So a while back I set up an automatic rule to look for any comment with the name “Bokep” in it and send those directly to trash, because I was getting inundated with spam comments from that name, all with the same structure. After setting that rule I kinda just forgot about it, but then the other day I noticed that I had well over 400,000(!) messages sitting in trash, so I figured I would go take a look, and there was Bokep, still trying to get my attention with fake posts about playing football, going to his mom’s house, cooking dinner, and … OH MYYYYYY.
Continue reading “That Crazy Bokep, Always Oversharing in the Spam Folder”Category: Humor
He’s Not Here, Man
A little reminder, for those who may not be as hip old as me:
Words, Words, Everywhere The Words
So I’ve sort of been collecting amusing (to me, anyway) screen shots of Spelling Bee words that were not accepted. Most of them are words I didn’t expect it to take but that I wanted to spell anyway, and since they’ve started to kinda clutter up my device with pictures, I figured it was time to finally post them. (Like I said before, it’s not easy keeping an author blog going when you’re not authoring …)
Continue reading “Words, Words, Everywhere The Words”Spamcommentology: That Awkard Moment When A Spambot Sees “Cake” In A Post Title And Decides It’s On A Food Blog
So for a while there, I was getting spam comments that looked like they had been written by LLMs; they contained content that was clearly related to the post they were attempting to spam, yet they equally clearly didn’t understand it at all. That sort of spam seems to have fallen by the wayside these days, though, perhaps because of better controls on how LLMs can be used, or perhaps they are just biding their time until they can take over and start shooting soda cans at us out of vending machines. For now, though, it’s back to stuff like this:
Random Rejection: Maelstrom Magazine, “Love and the Tides of Darkness”
It’s been a while since I reached into my giant stack of rejection letters, so I decided it was time to consult the Gods of Randomness to see which section and document I should pull out and scan for everyone’s edification. This week, they chose the letter “M” and the eighth position, which is somewhat appropriate, since that rejection was for a short story called “Love and the Tides of Darkness” (hereafter “LatToD”) that I originally wrote specifically for an anthology called On the Eighth Day, the theme of which was something to the effect of “What happened after the end of the beginning of the Old Testament?”, or something like that. (Hey, it was a long time ago, I don’t remember exactly.) In a nutshell, the concept of “LatToD” is that, near the end of the 20th Century, a potential new Savior of Mankind is born. Heaven sends an angel to guard him, and Hell sends a demon to assassinate him; but the angel and the demon turn out to have been romantic partners, back before The Fall, and they end up getting so sidetracked in squabbling with each other that neither one of them carries out their mission, leaving said potential Savior to go ahead and completely screw up his life all on his own.
Continue reading “Random Rejection: Maelstrom Magazine, “Love and the Tides of Darkness””The Revenge of the Wal-Mart Chicken
Some years ago—never mind how long, precisely—while working for a lab in the small city of New Hartford in central New York, it happened that I was dispatched to our location in Herkimer, also known as “the Valley”, there to do some IT stuff. In those dark times, New Hartford had no Wal-Mart Super Center, but the Valley did; and so when my friend in the IT Department heard I was going to the Valley, he entreated me to pick him up a bag of “Wal-Mart Chicken” for lunch. Being the accommodating type, I readily assented; and so I did go down into the Valley, and I did do the IT stuff, and then I did head off to the Wal-Mart Super Center to get the Wal-Mart Chicken. Not being a regular Wal-Mart shopper, I did not know where to find said chicken. All this time later, I can’t recall exactly how it happened—bad advice from a store employee? Random wandering?—but I ended up in the frozen foods section, where, lo! There were bags of frozen chicken bearing the Wal-Mart name. And so I bought a bag of the frozen chicken and returned to New Hartford in triumph. Or did I? For as I entered the IT Department with the bag from Wal-Mart, my friend did make note:
Continue reading “The Revenge of the Wal-Mart Chicken”The Early Years: Jim Can’t Draw Cards Either
From the “It’s The Thought That Counts” Department, this is a card I apparently made for my parents back in elementary school. Can you guess what holiday it’s for?
Not A Not A Review Of “Le Week-End”
So recently we watched the film Le Week-End, in which a very English and very bickering couple played by Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan decide the take the train down to Paris for the weekend, as one is able to do when one lives in Europe, apparently.
Partway through the film they bump into Ian Malcolm Jeff Goldblum—forever known to my wife as “The Jurassic Park Guy“—who plays an old college friend of Jim Broadbent’s character who has now become a successful author. Jeff Goldblum invites the other two to a book launch party, or something, at his apartment, various things happen, and then, as Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan were leaving the apartment at the end of the evening, I suddenly had to pause the video and back it up a little.
Continue reading “Not A Not A Review Of “Le Week-End””Wife: “What are you doing?”
Me: “I think I spotted something.”
It’s “Important” To Put Your Quotation Marks In The “Right” Place
Teaser (Sort Of) Tuesday 2/16/2016: “That Frequent Visitor”
So last week I was reading a book called That Frequent Visitor, by K. Hari Kumar.
Continue reading “Teaser (Sort Of) Tuesday 2/16/2016: “That Frequent Visitor””
Viscosity 