It’s gotten very cold in my world. I would leave the house slightly more if I wasn’t embarrassed to leave in my snuggly pajamas.
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Seeing the limitations of my own reach on social media via traffic to egregious is humbling, to say the least. I don’t share all my posts, and I don’t cross-post to all the websites when I do, so I’m only getting samples of what my visibility is like on social media. The samples aren’t impressive, though.
I keep thinking that little reach of mine is it, end of story, in terms of traffic, unless I decide to advertise stuff or write potentially viral content.
But I completely did not consider search engines as a source of traffic. There it is in my stats. Search traffic.
Of course I do not have my stats configured correctly, so I don’t know what searches are bringing folks here. Are they coming because of movie title searches, maybe? I have been watching an awful lot of movies. I also link to news articles by title sometimes, so that might be a source of traffic, but again…no clue. There’s a real easy way to satiate my curiosity I probably won’t do.
None of these numbers mean anything *tangible* to me, anyway. I’m not monetizing. No ads or sponcon here. I guess if someone performed a statistically near-impossible number of clicks to get traffic from a search engine to this website, then my author website, and then my books that cost money, I could get paid at some point for what I’m doing, but my understanding is That’s Too Much Work And Users Don’t Do That.
These are the mental negotiations I make with myself to convince myself that I blog into a silent void, and the void is important for maintaining the fun of it.
I live in perpetual terror of being perceived.
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The instant I saw the words “gay musical parody of Saw,” (NPR) I ran off to send this article to a queer horror fan friend of mine. I just gotta say…you should DEFINITELY try to be the kind of person who gets queer horror musicals sent to you. What a personal brand. (I get funny animal news and unusual applications for human skulls sent to me, which is also a great person to be.)
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We are to be punished with a sequel to This Is Spinal Tap. (Variety)
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The Doctor who got me into the show briefly for one short binge when Eldest was a baby has come back, and now he works for Disney. (Engadget)
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Ars Technica shared a fun project that allows you to play DOS classics in your browser.
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Here’s an interview that offers an explanation for the Roswell incident (NPR), which is not as compelling as the line drawn between the rise of UFO conspiracy theories and the alt-right’s obsession with America’s so-called deep state.
“The foundation of our modern conspiratorial age in our politics begins in the wake of Watergate with UFOs,” Graff says. “You don’t get January 6th and the big lie in the 2020 election without the foundation of those UFO conspiracies in the ’80s and ’90s.”
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Digby’s Hullaballoo has interesting commentary on the generalized and incredibly personal hostility of Trump followers.
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Book Riot covers the dystopian nightmare mirror universe of a website claiming to offer a right-wing book fair alternative to Scholastic. Because we really needed to get more right-wing than Scholastic.
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I’m going to link this NPR article about bat penises with the warning that it’s about bat penises. There’s diagrams. Detailed discussion of bat sexytimes. If you click on that, you gotta know what you’re getting into. But they describe a kind of mammalian intercourse that is…not familiar to me…and although I sort of regret knowing about it, knowledge is power, or something?
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Lawyers, Guns, & Money tries to understand large language models. It seems they’re not confident in their understanding by the end of it, but I actually feel like this explained things well.
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They really didn’t need a giant storm battering Russia and Ukraine’s coasts, yet there it is. (AJE)
More than half a million people are without power in occupied-Crimea, Russia and Ukraine after a storm in the Black Sea region flooded roads, ripped up trees and took down power lines, according to Russian state media and Ukraine’s Ministry of Energy.
More than 2,000 towns and villages were without electricity on Sunday night and Monday morning in 16 Ukrainian regions, including Odesa, Mykolaiv and inland in Kyiv, as trees were uprooted, power lines snapped and electrical substations failed, leaving almost 150,000 households in the area without electricity, Ukraine’s Energy Ministry said.
