#(so-called)

[sudzee]

Didn’t wanna reblog the whole chain again but this addition is important

[dduane]

I'm sorry, I can't resist

Sometimes stuff comes into the message box, and all I can do is sit and shake my head at it, and delete. But sometimes I troll back a bit. And I haven't had my tea yet this morning, and I'm feeling just a little bit edgy. So...

This person has kindly offered to help me market and sell my books. While also having, in their profile, an egregious and truly rookie-level error of English usage... the sight of which immediately rendered me about as likely to ever let them near my prose, as, well, the Most Unlikely Thing You Can Think Of.

So here's the exchange so far. Let's see how this goes. If they redeem themselves somehow, I will not reveal their identity. But if they don't... well, might as well warn people what they're getting into if they team up with them, yeah?

(And also: this may indeed be just a bot [and for all we know, the innocent-looking front end of what may be one of the increasingly common indie-publishing-flavored "pig-butchering" scams. Or an AI-prompt scraper]. Well, I've seen my kitties have as much fun with mechanical toys as with real rats...)

Anyway—

Grammar problems already. And no punctuation. Tsk tsk.

And sure enough...

(heh) We've got a live one, troops.

(...This is normally the point where I get ghosted, or blocked. I've stopped pointing them at my Wikipedia page, as this approach is way more entertaining.) 😏

(ETA: The current prolonged pause suggests that the person on the other end of the exchange—or the person running that bot—has actually now taken the time to look at my Tumblr profile and follow one or more of the links. And then there's usually some kind of reaction [which I would pay good money to see].)

...What they do next will determine whether I make their profile public or not: because sparing other people their inexpert (and probably expensive) attentions strikes me as a Good Act.)

...So in the meantime: How about those Mets? 😀

And look! After a two and a half hour pause, they still are apparently unaware of how deep they've dug their hole already. Let's see what they've got next, and prepare to hand them another shovel.

They've also apparently changed scripts. (As if that's going to help.) :)

(sigh) Okay. I'm sure this could go on for hours as some poor bot-runner switches from script to script... but i think we all get the gist. This person or person-with-a-bot is going to ask for money at some point, and someone's going to give them money, and then realize they've been cheated.

On consideration, there's no point in me outing the specific username. I'm going to take this up with @staff in a few minutes, and otherwise do what I can along the line to stop this kind of thing. (If nothing useful comes down from the Great Above, I'll warn people off this user. But seriously: a service-offerer with no credential, no posts, no shares... this is NOT anyone that a sensible writer, newbie or otherwise, wants to be dealing with. If only that went without saying.)

...For a little while yet, until there's a resolution, I'll add screenshots to this post as further developments occur.

Meanwhile: I don't feel like a big dinner tonight, but I really need to have a little something. I've got some end-bits of Emmental and Gruyere in the fridge, and its been an age since I last made the crunchy puffy cheese pastry called gougère... so I'll do that. The completed recipe will turn up on the Mind Palate site tomorrow, as soon as the light in the kitchen improves and I can get some decent shots of it. [Of which we have NONE: it's been way too long since I've made this sublime snack. My bad.] ...Stick around and I will cook for you while this business winds down.

Before...

...and after. (helpless laughter) TOTAL FAILURE!

...They utterly failed to puff up. (I think I didn't beat them long enough in the pan over the heat.) ...They'll still be crunchy and cheesy, though. And they'll absolutely get eaten! But if I want some for photographic purposes, I'll have to take another run at them tomorrow or the next day.

(chuckle) C'est la vie.

[aunti-christ-ine]

All logic points to YES.

[peachpulpeuse]

While the explicit emphasis in cutting, piercing, and S/M is on the exploration of the primitive and the surrender to sensuality and pleasure, there is a subtext of sacrifice and pain that I, at least, cannot ignore. While the spiritual content of these activities is based on invoking other traditions that supposedly do not deny the body in the way that our own do, they also index Western traditions in which enduring pain is a denial of the body in favor of the spirit. The primitive is commonly invoked in New Age movements that do not focus on modifying the body, and similarly, there are approaches to celebrating sexuality as self-discovery and subversion that involve neither pain nor the permanent modification of the body. Thus, the appeal of cutting and piercing must rest, at least in part, on their ability to combine a long-standing possibility of valorizing sexuality to oppose society with the mainstream notion that mortifying the flesh is a route to transcendence. [...] As noted earlier, in seeing society as antithetical to individual desire, modern primitives align with Christianity. By contrast, capitalist thinking holds that society arose out of the conjunction of individual desires and exists in order to further their fulfillment. As the latter view (with society glossed as "market forces") is particularly salient to 20th-century consumer capitalism, modern primitives are able to play the role of a "Christian opposition" to capitalism, albeit one in which sex is sacralized and consumer goods become "pleasures of the flesh."

Daniel Rosenblatt, from "The Antisocial Skin: Structure, Resistance, and 'Modern Primitive' Adornment in the United States" (1997)

[trash-and-trash-accessories]

BEGGING all of you to read bell hooks

[thatsbelievable]

[ghostclangen]

terrible comic about terrible cats