I am still getting amounts of spam that infuriate me. I’ve now turned the settings up so a comment can’t get through unless that person has a comment already approved by me. That means that random people who may come along and want to leave a comment will go into a pile with all the spam in there and I have to hopefully notice that one and approve it while I am deleting. This means I have to be more careful than ever before at cleaning the spams even though it is pretty rare a random person comes to this site.

In the meantime, here’s a list of the ten spams I found most interesting while clearing them out this week in no particular order with the name, then the comment and then my thoughts:

1. The Magic Bullet System 2: “I am loving this site accept I am having issues with getting the rss feed to work in the new Firefox 4.0. Any suggestions? Thanks a million! bye” This is easily the most common type of spam. It acts like it is some random dude and says it is having a problem viewing the site in a certain browser or finding the RSS feed or some other technical thing. Most of them are the same with some words changed. I wanted that kind of spam represented on the list and I picked this one because I think Magic Bullet is those stupid infomercials I’ve watched on occasion and because of the “accept” miswording.
2. Andy Ortiz:”You made some Good points there. I did a search on the topic and found most people will agree.” This guy has a surname I have always liked, he compliments me AND he can tell that people will agree with my having seen a UFO by doing a search. Neat.
3. Mending A Broken Heart: “26 Dec 10 at 6:38 pm” Somehow commenting just a random date is creepy. I can’t decide if it would be creepier if the date had been in the future or not.
4. Chris Doll: “Gran pagina web, me gusta mucho.” Spanish? Pagina is a funny word!
5. The Magic Bullet System: “Excellent write-up, I am a big believer in placing comments on websites to help the site writers know that they have added something of great benefit to the online world!” Nice try, spam robot, but I know you are in fact not a big believer in that or anything else.
6. clickbank product review: “Fingers down, you solved a problem I had linked to this for any when. Your blog is very inspiring also. Clickbank Product Reviews” This fellow makes the list for getting the phrase “hands down” so incorrect.
7. Fantastic007: “Hey Every one how are you doinging. hope you are haveing a wonderful day” This guy has a great attitude and amusing typos. This one popped up on two posts I did specifically complaining about the spam.
8. painful broken heart: “@thecico12345 shut up you fucking pussy” Hah! That one just made me laugh. I’d sure hate to be thecico12345 about now.
9. Bonita Dejesus: “Awsome article and straight to the point. I am not sure if this is really the best place to ask but do you people have any ideea where to get some professional writers? Thanks in advance :)” This is another one that makes the list for having a name that amuses me. Also, the idea of heading down to some store or something to pick up some professional writers is sorta fun.
10. bistro table: “What’s evil, then I might desire you’ll now extra acceptable? The standard of an evil human being, the place existence moved away to somebody in the way in which of a wound.” There were a ton of comments from bistro table that were just as incomprehensible as this apparently trying to muse upon the concept of evil. I probably could have filled this list with just those. Instead I picked this one. Oh what the heck. One more…
11. bistro table: “Business is divided into excellent and bad people. Few who do not anything however evil emperor. A person also was once this sort of person.” I want to get “Few who do not anything however evil emperor” on a motivational poster or something.

UPDATE:

And then this happened:

And suddenly another year is gone. Too fast to be properly appreciated and the new one will likely wind up the same way. Everyone be sure to light a candle so that the Dark Lord Char’Nagh can see properly as he makes his rounds this year-end.

I feel that 2010 was a pretty decent year. Granted, I may just be feeling that way because the last few weeks have been pretty nice and the rest of the year was just mediocre. I mean, I’m poorer than ever and I didn’t get to do any travelling whatsoever in 2010, but hey, at least I didn’t have a computer die on me like in stupid 2009. I’m getting comic strips done at a rate that I’ve probably not met since the death of Contains2.

2011 however is going to be the year for the Book of PDR and its related endeavours. I will make this true. So bring it on!

Today saw Kiiip and I joining forces for the first time in months to watch the movie True Grit. It was a solid flick. Somewhat less quirky and ambiguous than typical your Coen Brothers affair, but not without its charms. I am underselling it, I think. It’s really good. Certainly I liked last year’s A Serious Man better, but those brothers have yet to disappoint me. If anybody out there is thinking “I want to see a good Western” they have one they can go to. I’ve not seen the original attempt at making a movie of True Grit, so I can’t compare, but I’ll give this one like Four and a Half Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake.

Haiku!

Powerful hamster,
why do you do this to me?
Please just let me go.

And finally, the spammers are hitting my site harder than ever this week. Over 600 comments over the last two days alone and it still seems like any time I check there are more to go. Probably even as I write this very sentence the spam robots are hard at work creating bizarre compliments that they think will trick me into going to their sites. I will not be fooled! But I will have to delete a bunch of spams.

Haha! I just checked and here is the comment the robots have just added to this Monday’s comics post:

“I want to thank you for the efforts you have put in writing this post. I am hoping the same top-quality article from you in the upcoming as well. In fact your creative writing abilities has inspired me to start my own blog now. Truly the blogging is spreading its wings rapidly. Your write up is a fine example of it. “

Could they lay it on thicker? Geez.

So there is the only strip I’ve got to give you this week.

It is actually Sunday morning instead of Monday morning as I write this. I am using the little function to pre-date a post so that it will go up automatically when its time comes. I’ve never tried it before and I figure that if I’m going to be successful at making sure I get a post up every Monday I need to learn how to use it. It seems… pretty much as simple as changing one number, but I’ll not know for sure until I see this post come up on its own.

Update: And this is Monday PDR. Neat. My time-travel post seems to have gone on without a hitch, so now that is among the tricks up my sleeve. Level Up! So… The time I might have spent doing that post this day was instead spent watching television in the form of the Walking Dead and the Venture Brothers. For the Walking Dead I have to rescind my comments made after I’d seen the first episode that came to the fact that it was good but that since I’ve read the comics I knew the story. As the episodes have gone on I see that they are either doing things differently or I don’t actually remember the early issues of the book at all. For the Venture Brothers it was the season finale and it was good. I am going to miss that show while it is away, but I guess the guys who make it need a break. So I might as well let them have one. The episode also mentioned a Secret President, which amused me considering how recently I started doing this strip.

Marq has been doing behind the scenes work to get the transfer to the Book of PDR to the new WordPress and all that. Thanks Marq! But in doing so, he’s discovered something that is, quite frankly, shocking. Well, not shocking I guess. But it’s… not interesting… uh… notable? Not really, but that’ll have to do. Here’s a list of roughly how many posts I’ve done in each year that the Book of PDR has been in business.

2006 = 100
2007 = 81
2008 = 68
2009 = 58
2010 = 60

Now, first of all, 2006 is the highest by far and I wasn’t even on for that full year! I started in May or something. I can only assume that this because in 2006 I was still working with some of my Contains2 work ethic. On Contains2, if I didn’t post something every couple days, I wasn’t doing it wrong. But since 2006 consisted mainly of Contains2 dying and me working alternating day and night shifts every week, two of many things that make me look back on 2006 as utter ballsack, most of my posts were just complaining about work. Eventually I got sick of those complainy posts and made a conscious effort to do less of that. Sadly I don’t have much else going on. I can sit down and think “What’s going on that I should write about?” and mostly the only thing going on is that I don’t want to go to work. That is not newsworthy, so I just skip it.

The low point of 2009 is a bit of a surprise. I guess that during that year I had issues with my computer, including it finally dying, but it doesn’t look like I did much when I got the new computer either. Now keep in mind that in WordPress there is a difference between Posts and Pages. Posts are what this is and all my journal or prose or all that. Pages are stuff like my FAQ or my About page and I have put more work into those in the last couple years (plus there are tons of pages that are not even published that I use to keep notes for myself) and I think most of my writing in 2009 is probably on Pages. So it probably isn’t as bad a drop as it looks.

I’m going to try to get 2010 up a higher, but I’ve only got a month and a bit left and considering I was quite happy with the way I just avoided talking about Christmas last year, I’m going to have to find something else to talk about. Weekly comic posts are going to help, though. And I can say this: I’m going to break the record in 2011. By a lot if I can help it. And I can.