wassappening

I keep hearing Kyle's voice in my head.

Every once in awhile I think something so cool I just want to talk about it to somebody, and I don't know a single soul in real life who would understand a word I'm saying.

You know how source code (ok, just nod your head, all right?) tells you all this gobbledygook of wassappening (keep nodding) and you go ohhhh, yeah, ok, and then you think about how you'd write it yourself so you could see this or that variable as well (it's ok, you can stop nodding, just hang on) and then you wonder if your own source code in your body is like that. I mean, I have a Lyme marker, right? But you can't tell by looking at it whether it's in an active state or just a dormant marker. You would know I had come into contact with the Lyme bacteria and so therefore must have suffered at some point and am now a passive carrier, as I also am with CMV, and I'll probably wind up developing shingles later in my life because I still carry the chicken pox virus. But looking at the markers, you don't get a timestamp. It's kind of the same way with basic source code. Unless it's set up with lots of extra doohickeys, you have no idea when a visitor dropped by your site unless they click something you can see. Facebook is real bad for that because you can't just drop your own tracker in.

Timestamps are pretty awesome, because real time feed is a huge thing now. Stuff is whizzing around so fast that you practically need continual timestamps just to keep some kind of context, almost from second to second for some things. Our body source codes don't exactly keep timestamps, although we can figure out when some things must have happened and sometimes in what order for something else to be like it is now, right? But it all keeps moving around and regenerating. It doesn't hold still for an epoch like the layers that you can see slicing down through the Grand Canyon.

So I'm effing around some source codes today (ok, get your mind out, that's ctrl-F and then putting a search in), you know, for kicks to see what kind of blazing trail I'm leaving through someone else's stuff that I lurk on (this is where Tank could see what Neo was doing moving around in the code) (here, just take an eye break)...

Click for an ~actually cool~ post about Wall Street.

Ok, I'm not exactly stalking, I'm just lurking around more for my own amusement than for actual info because I'm too aspie to care about real human interests, I get bored too fast. So I wind up tiptoeing through the code thinking about neat things.

Anyway, I thought Wouldn't it be neat if we could right click our own bodies and just see the source code instead of having to draw blood, and then ctrl-F a search parameter straight to what we want to know, right? You know, like ["CurrentUserInitialData",[],{"USER_ID":"thisgermID","ACCOUNT_ID":"thisgermID"} blah blah ["CurrentCommunityInitialData",[],{},numberhere],["ISB",[],{},anothernumberhere],["LSD",[],{},anothernumberhere],["BanzaiConfig",[],{"EXPIRY":blahblah,"MAX_SIZE":blahthisamountblah,"MAX_WAIT":thisblahblahlong,"RESTORE_WAIT":anothernumber you get the point. (Nod.)

And then I thought WAIT, maybe we can...

I don't want to go too fast, so take a little break here, get up and stretch or put some dishes away or whatever while this cool song pumps you up to move around.


Ok, we're about to go some place really cool. My head. And this is good practice for me because I rarely share what's actually going on in here, so I'm sending thought waves out my arms and fingers through a keyboard off into a crazy invisible soup of zippy signals so they can settle into your monitor and glow into your eyes and become part of you. Brain sex. It's weird, and it's awesome. You ready? Well, not sure you can really get ready if this is your first time into my kind of weird and awesome. Just see if you can follow me.

Several days ago I shared a couple of posts on facebook, one saying the universe is fake and the other reconsidering the flat earth movement and then flippantly stated "If what I just posted before this is true, the earth could be both flat and round and inside out and all kinds of other things without any conflict. I've been thinking about this for years."

Those of you who've seen my little obsessions over everything from polychorons to envisioning a cat in hypertorus mode will probably be ok with this. The rest of you noobs will probably need a thinking cap. Hang on.

And I just took a wild romp through knitwear for pets. Sorry about that. If I'm losing you, you can click this next one and disappear like I did, but you'll be responsible for the following info and tested on it later. J/K, I know you'll come back because the suspense will kill you and you'll have unresolved weird dreams if you don't come back.

Good, you're back! See? This will be fun, I promise.

Let's assume that whatever state of existence we find ourselves in now, it's only like this for us, the way we actually think. We can't really see it from the outside of our existence. If you could step outside your body into other dimensions, your body would actually look quite different. Being 3 dimensional isn't very far from Mario or Link being 2 dimensional, but they have no clue, do they? They run into walls and make all kinds of mistakes that they totally take for granted, but we can see their world is really flat and has the illusion of being 3D. We play 'flat' video games all the time that look 3D.

Well, we live in a world all the time that looks 4D from one dimension outside of our viewpoint, and we don't have a clue. This was very well depicted in a Farscape episode called Through the Looking Glass, where Moya (the living spaceship) was unable to starburst properly because she was pregnant, and she got stuck in mid-burst schismed into four simultaneously existing but still all the same Moyas. Since Moya is a 3D creature, she couldn't exist for very long like that, and the crew got a hint from a higher dimensional being, which they were unable to properly see or interact with, on how to correct the problem. It was wonderfully weird and tense.

Imagine Mario or Link getting stuck in a weird schism like that, and you can see what happened and what they need to do next, but they can't- how would you communicate a simple idea to them?

I once read a scifi story (can't remember title and author) where an object was smuggled aboard a spacecraft past security because it had been dimensionally turned inside out, and no one could recognize it. I don't remember whether it was the same story that had someone undergoing alt-dimensional surgery because that was the easiest and safest way to remove shrapnel or a cancer without having to be cut open and lose a lot of blood. If you think along these lines long enough, you can imagine how our earth could be both a sphere and flat, and how our universe could be very different from what we conclude about it through our senses alone. Our senses help us navigate and survive, but they don't reveal to us everything there is. Case in point, the weird brain sex. My thoughts are glowing into your eyeballs right now. That shouldn't even be possible if all there can be is 3D.

Back to my source code point. There might actually be a certain way of looking at ourselves that really is as simple (to our minds) as popping a search ID into source code to find a problem, like germ warfare or cancer, but we just don't have a clue yet. We're still bouncing off walls and making all kinds of mistakes, like Mario and Link.

The reason this came up today is because I ran into another really old Lexx fansite that had been wiped out along with the rest of Geocities in 2009, and there's a guy out there working on resurrecting all the old archives, and there's a chance many people will get their old sites back. Since the root code was restructured, most of the old links are broken on the pages coming up, but if the owners realize what's going on and reclaim their old pages, they can get back in there and relink what they've got in their archives.

And the reason I kept meandering through thought after thought about source code is because I printed out the source code from two of my niece's old Geocities pages after she died, and it was all we had left of her sites after Geocities went down, because that was before I had learned how to rescue and salvage. (And now you know why I have such a deep compulsion to rescue and salvage.) Source code looks like a bunch of gobbledygook, but even the simplest source codes say so much about what a person was doing. I read through her old source code and I can see her, like Tank can see Neo. And if doctors had been able to correct her own source code, she'd still be here. I bet you guys didn't know that is exactly what they're trying to do with CF, correct the source code.
Yale scientists use gene editing to correct mutation in cystic fibrosis

Before she died, she teased me with all the cute little things she could do with her secret codes, and she never would tell me how she did things like marquee and mouseover, or embed music and gifs. She learned to build all her stuff from scratch. She kept secrets about cellspacing and stylesheets. She was just a kid playing around on Geocities, and mocking me with all her cute surprises that made me so jealous. I kept asking her to tell me how she did it.

And then she went away to a hospital and died. About a week after that in the middle of my sleep, I dreamed that I asked her to tell me her secrets now, now that she could go wherever she wanted and do whatever she liked. And I started dreaming about codes. For years I never even looked at a tutorial, I just sat there and figured stuff out after another dream I'd had. I went through brain fail about 7 months after she died, but that didn't stop me from building my first Lexx fan site on a glitchy old computer on dialup (I couldn't even pull up the page to see it until I saw it on a computer in college), and when I came back public I started dragging my glitchy brain through tutorials.

And now I watch people through their source codes while I think.

let it blow

This is why I'd like to have staff. It just eats too much of my time.

click for a ridiculously wordy tutorial and reasons why it's a supposedly a good idea

And that is exactly why I'm not fond of WordPress. The sheer amount of work it takes to actually set it up correctly in the first place is dumb. I've got what, 5 WP accounts now? I've never downloaded ANYTHING. Nada. I blog just fine, got 2 domains just fine, and yeah it looks sloppy and unprofessional like my jeans and t-shirt, but it's easy, fast, and still basically 'mine'.

What brought this up? Stupid verifying pinterest, that's what. I'm actually verified. I've got the checkmark, have had it for at least a year. They turned it off because I'm not 'famous'. #facepalm I've got gravatar verifying my stuff, G+ verifying my stuff, my Lexx on G+ actually has a checkmark thanks to Xanga, but WordPress and pinterest are like oil and water now. 'WordPress' is no longer considered professional enough for pinterest (which started off with loads of incredulity itself). If you wanna be business savvy enough for pinterest now, you've gotta self-host.

I know a guy who let his site sit completely dormant and empty for two years because he was waiting for a team to help him properly and professionally set up his coding. I know he had to pay money like I did to keep that site, but I didn't let mine sit empty. I started salvaging and repairing the shreds asap and loaded public backup over to new blogs just in case. I WORKED. ~~HARD~~. Not saying anything against biding time, more like get outa my frickin way and let. me. WORK.

I've been made fun of (rolling my eyes) by another person who has not only let sites sit around doing nothing but point, but paid tons of money to do it. And for what? Again, no hard feelings, but while other people sit around waiting for some idea of 'professional' to happen, I'm mangling lappy and stomping it flat in between cups of coffee. IF I WAIT I'LL DIE. Does no one else have a sense of urgency?

All the fancy blog stuff is like paint detailing a car and thinking that makes your content more special.

This is more my style.

Done now?

It's so tempting to go back to the real basics and make it all look like geocities super crap because THAT was magical. Yeah, like this guy. I'm in heaven, he's even got the crappy electronic music.

My Yablo's House used to be kind of like that, only it was on AOL Hometown. By the way, I'm split shifting runs into town today. This post is sort of like quality control on the job. Every little bit you gotta let the employees blow off some steam with a potluck or monthly birthday cake or something.

world class webmasters- a Jurassic expedition

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.