As most of you know already I freaked out when the first message appeared asking, “What are you wearing”?   I tore my computers apart looking for a problem that was not there.   I changed passwords and instituted two form authentication.   I wrote a post on it and a lot of you told me you had it also.   So I wrote word press support.  

The first response I got was clueless.  

Thank you for contacting WordPress.com support. I’ll be happy to help you out! 

In the editor when I am creating a post the first block under the ”Add title’ has weird messages in it. Day before the message was ‘What are you wearing’, this morning it says ‘What are your feelings about eating meat?’

This is very unusual, we’ll do everything we can to help you with this problem.
Does this happen when you create a new blog post? Or does it appear in an old one?
Can you share the name and the link to the post where this happened?
Can you also take a screenshot of the post with the message and send it to us?

 I did that.    Yesterday I got a response that cleared it up.  

Carol M. (Automattic)

Dec 4, 2022, 14:25 UTC

Hey there! Happy to help. 

I only noticed it about three days ago now. But I contacted several WordPress bloggers and they say it showed up on their write / create a post page before mine. Everyone assumed it was from WordPress. One blogger said the code implies it is a placeholder. I have included a picture of what I am talking about in this reply. I don’t see any unusual activity, and the blog seems to be working fine. If this is something WordPress added I wish they had told people

This is indeed just a placeholder, and it was something we did, your website is safe.
I understand your concern and apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions, we’ll gladly assist you.
Let us know if there’s anything else we can do to help!

I wrote this back

Scottiestoybox

Dec 4, 2022, 18:15 UTC

Hello Carol. It really would have been great if WordPress had bothered to tell people. See I tore my two computer systems down when I couldn’t find where it was coming from. In the process I lost a 1TB hard drive and the recovery potion of an SSD. Plus I have to say I don’t want it on my page when I go to create a post. The first one I seen was “What are you wearing?” and as a sexual assault survivor that is pretty damn scary. My question now is there a way to remove it so it doesn’t ever show again! If so please do so! Thanks.

Best Wishes,

Scottie

This morning I had this in my email.   

Shaun (Automattic)

Dec 5, 2022, 03:34 UTC

Hello there,

We’re very sorry to hear the difficulty this has caused. 

The idea behind the feature was to help people with inspiration for writing blog posts but I have passed this feedback on directly to the team behind the feature. 

Right now the new blog writing prompt that appears in the editor can’t be removed. You can certainly overwrite it or leave it and won’t appear on your page when you publish the post.

You can turn off the notifications this feature has also added by heading to your notification settings here – https://wordpress.com/me/notifications

It’s also possible to stop showing the writing prompt on the My Home of your WordPress.com dashboard by clicking the 3 dots in the top right corner of the card which shows it and then clicking “Hide daily prompts”.

Thank you again for sharing this feedback on this and we’ll relay this to the development teams immediately. 

Thanks again for getting in contact.

Best, Shaun

Happiness Engineer @ WordPress.com

Looking for more help

*Every day we have free live webinars for your WordPress.com site, including audience Q&A, visit wordpress.com/webinars for details on webinar topics, schedule, and registration. *

There is it, days of wasted effort, lost productivity all so WordPress can play around more with the product.   The first people made it worse by not even understanding what was going on.   Hugs

Trump Demands America Rip Up the Constitution, Make Him President
“Attacking the Constitution… should be universally condemned,” White House Deputy Secretary says, alongside the rest of the sane world

Read in Rolling Stone: https://apple.news/A2RrG5_v0Q4elpkQJNDb0fA

Shared from Apple News

Sent from my iPad

Hello All. Short story, all computers down, rebuilt one typing this on, the guys trying to rip out old shelves accidentally destroyed water heater, went to home improvement store to get new one now 7 PM no water, told no water until morning, James very upset, Just got told James wants to keep going until water, I think he is punishing himself, Because the guys are working so hard and upset i ordered pizzas, but I am not hungry at all, main computer down not sure when can get it back, the restore drive got corrupted, after 9 hours had to dump it, and now the secondary drive is wiping which I really did not want but the main SSD drive was corrupted so I had to delete it, I hope I can fix it all. The WordPress on my phone and tablet won’t work unless I download their app which I don’t want to do. I think that is an extortion screw job. Refused to let me sign in on my own blog kept asking me to download app. Good news is I have plenty of hard drives and I have ways to make all these work. I was worried about losing the recovery partition but when I reached out to Dell they talked me though how to re-download and force install the recovery partition. There is a reason you go with companies like Dell, they work to make sure their computers keep working. Mine is a 2017, they could have just blown me off, they didn’t. OK so I wont be getting to things or posting, and I wish I could say I was goofing off. Love all of you and it should show because I was more worried about getting back on my blog to interact with you all than the fact that when removing a rotten shelf in the shed a piece of wood brook the vales off inside the tank. Again James feels bad and wanted to pay for a new tank at about $700. Both Ron and I refused, it was an old tank and everyone can have an accident or mistake. James being who he is (and I love him with all my heart) is driving himself still feeling he is at fault. Not sure when I will be back fully on line again for the blog, I an upset that I was almost caught up with comments … oh well a pipe dream no to Be. Love you all, I will post as I can, there is so much hate and vitriol against gay and trans kids / people right now I have to wonder if that is why my blogging computer got hit. Strange, porn sites are not an issue but going to right wing media sites or posting on the idiocy of the rabid right gets my computers attack constantly. Most of them are caught by the security, but there are times … Think of the school board meetings, this is the cyber equivalent. How I figured out this one was every time this morning I went to post instead of the URL I was posting I got "what are you wearing" It was on every post. I could remove it but had no idea where it was coming from. I happened on both computers. Oh and daily I was getting all these emails asking me to OK my subscription to this dating site or that other porn site, and what is more disturbing is the ones to different churches and such OH well. be back to all of my wonderful online friends as soon as I can being both computers up safely . Hugs and loves. Oh for those that feel squeamish about my virtual hugs disregard them and instead best wishes.

Hugs and Best Wishes,
Scottie

Without Abortion, Doctors in Texas Are Forced to Witness Horrible Outcomes
The data they record is full of grief.

Read in Slate: https://apple.news/ADFQFpaGiTKmU2l1GeIJQLw

Shared from Apple News

A Trump judge seized control of ICE, and the Supreme Court will decide whether to stop him
Judge Drew Tipton’s order in United States v. Texas is completely lawless. Thus far, the Supreme Court has given him a pass.

Read in Vox: https://apple.news/AT659B9r2TJqCsmk0-8ONZw

Shared from Apple News

This has become the republican past time, gaslighting the nation.   Hugs

Lookups for the word beat out ‘oligarch’ and ‘omicron.’

“Gaslighting” — mind manipulating, grossly misleading, downright deceitful — is Merriam-Webster’s word of the year.

Lookups for the word on merriam-webster.com increased 1,740% in 2022 over the year before. But something else happened. There wasn’t a single event that drove significant spikes in the curiosity, as it usually goes with the chosen word of the year.

The gaslighting was pervasive.

“It’s a word that has risen so quickly in the English language, and especially in the last four years, that it actually came as a surprise to me and to many of us,” said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press ahead of Monday’s unveiling.

“It was a word looked up frequently every single day of the year,” he said.

 

There were deepfakes and the dark web, There were deep states and fake news. And there was a whole lot of trolling.

Merriam-Webster’s top definition for gaslighting is the psychological manipulation of a person, usually over an extended period of time, that “causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.”

Gaslighting is a heinous tool frequently used by abusers in relationships — and by politicians and other newsmakers. It can happen between romantic partners, within a broader family unit and among friends. It can be a corporate tactic, or a way to mislead the public. There’s also “medical gaslighting,” when a health care professional dismisses a patient’s symptoms or illness as “all in your head.”

Despite its relatively recent prominence — including “Gaslighter,” The Chicks’ 2020 album featuring the rousingly angry titular single — the word was brought to life more than 80 years ago with “Gas Light,” a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton.

It birthed two film adaptations in the 1940s. One, George Cukor’s “Gaslight” in 1944, starred Ingrid Bergman as Paula Alquist and Charles Boyer as Gregory Anton. The two marry after a whirlwind romance and Gregory turns out to be a champion gaslighter. Among other instances, he insists her complains over the constant dimming of their London townhouse’s gaslights is a figment of her troubled mind. It wasn’t.

 

The death of Angela Lansbury in October drove some interest in lookups of the word, Sokolowski said. She played Nancy Oliver, a young maid hired by Gregory and told not to bother his “high-strung” wife.

The term gaslighting was later used by mental health practitioners to clinically describe a form of prolonged coercive control in abusive relationships.

“There is this implication of an intentional deception,” Sokolowski said. “And once one is aware of that deception, it’s not just a straightforward lie, as in, you know, I didn’t eat the cookies in the cookie jar. It’s something that has a little bit more devious quality to it. It has possibly an idea of strategy or a long-term plan.”

Merriam-Webster, which logs 100 million pageviews a month on its site, chooses its word of the year based solely on data. Sokolowski and his team weed out evergreen words most commonly looked up to gauge which word received a significant bump over the year before.

They don’t slice and dice why people look up words, which can be anything from quick spelling and definition checks to some sort of attempt at inspiration or motivation. Some of the droves who looked up “gaslighting” this year might have wanted to know, simply, if it’s one or two words, or whether it’s hyphenated.

“Gaslighting,” Sokolowski said, spent all of 2022 in the top 50 words looked up on merriam-webster.com to earn top dog word of the year status. Last year’s pick was “vaccine.” Rounding out this year’s Top 10 are:

— “Oligarch,” driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

— “Omicron,” the persistent COVID-19 variant and the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet.

— “Codify,” as in turning abortion rights into federal law.

— “Queen consort,” what King Charles’ wife, Camilla is newly known as.

— “Raid,” as in the search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.

— “Sentient,” with lookups brought on by Google canning the engineer who claimed an unreleased AI system had become sentient.

— “Cancel culture,” enough said.

— “LGBTQIA,” for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, and asexual, aromantic or agender.

— “Loamy,” which many Wordle users tried back in August, though the right word that day was “clown.”

‘It’s open season’: Florida guards were filmed beating pinned inmate. None will face trial
The beating of an inmate by a cluster of Florida prison guards was recorded on a bootleg camera and posted on YouTube. None will face criminal charges.

Read in Miami Herald: https://apple.news/AoZv_Q-DVS_2kjDrYwaEU5w

Shared from Apple News

Conservative states are blocking trans medical care. Families are fleeing.
From Texas to Florida, families with kids who are medically transitioning say state policies limiting gender-affirming care are forcing them to flee.

Read in POLITICO: https://apple.news/A78-8CD_HSt-Fos1PeXRUTQ

Shared from Apple News

Black Employees Say Their Police Captain Went On 20-Minute Racist Tirade
Amber Beyer said that if she saw a Black man in her neighborhood, she would be suspicious, a federal lawsuit alleges.

Read in HuffPost: https://apple.news/AT8VOitotSH-K9BLm5OUFFw

Shared from Apple News

After the Colorado Springs attack, LGBTQ people are furious at the rhetoric targeting them
Colorado Springs locals and national activists said rising anti-LGBTQ rhetoric made the shooting at Club Q feel horribly predictable.

Read in NBC News: https://apple.news/A26u52lgwR1yCFNUeIYdsQw

Shared from Apple News

Sent from my iPad