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THE GLOBAL WEIRDING EFFECT featured

Oct

2010

WELCOME TO:
THE GLOBAL WEIRDING EFFECT

THIS IS AN INTRODUCTION

I HAVE CHANGED THE NAME OF THIS BLOG. It used to be called The Last of the Meketrex Supplicants. Now it is not, as of like ten minutes ago. The change is because, well the last name was always meant to be used on a temporary basis. You know, until I figured out what I should really call it. The last of the meketrex supplicants, while a clever and esoteric Ghostbuster's reference,

During the rectification of the Vuldronaii the Traveler came as a large, moving Torb! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the Meketrex supplicants they chose a new form for him; that of a giant Sloar! Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Sloar that day, I can tell you!

It is, in the end, absolutely meaningless to this blog or this site as a title, and in the end just sounds like gibberish. However, I am going to keep it as the title of my horrible one musician band, that I keep up on Myspace for some reason. I've embedded the music player at the bottom of this page, so you don't actually have to go to Myspace. Listen to the song Sackcloth; I think then you will have a better appreciation of my particular affinity to the phrase "Last of the Meketrex Supplicants".

Furthermore, I am going to attempt to use "last of the meketrex supplicants" in my normal, everyday blog speech. Maybe as a euphemism for 9/11, or something. I'll figure that out in due time.

Ok, I'm glad to have gotten that out of the way. I've been planning this change for some time and feel guilty I haven't told anyone. I've decided that I am going to name this blog THE GLOBAL WEIRDING EFFECT. Because, in case you haven't noticed, that is really what this blog is about. THE GLOBAL WEIRDING EFFECT. And I don't just mean global warming, although that is a significant aspect of our planet's general weirding trend.

Also, in case you are wondering, I do know that the GLOBAL WEIRDING effect is actually a term created by various scientists or something to more accurately describe climate change, but I don't care. It's not catching on in that capacity, so I will use it in a more expansive context.

But of course I'll write about anything I want here. I consider feeling motivated to spend hours writing a meaningless review about the only video game I play as part of the general, mysterious effect, of global weirding. Also, I have ten years of backlogged Livejournal entries on here, stretching back from 10 years ago, that I have migrated to this site. You might find other, past articles to be of interest.

As for a bit of disambiguation, even though this blog is really the only thing happening on TEXARRAKIS, it is not TEXARRAKIS. At this point, it is more analogous to a subsidiary of TEXARRAKIS, hosted by THE TEXARRAKIS PROJECT.

At any rate, my name is Gene, and this is my journal.

This is,

THE GLOBAL WEIRDING EFFECT

last of the meketrex supplicants

global weirding

Posted By gene

uggh resume writing

Jul

2011

i have to update me resume. it is making me feel like a prostitute.

ohhhh yeeeaahhh baby i know ms word and html, i know what you like baby. oooooohhhhhh and i’m a faaaast learner. here are my previous experiences servicing other bosses like yourself.

i just have to do this shit so i can convince someone to pay a fixed hourly sum of currency in exchange for my labor. because i am broke and want to buy a candy bar.

Posted By gene

SEO, social networking, and other BS I feel forced into whilst trying to create a popular, content rich website

Sep

2010

Here's the deal. I really want Texarrakis to turn and blossom into a really amazing website that has a large audience, because I have re-realized a love for writing and web design. I want to become one of those webpage people, with a content rich creative website and plenty of visitors.

writing and editing and writing and editing

In the last month and a half, my entire life has basically been web design and "blogging". This has been great fun, and I have realized I have a passion for web design and writing. But oh how frustrating modern, Web 2.0 web design can be! I miss the old days of the internet, when it was just a series of poorly designed static html pages, linked together by link pages, guest books and web rings. I miss the internet before Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, Google Buzz, and all this crap. I enjoy all of the aforementioned services, but I also feel like I have to constantly bow down to them, if I am to have any hope of receiving any traffic.

You may have figured out by now that I have no idea what I'm talking about. If you haven't figured this out yet, I thought I would tell you now. I really don't, I have just stumbled into modern web design without really any foreknowledge or understanding, besides from really terrible html, so excuse me if I sound naive or grotesquely ignorant.

Here are some reflections on aspects of modern web design I really hate:

GOOGLE SEO: I have worked pretty hard on Search Engine Optimization on Texarrakis, but I find the whole process of SEO quite unpleasant. Basically, everything on the page has been formatted in a special way that the vast artificial intelligence which is Google's search engine likes. The URL of this blog post was made using two separate processes; one which cleans the URL, so it is not displayed as http://texarrakis.com/?q=node/4556 , and will be displayed as http://texarrakis.com/node/4556 .

THEN, there is a second process where, when I hit save, a url alias will be created using the text of the title field, to make the url very nice indeed: http://texarrakis.com/journals/gene/popular-blogs-unpopular-blogs-blogs-... . There are so many minute details like this throughout this entire site, and none of it I particularly care about, it is all to feed the Google AI a website that tastes good. So that this webpage can be indexed correctly, and in turn found more easily.
GOOGLE ADSENSE: I have ads up here. I'm not proud of it, but I do. But I will say it actually manages to pay for my webhosting, for now. What would be amazing is if it would somehow pay for my life, but I don't see that happening any time soon. However, I have read many accounts of people making $10 - $100 a day on their blogs. This requires having a very popular blog with thousands of visitors every day. If I could really step up my game on this site, and make even $10 a day, then going back to West Texas and living on my property becomes a lot more viable, as $10 a day when you have no real expenses could be a nice extra padding.
POSTING ALL OVER THE PLACE: Now, I'm trying to actually get people to visit Texarrakis. This makes me feel pretty ridiculous. Facebook is the only place I feel comfortable posting every blog post I write; these are my friends, I'm just presenting what I have made. But then I go off and post it on Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Reddit . . . that makes me feel like a spammer. Maybe that's what a spammer is. But without doing all this, I'm not sure anyone actually would look at the content I'm creating. It appears the core base of visitors Texarrakis receives number in the lower 20s. I was able to observe this while spending a week with no internet in an old farm house on the outskirts of Des Moines, Iowa. When I got back to the internet and checked the numbers, after only a few days of not posting anything, 20 - 30 people a day would be visiting, down from 200 - 400. Even now, this site has not fully recovered from my internet black out.
PROPER CAPITALIZATION: This is driving me crazy. I hate proper capitalization, but apparently people tend to glaze over your writing when it isn't capitalized properly. And, it's also one of those things Google AI prefers as well.

These things all feel like enemies of actual, good content, but they aren't really.

It is a modern miracle that with limited knowledge in PHP and CSS, that I have been able to create this full functioning webpage. Drupal is amazing for such things. I can't believe I am even here, typing in my own WYSIWYG editor, typing a blog post, which will have comments and a captcha for writing comments. It's a terribly complex website, that took me over a month to build.

I think I need to really bust out some more amazing content onto this site. I'm thinking of basically making the entirety of the front page into a gateway to a "choose your own adventure" style story. I'm going to start making terrible drawings in MS Paint (an aside, one thing I like about Windows 7 is much better then any previous incarnation). I'm really gonna bust out blog posts, I have to fully recapture my old, psychotic style.

POINT IS, I WILL NOT REST UNTIL THIS SITE IS POPULAR. i understand that i have only really been at this for a month, and i am quite grateful for all of the traffic and visitors that i receive. however, i have realized that it is my dream to maintain one of those super popular blogs out there, that people read and link to and enjoy regularly. i just need to harness an audience, somehow. if you have any suggestions on how to do this, please let me know. until then, i will just use my overall principle; content. content. content.

artificial intelligence

adsense

digg

buzz