Sigh.

I'm just about at the end of the line here with spam commenters.  They're up to close to a dozen a day, each one emailing me separately through the LJNotify service. So far, I've been a good Internet citizen and gone back to the original entry, opened it (I'm the only one who ever sees them, because the LJ spam filters are pretty good and they all get hidden as "suspicious") and deleted it/reported it as spam. An hour later, a new one, the same crap, usually a different IP address (but, just as often, the same one; do Boris and Natasha even blacklist the IPs we report?). Frustrate, rinse, repeat.

I had a massive problem with this on my Mets blog, which, because it's linked to by a few Google heavy hitters, is even bigger bait for page-rank puffing. I tried putting CAPTCHAs on all comments there. The spammers laughed and slapped their 10-cent-an-hour CAPTCHA solvers to work harder.  Finally, I had to shut down comments on it altogether, because that journal doesn't have a useful Friendslist mechanism.

But this one does. And so, unless Russian Mafia Central cleans up the problem, I will be making commenting here friends-only. If you really have something to say? 

-Friend me, duh. Always looking for new and fresh.

-See if the post has been crossposted to Facebook. Many of them are, as are all of the Met blog posts (in the Met Bloggers group, oddly enough).

-And if all else fails, almost every entry I post here began its life on Dreamwidth and got cross-posted to LJ. Including this one. At the end of the cross-posted entry, there's always a link back to the Dreamwidth original. There's never been a spam problem there, and I will get and cross-post the comments over to here. Inconvenient, but less trouble than dealing with all this ugg soldes get a cash loan with bad credit drugstore and

Для чего нужен safe диска, а точнее образ системного диск

crap I get every day now.

I'm almost afraid to ask what that last one says.

Dexter is Dark.

Eleanor turned in early last night, so when 9:00 rolled round, I tried something completely different: I watched the current Dexter episode in real time, but with the lights and sound off and the captions on.

It worked out remarkably well. I did go back during laundry-folding time this afternoon, and watched the climactic scene, as well as the 705 previews and the aftershow, with the sound on, and it certainly aided the plot and the mood in the final scenes between Dex and Bad Guy and, then, Dex and Debs (the music at the end, which I rarely notice, was especially good this week), but you really didn't need them to build the suspense or the intense among the various developing storylines.

( Extra! Extra! Don't hear all about it! )

We now return you to our interminable plugging of Homeland.