Life is just people and things working together to make things difficult for you. Like on a rainy windy day where you can just lean into the wall of oncoming air and water and just push through.

Most of these things you cannot really do anything about, and there is no point to complaining about it, but then there are small wins, like going around the corner of a big building and it taking a few seconds for the wind to change direction and blast you in the face again. Those few seconds are golden.

Anyway – one of those breaks in the rain is that I’ve switched off comments on my blog. There are two people on average that read a post, and rarely do they want anything from me. A handful of posts have over the decades accumulated hundreds of views. Among humans my writing has the attention it deserves.

The bots though are big, unrelenting fans and have an insatiable appetite for communicating all kinds of offers through commenting on my posts (that they can’t have read according to the page statistics).

I pay for a service that is supposed to deal with my popularly in the bot scene. An inbox zero-as-a-service, basically. Well those guys were annoyed that I sent too much traffic. Again two (2) readers per day generates enough spam bots that I either have to get an even more ludicrously expensive anti spam tier, buy a higher tier blog hosting to be allowed to add a captcha, or lastly self-host with expenses of both money and time.

I don’t want to do any of those as they cost money, and if you have seen the rest of the blog you’ll see why I’d rather not be spending any money on it. So I’m shutting the comments. I know this may lead to reduced “engagement” but the thing is, people that reach this page know how to reach me, so nothing is really lost, except friction.

I get that brief respite from the rain that you get at a large building site where the hoarding and scaffolding are overbuilt into a luxurious chip board arcade with strip lights and trip hazard warning tape everywhere. You get in out of the direct rain, but big drops from 70m up the scaffolding hit you directly on your skull through a gap in the chip board instead. It’s a win, but you’re never allowed to be too elated.

Anyway, if you need me, you know where to find me.