And another update being written in the morning.  However since there's less traffic on weekends, and in theory the "must check it before work" people don't have to worry about that (work), it's all good.  I have to work tonight and I'm going to stay up later than I have been.  Usually I'm up all night, or at least until 3 or 4am, so around midnight something clicks in my brain that says, "blog time" and I work on it.

Lately I've been suddenly crashing at 11pm or so, and since I don't get any thought of doing this at 9pm, it ain't done when I fall into another night of restless, nightmare-wracked torment.  I mean sleep.

I was going to ramble a bit about this and that here, but as I don't have any longer topic for below, I'll just move that down there.  Proceed through the news.

One funny thing someone mailed me at the D2 site about yesterday is this.

The site is www.diabloii.net.  The mail pointed out that there is a www.diaboii.net. You don't want to click that, it's one of those "trap you with never-closing windows" porn sites, and in fact I didn't even see a porn site, just a bunch of full screen pages with redirects to porn sites.

The point is that it's sort of a back-handed compliment when some porn troll registers a domain name that's a misspelling or one letter off from your actual site.  Like there is enough traffic mistyping that they think it's worth it to try and trick them into visiting their site.  And it's just the www.diaboii.net, there's no www.diaboii.com, or www.diabo2.com, or www.diabo2.net.

By this logic, I'll know that my site has accomplished something when www.blackchampane.com or perhaps www.blackchampange.com, are online.  And pointing to some really annoying porno crap.

Just to post some tiny bit of news, there are about 9 articles in the top stories on Yahoo right now about the massive protests all around the world against the Iraq Attack.

LONDON - Anti-war protests Saturday drew hundreds of thousands of people in cities around the world — from London to Canberra — united in their opposition to a threatened U.S.-led strike against Iraq.

The British capital had one of the largest marches for peace on a day of global protest — at least a million people, organizers claimed, although initial police estimates were about half that. They hoped to heap pressure on Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has been Europe's biggest supporter of the tough U.S. policy.

Regardless of whether you agree with them or not, it's interesting to see how the rest of the world regards the US' impending war.

Not that any of this matters in terms of it happening, since Dumbya and company will do whatever they want to do, but it's funny how different the world wide reaction is with what you see in the US.  Lots of people oppose it in the US also, but they are generally shouted down by various conservative idiots with cries of "Traitor!".  It's amazing how opposition to US foreign policy can come to be equated with treason, especially since the people equating it with that were dismissing every foreign policy thing Clinton did, even the most warlike and random.

I mean he fired cruise missiles at Osama Bin Laden in Africa years ago, and apparently just missed by a day or so (destroyed the complex, but a day after Osama left it) and at the time all the people who are now rabid warhawks (since they're conservatives, and the president now is a conservative) decried it as foreign adventurism and said Clinton was just doing it to distract attention from the Monica Lewinsky foolishness.

The obsession some had for with trying to get to Clinton on personal issues is going to go down in US presidential history as one of the weirdest things ever, I think.  His presidency was a towering success in almost every measurement; crime went down, the economy boomed, there were no major wars world wide, the US' status around the world was good, we helped keep the peace in several regional conflicts, etc.  But none of that mattered to conservatives, since they were determined to hate Clinton and found a club to use in his adultery and went on and on about his ethical lapses, investigated Whitewater for 6 years (and found nothing), etc.

Meanwhile Bush was a draft-dodging, pot-smoking, coke-snorting, drunk until he was 40, attempted to conceal a drunk driving arrest, and has far more moral reprobation than Clinton ever did, including very shady financial dealings, insider stock trading that was ignored since his daddy's friends were running the SEC, etc. It's all about ideology.  The people who hounded Clinton for every sin would be so much more on top of Bush than they ever were on Clinton... except that Bush is on their side, and panders to their needs.

True, Clinton fooled around with a horny intern while in office.  It's unlikely Bush has done that, but even if he did, it would never come up.  There aren't billionaire liberal nuts paying private investigators to hunt around every aspect of Bush's earlier life, and paying bimbos to testify that he banged them, or raped them. They did that against Clinton, and a lot of the thrown feces stuck, accurate or not.

The perception is that the Clintons were up to no good with the whole Whitewater affair, but despite years and millions spent on the nutty Ken Star investigation, they found no evidence of wrong doing of any kind, and no one has ever disputed that the Clintons lost quite a bit of money in the investment.  The guy running it was a con artist and ripped them and others off; that's the extent of their involvement.

Meanwhile Bush has made tens of millions of dollars in past business deals, most of which are very shady and all of which he was grossly unqualified for being involved in; except that daddy was the Governor of Texas, and then the President of the United States.  And the rich bankers and oil men knew that Dubya Jr. would quite likely rise to power, and giving him sweetheart deals in oil companies and ownership of the Texas Rangers was a great way to get in good.  Cheney has much most suspect business deals and that whole Halliburton thing would have 3 independent councils and frantic congressional investigations... if Cheney weren't a Republican.

Looking internationally, these foreign protests are quite an international referendum on Bush's policies and behavior.  As people often point out, the US had amazing good will less than a year and a half ago, after 9/11.  There was broad international support for the Afghanistan adventure, and yet here we are, less than a year after that, and basically two countries (Israel and the UK) on earth support the Iraq Attack. Despite all of Dubya's speeches, and Powell's UN presentations, and talk of "weapons of mass destruction".

I think it's almost entirely due to the rest of the world so distrusting and fearing the nutty behavior of Dubya.  There is just something about him; the war mongering, or the super-Christian posturing, or the oil-frenzy of his cabinet.  Whatever it is, the rest of the world feels about Bush much like US Republicans felt about Clinton.  Where it almost doesn't matter what his policies are, they have no ability to see them clearly or objectively, since they are so obsessed with the man himself.

Mindless obstructionism is never a good thing, even if the person you are obstructing is demonstrably an idiot, as I think Bush is now, and as Republicans thought Clinton was then.  And as it got with Clinton where the Republicans opposed anything he did just reflexively, it seems like the rest of the world is getting with any policy of Bush's.

I would say that's foolish in both situations, and that the policies and actions should be judged on their own merits, and not automatically approved or vetoed based on the person proposing them.

Since Bush and his supporters don't care about world opinion, and in fact sort of revel in the disapproval, this is a lot less of a burden than it was for Clinton, who had to try and work with or around the obstructing idiots he was besieged by during his administration.  As usual, the non-US media is a better place to look for reporting on world events, and I'll try and post some links to stuff from around the world in the war-approaching days to come.

After I wrote this, I did some surfing and found this update on CalPundit, which is just a perfect example of what I'm talking about, in terms of Dubya's behavior and how it drives pretty much everyone else on earth nuts.

I don't know what I want to do today, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't involve writing long things, or trying to be clever.  Or both.  After the long ass D2 column feedback, and the long ass new D2 column on Thursday, and then the V's Day story yesterday, (yes, new fiction by me, go read it if you haven't already/know enough about Diablo II to appreciate it) plus blogs each day here, and something like 4-5 hours of intensive chat with one or the other of two newish female friends... I'm about clevered out.

In fact I have no idea if that last sentence made any sense, and I'm not going back to check it now.  I think I'll cook and watch a DVD, or something mindless this morning.

One thing I did learn yesterday is that if you are going to break off a budding romance with a woman who likes you a lot more than you like her, you do not want to do it 1) with an email, and 2) on Valentine's Day morning.

My first sighting of one of the aforementioned female friends, yesterday, was her popping online in the AM and just going a mile a second about the potential BF who had broken it all off with a classic "Dear John" (Jane?) email.  On the morning of V's day, when the Jane in question had been very much hoping that their relationship would finally begin to really take off.

I don't know how it is for other men, but Valentine's Day to me is almost entirely irrelevant.  I mean you see ads for it on TV, but it's sort of a glorified Secretary's Day, or Grandparent's Day.  Just something commercialized for the benefit of florists and greeting card sellers and expensive restaurants.

My caveat is that I haven't had a GF on V's Day in years, so I don't have first hand experience with it, and perhaps if I did have a GF I would be looking for a special day and excuse to do nice things for her, romantic things, and this would provide one.

I still don't think I'd be too caught up in it, I mean I hardly celebrate Xmas or my b-day; I'm just not a celebrate a day on the calendar sort of person.  When I'm in a relationship I think that anniversaries (of first date, or whatever, since I've never been married) for you two personally, are important.  Not even necessarily annual anniversaries, maybe you just want to set the 20th of the month for a special day, and always do something together then.  Whatever, it's a day based on you two and your relationship. Not just some February 14th date that's on a calendar, and has virtually nothing to do with what it originally meant.

My lack of concern for the day is not especially relevant here, since the Dear Jane in question is pretty much the opposite of me in this, and puts a lot of importance on the day.  To the point that it's one of the biggest days of the year, for her, in terms of a BF/romance, and she's made no secret of that to me, so her former semi-boyfriend surely must have realized that as well.

Which makes his breaking it off that morning, and with an email, not even a phone call, all the more heartless/thoughtless.  And made her all the more distressed.  I haven't talked to her today, but I hope she's feeling better and realizing that he wasn't really the one and thinking back to all the signs of that she was ignoring when she was hoping he was, etc.

So guys, that's the tip.  Make a big damn deal out of V's Day, even if you think it's silly, and for god's sake don't break up that day, and don't break up with an email under any circumstances.

Advice I shall try to store away, in case I need it some time in the future.

On a completely different subject, one of the things I enjoyed most about the Valentine's Day story I wrote for the D2 site was making the little candy hearts.  I found this site while searching for pictures of rude candy hearts, when I got the idea to use some in my story.  It's a little script that will let you make a candy heart in one of 6 colors, with any message you like on it.  Providing your message is limited to four characters and two lines.

I made a few of those up for the story, but the lack of space/letters was making it impossible to say what I wanted to so, so I eventually just made a blank heart and copied that image, shrunk it down a bit in Photoshop, and made a bunch of my own messages, with Comic Sans and color/hue adjustments to make them different festive colors.

And as I was doing that, I would hardly resist making some for this site as well.  With appropriately-naughtier messages, since I'm not keeping things to a PG rating, as I do on the D2 site.

And yes, I got lazy on the color shifting after a while.  I like pink, it seems the most innocent, when compared to the naughty messages, but I should have gone with more variety, and some darker colored ones with white text.  Sue me.

Thanks to D, my other female friend, the one who wasn't just dumped on V's Day, for several of the most clever captions listed above.

Yes, I should have done this yesterday, and you've been wondering what those candy hearts sprinkled around the page are. But now you know.  I can make new ones in seconds, with the template saved, so if anyone has any brilliantly-funny little sayings to slap on them, email me and I can put up some more tomorrow.

And if the things you send aren't funny I'll just put one up with your name and "suxor" or something like that below it.

Speaking of suxor, here's an interesting mail on that topic.

Your use of the word "suxor" got me thinking, again, about how that word might have come into general usage. I still don't have the answer, but the search produced this.

I suppose you have probably already seen it, but if you haven't, it shouldn't be missed.

Mike

I used "suxor" very briefly in yesterday's update, just as an aside and w/o giving it a thought, so it's odd the things that some people will notice while others don't. It's a slang term listed, appropriately-enough, on the Internet Slang page here, which is a pretty useful resource, really.  Especially if you are new to the Internet and want to know what the hell people in chat or forums or certain blogs are talking about.

Working on the D2 site, and being on Battle.net and in the D2 forums on a regular basis, all of that silly kiddy slang is quite familiar to me, and I drop it in w/o really giving any thought of how odd and annoying I once found it. It's funny since it's stupid, a sort of mockery of a silly term that some people invest with great importance.  Much like how "the terrorists have already won" became a punch line almost immediately after 9/11, when the tone-deaf media and government officials were using it like it was the most important phrase ever.

The comparison there is iffy, and sort of opposite. The "terrorists" one is making a joke of an overly pompous and self-important phrase being overused by overly pompous and self-important people.  Over over.  Over. Just to get those out of my system.

While "suxor" and "roxor" and "l33t" and other such silly slang are fun to use since the kiddies who create them and use them in all seriousness have no idea how stupid such terms are to an adult or real person.  It's sort of a Jeff K thing, except the person doesn't spell quite that badly, and isn't a cleverly-written parody of the entire k3wl dood Internet phenomena.

Anyway, I have no idea what I'm talking about at this point and I need to take a shower and get some brekkie and go shopping.

I did watch the movie Mike linked to there, and it's funny for about five minutes, but by the time it got to the long conversation in the P.I.'s office I was nodding off.

However it does have some funny stuff about Suxor, sort of in the theme of "The funniest joke in the world." the old Monty Python sketch (as opposed to the new Monty Python sketches?).  Yers.

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