oh the irony of it all

[rone]

So, Something Awful gets all pissy when people link directly to one of their images, thus leeching their bandwidth, so they'll sometimes replace it with a picture of a she-male or something similarly unpalatable to punish the leecher. And yet, in one of their own banner ads, they actually rip off our dearest sambushell (it's in the fourth frame of the animation).

Something Awful

jsam
(source page)

Sam, maybe you oughta send them a bill.

Comments

[mskala.livejournal.com]

Images on my Web site often turn up in postings on Web BBSes and journals and similar. The images from my recent comments on the Photoshop money block (http://www.livejournal.com/users/mskala/7727.html) did that a lot. I have strong views that in general, people should be allowed to make links to stuff without needing permission - but I find it quite annoying when the images I post are being embedded in pages that I can't read because they're on some private satellite-pirate BBS or in someone's friends-only Livejournal. It seems to me that if you want to share my content, you should share your content with me too.

So I've taken to redirecting links I consider abusive to the lead image from tubcat.com (http://www.tubcat.com/) (suitable for work, unless you're a professional Web designer), and I'm quite pleased with the results. When people see it where they expected one of my images, they immediately recognize that I have caught them stealing bandwidth, and it usually spawns a sub-thread of people expressing amusement on the BBS page where the deep-linked image had been posted (in those cases where I can read the BBS page). But they don't get angry, attempt to retaliate, or try to defeat the redirect, which is what I think they'd do if I used a directly hostile image like tubgirl or the late-lamented goatse. The bandwidth thieves recognize it as a fair cop, are amused by the funny picture, and then go away.