I’m going on vacation tomorrow, so there will be no new TBOTCOTW until the 12th. I’ve shut down comments unless you authenticate with TypeKey, and trackbacks will be held for approval until I get back, so don’t ping me ten times when your first one doesn’t show up on the page. Blame that on the spammers, they are teh suck.

Hopefully when I get back I’ll have some good ten-year high school reunion stories. Star quarterback is fat, the homecoming queen is a hardcore tweeker, that sort of thing.

See you in a week and a half.

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Inspired by the reaction that this post generated (I’m still getting, “Who’s the girl in that Motorola commercial?” comments two years later) I’ve started a new forum called AdActors.com.

I’m hoping this will be the place to go when you see that same guy in six different national commercials in one week and just have to know who he is and what else he’s been in. Clearly a blog comments section isn’t the place for this sort of dialogue, it just doesn’t allow for enough back-and-forth, user-to-user contact, so I needed to build something else. I realized that the wonderful forums at AdTunes answer very similar questions (”What’s that song they’re playing on Lost?”) very effectively. When I started thinking about ways to make a website dedicated to spreading info on ad actors, it was obvious who I should copy. An AdTunes-style bulletin board was the answer.

Go on over, log in, and check it out. I’m using Six Apart’s TypeKey for registration and authentication (thanks to Arvind Satyanarayan), so you’ll have to get a TypeKey account, but the sign up process is trivial. Please let me know in the feedback forum or via email if you see any problems or have any suggestions.

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Lots of stuff going on at TBOTCOTW, but you probably didn’t notice. I upgraded to Movable Type 3.2, which isn’t a whole lot different than the nightly build I was running previously. Then I set up some alternate skins. If you’re running Firefox (or any Mozilla browser, I think), you can go to View -> Page Style and pick a new one. If you’re running IE or Safari you’re out of luck for now. I’ll set up something in the sidebar to change the skin for those browsers eventually, once I figure out how to make it look nice.

Then I changed my blogroll to MT-Blogroll, which is a neat plugin. But I’m having trouble making its “Recently Updated” feature work. It requires that you dynamically publish your blogroll, but the tags don’t seem to work with dynamic publishing. Someone else in the forum is having the same problem, so hopefully that gets fixed soon. It also doesn’t support click counting without some serious hacking, so I might just delete it and go back to my old blogroll. Update awareness would be really cool, though.

Anyway, lots of technical stuff (and life stuff) going on, so I haven’t had time to update. Hopefully I’ll get a few posts in before Thursday, when I go back to Raleigh for my tenth high school reunion. Sigh, I’m getting old.

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What if this fat farm is like Orson Scott Card’s short story “Fat Farm?” Are they in the process of cloning a younger, thinner Michael Moore while unspeakable multitudes of fat Mikeys toil at backbreaking manual labor for years to come?

That might sound like a satisfying fate for the portly propagandist(s), but you have to ask yourself, what if they all escape?

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Like I said before, I’m going to miss this show. For thirteen weeks every couple of years I really looked forward to Sunday evenings, and I don’t think I’ll feel the same way about Rome. As derivative as it could be at times (and I don’t think it was nearly as unoriginal as Goldstein will tell you) I think it approached many subjects that nothing on teevee has ever attempted to come to grips with before. I’m not talking about death here, lots of shows have dealt with death (although not many on a weekly basis). I’m talking about things like father/son conflicts, mental illness, drug use, religion. But mostly the show was about identity. The question that Nate (who was the main character, if you ask me) was always asking himself was, “Can I become the person I want to be? Or is it enough to pretend to be that person so that everyone I know is fooled?” I think he always found out it wasn’t enough, but he kept trying to fool everyone anyway.

Deep questions weren’t the reason I kept watching, though. It was, purely and simply, a very entertaining show. There’s nothing wrong with that, it doesn’t mean that it’s mindless. Teevee can be entertaining and still be good.

I thought the final episode was very good. There were no attempts to shock us, all (most?) the loose psychological ends were tied up neatly yet realistically, and the epilogue will help me feel like I haven’t missed anything when I start wondering what’s up with the Fishers in a year or so. I tried to come up with some comparisons to other last episodes for this post, but I’ve never really cared about a show from start to finish before. Buffy I dropped after a few seasons, then caught up with on DVD. Angel and Firefly I never really watched except on DVD. Seinfeld was a sitcom, so it doesn’t really count. Did anyone really care when The X-Files called it quits? Maybe I’ll feel this way about Battlestar Galactica in a few years (it’s definitely the best thing on the tube now).

Six Feet Under was my show, the one I where I watched nearly every episode on first airing week in and week out for five seasons. It makes me feel stupid, but it hurts to see a show like that go.

(If you’re wondering, the song played over the epilogue was “Breathe Me” by Sia, and you can find it on the second soundtrack. That little bit of trivia brought to you via AdTunes, which is a great website for that sort of thing. I still don’t know what that damn bumper sticker was, though. And who buys a fucking car to move to New York City?)

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I’m going to miss the Fishers.

(But one question. What did the bumper sticker on Claire’s Prius say?)

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Our old friend Gandhi is over at Goldstein’s defending a guy who called Jeff a “Jew prick” in email.

I agree. “Jew prick” is tasteless, racist and completely unnecessary.

On the other hand, you and your disciples spout venemous insults, gratuitous lies and hateful invective non-stop on this blog, so what do you expect?

Yes, because if you make light of terrorists, murderous dictators, suicide bombers, and their fellow travelers you should just expect virulent Jew-hatred in return.

But Gandhi’s not an anti-Semite. So somehow justifying the phrase “Jew prick” is a way of bravely standing up to the Zionist interests that control America.

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Zomby complained that my blog was a little slow ealier this week. He was right, commenting was taking up to seventy seconds from pushing the post button to getting the refreshed page. Even dynamic publishing (which I thought would make things very quick) only cut off a few seconds.

So I decided to see if I could get something cheap that would be a big improvement. And what do you know, MicroCenter had an AMD Sempron (a processor I’d never heard of) for $250, with a 150 dollar rebate if you used their credit card. Another 80 bucks to add a half-gig of RAM and I was in business.

Now comment times are down to 15 seconds (and they’re usually much faster than that) and hopefully Andy won’t feel the need to ping me three times anymore because the first two time out.

Alternate post: 100 bucks for a computer that’s at least 100 times more powerful than the one my dad paid 4500 dollars for in 1983? What a great fucking country.

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So I complained a while back that I missed my blog’s “notify me of new comments” feature after upgrading to MT3.2. Well, Chad Everett is working on a new version of his great plugin. MT-Notifier 3.0 will be MT3.2 compatible and will probably be released for a wide audience before the final release of MT3.2. I’m testing it out the beta release here, so please check the “notify me” box if you leave a comment so it has something to do.

It’s got some neat new features. First, it doesn’t require hacking any of the standard Movable Type files like it used to, so it should get along with MT-Blackist and any other plugins you have installed, and it won’t break when you upgrade your MT installation. And it now features notification confirmation, so by default if you sign up you’ll get an email with a confirm link and you won’t get any actual notifications until you click it. If it wasn’t you that plugged your email in then you’ll just get the one email, delete it, and go on about your merry way. Also, it helps to make sure that only real live addresses are in my database.

I had to delete all my old notifications a couple weeks ago because the database was loaded with nonsense addresses and also a few real addresses from people that complained to my SMTP provider that I was spamming them. Between the bounce messages and the threats to have my service cut it just wasn’t worth the trouble. Now I’ll never have that problem again, every comment notification will go to a real person who wants to see it.

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Asbestos.

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