Category Archives: Sunday’s Rant

I’m Calling It

Perhaps you’ve seen something in the news about these “Panama Papers”. It seems the rabble within concerned online communities are frothing at the mouth over the thought that their ruling elites will somehow be held accountable, and justice will rain down from heaven upon those evil doers.

Whatever.

So the PM of Iceland stepped aside for a bit, a few world leaders acted like they were squirming a little, and a few calls for action were made, but the bottom line is this: Those in power will sacrifice a few of their members who’ve been getting a little sloppy lately, while the rest of them vindicate themselves and introduce new legislation that will promise to crack down on these “shell companies”.

Will this stop the practice? The reality of the situation implies something else… The rich and powerful will move on to their next secret tax haven. What is it? No one knows yet because it’s a secret, but rest assured they have plenty of backup plans. Meanwhile the rest of us will be burdened with some kind of bureaucratic red tape to remind us that our government is doing something about it. (Which is mainly forcing us to hop through more red tape so we don’t have the time and energy to deal with the fact that nothing’s really changed.)

So there… I’ve called it. Only time will tell if I’m right, but check back in about a year and tell me if I’m wrong.

Pax,

-f2x

Just so you know, I actually write these sidebars before they get published, so sometimes I have to rely on what I think I would say if it actually were Sunday. Right now it’s the Friday night before Sunday, so it’s not that far out. Even though there aren’t any jokes in the queue yet, I’m going to assume that by Sunday there will be, so let’s just pretend the queue is ready to go and there’s five jokes ready for the coming week.

A while back I deleted all the IP block-lists from the .htaccess file because I thought perhaps there might be people trying to visit through VPN’s or even TOR. I figured the site’s defenses were robust enough to hold its own against the hackers and spammers. It turns out I’ve been introduced to another internet scourge called scrapers. They basically rifle through the site and steal content. Even though this is mildly annoying, I’ll allow it for now. While I don’t agree with their methods, I don’t claim to actually own the jokes I publish, so they’re free to take them. In fact I maintain that all jokes are old jokes and predate most of the living.

Of course it goes from bad to worse… I can’t tell if there were any VPN or TOR users trying to get at the jokes, so my internal analytics are once again useless. The statistic plugin that I use can’t really tell a bot from a human, so I have no idea how many people actually visit the site. It would seem the humans are a mere drop in the bucket compared to all the bots out there.

Pax,

-f2x

Happy Easter!

Of course with me, nothing is ever truly happy… It’s not like the old days when I could just show up to the family Easter gathering, yap, and eat. Now I have to actually lend a hand in making the party happen, and you can believe with over twenty people coming, it’s a lot of work.

So there’s a new feature. I haven’t thoroughly tested it yet, but the random post tab will take you to a random post. How cool is that? Of course since it’s “random” it could take you to a comic, a joke, or even one of these sidebar rants of mine. It’s random!

I’m going to try to keep up with the schedule for this week, but there’s a possibility that I might not get the jokes up in time. As of this writing, the joke queue is bone dry, and since I’m going to be busy all day on Easter, you might have to entertain yourself on Monday with that fancy new random post tab.

Pax,

-f2x

And so spring has sprung! Nature’s time of re-birth arrives with fresh greens that fill the air with sweet and earthy aromas. It is a time of pleasantly brisk air along with occasional warm breezes. The birds begin to return in force as the buds on the trees spout into leaves. Life is anew!

That’s great and all, but I really can’t give two shits when my sciatica is acting up. I’m not kidding either. A couple weeks ago my back went out, and while I’m able to get around a bit better now, there’s still that nagging soreness in my lower spine and buttocks.

It’s hard to chuckle with a shooting pain in your backside, so I’ll just grin and bear it for another week or so, and I hope you never have to go through this sort of shit.

Pax,

-f2x

So things are moving along pretty good here. I took down the “deny from” list of IP addresses, opened up the comment function, re-instated the feeds, and added a sitemap page. So what happened with the bots and spammers? Not quite sure, but a new plugin has been keeping the spam out of the comments section. It seems that China, Russia, and Ukraine seem to have backed off as well. We still get probed by bots, but not like it was a while back. I’m pretty sure that if it was something I did, it was completely by accident.

You may be wondering, “Has opening things up lead to an increase in the number of real visitors?” Not really. I’m seeing a few more visits, but nothing like it was back in the day. I suppose that will have to do. There’s an over abundance of choices out there, so unless I come up with something truly novel, I doubt Flush Twice will see a huge influx of visitors.

I guess in the end it really doesn’t matter. I still enjoy maintaining the site, and there’s enough regular viewers to make it all worth it.

Pax,

-f2x

Update 3/15: Apparently I spoke to soon… The Ukrainians are back at it again. What gives with that country?

Big News! I’ve decided to turn the comment system back on. Whether or not they stay on is dependent on whether or not the spam situation is under control. If I start to see spam, then I’ll turn it off again. To leave a comment, you have to go to the article’s actual page. I really hope this works.

Just so you know, new comics will not appear in the main blogroll. You have to actually click on the “The Comic” tab. I only mention this because I put a new comic in there yesterday.

I’m also opening the site up to feed readers again… So you may be asking yourself, “What’s up? Why the sudden change of heart?” Simply put: Viewership is way down. For quite some time now I’ve been obsessed with blocking spammers and hackers, and it’s basically made Flush Twice all but invisible on the internet.

This site used to see over 5000 visits a day, and these days it’s lucky to see a hundred, and I think the site has a lot more to offer and looks a lot better than it ever has. I’ve got some new tools to make sure that hackers and spammers don’t take advantage of the site’s engine. Starting this week, I’m opening it up to all the bots and crawlers, and perhaps they’ll do me a solid and make Flush Twice more visible to people who like a daily dose of funny jokes.

Pax,

f2x

Update March 8, 2016 9:41pm: I thought I had opened the feeds, but apparently it was still borked. I was just about to commit seppuku when I found the problem… And it was actually a very simple fix. Feeds are working great, so let’s start increasing those visitor numbers. I want to see no less that 700 visitors a day by the end of the week!

No news is good news, and so that’s pretty much all I have to say.

Enjoy the jokes, and I hope you have a great week!

Pax,

-f2x

I was going to have a new strip for yesterday, but I was pretty drunk when I made it. After sobering up I realized it wasn’t funny. In fact it was disturbingly creepy, sad, and pathetic. I deleted it before it ever saw the light of day.

We made it through last week, and this week’s jokes are queued up. I’m going to try my best to have a February comic, but don’t hold your breath… My muse seems to be taking another sabbatical.

Pax

-f2x

So I haven’t actually gotten all the jokes ready for this week… Not going to bullshit you, I’ve just been working on other things. I’ll try to get this queued in time, but if you tune in on Tuesday and it’s still Monday’s joke, it’s not because I died or anything.

In case you’re wondering how my “jihad” against the webcrawlers and botnets is going, it looks like I slowed them down pretty good, but there’s no way to get rid of all of them. The worst of it is under wraps, and I’m tired of playing whack-a-mole for the moment.

So that’s it. If we don’t get all the jokes in this week, well… that’s just how it goes. Thanks for understanding.

Pax,

-f2x

We’ve got five more jokes lined up for February 8th through the 12th. It’s almost like there’s a pattern to this site’s behavior.

If you’ve been following the sidebar saga (to which I doubt anyone has), you’d know that I’m usually pissing and moaning about the back-end of this site and how search engines and bots get under my skin. Think of it like this:

Imagine you had a machine that made soft cuddly teddy bears to give away to people who love soft cuddly teddy bears. It can make hundreds of varieties of teddy bears endlessly. Now imagine a hygienically impaired, fat, hairy, shirtless thug walked up to the machine and started pushing the teddy bear dispensing buttons. The machine makes the teddy bears and dispenses them. Now the smelly beast rips off the soft cuddly skin of the bear and pulls out the stuffing. He puts the stuffing into a bin to use in his disposable diaper making facility and keeps pressing the dispensing button on your machine day in and day out.

Now as each of your bears leave the machine, they get one chance to tell you what kind of loving home they went off to. And while a few of them leave you a message that they went to a fine home in Kansas, or Canada, or England, or France… The vast majority of them report they had their heads ripped off by some dirty bastard working for a shit factory.

So in this story, my jokes and comics are the teddy bears, and the bots and spiders are the fat, smelly bastards. My goal is to make it easy for the good and wonderful people like yourself to come get your free teddy bear, while keeping out the scumbags that just want the rip apart the bears for their raw materials.

Maybe I take it a little too personally, but this is my little corner of the web, and I think I have an obligation to ensure it’s used as it was intended.

pax,

-f2x