Descent into Fandom

but it's an entirely new level of tragic when somebody you've actually spoken to gets turned into a bot account. it's like peeking at a zombie apocalypse through the window and realizing one of the shambling corpses was your friend.

and then the zombie catches sight of you, lurches up to your window, and shouts through the glass that they accidentally reported your account to tumblr and you'll be deactivated unless you click this link.

if you get something like this ↑ they're gonna follow up by instructing you to contact tumblr support on discord and give you contact info; or they're gonna link a website that looks sort of like tumblr support and say you have to email them; or any variety of "you must now contact tumblr, here is how you contact tumblr."

whatever they send you, it Does Not lead to tumblr. it leads to the master zombie that bit them and inducted them into the ranks of the undead, and will bite you the second they have your email and password. i might be confusing zombies and vampires. anyway,

it's easier to fall for these messages because the blog doesn't LOOK like a bot blog, because it ISN'T a bot blog. it's a normal person's blog that got accessed by a bot, meaning the blog's content CLEARLY looks like a real active user when you click on it. and yes—it might even be a blog you already know. sometimes bots like this go down a blog's DMs or reblogs and message people they've previously interacted with.

I started to give my order to the woman behind the counter and she immediately started shouting at me that we didn't have this that or the other, really aggressively given I was just placing an order. I hadn't been rude or asked for special treatment or something. I said "Sorry, that's what was listed on your website, what DO you have?" and she shouted some more and gestured at the display case.

So I picked out what I thought would be good from what was available and paid and went home, and that evening I made a -- I have to stress this -- entirely amused post about how if you're not going to carry a certain flavor on a certain day maybe don't list it as a flavor of the day. I get sometimes there are issues with ingredients, but by then there were multiple other cupcake shops in Chicago that did not seem to have this issue. We all laughed, we had cupcakes, life was fine.

A few days later, somehow the bakery manager found my post -- this was pre-algorithm, I had maybe 3000 readers at most, on a blogging site that was not all that well known. And she left a frankly rather nasty comment about how Magnolia Bakery originated in New York, and New Yorkers understood these things, and they hadn't realized when they expanded that Midwesterners were so attached to their menus.

Yeah. How dare we bumpkins out here in corn country see a menu and presume the establishment showing us the menu actually offers what is on it?

Anyway, I replied that I wasn't aware New York, a culinary capital of the world, was unfamiliar with the idea of a list of food and prices for said food. I suggested perhaps they could speak to their peer institutions in Chicago, like Sugar Bliss or Sprinkles, and see if they could help Magnolia Bakery out if they were struggling with the concept.

I did not receive a reply, but I laughed about that for days. We're too attached to our menus.