Rudy’s Blog

Thanks, Narrenschiff, for the new add_coment_cgi.php. I put it on my site and tried to post a message with the p-word and it wouldn't go up.

Exciting to get help in this odd global way. Like we're white blood cells.

But then I couldn't post any comments at all, even though I replaced Narrenschiff's file with a fresh version 4 SPHP add_comment_cgi.ph. Probably the problem was actually that I'm using an older version of the SPHP ware, and I've edited that so would rather not change.

So then I went and told Rudy Jr., owner of my host www.monkeybrains.net , and he had a similar fix that worked, based on the same version of SPHP that I have installed, he uses it on his First Twins site.

Here's the fix, with the red disk standing for an OR-separated string of dirty words, and the pointy-bracket-enclosed letter b being the HTML tag for boldface, which is a style that sp*mmers like to use.

Onward through the fog.

Talking this over with Rudy at the new Monkeybrains World Headquarters in San Francisco, it was funny, he said “Don't use the p*oker word too much, or talk about c*mments, or even about bl*g, or the BOTS will notice, they'll 'hear' and they'll come swarming.” Peeking in like attack dogs.

Reminds me of how people sometimes are reluctant to say G*d's name or S*tan's.

The Web is seething with artificial life.

Every few days some online p*ker bots post a sp*m ad for themselves as a c*mment on my bl*g.

I use some free blog ware based on PHP, whatever that is.

Rooting around in the blogware, I find a file called comments.php with this function, written in, I guess, javascript (script type=”text/javascript”):

=====



=====

Question Anyone know how to edit this so as to reject any theform.blog_text.value or theform.comment_name.value that includes the string “p*ker”? (I don't want to use the actual word here as I don't want to provoke the bots, watchful as mind parasites.)

========

Ever since Big Sur, I've been playing with this idea that just as it is, our world IS perfect. That's my new slogan, it could be the conclusion of the novel. They start in another Earth and go throgh a series of them and they meet God, who happens to be a giant jellyfish, and they end in God's profoundly considered and much pondered best of all possible worlds, and they in fact end up here. Where we live.

This is a picture I'm trying to paint of myself among the Micronesian jellyfish. (It's not done.) And here's another movie of me looking at stream eddies in Big Sur, it's an unconscionable 33 Meg. Click here to view movie. As before, the sound is a bit blown out, and you have to let it run jerkily once and only then can you click and play it at normal speed. Yes, I'm a geek, but I'm a happy one.

Sur obviously being the spot where I got the notion of our world being perfect. You or I are little universally computing eddies in the flow of it all.

Synchronistically, I found a passage in Borges to the same effect the day I got home. Here's a picture that Pearce took of me in a tree at Sur.

“We are not in paradise,” the young man stubbornly replied. “Here, in the sublunary world, all things are mortal.”

Paracelsus had risen to his feet.

“Where are we, then, if not in paradise?” he asked. “Do you believe that the deity is able to create a place that is not paradise? Do you believe that the Fall is something other than not realizing that we are in paradise?”

— from Jorge-Luis Borges, “The Rose of Paracelsus,” in Collected Fictions, Viking Penguin 1998, pp. 505-506.

======

Yes, you may say, but if this world is perfect, what about spammers? What about Iraq? What about the Chimp?

These things are unavoidable information-theoretic occurances. Turbulence of a certain type that has to occur. Any river has ripples in it.

Easy to say, of course, living in peace, I admit, and perhaps borderline fatuous. But how much does the daily news matter, really, compared to reality's rich computation? What if you just decide to think that everything is perfect, at least for a day? And if it works, try it for the next day too.