So, drama happened in mid-December. Then drama happened a few days after. Then I reached out to people, then I got invited back to live with my father, who has been through a major medical crisis in the past few months. So I am back in Louisiana, but there wasn’t anything (anyone) left in Ohio for me to stay for anyway. I miss the place, and my going back is not off the table, but it’s not likely to occur for a few years yet. That’s okay. I’m tired of not knowing what’s going to happen next, and me with zero economic defenses.
But! I was already slow with this site with all the other shit that went on last year (I AM SO GLAD 2023 IS OVER) and it’s going to be even slower now. But I do have options. I have a friend with a decent internet connection and I need to go visiting sometimes anyway. I will also get a library card once I get my state ID (driver’s license) situation sorted out, and they have internet too. So I’ll just schedule shit. Why not. Might as well. I can’t imagine I will find full-time work yet, so that should leave me time for hobbies.
I mean I don’t expect anyone’s watching proceedings here with bated breath. It’s just the kiss of death, at least in SEO terms, to leave this thing not updated. So I’m fuckin’ updating. Mwah.
Oh wow, it’s been almost a month. Sorry! Okay. Right quick:
1. I saw that new reel or highlight or whatever it was that Rory or the missus posted recently. He’s showing off Jackdaw. Love to see it, big man, but unsure whether or when it will be available here in the USA. And you probably said and I just can’t fucking remember. I’ll catch up one of these days. I am shit at keeping promises anyway, so I try to avoid making them, but I’m utterly hopeless about promises in the past couple years. Obvious reasons, to you longtimers.
2. So it seems we can thank the big man’s turn in Game of Thrones for an uptick in the fortunes of Scott’s Porage Oats. BAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Look here, item 34. OI, BIG MAN. How about HD versions for those old ads? Asking for a WHOLE LOT of friends. Erm, other fans. Well, you know what I mean. THEM.
3. Stuff’s going… about as well as it ever goes. I have my bad days and my mediocre days. I am not sure I know what a good day looks like anymore. The mediocre days are quite tolerable, however. I will say this: Nobody is allowed to share weird news nor do strange things to me in January this coming year. I hit my half-century then and goddamn it, I want some fucking peace. Put it off til February. Give me that much. It costs you nothing. Thank you.
P.S. Been rewatching GOT. Always a pleasure.
[edit] LOOK WHAT I FOUND!!!
When the trailers for Jackdaw first started coming out I saw no sign of the big man whatsoever. I just went and looked at one on YouTube and almost near the end, THERE HE WAS.
And I wondered the same thing I always wonder when I see him with a firearm in a film: How much experience has he got with them in real life? Just a random idle curiosity. I know it’s different in the UK.
Anyway. I know you guys probably saw that image a million fucking times around Instagram already. I’m just fucking pleased as punch that I caught it.
[edit edit] No wait! It’s coming out NEXT MONTH!!! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
I haven’t updated this thing in a while but I had a bit of a chuckle for you, seeing as how the United States just went back to Standard Time.
So, those of you who’ve been around for a while may or may not have been aware that I usually get my daily Google Alert for Rory around 8pm. That’s not a sure thing; sometimes I get it hours later than that. But 8pm has been the usual time.
Phone just went off. I noticed it was 7pm on the dot and thought, I bet that’s the Google Alert, and picked up the phone and went into my Gmail and sure enough. And then it struck me funny that it should be an hour early. And then I remembered why.
You would think a media behemoth like Google would remember to set its clocks back one hour. Apparently… not.
Oh well. Like I said, good for a chuckle.
P.S. The Alert was garbage, as usual. I am always pleasantly surprised when it’s got something useful, because that rarely happens.
I posted a while back about imposters on Instagram pretending to be Rory. I hadn’t wanted to keep harping on about it but someone messaged me pointing out that a lot of people don’t know his real IG handle and would be taken in. I still don’t want to say something every single time a spoofer turns up, because it gets tedious and looks like I’m drama-mongering.
However, it looks like quite a lot of you are wising up. I recently shamed a spoofer on my IG and THE VERY NEXT DAY, another one tried it. I saw the notification pop up. I thought, I’ll get around to that asshole later. Well, when I looked later — it hadn’t even been six hours — he was nowhere to be seen. He’d added me — so said the notification I had seen — but he was no longer in my Follower list.
I’ve been back and forth with family and friends in my IG direct messages about the situation with my father, which I mentioned here more recently, and noticed I had a message in my messages-from-not-friends folder. So I went and looked. I couldn’t see the pfp or the handle anymore, but going by what was said in the message I’m pretty sure that was Spoofer Two. But he’s been suspended.
Way to go, y’all! Keep it up. Nuke those fuckers from orbit just to be sure.
Honestly, I don’t know what Spoofer Two was thinking. Rory would never message me, much less like that. It wasn’t the sort of message that would have pissed Mrs. McCann off… it was just really not in character for Rory. I think Rory appreciates his fans on some level but would rather appreciate us at a distance, and I’m sure he’s met enough crazy people chasing him around that he’d rather not take the risk of encouraging any more to go off the deep end. If it were me, I wouldn’t. Not because I’m mean, though I can be that too, but because I’ve learned through painful experience that people misinterpret things. Nah. Pass.
I will not even tell you what the thing is. I will just tell you that it is Rory-related and also when I have gotten my grubby little hands on it.
I’m not getting it JUST yet. I am preparing to get it. I want to make sure it’s not gonna set me back too badly, and also that I’ll actually get it, and also that I’m not just self-medicating in some way trying to buy things I don’t need right now.
On a related note, good thoughts would be appreciated for my dad. He’s taken a sudden turn. Other stuff has gone south a bit too, but right now that’s the most major thing. Thanks.
Hey, I don’t know who the fuck’s visiting here from Chicago from like a dozen related IP addresses in one day but you can knock it the fuck off. It’s not cute, it’s not charming, it’s gonna get your entire IP range blocked because there’s no fucking call for that. Period. Grow up.
I mean the chances of that even being a weird cellular-network glitch are pretty slim. Reads more like an attempted DDOS attack, and not even a very professional one.
I got no beef with Chicago usually; I’m aware some American conservatives have a hard-on for criticizing every little thing about the place and just making shit up if they can’t think of anything. That’s not me; I’m not a conservative anyway. That just really is where this fuckwit was from. No, I’m calling you a fuckwit. Yes, you deserve it. Don’t ever do that again.
Not a good time even if I were up for weird attacks. It’s the two-year anniversary. Go find something useful to do, like chasing parked cars. Thanks.
…
I almost never have news about Rory. We all know this. Hello to Dundee, though. [waves] Cheers.
Some of you longtimers will recall I used to screenshot episodes of The Book Group on Tubi.
It’s totally free, no need to sign up for an account. The only real drawback, aside from the occasional ad (and it’s not too bad), is that they cycle through offerings a lot faster than Netflix does.
As you know, my ass is broker in the past two years than it was for over a decade before that because it’s just me now and I’ve got no backup anymore. So I haven’t tried paying for cable or Netflix or Hulu or anything like that. So, aside from checking videos out of the library, which I have also done from time to time (we have a fantastic library system), I tend to look to Tubi as one of my forms of television or film entertainment. Not all the time, but it’s there and sometimes I take advantage.
Well, tonight I discovered they have the film One Crazy Summer. I hadn’t seen it all the way through since I was a kid, and have forgotten more than I remembered. I did remember liking it a lot, so was delighted and decided to watch it again.
And here is where I explain why I am writing about it here.
I have put this note on Instagram itself, and I will also share it here in case you get here first and go there afterwards.
—–
Normally I don’t want to bother with these sorts of things because it’s getting too mixed up in various and sundry and I have gotten, like, fatally allergic to social-media drama. But I am given to understand people are being scammed and I’m not fucking having that. Big man doesn’t deserve his identity being dragged along for the ride either.
2. Rory is 99% UNlikely to ever message 99.9% of people on Instagram. And that includes me. I never hear from him either. I am completely fine with this. Man’s busy and don’t know me from Eve.
3. Rory is certainly never going to ask you for info or send you links to click, or whatever these scamming fucking bastards are doing, to steal your account or rip you off. Again… Man’s busy. And that’s just not how he rolls.
So. Follow the blue check that I’ve already tagged twice [in the original Instagram post]. Ignore all those scamming fucks. Report them to @instagram. I understand someone’s notified Rory’s agent too.
Thank you. And for those of you who got snagged, I am sorry to hear it. I hope you nail their asses to the wall.
—–
Someone emailed me about this today and first off, that was a fucking surprise: her email went straight to my normal inbox. I have no control over where they end up unless I use a filter, but I don’t think I have any (or very many) filters enacted there; nevertheless, in the past when people have emailed me about the fan site or Rory, it’s been a crap shoot and they’re highly likely to wind up in my spam folder. But secondly, she was the one who alerted me about the scamming specifically. Me, I’ll see something in my inbox on Instagram from a “Rory McCann”, take one look and know it’s not him, and delete the whole thing mostly-unread. Occasionally I’ll report them. Usually I just see them as a two-second nuisance. But it sounds like some of you weren’t seeing it that way. So be on the lookout.
And… I’m going to scold you a little bit. How many different fucking ways do I need to explain why this is Rory so stop saying it isn’t? That’s half the damn problem right there. Fans have been doubting his official IG account for months. When he didn’t have the blue check, I sort of understood though honestly, a little investigation would have told you that your concerns were likely unfounded. He has had people following him nearly all along who have his personal contact information: Chloe who was his Hound makeup artist from season four onward, and his agent, and a band who’ve actually met him, and his VOICE agent, and need I go on? They had other channels to check whether it was him, yet there they were. That should have been good enough for the rest of us until the blue check popped up. And now it’s there, so you’ve got no excuses left. It isn’t Twitter (X?). IG’s got slightly higher standards for verification. They just do.
So. Stop being fucking wet blankets and pay attention to what’s going on. Thanks. Not all of you were guilty of otherwise, but a lot of you were. Hopefully you were not taken in due to your inordinate degree of suspicion, but I never know what people are going to do anymore, so I’m covering all the bases. Moving along now.
[edit] He’s following Texas now too! Remember this?
But, hey. How many times have I gone on about how LAZY entertainment reporters are? Making news pieces out of other people’s social media stuff. I mean, damn. They’re getting paid for what I’m doing here for free!
…
Meanwhile. Do people out there have an alert set for when I start whinging about Scotland not visiting here?
Because suddenly it was everyone in Glasgow and their frickin’ mother. NOT COMPLAINING. Always a delight to see.
(Also, I may be exaggerating slightly. But there were several hits. Didn’t look closer to see if it was all the same IP address. Not bothering now.)
P.S. I’m pretty sure The Daily Record is the namesake of The Daily Prophet in JK Rowling’s Wizarding world. I just started a blog about my love of Scotland, and at some point I am probably going to write about the intersection of Scottish landmarks and cultural references vs. works of popular culture. Not just Harry Potter either. The world of A Song of Ice and Fire might as well be set there — it’s crazy. That’ll be fun.
