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If you're one of my three readers, and you've been paying attention, the Weekly Wes Whine has not happened. I'm sorry to say that, due to a severe cash flow problem, and the fact that I am not compensated sufficiently for my efforts here, the Weekly Wes Whine will be on hiatus indefinitely. In its place we will have a brand new feature, the Weekly Run Off Corporate Sponsor. This week Run Off is brought to you by the American Gruel Association -- Don't settle for some! Say, "Please, Sir, may I have some more?"

I'm The Ninja King of Lapland

I'm late with the Weekly Wes Whine. It's just as well, because this morning I got an email newsletter from my favorite goat, MySpace, telling me, among other things, all about

"MySpaceTV branded channels

As part of MySpaceTV's beta launch, a number of exciting video channels are now on MySpaceTV including your favorite sitcoms condensed to 'minisodes', Lonelygirl15, animation from Animation Show, lifestyle programming from RipeTV, KushTV, LXTV and Young Hollywood and a whole lot more. Go to MySpaceTV.com and check out our featured channels section."

Oh boy! Minisodes! Of my favorite sit-coms! Sit-coms are my third favorite genre of television entertainment, after fake news and comedic talk shows! I could hardly wait! With a trembling index finger, being careful to keep my drool from falling on the keyboard, I clicked my mouse upon the tantalizing link.

What sit-coms? Where? Which are the branded channels? I do a search among channels of branded and I get all the videos that have the word "branded" among their tags. I do a video search of "sit-com" I get, OK good, one fraction of one episode of Red Dwarf, and then Hangin' With Mr. Christ, Jesus's First Party? It's from a video podcast!

This is what you get. Fan rips of individual shows, plus episodes of video podcasts. You can look for a specific sit-com you want to watch but you won't find it posted by the brander. It's posted by the ripper. That means uneven quality and you're a party to copyright violations.

To me, branded channels means official internet distribution of the shows by the people who own them. I get quality and full range of episodes, and in return, I would expect, to have to fast-forward through the commercials, just like I have to do when I tape them off the cable box.

To MySpace, branded means anything that calls itself branded.

This business of "everybody can be what they self-identify as" is getting way out of hand.

Piddling Whine

Weekly Wes Whine

I spent most of the week marking messages to my YouTube account as spam. I was going to whine about it, but YouTube ruined my fun by getting on the ball and blocking spammers faster than I could spot them. I hate it when that happens. If they loved me they would have waited until I vented here first.

I can still whine about MySpace spam. I've already whined about the sheer volume of it. So today I will whine about my New Friend Request of August 23 from 25 year old Chinese Aries single female Belle. Here's what she says about herself on her page, along with a modest photo.

"Belle's Blurbs About me:
Ok, let's see... I am kinda a girle girl. I like to go shopping, talk gossip with other girls, hang out at the clubs, and things like that. Sometimes when I feel calm and relaxed I like to read and watch TV. TV is kinda boring these days because everything seems to be about "reality"... It's cool and all, but c'mon... Everybody is trying to do it. Movies are always fun! I really really like Comedies and Action movies. You can sit back and laugh your butt off or you can stay at the edge of your seat and be in suspense. Well, there is probably a lot more about me that I have not listed here. Ok, well see ya! Click Here For My Sexy HOT Pics!"

I've deleted the link attached to the final sentence. The link went to a well-known adult personals site. It's a company so brazen they have been known to present a page of thumbnails of beautiful women, names under each, with a sentence beneath it all in fine print to the effect that the pictures do not represent actual users, they are for "illustrative purposes only!"

At right, for illustrative purposes only, is a snapshot of me last night, preparing to enjoy a tasty treat.

Click on the picture to find out where you can get more goodies like that one!

Slow Boats

Weekly Wes Whine

So the last time I looked at MySpace there was a sign-off link on every page. Had I hallucinated their absence?

Hallucinating the absence of things is a genuine form of hallucination. It is far more common, in fact, than the kinds of hallucinations that you read about in novels. Long before a crazy person develops the ability to hallucinate a flying elephant, he will practice on less difficult tricks, like hallucinating that his wife isn't yelling at him, or that he isn't losing a war. It's easier to hallucinate that something isn't there, because not seeing a thing takes less imagination than seeing a non-thing.

I know all of that from vivid first-hand experience, garnered during my Funny-Peculiar Years, also known as What Years? So I wouldn't be surprised if the sign-off links were there all along.

OK. Let's try to gripe about something real this week. I'll give MySpace a rest, and gripe about Wikimedia Commons instead.

Before I do, I want to say that I really really love Wikimedia Commons, and my gripe will be a kind of love-slap. Wikimedia Commons has single-handedly made my blogs and countless other blogs easier on the eyes, by providing us with media that us little people can use for illustrations without having to constantly seek permissions. This is a boon to humanity.

My gripe concerns the search process. You go to search for a picture and you have two ways to peruse the hits. Let's say you decide to do a search on something there's too much of, like "painting". Now you have pages and pages of hits. How do you pick one that you want to use? You have to see them!

That's what thumbnails are for. That's why Google Image Search and every other image search-engine provides thumbnails.

Does Wikimedia provide thumbnails? If you make a separate request for them! You have to click on "Find media with Mayflower" and Mayflower, the slow boat to the new world takes weeks to land you 400 miles from where you wanted to be. And you stay! Because you don't want to go through that again!

What kind of images do most people want? They want the most relevant ones! That's what "relevant" means! So why is the default to waste all my time to give me the "most recent" images first? So if some fool just yesterday uploaded 20 expressionistic paintings of his right big toe, that's all I get on page one?

And, while we're at it, why is Mayflower piloted by an administrator named tangotango, not to be confused with the Polish user of the same handle?

This has been a love-slap at Wikimedia Commons, Mayflower, and phonetic alphabet spellings, by Whiskey-Echo-Sierra Bravo-Romeo-Oscar-Whiskey-November-India-November-Golf

No Exit at MySpace

The Weekly Wes Whine

I'm two days late with the Weekly Wes Whine. I'd have posted something before but I was busy trying to log off MySpace.

Hey, does anybody out there know how to log off MySpace? Help!

I've tried everything I could think of. I quit the browser. I shut the computer down. I unplugged it an hour. I looked for sign-off links on the site. I looked for sign-off links on my home page. I looked for sign-off links on my dashboard page.

I got desperate. I tried superstition. I hung a dead rat in the doorway. I walked around a post three times counter-clockwise and spit. I hummed Brown Sugar at the back of a bus. I played opera music while watching American Idol videos with the sound off, eating cheese.

Nothing works!

If I could figure out how to log off MySpace I would go there more often. I'm not going somewhere on a computer other than my own if I can't get out.

This has been a whine, about MySpace.

Gamelan Theory

The Weekly Wes Whine

This week I continue to whine about MySpace.

Regular visitors to this blog know that I like the music and the music videos. I am especially fond of out-of-the-way world music. I noticed that the only easy way to put music on my MySpace site was to get it from MySpace itself.

OK. First of all, would it hurt the management at MySpace to make the list of all genres immediately accessible when you are ready to search for music? Is it necessary for these puppy-killers to put the full list into a box you access only after making an initial inquiry? Or does the sadistic rush derived from knowing that we all have to make that extra step essential to maintaining their proper sado-masochistic balance?

Secondly, let's glance at the list, shall we?


WHAT THE HELL?

I admit, sometimes I'm looking for Balinese gamelan music, and I'm so picky I'm not prepared to settle for Javanese gamelan. Especially Northern Javanese. But I'm not so crazy as to expect to see a genre of Balinese-but-not-Javanese-gamelan on MySpace music.

And I don't! Instead, we get Screamo? Shoegaze? Acousmatic-slash-Tape music? Two categories of trance, both called trance?

Melodramatic popular song? That's gotta be a joke. That and hyphy. Resurrection of HiFi?

And through it all, nothing that fully takes in world music. Oh sure, Latin, african, afro, Chinese, J(apanese), K(orean), German, if you like pop. But no place to put the gamelan.

MySpace hates me, and they hate my music.

WWW Gets New Meaning

New Arc: The Weekly Wes Whine

I don't need no money, fortune, or fame.
I've got all the fake friends one man can claim.
I guess you'd say
What can make me feel this way?
MySpace (MySpace, MySpace)
Talkin' 'bout MySpace (MySpace).

Now that I'm not able to do the Technorati Sucks posts I was doing, I feel a great void in my life that can only be filled by whining about other things. Originally the plan was to do a "MySpace Sucks" arc, but I have decided that I need more. I can no longer limit my whining to one internet service or another, but must be free to roam the web and complain about it all.

I'm calling it the Weekly Wes Whine in imitation of Technorati's annoying Where's The Fire BS: stealing a popular abbreviation for my own use. Like WTF will never mean anything but what THEY say it means, from now on. Right. And, similarly, if I do enough of these posts, you'll one day google www and get this blog. Ha! Sure you will.

All that aside, I'm hot to bitch about MySpace this week. I have so many complaints about MySpace I think I could use the WWW to complain solely about them until the Mayan Calendar gives out in 2012.

I have already alluded to the fake friends. The last couple of weeks I have been actively updating my MySpace account, for the hell of it. To see what would happen. Like poking a stick in a pile of worms. What will the worms do?

Here's what: From getting an average of one New Friend Request every week, I've got up to an average of 5 or 6 per day!

The fun part!: if I do absolutely nothing about the New Friend Requests I get on any given day, by the next day 4 of every 5 requests will show this sort of message:


Then, when I've deleted all those, what I have remaining is a bunch of would-be New Friends who send me pictures like these:


Now, it says right on my MySpace profile I'm a 58 year old man. I'm old enough to be the father of any one of the pictured young ladies. Do you see how some of them are dressed? Especially the one on the left wearing the yellow ball. Outdoors in the snow, getting all flushed in the cold! That is totally inappropriate, young lady.

I swear the one in the blue can't be more than twelve, and the one holding up two fingers is showing way too much of the wrong sort of skin. That's not midriff, that's below-the-midriff. Don't think I'm too old to remember the difference!

The only one that might conceivably be an appropriate online internet buddy for a 58 year old old-fart like me, is Miss No Photo Provided, who for all I know is the online persona of the Seattle Mens Choir. At least we might have something in common.

Here's a little extra something for you readers so you won't feel too teased: