Rubin and I just heard the best joke ever:

We’re totally not going to tell you what it was though. Sorry.

Today I decided, in my infinite wisdom, that I would start up a Tumblr. Well, all the cool kids were doing it, and you know, me, if there’s a bandwagon in town, I’ll… well, I’ll probably wait a year or so and then I’ll jump right on it. Slowly. (Also, it bothered me that there was a blogging platform I hadn’t used. )

So I got me a Tumblr. Five minutes after I published my first post, I got my first spam comment.

Seven minutes after I published my first post, I got my first piece of personal abuse, from someone telling me I “look so much better when I don’t show my face.”

I deleted the Tumblr. I figure people have enough ways to abuse me on the Internet already.

(Seriously, though, maybe I was just unlucky, but worst blogging experience ever. I’d been wondering for ages why it was so popular and… I’m still wondering. Anyone?)

p.s. Nominate  TheFashionPolice.net in the Cosmo Blog Awards? Or Shoeperwoman.com? Or hey-dollface.com? Pretty please?

A comment I received on Saturday morning from a reader known as “Dillon”:

 

 “I personally hate gingers. the red hair is not pretty, dye your hair please! i live with a ginger and she is the worst person ive ever met. she is mean about everything and never stops complaining. not to mention she smells like tuna. don’t even get me started on the freckle situation. all im saying is that gingers really have no souls, they are heartless little gingers.”

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 was 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.)

(more…)

Well, THAT was a whole lot of fun, wasn’t it?

Look, though! We’re getting a sun obscured by a little bit of cloud tomorrow!

Do you know, that’s the first time I have EVER seen that particular icon, and I’ve had my iPhone for about two months now? It’s good that it turned up this weekend, though, because we’re going to a barbecue tomorrow, and “sun obscured by a little cloud” will be much better than the “rain of biblical proportions” we’ve been having lately.

NO idea what’s happening on Tuesday, though. It looks to me like the sun will be melting that day. OMG, WHAT’S HAPPENING ON TUESDAY? And how does the iPhone KNOW?

I also just wanted to say that comments on this site are now being moderated. Sorry about that – it’s not something I’d have chosen to do, but  as much as I am able to laugh at the trolls (and at myself, which is what my last entry was really about) I AM getting a bit tired of the personal attacks. Needless to say, the vast majority of you are absolutely lovely (and I really, really appreciate your support on The Post That Dare Not Speak It’s Name. Actually, let’s call that post “Voldemort”. Can we do that?), so I hope you’ll not be put off commenting. One more thing for the trolls: when I say “comments are being moderated” I just want to add “and they’re not being moderated by ME”. So not only will your hate mail not be published here, I won’t even see it.

Still: sun! And a whopping 18 degrees! It’s as good as it gets, folks…

Dear Idiot Teenagers who thought it would be a good idea to post a whole bunch of stupid comments on The Fashion Police this week, calling me an “idiot” and generally advertising your lack of brain cells:

It was not a good idea.

It was an even worse idea to use your actual email addresses to do it, though.

You actual email addresses that were issued by your actual high school. Your high school whose Internet connection you happened to be using at the time you posted the comments in question. Your high school Internet connection with an IP address that traced right back to… you guessed it!… your high school!

Also not a good idea? Repeatedly posting your mobile phone number, asking me to call you on it. And yeah, sure, it could’ve been a fake number, but given that you weren’t bright enough to use a fake email address, I’m going to guess it was real. Hey, guess what? The site had almost 15,000 visitors that day! That’s a lot of phone calls from potentially dangerous random Internet strangers you could be receiving, huh? So you’ll understand why I had to notify your school and ask them to notify your parents, no? It was my duty as a responsible adult. And as an ever-so-slightly vindictive one, to be completely honest.

Also? You’re SO grounded, chilluns. And on detention for the rest of the month, hopefully. Enjoy!

Love,

Amber

Seriously, I don’t know what they’re teaching kids today. In my day we knew how to troll a website, and we knew how to do it right. None of this “using real email addresses and posting from easily-traced IPs” nonsense. Honestly.  What is the world coming to when the youth of today don’t even know how to remain anonymous on the Internet? This was all fields then, you know…