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Archive for the ‘Bitching’ Category

Fansites are unoriginal, part #1

Posted in Bitching, Websites on 12/11/2007 11:55 pm by Iva

OK so…this is the first part of my rant regarding fansites/unofficial “celebrity” sites. This was not meant to be offensive, I just visited many, many of them for the purpose of writing this, even some about people whom I had to google further to see who they actually were; and I was surprised to see how manifactured they were. I thought the days of the “me/you/www” pattern were over, but nah: now the clichés have extended to other types of websites.

It all started sometime last year when an owner of a female celebrity website (I don’t even remember for whom) asked me to exchange links with Invisible Movement. I asked them in what way does the subject of their website relate to John Frusciante and/or RHCP and they said that they have no idea, but they’re looking for a website with Google PageRank of 4 to affiliate, so they could improve their own PageRank. That was surely amusing, especially now that I have examined the reportedly elite fansites, with 1000+ hits per day and discovered that none of them has a PageRank higher than 4. During that quest, I noticed how many things all those sites had in common. It was creepy. I thought I’d share the results of what appears to be some sort of a study I did.

Let’s analyse a typical fansite from start to finish and debate it a bit. Ready? Here we go!

The first thing you’ll notice upon entering a fansite, is a huge PNG image as its background. In some cases it could be a huge jpg or a flash file; but seriously, the most of them are huge PNGs. Oops, I was wrong, they are BLENDS…those lil’ things thrown together in Photoshop, saved instead of being exported. I saw one with a censored boob, even. Very artistic.

In some cases, people actually pay someone else to do them “a header” or “coding”. Let’s dive into the coding of a fansite and see what we paid for, shall we?

<body bottomMargin=0 topMargin=0>

<table width="640" border="0" bordercolor="#ffffff" bgcolor="#ffffff" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10" align="center">
<tr>
<td style="BORDER-RIGHT: #ffffff 1px solid; BORDER-TOP: #ffffff 1px solid; BORDER-LEFT: #ffffff 1px solid;
BORDER-BOTTOM: #ffffff 1px solid">

<table width="625" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" height="15" align="center">
<tr>
<td class=box1 style="BORDER-RIGHT: #BA251D 1px solid; BORDER-TOP: #BA251D 1px solid; BORDER-LEFT: #BA251D 1px solid;
BORDER-BOTTOM: #BA251D 0px solid">

<table width="400" border="0" cellpadding="1" align="center">
<tr>

<td width="65"><div align="center"><font size="1"

Know how, huh? Inline css, applied right after the element itself, font size of 1 (1 what?) and it’s quite obvious that people don’t even know what they’re doing. Web standards? I’ll have that with fries, thanks. Nested tables? Hello, 1999!

When you’ve recovered from the initial shock containing of a large image and horrible code (shame on you, you looked into a website’s underpants), take a peek at the domain name. It’s usually someonefan.com, miss-someone.com, ultimate-someone.com, someone-firstletterofsomeoneslastname.com, love-someone.com, oh-someone.com, someonenet.com (note the digresy), someoneweb.net …someone-online.com. Of course, there are also .net and .org domains, but you get the idea. If it is a website (duh), why does it need words like online and web? Of course it’s a website and it’s online.

The introduction texts are the same everywhere. It goes like this:

Welcome to domain.com, your newest/biggest/247 online source[1] for mr/mrs/miss Someone. Here you’ll find all the information about Someone, plus latest pics and videos.

If you’re lucky, such text won’t be written in font with bizzare dropshadow, of ridiculously small size, having its name begin with 04b or, why not, all three of those. Also, if you have not seen it scroll upside down and claim enormous amount of visitors as if there’s never been any differences between hit counters and visito counters, you have not seen anything.

Why is it “my” online source? If it’s online for everyone to see, why is it “mine”? Seriously.

Why are they 247 online sources? Do websites close at night, perhaps? The appropriate answer would be Of course they don’t, silly me, we all have to know when Someone went to pee and make a scandal of how they were actually leading lives of normal people. Duh.

1 They can also be “online sources of information” and “ultimate sources”, mind that.

In part two, I will be ranting more. The way I’d started, there might be up to five parts to this series, so look out for it!

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The Last Goal For 2007

Posted in Bitching on 12/10/2007 01:29 pm by Iva

I’m pretty chose to achieving my last goal for 2007: getting everything done. I’ve been a horrible procrasinator this year and I could’ve done it all in a much more timely fashion.

Then I need to schedule a meeting with my best highschool friend. The poor thing is one of the cutest and most generous human beings in the universe (until she starts using her friends as punchbags, that is) and I feel like I’ve been neglecting our re-union for quite a long time now.

I started with emails last week. I got them from around 700 to around 300 and…that sounds promising. Then I’ll look at a fee I didn’t pay when I rode on the bus without a ticket (oops), get the new yearly bus/trolleybus/tram ticket and what I hate the most: pay the first half of my university fee for 2007/2008. Maybe this time I’ll end up going to some classes and passing some exam, who knows?

Not to mention the presents for Christmas (for my foreign and rare local Catholic friends), New Year and Orthodox Christmas (for everyone else), my almost-dead battery in the mobile phone and my beautiful 2005-made 12x optical zoom Canon camera that needs to be fixed.

I need one more one-time freelance job like, now. I think I am one of those weird people who stock up money just to be sure they have some when they are in the situations a lot of it has to be spent for inevitable things. No wonder this site is called squirrelism, come to think of it…

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MySpace, forgive me. YouTube is worse than you!

Posted in Bitching on 12/04/2007 03:03 am by Iva

My YouTube account was suspended today, due to an incredibly bizzare reason. This company owns the rights to lyrics of some bands, including The Rolling Stones, and I had a bunch of videos I have taken at their show here in Beograd up there, people were commenting on them and various fansites wrote me to thank me. It’s a bit insane that YT would terminate my whole account because of that, without even letting me delete the problematic clips by myself and keep the rest of my stuff. Also, it’s not like I had the clips there to profit from them, I had put them up because, well, I wanted people to see how it was at the show, I was extremely lucky to be on a great place and I took some really, really great photos and videos. Also, nobody said cameras were not allowed. The band saw me film, the security saw me film and they didn’t mind at all. Ron Wood smiled to my mom and me when he saw me take a photo of the band on their way to the “stage-B”. It’s not them, it’s the extremely crazy company (which, unfortunately, has an outstandingly beautiful website…how ironic).

I read further on ABKCO and it turned out they completely destroyed The Verve because the violin sample they used in Bittersweet Symphony legally was “too long” and that they even sue teachers who use songs’ lyrics on their lectures. I also read that George Harrison once changed one of his songs’ lines to Beware of ABKCO. So…apparently, if I had a video of people singing a Herman’s Hermits song at some kid’s birthday party, that would be a copyright infringement? How come nobody sued the lyrics sites then? Or owners of fanlistings? This seriously makes no sense.

Then again, if ABKCO are like that and killing people’s love for music and spreading their video material free of charge, what the heck is YouTube doing? They could’ve warned me and deleted the problematic videos, but they sure didn’t have to cancel my account and even ban my default email address. I am not used to being considered some kind of a public enemy, seriously.

It’s not the first time they showed their unprofessionalism, however. Apart from the fact that they let people upload videos that get horribly compressed and screwed up, that’s not the evilest thing they do.

I was not able to send and receive private messages for about three months this year. A couple of friends had the same problem, we submitted a help request, no one ever responded to us.

Back in the days when I was trying to get YT delete something owned by a friend of mine and published on my site, with the site’s logo in it they refused my complainment and said that I had no ways to prove it was ours. In the comments to that video clip, some people were offending me in a horrible manner, I reported that to and guess what? Nothing happened. It’s completely OK to call someone a w**ker and a c**t just because they want their work to be respected. Yeah, right.

YT don’t respond when one reports them nazi sites with videos of beating up people who belong to a different race or a different nation and similar horrible stuff that should not be online. I saw a profile owned by someone from that-place-that-is-and-is-not-my-country with a bunch of videos of Serbs being beaten up and descriptions such as: “That’s what you get when you insult a member of the [insert nation name here].” In a similar situation, MySpace, which I always mock mostly because of poor coding and spelling mistakes, reacted within a couple of hours and even send an apology. They apparently DO have understanding for small people. Also, they don’t suspend accounts on their video site for things like this, they just delete the problematic clips and send warnings and explain why it was deleted.

So, thanks to this, all my friends have been deleted, all my comments are lost, my RHCP, Muse and Buena Vista Social Club are gone; my TV clips from this year’s Eurovision are gone, even my clips of my friend goofing and Gigi are gone.

Then I created a new account and tried to add all the people I could remember from my old friends list. I added eight of them and then, when I tried to add the ninth, I got this message: “You have recently posted several messages. Please wait for some time before posting another.”. I mean…come on? I just want my friends, subscriptions and favourites back! How about taking care of kids who post those OMG LOL dis iz stupid but i hav 2 post it. if u dont report it in 4 mins ur mom will die messages?

Having created that new account, I started reuploading the apparently-safe material to it. Three of my short clips of John Frusciante from Green Fest (which can be downloaded in the oldschool way at this address) “failed” to be uploaded for an unknown reason. Why did I waste my time, then? They have millions of bucks, how come they can’t sort out their bugs?

I think I just have found myself a new least favourite site on the internet. Oh yes, and if certain know-it-alls respond to this in their known sarcastic manner, I shall never speak to them again.

Further reading:
Reasons YouTube sucks, by Angry Aussie
Why YouTube sucks?

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Everything Something.

Posted in Bitching on 10/27/2007 12:34 pm by Iva

Everything Something. EVERYTHING SOMETHING. E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g s-o-m-e-t-h-i-n-g.

Isn’t it the stupidest and most illogical phrase you have ever read? Well, it’s one of the trend catchphrases in my country. I asked people who the heck came up with that and the answers were:

“Well, damn, where do you live? I believe this phrase has been in use since forever. And come to my place, I have to show you everything something!”

“Hahaha, you really hate slang, don’t you? Now I have to leave you, I have everything something to do.”

“You’re absolutely isolated from everything something around yourself!”

“How dare you to get involved with everything something in my life?

I feel sorry for these people. Especially for the fact that they hear someone say something as remarkably stupid and pointless as this and the next day, twenty more people are talking like that. If the person who blurted it out was famous, the number is more likely to be 2000. Sad. Pathetic.

This was my first mockery entry. I hope you liked it. Now I have to think of the everything something to add to my website.

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An update! Happy?

Posted in Babblings, Bitching, Life here, Reviews, Websites on 09/09/2007 01:07 pm by Iva

I hate blogging. If I wasn’t obliged to blog on this website, I’d never blog again. Never. All I want to do is to hide and disappear. Buteveryone wanted me to update. I basically wanted to redesign and reorganise the site a bit before I do anything else, it’s not like anyone is actually visiting this website (or not as much as I’d love them to, anyway) and I don’t like being average in anything, I prefer being either the best or the worst, so I don’t think I felt like updating. Oh yes, and I had 5 different drafts of what I wanted to post here, it’s just that I never managed to turn any of them into an actual post. So, I’ll try to connect ‘em with duct tape and superglue and see if it makes sense. It probably doesn’t, but who cares?

My personality changed over the years *le gasp*
…either that, or I didn’t calculate my results properly on the tests I did after the one Heidi sent me back in 2000, when Tickle was still known as Emode. I thought that, as Travis say in their song Why Does it Always Rain On Me?, I lied when I was seventeen years old. But, apparently that is not true. The first time I solved a personality test, I was an INFJ. Each time after that, from, let’s say, 2001 to 2006, I would have been INFP. Now I’m an INFJ again. And I like that type. I like the J in it, I have to judge everything, I gain pleasure from judging and critique, so I am proud that my personality type is called The Critic.

Fanlistings
New: Elisabeth of Bavaria, empress of Austria, Calítoe and one more to come.
Revamped: Alfred J. Kwak, Beograd, bridges (OK, somewhat revamped), Danube river.

More revamps to come as well.

I owe some people emails on running the fanlistings I lost with them and/or giving them the members list. Sorry, I’m slow and confused. All the time.

I won’t rant about what I think of some certain people on TFL, but I simply wish all the staff members could be like Adrienne. She’s the best ever. A human, for a change.

RHCP world tour is over
…and I’m already missing it as it was wonderful searching for material for Invisible Movement after each show, looking for video and audio of intro and outro jams and whatever song dear John sang on his own. There’s one difference from the previous tour, though. I actually went to some concerts. Three of them, even. Three shows, three front rows, three unforgettable experiences. And the second one was perfect, simply perfect. I should seriously write about it sometime. And go to more shows and score more front rows on the next tour. It’s nice to be able to see John mess with his complicated pile of effect pedals, etc. Oh …there are three more guys in the band? Thanks, I’m always forgetting that.

Squirrelism.net extravaganza
In future, expect rants against women, men, the world, MySpace (that one’s not going to be coated in sacharine, y’know?), fanclubs, things and stuff.

And that’s it, really.

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