Isn't this a Hugh Grant movie? YouTube has announced YouPrez; make a platform for your own presidential campaign, film a PSA/commercial for it, and post it on YouTube. Tag it "Youprez" and votes will be cast. I dunno what you get if you win…maybe Puerto Rico? Could be worse; have you ever been to Guam?
Can you tell I'm a writer? Let's test your knowledge of the writer's life.
I come into some money and I 
immediately go to:
A) the grocery store, for some much-needed foodstuffs
B) the bank machine, to pay off my bills
or
C) the bookstore for Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Masterpieces of Murder: The Best True Crime Writing from the Greatest Chroniclers of Murder, and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell for an aggregate of 2104 pages; thence to the liquor store for a bottle of Jackson-Triggs 2004 Proprietor's Grand Reserve Sauvignon Blanc; and thence to a restaurant, albeit one where they ask if that's for here or to go. I'm feeling flush, so, throwing caution to the winds and carpeing diem for everything I'm worth, I ask for extra hot sauce and a beef, rather than vegetarian burrito.
La vie Boheme ain't what it used to be.
To this tiny corner therof, anyway.
Sometimes it's quite a long and winding road to the raincoaster blog, and I thought, as I'm too lazy to think of something more original, that we might just map an idea as it makes its way to a raincoaster post. And, frankly, there's nothing you can do to stop me.
Is there?
So this is the way it happened: raincoaster, feeling somewhat guilty at having taken nearly 35 hours this week off blogging to try a day job (the experiment appears not to have been a success) and sincerely desperate at watching the stats crawl into a well and begin plummeting to Satan's Doorstep, began Standard Operating Procedure 101, trawling the blogroll, looking for ideas to steal which to refer.
BoingBoing…nada. Sometimes they get on their copyright rants and sometimes they get on their cool nerdware rants and sometimes they get on their "Disney's Haunted Mansion is the greatest work of the human imagination in the history of civilization" and this seems to be one of all three of those sometimes. NEXT!
Defamer. Hmmm, the links aren't working. Cannot find server? It's a fucking Gawker Media server, you stupid Internet Explorer window; if Denton ever finds out you don't know where to locate a GAWKER MEDIA SERVER you'll never crunch bits in this blogosphere again.
Gawker is totally down.
PerezHilton is up. Good for him, he's been taking a lot of shit lately from abusive Britney fans.
It's a Definite Maybe is up. So to speak. As am I. So I read Jonathan's blog, and lo if it don't tell me sumpin' about why Gawker Media is down: it's a Russian spammer who has been targeted by the US. In exchange for being penalized, he's basically sent a denial of service attack to all of the customers of the company that turned him in, including Gawker Media and – get this – LiveJournal. So all Typepad, Movable Type, and Livejournal blogs are at risk today. Swell.
There are only two inviolate laws of the intra-web, and none of them involve talking about fight club. These are sacrosanct, immutable and will remain unchanged so long as humans are classed as homo sapiens…
(1) The internet is for porn.
(2) The internet allows people to be assholes. (Alternatively, the internet turns people into assholes, the internet encourages people to be assholes, the internet gives people reasons to be assholes, the internet is operated, used and promulgated solely by assholes.)
File today’s post, sadly, in category two.
According to the Washington Post, a Russian-based botnet owner effectively ended Blue Security Inc.’s brave but ultimately futile bid to give a big middle finger to spammers everywhere…
Those “other Web sites” mentioned in the article include Six Apart and the millions (literally) of blogs and sites it runs through TypePad and LiveJournal. Another, lesser, axiom of the intra-web is “You know someone with an LJ account.” Plenty of the blogs featured in my own links section are powered by TypePad and Movable Type.
The Russian spammer, reportedly going by the name of PharmaMaster, conducted DDoS attacks against Blue Security, several hosting sites and Six Apart (this last one because Blue Security posted information using Six Apart’s services, causing the blog network to be down from six to eight hours) [Wired.com]. If you try to access Blue Security, by the way, you’ll notice it isn’t working. Botnets are scary sons of bitches.
And there you have how this got posted; the Blogicidal spammer is the story that made it to raincoaster.
But
The second of Jonathan's Internet Laws leads me to the next meaty post, which shall require much actual writing on my part and maybe even some thinking, so it could take some time!
I am going to explain to you, the world, and even Polly Toynbee, why the Internet is made up of assholes and why that's okay. And if you don't like it, you can just .
It's lucrative! From Small Town Misfit:
Monday, September 16, 2002
So once again I was off to buy food; don’t know what it is, can’t seem to help it. Even took money from the coffee budget and spent it on food. I think I have a problem, but it’s okay, I can handle it, it’s okay.
So there I was, lined up at Sunrise Market with my yellow tomatoes and red cabbage and orange peppers, all the signs of someone deep into a food dependancy. I can’t help it, but it’s okay.
I’ve never been there when they weren’t closing down; I think just as soon as somebody with a dolly hauls a flat of cauliflower in the front door and stacks it against the banana display another, more stealthy-like guy sneaks a box of summer squash back out the side door and around front again, so the packing up process can go on forever. It’s like grocery shopping in the movie Brazil, only they didn’t shop for groceries right there in the movie, so it’s more like their shopping would have been like, had they visibly shopped, but they all looked suspiciously well-nourished, so they probably snuck it in when we weren’t watching. I think they do the closing ritual to encourage everybody to leave, and if you had some of their customers you’d be tempted to do the same. I enjoyed working with the public because it gave me so many opportunities to meet people to whom I was superior, not an opportunity I pass up lightly; ah, the good old days. Anyway, there I was, lining up, and there they were, closing.
Closing has a way of encouraging people to get the hell into the lineup and out of the store, and the lineup was considerable. Kind of like the receipts here, the lineups go Chinese, Chinese, English, Chinese, English, and so on, but usually there’s no Produce in there, except such as belongs to the English and Chinese; it doesn’t just get in the lineup by itself the way it gets in the till receipts. Sometimes there’s produce in the till receipts that isn’t in the shopping, which is awkward and why you have to watch like a hawk when they ring things in. But the lineup: in the case of this particular lineup it went Chinese, Chinese, Native, English, Chinese, Chinese. Native was right in front of me, so guess which I was. He had a face like the surface of the moon, with the craters that come with crack and speed and a nose squashed flat so the nostrils were facing straight out. He looked about twenty, which is to say he looked about fifty without the drugs. He also had a bunch of bright green broccoli in his hand, and a shopping bag in his other hand; I figured he had just forgotten the broccoli and come back in to get it.
I thought so right up until I saw him edging up to the nearby displays and looking around to make sure he wasn’t being watched; he was, and he sidled back into the line. And then back out, over to the stacks of pickled cherries and hot Russian mustard and Horlicks crackers. 
And look around again, and sidle back into line. Then he gave one last, desperately nonchalant 360, bent down and pretended to fiddle with his shoe while his right hand grabbed a pack of Horlicks crackers and began to stuff them up his pants leg. His pants, however, were too tight. The crackers wouldn’t fit. He began working them back and forth, crumbling off the edges so he would have a nice pack of crumbs for his trouble, but at this point he was committed. Had to see the job through. Then he got an idea and began stuffing them in his sock, and for a few seconds I’m sure it looked to him like he was going to make it,
But for me.
When he bent over to stuff his pants full of imported malty snack crackers, the unintended sideffect was to thrust his own crack into the air and into my range of vision, courtesy of the lowriders he sported. Lovely. If there’s one thing that completely makes my day it is being treated to a 3-D closeup of unwashed, pasty, sagging and corrugated crackhead ass. Like a day without sunshine, I tell you.
So as he was shoplifting the tastiest treats that had ever seen the inside of his pants, I said, loud enough to be heard through most of the front of the store and all three lineups:
Hey, you moron! Don’t stuff those in your pants, or your sock either. Jesus, don’t do that. Hey, get those out of your pants!
He didn’t seem to be paying attention to me, still working away at the poor crackers, so being the shrinking violet I am I reached over and began to tug on his belt loops. The drawbacks of this immediately manifested themselves, as his jeans slipped even lower, but mercifully the impending sartorial apocalypse was averted when he immediately stood up, glaring.
Who you calling a moron? He sounded confused. He looked amazed when he realized how much shorter than him I was. I cleared up his confusion right away.
I’m calling you a moron, moron. You don’t do that right in front of people. Don’t steal. Duh
Wow, the eloquence even now moves me to tears; I’m sure he found it life-changing. At least he threw the poor, brutalized crackers back on the pile, paid for his broccoli in a big hurry and left so quickly he might have slipped through a crack in the floor.
When they came to me both the cashier and the bagger were laughing so hard they could hardly see. They didn’t overcharge me this time and they packed my bags very nicely, not too heavy at all, so I feel very special. But they left the crackers on the pile for sale.
raincoaster 