Red flag on the play, whistle, rebound. Actually, this is something I've been thinking about for several months.
I know what being public means, probably better than a lot of people. I can 'see' so much stuff because I'm good at lurking. I've talked about that here on Pinky blog. I have encouraged you guys many times to check your proxies, use your browser settings to cruise the webs anon, or at least vaguely. It's really not that big of a deal, I really don't care what you do, but since I can sometimes see details most people would think were private or at least protected from anyone outside their sphere being able to find, maybe it is a big deal.
I like baiting. Baiting lets me see all kinds of things. I can usually tell the difference between real people vs crawlers and spam, sometimes glaringly so, but the point is I can tell. I can't always see motivation, but I sometimes get hints. I've talked about that before, too. Again, not a big deal. If any of that really unnerved me I'd have gone dark a long time ago. I've been saying it won't be long until the entire world is public and we can all see all of it anyway. Even if you go off the grid you can be checked on fairly easily, and I don't mean putting GPS trackers on your car or because you talked to someone on a phone. But I don't care about that, either.
I set that bait out a long time ago. I caught the bait being taken. This isn't a petty thing, although it has nothing to do with my personal life in general, and I'm not even upset about it. I had a feeling sooner or later this bait would be taken. And now that it has been, I have no further use for a public personal facebook. That's right, I did all that for one person.
I need to see who I can trust. This person is not my friend on FB and has never returned contact after the minutest out of the way positive one line of comment I left in the most remote place you can imagine, again, not on facebook. Even though we met in real life during a big event and I was asked to turn over my intellectual property and help flip a fandom over, aside from free professional legal advice and an unrelated very brief late night phone call, this person has never in any way contacted me as a real human being with value.
After a particular bait hook went out, this person went through my public timeline and did recon on my family. The bait hook had nothing to do with my family, and I expected a very different kind of recon.
This person is a public relations professional. I feel this was a very unprofessional mistake. I just needed to know that in case something comes up for me in future.
I let that sink in for awhile, as you can see by the date. Making my facebook more private wasn't a rash decision based on emotion of any kind. I seriously doubt it changes anyone's ability to lurk me, actually probably makes the game more fun for some. Making this decision is more of a message. I have no idea if that message will be received, and since the bait took 5+ years, you can see I really don't care and that I have unlimited patience as a lurker deluxe.
There are other people that are much bigger threats or problems for my family, and I wasn't worried about that. I don't feel threatened by this person at all. I could feel flattered that I was worth that amount of stalking from someone who's been so around, but honestly, I'm just not that vain. I have laid out my life for the public, my personal flaws and fails and all the crawling I've done just to get here, and I challenge that person to do the same. Let's see a public relations expert truly go public. Own it.
I say that as a friend. Anyone who knows Pinky blog knows I own all my people, and I check on them. If I've met you and you impressed me, I number you among friends, even if you have no idea. That doesn't mean I am a rug to walk on or a toy to play with. I've already been tried by fire and lain in the abyss. I know what the dark is.
Getting really close to 1000 posts now. Actually, just over if I count a draft and a couple posts I pulled back from public for fixits and never put back out. But technically, TODAY, this one is 997 currently published. One of my private blogs has 759, another has 1831. I have a whole list of blogs, but Pinky blog here is the only personal blog that has remained this public for this long.
Let's celebrate! Bunny is having a sick day, Bunny mama had to stay home from work to take her to the doctor, they've both been asleep on the couch for hours making up for a long, rough night with a big ol' fever, and Pinky has been tucked away amusing herself with 'pinkyguerrero fans' in the search engine. I didn't really expect to find anything interesting, but search algorithms are funny things, and next thing you know, I'm finding my accounts associated with all kinds of weird and awkward things, and sometimes cool stuff. Basically, though, it's all content curation and then hoarding server space. Our entire planet is going to evolve into one giant server orbiting the sun. All these screenshots click to sources.
One thing I ran into toward the last was this ift.tt thingie.
I know, what the wut, right, so here you go, let's learn some fun stuff. First of all, click this next pic to go to its cache source on google. ift.tt stuff is cache, so now you can come off kinda cool knowing that.
Just above that Pinky in da Haus meme you see 'full version, text-only version, view source'. Click view source. All that gobbledygook that you see after you click that is what I see when I right click on all kinds of websites and select 'view source'. Unless a website is right click protected, everybody can see everything about that page, including all kinds of identifier numbers and where graphics are hosted and what your widget settings are. When people warn you to change your passwords to keep you safe from hackers, that's kind of a joke. Any website that has vulnerable 'back doors' can be perused in source mode (disclaimer- I do NOT use source code to hack log onto people's pages or websites, I just like getting the source addresses for their cool widgets and stuff, like the little hearts that spring out of the mouse cursor on Pinky blog), and there are other ways to get all kinds of info without ever having to log in. This is why secure sites are such a big deal for monetary exchange, like banking and shopping. This is why coding specialists make beaucoup bucks. This is also why extra-step verification is important for your accounts, like twitter and facebook. I can right click and see facebook source codes, but facebook coders are very clever and scrunch up the really important stuff. I can still see who visits whose facebooks (if I want to sit for hours matching up long number strings to names), but I can't see when or how often, and I can't see private messaging info, etc. I talk about source code once in awhile in other posts, especially in wassappening.
I just super distracted you. The real question is- Why is THAT particular post coming up in this kind of general search for 'pinkyguerrero fans'? Like, I mean, out of nearly 1000 posts? Why THAT one?
So let's look at the clues, check out the content of the original post called cool kids. Felicity Smoak in the video at the bottom of the post is a brilliant hacker, MIT class of '06. What did we just do? We opened up my code on a post alluding to a coder. Not a single other Pinky post showed up in search in this manner, even though many other Pinky posts use the word 'fans'. Is this something personal? Is this coming up in search because someone else has already done this? Google search is notorious for showing things in rank order, the most clicked at the top, instead of using a catalog system. Google search is a constantly changing information flow, and the more clicks a page gets, the higher it gets ranked in a search engine. It's a stupid game to play, and one I beat by simply infiltrating half the web with my name, lol. (I say simply, it took some time, haha, I'm pretty patient.) But the point is, a cache page is coming up in search. That means someone is clicking on that particular cache page a lot. I wonder why they'd need a cache page, because they could see the post easily enough, right? Sometimes the only way I can see a post outside the U.S. is by accessing the cache page, so maybe that's it.
A completely unrelated Pinky post way closer to the top of the ranking system is Wanna see some more? If you click that, you will get the France page for Pinky blog. I talk about lurkers in that post. Actually, I talk about lurkers in a lot of posts. It's interesting that the France version of that post talking about lurkers is ranking so high in the search, because I'm in the U.S.
And when we add all this up, it's very interesting that a general Pinky search will highlight a combo field of France, lurkers, and source code, especially since I revealed recently that Pinky blog is getting hammered from a single source in France. Coincidence?
Sometimes I talk between the lines in Pinky blog to lurkers. Some of them privately talk back to me once in awhile in real life. Some of them go dark again, some hang around on the edges leaving me alone but I know they're there, and some super lurk and play games on me. I think I might have a very patient game player who has been hanging around for probably at least a year and a half, and if it's the same person this whole time, has been sending me signals for awhile to play back, which I did, and now I'm getting signals to stop blowing them off and really play back, which I am now doing. I mean, how else can I play back except to talk out loud about it, but I'm not going to share the google map satellite zoom from an IP I think I finally got confirmation on and am 79% certain is the same person. That's the thing with playing these kinds of games, as long as I'm playing fair and by the rules (and with one arm tied behind my back and nearly 90% blindfolded if you think about how bad my analytics really are, I complain all the time), I really can't go Ah-HA!
Anyway, the cool kids source showing up in a pinky search isn't necessarily related, and I've had app spam/scam hits from a number of countries anyway, but it's something to think about, isn't it?
Those of you who really read Pinky blog know that I value creators in the dark, artists in the night, writers in pain, and I notice people who don't spell it all out. Several readers have let me know privately I'm hitting all the right nails square on, and part of the reason Pinky blog is important is because I keep it very cool here, no one sees you but me, and most of the time I don't see most of you because we've been talking about using proxy and private search settings, right? Still, sometimes someone needs an internet hug, and this post is my hug to the person who added resuscitation to the rotation in the continuous hammering, like the drumming in the Master's head.
And now, it's time to get back to my own stuff. Pinky blog isn't here to be about someone else's game, although this was a nice distraction on a long day.
I need to get back into something ~FUN~, last couple of posts have been a bit glum, way too thinky, right? I'MEXCITEDFORTHENEWMoCSERVERCOMINGSOON. I've been talking strategy with anyone who'll listen, watching other people place TNT and blow up the beautiful towns they made on the old server (it's been pretty hilarious), going back through chat logs at the very beginning when we were so nooby and realizing I'm becoming a truly competitive force. I'm betting I can tunnel through 20,000 blocks in 2 weeks flat, and if I go diagonally across the grid it'll actually be double that by the time I hit 20,000 because both x and z coordinate travel, plus I'll be having to get around lava. I did close to 8,000 blocks in one week last May, plus loads of tunneling since, so I'm pretty sure I can pull this off and still pop out onto the surface for food and wood and brief recon. I have several big construction goals, which will give me stuff to focus on when I kamikaze on bad days. Give me a year and see what happens, right? I'm also wanting to tunnel clear out to near 90,000, which will be map edge. I also have yet to learn the nether, can you believe it? I've never conquered the nether.
I've been experimenting while I wait for the old server to be wiped. I've been sinking gravel into ocean to kill the water blocks, then digging down into the gravel to clear space, pretty sure I can get the hang of creating underwater cities if I wanted to. I can always resurface with dirt for a tropical garden or even completely submerge.
That little white block in the water is a jellyfish.
That's about 15 blocks down, easily 3 stories.
Imagine lining a bunker a couple blocks up from the bottom of a deep ocean floor with obsidian, no one would ever find it, and it would be just about impossible to grief. I've also noticed that hostile mobs never seem to spawn where I'm working in ocean biome, which is a big plus for getting a lot of stuff done.
Scott and I ran into Springfield yesterday morning, got his hunting tags and some jeans at Bass Pro, got his flu shot at Walgreens, I loaded up on more spirals and pens, naturally. Talked time organization and financial strategies for the kids and the holiday season. Got some pix. If you guys have ever driven past or been in a Bass Pro, this is the original one that started it all, and it's ~huge~. I'll link this first pic to their website, but there's no compensation here, just making it easier for you to check it out.
I know, right?
I could lay inside one of those chandeliers.
Thought of all my rowdy friends.
3D depiction of what it looks like underwater.
Zoomed in a little. Love all those cute little feet.
Can't help thinking of all the crappy Syfy movies when I see this, lol.
I wrote this next bit several days ago and didn't know where to put it, so I guess I'll just leave it here.
There's a sort of haunting loneliness in getting to know your stats so well that IPs and particular browser-operating system combos feel like old friends. I've been able to see when some of you upgrade. (Half of you just froze and then scuttled off like rabbits.) (Srsly, can't see your names and addresses. Calm down.) I only thought of this because I got nostalgic about the old days this last week when site trackers were simpler and IPs weren't pinging off 5 different things and there was no such thing as keywords, and all I needed to see was entry point to know if it was coming in from a bookmark. Things have changed so much that I lost track of a particular check-in through the years, but I think I've found him again. That's right, took 2 years on Pinky blog trackers to untangle this lurker again once I started noticing, who I'm pretty sure knows the Lexx fandom better than any of us know it, even though he barely interacted. You know, one of the more serious collectors with the kind of money I only dream of. Finally nailed down a ping that's been going on right under my nose this whole time, and it had nothing to do with the regular stat readout. If I were to say out loud what caught my attention, every lurker in the land would just die, because it was that obvious, but let me repeat, it wasn't easy to put this trail together. At any rate, hello super lurker, really surprised to see you on Pinky blog but hey, thanx for the #s stacking up. I admire your sheer obsession, and I can't help wondering what your private collection looks like, which I imagine must include other fandoms.
Today. Click it to follow me on twitter.
I need to run away and do stuffs. Might have a minecraft date, might have a Bunny bomb, tending food and dodging all the incoming. Have a great weekend, guys.
I generally don't care about impressions because I still think they're just a 'possibility' count and not actual 'eyes on', but I really like that my July top media tweet has passed my June top media tweet. These snips click back to source tweets, which don't have the pic addy in them.
June- Remember, this is during a live tweet of the hottest show on TV.
July- This is ME. My own stuff, not a live tweet, just me, and more likely had eyes on actual tweet. The tweet that followed it giving actual location link to the post got 148 impressions and some sweet stats on my blog that day, which means impressions translated to engagement.
Again, impressions means "Exposure is the total number of times tweets about the search term were delivered to Twitter streams, or the number of overall potential impressions generated. When we say "impression", we mean that a tweet has been delivered to the Twitter stream of a particular account."
It's not anywhere near the most viewed post I've made, but I think speaks well for what I'm doing.
Why is this important? Because as much as I write, and as much as I've shared about my stuff, I still have days where I believe this public hanging on and moving forward is just a hokey game I made up that really doesn't mean anything and it would be so easy to let it all go and just never share any more. It would be so easy to slip away and never notice the effect of leaving it all behind.
But I know better. I've left it all behind before. I've seen the numbers jump up and down, I've seen years of dots pop up on maps, I've seen what I know is out there- lurkers looking for something to hang onto. And I am one of you.
I know there are loads of you out there that will never make real contact, never let anyone know you're on the webs looking for people and watching them live their days, never say "I love you" and "Thank you" and "I miss you" because you're afraid or too sad or don't believe they'll care. But you know what? They lurk you back. I know I have old friends out there who check on me, just like I check on them. I finally found someone yesterday who stayed underground for years, and I just want to say I love that cute house, the flowers, the scrapbooking (such an artist!), and I'm sorry I was so dumb years ago. Yes, I know, that person might never see that sentence with over 700 posts on Pinky blog now, but at least I said it, and it's important because she's a real life person who was there for me in real life and you know me, I suck as a friend.
I finally found a couple of other people, too, from high school. I'm pretty sure they'd have no idea who I am on the webs, but they were nice to me (that's actually pretty rare in my real life), and it was nice finally finding them and seeing they're ok and have families and other things going on. I still haven't found this guy yet. This is the guy I faked a date in high school with (my only date in my entire public school career) so his mom would back off, and he told me I have good lips for lipstick (which eventually inspired my 100 Girly Questions Survey).
I'm all nostalgic since I started the neurontin. This is day 11, and it seems like all these people are popping up in my head now like I wanna go back and give them hugs and stuff. Life is hard, some of us got through some weird stuff together, and our moments are unique to us. We lived on the same earth in the same space and shared the same time, and none of that is gone. For some reason, the neurontin is making it all fresh again, and I'm seeing things through much older eyes and wondering how in the world I got this far at all, and maybe I was just really really lucky to have these people in my life when I did. Or blessed, however you want to look at it.
Some of us have only one or two real friends at a time, and it's excruciating to go through life changes and lose friends, for whatever reason. It's important that we don't let go thinking we have no friends. They're still out there, wondering about us. Maybe they can't see us or find us, and maybe we can't see them or find them, but that doesn't mean someone isn't thinking about you right now. Don't let depression lie and tell you no one ever does.
We don't always make it easy for people to check in with us. Life is busy, schedules are all over the map, tiffs and disagreements make things weird, and we kinda hide so we don't get shoes thrown at our heads and stuff. (Some of us step out and throw shoes and duck back in, that's kind of a bad habit.) But there are sparkly dots out there on our earth in our time who really do think about us, just like we think about them.
I have a revolver map at Lexxperience.com. I've never put one on Pinky blog because I know some of you really like your privacy, but guys, this blog gets 3 times the traffic that fan blog does (revolver maps only shows about a tenth of all time views blogger says I have, which means repeat readers, which is really super good), from all over the world, people who know me from fandoms and social medias and real people I know and just lots and lots of dots. I know what I'm saying about lurkers. If I can get that many dots being a weirdo, imagine what you would get if you opened up being a real person with a real life for your friends and families to check on. I mean within reason, right? There are so many of you following me who live with depression like I do who don't believe people care because someone isn't responding or commenting or checking in asking how's it going, but if you could see the dots... You would know people really do check on you. Facebook and twitter don't let you see that. Just because people don't jump when you update, don't ever believe other people don't care.
If you make it hard for people to find you or be part of your life by forcing them to out themselves just to see what you're doing, you will always wonder why people "don't care". People read Pinky blog all the time, and barely a soul ever 'replies' to me about the content in private, no one carries it into convo elsewhere, and for all intents and purposes, it would seem like my content is being ignored outright by people I care about the most, but it's not. I give people their right to privacy by not forcing them to interact. I get the whole incognito thing we all live with, the masks we keep in place, keeping the inner turmoils separated from the outer interactions. Sometimes crossing those streams just winds up with a lot of really misunderstood and very hurt feelings.
Pinky blog is like a present to people. I don't know how else to be good for people or be there for those I care about, so I do what I can with Pinky blog. I've been very surprised this is what it's turned into, because this wasn't part of the original plan coming back out public, and yet this is the most successful thing I've ever done. Being real is the most important thing I've ever done on the internet. I'm very thankful every day I'm part of a group of good people who help model that online.
Honesty- I'm having my typical heat index headache on top of a seasonal allergy surge. I'm already taking what meds I can, so I just have to deal. I'm going to put on a little music and go work on today's chore list. Hugs to all you guys who are having trouble dealing right now.
click pic for
"37 Cats Inside Things That Are Much Too Small"
I've either broken my Pinky statcounter or you guys have successfully graduated to hardcore lurkers like I've taught you. Blogger says I'm getting steady traffic and shows legitimate referrals, statcounter says "What people? I didn't see any people." But as much as I've messed around with it, it's very possible I've corrupted the config. I could reset, but then all previous data is unrecoverable, so one of these days I might just add another one to pick up from now-ish and see if that works. Still feeling too lazy to do more than muse on it right now, though.
I'm crashing through a depressive cycle this week, which I was expecting because I was a bit euphoric for awhile again through December, so I'm doing all the usual routine stuff that keeps me functional while it passes, like house chores and research. I have a hard time watching TV when I'm like this, so I have ventured into a friend's RP forum for a good story to help distract me through this, and I'm loving it. In case you're new to me and would like more info about my head stuff, I'll put it at the bottom of this post, which you're welcome to skip down to if you don't want to read this next bit.
One of my distractions is writing through the aspie chaos in my head on weeks like this because focusing on a writing prompt helps my mood stay more balanced, so here we go, a whole buncha sex stuffs, lol. Close your eyes if you're easily miffed by discussions that challenge your belief system, whatever it is. I'll tell you when you can open them back up.
~~~~~~
One of the more amusing things I've run into in the last week was a trans friend wanting to know in a protected status update why asexuals were making a big deal planting their flag if they don't even want sex, because it can only be an attention-seeking thing, surely.
I've known since puberty that I'm pan (there was no word for it back then) and since high school that I prefer androgyny, although I do also really like strong male and female figures as well. I came out pangender asexual on a public blog in 2008, before it was fashionable for regular people in mainstream lives outside of entertainment to do that. That blog (one of so many I've had) is gone now, so I can't link to it, although several people in my life are aware and are fine with it. I don't bring it up much, although I have written about it here and there.
6-15-15 Khanlock One of the most popular posts I've ever created, and I never mention sexuality in any form.
7-1-08 self stim (this is an ongoing debate I have with my psychologist over aspie-autie kids having no self awareness during compulsive erogenous neuro stim, which I'm sure parents of autism spectrum children have a little difficulty understanding) (The book I'm working on, Existential Aspie, will have a LOT of autie kid POV in it that I don't usually see out in public, based on my personal experiences.)
Plus I've also had fun mocking the whole subject of sex in some of my silly surveys through the years at Surveypalooza.
For anyone in the world looking at that list and the length of this post thinking I must be one of those people who yaps about their sex stuff, rest assured this was very much me most of my life. For those of you who've not yet seen The Abominable Bride, I must put the word "spoilers" here, but seriously, not really much of a spoiler. But yeah, this is me at parties, on dates, through two marriages...
I'd love to source this for you at 5 a.m. because I grabbed it with my phone, but that was 2 days ago and the original tweet is already so buried in the twitter feeds that it would take at least an hour and I'm not feeling that patient.
My issues started early, about the time I hit puberty. I'd been sent to school in dresses for years and fought for my first pair of jeans around fifth grade, which my mom was strongly against until a friend of hers, who had five boys and wasn't that terribly feminine herself, shrugged it off, and they went through a stack of rejects in an outlet dump and brought home bargains, one with a twisted leg, one with a leg shorter than the other. I was ecstatic simply because I'd won. After that my mom got hold of someone's hand-me-down flare leg jeans and I spent a glorious year getting my jeans caught in my bike chain over and over like normal kids were supposed to until the jeans were too shredded to wear.
Being allowed to wear jeans didn't solve my problem, of course. I still had to be a girl. I really didn't care that I was actually a girl, I just hated being continually reminded I wasn't girl enough. I didn't sit right or move right or stand right or behave right, and then when I took things too far it was nice girls don't do that, like shave my legs above my knees. A kid at school actually made fun of my knees having bangs in P.E. Top that one, I dare ya. I wolfed out when I hit puberty, despite being a girl. (Irony has brought a patchy alopecia into my life, and I very rarely need to shave my legs any more.)
I liked being an action figure, along with being the secret genius behind the schemes my friend and I pulled off. I liked running cross country and jumping over fences and out of trees (and off the roof), and tried a few times to jump my bike over things, resulting in some impressive scrapings up and nearly ruining my bike. I liked that boys got to look cool and be cool running around and hated that I was expected to stand around looking demure. I studied how the fastest boys naturally ran differently from girls and taught myself how to move the same way. Same thing with throwing. I practiced throwing rocks and balls over our barn roof after school for days until I could mimic the way the boys at school threw stuff. There was no way I would ever be caught "throwing like a girl". It was bad enough that 'girl' was derogatory, it was worse to not overcome it and just accept it as my fate. All this before I was even twelve, and all my mom could go on about was her exasperation with me. We fought constantly (passive-aggressively, I wasn't allowed to yell at her without severe consequences), and the root of it all was my refusal to be gender typed.
So, yeah, it's a big deal to stand up for being asexual pangender, because I was treatly poorly over being my natural self. It has nothing to do with accepting who I have sex with and whether I sin, but about standing up to a demanding society shoving me down into a tiny little box and not allowing me to shine in my natural capacity with the instincts I was born with. While other girls were fighting to wear hip huggers to school, I was fighting to let my God-given hair grow out on my legs that no one ever saw except in P.E., and I was such a joke already that it wouldn't have made a difference. Believe me, I've investigated every which way hairy legs and nylons could possibly have anything to do with my status as a human being, and that is the tiniest tip of the asexuality iceberg that was my problems growing up in an ultra conservative household. You'd think asexuality would be a plus in a setting like that. It wasn't. I caught all my mother's repressed sexual issues head on and flung them back with vehemence. I look back now and feel quite sorry for her feeling so stuck and frustrated with her own stuff and never being able to verbalize it.
What no one knew at the time was that I come from genetic stock heavily leaning into polycystic ovarian syndrome, and along with extremely heavy periods, I grew an impressive amount of body hair for awhile and developed a fairly aggressive personality. A doctor confirmed in my 30s that I was making way too much testosterone and put me on hormone therapy to help control and regulate that and several other symptoms. (This is coming to light as a fairly common condition.) These are not things I chose. I've always been able to feel the duality in my brain chemicals. I feel very 'boy' sometimes along with the girl. If my brain chemicals are prompting things in my body I have no control over, and these things are in turn prompting behaviors like acting out and aggression, how in the world have I chosen this? As I have learned more about myself, I have come to realize that no one chooses their sexuality. We are caught in waves of hormones and chemicals, and we all do the best we can with what's going on in our brains and bodies. I see no shame in this, and no reason to 'choose' against who we are in order to appease a larger society of anxious and guilt-ridden believers who would rather turn their backs than forgive what they don't yet understand. People remind me of chickens sometimes, the really bossy ones pecking to death those who don't fall into step, out of sheer orneriness. How is continually picking on someone any different? You either love people or you don't. Actions speak louder than words. If there really is a God, and he really does promise a heaven, no wonder so many turn away when they're nearly picked to death for something they can't help and didn't choose.
My second best friend in high school was gay, and the treatment he went through got pretty ugly. A friend of his actually had to leave school out of fear for his life. Anyway, I had no problem being seen with him all over school, so he took me on my only date in high school to convince his mom everything was cool. She dropped us off at a movie, we never kissed, went back to his house, he showed me his bedroom, huge Marilyn Monroe poster on his wall, and he told me I had great lips and should be wearing lipstick. I still think that's a pretty awesome compliment.
Since many of my friends are gay, trans, alt, and whatever (I'm finding out there are a LOT of orientations out there), I barely even think about this stuff. I can swim in sex and never blink an eye, I am that asexual. Once in awhile my head turns, yes, but I miss unbelievable amounts of subtext and even blatant sex references in convos while at the same time I see it all around me much like a botanist would a forest. I grew up on a farm and know quite a lot about sexual anatomy and birthing and then wound up in nursing school for awhile, and I'm not squeamish at all, just terribly inexperienced with the social exchange that must accompany actual coupling up. I imagine I'd make a really good whorehouse madam or brothel priestess, sort of above it all and running things.
As for sex, I actually like it quite a lot, I just don't feel the need to share it with other people, and my asperger's makes it difficult for me to get past all the extra sensory overload anyway. Ever wonder why alcohol and sex go together? The entire human race would probably have died out long ago if it weren't for rape and alcohol. Yes, I actually believe that. I don't think most of the world has a clue what normal sex really is to begin with, especially belief systems that squelch women and children into third class citizenry, whether it's obvious or not. I grew up pretty third class right here in the United States. No one ever asked me growing up whether I had fallen in love with anyone. That just wasn't even a thing. The only reason I don't make a bigger deal of it is because I've met so many people who've actually been held hostage or have been owned either by default (family) or purchase (seriously, child trafficking) specifically for sex. Yes, right here in the United States. I've seen ultra conservative right wing Christians wink past the obvious under their noses to debate whether a divorced person can remarry without it being adultery, and I just walk away. Righteous people exasperate me.
Anyway, so I rarely find myself discussing the actual rights and wrongs of anything sex, but here we go. I grew up conservative, so naturally I start with the 'legalism' of faith. I'm not against faith, I'm just tired of it being used as a weapon or a shield.
The problem with debating about the natural order of nature being the correct way for things to work, especially if we are assuming a deity setting it all up, is running into little monkey wrenches like finding out male otters will steal harbor seal pups away and pleasure themselves on them to death, or that crabs will mate with so much gusto they kill off females that don't fight to get free. The instinct to mate is only that, a blind driven compulsion. The object of the mating, ideally, results in healthy offspring, but as we share more and more to the internet, we see a growing number of cats and squirrels doing sex trains, hunters having to get out of the way of elk or deer attempting to mate with their vehicles, the odd horse here or there rearing onto a police officer or rodeo clown for sex, dolphins happily pinning humans down, and I'll go so far as to say I actually saw a spider mate with a dead spider hanging limply in an old web, which is arachno-necrophilia. If natural sex has a directive for what is morally correct versus what is sinful, I'm not seeing it expressed so much as mowed over in the world around me, and I'm sorry, I can't blame all that on a fallen angel. And we must admit humans have been overseeing all kinds of breeding programs throughout human history, from cattle to fruit flies, and everything else on down to plant life. Anything that has DNA has been interfered with sexually by humans out of experimentation and the incentive for financial gain, which increases power, not to mention the food supply.
I saw this going around facebook yesterday (originally posted last summer), someone else doing research on why homosexuality is natural and important across the animal kingdom, and I agree it comes in pretty handy. (I'm not going to copy it here, sorry.) Case in point, my step daughter's mom has absolutely no natural mothering instinct just because she's a woman and gave birth. I grew up on a farm, we had farm animals like that, too, particularly noticeable among very young first time mothers, everything from cats to sheep and goats. If a first time birth is scary and too overwhelming, the mom rejects the babies and it's up to the kindness of strangers to make sure they stay alive and survive.
The Kindness of Strangers is a popular title when you run a search on it, but my first experience with the idea was a very thick textbook style research on orphanages being what saved quite a bit of old England during the dark ages, because so many people dropped babies and children off at churches that half the population could have died out if someone else hadn't raised the children. One of the concerns the priests had back then was that the children eventually wound up in brothels and it would be a sin for a father to be having sex with a prostitute daughter, even unawares. My mind was blown over this particular after so much else had been dismissed as not sinful, like an entire society making it impossible for parents to raise their own children in the first place between so many hard laws and taxing the people nearly to death (church and state were co-complicit in this). Humans have a long history of males raising children through rough patches. Whether the males were gay or not is kind of beside the point. Monks around the world have been taking in children as long as religions have existed. Those with nurturing instincts gravitate toward nurturing. Simple concept. We see this with pets, too, and with other animals both on the farm and in natural settings.
I once watched, in my own backyard, a bluejay swipe a baby bird out of nest, carry it to the ground, and viciously drill its beak through the baby's head. What got really interesting was not only the distraught parents darting around, but the anxious cowbird couple that hovered around the ground within inches trying to stop this from happening with their efforts to distract the bluejay. That baby bird had two sets of parents. Why does this happen in nature? Because there are killers out there. Because life is really hard and sometimes it takes a whole crowd of people to make sure babies survive. Perhaps human societies formed out of this very need. Perhaps the origin of society lies within the nurturing instincts of both male and female strangers feeling upset that babies get killed, and cooperating to keep babies alive.
I've mentioned I have a sociology degree, right? I was originally going for an anthropology degree but my college only supported a minor at the time, despite housing one of the most famous archaeologists in the world. I blame the bible belt. Sorry, got way off track. But my point is that sex hormones working properly enough to get babies born doesn't mean we're working properly as people. Pretending to fit into gender roles because a belief system requires it doesn't assure the proper survival of humanity. If anything, it encourages secret taboo behaviors that can't be talked about without severe repercussions. Trying to make people fit into standardized molds of any kind has a tendency to backfire into years of therapy at the very least, rampant public shootings at the very worst. A healthy sense of self within an accepting group creates an optimally functioning member of society, does it not? This is really basic stuff, not quite sure why it's still so hard for so many people to grasp. Oh, yeah, religion and politics. That.
What is often missed in gay debates are some of the secrets and problems that create conflict for a few caught in the middle of it. Gender reassignment isn't always a prerogative. Sometimes babies are born intersexed and a gender assignment must be made, creating conflict later as the brain matures into the 'wrong' hormones. Once in awhile an accident happens with circumcision and a boy is brought up as a girl. And sometimes a distressed parent with severe depression (and quite possibly other mental illness) just ignores the baby's gender and raises it oppositely. I met a guy that happened to. All his young child photos are in dresses, and he seems to be a girl. Somewhere in grade school his gender suddenly flipped because it became obvious, and he's dealt with that the rest of his life, plus being suddenly rejected by the parent who did that to him. He's not alone. Babies are like dollies for people in emotional pain. Likewise, how many girls are there who feel the fail when their parents really wanted a boy? Or passed themselves off as boys or men so they could do something females weren't allowed? I could go on and on. Gender issues aren't always about the individual being different, and they're not always rooted in the individual. Society creates gender problems before people are even born into their genders. Then entire lives are spent teaching children to hide things and perform for society.
In case you still haven't seen The Abominable Bride, the speech Sherlock gave near the end on women's suffrage was spot on, and in our own day and time, I would extend these thoughts to everyone on the planet. Here, go buy it right now.
The gay debate is not a simple one. There can be no black and white right or wrong or stamps of religious and political approval or disapproval if we don't have the whole story on each case. To deem any one person at fault for something beyond their control (so many maladies in this world are beyond our control, are they not?), and then to ostracize and lump individuals into a generic group and then make the entire group outcast from society in one fell swoop is as heartless as throwing unwanted pets out of moving vehicles onto highways. I say it this way because most people I've met would sooner have a tender heart for a derelict, abandoned, and abused animal than they would a mistreated and shunned fellow human being. We don't judge animals so harshly, and we are so much faster to stand up for their neglect and abuse, but that doesn't restore my faith in humanity as long as I'm still seeing humanity abuse, berate, and neglect whole chunks of its own over misconstrued opinions and ideologies. No wonder human trafficking thrives in all countries around the world, even under the very noses of the most adamantly religious and faithful- we so easily throw out our own.
There has always been a thriving underground of human trafficking and sex slavery beneath every civilization, and anyone studying human religious and political history and social psychology knows this. Perhaps the initial reason it wasn't ok for gays to come out was because once they did, they could no longer be secretly shuffled through an underground ring of perverted religion and politics, opening up many cans of worms, as it were. It's ok to see cabaret and S&M openly expressed in the entertainment industry going way back (war and sex seem to be market buddies), but it's not ok to admit it's real and all around us, and that accepting each other the way we are will save lives.
The answer between my trans friend and I wound up being how ridiculous all sexuality issues are in the first place, and we left it at that. It's not a competition for attention any more than any other sexual issue. It's people openly standing up for who they are, just like all the rest.
And yes, let's all facepalm and have a good laugh imagining Sheldon Cooper incorporating asexuality into his Fun With Flags series.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You can open your eyes now.
In case you skipped down for my head stuff-
On top of autism spectrum, I do have a 'mood disorder' diagnosis, although it's never been formally called bipolar, and this last fall I got 'adjustment reaction disorder' from my psychologist after I told him I finally processed through my friend's murder and my mom's death, since both of them happened years ago. Emotional shutdown can be pretty serious, but you guys know that because I'm always talking about it. I keep a standby team of touch base friends within reach, and about once a week someone is making sure I'm doing ok. As long as they see me out in public tweeting or facebook sharing or blogging, they know I'm not going down the rabbit hole. One of my constant goals is holding my weight steady and keeping a regular sleep schedule, both of which are high priority when I check in with my psychiatrist every 6 months. He literally counts pills. I'm allowed half a xanax 3X a day and that's it. I'm mostly otherwise managing to handle my anxiety disorder with diet, which I believe is directly related to diabetes and glucose spikes. As long as I can continue to self monitor and report in regularly, I'm allowed to stay off other head meds. It also helps that @bonenado oversees everything in my life and that I trust him to notice when I go off track and help me get back in routine. He's pretty cool about it, we laugh a lot.
~I'm kidding~
Off the subject, I have discovered Black Diamond Premium Reserve cheddar, aged 2 years. I'm the sort of person who will skimp on everything else in my life to spend $20 a pound on very hard to find cheeses, like aged gouda, so if you guys can find this one, it's totally worth it, even smoother and sharper than Cabot's Seriously Sharp. (Black Diamond is Canada based, Cabot is Vermont based.) I actually found it in the fancy cheese section in my local Walmart, so there you go. Good luck. It is absolutely wonderful with morning coffee.
Let's see, what can I find to get me out of here now and moving on into my day...
It's a bad habit, isn't it? And you think you're really good at it and no one sees you. Despite all the extra fancy stalker stat tools available, Google and proxies up the ante and the stealth game is on.
Most of you are truly invisible to me. I know, I go on about I can see this or that, but I really can't. I mean, I CAN, but all I see are markers, little bits of fluff you leave behind as you sneak through the bushes. I don't actually see you in the bushes.
I always assume I stand out like neon. Given what I can see on my end, and since I rarely try to actually hide anything I'm doing, if you can't see me in the bushes, it's likely because you are an inexperienced spotter, or I'm accidentally covered by invisibility magic of some kind. I really really don't try to be careful. A few of you are absolutely beautiful to figure out, I so love this game, and it's always thrilling when I actually peg someone down to a real neighborhood, but that's getting so rare nowadays that I hardly try any more.
It's true, I very rarely play the stalker game any more. It's mostly a waste of my time. I could care less who's stalking me (I'm super bored, give me better puzzles), and there's almost no one I care that much about. I bet there are only 5 people on this whole planet I have truly stalked, you know, with a purpose. Out of those 5, one doesn't have a clue at all, even though that person very heavily stalked me for awhile, and was so sloppy about it that I saw every actual location for almost a year, and we're talking world travel. The rest of you are pretty boring, at least to me. I'm sure a few of my darker lurkers laugh.
The real games begin when I train someone to stalk me, and train someone else to stop stalking me. It's actually pretty easy. I have already trained some of you to stay logged into google on your devices so I can't see every little thing you're doing. It cracks me up how fast that happened, just mentioned it one time, *poof*, suddenly I'm getting way more secure looking stats. Yes, I can still technically see you, but not like before. Now it's anyone's guess who is who half the time.
Nothing like having to train you guys how to make the puzzle more exciting and interesting for me, right? It is to lol.
I use to be easy to spot in my own stats, stood out like a flare gun. Then I got a new phone, now it's really random whether I see myself or not, and the only reason I know it's me is when it actually pings all my details correctly- device, browser, location, time. Time is a crucial element. It's also weird, like the slit experiments where one photon takes two different routes to a destination. Some devices ping 3 times if they are coming from outside the country through a translator and a particular proxy, caught one pinging 5 times. Mostly the pings are simultaneous, but sometimes the pings are off by a second or two as the signals split and sync back up.
Not every ping is a 'hit'. I'm pretty sure at least half the hits never get counted. Trackers are really picky, and they all have their own party going. All the same, I've got every eye trained on spam, and Pinky blog is really clean for drawing flies. Squeaky clean. I've seen what can happen when the spam hordes find a blog. After Xanga first came back from the migration, I was deleting a couple thousand spams a day, over ten thousand one week. There was no way I could get a tracker on that, but they had a spam catcher, and I saw every. single. one. of those suckers. I also know they can swarm in on pingbacks from other sites when I link them, because I saw it literally happen a couple of years ago immediately after I linked a particular website. What people don't realize is that we're all swimming in a really thick spam soup, and the only reason any of us have decent internet is because the spam protection coating everything has become so supersized that it's nearly invisible now. Anyway, the hit counters you see on Pinky blog are the real deal, you're 95% people. Yes, I check.
All that being said, polite nod to those who are truly dark and none of my tools catch the slightest little ping. I see a blip once in awhile when someone slips up, but it's all good, I'm pretending I didn't really see anything.
No point to this post. I'm just bored. Felt like talking.
Is Stalking Illegal? The act of stalking is often the culmination of several acts which, when taken on their own, are perfectly legal. Once they are all put together and used to harass or intimidate someone, then it rises to the level of stalking. Sending notes or gifts to a person’s home, dropping by a person’s home, sending flowers or waiting for someone at a workplace are all normal, routine activities. Once these actions instill a sense of fear in the recipient, then it becomes stalking.... To prove stalking, a complainant must be able to show a course of conduct or behavior; the presence of threats; and the criminal intent to cause fear. With two documented incidents, a stalking victim can get a court to issue a protective order or restraining order that directs the stalker to cease all stalking activities.
What *I'm* fondly calling 'stalking' is totally legal. It's actually lurking. It is quietly watching without making contact. I encourage lurking. I love lurkers.
There are lots of ways you can make yourself more invisible and harder to find on the internet, aside from the usual overwhelming tangle of settings in silly places like facebook. I can find just about anything or anybody on the webs if they haven't absolutely completely covered their tracks. It's not hard to do. I'm not challenging anyone, I'm just saying that as careful as you think you are being, all you have to do is put something into a search bar to light up someone else's stats pages. You might choose 'browse anonymously' within a certain parameter setting on a particular host site, but that doesn't mean you don't show up somewhere and someone can see exactly what you're doing.
Why am I saying all this? Because some of you are still so innocent. I guess I just have this instinct to protect, and I do that by pointing out the obvious. I'm not an expert, and this isn't a tutorial, just a touch base congratulating some of you on paying attention and tightening up your surfing security.
On a personal note, I can't seem to get warm and this keyboard feels lovely. I can see why cats lie on keyboards. It's a glum windy cold gray day and I keep wandering off into the more depressing videos. I don't know what to do about it, so writewritewrite, right? I think I'd be a little more chipper if the 'country beef ribs' hadn't gone hard on low slow heat (really bad sign I paid too much for the package presentation) and I'm trying to salvage them in the crock pot now (Can cooked meat still be tenderized?), but HEY, I got my Christmas cards addressed. Go me.
I guess it would be nice of me to share this in case you'd like to get started on learning more. Not The Same: Invisible Web and the Dark Web Good luck making your way through that horrendous kersplat of advertising. I generally steer clear of extra work (don't laugh), prefer simple point and clicks whenever possible. Please, I beg you, put a Google alert on your name. Not all it's cracked up to be, so kind of biting my tongue on that title. Yes, some of you remember I've already mocked google alerts. There are a couple of people on this earth who would probably be mortified to *cough* see how often their names *COUGH* have been searched by one person *hackCOUGHhkhrrkhk*. Coughing captured in writingIs there an onomatopoeia for coughing? If not, how can I capture it in writing?onomatopoeia
Someone needs to save you if you're still here. I'll quickly flee the page, you're probably more stuck than I am.
I'm not a safe person, but I will do everything in my power to stand between the dark and the people I love. I still make mistakes. I still say stupid things and do stupid stuff, but never out of malice. Some of my friends find me dragging them out of their holes and get a little scared. That's ok. I'm learning not to spotlight and make the world suddenly look at you. But y'all know it's important, right, to be seen. That people know you're there. I hope Holly won't mind me using her as an example. The first two snips were private, but hella cool.
I couldn't help pointing it out. SPOTLIGHT.
I've been saying for the last three years how important fans and fandoms are to me, helping me hang on through the long dark nights, helping me feel like I'm part of something and not alone. Even when I want to be alone, I'm lurking in the dark, watching the webs, finding cool stuffs, enjoying other people's wit and creativity and enthusiasm and love for something. So are you.
I've tried sitting in a dark hole. God knows I love my cave. But even in my cave I can't help starting trouble. It's in my nature to stand up and speak knowing I could be shot. It's in my nature to be real and draw fire, and it's deeply rooted in my nature to love it.
But I know the social discomfort I'm working through is nothing compared to what some of my lurkers are going through. Fandoms know no borders, and I feel like I have a worldwide family out there. Not all my lurkers are aware what's going on or what it's even like to live so close to the kinds of political stress I see people coming from in my trackers, but *I* see you, and I do not and never will take you for granted. I once got after another blogger for blowing her outside views off as spambots. Unless you haven't turned on your spam filters, those dots are PEOPLE.
I think the last big politically incorrect hurdle above all others that we need to overcome is the them vs us mentality, them being anyone who is not us. In the last couple of weeks my blogs have been hit hard by several areas dealing with military incursions and law/justice policies flipping over like pancakes. I can't even tell you how it blows my mind and how honored I feel seeing lurkers regularly coming from dire straits, because fandoms have no borders.
I'm a big leap person. All my life I've been the one in trouble, the one leading the pack into trouble, the one being kicked out of the pack because I'm trouble. Behind all of my leaping has been a solid belief that my all or nothing leaps are important, even when they were utterly wrong. They were important because I learned so much from them.
Some of you know I'm a Jim Kirk fan. Saying it like that is about as understating as it gets, but blogger doesn't allow 30 foot letters glowing into space. I'm not a mommy blogger. I'm not an entertainment journalist. I'm a fan who believes that what we're seeing in our favorite shows mirrors our fears, hopes, and dreams for our own futures. I believe it's important for fans to find each other and keep holding the world together in our hearts and souls while real life keeps blowing it up. I see you out there. You guys are my rock. I especially like that Holly isn't afraid to push me back out of my hole and challenge me. We used to make a game of it, and rock twitter apart, and maybe we will again.
The dark and I are not strangers. You guys know I wanna start bigger trouble than that. I'm not sure if me and Holly could ever break twitter, but there's something going on in this world I want to break really bad, and I see you guys that are watching and I know you'll know when to duck. #aspienado
I've crawled all over my blogs for three years and just now noticed these, and the only reason I noticed was because I created a new domain the other day and there it was. So now most of my blogs have a little strip running across when my pages open up. This is the WordPress disclaimer. It also contains an 'accept and close' button.
I've said in several places that we're going through growing pains until all the internet eventually syncs up. Whining about this won't stop it or even slow it down. Readers have the right to privacy, and using cookie disclaimers allows them an opt out. (I love lurkers.)
click me >=D heh heh
The reason this came up today is because a reader in Australia let me know on twitter that this page looks blank now since I put the disclaimer up. I gave Google feedback on that, hopefully it's nothing they can't quickly fix. :edit: Nevermind, it was blocked at work, lol. You guys surfing my blog at work- I love you.
Americans don't like being told what to do, but consider that one day all our pages will go blank to outside readers unless we keep up with the rest of the world. Ignorance isn't bliss. I've played around in fandoms for a long time, and fandoms are probably on the leading edge of world sync, even ahead of business. Fans find ways to get and share real time info like no one else in the world, and entertainment is trying to catch up with that. Live tweeting the Day of the Doctor with Doctor Who fans from all over the world was pretty awesome. This is what cookies is all about, guys. San Diego Comic Con is another example of real time world sync that depends heavily on cookies.
This is why I don't opt out. EU Cookie Law Could Be the Death of Digital "If you opt out, the next time you go to Netflix, you won't receive any movie recommendations because Netflix won't remember what you've watched in the past. Amazon's famed 1-Click experience will have to be replaced by 15 clicks. Ratings and reviews will cease to exist, effectively silencing the critic in all of us. Google searches will give you results for the wrong city."
Those of you who already know all this stuff, fine, you're on it. Put a gold star on your forehead. This post was for us regular people grinding through coffeejobdaycareschoolcollege and dragging back in our doors to watch a little TV before we collapse back into bed.
