I Am Completely Serious

Sometimes, people get to my website by way of search engine queries which it is ill-equipped to answer. Today I will help those people.

Continue reading “I’m helping.”

Cut for vague, incoherent muttering.

Continue reading “Piff on your newfangled crowdsourcing.”

D:<

Some Guy In Pokemon Pearl: I am a sailor because I love the Pokemon of the sea! *sends out a Feebas*

Me: Wait-a-second - Feebas is a freshwater fish!

(Feebas is not a freshwater fish, because a) Feebas is a Pokemon, not a fish, and b) Feebas isn’t real.)

-

An apparent SEO company named “[chapeau noir] [software facilitating dual-booting of Windows on Mac OS X]” has been spamming me in ways that deliberately reveal who they are. Is this supposed to convince me to purchase their services? I mean, some of the spam looks like this:

Hi, I found your blog on this new directory of WordPress Blogs at [company's url]. I dont know how your blog came up, must have been a typo, i duno. Anyways, I just clicked it and here I am. Your blog looks good. Have a nice day. James.

I cannot properly describe all the ways in which this message fails to inspire me to give you money, ridiculous SEO company.

I don’t know if this is new or I’m unobservant or what, but I just realized there’s a comments section under Yahoo Weather (or, Yahoo!7 Weather, which appears to have been left behind by all Yahoo’s redesigns since 1998). And it’s the same comments section for every region covered. People say helpful stuff like “I hate this weather” and “good to get some rain” without realizing that no one who reads the message will know where they are. Maybe it’s some kind of postmodern art exhibit.

Problems with which, according to my statistics, my website has failed to help people over the past two months:

why people hold grudges
i cuss too much
mangaka cant draw
why do i have self-destructive impulses
how do i find out if someone faked death
am i serious
can i borrow momo for a week?
serious deep thoughts
what is the longest someone s gone without bathing?
fuck alla yalls
plastic raincoates for gays
these brain numbers

* Definitely still in beta.

* The scroll-bar thingie on my touchpad scrolls down, but not up. (I assume this is at least partly because of some problem with my computer itself, since I’ve had similar issues on a few other applications, but those were all either kinda-crappy-open-source-projects or Second Life.)

* YouTube videos crash sometimes. What? Why? Don’t you guys, I mean, own YouTube? Some of Chrome’s documentation is hosted on YouTube.

* Sometimes there are artifacts left on screen after I select and then deselect something.

* The search-within-a-page-thing is apparently only accessible through a menu in the upper right. It doesn’t look like you can set it up to start searching whenever you start typing, a technique I use constantly in Firefox.

* Wordpress interface looks a little weird - there’s something resembling a “resize-here” point stuck into the bottom left of my text box.

* It’s pretty; the import from Firefox was smooth; address bar recommendations are thus far rarely confusing/irritating; I haven’t managed to make it crash yet; and double-clicking within a paragraph selects the whole thing, which is good (though sometimes the selection areas are shaped funny). And I like that the status bar only pops up when you mouseover a link, since checking URLs is all I do with it. This might cause problems for those 90’s-awesome websites that use Javascript to put Sylvia Plath poetry and stuff down there (though I haven’t yet searched one out to check).

* Not about Chrome specifically, but seriously, people - what is this thing with browser spellcheckers not recognizing stuff like “spellchecker,” “touchpad,” “Javascript,” “href” and “deselect?” Are these terms’ applications for “real” status still pending? It’s not like there’s some federal word review board that’ll get on you for including common non-OED words and HTML tags in the damn spellchecker.

* Edit: Ha! I made it crash immediately after posting this! I tried to disable the SnapShots mouseover boxes on LiveJournal, and it crashed so hard Vista wouldn’t let it use its recovery thing.

Image found on a mineral makeup company’s website:

“NATURAL” BECAUSE THE WOMAN’S FACE OBVIOUSLY HAS NOT BEEN PHOTOSHOPPED, NO NOT EVEN A LITTLE

You know, it wouldn’t even have stood out as much if they’d just gone ahead and smoothed her hand, too.

AWESOME BOOK SUMMARIES

Sam is a broken young man, whose job as a film critic is just starting to take off, even as his personal life is crashing down around him. His relationship with Marcus, God of Fear, turned out to be a horrible mistake.

(It has great cover art, too! It’s just so pleasant and domestic-looking. One of those objects is probably supposed to be a whip, but it’s so badly drawn it’s impossible to tell for sure.)

A WordPress plugin that works up to at least 2.5.1 that does threaded comments and email notifications, and seems to work fine so far. (The templates it includes are pretty bad, though - I had to put together my own.) If this had gone up a few days later, I’d suspect that the guy timed it to coincide with LiveJournal’s most recent episode of cleverness.

(I still haven’t found anything that mimics friends-lock functionality perfectly. It would probably have to combine OpenIDs and something like this.)

In short:

It’s not possible to either transfer or cancel a domain registered this way without making your personal information public. Yahoo’s description of the service is dishonest about this.

At length:

Continue reading “Why Yahoo Private Domain Registration Is Not Private”

Avatar isn’t going up on iTunes as it airs! What’s the point of these “season pass” things if I just end up on BitTorrent anyway?!

Blogs about WordPress themes whose own themes are broken.

(If anyone knows a good fluid-width two-column theme with a really robust options page, preferably one that plays nice with OpenID comments, tell me. The latest update pretty much broke all my customization, and I’m too lazy to fix it.)

If you have any domains registered at Yahoo, you might want to move them - as of tomorrow, they’re apparently upping their yearly fee to $35. This is just for a basic .com domain with no special features. And they’re being sneaky about it.

(I’m really glad now that I invaded Former Employer and insisted I move their site to a different host last time I was home. If Yahoo decided to raise hosting prices, too, they probably wouldn’t have noticed until they’d started getting charged. As it is, I’m going to email them and ask if I should go ahead transfer their domain, too.)

On YouTube I found a video of the Hemulen from Moominland Midwinter dying horribly. I have no idea what they’re saying, being as it is in Swedish Finnish, says the person in the comments, and all.

Also, this guy’s YouTube channel seems to have the entirety of the felt-puppets Moomin show. It is nice and creepy. “And the Lady of the Cold left the squirrel for dead, frozen stiff on the ground. Little My said, “Not to worry, we can give him a lovely funeral!” And so the horse of ice carried the squirrel away to their own frozen world!”

(It calls Too-ticky “he.” She’s a girl! She’s based on Jansson’s wife! Apparently people get confused because Swedish doesn’t have gendered pronouns?)

I walked all over Osu-Kannon today, and also I am in the middle of my routine bioform cleansing, so random places on my body feel cold and others feel like they have already fallen off. But I have acquired The Items. I hope the post office is open tomorrow.

Several new and bewildering comments appeared on the entry where I made fun of a Second Life build and the designer and one of her employees showed up to respond. I thought at first they were a real person, but now I’m wondering if they might be some kind of spambot. Turing tests are either funnier or sadder now that we have the internet to show us how often people fail them.

“The four vast duke houses Bezarius family’s next term owner, Oz Bezarius, a 15 year old who is being thrown into an abyss of darkness prison because of sins his body know not of when he was at the coming-of-age ceremony. Oz met the black rabbit(B-rabbit)which is stained by blood, which called upon the chain Alice, will the exchanging of contract help him escape the abyss successfully?”

- Peanut-Butter Monkey Pandora Hearts

I am determined to read this.

Women do not revere the venom cock as men do. Unless maybe they do?

NSFW cut. (Though honestly, I don’t think you can really tell what it’s supposed to be without the helpful descriptive text.)

Continue reading “Second Life Ruins Everything”

This post was edited to add an additional link and a correction on 3/19/08.

I looked at my referrer logs for the first time in a while the other day (as, you know, I mentioned…). One of the things I noticed was that I was getting more hits than usual on this entry, and the people getting to it were doing so by searching for “denison wingless angels.” This refers to a secret society called “The Wingless Angels” at Denison University, my former college.

(Somehow, I just can’t bring myself to type “my alma mater.” I guess it’s that primal fear that the act will instill in me an intense interest in tax evasion, boats, and drinks with names like “The Debauched Cub Scout.”)

I was thinking about that during lunch today, and a small light bulb flicked on above my head. I went back to look at the logs again when I got home. As I’d suspected, the spike started in November, when several incidents of racial tension (I seriously can’t think of a less wussy way to describe that; I think that means I’m a wuss) took place at Denison.

I tried googling for the Wingless Angels myself to see what came up, and mostly only found some blog posts to the effect that they were “just some idiots playing pranks.” This isn’t exactly correct. Since people looking for information on them apparently keep ending up here, I’ve decided to type up what I know.

Continue reading “Wingless Angels”

According to my referrer logs, over the past several months, this journal has failed comprehensively to help people with the following:

The Big Questions:

• can you show me some oof the food that pandas eat?
• ask jeeves who to talk to if i think someone has faked their own death?
• accidentally shoplifted should i go back to the store
• who is that lady walking in the crestor commercial
• what does it mean to play god?
• what happened in kare kano by masami tsuda

Bleeding:

• pineapple rectal bleeding
• when is rectal bleeding serious
• hives rectal bleeding
• hives and rectal bleeding
• rectal bleeding cat
• cat has rectal bleeding

Other Urgent Problems:

• worm accidentally in brownies
• true genius is never understood

Continue reading “I’m Not Going To Be Able To Help You With That”