Fafblog is a good blog. It is the best blog. It is a blog about God, the Universe and those Horrible Screaming Monkeys.
1. Is there an emergency?
a. Yes!
- Quick! Break glass in case of emergency.
- Oh no, now I'm all cut and bleeding on this broken glass!
- Sounds like an emergency! Quick, break more glass.
- Okay, I broke the glass! Now what?
- Oh no, what'd you do that for! You needed that glass for the emergency!
All shall prostrate themselves before SarcasmoTron! And now we shall learn of its genesis...
We will need to go back in time, back to the distant year of 1992, when motivational speakers come 'management experts' roamed the conference halls and lecture theaters of America, delivering impassioned seminars and talks. In attendance would be thousands upon thousands of corporate minions, aspiring middle management there to learn the one-line platitudes and gibberish of a new world, that which would become the dot-com bubble.
Synergy, Customer-driven, Paradigm, Core competencies, Value-added, Results-driven! Such was the ill-defined language they filled their silly heads with, and upon returning to their third-floor offices many of these people did a very curious thing. They put up framed images, each showing a word in all-caps, Times New Roman with the first and last letters several sizes larger than the rest. Above was a vaguely related photograph. The words would be 'Teamwork', 'Perseverance', suchlike.
But they don't have to be :-) Let us now lampoon those images, with whatever first enters our heads.
The sarcasmotron is a tool to make such parodies. There are other, similar tools, I wanted one of my own. This one has a gallery and an rss feed. [read on...]
Following are instructions for using the stencil generator, it's quick and easy. First, you'll need a source image to make your stencil from. You can upload a picture from your computer, or download one from the net. Try to find one where the background is distinct from the foreground (subject) of the image. I recommend the creative commons image search, since you can search for images which are copylefted to allow derivative works.
One you've found an image you'd like to use, copy its URL - not the URL of the page it's on, the URL of the image - or download it to your computer. Back at the stencil generator, paste the URL into the text field and click 'go'.
If all goes well you'll now have a set of thumbnails in front of you with differing levels of light and dark. Click one, and you'll notice the image in the middle of the page changes to a version of your picture at that white level. In this example I've used the 'Photo Negative' button at the bottom of the page to change the thumbnails from white-on-black to black-on-white. Click around until you find the whiteness level you like best.
I think that works, now to add a caption, using the text field at the bottom of the page:
All done, click 'Add to Gallery' (bottom of the page) et voila, your stencil. To save it to your computer, Right Click, 'Save As..'
Optional: Adding it to the gallery. Not forgetting to credit the original photographer Antiquité Tardive - this is basic courtesy and a condition of the Creative Commons license. It's now saved in the stencil gallery and published in the gallery's RSS feed.
Now print it on card or a transparency for screen printing, graffiti, interior decorating, cake icing, etc. The following instructables may be handy for the physical part:
Well, OK, there's many different kinds of stupid, but this is one of my favorites. rickrolldb.com in amassing a database of Rickrolls, web pages which trick the user into viewing 80's pop icon Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up. Ostensibly this is so that web users pissed at being taken for a dance can add the database to their browser's ad blocker. Since YouTube Rickrolled it's entire user base on April 1st 2008 it has gone irrepairably mainstream and is officially an old meme - unfunny outside its legitimate use in harassing Scientology.
But this database intrgues me. It's a realtime dataset showing the growth and manifestation of a meme, empirical data against which theories of meme behavior can be falsified or corroborated. There are other such datasets which can be created, one can track the reproduction of files on p2p networks (actually, I did study this, a story for another day) or the spread of threatening chain messages in YouTube comments. This is different though, the YouTube data is messed up by anti-spam systems that arbitrarily check and confine the meme's spread, and file sharing is a little simplistic. rickrolldb on the other hand is a real-time map showing the spread and use of a learned behavior in a human population. A limited demonstration that stupidity is contagious :-)
In 2005 or so I made an image macro that arranged letters cut from newspapers and magazines into text - like ransom notes on an old TV series. It's been offline for awhile , but no more. The ransom note generator is back, rewritten from scratch. It now has an RSS feed, an improved gallery and a bunch of new effects. Enjoy :-)
Great power stems from being in the path of information. I was reminded of that this weekend while watching (across the Limpopo) the media blockade surrounding the recent Zimbabwean election. With this lesson in mind I got to thinking about all the image hotlinking strix.org.uk carries. It's a lot, more than half of my bandwidth, and it costs money.
For the non-technical, hotlinking (or inline linking) is the practice of using files hosted on someone else's server in the HTML of web pages coming from your own server. It seems a perfect externality, shifting hosting costs from one site directly onto another. Site owners - jealous of their content and sensitive to the bottom line - can get very worked up about it. When being derogatory, the practice is referred to as 'leeching', 'bandwidth theft' or 'theft of service'.
I'm not as eager to assume it's a bad thing. If someone likes something on strix.org.uk enough to want to share it with their readers, that's pretty cool. One depressing evening in 2006 I drew a picture and posted it to the blog, a hotlink turned up with it in a greek blog post. What could be a better compliment for someone learning to draw? Sure, it'd be better if the blogger had copied it to their own server and provided an attribution link, but color me pleased. I'm happy for my stuff to get more exposure, hence the copyleft (cc) license.
In the more contemporary Web 2.0 view, hotlinking isn't a big deal. The nature of syndication and data mashing usually requires sources of information that are separate from the applications people use to combine and filter it. Most of the web applications I write hotlink images from other sites, sanctioned by the likes of flickr and youtube, and any number of services - from Google Reader to Babelfish - hotlink strix.org.uk. It's a good thing.
But.. there are some circumstances where the benefits are not as obvious. Those circumstances look like this:
Behold! a LolDuck. I've no idea where it came from, it was found on a forum and to the forums it returned. Such is the way of the LolDuck. The hotlink was copied from post to post and site to site, reproducing virally and exponentially. This site serves one every few seconds, and it's a lot of bandwidth to bear for nothing in return. The benefit? I am now in the path of information.
Since the image comes from strix.org.uk the file referenced by the link can be changed at this end. Thanks to the magic 'Referrer' field it can be done with some discretion, serving any image at all on any site with the hotlink. The LolDuck may not provide a direct benefit but it has created a microphone, an organic, unintentional broadcast system to say anything at all to surfers on hundreds of other sites.
The only question now is... what to say. One can tell where individual people are on the net (Referrer), where they are in the real world (IP address), that they're bored enough to be surfing Lol and can put an image on their monitors. Advertisers would love to be in this position. Most webmasters at this point do something distinctly uncreative; they replace the image with a tiny 'No Hotlinking' graphic and dismiss the opportunity.
Not I, but what to say? 'Vote Obama!', 'Womens Rights Are Human Rights', 'Help A Nun Kick The Habit'. Maybe. PSAs are Plan B. Best idea so far is to interact, to play a game with web surfers and engage them. An image lottery. I gathered together some random funny pictures, some disgusting shock pics, and some hentai (brown paper packages tied up with string, these are a few of my favorite things). The concept is a drinking game to be played with friends, every time the hotlink is loaded an image is chosen at random, if it's hentai, drink! If not, everyone can still laugh and groan at the funny/gross images. Though it needs some refining, the hotlink now looks something like this on forums/myspace:
And like this as a youtube background:
The hotlink directs people back here to play an expanded version of the game, an AdSense banner kicks a few cents toward the hosting costs, and someone gets drunk and giggles at Japanese sex comics. Everybody wins. So, if you came here wondering why there's strange and random crap appearing on your website, now you know. Feel free to copy stuff from strix.org.uk if you'd like to use it. Please link back :-) Thanks.
If anyone has an idea for a better use of this ability (other than Goatse on MySpace), I'd love to hear about it in the comments. Over the course of a day your idea could be broadcast to tens of thousands of people all over the web.
Imogen Heap - Just For Now: I love this performance, she samples and mixes her own voice as she sings, layering it and harmonising with herself. This should be a genre. [$0.02]And the genre should be called: Dancing With Marionettes[/$0.02].
The new Google AdSense Terms and Conditions behoove me to have a privacy policy, and it's about time. This document may change as the site and my situation does, but its spirit will remain the same. Laws change and I'm the type of guy that likes to roam around, I'm never in one place I roam from town to town, And when I find myself a-fallin' for some girl I hop right into that car of mine and ride around the world, Yeah I'm the wanderer yeah the wanderer, I roam around around around... so sometimes the law I'm subject to will require changes to this policy.
For the purposes of this document: 'I' means Strix, the owner and operator of this site. 'You' means you, the person reading this. 'The Software' means the collection of code powering strix.org.uk and its associated domains. 'The Site' means strix.org.uk and www.strix.org.uk. 'Douchebag' means Joel Osteen, Myanmar Premier General Than Shwe and any corporate legal or PR representative. This policy applies to human users of The Site I reasonably believe to be acting in good faith. Spammers, spam, associtated robots, Douchebags and any person engaging in illegal activites of which I disapprove are not protected by this policy. For example: a citizen of the Maldives quoting from the Bible is breaking the law of his home territory, but will still be protected by Strix.org.uk wherever possible.
Please note that strix.org.uk uses Google AdSense, and Google collects and stores a great deal of information about your travels on the web so as to better target ads to you and for this Site.
Protection of Personal Information
Strix.org.uk does not collect much private information, save for IP addresses in the webserver log and email addresses associated with blog comments. This information is not released to third parties or the public except in cases of spamming or when legal/personal threats are made. If this information is requested by actors to whom I do not have an obligation under South African law, I will usually destroy such information before a legally binding request can be made. In cases where third parties contact me to request the email address of Site users, I will forward that request to the user to allow them the discretion of responding. Search terms, when dissociated from IP, referrer and session data are not considered personal information and may be mined, aggregated and published.
Freedoms of Speech
I fully support your right to free speech. You can - or at the very least: should be able to - say or not say whatever you please on your own website. On my Site, however, I expect comments and other user-submitted content to conform to a minimum standard of civility and good taste. This does not mean that you cannot criticize myself, the positions of others, or espouse views radically different to my own. It does mean that bigotry (homophobia, sexism, racisim, etc) trolling (divisive comments that serve no useful purpose), personal attacks and offensive stupidity (eg, haulocaust denial, advocating violence) will be removed. I very rarely delete comments or other user-submitted content because I am fortunate to have a pretty excellent crowd here and it is seldom necessary.
If you have any further, specific questions, please ask them in the comments field below this post.[read on...]
I passed this sign today outside Grahamstown Checkers. My Afrikaans is non-existent but suddenly I know what the membership tattoo will be when I get that Apocalyptic Easter Suicide Cult off the ground. Now Recruiting! Join Today! Our Passover Balls Have The Most Fruit!
This peculiar and somehow comforting sentiment is from starrgirl at Associated Content:
Sock yarn has gone delicious. Besides all the available fibers, like cashmere, silk, merino wool, alpaca and more, there's a riotous choice of ... every shade of the rainbow and in patterns that "self-stripe" as you knit. Artisans hand-dye yarns into beautiful combinations ... try Superwash yarn ... There are lots of methods for knitting socks ... double pointed needles, circular needles, toe-up, cuff-down, magic loop, two at a time. Knitting socks can challenge you forever. The world is so full of sock yarns now that you'll want to try them all.
Researchers from the British Sea Life Centre group of aquariums have published a study detailing the sex lives of these charming, shag-happy little weirdos. The results, in brief:
According to the Wikipedia:
Scientists at 15 aquariums studied 90 seahorses of 3 species. Of 3168 sexual encounters, 37% were same sex acts. Flirting was common (up to 25 potential partners a day of both genders); only one species (the British Spiny Seahorse) included faithful representatives, and for these 5 of 17 were faithful, 12 were not. Bisexuality was widespread and considered "both a great surprise and a shock", with big bellied seahorses of both genders not showing partner preference. 1986 contacts were male-female, 836 were female-female and 346 were male-male.
I met a woman once who told me about her guardian angel. Her life wasn't all that great, but she believed in this invisible person that followed her around the whole time looking after her. It seemed a bit of a stretch, but she was certain of it. Me, I have an easier time believing in elves. Elves do stuff, they turn on the street lights every night and get the hedgehogs pregnant. Stuff you can see happening; empirical evidence.
In 1993 Snow - "Superb Notorious Outrageous Whiteboy" - was released from prison and launched his debut album, 12 Inches of Snow. (Blame Canada! Blame Canada!) The first single Informer spent seven consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Top 100. If you were alive in 1993 you've heard it, the high school classes of '99 and 2000 heard it so much, so often that the single is now deeply programmed into our subconscious. The song, however, is incomprehensible Ontario gibberish. In an effort to better understand myself and my peers, I have painstakingly translated it into English.
[*chorus*]
so..
Informer
You know say daddy me snow me-a (gonna) blame
A licky boom-boom down
Detective man he say, say Daddy Me Snow me stab someone down the lane
A licky boom-boom down.
Someone has been stabbed. Police suspect the fruity dancing cracker is to blame.
Police ina dem come an-a dey blow down me door
Ready to crawl through, through ma window
So they put me in the back the car at the station
From that point on I reach my destination
When the destination reached ina the East Detention
When-a look down me pants, look up my bottom.
Police arrive at Snow's house to ask questions, but must force their way in. They apprehend Snow trying to escape through a window. He is taken to a police station for questioning and then transferred to the Toronto East End Detention centre [google maps]. There he is strip searched, or maybe just whips down his pants to moon people.
East End Detention Centre, Toronto
[chorus]
Bigger them are, them think they have more power
Them on the 'phone, me stay there for an hour
Me for want to use it once an-a me call me lover
Lover who me call ina the one Tammy
An me love her in me heart down to ma belly
Yes [incomprehensible] me Snow I feel cool an deadly
It's the one MC Shan and the one that is Snow
Together we are love 'em as a tornado (?)
"Bigger them are, them think they have more power". This could express resentment of:
(a) beefy fellow inmates,
(b) correctional officers
(c) men with large penises
(d) illegitimate authority
(e) legitimate authority
I vote (c). Anyhoo a person who is somehow "bigger" makes him wait to use the telephone. He wants to call his lover Tammy. Speaking to Tammy puts Snow in the mood for a vigorous threesome with her and MC Shan.
[chorus]
Listen for me ya better listen for me now,
Listen for me ya better listen for me now,
When me a rock-a the microphone me rock on steady
Yes-a Daddy Me Snow me are the article done
But then in and out the the dance an they say 'where ya come from?'
People them say I come from Jamaica
But me born and raised in-a de ghetto an' I want ya to know,
Pure black people man is all a man know
Yeah ma shoes-a them tear up and the toes used'a show
For me a born in-a the one Toronto
Snow: Pay attention. I was raised in poverty in Toronto and have terrible shoes. Also, I only know 'pure' black people. (a strange feat in Canada)
[chorus]
Come with a nice young lady
Intelligent yeah she gentle an irie
Everywhere me go me never left her at all
Yes it's daddy snow me are the roam dance man
Romancing a dance-a ina nation-a
You never know say daddy Me Snow me are the boom shakata
Me never lay-a down flat in-a one cardboard box-a
Yes-a Daddy Me Snow me-a go reachin' a da top.
Snow has succeeded in his life - he has a girlfriend, dances a lot and does not sleep in cardboard boxes.
[chorus]
Why would he? Why whould he would he would he?
Why indeed.
[chorus]
Me sittin round cool with my dibby-dibby girl
Police knock my door, lick up my pal
Rough me up and I cant do a thing
Pick up my line when my telephone ring
Take me to the station, black up my hands
Trail me down 'cause I'm hangin with the Snowman
What I'm gonna do, I'm back and I'm trapped
Smack me in my face an took all of my Gap
They have no clues and they wanna get warmer
But Shan won't turn informer.
MC Shan is detained by the the Toronto Metropolitan Police and his fingerprints taken. He may know who is responsible for the stabbing, but is not willing to help the investigation.
[chorus]
And now you know. That's been riding around in your head the whole time, subtly affecting your thoughts.
To answer the question humans as a species would first need to agree on what it is to be human, and that'll never happen. Identities and views of life are too diverse (and often deeply irrational). For all that, googling the phrase "makes us uniquely human" turns up a bunch of answers:
One fabulously arb pair of sentences, from the Wikipedia article on Dandys:
By the time Pitt taxed hair powder in 1795 to help pay for the war against France, Brummell had already abandoned wearing a wig, and had his hair cut in the Roman fashion, "à la Brutus". Moreover, he led the transition from breeches to snugly tailored dark "pantaloons," which directly lead to contemporary trousers, the sartorial mainstay of men's clothes in the Western world for the past two centuries.
From now on this will be my recourse when asked to explain anything I don't understand.[read on...]
Following are the first six chapters of Anrew Montgomery's autobiographical novel Two Vicars for the Casserole. The paperback, which can be purchased at Lulu, comes highly recommended. Illustrations by Ash Latham.
CHAPTER ONE: ALDERNEY
The Channel Islands, those three words conjuring up sunshine, palm trees, white sandy beaches, tax-free drinks and cigarettes. Gatwick Airport was quiet, and our flight was called, on time. A smart and efficient-looking air hostess, with clipboard, forage cap and smile fixed firmly in place, led us out to the ’plane. My spirits sank when I saw it - a tiny, four-engined Heron which could take sixteen. “At least,” I cheered myself up by thinking, “we’ll get free gin but there’s not much room to get a trolley down the aisle”, as I climbed the three short steps and poked my head around the door.
“I wonder how she is going to get the trolley over that?” – ‘that’ being an enormous hump which crossed the narrow aisle - the main spar holding the wings on.
“Enjoy your flight”, the hostess smiled, then slammed the door shut from the outside. “Ah well, fasten safety belts.” Soon we were aloft in clear, sunny skies, and after about half an hour I looked down and saw a tiny island which looked most inviting and friendly, with small coves and sandy beaches, with the centre rising steeply, seemingly mostly grass-covered. “Must be Herm”, I thought, knowing my Channel Island names, but being sadly lacking in geographical knowledge. “We’ll soon be in Alderney.” We came in closer and closer, a long breakwater became visible, then a harbour, a church, houses and boats looking as though they were floating on air, the turquoise water was so still and clear.
“We’re not going to try and land this on that, there isn’t room!” But on we flew, inexorably, and lower and lower, until we were level with the top of a vertical cliff, flew up a steep valley, and plopped neatly down on a well-cropped grass airstrip, and rumbled to a clattering halt. Once the engines were cut, the quietness was almost oppressive.
Mum and Dad were there to meet me, with an ancient but dignified, faded pale blue half-timbered Morris Minor Traveller. Down from the airfield, through the cobbled streets of the small town, down towards the harbour and Braye Bay.
The house was in a cheerful, narrowing bit of street between the school and the Harbour Lights Hotel. A black dog, sound asleep in the middle of the road, woke, and ambled out of our way. Two tow-headed children, serious, hand in hand, in bathers, one of them holding a bucket, the other a shrimping net, picked their way between cottages, heading for the golden sweep of Braye. (continues after the jump...)
From the Wikipedia enty on Top Hats, about their inventor being arrested by the fashion police:
The top hat caused a riot the first time it was seen in London. The perpetrator was a “haberdasher” named John Hetherington, who designed it, made it and was the first person to wear it into the street in 1797. According to a contemporary newspaper account, passersby panicked at the sight and ran in terror. Several women fainted, children screamed, dogs yelped, and an errand boy’s arm was broken when he was trampled by the mob. Hetherington was hauled into court for wearing "a tall structure having a shining luster calculated to frighten timid people." He was fined £50.
Science Magazine recently ran a feature: Social Descision-making: Insights from Game Theory and Neuroscience - fascinating enough, though what really stuck out about it was an ad alongside the article. It's for a research service using PCR to somehow identify micro-RNA, messenger molecules that regulate gene expression.
(note: I do not endorse this company, its product or their advertising. I don't know enough about the subject.)
It shows an asian guy and a hot young woman - 20 or so by my optimistic guess but she might be 16 - pointing at a display (hologram?) showing what could be a section of folded miRNA. A visit to the advertiser's website shows many more pretty, smiling girls in spotless white lab coats; on almost every page (seriously, why wear a lab coat if you're not going to get dirty, or at least do some work and muss it up). However this service works it is highly technical, possibly proprietary, and serves a small and highly technical market. Whoever makes purchasing decisions for this service probably knows a *lot* about their field, is price sensitive (to be outsourcing) and knows exactly what their needs are, yet the provider (Qiagen, no link) is using sex to sell it.
There's a maxim in advertising: "No matter what you're selling, you're selling.", ie, the skills and methods of manipulating people are always the same, regardless of the end to which you are trying to affect peoples judgment and usurp their free will. I consider the pharmaceutical industry one of the hardest-nosed, second only to the banking industry, they would sell soylent green laced with thalidomide if they could make money doing it and I'd think the illness industry would be large among the customers of this PCR service. Yet the ad agency, who doubtless know what they're doing, have decided the best way to influence these people is with a pretty girl - such an obvious and transparent ploy. The maxim seems to hold true, and that's astonishing.
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