Uncategorized

zombie apocalypse

One thing I don't do well is what my mom and her family used to call "visit". I last about an hour on a good day, and then I need a 3-day break. This includes all kinds of interpersonal interactions, and especially the phone. If you're one of the rare few who have ever gotten me to chat with you on a phone, major kudos. I actually like being around people, but once the aspie overload hits, my brain melts and I slide right out of this dimension.

The last couple of weeks have been a nightmare. By some twist of fate, and this iconic truth has only recently revealed its true horror, people feel compelled to talk to me because, of all things, I'm a good listener.

Just writing that made me dizzy.

Scott's real dad from Florida showed up last week and spent four days at our house. His arrival was like a bomb going off. I had just sat through a "joint adventure" (knee replacement) class with Scott's mom, two long hours of graphic pictures and exercise demonstrations. We got out and phones started ringing. Boom, guess who's here, he's at her house with one of the sisters, omg his mom freaked out because that sister has MRSA, wtf, how long has this been going on, apparently at least a month of secrecy and extreme tension, now the whole family is freaking out.

Reality tv has nothing on my in-laws.

And then the rest of the week was an 80 year old Jehovah Witness in my house shutting down the 4th of July and his ex-wife's 80th birthday party. That's right, no cake. When I turn 80, if some old zombie kills my joy over religious convictions, I'm gonna poke his eyes out. And I can say that because I grew up Mennonite.

But the worst part was the compulsive talking. For 4 solid days. I'm serious. No, he wouldn't go watch tv or take a nap. When Scott got home from work the first day, I said "your turn", and I had to explain to his dad that now I'm on lazy face time. I spent eight polite hours nodding and looking interested, I'm off the clock. My own dad doesn't get that.

And that was just one day. *dayam*

This last Tuesday I got a phone call. Scott's mom was in a wreck only two miles from my house.

She's ok, thank goodness, but bruised up from the seatbelt and airbag, and amazingly was the worst one with injuries. I came back and got Scott's step dad and drove up to the hospital. He's a talker, too. Over 80. For five hours.... -omg-

And then I sat at the hospital with Scott's mom for two days. She's not a quiet person.

Before I sound just terrible, ok it's already too late, I have to beg off with a lot of hospital time I've put in already over the last seven months with other people, which cancels that out. But I worked out the math. In ten days' time, which is 240 hours, I spent 121 solid hours listening to three people over 80 talk. And that's not including a couple of phone calls from my dad over that weekend. This went way beyond my brain melting. I'm still picking sticky pieces off the walls and trying to cram them back into my cranium. The only way I could keep the days right in my mind (I'm notorious for showing up to appointments on the wrong day) was by counting down to ComicCon live on Spike. Which I missed because I was at the doctor making sure a little sore on my lip wasn't MRSA. Just the idea is finally going to cure my lip picking, I think.

hashtag asperger
- 9:55 pm
- Comments Off
I did the unthinkable

I've had this blog for 8 years. It morphed from a silly personal college group to public fandom, and then disappeared. Over that time it garnered 13,500 site visits from over 80 countries, and nearly 33,000 total page views. Unfortunately, I never paid for premium on my site meter, so the statistics and details disappeared during the year I had this blog locked down and the site meter went dormant. I know, right? It's all gone.

Long before I was Janika Banks in the Lexx fandom, I was Yablo, moderating onelist groups in the Sliders and Xena fandoms. Since 1994 I've owned over 40 websites, writing my own code and hosting all of them on my own dime. A lot of people from a lot of places have contacted me, including authors, publicists, actors, artists, and musicians. Fans have included all ages from all walks of life, very rich and very poor, some handicapped or terminally or mentally ill, all beautiful to me.

I've also met interesting people in some of my jobs, including very successful software developers, millionaires, performers, musicians, writers, athletes, all kinds of world travelers and business owners. I bought my second computer from Doug Pitt at Service World. Yes, Brad's brother. I drive by Brad Pitt's old high school at least once a week. I went to the same college as John Goodman and Kathleen Turner. Part of Larva (renamed MorphMan) was filmed in the courthouse of the town where I went to high school. The Blues Brothers featuring Dan Aykroyd performed in a field at a jeep rally 5 miles from my house. Yakov Smirnoff sat only a table away from my group at a Chuck E. Cheese. I could keep going.

I mention this stuff because I never really have before. A lot of people seem to know me in one way or another, not all by the same name. Some people have no idea who I am online, others have no idea who I am in real life. I so rarely mix my identities, have never before integrated my entire life as an aggregate.

I have fairly severe social anxiety. This is difficult for some people to understand since I have absolutely no fear of public speaking. Anyone who knows me will confirm that I don't know when to shut up. My problem is interaction on a personal level, because I have Asperger's Syndrome. I'm very good with the public at large, going so far as to win customer service awards. But I'm sure my internet friends have found me to be a confusing person. Even when the interaction is 100% positive, I'm easily overwhelmed by even a small volume of personal contact and go into shutdown mode, a very typical Asperger trait.

Like Burt on Soap, I need to be invisible. I need my comfort zone. That kinda blew up, I moved to another planet, my stuff disappeared, and Janika Banks dissolved into the mist, as did Yablo before that.

Until Scott and I were run completely off the highway last month avoiding a late night head on collision at 65 mph +(plus) the other car's speed coming the other way (this is where your middle school math skills come in handy, remember those word problems?) and miraculously we all lived, literally missing each other by an inch in the dark at high speed. Yeah, scary. The next day we could see that if we'd gone off the road in any other place a mile either way, we'd have been killed. We were on the only short strip of flat grass between deep ditches, steep drops, jagged flint outcrops, and big trees. It still feels really weird that we're alive, because during that incident with no time to think, we both assumed we were dead. Neither car rolled or wrecked, we both self corrected right back onto the highway, and I'm assuming the other driver went home pretty shook up. All I can figure is that person was coming home from a late shift at work and was asleep with their eyes open, using the headlights of oncoming cars to gauge their position, then automatically self correcting toward our headlights thinking that the further to their left we move, the more off the road to the right they were going. That driver self corrected four times straight for us and didn't jolt awake enough to self correct back until they saw our headlights tilt slightly going off the road, just in the very nick of time, which means their eyes were open and they were sober enough to make a vital hasty decision. We nearly got plowed. That was going to be a really nasty wreck.

My psychologist was very surprised when I told him I'm going public again. He's been working with me for 5 1/2 years on social and communication skills. My lawyer says my IQ is through the roof, but the psychologist assessed my GAF at a 60 on a day I thought was going pretty good. I'm the textbook nerdy geek with lower than average social skills. Scott calls me Sheldon when I get real bad, so imagine what I'm like to live with. I not only have a spot on the couch, but one friend went so far as to politely point out that I nest. He also said that I am to be taken with a tub of salt.

I have had more friends than just about anyone I know, friends who have literally left their homes and traveled a thousand miles just to come see me, but I don't know what to do with that. Alas, it has taken me so many years to understand and appreciate the portent behind that kind of behavior. I'm sorry it has taken so long, but given the Asperger's, I'm probably lucky I've learned it at all. Anyway, really long story dramatically shortened, ok, I confess I set those bombs under all those bridges. But I have a psychologist now. I've been practicing, like this: *ahem* "I'm sorry I ate your pets and used their skins for pillow cases. I hope you can forgive the misunderstandings and gloss over the awkwardness this has created."

And if not, I'll still leave comments open anyway. It's all good in a psychologist's office.

To all my friends who understood my encryptions and accepted who I am: Hello. I'm back.

GrandFortuna

cookie

Please go to Lexxperience.com for updates. This site is not yet EU cookie compliant and being blocked in some countries outside the U.S.

LEXX 20th Anniversary- 2016

Lexx Index

XANGA IS BACK - a public thank you to the Xanga Team.

Lexxperience.com supports mobile viewing until Xanga gets that going again. (It's back on my Android now when I turn it sideways.)

Lexxperience is also on Facebook Public sharing page for Lexx fans.

Open discussion in the Lexxperience group on Facebook if you'd like to interact with me and other fans about what I'm writing about Lexx.

Fanlisting

SAVE LEXX <-- what's happening with this blog.

I will NEVER ask for or accept donations to keep this site going. Ever.

Laptop screencaps used in not for profit blog episode and character reviews and film study at grandfortuna.xanga.com and lexxperience.blogspot.com Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use."

My screencaps are hosted at LexxPix. You are welcome to use my bandwidth to share these pix to other sites.

Join registered hashtags #Lexxperience, #Lexx, and mashtag #MerLexxian for real time twitter feed, photos, and videos.

Public hashtag #pblexxpix goes to a shared album in my photobucket. Anything on twitter, instagram, and photobucket labeled with this hashtag will automatically appear in this album as well. You are welcome to use my bandwidth to share these pix to other sites.

Lexx fans have permission to translate and copy my material to other fan sites and hotlink images from this blog.

dotcom disclaimer

Subscribe in a reader

Subscribe to GrandFortuna by Email

My first tracker was installed in 2004 and broke several times before moving to a new server, which lost a few months of stats, and then Xanga moved to new servers and I lost more stats for more months before the page came back up, so I've lost a total of about two years' worth of stats. The second was installed 2-22-14 and is considered very conservative by business owners who use analytics, which itself is very conservative, estimates being that roughly one third to one half of hits by real live people aren't even counted, most likely due to javascript discrepancies. Actual hits on several posts here are in the thousands now, and the Lexx Index in the ten thousands. I've got pingbacks turned off, so spam isn't counted at all within the Xanga internal tracker, and most direct post hits can be correlated to my real time linking activity on twitter and other social media. When I did Google Analytics beta testing I got to see how search engine performance compares to tracking. I believe live feed linking sources to various social medias are key to a future where search engines are more about performance than cataloging, which has been confirmed to me by coders who create bot algorithms as I was beta testing paper.li. I've fought hard through redundant age-old stacks to make my way to the google front lines again, so my Lexx work shows up faster on Chrome searches now. This has been a really interesting ride. At any rate, my point is, I can still go back 6 years on my original tracker and I can still see that in 2013 just before the last big blog server move, I was getting traffic like this (and since then, the tracker may have been abandoned, we can't tell). Click the thumbnail to see full size.

My original tracker also still lets me see the latest 500 visitors on a map. I once counted over 80 countries among the total visits. You guys are not alone. Click the map to see it better.

Besides Lexx, the most common search phrases that bring new visitors here are variations on 'huge spaceship'. The most seen post from a phrase search is How Big is the Lexx? My biggest Lexx referrer is Lexx Domain. Most of page views per person count comes from the Lexx tag on Tumblr. Visitors who stay the longest come through URLOpener and are pinged through the Google translator server in Mountain View, CA.

Lexx Index

Lexxperience

Google+