Ah. Work. Lovely little hell realm it is.

Excellent advice on the diet and exercise for my too-low cholesterol (who knew it was possible?) and osteopedic (I think I have the term right) situation. I figure delicate bones and an inability to heal from a break is probably a bad combination.

Between work and changing my lifestyle/health stuff - this has been a hell of a week. I'm changing my diet, fast. (They couldn't even measure my cholesterol - there wasn't enough for the test to detect.) As for the delicate bones, I'm walking home from work with a 20 lb. pack. Which I was sort of starting to do anyway.

The office politics... holy shit. Some of you read the post about my third day of work, when the Accounting Manager was fired with all the gentleness of a public execution. ( Well, here's what the last two weeks have been like. Jesus. )

This is hell. Amusing in the sense that, well, I've seen worse, too. But I still don't know if I have funding for school this fall. Glk.

Amusement level: 5 out of 10.
Stress level: 9 out of 10.

If I owe drabbles, stories, betas, posts, whatever -- they're more or less on hold for now. Unless I can eke out a moment here or there.

Speaking of con-artists

Oh. I forgot to mention.

I just found out this week that my stepmother has cancer.

My dad would like to read more of my fanfic, but all I have is slash to send him. NC-17 slash.

And I'm exhausted.

As for that LJ Crush Meme: don't use your real passwords when you sign up for that thing. It will accept any password - I know this because I made one up.

Muse-wanted.com still hasn't taken down my site and hasn't responded to my requests that they do so. Bloody con-artists, trying to take people for money with fake "tech issues" that can't be caused by either an overload of MP3s or a double trojan. Yeah, and 24 hours after the "desperation" for money, suddenly they have enough for four months. Sure.

The little fuckers. I recommend you take your site down if you have it there.

If you can.

ETA: Unsurprisingly, http://www.muse-wanted.com has been taken down. Scam's over it appears. I wonder how much she made in donations?

We'll never know.

ETA2: Hey Sabbie, I like your new journal name anka. But you need a layout and some friends and maybe a post or two to make your comment from your "friend" convincing. *shakes head* *deletes*

Cops say that criminals are stupid.

ETA3: Comments, emails from people I don't know are being deleted unread. For those of you singing the praises of and_love: yes. Con artists are very charming people, aren't they? I have a tune for you: "Oh there's a suck-er, born every min-ute..." If and_love were legit, she'd be emailing everyone their passwords and giving people the chance to download their sites.

British Insults

Ah, a thread to match my mood: British Insults

There's one comment in there that's just right.

And I've just found the hp_britglish community. I've always given up on proper British-ness when it came to Harry Potter fics, instead smirking over the Britishisms in SG-1 stories. Ha. So there, you get it wrong, too.

I cleaned the fuzz out of my computer keyboard. Which was relaxing.

Are there any HP stories I should be reading?

Eureka. At long last, muse-wanted.com has taken down the site.

and_love/for_long/muse-wanted.com has finally taken down my site.

And I quote Bill Clinton when I say, "interesting timing." Given I just posted about it.

Anyone else who has been looking for passwords to be able to upload again, or to ask her to take their sites down -- and_love/for_long has reappeared!

Not without excuses in tow, but we're used to that by now. Plausible if not verifiable (given I was online with my friends in FL last night) but, hey, if she wants to blame her disappearance over the last week or so on a storm that hit yesterday -- no problem. Right. Hit by wild hippopotamus? Don't care. Sure, whatever you say. Volunteering to provide emails "proving" the tech issues were real? Yeah, yeah. Sure. I really don't want her to waste so much time composing them with her friends, and, really, her credibility with me is zero.

But it really doesn't matter, just so long she can take the sites down now.

Geeze.

ETA: Speaking of interesting timing: http://www.muse-wanted.com seems to have been taken down completely. One hopes that she was responsible enough to let people download their sites first. But somehow, I would be surprised. And Sabbie put an anonymous post in my journal, shortly after she took it down. *rolls eyes*

(no subject)

I posted the bulk of this a while ago only to some friends, because I needed to vent:

Welcome to the shakedown, muse-wanted.com.

A friend advertised this webhosting was being set up for slash writers. I asked if I could host the Percy Ficathon there.

( And then the fun began... )

Then she contacted me August 4th. There was a new story:

She asked me to put up a post to ask people for money. It puzzled me, because I didn't think you'd need to ask 500 people for $35 dollars. She said the hostees had been generous, and she had 16 domains hosted and 28 subdomains. The math didn't add up. At the time I thought the site was somewhat mismanaged.

I agreed to help, but our conversation left a bad taste in my mouth.

( I kept a copy of it )

( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Denouement

So. The Percyfest is now at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~percyfest

My site is back at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~dinkbird

I've been very polite and avoided the wank the last couple weeks, though a few of you have already seen the bulk of this post, deeply friends-locked.

I gave her time from August 6th - 15th to respond to people and let them upload/download their sites.

Checked in with folks: Nope. Email, Y!M, AIM, comments in her journals all didn't get a response. I helped one friend copy her site.

Today, I let and_love/Sabbie/for_long have it. She miraculously reappeared. Told me hurricane Charlie prevented her from responding.

Oh. Really?

Since July 31st?

I'm assuming it stopped at her house early. Stayed a while. Then moved on to ravage the rest of Florida.

I did a little checking on her, and found something that I had read a while ago and had stuck in my mind.

July 23rd she put up this rather revealing post: ( An early hint of the character of our host. )

She got this response:
( The girl she ripped off responds. )

At the time it didn't bother me. In retrospect it raises my eyebrows. Because I've now had experience with her doing a bit of a shell game with her excuses. Including the vacationing hurricane Charlie.

I have little doubt that Sabbie, aka and_love, aka for_love, is a con artist, with an established pattern of bilking people out of money.

- If anyone who needs hosting now that she's dropped the site, email me or drop a comment.

- Anyone who has webspace they can give, please let us know: I'm okay, but and_love/for_long shut the site down without letting 16 domains and 28 subdomains know first.

I can temporarily host some people at my Earthlink free sites, but there isn't a lot of space there.

ETA: http://www.muse-wanted.com is back up again, or at least there's front page there. With a personalised announcement. *smirks* It's unclear whether she's going to continue the hosting or not. However, she has offered to give all the money back. It's as difficult to track how much is returned as it was to figure how much she had taken in. However, I would hope that she does at least return some of it.

ETA2: Thank you for your generous offers. We have as much (in fact far more) hosting than we need. As it turns out, http://www.muse-wanted.com only changed its front page. All of the sites are still up, and links work. Hostees are simply not able to upload or download files, which is no change from three weeks ago.