Yes, folks, it’s yet another edition of Friday (Stolen) Photo! Which can only mean one thing: another poor fool has stolen a photo of my face and is using it to sell things on eBay! Or at least, I think it’s eBay. I have no idea what “gittigidiyor.com” might mean, so I’m going to have to assume it means “Site where people habitually steal photos of Magic Amber, and use them to sell products including – but not limited to – false eyelashes and lip plumping gloss.”
Or, in this case, “Not-Particularly-Plumping-Gloss”:
Yeah, those are my lips. Hai, lips! Do you see how the “before” and “after” photos are ALMOST EXACTLY THE SAME here, readers? That’s because… they are. As I noted in my review of this product, “Sexy Motherpucker” made no discernable difference to my lips at all. STOLEN PHOTO FAIL.
This time, rather than politely ask the seller to remove the photo, I simply asked which address I should send my invoice to for use of the copyrighted images. I get more vindictive with every body part of mine that appears on eBay. The next person to use my face without permission wakes up to a horse’s head in their bed, I swear to God.*
Oh, I’m also now a member of Turkish eBay. Yes.
And here was I thinking the Friday (Stolen) Photo would be a one-off! Oh, if only!
[Thanks to Lucy for letting me know about this one!]
* That was a joke, by the way. I mostly just think, “Wow, AGAIN?” when I see these, not, “OK, horse’s head.” Mostly.
Tagged ebay, friday photo, impostor amber, people who steal my photos
In a change to our published schedule, rather than showing you a totally random photo every Friday some Fridays, I’m now going to use this slot to show you the new places my face has turned up on the Internet without my permission. It’ll be something to show the grandkids, I guess. Assuming Rubin has any.
I’m also going to refrain from rehashing the same old post about the CHEEK of people who use MY FACE for their own personal gain, and just allow you to imagine what I would have written if I wasn’t so lazy. Please refer to this post, this post and let’s not forget this post if you’re not sure.
This week’s Stolen Photo, then, sees me once again advertising false eyelashes on eBay:
There were actually three auctions featuring yours truly, but two of them used the same image, so I’m sure you don’t need the illustration. Oh, and when I contacted the seller she told me she’d removed the images, but it turns out she only removed one. The others are still there. Presumably she thought I wouldn’t bother to check.
Anyway, thanks to Ola for letting me know about this latest appearance. Remember, folks, there are fake Ambers all around you, so if you spot one, please let me know! Meanwhile, if anyone needs me, I’ll be spending my weekend watermarking all of my images. The fun just never starts, does it?
Tagged ebay, friday photo, impostor amber, OMG internet drama!, people who steal my photos
Remember the time someone stole one of my photos and pretended it was a photo of them?
Yeah, it happened again:
Wow, I have a twin called Susan! Living in Stoughton, MA! And not just a twin: a totally IDENTICAL twin! Only… no, not really. It’s just another idiot, stealing my photo and pretending it’s theirs. I would be flattered by this, but seriously. Seriously. It’s like I have some kind of invisible sign on my head saying, “Oh, hai, if you’re totally duplicitous and like pretending to be someone you’re not, feel free to use MY photo!”
As with the last time this happened, I only found out about the impostor because someone emailed me saying, “By the way, did you know someone is impersonating you on the internet?” The site in question is called She Writes, and is a social network for writers. My “twin” had been chatting away to people there, asking them for help with her writing endeavors, and, from what I can gather, trying to get them to exchange email and phone numbers with “her”. All pretty innocuous, you might think, but the person who contacted me about it tells me that “Susan Veltri” is actually a man, and to be honest with you, “man posing as a woman in order to get women to speak to him, and perhaps email/phone him” is just a little creepy to me. And sad. Very, very sad.
This is a network which requires you to register before you can do ANYTHING. I couldn’t even contact whoever owns/runs this site without being a registered member, so I was forced to set up an account (it took around 24 hours to be approved, during which time “Susan” was merrily pretending to be me), after which I posted a message asking “Susan” if this is the only site s/he’s impersonating me on, or if s/he is pretending to be me anywhere else on the internet. Then I went out for the day, and funnily enough, when I got back “Susan’s” page had been deleted, although whether by “Susan” or by the site administrators, I have no idea.
So, all of this has got me thinking. This is the second time in a couple of months someone has stolen my photo and claimed it was them - that I know of. The only reason I found out about these Impostor Ambers was because someone realised what was happening and emailed me to tell me about it. Needless to say, I’m now starting to wonder how many other people are passing themselves off as me that I don’t know about. And, you know, you could argue that the two cases I DO know about weren’t that serious in the great scheme of things. One was an insecure teenager trying to impress boys on a Sonic Youth forum, the other was a man talking about crime writing on a women’s network. (OK, that actually IS a little creepy to me, but whatever.)
But what if the NEXT person using my photo is posting on, say, a forum for neo-Nazis. Or for paedophiles. Or for people who… gulp… wear Crocs for non-gardening-related purposes? THAT would be a little more serious, no? What if I’m walking around town one day and someone comes up to me and smacks me in the face because “I” have been making highly offensive statements on a forum for white supremacists or some such thing? And yeah, it’s unlikely. But that’s what I thought the FIRST time this happened. I thought, “Well, that was pretty trippy, but bound to be a one off. Because what are the chances of THAT happening again?” And yet, here we are, just a few weeks later. Of all the photos, on all the websites, in all the world, the idiots HAVE to choose mine, don’t they?
So, now I’m starting to wonder: what do I do about this?
The thing is, there’s really no way to stop people stealing your images if they really want to. You can right-click disable them, but that’s so easy to get round that it’s barely even worth doing. You can watermark them, although, as I’ve seen with the images I use on The Fashion Police, that doesn’t actually stop people stealing them. (And I sincerely hope that the people who steal images that are licenced for my use only get a nice fat bill from the image agencies who own the copyright, once they find out about the unauthorised use. And trust me, they WILL find out…). Also, putting a whopping great watermark over my own face kinda defeats the purpose of posting the image in the first place. And if it’s NOT over my face, they can just crop it out.
In the end, the only real solution to this is to stop posting photos, and delete my Flickr account/Twitter avatar etc. And, I don’t know… I could do that. But I resent it, to be honest. And not just because I have LOTs of photos I was planning to post this week. I think my blog would be a lot less personal if I was some totally anonymous chick, who could be a guy called “Susan Veltri” for all anyone knew. It’s well known that people don’t like to interact with Twitter accounts that have a generic avatar rather than a personal photo. And I’m a big believer in transparency on the Internet. I’ve always used my own name, and I’ve always used my own photos. I think that if everyone did that, the Internet would be a much nicer place.
But, of course, the Internet ISN’T a nice place. I knew that, obviously: I’m not totally stupid. But until this year, it didn’t really occur to me to worry about these things. No, seriously. I’ve never been particularly paranoid about things like posting photos, for instance. I don’t really know why. I know lots of people who are absolutely horrified by the idea of posting their photo online. Some of my real life friends have asked if I worry about it. And my response has always been, “Worry about what? That people will know what I look like? So what? When I go to the supermarket, people can see what I look like. Every time I step outside my house, people can see what I look like. What does it really matter if a handful of people who read my blog ALSO know what I look like?”
And the fact is, it doesn’t matter that the people who read my blog can see my photos. (Well, other than when they write to tell me how ugly I am, obviously.) But it DOES matter that people steal those photos and try to pass them off as their own. I find that creepy and disturbing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not lying awake at night worrying about it or anything. I will be very surprised if this ever happens again. But I do wonder who the next person will be to decide to pose as me, and this latest experience has got me thinking a bit more carefully about issues of privacy etc. I’m not saying I’m going to stop posting photos or anything, but… it has given me pause for thought, put it that way.
I think my next tagline will be “The REAL Forever Amber: accept no impostors”. All those other Slim Shady’s are just imitating, after all…
Tagged impostor amber, OMG internet drama!, people who impersonate me, people who steal my photos
Well, it’s been one of those weeks, folks: husband sick (it’s those “daggers” again, unfortunately), new green dress still “in the post”, someone trying to impersonate me on the internet. You know, the usual.
Oh, the Crazy Internet Impostor thing? Yeah, that was… weird. I mean, OMG, drama on teh internets! Who’da thunk it? Because the internet is normally such a sane place! Or, if not “sane” exactly, at least there’s normally only one of me on it, which I think we can probably all agree is a Good Thing.
For a brief time this week, though, there were two of me. There was the REAL me, and then there was Imposter Amber: a girl – or possibly a boy, who knows? – pretending to be me. I found out about Impostor Amber yesterday morning, when I woke up to find an email in my inbox from a member of a Sonic Youth forum (I know, random!), who was writing to let me know that, well, there were now two of me in the world, in that one of the members of this forum had been posting my photo on a “Show us your face” thread, and claiming it was her. Or that she was me.
And sure enough, so she was:
And not only pretending that she was me, but pointing out that it is a “bad picture”! With zits!
(She later deleted all of her posts, but not before I took screenshots. Shame.)
Of course, I immediately assumed that this girl was one of my haters (Hi, Amy!), but as I read on, I realised that the thread she’d posted it on was one of those “post a photo of yourself” ones, and she actually wanted people to think it was a picture of her. So I think the whole “bad photo, sad face” thing was probably just a transparent attempt to get people to say nice things about her – I mean me – and of course, some people did. (To which she was all, “Aww, thanks, guys! I guess I just have low self-steem!” LOL!) And, inevitably, some other people … well, it’s the internet, you can probably guess how that one panned out. Just your average “group of teenage boys picking apart a woman’s appearance anonymously” kinda thing, really.
Luckily for me, I’m fairly used to being talked about as if I’m not a human being with, you know, actual feelings, and I’m pretty flattered that someone decided they wanted to pretend to be me (even if that person did turn out to be totally crazy), but even so: isn’t that just the funniest/saddest thing you’ve heard all week? Oh, and when someone called her on her idiocy, Impostor Amber claimed that it was all a “social experiment” and whined about how no one appreciated her “art”. Hee! I couldn’t make this up!
Still, another day, another drama, as Britney says. And here was me thinking only Elvis and Jacko got to have impersonators!
(Oh, and for anyone who’s interested, the Impostor Amber’s justification for pretending to be me is under the jump.)
Continue reading →
Tagged impostor amber, OMG internet drama!, people who steal my photos, trolls
It’s started again: the whole “let’s pretend Amber is running a shop!” thing, I mean. I’ve had a good few weeks WITHOUT being constantly asked about my “stock” and where I ship to, but this morning I woke up to this:
—–Original Message—–
From: Woman Who Thinks I Have a Shop
Sent: 05 August 2009 02:39
To: Magic Amber
Subject: guerlain kohl kajal eyeliner
Hi
I am wanting to purchase Guerlain Kohl Kajal Eyeliner online. Do you have it in stock?
Woman Who Thinks I Have A Shop (Australia)
And no, WWTIHAS. No, I don’t have it “in stock”, on account of how I AM NOT A SHOP. But still they contact me. Last week, I got this:
—–Original Message—–
From: Ponds Hand Cream Woman
Sent: 02 August 2009 20:04
To: Magic Amber
Cc: Magic Amber
Subject: ponds hand cream
i puchased some ponds hand creame and it was very watery..my address is [removed] [name removed]!
If I was American, I’m guessing the correct response to this would be a chirpy “Thanks for sharing!” But I’m not, so I just thought, “The HELL? That’s … fascinating… about the Ponds Hand Cream and all, but you know, why are you telling ME”? And why the address? What was she expecting me to do, turn up at her house to inspect the watery hand cream in person? And even if I DID sell Ponds Hand Cream(e) (Which, just to be clear, I DON’T), did she think I’d just send her a new one, on the strength of a one-line email? Sending complete strangers on the internet your address: not really such a great idea, no?
Also, note that this person was so keen to tell me about her watery hand cream that she put my email address in the CC box as well as the “to” box. Yes, the SAME email address. So I got two copies of this email, which, first thing in the morning, when I’d yet to have my coffee, convinced me there was some kind of watery hand cream epidemic going on, and that I was The Chosen One, who would have to fix it.
But no: it’s just yet another epidemic of people thinking I’m a shop. And there’s really nothing I can do about it.
Tagged email fun, I am not a shop, magic amber
Last week a comment flooded in to Hey-Dollface, from someone known to me only as ’Little Bitchy McBitcherston”. I hope she enjoys this brief moment of attention, as that is clearly something that has been missing from her life until now!
And what did Lil’ Bitchy have to say to me? She said:
“Ummm not to be mean but why do u have like scabs on ur lips?”
You know what, though, folks? Call me a cynic (I mean, I’ve been called worse. Like “scabby lipped”, for instance.), but I think Lil’ Bitchy DID want to be mean! I think she was… wait for it… lying when she said she wasn’t! Don’t you think she was probably lying? Because really, when you get right down to it, there’s never really a non-mean reason for calling someone “scabby lipped”, is there?
(These personal insults don’t bother me, by the way. I only take criticism seriously when it comes from people who actually know me and who I know have my best interests at heart. When it’s random kids who can’t spell, I take it for what it is: a pathetic attempt to be a little bitch. And I delete it. Oh, and I don’t have “like scabs” on my lips either. Or even just regular scabs. Just so’s you know.)
But what never fails to make me laugh about these stupid insults is the way people will always first of all make a transparently insincere attempt to pretend that they’re not just being a bitch. Seriously: “not to be mean, but…” That’s hilarious! What’s the point of even PRETENDING you don’t want to sound mean when you’re about to accuse someone of having “like scabs” on their lips? I mean, you may as well just admit it, right? It’s not like the person who receives that message is going to think, “My God, this person says I’m a scabby lipped ho! Oh no, wait… she says she’s not being mean! Whew!” is it?
And there are so many stupid little phrases like that. I’ve already mentioned the classic, “Sorry, but…” YOU’RE NOT SORRY! Don’t try to pretend you are! Just admit to yourself that you’re trying to make a complete stranger on the internet feel bad, and that that’s how you get to feel better about yourself. It will save you a fortune in therapy later!
Then there’s the rest. Last week, for instance, I was hit with, “I don’t want to burst your bubble, but…” And the thing about that? I didn’t even HAVE a bubble at the time! No, really, I didn’t. (It was a post about a new skin cream, and I think a lot of the time, people confuse “me blogging about something” with “me caring deeply about something”, though, which perhaps isn’t their fault) But if I DID have a bubble, you can be sure that person wanted to burst it for me. Oh, he may have SAID, “I don’t want to burst your bubble,” but what he MEANT was, “Excuse me, is this your bubble? Do you mind if I just… *BANG!*”
Basically, any phrase containing the word “but” is almost guaranteed to have me rolling my eyes. That and “Just sayin’”, which is a variation on this theme that’s used at the end of the insult rather than at the start of it and means, “I’ve just been a complete asshole, but, you know, just sayin’.”
Or how about “I’m just being honest!”, the clarion-call of the Big Brother generation. Let me tell you something: honesty is not always the best policy. You don’t actually NEED to tell someone you think they’re ugly, for instance. It doesn’t achieve ANYTHING, other than to make you look like an asshole. I, for instance, already know exactly what I look like. I see myself in the mirror every morning. I’ve known myself for … a while. I don’t need you to point out my flaws. Chances are, I already know what they are. Did your mother never tell you that drawing attention to other people’s flaws is rude? And makes the baby Jesus cry? And then Bichons come and bite your bum, and trust me, you do NOT want Bichons to come and bite your bum? DID SHE?
 Bum-Biting Bichon These people are not sorry.What they’re saying is, “I’ve noticed that you’re not perfect [and hey, who is?] and I’m worried that you might not feel quite bad enough about it, so I’m sending you this email/comment to make sure that you DO feel bad about yourself. Like I do.” That says a helluva lot about them, but it doesn’t actually say anything at all about me. My bubble remains intact.
Umm, where was I? Oh yeah, Bitchy McBitcherston, and all of the many, many other people like her recently, who try to make themselves feel better about their own problems in life by going out of their way to try to make a random stranger feel bad. I have a message for those people. To paraphrase a much better writer than me: my scabby lips* will heal. But you trolls will probably always be nasty little bitches. I know I’d rather have the scabby lips than the personality disorder any day.
*Note: totally don’t have scabby lips. No, really.
Tagged OMG internet drama!
They say you learn something new every day, and today I learned something about me. I learned I am “cold, calculating, sad and mad.” Also “lacking in essential humanity”. Oh, and just plain “weird”. Can’t forget that one!
Why am I all of these things, I hear you ask? (OK, not really, but let’s pretend.) Because I don’t want to have children. And according to a certain columnist for the Daily Fail Mail (a newspaper I hate with every fibre of my being), this makes me all of the above, and more.
I read Carol Sarler’s piece on Why bosses are right to distrust women who don’t have children this morning (I know, I should know better to read anything in the Mail, but there was a link on Twitter, I clicked…), and spent the next ten minutes or so ranting angrily to anyone who would listen (sorry, Terry and Rubin) about how women like Carol are the reason we’ll never have true equality with men: because as long as women insist on putting so much time and energy into tearing each other down, calling each other names and being holier-than-thou about every little choice other women make, we’ll always just seem like a bunch of cats fighting in a sack. And we will never, ever be taken seriously.
Here’s the part where I prove my point by tearing Carol Sarler down and being holier-than-thou. But where to start?
How about at the very beginning:
“Much as I like to trumpet the importance of a woman’s right to choose all things at all times, [says Carol] there’s one choice I simply cannot understand: the choice of an otherwise sane and healthy woman not to have children…if she says she hasn’t a shred of maternal feeling in her, moreover, if she says she would prefer to concentrate on her career and that a child would only get in the way of it, then my head might acknowledge her right to do so. But my heart whispers: ‘Lady, you’re weird.”
Continue reading →
Tagged childfree, feminism, Rants, work
Testing, testing, 1,2,3…
[nggallery id=sunday-may-3rd]
One morning last week, Terry and I returned home from the gym to discover the light on the answerphone flashing. Amongst the usual work-related messages that had been left (for Terry, obviously, not for me. Because I don’t actually “do” phone calls.) was a message from a Mystery Woman. “Please call me back,” said the Mystery Woman, in heavily accented English, before giving her number and then hanging up. It was actually quite thrilling, to be honest, like the start of an adventure novel which sees our intrepid, titian haired heroine travel the world, battling against the clock to solve the Mystery of the Mysterious Caller. Oh no, wait… I’m confusing myself with Nancy Drew again. Sorry. Where was I?
So, the Mystery Woman left her number. And that was it. No salutation, no indication of who she was, or what she was calling about – nothing to even tell us which one of us she was trying to reach. I mean, it could have been Rubin for all we knew. He gets a lot of calls like that: some of his friends have no manners AT ALL, really.
Well, Terry and I thought about this for about two seconds (and I Twittered about it, obviously), and decided that, nah, if it was THAT important to her, she’d surely call back. And she did. And do you know who our Mystery Caller was?
She was a telemarketer.
Yes, she wanted US to call HER, so she could try and talk us into buying something we didn’t want or need. Seriously, how cheeky is that? Very cheeky, I’d say. It’s bad enough that they call us all day long (Yes, we signed up to the Telephone Preference Service, but it doesn’t apply to business numbers, which ours is, and it also doesn’t stop people calling you from foreign call centres.) but expecting us to call them back? Seriously?
I thought this was a one off. But then yesterday night, an email flooded in. The subject line said “Can you call XXXXX?” (Company name removed to protect the very guilty) The body of the email contained… well, nothing, actually, other than the email signature of the person who sent it, which included the person’s phone number.
Well, of course I COULD phone that company. But the thing is, I didn’t want to. Not with my new knowledge of the way certain telemarketers have apparently started to operate, anyway, and actually, not before then either, to be honest, because I think it’s just horribly rude for a complete stranger to demand that you call them without saying why. No?
Instead, I emailed the person back to ask why they wanted to speak to me. This one turned out NOT to be a telemarketer. He was, however, a journalist who wanted my help (in the form of some quotes) for an article he was writing, and he went about asking for this help in just about the rudest way possible – and I say this as a former journalist myself. My rule of thumb when dealing with people like this is that if they can’t be bothered to be even reasonably polite when they’re asking for my help I can’t be bothered to help them. So I stopped replying to his emails, and when I got home from the gym this morning, I discovered that he had tried to call me no less than nine times. NINE. TIMES. Because, as we all know, if someone is out when you call them, phoning back repeatedly, at three minute intervals, is the best way to make them magically re-appear. Only not really, obviously.
The lesson in all of this? It pays to be polite. Also, if we didn’t have to have a phone for business reasons, I’d throw ours out of the window. Twice.
Tagged email fun, phones
There’s a full moon tonight. If recent circumstances hadn’t made this fact painfully obvious to me already, I’d have realised as soon as I received this email, earlier today:
—–Original Message—–
From: An Idiot
Sent: 11 March 2009 14:01
To: Amber, Verbal Punching Bag of the Internet
Subject: helpppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp.
dear amber:
i’ve reviewed books for the new york times, discussed the art of writing on npr’s fresh air with terry gross, and many other high points in my career as a freelance writer, and so i came to your site seeking enlightenment if not some freelance gigs, and what did i see, first thing?
do you have an interesting object?
tell us it’s story
ayieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
you need me. you need an editor. you really do.
I’ve removed two words which may or may not have been the author’s name from this literary feast (it was hard to tell due to the basic lack of writing skills) to protect the guilty but the rest is exactly as I received it, including font and funky yellow highlighter.
I think it becomes even more amusing when you realise it was written in response to this post at WritingWorld. Just in case you can’t be bothered reading it, it’s a post about its/it’s confusion, and I used an advert by a major publishing house as an example of how even the biggest companies sometimes get it wrong. It was the advert text that my correspondent is quoting here, and obviously, I’m not the best person to judge my own writing, but I thought it was pretty obvious that the incorrect “it’s” was an example, and wasn’t written by me (although I’m happy to admit that I get it wrong too, sometimes, even although I’m perfectly well aware of the correct use of the apostrophe). Apparently not, though.
That aside, I find it both shocking and amusing in equal measures that someone would send an email like THIS to ask me to employ them. Because, oh yeah, I’m going to totally want to take on a member of staff who wrote to me to slag off my website and try to make out that I’m an idiot who can’t spell! Doesn’t everyone want employees like that?
More importantly, though, if I WAS looking for a freelance editor (which I’m not, by the way), I’m thinking I’d probably go for one who wasn’t such a stranger to capital letters and punctuation, you know? One who, perhaps, knew that “ayieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” is not a word, and that “help” only has the one “p”.
Sadly, these kind of emails have become the norm for me recently, and to be totally honest, it’s kinda killing the Internet for me. If it’s not people writing to hurl abuse at me, or treat me as their own personal Google, it’s people commenting here to tell me they don’t like my face and that I should change it, or leaving nasty comments at The Fashion Police because a post from two years ago is now – surprise,surprise! – out of date, and the dress in question is no longer available. (Quite how this is my fault is beyond me, but apparently it is. I’m slowly starting to realise that almost EVERYTHING is my fault. Everything.) And if THAT isn’t enough, people are still confusing me with Rihanna, and writing to me AS IF I AM HER.
(Note: I am not Rihanna. NOT. RIHANNA.)
Tagged email fun, freelance writing, I See Stupid People, OMG internet drama!
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