Category Archives: conspiracy

Operation Global Media Domination: The Google+ Situation

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well in fact I AM a big deal on Google+

well in fact I AM a big deal on Google+

You know how we hate to toot our own horn around these parts, but this must be said: apparently I’m kind of a big deal on Google+

which is really rather amusing, considering I’ve been banned twice in two days and am still banned. Nonetheless, here’s what my stats look like today:

ReferrerView

sGoogle168

google.co.uk50

google.ca17

google.com.au8

StumbleUpon8

google.com.br8

gawker.com8

google.ro7

google.nl6

google.no4

Meaning that even though I can’t do my usual self-promotional link-dropping, and all my existing droppings have been mopped up from the Goog, other people are spreading my droppings all over the horizon. It’s kinda like Farmville, only I WIN!

And as to why I’ve been banned twice, that’s easy. I’m raincoaster, right? Over five million blog readers have encountered me as raincoaster, so when I started up in G+ I started as “rain coaster.” Now, I wasn’t stupid; the rules clearly say you MUST identify yourself by your real name, so I opened the account not from raincoaster at gmail dot com but from real.name at gmail dot com, and in the space provided for “other names” I put Real Name. I mean, why would you HAVE that space if you weren’t allowed to have more than one name, right? Or as this very wise person put it:

I actually got clipped by Google a week ago due to using the name CZ Unit. Which was interesting, since they asked me to use the name I am commonly known by.

I had to explain over the course of a week that my friends know me as CZ, family knows me as CZ, people in real life know me as CZ. I even asked my friends “What name pops into your mind when you think about me”? “What name do you call me when you see me across a room”

In both cases (and others) the results were unanimous: CZ. Even the person who turned me in used to call me CZ back in 1987 (yes, I have the NextMail with voice attachment

I had to point them to my LJ (cz-unit), something I have been keeping since 2002. 3,000 posts; probably not a sock puppet.

I had to have my friends send emails of support and they were even having notarized letters signed on my behalf saying that they knew me as CZ and only as CZ.

And I had to scan in a copy of my lunch bag as evidence that yes: My wife even writes “CZ’s Lunch” on my bag. What more positive, tangible ID would one need?

All of this brings up two points: First is who defines a person? Is it your parents? Your Job? The Government? Google? Your friends? You?

Second is just how wise is it to outsource your friend support network? I was on G+ for a week when I got clipped, and I still have my LJ as a backup. How about people who don’t have that? What are they going to do when their network vanishes due to upsetting the provider?

Very interesting stuff. I wrote about it on my LJ, it has been an interesting experience. But it does help me to answer the age old question:

“Who Am I?”

That’s a very, very wise post. My own experience was a little less profound, since I’m used to dealing with this question All the Damn Time.

The first time I was banned, there was no notification at all, and if someone hadn’t posted the direct link to the appeal process in the help forum, I wouldn’t have been able to ask for my account back. Google deleted that helpful forum post, by the way. Why, if they don’t want to be evil? It asked for links to places I was mentioned as “raincoaster,” and they had to be along the lines of registered accounts at Google-owned sites like YouTube or media mentions, that kinda thing. I gave them this list (stalkers, here’s your dream material!):

http://facebook.com/raincoaster
http://www.linkedin.com/in/raincoaster
https://twitter.com/#!/raincoaster
http://www.flickr.com/people/raincoaster/
http://www.facebook.com/raincoastermedia
http://empireavenue.com/RAINCOASTER
http://www.wordcampvictoria.ca/2010/04/featured-speaker-raincoaster/
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/profile/raincoaster
http://www.peerindex.net/raincoaster
http://ahamedia.ca/category/raincoaster-media/
http://gawker.com/people/raincoaster5/
http://1st.shortyawards.com/category/raincoaster
http://trueslant.com/people/raincoaster/
http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article70-raincoaster.html
http://www.surveymagnet.com/2011/01/lolebrity-interview/

raincoaster is a god

http://www.mainwriter.com/2010/02/09/questions-over-lunch-with-lorraine-murphy-raincoaster/
http://lanyrd.com/2011/northern-voice/speakers/

Vancouver Blogger Profile: Lorraine Murphy

http://emmerogers.com/tag/raincoaster/
http://carocat.co.uk/2009/08/14/twitlight-who-are-you-raincoaster/

 

Is that enough, Google??? IS IT??? For god’s sake, the LinkedIn and Facebook vanity links are “raincoaster.”

Google emailed me after I filled in the form to tell me that changing my name from “rain coaster” to what I had on my LinkedIn Profile would be acceptable. My LinkedIn profile says “Real (raincoaster) Name,” so that’s what I did (subbing in quotation marks for parenthesis). Last night, they suspended my account AGAIN.

I guess something like 20 links is still not enough?

When are they gonna suspend Xeni Jardin, who also isn’t using her birth name?

And, as women are disproportionate users of pseudonyms (for “what are you wearing, baby” issues), this has become a gender issue. Yeah, I know it’s old skool and boring to call out sexism, but even if that was not the intention, that has been the result.

Don’t be evil. Bitches.

and now, a word from our sponsors

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Not just “a word,” but “WORD!”

via the always-awesome JulianAssangeFanciersGuild

Assange Analyzed!

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Wikileaks

Yes, yes, I know. We’re two for two here on the ol’ raincoaster blog with the Julian Assange posts, but I’m on a roll and it’s my blog, so you have little to no choice, so just go with it. If you’ve come for celebrity news, I’m going to have to direct you to Lolebrity.net and Ayyyy.com for your fix for the next couple of weeks, as I’m currently in the middle of a panic attack about moving to the frozen tundra and transforming into icecoaster, and that seems to bring out the Julian Assange fangirl in me, for whatever reason God only knows, and if he does I hope he’ll do me the kindness of keeping it to himself.

So, where was I? About to introduce you to this very interesting little bit of analysis from Van in the comments on a post on the JulianAssangeFancier’sGuild tumblr, and better proof all Tumblrs should have comments sections built in, you will not find. And why not? Because you probably weren’t looking for it in the first place, and even now you’re too lazy, ya bum. So that’s why.

Julian Assange’s handwriting (sample size: three words, you’ll note) analyzed:

Publish or Perish Julian Assange or you could just continue to get book deals and ghost writers

Publish or Perish Julian Assange or you could just continue to get book deals and ghost writers

1.  he doesn’t follow rules (letters are not straight and aligned)
2.  but he knows what he wants  (underlining)
3.  he doesn’t always complete things  (letters p and b are not closed)
4.  he’s confident and also careless ( how he dots his i’s)
5.  he’s not patient ( looking at the first letter h)
6.  at times he likes to be private ( looking at letters 4-6 in first word, it’s
close together unlike the other words)
7.  He’s likes children and enjoys playing with them (looking at 2nd word,
it’s written in a child-like way)
8.  He’s strict, does not bend or compromise (looking at the word (“or”)
9.  He’s a dreamer (handwriting slopes upwards)
10.  He’s unusual, different ( looking at letters u and b)
11.  He changes (looking at letters i, s and p)
12.  He’s not romantic (can’t pick up anything….I could be wrong)
nb:  …….these are just guesses……….hope he doesn’t get mad:)

Hmmm. Handwriting analysis: harmless fangirling Ouija board substitute, or dangerous intelligence? Having watched a world-class expert at work once (he worked with the police on the Paul Bernardo/Karla Homolka case, among others) I would say it’s probably more accurate than you’d expect, but less accurate than you can count on. Still, you can say one thing for it unequivocally: it gave me blog fodder when I needed it!

Anon and On

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Anonymous vs the Police which is not exactly a new thing

Anonymous vs the Police which is not exactly a new thing

Dear Nonymite: you do realize you’re flipping off the photographer, not the cops, right? Jesus, EVERYONE hates the paparazzi!

Compare and contrast to our earlier Nony in London:

Work it, V!

Work it, V!

This is a democracy! VOTE, DAMMIT!!!

Whichever you prefer, the mere existence of Anonymous reminds us that the present moment, yes, this exact moment, is one that has never come before, and will never exist again. It won’t be long until existing power structures have either shattered into a new, digital Brownian Motion model of solipsistic yet collaborative civilization OR the fascists have infiltrated and wiped out the free thinkers, resulting in something akin to the Orwellian KleptoReich that Putin’s got going in Russia.

And that, my friends, reminds me of this, from the great prophet Hunter S. Thompson. Think carefully about these words, because for just this particular second of time, they apply again.

“It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant…

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour… booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turnoff to take when I got to the other end… but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that…

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…

And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

Where will you be when it does?

UPDATED: a couple of hours after I posted this, I found the following video, which claims to lay out the one-year plan of Anonymous. Presenting The Plan:

“While the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power.”

I have a copy of the Manual of Afghani Jihad (the CIA translation) and selections from the Japanese Kamikaze documents, and said back then that if we in the West had any documents as spiritually compelling as those, we would have no alienated teens, no existential crises. It’s literally unthinkable to most people in the affluent nations that their individual lives could actually have meaning; why is this so, when their nations wield the greatest financial and political power on the planet? When they enjoy personal freedoms undreamed-of in most of civilization and throughout history? Why is this, when destitute citizens of the poorest states on Earth change history every day as if it’s their birthright?

And it is.

Could this video and plan from Anonymous actually be That Call, the call to the hearts of the people of the West, for which we have been waiting?

Only you can answer that.

Situation Room Normal, All Fucked Up

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Situation Room Normal All Fucked Up

Situation Room Normal All Fucked Up

Or: SrNAFU.

As you can see from the above, newly-discovered image, the White House press secretary’s office has been going into overdrive, frantically and retroactively photoshopping people into the iconic Situation Room image in which, this blog revealed yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was invisible because she was a vampire. The female aide at the back of the room was also invisible, since of course she, too, belongs to the race of Amazonian Undead which has seized control of the State Department.

As for the Situation, it can only get better.

hat tip CamCavers

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