Per a few of the posts I've made lately, I'd like to mention that I'm getting calls again, this time from Las Vegas from alleged 'publishers' who want to help me with my book. I have the message saved on my phone, along with the phone number. I thought the timing was cute, and it's disconcerting as I am not only unlisted, but especially as they tied my pen name to my phone number when the last publishing solicitor in California used my real name. Before that, other publishing solicitors called trying to interrogate me.
Real publishers don't solicit. I am already contracted, so I had already called my own publisher and asked them about this. They sounded pretty shocked this was happening and assured me they don't give out client info.
The calls I'm getting might actually be legit, but it has the feel of someone working very hard tracking me down and letting me know they know where I am. I could be crazy, but my psychologist keeps insisting I'm not. It's funny they keep trying to help me sell my book, instead of other spammy things. They're trying very very hard to help me sell a book... The very first one who called let me know that if I handed over all my blog material they could put together the book *for* me. I'm a nobody, what in the world makes them think I have material worth any kind of money to them? They haven't even seen what is going into the actual book, and I'm sure not discussing it over the phone with a solicitor.
I've said before and I'll say again- If I ever disappear off the webs, it won't be because I left on purpose. I made a promise to stay public. I have my own story, and I'm already contracted. I'm not part of the entertainment industry except as a fan and an unpaid reviewer. The personal secrets I'm dealing with uncovering for my book are much more pervasive to all of us as a developing culture, but very disturbingly turning up in entertainment. Much to my surprise, eggs have started cracking throughout that industry unbidden by me, and I'm knocked over by how similar those stories are to my own.
If none of this is real, all I have to do is ask- Why the obsession, then? Because I'm not the one making up the obsession the entertainment industry has with certain themes and retelling the same stories over and over in varieties of ways, and I'm most certainly not alone noticing this.
K, I'm over the moc thing, lotta water under a bridge and thank goodness someone sane knows how to talk me down.
Now let's have some fun. 😁
Got this in my mail. Absolutely no idea, not a clue, why, wtf, wut, nada.
When I click that link it goes to this site, which looks legit when it first pops up.
However, when I remove the ?bhu= to peel it down to an original dotcom, it goes to this.
Please note that neither address on those last two shots have my name in the site address, like the original link did in the email above.
This is not the first time I've discovered that Pinky is associated with t15h in .ru, which basically means someone has a site set up in Russia specifically for link smashing app spamming junk. Why my name? God knows. Why Andrew Potts? God knows. The only connection I have to an Andrew Potts is I once ordered Little Links merch from his keychainproductions site, plus I've made a big deal in past linking a bit of his stuff around my blogs.
Just to make sure it's me Pinky and not one of the 12 other ones, I checked other Pinky's stuff, and I'm pretty sure there's no connection, except through me linking, which I rarely do so our content doesn't get entangled. She has her thing, I have mine, we both happened to be grabbing web IDs at the same time without even knowing it, I wound up with the twitter, she got the pinterest, another Pinky entirely got the facebook, still another got the linkedin, and dang if there aren't just a slew of PinkyGuerreros taking over the world. But not like this weird link, that is NOT any of us. By the way, if you EVER see my name on anything asking for money, it is NOT me unless you also see it linked on my official dotcom.
I'm going to make a big bad guess that this is one of my *cough*botfollowers*cough* fans who just loves pestering Pinky blog hoping to get some attention. Well, here you go, you got attention. The whole world can see you bugging me and either pretending to be Pottsy or bugging him too or whatever the boink is going on, and dang if I'm not getting a heads up poking me to go see what you're doing. Who knows, it might've ALL been you, right? You're a genius, you need someone to notice.
click to use this yourself
Ok, here's the thing. I believe sometime, possibly in my lifetime, one of two things will happen.
1- Dirty nukes will take down grids all over the planet and internet will super fail and all the fun will be over.
2- World Order will seize control of the internet and synchronize all of us and all the fun will be over.
And that is why none of this bothers me. Whether I shut all my stuff down myself or someone rips it out of my hands and mangles it up, y'all have heard me say first I'm not too stressed about it since I was the one nuking my own stuff in the first place. So you guys in other countries making fake mes on facebook in Brazil or hijacking my youtube vids in Germany and China or hitting me daily with app smash links and page openers- I don't care.
But the real question is do I appreciate it? Yes, I appreciate being alerted third party that my name is being used to hijack an American site, thanx. Yes, I appreciate the fun little jaunt off into space I took checking it out because my day wasn't exactly bubbly and I was needing distraction, thanx. Yes, I appreciate being able to use this as content now because, honestly, I'm hitting a burnout wall and have been awfully cranky lately, and this kinda cracks me up, so I'm sharing, thanx.
But I'm mostly wondering if this was a homework assignment and I was chosen because you get real feedback or something, go tell your teacher to give you an A, and tell Putin thumbs up on the whole Trump and North Korea thing, I saw that coming months before it happened. Nice theatrics there.
The rest of you are stewing that I'm steering off into this instead of finishing that Mantrid post...
Burnout, guys. 7 weeks of Disney Jr in my house. I appreciate all the distraction I can get.
:edit: 5-25-17 And this is why I use a Torch browser. Excellent vid, sorry to see it taken away from the public.
Caught it. Finally caught it. The hardest part about catching who exactly is doing what is when they know how to be invisible to trackers but still show up on blogger stats. Blogger stats are the vaguest stats I've ever seen in my life, but dang they actually see the incoming, so I can't fault them at all. I went through the Brazil and Ukraine things and laughed, this one has been a great big pill and I've finally got it nailed down now. I've been able to confirm that it began immediately after embedding a javascripted paper.li widget into Pinky blog, which meant their sharing code was vulnerable. This isn't the first big media site I've linked to and been cyber spammed out my eyeballs behind the scenes. If you guys think spam emails are bad, you've never seen bot swarms pinging back from legit companies who don't have a clue how to secure their sites and get hacked like crazy without even knowing it, and their clients get swarmed just for linking them. Yes, I was a paying client, was being the operative word.
This hacker who's been pinging me over the last year is definitely based in France, confirmed taking over my stats for months, and since the beginning of this year I've been watching 6 posts in particular pull in 50 hits a week each, over and over, like on a regular schedule. I never could nail the referrals until today because they were always mixed in with regular incoming. This morning in the wee hours I caught a loner, and all the rest was already in place.
This is about hash merge redirects. I don't think it affects you guys at all, but it seriously skews my statistics. Basically, hackers will use fairly innocent app sites like streamsend to set up redirects to a cover site that looks like porn but is REALLY a scalp site that hijacks personal info off your device. I've been able to compile a list of apps being used to hash redirects and they all go back to the same site, which no one would ever find on a search engine (big red flag that it's not really porn).
So why in the world would hackers like this be working so hard to get into Pinky blog? Well, my email address is like my phone number or social security number, a unique identifier that opens a great big door all over my medias. My blog fleet is only as secure as the host I choose, and that's pretty much why I've been sticking with blogger. They do most of the dirty work keeping the sewage cleaned out behind the scenes (they trash the spam for me, I normally don't see most of it), and these hackers are looking for ways around a really tough security system.
Why is this a big deal? Because my stats boomed. I want to know if those are real readers, right? Well, about a third of my readers at ~very particular times~ are fake. The rest of you are still real. I really did experience a reader boom, but it's been a little bit inflated lately for some reason. I couldn't help noticing they took the bait I put out awhile back and immediately fixed their bot to crawl instead of remaining static, so someone actually is paying attention. Hello, Someone. You Suck.
It's all good. We're both laughing.
All pix in this post were previously used and linked on Pinky blog, so I'm not linking them today.
coconut meringue, toasted like a giant marshmallow
The throbbing headache is finally gone, sure hope it stays that way. Although I usually blame not being able to move around for pain that bad, I was surprised to find during a quick search that radioactive dye can also lend to some pretty rough joint pain. My worst 'joint' is C1, so maybe it was affected.
Coming off that amount of pain sometimes leaves me a bit disenchanted, even if I'm actually feeling way better. I guess old brain chemicals are still seeping out the ol' coils after percolating around the pain. I'm ticked 50 different ways over nothing, and not even coffee is helping. I'd also considered part of the headache might be caffeine withdrawal since I cut my coffee in half this last week, but the headache was gone before the first coffee of the day, so maybe not.
Woops, said that all too soon. I had to get up from here because a pull in my back set the throb off again. So, super fibro flare it is. It's ok though, moving around helped immediately. My physical therapy training wasn't wasted.
Insert: I'm glad I cut my own hair. I have an awesome shag and my bedhead looks fantastic.
I got this email alert last night. Since I don't have an account with these guys, and since they handed me a password, you know all my cat toy alerts went off.
A quick search on that dot-org pulled this forum thread up. "I am planning for massive web spam and want to make sure my assets are safe." Um... So I looked at home page. My favest thread title is "100% Content Automation [Looks Human-Written & Passes Copyscape] intelligent software". I just lol'd. omg, there is so much crap out there. The whole world is fake and everyone's making money on it. Plastic all around us, all methaphors included.
Compared to THAT, statcounter is like sucking on a sugar cube, there's just no nutritional value whatsoever. I've been playing nice with my trackers. I put a harder hitting tracker on for about a week maybe what, a year ago? And I couldn't hide it and IPs shot out of it like neon for everyone to see, so I removed it. I could piddle around in the darker recesses but they'd want more money than statcounter ever got out of me, so I'm this close to just letting that go and flying blind for awhile. Numbers jump and drop and I can pretty much see certain percentages of incoming staying steady over time, app bugs poking around not really making a dent in the actual load numbers, and real time hits from link shares have been surprising successful, so I guess it's a matter of letting go of an obsessive tic on my end. Checking stats is like people checking social media on dinner dates, it's a bit repulsive if it's automatic. So I'm going to start practicing NOT looking. Statcounter expires in March, and then I might just delete it. All the info I might want to save can easily be copy/pasted or screen shot.
As for that dot-org busting into my email trying to tell me what to do, that was a blatant invitation to surf the outer edges of wide out in the open doorway to darker webs, and personally, it feels like a foolish move. Flies going in get eaten by spiders (spydars), and they have nothing I want. There's no fun in making fake content for fake readers, I don't care if it makes me a jillionaire. I cherish one real reader at a time making their way through real content because it touches something personal.
Yesterday was a small venison roast. I think today I might look into shrimp with some kind of homemade Mexican rice or something. I've got a tomato, a bit of bell pepper, and a few olives. Just remembered I also have some taco meat frozen back. Who knows how far this could go.
All the rest would be awesome falling back into place- Bunny back in daycare, @bonenado back at work, getting all our $$ sorted for taxes- but *boop* the heater blower blew out in Scott's car and just missed warranty by that much, so here we go, it's below freezing around the clock and time to scrape up some money. It wouldn't feel right if something wasn't going wrong, would it? Thankfully, he can take my car.
It's all good.
Oh, forgot to mention my mixer nearly caught on fire making that meringue yesterday, so now I'm looking at mixers.
Being caught in a mass tag notification blitz has prompted me to vow never to urge my own readers to write reviews or vote in polls for me after I'm published.
Since my name was embedded in a comment among at least 20 other names on a post that had numerous responses coming in left and right from people I've never heard of in my life, and since I was keeping sounds on my phone waiting for one of the kids to text with info I was waiting on, and since it's a holiday weekend and I was also waiting to hear from other people in real life, I facepalmed through a really weird 10-15 minutes of trying to get that to stop.
Blocking never works on mass tagging. Unfollowing, muting, stopping notifications on a particular post- none of that works on mass tags in a comment. And then a joke came through about the media host not allowing any more tagging for periods of time because it had reached spam level, but brave attempts were being made again every so many minutes.
I like the authors I follow, especially the ones who are part of the gang, but that wasn't cool, and it's embarrassing to have to break through with a comment to please don't in future because it makes me look like a bad guy not being supportive.
So, yeah. If the only reason a book is moving up in a poll is because a bunch of people are being aggressively encouraged to go vote as often as possible, that doesn't speak well for the quality of the content, in my opinion. The polls are ridiculous in the first place. Very few people pay attention to those, and so many books in the list had zero votes, it's hard not to stop and say srsly?
I've made the decision not to purchase and read that book. It could be the best book ever written, but that annoyance stuck with me and every time I see that book cover now I will remember the day my phone blitzed to the point where I was ready to throw it out a window.
I'm not saying this to be mean or petty. I'm not going to name the book or author or say anything negative anywhere else. I'm just saying don't tag me any more for that kind of stuff. If you've never been on the receiving end of tag spam (and I have multiple times, I know a lot of people), just please go read Social Media Netiquette and The Top 10 Rules of Netiquette for Social Media.
I finally got my first spam comments here on Pinky blog. The only way the spam comments got through my border patrol was via spam G+ spam account, so I'm really glad I had the moderation set to pending, and they only hit 4 posts before they gave up. Not bad. I've had a lot of blogs, have seen all the spam, have been wondering if the tight controls on blogger were a dream come true or something. All the same, might oughta set my other blogs the same way, just in case.
Timehop says this was a thing last year. I forgot all about it. I ripped the code but I can't make it work here (mean ol' blogger!), so if you can see it there, click on the circle button to see the cool card.
This tweet got more actual engagements (counts more than RTs & favs) than anything else I've tweeted all month, including anything Lexx.
It's kind of weird being public, because my own silly self stuff gets more actual traffic than Lexx stuff, but the most interesting thing I'm discovering this year is that crossing these streams spikes that traffic in all directions. I'm not any kind of social media butterfly, but I do have fun experimenting with how to move traffic, and since that was my goal from the very beginning, I feel like I'm having a really good year. Spoonie #aspienado openly sharing my #Lexxperience multifandom style is working better than anything I've ever done to get more eyes on both me and Lexx. Interesting.
My crew is just about out the door and back on the road, so Christmas is pretty much over here, except for what's left between @bonenado and Pinky behind the tree. I'm wiped out, so I probably won't be popping out on the twitters much yet. Mostly family texting and stuff this week, has been forever since so much has happened on Christmas at OUR house. It's nearly time to GET TO WORK! >=l FOCUS!!!
Meanwhile, got a little weird here on Pinky blog. All that angsting for months, suddenly dropping hints...
I almost never even go over there. (That clicks to LinkedIn.) If I took myself more seriously over there I'd probably scare people. I mean, can you imagine?
Current: Hijacking source code. Education: Kicked out of high school physics for beating the teacher in the derby race.
Summary:
Conceived on a motorcycle.
Trained in exsanguination and dismemberment.
Skilled with knives and keyboards.
Experience:
Controlled burns, dispatching varmints and troublemakers.
Wrasslin bunnies.
I also make a darn good apple pie.
Projects:
Reallocating space in my spaceship.
Formatting the latest live tweet review.
Skills and Endorsements- Top Skills:
Knowing when to stop and take a nap.
Juggling chainsaws and eggs.
Pinky also knows about:
Everything Johnlock.
Screwing up tables on blogger.
Education:
Thrown in the deep end of the pond.
Leap clear if you can't find the brakes on the tractor. #tuckandroll
Additional Info:
We just got a new roof so you might not reckonize the house on a google map now.
Following:
Many skilled magicians and thieves.
It's tempting. But a few of my connections take themselves a little more seriously than that, and, indeed, world dominate, so I don't want to be reassessed as property value fail by association.
Back to today! Yes, I made pie.
Day 2 of @bonenado's alarm not going off, we suspect Bunny tampering sometime during that 14-hour day. I also magically put on 2 pounds that day that aren't coming back off. Who knows what other surprises giggle in the dark waiting for us to find them.
I also got more spaceship work done yesterday. Behold my new work station. I promptly bumped something off behind the dresser, @bonenado says my loss, so today I need to figure out a bumper system where the gap of death vanishes. Temp solution is rolled towels, but I'm sure that'll be a fail sooner or later.
After I moved my work station I majorly found the kitchen table again, and today I'll be wreaking havoc on a buried counter that caught the flotsam and jetsam during the first big reallocation wave.
One of the biggies about my new work station is that I'll be able to stay on my feet and work. I moved around a LOT more yesterday. I mean, I'm always moving around, I'm the person that pauses Tosh every 5 minutes to jump up, right? But I've got two main grinders to get through this week, one being the live tweet review, and I simply cannot sit through that without neck and shoulder death and risking spiky headaches. One of the nicer changes after TWD left off last season was noticing my pain level went down because I was doing less force-work. So we'll see how I handle s6 standing up. The key to good standing work is a really good pair of athletic shoes, and I'm all over that.
I made the executive decision yesterday to stop being polite. I've mentioned in past that I don't have a natural timer in my head and often go down rabbit holes, forgetting to eat or never noticing the time passing in my enthusiastic jaunts into superfocus. I've worked very hard on learning to be polite. I've recently dissected exactly what that is to aspienado, and I think it's best if I stop doing what doesn't come naturally to me in places I shouldn't even venture. I still have DMs and PMs from several people sitting in a sort of pending hell because, and I keep saying this, I suck at being friends. There are exactly 5 people in this world, not counting actual family, that can reach me any time, and I'm good with that because they don't. They don't bug me with texting or phone calls, and they totally get that messaging through social media isn't a frivolity. I would love to be able to rank and filter inboxes on social media, that really is the biggest fail of networking. Kelly says scarcity, I say inaccessibility. 'Strict filtering' and 'only friends' is as vague as 'everyone I happen to be in line with at the water plunge ride in a theme park'.
Ah, yes, I jumped off the dissection. Do you know how much time goes by during typical social convos? 80% of interaction is pleasantries and word dance routines. My kids are allowed to bump me off track any time, but since I hilariously fail to unmute my phone half the time, 'any time' is kind of like 'whenever I happen to notice 2 hours later'. And then when we do get the phones bzzt bzzt bzzt-ing, they don't expect me to 'chat' or ask how their day was. They also know one wrong move can launch me into power point or Cthulhu from the abyss, so they don't prompt or poke me for response. Oh, I'll respond...
Anyway, if something's not working, stop doing it, right? And messaging isn't working for me. I don't have time to check out a new tv show someone says I'll love, I don't have time to put the brakes on ALL THE THINGS wondering wtf is this weird question about how I could be more supportive of a college student in another country having a bad day before finals (yes, seriously) (I apparently need sensitivity training for anguished souls who feel locked into doom by cruel parents), I don't have the time to juggle several real time unrelated dramas about who isn't talking to whom while I myself am grieving a loss (this actually seems to be a life theme, I may have to investigate this karmic riddle), and I certainly don't have the time to 'check out this bio' from a complete stranger who insists on using me as a step ladder. I mean, that one's a given, right? Here you go, a fun little game.
Yes, serious about the skyping sexploit thing. You people need to realize that as long as I don't name names and point fingers, I can talk about that all I want, right? It's a free country and this is my blog. I'm getting a little rankled by how many of you tease famous people, like it's an attention game or something, and then turn around and privately rip them like they're so awful when you're the ones starting the crap. What's really disturbing is how many times this has happened just in the last year to the same actor. Good lord, people. Call yourselves fans? That's not even cool. And I'm not talking about the actual skyping content, I'm talking about the laughing behind the back thing. >=l Pisses me off. See what you did there? You made it about ME. So now I hafta use Pinky blog for a #reoribraintation. (Get it? Reorientation. Never mind.)
Anyway, rulz. Whenever aspienado winds up in a spinning wheels in the mud kind of rut, aspienado extricates and flings mud before zooming off. I could go count and link the times I've said stop, but I have better things to do. My new rule is ignore, and that's really hard for a speed reading aspienado with a very serious reading compulsion. (That was a confession.) You know why I write so much? So I can stop reading.
If you or someone you know needs to chat on social media ~right now~, there's not a support group for that. Yes, I'm one of the worst when it comes to continual broadcasting, but I'm not bugging you guys to respond. I keep saying keep trying if you need someone to talk to, but that doesn't mean commandeer someone by cornering them in private until they feel the need to cut the relationship off. I'm saying this to at least 12 of you, and not just about me. I'll confess right here that I've been the worst in the past, and I had to learn the hard way myself why. that. doesn't. work. Trying to force explanations out of people is no replacement for good old fashioned reasoning something out yourself.
One observation I've made on social media is that people I've known in forums and facebook and whatevs are still saying the exact same thing ten years later. Seriously. I can't even imagine looking back ten years and not seeing personal growth and change. I can't imagine another year of stagnation. 2013 felt like serious stagnation to me. It was the year I yapped the most on twitter.
Need a work jam so I can pull my eyes off. Gotta keep moving. FOCUS! GET TO WORK!!!
I've lightly mocked Sumall and other analytics in the past, including pinterest business analytics, google analytics (I was a beta tester), youtube, and even compared notes between my own blogs' different traffic counters in the past. Stats are like a train counting passion with me. I took stats courses in college through three different fields, the most rigorous being sociology, and there are oh so many ways that stats can be misleading.
When we say "impression", we mean that a tweet has been delivered to the Twitter stream of a particular account. Not everyone who receives a tweet will read it, so you should consider this a measure of potential impressions. Both reach and impressions should be treated as directional metrics to give you an idea of the overall exposure the tracked term received. Use these metrics to get a sense of the size of yourpotential audience, and use engagement metrics like retweets, clicks and replies to gain a more complete understanding of your impact. You know the junk mail you get in your mailbox at home? And the junk email you get? Impressions are how many times your tweet or post or pin or youtube has been delivered to a feed, including list feeds and hashtag feeds. Impressions have nothing to do with people actually seeing your tweet (or pin or blog post in a search or youtube), especially when you think about all the junk or bot or dead accounts that follow you. Still, it's fun to think the possibility is there. In fact, the more popular the hashtags or tag words or links you make in the text, the more often what you posted gets picked up by bots for impressions. How you hook the bots is key to putting yourself 'out there' for the possibility of being seen more. THAT is why impressions analytics are useful, you can use them to gauge how well you are being picked up and distributed.
Let's play with this a little bit. According to twitter analytics, these (below) are the top tweets in each of these months. Keep in mind what I said about impressions. For instance, this first one was retweeted by one of the top NFL parody accounts, and even though it wasn't shared or responded to very much at all, it was distributed from that retweet through a whole slew of feeds I generally don't have access to. Even then, it didn't get anywhere near my favstar top tweets. Favstar is a much more reliable source for actual performance, and I even pay for pro because I find it so useful. But back to mocking twitter analytics.
Nov 2014
This was the week Leonard Nimoy died, and this probably remained much more private in a single list feed of friends than nearly 7000 people actually seeing it. You can see I didn't hashtag or even mention his name, but being convo-linked, it must have gotten caught up in the flurry of redistribution just by association. This is where I question how 'real' impressions are, even for feed distribution.
Feb 2015
The Walking Dead hashtag is pretty good for being flung by bots into more feeds, but that show is so saturated with a plethora of delightfully creative hashtags already that this hardly means a thing.
March 2015
Check these next two tweets, which were obviously actually seen by more people because they got more real response, thanks to Mr. Potts retweeting them. Andrew Lee Potts gives good tweet if you're cool about promoting his stuff.
April 2015
May 2015
This is a surprise. We've barely started June and already I've got this nice reach/response combo, so the impressions might actually mean something here. See the hashtags? MondayBlogs is a big deal and I've gotten some sweet traffic out of it in the past. Still, actual hits on that post at this very point in time is only 67, so I can clearly see that impressions do NOT mean much when it comes to actual link clicking. This is why I mock impressions being a thing. Yes, they are useful for gauging how I'm putting myself out, but they're useless for just about everything else.
June 2015 (so far)
Let's switch gears now. If that weren't enough, there's also such a thing as top media tweet, media meaning graphics of any kind, like pictures, videos, vines, etc., basically a tweet with an attachment. These are big deals because when they go viral the numbers go crazy. I've never reached a crazy point, but I admire some who have, although it's difficult to admire users who have figured out how to swipe the responses by coopting with the 'quote' option, which knocks you into the 'mentions' category of analytics. Since places like Ana Tweets don't count being quoted in their top mentions, your best actual response can still be completely missed or glossed over, so there is a bit of outcry about quoting being a form of cheating in order to steal response off other people's tweets. I actually view being quoted and my response being 'stolen' as a compliment, it means my tweets are worth something to other people. You won't see that in analytics.
But back to twitter analytics. Top media tweets are useful for perking up your timeline. If you're depressed about having a slow response day (because you're a real person and don't buy followers or have a ton of bots following you), just toss out a couple of cute pix and voila, someone retweets or likes, so you know your feed hasn't turned your entire reader base into zombies. Want to see what your readers respond to? Media tweets are a quick and fun way to experiment.
This one really was an experiment, everything about this tweet is so rare that pretty much the only way it got noticed was by fans who look for these things and this actor in particular.
Nov 2014
This is my most 'impressive' I think (ha, pun), because without a single hashtag I got this many impressions from a group of people who use a list feed to stay in touch. This speaks volumes for that list feed distribution.
Feb 2015
It helps to be live tweeting with a television show if you're looking for a way to be seen by more actual real users as opposed to twitter bots. Reading live hashtag feeds are the new 'reality show' of the internet.
March 2015
Tagging relevant accounts (we all hope for retweets) when we promote others usually helps jack the numbers a little, and always try to squeeze a hashtag in there somewhere. Being more specific would have been better, but I ran out of room. The #scifi hashtag is so vague that I'm sure this tweet was buried very quickly in that hashtag feed. I think I pushed the same media/link later with hashtags like #spaceship, but this one got top tweet since it was retweeted by the show creators and one of the actors.
April 2015
See what I mean, rev up a slow day with an oldie but a goodie.
May 2015
We've all seen people who get tons of retweets every day, and we wonder how that's happening, since they don't seem to be doing anything else but tweeting. Some get lucky, but a lot of it is either about turning networking into a game, or paying money for upgrades, promos, and followers. My twitter account is 'organic', meaning that most of my followers are real people (even the parody accounts) and I don't play the follow back game. I grew my twitter from scratch mostly on my own work and I really don't care about numbers. If I did I'd have over 4000 followers by now, but I keep banishing and purging.
Numbers are fun, but as I keep asking, do they really mean anything? Some of my best days have the lowest numbers attached to them. Why do I call them my best days? Because an actor or film maker or private club might have DMd or PMd me. Because I might've had a really cool private convo with someone. Because I might have noticed half the world hit a particular blog one day out of the blue and realized someone linked me somewhere, which is a nice compliment. Because I might've discovered someone hacked one of my youtube chicken videos into an Asian porn site and laughed my head off. Because I might have accidentally run into someone saying really cool stuff about something of mine that they took the time to translate into another language.
Slow days are good days. I don't have to see what's happening in analytics to know how I'm doing. It's fun, yes. It's good brain exercise to think about strategy, and good practice doing experiments, but don't let analytics be your 'report card'. What an auto-bot algorithm might tell you is your best work might actually be about the stupidest waste of time you ever did, and it's easy to feel disappointed that something we thought was more important didn't even make the bottom of a count list. Don't fall for that.
I see tons of advice floating around on how to build your media presence, blah blah blah, but in my experience, all you have to do is create a unique name or phrase and then attach it to hashtags, pictures, and links of all kinds, and then you pop up in all kinds of searches. Sheer numbers that never get measured are how many times pictures in search engines will click to something you created. The easiest way to get noticed is with variety. Tweeting or blogging the same thing over and over doesn't build web presence.
I'm afraid there are only two ways to get big numbers- with big money or big work, which includes persistence. They say do what you love, right? If you don't love doing what it takes to get the numbers, why are you worried about the numbers? Actors work very hard to get where they are. Film crews work very hard and sometimes dig deep into their own pockets to get where they are. It's not magic. You want to be a success? Either shell out the dough or work hard. Preferably both.
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.
