On guest blogger Gareth Branwyn's My Wallet Just Got Raptured thread, we have Meowfaceman, comment 12:

My reaction:

Man, that's ridiculous. Let me look at these -- holy shit, does that wallet have a guitar pick carrier?.

I hate you BoingBoing. You make me spend money on retarded things ALL THE TIME. At the same time, however, I love you for it.

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Also in that thread, FutureNerd, comment #4

My new wallet http://tinyurl.com/leathervek reflects my ambivalence about pretension with its appearance of genuine hand-tooled hand-stitched leather laser-printed on genuine Tyvek.

Which in turn grabbed Gareth Branwyn, #8:

Woah. I dig the Mighty Wallet. When my current wallet gets raptured, I think I'm going to trade down to a Mighty Wallet. Pretty cool. I love the faux tooled leather. Tres summer camp.

Good comments, front page.

Modusoperandi, responding to markmarkmark in the Attenborough's response to creationists' hate mail thread, said:

markmarkmark "Jesus is my rabbi and all that is best in me is him and every mistake is my own."

One Night a man had a dream. He dreamed he was walking along the beach with the Lord. Across the sky flashed scenes from his life. For each scene, he noticed two sets of footprints in the sand; one belonged to him and the other to the Lord.

When the last scene of his life flashed before him, he looked back at the footprints in the sand. He noticed that many times along the path of his life there was only one set of footprints. He also noticed that it happened at the very lowest and saddest times in his life.

This really bothered him, and he questioned the Lord about it: "Lord, you said that once I decided to follow you you'd walk with me all the way, but I have noticed that during the most troublesome times in my life, there is only one set of footprints. I don't understand why when I needed you most you would leave me."

The Lord replied, "My precious, precious child, I love you and would never leave you. Also, you're being intermittently stalked by the Invisible Man."

Good one. Front page.

Over at Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel has an extremely funny and acidic post up about a viral marketer who appears to be astroturfing in our comment threads on behalf of Motorola. Boing Boing Gadgets commenters respond in kind, and a comment war of wall-to-wall LOL ensues. Go read the whole thing, please: Motorola, could you please tell your viral marketer to get out of our comments? (gadgets.boingboing.net)

Oh, and hey, Joel -- I'm so glad my boss isn't like that! I'm working for Boing Boing right now, and became a huge fan of the Yeti Robot Sex blog post genre. I especially like YouTube dance remix. It's awesome!

Adam Rice and Phillip Lamb were both unable to comment, so they sent me letters.

ADAM RICE:

I hope you're the right person to contact; if not, my apologies.

We need a better way for readers to tell us about technical problems. One of our suggested mechanisms is to have a front-page link to a form for reporting glitches, much like the link for submitting suggestions for stories. Until then, we'll all keep improvising.

The last couple of times I've tried to leave a comment on Boingboing, I've gotten the following error:

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Your comment submission failed for the following reasons:
Text entered was wrong. Try again.
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I admit this may be true in an epistemological sense, but in a formal sense, the text I entered was entirely innocuous.

Would you believe I've occasionally been getting that one too? I don't know why that error message turns up. I wish it weren't even in the system. It keeps giving readers the idea that we use automated content-based message filtering, and that something they've written has infracted the filters' rules.

Not so. The only content-based filters on Boing Boing are the people who edit it. If you get an error message saying "Text entered was wrong," it's the error message that's in error.

Back to Adam Rice:

The other interesting thing is that the dynamic.boingboing.net page where this appears shows me as logged out, although I am logged in from the main boingboing page, or gadgets.

I feel your pain. I had the same problem for a couple of days this week. David Harmon's reported it too.

My comments were not such pearls that the Internet cannot function without their presence, but I thought I'd bring it to your attention.

Well said, and thank you for bringing those problems to our attention.

Onward to:

PHILLIP LAMB:

Hi there - not sure if you're the right person to send this to, but I can't seem to find a tech email on BoingBoing's site. ... Hope I'm not inconveniencing you!

Not at all. We really do want to hear about technical problems.

I and other people have had trouble submitting comments lately, getting a "Text entered was wrong. Try again" error message.

It seems like the following is happening:

1. User logs in

2. User does logged-in user stuff, including commenting.

3. User goes to sleep, or hibernates, or eats a Polish Sausage or whatever.

4. User comes back to BoingBoing, bleary-eyed because it's 3am and when you gotta get your fix you gotta get your fix.

5. User's session has timed out (rut roh!) but due to either a caching bug or perhaps a session timeout bug, the comment form still shows up.

6. User submits a comment, but sadly it doesn't go through, and they see, "Text entered was wrong. Try again."

7. User wrecks their apartment with a frying pan.

8. User eventually logs back in and is able to comment normally.

We're sorry about your apartment--and, presumably, your frying pan.

This is my hypothesis, and I've tested it (somewhat) and it seems valid. Just letting ya know. I'll email this to whatever email address I can find for your admin, assuming I can find one.

Thanks! I'm pretty sure the Polish sausage is a local artifact. The rest, we'll have to have a look at.

What hardware and browser were you using? (Adam, same question.)

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UPDATE: Semiotix comments:

I'm very disappointed to hear that the "Text entered was wrong" message is simply an indication of some sort of login error.

I've gotten the message several times, and, assuming that it was autogenerated in response to wrong ideas, have modified my beliefs (and comments) accordingly until I reached--so I thought--right text, and therefore right thinking.

Now you tell me that I haven't been engaged in a Socratic struggle for truth all this past week? That I changed my beliefs for no reason?! Well, thanks for nothing.

Note: From time to time we're going to be promoting especially wonderful comments (for all values of "wonderful") to the front page. This is Pipenta in "The science fiction book art of Richard Powers" thread, writing in response to someone who looked at Powers' art and said he must have been on drugs.

These look so dang familiar. I read a lot of science fiction back in the sixties and seventies. I picked up a lot of it secondhand. I know I've had books with this cover art. I wish there were examples of what they looked like as finished book designs. I'd love to see the titles.

@ #2 About drug addicts...

Jeff, I think you are huffing something.

Having attended a couple of big-name art schools back in the day (and by back in the day, I mean in the late 70's when drug use was common and open) and having visited and met artists from a number of other art schools during that time, I can assure you that there really is no noticeable difference between artwork made by drug users and artwork made by non-drug users.

We could fill a gallery the size of Grand Central Station with art, half by people who never touched drugs and the other half by people who "inhaled". You would not have any clue. You'd have no way of telling which was which.

I'm not saying that substances get mixed up with chemistry don't effect art output. I'm saying you could not tell. There is no consistent style, or technique, no way you could tell. No more than you could tell from reading a passage of text if the writer had been drinking.

Being an artist, doing art, involves operating at many levels. There's a cocktail of components such as learned skills, physical dexterity, life experience, personality, perceptual ability and more. Those are just off the top of my head. Someone who does a lot of their art, be it visual or musical, dance or theater or the written word, has a lot going on when they do it. Some processes are very much the active here and now, some are happening at a deeper intuitive level. The latter are where your history and training and experience come in to play.

Some folks, folks who either cannot or will not do art, see artists as savant, mystical or idiot. It isn't magic. It isn't one process happening. Art is not the same combination of processes for everyone.

And stoners don't necessarily make paintings like these.

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