Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - January 2002
A hard man is good to beat
December is, of course, all about Christmas, the Season of Serious Shopping. Nothing happens in December apart from Christmas, and the month is one long Shopping and Party time. Fun fun fun. I got a new sub-woofer, so now when I play Louis Armstrong I can really hear the bass. Thump thump thump.
It's colder these days. I see a white frosting over the green grass in the morning, but then I hear about other folks buried in 85 inches of snow, and I'm grateful.
Galleries added this month.
There's a new Bookshelf, for 'G', who writes about ruthless women wrestling against men.
Stories added this month.
Nothing new
Movies added this month.
Check out Renato's Illustrated Stories. The first one features the powerful and dominant Nani, and her friends Melissa and Alex.
Nothing to report. I had a very brief outage for an hour or so, but all the servers have been working fine. Eventually, they told me that the outage was caused by some routine changes that couldn't possibly have caused an outage ... but did.
In the New Year, I'm planning to completely replace my backup system. The current one I use gets 11 gb on each 12/24 gb tape, and about 125gb on a cartridge of 12 tapes, which takes a couple of days to back up. This is getting inadequate. I'm looking at buying something that has more capacity (100 gb per tape) and runs faster, at 50 gb/hour.
Julia got herself a Mavica, so we can hope for lots more pics of our sponsored powerlifter.
My NTSC camcorder has developed a serious glitch, so I looked into getting a new one. The JVC DVL310 gives you Digital Video for $439, that looks like such a good price. But eventually I went for a Panasonic. The amazing thing, though, is just how cheap a really good Digital Video camcorder is these days.
No changes. Stuff keeps coming in! Remember you can still check and search the three "Older servers"
I lead off this month with the classic "Cantor and Siegal" spam, the first mass spam on the internet. This was posted April 4, 1994,, and is brought to you by Google, who have just put up an archive of 20 years of Usenet.
This means that all the dumb and embarrassing things that you publicly posted 20 years ago are
still available for everyone to read.
Make $231 a Month Reading 20 eMails!
I estimate that I read and reply to over a thousand emails per month. I
get an additional 2000 per month that I don't reply to (routine emails from my
servers telling me about their situation). That's 3000 emails; if you'll pay me
$30,000 for that, I'll be very happy.
Want to receive the most guarded secret on the internet?
I don't think you're guarding it very well if you're offering it to a zillion
people via your spam.
Psoriasis or Seborrhea? Get relief now!
Sigh. Are those the only options? Whatever happened to BO and tired hair?
THE BENEFITS ARE UNBELIEVABLE!
You're right. I don't believe you.
Are your tired of 9 to 5?
No, but 10am in the morning till 3am at night can get a bit wearying.
Have you considered professional teeth whitening?
No, I usually just have them professionally sharpened.
MARRY your BROTHER, SISTER, or your BEST FRIEND!!
Hmmm. Are you sure that's entirely legal?
Hugh No Repay Cash Grants!
Most people getting this email won't have the name Hugh Grant. Except Hugh Grant, of course. So why are you sending out a million emails, you only need to send one!
We currently have ten running; Nicole Bass, Andrulla Blanchette, Sheila Burgess, Christine Envall, Marilyn Perret, Julia Santana, Peggy Schoolcraft, Larisa Hakobyan and the Iron Valkyrie.
We're also sponsoring individual events, and funding athletes to go to events with grant dollars.
The Valkyrie Playoffs. We did an audition, and you can see the pictures of the thirteen women that we shot. And now the fun starts, because you can vote for your favourite (members only). And it's worth voting, because A) the winner of the vote gets a full fee-paid still and video shoot ($$$ in her hands), and B) we get a lot more pictures of her on the web site.
Voting continued till December 31. The winner, by a clear margin, was Christine Marie.
We're sponsoring Roseanne Blackburn to go to the Canadian West Naturals. Roseanne plans to turn pro in the sport of boxing sometime in the latter part of 2001. Check out her Galleries on this web site.
For some reason, the internet is a place where feuds seem to proliferate. I think it's because people can't actually punch each other. This means that people can foam at the mouth, threaten, get really angry without having a concern that it might turn into a real fight. It's the sort of thing that dogs do - they'll bark and snarl as long as they're on the other side of a fence.
Dogs, of course, forget the whole thing immediately, but humans have long memories. feuds can go back for many years. The original bone of contention might have been quite small, but since then, layer on layer of anger has been built up until now the parties in the feud cannot contain their venom for each other.
How should you deal with such a thing? My way is to treat it as entertainment laid on for my benefit (and for the benefit of other spectators). After all, the two parties in the feud don't have to feud in public, they could simply fire emails at each other. But they don't, they want to have the feud in public. Well, bear baiting and dog fighting is illegal, but the spectacle of two adults hurling much and mud at each other is far more entertaining anyway.
Of course, you don't want that particular entertainment all the time. Maybe just now and then, so it's important to keep the feuding parties to some restricted area, a bit like a boxing ring. That way, when you want to watch two adults attempting to fill each others boots, you can go see and laugh; when you want to discuss interesting stuff you'd go elsewhere.
And that, of course, is why I have the Punch and Judy message board.
You can send someone a Valkyrie Greeting Card with a picture and music you choose.
New Message Boards:
Welcome back to Nicole!
Member | Posts |
| ginny2442 | 8186 |
| quad2002 | 6435 |
| boomer444 | 4292 |
| pamela69 | 4238 |
| Diana the Valkyrie | 3471 |
| gaily304 | 3310 |
| GrappleJack | 3280 |
| TomNine | 2844 |
| rdhdpwr150 | 2833 |
| jabb6328 | 2745 |
| cry2cin | 2627 |
| mit19237 | 2556 |
| buffy18976 | 2491 |
| gee1407 | 2485 |
| dgt321 | 2169 |
| sen | 1890 |
| shanice82 | 1727 |
| ciltim94 | 1649 |
| rob001 | 1621 |
| Sheila.Burgess | 1599 |
Anyone who's a regular in the chatroom knows about the thing that Mrk and Ginny are having. But Mrk's in England, and Ginny's in America. The good news is that Ginny's coming to London in a while, and Mrk is going to meet her there. What will happen then? Well, your guess is as good as mine, but they're both fancy free and free for anything fancy. And that's probably the explanation for why Ginny is Top Chatter, and Mrk is number two.
Most posted Board of the month | Poster of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
| TomNine takes the biscuit with his excellently attended board; I come second on account of a couple of controversies. | Jabber is still in decline; this month he didn't quite post twice as much as big200, fistman or Tre. |
Mavis is counting the number of times the message list is checked for each board. This gives a very different picture from the one above.
Most listed Board of the month |
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
| Fistman still retains the number one spot. |
So, you think your computer can do everything except make toast? Here's a neat thing - a toaster that connects to the internet, gets the weather forecast, and browns your toast with an image, telling what weather is forecasted for today.
And here's something else you can do with machines. Now if only they added a toaster to that ...
If you enjoyed Dismuke's Talking Machine of vintage music, you'll also enjoy the Turtle and Turtle's "78 rpm" Jukebox.
Last month, I gave you a guide to Australia's public toilets. This month, I've found the perfect follow-up to that - The Urinal Game
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of December 2001, there were about 444,000 pictures (24 gigabytes), 60 gigabytes of video, 5200 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 85 gigabytes.
On Vnews, the Current Newsthumbs server, there's the NewsThumbs, which is 6.2 million pictures in 439 gigabytes and 10 million text files, a total of 464 gigabytes.
Newsthumbs is now 86 million files, 2.4 terabytes.
There's now four newsthumbs servers.
| server | Million pictures | gigabytes | Million Text files | gigabytes | Million total files | gigabytes |
| Latest | 6.2 | 429 | 10.3 | 23 | 17.1 | 464 |
| Older 1 | 7.7 | 471 | 11.6 | 29 | 19.6 | 545 |
| Older 2 | 7.5 | 497 | 11.2 | 25 | 18.7 | 522 |
| Older 3 | 12.0 | 839 | 19.0 | 43 | 31.0 | 884 |
| Total | 33.4 | 2236 | 52.1 | 119 | 86.4 | 2415 |