~ it isn’t our concern that a 55 year old is looking to pick up 14 year old girls for sex; there are prisons and inmates with a sense of certain duties to take care of that. what is our concern is that someone who works for the department of homeland security is so lacking in the skills to maintain a fraudulent identity online. does the dhs not have classes on altering your images in photoshop, staging camera angles, pulling phony images (of someone more attractive) from home galleries, setting up accounts at hotmail, configuring the switchproxy extension, and, for fuck’s sake, not telling a girl whom you are seducing that you are really 55 years old? how are we supposed to remain safe from the terrorists?

~ has anyone noticed that we have been converting the log archives from 2000 to 2003 from static to dynamic pages? once completed, it will remain as easy to overlook the earlier entries as it is currently.

~ cross post from sisyphean [w]: ‘rest in peace dr. thompson, author of this entry’s opening line.’

when jt [w] told us about this, we first thought, ‘that figures’, as the man made a point of living life off the hook; however, on reflection it is quite surprising to us, and defeating in way, considering his positions with regard to the current political situation in the united states. who knows if this had any bearing at all on thompson’s mental state, but doubtlessly such an interpretation will have its own effect. a man can make his own decisions, but it is sometimes selfishly sad for the rest of us will now miss all the work that might have been.

~ since we had nothing else to do this weekend, we set up wordpress 1.5; the commenting templates reverted to the default layout. rather that spend more time on them or have the three of you who post comments look at something ugly, we have turned off the comment feature until march 3.

~ wordpress 1.5 [w] is available! this marquis bullshit can’t be over soon enough for yet another reason. two weeks until we are feasting on biscuits in ferriday and tater tots in cheyenne.

~ googlebomb: social security

~ our time these days has been duopolized by the marquis project at sisyphean and by postbaroque. not to say that there is a staggering production of work in these other arenas, for most of that time has been invested in the part of the process known as ‘staring vacantly at the wall’ or ‘weeping quietly over drafting board’ or ‘seeking clarity in escape’. no one gives a shit about postbaroque, but one can read more about the marquis project at toastmaster’s grounds [w] and see the project proper at sisyphean [w].

~ for filler, we have stolen from sisyphean the end-of-the-month ritual of posting the search terms that lead newcomers to the angry red planet. whereas queries on perry kulper’s architecture and the crowmaker are of interest to the work.group fans, the visitors here seem to have more prurient and/or angry thoughts:

angry red planet : 7.3 %
the angry red planet : 4.2 %
men porno : 3.6 %
nude muslim : 3.6 %
coy howard : 1.5 %
muslim nude : 1.5 %
comic book reader .cbr .cbz : 1.2 %
fahrenheit 911 bittorrent : 1.2 %
fuck condoleeza : 1.2 %
nude muslims : 0.9 %

continue reading…

~ colin powell has resigned, which should surprise no one. we await the deluge of liberal whining that with powell goes the only moderate voice of reason on bush’s cabinet. we say that this ‘moderate’ prick had the chance to stand up for what he knew to be true and right many times, especially before walking into the united nations and wittingly lying to the whole world about iraq’s weaponry, but he chose to sell out and tow the company line as the obedient soldier he has been trained to be – although, one might consider him to be a sellout since the days when he attempted to cover up the my lai massacre. good riddance; now bring us condi rice’s head (figuratively, of course).

~ our wordpress [w] install is finally getting hit with as much casino and finance spam as movable type. we have instituted a solution that involves the automatic deletion of a comment based upon the appearance of certain words. we will not tell you what they are, so if your comment doesn’t appear, get a thesaurus and try a new combination. combat comment spam [w] may help some of y’all other wordpress users clean up your site.

~ In a further demonstration that the Kerry campaign is keeping its ear to the angry red planet for cues concerning the language and salience of its arguments, we have one of our points, posted on an external website:

“Here’s something [Karen Hughes] said post-debate that bugged me on the bike ride home: I heard her say that Kerry didn’t have any plans, he just had a “litany of complaints”. Wow, it is reassuring to know that the Bushes just consider those of us who don’t have jobs are health care are just a bunch of complainers.”
-ashleyGA, 14 October 2004

We compare this with comments made by Senator Kerry whilst he spoke in Tampa today:

“And what does the President of the United States have to say about these out-of-control health care costs that are killing job creation and hurting middle-class families? In the debate the other night, he called these problems “a litany of complaints.”

There you have it folks. George Bush’s answer to our health care problems is to tell the American people: stop whining.”
-John Kerry, 18 October 2004

we would have taken it to the point of using the term ‘whining’ as well, but we did not think that the vast majority of our readers would have appreciated a Coy Howard/George W Bush double entrendre.

~ we have dropped the service provider for this site in favour of the umbrella which hosts sisyphean, from the ground, and a couple of other great sites. we are not about to publicly damn our old host by name, but if you ever thought ‘damn, the service at the angry red planet is crummy; i wonder why?’, and you are about to move into a new host, feel free to ask us, lest you get caught in the same mess. if you want to join the sisyphean [w] umbrella, and you have reason that would compel the work.group to host you, go ahead and petition them for a site; it would help your case immeasurably if you have ever been hosted by the godless red/born 2 lose house.

~ as mentioned in our testimonial concerning our switch to wordpress, we now offer the latest feature of the angry red planet, a section tentatively titled ‘tour of atlanta’, which will include site visits of important, overlooked, unappreciated, notorious, and misunderstood sites throughout the city. for the sake of irony, our own professed nihilism, or the post-modern qualification of ‘metro-‘, our first site is not in the city proper; it is about 20 miles from atlanta – stone mountain high school.

~ connoisseurs of irony should note that we ended up writing the code and database for the tour ourselves, thereby undermining the very impetus for making the switch to wordpress about which we devoted so much text and fury. the switch will not be totally futile, as we are considering adding a second log – or perhaps an addition to the current edition – for daily photos. for the past few years the daily photos have been incorporated as links from the text, but as the number of daily images has grown into the hundreds, perhaps they would be better appreciated on their own page. in the meantime, any response or feedback concerning the thumbnailing system we have implemented would be welcomed (re: speed, size).

~ the servers hosting the angry red planet and its family of sites are located in orlando, florida, one of the targets of hurricane charley; if you have noticed an inability to reach any of the sites in the past couple of days you now know the cause to which you can attribute this misfortune.

~ while checking out the new system on the mac, we found that the background for the text boxes were missing. it has been like this for at least a month, we presume, though we know we checked at the time we put up the pngs. no one mentioned anything to us; maybe people thought that we intended them to read green text over an orange background, maybe no one has used internet explorer, or maybe no one cared that we were demonstrating our incompetence. are we the ones who are incompetent because mac/ie has native transparent png support but win/ie does not? however, mac/ie does not support background filters that win/ie does! regardless, the only solution we could find to this involved javascript; we found that idea unappealing, so we instead created a 2nd stylesheet just for mac/ie. if you are looking at this in mac/ie, for pete’s sake get safari or firefox [w].

~ it took us awhile to become a part of the fallout from six apart’s licensing change, but we have finally migrated from movable type [w] to wordpress [w]. we should already have been on wordpress, as it is open source, which excites us, and it is more compliant with our preferred browser. but we were hedging our bets to see what movabletype 3.1 might have to offer. however, there is a new feature for the angry red planet which we have been cooking up – a sort of open ended scene report – and we would like to move on it. we thought that it would be best to make the switch in publishing systems before adding a new feature, as opposed to adding the feature first, raising the possibility of having two things to screw up in the inevitable move.

we are aware that most of y’all don’t care about the behind the scenes work, as we rarely talk about the page and we resist any mingling with the blogging community. however, because of the structural changes, some of the content is now inaccessible, and we fell that an explanation is owed. for example, for the time being, the pre-2003 log entries are not linked. some of you may remember our tirades against codeless fucks like kazys and alex lin who were signing up to blogger and greymatter in 2000; as a result of this quest for purity, most of our log entries are tied up in static pages. should we maintain them, as evidence of a scheme designed in the halcyon days passed in los angeles, or try to enter the data into the wordpress system, which would result in a loss of format but would allow searching.

as previously mentioned, we avoid the blogging community, but as we found it was a minor ordeal to migrate the archives to the new system, we reckon we should make an outline of the particular requirements we had to meet, in case they might prove useful to the next group of movabletype dropouts. the tasks themselves were simple, but having to visit several sites for each step proved tedious.

~ someone out there is using our rss feeds to read the angry red planet, so we have added links to the feeds in the right column. we also switched from excerpts to full entries, mainly because it is our preference when viewing news sites to view the entire entry at once, rather than having to look in the browser halfway through the article. if you need an aggregator, we recommend feedreader [w]

~ also find at the bottom of this window a link to a page containing the log archives, sorted by month; the drop down menu has become too long and unwieldy.

~ if you are using firefox [w] , which you already should be, you should add the quick note plug-in [w] if you find yourself copying and pasting in to a text editor or your email client too often.