Samy and Amy Bouzaglo, we salute you!

Even Gordon Ramsey gave up on them. Then they were mocked relentlessly on Facebook and Reddit.

Don't bother with the Reddit thread -- most of it was deleted, possibly because the Bouzaglos made legal threats.


The Buzzfeed entry seems to be the best overview of what happened.

Gawker covered it. Local media covered it. Have a look at their Yelp page, if you dare.

Plus, she spent time in prison many years ago, for bank fraud.


The videos will make you cringe. Fair warning. I don't think they were staged, even though they are beyond belief.

Forbes covered it. As did Huffington Post and CNET.

They were keeping the tips, which is illegal. As well as misrepresenting where their food came from, AND abusing the waitstaff, and some of the customers. Plus charging absolutely insane prices. The business is apparently still in operation.

After seeing this story, I am forced to surrender. Tossing out all the other links I've been saving.

Go ahead, move to beautiful sunny Scottsdale. Enjoy the fine cuisine.

Post something, she says. Post anything.

Fine.

I thought STFU Parents was a funny blog. Sadly, she's being vilified all over the place, for being "too negative" or crap to that effect. Bullshit, she's too honest. Yuppie assholes can't tolerate honest. (Needless to say, the even-more-horrible Get Off My Internets really likes her.)

If you need t-shirts that are vomitously cute and excessively nerdy as well, you might need Tee Turtle.

Wait, I have an idea! Let's talk about/laugh at Bitcoin! For example, if you need proof that it's just a big scam, Bit Potato might be helpful. You could always try a Bitcoin "hedge fund", if you're really stupid. Hah. And if you're still not convinced Bitcoin is a success, consider the magazine. And speaking of crime, one of the most notorious uses for Bitcoins is for buying illegal drugs on Silk Road. So, consider that Forbes magazine is now running articles about Silk Road's founder -- replete with "quotations". The FBI and DEA want to nail the guy so badly, it's not even funny. But they still have no idea who he is or where. So, it's funny anyway.

I keep being told, what The Onion is to general news, Reductress is to "women's magazines".  And like The Onion, it could be quite a lot funnier.

Satisfied now?

Kiss your Web goodbye.

Well, not so much a demise, but a major change. Many popular websites are slowly declining in market share, and have done so for the past few years -- with no end in sight. Soon the Web will be completely different from the one we've known and loved/hated since 1994. As I already pointed out, Twitter is declining in popularity with some speed.

First of all, against all expectations and reason, the monster Google has been declining in popularity. This helps to explain why Google killed off so many of their "projects" in the past two years.  (The massive "blip" in July 2012 was apparently a technical screw-up by Alexa, and appears on most of their charts.)

Yahoo's financial and managerial woes are easy to see in its traffic chart. In 2000, Yahoo was far and away the world's biggest and most popular web portal, and "unassailable". It appears to be headed for "ghost site" status, albeit slowly.

Microsoft, you say? MSN? Ha ha ha.

 
Bing, the mighty "Google Killer", isn't. They're spending billions to promote it but it's still a very distant second.









CNet, once the premier destination for tech news, is declining, probably because there's so much competition for a relatively small audience. In the 1990s the Web was a nerd's paradise. Those days are over.

I'm happy to report that "old-fashioned" blogs and communities, with the "traditional" geeky focus, are all going down the drain. Good fucking riddance. (No wonder you can't post anything "controversial" on Metafilter or Boing Boing anymore. They are dying of paralysis. See you in hell, Mr. Doctorow, you little shit.)

So much of Web 2.0 owes its existence to Pyra Labs, creators of Blogger. Pyra associates sold out to Google and went on to create Metafilter, Twitter, various personal blogs that are still popular with tech people, and to become the "cream" of the "digerati".

Soon, Pyra, and its "great creation", will be footnotes to history -- if that.

It's sad to see Digg go like this, since they've actually been working hard to become a good, varied and honest news aggregator. Not that anyone cares anymore -- if they do get any media coverage, it's usually a snarky putdown. That's something Web 2.0 specializes in. Kevin Rose is still a drunken asshole, though.








Which websites are increasing their traffic? Well, for one thing, the Web is becoming steadily more Chinese. Major Chinese-language portals like baidu.com and sino.cn have been gaining steadily for years. Russian sites like yandex.ru are also gaining ground at the expense of English-language portals, but not to the same extent. The slow penetration of broadband into those two countries seems to be a major reason for their late arrival to the "party". Or freak show, if you prefer.

For whatever arcane reason, Pinterest and Tumblr have been stealing the eyeballs normally expended on more traditional properties. Millennial "hipster" types apparently love them. When it first started, tech bloggers regarded Pinterest as a joke. Not anymore.

The only (and I mean ONLY) major Google project whose traffic has been improving in recent years? YouTube. Combined with the steady increases in other video-delivery systems, the Web is becoming an audiovisual drug delivery system, foremost, while its "traditional" uses for discussion and delivery of textual content have basically peaked.

 

And in 2012 the biggest winner of all, Facebook, came within striking distance of pushing Google out of the #1 spot, for the first time in more than ten years. Google not being #1 would have been unthinkable not long ago.

Facebook has turned itself into Website for Dummies. Deliberately programmed to generate obsessive behaviour and "socialization", it completes the popularization of a once-arcane communications system. From a digital "playground" into an addictive drug. Web 2.0 is essentially nothing more than a filthy heroin syringe.

And speaking of Wikipedia.......its traffic chart is a fucking mess, because it is a fucking mess. But it, too, is slowly declining. So much for "all human knowledge". From now on, it's reserved mostly for plagiarism by schoolboys and lazy journalists.



That's all I wanted to say. You can go back to playing Bejeweled and Pot Farm on Facebook now.

WOW ! ! !

I've got news for you, pussies: Twitter is declining. As you can see here, Twitter's daily reach, according to Alexa, has declined almost 50% since 2011. And according to stories like this, it's because the teenagers are getting sick of "social media". Ha ha.

(Next time, I'll show you what major websites are declining, and which ones are growing. Some of it is completely bizarre, yet understandable. Facebook is evil in ways you do not realize.)

And speaking of Facebook, there's a guy called "Ken M" who specializes in trolling Facebookers with completely bizarre comments. They are being collected on this Tumblr. Because Facebook is now the most popular Moron's Destination On The Web, Ken is having an easy time of it.

Insane Artist Corner: I'm quite pleased to belabor you with yet another Deviant Art cutesy-pie cartoonist from Candy-Coated Hell. Lorna Brighton. Open vomit bag before clicking.

And that reminds me: if you type "vanellope" into Deviant Art's search bar, you will get more than twelve thousand images of the Wreck-It Ralph character. That's what DA is, a massive sugar rush (with occasional porn).

Wondering why the media is making such a stink over the Boston Marathon bombing? Easy. The East Coast "elite", the scum of the Ivy League, attends that race. It's "traditional". And when some pissed-off crank tries to blow some of them up, not only are they deeply offended that someone dared to try to kill them; they will use it to scare the rest of the country into voting for whatever law-and-order crap they want. Including CISPA, of course.

Have a bucket of shit

Night Shade Books is apparently having "financial troubles". As their Wikipedia article says, they already had "financial troubles" back in 2010, troubles so bad that the Science Fiction Writers Association put them "on probation". Meaning, they tried to screw their authors out of their contracts. The SFWA said "you can't do that".

This time, Night Shade's "problems" are so terribly severe, they have to tear up all the contracts they presently have, or sell them to other publishers. In which case, the writers get a new offer: a flat 10% of net income, not gross. (Which is a time-honored Hollywood way of saying "fuck you".)

What does Night Shade publish? Well, for one, they published one of the most important and award-saturated SF books of the 21st century, The Windup Girl. Another of their popular authors, Kameron Hurley, just had to blog about this little fuck-you deal. So did Michael Stackpole. And Phil Foglio, coauthor of the hugely popular and award-soaked comic Girl Genius (whatta horrible article), also had a few choice things to say about his publisher. (You know you're being bullshitted, when they say "we're the good guys!")

Hungry? Write some science fiction! Ya can't lose!

Tumblr has reached its nadir: Indifferent Cats In Amateur Porn.

American "millennials" are so blindly fond of Japan, that occasionally someone has to remind them it's really not an awesome paradise of giant robots and anime girls with big tits. This time, Cracked magazine gives it a try.

G'bye, Frank! Go away, Frank! Arrrggghh, Frank!

Insane Artist Corner: "I am a guy that is becoming a pink disposable feminine pad, and later on I will be pressed against a soft vulva for a woman's period. I'm looking for more open-minded friends who are comfortable about this fate for me. I have wanted to become a pad since I was ten years old."

Know what's funny about this story? It said nothing about the bucket of shit.


I see that Spamhaus, one of the few honest spam-blocking outfits left, is getting fucked over again.

Let's just go ahead and let spammers and crazies take over the entire Web. Then you won't have to look at my fucking blog ever again. Yay.

Auburn sucks, too.

A 10-year-old boy was crushed to death by a collapsing sign in the Birmingham airport, which was newly renovated. The result has been a hellstorm of worldwide negative publicity for Alabama's largest city.

But what do people in Alabama really care about?
Not that, apparently.

All they really care about is someone
named Harvey Updyke.

I could not have done a better job of
making Alabama look like a shithole.
Nice work!


Why are bronies bad?
How about this?


I have seen few blogs sicker and more trivial than KnobFeel. Compared to that, Shit Planet is a cornucopia of genius and love and pleasure.


Insane Artist Corner: whoever is doing this bullshit. Don't worry, Tumblr hasn't reached its "peak" yet. Noise Park was much funnier.


As this pointed out, the average lifetime of a Google "project" is about four years. Meanwhile, Google's traffic keeps dropping. The only really successful property they have, YouTube, was bought from an outside developer group. The biggest search engine and ad agency the world has ever seen, is running itself into the ground. Very slowly.

(I'm tempted to write an article about how the traffic to many major Web properties has been slowly declining for the past few years. Twitter, for example, is dropping like a stone. It's never discussed in the tech media.)


Did you know that California governor Jerry Brown owns a dog?
And that said dog has a Twitter?


The world is going to shit, and what do people in Snobby Wine Country complain about? Someone might be flying a toy helicopter over their precious land.


Yes, Mike, you are still a dick. Yawn.

Dedicated to Matt Preston

Things I love about Muff's forum:
the list is long, but would have to include
Matt Preston whining about his modular synth.

(It's in the Members-Only area, for good reason.
You have to create an account to see it.
Worth the trouble.)

This Salon article is a laff-riot.
Either that guy is an idiot, or he's being
paid by the Secret Service to spread
misinformation.
Yeah, most counterfeiters are stupid, but
the good ones never get caught. So making
such generalizations is not fully honest.
Besides, the serious counterfeiters don't
use crap like Photoshop. They use GIMP,
because it doesn't care what you edit with it.
And it's free.

You'll be happy to hear that Lake County's
sheriff is headed for the shitter. Bye, Frank!
"Cottingham said PORAC, which knows of Rivero’s situation, is not aware of any sheriff or police chief in California ever having received a Brady determination before.
Brown said he has spoken to other sheriffs about Rivero’s Brady matter, and that they have called it both unprecedented and an embarrassment to the profession."

Matthew Keys is a bad, bad boy. (Something the "news" fails to mention: Mr. Keys is a notorious media gadfly and "troublemaker". His Twitter is full of examples. This story smells of the Feds trying to silence him.)

Well-known computer-security researcher Brian Krebs apparently isn't "well known" to his local police. Because, despite Krebs having filed a warning police report six months ago about the possibility that hackers would try to "SWAT" him using local cops, the dumb bastards fell for it anyway. (Read the comments, they are full of hackers identifying the idiot who "SWATted" Krebs, threatening Krebs, or posting assorted incoherent ranting. Google the hacker's name, "PhobiaTheGod", he turns out to be all over the internet. And he is the sysop for one of the fraud sites Krebs had been investigating.)

I like how his eyes follow you around the room.

Adventures At The Intersection of blahblahblah

A yuppie prick tries to be "funny" and "clever" when he writes an article about his plumbing problems. The result will be something like this.


(Found on Boing Boing, still a leading place for prickery. And just by the way, if you go to Alexa to look at Boing Boing's traffic stats, you will learn that their traffic has dropped by more than 50% since 2011. Something the Boing Boingers have failed to mention to their "loyal readers". Guess the prickery is wearing on people.)


Fucking sick of hearing about Jim. Funny for 5 minutes, then not so much.


You will no doubt rush right out and buy a Desert Eagle .50 cal pistol, now that it's being made in the good old USA. A completely impractical, stupid, useless dick-waving exercise of a gun. (There are many YT videos of people injuring themselves trying to fire one. Even with both hands.)


Insane Artist Corner: This guy has the right attitude about Disney "properties".

Perhaps I should reuse these poster graphics somehow.


Did you know that "Bigfoot studies" are now a "legitimate area of scientific study"? Thanks partly to a Texas veterinarian named Melba Ketchum. She's been doing DNA analyses. Woo hoo. Plus there's a Wikipedia article. (oops, tagged "multiple issues", ha ha.)


Go and buy some New Mexico Pinon Coffee. That's an order.


Goat Roulette. That is all.

Or your dick. Anything fleshy.