This week Qntra published 13 pieces of which 10 came from myself, one came from nicoleci, two came from shinohai. Thimbronion was struck by the flu after presenting some article ideas, but he did leave a comment with a point he had considered fleshing out into an article before being struck by the flu. The piece by nicoleci was striclty excelent, tight newswriting and I hope to see more of it. I do not expect to see more submissions from shinohai.1
Sunday
Dominated by assembling the previous week's review. Server other than the 'anyserver' lifeboat ordered for hosting.
Comments left on blogs:
Friendly Approach: 1
Other Than Friendly:
Monday
Reading AWStats docs begins. As discussed in footnote 1, late in the day a contributor rapibly pivots from excitement to depature. I am reminded I can't manage other's feelings for them. I set AWSstats and apache down for a while to get some outreach in.
Friendly Approach: 1
Other Than Friendly: 2
Tuesday
In light of the previous day's end, I use Tuesday to benchmark what sor of output I can produce when I keep the supporting tasks out of the way. I manage to output three Qntra pieces and a comment on nicoleci's Qntra piece in addition to the 7 outreach comments tallied below. I'm particularly unsatified by how few targets I managed to find for imposing the Qntra archive on derps. My searches queries are delivering a lot of nothing, but what the nothing is won't click until Thursday.
Friendly Approach: 5
Other Than Friendly: 2
Wednesday
Argentina news came out which meant a push to find Argentine blogs to it with comments. The results were disappointing because Argentines apparently don't believe in comments consistent with their thoroughly rounded retardation in all fields. The couple that do have comments are focused on the Falkland situation and how unjust and colonial it is that remote islands populated by Brits and sheep aren't theirs. Hanbot gets me on my premature treatment of targets as though they are people.
I acquire a kindergarten level text2 on the linux command line as companion reading to the more advanced examples of getting the most out of one's computers presented on Trilema. I've been covering my command line weakness too long by learning just a bit more than I need to as I need to, and this cannot persist.
Friendly Approach: 5
Other Than Friendly: 3
Thursday
I stumble into a blog that's an exemplar of all the nothing's clogging my crawl. Somsirac: The Indian Perspective. If hitting google with the limiters "site:wordpress.com" for results in the past 24 hours, it dominates the results alongside similar efforts. A clearly made for "SEO" production it dutifully pumps out dozens of articles a day of titles, fotos, and url shortener links drawn from RSS or Twitter. It has some keywords on the sidebar unrelated to anything appearing in its publications.
This is what the Pantsuitist "fight against 'fake news'" looks like under the hood. Despite reading about and seeing the the absolute shit that is google results before many times, only by narrowing my search for outreach did I find this natural evolution of the "Made For Adsense" derpery. Blogs by bots, for bots, and absolutely loved by Google.
As is to be expected, comments require moderation and the hopper is unattended.
Unsure if I want a couple dozen of these things or not,3 I spend a couple hours reading threads on Black Hat World and other SEO forums to see if anyone sells these. Maybe it is because I don't have their variety speak loaded in my head, but if someone's selling these they don't seem to be advertising it as such.
I published a blog post of some pictures from my archives because the thought had been bouncing around my head, and I needed to clear some working space
Friendly Approach: 7
Other Than Friendly: 2
Friday
Afternoon Spanish class again hits heavier of the weaker parts of my pronunciation. My tongue ends the session gassed after a series of exercises to de-gringo my lazy tounge's resistance to the more percusive demands of the Spanish R. Diversions into the Spanish-Spanish second person plural informal are made to hit some tripthongs for variety.
I start organizing the week's events and findings because this week has a lot to review. I get some command line basics reading in.
Friendly Approach: 5
Other Than Friendly: 3
Saturday
Production of this review began which meant doing a lot of re-reading with respect to the tools the Republic acquired in Q4 2019. By reviewing and applying the tools, the space for sadness to have emerged shrank though for having read the tools earlier, it hadn't grown much to start with. Still, the re-reading and study was necessary in applying the tools, because these are fine tools developed by a far better man than I.
I'm not very satisfied with the low tallies on the blog comment outreach done, but I do have a better understanding of the muck's shape than I did before. I have a much better idea of what some kinds of dead end in the crawl look like. I have yet to put access.log through AWStats to see where people coming from, but other live problem spaces were explored. Substantially, I have to accept the inhumanity of my targets until proven otherwise.
This week feels like more of a start than the preceeding week.
I ended the day with a call for interested parties to cover the election return in Ireland. I did not get any takers for the very good reason of their hands being full of work in the Republic. It is encouraging reminder that I have to keep moving forward, and that I there is a pool of actual humans available to help in the ways they can, if I remember to prod them.
Friendly Approach: 2
Other Than Friendly: 1
Upcoming
I'll try to start some conversations with warm bodies gathered on the SEO forums. In the past I've been very wary when approaching this species of mud hole, but they seem to have sufficient turnover to maybe hook some live bipeds passing through. I'll continue the blog commenting with some differnet crawls to try to cut past the bots blogging for other bots in the search of human appearing pockets, but so far the amount of blogs that need to be churned to find working4 comment boxes is high.
- He approached in the spirit of surrender:
shinohai: I like adventures. Imma throw up the white flag and attempt a truce and see where it goes.
And then as soon as his name was used as a label for a problematic behavior he's embraced in the past, he retreated from his surrender back into optionality's stubborn embrace. In the words of Lynyrd Skynyrd, "He's that bird that you can't chaaaaaaaaeeeeeeeeaaaeeeenge". In his return, I was reintroduced me to the joy editing can bring. In his departure all that is lost are those future pieces that were never had.
I started producing these reviews because when the blows come and they hurt, there's truth in the pain. It hurts me because the flaw is in me. Retreating to "life isn't fair and people don't act right", and strictly defending my weaknesses hadn't worked. I've got to get stronger where I'm weak instead of expending effort to cover the holes in a defensive crouch forever. Exposure and accountability are working in the #ossasepia schoolhouse, and I'd be a fool not to try the methods when they are being worked with success.
At this time, I am not going to read the burst of participation followed by sudden withdrawal after the first meaningful criticism as an attempted WoT attack. Instead this seems the disappoingly common problem of perceived optionality supported by a tolerable amount of comfort.
I have in front of me the task of making Qntra lively again if I am to live in the Republic. I know there's a chair waiting for me to sit around, reminiscing over "glory" days, but it isn't a truly live option. Certainly easier and less demanding, but it's short on necessary living. My beef with Pantsuitism is that it loaded me up with a bunch of stupid that only increased in proportion to the years I spent in "higher education" that was anything but. It's not that I enjoy Qntra as a vehicle for doing harm to Pantsuitisms just for the aesthetics, though that's a fine reason. I'm motivated by a greviance to return the harm.
For these reasons I am open to any old hands coming forward to help themselves by helping Qntra, but the reason I'm trawling through the muck outside the Republic out of necessity. If you know Qntra exists and you want to write for Qntra or spread the good word of Qntra's existence, please start submitting and spreading the word. Pre-emptively derping about "What a loss" is anti-productive. The invitation to help the thing live is open. Failure to contribute to the living process is an absolute disqualification to participate in the mourning, and mourning on the sidelines while there is work to be done... is unseemly at best. [↩]
- The Linux Command Line, 2nd Edition: A Complete Introduction, by William Shotts ISBN 9781593279523 [↩]
- I strongly suspect I don't. At least not in the form I encountered... [↩]
- One would expect human-appearing bloggers outside the Republic resemble bloggers inside the Republic by linking to other live blogs, but... ~3/4 of sidebar links are dead. Dead can mean they have not published since Trump's inauguration or their most recent post is a guest post annoucing the death of the person who kept the blog. [↩]
My reasoning behind saying "fuck this" and engaging myself in other activities has more to do with the fact that I hold you in rather high regard and I'd rather not see Qntra tanked because of my presence due to the inevitable behaviour of others.
It works both ways.
Thank you for the clarification.