The glowing sheep of old Sussex
I got nothin’ tonight. I’ve been doing housework(!) all evening, so please enjoy this picture Uncle B took earlier this Summer. (Yes, of course you can have it large and in color).
Now is probably the time to give the old mustelid a shout-out. I’ve taken almost none of the photos I’ve posted during this year’s fete season, he has. Uncle B is an enthusiastic photographer with a much better eye than mine.
This pisses me off. I went to art school, you know.
On the other hand, I’m also incredibly lazy and opportunistic, so having his visual record of our adventures has been most helpful.
September 25, 2017 — 8:52 pm
Comments: 7
In liberty…
Snapshot of the chooks from earlier this week. That’s Mapp (the old one), Colette, Rosie and Jenny.
I get mail, thanks to this blog. I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten hate mail, which is a little surprising given that I do occasionally touch on politics and politics is so effing fraught these days. A get a smattering of fan mail, some questions and lots of interesting links (thank you for that). And then I get mail like this:
Hi Weasel Times & Stoat Intelligencer editorial team,
My name is Sam and I’m an avid reader of Weasel Times & Stoat Intelligencer. I just wanted to say that I appreciate what you’re doing at Weasel Times & Stoat Intelligencer to encourage an open dialogue from both sides of the aisle. Few Americans today actively engage in meaningful, objective discourse to address the complex and morally significant questions on the national agenda today.
I subscribe to the Weasel Times & Stoat Intelligencer newsletter and regularly send your emails to friends and family. Thanks for being a voice of reason.
In Liberty,
Sam
Sam manages to work in “Weasel Times & Stoat Intelligencer” four times in this short message. I’m not sure, but that title might be in the header text (it’s not visible through ‘show source’ – I’d have to look at the page code), which is where a bot would grab it. I can’t find any obvious links in the message or nothing fishy. There is a first and last name, and they match the email address. Any ideas?
Sam — if you there is an actual human being named Sam — on behalf of the whole editorial team, thank you very much. I was afraid to hit ‘reply’. You write like a bot, dude.
August 31, 2017 — 10:17 pm
Comments: 14
News.
There was a sometime commenter here with the username Lipstick who was a stalwart of the blog Innocent Bystanders. Geoff, also a Bystander, informs me that she has died. I don’t know the details and I didn’t like to ask.
Death in the social media age is a strange thing. People that we both do and don’t know, that we experience only as voices, go silent. Or, rather, they stop adding new content, but the internet remembers them forever. Forever unchanged. It’s a weird immortality.
There’s a tribute thread on Innocent Bystanders if you
remember her well enough to want to pay your respects.
March 13, 2017 — 9:43 pm
Comments: 6
HAPPY WEASEL-DEC-AVERSARY!!
W00t!
If I did that right, you had a moment of technicolor mustelidity that click-linked to this individual post. Last time I hijacked my own front page, though, the place was a mess until I put it all back where it used to be. (April Fool’s Day, 2011. FYI).
I *will* have my little joke.
Oh, don’t worry. The blog’s still there. I’m not taking this opportunity to retire or anything like that. I’ll put everything back directly. I’d be lost without you, my imaginary internet friends.
I’ll entertain suggestions, though. If you’d like the occasional guest post or photo essay or something.
I was going to do a redesign, but I hate it when my sites change without warning. Also, lazy. I do think I’d like to freshen things up. Clean up the sidebars (are blogrolls any use any more?). Maybe tweak the comment section. Find a rating plugin that works.
Anyway — thanks for a decade of larfs! Honestly, I don’t think I could’ve made a trans-Atlantic move without you.
p.s. Oh, did I forget to mention? Today is also my eighth wedding anniversary. Tonight, I shall drink champagne and eat steak. And leave this post up another day. *waves*
February 13, 2017 — 9:28 pm
Comments: 57
Sticks and stones…
Ladies and gentlemen, my favorite tweet. I don’t know much about Mr the Creator, but he’s a rapper so I’m going to apply stereotypes and assume he’s at least a little bit ghetto. Bullying in his old haunts prolly involved blood loss.
It isn’t much fun to be the target of online abuse. I have been, long ago, not as Stoaty Weasel. But if you get shit on a blog or a forum or Twitter, you have the option to not fucking go there for a while. Not counting having your nudes or your name and address published, which I do see as actual real-world harm, nothing that happens to you in cyber space is real. It’s an essential social skill in [current year] to learn to walk away from, not get wadded up by, strangers in cyberspace trying to get under your skin.
I know, it’s a not-politics week, but I had to mention Milo Yiannapolis’ Twitter permaban, because I’m not sure what the small fry should do about it.
Backstory: Milo got into a slanging match with that black chick from the new Ghostbusters movie. The way I read it, she was ruder to him than he was to her, but because other people went after her with crude racial stuff, he got blamed for incitement. Good writeup of it here, if you care.
In response to the whole business, people were re-tweeting some hair raising things other Twitter users had said without getting banned. Like, advocating cop murder and recruiting for ISIS. All of the obvious pushback is against the right.
For those of you not on Twitter (most of my readership, I think), when a topic is discussed a lot, it appears in the sidebar as “trending”. The #FreeMilo hashtag was trending so hard, it was number three or four (it’s different in different locations) for hours. And then it was just gone. People were still tweeting about it in enormous volumes, but Twitter plucked it off the list and invisibilized it.
Now, I’m not much of a Twitter user. At all. So the obvious thing to do is walk away and hope enough others do so to make an already tanking business model tank harder. But social media have become a beloved crutch for lazy journalists everywhere. Whole tracts of the Daily Mail are just tweets from nobodies now. So what happens when all the nobodies are SJW nobodies?
July 21, 2016 — 9:19 pm
Comments: 16
It is finished.
Well, there you go. Migrated.
The deal was, I had two separate web hosting accounts. I started the blog on BlueHost and, when they hit a rough patch performance-wise, I opened another web hosting account at Hosting Matters to see if it was any better. It was, but I had pre-paid BlueHost for something like five years in advance.
When that expired, the procrastination began.
Anyway, it’s all with Hosting Matters now (except a few of my domain registrations) and excellent customer service they have, too. Mucho recommendo.
And no, I don’t have a bunch of fascinating websites out there (I should say, a bunch of OTHER fascinating websites). I’ve got a few bits I host for other people, and some domain names I registered and didn’t ever do much with.
The picture is from one of the fêtes this weekend. It was in aid of their local Bonfire Society, hence the scary ladies. Every local society has a costume, like Mardi Gras krewes. Trust me, this shit looks spookier by the light of burning stuff.
We enjoyed this one very much, but there’s not much to report.
Oh, I got lit up on warm beer and entered the axe-throwing competition. I didn’t win, but the moderator said I was “slightly above average”, which I regard as V-I-C-T-O-R-Y!!
So, back in business. The only thing that got lost in transition is, I saw a real live weasel cross the road on Midsummer’s Day!
June 22, 2016 — 8:44 pm
Comments: 12
Dang.
Well, poop. HotAir has just announced they’re turning their comments over to FaceBook. I don’t totally get how that works — I’ve not seen this done before — but it means the main articles still appear at HotAir.com, but to comment you’ll have to be a member of, and logged into, FaceBook.
And comment under your own real name. In front of your grandma and your boss and everything. On a conservative political site. In 2016.
How do you say “no, thank you” in rage-fuelled gibberish?
HotAir was never a great site and it’s been in decline for some time. The best thing about it was always Allahpundit, and he’s been mighty quiet since Salem took over. But still, it was my favorite straight-up, minimal-commentary news aggregator and I’ll be a little lost without it.
Can anyone recommend another? I want something that links to the top two dozen mainstream news stories (of interest to a righty) every day, preferably with a sample or synopsis so I don’t have to click through if I don’t wanna. More stories than Ace, more MSM than Breitbart. More meat than Drudge. And open comments, pls.
p.s. Sober readers will recall that I do have an FB account in the name of Stoaty Weasel. I opened that before I knew it was a TOS violation. They have since cracked down on anonymous and second accounts, but they somehow missed ol’ Stoaty. Still, I log in with a different browser to access it and I hardly ever do. I’m sure if I pop up and start commenting on the new HotAir, I’ll get rumbled and shut down in short order. I’m accepting suggestions of fun and creative ways we can send Stoaty down in flames.
February 15, 2016 — 9:02 pm
Comments: 30
The gift of passive-aggression
I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve lost interest in websites that don’t allow comments. Especially news sites. Especially news sites that I’m are going to piss me off royally (I’m looking at you, Daily Telegraph).
The comments are my favorite part. I don’t want to swallow a load of bullshit without the antidote handy.
Or, if the comment system is too onerous (I’m looking at you, Daily Mail), at the very least let me take out my passive-aggression with a rating system.
To that end — and Merry Christmas! — I’m test-driving a ratings plugin for the blog. It’s got all kinds of nifty options: stars, thumbs, vote once or vote infinite times. You can have a look at the possibilities here.
I think I’ve got it set to vote once a day, stars on the post and thumbs on the comments. For now. Honestly, they weren’t all that monochrome-friendly in their options (she harrumphed).
Let’s play around with it for a couple of weeks over the holidays, and then I’ll nail it down and stop clearing the cache.
The Official Merry Ho Ho Open Threadapaloozala
I was going to squeeze out a few more posts this week, but my heart’s not in it. G’wan witcha, knock yourselves out in this one.
To get the conversation re-rolling, have you seen this Telegraph bit? Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s white paper proposing a thing he called the World Wide Web. He said it was going to be a place where all sorts of people posted a bunch of content totally for free and let other people link to it totally for free. True story: I read that paper when it came out and thought it was the stupidest pile of implausible fantasy hippie crap I ever heard.
Don’t ever take investment advice from me.
December 21, 2015 — 8:04 pm
Comments: 83
Good weekend (and beyond!)
Okay, youse guys, I obviously checked out a couple of miles back. I got a stitch in my give-a-shit somewhere around Wednesday. I’ll be around all week and looking in, but the political class can go to hell without me for a couple of weeks.
Let the festivities begin!
December 18, 2015 — 11:22 pm
Comments: 17
Good weekend, everybody!
It all started when I went to upgrade my WordPress installation. And then I went to upgrade some plugins. And, next thing you know, I was paddling around in my PHP trying to tidy some loose ends. And before you know it, I had brokened the blog.
Not so’s YOU’d notice, but I messed up some important stuff behind the scenes. I built the blog nine years ago by mashing buttons until it kinda did what I wanted. I had no effing idea what I was doing and, anyway, it was a very long time ago. Trying to fix anything is…well.
It’s stable now, but don’t be surprised if I keep tinkering over the weekend and break it some more.
Have a good’un. Two weeks to Christmas!
December 11, 2015 — 11:37 pm
Comments: 25