Now that I’ve fired this old thing back up, the spammers have descended.
Sweet Freyja on a twister mat are the new breed more dedicated than their forebears. I just marked a comment as spam that had to be a several hundred words or more. And I’m seeing a lot more spam written in Cyrillic and Thai script than I used to.
Why would you spam an American blog in a language that has a good chance of not being spoken by either the author, or any of his readers?
Speaking of — does anyone know if the function where you mark a comment as ‘Spam’ on WordPress actually does anything? Other than kick that comment into the Spam folder?
Gentle Readers have been asking if I’m going to resume doing political commentary — particularly on the recent political court cases all over the media.
Ehh. I really don’t have a good opinion of the American judicial system right now, and rather than screaming, “They’re all sodding corrupt and dirty!” I’m just going to concentrate on other things.
Which is proving harder than I had thought it would be, because I’ve lost my creative spark, and getting it back is … not progressing as well as one might hope.
The worlds inside my head are not as clear and bright as they used to be, and getting them out of my head and onto the screen is running into a block somewhere around my fingers. I can sit down at the desk, see what I want to write in my head, but I can’t make my fingers hit the keys. Bloody frustrating.
And when I do, I inevitably compare what I’m writing now to what I’ve written in the past … and the comparison is never good. If you’re following our Substack, I wrote a little drabble called “The Jungles Of Y’rd”. After I finished it, I read it, and almost binned it because it feels clunky and inelegant compared to earlier works of mine. I realize — and have been informed by multiple people — that I am probably being hyper-critical, but I can’t help myself.
I don’t know what to do to get that spark re-ignited. I suspect pulling my head out of my fourth point of contact and cease feeling sorry for myself would be a good start, but that seems to be a slow process.
I probably need to go fishing again — I haven’t drowned a worm in years — and taking some firearms training to get my head right probably wouldn’t hurt.
I originally typed that as “… and taking some pew-pew training …” and realized that I was unconsciously typing in code, trying to avoid tripping the absolutely-bloody-ridiculous Social Media censorship … and now I’m peevish and annoyed.
Sigh.
I’m going to go research what’s new in bass lures. See y’all tomorrow.
LawDog
As far as I know, WordPress doesn’t have ANY spam filters.
While Blogger will delete people if they become unpopular with the purple haired nancys that run google, at least they had a spam filter that tended to work.
As for the writing, you just need to get the muscles back in shape, like everything else. Don’t fret so much.
Ian,
Yes, you really need to go fishing. On a boat if you can swing it.
That is the kind of thing that can add peace to your spirit.
Drown a worm, watch a bird, shoot some clays, learn a skill, dig a hole. The most effective cures for the blues I know.
Fishing has an appeal. I miss fishing. I get to watch the kids fishing at Tiny Town lake when I am there doing water sampling, and I absolutely love it. The look when they get a bite! I don’t know that the lake is a good place for you to fish, but I do recommend perambulating near the kids and watching their joy. It will help restore faith in humanity’s future, along with watching the Starship flight.
Like anything else, that which doesn’t get used gets rusty with practice… and the first draft is *never* as good as the final draft. Which is never as good as the thing in our heads, but sometimes it gets close.
You gotta fill the well before you can draw on it. I’ve been aggressively shrinking my circle of concern to smaller than my circle of influence during the long season of illness, and spending more time on my back porch watching the wind waving in the (too-long) grass and the (still need to prune that damn thing) tree. Between that and knocking tiny, irrelevant things off my to-do list that have been piling up for years, so they’re not taking up any mental space any longer, it’s starting to work.
Drowning a worm or twenty in the waters of nobody around but you, and no internet to bother you, sounds like a great way to spend a day. Me, this time of year, I’ll go for an air-conditioned shooting range, or too bloody early in the morning at an outdoor one with breakfast at a small town cafe afterward… but you do you.
I may be pretty aggressively hermiting, but if you need anything, you’re a friend. Let me know.
Since I started, I run Askimet to block spam and has done very well. Sometimes if a real human commenter has been punished in another site and marked as spam, Askimet will also dump him in the File 13 Folder where needs to be rescued. Once on a very pale moon, I will get one or two spam comments. No biggie.
Once or thrice a week flushing the spam folder, that is it.
I run a community website with a forum.. spam go so bad that I changed it to members only can comment on website or in forum. I had to use two sets of captcha with writing a paragraph of contextual content to the website to sign up before I would approve anyone to be a member. It fixed the hundreds of spam a day. It also made it difficult enough to sign up that membership slowed way down. However most of the site was thousands of pages of knowledge on the topic of the site and it was and still is up and available for anyone to see, member or not.
A ministry website I am responsible for was badly hacked on WordPress in spite of having their recommended plug-in. I am still working on a resolution to the problem. The web does seem to have more cybercriminality and just plain harassment these days.
If for some reason you end up in my neck of the woods, mark some time down and we’ll go drown some worms. I have the time. I rather wish I could have made time to do so this last week in TX.
A good range session, or training I can afford, is ALWAYS in order. Fishing is okay, if there’s fish worth catching. Not where I live, anymore… and I’m 2 blocks from a Chesapeake Bay inlet. (sigh)
Tight lines…
I am cutting my social media a great deal.
The tension lies in the notion that if good people do not speak in the public space, then nobody will counter the mad and the bad….
Yet without time alone in my own head, I cannot be present in my own world. I need to be almost-bored in order to appreciate the things around me, and to let my mind wander.
Well, we ‘do’ have an invite to a range up north of us…
Might the fact that you are reading a TON of work by very talented authors have anything to do with it? You may feel, at least subconsciously, that you don’t measure up. Which is a bunch of codswallop. You are one of the best story tellers and writers I’ve ever met. Period.
+1. Quite so!
-JLM
Post-script: Do please substitute “read” for “met”.
Hmm. Fair point. How ’bout “one of the best story tellers I’ve ever heard?” Because the lad can spin a yarn in person!
Edit: Above comment should have been posted as a reply to ScribblersDad, not as a standalone comment. Pilot error!
-JLM
A little recoil therapy solves a lot of problems
Amen to that. Learned that almost 50 years ago my freshman year of college.
Yeah, spam… it’s a thing. I hate spam, cue Monty Python.
Being getting a lot on my blogs of unrelated to anything my blogs are about spam, with URLs for discount coupons etc. Who knew? Not I!
However, I assume from you description that the spam you’ve been sent is more political in nature.
You’d likely class me as a Pinko Commie Fag, but I can tell you that the one thing I know from all my years working as a mental health nurse and psychotherapist, is that the number of people that have beliefs different to ones own approaches the number of people on the internet.
With seven billion people on Earth, given all the different languages, beliefs, and cultures the assumption that other people will agree with you is less than 50% by a huge margin.
Oh well, that’s all I’ve got to say on the subject.
Actually the Wall O’ Text spam seems to be for on-line gambling.
Pharmaceuticals are more prevalent, but they don’t go in for the 1,000 comments; and the political junk is — at best — a line or two with a hyperlink.
Damned annoying.
“Probably”?? Nonononono. You, sir, NEED to go fishing. Need.
AND go shoot things.
In fact, you might as well just combine the two and go shoot fish! Yes! As my granpa was wont to do in his younger years, go thou forth with a lever-action .30-30 and do likewise..just remember to calculate for the difference in angle between water and air…and in a remote creek, I might add-those pesky fish wardens take a dim view of such doings. I’ve been told, I mean. By Granma.
Sort of like my grandfather (not that one, but the other one) “calling fish” with a crank telephone. It made less noise than did dynamite. Or so I was told, according to a different relative.
Some of her past fiestas have been in a blind or on my anchored kayak.
Go fishing after turning off comments.
My damnlincoln worth of advice.
How did “my best” became “her past” ?