Calilasseia

I suspect quite a few of the female members of DeviantArt have had, at some time in their lives, to endure the ordeal of being pestered by some basement-dwelling creep for indecent photos. Well, here's one woman's completely epic response to the creep that pestered her for nude pics. Read this and savour the delicious schadenfreude, as you learn that the idiot in question didn't even realise he was being pranked big time.

The full story can be read here. This woman should receive a medal for this. I urge all my female followers to spread this one far and wide among their female friends.

Just out of curiosity, has anyone else been receiving notes from people, trying to offer sneaky, underhand ways of obtaining free premium memberships?

Only I've just had the hilarity of two such notes turn up in my inbox.

Apparently the idiots who sent these notes, are completely unaware that DeviantArt has automated filters looking out for messages of this sort, flagging the admins to their presence, and thus facilitating the instant dropping of the ban hammer. Which has duly happened to the senders of those two notes. Which I presume the admins left in my inbox so that I could have a good laugh at the stupidity of the senders.

Of course, there's probably a host of other options available to the admins, including good old fashioned detective work, which is hack proof, just in case anyone is stupid enough to try hacking the servers, and inviting criminal prosecution for doing so.

Which leads me nicely onto the matter of end to end encryption. Which, in a move involving more than its fair share of epic fail, the government in my country is trying to ban the use of. Resorting to the usual combination of stirring racial hatred, with its "OH NOES ENCRYPSHUN IS BEING USED BY SCARY BROWN TOWEL HEDZ WIV BOMBZ!!!!ELEVENTYONE" scare stories, and reliance upon the ignorance of the reality TV viewing crowd, they're trying to kill off end to end encryption for a host of websites. Except of course, that the biggest users of end to end encryption aren't the Scary Brown Towel Hedz(TM), but ... wait for it ... the banks. Yes, the same banks that the same right-wing politicians keep handing tax jollies to. Who use end to end encryption to ensure that the millions stashed in bank accounts by the same right-wing politicians, remain safe from being plundered by Bulgarian Mafia hackers.

Indeed, every commercial website on the planet uses end to end encryption in some form, to protect such traffic as credit card and PayPal transactions. Without it, the credit card companies would be completely and utterly swamped by fraudulent interceptions and diversions of funds. Including diversion of transactions by the same right-wing politicians spending their corrupt, ill-gotten expenses fiddles on new Bentleys and mansions. DeviantArt, and countless thousands of websites like it, would be completely dead in the water as commercial enterprises in my country, if end-to-end encryption was ever banned. My country would become an Internet trading desert. Amazon, EBay, Barnes & Noble, all the big supermarkets, utility companies, and the banks and credit card companies themselves, would all be rendered useless on the Internet.

In the case of DeviantArt, whilst there's nothing stopping idiots from stealing artwork after you've uploaded it here - though such thefts tend to be obvious, relatively easy to track, and determined aggrieved parties facing any commercial losses can set the lawyers loose on the miscreants in question - end to end encryption stops your work being intercepted before it appears on the site, and misused for criminal gain by that route. But of course, right-wing politicians have no understanding of such elementary concepts as social contracts, where people are allowed to take proper measures to protect honest earnings from plunder at the hands of the unscrupulous, but that might have much to do with the manner in which the same right-wing politicians are frequently caught engaging in fraud themselves.

So please, if anyone else feels the bizarre urge to invite me to defraud the website, don't bother. I'm prepared to wait until [1] I have the funds to PAY for a premium membership, or [2] I'm awarded one by the admins for various good deeds here. Trust takes years to build, but can be destroyed in seconds.

Someone sent me this video clip of some truly amazing deep sea creatures recently found in an Atlantic trench off Puerto Rico.

Perhaps QueenWerandra would like to swim amongst them in her mermaid suit ...

I'e just spent some time uploading and captioning a brace of entomology photos over at Facebook. Which has now blocked me as a spammer because I happen to be capable of typing at 70 WPM when captioning my photos. What a complete crock.

How the hell am I supposed to share meaningful information via social media, instead of the usual selfie tripe that pollutes FB, if I'm blocked just because I happen to possess some actual SKILL, as opposed to being a GCSE failure numpty with zero employability skills?

Message to the DeviantArt Devs: Do NOT follow this example. I do NOT want to be labelled a spammer just because I have a functioning brain.

Ok, which cretinous dolt thought it was a good idea to alter the database settings, and watermark tons of my images without telling me that this had happened?

I've just found out that a huge slew of my images were resized and watermarked without me being informed about this. I am NOT happy as a result!

Basically, when I choose settings for images, I want them LEFT ALONE. I do NOT want some database admin on a God trip piddling around with my settings behind my back, causing me a ton of needless work that I should never have had to face. What if I'd had 2,000 images watermarked instead of the 50 or so that were affected? Manually resetting 2,000 images back to their original settings would have taken me MONTHS to complete, because I would have had to fit in this colossal task amongst other things I do, including things I have to do as a result of being hogtied by official bureaucracy in the offline world, and I don't need this arse pain.

In short, if you're a DA dev, and you're reading this, my message is simple.

LEAVE MY BLOODY SETTINGS ALONE!!!