I Am Completely Serious

Link Removal Request

From: Keith Terrell (Keith.Terrell@melbourneit.com.au)

To: sarahpin.com@respectmyprivacy.com

Hello,

We recently reviewed all the links pointing to the MelbourneIT website, and found that you currently have link/s to us on your website, sarahpin.com.

While we appreciate your support, our online marketing team has requested that the links listed below be removed if possible, as they no longer

comply with the guidelines set out by the various search engines.

The page/s of your website that we found links on are:

http://www.sarahpin.com/2008/07/19/recent-researches-why-yahoo-private-domain-registration-is-not-private/

We appreciate your time in reviewing this. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any problems locating the links.

Kind regards,
Keith

The link in question is on one of several extremely critical posts I've made about Yahoo and MelbourneIT's unethical business practices. MelbourneIT provides Yahoo's horrific domain registration services.

Winners are the ones whose fucking arms have fallen off by the time the cookies are done.

I just spent an hour and a half preparing the dough for these chocolate chip cookies, deviating from the recipe only in that 1) I obviously do not have a stand mixer, because I am an armless winner, and 2) I used chocolate chips instead of chopped baking chocolate. The recipe dirties three bowls, two whisks, and a saucepan, and the dough needs to spend the night in the fridge.

There's a lengthy article explaining the chemical rationale behind all these steps. I shall learn tomorrow whether to take chemistry seriously.

Searching for "self-publish" or "ebook" or something on Kickstarter, and looking at the projects that didn't get funded.

The stuff by teenagers doesn't bother me - excitedly asking the internet to fund a print run for your awesome book that's almost a whole hundred pages long! strikes me as a pretty healthy thing for a kid to do. But the adults...

This poor guy. And there are so many Kickstarters like this - people who got a deceptively-worded letter from a vanity press, who are now desperately trying to raise money to get their book "published."

I kind of want to come up with a form letter to send to people like this, suggesting that they just start a blog. Or at least go to a PoD or online press, that's not going to lie to them about what kind of transaction this is.

I continue to be fascinated by this sort of stuff.

The unkindly-named Sheep Marketplace is gone, taking all the money in escrow down with it. Its creator claimed that they'd been hacked, but the online stoner consensus is that he/she is the actual culprit. Its name had long been a source of suspicion as to the owner's motives, but that didn't stop people who wanted drugs from using it when Silk Road went down. Addiction: not good for your risk-assessment skills.

A longer-running site, Black Market Reloaded, is down for an ostensibly temporary break due to security concerns. You will be unsurprised to learn that it was preceded by another defunct site called "Black Market." A third, Silk Road 2.0, was open only briefly before their servers were overloaded with traffic fleeing the other two.

This site's owner, who I guess I'll call the Dread Pirate Roberts 2.0, put up a note blaming the Tor protocol for the problem. This is plainly not the case. If it were, then the original Silk Road, which must have had much greater volumes of traffic, would not have existed.

What's especially fun about all this is that the absconding Sheep owner suggested that their users move to yet another newly-minted alternative illicit marketplace, Tormarket. Tormarket quickly posted an unhappy-sounding message saying that they had nothing to with Sheep and asking that Sheep take that recommendation down: "This is the worst PR we can get right now. Please admin remove the link. Please."

The subreddits on the subject are, as when Silk Road was seized, a tragicomedy - lots of people trying to figure out where to get their next hit, other people mocking them, others muttering darkly about conspiracies and assassinations. There's a debate raging as to whether Tormarket is the Sheep owner's latest con, or whether it's actually a fifth site called Pandora, and the link to Tormarket a strategy to blacken its competition's eye.

My pretend internet money's on Pandora as the honeypot, if you were wondering. Similar aesthetic sense in terms of names.

because some of it relies on Tumblr-reblog formatting and I have been too tired to convert it, upload the images to my own server, etc. So if you want to know every time I lose my shit about fake health facts and cruel video games, you may want to go over there.

In the interests of having some exclusive content over here, too, I will tell a story about my tiny dog. I have a tiny dog now. I found her at the school - someone had dumped her there with an injured leg and her ribs showing. So, she lives here now, and if I ever find out who did that I will injure them. She's good at calming down Dad's big neurotic dog, and likes to sit quivering in people's laps and look at them with wide trembling brown eyes.

However, she is still not full-grown, and still likes to chew things she shouldn't. She ruined my one good pair of flats, Mom's favorite slippers, Dad's sneakers, and somehow a dog bed that weighs more than she does.

As a result, Mom and Dad got her some toys. One of them was a white stuffed yeti that squeaks. Being a determined and inquisitive tiny dog, she decided that she had to get at the squeaky thing and put a stop to its plans once and for all.

The thing is that the squeaky thing, which is a little rubber ball, was sewn in place with bright red thread. This had to have been intentional on the manufacturer's part. I'll be walking through the living room, see a little white thing, and go "oh my god someone's killed a white cat - oh, never mind, it's just the yeti." She's carried some bits of the toy's filling to corners and stuff, and I'll see those, think they're feathers, go, "oh my god someone's killed a white bird - oh, never mind, it's just the yeti."

Yesterday she finally succeeded in entirely removing the squeaky ball from the yeti's body, all covered in red thread like fresh blood, tearing out its heart. In a wild display of triumph, she ripped off her doggy sweater, and moved a pillow off Mom and Dad's bed to sit on like a queen. She then started shivering and tried to climb inside my sleeve, because she doesn't have enough body mass to keep herself warm in cold weather.

Me, cleaning up the yeti guts: Well, at least that fluff's not from the pillow.

My dog has killed the last yeti, and I find this preferable to most of the alternatives.

Preserved here for posterity.

( 'HighQualityKratom.com review, by ljc79 )

At this point, I noticed that the ljc79 account had been deleted. I wonder why.