We are moving into a new era here at dashPunk, or to say that with a bit less drama: It is almost spring.  As we prepare for the April issue, I have a couple questions for you all:

Is your fandom a little dusty?

Do you have any area of fandom that you would like us to shine a little light on, or dust off for spring?

I have been reconnecting to my fannish roots, and falling in love with old loves all over again.  Have you looked as something with new eyes lately?  If so share your story with us.

The Best in SF

We are also preparing our first look at the best SF out there.  If you want to make sure your favorites make the list, send them in.

New Music

We are also building our first look at musicians and bands that everyone needs to know about this spring.  Send in your nominations.

Jump in!

Leave your comments here or email them to me.  I can’t wait to see what is heating up out there.

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The only live worth living is the one you are truly passionate about!

I hope by now you have discovered your passions and dreams, but I need to start practicing what I preach:

My Dream

I suppose the easiest way for me to explain my dream is to say that I want to be a cross between George Lucas, Stan Lee, and Gene Roddenberry.  That entails:

• Books
• Comics
• Movies/Series
• Games

I have a lot of ideas, stories, and settings that I want to share with the world.  I have already started with my books, but there is so much more I want to do.

So much of the community I love is maligned by the mainstream.  I want to help people feel comfortable with who they are and what they do.  To do that, I need to promote:

• Fandom
• Filk
• Fanfilm
• Fanfiction
• Remix Culture

I have some ideas about how to do this, and I have set some goals for myself.

For starters, I want to write at least 2,400 words a day.  Eventually, I want to push that higher, but it is a good starting goal.  I am going to divide my writing between dashPunk and my fiction.  Hopefully, I will be able to become disciplined enough to write 2,400 words s day for dashPunk and 2,600 a day for my fiction.  I have written 5,000 words a day before, but it is something to build up to.

I am reading feeds on the topics I want to talk about, and reaching out to others in those fields to hopefully get people to help out.

I am going to spend more time participating in Project: Shadow and Podcasting.

I am also building several table top role playing games just for fun.

What are your plans?

Hopefully, by now you have figured out some plans to achieve your dreams.  What are they?  Is there anything we can do to help?

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I just upgraded dashPunk.com to WordPress 2.8 and the new features are astounding!

The one this you should notice more than anything else is the speedier response time. Everything loads quicker, and the options for us to make navigation have increased. You should start seeing those improvements soon.

The most important change is that PressThis is now available to everyone!

Press This is a bookmarklet: a little app that runs in your browser and lets you grab bits of the web.

Use Press This to clip text, images and videos from any web page. Then edit and add more straight from Press This before you save it to dashPunk.

Just register, then Drag-and-drop the PressThis Link to your bookmarks bar or right click it and add it to your favorites for a posting shortcut from the sidebar on any page, and get started!

I cannot wait to see what you all find!

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The Project: Shadow HQ has been updated with some major improvements and a couple wonderful new features.

Improvements:

• Video Player
• Photo/Slideshow Player
• Music Player

New Features: Chat:

The chat itself isn’t new but it has been redesigned.  The chat is now a persistent bar on the bottom of the window with the options to have audio notifications when people chat and the ability to pop out the chat in a new window so you can continue to chat when you are not in the HQ!

I hope you all enjoy the new features, if you have any requests for additional features and improvements, please let me know.

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Fandango wants to thank you all for your support of dashPunk Media and your love of movies with three special offers!

Get $20 off at FTD.com when you buy a ticket on Fandango! Promo code FLOWER.

Enter to win free movie tickets for a year!

I hope who ever wins the trip will send us some pics.  Follow the links for rules and restrictions on these contests.

Good luck, and thank you for your continues support!

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Top Pages/Posts/Videos on our sites

1. Star Wars: Clone Wars Streaming Free Online | dashPunk
2. DVD Releases: January 6th, 2009 | dashPunk
3. Exploring: Hulk vs Wolverine 2009 Movie | dashPunk
4. Free Streaming | dashPunk
5. Free Streaming Star Trek | dashPunk
6. The Third Stargate Movie | dashPunk
7. An ‘angel’ in hospital hallway? | dashPunk
8. Theater or Renter: January 2009 | dashPunk
9. Lightsabers Are A Real Weapon? | dashPunk
10. Matt Smith, The 11th Doctor Who | dashPunk

Top Artists at dashPunk

This Week, these 12 artists are all tied for number 1 at the dashPunk Last.fm group.

1. System of a Down
1. Stone Sour
1. Trivium
4. Flyleaf
4. Black Label Society
4. Arch Enemy
4. Tori Amos
4. Drowning Pool
4. Slipknot
4. Black Sabbath

(dashPunk’s Charts – Group at Last.fm)  If your favorite artists didn’t make the cut, join our Last.fm group and scrobble away.

Top Referrers

1. 42 Blips
2. Twine
3. EMZ Box
4. Watch the Guild
5. Facebook
6. Find a social network
7. Social Median
8. Stumble Upon
9. You Bundle
10. CB Theatre
    

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Top Pages/Posts/Videos on our sites

1. Star Wars: Clone Wars Streaming Free Online | dashPunk
2. An ‘angel’ in hospital hallway? | dashPunk
3. Exploring: Hulk vs Wolverine 2009 Movie | dashPunk
4. Free Streaming Star Trek | dashPunk
5. How to: Stream Scifi TV Free and Legal | dashPunk
6. Randal Graves and the Empire Top 100 | dashPunk
7. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Streaming Free Online! | dashPunk
8. Men’s Steampunk Corset | dashPunk
9. DVD Releases: December 16th, 2008 | dashPunk
10. Doctor who: Series Four Box Set Features | dashPunk

Top Artists at dashPunk

This Week, these 12 artists are all tied for number 1 at the dashPunk Last.fm group.

1. Black Eyed Peas
2. Megadeth
3. Disturbed
4. Dragonforce
5. Nightwish
6. Queen
7. Rage Against the Machine
8. Marilyn Manson
9. Beastie Boys
10. Enigma
11. The Smashing Pumpkins
12. Meat Loaf

(dashPunk’s Charts – Group at Last.fm)  If your favorite artists didn’t make the cut, join our Last.fm group and scrobble away.

Top Referrers

1. images.google.com
2. Twine
3. 42 Blips
4. Watch the Guild.com
5. EMZBox
6. Google
7. You Bundle
8. The Cthulhu Mythos on the Internet
9. FeO News
10. Friend Feed

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With everything that happened in the last week, it is interesting to see what you all visited in the greatest numbers.  We have been making a lot of changes behind the scenes.  Most of the changes make it easier for us to post stories for you, but we have also been working to speed up the site, improve the site search, and improve the links between stories so you can find what you are most interested in.

Top Stories on dashPunk

Here are the posts and videos you all visited most:

1. DVD Releases: December 16th, 2008 | dashPunk

2. Free Streaming Star Trek | dashPunk

3. Exploring: Hulk vs Wolverine 2009 Movie | dashPunk

4. X-Men Origins Wolverine Trailer – Project: Shadow HQ

5. How to: Stream Scifi TV Free and Legal | dashPunk

6. Wolverine’s Origin Involves Gambit? | dashPunk

7. Review: The Day the Earth Stood Still | dashPunk

8. Speculative Fiction BOX Sets Limited Time Deals | dashPunk

9. Grains Of War – Project: Shadow HQ

10. The Guild Season 2 Starts November 25 | dashPunk

Top Search Terms

Here are the top search terms that brought people to the site:

1. star trek stream
2. star trek streaming
3. legend of neil season 2
4. the guild season 2
5. gambit wolverine origins
6. hellboy three
7. kaori yuki
8. russel tovey
9. what is mythology
10. coolest gift ever

Looking forward =>

That was last week, and we have a lot in the hopper for you for the coming weeks.  If you have any special requests, leaves us a comment, and we will do our best to bring you the stories and information you are looking for.

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After a couple days scrambling around after the site crashed on Monday, I am proud to say that all of the dashPunk Media sites are up and running better than ever.

What happened?

An error in our caching software at Project: Shadow caused the sites to at first become unreachable, then the databases were corrupted.  I won’t bore you with all the details, but it took some time to diagnose the problem and work out a solution.

What did we do?

Since the sites were down, we postponed the podcast and all other work to focus our efforts.

We relocated dashPunk.com to its own grid of servers.  This marks the end of the technical relationship between Project: Shadow and dashPunk.

• Project: Shadow will become a resource site, with links, primers, and information about Speculative Fiction.
• Project: Shadow Informant will continue on December 1st.
• Project: Shadow HQ will continue as the social network for all of the dashPunk Media sites.
• dashPunk will continue to as the blog you have come to know and love.

You should notice an improvement in the sites’ response time and performance.

I apologize for any inconvenience, but in the end, this was a growth pain.  The future looks bright.

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On Friday, Gawker Media, which runs 12 blogs, announced it was laying off 19 staffers. The New York Times called the layoffs “an early indicator” of a Web advertising slowdown. In a memo to employees, Gawker founder Nick Denton (pictured in a photo montage at right) said that 2009 was going to be “exceptionally difficult” as advertising declines, and said “we have to prepare for the worst, now, rather than when the worst comes upon us (Los Angeles Times).”

This is no time for Shadenfreud.  Times are tough, and we need to be thinking about the future.  I wondered what would happen to the oversized blogs on the net who have forgotten how to be blogs and thought they were magazines with an infinite pool of advertisers.  The answer was inevitable.  They started firing people.

Now is the moment for mid- and small-sized blogs to shine.  We have managed on a low overhead tight budget workflow for quite some time.  Whie the big boys have noticed there access to advertisers dropping off, we have not so far.  This is probably because we have never relied on Sponcerships.

Readers will be the ones to layout the future of the web over the next few months.  We will have to decide which sites we want to support, and how we can support them best.  For example, Cali Lewis gets credit every time I register a domain… which is far too often, but that is not the point.

Many blogs like ours rely on Affiliate deals like this to survive.  Using the Fandango, Netflix, Gamefly, and Amazon links that you find on these sites is a way to give money directly to the site, while only spending the money you would have and no more.

I think it is also incumbunt on sites like ours to help you all stay entertained in a way that will not break the bank.  An the flow of money gets tighter, we have to work together to help each other out.

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