The blog will be offline for a day or two due to bandwidth limits, and then be back as usual on the first of the month.

If I kind of disappear for a few weeks, it's because I have a couple of writing projects I need to apply myself to.  I'll still keep up with the webring, and the regular vintage ad & pipesmoker posts will continue.

One writing project is a sort of documentary thing for the blog.  The other is a (not Cthulhu related!) weird tale which has been lurking in my mind for several years and which I think I may have finally found an outlet for.  I just don't have time to write and keep up any real activity on this blog.  The deadline for the tale is around the end of February, so one way or the other it will all blow over eventually.

Thanks to everyone who visits and links.  I'll still be around, lurking in the shadows.

UPDATE:  It didn't go offline.  Weird.

Maybe I'll have more activity this week than last, but probably not.  Last week at work just seemed to beat me to death.  A two-day weekend just doesn't feel long enough to have recovered.On the plus side, I've been reading more, delving into Robinson Crusoe, a book I first read when I was just a kid, part of a biblophilic aunt's huge book collection.

Whatever happened to all her books?  I wish I knew.  She was the only aunt who gave me books instead of toys at Christmas.  She gave me Tom Sawyer when I was six years old.  She gave me two excellent books on trapping and handling furs when I was a teenager.  She had a complete collection of hardbacks by Zane Grey.  I wish I had managed to get my hands on them.

Well, anyway, checking Statcounter today I noticed that it appears that someone from a very nearby small town discovered this blog.  Whether they become a repeat visitor remains to be seen, but this is the first time a hit has come from that close to home.

Someone added their site to the webring today, but then withdrew it two minutes later, before I activated it.  I don't know why, but his site looks promising and if you read this I just want you to know that I've added your blog to my private subscriptions so I can check it out for a while.

This week at work should be easier, so maybe I won't be so tired when I get home.  I'm also going to keep working on those CHL Zip code maps and will be posting them as I get them finished.  Wilson County is easy, since it has only about 7 different ZIPs, but Bexar is going to be a real, er...bear (hee hee).  I don't expect any especially illuminating insights to come out of this, it's just something I've wanted to patch together for a while just for my own curiosity.

By the way, I don't know how it happened, but the pdf file map of all the Texas ZIP codes was about 3.8 megs, and I downloaded it at an average speed of about 12 kb/s.  That's way fast.  I don't know how my connection managed to bring it through that fast, but I wish it happened more often.  Usually my best download speed on this dial-up service is around 4 to 4.5.

Two more sites were activated today, bringing the total up to 22.

Traffic reports are about the same as last week.  As of today, the site generating the most traffic for the ring was The War On Guns.  Other than the ring home page, the site receiving the most traffic from the ring was Oscar Poppa.

I got an email a few days ago telling me that I had some "Cafe Cash."  So I just wanted to say thank you to whoever clicked through the ads on the left and bought the "peace, love, basketball" raglan and thong.

Raglan?  I thought that was just a long-sleeved t-shirt.

I don't know how some people can crank out so much stuff.

Today was miserable.  It hit about 45 for the high and I was totally soaked to skin over every square millimeter of my body for several hours.

An odd side-effect of being cold and wet all day was lack of thirst.  I didn't realize I hadn't even touched my water until I got home and saw that it was still full.

I'm going to have a lot of catching up to do this weekend, unless the weather turns nicer and I just take the kids and go shooting or something.

Anyway, I guess I've hit enough of a lull to post something I've been saving, so it will follow.

I know there's been a dearth of activity here, but I've been busy and working in this cold, rainy weather really tires me.  I've also been catching up on old Voyager and Enterprise shows now that they're being shown on SciFi and Spike.

I wasn't able to watch these often when they were on because they were shown on a lousy network that had sorry affiliates who broadcasted with pathetic power.

I still think Enterprise would have done a lot better if they'd syndicated it on networks that could actually put out a decent signal.

Now that a few days have gone by, the webring is beginning to generate some statistics.  You can click that link to see a list of the average daily hits each member of the ring has both generated and received during that past 30 days.

The biggest generator of hits to other sites in the ring is The War On Guns.  The site receiving the most hits from other sites in the ring is the webring home page, followed by Oscar Poppa.

There are currently 19 sites in the ring.

The most recent comment, left by JR, was comment #600!

Someone came here searching for the Excel formula to calculate the date of Easter.  It led them to a post that is nearly two years old.  That surprised me.

Someone else was looking for information on a High Standard revolver with a 13-round cylinder.  I've never heard of such a thing.  That would be a bulky cylinder, even for a .22.

We now have 12 sites in the Free Wayne Webring, not counting the webring's own homepage.  So far everything seems to be working right.

Well, one forecast says we'll break freezing on Tuesday, another says we won't.  I'll have to wait until after 5:30 Tuesday morning before I find out if I have to work that day or not.  It rained all day today and never broke 50 degrees.

I put some little link buttons up on the lower left sidebar if anyone ever wants one.

During my time not-blogging lately I have actually been working on a piece of satire that I started a long time ago.  I got about halfway through it--maybe a year ago, a long time anyway--and hit a wall.  In the last week I dug it out and finished it.  It also has some graphics with it that I was having trouble getting to look right, but my gimp-fu has improved so much since the last time I messed with them that I fixed them the way I wanted in just a few minutes once I took another look at them.  I was going to post it tomorrow morning but I think I'll wait until I hit another dry spell so I'll have something to post when I can't think of anything else.  Also I want the announcement about the webring to stay higher on the page for a day or two.  The satire piece is Cthulhu-related.  Maybe it isn't satire.  Maybe it's parody.  Or both.  I think it will be another one of those things that draws a lot of traffic once it gets indexed by the search engines and the Lovecraftians start finding it.

I can already tell I'm going to run out of bandwidth before the end of the month again.  Amazing.

One new site has already been added to the webring.

I threw the dregs of my last Bayou Night in with the souped-up Haunted Bookshop.  This random mix turned out to be very good, and completely unreproduceable.

I just learned that this past week (Jan 8-12) was National Delurking Week, a week when one encourages those readers who read a blog but never comment to come out of the shadows just to say hello.

So I'm a day late, but here's your chance.  If you are a regular--or even irregular--reader of this blog and have never commented, you can leave a comment on this post without having to worry about saying something on topic, incisive, intelligent, or even coherent.

Just babble, meep, or gibber away.

I thought I'd throw one of my new blogheader attempts up.  If it turns out to actually drive traffic away, I can always put the old one back.

I have a few different designs finished, plus some graphics collected for another one that I started on several months ago but never finished.

This is all complete vanity, of course, but since I can't seem to find much news to comment on and the weather is lousy (mild but raining right now), I might as well do this.

The weather predictions for next week keep getting worse every time I check.  The good thing is, if the weather gets bad enough, work will be called off.  It may be next Wednesday before I go back to work.  This is good because I really don't feel like stomping around outside for several hours in that cold weather.

We get an ice storm like this every couple of years, since at least the early 80s.  Every exposed surface outside gets covered with a sheet of ice because it rains in freezing weather.  Nothing moves until the ice thaws.

The Cthulhu bookends on the graphic are something I've had for a long time.  A friend of mine gave me a paper copy of this picture many years ago, which I scanned way back when with my old hand scanner.  The original hardcopy has been lost, or at least misplaced, but the original scan has been transferred from computer to computer through the years.  I've used it in a lot of different stuff.  I don't know who drew it.

So this is what happened...

I noticed a bunch of referrals from a French-language heavy metal discussion forum.  The hits weren't really referrals, they were just hits to a graphic I had uploaded here at Eponym and which I've since reloaded at Photobucket, re-editing my old post so that it still displays correctly:



The topic of this particular thread on the forum was "what are you listening to right now?" (thanks Babelfish).

So from now on, whenever someone views this thread, "Ganash" is apparently going to be listening to this:



BWA HA HA ha ha ha...

The thread can be viewed here.  (Using tinyurl just as a cheap & dirty way to disguise my referral link).

I'm sorry for the lack of any real posting lately, but I'm still taking the semi-break that I started last week.  Also I'm going through a busy period at work and I don't feel much like doing blogging-type stuff when I get home.

I'll get something new up this weekend, probably.  MLK Day is being forecasted as quite cold.  I think I'll have to make a pot of chili.

Eponym has a switch I can throw to stop other sites from hotlinking my graphics.  I used it for a while but it also stops Bloglines from displaying the graphics, so I turned it off.

It doesn't happen very often, but when it does it's very annoying.  It's always some picture that they could have found in about six million other places but picked my bandwidth to crash.

So I always delete the graphic and usually reload it at photobucket.

But I'm wondering...would it also be appropriate to replace the graphic with something the hotlinker might find offensive just to mess with them?  It would still cost me some bandwidth, but it might be worth it just to screw with them.

I don't know why 44 old posts suddenly turned up on Bloglines as new posts.  It wasn't anything I did.

There are ten blogs listed in Eponym's blog directory under the category of Politics > Activism > Gun Control.

Most of them I read pretty regularly.

I still don't know how I am managing to stay at #3.  The one blog I submitted hasn't been added yet, so I won't mention it until I get some news on it.

If you want to submit one, follow the link above and click on the big "Submit a blog!" icon in the right sidebar.  You can also click on the "detail" link for each blog and vote for it to have a higher or lower rating.

The full-size one looks a lot better.  I need to brighten the name so it stands out more, or use a different script-fu to create the logo.  I positioned it top left so I could put other stuff into the rest of it, like a tagline or something.

This is one of many astounding space graphics from Red Orbit's images section.

Maybe I'll just make a bunch of these and give them all a trial run, or just change it once a month or something.

I call this one "purple nightgaunt."  Probably still more boring than the current header, but the little nightgaunt graphic is so ubiquitous that I don't think I'd ever get in trouble for it.

I used to have a very large graphic of that nightgaunt picture, which I scanned from one of the CoC rulebooks.  I lost the graphic in a crash many moons ago, and I can't find the original paper copy.  I pulled all those color graphics out of the book so I could scan them, and they have to be around here somewhere, but I don't know where.  I just hunted this one up via G00gl3.

Since I'm doped up on cold medicine and I can't think very well, I'll just write about all those characters in the current header, in case someone doesn't know them all.  From left to right.

Togusa, from Ghost in the Shell.  In a future world where almost everyone is at least a little bit cyberized, Togusa is the least "modified" of his group.  He's also old-fashioned.  Whereas his associates carry various semi- and full-auto weapons in 5.57mm, he prefers an antique Mateba auto-revolver in .357 magnum.  This is his personal sidearm, but when occasion demands, he arms himself with the more high-capacity, rapid-fire weapons of his team-mates.

Vash the Stampede, from Trigun.  Vash lives on a world populated by colonists from Earth, although it is not the planet they intended to land on.  Vash is not exactly human, and his twin brother tried to kill all the humans on the colony ship to preserve the world for he and Vash alone.   Vash carries a large double-action revolver in .45 Colt.  It is a break-top revolver which fires from the chamber on the bottom of the cylinder.  He is an expert--even inhuman--marksman with it.  He never shoots to kill, except in one rare instance.  (Remember, it's only anime).

Brock Sampson, from The Venture Brothers.  Brock doesn't like guns.  Not because he has anything against violence.  He just finds it more esthetically satisfying to rip someone apart with his bare hands, use his enormous knife, or use any number of other makeshift weapons.  He also likes to run over people with his car, but only in self-defense.

"Derringer" Meryl Stryfe, from Trigun.  Meryl works for an insurance agency.  She was assigned to follow Vash the Stampede and report on him, since huge disasters seem to follow in his wake.  Meryl wears a cloak, inside of which are fastened something like 30 or 40 double-barreled derringers.  (It's only anime).

"Bob."  Not from any TV show.  Icon of the Church of the SubGenius.  More details on "Bob" when I feature him as a pipesmoker of the week sometime in the future.

Riza Hawkeye, from Full Metal Alchemist.  A non-alchemist member of the military.  Feels great personal loyalty to her immediate commanding officer and to anyone who she befriends.  Expert marksman.  Exact gun type unknown, but it looks like some 1911 variant to me.  Alchemist takes place in a world that could be considered a sort of parallel time-line to ours, with the story set in roughly about the early 1900s.  However, their firearms seem to be ahead of all the other technology shown in the series.

Cthulhu, squeezing his gelatinous green immensity from the depths of R'lyeh.

Bender, of course, from Futurama.  Finding this picture was not easy.  I had to find a video someone had put together and then run it over and over taking screenshots until I got a picture that looked right.  This is from my favorite episode, "Where No Fan Has Gone Before."  In this episode, an alien entity forces the gang to fight the cast of the original Star Trek.  Bender finds some guns behind a rock and picks up this Thompson to begin shooting into the air.  He fires the full drum non-stop, and as it finally clicks on an empty chamber he says, "Heh heh.  That was fun."

Alucard, from Hellsing.  Full details on him in the Hellsing post listed in the right sidebar.

Recent search term:  "cyberheadshop review."

I made that word up once to use sarcastically.

Apparently they really exist.

Once again, one of my jokes turns out to be the truth.  This happens with such regularity that I shouldn't be surprised anymore, but I always am.

Not that I'm a heavy-duty blogger anyway.

I just feel like taking a break.

I might work on something off-line for later posting.

Had one of those naps today where I slept too long and awakened with that drugged-out feeling.  You know.  So I was sitting here in my semi-stupor toying with the idea of a new header graphic.  Here's a first rough attempt.  Not finished, not even decided on, just playing around.


UPDATE:  Don't worry, I doubt if I'll be using this either.  However, I feel that I do need to come up with something that doesn't use graphics created by someone else.  It might come down to just the name of the site in some fancy font with some background colors that I can whip up myself.  When this site was still in total obscurity, I wasn't worried too much about using a bunch of obviously copyrighted graphics to create the header.  But, for some time now, I've been thinking that I need to come up with something that doesn't violate any copyrights.  Which is why the little graphic in this post is also out of the question.  I still think it looks cool, though.

Top ten blog referrers for December:

1.  Front Sight, Press
2.  Gun Law News
3.  The War On Guns
4.  Hell in a Handbasket
5.  A Keyboard and a .45
6.  Ninth Stage
7.  Oscar Poppa
8.  Parallax Adjustment
9.  South Park Pundit
10.  Four-way tie!  In no particular order:
    A.  Cowboy Blob
    B.  Conservative Scalawag
    C.  Eye On The World
    D.  Ride Fast and Shoot Straight

Top ten posts for 2006 (at least back to February when I moved to Eponym):

1.  Gun Review:  Walther P-22
2.  The Guns of Hellsing
3.  Cartridges of the Winchester 94
4.  The Taurus 4410
5.  Be Sure of Your Grip, Grasshopper
6.  Stevens Favorite:  A Favorite Old .22
7.  A Collection of Shiny Objects
8.  About Me
9.  World War II Ad:  Underwood Elliot Fisher Company
10.  SHTF Radio

Number 2 I've already mentioned in a previous post, it is now at my old Blogspot site.  If I hadn't deleted it from here, it would have easily been #1 and probably remained there for as long this blog exists.

Number 8 is just my "about me" post that is at the top of the left sidebar.  That this made it into the top ten shows me how many new people came through here this year.  It's amazing.

Number 9 is an odd one.  This is a vintage ad post.  The first month, it got about as many hits as any new post does.  The second month, it dropped into obscurity like most posts do.  But then starting with the third month, it started getting serious traffic.  The graphic is hosted at photobucket, and so far I haven't been able to figure out where all the referrals are coming from.  Especially odd because I accidentally misspelled the woman's first name in the file name so it wouldn't show up in any searches for her name.

Number 10 is a post from the old blog that was imported here along with all the other archives, and has managed to work its way up.

Thanks, everbody!