Brazilian Rainforest Plots Are Being Sold Illegally

Facebook is an evil company.

Daring Fireball: Brazilian Rainforest Plots Are Being Sold Illegally via Facebook Marketplace Ads:

Parts of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest are being illegally sold on Facebook, the BBC has discovered. The protected areas include national forests and land reserved for indigenous peoples. Some of the plots listed via Facebook’s classified ads service are as large as 1,000 football pitches.

Facebook said it was “ready to work with local authorities”, but indicated it would not take independent action of its own to halt the trade.

Message

My phone provider transcribed a message left for me using these words…

Aunt Marley Burt

I love it. For a second I was tempted to change my name to that…

MailTrackerBlocker

This post on Daring Fireball led me to this email tracker, read receipt and spy pixel blocker plugin for macOS Apple Mail. I know nothing about programming software and was able to install the plugin for my laptop using the Terminal. It’s working. If you want to check it out click on the next link.

GitHub – apparition47/MailTrackerBlocker: An email tracker, read receipt and spy pixel blocker plugin for macOS Apple Mail.:

MailTrackerBlocker is a plugin (mailbundle) for the default Mail app built-in to macOS. Email marketers and other interests often embed these trackers in HTML emails so they can track how often, when and where you open your emails. This plugin works by stripping out a good majority of these spy pixels out of the HTML before display, rendering the typical advice of disabling “load remote content in messages” unnecessary.

Browse your inbox privately with images displayed once again.

Website

Every day I am getting email about this website and specifically about this little blog. Here are a couple of examples:

One of our clients has shown interest in being featured on an article on your website.
Is that something you are able to accommodate?
We have a great in-house team of writers and we can provide the content, or if you prefer, you can also write it and feature our client.
Can you please send me a price quote for an article? Please keep in mind we are an agency and require competitive pricing as we resell them to our clients.

here is another one:

We’re interested in purchasing a link insert on ottmarliebert.com.
We’re happy to discuss terms that include:
Inserting a link onto your existing page of yours (as long as it’s relevant piece of content, of course). We’d love to discuss a home page link too, if possible!
Our link needs to be permanent & do-follow
Our link can’t be labelled ‘sponsored’ or ‘guest-post’ (or anything similar)
Please let us know your price. Serious buyer.

Our link can’t be labelled ‘sponsored’ or ‘guest-post’ – in other words we want it to be an ad that doesn’t appear to be an ad. I have received hundreds of emails like these. That’s all kinds of wrong. Sometimes I think everyone does it and perhaps I should do it too and who knows maybe I can make some coin this way… but I just can’t bring myself to do it. I have never even shown ads on this blog, so I am certainly not going to insert links into my posts, or allow guestposts that do.

ASMR

I have watched a whole bunch of videos. My first reaction is that I can’t believe people are willing to sit through so many ads! I suppose this reaction is similar to my disbelief that humanity is happy to use free email even if it means giving up loads of data.

I watched a Korean woman’s YouTube videos. She has almost 600,000 subscribers and gets away with multiple ads in each video. I am convinced that most of the appeal lies in the well-recorded ASMR-type sounds.

I started wondering about the importance of the human interaction. Could the imagery be more abstract without losing the appeal? Here is an example: what if a video combined the sound of brushing hair with moving images of a field of wheat or tall grass moving with the wind. Or, perhaps, the sound of soft footsteps and imagery of water – a still lake perhaps.

Does abstraction not work, or would it be more interesting?