Last Hope

I've always thought the name of this bar is perfect for a refuge of last resort. The plywood and the dumpster, which is conveniently located in front for easy disposal of those whose last hope expires, lend it a certain something extra and I hope they keep them there even after the construction on the building is completed. :)

Over the past week I started noticing that there were an awful lot of idiots linking back to images in my archives. One guy was using a photo of mine for the background for his webpage. I mean, sure, it's nice to know someone likes my photos, but should I have to become a content provider for random bizarre web pages and blogs to know that? In fact, 2 blogs liked the same photo, a Christmas star, and both of them were in Arabic which I thought was a little curious and idly wondered if they were related somehow and if they had both inherited the same stupid gene. Fark users like my political anti-bush pics and some churchy types on a jesus bulletin board liked a cross from Effingham for their avatars [Hey! Jesus doesn't approve of bandwidth theft in his flock you morons! There is evil in my domain name, too. Maybe the bible needs to be updated for the digital age.].

I first tried the subtle approach by replacing the images with an image of a hot tub full of naked, fat white guys brandishing a shotgun bearing the message, 'image linking verboten'. It would seem that the churchy folk unlinked rather quickly and are probably already leeching their new avatar from some other unsuspecting victim. The picture of the Effingham [F-ingham to the locals. Oh, the irony!] cross was so popular that I think the christians might be either stupid or terribly cheap [or both] when it comes to buying space on the web for their homepages since it seems that so few of them are willing to host a tiny 25kb image on their own site. Instead they prefer to let someone else pay for hosting their content. I wonder if I should write to the Pope and see if I can get in the queue for some kind of divine blessing for hosting this stuff for those whom Jesus hasn't given either clue or cash enough to provide for themselves. Maybe the new mission of the 21st Century is to go online without having to pay for anything!

The most galling offender was a cheeky asshole who liked one of my bitter candy valentine hearts and who, after I moved/replaced it, came looking for it and linked to the moved file instead. So, as a last resort, I've just gone ahead and used mod_rewrite to punt everyone, including google's image search, who try and link to images. I'll make exceptions, but the idiots who inline the background for their homepage from another host that isn't theirs just need a boot to the head and possibly something more gratifyingly visceral. I'm sure that this is very common around the net, but why do people do it so shamelessly and why are there so few sites who seem to know how to punt them and who indulge them? It ranks right up there with spam in terms of stealing bandwidth, rudeness and outright stupidity.

22 Mar 2004 at 23:42, Helsinki