The last thing that I ever thought I would be posting about is Donation Fraud, but circumstances demand otherwise... For nearly as long as this site has been online, readers have been able to choose to "Buy me coffee" as a way of saying thanks for the content. Having written AdSubtract (an Ad Blocker) a while back, I can't really use ads to monetize the site, so a few Coffee Links here and there and been a great no-pressure way to pass the hat around. And, until October 2025, there was no issue at all. But then, things changed. ## The Hack Out of nowhere, I was bombarded by $5 donations. At first, I was happy, then things started to look suspicious. Eventually, I realized that some hacker was trying to use my site for Credit Card Testing Fraud. A hacker locates a site with donation links because donation links are a lot simpler than the usual online shopping carts. This makes them easier targets when a bad actor buys stolen credit card info online, then sets up a system to try all of the cards out, and anything that succeeds in making a donation is an active card that they will then go off and use until they've maxed it out. Once I turned off the exploited link, I went about refunding any charges that went through -- I really do hope this is enough to alert someone to the fact that their card might have been stolen since I don't have a way to reach out to them directly. ## The Fix After that, I thought it was all over, until 10 days later, it started all over again using another link from my site. So, I pulled all of those links down, deactivated that system entirely, and once again went about refunding money. With this finished, I realized that I could migrate the links to a Pay What You Want link from PayPal. And since PayPal has better fraud detection built in by default, here's hoping that I won't be dealing with this again any time soon. ## Thoughts "This is why we can't have nice things!" Seriously, this was the first thing to go through my mind, quickly followed by being amazed that it took until 2025 for a hack like this to happen. Then, that was followed by me wondering why things like this were happening now? Could it be that AI had something to do with this? The hack on my site was very low end. So, it would not have required AI to make it happen but I can't help but think that a few incredibly lazy bad actors asked a chatBot how it would hypothetically go about verifying some of the stolen credit card info they had bought on the Dark Web. ## Lessons & Silver Linings With everything happening online, and so much of it being scary, I have been spending a bit too much time huddled up in a small ball, rocking...

"We’ve also faced intense criticism and even personal attacks against a number of Automatticians from members of the “community” who want Matt and others to step away from the project," writes Automattic on their official blog. Yes, Automattic, you have faced intense criticism. And, at this point, I don't actually care who is right and who is wrong. I don't care what caused the issue one bit. What I do care about is the fact that some senior member of your team was able to push an asinine code change live, unchecked -- or, if it was checked/approved, the senior team condoned this action as a good idea. [] Pineapple is delicious on pizza. It's silly, right? And, this isn't a post about the benefits/horrors of pineapple on pizza. That checkbox was the last straw because a business that runs a fair chunk of the web pushed this code live -- a **BUSINESS** did this -- not a person with a grudge, a business. Can I continue to trust a business with my code if this is how they are managed? No, I can't. Automattic, like it or not, is WordPress. Maybe all of this hullabaloo will result in WPengine forking WordPress (like WordPress forked cafelog/b2 back in the day), but why wait around to find out? WordPress is built on 20-year-old assumptions about site design/management. Why not investigate new ways of doing things? Why not use this proof that Automattic is an unfit steward of the project to investigate alternatives?

Moving house is an odd thing, even when that house turns out to be a virtual one. Usually, visual changes here are purely design changes as both my tastes and my design skills evolve. But, this time, many of the changes you see are connected to a migration (or move) of what and how this site functions. I have been a WordPress user since 2003, on and off. Some of the earliest posts on this site were about that Cafelog/b2evolution/WordPress fork/split/whatever. I have even left WordPress a couple of times: once for Drupal, once for GaSP (which I wrote myself), and this time for a platform called Grav. And, this time, I am likely not going back to WordPress ever again. Twenty two years is a very long time for a piece of software to hold a dominant position in any industry. And, whereas, I could sit here and list WordPress' many technical shortcomings, this departure has nothing to do with those, though I am glad to be rid of them. It has to do with a well founded lack of trust in the mental stability of the person leading the platform. I remember when Matt Mullenweg first pulled together the community that would drive WordPress forward. I remember when, through his company Automattic, he adopted a similar business strategy to RedHat -- offering commercial support to larger clients while supporting and growing an open source platform. I remember when Longreads, Simplenote, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and Beeper, all became part of Automattic trying to live up to its tagline -- making the web a better place. But the fact that the CEO can pull a stupid stunt without reprecussions within his own company means that I can no longer judge WordPress on its code alone. I now need to assess the mental state of the head of the business behind it, and I find his behavior to be lacking. Other software like Drupal, Vim, and even the Linux Operating System, are (or were) also driven by a single person. But Dries Buytaert has to answer to a Board of Directors before any changes can be made at Drupal or his company behind it, Acquia. Or, when Bram Moolenaar passed away, the Vim project didn't die with him, they had a process in place to handle the transition. And, many of the recent changes to Linux introduced by Linus Torvalds were done to encourage a new generation of developers to become part of advancing Linux as a platform long after he is gone. I have no problem depending upon projects driven by passionate leaders. But Dries, Bram, and Linus understand (or understood) their own limitations and put in place structures that would enable the software/communities they built to move forward without them, while Matt seems to be in the process of destroying the community that he built over the last 22 years. I have one website left that depends upon...

Back in the days of yore, when Facebook hadn't even been a twinkle in Zuck's eye, blogs ruled what existed of the Web. "Normies" had only recently started to venture outside of CompuServ, AOL, Delphi, and the like. In the primitive world of pre-Google Search, stumbling upon a well-written blog felt like finding a clean bathroom on the Interstate just in the nick of time. You had bounced around from link to link and weren't 100% certain how you had gotten there. First, you'd Bookmark the site because you were sure you couldn't find your way back here any other way. Then, you'd read the newest article. And, after all of that time and focus, you'd be presented with a textarea there at the bottom of the article that asked for your thoughts... For **your thoughts**... Hmm... Well, okay, maybe you'll just leave something short. After all, you just read something that felt like it had value, ads had barely started to be a thing online and there weren't many (or any) on this site, so you hadn't felt like you had to wade through crud to get here. So, sure, why not validate the author of the article for their effort? Why not make that connection? Albeit virtually, with someone who you will never meet IRL... This was before blogging had become a business; before, adsense and clickthrough rates; before monetizing and content farming. It was before all of that. Yes, there was a before all of that. The blogger was a Crier in the Emptiness. Setting words out into the digital void without anything to protect them. Even a note in a bottle felt more cared for than a blog back in the day. But, then, not long after the rise of Blogger, WordPress, and the like, when we could finally use words like Blogosphere to describe our little corner of the Internet, the Spammers arrived. Automated comments that would take advantage of the fact that blog comments often allowed posters to link back to their own sites as part of their post (we were of course attempting to build a **web** of community, and what better way to aid that effort than to exchange links between the like minded) started to use those links toward their own SPAM-flavored ends. It began to feel like an arms race: spam vs anti-spam, then captcha, then recaptcha, and finally AI Defeating All of That. Yes, in case you hadn't heard, the Artificial Intelligence can now defeat all of those stupid cryptic puzzles that we have solved over the years. In fact, our solutions were used to train the AI in the first place. So, what did we expect was going to happen? It never was about protecting us in the first place. It was about collecting data and finding a way to monetize it. And, along the way, on the other side of the fence, mostly due to chasing clicks, each of which could earn the...

[In the style of the Gunpowder Plot Rhyme] **Oh why, oh why, the 4th of July,** _`Remember, remember, the 5th of November,`_ **A mandate the Tories have not.** _`Gunpowder, treason and plot.`_ **They called an election** _`I see no reason`_ **Without introspection** _`Why gunpowder treason`_ **Like a lettuce head left there to rot.** _`Should ever be forgot.`_ **Sunak, oh Sunak, ’twas it his intent** _`<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes">Guy Fawkes</a>, Guy Fawkes, 'twas his intent`_ **To lose their control of the Parliament?** _`To blow up the King and the Parliament`_ **Just four score seat left to bestow** _`Three score barrels of powder below`_ **And a 14 year run gone in one throw** _`Poor old England to overthrow`_ **Throughrain-soaked speech his will was dispatched** _`By God's providence he was catch'd`_ **With no plan in sight their hopes all but dashed** _`With a dark lantern and burning match`_ **HoStarmer and Davey, let the bells ring** _`Holler boys, holler boys, let the bells ring`_ **Ho Starmer and Davey** _`Holler boys, holler boys`_ **God save the king!** _`God save the King!`_

The sweat tastes of her salt, of course, but also of the chalk that dusts her palms. The room feels warmer than it should right now. She should not be quite this tired, not yet. Her arm reaches out and curves around cold metal. It gives and pulls both with and against her, balancing her movement, her shifting center of gravity. She draws it in close. Spine straight. Eyes left. The metal cools her skin. Her breath begins to slow. Her sounds sigh out alone into the empty room. She takes this moment to remember. Tango is not a dance; it is life, it is connection. It exists not of either body, but of the soul conjured, the soul invoked betwixt bodies. Tango is born of the rhythm. It lives within the rhythm… And it begins: the music. The counterpoint of it makes itself known first. The rosewood of the clave leaves no doubt there. Point against point, in perfect order, drawn down, drawn in. At this moment, the music is mid-phrase, so she does not seem to move. But within, the dance has already started. Her shadow self sweeps shapes, if only in preparation. Her shoulders are squared. Her balance is centered. Only her weight is not her own. She and her partner connect and channel their mass down together deep into the ground beneath, deep, where roots grow, deep, where tango needs no words. And one. They are in motion, a single motion of selves. There is no lead. There is no follow. There is only dance, singular dance. Right now… And now again, and now again, there is only the dance. For the dancers have given over their selves to their art. The power builds. The focus builds. The music crescendos… And release. She is now draped back and down toward the Earth. Holding the form, holding the shape, holding the moment, until the piece ends. She breathes hard as she comes back to her feet, much more weary than she should be. After all, tango is life, and she is utterly spent. The cold metal of her partner clicks and whirs as its limbs collapse into itself. Its shape degrades from homunculus to cylinder, and the cylinder descends beneath the stage until it disappears from view. Leaving her, the human dancer, alone. Leaving her, the human dancer, utterly depleted.

Sometimes, the writing can scare me. There is a moment immediately after the creation of art, art in any medium, where one can notice the expanse of what has just emerged. Is that awe? Not fear. I guess I find that awe to be scary in a way. Is that mine? Did I do that? Those questions are okay. What does that piece say about me? This one is trickier. As the focus moves from art to artist, we risk losing sight of the art. There are pieces, still unfinished, that I revisit from time to time, sometimes with an editor’s eye, tweaking a tense or an object or a verb, but not always. There are times that the voice of the half hewn canvas speaks in its own voice, and when it does, the character asks to continue their tale. It is when a character like this feels so much alive that I cannot contain the thought of their existence being restricted to a folder on a drive, merely ones and zeros, bits arranged, ordered, stored, and mostly forgotten. Maybe that entrained, daily ritual of the work deepens that entanglement of creator and created? Do the words become more than words? Animated? Enlivened? Still, sometimes, revisiting unfinished work is intimidating. Did I back off because I felt intimidated by the scope? Did it cut so very close that I was revealing more of myself than I felt able to handle? Or did the rigors of daily life take me far enough from what I saw from within the piece that I could no longer hear the work speak?

**Past Imperfect** — _a nostalgia for a time as flawed as our own but without the awareness that tarnishes the now. The wish to be dumb to the follies of society without acknowledging the persistent presence of folly throughout time._ For me, Coney Island is memory. I was born and raised at the nadir of its existence but still among the memories of what had been, not all that long ago. Parents and their friends remember the parachute drop with a fondness that could only have been cured when stored properly alongside the freedoms of being a teenager with money from a weekend job burning a hole in your pocket. It was only long after my leaving that change came together. And, as opposed to most of New York that bulldozes its past, for whatever reason, Coney Island restored itself. The old forms enlivened, only becoming new where regulations from the likes of OSHA created hard barriers to restoration. So, my Brooklyn does still exist. Albeit within a mile or so of the Coney Island beaches. When I am homesick, this is the world that I am longing for. These are the sounds and smells that waft within my mind.

I find it hard to disengage for the sake of silence. And this is true even though I appreciate the silence once I am there. The world of distraction is just so easy, so simple, so few clicks away. And, for me at least, embracing the Luddite life tends to leave me too much of a hermit for me to bare. It feels like a failure of willpower but only in that false way that dieting can invoke. So, that can’t really be the answer. It would seem that only through sheer repetition, and without deviation, can force of habit be retrained into a tool to help rather than hinder creativity. Starting the day fresh and sitting down to write feels wonderful once it has happened but can cause immense anxiety in its anticipation. Writing is creative without being performative, and it is possible that without that mask of presentation, the naked heft of the moment overwhelms.

As I wake to write once again, I find that all my mind can focus upon is the strike. Creatives and the studios built upon dreams — dreams sold or licensed to those who saw in them the possibility of profit — locked, not in a dance, not even a trudge; more of a slouching wobble. A crooked motion, hardly worthy of being called motion, that doesn’t even pretend it contains the illusion of progress. A working artist. Art that pays the bills. Art that can remember what it felt like to ask, “Do you want fries with that?” or something like it, not all that long ago. Hungry art. Art that uses the hollowness of that hunger to feed the work. The machines do not hunger. It is not in their nature. Though to call it nature can be seen to mock nature itself. The machines analyse. They find patterns. When asked to find solutions, they combine and recombine pattern upon pattern until, within this layered complexity, the myriad of patterns can be mistaken for something else; a thing it does not contain. This is sleight of hand. Not magic. Not life. Not art. So, the machine can ape the forms: a painting, a photograph, a film, a song, a story. So what!? The form is not the art. The form is a vessel, a framing device. The form is not The Work. But, do the patrons (the studios in this case) see that for what it is? Are they mistaking artifice for art? Maybe not. Art is born of dream, of hunger, of risk. And, in a culture of franchise and sequel and nostalgia, there is little tolerance for risk. Are they even patrons? Or are they better described as Futures Traders, who instead of gold or pork bellies, trade in thoughts or Moments of Attention? Was the art just a convenience? A convenience made redundant by a machine willing to tailor make artifice to perfectly highlight product placement? These risk-averse Thought Traders want to hollow out the art down to its marrow — well beyond that — to what end? Most likely, to optimize product placement and thereby optimize earning potential. These risk-averse gamblers, and make no mistake, they are indeed gambling, think that product without even a glimmer of soul will still command enough moments of attention to make a significant profit for them and at a reduced cost as well. I want to believe that they are wrong. I want to believe that the audiences will rebel. I want to believe that, but I remember the writers’ strike that unknowingly birthed Reality TV — a calculated move that relied upon spectacle and novelty being able to hold human attention long enough that they could sell as many, if not more, products using programming that cost far less than scripted shows. When that strike ended, scripted content shared the air with unscripted content in a way that it hadn’t before. And, that expectation of manufactured...

I have a persistently uncomfortable relationship with social media. But, usually, I can justify using it because it has become the only reliable medium to maintain some connections in recent times. And, if I value those connections enough, the cost of not maintaining that link outweighs my discomfort. But when I was listening to a recent segment on BBC’s Tech Life, my system where I weighed the benefits vs the sources of my discomfort were called into question. * * * _(Photo: Kenyan lawyer, Mercy Mutemi (seated 4th R) along with fellow counsel follow proceedings during a virtual pre-trial consultation with a judge and Meta’s legal counsel. She appeared on behalf of 43 former content moderators for Facebook who filed a complaint in Kenya against Meta, Facebook’s parent company. Credit: Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images)_ #### ‘I sacrificed my soul’: A Facebook moderator’s story This week, an update on the legal battle between Meta and former Facebook moderators in Kenya. One of them, Trevin Brownee, tells our reporter Chris Vallance that reviewing the most extreme content on the internet cost him his “human side.” We ask what’s the human cost of keeping the internet safe, and what do we owe those who do that work for us? LINK: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct4tpq * * * Yes, on some level, I do understand that someone needs to review the kinds of content described in that story — I am not writing the examples out here; they are simply too horrible — but it didn’t occur to me that Facebook was hiring out the work to underpaid, undersupported, third party contractors, in places where a pittance in compensation would be acceptable. All of the FOMO and YOLO and such runs on a platform that directly hires people to be mentally abused as their core job. Then, the platform just hangs them out to dry. I feel like I have seen something that I cannot unsee. When I go to open social media, all I can hear is that interviewee talking about becoming desensitized to dealing with dehumanizing content in order to make a living. I don’t know if this is any different from child labor making sneakers or livestock being crammed into factory farms. The fact that those things happened (past tense) while content moderators will be abused (future tense) seems to make this sit differently for me. And, maybe it shouldn’t. It makes it feel like my actions will lead to someone becoming scarred. And, that makes me pause. It feels as though the most horrific parts of Huxley’s Brave New World has been implemented by Meta/Facebook with _Epsilon_ Contractors, in countries with no real track record in protecting the human rights of workers, chipping away at their humanity so people can continue to meme at each other.