One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

One of my ongoing questions is why the fuck companies continue to send me spam even though I am very, very guarded as to who I give my main e-mail address to.

I’ve often wondered if companies that I do business with (and whom I have listed the address with) sell it. I imagine that many of them do. Most of them have little clauses in their privacy policy that say something like “We occasionally share our customer information with companies we believe our customers may be interested in” which is corporate legal mumbo-fucko for “We sell your email address to any company willing to pay for it, fucknuts.” I know this, because I collect email addresses from people as part of my job. I know those addresses get resold. Hell, the company I work for is so busy tripping over dollars, picking up dimes that I am certain that if they could find a company interested in paying money for a general breakdown of hair color amongst employees, we would be getting mandatory hair color surveys within the week.

However, a new affront to decency breached my inbox today. I give my e-mail address to the people I know in real life pretty freely, never really thinking much about it. I usually assume that the people I give it to won’t sign me up for spam. However, one of those people saw fit to put my e-mail address in a “HEY GIVE US EMAILS TO SPAM AND WE’LL THINK ABOUT GIVING YOU FREE SHIT, BUT NOT REALLY (SUCKER)” offer he saw on the ‘Net. So that means I’m going to be getting yet more spam.

To the person who decided I am spam-worthy: If I meet you in person again, asshole, I will be delivering one fist-sized thank you to your face for every single e-mail I recieve that I can prove was due to your negligence.

Every once in a great while, something happens that makes you think that, while you’re not lucky enough to live in one, there are pockets of true justice that do exist in the world. When one of those pockets just happens to coincide with one of your favorite organizations, it’s all the sweeter.

Last week, the story broke that some politicians had been having staffers edit their own Wikipedia articles. Gee, politicians spending our tax dollars trying to spread good PR about themselves? There’s not a big enough :rolleyes: for this.

Still, it’s one in a whole string of challenges that Wikipedia has been facing lately - and considering it’s a really revolutionary idea, it’s sad to see this stuff happening. Still, challenges make us stronger, and that definitely seems to be the case with Wikipedia. I mean, how do you respond to a situation like that? You could ignore it altogether, downplay it and say that changes like that often get edited back to normal quickly, write up a press release chastizing these politicians and their minions…

or you could ban Congress.

This is so fucking cool that it deserves a alpha-blended

Yeah, I know, it’s only for a week, it’s happened before and it’s not a final decision but it is nice to see an organization standing up and telling our tidy collection of cocksuckers that they may be rich and powerful and owned by major corporations and usually don’t have to obey the laws they create but they can’t fuck with Wikipedia.

I never did get around to officially announcing the existence of my NWS wallpaper gallery (hint: it’s NWS.) There’s a lot of amateurish crap and a lot of unfinished things but I decided to just put it all up there anyway around the first of the year. Of course, I completely didnt bother to mention it,

As to why I’m announcing this today, I put a few new walls up. Here you go.

Shannon Elizabeth 1 A ludicrously hot promo shot for one of the American Pies (I forget which one.) I cropped out almost all of Pie Fucker.
Jennifer Love Hewitt twelve thirteen fourteen 14 is one of her greatest pictures ever, and I need something to fill in that empty space on the right. Can’t figure out what, though.
Last but not least meet Evangeline Lilly (Kate from Lost, one two three four.) You should be watching Lost anyway, but now you have a really good reason.

Also, a lot of the new stuff is going to be coming out in 1.48:1 widescreen, it’s very popular with notebooks and it’s a great resolution to start with and/or crop down to other resolutions. I’m working on convincing Gallery to crop and resize to common desktop resolutions, but I haven’t found a way to automatically do it yet (I’ve pretty much got to do every single wallpaper by hand.) For now just download and crop them yourself. If you don’t have any tools with which to do this download the GIMP (Windows installer here.)

This article by Charlie Demerjian over at The Inq pretty much covers, word for word, what DRM is really all about, for those out there who are convinced that “only thieves are afraid of DRM.”

So, it makes content less attractive, less playable, and is legally dubious, so why is the industry hell bent on infecting everything from your prophylactics to your computers? Simple, they want a bigger slice of the pie, and DRM is the way to get it. No, not bigger profit margins, the greedy bastards already do that with each format change, DRM infections are about edging each other out.

Honestly, I think this is the only part that Charlie got wrong. Agreed, DRM is largely to control other media companies’ leverage of your product, however it also serves the rather convenient purpose of being the ‘2′ in the 1-2 punch of stomping out anything that could possible even vaguely look or smell like fair use (the ‘1′ being the laws that our basically worthless, purchasable senators and congresspeople enact for the highest bidder.) This has the convenient side effect of making various types of time-shifting and space-shifting that traditionally people were already used to doing something that can be sold as an add-on or for an additional fee.

Dammit, why do I have to like movies again?

As reported by Can’t Get Enough Futurama, Billy West is going around yammering about four full-length movies that will be done sometime in late summer/early fall, or something like that. Now since Fry would have no real reason to lie to us, we can assume that even if the timetable gets fucked with, this is probably going to happen.

I find myself wondering, though, if this is a good thing or not.

First off, Futurama is rather chaotic. Not Aqua Teen Hunger Force chaotic, but substantially more random than most things out there. I worry about their ability to pull off a couple hours at a shot without either losing the audience or beating the horse so soundly that only a chunky pulp remains.

In addition, while not having a real linear progression from beginning to end (to such a degree that they actually made fun of this in one episode) it seemed, to me at least, to have a fairly solid beginning, middle, and end. I don’t know, for example, where they would go with the Fry/Leela angle other than beating us the fuck up with it, Spielberg/Minority Report style.

Still, will I buy it? Goddamn right, motherfuckers. I’m such a sucker for the entertainment industry. Oh, how I love to hate them.

Actually, there’s a few, but the really scary one is Nyxem (f-secure) (sophos). On the 3rd of the month it overwrites a lot of documents and compressed files with a text string. I’m really, really glad I’m not working consumer support, because I’m scared this is really going to come to a head in a couple weeks.

Looks like the folks responsible for eBaumsworldsucks.com has had a major update. Included on the new site is the complete transcript from the AltF4/Ebaum Encounter. Eric’s not only a thief, but he’s rather thick as well.

If you haven’t seen the video, go check it out. 100% SA Forums homegrown work right there. And once you’re done check out the 2nd AltF4/Trapezoid collaberation, The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny. (It’s on Newgrounds too, but that’s blocked at work.)

Ronk

And by that I mean, sometimes it makes more sense to quote somone else wholesale when they say something that so plainly describes something you’ve been trying to put across for quite some time. Take this quote here about atheists and agnostics by Uranium 235 of the SA Forums:

Atheism does not require a leap of faith because saying “I don’t believe in God” is completely congruent with logic and reason. Since there’s not positive evidence that there is a God, there’s no rational reason to believe that a God exists. Therefore, not believing in God is rational and not based on faith.

However, saying positively that God does not exist is a different matter, since there is no positive evidence that God does not exist.

Nevertheless, I would argue that believing that a God does not exist is very close to rational. It’s the equivalent of saying positively that there is no goblin that lives in your shower, but disappears every time you enter the bathroom. You can never prove that such a goblin doesn’t exist, but that doesn’t mean you should take a neutral stance on its existance.

edit: One more thing: I wanted to point out that it is definitely possible for one to be an agnostic atheist. I do not believe it is knowable whether or not a God exists, I do not believe that it really matters, and I also believe that a God probably does not exist. I feel that my atheism is justifiable because there’s no reason to believe in something for which no positive evidence exists.

This and Bertrand Russell’s china teapot example are some of the more interesting things I’ve found in a day thorougly filled with blasphemy against God (i.e. rational thought.)

More to come, eventually.

I remember a really, really long time ago we used to have these things called bulletin board systems where we shared messages, played online games, and did other various legal and illegal activities. These activities were almost exclusively done in text mode, if only because they were often done at 1200bps or so, and sending graphics took a really, really long time. Thus led to the rise of ASCII art, and ANSI color extensions after that. (I still have a working copy of TheDraw, and a bunch of my old art.) So when I saw this particular spam message I felt both a twinge of nostalgia for the good old days (let’s face it, there was something that just seemed more honest about plain text) and a bit of perturbation over the corruption of yet another institution to the god of advertising. Oh Internet, what won’t you ruin?

It’s missing a few things, though, so it can’t be ‘true’ ascii art. Among the notably missing are

• greetz
• 0l4-sk3w1 133tsp34k
• starred-out numbers for boards you’re not l33t enough to know about

(i’d bet nobody reading this blog even knows what the fuck i’m talking about… I can feel the ‘old’ setting in.)

Thankfully, though, it may be a clever idea but it didn’t work anyway, Mail’s junkmail filter caught it anyway. Suckers.