If you were to compare and contrast the artistic style of this week’s offering with that of last week, you might notice a slight difference. Ah well.
A subject matter close to everyone’s heart. In my case, that means that it often causes my wife to stab me in the chest with sharp implements.
As is the case with every site that’s been up for more than five minutes, the spammer’s scripts are starting to find me. I have no desire to turn comments off, nor do I want to have to waste time sifting through email notifications trying to seperate real comments from spam.
Captchas are annoying, but I think they’re the only workable solution that anyone’s managed to come up with. However, there’s an ingenious implementation that does the job while simultaneously assisting various book scanning projects. The system provides two words to input, one being the actual captcha, and the other a word taken from a list of words that an OCR scanner failed to recognise. Promotes literacy, stops spam. And hey, this is a quasi-literary site, so it even fits the theme. Of course, you may consider the entire site to be spam, in which case no captcha system will help you.
Full explanations and details here, highly recommended.
It’s occurred to me, poking through the date-stamped muck that constitutes apache’s access logs, that loads* of people appear to be accessing the main page, but very few seem to be clicking through the previous postings to have a look at earlier work. The way I see it, there are two possible explanations for this.
1) Most people, after getting their first taste of Iambits’ unique flavour of poetic pointlessless, are completely underwhelmed, have no interest in perusing further readings, and write a strongly worded posting on the referring page telling them to remove the link to Iambits or face trolling wrath.
2) Some (I won’t say most) people might have an interest in poking around further, but it’s not clear to them that there are back and forward buttons that move them through Iambits postings separately from the main blog portion.
There isn’t much I can do about number one, other than continue to refine the art as best I can and hope to one day gain an appreciative^ audience. As for the second point, I’m not sure. I will poke around a little bit on the site to try and draw more attention to the navigation controls and see if that changes anything.
Would some kind person care to comment on whether the navigation controls were obvious to him or herself? Whenever you can, no hurry. Thanks to this funky theme, (excellent for similar purposes, BTW, and available at http://mindfaucet.com/comicpress/) this question will remain on the main page independent of Iambits updates.
*(In Iambits terms, 1 ‘load’ is roughly equal to a group of 3 people, usually composed of about 66.6% family members)
^(In Iambits terms, “Appreciative” means “Doesn’t actively threaten my family”)
It’s been what, two weeks and already I’m making a post to my imaginary audience about the recent lack of updates. I’m not going to go into too much detail about the factors leading to this lapse, but please believe me when I say it was justified.
Given the asymptotically small readership, I’m going to play a bit fast and loose with backdating a couple of postings, to make it appear to all posterity that all is normal here. Please innocently look the other way while this happens.
Given the fact that my current readership is still hovering around the zero mark (give or take,) and I’ve got a bit of a backlog of these things starting to pile up, I don’t see the harm in upping the freqency of postings for the time being. I think I’m going to be a little sporadic for the time being with the timing of these things, with a minimum posting rate of one a week.
A new branch of mathematics would be required to quantify the amount of pointless muck clogging up the Intertubes these days. In order to come up with some sort of metric, you’d have to start by multiplying each and every conceivable idea/interest/fettish by however many thousands of sites are already dedicated to exploring each subject’s pungent nooks and crannies. Now take this number, (which should already be causing overflow problems in all but the most advanced calculating software packages backed up by a clusters of appropriate hardware,) and raise it to the power of the number of awkward and improbable sexual positions you can juxtapose with each subject, and we’re getting to a point in the calculation which can still only be optimistically described as ‘not even close.’
Thus, I humbly introduce Iambits, the latest floater to lodge itself in the U-bends of the Intertubes.
The name itself is a hastily derived combination of ‘Iambic,’ (with its precise meaning in the fast-paced world of poetic meter,) and ‘bits’ (as in eighth of a byte.) It was not intended to convey any deep meaning, and actually represents the least lame-sounding and mildly relevant name I could come up with while racking my brains at the ‘enter a domain name’ field of the hosting registration. However, by happy accident, I found that when typed it just so happens to spell out the assertion ‘I am bits,’ which could be construed, by people who construe such things, as some sort of a purposeful existential statement to be applied to our times. However, this kind of nonsense is better suited to college students and French philosophers, so pronounce the name however you like.
I’m also going to use the word Iambit as a noun to describe the product of this … er … art form, (if you’ll forgive the liberal application of the term). The … oeuvres … I intend to put up are web-comic like, (and indeed will be presented, archived and indexed as such,) but are actually poems embedded into images in an attempt to make them a little more interesting. The, overall theme (or motif for the expensively educated,) is whatever I happen to think about, which more often than not involves extraordinarily mass-market-unfriendly geek-type matters. The first few opuses I have prepared will address the burning topics of Nigerian Spammers, the Commodore 64, Slashdot In-Jokes, and AGI Sierra games, to give you a general flavour of the intended content.
This is not meant to represent a new and revolutionary poetic movement, merely the only form of creative work which my limited artistic talents will allow me to produce on a somewhat regular basis. I can’t currently offer you rich visuals, loveable characters, or Penny-Arcade style wit and relevancy. But if it’s a sonnet you want, then by Jove, a sonnet you will get, with a choice of Shakespearean, Spenserian, or Petrarchan. Or perhaps you might come here in search of a newly formed Villanelle? Well, I’ve got your number right here.
Apologies for the completely default look and feel of everything on the site thus far, but having a few oeuvres ready for presentation, I thought it was important to get something up quickly to keep me going. This is a new thing for me, and I promise the look and feel with develop over time. At present, I will endeavor to introduce a new poem at the rate of one a week. I realise this is very infrequent, but given the current demands on my time, this schedule is as un-infrequent as I can possibly make it at the moment. Given the likely readership, I somehow doubt entire nations will find themselves facing civil disobedience should I not post more frequently.
Thus, to the four of you out there who’ve really noticed the absence of geek flavoured poerty, welcome home.
The rest of you please try to temper your mockery.