not falling down

I have totally been served. Diane Duane, who evidently reads her referral logs with as much care as I do, wrote me an email confirming the corrections Wheeler offered the other day to my entry about her entry:

Dear Brendan,

Thanks for the mention. :)

BTW, I’ve known about Lulu.com for a long time: I used their pricing model to come up with the range of prices mentioned. Obviously there’s nothing particularly new about the concept…except, maybe, not giving up on a situation that common publishing wisdom has routinely up until now dismissed as a lost cause. But much has changed: so we’ll see what happens.

My main point was that, for the size of book in question, POD is still kinda pricey, and I wanted to see if there was any interest among the readership before I started serious thinking / work on the project. Fortunately it looks like there’s a fair amount of interest: now all I have to do is (a) consider my schedule and (b) convince my agent. ;)

Best! D.

Diane Duane wrote me an email!

Diane Duane wrote me an email!

Disturbing Search Result (that led somebody to my site):

tv remote control fall down and don't work


Ten bucks says that’s a Kentucky original!

Getting more hits for “thinspiration,” too: Ana has moved up to the #84 Google result.

Got the first search referral for “thinspiration” today. That story is currently the #113 Google result for it. Think I’ll get any mail?

I’m not sure whether it counts as irony that I only realized this morning that “Me and Mia,” one of my favorite songs ever, is about, um, ana and mia. Ted Leo should enunciate better, and I should listen harder. It’s a vicious song.

Search query that led a human to my site:

gnat eating spiders

I do not want to meet that gnat.

I wonder if Google’s enforcement department had any idea what they were getting into when they pissed off Qwantz. When people are already looking at you and coughing “Redmond,” the last thing you want to do is start picking on the little guy. Especially when the little guy is an indie geek god.

Put simply, there is nobody on the interweb with as much immaculate nerd cred as Ryan North. He is untouchable. He posts comics about quantum physics with too many words no original art, and thousands of people read them and laugh and tell their friends. His journal entries they start memes–real memes, the kind that tear free their moorings and storm the city. And he has generated absolutely no backlash. He is riding a dinosaur over palm fronds.

Riana already has a better exploration of the situation from a search-marketing view, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see this hit MetaFilter soon. I know it’s going to be on Websnark within days, and, well, we all know what Websnark does to mild controversy.

I’m not saying a broke Canadian webcomic writer is going to topple a company that just made three billion dollars because it was bored. But it’s a crack in the glory, man. Between this, China, the original AdSense terms of service and blacklisting the news for using their engine, that unofficial motto is looking more unofficial than ever.

(Dear people like Mom and Verla: What I’m saying is that people on the computer are dumb. I love you, and my ankle’s getting better!)

Xorph.com served six hundred-odd pages to the Universitat Politècnica De Catalunya yesterday, which presumably means somebody in their CS department told a bot to crawl me–I’ve never seen them in my referral logs before. Anyone else get similar hits?

Also, Dreamhost now has a thing where they up your bandwidth and disk space quotas every week. It’s not much in terms of disk space–like 20Mb a week–but the bandwidth grows by a gig a week (both for the cheapest plan). Dreamhost is pretty great.

By far the most popular referral I have ever had to this site, or anyway one of its images, is some people who think my bad haircut two years ago was, in fact, a good haircut.

The IdiotCam©: Bringing People Together

war is not over anacrusis

OH SHIIIIIT

Anybody have any idea why something at IBM’s Almaden Research Center crawled my site for 2400 pages yesterday? Are they building a search engine? Or being haxxored?

Maybe they want to hire me!

(Two minutes later: Oh wait.)

I keep meaning to talk about Vocabulary Notebook! Why haven’t I talked about Vocabulary Notebook yet! Ack!

So basically Jeiel (and, sometimes, his cousin Mia) checks the Word-of-the-Day lists at MW or NYT or wherever and finds a cool word, and writes a story using it. I think this is a fantastic illustration of an inspiring constraint–he starts every story with a limitation and the seed of an idea, and they’re different every time.

Jeiel’s stated that VN was inspired by Anacrusis, which is very flattering (and is how I found the site in the first place). This isn’t a sneaky back-pat loop, though; the stories he writes are good, and they’re getting better.