I've now come somewhat closer to leaving the ranks of the smelly indigent losers of the perpetually housebound world, and rejoining that elite and fond-remembered Valhalla of the Normal: I have cleaned my bathroom. For months more or less (more), I've ignored the brown water-stain borders of the floor tiles, the chips and shards of discarded soap dross that cluttered the shower bins, the streaks and splotches on every mirrored and metal part, the cursive shaped hairs that stuck somehow to the ceiling and walls, and the disturbing green splotches of God-knows-what that had somehow developed a community behind the bathroom door. Armed with Windex and paper towels, I first made forays to soften the enemy up, then launched full assaults with mop and industrial Green Stuff in Spray Bottle Type 2, then leveled the survivors with a deluge of white spray stuff from Aerosol Can 1. The bathroom is now clean. On to the kitchen....

Caught 50% of the new Musketeers movie tonight, The Musketeer, with what I assume must be some sort of teen idol in the lead role, some kind of pretty girl in the pretty girl role, Catherine Deneuve (!) as the Queen of France, and Tim Roth reprising his soon-to-be-type-cast role of Bad Guy Who Wields Mighty Sword. This is a terrible movie. For one thing, the accents were all over the place: there was a Frenchman with an English accent, a Hessian with a French accent, and a D'Artagnan with such an American accent that he couldn't even pronounce his own name correctly. It's primary selling point in the trailer was that it featured fight choreography by the same guy who did Crouching Tiger, but I could barely make it out this time due to really poor editing, and what I could see looked forced and awkward if not just silly (somehow these actors couldn't pull off the wild stuff the way the Crouching Tiger cast did--maybe it's a cultural thing, and we're just used to seeing Chinese dudes flying around kicking and punching so it doesn't seem so outlandish; but come on: Frenchmen running up walls and clinging to ceilings? That's just asking too much!). This movie must have been a rush job attempting to capitalize upon the unexpected popularity of the Crouching Tiger movie; the script was obviously dumped out of a stock words and plots notebook (2 for 1 at your local Hollywood Hackz store), the characters rehashes of other roles (cf Tim Roth in that Scottish movie, or Tim Curry as the Cardinal in that other Musketeers movie (also poor, but with Charlie Sheen in it for great comic effect) whom Stephen Rea pretty much just mimes in this one to much poorer effect due to much less noticeable personality), and Catherine Deneuve, who could have been this movie's sole hope for salvation, just getting suffocated by the morass of damnation all around her--making me long to put on Belle de Jour instead (if I still watched French movies that is, which I do not on general principle).

Why do thug-countries employ such idiotic spokespeople as their faces to the world? Sometimes, fighting these people is uncomfortably similar to wading through an eighth grade playground full of little bullies who think they're Mike Tyson. I actually for a moment thought the lovable rogue, Taliban Ambassador Zaeef, was an exception, but in response to the US's recent nuclear sabre-rattling, there is abundant evidence that most if not all third-world despotic regimes are staffed and fronted by loud-mouthed, self-deluded morons:

North Korea stated, "We're ready for U.S. strikes", and prepared to fight back. "If the aggressors ignite a war on this land at any cost, they will face punishment unprecedented in war history and will be bound to drink a bitter cup of defeat." [sic!] This from 'Rodong Sinmun', the official newspaper of the North's ruling Workers' Party. They warned that a nuclear attack would result in America's own "ruin in nuclear disaster."

Elsewhere, al-Qadissisya, the official Iraqi newspaper [and just the fact that a country has an "official newspaper" is reason enough set target on them imao] stated, "Recent futile threats will not scare [us]."

The problem here is simple: these people are speaking to the rest of the world as they do to their own people. They fail to see a distinction between the huddled, impoverished, and controlled masses that they oppress, and the well-informed, educated first world.

Saddam Hussein told a group of pro-Baghdad Kurds the other day: "Your country has reached a level that such threats will not intimidate it." Um, yeah, so... what, is this guy just a little noisemaker, or does he honestly believe the words that come from his mouth? Could these people be victim to their own propaganda? Or are they themselves no more in touch with the real world around them?

Saddam recentlystated, "America can harm the Iraqi people by launching guided missiles...but it cannot thwart their will." Meanwhile, Iraq Press has this story, describing how at least 40% of Iraq's military has deserted the army based on the simple threat of another war.

Btw, check out this photo and then this one. Hmm....

Never underestimate the power of underground communities--Linux should teach us that if nothing else. Thanks to such groups, it is still possible to claim that anything most people pay for on the internet (excluding non-software retail products), and anything ever published digitally, is available somewhere, somehow for free. Some of this stuff is immoral, illegal, or just plain wrong. Some of it is indirectly responsible for criminal acts and countless deaths. But some of it has allowed for the creation of great foolish projects that never could have been born otherwise.

Usenet is still the heart of the digital underground, the secret sharer of information otherwise not available or distributed only for a premium. The reason for this is simple: Usenet is still, believe it or not, too difficult for the average user to understand. It is basically unevolved beyond what it was in the beginning, back before the WWW existed, back before AOL started bombing mailboxes, magazine sleeves, and retail counters with their little white floppy disks (this was back before CD drives too). Even with web interfaces such as DejaNews, the average user was never able to grasp the subscription or organizational methods of Usenet, and was never provided a simple means of streamlining it.

Perhaps the most significant factor that has keep Usenet out of the mainstream is the fact that it is just text. Plain, unadorned, ignorant-of-photoshop ascii text. Most people wouldn't spend five seconds reading it. (Honestly, when you stumble upon what looks like one of those dinosaurs of the long-long-ago clothed in html but still just black on white, like this, isn't your first impulse to go elsewhere? There are those who would, and have in this case, greedily devour such things.)

Freedom from the morass of the commons, isolation from the dilution of the vulgar hordes (regularly clicking "NO" to popup ads, installing Real Player, and downloading Flash components), has fostered the existence of strong and closely knit dedicated communities. These are people willing to spend the time and effort required to understand arcane methods, people smart and dedicated enough to use outmoded tools and suffer configuration problems, all for access to the interiors of fringe information sources. Furthermore, and most importantly, these people are willing to share with one another. This is mainly a matter of prestige in these groups--these are meritocracies of the purest sort, or, to coin a word, providocracies, where what you know or what you are able to provide is what sets you above your peers and earns their respect. It's all about reputation here, the reputation of a simple name rarely if ever connected to a face or a voice, truly a throwback to a darker yet cleaner, even purer time.

There's a certain camaraderie fostered by mutual interest. Humans are group-oriented animals, and they will find alternative means of communication when the common group gets so diverse and diluted that the primary channels are filled with noise (and Usenet is by no means exempt--the term spam was first applied there). Subgroups and sub-subgroups form both the organizational and cultural directives of Usenet. This is, perhaps, one of the most illuminating aspects of the growth of the internet: the way it clearly demonstrates the organizational tendencies of large groups, and how those tendencies affect and parallel technological developments. Technology is, in essence, an effort to extend our biological--and by extension sociological--processes beyond our physical selves. Every technological development, with the arguable exception of language, is nothing but an extension through one or n stages of our physical bodies. A potential corollary then is that technological organization is nothing but an extension (or parallel) of our sociological organization. Following the example of groups and subgroups, we find that a WAN (a wide area network) is a collection of and connection between a given set of LANs (local area networks), each of which contain nodes. Choosing from a host of potential cultural parallels, a religion is a set of sects (potentially), which is a set of churches, which is a collection of worshipers. Etc, etc.

The real fun is when you make them fight.

Some newsgroups have become so completely saturated by advertisements that nobody reads or posts to them anymore, yet they continue to exist. Indeed, they are some of the most active groups on the internet. But they are kept alive by artificial means, through a kind of digital resuscitation, and encountering them is like entering a big celebratory party, air filled with colorful paper streamers tossed through strobing lights, where all the people have vanished, yet the music goes on, the chatter of empty voices persists. It's as if some ghastly commercial holocaust had taken place, and all that remains is a wasteland of their offal.

Software applications exist that post advertisements to "active" newsgroups, but of course the activity is an illusion since every poster is just another application, often the *same* application; so this is software talking to itself, attempting to sell itself breast enlargement surgery or low interest refinancing. It's a reciprocating cycle, a feedback loop that keeps the newsgroup alive--and it's the fact of its vibrant existence that ensures its survival. The moderators of the groups have given up long ago or moved on to other things, sometimes taking a quiet pleasure in the continued, albeit artificial, survival of their artificial creation, or often never took their role seriously from the beginning, and were quick to forget what they had set in motion. As long as the advertising software continues to exist (and why not: it requires little in cost or maintenance), the newsgroup will survive, the party will go on--sans guests.

Is this an example of artificial life?

I've recorded my dismay over the new breed of website advertising that's been popping up, but I've only just begun to realize how common intrusive advertisements have become. Yahoo, for instance, has been going crazy with the ads lately. In order to read a groups (mailing list) message on the site, you will often first have to click through an intermediate page with a link to the content you were seeking. This page has about a 640x480 sized advertisement on it, along with the somewhat ironic seeming message, "Yahoo! Groups is an advertising supported service". The URL that generates this ad, incidentally, was named "interrupt" by the programmers who wrote it. (Q: how much input into visible page names does the marketing department of a major website have? Do most people even notice those things?)

Salon.com has these now too, see if this one is still there. This is like the media clips supplied by CNN or Gamespot (before they went subscription), or the forced intro movie subsequent to installing realplayer (and I have to remember to complain about *those* guys too one day--ugghhh!), where you have to watch a commercial before watching the video. Another strategy now being employed by salon.com is the screen-wiper ad (what is it, Flash?), the one that randomly blocks you from the content until you tell it to go away, or the one that zips across the browser (car ads are often the perpetrators here). I say randomly, but it is actually an infrequent manifestation (just now trying to see it again, I had to click many times in order to coax it out--it's a Punxatawny ad.) I've registered my distaste for these before.

Randomness is the key ingredient here, some new page in the handbook of guerilla marketing, intended to force the viewer, lulled into a false sense of complacency, to take notice out of simple surprise. I don't want to reiterate what I've said before, but it's the randomness of these ads that tend to irritate me most. I understand that nothing is free (TANSTAAFL, cobber!), and I accept that websites require advertising revenue in order to stay alive. I accept banner and column ads without any fuss. Even pop-ups I can tolerate (thanks to my beloved popupstopper). But this strategy of the unexpected ad, the one that wasn't there the last three visits but now has abruptly returned, seems like a kind of commercial terrorism to me. It's the unexpectedness of it that makes you fear it's return, producing a constant state of generalized anxiety. Admittedly, this anxiety is very mild, and most people won't even notice it, but just the fact that someone is adding anxiety to the world, *now* when everybody is already freaked out enough by real terrorists, makes me disgruntled. Again, I reiterate.

Like it or not, this seems to be the next stage for revenue-models on the internet. The degree to which an advertisement *forces* you to look at itself, whether as a "content-door" or a "defacer" (I don't know the terms for them, so I've just made some up), has to be becoming a determining factor in the value of its placement. A site like yahoo, with it's zillions of users, can earn quite a bit of revenue by slapping advertisements over its search or personalization pages, or by blocking access to those pages by "interrupters". (Something about containing words in quotes is pleasing to me today, perhaps because any real sense of irony I might once have possessed has by now sunk thoroughly into abject bitterness--or do I mean honesty?) There has to be a lot of "tweaking" involved here. The advertiser may distrust their agency's claim that having the ad *not* present at every page view will actually attract more notice to it. But how much absence is just the right amount to create more presence? (Ah, a metaphysical angle at last--is it time to break out the old Sartre?) How absent is too absent? (It works for God, why not Toyota?) How much presence will the average viewer tolerate before quitting the site altogether? Perhaps someone has worked up a .ppt detailing answers to these truly troubling issues, maybe a formula for optimal page clicks per ad presence with adjustments for varying volumes and content popularity, etc. Or maybe there's no thought behind it at all, maybe the randomness itself is random, hell, maybe these ads are pure products of chaos to begin with, not generated by any direct human agency at all, hell, maybe they're all just in my head! Somebody help?

It's not an al Qaeda plot, but it could signal the demise of all of us. This article describes the presence of a dark blob floating ominously off the coast of Florida. Some "scientists" are claiming that it's probably just algae, but those guys are paid by the government to keep people from panicking. It is, in fact, The Blob. The 1950's movie, The Blob, was actually a documentary concealed as entertainment. It describes how the terrible, all-devouring blob was finally contained and frozen, then dropped somewhere unspecified in the Antarctic. That place was, in fact, the Larsen B Ice Shelf, which just broke apart earlier this week. And now the blob has escaped its icy prison and is on it's way to the sunny beaches of Miami, Florida. How long before it gets to your town?

Using bloggerbot, I can now post to this web page through my mobile phone. I don't know why I would do that, but it somehow gives me a moment of happiness. Okay, it's gone now.

The Third World Trade Center.

You think parents in the US have a hard time keeping their teenage children from doing things harmful to themselves: this one is smoking Camels in the school parkinglot, that one is buying weed from a Mexican gangmember, some other kid is getting drunk and then having sex without birth control. "Johnny, do you have cigarettes in that drawer?" But check out what parents of Palestinian children have to deal with: this one is cleaning an M-16 in his basement, that one is buying mortar shells from a Hammas terrorist, some other kid is filming a suicide video in his basement, posing with rifles and declaring Death to Israel, Praise Allah. "Mohammed, do you have a bomb in that drawer?" Both sets of parents blame television and video games.