Anotherblog

Scared out of hiccups

Our second stage of the Whole-Body technique employs a little shiver as we go from side to side. I find it helps to imagine an ice-cube down the back as I do this one.

I’m very proud of myself. Jade had hiccups the other day, and, in the middle of a crowded restaurant, I managed to cure her with the Sudden Fright technique quietly enough that nobody at nearby tables even noticed I was doing it. In fact, it worked so well that half an hour later, when the hiccups returned, even the memory of the fright was enough to cure her a second time.
I’m not sure I’ve ever successfully used the Sudden Fright technique before!

What it is to be human

As it is a Monday, we should start our whole-body exercises gently. Here, Mr Rabbit demonstrates a simple relaxing exercise. Remember to close your eyes and think of birds or fish.

Speaking of semi-sentient entities, and despite Marco’s skepticism, I’m pretty sure these are humans at clickbank:

“I think we should all try to help our fellow human beings,who are trying to make a living online. I’m a human, really I am! Bad robots, bad! Hee, Hee.I enjoyed reading your article.”

I’d certainly be amused (and impressed) if this was a spambot, but I’m not going to do a word-jumble humanity-checker because I really think that’s just going to let some of the spammers in. It’s easy enough to sort the friends from the spam at the moment. I don’t think I’m missing much.

OK, a hypothetical question for the clickbankers, then:

You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. It’s crawling toward you. You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?

More head exercises

Mr Rabbit here demonstrates a head exercise to which we can all relate.
OK, let’s continue our head exercise with a hypothetical game of D&D. You are the GM, and for larks, you introduced a Deck of Many Things into the game (it’s a card deck that has many powerful but random effects). One of your characters gets a Wish from the deck.
The Wish spell in D&D has a measure of balance to it. According to the description, you could use it to permanently increase one of your stats by 1 point, no problem. You wish, it happens. More powerful than that… well, it gets dodgy.
Your player’s wish: “I wish for a Tome of Clear Thought +5 to immediately appear in my hands with no problems.”
What do you do?

More on spam

Ah. As expected, I’m getting would-be comments from real people who are not from clickbank but are desiring to get their money grubbing hands on the anotherblog comments section. I never realised it was such an idealogical battleground. Witness:

“I see you laid down the law and you don’t know me nor am I a family member But can you hear me out? the internet is a part of the information age it’s a different world on the net and one thing i have learned is money is made by any means necessary. The world is hard to live in right now, with high gas prices high electric prices high rent/mortgage and low pay at the job people are scurrying to the internet to make ends meet or even have a better life than the traditional job can give them, when you don’t have money to advertise god gives you creativity to seek other ways to accomplish your goals in my opinion if the website is not pornagraphic or vulgar why not let someone post for exposure I think it’s the american way and thats love life liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all.”

No.

Darths & Droids

We had tremendous fun at Friday lunchtime. Mr Morgan-Mar proposed that we continue the work of the recently-concluded “DM of the Rings” by doing a similar thing with Star Wars. So we plotted it out and created the first two strips, which Mr. MM then created that evening. The webcomic is now up. We’re very excited by the possibilities.

Phew!

In keeping with the brain-bending efforts of the weekend, Mr. Rabbit today presents: head exercises.
The first event that, for me, required head exercise, was the upgrade of otherleg and affiliates to the new servers. It is just about complete. The new servers are faster, and I have more space and bandwidth allowances. This makes me… pleased.
The head exercise was because in order to get everything changed over, I had to remember/find logins for my domain name registrars, one of which had an extremely outdated contact detail which made it very difficult to confirm that it was, in fact, me who was requesting the change and not Random Internet Person. In the end, I had to buy a printer/scanner/fax, print out a form, sign it, and fax it to the US. Happily, it was then very promptly processed.
So, new toy: Canon MX310. Seems to work well with the mac.
Other head-spinning exercises: Jon gave me a copy of his script “The I Job”, which I want to produce using the lunchtime gamers/Irregular Webcomic crew. It’ll be the most ambitious script yet, by far - it requires actual acting.
And there are more exercises, which I’ll save for separate posts.

More on clickbank

I think I worked out what this clickbank malarkey is about. It is, indeed, spam, but it’s human-generated. They appear to be running some kind of scheme where people can earn money by commenting on people’s weblogs, thus presumably opening up those weblogs to spam once the initial comments have been approved, thus inflating their search engine rankings.

Just a guess, mind you, but it explains the generic and impersonal (yet curiously relevant) comments from random strangers on clickbank IP addresses. For example, a typical one:

“Great Article! Vik”

or

“I have to agree. This was the best of the series.”

(in response to a post about the last HP book being good)

or

“Looks like you’re having loads of fun; now maybe you can find some time to sleep.”

Here’s a more cunning one:

“I would really like to learn how to make things out of balloon. I’ve always been interested in how to come up with creative images very quickly. I’d like to see more. Please post more images. Thanks.”

…which I almost approved, except that it comes from clickbank.

The penny kinda dropped when I got this comment from a clickbanker, in response to my previous posts on the topic:

“No, it’s just someone advertising their websites, just like everybody else advertising on the web. Even the owner of this site is advertising his website here. That’s how he continually get viewers such as yourself to come here and read the articles and make comments. So what if you’re advertising a website. That’s what it’s about. Someone took the time to visit your website, now you can “choose” whether you would like to visit their’s, IF it interests you of course. I have a website to advertise also but when I come to these sites, I search through the articles like everybody else, looking for a topic that I’m interested in reading just like everybody else, click on it, read it , post a comment, like everybody else. I have a website that others can choose to check out if they’re interested. If you don’t like advertisements, maybe you should stay off of the internet. And really, I would teach you how to advertise, which posting a website to comments is such a small way for exposure compared to others but I am making over 5 thousand a month by advertising clickbank companies and i started only 2 months ago.”

So, yeah, a spam scam.

Anyway, I’m not sure the technology for resisting spam will keep up with this approach for long. Soon they will be able to conceal that they come from clickbank, and then I’m straight into paranoid mode. Hence: if I don’t know you, and you send a marginally relevant comment, I’m afraid I’m not going to approve it. If it’s a *good* comment, I’ll post it directly in a weblog entry. But not in the comments.

It’s friends-and-relatives-only in the comments from now on.

Droste Effect

The Droste Effect, for those who thought my balloon animal photo was scary (note: link has nothing to do with me, just a cool thingy).

And now, the lower body

Obviously, one cannot concentrate on the upper body alone. This exercise gradually allows the blood to flow from the upper body into the legs, a process that does not happen in normal circulation (note: this is a lie).

I went to the Chaser’s War on Everything on Tuesday night (yes, two weeks in a row!). It was really good. I felt like we were part of something historic, and all the Chaser guys definitely felt it, and were a bit rattled. There were lots more flubbed lines, and quite a bit of last-minute writing and alternate footage for different scenarios (they filmed an alternative beginning, on the off chance that Howard got kicked out on Wednesday). It ran quite long, though that was mostly because of the musical number at the end. We were out at 9:30pm after a late 7:30 start, and then we hung around to get photos of Kat with the crew. I got interviewed by the guy on the right here:

Kat is on the left. Apparently the interviewer was a presenter on Big Brother a few seasons back, and is now a writer for the Chaser. Anyway, he was famous enough for Kat to want a photo with him. He asked me a couple of questions about the APEC stunt, and I blathered on in a rather uncharismatic way, so I suspect I will not make whatever final footage is shown wherever they are showing that bit. Probably not on the Chaser.

The controversial APEC stunt was very interesting - Julian Morrow (who is clearly in charge - unlike last week’s show, this one was quite revealing about the relative seniority of team members) was very embarrassed, and answered lots of questions in between filming bits and after the show. The stunt got way out of control, and they were horrified that they got their crew arrested. They really, really weren’t expecting to get inside, and the footage clearly shows that when they did get inside - only just inside, too, having gone through the security fences - they immediately turned around. I’m very much on their side on this issue. If they get sent to prison, I’ll be protesting.

(I am visible in the audience in the front row on the right hand side, by the way. I am wearing my hat.)

Mr Rabbit demonstrates upper-body exercises

As you can see, today’s upper-body exercise is a little advanced. Achieving the stars in front of the eyes may only occur after many iterations, and may be accompanied by feelings of dizziness.

Speaking of upper-body exercise, I went to the Chaser filming last night, so people watching tonight may notice me (and Jade) in the studio audience. As proof, I offer photographs.

It was very enjoyable. What really surprised me was how quickly they got through the show. There was only one retake, and they did that at the end of the show. Otherwise, it pretty much resembled the TV version, except that they gave us about 20 minutes worth of extra “warm up” material, including an extended running gag on a mispronunciation of “cavity search” as “cavity church”. They really are good at improvising.