Friday  the Sixth of December, 2002

Buttonmen.com; a retro-HTML online gaming arena for the elegant little dice-and-badge Cheapass game.
The Google Catalogs beta is rather astonishing - you can search a huge stack of OCR'd US mail-order catalogs for whatever rubbish takes your fancy, and it displays graphically-highlighted extracts of page scans.

Entertainingly, the OCRing has been done at such a catch-all level that searching for very simplistic ASCII-art will return results with bits of pictures highlighted. (And there are a few places where the software couldn't quite make something out.)


CAMRAD Update #6

"The class action complaint alleges that Bonzi deceptively and fraudulently commandeered millions of internet users to Bonzi’s commercial websites through dissemination of tens-of-millions of fraudulent Internet advertising banners that impersonated computer error messages."
Bonzi are being dragged to court over their naif-misleading faux-alert-box banner adverts. Absurd compensation aside, it's about time this sort of thing was regulated.

Elsewhere, a case of corporate-sponsored automated telemarketing is being investigated by the ASA, although it's an opt-in thing for people remiss enough to actually give their phone number to a previous promotion, so probably won't amount to much. Full marks for it being a campaign for Minority Report, with all its advertising-dystopia ambience, though.

(I'm toying with the idea of setting up a communal Campaign for Real Advertising weblog - any takers?)


Passing Frenzies: Urban Letterboxing - War of the Worlds - Rumble - Nation States


 Wednesday  the Fourth

Kennings are a particularly Norse brand of poetic metaphor that I hadn't met before. Looking at them more closely, they can be expressed as groups of four terms, connected in a standard "a is to b as x is to y" fashion - by following the connections in different ways, we can derive four different, sturdy metaphors from a single pairing.

Example. If we decide that "sheep is to field as cloud is to sky", we can consider sheep to be field-clouds, clouds to be sky-sheep, fields to be sheep-skies and think of the sky as a cloud-field. All terribly obvious in hindsight, but my brain didn't read and twist metaphors this neatly a few hours ago. It has since, and will from now on. Thankyou Ben. (And sorry Joh...)


"The below-sheep clouds warm mirrors over snow-soft sky."
Electric Sheep Poetry; lazy proof that if you spray-paint fifteen poetic words onto some sheep, you shouldn't be too surprised when they occasionally herd themselves into poetic sentence fragments. Still not really sure where the quantum physics enter into it, though, unless sheep possess some odd properties on the subatomic level. Perhaps they do.


 Tuesday  the Third

"After the rapture, there will be a lot of speculation as to why millions of people have just disappeared. Unfortunately, after the rapture, only non believers will be left to come up with answers. You probably have family and friends that you have witnessed to and they just won't listen. After the rapture they probably will, but who will tell them?"
Automated Christian spam email, that's who. After you've been saved, the Rapture Letters service will send a smug email to your evil atheist friends every Friday afternoon, something for them to think about while they're waiting for NTK. [via Leonard]

According to this fantastic timeline of the end days, there are likely to be a good five and a half months of peace between the initial Rapture and the opening of the first seal; some twenty or so automated reminders for us to repent our sins. After that, the Internet should be able to reroute around the apocalypse until at least the sixth seal.



 Monday  the Second

"I recall particularly the illustration of one of the first pamphlets to give a consecutive account of the war. The artist had evidently made a hasty study of one of the fighting-machines, and there his knowledge ended. He presented them as tilted, stiff tripods, without either flexibility or subtlety, and with an altogether misleading monotony of effect. The pamphlet containing these renderings had a considerable vogue, and I mention them here simply to warn the reader against the impression they may have created. They were no more like the Martians I saw in action than a Dutch doll is like a human being. To my mind, the pamphlet would have been much better without them."
I presume H G Wells was specifically having a go at these 1897 illustrations of War of the Worlds, when he published the book, but he could just as easily have been commenting on quite a few of the covers since, from the leather armchair of his time machine.

Rather startlingly, Edward Gorey illustrated a 1960 edition; both the cover and a few illustrations. [via Sore Eyes]


As Above

Brain children. Recent or noteworthy Web offspring.

Online cliques. Trespassers may be welcome.

In the bookpile. Powered by allconsuming.net.

Incidental music. Ohrwurmen or otherwise.

Other weblogs. The ones I make a point of returning to a lot.

Supporting cast. That have Web pages. In alphabetical order.

Weeks beginning. All having ended.
2002: 02.12 25.11 18.11 11.11 04.11 28.10 21.10 14.10 07.10 30.09 23.09 16.09 09.09 02.09 26.08 19.08 12.08 05.08 29.07 22.07 15.07 08.07 01.07 24.06 17.06 10.06 03.06 27.05 20.05 13.05 06.05 29.04 22.04 15.04 08.04 01.04 25.03 18.03 11.03 04.03 25.02 18.02 11.02 04.02 28.01 21.01 14.01 07.01

2001: 31.12 24.12 17.12 10.12 03.12 26.11 19.11 12.11 05.11 29.10 22.10 15.10 08.10 01.10 24.09 17.09 10.09 03.09 27.08 20.08 13.08 06.08 30.07 23.07 16.07 09.07 02.07 25.06 18.06 11.06 04.06 28.05 21.05 14.05 07.05 30.04 23.04 16.04 09.04 02.04 26.03 19.03 12.03 05.03 26.02 19.02 12.02 05.02 29.01 22.01 15.01 08.01 01.01

2000: 25.12 18.12 11.12 04.12 27.11 20.11


Archive search. You never know.