I was at the MCM Expo this weekend and I have to say these two girls were the first two cosplayers I saw that weekend and I went “WOW” at. There were many more that I did that too over ther weekend but these girls did look amazing.
Well done!
Hello my dears. I have been in Canada for the last two weeks which would explain my lack of updates and well general lack of looking at Pink Domino. We were meant to get a new Layout but the person who was meant to help do that IS NOT VERY RELIABLE. Anyway in honor of my trip to Canada (which is a country I now love) I present to you Mr Andrew Bravener. A sexy Candian from Canadia making CINNAMON BUNS which are the tastiest thing ever. Tasty boy makes Tasty food. Where in this video is the fail? Nowhere, that’s right.
Cinnamon Buns in less than 5 minutes? Yes please I say. Yes please.
Enjoy!
It is no secret that I have an intrest in this Anonymous Situation that’s going on at the moment. It’s taken over my You Tube time and has taken my attention away from Britney Spears being commited. It might just be me but the Anonymous videos on YouTube from some of the “members” can actually be very entertaining. Though the most entertaining ones are usually when the member isn’t actually in the video (therefore not breaking the rules on Anonymous). So I decided to make a bit of a compilation of all my favs. Paul Fetch may think everyone will HATE ME FOR SUPPORTING ANONYMOUS but I know better than he does 
ANONYCAT
OH NOEZ! THEY ARE GOING AFTER LOLCATS!
ENGLISH GIRL SHOUTS A LOT
TOM CRUISE TALKS TO MR FETCH
I AM ANONYMOUS
EVEN ANIME LOLZ
LOLZ
Maybe some more.. once I have watched some more.
Ok so we knew at some point some attention whore would come along and post some shit on YouTube saying ON NOEZ ANONYMOUS IMMA GET YOU and this dumbass is trying to do this. CHRIS CROCKER ANYONE?! Yes, this is the Anonymous version of him. Looking for fame in the cheapest of ways.
I love how he compare Anonymous to Nazis. THE INTERNET IS NOT SERIOUS BUSINESS. And why on Earth does he think people will listen to him? I mean if I wasn’t already agreeing with their cause and had no opinion I would actually back Anonymous MORE after seeing this pussy go on at me and telling me Anonymous are evil and are terrorists. Isn’t it funny how Americans love to label EVERYONE as terrorists? COME ON PEOPLE. THEY HAVE FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Running around saying I AM NOT SCARED and YOU ARE ALL TERRORISTS just makes people target you more. This is why I think this guy is an attention whore. Anyone who knows Anonymous knows the raids they conduct… EMOCHIN ANYONE?! and this guy knew what he was asking for. Most people will just laugh at him for bringing trouble upon himself.
And Anonymous’ response was:
Which of course is the usual thing
This all distracts from their issue of CO$. But Whatever. They are making a huge thing out of nothing. Why is everyone acting like Anonymous is some secret oragnization that noone can get into? This one kid made a film saying “I HAVE INFO ON ANONYMOUS. EBAUMS WORLD”. It’s funny coz I’m sure we’re all laughing everytime someone makes a post saying I know where anonymous hides out. Firstly because Anonymous are spread over quite a few places and secondly because IT’S NOT A BLOODY SECRET.
And lastly…
LEAVE ANON ALONE!
Just to make this clear, Anonymous is NOT ATTACKING Scientology (as in the belief) but the ORGANIZATION (the Church of Scientology). Anonymous are not persecuting anyones right to believe in Scientology or anything like that I believe it is more of the fact they see the organization of Scientology as a sort of pyramid scheme conning the believers out of money and such things.
The general goal is to dismantle the CoS and free its members. Let the teachings of Scientology be available freely, and let people practice how they will
This is quite a good cause if you think about it really. I guess what I am seeing from this is exactly what people can achieve if the band together. I mean Anonymous is just a bunch of people (younger people we’d think) from Japanese Style Image Boards who have suddenly realised they might actually be able to achieve something if they band together. I can’t help but find it amusing how the internet has bought all these people together united to fight one for one cause. We associate Anonymous with really immature attacks on people (Hello Tom Green) but this is co-ordinated and thought over. The Website is totally condemning anyone who does anything illegal or violent, saying that if they do they will hinder the cause. They are aware that they must come out looking like the Good Guy in all this and not the CO$ claim to be the victims.
WANT TO KNOW MORE...
PLAN OF ACTION
ANONYMOUS ADDRESSES THE MEDIA
CNET Coverage
MORE MEDIA COVERAGE LINKS
I suggest you get involved. Go and find out where they are holding demonstrations in your area and go and hand out flyers and get people to understand what’s going on. They will be so many people looking at this as a hate issue and thinking Anonymous are all cunts and it’s up to use to show them what’s really going on.
EVENTS IN EUROPE
HOW YOU CAN JOIN IN
FACEBOOK GROUP
I am not sure what to expect. But this is the first time Anonymous has taken action this organized and this well thought out. I am looking forward to see what happens!
********
FOR SOME READING…
A History on Anonymous
What is Anonymous?
The beginnings of the Anonymous concept likely were inspired from Japanese internet forums. Many western-style forums require you to register an account before you can post. Your account can almost always be customized to contain profile information, a custom avatar (picture to represent you, shown with all of your posts), and it will track your posts. The more popularized Japanese forums do not require account creation. In fact, there is no option to create an account. While you can enter a username and an email address with your post, nothing would prevent someone else from entering the same information and impersonating you. In general, people posting with information stick out and are prone to being heckled. One of the most popular Japanese forums is 2ch, which the events of the story/drama/movie Densha Otoko played out on.
The western forums and the Japanese forums differ in a number of ways. The Japanese are rather famous for making elaborate emoticons and ASCII (text) art. The western forums instead are image boards, and people commonly upload pictures that either express a message or add to the post (but not always). Additionally, while both forums are extremely active, at this time only some Japanese forums have turned the forum into a sort of chatroom, where replies are updated in real-time as posts are made. As far as I can tell, the western forums still require you to hit the refresh button to see new replies.
The western boards contain a number of sections that somewhat loosely correlate to subjects or interests. Most of the forum activity is not generated by meaningful discussions, but by people seeking entertainment. Amusing stories are shared to which amusing replies are made. Amusing pictures are also posted, modified, and reused as seen fit. This is where many of the internet’s memes are generated. Many people visiting such sites are put off by the seemingly rude people and inappropriate humor. This is largely a misunderstanding - it’s not that the people visiting these sites have no values, but that these are places where the goal is amusement, rather than serious discussion.
At some point in time the people realized that they were many in number, and this is when an active Anonymous may have first been born. Seeking another form of entertainment and acting out of commonly held sentiments, raids would be organized against certain targets. The target would usually be a person and their presence on the internet who had done something that either angered many, or who simply seemed like an amusing target to mess around with. This is where Anonymous first became more well-known, as Fox News put out an amusing (and very misunderstanding) news story on the actions of Anonymous. In the broadcast, Anonymous was portrayed as a group of hackers bordering on terrorism. The story focused on how they had targeted a person, found out his name, address, phone number, stolen some of his passwords, and made prank threats against him. While people not in the know would probably have been terrified of this, Anonymous was seen as little more than a group of annoying kids who would cause trouble for their own amusement to many on the internet.
How raids are instigated is relatively interesting in itself. If you ever browse the various forums you may occasionally see requests for raids against a target put out by certain posters. These are frequently answered with “not your personal army” and questioning why the target should be raided, and why the original requester shouldn’t be counter-raided instead. This shows that these are not a group of people who derive amusement from messing around with any random person. There must be a reason or a commonly held goal among the collective. Keep in mind that this is all further interesting because all of this is taking place anonymously - while some members may recognize others (perhaps by posting style), nobody can really be identified.
There’s what Anonymous is, in a very brief and perhaps somewhat flawed summary. Unlike what the media believes, it is not a defined group. You could become Anonymous just as easily as I or anyone else with a computer could. It is a group collective.
A HISTORY OF THE CO$
What is the Church of Scientology?
Much information about the Church of Scientology (CoS) is available online. If you’re interested, I highly recommend researching them on your own for more hard facts. I’m only going to provide the core basics here that will help to catch you up to the issue.
Before discussing the CoS, I would like to state that I’m extremely skeptical of them and their beliefs. Regardless, people should be free to practice what ever beliefs they want to, so long as they are not harmful to others. Much of what I say will show my skepticism for the CoS, but know that I do not look down on their members for believing the teachings of Scientology.
The CoS was founded in the mid-1900’s by a science fiction writer, Ron L. Hubbard. Shortly before the conception of the CoS, Hubbard was quoted as claiming that the best way to make a lot of money was to found a religion. Even ater the CoS was in full formation, Hubbard was again quoted off-record as claiming that the best way to control people is to lie to them. A rumor that I’ve heard was that Scientology originally came about as a bet. In one version, Hubbard simply bet against another man that he could successfully create his own religion; in another, Hubbard squared off against other science fiction writers to see who could create the wackiest story that people would believe and take up as religion. CoS was originally recognized as a corporate entity, and was taxed accordingly. Eventually it was found that CoS members were breaking into the IRS or had infiltrated the IRS, and a federal investigation was launched that netted a few CoS members jailtime. Currently, however, the CoS is tax-exempt. This makes a difference because the teachings of CoS are only available to people who pay for them. They are given in tiered levels, and it seems to become more expensive as you get farther into the religion.
Despite that, I’m going to give you a very brief overview of what the core beliefs of the religion state. This information is only presented at the very end levels, and scientologists are told to deny that these teachings are real. The basic beliefs of Scientology state that humans essentially came to Earth as a result of an alien known as Xenu (Xemu), who was responsible for managing an overpopulated solar system. We are plagued by intergalactic parasites (I believe these are identified as Thetans) that hold us back from our full potential. If you can fully cleanse yourself of thetans, you will not only be happy and stop suffering, but you’ll gain powers such as the ability to fly through space and perform telekenesis. Scientology does empower people to feel that they can make a change in the world and make things better, which is a positive benefit of the CoS and other religions as well.
The CoS has a bad history on the internet. Around 1995 or 1996 they began attacking a Usenet group that was incredibly skeptical of them. Usenet is basically a very old message forum system that requires a paid account to access (generally internet service providers grant you an account) as well as client software. Messages and files that are posted are propogated among the servers of various Usenet providers - there is no central Usenet server. The CoS attacked Usenet regardless, claiming that copyrighted works belonging to the religion were posted and that if these works were not removed then lawsuits would ensue. Those threats failed, and the CoS resorted to having some of its members become active on the Scientology discussion area of Usenet, arguing with skeptics and attempting to discredit them while making Scientology seem glorious. Part of the CoS’ issue with information about them on the internet is that members must pay to advance through the ranks of scientology, and it gets increasingly expensive. In addition to discussing the organization itself, much of the internet discussions focus on examining the teachings of Scientology. The CoS is one of the most notorious organizations to make use of copyright as a grounds for lawsuits and threats.
The CoS has also made enemies with the medical industry. They claim that the field of psychiatry is a crime against humanity. According to them, psychiatry doesn’t work and is based on psuedo-science, the drugs hold people back, and it mistreats people. While they don’t claim to be against medicine in general, their strange stances about medicine have resulted in a number of deaths of their members. The most notable is the Lisa McPherson case - McPherson was a young lady who had been involved in Scientology for a number of years (close to 20, I believe) and then removed herself from the religion. Shortly after that, she got into a car accident and was badly injured. She was transported to a hospital for treatment, but a number of scientologists then came and collected her, moving her to a building of theirs (I believe it was a hotel). She ultimately died from her injuries and dehydration. There was also another case where a CoS member had a son (also in CoS) with some form of mental disorder: CoS dictated that he shouldn’t receive treatment, and that he simply needed to cleanse himself of thetans. The young man ultimately ended up murdering his mother.
The CoS also advocates extreme hostility against detractors to the organization. Part of the teachings explain that there are SPs (suppressed people) who are enemies of the church. These people, along with ex-members of the church, fall under the CoS “open game” policy - essentially, they are to be harrassed and may be abused. Mark Bunker, the man behind XenuTV, has some massive courage and has documented some examples of this hostility on tape. XenuTV attempts to expose the CoS through video streams, and some of his media shows confrontations where CoS members forcibly grab the camera and threaten to break it. In other videos, CoS members gang up around him, yelling at him and trying to provoke him to anger. It’s disgusting behavior, and yet Mark Bunker consistently keeps a cool head and a light demeanor. Mr. Bunker has gained infamy among CoS, and supposedly CoS members have even picketed his house.
Further, there are stories from ex-CoS members detailing how the CoS becomes extremely hostile to them. There is a policy of disconnection within the church, which states that ex-members cannot be communicated with. I’ve read plenty of first-hand accounts of how a person is cut off from his or her family because they left the church. This also makes leaving the church difficult, as a person is required to give a lot of their life to the church in order to advance through its teachings. Of course their friends and close associates with then be fellow CoS members - when you leave, you’re left with nobody to turn to, and those people you knew are suddenly against you. I highly recommend reading the story of Tory Bezazian, a woman who became involved with the CoS and eventually achieved a position pitting her against Usenet detractors. It’s a long read, but the end details her leaving CoS and is totally unreal - it details her “defection” to an anti-CoS group, and how she was intercepted at the airport by CoS who attempted to prevent her from leaving. Even after she’d landed, the CoS was there to attempt to stop her once more. This organization operates in incredibly frightening ways.
If you’d like even more information, visit Operation Clambake. Clambake and other Scientology detractors have claimed that the way to dismantle Scientology is through proper litigation. However, Scientology has remained an entity that not many people know about. Further, they have a number of movie celebrities among their ranks (most notably Tom Cruise). Scientology seems poised to take a number of unknowing people in and grow unabated.
(the two summaries above were written by my good friend AnimeXreme over at this LJ. I won’t link so he doesn’t get spammed up but he made some good points)
Oh yes. Apparently a boy in Japan has stolen 36 Million yen of Virual Money for the gameMabinogi! Why did he resort to such drastic measures you may be wondering? What could have been so enticing in the game that he had to go and hack into someones account and steal all the money? Well he wanted a pink Princess dress for his character.
OH NOEZ THE WoW IS UNDER ATTACK.
For serious though, how do we treat “online” or “virtual” crimes? Are they just as bad as real crimes? Should people be prosecuted for stealing money from someone else or is BANNNNZZZ working just as well? SHOULD WE REALLY CARE ABOUT ETHICS (yes I did just write Ethnics there and had to correct it) and MORALS IN AN ONLINE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT THAT ESSENTIALLY IS NOT REAL? I have no clue.
These are the questions I pose to you dear Readers.
Maybe you can help.
…”You might not want things you do to be broadcast into facebook, but the evidence says that many people would”…
Facebook have set up this thing called Beacon (see end of post for a bit of a description), which shopping sites can use so that when you buy things from them it shows up on your Facebook Mini Feed. According to the writer over at JbJb this is ok.
So I ask you:
I am interested to see how many people would actually want this. So please leave a comment and your thoughts (:
Thank you!
The following is stolen from the blog post :
“Facebook Beacon”
This is the big one - and it’s caused a good deal of controversy in the press this week. Here’s the elevator pitch: add a few lines of code to your company’s website, and when a facebook user makes some kind of action on your site (e.g. purchases a product) this news gets published on their mini-feed and on their friend’s newsfeeds. Users get a chance to opt-out, but not by default. This can be used intelligently with social ads so that people only see an advert for your product when they’ve committed a Beacon action. In other words, it’s a new way for Facebook users to log and broadcast their outside-of-Facebook online activity inside Facebook.
I procrastinate. But to be honest with you I bet all of you at some point get bored when at work/home and randomly search around on Google for things to watch and see. I was having one of these moments the other day when I read this article on Wired which suggests that we have “evolved” as such so that our computers are an extension of our brains. We look up facts on Google, we don’t remember email addresses or phone numbers now because they are just stored in our Gmail accounts or on our Mobile Phones. Apparently each generation is remembering less and less basic facts due to the fact we can access basic information at the press of a button. Why should we waste the memory space inour head remembering them?
I don’t think I’m so bad at this. I know my own cellphone number, I did know my home phone number till it was changed a few weeks ago, I know my bank account number and sort code and a lot of peoples emails off by heart. The things I forget are usually song titles (I can never tell you what a song I love is called. I just know the band usually) and peoples birthdays. I need to program my friends birthdays onto my phone so I can have a reminder a few days before. But actually Facebook takes care of that for me now. I know that if you took my phone or my laptop away I would probably be a bit lost. Not for information, but I would simply run out of things to do to waste time when I am waiting for something I have to go to or when I am just simply bored.
A lot of us are way too reliant on our computers. I know that I don’t stay in on mine every night of the week but I know people that do and it’s rather worrying I have to say. You can do pretty much all things from your PC now right? Talk to people, watch TV, watch Movies… you have access to everything so it’s easy to see why people tend to spend more and more time on the Interwebs than they do actually going out. I think that extreme is pretty bad, I mean there is a limit to how much you should spend on your computer surely? It’s not very healthy to not get out and about and I’m sure you’ll get some sort of health defects from sitting around all day staring at a screen. Everyone needs fresh air, excercise and a bit of social interaction everyday.
The thing about me and my PC is, whilst I can probably live without it, I wouldn’t want to live without it. Think about it, we have laptops, wireless internet connections, internets on our mobile phones and all sorts now so that accessing the Interwebs has become a norm. You may not think it would affect you if you took it all away but it would, even if you don’t use your PC that much. One of my friends only uses her computer and is only online when she’s at work. She said she’d cope fine without having the internet on her PC at work but she wouldn’t. Her job is pretty slow and she spends ALL day on Facebook messaging people, browsing Youtube and listening to Last.FM. She would miss the internet if it was pulled. The internet is a procrastiators dream and no matter how much you deny you wouldn’t mind if it died and never reared it’s head again you totally would! You just haven’t realised how much you would yet.
What was the point to this article? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just the fact that I’ve noticed that at work time would go much slower had I not had the internet on my computer. I read articles on Wired and I read Blogs and I update Pink Domino and before I know it it’s 5pm and I can go home. I am so glad noone is planning to kill the internet. I know I would miss it!
My friend said to me the other day that he was worried and I asked him why. He replied he was worried that after seeing so much weird, perverted, violent stuff on the internet from when he was a teenager he now no longer is shocked by it. The example he gave was that in 4chan there is a Hentai Section with normal Hentai in it and a Hentai/Alternative section with tentacle rape, dick girls and other strange Hentai related images. He didn’t realise that the Hentai alternative section wasn’t the normal Hentai section for ages. He didn’t even realise there was a normal Hentai section. To him this was just normal, he didn’t find it shocking. When he said that I realised that I too thought that /d/ the Hentai Alternative section on 4chan was just for normal Hentai too. Is it really like that? Is the fact we have been exposed to things like goatse and tubgirl and really weird Hentai from a young age mean that things that shock everyone else are just the norm to us now? I had to investigate why and how this happened.
4chan is the first thing we need to look at when thinking about why Geeks and Internet Addicts are desensitised to the horrors of the Internet. I mean it’s not the worst site on the Internet by far but like there are things in /b/ that would disgust any normal person. I don’t go in /b/ but I have been a regular on an IRC chat channel since I was about 17 that loves /b/. It’s an anime related IRC chat channel that never talks about Anime. It’s all rape, sex, violence and gross outs mostly. But the thing is every time something disgusting from /b/ was linked, or something totally racist or something about rape or Loli I never batted an eyelid. I was just like *click**look**lol**close*. Is this bad? Because I know I’m not the only person out there with a sense of humour so much in the gutter. I know many people who find things that I find funny that a lot of people would just be grossed out by. Have we crossed a line or are we just a new kind of culture? Forget the MTV Generation we are the 4chan Generation.
Another friend of mine finds Anime quite disturbing. A few years back we were sitting in Borders and I was going down the Onegai Teacher art book and squeeing at the goodness inside. He pointed out that one of the girls rolling around in her underwear very much exposed looked like she was about 14 years old. I said “No no she has a condition that makes her look that way. Like the boy doesn’t look his age. She’s actually 21 or something”. He looked at me funny because I had quite calmly explained why the fact she was an obvious Loli wasn’t actually that bad because of the story of the Anime. He responded with “But she still looks 14. That doesn’t change that” and I shrugged and told him he just didn’t understand Anime. Anime is a strange medium I think because there really are no boundaries. It’s like.. anything goes. So we watch things that you would never ever see on TV in the West and then just think nothing of them after that. Like they banned an episode of Pokemon in the West where James was in a Bikini and had huge breasts. It was ok to air in Japan to the kids but here it was too controversial.
I think now that everyone has access to the internet its pretty hard to not become desensitised to things. They worry about violent films on the TV making their kids desensitised to things but to be fair it’s probably seeing photos of people smashed against trains or the after math of car crashes on the internet that’s doing it. I don’t know if it’s such a bad thing. I mean I am hardly a bad person, I have a good moral conscience and know right from wrong. So I laugh at things some people would think are sensitive areas or couldn’t find funny. That’s hardly making me evil. I think I am hardly alone in my being desensitized to a lot of bad things and therefore that hardly makes me a freak on nature.
You never know though. I may find something shocking one day and not laugh at it.
