May 6, 2008
Don't start a poke war with me because I'll win.
I'm assuming that most of you have at the very least heard of facebook, but there are probably a few people who are unfamiliar with the concept of poking, so I'm going to explain it. You facebook pros can skip ahead to the next paragraph. When you're on facebook, looking at someone else's profile, you have the option of poking them. If you poke them, next time they log in, they'll have a little message saying that you poked them. They then have the option of poking you back or removing the poke. What is poking for? It's basically a way of getting someone's attention without having to go to the trouble of stringing a few words together. I was going to do a post about how poking is possibly the lowest form of human communication, one rung below grunting and pointing, but I'll save that for another day.
I myself, have been poked by four people. One was an old friend looking to get back in touch. Another was a woman I didn't know who I'm fairly certain thought I was cute. (I'm relatively sure that this is its main use, but what do I know.) The third was someone who I think just didn't know what poking was. And the fourth was my poke war rival.
The concept of a poke war had never occurred to me when all this started. When my rival poked me for the first time, I poked him back and thought that would be the end of it. He quickly poked me right back again and I did the same back to him. I soon realized that this was going to be an ongoing thing and was pretty sure I was going to win. I pride myself on being able to do things I don't enjoy for long periods of time. There was no way I'd get tired of this before he did.
The thing about poking is you can't just flood somebody with pokes over and over again. You have to wait for them to remove your poke or to poke you back before you can send them another one. So the real trick of a poke war is trying to poke someone back as quickly as you can after they poke you.
A month or two went by and my rival showed no sign of stopping and I was at the end of my rope. There's only so much poking a guy can take. There was almost no point in poking him, because his return poke would appear seemingly instantly. I wasn't going to win this through sheer force of will. I was going to have to cheat.
Through a little googling, I found a script that automatically pokes people by pretending to be a web browser, logging into your account, and then poking whoever's poked you. It didn't actually work in its current state, but with a little bit of tweaking, I got it to run and changed it to fit my specific needs. Then, I set up a separate mail address to receive all my facebook email. Every time the account got an email telling me my rival had poked me, it would poke him right back. Every time it got an email from facebook unrelated to pokes, it forwarded it on to me. I was able to wage a poke war without even having to think about it.
A few days ago I checked in to see how it was all going. It had been ten days since I had last received a poke from my rival. The war was over. But it was such an empty victory. And not because I had cheated, although that was part of it. I expected some fanfare. A formal surrender. Something. But really, all I ended up with was a facebook account that wasn't even worth logging into. What's the point now that it's all over? I haven't told him it was a computer poking him all those times and not me. I don't think I will. It seems mean somehow. Poke war is hell.
Posted by Will at 1:48 AM | Comments (2) digg delicious reddit
February 4, 2008
Thank goodness I have facebook to tell me these things
Posted by Will at 9:37 PM | Comments (2) digg delicious reddit
July 10, 2007
This is a real question party!
I give you http://questionparty.com/
Update: Video of my presentation to the NY Tech Meetup. If you're hoping for an explanation of question party, you're not going to get it here.
Posted by Will at 11:34 PM | Comments (0) digg delicious reddit
June 13, 2007
Safari 3's search is kinda cute and all
But it didn't take me long to find out that searching for Cobra Commander here...
becomes...
And yet, I'm still going to use Safari 3, just cuz. Go figure.
Posted by Will at 2:27 PM | Comments (0) digg delicious reddit
June 9, 2007
What a creepy spam I just got
It's like M. Night Shyamalan himself needs for me to know about Canadian pharmacies.
Posted by Will at 4:13 PM | Comments (1) digg delicious reddit
May 29, 2007
This is an ad for myspace's job section
Seriously, myspace? This is seriously your ad for your jobs section? I'm not saying that you've got to be all dreary suit and tie about it, but geez. You think you're going to trick horny teenagers into becoming responsible members of society or something? How dumb do you expect your users to be? I mean, I'm already insulted enough by your dating site ads that are supposed to make me think some hot college girl is somehow trying to magically video instant message me. And I know it's passe to be bagging on you these days myspace, but you've really gone all out with this one.
Speaking of those dating site ads, I wonder if there are people who actually think that hot college girl is trying to chat with them. I'm tempted to say there aren't, but then why would they keep making the ads? It must be the same people who are unemployed and looking for sexy summer jobs.
Posted by Will at 1:19 AM | Comments (0) digg delicious reddit
February 13, 2007
My digg rss yahoo pipe
Note: regular readers who don't know what digg is will probably find this post confusing and/or dull.
I'd tried to use digg to promote diogenes club with little success, and had been trying to figure out a way to lure people from digg here and realized the only chance a plain old blog like diogenes club had of getting to the front page of digg is by making a post about digg itself. Add the technology people are most excited about but aren't quite sure what to do with, yahoo pipes, and I might have a shot. So here it is, my digg rss limiter:
What's it for, you say? Well, anyone subscribed to digg's rss feed knows that there's just too much damn stuff in there, you can barely keep up with it, even if you're intent on getting no work done all day. Fortunately, digg puts the amount of diggs and comments any story has in their feed, so you can strip out the slightly less popular ones. I like setting the threshold at 500, adjust it to your taste. Admitted, this doesn't take into account digg's crazy algorithm for figuring out how interesting a story actually is, but it's a start.
Oh, and speaking of rss, diggers, feel free to add diogenes club's to your readers, (assuming some intrepid commenter didn't already decide this was blog spam and post a direct link to the pipe itself). I do interesting stuff every once in a while, I made the Double Feature Finder, I was one of the original Crying While Eating criers, I made that Batman movie with Sam Rockwell and Justin Long, Robin's Big Date that ended up going to Sundance last year, and all kinds of stuff. And what with this digg limiter, you're going to have a lot more free time at work, so you might as come here every once in a while.
Update: This attempt to get on the front page of digg was as dismal a failure as the first three times. Ah well.
Posted by Will at 12:54 AM | Comments (2) digg delicious reddit
January 28, 2007
Thoughts on House of Pain lyrics and the Sega Dreamcast that you may or may not find interesting, depending on how much you like rap and video games
"Trying to play me out like as if my name was Sega"
That's a line from House of Pain's 1992 hit, Jump Around. At the time, there were two big video game console companies, Sega and Nintendo. The choice to reference Sega instead of Nintendo might have been influenced by the edgier image that Sega had at the time with their console, the Genesis. It might also have something to do with finding a rhyme for the preceding line -- there's not that much that rhymes with Schwarzenegger. The next line, "but I ain't going out like like no punk bitch" was moving onto a different thought, but come 2001, it took on another meaning. Sega's system at the time, the Dreamcast, was struggling in its competition with the PlayStation 2, the GameCube, and the Xbox, so they announced that they were throwing in the towel. They ceased production and gave up the console business, deciding to stick to making software for other companies' systems. Sega, in the end, went out not unlike a punk bitch. Prophetic words from Everlast and House of Pain.
Posted by Will at 9:14 PM | Comments (7) digg delicious reddit
January 14, 2007
If you wanted to know what search terms and posts were most popular in 2006, this is the post for you
The top post of the year goes to the one about Ashlee Simpson with the Cheaper By the Dozen 2 one a distant second. People who went to the first one were probably just looking for before/after pictures of Ashlee, I'll be damned if I can figure out why people were searching for a smarmy looking picture of Steve Martin.
Least popular post goes to:
A list of things that people seem to find hilarious, but I either never did or have gotten sick of for various reasons. I was always pretty sure no one cared what I found funny, but now I know it for a fact.
Now here are the top eight search terms for last year. My comments to the people searching for those things follow.
1. minnie mouse porn -- Good god, this is the number one search term for my site, and I'm at the top of the list on google. I don't mind you searching for porn, but try to keep it to porn that might possibly exist.
2. diogenes club -- Sadly, I'm #4 on google for this one. #1-#3 actually talk about Diogenes Club, the cheaters.
3. will carlough -- I used to have #1 on google for this, now it's been usurped by my myspace page. I'm not sure how I feel about that.
4. margaret cho sucks -- My post about Margaret Cho sucking was on of the first ones I ever wrote, I'm not even sure why I was mad at her anymore.
5. at june 17 2005 -- What happened on June 17, 2005 and what's it got to do with me? Seriously.
6. green leotards -- People need their green leotards, I guess.
7. ashlee simpson -- I should probably just give people what they want and make this an Ashlee Simpson fan site.
8. karate jokes -- Man, I'm only #10 on google for this one. I've got to come up with some more karate jokes. Or I'll just type karate jokes a bunch of times here. Karate jokes are karate jokes and there was this one karate joke that was a karate joke. Karate jokes.
There are a lot of terms that only got a few people here that are worth noting:
why is wario mean to mario, 1 person -- Because Mario picked on him when they were younger. Mario started it, look it up if you don't believe me.
jason statham and hotels in kent he stays at, 2 people -- You are creepy and you have bad taste in people to stalk.
you are a idiot, 2 people -- No, you are a idiot.
fuck club, 3 people -- I wouldn't let you in, even if this were one. Which it might be, you'll never know.
Hoo. It was a heck of a year. More as it comes. Oh yeah, and karate jokes.
Posted by Will at 12:17 AM | Comments (3) digg delicious reddit
October 27, 2006
Will
I realized the other day that pretty much since I started regularly using email, some time in late 1995, I've been writing "Will" at the bottom of each message that I send. If I were smart, I'd have put it into a signature, and just have the computer insert it into the bottom for me. How much time would I have saved? Judging my sent box, (which only goes back two years and probably doesn't contain every email I've sent in that time period and is inaccurate for any number of other reasons) I've sent 16,000 emails in the last eleven years. Let's say it takes me half a second to type "Will" every time. That's over two hours I'd have back! Not to mention the five minutes I've spent typing this post. And yet, I'll probably never make the change. Why? Stuck in my ways? Not worth the trouble? I think I just like typing my own name.
Posted by Will at 9:16 PM | Comments (0) digg delicious reddit
October 19, 2006
Think before you click submit.
I recently changed the contact forms for the League and the Club. They used to say "Your address:" where you're supposed to put your email address. Enough people put in their street address so that I finally decided to make it clear that it was their email address I was looking for. That didn't stop this guy:
From: 89 Dundee Drive
do you have money
Apparently the guy found the League from a New Zealand msn search for 'bat man' and, well, you know the rest. Now, I don't want to take potshots at msn or its user base, but when I track down how the especially stupid people get here, it's usually through msn.
On a less mean-spirited note, congratulations to the Hazzards for being awarded The Village Voice's Best Ukulele-playing Fag Hags, 2006!
Posted by Will at 12:12 AM | Comments (3) digg delicious reddit
August 4, 2006
Instead of posting more frequently, I made a graph of how infrequently I post
This is how long it is between posts since the beginning of diogenes club back in September 2004.
I made that graph with the intention of proving that I post just as infrequently as I ever did, but apparently that's not the case. So I've been slacking off. Suggestions for upcoming posts are welcome in the comments. Otherwise I'll just find a bunch of random comments from strangers and make fun of them.
Posted by Will at 12:27 AM | Comments (24) digg delicious reddit
June 22, 2006
Luigi, dictator
To further embroil the raging controversy over the representation of Mario and Luigi, I present to you the finishing screen from the arcade version of Bionic Commando:
Recognize that L on the hat?
Sometimes I even bore myself.
Posted by Will at 6:21 PM | Comments (4) digg delicious reddit
May 22, 2006
The Anti-hero-ization of Mario
Nintendo, in the past few years, has developed an uncanny sense of what I want, occasionally sucking me back into the world of video games like the green pipe used to suck you out of the underground level when you were trying to get the last coin block. And true to form, last week, Nintendo released New Super Mario Bros., the first original Mario 2-D platformer since, I don't know, since I was in high school?
Anyway, I won't bore you with a review of the game and a comparison to earlier entries in the Mario saga*, but there is something important to note. When you start a level, Mario proclaims, "Here I go!" I've played a lot of Mario Kart in my day, and Mario was always the one to shout, "Here we go." "Here I go" was reserved for Wario, Mario's evil twin (I'm not sure if they're actually related). This somehow implied that Wario was greedier and more selfish than Mario, although I never really bought it. I mean, they were both clearly racing out of self interest, it's not like Mario was helping Toad and Yoshi across the finish line.
I didn't think much of it until I played New SMB as Luigi, who nervously screams, "Here we go" when he's shot out of a cannon. Is Luigi being portrayed as the more altruistic Mario brother? That's what I thought until I realized that at the end of every level he tells you, "Yay for me, Luigi," saying his own name, like you didn't know who he was already. And when he starts a level, I think he says, "Oh, 'uigi," which is weird too. It kind of comes off as affable overcompensation for being the less famous brother though.
So what's this all mean? It means I put more thought into Mario's sound bytes than the game designers probably did. Yay for me, Will.
* Although I was ridiculously close to doing so.
Posted by Will at 11:46 PM | Comments (2) digg delicious reddit
December 22, 2005
The Double Feature Finder
Want to spend the whole day at the movies? Check out...
Posted by Will at 4:39 PM | Comments (2) digg delicious reddit
July 27, 2005
I got identity thefted!
And I'm not even the first person to come up with the term "identity thefted," sadly.
The other day, I got my bill from my credit card company, looked it over, everything looked okay. I went online to pay the bill, and it said there was an error in logging me in and I should call some number. Well, whatever, I thought, they're stupid, I'll do it later. The next day I tried to buy something online with the card, and it was denied. It seemed like it was worth it to call now.
As I waited on hold for a little while, I realized that I had probably set off some warning in their system by buying a new computer and blowing some money in Montreal. I'd tell them everything was fine and to stop being a bunch of nervous nellies with my damn card. When they got to my call, I had trouble convincing them that I was, in fact, Will Carlough, since I wasn't calling from my home phone number (a number which is now defunct) and I didn't get the security question that I had come up with five years ago right, for reasons I won't go into, in case there are any prospective identity thefters reading. (Fuck, I didn't come up with identity thefter either.)
So the guy started listing off things that were bought in The Philippines and Great Britian that I had never heard of: A cell phone bill, an ebay purchase, I forget what else. Nothing too exotic, it all seemed rather mundane, other than the locales. I'm a little disappointed my thief didn't have more fun with it. The guy on the phone wrapped up the list, told me to cut up my card, they'd send me a new one, and they wouldn't charge me for any of the stuff. (I probably should have told him my computer and the Montreal trip weren't me either.)
I went back to my desk and was ready to forget about this petty annoyance. I was in the middle of an instant message conversation with my friend Michelle, so I told her about what had just happened. "You must feel so violated!" she said, or something to that effect. Hey, you know what, I hadn't thought of it until then, I was still on my kick of being annoyed by my stupid credit card company for making me call them. Maybe I did feel violated. I started to think, how could my card have been leaked? I'm usually fairly careful. Was it that tape stock I bought over the phone the other day? Did someone out there have more personal information on me? I'm stealing wi-fi from my neighbor, could he have intercepted something?
Well, who knows. My neighbor's probably out, since he can't even figure out how to password protect his wi-fi network. I vaguely remember an episode of CSI: Miami about identity theft, and they said that most identity theft is all about just garbage picking. I think. Oh, and my friend Peter claims that what happened doesn't qualify as identity theft, because no one actually assumed my identity, they just got a hold of my credit card number. I think he was implying that identity theft is more pervasive than just a credit card. It's true, that lady on CSI had to carry around paperwork proving that she was herself. And then the thief started doing the same thing, it was crazy! Well, you had to be there. And that's how I became an identity theftee. (Finally!) More from Montreal next time.
Posted by Will at 11:52 PM | Comments (2) digg delicious reddit
June 12, 2005
I'm sure you all get as much or more spam than I do, but I thought I'd share this.
And I may be naive, but I'm almost positive this isn't true.
Female club readers, feel free to correct me.
Posted by Will at 12:42 AM | Comments (3) digg delicious reddit
May 30, 2005
How to spend a lot of money on bandwidth
Avid club readers may have noticed the site going down a fair amount this month (although to be honest, I've gotten more complaints about benfine.com being down). I can only blame my poor planning. See, my hosting company gives me 80 gigs of transfer each month. After people download 80 gigs of stuff, they shut me down. The Bat-man movie is 20 megs. If I had done the math, I would have realized that if 4,000 people watched it, that would have been it. I also posted a torrent file, but if I had given it any thought I would have realized that a) most people don't know what a torrent file is, and b) if people have a choice between watching the movie in a browser and dicking around with bittorrent, they're just going to watch it in the browser. Oh yeah, and once the site goes down, the torrent is useless.
But all that boring tech stuff is neither here nor there.
Posted by Will at 1:23 PM | Comments (0) digg delicious reddit
April 18, 2005
Some more kind of funny search terms that got people here and reader mail
"episode baby ducks chicks daily show"
"harlem rennaissance cocktail"
"fefe dobson ethnicity"
And of course, lots of bloggers trying to uncover more of The Bravery's dirty secrets. It's quite a thrill being an obscure footnote of popular culture. An email from a fan:
this is for Will Carlough... you said in your blog that you were in The El Conquistadors/Skabba the Hut, and if that's true, do you have any photos from when you were in them? I'm trying to destroy the bravery and need some pictures of Sam Endicot with that gorgeous blond 'do.
Well, as eager as I am to aid in the destruction of people who I've been friends with for the better part of a decade, I sadly don't have any pictures from those halcyon days. Oh wait, hold on, here's a picture of their keyboardist, John Conway, and me eating...
MCDONALDS! Can you believe it? I think I cracked the case.
Posted by Will at 5:41 AM | Comments (9) digg delicious reddit
A link, but I made it myself
Brooklyn hearts you. It's a sign making company.
Posted by Will at 4:00 AM | Comments (0) digg delicious reddit
February 24, 2005
Logs and the League
In that last post, I referenced Doctor Who and Star Trek just in the title. I should thank God everyday that I've even kissed a girl.
I've gotten a couple of compliments on diogenes club, both in the comments section and in real life, which really puts the pressure on to come up with material. Especially since the compliments are usually followed by something about how I should post everyday. But it's nice to know that these postings aren't being totally lost in the ether. The logs claim that the club's readership has been steadily growing, and I'm occasionally pleasantly surprised by a complete stranger posting a comment. I started this blog so that people who visit the League would have something to come back to more often than when we make a new movie or I come up with another The Bat-man comic. I didn't do that great a job, because the relationship between the two is probably unclear to the casual observer, and the links to each other are not immediately apparent, which I kind of did on purpose so that diogenes club wouldn't take focus away from the League. That said, the League gets four times the traffic that this site does, despite the fact that it hasn't been updated in months, so I don't have to worry about this overshadowing all the good stuff on the League. I may try to make their relationship more obvious, but as anyone who's ever used the double feature finder knows, in the web development world, user interface is not my speciality.
More interesting than numbers in the logs, though, are the search terms that get people to this page. By far, the biggest search term that draws people to this site is Jonathan Togo, who I mentioned once in a post mostly unrelated to him. Most people were probably disappointed that this is just a site where I complain about movies and talk about people on the subway that I hate, but for all of you Togo fans out there, there may or may not be a special something for you in the League archives.
Most other search terms other than Will Carlough and diogenes club only brought one person here, but here are some of the more interesting ones:
"underwater homes"
"he doesn't make sense, i don't make sense , together we make sense - to what movie" (It's Untamed Heart, by the way)
"porn with the scooby-doo characters" (sorry to disappoint)
"grammer you and" (I misspelled grammar on the right on purpose, I'm not sure if this guy did)
"bunch of jerks"
"trimspa sucks"
"margaret cho sucks" (I suppose this site really is all about negativity, isn't it)
Anyway, I've got one or two more ways to tell a movie's bad in me and maybe another vaguely offensive picture that takes me a lot longer to do in photoshop than it should. More as it comes.
Posted by Will at 9:56 PM | Comments (6) digg delicious reddit
February 1, 2005
All right trackback spammers, you got me
I wasn't going to brag about it, in fear of spammer retaliation, but I thought my little hack of movabletype to require that 'yeah' thing for comments was pretty clever. On their website, movabletype recommends against methods like this, because spammers can easily adapt, but my site is so small, I doubted they'd go to the trouble. The mt code seems pretty well orgainzed, even though some of the Perl is so Perl-y it, well, you don't really care about Perl syntax I bet. But I'll be damned if I can figure out why they've got some php files kicking around in there too.
Anyway, the reason why I bring it up is that, while the tweak was successful (I haven't had any comment spam since), spammers have taken to a new method of annoying me: trackback spam. I got my first twenty sometime this morning. Trackbacks, for those of you who have always wondered why there's 'Trackbacks (0)' on the bottom of most blogs, are how blogs tell other blogs that they're linking to a specific article. That's all well and good, but I've only had one legitimate trackback in my blogging career. I've seen a few solutions for trackback spam, but they all seem like a lot of trouble for how effective they may or may not be.
So, sadly, trackbacks are off for good. They always kind of depressed me anyway, those big zeros at the bottom of each entry.
I'm also turning on anonymous posting, since asking people to put their email address onto a web page is exactly what spammers want me to do. If you do want to post anonymously, I encourage you to at least make up a funny name.
So, that's it for now. Sorry this wasn't more exciting, I've got some more interesting stuff in the hopper.
Posted by Will at 3:52 PM | Comments (2) digg delicious reddit
December 28, 2004
I minored in math at college
Let's take the old saying, comedy is tragedy plus time.
c = r + t where c is comedy, r is tragedy, and t is time.
Subtract c.
0 = r + t -c
Subtract t.
-t = r - c
As you can see, tragedy minus comedy is negative time. Yes, I just invented time travel.
Posted by Will at 4:26 AM | Comments (3) digg delicious reddit
December 7, 2004
All right, you can stop hitting refresh now
Occasionally, diogenesclub.net will come up in polite conversation with a friend. They usually say something to the effect of, "Yeah, I used to check it, but you don't update it every day." To which I reply, "Well, you should subscribe to my rss feed." To which they reply with a blank stare. Explaining rss to someone unfamiliar with it is like explaining email to my grandfather. Even if you can get him to understand what it is, you still are going to have a job convincing him he should use it.
A note to my coworkers and anyone reading this in an rss reader, you can pretty much mark this is as read, I'm just going to be preaching to the choir here.
So rss. I won't bore you with the Webster's definition of it or what it stands for or anything, you can look that up yourself. But rss basically solves a big problem for people trying to waste time at work when their boss isn't looking: Sites like this one don't update every day. And it's an exercise in disappointment to come here and have that same old story about The Will Show staring you in the face all the time. In short, rss tells you when a site updates.
Rss didn't click with me for a long time. (So it tells me if a site updates, so what, I can figure that out by going to it.) That is, until Thunderbird, an email client, came with its own rss reader. It finally made sense. It's just like getting an email. I can give Thunderbird the address of a site, and it's like the site emails me every time it updates. It appears right next to my inbox, with the title of the article where the subject would be, and a brief summary below. You can then read the article, mark it is read, and it'll remember that you've read that article next time you look. (Keep in mind that you don't have to use Thunderbird to use rss, more on that later.)
But Will, you might be saying, your blog is the only blog I read. It's not worth the trouble for me.
First, I'd like to compliment you on your discriminating taste. Second, I'd wager nine out of ten of the sites you read, be it Salon, The New York Times, Slate, or BBC News publish rss feeds too. Often times, a quick google search can find a feed for sites that don't publish their own like Ain't it Cool News. So with your rss reader, you can browse the headlines of Times without having to look at ads trying to trick you into seeing that sucky new movie, Closer, and never have to browse the same headline twice.
So after I figured this all out, I installed rss readers on the three computers I use on a regular basis, and it was pretty sweet, until I realized that I could mark an article as read on one machine, and the other two machines would still think it was unread. Imagine marking every message in your inbox as read every time you check it. It blew. That's when I found out about Bloglines.
Hold on Will, I kind of followed you on the email comparison, but now I'm going to a web site to see if another web site is updated? That's stupid.
I know, I know it seems stupid. Here's why it's not:
First, it's one site instead of how ever many sites you read. Take a look at this guy's list, and it starts to make sense. Checking all of those sites for updates all the time would take more time than I'm usually trying to waste.
Second, regardless of what browser you're using, there's a bloglines notifier. The Firefox version is a little B that sits politely in the corner until there's an update, at which point it gets a little red dot that you can click on and go straight to see what sites have updated.
So, there you go, rss, na na. Most of the time I'm pretty indifferent to whether people are using technologies that I like (as a Mac and Linux user, it's a necessary defense mechanism). But there are only so many movies I can post and trivial things I can complain about, and I wouldn't want you all to forget about little ol' diogenesclub.net just because I'm a little slow on the draw sometimes.
Posted by Will at 12:54 AM | Comments (8) digg delicious reddit
