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I get plenty of correspondence from various people. Obviously, most aren't very
bright. Strangely, a good chunk of them have a prominent fetish for some web author
or other. Therefore, I get plenty of dumbass emails, that while brilliantly
inconsistent, entirely incongruent with any imaginable manifestation of logic and
generally just plain old stupid, share one broad theme :
You (that means me) stole X from Y, where X is some random bit or collection of bits found on my site, and Y some obscure "writer". On a particularly bad day, Y is an "Internet personality" no less, and I am to burn in Hell for all eternity. To which crap I do not personally reply. What I do is bounce it off to a little script I wrote that, when forwarded an email, proceeds to send the originator a reply, detailing that, as the case may be : 1. Y did not actually come up with X, it was rather Z, well known and usually dead and buried, either under ground or in some "rehabilitation clinic", or at least married with kids a tad older than Y. In the extremely rare cases when the script doesn't readily find the Z, it just skips this part. You might think such a script is downright artificial intelligence, but that would only prove you don't know what sort of people send those emails. As it happens, idiots are statistically predictable and in pre-scripting their future actions, you run very little risk of being ever surprised. 2. X is in fact something as horribly common, general or non-specific that it makes kittens cry. This part of the response is the funniest to read, my script really lets them have it. Some great computer-generated quotes over the months : "Claiming that zenofeller.com is copying xxx.yyy.com by having a black background implies that xxx.yyy.com would hold some sort of privileged relation with the color black, in which case the hollow inside of your head could be said to be also a rip-off xxx.yyy.com. Which it unrelatedly is." I mean, beat that. I have to figure a way to feed scripts cookies. 3. X as it appears on my site is actually only very remotely related to X as quoted to have been the invention of Y. "While upon examination it is apparent that site xy.com does in fact host a picture of the presumed site owner's face grafted atop a stylized drawing of a pirate, zenofeller.com hosts an unprocessed photograph of the site owner dressed in black, holding a sword and a knife. If we could consider those two closely related, we could also consider you intellectually part of the human race, something clearly disproved by empirical evidence. Sincerest regrets to the unfortunate mother." 4. Either X does not in fact appear on my site, or it does not in fact appear on site Y. Unbelievable as it may sound, most often two or three of the above scenarios happen simultaneously. I swear someone must be secretly training idiots for deployment on the Internet. There's just no way, just no fucking way these levels can occur naturally. The response comes back, and it is ALWAYS, and I do mean freakin always, a reference to some dumbass traffic statistics site, usually Alexa. On the lines of, site Y scores a lot higher in (whatever blatantly inaccurate if not completely imaginary stats site, usually) Alexa, so therefore zenofeller.com definitely copied site Y. This visionary approach would for instance explain, and even justify, the Spanish massacres in America : Those people were walking on two feet, but did not pay royalties to the most holy Church of Rome and it's apostolic and so forth leader, the Pope, thus they needed stocking&burning. And those niggers in Africa ? Totally using their hands, and completely ignoring the good people of the Louisiana territory, who certainly were using their hands first. They invented hands, after all. They did. Or maybe they just scored higher on Igotcannons.com. Let me have try and explain something, as slowly and clearly as divinely possible. Traffic statistics as presented by third party sites, usually Alexa, are bollocks. Crap. Crud. Don't mean shit. I have seen time and again things like today's reach, 5.0 per million. Weekly average, 0.5 per million. Somebody forgot to tell the rest of us that the world moved to 10 day weeks. You know, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Night Live, Sunday, Googleday, Alexaday, Microday. Get the fuck over yourselves already. If I were so inclined, I could have every person that works for me download the Alexa toolbar. I could actually put it in their job description. That alone would suffice to put me in the 10,000's per million range of "reach", considering the size of their sample. I could pass a workplace rule that for every page opened, they must also open a page from my website. That would put me easily in the top 10, by sheer size of pages/viewer averages. It would also be kinda funny, all those pasty idiots trying to jack off on the job while endlessly opening pages. Come to think about it... I might actually do it mwahahaha. Frankly, I can't be bothered. Instead, to save everyone the aggravation, I have created the real Alexa entry for my site, which you can find here. What's that you say ? That's not the real Alexa entry for my site ? Oh, really ? And why would any other opinion on my traffic rankings be any more real than the real one you can find from the horse's mouth ? Ironically, the real Alexa ranking just hit record lows as my server logs show record highs. Really. And I somewhat tend to think 27,534,492,746,193 bytes served in the past year, of which 7 TB in the past month are real and a 5,000 people sample for a half billion population is just an illusion. Not that I wouldn't prefer the illusion, to be honest, it'd save me plenty on bandwidth costs. 1 webmasters think Alexa is like the dork in highschool that had parties where nobody was invited, but then again that was okay because nobody ever considered going. |