In a flip of the words, look at the hit count for mentions of suicide on MySpace:

Google shows 29.1 million pages for site:myspace.com
Google shows 1.86 million of those include the word “suicide”
If you remove “goth” you still get 1.75 million, so that’s not it.
Adding “depressed” didn’t do much to the count (62,000), nor really did “depression“

Since I re-started this blog under my own name I have been reading a few more blogs than usual. It dawns on me that this Internet thing that transformed our work environments, and transformed our careers, has simply removed inhibitions. The latent artists and writers that failed to “be themselves” but instead went onwards with school and traditional jobs, are finding their way (back) to their destinies via the web. Digital photography has helped them rationalize it as well.

You all best be careful, though, because that same society that didn’t pay artists nor writers will similarly attempt to enslave The Webologist.

I have always been a supporter of artists, emotionally and financially when possible. They are amazing. Like most normal people, I have artistic visions, yet lack the skills to express them. So when a free-thinking expressionist doesn’t say “look” and explain something in words, but rather looks away and starts to draw or sketch or paint, or simply goes away, coming back some time later to show me something he created that reflects the original ideas not-excessively-discussed, I think it’s cool.

Of course there are commercial artists. And technicians. And hopeless romantics. And talentless hacks. And gifted ones that self destruct, and not-so-gifted ones that self destruct. It’s funny just how many parallels there are between web thought pioneers and “traditional” artists.

“412: Precondition Failed”

We’re sorry, but we could not fulfill your request for / on this server. We have established rules for access to this server, and any person or robot that violates these rules will be unable to access this site.

Oops. It appears I have pissed off GrayWolf’s server. Or he’s been drinking the IncrediBill Coolaide and installed anticrawl on his blog. That’s really too bad, because he just IP blocked a whole helluvalot of people on the t-mobile Starbucks network.

I make no apologies. Yes, I had my referrer spoofing Googlebot. I forgot to set it back; so sue me. But is that really a good enough reason to IP block all the innocent Starbucks customers? I’m going to guess it was a lack of checking robots.txt while appearing to be a bot. Violated his “MUST NOT pretend to be a robot” regulation. Ah well.

I saw a Squidoo comment in the Google SERPs, and hopped on over to read it. Alas, no more wolf-howl for now. I wonder how long we’ll be blocked? I mean, they’ll be blocked. I’ll just hop over to one of my proxies, but I am pretty sure the rest of the Starbuckers won’t be so well equipped. What will they do when the follow what looked like a good snippet in Google, only to get this 412 message? They will bail. Ferr sherr.