perfidy

Well, I'm back, and just in time for World War III, it seems.

Hearing from Buckethead out of the blue was a welcome rekindling of an old friendship. I spent a lot of time blogging here, snarking, and shitposting before that was really a thing. Now everybody's doing that on Xwitter, or Bluesky, or Threads (my hangout of choice), or even CounterSocial (my other hangout of choice). Nevertheless, before there were Tumblrs and Substacks and everything else, there was Blogger, where I cut my eyeteeth on this type of stream-of-consciousness posting, and that led to an invitation to join the Ministry. And now, an invitation to rejoin it. There's just me and Buckethead now, but with luck, we may yet run down the old crew. And maybe even find a few new faces.

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This is the fifth (or sixth) incarnation of a website that first staggered, drunken and confused, from primordial ooze in the long ago days of 2003. 

Perfidy has had a sordid history of wooing and then discarding hopeful blog platforms. The first victim was blogger, where perfidy masqueraded under modestly clever nom-de-net "Johnny Two-Cents’. It was only weeks before frustration with the limitations (if not the cost) of blogger led to its unseemly abandonment.

Then began the ambitious task of creating our own blog. The first blog that actually had the name Perfidy lived on the expression engine platform. It was rudimentary and frankly rather sad. The second effort saw improvement and actually approached mediocrity. For an absurdly long time, that blog remained visible for the simple if lame reason that we never bothered to export its content. It’s departure into the outer darkness was little noticed. 

The third incarnation of perfidy (and the fourth overall, for those without a program) saw the big move to Wordpress and the kicking-to-the-curb of an increasingly outmoded and unpopular Expression Engine.

Giddy with the possibilities of Wordpress theming and high as a kite generally, the perfidy design steering committee selected an ill-fated experimental design. This was nearly instantly shit-canned in favor of the fourth incarnation (whose own colophon you can read) and by far longest-lived of all perfidy flavors. 

As the demands of work and children took their toll, ministers fell away. Buckethead was the last to fall, and certainly most guilty. The blog staggered on with a single minister. After a nearly four-year lapse a fortuitous (nigh on to miraculous) intersection of increasing skill and increasing time allowed this, the fifth incarnation, to take shape. 

In what is now a dirty habit, Wordpress was left crying at the altar. This new and shiny Perfidy is on yet another new platform: Drupal. This also marks the first time in almost a decade that all of the content is in the same place. Many immigrant laborers, toiling in the code mines deep below the Perfidious fortress retreat suffered greatly so that you might easily read the random thoughts of a passel of overprivileged retards from 2005.  

Though this grand new Perfidy in many regards replicates the look of the old and lame previous Perfidy, it is in fact actually and entirely new. In designing this new theme, there were two primary considerations:

1. Recapture the unique perfidious magic of the previous design
2. Change it so that aging eyes can actually read the damn thing

The Ministry design steering committee believes that both of these objectives have been met. Because no sane developer starts from scratch unless threatened with grievous bodily harm, the perfidy theme was stolen in large part from the work of others. Most notably in this case from the Writer theme by Bryan Braun. From his own description, he valued:

• Brutally simple design
• Fantastic typography
• Support for code snippets

That third item won't likely be a huge factor here, but we liked the first two a lot. If Bryan saw what we did with his menu, he'd probably hate that; but mostly we kept to his excellent design. Some changes include the aforementioned menu (moved to the side in memory of perfidies that have gone before), the very same link colors we've used since the start, the category icons that we love so much, and a few other minor changes. Body text is Merriweather, meta text is Lato. Enjoy, and tell us what you think.

As the title says...

It came to my attention that the original explanation of why this blog is named the Ministry of Minor Perfidy, or 'perfidy' for short, is not easily available. While the most dedicated and assiduous readers could likely track it down, it is our goal here at perfidy to make things easy.

Back in July of aught 3, we had this to say:

In his most recent bleat, Lileks tosses this out:

When I hear a speech like Blair’s, I have to check the calendar. And the calendar is usually wrong. It may say 2/23, or 7/16, or 4/30. But I know what the date is, and the date is 9/12. It’s going to be 9/12 for a long time to come.

While I’m on the subject of Lileks, I should mention that we shamelessly stole the name of our blog from one of his bleats.

In a bleat shortly after the beginning of the war, but before American troops reached Baghdad, Lileks had this to say:

These pictures are fascinating - it's a capital in wartime, and it looks like it's had a few bad gas main leaks, nothing more. The giant black plumes of fire come from oil trenches set alight by the Iraqis, and looking at them from above you realize they make excellent visual markers for incoming bombers. (If they needed such a thing, which they don't.) The first picture shows a Presidential Palace - two words that ought not cohabitate, really - and it's had the crap blown out of it. Across the street is a gigantic assembly building of some kind, perhaps the National House of Enthusiastic Rubber Stamping. It's untouched. I'd wager a five-spot that they left it for whatever legislative body comes next. There's no sign of bombing anywhere else, except for a small building down at the bottom of the picture; perhaps that was the Ministry of Minor Perfidy, or the State Bureau for Interrogative Dentistry. Something naughty happened there, in any case. I'd thought that the first phase of the air war would see the atomization of all the palaces, but perhaps that's not so; good. Turn them into bed & breakfasts. Give every iraqi citizen a coupon good for one free night in a room in the palace. Thin Mints on the pillow, courtesy the US Military.

The phrase just caught us, and we ran with it. If you’re going to steal, steal from the best.

Once you've commented here on perfidy, the kobolds and goblins running on their treadmills in the dismal subterranean engines that power our website will remember you. You won't have to have your comment languish in purgatory - it should appear immediately. But if your comment doesn't appear, it means that for some reason the vicious spam filter monsters were alerted, and they ate it; or you are a first time commenter.

So, if your comment doesn't immediately appear, or within the next couple hours, please feel free to use the contact thingy in the left sidebar to send us an email.  We've had a several of these over the last couple months, and I don't want people to feel left out or discriminated against.  Because perfidy stands four-square against discrimination and leaving-out.

When Aretae blew through a grand of posts, I was of course curious as to how many posts I've written.  The answer was less than obvious.  I could tell immediately that since the migration to WordPress in 2007, I'd written 142.  (Counting this one, that is 144 now.)  But we've migrated through three CMS platforms in the seven plus years that this blog has been around.  The earliest Blogger posts were rolled into Expression Engine in 2004, so they should be in that count.  But I couldn't get into the EE control panel, so I had no idea how many posts I wrote up to 2007 and the second migration.

With a timely assist from Patton, I was able to use another way to get into a crippled version of the cpanel, and saw that I had written 811 posts.  So, 955.  Wait a minute, though - in seven years of blogging I hadn't even matched what Aretae has written in a year?  That can't be right.  It turns out, for some reason lost to time, there are two Buckethead users in the old system.  So, the number jumps to 1848.  More respectable - considering that I've not blogged at all for months, if not years at a time.

Then it occurred to me that most of the posts written as "The Ministry" were actually written by me.  Assuming 75% of those are mine on the old system, and the seven since we moved to WordPress, that makes about 1915.  I probably broke a 1000 posts sometime in 2005, I'm guessing.  I'm averaging about a post a day, these days, so I should clear the double-M, two thousand sometime in the early part of October.  Post 229 should be it, or close enough.

Welcome to the newest version of The Ministry of Minor Perfidy. This is the fourth incarnation since Perfidy popped, blooded and squalling, into the blogosphere in the Spring of 2003. The first effort was a rudimentary effort built on the Expression Engine platform. Our first redesign stayed with EE, and because we didn't want to go through the effort to import everything into WordPress for #3, it still exists, and can be viewed here.  I still kinda like that one.  The penultimate version saw a move to the WordPress platform, and a precipitous and ill-considered dive into an experimental format.  As of today, it sleeps with the fishes.

So here we are with the new hotness.  Or so we hope.  The theme for your present-day perfidy is a pared-down, simple design that in some respects harkens back to our first attempts at web design.  But this time, we know a lot more about html, css, php and other acronyms.

The starting point for Perfidy's layout was inspired by Oulipo, an elegant theme created by talented web desinger Andrea Mignolo.  After cutting out the few bits we didn't need, we made some changes: like the post meta thingy that hangs to the left of the posts and a new format for the archive pages.  We brought in the category icons that have been a tradition with Perfidy since v2.0.  We also brought over the link colors we've used since we started.  Other colors were removed - except for the links, the new theme is completely monochrome.  The fonts are also different.  The body text is Georgia; titles and incidental text are set in Hoefler Text or Constantia, depending on what you're using to look at us.

So look around, see what's different.  You will appreciate being able to scroll through all the content, rather than just the two most recent posts.  Email us on the contact page.  Click the magnifying glass in the top left corner to search.  Leave a comment and subscribe for notifications on that comment thread.

Because this bitch is under construction. Most features should be fully functional by sometime on Tuesday. In the meantime, please enjoy this 90% complete webpage, free of charge.

Believe it or not, I'm redesigning Perfidy again.  I've had a whole bunch of design ideas I've wanted to play with, and I'm actually finding that I have a little bit of time and motivation to post again.

So go figure.  I've spent a whole day designing a website that I use once a month on average, and that no one else reads.  That's productivity, dammit!

Perfidy is now at WordPress version 2.8.4, and theoretically safe from blog eating monsters.  That's the upside.  Downside is that some of the old plugins apparently aren't very compatible with the new version, and some things are hosed.  Like the "open sesame" button up there to the right, fer instance.

I think I might just redesign the whole site, seeing as I'm going to be doing that same thing for two others over the next couple weeks.  And seeing as I'm the only one who's posted anything over the last year or so, and damn little of that, well, I'm not even going to solicit input from my fellow ministers.

I am Perfidy.  I control the horizontal.  I control the vertical.  And no one really cares.

'Cause of the scary wordpress-eating-internets-worm, we are upgrading perfidy. Perfidy may behave oddly for a while. But since this will affect, by our calculations, as many as .001 persons, on average, don't worry too much.

By the close of FY09, all Ministers are required to own one of these. The expectation is it will be worn at all Ministry functions, in the creation of Ministry content, and at all viking metal shows. This directive supercedes prior guidance regarding the wear of perfidious garments.

In the event of zombie attack or Ragnarok, continued wear is at Minister's discretion.

[wik] Of course no outfit would be complete without a matching purse.

The Ministry was seemingly contacted by Bill Murray last fall at a crisis moment.

Expressed as a dream manifestation, the message- a plea for help from Murray- should have come via the Ministry Dreamgate Terminus at Muscle Shoals but appears to have been shunted to the south Asian substation in Karachi for reasons unexplained at this time. There it languished for several seconds before redirection to Byzantium Prime, Domnu-West, and Lytani, and finally going unflitered straight into my cerebral receiver. Had the communication been routed normally through MDT Muscle Shoals, I might have been able to decode, interpret, and react to it properly. As things stand, the misdirection allowed it to become garbled and the message was lost, nested in imagery of golfcarts and college reunions.

A shame, really, because it was the first oppoprtunity to deploy the Ministry's newly-formed Bill Murray High-Energy Reaction/Interdiction Team, formed for just such an emergency.

I've already tasked the Directors of the dreamgates in question to investigate the ethereal messaging in the relevant timeframe. Ministers or minions who have ideas about how this could have happened are asked to comment below.

End communication.

Over the last two years, the Ministry has taken on a new mandate. Aside from our work ensuring that small-time cheats, liars, scammers, skivers, scoundrels, sharps and thieves are well subsidized in their retirement (hey - someone's gotta do it!), protecting the world against bigger human-based threats (dictators, wingers, mimes), monitoring ongoing developments on the nightmare front (zombie infestation, alien invasion, enslavement by giant fighting space robots, enslavement by regular Earth robots, Blue Man Group), we have also founded the Perfidy Home for Wayward Bloggers.

Founding ministers Johno and Buckethead first came upon GeekLethal plinking rats with a .50 caliber frigging handgun and muttering about zombie attack. We knew immediately he would be a great asset. It was only afterward that we found out that his cat was also an emissary to the lords of the Outer Darkness, and an expert in unholy contract law. Bonus! Ross, the most shadowy and mysterious of our number, was the next to join us. We think. There's a room for him in the Ministry Bunker and Catastratorium, and sometimes we hear noises from within. And sometimes the commissary shows evidence of a meal of moose steak and pouteen. But what we can be sure of is, since joining the Ministry's ranks, his coding skills have exploded and all the web applications of the world bear his subtle mark. When Patton first hove himself upon the shattered slates of our courtyard, he was a haunted and hunted creature of skin and bones, barely able to lift his head out of a puddle of his own sick. Now, he is a sleek and powerful creature of plastic and steel, and those who hunted him are just memories, if by "memories" you mean "their skulls are our goblets."

We agreed to let Mapgirl come on board for at least three reasons, leaving aside the fact that until she joined us this place was a total sausage party. First, her incisive wit and probing mind have increased our litigative and actuarial might tenfold. Second, her financial acumen has resulted in a drastic overhaul of Ministry assets. Some of the moldier parts of our centuries-old portfolio saw light for the first time since the age of pantaloons, and the truly stupendous fruits of three hundred years of compounded interest have been rolled into more modern investment strategies such as MITTS, STRIPS, and fabulously complicated Gamma scalping and delta hedging schemes that even Harvard Business School has yet to discover. Finally, she knits. The recent acquisition of EDog, one of our oldest and most loyal allies, was partially for the chuckles and partially for his skills in writing, forklift operations, and zombie deterrence. You can read his own introduction to himself here. And finally, we must hasten to introduce the latest addition to the Ministry, Kate, AKA Six Layer Kate, AKA Teeamora the Improbable, Potentate of the Lower Reaches. Both Buckethead and I know Kate from college (Clown College), and have long appreciated her sardonic humor, technical acumen, and incredible facility with code gnomes. She will be taking control of our massive, 300 Petabyte data center and the legions of pasty faced minions who keep it running. What she does with those minions is her business, just so long as the uptime on the Halo3 server stays about six nines... Welcome to Kate, and all hail!

*tap tap* Is this thing on?

Greetings and salutations, Faithful Readers! Or breathings and salivations as the case may be (if you're an asthmatic zombie).

I am Minister EDog, and this is my first Perfidious Post about All Things Dark, Evil, and Twisted (those things in particular cause the riding up of certain kinds of underwear). To celebrate this momentous event, I feel it my duty to do what I've done for a couple years now via email to other ministers - that of pointing you towards some of the oddities I've discovered in this magical digital world we've created. And barring that, just show you some Pretty Weird Shit. Being as my nickname is EDog, I thought I'd fire off some cannons of canine-ical canon. And if you're still reading after that fusillade, then we'll get along just fine.

Unlike certain other Ministers here, I am a carnivore, and cheerfully indulge in All Things Meat, whether seared, broiled, boiled, fried, braised, baked, spoken to in anger, or given a dirty look. I'll admit that one of my favorite breakfast foods is the Gas Station Hot Dog, a taste I developed back in The Day when I managed a 7-Eleven. Now you don't have to go to a gas station any more to experience that wonderfully creative flavor of not-quite-grade-A-meat product. You can get it delivered right to your door!

Many are those of us who have canine companions. I myself have a lovely Australian Cattle Dog with a penchant for breaking out of the house through screens when frightened by approaching storms. Yes, I know. Dog logic. But here we cook and clean for our dogs - at least, some of us do - and take care of nearly their every need except one. Sure, you've probably neutered your male dog, because you've seen the Public Service Announcements. But if you haven't because, say, you intend to breed the animal, you have to deal with certain, ah, libidinous instincts. Someone has finally come up with a solution for the problem of the horndog.

And last but not least, if your dog is still of a mind to sow his wild oats, don't pray for crop failure. Instead, learn to help him practice safe sexual recreation with a time-tested method with approximately a 98% rate of effectiveness.

I know you're out there...I can hear you breathing.

While I was checking out the wayback machine to find some old perfidy, I also found some old perfidy. Apparently just months before we acquired the perfidy.org domain, it was inhabited by someone from Singapore. For most of its tenure, it looked like this:

But it seems that he got tired of that, and it changed to this:

And then he got real tired of that, and it changed to this:

And shortly after that the domain lapsed and like a cave bear claiming an empty, ah, cave, we took over. Strange things you find on the internets.