Spontaneous ∂erivation

It amuses me muchly, but it all started due to a troll that showed up, in, of all places, my TEA BLOG.

Here it is.

A lot of it applies to just about any fandom or hobby with whom I’ve shared interests. For some reason, when it’s real life, I don’t have the same chutzpah; but when it’s some subject that barely matters in the long term where life is concerned, hell yeah I will enjoy the bitter, bitter tears that some fanatics shed.

I’m contemplating turning off trackbacks across all my blogs. And now to go amend my ban lists.

… can’t decide how many subscribers I have.

It was the year of fire…
The year of destruction…
The year we took back what was ours.
It was the year of rebirth…
The year of great sadness…
The year of pain…
And the year of joy.
It was a new age.
It was the end of history.
It was the year everything changed.
    – Babylon 5 Season 4 introduction

You know, it’s really quite strange to think about my life in terms of Babylon 5 seasons. My life has been a dramatic one, but that doesn’t mean it was a good one.¹

Anyways, change started back in what might be considered Season 3, which I tend to think of as the previous decade (rather than just one year, a definite difference from Babylon 5). There was a point when I said, “it can only get better from here on out,” and really, it kind of got worse, but nowhere near as bad as the time I map to “The Great War.”

It’s getting better again, but in large part because I changed the nature of S∂. It still serves as a home away from my head of thoughts about Fantasy and Science Fiction, and my Kindle, but, like Babylon 5, it’s switched to a new role (although it doesn’t get guns, you can actually trace the change almost back to when my theme switched over to a long-term, no-fuss theme).

And that role is mostly as a journal for recovering from PTSD. Or, more to the point, a journal where I write down about my experiences in the present, i.e. the flashbacks and other crap. Otherwise, I’d continue in my cycle of coping previously, which didn’t really work—which was to constantly forget what happened to me every single year. As life goes in cycles, and especially since my PTSD is triggered by holidays, that really doesn’t lead to healing.

The path to healing requires learning. Learning requires memory. Memory induces, in my experience, mostly pain. Which is why I strive to forget, and why S∂ now serves as a refugee camp for my experiences. I can look back at previous years (well, a previous year back, almost; “Season 4″ more or less started with 2009′s Father’s Day) and see what happened and try to apply coping strategies.

Heck, I can look at what happens when I try different coping strategies, instead of being scared of coping strategies turning into triggers. I’ll remember when they do. (I should also start making notes about restaurants that get new management and go to hell, but that’s different.)

Anyways, I blog about the Overherd on a somewhat daily basis now. They may or may not become a focus point for recovery. My other interests are Sherlock Holmes (which I need to update more often, but recovery has made it difficult to allocate time to that blog, which mostly involves a deep form of analysis) and tea, which doesn’t require deep analysis but instead a broader spectrum of light, daily enjoyment.

Anything FSF will likely go on Tor.com.

So, hi there. You can probably unregister Spontaneous ∂erivation as a proper FSF or SFF blog now.

PS: The FSF parts left can be considered the Tor.com post announcements, stuff about Echo Bazaar, and my Mushi-shi rewatch.

1. I think… some people wish they had lived lives like mine, for the authentic experience of extreme pain and suffering and the contrast with normal life thereof. These people should not speak of those wishes to me. [↩]

Someone decided to list my site under their blogs on a site profile somewhere. Actually, that somewhere is a Technorati wanna-be, but if they want to be one, they really ought to add a verification method like Technorati does. (Here is a random example I pulled from Google.)

This is kind of dumb in many ways, not the least of which is that you can visit my About/Who page and find out that she and I don’t share names, or even my Contact page to discover, whoah, that email doesn’t even look slightly like it would be owned by someone under her name.

The dumbest and also most dangerous aspect is this: I have murderous stalker insane parents who can still conceivably show up and kill me on my doorstep one day over the next 30 years or so.

I imagine her levels of identity hiding are less than mine. Certainly her paranoia is much less.

While it is nice to suddenly have an extra fake shield identity (even if I don’t control it), well, I’m just a nice person and think this is really an unwise course for her to take.

Of course, I am paranoid.

(Man, I’ve been blogging a lot lately. I don’t know why. Probably because I’m trying to think about anything else than the quiet downtime I currently have to, well, marinate in the past. Anyhoo….)

A long time ago (2.5 years, which is Forever in Internet Time) I started this blog, and I blogged about writing. I discovered that you can get a decent audience that way, provided you networked via some kind of blogging network, like Ning or something like that, so I blogged some more, despite not having a freaking clue (almost all of these posts are gone. I am so embarrassed by them).

Then I switched to blogging about blogging, which is a meta discourse snake that can really boost your website visits through the rough, especially if you manage to write a couple of nice articles that get caught up in StumbleUpon. One month I think I managed 10,000 unique visits a day. Relatively small potatoes, but bigger than tiny potatoes.

From this kind of base, you really can work yourself up. I made a goal for myself of gaining an average of new 10 feed burner subscriptions every week, a very modest goal indeed.

And then I got bored. Blogging about blogging can get repetitive after a while, and lots of other people did it better than me. This resulted in serious visit falloff as I disconnected myself from all blog networking sites (I just couldn’t keep up with some of them anymore, so it became pointless) and changed the focus of my blog. If you could call it “focus”; marrying my Kindle helped, and getting interested in the science fiction genre and more into the fantasy genre helped a lot.

I lost just about all my subscribers. And almost all my unique visits. It was rebuilding time, but this time I really didn’t have any external support. So I wrote about things that interested me, and made me happy, and this resulted in more articles where I felt the zing of my better articles from my meta-blogging days, even if they would never get Stumbled.

At some point I started blogging about more specific items. At some point Tor.com said “Hi there.” At some point I started blogging about PTSD, which I had sworn I’d never do, because I thought there was nothing that dropped all your numbers like writing about, well, very personal woes and sorrows. But I wasn’t looking for numbers anymore, was I?

I still had my web analytics software installed, of course, and my Feedburner wrapper around my RSS, so what the hell, I left them on out of curiosity.

And, gradually, ever so gradually—definitely more gradually than my meta-blogging days—the numbers came back up. These days I generally think about getting an average of 10 new feed subscribers every two months, and that’s happened somewhat regularly, but not because I’ve done much about it—I just blog about stuff that interests me now.

I do want this to be among my last blog retrospective posts for a while, because they can get boring, especially as I now am bored by meta-blogging.

One day, maybe, I’ll have a real platform with medium potatoes numbers, but it will take years, more than a decade perhaps—not just a few, as some of my former compatriots in the meta-blogging world have managed. And by then blogging may well be dead, so it all won’t matter anyways.

I have no idea what’s bringing on the current spate of entries, but they’ve all been interesting to me at least, which is more than I can say for the first months of S∂. I even have what I consider a bonsai blog now, my Tea Blog, where I barely care about hits, and just want to write it for fun.

When interacting with people on the internet these days, I do my best to remember these tenets:

1) Will what I’m about to say end up on Fandom Wank, and not in a good way? If so, what I’m about to express is RAEG!!1!! and not legitimate anger.

2) The only proper way to react to RAEG!!!11!! is to grab the popcorn and wait for the show to appear on Fandom Wank.

ETA: These rules also apply to stupid as well as RAEG.

Being able to discern what falls under RAEG!!!1!!!1! and “rage” means hanging out on Fandom Wank for a while and processing/analyzing what you see (make sure you don’t fall into RAAAEEEEG!!!11!1!! because wanking on wanks definitely falls under tenet #1).

Make sure you’re not drinking anything during this time.

For historical study, check out the Fandom Wank Wiki.

If you’re a blogger, you’ve probably heard about the Federal Trade Commission deciding to come down on blogs without paid editors and whether they got a free copy of things they review. (For more information, see this interview with Richard Cleland of the FTC.)

I’m not that worried about disclosing whether I got free copies of stuff I reviewed on my blog (answer is: generally no, because eArcs are very rare) rather than for Tor.com. I’m not even upset that edited blogs don’t need to comply.

I just wonder if this means that non-professional bloggers will stop receiving free products. That, really, is the question.

At some point (before December 1st) I will finish editing the S∂ reviews and note whether they were products I paid for, received via Hugo packet (which is a variant of “paid for”), free products, or were Tor.com reviews (not covered by FTC law).

I am so rarely satisfied with them. Most of them suck.

But I need to do something fairly mechanical at the moment. Because I am so often wrong about what triggers me that I should start betting against myself.

Update: Well, that really didn’t work. Back to the simpler plugin, which sucks at categories, but oh well.

Well, they always are. That’s the lovely thing about script kiddies.

So here are two specific attacks I’m running across in my logs:

http://www.spontaneousderivation.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/spec-22.jpg
&imgrefurl=http://holmes.spontaneousderivation.com/page/2/&usg=__oXqahCshP1XcZZqnIAJHIBmna8s=
&h=258&w=180&sz=14&hl=de&start=6&tbnid=IgIMoSnmg_6FuM:&

God knows where the hell this is coming from, but it’s streamed in 9 times on a low-traffic blog over the last few days. I think it’s some sort of specific plugin attack.

The second type:

http://www.spontaneousderivation.com/page/2/
&usg=__oXqahCshP1XcZZqnIAJHIBmna8s=&h=258&w=180&sz=14&hl=de&start=6
&tbnid=IgIMoSnmg_6FuM:&tbnh=112&tbnw=78&prev=/
images%3Fq%3DSpeckled%2BBand%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Dde%26sa%3

And this is just a typical ramming nonsense at the server and see if it trips over itself and opens access.

Seal up with the WordPress release, I suspect, or you shall seriously regret….

Off to sleep now. Not operating at great efficiently right now.

It’s temporary, but it’s always nice to see a statistics graph that looks like this.

Much of this is directed at HTML for Dummies, Part 1. It’s got parts two and three but I never got further, which makes me feel a bit sad.

But at least I didn’t do anything flamboyantly stupid to get the hits. :)