I'm going to spend all day vandalizing slashdot, just to see what happens. I'm already finding that they make it extraordinarily difficult and inconvenient, such that it becomes very rapidly not worth the effort. But I will prevail.
I've always been curious as to why malicious netizens (of which there are thousands) don't vandalize slashdot more often than they do. Today, I'm finding out. 1) anonymous posts are assigned a very low mod level -- it requires a few clicks to see them. 2) even logged-in (this is me -- I'm now a proud slashdot account-holder) posts are assigned such a mod level that browsers don't see them on the unclicked first screen of a comments-page. 3) you have to wait a good while between posts. 4) you can't post exactly the same thing twice in a row. 5) you can't make your post too repetitious (FAGGET FAGGET FAGGET FAGGET x1,000). 6) you can't script any of this, unless you have a brilliant CAPTCHA reading program. 7) perhaps most importantly: new users or blacklisted users (that's going to be me pretty soon) are only allowed a certain number of posts per day (including 0). New users are allowed 10 by default.
Since slashdot can and does detect IP addresses, it's only a matter of time before I get banned from editing. Hopefully not from reading; this would be an even more powerful deterrent.
By the time I get IP-banned from editing the site, I'll have inflicted relatively little damage. I wonder if my posts or even account will get removed (my username there is pen0rdeath). One trick would be to use very subtle vandalism, along the lines of changing dates in wikipedia entries (ie, deliberately asinine slashdot posts, which practically no-one will read, because the poster's mod-level will be and remain so low). At that point, the "worth the time and effort" variable becomes even less favorable.
I'll probably get tired of this soon. Not only that, but to accumulate any real community annoyance, I'd have to post under the same username my allowed 10 posts a day, but not comments so similar that they're recognized by scripts, over a number of weeks, using an IP proxy and/or several remote browsers.
I don't know how much longer I can keep this /. Vandalizing up. I'll try to do it intermittently throughout the day, and report back on what happens. You can check up on me by searching for posts by user:pen0rdeath, on the Swarming And Hopping Planetary Robots article.
Of course, here's another way to facilitate vandalism: get several people on different computers interested in the same project. See, this is the essential problem with net-vandalizing -- it's eventually (or immediately) boring. There are better things to do, like write retard-o blogs all night.
I notice that my 'net-gollum terminology is getting less apologetic; I don't have the energy anymore to speak in a language that normal people understand, or at least take the time to define my terms. I consider a link to be almost as good as defining a term; maybe I should do that more often. I'll just go through what I wrote today, and pretend I'm my mom; whatever she can't understand, I'll add to the list below:
Some belong more than others; I didn't include things like "click," "username," "log in," and "post," because I think those are going to be understood by normal computer users (ie, non net-addicts), a group which comprises pretty much everyone. Even so, those latter terms might not be understood by a depressionite. You don't realize you're part of a subculture until it's too late.
I think I'll go back and include a few links (it's hard not to rely solely on wikipedia for explicative links), just to be normal and nice, even though there's no way I'm going to do that on every subsequent entry. Of course, my blogging about computer-related garbage is a relatively rare thing.
depressionite: someone who grew up or was born during the Great Depression.
I just tried to submit another vandalic comment to slashdot, and they wouldn't allow it -- they told me new users are only allowed 10 posts a day. I'll add that to my list above. Retroactive, nonlinear blogging; I transcend space and time. Or, I provide superfluous information.
So it seems slashdot is more or less the king of vandalism/trolling-prevention. I remember reading about the "slashdot trolling phenomenon," about how users years ago used to post disguised links to things like hello.jpg, lemonparty.jpg, tubgirl.jpg, etc, which are obscene pictures that have been assigned a permanent place in the anals (sic) of internet culture. Slashdot foiled that trollish practice by displaying the root-directory of the URL next to every user-provided link.
Interested readers can find the aforementioned files in this directory (WARNING: horrible, awful, don't do it), even with the URL painstakingly removed from tubgirl.jpg in a project of masterpiece restoration.
Since I'm experimenting with providing lots of links in this entry, I'm gaining an insight into a weakness of the web: it's very easy to rely on other pages rather than providing your own information. If this continues ad infinitum, obvious problems ensue. I guess this is truism, and old-hat.
Haha, my karma has already been rated as terrible. All of my posts were rated "-1 troll." I <3 the internet :-)
pen0rdeath pen0rdeath@hotmail.com (email not shown publicly) Karma: Terrible
I see a site hit. I'm going to find out who it was. Some ho in bellevue, washington, at midnight. HAHA I KNOW WHO YOU ARE. You can't hide from my MAD 1337 SKILLZ.
Tee-hee, some people's searches are funny. Not necessarily in the content, but in the syntax. Check this one out:
what is paris like during the summer
I guess it's natural to phrase a search like a question asked of a human being, and I think some search engines encourage this ("ask jeeves"). But a search like paris summer climate OR temperature OR weather might be a better one. Google comes right out and tells you that including "is," "the," "an," etc is retarded, unless you're searching on a phrase. I crap on you.
In conclusion, if paris hilton was paid $250,000 to do a "t-mobile" commercial (stand around smiling, read some words from a teleprompter), why should I have to pay back my student loans?
Paris hilton is my heroine, just because she is the most pointless human being ever to exist in civilization. I genuinely respect that, and I respect even more that she's famous in spite of, or perhaps because of this. In a sense, paris hilton is very dada, or at least the concept of "paris hilton" is.
I'm running out of steam here. No more blogging for four months. Blogging will resume on April 9th, 2006. I'm serious.
Something surreal:
A non-anglophonic sikh woman from next-door (the nanny, I think) just came to my door in the cold, in her sari, holding a disposable camera. She rang the doorbell, and when I answered she told me "light off! Light off!" she wanted me to turn off the little blinking light on top of her camera. I advanced the film, clicked a pic, and the light was silent. She said "thank you," and skittered back across the lawn.
I think she might have been fiddling with the disposable camera illegally, and didn't want her housemasters to find out. But now they'll surely know the secret, when they see a snapshot of my coat closet in their role of film. One of those totally weird things.
Welp, I'm 31, and I continue to fundamentally suck. I demand a list of names of people who regularly read my blog. I really can't keep track, based on small tidbits of info I get here and there.
I'm about to head off to catonsville to bring my guitar in for a tune-up and intonation correction. I have this repairman whom I trust and like, recommended to me by my old guitar teacher at MC. He's good, based on my experience and assessment. Certainly better than the 20 year old kids working in rock n roll shops. This one kid in wheaton, working at "chuck levins," couldn't even set my intonation.
The kid told me that he wanted to open up his own shop somewhere out in the desert. "i don't care about money, man, I just want to do what I want." well, do you care about food? Shelter? It gets pretty hot and dry in said desert. He lived in the proverbial dream world. I think there are a lot of real incompetent idiots of that calibre in the world of guitar-repair. But not my guy, in catonsville.
I'd like to design a site for him -- he doesn't have one, and I wouldn't charge very much. I'm going to ask him, when I head up to my old hometown in about fifteen minutes.
I'm having class-anxiety about montgomery college, and can't decide whether to take landscaping classes (a weird inspiration that came about via some advice someone gave me), web programming classes, or no classes whatsoever. The problem with web programming classes is that they aren't really offered this semester. Oh well. Pointless.
Catonsville is nice, sorta. It's quieter than gaithersburg, and has more personality, in the form of decrepit buildings and people ambling around more slowly. It's kind of rednecky, but in a pleasant way. Gaithersburg is just yuppie hell.
SHITY BLOG
I fiddled around with my DNS (or DDNS or DYNDNS, or something), which was being handled by afraid.org. Actually, what I did was fiddle around with my registrar, gandi.net, and entered the afraid.org nameservers into their nameserver fields. See, afraid.org is my dynamic DNS service, and what it does is points my domain to my IP address (it used to point their domain to my IP address, with my domain as their subdomain), even though I personally don't have any nameservers. So, I use theirs. Whatever a nameserver is. I don't care.
Anyway, for a long time I just had my domain (as I told my registrar to do) redirect to deadbarnacle.afraid.org, and then afraid.org pointed to my IP address. But, for some reason I was in the mood for fiddling around, and I found my way to afraid.org's interface. From there, I noticed that it seemed to indicate that I could have "my domain" in my location bar instead of "deadbarnacle.afraid.org." this intrigued me, and titillated me.
So, I went to gandi.net, and altered my nameservers there. Formerly, I was using gandi.net's nameservers, but now I'm using afraid.org's, and those nameservers are able to see my IP address. So, now my domain points directly to me via afraid.org, but through nameservers as opposed to through re-direction, and shows up in the location bar; afraid.org might be seen as a ssort of "hosting intermediary" between my registrar and host (which is myself). try it! See? No more deadbarnacle.afraid.org; now their is only my domain
The thing is, www.my domain (the domain with www attached, as opposed to just my domain) was broken for a while, and I couldn't figure out why. Gandi tells me that it automatically registers the www along with the straight domain, and afraid.org says a a similar thing (or something -- I don't remember what exactly. Who cares. It turns out I misinterpretd this, and I actually did have to add the www as a subdomain on the afraid.org interface). But, it woudln't work -- for some reason, www.my domain was redirecting to the afraid.org homepage, with a special message for me in the location bar: "http://freedns.afraid.org/?no_webforward_found_for_www.my domain."
Ok, whatever. I played around with the web forwarding, pointing my domain to www.my domain. This worked for a while (before I found this mistake), but then it magically stopped working, and as I said my domain with thet www attached started forwarding to afraid.org. I clicked a few things, typed a few things, and suddenly http://www.my domain gave me a browser errror message of "www.my domain cannot be found." I also tried to get www.my domain working without a re-direct -- just having the www function as a subdomain (which it is) of my domain, and pointing to the same host.
Ok, so I thought it could be one of three things: 1) my dyndns client, which automatically updates afraid.org with my IP address. 2) my registrar, the snotty, deliberately un-user-friendly, translated-from-french, geeky registrar, gandi.net (Gestion et Attribution des Noms de Domaine sur Internet). 3) afraid.org, which isn't exactly the king of user-friendliness, but at least it's text is comprehensible, even though I've gotten pretty good at figuring out what the hell gandi.net is talking about:
If you are currently using our redirection services or our custom DNS service, and if you want to change nameservers (thus not using anymore those services), you will need to use link ``Change your DNS hosting from GANDI to another service'' (also available directly from the Administration section).
Teehee. Anyway, my registrar and my Dynamic DNS client seemed to be set up fine (even though when I was mucking around on gandi.net, I spotted a leftover record of mark's old server in san francisco that I used to use, so I deleted that).
I twiddled some more with afraid.org, and suddenly http://www.my domain was working. I don't know. Maybe I did something different (there were a few combinations of actions, and I probably should have made a detailed list, but who cares), or maybe afraid.org needed some time, or gandi.net needed some time. Anyway, what's done is done.
I've tried to do some reading on wikipedia on DNS and nameservers, just so I can have a better idea of what's going on here, but it was too complicated. One of those things where the article is full of linked terminology, and then the article about "term x" is incomprehensible because of more unknown terms, ad infinitum.
I just tried it on links on SDF (a remote browser), and http://www.my domain DOESN'T WORK AFTERALL. Oh well. I go kill myself now. It seeming to work must have had something with my trying to access my own files locally, even though I was going through an online request. Who knows.
Ok, it's fixed. I think my registrar was just slow in updating things. Both http://my domain and http://www.my domain work.
I've managed to pay 110 USD back in 1999, and that was and will be the only my domain-related expense I'll ever incur. I've never paid a cent for hosting, in other words. I am a god, except I'm a little fuzzy on how I achieved this godhood. I'm lovecraft's "blind, idiot god."
In other news, yesterday I ate five protein bars in a row, and experienced ensuing bowel trouble. If you google my name without the quotes, I don't come up on the first google hit-page (which is all anyone ever looks at). With the quotes, I'm still #1. I don't get google at all.
I realize it's impossible (or very nearly so) to completely anonymize myself from the internet, or rather disassoviate myself with this website, but I can get pretty damned close, and block almost every path to recognition the average person (ie, non computer geek, non social engineer) could use. But really, who cares? This is all academic.
A contender not for "most asinine blog ever," but instead for "most boring blog ever." I should put together a list of superlatives.
Happy birthday to me, by the way.
The members of "led zeppelin" like to write songs about how women are despicable. Or, at least robert plant does, and the other three don't disagree enough to refuse to play the song. A few examples:
Good god, that was exhausting. I might have missed some, and some of my examples might be stretching it, but you get the idea.
I guess it's safe to assume that robert plant had a few unsucessful relationships. Some of the songs and lines therein are more about failed love, and not necessarily about despicable woman. But most of the time, in "led zeppelin"'s eyes, the culprit is clear.
"led zeppelin"'s music was influenced hugely by and sometimes precicely imitates classic blues, and blues songs are infamous for overty mysoginist lyrics ("now listen here woman, let me tell you this...you want to get crooked, im gonna give you my fist" -- blind willie mctell, "your southern can is mine").
Premise: all songs are about sex and/or love. Premise: the blues are about sad things. Premise: the blues are sung by men. Conclusion: the blues are going to be songs about men's bad experiences with sex and love, the cause of which is attributed to women.
To their credit, "led zeppelin" wrote a number of songs about the joys of being in love and of having sexual intercourse. However, songs about bad women represents a significant percentage of the band's total output.
I've noticed that they don't have a big female fan-base, even though there are a die-hard few, sort of like the women who enthusiastically shake dey booties to "li'l john"'s "get low" ("3,6,9 damn she fine hopin she can sock it to me one mo time, get low get low, to the sweat drop down my balls, to all these bitches crawl").
As I mentioned, some "led zeppelin" songs are about good relationships and about sex. Songs that portray and describe love, whether positively or negatively, comprise the overwhelming majority of their catalog. If you pick a "led zeppelin" song, chances are it will be about love and/or sex, either failed or successful (no songs about sexual impotence, however).
Songs not about some aspect of mating constitute something like three or four numbers that are about weird mystical pagan crap, or some combination of weird mystical pagan crap, love, and just incomprehensible babbling.
I guess this reflects the general state of pop music: most songs are about sex, relationships, love, heartbreak, etc. It's surprising when one takes notice of it; consider the songs you know, and how many are about the sexes relating.
Our purpose as living organisms is really thrown into relief here (to make more of ourselves -- species propagation); it's what our poetry is about, and clearly it's the principle thing that concerns us.
There should be more songs about food, or sleep, or taking a crap. Admittedly there are some songs about how work sucks, and existential, introspective angst (think "nirvana"). There's some fringe stuff, of course, like "slayer"'s refreshing bits about violence, death, satan, and medical experimentation.
Recomendation for people shipping a package: prepare it such that it and its contents will withstand being dropped from 10 feet in the air onto a hard, wooden floor. But that's it -- it won't impact anything harder than that. And it doesn't matter if it says "fragile" on it -- handlers might be more careful with it (in some cases), but it might still be resting near the ceiling of the trailer, on top of other boxes, and come tumbling down to the trailer floor when its massive support structure of stacked boxes is compromised.
The only other thing that might go wrong is that your box gets its corner crushed or torn open by being at an odd angle to some other really heavy package, the rear wheel well, or a corner of the trailer. But this doesn't happen very often. Also, tape it really carefully. Box tops tend to pop open if they're poorly taped, and then bits of your life are exposed.
Also, it's a bad idea to send a small, fragile thing in a big, used box that's otherwise empty; the result is like setting a paperweight on a cooked tube of macaroni. New boxes are ok, though; they don't get crushed too easily. Generally, avoid previously used boxes, unless they're full of something that braces the sides, and they're obsessively well-taped. Also, use square boxes. Weirdly-shaped ones don't interlock well with the mass of other boxes, and stand a greater risk of being mashed.
UPS might be a good way to ship methamphetamine, child porn, biological weapons, human heads, etc. They don't employ sniffer dogs, x-rays, or anything like that -- every package just gets tossed on the belt without consideration. The only thing to watch out for is that if a package is poorly packed and comes apart, then everyone sees your goodies.
That said, who knows what they're doing at the national distribution centers -- the sniffer dog kennels might be there. And it just doesn't make sense that sniffer dogs and/or x-rays aren't used to inspect, say, international shipments from columbia to the united states. Why else would people catch flights from bogata to new york with $2,000,000 worth of cocaine-balloons in their digestive tracks?
Also: fuck "pottery barn." the heaviest and biggest packages are almost invariably from "pottery barn," and are probably tacky four foot high sculptures of a cupid or something like that (in the "crystal cat" category).
Also: I find it sort of ironic that I'm heaving dozens of 50 pound boxes containing "bowflex" exercise machines, and in doing so am probably getting more exercise than the recipient will ever get via his or her "bowflex," until it ends up in the basement two months after receipt. The whole thing reminds me of people with gym memberships driving one mile to the gym to go run on a treadmill.
If you think you're going to solve your problems or satisfy your ideological cravings by coming up to Canada, you are gravely mistaken. I'm embarrassed to be a Canadian right now. We're an arrogant little country with an unjust hate of Americans without being able to look at our own problems objectively. -- StandardCell, Slashdot.org
Teehee. That was from an interesting series of posts on canada vs. the united states. My official position is: "canada is best for some, while the usa is best for others." also, I haven't lived as an adult in canada (nor have I lived as a self-supporting adult in either country), so I'm really not qualified to make statements on it. Drawing from my standard pile of hearsay and muddled intuition, I conject that it's better to be upper-middle class and rich in the usa, better to be lower middle class in canada, and being middle class really depends on aesthetic preferences.
If you don't like american culture or the current government, then move to a different u.s. City and vote.
Do I like america? I dislike most of the leaders' (corporate and government) policies and actions, I have mixed feelings about the culture, and I guess I like the landscape (even though I haven't seen a lot of it). I don't think I'd be "happier" in canada, however -- I'd be just as miserable working a shitty job with no friends there as I would be here. I'll probably stay in the united states; one place is basically the same as another, unless one is speaking a different language. So, quebec might be radically different. It's becoming a habit to say "who cares?" and give up on either an analysis or a project. It's relieving, but probably not good for stuff. I dunno. Who cares? I want a sausage mcmuffin.
By linking to a slashdot comments page, have I reached the point of no return?
I have to get up tomorrow at 3am. Good thing this is temporary. It's Monday, too -- gonna be a lot of packages. I bought some sticky rubber gloves (lowes - $4.99), and I'm going to wear a sweatshirt to pad the underside of my forearms. Last Wednesday, they each developed a stigmata-like bruise from the corners of boxes. I generally tend to operate my body wrongly.
I'm starting to have second thoughts about the upcomming meditation retreat; 10 days of silence and no distractions might drive me crazy. I wish it was a little shorter, like maybe four or five days. Then, I wouldn't be experiencing quite as much trepidation. But how would poor yoni get up there if I bail out?
I took some steps to anonymize my site, and took out some "offensive" material. I'd like to have the option of re-entering normal society in some way. Plus, it sort of feels good to have a little shelter from having my name smeared all over the web. Already, searches on it yield links to my site as the fourth or fifth hit. I join the ranks of the nameless internet lurkers -- only those of us with something to hide.
Today, I clean! Always a better choice than browsing the web, playing maelstrom and chatting with post-adolescents (no offense). By writing it here, I'm more likely to actually do it. In fact, I'm going to post before and after pictures -- that'll really get me going, I think. But first, food.
Who the hell is visiting my site on Sunday at 7:30am, EST? Must be one o' dem damn yoor-o-pee-uns. Not only that, but with a macintosh. A traitor to the New World Order if ever there was one. Wow, a japanese; few and far between.