Tales of humour, whimsy and courgettes
“You look sexier than usual today,” observed Parrotfish.
“Yeah, I left my bra at home,” sighed Jelly.
“Well, you look just fine,” replied Parrotfish. “Hey, I noticed the last Sprite that came through had a wireless brazier.”
“Jeez, bras are enough of a pain in the arse, as is,” grumbled Jelly. “Now they need a wi-fi password?”
Cheers to Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.
“Hey, Jelly,” said Parrotfish. “Can I interest you in all of the
awesome health benefits of a dried grape?”
“What are you on about?” replied Jelly.
“Oh, you know,” sighed Parrotfish. “Just raisin awareness.”
Shout out to my new and rather dystopian patron, J. Rogers. Thanks for the new patronage.
Cheers to Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.
“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.
“Do you know what’s odd?” asked Spectre. “Yuffie once said you and I are ideas, hopes or dreams of the same person. I’ve met thousands of Sprites, but I’m the only one of me.”
“That is odd,” sighed Sprite. “Do you know what else is odd?”
“Numbers that aren’t divisible by two,” replied Spectre.
They chuckled and looked up the road.
Cheers to Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.
“You’re thinking about it again,” sighed Sprite. “Walking up the road to the afterlife.”
“Everything ends, man,” said Spectre. “Even ideas like us.”
“Ideas of what?” asked Sprite. “We don’t even know what we are. For all you know we’re a memory of a circus that burned down.”
“Now that would be in-tents,” pondered Spectre.
Cheers to Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.
“Did you see that Freddie Mercury biopic?” asked Spectre.
“Yeah, I got a download of it,” replied Sprite. “I think it was a cinema recording.”
“What makes you say that?” asked Spectre.
“Because,” sighed Sprite, “I saw a little silhouetto of a man.”
Cheers to Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.
“Would you look at that,” pondered Spectre.
“They’re the smallest peppers I have ever seen,” said Sprite.
“Maybe we should find a blanket to put on them,” said Spectre.
“Good idea,” replied Sprite. “They look a little chilli.”
Cheers to Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.
“I sometimes think there’s a deeper meaning to our constant puns,” pondered Spectre.
“Yeah,” replied Sprite. “Some puns just can’t die.”
“I assume you heard about the ten-pun pile up on the M62 a few weeks back?” asked Spectre. “All of them survived.”
“It was a spot of luck,” said Sprite. “No pun in ten-dead.”
Cheers to Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.
“Wait,” cried Sprite, as Swamp Fiend began dragging her beneath the soil. “You don’t want to eat me! I was a pirate! I have scurvy and moles on my back.”
Swamp Fiend turned Sprite over. “Looks like they’re benign.”
“Count again,” replied Sprite. “I think there be ten.”
A squelch, a pop and another Sprite was gone.
Cheers to Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.
“See, this is why I cannot stand you,” grumbled Swamp Fiend. “You all think you’re funny and all of you are so unhealthy.”
“Tell me about it,” lamented Sprite. “Just the other day, I was tweeting about my bad posture.”
“Spinal tweets?” asked Swamp Fiend.
“Yeah, it was about a weak back,” smirked Sprite.
Cheers to Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.
Little Fears 