Monthly Archive for March, 2009

Page 3 of 3

Hugs, Twisty: “WTF?”

Published by Twisty on March 2, 2009. 24 Comments

Today’s installment of Hugs, Twisty is yet another post on internecine blogular admin stuff, wherein I attempt (but fail) to explain a new and terrifying phenomenon tearing a swathe of despair through the Blametarian community.

If you never comment on the blog, and therefore the shits you give about this stuff are minimal, here’s a nice taco, because certainly you do care what I had for lunch.

tacocabana.jpg

Bean and cheese taco at Taco Cabana: gross, but in a good way

Hi Twisty,

In the last week or so, whenever I try to access IBTP from my home network, I get an “access denied” message. There was a brief missive early on saying something about me having been banned, but it flicked off the screen too fast for me to take in the details.

I’ve been commenting on the blog for something like a month under the moniker TheLady, with an impressive total output of 4 or 5 comments of no obviously trollish bent. If in that brief time I’ve managed to piss you off to such an extent that you really have banned me, well, I’ll be secretly impressed frankly, but also rather heart-sore. I do find a daily dose of Blaming to be a healthy and necessary addition to my ideological diet.

Normally I’d take my banning and fuck off to have a good long sulk about it someplace else, but you did say a few times recently that issues have been observed with blog maintenance and moderation, so I thought I’d let you know in case your shunning of me was inadvertent.

Thanks,
TheLady

Dear TheLady,

Allow me to congratulate you on having composed an email that I didn’t have to edit. I am also impressed that you are on an “ideological diet.” It takes an iron stomach.

Anyway, I hate to ruin what was potentially a deeply satisfying sulk, but you have not been banned. The message you received was an error.

Yours, TheLady, is only the most recent in a slew of emails describing this same mystifying “access denied” scenario. Emails complaining of moderation issues began arriving in numbers higher than usual right around the time Mungo, my previous computer, began singing “Daisy, Daisy” and had to be terminated. But the onset of the “access denied” dealio coincides more precisely with a tragedy I suffered a couple of weeks ago when I entirely encrumulated the whole blog while trying to update the template. I’d thought the crappitations resulting from that little episode of auntly ineptitude were mostly resolved, but, given my extremely non-existent apprehension of PHP, it’s beginning to look like something untoward slipped past me.

Here is my confession: I have no idea what the heck is going on. Maybe a hack, maybe a software glitch. I can only imagine how aggravating it must be to deal with so incompetent an Internet feminist as myself.

But rest assured, I Blame the Patriarchy does not, at least not to my knowledge, contain any page with a “you have been banned” message. If it does, I will find it and get rid of it, because if you really had been banned, the last thing I would do is bother to mention it.

If any WordPress-savvy blamers are able to get past this renegade “access denied” message and can offer any suggestions, I’m all ears. Or eyes, I guess.

Hugs,
Twisty

Posted in Blogulation and Hugs, Twisty. Bite me, Chad.

Gray tree frog of the week

Published by Twisty on March 1, 2009. 63 Comments

grey_tree_frog.jpg

This just in! The gray tree frog brings the grand total of tree frogs spotted at El Rancho Deluxe up to 1. Hyla chrysoscelis or Hyla versicolor, who knows which. Cottonmouth County, TX, February 2009.

When Mungo, the big-ass computer nerve center here at Spinster HQ, went belly-up a few weeks ago, it took Photoshop with it.

As you can imagine, living without Photoshop has been an excruciating experience. Overwhelmed by the sudden void in my life, I took to my bed for the first few days. There I ate cold pizza and scorched my retinas watching thousands of episodes of a TV detective show called “NCIS.”

“NCIS” is one of the most asinine TV detective shows ever made, which is undoubtedly why it’s in its 7th season and there exists an entire cable channel devoted to rerunning it practically nonstop. It’s corny and sexist (even for TV) and all-honky-all-the-time and one suspects its audience is primarily the teen NASCAR demographic. The incessant background music track is so loud in the mix it doesn’t quite drown out all the dialogue, which is too bad, because the writing on this show makes “The A Team” look like Othello.

I’ll spare you further details, but in one episode, one of the studly young honky detectives gets his beloved Corvette stolen. His character is a stereotypical TV ladies’ man, and stereotypical TV ladies’ men are always comically devoted to their sports cars, so he is comically devastated by this terrible loss. After the commercial break (wherein KIA tries to sell me a cheap car with zero percent financing and a ten year warranty) he discusses the tragedy with his hot honky female partner.

“You know, I don’t think I want her back,” he says. By “her” he means the stolen Corvette.

“Why not?” asks the hot honky female partner, shocked.

“Because she’s been violated, ha ha!”

Rape jokes! Yeah, baby! When you want teenage boys rolling in the aisles, don’t mess around! Bring on the A material!

But there I go again, talking about hilarious mainstream rape culture when I really should be discussing gray tree frogs.

No doubt you have remarked, to yourself and to your friends over dinner and drinks, the relatively scant number of gray tree frog photos I’ve posted recently. It’s because I had no Photoshop. For weeks.

But that’s all behind us now. Mungo’s replacement, Harriet Vane, has just finished downloading a dewy-fresh copy of that most essential and ridiculously expensive software, so the Twisty Herp Department Online Division is back in business.

Thus it is with extreme pleasure that I invite you to behold the Gray Tree Frog of the Week. Our specimen belongs to one of two species of gray tree frog that, except to the loving eye of the electron microscope, are indistinguishable from each other.

This individual is something of an anomaly. Like all frogs, it immediately pees on you when you pick it up, but there’s definitely something weird going on with this guy. Gray tree frogs are completely arboreal except during breeding season, but this one has appeared, rootling in the leaf litter, a month early. Weirdlier, the frog’s range doesn’t even include Cottonmouth County. I can only conclude that the crumbling economy has driven it to wild acts of desperation.

Posted in El Rancho Deluxe, Mass Media and Varmint Center. Bite me, Chad.