Secret Cities on the Moon!

U.S. scientists unveil NASA’s secrets about cities on the Moon and microbes on Mars

Posted on: 2007-10-31 10:57:01 AM

He claims to have photos from NASA of ancient moon bases, yet the photos in the book are described in that article as being of poor quality. The ONLY photo shown in the article appears to the heel portion of a footprint.

I'd LOVE to see some photos of these ruins. Anyone got any?

(Holding breath waiting for ancient alien moon base photos.)

On Thongs

Victoria's Secret selling children's play dolls scantily clad in underwear. Sure, you SAY you're buying them for your kid. The problem is, some people actually are

My post:

Thong: Butt floss

I never understood why women wear those things. They seem to be designed to create an ongoing, constant wedgie which can't be comfortable.

What's the appeal?

Posted on: 2007-10-31 10:46:19 AM

Gay Footballers

A third of US high school footballers have gay sex, claims sociologist

My post was:

This was why I was in Theater Guild. While we had just as many gay members as it seems the sports teams did, they were out, so everyone knew where everyone else stood, at least on that playing field.

Of course there was always one or two women who made it a goal to seduce the gay guys. Based on how often it worked, I'm inclined to suspect there were a few guys who were only pretending to be gay in order to easily score with these women. Two guys in particular spring to mind. They always talked about how cute such-and-such guy was, but whenever their actual sex lives came up, it was about the WOMEN they'd tagged.

High school was a messed up time.

Oddly, soon after I posted an earlier comment, the Fark Message threads would only load a dozen or so comments even when the main page claimed there were hundreds in the tread. I've noticed this pattern before. Are the servers just overloaded, or is the user experience for "undesirables" downgraded?

Regardless, the comment was successfully posted at 2007-10-31 10:30:39 AM. We'll see how long it lasts.

Update: It's gone

A Tip of the Hat

Fark has many chestnuts, old jokes that get reused shamelessly, as if by repeating the same gag used 1,000 times before you're magically funny. One of these gags is the "I work for ____ so I'm really getting a kick out of these replies," formula. The "joke" is to pretend to be someone "in the know" on a story. The joke however has gotten to the point where it's posted two or three times in every article.

Every once in a blue moon however, it's actually a little bit funny, and this Fark comment was my attempt at complimenting someone who managed it. The article in question was "How shyness became a mental illness: Scientific breakthrough reveals the importance of drug maker profits in the discovery of new diseases"

I quoted the comment to which I was responding:

friendly fire isn't friendly
"I'm an introvert who also has restless leg syndrome so I'm really getting a kick out of these replies."

Friendly, I think that's the first time that gag has been used and actually been funny.

I tip my hat to you.

The first time I tried to post the comment I got the infamous error message:

FARK.com database is down; try again later. (We spilled beer on the servers again.)

If I were Drew (The owner of Fark.com) and I had as many server problems as the error messages claim I'd fire my administrators, but then I'm used to environments where 99.999% uptime is expected, not a happy accident.

The second time I tried to submit the comment it wen through and posted at 2007-10-31 09:48:35 AM. If the past posts are any indication, it may take up to 24 hours for the mods to delete it.

Deleted: Posts about Fred Phleps

This post only lasted a few hours. When I checked at 8:00 pm the night I'd made the post, the comment was gone.

I made the following post in the thread:
Father of fallen Marine is suing the attention whores at the Westboro Baptist church for protesting his son’s funeral in response to people talking about how they want to counter protest Phelps.

You need to do more research into Phelps if you want to really hurt his movement. Look up and read "Addicted to Hate" to get some background about how he allegedly raised his family. When you go to protest bring signs that address the dark aspects of their past. Don't target Phelps, he's too bitter and hateful to care, target his followers.

For example, Fred Jr. was in love with a young woman in high school whom Fred Phleps drove to suicide. Look up her name, it's in "Addicted to Hate" and make a sign asking Fred Jr. if he remembers her. Include an autopsy photo of the young woman if you can find one.

Don't attack Phelps, go after the reasons his followers stay with him. The most devastating thing you can do to Phelps is to get his congregation to desert him.

Approach them with compassion and try to help his followers leave him. Treat it like trying to get an abused wife to leave a violent husband.

Later in the tread I posted this response to one of the more articulate and thoughtful posters (At least based on the posts of his/hers that I read)

technicolor-misfit,

What about making people see him with pity? What if everyone who walked past him reacted with pity and sorrow for the sad, pathetic man and his broken, beaten followers? What if the words he heard the most were to the effect of "I'll pray for your broken, battered soul."

What if people stopped hating him and just pitied him?

How do you think he'd feel about that?

Deleted: The Dell - Apple Thread

Update: As of 10-26-2007, the post below has been deleted by Fark.com. It lasted about a day.

Ten years after Michael Dell stated that Steve Jobs should just "shut down" Apple and give the money back to their stockholders, Apple's value has now exceeded Dell's

This thread had a troll named tomWright who was bashing Apple left and right. I, and many others replied to him for no good reason. Here was my reply:

<b>tomWright</b>

You seem to be confused as to the difference between Microsoft and Dell.

If Apple were to release OS X for use on generic PCs, they'd be competing with Microsoft. Dell sells hardware and so does Apple. Dell bundles a bunch of mangled, semi-functional software (Dell Wirelss anyone?) with their PCs in an attempt to improve their value to end users. Apple bundles an entire OS to make their PCs more valuable to end users.

The only thing Apple would need to change to be a DIRECT competitor to Dell would be to start selling Macs with Windows pre-installed, but even without that step, Apple and Dell are direct competitors. Both sell PCs capable of running the Windows Operating System, Dell just happens to preinstall it.

Notice that the name tomWright is not in bold. The Fark comment box allows you to insert some tags, but instead of bolding the text, my comment shows up with the raw HTML.

The Tracking Begins

I created my Fark account on 2003-02-04. I enjoyed Fark.com and posted every now and then. I occasionally submitted a story but none of them ever got green lighted. I didn't take this personally as similar stories, generally with catchier titles were green lighted. Green Lighting is Fark's nomenclature for a story being promoted from the glurdge gallery of TotalFark to the front page.

All was well, until one day, I lost the ability to include HTML in my posts. I had no idea why this was, but soon after I got an e-mail accusing me of "Stealing" content and informing me that I was being suspended for a few days.

Shortly after that, I discovered that tall mo posts were being deleted within hours, sometimes minutes of making them. I wasn't trolling or abusing anyone but was merely trying to engage in the conversation.

To this day I have no idea what I did to get on someone's bad side. I tried creating a new account, but that didn't work either. I made the mistake of creating it from the same IP I'd always used to post to Fark. Often when I tried to post I get an error message saying that they "spilled beer on the servers again" or that the server "didn't feel like" recording my comment.

I left Fark, which was probably the intention of whatever sad, pathetic moderator was diligently deleting my posts. I frequented other sites when I had the time, but largely ignored Fark.

On October 25, 2007 I posted to Fark.com again. The post was in the thread "It's all fun and games when you let your 11 year old ride her bike down the hill on the street without a helmet. Then someone gets hurt and it's a $27.5M lawsuit. Fark: because the street had a hill and guideposts" The gist of my comment was that when I was a kid and was injured in a bike accident, my parent's didn't sue anyone.

The comment was deleted in short order.

As a result, I'm starting this Blog. When ever I post to Fark.com, I'll post the same content and a link to the thread here. This is being done with the following goals in mind:

1. To record the content before it's deleted. If I wrote it, I don't feel like seeing it vaporized in the ether.

2. To see if anyone else is having similar experiences.

3. To let people see what the Fark moderators are doing.

4. Finally, I have a small, futile hope that if I expose these shenanigans whoever is runnign around deleting posts for no good reason will be shamed into changing their behavior or removed as a moderator.