One of those daunting weekends where a cascade of things going wrong was best handled by becoming a switch thrower, sort of like a controlled burn. One of the funny outcomes is that we had a Bunny for about 14 hours and I totally lost my voice this weekend, a unique combo of energizer motormouth and croaking whispers.
I made the trending tweets list for #AutismAwarenessMonth, yay! I imagine this is an ever-changing sort of list, so no idea how long it'll hold or if another of mine will show up.
Also discovered my G+ page was put through a Chinese filter. I thought Google sites were at least partially blocked in China.
My original Lexx fansite is still viewable in China. Pinky blog is blocked, and so is Lexxperience, so big thumbs up to Xanga, I don't care what anyone says. (And now I see the logic in teaming up with WordPress, because WordPress blogs aren't blocked.)
I can only guess why anyone in China would even care (although I was among the retweeters about China getting in on the Sherlock marketing and merch action), but years ago, I watched a very determined China footprinter in my Xanga tracker methodically go through my entire Lexx fansite over a course of several days (nearly a week, I think) with a very specific sort of trail that hinted maybe someone was taking the time to reproduce my entire Lexx site post by post in Chinese (I was able to see when posts were shared via email link, and based on my own web salvage experiences back then, I could tell the regularity of the time spans between the tracked links might mean someone was literally printing the entire website out, post by post), which was pretty cool since Google was still really new and China was still pretty much sealed off from world webs. I do remember Xanga intro'd into Hong Kong around 2008, and that is probably how they got to my Lexx, but I think I mentioned it back then even before 2008. As far as I am aware, my fansite disappearance later in the western hemisphere as it lay dormant while I was delete-bombing my own content probably didn't harm the Chinese version at all, if it was truly reprocessed into a different server. It's quite possible my entire original site still exists and nothing I threw away was truly lost forever.
btw, plz to note that my original site address is still ranked in the #3 position for mobile listing for xanga. You know, in case u think I'm making a big deal bcuz I say ppl know who I am.
I'm actually super brainless right now. I'd go to bed for severe sleep deprivation over the weekend between being so sick and miserable and then helping with Bunny, but my bedding is still in the dryer. I'm doing my best to pass a respectable amount of time keeping myself occupied in between random chores while I wait on that.
I'm also feeling a little sorry I made taco nachos earlier. It was my first solid meal in over 48 hours because acute pharyngitis, barely being able to swallow a little yogurt and ice cream at all, so I was ecstatic to finally get some real food in, and the more flavor the better, right? Oh, silly me... My body is very keenly aware of every nuance of chili powder and cumin throughout my nervous system now. You don't come out of fasting chills and sweats with a big load of spicy food. It only adds to the overwhelming shock of having been so sick. Engrave that on a plaque and hang it up somewhere.
~later~ +_+ Add chocolate to that.
~suppertime~
Doing it properly now with sauerkraut and hotdogs. No bun. Everything in my body is saying thank you.
"You look sad, when you think he can't see you." Every time the focus is on Sherlock, I wonder what they're really saying about John. "I was so alone, and I owe you so much..." John knows Sherlock sees it all and says it anyway. If only we could see in John's mind palace, what sort of conversations does he have with Sherlock that remain in his head?
Jagged random naps in between insomniac feverish hazes really mess with me. Thank goodness I woke up with this song stuck in my head. I was dreaming about the mineshaft I had found while I was tunneling deep underneath the ocean, and it got kinda weird when Sherlock and John showed up. Germ warfare gets pretty serious with me.
I may be getting a custom built Lamborghini for Christmas- MSI GE Series, 12-16 GB DDR3, Intel i7 processor, 256 GB SSD, 1TB HDD, dedicated Nvidia video card... It'll probably be something close to this. Won't be getting it from Best Buy, though.
I neither asked for it nor was expecting it. I think @bonenado just knows I'm doing with lappy what I did with my old phone, running it down until there is just nothing left. This will probably be my MOD for awhile after the holidays. (method of destruction)
I'm also not very adaptable to change and tend to go gloriously down with my ship. This is me and lappy crashing soon irl.
Oh, by the way, I made @bonenado chief admin over my tech staff now. I have staff!!!!
Speaking of adaptable, Ellen Dubinlightly cajoled me for not being all over a Lexx instagram. Ok, I'm sure she had no idea that even pointing something out to aspienado is a full-on challenge. Of course "Lexx" and even "Lexxperience" were taken (THAT is why I didn't go there, I was kinda ticked about that when I found it awhile back) (I take things personally that have nothing to do with me) (that's what evil villains DO), and I had made a lame generic account instead to follow a couple people and then never use again. So ok, dragged my butt back over there, used my NAME, and now I've got an instagram account linked to my Lexxperience facebook page. And I'm following Ellen Dubin on instragram, go do that right now, guys.
I'll be truthful, I find instagram clumsy for the kind of work I do. If I ever wind up on a convention floor again, sure, fine, I'll fill instagram up right and left, but I'm already paying for premium photobucket and self hosting probably over ten thousand pix across the webs by now. I'm not paying for instagram. Well, yet. If I can pay for Jib-Jab, favstar, paper.li, littlelexx.net, statcounter, and several of my own blogs and domains, yeah, I'll probably wind up paying for instagram. But not yet.
By the way, this is not me. Other people use the Lexxperience handle as a monicker. I don't. All my Lexxperience stuff is out in the open and linked and utterly consumed with Lexx. My monickers are Pinky, Janika, and in the past were Bluejacky or Yablo. I don't toy around with my passions and leave them dangling like that person did in that forum.
ONE person caught this retweet and said it looked like fossilized dead Lexx. Brava.
:edit: Some content removed due to conflict of interest. 3-27-16
I realized again last night I really do need a professional handler to help me interface. I think more people realize stuff than I do, takes Pinky Robot so long to process, the real time stuff gets pretty overwhelming. But now I need to gather myself and GET TO WORK! >=lFOCUS!!!
I'm feeling excessively super focused this morning, what can I say. Wait, that vid was NSFW. Hang on. Rats, I'm veering off, little too intense. Gritting my teeth, steeling my will. I've gotta go back to some solid standbys.
I had a great day yesterday. I accidentally found out bumping into one of the top 10,000 sites in the world (as reviewed by another one) that, thanks to my blog host remaining so strong in spite of major server moves (according to alexa, according to webstatsdomain), that my fansite is worth nearly $25,000, if one can really estimate dollar worth by the rankings.
I came back public just a little over 3 years ago not at all intending to resurrect my Lexx stuff. The only reason I started doing that was because my traffic spiked by hundreds of percents when I mentioned it one day. I decided that if I really do bring it back, I will do it as professionally as possible, with focus and a mission statement, and never delete it again.
One of the challenges of growing and maintaining a fansite is remaining true to the reason one builds it. My goal is across the board fandom support. I have a history, I own who I am, and I have hopefully grown up. Being able to do what one loves is a precious delight, and I love thinking about Lexx.
Because I have affected so many people, I made a decision coming back public to be real. This means learning to balance public and private. I am a real person with a real face and a real life full of stuff. I don't want to use Lexx to get attention for my personal stuff- I don't want to mix the streams. However, it's important sometimes to reach real people. Entertainment has its value, but without all the fans in all the fandoms having real lives, entertainment becomes hollow, shallow. For entertainment to have value, it must touch real people. The more deeply we identify with stories through our emotions, the more meaningful fandoms become.
I started rebuilding while my world was still pretty dark. I am finally in the recovery stages of years-long illness. Three years ago I was just beginning to be able to read and watch television again. I've publicly documented my progress at spaz starting on 3/17/11. One of the reasons I started blogging real stuff is because, after losing a family member in 2004, I realized that was the coolest part of her, seeing into her head online. Historians love finding old journals and diaries, and blogs and facebooks are the nouveau memory catacombs (Lexx fans will appreciate the reference). I'll be honest- the real reason I'm blogging is because so often we're too busy in life to stay in touch with people we love, and it'll all be here if I go poof. I'm such a terrible recluse, I decided I don't want to take it all to the grave with me. At any rate, as I keep working little by little day after day, my health also keeps improving.
My Lexx work, as always, happens on some of my hardest days when I need the most distraction. Sometimes I write, sometimes I code. As it turns out, apparently, some of my work that involved wrangling with ID inserts across the webs verified me as an owner, and sticking with Xanga instead of bailing kept me ranked well, so without having a clue what I was even doing, I seem to have accidentally created a marketable web product. There was a time when I was given a very nice opportunity to move my Lexx into other hosting, and as I came back public I also seriously considered other umbrella options (Nerdist is very popular), but I reasoned that remaining rogue and standing alone (a very Lexxy thing to do) would be my most visible bet, even if I did have to laboriously learn the ever-changing all-new web presence ropes and climb my way back up a mountain, grain by grain. The web world has changed so much since 2006.
I have never monetized my blogs. I avoid dollar signs around my Lexx blogs like the plague. I don't own Lexx, and I think everything I do should be free for fans out of my own pocket. BUT, as it turns out, it was pretty cool to learn that even without monetizing, my original core fansite is worth $24,700. No, I'll never take bids. I just want to make it clear to anyone who ever questions my authenticity or ever makes another attempt to coopt or sabotage that blog (that I've paid dearly for to keep ad-free), I probably have legal claim now. I'm not trying to be abrasive or defensive or arrogant, I'm just saying that I worked very hard for this, I'm trying to do it right and keep everything legal so I can support my fave show, and I really hope the fans understand heart and soul went into it during some black times when I had a very hard time finding anything else to live for, both through physical illness and severe depression. The most valuable lessons came from those who demanded the most from me, and I'll emphatically state in several people's defense right now that if I hadn't learned while I was being kicked down on the floor, I would never have learned go big or go home. Do I love Lexx enough to stand back up? Hell yes I do. This is about Lexx and my love for Lexx now. This is about me growing up.
That snip up there- I feel like I got an A on my report card.
I'm not crazy about getting gooey with my feels, but I really do love fandoms. You guys know I love you, right? You save me. I can't apologize enough to all the people who've suffered my asperger's along the way. Thank you to everyone who has been a part of who I've become.
The glory days of fan sites and forums is slowly ebbing into an unnoticeable extinction as all new tech and software interfacing change the way fans find info now. IMDB and Wikipedia, bless them, grew into the bibles of info gathering, making it easier over time for deeper wikis and advanced searches to channel hunters and gatherers into camps, and before long, TV show creators learned the ways of the web force and started constructing their own wikis, blogs, and forums, which have become a staple of fandom, sending onelist and bulletin board forums the way of the dodo. The latest trash-glam fan support, thanks to Nerdist creating an all new band of marauders, is all about the competition of recapping- who can get theirs out the fastest, who can get noticed, who can outshine? Nerdist has become the Graham Norton/Oprah/Rachael Ray of fandom. Now it's all about syncing devices and live twitter interaction.
In the meantime, I'm still working on an old dinosaur fansite.
Well, the truly old dinosaurs have vanished. Remember geocities? "In 2009, Yahoo! succeeded in destroying the most amount of history in the shortest amount of time, certainly on purpose, in known memory. Millions of files, user accounts, all gone." Yeah, talk about an asteroid wiping out all life as we know it. But thanks to retro becoming uber fashionable with the nerd geekery upper crust, it's actually back. A lot of Lexx fans had stuff in the old geocities archives. I have no idea if salvage will be the next cool internet thing (y'all know I paid big bucks to help keep Xanga alive, right?), but CHECK THIS OUT.
That's right, Cloaked's original links to the Lexx game, comic, legos... Some actual content is still jaggedly missing, but the original pages are being revived, much like Prince bringing Xev out of stasis. (Does this mean I'll eventually be able to reaccess old youtube videos I deleted? There used to be a way to get those back, but then youtube changed a root command because too many users were resurrecting other people's embarrassing flashes of exhibitionism. But I'm going off track.)
I go off into these jaunts on days where I get lost in working on minor code fix-its, transfers, general maintenance, stuff most bloggers nowadays don't even know is a thing. Myspace was the ultimate code playground (like the evil side of facebook) until 'Tom' stomped it so flat smashing bugs that he had to rebuild it into the $6mil facsimile from Alpha Centauri. I was a huge fan of Lycos gears until they shut down, and as the years go by, internet life seems to be about trudging from one blog host to the next looking for an ecosystem that isn't already doomed. I facepalm every time I see posts on buzzfeed, omg, if that isn't the rock bottom of 'journalistic' digging and sharing, what is?
So, lately I'm learning how to figure out the percentage of proxy visits coming through translators. I don't think this is being done on purpose, like Codingfreak goes on about, and I know from my own laptop that my exact locations vary from browser to browser. One of my own proxies puts me in Florida, another in Monett, still another in New Jersey, depending on what device I'm using and even the blog I'm working on. Throw in the service my device is using, the browser using this or that service, the building I'm in, on and on. Some days I'm out in the wheat fields of Kansas when I accidentally ping one of my stat trackers. But back to the point, the Mountain View percentage thing kind of matching the outside the U.S. percentage thing makes sense now.
The weather app on my phone places me in four different geolocations just moving from room to room in my house because I'm in an oddball school-voting-city line-county line-whatever piles of districts. My IP might never change, but facebook has logged me in from several states. I've actually watched this happen live on my facebook login activity with SMS backup codes going between my laptop and phone, shut the log history, start over, it's incredible. Try it, you can watch yourself pop in and out of existence.
I know that the cities, states/regions, and countries I see in my stats aren't necessarily spot on. The info I get is generalized. Yes, I can use particular IP geolocators and actually see the real areas where most of my visitors originate, and I've even used maps to pinpoint a few neighborhoods, but odds are that actual locations are much more solid coming from campuses, hospitals, and military bases. I say that because one of my browsers insists I am sitting in the middle of a street about ten miles from my house, between a clinic and a restaurant. I know many of you probably never do all your logging in from open fields and industrial warehouses, but that's where the maps say some of you are. Once in awhile I get an actual house if someone is paying for all their bundled services locally and the host proxy service is turned off.
Stat counters are not an exact science. Well, at least not for those of us on the outside of those cool super computer nerd scenes in TV shows where all it takes is 3 seconds to find someone somewhere on the earth. I have found my blogs and youtubes linked to some really oddball sites in other countries, but usually the only way I find them is because of pingbacks, which are actually very annoying, so I turn them off. I've seen the difference between having bot filters and spam filters. If you want to run numbers up really fast, just turn your spam filter off, but then it won't be long until your site picks up a pile of trojans, worms, and all those little bugs that make up internet VD. I think I mentioned somewhere a few years ago that I once crashed my hard drive hacking a song off a super cool abandoned scifi site that was infested with code germs. Wound up paying $300 for a rescue that could have been avoided with a 99cent purchase from a legitimate sharing site. @bonenado will never let me live that down.
Why in heaven's name is all this even coming up? Because it felt so good this week to gab a little bit of code fix stuff with another genuine webmaster. Site building is a brain sport, a sort of joie de vivre that sometimes out rivals coffee and bacon in the mornings, and I'm seriously not kidding.
Becoming a webmaster for one's own enjoyment is a hobby. I use webmaster loosely, I'm obviously not building my fansites from absolutely scratch with a webkit, although that actually is how I got started years ago. I tend to be lazy (don't laugh) and choose to use the inbuilt preset parameters of blogs, which are making archiving and filing easier all the time, although I sometimes turn even that into a mountainous chore because simplicity needs a touch more elegance. (I'm sorry, creating a WordPress 'menu' is laborious and artistically dull, par exemple, not to mention stymied in its usage parameters.)
I'm a triceratops in a world of dying brontos, stegs, raptors, and T-rexes. Metaphorically. Top 10 Biggest Errors in Jurassic Park Current fandom is all about trending on twitter. Lexx will never trend. The actors from Lexx will never trend. But I intend to leave solid evidence that Lexx was once here. Resurrecting sites is great, but broken links and missing images makes piecing fossils together ridiculously difficult for fans picking through the last vestiges of an ancient era that ended yesterday. The idea that the internet will contain all human knowledge is a joke. The idea that the internet is used to spy on people is hilarious. The idea that TV show recaps and trending is the bulk of what we have to show now for fandom loyalty burns my hide.
Fandoms have become a fleeting thing. Riding the live interaction wave of hardcore investment rivalries is exhilarating, yes, but it's not a real commitment. I call the continual reconditioning of audience jerking experience addiction. The same emotional and relationship stories are told over and over in different characters, settings, art forms. The same feelings are being evoked over and over in the audiences, no matter what is being watched.
As long as this formula holds and money keeps rolling around, the stories and characters that fall by the wayside will continue to be perishable. So many series have gone out of print, and I manage to get a few because someone in another country illegally recorded them and found out they could sell them to a warehouse to be remarketed (hopefully not illegally), and even though the condition is much poorer than originally created, it's better than never seeing it again at all. Fans screaming over cancellations is easily satiated with a continual barrage of new shows that themselves will fall by the wayside in the near future. Entertainment has become a bonanza on building roller coaster experiences, and it must be extremely profitable. Evidently, the more the fans are jerked around, the more merchandise they'll buy as quickly as possible before it disappears.
Lexx fans are more hard core than that. I honestly couldn't tell you whether or not this is fan-made or an actual original trailer. I caught Lexx from the very beginning on Showtime, including the featurettes before the first airing. When Lexx disappeared it really was ~gone~ until fans started their own salvage. It's available for purchase again, but it's been edited and some original content is gone now, from what I understand. The acquisitions page probably indicates why Lexx is so difficult to expand on, while other franchises right and left go through reboots galore. Because of this, Lexx remains unique and untainted, a true original.
