blog to resume tomorrow (Tuesday)
Monday, January 25, 2016
43 comments:
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What is this new devilry in the comments?
ReplyDeleteSpam?!?
I hope everyone on the East Coast stayed safe and warm over the last few days.
Uhoh, sick and tired of dealing with the crud? Then you're feeling better. Yay. Glad you've survived. And hopefully no one will click on that link in the first post as I suspect it's spam?
ReplyDeleteFeeling slightly more human? Less like the bag of poop on the doorstep of hell?
ReplyDeleteI'm just glad there is a picture post this morning. Must say, you worried me yesterday.
The spammer commented under the name "Croose Hackle" which seems so on brand for a spammer I think it's what we should call all spammers from now on.
ReplyDeleteHope you're feeling better, Janet!
ReplyDeleteWhoa! we were worried.
Nice to see the post this morning.
cheers Hank.
I'm normally fairly alert on spam-watch - They tend to crop up in the tail end of the comments, so I usually spot them the next morning when checking out what craziness I've missed after logging off for the day!
ReplyDeleteAlways feels like such a violation - do they not know who we are? We are Reiders, and we are not to be spammed at!!!
Hope you're on the mend Janet :-)
Hope you are feeling a whole lot better! We miss you. Take it easy the first few days back. A lot of the crud going around has startling boomerang properties where relapse can be as devilish as original viral plague. So duck if it swings back at you.
ReplyDeleteI will, along with others, take this to imply that you are on the mend, which is wonderful news. I hope the crud's last stand is swift and final, and you will be back to full health before you can say Felix Buttonweezer. :)
ReplyDeleteJANET!!! QOTKU!!! You posted!!!
ReplyDeleteYes, lots of exclamation points, but I'm so glad to see this. Means you must be feeling marginally better. I'm glad. :)
Spammers: I run a very small forum with a very tiny membership and a very focused subject and I can't tell you, even after posting in several languages on the registration page that spammers of any kind will not be approved, and I still get several every day. (wow! long sentence.) And they're always odd names and the emails are a dead giveaway. I finally took all the warnings off and once a day, gleefully go in and delete them all. But I really don't get this whole spammer thing to begin with. Do they really think people will click the links?
Ridiculous.
Hey Janet, good to (kinda) hear from you!
ReplyDeleteDon't push yourself too quickly. Truly get over the crud, then come out swinging (maybe a good rant about spammers in comment sections?).
We'll wait, happy to know you're on the mend.
See ya tomorrow!
I checked the blog at least six times yesterday. You had me worried!
ReplyDeleteHere's hoping you feel like a million bucks by tomorrow. Glad to have you back, Janet.
Whoopee, a post.
ReplyDeleteI was getting worried, not about you, I figured you're eventually be fine, but what about us. Life without this blog is like life without teachers, friends, politians and punching bags.
Of course it's all about us.
Miss ya. Can't wait 'til you are back and bushy tailed. Oh sorry, sharks don't have bushy tails.
I'm very sorry Janet's still under the weather. But her illness has allowed my quote to remain the header for an extra day!!!!
ReplyDelete(We fame whores have to take our little victories when we can.)
Assuming New York melts, i go back on submission this week. I can already hear the crickets in my inbox warming up.
Feel better soon, Janet.
I'm with Audrey, a million bucks, in your pocket.
ReplyDeleteLooks like you passed off the crud to the horse and he's totally PISSED about it!
ReplyDeleteI missed the spam attack, (yay), but Lucie mentioned it was under Croose Hackle? I know about hackle, but not croose, so I had to look it up just to see if it was a word. Just for you all this morning - the definition of croose from Urban Dictionary!
"The drunken state where you do not act solely crazy or solely loose, instead you are somewhere along the middle, thus "croose" Sentence use: She got so drunk at that party last night, she was croose."
So, we had someone show up who was quite drunk with raised hairs. There. My work for the day is done. Off to Raleigh to see Mom!
If you are still under the weather and not just thwarted by it, it might be time for a water fast.
ReplyDeleteWater fasting has been my go to herbal remedy for what seems like centuries.
Pour water down by the gallon and don't eat anything for a day. That seems to wash away all of the nasty little buggers. Not eating will keep them from multiplying.
Wish you the best and am amazed at how much of a religion your blog is to some of us.
Looks like you're getting back to fighting strength. Glad you're on the mend, Janet.
ReplyDeleteElka and I hope you continue to feel better! We're holding the couch down. We didn't get the snow up here, somehow, but it's COLD.
ReplyDeleteI've begun making gestures at editing/completing the novel I started in July (well, started in its current incarnation of two novels cobbled together and the seams smoothed out). Just have some geographic particulars to work out, among other things.
I'm glad you're on your way to feeling better, Janet. I look forward to tomorrow's post!
ReplyDeleteJanet's pretty good at removing spam when it happens. She'll often remove comments that comment on the spam, as well, just to keep things clean.
NM: Spamming is free marketing. Unless you pay someone to do it for you, in which case it's very profitable for them. The way blog spammers work is: they send out thousands of comments using robotic functions. Thousands and thousands and thousands. That means that they don't even need a 1% click-through rate to get what they want, whether it's someone's financial information, money, or simply 'views' or 'likes'. (Don't get me started on 'like' farming.) Because it doesn't cost them anything, it's all profit.
We're all pretty savvy here. But what if this comment happened to show up on a knitting website, and your grandmother saw it? (I didn't see what the spam was, so I don't know what it was selling.) Would she click on that link, because she thought it was from another knitter?
They only need ONE innocent sucker out of thousands of posts, and they've made a profit.
So the short answer is: No. They don't expect us to click on the link. They expect someone gullible to click on it, but not necessarily us.
Really missed your blog; hope you're feeling better.
ReplyDeleteWell, it seems we are a bunch of worry warts here, but I'm sure that's no surprise to you, Janet. Glad you're feeling well enough to give us a sign.
ReplyDeleteIf you don't want to follow Craig's water fast, may I suggest a cupcake binge. I'm sure you'll be feeling better in no time.
When I see the words "water" and "fast" together, all I can think of is the speed at which water seems to go from my mouth to my bladder. :-\ Craig's toxin purge would require me to spend the day in the bathroom. That might be an excellent opportunity to get some quality reading time, but the six girls in the house might get a little annoyed... ;-)
ReplyDeleteVery glad you seem to be feeling better Janet!
ReplyDeleteSpammers, ugh. In undergrad, a friend from Korea pulled me aside one day after ESL class. She seemed slightly embarrassed but showed me an envelope she had just gotten in the mail. "YOU'VE WON A MILLION DOLLARS!!!" it said. As a super intelligent, grown woman, she suspected it was false, but still felt the need to confirm because she just didn't know for sure. So, as BJ Muntain pointed out, I could see how someone not very computer-savvy would think it harmless to click something to investigate.
Looking forward to the post tomorrow - I did miss seeing all the writerly ideas here, even if it was just for a couple days. It's like a writer's fix!
Commenting late here, not because I'm a spammer, but just because I'm on the West Coast and we get our mornings delivered a little later than the rest of you do.
ReplyDeleteJanet, I hope you're feeling better! The crud is the worst.
I also wanted to post this morning because I am feeling very thankful to the QOTKU and to all the other Reiders. Some time ago, Janet congratulated a commenter on her (his?) first fiction sale, and I'm sorry that I don't remember who it was (sieves-for-brains here, I blame my four kids), but that link led me to my first sci-fi flash fiction site, which led me to others, which led to (deep breath!) my own first fiction sale*!
You can read "Expensive" today over at DailyScienceFiction.com and know that you all had a part in it happening. I know I don't comment here as much as I should, but I have to say it: you guys are the best. I've learned so much here. Thank you, folks. Truly.
*Okay, not *quite* accurate. In college, I convinced our newspaper editor to pay me 10 bucks a week to write a thinly-disguised serial story about the adventures of an undergraduate who looked suspiciously like me, having adventures on a campus that looked suspiciously like our own. I still don't know why the editor to let me get away with it.
Okay then. Looks like we are starting to feel better enough to realize we feel like crap...That's always a stage in illness that's better left to being isolated from others. Good call on waiting to post.
ReplyDeleteGet better soon, Janet, and looking forward to reading your post tomorrow!
And thank you to all who stopped by and visited my Blog! You motivated me to go peek at the list and do a little visiting too - what a wonderful writer's world it is :)
And Congrats Jessica1! We'll have to go and take a peek over there now too!
ReplyDeleteYay, Jessica!! Congratulations!!! :D
ReplyDeleteHere's Jessica's link: http://dailysciencefiction.com/ Check out her beautifully written story. :)
Oh, and here's the permanent link to Jessica's story, in case you're reading this a week or month or year from now, and it's no longer the "cover" story:
ReplyDeletehttp://dailysciencefiction.com/fantasy/fairy-tales/jessica-snell/expensive
It's wonderful that Janet is *better* now. The shark might need to be that polar bear for a while in that city!
ReplyDeleteYou don't owe us anything, Janet. Get well soon!
ReplyDeletePlease take good care of yourself, Janet! <3
ReplyDeleteJessica: congratulations! :-)
Thanks so much for the congratulations! (And thank you, Colin, for the links!)
ReplyDeleteLike the others, I've been checking regularly, working out time zone differences and accounting for Sunday etc and getting worried. Lovely to hear from you (my kids LOVE Tangled, and Maximus is my favourite character, so the picture made me smile) and I hope that you're feeling much much much better. But don't rush things; we'll all still be here for whenever you're feeling up to returning - tomorrow, next week, next month. (You're the QOTKU, so please take as much time as you like, Your Highness!) As others have written, you don't want a relapse, so please take care!
ReplyDelete@Colin - your 'water-fast' image cracked me up!
@Jennifer - congratulations!!
Whoops!!! Sorry, that should have been @Jessica, not @Jennifer (I blame the rain and the fact I should be at the beach right now for Australia Day). Sorry, Jessica!
DeleteHey cool, Jessica! I saw that in my e-mail, but hadn't read it yet. I'll have to do that now. :)
ReplyDeleteGood job!
Glad to hear you are on the mend and have power, Janet. I guess all the US residents knew that power wasn't an issue because I haven't seen anyone else mention it in the comments. The little news we've had down here on what's going on up there has been very doom and gloom: death, destruction and no power.
ReplyDeleteSo I was imagining Janet with no power: snuggled under every dropcloth she owns, loaner cat wrapped around her neck, empty whisky bottle at her feet, muttering "Reiders, Carkoon, Rant, Kale, Flash Fiction' over and over while staring at a blank screen.
1. Congratulations Jessica on your sale. So glad your told us. May you have many more.
ReplyDelete2. Happy Australia Day, mates. Go Barbie some lamb and sing "Advance Australia Fair" (both verses). I'm especially proud of the line "for those who come across the sea, we've bounteous plains to share."
3. Time moves differently when one is ill. Also, priorities shift. at least we're clever enough to amuse ourselves for a day. Still, I missed my not-my-agent. Recover completely, Janet. Until I woo over an agent of my own, you're one of my biggest sources of agenty wisdom. I'm a more professional author because of your advice. Much appreciated. I'm certainly not going to begrudge you a few more days of enforced rest. Take your time.
Oh, Jessica. Be still my beating romantic heart!
ReplyDeleteCongratulations, Jessica! Thanks for sharing your story with us.
ReplyDeleteJanet, glad you seem to getting better!
Well, *I* wasn't worried. I figured Janet was MUCH better yesterday and thus spent the day making snow sharks and sledding in the park, when she accidentally slipped down through a drift into a little-known opening to an old abandoned subway tunnel where the giant squid roams and wreaks havoc on unwary underground explorers, leaving its victims in little piles of bones sucked clean like culinary artifacts, covering its crimes with a noxious cloud of dark ink. You know, a typical day in NYC, hanging out with her pals.
ReplyDeleteNope. Not worried at all.
(Hope you really are feeling better, Janet, and will heed the advice not to overdo it.)
Jessica, congrats on your first sale! Well done, too. You're off to a great start.
Jessica, congratulations on the story. I read it this morning in my mail and didn't realize it was by "one of us." Way to go!
ReplyDeleteCongrats Jessica!
ReplyDeleteStephen - "one of us"! Now *that* is a warm, fuzzy feeling.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much, everyone. It wouldn't have happened without this blog and the commenters here.