Just a Little DDOS Fun, Dildos, and Finding the Mystery Cowboy

1 month ago 14

If you’ve noticed CloudFlare verifying that you’re human, that’s because I had to enable extra security because of a DDOS attack.

I also woke up to 1500+ spam email messages sent through contact forms on the site, too. The poor server is having A Time of it.

If it's Tuesday There Must be Dildos - computer generated dude with a goofy grin looking down at a woman whose neck is rotated more than 180 degrees

At least it’s not Tuesday, I guess? Then I’d have all those dildos to contend with.

(Also: every time I see that cover, my brain wants to read it as “Elizabeth Lowell,” which it is not.)

So apologies for the strange screen when you visit. We’re trying to convince bozos with nothing better to do to move on to better hobbies. And, honestly, it’s a romance website. What do you win by knocking it offline? Like what even is the point, here?

Tariq, the Playboy Sheikh with the Virgin Stable Girl, would be very disappointed to know of this behavior.

I’m pausing content that would have gone up, and rescheduling other things, and it’s a boring holding pattern. So it seems like a good opportunity to ask: Hayadoin?

I’m very excited because while doing some housekeeping in the archives, I found the cover that features the illustration of the cowboy I couldn’t identify but knew I’d seen before.

Back in the December 1997 issue of Romantic Times, there was a full color collage of cover models as part of a contest to find new ones. And this cowboy was really familiar to me.

A shirtless man in a leather vest and long leather gloves, flexing his abs over low cut jeans and chaps. He has floppy blonde hair

I knew I recognized him. We snarked the cover in March 2005.

It’s Leigh Greenwood’s Jake.

In related news, I feel very, very old.

Here’s the French cover, which is delightful.

The French cover of Jake by Leigh Greenwood which features a shirtless man with a cowboy hat down on his upper back kneeling and leaning into a blonde woman in a blue dress hiked up to her thighs, and the sky is BRIGHT red behind them.

Either the sunset is really opulent, or there’s a wildfire nearby and they might want to pick another location to go to bonetown.

Speaking of older covers, tomorrow the podcast and visual aids for the Ads & Features of the 1988 issue of Romantic Times goes up, and WOW was it fun to go trawling for 80s romance covers. The expressions on the models’ faces make it seem like sex is really unpleasant and uncomfortable, but it was indeed the style.

Take this one for example:

A blonde woman with a lot of split ends wearing the puffy shirt from Seinfeld and a long skirt is sitting on the lap of a guy whose shirt she is grabbing, and both of them look miserable.

Is it O Face or is it Indigestion? Who can tell?

You could make a pretty awesome set of pepto bismol ads with old O Face covers, I think. Jake definitely wants to help with your upset stomach.

It’s a really fun episode and accompanying post – wait until you see the swamp aerobics couple.

Thank you for being patient with the extra security. I’m hoping to turn it off next week. (And I wish Diarrhoea, with the UK spelling because it has extra vowels, upon whoever is making the server sad!)

So what’s new with you? Hayadoin?

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