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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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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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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I accidentally upset Rodger Trinidad with my review of “The Deavil and the Monk.”

This is probably the first response where someone found the story more funny than they found it spiritually enlightening (Theory of Everything Comics).

I hate to say this, but I found the story to be a great tale of Crazy Wisdom.  I have practiced several forms of Buddhist Meditation for years, and after 2004, I have refrained from talking about my religious and spiritual beliefs on this site.  As a result, I did not mention to the enlightening nature of the comic.

As often happens, I have gone to an extreme that is too far from where I should be, and it caused my review to suffer.  When I told my friends in person, I explained the spiritual insight of the comic.

I am sorry for this, and I will work harder in the future to find a better middle between talking too much and not at all.

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With only 1% of the top blogs having anything to do with Speculative Fiction, we have been doing a great deal of soul searching lately, trying to find out where the blogs have gone wrong. I think I have found the answer:

Most Speculative Fiction blogs do not provide enough value to their readers to make it into the top 100.

On that front, we have decided to make some changes to our format to be more helpful to you our readers. We are planning to bring more content to the sites and podcast that we have been looking for ourselves.

Primers

The first thing we will be adding are the periodic primers. Everything you need to know about a given topic in a nutshell. What primers are you interested in? You can either comment here or in the forum.

How tos

I get a lot of Questions asking how to do different things. For some reason beyond my own comprehension, I have been answering these questions in email. In future, I will be posting the answers to dashPunk. What things do you what to know how to do? You can either comment here on in the forum.

Interviews

We send out interview requests as people float onto our radar, but periodically, we send out a flurry of request to see who we can get to respond. I have been pleasantly surprised by the return we get. Who would you like to see us get an interview with, and what would like to have them answer? You can either respond here or in the forum.

Don’t worry, we will still be providing you with reviews, theater or renter, news, and the other random bits we find around the internet.

Did I miss anything? Are there any features you would love to see us add to the mix? Leave a comment below.

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I got nothing to say I aint said before
I bled all I can, I wont bleed no more
I dont need no one to understand
Why the blood run hold
The hired hand
On heart
Hand of god
Floodland and driven apart
Run cold
Turn
Cold
Burn
Like a healing hand

This is one of those days that makes me sing Sisters of Mercy songs like this . The rain has ended and the sun came out. Water no longer fills my lawn, but it levees broke and the town is flooded. At least four people died. Over the last couple weeks I have realized how little friends and family actually know about me. They have a construct of images that they have labeled with my name, but it has little to do with me.

The more I think about it, the more I realize how little I know about them as well.

Spring is a hard time for me. It reminds me of my estrangement from the Church, of the time I had to barter for my life, and the general state of the world. It is hard for me, not because I sit around and think about these things, but the smell of spring air brings back memories. I actually spend a remarkable amount of time trying to cheer myself up.

So, why am I writing about all of this? Because, as he always does, Robert Scoble kicked the ass of every blogger out there in a recent post. Mike Arrington’s dream team has the wrong goal. What a provocative title? It is the hit we all needed.

Bloggers have lost their way, I sure know that I have over the last several years. We began writing for ignoble reasons. His five reasons to get up in the morning and four things to do really woke me up.

This is suppose to be about us, not me. I really have to be more open and direct on the site, and on the blog, taking up Scoble’s 5 reasons to get up and blog for myself.

1. Discovery.
2. Getting smarter.
3. Having interesting experiences.
4. Access to things that we don’t usually get access to.
5. Comparing notes.

So, here is my call to action. I want your help to get this up and running.

1. join me on Twitter
2. join the network on del.icio.us
3. tell me about your blog or links

I am going to start talking more about the things I am fascinated by and I would love to see your suggestions.

Like I said in the quote at the beginning, I feel like I have said everything already, and I have not had that experience of discovery, but I am sure I can find something new. I feel challenged, and that is always a good thing.

I will also start blogging my story research, so get ready for strange things to start appearing on the blog. There is a little tickle in me. Let’s get this started.

(thanks Bill for the Scoble story.)

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