Citypages’s story on Plain Layne, including an interview with Odin Soli, fills in some gaps in the story.

“People have asked at what point readers began to suspect that Plain Layne was make-believe, and the answer is, from the very beginning.”

Unable to settle, it feels good to have something different on the horizon.

Kun yksittäisistä tv-ohjelmista lähetetään lehdistötiedotteita, on lähetykset kai syytä katsoa. Sekä BBC että CBS ovat haastatelleet ex-presidentti Bill Clintonia. Haastattelut esitetään:

• ke 7. heinäkuuta, klo 19.05 (TV1)
su 11. heinäkuuta, klo 19.00 (Nelonen)

Silmään tarttui myös uutinen, että Luupäiden luoja Jeff Smith saapuu vieraaksi Helsingin Sarjakuvafestivaaleille 18.-19. syyskuuta.

Siemens won’t be moving production to Hungary after more than 4000 workers agreed to work five more hours a week without additional pay. Hooray for capitalism!

I first heard about the Plain Layne story from Kottke, who has done an exemplary job summing up what’s happened. There are, of course, links to the various twists and turns, such as a discovery and a confession.

Plain Layne, as a hoax, is in no way wrong to me. But then again, I’ve never read her weblog—I might feel different if I had, and felt betrayed. While presenting yourself as someone you’re not isn’t nice (and I mean when interacting with other people, not when writing a journal or a weblog), it still seems funny—all this outrage over assumed identities—considering how often it was said in the early days of the Net that one of the great things about it was that it would afford people new ways to explore their identities.

Remember, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

My only gripe is that Plain Layne’s weblog has been taken off the Net. Why? So the cat’s out of the bag, and the journal’s been discontinued—this isn’t a reason to remove it from the Web. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much of it archived, either.

I support the right to write fictive journals without disclaiming them as such. But if such a creative endeavour is undertaken, isn’t it artistically reprehensible to take it down once you’ve been outed?

Some good-looking blogs I’ve come across recently: Airbag Industries, Simplebits, PixelChatter, Unreal Travels, most of them found via Cameron Moll’s “wicked worn” tutorial. I like the wicked worn look (despite the name), but I suspect the style will age quickly. No pun intended.

Boredom is not so much about having nothing to do at present. Boredom is more about the unlikeliness of this changing in the immediate future.

With a smile on her face and a telephone headset, this lady looking at Rasputin’s pickled member could be model from a photo on the site of a webhosting company.

The other day, while talking about comics, Emmi said: “Garfield can’t be anyone’s favorite cartoon character.”

I don’t remember exactly why this came up, we probably saw a movie poster in the metro, but there might actually be an explanation proving Emmi right. Slate has a story on how Jim Davis made Garfield purposely bland. Crafted as a purely commercial cipher, the secret of Garfield’s long lifespan has been that he doesn’t elicit strong emotions, which could lead risk overexposure.

A list of essential applications for Windows. I don’t know all the software, but I agree with most of the list. I prefer Tiny Firewall over ZoneAlarm.

Having had a few headaches with spyware, I downloaded WinPatrol (the first spyware-buster I’ve seen that hasn’t had serious integrity issues).

When real life looks like an ad. The caption reads: “Family members of a kidnapped and murdered girl take pictures of the dead bodies of the three men convicted and hung for the crime in Saudi Arabia.”