We must believe in free will — we have no choice.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Registration is open, the troll early warning systems are enabled, and here’s your chance if you’ve been waiting to join the Lizardoid Army.

Read the fine print. We’re not just sayin’ that. If you transgress the rules, your account(s) will be blocked.

UPDATE at 10/11/08 7:34:56 pm:

The door has closed, with 126 hatchlings.

Behind the scenes, the LGF Blog Engine code is being radically reworked, especially in pages with comments. By optimizing the HTML/Javascript/CSS design, we’ve managed to reduce the size (defined as the amount of HTML code it takes to render the comment in your browser) of each individual comment by about half.

Half, I say. Half.

This is a very good thing, because until we implement Ajax pagination of comments (on the drawing board), reducing the size of each comment is the best way to reduce the size of the entire page. In a page with a thousand comments, saving 10 bytes per comment results in a 10K savings on the size of the page. (And these changes have saved a lot more than 10 bytes per comment.)

Most of the trimming took place in the various elements that make up the top line of each comment, what Stinky and I call the “meta” line; the line that contains the icon and name of the user who posted it, the time and date, and all those little icons for rating, favoriting, reporting, etc. There was a lot of duplicated functionality in that meta line, and it’s all stripped down now.

The meta line is the only remaining table in our main templates, because a table still gives the best display results in all browsers and resolutions. But this table is about as optimized and CSS-ized as we can make it.

The usual web monkey advice applies: if something exhibits odd behavior or refuses to work entirely, clear your browser cache and refresh the page.

As always with these tech threads, big ups to the grooviest Javascript library in the known world, jQuery, without which this would be immeasurably more painful.

In a cage match to the death between Germany’s Der Spiegel and Noam Chomsky, who would you root for? Interview with Noam Chomsky: ‘The United States Has Essentially a One-Party System’.

SPIEGEL: Do you prefer the team on the other side: the 72 year old Vietnam veteran McCain and Sarah Palin, former Alaskan beauty queen?

Chomsky: This Sarah Palin phenomenon is very curious. I think somebody watching us from Mars, they would think the country has gone insane.

When things get weird, reload.

— Stinky Beaumont

Gawker.com, the ethics-devoid pseudo-blog that published Sarah Palin’s private email, is now hawking another creepy little invasion of privacy: Sarah Palin’s High-School Grades?

But this is what happens when you race to the bottom and sneer at ethical behavior along the way; you get taken in by obvious fakes: Nutroots use my SAT scoresheet to forge ‘Palin Grades’.

Idiots.

Neo-fascist Austrian politician Joerg Haider has been killed in a car crash.

Austrian far-right politician Joerg Haider has been killed in a road accident, police reports say.

Haider died near Klagenfurt in Carinthia, his political stronghold. He was driving alone when his car came off the road and he suffered severe head and chest injuries, police told the Austrian APA news agency.

The 58-year-old was a former leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, and was known for his anti-immigration and anti-EU policies.

Police investigators in Klagenfurt told the BBC that investigations into the crash were under way.
He had reportedly been due to attend his mother’s 90th birthday celebrations later in the day.

“For us this is the end of the world,” the deputy leader of Haider’s Alliance for Austria’s Future, Stefan Petzner, told Austrian news agency, APA.