I have received a few complaints that the word-recognition comment security feature on Blogger has been getting a little cranky lately, rejecting all requests for approval. I fret that this may be partly responsible for the withering away of comments in recent weeks. I hope this will just be a transient glitch; but if it persists much longer, I will consider disabling the feature. (Torrents of spam will be unleashed, no doubt! But it might be amusing, for a while.)
Of course, I was reminded of the implacable Gatekeeper in Kafka's crushing fable Before the Law, who sternly refuses to grant the supplicant entrance, as decades pass and they grow old together.
In looking around the Net yesterday for that link to the text of the story, I happened upon this charming oddity created by Brandon Brizzi - described as a 'desktop game', it's really just a quaint animated version of the tale (although the minimal interactivity does allow for a second possible ending, it's no less disheartening than Kafka's).
3 comments:
I've noticed Blogger's crankiness recently, but it's a specific form of crankiness: when enter the word-verification text and click "PREVIEW," Blogger now never accepts the entry as valid. So in the Preview window, if you then click "PUBLISH" (i.e., from the Preview window), Blogger always insists that you got it wrong. This annoys me mildly (but only mildly), especially for brief comments (like the one to your preceding post, on the weekly bon mot).
I've never read that Kafka story. (Never even heard of it before now.) So, thanks for the links -- not sure I'm ready to read anything at all crushing at the moment, but will save the links for future reference!
I can always get a rise out of The Missus by pointing out ways in which I resemble Kafka, personally and/or in my writing. These don't even have to be real similarities; I just have to suggest it. But driving The Missus crazy this way is really the sort of thing I did much more in our (relative) youth, when we first met. She didn't want to believe she felt something for a weirdo.
(She might say I've simply moved on to subtler and/or more sophisticated ways to drive her crazy.)
So, you're saying 'Don't use the Preview function' is the answer to this problem? I'll have to let a couple of people know.
I bet you do know this story. It's very short. And I think it's embedded in The Trial. (I can't now remember if it's part of the text, or has simply become an habitual appropriate add-on, as prologue or epilogue.)
I thought you'd really like the 'game'; but you probably shouldn't try that until you've read the story.
For what it's worth I haven't had any trouble with the CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart- technical term for "word-recognition comment security feature"), it's Blogger's use of website cookies that seems to glitch for me:
If my cookie has expired, sometimes when I am prompted to log-in again having posted a comment an error will occur and I'll lose the entire comment; very frustrating you can imagine. This doesn't happen on every situation my cookie expires and I don't know why it does. To remedy the problem I've gotten used to copying my comment to the clipboard (more technical jargon to say highlight, copy). In fact I do this regularly; for e-mails written in the browser especially (although this is less of a problem these days) and basically any website form where there's a risk of hitting the backspace key (e.g. making a mistake while typing!) activating your browser's browse back function. So annoying.
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