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January 02, 2024
Krzysztof's Balls
This 
is our cat Krzysztof. These 
are Krzysztof's balls. I'm no expert on cat anatomy, but it seems to me that Krzysztof has him some enormous testicles. Certainly his behavior would seem to reinforce that theory, in as much as figurative ballsiness is related to actual size of balls (which, as far as I know, is not at all, so never mind except inasmuch as it makes this story a little more interesting). In fact, Krzysztof's aggression recently landed another of our cats, Jones, in the hospital. Quite literally. (She had an abscess that needed to be drained after Krzysztof hooked a filthy claw into her neck, causing an infection that created a lump the size of a gumball underneath poor Jones's jaw. The yellow thing sticking out of her in this picture is a "drain" that had to be sewn into her skin for five days. Why Krzysztof refuses to clean his claws like a decent feline is beyond me.)
But never mind all that. I've gotten my back up recently over something that's commonly known as bandwidth stealing. Now, obviously, I love it when people link to deep-focus.com. I don't even mind, so much, when they republish my work without asking me, as long as I'm credited. And it bothers me not at all when they transfer my images to their own Web servers and use them on their own pages. I mean, I don't own the movie stills I've appropriated. I say "my" knowing full well that the images aren't really mine. I may have grabbed them from video or DVD, hunted them down at some Belgian Web site, and even done some Photoshop work on them, but I have no illusions that I've got any business getting all high and mighty about this stuff.
Increasingly, however, people are not transferring my images to their own Web servers, but simply linking to my images in their own HTML code. This is just bad manners. To a Web browser, it looks like the images at Deep-Focus.com are actually originating at the remote Web site. But in reality, the images are sucked off of my server and embedded in someone else's Web page. That drains my bandwidth, which is expensive enough already, thank you very much.
This pisses me off, but it is, fortunately, limited to a few images. My access logs told me earlier this year that the image of Vin Diesel from my review of The Fast and the Furious was being downloaded more quickly than the review itself by a factor of 10. Ouch. More recently, I found that the key image from my City of Lost Children review had been picked up by the masses. Specifically, it was downloaded about 3000 times in December. To keep that in perspective, the review itself has been downloaded about 150 times over the same period.
So I've decided that, from now on, if somebody is hijacking enough of my bandwidth to attract my attention, they're going to wind up serving their viewers not a tasty image of Scarlett Johanson and Thora Birch in Ghost World (720 unaccountable downloads in December), not an admittedly super-cool image of Takeshi Kitano blowing his own brains out in Sonatine (more than 200 hijacked downloads in the month), and not even that gorgeous picture of Nicole Kidman from The Others (about 100), but instead a color photo of Krzystof's furry balls, with "Deep-Focus.com" plastered across the bottom of the image. Meanwhile, the real images will be moved into a .htaccess-protected directory on the server, where they'll be locked down so they can't be accessed from outside of this domain. I truly want to leave the majority of the site wide open, but a man's gotta defend himself and shit.
I hope this gave all y'all some amusement. New reviews coming soon. Happy new year. And thanks for reading.
-bf-
Posted by Bryant at January 2, 2024 01:13 AM
Comments
Wow, Krzystof's furry balls compressed really nicely.
Posted by: Burton Radons at January 7, 2024 09:58 PM
They're going to compress even nicer after his appointment with the vet next Thursday, if you get my drift.
-bf-
Posted by: Bryant at January 8, 2024 08:37 AM