Ok. All you need to do is open a text file using Notepad or whatever else you use to create plain text files. Copy this code into that file:

#recommended_users {
display: none;
}

Now save the file as userContent.css.

The next step depends on what browser you use -

• Firefox - All you have to do for Firefox is move the file to your “chrome” directory. If you don’t know where that is, go to Help -> Troubleshooting Information and click “Open Containing Folder”. Once you move the file there, restart Firefox and you’re done!
   
• Internet Explorer - go to Internet Options -> General -> Accessibility and find the “format documents using my style sheet” option, usually near the bottom. Browse to your file and save. Restart IE.
   
• Safari - save the file to Library > Application Support > Safari. Now open Safari, open Preferences and select Advanced. Change the “Style sheet” option to “userContent.css”
   
• Opera - go to File -> Preferences -> Page Style and under “My Style Sheet” add the userContent.css file.

And that’s it! You’re done.

But as I said, I’m not completely wrapping things up here. I’ll continue to post on on occassion. But, you probably already noticed that. Sign up for RSS if you want to get my occasional post. Or follow me on Twitter where it’s easier for me to post frequently.

As for AARG, it’s a role-playing system I wrote back in highschool. I’ve made several attempts over the years to create an actual hard-copy rule book and failed at every one of them. This time, however, I’ve not only written down the rules, I’ve got a group play-testing them and the system works beautifully. I say this without irony or hubris, it’s the smoothest, easiest to learn system I’ve seen in two-plus decades of gaming. The rulebook is done, the I’m proof-reading the skills set now, and the basic equipment and magic sets will follow. Once the initial four books are done, and I can write up a document for the scenario we’re currently playing in, I plan on setting up a website for the system and distributing it for free and podcasting a fantasy adventure based on the system.

You’ll need:

4-5 medium sized potatoes
1/2 cup fake parmesan cheese (not the real stuff)
1/2 cup italian style breadcrumbs
1/4 cup of bacon bits (real bacon, not Bacos)

1. Oil a pan, get the oil hot. You want a layer of oil - about 1/8″.
2. Chop potatoes into bits no bigger than 3/4″ cubes. Toss the potatoes into the oil and cook until partially browned on most sides. You don’t really need to be exact here, and if you over-cook them they get mushy and the whole thing goes to pot.
3. When the potatoes are brown-ish, mix the cheese and breadcrumbs and sprinkle half the mixture over the potatoes. Give it a minute or two to soak up some of the oil and stick to the potatoes. Flip the potatoes and sprinkle the rest on the other side. Top with the bacon.
4. Cook the whole thing until it’s a dark brown.
5. Cover a plate with a couple layers of paper towels and transfer the potatoes to the plate. Let the grease soak into the towels for a while.
6. Top with fresh chives & sour cream or serve with ranch dressing.

Back in high school, I listened to a lot of crap. In addition to the Ozzy and Poison and Joe Satriani and the stuff that all my friends listened to, there were also bands and albums I really enjoyed that I would’ve never let anyone find out about (although, Mike Norat, if you’re reading this, I’d like to get my copy of Lisa Stansfield’s “Affection” back some day. You’ve had it for 19 years, I think that’s long enough).

Anyway, one of those albums that I’d never let my friends know about was on an old cassette (that’s a music thing we used to have before CD’s) called “Astral Weeks“. I know it was old because it belonged to either my brother or sister and they were always old. One of them left it behind when they went off to college, I foudn it, gave it a shot, and was hooked. I listened to that album thousands of times. In fact, it was the third album I ever bought with my own money (right after Pink Floyd’s “Momentary Lapse of Reason” and Guns ‘n’ Roses “Appetite for Destruction”) because I ended up breaking it.

It’s still one of those albums that I can put in at any time, no matter how I’m feeling, and listen to without skipping any tracks.

So when I heard Van Morrison was remaking it, I was worried. This kind of album - you can’t mess with the magic. It’s like Star Wars, and look how that turned out. Seriously, just step away from the mic. This is a bad idea.

But I admit, I was curious. And I didn’t want to wait for it to “officially” release. So I, um, found a copy yesterday. And I listened to it today. And I was immediately put off.

“Is this supposed to be Astral Weeks?” I asked myself. “Is that a banjo? My god, was that an orchestra hit?!”

But then “Beside You” came on, and that wasn’t that bad, even with the breathing in and breathing out. And, oddly, before “Slim Slow Slider” was over I realized that Van Morrison has done something I never would have thought possible in this post-Lucas era - he remade something beautiful and beloved and perfect, and he made something different out of it that’s just as beautiful. How this is possible, I can’t explain.

I set aside money for Killzone 2 this week, but I think I’m going to buy a copy of “Astral Weeks Live” instead, just to have a real copy.

• Wikipedia: Zebraplatys Bulbus (which sounds less like a band name and more like a Harry Potter character to me)
• Photo from LJ.’s photostream
• Quote from John Ruskin

I’m pretty sure I saw these guys open for Soul Asylum and Screaming Trees in ‘94.

See, I still post on Fark on occassion. I also share images on Fark once in a while that I host on my own website. Now, being the forward thinking kind of guy that I am, and having had my share of ripped off images, I put a nice tight cap on who can and can’t embed images hosted on my domain. In fact, I created a directory just for images I want to share with Fark that’s visible only to Fark.

Of course, the flaw in my logic is that, if I can link to my images on Fark, so can other Farkers. I hadn’t considered that, and was kind of surprised today when I found someone linking to my images.

Now, I’m not one to complain about bandwidth. Lord knows I’ve got transfer limits coming out my ears from being on Dreamhost so fricking long. But really, was I supposed to let that go by without having fun with it?

Of course not.

I have to admit that, until recently, I was quite fond of Flickr. It was a simple, clean interface that did exactly what it was supposed to do with, minus the “video” thing, wasn’t cluttered with too much feature creep.

But this week I’ve seen a ridiculous, out of control side to Flickr that I never expected to see.

Someone I know had her account set to “moderate” by Flickr due to a user complaint and the way Flickr handled it was preposterously juvenile. And doing a little bit of reading to find out why they’ve done this, I found that it’s actually pretty common for Flickr staff to be petty and juvenile.

Now, let me preface this by saying that I have no problems with tagging images as NSFW. It’s in the best interest of Flickr’s users that the site stay off of corporate block lists because of public-accessible NSFW content.

No, what I have issue with is how Flickr goes about dealing with problems with customer content. Flickr handles questionable material with an extremely heavy hand, often outright deleting acounts without warning and without offering users any kind of remediation. This is where I have a serious issues with their policies.

Rarely do I agree with people who rant that a company is destroying itself by annoying users. Usually those kinds of complaints are from people who believe that companies owe them something just for being customers of theirs and their complaints are more entitlement than actual complaint.

This time, however, I firmly believe Flickr is heading toward self-destruction. Here’s five points where I think Flickr’s gone horribly, horribly wrong:

1. Flickr can, and will, terminate your account without any explanation - Although the story of Shéhérazade is an extreme case, and Shéhérazade herself has been abusive of staff in the Flickr forums, the case still stands as an example of the problems with Flickr’s way of dealing with things. Here you have a user who’s been shut down in the past and was asking for help from Flickr’s staff to avoid being shut down again, when along comes a Flickr staffer who jumps the gun and shuts her down preemptively. Seriously, read the original story. Why is someone who is actually asking for help from Flickr being punished for doing so? And as far as the accusation that some of her photos were not her own, why was Shéhérazade not given the option to defend herself? What possible justification could Flickr have for deleting first?

   More importantly, can I copy an image from your account to mine, then flag your image and report it as stolen and have your account deleted without you having a chance to defend yourself? Yes, the Flickr staff is telling us, yes I can.

2. Flickr offers no explanation or help for customers looking to get out of the Flickr doghouse - If you do somehow manage to get a notification from Flickr instead of being deleted outright, don’t expect any help from Flickr as to why you’re being warned or even what you need to do to avoid such warnings in the future. Allow me to cite from Flickr’s form letter which it sends out to people who’ve been moderated:

   To demonstrate that you understand what content in your photostream is not appropriate for the “safe” areas of the Flickr site, we ask that you moderate all the public, private, and friends/family content in your photostream within the Flickr Community Guidelines.

   In other words, you have to guess what you did wrong and if you don’t know then Flickr is not going to waste its time explaining it to you. You have to “demonstrate” that you’ve suddenly developed a sense of what’s decent and pure that’s identical to that of the Flickr staff. And if you can’t do that then tough nuts to you.

   This isn’t a business way of doing things, it’s an elementary school teacher way of dealing with problems. Flickr is basically sending its users to the corner to “think about what they did” and expecting them to use their psychic powers to come up with the answer. They’re acting like a petulant high school girlfriend and expecting you to know how you’ve offended them without any clues.

   The first notification a user receives that they’ve broken the rules reads

   Use your common sense about whether or not your content is suitable for a global, public audience. If the answer is no, you need to filter it from public view.

   And this vague tut-tutting is all the information you get about why you’re being warned. There’s no identification as to which images are in violation contained in the email. None at all. It’s assumed that you already know which images are in violation because it’s assumed you did it on purpose.

   Flickr is starting with the assumption that you have a flagrant disregard for their policies.

   Now, at this point I should point out that you can ask for a “review” of your account if you’ve had your account status changed instead of being outright deleted. Don’t expect that review to be informative, however, as you’ll most likely get this:

   Examples of content in your photostream that needs to be moderated:

   Examples. Not a list of which images were part of the original complaint, not a list of images in your stream that are in violation, just one or two examples of what could be considered in violation. As I said, Flickr assumes you already know which images of yours are naughty.

   I know, you’re thinking, “but Steve, Flickr doesn’t have the time to go through your account and let you know each and every image that’s in violation!” Which is a great argument except that, as we’ve already seen, they’re going to review each and every image in your account if you ask to get un-moderated.

   The notification continues:

   You should also know that if we receive another report about your content or conduct, it’s very likely we’ll terminate your account.

   Two complaints and you’re done. No review, no options for you. If two people don’t like you, you’re done.

3. Flickr staff gets defensive when customers complain - Google for Flickr and you’ll find lots of pages accusing them of “censorship”, which is absolutely retarded. Flickr is not a government agency. But read a little deeper and you’ll find links into Flickr’s Help Forum. Read it and be alarmed at the number of times “Heather” gets fed up with a thread and closes it for no other reason than she doesn’t like the direction its headed. She actually seems incapable of not getting defensive when Flickr is accused of impropriety. Heather completely fails to understand that, when people are argumentative with them, they’re argumentative because Flickr has destroyed months, sometimes years of work and connections on the part of users, users who in many cases have paid Flickr to keep their content. Many photographers use Flickr as a sample portfolio. Having that work at risk of being removed without a trace and without recourse on the part of the customer puts a lot of people on edge. Heather, rather than address these concerns, bristles at them and takes her Flickr ball and goes home.

4. Flickr’s terms of use are maleable, and become whatever the staff needs them to be - Read Flickr’s Community Guidelines. Notice anything missing? It’s the definitions of what’s acceptable and what’s not. The Guidelines uses phrases like “If you would hesitate to show your photos or videos to a child, your mum, or Uncle Bob, that means it needs to be filtered.” That’s a pretty broad stroke. My Uncle Bob drinks and watches wrestling and “Trailer Park Boys”. Your mum goes to church and believes that “stem cells” means “dead babies”. By not defining “unacceptable”, Flickr has left themselves the out of manufacturing violations to use to support their actions.

   In fact, Flickr’s own application of its made-up rules has been shown to vary from month-to-month and week-to-week. Photos that were included in Flickr’s own Explore by Flickr staffers have later been marked inappropriate by other Flickr staffers.

5. Certain Flickr staff have been shown to be heavy handed in their application of the rules, yet Flickr defends them - Poke around complaints about Flickr long enough and you’ll find that an overwhelming majority of complaints centering around Flickr over-moderating accounts involve one name - Terrence. But don’t mention this in the Flickr Help Forum. Dig up threads in the Help Forum that name names and you’ll find a lot of people saying “My account was deleted by [NAME REMOVED BY STAFF]!” In other words, Heather is, again, getting defensive and removing Terrence’ name just because she doesn’t like that people are pointing out that is he who is behind a majority of account closures and moderations. In one Flickr help thread where someone accused Terrence of acting out of line, Heather responded with an extremely defensive, “Don’t accuse Flickr staff of going rogue!”

   Well, Heather, if Terrence hasn’t “gone rogue” and started applying the rules with puritan zeal then the person he’s getting his orders from certainly has. Is it you?

Sadly, there’s not much in the way of an alternative to Flickr. Yes, there are photo hosting websites, but none of them have developed the access and following that Flickr has. They’re using this as leverage against their own users. Play our mind games or we won’t let you play at all.

Of course, there are a lot of Flickr users who say “I’ve never had a problem with them”. Neither have I. But doesn’t it concern you that the first time you do have a problem with them is the time your account is deleted without warning?

Now, heavy-handed tactics from web sites is nothing new. I myself recently had a run-in with a division of the Gawker network in which it was pointed out to me by one of the editors that they’re Gawker and they’ll do whatever the hell they damn well please thank you very much. That’s not going to kill Gawker, their editors being dicks. It might cost them a few readers, but they’ll make them up fairly quickly.

But this tactic of Flickr’s, this punishing users first and then refusing to listen later, will hurt Flickr, and hurt them very quickly.

No, they’re not going to close because of this, but they’ll definitely lose a large portion of their high-quality contributors, contributors who are providing Flickr with the material that brings people to their site. See, unlike Gawker, Flickr feeds on user contribution, and driving users away, especially those who are giving you the content that gets hits, is not going to help them. No, this won’t be the literal end of Flickr, but they’re going to lose huge portions of their market.

And if there’s anything Yahoo should be intimately familiar with, it’s the impact of losing market share.