This Space for Rent

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

I bought an old Japanese “rock & roll chicken” alarm clock, and Dust Mite wanted to pose with it for Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

—orc Fri Jul 31 23:27:32 2026

Ummm, ok (bitcoin “we have video of you masturbating” scam)

The great thing about spammers using html to confuse virus checking software is what the messages look like after the html is stripped out. As an example, this missive that showed up in my spam mailbox today:

Greetings, my innocent comrade.

Unfortunately, this messae will artition your existence into earlier and ater. But, the hoeul messae is (rltvajj) that it will show you a lot. or (bduxqim) examle, (ojmrhamb) what you are able to and can’t do (ydqjajws) on the cybersace, how to secure your internet saety (nzmzzzv) roerly, and how to revent to nelect (mxsedc) cyber traces. Most likely, you have heard about Russian-ailiated hacker collectives such as Cozy Bear, (wcokji) Killnet, (wsbmmeab) and others. Well, we work or these groups.

In moreover to our hackin activities, we are also conductin keein (webwbhy) watch or varied susicious online roiles (xybmki) that we would like to enerate cash on. We believe you are (xgprwyy) beinnin how we located you. However, what you are tryin to ind on the web does not it into (jyxzvi) any ethical boundaries. Now we (kqakekoh) ossess (psctmzjn) your search history and your (aailih) camera recordins while you are (mhxwrlry) indulin in sexual activity. We activate a schedule or ublic release. However, do not ret, there’s ood udate as well. unds is our only oal. ven (vrkkeyk) inside our oranization, there are eccentric members, but they roduce a lot o roit that we ay (goamfl) no attention to their flaws.

In this case, YOU are required to send the ransom. or 1300 USD, you and (wedkqng) us will oret about each other or (jowvll) ood. (owhmslsz) Here is the location o the BTC address or the settlement: bc1q9jer3auc5f96q2ff6te07u99py8vhx3xqy8mud Otherwise, all your colleaues, contacts, (htwcqco) and relatives (fufmkb) will be handed a dulicate o your data: browsin history, webcam videos, and even ersonal messages. !Don’t orward this alert to third arties, includin the oicials. By doin that, will lead to the romt (nhmkpp) releasin o all details about you. We watch what you are enain in.

!Don’t answer to this alert. It was sent rom a temorary email mailbox, (cjqtudml) you don’t (wrxmia) have (ysgsnijd) the means (qwbdxtqi) to (zrcilg) messae back to it; this messae is untrackable. If you haven’t used crytocurrency earlier, everythin is straihtorward. Just look u it. That’s all o our (slbmlf) messae. As they (ccrylf) state, (tofufic) we wish in a roductive (ptbrbqx) artnershi. (zxtgfx) Otherwise, this would be detrimental to you.

There is a (jgvcjys) menacin thrill o voracious sharks huntin or nelient ersons like you.

Um, thanks(?) for your ransom note. I’ll be sure to take it under consideration.

—orc Mon Jul 27 17:36:20 2026

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

—orc Fri Jul 24 23:49:43 2026

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

—orc Fri Jul 17 23:18:30 2026

It has pockets! :-)

—orc Thu Jul 16 22:20:28 2026

Poke!

So, it turns out that I’ve managed to wrestle my needlephobia down to the point where I can actually give myself estrogen shots (my liver breathes a sigh of relief at this!) as long as I use an autoinjector to hide the pointy bits until it’s too late.

I still sat on the floor for this, because I didn’t want the opportunity to faint and fall off a chair during the process. Sadly, no fainting was to be found in this episode of “jessica hacks her endocrine system.”

I live to disappoint the reviewers.

—orc Tue Jul 14 22:53:59 2026

The new rear rack on the emergency randonneuse

(Don’t look too closely; this is the first rack I’ve put together in a couple of years and I did it in the evening after I made a berry pie)

—orc Mon Jul 13 00:02:13 2026

Never too old for new tricks

I went – for the first time – bike camping this weekend (after spending part of friday night brazing together a skeleton rear rack to strap a pop-up tent and a sleeping pad to) and it was actually fun.

Fun despite being in the throes of recovering from a cold that filled my lungs with snot and cut my effective cycling range down to about 5 miles less than the distance we rode each way :-)

—orc Sun Jul 12 21:25:15 2026

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

—orc Fri Jul 10 23:51:03 2026

dangerous drugs for a dangerous mind

last year, I finally snapped and asked my primary care physician for a prescription for adderall so I could spend my declining years doing something, anything, other than flitting around like a crow from one shiny object to another while letting all the other important stuff in my life pile up unattended.

I was referred to a psychiatric clinic, where, over the course of 6 months they ascertained that I am not quite adhd, but most likely was autistic, and yeah my request for dangerous drugs was actually a reasonable treatment.

… I’m gonna be peeved if this doesn’t work. I’m pretty sure it will, because I’ve been doping with nicotine and that makes a big difference when I remember to take it, but still!

Gonna start drugging myself on friday, then go bike camping for real on saturday (40 miles out, which should not be a problem, but I came down sick with something !covid last weekend and my lungs are f-u-l-l of snot) while under the influence.

—orc Wed Jul 8 23:46:19 2026

toe beans

Thor and I were relaxing on one of our comfy chairs this afternoon. She stretched out her hind legs and spread her toes, so SWITCTBN had to take a picture.

—orc Sat Jul 4 19:42:33 2026

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

—orc Fri Jul 3 23:40:54 2026

A dyke & her bike

A photo of me (taken by my son) after I came back from the Mill End Store (camping quilt fabric) and the cat fud store (a shitload of catfud.)

—orc Wed Jul 1 18:30:46 2026

Time for the boss battle

Estrogen availability is, thanks to be A+ business sense of the mad king, becoming super unreliable, so I’ve finally snapped and gotten a prescription for injectable estrogen.

And I’m pretty needlephobic.

It’s gonna be a bit of a challenge. I’m trying to source an auto-injector that I can fill myself to get around the whole routine of having to poke myself with a needle, then holding it in place while I shovel E into my system, but it’s proving to be a somewhat complicated task (in the olden days, I’d search for auto-injector on the net of a billion lies, but as you may have noticed generative LLMs have infested the whole thing despite the teeny detail that they aren’t yet suited for the job) that means I’m gonna keep taking from my small supply of pills for the near future. Sigh.

I’ve gotten a lot less needlephobic since I stopped cosplaying as a man, but still the thought of actually doing injections myself gives me a bit of the heebie-jeebies. So it’s gonna be a whole lotta drama :-)

—orc Wed Jul 1 18:27:29 2026

Friday(ish) Dust Mite Blogging™

—orc Sat Jun 27 00:53:20 2026

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

When we went to the coast last week I took a couple of pictures of Dust Mite chatting with a banana slug. Alas, my camera can switched to manual focus and all the pictures came out blurry, so we did a reenactment of that fateful meeting with our wooden slug acting as a stand-in for the banana slug and our living room floor acting as a stand-in for the trail out to the end of Cape Lookout.

—orc Fri Jun 19 22:04:52 2026

Cape Mears panorama

—orc Fri Jun 19 21:27:43 2026

New Code!

Discount has been pushed up to version 3.0.1.3 after a few trivial fixes:

1. I updated the published interface (“API”) documentation to more correctly reflect how callbacks work,
2. I went back in to my implementation of “fenced code blocks” (a creeping feature that a lot of markdownish software has implemented) to make it less ugly, and
3. I continue to chase the ongoing dumbification of the C programming language standard by, ugh, having to hand-declare a prototype for memset() because macos ventura no longer has it and the C compiler there loses its shit when it encounters an external function that doesn’t have a prototype.

I have not yet reached the point of software completeness that Markdown.pl is at, but at least these days the primary changes I need to make are around chasing the standard and keeping the documentation up to date.

So, New Code!! Try it out, see if your computer eats itself, and enjoy!

—orc Sun Jun 14 06:12:33 2026

Friday Saturday Dust Mite Blogging ™

Yesterday, SWITCTBN & I walked out to the western end of Cape Lookout, and we brought Dust Mite along. It was an arduous trek, so Dust Mite & I had to pose for a picture before we came back.

—orc Sat Jun 13 14:43:46 2026

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

—orc Fri Jun 5 23:18:25 2026

Sundress season

—orc Tue Jun 2 17:23:45 2026