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31 Responses to “Hey, here’s a word I’m glad I haven’t heard in a good long time”
There’s a place in Canada (or in northwest New York — I can’t quite remember, exactly) called “Tonawondas”. I always wondered whether it was an actual Native American word or if it was a kind of “sensawunda” type of sentiment shoehorned all cutesy-like into a really fake-sounding Native American word, like “visit our town, there are a ton-a-wonders!” or something.
In any event, one night it was really late and Janet and I were driving through it on a trip, and we saw the sign and decided it sounded a lot like really dirty-sounding slang for breasts. It’s probably not nearly as funny as it was at that very moment in person, when we were kind of tired from having driven about nine hours, but I figured I’d share that in the event any additional amusement can be extracted from it.
Yes, Tonawanda is in NY, not far from Niagara Falls. To me it always sounded like something you’d hear from that tentacled guy outside Jabba’s palace. “No jabba tonawanda, bo jedi.”
Having done a 2 week gig in the area, Tonawanda is nowhere near as exotic or romantic as it sounds. I remember the client specifically routing me back and forth to my hotel near the falls so I wouldn’t come anywhere near the “Compton of the Niagaras” as they called it.
Here’s a phrase I *WISH* I hadn’t heard in awhile:
“Presidential Debate”; if they segment these debates by demographic any more, the next one is going to be held in my living room with me and my dog.
Actually, it’s more like a site I check back with now and then to see if the owner’s gotten over this period where he thinks the loyal viewers who gave his site all these hits over the years want ANOTHER blog telling them how badly the Republicans suck* more than they want the stuff that kept them coming back all those times.
*=As if having eyes and ears for the past 7 years didn’t do that job for us nicely enough.
Regarding captioning and blogging: why not combine the two? Post photos of our Republican overlords for us to caption. Post your blog entries with a link to the relevant photo. It’s win-win!
Look. I’ll admit it. I’m not here to read your blog. I didn’t find out about you recently from one of my liberal friends.
I am one of your Fair-Weather Readers. I am Old School.
I type in spinnewebe.com every couple of weeks when I’m bored at work. When that connects to nothing, I try typing spinwebe. Eventually I get here.
You seem to despise me because I am one of the bastards who keeps showing up here hoping that you’ll re-activate the captioning. Look. I agree that you don’t owe me anything. You don’t want to give me a free diversion, then don’t.
But why not harness my power?
Instead of bemoaning the fact that your web page attracts idiots like me, why not sell ad-space and convert your popularity among boors into money. That’s right, I said it. Money. Feel like contributing it to a candidate of your choice? Awesome. Want to pocket it and stop working for the Man? Neat.
My oft-stated goal is that I want to get every idiot in America to send me a dollar. You are way ahead of me. You are in a position where you could get corporations to send you one dollar for the eyeballs of every idiot in America.
No, but really, there’s a third option to all of this. Why don’t one of us MAKE a site with captioning? I mean, damn, with all the programmer types around here I’m surprised a spin-off (N.P.I.) hasn’t surfaced yet. I’ve seen a handful come and go through the years, but they were all slightly different concepts (different cartoons/pictures, alternate editorial process, etc.) and nothing seemed to compare… especially since SpinnWebe was still in it’s full captioning glory. Why doesn’t someone straight up rebirth A1? Call it B2! funnynonsequitirs.org! The possibilities!
I don’t know, just a thought. My free-time is much more limited than ever these days, but for you lucky bastards who can still spend infinite hours hitting plastic keys, get to work! I think a decade of captioning is a solid feat for anyone, now someone else oughta take the torch. Not that it matters either way to me, this site has been one of my regular stops for a really long time. But if someone was to resurrect the old spinnwebe toys we all enjoyed playing with, I’d go there too.
Besides, it’s not like no one would visit the proposed site. One post anywhere on here and people would jump on that like a republican on a pot of gold.
Yeah, I suppose that it doesn’t already exist in a form you people like is kinda a compliment. Though that was Debb’s reaction when I told her about this thread: “I don’t see him making one.”
Though my programming urge has been higher recently. I’ve been getting together something for my WoW guild to track raids, it’s kinda nice and uses AJAX updates. It’s giving me some ideas, and actually, probably not a bad warmup, because my programming bone was kinda rusty.
I dunno, with all of Lore’s damn near schizophrenic leaping and jumping across the internet over the years at least we can all be thankful that spinn’s managed to stay in one place.
If anyone’s interested, I got kind of a wild hair (or, well, wig) up my ass and whipped up a currently beta quality AJAX-ish captioning doohickey in OpenLaszlo. You can find it temporarily here, but I may end up moving it either over to enterthejabberwock.com or perhaps to hitlermustache.com. Or I may leave it at incessantscreaming, but move it to a different directory, possibly making it the primary feature of the site.
I still have to implement a better navigation system, and streamline/clean/etc things a bit, but… whatever.
I have an admin backend worked out as well, so I should hopefully be able to keep up with captions on at least, say, a bi-weekly basis. Probably more, and probably even more than that if I can get other people interested. And if anyone has any pics they want to submit, they can e-mail me via my contact information at the site you’ll find by clicking on “J Crowley”. I’ll be streamlining the process for image submission as well.
Link change: The captioning thing, which is now much better/sleeker than it was when I first linked it the other night, is now at this link, which is slightly different, but easier to remember because you don’t have to worry about pluralization of the directory and such. (e.g. “Is it caption or captions or captioning or…”) It’s just incessantscreaming.com/cap/ Or, if you want to link to a particular image, incessantscreaming.com/cap/?cimg=x where x is the image number.
Heh, it’s still kinda beta right now. It’s likely to stay where it is, I think, now, but it’ll be gradually improving over the next couple weeks, when I’m likely to finally be satisfied enough with it.
I’m planning on making it a permanent installation, so please feel free to caption away and tell your friends and such.
Well, I’m glad that the others finally chimed in here as I was sick of looking like the only a-hole who was tired of waiting for A1 again.
Spinn, I love ya and I’m am finally starting to read the blog on a more regular basis but you frankly have to realize that people come here to read the blog in hopes of seeing A1 and Scribs, not the other way around. You have a talent that I’ve yet to see duplicated and you piss me off that you seem to want to throw it away and divorce yourself from it.
We KNOW the world sux and the evil overlords are in control for the next 13 months. WE COME HERE TO LAUGH AND FORGET IT FOR A FEW HAPPY MOMENTS!!! Or at least we DID until you saw fit to take it all away.
Crowley - I love the idea, but still can’t figure out how to leave a caption. I will caption my ass off if you can make it a bit more logical (as in: a field labelled “caption” perhaps!) Please keep up the good work and make this a permanent fixture!!
Ok well, finally figured out how to enter a caption…perhaps reinventing the concept of a form interface leaves a bit to be desired…usually, when there’s a field label to the left, you expect the entry field to be on the right. In this case, the field label IS the etry field and the big field on the right is for the caption.
Spinn, I love ya and I’m am finally starting to read the blog on a more regular basis but you frankly have to realize that people come here to read the blog in hopes of seeing A1 and Scribs, not the other way around.
CHRIST man I KNOW how many TIMES do I have to SAY IT. The BLOG is HERE because I FEEL LIKE IT. I have no illusions of gathering/maintaining a readership because of it. IT’S HERE BECAUSE I FEEL LIKE PUTTING IT HERE.
Hmmmmm. No, sorry, the ranting isn’t doing anything for me at all. We don’t come here to listen to you go off like a firecracker on the other posters, you know. It was a nice try, but I still think I’d rather have A1 back.
subdude: I’ve updated the text fields so that they a) more resemble text fields, b) clear their initial values when you click in them, and c) are all labeled accordingly. (That is, the one for captions now says “Caption”.) I’d forgotten to do that, sorry. There are also a few other improvements that have gone into it today.
I think what Spinn is trying to say is that this blog, while currently the primary element of spinnwebe.com, isn’t necessarily intended as a public entertainment function, but rather a place where he can organize and textually manifest his thoughts on things for his own benefit. That others might read it is incidental.
I know it’s a bit disappointing that the features of spinnwebe we’d all grown to know and love aren’t currently available here, but it’s ultimately Spinn’s prerogative to do with this site what he pleases. Maintaining a rather popular website with content active and interesting enough to slake the readership’s hunger for it is more exhausting than it might superficially seem. Maybe someday these features will again be available here, but if not, we can’t just, like, strong-arm or browbeat or guilt Spinn into making this site what we’d like it to be. We have to come to terms with it.
I’m coming to terms with it by trying to provide captioning to people again, so you’re all welcome to come and caption over on incessantscreaming.com/cap. I’m trying to mirror Spinn’s approach as much as possible, though initially, with only a few people participating, I’ll be a bit looser about accepting. I can always go back later and do some pruning. It’s not DFC or IADL or A1, but an approximation is better than nothing. And we shouldn’t forget that most of the funny of the DFC/IADL/A1 came from the people participating, not from the mere concept of captioning pictures and a web widget that facilitated it. ACT, goddammit, don’t just leave fruitless comments complaining about how you don’t have an outlet for your own ability to be funny.
I come here because I just… shit. I don’t know. Why the hell do I come here? Anybody? Anybody? Anybody? I guess I mostly come here to watch people self implode. They do it better here than anywhere else.
September 30th, 2007 00:21
And here I thought it’d be “update.”
September 30th, 2007 05:01
There’s a place in Canada (or in northwest New York — I can’t quite remember, exactly) called “Tonawondas”. I always wondered whether it was an actual Native American word or if it was a kind of “sensawunda” type of sentiment shoehorned all cutesy-like into a really fake-sounding Native American word, like “visit our town, there are a ton-a-wonders!” or something.
In any event, one night it was really late and Janet and I were driving through it on a trip, and we saw the sign and decided it sounded a lot like really dirty-sounding slang for breasts. It’s probably not nearly as funny as it was at that very moment in person, when we were kind of tired from having driven about nine hours, but I figured I’d share that in the event any additional amusement can be extracted from it.
I fucking hate the word “sensawunda”.
September 30th, 2007 05:17
I’d never heard this expression before now. What circles do you guys travel in that you would develop a dislike for it?
September 30th, 2007 22:10
Science fiction fandom.
October 1st, 2007 08:08
Yes, Tonawanda is in NY, not far from Niagara Falls. To me it always sounded like something you’d hear from that tentacled guy outside Jabba’s palace. “No jabba tonawanda, bo jedi.”
Sensawunda, never heard of it.
October 1st, 2007 18:40
Having done a 2 week gig in the area, Tonawanda is nowhere near as exotic or romantic as it sounds. I remember the client specifically routing me back and forth to my hotel near the falls so I wouldn’t come anywhere near the “Compton of the Niagaras” as they called it.
Here’s a phrase I *WISH* I hadn’t heard in awhile:
“Presidential Debate”; if they segment these debates by demographic any more, the next one is going to be held in my living room with me and my dog.
October 2nd, 2007 18:22
And sadly, your dog’s lack of a vote wouldn’t matter because it’d get miscounted anyway.
October 3rd, 2007 13:48
Whatever. Fix amusing.org.
October 3rd, 2007 17:27
Hear, Hear, MyName.
October 4th, 2007 11:10
On behalf of those assembled (and those disassembled), thank you!
October 4th, 2007 15:38
Huzzah! Now if only A1 were working, this would be a site I ENJOY coming to again.
October 4th, 2007 16:34
Thank you. But unfortunately you still think Mr. ? is amusing.
October 4th, 2007 21:23
And I’m still waiting for my pony.
October 5th, 2007 08:57
Well until then, it’ll just be a site you TOLERATE coming back to again.
October 5th, 2007 13:03
Actually, it’s more like a site I check back with now and then to see if the owner’s gotten over this period where he thinks the loyal viewers who gave his site all these hits over the years want ANOTHER blog telling them how badly the Republicans suck* more than they want the stuff that kept them coming back all those times.
*=As if having eyes and ears for the past 7 years didn’t do that job for us nicely enough.
October 5th, 2007 18:45
Sounds like the same thing.
You want what you want, man. I’m just writing up what I feel like.
October 7th, 2007 21:05
Regarding captioning and blogging: why not combine the two? Post photos of our Republican overlords for us to caption. Post your blog entries with a link to the relevant photo. It’s win-win!
Look. I’ll admit it. I’m not here to read your blog. I didn’t find out about you recently from one of my liberal friends.
I am one of your Fair-Weather Readers. I am Old School.
I type in spinnewebe.com every couple of weeks when I’m bored at work. When that connects to nothing, I try typing spinwebe. Eventually I get here.
You seem to despise me because I am one of the bastards who keeps showing up here hoping that you’ll re-activate the captioning. Look. I agree that you don’t owe me anything. You don’t want to give me a free diversion, then don’t.
But why not harness my power?
Instead of bemoaning the fact that your web page attracts idiots like me, why not sell ad-space and convert your popularity among boors into money. That’s right, I said it. Money. Feel like contributing it to a candidate of your choice? Awesome. Want to pocket it and stop working for the Man? Neat.
My oft-stated goal is that I want to get every idiot in America to send me a dollar. You are way ahead of me. You are in a position where you could get corporations to send you one dollar for the eyeballs of every idiot in America.
I am Idiot. Harness me, already.
October 9th, 2007 01:57
And where is the *fucking* DFC?
No, but really, there’s a third option to all of this. Why don’t one of us MAKE a site with captioning? I mean, damn, with all the programmer types around here I’m surprised a spin-off (N.P.I.) hasn’t surfaced yet. I’ve seen a handful come and go through the years, but they were all slightly different concepts (different cartoons/pictures, alternate editorial process, etc.) and nothing seemed to compare… especially since SpinnWebe was still in it’s full captioning glory. Why doesn’t someone straight up rebirth A1? Call it B2! funnynonsequitirs.org! The possibilities!
I don’t know, just a thought. My free-time is much more limited than ever these days, but for you lucky bastards who can still spend infinite hours hitting plastic keys, get to work! I think a decade of captioning is a solid feat for anyone, now someone else oughta take the torch. Not that it matters either way to me, this site has been one of my regular stops for a really long time. But if someone was to resurrect the old spinnwebe toys we all enjoyed playing with, I’d go there too.
Besides, it’s not like no one would visit the proposed site. One post anywhere on here and people would jump on that like a republican on a pot of gold.
October 9th, 2007 08:14
Yeah, I suppose that it doesn’t already exist in a form you people like is kinda a compliment. Though that was Debb’s reaction when I told her about this thread: “I don’t see him making one.”
Though my programming urge has been higher recently. I’ve been getting together something for my WoW guild to track raids, it’s kinda nice and uses AJAX updates. It’s giving me some ideas, and actually, probably not a bad warmup, because my programming bone was kinda rusty.
October 9th, 2007 23:21
I dunno, with all of Lore’s damn near schizophrenic leaping and jumping across the internet over the years at least we can all be thankful that spinn’s managed to stay in one place.
Though I do get very nostalgic from time to time.
October 14th, 2007 04:12
If anyone’s interested, I got kind of a wild hair (or, well, wig) up my ass and whipped up a currently beta quality AJAX-ish captioning doohickey in OpenLaszlo. You can find it temporarily here, but I may end up moving it either over to enterthejabberwock.com or perhaps to hitlermustache.com. Or I may leave it at incessantscreaming, but move it to a different directory, possibly making it the primary feature of the site.
I still have to implement a better navigation system, and streamline/clean/etc things a bit, but… whatever.
I have an admin backend worked out as well, so I should hopefully be able to keep up with captions on at least, say, a bi-weekly basis. Probably more, and probably even more than that if I can get other people interested. And if anyone has any pics they want to submit, they can e-mail me via my contact information at the site you’ll find by clicking on “J Crowley”. I’ll be streamlining the process for image submission as well.
October 14th, 2007 05:04
Er, the databases will all be the same, by the way, so feel free to start submitting captions.
October 15th, 2007 17:47
Link change: The captioning thing, which is now much better/sleeker than it was when I first linked it the other night, is now at this link, which is slightly different, but easier to remember because you don’t have to worry about pluralization of the directory and such. (e.g. “Is it caption or captions or captioning or…”) It’s just incessantscreaming.com/cap/ Or, if you want to link to a particular image, incessantscreaming.com/cap/?cimg=x where x is the image number.
October 18th, 2007 00:28
That is slick, Mr. Crowley. Test run?
October 18th, 2007 02:59
Thanks.
Heh, it’s still kinda beta right now. It’s likely to stay where it is, I think, now, but it’ll be gradually improving over the next couple weeks, when I’m likely to finally be satisfied enough with it.
I’m planning on making it a permanent installation, so please feel free to caption away and tell your friends and such.
October 18th, 2007 09:52
Well, I’m glad that the others finally chimed in here as I was sick of looking like the only a-hole who was tired of waiting for A1 again.
Spinn, I love ya and I’m am finally starting to read the blog on a more regular basis but you frankly have to realize that people come here to read the blog in hopes of seeing A1 and Scribs, not the other way around. You have a talent that I’ve yet to see duplicated and you piss me off that you seem to want to throw it away and divorce yourself from it.
We KNOW the world sux and the evil overlords are in control for the next 13 months. WE COME HERE TO LAUGH AND FORGET IT FOR A FEW HAPPY MOMENTS!!! Or at least we DID until you saw fit to take it all away.
Crowley - I love the idea, but still can’t figure out how to leave a caption. I will caption my ass off if you can make it a bit more logical (as in: a field labelled “caption” perhaps!) Please keep up the good work and make this a permanent fixture!!
October 18th, 2007 10:03
Ok well, finally figured out how to enter a caption…perhaps reinventing the concept of a form interface leaves a bit to be desired…usually, when there’s a field label to the left, you expect the entry field to be on the right. In this case, the field label IS the etry field and the big field on the right is for the caption.
CAPTIONS AHOY!!
October 18th, 2007 11:57
Spinn, I love ya and I’m am finally starting to read the blog on a more regular basis but you frankly have to realize that people come here to read the blog in hopes of seeing A1 and Scribs, not the other way around.
CHRIST man I KNOW how many TIMES do I have to SAY IT. The BLOG is HERE because I FEEL LIKE IT. I have no illusions of gathering/maintaining a readership because of it. IT’S HERE BECAUSE I FEEL LIKE PUTTING IT HERE.
October 18th, 2007 17:35
Hmmmmm. No, sorry, the ranting isn’t doing anything for me at all. We don’t come here to listen to you go off like a firecracker on the other posters, you know. It was a nice try, but I still think I’d rather have A1 back.
October 18th, 2007 18:16
subdude: I’ve updated the text fields so that they a) more resemble text fields, b) clear their initial values when you click in them, and c) are all labeled accordingly. (That is, the one for captions now says “Caption”.) I’d forgotten to do that, sorry. There are also a few other improvements that have gone into it today.
I think what Spinn is trying to say is that this blog, while currently the primary element of spinnwebe.com, isn’t necessarily intended as a public entertainment function, but rather a place where he can organize and textually manifest his thoughts on things for his own benefit. That others might read it is incidental.
I know it’s a bit disappointing that the features of spinnwebe we’d all grown to know and love aren’t currently available here, but it’s ultimately Spinn’s prerogative to do with this site what he pleases. Maintaining a rather popular website with content active and interesting enough to slake the readership’s hunger for it is more exhausting than it might superficially seem. Maybe someday these features will again be available here, but if not, we can’t just, like, strong-arm or browbeat or guilt Spinn into making this site what we’d like it to be. We have to come to terms with it.
I’m coming to terms with it by trying to provide captioning to people again, so you’re all welcome to come and caption over on incessantscreaming.com/cap. I’m trying to mirror Spinn’s approach as much as possible, though initially, with only a few people participating, I’ll be a bit looser about accepting. I can always go back later and do some pruning. It’s not DFC or IADL or A1, but an approximation is better than nothing. And we shouldn’t forget that most of the funny of the DFC/IADL/A1 came from the people participating, not from the mere concept of captioning pictures and a web widget that facilitated it. ACT, goddammit, don’t just leave fruitless comments complaining about how you don’t have an outlet for your own ability to be funny.
It’s here — come get it.
October 18th, 2007 19:18
I come here because I just… shit. I don’t know. Why the hell do I come here? Anybody? Anybody? Anybody? I guess I mostly come here to watch people self implode. They do it better here than anywhere else.