text: You've been hacked!!! | Alma Alexander
  February 21, 2018 June 9, 2021 Alma Alexander
  It started when Google told us…
  No, it started when the website decided to…
  Oh, we've had TROUBLE. Right here in River City. And the Trouble started with an H and it was a HACK…
  Something was off, in the beginning, but as non-techie website-running people we tend to assume that we're going to trip over stray bits of the site in our bumbling ways to ride it in a controlled manner, and we tend to give ourselves a bit of rope to hang ourselves with before we really start hollering for the cavalry.
  It got rather big rather fast when the user who was Chief Admin And Cook And Bottle Washer… simply vanished. We couldn't log onto the site. At all. It sat there and blinked red at us and said "I can't do that, Dave".
  So we scrambled for workarounds, and created new admins and sure enough our original user ID wasn't even on the site anymore when we finally got back in and checked.
  But we got back in. And, like I said, enough rope – we just gulped and got on with it.
  Right until Google, when fetching our site, followed it up with a graphic announcement, "This site may have been hacked".
  So we ran to the company which hosts the site, and they palmed us off on their damage control moiety, and they said, yes, we can see problems, we can fix problems, that'll be $$$$$. (Buy some of my books, please!)
  Now they tell us we're clean again. That's good. I still don't know WHAT the @@($*%^#@!! happened, HOW it happened, or WHY it happened – but for now, we're clean.
  I got home from a nice con and walked straight into a brush fire. Through I'm on the other side now, I'm still dealing with scalds and smoke inhalation.
  We're clean. Thank you for your patience. You may now sit back, relax, and enjoy the rest of the flight.
  Wired asked writers to create 6-word SF stories. e.g.
  It's behind you! Hurry before it ~ Rockne S. O'Bannon
  Ursula Le Guin (from her essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie")
  "Fantasy is a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence.
  It is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud's terminology, it employs primary, not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes, which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things.
  Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe. And their guides, the writers of fantasy, should take their responsibilities seriously…
  A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like pyschoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you."'
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