for them, and I’d been wanting to get into web design and development, so I made the jump: I left the world of digital video editing to jump into the dotcom boom — a boom which turned bust the very month I arrived, June 2000. I should have seen it coming, I guess: NASDAQ had crashed, Silicon Valley’s extravagant partying had died down, and the “Long Boom” utopianists were falling silent.
I was there for about three months as “Web Executive.” My job was to manage a small team of web designers which got smaller and smaller till there was just me, and the company had been acquired by a Singaporean company called Impact Digital Media Group. In that time, there was a meeting, followed by a weekend of somewhat patronizing human resources team-building activities at a resort somewhere in Laguna, then a flurry of resignations over the next few weeks. When the cubicle walls and timecard punchers were installed, I left for a better offer from a video archiving company in Makati.
For a time, MyPhilippines.com continued on. Yuga took over my post well after I left, and I liked the designs that came after my rather amateur start. Today, however, nothing seems to be there but a preview ad for prepaid internet and credit cards. Tobi, are you out there? What’s up next?
NOTE: This work is fiction. Any resemblance to real persons or entities, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Source of inspiration here.
“Mullenvegg? Is thet you?”
The voice was familiar, but Matt did not respond. Cautiously he rounded the corner, eyes darting in every direction, trying to make out any threatening forms in the murky haze of light from the Bay Bridge. This part of downtown wasn’t so great past midnight, and the fog wasn’t helping. “Should have brought a stun gun or something,” he mumbled under his breath.
“Vhat need for a stun gun, Mullenvegg?” The voice, Russian, heavily accented, came from right behind him. Matt whirled around with a startled yelp, hands instinctively shoving away the black-clad figure who had so silently walked up to him.
“Dammit, Piotr! You know I hate that!”
Piotr Vasilevsky staggered back from the force of Matt’s push, chuckling to himself. “Okay, okay, Mullenvegg, I apologize. Just heving my fun, you know.”
Matt swallowed, trying to compose his wild-eyed face after the startled rush, willing his racing heart to back down out of his throat. “Okay, Piotr. I’m here. This had better be good. Now what do you want?”
“Ah, you Americans, always right to the business,” Piotr muttered, smoothing out his leather bomber jacket. He loved that thing. Sometimes he’d even wear those silly flight goggles that had come with it. Except he liked to call them his “googles.” He thought himself incredibly clever, especially when he sent those anonymous “meet me for marketing” emails to Matt. Why do I keep coming, Matt wondered to himself, and his inner dialogue responded, Because maybe you can make him know what’s wrong with his business. Maybe you can save him from the scourge of the spam industry.
“I hev a new proposition for you, tovarisch,” Piotr said with a wink. “An offer you cannot refuse.”
“Oh God, not again,” Matt sighed, rolling his eyes. “You know the shit I got in for that whole search engine spam brouhaha. Affiliate deals are okay, Piotr. Text ads, banners, maybe even animated ‘shoot the terrorist for free iPod Nano’ banners, as long as they’re not those fake shaking Windows alerts, but not more of this stupid spa-”
“Is not spam!” It was nearly a shout — it might as well have been. One of those ubiquitous San Francisco mendicants yelled from some hidden corner, “Shut up, I’m sleeping here!”
Matt faced Piotr, arms folded, face calm, though the intensity of the Russian web marketer’s outburst had startled him anew. The man did have a wife and a daughter to feed, back in Saint Petersburg — a fact he never failed to remind his “Client 2.0,” as he insisted on calling his favored customers.
“Okay, Piotr, not spam, then. What do you have for me?”
“Great opportunity, my friend,” Piotr began, “very simple, but uses these ‘blags’ that are all the rage now-”
“Blogs, Piotr.” Matt was getting annoyed.
“Blorgs, yes, whatever.” He waved his hand nonchalantly. “Ve hev an application to make blorgs, like that Pressword of yours-”
“WordPress.”
“Ah, WordPress!” Piotr’s eyes lit up. “Clever, Mullenvegg, to mix the acts of clicking and writing in a name!” He smiled unctuously. “Anyway, ve make the blorgs, no? Then ve post to it vith a bort which you set to-”
“A what?” Matt frowned, starting to see what Piotr was getting at, and not liking it at all.
“Bort! You know, little script you put into cron, to automate task-”
“That’s a bot. I don’t-”
“Bort, yes!” His hands gestured wildly. “The bort gets text from the other sites, modifies it slightly, reposts — instant content! All ve need is the ads! I start on your new Pressword.com with something like tips on gambling in, vhat do they call it, Tennessee Holdem…”
“Texas,” Matt corrected him, but his heart was not in it.
“Yes, Texas, the poker!” Piotr’s face was eager, triumphant. Matt’s was openly dismayed.
“We can’t do that,” Matt said as gently as possible “Not only is it incredibly unethical, but it means copyright and terms of service violations.”
The Russian’s face only grew more agitated. “Ve use the Creative Commons content, then, Mullenvegg! The bort can scan vhat licenses are noncommercial, nonattribution, da? They vill not mind if they do not notice. Ve can call it remixing!” He had taken on an almost pleading tone. “Come now, friend. It vill make thousands! Think of little Sasha in Saint Petersburg-”
“I can’t stand before the community and say I used a plagiarism bot to take other people’s content for money, then just call it art, man!” Matt burst out. But then he paused. “Wait. Saint Petersburg? Which one?”
“Eh?” Piotr frowned, the crafty smile long gone.
“Is Sasha in Saint Petersburg in Russia, Piotr? Or is it the one in Florida? How much is your airfare for these ‘marketing’ meetings anyway?”
“Oh, come now, tovarisch, Russia, Florida, all same, vhat matters is-”
“Don’t you tovarisch me,” Matt said sternly. Suddenly he had lost all patience. “I’m not doing this. I knew you’d try and push another of these damned internet ‘marketing’ ploys on me. Why do I bother?” He turned around and began to walk away. “Forget it, Piotr,” he spat over his shoulder. “I’ve messed with that world, and it’s shit. It’s all shit. Go to hell.”
There was a splash, a click, directly from behind him. Matt stopped in his tracks as something cold and hard poked into his back. Damn that man’s quick, quiet feet! And that gun. From the click, it was probably that MP-446 Viking he had picked up on eBay. Never turn your back on him. Never!
“Perhaps it is not I who is goink to hell, eh, Mullenvegg,” Piotr’s voice rasped, his breath practically on the back of his neck. There was a strong odor of vodka. “Now, do ve hev a deal, or not?”
Matt inhaled deeply, tensing his hands. “Oh, I think we have a deal, tovarisch,” he muttered. And with one quick, fluid motion, Matt whirled around, hands flying, left fist connecting straight with the Russian’s right cheek, the other hand grabbing Piotr’s gun-holding wrist and squeezing that exact nerve which would cause him to drop the pistol without squeezing the trigger.
Two seconds later, Matt was emptying the Viking’s magazine, and Piotr Vasilevsky was on the ground, gripping his right wrist in pain.
“Here’s the deal, Piotr. You never email me again, and I add your IP to the Akismet blacklist.” Matt threw the empty gun and magazine to the ground behind him. “The terms are non-negotiable.”
“You’re losing a fortune, Mullenvegg,” gasped Piotr, scrambling to his feet and backing away from Matt warily. “Ve’ll find other buyers! Maybe Werisign, eh? They vill not be quite so… so honest!” He spat the word out like a curse.
“Go away, Piotr,” Matt said, his hands still balled into fists. “I’m a blogger. You’re a spammer.” That left fist was aching a bit, though. “I am your enemy, not your client.”
Piotr scowled, looked as if he was about to say something, but then abruptly turned around and stalked off into the night fog without a further word.
Matt released a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. He still won’t learn, he thought, he stil thinks it’s about the money. He began to walk in the opposite direction, towards the closest BART station. He examined his throbbing left hand. Ow. I must have hit him harder than I thought I could. Better get this looked at…
Update: Film link below no longer works, as the Hanso website is now all ugly and Flash-based. You can follow more of my “LOST” notes in the TV category.
Update: The Dharma Initiative Orientation film (SPOILERS!) is now up on the Hanso Foundation website. You’d think they would post a higher quality copy, that being the “official” website and all. Obviously polar bears got to the film reel and had a chew on it before they could do a capture and transfer to Flash.
At this moment, 9:26pm of 5 Oct 2005, there are exactly zero results on Google for “The Dharma Initiative.” That’s going to change starting in the next thirty minutes or so. I’m pleased to see that my “Lost” theory as of last episode was close, though not too close, but I knew the ba gua was significant. Possible spoilers follow; highlight the text to read.
My theory from before this episode, “Orientation”: [SPOILER]The ba gua, popularly a Chinese good luck emblem, is the logo of Dharma, a company involved in manipulating the fabric of chance and reality based on the thoughts and desires of its “customers.” The island is their testing ground, but something has gone wrong, and the experiment is pulling people to itself, stretching out tentacles of chance to anyone infected directly or indirectly, with The Numbers — a memetic pathogen which changes its victims’ luck, bending reality around them and ultimately drawing them to the island, where the experiment brings to life the thoughts and desires of the more “sensitive” survivors. The polar bear, the shark, the Monster, the anomalies and sicknesses, are all the result of Dharma Corp’s meddling in the fabric of reality, but ultimately have sprung from the tortured minds of the characters. Kind of like that “Shore Leave” episode of classic Star Trek.[/SPOILER]
Revealed on tonight’s episode of Lost: [SPOILER]The Dharma Initiative, a collective of 1980s scientists who conducted research in a variety of fields with the funding of a wealthy benefactor, refer to the island as a “station” with unique electromagnetic qualities. The Numbers are some kind of maintenance routine which resets Desmond’s counter and keeps something from happening. (A dimensional rift? The release of a world-threatening pandemic? Nothing at all?) It would seem that the various phenomena on the island are results of the scientists’ experiments from long ago. (But not too long ago; c’mon, Betamax was around by 1980. Dharma could have shot their instructional videos on tape. The “film” was so obviously an edited video with strobe and dust-and-scratches filters applied to it. Too much fancy graphics work and clarity for a simple 8mm or 16mm film.)[/SPOILER]
It’s kind of funny that the ba gua (or pa kwa, as I knew it growing up) is treated with such mystery in this series. I was surrounded by pa kwas in the Philippines, whose culture is strongly influenced by its significant Chinese heritage. (Both sides of my family are part Chinese.) Thousands of houses in Manila have the little red pa kwa mirror over their front doors to invite good luck and ward off evil spirits. I was not particularly fond of the emblem myself.
Updates: Also see The Hanso Foundation, and the same person seems to have registered TheDharmaInitiative.com. Collin vs. Blog has some background on Desmond’s choice of reading material. More on that, and references to the “black air,” from Mostly Muppet. Also note this reference to B. F. Skinner. Egoplex has some thoughts on The Numbers, 108, and solar rotations.
Ooohh, something that just occurred to me: when Michael’s ex (Walt’s mother) left to go to Europe with Walt, what was this huge, high-paying job she was going off to take? My theory is that it was something to do with the Dharma Initiative, which would explain Walt’s deeper involvement with the island’s goings-on. Maybe Walt has Polar Bear Summoning Powers or something.
