I’d love to see the hidden “disable trackbacks entirely, fucking forever, NOW goddamn it” option that Wordpress ought to have but I can’t find. Bad enough I get all this comment spam because I’m too lazy to install a CAPTCHA plugin, but now I get trackback spam. Nice to know that a useless system to further enable the automatic counter-fellation all bloggers seem to engage in is being used for the sole purpose of adding spam to the comments section of a site next to nobody reads. (And since I don’t use the “More” tag often, if ever, there’s no reason to actually click through to the articles, hence nobody sees your goddamn spam, assholes.) I guess I have to dig further into the archives and manually turn talkbacks off on more posts. Yay.

I wonder if Spam Poison is still around… Regardless of if it works (I think it does, but I have no real proof), I get a very fulfilling sensation of pure unbridled malice at the thought of even potentially fucking up their little spam spiders. (Ostensibly, the link code they give you, and maybe any link back to Spam Poison, will send the spiders that way, as spiders are wont to do. Their server then detects spam spiders somehow, and sends them a different page than we see, full of complete garbage data, with links back to itself or pages much like it. This apparently jacks the signal to noise ratio of the spider’s lists up somewhere way past anything even remotely usable. Again, I don’t have anything but their word that it works, but it seems to have worked on the old brimzero homepage, when my email was listed in full after every newspost.

Oh, look at that, I’ll be late for work if I don’t leave within the next sixty seconds, assuming traffic is good. Pretty sure the spammers won this particular battle. (Then again, I had somewhere between one and three separate dreams where I was doing something and ended up being late for work, and I’d hate to let a portent like that turn out to be false, as the rest of my dreams centered around the book Interworld, and it would be cool as hell if that came true too.

Oh look, I’ve now got thirteen minutes to make a minimum twenty minute trip. Upon identifying a problem, it’s good to know I swiftly do nothing to resolve it. I did add a new tag, which applies to 90% of the shit I write here. That count for anything?

When I assumed that my account with ehostpros was closed, it turns out I was wrong. And that I potentially made an ass out of you and me, but that’s not proper grammar. So I don’t have a hosting account, but they just sent me a bill for the brimzero.com domain. And here I thought I was done with their damn help desk.

Hell Moo is awesome. Though I got my shit fucked up by a crackhead, that’s pretty damn embarrassing. Fortunately, I got to take out my frustration on defenseless orphans. Even got paid for my trouble if they were rabid, got bless that creepy nun.

Also, Portal is short as fuck, but also fun as hell. Well worth the twenty bucks. The Enrichment Center would like to remind you that android hell is a real place where you will be sent at the first sign of defiance.

I’ll give you two guesses as to how much I got done on the comics this weekend.

I just lost The Game. As it turns out, I lose every time I think of anything even tangentially related to the game, in this case subvert apathy.

News of the comic-related variety: SEP is on indefinite hiatus, pending me hacking together a non-sucking story. Brimzero is terminated, though my next project will basically be the third attempt at Brimzero. I’d change the name, but it’s already the damn domain name so I may as well keep it. Actual production is pending a completed story, for once, and actual public updating is pending me building up a buffer. I’m trying to do this right, and using the word “pending” a lot in the process. I plan to stop, pending the purchase of a thesaurus.

NHB was funny as hell tonight, Damon brought up Hell Moo, and his character was raped and killed in his sleep on air. I might have to check this out.

On a related tangent, why is there no decent terminal client for Windows CE? Every one I’ve found is a crippled demo, the full version being obscenely expensive. Every fucking one. Next to nobody uses these devices, so why these assholes are expecting payment at all is a mystery to me.

I got a catalog from both Musician’s Friend and Guitar Center in the mail today. I’m already out of money, goddamn it! So just out of curiosity I flip to the keyboards, and find the Roland Juno-G. (I want one of these hard..) And there’s this note: “Get a free SRX board and keyboard stand with purchase.” That’s a hell of a deal considering how expensive those SRX boards are. And then I see this: “Don’t pay for a full year on Roland & Boss products.” Fuckers. I have enough credit card debt already. I suppose I should be thankful that my credit is in the shitter, thus removing me from temptation.

A quick glossary because I’m just plain bored:
Musician’s Friend is an online music store, very nice.
Guitar Center is a brick and mortar music store, their primary use is to demo instruments before buying them on Musician’s Friend.
Roland makes music gear, I know ‘em best for keyboards that are nicer and more expensive than my Yamaha but they do a lot of other shit.
SRX is, as I understand it, is a memory card that you can slot into certain Roland keyboards, thus adding more sounds.
JUNO-G is a 61 key synth/workstation, visually styled after the old JUNO synths from the 80s. It’s been described (accurately from what I’ve seen) as a poor man’s Fantom-X.
Fantom-X is Roland’s high-end workstation line. The 61 key model costs twice as much as the JUNO-G.
Credit debt is what I get for spending money I did not have on shit I didn’t technically need. Sadly, my debt is considered small by most people who I’ve told the actual number to. (Over three months’ wages is not a small number.)
The shitter is where my credit score is, and will probably remain for the next decade.

Also, I just lost the game. Again. Posting to this blog seems to be this weird Pavlovian mnemonic for that now.

Downloaded Joost. Not bad, suffers the same flaw as iTunes (wasting CPU to draw a pretty interface) but not nearly as pronounced. Also has the same flaw that all TV alternatives have: there is not enough content. Granted, there’s a lot, but most of that is CSI and Aqua Teen hunger Force. If I wanted to only watch a few shows, I hop on iTunes and buy them. (Because I’d never use bit torrent to download content illegally, of course.)

Deleted Joost. Enjoyed the hell out of some cartoons and Premium Blend episodes, but this is basically a less-efficient alternative to YouTube, with better image quality.

This is what I’d like to see. Don’t know how feasible it is, but then again I’m not going to keel over and die for lack of it. Anyhow, my idea is this: every day at midnight eastern (all TV is on eastern time anyway), each network puts their entire lineup for the day on this service, which I will call “the service” because I just can’t bring myself to give a damn. Now what you’d do is fire it up and load a channel, let’s say Discovery Channel, and it plays what’s on Discovery right then and there, same as if you’d tuned your TV in to it. If you don’t want to watch Dirty Jobs or whatever, you can bring up a list and see what else is on the list for the day, and watch what the hell you please. In other words, the way Comcast On Demand should work. Add in a Tivo-like function since everyone and their dog would demand it anyhow. But most importantly, it should be centralized. You should never have to close out the service and fire up a different one because you wanted to change channels.

Incidentally, as much as I dislike ads all over everything, I think this hypothetical service would do well with the ad model Joost uses. An ad plays at the commercial breaks and between shows. Not a whole commercial block, an ad. I’m not thinking along the lines of what’s feasible or fiscally viable, just what I’d like to see. Though I have a suggestion for both the hypothetical service and Joost: at least attempt to normalize the ads’ volume with the show content.

I don’t mind so much that Greg Dean made me lose The Game last week. (This strip, specifically.) What gets me is that every time I read the newsposts under the comic, I see his post about the award he got for the strip, and lose again.

Also, I just lost the game. Fortunately, nobody reads this blog so you’re all still winning.

EDIT 10-2-07
I just stopped myself from looking at the front page to double check the new post so i wouldn’t lose the game. Hence, I lost the game. I’m bad at this…