Ughs and spams and EMG stuff

[ellenmillion]

Tired this morning.

(Are we seeing a trend here?)



Seriously need an EMG day, may get one on Sunday before gaming, may take one Monday. (May call in sick... may arrange it beforehand. Who knows...)

Art-time has been in wonderful abundance (comparatively, an hour a day *is* abundance), but I'm still feeling awfully, *horribly* disconnected from my precious EMG. Having it in town while I'm living at our house (with only one vehicle) is a major inconvenience and a PIMA (pain in my ass). Emails are sitting around for-freaking-ever before I manage to answer them, orders I get out relatively speedily (once a week), catalog requests are piled up from two or three weeks ago, and there is so much darn administration that needs to be done. UGH. Doesn't help that funds are low at the moment. Not ours, just EMGs, which have always been completely independent. I've got a lot of blank stock and ink and products, so it's not that the big-picture is doing badly, but the bank account is awfully slim. I *really* don't want to have to dip into the studio fund. I've been squirreling away nickels and dimes for about two years in order to be able to afford to build a little waterproof, warm shack out in our woods where I can run EMG. So far I've saved close to $2500, I think. I try not to look at the balance too often. It's too much like a possible tablet, but a studio is for EMG, and a tablet... that's just for me. :) It's looking more like the end of June for earning that tablet, not the end of May. I was sort of hoping to buy it as a birthday present for myself, but another month isn't going to kill me. I've lived this long without one.

At any rate, I did finish that second mermaid coloring book page (very pleased) and started another. The third one is a single mermaid looking in astonishment and curiosity at a stream of bubbles filled with fairies, with big broken stone columns in the background. I had the June theme of Woodworks in mind: ancient lands. No one has claimed that cover yet, so I was thinking about offering this design for use. I was *hoping* to have my tablet in time to color it, but I may have to either beg someone else to color it for Woodworks, go traditional media, or see if they'll take black and white. Or see if someone else comes with something between now and then. It's only on regular drawing paper, so it wouldn't take watercolor well, and I tend to get a little hard on paper with my colored pencils. Maybe I'll print it out on cardstock and use pencils... that worked rather nicely with Kativa. (I still want to go back and darken the snowy's coat.)

Still giving some thought to a possible contest, but two peoples-worth of interest isn't enough to justify the work it would be. I'll stew on it a bit longer. Maybe I won't make it a competition, just put out a call for said work. But I like competitions; they're fun. :P I think I'd take poetry, too.

Is it me, or is spam getting more... distasteful? Girls and barnyard animals? Even the subject lines make me shudder, and they're more explicit than most porn. I should note; I have *nothing* against porn. I like tasteful nude photography and believe that the human body is a lovely thing. I don't even mind sexually suggestive nude photography. But I have problems with emails in my inbox that describe acts I don't even want to know about. Where is this 'mother teaching her teen son to cum' stuff coming from?! *shudders*

I feel unclean just being exposed to the subject lines... it's way worse than the damned 'please your woman' viagra ads.

Ugh.

They fed us fried chicken for lunch today. I adore fried chicken, so I am feeling terribly charitable towards work. This is the last free lunch, probably for a very long time (listening to the 'never-agains' from the front desk staff).

Comments

[ursulav.livejournal.com]

Hey, you're getting the glut of barnyard animal porn too? I swear to god, in the last month or so, I've gotten more beastiality porn spam than in the entire year before that. And it's always the same ad, too, they just keep changing the subject line to escape my filter. I mean, what the hell? That's a pretty specialized market, for god's sake, and if I didn't click the first time, I'm not gonna click the next five HUNDRED times...*grumble*

So Speaketh The Voice Of The Internet Tech Guy...

[jemstone.livejournal.com]

If you can at all delete the mail without previewing it or opening it in any way, do so. That will greatly help reduce the amount of spam you will get from certain (not all) individuals. A really sneaky thing people are doing these days is running a script that figures out who is accessing mail by pulling the e-mail addresses and ip's of viewers (intentional or not) of the images contained in the e-mail itself. Even if you don't click the links, you're still pulling up the images in your mail, which are inserted via HTML tags rather than just attaching them to the mail itself. So, when you preview or open the mail, it does an HTTP command and gets the images off the net, and in doing so, logs where the request came from.

Sadly, I think some people are trying to classify this as "opting in," no less. Argh.

The one that gets me is when I get mail from the same spammer advertising both breast enhancements and penis enlargement. That one slays me.

-JEM

[tarlia.livejournal.com]

Mailwasher. Friends, family, colleagues and I swear by this.

http://www.mailwasher.net (does not seem to work atm)
http://www.cricket.org/link_to_database/PRODUCTS/firetrust/