Wondering why you see this message?
It’s because I’ve hit a problem lately with people hotlinking to this site. Most of the cute images you see here on the blog are redistributable things of questionable ownership to begin with, so do feel free to copy them. But when I say “copy” that means do a “Save As” and then upload them to your own blog/livejournal/myspace site, or whatever. DO NOT just copy the direct link and include that in an <img …> tag or similar, or do the same thing via one of the sites that hides the HTML from you.
This blog runs on my DSL line, and when a lot of people are all downloading images, that slows down everything else I do. Normally I don’t have tons of readers, and while hey, it’d be nice if that changed – though it would probably mean I’d have to WRITE more first, it would probably also mean it was time to move it to a real hosting provider who would then charge me for bandwidth overages :(. Either way, losing bandwidth to hotlinks to silly “forward” type images (the “Bible Warning” and the “Pancake Rabbit” in particular) is just a pain I’m not happy with.
We’ll see if that ugly link is sufficient to get people to stop. If not, I’ll just have to block them entirely, and then folks’ll just get the ugly “couldn’t load image” red x.