My functionality hath ceased. It’s been a day of non productivity and instead I’ve simply been in motion. Social media posting and advertising and small-form generic graphics that I need for events. A terrible realization that there’s very little in the future on the calendar and I’m going to need to fix that. Just dropped a show because things simply weren’t coming together on a number of fronts and suddenly the ilyAYREheart show has a LOT more weight to it.
In the back of my mind I’m still chewing on Kristen’s problem : scammers have once again scraped House of Musical Traditions’ website and created a fake site with all the same products and descriptions (you know, pretty specific too – it’s not like anyone else HAPPENS to have a used William Grit 10-string Tenor Mandolin for sale!) and a discount of about 70% from HMT’s prices. It’s pretty far down in the search results, but if you were interested in said 10-string tenor mandolin and search for other shops that might be carrying something similar, it doesn’t take much hunting to find the fake site. I think we first became aware of the problem when someone asked us to price-match something from the first fake site.
It’s just so much EFFORT to exist in the world today. Whether it’s increasingly savvy AI-generated phishing emails, the constant barrage of pre-recorded scam calls that now sound just like harried, sympathetic employees, deep faked voices of relatives claiming to have been kidnapped, or bots scraping websites faster than a human can generate one – I barely understand how to keep up, DON’T understand how my mom keeps up, and fear that I will NOT be able to keep up in the next five years or so.
The weather’s finally gotten truly COLD and we’re putting our heat pump to through its first paces. I guess we’ll understand our success or folly in the next week or so. The humidifiers are out and the baritone’s gone upstairs. The Seagull needs to join it. Heather’s car was broken into and the steering column destroyed when someone tried to steal it last weekend. We’re waiting on replacement glass so she can drive it in the cold. Kristen’s window simply BROKE and we’re waiting on glass for THAT so we can drive it in the cold. It’s been a discouraging couple of weeks in which it’s been very, very, very hard to maintain any kind of optimism about my species.
There’s a new piece of graffiti on a bridge on I-95 south that simply says “cope”.
I feel like that bridge is speaking to ME.
