|
Sept. '02 May '02 April '02 March '02 Feb. '02 Jan. '02 Nov. '01 Oct. '01 Sept. '01 Aug. '01 July '01 June '01 May '01 April '01 March '01
|
monday, april 22
Once again we had chat tonight. I wasn't paying too much attention, so this is probably going to be a bit choppy. Also, I'm watching Alias while I type this up. *g* SPOILERS FOR ANGEL: "DOUBLE OR NOTHING" * * * At first, it seemed like the Vegas!Demons were after Angel, because well... come on, anything that has to do with a soul usually has to do with Angel. Um, but no, it's Gunn. He made some deal with Jenoff and traded his soul for happiness. We later find out it was for his truck. How.. typical. Also: Do not cheat in demon casinos. They will remove your hand. The grumpy old demon couple at the beginning was very funny. Enjoyed that muchly, as well as Gunn sitting at the desk with Fred as his girl Friday. That demon spitting projectile phlegm was pretty nasty...I think they called it a "stench problem." Groo was definitely doopey and cute with his "is there evil to vanquish?" inquiry. Fred's little visit to the hospital started nice. She brought his some of his stuff and told him that she understood why Wes did what he did. Then, of course, she goes on a huge tirade about how Angel was right to blame him and he'd better not go back to the Hyperion. Ever. Because next time, Angel will kill him. And, wheee! Jason Carter! Yes, that Jason Carter of Babylon 5. ^____^ Even with all the make-up I could recognize his voice. He sure has been popping up on the WB a lot. Great job as the repo demon. "Gangsta's Paradise" playing as Gunn walked to the casino was really, really unnecessary. The gambling? Totally predictable. Angel was gonna lose and then just kick demon-ass. That's just what happens. Fred whinging about how she's a loser or whatever was not necessary and the drama of the card game was even less necessary. I mean, come on. Angel loses 9 to 3?! What is that about? Though, Cordy staking Jenoff's hand to the table was pretty entertaining, as was Angel's "Anybody else owe this guy?" line. That regenerating slime-covered head was pretty gross, though. The last scene with Angel dismantling Connor's crib was pretty poignant. Hopefully there will be no more babbling about the baby because I am so sick of hearing about him. From the looks of next week's promo, however, it seems the tiny tot might be coming back. Quotage: "I don't traffic in wants. I supply needs." - Jenoff JennyEdu: when did Cordy become so wise? * * * Other chattage randomness: Scifi1701D: yeah, well.... guys are stupid :-P
sunday, april 21
Uh, there was yucky static throughout the broadcast of Alias on my end. I hate when that happens. SPOILERS FOR ALIAS: "THE SOLUTION" * * * Weird that Sloane's wife knew about SD-6 and Sloane never suspected a thing. Also, I think it's a little redundant that the Alliance is going to kill her - the woman is already dying of cancer. And Will... Will needs to just die. He's annyoing and nosey and just plan.. stupid. Yay! About time we had a Syd/Vaughn mission. Things do, of course, go very wrong and we get treated to Michael Vartan speaking in both French and a lovely French accent. *dreamy sigh* Once again, Will needs to be shot. Yes, let's confront Jack Bristow. Uh huh. Good idea. Who the hell keeps tipping Will off? Because they really aren't helping him at all. Oh, maybe it's Vaughn trying to get him killed >_< Oh.. hahaha Haladki! Oh, that would be so great if it were Haladki. Jack is all over the planning, so Will just needs to step aside and not get killed. Heh. Good for Sloane (did I just say that?) for standing up to that guy and trying to keep his wife alive. It was expected, but still you never know with him. Maybe...maybe Sloane's not such a bad guy. Uh oh, Dixon is on assignment and is going to run into Syd. Maybe this will be the episode where the whole "SD-6 is evil" thing is going to be explained to him. That is just so necessary. Hahaha, Sydney kicked Sark's ass. That was pretty sweet. Worried!Vaughn didn't suck either. Ah crap! ::whinges:: I hate these cliffhanger endings! Grr! Two weeks we have to wait?! That is just... cruel. * * *
saturday, april 20
This if for all those people who think sleeping more is a good idea. Because.. really, it's not. Quotations from ABC.com [complete article]:
wednesday, april 17
Apologies if the page looks a bit freaky for awhile and for not fixing the code when I was supposed to. There were errors up the wazoo because the comments thing I was using before had gone offline and I didn't really know about it. But Soulstar is letting me use some space at her server so I can have this lovely new php remotedotcomments thing. Now, let hope it works and people will actually use it :-P
monday, april 15
SPOILERS FOR ANGEL: "FORGIVING" * * * Angel is still highly concerned about Cordelia and stops Fred from calling her. He doesn't want to "ruin her holiday," then bugs out and goes on a tirade about how Cordy will be bringing back presents and Connor will be there for her to give them to him. Okay, that was kind of sad. Meanwhile, poor Wes is still bleeding to death in the park. A homeless guy comes by and hey - we think he's going to get help. Instead, he robs Wes and drags him behind a shrub. And of course, we had to make "Princess Bride" jokes: Angel kidnaps er.. don't know his name.. from Wolfram & Hart and sets up a little torture tray a la Faith, complete with scary sharp objects. Lilah is directed to cooperate fully and accompanies Angel to the White Room. There's a little girl dressed in red - with a very sick sense of humor. She tells Angel to kill Lilah and he readily prepares to, but she stops him with a laugh and "that's enough... for now." She reminds me a bit of the Red Queen from "Resident Evil." Evil children are scary. Gunn and Fred pay a visit to Justine and her gang. Justine seems to have developed a bit of a conscience - she stops one of her crew from slitting Gunn's throat. And this is why I don't like Gunn - he lets Fred rummage through a dumpster. What the hell is that? That's just.. not cool. And another thing - why did Wesley just throw the notebook in the garbage? Burn it or something. Anyway, they discover that the prophecy was "The Father Will Kill the Son," and glee, they forgive him. Sort of. The spell Angel performs (using some of Lilah's blood) turns Sahjhan into a corporeal being. And I think he was supposed to materialize in the middle of the pentagram, but he appears in the middle of the road and causes an accident. I was hoping that the little collision would lead to a simple, humorous end to Mr. Scarface, but I was wrong. Gunn and Fred track Justine back to the underground caves. They want to know where Wesley is and what happened to him. Fred tries talking relatively sanely to Justine, who finally realizes that Holtz is not coming back and he just used her to get to Connor. She tells them that she slit Wesley's throat; left him for dead. Fred throws a nice backhand and a teenie fight breaks out with Gunn backing Fred up, telling Justine to stay down. "I chose the wrong man," she says. Of course, Sahjhan chooses that opportunity to show up. Angel eventually appears and keeps Sahjhan from wiping the floor with Gunn, Fred, and Justine. Sahjhan reveals that Angel was never actually his enemy, Connor was. In fact, he'd gone back in time to manipulate the true prophecy. Big stylized fight sequence with Angel getting in some good shots. Though, actually, Sahjhan was about to spread Angel ashes all over the dirt floor - which is where Justine steps in and saves the day with the magic jar. And then... Wesley is located at a local hospital. We're led to believe that Angel really understands that Wes was trying to save Connor. Hell, he tells Wes that he understands his motives and hey - this is Angel and not Angelus talking. He makes sure that Wes understands the difference. Why? Because he is majorly ticked and tries to smother Wes with a pillow! All the while he is yelling and cursing him out. Holy frell, I have never been so shocked. Not this season anyway. This was just.. wow. Quotage: "Great, let's have more violence. It's such a help." - Fred "You know, not speaking would be a really good look for you." - Lorne "I'm not your boyfriend. Find someone else to smack you around." - Angel to Justine "Do I look like I need more skin problems?" - Sahjhan * * *
wednesday, april 10
More computer geek stuff. But this one is more important. Virus Spread through AOL Instant Messenger From the school broadcast e-mail: User: cool, (infected system's IP address):8180 Note: the word "cool," may be replaced with any of the following words/phrases * btw, download this, * I wanted to show you this, * please check this out, * hey go to, * download this, * see if you can get this to work, * this is cool, * tell me what you think about, * try this, * I almost forgot about, * I like this, * what about, * have you seen, * interesting, * lol, * wow, * whoa, * neat, * hmm, * psst, * hehe, * haha, * silly, * weird, Delete anything that looks like this immediately. From Symantec.com: The worm sends an email containing the attachment Psecure20x-cgi-install.version.6.01.bin.hx.com to all addresses found in the Microsoft Outlook address book. When connected to IRC or AIM, the worm sends a web link to IRC channels or AIM contacts which references an .html file which was dropped on the infected computer. This file displays as a Webpage which asks the visitor to run a copy of the worm. Take it for what it's worth. I'm glad I don't use Outlook :-P My computer is messed up enough as it is. Though now would probably be a good time to update Norton and AIM.
tuesday, april 9
Yahoo! Implementing Charges System (via Vicky from the Bringers list) There's been talk for a while now of possible charges for yahoogroups. Yahoo recently started charging for the forwarding service on yahoo mail and there's talk of charging for the mail accounts themselves. Obviously, that's going to have wide ranging implications for this group and fandom as a whole, not to mention people without computers at home having access to e-mail accounts. There's a petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/11213/petition.html Incidentally, comics writer Warren Ellis recently moved his mailing list from yahoogroups to a non-corporate system after clues started to appear that people might be charged and there's dispute over his message forum at delphi.com after they announced new changes to the free version they offer. Here's a column from his new mailing list about it: bad signal The web has to pay for itself. But do we have to pay for the web? BAD SIGNAL is now on a nice donated non-corporate system organised by some lovely people in London. It was previously on Yahoo. Actually, it was first on coollists, which was shit. Then I moved it to onelist, which was excellent. Onelist was then bought by egroups, with a little degradation in service. Egroups was swallowed by Yahoo, which led to serious degradation in service. Yahoo took some months to get its act together -- and, a little while later, started making noises about making people pay for it. I was tired of Yahoo and its shit advertising inserts by that point anyway. So here we are. Since 1998, I've also run a message board at Delphi. The Warren Ellis Forum -- WEF is the usual abbreviation. Delphi have been through a lot of changes since 1998. They've revamped the board software twice -- the second time, to introduce a pay version of what was previously an all-free service. DelphiPlus provides a bunch of additional functionality. Some of it, like a built-in HTML editor for message writing, is fun and very well-designed. Some of it is fancy crap. All of it is pretty much surplus to requirements. It costs $3.95 a month, which isn't much for me. The basic free service is still in place for everyone, and that's good enough. On basic, you can still hand-code HTML into messages and all that. Which is about to change. Delphi are currently, very badly, rolling out a three-tier service. Basic Delphi is now called Delphi Advanced, and runs to 99 cents a month. DelphiPlus stays in place. And Delphi Basic is a crippled version of the old basic service, for free. WEF relies heavily on HTML in messages and attachment of files to messages. It's a success (2000 people a day, half a million message views a day, 8500 messages posted a week) partly because people can see each other in photos, can see where each other live, can arrange meetings through the board and the attached chatroom -- are not anonymous to each other. We have the first two marriages of people who met on WEF this year (one of which is Kelly Sue DeConnick and Matt Fraction, who also became my colleagues on Artbomb.net). Without people having unrestricted access to the basic message board tools, right from the moment they enter, I'm not convinced WEF will work as well. DelphiPlus was introduced because people weren't clicking on the ad banners. Or the pop-ups, or the Sprink ads that were dropped in the frame gutters between messages for a while. Ad revenue is bad all over, as we're all constantly told. And, you know, the ads were shit anyway. The only one I ever clicked on was eyada.com, which made the fuckedcompany.com listings last year. I kind of liked the idea of having my own internet radio show. Until I looked at the incomprehensible interface. But, even through all this, I can't think of paying for web services as an especially bad thing. People pay for services useful to them all the time. I mean, this is pretty basic free economy stuff. If I make something you want, you pay me for it. Even an old mixed-economy English Socialist like me can see that. And I like the cult of personality. And so did Stalin. The web, however, has trained the online community to expect stuff for free. The refrain goes that since I'm paying for my online access, everything I get on it should be free. That's Napster in a nutshell. Fuck you, I want it. There'a nascent activist enclave getting behind the new wireless protocol, fronted recently by egroponte, declaiming that the sphere of influence of wireless nodes will let people just ride on whoever's access field they're passing through. On the understanding, of course, that it's reciprocated, and I don't use your wireless access to grab down eight feature films and reduce your porn-surfing to a crawl. Information wants to be free. But if that means I have to sell my computer, how far has that got you? No-one has really philosophically recovered from the dot-com crash yet. We're at the point where the web either becomes a community or an economy. It doesn't seem able to become both. Either it's where we talk, and show the things we made ourselves, and facilitated goodwill trade and exposure for our arts -- or it becomes a network of services that we are prepared to pay for according to their value to us. This has been on my mind for a couple of days. I do shop via the web -- I buy food, books, DVDs, music, hotel rooms. There will always be useful vendors making the web work for them. But operations like Delphi? Or Yahoo? (and a lot of us can remember when they were just a useful directory.) Will people pay for community? And I don't mean, will people pay for community because they are naturally cheap. Although, since the announcement broke, certainly a few people on WEF have revealed themselves as just painfully tight-fisted. What I mean is: If you access WEF from the library because you don't have a computer at home but you're involved with something in discussion, or you want to show people your art or your writing, or you need help finding a job or somewhere to live, or it's the best way to see photos of your boyfriend when you're in another country. Or if you get BAD SIGNAL from a Hotmail account you access from a friend's computer or a public net terminal. Or you're reading this on the train, grabbed from a handheld or a WAP phone. or if, crucially, you don't have a bloody credit card. I've only had a credit card since '99 or so. If that financial and societal barrier to participating in, or just reading of, the various communities in web culture is introduced... where does the web go? Well, the web's a big place. And themore I think about it, the more I think the pay-community sites get left for dead. Time was, I would've left WEF for dead. I toyed with the idea of shutting it down more than once. But it's bigger than me now. Tonight, all over the world, there's going to be about fifty people drinking together who would not have met without WEF. There'll be two thousand people in the doors of the Forum tonight, about fifty of whom won't have been there before. Certainly part of me thinks that the organisation that facilitates that shouldn't be expected to do so for free. But I don't know if you can pay for that. Do you know how creepy it is to think that at least eight people will be having sex tonight because of you? I should tell them. Let's see the boys keep it up after that. Warren
wednesday, april 3
Just a reminder that although Yahoo is free and is a better option than the evilness that is MSN and Hotmail, they are money-grubbing bastards. From the LoganMarie list (via Kazz): "On the web site you will see in the privacy statement a reference to "Web Beacons" you need to click on the OPT-OUT button to opt-out. If you don't Yahoo will follow you around on the Internet tracking the sites you visit and every thing you do and sends this info back to Yahoo for "marketing" info. This is a Web Bug. It is not cool and it is an invasion of your privacy, but it is still legal. All Yahoo HTML email that you receive also includes a Web Beacon (Web Bug) this is so they can keep track of live email addy's and to see who is opening up the email. All Commercial and HTML email you receive has a web bug, not just that from Yahoo." Here's the link to opt-out: http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy/us/pixels/details.html
Maintained by Amezri. This is totally over-opinionated. So pardon if Ah offend. |
