Now that we’ve dispensed with the fake advice and fake technical support spam, it’s time to look at another common category: Fake praise and fake insults. The fake praise is designed to get you to approve it even though it’s clearly B.S., and the fake insults are designed to provoke a response even though they, too, are clearly B.S. For example:
Continue reading “Spamcommentology, Part III: Praise and Insults”Spamcommentology, Part II: Seeking Fake Technical Support (And Fake Technical Comments In General)
So last week I posted some examples of spam where the spambot was allegedly seeking advice about various things, such as blogging platforms, AOL, and sex toy manufacturers. This week I’m back with a somewhat related category of spam, in which the spambot either claims that there’s something wrong with your site which they beseech you to fix, or else tries to make it sound like they are totally hip to today’s technology and so are you. Unfortunately, it seems like spambots don’t get updated regularly, and so these sorts of comments are often hilariously out of date. To wit:
Continue reading “Spamcommentology, Part II: Seeking Fake Technical Support (And Fake Technical Comments In General)”Spamcommentology, Part I: Seeking Fake Advice
So one of the regular housekeeping chores involved with running a blog is of course reviewing spam comments. I mean, you don’t have to do it; you can just ignore your spam comments, and let them be fully managed and deleted automatically by your anti-spam plugin. (And you do need an anti-spam plugin. Oh boy do you need an anti-spam plugin.) But if you never review the comments on your spam list, you will miss the (very) occasional real comment that gets caught up in the dragnet, and you don’t really want to leave someone twisting in the wind after they took the time to write a comment, do you?
Continue reading “Spamcommentology, Part I: Seeking Fake Advice”Teaser Tuesday: “The Magicians”
So this week I was reading The Magicians, by Lev Grossman, AKA This Is Not A Harry Potter Book Even Though It’s About a College of Magic and References Quidditch.
This Brain Aneurysm Awareness Month Reminder Brought To You By An Insurance Company That Doesn’t Want To Insure You If You Have An Aneurysm
So September is Brain Aneurysm Awareness Month, and as it happens, I received this advertisement from AAA life insurance (I added the red box):
Continue reading “This Brain Aneurysm Awareness Month Reminder Brought To You By An Insurance Company That Doesn’t Want To Insure You If You Have An Aneurysm”Not A Review Of The “Spider-Man: No Way Home” Trailer
So at this point, everyone who’s interested has seen the new trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home. Multiple times. (Lord knows I have.) For those who haven’t run across it yet, here it is:
Not A Review Of “A Scanner Darkly”
So recently we watched A Scanner Darkly, the film adaptation, by Richard Linklater, of the book of the same name, which I read last month.
Teaser Tuesday: “The Stone Sky”
So this week I’ve been reading The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin, the final book in “The Broken Earth” trilogy:
The premise of this trilogy is, basically, that the Earth hates humanity and is trying to destroy it via disasters both natural and man-made.
And here you thought I only read fiction.
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday: “The Stone Sky””The Early Years: Everyone Loves Monkeys. Apparently.
So this week I peeled a few layers off the top of the giant cache of my old elementary school work that my folks discovered and sent out to me a few years ago, in which I found this early, analog example of collecting “Likes”:
Continue reading “The Early Years: Everyone Loves Monkeys. Apparently.”Technical Support, Mandalorian-Style
So a while back I mentioned that, a year or two after everybody else, I had started watching The Mandalorian on Disney+, and that I had hoped my wife would like it, since she had, unexpectedly, been a fan of the late, lamented, sabotaged-by-Fox Firefly, not to mention the film Pitch Black; so there’s a precedent for her enjoying the Space Western* genre. Sadly, she tuned out The Mandalorian almost immediately, other than her recently-noted strong objection to the characterization of the Frog Lady as a “Frog”. But then there was this scene, at the beginning of a recent episode, after the Mandalorian’s has sustained major damage, requiring Baby Yoda** to be dispatched into, let’s call it a Jefferies Tube, so that the Mandalorian*** can talk him through a minor wiring repair. How does that go? About as well as you would think.
Continue reading “Technical Support, Mandalorian-Style”
Viscosity 