This is the curator’s corner; a place where I express my own thoughts about whatever crosses my mind. The jokes are much more fun to read. This section of the site can safely be ignored.
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.
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.
Five more jokes are in the queue, and things are kinda going OK at the moment. I find it odd, however, that Bing’s image search is still hot-linking to where the image files used to be located… Oh, how can I explain this…
Before 2016, all the images were stored like this: https://flushtwice.com/wp-content/uploads/year/month/image.jpg
As of January 11, 2016, the “/year/month” part of the address had been removed so that all images are stored directly under “./wp-content/uploads”. A week later, Bing, Yahoo, and something called Kik began referring people to those images in their old locations, which of course results in a 404 not found page. What’s worse is the search terms used had nothing to do with the image they were trying to view.
I know what you’re thinking… Maybe they were linking to those images all along, and you just noticed it when the 404’s started happening… Well, no… There was simply no direct linking to any of my image files until a week after the change. I check for that stuff, because in the past I would have been ecstatically flattered if someone hot-linked to one of my comics in some forum, but that never happened, and these are just search engines lumping my comics with random offensive search terms that aren’t related to the comic. The whole experience has led me to permanently disable hot-linking. Although I’m not too happy about the way in which my webhost actually handles the hot-link blocking situation, it’s the best I can do for now.
So more controls have been put in place, more IP addresses have been blocked, and that includes every IP address belonging to Microsoft to keep them from crawling my site for at least the next 90 days. Fingers crossed, I’m hoping the overall traffic to the site will start to look more legit in the coming weeks.
I’m having what you might call a tantrum with regards to the search engines at the moment. I’ve already blocked most of the crawlers out there, and this past week I went and axed Bing, Yahoo, and the almighty Google.
And a couple days later I let Google back on.
Interestingly the moment I blocked those guys, the Ginger Jokes immediately stopped getting hits, but for some reason Bing is still referring people to images that aren’t even here.
So this past week has been really rough… My civilian job truly sucks, and I’ve been working so much overtime I really haven’t had time to work on lining up any jokes. Please accept my humble apologies if the jokes are lame or missing this week.
This is great. Usually I have to write this stuff on Sunday, but thanks to the miracles of content management systems, I can write it ahead of time and schedule it.
We got another week’s worth of jokes lined up again, and it just occurred to me that there’s a common thread in all of them: Sex.
To be honest, most of the jokes I publish here involve sex. It seems to be a very popular subject in the area of humor.
So if you like sex jokes, you’re gonna like the 18th thru 22nd here on Flush Twice.
I finally did it, and Wow… About all I can say is “Wow”.
I did the equivalent of a format/re-install on Flush Twice today. I backed up everything, wiped the site, installed a fresh copy of WordPress, and imported all of the posts, pages, media, and settings back like it was. Well, almost. The directory structure for the media files is more streamlined.
I learned a lot, and feel more confident about the site’s backup and restore-ability. I can also tell you that this site is absolutely clean.
In case you weren’t aware, the back-end of the site had become rather corrupt. There were a lot of glitches and sometimes crashes. In some ways I feel I have to give WordPress fair credit. Flush Twice had been running off the initial install back in 2009. (It was briefly running under Movable Type from around October of 2008, and blogger before that.) When I think back five years ago, and all the experimenting with themes and plugins, it’s a wonder the site made it this far.
But everything is back in place, and it looks like it’s all running quite smoothly. I even managed to preserve all of the star rating data.
We’re going to try something new. These “News” items used to be “ephemeral”, but with the aid of a couple of plug-ins, they are now able to be preserved. You can actually click on the date above to see this text’s permanent home. I really hope this works out.
OK then… We’re still on our winning streak with five more jokes lined up for January 11 thru 15. I can hardly believe we actually got through 2015 without missing a single Monday thru Friday, and I’m hoping we can pull it off again this year!
On to another topic: It appears as though things are starting to get back to normal. I’m still way too fat from eating so much over the holidays, but at least the food was tasty.
I did try to eat more healthy this past week… Unfortunately I forgot about the bananas on top of the fridge, so now I’m making banana bread. That still counts as fiber, doesn’t it?
Flush Twice is back online again. Sure… It may seem like I change direction more than a feral caged animal looking for an escape, but this time we’re almost 100% positive that WordPress is going to be our new saviour since Movable Type was obviously not working out for us.
Meanwhile I’m going to try to get all these posts back up and in place, but I just realized that it has to be done manually… yes- one. at. a. time… since MT was storing its back up into a directory that I didn’t have access to.
I also came to the sudden realization that I made a mistake when I started putting everything into MT. Apparently I was shorting myself a panel… So this page is being retro-posted to help make up the difference.
But nevermind that boring stuff. Just go and enjoy the jokes and comics!
Flush Twice has been around since May of 2003. It started out as a JOTD (Joke of the Day) website. New jokes were published every weekday. Over the years, good jokes were increasingly hard to come by, and eventually they got so rare that I just stopped trying to publish them.
Since 2004 there has also been an eponymous comic. I still occasionally publish a new one on Saturdays. It’s also rare anymore, but sometimes it happens.
Here lately I’ve been posting a “Link of the Day”. For the time being, I will be featuring a new website from my enormous collection of bookmarked websites every weekday. None of it is solicited promotions, and no one is paying me to feature their site. These are just websites that at one time I thought were interesting enough to add to my bookmarks folder.
I highly encourage using some kind of ad blocking extension before clicking on any of these links. You’ll also hear me say this phrase a lot about these posts: “They can’t all be winners.” But it’s better than just leaving the site abandoned.
The jokes were generously provided by friends and visitors such as yourself. I want to express my eternal thanks to everyone over the years who helped contribute to the collection.
So what is it that makes a joke funny?
It all boils down to a sudden shift in perception. The story starts you thinking one way, then the punchline turns that thinking on its ear. The art of the joke is to craft a short story that isn’t overly contrived, then deliver a punchline that suddenly shifts your perception about the story you were being told.
Many of the jokes on this site are offensive, and I make no apologies for it. Offensive jokes work by making the reader uncomfortable through the use of a taboo subject thus enhancing the underlying humor. Without the offensive element, the joke would simply not be as funny.
