Old websites are grizzled old beasts that should be put out of their misery. I've been moving GF! (http://www.gamesfirst.com) over to a new server -- our old Idaho host just wasn't cutting it for us. We were really willing to deal as long as it was free, but it ain't no more. We're with 1and1.com now, which has been a good place so far. Dealing with two hosting services and Network Solutions is about enough to make you pull your hair out, though.

We seem to have made it through with minimal hassle. We serve about 250K readers per month, so we wanted it to be as smooth as possible. Now we begin the work of re-creating the monster in the image of a dynamic PHP and mySQL -based website. Whoo! Get on the PHP bandwagon!

With luck everything will be in place in time for our 10 year birthday. Wow. 10 years online...

w3rd, the UT2k4 demo is available and it pretty much roxor my world, y'know? It's just such a high-energy, adrenaline-fueled speed shooter. Now that they added loads of badass vehicles to cruise around in, it's like a whole new chaos to luxuriate in. It might be the exact opposite of Second Life... (until somebody programs a good enough UT2k3-like game to play in SL, which would be a fun project). But I know that I'm not the only one who enjoys both. Anyway, the demo rules and you should download it. Check the Downloads section on Unreal Tournament dot Com :

Paul's built so many cool things into (e:s) here that I haven't had time to take full advantage of all of them. However, I had a disturbing experience when I noticed I could click on my user image. I did so, launching an audio message telling the user that the journal owner had not posted an audio file. It was that completely characteristic Clearvoice TTS.

I'm the kind of guy who hates robotic voices on answering machines and tries to humanize my own messaging systems. So I decided the time had come to upload an audio file. I'm trying to generate new material for another DJ FnW feat. CM album, so here's a wee sneak peek at some experimentation I've got going on... The quality on the journal sound file is kind of cruddy in order to get it in under the filesize limit. But I've posted a full CD quality version on my personal webspace. Click the link to download the MP3:

So I got on this train via a link from BoingBoing to Neil Gaiman's weblog, and I thought it fitting for (e:Strip).

Looks like Bush's Dept of Education has created a new list of television shows that will be barred from being captioned for the hearing impaired (apparently there's not much going on in education these days). Here's a link to the list:

Needless to say, the approved and disapproved lists reflect the far-right, rabidly Puritan values of the current administration. What can I even say about it? It's ludicrous mistreatment and abuse of a service intended to aid people. But apparently BushCo doesn't think the hearing impaired are smart enough to protect their children from the evils of The Amazing Spiderman... Needless to say, the National Association of the Deaf are upset about the whole thing (http://www.nad.org/openhouse/action/alerts/captioningcensorship/pr.html).

And not many folks are talking about this. The decisions went into effect last October. The effect is that groups applying for federal funds to caption television programming will not be eligible if they are captioning the disapproved shows. So no captions for "Gay Hollywood" or "Papparazzi Part 1: New York", which may or may not be so bad (many of the shows on both the approved and disapproved lists are probably better off not being watched by the general public, IMO), but it also means that poor little hearing impaired children won't be able to get their Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, or Samurai Jack fixes. It's classic class-oriented cultural eugenics. Cartoons and fantasy are bad for kids and might get them doing things like reading Harry Potter novels and sacrificing babies to Satan.

In the eyes of the right wing radicals, it's better to watch The Fountainhead (approved) or Amazing Animal Videos (also approved). But regardless of who is making the list, the whole endeavour is dumb. Why isn't everything captioned? Can't we pull that off? To cut any group out of the loop when it is so feasible to provide a modicum of accessibility is just treacherous. When making lists like this to fasttrack the meager distribution of a pathetic amount of funds is how the Department of Education spends its time, things must be really rough.

Has anyone seen the documentary "The Gift"? It's an independent flick, check out what little info they have on IMDB:

Anyway, it's about a subculture of men who fetishize the HIV virus, and it's one of the most disturbing and sad things I've ever seen. But I was struck at the connections to web culture and web communities. The general trend of porn sites is to fetishize the repulsive -- in many ways it has been claimed that net.culture drives us to the fringe of acceptability and palatability. Sites like SnuffX (http://www.snuffx.com) and Stileproject (http://www.stileproject.com) have been longtime suppliers of images and movie files of mixed porn and snuff. I saw this as really connected to that sort of gruesome one-upmanship that goes on in these "backrooms" of the Internet. I think that once there's a whole group of people ingesting and commenting on these kinds of subjects, then it's inevitable that some kind of community would be formed. I've seen design sites where you could be shot for using a dropshadow. Or gaming sites that cater (unofficially) to very particular tastes. There are the meta-customs we see in all boards and forums, but each individual site has particular rules and traditions. In many ways, the phenomena described in "The Gift" reminded me of these odd, insular discussion groups.

Anyway, I was just really struck by how much the Web and websites were involved in building and maintaining the subculture covered in the documentary. I definitely recommend checking it out.