I can’t even begin to express how absolutely full of awesome this is.
There’s an online comic I read regularly called Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal that’s drawn by Zach Weiner. It’s a rather bizarro comic, lots of science fictiony type stuff, generally hysterical. Not long ago, he ran this comic:
The odious homophobic, anti-gay, anti-same sex marriage group, National Organization for Marriage (NOM) for some reason thought this was an anti-gay comic so they put it on their website (which I’m not linking here because they are such hateful tools.) When they did so, they didn’t save the image to one of their servers and then link to it. They hotlinked directly to the online comic. As soon as he found out about it, Zach, a rather liberal dude in his own right, saw an opportunity.
He replaced the image with another one. So, when people visited the NOM website, instead of the comic (which had absolutely nothing to do with anti-gay bigotry) they saw this:
Click for a larger image
Zach wrote about it on his blog:
N.O.M. N.O.M. N.O.M.
By ZachWeinerAround 9 this morning I got messaged by a few twitter followers that a group called National Organization for Marriage (NOM) had posted a comic of mine. This was the comic, which was in no way conceived of or related to gay rights issues.
NOM is a group whose major function is lobbying against gay marriage. They were made notorious for this video. They seem to have construed the comic to have some stance in favor of traditional sexuality. Apparently they don’t read my comics regularly.
My first response was to ask my followers to post some ascii dicks to their comment board. Unfortunately, they moderate their comments there. Then, someone told me that they had hotlinked the image. In case you’re not aware, “hotlinking” means the image they display is accessed directly from my database. That is, whatever image their computer requests from my computer, their computer gets.
This presented an opportunity.
I messaged my brother/webguru Marty Weiner, who sprung into action. He worked on figuring out how to change the image without affecting the SMBC main page while I worked on finding an image. My initial idea was to post some dirty pictures, but I figured I could get more traction if I went the classy route.
I settled on a rainbow flag and a quote. At first, I considered using a Harvey Milk quote, but I decided to go with someone I could only assume NOM favors: Mr. Thomas Jefferson.
The moment it went live, I encouraged my readers to check it out and get screencaps before the post went down. This had the unfortunate (though amusing) side effect of wanging their site. In case you’re not aware, “wanging” is when too many users try to access a server at once, causing it to slow down or shut down. So, their site crashed almost immediately.
BUT, not before I (and several others) got screenshots.
And, since I’m already on my soap box, I want to add: There seems to be this idea out there that action through the Internet has no important effect. Even people I really respect, like Jon Stewart, promote this idea. Well, today, I probably got a message of equality to over 100,000 people, among them members of the other side. This generation fights in a new way, but we fight just as hard.
Zach
PS: Thanks to everyone who helped promote this. Marty and I mostly did it for fun, but were pleased to see it struck a chord with so many people.
While I am just so in love with this whole story, I love that last line most of all:
So full of awesome that it’s spilling out all over the internetz.
I’m just sayin’…
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