tom moody

It's not Sir Ian McKellen as Magneto as some have suggested but rather Dame Margaret Rutherford playing Agatha Christie's Miss Marple:

Hard up for new material so here are recycled comments I've been making on Paddy Johnson's blog.

On the topic of yet another announcement of "artist-technologist pairings" at a major museum:

When discussing formulaic "XYZ art" on my old blog (for example, at http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/comment/41330/), the topic came up of "artist and technologist teams." In the thread I linked to spd said: "media art is rife with collaborative work (often it’s a cover for one person getting someone else to do technical stuff)" and "while i’m actually a fan of people working together, it seems underacknowledged so far and i wonder if the collaborative process of new media privileges talking a project through over actually doing stuff." And I replied: "I…hadn’t thought about the issue of artist-tech person teams having any effect on content. It kind of makes sense–-they have to talk to each other and some simplified middle ground (and thus middle of the road) art emerges out of that dialogue."

(spd chimed in on the same thread to add some additional thoughts to his 2.5 year old statement.)

In response to Johnson's review of two Omer Fast films:

We can forgive [Fast's] emptiness and nihilism if it makes us laugh: Take a Deep Breath, at least, keeps the chuckles coming. In the midst of all the feints, false starts, gore, and revelations of artificiality Fast has cast himself as an over-intellectualizing bumbler a la Albert Brooks, agonizing about the script and acting choices while the per diem clock is running; trusting his cell phone to an actor he’s just fired; declaiming to the cops about the integrity of the film’s "tableaux vivants" (soon undercut by the revelation that he asked the actress to take her shirt off–-supposedly to make the blast from the suicide bomber "more authentic"). Several of the crew members also have laugh lines in the form of a stream of inappropriate and politically incorrect comments. From the press release, which painted the project as another earnest investigation of contested, semiotic reality, I wasn’t prepared for it to be such a yockfest, goofing non-stop on its own premises. The other film at Postmasters was pretty much a downer, however, as you describe.

Just wrote my first "rule," in code, and stuff, to block a URL that has been haunting me for weeks.
A company's enterprising web guy hotlinked one of the GIFs posted here, probably for a "loading" graphic.
The business is a semi-automated site where people can get low level jobs by applying online. Kind of a Craigslist for day laborers.
I changed the GIF address but my "stats" continued to be overwhelmed with links from the "online forms" people fill out when applying for cab driver and bookkeeper jobs.
A couple of weeks ago I emailed the company and asked what gives.
Someone at the executive/sales level replied and said the company's web technician had been informed and my URL was no longer in its code.
Then a couple of days ago the hits started again, thousands of them. (Some bloggers might say, "Cool, traffic!")
Probably a backup someone never erased.
So today I did some research into how to block an unwanted visitor. If anyone notices anything weird or inaccessible on the site please shoot me an email.

Update: So far my work has seen no tangible results. Will give it another 24 hour "stat cycle" before admitting failure.
Update 2: The traffic has slowed but appears to have nothing to do with my "fix." Need to quit thinking about this.