Category: administrivia

If you’re going to text me via the phone number on this site, you should be prepared to tell me who the fuck you are in your first message. If you don’t, you will be blocked. I may or may not say anything before said blocking.

Not anticipating that the people I occasionally hear from will ever read this; they may in fact not have gotten the number from here. But.

Additional note: if you claim to be someone I know, be prepared to prove it.

So, I have a phone number down in the info at the bottom of this website’s layout. It is a Google Voice number, meaning it does not ring my phone, though I do get notifications whenever someone contacts it in some way. And I’ve had a voicemail and a text message in the past three days, which is weird; I go literal years with no notifications of any kind usually, other than random spam.

I suspect the voicemail was from someone who dialed a wrong number, because I’ve had this thing for months and it sounded like someone had just recently given the person the number they thought they were calling. Just in case, I’ve texted them back to let them know they dialed the wrong person. My luck it was a landline, though it doesn’t hurt to try. But I don’t know the other person’s circumstances, so I’m posting this here in case here is where they got the number from.

The main reason I have the number on my site at all is so that people who know me but haven’t kept up with my number can still contact me. Primarily it is there for my kids. I am not counting on the older one ever using it, but it’s possible the younger one might at some point. In any case, regardless of who it is, if they’re someone I know then they can’t say they had no way to reach me. This is particularly important as I have not been in a good place to acquire a post office box, though if I ever get around to that I’ll add the address to my contact info here as well.

I cannot fathom why anyone else would want to contact me by phone without so much as an email introduction first. But if you’re wanting me to respond to you, I’m going to need a bit more to go on than “hello.” Google Voice doesn’t seem to have caller ID apart from showing me the originating number. I know you can google phone numbers, but that doesn’t often produce any useful results.

It goes without saying that anyone who leaves me nasty messages will be blocked. That hasn’t happened so far, but you never know. I cannot say whether I will do the mature, sensible thing and pretend nothing happened just so you don’t get your kicks, but if I am immature and non-sensible, very likely I will post your phone number too. Hey, it could be a burner. But maybe it won’t be. You like it? Me too. Let’s not even go there.

I wouldn’t even bring this up as a possibility, but I’ve had too much weird shit happen to me in half a century. I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t try to cover all bases.

Speaking of which… and this is a shot so long it’d land me on Pluto. If you’re the big man, better be ready to prove it.

He wouldn’t. But if he did. Just saying.

Oops. I had left comments on. Got a spam comment, is the only way I caught it.

Sorted. Every post prior to this one will have a message on it after the main body of the post that says you have to be registered and logged in to comment, but you won’t be able to actually do that. From this post forward, I don’t think it’ll even have that message.

I used to love allowing comments and having people to talk to, and I would even hear from people I knew, but I was hypersensitive and trigger-happy and sooner or later someone would try to start an argument or a debate in my personal space and it would usually annoy me or piss me off. And then there was the occasional troll. So it’s just not something I want to deal with anymore.

Update on the Facebook thing. It’s more like a 90/10 on interactions and maybe 80/20 on looking at it at all.

Predictably, the person who often chats with me on Messenger is still doing so and only one other person has reached out whatsoever. One.

We do understand that friendship is a basic human need, right? I’m not very clear on the thought process here. I just know what it looks like. I’m not a mind-reader, y’all.

Well, okay though. Survival is even more basic a need than friendship. (Though I could argue that friendship aids survival.) I suppose I had best get to work on that and maybe the rest of you will catch up and maybe you won’t.

I ought to quit Facebook for its “friend” designation alone. Intellectually we know it isn’t REALLY “adding a friend,” but that language still automatically triggers unconscious expectations and it can gum up the emotional works if you’re not careful. Or maybe that’s just me.

I was serious. If you want to keep me around then you want to start reaching out to me. I’m done with the passive consumerism masquerading as “social interaction.” It is nothing of the sort.

Though this isn’t just about Facebook. When you can interact with people in person and they still don’t give a shit about you, that’s pretty demoralizing after a while.

Okay. Enough drama on the “administrivia” category. Also, I tweaked a couple things here at the site. Nothing important or affecting functionality. The end.

This is a sort of “administrivia” for both here and my social media.

I am on a sort of hiatus with Facebook. I would say it’s about a 95/5 split of staying off Facebook vs occasionally liking or commenting, respectively, and I’ve written no new posts since the one about my old house in Columbus.

If you go to my profile and notice you can see maybe two posts (not counting announcements that a profile or cover photo has been changed) but you can also see we’re still Facebook friends, you went on the Restricted list. If you don’t know what that is, google “Facebook friend restricted list.” We’re still Facebook friends because I still like you and want to keep you around. However, apparently neither of us is getting much out of the interaction and I am at a stage of debating next steps with myself. Likely I will leave the status quo in place for now; I may even add more people to Restricted status. It is not a compelling enough decision that I have to settle on it right now.

There is a difference between friends and friend lists. I need friends, not friend lists. One can have mutual benefit without having friendship. That is an incredibly lonely way to live. I don’t know what to do from here. I can’t even ask, because people can’t have these conversations without flying off the handle and assuming the worst.

So, one criterion I’ll likely refer to, if I even stay on Facebook (more on that in a minute), in order to decide who to keep around is who starts conversations with me. I now have Messenger installed on my laptop and running even when I don’t have Facebook up in my browser. I’ve had it on my phone for ages. If you actually want to talk to me and not just react to shit that you get notifications for like you are getting a hit of heroin, you know where I am.

Because you can say “well, we can’t really be friends if we don’t know one another that well yet” all you like, and I will still point out to you that there ain’t no fucking way we’re ever going to get to know one another if I only ever hear from you when you want that mutual benefit. I’m not a fucking appliance. Figure it out or fuck off.

If you feel I haven’t made enough of an effort in your direction, you certainly have the right to criticize me in the same vein. That’s fair. And at least then it would be a real interaction and not that stupid haha react I’d love to shove up Mark Zuckerberg’s left nostril sideways.

(Does a round shape have a “sideways”? Do I fucking care? Just wondering.)

Now. As to whether I stay on Facebook. I have no idea. I’ve toyed around with alternatives like getting back on MeWe, but no one would go with me. You’d rather complain about Facebook than leave Facebook. I’m on Spinster, but most of you wouldn’t go there. I’m on X, but I don’t use it much. (The current 0 tweets are because I deleted what little there was.) You know what? I’d rather just hang out with people. Can I hang out with people? Can I have a real life again finally? Please?

I won’t even get drunk and flash my tits. You should be glad. My biopsy scars do nothing for my personal aesthetics.

Okay, everybody. We’re going to see some upset with some functionality for a bit. I am desperate to get my expenses down until I can get my income up, and probably even then because I have a LOT of economic recovery to be doing. So I am changing my website hosting service for the first time in five years.

I hate to leave Old Host because on the service side of things they’ve been good to me, but on the fiscal side of things they’ve been fucking awful. New Host is reputable (if I told you who they were and if you are at all familiar with hosting services, you’d probably recognize their name — they’ve been around for a good while) and currently holding a hosting sale where it’s around forty bucks for a year for me. Which is five dollars more than I was paying Old Host per month. Nope. I’m outta here.

So if for some bizarre reason you know my first name AT last name DOT net email address, that’s not going to work until at least the 27th. I have it all set up and I’ll know it’s working when Thunderbird stops whining at me about it.

This site may hiccup too because I’m not moving the domain name yet but will be migrating the site. I would just do it myself but I want to see if the official migration service with New Host will move the photos too. I’m currently testing this with another of my websites but I can’t remember if I have photos there or just links. We’ll see how that goes. Whee!

[edit] The site migration seems a mite complicated. Manual migration it is, then. Bleah.

Trip to California was supposed to run from Sunday to Wednesday. I got delayed two days, so I got here Friday. Stuff’s going okay. Part of me wants to write it all up and part of me’s still in sort of a daze.

Who on earth is now visiting me from Columbus, and who pops in from Dublin? Right, wait, I don’t know if I mentioned the visitor counter. There’s a visitor counter. Iiiiii seeeeeee yooooouuuuu. Sort of. Can’t see your name or home address. Definitely can see you’ve been by.

Not that the IP-parsing is always reliable about locations. I have not excluded my home IP address, so I can tell I’ve been here but… it thinks I’m in both Canada and in California. Make it make sense. I dunno. I don’t write these plugins.

[edit] Why the hell was my time set to Greenwich Mean? Ugh. Fixed it.

If you follow my personal blog or my social media then you know I’m about to relocate for the second time in less than a year. If I had to sum up my situation it would be “I need to stop associating with late-stage alcoholics.” I have been working on my exit from Louisiana for a little over two weeks, and I leave tomorrow night, heading for what sounds like a much happier or at least safer situation. “Safe” in the sense that I will have breathing room to improve my situation without being treated like a criminal. I already have a game plan for when I get where I’m going, and things should improve fairly quickly if it works out, but I count on nothing. That’s the game plan, anyway. Plans don’t mean squat when the universe has other ideas.

I mean, as it is I’ve done a 180 from two positions previously adopted: I didn’t want a roommate and I never wanted to move to California. But my prospective roommate seems relatively sane — by my standards, which are the only ones that really count here — and that particular area of California has much nicer weather than here in Louisiana. More important is the having breathing room. I haven’t had that in two years and it was really messing up my life. Now let’s see what I can do.

So at some point my contact info will change — I will not be keeping my Ohio number either, as I need a cheaper phone service and I will just get a new number rather than port mine — and you’ll see that at the bottom of the page here. I need to adjust some other information that’s already changed, too. I’ll get on that now.

Wish me luck.