relief from visual twitching

[egypturnash]

If you use Privoxy and have mucked with the default settings to turn animated gifs back on, some web experiences become intolerable. Like scrolling down the comments left on an image on Deviantart - it seems like your user icon must be an animgif, and you get bonus points for every user icon sized image you have in your signature that twitches and flashes and animates, plus all the animated smiley things... aggh! All the tar-toofas and tar-tinkas! Noise, noise, noise, noise, noise!

So I configured Privoxy to deanimate gifs for any URL involving .deviantart.com - now I can click on DA-hosted links without having my eyes strapped to a tornado of pain.

---

Privoxy is mostly concerned with blocking annoying ads. Which reminds me that I never did the follow-up to the ad spigot e-mail. The people behind the checkout-line ad screens replied to my e-mail.

From:"Jeff Dickey" <jdickey@jps.net>
Subject: RE: Thanks!
Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2003 15:36:50 -0800

Peggy -

Jeff's away right now, but I'm monitoring his email and thought I'd
respond.  We try very hard to make the screens both informative and
entertaining, with recipes, travel, fashion and other types of content -
with a minimum of advertising.  We've also put the system on the Amber
Alert program for missing children and are adding other public service
content as often as we can. 

Ralphs is a great company with great people working for them - and good
customers like yourself.  I would be very interested to hear from you
regarding what type of content you would have preferred to see - 
content
that would have generated positive feedback from you.

I will also forward your email to other, appropriate people.

Thank you for your candid remarks.

Melanie Mincer

—followed, of course, by my entire message quoted back to me.

It's been sitting in my created-specifically-for-this-task Yahoo mailbox. I don't think I'm going to respond to it; the people there are obviously in heavy denial of how essentially vile their 'exciting new digital medium' is. Or they know it and don't care.

Comments

[barberio.livejournal.com]

Its just a short step from this to animated cerial boxes where the characters sing to you about the wholesomeness of their wheatie treats you know. Well, okay, a large step.

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

1. I use Proxomitron for my filtering. Privoxy sounds like a similar proigram.

2. There is no response that would be more appropriate for that email than to forward their adderess to a spam list. And if possible, get the guy on every junk mail list possible.