A mysterious, anonymous friend, co-worker or miscellaneous associate generously extended me the warmth of sharing with me a Larvatus Prodeo blog post about an upcoming British TV event dubbed “Wank Week”, involving hundreds of Poms gathering in a hall in London to wack off apparently to aid some charity.

They can do whatever they need to so that they feel justified about rubbing one out, I say. Who am I to judge?

To me, the most disturbing issue in this whole matter is that “Kim” of Larvatus Prodeo (what is that anyway?) managed to start her blog post about a large number of people masturbating and a lot of people having a “debate” without writing “mass debate”. Truly a sad story, Kim has really let herself and the Australian blogging community down here by not taking this most blindingly obvious of opportunities to indulge in high-school humour.

This emoticon’s story is also quite interesting because it went through several stages of evolution, as seen in Fig. 1 above.

Here you can see the emoticon graduated from its first inception as a static emoticon which MSN displays very small and boring in the chat window. Clearly, this is not the effect we were after with this emoticon so more work was needed. In the unlikely case that you want to download the boring version, it is provided for you as a normal static GIF file below. It does look the same enlarged size as the other emoticons but don’t be fooled — MSN will shrink it once you convert it to an emoticon.

The next version was the first animated one but it also failed to impress us with its predictable, even keeled and slow wagging side to side. If this emoticon was a dog, you wouldn’t assume that it was particularly happy to see you, would you? It is more of a dog that is begging for a biscuit at the side of the table but doesn’t really believe it will get a biscuit, yet it can’t leave the table lest it misses out. Thus this emoticon failed in its task of conveying the “Gold!” emotion successfully as well.

Finally, we struck gold (hah!) with the next iteration. This version was named “Goldy” because of either a mistyped filename or for some equally inane reason. Nevertheless what it lacks in name it makes up for in spirit, because you can’t deny what this emoticon conveys — wacky comedy gold! And that’s what it represents. So next time your friend says something hilarious you don’t need to just say “oh that was gold my friend, yes indeed you certainly have a sense of humour don’t you”…you can just slap this emoticon into his window and show your gratitude for his comic genius.

1. you can appear offline and still talk to people (this was a feature of ICQ about 8 years ago I think), which is cool if you’re trying to get something done but you still want to be able to talk to one or two people on your list.
2. you can click a single button on the conversation window to hide the display pictures, and it remembers this when you open a new window! Finally this has been added, the big waste of display picture space was annoying to me before; you really don’t want to look at a person’s display picture the entire time you speak to them and it just makes the conversation window even bigger.

I’ve still patched my version with APatch as well, because it does a bunch of other useful stuff like removing ads and useless crap I don’t want to use. You can download my APatch settings if you want; I’ve done all the hard work of deciding what’s necessary and what’s not and of course the way I use software is the best so you’ll definitely want to use my settings.