The National Organization for (Straight) Marriage, aka NOM, thought it might be cute to use February 3rd’s edition of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal to illustrate their perspective on heterosexual-only marriage, specifically, the point that only straights can marry because only they can procreate. The old-fashioned way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, NOM. Unfortunately, what they did was hotlink the webcomic, meaning that the image came directly from SMBC creator Zach Weiner‘s server, using his bandwidth and not NOM’s. This is a big no-no in the blogosphere. It’s considered rude, as opposed to saving the image to one’s own server. And that’s not the only problem.
Not only was NOM flat-out rude about using an SMBC comic to push its own point of view, it didn’t bother to ask SMBC if it shared their point of view. If you’re guessing that they don’t, you are correct. So, Weiner took action:
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.
And this is the image he chose, as it was seen on NOM’s site:
Predictably, NOM doesn’t want to remind its readers of this quote, so they’ve since taken it down and replaced it with the webcomic, but not before SMBC got screen caps while the image was up. But after “wanging” the site. (Or causing the NOM site to crash upon receiving a huge amount of traffic.) And that’s pretty sweet.
Let this be a lesson to any political-leaning sites out there: Don’t hotlink. People will find out about it, and they will not like you more for it.
(The Weinerworks via MetaFilter, title pic via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)
