I asked my mom how she started her business with grandma and, without getting into the weeds of it, they did it with even less money than I guessed. Maybe it’s just being in a small town where everyone knows everyone’s business, maybe in Kansas, at that time, people were just cooler. Even bankers, against all evidence to the contrary. I don’t know, but I do know that my memory of it wasn’t far wrong. I wonder if a person could do so much with so little now. My guess is no. Systemic hatred for small business is more advanced than I’ve ever seen it. The wealthy want very much to keep all the money, power, and control for themselves. But perhaps the tide is turning…

This puts me in mind of something. I’ve noticed a few voices absent from the comments. Generally when this happens it’s because people accidentally stumble into the list of forbidden words that get comments moderated. If the system flags you without me noticing it’s functionally a permanent ban unless I specifically ok your IP. If you think you’ve been moderated into the shadow realm you’ll have to contact me vie the site’s email, or mask your IP via a VPN. The reason that people accidentally stumble into these pitfalls is usually because I add the names of annoying public figures to the list regularly. So if you go on a tear and mention someone in the news who is annoying you can accidentally get banished. I am very random about the moderation list, as I tend to be with most things like that. Also, sites like facebook are banned words because so much spam is built on a foundation of their name recognition. In spite of the very strange moderation practices of the site since I try never to bring up banned words people getting banned is actually pretty rare, but every so often people will get their dander up over something and fall afoul of the moderation bot.
Just a little admin for anyone who may be wondering why their comments keep disappearing.

The site doesn’t get anything approaching the level of spam it did when the personal website was still relevant on the internet. At one point it was thousands of spam comments a day. Now it will sometimes hover under a thousand for a few days. The level of spam comments has been declining for some time now. I have a feeling that all the attention has shifted to using AI to relentlessly attack social media sites now. A site like mine, which has very limited reach, is not the enticing target it once was.

I often peruse the spam just to see what kinds of scams they are trying to pull, or what they are using as a base for the comments. It tends to go in waves. Right now a lot of them are talking about septic systems. I have no idea why that would be a subject they think would trick people, but who knows, maybe the gullible online tend to have septic problems. For a long time the comments were clearly targeting blogging style sites and just assumed that’s what my site was. I mean, it’s not exactly wrong is it? I’ve maintained a much more robust blog than any of my peers that I can think of. Probably to my detriment since I am far more open than most sensible people would be. As I said earlier facebook and amazon have long been problem terms for the spam comments. At one point so were Tumblr, Pintrest, Instagram, and others. They fell off quite a bit recently though. Facebook has always been the worst because it has always encouraged botted engagement as a means to inflate its importance.

Anyway, it is what it is. My comments have always been pretty heavily moderated because I didn’t want them turning into a big damn mess. At the same time I wanted to be a more present than someone who just silently posted comics. Of course when I started the idea was that the cartoonist was supposed to be a minor celebrity who made their work seem more important by way of their force of personality. I don’t have the kind of personality that can make that work since I openly hate many of my peers. You have to be… Obsequious, shall we say, to advance in most professions and cartooning is no different. I am not that.

Unrelated. It’s going to be an annoying month. Annoying things are going to happen that I can’t avoid and I’m fuming about them the closer they get. I have been isolated for so long now that I can just barely tolerate the outside world. Humans are supposedly social creatures, but if you don’t slot in very comfortably we begin to break down more and more. Before Covid most people I knew didn’t really get what it’s like to live like I do. Now they understand it at least. Many of my friends and associates developed anxiety disorders during the lockdown and they got a lot more empathetic when it was all over. You have to be broken in a very particular way to continue to survive long term. The longer you go though and the more difficult it gets to get back, if you even want to. At this point one of the only motivating factors for me to improve my health is so I don’t have to go anywhere to deal with its decline. I’ve managed to reduce trips to the hospital for bloodwork to levels I can almost tolerate. If I can go just a little bit further I can limit my human contact even more again. Maybe if I get past this month I’ll be able to go back to just sitting in my dimly lit room making up the life story of made up people and dealing with real ones as little as possible. I should really be taking advantage of this unseasonable warmth to get out and walk, but after the holidays my insomnia snapped back the other way and now I want to sleep for uncommonly long stretches. The entire time I’ve been typing this I’ve wanted to go to sleep but it’s only 6PM. If I go to sleep now and go for 9 hours I’ll be up at 3AM. If I could trust myself to just take a little nap that would be one thing… Of course the problem is that if I don’t take advantage of feeling sleepy I’ll get past the feeling and then I’ll be stuck awake for god knows how long. It’s probably better to just go to sleep and deal with whatever happens then to not sleep and be even less effective than usual when I’m wide awake.

Well whatever. I will return on Wednesday with another page, assuming some dire fate doesn’t befall me. Let’s plan for a future where I continue to exist. Since that is the plan we have agreed on I hope to see you here at that time. Please try to avoid a dire fate so we can make this future we have planned for a reality. Until then, be vigilant!

2929 The Value Of Nothing.

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