Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=926094

**This is an official call for artwork.** Shortly after the announcement of the Popes passing last Saturday, I came to Renderositys galleries to see the reaction. And I found, almost nothing. So, I waited until the next day Sunday, still very little. By Wednesday, I decided Id stay up and make a memorial since I wasnt really finding any. I am grateful to the handful of people who have commented on my image. But I really want to see your feelings put forth in pixels. Especially since I feel I am coming at this as an outsider, Im a Mormon not a Catholic, but have great regard for the Popes work in standing up for moral virtue. With my explanation made I leave it to you, Aaron

P.S. If anti-Christians start posting to this thread Id strongly suggest not responding to what they say, but if you cant fight the urge IM them instead of having this degenerate into a flame session.

I also have noticed this lack of interest.

Stupidity also evolves!

Sadly, every year some great 20th century person passes away... this is in the nature of our mortal being. Much mourning is being done all over the world, so I think many people feels not the need to express it even if they feel it in their hearts. In the end, IMHO what this Pope would like it is more respect for ALL humans beings and more dialogue to end wars and incomprehensions, not great memorial speeches. If you want to do him honor, honour him in actions and not words :)

Well, I wasn't too crazy about the Pope, but will say you did a remarkable job on the portrait.

Mourning is a personal matter, whether or not a person choses to share how the feel on the gentleman in question is up to them. Many have gone to Vatican City, many others pray in their own church. Many others pay their respect in their own way. To solicate these type of images, however, strikes me as superficial at best. I respected the gentleman and I will not villify him now that he has passed on. I do not agree with much of his stances as head of the church but that is my own personal views. I can pay my respects in my own fashion, but I do not see the need to post a memorial here when there are so many venues and services that are performing such. This is the opinion of a non-practicing Catholic...

I think a lot of the lack of interest here darthuv isn't because of the Pope himself. First- it's too much. Too much on the news. To much saturation. Second- the clothing needed just dosn't exist. Show me a priest robe for M2 ? Third- the very nature of artist tends to make them non-conformist. The number of wicca, athiest, pagens, ect is FAR higher then in the normal population. Just the way it is. Plus protestants in the US and Europe far out number Catholics. Maby not in the whole world but in the richer countries that can afford (more) computers. To give you an example of what I mean NBC reported (at different times) that there are 66 million Catholics in America. But there are also 51 million athiest in the US too!!! Very close in numbers. And a 120 million "Others- Wicca, Pagens, Agnostics, Jews ect...". The rest are fundamentalist protestant aprox (90-100 million). So you see, the excessive wall to wall news coverage just gives em something to talk about other then Bush endlessly. But is NOT a major part of most peoples lives. Just the way it is! This is not a christian bashing post- but it is the country we live in. And it is why there is such a lack of interest. This is also why the current business practices around here have me stumped. Cutting off there nose despite there face.

Looking at the html source for the subject line in this thread, they all include what may be a unicode character (#65279). It doesn't display in my browser, and it causes the end of the subject line to become corrupted in my browser.

Anyway, I'm wondering if this could be some kind of security weakness somehow.

P.S. geo - "Cutting off there nose despite there face." That's gotta be the most creative use of syntax I've seen this week.

lol :) Thanks- I try :)

mateo_sancarlos, Maybe you can answer this... about half my spam lately seems to be garbage characters: every letter has some diacritic mark above it. I use a webmail reader (text) and assume that this is from Russian porn sites wanting to hook up long distance charges or something equally exotic. I wonder though, if these are foreign (Russian, Chinese, Swahili) charcters not getting translated into the Roman alphabet, or is there some redirection code involved? I peeked at a couple via "view source" and saw what might have been phone numbers, but I'm not curious enough to check them via an html reader. Carolly

Carol, those characters could be designed to bust Bayesian filters, which are attuned to recognize actual spam words, and which can't read words with asyntactical characters in them.

However, what you're describing sounds more like a y-encoded web bug, a tiny image that would show in an html-reading e-mail client as a dot or small square. They like to use yenc now, because it statistically has a much lower overhead than the older encodings, meaning less of a hit on the zombie machines that are sending the spam out.

The Unicode character that is present in the preceding subject lines, other than mine (#65279 (FEFF)) is a zero-width no break space. My suggestion is to disable all html, font or unicode input to the subject field, which I thought they did already. Whether it's a Unicode non-breaking space (#65279), a regular non-breaking space (nbsp), or whatever, I don't think it's a good idea to have such characters in that field. Just a gut feeling.

P.S. I think the Pope memorial is a good idea. If I were an artist, I would contribute to it. The Pope was maligned for decisions against women, gays, abortion et al., but he was basically an exceptional man, a good man, but some of his decisions were forced by two items out of his control: dogma and hierarchy.

Thank you... that means I should just continue deleting the little buggers and put my curiosity to the side. There are a lot of good people, extraordinary people, on this planet, endangering their lives or health for the betterment of others, but nobody is asking for their instant sainthood. People should wait at least 50 years to see what the real measure of a woman or man is, without the clouding of teary emotion over clear-eyed judgement. He will be judged in part by those he elevated to the rank of cardinal... perpetuating that dogma and covering the scandals. He was polyglot and charming, but his actions, and his inactions, will weigh heavily in the balance. Meanwhile, that is a job I wouldn't want, despite having the library and art collection. I don't understand all that posturing and politicing among the cardinals, but they are all caught up in a system where power is rewarded with the right to bestow power, and they desperately want to wear the ring. Carolly