fling93 loves fishies

Comments Disabled

The comment spam problem has gotten drastically worse over the past few weeks (yes, I already have MT-Blacklist installed). Comments will be disabled for now until further notice.

Update

Okay, they’re back on again. One of these days I’ll probably dump the easily-exploited Movable Type for WordPress or something, but for now I’ve implemented a somewhat better throttling mechanism via Phil Ringnalda. The one built-in to Movable Type 2.661 only throttles comments from the same IP address, and intelligent spammers and immature script-kiddies can easily get around that. Now the site will disallow more than one comment every five minutes. I’m not exactly heavily-trafficked, so I figure that should do for now, but apologies for any inconvenience!

I’ve also closed comments on any entries older than one month. I disliked having to do that, as I like to think several of my posts are of a timeless nature (then again, I’m rather prone to delusions of grandeur).

Update 12/4/04

Okay, Geoffrey and Laura have pointed out that the spam problem is just as bad or worse for WordPress. The reason I mentioned WP was that the actual problem wasn’t so much the spam itself, but a spike in server load from having to rebuild the individual archive page after each comment. A system which allows dynamic individual archive pages (using PHP or whatnot) would not require a rebuild. But if there’s no comment-spam protection for WordPress, maybe I should just upgrade to Movable Type 3.0. Well, maybe when Blacklist 2.0 improves enough. Throttling seems to work well enough so far, so I can afford to wait some more.

A Christmas of Being Still

I heard about Buy Nothing Day from Courtney. It’s too late now, but the idea was for everybody to agree to not buy anything on one of the heaviest shopping days of the year, November 26th. Kind of a mini-boycott to protest the consumerism that now dominates the holiday season.

I understand the sentiment behind it, but I have to say that this sort of thing just won’t work from an economic perspective. It’s a pretty similar situation to those calls for boycotts of gasoline on certain days or weeks or from certain gas stations. You just end up shifting some demand from one day to another (or from one station or oil company to another1). The overall level of demand doesn’t change, which means the overall amount of sales and revenues do not change. And so the companies really don’t care.

Indeed, it’s my suspicion that retailers really don’t like the holiday rush that much since it’s harder to project sales for such a high peak and then stock inventories accordingly. Of course, they do like the overall effect of increased demand and buying of stuff. Because seriously, what percentage of the gifts you get are things you really want or use? Yeah, a lot of them end up sitting in an attic or closet unused, or you end up donating them or regifting them to someone else. This essentially means someone got manipulated into paying money for something that nobody wanted (an economist would call this high deadweight losses — via Tyler Cowen). And furthermore, it happens every year. Retailers absolutely love that. And it’s this sort of craziness that inspires anti-consumerism (and I can understand the sentiment, being a big fan of Fight Club and Radiohead’s OK Computer).

But buying stuff is not evil. Indeed, it’s the lifeblood of economic activity. An economy can’t provide jobs unless people are buying stuff to pay for those jobs. But, of course, buying stuff that nobody wants just causes the economy to create more useless things. So I thought I’d provide a few more constructive suggestions.

Review: Closer

Okay, I watched Closer for the same reason I watched Garden State, namely to drool over the hotness that is Natalie Portman. In that respect, Garden State was more enjoyable because it was easy to pretend to be Zach Braff’s character and enjoy watching Natalie fall for you. In this film, everybody is really nasty to each other, so it wasn’t as satisfying on that level. But she still has plenty of screen time, and as a bonus, her character is a stripper! Unfortunately, you don’t really get to see her naked. But hey, just the idea is still pretty damn cool.

Of course, as a film, Closer is much harder to judge, as it’s pretty different from most other films. It revolves around two couples whose lives intertwine in complex and nasty ways. Jude Law plays Dan, a writer of obituaries who hooks up with Alice (Natalie Portman) in a typical “meet cute” fashion. But the rest of the film is far from typical, and I do have to give director, Mike Nichols (Angels in America, The Graduate, and Primary Colors, among many others), and writer, Patrick Marber, some credit for taking chances. For one, there are essentially only four characters, and none of them are particularly sympathetic, except perhaps Alice (although I might be a bit biased there). Secondly, it abruptly shifts in time from scene to scene, which is jarring. For example, when we next see them, Dan has written a novel about Alice and is having his book jacket photograph taken by Anna (Julia Roberts), to whom he is instantly attracted to.

My Really Snarky Comment

There were a couple of reasons why blogging was so light the past couple of weeks. One of which was health related, which I won’t get into here (perhaps later on my LiveJournal account), beyond to say that everything’s okay now. The other reason being that I’ve been pretty active commenting on other blogs. I don’t get a whole lot of commenters here, and sometimes I have the itch for some more interaction. Or maybe I’m sometimes itching for a fight, who knows?

Anyway, I generally don’t get too snarky (in both comments and this blog), but I’d like to highlight one notable exception. The discussion revolved around Rumsfeld, troop levels, and how to pay for more troops. But the reason I’m reposting it here is cuz I got in a real zinger (and, of course, being a blogger, I have a really high opinion of myself and want everybody else to share that opinion).