Unethical idea of the day: Write a web crawler that grabs the list of recently updated MovableType or Blogger weblogs, and posts a spam comment to every weblog entry. Sound too far-fetched? Maybe not; a porn site recently spammed Andrew Burke’s weblog. I’m sure it won’t be long before someone automates the process and ruins online community forever. (Or at least until someone writes a SpamAssassin plugin for weblogs.)

There are several outlets for extremely obsessive fans to vent their creativity, including fan fiction, fan art, and slash. Or you can follow the lead of these fans of the Dark Shadows series, and start re-enacting roles and episodes online in real-time chat.

Meeting regularly in an AOL chat room, they pick an episode or a setting, take on the roles of the show’s characters, and improv the dialogue. If that’s too mainstream for you, try combining two TV universes… Like, say, Dark Shadows meets Scooby Doo, Where Are You?

Continue reading “Dark Shadows Online Role-Playing” →

Congratulations to my good friend, Crazy Uncle Joe Utsler, for successfully impregnating his wife. Nice work, stud!

Courtesy of Matt Haughey, the best bootleg remix I’ve ever heard: Eminem goes ragtime (2.6 MB MP3).

Continue reading “The Eminem Rag” →

I updated my Dictionary Domain page, a list of all available com/org/net domains that are words in the English dictionary. As domain squatters slowly shrivel up and die, these domains are finally getting released back into the wild. The good .com domains are still scarce, but there’s plenty of great .org and .nets available. Some of my favorites from this round are below. (turd.org!)

Continue reading “Dictionary Domains” →

NetControl, some sort of old Greek magazine, cached thousands of random homepages between 1994 and 1997 and never took them offline. The result is a strange surfing experience, like randomly browsing the Wayback Archive for homepages.

If you like, you can skip their obfuscated navigation entirely and go straight to lists of the cached homepages (1, 2, 3, 4).

Like the Wayback Archive, it’s a great way to see old and ugly versions of popular sites. It’s also a great reminder of dead design trends, like “adjust your browser” notices, full-color backgrounds, rendered animations, giant imagemaps and splash screens, pages enhanced for Netscape Navigator 2.0 or optimized for 640×480.

Also, a CNNfn capture from July 1996, with the Dow up and Nasdaq at just over 1000. And graduate student Philip Greenspun and First Lady Hillary Clinton.

I went through and pulled out some of the best, so you won’t have to.

Continue reading “NetControl Archive” →

Back in the day, I used to tell my little sister about new music. Now she not only hears about new artists before I do, but she becomes friends with them. (See: photos with Momus, Mirah and Khaela, Phil Elvrum from the Microphones.)

So, at her recommendation, we went to a party in Pasadena last night at some-guy-named-Dave’s house. In the muggy living room, local band Katie the Pest and Katy Robinson from the San Francisco-based Dear Nora entertained 20 or so musigeeks with acoustic tales of hope, heartbreak and baby kittens. Best show I’ve seen in ages. (Thanks, sis.)

Gene Kan, founder of InfraSearch/Gonesilent.com and Gnutella’s most vocal spokesman/developer, passed away on June 29, at age 25. I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere, except for a single post by Wired reporter Brad King on the Pho music list. Brad informed us that Gene was found dead in his apartment around June 27-29. There was a note found alongside his body, but no additional details are currently available. I expect this will soon be picked up by Slashdot, Wired, and the usual suspects.

I had the privilege of working with the XCF folks, but never managed to meet Gene. Here’s his musings on open services from last September, an audio interview on NPR, some haiku from his personal homepage, and his resume. Also, you should read Joey DeVilla’s Letter to Gene Kan.

Continue reading “Gene Kan, Dead at 25” →

After expiring last September, Baio.net was finally released back into the wild yesterday and I snapped it up! I’d been patiently waiting for months, so it’s a relief that nobody else registered it (like the Scott Baio fan club.)

Now, I can give out vanity e-mail addresses to my dad’s side of the family, if they ever got around to getting computers. Also, I was thinking of setting up a family weblog a la Utsler.net. Any Baios (Baioes? Baioii?) around the world who want a free e-mail address, give me a buzz.

I’m probably going to regret this, but I found the full video clip of Katie Couric battling conservative psycho-pundit Ann Coulter on the Today Show. It’s been in the entertainment press recently, dubbed the Couric/Coulter Catfight. Needless to say, it’s uncomfortable and strangely compelling. Download the 8 MB Windows Media video, or the rushed transcript from Drudge. (If anyone can mirror this video, post the link in the comments. Thanks to Moatmai for the clip.)