Sounds Of Silence

Hello darkness, my old friend ...

Retiring Signal & Taking Time Off back on May 3rd was the beginning of a self-imposed quiet time. I was feeling those serious symptoms of burnout, but as always, I have layered, interlocking motivations.

During the downtime I finished a bunch of the Google Analytics training … and I let my Two Week Semrush Pro Trial run out without touching it. I still don’t have a Google Pixel 8, but I am pleased to report that if you want to use the Nvidia P4200 in your new laptop, it’s extraordinarily helpful to enable the #&#$(#@&%#$ thing using the Nvidia Optimus application. The alternative is endless frustration as an overworked Intel UHD 630 video controller mimics serious system problems.

And thanks to the quiet time I both learned a thing that’s definitely connected to the story I hinted at in MIOS: Doin’ A FISA, and maybe started untangling a mystery related to the Crack Babies Of Kiwi Farms.

Attention Conservation Notice:

I am overtly, aggressively opposed to what’s happening to Ukrainians. I’m not a fan of the mistreatment of the people in Gaza, nor a reprise of the Ottoman genocide of Armenians. But I don’t think Armenian extremists attacking the UCLA protesters are making a positive contribution. Nor are the tankies who are paid to shill for a hostile foreign power. What’s inside is about keeping an eye on some would-be sneaks.

Sounds In Silence:

This is the Substack internal activity graph for this site. The low days traffic are consistently 43 visits - automated systems, spiders that check this site to see what’s new.

Looking a bit closer with Google Analytics, which will ignore the well known spiders, we find two indications of other forces at work in the last 72 hours. The zero second stays are automated visits, the ones that show a “human reading an article” duration are either humans, or a bot carefully built to mimic humans.

Someone in Tehran is very, very concerned about something, so they’re checking regularly. All I have to say about that is …

خداوند هر که را بخواهد تقدیس می کند.

The attention on the East Bay Craigslist Scammer is a mixture. Two bot visits and three actual humans. Do you have a theory on what that might be? I can’t prove any of this (yet), but what I think may be happening is …

There’s a skiddie out there to whom I’ve provided butthurt, so much so that they might be showing signs of perineum cancer. This skiddie isn’t very smart, but it has access to a botnet, so it’s boosting the Craigslist scammer article, thinking that’s a way to get at me. The article readers are picking up the story from some sort of forum.

Now there’s a chance this could have something to do with the 371 views of the manifest for the January 6th Capitol Siege data I published on my Figshare. But the timing of things make skiddie assrage the most likely explanation.

Serving In Silence:

The Malign Influence Operations Safari’s first big analytics find was MIOS: Russpublicans. I didn’t do that, someone else handed it to me. Then they started explaining how it was found, and I immediately snapped to Social and Economics Networks: Models and Analysis mode. This discipline is very complimentary to many of the other things I do … and it has boundless commercial applications.

I haven’t had anything that wasn’t at the intersection of extremism and politics in fourteen years. If I were a Christian Nationalist my track record would have me rolling in dough. Since I’m some sort of annoyed hawkish centrist I can barely tease a paycheck out of this field, let alone make any money. My retirement plan is forcing the DOJ pay for the insult that is Rauhauser v. McGibney, but it seems we’ll need yet another trip through the appellate court system, here in the eleventh year of this nonsense, before I can start collecting. Between now and then I would like some of life’s little luxuries, say replacing that molar I broke back in 2008 … and its three more recent companions.

This isn’t an end to the conflict stuff I do, but the combination of a chance to exercise my skills in this area AND the massive upset that artificial intelligence is causing … I’m actually in the right place, at the right time, and that’s low key kinda weird for a guy pushing sixty, but I’m gonna carpe diem. A whole bunch of the world is either selling goods, or services, or maybe a mix of both. I don’t care what’s in the boxes leaving Wally’s Widget World, as long as I get my six Peruvian pesos per box.

Conclusion:

I knew it was OK to write again when I started tripping over stuff, wanting to reference things that only exists as a draft, in what I was working on at the moment. There are four other drafts that will see the light of day and a one line placeholder that requires some development, but the topic itself is golden.

This is yet another instance of my treading water whilst waiting for the real news MIOS: Doin’ A FISA story to appear. It is nice to have a number of sites under observation with Google Analytics and Semrush well in advance of it appearing. I’m starting to see what’s internal discussions where preview links are shared, what’s bot traffic, and what’s legitimate interests from actual humans.

Now … how do I to turn the purely theoretical Wally’s Widget World into a real live source of those all important Peruvian pesos …