Friday, February 16, 2001 I'm going nuts researching this phrase. Mr.T vrs Zero Wing.
[via nulldevice]
World War II Poster collection from Northwestern University.
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
In A.D. 2101
War was beginning.
Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's You !!
Cats: How are you gentlemen !!
Cats: All your base are belong to us.
Cats: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say !!
Cats: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Cats: HA HA HA HA ....
Captain: Take off every 'zig' !!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move 'zig'.
Captain: For great justice.
This meme is apparently exploding amoung the 31137 crowd. ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US being the catchphrase. And honestly it does sound like an appropriate taunt when playing multiplayer combat games. I find it interesting that this meme is bubbling up at the same time as the US attack on Iraq.
Check out the movie, and the comprehensive techno remix including the photoshoped art with the slogan plastered everywhere.
Hey! There's a people's choice award for SxSW! Everyone go vote for Robota: Reign of Machines in the high bandwidth category.
So Zeldman has unveiled a new web campaign, the WaSP upgrade your browser project. People are encouraged to construct their pages only using W3C compliant coding, valid HTML with CSS for the style. Further, page authors are encouraged to put up a big "Your browser doesn't support standards, go away" message. And he further goes on to put his money where his mouth is by redesigning A List Apart so it is powered only by validated markup and CSS. Take a look at it under IE 5 or Netscape 6, then boot up Netscape 4 and take a gander. As much as I dislike denying viewers access to any site based on the browser they are using, this seems to be the only way to deal with it. It worked to get people to upgrade to frames based browsers, and it worked to get people to install the flash plugin. So why not do it for some standards you care about.
I'm finally getting around to documenting the Webmonkey toolbar. The W3C compliant version, that includes the conditional for IE4 is ten lines of code. The Netscape version is like 30, and has taken days of debugging to get to work. Why should we spend so much time to support Netscape's wrongheaded decision to define its own standards. The answer is of course because we have clients to please and we don't want to drive away 10-30% of their business because of our developer activism.
So let's do it on our personal sites, our blogs and fanzines, and other pages where we can do things the way that we want. Send a message to everyone out there that it does matter if you upgrade. That there is a difference, and you are missing out on some of the best parts of the web.
However if you are a client of mine, rest assured I'll make your site workable, and beautiful in every damn browser. People will be able to use it in Lynx.
Now I have to go about redesigning this site.
Thursday, February 15, 2001 This to that: Because people have a need to glue things to other things.
[via mike k]
Wednesday, February 14, 2001 And we thought that Metallica was bad. In Germany the rock band Böhse Onkelz
(along with several major copyright societies) to impose copyright fees on all computers sold in Germany that could possibly be used to copy or record mp3s. [via stratics]
This is a tool I'm been looking for for a long time. The Dreamweaver wireframing extensions. If you do any kind of Information Architecture and would like to use HTML as a delivery mechanism you should download this.
But Dack, I was doing this before it bought me a case of cheap beer. Now I can do it while drunk. The fact that I haven't collected much money shouldn't be an indictment of the microdonation model. So far it's been all gravy. Look at Metafilter's donation page. Considering that pay-pal donations may have accounted for a good chunk on top of that. I don't think that microdonations are going to make anyone rich, but I think that they will more than cover the expenses of a site that was operating for free before.
Advertising is probably a much better model. Perhaps someone should figure out online advertising once again. But this time just skip all that futurist hype about directly targeting a consumer with their exact need. Because that didn't really happen beyond serving up a porn ads on HotBot when someone would type "boobies" into the search field. Also when you reinvent advertising, go in with the expectation that very few people care about the particular ad on the page, so clickthrough rates will be less than %1 of all viewers.
Tuesday, February 13, 2001 I think the real key to MTV's Undressed is that they run marathons late at night. You're flipping around not finding anything to have on in the background as you explore the ruins of Khaldun, and it's better than anything else so you watch it. But since the episodes never end all three threads at the same time you just stick around until the marathon is over, three hours later. Oh yeah, and then there's the sex.
Monday, February 12, 2001
Content management
systems: short-lived satisfaction. I couldn't agree more. Finding a good
CMS system is a choice between the lesser of all the myriad evils. It gets even
harder to find a system that will work for small clients. I still think that
blogger is genius for this reason and
hope Ev finds a way to fund this eventually.
[via Cam and his CMS
list]
Greg responds to my post about the web and the suspension of disbelief.
Nope, it's because the web is NOT narrative in nature.
Coleridge's idea of "a willing suspension of disbelief" is necessary
to narrative because, by definition, narrative is not true even though it
presents itself as if it were. To experience the narrative in an effective
and meaningful manner, you have to allow yourself to momentarily forget that
what you are experiencing is actually ink on a page or pixels on a screen.
To experience the emotions of a narrative, you have to accept that it's valid
to have emotions about these words that describe people that never existed.
However, in non-narrative writing -- say a Perl manual or the cooking directions
on a pasta box -- there is no (or at least less) need for emotional involvment,
not to mention no characters, so there is nearly no need for suspension of
disbelief. The reader isn't expected to generate emotional involvment with
the text. I think most of the texts on the web fall into these kind of informational,
non-narrative forms . . . and thus require no suspension of disbelief.
Two additional points:
There's a wide gray area between "narrative form" and "non-narrative
form." Arguably, something like journalism or a restaurant menu (or a
J. Peterman catalog!) might appropriate aspects of a narrative form, or at
least narrative description, to generate emotion in relation to the topic
or product.
Also, "belief" and "suspension of disbelief" are not
synonymous. To believe a news story, I do not have to suspend disbelief --
in fact, a modicum of disbelief in the evening news is probably productive
for critical understanding. Likewise, if I suspend disbelief in Don Quixote,
that doesn't mean I'm suddenly convinced Don Quixote was a real person. In
fact, the word "suspension" implies that I will return to a state
of disbelief. It would be a quite difficult and bizarre world if we *permanently*
suspended disbelief in all narratives.
And that last comment brings to mind Don DeLillo's _White Noise_ which centers
around a drug called Dylar. Dylar removes the fear of death . . . but the
side effect is that the user becomes unable to distinguish narrative from
reality, effectively living in a state of permanent suspension of disbelief.
Sunday, February 11, 2001 Random thought I had during a bad movie.
On the web there is no suspension of disbelief. We take everything at face value, like we do with a newspaper. With computer games we put aside reality and let ourselves get lost in the world, and the rules that apply. On the web, very few authors attempt to do so, and when they do the audience doesn't grant them that right. Is it because the web is narrative in nature? Is it the expectations that one has while surfing the web, mixing fact and fiction as one grazes through? Or is the technology and form of the web just bad at getting the audience to suspend their disbelief? Do we need things like full screen windows and hiding the browser chrome to achieve this?
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