Yeah, it appears my little anti-spam security hack didn't work. Several new spam messages have popped up on some of the more recent posts. As annoying as they are, I find them rather humorous. E.g.:

Great men can't be ruled. by free online poker

Or even more philosophical:

The blind willingness to sacrifice people to truth, however, has always been the danger of an ethics abstracted from life. by online poker

I'm personally waiting for:

Morality is thus the relation of actions to the autonomy of the will, that is, to a possible giving of universal law through its maxims. An action that can coexist with the autonomy of the will is permitted; one that does not accord with it is forbidden. A will whose maxims necessarily harmonize with the laws of autonomy is a holy, absolutely good will. The dependence upon the principle of autonomy of a will that is not absolutely good (moral necessitation) is obligation. This, accordingly, cannot be attributed to a holy being. The objective of an action from obligation is called duty. by online poker

Ahh, Kant. Er, yeah. I'm going to have to figure something out. I really dig comments on my posts, but this spam shit is killing me.

For the past few weeks, I've had comments completely disabled on this site because I was a little peeved about comment spam. I'm not talking idiotic jerks who flood comment sections just for the fuck of it. They usually take care of themselves with a quick IP ban. No, I'm talking the blog-comments-section equivalent of e-mail spammers. Morons who post advertisements for penis enlargement, online casinos, and teen-sex webcams.

As much as I love teen sex (ahem), spam is annoying and evil. I came up with a solution the other day, but I'm not entirely sure it's going to work. A lot of big online sites stop automated account signups and whatnot by requiring users to type in a word or passcode randomly generated and displayed as an image. This makes things harder for bots. I've tried something similar, but less sophisticated.

Basically, to post a comment, you type in your user info as normal. But before you go to type in the text of the comment, you write the word that appears in the little image. If you type it correctly, the Post button will be enabled and you can go to town.

I'm not sure this will work. If the bots just send data directly to the comment-posting script, then I'll have to do a little bit more hacking to get the comment-posting script to check that the security word is correct. But we'll see if that's necessary in the coming days.

It seems like music is the only form of media that I really consume with any kind of passion. Seriously, I've seen maybe 10 new movies this year. And that doesn't make for a very good top 10 list. Likewise for books and TV shows. Although, I think I will say a word or two about video games, but that's for later. Right now, we get to talk about music! Sweet, wonderful music.