Category Archives: Hellenistai Projects

Busy couple days for Hellenistai Project

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The last couple days have been busy for the Hellenistai Projects.

In a nutshell, I’ve been really stressed out about a lot of things I don’t really need to elaborate on right now, and so that’s a primary reason I’ve been neglecting Wiki maintenance. I feel awful for letting it get to that state, but when I’m in a state where I can’t concentrate on cleaning out spambot pages and building real pages, I can’t force myself to do it.

Thankfully, a few days ago, I was feeling up to it — oddly, this was after maybe four hours of regularly-interrupted sleep on account of heat and nightmares of the wake-up-screaming variety, so difficulties in sleeping them further complicated when one of my cats decided that she was going to cuddle me to sleep — which is only adorable in retrospect, or when she’s not doing it to you, personally. Unfortunately, due to the lack of sleep and other things, things that won’t do themselves, I barely got 750+ spam-pages deleted in twenty hours — and there was still ~1500 left to go. Thankfully, my friend Jessi was up and apparently had nothing better to do, so after promoting her login on the Wiki, all spam got deleted in the 9-ish hours I spent in bed (and free of nightmares).

The reason the spam keeps coming is in part cos while I understand, in theory, how to install Mediawiki plugins, I can never make them work. I follow the directions on how to do it, and nothing ever happens — good or bad — so while I’m clearly doing something wrong, it’s not so wrong it borks up the whole site functionality. I’m about ready to see if there’s a WordPress plugin that will basically make a wiki built right into the site, and allow me to import the pages from the Mediawiki-based one.

I really feel like I should pay Jessi something for doing all that, but I had fifteen dollars until the end of the month, and I won’t know immediately after I get paid again what I’ll have left for August.

Then there’s the forum.

I undated the phpBB software that the forum runs on a few weeks ago, and I knew since the day after that at least one person couldn’t properly log in. I still have no idea what went wrong. I also learned a few days ago that the registration question, my best line of defense against spam-bots on the forum, suddenly was no longer visible, but it still had the text box and expected an answer. After I reset the registration human-check to a “captcha” image, back come the spam-bots, and seemingly with vengance, so I disabled new user registrations and installed a WordPress forum plugin, so that at least there will be a forum that works. I’m going to lock the threads on the old forum by Thursday, and I’m updating my own links.

gee, I guess the Gods ARE laughing

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So, after a couple years of fighting it, last week, I signed up for Google Analytics and plugged some code into all of the Hellenistai Project sites (though the wiki was the last one, just cos I was trying to avoid opening up the appropriate file in Notepad), and since now it’s been a week, I figured I’d start a new regular feature around here: The weird shit that brings people to the Gods

Wel, more accurately, this would be “The weird shit that brings people to a bunch of sites occupied by people who’s most constant shared quality is their love for the gods”, but that doesn’t roll off the tongue as well, and hey, if even one person a week found something on the Hellenistai sites that resonnated with the, spiritually, that not only makes “…brings people to the Gods” true, but it means my work at plugging keywords into this stuff to lay some decent SEO work is doing some good not just for hit counters, but for the community. After all, just cos the homo-fags can’t make their own babies doesn’t mean that they can’t bring in fresh meat.

Furthermore, this may not be something that the average Hellene would find spiritually relevant, but as Rev. Dr. Rho Iota Mu from The Church of the SubGenius, as I recognise “Bob” as a disciple of Hermes (don’t try to convince me the God of commerce, theives, story-tellers, and vagabonds wouldn’t appreciate the idea of a church whose only sin is not giving them $30, and with the promise of “eternal salvation or triple your money back”), this is of especial interest to me, as some of it is pure wrongness, and wrongness breeds slack — albeit, only if it’s the proper kind of wrongness, which this is. (How’s that logic for you? Perfectly circular! Hail Hermes! Praise “Bob”!)

This week, the weirdest search engine phrases that brought people to the forum is a bit of a tie:
1) “youngsoulrebel trans” — and it’s sixteen hits from the same person who apparently can’t just get over the fact that my squiddley bits don’t make my testosterone for me. Probably somebody I had to hand their own arse to on FetLife — obviously somebody who makes my beloved Pope No-Life look like he has one.

2) “kevin smith religion” — O_O I have no idea what this is about, or why it brought somebody to the forum. My only hope is that they took the right message from their visit, even if it wasn’t the one they thought they were looking for.

Nothing brought people to Of Thespiae, nor the Wiki, nor the shiny new media blog/webzine that I didn’t expect or would otherwise come as a total “wtf?” on whatever level, so I close with the weirdest keyword search that brought people to Urban Hellenistos — THAT would have been the phrase “slap a girl menstruating in greece”.

O_O

OK, I wrote that that post about miasma and menstruation, but the only instance of the word “slap” in that post is from the phrase “slap a bandage on it”. This is possibly the weirdest thing that will bring anybody to this blog, or ANY site on the Hellenistai.com domain ever (technically, this blog and OT aren’t part of the Project, but they’re on the same domain just to keep things simpler for people). Truly, this world has strange people in it — like that guy who’s made Philadelphia the U$ city where the Hellenistai Forum is most-popular by IP number. Tell us about it, Gordon:

Dead serious, next post will be about how my apartment complex has nymphai, and my first review to the media blog is scheduled for Wednesday (tomorrow, at this point). May take a few days on the next one for here, as I’ve got something for OT planned about the “elf home” in my fridge.

A Project Long-Overdue

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A few of you kind readers may already know (if only because I’ve talked about this to you), but my plan for the hellenistai.com mainpage (no sub-domain, like “forum.hellenistai.com”) has been a media review blog/webzine. The main reasons that this hasn’t taken off yet is because 1) I’m too broke to start this off all by myself (and, having worked for a small-press and very short-lived magazin myself, in the past, “awkward” doesn’t begin to describe the shared feelings between artist and magazine when the topic of review copies of things comes up, especially with a very new magazine), and 2) at first I thought that people would submit to me and I’d post it all myself, but not only did all of one person send anything in, ever (dead serious), it turns out that I’m too lazy to be the lone cheerleader to amass a wealth of material, enough to post regularly, and enough to make for a respectable media blog.

Yes, gentle reader, sometimes I have a kernel of a good idea, but it’s got this husk of bad idea surrounding it. This has been my plight with the Hellenistai Project Media Blog.

Now for the good news: I’ve finally managed to separate that kernel from the husk.

It was really pretty simple; wrangle in a few friends, at least to start out, and let them upload their articles themselves. My experiences of “friends + work” has been about fifty-fifty, and there seems to be a correlation between how much money is involved, and how fast it will destroy the friendship. On the good side, this is so far from a money-making endeavour that I’m confident that people will trust me about site donations (but in the off-chance I’m proved wrong in this, I have PayPal and DreamHost set to send me receipts for everything), and I’d be seriously surprised if people start sending in review copies of stuff (though later this year, I will probably be setting up a P.O. Box just in case), but even then, it probably won’t be until long after we’ve already discussed an established protocol for when review items come in.

I’ve so far confirmed one wrangled-in friend, and I’m pretty confidant that at least one of the other two people I have in mind will be willing and able to participate.

I ask for little from these friends for this project: A minimum of once a fortnight (that’s every two weeks), post a minimum of one review of any media item of potential Hellenic polytheist interest (books – both fiction and non, music, film, games, theatre; hell, even a painter’s body of work is a potential media topic). It doesn’t have to be new, either, since we all seem to be regularly re-discovering old things. I’m not even going to be a big stickler that all media items reviews be “strictly Hellenic”, either, cos that would, at the very least, seriously drive us to running out of articles very fast. I don’t even care if two people want to post contrasting reviews of the same thing, as long as their opinions of the item contrasts enough — in fact, since my tastes with people on the Hellenistai Forum seems to differ so greatly, such reviews could become a regular thing. Hell, enough people have divergent enough tastes, I’m sure mine won’t be the only contrasting voice for long.

Will we take on other reviewers or guest reviews? In time, sure, obviously. Hell, if we want to limit no more than one post per day, this project can easily accommodate as many as fourteen different voices per fortnight. I just think a nice steady start of a core of four people who can post new reviews in their spare time every other week is a solid place to start. People who want to submit a guest review can talk to me about it, and I’m sure something can easily be worked out.

So, by all means, go to Hellenistai.com and click and / or copy the appropriate links to add it to your blog feeds and what-not, cos I’m hoping that within the next two weeks, there will be a review up from at least two of us.

Chat review and New Forum!

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First things first:
The chat on March 31/April 1 went swimmingly. A handful of people showed up, and I was very pleased. Main topic of discussion turned out being the creation of a stronger face for the greater Hellenic community on-line, which brings me to topic #2:

I have created a new forum for Hellenistai! There are a small number of people already signed up and a few “starter threads” in a butt-load of topics. Come sign up and enjoy.

I’m also working on a “main site” to compliment the forum. This will concentrate pretty much just on media reviews for Hellenistai and with Hellenists in mind. I’m still working out the look and feel of that one, but I’m also more than willing to have other people writing articles for that site, as well. Feel free to contact me (rowan@sexyhobbitsuperstar.com) if you have ideas — I’m not going to expect individual media reviewers to submit more than one or two things a month, and I may be interested in other regular columns or articles. Again, I’m still in the brainstorming phase here, so feel free to contact me.

The Chat room should also be assumed “open 24-7″, but scheduled chats will be announced with a minimum 48-hour notice.