This is the last post.  The MKX® has shut down. It’s been a great five years. The website will remain online for now and then vanish into the great internet graveyard, like many other websites before it.

Thank you for your readership and comments.

The MKX® Staff

Update 4/9/2008: As most of you guessed, this was an April Fool’s joke. The MKX® is here to stay… for now.

I did a little bit of reorganization in the site. There were a good amount of posts mostly under Keep Austin Weird and Austin Nights that didn’t really fit in so well.So I created Life of Marcos and moved a bunch of old posts there.In case you care, which you don’t. 

I updated The MKX® Photo Central to the latest version of Zenphoto (1.1).

The template is newer too, and a little better IMO. One of the cool new features is the publication of an RSS feed, for that small subset of readers that a. Want to find out whenever new photos are added and b. Know what RSS is an use some sort of RSS reader (Google Reader is quite nice, you should check it out). There’s also a search box and the ability to tag. I don’t know how useful that’s going to be.

Let me know if you find any problems. So far it appears to work well, but it feels a little slow and I don’t know if it is Zenphoto’s fault or my hosting service’s. We’ll see.

For those keeping track:

I broke up the now non-existent category Austin at night (and day) into two more specific, not very cleverly named ones: Keep Austin Weird and Austin nights. I think I might do some more breaking up in order to keep things more on-topic. I’ll sleep on it.

Also, I’ve added a new link to the sidebar: La Parolis. I’m not sure whose it is but from the looks of it, it must be one of the split personalities of an otherwise normal girl (or maybe it’s a guy?!). She uses proper punctuation and receives way more comments than The MKX® does. It’s in Spanish.

And I removed a bunch of blogs that are not being updated anymore. Shame on the authors. You’ve been un-Experienced®. Boom!

To be honest, The MKX® Gift Shop has not exactly overtaken Wal-Mart in sheer sales volume yet.

However, a big step in the right direction happened this morning when I received an invoice for and order of one of our most popular items: Ugly Nun Thon (pictured below), placed by a Susan from California… whom I’ve never met but is listed in IMDB as an actress (could it be the same Susan?).

That’s pretty cool by itself, but there’s more: This order was not for 1, but for 7 (yes, seven) thongs. The mere idea of Susan and six of her Hollywood actresses or Victoria’s Secret model friends wearing underwear with my face on it is mind blowing. The idea that maybe she bought them all for herself so she can wear them every day is, frankly, creeping me out, but exciting nonetheless.

Susan, I’m not revealing your full name here but if you ever happen to bump into this blog, we’d love to hear what you thought of our fine products.

Incidentally, last Saturday the Ugly Nun herself re-emerged at a Brazilian party (proof).

Note from the Editor: The staff of The MKX® is held to the highest journalistic standards. The information presented here is authentic and not a ploy to generate more sales.

I’ve been waging a relentless war against spam for year on multiple fronts. And I’m losing.
My brilliant catch-all strategy/use hundreds of email addresses so I can identify the bastards that give up my email and then do who knows what backfired on me. I had to switch gears and it’s been a lot of work. You don’t want to know the details.

My previous email addresses became unusable long ago. I recently had to ask the owner of the kirsch.net domain to kill it. Sad. Don’t send me email there, it hasn’t been in use for years anyway. All spam.
I use spam filters. I train them. On both Mail.app and on Thunderbird.
And still, the Viagra advertisements will not stop!

Ok, I’m not alone here, and sadly many have learned to live with it. But this is not the point of this post (just some venting). I want to talk about a different kind of spam. Not the kind you get in your email mailbox, but the kind us bloggers and webmasters need to deal with in our websites.

Yes, The MKX® has comment spam problems. I’ve tried things before and they helped a lot but did not eliminate the problem. I still get many spam comments that I just delete. Sure, they never make it to the website but I’d say that roughly 80% of the comments made on this blog are spam. A real pain in the ass for me.

Now, I use the excellent WordPress for this website, and so do millions of others (even my mom uses it!) so I can imagine thousands of russian hackers putting together perl scripts to spam the hell out of every WordPress blog out there. Fair enough, more bang for the buck.

But how, oh how in the world did it ever get to this?

Next on this series… La Polla Defaced, Jinuj.net, and a worthy CAPTCHA.
to be continued…