Day Twenty- last of 2016 30 day challenge

I've been using this month to slowly turn my ship around under a new star chart, locking down a new heading kind of thing. One of my biggies I've been talking about with my immediate family lately is transparency. I've been so accustomed to hiding challenges and navigating around flaws for so many years that, since I've been opening up and really being more honest, I feel I need to stop dancing around some real things.

First of all, and this really is a big deal and affects nearly everyone I meet in real life, let's just get the whole dog allergy thing dealt with. It's usually not a big deal because I keep to myself, but it's holidays and all the people are pinching each other's little cheeks and saying howdy in person, so I need to be forthright and asplain all the awkward stuff as easily as I can, which in Pinky terms mean ripping the ol' bandaid right off.

I have never told anyone this until now- after hugging several different pet owners over a few years as visits ended (with no pet even being present), my face immediately rashed out and swelled because of indirect exposure, and I had to start slugging benadryl and watch it for an hour in case I had to run in for phenergan and possibly even prednisone. Yes, it affects my health that much. If you own a pet, you are wearing your pet everywhere you go. I didn't say anything because I didn't want anyone to feel bad. Well, that's a lie then, isn't it? I need to tell the truth.

From Dog Allergies on WebMD- "Some people with dog allergies also have skin reactions. For instance, their skin might break out where a dog licks them. Others with more severe allergies might develop hives on their face or chest. People with asthma as well as pet allergies can have especially serious symptoms." Serious means breathing emergency. I usually skip the hives part and go straight to airway with just about every allergic reaction I have, so I am ready for no warning emergency response 24/7. I live this way.

My favorite part about debunking pet allergy myths is scientists finding molecular pet evidence even in homes with no pets (that's a link, click it), because our society is so overrun with dogs and cats everywhere we go, so there you go, just avoiding a dog in its own house isn't enough. I'm also terrified of walking into a home saturated with something else that could cause anaphylaxis, and this includes everything from dogs (medically documented with an allergist) to party balloons, toys, and sports equipment (latex) to everything nuts and peanuts to citrus (which includes cleaners, aromatherapy, and beauty products, especially aerosolized), you get the picture, so it's not something personal against dogs. I would be an idiot to walk into a place where I even remotely think emergency response might become the highlight of our visit, and I know it would make my hosts feel terrible. I know a lot of people still don't get this yet, but if I could get an airline flight shut down over a peanut allergy, I can sure as hell kill your party vibe over a really scary hour of croup and face swelling, which can easily turn into 6 hours in an ER.

I don't expect people to go to this much work, because it's truly exhausting, and it's really not detailed enough to prevent a serious problem. It doesn't address issues like small children spreading contact allergens, what to do when your pet pukes during a visit, stuff like that. Are Your Holiday Guests Allergic to Pets? Here Are 5 Ways to Make Them More Comfortable

I grew up with dogs. I love dogs. I'm not against anyone owning dogs, eating peanut butter, decorating with balloons, and wearing perfume. Instead of you guys trying to make room for one person who necessarily shuts that all down and kills the whole party, just scrape all that off and meet that person halfway in a convenient place for a bit and then jovially say goodbye, no pressures, no hugs, just glad to see someone. And if it really is inconvenient, I am the first person who understands all the holiday pressures and the last person to pile on any guilt over it. I'm a bubble person in a very mobile world, so I mostly live vicariously on the webs. I'm good with that.

My second transparency thing has been playing around with tracking and thinking about making stats public, which involved tests on IP masking and code reinstalls and turned into a bigger headache than it looked starting out. I kept tweaking stuff, like turning off reports on crawlers and bots, wiping out all the IP blocking (I had that so screwed up anyway, all I could mostly see was myself instead of the other way around), generally just making visitor data more accessible. I installed a second statcounter tracker with different settings to see how they compare, and I was fine with the whole visible thing until I zoomed down on the map and actually got a real location, thanks to GPS on mobile, so there is no way I'm making all the stats visible. You guys can see a graph now, that's basically it. No maps.

Even when humans know how to mask their IPs, if they switch to mobile that has GPS locator turned on and ping my tracker without using data masking, I can sometimes see actual locations on a map. (It's rare, but it still happens.) I feel like I would be sloppy to allow all of that to be publicly available. I mean, some people I know check in all over the place on apps, you can see exactly where they are through the day and anyone following on social media can see that (but you can't see all their operating system data like you can on a tracker map), but other people might not want the world to know the actual building they're sitting in. The problem with making stats completely public is that, even with IP masking, a few people can still be zoomed into actual street and building on the map, and I know that because I could see someone in a named daycare parking lot (thank you, Google super zoom) with a timestamp on it. THAT is what I mean by protecting my lurkers by not publishing my stats. There are several of you I can see coming in from named work places, or I can tell how far you drive to work and back home, and it's not because you're careless or because I'm a stalker, it's just stats and I'm so used to seeing mine. (In the old Lexx days, I knew exactly where my 3 biggest 'enemies' logged in from, and one of them pinged from both a work computer and home computer so regularly that I could tell what her work hours were and when she went shopping or out on a weekend.) Most of you are getting really good at the IP masking, which is awesome, but unless you've got GPS locator turned off (I keep mine turned off out of habit), I can still see where you actually are if you are using certain mobile devices and browsers. Not trying to scare anyone, just saying that's why I'm NOT going full transparency and opening access to the awesome map. I wish I could, but I'm not a jerk. Otherwise it would be cute and fun to see all the pings coming in from cities and countries and stuff.

When you visit other sites, if you see a tracker, always check it out. If you can click on it and go to a data site, see if you can see yourself in the stats. If you can see everything about your operating system, IP, and location, so can the entire world, and once someone who for real deep stalks you figures out your patterns on public trackers, they can see with a few clicks what you're reading and when, and sometimes even where from. (Seriously, when you hang out with a group of writers who code their own sites, it can get that intense.) I honestly would never have thought of this stuff if I hadn't had people fighting over something in the past, and it really did boil down to watching public stats. This is why I love lurkers, and I will always protect lurkers. Some day everything everyone does on internet will be completely transparent just because one day it will legally all boil down to that, but for now, we can still be anons, free to glide through the ether.

Ok, I'm worn out. That was way too much thinking for one post. But you get the gist, no more dancing around stuff. 2017 is about 1- getting back to work, and 2- ripping off bandaids.

Time to be real.

last of 2016 30 day challenge- Day Two

It's been over a year since I've done one of these.

Part of my 30 day challenge is to reach a place where some things in the way are out of the way enough to get a much bigger idea written out. Several, actually, but I've got one trying to come out and I need to be a little more organized when it does so I don't lose it all in bits and pieces like I do everything else. Since Christmas and New Year's will be a monumental and continual disruption interrupting my life, best to redirect so I don't have frustrations erupting, and whatever other uptionings there could possibly be. I'm kind of winging it, but things keep getting done. I feel like I should report in, though, but I don't feel like saying "I cleaned my house."

World of Spin
I'm trying out new wallpaper. I'm also playing with the table auto expanding. click for wallpaper Original art from pinterest
Or maybe you don't know what that means. The closest feeling I can find that mimics for other people what I feel for fractals in my head is stuff like this. Like the lyrics, we don't quite know what it all means. If you could see the music as colors, and the timed visuals as an artistic representation of the feelings inside someone else (not as characters or a story), you would be close to what a synesthete might feel in a euphoric state. My synesthesia seems to be much less literal and more orientation based than a lot of what I'm finding described on the interwebs, but when I'm like this, I see wonders I can't begin to describe. :edit: Since the word "orientation" is quickly coming to mean something much different now than what I intend, I need to let you know that I'm using it in the classical sense, spatial orientation, not sexual, although I do admit this probably sure looks like it. Perhaps, I'm subtexting, but again, if I could share what the music part does in my brain, you'd forget the rest and want to soak it in like a drug. Autism sensory issues have been compared by some to psychedelic drug trips without the drugs, and I can hit nirvana pretty quickly with this vid, for whatever reason. Once there, all thought of 'me' vanishes, and I'm just moving through the colors.
Just drifting past, by, in, out. Many years ago I wrote this poem when I was in a mood just like this one. EQUATIONAL ELAPSE I suffer a brooding earnestness to coalesce--      what is life in a world of spin? I feel an awkward compelling to merge. I glide and collide through denseness and time--      what is purpose in a world of spin? I want and have not where I am when. I see vastness, smallness, matter of mirrors--      what is hope in a world of spin? I know up is across is inverted is naught. I dream my own patterns and cleave to ideas--      what is joy in a world of spin? I will die ere the story reveals me.
I see stuff like this when I 'go deep'. I saw stuff like this long before fractals appeared in artwork, or even mathematics. I have been making stuff like this in my head since I was a child. I don't know how to make it to show to other people like some more artistic people do, or how to find a way to describe it like mathy people do, but I do know it means something. This is a detailed (be it real or imaginary) map of multi coordinates. I see colors as places, and where they are placed in relation to other colors as whens. They don't all reside inside what we think of as a universe. Someone studying synesthesia might take what I just said very literally and point out that's exactly what it really is, colors placed in specific locations in a time order, but since I can't show them how I can move in and out of it, I can only say Sure, whatever. If music can evoke a feeling of nostalgia, a pattern of colors can surely evoke a meaningful journey to a place. It's very hard to describe color being something other than an actual visual to people who use visuals as part of the description process. To me, this artwork is communication, the same way a road map is. If we were some other type of being and not humans, this might be a logical way to express instructions.
I first recognized this weird visualizing was a real thing outside myself while sitting in a theater. This could seem very stupid to someone who's never experienced a thrilling leap of recognition in any kind of symbolism. The lights had gone down, the ads were over, the screen was dark, and then a new rendition of the Wehrenberg Theaters bumper theme started up and I froze. It's the 1980s version with the jewels, you only get a couple seconds of it in that vid link. The view panned around and over and through the animation and *felt* BIG, with the jewels spinning and choreographed into what almost seemed like a flight pattern to alight onto the crown. That was the first time I could see anything close to how I could manipulate visuals inside my head actually going on outside of my head, and it was important because they were geometric shapes and colors, not symbolizing anything else at all. The screen was big enough to immerse me into the animation the same way I could go into the stuff I could see in my head. A few years later, the science of chaos emerged into the general population and fractals seized the imaginations of artists around the world. A few years after that, it went digital, and now anyone can create fractal art, and even choreograph it and set it to music. Trying to explain to anyone that I could do much more than simple fractal zooms in my mind at the age of 12 is useless. My psychologist asked me once what it was like, and that was about the only time in years I stuttered and went hopelessly silent in his office. If I could press my head up to someone else's and file share, I'd do that without hesitation. Or throw a thought like we can throw stuff from devices to other screens now.

My very first tracker embed code was named World of Spin. It still works, and the map is still active. The most recent hit from the time of this snip is from Wisconsin Dec 1 2016 11:48:56 pm The time is off because it didn't reset for daylight savings, that should be an hour earlier. I could tell you the page that got viewed on another blog, but I don't want to spook anybody.

That's right, I'm not sleeping. I'm usually sleeping by now. It's probably cheating if I call this Day Two and post it before midnight, but I might do that anyway.

I can already tell my brain is going to call in sick Monday

@ 3ish pm

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.

Why Google Quit China—and Why It’s Heading Back
The list of blocked websites in China (2016)
Test if any website is 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 heard you

Two more days until my one year anniversary here.

click for HampsterDance

What I have learned so far-

Statcounter shows my own phone viewing from St. Louis, Kansas, and Illinois.

Blogger views don't count me when I'm on Chrome because I've got my cookie blocked, and there are around 1700 Android views that I can triangulate with other trackers to not me, so my blogger views are you guys.

Twitter is my top referrer, thanks to hashtag days, G+ is second, google search engine in U.S. fourth, google search engine in EU fifth, facebook 6-9, and buffer tenth. I had never heard of buffer, but looking it up I see it is 'the Siri of social media'. If that means scheduled posts with tweet links, yeah, that. I rarely schedule, so I'm surprised to see it made a top ten list.

Besides my G+ page, my top referring url is Pinky blog, apparently many of you keep browsing while you are here. I wish I had a little slot to serve you coffee or something. My top internally referring post is the #bencongruity of lambs, lollipops, and goth spaceships (pre-coffee), 2nd is ... (yes, that is the title), 3rd is 5 ways people push my asexuality button.

GWT (Google Web Tools) says both my top impressions and top clicks (I assume from outside sources) is 'khanlock'. I linked that to all my Khan posts in case you're interested.

Google analytics (installed two weeks ago) shows my bounce rate is 28% out of 231 sessions (that's actually really good). Between all my stat trackers and analytics, 38 countries have visited Pinky blog. This is consistent with my history in the Lexx fandom, and I know several Merlin, Sherlock, Farscape, and Stargate fans pop in and out, making my decision to step out and be a real person aggregating all my internet stuffs a good one.


Remember, stats are my #aspienado train obsession, finding web sharing algorithm flaws is my favorite game, and mocking analytics is my favorite sport. I aced 3 stat classes in 3 different college fields, and numbers mean nothing when they're skewed, inflated, and then assessed incorrectly. Analytics help companies sell click space. Us little guys jumping in is just us splashing around the shallow end of a giant corporate pool. If you're using a tracker, my advice is use at least 3 trackers, because they will all show you completely different things, and you can triangulate your data for more realistic info. The goal is to watch trending over time to see how your content is doing. You can whine about comments, but the goal as a blogger is to attract and retain readers. I learned long ago that for every one comment I get, there are thousands of views, and the fact that they're sticking around and even coming back is gold. Never use a lack or slew of comments to judge how your blog is doing. Your lurkers are your bread and butter, as it were.


That being said, I never expected this.

Or this.

Because I was content with this.

I am- mRpl, GrandFortuna, YabloVH, Bluejacky, JanikaBanks, PinkyGuerrero, GuidoSpock, aspienado, ExistentialAspie I'm everywhere, in the mists all around you.


You guys know why I'm here. Please excuse my gooey feels. I just never expected this much support on a personal blog. Some of you know how difficult a challenge it is to be honest (i.e. brazenly stupid) with personal stuff, and more because I've been taught all my life to hide everything that is wrong with me, and it seemed like there was nothing that wasn't. #aspienado But that's ok. We are all who we are.

ok, now I'm just wasting time

Trying to wrap my head around this. My different stat reports are wildly unsynched. Maybe you have the same conundrum.

Examples-

This blog. I loaded stat counter onto it right away. Blogger says I have 1160+ hits, stat counter says I have 398. However, blogger shows 10 countries have visited, stat counter shows 13. What gives?

My dotcom. Same thing, loaded stat counter right away. WordPress says I have 481 hits, stat counter says I have 644. WordPress shows 39 countries have visited, stat counter shows 40 countries. These two counters seem to be more synched on their numbers.

My Lexx blog. Same thing, loaded stat counter right away. Blogger says 1060+ hits, stat counter says 260... *wow*. Blogger says 9 countries have visited, stat counter says 16. That kind of backwardness boggles the mind.

Obviously stat counter and wordpress pick up my audience locations pretty well, but I'm wracking my brain over the disparity between the visit numbers. I am aware there are 'unique' visits vs returning visits, and that most spam is generally filtered out from being counted as a visit, etc, but as far as I can tell, even though stat counter allows google search pings and a couple of other pings to get through, their visit numbers fall below what blogger calls visitors, and wordpress stats are so dismal by comparison (while on the page itself it displays a 'hit brag' that is ridiculously higher than the stats it shows) that it makes 75% of the possible incoming look like it must have been filtered out spam that it just threw away. But as little spam as I'm actually having to trash, that just isn't making up for the lost numbers.

I've got about ten years' experience with site trackers. If we wanna drag my old site meter account into this mess, then I can see that over the last 8 months on my original Lexx blog I have gotten 1212 hits on stat counter, while site meter says 746 unique visits and 1176 total page views, so it looks like stat counter is apparently catching page views just fine. So if stat counter is comparing well to site meter on total views, what is wordpress dropping the ball on? What is blogger additionally catching? Because I know site meter is very stringent about not counting spam, BUT I also think it's so old that it doesn't recognize newer mobile devices very well. Stat counter and blogger do a fantastic job catching mobile hits, but site meter reverts to 'unknown' for the operating system even when it does a brilliant job identifying the browsers used, and I've been suspecting that the newest devices don't even get counted. And honestly, I can't help wondering if site meter is somewhat abandoned because I no longer receive support and I can't log in any more without my Kaspersky going crazy blocking phishing downloads.

So what do the visitor numbers actually mean when 4 different tracking systems don't match? How can you tell if it's a real visitor, or an automated ping from someone linking your site somewhere, or an automated spam trying to leave something in comments, or a stalker that comes back every single day for several months? (I've had several of those, gets a little creepy but I've learned to ignore them.)

I used to triangulate my trackers trying to pinpoint the difference between two different visitors, and found out that even when I get a solid comment with a timestamp, not a single tracker showed I had a visitor that time of day from anywhere near where that person lived. Some visitors are like ghosts and don't show up at all. Imagine that.

What you really want out of a good tracker, besides seeing how many countries visit (because that's really cool), is seeing who keeps coming back. I think the most flattering stats are the ones that show return visits. WordPress doesn't seem to count those. Honestly, WordPress is so ridiculously counterintuitive that I'm just stunned when I finally stumble on a follower list and find 80 people there. And that's another thing, if your blog winds up in a 'reader', those emails or views in the reader don't count as hits on your blog. Amazing as this sounds, hundreds of people that never show up in your stats could be reading your material, and this is especially nearly untraceable if people like your stuff enough to copy (and even translate) to their own sites. Even if they link back there is no guarantee their own readers will backtrack to your blog, so you don't see those hits on your content.

I like that.

I must be crazy, you say.

I've had some really cool surprises discovering that some of my content has been translated into other languages, not by a software translator, but by real people who took the time to rewrite my words into their languages. My first experience with how cool this feels was realizing that what I was seeing on my original site meter years ago was that someone in underground China was opening every single page of my old Lexx blog post by post, in order, in too short of a time frame to actually read, and back then there was no such thing as google translate so I don't know if they even used a software translator, but I'm pretty sure my entire Lexx blog was copied and then translated into Chinese, and may even still exist somewhere. Considering how limited their internet is from contact with the U.S. I found this extremely flattering. Some of my stuff has also been translated into Russian (I've seen it), and maybe even other languages, which I think is wonderful.

But they're ripping me off, you say. I figure it like this- there are several billion brains on the planet, any ten thousand of us could be having nearly identical thoughts at the same time, I just happen to be writing them down. Whatever I splash out onto the internet for FREE is open season. I don't quibble. I also don't put anything on public blogs that I don't want ripped off. In ten years I've never asked anyone to remove anything of mine from their sites, even if it wasn't linked back. I take it as a compliment that people take my stuff. Besides, if I croak off, who cares?

Stat trackers are fun little toys, but until you spend some quality time playing with them, you really have no clue what those numbers represent. They still frustrate me. I would love to take them apart like tinkertoys and cobble them back together into my own frankensteinian tracker.

Did you see my title up there? It's just reaching 10 a.m. and look, I've got all this writing practice in, lol.