It doesn't stop!
Members-Only Lockdown In Progress
US governmental upheaval last week knocked me down, hard.
I reacted to floods of online attacks against anyone who isn't an Xian white dude swiftly, taking a lot of things in the Phooliverse offline, and deleting most of this Blague.
Back when I first started broadcasting Phoole & the Gang, "success" meant "billions of followers" and "failure" meant "under a thousand supporters." Over the years, I've bled listeners and followers by the hundreds, as I moved away from UK/EU club-music connoisseuse playlists toward just playing a lot of different kinds of music that I love.
No matter how often one tells oneself that the stats don't matter, and all that matters is community connection in the moment, watching those numbers decline into triple digits is heart-grinding, when one began the game pulling in live audiences of thousands with every show.
I get the last laugh, though!
There are so few Phooligans left - and that turns out to be something that's just fine and great. That turns out to be wonderful.
That means I can safely lock down the places we congregate online, and do a more thorough job of keeping villains at bay.
I can't just stop writing. I tried for a week. It went poorly for me. I want to type stuff for your eyeballs and brainholes.
So I'm just going to keep going. I have locked down the Blague to be accessible by site members only, and I may lock down other pages to be members-only too. I'm setting the site to not be able to be crawled or scraped by search engines - anathema to those 2013 days of maximizing SEO! Horror! But, desperate times, et cetera.
I used to maintain TWO blogs - this Blague and a heavier-duty, more-personal blog for my Patreon patrons.
This present moment feels like an opportune time to streamline and commit to just one blog, The Blague, and to sort of re-launch it as a whole new version of itself.
I have paused my Patreon campaign's billing. The Patreon page is still up, at patreon.com/phoole - and the blog on that page is beefier, more in-depth, and more personal than the Blague posts from the past were, here. You're welcome to become a patron of that page if you like - click the Join for Free button, and that will let you see what Patreon patrons have enjoyed all this while.
The Patreon billing is likely to go away forever, for complicated reasons I can't articulate clearly right now, but the Patreon page has so much stuff in its blog that I like. I need to keep it around for a while yet, until I can scrape it and transfer it here somehow. Patreon is a great platform, and it's been very good for me to have. Maybe if unforeseen wonderful things happen, impossibly-good things, and the world turns around and clambers back up the precipice of doom and away from the edge of total global annihilation, maybe then I'll re-start billing for patrons who want to contribute moneys, but it feels like the exact wrong thing to ask of people right now.
Patreon Phooligans, if you're both here and there, and you feel strongly that you should still give me moneys, please consider, instead, donating to the American Civil Liberties Union. Every bit of money donated and every share of their link helps them fight important battles across the US for all of us in this tumultuous time.
I may continue to use the Patreon page as an alternative video archive for past show videos; I have to think about it more. Don't know yet. Their built-in player feels more welcoming than what I have at phoole.com/videos (soon to be members-only).
The Ultimate Disaster Prep: Fitness
Prep yourself! You can do it.
Move more every day. Move just a little more every day. You can do it.
Drink more water - not water IN something else, just water. If you hate drinking water, drink iced green tea instead of other stuff. You can do it.
Last Friday, on All Souls' Day, the day after Halloween, my Meta Quest 3 headset perished, again. It was a refurbished unit - the one I'd bought initially also perished, shortly after I got it. It's got a beefy warranty, happily, so I had a very easy time of returning it for replacement, but that process took until the day before yesterday - so I had to go a week without my hour of virtual-reality moderate-to-vigorous cardio exercise every morning immediately upon awakening.
It's my own principal failing that I don't have an "acoustic" alternative for fitness. I really should keep up fitness practice daily with videos or just solo exercise when I can't be in the headset, smashing virtual targets. That's a goal to strive for during the next several years - to be able to get my hour of sweat, rage, adrenaline, endorphins and dopamine in, every day, no matter what. I need one of those B.O.B. dummies in our basement to practice landing actual strikes on solid surfaces. That will become the NEW "Fighty BOB."
But, during a week when I really could have used the (admittedly-artificial) encouragement I get from the Supernatural VR coach crew, I got very little physical exercise, and I had to encourage myself, something I'm very poor at.
On top of that, I had to encourage Tiffany, when to me, everything looked beyond hopeless. I've never seen Life is Beautiful, and I never ever will, because I can't withstand the pathos, but I know what it's about, and last week felt a little bit like having to cheer up people I love while we waited for death.
Things don't feel more hopeful now, but I've had time to take a lot of deep breaths, delete a lot of things, get encouragement from Phooligans around the world, and calculate probabilities. And smashing VR targets for an hour today made me really, really happy and made me feel powerful again. Today, in my hour of sweating, I punched over 2,400 targets and smashed another 2,135 targets with bats. My average punching speed was 6.5 meters (metres) per second. It's good to be back! PUNCH EVERY DAY!
More Phooliverse Changes are coming
Thank you for becoming a site member here at phoole.com, and thank you for reading. As pages move to being members-only, I'll do my best to let you know, though of course you'll figure that out when you have to log in to see them.
If there are things you want me to Blague about, you can always tell me. Please join the Discord (an invite code is at phoole.com/discord) - I mean to lean on it more heavily in future and converse there more frequently. Don't get eliminated! Stay safe, sane and strong, and thank you for your eyes on these words.
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