If things have been quiet around here lately, it’s because all my free time has gone to the Gettingit.com redesign. This is the perfect exercise in pointlessness: redesigning a defunct, three-year-old webzine that hasn’t published an article since 2000.

Well, not entirely pointless. Webpower, the company that funded Gettingit, finally killed the old story database a couple weeks ago, leaving the entire archive offline. I’d foreseen that inevitability a while back, and whipped up a Perl script to crawl the old site and save the stories locally. I’m glad I did.

Take a look and let me know what you think. Built in a couple weeks with no budget and PHP/MySQL/Apache by my side, I’m proud of it. I did everything except for the monkey logos, which were provided by the extremely talented Goopy.

Continue reading “Gettingit Redesign” →

Set your TiVos: HBO, Monday morning, 4:20am. Leprechaun in the Hood (2000, Horror). An evil leprechaun and a powerful producer pursue three rap artists who stole a magic flute. Features Ice-T, Coolio, and Ensign Travis Mayweather. Not to mention, Willow Ufgood rapping a song entitled “Lep in the Hood” over the end credits (sound clip).

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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!