Years ago, Walter Russell Mead wrote an article about Jacksonianism for a magazine called "The National Interest". I put a copy of that article, complete with original formatting, on my server.
A few days ago Mead wrote an article called "Obama and the Jacksonian Zionists" and wanted to link to his own original article. But he couldn't; TNI has deleted it. (Or put it behind a pay wall. I'm not sure about that.) But Mead found his article on my server, and linked to it instead.
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Heh... somewhat amusing turn of events. Gotta love the Internet.
I used to try to read Mead's "4 archetypes" articles once a year or so, but I don't think I'd looked them up in the last couple of years... too depressing, of late.
I'll readily confess to being a hardcore Jacksonian. Curiously enough, I despise the name Mead has given us, because I personally believe that Jackson violated the honor attributed to Jacksonians with the Trail of Tears. Here you had a people who were willing to adopt Jacksonian rules and honor whole cloth within a generation, and they were treated dishonorably for it. In addition, in rebuking the Supreme Court over the matter, he violated his Oath of Office, a mortal offense to a Jacksonian.
Posted by: BigD at March 19, 2010 12:18 AM (LjWr8)
Oh, rats. I forgot that I'm using the same top rotation image in the pages I'm hosting on my own server, such as the reviews. The formatting isn't being blown up, but the images are being shrunk and the aspect ratio is wrong. I have to fix that. (grumble; I feel lazy today, and anyway I have to go to the store again for groceries before the weather gets nasty.)
I am now going to change the top rotation. The new format is 500*330 instead of 440*330, and that means I have to make some CSS changes. Until I get it all fixed up, the site will probably look strange.
UPDATE: OK, fixed. A nice (but unintended) side effect of this change is that the right edge of the top rotation picture now aligns with the vertical line separating the main section from the side bar.
UPDATE: I hope you folks don't mind: there are 41 pictures of Guchuko in the new rotation. Most of the frames I grabbed from Potemayo were either of her or of Kyo.
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I like it. But can I suggest a short horizontal line centered under "Why suggestions are unwelcome" (oh, the irony...) even with the bottom of the picture? It would visually complete what now looks like a deliberate header block.
Trim pass complete. I ended up tossing Prism Ark, and Kaze no Stigma, and a couple of others because there weren't very many good pictures, and the ones I did have looked like crap. So here's the current score:
Aika zero
38
Sleeping with Hinako
20
Training with Hinako
15
Ikki Tousen Dragon Destiny
25
Kenichi
31
Macademi Wasshoi
54
Mai Otome Zwei
26
StrikerS
67
Potemayo
65
To Aru Kagaku no Railgun
21
Realbout High School
56
Rosario to Vampire
51
Saki
55
Shrine of the Morning Mists
20
Strike Witches
79
Yoku Wakaru Gendai Mahou
42
Total: 665. Which translates to 27 days and 17 hours. Which is just right. I try to come up with a total such that it phase shifts about 8 hours on every cycle.
However, there are a few pictures which I want to use which are borderline. I've got nine of them below the fold, which represent maybe 20 or so total. I solicit opinions: are these OK to use?
UPDATE: Just for the record, it's actually 664. There were two shots from Saki which were virtually identical, so I deleted one of them.
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I have no objections, but I do all my surfing from home, where I do not have to worry about what other people see. (Also, work computers are for work. Surfing is for when I am not on someone else's clock.)
My main concern whenever you switch the rotation is that I've missed something nice in the current and previous rotations. I assume sticking an archive of them on the internet somewhere would not be worth it in terms of time and bandwidth?
Posted by: PatBuckman at March 01, 2010 12:52 PM (agn77)
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IMHO (the standard opening for someone about to be opinionated but not humble), The Macademi & Rosario & (maybe) Saki pics are a bit out of line. Those don't look like "outside clothes". Saki might be OK given the two obvious swimsuits next to the frilly maybe-swimsuit/maybe-undies. The others look like (or are) lingerie.
If "cleavage" in the workplace is a problem, you probably can't have J.-Random-24-hour-news-channel playing at work either, the way some of the anchorwomen are dressed. (And that rule would totally outlaw the Kirameki Project pic at the top of the page right now... she even has a nipple showing through.)
The worst part about the Hinako pictures, in a co-worker-spotting-them situation, is the "Sleeping" with Hinako text on them. "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Posted by: Mikeski at March 01, 2010 03:19 PM (GbSQF)
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Yomiko is a-okay, I think. Macademi and Rosario are a real stretch. Kenichi would be fine if she had something other than a loincloth. The Hinakos are acceptable, except maybe for the floor-level shot. YMMV on that.
The Saki shots are... mm... pedobear approved, let's say, but not overly horrible. I don't mind 'em, but I can see some workplaces having problems. I'd put them on The Pond.
Posted by: Wonderduck at March 01, 2010 03:50 PM (mfPs/)
I've had a couple of people mail me to point out that these pictures are no worse than many I already have in the top rotation. For instance, right now it's this:
And that's just as much cleavage as any of the ones in this post -- with the added advantage that Nene is supposed to be 12 years old.
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Enh, I was going to post a comment about a couple of them, but the truth is, I've been reading GS Mikami at work occasionally, and it throws topless shots at me sometimes. I'm lucky that my monitor is in such a place it can't be seen without entering the cubicle though. And I have had to minimize screens quickly before.... Pushing my luck, I am.
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If you use Firefox at work and you're really worried, right-click the rotation banner and select "Block images from denbeste.nu". Since the host is kind enough to have those on a separate site Firefox will cleanly block just that image (and possible the other images he posts) but leave the bulk of the site alone, no extension required. IE probably has something equivalent but it might take more work.
My workplace is already a generally "not safe for work" environment so I'm not too worried. Spam classification occurs on site, anything may be on their screens at any time. YMMV in difficult-to-predict ways.
Posted by: Jeremy Bowers at March 01, 2010 05:43 PM (QUR0g)
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That would also block all the images which are part of my reviews.
No worries; none of those would stop me from looking at the site from work (I'm a fellow EE; 97% of my cubicle visitors would be male anyway, and a good number of those know I'm an anime geek.) Â I was just considering what might have been defensible at past places of employment.
Posted by: Mikeski at March 02, 2010 12:45 AM (GbSQF)
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You could just do what I do: Write a GreaseMonkey script that forwards previously unseen images to a back-end running Xapian and ImgSeek to perform a 46-dimensional Bayesian similarity search against a historical database of previous images and automatically replace any SFW images with NSFW ones.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 02, 2010 02:55 AM (PiXy!)
BTW, some captions are completely unreadable. For example, the one with Nanoha in other of those goofy dresses and grey letters looks like a licence plate imaged by a Kobalt satellite.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 02, 2010 09:36 AM (/ppBw)
I put the captions onto the images using a batch file with Paint Shop Pro 8.1. The color mode for the text is "invert" over the background. Which works pretty well, unless the background is neutral gray or close to it.
But the idea of manually captioning 650 images doesn't appeal to me.
The last time someone commented about the text being unreadable, I made this to show how the color mode works. The problem with it is when the inverted color and the original color are nearly the same, then the foreground text doesn't really stand out very well -- especially since the JPG compression algorithm tries to erase the edges if they're not very steep.
I kicked in and started sorting and trimming frame grabs for the top rotation last night. Care to see some that didn't make the cut? NSFW below the fold.
Watching my refers, occasionally some ancient article will suddenly get a lot of traffic. Usually when that happens I never find out why. Today, however, that happened and I've lucked into an explanation.
Pravda ran an article denouncing the Vancouver games for discriminating against Russian competitors. You get to the bottom of it and see that it was written by "Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY", and apparently a lot of people are going "(head scratch) that doesn't sound like a Russian name to me. Who the hell is that?"
So they're googling, and turning up this article of mine. Or they're turning up this, which links to mine. (That latter one turns out to be the first google hit for his name.)
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Borderline, but I was actually much more uncomfortable with a scene from Misaki Chronicles you used to have up here. (The one with Misaki on the exam table in her underwear). I'd generally wait for that one to rotate out, then come back, if I were at work.
Posted by: ubu at February 15, 2010 09:22 PM (uDoAi)
There are a lot of pictures of Hinako leaning forward like that and I'm strongly tempted, but they may just be too much for the top rotation. I fear I'm going to have to skip them.
This one is particularly egregious in that she's also right into the camera, which is why I chose it for an example here.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 15, 2010 09:28 PM (+rSRq)
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(That was actually Prim on the table. I know what you mean about that one, but I just liked it too much and figured that one out of 700 I could get away with. Anyway, it'll drop out this time, whenever I get my act together and do it, because this time it'll be a complete replacement.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 15, 2010 09:30 PM (+rSRq)
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It's a bit more H than what you usually put in the rotation. I'd leave it out.
Posted by: atomic_fungus at February 15, 2010 09:37 PM (PN+f2)
5
You're probably right. It's a pity, however; that means about half the grabs I just collected from that disk will have to get tossed.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 15, 2010 10:26 PM (+rSRq)
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...and that's why I added a roof and another wall to my cubicle.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at February 16, 2010 12:06 AM (2XtN5)
Looks like us old fogies (defined in this case as "anyone over 17") are behind the curve again. The BBC says:
A US study has indicated that younger internet users are losing interest in blogging and switching to shorter and more mobile forms of communication.
The number of 12 to 17-year-olds in the US who blog has halved to 14% since 2006, according to a survey for the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
It suggests they prefer making short postings on social networking sites, and going online on mobile phones.
But the study also found a modest rise in blogging by those aged 30 and older.
Thought I'd offer a status update. I have occasionally spent time collecting framegrabs for a big top-rotation update. I'm not ready to do it yet, but I'm making progress.
I've gone through the episodes of Railgun available so far and ended up with 49 grabs, but a lot of those are duplicates. And some of them look good but probably can't be framed in a 4:3 format, what with the series being 16:9. (I've run into that problem many times before. NO SUGGESTIONS PLEASE!)
Last night I went through the first two episodes of Aika Zero and I had a lot of trouble finding decent images. Lots of indecent images, of course, but it was tough coming up with things worth looking at which wouldn't get my readers fired or divorced. So that meant things like this:
And definitely not things like this:
Ye Gods. Shots like the latter are more common in that show. I swear, I think that someone's panties are visible on screen somewhere at least 50% of the time. (I do love Studio Fantasia!)
I also went back through Training with Hinako and managed to come up with maybe 10 grabs from there.
Jinki Extend turned out to be a real disappointment. In the entire 13-ep series I only got about 10 usable ones. Kaze no Stigma was no better; I bet I won't have more than maybe 10 worthwhile grabs out of that whole show.
The second volume of Kenichi, the mightiest disciple was a lot more fruitful. But just how many pictures of Miu will my readers put up with? Macademi Wasshoi was a lot more fruitful; I think there are probably 50 out of that. Not just cheesecake, either. I got several good pictures of Mini-Eneuses. (Aww, they're cute!)
So progress is being made, albeit more slowly than I'd like. (NO SUGGESTIONS PLEASE)
UPDATE: How do you folks feel about this as a new size for top rotation pictures?
The existing size is 440*330 which is 4:3. That new one is 500*330 which is just a tadge larger than 3:2. I realized tonight that since I'd widened the entire page, I could soak up some room by making the top rotation picture wider. 3:2 is a nice compromise between 4:3 (1.333:1) and 16:9 (1.777:1).
It's still possible to display older 4:3 images in the new page layout, but they'd leave a big white section between the picture and the menu in the upper right, so if I go with this I'm probably going to want to replace the rotation completely. Which is a bit of a problem; as of tonight I only have about 300 candidates, and that's not really enough.
Of course, I could use this as an excuse to revisit some older shows and grab new pictures from them.
UPDATE: If I use 500*330, then this is how it would fit in a 4:3 and a 16:9 frame grab:
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 15, 2010 09:18 PM (+rSRq)
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I see, you aren't going to letterbox them, only crop. That sounds good.
As for Miu, I didn't like many caps of misshapen boobs that I saw here.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at January 16, 2010 10:46 AM (/ppBw)
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Yeah, exactly so. If I letterboxed, it would be hideous.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 16, 2010 05:06 PM (+rSRq)
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Unfortunately, many 4:3s are crop-resistant, because the picture is 90+% tall. Sometimes you can work around it by moving the crop frame up and down, but often not even that.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at January 16, 2010 09:12 PM (/ppBw)
I've always had that problem, it's just that it used to be exclusively a problem with 16:9 grabs. I always start with a lot more raw grabs than I expect to be able to use, and after I try to crop them, I toss the ones that look crappy. I'd have to do that more with 4:3's now, but on the flip side I'll be able to save more 16:9's than I used to. I'm hoping that's a win, but if it's a break-even then it's a win anyway because it'll be more pixels up top, and I think it'll look better.
...also, I always do the crops manually.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 16, 2010 09:25 PM (+rSRq)
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I'm viewing your site in Safari via Snow Leopard and all I get for the top rotation is the no bandwidth theft image.
I saw this once before but I'd flubbed the address. I'm looking at http://chizumatic.mee.nu/top_rotation_--_slow_progress
In Firefox via Vista, the image is Magical Girl Lyrical Nanhoa and looks fine.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at January 17, 2010 05:48 PM (NkKu7)
If the referer sent by your browser gets trashed some way, then my server will refuse to send the requested picture. It sends the bandwidth-theft GIF instead.
If you get nothing at all, a timeout, it means my server is down. (That does happen occasionally.) But if you get the bandwidth-theft GIF, it means you reached my server but sent a referer that's not on the short list of acceptable ones.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 17, 2010 06:49 PM (+rSRq)
