I’ve also been working on the “too many requests” problem, as well as other issues that have plagued the blog for while. Basic cleanup. I’ve changed certain things and it seems to have helped, but time will tell. Let me know if you’ve been having problems.

The post Update on tech stuff here appeared first on The New Neo.

And so although I don’t think I’m all the way back to square one, the problem seems to be persisting at least somewhat. One tip – if you happen to get the error message – is to wait about a half-hour and it should clear up. It also doesn’t seem to happen to everyone all at once, because when I’m getting the error message, I can see by my site traffic meter that some people are still getting through.

Hope they’re not bots.

Now my host has escalated things and supposedly the higher-ups are working on fixing the glitch. We’ll see. I hope they don’t tell me to just get a much more expensive hosting service.

I’ll keep you posted.

The post Update on the “too many requests” error message appeared first on The New Neo.

Usually the “too many requests” message only lasts at most about a half-hour or forty-five minutes, but I don’t want it to happen at all. So I ask you to please bear with me and be patient for at least a few more days while I try a bunch of other possible fixes.

This is not my forte, but I can always upgrade if it doesn’t work. Nothing I do at this point should disrupt service … hopefully.

The post Blog tech talk appeared first on The New Neo.

13-inch MacBook Neo Apple A18 Pro chip with 6 core CPU and 5 core GPU – 8GB Memory – 256GB SSD – Indigo

Customers commend the 13-inch MacBook Neo for its portability and overall performance, noting its seamless integration with iPhones. The impressive battery life is also a highlight for users. Additionally, customers appreciate the available color options, allowing them to coordinate with other devices.

The post Let me just say that … appeared first on The New Neo.

So you can rest easy about that.

The post A note for those asking after commenter Rufus T. Firefly appeared first on The New Neo.

As for Megyn, she’s in a feud with Mark Levin in which she said he has a micropenis. I am not making that up; that’s the level at whcih she’s operating these days. Well you might ask, how would you know, Megyn?

Micropenis Mark @marklevinshow thinks he has the monopoly on lewd. He tweets about me obsessively in the crudest, nastiest terms possible. Literally more than some stalkers I’ve had arrested. He doesn’t like it when women like me fight back. Bc of his micropenis. https://t.co/7cl3Efc3N7

— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) March 15, 2026

But rather than get any deeper into the weedy details, I’ll just say that I think part of what’s happening is this (a quote from a response to Megyn on X):

Often happens to those who experience a very long and successful run. Something snaps and their ego’s invincibility trait goes haywire.

In other words, in the fight for clicks and without anyone setting external limits on them anymore, they get very full of themselves. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. For Carlson and Kelly, their previous employer Fox News used to act as the falconer and was a check on their wilder tendencies. Released from those constraints and wildly successful on their own terms, things fall apart, and those things are Carlson and Kelly. They’re not the only ones, either.

Over twenty(!) years ago I wrote about a similar phenomenon in connection with bloggers but also pundits in general:

But I think they (we) do need to be careful not to get carried away with the sheer brilliance of their (our) rapier wit and trenchant opinions.

Alone in front of the computer (or, increasingly less often, a pad of paper), the pundit/blogger sits. Inspiration strikes, and the need to be wittier, sharper (there’s that word again!), more opinionated–to be noticed–rises up in folks who tend to be pretty witty and sharp to begin with. “The pen is mightier than the sword” is a cliche because it has some truth to it–and the sharper the words the mightier they sometimes sound, especially in the solitude of the act of composition. And once put down and published, they can’t be recalled.

Then there’s the group aspect. Bloggers and pundits write in isolation, but they’re not really in isolation at all, except physically. Mentally and emotionally they are part of one huge mass shouting out at each other and at everybody else, the sounds of the exchange echoing and ricocheting and reverberating all over the country–and in some cases the world. As such, we influence each other greatly. It’s not even a case of following the herd, it’s more a case of being influenced by the opinions of others, a process we are all susceptible to no matter how independent we may think we are. We influence each other directly by our words, and also indirectly by the sense of competition that’s inherent in this pundit/blogger game–the need, for some at least, to try to outdo each other.

So what’s the result? Sometimes it’s wonderful–in fact, since I’m a fan of blogs, I’d say it’s often wonderful–a liveliness of writing and thinking and interacting that you just can’t get in the staid old MSM. There’s an energy here, and part of it is the energy that comes with a bunch of sharp (in several senses of the word) and verbal people mixing it up and trying to say intelligent things in a way that’s interesting to read. Sometimes it segues into a group of people trying to say outrageous things, either to amuse or to stir up or out of anger or the desire to call attention to themselves, or some of the above or all of the above.

When is the line crossed and it becomes a feeding frenzy? I don’t have the answer; each person has to decide that for him/herself. But when there’s a lot of blood in the water and people find that their own entrails, and those of their allies, are hanging out–that could be a sign.

The only thing that’s changed is that the ascendance of social media has made it worse.

ADDENDUM:

The post Pundits unbound appeared first on The New Neo.

For those of you who didn’t see the original post on the subject and don’t know what I’m talking about, please go here.

And once again I want to thank everyone who posted a comment in that thread. It’s heartwarming, comforting, and inspiring to hear from you.

The post The traffic counter … appeared first on The New Neo.

Years ago I had a kindly web developer helping me now and then, a relative of a relative. Most web developers of any skill will only take on large projects, and mine never was large. Now he’s unavailable, and so when something goes wrong I break out into a cold sweat and start pacing around and yelling at no one. And then I have to fix it myself.

The latest involved my site meter. My traffic used to be higher years ago. But natural attrition among older readers, fewer links to me, and perhaps better bot detection have reduced the traffic count.

But it’s still decent, although far from huge, and it’s been stable for several years. It goes up when there’s a big link and down a bit on weekends, but otherwise it’s quite predictable unless the blog goes down for a while. I don’t check it every day, but it shows traffic for a month.

Yesterday I checked it and was shocked to see that my traffic for the day was about 30% of the usual. That’s quite a dropoff. I couldn’t figure it out, and right up until yesterday the traffic was at the normal level.

Then I noticed that the people who administer the tracking site said that they had just installed a newer and even better bot blocker. So apparently, fewer bots were being counted, although they had supposedly been effectively blocked before.

Was it possible that over two-thirds of my traffic has been bots all this time? This was profoundly disturbing. Had I been living in a dream world till now?

I contacted the site and they suggested re-installing the code. It took me hours to figure out how to do that, but I did it. Unfortunately, there was no change. I also noticed that all the traffic that was being reported was said to be coming from “Icloud Private Relay,” which turns out to be a sort of VPN connected with Safari on Apple. So it seems the counter was filtering out all visitors but those.

I finally figured out something I think fixed it; I’ll skip the boring details. Now other visitors are being recorded as coming in from other sources. But I’ve lost faith in the counter.

I could install a different counter, and have many times. But every single one gets a wildly different count, and I’ve come to distrust all of them. Or, I could ignore traffic entirely and be grateful that you’re all here, however many of you there are.

The post Traffic counter shenanigans appeared first on The New Neo.

Please let me know if the website has any glitches – it wouldn’t be unheard of, since I’m my own web developer and designer. One possible glitch I’m seeing: make sure the order has the correct number of books.

The poems are as varied as Gerard’s thoughts and interests: love, time, death, birth, family, the universe and man’s relation to it, the beginnings of life, and more. You can find more information at the link.

The post You can now buy <i>INTO THE SMOKE OF THE WORLD</i>, the book of Gerard Van der Leun’s poetry [scroll down for new posts, because I’ve pinned this one] appeared first on The New Neo.

A preview of the cover:

The post Progress on the poetry book appeared first on The New Neo.