So anyway…

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We went out to the National Gallery yesterday to see the Caravaggio exhibit. It wasn’t just Caravaggio, though, but also other artists who were his contemporaries, and some artists whose work shows clear Caravaggio influences.

In case you’re not aware, Caravaggio is one of those artists whose work totally and completely changed the way people make art. His use of light and dark was revolutionary, and it can still be seen in a lot of modern media like art photography and cinematography.

Anyway, I confess that I’m not all that much of a fan of Caravaggio’s work, specifically, although I do recognize his tremendous influence (I studied art, you can’t really miss it, heh).

One work of his that just blew me away, though, is a picture of fruit. Yes, really. I saw it from across the room and got a little closer and started to giggle and just kept on giggling. Talk about sexual innuendo. I’ll never think of plums the same way again. Of course, it’s just a picture of fruit, right? (And yes, Caravaggio was certainly a bit of a perv, and he drank too much, brawled a lot, slept with most anything that would hold still, and carried on horribly a lot of the time). I actually bought a print of the fruit painting, although the print doesn’t really do justice to the original. Something about the brush strokes, maybe… (There’s a digital version of the fruit picture if you want to take a look, but as I said, it really doesn’t do the original justice, and a lot of the very clear sensual element is lost or difficult to discern.)

I also got to see one of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith paintings. I knew a fair bit about Artemisia and her work, but seeing the painting for real was amazing. It was pretty intense, lots of gore, wow.

I also saw several other famous (or not so famous) paintings that I knew from studying them. It was wonderful. One of my life goals is to see with my own eyes the great works of art and architecture that I’ve read about and admired from studying them (or hearing about them on one of the art history documentaries I like so much).

It was good. Really good.

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Well, this month it’s ten years since I first put up a graphical homepage (I had a text-only one earlier in 1993, though). Some parts of that site are still visible in my personal pages, including the anthropomorphic unicorn, although she’s been digitally repainted several times (at one point, she was an animated .gif and she winked!). Some of the content in those pages goes back that far, as well, but not much of it. Just bits and pieces.
My unicorn pages were originally part of my personal homepage, as well, so they’re about ten years now, too.
Anyway, my first homepage was designed for Netscape1.1, and I used Paint Shop Pro (I believe it was version 3, but don’t hold me to that; it ran in Win3.x, at any rate) to make the original graphics, although not all were original. At that time, there weren’t actually that many pages on the net at all and I was very well known in a particularly well-read Usenet group, so I got a fair bit of traffic to those pages. I was even in the local newspaper in 1993 because I had any homepage at all, that’s how unusual it was at the time.
I’m still using Netscape, for what it’s worth. I did switch to Internet Exploiter for a few years because NS really dropped the ball after version 4.x, but I came back to NS when version 7 came out and it’s my primary browser of choice (I only use IE for testing and downloading Windows updates).
And I still use PSP, although not that often any more. It’s got some really good features, which is why I keep upgrading it, but I switched to Photoshop sometime in 1998 or so (maybe it was 1999) and I haven’t looked back.
Today I was pondering the line of bull that I was fed about how I was “addicted” to the internet. Well, I’ll admit that for a while I was using the net addictively to escape some of the crap that was going on in my non-virtual life, no argument there, but the fact is, hardcore net-heads like me are part of a sub-culture, and that’s all there is to that. I’m part of that culture. It’s no worse than any other sub-culture. It has its good points and its bad. It’s just part of who I am. I don’t think that bikers are “addicted” to their bikes (and leather, mmm) or that surfers are “addicted” to the beach or that any other sub-culture are “addicted” to their particular culture. They may well be very into it, sure, but that’s not an addiction. It’s a lifestyle choice.
So, there you go. Ramblings from a ten-year veteran of the internet. Does it mean anything? Probably not. Doesn’t have to, though. This is my blog and I can blather on endlessly in it and waste as much bandwidth as I darn well please. After all, I’ve been wasting bandwidth for ten years, why stop now?

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A man who sent 850 million junk e-mails through accounts he opened with stolen identities was sentenced to up to seven years in prison Thursday.
Atlanta-based Internet service provider Earthlink Inc. said it hoped the sentence and an earlier $16.4 million civil judgment against Howard Carmack will deter other spammers.

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Ugly Zoo is a lot of fun, and has some really clever Photoshopping. Warning: page is graphics intensive and slow to load, but be patient. It’s pretty cool.

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I’m 40 years old today. I’m not bothered by it. I’ve been kind of looking forward to it, actually. My teens were spent in a state of perpetual and frantic dysfunction, my twenties were spent in a state of oblivion and foolishness, my thirties were spent in a state of metamorphosis and change, much of it painful. I’m hoping that my forties will be when I finally get to start really, truly BEING the person I’ve become.

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The spam was entitiled, “Stop these annoyying messages here”. Naturally, it was in my spam filter (and NOT in my inbox).

But I was so intrigued I had a look at the contents:

Hi Candy,
If you received this email then whatever s.p.a.m filter your using is not working properly.
If your one of those people that are sick and tired of sifting through your in.box looking for the “good” emails
then we have the product for you. Your time is valuable, so having your inbox flooded with junk messages is not only annoying, but also costly.
The answer to all your problems is here…
[url deleted because there's NO WAY I'm giving them a free link!]

First of all, I’m not Candy (although if you are what you eat, I might feasibly be chocolate, but I’m more likely to be iced vanilla latté).

Secondly, my spam filter was working perfectly, thanks.

Thirdly, although generally speaking I think spammers are the absolute scum of the internet, at least this one (or whomever came up with this spam campaign) was somewhat clever and a little bit funny.

It’s better than asking me if my penis is big enough, anyway.

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Just got this spam message in my spam can:

learn how to dialate! wichita

Uhm…. Does Wicheta actually need dialation? If so, why?

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A German couple who went to a fertility clinic after eight years of marriage have found out why they are still childless – they weren’t having sex.

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TIM: There he is!
ARTHUR: Where?
TIM: There!
ARTHUR: What, behind the rabbit?
TIM: It is the rabbit.
ARTHUR: You silly sod!
TIM: What?
ARTHUR: You got us all worked up!
TIM: Well, that’s no ordinary rabbit!
ARTHUR: Ohh.
TIM: That’s the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on!
ROBIN: You tit! I soiled my armour I was so scared!
TIM: Look, that rabbit’s got a vicious streak a mile wide! It’s a killer!
GALAHAD: Get stuffed!
TIM: He’ll do you up a treat, mate.
GALAHAD: Oh, yeah?
ROBIN: You mangy Scots git!
TIM: I’m warning you!
ROBIN: What’s he do, nibble your bum?
TIM: He’s got huge, sharp– eh– he can leap about– look at the bones!
ARTHUR: Go on, Bors. Chop his head off!
BORS: Right! Silly little bleeder. One rabbit stew comin’ right up!
TIM: Look!
[rabbit leaps at Bors and rips his throat out gruesomely]
BORS: Aaaugh!

Wild hare attacks man

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