Youtube recently recommended to me a video about a monstrous figure that wears a hat and haunts people. Apparently the Hat Man is a known variation of the Shadow Person folklore that has cropped up, According to Wikipedia, there have been reports of him since at least the “late 2000s”. But what the video reminded me of is that I basically invented that guy myself in 2014.

The Hatwearer, I called him. Hat-wearing guy who haunts people, and in my version, kills them. I was just trying to create something evocative of the Creepypasta stories I was learning about around that era and thought he was generic enough to work. Obviously the big difference between my Hatwearer and this Hat Man fellow is that my one isn’t a shadow person. He has corporeality going on and everything. Detailed features, messed up though they are by our human standards. But the basics are similar enough that it made me think.

I’ve never had a sleep paralysis event, and I have never had a need to take Benadryl. Those, Wikipedia says, are the main sources of seeing the Hat Man. I guess I just tapped into the zeitgeist and trod some mental territory that was already well-trodden. I can only apologize for being unoriginal.

Anyway, I didn’t mention it at the time, because I hoped I’d do it some day, but my intended use for the Hatwearer was for him to appear in a specific story. I had, in those days, hoped I’d be able to get stories about the Hateful King made, and it was my intention to have the King just casually kill off that particular demon with ease, to show how powerful he could be. It’s more than a decade later and I’ve made no progress on any Hateful King stories, so I guess that story can now be told here. In this form. Consider this hackneyed demon to have been slain.

I used to occasionally check Google for strange sentences to see if anyone had ever said them on the Internet, and if not, put them in a post. Well, if I thought Google was unreliable in 2022, when last I did this, it’s downright anti-reliable now.

But I assume I can still populate my website with some fresh sentences even if I can’t check to be sure. I just need to make the sentences overly specific and complex and the odds are they will be new!

• “The wisest hamster in the bucket is still a hamster in a bucket.”
• “If you think about it, there’s no hair on the sun.”
• “Hey everybody, it’s new haircut day and that means we can all download our new haircuts.”
• “That coyote knows that the other coyotes think he’s an idiot.”
• “Hey Alvin, should we go taste the parking lot before it gets away?”
• “The national dish of Italy is a plate of grated potato dyed to resemble whoever is the current mayor of Palermo.”
• “The difference between a king and a peasant is how many racecars they’ve kissed.”
• “The dog with fleas is capable of running faster than the dog without fleas, because of all the extra legs.”
• “Sometimes the best way to fly to the doctor’s office is with a doctor copter.”
• “I want to ride the slime all the way through time!”
• “Baseball is the only sport in which the base is made of balls.”
• “If the internet has sentences on it, they were probably put there by Satan to trick people into believing that the Internet exists.”

I’ve often thought of spam as one of the worst things about the Internet. There’s the fact that a lot of it is done as an attempt to scame people, of course, so I don’t like that. But there’s also the fact that there’s just so much of it. Most of it is, I assume, automated by programs that run without human intervention. So there’s just spam comments and emails being created and either blocked by spam filters or deleted or ignored probably thousands a second or some other more impressive number I can’t imagine. How much energy does that eat up? I assume it’s as bad as NFTs and crap like that. The very fact that we need to have spam filters is a bad, like the internet equivalent of sunscreen protecting us from UV rays, except spam was created by people who are fine with making the world worse. It all saddens me.

I used to have a lot of problem with spam on the site, but judging by last post in my spam tag being from 2012, I thought it was less of a direct issue for the Book of PDR. That has changed. The spammers have dragged me back into their electronic underworld of internet evil.

About a week ago, someone apparently hacked into my website provider thing and used my account to create 500 new email addresses. I assume this was all done by bots and the emails began to pump out spam emails. I knew nothing of this. I am meant to get an email when someone who isn’t me logs into the account, but it didn’t happen. Also, supposedly I was sent an email by the company’s security people saying there was suspicious activity, but I received no such thing. I have to assume the spammers have ways around such things. I learned of all this when suddenly I was not allowed to send emails (though thankfully I can still receive them) and I tried to log into the control panel and I was locked out of that as well. Only when I got through to the support people did I learn what had happened.

So anyway, they let me back into the control panel and I did indeed find that someone had indeed created 500 email addresses using my domains (they were just named by numbers, which means there was a “69@contains2.com” in there, which amused me slightly). Anyway, it took me FIVE HOURS but I did delete all those bastards.

I did eventually determine that there were some logins from Oslo that I did not get an email about. I got an email when I logged in on my phone, and when Marq logged into help me, but not these Oslo occurrences. I doubt the spammers are actually from Oslo, I assume their bots just use it as a base or whatever, but now I have to hate Oslo for at least one calendar year. Sorry, Oslo.

As of this writing I do not have the ability to send email back yet. I hope that is changed soon, but I am aware this could all be worse. I love my website and I hate to see it’s fragile stability threatened by jerks.

I was reluctant to join Twitter when it was new. Eventually I did, though. And I got to like it.

Some people bemoan how “people are always looking at their phones” these days, but I can only speak for myself about how having the Internet readily at hand has made me happier. Back before I had a “smartphone” when I was caught out in the world, I didn’t look around with greater appreciation or some other idyllic feeling. My mind was just as chaotic then as it was after I got the phone, I just had to deal with it in different ways. I remember sitting in waiting rooms and just arranging everything on the tables so that they were at right angles to one another. I often used to just throw coins around randomly, like just hucking pennies into the street and such. I did minor graffiti on many occasions. All this was stuff I did just because I didn’t have something better to focus on.

Twitter was never the most important use for my newfangled high-tech phones, but it was high on the list. It would allow me, at any time, to check and see if any of the people I cared to hear about had said anything I might like to read. It was a source of entertainment I could pull out of my pocket when I needed it, and also it kept me feeling like I was connected to society around me. And sometimes I made dumb jokes on there*. And, perhaps most importantly, Twitter confirmed that I am the Pope now:

But it is now past time to leave that particular social media site. For what it’s worth, I have joined Bluesky, an up and coming rival for Twitter’s userbase. It is currently invitation-only but it has enough people on there that I can usually find something entertaining when I crave it (Which is good because Canada doesn’t have pennies anymore). But I will miss what Twitter was when I enjoyed it.

*Making dumb jokes on Twitter was never my favourite usage for it. I know the common belief is that we need to be careful what we say on the Internet because it sticks around forever, but a lot of the time that just ain’t true. I crave permanence and the Internet is an ephemeral place. If I had my way, everything I ever posted on Contains2 (or its Geocities predecessor the Adam West Batcave) would all be accessible on this website, but they just aren’t. This is why I got Marq to make a thing for me so that the things I posted on Twitter would show up on this site too (they also helped keep things visually more appealing here for a couple years), but that program eventually stopped working. Before I fully leave Twitter I am going to go through and find any jokes worth repeating here or turning into Phone Guys strips or whatever. But no matter how much I salvage, I’ll be losing something. That’s the Internet for ya.

Even though it is perfectly common for me to go weeks without making a non-scheduled post on the site here, I feel like I should explain my current span of weeks in which I won’t be posting. I’ve had to move again, and as a result I am currently without Internet for a while.

For the last few years I have lived in an apartment above what is, to my generation, still known as the Video Difference building in Halifax. I liked it and it was nice to live in a Haligonian landmark of sorts. And for the fifteen years prior to that, I had an apartment just across the street from that, so for almost half of my life I’ve lived on Quinpool Road. I like it there and still think of it as my neighbourhood.

But, a victim of the whims of capitalism as I am and as are we all, I have had to move about two blocks away. It’s fine, though inconvenient. I’ll get by, because what other choice do I have?

Haiku!

Why can’t turtles fly?
Because if they were up there,
they would not be here?

Anyway, I am also about to change my Internet service provider, which is part of the reason for the delay I am currently going through. I would have happily continued to pay the city’s most expensive provider if they’d managed to make the switch right away, but they didn’t so I’m going with someone cheaper. Hopefully in the long run, that will help.