Meta

The Beat will be moving servers tonight, from the insanely expensive one to a slightly less expensive one. There will be no posting until our Operatives give the go-ahead and there might be some wonkiness in the morning, as well. As soon as everything is safe and sound in the new spot, we'll give you an earful on our hosting advice.

It's my birthday, and I'm giving myself a present. No, not a Longstreth style beard. Email escape amnesty. After looking at the thousands of...

In the early days of The Beat I used to start many days with a "meta" post about my doings and very important thoughts, but that kind of personal stuff jumped the shark long ago, it seems. No one really cares about me seeing a blue lobster anymore...or rather, that's really what Twitter and Facebook are for. There's a social network for every ephemeral thought, and I now spend hours each day sharing the ephemeral thoughts of thousands of my close personal friends. In a way, it's too bad. Those were some of my most favorite posts to write -- like the time I went shopping for a mop. I guess you had to be there.

Just a quick note -- DC sales figures for August are, as you have seen, VERY late this month due to actual work for Marc-Oliver. He assures me he IS working on it, however, and we're hoping to have it finished imminently. Thank you for your patience.

A big birthday shout out to the Beat's own sainted mother, who is celebrating a special birthday today. My mother's art and cartooning and continuing interest in everything from MMORPGs to webcomics has always been an inspiration to me, and it's probably a huge reason why I've ever reached toward success in any endeavor. Thank you, Suzu.

As you may recall, I lost my camera at this year's SPX. Soon after, Jen Vaughn, bless her heart, started a fund raising drive to buy me a new camera, and -- mostly I'm sure because of Jen's enthusiasm -- folks had donated about enough for a more than decent digital camera.

Where to find The Beat at New York Comic Con:

Please note, if I catch anyone spoofing a comics professional or another poster, the spoofer will be BANNED. The spoofing does not include ISPs, so you will be caught very quickly.

Hey kids, apparently I lost my camera at SPX. I think I must have set it down on someone's table and then just forgotten about it in all the excitement of love and comics. It's a Canon Powershot A570is from 2007. I had downloaded about 95% of the pictures on it, but I'd like to get the SPX ones back. No questions asked!

Well, the RSS spam crisis seems to have passed. We called the web host and after a hold of a mere 45 minutes they ran a clean-up program and found the offending files which had been embedded in the theme folders. Not sure how the original hack occurred, but there are a lot of WordPress vulnerabilities that still exist.

We are still having problems where people's private emails are visible on the site. It's a very, very weird problem, evidently related to our use of Supercache to alleviate the GPU problem. We're actually in the process of moving to a new server. I tried turning off comments, but that doesn't work either. What I would recommend to people who don't want their private emails available to the next few posters is to use a dummy email for now. The way the controls are presently set, there is no technical reason to post a working email. I will of course continue to monitor comments and remove asshats, so this is not carte blanche to go nutso.

A lot of you have been emailing me about the comment glitch wherein the previous commenters information is still in the commenting box, and some bogus posting has resulted. Unfortunately, I've had to disable comments until we can figure out what's going on.