The first stage of grief, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross famously postulated, is denial.
So it’s hardly surprising that Paul Elam and his gang of flunkies and fans at A Voice for Men have responded to the news that my site is besting AVFM in traffic by trying to claim that my traffic is somehow … fake.
Elam’s “evidence” for this assertion? He poked around my site for a few minutes and couldn’t find any posts that felt really “viral” to him.
He explained his, er, logic in a post yesterday. (You’ll have to excuse his terrible prose; he’s apparently running out of ways to call me fat.)
The gynecomastia plagued mammoth hunter’s sudden, meteoric rise into alleged relevance can only be explained by one thing. There must have been a stratospherically viral article (usually meaning more than two paragraphs) penned by the Wizard of Wallow that must have been picked up by every major media outlet in the mainstream.
Trouble is, we could not find it. A complete search of his website for something that coincided with his liftoff into the upper echelons of Alexa rankings, only turned up more of his usual fare. Quote mining, distortions, lies, poorly written snark and hundreds of comments, most of which have nothing to do with the OP and everything to do with kittens.
I’m not sure how one is supposed to be able to tell how much traffic a post has generated just by looking at it; it’s a bit like trying to tell how fast a car can go by looking at it parked.
But using some methodology of his own, apparently based not so much on what is true as on what he desperately wants to be true, he concludes that I bought the traffic using some of that sweet sweet cash I apparently get from the Femilluminati overladies.
So, that leaves us with only one other conclusion about David’s strut-worthy presence on Alexa. He paid for it. Yes, for those who cannot create real traffic, it can be purchased. Of course, purchasing a fake Alexa ranking is, well, fake. But what better tool for web presence could there ever be for a fake writer, with fake ideas waging a fake war against fake enemies for the approval of fake allies?
Also, I’m a big fan of fried chicken. (How did he know?)
A fake Alexa ranking fits on David Futrelle like a day old bucket of fried chicken fits in his lap . And it will probably last about as long given it requires regular financial maintenance.
Elam’s preoccupation with Alexa is a little weird. I didn’t even mention Alexa in my post comparing my traffic to his. Alexa’s numbers for my site and his are based on estimates — extimates that I’m pretty sure are something less-than-reliable, at least when it comes to my site.
No, the reason I know that I’m getting more traffic than A Voice for Men – or at least that I was getting more when I wrote my post on the subject – has nothing to do with Alexa rankings. It’s because Elam posted a screenshot of his actual traffic stats. Which I was able to compare to the traffic stats I get directly from WordPress. (You can see my screenshot and his in my post om the subject.)
The closest thing to “evidence” Elam has to back up his false accusation that my traffic is “fake” is based on something called Google PageRank, a zero-to-ten ranking that provides at least a rough representation of a site’s importance in the internet world. (Zero is totally obscure; ten means you’re as popular as Google.) Unfortunately, Elam’s internet research skills leave something to be desired, and his “evidence” isn’t actually evidence of anything real.
Elam reports that when he typed his site’s url into a site that tracks PageRank it got a rating of 5. He typed WeHuntedTheMammoth.com into the same page and it gets a PageRank of … zero.
Which would be pretty damning, except that it’s meaningless.
You see, the real URL for this blog is manboobz.wordpress.com; that’s the URL that WeHuntedTheMammoth.com redirects you to. And if you type manboobz.wordpress.com into that same PageRank site that Elam used, you’ll see that my site has a Google PageRank of … 4, pretty close to that of AVFM.
Seriously, Paul, try it yourself if you don’t believe me.
So, no, Paul, I didn’t buy traffic or whatever it is you think I did to get “fake” traffic for my “fake” writing.
You want to know the real secret behind the increased traffic to my site? Well. I don’t know if you realized it, Paul, but last year was kind of a breakout year for online misogyny. You remember that whole GamerGate thing? I wrote a lot about that, including a number of posts that collected together a lot of information that other people found useful.
If you look at my most-read posts from the past year – here, here and here – you can see that a lot of people did in fact find them useful: each one was shared on Twitter and Facebook literally thousands of times, as you can see by scrolling down to the bottom of each post. (Or did I fake those too?)
Also, I started writing more than one post a day. All else being equal, more posts means more traffic.
The flipside is that all this misogyny and all this writing kind of burned me out, and I’ve been taking a bit of a breather for the last few weeks, writing fewer posts and taking some days off. So my traffic has slowed a bit. Heck, my traffic may have dropped back down to AVFM levels.
But I’m not worried, Paul. As long as terrible and ridiculous people like you keep saying and doing terrible, ridiculous things, I’m not going to run out of things to write about. And as long as people are interested in hearing about people like you, it seems likely that I’ll continue to get enough traffic to reduce you to tooth-grinding rage.
I can only hope you’re able to work y0ur way through the other stages of grief until you finally reach acceptance. Because right now your desperation is so obvious it can probably be seen from space. It’s not a good look for you.
Yeah, I purposely left out the first sentence of that quote. Anyone who want to know why can go to Nicoll’s Wikipedia page and read it.
Has anyone tried playing WOD’s Prometheus? I have the book, but never attempted to play it. It seems interesting but terribly challenging as an ongoing campaign. (Full disclosure: I translate any game I play into Fudge rules, which is my system of choice.)
Ecce Romani!!! Yes!! So much more exciting than the stories they got in Spanish and French class.
I only use 2nd ed WOD rules unless the MUSH I play in uses 3rd. But I am old WoD to the core
Man, I miss Latin. Latin classes never insult your intelligence. End of the first year and you can handle Caesar. Meanwhile, I’m in third semester Russian and we haven’t read a word of real Russian.
Katz, check Amazon. I found a book of Russian short stories (from various eras!) there, with a side-by-side English translation, so you can just look from one page to the other to see what any strange new phrases mean, or enjoy it in whichever language you prefer. Perfect for any autodidact, or indeed anyone who just wants to learn to read some Russian!
(And now, to go hunting for a copy of Ecce Romani. I don’t recall reading it myself, but the title sounds vaguely familiar, so I’m betting that excerpts from it are in the old university Latin textbooks I’m too lazy/busy to dig out from under the mounds of other readables I’ve got piling up around my ears here.)
I did an hour of tourist Russian a week for 2 terms in High School. We might not have read Russian, but we watched a rather nice serial about a taxt driver and a student called Dasvidanya Leto (Transliterating) Goodbye Summer.
I can’t remember much of it, but I can start a query politely, ask ‘where is..?’ and say ‘I am travelling to..’ which I think would all be useful if I ever found myself in Russia.
And bingo. This sums it up perfectly. I really rather like Prometheus: The Idea but the mechanics of Prometheus: The Game end up causing me some serious headaches as a DM, and there were * a lot* of things I somewhat altered, changed or just flat out ignored, because I think it rather seriously disrupted what I was trying to do.
There’s basically two ways to do it, as far as I can see. You maintain full ramifications of the Disquiet rules, so that just by existing in any area for more than a moment, Prometheans start disrupting *everything* and turning it to utter shit. I tried DM’ing it like this. It’s actually pretty interesting, because it forces the Pilgramage to actually be a pilgramage. Players literally cannot stick around any one area for very long, unless they want floods and mobs and storms and fire and stalkers and problems. It’s nicely thematic, since essentially they’re always on the run and the thing they’re trying to escape is the universe that hates them.
But it also makes it difficult to maintain a story, since NPC’s *will* end up hating the player characters, locations *will* fall into disarray and problems *will* happen. It had the somewhat unfortunate effect of dulling a lot of the emotional impact of interacting with anything in the game, because the players know, in the back of their heads, that the rules work in such a way that they will soon be forced to flee and abandon everything. That works great as a story about yearning for humanity, sure, I just tend to find that players end up reacting by not really caring all that much… since any unit of “Caring” is eventually cruelly punished by destruction. It’s literally a codification of the old DM trope of killing off any character mentioned by name in the player’s backstory.
It undercuts the theme of participating in mortal society without being mortals, since stuff like friendship, hobbies and interactions become basically impossible. Unlike Vampires, who get to goth around and complain about their inner Beast but still go out to a nightclub and see happy people having fun, a Promethean gets to sit around and complain that the universe hates it and life is suffering… because the universe hates it and its life is literally suffering.
So I toned it down a lot, and made it slightly more abstract. People were getting bad dreams, and also feeling disquiet about the wandering abominations against nature, but some others wouldn’t be affected and entire cities wouldn’t go up in flames just because. That made it possible to have plot threads and pursue information and solve problems without also racing against a Doom Clock, and it meant that the interactions with NPC’s actually mattered. Suddenly they were Friends, friends the players wanted to stick around with, but couldn’t because if they did, somewhere down the line, tragedy would strike.
But there’s so much in Promethean that’s so much fun! Pandorans and Centamali are body-horror awesome, there’s a lot of cool stories to tell, and when the Hunters show up (And the Hunters will show up) it’s always fun because A) it’s obvious that the reason they’re showing isn’t just DM fiat, it’s because the Disquiet is attracting them and B) The people they’re hunting aren’t actually monsters unlike the Vampires or the werewolves or the fucking Mummies, they’re just abominiations trying to liiiveeee.
Good times, but be careful with the Disquiet.
Never played Prometheus. My buddies and I prefer D&D. Eberron, specifically. I use 3.5 because I grew up on it and I don’t have Pathfinder. We have some strange characters (Vastar Darkwind the half-elf paladin, with his sword, Syphilitic Insanity, and his armor, Mr. Condom), but I try to keep ’em online.
There was that time Mollie turned Tenser’s Floating Disk into a sideways guillotine, so I made her roll about 35d6 for the damage she dealt to a goblin warrior.
It was HILARIOUS.
Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I’m ಠ_ಠ pretty hard at this. I hope “Syphilitic Insanity” is just a fancy nickname, because if he’s actually running around with Stormbringer he’d better be working really hard to keep that paladin status.
I wouldn’t have let it do that much damage, but hey, different strokes, and that does sound awesome. I hope they didn’t abuse it too much on you.
Falconer, the joke about VD is that everything he owns is a sex joke that goes over his head. Venereal Disease–I mean, VD, I mean, Vastar Darkwind–is actually a pretty nice guy. Who rolls sense motive checks on literally everything, up to and including a literal god of insanity (this Cthonian abomination called a daelkyr that takes humanoid form JUST TO FUCK WITH PEOPLE’S HEADS).
On the Tenser’s Sideways Guillotine of Ball-Slicing Medium creatures and Decapitating Small creatures: Yeah, it needs a stratospheric Concentration check, and I specifically said that the massive damage dice were for the humor value alone; the goblin was dead either way, I just had her use 7 times the damage dice for sheer hilarity. But it’s dead useful for clearing out mobs of annoying low-level monsters. Useless on swarms, though.
And it doesn’t even have the problem of back-blast that plagues the traditional mob-clearer fireball!
I know! It’s such a great way of applying the rules, I don’t know why nobody ever thought about it before!
Also, I rule that natural 1s on a d20 are an “epic fail”. Natural 1s have included:
–Mollie’s character had blinded a gnoll wizard with creative rules usage. Said wizard tried to shoot Mollie’s character with Tasha’s Hideous Laughter, but I ruled that his blinded state forced him to make an attack roll. He rolled a 1 and shot himself in the balls, then fell over screaming in uncontrollable laughter.
–Vastar was interrogating an ostensibly benevolent priest at a temple of a good deity that had been linked to some unusual happenings. The priest rolled a natural 1 on his Bluff check, and I ruled that his fail was so bad that his undetectable alignment potion lapsed for a split-second. The fake good priest ended up frozen and punched out and hypnotized and impaled by Syphilitic Insanity (which is in all respects save its name a normal greatsword). It was very funny.
Good times.
Pfh, fireball. Amateur. Real heroes use Universal Glue and 10 flasks of oil glued together to do 10d6 fire damage to themselvesthe ground. You think you’re do good just because you’re a reality shaping demigod of infinite power, you arcane caster? Oooh, Fog Cloud? How impressive. BEHOLD, my Bundle of Smoke Sticks. Just as much smoke, much less insufferable wizard!
( The longest campaign of 3.5 I ever played consisted of a tale of medieval misery and churches, and me playing a magic-university drop out rogue. Who needs magic when you have acid flasks, fuses and craft skill ranks? No, I’m not bitter, it’s not like I wanted to be a wizard or anything )
Pfeh, puny humanoids! Wimpolite.
I played a lizard-warrior from an all-female, parthenogenetic species with no concept of masculinity with respect to sentient species once.
She would ask women why they had sex with their pets. Then she learned that men are sentient, so she was like “oh, so that’s your mate-partner, not your pet? Why is she from a different caste, then?”
It was really funny. The idea of a species that associates gender binary with animals (they were basically sentient monitors with biology closely based on parthenogenetic whiptail lizards) led to so many laughs and a fuckton of character development.
Plus, jir’aata Nivat was eight feet tall and build like the Terminator on serious steroids. I’m talking inch-thick scutes, semi-prehensile tail, lifting half-ton boulders, ECL of 8 before adding class levels, and anatomically correct (as in, she went around in either full body armor or a loincloth, because her species, as proper reptiles, had no breasts. Which is a point of much SF/F that annoys me greatly).
Ahhhh, fond memories…Supreme High Lord Inevitably-Fated-for-Greatness was NOT expecting the tank of the group to be an 8-foot lizard warrior woman. The look on his face, as the DM described it, was priceless.
I did play a water elemental once. Her appearance was good on the outside, but she knew zero about human anatomy, let alone female human anatomy. The cantrip that lighted a candle ? Her version created a small spray of salt water. The Elf Mage in the party was the only one to realise what she was, but still didn’t understand her true self. There was a group of mercs she didn’t approve of. All she did was walk close to their water supples (She turned all water within a 2 foot radius to salt, so she could survive in it)
@Fibinachi: We had a new player who loaded his character down with as many flasks of alchemist’s fire as he could carry. He kept getting caught in Beloved’s area-effect damage spells because he was an assassin who kept hiding in shadows, so none of the rest of us knew where he was. Good thing Beloved wanted something more interesting than fireball.
I kept lobbying for her to take disintegrate just to see if we actually could scrape up 22d4 (the minimum damage).
@GroundPetrel: “Hello, I am a lizard woman from the dawn of time, and this is my wife.”
http://cdn3.whatculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/madame-vastra-and-jenny-500×250.jpg
That must have been awesome.
Rather less trauma to balls in my games than in yours.
I’ll take awkward conversations with waiting clients for $400, Alex.
Vastra, Jenny, and Strax are awesome (still want to punch out Moffat for turning a sweet character moment in Deep Breath into “Dur hurr hurr, look at 2 hawt gurls kissin”), but I’m talking about a literal bipedal lizard.
Sort of like one of these with a 4-foot muscular tail: http://sto.buffed.de/board/attachment.php?attachmentid=5803&d=1318528774
(Those are Gorn, BTW. From the Star Trek universe. And soft canon holds that the big ones are the females, which is kind of cool when you think about it. The biggest one in that picture is about 10 feet tall)
Nivat’s species was a burrowing monitor race, tetraploid and with three genetically-determined castes (all had the same sex chromosomes and organs, the caste was determined by a gene on one of the other chromosomes). There were the 8- to 10-foot warrior badasses, the human-sized civilians who handled things like bureaucracy, leadership, and watching the scientists, and the scientist caste, who were small and frail but incredibly intelligent and with SERIOUSLY bad ADHD.
The scientist caste was sort of an exaggeration of myself, tbh.
Anyway, I spent a long time fleshing out the species, and we had a lot of great character development. And all because I told the DM “I want to play an anatomically correct lizard woman who kicks ass”.
It was awesome; SHLIFFG (his parents actually named him Inevitably-Fated-for-Greatness) got a Meteor Swarm literally shoved down his throat. Like Xykon tried in that OOTS comic.
As for balls…yeah, I have a standing rule where anybody who gets hit in the groin (I allow called groin shots) is instantly disabled with horrible pain for three rounds, with a really high Fortitude save. Of course, it can be pretty hard to find the genitalia of some species…
I think the bit was awkward and gratuitous, but please don’t wish violence on people. A popular curse ’round these parts is “may he step on a Lego,” although d4s are sometimes substituted. A couple of days ago someone, and I’m sorry I forget who, let loose with “may his tea be over-steeped and his coffee full of grounds,” which is just beautiful.
Yeah, I know you said “anatomically correct,” but “lizard woman who kicks ass” has one major connection in my brain.
Did you start from the published lizard folk and push her stats up, or did you start from scratch?
I find it’s a lot quicker to create or modify monsters in the older editions, if only because there’s so many fewer decisions to make.
He wasn’t an Omnian, by any chance? Even if he was, sounds like an Orthodox Omnian to me.
1. Moffat should step on a 50d20 of d4s.
2. Scratch. Culture, biology, stats–everything. It was a labor of love. 🙂
3. SHLIFFG was the sort of death metal cover-album refugee who sets himself up as a dark lord because he thinks it’s KEWL. Like Sithrak, the god who hates you unconditionally. Or that dude from that webcomic my roommate reads that I can’t remember right now. He was incredibly arrogant, OP as f*ck (we had him be an Iconian, like the Star Trek Online kind, who got lost between universes–he could melt people down to their subatomic particles with a thought, which did absurd amounts of damage), and mindbogglingly stupid. This guy fell for every single one of the Evil Overlord List’s provisions. Like Ming the Merciless take up to 11 121 times.
I have two new favorite curses, one which may have come from here or may have come to me via twitter (I think it was twitter, because I am pretty sure it was wished by Jessica Valenti on Janet Bloomfield) and that was “may she get the ugliest sweater that ever existed for Christmas and may it come from someone she can’t risk offending by not wearing it.”
But then there was this http://shipyourenemiesglitter.com/ and that inspired me to wish that crummy people get an envelope full of glitter in the mail on an incredibly dry day so that static cling helps spread it EVERYWHERE.
@gilshalos: I don’t think I’ve ever played any character too far out of the mainstream. I had an elderly aasimar sorcerer once who thought he was a paladin; when questioned about his differing power set, he explained that the gods obviously had different plans for him.
@gillyrosebee: We bought a kitchen playset for my kids this past Christmas, and it came packed in with the lightest, fluffiest Styrofoam you ever did see. Well, my kids thought that was the best and broke most of it into individual beads. Kinda looked like this:
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/e4/1f/8e/e41f8e9f64c909bd943d768d62b56983.jpg
We are still vacuuming beads up from between the floorboards.
Yep, styrofoam packing peanuts work just as well for that particular curse, as do the little styrofoam beads that come inside beanbag chairs!
Sorry to hear that happened and I am totally, really not at all giggling about it! Nosirree!!