YABACS
Yet Another Bad Album Cover Site. I never get enough of these. I grew up thinking the world was a hideous, terrifying place…but it turns out, it was just the Seventies. Whew!
This site is particularly fun, as it’s the man’s actual vinyl album collection, and he offers digitized samples of the delights in store. Also, links to CD’s and DVD’s (uh-huh…some of this stuff has been recently re-released). Yes, they sound EXACTLY the way they look.
I found this trawling through my stats page. Whenever someone finds sweasel.com through a Google search, I always run the same search and see where I place next to the competition. This was an MSN search of “peanut lady fuck.” I do not actually have any posts about “peanut lady fuck” (and neither did this guy), but search engines aren’t very clever about these things. As long as those three words ever appeared together on a page (including comments), it’ll register a hit. That’s right; you guys contribute to my search engine mash-up weirdnesses. Thank you!
I am not an authoritative “peanut lady fuck” source (though I will be now). I placed on page eight. Somebody clicked through eight pages of links searching for his answer. Just, damn.
I am, however, hit #5 on page one for “supernumery nipples”!
That thumping sound you hear is my grandmother. In heaven. Wagging her tail.
September 21, 2007 — 8:31 am
Comments: 53
Skype is down
UPDATED 14:02 GMT: Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Additionally, downloads of Skype have been temporarily disabled. We will make downloads available again as quickly as possible.
…for those trying to get in touch. For those pissed off that I don’t
give out my Skype details: I’m ashamed of my high, squeaky voice.
Where we are at 1100 GMT
By Villu Arak on August 17, 2007.Hello all,
As Europe has woken up to a new day and Asia is entering the evening hours, here’s the latest on the sign-on problem.
We’re on the road to recovery. Skype is stabilizing, but this process may continue throughout the day.
An encouraging number of users can now use Skype once again. We know we’re not out of the woods yet, but we are in better shape now than we were yesterday.
Finally, we’d like to dispel a couple of theories that we are still hearing. Neither Wednesday’s planned maintenance of our web-based payment services nor any form of attack was related to the current sign-on issues in any way.
We’ll update you again as soon as we can. Thanks for hanging tight.
Man, I didn’t realize how dependent I was until it went down.
WHERE IS EVER’BODY?
August 16, 2007 — 4:36 pm
Comments: 29
Stalking the BBC
Brian: Excuse me. Are you the Judean People’s Front?
Reg: Fuck off! We’re the People’s Front of Judea——————————————————————————–
Reg: If you want to join the People’s Front of Judea, you have to really hate the Romans.
Brian: I do!
Reg: Oh yeah, how much?
Brian: A lot!
Reg: Right, you’re in.
However bad our media is, the BBC is shockingly worse. Smug, bitter, anti-West, pro-just-about-anything-else — I swear, they work “George Bush is stupid” jokes into the cooking program. It’s like swimming through a leftoid fever dream.
Brits are required to fund the BBC by paying a hefty annual license fee. A colo(u)r TV license currently stands at £135.50 annually, which is…$278.14627 per today’s exchange rate. Free if you’re old, half price if you’re blind (I guess they figure blind people aren’t using the video portion. Maybe they recycle it).
Having ‘customers’ that are forced to pay up whether they like your product or not is bad, m’kay? Brits of the conservative persuasion (a small, angry tribe) are justly furious at the BBC’s clear ideological bent, but they have no recourse. Being stuck in a situation they are utterly helpless to change makes people mad, and mad is going to spill onto the web.
The best blog tracking the BBC was Biased BBC. I’ve read it for a couple of years, but it’s been going for five. In my time, there wasn’t a whole lot of action in the main posts; the good stuff was in the comments. An open thread there will typically run for a couple of hundred comments, most by good and conscientious regular commenters. Trollage was minor.
Sweet deal, huh? An excellent, popular blog that writes its own damn self…?
I guess not. Someone with a set of keys decided to impose a little authoritay on the place. Have you ever seen someone get hold of the moderating stick and go nuts? It’s an ugly scene. It’s like a blood frenzy. It starts with “off topic” posts and naturally moves to the posts that complain about the deletions, and then to any complaints and settles into a cranky, arbitrary, uneasy place, where no-one knows quite where they stand. For a blog that relies so heavily on commenters, it was a suicidally arrogant act.
This happened when I was away at Weaselfest last week, so I didn’t see it in realtime. I’m not a contributor there, anyhow. A faithful reader, but the BBC is not (yet) imposed on me by force, so I seldom have much to add. But that alpha wolf shit really gets my knickers in a twist, so I pulled my link (that’s right — offa my blogroll! They’ll rue the day they angered a weasel. Rue, I say!)
I repeat: Being stuck in a situation they are utterly helpless to change makes people mad, and mad is going to spill onto the web. A couple of different schismatic sites sprang up and fizzled. One looks like it’s got the right attitude and is going to stick: BBC-Biased — Exposing the bias of the BBC.
Keep an eye on it. It’s picked up several of the better commenters from the old site, and will undoubtedly pick up more when word gets out (it’s hard to leave a breadcrumb trail in a place where posts disappear).
I’ll even put it on my blogroll (my blogroll!) if I can remember where I left the keys…
July 20, 2007 — 9:07 am
Comments: 34
Excuse me, there’s a weasel in the ballpit
That’s what the web reminds me of. It’s nothing like a super highway, it doesn’t hugely feel like an interconnected web. The way I do it, it’s more like swimming in a big, colorful, bobbly pit of information balls.
I’ve never actually been in a ballpit, for I am old. Wikipedia tells me they have hygeine issues — they’re full of children and unwashed balls. Bad stuff floats to the bottom and stays there. So, see, the comparison is perfect.
Anyhow…like so: click on a link in your own blogroll, then click on a link in his blogroll, then click on a link in her blogroll…and keep clicking links until you find yourself someplace utterly strange. I do that a lot. I was hoping to come up with a cool name for this activity, but I failed.
I am also (you may have noticed) a gigantic consumer of Wikipedia (not everything hippies do is stupid). I frequent link collecting sites like Fazed and Portent. I keep a whole page of international newspaper links that I add to (and occasionally remove from).
Here’s the problem: I use Opera, the original tabbed browser. And I drink. And I leave my desktop machine on all the time. So when I come down most mornings, I am confronted with twenty cool open Web pages and no earthly idea how I got to any of them. I think it’s important to attribute stuff properly. But then, life is full of important things I don’t do.
So please, share some of my colorful balls of unknown provenance…
Did you know there was a Daily Photo Blog community? Here’s a map of current participants. I got in through Milano Daily Photo. Bath and Budapest were good, too. I only really got to the B’s before I began to skip around. Some are better about updating than others, but I enjoyed the lot of ’em.
I really love ideas like this. They feed my sick delusional yearning for godlike powers of vision and…eavesdropping. Oh, yeah, like you wouldn’t eavesdrop if you were a god.
And so continues our proven interest in all things deer anus — behold, the Butt Out Tool.
This tool is the fastest, easiest way to disconnect the anal alimentary canal from deer or similar-sized game. Immediately after harvesting game, insert the Butt-Out Tool into the anal canal and twist until it grabs the membrane. Continue twisting another half turn, then steadily pull the Butt-Out Tool out of the canal. Extract 10″ of membrane, tie the membrane off and cut.
There’s video. (I definitely got this one from Fazed).
This tattoo artist apparently specializes in bulldogs and serial killers. Okay, I don’t recognize that very last one, but the one before that is Albert Fish, Eater of Children, and the one before that is Richard Ramirez. Not just serial killers, but badly drawn, especially losery serial killers. Would it be better if these tats were all on one guy, or spread out among several scary people with bad taste? I can’t make up my mind.
This one’s almost a year old, so you’ve probably seen it if you’re into gaming. I’m not and I hadn’t. It’s 1K Project II, a thousand cars racing through a game called Trackmania. I tried a couple of different addresses for the kid who made it, in case he had any remarks, with no luck. Then I found a page explaining how he did it — in French. My French, she is not so good — but I gather he cut together multiple walkthroughs to achieve the effect. This explains why the cars seem to have collision detection in some cases and not in others.
It’s very well done and seriously cool. Sometimes they look like shoals of fish and sometimes flocks of birds and sometimes swarms of bugs and sometimes bitchin’ cars.
Finally, this guy: Tim Knowles. He’s an artist in London of the kind that does stupid shit like ink up pine trees and put paper under them and let them draw pictures in the breeze. I know, I know…I can’t help myself. I went to a poncy art school. They polluted my mind.
Like, check out this drawing, which was made by this huge seismography thing in the back of a station wagon on the way to its own exhibition. Or the slideshow he made by mailing a box rigged with a digital camera to take a picture of its journey every ten seconds for 6,994 pictures (sadly, the whole slideshow is not online). Or these surprisingly evocative pictures of the full moon reflected in water.
Or you could, you know, bite me.
July 6, 2007 — 4:36 pm
Comments: 10
Islamic Rage Boy: the interview
Look what JW found: an interview with Shakeel Bhat, the Islamic Rage Boy. Who is, in fact, 31 and a “full-time demonstrator” (how do you say “lives in moms’ basement” in…whatever dialect they speak in Kashmir?)
Apart from drawing ridicule from bloggers, Bhat has even inspired one American neoconservative website to push “Rage Boy” merchandise — including T-shirts, beer mugs, mouse pads.
“I don’t believe this! I have no knowledge about all this. Why do they do it?” demanded Bhat, who says he has no idea how to use a computer and the Internet. [You don’t say? – ed]
Bhat also shrugged off his rather unflattering “Rage Boy” nickname.
“I don’t need any titles. I am a simple Muslim. Yes, I get enraged if someone, somewhere makes derogatory remarks about our religion or Prophet,” he said.
“Titles”? I wonder if he thinks he’s being honored in some way. It would really mean a lot to me if I knew he knew we were laughing at him.
Update: Oooo! And look at the cool picture Dawn found. Which I might possibly have tweaked just a little teeny bit. How does one get a nostril injury, anyhow?
July 5, 2007 — 3:27 pm
Comments: 54
Monday dog’s breakfast
Dog’s breakfast. I’ve always loved that expression. It’s a Britishism for ‘mess’, but it conveys a cheerful appreciation of assorted vilenesses. Like a Whitman’s sampler of rotting garbage. I imagine Queenie loping through the neighborhood, going, “ooo! A delicious dead squirrel’s bottom! And — oh look! Fresh cat shit!”
Anyhow, here’s some carrion. Enjoy!
Uncle Badger introduced me to the vehicle above, the Mazda Bongo Friendee. Okay, I’m not sure that one’s a Friendee (a subspecies of the Bongo line), but as “Mazda Bongo Friendee” is the gayest car name ever, I’m running with it. It came out in 1966 (I didn’t know there was a Mazda in 1966!) and is sold in the States as the Ford Econovan.
Gnus called my attention to this image (detail at right) and wondered if a minion we know might be moonlighting. Since McGoo isn’t here to defend himself, I figured now was a good time to post it.
The whole site is worth clicking around. Some pretty pictures. Some strange pictures. Some mildly pornographic ones. All in Portuguese, for extra added WTF?!
Bloody Mess
Half an hour ago, I was moving a chair to clean behind it, and I caught the leg against my right big toenail, tearing it half away. What a bloody mess. And by “bloody mess” I don’t mean, “I say, Rupert, this New Delhi business is a bit of a bloody mess, eh wot?” I mean, “Oh fucking hell! Blood! Everywhere! What a mess!”
See? Cleaning is unnatural.
I don’t appear to own any bandaids. I used to. What happened? I’m thinking of putting a strip of duct tape around it, but the idea of tearing it off again gives me the vapors. The nail is going to go, but I’d like to see it go gently into that dark night.
The really rotten part? I was stone cold sober. I mean, then. Not now. Certainly not now.
Finally, Dawn thinks “amok” deserves its own thread. It’s pretty interesting, I admit. I did not know this:
Running amok, sometimes referred to as simply amok (also spelled amuck or amuk), is derived from the Malay word mengamuk, meaning “to go mad with rage” (uncontrollable rage). In typical cases of running amok, someone, although having shown no previous sign of anger and/or any inclination to resort to violence, will acquire a weapon and in a sudden frenzy will attempt to kill or seriously injure everyone they meet. Amok episodes of this kind normally end with the amok-runner being killed by bystanders.
[…]
The explanation which is now most widely accepted is that amok is closely related to male honor (amok by women is virtually unknown). In many cases where the background of the amok-runner is known, there seems to have been some element of deep shame which prevented the man from living honorably, as he saw it, in his own society. Running amok was both a way of escaping the world (since perpetrators were normally killed) and re-establishing one’s reputation as a man to be feared and respected. Some observers have related this explanation to Islam’s ban on suicide, which, it is suggested, drove Malay men to create circumstances in which others would kill them. Evidence for this explanation is that the incidence of amok seems to be less where amok runners are captured and tried, rather than being beaten to death on the spot.
So it’s basically Islamic suicide by cop.
What worries me is why Dawn wants a whole thread to talk about it. I’m thinking…cry for help. Then I’m thinking, “hey, I don’t live anywhere near this woman. What do I care?”
I’m practicing my [cyber]neighbor-of-the-perp speech: “No, I’m shocked. Absolutely shocked. She was a quiet woman, kept to herself. None of us knew her all that well. Still, we never expected anything like this.”
Ow. Here comes the toe hurty.
June 25, 2007 — 5:42 pm
Comments: 34
Down and out in Visitorville
Anybody else notice the ad for this thing on Sitemeter? It’s a program that takes your usage logs and turns them into a Second Life for deaf mutes. They call it Visitorville. Your web site is rendered as a city, incoming queries from search engines are drawn as buses, and you guys shuffle off the buses — a bunch of unshaven zombie retards sunk in existential gloom with IP addresses floating over your heads — and drift around not interacting with each other. So, no change there.
It’s supposed to be a way of better visualizing website flow: rooms and buildings correspond to sections and pages. Repeat visitors have special little things floating over their heads, buyers little something elses floating over their heads, and repeat buyers are served with sticks up their backsides like all-day suckers (not true, but my posts are required by law to have at least one butt reference per).
Reminds me of the game Black & White — the last (but not the first) game I bought a whole new computer to be able to play. You’re God, and you make these little people, and they walk around doing stuff with their thoughts floating over their heads like, “I have to pee” or “I’m sad” or “I have a disease” or “I’m lonely” and I’m, like, “look, there are millions of you and you all look alike to me — needy, high-mainenance bastards, every one of you. I’m only a god here.” I got bored with it real quick. But I learned an awful lot about theology.
We must be in another wave of 3D visualization marketing ideas. Microsoft is trying it on again, with Photosynth (which I saw at Enas Yorl‘s place) and Surface (which I’m sure you’ve seen, unless you live in a yurt on the windy steppes milking horses).
I have to admit, Microsoft hater that I am, Surface is very cool. Watch some of the videos, if you haven’t. I love the idea of setting cameras and phones on the table and pulling data onto or off of them with your fingers.
But I saw prototypes of these things — not these literal things, but ones very like them — twenty years ago. I saw (and lusted after) a drafting table that was a giant pressure-sensitive tablet combined with rear projection video. I saw high-def and 3D screens and 6D mice and visualized worlds. I saw all this at a Siggraph show in…1990?
By the time we got videophones (backhandedly, via webcams) we were bored with the idea. Too much time elapsed between the tease and the release.
I damn well better still have a license when they roll out the rocketcar.
June 21, 2007 — 5:49 pm
Comments: 40
BT, DT…got this butt ugly t-shirt
Okay, so in the comments, I mentioned that I lurked on the internet for my first two years, but I had a Good Reason. Which I then left hanging like some huge hangy thing, As If You Cared. Well, back up…here it comes.
I got online in the mid-Eighties. “Online” then meant one of the big services: Compu$erve, Prodigy, GEnie. I tried them all, one after the other. I joined more than one service that claimed to be the first real Internet Service Provider (and they’re all telling the truth, depending on how much of the internet you have to provide for it to count). Portal Communications has a good claim, and they were my ISP for years.
Anyhow, we represented the first “civilian” wave of internet users and the academics, scientists and military types who were already there were not at all happy to see us coming.
So Portal made us read a bunch of posts before we were allowed access to Usenet. Mostly netiquette FAQs and stuff, but one document was extraordinary. I wish I had a copy. I don’t remember the details, but the gist was, “hey! You! Peasant! You’re not wanted here! We were forced to let you in. Keep your mouth shut and your hands to yourself or we’ll kick you out with all your smelly friends, roll up the drawbridge and then you personally will have ruined everything for everybody.”
Scared the hell out of me. I was still at the stage where I believed I could hit a wrong key combination and my monitor would explode or I’d totally break the internet or something. I kept my mouth shut for two whole years. To be honest, I didn’t really know what I was looking at, at first. Usenet didn’t seem all that different from Fidonet, which allowed local bulletin boards to hook up to each other all over the world. Except netizens were real tight-asses back then. Yeah, says Weasel, “on topic” this, Poindexter.
Two events made me realize the size and potential of what I was looking at. There was a terrible drought in the Midwest and a woman posted that rabbits had come out of the fields and nibbled her sheets on the washing line to get at the moisture. The power and homeliness of that image — as opposed to all the meteorological blah-blah-blah on the TV news — stuck in my head. And then in August 1991 the attempted coup in Moscow was “live blogged” by someone looking out his window onto Red Square.
“Hm,” I thinks to myself, “this is like some kind of…international network, or something.”
“You know,” I say, thoughtfully scratching my bonce, “these people are like…citizen journalists, or something.”
Then the Web happened in 1990, and the Eternal September happened in 1993 and the party moved on. But the principle remains the same.
June 14, 2007 — 5:24 pm
Comments: 26
The few, the loud, the 1%
Somebody blew his or her Friskies on the hood of the Weaselmobile last night. I should probably wash that off, huh?
This reminded me of something I read recently about ‘participation inequality’ on the internet. It flows from the stuff about online communities: 90% of the people who use the internet do nothing but lurk, 9% contribute a bit, and 1% are pretty much carrying the whole thing. And by “carrying” I mean “will not shut-the-fuck-up.” On blogs, it’s even more skewed; more like 95%/5%/.1%.
I am, I confess, completely mystified by this. That’s the whole dealio for me: I FINALLY get to talk back to the book/newspaper/TV program. I’ve been rustling newsprint and waving books around in the air, screaming at televisions and giving lectures to my car radio for decades. Now, it’s my turn. Back up, folks! The internet is Preparation H for the burning, itching soul.
If you don’t talk back, how is browsing the Web any different than channel-flipping cable? Not counting the abundant free hardcore porn. I don’t get what you’re getting here.
See, this is hard. I’m trying to ask a question of a group of people whose signal characteristic is that they don’t answer questions. I want to know why you Lurkie Lous and Silent Sams won’t talk to me, but it’s like asking a blind man his favorite color: it’s pointless and cruel at the same time.
So…why won’t you blind bastards talk to me?
June 13, 2007 — 5:32 pm
Comments: 34
Tribes
Primates are tribal. Drop a bunch of us on the savannah, and we promptly coagulate into angry screaming monkeyclumps and start a war.
It’s been fun watching this play out online. I’ve been here since the mid eighties, from local bulletin boards, Fidonet and PCPursuit, to Prodigy, GEnie, Compu$erve and Arbornet, from USENET to IRC to online games to Web bulletin boards to blogs. I sat down a decade ago and started to write down all the groups I’d been a part of and handles I’d posted under and I got well over 50 of the one and 100 of the other before I lost interest in the question.
The internet is particularly well suited to tribal warfare. It is a slippery place; only a “place” at all in the most metaphorical way. It’s a suitable place for anonymity, intrigue and imposture. It’s a billion timbreless voices whispering to each other in the dark.
The thing I most loved to read on USENET was the sputtering indignation of a newbie who suddenly realizes that, yes, that other guy damn well can talk to you that way and no, there’s not a thing you can do about it. But, of course, this is why internet arguments never die: they don’t have to. There is no mechanism to declare a winner and go home.
Except when there is. And moderated groups and bulletin boards tend to generate the hardest feelings of all. Moderation is a job almost impossible to do gracefully. Most places it’s like romping through a toe factory with a hammer.
I have hung out in happy places and cranky places and contributed as lavishly as I was able to the happiness and the crankiness thereof, if not always the right way around. I’ve been so busy identifying and supporting my online tribe, it totally snuck up on me, that point where I came to identify more with the online tribe than the meat tribe.
Oh, I trim my hedges and say hi to my neighbors. I vote. I shop. If the Redcoats ever come back, I’ll run to the barricades with my carbine (getting tired of keeping up my marksmanship skill in preparation for that glorious day, in fact). But if you ask me where I live, work and play, the answer to all three is on the computer. And, pretty much, online. I blame broadband. What’s satellite wifi going to do?
Leave a mark on the genome, is my guess.
June 12, 2007 — 1:52 pm
Comments: 14