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Posts published in “Day: November 11, 2009

08 – Dating Service

“So…uh, what is Morris dancing again?” Layla asked the man sitting in front of her second hand, obsolete, VHS camcorder.  

“It’s a traditional English dance.  My group does it at Renaissance Faires across the country and sometimes as far as Canada.”

“Yeah…cool.  Could you say that again, like, ‘Morris dancing is…’  We’ll edit this video later to get my questions out, so if you could answer my questions by restating them, that would be super helpful, ok?”

“Oh yeah, of course.  That’s good.  It’s like a documentary or something, right?”

“Yeah, sure, something like that,” she said and waited for the pony-tailed man to start again, but he just sat there looking at her like an expectant puppy—well-meaning and confused, but obviously too stupid to survive without help.  “So, what is Morris dancing?” she asked, this time with what she hoped was not too much of an edge in her voice.

“Oh jeez, right, sorry,” he said and cleared his throat, “Morris dancing is a traditional form of English dance.  My troupe dances a border-style morris.  We’ve travelled all over the United States and Canada, performing mostly at Renaissance Faires, but we occasionally will perform at schools or various other heritage festivals.  The real dream of ours is to get over to England to perform with some of the troupes over there.  It would be a real honor since none of us are natives.”

Happy 1st Birthday, The Black Laser!!

Today is The Black Laser’s first birthday. Yay! I made my very first post here on November 11, 2008, and you can see it here: The inaugural posting at The Black Laser.com/.net. A year in internet time is basically, what?, a decade in regular old meatspace time? That’s pretty awesome. Here’s a look at the current stats.

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311 posts works out to 85% of a post every day. Not bad for being written by one solitary Space Pope from Beyond the Stars. I wonder how many of those are just music videos? I could probably figure it out, but I’m not going to. Too depressing, I think. 285 comments is not so great. It works out to comments on 91.6% posts if averaged, or 78% of a comment per day. Mind that this number also includes my comments in response to your comments. I encourage you to leave a comment for me if you liked what I wrote or have thoughts or whatever. I see all of them and it’s good to know people are reading. This number does not include the comments left by people on Facebook, which is too bad since I think the number would be significantly higher. I wish I knew of a way to migrate the comments from Facebook to these pages, but I don’t think it’s possible. Too bad. Our superstar poster is Don Diggler. Good work, Deegs!

And 5,640 spam comments?! Holy crap!

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This handy little graph (which you can see full size if you click on it) shows the number of hits received by The Black Laser of the last 12 months. April of this year was a high point in the readership of The Black Laser, with 1,060 views.

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In case the little line wasn’t telling enough for you, here’s a table of the data for hits on The Black Laser since 11/11/2008. I don’t know if this will be interesting to anyone but me, but it’s interesting to me and this is my fucking site, so deal.

According to Google, I get 32.52% of my traffic directly, 37.79% from referring sites, and 29.41% from search engines. That is remarkably even, I think. I don’t know, or care, what it signifies, but the numbers are fun!

I’ve had visitors from 84 different countries, including Slovenia, Thailand, Israel, and Poland. Most hits come, unsurprisingly, from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom and Canada. To all my international readers—thanks!

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Internet Explorer 6, people? Seriously, GET WITH THE NOW. You’re not seeing The Black Laser as it’s intended if you’re using IE6. Upgrade to Firefox. It’s free and lightyears better. And you 1059 hits using IE5? May God have mercy on your iSouls.

But more important that all of this, November 11, 2008 was also the day my darling little niece, Sienna, was born. Happy birthday, Sienna Jo! We’re both 1 today! YAY!!!!!!!