Caveat Lector

Well, well, well. I’m a Dreamhost customer. Have been for almost two years.

Yep. I’m one of the ones that got hacked.

They don’t seem to have done any damage to CavLec or yarinareth.net proper. You folks whose blogs I host, please check your front pages with View Source to be sure you didn’t get damaged either (the link above tells you what to look for). I have changed passwords on the account, of course.

I’m hacked off. My account with Dreamhost expires in a couple months, and I think I’ll (ugh ugh UGH) be moving. Pair Networks has a nice deal this month…

So I get an email from one Megan Farnum asking to buy an ad on my graduate school page. It is unprofessionally poorly-spelt, but seems sincere enough, and lacks the commonest feature of spam (that being, spammers want my money, not the other way ’round). The commodity to be advertised is not named. I am offered $30.

I could fire off “Scram, pathetic loser,” but that would be rude. Megan looks like just a kid trying to get a business (or something) started.

I could just delete the email, but that would be boring. So I Google Megan Farnum’s name, and look what I turn up! I also check out the domain listed as her return email address, and look what I find! I could call them skeevy Internet marketers with a lame brochureware site, but that would be rude.

I wonder, though… is Miss Megan stupid like a fox? For one thing, she is obviously targeting sites with respectable PageRanks (the page she wanted from me is PR 5; not great, but not bad either, especially for a static page) that don’t already have great green gobs of greasy-grimy advertising all over them. The sorority-chick email style got past my spam filters and actually got a personal response from me.

If my guesses about their motivations are true… clever, they are, but astoundingly slimy. I could call them scumsucking Internet parasites trying to goo up the last few bastions of advertising-free materials on the Web—

—but that would be rude, wouldn’t it?

Back when academia was the chief target of the more caustic aspects of my nature, I caught some flak for it from fellow bloggers. There’s a difference between disagreement and flak. The difference is that disagreement allows me on the playing field, so to speak. Flak questions my right to weigh in at all, my stature to judge, the terms in which I frame the discussion.

And I hate it. Flak jumps onto my forebrain like a tick on a dog, sucks blood and doesn’t let go. I feel like crap for weeks, no matter what else is going on, or how ludicrous the flak. Yes, I am a wuss, that’s quite right.

Last week I was catching flak from two directions. One, over conference finance: “shut up and go away, you whiny bitch, the system works fine if you play it right and you can’t change it anyway.” Yeah, okay, whatever. I’ll bide my time on that one. I think things are going to change with or without me; I had meditated explaining just why I think that, as it pulls together a number of recent CavLec threads including Five Weeks, but hell, no percentage in it, really. This is me shutting up and going away.

Two, the eminently predictable: over what men can do to improve the social experience of the Internet for women. That flak was private, and no points at all for guessing the allegiance of the flak-thrower. If you know my history, it’s that obvious.

The substance of the flak was that “geekland” was a stereotype and a slam, and I didn’t have any right to do that if I was asking for women not to be stereotyped and slammed. I’ve heard this one before. It’s still playing tick on my forebrain; I got a ton of linklove for that post from all over the place (including places I’d never heard of and that had never heard of me), and still that one criticism feels fifty times more salient. I don’t buy it, but I don’t know yet why I don’t, so… there that is.

Sometimes I think that if I could just adjust my personal salience meter, the world would feel like a much friendlier place. Haven’t managed it yet, and may never, so my apologies to you all for the wallowing in self-pity.

Which is over now, because the other thing that happened was an outpouring of grace and kindness from various corners of the web. I didn’t ask for it, having largely kept my self-pity to myself until now, but oh, it was welcome and well-timed, and I appreciate it more than I can say.

An email I read this morning sealed the deal, and I’ve asked permission to reproduce part of it here, but haven’t heard back yet, so you’ll just have to wait. Trust me, though, this one’s worth waiting for.

Thank you. I am grateful, very much so, for the friendship and respect I have found here.

Walt started it, not me. C’mon, when was the last time I started anything good?

To me, a blogger hero is a blogger who has used the medium for good, really built something worthwhile off blog software. Lots of ways to do that, thank heaven. Some bloggers do it just by being who they are. Some take on the thankless task of the dutiful chronicler. Some teach others, amazingly effectively. Some advocate.

Mind you, to make this list, it’s not enough to be a hero of mine who blogs. Gotta do something special with or within the medium to qualify.

So. Here are five of my blogger heroes.

• Peter Suber. I don’t think I even need to explain this one, never mind justify it. Open Access News is an amazing feat. If it didn’t exist, how on earth would we invent it?
• The Angry Black Woman. I couldn’t do what she does. Gosh, no. I’d explode, implode, then spontaneously combust. I’m glad she’s doing it, though, and maybe her example will someday teach me not to be such a damn wuss.
• Meredith Farkas. Talk about a rocket to the moon. Meredith rode her blog all the way to librarian rock-stardom. That’s a respectable feat, and I’m happy to say I knew her when—when we were both new grads looking for our first jobs, that is! When EBSCO decided to index blogs, I just bet Meredith was why.
• Lorcan Dempsey, because he’s got a number of strikes against him in the biblioblogosphere—he works for A Vendor, he’s in a position of considerable power at said vendor, and he doesn’t shy away from talking about revolutionary stuff in a reactionary profession—but that level, urbane, discerning tone of voice never falters. It’s a great thing in a blogger. I’d say I wish I could do it, but the day I can is when hell really freezes over.
• And gone but never forgotten, the Invisible Adjunct, who said the unsayable and made it stick. I hope she’s all right. I believe she must be.

Tag. You’re it. Yes, you.

It’s CSS Naked Day again. CavLec is a proud participant, in part because its owner is aware of the difficulty of making anything “naked” on the ’net halfway tasteful, and is deeply impressed that the organizer does actually manage it.

Also to remind herself that a markover for CavLec is well overdue.

To do the latest biblioblogosphere meme, I had to pull up my non-work Gregarius install. For obvious reasons, all my work blogs have to do with libraries, librarians, or markup!

Five blogs I read that don’t come out of librarianship:

• Norm Walsh’s blog, which has no title other than its URL. I know a surprising lot of top-tier markup slingers, among whom Norm “Mr. DocBook” Walsh has no trouble whatever holding his own. Plus he’s a nice guy who has a Goth-kitty of his own and is good with a camera. Norm’s on my work blog list, but he still counts, because he’s not a librarian!
• Tenser, said the Tensor. Linguistics and skiffy geek stuff, often combined.
• Feminist SF - The Blog! Not as frequently updated as I’d like, but it’s got some amazingly thoughtful posters.
• Vitia, by a rhetorician whose research interest (which I am about to butcher horribly, I’m sure) is the intersection of labor theory with the writing classroom. Don’t miss the latest ongoing Friday-fiction series.
• The Madison Wisconsin Housing Bubble Blog. Do I live here? Yes, I do. Am I thinking about buying another house here? Not until the funny money’s flushed out of the market and the shadow inventory (especially those condos) gets taken care of, no.

One of these days I should go looking for more non-library blogs; the non-work Gregarius install is pretty light. Some writers’ blogs are phenomenal (I ran into Deep Genre in the course of working on That Dratted Book, and quite liked it), but the thing is, I’m not a fiction writer, so I don’t need and have only marginal interest in the advice those blogs tend to (very kindly and patiently) shovel out with a backhoe to the many aspiring fictioneers.

But the above gives you a general idea of the sort of thing that catches my eye and holds it.

Two days ago, Caveat Lector turned five years old. That doesn’t make it an elder statesblog exactly, but five years is still a respectable age for a weblog.

Two thousand seven hundred thirty-one posts (give or take; I don’t know if that number includes the five I’ve got in various states of draft). A few hundred trackbacks, from the days when trackback wasn’t a spam vector. No comments. (Still.) No ads, no tip jars; blogging is my private vice, and I see no reason anyone but me should pay for it, and plenty of reasons they (for various values of “they”) shouldn’t. A semi-respectable Google PageRank of 6 (I’ve occasionally flirted with 7, but I can’t seem to keep it).

CavLec has outlasted four jobs, one master’s degree (from soup to nuts), one move (soon to be two), one blogging platform (seriously, does anybody use Movable Type any more who isn’t forced to?), at least three webhosts, and more blog-drama than I like to contemplate.

Putting things in perspective, however, CavLec is one-seventh the chronological length of my life, only five-eighths the length of my marriage, and a bit less than one-third the length of the relationship that includes my marriage. Hell, my tubal ligation is older than CavLec; that’s just the kind of stubborn old bag I am.

Rather to my dismay, CavLec has become far more of a professional blog than I ever imagined or wanted. (”Professional” in the sense of “engaging with professional issues,” not in the sense of “paid to blog,” because I’m not that last and don’t aim to be, either.) There’s a life-balance issue lurking there. I’ve spent too much time in the last couple years couch-potatoing at home because it’s just such a pain in the rear to go anywhere in the vicinity of Washington DC if one doesn’t drive. I’m hoping the move back to Madison will wake me up a bit, and get CavLec back to the usually-cheerful miscellaneous geeks-and-their-cats haven it used to be.

(The vacation from open-access wrangling has been nice, I must confess. I completely missed the latest Harnad-Velterop green-versus-gold exchange, and I couldn’t manage to be happier about that if I tried my level best.)

I ought to give the poor old thing a redesign for its birthday; it’s still, well, terribly rectangular and all. (Hello? The late ’90s are calling, and they want their squared-off visual aesthetic back.) I don’t want to ditch the William Morris entirely, but I think I can contrive something a bit more in touch with modern web design. Maybe when I get settled in Madison—though another project is hanging fire for that, and it really ought to get done first.

We’ll see. I can at least assert that scars and all, CavLec will keep its dusty little over-Latinated corner of the blogosphere open for business.

I sing opera. Who knew?

(I don’t. I do have the stereotyped opera-singer physique, but I still don’t, and everyone should be very very glad I don’t because I would be excruciatingly bad at it. I sing choral music, sacred and secular. Trust me, it’s not the same thing at all.)

I’m not a publisher, either, and I really wonder about someone who would publish a piece of writing in an outlet whose title translates “Reader beware.” (Sure, I wonder about myself. Often.) I don’t know who the owner of that site is, I’ve never seen a word of her writing save for what’s on that site, and I certainly never promised publication of any sort, here or anywhere else.

Anyway, I noticed these because of Referrer Karma, which I have running on CavLec. I give it a qualified endorsement; its chief problem is that it can and does bar people who click on links in their webmail. If you’ve got a bad referrer spam problem, though, I’d call webmailers acceptable collateral damage and install it.

Eye-opening… I’ve been fielding emailed congratulations on my new job as best I can amidst taxes (ugh) and move-planning and whatnot. (I still owe a lot of email. Will try to get through it all tonight.)

Messages trickled joyously in—until Meredith posted her kind congratulations, at which point I got a veritable flood.

This, of course, suggests rather strongly that quite a few folks who know me read Meredith and not me! Which is a perfectly logical and reasonable decision by the reading public, mind you. I’m just amused at what email inbox patterns suddenly revealed.

One particular kind of Internet bully yanks my chain good and hard: the kind who fights more or less fair in public, but sends harassing email in private. It’s not always as simple as bozofiltering somebody, though I’ve certainly done that; masters of the art are good at joe-jobs and building stoolie/sockpuppet armies, and if something material is at stake (rather than the usual Internet teapot-tempest), it may not be possible to bozofilter at all.

It so happens that there is an absolutely infallible tool for recognizing such a bully by their public actions. If you see someone complain that a private email has been made public, or even so much as mentioned in public—I guaran-damn-tee you, that’s a bully upset that private hectoring and threats are suddenly making the public rounds. Damaging to the image, don’t you know.

(Certainly there are times when going public with a private email is lousy behavior, notably when both parties have consciously agreed that a correspondence should be private. And flagrant misrepresentation of a private email is plain old deceit. But lacking that, email is not in my opinion so sacrosanct that other concerns never trump the illusion of privacy—and lest we forget, it is an illusion.)

The most outrageous (and unintentionally funny) variant on this tactic is when the bully beats its chest gorilla-style about copyright violations. Yes, publishing private email may be one. No, it’s not an actionable one, at least not in the States; let us all recall, copyright violation is a civil offense, not criminal (except under rare and weird circumstances), and the States don’t have “moral rights” for authors.

Just try taking a copyright case over a private email to court. I double-dog-dare you. There are no monetary damages to consider (a private email has as near zero market value as makes no odds), so the judge will laugh herself sick, if she doesn’t charge you with contempt or barratry. The appropriate response to such a copyright threat is always a shrug and a bluff-calling “Cool. See you in court.”

And as I hinted parenthetically earlier, abusive email is to my mind a considerably greater sin than publicly acknowledging or even publishing same. A talented bully can get away with murder for ages—target many different people, use sockpuppets or stoolies, whatever—because it counts on its victims being too nice to call its behavior out in public. Once one worm turns, though, things have a way of changing. Also, evidence made public can be built upon later, and lets victims know they’re not the first or the only.

So beware. Do not engage a bully in private email; there is no win in it, ever, because bullies fight dirty. Also, don’t go public without warning the bully first (preferably directly in private as well as indirectly in public): “Please do not email me again. If you do, I will repost your words.” Incredible though it seems, people believe the injured-innocence schtick bullies pull. If you warned but the bully still bullies, though, reposting is generally okay in the pitiless eye of the public.

Which leads me to my disclaimer. I have the disclaimer I do in my sidebar because I’ve seen one or two of these bullies in action, and have been a potential target of one in particular as long as I’ve been blogging. Do I make a habit of reposting private email to CavLec? Of course I don’t. I get lots of email (which helps explain but does not excuse how bad I am about answering it); when was the last time you saw any posted here? I’ve done it, yes, but I’ve asked first, and the reposting had nothing whatever to do with bullying.

(The one exception I can think of is this post, whose reposted email was only an indirect form of bullying, the oh-so-very-reasonable “you’re a total effing loser but I love you anyway in my condescendingly superior fashion!” kind. The writer of that email may deserve an apology from me, though I doubt he cares.)

I tell you what, though—the disclaimer works. Like maggots, bullies don’t like their under-log lifestyles exposed. I can think of one bully email I’ve gotten in the last couple-three years. (Didn’t repost it. Wasn’t important or interesting enough. I fired back a snarktastic response—happened to be in a suffer-not-fools-gladly mood that day—bozofiltered the guy, and let it go.) If you are running into this problem, I strongly recommend such a disclaimer. As CavLec was granted to the public domain ages ago, you can even grab my wording directly, if you like.

Because bullies just chap my hide. Get up my left nostril. However you want to put it. Less bullying in the virtual world is a good thing.