…this is.

Found via Neatorama.

Jhayne, the Lady Porphyre, is going to Alberta next month. In an effort to raise the $250 needed to prevent a crater in the middle of her wallet, she's selling digital prints, original or no, for $10 a piece. This actually a pretty good deal for everybody involved, because her casual photos are better than any I've ever staged. So. I mean: I'd be paying you $10 to take one of them.

Anyway, if you want to see her work, check it out here. Her LiveJournal is here, and you can see the work that I received here.

Slightly late to the party on this one, but here we go.

Now that it's been revealed that worrying about terrorists targeting gumballs is fucking lunacy (because really, when all of our public transportation, ports, borders, and everything else is pretty much an open target, gumball protection being a priority is the height of madness), the aldermen reveal their "real" idea: licensing gumball machines.

That's right: of all the other problems facing the town like "overcrowded housing, taxi ordinances and redevelopment projects" says the Daily Record (cached version here), not to mention others we can probably think of because they're problems everywhere (education, perhaps?), we want to license gumball machines.

[Alderman Frank] Poolas said he is convinced that the town needs to license gumball machines and other currently-exempt devices to better protect children against food-borne illnesses and defective toys. He also said such a licensing scheme could make it easier to track down someone who might use gumball machines in an unlikely, if not impossible, attempt to poison kids. Source.

Question: when was the last time you heard about a kid getting sick from something they ate out of a gumball machine? Has there been an E. coli outbreak from gumballs that I haven't heard of? I'm being serious when I ask that…is this really some sort of safety issue I've just missed? And the defective toys business…what does that mean? If the spider ring breaks within 30 days of purchase? (And yes, I know some toys shouldn't be given to kids to screw around with, but if the parent won't check the toys to ensure they're not going to kill their kid, they probably expect Alderman Poolas to come and ensure that the doors to where they keep the drain cleaners are secured as well. Should we license parents?)

And let's go ahead and think like a loony alderman for about five seconds. Let's assume that all gumball machines are licensed, and the government is wasting lots of money and time making sure they know what goes in the gumball machines and where it's come from. Then let's assume, because we're in Loony Alderland, that a terrorist decided that poisoning gumballs was a good idea. Are they going to log this on a schedule somewhere? No, they're going to do Bad Things to the gumballs without said Bad Things showing up anywhere. So all your vaunted licensing won't help you.

No, you're trying to build a bridge not just where there's no water, but in the middle of the Gobi desert. Why not just be up front about it and say you want to eek some more money in a scheme that adds absolutely no value to the experience of getting a gumball out of a machine? At least then I could have some respect for you idiots.

You must be proud, Dover. You must be so proud.

This panel makes me very happy.

This is interesting. So Headspace2, the badass plugin that I'm using over on Needcoffee currently, has a Frame Breaker built into it.

WTF is a Frame Breaker?

Well, you know how when you search in Google Images, you get presented the site below a Google frame up top? The Frame Breaker breaks you out of that frame, natch, so you get served the site without the Google flavoring up top.

I always did wonder about that, so I flicked it on. That was around the 22nd or 23rd of October.

I decided to come back and check to see how it had affected my traffic on Google Images.

Now, let me state this up front. My understanding is that Google Images doesn't update very often. And I also understand that for the majority of my images, I haven't SEO'd them up worth a good goddamn because at the time I was putting them up, I had no idea why I should. (Of course, people still seem to find me and force me to do shit like this.)

So I don't have a great deal of traffic coming in anyway. But let's look.

Google Images spiked the day I turned it on, then went to a reasonable trickle.

As for Google Images.ca? I went from a trickle…to nothing.

Google Images.uk? From an erratic mess to…nothing.

And pretty much on down the line.

Did it do anything to my regular Google results? No. No discernable change.

In fact, if I just do "images" and pull that chart up, I spike, and then crater.

Fascinating. Now. One of two things is happening.

1. Either Google Images doesn't like the frame break and has something built in which makes me show up lower in the results because of it. Or…

2. Google Images needs the frame to show up as Google Images in my Analytics.

I don't know which. If I had a huge amount of Google Images traffic, I would be able to see if my Google hits went up an equivalent amount, so maybe Images traffic was being counted as regular traffic. Just a theory.

Or, if I had Analytics installed on my Version 3 archival part of the site, which has no Frame Breaker, I could see if it suffered, yes or no.

I've heard rumors that breaking the frame caused Google Images to not speak to you anymore, but never really saw that substantiated. And trying to Google terms like "frame breaker google images penalty" and the like didn't really get me anywhere.

Either way, I'm taking off the Frame Breaker. I'll see if it changes anything and if so, how quickly. And hopefully, I'll get Google Images out here to reindex my site with the SEO'd bits I do have.

If anybody has their own experience, I'd love to hear it.

ScottC sent me this:

On Halloween night I was attacked by zombies. Funny thing is, I think I recognized one of them.

"Hey, aren't you Ben Franklin?"

Go read the whole thing. Well played.

And everyone else had left the world, and I was all alone.
No one thought to write a note, though I looked.
No explanation, nothing written on anyone's calendar.
The day was not circled, saying "This is it!"

You were all just gone.
The first two weeks I just sat and waited for an explanation.
I tried to make sense of why the power grid didn't fail.
Of why the phones all still worked (though no one answered).
Of who thought to take all the animals too.
(Good thing–I wouldn't have been able to feed them all.)

Then for the next week I fancied that the entire world had
secretly been devoutly religious and I was the only atheist.
The rapture had happened. And if I had known Richard Dawkins'
number, I would have called to see if he was doing what I was doing:
eating yogurt from the fridge before the expry date passed.

Then the worst of it was gone, and I spent several months
finally reading all the books, and watching all the movies
I had never had a chance to read or watch before.
I went to the drugstore and stole cheap reading glasses
and played Burgess Meredith on the steps of the library
over and over again, thinking the joke would stop being
funny. It never did.

I kept myself busy. For a solid week I provided chalk outlines
for where I thought the people would have fallen, had they fallen.
It seemed like a charitable thing to do. A graffiti art project
for an audience of one.

I went and lived in abandoned houses and pretended I
belonged there. I tried to go through people's CD libraries
and divine what they must have been like, before they left.

It's going to be fine. I've stopped incessantly checking my voicemail,
to see if anyone called. I've stopped going online to see if
anyone had come on. I am still blogging, though. It sounds
mad, but it really does make sense. If it weren't for that,
how would I remember all the adventures I've had as the
last man on earth.

The last man on earth.

There's not even any vampires here to harass me and be
harassed in return. I'd even take the pasty-faced monks.
I'd accept you, Anthony Zerbe. It's okay, come out and
try and kill me. It's all good.

Nothing.

I'll be moving south before it gets cold. Just in case the grid
does go. Just in case. Maybe there's somebody else
in some other city, thinking these same things. Maybe everyone
has been shunted into their own world and everyone wound up alone.

It's strange, you know. I'm not feeling lonely, really. I'm
just honesty curious as to where you all went. Or if you went
anywhere at all.

If I could talk to someone and find out what
happened, then that would be all right.

And that someone would be free to go.