While the Warden’s not looking

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and there IS no key

and there IS no key

Ah, GPOY right there. I often feel like the smartest person in the room, but some days I literally feel like the only smart person in any room or even outdoors, all the way to the sky and including any spelunkers or snorklers currently under the surface of the planet. And then I go to Facebook, where I receive confirmation of this.

Yesterday I went to a meeting of people interested in a particular do-gooder nonprofit where the project lead spent FIFTEEN MINUTES defining the words in the title of the talk. If he didn’t think we knew what those words meant, why did he think we were there?

Hvacrpro takes us on a Flashback to 2009

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It's spam, man

It’s spam, man

Ah, AutoDM spam! That takes me back; back all the way to 2009. Mariah Carey wants to know what love is. The Glee cast found somebody to love. Alicia Keys and Jay-Z were in an Empire state of mind.

And spammers had just discovered Twitter.

The revolting Auto-DM, in which a marketer automatically privately messages some “Like us on Facebook and ask me about MLM marketing” garbage, is a noxious remnant of that time, clinging to its loathsomely recrudescent existence with brittle, shattered claws, refusing to let go, refusing to acknowledge that, in fact, it is noxious spam.

And today I got one.

Now, I’m not cruel. Okay, sometimes I’m not cruel. And people do get hacked, do authorize apps which then go bad and start DMing spam. So I generally give them a heads-up along the lines of “oh, and did you mean to send that spam?”

And so it was on Twitter today, when I got an autoDM from @Hvacrpro, a self-proclaimed “World Shaper, Media Shaker,Game Changer & Innovator’ Progressive Democratic Union Party. Love my Country, & Christian, Live2Tweet&Love2Live,Teabagger whisperer” and Blogspot blogger. Oooh, colour me impressed!

It went something like this.

5h

Hvacrpro's avatar
Hvacrpro @Hvacrpro

Hi! You can auto follow back, find unfollowers, unfollow inactive users, check for fake followers, and more FREE at bit.ly/14quajJ

3h

raincoaster's avatar
raincoaster @raincoaster

Or I could become offended by this spam

16m

Hvacrpro's avatar
Hvacrpro @Hvacrpro

spam is sales, promotion and marketing… this is not the same its an automated message, get with the times.

16m

Hvacrpro's avatar
Hvacrpro @Hvacrpro

research before u put your foot into your mouth.

16m

Hvacrpro's avatar
Hvacrpro @Hvacrpro

:P

Whereupon I unfollowed him, wondering what in the UNIVERSE had ever induced me to follow somebody who thought self-righteous spam, insults and “:P” were advanced marketing techniques.

Not exactly sure what his brand of “conservative corporatism” is meant to conserve, but I don’t know many corporations who’d be happy to admit they’d hired this loosaire.

Meet a Forum Volunteer: raincoaster, She’ll Fucking Cut You

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GPOY, bitch please edition

GPOY, bitch please edition

I can’t take credit for the title: that was all the doing of Gabriel, of Vankleek Hill fame. He thought the original title of my profile as a WordPress.com tech support forum volunteer was completely inappropriate: Meet a Forum Volunteer: Lorraine Murphy does lack a certain zing, does it not?

I’ve apparently answered 60,000 questions in the forums, and if I had to guess I’d say about 5% of those snippily (scroll through this blog for examples like this one). I didn’t include this in the interview, but once I got an email from a senior support staffer w/r/t a snarky reply I’d made some rando who insisted on being given instructions for something basic but NOT, god forbid, either a copy/paste of the info in the support docs or a link to the appropriate page: nooooo, he wanted someone to put the exact same thing into words in a completely unique way, just for him/her/it, because he/she/it was a very busy person/thing and couldn’t be bothered to read prefab answers but wanted bespoke, immediately, and for free.

My reply began, “Listen Princess…” and continued from there. The staffer emailed to say he probably SHOULD have deleted the thread, but it was just too damn funny, so it’s out there still somewhere in the archives. Happy Hunting.

But back to the glorious interview with ME ME ME! Here’s a taste of the wonders that lie within!

You’ve posted over 60,000 replies in the WordPress.com forums since 2006. Thank you for your support! What types of questions do you like helping users with, and what do you find the most rewarding about contributing?

I like answering someone’s first question the most. People are often shocked by how fast they get an answer, how clear it is, and how they can put the solution to work right away; they’re very grateful, and it’s wonderful to see. The next best thing is when people who’ve asked questions in the past come to the forums and start answering questions themselves.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned from your volunteer experience in the forums?

Meaningful, strong relationships can be forged over mundane, repetitive questions about domain mapping. Really, my forum experience at WordPress.com shows that humans are, even in the midst of technology, fundamentally human.

One of my friends reported that his (positive) comment on the post had been first held in moderation, then deleted. And he didn’t even swear! They’re awfully careful at Corporate WordPress Global HQ, and very, very polite. As you can imagine, there was a titch of editing to my responses, but I’d tried hard not to swear so they didn’t change much except to cut for length.

One of the commenters called my situation a “rags to riches blogger story” which shows you how low people set the bar for riches nowadays, although it was very nice of her.

Anyhoodle, it’s very good for hits. Why, between this with it’s two hundred plus social shares, and the Mummified Fairy Post, now enjoying a renaissance thanks to some random OTHER mummified fairy trying to steal its thunder, looking at the stats graph is like travelling back in time to the glory days of Follow links on the Global Tag Pages. Sigh. It seems so, so long ago now.

We had to blog in black and white back then, kids. Uphill in the snow.

The Birth of a Meme

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You can blame Julian Assange for an awful lot: This whole Cablegate kerfuffle. The Collateral Murder video. Embarrassing virtually every nation and security company on the planet. Really stunningly poor relations with at least two exes. Annoying the staff at the Ecuadorian Embassy by humming to himself too loudly on occasion. That jacket.

And now, this. It’s all yesterday’s fault.

https://twitter.com/IanAMartin/status/331868173974503426

https://twitter.com/IanAMartin/status/331893331648978944

Words, my friends. They fail me.

Particularly when the poster in question fails to back it up with the magical words “I’m buying.” Sigh. Tease. Story of my life.

Now this girl, she has got it going on. Or had. Since nobody has heard from her since posting this.

Here Cthulhu! says Summon Cthulhu Kid

Here Cthulhu!

Seriously, I’m dying to find this kid and her dad, for soooo many reasons. So many questions.

  • Did she summon Cthulhu?
  • Did she do it twice, since she got over 2000 Likes?
  • Did she summon Cthluhu instead and if so what does s/he look like?
  • Did she summon Cthulhu and then just pick a random additional Great Old One to summon, and if so which one and why?
  • This.
  • Who the hell is she and where did she and her dad come up with this brilliant idea? Seriously, I want to interview her for the Daily Dot if I can find her but the only lead I’ve got is that it was uploaded to the Atheism Loves You Facebook page on Monday and they can’t remember where they got it. Anyone?
  • Also, what is an atheist site doing supporting theist endeavours such as this, however eldritch and unspeakable they may be?

COMPLETELY UNRELATED POSTSCRIPT: Today’s celebrity encounter, thanks to a comment I made on a story Fidel wrote about “Sex and the City” author Candace Bushnell.

https://twitter.com/CandaceBushnell/status/331910083942432768

Operation Global Media Domination: the mash note situation

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To raincoaster love Julian

To raincoaster love Julian. Awww, isn’t that sweet?

NOTE TO NEW READERS: it’s not always this insidery. Just usually this insidery.

Well, I had been working on an epic Storify of the even-more-overcaffeinated-than-usual drama over Thursday and Friday, including multiple Ron sightings (hi Ron!) and relentless attempts to get my Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts suspended (all unsuccessful), but Storify’s Twitter search succumbed to the heated atmosphere and fainted, rendering me unable to do more than say “and then he said this, and I was all like bitch please and then … ” etc, etc, etc although it must be said that Storify themselves were very nice about it, particularly as I’ve bitched at them before for offering a WordPress.com embed code that does not embed anything readable in your WordPress.com blog; still, they mean well and if they can get that Twitter search to stop collapsing and asking me to sign in with Twitter instead of my Storify account, it’ll all be hunky-dory.

And yes, I believe that was all one sentence, why do you ask?

Still, drama has its uses. Always good for the Follower count if you have the right enemies, as I seem to. Here’s a tiny slice of just one of the four dramas that went on over that period.

https://twitter.com/InfernoJourno/status/330348617749651456

https://twitter.com/flotsam_jetsum/status/330272514678849536

Apparently if you tweet to his family and ask the entirely logical question “WTF?” he stops. Useful.

So both the computer and the iPhone have started overheating, to the point where it hurts to handle them. Gonzo gave me a great suggestion: A Belkin laptop desk/fan/thingy which costs about $20, which is easily ordered from Amazon possibly even using my own affiliate ID. Beats balancing it on a block of frozen soup stock as I am doing now.

The iPhone is a trickier brick altogether; it’s no longer emitting or detecting sounds on its own. With the headphones plugged in, I can listen to things. When I plug it in to charge I cannot have it connected to the cord first, prior to plugging the plug into the wall, or it will not charge. If I plug the plug into the wall and then connect the iPhone, it will charge.

Wouldn’t it be lovely to have something which simply worked? I wonder what that’s like. Wait. No. I take that back. My notebook works just fine, it’s just a bitch to upload is all. You have to spindle the pages really teeny.

But as you can see, Julian is keeping his spirits up and maybe someday he’ll be in a nice enough mood to just mail me one of those compromised phones or laptops he’s forced to discard (do you need the PO Box? Lemme know).

UPDATE:

OH, so much drama that I forgot to add my ACTUAL celeb encounter; Tommy James, yes THE Tommy James of “and the Shondells” Favorited a tweet of mine when I complained the cats were not sophisticated enough to enjoy Crimson and Clover. As indeed they are not, being both well below teenage.

And Ruth Buzzi Followed me.

And no, Julian Assange did not really write me that postcard. But I’m quite pleased so many people think he did. Going to go around with a swelled head all day.