I've talked about google masking, and some of you have become so brilliant with it that you think you're completely invisible. Well... these are how other bloggers handle incoming.
I've had a steady flow of hourly/daily/weekly traffic for years. It's easy to misunderstand trackers and mistake a friend lurking for a weirdo stalker, and I freely admit I once very accidentally had a friend cease and desisted. Yes, actually. Since then I've backed off on the IP game, but a few of you do need to know that just because you are masked doesn't mean your IP isn't lit up like neon all over a tracker, and that it seems unusually obsessive and ties in nicely to specific blog dates. Yes, there are several, not just one, so it's nothing terribly personal, but I do think 'regular readers' are being far outpaced by a handful of 'consumed with what Pinky is doing' *cough*fans*cough*.
The people who just went on alert thinking it's them- it's not you. Seriously, I know the people who will do that, and it's not you. This isn't anything bad, it isn't upsetting me, but I think it's only fair that a few regulars kind of know this happens in case I trigger again. I'll try to hold it down to Pond of Death and keep it private. Regulars also need to know this is common. This happens all the time all over the internet in every form of media, and I knew coming back out I would need to be psychologically prepared to handle being so visible.
I share because
I hope I'm good for people
so I don't have to talk on the phone repeating stuff to individuals
I need the public awareness for the kind of support system and safety net I've constructed around myself
I have disappeared before without explanation and upset a few people
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.
As someone with a cognitive diagnosis (Aspergers), I have been psychologically evaluated and documented as being easily led. I'm a sucker. I fall for the whole friend thing. I have a hard time filtering through subtext and whether someone is pulling my leg or using me and whether I'm really the bad guy if I'm the one who finally says Ok, it's time to stop this... You would think with as much internet experience as I've got I would have caught on to all this by now, but I'm still swimming through an ocean of social deficit.
I realize other people have their own stuff, too, but my point is that this silly idiotic dragging me into head drama stuff is so, what word am I looking for... redundant. Whining to someone in private isn't a skill set in the problem-solving arena if you're not willing to do what it takes to actually solve the problem. And telling me over and over and over only makes me want to poke your eyes out.
Guys, I'm not kidding. You could be someone I love dearly and I'll still snarl at you and rake your back up till. you're. bloody. The reason I try very hard not to do that is because it's been done to me and I know what it feels like. The other reason I try very hard not to do that is because that isn't the kind of public person I want to be. I loathe having to deal with this kind of stuff, which I'm sure many of my hardcore lurkers totally get, because they understand the issues I already deal with. And if I won't go that far out of my way for my own family, why should I for someone I've never met.
Anyway, I'm so done with the love triangles. And the confessions. The angsting and weeping. The pouting and moar pouting. The innocent defenses and angry retorts. The lack of anything better to do than pokepokepoke people.
Especially when someone has no regard for what's going on in real life. Like the world's biggest live tweet that we only waited months for.
Every once in awhile I think something so cool I just want to talk about it to somebody, and I don't know a single soul in real life who would understand a word I'm saying.
You know how source code (ok, just nod your head, all right?) tells you all this gobbledygook of wassappening (keep nodding) and you go ohhhh, yeah, ok, and then you think about how you'd write it yourself so you could see this or that variable as well (it's ok, you can stop nodding, just hang on) and then you wonder if your own source code in your body is like that. I mean, I have a Lyme marker, right? But you can't tell by looking at it whether it's in an active state or just a dormant marker. You would know I had come into contact with the Lyme bacteria and so therefore must have suffered at some point and am now a passive carrier, as I also am with CMV, and I'll probably wind up developing shingles later in my life because I still carry the chicken pox virus. But looking at the markers, you don't get a timestamp. It's kind of the same way with basic source code. Unless it's set up with lots of extra doohickeys, you have no idea when a visitor dropped by your site unless they click something you can see. Facebook is real bad for that because you can't just drop your own tracker in.
Timestamps are pretty awesome, because real time feed is a huge thing now. Stuff is whizzing around so fast that you practically need continual timestamps just to keep some kind of context, almost from second to second for some things. Our body source codes don't exactly keep timestamps, although we can figure out when some things must have happened and sometimes in what order for something else to be like it is now, right? But it all keeps moving around and regenerating. It doesn't hold still for an epoch like the layers that you can see slicing down through the Grand Canyon.
So I'm effing around some source codes today (ok, get your mind out, that's ctrl-F and then putting a search in), you know, for kicks to see what kind of blazing trail I'm leaving through someone else's stuff that I lurk on (this is where Tank could see what Neo was doing moving around in the code) (here, just take an eye break)...
Click for an ~actually cool~ post about Wall Street.
Ok, I'm not exactly stalking, I'm just lurking around more for my own amusement than for actual info because I'm too aspie to care about real human interests, I get bored too fast. So I wind up tiptoeing through the code thinking about neat things.
Anyway, I thought Wouldn't it be neat if we could right click our own bodies and just see the source code instead of having to draw blood, and then ctrl-F a search parameter straight to what we want to know, right? You know, like ["CurrentUserInitialData",[],{"USER_ID":"thisgermID","ACCOUNT_ID":"thisgermID"} blah blah ["CurrentCommunityInitialData",[],{},numberhere],["ISB",[],{},anothernumberhere],["LSD",[],{},anothernumberhere],["BanzaiConfig",[],{"EXPIRY":blahblah,"MAX_SIZE":blahthisamountblah,"MAX_WAIT":thisblahblahlong,"RESTORE_WAIT":anothernumber you get the point. (Nod.)
And then I thought WAIT, maybe we can...
I don't want to go too fast, so take a little break here, get up and stretch or put some dishes away or whatever while this cool song pumps you up to move around.
Ok, we're about to go some place really cool. My head. And this is good practice for me because I rarely share what's actually going on in here, so I'm sending thought waves out my arms and fingers through a keyboard off into a crazy invisible soup of zippy signals so they can settle into your monitor and glow into your eyes and become part of you. Brain sex. It's weird, and it's awesome. You ready? Well, not sure you can really get ready if this is your first time into my kind of weird and awesome. Just see if you can follow me.
Several days ago I shared a couple of posts on facebook, one saying the universe is fake and the other reconsidering the flat earth movement and then flippantly stated"If what I just posted before this is true, the earth could be both flat and round and inside out and all kinds of other things without any conflict. I've been thinking about this for years."
Those of you who've seen my little obsessions over everything from polychorons to envisioning a cat in hypertorus mode will probably be ok with this. The rest of you noobs will probably need a thinking cap. Hang on.
And I just took a wild romp through knitwear for pets. Sorry about that. If I'm losing you, you can click this next one and disappear like I did, but you'll be responsible for the following info and tested on it later. J/K, I know you'll come back because the suspense will kill you and you'll have unresolved weird dreams if you don't come back.
Good, you're back! See? This will be fun, I promise.
Let's assume that whatever state of existence we find ourselves in now, it's only like this for us, the way we actually think. We can't really see it from the outside of our existence. If you could step outside your body into other dimensions, your body would actually look quite different. Being 3 dimensional isn't very far from Mario or Link being 2 dimensional, but they have no clue, do they? They run into walls and make all kinds of mistakes that they totally take for granted, but we can see their world is really flat and has the illusion of being 3D. We play 'flat' video games all the time that look 3D.
Well, we live in a world all the time that looks 4D from one dimension outside of our viewpoint, and we don't have a clue. This was very well depicted in a Farscape episode called Through the Looking Glass, where Moya (the living spaceship) was unable to starburst properly because she was pregnant, and she got stuck in mid-burst schismed into four simultaneously existing but still all the same Moyas. Since Moya is a 3D creature, she couldn't exist for very long like that, and the crew got a hint from a higher dimensional being, which they were unable to properly see or interact with, on how to correct the problem. It was wonderfully weird and tense.
Imagine Mario or Link getting stuck in a weird schism like that, and you can see what happened and what they need to do next, but they can't- how would you communicate a simple idea to them?
I once read a scifi story (can't remember title and author) where an object was smuggled aboard a spacecraft past security because it had been dimensionally turned inside out, and no one could recognize it. I don't remember whether it was the same story that had someone undergoing alt-dimensional surgery because that was the easiest and safest way to remove shrapnel or a cancer without having to be cut open and lose a lot of blood. If you think along these lines long enough, you can imagine how our earth could be both a sphere and flat, and how our universe could be very different from what we conclude about it through our senses alone. Our senses help us navigate and survive, but they don't reveal to us everything there is. Case in point, the weird brain sex. My thoughts are glowing into your eyeballs right now. That shouldn't even be possible if all there can be is 3D.
Back to my source code point. There might actually be a certain way of looking at ourselves that really is as simple (to our minds) as popping a search ID into source code to find a problem, like germ warfare or cancer, but we just don't have a clue yet. We're still bouncing off walls and making all kinds of mistakes, like Mario and Link.
The reason this came up today is because I ran into another really old Lexx fansite that had been wiped out along with the rest of Geocities in 2009, and there's a guy out there working on resurrecting all the old archives, and there's a chance many people will get their old sites back. Since the root code was restructured, most of the old links are broken on the pages coming up, but if the owners realize what's going on and reclaim their old pages, they can get back in there and relink what they've got in their archives.
And the reason I kept meandering through thought after thought about source code is because I printed out the source code from two of my niece's old Geocities pages after she died, and it was all we had left of her sites after Geocities went down, because that was before I had learned how to rescue and salvage. (And now you know why I have such a deep compulsion to rescue and salvage.) Source code looks like a bunch of gobbledygook, but even the simplest source codes say so much about what a person was doing. I read through her old source code and I can see her, like Tank can see Neo. And if doctors had been able to correct her own source code, she'd still be here. I bet you guys didn't know that is exactly what they're trying to do with CF, correct the source code. Yale scientists use gene editing to correct mutation in cystic fibrosis
Before she died, she teased me with all the cute little things she could do with her secret codes, and she never would tell me how she did things like marquee and mouseover, or embed music and gifs. She learned to build all her stuff from scratch. She kept secrets about cellspacing and stylesheets. She was just a kid playing around on Geocities, and mocking me with all her cute surprises that made me so jealous. I kept asking her to tell me how she did it.
And then she went away to a hospital and died. About a week after that in the middle of my sleep, I dreamed that I asked her to tell me her secrets now, now that she could go wherever she wanted and do whatever she liked. And I started dreaming about codes. For years I never even looked at a tutorial, I just sat there and figured stuff out after another dream I'd had. I went through brain fail about 7 months after she died, but that didn't stop me from building my first Lexx fan site on a glitchy old computer on dialup (I couldn't even pull up the page to see it until I saw it on a computer in college), and when I came back public I started dragging my glitchy brain through tutorials.
And now I watch people through their source codes while I think.
Three different people have told me they keep dossiers on me. None of them were joking.
Sometimes you accidentally cease and desist an amateur you know in real life and then stuff gets awkward.
And sometimes it gets weird.
I wish we could get together in a lurkers club and swap tech advice, but I know that defeats the whole purpose.
So we just quietly watch each other.
I live for the plot twists, like when an ultra dark lurker pings on top of me and someone else lurking each other. I know you know I know you know I know, but now you know.
