Thinking Unenslaved

w00t! after i moved the otherwhirled over here and got its shiny domain and all that, it took my current Internet Service Provider about 3 months to actually get statistics running where i could see them. and by ‘where i could see them’, i mean, they got statistics set up (except for search engine and other referrer data) and never sent me the login to the statistics module, so i thought it wasn’t done. then, once i finally got access to the statistics and discovered there was no referrer data, i just went and signed up with Google Analytics. i may have even mentioned that.

i kept hounding their tech support, though, on the limitedly viable premise what i was paying for certain services, so at this point, in conversations with one particularly-overpaid-for-his-lack-of-intelligence technician, attempts were made to convince me that referrer statistics had been running all along, even though there was a gross disparity between what Google Analytics reported and what their statistics didn’t report. finally, after three months, i told him about the noticeable difference between their statistics and Google’s, and surprise-surprise, i suddenly had full referrer statistics that have now been pumping to me for the past month. whee!

{don’t you just love the phrase ‘gross disparity’? i do. that’s why i used it.}

so, without further ado, i present to you the most recent ways in which people stumbled upon the otherwhirled via the search engines, duly qualified by two statistical systems, no less!

• “headless body found in topless club” ~ that’s funny, i always thought the paying clients might find head in a topless club. what a twisted world.
• “james briggs stratton” ~ i used to link to him, but he was getting awful right-wingy there for a while, then i glitched up my Google Reader while i was moving the site and never got him replaced. i think i was the only one clicking through to him, but here’s a link to Bats Left, Throws Right for you.
• “bear attacks” ~ bear attacks can cause panic attacks which can cause heart attacks. weird, ain’t it?
• “biguns” ~ i appeal to an awfully intellectual crowd.
• “condi rice ‘in her bath’” ~ heh. still a favorite of mine, but i didn’t do it. for those of you who just threw up in your mouths, you’re very welcome.
• “condoleezza rice nude” ~ fine. here you go, you sick bastards.
• “darkblack wordpress template” ~ this is funny on several levels. it’s an excuse to shamelessly link to darkblack again, though. that site should be in your blogrolls anyway.
• “freedom to petition” ~ yes, i’m all for that. where do i sign?
• “fuck-his-wife” ~ yes, i did. that’s how we got the Otherlings, after all.
• “http://www.otherwhirled.com” ~ well, no shit. the address bar is usually above the search bar on your Google homepage, moron. learn how to use your browser.
• “nonnie9999″ ~ well, that’s nice. go visit Hysterical Raisins and tell her i sent you.
• “perverts r us” ~ i still think this should be the official RNC slogan.
• “ron edmonds” ~ obviously doesn’t editorialize when he shoots.
• “skating trolls” ~ we had a logic-impaired, self-fellating, semi-professional keyboard masturbator bugging some fellow bloggers a while back. i paid him a modicum of attention, he mumbled something and slithered away. coward.
• “spice girls inflict their” ~ INFLICT THEIR WHAT!?!?! you just can’t leave a good search phrase like that hanging. i’m very disappointed.
• “touchdown jesus, photoshop” ~ obviously typed by a heathen, because “Jesus” wasn’t Capitalized. you are SO going to H-E-double-toothpicks, you non-capitalizing searcher! and i still want to know what happened to his feet.
• “what i want for christmas essay” ~ again with the lack of Capitalization. if all you got was coal in your stocking, it’s because Santa Claus technically represents the Holy Spirit, and you. have. pissed. Him. off. still, i thought it was a decent wish. a boy can dream, right?
• “young and tender” ~ actually, i think your searches for interns should be confined to the government web sites, Senator!

so, there you have it. the search engine shenanigans have been revived! now your lives are complete!

previous shenanigans:

• I
• II
• III
• IV

…i have been on temporary hiatus due to preparations for a move and the fact that my new provider has not yet been able to respond to my support ticket for getting this blog imported at the new location, which also adversely affects the move of synthaetica.com and the draft of our business site. there has been very much i have wanted to snarkerize, but i’ve been partly trying to balance out duplicating the work between two installations of the same blog (the last time i tried importing it on the new system, it stopped at October 1), and there’s a lot of clean-up work for us to do before we drag a realtor out here to see what we need to do to this house before we put it on the market. we’re not the messiest people in the world by a long shot, but we’re not exactly neat-freaks either. and Mrs. Other and both the Otherlings were apparently remarkably proficient pack-rats in previous incarnations.

anyway, i guess since filing a support ticket during the middle of the holidays was a bad idea, i’ll just continue on here. there’s a lot of crap to do today, but i’ll try to get some good snarkery up later tonight. it would certainly be good stress-relief.

be careful out there, ‘mong the English (i don’t know why i just thought of that line from ‘The Witness’. i suppose i should actually take offense at it since i’m Scotts-Irish).

….i’m just waiting to see if a support ticket with my new provider, regarding the failed imports of the contents of this blog into the location of its next incarnation, will be rectified in the near term. elsewise, you’d've already been redirected to the new digs (with a fancy-shmancy new theme, i might add). in the meantime, be patient. i’m trying to be. but as mentioned here, i may just do it the database way and have done with it, at which point or shortly thereafter, you’d already be at the new digs, anyway….

we are back from the frozen wastelands of slightly-north-of-here. despite being this far north (relative to the residences of many of my readers), this was our first “truly white” Christmas in several years. yeah, yeah, yeah…there’s been snow on the ground the last few years…snow like somebody went and opened a fifty-pound bag of flour over every square mile. this year, there were actually a few inches of sun-and-wind-skinned snow setting, and some appreciable drifts courtesy of the wind.

it was an early Christmas this year, thanks once again to the sisters’ conflicting work schedules. one of my brothers-in-law got half the family sick because of something he brought along with him after having gotten it from one of his kids. so our short, early Christmas rapidly became a care center for the stricken: my other brother-in-law, my son, and both of my parents-in-law. i knock on wood several times a day.

i am trying to pump out the blog transfer for the otherwhirled and synthaetica, but i have experienced a wordpress import problem that may ultimately require me to do the import directly from the database. in fact, i should probably just do that and scrub the support ticket. it’s been a while since i did something completely databasey, anyway.

and, for what it’s worth, i know this will eventually come up in searches for wordpress+'import & problem'which is by no means the point of this post. but in case that happens, i hope you read down to this to discover me saying “the wordpress import problem is probably somewhere in my php.ini, the default installation of which is an excellent example of too much information in the way of code-comments provided in the file.” because if it wouldn’t be such a butt-pain to read without all the comments, but my limited understanding of regular expressions keeps me from making that available in any sort of responsible, feasible time. besides which, i’m not really confident of the intrinsic, ongoing, and long-term benefit of seeing that file as just a bunch of settings with no explanations. heh. i’ll just have to sit down and read the whole damn thing one of these days, but….*yawn*….

anyway, we are back, except for #1 Daughter, who is continuing her annual stay with her grandparents, who always enjoy her company. she’ll be coming back on New Year’s Eve, i believe. and we are back, but will quite likely be moving—out of this house at a very likely minimum, and possibly even out of the state. it’s all rather hypothetical right now, but the bottom lines are fairly simple. the Spouse Unit is getting laid off where she works, and some of her best job opportunities could potentially lead us to “follow the money” to places as far apart as Santa Clara, CA to Colorado Springs, CO to Minneapolis, MN to somewhere in Florida. Colorado Springs would be our preferred area if our current location isn’t an option, although Minneapolis would put us closer to the Spouse Unit’s sisters.

but even that aside, the other bottom line is the fact that even after putting a lot of money down on this house when we moved here, the inherent limitations on how much i can make when working almost entirely alone coupled with the fact that companies out here do not come even close to compensating intelligent, well-educated females for what they’re actually worth is forcing us to consider selling this house and moving into town. None of us want to do that, but since we put so much down on the house (which was actually a very good idea on the time, just one that was based primarily on the expectation that it’d take the Spouse Unit about six months to get hired. instead, it took almost 18. and then her layoff comes at the bottom of the bell curve of my business cycle (not many people get married in the winter, and soccer’s not a good game when it’s less than 40 degrees. cold-weather injuries are a bitch).

so, it looks very strongly like we’re moving. we just have to figure out how not to make it an entirely bad thing for #1 Son and #1 Daughter. the photo is from our current front porch just this morning. several retouch methods, obviously. predictably, with the prospect of moving looming over us, i will be more inclined to document the views for what little time i have remaining.

congratulations to my father, by the way. it took the VA until just this past Monday to finally award him 50% disability with back-pay. it should have been at least 75%, but now that he has finally been awarded something, the paperwork, while considerable, is much easier to file. i’m glad you finally got something out of them, Dad. hang in there!

as in, “back in 3 days.”

happy holidays, all!!!

as in, “back in 3 days.”

happy holidays, all!!!

…i have decided to change the theme for the site. change is a good thing.

i wouldn’t be able to answer “why” in so many words per se, but i very much like the theme work of milo317. Kyrian’s blog is using one, as is synthaetica.com and so will be the next version of shadowmoon.com. milo317 is a very prolific theme designer and has been very easy to work with in developing a custom theme for shadowmoon.com. she’s also an accomplished artist and graphic designer.

so, thanks milo317 for your themes, and especially for putting up with me!

geez, that was almost painless

if the feedburner feeds do not automatically revive themselves after i get the theme and plugins uploaded (i will also double-check it through feedburner), then if the few of you who subscribe to the feeds will let me know, i’d appreciate it. that seems to be all done correctly now, though.

i forgot that WordPress’s export/import process wouldn’t retain images. i’ll try to get the images back in. sadly, i didn’t do a very diligent job of ensuring that i kept images i uploaded to here all in one concise place. they’re probably not that big of a deal, but i’ll get that fixed a) if you ask to see one specifically, or b) if not having it up here just really bugs me.

i have to re-upload the one gallery i had up here and configure the gallery plugin. that can probably wait a bit, since you family members, according to my previous statistics, had pretty much looked at them all.

i’ve got to reconstitute my blogroll and tweak the sidebar as well, so for those of you who were on it, i apologize for the sudden lack of linkage. i’ll get that fixed next, while i’m batching out some client photos.

if you’re wondering, i changed hosting to bluehost.com, one of the most reputable national hosting systems available. i found very few negative reviews, and their price is literally a fraction of what i’m being charged from my local host. i do think i should make it clear, however (and not just because they might be reading this), that i greatly appreciate my local provider (see the footer of the otherwhirled for details). i have learned a lot from them and have appreciated the efforts of especially one individual there (Isaac). the bottom line here is, frankly money. money, and the fact that support, while effective, is often rather slow. bluehost’s system is so comprehensive that in many ways the need for active, personal support is moot. i was able to get dawnne.com transferred and running, setup with email, ftp, and statistics, over here without talking to anyone. and the few questions i had before signing up were answered within 30 minutes in person, via telephone, in response to questions from a guy who pretended like he couldn’t read a website, no less. very impressive.

enough about that. moving on….

well, i’ve got to do some work for a bit.

and i won’t be back again. well, at least not at the current ip address.

i don’t know what i was thinking. wait, yes i do. i was thinking that keeping the money in our community was a better thing. and it typically is. and i am a big proponent of keeping the money in the local community. so doing this bugs me on several levels. however, when it comes down to the fact that for the hosting of six domains, i am being charged $150/month, when i could just be paying $6.95/month (for better service, greater configurability, and higher bandwidth, no less)…well, it’s time to move.

so, that’s what’s going to happen. i have already semi-successfully moved dawnne.com. i say “semi-successfully” only because i have to re-upload a couple of galleries and a few images (stuff that didn’t make it via the WordPress export/import utility), and because someone in the WordPress development group thinks we like to have to hand-enter our blogrolls if we ever pick up and move. that aside, moving over to BlueHost was not only a complete no-brainer in financial terms, but was also done in less than 12 hours, although DNS propagation outside North America may take longer. and goodness knows i have a bazillion readers from overseas on my personal blog. har-de-har-har.

did i mention it was BlueHost? it’s BlueHost. shameless plug from a woefully shameless man.

so, like, over the next few days, i will be moving everything. the hardest part of this is going to be moving the blogroll. because i like to serve the click-through method (the supposed reason why blogrolls exist), i will have to add some of the more recent additions into my google reader so i can do the export thingy from that to the wordpress blogroll. i’m going to take my time on that, however, as i am more focused on getting some client stuff done before Christmas. just be advised, you’ll see temporary burps not only in the website, but in the feeds, and when the website comes back up, it won’t be perfect from the get-go.

i just said “get-go”. yes, i was raised in Texas. carry on.

i do want to say that i deeply appreciate the services of my local provider (see the current footer). this is primarily a money issue. sure, as with any other small-business host, service sometimes isn’t what i would ideally want it to be. but i have learned quite a bit from them, just as i have hopefully helped them learn about WordPress hosting as well. they are good people, and i do somewhat regret bailing on them. but, like i said, at $6.95 a month, i can simply choose not to eat out ONCE each month and i draw even, or better. pfft. what was i thinking….

ironically, this comes immediately after making the comments plugin gravatar-compliant. if you haven’t setup a gravatar on your email address, why not? well, the reason why commander[dot]other[at]otherwhirled[dot]com doesn’t have one is because apparently they can’t handle email addy’s with [dots]. that aside, it’s a fine way to make your comments across your favorite blogs—all of whom should be supporting the gravatar project—more consistent, so peeps can recognize you and see how cool you are.

hee-hee….did that get your attention?

actually, it’s nothing really major this time, other than the fact that i have belatedly discovered a hosting service that runs circles around what i’m currently getting, and literally at a fraction of the cost.

as a result, you will quite likely see some service bumps/oddities in the following domains:

1. dawnne.com
2. selanie.com (my daughter’s site)
3. shadowmoon.com
4. shadowart.com
5. synthaetica.com
6. fairweathertempest.com (my brother’s site)
7. otherwhirled.com

bumps will come intermittently. i’ll try to have things up and running on them properly. those of you who have access to your own sites (er…that’d be Daughter the First and Not-So-Little Brother), i will use the original information i used to setup your stuff when i move things over. any questions, just ask.

~d~

there may be burps and glitches this morning as i install a few plugins. it shouldn’t affect the feeds.

if you look at the footers here, here and here, you can probably guess what i’m installing, but also to give them credit where credit is due, and probably because i’ll screw up and forget to put them in the footer of this blog….

1. Alex Rabe’s Next Gen Gallery ~ i have some plans for the otherwhirled that may include a gallery format on certain photos, especially as we near the next major elections and there will be plenty of photos of Republican candidates ducking past the White House, etc. and gallery-izing my LOLcons and otherwhirled originals (whenever i put more than two up, lol) is just an option i’d like to have.
2. Andrew Ozz’s Shutter Reloaded ~ i use this on my other blogs to preview images. the code is phenomenally clean and it works much faster than Thickbox or Lightbox (the two more popular versions of this type of thing). but if good photoshoppers such as Tengrain are going to post here occasionally, i want to give them the opportunity of providing higher-resolution versions of their talents, and Shutter Reloaded is a grand way of doing it.
3. Oliver Seidel’s ContactForms II ~ used on my other blogs to replace the wordpress comment mechanism, and i simply would like to have it here for consistency’s sake. to implement this one, i have to edit core wordpress files, hence my reasoning for this post as warning that things might go “boom”. i haven’t screwed up implementing it yet, but there’s always a first time. after it’s installed, commentators will have the option to contribute their comments as an email to the author instead of a regular comment, and will have to prove their humanity. sorry about the latter requirement, but in the past week, i have seen the spam beginning to shift off the original otherwhirled over to here. neat-o!

as a reminder, i still would like others involved here in the otherwhirled. if you’d like another place to share your insight, witticism, and/or anything else talk to me at commander[dot]other[at]otherwhirled[dot]com.

your regularly-unscheduled programming will begin again starting tomorrow, folks. very sorry. i’ve been trying to get some answers for a medical condition that would be minor if i had some answers for it and why it has gotten worse lately. nothing major (i hope), and no need to worry about contagion via this here otherwhirled. suffice it to say that out here in podunky podunkersville, well-informed and, dare i say, competent answers are hard to come by.

for those of you on wordpress (hosted at wordpress.com or not), i offer two items of advice, if you are interested in knowing who’s really linking to you, and how many people are visiting your contributions to the general irresponsibility of the world at large:

1. WordPress statistics is very generalistic. they depend entirely upon whether or not the proper tag {wp_footer()} is contained somewhere within your main index page and any other pages that might serve content (author templates, archive templates, category templates, tag templates, single post templates, and wordpress ‘page’ templates). if your theme has all those separate templates, but lacks the proper code, those templates won’t trigger information into your stats. and if you’re on the hosted wordpress.com, you can’t edit the themes. see why i left? well, that was reason # 57, i think.
2. When blogs that link to you directly, as in through a particular post, update their content and that post scrolls to the next page, that link will disappear from your wordpress dashboard. i just saw that happen with links from Jess and Tengrain. so basically, you can ignore that kind of shit too in your dashboard. Also, if someone simply hasn’t clicked a link to you, say in someone’s blogroll, for a while, wordpress drops reporting it as well. this is one of the reasons why i try to take time out every week to click through people’s blogrolls.

in short, the wordpress stats and dashboard information never come close to matching the real stats i get from my server software itself. so, at the risk of pimping something my wife may or may not be working for in the near future, i humbly suggest google analytics. it’s free, for one thing, the stats are far more verbose, and they match succinctly with the actual statistics i get from my server software. it does a lot of other useful things as well.

i also have a sitemeter thingy running from my sidebar. it’s not very verbose, either, for what it’s worth. at least not the free one. my stats from feedburner are absolute crap (they report less than 30% of the hits my server stats say touch my feed. kinda sad, that, and i’m glad i don’t pay for it).

okay, that was your handy tip for the day from Commander Other. carry on!

…and ‘cuz i don’t feel like doin’ nuttin’ else t’day.

except client work, of course. durn clients never go away. maybe smack the kids around a bit and yell at ‘em for bein’ mine.

okay, okay, put up the damn christmas tree. lowercase ‘c’, because “he” was just a propaganda tool, mind you.

so, i added some new additions to the blogroll over there on the right, because i was tired of following links from other people’s blogs to theirs. i’ve been reading/watching/listening to these folks for a while, and i like ‘em. you should, too. hell, most of you probably already do, but according to google analytics, SOME of you are ‘new’ visitors each day, so what the hell… ~
more below the fold

i have become infected with a virus that started with Splotchy, wherever it is Splotchy lives, and has made its way to me here in South Dakota, where people willingly share viruses, but frequently attempt to deny that sex exists. at least, the religious ones do, anyway. but i digress, which is a particularly exceptional talent of mine. a pity, that, no?

at any rate, here i sit with a virus at my fingertips, courtesy of Jess Wundrun, who got it in turn from Enriched Geranium who contracted it from Dr. Monkey von Monkerstein (no doubt during one of his $1,000-per-plate campaign dinners), who got it from FranIAm, who apparently picked it up from Splotchy during that all-night binge-fest with the “foreign exchange” students, if you know what i mean, wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

seriously, i have no idea where all that just came from. my doctor would probably say that i drink too much caffeine, though. last time he told me that, i jumped up and beat him with his stethoscope.

but i digress….(told you so!)

Continue to the intriguing and mystifying story of I-dunno-what

Tengrain didn’t really tag me with this although he did say that if we wanted to do it, we should consider ourselves tagged, and I’ve been dying to do it because I have a relatively eclectic collection of music in my iTunes library: somewhere over 80Gb of high-resolution compact disc rips going back as far as the early 1970′s and including several hundred songs pulled for free from the original mp3.com site. So, I’m doing it, and then I’m going to tag some homies. Pfft.

The rules:

1. Put your music player on Shuffle
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER WHAT (this is in capital letters, so it is very serious).

1. IF SOMEONE SAYS “IS THIS OKAY” YOU SAY: “No Self Control”, Peter Gabriel (untitled album, 1980)

2. WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY: “World Full of Nothing”, Depeche Mode (Black Celebration, 1986)

3. WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL: “I Feel You (Helmet at the Helm Mix)”, Depeche Mode (I Feel You, Maxi Single, 1993)

4. HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY: “Cold Alien”, Planet Bliss (via mp3.com circa 2003)

5. WHAT IS YOUR LIFE’S PURPOSE: “One Tree Hill”, U2 (Joshua Tree, 1987)

6. WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO: “Moon In Ice”, Yello (One Second, 1987)

7. WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU: “Poison in the Well”, 10,000 Maniacs (Blind Man’s Zoo, 1989)

8. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR PARENTS: “End of the Line…” designerthumbs (via mp3.com circa 2004)

9. WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN: “A Matter of Conscience”, The Sun and the Moon (The Sun and the Moon, 1988)

10. WHAT IS 2+2: “The Song of the Sybil”, Dead Can Dance (A Passage In Time, 1991)

11. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND: “Six Different Ways”, The Cure (The Head on the Door, 1985)

12. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE PERSON YOU LIKE: “Superunknown”, Soundgarden (Superunknown, 1994)

13. WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY: “i remember everything”, Sub City (via mp3.com circa 2002)

14. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP: “Craving”, Xymox (Twist of Shadows, 1989)

15. WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE: “Into the Fourth Dimension”, The Orb (The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, disc 2, 1991)

16. WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU: “Help Me Lift You Up”, This Mortal Coil (Blood, 1991)

17. WHAT WILL YOU DANCE TO AT YOUR WEDDING: “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”, The Smiths (The World Won’t Listen, 1986) (okay, i’ll admit it: i rigged this one answer, because we DID dance to this at our wedding!)

18. WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL: “The Colour Hurts”, Curve (Pubic Fruit, 1991)

19. WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST: “Suboceana”, Tom Tom Club (Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom, 1989)

20. WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET: “To Wish Impossible Things”, The Cure (Wish, 1992)

21. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS: “Solar Choir”, The Creatures (Boomerang, 1989)

22. WHAT SHOULD YOU POST THIS AS: “Life’s What You Make It”, Talk Talk (The Colour of Spring, 1986)

It entirely figures that with over 30 years of music to pick from and the entire library active, the “next” button on my keyboard nearly-consistently brought up music from the mid-to-late 1980′s and early 1990′s. Bah!

Tag, You’re It! Tramplingrose, Tim and Todd

i finally blogrolled the people i said i would blogroll back on thanksgiving. damn, i’m quick, huh?

aw, hell. since i took so damn long, why not show ‘em all again?

• Life & Times of NotSoccer mom. yes, even though i’m a soccer dad.
• Say What?! signs of the times. funny stuff. i have things from here in Sioux Falls i should obviously be submitting.
• Little Bang Theory. just because you should. good writing and good content.
• The Great Endarkenment. frequently channels our inner sixth grade fuck.
• The Future Was Yesterday. oh, yes it was. weren’t you paying attention?
• Namaste. the tagline is over my head, but the content is superb!

oh, and also this individual, whom some of you might know from this place.

okay, i get it now. wordpress.com statistics being necessarily generalistic, i failed to understand, back when i had the otherwhirled on wordpress.com, just how many of my visitors were really just spam-whores looking for ways to sell their wares. in fact, as i noted over on Jonestown in the comments the other day, spam-whores still visit the now-defunct otherwhirled at a rate of several hundred per day. now that the otherwhirled has been on its own domain for several months, i begin to perceive:

1. that i generally enjoy somewhere between 20-30 actual visitors per day.
2. that in part this is because i haven’t spent a lot of time getting the domain registered with all the search engines.
3. but also that i alone am not really all that funny. i draw this conclusion both from the visitation numbers and the number of comments.
4. especially when my work-load of late has forced me to not be very consistent with the quantity and frequency of my posts.

i think this is also largely because i’m being a one-hit wonder in that all i do is snark on photos. i’m not that eloquent of a writer, and i frankly spend so much of my life in PhotoShop and Adobe Camera Raw that to a large degree, the last thing I want to do in my free time is manipulate someone else’s photographs.

there are some elements of this that i cannot really change. clients and family have to come first, and so do certain other activities (i’m one of our state’s handful of soccer referee instructors, and am just a few months shy of being expected to start teaching TaeKwonDo classes on my own). the thing is, i don’t want to stop doing what i do here, especially with at least another 9 months on the contract for domain services, and i don’t want to mix it with my personal blog. as for the latter matter, i don’t really have a good reason as to “why” i don’t want to mix the two, i just feel it would be better if i didn’t. and because hardly anyone spells my name right and my personal blog is one of the ‘original’ vanity domains (i got the domain back in 1995).

so, i’m wondering something. i had this idea, for what it’s worth, a long time ago, back during the summer when Tengrain and Dr. Monkey von Monkerstein were kind enough to guest-blog for me, in fact. so at the risk of appearing to rip off an idea from Fairlane, if the 20-30 of you are aware of anyone who’d like to help the otherwhirled provide something other than snarkery on photos, please invite them to contact me at commander[dot]other[at]otherwhirled[dot]com. the types of things i’d like to do here, but lack the time to do consistently myself:

1. Onion-esque rewrites of news articles.
2. Unique snarkographic imagery.
3. Editorials of social, political, religious, and/or other pertinent topics—with the understanding that political and religious matters are generally considered snarky cannon fodder.
4. Snarkery on the entertainment industry and the public’s tendency towards materialism.
5. Pretty much anything else that fits into those modes of thinking.

ultimately, i would really like to have several good bloggers participate here—i don’t currently have an intention on limiting the number of them, provided we can all get along and support each other even when we might share idealogical differences. i am also willing to extend the offer to moderate and conservative bloggers, again, given the caveat that we treat each other respectfully.

thank you for your time and your assistance. and thank you to those few of you who have kept visiting here over the months.

{actually, as a side note, having just typed the title, the thought comes to mind that the English language, without punctuation, is a nefarious beast. because at this point, you don’t know if that statement is an imperative, or one of those second-person rhetoricals. for the record, it’s one of those second-person rhetoricals. i’m sure Bing or Morse would be able to supply the proper label to ‘second-person’ rhetorical, but i don’t even know if they read this blog, and i’ve been horrendously crappy about posting on otherwhirled.com lately. sigh.}

but yeah, anyway, you just never know how people are going to take things. i’ve had some trouble uploading files to my business site, which trouble came somewhat ironically (and mostly unrelatedly) in the midst of getting synthaetica.com launched. and since i’m done with getting synthaetica.com up and running, it was time to refocus my development efforts on the new version of the business website. out of convenience, i had my ISP point my old domain name shadowart.com at this new developmental site, and as a result, since i’ve had some trouble uploading files to shadowmoon.com, i went ahead and used shadowart.com for the online proofs of a couple of recent engagement sessions.

since shadowart.com is in development, i have it “invisible” to search engines, and the only people who know about it are those whom i’ve told (which i guess now includes you, who incidentally constitute the vast majority of “those whom i’ve told”) about it, the clients whose proof sites are up there, and a couple of wordpress developers whom i’ve asked for some assistance on beefing up some plugins so that the site could handle the selection of images for purchase—something we’ve been needing to have embedded in our business site for about a decade now.

so in the meantime, i’m building up the site, adding page, tweaking the site header image and other little things with the template, and realize that the site has begun to become rather slow for no apparent reason. out of curiosity, i go look at the stats, and was shocked to discover that there were (at the time) about 250 visits on one particular client’s proof site (over 300 now) .

now, i really don’t know (read,”bother to look”) how many people normally come look at an engagement proof site, but since the site is invisible and closed, it was obvious that those visits were by no means random. so, i called the client to ask how many people she had shared the site with, and it turns out that the number of visits is roughly equatable to the number of people she and her fiancé have shared the site with. go figure. the other engagement proof site on there, for what it’s worth, has totaled 24 visits. mine, of course, are not counted.

i have a suspicion that the latter number is the more expected one.

anyway, like i said, you just never know how some people are going to take things. i guess it means i did i good job?

maybe.

but since it beats the shit out of daily visits to my more established blogs, it does make you think {although by “you”, i probably just mean “me”. what a silly language we have….}

the new fine-art site is officially live.

…fwiw, largely because i have not been lacking in the business. my apologies to the five or six of you who check in here regularly to see what i’m not doing and how funny i am not being.

parts of what is eating my time and/or my mental energy is minimally alluded to here and certainly consumed here (because “here” is not just “there”, but it’s also my presence on two other websites), while also trying to get my fall wedding shoot finished up and out for proof. wheee!

i’ll try to get back to teh funny as soon as i can. i also turn 41 this week. commander other is not getting any younger. dammit.

sorry, kids. i’m ‘way up north’ in Aberdeen, SD for the state high school tournament. i meant to be posting each night while i’m here, but last night turned into a long evening of discussions on all the politics and other things that infest any such organization, so not only did i not get to post last night, but i didn’t even get to catch up on my favorite blogs! my life feels so incomplete

the tournament, if you care, is going well thus far. it actually starts today, but yesterday there were several “play-in” games: last chances for teams tied on points to get into the tournament. sadly, some boys and girls will be back in school on friday despite their best efforts.

anyway, i’ll post some things tonight and get back on the ball here, so to speak. sorry to leave you hanging. i’m sure your lives are nearly as incomplete without me as mine is without you. or, not.

seeing as i so rarely actually write on the otherwhirled, i figured i should broadcast that i actually wrote something.

weird, i know, but there you have it.

Trolls are one of my favorite things. I don’t collect troll dolls or anything, nor do I amass a collection of troll-doll paraphernalia. In fact, the little troll dolls kinda creep me out, to be perfectly honest. That’s why I’m not actually talking about them. The trolls I like are the ones you find on blogs—the kind of person whom, by the way his (and trolls are normally male and don’t seem to mind letting us know this) fingers punch about on the keyboard, one can readily recognize as “someone who doesn’t get out much”. And if he does happen to “get out much”, one can readily discern that his interaction with the universe is relatively—possibly even exclusively—so hideously self-absorbingly anthropomorphic, that his ability to interact on what most of the rest of us would consider to be a common level of awareness, is severely lacking.

Okay, so those several sentences above have probably already driven Bing and every other well-educated reader of this blog mad with their poor constructions. This is one of the reasons why I don’t write much. Since, when I try to plan a written thing out, I never seem to get it done, stream of consciousness is pretty much my only viable method of operation. Which, by the way, is something I will admit to having in common with what many people complain about trolls doing: the stream of consciousness thing. However, if one thinks about that a bit more clearly, one would be reminded that stream of consciousness is the basis of most oral conversation, and the expectation that written conversation be any different is at least slightly misplaced. At least, I don’t tend to treat conversation in the same vein as discourse, anyway.

At any rate, I always enjoy it when a troll comes along on a blog I read frequently. Naturally, this happened recently during a period when I’ve not only not been able to post here as much as I would like, but also have had to curtail my reading a bit as well, despite the realization that I am slowly becoming a better person for continually reading each and every one of the blogs that I have so conveniently linked on the right. Hey, did I digress again? Hush.

To repeat myself (it’s a talent), at any rate, I enjoy the trolls, but not so much that I want to have them around me all the time. That was actually one of the considerations for the format of the otherwhirled, truth be told. I know my captions and titles may piss some people off from time to time, but I’m an avid believer in the principle, “If you can’t take a joke, then get the hell out of the kitchen.” Or something like that. Anyway, I’ve had a couple of people not understand that what I do here is satire, but I don’t get much trolling because I rarely expound upon a particular subject. However, I used to deal quite frequently with trolls on a now-defunct blog I used to participate in daily. We have some particularly charming trolls out here in the hinterlands…er, I mean, the northern Midwest…and I’ve been missing their company—not really enough to remain involved in some of the other blogs these particular trolls frequent, but I’ve missed them nonetheless.

So imagine my initial joy to discover a troll over at Jess‘s and Fran‘s places! Followed closely on, of course, by a modicum of depression due to the fact that I discovered this troll rather late in the game, and he seems to already be gone. Sigh. If there is any Justice in the Universe, She is a high-handed bitch. Damn, there I did it again, going and digressing in just two sentences. See? I suck at this.

You may enjoy skating on over to the following threads where our most recent troll outbreak has been spotted. I think he’s pretty much done now, but perhaps he can be coerced to pipe up with additional examples of his personal inadequacy in the near future. Perhaps I’ll even get lucky and he’ll come over here and piss in my back yard for a while.

• FranIAm’s War…What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! Say it again!
• FranIAm’s Sophie Scholl – Or why we must expand and not contract in the face of fear
• Jess Wundrun’s Could it have been me?

Relatedly, I’ve read this article before, but I’m still not convinced it’s entirely helpful in the way I want it to be. Of course, that’s probably just because I enjoy poking trolls (and poking them and poking them and poking them) and watching them spew ever more incoherently and passionately until they have to stop because their heart rate is giving them fits. Of course, I realize that’s at least partially due to the fact that I keep in touch with my semi-sadistic inner child and give him food and water every day, but it’s also because it violates one of the principles behind the practice of trolling, which succinctly is, “No backsies!”

Anyway, if you want a bit of fun, go read the troll, and Jess and Fran’s fine rebuttals to his missives. I will say this for him: He types pretty well for having one hand down the front of his pants.

My friend Todd was allowed to reprint a Media Matters report that exemplifies the right-wing butt-fuckery of the press, which incidentally gives me an excuse to use a quote that’s from a not-very-popular guy, but which is still one of my favorite quotations on the media.

Read Todd’s post on rebutting the idea of a “Liberal” South Dakota newspapers.