I saw nothing but Black Squirrels in DC and Maryland areas (Chevy Chase Circle, for example, tons.) but haven't really seen them anywhere else. I remember commenting to my friend's parents that they looked kind of cute and they shot me an evil look. Apparently they tend to be a bit more bold, tenacious and destructive than most squirrels. In Chicago, they all run away from people...
"Skipweasel June 10th, 2009 at 3:38 pm I just can’t get my head round the idea that such law would exist - how could anyone ever have thought they were right?"
"HollywoodBob June 10th, 2009 at 4:27 pm Shouldn’t be too hard to understand, we hear the exact same arguments against gay marriage today."
It really puts the whole matter of gay marriage into perspective, doesn't it?
By the reasoning cited by Warren in the Loving opinion, renders the purpose of the fundamental right of marriage worthless. If you can't choose your partner, your right to pursue happiness is abridged. Why shouldn't someone be allowed to marry the person they love, want to spend the rest of their lives with, if they happen to be of the same sex? There truly is no argument against it once religious "ideals" and "values" are taken out of the debate.
While I found some of the setups to be incredibly elementary, the tunnel of polarized shards of glass (One Way Colour Tunnel) was nice. Two other pieces that you'll find on the MCA Chicago website look better photographed than they did in person. (Beauty (a fine mist sprinkler hanging from the ceiling with a light aimed at it) and Color Space Embracer (more polarized glass with a light aimed at it))...
If the photgraphs were printed and hung, I probably would have been more impressed with what I saw. The shots were very well composed and framed. It was funny in that way. So I tend to stand by the statement that Art is the Experience on top of what is done. But seeing the caged fan dangling from the ceiling was just so dumb that I couldn't justify it at all.
One of the other bits in the exhibit was called Mirror Doors. 4 spot lamps aimed at the floor or wall with a mirror completing the shape if you looked at it from a certain angle. One was just simply aimed at the floor.
Considering I've worked in the arts, both theater and institutions... I found a lot of the installations to be so pedestrian and insulting. Aiming a light at the floor? Come on.
Eliasson certainly, for myself, carries the distinction to have among the most "extreme" works in a single installation that I have seen: Some -really- nice setups (The Photographic series, very nice) and the most DUMB things I've ever seen (mentioned above)... So yeah. Certainly hit both ends of the scale for me.
Mind you, I'm a fan of Duchamp and his readymade works. I thought tipping a urinal over and calling it Fountain is hysterical... (Especially when you notice it's also sacrilegious, the vague shape of the Virgin Mary), but there's so much more to say about things like that and a bicycle wheel mounted to a stool than there could have been said about...
A caged fan hung from the ceiling or a spotlight aimed at the floor.
I tend to have better results by outright saying what I think of any specific piece. Rather than faking an appreciation, pandering to someone who doesn't share your feelings about something... Well, it's a waste of time.
Case in point. MCA in Chicago. The current exhibition on the main floor has one room where a fan is tethered by a cable to the ceiling. Like an upright caged standing fan, except it has no base and hangs from a cord. It is powered on and swoops and flutters about while anchored to the ceiling.
I took a long look at it, people walking around me. Some others curiously standing in the room and pondering.
I just blurted out. "This is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever seen called art."
Two people looked upset at me, everyone else clapped.
Unfortunately... there were worse examples in the other rooms. So that ceiling fan is no longer _the_ stupidest, but among the most stupid things I've ever seen installed and called art.
One of the reasons we have the online shop is that I want another source of revenue for the blog that is independent of advertisements. Ad revenues on a per impression basis have been declining for many years. Because more people ignore ads, the ads themselves have become more intrusive."
I think you've gone the right way about all of it. I make no apologies for using plugins to block third party ads... but absolutely would not begrudge you of any revenue if it was selfhosted. The problem is that it really is a logistics nightmare unless you're a huge megasite (like Digg, et al) and can rely on your own name or connections to sell space and have a departmental staff to deal with all of it.
When it comes to intrusiveness... A well designed layout also helps. (In other words: Don't do anything Myspace does when it comes to placing ads.) But then you deal with third party stuff that results in situations like these. It's not pretty, nor fun. It's a sad irony... People ignore ads because they were getting quite intrusive, so the ads become more intrusive because people are blocking what was 'bad enough' before. The point of no return (I used to whitelist some sites that I visited often) was when Flash overlay and keyword inlinking ads started showing up. The unfortunate thing was that some of these changes in behaviour were pushed to sites using the third party ad services without them knowing... resulting in a LOT of pissed off users.
But after you mention your share of the costs, I shudder to think how much myself and David may have "wasted" on erasure.org in hosting. (Ahhh. Youthful disposable income. Those were the days...) The Amazon referral links certainly did help, though.
Something for the ‘Adblock’ fanbois to think about.
Adblock is ‘not’ a sustainable solution, because if everybody does that Neatorama loses it’s revenue stream, and, although you’ve got rid of the irritating adverts, you’ve got rid of Neatorama too…"
I hate to do this, but I guess I'm going to have to.
Every site, unless it starts for the intent of being a commercial site, essentially is a hobby. I remember the older days of Neatorama when (not much different than it is now) it was just a blog of neat things. Except now, they have some promotional bits that I don't mind and occasionally offer things for sale or prize giveaway. That's all fine by me.
However, if you're running a site expecting to subsist purely on ad revenue, then you've got your head up your arse. The simple fact of the matter is that one bad apple (or in this case, many bad apples) spoils the whole bunch and well... Adblock didn't begin to exist out of a pathological need to deprive sites of revenue. It came to exist because of a need to control the flood of popping, abusive, site hijacking and browser crashing ads that were all the rage not much more than 5 years ago.
Who remembers the days when Doubleclick flooded the internet with tracking bug images? Who remembers the X-11 wireless camera popunders? Who remembers the spank the monkey ads? Who remembers Bonzai Buddy? It goes on and on and on. Even as well as a site can be maintained... (Sorry, Alex, I know you're trying, but this is a prime example right here, right now) There is ALWAYS going to be the risk of devious practices being done by the -third party- advertising resellers that are used to generate revenue for a site. Otherwise this problem and this thread that I'm posting in wouldn't even exist right now.
Do I think Neatorama would magically vanish along with half the internet if everyone blocked ads? No. But the sites that exist only to make money and not out of the labor of love that most tend to start out as... yeah, they would disappear, and I wouldn't miss them.
You see, I've run a site to host various projects and such... have helped to run others that reached a marked degree of recognition for the effort put into it. The temptation to put adboxes up was always there though the hosting costs actually weren't all that bad. It was out of pocketable for someone in his 20's.
One site that I had a 50% stake in was erasure.org. It was, at the time of it being shut down, the longest maintained erasure fansite on the internet. (It started in 1997) What killed it for us? Ads. One adbox that had those free iPod ponzi scheme offers ended up loading malware from another compromised thirdparty site and put us in a state where we were asking if it was worth it to continue the effort we put in for a few cents on clickthroughs. It wasn't. Restoring the site from backups took weeks and by that point... David and myself were both ready to move on. (Backing up a site you made at home is simple. Backing up a site that relies on multiple MySQL instances and a patchwork of php scripts and blog interfaces? Not so much. Things broke.)
Other circumstances led to the ultimate death of the site, which aren't really relevant to the issue at hand. But yes, the ads certainly caused more problems than it was worth for the amount of money that was coming in. To give you an idea of the distinction we had for being a fansite: Mute Records North America used us as their official press release source URL. (Mute Records UK had not yet bothered to give NA a discrete site) After EMI Records bought out Mute Records, the official url for Erasure releases continued to be our old erasure.org fansite... despite the site having been taken offline a few years before. (It simply redirects to my project site domains now.)
A bit of a tangent, but regardless. It was a hobby. We tried the expected thing of making money off of it, or in the least, covering our own expenses... and in doing so, it ended up being one of the many straws that lead to breaking the camel's back.
If your site cannot survive without adbox or banner impressions, then your business model is bullshit and site is not worth visiting. Alex and others have the right idea by integrating prize giveaways as a form of advertising (one of the many things we did at Erasure.org when other labels were getting in touch with us) and setting up a store to sell items featured on the site before. I'm pretty sure erasure.org would still be around if not for the problems we encountered because of attempting to do ads in the first place. So, I understand what Alex might be feeling right now. Losing control over your site because of some stupid ads is a pretty scary feeling.
I have my own projects that I host on my domains. I use a Donate button. I will not do ads. Period. If someone appreciates my site so much, then I hope they will donate... but I will not hold visitors accountable for my site's existence. It wouldn't continue to be the hobby that it started as if I did. That was the lesson I learned with erasure.org and the eventual toll it took upon myself and my friend in trying to do everything we thought we should have done for what we had.
If you are able to find a way to fund your time and expenses with what you do on your site... great. But you cannot do it with the expectation that the internet is a safe place and shit like this doesn't happen. Clearly, as you can see... it does. That is why I use Adblock and a 1/2 megabyte sized HOSTS file. If Alex were to sell adspace himself, uploading the images or scripts to be hosted locally... I would not block them. All bets are off when it's third party.
Conspiracy theories abound, some posted by former developers on this project, suggest that this game was never meant to be finished... but to increase sales of whatever new engine that they "switched" to at the time. The Unreal engine was updated a few times and released with subsequent Unreal games... and each time before, DNF was announced as switching to it. There has also been comments by devs and designers that the trailers were all faked, meaning that whatever little bit they were working on was done only for that scene in the trailer before it was scrapped. Whatever was going around with DNF, I don't think it's as simple as them taking their time and not managing to get it done before cash ran out.
Every pit that I've met (then again, it comes down to the people you associate with) has pretty much been a big sack of love. I was surrounded by rotties as a kid and they're still my preferred breed now, but Pits also have a big spot in my heart. A properly trained (and this is true for all pets) and socialized Pit isn't going to go apeshit and murderous as the hysterical media has put it. Look beyond the dog and take a close look at every person who has owned one of the 'problem animals' you hear about. It tells you everything you need to know.
The fact that all of the adopted Michael Vick pits are doing great and those in homes with children... no incidents have occurred. Would you expect this from something that was a breed that was born to fight? No. I expect this from a breed that was mistreated, abused, ill trained, but then rehabilitated, socialized and properly integrated into a household. Sports Illustrated did a photo spread on them and the pictures were pretty incredible. You can clearly see that the pits have adjusted well and appreciate their new owners. Pits are the kind of dogs that love to cuddle and be as close as possible to those they trust the most. (To the point to where they practically smother you, but that's their charm.)
I did come across a breakdown of reported dogbites and noticed something: Small breeds, combined, had a higher percentage of bite incidents compared with larger breeds... So no, this wouldn't be a case of using a larger population to dwarf another number. As I said before, look beyond the breed and look at the owner. A lot of small breeds can be a problem because they're not properly socialized and trained. "Oh, he's just a little dog. He doesn't need to be trained not to bite like a big one." Bullcrap.
Whether it's a Pit or a Lab, an ill tempered, abused and improperly trained dog is a problem dog.
My parents had adopted a Britney Spaniel, a breed known for being loyal, smothering (ever heard of the "Britney Hug?") and aggressive under certain circumstances. When my mother went to get the mail, it was raining. She had a hoodie on and the hood over her head. We had the dog for one week. It growled and snarled at her, snapping at her until my father chased it away. It had been trained to respond that way to anyone wearing a hoodie. Turns out, it was given up for adoption by someone who lived in a bad neighborhood. We didn't know about this until we reported the issue with the SPCA.
Yes. A _SPANIEL._
If there is one thing I can point a finger at that contributes to the impression of Pits as a problem breed, it's their stubbornness in always wanting to please their owners. They're so eager to please, coupled with their looks, it's not surprising they get a bad rap as vicious dogs when in the hands of vicious people.
Everyone complaining about how they didn't get a rescue... if you remember, they had to make sure they got a specific breed that wouldn't aggravate one of the girl's allergies and asthma. The Portuguese Water Dog happens to be one of those breeds that are fairly well tolerated. They don't shed, some people claim they're hypoallergenic, which isn't exactly true. But given the requirements for the pet... there'd be no guarantee that the girls could tolerate a shelter dog that APPEARS to be a true breed but may be a slight mutt. In this case, it's better not to take the chance and run the risk of finding out after some time that the allergies and asthma would flare up.
"litlfrog
June 13th, 2009 at 8:32 am
Guys, I just picked up a couple of trojans going to the popcrunch website. Can anyone confirm that the site is infected today?"
Any AntiVirus scanner logs you can share? Nothing registered when I went there, but also, I have AdBlock and a pretty comprehensive HOSTS file.
June 10th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
I just can’t get my head round the idea that such law would exist - how could anyone ever have thought they were right?"
"HollywoodBob
June 10th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Shouldn’t be too hard to understand, we hear the exact same arguments against gay marriage today."
It really puts the whole matter of gay marriage into perspective, doesn't it?
By the reasoning cited by Warren in the Loving opinion, renders the purpose of the fundamental right of marriage worthless. If you can't choose your partner, your right to pursue happiness is abridged. Why shouldn't someone be allowed to marry the person they love, want to spend the rest of their lives with, if they happen to be of the same sex? There truly is no argument against it once religious "ideals" and "values" are taken out of the debate.
June 9th, 2009 at 8:22 am
james - did you like anything by him (Eliasson)?"
While I found some of the setups to be incredibly elementary, the tunnel of polarized shards of glass (One Way Colour Tunnel) was nice. Two other pieces that you'll find on the MCA Chicago website look better photographed than they did in person. (Beauty (a fine mist sprinkler hanging from the ceiling with a light aimed at it) and Color Space Embracer (more polarized glass with a light aimed at it))...
If the photgraphs were printed and hung, I probably would have been more impressed with what I saw. The shots were very well composed and framed. It was funny in that way. So I tend to stand by the statement that Art is the Experience on top of what is done. But seeing the caged fan dangling from the ceiling was just so dumb that I couldn't justify it at all.
One of the other bits in the exhibit was called Mirror Doors. 4 spot lamps aimed at the floor or wall with a mirror completing the shape if you looked at it from a certain angle. One was just simply aimed at the floor.
Considering I've worked in the arts, both theater and institutions... I found a lot of the installations to be so pedestrian and insulting. Aiming a light at the floor? Come on.
Eliasson certainly, for myself, carries the distinction to have among the most "extreme" works in a single installation that I have seen: Some -really- nice setups (The Photographic series, very nice) and the most DUMB things I've ever seen (mentioned above)... So yeah. Certainly hit both ends of the scale for me.
Mind you, I'm a fan of Duchamp and his readymade works. I thought tipping a urinal over and calling it Fountain is hysterical... (Especially when you notice it's also sacrilegious, the vague shape of the Virgin Mary), but there's so much more to say about things like that and a bicycle wheel mounted to a stool than there could have been said about...
A caged fan hung from the ceiling or a spotlight aimed at the floor.
Case in point. MCA in Chicago. The current exhibition on the main floor has one room where a fan is tethered by a cable to the ceiling. Like an upright caged standing fan, except it has no base and hangs from a cord. It is powered on and swoops and flutters about while anchored to the ceiling.
I took a long look at it, people walking around me. Some others curiously standing in the room and pondering.
I just blurted out. "This is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever seen called art."
Two people looked upset at me, everyone else clapped.
Unfortunately... there were worse examples in the other rooms. So that ceiling fan is no longer _the_ stupidest, but among the most stupid things I've ever seen installed and called art.
May 27th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
One of the reasons we have the online shop is that I want another source of revenue for the blog that is independent of advertisements. Ad revenues on a per impression basis have been declining for many years. Because more people ignore ads, the ads themselves have become more intrusive."
I think you've gone the right way about all of it. I make no apologies for using plugins to block third party ads... but absolutely would not begrudge you of any revenue if it was selfhosted. The problem is that it really is a logistics nightmare unless you're a huge megasite (like Digg, et al) and can rely on your own name or connections to sell space and have a departmental staff to deal with all of it.
When it comes to intrusiveness... A well designed layout also helps. (In other words: Don't do anything Myspace does when it comes to placing ads.) But then you deal with third party stuff that results in situations like these. It's not pretty, nor fun. It's a sad irony... People ignore ads because they were getting quite intrusive, so the ads become more intrusive because people are blocking what was 'bad enough' before. The point of no return (I used to whitelist some sites that I visited often) was when Flash overlay and keyword inlinking ads started showing up. The unfortunate thing was that some of these changes in behaviour were pushed to sites using the third party ad services without them knowing... resulting in a LOT of pissed off users.
But after you mention your share of the costs, I shudder to think how much myself and David may have "wasted" on erasure.org in hosting. (Ahhh. Youthful disposable income. Those were the days...) The Amazon referral links certainly did help, though.
May 27th, 2009 at 8:13 am
Something for the ‘Adblock’ fanbois to think about.
Adblock is ‘not’ a sustainable solution, because if everybody does that Neatorama loses it’s revenue stream, and, although you’ve got rid of the irritating adverts, you’ve got rid of Neatorama too…"
I hate to do this, but I guess I'm going to have to.
Every site, unless it starts for the intent of being a commercial site, essentially is a hobby. I remember the older days of Neatorama when (not much different than it is now) it was just a blog of neat things. Except now, they have some promotional bits that I don't mind and occasionally offer things for sale or prize giveaway. That's all fine by me.
However, if you're running a site expecting to subsist purely on ad revenue, then you've got your head up your arse. The simple fact of the matter is that one bad apple (or in this case, many bad apples) spoils the whole bunch and well... Adblock didn't begin to exist out of a pathological need to deprive sites of revenue. It came to exist because of a need to control the flood of popping, abusive, site hijacking and browser crashing ads that were all the rage not much more than 5 years ago.
Who remembers the days when Doubleclick flooded the internet with tracking bug images? Who remembers the X-11 wireless camera popunders? Who remembers the spank the monkey ads? Who remembers Bonzai Buddy? It goes on and on and on. Even as well as a site can be maintained... (Sorry, Alex, I know you're trying, but this is a prime example right here, right now) There is ALWAYS going to be the risk of devious practices being done by the -third party- advertising resellers that are used to generate revenue for a site. Otherwise this problem and this thread that I'm posting in wouldn't even exist right now.
Do I think Neatorama would magically vanish along with half the internet if everyone blocked ads? No. But the sites that exist only to make money and not out of the labor of love that most tend to start out as... yeah, they would disappear, and I wouldn't miss them.
You see, I've run a site to host various projects and such... have helped to run others that reached a marked degree of recognition for the effort put into it. The temptation to put adboxes up was always there though the hosting costs actually weren't all that bad. It was out of pocketable for someone in his 20's.
One site that I had a 50% stake in was erasure.org. It was, at the time of it being shut down, the longest maintained erasure fansite on the internet. (It started in 1997) What killed it for us? Ads. One adbox that had those free iPod ponzi scheme offers ended up loading malware from another compromised thirdparty site and put us in a state where we were asking if it was worth it to continue the effort we put in for a few cents on clickthroughs. It wasn't. Restoring the site from backups took weeks and by that point... David and myself were both ready to move on. (Backing up a site you made at home is simple. Backing up a site that relies on multiple MySQL instances and a patchwork of php scripts and blog interfaces? Not so much. Things broke.)
Other circumstances led to the ultimate death of the site, which aren't really relevant to the issue at hand. But yes, the ads certainly caused more problems than it was worth for the amount of money that was coming in. To give you an idea of the distinction we had for being a fansite: Mute Records North America used us as their official press release source URL. (Mute Records UK had not yet bothered to give NA a discrete site) After EMI Records bought out Mute Records, the official url for Erasure releases continued to be our old erasure.org fansite... despite the site having been taken offline a few years before. (It simply redirects to my project site domains now.)
A bit of a tangent, but regardless. It was a hobby. We tried the expected thing of making money off of it, or in the least, covering our own expenses... and in doing so, it ended up being one of the many straws that lead to breaking the camel's back.
If your site cannot survive without adbox or banner impressions, then your business model is bullshit and site is not worth visiting. Alex and others have the right idea by integrating prize giveaways as a form of advertising (one of the many things we did at Erasure.org when other labels were getting in touch with us) and setting up a store to sell items featured on the site before. I'm pretty sure erasure.org would still be around if not for the problems we encountered because of attempting to do ads in the first place. So, I understand what Alex might be feeling right now. Losing control over your site because of some stupid ads is a pretty scary feeling.
I have my own projects that I host on my domains. I use a Donate button. I will not do ads. Period. If someone appreciates my site so much, then I hope they will donate... but I will not hold visitors accountable for my site's existence. It wouldn't continue to be the hobby that it started as if I did. That was the lesson I learned with erasure.org and the eventual toll it took upon myself and my friend in trying to do everything we thought we should have done for what we had.
If you are able to find a way to fund your time and expenses with what you do on your site... great. But you cannot do it with the expectation that the internet is a safe place and shit like this doesn't happen. Clearly, as you can see... it does. That is why I use Adblock and a 1/2 megabyte sized HOSTS file. If Alex were to sell adspace himself, uploading the images or scripts to be hosted locally... I would not block them. All bets are off when it's third party.
The fact that all of the adopted Michael Vick pits are doing great and those in homes with children... no incidents have occurred. Would you expect this from something that was a breed that was born to fight? No. I expect this from a breed that was mistreated, abused, ill trained, but then rehabilitated, socialized and properly integrated into a household. Sports Illustrated did a photo spread on them and the pictures were pretty incredible. You can clearly see that the pits have adjusted well and appreciate their new owners. Pits are the kind of dogs that love to cuddle and be as close as possible to those they trust the most. (To the point to where they practically smother you, but that's their charm.)
I did come across a breakdown of reported dogbites and noticed something: Small breeds, combined, had a higher percentage of bite incidents compared with larger breeds... So no, this wouldn't be a case of using a larger population to dwarf another number. As I said before, look beyond the breed and look at the owner. A lot of small breeds can be a problem because they're not properly socialized and trained. "Oh, he's just a little dog. He doesn't need to be trained not to bite like a big one." Bullcrap.
Whether it's a Pit or a Lab, an ill tempered, abused and improperly trained dog is a problem dog.
My parents had adopted a Britney Spaniel, a breed known for being loyal, smothering (ever heard of the "Britney Hug?") and aggressive under certain circumstances. When my mother went to get the mail, it was raining. She had a hoodie on and the hood over her head. We had the dog for one week. It growled and snarled at her, snapping at her until my father chased it away. It had been trained to respond that way to anyone wearing a hoodie. Turns out, it was given up for adoption by someone who lived in a bad neighborhood. We didn't know about this until we reported the issue with the SPCA.
Yes. A _SPANIEL._
If there is one thing I can point a finger at that contributes to the impression of Pits as a problem breed, it's their stubbornness in always wanting to please their owners. They're so eager to please, coupled with their looks, it's not surprising they get a bad rap as vicious dogs when in the hands of vicious people.
ThinkGeek has been selling these for quite some time. Could never bring myself to, uhm... find disease calling bugs cuddly, though.