The Pig's Lipstick

I fled from the unloved Blogger to Posterous some time ago but now, having been acquired by Twitter, it’s about to close down.

It’s been quite simple, thanks to JustMigrate, to move my “belongings” up here on Tumblr but it’s a great reminder in the impermanence of any Internet service.

As to where to keep important things safe; i.e. photos, it’s a preoccupation. “In a photo album” seems to be the safest option though Flickr is a great product. For now anyway.

I might dedicate this site to the art of Spam.

“The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Festus (sic) must be damned.”

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Hello,

I decided to be communicating with you with my personal email id, for the sake of confidentiality of this transaction,Please consider this mail considering the fact that we have not known each other before.My name is Dr.festus kwofie, an Account Officer to Late TONY ROBERT; an immigrant, who was a businessman and building contractor in Ghana.

I was his personal banker at the bank were i work,as his account officer. On the 21st of April 2010, unfortunately TONY ROBERT lost his life here in Ghana. The deceased has an account that valued huge sum of 10.5 million US Dollars, and I have contacted you to assist in safe guarding the said money left behind by TONY ROBERT in this bank before the bank authority gets it confiscated or declared unserviceable.

Particularly, the bank has issued me a notice to provide Tony Robert’s next of kin or have the account confiscated within a short time and I have been unsuccessful in locating the relatives for over 2 years. Now I seek your consent to present you as Late Tony Robert’s Next of Kin, so that the proceeds of this account can be paid into your designated bank account in your country. I have all necessary information that can! be used to backup any claim we may make. All I require is your honest co-operation to enable us seeing this deal through. I guarantee that this will be executed under a legitimate arrangement that will protect you from any breach of the law. Please get in touch with me by my email and send your telephone numbers to enable us discuss further about this transaction.

I can email by attachment all the documents covering the funds on your interest and request.

Best regards,

Dr.Festus kwofie

I received this today. It’s a beauty. Abimbola is, it turns out, a girls’ name not a boys’ name. But it does mean, according to this site, “born to be wealthy”.

—

A (7 years): “I am literally starving”

N (A’s mother): “Do you know what literally means?”

A: “No. I used it randomly”

N: “Do you know what randomly means?”

A: “No”

 

Thanks to Radio 6 for introducing me to this last night.

More about Red Guitars on Wikipedia.

I’ve been contacted by an agency called More Digital who are offering me money to write a blog post about anything I like, so long as it includes a link one of their clients and it is in keeping with the rest of my blog. Since the blog is about stuff to do with the Internet and so on, the approach itself seems a legitimate topic.

I guess the agency’s plan is to ensure that their client gets lots of authentic-looking in-bound links and thus profits from an SEO perspective.

I’ve looked into it and although there are some doubters (here is some talk about it being a scam), it does seem as though  people are receiving their payments.

Since gaming the relative SEO rankings of Italian poker companies doesn’t hurt anyone I thought I’d do it as an experiment.

If I get the money I will donate it to charity. If I don’t I will update this post as a warning.

Let’s see ..

—

Update: payment received and promptly given away.

Whether or not it’s good practice; it’s not a scam.

Loved this thoughtful book exploring the tension between our ideas of humanity and the kind of technological world we are choosing to rush into.

Here is a link to the book (no I am not getting affiliate fees!): You Are Not a Gadget on Amazon UK.

Here’s the author Jaron Lanier’s homepage.

And here are a few choice cuts:

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“I had an epiphany once that I could stimulate in everyone else. The plausibilty of our human world, the fact that the buildings don’t all fall down and you can eat unpoisoned food that someone grew, is immediate palpable evidence of an ocean of goodwill and good behaviour from almost everyone, living or dead. We are bathed in what can be called love”.

—

“The distinction between first -order expression and derivative expression is lost on true believers in the hive. First-order expression is when someone presents a whole, a work that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic. It is something genuinely new in the world.

Second-order expression is made of fragmentary reactions to first-order expression. A movie like Blade Runner is first-order expression, as was the novel that inspired it, but a mashup in which a scene from the movie is accompanied by the anonymous masher’s favourite song is not in the same league.

I don’t claim I can build a meter to detect precisely where the boundary between first and second order expression lies. I am claiming, however, that the web 2.0 designs spin out gobs of the latter and choke off the former”.

—

“Take a look at one of the big cultural blogs, or the endless stream of mashups that appear on YouTube. It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump.

This is embarrassing. The whole point of connected media technologies was that we were supposed to come up with new, amazing cultural expression. No, more than that - we were supposed to invent better fundamental types of expression: not just movies but interactive virtual worlds; not just games but simulations with moral and aesthetic profundity.”

—

“Freedom is moot if you waste it. If the Internet is really designed to be no more than an ancillary medium, whcih I would view as a profound defeat, then it at least ought to do whatever it can not to bite the hand that feeds it - that is, it shouldn’t starve the commercial media industries.”

—

“So if you get in deep enough, you get trapped. Stop calling yourself a user.

You are being used”.