All posts tagged ‘Alt Text’

Alt Text: Stupid New Domain Names and What They Really Mean for the Web

What kind of havoc will the new top-level domain names wreak?
Photo: Paul Downey/Flickr

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers announced hundreds of possible new top-level domain names last week, which is great because clearly we need more unqualified successes along the lines of .mobi, .xxx and .travel.

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The wave of new possible new web addresses has nothing to do, ICANN assures us, with pocketing millions of dollars from hopeful registrants. Thus, it looks like we’re going to have to deal with a whole host of D-string TLDs. Here’s a look at some of the domain names applied for, along with my thoughts.

.app
This is the most popular request, with 13 corporations fighting over these three letters like Irish setters with an English muffin. I say we pull a Solomon and divide it into “.a” and “.pp.”

.cool
This could actually be handy. Just as .xxx theoretically tells us a domain is X-rated, we can rest assured that any domain ending in .cool is in absolutely no way cool.

.baby
I’ll be first in line to register iceice.baby, ineedsomehotstuff.baby, and the classic allthatshewantsisanother.baby.

.bible
This is a wonderful idea. We can make every wholesome, family-friendly, deeply moral site register under .bible and leave the rest of the web to lascivious degeneracy like God intended.

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Alt Text: How to Make Friends With Famous People at Cons

Here's how to make a good impression on semi-famous folks you meet at fan conventions this summer.
Photo: Lore Sjöberg/Wired

Convention season is well and truly upon us, and hundreds of thousands of geekfolk are even now descending upon convention centers, hotels and the occasional high school auditorium for the usual sports of the season: buying crap they don’t need, previewing movies they won’t like, and, best of all, meeting people who are famous, but not so famous that they can opt out of the convention circuit.

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Being a famous person myself, I have dealt with the approach of a nervous fan who is silently mouthing a memorized opening line designed to convince me of an undying loyalty to me and my work, while at the same time cultivating an air of attractively jaded worldliness. Being not actually famous in any useful sense of the word, I have more often been that nervous fan, meeting such luminaries as the guys who did that weird song where animated floating protosimians sing about the moon.

So I talked to a number of established con-going webcartoonists and asked them how a lowly fan could work toward being The Sort of Cool Person That Would Be Pretty Cool to Have a Drink With, If That’s Cool. Here’s what I learned.

Be Yourself

Many fans treat their golden moment meeting their idol like an audience with the Pope, the Queen or the Queen of Popes and make the mistake of assuming there’s some sort of elaborate etiquette to follow. Others try to seem as sarcastic or cynical as, well, a cartoon character. Neither is as appealing as just being yourself.

“We do not expect you to have a funny line, or repeat our jokes back to us, or dazzle us with something rehearsed.” — Kris Straub, Chainsaw Suit and Starslip

“Don’t feel like you have to make jokes or be sarcastic to win me over.” — Shmorky, The Flash Tub

“A person who is sweet and brief will brighten a crappy convention day while a loudmouth who tries to act cool and make rude jokes will not.” — Jess Fink, Chester 5000 XYV (NSFW)

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Alt Text: In Space, No One Can Hear You Haul

Image: NASA

Last week was a big deal for fans of both space travel and capitalism, as the spacecraft Dragon visited the International Space Station and, like its fantastical namesake, delivered food and computers to astronauts.

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The reason the SpaceX Dragon is big news is not because the unmanned spacecraft is huge or advanced or armed with photon torpedoes. It’s news because it’s a privately built and privately funded vehicle, ushering us into a shining new era in which space travel becomes banal and tedious.

If you read the account of the mission and substitute “Peterbilt” for “Dragon,” “loading dock” for “International Space Station” and “Bakersfield” for “orbit,” you’ll see that once you get over the whole “vacuum of space” thing, it’s the story of a slightly awkward delivery of dry goods to a government warehouse.

This, I should explain, is a good thing. Humanity never advances without reaching for the stars, pulling them from the spheres, looking at them and saying, “Man, these stars suck. Why don’t we get better stars? Pfft.”

So I will be extremely satisfied if, within my lifetime, I can see space travel become completely, irritatingly common. I look forward to hackneyed stand-up comedians making predictable jokes about G-forces and anti-space-sickness pills. I await the formation of a corrupt and inefficient Space Docker’s Union. I anticipate being annoyed by yet another maudlin country-western song about the lonely but honest life of a geosynchronous cargo handler.

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Alt Text: Diary of a Dino-Smuggler

It's not that easy smuggling a long-dead dinosaur out of its country of origin.
Image: Lore Sjöberg

A Tyrannosaurus skeleton recently sold at auction for just over a million dollars, leading to two secondary effects. First, I added “awesome dinosaur skeleton” to my “What I Would I Buy If I Had Just Over a Million Dollars” list. Secondly, Mongolia complained.

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You see, this particular Tyrannosaurus species has only been found in Mongolia, and Mongolia prohibits export of its dead prehistoric lizardlike bird-ancestors, so ipso facto alohomora, this is a black-market tyrant lizard.

Side note: There is some dispute in the scientific community over whether this creature, Tarbosaurus bataar, is actually a cousin species of Tyrannosaurus rex, or if it was, in the words of noted palentologist Erich Falschennamen, “just biting T. rex‘s style.”

Side side note: Detailed studies of its teeth indicate that, rather than biting, Tarbosaurus bataar probably swallowed styles whole.

The point is that the skeleton of whatever sort of huge-headed, tiny-armed carnivore we’re talking about was probably smuggled out of the country. This brings up a lot of questions about political sovereignty and its relationship to scientific research and private ownership.

A lot of boring questions.

Instead, I’m going to answer a much more interesting question: How the hell do you smuggle an entire massive dinosaur skeleton out of a country?

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Alt Text: 5 Horrifying Combo Monsters for Syfy Creature Features

The dreaded Ostrichsaurus Rex would find an unnatural home in a Syfy movie.
Image: Lore Sjöberg

Syfy, the channel that felt “Sci-Fi” was too dignified a word, will premiere the vaguely anticipated original movie Piranhaconda in June. Whatever else Syfy does, it will always been known as the greatest disseminator of portmanteau horror, that extremely specific genre of action thriller in which C-list actors face CG monsters made up of two different, somewhat threatening, animals.

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For instance, we have the classic Dinocroc, which features a combination dinosaur/crocodile. Which doesn’t actually make much sense, as crocodiles were around at the same time as dinosaurs and are basically first cousins. It’s a bit like having a Hamstergerbil. Aside from a medium-length tail, what do you get out of it?

There’s also Dinoshark, which I hope indicates an intent to add “dino” to every apex predator Syfy’s programming wizards can think of. Dinolion! Dinogrizzly! Dinodingo!

Speaking of sharks, there’s Sharktopus, which one would hope combines the teeth and speed of a shark with the grabbing and jar-opening ability of an octopus rather than, say, pairing the little beak of an octopus with the delicious fins of a shark. But I’d have to watch it to find out.

Elswhere on Syfy’s lineup of original movies I see Mammoth, which is probably about a woolly mammoth, but it could be about a cross between a moth and a black mamba, which would be pretty cool, actually. Better than a fuzzy extinct elephant, I’ll tell you that.

At any rate, it’s been nearly two years between Sharktopus and Piranhaconda, which I think you’ll agree is too long, because you’re kind of a pushover. In hopes of inspiring Syfy to create more entries in this genre that I probably won’t watch, I present the following six movie ideas:

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