Category: Uncategorized

Little fears, big time-gap

LittleFears25 Comments

Howdy WordPress. It’s been a long time, eh? 

I keep meaning to make this post, but every time it turns into a ramble. I’ve returned this weekend to do some housekeeping though, so I’ll try and do some TL:DR of my notes and failed attempts at this post.

  1. Holy heck, you’re an incredible, wonderful, and supportive bunch.
  2. The Fears isn’t returning. Quite literally, just came back to do some housekeeping. I’ll be taking a lot of stuff offline in 2021.
  3. I like projects that end. It’s not a bad thing. *Eyes Big Bang Theory, Simpsons, and Fonzie strapping on a pair of water skis* 
  4. I’ve lost access to my old email, and with it, some social media accounts. If you see spam, it’s not me, and sorry I can’t do anything about it.
  5. I’m aware some posts have reposted on WordPress, sorry, I haven’t logged in or looked at the Fears in a year. Only just found out today.
  6. WordPress is still a wonderful community with terrible technology.
  7. So much bad stuff happened to me across 2016-2019 it’s a miracle Fears sustained me at all, regardless of its ending.
  8. It wasn’t a miracle. It was you, the readers and subscribers. What an incredible, wonderful, and supportive bunch. Thank you.
  9. I still despise leaseholders, Land Registry, HMRC, and the Tory party.
  10. I’m in a frickin’ wonderful place in life now.
  11. Thank you. For reading, supporting, and groaning at the Little Fears.

I know, there’s some repetition there, but I cannot stress enough how awesome you good folks are.  

Thank you.

I’ve lost access to my old email, Amazon Publishing account and some social media accounts. Also, two business’ are using the exact words, Little Fears, as a product name. They have trademarks and copyright. 

I haven’t received any solicitors letters (yet), and I’m still happy with the last series of stories as a bookend to this project, and as I haven’t been here for a year, yeah. We can safely call this a finished project and move on.

The domain name pops in a few months. When that happens, I’ll swing back in and delete all accounts associated with the Fears that I can.

I don’t have any projects online at the moment, but you can find me under the handle Idle PX in a few places. Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and WordPress. Currently only active properly on Twitter. Not sure I’m set on using WordPress, but it seems a lot of you still hang out here. Would be nice to catch up. I’m doing some VSS365 stories at the moment, but only to get back into a writing habit. It’s not a Fears V2.

I hope to catch up with some of you over the next few weeks, and I will be hunting some of you down, heh.

Cheers.

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Pencil

LittleFears32 Comments

“How did you deal with her passing?” asked Sprite.

“I tried marrying a pencil,” chuckled Lucy.

“You didn’t follow through with it, did you?” asked Sprite.

“Nah,” replied Lucy. “Yuffie talked me out of it when she met my bride 2B.”

Cheers to Bruce, Badger, Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.

The mass duplication of WordPress blogs

LittleFears176 Comments

“Hey there, I see you have something good going on there. Mind if I swoop in and take it?”

Ahh, if content thieves only asked first, right? You’ve heard about this weeks explosion of content theft. Please allow Ashley to fill you in. Link: mentalhealthathome.org/2019/08/02/blogging-copyright

I’ve seen and spoken to a lot of people closing their WordPress sites over this. It sucks. It’s also a wake-up call for a lot of folks. If you put anything online, the odds are, at some point it’s going to get copied.

There’s a lot of short term solutions. DMCAs, messaging hosts, having the content removed from search engines and so on. But long term, this all leads to a neverending, soul-sapping, demoralizing and unwinnable game of whack-a-mole.

It doesn’t matter where you put your content either. If text can be copy-pasted then a bot can scrape it. It doesn’t matter if you’re on Tumblr, Medium or Live Journal. Are you a photographer or an artist? Well, you know what I mean. You’ve likely been dealing with your images being copied for years.

The only way to stop your content being ripped-off is to stop putting it online. For me, that’s not an option. I’m still paying my bills off of freelance work mostly picked up from the Fears.

You can try to prevent your writing, art and photography being stolen. But none of us thinks about that when starting an online project, do we? I moved onto fixed panels for social media a while ago. The only reason I haven’t done that on my home page is because of the theme and the way WordPress.com shows image posts where my main following is.

Also, in the current copy-bot mess, it’s three websites in India. I can’t see them having a huge impact on what we do on WordPress. They’re not going to rank on search engines. Your readers and social media followers know who and where you are. New followers are probably never going to see the duplicate websites. So in this case, the way I see it is the only negative impact is on your own mental state. Can you live with the idea a website almost nobody is going to see is duplicating your content in India?

I know to a lot of folks, that’s not a straight forward question. It sure as heck pisses me off. But I ain’t going to let it stop me. Heck, it makes me want to fart out more content for them to copy. Let the buggers pay for hosting all that content nobody is going to see.

OK, so, only you can decide whether or not you want to pull your content from being online. It’s an entirely personal choice. If you don’t want to publish online anymore, we’re going to miss you. Take care of yourself.

If you do want to keep publishing your works to the internet, here, take a hammer. Welcome to whack-a-mole, internet edition.

Please do drop into Ashley’s site and say hello and thanks for post.

Edited to add: Very first comment from Joanne asks “how do you find out contents been copied?” Go to one of the offending websites, Tygpress.com, and copy paste a snippet from your website into their search bar. They’re mirroring websites wholesale. In Europe at least, this is illegal. They’re allowed to post a snippet of your website and link back to your own website with a Read More style link. Not duplicate everything like Tygpress are.

Cheers to Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.

Fowl Furnish

LittleFears9 Comments

Brass Ep. 48

Copper put her hand on Irons’ shoulder. “Hold up.” The body of a robot lay on the floor outside a furniture shop. In the window hung a wanted poster with a picture resembling the rusted machine beneath.

Wanted: Dead or Alive.

£5,000

For the crimes of murdering eighteen furniture sets with paint removal fluid.

Jackie The Stripper.

Thanks to Warren for the $10 Patronage.

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Olivia’s Tree

LittleFears11 Comments

By Layne Ambrose

“Seriously another one?” Olivia says.

“Every day Olivia. It is a graveyard after all. People have to go somewhere,” Rufus says in a deflated tone.

“Well can’t they see that we are running out of space here?” Olivia protests.

Rufus shrugs. “Whatever, I’m not sharing my tree. This is my tree so, everyone can just bugger off,” Olivia exclaims.

“Calm down, no one said that you had too,” Rufus says.

“Good because I’m not. I saw that old lady with her dog eyeing my tree. It is totally not happening.”

Story by Layne Ambrose of Chewing-On-Glass.com. Check out Layne’s blog for more glass being chewed. Thanks for the vignette, Layne!

Thanks to Warren for the $10 Patronage. 

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The Swing

LittleFears26 Comments

Simon gulped down a whiskey. Gina stood outside by the swing, pushing little Rachael as though nothing had changed in their lives. He couldn’t look at them. He downed two more shots and lay down on the couch.

There was a rap at the sliding glass door. Not again. Couldn’t they leave him alone? Simon covered his face with a blanket, waiting the sound out. The hanging tendrils soon dragged Gina’s corpse back to the swing, returning to their endless mockery of Simon’s old life.

Story by Alex Buchholz of weirdshitwithalex.blog. Check out his blog for more weird shit, with Alex. Thanks for the tale, Alex!

Thanks to Warren for the $10 Patronage. 

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End Goals

LittleFears28 Comments

I get a lot of emails from people asking for help with their blogs/writing/art/portfolio sites.

My first response is to always ask “what’s your end goal?”

If the answer is “I have no end goal, I just love doing what I do,” that’s awesome. I have no advice to give. Just keep doing what you’re doing and enjoy it.

If you do have an end goal, my advice would be different depending on what answer you give. I had a little ramble about this last night when I was doing yesterdays story panel.

I think that may qualify as a vlog… Yikes.

Thanks to Warren for the $10 Patronage.

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Aubergine

LittleFears5 Comments

A healthy dose of Aubergine this week for #Colour_Collective. On reflection, I should have made the face off-white. Textures on flat black or white are always rubbish.

No name for this lady. Also, no need to fill out the alphabet anymore. So I can name her whatever I want. Erm… That’s harder than having to pick a name to a specific letter, haha.

Thanks to Warren for the $10 Patronage.

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Dead Deer

LittleFears21 Comments

“Shogmagrathagratiu,” croaked Deer.

“Whatever you say, mate,” replied Lucy.

Deer slumped to the ground, his skin fell from his body. The features of his face slid off piece by piece until just a skull remained.

“Hey, hey,” chuckled Lucy, tugging on an antler, pointing at Deers skull. “No eyed deer!”

“Oh, for god’s sake,” sighed Yuffie. “Now what do we do with him?”

“Chop it up and sell it to passing people?” suggested Lucy. “We could chop off his balls and tell a human they have medicinal purposes.”

“We wouldn’t get much for them,” sighed Yuffie. “Deer testicles are under a buck.”

Deers corpse and pixel art trees are snap-shotted, printed and doodled on with permission of the rather awesome, lum. It’s from a free game, Devil Haunts Me. A free survival horror game by lum. Check em out here: https://lum-scum.itch.io/. You can hit ’em up on Twitter at @uberprawn.

Shout out to John of Nowhere Tribune for buying me a cuppa ko-fi yesterday and thanks to Warren for the $10 Patronage.

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Mem Test

LittleFears16 Comments

Brass Ep. 34

“It’s a long way to Brass,” sighed Copper. “We’ll need some extra spares.”

Iron mewed an agreement as Copper led them into St Francium school. A map hung on the wall inside. It looked as familiar as everything else that was falling apart around here.

She used to strip the RAM and hard drives out of computers. She had some good memories.

Shout out to John of Nowhere Tribune for buying me a cuppa ko-fi yesterday and thanks to Warren for the $10 Patronage.

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