Broken Paintbrush

Anyone out there who has ever run a blog knows that one of the more annoying issues of it is dealing with Spam comments. People have tried all kinds of ways to filter them out from black listing words, IP or links, or making everyone type in those funny looking words.

I currently use Akismet which works pretty well but occasionally a Spam does get through and I have to manually clean it up. The last one to get through though really made me laugh at the irony of their own post (and no, I won’t be giving them some ‘link juice’).

I just can’t believe how many individuals post spam on websites, specially private blogs just for the interest of some link juice. I need to stay alert all day even with fantastic plugins like Akismet. I don’t want to imagine what would happen to my websites if I didn’t had this kind of security. Get a solid job spammers!

What do you guys use to block or filter spam? If you are one of those guys that lets everything in to make it easy for commenter how much work do you put it to delete all the spam manually?

This week it is in the upper 90s here in the PNW and I know there are much hotter places in the world, but it hardly ever reach the 80s here in Seattle, let-alone the upper 90s. Because of this my apartment isn’t set up with air conditioning. This means two things hobby-wise: I’m staying up much later since I can’t sleep and am able to get more painting done, and my paint dries out faster than normal. When doing the washes this is actually a benefit as I can paint the next coat not long after painting the first. The problem though is when putting some paint down on my pallet, I am adding water between each model to keep it liquid. This is causing me to struggle keeping a good paint-to-water mix so my question is this to my fellow hobbyist in the warm/dry climates: what do you add to your paint to keep it from drying out quickly?